"I spoke nothing," he replied still in the smooth accent which was not familiar to her. "A man of business like myself, feels bound, if he has any natural turning that way, to become a physiognomist and thought-reader in order not to pay too dearly for bargains; I am happy to say that I rarely blunder."
"Then you can read my disposition?" exclaimed Cesarine mockingly.
"I knew it before."
"Indeed! then you would do me a great service, monsieur, if you would tell me how it strikes you, as an average man. For I a.s.sure you," she went on, taking a seat without pointing out one to him, "that some days I do not understand myself, a most humiliating thing, though ancient wisdom acknowledged that the hardest thing is self-knowledge."
"If you authorize me to be outspoken, madame, I will enlighten you,"
returned Cantagnac.
"Do not let me be in your way!" impertinently.
"It is the most simple thing, for your entire character is described in these four words: venal, ferocious, frivolous and insubmissive!"
She sprang to her feet with quivering lips and flashing eyes, while he, like a statue, lowered upon its pedestal, calmly sank upon an arm-chair.
Then, looking round and listening to make certain that they had no observers, he leaned both elbows on the table and fixed his sea-blue eyes on the startled lady.
"Kaiserina!" he said in a commanding voice, without the least softening with that southern suavity, "for how much do you want to sell me secretly, your husband"s invention?"
The altered voice appeared not at all strange, but the words were so unexpected that she merely stared in bewilderment while he had even more deliberately to repeat them. Deeply frightened by this mystery which in vain she tried to solve, she forced a laugh.
"Oh, it is no jest--I am one of the most serious of men," proceeded Cantagnac, "as becomes one of the busiest."
She looked at him like a fawn, which, having never seen a human being, is suddenly peered upon in the lair by the hunter.
"You want to know who I am, speaking to you in this style? See my card on the table there--it says I am Cantagnac, the agent, modest but pa.s.sing for rather subtle, of a private and limited company recently established with a cash capital fully paid up of several millions of _fredericks_--for, to tell the plain facts to you--the obtaining for its profit the ideas, inventions and discoveries of others. In short, we, who used to despise mental fruits, see that it is the most profitable of trades to work genius. As soon as we see, learn, or even scent that an important thing is being produced anywhere in the world, we hurry to the spot and by one means or another--money, cunning, persuasion, main force, if needs must, we make ourselves master of what we must have if we mean to be the world"s rulers. With a European war impending, even a lady will see at once of what value an invention is, like M.
Clemenceau"s."
"In plain language, you are proposing to me an infamous deed!" she exclaimed with scathing irony which failed to scare the other.
"I am proposing a matter of business. Where are you going?"
"Straight to my husband--whose confidence you have imposed on by some deception"
"Dear madame, do not do what you would eternally deplore," said Cantagnac quietly, and motioning with his broad hand for her to be seated again. "I deceived your husband with a bit of character acting which you would, I think, have applauded, as you were once on the stage--the music hall stage, at least."
She sat down, as if this allusion had stunned her.
"His secret is indispensable to my company and I was given instructions to try to obtain it, by surprise and for nothing, if possible. Without it, many another purchase of ours made at great expense, would become utterly useless. From an incomplete acquaintance with your husband, I feared I could do nothing with him; from a study of him here, at a later period, I doubted still more; and, having spoken with him, I am sure."
A previous acquaintance with Clemenceau? It was a ray of light, but still Cesarine, who did not cease to stare at him, failed to identify him with a figure in her past. Was this only a new phase of a Proteus?
"Clemenceau is no longer the frank and enthusiastic student but a man of talent and feeling who has found his true course. In what concerns the revelation he has had from science, he is reserved and circ.u.mspect.
Happily, man that is borne of woman, however great, if a simpleton and an idealist, almost always is the prey of the s.e.x in one form or another. When they escape feminine influence, they are impregnable, and strong measures must be employed."
"Strong measures," repeated Cesarine, shuddering at the icy, pa.s.sionless tone like a lecturer"s.
"They must be blotted off the book of life--and it is always painful to have to proceed to such extremities. It is frequent, very--and ninety-nine times in the hundred, we run up against the woman for whom a great magistrate advised the search whenever a crime is perpetrated."
"It would appear that you expect to induce me to commit that crime!"
sneered the woman, pale but rebellious.
"We have no need to induce you, dear madame, for we can constrain you."
"Constrain me!" repeated the woman savagely and tossing her head with pride. "If you really knew my nature, you would not say that. You might tell me how?"
"Really know you? you shall judge for yourself. In your marriage certificate, you are described as of the Vieradlers, but your eagle is not the German one--it is the Polish. The women of your race are distinguished for beauty, when young, and freedom in love at all times.
Your grandma has a volumnious chronicle of scandal all to herself, but her glory is thrown into the shade by the peculiar celebrity enjoyed rather briefly by her favorite daughter, La Belle Iza, that one of the Sirens of Paris who has, under the present Empire, lured the most men to wreck. This was your aunt. Her sister, your mother, quite as beautiful, was rescued at an early hour from her mother"s manoevres to "place" her, as she called it, and for this loss, the indignant old lady vowed a kind of unnatural vengeance, to be visited on the child of her who had offended her by remaining in the path of virtue. This child is the woman before me. Oh, it is useless to look at me like that!" he grimly said, with the perplexed air of a man with no ear for music who listens to a music-box delighting others. "Pure wasted labor! The old lady, who had fallen from her high estate where Iza had lifted her, and was ordered out of the capital for extorting hush-money upon her daughter"s stock of love-letters, the old lady became a queen--a queen of the disreputable cla.s.ses. In Munich, sleepy old town where superst.i.tions linger and the women are as besotted with ignorance as the men with beer, she ruled the beggars and vagabonds. It was there that fate led you and you fell under her hand. She pretended to befriend you, for even so young, you promised to have power by your charms, renewing those she had never forgotten in her lost Iza. No one consulted the Almanack de Gotha when you were launched on an admiring society as one of the Vieradlers. You soon won a great reputation for freshness of wit and coquetry in all South Germany. In plain words, you could not see a man come into the drawing-room without wishing to make him fall in love with you. We want to monopolize genius--you to monopolize the love of man. You have the mania of loving, more common than it is suspected, especially by those who would have us believe that good society is a fold where snowy lambs are led about from the cradle to the butcher"s shambles, by pastors carrying crooks decked with sky blue ribbons. The feeling is a craving in you--an involuntary and invincible instinct which was to have its inevitable end. You turned from a man who sincerely loved you to make a conquest of another whose heart was engaged."
"Stop!" interrupted Cesarine, triumphantly for she had detected genuine feeling the last tone used by the living enigma. "I know you now! you are the man whom you say really loved me. Down with the masks! You are--"
"Not so loud!"
"You are Major von Sendlingen!"
"Say "Colonel" and you will be exact. Yes; I am the lover whom you cast off in favor of the student Ruprecht, as this Clemenceau was called when he pottered about Europe, sketching ruined doorways and broken windows and dreamed of architectural structures. A man whom destiny had chosen to be the greatest demolisher of the age! what sarcasm!"
"Well, you should be the last to complain! Was it like devotion to me that you should try to abduct La Belle Stamboulane in the public street?
"To remove her from your path! She was your rival in the music hall!
Love her, love a Jewess? You do not understand men--you fancy they are put here for your pleasure, safeguard and redemption. An error! We are neither your joy or your punishment. Let that pa.s.s. You married the student Ruprecht who turned out to be your cousin Felix Clemenceau. For a time you played the part of the idolizing young wife admirably. You never reproached his father"s head for the murder of your aunt and he said never a word about the old beggar-sovereign Baboushka. In your gladness at having stolen the man away from Fraulein Daniels, I believe you imagined that it was love you felt. Not a bit of it! Love is the sun of the soul--all light, heat, motion and creativeness! there are no more two loves than two suns. There may be two or many pa.s.sions, but not two loves. If a man loved twice, it would not be love!"
The hard man spoke so tenderly that his hearer dared not scoff.
"He ran through your witchery after a while, but he built his hopes upon maternity. You had a child but you connived at its death, if you did not deal the stroke."
How accurately Sendlingen had measured this woman! Another would have cried out against him at this accusation--or burst into tears and so disarmed a less adamantine man. She did not blanch; she did not lift her hand to cover her unaltered features, but listened as idly as she would to the last plaint of the fool who might blown out his brains at her feet. The false Cantagnac pursued in his natural voice, rancid and imperious, rolling out the gutturals like a heavy wagon thundering over an old road.
"It follows, madame, that if you run to your husband at a faster gait than you took to run away with the Baron of Linden, to inform him of my proposition, I will tell him what you hear--I will accuse you of infanticide, of unfaithfulness--"
"He knows that!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the woman with irony and in defiance. "Ask him, if you do not believe."
"Impossible."
"He would not say a word to anybody, and I would not have confessed only I was driven to it."
"And he forgave you?"
"All!"
"He is very grand; and few men of my acquaintance would not at least have caned you smartly. However, it was not long after the "removal" of your child, to put it mildly, that you threw yourself into the swim of distractions, such as were to be had hereabouts. The old marchioness"
circle soon surrounded you; she was one of my company"s instruments, and from that time we counted on you as a coadjutrix some day."
"On me!"
"Precisely! to whom should we look for aid and complicity in our concealed and wary work but to the embodiment of permanent and domestic corruption? You are merely an impulse--we are a policy, and you will be our bondwoman. Ah, we are merely men--not fools, scoundrels or G.o.ds like your husband, for only such would tolerate depravity like yours."
"He is like a G.o.d," said Cesarine, trembling, in a low, hushed voice.