Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Her lips tighten, and her jaw grows rigid in spite of herself. The secret is known, then — known to this stranger, who dares to intrude himself upon her on the strength of this knowledge.

  “Monsieur,” she says, “people rarely insult Valerie de Cevennes with impunity. You shall hear from my uncle to-morrow morning; for to-night—” she lays her hand upon the mother-of-pearl handle of a little bell; he stops her, saying, smilingly,

  “Nay, madame, we are not playing a farce. You wish to show me the door? You would ring that bell, which no one can answer but Finette, your maid, since there is no one else in this charming little establishment. I shall not be afraid of Finette, even if you are so imprudent as to summon her; and I shall not leave you till you have done me the honour of granting me an interview. For the rest, I am not talking to Valerie de Cevennes, but to Valerie de Lancy; Valerie, the wife of Elvino; Valerie, the lady of Don Giovanni.”

  De Lancy is the name of the fashionable tenor. This time the haughty girl’s thin lips quiver, with a rapid, convulsive movement. What stings her proud soul is the contempt with which this man speaks of her husband. Is it such a disgrace, then, this marriage of wealth, rank, and beauty, with genius and art?

  “Monsieur,” she says, “you have discovered my secret. I have been betrayed either by my servant, or the priest who married me — no matter which of them is the traitor. You, who, from your conduct of to-night, are evidently an adventurer, a person to whom it would be utterly vain to speak of honour, chivalry, and gentlemanly feeling — since they are doubtless words of which you do not even know the meaning — you wish to turn the possession of this secret to account. In other words, you desire to be bought off. You know, then, what I can afford to pay you. Be good enough to say how much will satisfy you, and I will appoint a time and place at which you shall receive your earnings. You will be so kind as to lose no time. It is on the stroke of twelve; in a moment Monsieur De Lancy will be here. He may not be disposed to make so good a bargain with you as I am. He might be tempted to throw you out of the window.”

  She has said this with entire self-possession. She might be talking to her modiste, so thoroughly indifferent is she in her high-bred ease and freezing contempt for the man to whom she is speaking. As she finishes she sinks quietly into her easy-chair. She takes up a book from a little table near her, and begins to cut the leaves with a jewelled-handled paper-knife. But the battle has only just begun, and she does not yet know her opponent.

  He watches her for a moment; marks the steady hand with which she slowly cuts leaf after leaf, without once notching the paper; and then he deliberately seats himself opposite to her in the easy-chair on the other side of the fireplace. She lifts her eyes from the book, and looks him full in the face with an expression of supreme disdain; but as she looks, he can see how eagerly she is also listening for her husband’s step. He has a blow to strike which he knows will be a heavy one.

  “Do not, madame,” he says, “distract yourself by listening for your husband’s arrival. He will not be here to-night.”

  This is a terrible blow. She tries to speak, but her lips only move inarticulately.

  “No, he will not be here. You do not suppose, madame, that when I contemplated, nay, contrived and arranged an interview with so charming a person as yourself, I could possibly be so deficient in foresight as to allow that interview to be disturbed at the expiration of one quarter of an hour? No; Monsieur Don Giovanni will not be here to-night.”

  Again she tries to speak, but the words refuse to come. He continues, as though he interpreted what she wants to say, —

  “You will naturally ask what other engagement detains him from his lovely wife’s society? Well, it is, as I think, a supper at the Trois Frères. As there are ladies invited, the party will no doubt break up early; and you will, I dare say, see Monsieur de Lancy by four or five o’clock in the morning.”

  She tries to resume her employment with the paper-knife, but this time she tears the leaves to pieces in her endeavours to cut them. Her anguish and her womanhood get the better of her pride and her power of endurance. She crumples the book in her clenched hands, and throws it into the fire. Her visitor smiles. His blows are beginning to tell.

  For a few minutes there is silence. Presently he takes out his cigar-case.

  “I need scarcely ask permission, madame. All these opera-singers smoke, and no doubt you are indulgent to the weakness of our dear Elvino?”

  “Monsieur de Lancy is a gentleman, and would not presume to smoke in a lady’s presence. Once more, monsieur, be good enough to say how much money you require of me to ensure your silence?”

  “Nay, madame,” he replies, as he bends over the wood fire, and lights his cigar by the blaze of the burning book, “there is no occasion for such desperate haste. You are really surprisingly superior to the ordinary weakness of your sex. Setting apart your courage, self-endurance, and determination, which are positively wonderful, you are so entirely deficient in curiosity.”

  She looks at him with a glance which seems to say she scorns to ask him what he means by this.

  “You say your maid, Finette, or the good priest, Monsieur Pérot, must have betrayed your confidence. Suppose it was front neither of those persons I received my information?”

  “There is no other source, monsieur, from which you could obtain it.”

  “Nay, madame, reflect. Is there no other person whose vanity may have prompted him to reveal this secret? Do you think it, madame, so utterly improbable that Monsieur De Lancy himself may have been tempted to boast over his wine of his conquest of the heiress of all the De Cevennes?”

  “It is a base falsehood, monsieur, which you are uttering.”

  “Nay, madame, I make no assertion. I am only putting a case. Suppose at a supper at the Maison Dorée, amongst his comrades of the Opera and his admirers of the stalls — to say nothing of the coryphées, who, somehow or other, contrive to find a place at these recherché little banquets — suppose our friend, Don Giovanni, imprudently ventures some allusion to a lady of rank and fortune whom his melodious voice or his dark eyes have captivated? This little party is not, perhaps, satisfied with an allusion; it requires facts; it is incredulous; it lays heavy odds that Elvino cannot name the lady; and in the end the whole story is told, and the health of Valerie de Cevennes is drunk in Cliquot’s finest brand of champagne. Suppose this, madame, and you may, perhaps, guess whence I got my information.”

  Throughout this speech Valerie has sat facing him, with her eyes fixed in a strange and ghastly stare. Once she lifts her hand to her throat, as if to save herself from choking; and when the schemer has finished speaking she slides heavily from her chair, and falls on her knees upon the Persian hearth-rug, with her small hands convulsively clasped about her heart. But she is not insensible, and she never takes her eyes from his face. She is a woman who neither weeps nor faints — she suffers.

  “I am here, madame,” the lounger continues-and now she listens to him eagerly; “I am here for two purposes. To help myself before all things; to help you afterwards, if I can. I have had to use a rough scalpel, madame, but I may not be an unskilful physician. You love this tenor singer very deeply; you must do so; since for his sake you were willing to brave the contempt of that which you also love very much — the world — the great world in which you move.”

  “I did love him, monsieur — O God! how deeply, how madly, how blindly! Nay, it is not to such an eye as yours that I would reveal the secrets of my heart and mind. Enough, I loved him! But for the man who could degrade the name of the woman who had sacrificed so much for his sake, and hold the sacrifice so lightly — for the man who could make that woman’s name a jest among the companions of a tavern, Valerie de Cevennes has but one sentiment, and that is — contempt.”

  “I admire your spirit, madame; but then, remember, the subject can scarcely be so easily dismissed. A husband is not to be shaken off so lightly; and is it likely that Monsieur do Laney will readily resign a
marriage which, as a speculation, is so brilliantly advantageous? Perhaps you do not know that it has been, ever since his début, his design to sell his handsome face to the highest bidder; that he has — pardon me, madame — been for two years on the look-out for an heiress possessed of more gold than discrimination, whom a few pretty namby-pamby speeches selected from the librettos of the operas he is familiar with would captivate and subdue.”

  The haughty spirit is bent to the very dust. This girl, truth itself, never for a moment questions the words which are breaking her heart. There is something too painfully probable in this bitter humiliation.

  “Oh, what have I done,” she cries, “what have I done, that the golden dream of my life should be broken by such an awakening as this?”

  “Madame, I have told you that I wish, if I can, to help you. I pretend no disinterested or Utopian generosity. You are rich, and can afford to pay me for my services. There are only three persons who, besides yourself, were witnesses of or concerned in this marriage — Father Perot, Finette, and Monsieur de Laney. The priest and the maid-servant may be silenced; and for Don Giovanni — we will talk of him to-morrow. Stay, has he any letters of yours in his possession?”

  “He returns my letters one by one as he receives them,” she mutters.

  “Good — it is so easy to retract what one has said; but so difficult to deny one’s handwriting.”

  “The De Cevennes do not lie, monsieur!”

  “Do they not? What, madame, have you acted no lies, though you may not have spoken them? Have you never lied with your face, when you have worn a look of calm indifference, while the mental effort with which you stopped the violent beating of your heart produced a dull physical torture in your breast; when, in the crowded opera-house, you heard his step upon the stage? Wasted lies, madame; wasted torture; for your idol was not worth them. Your god laughed at your worship, because he was a false god, and the attributes for which you worshipped him — truth, loyalty, and genius, such as man never before possessed — were not his, but the offspring of your own imagination, with which you invested him, because you were in love with his handsome face. Bah! madame, after all, you were only the fool of a chiselled profile and a melodious voice. You are not the first of your sex so fooled; Heaven forbid you should be the last!”

  “You have shown me why I should hate this man; show me my revenge, if you wish to serve me. My countrywomen do not forgive. O Gaston de Lancy, to have been the slave of our every word; the blind idolator of your every glance; to have given so much; and, as my reward, to reap only your contempt!”

  There are no tears in her eyes as she says this in a hoarse voice. Perhaps long years hence she may come to weep over this wild infatuation — now, her despair is too bitter for tears.

  The lounger still preserves the charming indifference which stamps him of her own class. He says, in reply to her entreaty, —

  “I can lead you to your revenge, madame, if your noble Spanish blood does not recoil from the ordeal. Dress yourself to-morrow night in your servant’s clothes, wearing of course a thick veil; take a hackney coach, and at ten o’clock be at the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne. I will join you there. You shall have your revenge, madame, and I will show you how to turn that revenge (which is in itself an expensive luxury) to practical account. In a few days you may perhaps be able to say, ‘There is no such person as Gaston de Lancy: the terrible delusion was only a dream; I have awoke, and I am free!’”

  She passes her trembling hand across her brow, and looks at the speaker, as if she tried in vain to gather the meaning of his words.

  “At ten o’clock, at the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne? I will be there,” she murmurs faintly.

  “Good! And now, madame, adieu! I fear I have fatigued you by this long interview. Stay! You should know the name of the man to whom you allow the honour of serving you.”

  He takes out his card-case, lays a card on the tiny table at her side, bows low to her, and leaves her — leaves her stricken to the dust. He looks back at her as he opens the door, and watches her for a moment, with a smile upon his face. His blows have had their full effect.

  O Valerie, Valerie! loving so wildly, to be so degraded, humiliated, deceived! Little wonder that you cry to-night. There is no light in the sky — there is no glory in the world! Earth is weary, heaven is dark, and death alone is the friend of the broken heart!

  CHAPTER IV. OCULAR DEMONSTRATION.

  INSCRIBED on the card which the lounger leaves on the table of Mademoiselle de Cevennes, or Madame de Lancy, is the name of Raymond Marolles. The lounger, then, is Raymond Marolles, and it is he whom we must follow, on the morning after the stormy interview in the pavilion.

  He occupies a charming apartment in the Champs Elysées; small, of course, as befitting a bachelor, but furnished in the best taste. On entering his rooms there is one thing you could scarcely fail to notice; and this is the surprising neatness, the almost mathematical precision, with which everything is arranged. Books, pictures, desks, pistols, small-swords, boxing-gloves, riding-whips, canes, and guns — every object is disposed in an order quite unusual in a bachelor’s apartment. But this habit of neatness is one of the idiosyncrasies of Monsieur Marolles. It is to be seen in his exquisitely-appointed dress; in his carefully-trimmed moustache; it is to be heard even in the inflexions of his voice, which rise and fall with rather monotonous though melodious regularity, and which are never broken by anything so vulgar as anger or emotion.

  At ten o’clock this morning he is still seated at breakfast. He has eaten nothing, but he is drinking his second cup of strong coffee, and it is easy to see that he is thinking very deeply.

  “Yes,” he mutters, “I must find a way to convince her; she must be thoroughly convinced before she will be induced to act. My first blows have told so well, I must not fail in my masterstroke. But how to convince her — words alone will not satisfy her long; there must be ocular demonstration.”

  He finishes his cup of coffee, and sits playing with the teaspoon, clinking it with a low musical sound against the china teacup. Presently he hits it with one loud ringing stroke. That stroke is a note of triumph. He has been working a problem and has found the solution. He takes up his hat and hurries out of the house; but as soon as he is out of doors he slackens his step, and resumes his usual lounging gait. He crosses the Place de la Concorde, and makes his way to the Boulevard, and only turns aside when he reaches the Italian Opera House. It is to the stage-door he directs his steps. Au old man, the doorkeeper, is busy in the little dark hall, manufacturing a pot à feu, and warming his hands at the same time at a tiny stove in a corner. He is quite accustomed to the apparition of a stylish young man; so he scarcely looks up when the shadow of Raymond Marolles darkens the doorway.

  “Good morning, Monsieur Concierge,” says Raymond; “you are very busy, I see.”

  “A little domestic avocation, that is all, monsieur, being a bachelor.”

  The doorkeeper is rather elderly, and somewhat snuffy for a bachelor; but he is very fond of informing the visitors of the stage-door that he has never sacrificed his liberty at the shrine of Hymen. He thinks, perhaps, that they might scruple to give their messages to a married man.

  “Not too busy, then, for a little conversation, my friend?” asks the visitor, slipping a five-franc piece into the porter’s dingy hand.

  “Never too busy for that, monsieur;” and the porter abandons the pot à feu to its fate, and dusts with his coloured handkerchief a knock-kneed-looking easy-chair, which he presents to monsieur.

  Monsieur is very condescending, and the doorkeeper is very communicative. He gives monsieur a great deal of useful information about the salaries of the principal dancers; the bouquets and diamond bracelets thrown to them; the airs and graces indulged in by them; and divers other interesting facts. Presently monsieur, who has been graciously though rather languidly interested in all this, says—”Do you happen to have amongst your supernumeries or choruses, or any of your insi
gnificant people, one of those mimics so generally met with in a theatre?”

  “Ah,” says the doorkeeper, chuckling, “I see monsieur knows a theatre. We have indeed two or three mimics; but one above all — a chorus-singer, a great man, who can strike off an imitation which is life itself; a drunken, dissolute fellow, monsieur, or he would have taken to principal characters and made himself a name. A fellow with a soul for nothing but dominoes and vulgar wine-shops; but a wonderful mimic.”

  “Ah! and he imitates, I suppose, all your great people — your prima donna, your basso, your tenor—” hazards Monsieur Raymond Marolles.

  “Yes, monsieur. You should hear him mimic this new tenor, this Monsieur Gaston de Lancy, who has made such a sensation this season. He is not a bad-looking fellow, pretty much the same height as De Laney, and he can assume his manner, voice, and walk, so completely that—”

  “Perhaps in a dark room you could scarcely tell one from the other, eh?”

  “Precisely, monsieur.”

  “I have rather a curiosity about these sort of people; and I should like to see this man, if—” he hesitates, jingling some silver in his pocket.

  “Nay, monsieur,” says the porter; nothing more easy, this Moucée is always here about this time. They call the chorus to rehearsal while the great people are lounging over their breakfasts. We shall find him either on the stage, or in one of the dressing-rooms playing dominoes. This way, monsieur.”

  Raymond Marolles follows the doorkeeper down dark passages and up innumerable flights of stairs; till, very high up, he stops at a low door, on the other side of which there is evidently a rather noisy party. This door the porter opens without ceremony, and he and Monsieur Marolles enter a long low room, with bare white-washed walls, scrawled over with charcoal caricatures of prima donnas and tenors, with impossible noses and spindle legs. Seated at a deal table is a group of young men, shabbily dressed, playing at dominoes, while others look on and bet upon the game. They are all smoking tiny cigarettes, which look like damp curl-papers, and which last about two minutes each.