His Excellency the Minister Part 17

"You are not altered, in fact," said Rosas. "I am mistaken--"

"Yes, I know. I have grown lovelier. That is a compliment that I am used to--Lissac has told me that already, only the other morning."

She bit her lips almost imperceptibly, as if to blame herself for her imprudence, but had she mentioned Guy's name designedly, she could not have been better satisfied with the result. Monsieur de Rosas, usually very pale, became pallid, and a slight curl of his lip, although immediately suppressed, gave an upward turn to his reddish moustache.

"Ah!" he said, "You still see Guy."

"I!--I had not spoken a single word to him until I asked him to have an invitation sent me for this soiree, and then it was merely because I knew you would be here."

"Ah!" said Jose again, without adding a word.

Marianne was satisfied. She knew now that the duke still loved her, since the mention of Lissac's name had made him tremble. Well! she had shrewdly understood her Rosas.

"And what have you been doing, my dear duke, for such an age?" she said.

She looked at him as she had looked at Vaudrey, with her sweet and shrewd smile, which moved him profoundly, and her glance penetrated to the inmost depths of his being.

"You know the old saying: 'I have lived.' It is great folly, perhaps, but it is the truth."

"And I wager," boldly said Marianne, "that you have never thought of me."

"Of you?"

"Of me. Of that mad Marianne, who is the maddest creature of all those you have met in your travels from the North Pole to Cambodia, but who has by no means a wicked heart, although a sufficiently unhappy one, and that has never ceased to beat a little too rapidly at certain reminiscences which you do not recall, perhaps--who knows?"

"I remember everything," replied the duke in a grave voice.

Marianne looked at him and commenced to laugh.

"Oh! how you say that, _mon Dieu!_ Do you remember I used to call you Don Carlos? Well, you have just reminded me of Philip II. 'I remember everything!' B-r-r! what a funereal tone. Our reminiscences are not, however, very dramatic."

"That depends on the good or ill effects that they cause," said Rosas very seriously.

"Ah! G.o.d forgive me if I have ever willingly done you the least harm, my dear Rosas. Give me your hand. I have always loved you dearly, my friend."

She drew him gently toward her, half bending her face under the cold glance of the young man:

"Look at me closely and see if I lie."

The duke actually endeavored to read the gray-blue eyes of Marianne; but so strange a flash darted from them, that he recoiled, withdrawing his hands from the pressure of those fingers.

"Come, come!" she said, "I see that my cat-like eyes still make you afraid. Are they, then, very dreadful?"

She changed their expression to one of sweetness, humility, timidity and winsomeness.

"After all, that is something to be proud of, my dear duke. It is very flattering to make a man tremble who has killed tigers as our sportsmen kill partridges."

"You know very well why I am still sufficiently a child to tremble before you, Marianne," murmured Jose. "At my age, it is folly; but I am as superst.i.tious as gamblers--or sailors, those other gamblers, who stake their lives, and I have never met you without feeling that I was about to suffer."

"To suffer from what?"

"To suffer through you," said the duke. "Do you know that if I had never met you, it is probable that I should never have seen all those countries of which I spoke just now, and that I should have been married long ago, at Madrid or at Toledo?"

"And I prevented you?--"

Rosas interrupted Marianne, saying abruptly, and smiling almost sadly:

"Ah! my dear one, if you only knew--you have prevented many things."

"If I have prevented you from being unhappy, I am delighted. Besides, it is evident that you have never had a very determined inclination for marriage, seeing that you have preferred to trot around the world."

"Like Don Quixote, eh? Do you know, moreover, since we are talking of all these things, that you have saved me from dying in the corner like an abandoned dog?"

"I?" said Marianne.

"You or your songs, as you please. Yes, in Egypt I suffered from fever something like typhus. They left me for dead, as after a battle, in the most wretched and frightful of native villages. No doctors, who might, perhaps, have cured me, not a bed, not even a mattress. My servants, believing me past hope, abandoned me--or rather, for I prefer your Parisian word--cast me adrift--there is no other expression. There I was, stretched out on a heap of damp straw--in short, on a dunghill--"

"You, Rosas?"

"In all conscience, I correctly portrayed Job there; lean, with a three months' old beard, and with the death-rattle in my throat; in the open air--don't alarm yourself, the nights were warm. In the evening the fellah-women gathered round me, while I watched the sun that tinted their cheeks with bronze--there were some pretty ones among them, I have painted them in water-colors from memory--they poured out their insults upon me in guttural tones, which I unfortunately understood, as I am an Orientalist,"--he smiled--"and in addition to those insults they threw mud at me, a fetid ma.s.s of filth. The women were charming, although they took part in it. These people did not like the _roumi_, the s.h.i.+vering Christian. Besides, women do not like men who have fallen. They do not like feeble creatures.--"

"Bah!--and where were the hospitals, the Sisters of Charity?"

"Are you quite sure that the Sisters of Charity are women, my dear Marianne?--In a word, I swear that I asked only one thing, as I lay on that devilish, poisonous dunghill, and that was, to end the matter in the quickest possible way, that I might be no longer thought of, when--don't know why, or, rather, I know very well--in my fever, a certain voice reached me--whence?--from far away it commenced humming,--I should proclaim it yours among a thousand--a ridiculously absurd refrain that we heard together one evening at the Varietes, at an anniversary celebration. And this Boulevard chant recurred to me there in the heart of that desert, and transported me at a single bound to Paris, and I saw you again and these fair locks that I now look at, I saw them, too, casting upon your forehead the light shadow that they do now. I heard your laugh. I actually felt that I had you beside me in one of the stage-boxes at the theatre, listening to the now forgotten singer humming the refrain that had so highly amused you, Guy and myself--"

It seemed to Marianne that the duke hesitated for a moment before p.r.o.nouncing Guy's name. It was an almost imperceptible hesitation, rather felt than seen.

Rosas quickly recovered:

"On my word, you will see directly that the Boulevard lounger was hidden under your gloomy Castilian,--that refrain took such a hold on my poor wandering brain, such an entire possession, that I clung to it when the fever was at its height--I hummed it again and again, and on my honor, it banished the fever, perhaps by some homeopathic process, for at any other time, this deuced refrain would have aroused a fever in me."

"Why?--Because it was I who formerly hummed it?"

"Yes," said Rosas in a lowered tone. "Well! yes, just for that reason!--"

He drew closer to her on the divan, and she said to him, laughingly:

"How fortunate it is that Faure is singing yonder! He attracts everybody and so leaves us quite alone in this salon. It is very pleasant. Would you like to go and applaud Faure? It is some years since I heard him."

"You are very malicious, Marianne," said the duke. "Let me steal this happy, fleeting hour. I am very happy."

"You are happy?"

"Profoundly happy, and simply because I am near you, listening to you and looking at you--"

"My poor Job," she said, still laughing, "would you like me to sing you the refrain that we heard at the Varietes?"

De Rosas did not reply, but simply looked at her.