His Excellency the Minister Part 31

Hardly was she installed in Rue p.r.o.ny than she reminded him of his promise to call on her. He hastened to her with strange eagerness and he left her more disturbed, as if he had just taken a peep at an unknown world. The feminine elegance of the Hotel de Vanda had suddenly intoxicated him. Marianne played her part very calmly in producing the daily ravage that pa.s.sion was making on Sulpice. She studied its rapid progress with all the sang-froid of a physician. She regulated the doses of her toxicant, the poison of her glance instilled into the veins of this man. Determined to become his mistress, she desired to fall in the guise of a woman madly in love, and not as an ordinary courtesan. With any other man than Vaudrey, she would, perhaps, have yielded more quickly. But she acted with Vaudrey as formerly she had done with Rosas.

Seeing that these idealists caressed their dreams, she coquetted with platonic love, besides, she preferred to remain free for a short time, without the burden of those pleasures of which she had grown tired, and which had always caused her more disgust than delight.

Moreover, she said to herself that it was necessary in Sulpice's case to have the appearance of playing frankly, of loving truly, as in the case of Rosas. But, this time, she would not let Vaudrey escape her by flight, as the duke did. She would yield at the desired moment, certain that Sulpice would not leave her the next day.

"Rosas would be here," she said to herself self-confidently, "if he had been my lover."

After a moment of regretful preoccupation, she shrugged her shoulders and said quickly:

"Bah! _what is written is written_, as he said. If I haven't him, I have the other."

The "other" grew day by day more deeply enamored. He rushed off in hot haste to visit Marianne; his hired hack, in which he sometimes left his minister's portfolio peacefully at rest, pending his return, stood before the little door in the Avenue p.r.o.ny. He was happier when he thought he had made a forward step in Marianne's affections than when he had acquired new votes from the minority in the Chamber. Ambitious projects yielded to the consuming desire that he felt toward this woman.

At the ministry, during the familiar conversations at table with Adrienne and even during the hurly-burly attendant on private receptions and morning interviews, he sometimes remained silent, lost in thought, his mind wandering and, in reality, with Marianne.

Adrienne, at such times, with a sweet smile which made Sulpice shudder with remorse, would beseech him to work less, to take some recreation, and not allow himself to be so absorbed in politics.

"You are extremely pale, I a.s.sure you. You look worn out. You work too hard."

"It is due to administrative changes. There are so many doc.u.ments to examine."

"I know that very well, but isn't Monsieur Warcolier there? In what way does he help you?"

"In no way," replied the minister sharply, speaking with truth.

Public affairs, in fact, absorbed him, and he found it necessary to steal the precious time to make a hasty trip to Rue p.r.o.ny. A vacation, it is true, was near. In less than a month, Vaudrey would have more time at his disposal. But for more than three weeks yet, the minister would have everything to modify and change,--everything to put into a healthy shape, as Warcolier said--in the Hotel Beauvau.

What matter! He found the time to fly incognito to the Maison de Vanda, leaving his coupe at the ministry. Marianne was always there for him when he arrived. The male domestic or the femme de chambre received him with all the deference that "domestics" show when they suspect that the visitor brings any kind of subsidy to the house. To Vaudrey, there was a sort of mystery in Mademoiselle Kayser's life. Ramel, who knew her uncle Kayser, had told him of the poverty of the painter. How then, seeing that her uncle was so shabby, could the niece be so sumptuously established?

Kayser, whom he had once met at Marianne's, had answered such a question by remarking that his niece was a _sly puss_ who understood life thoroughly and would be sure to make headway. But that was all.

"I have suspected for a long time that that little head was not capable of much," the painter had added. "I considered her a light-headed creature, nothing more. Fool that I was! she is a shrewd woman, a clever woman, a true woman. I only find fault with her for one thing."

"What?" asked Vaudrey.

"Do you ask what, Monsieur le Ministre? The style of her establishment.

It is flashy, tawdry, noisy, it is boudoir art. It lacks seriousness! It lacks morality! I would have in it figures that have style, character. I don't ask for saintly pictures, but moral allegories, austere art. I understand only the severe in art. I am a puritan in the matter of the brush. For that reason, I shall attain nothing in these days of _genre_ and water-color painting."

And Kayser went on painting allegories, to digest his dinner, the pate de foie gras washed down with k.u.mmel, of which he had just partaken at his niece's.

Vaudrey himself viewed those j.a.panese trifles, those screens, those carpets, those pedestals surmounted by terra-cotta figures presenting in their nudity the flesh tints of woman, those clock-cases above the doors, that profusion of knickknacks, of furniture, of ottomans, that soft upholstery that seemed to be made only to excuse a fall--nay, even urged to sudden temptations, to chance love, to violent caprices; and on leaving the house, where he had spoken to Marianne only in compliments a hundred times repeated, and where she had but re-echoed sarcasms full of tender, double meanings, as a woman who would undoubtedly yield, but would not offer herself, he bore away with him in his nostrils and, as it were, in his clothes, a permeating, feminine odor, which would now follow him everywhere, and everywhere float about him in whiffs, urging him to return to that house in which a new world seemed to be opening to him.

He would not long persist in enquiring how Marianne Kayser had procured all those baubles that so highly incensed the puritan instincts of her honest uncle. He found himself urged forward with profound delight in this adventure whose mysterious features pleased him. Bah! the very fact that he found so much inexplicable in the life of this woman enticed him all the more. It seemed to him that not only had he entered upon a romantic course, but that he was himself the hero of the romance. Never, in the days when he rolled about, an unknown student, on the Parisian wave, and had lifted his thoughts toward some pale patrician girl, toward some pretty creature he had caught a glimpse of, leaning back in a dark-blue coupe, or framed in by the red velvet hangings of a proscenium box, had he more perfectly incarnated the ideal of his desire than in so charming a creature. Dreams of power, visions of love of his twentieth year, had now become tangible to him and at forty he stretched out his feverish hand toward them all.

"Could Ramel have been right?" he said to himself, "and I, only a provincial, athirst for Parisine? But what matter? Let Mademoiselle Kayser be what she will and I what I may be, it seems to me that I have never loved any one as I love this woman."

"Not even Adrienne," added a faint, trembling voice from within. But Sulpice had a ready answer to stifle it: Adrienne could not be compared with any creature in the world. Adrienne was the charm, the daily comfort of the domestic hearth. She was the wife, not the "woman." She was the darling, not the love. Vaudrey would have severed one of his arms to spare her any heavy sorrow, but he was not anxious about Adrienne. She knew nothing, she would know nothing. And what fault, moreover, had he committed hitherto? In that word _hitherto_, a host of mental reservations were involved that Sulpice would gladly have obliterated with his nails, he was ready to cry out with the same good faith,--that of the husband who deceives the wife whom he loves:

"What wrong have I done?"

One afternoon,--there was no session of the Chamber that day,--Marianne was seated in her little salon. She was warming the tips of her slippers, that furtively peeped from beneath the lace of her skirt as a little bird might protrude its beak from a nest, her right leg crossed over the other, and she appeared to be musing, her chin resting on her delicate hand.

She was weary. Justine, her recently engaged femme de chambre, who, like the silverware, was provided by the Dujarrier, came to announce with the discreet, bantering little smile of servants, that Monsieur Dachet, the upholsterer, had called twice.

"The upholsterer!"

Marianne frowned slightly.

"What did he say?"

"Nothing, that he would return to-morrow."

"You call that nothing?" said Marianne, with a short laugh.

When Justine had left the room, she went straight to a small, black, Italian cabinet inlaid with ivory, of which one drawer was locked. In opening it, the sound of gold coins rattling on the wood caused her to smile; then, with the tips of her white fingers, she spread out the louis at the bottom of the drawer, which she abruptly closed, making a wry face, and folding her arms, she returned to her seat in front of the fire, beating her right foot nervously upon the wrought-iron fender.

"The Dujarrier's money will not go much further," she thought. "It is finished."

She thought of striking a decisive blow. Up to the present time, her relations with Sulpice had floated in the regions of the sentimentalities of the novel, or of romance. The minister believed himself loved for love's sake. He saw in Marianne only an eccentric girl free from all prejudices and every duty, who disposed of her life as seemed best to her, without being under the necessity of accounting to either husband or lover. Free, she made of her liberty pleasure or pa.s.sion according to her fancy. The frightful, practical questions, the daily necessities, were lost sight of by this man who was burdened with the governmental question of France. Again, he never asked himself the source of Marianne's luxury. He delighted in it without thinking of a.n.a.lyzing anything or of knowing anything, and this ingenuously.

Mademoiselle Kayser's first word must necessarily awaken him to the situation.

She knew that Vaudrey was to come, and suddenly leaving the fire, she arrayed herself for him in a black satin peignoir lined with red surah, with lapels of velvet thrown widely apart and allowing the whiteness of her neck and chest to be seen under folds of old lace. Her fair hair fell upon her velvet collar, and surmounting this strange costume, her pale face against the background of the red-draped salon a.s.sumed the disturbing charm of an apparition.

On seeing her, Sulpice could not refrain from stopping short and looking at her in admiration. Seated there, in the centre of her salon, she was awaiting him and arranging bundles of papers in a basket with gilded feet and lined with pink satin. She extended her hand to him. It was a pale hand, as inanimate as the hand of a dead person, and she languidly asked him why he remained there stupefied without approaching her.

"I am looking," said the minister.

"You are always the most gallant of men," said Marianne, and she added:

"You are not already tired then of looking at me? Usually, caprices do not last so long."

"The affection that I have for you is not a caprice."

"What is it, then? I am curious--"

"It is a pa.s.sion, Marianne, an absolute, deep, mad pa.s.sion--"

"Oh! nonsense! nonsense!" said Marianne. "I know that you speak wonderfully well, I have heard you in the tribune. A declaration of love costs you no more than a ministerial declaration. But to-day, my dear minister, I am not disposed to listen to it even from you."

In these last words, there was a certain tenderness that in a measure modified the expression of weariness or sulkiness which Marianne suggested. Sulpice inferred therefrom an implied acceptance of his proffered love.

"Yes," said she abruptly; "I am very sad, frightfully sad."

"Without a cause?" asked Vaudrey.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Oh! I am not of those who allow their nerves to control them. When I am out of sorts, there is invariably a cause. Let that be understood once for all."

"And the cause?--I should be delighted to learn it, Marianne, for I swear to you that I would always bear a half of your troubles and pains."