Part 10 (1/2)
So Kayser consoled himself for this escapade by the sacredness of art, the only sacredness he recognized. On that indeed he yielded nothing.
What mattered it to the world, if a girl went astray, even if that girl were his niece? Public morality was not hurt thereby. Ah! if he, Kayser, had exhibited to the world a lewd picture, it would have been ”a horse of a different color”! The dignity, seriousness, purity of art, that was right enough!--But a woman! Pshaw! a woman!--Nor was he heard once to express any uneasiness as to what might become of Marianne.
In the course of her perilous career, which, however, was not that of a courtesan, but that of a freed woman avenging herself, Marianne had met Guy de Lissac and loved him as completely as her nature allowed her to love. Guy entertained her. With him she talked over everything, she gave herself up to him, and made plans for the future. Why should they ever separate? They adored each other. Guy was rich, or at any rate he lived sumptuously. Marianne was a lovely mistress, clever, in fact, ten women in one. Guy became madly attached to her and he felt himself drawn closer to her day by day. She often repeated with perfect sincerity that she had never loved any one before.
The first lover, then? She did not even know his name now!
There was no reason why they should not live together for ever, a life of mutual joy and happiness, led by the same fancies, stirred by the same desires. Why ever leave each other, even once? But it was just this that induced Guy to abandon this pretty girl. He was afraid. He saw no end to such a union as theirs. The little love-affair that enticed him a.s.sumed another name: _The Chain_. He sometimes debated with himself seriously about marrying this Marianne, whose adventures he knew, but who so intoxicated him that he forgot all the past.
Uncle Kayser, entirely engrossed in the ”dignity of art,” and occupied with the composition of an allegorical production ent.i.tled _The Modern Family_,--a page of pure, mystic, social, regenerative art,--had certainly forgotten his niece; nevertheless, Lissac at times felt somewhat tempted to restore her to him. He was grieved at the thought of abandoning Marianne to another. His dread of marriage triumphed over his jealousy. One fine day, Guy suddenly brought about a separation.
Feeling ill, he took to his bed, when one morning Marianne came to him and said in pa.s.sionate tones:
”Now I will never leave you again! You are in danger, and I am here to save you!”
Guy now felt himself lost. His rapid perception, whose operation was as sudden as a blow of the fist, warned him that if he allowed this woman to install herself in his house, he might say good-by to liberty, and probably also to his life. This Parisian had laid down as a principle, that a man should always be _unfettered_. He held in horror this shameful half-marriage that the language of slang had baptized, as with a stain: _Collage_. He therefore decided to play his life against his liberty, and during the temporary absence of this nurse established at his bedside, he packed his clothes in his trunk at random, s.h.i.+vering as he was with fever, threw himself into a hack, and, with chattering teeth and a morbid shudder creeping over his entire body, had himself driven to the railroad station and departed for Italy.
Marianne was heartbroken anew at this unexpected departure. A hope had vanished. She loved Guy very sincerely, and she vainly hoped that she would hold him. He fled from her! Whither had he gone? For a moment, she was tempted to rejoin him when she received his letters. She surmised, however, that Guy, desiring to avoid her, caused his brief notes to be sent by some friend from towns that he had left. To play there the absurd part of a woman chasing her lover would have been ridiculous. She remained, therefore, disgusted, heartbroken for a moment like a widow in despair, then she retraced her steps to the Rue de Navarin, and returned to the fold, where she found Uncle Kayser still quite unruffled, with the almost finished picture of _The Modern Family_.
”That is, I verily believe, the best I have done, the most moral,” said Kayser to her. ”In art, morality before everything, my girl! Come, sit down and tell me your little adventures.”
It was five years--five whole years--since Lissac had seen Marianne.
Their pa.s.sion had subsided little by little into friends.h.i.+p,--expressed though by letters. Marianne wrote, Guy replied. All the bitter reproofs had been exchanged through the post, yet, in spite of this correspondence, neither had sought the opportunity nor felt the desire to meet. The fancy was dead! Nevertheless, they had loved each other well!
Suddenly, without overtures, on this bitingly cold morning, Marianne arrived, half s.h.i.+vering, in the new apartment, warmed her tiny feet at the fire and raised to him the rosy tip of her cold nose.
Guy was somewhat surprised.
He looked with a curiosity not unmixed with pain at that woman whom he had loved truly enough to suffer love's pangs,--the innocents say to die of it. He tried to find again in the depths of those gray eyes, sparkling and malicious, the old burning pa.s.sion, extinguished without leaving even a fragment of its embers. To think that he had risked his life for that woman; that he should have sacrificed his name; that he should have torn himself from her with such harsh bravado; that he should have cut deep into his own being in order to leave her; that he had fled, leaving for Italy with a craving desire for solitude and forgetfulness! Eh! yes, Marianne had been his true love, the true love of this blase Parisian sceptic and braggart, and he sought, while again looking at the lovely girl, to recover some of the sensations that had flown, to recall some of those reminiscences which more than once had agreeably affected him.
Marianne evidently understood what was pa.s.sing in Guy's mind. She smiled strangely. Buried in the armchair, whose back supported her own, and half-bending her fair neck that reclined on the lace-covered head-rest, she looked at Lissac fixedly with an odd expression, the sidelong glance of a woman, that seems to be her keenest scrutiny.
Through her half-closed lashes he seemed to feel that a malicious glance embraced him. The mobile nostrils of her delicate nose dilated with a nervous trembling that intensified the mocking smile betrayed by her curling lips. Her hands were resting upon her plump arms, and with a trembling motion of the fingers beat a feverish little march as if she were playing a scale on a keyboard.
Guy sought to evoke from the well-set, gracefully reclining form, from the half-sly and half-concealed glance, from the palpitating nostrils, something that reminded him of his former ecstasies. Again he saw, shadowed by the chin, that part of her neck where he loved to bury his brow and to rest his lips, greedily, lingeringly, as when one sips a liqueur. A strange emotion seized him. All that had not yet been gratified of his shattered, but not wholly destroyed love, surged within him.
Were it fancy or reminiscence, beside this woman he still felt as of old, a feeling that oppressed his heart and caused him that delightful sensation of uneasiness to which he had been a stranger in connection with his many later easy love adventures. A light, penetrating and sweet odor floated around Marianne, reminding Lissac of the intoxicating perfume of vanished days, an irritating odor as of new-mown hay.
He said nothing, while she awaited his remarks with curiosity. Guy's mute interrogation possibly embarra.s.sed her, for she suddenly shook her head and rose to her feet.
”May one smoke here?” she said, as she opened a Russia leather cigarette-case bearing her monogram.
”What next?” said Guy, lighting a sponge steeped in alcohol that stood in a silver holder and offering it to Marianne.
She quickly closed her fine teeth on the end of the paper cigarette that she had rolled between her fingers and lighted it at the flame. The gleam of the alcohol brightened her eyes and slightly flushed her pale cheeks, which Guy regarded with strange feelings.
”Your invention is an odd one!” she said, as she returned him the little sponge upon which a tongue of blue flame played.
He extinguished it, and abandoning himself to the disturbing charm of reminiscences, watched Marianne who was already half-enveloped in a light cloud of smoke.
”There is one thing you do not know,” he said. ”More than once--on my honor--at the corner of the street, at some chance meeting, my old Parisian heart has beaten wildly on seeing in some coquettish outline, or in some fair hair falling loosely over an otter-skin cloak, or in some fair, vanis.h.i.+ng profile with a pearl set in the lobe of the ear, something that resembled you. Those fur toques with little feathers that everybody wears now, you wore before any one else, on your fair head.