Part 18 (1/2)
He felt as if he were surrounded with all the perfume of youth. On a console beside Marianne, stood a vase of inlaid enamel containing sprigs of white lilacs which as she leaned forward, surrounded her fair head as with an aureole of spring. Her locks were encircled with milk-white flowers and bright green leaves, transparent and clear, like the limpid green of water; and at times these sprigs were gently shaken, dropping a white bud on Marianne's hair, that looked like a drop of milk amid a heap of ruddy gold.
Ah! how at this moment, all the poetry, all the past with its unacknowledged love swelled Rosas's heart and rushed to his lips. In this brilliantly-lighted salon, under the blaze of the lights, amid the s.h.i.+mmering reflections of the satin draperies, he forgot everything in his rapture at the presence of this woman, lovely to adoration, whose glance penetrated his very veins and filled him with restless thoughts.
The distant music, gentle, penetrating and languis.h.i.+ng, some soothing air from Gounod, reached them like a gentle breeze wafted into the room.
Jose believed himself to be in a dream.
”Ah! if you only knew, madame,” he said, becoming more pa.s.sionate with each word that he spoke, as if he had been gulping down some liqueur, ”if you only knew how you have travelled with me everywhere, in thought, there, carried with me like a scapular--”
”My portrait?” said Marianne. ”I remember it. I was very slender then, prettier, a young girl, in fact.”
”No! no! not your portrait. I tore that up in a fit of frenzy.”
”Tore it up?”
”Yes, as I thought that those eyes, those lips and that brow belonged to another.”
Marianne's cheeks became pallid.
”But I have taken with me something better than that portrait: I preserved you, you were always present, and pretty, so pretty--as you are now, Marianne--Look at yourself! No one could be lovelier!”
”And why,” she said slowly, speaking in a deep, endearing tone, ”why did you not speak to me thus, of old?”
”Ah! of old!” said the duke angrily.
She allowed her head to fall on the back of the divan; looking at this man as she well knew how, and insensibly creeping closer to him, she breathed in his ears these burning words:
”Formerly, one who was your friend was beside me, is that not so?”
”Do not speak to me of him,” Jose said abruptly.
”On the contrary, I am determined to tell you that even if I had loved him, I should not have hesitated for a moment to leave him and follow you. But I did not love him.”
”Marianne!”
”You won't believe me? I never loved him. I have never been his mistress.”
”I do not ask your secret. I do not speak of him,” said the duke, who had now become deadly pale.
”And I am determined to speak to you of him. Never, you understand, never was Guy de Lissac my lover. No, in spite of appearances; he has never even kissed my lips. I thought I loved him, but before yielding, I had time to discover that I did not love him! And I waited, I swear to you, expecting that you would say to me: 'I love you!'”
”I?”
”You,” said Marianne, in a feeble tone. ”You never guessed then?”
And she crept with an exquisitely undulating movement still closer to Rosas, who, as if drawn by some magnetic fluid, surrendered his face to this woman with the wandering eyes, half-open lips, from which a gentle sigh escaped and died away in the duke's hair.
He said nothing, but hastily seizing Marianne's hand, he drew her face close to his lips, her pink nostrils dilated as if the better to breathe the incense of love; and wild, distracted, intoxicated, he pressed his feverish, burning lips upon that fresh mouth that he felt exhaled the perfume of a flower that opens to the morning dew.
”I love you now, I loved you then!--” Marianne said to him, after that kiss that paled his cheeks.
Rosas had risen: a thunder of applause greeted the termination of a song in the other salon and the throng was pouring into the smaller salon.