Part 61 (1/2)

She fastened her bouquet of drooping roses to her corsage and without daring to look at Lissac again, she re-entered, leaning on Ramel's arm.

Left alone in the salon, Guy remained a moment to shake his head.

”Poor, dear creature!” he said. ”If I had been young enough not to understand the position in which her madness placed me, or base enough to profit by it, what a pretty little preface to a great folly she was about to commit this evening! Well! this attack of morality will perhaps count in my favor some day.”

He stooped down and picked up a rose that had fallen from Adrienne's bouquet to the carpet.

He smiled as he took up the flower and looked at it.

”One learns at any age!” he thought, as he put the flower in his coat.

”That, at least, is a love souvenir that they will not send the police to rob me of.”

VII

On rising the following morning, after a feverish night, Sulpice realized a feeling of absolute moral destruction. It seemed to him that he had lost a dear being. In that huge, silent hotel one would have thought that a corpse was lying. He did not dare to present himself to Adrienne. He could not tell what to say to her. He went downstairs slowly, crossing the salons that were still decorated with the now fading flowers, to reach his cabinet. The carpet was littered with the broken leaves of dracaenas and petals that had fallen from the azaleas, and presented the gloomy, forsaken aspect peculiar to the morrow of a fete. The furniture, stripped of its coverings, offered the faded tint of old maids at their rising. With heavy head, he sat at his desk and looked at the piled-up doc.u.ments with a vague expression. Always the eternal pile of despatches, optimistic reports, and ba.n.a.l summaries of the daily press. Nothing new, nothing interesting, all was going well.

This tired world had no history.

The minister still remained there, absorbed as after an unhealthy insomnia, when Warcolier entered, ever serious, with his splendid, redundant phrases and his usual att.i.tude of a pedantic rhetor. He came to inform the minister that a matter of importance, perhaps of a troublesome nature, loomed on the horizon. Granet was preparing an interpellation. Oh! upon a matter without any real importance. An affair of a procession that had taken place at Tarbes, accompanied by some little disturbance. It was only a pretext, but it was sufficient, perhaps, to rally a majority around the _minister of to-morrow_. Old Henri de Prangins, with his eye on a portfolio, and always thirsting for power, was keeping Granet company: the man who would never be a minister with the man who was sure to be.

”Well, what has this to do with me?” asked Vaudrey indifferently.

Granet! Prangins! He was thinking of a very different matter. Adrienne knew all and Marianne deceived him. She was to marry Rosas.

The very serious Warcolier manifested much surprise at the little energy displayed by Monsieur le Ministre. He expected to see him bound, in order to rebound, as he said, believing himself witty. Was Vaudrey himself giving up the game? Was Granet then sure of the game? He surmised it and had already taken the necessary measures in that direction. But surely if Granet were the rising sun, Vaudrey was himself abandoning his character of the setting sun. He was not setting, he was falling. A sovereign contempt for this man entered Warcolier's lofty soul, Warcolier the friend of success.

”Then you do not understand, Monsieur le President?”

Vaudrey drew himself up with a sudden movement that was frequent with him. He struck the table on which his open portfolio rested, and said:

”I understand that Granet wants that portfolio! Well, be it so! I set little store by it, but he does not have it yet!”

”That is something like it! It is worthy of a brave man to show a resolute front to his enemies! It is in battle that talent is retempered, as formerly in the Styx were tempered--”

”I know,” said Sulpice.

Warcolier's intelligent smile was not understood by the minister.

Sulpice, who was in despair over his shattered domestic joys, had no wish to enter on a struggle except to bring about a reaction on himself.

To hold his own against Granet, was to divert his own present sadness.

”All right,” he said to Warcolier. ”Let Granet interpellate us when he pleases--In eight days, to-morrow, yes, to-day even, I am ready!”

”Interpellate _us_!” thought Warcolier. ”You should say, interpellate _you_.”

He had already got out of the sc.r.a.pe himself.

Vaudrey debated with himself as to whether he would try to see Adrienne.

No? What should he say to her? It would be better to let a little time shed its balm upon the wound. Then, too, if he wished to bar the way to Granet, he had not too much time before him. The shrewd person should act promptly.