He simpered awhile and toyed with trivialities of speech before he gave utterance to the matter that absorbed him. Then, at last, when they were alone, he loosed the question that was bubbling on his lips.
"I hear a courier came to Condillac to-day."
For answer she told him what he sought to learn, whence came that courier, and what the message that he brought.
"And so, Monsieur de Tressan," she ended, "my days at Condillac are numbered."
"Why so?" he asked, "since you say that Florimond has adopted towards you a friendly tone. Surely he would not drive his father's widow hence?"
She smiled at the fire in a dreamy, pensive manner.
"No," said she, "he would not drive me hence. He has offered me the shelter of Condillac for as long as it may pleasure me to make it my home."
"Excellent!" he exclaimed, rubbing his little fat hands and screwing the little features of his huge red face into the grotesque semblance of a smile. "What need to talk of going, then?"
"What need?" she echoed, in a voice dull and concentrated. "Do you ask that, Tressan? Do you think I should elect to live upon the charity of this man?"
For all that the Lord Seneschal may have been dull-witted, yet he had wit enough to penetrate to the very marrow of her meaning.
"You must hate Florimond very bitterly," said he. She shrugged her shoulders.
"I possess, I think, the faculty of feeling strongly. I can love well, monsieur, and I can hate well. It is one or the other with me. And as cordially as I love my own son Marius, as cordially do I detest this coxcomb Florimond."
She expressed no reasons for her hatred of her late husband's elder son. Hers were not reasons that could easily be put into words. They were little reasons, trivial grains of offence which through long years had accumulated into a mountain. They had their beginning in the foolish grievance that had its birth with her own son, when she had realized that but for that rosy-cheeked, well-grown boy borne to the Marquis by his first wife, Marius would have been heir to Condillac. Her love of her own child and her ambitions for him, her keen desire to see him fill an exalted position in the world, caused her a thousand times a day to wish his half-brother dead. Yet Florimond had flourished and grown, and as he grew he manifested a character which, with all its imperfections, was more lovable than the nature of her own offspring. And their common father had never seen aught but the faults of Marius and the virtues of Florimond. She had resented this, and Marius had resented it; and Marius, having inherited with his mother's beauty his mother's arrogant, dominant spirit, had returned with insolence such admonitions as from time to time his father gave him, and thus the breach had grown. Later, since he could not be heir to Condillac, the Marquise's eyes, greedy of advancement for him, had fallen covetously upon the richer La Vauvraye, whose lord had then no son, whose heiress was a little girl.
By an alliance easy to compass, since the lords of Condillac and La Vauvraye were lifelong friends, Marius's fortunes might handsomely have been mended. Yet when she herself bore the suggestion of it to the Marquis, he had seized upon it, approved it, but adopted it for Florimond's benefit instead.
Thereafter war had raged fiercely in the family of Condillac—a war between the Marquis and Florimond on the one side, and the Marquise and Marius on the other. And so bitterly was it waged that it was by the old Marquis's suggestion that at last Florimond had gone upon his travels to see the world and carry arms in foreign service.
Her hopes that he would take his death, as was a common thing when warring, rose high—so high as to become almost assurance, a thing to be reckoned with. Florimond would return no more, and her son should fill the place to which he was entitled by his beauty of person and the high mental gifts his doting mother saw in him.
Yet the months grew into years, and at long intervals full of hope for the Marquise news came of Florimond, and the news was ever that he was well and thriving, gathering honours and drinking deep of life.
And now, at last, when matters seemed to have been tumbled into her lap that she might dispose of them as she listed; now, when in her anxiety to see her son supplant his step-brother in the possession of La Vauvraye—if not, perhaps, in that of Condillac as well she had done a rashness which might end in making her and Marius outlaws, news came that this hated Florimond was at the door; tardily returned, yet returned in time to overthrow her schemes and to make her son the pauper that her husband's will had seemed to aim at rendering him.
Her mind skimmed lightly over all these matters, seeking somewhere some wrong that should stand out stark and glaring, upon which she might seize, and offer it to the Seneschal as an explanation of her hatred. But nowhere could she find the thing she sought. Her hatred had for foundation a material too impalpable to be fashioned into words. Tressan's voice aroused her from her thoughts.
"Have you laid no plans, madame?" he asked her. "It were surely a madness now to attempt to withstand the Marquis."
"The Marquis? Ah yes—Florimond." She sat forward out of the shadows in which her great chair enveloped her, and let candle and firelight play about the matchless beauty of her perfect face. There was a flush upon it, the flush of battle; and she was about to tell the Seneschal that not while one stone of Condillac should stand upon another, not while a gasp of breath remained in her frail body, would she surrender. But she checked her rashness. Well might it be that in the end she should abandon such a purpose. Tressan was ugly as a toad, the most absurd, ridiculous bridegroom that ever led woman to the altar. Yet rumour ran that he was rich, and as a last resource, for the sake of his possessions she might bring herself to endure his signal shortcomings.
"I have taken no resolve as yet," said she, in a wistful voice. "I founded hopes upon Marius which Marius threatens to frustrate. I think I had best resign myself to the poverty of my Touraine home."
And then the Seneschal realized that the time was now. The opportunity he might have sought in vain was almost thrust upon him. In the spirit he blessed Florimond for returning so opportunely; in the flesh he rose from the chair and, without more ado, he cast himself upon his knees before the Dowager. He cast himself down, and the Dowager experienced a faint stirring of surprise that she heard no flop such as must attend the violent falling of so fat a body. But the next instant, realizing the purpose of his absurd posture, she shrank back with a faint gasp, and her face was mercifully blurred to his sight once more amid the shadows of her chair. Thus was he spared the look of utter loathing, of unconquerable, irrepressible disgust that leapt into her countenance.
His voice quivered with ridiculous emotion, his little fat red fingers trembled as he outheld them in a theatrical gesture of supplication.
"Never contemplate poverty, madame, until you have discarded me," he implored her. "Say but that you will, and you shall be lady of Tressan. All that I have would prove but poor adornment to a beauty such as yours, and I should shrink from offering it you, were it not that, with it all, I can offer you the fondest heart in France. Marquise—Clotilde, I cast myself humbly at your feet. Do with me as you will. I love you."
By an effort she crushed down her loathing of him—a loathing that grew a hundredfold as she beheld him now transformed by his amorousness into the semblance almost of a satyr—and listened to his foolish rantings.
As Marquise de Condillac it hurt her pride to listen and not have him whipped for his audacity; as a woman it insulted her. Yet the Marquise and the woman she alike repressed. She would give him no answer—she could not, so near was she to fainting with disdain of him—yet must she give him hope against the time when, should all else fail, she might have to swallow the bitter draught he was now holding to her lips. So she temporized.
She controlled her voice into a tone of gentle sadness; she set a mask of sorrow upon her insolent face.
"Monsieur, monsieur," she sighed, and so far overcame her nausea as for an instant to touch his hand in a little gesture of caress, "you must not speak so to a widow of six months, nor
must I listen."
The quivering grew in his hands and voice; but no longer did they shake through fear of a rebuff: they trembled now in the eager strength of the hope he gathered from her words. She was so beautiful, so peerless, so noble, so proud—and he so utterly unworthy—that naught but her plight had given him courage to utter his proposal. And she answered him in such terms!
"You give me hope, Marquise? If I come again—?"
She sighed, and her face, which was once more within the light, showed a look of sad inquiry.
"If I thought that what you have said, you have said out of pity, because you fear lest my necessities should hurt me, I could give you no hope at all. I have my pride, mon ami. But if what you have said you would still have said though I had continued mistress of Condillac, then, Tressan, you may repeat it to me hereafter, at a season when I may listen."
His joy welled up and overflowed in him as overflows a river in time of spate.
He bent forward, caught her hand, and bore it to his lips.
"Clotilde!" he cried, in a smothered voice; then the door opened, and Marius stepped into the long chamber.
At the creaking sound of the opening door the Seneschal bestirred himself to rise. Even the very young care not so to be surprised, how much less, then, a man well past the prime of life? He came up laboriously—the more laboriously by virtue of his very efforts to show himself still nimble in his mistress's eyes. Upon the intruder he turned a crimson, furious face, perspiration gleaming like varnish on brow and nose. At sight of Marius, who stood arrested, scowling villainously upon the pair, the fire died suddenly from his glance.
"Ah, my dear Marius," said he, with a flourish and an air of being mightily at his ease. But the young man's eyes went over and beyond him to rest in a look of scrutiny upon his mother. She had risen too, and he had been in time to see the startled manner of her rising. In her cheeks there was a guilty flush, but her eyes boldly met and threw back her son's regard.
Marius came slowly down the room, and no word was spoken. The Seneschal cleared his throat with noisy nervousness. Madame stood hand on hip, the flush fading slowly, her glance resuming its habitual lazy insolence. By the fire Marius paused and kicked the logs into a blaze, regardless of the delicate fabric of his rosetted shoes.
"Monsieur le Seneschal," said madame calmly, "came to see us in the matter of the courier."
"Ah!" said Marius, with an insolent lifting of his brows and a sidelong look at Tressan; and Tressan registered in his heart a vow that when he should have come to wed the mother, he would not forget to take payment for that glance from her pert son.
"Monsieur le Comte will remain and sup with us before riding back to Grenoble," she added.
"Ah!" said he again, in the same tone. And that for the moment was all he said. He remained by the fire, standing between them where he had planted himself in the flesh, as if to symbolize the attitude he intended in the spirit.
But one chance he had, before supper was laid, of a word alone with his mother, in her own closet.
"Madame," he said, his sternness mingling with alarm, "are you mad that you encourage the suit of this hedgehog Tressan?"
She looked him up and down with a deliberate eye, her lip curling a little.
"Surely, Marius, it is my own concern."
"Not so," he answered her, and his grasp fastened almost viciously on her wrist. "I think that it is mine as well. Mother, bethink you," and his tone changed to an imploring key, "bethink you what you would do! Would you—you—mate with such a thing as that?"
His emphasis of the pronoun was very eloquent. Not in all the words of the French language could he have told her better how high he placed her in his thoughts, how utterly she must fall, how unutterably be soiled by an alliance with Tressan.
"I had hoped you would have saved me from it, Marius," she answered him, her eyes seeming to gaze down into the depths of his. "At La Vauvraye I had hoped to live out my widowhood in tranquil dignity. But—" She let her arms fall sharply to her sides, and uttered a little sneering laugh.
"But, mother," he cried, "between the dignity of La Vauvraye and the indignity of Tressan, surely there is some middle course?"
"Aye," she answered scornfully, "starvation on a dunghill in Touraine—or something near akin to it, for which I have no stomach."
He released her wrist and stood with bent head, clenching and unclenching his long white hands, and she watched him, watching in him the working of his proud and stubborn spirit.
"Mother," he cried at last, and the word sounded absurd between them, by so little did he seem the younger of the twain, "mother, you shall not do it you must not!"
"You leave me little alternative—alas!" sighed she. "Had you been more adroit you had been wed by now, Marius, and the future would give us no concern. As it is, Florimond comes home, and we—" She spread her hands and thrust out her nether lip in a grimace that was almost ugly. Then: "Come," she said briskly. "Supper is laid, and my Lord Seneschal will be awaiting us."
And before he could reply she had swept past him and taken her way below. He followed gloomily, and in gloom sat he at table, never heeding the reckless gaiety of the Seneschal and the forced mirth of the Marquise. He well understood the sort of tacit bargain that his mother had made with him. She had seen her advantage in his loathing of the proposed union with Tressan, and she had used it to the full. Either he must compel Valerie to wed him this side of Saturday or resign himself to see his mother—his beautiful, peerless mother—married to this skin of lard that called itself a man.
Living, he had never entertained for his father a son's respect, nor, dead, did he now reverence his memory as becomes a son. But in that hour, as he sat at table, facing this gross wooer of his mother's, his eyes were raised to the portrait of the florid-visaged haughty Marquis de Condillac, where it looked down upon them from the panelled wall, and from his soul he offered up to that portrait of his dead sire an apology for the successor whom his widow destined him.
He ate little, but drank great draughts, as men will when their mood is sullen and dejected, and the heat of the wine, warming his veins and lifting from him some of the gloom that had settled over him, lent him anon a certain recklessness very different from the manner of his sober moments.
Chancing suddenly to raise his eyes from the cup into which he had been gazing, absorbed as gazes a seer into his crystal, he caught on the Seneschal's lips so odious a smile, in the man's eyes so greedy, hateful a leer as he bent them on the Marquise, that he had much ado not to alter the expression of that flabby face by hurling at it the cup he held.
He curbed himself; he smiled sardonically upon the pair; and in that moment he swore that be the cost what it might, he would frustrate the union of those two. His thoughts flew to Valerie, and the road they took was fouled with the mud of ugly deeds. A despair, grim at first, then mocking, took possession of him. He loved Valerie to distraction. Loved her for herself, apart from all worldly advantages that must accrue to him from an alliance with her. His mother saw in that projected marriage no more than the acquisition of the lands of La Vauvraye, and she may even have thought that he himself saw no more. In that she was wrong; but because of it she may have been justified of her impatience with him at the tardiness, the very clumsiness with which he urged his suit. How was she to know that it was just the sincerity of his passion made him clumsy? For like many another, normally glib, self-assured, and graceful, Marius grew halting, shy, and clumsy only where he loved.
But in the despair that took him now the quality of his passion seemed to change. Partly it was the wine, partly the sight of this other lover—of whom there must be an end—whose very glance seemed to him an insult to his mother. His imagination had taken fire that night, and it had ripened him for any villainy. The Seneschal and the wine, between them, had opened the floodgates of all that was evil in his nature, and that evil thundered out in a great torrent that bid fair to sweep all before it.
And suddenly
, unexpectedly for the others, who were by now resigned to his moody silence, the evil found expression. The Marquise had spoken of something—something of slight importance—that must be done before Florimond returned. Abruptly Marius swung round in his seat to face his mother. "Must this Florimond return?" he asked, and for all that he uttered no more words, so ample in their expression were those four that he had uttered and the tone of them, that his meaning left little work to the imagination.
Madame turned to stare at him, surprise ineffable in her glance—not at the thing that he suggested, but at the abruptness with which the suggestion came. The cynical, sneering tone rang in her ears after the words were spoken, and she looked in his face for a confirmation of their full purport.
She observed the wine-flush on his cheek, the wine-glitter in his eye, and she remarked the slight smile on his lips and the cynical assumption of nonchalance with which he fingered the jewel in his ear as he returned her gaze. She beheld now in her son a man more purposeful than she had ever known before.
A tense silence had followed his words, and the Lord Seneschal gaped at him, some of the colour fading from his plethoric countenance, suspecting as he did the true drift of Marius's suggestion. At last it was madame who spoke—very softly, with a narrowing of the eyes.
"Call Fortunio," was all she said, but Marius understood full well the purpose for which she would have Fortunio called.
With a half-smile he rose, and going to the door he bade his page who was idling in the anteroom go summon the captain. Then he paced slowly back, not to the place he had lately occupied at table, but to the hearth, where he took his stand with his shoulders squared to the overmantel.
Fortunio came, fair-haired and fresh-complexioned as a babe, his supple, not ungraceful figure tawdrily clad in showy clothes of poor material the worse for hard usage and spilt wine. The Countess bade him sit, and with her own hands she poured a cup of Anjou for him.
In some wonder, and, for all his ordinary self-possession, with a little awkwardness, the captain did her bidding, and with an apologetic air he took the seat she offered him.
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