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“Particular,” laughs Shropshire, “did you ever know an Alcazar songstress particular? You might as well expect prudery from Rose Stanley at the Holborn, or from little Kitty Mortimer at the Pavilion. Do you imagine her salary at the Alcazar pays for her charming au premier in the Rue Tronchet, her carriage and haute ecole cattle, the jewels and laces and velvets that are the very soul and essence of the beautiful Marguerite. Sapristi! You must have forgotten the world and its ways.”

“And the parable of the lamb and the wolves,” Silverlake adds. “I defy any woman making head against the current of lovers that Marguerite has.”

“I might have known it! They are all alike, these women,” Delaval mutters savagely through his set teeth.

“Understand, I don’t mean to hint a word against her morals, in fact, the Ange is extra proper. She always goes about with the most hideous of duennas. But she’s the very devil with men – twists them round her fingers – fools them to any extent – cleans them out and then throws them overboard. Young Valentin de Brissac blew his brains out about her last week, and not very long ago Jules de Grammont Charleville, a capital fellow, and one of the Faubourg St. Germain Charleville’s, went to the bad – took to drinking like a madman – tried to shoot her, and has got five years for it. The Ange is as hard as granite, as calculating as a Jew, and as vain as – well – I really can’t find anything to compare with her vanity.”

“Where did you say she lived, Shropshire?”

Shropshire looks at him and elevates his eyebrows, while Silverlake bursts out laughing.

This is the model Benedict all London has talked about!

“I thought you’d soon tire of domestic bliss and look out for pastures new,” Shropshire says. “Well – well – Marguerite won’t have anything to say to me, so I won’t be a dog in the manger, but wish you success. She lives at Number 17 Rue de Tronchet, just close to the Madelaine, you know.”

“Thanks.”

And Delaval, leaving his companions, saunters towards the Champs Elysèes instead of going home.

It is a lovely night. There is no moon, but myriads of stars cluster overhead, and somehow the quiet and the stillness of midnight are pleasant to him. He has quite made up his mind to see Marguerite Ange again.

It is not because he has fallen in love with her, far from it. The feeling she has inspired in him has at present, at any rate, no particle of love in it, but something draws him on to seeing her – to speaking to her – to saving her from a path that must lead to perdition.

And he smiles almost bitterly at such a feeling possessing him about a singing woman at the Alcazar!

By and by, when the air has cooled his hot temples a little, and the oppressive sort of spell this evening has brought him disperses somewhat, he goes back to the hotel and enters the room where Zai lies fast asleep. How pretty she looks to his feverish eyes! The purity and sweetness of her face come like a glimpse of blue sky after a storm. She is happy, too, for her red lips part in a smile as she clasps her child close to her heart.

Lord Delaval stoops down and kisses her so softly that she never stirs. He is a worshipper of female beauty, and here before him – within his grasp – lies as fair a woman as ever was made to please the eyes of man. His wife – his own! a legitimate object for love and passion and admiration.

But men’s hearts are perverse things.

Noiselessly as he entered he steals away again to the adjoining room, and without undressing, flings himself into an armchair.

Here the break of dawn finds him – still sleepless, but lost in a waking dream of “La Blonde aux yeux noir.”

CHAPTER V.
DRIFTING

 
“A year divides us – love from love,
Though you love now, though I loved then,
The gulf is straight, but deep enough,
Who shall recross – who among men
Shall cross again?”
 

“You came in very late last night, darling,” Zai says, a little reproachfully, as she sits en peignoir– but a peignoir daintily got up, with Valenciennes and pink ribbons, and looks divinely fair at the head of the breakfast-table.

“There was a carriage accident on the Boulevard, and I helped the occupants to get out,” he answers.

It is the first falsehood he has uttered to his wife, and in spite of him a tinge of red sweeps across his fair skin, to hide which he buries his face in his coffee-cup.

“Were the occupants ladies?” Zai asks, with a sensation of incipient jealousy.

She has learned to think this husband of hers so superbly handsome and irresistible that she believes all other women must consider him so likewise.

“Yes, ladies —old ladies, going home from some concert. They were terribly frightened, poor old girls,” he says, coolly.

“And how did you amuse yourself, darling? – and did you talk to anyone?”

“Why, you’ve grown into the Grand Inquisitor, my pet! I went to the theatre and I talked to Shropshire and Silverlake.”

“Those men!” she says with a little moue. “They are dreadfully fast, are they not, Delaval?”

“So so!”

“Were Lady Shropshire and Lady Silverlake there?”

“Oh, no! – the husbands are doing Paris en garçon.”

“How very horrid!” she decides. “You wouldn’t care to go about en garçon, would you, my own?”

“Certainly not,” he answers fervently.

But he has made up his mind to go out en garçon all the same.

“And how’s baby?” he inquires unctuously, in the hope of turning the subject.

“He’s very well. I am sure he has grown half-an-inch in the last few days, and I really think he tried to say ‘pa – pa’ this morning, Delaval!”

“Did he really! Dear little chap!”

“Yes! and Madame Le Blanc tells me that she has been a monthly-nurse for thirty years, and that its the first time she has ever heard a child of two months-and-a-half pronounce so plainly!”

“Why the little chap must be the infant prodigy! Pity he’s so beastly red!”

“Red, Delaval! Why he’s exactly like Dresden China!” she replies, with intense mortification.

He gives a forced laugh. Then he pushes his plate away, with the devilled kidneys untouched, for he has no appetite. And leaning back in his chair, looks at his wife.

And he comes to the conclusion that he ought to be thoroughly ashamed of himself.

There she is, facing him. Could any creature of mortal mould be sweeter, lovelier, purer, more adorable?

And yet!

These are two little words that carry more meaning in them than all the long, grandiose phrases in the Queen’s English. These two little words, indefinite as they seem, show exactly what a man’s mind is when it oscillates ’twixt right and wrong. Zai is undeniably charming, but she is not —la Blonde aux yeux noir!

She lacks the power to inflame the heart of the million. Her soft, dove-like eyes, cannot burn into men’s brains and souls like the dangerous but glorious black ones of Marguerite Ange!

“What piece did you see last night, Delaval?”

It is a poser. For one moment Lord Delaval, with the impatience and dislike of being catechised, which is natural to him, has a mind to speak the truth, and tell his wife that this morning he is not up to small talk. But he thinks better of it, and is equal to the occasion.

“A piece called La Tentation, darling! A thing in which there was a lot of love-making and smiling and bowing, and a woman, supposed to be an angel – but probably she is a devil,” he adds, almost sotto voce.

“Was she pretty?”

“Tol lol! You can’t tell what an actress is like on the stage, you know!”

“I hope you won’t find out what she is like off the stage!” Zai says earnestly. “Actresses are such bad, dangerous women, sometimes!”

“And how about actors?”

The shot goes home, for she flinches and flushes a little, and he is rather sorry he has said this. It was snobbish, perhaps! But when a man wishes to stop his wife’s mouth, he must do it the best way he can. Zai will not pursue the subject of Theatres and Thespians after his cut, he thinks. But he is wrong. She flushed more from a wounded feeling at his manner and tone than from the reference to her old lover, for whom she has the most profound indifference now.

“Have you heard anything about Trixy, Delaval?” she asks, in a low, humble voice. She is very much ashamed of this sister of hers, and scarcely likes mentioning her name before the man she not only loves but honours.

“Yes. Stubbs has got a divorce. Poor old chap! It appears that he was awfully cut up; had a fit, and nearly died. He wanted her to go back to him, and promised never to breathe a word of recrimination; but when he found she wouldn’t, he got a divorce, and gave that scoundrel Conway a bill at six months for ten thousand pounds provided he married her! Of course, the money was too much for the fellow; so the marriage will come off by-and-by.”

“And where is Trixy now?”

“Living at Hammersmith; dining at Richmond and the Orleans with all the fast men; dressing to the nine, and making herself the talk of town. She has quite forgotten the word more familiar to her youth than her Bible —convenances; but what can be expected? If a girl is innately bad, no power on earth can keep her straight.”

“But Trixy was not innately bad,” Zai murmurs, deprecatingly. “She married a man she could not love, and then – she yielded to – ”

“The fascinations of Mr. Conway! Joy go with her! Men are not fair judges of their own sex, but if I was a woman, I should prefer old Stubbs to a dozen Conways!”

“And so should I —now,” Zai confesses meekly. “What a pity women have not the gift of clair-voyance!”

“Thank God, they haven’t!” he says to himself, as he rises, and walking up to the mirror on the mantel, looks at himself. “I wonder what Mademoiselle Ange saw in me to make her faint? It could not have been my ugliness!” he thinks, as the glass reflects back his handsome face – a face which he knows to be handsome and irresistible to most women.

Then he turns away carelessly – for he is not a vain man – and going up to his wife kisses her on her forehead.

But Zai is not satisfied with this.

“Won’t you kiss me properly, darling?” she says, holding up her fresh, red lips.

And her darling kisses her “properly,” though all the while he is wronging her in his heart, on the principle that sins of omission are as bad as sins of commission!

CHAPTER VI.
IN THE MESHES

 
“Take hands and part with laughter,
Touch lips and part with tears,
Once more, and no more after,
Whatever comes with years.
We twain shall not remeasure
The ways that left us twain,
Nor crush the lees of pleasure
From sanguine grapes of pain.”
 

Lord Delaval has never let a desire of his remain ungratified in his life, so now, haunted by the beauty of a woman for the space of twenty-four hours, he resolves to make her acquaintance.

“Her sort are not very particular about the convenances,” he says to himself as he approaches Numèro 17 Rue de Tronchet, but it must be confessed that his courage does not rear its crest much aloft as he rings the bell, and hears from the concierge that “Mademoiselle Ange est chez elle.”

Still, though his mind is perturbed, his pulses throb, and there is a mingling of expectation and trepidation in his breast, if his real feelings were finely analysed, it would be found that Mademoiselle’s beauty repels even while it attracts him to the point of looking on it closer.

Possibly the daylight may dissipate his delusion, he thinks. And he is conscious of a sort of half-hope, half-regret, that it may be so.

The apartment, into which he is ushered by Mademoiselle’s own smart soubrette, disappoints him at once.

The decorations are florid and over-done. The big mirrors gleam too brightly on the sea-green of the walls, the vivid scarlet of the ottomans, the chairs, the velvet cushions, the too heavily perfumed atmosphere, the curious medley of objets d’art, individually costly, but making a strange and heterogeneous whole, all seem to his fastidious eyes as redolent of the Alcazar.

The sunbeams that fall through the rose-tinted blinds are studiously toned down to a pale mystic light, fit for the languor of magnificent, heavy-lidded eyes – a Marie Antoinette fan with a jewelled handle, a flacon of esprit des millefleurs, a tiny handkerchief with a Chantilly border, a volume of De Musset’s poems, lie together, and bric-à-brac, rococo, ormolu, and Sèvres are heaped everywhere in picturesque confusion. If Mademoiselle Ange has ever desired to be grand, she has gained her desire.

While he waits, he wonders if the woman is really content, and whether these things are worth possessing at the price she has to pay for them.

“Gratified vanity goes a precious long way, so I suppose she is happy and satisfied,” he thinks with a sneer, and a sort of savage sensation in his heart, that he has not found her in a barely furnished room, devoid of luxury, and indicative of high moral worth.

It certainly is not marvellous that La Blonde aux Yeux Noir has created a regular furore in Paris.

As the heavy red velvet portières are pushed aside, and she comes into the room, the sneer dies right away from his mouth, and he confesses that this woman is a thing to wonder at.

If she had struck him as beautiful in her diaphanous robes, in her semi-nudity, with manacles of gold on her neck and arms, fit for an Eastern Satrap’s love, she strikes him as ten times more attractive in her day attire.

She wears a deep wine-coloured satin, covered with a profusion of lace; the bodice is cut square and the sleeves are open and hanging. Her throat and slender wrists gleam like the purest alabaster under the delicious rose-tinted light, and wine-coloured bands, studded with small but rare brilliants, go round them. Her hair, perfectly golden, falls in light bright curls above her dark straight brows, and is knotted carelessly, but artistically, in thick glossy coils at the back of her well-shaped head.

She is thoroughly well got up, she has made the most of herself in every particular, and yet she has the art of letting her magnificence seem part and parcel of herself, as if it belonged to her and was not a studied effect.

And one of Marguerite Ange’s attractions is that she looks so young; she cannot have reached one score to judge by her flawless face and her slender figure, which is all bends and curves without an angle in it.

“I scarcely dared to hope that you would come and see me,” she says in French that is true Parisian, though Delaval has heard that she comes from Arles, the birth-place of beauty; and she holds out, rather deprecatingly, a slim white hand, which, of course, he clasps eagerly, a sharp thrill going through him as he does so.

“Why not?” he asks in as excellent French as her own. “Could I be the only man to resist the Queen of —Hearts?”

And his voice has certainly a fervour and a ring of truth about it, which perhaps gratifies her, for a little smile, savouring of triumph, crosses her lips.

She throws herself back among her vivid scarlet cushions, and makes a gesture to him to sit down beside her.

Then, for the first time, he grows conscious of the presence of a third person, an old woman, hideous as Hecuba, who has seated herself close to the portière.

“That’s the sheep-dog Shropshire spoke of,” he thinks.

“Madame Perchard, you can go for a walk if you like. It is a charming day, and it will do you good. Stay! you might call at the costumier’s, and desire them to send the domino and mask for the Bal de l’Opera to-morrow.”

Madame Perchard, who looks as if she were well paid and well fed, smiles feebly and goes on her way, and the others are left tête-à-tête.

If anyone had suggested two months ago that he would be seated in a dimly-lit room, side by side with a music-hall singer, Lord Delaval would probably have scouted the notion, and resented the speaker’s impertinence; but now it seems to him as if it is the most natural thing in the world that he should be here, at Marguerite Ange’s feet (mentally).

He turns, and looks into her beautiful eyes long and steadfastly, without speaking, until she, who has grown hardened to the boldest stare, reddens a little.

“Eh bien?” she says smiling, and her voice startles him out of a reverie. He is not only thinking how exquisitely lovely she is, but taxing his brain once more to find out who she resembles.

“I was dreaming, I believe, Mademoiselle Ange! Will you forgive me for coming here like this? My only excuse is that my heart was stronger than myself,” he says, in a low, passionate voice.

“I forgive you!” she answers. “Ah! you don’t know what I felt the other night when I first saw you. You are very like someone I once knew – someone I loved as women only love once in their lives! – someone who is dead to me, and when I saw you I fainted.”

So, this is why she fainted at sight of him – simply because he happens to resemble some sweetheart of other days. The idea is not flattering, and irritates him. Somehow, he had fancied that his own irresistible attractions had had an effect on her; but he cannot gaze on her and not soften at once.

“Mademoiselle Ange, why do you live this life?” he says abruptly.

“What harm is there in my life?” she asks. “It suits me!”

“It suits no woman to forfeit respect for admiration – modest life for public display; but what right have I to talk to you so? To what good can I talk? For, is it not a little too late?”

“You are very hard on me,” she falters. “Ah! I see you will never like me – for you are prejudiced!”

“What does it matter to you if I am prejudiced? After all, you could only care for my liking as you care for the liking of a dozen other men. Come – strangers almost though we are – tell me who is the most favoured amongst your worshippers! For, in spite of being prejudiced, I have felt a great interest in you ever since I first looked on your face.”

She glances up at him, and the colour deepens on her cheek.

“Why should you take an interest in me? I am only a poor artist, and quite below your notice,” she answers, with a sort of proud humility.

“You would not say that if you knew how much I have thought about you, how your face has haunted me. It has bewitched me —malgre moi– I think. Do you know, Mademoiselle Ange, that if I am like someone you knew, you are strangely like someone I have seen; someone who certainly was not so beautiful as you are, or I should remember her to my cost,” he adds softly.

She flushes still deeper as she listens, then turns the subject by saying lightly:

“And what am I to tell you about myself? Only that I have a great deal of admiration and very little love! Perhaps you will think that is all I ought to expect, being myself! But really I don’t believe anyone has ever loved me!”

“It would indeed, be strange if they hadn’t,” he replies, unable to remove his gaze from her. “You are deceiving yourself or deceiving me. You are not one to be seen and not loved —madly loved! No matter the dire results of it!” he cries eagerly, and her lids droop under the infinite passion of his eyes.

“It is very hard to tell the real from the sham in love, and in everything else I don’t take the trouble to try; I class them all together, and value them at just as much as they are worth,” she says with a low laugh. “You asked me which of them I liked best – no one; but somehow, though I only saw you two nights ago, you seem to stand apart from the rest, you are different to me! You won’t be ashamed to come here now and then? I am not a grande duchesse, but still – ”

“I’ll come till you tire of me. I am afraid that will be too soon. You women are so capricious, especially lovely ones.”

“To everyone else, perhaps, but never to you!” she almost whispers, looking right into his eyes now with a yearning, wistful look that might make him lose his head, and he feels already that the best thing he can do is not to see Mademoiselle Ange again.

But what man has the strength of mind to resist a sudden and violent passion like this? He thinks, as he gazes infatuated on her, of some splendidly plumaged bird, of a mirage in the desert, of heavily scented exotics, of burning skies, or rather he feels all this, for her prerogative is to inspire sensation. To look at her is a species of moral dram drinking, and she stands in comparison to better, purer women, women like Zai, as brandy stands to weak wine and water.

“If Rubens had seen this girl,” Delaval says to himself, “he would not have sent down for all time a burlesque upon this splendid red and white, this fleshly magnificence!”

“Do you know I had an instinct when I saw you the other night? I believed you were my fate,” she says in a dreamy voice, but so suddenly that he starts a little.

It is startling to think that he should in any way be connected with the fate of this exquisite woman.

As she sits here before him, her hands clasped loosely together, a sort of abandon in her lovely figure, the light throws up richer gold on her hair, the soft folds of her satin gown fall round her moulded form like the robes of an empress, and he almost groans as he realises how impossible it would be to choose a life for one gifted with such rare physical beauty, that would not be hedged round with ten thousand dangers.

He shudders as he feels that this gift of beauty must be a curse, dragging her downwards.

“I your fate? God knows what your fate will be! You must have been mad to choose such an awful life.”

“Because you think me pretty, you say that! What is the use of being good-looking if it can bring me none of the nice things I desire? I might as well be ugly and old and senseless, if I had to be shut up within the narrow limits of most women’s lives. How could I gain power, the appreciation which is my due, if the public do not see me and judge for themselves? I wanted to be rich and I am so; I wanted to ride in carriages like I have seen women do, whose beauty has paled beside mine. What women care to live always in insignificance, obscurity, and, worst of all, in poverty?” she asks simply.

Lord Delaval is too much homme du monde to shrink from her when she says all this – when she breathes a creed utterly antagonistic to the training of good women. He does not revolt even from the evidently hard realism of her nature; the manner in which she seems to appraise and value her own attractions, setting no store on the beauty which womanly women hold as a gift beyond price, but only as a means of winning money, makes him regard her with a curious feeling that has no repulsion in it.

“Marguerite,” he says – he has already come to her Christian name, but among her class this is so common that she probably never even notices it. “Tell me, have you no heart, no feeling, that you talk so strangely?”

“Do I talk strangely?” she asks with a bewildering smile. “Do I differ so much in my words and ways from your high-born English misses – the women who live in what you call your May Fair, your Belgravia, who sell themselves for gold? I have heard that it is the trade, the profession, of those ladies very often to lay themselves out to win some man, no matter how old he is, how ugly he is, so that he is rich! And then they give themselves in exchange for money or title. But it is a fair bargain, is it not so? So much flesh and blood for so much gold, and your aristocratic world smiles on them and honours them, while it and you condemn such poor girls as I, who only use my youth and good looks in the pursuit of my profession. There is only one difference you see, the matrimonial market is not open to such as me with my soiled name, so I am obliged to try and make a name and reputation for myself.”

As he listens to her he wonders how a music-hall singer has learned the astute wisdom of the world, how words flow to her lips so easily, how, in spite of the surroundings of her daily life, her voice is so sweet and low and soft, her manner so well-bred, her language so refined.

“You say I have no heart, no feeling?” she goes on, drawing nearer him and placing her hand upon her breast with a melo-dramatic air, “but what have I to do with such things? Who has ever taught me what love means? Cruelty and insult I have suffered. Once – ah! I nearly died because he whom I adored, trampled on my heart as if it had been dust beneath his feet! But that is past and gone. I forgive him and I do not resent it, but love him still. Love, you know, like one gives to the dead. No! Respect and tenderness to me are just empty sounds. Who in all this world ever cared whether I suffered, whether I lived or – died? No one!”

Her face glows with emotion, and he, as her wild, reckless words sweep over his ear, feels as if some spell was at work; the room seems to stifle him, and Marguerite’s great black eyes seem to blaze and burn into his brain.

“You see I am quite removed from the pale of men’s sympathy. I cannot find any happiness in the way other women find it. I am only a pariah – an outcast.”

“You say that you have no chances of happiness like other women have, that there are none who would care to marry you! You will find out your mistake some day, Marguerite. You will find that such a face as yours can win, not only admiration and love, but a husband,” he answers. And he actually believes that, if the Gordian knot was not already tied, there is no knowing what imprudence he might not commit for a creature as rarely lovely as this!

“Is that true?” she asks, lifting her head with a strange light in her eyes. “Would men who are far above me – like you, for instance – ever stoop to me?”

He half turns away from her. Perhaps his good angel is hovering near, for he comes to the conclusion that it may be best for her and best for himself if this interview comes to an end.

She seems to have the power of drawing him nearer and nearer to her every moment.

“When you know more of the world,” he says quietly, “my greatness will diminish very greatly in your eyes, if it does not cease altogether. Why, you have raised me aloft, Marguerite, when you don’t even know my name or the class I belong to!”

She smiles rather bitterly, and a bright pink surges over her face.

“I know who you are – you are Lord Delaval!” she answers in a very low voice, that lingers a little over his name. “Your friends who were with you the other night told me.”