After Clementine's little speech, the Marquis de Ronquerolles and his sister exchanged a singular glance, embracing their niece, Comte Adam, and Paz. It was one of those rapid scenes which take place only in France and Italy,--the two regions of the world (all courts excepted) where eyes can say everything. To communicate to the eye the full power of the soul, to give it the value of speech, needs either the pressure of extreme servitude, or complete liberty. Adam, the Marquis du Rouvre, and Clementine did not observe this luminous by-play of the old coquette and the old diplomatist, but Paz, the faithful watchdog, understood its meaning. It was, we must remark, an affair of two seconds; but to describe the tempest it roused in the captain's soul would take far too much space in this brief history.
"What!" he said to himself, "do the aunt and uncle think I might be loved? Then my happiness only depends on my own audacity! But Adam--"
Ideal love and desire clashed with gratitude and friendship, all equally powerful, and, for a moment, love prevailed. The lover would have his day. Paz became brilliant, he tried to please, he told the story of the Polish insurrection in noble words, being questioned about it by the diplomatist. By the end of dinner Paz saw Clementine hanging upon his lips and regarding him as a hero, forgetting that Adam too, after sacrificing a third of his vast fortune, had been an exile. At nine o'clock, after coffee had been served, Madame de Serizy kissed her niece on the forehead, pressed her hand, and went away, taking Adam with her and leaving the Marquis de Ronquerolles and the Marquis du Rouvre, who soon followed. Paz and Clementine were alone together.
"I will leave you now, madame," said Thaddeus. "You will of course rejoin them at the Opera?"
"No," she answered, "I don't like dancing, and they give an odious ballet to-night 'La Revolte au Serail.'"
There was a moment's silence.
"Two years ago Adam would not have gone to the Opera without me," said Clementine, not looking at Paz.
"He loves you madly," replied Thaddeus.
"Yes, and because he loves me madly he is all the more likely not to love me to-morrow," said the countess.
"How inexplicable Parisian women are!" exclaimed Thaddeus. "When they are loved to madness they want to be loved reasonably: and when they are loved reasonably they reproach a man for not loving them at all."
"And they are quite right. Thaddeus," she went on, smiling, "I know Adam well; I am not angry with him; he is volatile and above all grand seigneur. He will always be content to have me as his wife and he will never oppose any of my tastes, but--"
"Where is the marriage in which there are no 'buts'?" said Thaddeus, gently, trying to give another direction to Clementine's mind.
The least presuming of men might well have had the thought which came near rendering this poor lover beside himself; it was this: "If I do not tell her now that I love her I am a fool," he kept saying to himself.
Neither spoke; and there came between the pair one of those deep silences that are crowded with thoughts. The countess examined Paz covertly, and Paz observed her in a mirror. Buried in an armchair like a man digesting his dinner, the image of a husband or an indifferent old man, Paz crossed his hands upon his stomach and twirled his thumbs mechanically, looking stupidly at them.
"Why don't you tell me something good of Adam?" cried Clementine suddenly. "Tell me that he is not volatile, you who know him so well."
The cry was fine.
"Now is the time," thought poor Paz, "to put an insurmountable barrier between us. Tell you good of Adam?" he said aloud. "I love him; you would not believe me; and I am incapable of telling you harm. My position is very difficult between you."
Clementine lowered her head and looked down at the tips of his varnished boots.
"You Northern men have nothing but physical courage," she said complainingly; "you have no constancy in your opinions."
"How will you amuse yourself alone, madame?" said Paz, assuming a careless air.
"Are not you going to keep me company?"
"Excuse me for leaving you."
"What do you mean? Where are you going?"
The thought of a heroic falsehood had come into his head.
"I--I am going to the Circus in the Champs Elysees; it opens to-night, and I can't miss it."
"Why not?" said Clementine, questioning him by a look that was half-anger.
"Must I tell you why?" he said, coloring; "must I confide to you what I hide from Adam, who thinks my only love is Poland."
"Ah! a secret in our noble captain?"
"A disgraceful one--which you will perhaps understand, and pity."
"You, disgraced?"
"Yes, I, Comte Paz; I am madly in love with a girl who travels all over France with the Bouthor family,--people who have the rival circus to Franconi; but they play only at fairs. I have made the director at the Cirque-Olympique engage her."
"Is she handsome?"
"To my thinking," said Paz, in a melancholy tone. "Malaga (that's her stage name) is strong, active, and supple. Why do I prefer her to all other women in the world?--well, I can't tell you. When I look at her, with her black hair tied with a blue satin ribbon, floating on her bare and olive-colored shoulders, and when she is dressed in a white tunic with a gold edge, and a knitted silk bodice that makes her look like a living Greek statue, and when I see her carrying those flags in her hand to the sound of martial music, and jumping through the paper hoops which tear as she goes through, and lighting so gracefully on the galloping horse to such applause,--no hired clapping,--well, all that moves me."
"More than a handsome woman in a ballroom?" asked Clementine, with amazement and curiosity.
"Yes," answered Paz, in a choking voice. "Such agility, such grace under constant danger seems to me the height of triumph for a woman.
