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Heart Of Gold
by
“Hélène–!” he cried.
“But no, my story is too dull,” she protested, and shrugged her shoulders, and disengaged herself–half-fearfully, it seemed to her husband. “Even more insipid than your comedy,” she added, with a not unkindly smile. “Do we drive this afternoon?”
“In effect, yes!” cried the Duke. He paused and laughed–a low and gentle laugh, pulsing with unutterable content. “Since this afternoon, madame–“
“Is cloudless?” she queried.
“Nay, far more than that,” de Puysange amended; “it is refulgent.”
V
What time the Duchess prepared her person for the drive the Duke walked in the garden of the Hôtel de Puysange. Up and down a shady avenue of lime-trees he paced, and chuckled to himself, and smiled benignantly upon the moss-incrusted statues,–a proceeding that was, beyond any reasonable doubt, prompted by his happiness rather than by the artistic merits of the postured images, since they constituted a formidable and broken-nosed collection of the most cumbrous, the most incredible, and the most hideous instances of sculpture the family of Puysange had been able to accumulate for, as the phrase is, love or money. Amid these mute, gray travesties of antiquity and the tastes of his ancestors, the Duc de Puysange exulted.
“Ma foi, will life never learn to improve upon the extravagancies of romance? Why, it is the old story,–the hackneyed story of the husband and wife who fall in love with each other! Life is a very gross plagiarist. And she–did she think I had forgotten how I gave her that little locket so long ago? Eh, ma femme, so ‘some one’–‘some one’ who cannot be alluded to without a pause and an adorable flush–presented you with your locket! Nay, love is not always blind!”
The Duke paused before a puff-jawed Triton, who wallowed in an arid basin and uplifted toward heaven what an indulgent observer might construe as a broken conch-shell. “Love! Mon Dieu, how are the superior fallen! I have not the decency to conceal even from myself that I love my wife! I am shameless, I had as lief proclaim it from the house-tops. And a month ago–tarare, the ignorant beast I was! Moreover, at that time I had not passed a month in her company,–eh bien, I defy Diogenes and Timon to come through such a testing with unscratched hearts. I love her. And she loves me!”
He drew a deep breath, and he lifted his comely hands toward the pale spring sky, where the west wind was shepherding a sluggish flock of clouds. “O sun, moon, and stars!” de Puysange said, aloud: “I call you to witness that she loves me! Always she has loved me! O kindly little universe! O little kings, tricked out with garish crowns and sceptres, you are masters of your petty kingdoms, but I am master of her heart!
“I do not deserve it,” he conceded, to a dilapidated faun, who, though his flute and the hands that held it had been missing for over a quarter of a century, piped, on with unimpaired and fatuous mirth. “Ah, heart of gold–demented trinket that you are, I have not merited that you should retain my likeness all these years! If I had my deserts–parbleu! let us accept such benefits as the gods provide, and not question the wisdom of their dispensations. What man of forty-three may dare to ask for his deserts? No, we prefer instead the dealings of blind chance and all the gross injustices by which so many of us escape hanging”….
VI
“So madame has visitors? Eh bien, let us, then, behold these naughty visitors, who would sever a husband from his wife!”
From within the Red Salon came a murmur of speech,–quiet, cordial, colorless,–which showed very plainly that madame had visitors. As the Duc de Puysange reached out his hand to draw aside the portières, her voice was speaking, courteously, but without vital interest.
“–and afterward,” said she, “weather permitting–“
“Ah, Hélène!” cried a voice that the Duke knew almost as well, “how long am I to be held at arm’s-length by these petty conventionalities? Is candor never to be permitted?”