CHAPTER XI
During much of the night that followed Sylvia lay awake, her mind full of the Comte de Virieu, and of the strange friendship which had sprung up between them.
Their brief meeting at the door of the Casino had affected her very painfully. As he had passed her with a distant bow, a look of shame, of miserable unease, had come over Count Paul's face.
Yes, Madame Wachner had summed him up very shrewdly, if unkindly. He was ashamed, not only of the way in which he was wasting his life, but also of the company into which his indulgence of his vice of gambling brought him.
And Sylvia—it was a bitter thought—was of that company. That fact must be faced by her. True, she was not a gambler in the sense that most of the people she met and saw daily at the Casino were gamblers, but that was simply because the passion of play did not absorb her as it did them. It was her good fortune, not any virtue in herself, that set her apart from Anna Wolsky.
And now she asked herself—or rather her conscience asked her—whether she would not do well to leave Lacville; to break off this strange and—yes, this dangerous intimacy with a man of whom she knew so very little, apart from the great outstanding fact that he was a confirmed gambler, and that he had given up all that makes life worth living to such a man as he, in order to drag on a dishonoured, purposeless life at one or other of the great gambling centres of the civilised world?
And yet the thought of going away from Lacville was already intolerable to Sylvia. There had arisen between the Frenchman and herself a kind of close, wordless understanding and sympathy which she, at any rate, still called "friendship." But she would probably have assented to Meredith's words, "Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two."
At last she fell into a troubled sleep, and dreamt a disturbing dream.
She found herself wandering about the Châlet des Muguets, trying to find a way out of the locked and shuttered building. The ugly little rooms were empty. It was winter, and she was shivering with cold. Someone must have locked her in by mistake. She had been forgotten. ...
"Toc, toc, toc!" at the door. And Sylvia sat up in bed relieved of her nightmare. It was eight o'clock! She had overslept herself. Félicie was bringing in her tea, and on the tray lay a letter addressed in a handwriting Sylvia did not know, and on which was a French stamp.
She turned the pale-grey envelope over doubtfully, wondering if it was really meant for her. But yes—of that there could be no doubt, for it was addressed, "Madame Bailey, Villa du Lac, Lacville-les-Bains."
She opened it to find that the note contained a gracefully-worded invitation to déjeuner for the next day, and the signature ran—"Marie-Anne d'Eglemont.
Why, it must be Paul de Virieu's sister! How very kind of her, and—and how very kind of him.
The letter must have been actually written when Count Paul was in Paris with his sister—and yet, when they had passed one another the evening before, he had bowed as distantly, as coldly, as he might have done to the most casual of acquaintances.
Sylvia got up, filled with a tumult of excited feeling which this simple invitation to luncheon scarcely warranted.
But Paul de Virieu came in from his ride also eager, excited, smiling.
"Have you received a note from my sister?" he asked, hurrying towards her in the dining-room which they now had to themselves each morning. "When I told her how you and I had become"—he hesitated a moment, and then added the words, "good friends, she said how much she would like to meet you. I know that you and my dear Marie-Anne would like one another"
"It is very kind of your sister to ask me to come and see her," said Sylvia, a little stiffly.
"I am going back to Paris this evening," he went on, "to stay with my sister for a couple of nights. So if you can come to-morrow to lunch, as I think my sister has asked you to do, I will meet you at the station."
After breakfast they went out into the garden, and when they were free of the house Count Paul said suddenly,
"I told Marie-Anne that you were fond of riding, and, with your permission, she proposes to send over a horse for you every morning. And, Madame—forgive me—but I told her I feared you had no riding habit! You and she, however, are much the same height, and she thinks that she might be able to lend you one if you will honour her by accepting the loan of it during the time you are at Lacville."
Sylvia was bewildered, she scarcely knew how to accept so much kindness.
"If you will write a line to my sister some time to-day," continued the Count, "I will be the bearer of your letter."
That day marked a very great advance in the friendship of Sylvia Bailey and Paul de Virieu.
Till that day, much as he had talked to her about himself and his life, and the many curious adventures he had had, for he had travelled a great deal, and was a cultivated man, he had very seldom spoken to her of his relations.
But to-day he told her a great deal about them, and she found herself taking a very keen, intimate interest in this group of French people whom she had never seen—whom, perhaps, with one exception, she never would see.
How unlike English folk they must be—these relations of Count Paul! For the matter of that, how unlike any people Sylvia had ever seen or heard of.
First, he told her of the sweet-natured, pious young duchess who was to be her hostess on the morrow—the sister whom Paul loved so dearly, and to whom he owed so much.
Then he described, in less kindly terms, her proud narrow-minded, if generous, husband, the French duke who still lived—thanks to the fact that his grandmother had been the daughter of a great Russian banker—much as must have lived the nobles in the Middle Ages—apart, that is, from everything that would remind him that there was anything in the world of which he disapproved or which he disliked.
The Duc d'Eglemont ignored the fact that France was a Republic; he still talked of "the King," and went periodically into waiting on the Duke of Orleans.
Count Paul also told Sylvia of his great-uncle and godfather, the Cardinal, who lived in Italy, and who had—or so his family liked to believe—so nearly become Pope.
Then there were his three old maiden great-aunts, who had all desired to be nuns, but who apparently had not had the courage to do so when it came to the point. They dwelt together in a remote Burgundian château, and they each spent an hour daily in their chapel praying that their dear nephew Paul might be rescued from the evils of play.
And as Paul de Virieu told Sylvia Bailey of all these curious old-world folk of his, Sylvia wondered more and more why he led the kind of existence he was leading now.
For the first time since Sylvia had come to Lacville, neither she nor Count Paul spent any part of that afternoon at the Casino. They were both at that happy stage of—shall we say friendship?—when a man and a woman cannot see too much of one another; when time is as if it were not; when nothing said or done can be wrong in the other's sight; when Love is still a soft and an invisible presence, with naught about him of the exacting tyrant he will so soon become.
Count Paul postponed his departure for Paris till after dinner, and not till she went up to dress did Sylvia sit down to write her answer to the Duchesse d'Eglemont.
For a long while she held her pen in her hand. How was she to address Paul de Virieu's sister? Must she call her "Dear Madame"? Should she call her "Dear Duchesse"? It was really an unimportant matter, but it appeared very important to Sylvia Bailey. She was exceedingly anxious not to commit any social solecism.
And then, while she was still hesitating, still sitting with the pen poised in her hand, there came a knock at the door.
The maid handed her a note; it was from Count Paul, the first letter he had ever written to her.
"Madame,"—so ran the note—"it occurs to me that you might like to answer my sister in French, and so I venture to send you the sort of letter that you might perhaps care to write. Each country has its own usages in these matters—that must be my excuse for my apparent impertinence."
And then there followed a prettily-turned little epistle which Sylvia copied, feeling perhaps a deeper gratitude than a far greater service would have won him from her.