CHAPTER XIV.
PLEASURE TAKES LEAVE TO PROTEST.
During the months that followed the departure of the Sempachs I engaged myself busily in public affairs, in the endeavour to gain better acquaintance with the difficult trade which was mine. I do not throw off impressions lightly, and I was disinclined for gaiety, or for more society than the obligations of my position demanded. My mother approved of my zeal; a convinced partisan, she enjoyed that happy confidence in her own views which makes people certain that everybody can study their opinions only to embrace them. Attention is the sole preliminary to conversion. I will not speak further of this matter here than to say that I was doomed to disappoint Princess Heinrich in this respect. I am glad of it. The world moves, and although it is very difficult for persons so artificially situated as I have been to move with it, yet we can and must move after it, lumbering along in its wake more or less slowly and awkwardly. We hold on this tenure; if we do not perform it—well, we end in country-houses in England.
It was, I suppose, owing to these occupations that I failed to notice the relations between Victoria and her husband until they had reached a rather acute crisis. Either from a desire to re-enforce the number of my guardian angels, or merely because they found themselves very comfortable, the pair had taken up a practically permanent residence with me. I was very glad to have them, and assigned them a handsome set of apartments quite at the other end of the house. Here they lived in considerable splendour, seeing a great deal of company and assuming the position of social leaders. Victoria at least was admirably suited to play such a part, and I certainly did not grudge it to her; for my mother I can not speak so confidently. William Adolphus, having abandoned his military pursuits, led an idle lounging life. In consequence he grew indolent; his stoutness increased. I mention this personal detail merely because I believe that it had a considerable influence on Victoria's feelings toward him. Her varied nature included a vivid streak of the romantic, and with every expansion in his belt and every multiplication of the folds of his chin William Adolphus came to satisfy this instinct in her less and less. She sought other interests; she contrived to combine very dexterously the femme incomprise with the leader of fashion; she posed as a patron of letters and the arts, indulging in intellectual flirtations with professors and other learned folk. There was no harm in this, and William Adolphus would not have been in the smallest degree disturbed by it. He had all the self-confidence given by a complete want of imagination. Unhappily, however, she began to treat him with something very like contempt, allowed him to perceive that his company did not satisfy her spiritual and mental requirements, and showed herself more than willing that he should choose his own associates and dispose of his own time. He was not resentful; he confessed that his wife's friends bored him, and availed himself amply and good-naturedly of the liberty which her expressed preferences afforded him. He devoted himself to his sport, his dogs, and his horses; this was all very well. He also became a noted patron of the lighter forms of the drama; this, for reasons that I shall indicate directly, was not quite so well. Out of this last taste of William Adolphus came the strained relations between his wife and himself to which I have referred.
Among those who have crossed my path few have stamped themselves more clearly on my memory than Coralie Mansoni. She was by no means so great a force in my life as was the Countess von Sempach, but she remains a singularly vivid image before my eyes. Born heaven knew where, and of parents whom I doubt whether she herself could name, seeming to hail from the borderland of Italy and France, a daughter of the Riviera, she had strayed and tumbled through a youth of which she would speak in moments of expansion. I, however, need say nothing of it. When I saw her first she was playing a small part in a light opera at Forstadt. A few weeks later she had assumed leading rôles, and was the idol of the young men. She was then about twenty-three, tall, dark, of full figure, doomed to a brevity of beauty, but at the moment magnificence itself. Every intellectual gift she appeared to lack, except a strangely persistent resolution of purpose and an admirably lucid conception of her own interest. She was not in the least brilliant or even amusing in general conversation. She worshipped her own beauty; she owed to it all she was, and paid the debt with a defiant assertion of its supremacy. None could contradict her. She was very lazy as regards physical exertion, extremely fond of eating and drinking, a careful manager of her money. All this sounds, and was, very unattractive. On the other side of the account may be put a certain simplicity, an indolent kindness, a desire to make folks comfortable, and (what I liked most) a mental honesty which caused her to assess both herself and other people with a nearness to her and their real value that was at times absolutely startling. It seemed as though a person, otherwise neither clever nor of signally high character, had been gifted with a clairvoyance which allowed her to read hearts, and a relentless fine sincerity that forced her to declare what she read to all who cared to listen to her. Whatever she did or did not in that queer life of hers, she never flattered man or woman, and fashioned no false image of herself.
William Adolphus made her the rage, so strangely things fall out. He went five nights running to see her. Next week came a new piece, with Coralie in the chief part. My brother-in-law had sent for her to his box. He was a Prince, a great man, exalted, of what seemed boundless wealth. Coralie was languidly polite. William Adolphus' broad face must have worn a luxurious smile. He did Coralie the honour of calling on her at her pretty villa, where she lived with her aunt-in-law (oddly selected relationship!), Madame Briande. He was received with acquiescence; enthusiasm was not among Coralie's accomplishments. However, she lazily drawled out the opinion that Monseigneur was bon enfant. William Adolphus mounted into the seventh heaven. He came home and did not tell his wife where he had been. This silence was significant. As a rule, if he but visited the tailor or had his hair cut, he told everybody all about it. He had really no idea that some things were uninteresting. I do not mean to say that this trait constitutes exactly a peculiarity.
My brother-in-law and I were very good friends. He proposed that I should accompany him to the theatre, and afterward be his guest, for he was to entertain Coralie at supper.
"But where?" I asked with a smile.
"There is an excellent restaurant where I have a private room," he confessed.
"And they don't know you?"
"Of course they know me."
"I mean, where they would be willing to know neither you nor me."
"Oh, I see what you mean. That's all right."
So I went with William Adolphus. Several men whom I knew were present, among them Wetter and M. le Vicomte de Varvilliers, second secretary of the French Embassy and a mirror of fashion. We were quite informal. Varvilliers sat on my left and employed himself in giving me an account of my right-hand neighbour Coralie. I listened absently, for the sight of Wetter had stirred other thoughts in my mind. I had not yet spoken to Coralie; my brother-in-law monopolized her.
"I ought to speak to her, I suppose?" I said to Varvilliers at last.
"A thousand pardons for engrossing your Majesty!" he cried. "Yes, I think you should."
William Adolphus' voice flowed on in the account of a match between one of his horses and one of somebody else's. I turned to follow Varvilliers' advice; rather to my surprise, I found Coralie's eyes fixed on me with an appearance of faint amusement. She began to address me without waiting for me to say anything.
"Why do you listen to what Varvilliers says about me instead of finding out about me yourself?" she asked.
"How do you know he talked of you, mademoiselle?"
She shrugged her shoulders and returned to her salad. William Adolphus asked her a question; she nodded without looking up from the salad. I began to eat my salad.
"It's a good salad," I observed, after a few mouthfuls.
"Very," said Coralie; she turned her great eyes on me. "And, mon Dieu, what a rare thing!" she added with a sigh.
Probably she would expect a touch of gallantry.
"The perfection of everything is rare," said I, looking pointedly in her face. She put up her hand, lightly fingered the curls on her forehead, smiled at me, and turned again to her salad. I laughed. She looked up again quickly.
"You laugh at me?" she asked, not resentfully, but with an air of frank inquiry.
"No, at the human race, mademoiselle. It is we, not you, who excite laughter."
She regarded me with_ apparent curiosity, and gradually began to smile. "Why?" she asked, just showing her level white teeth.
"You haven't learned yet?"
William Adolphus began to speak to her. You would have sworn she had a deaf ear that side. She had finished her salad and sat turned toward me. If a very white shoulder could at all console my brother-in-law, he had an admirable view of one. Apparently he was not content; he pushed his chair back with a noise and called to me:
"Shall we smoke? I have eaten enough."
"With all my heart," I answered.
"In fact he has eaten too much," observed Coralie, by no means in an "aside." "He and I—we both eat too much. He is fat already. I shall be."
"You are talkative to-nighl;, mademoiselle," said Varvilliers, who was offering her a cigarette.
"I believe there is to-night some one worth talking to," she retorted.
"Alas, and not last night?" he cried in affected despair.
I, however, thinking that it would ill become me to eat my brother-in-law's supper and then spoil his sport, bowed to the lady and crossed over to where Wetter was standing. Near him was a group of young men laughing and talking with Madame Briande; he seemed to pay little heed to their chatter. Varvilliers followed me, and William Adolphus sat down by Coralie. But I had not been talking to Wetter more than two minutes when the lady rose, left my brother-in-law, and came to join our group. She took her stand close by me. Half attracted and half repelled by her, young enough still to be shy, I was much embarrassed; the other men were smiling—I must except William Adolphus—and Varvilliers whispered to me:
"Les beaux: yeux de votre couronne, sire."
Coralie overheard his warning; she was not in the least put out.
"Don't disturb yourself," she said to Varvilliers. "The King is not a fool; he doesn't suppose that people forget what he is."
"You've judged him on short acquaintance," said Varvilliers, rather vexed.
"It's my way; and why shouldn't I give my opinion?"
Wetter laughed, and said to the Frenchman:
"You had better not ask for your character, I think, Vicomte."
"Heavens, no!" cried he. "Come, I see Monseigneur all alone!"
"You are right," said Coralie. "Go and talk to him. The King and I will talk."
They went off, Wetter laughing, Varvilliers still a little ruffled by his encounter. Coralie passed her arm through mine and led me to a sofa. I had recovered my composure, was interested, and amused.
"Briande," she said suddenly, "is always deploring my stupidity. 'How will you get on,' she says, 'without wit? Men are ruled by wit though they are won by faces.' So she says. Well, I don't know. Wit is not in my line." She looked at me half questioningly, half defiantly.
"I perceive no deficiency in the quality, mademoiselle," said I.
"Then you have not known witty women," she retorted tranquilly. "But I am not altogether dull. I am not like Monseigneur there."
"My brother-in-law?"
"So I am told."
As she said this she looked again at me and began to laugh. I laughed also. But I could not very well discuss William Adolphus with her.
"What man do you desire to rule with this wit?" I asked.
"One can't tell when it might be useful," said she, with a barely perceptible smile.
"Surely beauty is more powerful?"
"With Monseigneur?"
"Oh, never mind Monseigneur."
"But not with men of another kind."
"Some men are not to be ruled by any means."
"You think so?"
"Take Wetter now?"
"I would give him a week's resistance."
"Varvilliers?"
"A day."
I did not put the third question, but I looked at her with a smile. She saw my meaning, of course, but she did not tell me how long a resistance she would predict for me. I thought that I had talked enough to her, and, since she would not let me alone, I determined to take my leave. I wished her good-night. She received my adieu with marked indifference.
"I am very glad to have made your acquaintance," said I.
"Why, yes," she answered. "You are thinking that I am a strange creature, a new experience," and with this she turned away, although I was about to speak again.
Varvilliers' way lay in the same direction as mine, and I took him with me. He chatted gaily as we went. What I liked in the Vicomte was his confident denial of life's alleged seriousness. He seemed much amused at the situation which he proceeded to unfold to me. According to him, Wetter was passionately, my brother-in-law inanely, enamoured of Coralie. Wetter was ready to ruin himself in purse and prospects for her, and would gladly marry her. William Adolphus would be capable of defying his wife, his mother-in-law, and public opinion. But Coralie, he explained, cared little for either. Wetter could give her nothing, from William Adolphus she had already gained the advancement which it was in his power to secure for her.
"She wanted something new, so she made him bring your Majesty," he ended, laughing.
"Was my brother-in-law unwilling?"
"Oh, no. He didn't understand," laughed Varvilliers. "He was proud to bring you."
"It's rather awkward for me. I suppose I oughtn't to have come?"
"Ah, sire, when we have enjoyed ourselves, let us not be ungrateful. She amused you?"
"She certainly interested me."
He shrugged his shoulders. "What more do you want?" he seemed to ask. But I was wondering whether I should be justified in lending countenance to these distractions of William Adolphus. The Frenchman's quick wit overtook my thoughts.
"If you wish to rescue the Prince from danger, sire," he said, laughing, "you can't do better than come often."
"It seems to me that I'm in danger of quarrelling either with my sister or with my brother-in-law."
"If I were you, I should feel myself in a danger more delightful."
"But why not yourself equally, Vicomte? Aren't you in love with her?"
"Not I," he answered, with a laugh and a shake of his head.
"But why not?" I asked, laughing also.
"Can you ask? There is but one possible reason for a man's not being in love with Coralie Mansoni."
"Tell me it, Vicomte."
"Because he has been, sire."
"A good safeguard, but of no use to me."
"Why, no, not at present," answered Varvilliers.
The carriage drew up at his lodgings. I was not inclined for sleep, and readily acceded to his request that I should pay him a visit. Having dismissed the carriage (I was but a little way from my own house), I mounted the stairs and found myself in a very snug room. He put me in an armchair and gave me a cigar. We talked long and intimately as the hours of the night rolled on. He spoke, half in reminiscence, half in merry rhapsody, of the joys of living, the delight of throwing the reins on the neck of youth. As I looked at his trim figure, his handsome face, merry eyes, and dashing air, all that he said seemed very reasonable and very right; there was a good defence for it at the bar of nature's tribunal. It was honest too, free from cant, affectation, and pretence; it was a recognition of facts, and enlisted truth on its side. It needed no arguing, and he gave it none; the spirit that inspired also vindicated it. I could not help recalling the agonies and struggles which my passion for the Countess von Sempach had occasioned me. At first I thought that I would tell him about this affair, but I found myself ashamed. And I was ashamed because I had resisted the passion; it would have been very easy to tell him had I yielded. But the merry eyes would twinkle in amusement at my high-strung folly, as I had seen them twinkle at my brother-in-law's stolidity. He said something incidentally which led me to fancy that he had heard about the Countess and had received a mistaken impression of the facts; I did not correct what appeared to be his idea. I neither confirmed nor contradicted it. I said to myself that it was nothing to me what notion he had of my conduct; in reality I did not desire him to know the truth. I clung to the conviction that. I could justify what had seemed my hard-won victory, but I did not feel as though I could justify it to him. He would laugh, be a little puzzled, and dismiss the matter as inexplicable. His own creed was not swathed in clouds, nor dim, nor hard clearly to see and picture; it was all very straightforward. Properly it was no creed; it was a course of action based on a mode of feeling which neither demanded nor was patient of defence or explanation. The circumstances of my life were such that never before had I been brought into contact with a similar temperament or a similar practice. When they were thus suddenly presented to me they seemed endowed with a most attractive simplicity, with a naturalness, with what I must call a wholesomeness; the objections I felt to be overstrained, unreal, morbid. Varvilliers' feet were on firm ground; on what shaking uncertain bog of mingled impulses, emotions, fancies, and delusions might not those who blamed him be found themselves to stand?
I am confident that he spoke without premeditation, with no desire to win a proselyte, merely as man to man, in unaffected intimacy. I think that he was rather sorry for me, having detected a gloominess in my view of life and a tendency to moody and fretful introspection. Once or twice he referred, in passing jest, to the difference of national characteristics, the German tendency to make love by crying (so he put it) as contrasted with the laughing philosophy of his own country. At the end he apologized for talking so much, and pointed out to me a photograph of Coralie that stood on the mantelpiece more than half-hidden by letters and papers, saying, "I suppose she set me off; somehow she seems to me a sort of embodiment of the thing."
It was three o'clock when I left him; even then I went reluctantly, traversing again in my mind the field that his tongue had easily and lightly covered, and reverting to the girl who, as he said, was a sort of embodiment of the thing. The phrase was definite enough for its purpose, and struck home with an undeniable truth. He and she were the sort of people to live in that sort of world, and to stand as its representatives. A feeling came over me that it was a fair fine world, where life need not be a struggle, where a man need not live alone, where he would not be striving always after what he could never achieve, waging always a war in which he should never conquer, staking all his joys against most uncertain shadowy prizes, which to win would bring no satisfaction. I cried out suddenly, as I walked by myself through the night, "There's no pleasure in my life." That protest summed up my wrongs. There was no pleasure in my life. There was everything else, but not that, not pure, unmixed, simple pleasure. Had I no right to some? I was very tired of trying to fill my place, of subordinating myself to my position, of being always Augustin the King. I was weary of my own ideal. I felt that I ought to be allowed to escape from it sometimes, to be, as it were, incognito in soul as well as in body, so that what I thought and did should not be reckoned as the work of the King's mind or the act of the King's hand. I envied intensely the lot and the temper of my friend Varvilliers. When I reached the palace and entered it, it seemed to me as though I were returning to a prison. Its walls shut me off from that free existence whose sweetness I had tasted, and forbade me to roam in the fields whither youth beckoned and curiosity lured me. That joy could never be mine. My burden was ever with me; the woman I had loved was gone; the girl I must be made husband to was soon to come. I was not and could not be as other young men.
That all this, the conversation with Varvilliers, its effect on me, my restless discontent and angry protests against my fate, should follow on meeting Coralie Mansoni at supper will not seem strange to anybody who remembers her.