My mother adores her."
That dinner at M. Louvier's had already effected a great change in the mood and temper of Alain de Rochebriant; he felt, as if by magic, the sense of youth, of rank, of station, which had been so suddenly checked and stifled, warmed to life within his veins. He should have deemed himself a boor had he refused the invitation so frankly tendered.
But on reaching the coupe which the brothers kept in common, and seeing it only held two, he drew back.
"Nay, enter, mon cher," said Raoul, divining the cause of his hesitation; "Enguerrand has gone on to his club."
CHAPTER V.
"Tell me," said Raoul, when they were in the carriage, "how you came to know M. Louvier."
"He is my chief mortgagee."
"H'm! that explains it. But you might be in worse hands; the man has a character for liberality."
"Did your father mention to you my circumstances, and the reason that brings me to Paris?"
"Since you put the question point-blank, my dear cousin, he did."
"He told you how poor I am, and how keen must be my lifelong struggle to keep Rochebriant as the home of my race?"
"He told us all that could make us still more respect the Marquis de Rochebriant, and still more eagerly long to know our cousin and the head of our house," answered Raoul, with a certain nobleness of tone and manner.
Alain pressed his kinsman's hand with grateful emotion. "Yet," he said falteringly, "your father agreed with me that my circumstances would not allow me to--"
"Bah!" interrupted Raoul, with a gentle laugh; "my father is a very clever man, doubtless, but he knows only the world of his own day, nothing of the world of ours. I and Enguerrand will call on you to-morrow, to take you to my mother, and before doing so, to consult as to affairs in general. On this last matter Enguerrand is an oracle. Here we are at the Contessa's."
CHAPTER VI.
The Contessa di Rimini received her visitors in a boudoir furnished with much apparent simplicity, but a simplicity by no means inexpensive. The draperies were but of chintz, and the walls covered with the same material,--a lively pattern, in which the prevalents were rose-colour and white; but the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the china stored in the cabinets or arranged on the shelves, the small knickknacks scattered on the tables, were costly rarities of art.
The Contessa herself was a woman who had somewhat passed her thirtieth year,--not strikingly handsome, but exquisitely pretty. "There is," said a great French writer, "only one way in which a woman can be handsome, but a hundred thousand ways in which she can be pretty;" and it would be impossible to reckon up the number of ways in which Adeline di Rimini carried off the prize in prettiness.
Yet it would be unjust to the personal attractions of the Contessa to class them all under the word "prettiness." When regarded more attentively, there was an expression in her countenance that might almost be called divine, it spoke so unmistakably of a sweet nature and an untroubled soul. An English poet once described her by repeating the old lines,
"Her face is like the milky way I' the sky, --A meeting of gentle lights without a name."
She was not alone; an elderly lady sat on an armchair by the fire, engaged in knitting; and a man, also elderly, and whose dress proclaimed him an ecclesiastic, sat at the opposite corner, with a large Angora cat on his lap.
"I present to you, Madame," said Raoul, "my new-found cousin, the seventeenth Marquis de Rochebriant, whom I am proud to consider on the male side the head of our house, representing its eldest branch. Welcome him for my sake,--in future he will be welcome for his own."
The Contessa replied very graciously to this introduction, and made room for Alain on the divan from which she had risen.
The old lady looked up from her knitting; the ecclesiastic removed the cat from his lap. Said the old lady, "I announce myself to M. le Marquis. I knew his mother well enough to be invited to his christening; otherwise I have no pretension to the acquaintance of a cavalier si beau, being old, rather deaf, very stupid, exceedingly poor--"
"And," interrupted Raoul, "the woman in all Paris the most adored for bonte, and consulted for savoir vivre by the young cavaliers whom she deigns to receive. Alain, I present you to Madame de Maury, the widow of a distinguished author and academician, and the daughter of the brave Henri de Gerval, who fought for the good cause in La Vendee. I present you also to the Abbe Vertpre, who has passed his life in the vain endeavour to make other men as good as himself."
"Base flatterer!" said the Abbe, pinching Raoul's ear with one hand, while he extended the other to Alain. "Do not let your cousin frighten you from knowing me, Monsieur le Marquis; when he was my pupil, he so convinced me of the incorrigibility of perverse human nature, that I now chiefly address myself to the moral improvement of the brute creation. Ask the Contessa if I have not achieved a beau succes with her Angora cat.