I
A young man—tall, spare, with sallow skin and shifty, restless eyes—pushed unceremoniously past the old servant, threw his hat and cane down on the nearest chair, and hurrying across the vestibule, entered the salon where the beautiful Spaniard, a picture of serene indifference, sat ready to receive him.
She had chosen for the setting of this scene a small settee covered in old rose brocade. On this she half sat, half reclined, with an open book in her hand, her elbow resting on the frame of the settee, her cheek leaning against her hand. Immediately behind her, the light from an oil lamp tempered by a shade of rose-coloured silk, outlined with a brilliant, glowing pencil the contour of her small head, one exquisite shoulder, and the mass of her raven hair, whilst it accentuated the cool halftones of her diaphanous gown, on the round bare arms and bust, the tiny sandalled feet and cross-gartered legs.
A picture in truth to dazzle the eyes of any man! Tallien should have been at her feet in an instant. The fact that he paused in the doorway bore witness to the unruly thoughts that ran riot in his brain.
“Ah, citizen Tallien!” the fair Theresia exclaimed with a perfect assumption of sangfroid. “You are the first to arrive, and are indeed welcome; for I was nearly swooning with ennui. Well!” she added, with a provocative smile, and extended a gracious arm in his direction. “Are you not going to kiss my hand?”
“I heard a voice,” was all the response which he gave to this seductive invitation. “A man’s voice. Who was it?”
She raised a pair of delicately pencilled eyebrows. Her eyes became as round and as innocent-looking as a child’s.
“A man’s voice?” she riposted with a perfect air of astonishment. “You are crazy, mon ami; or else are crediting my faithful Pepita with a virile bass, which in truth she doth not possess!”
“Whose voice was it?” Tallien reiterated, making an effort to speak calmly, even though he was manifestly shaking with choler.
Whereupon the fair Theresia, no longer gracious or arch, looked him up and down as if he were no better than a lackey.
“Ah, ça!” she rejoined coldly. “Are you perchance trying to cross-question me? By what right, I pray you, citizen Tallien, do you assume this hectoring tone in my presence? I am not yet your wife, remember; and ’tis not you, I image, who are the dictator of France.”
“Do not tease me, Theresia!” the man interposed hoarsely. “Bertrand Moncrif is here.”
For the space of a second, or perhaps less, Theresia gave no reply to the taunt. Her quick, alert brain had already faced possibilities, and she was far too clever a woman to take the risks which a complete evasion of the truth would have entailed at this moment. She did not, in effect, know whether Tallien was speaking from positive information given to him by spies, or merely from conjecture born of jealousy. Moreover, another would be here presently—another, whose spies were credited with omniscience, and whom she might not succeed in dominating with a smile or a frown, as she could the lovesick Tallien. Therefore, after that one brief instant’s reflection she decided to temporise, to shelter behind a half-truth, and replied, with a quick glance from under her long lashes:
“I am not teasing you, citizen. Bertrand came here for shelter awhile ago.”
Tallien drew a quick sigh of satisfaction, and she went on carelessly:
“But, obviously, I could not keep him here. He seemed hurt and frightened … He has been gone this past half-hour.”
For a moment it seemed as if the man, in face of this obvious lie, would flare out into a hot retort; but Theresia’s luminous eyes subdued him, and before the cool contempt expressed by those exquisite lips, he felt all his blustering courage oozing away.
“The man is an abominable and an avowed traitor,” he said sullenly. “Only two hours ago—”
“I know,” she broke in coldly. “He vilified Robespierre. A dangerous thing to do. Bertrand was ever a fool, and he lost his head.”
“He will lose it more effectually tomorrow,” Tallien retorted grimly.
“You mean that you would denounce him?”
“That I will denounce him. I would have done so tonight, before coming here, only—only—”
“Only what?”
“I was afraid he might be here.”
Theresia broke into a ringing if somewhat artificial peal of laughter.
“I must thank you, citizen, for this consideration of my feelings. It was, in truth, thoughtful of you to think of sparing me a scandal. But, since Bertrand is not here—”
“I know where he lodges. He’ll not escape, citoyenne. My word on it!”
Tallien spoke very quietly, but with that concentrated fury of which a fiercely jealous man is ever capable. He had remained standing in the doorway all this while, his eyes fixed on the beautiful woman before him, but his attention feverishly divided between her and what might be going on in the vestibule behind him.
In answer to his last threatening words, the lovely Theresia rejoined, more seriously:
“So as to make sure I do not escape either!” And a flash of withering anger shot from her dark eyes on the unromantic figure of her adorer. “Or you, mon ami! You are determined that Mme. Roland’s fate shall overtake me, eh? And no doubt you will be thrilled to the marrow when you see my head fall into your precious salad-bowl. Will yours follow mine, think you? Or will you prefer to emulate citizen Roland’s more romantic ending?”
Even while she spoke, Tallien had been unable to repress a shudder.
“Theresia, in heaven’s name—!” he murmured.
“Bah, mon ami! There is no longer a heaven these days. You and your party have carefully abolished the Hereafter. So, after you and I have taken our walk up the steps of the scaffold—”
“Theresia!”
“Eh, what?” she went on coolly. “Is that not perchance what you have in contemplation? Moncrif, you say, is an avowed traitor. Has openly vilified and insulted your demigod. He has been seen coming to my apartments. Good! I tell you that he is no longer here. But let that pass. He is denounced. Good! Sent to the guillotine. Good again! And Theresia Cabarrus in whose house he tried to seek refuge, much against her will, goes to the guillotine in his company. The prospect may please you, mon ami, because for the moment you are suffering from a senseless attack of jealousy. But I confess that it does not appeal to me.”
The man was silent now; awed against his will. His curiously restless eyes swept over the graceful apparition before him. Insane jealousy was fighting a grim fight in his heart with terror for his beloved. Her argument was a sound one. Even he was bound to admit that. Powerful though he was in the Convention, his influence was as nothing compared with that of Robespierre. And he knew his redoubtable colleague well enough that an insult such as Moncrif had put upon in the Rue St. Honoré this night would never be forgiven, neither in the young hothead himself nor in any of his friends, adherents, or mere pitying sympathisers.
Theresia Cabarrus was clever enough and quick enough to see that she had gained one point.
“Come and kiss my hand,” she said, with a little sight of satisfaction.
This time the man obeyed, without an instant’s hesitation. Already he was down on his knees, repentant and humiliated. She gave him her small, sandalled foot to kiss. After that, Tallien became abject.
“You know that I would die for you, Theresia!” he murmured passionately.
This is the second time tonight that such an assertion had been made in this room. And both had been made in deadly earnest, whilst the fair listener had remained equally indifferent to both. And for the second time tonight, Theresia passed her cool white hand over the bent head of an ardent worshipper, whilst her lips murmured vaguely:
“Foolish! Oh, how foolish! Why do men torture themselves, I wonder, with senseless jealousy?”
Instinctively she turned her small head in the direction of the passage and the little kitchen, where Bertrand Moncrif had found temporary and precarious shelter. Self-pity and a kind of fierce helplessness not untinged with remorse made her eyes appear resentful and hard.
There, in the stuffy little kitchen at the end of the dark, dank passage, love in its pure sense, happiness, brief perhaps but unalloyed, and certainly obscure, lay in wait for her. Here, at her feet, was security in the present turmoil, power, and a fitting background for her beauty and her talents. She did not want to lose Bertrand; indeed, she did not intend to lose him. She sighed a little regretfully as she thought of his good looks, his enthusiasm, his selfless ardour. Then she looked down once more on the narrow shoulders, the lank, colourless hair, the bony hands of the erstwhile lawyer’s clerk to whom she had already promised marriage, and she shuddered a little when she remembered that those same hands into which she had promised to place her own and which now grasped hers in passionate adoration had, of a certainty, signed the order for those execrable massacres which had forever sullied the early days of the Revolution. For a moment—a brief one, in truth—she marvelled if union with such a man was not too heavy a price to pay for immunity and for power.
But the hesitancy only lasted a few seconds. The next, she had thrown back her head as if in defiance of the whisperings of conscience and of heart. She need not lose her youthful lover at all. He was satisfied with so little! A few kind words here, an occasional kiss, a promise or two, and he would always remain her willing slave.
It were foolish indeed, and far, far too late, to give way to sentiment at this hour, when Tallien’s influence in the Convention was second only to that of Robespierre, whilst Bertrand Moncrif was a fugitive, a suspect, a poor miserable fanatic, whose hotheadedness was forever landing him from one dangerous situation into another.
So, after indulging in the faintest little sigh of yearning for the might-have-been, she met her latest adorer’s worshipping glance with coquettish air of womanly submission, which completed his subjugation, and said lightly:
“And now give me my orders for tonight, mon ami.”
She settled herself down more comfortably upon the settee, and graciously allowed him to sit on a low chair beside her.