Chapter XIV

“C’est étonnant!” murmured the Duc de St. Louis softly to himself, the same evening, standing on the steps of the Hôtel Murat, after assisting in the morning at those various civil ceremonies and impediments with which our beloved Italy, in her new character as a nation of Free Thought, does her best to impede and deter all such as cling to so old-world and pedantic a prejudice as marriage.

The dénouement of the drama which he himself had first set in action had fallen upon him like a thunderbolt. He had had no conception of what would happen. He had thought to enrich his friend by one of the finest fortunes in Europe, and lo!—the Duc remained in an amazement and a sense of humiliation from which he could not recover.

“C’est étonnant!” he murmured, again and again. “Who would ever have believed that Miladi was a woman to beggar herself and play the romance of the ‘world lost for love’? If I had only imagined!—if I had only dreamed! I will never propose a marriage to any living being again; never.”

“You have nothing to be so remorseful about, Duc,” said Lord Clairvaux, with a sigh, himself utterly exhausted by all the law work that he had been obliged to go through. “It is very funny, certainly,—she of all women in the world! But they are happy enough, and he really is the only living creature that ever could manage her. If anybody had ever told me that any man would change Hilda like that!”

“Happy!” echoed M. de St. Louis, with his fin sourire. He was a man who had no delusions; there were no marriages that were happy; some were calm, that was the uttermost, and to remain calm required an immense income; money alone was harmony.

Lord Clairvaux lighted a very big cigar, and grumbled that it had been horrible to have to leave England in the Epsom month, but that he thanked goodness that it was the last of her caprices that he would be worried with; and he hoped that this Italian would like them when he had had a year or two of them.

“I don’t know, though, but what it is the only sensible caprice she ever had in her life; eh?” he added; “except buying Escargot and giving him to me after the races,—you remember? Hang it, I’ve never seen such a Chantilly before or since as that was!”

“We never do see such a race as the one that we happen to win,” murmured M. de St. Louis.

“Of course it’s an awful cropper to take, and all that; but I’m not sure but what she’s done a wise thing, though all the women are howling at her like mad,” continued Lord Clairvaux; “a woman can’t live forever on chiffons, you see.”

“Most women can—admirably. They buy at eighty as much white hair, the coiffeurs tell me, as they buy blonde or black at twenty.”

“Ah, but they can’t, if they have a bit of heart or mind in them. Hilda has both.”

“The case is so rare I could not prescribe for it: let us hope Miladi’s own prescription will suit her,” said the Duc, whose serene good humor was still slightly ruffled.

“Well, she always was all extremes and contraries,” said Lord Clairvaux. “You never could say one minute what she wouldn’t do the next. By George! you know there is nothing too odd for her to go in for; I should not wonder an atom if when we come here two or three years hence, we find her worshiping a curly Paolino, seeing to the silkworms, and studying wine-making: she’s really tried everything else, you know.”

“Everything except happiness? Well, very few of us get any chance of trying that, or would appreciate it if we did get it. Happiness,” pursued the Duc, pensively, “must, after all, be almost as monotonous as discontent,—when one is used to it. It is comforting to think so; for there is very little of it. I cannot realize Miladi among the babies and the wine-presses; but you may be right.”

“Well, you know she’s tried everything else,” repeated Lord Clairvaux. “It will be like Julius Cæsar and his cabbage-garden.”

“You mean Diocletian,” said the Duc. “Do you leave to-night? We may as well go as far as Paris together.”

And he turned back into the hotel to bid farewell to Madame Mila.

Madame Mila, who had made the religious and civil ceremonies gorgeous in the last new anomalous anachronisms, with a classic clinging dress, quite Greek in its cut, covered all over with the eyes out of peacocks’ feathers, and a cotte-de-maille bodice, stiff as pasteboard with gold and silver embroideries, and who was now on the point of departure across the Mont Cenis, covered up in the most wonderful of hooded cloaks trimmed with the feathers of the Russian diver and the grebe; about one hundred and fifty birds, happy, peaceful, and innocent under their native skies, had died to trim the wrap, and it would probably be worn about half a dozen times; for feathers are so very soon chiffonnés, as everybody knows.

“They are quite mad, both of them!” said the Countess, giving her small fingers in adieu, and turning to see that Maurice had all the things she wanted and was duly hooking them on to her ceinture of oxidized silver.

“Perhaps, madame,” said the Duc, who indeed thought so himself. “But if a few people were not mad occasionally there would be no chance for the sanity of the world.”

“Well, they will repent horribly, that is one comfort; she most of all,” said Madame Mila, with asperity. “She ought to have been prevented; treated for lunacy, you know; in France they would have managed it at once with a _conseil de famille_. Maurice, you are screwing the top of that flacon on all wrong: do take more care! She will repent horribly, but she don’t see it now. Of course if she had had to lose the jewels they would have brought her to reason. As it is, she don’t in the least realize the horrible thing that she has done,—not in the least, not in the least. When I said to her that she wouldn’t be able even to afford Worth, she laughed, and answered that she would have one dress from him every year for old friendship’s sake for the contadini’s vintage balls, and that he would be sure to embroider her the loveliest Bacchic symbolisms and put the cone of the thyrsus for buttons!—only fancy! She could actually jest about _that_! How miserable she will be in three months when she has come back to her senses; and how miserable she will make _him_!”

“Chère Comtesse,” said the Duc, taking up his hat and cane, “everybody repents everything. It is a law of Fate. The only difference is that some people repent pleasantly and some unpleasantly. Let us hope that our beautiful Duchess will repent pleasantly. Madame, j’ai l’honneur de vous saluer—Bon voyage; au revoir.”

THE END.

FOOTNOTES

[1]

“Leavest thou me?—leave thee I will not.
Dost thou forsake me, yet will I follow thee.
Does the sea take thee?—the sea will I traverse.
Wilt thou wander the world, then a wanderer am I.”

[2] The old conservative party is so termed in Italy,—_codini_.