"Can you lend me a bandana handkerchief? The stupid fool Charles leaves me without a single one. In the early days you used to bother me with looking after me so carefully. Ah, well, the honeymoon did not last very long for me, nor yet for my cravats. Nowadays I am given over to the secular arm, in the shape of servants who do not care one jack straw for what I say.""There! There is a bandana for you. Did you go into the drawing-room?""No."
"Oh! you might perhaps have been in time to see Lord Grenville.""Is he in Paris?"
"It seems so."
"Oh! I will go at once. The good doctor.""But he will have gone by now!" exclaimed Julie.
The Marquis, standing in the middle of the room, was tying the handkerchief over his head. He looked complacently at himself in the glass.
"What has become of the servants is more than I know," he remarked. "Ihave rung the bell for Charles, and he has not answered it. And your maid is not here either. Ring for her. I should like another blanket on my bed to-night.""Pauline is out," the Marquise said drily.
"What, at midnight!" exclaimed the General.
"I gave her leave to go to the Opera."
"That is funny!" returned her husband, continuing to undress. "Ithought I saw her coming upstairs."
"She has come in then, of course," said Julie, with assumed impatience, and to allay any possible suspicion on her husband's part she pretended to ring the bell.
The whole history of that night has never been known, but no doubt it was as simple and as tragically commonplace as the domestic incidents that preceded it.
Next day the Marquise d'Aiglemont took to her bed, nor did she leave it for some days.
"What can have happened in your family so extraordinary that every one is talking about your wife?" asked M. de Ronquerolles of M.
d'Aiglemont a short time after that night of catastrophes.
"Take my advice and remain a bachelor," said d'Aiglemont. "The curtains of Helene's cot caught fire, and gave my wife such a shock that it will be a twelvemonth before she gets over it; so the doctor says. You marry a pretty wife, and her looks fall off; you marry a girl in blooming health, and she turns into an invalid. You think she has a passionate temperament, and find her cold, or else under her apparent coldness there lurks a nature so passionate that she is the death of you, or she dishonors your name. Sometimes the meekest of them will turn out crotchety, though the crotchety ones never grow any sweeter. Sometimes the mere child, so simple and silly at first, will develop an iron will to thwart you and the ingenuity of a fiend. I am tired of marriage.""Or of your wife?"
"That would be difficult. By-the-by, do you feel inclined to go to Saint-Thomas d'Aquin with me to attend Lord Grenville's funeral?""A singular way of spending time.--Is it really known how he came by his death?" added Ronquerolles.
"His man says that he spent a whole night sitting on somebody's window sill to save some woman's character, and it has been infernally cold lately.""Such devotion would be highly creditable to one of us old stagers;but Lord Grenville was a youngster and--an Englishman. Englishmen never can do anything like anybody else.""Pooh!" returned d'Aiglemont, "these heroic exploits all depend upon the woman in the case, and it certainly was not for one that I know, that poor Arthur came by his death."