The Call of the Blood | Page 9

Hermione looked round at him, turning her tall figure rather slowly in the chair, Artois made up his mind that she had been captured by the physique of this man. He could not be surprised, but he still felt angry.
Hermione introduced Delarey to him eagerly, not attempting to hide her anxiety for the two men to make friends at once. Her desire was so transparent and so warm that for a moment Artois felt touched, and inclined to trample upon his evil mood and leave no trace of it. He was also secretly too human to remain wholly unmoved by Delarey's reception of him. Delarey had a rare charm of manner whose source was a happy, but not foolishly shy, modesty, which made him eager to please, and convinced that in order to do so he must bestir himself and make an effort. But in this effort there was no labor. It was like the spurt of a willing horse, a fine racing pace of the nature that woke pleasure and admiration in those who watched it.
Artois felt at once that Delarey had no hostility towards him, but was ready to admire and rejoice in him as Hermione's greatest friend. He was met more than half-way. Yet when he was beside Delarey, almost touching him, the stubborn sensation of furtive dislike within Artois increased, and he consciously determined not to yield to the charm of this younger man who was going to interfere in his life. Artois did not speak much English, but fortunately Delarey talked French fairly well, not with great fluency like Hermione, but enough to take a modest share in conversation, which was apparently all the share that he desired. Artois believed that he was no great talker. His eyes were more eager than was his tongue, and seemed to betoken a vivacity of spirit which he could not, perhaps, show forth in words. The conversation at first was mainly between Hermione and Artois, with an occasional word from Delarey--generally interrogative--and was confined to generalities. But this could not continue long. Hermione was an enthusiastic talker and seldom discussed banalities. From every circle where she found herself the inane was speedily banished; pale topics--the spectres that haunt the dull and are cherished by them--were whipped away to limbo, and some subject full-blooded, alive with either serious or comical possibilities, was very soon upon the carpet. By chance Artois happened to speak of two people in Paris, common friends of his and of Hermione's, who had been very intimate, but who had now quarrelled, and every one said, irrevocably. The question arose whose fault was it. Artois, who knew the facts of the case, and whose judgment was usually cool and well-balanced, said it was the woman's.
"Madame Lagrande," he said, "has a fine nature, but in this instance it has failed her, it has been warped by jealousy; not the jealousy that often accompanies passion, for she and Robert Meunier were only great friends, linked together by similar sympathies, but by a much more subtle form of that mental disease. You know, Hermione, that both of them are brilliant critics of literature?"
"Yes, yes."
"They carried on a sort of happy, but keen rivalry in this walk of letters, each striving to be more unerring than the other in dividing the sheep from the goats. I am the guilty person who made discord where there had been harmony."
"You, Emile! How was that?"
"One day I said, in a bitter mood, 'It is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a creator. You two, now would you even dare to try to create?' They were nettled by my tone, and showed it. I said, 'I have a magnificent subject for a conte, no work de longue haleine, a conte. If you like I will give it you, and leave you to create--separately, not together--what you have so often written about, the perfect conte.' They accepted my challenge. I gave them my subject and a month to work it out. At the end of that time the two contes were to be submitted to a jury of competent literary men, friends of ours. It was all a sort of joke, but created great interest in our circle--you know it, Hermione, that dines at Réneau's on Thursday nights?"
"Yes. Well, what happened?"
"Madame Lagrande made a failure of hers, but Robert Meunier astonished us all. He produced certainly one of the best contes that was ever written in the French language."
"And Madame Lagrande?"
"It is not too much to say that from that moment she has almost hated Robert."
"And you dare to say she has a noble nature?"
"Yes, a noble nature from which, under some apparently irresistible impulse, she has lapsed."
"Maurice," said Hermione, leaning her long arms on the table and leaning forward to