Paz was leading so subterranean a life that the fashionable world of Paris asked who he was when the Comtesse Laginska was seen in the Bois de Boulogne riding between her husband and a stranger. During the ride Clementine insisted that Thaddeus should dine with them. This caprice of the sovereign lady compelled Paz to make an evening toilet.
Clementine dressed for the occasion with a certain coquetry, in a style that impressed even Adam himself when she entered the salon where the two friends awaited her.
"Comte Paz," she said, "you must go with us to the Opera."
This was said in the tone which, coming from a woman means: "If you refuse we shall quarrel."
"Willingly, madame," replied the captain. "But as I have not the fortune of a count, have the kindness to call me captain."
"Very good, captain; give me your arm," she said,--taking it and leading the way to the dining-room with the flattering familiarity which enchants all lovers.
The countess placed the captain beside her; his behavior was that of a poor sub-lieutenant dining at his general's table. He let Clementine talk, listened deferentially as to a superior, did not differ with her in anything, and waited to be questioned before he spoke at all. He seemed actually stupid to the countess, whose coquettish little ways missed their mark in presence of such frigid gravity and conventional respect. In vain Adam kept saying: "Do be lively, Thaddeus; one would really suppose you were not at home. You must have made a wager to disconcert Clementine." Thaddeus continued heavy and half asleep. When the servants left the room at the end of the dessert the captain explained that his habits were diametrically opposite to those of society,--he went to bed at eight o'clock and got up very early in the morning; and he excused his dulness on the ground of being sleepy.
"My intention in taking you to the Opera was to amuse you, captain; but do as you prefer," said Clementine, rather piqued.
"I will go," said Paz.
"Duprez sings 'Guillaume Tell,'" remarked Adam. "But perhaps you would rather go to the 'Varietes'?"
The captain smiled and rang the bell. "Tell Constantin," he said to the footman, "to put the horses to the carriage instead of the coupe.
We should be rather squeezed otherwise," he said to the count.
"A Frenchman would have forgotten that," remarked Clementine, smiling.
"Ah! but we are Florentines transplanted to the North," answered Thaddeus with a refinement of accent and a look in his eyes which made his conduct at table seem assumed for the occasion. There was too evident a contrast between his involuntary self-revelation in this speech and his behavior during dinner. Clementine examined the captain with a few of those covert glances which show a woman's surprise and also her capacity for observation.
It resulted from this little incident that silence reigned in the salon while the three took their coffee, a silence rather annoying to Adam, who was incapable of imagining the cause of it. Clementine no longer tried to draw out Thaddeus. The captain, on the other hand, retreated within his military stiffness and came out of it no more, neither on the way to the Opera nor in the box, where he seemed to be asleep.
"You see, madame, that I am a very stupid man," he said during the dance in the last act of "Guillaume Tell." "Am I not right to keep, as the saying is, to my own specialty?"
"In truth, my dear captain, you are neither a talker nor a man of the world, but you are perhaps Polish."
"Therefore leave me to look after your pleasures, your property, your household--it is all I am good for."
"Tartufe! pooh!" cried Adam, laughing. "My dear, he is full of ardor; he is thoroughly educated; he can, if he chooses, hold his own in any salon. Clementine, don't believe his modesty."
"Adieu, comtesse; I have obeyed your wishes so far; and now I will take the carriage and go home to bed and send it back for you."
Clementine bowed her head and let him go without replying.
"What a bear!" she said to the count. "You are a great deal nicer."
Adam pressed her hand when no one was looking.
"Poor, dear Thaddeus," he said, "he is trying to make himself disagreeable where most men would try to seem more amiable than I."
"Oh!" she said, "I am not sure but what there is some CALCULATION in his behavior; he would have taken in an ordinary woman."
Half an hour later, when the chasseur, Boleslas, called out "Gate!" and the carriage was waiting for it to swing back, Clementine said to her husband, "Where does the captain perch?"
"Why, there!" replied Adam, pointing to a floor above the porte-cochere which had one window looking on the street. "His apartments are over the coachhouse."
"Who lives on the other side?" asked the countess.
"No one as yet," said Adam; "I mean that apartment for our children and their instructors."
"He didn't go to bed," said the countess, observing lights in Thaddeus's rooms when the carriage had passed under the portico supported by columns copied from those of the Tuileries, which replaced a vulgar zinc awning painted in stripes like cloth.
The captain, in his dressing-gown with a pipe in his mouth, was watching Clementine as she entered the vestibule. The day had been a hard one for him. And here is the reason why: A great and terrible emotion had taken possession of his heart on the day when Adam made him go to the Opera to see and give his opinion on Mademoiselle du Rouvre; and again when he saw her on the occasion of her marriage, and recognized in her the woman whom a man is forced to love exclusively.
For this reason Paz strongly advised and promoted the long journey to Italy and elsewhere after the marriage. At peace so long as Clementine was away, his trial was renewed on the return of the happy household.
As he sat at his window on this memorable night, smoking his latakia in a pipe of wild-cherry wood six feet long, given to him by Adam, these are the thoughts that were passing through his mind:--
