Читать книгу The Comancheros - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 7

Eloise Grailhe came out of the tavern on Judge Beaubien’s arm, and was assisted into her carriage. The judge mounted his horse and rode beside her equipage back toward the French Opera. It was the custom in New Orleans—the gentleman in the saddle and the lady in the vehicle—but it hardly led to intimacy.

Not that there would have been much intimacy in any case. The judge was moodily silent, and Eloise was glad of it. She had hardly spoken the truth when she told him that she loved Emile, his son. But for the matter of that, if all women spoke with full candor of their love affairs, this world would be plunged at once into a state of anarchy worse than war. Eloise merely was observing discretion, and she hoped the judge would not cross-examine her too severely.

Once she stole a glance at his face, and noticed again its texture: the mature, burdened lines; the gray hair and florid skin; the sagging lower lids of the level, assured eyes; the uncompromising, self-willed mouth.

It was only seven or eight squares to the French Opera House. The last of the shreds of fog had gone, and the morning was fine and clear, but Eloise, riding demurely, with her hands folded in her lap, took less pleasure than common in the sun-brightened streets and the changing scenes of the old city. A heavy depression seemed to be weighting her.

After they had passed the Cathedral of St. Louis, the judge spoke for the first time.

“May I ask, mademoiselle, how long you have known my son?”

“About six months,” she replied.

He frowned slightly, turning it over in his mind. At last he said, “You knew, of course, his station and expectations?”

“Yes, your honor.”

He let it go at that, but she could read his mind. Between Emile Beaubien, the heir of two great families, and an actress like herself, existed an enormous gulf. As well might the judge have rasped out, “My dear young woman, don’t you think your ambitions fly rather high?”

She was accustomed to this sort of snobbery. One accepted it, if one chose the stage as a profession—even the opera stage. An actress was condemned in advance to the demimonde, her reputation considered at least doubtful. She hardly minded it, except that she felt that as an operatic soprano she should hardly have been lumped with other female public entertainers by this intolerant old man. The opera, after all, had dignity, required talents of a high order.

Yet to arrogant aristocrats like Judge Beaubien, it was only a stage. Of another sort, perhaps, but still a stage, employing grease paint and footlights, and—most damning—sometimes flaunting its shapely feminine performers in tights.

And this in spite of the fact that people like Judge Beaubien crowded the French Opera to see the twinkling legs of the corps de ballet in some of the operas. Eloise herself had worn tights—when she played Jemmy in William Tell, and the Naide in Armide—and saw nothing very sinful about it, provided one had legs that were worth looking at.

Her own legs, as she recalled, had been tumultuously applauded.

No accounting for people. Men like Judge Beaubien, who paid money to look, then were scornful of what they looked at, were beyond Eloise. But she did not say so. Not to the judge, at least.

Instead, she sat straight up in the carriage, and contemplated her slim hands folded together in her lap. Since she left the convent, where she was brought up, the opera had been her life. She was accustomed to the thought of being an orphan: her mother dead while she was a baby, her father also, as the nuns said—and with some sort of a cloud hanging over him, she did not know exactly what. A sum of money was held in trust for her by Colonel Grymes, that cold-faced, white-haired lawyer, who was said once to have had connections with the piratical Lafitte brothers, and from this she was paid an allowance. It was Colonel Grymes who, when the sisters at the convent said she had a better than good soprano voice, suggested she should try for the French Opera troupe, and continue her studies in music, especially since her trust fund was getting low.

That was when she was fifteen. She thought back on it: her presentation to the manager of the Opera by Colonel Grymes, and the manager’s rather reluctant acceptance of the responsibility of schooling her—which he undertook, as he said, only because of his devotion for his dear friend, the colonel.

She sang in choruses, and held torches in spectacle scenes, and had a bed in the girls’ dormitory, and a place at the table with the ballet, and a constant running of vocal scales under the iron discipline of Monsieur Doumic, the broken-down concert master.

That lasted a year. In the year she grew from long-legged adolescence into the fulfillment of young womanhood. It is wonderful how important are looks in a girl. Eloise, the management suddenly discovered, was very pretty, with a voice both sweet and flexible, who could reach high C without straining for it. And, of course, the legs ...

Often she wondered how she would have fared had she possessed bad teeth, or a muddy complexion. But as it happened, she did not have these or any other serious flaws, and since feminine beauty is always a boon to the box office, she began to receive much attention from the management.

She learned prodigiously about music, the mechanics of the theater, the methods of acting, the repertoire, and the odd backstage politics which always occur where play folk gather.

Then she made her debut, when she was seventeen, in Armide, as the wood nymph, the role for which her legs qualified her. Shortly after she sang Adina in L’Elisire d’Amore, in which she rendered the arias of that outrageous flirt with such happy charm that she received an ovation, her first.

Afterward, there was a dinner, and now she learned a number of other things.

Chief in importance among these were the following: that while men are delightful, they are continuously and forever dangerous to a woman; that one must never believe anything they say; that an actress is considered fair game by them, her seduction becoming in measure a joint enterprise, the lucky winner to be toasted by his fellows; and above all, that a girl who has charming legs, and has not scrupled to display them, is a particular prize for conquest by all of them.

Fortunately, Eloise Grailhe had a level little head, and her convent training helped her. None of her suitors had been toasted by his friends—thus far. Three years had passed since then, she was now twenty, and she had not done badly for a lone wench, on the defensive continually against every man, although sometimes, most inconveniently, men were not on the defensive against her.

Emile Beaubien, for example.

Before God, she had never made the slightest conscious effort to captivate him. He was, for one thing, not appealing to her, callow to the point of being pinfeathered, with distressingly clammy hands, and pimples on the face which she found unpleasant. He was given to the kind of bleating, furthermore, that a girl could hardly respect, when he pleaded with her. He was her own age, twenty, but she felt years older and wiser than he. Yet Emile had fallen in love with her, so precipitately and blunderingly that she was half amused and more than half chagrined by the whole thing.

To be sure, he was heir to the De Rieux and Beaubien fortunes ...

But she shrugged her slim shoulders at that thought, a little impatiently. Emile was such a fool! It astonished her that he had enough gumption to get into a duel. With a man like Paul Regret, of all people ...

She considered Paul. He, at least, was not pinfeathered.

A charming scoundrel. She had told him that, and it was the truth. She had been warned against him from the first, and there were enough bad stories about him to condemn him completely.

And yet ... Paul Regret was handsome, and supple, and he gave you the idea, somehow, that under everything superficial he was a man. She remembered with a little, helpless quiver the flash of his reckless black eyes and the flash of his reckless white smile beneath that little neat mustache.

If things were a little different, now ... But Paul was what he was, a deceiver of women, constantly on the prowl, and not even ashamed of it. The whispers about him—when they were brought to his ears, he just laughed, or confessed them quite blandly. He ought not be given a minute’s time by any young woman with her own welfare to consider!

She fortified herself with that last thought, and sat up with her red lips in a firm straight line.

Then she sighed, and her lips softened. After all, Paul was the most entertaining man in New Orleans. And when he asked her to go to Victor’s for a late supper after the performance, it took superhuman will power to refuse him. And when he invited her to ride with him in the park on Sunday morning, she usually went.

He made love to her, gaily, with a mingled grace and gentleness, but never seriously. She could picture in her mind now the strong angle of his jaw, and the way his black hair curled on the neck just behind his ear. Once or twice she had almost succumbed to the temptation to snuggle her face in the hollow of that neck ...

But she had never succumbed. Never quite. She kept matters on a flirt-and-laughter basis, which was the only way a girl could possibly handle a man like Paul Regret.

Or had she, quite? She colored a little. No doubt about his conclusions when she went to his rooms that morning. His eyes: surprised, then pleased, then smilingly possessive. His voice: warm, and sure. He thought she was so much in love with him that she had come to him like a common hussy.

A large assumption! And she had told him so, roundly. But that did not altogether cure her embarrassment.

Oh, why did Paul Regret have to be like Paul Regret?

Or rather, why couldn’t Paul Regret be like Paul Regret—but with some important differences?

Well, no use concerning herself. She was not in love with him, whatever he thought. And even if she were, she told herself primly, millions of women had found men attractive and not to be believed—and wiped those men, wisely, off the slate. As for Paul Regret, he was false, false, to every woman ...

Just the same, she found herself wondering a little tremulously where he was now, and if he had gotten away from those sheriff’s deputies. She hoped very much he had, if only through motives of charity.

Sincerely, she hoped it was charity ...

The carriage came to a stop. They were before the French Opera.

“I must apologize, mademoiselle,” the judge was saying. He had taken off his hat. “I haven’t been very good company. You must pardon me.”

Belatedly, he seemed concerned at his own lack of conversational manners.

As women can do, she gave him a brilliant smile which in no way suggested that she had been as abstracted as he.

“I gladly pardon—a gentleman with grave worries and griefs on his mind,” she said. “And I thank you for escorting me.”

He looked at her. “You are a charming creature,” he said as if to himself, and as if in his mind excusing his son, Emile, for the indiscretion of falling in love with her.

Very stately, Judge Beaubien rode away, while the door-man of the Opera House assisted her from the carriage.