Name and Fame A Novel

Excerpt

HUSBAND AND WIFE.

It was a brilliant day in June. The sky was cloudless and dazzlingly blue, but the heat of the sun's rays was tempered by a deliciously cool breeze, and the foliage of the trees that clothe the pleasant slopes round the vivacious little town of Aix-les-Bains afforded plenty of shade to the pedestrian. Aix was, as usual, very crowded and very gay. German potentates abounded: French notabilities were not wanting: it was rumored that English royalty was coming. A very motley crowd of divers nationalities drank the waters every morning and discussed the latest society scandal. Festivity seemed to haunt the very air of the place, beaming from the trim white villas with their smart green jalousies, the tall hotels with crudely tinted flags flying from their roofs, the cheery little shops with their cheerier dames de comptoir smiling complacently on the tourists who unwarily bought their goods. Ladies in gay toilets, with scarlet parasols or floating feathers, made vivid patches of color against the green background of the gardens, and the streets were now and then touched into picturesqueness by the passing of some half-dozen peasants who had come from the neighboring villages to sell their butter or their eggs. The men in their blue blouses were mostly lean, dark, and taciturn; the women, small, black-eyed, and vivacious, with bright-colored petticoats, long earrings, and the quaintest of round white caps. The silvery whiteness of the lake, flashing back an answer to the sunlight, gave a peculiarly joyous radiance to the scene. For water is to a landscape what the eye is to the human countenance: it gives life and expression; without it, the most beautiful features may be blank and uninteresting.

But the brightness of the scene did not find an echo in every heart.

"Dame!" said a French waiter, who stood, napkin in hand, at a window of the Hôtel Venat, watching the passers-by, "there they go, that cold, sullen English pair, looking as if nothing on earth would make them smile again!"

A bullet-headed little man in a white apron stepped up to the window and stared in the direction that Auguste's eyes had taken.

"Tiens, donc! Quelle tournure! But she is superb!" he exclaimed, as if in remonstrance.

"She is handsome—oui, sans doute; but see how she frowns! I like a woman who smiles, who coquettes, who knows how to divert herself—like Mademoiselle Lisette here, queen of my heart and life."

And Auguste bowed sentimentally to a pretty little chambermaid who came tripping up the stairs at that moment, and laid his hand upon his heart.

"You are too polite, Monsieur Auguste," Lisette responded amicably. "And at whom are you gazing so earnestly?"

"At the belle Anglaise—you can still see her, if you look—she is charmingly dressed, but——"

"She is magnificent! simply magnificent," murmured the bullet-headed Jean, who was not, like his friend, enamored of the pert Lisette. "I have never seen so splendid an Englishwoman, never! nor one who had so much the true Parisian air!"

Lisette uttered a shrill little scream of laughter....