The Marquis of Bolibar (15 page)

Eglofstein, Donop and I had meanwhile retired to the inner room, where Brockendorf joined us. Monjita was still busy setting out dishes and platters on the table. We hemmed her in on all sides like skirmishers surrounding an enemy outpost, and, while Don Ramon diligently painted away at his
Entombment of Christ,
Eglofstein opened the assault on our colonel's mistress.

None of us knew better than Eglofstein how to pay addresses to a woman. He had the knack of using his voice as a master violinist plays his instrument. When he made it tremble and swell, it seemed to convey a passion and emotion which his heart did not truly feel, and there were women enough who fell prey to such empty wiles.

This was the first occasion on which we had been able to speak with Monjita alone, for we had never before seen her unaccompanied by the colonel. Eglofstein began with all manner of little compliments and blandishments which Monjita seemed to welcome, and the rest of us gave him free rein and listened in silence as he pleaded his cause and our own.

He said how happy he was to have met her, for all that rendered his sojourn in the little town tolerable was the prospect of seeing her from time to time.

Monjita smiled with pleasure, and her smile and the way in which her hands toyed with one of the silken flowers in her hair were such that Françoise-Marie seemed to be standing there before my very eyes, as she so often had in the past. And all at once it struck me as bizarre and nonsensical that we should have to expend so many words on winning a woman who had long been ours already.

"Is La Bisbal so wretched a town," she now asked, "that you regret your presence here?"

"No more wretched than any other town in your country, but I miss so many things here: Italian opera, the company of kindred spirits, balls, casinos, sleigh-rides with beautiful women ..."

Eglofstein paused as if allowing Monjita time to conjure up the diversions of high society - balls, sleigh-rides and Italian opera — in her mind's eye.

"But in your company," he went on, "I can dispense with all such things and am simply content to feast my eyes on you.

Monjita was at a loss how to answer and blushed with delight and confusion, but Don Ramon hailed her from the adjoining room.

"Come now, thank the gentleman for his kindly words, as courtesy prescribes!"

The discovery that Monjita's father had overheard every word of the conversation seemed to fluster Eglofstein and deprive him of his self-assurance. He turned vehement for no reason. When Monjita still said nothing, he addressed her angrily in a much lower voice.

"Can you find nothing to say? Have you no word for me? Very well, look down your nose at me. I'm unworthy of an answer, is that it?"

Monjita shook her head vigorously. She seemed alarmed, perhaps because she feared that she had made an enemy of an officer whom she had often seen conversing privately with her lover.

"You still say nothing," he continued more gently. "I know, you secretly deride the passion which you yourself have kindled in my breast with a single glance from your burning eyes, with one wilful toss of your dainty head, with the unruly ringlet that persists in straying across your marble brow."

"Pay no attention to my hair," Monjita said swiftly. She smoothed it with her hand, relieved that Eglofstein was no longer angry. "It was ruffled by a silly gust of wind as I walked along the street."

Eglofstein, who had not known what else to say, seized upon her allusion to a gust of wind with the dexterity of a juggler wielding his knives at an Ascension Day fair.

"Ah," he exclaimed, "the wind! How jealous I am of the wind, which is permitted, unlike me, to ruffle your hair, caress your cheeks, kiss your lips ..."

"Don Ramon!" the impersonator of Joseph of Arimathea cried pathetically at that moment. "How much longer am I to stand here? I want to go home."

"Patience! Half an hour more. I must make the most of the time that remains before the light fades."

"What! Will it take so long? A pretty prospect, by heaven, and my mother awaits me at home with a mess of sheeps' tripes she brought from Saragossa."

"Sheeps' tripes from Saragossa, eh?" said the pious woman of Jerusalem, with a sidelong glance at the laden table. "A rare delicacy nowadays."

"Fried in oil with pepper and onions."

"Don't think of sheeps' tripes now, in God's name, nor of pepper and onions!" cried Don Ramon. "Remain as you are and don't move. I paint for the edification of all good Catholics."

Meantime, Eglofstein appeared to have made some progress with Monjita. He had taken her hand and was clasping it in both of his.

"I detect a gentle answering pressure," he said. "The hand that lies in mine is cold and lifeless no longer. May I construe that as a sign that you will grant my heart's desire?"

"Which is?" Monjita asked without raising her eyes to his.

"That tonight you will spend an hour in my arms," Eglofstein whispered.

"That I cannot do," she replied, very firmly, and withdrew her hand.

Seeing Eglofstein's discomfiture, I was overcome with impatience because all his fine words had proved of no avail.

"Listen to me, Monjita!" I cried. "I love you, you know that."

Monjita turned to me with a sudden movement of the head, and I felt the heat of her gaze on my brow. She may have smiled in a friendly or mocking way - I could not tell, for I hesitated to look her in the face.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Eighteen," I replied.

"And already in love? May God preserve you."

Rage and humiliation overwhelmed me at the sound of her soft, merry laughter, for she was no older than I.

"I congratulate you on your good humour," I said, "but you should know that I make a practice of taking by force whatever is denied me on account of my youth."

Monjita's laughter ceased at once.

"Young sir," she retorted, "that would earn you little glory. Although I am not a man, I know full well how to defend myself. But now, enough of this."

Eglofstein gave me a terrible glare.

"Lieutenant Jochberg was speaking in jest," he said, and kicked me on the shin in the lee of the table. "Be silent, you mule, or you'll spoil things for all of us." He readdressed himself to the girl. "Believe me, Monjita, he would never so far forget himself as to force his attentions on a lady."

"A declaration of love should properly be gentle and tender," said Monjita, "but that gentleman, it seems to me, was downright discourteous."

"Stand straight!" Don Ramon adjured his Joseph of Arimathea. "The biblical personage you represent was no hunchback."

"No," I cried, "I'm neither gentle nor tender, for my love is such —"

"I shall never be done if you continue to swallow and cough, yawn and scratch yourself!" Don Ramon exclaimed angrily. "Remain exactly as I showed you!"

"My love is such," I repeated, "that frenzied words are all I can find to express what I have to tell you."

"You're still young," said Monjita, "and love's novitiate is a hard apprenticeship. Doubtless you'll learn how a woman should be treated when you're older."

I looked at her and was incensed no longer, merely astonished that a woman with the voice of Françoise-Marie should have addressed me in so cold and distant a manner.

Brockendorf proceeded to take matters in hand in my place, firmly resolved to bring them to a swift and satisfactory conclusion.

"Why," he asked without ceremony, "would you deny us the little favour you have so readily, willingly and frequently granted our commanding officer?"

"That is an insulting remark."

"Insulting? Far from it. In our country, to make such requests of women is customary, not offensive."

"And in mine," Monjita rejoined curtly, "it is customary to reject them."

Brockendorf, irked that their conversation had failed to take the turn he desired, grew impatient.

"What in the world do you see in the colonel?" he demanded. "He's neither young nor handsome. Be honest: nothing about him is apt to tickle a young girl's fancy. He's tyrannical, waspish, and moody in the extreme. What's more, he suffers from the migraine. Whenever I enter his bedchamber I find it full of pill-boxes, large and small."

"And I thought you were friends of his," said Monjita, quietly and dejectedly.

"Friends of his? Friends are those with whom one would share one's last sip of brandy and morsel of bread. No man is my friend who hides a tidbit from me and keeps it to himself. If that's friendship, my landlady's chamber pot is a priceless goblet!"

"Aren't you afraid that I shall tell him all you've said?"

"Do so by all means!" Brockendorf said brusquely, looking grim. "It's only three months since I left my last man dead on the duelling ground. In Marseille it was, near the Porte Maillot. We fought it out with pistols at six paces." He turned to us. "You remember Captain-General Lenormand, my table companion when I dined with Marshal Soult's staff at Marseille?"

None of us knew anything of this duel. There was no Porte Maillot in all Marseille, and Lenormand was the name of the humble Rue aux Ours shopkeeper to whom Brockendorf still owed sixty francs for goods supplied:
pâté de foie
gras
, a ham, and two bottles of sherry wine.

It was clear that Brockendorf had invented the whole story to frighten Monjita, but we behaved as if we remembered the incident perfectly.

"Yes," said Eglofstein, hurrying to his aid, "except that the lady in question was Lenormand's wife, not his mistress." Musingly, he added, "When a Frenchwoman is pretty, she's pretty with a vengeance."

I had a brief but vivid recollection of the worthy Madame Lenormand. A gaunt, elderly creature with an exceedingly misshapen body, she would come to our billet to demand her sixty francs of Brockendorf every morning save on Sundays, when she went to church carrying a red velvet missal bag.

Monjita gave Brockendorf a look of timid entreaty, and we knew that she would say nothing for fear of endangering the colonel's life.

"He means to make me his wife," she said.

Brockendorf stared at her in astonishment and began to roar with laughter.

"Great heavens! Have the musicians been engaged? Is the wedding cake already baked?"

"What was that?" Eglofstein exclaimed. "His wife, did you say? Has he given you his word on it?"

"Yes, and he gave the Señor Cura fifty reals to cover the cost of the wedding."

"And you believe him? You're deceived. Even if he had a mind to marry you, he could never do so. His noble lineage precludes it."

Monjita looked downcast for a moment. Then she shrugged as if to say that she knew whom to believe and whom not. Don Ramon de Alacho emerged from behind the
Entombment of Christ,
blue paint dripping from the brush in his hand, and addressed us all in a sombre voice.

"No man need blush to wed my daughter, be he count or duke. She comes of true Christian stock on both her father's and her mother's side."

"Don Ramon," Brockendorf told him, very deliberately, "an ancient patent of nobility carries some weight with me, but if yours attests to nothing save your Christian blood - why, a German innkeeper would wipe his counter with it. In Germany, every cobbler comes of Christian stock."

Joseph of Arimathea threw up his hands in a gesture of dismay and entreaty, the pious woman of Jerusalem shook her head with a look of deepest sorrow, and Don Ramon de Alacho slunk silently back behind his easel.

It was growing dark, and our impatience had mounted as the time went by. Brockendorf uttered a stream of oaths and vowed, loudly enough for Monjita to hear, that none of us would stir from the spot until the matter was settled, even if we had to stand there all night. Donop, who had hitherto left the talking to us, now took the floor.

"It would almost seem, Monjita, that you're truly enamoured of our old colonel."

"What if I am?" she cried fiercely, but it sounded to us as if she was loath to admit, even to herself, that she favoured the colonel over us solely on account of his senior rank, his wealth and generosity.

"The emotion you feel for the old man cannot be love," Donop said quietly. "True love is a sentiment of a different kind, and one with which you are still unacquainted. Love entails secrecy. I shall wait for you tonight, atremble with impatience and frantic with desire, counting the minutes that separate us. And if you steal away to join me, furtively and filled with trepidation, you will look into your heart on the way and discover a new and unfamiliar emotion:
that
is love!"

It was now so dark that I could no longer discern Monjita's face with any clarity, but I heard her laugh - loudly, heartily, and a trifle mischievously.

"Well, I declare! You've converted me. I'm almost curious to become acquainted with the new and unfamiliar emotion you describe. To my regret, however, I've promised to be true to my lover."

Our suspicions should, I suppose, have been aroused by her sudden change of tack and mocking tone, but we were all far too impatient and lovesick to heed them.

"You need not keep that promise," Donop hastened to reassure her, "since you gave it to a man you do not love."

Don Ramon had meanwhile lit a wax candle in the adjoining room, and a slender shaft of light was streaming through the half-open door.

"If it's true, as you say, that a promise given to a man one does not love need not be honoured, you have banished all my misgivings. I undertake to come, and gladly."

There was still a trace of mockery and mischief in her voice, but her face, insofar as I could see it in the candle's meagre light, wore its usual earnest, pensive expression.

"Spoken like a sensible girl!" Brockendorf cried gaily. "And when, fairest Monjita, may we expect you?"

"I shall come after Compline, which will, I think, be over by nine o'clock."

"And which of us will be the lucky one?" Eglofstein insisted eagerly, already jealous of Brockendorf, Donop and myself.

Monjita looked into our faces one by one. Her eyes lingered on mine longer than any, and I felt at that moment as if her eighteen years had at last made common cause with my own.