It was also undeniable that there was a marked difference in the Baron's manner whenever his charmer was present. He was fickle and easily impressed, and evidently beginning to regard me with the eyes of the sorceress.
We had not long to wait; the pair appeared at the garden gate, merrily talking and laughing.
The girl was brimming over with fun and merriment; she used bad language, a little too freely perhaps, but with excellent taste; she uttered double-entendres with such an appearance of perfect innocence that it was impossible to credit her with the knowledge of the meaning of her ambiguous words. She smoked and drank without forgetting for one single moment that she was a woman, and, what is more, a young woman. There was nothing masculine about her, nothing emancipated, nor was she in the least prudish. She was certainly amusing, and time passed quickly.
But what surprised me most and ought to have been a warning to me, was the excessive mirth with which the Baroness greeted any doubtful remark which fell from the girl's lips. Then a wild laugh, a cynical expression would flit over her countenance, giving evidence that she was deeply versed in the secrets of excess.
While we were thus amusing ourselves, the Baron's uncle joined our little party. A retired captain, a widower of many years' standing, very chivalrous, of pleasing manners, a little daring in his old-fashioned courteousness, he was, thanks to his connection with the family, the declared favourite of these ladies, whose affections he had succeeded in winning.
He looked upon it as his right to fondle them, kiss their hands, pat their cheeks. As he came in, both of them fell on his neck with little exclamations of pleasure.
"Take care, my little ones! Two at a time is too much for an old fellow like me. Take care! You are burning yourselves. Quick, down with your hands, or I won't be responsible for anything."
The Baroness held her cigarette, poised between her lips, towards him.
"A little fire, please, uncle!"
"Fire! Fire! I'm sorry I can't oblige you, my child, my fire has gone out," he answered slyly.
"Has it?"
She boxed his ears with her finger-tips. The old man seized her arm, held it between his hands and felt it up to her shoulder.
"You're not as thin as you look, my darling," he said, stroking her soft flesh through her sleeve.
The Baroness did not object. The compliment seemed to please her. Playfully, smilingly, she pushed up her sleeve, exposing a beautifully-modelled arm, daintily rounded and white as milk. Almost immediately, however, remembering my presence, she hastily pulled it down again; but I had seen a spark of the consuming fire which burned in her eyes, an expression which comes into the face of a woman in the transports of love.
The burning match which I held between my fingers, with the intention of lighting a cigarette, accidentally dropped between my coat and waistcoat.
With a terrified scream, the Baroness rushed at me and tried to extinguish the flame between her fingers.
"Fire! Fire!" she shrieked, her cheeks scarlet with excitement.
Losing my self-control, I started back and pressed her hand against my breast, as if to smother the smouldering fire; then, shamefacedly releasing myself and pretending that I had escaped a very real danger, I thanked the Baroness, who was still unable to control her agitation.
We talked till supper-time. The sun had set, and the moon rose behind the cupola of the Observatory, illuminating the apple trees in the orchard. We amused ourselves by trying to differentiate between the apples suspended from the branches and half-hidden by the leaves, which looked sedge-green in the pale moonlight. The ordinary blood-red Calville seemed but a yellow spot; the greyish Astrachan apple had turned green, the Rennet a dark, brownish red, and the others had changed colour in proportion. The same thing had happened with the flowers.
The dahlias presented to our eyes unknown tints, the stocks shone in the colours of another planet, the hues of the Chinese asters were indefinable.
"There, you see, Baroness," I said, commenting on the phenomenon, "how everything in the world is imaginary. Colour does not exist in the abstract; everything depends on the nature of the light. Everything is illusion."
"Everything?" she said softly, remaining standing before me and gazing at me with eyes magnified by the darkness.
"Everything, Baroness!" I lied, confused by this living apparition of flesh and blood, which at the moment terrified me by its unearthly loveliness.
The dishevelled golden hair formed a luminous aureole round her pale, moonlit face; her exquisitely proportionate figure rose by my side, tall and straight and more slender than ever in the striped dress, the colours of which had changed to black and white.
The stocks breathed their voluptuous perfumes, the crickets chirped in the grass, wet with the falling dew, a gentle breeze rustled in the trees, twilight wrapped us round with its soft mantle; everything invited to love; nothing but the cowardice of respectability kept back the avowal which trembled on my lips.
Suddenly an apple dropped from a wind-shaken bough and fell at our feet. The Baroness stooped, picked it up and gave it to me, with a significant gesture.
"Forbidden fruit!" I murmured. "No, thank you." And to efface the impression of this blunder, which I had committed against my will, I hastened to improvise a satisfactory explanation of my words, hinting at the parsimony of the owner. "What would the owner say if he saw me?"
"That you are at least a knight without reproach," she replied disapprovingly, glancing at the shrubbery which effectively screened the Baron and her cousin from indiscreet observers.
When we rose from the supper-table the Baron proposed that we should accompany "the dear child" home. At the front door he offered her his arm, and then turned to me.
"Look after my wife, old man," he said, "and prove to her that you really are the perfect cavalier I know you to be." His voice was full of tender solicitude.
I felt ill at ease. As the evening was warm the Baroness, leaning lightly on me, was carrying her scarf in her hand, and from her arm, the graceful outline of which was plainly perceptible through the thin silk, emanated a magnetic current which excited in me an extraordinary sensitiveness. I imagined that I could detect, at the height of my deltoid muscle, the exact spot where the sleeve of her under-garment ended. My sensitiveness was intensified to such a degree that I could have traced the whole anatomy of that adorable arm. Her biceps, the great elevator which plays the principal part when two people embrace each other, pressed mine, flesh against flesh, in supple rhythms. In walking along, side by side, I could distinguish the curve of her hips through the skirts which brushed against my legs.
"You walk splendidly, you must be a perfect dancer," she said, as if to encourage me to break an embarrassing silence.
And after a few moments, during which she must have felt the quivering of my overstrung nerves, she asked, a little sarcastically, with the superiority of a woman of the world—
"Are you shivering?"
"Yes, I'm cold."
"Then why not put on your overcoat?"
Her voice was soft and velvety, like a caress.
I put on my coat, a veritable straight jacket, and so was better protected against the warmth which flowed from her body into mine.
The sound of her little feet, keeping time with my footsteps, drew our nervous systems so closely together that I felt almost as if I were walking on four feet, like a quadruped.
In the course of that fateful walk a pruning occurred of the kind which gardeners call "ablactation," and which is brought about by bringing two boughs into the closest proximity.
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