I had still some of the feeling of having been in contact with a personality of the most colossal significance as we went down the red carpet of the broad white marble stairs. With one foot on the lowest step, the figure of a perfectly clothed, perfectly groomed man was standing looking upward at our descent. I had thought so little of him that the sight of the Duc de Mersch's face hardly suggested any train of emotions. It lit up with an expression of pleasure.
She stood looking down upon him from the altitude of two steps, looking with intolerable passivity.
"So you use the common stairs," she said, "one had the idea that you communicated with these people through a private door." He laughed uneasily, looking askance at me.
She moved a little to one side to pass him in her descent.
"So things have arranged themselves--_là bas_," she said, referring, I supposed, to the elective grand duchy.
"Oh, it was like a miracle," he answered, "and I owed a great deal--a great deal--to your hints...."
"You must tell me all about it to-night," she said.
De Mersch's face had an extraordinary quality that I seemed to notice in all the faces around me--a quality of the flesh that seemed to lose all luminosity, of the eyes that seemed forever to have a tendency to seek the ground, to avoid the sight of the world. When he brightened to answer her it was as if with effort. It seemed as if a weight were on the mind of the whole world--a preoccupation that I shared without understanding. She herself, a certain absent-mindedness apart, seemed the only one that was entirely unaffected.
As we sat side by side in the little carriage, she said suddenly:
"They are coming to the end of their tether, you see." I shrank away from her a little--but I did not see and did not want to see. I said so. It even seemed to me that de Mersch having got over the troubles _là bas_, was taking a new lease of life.
"I _did_ think," I said, "a little time ago that ..."
The wheels of the coupe suddenly began to rattle abominably over the cobbles of a narrow street. It was impossible to talk, and I was thrown back upon myself. I found that I was in a temper--in an abominable temper. The sudden sight of that man, her method of greeting him, the intimacy that the scene revealed ... the whole thing had upset me. Of late, for want of any alarms, in spite of groundlessness I had had the impression that I was the integral part of her life. It was not a logical idea, but strictly a habit of mind that had grown up in the desolation of my solitude.