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The Bondwoman

by Marah Ellis Ryan · English · Gutenberg #29581 · 705,514 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Bondwoman

Author: Marah Ellis Ryan


        
Release date: August 3, 2009 [eBook #29581]
                Most recently updated: January 5, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BONDWOMAN ***




Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net





[Illustration: "I give you back the wedding ring."--_Page 400._]




THE BONDWOMAN

BY

MARAH ELLIS RYAN,

AUTHOR OF

"Told in the Hills," "A Pagan of the Alleghanies," etc.

CHICAGO AND NEW YORK:

RAND, McNALLY & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS.

MDCCCXCIX.




Copyright, 1899, by Rand, McNally & Co.

All rights reserved.

Entered at Stationers' Hall, London.




THE BONDWOMAN




CHAPTER I.


Near Moret, in France, where the Seine is formed and flows northward,
there lives an old lady named Madame Blanc, who can tell much of the
history written here--though it be a history belonging more to
American lives than French. She was of the Caron establishment when
Judithe first came into the family, and has charge of a home for aged
ladies of education and refinement whose means will not allow of them
providing for themselves. It is a memorial founded by her adopted
daughter and is known as the Levigne Pension. The property on which it
is established is the little Levigne estate--the one forming the only
dowery of Judithe Levigne when she married Philip Alain--Marquis de
Caron.

There is also a bright-eyed, still handsome woman of mature years,
who lives in our South and has charge of another memorial--or had
until recently--a private industrial school for girls of her own
selection. She calls herself a creole of San Domingo, and she also
calls herself Madame Trouvelot--she has been married twice since
she was first known by that name, for she was never the woman to live
alone--not she; but while the men in themselves suited her, their
names were uncompromisingly plain--did not attract her at all. She
married them, proved a very good wife, but while one was named
Johnson, and another Tuttle, the good wife persisted in being
called Madame Trouvelot, either through sentiment or a bit of irony
towards the owner of that name. But, despite her vanities, her
coquetries, and certain erratic phases of her life, she was
absolutely faithful to the trust reposed in her by the Marquise; and
who so capable as herself of finding the poor girls who stood most
in need of training and the shelter of charity? She, also, could
add to this history of the woman belonging both to the old world
and the new. There are also official records in evidence of much
that is told here--deeds of land, bills of sale, with dates of
marriages and deaths interwoven, changed as to names and places but--

There are social friends--gay, pleasure-loving people on both sides of
the water--who could speak, and some men who will never forget her.

One of them, Kenneth McVeigh, he was only Lieutenant McVeigh
then!--saw her first in Paris--heard of her first at a musicale in the
salon of Madame Choudey. Madame Choudey was the dear friend of the
Countess Helene Biron, who still lives and delights in recitals of
gossip belonging to the days of the Second Empire. The Countess Helene
and Mrs. McVeigh had been school friends in Paris. Mrs. McVeigh had
been Claire Villanenne, of New Orleans, in those days. At seventeen
she had married a Col. McVeigh, of Carolina. At forty she had been a
widow ten years. Was the mother of a daughter aged twelve, and a
six-foot son of twenty-two, who looked twenty-five, and had just
graduated from West Point.

As he became of special interest to more than one person in this
story, it will be in place to give an idea of him as he appeared in
those early days;--an impetuous boy held in check, somewhat, by
military discipline and his height--he measured six feet at
twenty--and also by the fact that his mother had persisted in looking
on him as the head of the family at an age when most boys are
care-free of such responsibilities.

But the responsibilities had a very good effect in many ways--giving
stability and seriousness to a nature prone, most of all, to
pleasure-loving if left untrammelled. His blue eyes had a slumberous
warmth in them; when he smiled they half closed and looked down on you
caressingly, and their expression proved no bar to favor with the
opposite sex. The fact that he had a little mother who leaned on him
and whom he petted extravagantly, just as he did his sister, gave him
a manner towards women in general that was both protecting and
deferential--a combination productive of very decided results. He was
intelligent without being intellectual, had a very clear appreciation
of the advantages of being born a McVeigh, proud and jealous where
family honor was concerned, a bit of an autocrat through being master
over extensive tracts of land and slaves by the dozen, many of them
the descendents of Africans bought into the family from New England
traders four generations before.

Such was the personality of the young American as he appeared that day
at Madame Choudey's; and he looked like one of the pictured Norse sea
kings as he towered, sallow and bronzed, back of the vivacious
Frenchmen and their neighbors of the Latin races.

_The_ solo of the musicale had just ended. People were thronged about
the artiste, and others were congratulating Madame Choudey on her
absolute success in assembling talent.

"All celebrities, my lad," remarked Fitzgerald Delaven as he looked
around. The Delavens and the McVeighs had in time long past some
far-out relationship, and on the strength of it the two young men,
meeting thus in a foreign country, became at once friends and
brothers;--"all celebrities and no one so insignificant as ourselves
in sight. Well, now!--when one has to do the gallant to an ugly woman
it is a compensation to know she is wondrous wise."

"That depends on the man who is doing the gallant," returned the young
officer, "I have not yet got beyond the point where I expect them all
to be pretty."

"Faith, Lieutenant, that is because your American girls are all so
pretty they spoil you!--and by the same token your mother is the
handsomest woman in the room."

The tall young fellow glanced across the chattering groups to where
the handsomest woman was amusing herself.

She certainly was handsome--a blonde with chestnut hair and grey
eyes--a very youthful looking mother for the young officer to claim.
She met his glance and smiled as he noticed her very courtier-like
attendant of the moment, and raised his brows quizzically.

"Yes, I feel that I am only a hanger-on to mother since we reached
France," he confessed. "My French is of the sort to be exploited only
among my intimates, and luckily all my intimates know English."

"Anglo-Saxon," corrected Delaven, and Lieutenant McVeigh dropped his
hand on his friend's shoulder and laughed.

"You wild Irishman!--why not emphasize your prejudices by unearthing
the Celtic and expressing yourself in that?"

"Sure, if I did I should not call it the Irish language," retorted the
man from Dublin.

They both used the contested tongue, and were evidently the only ones
in the room who did. All about them were the softened syllables of
France--so provocative, according to Lord Lytton, of the tender
sentiments, if not of the tender passion.

"There is Dumaresque, now," remarked Delaven. "We are to see his new
picture, you know, at the Marquise de Caron's;--excuse me a moment,"
and he crossed over to the artist, who had just entered.

Kenneth McVeigh stood alone surveying the strange faces about. He had
not been in France long enough to be impervious to the atmosphere of
novelty in everything seen and heard.

Back of him the soft voice of Madame Choudey, the hostess, could be
heard. She was frankly gossiping and laughing a little. The name of
the Marquise de Caron was mentioned. Delaven had told him of her--an
aristocrat and an eccentric--a philanthropist who was now aged. For
years herself and her son had been the patrons--the good angels of
struggling genius, of art in every form. But the infamous 2d of
December had ended all that. He was one of the "provisionally exiled;"
he had died in Rome. Madame La Marquise, the dowager Marquise now, was
receiving again, said the gossips back of him. The fact was commented
on with wonder by Madame Choudey;--with wonder, frank queries, and
wild surmises, by the little group around her; for the aged Marquise
and her son Alain--dead a year since--had been picturesque figures in
their own circle where politics and art, literature and religion, met
and crossed swords, or played piquet! And now she was coming back, not
only to Paris, but to society; had in fact, arrived, and the card
Madame Choudey held in her white dimpled hand announced the first
reception at the Caron establishment.

"After years of the country and Rome!" and Sidonie Merson raised her
infantile brows and smiled.

"Oh, yes, it is quite true--though so strange; we fancied her settled
for life in her old vine-covered villa; no one expected to see the
Paris house opened after Alain's death."

"It is always the unexpected in which the old Marquise delights," said
big Lavergne, the sculptor, who had joined Sidonie in the window.

"Then how she must have reveled in Alain's marriage--a death-bed
marriage!"

"Yes; and to an Italian girl without a dot."

"Oh--it is quite possible. The marriage was in Rome. Both the English
and Americans go to Rome."

"Italian! I heard it was an English or American!"

"Surely, not so bad as that!"

"But only those who have money;--or, if they have not the money, our
sons and our brothers do not marry them."

"Good!" and Lavergne nodded with mock sagacity. "We reach conclusions;
the newly made Marquise de Caron is either not Anglo-Saxon or was not
without wealth."

"I heard from Dumaresque that she had attended English schools; that
no doubt gives her the English suggestion."

"Oh, I know more than that;" said another, eager to add to the
knowledge of the group. "Between Fontainbleau and Moret is the Levigne
chateau. Two years ago the dowager was there with a young beauty,
Judithe Levigne, and that is the girl Alain married; the dowager was
also a Levigne, and the girl an adopted daughter."

"What is she like now? Has no one seen her?"

"No one more worldly than her confessor--if she possess one, or the
nuns of the convent to which she returned to study after her marriage
and widowhood."

"Heavens! We must compose our features when we enter the presence!"

"But we will go, for all that! The dowager is too delightful to
miss."

"A religieuse and a blue stocking!" and the smile of Lavergne was
accompanied by a doubtful shrug. "I might devote myself to either, if
apart, but never to both in one. Is she then ugly that she dare be so
superior?"

"Greek and Latin did not lessen the charm of Heloise for Abelard,
Monsieur."

Sidonie glanced consciously out of the window. Even the dust of six
centuries refuses to cover the passion of Heloise, and despite the
ecclesiastical flavor of the romance--demoiselles were not supposed to
be aware--still--!

Lavergne beckoned to a fair slight man near the piano.

"We will ask Loris--Loris Dumaresque. He is god-son of the dowager. He
was in Rome also. He will know."

"Certainly;" and Madame Choudey glanced in the mirror opposite and
leaned her cheek on her jeweled hand, the lace fell from her pretty
wrist and the effect was rather pleasing. "Loris; ah, pardon me, since
your last canvas is the talk of Paris we must perhaps say Monsieur
Dumaresque, or else--Master."

"The queen calls no man master," replied the newcomer as he bent over
the pretty coquette's hand. "The humblest of your subjects salutes
you."

"My faith! You have not lost in Rome a single charm of the boulevardes.
We feared you would come back a devotee, and addicted to rosaries."

"I only needed them when departing from Paris--and you." His eyes
alone expressed the final words, but they spoke so eloquently that the
woman of the world smiled; attempted to blush, and dropping her own
eyes, failed to see the amusement in his.

"Your gallantry argues no lack of practice, Monsieur Loris," she
returned; glancing at him over her fan. "Who was she, during those
months of absence? Come; confess; was she some worldly soul like the
Kora of your latest picture, or was it the religieuse--the new
marquise about whom every one is curious?"

"The Marquise? What particular Marquise?"

"One more particular than you were wont to cultivate our first season
in Rome," remarked Lavergne.

"Oh! oh! Monsieur Dumaresque!" and the fan became a shield from which
Madame peered at him. Sidonie almost smiled, but recovered herself,
and gave attention to the primroses.

"You see!--Madame Choudey is shocked that you have turned to
saintliness."

"Madame knows me too well to suppose I have ever turned away from
it," retorted Dumaresque. "Do not credit the gossip of Lavergne. He
has worked so long among clays and marbles that he has grown a
cold-blooded cynic. He distrusts all warmth and color in life."

"Then why not introduce him to the Marquise? He might find his ideal
there--the atmosphere of the sanctuary! I mean the new Marquise de
Caron."

"Oh!" Dumaresque looked from one to the other blankly and then
laughed. "It is Madame Alain--the Marquise de Caron you call the
devotee? My faith--that is droll!"

"What, then, is so droll?"

"Why should you laugh, Monsieur Loris? What else were we to think of a
bride who chooses a convent in preference to society?"

"It was decided she must be very ugly or very devout to make that
choice."

"A natural conclusion from your point of view," agreed Dumaresque.
"Will you be shocked when I tell you she is no less a radical than
Alain himself?--that her favorite prophet is Voltaire, and that her
books of devotion are not known in the church?"

"Horror!--an infidel!--and only a girl of twenty!" gasped the demure
Sidonie.

"Chut!--she may be a veteran of double that. Alain always had a fancy
for the grenadiers--the originals. But of course," he added moodily,
"we must go."

"Take cheer," laughed Dumaresque, "for I shall be there; and I promise
you safe conduct through the gates when the grenadier feminine grows
too oppressive."

"Do you observe," queried Madame, slyly, "that while Monsieur Loris
does speak of her religion, he avoids enlightening us as to her
personality?"

"What then do you expect?" returned Dumaresque. "She is the widow of
my friend; the child, now, of my dear old god-mother. Should I find
faults in her you would say I am jealous. Should I proclaim her
virtues you would decide I am prejudiced by friendship, and so"--with
a smile that was conciliating and a gesture comprehensive he dismissed
the subject.

"Clever Dumaresque!" laughed Lavergne--"well, we shall see! Is it true
that your picture of the Kora is to be seen at the dowager's
tomorrow?"

"Quite true. It is sold, you know; but since the dowager is not equal
to art galleries I have given it a rest in her rooms before boxing it
for the new owner."

"I envy him," murmured Madame; "the picture is the pretty octoroon
glorified. So, Madame, your god-mother has two novelties to present
tomorrow. Usually it is so difficult to find even one."

When Delaven returned he found Lieutenant McVeigh still in the same
nook by the mantel and still alone.

"Well, you are making a lonesome time of it in the middle of the
crowd," he remarked. "How have you been amused?"

"By listening to comments on two pictures, one of a colored beauty,
and one of an atheistical grand dame."

"And of the two?"

"Of the two I should fancy the last not the least offensive. And, look
here, Delaven, just get me out of that engagement to look at
Dumaresque's new picture, won't you? It really is not worth while for
an American to come abroad for the study of pictured octoroons--we
have too many of the originals at home."




CHAPTER II.


Whatever the dowager's eccentricities or heresies, she was not afraid
of the sunlight, figuratively or literally. From floor to ceiling
three great windows let in softened rays on the paneled walls, on the
fluted columns of white and gold, and on the famous frescoes of the
First Empire. She had no feeling for petite apartments such as appeal
to many women; there must, for her, be height and space and long
vistas.

"I like perspective to every picture," she said. "I enjoy the
groupings of my friends in my own rooms more than elsewhere. From my
couch I have the best point of view, and the raised dais flatters me
with its suggestion of a throne of state."

She looked so tiny for a chair of state; and with her usual quaint
humor she recognized the fact.

"But my temperament brings me an affinity with things that are great
for all that," she would affirm. "One does not need to be a physical
Colossus in order to see the stars."

The morning after her first reception she was smiling rather
sardonically at a picture at the far end of the great salon--that of a
very handsome young woman who laughed frankly at the man who leaned
towards her and spoke. The man was Dumaresque.

"No use in that, Loris," commented his god-mother, out of his
hearing. "It will do an artist no harm, but it will end nowhere."

Their attitude and their youth did make them appear sentimental; but
they were not really so. He was only telling her what a shock she had
been to those Parisians the day before.

"I understand, now, the regard of Madame Choudey and her pretty, prim
niece, Sidonie. They will never forgive me."

"You, Madame!"

"Me, Monsieur. Their fondness will preclude resentment towards you,
but against myself they will feel a grievance that I am not as they
pictured me. Come; you must tell Maman."

The dowager nodded as one who understood it all.

"They will not forget you, that is sure," she said, smiling; but the
girl--for she was only a girl, despite the Madame--shrugged her
shoulders.

"Myself, I care little for their remembrance," she replied,
indifferently; "they were only curious, not interested, I could see."

"You put my picture in the shadow at all events," protested
Dumaresque, pointing to a large canvas hung opposite; "my picture over
which art lovers raved until you appeared as a rival."

"How extravagant you are, Monsieur Dumaresque, a true Gascon! To think
of rivaling that!"

As she faced the canvas the dowager watched her critically, and nodded
her approval to Dumaresque, who smiled and acquiesced. Evidently they
were both well satisfied with the living picture of the salon.

The new Marquise de Caron had lived, probably, twenty years. She was
of medium height, with straight, dark brows, and dark, long-lashed
eyes. The eyes had none of the shyness that was deemed a necessity to
beauty in that era of balloon skirts and scuttle bonnets under which
beauty of the conventional order hid.

But that she was not conventional was shown by the turban of grey
resting on her waved, dark hair, while the veil falling from it and
mingling with the folds of her dress, suggested the very artistic
draperies of the nuns.

Not a particle of color was in her apparel, and but little in her
face; only the lips had that thread of scarlet sung of by Solomon, and
the corners of them curved upwards a trifle as she surveyed the
canvas.

The turban was loosened and held in her hands as she stood there
looking. The picture evidently attracted her, though it did not
please. At last she turned to the artist.

"Why do you paint pictures like that?"

"Like that? Pouf! You mean beautiful?"

"No, it is not beautiful," she said, thoughtfully, as she seated
herself on the dais by the dowager's couch. "To be truly beautiful a
thing must impress one with a sense of fitness to our highest
perceptive faculties. A soulless thing is never beautiful."

"What then, of dogs, horses, lions, the many art works in metal or on
canvas?"

"You must not raise that wall against her words, Loris, unless you
wish to quarrel," said the dowager in friendly warning. "Judithe is
pantheist enough to fancy that animals have souls."

"But the true artist does not seek to portray the lowest expression of
that soul," persisted Dumaresque's critic. "Across the Atlantic there
are thousands who contend that a woman such as this Kora whom you
paint, has no soul because of the black blood in her veins. They think
of the dark people as we think of apes. It is all a question of
longitude, Monsieur Dumaresque. The crudeness of America is the jest
of France. The wisdom of France is the lightest folly of the Brahims;
and so it goes ever around the world. The soul of that girl will weigh
as heavily as ours in the judgment that is final; but, in the
meantime, why teach it and others to admire all that allurement of
evil showing in her eyes as she looks at you?"

"Judithe!" protested the dowager.

"Oh!--I do not doubt in the least, Maman, that the woman Kora looked
just so when she sat for the picture," conceded the girl; "but why not
endeavor to awaken a higher, stronger expression, and paint _that_,
showing the better possibilities within her than mere seductiveness?"

"What fervor and what folly, Marquise!" cried Dumaresque. "It is a
speech of folly only because it is I whom you ask to be the
missionary, and because it is the pretty Kora you would ask me to
convert--and to what? Am I so perfect in all ways that I dare preach,
even with paint and brush? Heavens! I should have all Paris laughing
at me."

"But Judithe would not have you that sort of extremist," said the
dowager, laughing at the dismay in his face. "She knows you do well;
only she fears you do not exert yourself enough to perceive how you
might do better."

"She forgets; I did once; only a few weeks ago," he said briefly; and
the girl dropped her hands wearily and leaned her head against the
dowager's couch.

"Maman, our good friend is going to talk matrimony again," she said
plaintively; "and if he does, I warn you, though it is only mid-day, I
shall go asleep;" and her eyes closed tightly as though to make the
threat more effective.

"You see," said the old lady, raising one chiding finger, "it is
really lamentable, Loris, that your sentimental tendencies have grown
into a steady habit."

"I agree," he assented; "but consider. She assails me--she, a saintly
little judge in grey! She lectures, preaches at me! Tells me I lack
virtue! But more is the pity for me; she will not remember that one
virtue was most attractive to me, and she bade me abandon it."

"Tell him," said the girl with her eyes still closed, "to not miscall
things; no one is all virtue."

"Pardon; that is what you seemed to me, and I never before fancied
that the admirable virtues would find me so responsive, when, pouf!
with one word you demolished all my castle of delight and now condemn
me that I am an outlaw from those elevating fancies."

He spoke with such a comical air of self-pity that the old lady
laughed and the young Marquise opened her eyes.

"A truce, Monsieur Loris; you are amusing, but you like to pose as one
of the rejected and disconsolate when you have women to listen. It is
all because you are just a little theatrical, is it not? How effective
it must be with your Parisiennes!"

"My faith!" he exclaimed, turning to the dowager in dismay; "and only
three months since she emerged from the convent! What then do they not
teach in those sanctuaries!"

The girl arose, made him a mocking obeisance, and swinging the turban
in her hand passed into the alcoved music room; a little later an
Italian air, soft, dreamy, drifted to them from the keys of the
piano.

"She will make a sensation," prophesied Dumaresque, sagely.

"You mean socially? No; if left to herself she would ignore society;
it is not necessary to her; only her affection for me brings her from
her studies now. Should I die tomorrow she would go back to them next
week."

"But why, why, why? If she were unattractive one could understand; but
being what she is--"

"Being what she is, she has a fever to know all the facts of earth and
all the guesses at heaven."

"And bars out marriage!"

"Not for other people," retorted the dowager.

"But to what use then all these accomplishments, all this pursuit of
knowledge? Does she mean to hide it all in some convent at last?"

"I would look for her rather among some savage tribes, doing
missionary work."

"Yes, making them acquainted with Voltaire," he said, laughingly. "But
you are to be envied, god-mother, in having her all to yourself; she
adores you!"

The dark old face flushed slightly, and the keen eyes softened with
pleasure.

"It was Alain's choice, and it was a good one," she said, briefly.
"What of the English people you asked to bring today?"

"They are not English; one is American and one is Irish."

"True; but their Anglo-Saxon makes them all English to me. I hear
there are so many of them in Paris now; Comtesse Biron brings one
today; there is her message, what is the name?"

Dumaresque unfolded the pink sheet, glanced at it and smiled.

"My faith; it is the mother of the young lieutenant whom I asked to
bring, Madame McVeigh. So, she was a school friend of the Comtesse
Helene, eh? That seems strange; still, this Madame McVeigh may be a
French woman transplanted."

"I do not know; but it will be a comfort if she speaks French. The
foreigners of only one language are trying."

                  *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. McVeigh offered no linguistic difficulties to the dowager who was
charmed with her friend's friend.

"But you are surely not the English-Americans of whom we see so much
these days? I cannot think it."

"No, Madame. I am of the French-Americans--the creoles--hence the
speech you are pleased to approve. My people were the Villanennes of
Louisiana."

"Ah! a creole? The creoles come here from the West Indies also--beautiful
women. My daughter has had some as school friends; only this morning she
was explaining to an English caller the difference between a creole and
that personality;" and the dowager waived her hand towards the much
discussed picture of Kora.

The fine face of the American woman took on a trace of haughtiness,
and she glanced at the speaker as though alert to some covert insult.
The unconsciousness in the old face reassured her, though she could
not quite banish coldness from her tones as she replied:

"I should not think such an explanation necessary in enlightened
circles; the creole is so well known as the American born of the Latin
races, while that," with a gesture towards the oriental face on the
canvas, "is the offspring of the African race--our slaves."

"With occasionally a Caucasian father," suggested the dowager
wickedly. "I have never seen this new idol of the ballet--Kora; but
her prettiness is the talk of the studios, though she does not deny
she came from your side of the sea, and has the shadows of Africa in
her hair."

"A quadroon or octoroon, no doubt. It appears strange to find the
outcasts of the States elected to that sort of notice over here--as
though the old world, tired of civilization and culture, turned for
distraction to the barbarians."

"Barbarians, indeed!" laughed the Countess Biron--the Countess Helene,
as she was called by her friends. She laughed a great deal, knew a
great deal, and never forgot a morsel of Parisian gossip. "This
barbarian has only to show herself on the boulevards and all good
citizens crane their necks for a glimpse of her. The empress herself
attracts less attention."

The dowager clicked the lid of her snuff box and shrugged her
shoulders.

"That Spanish woman--tah! As _Mademoiselle d'Industrie_ I do not see
why she should claim precedence. The blonde Spaniard is no more
beautiful than the brown American."

"For all that, Louis Napoleon has placed her among the elect,"
remarked the Countess Helene, with a mischievous glance towards the
Marquise, each understanding that the mention of the Second Empire was
like a call to war, in that salon.

"Louis!" and the dowager shrugged her shoulder, and made a gesture of
contempt. "That accident! What is he that any one should be exalted by
his favor? Mademoiselle de Montijo was--for the matter of that--his
superior! Her family had place and power; her paternity was
undisputed; but this Louis--tah! There was but one Bonaparte; that
subaltern from Corsica; that meteor. He was, with all his faults, a
worker, a thinker, an original. He would have swept into the sea the
envious islanders across the channel to whom this Bonaparte
truckled--this man called Bonaparte, who was no Bonaparte at all--a
vulture instead of an eagle!"

So exclaimed the dowager, who carried in her memory the picture of the
streets of Paris when neither women nor children were spared by the
bullets and sabres of his slaughterers--the hyena to whom the clergy
so bowed down that not a mass for the dead patriots could be secured
in Paris, from either priest or archbishop, and the Republicans piled
in the streets by hundreds!

Mrs. McVeigh turned in some dismay to the Countess Helene. The people
of the Western world, the women in particular, knew little of the
bitter spirit permeating the politics of France. The United States had
very knotty problems of her own to discuss in 1859.

"Tah!" continued the dowager, "I startle you! Well, well--it profits
nothing to recite these ills. Many a man, and woman, too, has been put
to death for saying less;--and the exile of my son to remember--yes;
all that! He was Republican--I a Legitimist; I of the old, he of the
new. Republics are good in theory; France might have given it a longer
trial but for this trickster politician, who is called Emperor--by the
grace of God!"

"Do they add 'Defender of the Faith' as our cautious English neighbors
persist in doing?" asked the girlish Marquise with a smile. "Your
country, Madame McVeigh, has no such cant in its constitution. You
have reason to be proud of the great men, the wise, far-seeing men,
who framed those laws."

Mrs. McVeigh smiled and sighed in self-pity.

"How frivolous American women will appear to you, Madame! Few of us
ever read the constitution of our country. I confess I only know the
first line:--'When in the course of human events it becomes
necessary,' but what they thought necessary to do is very vague in my
mind."

Then, catching the glance of the Marquise bright with laughter, she
laughed also without knowing well at what.

"Well; what is it?"

"Only that you are quoting from the Declaration of Independence, and
fancy it the constitution."

"That is characteristic of American women, too," laughed Mrs. McVeigh;
"declarations of independence is one of our creeds. But I shall
certainly be afraid of you, Marquise. At your age the learning and
comparing of musty laws would have been dull work for me. It is the
age for dancing and gay carelessness."

The Marquise smiled assent with her curious, dark eyes, in which amber
lights shown. She had a certain appealing meekness at times--a sweet
deference that was a marked contrast to the aggressiveness with which
she had met Dumaresque in the morning. The Countess Helene, observing
the deprecating manner with which she received the implied praise for
erudition, found herself watching with a keener interest the girl who
had seemed to her a mere pretty book-worm.

"She is more than that," thought the astute worldling. "Alain's widow
has a face for tragedy, the address of an ingenue, and the _tout en
semble_ of a coquette."

The dowager smiled at Mrs. McVeigh's remarks.

"She cares too little for dancing, the natural expression of healthy
young animalism; but what can I do?--nothing less frivolous than a
salon a-la-Madame D'Agoult is among her ambitions."

"Let us persuade her to visit America," suggested Mrs. McVeigh.
"I can, at least, prescribe a change promising more of joyous
festivity--life on a Carolina plantation."

"What delight for her! she loves travel and new scenes. Indeed, Alain,
my son, has purchased a property in your land, and some day she may go
over. But for the brief remnant of my life I shall be selfish and want
her always on my side of the ocean. What, child? you pale at the
mention of death--tah! it is not so bad. The old die by installments,
and the last one is not the worst."

"May it be many years in the future, Maman," murmured the young
Marquise, whose voice betrayed a certain effort as she continued: "I
thank you for the suggestion, Madame McVeigh; the property Maman
refers to is in New Orleans, and I surely hope to see your country
some day; my sympathies are there."

"We have many French people in the South; our own part of the land was
settled originally by the cavaliers of France. You would not feel like
a stranger there."

"Not in your gracious neighborhood, Madame;"--her face had regained
its color, and her eyes their brilliant expression.

"And there you would see living pictures like this," suggested the
Countess Helene; "what material for an artist!"

"Oh, no; in the rice fields of South Carolina they do not look like
that. We have none of those Oriental effects in dress, you know. Our
colored women look very sober in comparison; still they have their
attractions, and might be an interesting study for you if you have
never known colored folks."

"Oh, but I have," remarked the Marquise, smiling; "an entire year of
my life was passed in a school with two from Brazil, and one from your
country had run away the same season."

"Judithe; child!"

The dowager fairly gasped the words, and the Marquise moved quickly to
her side and sank on the cushion at her feet, looking up with an
assuring smile, as she caressed the aged hand.

"Yes, it is quite true," she continued; "but see, I am alive to tell
the tale, and really they say the American was a most harmless little
thing; the poor, imprisoned soul."

"How strange!" exclaimed Mrs. McVeigh; "do you mean as fellow
pupils?--colored girls! It seems awful."

"Really, I never thought of it so; you see, so many planters'
daughters come from the West Indies to Paris schools. Many in feature
and color suggest the dark continent, but are accepted, nevertheless.
However, the girl I mention was not dark. Her mother had seven white
ancestors to one of black. Yet she confided her story to a friend of
mine, and she was an American slave."

The dowager was plainly distressed at the direction of the conversation,
for the shock to Mrs. McVeigh was so very apparent, and as her hostess
remembered that slavery was threatening to become an institution of
uncompromising discord across the water, all reference to it was likely
to be unwelcome. She pressed the fingers of the Marquise warningly,
and the Marquise smiled up at her, but evidently did not understand.

"Can such a thing be possible?" asked Mrs. McVeigh, incredulously; "in
that case I shall think twice before I send _my_ daughter here to
school, as I had half intended--and you remained in such an
establishment?"

"I had no choice; my guardians decided those questions."

"And the faculty--they allowed it?"

"They did not know it. She was represented as being the daughter of an
American planter; which was true. I have reason to believe that my
friend was her only confidant."

"And for what purpose was she educated in such an establishment?"

"That she might gain accomplishments enhancing her value as companion
to the man who was to own her."

"Madame!"

"Marquise!"

The two exclamations betrayed how intent her listeners were, and how
full of horror the suggestion. There was even incredulity in the
tones, an initiative protest against such possibilities. But the
Marquise looked from one to the other with unruffled earnestness.

"So it was told to me," she continued; "these accomplishments meant
extra thousands to the man who sold her, and the man was her father's
brother."

"No, no, no!" and Mrs. McVeigh shook her head decidedly to emphasize
her conviction. "I cannot believe that at the present day in our
country such an arrangement could exist. No one, knowing our men,
could credit such a story. In the past century such abuses might have
existed, but surely not now--in all my life I have heard of nothing
like that."

"Probably the girl was romancing," agreed the Marquise, with a shrug,
"for you would no doubt be aware if such a state of affairs had
existence."

"Certainly."

"Then your men are not so clever as ours," laughed the Countess; "for
they manage many little affairs their own women never suspect."

Mrs. McVeigh looked displeased. To her it was not a matter of
cleverness, but of principle and morality; and in her mind there was
absolutely no comparison possible without jarring decidedly on the
prejudices of her Gallic friends, so she let the remark pass without
comment.

"Yes," said the Marquise, rising, "when I heard the story of the girl
Rhoda I fancied it one the white mistresses of America seldom heard."

"Rhoda?"

"Yes, that was the name the girl was known by in the school--Rhoda
Larue--the Larue was a fiction; slaves, I am told, having no legal
right to names."

"Heavens! What horrors you fancy! Pray give us some music child, and
drive away the gloomy pictures you have suggested."

"An easy penance;" and the Marquise moved smilingly towards the
alcove.

"What!" cried the Countess Helene, in protest, "and the story
unfinished! Why, it might develop into a romance. I dote on romances
in real life or fiction, but I like them all spelled out for me to the
very end."

"Instead of a romance, I should fancy the girl's life very prosaic
wherever it is lived," returned the Marquise. "But before her year at
the convent had quite expired she made her escape--took no one into
her confidence; and when her guardian, or his agent, came to claim
her, there were storms, apologies, but no ward."

"And you do not call that a romance?" said the Countess. "I do; it
offers all sorts of possibilities."

"Yes, the possibility of this;" and Mrs. McVeigh pointed to the
picture before them. The Marquise halted, looked curiously at the
speaker, then regarded the oriental face on the canvas thoughtfully,
and passed her hand over her brow with a certain abstraction.

"I never thought of that," she said slowly. "You poor creature!" and
she took a step nearer the picture. "I--never--thought of that! Maman,
Madame McVeigh has just taught me something--to be careful, careful
how we judge the unfortunate. They say this Kora is a light woman in
morals; but suppose--suppose somewhere the life that girl told of in
the convent really does exist, and suppose this pretty Kora had been
one of the victims chosen! Should we dare then to judge her by our
standards, Maman? I think not."

Without awaiting an opinion she walked slowly into the alcove, and
left the three ladies gazing at each other with a trifle of constraint
mingled with their surprise.

"Another sacred cause to fight for," sighed the dowager, with a quaint
grimace. "Last week it was the Jews, who seem to me quite able to take
care of themselves! Next week it may be Hindoo widows; but just now it
is Kora!"

"She should have been born a boy in the age when it was thought a
virtue to don armor and do battle for the weak or incapable; that
would have suited Judithe."

"Not if it was the fashion," laughed the Countess Helene; "she would
insist on being original."

"The Marquise has a lovely name," remarked Mrs. McVeigh; "one could
not imagine a weak or unattractive person called Judithe."

"No; they could not," agreed her friend, "it makes one think of the
tragedy of Holofernes. It suggests the strange, the fascinating, the
unusual, and--it suits Madame la Marquise."

"Your approval is an unconscious compliment to me," remarked the
dowager, indulging herself in a tiny pinch of snuff and tapping the
jeweled lid of the box; "I named her."

"Indeed!" and Mrs. McVeigh smiled at the complacent old lady, while
the Countess Helene almost stared. Evidently she, also, had heard the
opinions concerning the young widow's foreign extraction. Possibly the
dowager guessed what was passing in her mind, for she nodded and
smiled.

"Truly, the eyes did it. Though she was not so fully developed as now,
those slumbrous, oriental eyes of hers suggested someway that beauty
of Bethulia; the choice was left to me and so she was christened
Judithe."

"She voices such startlingly paganish ideas at times that I can
scarcely imagine her at the christening font," remarked the Countess.

"In truth her questions are hard to answer sometimes. But the heart is
all right."

"And the lady herself magnetic enough without the added suggestion of
the name," remarked Mrs. McVeigh; then she held up her finger as the
Countess was about to speak, for from the music room came the
appealing legato notes of "Suwanee River," played with great
tenderness.

"What is it?" asked the dowager.

"One of our American folk songs," and the grey eyes of the speaker
were bright with tears; "in all my life I have never heard it played
so exquisitely."

"For a confirmed blue stocking, the Marquise understands remarkably
well how to make her little compliments," said the Countess Helene.

Mrs. McVeigh arose, and with a slight bow to the dowager, passed into
the alcove. At the last bar of the song a shadow fell across the keys,
and the musician saw their American visitor beside her.

"I should love to have you see the country whose music you interpret
so well," she said impulsively; "I should like to be with you when you
do see it."

"You are kind, and I trust you may be," replied the Marquise, with a
pretty nod that was a bow in miniature. She was rising from the piano,
when Mrs. McVeigh stopped her.

"Pray don't! It is a treat to hear you. I only wanted to ask you to
take my invitation seriously and come some time to our South Carolina
home; I should like to be one of your friends."

"It would give me genuine pleasure," was the frank reply. "You know I
confessed that my sympathies were there ahead of me." The smile
accompanying the words was so adorable that Mrs. McVeigh bent to kiss
her.

The Marquise offered her cheek with a graciousness that was a caress
in itself, and thus their friendship commenced.

After the dowager and her daughter-in-law were again alone, and with
an assurance that even the privileged Dumaresque would not break in on
their evening, the elder lady asked, abruptly, a question over which
she had been puzzling.

"Child, what possessed you to tell to a Southern woman of the
States that story reflecting on the most vital of their economic
institutions? Had you forgotten their prejudices? I was in dread
that you might offend her, and I am sure Helene Biron was quite as
nervous."

"I did not offend her, Maman," replied the Marquise, looking up from
her embroidery with a smile, "and I had not forgotten their
prejudices. I only wanted to judge if she herself had ever heard the
story."

"Madame McVeigh!--and why?"

"Because Rhoda Larue was also a native of that particular part of
Carolina to which she has invited me, and because of a fact which I
have never forgotten, the young planter for whom she was educated--the
slave owner who bought her from her father's brother was named
McVeigh. My new friend is delightful in herself but--she has a son."

"My child!" gasped the dowager, staring at her. "Such a man the son of
that charming, sincere woman! Yes, I had forgotten their name, and bid
you forget the story; never speak of it again, child!"

"I should be sorry to learn it is the same family," admitted the
Marquise; "still, I shall make a point of avoiding the son until we
learn something about him. It is infamous that such men should be
received into society."

The dowager relapsed into silence, digesting the troublesome question
proposed.

Occasionally she glanced towards the Marquise as though in expectation
of a continuation of the subject. But the Marquise was engrossed by
her embroideries, and when she did speak again it was of some entirely
different matter.




CHAPTER III.


Two mornings later M. Dumaresque stood in the Caron reception room
staring with some dissatisfaction across the breadth of green lawn
where the dryad and faun statues held vases of vining and blooming
things.

He had just been told the dowager was not yet to be seen. That was
only what he had expected; but he had also been told that the
Marquise, accompanied, as usual, by Madame Blanc, had been out for two
hours--and that he had not expected.

"Did she divine I would be in evidence this morning?" Then he glanced
in a pier glass and grimaced. "Gone out with that plain Madame Blanc,
when she might have had a treat--an hour with me!"

While he stood there both the Marquise and her companion appeared,
walking briskly. Madame Blanc, a stout woman of thirty-five, was
rather breathless.

"My dear Marquise, you do not walk, you fly," she gasped, halting on
the steps.

"You poor dear!" said the Marquise, patting her kindly on the
shoulder. "I know you are faint for want of your coffee," and at the
same time her strong young arms helped the panting attendant mount the
steps more quickly.

Once within the hall Madame Blanc dropped into the chair nearest the
door, while the Marquise swept into the reception room and hastily to
a window fronting on the street.

"How foolish of me," she breathed aloud. "How my heart beats!"

"Allow me to prescribe," said Dumaresque, stepping from behind the
screen of the curtain, and smiling at her.

She retreated, her hands clasped over her breast, her eyes startled;
then meeting his eyes she began to laugh a little nervously.

"How you frightened me!"

"And it was evidently not the first, this morning."

She sank into a seat, indicated another to him, away from the window,
removed her hat and leaned back looking at him.

"No, you are not," she said at last. "But account for yourself,
Monsieur Loris! The sun is not yet half way on its course, yet you are
actually awake, and visible to humanity--it looks serious."

"It is," he agreed, smiling at her, yet a trifle nervous in his
regard. "I have taken advantage of the only hour out of the twenty
when there would be a chance of seeing you alone. So I made an
errand--and I am here."

"And--?"

"And I have determined that, after the fashion of the Americans or the
English, I shall no longer ask the intervention of a third person. I
decided on it last night before I left here. I have no title to offer
you--you coldest and most charming of women, but I shall have fame;
you will have no reason to be ashamed of the name of Dumaresque. Put
me on probation, if you like, a year, two years!--only--"

"No; no!" she said pleadingly, putting out her hands with a slight
repellant gesture. "It is not to be thought of, Monsieur Loris, Maman
has told you! Twice has the same reply been given. I really cannot
allow you to continue this suppliance. I like you too well to be
angry with you, but--"

"I shall be content with the liking--"

"But I should not!" she declared, smilingly. "I have my ideals, if you
please, Monsieur. Marriage should mean love. It is only matrimony for
which liking is the foundation. I do not approve of matrimony."

"Pardon; that is the expression of the romance lover--the school girl.
But that I know you have lived the life of a nun I should fear some
one had been before me, some one who realized those ideals of yours,
and that instead of studying the philosophies of life, you have been a
student of the philosophy of love."

He spoke lightly--half laughingly, but the flush of pink suffusing her
throat and brow checked his smile. He could only stare.

She arose hastily and walked the length of the room. When she turned
the color was all gone, but her eyes were softly shining.

"All philosophy falls dead when the heart speaks," she said, as she
resumed her chair; "and now, Monsieur Loris, I mean to make you my
father confessor, for I know no better way of ending these periodical
proposals of yours, and at the same time confession might--well--it
might not be without a certain benefit to myself." He perceived that
while she had assumed an air of raillery, there was some substance
back of the mocking shadow.

"I shall feel honored by your confidence, Marquise," he was earnest
enough in that.

"And when you realize that there is--some one else--will you then
resume your former role of friend?"

"I shall try. Who is the man?"

She met his earnest gaze with a demure smile, "I do not know,
Monsieur."

"What, then?--you are only jesting with me?"

"Truly, I do not know his name."

"Yet you are in love with him?"

"I am not quite certain even of that," and she smiled mockingly;
"sometimes I have a fancy it may be witchcraft. I only know I am
haunted--have been haunted four long weeks by a face, a voice, and two
blue eyes."

"Blue?" Dumaresque glanced in the mirror--his own eyes were blue.

"Yes, Monsieur Loris--blue with a dash of grey--the grey of the sea
when clouds are heavy, and the blue of the farthest waves before the
storm breaks--don't you see the color?"

"Only the color of your fancy. He is the owner of blue eyes, a
haunting voice, and--what else is my rival?"

"A foreigner, and--Monsieur Incognito."

"You have met?"

"Three times;" and she held up as many white fingers. The reply
evidently astounded Dumaresque.

"You have met three times a man whose name you do not know?"

"We are even on that score," she said, "for he has spoken to me three
times and does not know what I am called."

"But to address you--"

"He called me Mademoiselle Unknown."

"Bravo! This grows piquant; an adventure with all the flavor of the
eighteenth instead of the nineteenth century. A real adventure, and
you its heroine! Oh, Marquise, Marquise!"

"Ah! since you appreciate the humor of the affair you will no longer
be oppressed by sentimental fancies concerning me;" and she nodded her
head as though well pleased with the experiment of her confession.
"You perceive how wildly improper I have been; still, I deny the
eighteenth century flavor, Monsieur. Then, with three meetings the
cavalier would have developed into a lover, and having gained entrance
to a lady's heart, he would have claimed also the key to her castle."

"Astute pupil of the nuns!--and Monsieur Incognito?"

"He certainly does not fancy me possessed of either castle or keys. I
was to him only an unpretentious English companion in attendance on
Madame Blanc in the woods of Fontainbleau."

"English! Since when are you fond enough of them to claim kindred?"

"He was English; he supposed me so when I replied to him in that
tongue. He had taken the wrong path and--"

"And you walked together on another, also the wrong path."

"No, Monsieur; that first day we only bowed and parted, but the ghost
of his voice remained," and she sighed in comical self-pity.

"I see! You have first given me the overture and now the curtain is to
rise. Who opens the next scene?"

"Madame Blanc."

"My faith! This grows tragical. Blanc, the circumspect, the dowager's
most trusted companion. Has your stranger bewitched her also?"

"She was too near sighted to tell him from the others. I was making a
sketch of beeches and to pass the time she fed the carp. A fan by
which she set store, fell into the water. She lamented until Monsieur
Incognito secured it. Of course I had to be the one to thank him, as
she speaks no English."

"Certainly!--and then?"

"Then I found a seat in the shade for Madame Blanc and her crochet,
and selected a sunny spot myself, where I could dry the fan."

"Alone?"

"At first, I was alone."

"Delicious! You were never more charming, Marquise; go on."

"When he saw Madame Blanc placidly knitting under the trees, while I
spread her fan to dry, he fancied I was in her service; the fancy was
given color by the fact that my companion, as usual, was dressed with
extreme elegance, whilst I was insignificant in an old school habit."

"Insignificant--um! There was conversation I presume?"

"Not much," she confessed, and again the delicious wave of color swept
over her face, "but he had suggested spreading the fan on his
handkerchief, and of course then he had to remain until it was dry."

"Clever Englishman; and as he supposed you to be a paid companion, was
he, also, some gentleman's gentleman?"

She flashed one mutinous glance at him.

"The jest seemed to me amusing; his presence was an exhilaration; and
I did not correct his little mistake as to mistress and maid. When he
attempted to tell me who or what he was I stopped him; that would have
spoiled the adventure. I know he had just come from England; that he
was fascinating without being strictly handsome; that he could say
through silence the most eloquent things to one! It was an hour in
Arcady--just one hour without past or future. They are the only
absolutely joyous ones, are they not?"

"Item: it was the happiest hour in the life of Madame La Marquise,"
commented Dumaresque, with an attempt at drollery, and an accompaniment
of a sigh. "Well--the finale?"

"The hour ended! I said 'good day, Monsieur Incognito.' He said, 'good
night, Mademoiselle Unknown.'"

"Good night! Heavens--it was not then an hour, but a day!"

"It was an hour, Monsieur! That was only one way of conveying his
belief that all the day was in that hour."

"Blessed be the teachings of the convent! And you would have me
believe that an Englishman could make such speeches? However, I am
eager for the finale--the next day?"

"The next day I surprised Monsieur and Madame Blanc by declaring the
sketch I was doing of the woods there, was hopelessly bad--I would
never complete it."

"Ah!" and Dumaresque's exclamation had a note of hope; "he had been a
bore after all?"

"The farthest thing possible from it! When I woke in the morning it
was an hour earlier than usual. I found myself with my eyes scarcely
open, standing before the clock to reckon every instant of time until
I should see him again. Well, from that moment my adventure ceased to
be merely amusing. I told myself how many kinds of an idiot I was, and
I thrust my head among the pillows again. I realized then, Monsieur,
what a girl's first romance means to her. I laughed at myself, of
course, as I had laughed at others often. But I could not laugh down
the certainty that the skies were bluer, the birds' songs sweeter, and
all life more lovely than it had ever been before."

"And by what professions, or what mystic rhymes or runes, did he bring
about this enchantment?"

"Not by a single sentence of protestation? An avowal would have sent
me from him without a regret. If we had not met at all after that
first look, that first day, I am convinced I should have been haunted
by him just the same! There were long minutes when we did not speak or
look at each other; but those minutes were swept with harmonies. Now,
Monsieur Loris, would you call that love, or is it a sort of
summer-time madness?"

"Probably both, Marquise; but there was a third meeting?"

"After three days, Monsieur; days when I forced myself to remain
indoors; and the struggle it was, when I could close my eyes and see
him waiting there under the trees!"

"Ah! There had been an appointment?"

"Pardon, Monsieur; you are perhaps confounding this with some
remembered adventure of your own. There was no appointment. But I felt
confident that blue-eyed ogre was walking every morning along the path
where I met him first, and that he would compel me to open the door
and walk straight to our own clump of bushes so long as I did not send
him away."

"And you finally went?"

She nodded. "He was there. His smile was like sunshine. He approached
me, but I--I did not wait. I went straight to him. He said, 'At last,
Mademoiselle Unknown!'"

"Pardon; but it is your words I have most interest in," reminded her
confessor.

"But I said so few. I remember I had some violets, and he asked me
what they were called in French. I told him I was going away; I had
fed the carp for the last time. He was also leaving. He had gathered
some wild forget-me-nots. He was coming into Paris."

"And you parted unknown to each other?"

"How could I do else? When he said, 'I bid you good-bye, Mademoiselle
Unknown, but we shall meet again.' Then--then I did correct him a
little; I said _Madame_ Unknown, Monsieur."

"Ah! And to that--?"

"He said not a word, only looked at me; _how_ he looked at me! I felt
guilty as a criminal. When I looked up he turned away--turned very
politely, with lifted hat and a bow even you could not improve upon,
Monsieur Loris, I watched him out of sight in the forest. He never
halted; and he never turned his head."

"You might at least have let him go without the thought that you were
a flirtatious matron with a husband somewhere in the back-ground."

"Yes; I almost regret that. Still, since I had to send him away, what
matter how? It would have been so common-place had I said: 'We receive
on Thursdays; find Loris Dumaresque when you reach Paris; he will
present you.' No!"--and she shook her head laughingly, "the three days
were quite enough. He is an unknown world; a romance only suggested,
and the suggestion is delicious. I would not for the world have him
nearer prosaic reality."

"You will forget him in another three weeks," prophesied Dumaresque;
"he has been only a shadow of a man; a romantic dream. I shall refuse
to accept any but realities as rivals."

"I assure you, no reality has been so appealing as that dream," she
persisted. "I am telling you all this with the hope that once I have
laughed with you over this witchcraft it will be robbed of its
potency. I have destroyed the sacred wall of sentiment surrounding
this ghost of mine because I rebel at being mastered by it."

"Mastered?--you?"

"Oh, you laugh! You think me, then, too cold or too philosophic, in
spite of what I have just told you?"

"Not cold, my dear Marquise. But if you will pardon the liberty of
analysis I will venture the opinion that when you are mastered it will
be by yourself. Your very well-shaped head will forever defend you
from the mastery of others."

"Mastered by myself? I do not think I quite understand you," she said,
slowly. "But I must tell you the extreme limit of my folly, the folly
of the imagination. Each morning I go for a walk, as I did this
morning. Each time I leave the door I have with me the fancy that
somewhere I shall meet him. Of course my reason tells me how
improbable it is, but I put the reason aside and enjoy my walk all the
more because of that fancied tryst. Now, Monsieur Loris, you have been
the victim of my romance long enough. Come; we will join Madame Blanc
and have some coffee."

"And this is all you have to tell me, Marquise?"

"All but one little thing, Monsieur," and she laughed, though the
laugh was a trifle nervous; "this morning for an instant I thought
the impossible had happened. Only one street from here my ogre
materialized again, or some one wondrously like him. How startled
I was! How I hurried poor Madame Blanc! But we were evidently not
discovered. I realized, however, at that moment, how imprudent I had
been. How shocked Maman would be if she knew. Yet it was really the
most innocent jest, to begin with."

"They often begin that way," remarked Dumaresque, consolingly.

"Well, I have arrived at one conclusion. It is only because I have met
so few men, that _one_ dare make such an overwhelming impression on
me. I rebel; and shall amaze Maman by becoming a social butterfly for
a season. So, in future bring all your most charming friends to see
me; but no tall, athletic, blue-eyed Englishmen."

"So," said Dumaresque, as he followed her to the breakfast room, "I
lay awake all night that I may make love to you early in the morning,
and you check-mate me by thrusting forward a brawny Englishman."

"Pardon; he is not brawny;" she laughed; "I never said so;
nevertheless, Monsieur Loris, I can teach you one thing: When love has
to be _made_ it is best not to waste time with it. The real love makes
itself and will neither be helped or hindered; and the love that can
be conquered is not worth having."

He shrugged his shoulders and rolled his eyes towards the ceiling.

"In a year and a day I shall return to the discussion. I give you so
long to change your mind and banish your phantasy; and in the meantime
I remain your most devoted visitor."

Madame Blanc was already in evidence with the coffee, and Dumaresque
watched the glowing face of the Marquise, surprised and puzzled at
this new influence she confessed to and asked analysis for. This
book-worm; this reader of law and philosophy; how charming had been
her blushes even while she spoke in half mockery of the face haunting
her. If only such color would sweep over her cheek at the thought of
him--Dumaresque!

But he had his lesson for the present. He would not play the
sighing Strephon, realizing that this particular Amaryllis was not
to be won so. As he received the coffee from her hand he remarked,
mischievously, "Marquise, you did not quite complete the story. What
became of the forget-me-nots he gathered?"

But the Marquise only laughed.

"We are no longer in the confessional, Monsieur," she said.




CHAPTER IV.


Mrs. McVeigh found herself thinking of the young Marquise very often.
She was not pleased at the story with which she had been entertained
there; yet was she conscious of the fact that she would have been very
much more displeased had the story been told by any other than the
fascinating girl-widow.

"Do you observe," she remarked to the Countess Helene, "that young
though she is she seems to have associated only with elderly
people, or with books where various questions were discussed? It
is a pity. She has been robbed of childhood and girlhood by the
friends who are so proud of her, and who would make of her only a
lovely thinking-machine."

"You do not then approve of the strong-minded woman, the female
philosopher."

"Oh, yes;" replied Mrs. McVeigh, dubiously; "but this delightful
creature does not belong to that order yet. She is bubbling over with
enthusiasm for the masses because she has not yet been touched by
enthusiasm for an individual. I wish she would fall in love with some
fine fellow who would marry her and make her life so happy she would
forget all the bad laws of nations and the bad morals of the world."

"Hum! I fancy suitors have not been lacking. Her income is no
trifle."

"In our country a girl like that would need no income to insure her
desirable suitors. She is the most fascinating creature, and so
unconscious of her charms."

Her son, who had been at a writing desk in the corner, laid down his
pen and turned around.

"My imperfect following of your rapid French makes me understand at
least that this is a serious case," he said, teasingly. "Are you sure,
mother, that she has not treated you to enchantment? I heard the same
lady described a few days ago, and the picture drawn was that of an
atheistical revolutionist, an unlovely and unlovable type."

"Ah!" said the Countess Helene. "You also are opposed to beautiful
machines that think."

"I have never been accustomed to those whose thoughts follow such
unpleasant lines, Madame," he replied. "I have been taught to revere
the woman whose foundation of life is the religion scorned by the lady
you are discussing. A woman without that religion would be like a
scentless blossom to me."

The Countess smiled and raised her brows slightly. This severe young
officer, her friend's son, took himself and his tastes very
seriously.

Looking at him she fancied she could detect both the hawk and the dove
meeting in those clear, level eyes of his. Though youthful, she could
see in him the steadiness of the only son--the head of the house--the
protector and the adored of his mother and sister, who were good
little women, flattering their men folks by their dependence. And from
that picture the lady who was studying him passed on to the picture of
the possible bride to whom he would some day fling his favors. She,
also, must be adoring and domestic and devout. Her articles of faith
must be as orthodox as his affection. He would love her, of course,
but must do the thinking for the family.

Because the Lieutenant lacked the buoyant, adaptable French
temperament of his mother, the Countess was inclined to be rather
severe in her judgment of him. He was so young; so serious. She did
not fancy young men except in the pages of romances; even when they
had brains they appeared to her always over-weighted with the
responsibility of them.

It is only after a man has left his boyhood in the distance that he
can amuse a woman with airy nothings and make her feel that his words
are only the froth on the edge of a current that is deep--deep!

Mrs. McVeigh, unconscious of the silent criticism being passed on
her son, again poised a lance in defence of the stranger under
discussion.

"It is absurd to call her atheistical," she insisted; "would I be
influenced by such a person? She is an enthusiast, student of many
religions, possibly; but people should know her before they judge, and
you, Kenneth, should see her before you credit their gossip. She is a
beautiful, sympathetic child, oppressed too early with the seriousness
of life."

"At any rate, I see I shall never take you home heart whole," he
decided, and laughed as he gathered up letters he had been addressing
and left the room.

"One could fancy your son making a tour of the world and coming back
without a sentimental scratch," said the Countess, after he had gone.
"I have noticed him with women; perfectly gallant, interested and
willing to please, but not a flutter of an eyelid out of form; not a
tone of the voice that would flatter one. I am not sure but that the
women are all the more anxious to claim such a man, the victory seems
greater, yet it is more natural to find them reciprocal. Perhaps there
is a betrothed somewhere to whom he has sworn allegiance in its most
rigid form; is that the reason?"

Mrs. McVeigh smiled. She rather liked to think her son not so
susceptible as Frenchmen pretended to be.

"I do not think there are any vows of allegiance," she confessed; "but
there is someone at home to whom we have assigned him since they were
children."

"Truly? But I fancied the parents did not arrange the affairs
matrimonial in your country."

"We do not; that is, not in a definite official way. Still, we are
allowed our little preferences, and sometimes we can help or hinder in
our own way. But this affair"--and she made a gesture towards the door
of her son's room, "this affair is in embryo yet."

"Good settlements?"

"Oh, yes; the girl is quite an heiress and is the niece of his
guardian--his guardian that was. Their estates join, and they have
always been fond of each other; so you see we have reason for our
hopes."

"Excellent!" agreed her friend, "and to conclude, I am to suppose of
course she is such a beauty that she blinds his eyes to all the charms
arrayed before him here."

"Well, we never thought of Gertrude as a beauty exactly; but she is
remarkably good looking; all the Lorings are. I would have had her
with me for this visit but that her uncle, with whom she lives, has
been very ill for months. They, also, are of colonial French descent
with, of course, the usual infusions of Anglo-Saxon and European blood
supposed to constitute the new American."

"The new--"

"Yes, you understand, we have yet the original American in our
land--the Indian."

"Ah!" with a gesture of repulsion; "the savages; and then, the
Africans! How brave you are, Claire. I should die of fear."

Mrs. McVeigh only smiled. She was searching through a portfolio, and
finally extracted a photograph from other pictures and papers.

"That is Miss Loring," she said, and handed it to the Countess, who
examined it with critical interest.

"Very pretty," she decided, "an English type. If she were a Parisian,
a modiste and hairdresser would do wonders towards developing her into
a beauty of the very rare, very fair order. She suggests a slender
white lily."

"Yes, Gertrude is a little like that," assented Mrs. McVeigh, and
placed the photograph on the mantel beside that of the very charming,
piquant face of a girl resembling Mrs. McVeigh. It was a picture of
her daughter.

"Only six weeks since I left her; yet, it seems like a year," she
sighed; and Fitzgerald Delaven, who had entered from the Lieutenant's
room, sighed ponderously at her elbow.

"Well, Dr. Delaven, why are you blowing like a bellows?" she asked,
with a smile of good nature.

"Out of sympathy, my lady," replied the young Irishman.

"Now, how can you possibly sympathize understandingly with a mother's
feelings, you Irish pretender?" she asked with a note of fondness in
her tones. "I sigh because I have not seen my little Evilena for six
weeks."

"And I because I am never likely to see that lovely duplicate of
yourself at all, at all! Ah, you laugh! But have you not noticed that
each time I am allowed to enter this room I pay my devotions to that
particular corner of the mantel?"

"A very modern shrine," observed the Countess; "and why should you not
see the original of the picture some day. It is not so far to
America."

"True enough, but I'll be delving for two years here in the medical
college," he replied with lamentation in his tone. "And after that
I'll be delving for a practice in some modest corner of the world, and
all the time that little lady will be counting her lovers on every one
of her white fingers, and, finally, will name the wedding day for a
better boy than myself, och hone! och hone!"

Both the ladies laughed over his comical despair, and when Lieutenant
McVeigh entered and heard the cause of it he set things right by
promising to speak a good word for Delaven to the little girl across
the water.

"You are a trump, Lieutenant; sorry am I that I have no sister with
which to return the compliment."

"She might be in the way," suggested the Countess, and made a gesture
towards the other picture. "You perceive; our friend need not come
abroad for charming faces; those at home are worth courting."

"True for you, Madame;" he gave a look askance at the Lieutenant, and
again turned his eyes to the photograph; "there's an excuse for
turning your back on the prettiest we have to offer you!" and then in
an undertone, he added: "Even for putting aside the chance of knowing
our so adorable Marquise."

The American did not appear to hear or to appreciate the spirit of the
jest regarding the pictures, for he made no reply. The Countess, who
was interested in everybody's affairs, wondered if it was because the
heiress was a person of indifference to him, or a person who was
sacred; it was without doubt one or the other for which the man made
of himself a blank wall, and discouraged discussion.

Her carriage was just then announced; an engagement with Mrs. McVeigh
was arranged for the following morning, and then the Countess
descended the staircase accompanied by the Lieutenant and Delaven. She
liked to make progress through all public places with at least two men
in attendance; even a youthful lieutenant and an untitled medical
student were not to be disdained, though she would, of course, have
preferred the Lieutenant in a uniform, six feet of broad shouldered,
good-looking manhood would not weigh in her estimation with the
glitter of buttons and golden cord.

The two friends were yet standing on the lower step of the hotel
entrance, gazing idly after her carriage as it turned the corner, when
another carriage containing two ladies rolled softly towards their
side of the street, as if to stop at a jeweler's two doors below.

Delaven uttered a slight exclamation of pleasure, and stepped forward
as if to speak, or open the door of their carriage. But the occupants
evidently did not see him, and, moreover, changed their minds about
stopping, for the wheels were just ceasing to revolve when the younger
of the ladies leaned forward, spoke a brief word, and the driver sent
the horses onward at a rapid trot past the hotel, and Delaven stepped
back with a woeful grimace.

"Faith! no chance to even play the lackey for her," he grumbled.
"There's an old saying that 'God is good to the Irish;' but I don't
think I'm getting my share of it this day; unless its by way of being
kept out of temptation, and sure, its never a Delaven would pray for
that when the temptation is a lovely woman. Now wasn't she worth a
day's journey afoot just to look at?"

He turned to his companion, whose gaze was still on the receding
carriage, and who seemed, at last, to be aroused to interest in
something Parisian; for his eyes were alight, his expression, a
mingling of delight and disappointment. At Delaven's question,
however, he attempted nonchalance, not very successfully, and
remarked, as they re-entered the house, "There were two of them to
look at, which do you mean?"

"Faith, now, did you suppose for a minute it was the dowager I meant?
Not a bit of it! Madame Alain, as I heard some of them call her, is
the 'gem of purest ray serene.' What star of the heavens dare twinkle
beside her?"

"Don't attempt the poetical," suggested the other, unfeelingly. "I am
to suppose, then, that you know her--this Madame Alain?"

"Do I know her? Haven't I been raving about her for days? Haven't you
vowed she belonged to the type abhorrent to you? Haven't I had to
endure your reflections on my sanity because of the adjectives I've
employed to describe her attractions? Haven't you been laughing at
your own mother and myself for our infatuation?--and now--"

He stopped, because the Lieutenant's grip on his shoulder was
uncomfortably tight, as he said:

"Shut up! Who the devil are you talking about?"

"By the same power, how can I shut up and tell you at the same time?"
and Delaven moved his arm, and felt of his shoulder, with exaggerated
self-pity. "Man! but you've got a grip in that fist of yours."

"Who is the lady you call Madame Alain?"

"Faith, if you had gone to her home when you were invited you'd have
no need to ask me the question this day. Her nearest friends call her
Madame Alain, because that was the given name of her husband, the
saints be good to him! and it helps distinguish her from the dowager.
But for all that she is the lady you disdained to know--Madame la
Marquise de Caron."

McVeigh stared at him moodily, even doubtfully.

"You are not trying to play a practical joke, I reckon?" he said at
last; and then without waiting for a reply, walked over to the office
window, where he stood staring out, his hands in his pockets, his back
to Delaven, who was eyeing him calmly. Directly, he came back
smiling; his moody fit all gone.

"And I was idiot enough to disdain that invitation?" he asked; "well,
Fitz, I have repented. I am willing to do penance in any agreeable way
we can conjure up, and to commence by calling tomorrow, if you can
find a way."

Delaven found a way. Finding the way out of, or into difficulties was
one of his strong points and one he especially delighted in, if it had
a flavor of intrigue, and was to serve a friend. Since his mother's
death in Paris, several years before, he had made his home in or about
the city. He was without near relatives, but had quite a number of
connections whose social standing was such that there were few doors
he could not find keys to, or a password that was the equivalent. His
own frank, ingenuous nature made him quite as many friends as his
social and diplomatic connections; so that despite the fact of a not
enormous income, and that he meant to belong to the professions some
day, and that he was by no means a youth on matrimony bent--with all
these drawbacks he was welcomed in a social way to most delightful
circles, and when he remarked to the dowager that he would like to
bring his friend, the Lieutenant, at an early day, she assured him
they would be welcome.

She endeavored to make them so in her own characteristic way, when
they called, twenty-four hours later, and they spent a delightful
twenty minutes with her. She could not converse very freely with the
American, because of the difficulties of his French and her English,
but their laughter over mistakes really tended to better their
acquaintance. He was conscious that her eyes were on him, even while
she talked with Delaven, whose mother she had known. He would have
been uncomfortable under such surveillance but for the feeling that
it was not entirely an unkindly regard, and he had hopes that the
impression made was in his favor.

Loris Dumaresque arrived as they were about to take their departure,
and Lieutenant McVeigh gathered from their greeting that he was a
daily visitor--that as god-son he was acting as far as possible in the
stead of a real son, and that the dowager depended on him in many ways
since his return to Paris.

The American realized also that the artist would be called a very
handsome man by some people, and that his gaiety and his self
confidence would make him especially attractive to women. He felt an
impatience with women who liked that sort of impudence. Delaven did
not get a civil word from him all the way home.

Madame la Marquise--Madame Alain--had not appeared upon the scene at
all.




CHAPTER V.


"But he is not at all bad, this American officer," insisted the
dowager; "such a great, manly fellow, with the deference instinctive,
and eyes that regard you well and kindly. Your imagination has most
certainly led you astray; it could not be that with such a face, and
such a mother, he could be the--horrible! of that story."

"All the better for him," remarked her daughter-in-law. "But I should
not feel at ease with him. He must be some relation, and I should
shrink from all of the name."

"But, Madame McVeigh--so charming!"

"Oh, well; she only has the name by accident, that is, by marriage."

The dowager regarded her with a smile of amusement.

"Shall you always regard marriage as merely an accident?" she
asked. "Some day it will be presented to you in such a practical,
advantageous way that you will cease to think it all chance."

"Advantageous?" and the Marquise raised her brows; "could we be more
happy than we are?" The old face softened at the words and tone.

"But I shall not be always with you," she replied; "and then--"

"Alain knew," said the girl, softly. "He said as a widow I could have
liberty. I would need no guardian; I could look after all my affairs
as young girls could not do. Each year I shall grow older--more
competent."

"But there is one thing Alain did not foresee: that your many suitors
would rob you of peace until you made choice of some particular one.
These late days I have felt I should like the choice to be made while
I am here to see."

"Maman! you are not ill?" and in a moment she was beside the couch.

"No; I think not; no, no, nothing to alarm you. I have only been
thinking that together--both of us to plan and arrange--yet I need
Loris daily. And if there should be only one of us, that remaining one
would need some man's help all the more, and if it were you, who then
would the man be? You perceive! It is wise to make plans for all
possibilities."

"There are women who live alone."

"Not happy women," said the dowager in a tone, admitting of no
contradiction; "the women who live alone from choice are cold and
selfish; or have hurts to hide and are heart-sick of a world in which
their illusions have been destroyed; or else they have never known
companionship, and so never feel the lack of it. My child, I will not
have you like any of these; you were made to enjoy life, and life to
the young should mean--well, I am a sentimentalist. I married the one
man who had all my affection. I approve of such marriages. If the man
comes for whom you would care like that, I should welcome him."

"He will never come, Maman," and the smile of the Marquise someway
drifted into a sigh. "I shall live and die the widow of Alain."

The dowager embraced her. "But for all that I do not approve," she
protested. "Your reasons for not marrying do not convince me, and I
promise my support to the most worthy who presents himself. Have you
an ideal to which nothing human may reach?"

"For three years your son has seemed ideal to me," said the Marquise,
after a moment's hesitation. The dowager regarded her attentively.

"He was?" she asked; "your regard for him does you credit; but, amber
eyes, it is not for a man who has been dead a year that a woman
blushes as you blush now."

"Oh!" began the Marquise, as if in protest; and then feeling that the
color was becoming even more pronounced, she was silent.

The dowager smiled, well pleased at her cleverness.

"There was sure to be some one, some day," she said, nodding
sagaciously; "when you want to talk of it I will listen, my Judithe. I
could tell it in the tone of your voice as you sang or laughed; yes,
there is nothing so wonderful in that," she explained, as the girl
looked up, startled. "You have always been a creature of aims,
serious, almost ponderous. Suddenly you emerge like sunshine from the
shadows; you are all gaiety and sudden smiles; unconsciously you
sing low songs of happiness; you suggest brightness and hope; you
have suddenly come into your long-delayed girlhood. You give me
affectionate glimpses of the woman God meant you to be some day. It
can only be a man who works such a miracle in an ascetic of nineteen
years. When the lucky fellow gathers courage to speak, I shall be
glad to pass judgment on him."

The Marquise was silent. The light, humorous tone of the dowager had
disarmed her; yet she had of her own accord, and influenced by some
wild mood, told Dumaresque all that was only guesswork to the friend
beside her. How could she have confessed it to him? She had wondered
at herself that she had dared, and after all it had been so entirely
useless; it had not driven away the memory of the man at Fontainbleau,
even for one little instant.

Madame Blanc entered with some message for the dowager, and the
question of marriage, also the more serious one of love, were put
aside for the time.

But Judithe was conscious that she was under a kindly surveillance,
and suspected that Dumaresque, also, was given extra attention. Her
confession of that unusual fascination had made them better comrades,
and the dowager was taking note that their tone was more frank, and
their attitude suggested some understanding. It was like a comedy for
her to watch them, feeling so sure that their sentiments were very
clear and that she could see the way it would all end. Judithe would
coquette with him awhile, and then it would be all very well; and it
would not be like a stranger coming into the family.

The people who came close enough to see her often, realized that the
journey back to Paris had not been beneficial to the dowager. It had
only been an experiment through which she had been led to open her
house, receive her friends, introduce her daughter; but the little
excitement of that had vanished, and now that the routine of life was
to be followed, it oppressed her. The ghosts of other days came so
close--the days when Alain had been beside her. At times she regretted
Rome, but the physician forbade her return there until autumn. She had
fancied that a season in the old house at Fontainbleau would serve as
a restorative to health--the house where Alain was born; but it was a
failure. Her days there were days of tears, and sad, far-away
memories. So to Paris she went with the assertion that there alone,
life was to be found. She meant to live to the last minute of her
life, and where so well as in the one city inexhaustible?

"Maman is trying to frighten me into marriage," thought the Marquise
after their conversation; "she wants some spectacular ceremony to
enliven the house for a season, and cure her ennui; Paris has been a
disappointment, and Loris is making himself necessary to her."

She was thinking of the matter, and of the impossibility that she
should ever marry Loris, when a box of flowers was brought--one left
by a messenger, who said nothing of whence they came, and no name or
card attached suggested the sender.

"For Maman," decided the Marquise promptly.

But Madame Blanc thought not.

"You, Madame, are the Marquise."

"Oh, true! but the people who would send me flowers would not be so
certain their own names would not be forgotten. I have no old, tried,
and silent friends to remember me so."

While she spoke she was lifting out the creamy and blush-tinted roses;
Maman should see them arranged in the prettiest vase, they must go up
with the chocolate--she would take it herself!

So she chattered while Madame Blanc arranged the tray. But suddenly
the chatter ceased. The Marquise had lifted out the last of the roses,
and under the fragrant screen lay the cause of the sudden silence.

It was a few sprays of dew-wet forget-me-nots! Her heart seemed to
stop beating.

Forget-me-not! there was but one person who had any association in her
mind with that flower. Did this have a meaning relating to him? or was
it only chance?

She said nothing to Madame Blanc about the silent message in the
bottom of the box.

All that day she moved as in a dream. At times she was oppressed by
the terror of discovery, and again it was with a rebellious, delicious
feeling of certainty that he had not forgotten! He had searched for
her--found her! She meant to ignore him if they should meet; certainly
she must do that! His assurance in daring to--yet--yes, she rather
liked the daring--still----!

She remembered some one saying that impertinence gained more favors
from women than respect, and he--yes, certainly he was impertinent;
she must never recognize him, of course--never! Her cheek burned as
she fancied what he must think of her--a girl who made friends with
strangers in the park! Yet she was glad that since he had not let her
forget, he also had been forced to remember.

She told herself all this, and much more; the task occupied so much of
her time that she forgot to go asleep that night, and she saw the
morning star shine out of the blue haze beyond the city, and it
belonged to a dawn with a meaning entirely its own. Never before or
after was a daybreak so beautiful. The sun wheeled royally into view
through the atmosphere of her first veritable love romance.




CHAPTER VI.


Even the card of Lieutenant McVeigh could not annoy her that morning.
He came with some message to the dowager from his mother. At any other
time the sound of his name would have made a discord for her. The
prejudices of Judithe were so decided, and so independent of all
accepted social rules, that the dowager hoped when she did choose a
husband he would prove a diplomat--they would need one in the family.

"Madame Blanc, will you receive the gentleman?" she asked. "Maman has
not yet left her room, and I am engaged."

And for the second time the American made his exit from the Caron
establishment without having seen the woman his friends raved about.
Descending the steps he remembered the old saw that a third attempt
carried a charm with it. He smiled, and the smile suggested that there
would be a third attempt.

The Marquise looked at the card he left, and her smile had not so much
that was pleasant in it.

"Maman, my conjecture was right," she remarked as she entered the room
of the dowager; "your fine, manly American was really the youth of my
Carolina story."

"Carolina story?" and the dowager looked bewildered for a moment; when
one has reached the age of eighty years the memory fails for the
things of today; only the affairs of long ago retain distinctness.

"Exactly; the man for whom Rhoda Larue was educated, and of whom you
forbade me to speak--the man who bought her from Matthew Loring, of
Loringwood, Carolina."

"You are certain?"

"Here is the name, Kenneth McVeigh. It is not likely there are two
Kenneth McVeighs in the same region. How small the world is after all!
I used to fancy the width of the ocean was as a barrier between two
worlds, yet it has not prevented these people from crossing, and
coming to our door!"

She sank into a seat, the card still in her hand.

"Judithe," said the dowager, after watching her moody face thoughtfully,
"my child, I should be happier if you banished, so far as possible,
that story from your memory. It will have a tendency to narrow your
views. You will always have a prejudice against a class for the wrong
done by an individual. Put it aside! It is a question outside of your
life, outside of it always unless your sympathies persist in dragging
you into such far-away abuses. We have the Paris poor, if you must
think and do battle for the unfortunate. And as to the American,
consider. He must have been very young, perhaps was influenced by
older heads. He may not have realized--"

The Marquise smiled, but shook her head. "You are eloquent, Maman, but
you do not convince me. He must be very handsome to have won you so
completely in one interview. For me, I do not believe in his ignorance
of the evil nor in his youthful innocence. I think of the women who
for generations have been the victims of such innocence, and I should
like to see your handsome young cadet suffer for his share of it!"

"Tah!" and the dowager put out her hand with a gesture of protest and
a tone of doubt in her voice. "You say so Judithe, but you could not
see any one suffer, not even the criminal. You would come to his
defense with some philosophical reason for the sin--some theory of
pre-natal influence to account for his depravity. Collectively you
condemn them; individually you would pardon every one rather than see
them suffer--I mean, than stand by and actually see the suffering."

"I could not pardon that man," insisted the Marquise; "Ugh! I feel as
if for him I could have the hand of Judithe as well as the name."

"And treat him a-la-Holofernes? My child, sometimes I dislike that
name of Judithe for you; I do not want you to have a shadow of the
character it suggests. I shall regret the name if it carries such dark
influences with it. As for the man--forget him!"

"With all my heart, if he keeps out of my way," agreed the Marquise;
"but if the old Jewish god of battles ever delivers him into my
hands--!" She paused and drew a deep breath.

"Well?"

"Well--I should show him mercy such as the vaunted law-giver, the
chosen of the Lord, the man of meekness, showed to the conquered
Midianites--no more!" and her laugh had less of music in it than
usual. "I instinctively hate the man, Kenneth McVeigh--Kenneth
McVeigh!--even the name is abhorrent since the day I heard of that
awful barter and sale. It seems strange, Maman, does it not, when I
never saw him in my life--never expected to hear his name again--that
it is to our house he has found his way in Paris; to our house, where
an unknown woman abhors him. Ah!" and she flung the card from her.
"You are right, Maman; I am too often conquered by my own moods and
feelings. The American need be nothing to us."

The dowager was pleased when the subject was dropped. She had seen so
many battles fought, in theory, by humanitarians who are alive to the
injustice of the world. But her day was over for race questions and
creeds. Judithe was inspiring in her sympathies, but the questions
that breathe living flame for us at twenty years, have burned into
dead ashes at eighty.

"Tah! I would rather she would marry and let me see her children," she
grumbled to Madame Blanc; "if she does not, I trust her to your care
when I am gone. She is different since we reached Paris--different,
gayer, and less of the student."

"But no more in touch with society," remarked the attentive companion;
"she accepts no invitations, and goes only to the galleries and
theatres."

"Um!--pictured people, and artificial people! Both have a tendency to
make her an idealist instead of a realist."

To Dumaresque she made the same remark, and suggested he should help
find attractions for her in real life.

"She is too imaginative, and I do not want her to be of the romantic
women; the craze for romance in life is what fills the columns of the
journals with new scandals each month."

"Madame Judithe is safe from that sort of romance," declared her
god-son. "Yet with her face and those glorious eyes one should allow
her some flights in the land of the ideal. She suggests all old Italy
at times, but she has never mentioned her family to me."

"Because it was a topic which both Alain and I forbade her, when she
was younger, to discuss. Naturally, she has not a joyous temperament
and memories of her childhood can only have an unhappy effect, which
accounts for our decision of the matter. Her father died before she
could remember him, and the mother, who was of Greek blood, not long
after. A relative who arranged affairs left the daughter penniless. At
the little chateau Levigne she was of great service to me when she was
but sixteen. Madam Blanc, who tried to reach me in time, declares the
child saved my life. It was a dog--a mad one. I was on the lawn when
he broke through the hedge, snapped Alain's mastiff, Ponto, and came
straight for me. I was paralyzed with terror; then, just as he leaped
at me, the child swung a heavy chair over her head. Tah! She looked
like a young tigress. The dog was struck helpless, his back broken.
The gardener came and killed him, and Ponto, too, was killed, when he
showed that the bite had given him the poison. Ah, it was terrible,
that day. Then I wrote Alain and we decided she should never leave us.
I made over to her the income of the little Lavigne estate, thus her
education was carried on, and when we went to Rome--well, Alain was
not satisfied until he could do even more for her."

The old lady helped herself to snuff and sighed. Her listener wondered
if, after all, that death-bed marriage had been entirely acceptable to
the mother. Some suggestion of his thought must have come to her, for
she continued:

"Not that I disapproved, you must understand. No daughter could be
more devoted. I could not be without her now. But I had a hope--a
mother's foolish hope--that perhaps it might be a love affair; that
the marriage would renew his interest in life and thus accomplish what
the physicians could not do--save him."

"Good old Alain," said Dumaresque, with real feeling in his tones. "He
deserved to live and win her. I can imagine no better fortune for a
man."

"But it was an empty hope, and a sad wedding," continued the dowager,
with a sigh. "That was, to her, a day of gloom, which to others is
the one day to look forward to through girlhood and backward to from
old age. Oh, yes; it is not so much to be wondered at that she is a
creature of moods and ideals outlined on a background of shadow."

The voice of the Marquise sounded through the hall and up the stairs.
She was singing, joying as a bird. The eyes of the two met, and
Dumaresque laughed.

"Oh! and what is that but a mood, too?" demanded the dowager; "a mood
that is pleasant, I grant you, and it has lasted longer than
usual--ever since we came to Paris. I enjoy it, but I like to know the
reason of things. I guess at it in this case; yet it eludes me."

Dumaresque raised his brows and smiled as one who invites further
confidences. But he received instead a keen glance from the old eyes,
and a question:

"Loris, who is the man?"

"What! You ask me?"

"There is no other to ask; you know all the men she has met; you are
not a fool, and an artist's eye is trained to observe."

"It has not served me in this case, my god-mother."

"Which means you will not tell. I shall suspect it is yourself if you
conspire to keep it from me."

"Pouf! When it is myself I shall be so eager to let it be known that
no one will have time to ask a question."

"That is good," she said approvingly. "I must rest now. I have talked
so long; but a word, Loris; she likes you, she trusts you, and
that--well, that goes far."

And all the morning her assurance made for him hours of brightness.
The stranger of Fontainbleau had drifted into the background, and
should never have real place in their lives. She liked and trusted
_him_; and that would go far.

He was happy in imagining the happiness that might be, forgetful of
another lover, one among the poets, who avowed that the happiness of
the future was the only real happiness of the world.

He was pleased that his god-mother had confided to him these little
facts of family history. He remembered how intensely eager the dowager
had been for Alain's marriage, years before, that there might be an
heir; and he remembered, in part, the cause--her detestation of a
female relative whose son would inherit the Marquisate should a son be
born to her, and Alain die without children. He could see how eagerly
the dowager would have consented to a marriage with even the poorest
of poor relations if both the Marquisate and Alain might be saved by
it.

Poor Alain! He remembered the story of why he had remained single; a
story of love forbidden, and of a woman who entered a convent because,
in the world, she could not live with her lover, and would not live
with the man whose name she bore. It was an old story; she had died
long ago, but Alain had remained faithful. It had been the one great
passion he had known of, outside of a romance, and the finale of it
was that the slight girlish protegee was mistress of his name and
fortune, though her heart had never beat the faster for his glance.

And the Greek blood doubtless accounted for her readiness of speech in
different tongues; they were so naturally linguists--the Greeks. He
had met her first in Rome, and fancied her an Italian. Delaven had
asked if she were not English; and now in the heart of France she
appeared to him entirely Parisian.

A chameleon-like wife might have her disadvantages, he thought, as he
walked away after the talk with his god-mother; yet she would not be
so apt as others to bore one with sameness. At nineteen she was
charming; at twenty-five she would be magnificent.

The streets were alive that morning with patriotic groups discussing
the victory of the French troops at Magenta. The first telegrams were
posted and crowds were gathered about them.

Dumaresque passed through them with an unusually preoccupied air. Then
a tall man, leaning against a pillar and viewing the crowd, bowed to
him in such a way as to arrest his attention. It was the American, of
the smiling, half sleepy eyes, and the firm mouth. The combination
appealed to Dumaresque as an artist; also the shape of the head, it
was exceedingly good, strong; even his lounging attitude had the grace
suggestive of strength. He remembered seeing somewhere the head of a
young lion painted with just those half closed, shadowy eyes.
Lieutenant McVeigh was regarding him with something akin to their
watchfulness, the same slow gaze travelling from the feet to the head
as they approached each other; it was deliberate as the measuring of
an adversary, and its finale was a smile.

"Glad to see a man," he remarked. "I have been listening to the
jabbering and screeches of the crowd until they seem only manikins."

Dumaresque laughed. "You come by way of England, I believe; do you
prefer the various dialects of that land of fog?"

"No, I do not; have a cigar?" Dumaresque accepted the offer. McVeigh
himself lighted one and continued:

"Their stuffiness lacks the picturesque qualities possessed by even
the poorest of France, and then they bore one with their wranglings
for six-pences, from Parliament down to peasant. They are always at it
in Brittania the gem of the ocean, wrangling over six-pences, and
half-pennies and candle ends."

"You are finding flaws in the people who call you cousin," remarked
the artist.

"Yes, I know they do," said the other, between puffs. "But I can't
imagine a real American helping them in their claims for relationship.
Our history gives us no cause for such kindly remembrances."

"Unless on the principle that one has a kindly regard for a man after
fighting with him and not coming out second best," remarked
Dumaresque. "I have an errand in the next street; will you come?"

McVeigh assented. They stalked along, chattering and enjoying their
cigars until they reached a florists, where Dumaresque produced a
memorandum and read off a list of blossoms and greenery to be
delivered by a certain date.

"An affair for the hospitals to be held in the home of Madame Dulac,
wife of General Dulac," he explained; "it is to be all very novel, a
bazaar and a ball. Madame is an old friend of my god-mother, the
dowager Marquise de Caron, whom you have met."

McVeigh assented and showed interest.

"We have almost persuaded Madame Alain, her daughter, to preside over
one of the booths. Ah! It will be a place to empty one's pockets; you
must come."

"Not sure about invitations," confessed McVeigh, frankly. "It is a
very exclusive affair, I believe, and a foreigner will be such a
distinctive outsider at such gatherings."

"We will undertake to prevent that," promised Dumaresque, "and in the
interests of charity you will find both dames and demoiselles
wonderfully gracious to even a lonely, unattached man. If you dance
you can win your own place."

"Oh, yes; we all dance in our country; some of us poorly, perhaps;
still, we dance."

"Good! You must come. I am assisting, after a fashion, in planning the
decorations, and I promise to find you some one who is charming, and
who speaks your language delightfully."

There was some further chat. McVeigh promised he would attend unless
his mother had made conflicting engagements. Dumaresque informed him
it was to be a fancy dress affair; uniforms would be just the thing;
and he parted with the American much more pleased with him than in the
salons where they had met heretofore.

Kenneth McVeigh sauntered along the avenue, tall, careless, reposeful.
His expression was one of content, and he smiled as he silently
blessed Loris Dumaresque, who had done him excellent service without
knowing it--had found a method by which he would try the charm of the
third attempt to see the handsome girl who had passed them that day in
the carriage.

He entered the hotel late that night. Paris, in an unofficial way, was
celebrating the victory of Magenta by shouting around bon-fires,
laughing under banners, forming delegations no one remembered, and
making addresses no one listened to.

Late though it was, Mrs. McVeigh had not retired. From a window she
was looking out on the city, where sleep seemed forgotten, and her
beautiful eyes had a seriousness contrasting strangely with the joyous
celebrations of victory she had been witnessing.

"What is it, mother?" he asked, in the soft, mellow tones of the
South, irresistible in their caressing qualities. The mother put out
her hand and clasped his without speaking.

"Homesick?" he ventured, trying to see her face as he drew a chair
closer; "longing for that twelve-year-old baby of yours? Evilena
certainly would enjoy the hubbub."

"No, Kenneth," she said at last: "it is not that. But I have been
watching the enthusiasm of these people over a victory they have
helped win for Italy's freedom--not their own. We have questions just
as vital in our country; some day they must be settled in the same
way; there seems no doubt of it--and then--"

"Then we will go out, have our little pass at each other, and come
back and go on hoeing our corn, just as father did in the Mexican
campaign," he said with an attempt at lightness; but she shook her
head.

"Many a soldier left the corn fields who never came back to them."

"Why, mother, what is it, dear? You've been crying, crying here all
alone over one war that is nothing to us, and another that may never
happen; come! come!" He put his arm about her as if she were a child
to be petted. Her head sank on his shoulder, though she still looked
away from him, out into the brilliantly lighted street.

"It was not the--the political justice or injustice of the wars," she
confessed after a little; "it was not of that I was thinking. But a
woman screamed out there on the street. They--the people--had just
told her the returns of the battle, and her son was among the
killed--poor woman! Her only son, Kenneth, and--"

"Yes, dear, I understand." He drew her closer and lifting her head
from her lap, placed it on his shoulder. She uttered a tremulous
little sigh of content. And then, with his arms about her, the mother
and son looked out on Paris after a victory, each thinking of their
own home, their own capital cities, and their own vague dread of
battles to be in the future.




CHAPTER VII.


As morning after morning passed without the arrival of other
mysterious boxes of flowers or of significant messages, the Marquise
began to watch Loris Dumaresque more than was usual with her. He was
the only one who knew; had he, educated by some spirit of jest, been
the sender of the blossoms?

And inconsistent as it may appear when one remembers her avowed fear
of discovery, yet from the moment that suspicion entered her mind the
charm was gone from the blossoms and the days to follow, and she felt
for the first time a resentment towards Monsieur Incognito.

Her reason told her this was an inevitable consequence, through
resentment forgetfulness would come.

But her heart told her--?

Her presence at the charitable fete held by Madame la General at the
Hotel Dulac was her first response, in a social way to the invitations
of her Parisian acquaintances. A charity one might support without in
any way committing oneself to further social plunges. She expected to
feel shy and strange; she expected to be bored. But since Maman wished
it so much--!

There is nothing so likely to banish shyness as success. The young
Marquise could not but be conscious that she attracted attention,
and that the most popular women of the court who had been pleased to
show their patronage by attendance, did not in the least eclipse
her own less pretentious self. People besieged Madame Dulac for
introductions, and to her own surprise the debutante found herself
enjoying all the gay nothings, the jests, the bright sentences
tossed about her and forming a foundation for compliments delicately
veiled, and the flattering by word or glance that was as the breath
of life to those people of the world.

She was dressed in white of medieval cut. Heavy white silk cord was
knotted about the slender waist and touched the embroidered hem. The
square neck had also the simple finish of cord and above it was the
one bit of color; a flat necklace of etruscan gold fitted closely
about the white throat, holding alternate rubies and pearls in their
curiously wrought settings. On one arm was a bracelet of the same
design; and the linked fillet above her dark hair gleamed, also, with
the red of rubies.

It was the age of tarletan and tinsel, of delicate zephyrs and
extremes in butterfly effects. Hoop-skirts were persisted in, despite
the protests of art and reason; so, the serenity of this dress,
fitting close as a habit, and falling in soft straight folds with a
sculpturesque effect, and with the brown-eyed Italian face above it,
created a sensation.

Dumaresque watched her graciously accepting homage as a matter of
course, and smiled, thinking of his prophecy that she would be
magnificent at twenty-five;--she was so already.

Some women near him commented on the simplicity of her attire.

"Oh, that is without doubt the taste of the dowager; failing to
influence the politics of the country she consoled herself with an
attempt to make a revolution in the fashions of the age."

"And is this sensation to illustrate her ideas?" asked another. "She
has rather a good manner--the girl--but the dress is a trifle
theatrical, suggestive of the pages of tragedies and martyred
virgins."

"Suggestive of the girl Cleopatra before she realized her power,"
thought the artist as he passed on. He knew that just those little
remarks stamped her success a certainty, and was pleased accordingly.
The dowager had expressed her opinion that Judithe would bury herself
in studies if left to herself, perhaps even go back to the convent. He
fancied a few such hours of adulation as this would change the ideas
of any girl of nineteen as to the desirability of convents.

He noticed that the floral bower over which she presided had little
left now but the ferns and green things; she had been adding money to
the hospital fund. Once he noticed the blossoms left in charge of her
aides while she entered the hall room on the arm of the most
distinguished official present, and later, on that of one of the
dowager's oldest friends. She talked with, and sold roses to the
younger courtiers at exorbitant prices, but it was only the men of
years and honors whom she walked beside.

Madame Dulac and Dumaresque exchanged glances of approval; as a
possible general in the social field of the future, she had commenced
with the tactics of absolute genius. Dumaresque wondered if she
realized her own cleverness, or if it was because she honestly liked
best to talk or listen to the men of years, experience, and undoubted
honors.

Mrs. McVeigh was there, radiant as Aurore and with eyes so bright one
would not fancy them bathed in tears so lately, or the smooth brow as
containing a single anxious motherly thought. But the Marquise having
heard that story of the son, wondered as she looked at her if the
handsome mother had not many an anxious thought the world never
suspected.

She was laughing frankly to the Marquise over the future just read in
her palm by a picturesque Egyptian, who was one of the novelties added
to Madame Dulac's list for the night.

Nothing less than an adoring husband had been promised her, and with
the exception of a few shadowed years, not a cloud larger than the
hand of a man was to cross the sky of her destiny.

"I am wishing Kenneth had come--my son, you know. Something has
detained him. I certainly would have liked him to hear that promise of
a step-father. Our Southern men are not devoid of jealousy--even of
their mothers."

Then she passed on, a glory of azure and silver, and the Marquise felt
a sense of satisfaction that the son had not come; the prejudice she
felt against that unabashed American would make his presence the one
black cloud across the evening.

While she was thinking of him the party about her separated, and she
took advantage of a moment alone to slip the alcove back of the
evergreens. It seemed the one nook unappropriated by the glittering
masses of people whose voices, near and far, suggested the murmur of
bees to her as she viewed it from her shadowy retreat, while covered
from sight herself.

The moonlight was shining through the window of the little alcove
screened by the tall palms. The music of a tender waltz movement
drifted softly across to her and made perfect her little retreat. She
was conscious that it had all been wonderfully and unexpectedly
perfect; the success, the adulation, had given her a new definite
faith in herself. How Maman would have enjoyed it. Maman, who would
want every little detail of the pleasant things said and done. She
wondered if it was yet too early to depart, she might reach home
before the dowager slept, and tell her all the glories of it.

So thinking, she turned to enter again the glare of light to find
Madame Dulac, or Madame Blanc, who had accompanied her, to tell them.

But another hand pushed aside the curtain of silk and the drooping
fronds of gigantic fern. Looking up she saw a tall, young man, wearing
a dark blue uniform, who bowed with grace, and stood aside that she
might pass if she chose. He showed no recognition, and there was the
pause of an instant. She could feel the color leave her face. Then,
with an effort, she raised her eyes, and tried to speak carelessly,
but the voice was little more than a whisper, in which she said:

"You!"

His face brightened and grew warm. The tone itself told more than she
knew; a man would be stupid who could not read it, and this one,
though youthful, did not look stupid.

"Madame Unknown," he murmured, in the voice she had not been able to
forget, "I am not so lost here as at Fontainbleau. May I ask some one
to present me to your notice?"

At that she smiled, and the smile was contagious.

"You may not," she replied frankly, recovering herself, and assuming a
tone of lightness to conquer the fluttering in her throat. "The list
of names I have had to remember this evening is most formidable,
another one would make the last feather here," and she tapped her
forehead significantly. "I was just about to flee from it all when--"

She hesitated and looked about her in an uncertain way. He at once
placed a chair for her. She allowed her hand to rest on the back of it
as if undecided.

"You will not be so unkind?" he said; and his words held a plea. She
answered it by seating herself.

"Well?"

At the interrogation he smiled.

"Will you not allow me, Madame, to introduce myself?"

"But, Monsieur Incognito, consider; I have remembered you best because
you have not done so; it was a novelty. But all those people whose
names were spoken to me this evening--pouf!" and she blew a feathery
spray of fern from her palms, "they have all drifted into oblivion
like that. Do you wish, then, to be presented and--to follow them?"

"I refuse to follow them there--from you."

His tones were so low, so even, so ardent, that she looked startled
and drew her breath quickly.

"You are bold, Monsieur," and though she strove to speak haughtily she
was too much of a girl to be severe when her eyes met his.

"Why not?" he asked, growing bolder as she grew more timid. "You grant
me one moment out of your life; then you mean to close the gates
against me--if you can. In that brief time I must condense all that
another man should take months to say to you. I have been speaking to
you daily, however, for six weeks and--"

"Monsieur! Six weeks?"

"Every day," he assented, smiling down at her. "Of course you did not
hear me. I was very confidential about it. I even tried to stop it
entirely when I was allowed to believe that Mademoiselle was Madame."

"But it is quite true--she is Madame."

"Certainly; yet you let me think--well, I forgive you for it now,
since I have found you again."

"Monsieur!"--she half arose.

"Will Mademoiselle have her fortune told?" asked a voice beside them,
and the beringed Egyptian pushed aside the palms, "or Monsieur,
perhaps?"

"Both of us," he assented with eagerness; "that is, if Mademoiselle
chooses." He dropped two pieces of gold in the beaded purse held out.
"Come," he half whispered to the Marquise, "let me see if oblivion is
really the doom fate reads against me."

She half put out her hand, thinking that after all it was only a part
of the games of the night--the little amusements with which purses
were filled for charity; then some sudden after thought made her draw
it back.

"You fear the decision?" he asked.

She did not fear the decision he meant, but she did fear--

"No, Monsieur, I am not afraid. Oh, yes; she may read my palm, it is
all a jest, of course."

The Egyptian held the man's hand at which she had not yet glanced. She
took the hand of the Marquise.

"Pardon, Madame, it is no jest, it is a science," she said briefly,
and holding their hands, glanced from one to the other.

"Firm hands, strong hands, both," she said, and then bent over that of
the Marquise; as she did so the expression of casual interest faded
from her face; she slowly lifted her head and met the gaze of the
owner.

"Well, well? Am I to commit murders?" she asked; but her smile was an
uneasy one; the gaze of the Egyptian made her shrink.

"Not with your own hand," said the woman, slowly studying the
well-marked palm; "but you will live for awhile surrounded by death
and danger. You will hate, and suffer for the hate you feel. You will
love, and die for the love you will not take--you--"

But the Marquise drew her hand away petulantly.

"Oh! I am to die of love, then?--I!" and her light laugh was
disdainful. "That is quite enough of the fates for one evening;" she
regarded the pink palm doubtfully. "See, Monsieur, it does not look so
terrible; yet it contains all those horrors."

"Naturally it would not contain them," said the Egyptian. "You will
force yourself to meet what you call the horrors. You will sacrifice
yourself. You will meet the worst as the women of '93 ascended the
guillotine--laughing."

"Ah, what pictures! Monsieur, I wish you a better fortune."

"Than to die of love?" he asked, and met her eyes; "that were easier
than to live without it."

"Chut!--you speak like the cavalier of a romance."

"I feel like one," he confessed, "and it rests on your mercy whether
the romance has a happy ending."

She flashed one admonishing glance at him and towards the woman who
bent over his hand.

"Oh, she does not comprehend the English," he assured her; "and if she
does she will only hear the echo of what she reads in my hand."

"Proceed," said the Marquise to the Egyptian, "we wait to hear the
list of Monsieur's romances."

"You will live by the sword, but not die by the sword," said the
woman. "You will have one great passion in your life. Twice the woman
will come in your path. The first time you will cross the seas to her,
the second time she comes to you--and--ah!--"

She reached again for the hand of the Marquise and compared them. The
two young people looked, not at her, but at each other.

In the eyes of the Marquise was a certain petulant rebellion, and in
his the appealing, the assuring, the ardent gaze that met and answered
her.

"It is peculiar--this," continued the woman. "I have never seen
anything like it before; the same mark, the same, Mademoiselle,
Monsieur; you will each know tragedies in your experience, and the
lives are linked together."

"No!"--and again the Marquise drew her hand away. "It is no longer
amusing," she remarked in English, "when those people think it their
duty to pair couples off like animals in the ark."

Her face had flushed, though she tried to look indifferent. The
Egyptian had stepped back and was regarding her curiously.

"Do not cross the seas, Mademoiselle; all of content will be left
behind you."

"Wait," and the Monsieur Incognito put out his hand. "You call the
lady 'Mademoiselle,' but your guess has not been good;" and he pointed
to a plain ring on the hand of the Marquise.

"I call her Mademoiselle because she never has been a wife, and--she
never will be a wife. There are marriages without wedding rings, and
there are wedding rings without marriages; pardon!--" and passing
between the ferns and palms she was gone.

"That is true!" half whispered the Marquise, looking up at him; "her
words almost frighten me."

"They need not," and the caress in his eyes made her drop her own;
"all your world of Paris knows the romance of your marriage. You are
more of a celebrity than you may imagine; my knowledge of that made
me fear to approach you here."

"The fear did not last long," and she laughed, the coquetry of the sex
again uppermost. "For how many seconds did you tremble on the
threshold?"

"Long enough to avoid any friends who had planned to present me."

"And why?"

"Lest it might offend to have the person thrust on you whom you would
not know among less ceremonious surroundings."

"Yet you came alone?"

"I could not help that, I _had_ to see you, even though you refused to
recognize me; I had to see you. Did I not prophecy there in the wood
that we should meet again? Even the flowers you gave me I--"

"Monsieur, no more!" and she rose from the chair with a certain
decision. "It was a thoughtless, childish farce played there at
Fontainbleau. But--it is over. I--I have felt humiliated by that
episode, Monsieur. Young ladies in France do not converse with
strangers. Pray go back to England and forget that you found one so
indiscreet--oh! I know what you would say, Monsieur," as he was about
to speak. "I know many of these ladies of the court would only laugh
over such an episode--it would be but a part of their amusements for
the day; but I, I do not belong to the court or their fashions. I am
only ashamed, and ask that you forget it. I would not want any one to
think--I mean that I--"

She had commenced so bravely with her wise, firm little speech, but at
the finale she wavered and broke down miserably.

"Don't!"--he broke in as a tear fell on the fan she held; "you make
me feel like a brute who has persecuted you; don't cry. Come here to
the window; listen to me. I--I loved you that first day; you just
looked at me, spoke to me and it was all over with me. I can't undo
it. I can go away, and I _will_, rather than make you unhappy; but I
can't forget you. I have never forgotten you for an hour. That was
why. Oh, I know it is the wildest, maddest, most unpardonable thing I
am saying to you. Your friends would want to call me out and shoot me
for it, and I shall be happy to give them the chance," he added,
grimly. "But don't, for Heaven's sake, think that my memory of you
would be less than respectful. Why, I--I adore you. I am telling it to
you like a fool, but I only ask you to not laugh until I am out of
hearing. I--will go now--and do not even ask your forgiveness,
because--well I can't honestly say I am sorry."

Sorry! She thought of those days when she had wakened to a new world
because his eyes and his voice haunted her; she heard him acknowledge
the same power, and he spoke of forgiveness as though convicted of a
fault. Well, she had not been able to prevent the same fault, so, how
dared she blame him? He need not know, of course, how well she had
remembered; yet she might surely be a little kind for all that.

"Monsieur Incognito!"

Her voice had an imperious tone; she remembered she must not be too
kind. He was already among the palms, in the full light of the salon,
and he was boy enough for all the color to leave his face as he heard
the low command. She had heard him declare his devotion, yet she had
recalled him.

"Madame," he said, and stood stubbornly the width of the alcove from
her, though he was conscious of all tender words rushing to his lips.
She was so adorable; a woman in mentality, but the veriest girl as to
the emotions his words had awakened.

"Monsieur," she said, without looking at him, "I do not truly believe
you meant to offend me; therefore I have nothing to forgive."

"You angel!" he half whispered, but she heard him.

"No, I am not that," and she flashed a quick glance at him, "only I
think I comprehend you, and to comprehend is to forgive, is it not?
I--I cannot listen to the--affection you speak of. Love and marriage
are not for me. Did not the Egyptian say it? Yes; that was quite true.
But I can shake hands in good-bye, Monsieur Incognito. Your English
people always do that, eh? Well, so will I."

She held out her hand; he took it in both his own and his lips touched
it.

"No! no!" she said softly, and shook her head; "that is not an English
custom." He lifted his head and looked at her.

"Why do you call me English?" he asked, and she smiled, glad to break
that tenseness of feeling by some commonplace.

"It was very simple, Monsieur; first it was the make of your hat,
I read the name of the maker in the crown that day in the park;
then you spoke English; you said you had just arrived from England;
and the English are so certain to get lost unless they go in
groups--therefore!"

She had enumerated all those reasons on her white fingers. She glanced
at him, with an adorable smile as a finale, so confident she had
proven her case.

"And you French have no fondness for the English people," he said
slowly, looking at her. "I wear an American uniform tonight; suppose I
am an American? I am tempted to disobey and tell you who I am, in
hopes you will not send me into exile quite so soon."

"No, no, _no_!" she breathed hurriedly. "You must go; and you must
remain Monsieur Incognito; thus it will be only a comedy, a morsel of
romance. But if I knew you well--ah! I do not know what it would be
then. I am afraid to think. Yes, I confess it, Monsieur, you make me
afraid. I tell myself you are a foreign ogre, yet when you speak to
me--ah!"

She put out her hands as he came close. But he knelt at her feet,
kissing her hands, her wrists, the folds of her dress, then lifted his
face glowing, ardent, to her own.

"I shall make you love me some day," he whispered; "not now, perhaps,
but some day."

She stared at him without a word. She had received proposals of
marriage, dignified, ceremonious affairs submitted to her by the
dowager, but from this stranger came the first avowal of love she had
ever listened to. A stranger; yet he held her hand; she felt herself
drawn towards him by a force she could not combat. Her other arm was
over the back of a chair, slowly she lifted it, then he felt her hand
touch his hair and the touch was a caress.

"My queen!"

"Co--now," she said so lowly. It was almost a whisper. He arose,
pressed her hand to his lips and turned away, when a woman's voice
spoke among the palms:

"Did you say in this corner, Madame? I have not found him; Kenneth!"

"It is my mother," he said softly, and was about to draw back the
alcove draperies when the Marquise took a step towards him, staring
strangely into his face.

"_Your Mother!_" and her tones expressed only doubt and dread. "No,
no! Why, I--I know the voice; it is Madame McVeigh; she called
Kenneth, her son--"

He smiled an affirmative.

"Yes; you will forgive me for having my name spoken to you after all?
But there seems to be no help for it. So you see I am not English
despite the hat, and my name is Kenneth McVeigh."

His smile changed to quick concern as he noticed the strange look on
her face, and the swaying movement towards the chair. He put out his
hand, but she threw herself back from him with a shuddering movement
of repulsion.

And a moment later the palms parted beside Mrs. McVeigh, and she was
startled at sight of her son's face.

"Kenneth! Why, what is wrong?"

"A lady has fainted there in the alcove," he said, in a voice which
sounded strange to her; "will you go to her?"

"Fainted? Why, Kenneth!--"

"Yes; I think it is the Marquise de Caron."




CHAPTER VIII.


The dowager was delighted to find that the one evening of complete
social success had changed her daughter-in-law into a woman of
society. It had modified her prejudices. She accepted invitations
without her former protests, and was only careful that the people whom
she visited should be of the most distinguished.

Dumaresque watched her with interest. There seemed much of deliberation
back of every move she made. The men of mark were the only ones to
whom she gave encouragement, and she found several so responsive
that there was no doubt, now, as to whether she was awake to her own
power--more, she had a mind to use it. She was spoken of as one of the
beauties of the day.

The McVeighs had gone to Italy, the mother to visit a relative, the
son to view the late battle fields on the other side of the Pyrenees
and acquaint himself with military matters wherever he found them.

He had called on the Marquise the day following the fete at the Hotel
Dulac. She had quite recovered her slight indisposition of the
preceding evening, and there had been no hesitation about receiving
him. She was alone, and she met him with the fine, cool, gracious
manner reserved for the people who were of no importance in her life.

Looking at her, listening to her, he could scarcely believe this could
be the girl who had provoked him into a declaration of love less than
a day ago, and in whose eyes he had surprised a fervor responding to
his own. She called him Lieutenant McVeigh, with an utter disregard of
the fact that she had ever called him anything else.

When in sheer desperation he referred to their first meeting, she
listened with a chill little smile.

"Yes," she agreed; "Fontainbleau was beautiful in the spring time.
Maman was especially fond of it. She, herself, had been telling a
friend lately of the very unconventional meeting under the bushes of
the Mademoiselle and Monsieur Incognito, and he--the friend--had
thought it delightfully amusing, good enough for the thread of a
comedy."

Then she sent some kindly message to Mrs. McVeigh, but refused to see
the wonder--the actual pain--in the eyes where before she had
remembered those half slumberous smiles, or that brief space of
passionate pleading. He interrupted some cool remark by rising.

"It is scarcely worth while--all this," he said, abruptly. "Had you
closed your doors against me after last night I should have
understood--I should have gone away adoring you just the same. But to
open them, to receive me, and then--"

His voice trembled in spite of himself. All at once he appeared so
much more boyish than ever before--so helpless in a sort of misery he
could not account for, she turned away her head.

"With the ocean between us my love could not have hurt you. You might
have let me keep that." He had recovered control of his voice and his
eyes swept over her from head to foot like blue lightning. "I bid you
good-day, Madame."

She made an inclination of the head, but did not speak. She had
reached the limit of her self control. His words, "_You might have let
me keep that_," were an accusation she dared not discuss.

When the door closed behind him she could see nothing, for the blur of
tears in her eyes. Madame La Marquise received no other callers that
day.

In the days following she compared him with the courtiers, the
diplomats, the very clever men whom she met, and told herself he was
only a boy--a cadet of twenty-two. Why should she remember his words,
or forget for one instant that infamy with which his name was
connected?

"He goes on his knees to me only because he has grown weary of the
slave-women of the plantations," she told herself in deepest disgust.
Sometimes she would look curiously at the hands once covered by his
kisses. And once she threw a withered bunch of forget-me-nots from her
window, at night, and crept down at daybreak next morning and found
it, and took it back to her room.

It looked as though the boy was holding his own despite the
diplomats.

When she saw him again it was at an auction of articles donated for a
charity under the patronage of the Empress, and open to the public.
Cotton stuffs justled my lady's satins, and the half-world stared at
short range into the faces whose owners claimed coronets.

Many leading artists had donated sketches of their more pretentious
work. It was to that department the Marquise made her way, and
entering the gallery by a side door, found that the crowd had
separated her from the Countess Biron and the rest of their party.

Knowing that sooner or later they would find her there, she halted,
examining some choice bits of color near the door. A daintily dressed
woman, who looked strangely familiar, was standing near with
apparently the same intent. But she stood so still; and the poise of
her head betrayed that she was listening to something. The something
was a group of men back of them, where the black and white sketches
were on exhibition. The corridor was not wide, and their conversation
was in English and not difficult to understand if one gave attention.
The Marquise noted that Dumaresque was among them, and they stood
before his donation of sketches, of which the principal one was a
little study of the octoroon dancer, Kora.

Then in a flash she understood who the person was who listened. She
was the original of the picture, drawn there no doubt by a sort of
vanity to hear the artistic praise, or personal comment. But a swift
glance showed her it had been a mistake; the dark brows were frowning,
the full lip was bitten nervously, and the small ungloved hand was
clenched.

The men were laughing carelessly over some argument, not noticing
that they had a listener; the people moving along the corridor, single
and in groups, hid the two who remained stationary, and whose backs
were towards them. It was most embarrassing, and the Marquise was
about to move away when she heard a voice there was no mistaking--the
voice she had not been able to forget.

"No, I don't agree with you;" he was saying, "and you would not find
half so much to admire in the work if the subject were some old
plantation mammy equally well painted. Come over and see them where
they grow. After that you will not be making celebrities of them."

"If they grow many like that I am most willing, Monsieur."

"I, too. When do we start? I can fancy no land so well worth a visit
but that of Mohammed."

The first speaker uttered an exclamation of annoyance, but the others
laughed.

"Oh, we have seen other men of your land here," remarked Dumaresque.
"They are not all so discreet as yourself. We have learned that they
do not usually build high walls between themselves and pretty
slaves."

"You are right," agreed the American. "Sorry I can't contradict you.
But these gorgeous Koras and Phrynes remind me of a wild blossom in
our country; it is exquisite in form, beautiful to the eye, but poison
if touched to the lips. It is called the yellow jasmine."

"No doubt you are right," remarked one of the men as Kora dropped her
veil over her face. "You are at all events poetical."

"And the reason of their depravity?"

"The fact that they are the outgrowth of the worst passions of both
races--at least so I have heard it said by men who make more of a
study of such questions than I."

A party of people moved between the two women and the speakers. The
Marquise heard Kora draw a sobbing breath. She hesitated an instant,
her own eyes flashing, her cheeks burning. _He_ to sit in judgment on
others--he!

Then she laid her hand on the wrist of Kora.

"Come with me," she said, softly, in English, and the girl with one
glance of tear-wet eyes, obeyed.

The Marquise opened the door beside her, a few steps further and
another door led into an ante-room belonging to a portion of the
building closed for repairs.

"Why do you weep?" she asked briefly, but the kindly clasp of her
wrist told that the questioner was not without sympathy, and the girl
strove to compose herself while staring at the other in amazement.

"You--I have seen you--I remember you," she said, wonderingly, "the
Marquise de Caron!"

"Yes;" the face of the Marquise flushed, "and you are the dancer--Kora.
Why did you weep at their words?"

"Since you know who I am, Madame, I need not hesitate to tell you more,"
she said, though she did hesitate, and looked up, deprecatingly, to
the Marquise, who stood a few paces away leaning against the window.

There was only one chair in the room. Kora perceived for the first
time that it had been given to her while the Marquise stood. She arose
to her feet, and with a deference that lent a subtile grace to her
expression, offered it to her questioner.

"No; resume your seat;" the command was a trifle imperious, but it was
softened the next instant by the smile with which she said: "A dear
old lady taught me that to the burdened horse we should always give
the right of way. We must make easier the way of those who bear
sorrows. You have the sorrow today--what is it?"

"I am not sure that you will understand, Madame," and the girl's
velvety black eyes lifted and then sought the floor again. "But you,
perhaps, heard what they said out there, and the man I--I--well, he
was there."

The lips of the Marquise grew a trifle rigid, but Kora was too much
engaged with her own emotion to perceive it.

"I suppose I shouldn't speak of him to a--a lady who can't understand
people who live in a different sort of world. But you mean to be kind,
and I suppose have some reason for asking?" and she glanced at the
lady in the window. "So--"

The Marquise looked at her carefully; yes, the girl was undeniably
handsome; a medium sized, well-turned figure, small hands and feet,
graceful in movement, velvety oriental eyes, and the deep cream
complexion over which the artists had raved. She had the manner of one
well trained, but was strangely diffident before this lady of the
other world. The Marquise drew a deep breath as she realized how
attractive she could be to a man who cared.

"You are a fool," she said, harshly, "to care for a man who speaks so
of your people."

"Oh, Madame!" and the graceful form drooped helplessly. "I knew you
could never understand. But if folks only loved where it was wise to
love, all the trouble of the world would be ended."

The hand of the Marquise went to her throat for an instant.

"And then it is true, all they said there," continued Kora; "that is
why--why I had let you see me cry; what he said is true--and I--I
belong in his country where the yellow jasmine grows. There are times
when I never stop to think--weeks when I am satisfied that I have
money and a fine apartment. Then, all at once, in a minute like this,
I see that it does not weigh down the one drop of black blood in my
hand there. Sometimes I would sell my soul to wipe it out, and I
can't! I can't!"

Her emotions were again overwhelming her. The Marquise watched her
clench the shapely hands with their tapering fingers and many rings,
the pretty graceful bit of human furniture in an establishment for
such as _he_!

"An oriental prince was entertained by the Empress last week," she
remarked, abruptly. "His mother was a black woman, yours was not."

"I know; I try to understand it--all the difference that is made. I
can't do it; I have not the brain. I can only"--and she smiled
bitterly--"only learn to dance a little, and you don't need brain for
that. My God! How can they expect us to have brain when our mothers
and grandmothers had to live under laws forbidding a slave to dispute
any command of a white man? Madame, ladies like you--ladies of
France--could not understand. I could not tell you. Sometimes I think
money is all that can help you in this world. But even money can't
kill the poison he spoke of. We might be free for generations but the
curse would stay on us, because away back in the past our people had
been slaves."

"So have the ancestors of those men you listened to," said the
Marquise, and the girl looked at her wonderingly.

"_They!_ Why, Madame!"

"It is quite true. Everyone of them is the descendant of slaves of the
past. Every ancient race was at some time the slaves of some stronger
nation. Many of the masters of today are the descendants of people who
were bought and sold with the land for hundreds of years. Think of
that when they taunt you with slavery!"

"Oh! Madame!"

"And remember that every king and queen of Egypt for centuries, every
one told of in their bibles and histories, would look black beside the
woman who was your mother! Chut! do not look so startled! The
Caucassian of today is now believed by men of science to be only a
bleached negro. To be sure, it has taken thousands of years, and the
ice-fields and cave dwellings of the North to do the bleaching. But
man came originally from the Orient, the very womb of the earth from
which only creatures of color come forth."

"You!--a white lady! a noble! say this to comfort me; why?" asked the
girl. She had risen again and stood back of the chair. She looked half
frightened.

"I say it because, if you study such questions earnestly, you will
perceive how the opinion of those self-crowned judges will dwindle;
they will no longer loom above you because of your race. My child, you
are as royal as they by nature. It is the cultivation, the training,
the intellect built up through generations, by which they are your
superiors today. If your own life is commendable you need not be
ashamed because of your race."

Kora turned her head away, fingering the rings on her pretty hands.

"You--it is no use trying to make a lady like you understand," she
muttered, "but you know who I am, and it is too late now!"

She attempted to speak with the nonchalance customary to her, but the
entire interview, added to the conversation in the corridor, had
touched depths seldom stirred, and never before appealed to by a
woman. What other woman would have dared question her like that? And
it was not that she had been awed by the rank and majesty in which
this Marquise moved; she, Kora--who had laughed in the face of a
Princess whose betrothed was seen in Kora's carriage! No; it was not
the rank, it was the gentle, yet slightly imperious womanliness, back
of which could be felt a fund of sympathy new and strange to her; it
appealed to her as the reasoning of a man would appeal; and man was
the only compelling force hitherto acknowledged by Kora.

The Marquise looked at her thoughtfully, but did not speak. She was
too much of a girl herself to understand entirely the nature before
her or its temptations. They looked, really, about the same age, yet
for all the mentality of the Marquise, she knew Kora was right--the
world of emotions that was an open book to the bewitching octoroon was
an unknown world to her.

"The things I do not understand I will not presume to judge," she
said, at last, very gently; "but is there no one anywhere in this
world whose affection for you would be strong enough to help you live
away from these people who speak of you as those men spoke, yet who
are themselves accountable for the faults over which they laugh
together."

"Oh, what you have said has turned me against that Trouvelot--that
dandy!" she said, with a certain vehemence. "He is only a Count of
yesterday, after all; I'll remember that! Still; it is all the habit
of life, Madame, and I never knew any other. Look here; when I was
twelve I was told by an old woman to be careful of my hands, of my
good looks every way, for if I was handsome as my mother, I would
never need to do housework; that was the beginning! Well!" and she
smiled bitterly, "I have not had to do it, but it was through no
planning of theirs."

"And your mother?"

"Dead; and my father, too. He was her master."

"It is that spendthrift--Trouvelot, you care for?"

"Not this minute," confessed the girl; "but," and she shrugged her
shoulders, "I probably shall tomorrow! I know myself well enough for
that; and I won't lie--to you! You saw how he could make me cry? It is
only the man we care for who can hurt us."

The Marquise did not reply; she was staring out of the window. Kora,
watching her, did not know if she heard. She had heard and was angry
with herself that her heart grew lighter when she heard the name of
Kora's lover.

"I--I will not intrude longer, Madame," said the girl at last. "What
you've said will make me think more. I never heard of what you've told
me today. I wish there were women in America like you; oh, I wish
there were! There are good white ladies there, of course, but they
don't teach the slaves to think; they only tell them to have faith!
They teach them from their bible; and all I could ever remember of it
was: 'Servants, obey your masters;' and I hated it. So you see,
Madame, it is too late for me; I don't know any other life; I--"

"I will help you to a different life whenever you are willing to leave
Paris," said the Marquise.

"You would do that, Madame?"

Kora dropped into the chair again, covering her face with her hands.
After a little she looked up, and the cunning of her class was in her
eyes.

"Is it to separate me from _him_?" she asked, bluntly. "I know they
want him to marry; are you a friend of his family?"

The Marquise smiled at that.

"I really do not know if he has a family," she replied. "I am
interested because it seems so pitiful that a girl should never have
had a chance to live commendably. It is not too late. In your own
country a person of your intelligence and education should be able to
do much good among the children of the free colored people. You would
be esteemed. You--"

"Esteemed!" Kora smiled skeptically, thinking no doubt of the
half-world circle over which she was a power in her adopted city; she,
who had only to show herself in the spectacle to make more money than
a year's earnings in American school teaching. She knew she could not
really dance, but she did pose in a manner rather good; and then, her
beauty!

"I was a fool when I came here--to Paris," she said woefully. "I
thought everybody would know I was colored, so I told. But they would
not know," and she held out her hand, looking at the white wrist, "I
could have said I was a West Indian, a Brazilian, or a Spanish
Creole--as many others do. But it is all too late. America was never
kind to my people, or me. You mean to be kind, Madame; but you don't
know colored folks. They would be the first to resent my educational
advantages; not that I know much; books were hard work for me, and
Paris was the only one I could learn to read easy. As for America, I
own up, I'm afraid of America."

The Marquise thought she knew why, but only said:

"If you change your mind you can let me know. I have a property in New
Orleans. Some day I may go there. I could protect you if you would
help protect yourself." She looked at the lovely octoroon with
meaning, and the black velvety eyes fell under that regard.

"You can always learn where I am in Paris, and if you should change
your mind--" At the door she paused and said kindly: "My poor girl, if
you remain here he will break your heart."

"They usually do when a woman loves them, Madame," replied Kora, with
a sad little smile; she had learned so much in the book of Paris.

The friends of the Marquise were searching for her when she emerged
from the ante-room. The Countess Biron confessed herself in despair.

"In such a mixed assembly! and all alone! How was one to know what
people you might meet, or what adventures."

"Oh, I am not adventurous, Countess," was the smiling reply; "and let
me whisper: I have been talking all of the time with one person, one
very pretty person, and it has been an instructive half hour."

"Pretty? Well, that is assurance as to sex," remarked Madame Choudey,
with a glance towards one of the others of the party.

"And if you will watch that door you will be enlightened as to the
individual," said the Marquise.

Three pair of eyes turned with alertness to the door. At that moment
it opened, and Kora appeared. The lace veil no longer hid her
beautiful eyes--all the more lovely for that swift bath of tears. She
saw the Marquise and her friends, but passed as if she had never seen
one of them before; Kora had her own code.

"Are you serious, Judithe de Caron?" gasped the Countess Helene. "Were
you actually--conversing--with that--demi-mondaine?"

"My dear Marquise!" purred Madame Choudey, "when she does not even
_pretend_ to be respectable!"

"It is because she does not pretend that I spoke with her. Honesty
should receive some notice."

"Honesty! Good heavens!" cried Madame Ampere, who had not yet spoken,
but who expressed horror by her eyes, "where then do you find your
standards for such judgment?"

"Now, listen!" and the Marquise turned to the three with a quizzical
smile, "if Kora lived exactly the same life morally, but was a ruler
of the fashionable world, instead of the other one; if she wore a
crown of state instead of the tinsel of the varieties, you would not
exclaim if she addressed me."

"Oh, I must protest, Marquise," began Madame Ampere in shocked
remonstrance, but the Marquise smiled and stopped her.

"Yesterday," she said slowly, "I saw you in conversation with a man
who has the panels of his carriage emblazoned with the Hydrangea--also
called the Hortensia."

The shocked lady looked uncomfortable.

"What then? since it was the Emperor's brother."

"Exactly; the brother of the Emperor, and both of them the sons of a
mother beside whom beautiful Kora is a thing of chastity."

"The children could not help the fact that they were all half-brothers,"
laughed the Countess Helene.

"But this so-called Duke could help parading the doubtful honor of his
descent; yet who fails to return his bow? And I have yet to learn that
his mother was ignored by the ladies of her day. Those Hortensias on
his carriage are horrible to me; they are an attempt to exalt in a
queen the immorality condemned in a subject."

"Ah! You make my head swim with your theories," confessed the
Countess. "How do you find time to study them all?"

"They require no study; one meets them daily in the street or court.
The difficulty is to cease thinking of them--to enjoy a careless life
when justice is always calling somewhere for help."

"I refuse to be annoyed by the calls, yet am comfortable," said Madame
Choudey. "The people who imagine they hear justice calling have had,
too often, to follow the calls into exile."

"That is true," agreed her friend; "take care Marquise! Your theories
are very interesting, but, truly, you are a revolutionist."

Their little battle of words did not prevent them parting with smiles
and all pleasantry. But the Countess Biron, to whose house the
Marquise was going, grimaced and looked at her with a smile of doubt
when they were alone.

"Do you realize how daring you are Judithe?--to succeed socially you
should not appeal to the brains of people, but to their vanities."

"Farewell, my social ambitions!" laughed the Marquise. "Dear Countess,
pray do not scold! I could not help it. Why must the very respectable
world see only the sins of the unfortunate, and save all their charity
for the heads with coronets? Maman is not like that; she is always
gentle with the people who have never been taught goodness; though she
is severe on those who disgrace good training. I like her way best;
and Alain? Well, he only told me to do my own thinking, to be sure I
was right before I spoke, and to let no other consideration weigh at
all."

"Yes! and he died in exile because he let no worldly consideration
weigh," said the Countess Helene grimly.




CHAPTER IX.


At the entrance to the gallery the Marquise saw Dumaresque on the
step, and with him Kenneth McVeigh. She entered the carriage, hoping
the Countess would not perceive them; but the hope was in vain, she
did, and she motioned them both to her to learn if Mrs. McVeigh had
also unexpectedly returned.

She had not. Italy was yet attractive to her, and the Lieutenant had
come alone. He was to await her arrival, whenever she chose, and then
their holiday would be over. When they left Paris again it would be
for America.

He smiled in the same lazy, yet deferential way, as the Countess
chatted and questioned him. He confessed he did not remember why he
had returned; at least he could not tell in a crowd, or with cynical
Dumaresque listening to him.

"Invite him home, and he will vow it was to see you," said the
artist.

"I mean to," she retorted; "but do not judge all men by yourself,
Monsieur Loris, for I suspect Lieutenant McVeigh has a conscience."

"I have," he acknowledged, "too much of one to take advantage of your
invitation. Some day, when you are not tired from the crowds, I shall
come, if you will allow me."

"No, no; come now!" insisted the Countess, impulsively; "you will rest
me; I assure you it is true! We have been with women--women all
morning! So take pity on us. We want to hear all about the battle
grounds and fortresses you were to inspect. The Marquise, especially,
is a lover of wars."

"And of warriors?" queried Dumaresque; but the Countess paid no
attention to him.

"Yes, she is really a revolutionist, Monsieur; so come and enlighten
us as to the latest methods of those amiable patriots."

The Marquise had given him a gracious little bow, and had politely
shown interest in their remarks to such an extent that the Countess
did not notice her silence. But during the brief glance she noticed
that the blue eyes had dark circles under them, but they were steady
for all that. He looked tired, but he also looked more the master of
himself than when they last met; she need fear no further pleading.

The Countess prevailed, and he entered the carriage. Dumaresque was
also invited, but was on some committee of arrangements and could not
leave.

As they were about to drive away the Marquise called him.

"Oh, Monsieur Loris, one moment! I want the black and white sketch of
your Kora. Pray have it bid in for me."

It was the first time she had ever called him Loris, except in her own
home, and as a partial echo of the dowager. His eyes thanked her, and
Kenneth McVeigh received the benefit both of her words and the look.

"But, my dear Marquise, it will give me pleasure to make you something
finer of the same subject."

"No, no; only the sketch. I will value it as a souvenir of--well--do
not let any one else have it."

Then she bowed, flashed a rare smile at him, and they wheeled away
with McVeigh facing her and noting with his careless smile every
expression of her coquetry. He had gone away a boy--so she had called
him; but he had come back man enough to hide the hurts she gave him,
and willing to let her know it.

Someway he appeared more as he had when she met him first under the
beeches; then he had seemed so big, so strong, so masterful, that she
had never thought of his years. But she knew now he was younger than
he looked.

She had plenty of time to think of this, and of many other things,
during the drive.

The Countess monopolized the young officer with her questions. He
endeavored to make the replies she invited, and neither of them
appeared to note that the share of the Marquise was limited to an
interested expression, and an occasional smile.

She studied his well-formed, strong hands, and thought of the night
they had held her own--thought of all the impetuous, passionate words;
try as she would to drive them away they came back with a rush as his
cool, widely different tones fell on her ear. What a dissembler the
fellow was! All that evil nature which she knew about was hidden under
an exterior so engaging! "_If one only loved where it was wise to
love, all the sorrows of the world would be ended,_" those words of
the pretty figureante haunted her, with all their meaning beating
through her brain. What a farce seemed the careless, empty chatter
beside her! It grew unbearable, to feel his careless glance sweep
across her face, to hear him laugh carelessly, to be conscious of the
fact that after all he was the stronger; he could face her easily,
graciously, and she did not dare even meet his eyes lest he should,
after all, see; the thought of her weakness frightened her; suppose he
should compel her to the truth. Suppose--

She felt half hysterical; the drive had never before been so long. She
feared she must scream--do something to break through this horrible
chain of circumstances, linking them for even so short a space within
touch of each other. And he was the man she had promised herself to
hate, to make suffer, to--

Some one did scream; but it was the Countess. Out of a side street
came a runaway team, a shouting man heralding their approach. At that
point street repairs had left only a narrow carriage-way, and a wall
of loose stone; there was no time to get out of the way; no room to
turn. There was a collision, a crash! The horses of the Countess
leaped aside, the right front wheel struck the heap of stone, flinging
the driver from his seat. He fell, and did not move again.

At that sight the Countess uttered a gasp and sank to the bottom of
the carriage. The Marquise stooped over her only for an instant, while
the carriage righted itself and all four wheels were on a level once
more; the horses alone had been struck, and were maddened with fear,
and in that madness lay their only danger now.

She lifted her head, and the man opposite, in her instant of
shrinking, had leaped over the back of the seat to secure the lines of
the now thoroughly wild animals.

One line was dragging between them on the ground. Someway he
maintained his footing on the carriage pole long enough to secure the
dragging line, and when he gained the driver's seat the Marquise was
beside him.

She knew what lay before them, and he did not--a dangerous curve, a
steep embankment--and they had passed the last street where they could
have turned into a less dangerous thoroughfare.

People ran out and threw up their hands and shouted. She heard him
fling an oath at them for adding fury to the maddened animals.

"It is no use," she said, and laid her hand on his. He turned and met
her eyes. No veil of indifference was between them now, no coquetry;
all pretense was swept aside and the look they exchanged was as a
kiss.

"You love me--now?" he demanded, half fiercely.

"Now, and always, from the first hour you looked at me!" she said,
with her hand on his wrist. His grip tightened on the lines, and the
blood leaped into his face.

"My love, my love!" he whispered; and she slipped on her knees beside
him that she might not see the danger to be faced.

"It is no use, Kenneth, Kenneth! There is the bank ahead--they cannot
stop--it will kill us! It is just ahead!"

She was muttering disjointed sentences, her face averted, her arms
clasping him.

"Kill us? Don't you believe it!" And he laughed a trifle nervously.
"Look up, sweetheart; the danger is over. I knew it when you first
spoke. See! They are going steady now."

They were. He had gained control of them in time to make the dangerous
curve in safety. They were a quarter of the way along the embankment.
Workmen there stared at the lady and gentleman on the coachman's seat,
and at the rather rapid gait; but the real danger was over.

They halted at a little cafe, which was thrown into consternation at
sight of a lady insensible in the bottom of the carriage; but a little
wine and the administrations of the Marquise aided her recovery, and
in a short time enabled her to hear the account of the wild race.

The driver had a broken arm, and one of the horses was slightly
injured. Lieutenant McVeigh had sent back about the man, and secured
another team for the drive home. He was now walking up and down the
pavement in front of the cafe, in very good spirits, and awaiting the
pleasure of the Countess.

They drove home at once; the Countess voluably grateful to Kenneth,
and apparently elated over such a tremendous adventure. The young
officer shared her high spirits, and the Marquise was the only silent
member of the party. After the danger was passed she scarcely spoke.
When he helped her into the carriage the pressure of his hand and one
whispered word sent the color sweeping over her face, leaving it paler
than before. She scarcely lifted her eyes for the rest of the drive,
and after retiring for a few moments' rest, apparently, broke down
entirely; the nervous strain had proven rather trying, and she was
utterly unable--to her own regret--to join them at lunch.

Lieutenant McVeigh begged to withdraw, but the Countess Biron, who
declared she had never been the heroine of a thrilling adventure,
before, insisted that she at least was quite herself again, and would
feel cheated if their heroic deliverer did not remain for a lunch,
even though it be a tete-a-tete affair; and she, of course, wanted to
hear all the details of the horror; that child, Judithe, had not
seemed to remember much; she supposed she must have been terribly
frightened. "Yet, one never knew how the Marquise would be effected by
_any_ thing! She was always surprising people; usually in delightful
ways, of course."

"Of course," assented her guest, with a reminiscent gleam and a wealth
of absolute happiness in the blue eyes. "Yes, she is rather surprising
at times; she surprised me!"

                  *       *       *       *       *

"Judithe, my child, it was an ideal adventure," insisted the Countess,
an hour after the Lieutenant had left her, and she had repaired to
the room where the Marquise was supposed to be resting. Her
nervousness had evidently not yet abated, for she was walking up and
down the floor.

"An absolutely ideal adventure, and a heroic foreigner to the rescue!
What a god-send that I invited him! And I really believe he enjoyed
it. I never before saw him so gay, so charming! There are men, you
know, to whom danger is a tonic, and my friend's son is like that,
surely. Did he not seem at all afraid?"

"Not that I observed."

"Did he not say anything?"

"Y--yes; he swore at the people who shouted and tried to stop the
horses."

"You should not have let yourself hear that," said the Countess,
reproachfully. "I thought he was so perfect, and was making my little
romance about him--or could, if you would only show a little more
interest. Ah! at your age I should have been madly in love with the
fine fellow, just for what he did today; but _you_! Still, it would be
no use, I suppose. He is fiancee, you know. Yes; the mother told me; a
fine settlement; I saw her picture--very pretty."

"American--I suppose?"

"Oh, yes; their lands join, and she is a great heiress. The name--the
name is Loring--Genevieve? No--Gertrude, Mademoiselle Gertrude Loring.
Ah! so strong he was, so heroic. If she loves him she should have seen
him today."

"Yes," agreed the Marquise, with a curious little smile, "she
should."

                  *       *       *       *       *

Two hours later she was on her knees beside the dowager's couch, her
face hidden and all her energy given to one plea:

"Maman--Maman! Do not question me; only give me your trust--let us go
away!"

"But the man--tah! It is only a fancy; why should you leave for that?
Whoever it is, the infatuation grew quickly and will die out the same
way--so--"

"No! If I remain I cannot answer for myself. I am ashamed to confess
it, but--listen, Maman--but put your arms around me first; he is not
worthy, I know it; yet I love him! He vows love to me, yet he is
betrothed; I know that, _also_; but I have no reason left, and my
folly will make me go to him if you do not help me. Listen, Maman!
I--I will do all you say. I will marry in a year--two years--when this
is all over. I will obey you in everything, if you will only take me
away. I cannot leave you; yet I am afraid to stay where he is."

"Afraid! But, Judithe, my child, no one shall intrude upon you. Your
friends will protect you from such a man. You have only to refuse to
see him, and in a little while--"

"Refuse! Maman, what can I say to make you understand that I could
never refuse him again? Yet, oh, the humiliation! Maman, he is the man
I despised--the man I said was not fit to be spoken to; it was all
true, but when I hear his voice it makes me forget his unworthiness.
Listen, Maman! I--I confessed to him today that I loved him; yet I
know he is the man who by the laws of America is the owner of Rhoda
Larue, and he is now the betrothed of her half-sister; I heard the
name of his fiancee today, and it told me the whole story. He is the
man! _Now_, will you take me away?"

The next morning the dowager, Marquise de Caron, left her Paris home
for the summer season. Her destination was indefinitely mentioned as
Switzerland. Her daughter-in-law accompanied her.

And to Kenneth McVeigh, waiting impatiently the hour when he might go
to her, a note was given:

  "Monsieur:

  "My words of yesterday had no meaning. I was frightened and
  irresponsible. When you read this I will have left Paris. By not
  meeting again we will avoid further mistakes of the same nature.

  "This is my last word to you.

                                                    "JUDITHE CARON."

For two weeks he tried in vain to find her. Then he was recalled to
Paris to meet his mother, who was ready for home. She was shocked at
his appearance, and refused to believe that he had not been ill during
her absence, and had some motherly fears regarding Parisian
dissipations, from which she decided to remove him, if possible. He
acknowledged he would be glad to go--he was sick of Europe any way.

The last day he took a train for Fontainbleau, remained two hours
under the beeches, alone, and got back to Paris in time to make the
train for Havre.

After they had got comfortably established on a homeward-bound vessel,
and he was watching the land line grow fainter over the waters, Mrs.
McVeigh came to him with a bit of news read from the last journal
brought aboard.

The dowager, Marquise de Caron, had established herself at Geneva for
the season, accompanied by her daughter, the present Marquise, whose
engagement to Monsieur Loris Dumaresque had just been announced.




CHAPTER X.


Long before the first gun had been fired at Fort Sumter, Madame la
Marquise was able to laugh over that summer-time madness of hers, and
ridicule herself for the wasted force of that infatuation.

She was no longer a recluse unacquainted with men. The prophecy of
Madame, the dowager, that if left alone she would return to the
convent, had not been verified. The death of the dowager occurred
their first winter in Paris, after Geneva, and the Marquise had not
yet shown a predilection for nunneries.

She had seen the world, and it pleased her well enough; indeed, the
portion of the world she came in contact with did its best to please
her, and with a certain feverish eagerness she went half way to meet
it.

People called her a coquette--the most dangerous of coquettes, because
she was not a cold one. She was responsive and keenly interested up to
the point where admirers declared themselves, and proposals of
marriage followed; after _that_, every man was just like every other
one! Yet she was possessed of an idea that somewhere there existed a
hitherto undiscovered specimen who could discuss the emotions and the
philosophies in delightful sympathy, and restrain the expression of
his own personal emotions to tones and glances, those indefinite
suggestions that thrill yet call for no open reproof--no reversal of
friendship.

So, that was the man she was seeking in the multitudes--and on the
way there were surely amusements to be found!

Dumaresque remonstrated. She defended herself with the avowal that she
was only avenging weaker womanhood, smiled at, won, and forgotten, as
his sex were fond of forgetting.

"But we expect better things of women," he declared warmly; "not a
deliberate intention of playing with hearts to see how many can be
hurt in a season. Judithe, you are no longer the same woman. Where is
the justice you used to gauge every one by? Where the mercy to others
weaker than yourself?"

"Gone!" she laughed lightly; "driven away in self-defense! I have had
to put mercy aside lest it prove my master. The only safeguard against
being too warm to all may be to be cool to all. You perceive that
would never--never do. So--!"

"End all this unsatisfied, feverish life by marrying me," he pleaded.
"I will take you from Paris. With all your social success you have
never been happy here; we will travel. You promised, Judithe, and--"

"Chut! Loris; you are growing ungallant. You should never remember a
woman's promise after she has forgotten it. We were betrothed--yes.
But did I not assure you I might never marry? Maman was made happy for
a little while by the fancy; but now?--well, matrimony is no more
appealing to me than it ever was, and you would not want an
indifferent wife. I like you, you best of all those men you champion,
but I love none of you! Not that I am lacking in affection, but
rather, incapable of concentrating it on one object."

"Once, it was not so; I have not forgotten the episode of Fontainbleu."

"That? Pouf! I have learned things since then, Loris. I have learned
that once, at least, in every life love seems to have been born on
earth for the first time; happy those whom it does not visit too late!
Well! I, also, had to have my little experience; it had to be _some_
one; so it was that stranger. But I have outgrown all that; we always
outgrow those things, do we not? I compare him now with the men I have
known since, and he shrinks, he dwindles! I care only for intellectual
men, and the artistic temperament. He had neither. Yes, it is true;
the girlish fancies appear ridiculous in so short a time."

Dumaresque agreed that it was true of any fancy, to one of fickle
nature.

"No, it is not fickleness," she insisted. "Have you no boyish loves of
the past hidden away, each in their separate nook of memory? Confess!
Are you and the world any the worse for them? Certainly not. They each
contributed a certain amount towards the education of the emotions.
Well; is my education to be neglected because you fear I shall injure
the daintily-bound books in the human library? I shall not, Loris. I
only flutter the leaves a little and glance at the pictures they
offer, but I never covet one of them for my own, and never read one to
the finale, hence--"

Dumaresque left soon after for an extended artistic pilgrimage into
northern Africa, and people began to understand that there would be no
wedding. The engagement had only been made to comfort the dowager.

Judithe de Caron regretted his departure more than she had regretted
anything since the death of the woman who had been a mother to her.
There was no one else with whom she could be so candid--no man who
inspired her with the same confidence. She compared him with the
American, and told herself how vastly her friend was the superior.

Had McVeigh been one of the scholarly soldiers of Europe, such as she
had since known--men of breadth and learning, she could have
understood her own infatuation. But he was certainly provincial, and
not at all learned. She had met many cadets since, and had studied
them. They knew their military tactics--the lessons of their schools.
They flirted with the grissettes, and took on airs; they drank and had
pride in emptying more glasses and walking straighter afterwards than
their comrades. They were very good fellows, but heavens! how shallow
they were! So _he_ must have been. She tried to remember a single
sentence uttered by him containing wisdom of any sort whatever--there
had not been one. His silences had been links to bind her to him. His
glances had been revelations, and his words had been only: "I adore
you."

So many men had said the same thing since. It seemed always the sort
of thing men said when conversation flagged. But in those earlier days
she had not known that, hence the fact that she--well, she knew now!

Twice she had met that one-time bondwoman, Kora, and the meeting left
her thoughtful, and not entirely satisfied with herself.

How wise she could be in advice to that pretty butterfly! How plainly
she could work out a useful life to be followed by--some one else!

Her more thoughtful moods demanded: Why not herself? Her charities
of the street, her subscriptions to worthy funds, her patronage
of admirable institutions, all these meant nothing. Dozens of
fashionables and would-be fashionables did the same. It was
expected of them. Those charities opened a door through which
many entered the inner circles.

She had fitful desires to do the things people did not expect. She
detested the shams of life around her in that inner circle. She felt
at times she would like to get them all under her feet--trample them
down and make room for something better; but for what? She did not
know. She was twenty-one, wealthy, her own mistress, and was tired of
it all. When she drove past laughing Kora on the avenue she was more
tired of it than ever.

"How am I better than she but by accident?" she asked herself. "She
amuses herself--poor little bondslave, who has only changed masters! I
amuse myself (without a master, it is true, and more elegantly,
perhaps), but with as little usefulness to the world."

She felt ashamed when she thought of Alain and his mother, who seemed
to have lived only to help others. They had given over the power to
her, and how poorly she had acquitted herself!

Once--when she first came with the dowager to Paris--the days had been
all too short for her plans and dreams of usefulness; how long ago
that seemed.

Now, she knew that the owner of wealth is the victim of multitudinous
schemes of the mendicant, whether of the street corner or the
fashionable missions. She had lost faith in the efficacy of alms. No
cause came to her with force enough to re-awaken her enthusiasms.
Everything was so tame--so old!

One day she read in a journal that the usefulness of Kora as a dancer
was over. There had been an accident at the theatre, her foot was
smashed; not badly enough to call for amputation, but too much for her
ever to dance again.

The Marquise wondered if the fair-weather friends would desert her
now. She had heard of Trouvelot, an exquisite who followed the
fashions in everything, and Kora had succeeded in being the fashion
for two seasons. She was just as pretty, no doubt--just as adorable,
but--

As the weeks of that winter went by rumors from the Western world were
thick with threats of strife. State after State had seceded. The South
was marshalling her forces, training her men, urging the necessity of
defending State rights and maintaining their power to govern a portion
as ably as they had the whole of the United States during the eighty
years of its governmental life. The North, with its factories, its
foreign commerce, and its manifold requirements, had bred the
politicians of the country. But the South, with its vast agricultural
States, its wealth, and its traditions of landed ancestry, had
produced the orators--the statesman--the men who had shone most
brilliantly in the pages of their national history.

From the shores of France one could watch some pretty moves in the
games evolving about that promise of civil war; the creeping forward
of England to help widen the breach between the divided sections, and
the swift swinging of Russian war vessels into the harbors of the
Atlantic--the silent bear of the Russias facing her hereditary English
foe and forbidding interference, until the lion gave way with low
growlings, not daring to even roar his chagrin, but contenting himself
with night-prowlings during the four years that followed.

All those wheels within wheels were discussed around the Marquise de
Caron in those days. Her acquaintance with the representatives of
different nations and the diplomats of her own, made her aware of many
unpublished moves for advantage in the game they surveyed. The
discussion of them, and guesses as to the finale, helped to awake her
from the lethargy she had deplored. Remembering that the McVeighs
belonged to a seceding state, she asked many questions and forgot none
of the replies.

"Madame La Marquise, I was right," said a white moustached general one
night at a great ball, where she appeared. "Was it not a rose you
wagered me? I have won. War is declared in America. In South Carolina,
today, the Confederates won the first point, and secured a Federal
fort."

"General! they have not dared!"

"Madame, those Southerons are daring above everything. I have met
them. Their men are fighters, and they will be well officered."

Well officered! She thought of Kenneth McVeigh, he would be one of
them; yes, she supposed that was one thing he could do--fight; a thing
requiring brute strength, brute courage!

"So!" said the Countess Biron, who seldom was acquainted with the
causes of any wars outside those of court circles, "this means that if
the Northern States should retaliate and conquer, all the slaves would
be free?"

"Not at all, Countess. The North does not interfere with slavery where
it exists, only protests against its extension to greater territory."

"Oh! Well; I understood it had something to do with the Africans. That
clever young Delaven devoted an entire hour to my enlightenment
yesterday. And my poor friend, Madame McVeigh, you remember her,
Judithe? She is in the Carolinas. I tremble to think of her position
now; an army of slaves surrounding them, and, of course, only awaiting
the opportunity for insurrection."

"And Louisiana seceded two months ago," said the Marquise, and then
smiled. "You will think me a mercenary creature," she declared, "but I
have property in New Orleans which I have never seen, and I am
wondering whether its value will rise or fall because of the proposed
change of government."

"You have never seen it?"

"No; it was a purchase made by my husband from some home-sick
relative, who had thought to remain there, but could not live away
from France. I have promised myself to visit it some day. It would be
exceedingly difficult to do so now, I suppose, but how much more
spirited a journey it would be; for each side will have vessels on
guard all along the coast, will they not?"

"There will at least be enough to deter most ladies from taking
adventurous pilgrimages in that direction. I shall not advise you to
go unless under military escort, Marquise."

"I shall notify you, General, when my preparations are made; in the
meantime here is your rose; and would not my new yacht do for the
journey?"

So, jesting and questioning, she accepted his arm and made the circle
of the rooms. Everywhere they heard fragments of the same topic.
Americans were there from both sections. She saw a pretty woman from
Alabama nod and smile, but put her hands behind her when a hitherto
friendly New Yorker gave her greeting.

"We women can't do much to help," she declared, in those soft tones of
the South, "but we can encourage our boys by being pronounced in our
sympathies. I certainly shall not shake hands with a Northerner who
may march with the enemy against our men; how can I?"

"Suppose we talk it over and try to find a way," he suggested. Then
they both smiled and passed on together. Judithe de Caron found
herself watching them with a little ache in her heart. She could see
they were almost, if not quite, lovers; yet all their hopes were
centered on opposite victories. How many--many such cases there must
be!

                  *       *       *       *       *

Before spring had merged into summer, a lady, veiled, and giving no
name, was announced to the Marquise. Rather surprised at the
mysterious call, she entered the reception room, and was again
surprised when the lifted veil disclosed the handsome face of the
octoroon, Kora.

She had lost some of her brilliant color, and her expression was more
settled, it had less of the butterfly brightness.

"You see, Madame, I have at last taken you at your word."

The Marquise, who was carefully noting the alteration in her, bowed,
but made no remark. The face of the octoroon showed uncertainty.

"Perhaps--perhaps I have waited too long," she said, and half rose.

"No, no; you did right to come. I expected you--yes, really! Now be
seated and tell me what it is."

"First, that you were a prophetess, Madame," and the full lips smiled
without merriment. "I am left alone, now that I have neither money nor
the attraction for the others. He only followed the crowd--to me, and
away from me!"

"Well?"

"Well, it is not about _that_ I come! But, Madame, I am going to
America; not to teach, as you advised, but I see now a way in which I
can really help."

"Help whom?"

Her visitor regarded her with astonishment; was it possible that she,
the woman whose words had aroused the first pride of race in her, the
first thought of her people unlinked with shame! That she had so soon
forgotten? Had she remembered the pupil, but failed to recall the
lesson taught?

"You have probably forgotten the one brief conversation with which you
honored me, Madame. But I mean the people we discussed then--my
people."

"You mean the colored people."

"Certainly, Madame."

"But you are more white than colored."

"Oh, yes; that is true, but the white blood would not count in America
if it were known there was one drop of black blood in my mother. But
no one need know it; I go from France, I will speak only French, and
if you would only help me a little."

She grew prettier in her eagerness, and her eyes brightened. The
Marquise smiled at the change enthusiasm made.

"You must tell me the object for which you go."

"It is the war, Madame; in time this war must free the colored folks;
it is talked of already; it is said the North will put colored
soldiers in the field; that will be the little, thin edge of the
wedge, and if I could only get there, if you would help me to some
position, or a recommendation to people in New Orleans; any way so
that people would not ask questions or be curious about me--if you
would only do that madame!"

"But what will you do when there?"

The girl glanced about the room and spoke more softly.

"I am trusting you, Madame, without asking who you side with in our
war, but even if you are against us I--I trust you! They tell me the
South is the strongest. They have been getting ready for this a long
time. The North will need agents in the South. I have learned some
things here--people talk so much. I am going to Washington. From
there I will go south. No one will know me in New Orleans. I will
change my name, and I promise not to bring discredit on any
recommendation you may give me."

"It is a plan filled with difficulties and dangers. What has moved you
to contemplate such sacrifices?"

"You, Madame!" The Marquise flushed slightly. "From the time you
talked to me I wanted to do something, be something better. But, you
know, it seemed no use; there was no need of me anywhere but in Paris.
That is all over. I can go now, and I have some information worth
taking to the Federal government. The South has commissioners here
now. I have learned all they have accomplished, and the people they
have interested, so if I had a little help--"

"You shall have it!" declared the Marquise. "I have been dying of
ennui. Your plan is a cure for me--better than a room full of
courtiers! But if I give you letters it must be to my lawyers in New
Orleans--clever, shrewd men--and I should have to trust you entirely,
remember."

"I shall not forget, Madame."

"Very good; come tomorrow. What can you do about an establishment such
as mine? Ladies maid? Housekeeper? Governess?"

"Any of those; but only governess to very small children."

"Come tomorrow. I shall have planned something by then. I have an
engagement in a few minutes, and have no more time today. By the way,
have you ever been in Georgia or South Carolina?"

Kora hesitated, and then said: "Yes, Madame."

"Have you any objection to going back there?"

The octoroon looked at her in a startled, suspicious way.

"I hesitate to reply to that, Madame, for reasons! I don't mind
telling you, though, that there is one place in America where I might
be claimed, if they knew me. I am not anxious to visit that place."

"Naturally! Tomorrow at eleven I will see you, and you can tell me all
about it. If I am to act as your protectress I must know all you can
tell me--_all_! It is the only way. I like the mystery and intrigue of
the whole affair. It promises new sensations. I will help you show
that government that you are willing to help your people. Come
tomorrow."

A few days later the Marquise set her new amusement on foot by bidding
adieu to a demure, dark eyed, handsome girl, who was garbed most
sedately, and whose letters of introduction pronounced her--oh,
sentiment or irony of women--Madame Louise Trouvelot, an attache of
the Caron establishment, commissioned by the Marquise to inspect the
dwellings on the Caron estate in New Orleans, and report as to whether
any one of them would be suitable for a residence should the owner
desire to visit the city. If none should prove so, Louise Trouvelot,
who comprehended entirely the needs of the Marquise, was further
commissioned to look up such a residence with a view to purchase, and
communicate with the Marquise and with her American lawyers, who were
to give assistance to Louise Trouvelot in several business matters,
especially relating to her quest.




CHAPTER XI.

ON THE SALKAHATCHIE.


Scarce a leaf quivered on the branches of the magnolias, or a tress of
gray-green moss on the cypress boughs. All the world of the
Salkahatchie was wrapped in siesta. The white clouds drifting on
palest turquoise were the only moving things except the water flowing
beneath, and its soft swish against the gunnels of the floating wharf
made the only sound.

The plantation home of Loringwood, facing the river, and reached
through the avenue of enormous live oaks, looked an enchanted palace
touched with the wand of silence.

From the wide stone steps to the wide galleries, with their fluted
pillars, not a murmur but the winged insects droning in the tangled
grasses, for the wild luxuriance of rose tree and japonica, of lawn
and crape myrtle, betrayed a lack of pruning knives in the immediate
season past; and to the south, where the rice fields had reached acre
beyond acre towards the swamps, there were now scattered patches of
feathering young pine, creeping everywhere not forbidden to it by the
hand of man.

Spring time and summer time, for almost a century, had been lived
through under its sloping, square, dormer-windowed roof. But all the
blue sky and brilliant sunshine above could not save it from a
suggestion of autumn, and the shadows lengthening along the river were
in perfect keeping with the entire picture--a picture of perpetual
afternoon.

"Row-lock," "Row-lock," sounded the dip and click of paddles, as a
boat swept close to the western bank, where the shadows fell. Two
Afro-Americans bent in rhythmic motion--bronze human machines, whose
bared arms showed nothing of effort as they sent the boat cutting
through the still water.

A middle-aged woman in a voluminous lavender lawn and carrying a
parasol of plaid silk-green, with faded pink bars, sat in the after
part of the boat, while a slight brown-haired girl just in front
amused herself by catching at branches of willows as they passed.

"Evilena, honey, you certainly are like to do yourself a hurt reaching
out like that, and if you _should_ go over!"

"But I shan't, Aunt Sajane. Do you reckon I'd risk appearing before
Gertrude Loring in a draggled gown just when she has returned from the
very heart of the civilized world? Goodness knows, we'll all look
dowdy enough to her."

Aunt Sajane (Mistress Sarah Jane Nesbitt) glanced down at her own
immaculate lawn, a little faded but daintily laundered, and at her own
trim congress-gaitered feet.

"Oh, I didn't mean you," added the girl, laughing softly. "Aunt
Sajane, I truly do believe that if you had nothing but gunny sacks for
dresses you'd contrive to look as if you'd just come out of a
bandbox."

"I'd wear gunny sacks fast enough if it was to help the cause," agreed
Aunt Sajane, with a kindly smile. "So would you, honey."

"Honey" trailed her fingers in the waters, amber-tinted from the roots
of the cypress trees.

"If a letter from mama comes today we will just miss it."

"Only by a day. Brother Gideon will send it."

"But suppose he's away somewhere on business, or up there at Columbia
on state councils or conventions, or whatever they are, as he is just
now?"

"Then Pluto will fetch it right over," and she glanced at one of the
black men, who showed his teeth for an instant and bent his head in
assent.

"Don't see why Judge Clarkson was _ever_ named Gideon," protested the
girl. "It's a hard, harsh sort of name, and he's as--as--"

"Soft?" queried the judge's sister, with an accompaniment of easy
laughter. The youngest of the two oarsmen grinned. Pluto maintained a
well-bred indifference.

"No!" and the girl flung a handful of willow leaves over the lavender
lawn. "He is--well--just about right, the judge is; so gentle, so
considerate, so altogether magnificent in his language. I've adored
him as far back as when he fought the duel with the Northern man who
reflected some way on our customs; that was starting a war for his
state all alone, before anyone else thought of it, I reckon. I must
have been very little then, for I just recollect how he used to let me
look in his pockets for candy, and I was awfully afraid of the pistols
I thought he must carry there to shoot people with," and she smiled at
the childish fancy. "I tell you, Aunt Sajane, if my papa had lived
there's just one man I'd like him to favor, and that's our judge. But
he didn't, did he?"

"No, he didn't," said Aunt Sajane. "The McVeigh men were all dark,
down to Kenneth, and he gets his fairness from your ma." Then she
added, kindly, "the judge will be very proud of your admiration."

"Hope he'll care enough about it to hurry right along after us. He
does put in a powerful lot of his time in Charleston and Columbia
lately," and the tone was one of childish complaint.

"Why, honey, how you suppose our soldier boys would be provided for
unless some of the representative men devote their time to the work?
It's a consolation to me that Gideon is needed for civil service just
now, for if he wasn't he wouldn't be so near home as he is; he'd be
somewhere North with a regiment, and I reckon that wouldn't suit you
any better."

"No, it wouldn't," agreed the girl, "though I do like a man who will
fight, of course. _Any_ girl does."

"Oh, Honey!"

"Yes they do, too. But just now I don't want him either fighting or in
legislature. I want him right along with us at Loringwood. If he isn't
there to talk to Mr. Loring it won't be possible to have a word alone
with Gertrude all the time we stay. How he _does_ depend on her, and
what an awful time she must have had all alone with him in Paris while
he was at that hospital, or whatever it was."

"Not many girls so faithful as Gertrude Loring," agreed Aunt Sajane.
"Not that he has ever shown much affection for her, either,
considering she is his own brother's child. But she certainly has
shown a Christian sense of duty towards him. Well, you see, they are
the only ones left of the family. It's natural, I suppose."

"_I_ would think it natural to run away and leave him, like Aleck and
Scip did."

Aunt Sajane cast a warning glance towards the two oarsmen.

"Well, I would," insisted the girl. "I wonder no more of them ran away
when they thought he was coming home. How he must have raved! _I_
shouldn't wonder if it prostrated him again. You know old Doctor
Allison said it was just a fit of temper caused--"

"Yes, yes, honey; but you know we are to sleep under his roof
tonight."

"I'll sleep under Gertrude's half of it," laughed the girl. "It's no
use reminding me of my bad manners, Aunt Sajane. But as long as I can
remember anyone, I've had two men in my mind. One always grunted at me
and told me to take my doll somewhere else or be quiet. That was
Kenneth's guardian, Matthew Loring. The other man always had sugar
kisses in his pocket for me and gave me my first dog and my only pony.
That was Judge Clarkson. You see if my judge had not been so lovely
the other would not have seemed so forbidding. It was the contrast did
it. I wonder--I wonder if he ever had a sweetheart?"

"Gideon Clarkson? Lots of them," said his sister, promptly.

"I meant Mr. Loring."

"Nonsense, honey, nonsense."

"And nonsense means no," decided the girl. "I thought it would be
curious if he had," then an interval of silence, broken only by the
dip of the oars. "Gertrude's note said a Paris doctor is with them, a
friend of Kenneth and mama. Well, I only hope _he_ isn't a crusty old
sweetheartless man. But of course he is if Mr. Loring chose him. I'm
wild to know how they got through the blockade. Oh, dear, how I wish
it was Ken!"

"I don't suppose you wish it any more than the boy himself," said Aunt
Sajane, with a sigh. "There's a good many boys scattered from home,
these days, who would be glad to be home again."

"But not unless they gain what they went for," declared the girl in
patriotic protest.

The older woman sighed, and said nothing. Her enthusiasms of a year
ago had been shrouded by the crape of a mourning land; the glory of
conquest would be compensation, perhaps, and would be gained, no
doubt. But the price to be paid chilled her and left her without words
when Evilena revelled in the glories of the future.

"Loringwood line," said Pluto, motioning towards a great ditch leading
straight back from the river.

Evilena shrugged her shoulders with a little pretense of chill, and
laughed.

"That is only a reminder of what I used to feel when Gertrude's uncle
came to our house. I wonder if this long dress will prevent him from
grunting at me or ordering me out of the room if I talk too much."

"Remember, Evilena, he has been an invalid for four years, and is
excusable for almost any eccentricity."

"How did you all excuse his eccentricities before he got sick, Aunt
Sajane?"

Receiving no reply, the girl comforted herself with the appreciative
smile of the oarsmen, who were evidently of her mind as to the planter
under discussion, and a mile further they ran the boat through the
reeds and lily pads to the little dock at Loringwood.

Mrs. Nesbitt shook out the folds of her crisp lawn, adjusted her
bonnet and puffs and sighed, as they walked up the long avenue.

"I can remember when the lily pads never could get a chance to grow
there on account of the lot of company always coming in boats," she
said, regretfully, "and I've heard that the old Lorings lived like
kings here long ago; wild, reckless, magnificent men; not at all like
the Lorings now; and oh, my, how the place has been neglected of late.
Not a sign of life about the house. Now, in _Tom_ Loring's time--"

They had reached the foot of the steps when the great double doors
swung back and a woman appeared on the threshold and inclined her head
in greeting.

"Well, Margeret, I am glad to see some one alive," declared Mrs.
Nesbitt; "the place is so still."

"Yes; just look at Pluto and Bob," said Evilena, motioning towards the
boatmen. "One would think a ghost had met them at the landing, they
are so subdued."

The brown eyed, grey haired woman in the door glanced at the two
colored men who were following slowly along a path towards the back of
the house.

"Yes, Miss Lena, it is quiet," she agreed. "Please step in Mistress
Nesbitt. I'll have Raquel show you right up to your rooms, for Miss
Loring didn't think you could get here for an hour yet, and she felt
obliged to ride over to the north corner, but won't be gone long."

"And Mr. Loring--how is he?"

"Mr. Loring is very much worn out. He's gone asleep now. Doctor says
he's not to be seen just yet."

"Oh, yes; the doctor. I'll see him directly after I've rested a
little. He speaks English, I hope. Are you coming up, honey?"

"Not yet. I'll keep a lookout for Gertrude."

Margeret had touched a bell and in response a little black girl had
appeared, who smiled and ducked her head respectfully.

"Howdy, Miss Sajane? Howdy, Miss Lena?" she exclaimed, her black eyes
dancing. "I dunno how come it come, I nevah heerd you all, for I done
got--"

"Raquel, you show Mistress Nesbitt to the west room," said the quiet
tones of Margeret, and Raquel's animation subsided into wordless grins
as she gathered up the sunshade, reticule and other belongings, and
preceded Mistress Nesbitt up the stairs.

"If there's anything I can do for you just send Raquel for me."

"Thank you, Margeret. I'll remember."

Margeret crossed the hall to the parlor door and opened it.

"If you'd rather rest in here, Miss Lena--"

"No, no; I'll go look for Gertrude. Don't mind me. I remember all the
rooms well enough to make myself at home till she comes."

Margeret inclined her head slightly and moved along the hall to the
door of the dining room, which she entered.

Evilena looked after her with a dubious smile in the blue-gray eyes.

"I wonder if I could move as quietly as that even with my feet
_bare_," and she tried walking softly on the polished oak floor, but
the heels of her shoes would persist in giving out little clicking
sounds as Margeret's had not.

"It's no use. No living person with shoes on could walk silently as
that woman. She's just a ghost who--_a-gh-gh_!"

Her attempt at silent locomotion had brought her to the door of the
library, directly opposite the dining room. As she turned to retrace
her steps that door suddenly opened and a hand grasped her shoulder.

"Oh, ho! This time I've caught you, have I? you--oh, murder!"

Her half uttered scream had been checked by the sound of a voice which
memory told her was not that of her bugbear, the invalid master of the
house. It was, instead, a strange gentleman, who was young, and even
attractive; whose head was a mass of reddish curls, and whose austere
gaze changed quickly to an embarrassed stare as her hat slipped back
and he saw her face. The girl was the first to recover herself.

"Yes, you certainly did catch me this time," she gasped.

"My dear young lady, I'm a blundering idiot. I beg your pardon most
humbly. I thought it was that Raquel, and I--"

"Oh, Raquel?" and she backed to the opposite wall, regarding him with
doubt and question in her eyes.

"Exactly. Allow me to explain. Raquel, in company with some other imps
of all shades, have developed an abnormal interest in the unpacking of
various boxes today, and especially a galvanic battery in here,
which--"

"Battery? In _there_?" and Evilena raised on her tip-toes to survey
the room over his shoulder. "I know some boys of Battery B, but I
never saw them without uniforms."

"Uniform, is it? Well, now, you see, I've only been a matter of hours
in the country, and small chance to look up a tailor. Are--are they a
necessity to the preservation of life here?"

He spoke with a doubtful pretense of timidity, and looked at her
quizzically. She smiled, but made a little grimace, a curve of the
lips and nod of the head conveying decision.

"You will learn it is the only dress for a man that makes life worth
living, for him, around here," she replied. "Every man who is not
superannuated or attached to the state government in some way has to
wear a uniform unless he wants his loyalty questioned."

The un-uniformed man smiled at her delightful patriotic frankness.

"Faith, now, I've no objection to the questions if you are appointed
questioner. But let me get you a chair. Even when on picket duty and
challenging each new comer, you are allowed a more restful attitude
than your present one, I hope. You startled me into forgetting--"

"_I_ startled _you_? Well!"

"Oh, yes. I was the one to do the bouncing out and nabbing you, wasn't
I? Well, now, I can't believe you were the more frightened of the two,
for all that. Have this chair, please; it is the most comfortable. You
see, I fancied Raquel had changed under my touch from dusky brown to
angelic white. The hat hid your face, you know, until you turned
around, and then--"

"Well?" At the first tone of compliment she had forgotten all the
strangeness of their meeting, and remembered only the coquetry so
naturally her own. With or without the uniform of her country, he was
at least a man, and there had been a dearth of men about their
plantation, "The Terrace," of late.

"Well," he repeated after her, "when you tipped the hat back I thought
in a wink of all the fairy stories of transformation I used to hear
told by the old folks in Ireland."

"Do you really mean that you believe fairy stories?" Her tone was
severe and her expression chiding.

"On my faith I believed them all that minute."

Her eyes dropped to the toe of her slipper. It was all very
delightful, this tete-a-tete with the complimentary unknown, and to be
thought a fairy! She wished she had gone up with Aunt Sajane and
brushed her hair. Still--

"I was sure it was Mr. Loring who had hold of me until I looked
around," she co

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