The Bondwoman. Ryan Marah Ellis

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ