The Bondwoman. Ryan Marah Ellis

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ