The Essential Writings of Marie Belloc Lowndes. Marie Belloc Lowndes

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СКАЧАТЬ most prosperous people who have not made the money they are able to spend, Mrs. Bailey did not attach any undue importance to wealth. But she knew that her friend was not as well off as herself, and therefore she was always trying to pay a little more of her share than was fair. Thanks to Madame Wolsky's stronger will, she very seldom succeeded in doing so.

      "We might at least ask her to open the window," she said rather plaintively. It really was dreadfully stuffy!

      Madame Cagliostra had gone to a sideboard from which she was taking two packs of exceedingly dirty, queer-looking cards. They were the famous Taro cards, but Sylvia did not know that.

      When the fortune-teller was asked to open the window, she shook her head decidedly.

      "No, no!" she said. "It would dissipate the influences. I cannot do that! On the contrary, the curtains should be drawn close, and if the ladies will permit of it I will light my lamp."

      Even as she spoke she was jerking the thick curtains closely together; she even pinned them across so that no ray of the bright sunlight outside could penetrate into the room.

      For a few moments they were in complete darkness, and Sylvia felt a queer, eerie sensation of fear, but this soon passed away as the lamp—the "Suspension," as Madame Cagliostra proudly called it—was lit.

      When her lamp was well alight, the soothsayer drew three chairs up to the round table, and motioned the two strangers to sit down.

      "You will take my friend first," said Anna Wolsky, imperiously; and then, to Sylvia, she said, in English, "Would you rather I went away, dear? I could wait on the staircase till you were ready for me to come back. It is not very pleasant to have one's fortune told when one is as young and as pretty as you are, before other people."

      "Of course I don't mind your being here!" cried Sylvia Bailey, laughing—then, looking doubtfully at Madame Cagliostra, though it was obvious the Frenchwoman did not understand English, "The truth is that I should feel rather frightened if you were to leave me here all by myself. So please stay."

      Madame Cagliostra began dealing out the cards on the table. First slowly, then quickly, she laid them out in a queer pattern; and as she did so she muttered and murmured to herself. Then a frown came over her face; she began to look disturbed, anxious, almost angry.

      Sylvia, in spite of herself, grew interested and excited. She was sorry she had not taken off her wedding-ring. In England the wise woman always takes off her wedding-ring on going to see a fortune-teller. She was also rather glad that she had left her pearls in the safe custody of M. Girard. This little house in the Rue Jolie was a strange, lonely place.

      Suddenly Madame Cagliostra began to speak in a quick, clear, monotonous voice.

      Keeping her eyes fixed on the cards, which now and again she touched with a fat finger, and without looking at Sylvia, she said:

      "Madame has led a very placid, quiet life. Her existence has been a boat that has always lain in harbour—" She suddenly looked up: "I spent my childhood at Dieppe, and that often suggests images to me," she observed complacently, and then she went on in quite another tone of voice:—

      "To return to Madame and her fate! The boat has always been in harbour, but now it is about to put out to sea. It will meet there another craft. This other craft is, to Madame, a foreign craft, and I grieve to say it, rather battered. But its timbers are sound, and that is well, for it looks to me as if the sails of Madame's boat would mingle, at any rate for a time with this battered craft."

      "I don't understand what she means," said Sylvia, in a whisper. "Do ask her to explain, Anna!"

      "My friend asks you to drop metaphor," said the older woman, drily.

      The soothsayer fixed her bright, beady little eyes on Sylvia's flushed face.

      "Well," she said deliberately, "I see you falling in love, and I also see that falling in love is quite a new experience. It burns, it scorches you, does love, Madame. And for awhile you do not know what it means, for love has never yet touched you with his red-hot finger."

      "How absurd!" thought Sylvia to herself. "She actually takes me for a young girl! What ridiculous mistakes fortune-tellers do make, to be sure!"

      "—But you cannot escape love," went on Madame Cagliostra, eagerly. "Your fate is a fair man, which is strange considering that you also are a fair woman; and I see that there is already a dark man in your life."

      Sylvia blushed. Bill Chester, just now the only man in her life, was a very dark man.

      "But this fair man knows all the arts of love." Madame Cagliostra sighed, her voice softened, it became strangely low and sweet. "He will love you tenderly as well as passionately. And as for you, Madame—but no, for me to tell you what you will feel and what you will do would not be delicate on my part!"

      Sylvia grew redder and redder. She tried to laugh, but failed. She felt angry, and not a little disgusted.

      "You are a foreigner," went on Madame Cagliostra. Her voice had grown hard and expressionless again.

      Sylvia smiled a little satiric smile.

      "But though you are a foreigner," cried the fortune-teller with sudden energy, "it is quite possible that you will never go back to your own country! Stop—or, perhaps, I shall say too much! Still if you ever do go back, it will be as a stranger. That I say with certainty. And I add that I hope with all my heart that you will live to go back to your own country, Madame!"

      Sylvia felt a vague, uneasy feeling of oppression, almost of fear, steal over her. It seemed to her that Madame Cagliostra was looking at her with puzzled, pitying eyes.

      The soothsayer again put a fat and not too clean finger down on the upturned face of a card.

      "There is something here I do not understand; something which I miss when I look at you as I am now looking at you. It is something you always wear—"

      She gazed searchingly at Sylvia, and her eyes travelled over Mrs. Bailey's neck and bosom.

      "I see them and yet they are not there! They appear like little balls of light. Surely it is a necklace?"

      Sylvia looked extremely surprised. Now, at last, Madame Cagliostra was justifying her claim to a supernatural gift!

      "These balls of light are also your Fate!" exclaimed the woman impetuously. "If you had them here—I care not what they be—I should entreat you to give them to me to throw away."

      Madame Wolsky began to laugh. "I don't think you would do that," she observed drily.

      But Madame Cagliostra did not seem to hear the interruption.

      "Have you heard of a mascot?" she said abruptly. "Of a mascot which brings good fortune to its wearer?"

      Sylvia bent her head. Of course she had heard of mascots.

      "Well, if so, you have, of course, heard of objects which bring misfortune to their wearers—which are, so to speak, unlucky mascots?"

      And this time it was Anna Wolsky who, leaning forward, nodded gravely. She attributed a run of bad luck she had had the year before to a trifling gift, twin cherries made of enamel, which a friend had given her, in her old home, on her birthday. СКАЧАТЬ