The Bondwoman. Ryan Marah Ellis
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