Читать книгу The Golden Bees - Daniel Henderson - Страница 9

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"Guess where I have been! Guess whom I have seen!"

William Patterson, startled and curious, glanced from his news journal.

In the doorway Betsy stood, a breath-taking vision of youth and ardor and grace.

"Why, girl!" he exclaimed. "What a color the races gave you! Please stop growing lovelier. Give some of these other girls a chance to catch up with you. I don't want to entertain too many beaux."

"If today is an augury," Betsy teased, "you may not be bothered by my suitors very long. A young nobleman of France appears to be much taken with me. Yet, if what Commodore Barney says is true—that he came to the United States mainly to meet me—why does he delay? Does he want me to call on him, I wonder?"

"So it's young Bonaparte!" her father chuckled. "Barney had meant to bring him here tonight, but the French residents are giving him a dinner."

William Patterson was less at ease about it than he seemed.

Plague take Joshua Barney for ever inviting the Bonaparte to Baltimore! A lot of cheek this young Frenchman had—coquetting with Baltimore maidens after those affairs in the West Indies. If the worst came, William Patterson decided, he would tell his girl gossip his captains had brought from Martinique. He would have liked it if a meeting of the headstrong, headlong Betsy and the gay blade from France could have been avoided—they might blend like flame!

Betsy's tongue ran on:

"We looked across a sea of heads at each other, and I could tell that he was speaking to the Commodore about me. He pretended to be watching the horses, but his face was ever in my direction. The girls said it was noticeable that he looked at me even in the hottest excitement of the races. I hardly glanced at him. At last Commodore Barney and he started toward our party, but the crowd and the carriages came between us, and, of course, we drove home without waiting—it wouldn't do to appear too eager."

"Quite right, Elizabeth," Miss Spear, her prim aunt, cooed above her clicking needles; "even with a prince, that's the wiser course!"

Betsy made a face behind her aunt's back, but her talk flowed on vividly.

"Prince—how like one he is! It doesn't seem so far away now—my dream of becoming a great lady of the salons and courts of Europe!"

William Patterson, easily provoked, began to boil.

"For shame, Betsy! For shame! If this Bonaparte were owner of all of France, he'd be less desirable a husband for you than any of a score of American young men I could name."

"Please don't mention them, Father," said Betsy, icily; "please don't mention even one in the same breath with the brother of Napoleon! American young men! What do they talk to me about? Trading expeditions westward. Cargoes of flour and staves for Europe! Prospects of war between England and France that will give them a chance in their tricky clippers to make fortunes privateering! Never a topic such as the cultivated men and women of Europe discuss. A dull country produces dull people!"

Miss Spear, in high indignation, quit the room. William Patterson, quivering, rose to his feet.

"Girl, I tell you to hush! A fine American you are, speaking so uncivilly of your countrymen. If one of your brothers said that, I'd cowhide him. Don't try my patience too far—I'll contrive that you never meet this Lothario!"

Fearing that she had gone too far, Betsy fled upstairs.

"Lothario? What did Father mean by that?" she asked herself as she escaped to her own room. The question did not trouble her long—she gave her thoughts completely to the captivating Jerome. With flushed cheeks the entranced girl lay awake the night through, dreaming of a dark-eyed, aristocratic lover, breathing again and again the words: "Madame Jerome Bonaparte, sister-in-law to the Emperor of France."

*****

The pair met, as predicted, at the home of the Honorable Samuel Chase, Commodore Barney's father-in-law.

The ornamentation of the Chase mansion was impressive. Plants and flowers lined the hall and staircase. Great chandeliers with myriad prisms shimmering above the mahogany floor gave a soft glow to the brilliant uniforms of the officers and the white shoulders and jeweled necks of the rarely beautiful women.

Most of the guests had arrived, and sat chattering in a fever of expectancy. Suddenly horses' hooves clashed in the driveway. Betsy, for all her feigned coolness, trembled as the Bonaparte entered.

The orchestra began; dancers filled the floor. There were no couples—the young people, dancing the quadrille, stepped about gracefully in groups, never clasping more than their hands. No dance like the iniquitous waltz—which, a decade later, daring Americans borrowed from Europe—was introduced that evening to send shocked chaperons hurrying out of the room with their fair charges. No gentleman's hand dared encircle a lady's waist. The day had not yet come in Baltimore when, as Fielding wrote, "a delicate girl who would shudder at the gross idea of a man's advance, has come to permit herself to flourish around the room to a wriggling German air, with a strange man's arm around her waist, and her delicate hand upon his brawny shoulder."

Yet for the distinguished pair, brought suddenly together and rapidly introduced in the quadrille, there were moments of intoxication even in this prim dance, moments of adventure on his part and of retreat on hers; of soft words hinting at admiration and love; of daring feminine glances alternating with shy downward looks.

"How princely he seems! What a lover he would make!" Betsy's heart was whispering. "Every girl in the room wants him. But he sees only me. I shall be coy yet bold if need be. . . . If my French were only better . . . will he think me stupid beside those brilliant women of the salons and courts?"

In one of these delicious moments Bonaparte, twirling suddenly, felt the long, gold chain he wore about his neck suddenly taut. Turning, he found that its links had become entangled in Miss Patterson's hair. With soft words and gentle fingers, he disentangled the chain from that exquisite neck.

"So in this way," breathed Jerome, "Fortune has answered my prayer. I trust, mademoiselle, this chain is an augury—while I apparently release you, still I trust you will be bound to me in friendship."

Betsy was dazed by the swift, subtle attack. Yet she had the wit to answer: "I fear, Captain Bonaparte, that you but add me to a chain of many captives!"

He gave her a startled look. Could she have heard of his West Indian affairs? Seeing, however, that she had made the retort out of utter innocence, he replied in kind and pleaded that he might dance in the next quadrille with her. Dowagers, clucking, gathered their disappointed marriageable daughters to their sides, and whispered disapproval at the Frenchman's fervor, at the girl's surrender. The tongues of Betsy's friends married them that night.

Facing this radiant girl, Jerome forgot brother, empire and the future.

"Another dance—we cannot separate!" he whispered. "To miss a dance would mean an eternity of waiting."

She glanced about at wistful maids and scandalized matrons. "How warm I am!" she said. "Let us go outdoors."

It was moonlight in the fragrant garden. Among the rose-bushes and asters and boxwood, the fingers that had disentangled the chain from the lovely neck pressed her waist.

She felt his breath against her cheek—eighteen wooed impetuously by twenty.

"I have known you scarce an hour," she breathed; "you must not kiss me!"

"Our hearts came together long before this hour," he pleaded. "Do not keep your kisses from me longer!"

The girl yielded her lips—Jerome ravished them.

All of a sudden she recovered from her intoxication. He must not think her too easily won.

Returning at last at the dismayed Miss Spear's command, Betsy met with cool indifference the searching eyes of envious girls and outraged mothers, but her flushed cheeks and lustrous eyes betrayed her secret.

Mary Caton, at the first opportunity, came up to her breathlessly.

"Are you in love with him? Did he propose?"

"Mercy!" pleaded Betsy. "Give him time. He has not proposed yet, but he kissed me!"

"Betsy!" the shocked Mary cried.

"Pshaw," said Betsy coolly, "it's the French way. As for my being in love with him—I don't know. He is handsome and polite and he makes love divinely, but he's a foreigner, and I must admit that while he fascinates, I also shrink from him. When I shut my eyes and think that he is soon to be a prince, I can imagine myself marrying him. But if he had as a rival an Englishman with the same prospects, I couldn't say what I'd do."

"But there are no titled Englishmen coming to Baltimore," sighed Mary. "I want one of those myself."

"You mustn't throw over brother Robert," Betsy chided as Mary blushed. "You'd better let me be the pioneer in title-hunting."

"Then you think you really can learn to love Jerome Bonaparte?" Mary asked.

"I'm going to let my head rule my heart," Betsy replied. "We shall see what we shall see."

From the night of the Chase ball, Jerome devoted himself to the furtherance of his courtship. General Rewbell tugged in dismay at his mustache, while his pretty wife exulted. Le Camus swore. Bonaparte swept aside their doubts and protests as if they were thistledown, and went to enlist Commodore Barney as love's advocate.

"Well," the Commodore greeted him, "you've met her!"

"And been conquered!" sighed Jerome. "She is adorable! I have not slept a wink since I parted from her. This is no light flirtation. I realize there is only one way to win Elizabeth—I desire to marry her. My friend, you must aid me. Tell me about her family—so that I can write to my mother and win her to my side in case Napoleon is nasty about it. What can I say that will convince them that I will not marry beneath me?"

"Beneath you!" the Commodore exploded. "One look at her will show them that there's as much quality to her as to any of your fine ladies of France! William Patterson, her father, may seem to you to lack some of the polish of your French associates, but over here we like our diamonds in the rough. Sit down and I'll give you his pedigree.

"Betsy's father was one who preferred to flee from royalty rather than pursue it. 'Tis the county of Donegal he claims as a birthplace—though there's English and Scotch blood in him too. His father was a small farmer there whose farm was too poor to enable him to give his flock that learning every son of Erin desires his children to have. An older brother had gone to Philadelphia and was doing well there. Will, when fourteen, came out to join him. An Irish shipping merchant of Philadelphia gave the lad work. At twenty-one Will was in the shipping business for himself.

"Then his big chance came. When the Revolutionary War started, he foresaw that munitions would be required by the American troops, and so he invested all his savings in two vessels, loading them with native products for which there was a market abroad. These ships he sent to your country, going himself as passenger. There he reinvested the money he got for the cargoes in arms and ammunition, and sailed home.

"Never was the arrival of arms more opportune. The army of General Washington was then entering on the siege of Boston with scarcely enough ammunition to fire a salute. The guns and bullets brought by Patterson were rushed northward.

"Sailing to the West Indies, he helped the American cause there with profit to himself. On his return two years later he landed at Baltimore instead of Philadelphia, and was shrewd enough to see the advantage of this town for a man in the shipping trade. So he decided to live here. Half of his fortune he has invested in Baltimore real estate. The remainder he devotes to shipping. He is now one of the two wealthiest men in the State—the other being the Signer—Charles Carroll of Carrollton.

"I've made considerable money myself, at privateering, but I can't hold a candle to Will. His ships are on every sea. He is president of the Bank of Maryland—the first bank to be chartered south of Philadelphia. He married Dorcas Spear—a woman of high social position, a lady to her fingertips. His wife and he move in the highest circles; he has relatives in Congress and in administrative offices. The President is proud to count him his friend. Permit me to assure you that your marriage into his family will bring honor rather than discredit to the Bonapartes!"

"I beg you to understand, my dear friend," said the humbled Jerome, "that my inquiry was not to set at rest any fears on my own part. Her attraction for me would be as strong if she were without wealth or family. But you know my brother. It will be happier for Elise—should I win her—if by such honorable facts the way is paved for her in France."

Monsieur Pascault's became a trysting-place for the pair. Madame Rewbell devised ways of bringing them together. They were seen at balls and theaters. And always it was Jerome the pursuer and Betsy the coy and capricious.

"Has the head decided that the heart will take him?" Mary Caton asked.

"Both head and heart seem to be on the point of agreement," Betsy confessed.

Betsy had decided—she could give to Jerome Bonaparte as much love as she could give to any man. To mate with him would bring her grandest dreams true—she would marry him.

The town talked and talked. Mrs. Caton, Mrs. Mansfield and other estimable ladies deemed it wise to have a talk with Betsy's mother. Mrs. Patterson, a woman of many children and many cares, realized at the end of the talk that her eldest daughter was on the verge of an engagement which, however romantic it seemed, promised no happy ending.

She went to her husband with her problem. He listened frowningly.

"Take her down to Virginia—I'll force her to go!" said William Patterson. "The Frenchman will be gone in a few weeks. Keep her there till I send you word."

Betsy would not hear of leaving Baltimore.

"We are betrothed—you shall not separate us. I was born for court life—Jerome will make me a queen. My ambitions make me wretched here. It amazes me that you do not see the advantages a marriage with the brother of Napoleon would bring me. It might be a blessing for us if I could stay here as the wife of some respectable young man in business; but nature never intended me for obscurity."

"Don't be ridiculous!" said William Patterson. "To Virginia you'll go if I have to send you there bound in a coach. If you make further trouble, I'll disown you. There'll not be a penny for your wedding-dress or a relative to attend your marriage. I wonder what Jerome will say to a bride without fortune, and what Napoleon will think of a girl cast off by her family."

Betsy grew frightened. Jerome's family could be counted on to oppose the match. If her family also remained hostile to it, it might never take place. She would yield now, that she might gain later. And maybe absence would intensify Jerome's desire for her.

So, after a long, tearful talk in Jerome's embrace, the girl yielded to her parents. "I'll find a way to come back soon," she promised her lover. The coach and four, with Isham sitting somberly on the carriage-box, and with the slaves saying farewell as sorrowfully as if the occasion were their young mistress's funeral, rolled away to the hospitable but undesired Virginia.

The Randolphs welcomed the girl warmly; yet all the diversions the plantation offered—pleasures that in her childhood Betsy had relished to the utmost—abundant food, dancing, fine horses, corn-husking, merry-making in "the quarters," failed to lift Betsy's spirits.

Lovely as she knew herself to be, captivating as she had proved to Jerome, she knew that there were at home scores of beautiful girls who, envying her, would make the most of her absence. She grew madly restive as she pictured her prince surrounded by them, dancing with them, in moonlit gardens with them. Was it true what people whispered—that he was a light-of-love?

Listlessly she drove to the county fair; abstractedly she watched a dozen blooded horses race round the three-mile course. She could scarcely smile when young men cudgeled each other for a prize of five dollars; or when a score of fiddlers contested; or when a number of singers, having wet their windpipes with good liquor, tried which could render a song most pleasingly. Had she not been in such a distracted state, she might have joined Nancy Randolph in dancing for the prize of a pair of handsome slippers. As it was, she looked on tragically, and when handsome, soft-spoken James Randolph, Nancy's brother home on a visit from the college of William and Mary, begged her to dance with him she did so with a listlessness that caused other girls to pity her partner.

James, however, having been a beau among the girls of his college town, was resourceful. Challenged by the girl's lack of interest, he drew upon all these resources—his fiddle, his sweet tenor voice, his knowledge of the world as gained in the enlightened circle of Williamsburg, and the shy, merry sayings that had conquered other girls almost as charming as this one.

He wooed her on horseback; he wooed her by telling her of how he was reading Blackstone and how, through his family's friendship with Jefferson and Madison, he hoped for a chance some day to represent Virginia in the Congress of the United States; he wooed her by telling of his plans to emulate Roger Taney and move to Annapolis where the judges sat so solemnly in long scarlet cloaks. The girl, however, checkmated him by weeping on his shoulder.

"Don't speak of love, James," she sobbed. "Don't make life any harder for me! I am pledged to Jerome Bonaparte. Separation can't change my feelings. Please, James, help me to persuade Mother to take me home. I shall run away if she doesn't."

There was then, of course, nothing for a chivalrous young Virginian to do but to put his arm about her, wipe the tears from her enchanting eyes, fortify his heart against their lure, and assure her his aid though it were like plunging a dagger into his heart.

Her heartbroken appearance melted her mother as it had melted James Randolph.

"I'd rather have her the wife of a foreigner than see her pining away," Mrs. Patterson told Mrs. Randolph. "Home we'll go. I've done my best to break it off and my conscience is clear."

And so, leaving James Randolph lorn and disconsolate beside his fiddle and law-books, Betsy, preparing to use her wits to the uttermost to overcome her stubborn father, returned home.

*****

Had the girl been able to watch Jerome's distress at her vanishing, and his utter dejection in the midst of the very girls she feared as rivals, she would have been happier in Virginia.

"I have never seen Jerome in such a mood," said crafty Le Camus, his secretary, to General Rewbell. "He's really in earnest this time. It will never do—we must get him back to France."

"It will do well enough—that girl would grace a French throne!" returned Rewbell, happy in his own marriage.

Again Jerome came and went to the Patterson home, for Betsy's first act on stepping out of the coach was to make Isham the bearer of a throbbing note to Jerome. That night the room that held them was Paradise. All the romance and passion of France and Corsica throbbed in the embrace of Jerome. Betsy, warm eighteen, forgot for the hour her ambitions and yielded herself to rapture.

On the other side of the wall, William Patterson puffed his pipe, scowled and confessed himself on the verge of defeat. Still, however, he hoped against hope.

"Napoleon will never allow it. He'll soon call the lad home, and then it'll all be over. The girl will mourn him only until the proper man comes along—then she'll boast her life long how once a prince asked her to be his queen!"

As if reading her father's thoughts, Betsy at that moment was whispering to her lover:

"Tell me it's not true that some day a French frigate will come and bear you away from me!"

He stopped her speech with his lips. "Flower of my heart," he said, in his fascinating broken English, "when that frigate comes, never fear, you shall go aboard it as my wife!

"Once Napoleon looks into your eyes he will say that I could have made no other choice. My mother and sisters will be fond of you, for you are not at all the American type; indeed, beloved, you are remarkably like my sister Pauline and strongly resemble the women of the Bonaparte family!"

Betsy was delighted with this declaration. She took it as an acknowledgment by Jerome that she was fit to grace a palace. It gratified her immensely to be linked in a careless compliment with the sisters of the Corsican.

*****

On the day the two announced their engagement, William Patterson went to Washington to see the French Consul-General.

"Why didn't you have the young man sent back to his ship? What will his family say?" he queried.

"Napoleon has been advised that he is away from his post of duty. The marriage would be disastrous for your family, monsieur," said that courteous but adamant official. "Napoleon designs to protect France by making alliances with the leading powers of Europe. Eugene Beauharnais, his stepson, has, at the First Consul's suggestion, married Princess Augusta of Bavaria. Napoleon regrets the union of his brother Lucien with a woman who is not of royal birth. Estimable as your daughter is, should Jerome make such an alliance, he will provoke the wrath of his brother. He will assuredly be cast off without position or money. You will have the young man to support.

"Remember, too, that according to the laws of France the marriage of a man of Jerome's age is not legal without the consent of a parent or a guardian. Jerome cannot obtain the consent of his mother, who is obedient to the will of her illustrious son, the First Consul."

Back to Baltimore came William Patterson. Betsy, a lovely volcano of wrath, sneered at "the lying diplomat!"

She was more certain of Jerome now; less fearful of provoking her father.

"I have won Jerome's love! I shall win Napoleon's admiration! They say he is only an ogre at a distance, that he is the most susceptible of men to a fair face. If you will help me play the game, Father, you shall see me conquer the court of France—you will be proud to be the father of the only American girl who has attained distinction in the French empire!"

*****

To the Baltimore County Court House the couple rode one afternoon, and there Jerome obtained a marriage license.

Utterly defeated, William Patterson resolved to "play the game." However, six days later than the one on which the license was issued, he received in a bold hand, a well-written anonymous communication:

"Is it possible, sir," [the letter ran] "you can so far forget yourself, and the happiness of your child, as to consent to her marrying Mr. Bonaparte? If you knew him, you never would, as misery must be her portion—he who but a few months ago destroyed the peace and happiness of a girl of a respectable family in Nantz by promising marriage, then ruining her, leaving her to misery and shame. What has been his conduct in the West Indies? There he ruined a lovely young woman who had only been married for a few weeks! He parted her from her husband, and destroyed that family! And here, what is his conduct? At the very moment he was demanding your daughter in marriage he ruined a young French girl, whom he now leaves also in misery!

"His conduct at Nantz and in the West Indies has already reached his brother's ears, and he dares not appear before him! His voyage to this country proves it! He now wishes to secure himself a home at your expense until things can be arranged for his return to France—when, rest assured, he will be the first to turn your daughter off, and laugh at your credulity! Nothing that can be done will be binding on him; and if you knew his true character of dissipation, you would never! no, never! even with the approbation of his family, trust your daughter to him.

"Then take advice in time and break off everything before it is too late. Let nothing on earth tempt you to such a union! What is here said may be depended upon, and much more might be said, for, without exception, he is the most profligate young man of the age. Demand seriously of Miss Wheeler, and you will there find he has already asked her in marriage with the same intentions!

"Will he marry your daughter at the Catholic Church before the Bishop in open day, as did his friend? I say no! because he knows such a marriage would be in some measure binding upon him; and that he will not do, nor anything else that will appear against him. Trust not his honor! There never was any in his family!

Yours,

A Friend."