Читать книгу The Iron Mistress - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 25

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The music room was richly furnished in the Bourbon fashion, with soft curtains of French lace, some paintings of merit on the walls, and beside the window a great carved rosewood pianoforte.

The instrument was magnificent and it was the first of its kind Bowie had ever seen: but that was not what stopped him on the threshold. A girl was seated on the rosewood piano bench, and he had seen her before. Once only. Under the archway of the Cabildo on Sunday morning she had given him one quick side glance, and he had not been able to forget it. That he would encounter her here had not entered his mind.

Dimly he was aware of another, older woman: probably her mother. But the girl had fixed upon herself his entire attention and interest.

Was this the terrifying Mademoiselle de Bornay? She looked the reverse of frightening, sitting beside the great pianoforte which served to emphasize her diminutive perfection. He had an impression of eyes wide and lustrously dark with wonderful curved eyelashes, and high-piled black curls on a small and shapely head. The beauty of a perfect miniature: a miniature painted on ivory.

It required an effort of will to tear his gaze away, and receive his introduction to Narcisse’s mother. Madame de Bornay was hardly taller than her daughter, though plump in figure. Her iron-gray hair was carefully dressed, and her fine dark eyes at this moment contained a faint hint of surprise, as if she wondered why her son had brought to them this specimen, with countrified clothes and a frame so huge that it seemed to dwarf almost everything in the room.

Then Narcisse was saying, “Mademoiselle, it is my honor to present my friend, Monsieur James Bowie. Monsieur, my sister, Mademoiselle Judalon Daphne Seraphine de Bornay.”

And Bowie found himself dissolving into all bones and knuckles as he made a needlessly awkward bow and blundered out some sort of tongue-tied acknowledgment.

The girl smiled slightly, but the smile instantly disappeared and she gazed at him with that singular expressionless look which women often give a new man: the look that mirrors neither curiosity nor expectation, but a judgment secret and withheld. Her attitude was completely graceful, arms slim and bare, white hands lying loosely together down at one side of her lap. Her gown, of some delicate white silken material, was of the high-waisted, low-cut Empire fashion, and the loveliness of all the world was in the cleft of her bosom, half concealed, half revealed.

The pose was almost too elegant to be natural. A cynical man might have suspected that it was studied, perhaps assumed for the moment: but Bowie was provided with no such insight.

“Monsieur Bowie and I,” said Narcisse, to break the silence, “exchanged challenges yesterday.”

“Truly?” The girl’s face showed a stirring of interest. “But you didn’t meet? Why?”

“Happily we discovered that the reason for our quarrel had disappeared.”

“A reason, then, is necessary for a duel? I thought gentlemen required only an opportunity—to go bang! with a pistol—or cut-and-thrust with a sword—spill a little blood—and be heroes. Have I been misinformed?”

Her question was addressed not to Narcisse, but directly to Bowie. In her eyes was an equivocal little light; he knew she was debating what treatment she should accord him, and wondered if she was finding amusement in his Opelousas tailoring and homemade waistcoat.

“To tell the truth, mademoiselle,” he said, finding his tongue, “we avoided fighting solely because I was certain your brother would cut me to ribbons. And I didn’t think ribbons would become me.”

“Don’t let him deceive you,” Narcisse said. “He was ready enough. It was I who wriggled out of it.”

“You know your brother sufficiently well to know how much of that to believe,” said Bowie.

The equivocal gleam disappeared from the girl’s eyes and she smiled: a smile singularly brilliant.

“I know Narcisse well. A friend of his is a friend of this house.” Her tone was suddenly cordial.

“Will you sit, monsieur?” Madame de Bornay said formally. But as he turned somewhat awkwardly toward the nearest seat, she added rather hastily, “I think you will be more comfortable on this chair than that one.”

He hesitated, looking at her questioningly.

“My mother really means that she will be more comfortable if you take the larger chair,” the girl said.

She was amused, and he saw the reason for it. The chair toward which he had first moved was one of those excessively frail and spindly things popular in France in the reign of Louis XV—a family heirloom, probably. Bowie’s one hundred and ninety pounds of bone and muscle might easily have wrecked it. Hastily he accepted the sturdier armchair, vexed with himself because he was sure the girl enjoyed his confusion.

Thereafter he sipped bitter chicory coffee from a tiny porcelain cup too small for his big mouth, and listened helplessly to conversation in which he had no part: talk quite trivial, quite sophisticated, and quite witty, in so far as he could follow it, encircling the earth, touching the poetry of Chénier and Delavigne, the plays of Diderot and Beaumarchais, and punctuated with anecdotes concerning Madame de Staël, Talleyrand, Mrs. Fitzherbert, Beau Brummell, Fouché, and Napoleon Bonaparte, of which personages, save the last, he had never heard.

Yet though he was lost in the discourse, it enabled him to recover his composure, and even watch Mademoiselle Judalon covertly. A far more captious eye than his would have discovered little to criticize in her beauty. Her features were too small, perhaps, but her mouth was a dainty modeling in coral, her nose delicately patrician. And there were those eyes!

With a sensation of astonishment he suddenly realized that this was the girl Audubon had neglected to paint. He remembered the artist’s shrug, and the artist’s words: The painted bunting—or the painted beauty? Peste, I prefer the bird.

He marveled: what manner of man of flesh and blood was Audubon?