Читать книгу The Bondwoman - Ryan Marah Ellis - Страница 2

Whatever the dowager’s eccentricities or heresies, she was not afraid of the sunlight, figuratively or literally. From floor to ceiling three great windows let in softened rays on the paneled walls, on the fluted columns of white and gold, and on the famous frescoes of the First Empire. She had no feeling for petite apartments such as appeal to many women; there must, for her, be height and space and long vistas.

“I like perspective to every picture,” she said. “I enjoy the groupings of my friends in my own rooms more than elsewhere. From my couch I have the best point of view, and the raised dais flatters me with its suggestion of a throne of state.”

She looked so tiny for a chair of state; and with her usual quaint humor she recognized the fact.

“But my temperament brings me an affinity with things that are great for all that,” she would affirm. “One does not need to be a physical Colossus in order to see the stars.”

The morning after her first reception she was smiling rather sardonically at a picture at the far end of the great salon–that of a very handsome young woman who laughed frankly at the man who leaned towards her and spoke. The man was Dumaresque.

“No use in that, Loris,” commented his god-mother, out of his hearing. “It will do an artist no harm, but it will end nowhere.”

Their attitude and their youth did make them appear sentimental; but they were not really so. He was only telling her what a shock she had been to those Parisians the day before.

“I understand, now, the regard of Madame Choudey and her pretty, prim niece, Sidonie. They will never forgive me.”

“You, Madame!”

“Me, Monsieur. Their fondness will preclude resentment towards you, but against myself they will feel a grievance that I am not as they pictured me. Come; you must tell Maman.”

The dowager nodded as one who understood it all.

“They will not forget you, that is sure,” she said, smiling; but the girl–for she was only a girl, despite the Madame–shrugged her shoulders.

“Myself, I care little for their remembrance,” she replied, indifferently; “they were only curious, not interested, I could see.”

“You put my picture in the shadow at all events,” protested Dumaresque, pointing to a large canvas hung opposite; “my picture over which art lovers raved until you appeared as a rival.”

“How extravagant you are, Monsieur Dumaresque, a true Gascon! To think of rivaling that!”

As she faced the canvas the dowager watched her critically, and nodded her approval to Dumaresque, who smiled and acquiesced. Evidently they were both well satisfied with the living picture of the salon.

The new Marquise de Caron had lived, probably, twenty years. She was of medium height, with straight, dark brows, and dark, long-lashed eyes. The eyes had none of the shyness that was deemed a necessity to beauty in that era of balloon skirts and scuttle bonnets under which beauty of the conventional order hid.

But that she was not conventional was shown by the turban of grey resting on her waved, dark hair, while the veil falling from it and mingling with the folds of her dress, suggested the very artistic draperies of the nuns.

Not a particle of color was in her apparel, and but little in her face; only the lips had that thread of scarlet sung of by Solomon, and the corners of them curved upwards a trifle as she surveyed the canvas.

The turban was loosened and held in her hands as she stood there looking. The picture evidently attracted her, though it did not please. At last she turned to the artist.

“Why do you paint pictures like that?”

“Like that? Pouf! You mean beautiful?”

“No, it is not beautiful,” she said, thoughtfully, as she seated herself on the dais by the dowager’s couch. “To be truly beautiful a thing must impress one with a sense of fitness to our highest perceptive faculties. A soulless thing is never beautiful.”

“What then, of dogs, horses, lions, the many art works in metal or on canvas?”

“You must not raise that wall against her words, Loris, unless you wish to quarrel,” said the dowager in friendly warning. “Judithe is pantheist enough to fancy that animals have souls.”

“But the true artist does not seek to portray the lowest expression of that soul,” persisted Dumaresque’s critic. “Across the Atlantic there are thousands who contend that a woman such as this Kora whom you paint, has no soul because of the black blood in her veins. They think of the dark people as we think of apes. It is all a question of longitude, Monsieur Dumaresque. The crudeness of America is the jest of France. The wisdom of France is the lightest folly of the Brahims; and so it goes ever around the world. The soul of that girl will weigh as heavily as ours in the judgment that is final; but, in the meantime, why teach it and others to admire all that allurement of evil showing in her eyes as she looks at you?”

“Judithe!” protested the dowager.

“Oh!–I do not doubt in the least, Maman, that the woman Kora looked just so when she sat for the picture,” conceded the girl; “but why not endeavor to awaken a higher, stronger expression, and paint that, showing the better possibilities within her than mere seductiveness?”

“What fervor and what folly, Marquise!” cried Dumaresque. “It is a speech of folly only because it is I whom you ask to be the missionary, and because it is the pretty Kora you would ask me to convert–and to what? Am I so perfect in all ways that I dare preach, even with paint and brush? Heavens! I should have all Paris laughing at me.”

“But Judithe would not have you that sort of extremist,” said the dowager, laughing at the dismay in his face. “She knows you do well; only she fears you do not exert yourself enough to perceive how you might do better.”

“She forgets; I did once; only a few weeks ago,” he said briefly; and the girl dropped her hands wearily and leaned her head against the dowager’s couch.

“Maman, our good friend is going to talk matrimony again,” she said plaintively; “and if he does, I warn you, though it is only mid-day, I shall go asleep;” and her eyes closed tightly as though to make the threat more effective.

“You see,” said the old lady, raising one chiding finger, “it is really lamentable, Loris, that your sentimental tendencies have grown into a steady habit.”

“I agree,” he assented; “but consider. She assails me–she, a saintly little judge in grey! She lectures, preaches at me! Tells me I lack virtue! But more is the pity for me; she will not remember that one virtue was most attractive to me, and she bade me abandon it.”

“Tell him,” said the girl with her eyes still closed, “to not miscall things; no one is all virtue.”

“Pardon; that is what you seemed to me, and I never before fancied that the admirable virtues would find me so responsive, when, pouf! with one word you demolished all my castle of delight and now condemn me that I am an outlaw from those elevating fancies.”

He spoke with such a comical air of self-pity that the old lady laughed and the young Marquise opened 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 of our country. I confess I only know the first line:–‘When in the course of human events it becomes necessary,’ but what they thought necessary to do is very vague in my mind.”

Then, catching the glance of the Marquise bright with laughter, she laughed also without knowing well at what.

“Well; what is it?”

“Only that you are quoting from the Declaration of Independence, and fancy it the constitution.”

“That is characteristic of American women, too,” laughed Mrs. McVeigh; “declarations of independence is one of our creeds. But I shall certainly be afraid of you, Marquise. At your age the learning and comparing of musty laws would have been dull work for me. It is the age for dancing and gay carelessness.”

The Marquise smiled assent with her curious, dark eyes, in which amber lights shown. She had a certain appealing meekness at times–a sweet deference that was a marked contrast to the aggressiveness with which she had met Dumaresque in the morning. The Countess Helene, observing the deprecating manner with which she received the implied praise for erudition, found herself watching with a keener interest the girl who had seemed to her a mere pretty book-worm.

“She is more than that,” thought the astute worldling. “Alain’s widow has a face for tragedy, the address of an ingenue, and the tout en semble of a coquette.”

The dowager smiled at Mrs. McVeigh’s remarks.

“She cares too little for dancing, the natural expression of healthy young animalism; but what can I do?–nothing less frivolous than a salon a-la-Madame D’Agoult is among her ambitions.”

“Let us persuade her to visit America,” suggested Mrs. McVeigh. “I can, at least, prescribe a change promising more of joyous festivity–life on a Carolina plantation.”

“What delight for her! she loves travel and new scenes. Indeed, Alain, my son, has purchased a property in your land, and some day she may go over. But for the brief remnant of my life I shall be selfish and want her always on my side of the ocean. What, child? you pale at the mention of death–tah! it is not so bad. The old die by installments, and the last one is not the worst.”

“May it be many years in the future, Maman,” murmured the young Marquise, whose voice betrayed a certain effort as she continued: “I thank you for the suggestion, Madame McVeigh; the property Maman refers to is in New Orleans, and I surely hope to see your country some day; my sympathies are there.”

“We have many French people in the South; our own part of the land was settled originally by the cavaliers of France. You would not feel like a stranger there.”

“Not in your gracious neighborhood, Madame;”–her face had regained its color, and her eyes their brilliant expression.

“And there you would see living pictures like this,” suggested the Countess Helene; “what material for an artist!”

“Oh, no; in the rice fields of South Carolina they do not look like that. We have none of those Oriental effects in dress, you know. Our colored women look very sober in comparison; still they have their attractions, and might be an interesting study for you if you have never known colored folks.”

“Oh, but I have,” remarked the Marquise, smiling; “an entire year of my life was passed in a school with two from Brazil, and one from your country had run away the same season.”

“Judithe; child!”

The dowager fairly gasped the words, and the Marquise moved quickly to her side and sank on the cushion at her feet, looking up with an assuring smile, as she caressed the aged hand.

“Yes, it is quite true,” she continued; “but see, I am alive to tell the tale, and really they say the American was a most harmless little thing; the poor, imprisoned soul.”

“How strange!” exclaimed Mrs. McVeigh; “do you mean as fellow pupils?–colored girls! It seems awful.”

“Really, I never thought of it so; you see, so many planters’ daughters come from the West Indies to Paris schools. Many in feature and color suggest the dark continent, but are accepted, nevertheless. However, the girl I mention was not dark. Her mother had seven white ancestors to one of black. Yet she confided her story to a friend of mine, and she was an American slave.”

The dowager was plainly distressed at the direction of the conversation, for the shock to Mrs. McVeigh was so very apparent, and as her hostess remembered that slavery was threatening to become an institution of uncompromising discord across the water, all reference to it was likely to be unwelcome. She pressed the fingers of the Marquise warningly, and the Marquise smiled up at her, but evidently did not understand.

“Can such a thing be possible?” asked Mrs. McVeigh, incredulously; “in that case I shall think twice before I send my daughter here to school, as I had half intended–and you remained in such an establishment?”

“I had no choice; my guardians decided those questions.”

“And the faculty–they allowed it?”

“They did not know it. She was represented as being the daughter of an American planter; which was true. I have reason to believe that my friend was her only confidant.”

“And for what purpose was she educated in such an establishment?”

“That she might gain accomplishments enhancing her value as companion to the man who was to own her.”

“Madame!”

“Marquise!”

The two exclamations betrayed how intent her listeners were, and how full of horror the suggestion. There was even incredulity in the tones, an initiative protest against such possibilities. But the Marquise looked from one to the other with unruffled earnestness.

“So it was told to me,” she continued; “these accomplishments meant extra thousands to the man who sold her, and the man was her father’s brother.”

“No, no, no!” and Mrs. McVeigh shook her head decidedly to emphasize her conviction. “I cannot believe that at the present day in our country such an arrangement could exist. No one, knowing our men, could credit such a story. In the past century such abuses might have existed, but surely not now–in all my life I have heard of nothing like that.”

“Probably the girl was romancing,” agreed the Marquise, with a shrug, “for you would no doubt be aware if such a state of affairs had existence.”

“Certainly.”

“Then your men are not so clever as ours,” laughed the Countess; “for they manage many little affairs their own women never suspect.”

Mrs. McVeigh looked displeased. To her it was not a matter of cleverness, but of principle and morality; and in her mind there was absolutely no comparison possible without jarring decidedly on the prejudices of her Gallic friends, so she let the remark pass without comment.

“Yes,” said the Marquise, rising, “when I heard the story of the girl Rhoda I fancied it one the white mistresses of America seldom heard.”

“Rhoda?”

“Yes, that was the name the girl was known by in the school–Rhoda Larue–the Larue was a fiction; slaves, I am told, having no legal right to names.”

“Heavens! What horrors you fancy! Pray give us some music child, and drive away the gloomy pictures you have suggested.”

“An easy penance;” and the Marquise moved smilingly towards the alcove.

“What!” cried the Countess Helene, in protest, “and the story unfinished! Why, it might develop into a romance. I dote on romances in real life or fiction, but I like them all spelled out for me to the very end.”

“Instead of a romance, I should fancy the girl’s life very prosaic wherever it is lived,” returned the Marquise. “But before her year at the convent had quite expired she made her escape–took no one into her confidence; and when her guardian, or his agent, came to claim her, there were storms, apologies, but no ward.”

“And you do not call that a romance?” said the Countess. “I do; it offers all sorts of possibilities.”

“Yes, the possibility of this;” and Mrs. McVeigh pointed to the picture before them. The Marquise halted, looked curiously at the speaker, then regarded the oriental face on the canvas thoughtfully, and passed her hand over her brow with a certain abstraction.

“I never thought of that,” she said slowly. “You poor creature!” and she took a step nearer the picture. “I–never–thought of that! Maman, Madame McVeigh has just taught me something–to be careful, careful how we judge the unfortunate. They say this Kora is a light woman in morals; but suppose–suppose somewhere the life that girl told of in the convent really does exist, and suppose this pretty Kora had been one of the victims chosen! Should we dare then to judge her by our standards, Maman? I think not.”

Without awaiting an opinion she walked slowly into the alcove, and left the three ladies gazing at each other with a trifle of constraint mingled with their surprise.

“Another sacred cause to fight for,” sighed the dowager, with a quaint grimace. “Last week it was the Jews, who seem to me quite able to take care of themselves! Next week it may be Hindoo widows; but just now it is Kora!”

“She should have been born a boy in the age when it was thought a virtue to don armor and do battle for the weak or incapable; that would have suited Judithe.”

“Not if it was the fashion,” laughed the Countess Helene; “she would insist on being original.”

“The Marquise has a lovely name,” remarked Mrs. McVeigh; “one could not imagine a weak or unattractive person called Judithe.”

“No; they could not,” agreed her friend, “it makes one think of the tragedy of Holofernes. It suggests the strange, the fascinating, the unusual, and–it suits Madame la Marquise.”

“Your approval is an unconscious compliment to me,” remarked the dowager, indulging herself in a tiny pinch of snuff and tapping the jeweled lid of the box; “I named her.”

“Indeed!” and Mrs. McVeigh smiled at the complacent old lady, while the Countess Helene almost stared. Evidently she, also, had heard the opinions concerning the young widow’s foreign extraction. Possibly the dowager guessed what was passing in her mind, for she nodded and smiled.

“Truly, the eyes did it. Though she was not so fully developed as now, those slumbrous, oriental eyes of hers suggested someway that beauty of Bethulia; the choice was left to me and so she was christened Judithe.”

“She voices such startlingly paganish ideas at times that I can scarcely imagine her at the christening font,” remarked the Countess.

“In truth her questions are hard to answer sometimes. But the heart is all right.”

“And the lady herself magnetic enough without the added suggestion of the name,” remarked Mrs. McVeigh; then she held up her finger as the Countess was about to speak, for from the music room came the appealing legato notes of “Suwanee River,” played with great tenderness.

“What is it?” asked the dowager.

“One of our American folk songs,” and the grey eyes of the speaker were bright with tears; “in all my life I have never heard it played so exquisitely.”

“For a confirmed blue stocking, the Marquise understands remarkably well how to make her little compliments,” said the Countess Helene.

Mrs. McVeigh arose, and with a slight bow to the dowager, passed into the alcove. At the last bar of the song a shadow fell across the keys, and the musician saw their American visitor beside her.

“I should love to have you see the country whose music you interpret so well,” she said impulsively; “I should like to be with you when you do see it.”

“You are kind, and I trust you may be,” replied the Marquise, with a pretty nod that was a bow in miniature. She was rising from the piano, when Mrs. McVeigh stopped her.

“Pray don’t! It is a treat to hear you. I only wanted to ask you to take my invitation seriously and come some time to our South Carolina home; I should like to be one of your friends.”

“It would give me genuine pleasure,” was the frank reply. “You know I confessed that my sympathies were there ahead of me.” The smile accompanying the words was so adorable that Mrs. McVeigh bent to kiss her.

The Marquise offered her cheek with a graciousness that was a caress in itself, and thus their friendship commenced.

After the dowager and her daughter-in-law were again alone, and with an assurance that even the privileged Dumaresque would not break in on their evening, the elder lady asked, abruptly, a question over which she had been puzzling.

“Child, what possessed you to tell to a Southern woman of the States that story reflecting on the most vital of their economic institutions? Had you forgotten their prejudices? I was in dread that you might offend her, and I am sure Helene Biron was quite as nervous.”

“I did not offend her, Maman,” replied the Marquise, looking up from her embroidery with a smile, “and I had not forgotten their prejudices. I only wanted to judge if she herself had ever heard the story.”

“Madame McVeigh!–and why?”

“Because Rhoda Larue was also a native of that particular part of Carolina to which she has invited me, and because of a fact which I have never forgotten, the young planter for whom she was educated–the slave owner who bought her from her father’s brother was named McVeigh. My new friend is delightful in herself but–she has a son.”

“My child!” gasped the dowager, staring at her. “Such a man the son of that charming, sincere woman! Yes, I had forgotten their name, and bid you forget the story; never speak of it again, child!”

“I should be sorry to learn it is the same family,” admitted the Marquise; “still, I shall make a point of avoiding the son until we learn something about him. It is infamous that such men should be received into society.”

The dowager relapsed into silence, digesting the troublesome question proposed.

Occasionally she glanced towards the Marquise as though in expectation of a continuation of the subject. But the Marquise was engrossed by her embroideries, and when she did speak again it was of some entirely different matter.