“Enter,” he remarked in a low tone,--“enter M. Ralph Edmondstone, the
cousin of Madame.”
His companion asked no questions, but he proceeded, returning to his
light and airy tone:--
“M. Ralph Edmondstone is a genius,” he said. “He is an artist, he is a
poet, he is also a writer of subtile prose. His sonnets to Euphrasie--in
the day of Euphrasie--awakened the admiration of the sternest critics:
they were so tender, so full of purest fire! Some of the same critics
also could scarcely choose between these and his songs to Aglæ in
her day, or Camille in hers. He is a young man of fine fancies, and
possesses the amiable quality of being invariably passionately in
earnest. As he was serious in his sentiments yesterday, so he will be
to-morrow, so he is to-day.”
“To-day!” echoed Madame de Castro. “Nonsense!”
Madame Villefort did not seem to talk much. It was M. Ralph Edmondstone
who conversed, and that, too, with so much of the charm of animation
that it was pleasurable even to be a mere looker-on.
One involuntarily strained one’s ears to catch a sentence,--he was
so eagerly absorbed, so full of rapid, gracefully unconscious and
unconventional gesture.
“I wonder what he is saying?” Madame de Castro was once betrayed into
exclaiming.
“Something metaphysical, about a poem, or a passage of music, or a
picture,--or perhaps his soul,” returned M. Renard. “His soul is his
strong point,--he pets it and wonders at it. He puts it through its
paces. And yet, singularly enough, he is never ridiculous--only fanciful
and _naïve_. It is his soul which so fascinates women.”
Whether this last was true of other women or not, Madame Villefort
scarcely appeared fascinated. As she listened, her eyes still rested
upon his eager mobile face, but with a peculiar expression,--an
expression of critical attention, and yet one which somehow detracted
from her look of youth, as if she weighed his words as they fell from
his lips and classified them, without any touch of the enthusiasm which
stirred within himself.
Suddenly she rose from her seat ana addressed her husband, who
immediately rose also. Then she spoke to M. Edmondstone, and without
more ado, the three left the box,--the young beauty, a little oddly,
rather followed than accompanied by her companions,--at the recognition
of which circumstance Madame de Castro uttered a series of sharp
ejaculations of disapproval.
“Bah! Bah!” she cried. “She is too young for such airs!--as if she were
Madame l’Impératrice herself! Take me to my carriage. I am tired also.”
Crossing the pavement with M. Renard, they passed the carriage of the
Villeforts. Before its open door stood M. Villefort and Edmondstone, and
the younger man, with bared head, bent forward speaking to his cousin.
“If I come to-morrow,” he was saying, “you will be at home, Bertha?”
“Yes.”
“Then, good-night,”--holding out his hand,--“only I wish so that
you would go to the Aylmers instead of home. That _protégée_ of Mrs.
Aylmer’s--the little singing girl--would touch your heart with her
voice. On hearing her, one thinks at once of some shy wild bird high in
a clear sky,--far enough above earth to have forgotten to be timid.”
“Yes,” came quietly from the darkness within the carriage; “but I am too
tired to care about voices just now. Good-night, Ralph!”
M. Renard’s reply of “God knows, Paris does not,” to Madame de Castro’s
query as to why Madame Villefort had married her husband, contained an
element of truth, and yet there were numbers of Parisian-Americans, more
especially the young, well-looking, and masculine, who at the time
the marriage had taken place had been ready enough with sardonic
explanations.
“There are women who are avaricious enough to sell their souls,” they
cried; “and the maternal Trent is one of them. The girl is only to blame
for allowing herself to be bullied into the match.”
“But the weak place in this argument,” said M. Renard, “is, that the
people are too rich to be greatly influenced by money. If there had been
a title,--but there was no title.”
Neither did Bertha Trent comport herself like a cowed creature. She took
her place in society as Madame Villefort in such a manner as could give
rise to no comment whatever; only one or two of the restless inquisitive
wondered if they had not been, mistaken in her. She was, as I have said
already, a childishly small and slight creature,--the kind of woman to
touch one with suggestions of helplessness and lack of will; and yet,
notwithstanding this, a celebrated artist--a shrewd, worldly-wise old
fellow--who had painted her portrait, had complained that he was not
satisfied with it because he had not done justice to “the obstinate
endurance in her eye.”
It was to her cousin, Ralph Edmondstone, he had said this with some
degree of testiness, and Edmondstone had smiled and answered:--
“What! have you found that out? Few people do.”
At the time of the marriage Edmondstone had been in Rome singeing his
wings in the light of the eyes of a certain Marchesa who was his latest
poetic passion. She was not his first fancy, nor would she be his last,
but she had power enough for the time being to have satisfied the most
exacting of women.
He was at his banker’s when he heard the news spoken of as the latest
item from American Paris, and his start and exclamation of disgust drew
forth some cynical after-comment from men who envied him.
“Who?” he said, with indiscreet impatience. “That undersized sphynx of a
Villefort? Faugh!”
But insignificant though he might be, it was M. Villefort who had
won, and if he was nothing more, he was at least a faithful attendant.
Henceforth, those who saw his wife invariably saw him also,--driving
with her in her carriage, riding with her courageously if ungracefully,
standing or seated near her in the shadow of her box at the Nouvelle
Opéra, silent, impassive, grave, noticeable only through the contrast he
afforded to her girlish beauty and bloom.
“Always there!” commented a sharp American belle of mature years, “like
an ugly little conscience.”
Edmondstone’s first meeting with his cousin after his return to Paris
was accidental. He had rather put off visiting her, and one night,
entering a crowded room, he found himself standing behind a girl’s light
figure and staring at an abundance of reddish-brown hair. When, almost
immediately the pretty head to which this hair belonged turned with
a slow, yet involuntary-looking movement toward him, he felt that he
became excited without knowing why.
“Ah, Bertha!” he exclaimed.
She smiled a little and held out her hand, and he immediately became
conscious of M. Villefort being quite near and regarding him seriously.
It was the perverseness of fate that he should find in Bertha Villefort
even more than he had once seen in Bertha Trent, and there had been
a time when he had seen a great deal in Bertha Trent. In the Trent
household he had been a great favorite. No social evening or family
festivity had seemed complete without his presence. The very children
had felt that they had a claim upon his good-humor, and his tendency
to break forth into whimsical frolic. Good Mrs. Trent had been wont to
scold him and gossip with him. He had read his sonnets and metaphysical
articles to Bertha, and occasionally to the rest; in fact, his footing
in the family was familiar and firmly established. But since her
marriage Bertha had become a little incomprehensible, and on that
account a little more interesting. He was sure she had developed, but
could not make out in what direction. He found occasion to reproach her
sometimes with the changes he found in her.
“There are times when I hardly know you,” he would say, “you are so
finely orthodox and well controlled. It was not so with you once,
Bertha. Don’t--don’t become that terrible thing, a fine lady, and worse
still, a fine lady who is _désillusionée_”
It baffled him that she never appeared much moved, by his charges.
Certainly she lived the life of a “fine lady,”--a brilliant life,
a luxurious one, a life full of polite dissipation. Once, when in a
tenderly fraternal mood, he reproached her with this also, she laughed
at him frankly.
“It is absinthe,” she said. “It is my absinthe at least, and who does
not drink a little absinthe--of one kind or another?”
He was sincerely convinced that from this moment he understood and had
the right to pity and watch over her. He went oftener to see her. In her
presence he studied her closely, absent he brooded over her. He became
impatiently intolerant of M. Villefort, and prone to condemn him, he
scarcely knew for what.
“He has no dignity--no perception,” was his parental decision. “He has
not even the delicacy to love her, or he would have the tenderness to
sacrifice his own feelings and leave her to herself. I could do it for a
woman I loved.”
But M. Villefort was always there,--gravely carrying the shawls, picking
up handkerchiefs, and making himself useful.
“_Imbécile!_” muttered M. Renard under cover of his smile and his
mustache, as he stood near his venerable patroness the first time she
met the Villeforts.
“Blockhead!” stealthily ejaculated that amiable aristocrat. But though
she looked grimly at M. Villefort, M. Renard was uncomfortably uncertain
that it was he to whom she referred.
“Go and bring them to me,” she commanded, “Go and bring them to me
before some one else engages them. I want to talk to that girl.”
It was astonishing how agreeable she made herself to her victims
when she had fairly entrapped them. Bertha hesitated a little before
accepting her offer of a seat at her side, but once seated she found
herself oddly amused. When Madame de Castro chose to rake the embers of
her seventy years, many a lively coal discovered itself among the ashes.
Seeing the two women together, Edmondstone shuddered in fastidious
protest.
“How could you laugh at that detestable old woman?” he exclaimed on
encountering Bertha later in the evening. “I wonder that M. Villefort
would permit her to talk to you. She is a wicked, cynical creature, who
has the hardihood to laugh at her sins instead of repenting of them.”
“Perhaps that is the reason she is so amusing,” said Bertha.
Edmondstone answered her with gentle mournfulness.
“What!” he said. “Have you begun to say such things? You too, Bertha”--
The laugh with which she stopped him was both light and hard.
“Where is M. Villefort?” she asked. “I have actually not seen him for
fifteen minutes. Is it possible that Madame de Castro has fascinated him
into forgetting me?”
Edmondstone went to his hotel that night in a melancholy mood. He even
lay awake to think what a dreary mistake his cousin’s marriage was. She
had been such a tender and easily swayed little soul as a girl, and now
it really seemed as if she was hardening into a woman of the world.
In the old times he had been wont to try his sonnets upon Bertha as a
musician tries his chords upon his most delicate instrument. Even now
he remembered certain fine, sensitive expressions of hers which had
thrilled him beyond measure.
“How could she marry such a fellow as that--how could she?” he groaned.
“What does it mean? It must mean something.”
He was pale and heavy-eyed when he wandered round to the Villeforts’
the following morning. M. Villefort was sitting with Bertha and reading
aloud. He stopped to receive their visitor punctiliously and inquire
after his health.
“M. Edmondstone cannot have slept well,” he remarked.
“I did not sleep at all,” Edmondstone answered, “and naturally have a
headache.”
Bertha pointed to a wide lounge of the _pouf_ order.
“Then go to sleep now,” she said; “M. Villefort will read. When I have a
headache he often reads me to sleep, and I am always better on awaking.”
Involuntarily Edmondstone half frowned. Absurdly enough, he resented in
secret this amiability on the part of M. Villefort toward his own wife.
He was quite prepared to be severe upon the reading, but was surprised
to be compelled to acknowledge that M. Villefort read wondrously well,
and positively with hints of delicate perception. His voice was full and
yet subtly flexible. Edmondstone tried to protest against this also, but
uselessly. Finally he was soothed, and from being fretfully wide-awake
suddenly passed into sleep as Bertha had commanded. How long his slumber
lasted he could not have told. All at once he found himself aroused and
wide-awake as ever. His headache had departed; his every sense seemed to
have gained keenness. M. Villefort’s voice had ceased, and for a few
seconds utter, dead silence reigned. Then he heard the fire crackling,
and shortly afterward a strange, startling sound--a sharp, gasping sob!
The pang which seized upon him was strong indeed. In one moment he
seemed to learn a thousand things by intuition--to comprehend her,
himself, the past. Before he moved he knew that Villefort was not in the
room, and he had caught a side glimpse of the pretty blue of Bertha’s
dress.
But he had not imagined the face he saw when he turned his head to look
at her. She sat in a rigid attitude, leaning against the high cushioned
back of her chair, her hands clasped above her head. She stared at the
fire with eyes wide and strained with the agony of tears unshed, and
amid the rush of all other emotions he was peculiarly conscious of
being touched by the minor one of his recognition of her look of extreme
youth--the look which had been wont to touch people in the girl, Bertha
Trent. He had meant to speak clearly, but his voice was only a loud
whisper when he sprang up, uttering her name.
“Bertha! Bertha! Bertha!” as he flung himself upon his knees at her
side.
Her answer was an actual cry, and yet it reached no higher pitch than
his own intense whisper.
“I thought you were asleep?”
Her hands fell and he caught them. His sad impassioned face bowed itself
upon her palms.
“I am awake, Bertha,” he groaned. “I am awake--at last.”
She regarded him with a piteous, pitying glance. She knew him with a
keener, sadder knowledge than he would ever comprehend; but she did not
under-estimate the depth of his misery at this one overwhelming moment.
He was awake indeed and saw what he had lost.
“If you could but have borne with me a little longer,” he said. “If I
had only not been so shallow and so blind. If you could but have borne
with me a little longer!”
“If I could but have borne with myself a little longer,” she answered.
“If I could but have borne a little longer with my poor, base pride!
Because I suffered myself, I have made another suffer too.”
He knew she spoke of M. Villefort, and the thought jarred upon him.
“He does not suffer,” he said. “He is not of the fibre to feel pain.”
And he wondered why she shrank from him a little and answered with a sad
bitterness:--
“Are you sure? You did not know that!”--
“Forgive me,” he said brokenly, the face he lifted, haggard with his
unhappiness. “Forgive me, for I have lost so much.”
She wasted few words and no tears. The force and suddenness of his
emotion and her own had overborne her into this strange unmeant
confession; but her mood was unlike his,--it was merely receptive. She
listened to his unavailing regrets, but told him little of her own past.
“It does not matter,” she said drearily. “It is all over. Let it
rest. The pain of to-day and tomorrow is enough for us. We have borne
yesterday; why should we want it back again?”