PERFECTING THEMSELVES IN FRENCH.
That was what Mr. Beresford and Phil were said to be doing during the
weeks when they went every day to Hetherton Place, Phil, who had nothing
to do, riding over early every morning, and Mr. Beresford, who had a
great deal to do, going in the evening, or as early in the afternoon as
he could get away from his office. It was not unusual for the two to
meet on the causeway, Phil coming from and Mr. Beresford going to the
little lady, who bewitched and intoxicated them both, though in a very
different way. With Phil, her cousin, she laughed, and played, and
flirted, and quarreled—hot, bitter quarrels sometimes—in which she
always had the better of Phil, inasmuch as her command of language was
greater, and her rapid gestures added point to her sarcasm. But if her
anger was the hotter and fiercer, she was always the first to make
overtures for a reconciliation; the first to confess herself in error,
and she did it so prettily and sweetly, and purred around Phil so like a
loving kitten, that he thought the making up worth all the quarreling,
and rather provoked the latter than tried to avoid it.
Sometimes, when she was more than usually unreasonable and aggravating,
Phil would absent himself from Hetherton Place for two or three days,
knowing well that in the end Pierre would come to him with a note from
Queenie begging him to return, and chiding him for his foolishness in
laying to heart anything she had said.
“You know I do not mean a word of it, and it’s just my awful temper
which gets the mastery, and I think you hateful to bother me by staying
away when you know how poky it is here without you,” she would write,
and within an hour Phil would be at her side again, basking in the
sunlight of her charms, and growing every day more and more infatuated
with the girl, whose eyes were just as bright, and whose smile was just
as sweet and alluring, when, later on, Mr. Beresford came, more in love,
if possible, than Phil, but with a different way of showing it.
Queenie was morally certain that he was either in love with her or would
be soon; and she was always a little shy of him, and never allowed the
conversation to approach anything like love-making; and if he praised a
particular dress and said it was becoming, as he sometimes did, she
never wore it again for him, but when she knew he was coming, donned
some old-fashioned gown in which she fancied herself hideous.
“If Mr. Beresford would be foolish, it should not be from any fault of
hers,” she thought, never dreaming that if she arrayed herself in a bag
he would still have thought her charming, provided her eyes and mouth
were visible.
Ostensibly Mr. Beresford’s relations with her were of a purely business
nature; for in managing so large an estate there was much to be talked
about, and Queenie would know everything, especially with regard to
foreign matters.
There were many letters from France, and these she read to Mr.
Beresford, who, with Phil’s help, might have made them out: but he
brought them religiously to Queenie, who had insisted upon it with a
persistence which surprised him, and insisted, too, upon receiving them
from him with the seals unbroken and reading them first herself. She had
not forgotten her father’s dying injunction: “If letters come to me from
France burn them unread.”
No letters had come to him from any source, proving that he had no
friends who cared to know of his welfare: but with a woman’s subtle
intuition, heightened by actual knowledge, Queenie knew there was
something somewhere which she was to ward off if possible, and, as it
might come in some business letter, she made it a condition that all
documents should be brought to her first. As yet, however, everything
had been open and clear, and Queenie was beginning to think her fears
groundless, when Mr. Beresford brought her one day a letter from Messrs.
Polignie & Co., who, among other things, wrote that the money invested
with them for the benefit of a certain Christine Bodine had been paid by
them to her agent, who had been empowered by her to receive the same.
The name of the agent was given, and enclosed was his receipt, and then
M. Polignie wrote:
“For reasons which may or may not be just, I would not advise the young
lady to continue her search for this woman Bodine, whom we shall make no
effort to find nor shall we answer Miss Hetherton’s letter with regard
to her, unless greatly pressed to do so.”
Reinette was white to her lips as she read this, with Mr. Beresford
sitting by and watching her, but she uttered no sound She merely took a
pencil from the table, and on a slip of paper wrote the name and address
of Christine’s agent, which she put into her pocket; then, still keeping
the letter from Mr. Beresford, she scratched out every word concerning
Christine so effectually that it would be impossible for any one to
decipher it, much less Mr. Beresford, whose knowledge of the language
was so imperfect.
“Miss Hetherton! what are you doing? You may be erasing something very
important for me to know. Stop, instantly! You have no business thus to
mutilate a letter which does not belong to you,” he cried, growing more
and more in earnest, and even irritable, as she paid no heed to him, but
went coolly on with her erasures.
“It is my business,” she answered, at last, and her voice was low and
strange. “It is my business, and no one’s else. It has nothing to do
with you. It only concerned me. You can have your letter now; they have
paid my nurse’s agent and sent you his receipt.”
She handed him the letter, which, as it was written in an unusually
hurried manner, he could not read, and so she read it to him,
unconsciously laying a good deal of stress upon the fact that Christine
had been paid, and that there was an end of that.
“You see they do not tell you where she is,” she said, trying to speak
naturally, though there was a kind of defiant tone in her voice. “And
you need not make any further inquiries. I might not like her, and if I
brought her here I should feel obliged to keep her.”
She looked straight at Mr. Beresford, who nodded assent to what she
said, but was not wholly deceived. That the erasure had something to do
with Christine he was certain, and, with his curiosity roused by
Reinette’s excited manner, he resolved to ascertain for himself who and
what the woman was. He, too, had the address of her authorized agent,
and the mail for New York which left Merrivale next day carried two
letters, one in English and one in French, directed to M. Jean Albrech,
Mentone, France, and in the one written in French was a note for
_Christine Bodine_, in whom Reinette had implicit faith as a true, good
woman, notwithstanding what the Messrs. Polignie had insinuated against
her. They were vile, suspicious people, Reinette said to herself, who,
because her father paid money to a poor woman, thought she must be bad.
They did not know, as she did, how kind and faithful Christine had been
to her mother, who asked that she should be rewarded and cared for, and
this was the way her father had done it. Thus Queenie reasoned and tried
to reassure herself, but for days there was a shadow on her bright face
and a dull pain in her heart as she wondered what the mystery could be
concerning the woman Bodine.
But Queenie could not be unhappy long, and in visiting Margery as she
did every day, and calling upon her cousins at the Knoll, and watching
what had become a decided flirtation or rather genuine love affair
between Major Rossiter and Anna, she recovered her spirits, and resuming
her old, fascinating manner with Mr. Beresford and Phil, drove them both
to the point of seeking to know their fate, whether for good or evil.