TRYING TO READ THE PAGE.
The night set in dark and stormy even for November and the wind howled
dismally through the tall elms which grew upon the common, while both
sleet and rain were falling pitilessly, when Mr. Beresford left his
office, equipped for an evening call. He was going to see Margery La
Rue, whom he found alone, as her mother had retired to her room with a
toothache and swollen face. Margery let him in herself, and looked fully
the surprise she felt when she saw who her visitor was. It was not so
much that he should come that night as that he should come at all which
astonished the young girl, who, with a woman’s intuition, had read the
proud man pretty accurately, and guessed that persons like her, whose
bread was earned by their own hands, had not much attraction for him.
But it was his early training, which was at fault, and not the real
heart of the man himself. His mother had seldom done so much for herself
as to arrange her own hair, and when her immense fortune slipped away
from her, and left her comparatively poor, and compelled her sons, two
as noble boys as ever called a woman mother, to choose professions and
care for themselves, she could not bear the change, and with a feeling
that she would rather die than live and work, she died, and very few
mourned for her. With such a mother and a long line of ancestry on her
side, as proud and exclusive as herself, it is not strange that Mr.
Beresford should have imbibed some notions not altogether consistent
with democratic institutions. He thought a great deal of family and
blood, and though he was always polite and courteous to Margery when
they met, he had unconsciously made her feel the gulf between them, and
she had good cause to gaze on him wonderingly as she opened the door,
and held it open a moment as if expecting him to give her some message
from Queenie, as he had done when Phil went away. Laughing
good-humoredly as he stepped past her into the hall, he said:
“I am coming in, you see, though I do not wonder that a call on such a
wild night as this surprises you. But it is the weather which brings me
here. I believe I have had the blues or something to-day, and need to
talk to some one, and as Phil is gone, and Reinette is sick, I have come
to call on you. I hope I am not unwelcome.”
He was talking rather strangely, and not at all in a strain
complimentary to Margery, who, nevertheless, passed it off pleasantly,
and said, with her pretty accent, which struck Mr. Beresford with a
degree of newness.
“Thank you, Mr. Beresford; I surely ought to feel honored to be No. 3.
Let me see; you said that as Mr. Rossiter was gone, and Reinette sick,
you were reduced to the alternative of coming here to be rid of the
blues. Is that it? or have my French ears misinterpreted your English
meaning?”
“That is the way it sounded, I will admit,” Mr. Beresford replied, “but
I am a bungler anyway, so please consider that I have made you number
one, for really I have been intending to call for some time.”
He took the seat she offered him, and moved it a little more in front of
her, where he could look directly at her as she bent over her work,
which, with his permission, she had resumed, and which, as it was a
sacque for Miss Anna, must be finished as soon as possible.
How graceful every motion was, and how well her dress of black cashmere,
with soft lace ruffles at her throat and sleeves, became her, and how
very beautiful she was both in face and form, with her golden hair
rippling over her finely shaped head, her dazzling complexion, her
perfectly regular features, and, more than all, her large, clear, sunny
blue eyes, veiled by long, fringed lashes, and shaded by eyebrows so
heavy and black, that they seemed almost out of place with that hair of
golden hue. But they gave her a novel and _distingue_ look, and added to
her beauty, which, now that he was studying her, struck Mr. Beresford as
something remarkable, and made his eyes linger on the fair face with
more admiration even than curiosity. But the likeness he sought for was
not there, unless it were in the occasional toss of the head on one
side—the significant shrug of the shoulders, or gestures of the
hands—and something in the tone of the voice when it grew very earnest
as she talked to him of Reinette, who was not like her in the least. In
feature and complexion, Margery was the handsomer of the two. Mr.
Beresford confessed that to himself with a kind of jealous pang, as if,
in some way, a wrong were done the dark-faced, dark-eyed Queenie, who,
put side by side with Margery La Rue, would, nevertheless, win every
time, and make people see only herself, with her wonderful sparkle, and
brightness, which threw everything else into the shade. Queenie was the
diamond, and Margery the pearl, and they were not at all alike, and Mr.
Beresford felt puzzled, and inclined to believe the agent in Mentone a
slanderer, especially after he had talked with Margery awhile, of her
friend.
“You have known Reinette a long time?” he said and she replied:
“Yes, a long time—ever since we were little girls—though it seems but
yesterday since she climbed the narrow, winding stairs up to that low
room, where I staid all day long with no company but the cat, and
nothing besides my playthings to amuse me, except to look down into the
narrow street below, the Rue St. Honore, and watch the carts, and
carriages, and people as they passed, and wonder when mother would come
home, and if she would bring me, as she sometimes did, a bon-bon, or a
white, tender _croissant_, which I liked so much better for my supper
than our dark, sour bread.”
“Yes,” Mr. Beresford said, leaning forward and listening eagerly to what
Margery was telling him of her early life, and wondering a little that
she should be so communicative.
“Most girls would try to conceal the fact that they had once known such
poverty,” he thought, but he did not know Margery La Rue, or guess that
it was in part her pride which made her talk as she was talking.
She was naturally reserved and reticent with regard to herself, but to
him, whose value of birth, and blood, and family connections she rightly
guessed, she would speak openly, and show him that it was something more
than a mere dressmaker—a sewing-woman—whom he was honoring with his
society, and in whom he was interested in spite of himself. She divined
that readily, by the kindling of his eyes when they met hers as she
talked, and by some of those subtle influences by which a woman knows
that the man she is talking with is entertained and pleased with herself
as well as with what she is saying.
So, when he said to her, with a kind of pity in his tone, “And you were
so desolate as that when Reinette found you?” she answered:
“Yes, more desolate than you can guess—you who have never known what
poverty means in a large city like Paris. But I was not unhappy,
either,” she added, quickly. “I had too much love and petting from my
mother for that. I was only lonely in her absence; for she worked at a
hair-dresser’s and was gone all day, and I kept the house and got the
meals for father till he died.”
“Your father—yes,” Mr. Beresford repeated. “What was he, what did he do,
and when did he die?”
He seemed very eager in his questionings, and mistaking his meaning
altogether, Margery’s cheeks flushed, but her voice was steady and clear
as she replied:
“I do not know that he did anything. I think it is a fashion in France
more than here for the women to work and the men to take their ease. At
all events, father had no regular occupation that I know of. Sometimes
he acted as guide to strangers, for he could speak a little English, and
sometimes he was employed for a few days as waiter at some of the Duval
restaurants, and once he took mother and me there to dine. That is the
white day of my life, as connected with him. Reinette heard of me from
old Lisette, the laundress, who lived on the floor below, and she came
up to our humble room in her scarlet cloak and hood trimmed with ermine,
and filled it with glory at once. You know what a halo of brightness
seems to encircle her, and affect everything around her. And how she did
sparkle and glow, and light up the whole room, as she sat there in that
hard wooden chair with me standing awkwardly by, in my coarse
high-necked working apron, with broom in hand, and gazing at her as if
she had been a being from another sphere.”
How rapid and excitedly she talked, gesticulating with her hands, which
were as small and white as those of any lady, and how large and bright
her blue eyes grew, as she described that first interview with Reinette
so vividly that Mr. Beresford could see the low room, far up the winding
stairs, the humble furniture, the bare floor, the smoldering fire on the
hearth, the wooden chair, the dark-eyed little girl in scarlet and
ermine who sat there with the captured cat in her lap, talking to
another child quite as beautiful as herself, though of another type of
beauty, and clad in the coarse garments of the poor. He could see it all
so plainly, and forgetting for a time why he was there, he listened
still more intently, while Margery went on to tell him of the Champs
d’Elysees, where she wore the scarlet cloak and played she was Mr.
Hetherton’s little girl, while Queenie sat demurely at her side, clad in
homely garments, and making believe that she was Margery La Rue, whose
home was up the winding stairs in the Rue St. Honore.
“I think that one act bound me to her forever,” Margery said, “though it
was the beginning of many make-believes and many deeds of kindness, for
through Queenie’s influence her father paid my expenses in part at the
English school which she attended, and where I learned to speak your
language and all I know besides, and after that she stood my fast friend
in everything and treated me more like a sister than an inferior, as I
am, by birth and social position. I think her love has never failed me
since the day she first came to me and brought the glorious sunlight
with her. So, do you wonder that I love her? I would lay down my life
for her, if need be—would sacrifice everything for her, and I sometimes
wish that I might have the chance to show how much I love her, and would
endure for her sake.”
Margery paused here, and with clasped hands, and eyes which had in them
a rapt, far-away look, seemed almost to see looming on the horizon not
far in the distance the something for which she longed, and which, when
it came, would test her as few women have ever been tested in their love
for another.
It was not possible that the dark shadow touched her now, although it
was so near, and yet she shivered a little and drew a long breath as she
at last came back to the present and turned her eyes upon Mr. Beresford,
who said to her:
“Did you even see Queenie’s father?—did you know him, I mean—you or your
mother?”
“No, neither of us,” Margery answered promptly. “I saw him once when
Queenie and I were riding in the Bois, and she made him come and speak
to me, but I did not like him much. He impressed me as one very proud
and haughty, who only endured me for Queenie’s sake. He was
fine-looking, though, and his manners were very elegant. Did you know
him, Mr. Beresford?”
“Scarcely at all, as I was a mere boy when he went away, but I have
heard much of him from the villagers; he was not very popular, I
imagine,” Mr. Beresford replied, and then the conversation drifted into
other channels, and they talked of Phil and Anna, and her engagement
with the major, which was generally understood, but nothing more was
said of Margery’s early life.
Mr. Beresford had not succeeded in reading the page just as he had
expected to read it, and was a good deal puzzled and perplexed when, at
rather a late hour, he said good-night to Margery, and went back to his
rooms at the hotel, with his mind full of what she had told him of her
life as connected with Reinette Hetherton, and full too with thoughts of
herself, and after he had retired to his bed, and a feeling of
drowsiness began to steal over him, there came to him another face than
Queenie’s—a fairer face, with golden hair and eyes of blue—and in his
troubled dreams the face hid Queenie’s from him, and a voice with more
of a foreign accent than Queenie’s was sounding in his ears.
It was very late when he awoke, with a confused vision of black eyes and
blue eyes dancing before him, and hastily dressing himself and
swallowing his breakfast, he started for his office, where to his
surprise he found Reinette Hetherton waiting for him.