Van Zandt determined to keep his promise to call in Esplanade Street
that evening. He felt a languid curiosity over Mme. Lorraine's charge,
the daring girl whose whole young body was worth less to madame than
one of the slender hoofs of her favorite Selim.
He arrived early, and was ushered into an exquisite little salon all in
olive and gold--fit setting for madame's ripe, dusky beauty. She was
alone, looking magnificent in ruby velvet with cream lace garnishing
and ruby jewelry, and the smile with which she received him was welcome
itself.
"Ah, _mon ami_! I was wondering if you would really come," she said,
archly. "Sit here beside me, and tell me how you enjoyed the day?"
She swept aside her glowing draperies, and gave him a seat by her
side on the olive satin sofa. He accepted it with an odd sensation of
disappointment, despite her luring beauty and the sensuous comfort and
luxury of the room, whose air was heavy with the perfume of flowers in
vases and pots all about them.
He thought, disappointedly:
"Am I not to see her Little Nobody?"
Apparently not, for no one entered, and madame sat contentedly by his
side, talking arch nothings to him, fluttering her fan coquettishly,
and laughing at his careless repartee. Not a word all the while of her
whom madame had sworn should pay for her madcap freak of to-day.
By and by came Carmontelle, Remond, and Markham. They laughed at
finding Van Zandt before them.
"But, madame, where is your Little Nobody?" queried the gay
Carmontelle. "We are come to lay our hearts at her feet. Know that she
has supplanted you in the adoration of the Jockey Club. Her victory
to-day makes us all her slaves."
Madame gave utterance to a light, mocking laugh as she touched the
gilded bell-cord close to her hand, and all eyes turned to the door.
Five, almost ten, minutes passed, then it was softly opened, and a girl
came in with a silver salver heaped high with luscious tropical fruit.
Van Zandt recognized her as the winner of the race by the wealth of
tawny golden hair that flowed down her back below her slim, girlish
waist. He waited, with his eyes on the strange young face, for madame
to speak some words of introduction, but none came. Just as any other
servant might have entered, so was this girl permitted to enter. The
fellows from the Jockey Club nodded familiarly at her, and received
a sulky stare in return as she dispensed her fruit among them with
impatient courtesy.
When she paused, last of all, before Mme. Lorraine, with her salver of
fruit, she seemed first to observe the tall, fair man by her side. She
started and fixed her big, solemn, dark eyes half wonderingly upon him,
and for a second they gazed silently and curiously at each other.
He saw a girl of fifteen or so, very _petite_ for her age, and made to
look more so by the fashion of her dress, which consisted mainly of
a loosely fashioned white embroidered slip, low in the neck, short in
the sleeves, and so short in the skirt that it reached the verge of
immodesty by betraying much more than the conventional limit of the
tapering ankles and rounded limbs. Madame had evidently aimed more
at picturesqueness than propriety in choosing her dress, and she had
certainly attained her point. Anything more full of unstudied grace and
unconscious beauty than the little serving-maid it would be hard to
imagine. The contrast of tawny golden hair with dark eyes and slender,
jetty brows, with features molded in the most bewitching lines, and
form as perfect as a sculptor's model, made up a _tout ensemble_ very
pleasing to the journalist's observant eyes. There was but one defect,
and that was a certain sullenness of eyes and expression that bespoke a
fiery spirit at bay, a nature full of repressed fire and passion ready
to burst into lava-flame at a touch, a word.
For her she saw a man of twenty-five or six, tall, manly, and handsome
in a splendid intellectual fashion, with fair hair clustered above a
grand white brow, blue-gray eyes bright and laughing, a fair mustache
ornamenting lips at once firm and sweet, a chin that was grave and full
of power in spite of the womanish dimple that cleft it--altogether a
most attractive face, and one that influenced her subtly, for some
of the sullenness faded from her face, and with brightening eyes she
exclaimed, with all the freedom of a child:
"Oh, I know you at sight! You are madame's handsome Yankee, _n'est ce
pas_?"
He rose, laughing, and with his most elaborate bow.
"Eliot Van Zandt, at your service," he said. "Yes, I am the Yankee. And
you?"
He saw the sullen gleam come back into her eyes, as she answered
curtly, and, as it seemed, with repressed wrath:
"Oh. I am Little Nobody, madame says. I have always been too poor to
have even a name. Have some fruit, please."
Madame tittered behind her elaborate fan, and the members of the Jockey
Club exchanged glances. Eliot took an orange mechanically, and then the
girl put the salver down and turned to go.
But Mme. Lorraine's dark eyes looked over the top of her fan with
sarcastic amusement.
"Remain," she said, with cold brevity; and the girl flung herself
angrily down into a chair, with her hands crossed and her tiny slippers
dangling. With uplifted eyes she studied intently the face of the
stranger.
"Handsome, is he, madcap?" at length queried Carmontelle, full of
amusement.
The large eyes turned on his face scornfully.
"Handsomer than any of the ugly old Jockey Club!" she replied, with
decision.
"We shall all be very jealous of this Yankee," said Markham. "Here we
have been adoring you ever since you were a baby, ma'amselle, and you
throw us over in a bunch for the sake of this charming stranger. You
are cruel, unjust." He began to hum, softly, meaningly:
"'Do not trust him, gentle lady,
Though his words be low and sweet;
Heed not him that kneels before thee,
Gently pleading at thy feet.'"
The song went no further, for the girl looked at him with large eyes of
sarcastic amusement and said, curtly:
"If I had such an atrocious voice as yours, I should not try to sing."
A sally of laughter greeted the words, and the sulky countenance
relaxed into a smile.
Van Zandt studied the young face closely, his artistic taste charmed by
its bright, warm beauty, full of Southern fire and passion.
"How came she, the nameless child of a circus-rider, by her dower of
high-bred, faultless beauty?" he thought, in wonder, noticing the
dainty white hands, the
"Delicate Arab arch of her feet,
And the grace that, light and bright as the crest
Of a peacock, sits on her shining head;
And she knows it not. Oh, if she knew it!
To know her beauty might half undo it."
Mme. Lorraine, at his side, watched him with lowered lids and
compressed lips. At last, tapping his arm with her fan, and smiling
archly, she said, in an under-tone:
"Beautiful, is she not, _mon ami_? But--that is all. Her mind is a
void, a blank--capable of nothing but the emotions of anger or hatred,
the same as the brute creation. I have tried to educate her into a
companion, but in vain; so she can never be more than a pretty toy to
me--no more nor less than my Maltese kitten or my Spitz puppy, although
I like to see her about me, the same as I love all beautiful things."
He heard her in amazement. Soulless--that beautiful, spirited-looking
creature! Could it be? He saw the dark eyes lighten as the men began
to praise her dauntless riding that day. They were very expressive,
those large, almond-shaped eyes. Surely a soul dwelt behind those
dark-fringed lids.
Some one proposed cards, and madame assented with alacrity, without
seeing Eliot Van Zandt's gesture of disgust. He refused point-blank to
take a hand in the game, and said, with reckless audacity:
"Do not mind me; I am always unlucky at play; so I will amuse myself
instead with Little Nobody."
Her eyes flashed, but when Mme. Lorraine vacated the seat upon
the sofa, she came over and took it, not with any appearance of
forwardness, but as a simple matter of course. Then, looking up at him,
she said, with child-like directness:
"And so you are a Yankee? I am surprised. I have always hated the
Yankees, you know. My father was a Confederate soldier, madame says. He
was killed the last year of the war, just a month before I was born."
Mme. Lorraine looked around with a dark frown, but Van Zandt pretended
not to see it as he answered:
"Do you mean that you will not have me for your friend, ma'amselle,
because I was born in Boston, and because my father fell fighting for
the Stars and Stripes?"
"A friend? What is that, monsieur?" she queried, naïvely; and Markham,
to whom the conversation was perfectly audible from his corner of the
card-table, looked around, and said, teasingly:
"It is something that you will never be able to keep, ma'amselle, by
reason of your pretty face. All your friends will become your lovers."
"Hold your tongue, Colonel Markham; I was not talking to you, and it's
ill manners to break into a conversation," said the girl, shortly.
She broke off a white camellia from a vase near her, and held it
lightly between her taper fingers as she again addressed herself to the
journalist:
"I like your word 'friend.' It has a nice sound. But I don't quite
understand."
"I must try to explain it to you," he replied, smiling. "I may tell
you, since Markham has broached the subject, that the poets have said
that friendship is love in disguise, but the dictionary gives it a more
prosaic meaning. Let us find it as it is in Webster."
"Webster?" stammeringly, and Mme. Lorraine looked around with her
disagreeably sarcastic laugh.
"Monsieur Van Zandt, you bewilder my little savage. She can not read."
But a light of comprehension flashed instantly into the puzzled eyes.
She pulled Eliot's sleeve.
"You mean books. Come, you will find plenty in the library."
He followed her into the pretty room beyond the olive satin _portière_,
where they found plenty of books indeed. She pointed to them, and
looked at him helplessly.
He found Webster on the top shelf of a rich inlaid book-case, and was
half-stifled with dust as he drew it down from the spot where it had
rested undisturbed for years. He sneezed vigorously, and his companion
hastened to dust it off with her tiny handkerchief.
"Now!" she said, anxiously, spreading the big book open on a table
before him.