To return to Mme. Lorraine the night when Eliot Van Zandt lay like one
dead before her door in a pool of his own blood, deserted by the brutal
Remond, who had left him for dead upon the pavement.
She had peeped from the window as Carmontelle had charged her with
doing, although she had denied the accusation, and she had beheld all
that passed. If she had not conceived a passion for Van Zandt, he might
have perished, for all she would have cared; but something of womanly
softness stole into her heart as she gazed, and she murmured:
"Can he be dead, or only in a deadly swoon? What if I go and find out?"
Glancing up and down the street to make sure that no one was in sight,
she slipped out and knelt down by the prostrate form. Pushing back his
coat and vest, she laid her hand over his heart.
"There is some faint pulse. He lives, he lives!" she murmured,
joyfully. "Now, now is my chance to act the good Samaritan. I will take
him into my house, nurse him, tend him, and gratitude may win for me
that which beauty and fascination failed to conquer."
She hastily summoned a confidential servant, a woman who had been in
her employ many years, and the repository of many strange secrets.
Together they managed to convey the wounded, unconscious man into the
house, although the domestic expostulated with every breath.
"Hold your tongue, Mima. It is none of your business. You have only to
obey my orders," madame returned, coolly. "The underground chamber,
please. His presence is to be kept a secret. You and I will have the
care of him--you are quite skillful enough, after your experience as a
hospital nurse during the war, to attend his wound. He will be hidden
here, while to the world he will have mysteriously disappeared."
They laid him down on a couch in the wide hall, and Mima took a lamp
and went out.
Soon she returned, and stood before her mistress, huge, and tall, and
dark, with a malignant scowl on her homely foreign face.
"Madame, your strange guest-chamber is ready," she said, with curt
sarcasm. "But this heavy body--how shall we convey it down the stairs?"
"You are big and strong enough," Mme. Lorraine replied, coolly. "You
may go in front and carry his body; I will follow with his pretty head
in my arms."
And so, as if the fate that had stricken him down into seeming death
had not been dark enough, he was borne, an unconscious prisoner, into
an underground chamber beneath Mme. Lorraine's house--a luxurious
chamber, richly furnished, but of whose presence no one was aware
save herself and this servant, for it was entered by a door cleverly
concealed among the oak panelings of the hall. The light of day never
entered this secret chamber. It was illumined by a swinging-lamp, and
the odor of dried rose leaves from a jar of _pot-pourri_ in one corner
pleasantly pervaded the air, dispelling some of the mustiness and
closeness inseparable from its underground situation.
They laid Van Zandt down upon a soft white bed, and Mme. Lorraine said,
coolly:
"Now, Mima, you may examine into the extent of his wound."
The large, masculine-looking woman went to work in quite a professional
way on her unconscious patient, and in a short time she looked around
and said, to the great relief of her mistress:
"It is an ugly wound, very near his heart, but not necessarily a
dangerous one, unless a fever sets in. He has fainted from loss of
blood, and I will dress the wound before I attempt to revive him. You
may go upstairs, for I see you growing pale already at the sight of
blood, and I don't want you here fainting on my hands."
"Thank you, Mima," said Mme. Lorraine, almost meekly; for one of her
weaknesses, which she shared in common with most women, was that the
sight of blood always made her very sick and faint.
She staggered out of the close room, toiled feebly up the stairs, and
drank two glasses of wine to steady her trembling nerves; then she
extinguished the lights in the house, and retired to her bed. She was
still awake when Carmontelle returned in quest of Eliot Van Zandt, and
she laughed in her sleeve at his furious, ineffectual peals at the bell.
Stealing to the window, she drew back a fold of the curtain and
peered down at him, chuckling softly when she saw him take his angry
departure. Then she returned to her silken couch, and slept soundly for
hours.
The sun was high in the heavens when Mima's rough, impatient hand shook
her broad awake without ceremony.
"Are you going to sleep all day?" she demanded. "You wouldn't if you
knew what had happened. The little one's gone. I can't find her in the
house or the grounds, and her bed ain't been slept in all night."
She gazed suspiciously into madame's startled face, which was not
so handsome now with the cosmetics washed from it, and that frown
wrinkling her brow. She repeated Mima's word in apparently stupid amaze:
"Gone!"
"Yes, gone! Don't you know anything about it? Ain't you had a hand in
it?"
Mme. Lorraine, sitting up in bed in her night-robe of soft white linen,
burst out, indignantly:
"Look here, Mima, don't make a fool of yourself. If the girl's gone,
it's none of my work. She threatened, the last time I beat her, that
she would run away, and I suppose she's kept her word. I've noticed
that some of the men that come here were sweet on her, and she's gone
with one of them, no doubt."
Mima stood like one petrified, looking at her, when she suddenly burst
out again:
"Oh, dear! perhaps she has taken Selim! Run, Mima, to the stables. Oh,
the little wretch!--if she dared--"
Mima interrupted, harshly:
"She has not taken your idol. I knew she was in the habit of stealing
him out for a wild canter sometimes, and I ran to the stables when I
missed her. Selim was there all right, and the ponies, too."
"Then she has gone off with some of the men; she has eloped, the little
vixen, and may joy go with her! It is a good riddance of bad rubbish,"
madame cried, in such violent indignation that the servant's suspicions
were disarmed. Seeing the impression she had made, the wily ex-actress
went on: "I dare say that was the cause of the shooting last night.
I was awakened by the report of a pistol, and jumped out of bed and
ran to the window. I saw a carriage in front of my door, and two men
scuffling on the pavement. Suddenly one fell to the ground; the other
jumped into the carriage and drove rapidly away. No doubt the wicked
little baggage was in the vehicle, and the fight was over her. Let her
go, the little nobody. I shall make no effort to find her. But aren't
you going to give me my chocolate, when I'm so weak I can scarcely
speak?" pausing in her voluble tirade, and fixing a glance of reproach
on the servant's dark, stolid face.
Mima shrugged her broad shoulders sarcastically and retired, and madame
sprung out of bed, thrust her feet into satin slippers, and huddled on
an elaborate _robe de chambre_.
"I suppose I shall have to dress myself now, having deprived myself
of my little maid's services to gratify my desire for revenge," she
muttered, half regretfully. "_Ciel_! but she had deft fingers and a
correct taste. I can not replace her services by another, for the
secrets of this old house are not to be trusted to a stranger. Well, I
am a thousand dollars the richer, although Remond let the prize slip
through his fingers after he had paid the price. And what a fortune it
was that cast Van Zandt into my hands! I have fallen in love with the
beautiful boy. It is really love, not the _penchant_ I have entertained
for a score of others. Ah!" She paused in her soliloquy, for Mima
entered with a tray on which glistened the gold and silver of a costly
breakfast service, spread with delicate edibles. "Your patient, Mima,
how is he?" she queried, anxiously.
"He is doing well, and thinks he is in a hospital," said the woman. "It
is best to humor him in that delusion for several days; for if he were
to find out the truth now, he would fret and chafe, and perhaps bring
on the fever I am anxious to avoid. So, madame, you would do well to
stay out of the sick-room until he is well enough to bear the news that
he is a prisoner of love," sarcastically.