"Scarcely," answered Carmontelle, dryly, for Eliot Van Zandt seemed
to have no words at his command. He could only gaze in horror at the
vindictive woman. The former went on curtly, and in tones of calm
authority: "We are here, madame, to hear from your own lips the strange
story with which you sundered two loving hearts five years ago."
A sneer curled the lips of the handsome, heartless woman.
"You use romantic phrases, monsieur," she said.
"But true ones," he replied.
"Well?"
"We are waiting to hear the story you told Mr. Van Zandt's wife--the
story that parted them," he answered again.
She shot a quick, inquiring glance at Eliot's agitated face.
"But you--you are divorced and married again, monsieur, are you not?"
"No," he answered; "I shall never have any other wife but her whom you
drove from me by your treachery that night."
Madame was genuinely puzzled this time, for she exclaimed:
"But Mrs. Bryant Van Zandt told me you hated Little Nobody, and would
have married her sister Ida, only for the circumstances that forced you
into a hated marriage."
"It is false! I never loved Ida, nor one but the girl I made my wife!"
exclaimed Eliot, indignantly; and his brother-in-law added:
"He loved Una from the first time he met her here, and when she was
imprisoned with him in your secret cellar, she must have died of
starvation but that he opened a vein in his arm and fed the dying girl
with his own blood. Does not that prove the love he had for his wife?"
A bitter, ghastly change came over madame's rouged face, with a gasp,
she reeled backward into a chair, and lifted her heavy eyes to Eliot's
face.
"You loved her like that?" she cried; "and I--oh, I believed that
you hated her! I was so glad, so glad! But--yes, it is better so; my
revenge is more complete, for I have made you both suffer where I
believed that it was only her heart I broke!"
"Fiend!" exclaimed Eliot.
And Carmontelle echoed:
"Fiend!"
The angry woman only laughed mockingly, as she said:
"Revenge is sweet! You scorned me, Eliot Van Zandt, for that slip of a
girl, and now I have my pay!"
And throwing back her handsome head against the silken back of her
chair, she laughed low and exultantly.
"We did not come here for recriminations, Madame Remond. We came, as I
explained just now, to hear the story you told Una."
"_Oui_, monsieur; but your friend there will be sorry when he hears it.
In fact, his Una wished him never to know it," madame said, maliciously.
"I have no doubt it was something very horrible, but doubtless it
was an untruth. We wish to hear and judge for ourselves," was her
opponent's undaunted reply.
She glared at him, and muttered something uncomplimentary beneath her
breath, but he continued, coolly:
"Go on and tell us, please. We do not wish to detain your _estimable_
husband much longer from his amiable bride!"
"Very well, then, since you will have it, here is Una's history in a
nutshell: She is a child of shame."
"You told me that once before; also, that she was your child, but I did
not believe you," answered Carmontelle.
She glared at him angrily, and said:
"Well, part of it was untrue, but so much the worse for the girl. She
might better be my child than the offspring of a slave with a taint of
African blood in her veins!"
"Woman!"
Eliot had sprung at her fiercely and clutched her white shoulder in a
grasp like steel. He shook her wildly in a tempest of rage.
"Unsay that lie!" he hissed, fiercely, with blazing eyes. Madame
turned, shrieking, to Carmontelle.
"Make him take his hands off me!" she panted, in terror. "Do not let
him kill me for telling the truth!"
It looked indeed as if her life was in danger, for Eliot's face worked
with fury, and sparks of fire seemed to flash from his angry eyes. It
was with the greatest difficulty that Carmontelle dragged him away from
the frightened woman and forced him into a seat.
"Be calm," he said. "Do not let her lies put you into a passion."
"Prove them lies if you can!" she screamed, losing her self-possession
in anger at his incredulity.
"I shall certainly endeavor to do so," he replied, calmly. "But go on;
finish the details of your story. So our Una was a slave's child, you
say? Who, then, was her father?"
"You force me to disgrace the dead!" she flashed. "Very well, then, it
was Monsieur Lorraine."
"Lorraine dead?" he exclaimed.
"Yes," sullenly.
"I remember Lorraine well. He was an exceedingly homely man. Una does
not resemble him in the least," said aggravating Carmontelle.
Flashing him a fiery glance, she retorted:
"No, but she resembles her mother, the beautiful quadroon whom he
gave me for a maid when I came to this house a bride the last year of
the war. Una was a pretty little infant then, and the young quadroon,
in a fit of jealous fury, told me all. Lorraine whipped her cruelly,
and in her rage she stabbed herself to death. The world says that I
made him jealous and drove him mad, but it is untrue. Remorse over the
quadroon's death drove him inside the walls of a lunatic asylum." She
paused a moment, then added: "I have told you now the simple truth, the
same that I told the girl in Boston. She is the daughter of Monsieur
Lorraine and his beautiful slave, and was in infancy a slave herself,
until the failure of the Southern Confederacy freed her in common with
all the other slaves."
She laughed aloud at the white horror of Eliot Van Zandt's face as he
crouched upon a sofa at the further end of the room.
"A slave's child the bride of one of the proud, highly born Van Zandts!
I am well avenged!" she exclaimed, fiendishly.