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[Illustration: "I give you back the wedding ring."--_Page 400._]
THE BONDWOMAN
BY
MARAH ELLIS RYAN,
AUTHOR OF
"Told in the Hills," "A Pagan of the Alleghanies," etc.
CHICAGO AND NEW YORK:
RAND, McNALLY & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS.
MDCCCXCIX.
Copyright, 1899, by Rand, McNally & Co.
All rights reserved.
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London.
THE BONDWOMAN
CHAPTER I.
Near Moret, in France, where the Seine is formed and flows northward,
there lives an old lady named Madame Blanc, who can tell much of the
history written here--though it be a history belonging more to
American lives than French. She was of the Caron establishment when
Judithe first came into the family, and has charge of a home for aged
ladies of education and refinement whose means will not allow of them
providing for themselves. It is a memorial founded by her adopted
daughter and is known as the Levigne Pension. The property on which it
is established is the little Levigne estate--the one forming the only
dowery of Judithe Levigne when she married Philip Alain--Marquis de
Caron.
There is also a bright-eyed, still handsome woman of mature years,
who lives in our South and has charge of another memorial--or had
until recently--a private industrial school for girls of her own
selection. She calls herself a creole of San Domingo, and she also
calls herself Madame Trouvelot--she has been married twice since
she was first known by that name, for she was never the woman to live
alone--not she; but while the men in themselves suited her, their
names were uncompromisingly plain--did not attract her at all. She
married them, proved a very good wife, but while one was named
Johnson, and another Tuttle, the good wife persisted in being
called Madame Trouvelot, either through sentiment or a bit of irony
towards the owner of that name. But, despite her vanities, her
coquetries, and certain erratic phases of her life, she was
absolutely faithful to the trust reposed in her by the Marquise; and
who so capable as herself of finding the poor girls who stood most
in need of training and the shelter of charity? She, also, could
add to this history of the woman belonging both to the old world
and the new. There are also official records in evidence of much
that is told here--deeds of land, bills of sale, with dates of
marriages and deaths interwoven, changed as to names and places but--
There are social friends--gay, pleasure-loving people on both sides of
the water--who could speak, and some men who will never forget her.
One of them, Kenneth McVeigh, he was only Lieutenant McVeigh
then!--saw her first in Paris--heard of her first at a musicale in the
salon of Madame Choudey. Madame Choudey was the dear friend of the
Countess Helene Biron, who still lives and delights in recitals of
gossip belonging to the days of the Second Empire. The Countess Helene
and Mrs. McVeigh had been school friends in Paris. Mrs. McVeigh had
been Claire Villanenne, of New Orleans, in those days. At seventeen
she had married a Col. McVeigh, of Carolina. At forty she had been a
widow ten years. Was the mother of a daughter aged twelve, and a
six-foot son of twenty-two, who looked twenty-five, and had just
graduated from West Point.
As he became of special interest to more than one person in this
story, it will be in place to give an idea of him as he appeared in
those early days;--an impetuous boy held in check, somewhat, by
military discipline and his height--he measured six feet at
twenty--and also by the fact that his mother had persisted in looking
on him as the head of the family at an age when most boys are
care-free of such responsibilities.
But the responsibilities had a very good effect in many ways--giving
stability and seriousness to a nature prone, most of all, to
pleasure-loving if left untrammelled. His blue eyes had a slumberous
warmth in them; when he smiled they half closed and looked down on you
caressingly, and their expression proved no bar to favor with the
opposite sex. The fact that he had a little mother who leaned on him
and whom he petted extravagantly, just as he did his sister, gave him
a manner towards women in general that was both protecting and
deferential--a combination productive of very decided results. He was
intelligent without being intellectual, had a very clear appreciation
of the advantages of being born a McVeigh, proud and jealous where
family honor was concerned, a bit of an autocrat through being master
over extensive tracts of land and slaves by the dozen, many of them
the descendents of Africans bought into the family from New England
traders four generations before.
Such was the personality of the young American as he appeared that day
at Madame Choudey's; and he looked like one of the pictured Norse sea
kings as he towered, sallow and bronzed, back of the vivacious
Frenchmen and their neighbors of the Latin races.
_The_ solo of the musicale had just ended. People were thronged about
the artiste, and others were congratulating Madame Choudey on her
absolute success in assembling talent.
"All celebrities, my lad," remarked Fitzgerald Delaven as he looked
around. The Delavens and the McVeighs had in time long past some
far-out relationship, and on the strength of it the two young men,
meeting thus in a foreign country, became at once friends and
brothers;--"all celebrities and no one so insignificant as ourselves
in sight. Well, now!--when one has to do the gallant to an ugly woman
it is a compensation to know she is wondrous wise."
"That depends on the man who is doing the gallant," returned the young
officer, "I have not yet got beyond the point where I expect them all
to be pretty."
"Faith, Lieutenant, that is because your American girls are all so
pretty they spoil you!--and by the same token your mother is the
handsomest woman in the room."
The tall young fellow glanced across the chattering groups to where
the handsomest woman was amusing herself.
She certainly was handsome--a blonde with chestnut hair and grey
eyes--a very youthful looking mother for the young officer to claim.
She met his glance and smiled as he noticed her very courtier-like
attendant of the moment, and raised his brows quizzically.
"Yes, I feel that I am only a hanger-on to mother since we reached
France," he confessed. "My French is of the sort to be exploited only
among my intimates, and luckily all my intimates know English."
"Anglo-Saxon," corrected Delaven, and Lieutenant McVeigh dropped his
hand on his friend's shoulder and laughed.
"You wild Irishman!--why not emphasize your prejudices by unearthing
the Celtic and expressing yourself in that?"
"Sure, if I did I should not call it the Irish language," retorted the
man from Dublin.
They both used the contested tongue, and were evidently the only ones
in the room who did. All about them were the softened syllables of
France--so provocative, according to Lord Lytton, of the tender
sentiments, if not of the tender passion.
"There is Dumaresque, now," remarked Delaven. "We are to see his new
picture, you know, at the Marquise de Caron's;--excuse me a moment,"
and he crossed over to the artist, who had just entered.
Kenneth McVeigh stood alone surveying the strange faces about. He had
not been in France long enough to be impervious to the atmosphere of
novelty in everything seen and heard.
Back of him the soft voice of Madame Choudey, the hostess, could be
heard. She was frankly gossiping and laughing a little. The name of
the Marquise de Caron was mentioned. Delaven had told him of her--an
aristocrat and an eccentric--a philanthropist who was now aged. For
years herself and her son had been the patrons--the good angels of
struggling genius, of art in every form. But the infamous 2d of
December had ended all that. He was one of the "provisionally exiled;"
he had died in Rome. Madame La Marquise, the dowager Marquise now, was
receiving again, said the gossips back of him. The fact was commented
on with wonder by Madame Choudey;--with wonder, frank queries, and
wild surmises, by the little group around her; for the aged Marquise
and her son Alain--dead a year since--had been picturesque figures in
their own circle where politics and art, literature and religion, met
and crossed swords, or played piquet! And now she was coming back, not
only to Paris, but to society; had in fact, arrived, and the card
Madame Choudey held in her white dimpled hand announced the first
reception at the Caron establishment.
"After years of the country and Rome!" and Sidonie Merson raised her
infantile brows and smiled.
"Oh, yes, it is quite true--though so strange; we fancied her settled
for life in her old vine-covered villa; no one expected to see the
Paris house opened after Alain's death."
"It is always the unexpected in which the old Marquise delights," said
big Lavergne, the sculptor, who had joined Sidonie in the window.
"Then how she must have reveled in Alain's marriage--a death-bed
marriage!"
"Yes; and to an Italian girl without a dot."
"Oh--it is quite possible. The marriage was in Rome. Both the English
and Americans go to Rome."
"Italian! I heard it was an English or American!"
"Surely, not so bad as that!"
"But only those who have money;--or, if they have not the money, our
sons and our brothers do not marry them."
"Good!" and Lavergne nodded with mock sagacity. "We reach conclusions;
the newly made Marquise de Caron is either not Anglo-Saxon or was not
without wealth."
"I heard from Dumaresque that she had attended English schools; that
no doubt gives her the English suggestion."
"Oh, I know more than that;" said another, eager to add to the
knowledge of the group. "Between Fontainbleau and Moret is the Levigne
chateau. Two years ago the dowager was there with a young beauty,
Judithe Levigne, and that is the girl Alain married; the dowager was
also a Levigne, and the girl an adopted daughter."
"What is she like now? Has no one seen her?"
"No one more worldly than her confessor--if she possess one, or the
nuns of the convent to which she returned to study after her marriage
and widowhood."
"Heavens! We must compose our features when we enter the presence!"
"But we will go, for all that! The dowager is too delightful to
miss."
"A religieuse and a blue stocking!" and the smile of Lavergne was
accompanied by a doubtful shrug. "I might devote myself to either, if
apart, but never to both in one. Is she then ugly that she dare be so
superior?"
"Greek and Latin did not lessen the charm of Heloise for Abelard,
Monsieur."
Sidonie glanced consciously out of the window. Even the dust of six
centuries refuses to cover the passion of Heloise, and despite the
ecclesiastical flavor of the romance--demoiselles were not supposed to
be aware--still--!
Lavergne beckoned to a fair slight man near the piano.
"We will ask Loris--Loris Dumaresque. He is god-son of the dowager. He
was in Rome also. He will know."
"Certainly;" and Madame Choudey glanced in the mirror opposite and
leaned her cheek on her jeweled hand, the lace fell from her pretty
wrist and the effect was rather pleasing. "Loris; ah, pardon me, since
your last canvas is the talk of Paris we must perhaps say Monsieur
Dumaresque, or else--Master."
"The queen calls no man master," replied the newcomer as he bent over
the pretty coquette's hand. "The humblest of your subjects salutes
you."
"My faith! You have not lost in Rome a single charm of the boulevardes.
We feared you would come back a devotee, and addicted to rosaries."
"I only needed them when departing from Paris--and you." His eyes
alone expressed the final words, but they spoke so eloquently that the
woman of the world smiled; attempted to blush, and dropping her own
eyes, failed to see the amusement in his.
"Your gallantry argues no lack of practice, Monsieur Loris," she
returned; glancing at him over her fan. "Who was she, during those
months of absence? Come; confess; was she some worldly soul like the
Kora of your latest picture, or was it the religieuse--the new
marquise about whom every one is curious?"
"The Marquise? What particular Marquise?"
"One more particular than you were wont to cultivate our first season
in Rome," remarked Lavergne.
"Oh! oh! Monsieur Dumaresque!" and the fan became a shield from which
Madame peered at him. Sidonie almost smiled, but recovered herself,
and gave attention to the primroses.
"You see!--Madame Choudey is shocked that you have turned to
saintliness."
"Madame knows me too well to suppose I have ever turned away from
it," retorted Dumaresque. "Do not credit the gossip of Lavergne. He
has worked so long among clays and marbles that he has grown a
cold-blooded cynic. He distrusts all warmth and color in life."
"Then why not introduce him to the Marquise? He might find his ideal
there--the atmosphere of the sanctuary! I mean the new Marquise de
Caron."
"Oh!" Dumaresque looked from one to the other blankly and then
laughed. "It is Madame Alain--the Marquise de Caron you call the
devotee? My faith--that is droll!"
"What, then, is so droll?"
"Why should you laugh, Monsieur Loris? What else were we to think of a
bride who chooses a convent in preference to society?"
"It was decided she must be very ugly or very devout to make that
choice."
"A natural conclusion from your point of view," agreed Dumaresque.
"Will you be shocked when I tell you she is no less a radical than
Alain himself?--that her favorite prophet is Voltaire, and that her
books of devotion are not known in the church?"
"Horror!--an infidel!--and only a girl of twenty!" gasped the demure
Sidonie.
"Chut!--she may be a veteran of double that. Alain always had a fancy
for the grenadiers--the originals. But of course," he added moodily,
"we must go."
"Take cheer," laughed Dumaresque, "for I shall be there; and I promise
you safe conduct through the gates when the grenadier feminine grows
too oppressive."
"Do you observe," queried Madame, slyly, "that while Monsieur Loris
does speak of her religion, he avoids enlightening us as to her
personality?"
"What then do you expect?" returned Dumaresque. "She is the widow of
my friend; the child, now, of my dear old god-mother. Should I find
faults in her you would say I am jealous. Should I proclaim her
virtues you would decide I am prejudiced by friendship, and so"--with
a smile that was conciliating and a gesture comprehensive he dismissed
the subject.
"Clever Dumaresque!" laughed Lavergne--"well, we shall see! Is it true
that your picture of the Kora is to be seen at the dowager's
tomorrow?"
"Quite true. It is sold, you know; but since the dowager is not equal
to art galleries I have given it a rest in her rooms before boxing it
for the new owner."
"I envy him," murmured Madame; "the picture is the pretty octoroon
glorified. So, Madame, your god-mother has two novelties to present
tomorrow. Usually it is so difficult to find even one."
When Delaven returned he found Lieutenant McVeigh still in the same
nook by the mantel and still alone.
"Well, you are making a lonesome time of it in the middle of the
crowd," he remarked. "How have you been amused?"
"By listening to comments on two pictures, one of a colored beauty,
and one of an atheistical grand dame."
"And of the two?"
"Of the two I should fancy the last not the least offensive. And, look
here, Delaven, just get me out of that engagement to look at
Dumaresque's new picture, won't you? It really is not worth while for
an American to come abroad for the study of pictured octoroons--we
have too many of the originals at home."