The Bondwoman Part 17

The next morning the dowager, Marquise de Caron, left her Paris home for the summer season. Her destination was indefinitely mentioned as Switzerland. Her daughter-in-law accompanied her.

And to Kenneth McVeigh, waiting impatiently the hour when he might go to her, a note was given:

"Monsieur:

"My words of yesterday had no meaning. I was frightened and irresponsible. When you read this I will have left Paris. By not meeting again we will avoid further mistakes of the same nature.

"This is my last word to you.

"JUDITHE CARON."

For two weeks he tried in vain to find her. Then he was recalled to Paris to meet his mother, who was ready for home. She was shocked at his appearance, and refused to believe that he had not been ill during her absence, and had some motherly fears regarding Parisian dissipations, from which she decided to remove him, if possible. He acknowledged he would be glad to go--he was sick of Europe any way.

The last day he took a train for Fontainbleau, remained two hours under the beeches, alone, and got back to Paris in time to make the train for Havre.

After they had got comfortably established on a homeward-bound vessel, and he was watching the land line grow fainter over the waters, Mrs.

McVeigh came to him with a bit of news read from the last journal brought aboard.

The dowager, Marquise de Caron, had established herself at Geneva for the season, accompanied by her daughter, the present Marquise, whose engagement to Monsieur Loris Dumaresque had just been announced.

CHAPTER X.

Long before the first gun had been fired at Fort Sumter, Madame la Marquise was able to laugh over that summer-time madness of hers, and ridicule herself for the wasted force of that infatuation.

She was no longer a recluse unacquainted with men. The prophecy of Madame, the dowager, that if left alone she would return to the convent, had not been verified. The death of the dowager occurred their first winter in Paris, after Geneva, and the Marquise had not yet shown a predilection for nunneries.

She had seen the world, and it pleased her well enough; indeed, the portion of the world she came in contact with did its best to please her, and with a certain feverish eagerness she went half way to meet it.

People called her a coquette--the most dangerous of coquettes, because she was not a cold one. She was responsive and keenly interested up to the point where admirers declared themselves, and proposals of marriage followed; after _that_, every man was just like every other one! Yet she was possessed of an idea that somewhere there existed a hitherto undiscovered specimen who could discuss the emotions and the philosophies in delightful sympathy, and restrain the expression of his own personal emotions to tones and glances, those indefinite suggestions that thrill yet call for no open reproof--no reversal of friends.h.i.+p.

So, that was the man she was seeking in the mult.i.tudes--and on the way there were surely amus.e.m.e.nts to be found!

Dumaresque remonstrated. She defended herself with the avowal that she was only avenging weaker womanhood, smiled at, won, and forgotten, as his s.e.x were fond of forgetting.

"But we expect better things of women," he declared warmly; "not a deliberate intention of playing with hearts to see how many can be hurt in a season. Judithe, you are no longer the same woman. Where is the justice you used to gauge every one by? Where the mercy to others weaker than yourself?"

"Gone!" she laughed lightly; "driven away in self-defense! I have had to put mercy aside lest it prove my master. The only safeguard against being too warm to all may be to be cool to all. You perceive that would never--never do. So--!"

"End all this unsatisfied, feverish life by marrying me," he pleaded.

"I will take you from Paris. With all your social success you have never been happy here; we will travel. You promised, Judithe, and--"

"Chut! Loris; you are growing ungallant. You should never remember a woman's promise after she has forgotten it. We were betrothed--yes.

But did I not a.s.sure you I might never marry? Maman was made happy for a little while by the fancy; but now?--well, matrimony is no more appealing to me than it ever was, and you would not want an indifferent wife. I like you, you best of all those men you champion, but I love none of you! Not that I am lacking in affection, but rather, incapable of concentrating it on one object."

"Once, it was not so; I have not forgotten the episode of Fontainbleu."

"That? Pouf! I have learned things since then, Loris. I have learned that once, at least, in every life love seems to have been born on earth for the first time; happy those whom it does not visit too late!

Well! I, also, had to have my little experience; it had to be _some_ one; so it was that stranger. But I have outgrown all that; we always outgrow those things, do we not? I compare him now with the men I have known since, and he shrinks, he dwindles! I care only for intellectual men, and the artistic temperament. He had neither. Yes, it is true; the girlish fancies appear ridiculous in so short a time."

Dumaresque agreed that it was true of any fancy, to one of fickle nature.

"No, it is not fickleness," she insisted. "Have you no boyish loves of the past hidden away, each in their separate nook of memory? Confess!

Are you and the world any the worse for them? Certainly not. They each contributed a certain amount towards the education of the emotions.

Well; is my education to be neglected because you fear I shall injure the daintily-bound books in the human library? I shall not, Loris. I only flutter the leaves a little and glance at the pictures they offer, but I never covet one of them for my own, and never read one to the finale, hence--"

Dumaresque left soon after for an extended artistic pilgrimage into northern Africa, and people began to understand that there would be no wedding. The engagement had only been made to comfort the dowager.

Judithe de Caron regretted his departure more than she had regretted anything since the death of the woman who had been a mother to her.

There was no one else with whom she could be so candid--no man who inspired her with the same confidence. She compared him with the American, and told herself how vastly her friend was the superior.

Had McVeigh been one of the scholarly soldiers of Europe, such as she had since known--men of breadth and learning, she could have understood her own infatuation. But he was certainly provincial, and not at all learned. She had met many cadets since, and had studied them. They knew their military tactics--the lessons of their schools.

They flirted with the grissettes, and took on airs; they drank and had pride in emptying more gla.s.ses and walking straighter afterwards than their comrades. They were very good fellows, but heavens! how shallow they were! So _he_ must have been. She tried to remember a single sentence uttered by him containing wisdom of any sort whatever--there had not been one. His silences had been links to bind her to him. His glances had been revelations, and his words had been only: "I adore you."

So many men had said the same thing since. It seemed always the sort of thing men said when conversation flagged. But in those earlier days she had not known that, hence the fact that she--well, she knew now!

Twice she had met that one-time bondwoman, Kora, and the meeting left her thoughtful, and not entirely satisfied with herself.

How wise she could be in advice to that pretty b.u.t.terfly! How plainly she could work out a useful life to be followed by--some one else!

Her more thoughtful moods demanded: Why not herself? Her charities of the street, her subscriptions to worthy funds, her patronage of admirable inst.i.tutions, all these meant nothing. Dozens of fas.h.i.+onables and would-be fas.h.i.+onables did the same. It was expected of them. Those charities opened a door through which many entered the inner circles.

She had fitful desires to do the things people did not expect. She detested the shams of life around her in that inner circle. She felt at times she would like to get them all under her feet--trample them down and make room for something better; but for what? She did not know. She was twenty-one, wealthy, her own mistress, and was tired of it all. When she drove past laughing Kora on the avenue she was more tired of it than ever.

"How am I better than she but by accident?" she asked herself. "She amuses herself--poor little bondslave, who has only changed masters! I amuse myself (without a master, it is true, and more elegantly, perhaps), but with as little usefulness to the world."

She felt ashamed when she thought of Alain and his mother, who seemed to have lived only to help others. They had given over the power to her, and how poorly she had acquitted herself!

Once--when she first came with the dowager to Paris--the days had been all too short for her plans and dreams of usefulness; how long ago that seemed.

Now, she knew that the owner of wealth is the victim of mult.i.tudinous schemes of the mendicant, whether of the street corner or the fas.h.i.+onable missions. She had lost faith in the efficacy of alms. No cause came to her with force enough to re-awaken her enthusiasms.

Everything was so tame--so old!

One day she read in a journal that the usefulness of Kora as a dancer was over. There had been an accident at the theatre, her foot was smashed; not badly enough to call for amputation, but too much for her ever to dance again.

The Marquise wondered if the fair-weather friends would desert her now. She had heard of Trouvelot, an exquisite who followed the fas.h.i.+ons in everything, and Kora had succeeded in being the fas.h.i.+on for two seasons. She was just as pretty, no doubt--just as adorable, but--

As the weeks of that winter went by rumors from the Western world were thick with threats of strife. State after State had seceded. The South was marshalling her forces, training her men, urging the necessity of defending State rights and maintaining their power to govern a portion as ably as they had the whole of the United States during the eighty years of its governmental life. The North, with its factories, its foreign commerce, and its manifold requirements, had bred the politicians of the country. But the South, with its vast agricultural States, its wealth, and its traditions of landed ancestry, had produced the orators--the statesman--the men who had shone most brilliantly in the pages of their national history.

From the sh.o.r.es of France one could watch some pretty moves in the games evolving about that promise of civil war; the creeping forward of England to help widen the breach between the divided sections, and the swift swinging of Russian war vessels into the harbors of the Atlantic--the silent bear of the Russias facing her hereditary English foe and forbidding interference, until the lion gave way with low growlings, not daring to even roar his chagrin, but contenting himself with night-prowlings during the four years that followed.

All those wheels within wheels were discussed around the Marquise de Caron in those days. Her acquaintance with the representatives of different nations and the diplomats of her own, made her aware of many unpublished moves for advantage in the game they surveyed. The discussion of them, and guesses as to the finale, helped to awake her from the lethargy she had deplored. Remembering that the McVeighs belonged to a seceding state, she asked many questions and forgot none of the replies.

"Madame La Marquise, I was right," said a white moustached general one night at a great ball, where she appeared. "Was it not a rose you wagered me? I have won. War is declared in America. In South Carolina, today, the Confederates won the first point, and secured a Federal fort."

"General! they have not dared!"