NEWS OF ST. UDO BRAND.
Dinner over, the ladies scattered, some to their rooms, some to go walking—Margaret and Madame Hesslein simultaneously entered the drawing-room. They turned to each other, the glittering bird of Paradise, and the gentle ring-dove, with a resistless impulse of attraction, and each examined the other keenly.
"You are Miss Margaret Walsingham, a celebrity, even in America," quoth madame, blandly. "Your colonel was much talked of here for his bravery. I am quite delighted to meet the woman who has fought so spiritedly for the colonel's rights."
Margaret gazed earnestly at her; she was reading that artful simplicity of madame with regret, and pitying the fine woman whom the world had spoiled.
"Your praise is very disinterested, Madame Hesslein," returned she, simply. "I thank you for it. I am very strange here, and can't tell what the people say about my affairs. I had hoped that they knew nothing about me."
"Pshaw! my good lady, you can't expect to pass through life with your history and not excite remark," retorted Madame Hesslein, with a flirt of the jeweled fan. "No heroine does, be she a good or a bad one. Men must talk—give them something to talk about."
Margaret watched her spirited face with secret fascination.
"You are reading me," laughed madame, clanking her golden bracelet on her dainty wrist. "You are wondering what a woman of the world like me wants with a saint like yourself, are you not?"
"I am thinking that no doubt you have a purpose in view," said Margaret, struck by the unlovely shrewdness of the lady's speech.
Madame Hesslein waved her dainty hands in graceful protest.
"Quite wrong, Miss Walsingham," she cried. "I have no purpose as yet, save the pleasant one of studying a nature which I cannot imitate. I have been celebrated in my day, but not as you; women are your worshippers; women cry, 'Noble, generous creature!' Women only envied me, and presumed to criticise; 'twas men who gave me homage."
"Don't jest, madame, upon my history; it may yet end in a tragedy!" said Margaret.
"Ah, ah!" breathed madame, warningly, "you are one of those great hearted, soft souled women who suffer affairs of the heart to trouble them. Don't suffer affairs of the heart to trouble you. Griselda the patient. When one hope dies, pursue another, and have a new one every day. Ha! ha! Joliffe (my husband) used to say, 'Honoria sees no trouble, for her heart is never at home to grant an interview.'"
"Your husband is dead?" asked Margaret, coldly.
"Yes, and no. Dead to me these five years, though. Fact is, Miss Walsingham—don't feel horror-stricken—that Joliffe was intolerably prosy; we had a quarrel, and I ran off. Why not? Since then we have got comfortably divorced, and I can marry as soon as I like again. Joliffe was so jealous. I must not drive to the general's, I must not walk with a senator, I must eschew the military, and the best wits of the day are military men. Horrors! I must devote myself to Joliffe, and he only on the embassy at Washington."
Madame appealed impressively to the icy Margaret.
"General Legrange here declares that you are the widow of a Plenipotentiary of the French Court!" she said.
"Does he indeed?" cried madame, with the gusto of habitual vanity. "Then I sha'n't contradict him—don't you, Miss Walsingham. They must always talk about me wherever I go. I am accustomed to it; I let them say what they choose. I please myself, and the world gives me my way, I've been North and South, East and West, and although I have seen trouble, I have ever trodden over it; no woman has ever got into the wrong box so often and come out of it to a higher grade; no woman has ever borne so much scandal, and been popular in spite of it. I survive it all; I eat, drink, make merry—am feasted, courted, and adored, and all because I don't let affairs of the heart vex me. I don't mope, and muse, and turn melancholy as you (a good creature, too), are doing."
The fine, small face of Madame Hesslein shone with wicked animation; her thin, scarlet lips parted in two beauty curves with a string of pearls between, with small, glittering head poised on one side, the gorgeous parakeet studied the plain, tender creature before her, and laughed at such a contrast.
"Do you know why I am here?" queried Margaret, tremulously.
Madame Hesslein smiled and nodded.
"All New York knows why the sombre English dame is here," she jibed, "for your stupid lawyer has bored the city for news of your Colonel Brand."
"Mr. Davenport only does his duty."
Madame grimaced charmingly.
"Duty!" she mocked. "Oh, Juggernaut of good people's lives, what unwilling victims do ye crush beneath your wheels in your heavenward march?"
"Have you been crushed?" asked Margaret, smiling.
"Oh, no; Mr. Davenport is too pompous to expect anything of a woman. Stupid wretch!"
"Had you known St. Udo Brand," cried Margaret, blushing, "you could not laugh at his destruction. He was bitterly proud, but he was true as steel."
"Was he so?" breathed madam—and her green eyes grew black—"I should have liked to meet him, then. I have yet to meet the man who is as true as steel. Griselda, you are one who should win back a man—but, oh, you'll never do it! never!"
A wild change swept over her fine face, her wondrous, globular eyes grew deep and passionate, and her beautiful hands were clasped in covert anguish.
"I pity your sad life, madame, if you have proved all false," said Margaret, with feeling, "for there are good men on earth, I doubt not."
"The best die; the fairest, the most loved," said madame, faintly. "Miss Walsingham, I had one son—ah!"—she shivered and closed her eye—"and he died miserably. I loved him, I did love him, and he was my only consolation for many years." She dashed her tears away and looked up sternly. "You make me talk to you, with your soft, true face," she exclaimed, bitterly, "and I must not talk. But mind, I have told you nothing; you can't say that I have narrated any of my history to you."
"I had not thought of saying so," replied Margaret.
"Ah, you are a good soul, and I like you," murmured madame, patting Margaret's hand with a touch like falling rose-leaves. "So sweet, so heroic, so humble! You remind me of myself many years ago in old Austria, when I was in love with—my destroyer!"
Her face hardened, her green eyes glimmered with the deadly light of hate.
She turned off her momentary remorse with a heartless laugh, and rattled her collier of golden lockets.
"Each of these lockets," sneered madame, "contains a victim to my power of fascination, [there were at least a dozen,] and the whole string of them was presented to me by an old vice admiral who fell in love with me at Barbadoes last winter, and escorted me to the Bermudas when I went there. My good lady, that first foolish passion of mine has so destroyed my powers of mercy that I love to torture mankind and madden them with false expectations, if only I might be revenged."
The beautiful lips of the lady suddenly compressed with a cruel expression, and looking up, Margaret beheld the Chevalier de Calembours hurrying across the room to join them.
"The Chevalier de Calembours wishes to be presented to you," said Margaret.
Those gleaming, chrysolite orbs flashed a full upward glare in the chevalier's face. He recoiled, he changed color, and became strangely silent.
"So glad to meet the chevalier," murmured madame, with an inimitable elegance of manner.
Monsieur's face relaxed; he drew near her, dazzled as with the eye of a rattlesnake.
"Incomparable madame, where have we met before?" inquired he, with soft insinuation.
She honored him with a glance of astonishment and an artless smile.
"Indeed I cannot say, chevalier," she minced, "unless we've met in dreams."
"Pardon the presumption, madame, mon amie," persisted the chevalier, growing very pale, "but I think we are not strangers."
Another change swept over Madame Hesslein's ever-changeful face; all resemblance of her late self disappeared, and a bold, brilliant, haughty creature sat in her place, smiling with supercilious amusement at the little Bohemian's blunder.
"I should indeed feel honored if monsieur would recall the circumstances of our acquaintance," she said, blandly; "for I am frequently accosted by strangers who vow that I am known to them, and who afterward discover that my resemblance to the person they took me for was owing solely to the Protean expression of my face. I can't help my face being like twenty other people's in a breath, can I, Miss Walsingham? But I would like to think that Chevalier Calembours had known me previously, for I always have a warm side to Frenchmen for a special reason."
The chevalier was himself again: his doubts had fled, and he was laughing at himself for his momentary illusion.
"Madame has explained the sweet hallucination," he said, hand on heart. "We have not met except in dreams. Ah! that we had been friends in those days of glory when I was the favorite of the Hungarian court, the Count of Calembours, owner of diamond mines! Mon Dieu! my homage was worthy of its object then!"
Monsieur launched into his loftiest braggadocio, and madame listened well, and drew him out with skill.
"So monsieur was born in Hungary?"
"In Hungary, madame."
"Have you seen the pretty river Theiss?"
"Hem! Yes, madame. I lived in Irzegedin."
"Ah!"—with a mocking smile—"the residences of the counts are particularly magnificent in that city, are they not?"
"Madame is right. Madame must have been there."
"Oh, no, my dear chevalier, else I should have heard of Count Calembours, without doubt. And Chevalier de Calembours left his princely fortune behind when he came here to fight?"
"Madame is a good listener."
"Brave chevalier! but you will return to your estates?"
"Without doubt, madame, when I am weary of glory."
"Admirable man!" cried madame, with a silvery laugh. "What an enviable lady your wife is."
"Dear friend, I have no wife," complacently.
"Is that credible? A young and handsome man without a wife? Oh, chevalier!"
"My wife,"—with a frown—"my wife is gone long since."
"Alas! how sad. You must have been adored by her," breathed Madame Hesslein.
"Ah, pauvrette, yes. She wearied me with that grand passion of hers."
Madame's smiling face hardened into a stone-mask, but her eyes seemed to pulsate with smothered fire.
"Wearied monsieur, did she?" (with a threatening smile into his eyes). "Silly, clumsy wretch!"
"No, no, madame," laughed the chevalier; "she was a pretty Venus, but unsophisticated, unformed, somewhat vulgar."
"And your indifference broke her heart—she died for love of you?" questioned madame, wickedly.
"No, no, madame," laughed the chevalier again. "She consoled herself. She ran away with a cotton lord from Manchester, and I heard of her no more."
"She was mad—she was a fool!" cried madame, blandly mischievous. "She should have polished her dull luster, and recaptured the errant heart of her noble chevalier. I should have done so."
"You, exquisite madame?" sighed the chevalier, con amore. "Ah, but my wife was not clever like you, nor beautiful."
"She was only affectionate?" whispered madame.
"Only affectionate," and monsieur bowed.
Again their eyes met, hers streaming forth a bewildering fire, his wistful and adoring, and though her words stung the Chevalier de Calembours, the victim could not choose but hover close, and closer to admire the serpentine grace of his tormentor.
Presently, becoming weary of the amusement, the siren sent him for a chess-board, promising him a game of backgammon for reward, and turning to Margaret, with a laugh of derision, her excitement burst forth.
"See how that man throws himself down to be trampled over by me," she whispered, exultingly. "See how he licks the dust from my feet. Ah, if I could only spurn him into ruin I would do it."
She thrust her lovely foot of Andalusian grace from out of its velvet folds, and contemplated it with a smile.
"I am more beautiful than that creature who loved him long ago on the banks of the Theiss, am I? Then by virtue of my beauty, I shall avenge her cause, and my own. I shall humiliate our noble count."
She whispered it gayly to her sumptuous bracelets, turning and clanking the golden shackle on her shapely wrist; but her fine, small face was wild with malice.
"You hate my friend, the chevalier, with a strange perversity," remarked the disapproving Margaret. "Doubtless that hapless woman was as much to blame as he."
"Ah, was she?" breathed madame, turning pale. "I think he said that her only fault was her passionate love, which his shallow soul wearied of. Oh, Heaven! how cruel you can be! Her case, Miss Walsingham, is like my own—how keenly I can understand such wrongs. Pshaw! I shall moralize no more. I have long, long ago left these stormy waves behind, and now float on a glassy sea, lit by rays of golden ambition. I have buried the god of luckless youth, poor Cupid, and set upon his grave the god of the Thirties—yellow-faced Pluto. My motto is, 'No heart and a good digestion,' and taking heed to its warning, I expect to live, handsome as a picture, to the age of old Madame Bellair, who
"'Lived to the age of one hundred and ten;
And died from a fall from a cherry-tree then.'"
The chevalier returning with the chess-board, madame and he enjoyed several hours of their game, she played more games than that of backgammon, although all her faculties seemed to be concentrated in winning the chevalier's golden dollars from him, which she did with marvelous relish, and keeping her accounts, which she did with marvelous precision.
She ended her game of backgammon by transferring the last piece in the charmed chevalier's purse to her own, and she ended the game of hearts by dropping the net of bewilderment completely over poor Calembours, and then she thought of tightening the cord.
"Poor Miss Walsingham!" said madame, with a rippling laugh of wicked glee; "I shall chase away that look of stern dislike which has settled upon your face ever since you discovered that I added gambling to my other sins—I shall make you like me in spite of yourself. Come, chevalier, turn my music."
She strolled gracefully down the long drawing-room, attended by the elated chevalier, who had never been so happy in his life, and, followed by the wondering and admiring eyes of a score of both sexes, took her seat at the piano.
But Margaret turned her back, and shut her heart against the bold and erring creature, whose beauty was but the fatal bewitchment of clever wickedness, whose spasms of grief were the last expiring gleams of a better nature which she sedulously quenched.
Madame played some air, fairy nonsense, that her little hands might glamour the rapt chevalier in their bird-like glancings here and there; and then, with a defiant glance over her shoulder at cold Margaret Walsingham, she stole into a theme with sentiment, with soul in every chord.
Ah, those strains of tender sadness! how they rose and fell in persistent plaint! how they mourned, and whispered of hope, mourned again in homeless accents! Then these waves of stronger passion—how they surged from grief to fury! how they gushed from beneath the glancing hands in menacing strains and conquering thunder!
It was as if a Frederic Chopin sat before the keys, instead of that small Circe.
Then these songs, so wild, so caroling, so purely joyous—could Sappho sing more burningly of happiness and love?
Margaret forgot her chill disdain of the perverted nature, forgot her own heart-trouble, even forgot St. Udo Brand in her trance of ravishment; and unconscious that she did so, rose and stood beside the wondrous St. Cecilia.
Madame raised her mock-simple eyes—they were not disappointed—Margaret was bending over her with a fascinated face, and the chevalier was wrapped in his study of the fair musician.
"Thanks for that act of homage," said Madame Hesslein, gravely, to Margaret; then dropping her tones, and rising, "I thought I could make you like me. I came here, to this hotel, to make you like me, because I had something pleasant to tell you; and I never do a favor for any one who presumes to criticise me unfavorable. Griselda, patient soul, come to my room, and we shall talk."
She drew the astonished Margaret's hand within her arm, gave a majestic bow to the flushed chevalier, and led the unresisting girl out of the drawing-room to her own luxurious apartments.
"Now, my good lady," observed Madame Hesslein, airily. "I have conceived something like appreciation of your humdrum goodness, and since I see a good deal of intellect at the back of it, I am disposed to do you a good turn, hoping that, charity-like, it may cover a multitude of my sins."
"What is it that you have to communicate?" asked Margaret, earnestly. "How can it be that you, a stranger have become acquainted with my concerns?"
"Pshaw! English exclusiveness again!" mocked madame. "But I do know somewhat of your affairs, gentle Griselda. For instance, I hear that you are searching for Colonel Brand, that you may make over your fortune to him. Margaret Walsingham, how can you be so foolish?"
"Madame, I only do my duty."
"Ugh! You horrify me with your crucifixion of the flesh, you devotee of Duty."
"Colonel Brand is worth sacrificing life itself for," said Margaret, with glowing eyes.
Madame watched her with sudden interest.
"Ah! I thought so," murmured she, sadly; "You care for this man—you love him."
"Madame!" deprecated timid Margaret, coldly.
"Yes, I see it. Poor creature, you should not love anything, do you know that, said madame, pityingly.
"You are right," replied Margaret, with a meek, quiet despair. "My plain face and manner will never win me love."
Madame Hesslein looked at her with a curious smile—at the spiritual face, the soulful eyes, the tall, magnificent figure—and she patted Margaret's hand with dainty tenderness.
"Your humility is very prettily done," said she, "and would really look well on myself, for I have none of it. But you mistake me; I meant that since love is eternally being met with treachery, why do you waste it, and especially upon such a poor parti as a colonel? Heavens! she troubles her digestion about a colonel! Why are you not more ambitious? If I were you, I wouldn't look below a major-general. I don't intend to give myself to any man who can't give me a lift in life. I am going to marry Vice-Admiral Oldright, who followed me to the Bermudas. I have worked hard to entrap him, and I have succeeded, I crossed the Atlantic five times for his sake, and I mean to get him; because when he is an admiral, and I am his wife, I shall take precedence of all other women in my circle."
"Ambition is not worth a true woman's pursuit," said Margaret.
"Well said, St. Griselda—such an apothegm deserves applause. Ah, well, Miss Walsingham, perhaps you are right, but you are not wise. You will stick to your colonel in spite of my advice? You will give him your fortune, and live on your wits in future? Poor creature! However I will not reproach you; for, as St. Chrysostom wrote to Pentadia, 'I know your great and lofty soul, which can sail, as with a fair wind through many tempests, and in the midst of the waves enjoy a white calm.' You will depart on your Utopian enterprise, contented with the white calm of an approving conscience in the midst of the waves of starvation. Men are such beasts, they prefer the bold and grasping Kestral like myself to rewarding the fidelity of a ring-dove like Miss Walsingham."
Margaret was gazing breathlessly in the brilliant, heartless woman's face, and her voice faltered, as she asked:
"Can you send me on that enterprise? Do you bring me news of Colonel Brand?"
And madame, with a glance of pity in the passionate eyes, replied:
"Yes, I can. When at Key West, a month ago, I saw Colonel Brand driving out with a friend. Does that please you?"
Margaret's face was quivering with joy—with a noble triumph; she turned it from those scoffing eyes, and whispered a quiet "Thank God!"