“She’s always written her letters to me in French ever since she was at school in Passy. They told her it——”
“Never mind what they told her. What’s the letter say? Ain’t married? Why——!”
“She was married. But she isn’t. And——”
“You talk like a man in a cave. Is d’Antri dead, or——”
Her husband’s frenzied impatience, as usual, served to drive the cowed little rabbit-like woman into worse agonies of incoherence. But by degrees, and through dint of much questioning, the whole sordid petty tragedy related in the Como postmarked letter was at length extracted from her.
Blanche, thanks to her heavy dower and her prince’s family connections, had cut more or less of a swath in certain strata of continental society during these early days of her stay in d’Antri’s world. Her husband’s ancestral rock with its tumble-down castle had been bought back, and the edifice itself put into course of repair. A bijou little house on the Parc Monceau and a palazzo at Florence had been added to the Conover fortune’s purchases, and at each of these latter abodes a gaudy fête had been planned, to introduce the American princess and her dollars to the class of people who proposed henceforth to endure the one for the sake of the other.
Then, according to the letter, a château on the north shore of Como had been rented for the autumn months. Here the bride and groom had dwelt in Claude Melnotte fashion for barely a week when another woman appeared.
The newcomer was a singer formerly employed at the Scala, but now just returned from a prolonged South American tour. Her voice had given out, and, faced by poverty, she had prudently unearthed certain proofs to the effect that, twelve years earlier, she had secretly married Prince Amadeo d’Antri, then a youth of twenty-two.
Thus equipped, she had descended on the happy pair, and a most painful scene had ensued. D’Antri, confronted with the documents, had made no denial, but had tearfully assured Blanche that he had supposed the woman dead. Be this as it might, the first wife had been so adamantine as to refuse with scorn the rich allowance d’Antri offered her, and had carried the matter to the Italian courts.
There it was promptly decided that, as Amadeo’s princely title was chiefly honorary, and carried no royal prerogatives of morganatic unions, the first marriage held.