CHAPTER XIV.
DIAMONDS AND EMERALDS.
"I wish you would go, Maurice. Do, for my sake!" pleaded Bertha, twisting in her slender fingers a note of invitation. "The Marquis de Fleury was one of the first persons who called upon my uncle, and he made a very favorable impression. Then Madame de Fleury has nearly crushed me beneath an avalanche of sweet civilities. I fancy that a humming-bird drowned in honey must experience sensations very similar to mine in her presence. Is it not the Chinese who serve as the greatest of delicacies a lump of ice rolled in hot pastry? The condiment with which she feeds my vanity reminds me of this singular and paradoxical dainty. If you penetrate the warm, sugared, outer crust, you find ice within. But, as my uncle does not anticipate Chinese diet at the table of the marchioness, he desires me to accept her invitation; and, as you are invited, I wish you to do the same, that I may have some familiar face near me."
"Gaston de Bois will be there," returned Maurice, "and so will the young American student, Ronald Walton, whom I presented to you; they are my dearest friends; pray let them represent me, little cousin."
But Bertha was obstinate; her character had a strong tincture of wilfulness, the result of invariably having her pleasure consulted, and always obtaining her own way. She did not relinquish her entreaties until Maurice, who had not lived long enough to be skilled in the art of successfully denying the petition of a person who will take no refusal, or of plucking the waspish sting out of a "no," consented to be present at the dinner.
The Marquis de Fleury had learned, through his secretary, that Mademoiselle Merrivale and her guardian were in Paris. Though the matrimonial proposition of the marchioness on behalf of her brother, the Duke de Montauban, had been so unfavorably received by Bertha's relatives in Brittany, and though Bertha herself, when she met the duke at the Château de Tremazan, had treated him somewhat coldly, the young duke was too much enamored of the fair girl herself,—to say nothing of a tender leaning towards her attractive fortune,—to be discouraged by a passing rebuff. His relatives hailed the anticipated opportunity of making the acquaintance of Bertha's guardian, and were prompt in paying their devoirs. An invitation to dine followed quickly on the footsteps of the visit.
We pass over the days that preceded the one appointed for the dinner party; they were unmarked by incidents which demand to be recorded.
The bond of intimacy between Ronald and Maurice was drawn closer and closer each day. Little by little the latter had communicated the history of his own trials; his father's determined opposition to his embracing a professional career; his attachment to Madeleine; her unaccountable rejection of his hand; her sudden disappearance, and the mad pursuit, which terminated by casting him insensible at Ronald's door, and brought to his succor one who not only watched beside him with all the devotion of a brother, mingled with the tenderness of womanhood itself, but whose buoyant, healthy tone of mind had infused new hope and vigor into a broken, despondent, prostrate spirit.
Ronald Walton was placed in an advantageous position in Paris by the very fact of being an American. His intellect, talents, manners, person, fitted him to grace the most refined society; and, coming from a land where distinctions of rank are not arbitrarily governed by the accident of birth, but where men are assigned their positions in the social scale through a juster, higher, more liberal verdict, the young Carolinian gained facile admission into the most exclusive circles abroad, and even took precedence of individuals who made as loud a boast of noble blood and hereditary titles as though the concentrated virtues of all their ancestors had been transmitted to them through these dubious mediums.