"I have known one such woman once, to whom all life and all time was but the cry of 'a damnèd soul,' crying out ceaselessly against 'an immortal wrong.' Did our poet know her story, I wonder, when he wrote of his 'brown siren'? But no; this poor soul has had no one to sing out her wrongs, or open up the story of the treachery that blasted her life. Alone she has had to bear her burden, and alone she must bear it to the very end."
As Miss Hildreth spoke, Dick Darling crept close to her side, and knelt there, listening eagerly, with quick-coming breath, to the disjointed sentences. In the deep interest of the moment no one looked towards the window where sat Rosalie James, or noticed the intense nervous restraint she was exercising. Her face was absolutely colourless; her hands pressed so hard one upon the other that they left blue marks upon the soft flesh; her eyes were strained and feverish; she bent forward in an alert, expectant attitude, as of one awaiting, yet not certain of, some preconceived revelation. At the Psyche-mirror sat Baby Leonard, still placidly trying one artistic preparation after another, and totally oblivious to the tense atmosphere of suppressed excitement about her.
"And who was she? Is she alive?" asked Dick, her whisper catching up Miss Hildreth's falling inflection, and sustaining the interest of the moment. "Who was she? Is she alive? Where did you know her?"
"Yes, she is alive; oh, yes, indeed, she is alive," answered Patricia, still in a retrospective tone; "and I knew her in Petersburg when I was last there—such a little time ago, as it seems now."
"Was she beautiful?" Again it was Dick's voice that asked, and Patricia's that replied.
"She was very beautiful—so beautiful that no one could withstand her loveliness. And her beauty became her curse; ah, what a curse, since it attracted the attention of one so high above her that his lightest regard was an insult! What but bitter wrong and crime could be the outcome of a love proffered by a scion of the Imperial house to a woman of the people? Beauty is a grand leveller, it is true, but it cannot level the iron hand and cruel laws of Russia. It was the old story—the old, old, pitiful story—that comes to every woman once in her lifetime, and that each woman translates as best suits her desires—the story that makes a heaven upon earth, a paradise within our hearts."
Again the musical tones died away in a sigh of regret, and again Dick cried out in her quick, absorbed whisper:
"Is there any more to tell? What happened? What was the end?"
"What any woman might have looked for, save a woman blinded by love, and a man absorbed by passion. They lived in a fool's paradise for an all too brief space, and then, before the golden sheen had fallen from their vision, while the woman still played with fate and the man toyed with destiny, the blow fell—sudden, sharp, omnipotent, as is the nature of Russia's potency. Taken away from his very arms, her marriage annulled by Imperial ukase, her life ruined, her soul lost in a whirlwind of injustice and despair, what wonder that her woman's nature revolted, and that throwing aside the narrower swathing bands of law and conventionality, she stood forth, bold and free and savage, and struck down her craven lover in the very zenith of his manhood, with a hand that never faltered, as it drove home the steel to his very heart?"
Miss Hildreth had grown strangely excited as she told the tragic story; she rose up now and stood at her full height, the clinging cashmeres marking every line and curve of her beautiful form; her face was pale as death, and beneath her dark brows her eyes gleamed with their old dangerous fire; she lifted her hands and brought them together before her, throwing them out palm upwards in passionate protest; her voice was low and concentrated, vibrating with intolerance.