Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

"When thou and I must part, fillette."

But the child lifted her head and shook her golden curls. The clear, bracing air, the brilliant sunshine, the glittering snow had breathed a spirit of gladness into her heart. She could not see the necessity for such sad forebodings.

"Mon père," she answered eagerly, "you should not say things like that; indeed, indeed, it's very wrong. You are going back with me to mamma, who'll be ever so glad to see us; and my own papa is to be found: he will thank you, mon père, for bringing me, and then we shall all be so happy together."

For this was always the end of the child's plans. She could not imagine anything else. Her friend smiled, and then he sighed. "Soit donc, petite sage," he replied enigmatically, and Laura was perfectly satisfied.

Once or twice during that day the mysterious waiter interviewed L'Estrange, and each time Laura was condemned to be mystified. They spoke in a language which was a jargon to her; but she was accustomed to mystery where this strange friend of hers was concerned.

The waiter was keeping him au courant in the most trivial details that concerned those inhabitants of the house in whom L'Estrange was interested. He heard of the hue-and-cry that followed the Austrian lady, and of her husband's despair; he heard of the several arrivals, first Maurice Grey's, and then Arthur Forrest's; he knew that they had dined together tête-à-tête and sat a long time over their wine, evidently in deep converse; finally, when the two men were closeted in Maurice's room, his confidential emissary was hovering about, ready to report the slightest extraordinary demonstration. For L'Estrange did not credit Arthur Forrest with so much diplomacy as he had hitherto used in his treatment of the delicate mission with which Margaret had entrusted him, and he knew that fire lay hidden under Maurice Grey's cold reserve. The name of his wife blundered out by a stranger, who would appear to know the sad details of her history and his own, might very possibly cause an explosion of some kind; indeed, during that long evening, whose tedious hours not even Laura's gentle ministries could beguile, the Frenchman was on the alert. From moment to moment he expected to hear the door of the neighboring room pushed violently open, and to understand from his well-feed observer that the young peace-maker had been thrust out from the presence of the proud Englishman, who would feel himself doubly injured by this interference.

Laura did not tell her friend about the strange look which had met hers that evening, though the child pondered it in her simple heart, trying to find out what there was in it that had affected and fascinated her. She would have asked L'Estrange if he thought that this man who had looked at her with a kind of yearning in his sad face could be, indeed, the father they were seeking; but one of his dark moods was on him, and for the first time in all their intercourse she feared to break it.

Since their dinner in the afternoon he had not stirred from the one position, except when the mysterious informant had come in to report progress, and then he had looked at him from under his shaggy eyebrows with a glance that would have killed deceit at its very birth. At other times he remained silent, his hands clasped over an ancient staff, on his strong face a look of pain—but pain crushed down by indomitable will—his lips and nostrils faintly quivering as any sound came from outside, his eyes fixed on the small patch of glowing red that was waning and fading out as the day passed away behind the western mountains.

But though Laura feared to break in upon his silence, she did not fear him. She sat at his feet, curled up like a kitten wearied with play, on a crimson cushion that belonged to the heavy-looking couch, trying by the shimmering firelight to look over a book of very gaudy pictures which the landlady, who pitied her apparent isolation, had lent her.