Miriam Monfort / A Novel

by Catherine A. Warfield

"There it is!" he muttered. "It is all very well with me in peaceful times, but, when it comes to battle, a poor, lame wretch is of little account. I might as well be a woman;" and the tears flowed down his quivering cheeks. "It was shameful, disgraceful, that any other man should have defended you, Miriam," he added, in a broken voice, clinching his hands, "than I, your escort."

"You did not even see the affair, George," I remonstrated. "Had you been as strong as Samson, and I know you are just as brave, you could not have helped me, for there I was lagging away behind, through my own fault, and how could you, in front, between your aunt and Laura, possibly know what danger was in store for me? Now, I shall feel provoked if you show so much morbid feeling; besides, reflect, you are but a boy, dear. George. No youth of your age is ever very strong."

"A boy! and what are you, Miriam Monfort, that you taunt me with youth! a woman, I suppose—a heroine!" with bitter sarcasm in his voice and eye, for the first time in his life so directed to me. I gazed at him in mute surprise.

"My dear George, you are very unreasonable, indeed," said Mrs. Stanbury. "What has Miriam done to deserve such a taunt? I never knew you to behave in such an uncourteous way before."

"You must be crazy, George Gaston," added Laura Stanbury, sharply. "Don't you know you are attracting attention toward our box. Be still directly!"

"Oh no, it is only the magnificent Miss Monfort that every one is staring at," he sneered. "The grown-up lady, the heroine, the heiress, who lingers behind in the lobby, in order to get up little melodramas of her own at the opera where such things are admissible, at the expense of her lame escort!"

I turned to him calmly; I had not spoken before. "George," I said, "if you say another word I shall go home alone, or burst into tears on the spot, and disgrace myself and you, one or the other. I cannot bear another word like this. I warn you, George Gaston!"

"Dear Miriam, forgive me; I am a fool I know," he said, as soon as he could recover himself. "Lend me your handkerchief, Laura, mine has mysteriously disappeared. There—Richard's himself again! (Sorra to him!) He ought to have a bullet through his head for his pains" (sotto voce).

This stroke of bathos brought about good-humor again, and soon our whole attention was absorbed in that magical music which to this hour electrifies me more than that of any other opera excepting "Norma." "Bad taste this," connoisseurs will say; but the perfection of human enjoyment is to pursue one's own tastes independently of Mrs. Grundy, whether musical, or literary, or artistic, according to my mode of thinking. In all the pauses of the opera, however, I saw that handsome and agitated face, that had last caught my eye at the box-door, rise before me like a spell; and anxiety for the safety of my strange champion—some curiosity too, mingled therewith, I do not deny, to know his name and lineage—beset me during the whole of a sleepless night and the dreaming day that succeeded it.

We were sitting around a cheerful spring fire in the front parlor, our ordinary sitting-room, opening as this did into the dining-room beyond on one hand, and the wide intersecting hall of entrance on the other, on the opposite side of which lay the long, double-chimneyed drawing-room, less cheerful than our smaller assembly-room by half, and therefore less often used (there, you have our whole first-floor arrangement now, my reader, I believe, and I must begin over again, to catch the clew of my long sentence). We were sitting, then, around the cheerful fire in the parlor in question, when Morton, my father's "own man," announced "Mr. Bainrothe and son," and a moment afterward the two gentlemen so heralded entered the room together. With one you are already somewhat familiar, reader mine, as a gentlemanly, handsome man, with deliberate movements and confident address. You have seen such men in cities frequently; but the word distingué, so often too hastily bestowed, was the chief characteristic of the appearance of his younger companion.