"Thank you, Mr. Bainrothe," I replied coldly. "For reasons of my own, I have preferred to make my costume as subdued as possible."
"By Jove! I wish our young exile could see you this evening," he went on, disregardful of my brief explanation. "He would strew his hair with ashes, and wear sackcloth in penance for the past, I doubt not; for I tell you frankly, Miriam, you have improved wonderfully of late, and you bear inspection far better than Evelyn with all her beauty; your figure is absolutely faultless; your face the most attractive woman ever wore, if not the most absolutely regular. I tell you simple truths. I am a disinterested critic, you see, and stand apart gazing upon women simply as specimens. Your hands and feet are models, your smile enchanting, your voice musical, your manner witchery itself, when you choose to let out your nature; what more could heart desire?" and he gazed steadily in my face, insolently I felt it!
I had been listening indignantly to this cool summary of my attractions, and the arrogant idea manifestly uppermost, that Sultan Claude Bainrothe had only to appear on the scene, and throw his handkerchief, for me to succumb, and I had been so confounded by this tirade of compliment and commonplace that I scarcely knew how to stay its tide without absolute rudeness, such as no lady should ever be guilty of—when he coolly continued his remarks as if wholly unobservant of my displeasure.
"Evelyn, with all her arts, is a little faded already; don't you see it, Miriam? There is no corrosive poison equal to envy, and that, by-the-by, is her specialty. She is bitterly envious by nature. Most of those thin-lipped, sharp-elbowed, sharp-nosed women are, if you observe. Faded at twenty-three! Sad, but true of half our American morning-glory beauties. For my part, I love the statuesque in women, the enduring! those exquisitely-moulded proportions on which the gaze reposes with such delight, and that set a man to dreaming, whether he will or not." And his eye dwelt on me from throat to waist in a manner that made my flesh crawl as if the worms that tortured Herod were passing over it. At this point I rebelled—I ground my teeth resolutely—my face flushed to the temples—I could willingly have stricken that audacious scrutinizer in the face with my clinched hand, and he knew it! How coarse coarseness makes us, even when most disinclined to it naturally! His sensuous brutality made me almost fiercely brutal in turn. As it was, I could only put him away with a gesture of contempt I sought not to command, and with which I swept past him into the thickest of the crowd, cursing at heart the bitter fate that had cast me bound and helpless, for a season, into such unscrupulous hands.
There was no one to turn to now. I knew Mr. Lodore thought Evelyn perfect, and me a sinner, because in the matter of church duties she was the more observant. Besides, my Jewish pedigree had always been a barrier between us. Dr. Pemberton, Mr. Stanbury, Laura, George Gaston, all that truly loved and believed in me, were gone for an indefinite time to Europe. I had not been suffered to accompany them, on many pleas and pretences, as I had wished to do, and this was the end of it all. Licentious persecution!
Evelyn, too! a blinded confederate in such schemes as should have nerved her woman's heart to indignation rather! Marry that man! I would have cut off my own right hand, or burnt it to a cinder like Scaevola; sooner gone out to service—played chambermaid on the boards, or the tragedy-queen of the commonest melodrama, far rather! It was all insult, injury, degradation, in whatever light I could view it, and every feeling in my nature was stung to exasperation.
It was well understood that I was an heiress, and I did not want for adulation. I was surrounded by fashion and beauty, and wreathed with approbation from the noblest and most exalted, on that night of festal splendor; and again that beautiful face that had cast its spell above me in my inexperienced childhood, and that age never seemed to change nor chill, bent above me with its gracious and genial sweetness, and the princely banker on this occasion condescended to manifest his kindly and approving interest in the daughter of his dead friend. At any other time, such tribute would have been most grateful and acceptable to me, for this man was almost my beau idéal at this period, but now the bitterness with which my heart was filled, permeated my whole being, and dashed every draught of enjoyment untasted from my lips.
Yet the memory of that time—that face—returned to me later with emotions irresistible, when the being who was then the idol of society, became its ostracized outcast, and, among all who bowed before him in his pride of place and power, were found, before two years had elapsed from this period,
"None so poor
To do him reverence."
Already is the injustice of that decision forced on the convictions of his fellow-men. Our scales are not wisely balanced in this world—we cannot weigh motives against acts, thought against deeds, with atom-like precision, nor measure the tempted with the temptation grain by grain, hair by hair. Ambition was the fault of the seraphim in the commencement—be well assured that some of the old angelic leaven lingers still about all of its votaries and victims.