“Spiritual!” shrieked the other, springing forward; “do you dare to use that stupid cant to me? Keep it for the sap-headed boys and senile drivellers that you decoy with such bait, to plunder. You shan’t insult me to my teeth with it.”
The speaker, whose physical energies were far more vehement and overbearing than the other, seemed to have entirely awed her. She sank meekly into a chair, turned very pale, and lifting her eyes with an humble look, she said, in a low imploring voice, “Now, Jeannette, please don’t be so violent. I did not mean to taunt or insult you. You have altogether mistaken me, dear friend. Now, please be calm.”
But the other, whose long black curls still writhed and quivered, like the snakes of the Gorgon head, with rage, stood towering before the suppliant, as if she meant to crush her; and as she thus stood, she really looked superb.
Her profile was delicately chiselled and Roman, with large, dark gray eyes, thin lips, and fine chin; and now that every feature was inspired with anger, the eye ceased to be offended by their habitual expression of selfish, cold, and sharp intellection. She continued, quite as vehemently—
“You have sown the wind, and you must reap. I have heard this vile insinuation before of something between you and Edmond at B.”
“Jeannette! Jeannette! it is false! every word of it. It is a vile slander of my enemies. Ask Edmond himself—he will tell you it is so.”
“Yes! yes! I know it is false. But who gave circulation to these reports? Hey? Your enemies, were they? Your enemies must have a great deal to do, that they keep themselves busy with these manifold stories of your adventures. Who was it aspired to the eclat of any affair with the rich, generous, learned, and travelled Edmond? Who was it dragged him, through his unsuspecting recklessness of conventional usages, into conditions which rendered him liable to such an imputation? Who boasted of it, and attempted to place him in the same category with the dupes and gulls and fools she had already ruined and plundered? Hey? Who was it? Marie ——, I know you,” and she stretched herself to her full height; but, had her vision not been blinded by passion, she might have perceived a cold and scarcely perceptible smile of scornful incredulity pass over the face at which she pointed her sharp finger. “I know you, woman! Beware! beware how you cross my track with Edmond! You had better rouse the sleeping tigress with her young in your arms. He shall be mine! I have sworn it! One year ago, when I heard of his return from Europe, and left everything, mother, sisters, friends, and came on to this city, a thousand miles, alone and unprotected, that I might throw myself in his way, I swore that he should be mine. I had watched his career for years, from a distance, and he had grown to be my ideal. When he became, first the pupil and then the expounder of the new philosophy in France, I too became its student; with unwearied labor I mastered its prodigious science, for I divined the purpose of the man. I knew he must return to his own country, and become its exponent here, and that then my time would come.
“I studied the German, the French, and the Italian; with all which languages I knew him to be familiar. I acquainted myself with the literature of each, that I might be able always to speak with him in the tongues and of the themes of which his long residence in Europe had made the associations most pleasant. Armed thus, cap-a-pie, I have met him at last, as I felt it was my destiny to do.
“I have attracted him; I have all but conquered him. That man shall be my lover! Ay, woman, he shall be my lawful husband! Cross my track in any way, if you d-a-a-r-e! I know your arts; I will render them for ever unavailing to you; I will explain them, and expose them. Cross my track, then, if you d-a-a-r-e!” and, as she hissed out the words between her teeth, she stooped forward and shook her finger in the face of the now actually trembling woman. “Remember! our compact is, you let me alone, and I will let you alone; you help me, I’ll help you; cross me, I destroy you!”
“Is that all?” murmured the woman, in a soft voice, opening her eyes, which had been closed during the greater part of this tirade, while, at the same time, the old obliquity became for a moment apparent.