For it was the face of a devil glaring on an enemy, and that a well-hated one; the face of a fiend regarding that which it would blast to all eternity if possessing the power to do so. The mouth twitching--the full lips livid now, and with the teeth clenched over the lower one so that they seemed dug into it, until Andrew wondered no blood spurted forth--the eyes staring, the last remaining colour gone from the already dead-ivory of the cheeks--the woman gazed Medusa-like at what she held in her hand.
Then, suddenly, her long, loose gown swishing the floor as she moved, she strode back to him, her movements resembling a tigress's now; and, standing quivering before him, she said--while her voice sounded hoarse from out her throat--
"This! This! This! This cursed thing! It has fallen from your body--must have done so when you were brought here. How came it yours? Answer!"
"If," replied Andrew calmly, yet marvelling now at what the "cursed thing" could be, the finding of which had stirred her so--observing, too, the shaking of her limbs and the wild tempestuous fury that held her in its grasp, "If madame would deign to say what it is that she has found which moves her so----"
"What it is! What!" she repeated. Then exclaimed, "Man, trifle not with me, or I shall anticipate your death by some few hours. God! why bring this before my eyes? This! This picture of Fleurange Debrasques! His mother! And in your possession. In yours! It is some trick 'twixt you and him! Are you in truth his enemy?" and she bent her livid face down and peered into his face. "Or is this a scheme to torture me even in my swift-coming age, as, oh my God," and she wailed out these last words, "I have been tortured all my life by her. By her and by her memory," and, while she spoke, she struck the miniature against the side of the lanthorn as though demented.
In a moment it seemed to Andrew's now cleared brain that here was an accident, a chance, that might go far to help him to win, perhaps, this wild cat, this creature of mad passions, to his side. To win her--to!--to!--ah! it seemed more than one might hope for! Yet he would make the attempt. His life--Marion's life--might hang on what he could do with this woman.
"That," he said quietly, "Oh! that. The miniature. Why, 'tis nothing. Only his mother's portraiture. True, I have heard she was a Debrasques. And beautiful as the morning. Is it not so?"
Yet he had to pause as he looked now at the fury above him. For, by his remarks on the beauty of the woman whose likeness she held in her hand, he saw that he had goaded her almost too far. That she was trembling from head to foot, that a little more and he would spoil his chance. He must goad her further--but by degrees.
As he so paused she controlled herself. Calmed herself enough to say, "how came it in your possession? Answer that."
"'Tis simple. He dropped it fleeing from Turenne's army--fleeing, as I do pride myself, from me. For in solemn truth I am his enemy. Yet, I pray, an honest one. And, therefore, because I know he loved that lady, his mother, dearly, because also I knew his father worshipped her from the moment he set eyes on her first, it was my intention to have returned the jewel to him."