“Forgotten?” Madame de Varigny seized upon the unlucky word. “Yes—it may be easy enough for you to forget—you who took Nesta’s young, beautiful life and crushed it; you who came like a thief and stole from me the one creature in the whole world whom I loved—my bambina, my little sister. Oh, yes”—her voice rose passionately—“easy enough when there is another woman—a new love—with whom you think to start your life all over again! But I tell you, you shall not! There shall be no new beginning for you—no marriage with this Jean Peterson to whom you are now fiancé. I forbid it—I——”
Blaise stemmed the torrent of her speech with an authoritative gesture.
“May I ask how the news of my engagement reached you?” he asked, his cool, dispassionate question falling like a hailstone dropped into some molten stream of lava.
“Oh, I have kept watch. I have the means of knowing. There is very little that has happened to you since—since I wrote to you of Nesta’s death”—she stumbled a little over the words, and Blaise, despite his anger, was conscious of a sudden flash of sympathy for her—“very little that I have not known. And this—your engagement, I knew of that when it was barely a week old.”
“I’m really curious to know why my affairs should be of such surpassing interest to you. My engagement, for instance—how did you hear of it?”
“Oh, that was easy”—contemptuously. “There was another man who loved your Mees Peterson—this Monsieur Burke. I used him. I knew he was afraid that you might win her, and I told him that if ever you became engaged he must come and tell me, and I would show him how to make sure that you should never marry her. Oh! That was vairy simple!”
“I’m afraid you promised him more than you can hope to perform. I grant that you have every reason to dislike me—hate me, if you will. I acknowledge, too, that I was to blame, miserably to blame, for Nesta’s unhappiness—as much in fault as she herself. But there is nothing gained at this late hour by apportioning the blame. We each made bad mistakes—and we have each had to pay the price.”
“Yours has been a very light price—comparatively,” she commented with intense bitterness.
“Do you think so?”
Something in the quiet, still utterance of the brief question brought her glance swiftly, curiously, back to his face. It was as though, behind those four short words, she could feel the intolerable pressure of years of endurance. For a moment she seemed to waver, then, as though she had deliberately pushed the impression aside, she laughed disagreeably.