Why she stood there I did not know, unless it was to be within call if madame needed her for anything. Once, when madame was about to take sherry, she touched her arm very lightly, and the glass was put down.
Seeing that I noticed the act, madame said:
“I am apt to forget that sherry gives me a headache, and Zaidee helps me to remember. She is quite invaluable. I often wonder where Michel found her. He says ‘in the street,’ and she says ‘nowhere,’”
She evidently did not know about my old hat, or the flowers the girl had sent me. Neither did she or Michel know that the girl could speak a little English, and understood more; and it was not for me to enlighten them. Afterward I heard that more than once the sherry or champagne had made such havoc with madame’s head and feet that Zaidee had led her from the table to her room, where she had gone off into a heavy sleep, which lasted for hours. Zaidee kept guard over her like a watchdog, making excuse, if anyone called, that madame was suffering from one of her nervous headaches, and must not be disturbed.
She seemed invaluable to madame, who liked just such homage as the girl paid her. She was an out-and-out aristocrat, believing fully in absolute imperialism, and that every nihilist or anarchist who was caught received his just desert.
“Siberia or the knout for the whole of ’em!” she said, with a great deal of bitterness, when speaking of them; and I wondered how her son could be as kind as he was. She was very proud of him, but very sorry he had taken up a profession she felt was beneath him.
“Why did he do it?” I asked; and again the black eyes flashed upon me a look which made me feel that I had been impertinent.
“Ask him,” was her reply.
This was after dinner, when we were sitting in the drawing room by the fire, and Michel was smoking in the dining room by himself. As madame could speak English fairly well, she did so most of the time, for the sake of the children, to whom she seemed more favorably disposed than toward me. But Jack fell very low in her opinion as the conversation went on, and she spoke of Monte Carlo, where she hoped to go very soon, saying she usually went there every winter.
Jack, who had been strictly brought up to look upon gambling as wicked and low, said to her: