He was talking rather strangely, and not at all in a strain complimentary to Margery, who, nevertheless, passed it off pleasantly, and said, with her pretty accent, which struck Mr. Beresford with a degree of newness.
“Thank you, Mr. Beresford; I surely ought to feel honored to be No. 3. Let me see; you said that as Mr. Rossiter was gone, and Reinette sick, you were reduced to the alternative of coming here to be rid of the blues. Is that it? or have my French ears misinterpreted your English meaning?”
“That is the way it sounded, I will admit,” Mr. Beresford replied, “but I am a bungler anyway, so please consider that I have made you number one, for really I have been intending to call for some time.”
He took the seat she offered him, and moved it a little more in front of her, where he could look directly at her as she bent over her work, which, with his permission, she had resumed, and which, as it was a sacque for Miss Anna, must be finished as soon as possible.
How graceful every motion was, and how well her dress of black cashmere, with soft lace ruffles at her throat and sleeves, became her, and how very beautiful she was both in face and form, with her golden hair rippling over her finely shaped head, her dazzling complexion, her perfectly regular features, and, more than all, her large, clear, sunny blue eyes, veiled by long, fringed lashes, and shaded by eyebrows so heavy and black, that they seemed almost out of place with that hair of golden hue. But they gave her a novel and distingue look, and added to her beauty, which, now that he was studying her, struck Mr. Beresford as something remarkable, and made his eyes linger on the fair face with more admiration even than curiosity. But the likeness he sought for was not there, unless it were in the occasional toss of the head on one side—the significant shrug of the shoulders, or gestures of the hands—and something in the tone of the voice when it grew very earnest as she talked to him of Reinette, who was not like her in the least. In feature and complexion, Margery was the handsomer of the two. Mr. Beresford confessed that to himself with a kind of jealous pang, as if, in some way, a wrong were done the dark-faced, dark-eyed Queenie, who, put side by side with Margery La Rue, would, nevertheless, win every time, and make people see only herself, with her wonderful sparkle, and brightness, which threw everything else into the shade. Queenie was the diamond, and Margery the pearl, and they were not at all alike, and Mr. Beresford felt puzzled, and inclined to believe the agent in Mentone a slanderer, especially after he had talked with Margery awhile, of her friend.
“You have known Reinette a long time?” he said and she replied:
“Yes, a long time—ever since we were little girls—though it seems but yesterday since she climbed the narrow, winding stairs up to that low room, where I staid all day long with no company but the cat, and nothing besides my playthings to amuse me, except to look down into the narrow street below, the Rue St. Honore, and watch the carts, and carriages, and people as they passed, and wonder when mother would come home, and if she would bring me, as she sometimes did, a bon-bon, or a white, tender croissant, which I liked so much better for my supper than our dark, sour bread.”
“Yes,” Mr. Beresford said, leaning forward and listening eagerly to what Margery was telling him of her early life, and wondering a little that she should be so communicative.
“Most girls would try to conceal the fact that they had once known such poverty,” he thought, but he did not know Margery La Rue, or guess that it was in part her pride which made her talk as she was talking.
She was naturally reserved and reticent with regard to herself, but to him, whose value of birth, and blood, and family connections she rightly guessed, she would speak openly, and show him that it was something more than a mere dressmaker—a sewing-woman—whom he was honoring with his society, and in whom he was interested in spite of himself. She divined that readily, by the kindling of his eyes when they met hers as she talked, and by some of those subtle influences by which a woman knows that the man she is talking with is entertained and pleased with herself as well as with what she is saying.