So, when he said to her, with a kind of pity in his tone, “And you were so desolate as that when Reinette found you?” she answered:
“Yes, more desolate than you can guess—you who have never known what poverty means in a large city like Paris. But I was not unhappy, either,” she added, quickly. “I had too much love and petting from my mother for that. I was only lonely in her absence; for she worked at a hair-dresser’s and was gone all day, and I kept the house and got the meals for father till he died.”
“Your father—yes,” Mr. Beresford repeated. “What was he, what did he do, and when did he die?”
He seemed very eager in his questionings, and mistaking his meaning altogether, Margery’s cheeks flushed, but her voice was steady and clear as she replied:
“I do not know that he did anything. I think it is a fashion in France more than here for the women to work and the men to take their ease. At all events, father had no regular occupation that I know of. Sometimes he acted as guide to strangers, for he could speak a little English, and sometimes he was employed for a few days as waiter at some of the Duval restaurants, and once he took mother and me there to dine. That is the white day of my life, as connected with him. Reinette heard of me from old Lisette, the laundress, who lived on the floor below, and she came up to our humble room in her scarlet cloak and hood trimmed with ermine, and filled it with glory at once. You know what a halo of brightness seems to encircle her, and affect everything around her. And how she did sparkle and glow, and light up the whole room, as she sat there in that hard wooden chair with me standing awkwardly by, in my coarse high-necked working apron, with broom in hand, and gazing at her as if she had been a being from another sphere.”
How rapid and excitedly she talked, gesticulating with her hands, which were as small and white as those of any lady, and how large and bright her blue eyes grew, as she described that first interview with Reinette so vividly that Mr. Beresford could see the low room, far up the winding stairs, the humble furniture, the bare floor, the smoldering fire on the hearth, the wooden chair, the dark-eyed little girl in scarlet and ermine who sat there with the captured cat in her lap, talking to another child quite as beautiful as herself, though of another type of beauty, and clad in the coarse garments of the poor. He could see it all so plainly, and forgetting for a time why he was there, he listened still more intently, while Margery went on to tell him of the Champs d’Elysees, where she wore the scarlet cloak and played she was Mr. Hetherton’s little girl, while Queenie sat demurely at her side, clad in homely garments, and making believe that she was Margery La Rue, whose home was up the winding stairs in the Rue St. Honore.
“I think that one act bound me to her forever,” Margery said, “though it was the beginning of many make-believes and many deeds of kindness, for through Queenie’s influence her father paid my expenses in part at the English school which she attended, and where I learned to speak your language and all I know besides, and after that she stood my fast friend in everything and treated me more like a sister than an inferior, as I am, by birth and social position. I think her love has never failed me since the day she first came to me and brought the glorious sunlight with her. So, do you wonder that I love her? I would lay down my life for her, if need be—would sacrifice everything for her, and I sometimes wish that I might have the chance to show how much I love her, and would endure for her sake.”
Margery paused here, and with clasped hands, and eyes which had in them a rapt, far-away look, seemed almost to see looming on the horizon not far in the distance the something for which she longed, and which, when it came, would test her as few women have ever been tested in their love for another.
It was not possible that the dark shadow touched her now, although it was so near, and yet she shivered a little and drew a long breath as she at last came back to the present and turned her eyes upon Mr. Beresford, who said to her:
“Did you even see Queenie’s father?—did you know him, I mean—you or your mother?”