A Strange, Sad Comedy

by Molly Elliot Seawell

The proposition made to Madame de Fonblanque was truly startling. Almost anything on earth was better than marrying him—and what he had whispered to her proved that she could not profit one penny by his death. She would gladly have foregone that offer on paper for some other letters she had in which he flatly refused to keep his word, and which she had held over him in terrorem. She could not determine in a moment what to do, but she was convinced that she could not see Mr. Romaine again, and the matter would have to be settled by correspondence. And then she felt the sooner she got away from this place where she had been checkmated the better. When they were traveling fast through the murky night toward Corbin Hall, she broached the subject at once of her return in the morning. The Colonel declared it depended upon the weather, which puzzled Madame de Fonblanque very much until it was explained to her that it was a question of weather whether the boat came or not. Sometimes, in that climate, the river froze over, and then the river steamers stopped running until there was a thaw—for ice-boats were unknown in that region. It was very cold, and getting colder, and the Colonel was of the opinion that a freeze was upon them, and no boat could get down the river that night.

When they got to Corbin Hall, Madame de Fonblanque was extremely nervous about the greeting she would get from the Colonel’s womankind—but it was as cordial and unsuspicious as his had been. The Colonel explained that Madame de Fonblanque had business with Mr. Romaine, who had treated her like—Mr. Romaine; and Letty, as soon as she found somebody with a community of prejudice against the master of Shrewsbury, felt much drawn toward her. There was no doubt that Madame de Fonblanque was a lady; and in the innocent and unworldly lives of the ladies at Corbin Hall, the desperate shifts and devices to get money of people with adventurous tendencies were altogether unknown and unsuspected. Besides, people from a foreign country were very great novelties to them; and Letty seated herself, after tea, to hear all about that marvelous world beyond the sea. The Colonel still talked about his visit to Europe in 1835, and Paris in the days of the Citizen King, and imagined that everything had remained unchanged since then. Madame de Fonblanque was a stout Monarchist, as most French people of dubious antecedents profess to be, and gave out with much tact that, although only the widow of a poor officer in the Lancers, she was on intimate terms with all the Faubourg St. Germains. As she frankly admitted her modest means, there was no hint of braggadocio in anything she said in her fluent French-English. She had great curiosity about Mr. Romaine, and was well up in all his adventures since he had been in America. She spoke of him so coolly and critically that it never dawned upon her listeners that the difficulties between them were not of the usual business kind.

“As for the English mees,” she said, calmly, “I would say to her, ‘Go home, my pretty demoiselle; don’t waste your time on that—that aged crocodile.’ The English, you know, have no sentiment. They call us unfeeling because French parents select a suitable man for an innocent young daughter to marry, and bid her feel for him all the tenderness possible. But those calculating English meeses would marry old Scaramouch himself if he had money enough.”

The Colonel did not like to hear his favorite nation abused, and rather squirmed under this; but he reflected that Madame de Fonblanque’s remarks were due, no doubt, to the traditional jealousy between the French and the English.

Madame de Fonblanque gave the straightest possible account of herself, including the desertion of her maid the day before.

“I thought, with my trusty Suzanne, I could face anything. I did not imagine I could go anywhere in this part of America that I would not find hotels, railroads, telegraph offices—”

“There is one tavern in the county, and that a very poor one, six miles away—and not a line of telegraph wire or railway nearer than two counties off,” explained Letty, smiling.

Madame de Fonblanque clapped her hands.

“How delicious! I shall tell this in France. It is like some of our retired places in the provinces, where the government has erected telegraph lines, but the people do not know exactly what they are meant for! And when that wretched Suzanne left me, I asked at once for the French consul—but I found there was none in town. All of my adventures here have been novel—and as I have met with such very great kindness, I shall always regard them as amusing.”

She showed no disposition to trespass on the hospitality so generously offered her, and looked out of the window anxiously when they rose to go to their rooms. But it had begun snowing early in the evening, and the ground was now perfectly white.