OFF TO AMERICA.
The chevalier paused with dramatic empressement to enjoy the effect of his announcement. But the pale woman who was sitting before him made little sign of her emotions.
With the tears still upon her cheeks, and hands clasped in her lap, she had gone a wild trip into fairyland, and its brilliant fantasies were whirling round her in all manner of rainbow tints presaging hopes of joy; and the little chevalier, glossy-bearded, pleased, and triumphant, seemed to dance round her in the many-tinted flare, like the good geni of the fairy tale.
Save the added wildness to these resistless gray eyes, and the sudden aurora gleam over brow and cheek, the demonstrative Frenchman might have doubted if she believed him.
"Admirable mademoiselle," aspired he, after a due pause; "she is brave as the Spartan boy with his more disagreeable burden, the wolf. She will not let the surprise show so much as the tip of his nose—ah, you British know how to shut the teeth. Mais Voila, you shall say, 'Go on, mon ami, and accept your thousand pounds,' or shall I say no more of my colonel, and let the naughty convict go hang?"
"He is alive—go on," breathed Margaret to the pirouetting geni of her fairy-tale.
"What! and loose monsieur's neck-cloth, which was to strangle him?"
"Yes yes; tell me of St. Udo Brand, that we may bring him home to his own."
"Mademoiselle is magnificent. She forgives like an angel, and pays like an empress. I bow before so grand a demoiselle, the effulgence of her nature dazzles me, and Voila! I, also touched with enthusiasm, emulate her in magnificence. For the poor sum of one thousand pounds I give to mademoiselle the hero of her heart, and happiness, and to me darkness, after the blinding study of her perfection. Nay more, I have a turn for necromancy—I may not read man's destiny in the stars, but woman's future in her own petite hand I have often seen, and I see this hand, which is a lovely hand, holding out the fortune of St. Udo, my fine colonel, to him, and being taken, fortune and all, for its own open kindness; and I behold myself (in the future of this petite hand) placing by the revelation I am about to make, my noble heroine in the arms of another—for only one thousand pounds.
"Behold me, then, lift the cloud which has swallowed up the life of our gallant St. Udo Brand from the moment in which the renegade, Thoms, has stabbed him on the battle-field and lo! with the sweep of my magician's wand I place before you the succeeding picture, clear, truthful, and unshadowed.