Upon a small stand were two packs of cards—the one an ordinary playing pack, and the other what are known sometimes as fortune-telling cards. The devices on these latter differed materially from those in ordinary use; there were no plain cards; every one was ornamented with some kind of a significant design; there were pictures of women, of men, of ships and raging seas, of hearses, and sickbeds, and shrouds, and coffins, and corpses, and graves, and tombstones, and similar cheerful objects; then there were squares, and circles, and hands with scales, and hands with daggers, and hands sticking through clouds, and purses of money, and carriages, and moons, and suns, and serpents, and hearts, and Cupids, and eyes, and rays of light coming from nowhere, and shining on nothing, and Herculeses with big clubs, and big arms, bigger than the clubs, and big legs, bigger than both together, and swords, and spears, and sundials, and many other designs equally intelligible and portentous.
Soon the Madame appeared, and the attention of the Individual was immediately diverted from surrounding objects and riveted on the incomprehensible woman who was “no humbug,” and who, according to her own opinion of herself, would have exactly realized Mr. Edmund Sparkler’s idea of a “dem’d fine woman, with nobigodnonsense about her.”
On the first glance, Madame Clifton is what would be called “fine-looking,” but she does not analyse well. She is of medium height, aged about thirty-five years, with very light, piercing blue eyes, and very black hair, one little lock of which is precisely twisted into a very elaborate little curl, which rests in the middle of her forehead between her eyes, as if to keep those quarrelsome orbs apart. Her eyebrows are unusually heavy, so much so as to give a curious menacing look to the upper part of her face, which disagreeable expression is intensified by the extreme paleness of her countenance.
Her dress was unassuming, neat, and tasteful, save in the one article of jewelry, of which she wore as much as if the stock in trade at the Broadway perfumery store had been pearls, and gold, and diamonds, instead of perfumes and essences. Her deportment was self-possessed and lady-like, that is, if an expression of tireless watchfulness and unsleeping suspicion are consistent with refined and easy manners. She never took her steel-blue eyes from her visitor’s face; she did not for an instant relax her confident smile; she did not speak but in the lowest softest tones; but her auditor felt every instant more convinced that the voice was the falsest voice he ever heard, the smile the falsest smile he ever saw, and that the cold piercing eye alone was true, and that was only true because no art could conceal its calculating glitter.
If one could imagine a smiling cat, Madame Clifton would resemble that cat more than any one thing in the world. Neat and precise in her outward appearance; not a fold of her garments, not a thread of lace or ribbon, not a hair of her head, but was exactly smooth and orderly, and in its exact place; not a glance of her eye that was not watchful and suspicious; not a tone or word that was not treacherous in sound; not a movement of body or of limb that was not soft and stealthy; her feline resemblances developed themselves more and more every instant, until at last the Individual came to regard her as some kind of dangerous animal in a state of temporary and perfidious repose. And this impression deepened every instant, so much so, that when the small soft hand was laid in his, he almost expected to see the sharp claws unsheathe themselves from the velvet finger-tips and fasten in his flesh.
The language she used, when freed from the technical phrases of her trade, was good enough for every day, and she did not distinguish herself by any specialty of bad English.
She asked her customer, with her most insinuating smile, if he would have her “run the cards for him,” and on receiving an affirmative answer she took the pack of playing cards into her velvet hands, pawed them dexterously over a few times to shuffle them, laid them in three rows with the faces upward, and softly purred the following words:
“I am uncertain whether to run you a club or a diamond, for I do not exactly see how it is; but I will run you a club first, and if you find that it does not tell your past history, please to mention the fact to me, and I will then run you a diamond.”
She then proceeded to mention a number of fictitious events which she asserted had happened in the past life of her listener, but that individual, who did not find that her revelations agreed with his own knowledge of his former history, tremblingly informed her of that fact; and she then, with a most vicious contraction of the overhanging eyebrows, broke short the thread of her fanciful story, and proceeded to “run him a diamond.”
She evidently was determined to make the diamond come nearer the truth—to which end she dexterously strove by a series of very sharp cross-questionings to elicit some circumstance of his early history, on which she might enlarge, or to get some clue to his present circumstances, and hopes, and aspirations, that she might find some peg on which to hang a prediction with an appearance of probability. The Individual—with humiliation he confesses it—was a bachelor. His heart had proved unsusceptible, and Cupid had hitherto failed to hit him. On this occasion he proved characteristically unimpressible; and the insinuating smile, the inquiring look, and the winning manner, all failed of effect, and he remained pertinaciously non-committal.