“I did not tell her you were coming.... I so much wished that you should see her!... Dearest Hector! My own sweet Madame Dunoisse’s beloved boy!” poor Smithwick tittered, and Hector kindly soothed her, being nervously mindful of the nurse’s warning, the while she held his strong, supple, red hand in both her frail ones, and gazed into the man’s face, wistfully looking for the boy.
He was not conscious of the old uncomfortable shrinking from poor Smithwick. Her nose was not so cold; her little staccato, mouselike squeaks of emotion were missing. Most of her sentimentalities and all of her affectations had fallen away from her with her obsolete velvet mantles and queer old trinkets, fallals of beads, and hair, and steel, and the front of brown curls that deceived nobody, and never even dreamed of trying to match the scanty knob behind. The honest, genuine, affectionate creature that she was and had always been, shone forth now.... For Death is a skillful diamond-cutter who grinds and slices flaws and blemishes away, and leaves, although reduced in size, a gem of pure unblemished luster, worthy to be set in Heaven’s shining floor.
And now he was to learn the reason of her harsh dismissal, and to respect her worth yet more. She charged him with her affectionate humble duty to his father....
“Who, I trust, has long since pardoned me for what he well might deem presumption in venturing to judge his actions, and question his”—Smithwick hemmed—“strict adherence to the—shall I call it compact?—made with your dear mother, at the time when she conceived it her duty to resume the religious habit she had discarded under the influence of—of a passion, Hector, which has made many of my sex oblivious to the peculiar sacredness of vows.” She added, reading no clear comprehension of her meaning in the brilliant black eyes that looked at her: “I refer to the Marshal’s unsuccessful attempt to obtain from His Serene Highness the Hereditary Prince of Widinitz recognition, and”—she hesitated—“acceptance of—yourself, dear boy, as the—in point of fact—the legitimate heir to his throne!”
“Can my father have conceived such a thing possible?” said Dunoisse, doubting if he had heard aright. “Can he have courted insult, rebuff, contempt, by making such an approach? Think again, dear friend! Is it not possible you may be mistaken? No hint of any such proceeding on my father’s part has ever been breathed to me. I beg you, think again!”
Miss Smithwick shook her head and sighed, and said that there was no mistake at all about it. She had received her dismissal for—it might be presumptuously—venturing to expostulate, when the public prints made the matter a subject for discussion. It had been going on for some time previously; the comments of the principal newspapers of Widinitz, and of the leading Press organs of Munich and Berlin were largely quoted in the Paris journals which had enlightened Smithwick on the subject of her patron’s plans. The cuttings she had preserved. They were in her desk, there upon the little table. Hector might see them if he would.... Her thin fingers hunted under the velvet-covered flaps of the absurd little old writing-box that her old pupil handed her; she followed the movements of the well-made manly figure in the loosely-fitting gray traveling-suit, with fond, admiring eyes. A blush made her old cheeks quite pink and young as she said:
“Forgive me, dear Hector!—but you have grown so handsome.... Has ... has no beautiful young lady told you so? With her eyes, at least, since verbally to commend the personal appearance of a gentleman would be unmaidenly and unrefined.”
“You have lived too long out of France to remember, dear friend,” said Hector, showing his small, square white teeth in a laugh of heart-whole amusement, “that young ladies, with us, are not supposed to have eyes at all!”
He forgot meek Smithwick for a moment, remembering an Arab girl at Blidah who had seemed to love him.... Adjmeh had been very pretty, with the great blue-black dewy eyes of a gazelle, and the hoarse cooing voice of a dove, despite the little indigo lilies and stars tattooed on her ripe nectarine-colored cheeks; on the backs of her slender, red-tipped hands, and upon the insteps of her slim arched feet, dyed also with henna; their ankles tinkling with little gold and silver coins and amulets, threaded on black silk strings similar to those bound about her tiny wrists, and plaited into the orthodox twenty-five tresses of her night-black hair....
Ah, yes! though at twenty she would be middle-aged, at thirty a wrinkled hag, Adjmeh was very pretty—would be for several years to come.... Who might be telling her so at that particular moment?... Dunoisse wondered, and then the conjured-up perfumes of sandal and ambergris grew faint; the orange glow of the African sunset faded from the flat, terraced roof of the little house at Blidah, the tinkle of the Arab tambur was nothing but the ring of a London muffin-man’s bell—and Miss Smithwick was tendering him a little flat packet of yellowed clippings from the Monarchie, the National, the Presse, the Patrie....