A livid face of hate, streaked with those faint brownish red marks left by the tightened folds of the silk scarf that had so nearly strangled her. She had tried to laugh at this childish form assumed by the malice of the Roumanian. But the deadly cleverness of the thing lay in the fact—that it did what it was meant to do. The medieval torture of the falling drops of water was equaled by this Ordeal of the Penny Looking-Glass.
"Look, see, and think of me!" sometimes ran the doggerel rhyme scrawled on the paper wrapping of the doll's mirror. At other times:
"Charms that are spoiled hold no men entoiled!" would be the motto, or something equally stupid, dull and banal. The stupidity was becoming unbearable by its very repetition; by the certainty and regularity with which the laden envelopes arrived. Sometimes Adelaide felt entangled in a cunningly woven network ... surrounded by spies, sleepless and unseen.... Yet in the maid Mariette the Slav had found an accomplice clever enough to carry out his purposes single-handed. The cream of the thing was—Adelaide never suspected Mariette.
Treacherous herself, she believed in the devotion of this woman, who watched her anguish grimly, planting fresh thorns in her mistress's shuddering flesh. And every day or so brought another doll's looking-glass. The jeer that accompanied the last had been a vilely parodied verse of the child's dancing-song:
"Ma commère était belle!
Helas! dans le temps!
Ma commère était belle!
Helas! dans le temps! Hélas!
Pousser un soupir!
A vue de ma commère:
L'Amour n'a qu'à mourir!
Hélas!"
One may imagine the curl of Adelaide's lip on reading rubbish like this. But she read it more than once, and when she finally burned it, the accursed jingle, burr-like, stuck in her memory: for she it was who had been beautiful in the time that had passed for evermore—the gossip at the first sight of whose damaged, unveiled charms Love sighed and gave up the ghost.
LII
Meanwhile Juliette, nestled in her corner, stared from the window as Belgium hurried by. Bouillon, at whose station they left the train, showed a platform crowded with swaggering Prussian officers of the Crown Prince's army—some of them wounded, all upon parole. French ladies, entering and leaving the carriages, looked daggers at their enemies. Poisoned daggers at Adelaide, who, to her secret annoyance, was recognized and familiarly greeted by two of these Teutonic warriors, one a tall and red-whiskered Bavarian Light Dragoon, the other a brown-coated Hussar of von Barnekow's Brigade.
In vain Adelaide ignored the pair and redoubled the directions she was giving to a porter. The Bavarian coolly thrust the man aside, opened the carriage-door and jumped upon the steps.