CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VI.

When Norman de Vere turned away from his wife’s door the maid locked it quickly, and crossed the room to the bedside of her mistress.

Mrs. de Vere had half risen from the luxurious nest of linen and lace, and with her wavy red locks falling backward like a veil, was leaning on her white elbow listening eagerly.

“He did not ask to see me, Finette?” she whispered, half longingly.

“Non, miladi—only about your health.”

“You told him I was asleep—that you were ordered to remain by me all night?”

“Oui, madame.”

“Finette, I wish you would quit your bad habit of falling into French. It is annoying, after the pains I took to have you taught good English years ago!” Mrs. de Vere cried out petulantly.

“Pardon, madame.C’est—that is, ’twas slip of the tongue,” Finette replied, meekly.

“Very well. Try to command your tongue. Now, tell me, what of the brat?”

“He left it with the old lady, madame, as I told you.”

“You heard nothing of what they said when you listened at the door?”

Finette’s beady black eyes glistened malevolently.

“Not vair mooch—they spoke too low,” she said. “As well as I could understand English—which I speak but imperfectly, madame—my master he complained bitterly of you. His mother she said it was one vair great shame you was so jealous and so cruel to him.”

The hazel eyes shot forth red lights of fury.

“Very well; I will pay her out for her interference!” she cried, in a hissing tone of rage; then she lay back on her pillow, gasping with anger.

“Oh, madame! these moder-in-laws they be marplots between the young married ones,” cried Finette, lugubriously.

Having cast this lighted match into the gunpowder of her lady’s wrath, the artful and malicious French maid became discreetly silent.

Her mistress too was very quiet. She was divided between bitter wrath and inconsistent pique. She had forbidden her husband’s presence, yet she fiercely resented the fact thathe had not insisted on coming into the room—that he had taken her dismissal so calmly and gone away.

“If he had really loved me, he would have insisted on seeing me,” she burst out, bitterly, and the wily French maid answered:

“Madame, he loves you—be sure of that. But he is too young; that is my master’s great fault. He is just from his books; he understands not, like a man of the world, the caprice of the woman. He knows not that her no means yes, and that her stay out means come in.”

Mrs. de Vere flushed at hearing herself so correctly analysed by the crafty French maid, but she did not contradict her. She remained silent for a few minutes, and Finette waited patiently. At last:

“He defies me; his mother defies me; the ungrateful beggars that I raised from penury to wealth and luxury!” Mrs. de Vere burst forth, wrathful, unheeding the presence of the attendant. “They keep the little wretch here, despite the fact that I ordered him to take it away! Strange! Strange! But I will show them what stuff Camille de Vere is made of! Finette!”

“Madame!”

“Do you not believe with me that this mysterious child is Norman de Vere’s own?”

Finette shrugged her narrow shoulders expressively.

“Dear madame, if I agree to any of the hard things you uttaire against your husband now, you will be indignant with poor Finette when you make up your love quarrel with him.”

Finette had not attained the age of forty years without becoming a clever student of feminine nature. She was too astute to abuse her master. She knew well that the capricious woman before her would like her better for defending him.

Mrs. de Vere bit her lip and answered sharply:

“You are too pert, Finette; but it matters not what you believe—I have my own opinion, and it is unchangeable.”

“Pardon, dear madame,” replied the polite and indefatigable maid.

Mrs. de Vere scowled at her, but smiled a minute after, and asked eagerly:

“Finette, would you like to earn a hundred dollars to-night?”

“Only tell me how, madame!” cried the woman, her small black eyes glittering avariciously.

“Very well. Steal that child from my mother-in-law’s room, take it away from here and place it with some onewho will keep it forever away from Norman de Vere, and I will pay you a hundred dollars in the morning.”

“But, madame, it is so late! It is now long past the midnight hour. There is scarce time.”

“‘Where there is a will there is a way,’” Mrs. de Vere replied, sagely.

“Let me think,” said Mlle. Finette.

She stood so long with down-dropped eyes that Mrs. de Vere cried impatiently:

“I will make it two hundred if you will consent, Finette, and I will always be grateful to you for helping me to outwit these tyrants who have tried to impose upon me with their infamous plot.”

Finette smiled.

“I will try,” she said.

Mrs. de Vere showered praises upon her confederate, and then Finette bent down, whispering a question that made her mistress recoil with blanched cheeks.

“Ah, no, no! not that!” she cried, with a horrified gesture of her white hand. “Only let me be rid of her—that is all I ask.”

“Very well, madame—as you wish it, of course. I think I know the woman that will do what you want—a wretched old miser of a rag-picker. But she lives a long way from here. If I might have your saddle-horse—”

“You are welcome to it.”

“Oh, many thanks, madame! The little one will be asleep, you see. I shall have to chloroform both her and the old lady to get her, you know.”

“Do not annoy me with the details. Only do your task as silently and efficiently as possible, and look to me for your reward as soon as you return!” Mrs. de Vere exclaimed, with haughty impatience.

“I go then at once,” Finette answered, in a cringing tone.

“My blessings and my thanks go with you!” exclaimed her wayward mistress.

“I don’t know about that,” the clever maid muttered, when she found herself alone in the darkness of the hall. “You’re a capricious one as ever I see. Maybe by to-morrow you’ll make up your quarrel with your boy-husband and want to undo all I’ve done to please you to-night.”

She crept softly along the hall, and knelt down and applied her ear to the key-hole at the old lady’s door. There came to her distinctly the deep breathing of one asleep.

“Deep in the arms of Morpheus!” she muttered, grimly.“And she never locks her door at night. Come, I do not think I’m going to have vair mooch trouble getting the brat away.”

She slid along the floor and went softly down-stairs to prepare for her evil errand. To do so she had to go out to the stables to saddle a horse.

As she was going softly past the summer-house, she started on coming face to face with a female figure in white with a shawl thrown over its head.

“Oh, Miss Finette, don’t holler, please! ’Tain’t nobuddy but Nance! I’se been to an ebenin’ party, an’ gwine to slip inter de back do’ easy,” half whispered the voice of one of the negro house-maids.

“I don’t know but I ought to report you to the housekeeper, Nance, for keeping such late hours,” Finette answered, jokingly.

“Per’aps I’ll ’port you to your young missus fer de same t’ing!” cried Nance.

“‘Sh! I was fooling, Nance. I had to come out for some fresh air before I went to bed. I’ve been up all night with my lady.”

“In ’nuther tantrum?” inquired Nance, intelligently.

“Yes.”

“Whut’s up now?”

“Master came to-night, and they quarreled as usual.”

“I wonder he don’t leave her for good and all, she’s so aggervating, and he’s the most patientest soul alive,” cried the house-maid, indignantly.

“Well, she is a high one,” giggled Finette, some secret memory seeming to amuse her. Presently she said, confidentially: “Well, she’s been in an outrageous temper since yesterday morning.”

“Fer why?” queried Nance.

“Well, she was looking in the glass at herself, and whatever do you think she found?”

“Oh, whut?” gasped Nance, breathless with eagerness.

Finette, whose coarse, unscrupulous nature always took revenge in private for the snubs her mistress often gave her, giggled softly again and answered:

“The first gray hair in that red hair of hers.”

“Oh, my! she is a-gitten old.”

“Yes; and she cut a caper, I tell you! Actually threw herself down and cried like somebody was dead. Then she got up, glared at herself, and made me pull the gray hair outand burn it in a hurry. She was as cross as could be after that.”

“Lordy!” giggled Nance, who had no love for her young mistress.

“Yes, indeed,” said Finette. “Oh, it cuts her to be so much older than the boy she married. She hates it. She’s as jealous as—a—a—tigress!” said Finette. “But it’s cool, ain’t it? Let’s go in,” and she turned back, saying to herself: “I’ll have to slip out after she’s abed, drat her!”

They both vanished, and the next moment Norman de Vere appeared in the door-way of the summer-house, from whose shelter he had heard every word that had passed outside.

His eyes blazed with indignation, and it was with difficulty that he had restrained himself from confronting the treacherous maid and sternly rebuking her for her flippancy.

“The coarse, ungrateful, shameless creature! It is thus that she repays the confidence her mistress has reposed in her for years!” he thought, and he resolved that to-morrow Camille should hear the story, when he did not doubt that she would rid herself of the woman.

Although smarting with resentment at the false and cruel charge Camille had brought against him, Norman de Vere was touched to the heart by the fact that Finette had betrayed. The story of her grief at finding in her rich, abundant tresses the first gray hair had a deep pathos for the man who loved Camille still, in spite of her caprices and cruelties.

As he thought of her weeping over her misfortune before the hard, unsympathetic eyes of the secretly amused French maid, he forgot for a moment his own grievances; his manly heart grew warm with pitying love.

“Poor Camille! Poor darling!” he murmured, “how cruelly sensitive she is over the slight disparity between our years! It is because she loves me well, in spite of her morbid fancies, and I wish I had been with her yesterday, instead of Finette, when she found that little silver thread. I would have taken her in my arms and kissed that hair so many times she would not have had the heart to remove it from her shining tresses. Perhaps she is grieving over it now, and I might comfort her. I will go to her now; I will risk another rebuff in the endeavor to make peace with that proud heart,” turning hurriedly toward the house.

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