CHAPTER XVI.MARGERY LA RUE.
She was a tall, beautiful blonde, with reddish golden hair, and lustrous blue eyes shaded with long curling eyelashes and heavy eyebrows, which made them seem darker than they really were. The features were finely cut and perfectly regular, and the whole face and figure were of that refined, delicate, type supposed to belong mostly to the upper classes in whose veins the purest of patrician blood is flowing. She said she was twenty-one, but she seemed older on account of that air of independence and self-reliance habitual to persons accustomed to care and think for themselves. She had come to America the April previous and stopped at Martha’s Vineyard with her mother, who was short, and stout, and dark, but rather prepossessing in her manner, with more signs of culture and education than is usual with the ordinary type of French woman. In her girlhood she must have been very pretty and attractive, with her bright complexion and large black eyes, which had not yet lost their brilliancy, though there was in them a sad thoughtful expression, as if she were continually haunted with some bitter memory.
Margery had been introduced to the Misses Rossiter by a friend from Boston who had employed her in Paris, but occupied as they were with their mother and the gay world around them, they had hardly thought whether she were unusually pretty or not, until Phil electrified them with the news that she was the friend of their cousin, who said she was beautiful.
“I will look at her now for myself,” Ethel thought, as she entered the room where Margery sat sewing, with adeep flush on her cheek and a bright, eager look in the blue eyes lifted respectfully but inquiringly to the face of her employer.
During the last ten minutes Margery’s thoughts had been traveling back over the past to the early days of her childhood, when her home was on the upper floor of a high dwelling in the Rue St. Honore, where her days were passed in loneliness, except for the companionship of a cat and her playthings, of which she had a great abundance. Her parents were poor, and her mother was busy all day at a hair-dresser’s, going out early and coming home late, while her father worked she did not know where, and sometimes it entered her little active brain that perhaps he did not work at all, for on the days when she went to walk, as she occasionally did, with the woman who had the floor below, and who looked after and was kind to the lonely little girl in the attic, she often saw him lounging and drinking at a third-class cafe which they passed when her friend, Lisette Vertueil, had clothes to carry to her patrons, for Lisette was a laundress, and washed for many of the upper class. Sometimes, too, Margery heard her mother reproach her father for his indolence and thriftlessness, and then there was always a quarrel, into which her name was dragged, though in what way she could not tell. She only knew that after these quarrels her mother was, if possible, kinder to her than before—and said her prayers oftener in a little closet off from the living room. Her father, too, was kind to her in his rough, off-hand way, but she did not love him as she did her pretty mother, and when at last he died, her grief for him though violent at first was very short-lived and soon forgotten, as the griefs of children are.
Among the patrons of Lisette Vertueil was Mr. Hetherton, the reputed millionaire, whose elegant carriage and horses sometimes stood on the St. Honore while his housekeeper talked to Lisette of the garmentsshe had brought to be washed for her little mistress, Miss Reinette—garments dainty enough for a princess to wear, and which Lisette took great pride in showing to her neighbors, as a kind of advertisement for herself.
One morning when Margery was spending an hour or two with the laundress, helping to fold the clothes preparatory to being sent home, Lisette had shown her the lovely embroidered dresses, and told her of the little black-eyed girl who occasionally came there with her maid, and seemed so much like a playful kitten, in her quick, varying moods.
“Oh, how I wish I was rich like her, and had such lovely dresses, and how I’d like to see her! Do you think she’d come up to our room, if you asked her?” Margery said, and Lisette replied that she did not know but would try what she could do.
Accordingly, the next time Reinette came to the laundry, in her scarlet hood and cloak, trimmed with white ermine and lined with quilted satin, Lisette told her of the little girl who lived on the floor above, and who was alone all day, with only her doll and cat to talk to, and who would like to see her.
The cat and doll attracted Reinette quite as much as the little girl, and with the permission of her maid, she was soon climbing the steep, narrow, but perfectly clean stairway which lead to Numero 40. Mr. La Rue had been home to lunch that day, and Margery, though scarcely nine years old, was clearing away the remnants of their plain repast, and brushing up the hearth, when the door was pushed softly open, and a pair of bright, laughing eyes looking at her from under the scarlet and ermine, and a sweet bird-like voice said:
“Please, Margie, may I come in? I am Reinette Hetherton—Queenie, papa calls me, and I like that best. Lisette said you lived up here all alone with only the cat. Where is she? I don’t see her.”
Margery was standing before the fire, broom in hand,with a long-sleeved apron on, which came to her feet and concealed her dress entirely, while her hair was hidden in a cap she always wore at her work. At the sound of Reinette’s voice she started suddenly, and dropping her broom, gazed open-mouthed at the vision of loveliness addressing her so familiarly. The mention of the cat struck a chord of sympathy, and she replied at once:
“She isn’tshe; she’she, and his name isJacques. There he is, under father’s chair,” and the two girls bumped their heads together as they both stooped at the same moment to capture the cat, who was soon purring in Reinette’s lap, as she sat before the fire, with Margery on the floor beside her, admiring her bright face and beautiful dress.
“I’ve nothing half so pretty as this,” Margery said, despondingly, as she touched the scarlet cloak. “My best coat is plaid, and I only wear it on Sundays.”
“Oh my!” Reinette replied, with a great air of self-importance, “I have three more. One is velvet, lined with rose color, which I wear to church, and when I drive with papa in theBois. Do you ever go there, or on theChamps d’Elysees?”
“I walk there sometimes on Sundays with mother, but I was never in a real carriage in my life,” was Margery’s reply, and Reinette rejoined:
“Then you shall be. I’ll make Celine—that’s my maid—take us this very afternoon. There’ll be a crowd, and it will be such fun! But why do you wear that big apron and cap?—they disfigure you so.”
Margery blushed and explained that she wore them to keep her clothes clean; then, divesting herself of the obnoxious garments, she shook down her rippling hair, and stood before Reinette, who exclaimed:
“How sweet you are, with that bright sunny hair and those lovely blue eyes! I wish mine were blue. I hate ’em—the nasty old things, so black and so vixenish, Celine says, when I am mad, as I am more than half the time. But tell me, do you really live here all alone with the cat?”
“Oh no.” And in a few words Margery explained her mode of life, which to the pampered child of luxury seemed desolate in the extreme.
“Oh, that’s dreadful!” she said; “and I am so sorry for you! You ought to see our apartments at the Hotel Meurice. They are just lovely! and Chateau des Fleurs our country home, is prettier than the Tuilleries—the grounds are, I mean—and most as pretty as Versailles.”
Margery listened with rapt attention to Reinette’s description of her beautiful home, and then, as she said her father was an American, she suddenly interrupted her with:
“Can you speak English?”
“Of course I can,” said Reinette. “I always speak it with papa, who wishes me to know it as well as French. Mamma was English, and died at Rome when I was born, and I go to an English school, and when papa is away, as he is a great deal, I board at the school, and have such fun, because they don’t dare touch me, papa is so rich.”
“Oh, if I could only speak English! Mother wishes me to learn it, and says I shall by and by, when she can afford it. She speaks it a little,” Margery said; and, after a moment, Reinette replied:
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. Papa has more money than he knows what to do with, and I mean to tease him till he gives me some for you, and you shall go to that school with me.”
“Oh, I shall be so glad, and I’ll tell mother to-night!” Margery exclaimed, feeling unbounded faith in Reinette’s ability to accomplish anything.
Nor was her faith at all shaken when, a few minutes later Reinette’s smart maid Celine came up the stairs after her little mistress, who horrified her with the announcement that she meant to take her new friend for a drive in the Champs d’Elysees.
“I shall; I will,” she said, as Celine protested against it. “I like her, and she’s never been in a carriage in herlife, and she stays here all day with the cat, and washes the dishes, and she’s going to ride with me, and I’ll spit and bite, if you don’t let her.”
Celine knew better than to oppose the imperious child when in this mood, and besides, there was something very winning and attractive in the bright-haired, blue-eyed little girl, whose dress, though plain, was becoming and faultlessly clean. She certainly was no ordinary child, and that beautiful face would not disgrace the carriage. So Celine consented, and with joy beaming in every feature Margery brought out her plaid cloak and hood, which presented so striking a contrast to the rich scarlet one of Reinette that she drew back at once, and with quivering lip said to Celine:
“I must not go. I am so shabby beside her. She would be ashamed, and that I could not bear. Oh I wish I was she and she me, just for once—wish I could wear a scarlet cloak and see how it seemed.”
“You shall!” Reinette cried, with great tears in her eyes. “You shall know how it seems. We’ll make believe you are papa’s little girl, and I am Margery,” and before Celine could divine her intention, she was removing her dainty scarlet cloak and hood, and putting them on Margery, who was too much astonished to resist, but stood perfectly still, while Reinette wrapped the ermine, and satin, and merino around her, and put the plaid cloak and hood upon herself. “Oh, how lovely you are,” she said, gazing admiringly at Margery, “and how ugly I am in this plaid. Nobody will know but what you are really Queenie Hetherton, and I am Margery,” and she dragged the child down the stairs, and out into the street, where at a corner the Hetherton carriage was waiting.
Reinette gave Margery the seat of honor, and then sat down beside her, looking somewhat like a dowdy bit of humanity in the plain plaid cloak, with the large hood hiding her face. But she enjoyed it immensely, playingthat she was Margery, and bade the coachman drive straight to the Champs d’Elysees.
It was a lovely winter afternoon, and all the Americans and English, with many of the Parisians, were out, making the Champs d’Elysees and the Bois beyond seem like a brilliant procession of gayly-dressed people and splendid equipages. And among the latter none was handsomer or more noticeable than the fine bays and elegant carriage of Mr. Hetherton, in which Margery sat making believe that she was Queenie, and enjoying it as much as if she had really been the daughter of the millionaire, instead of humble Margery La Rue, whose mother was a hair-dresser, and whose father was a nothing.
How happy she was, and how in after years that winter when she rode in the Champs d’Elysees in borrowed plumes, stood out before her as the bright spot in her life from which dated all the sunshine and all the sorrow, too, which ever came to her. Nor was it hard for her to go back to the humble lodgings—to give up the scarlet cloak and beMargeryagain, for she had so much now to think of; so much to tell her mother, whom she found waiting at the head of the narrow stairs, with a white, scared look on her face, and an eager, wistful expression in her eyes which seemed to look past Margery, down the dark stairway, as if in quest of some one else.
“Oh mother,” Margery cried, “you are home early to-night, and I am so happy. Heaven can never be any brighter than this afternoon has been to me, playing that I was Mr. Hetherton’s little girl, and wearing her scarlet cloak.”
She was in the room by this time, taking off her own plaid coat, which she had put on in the court below, and talking so fast that she did not see the pallor on her mother’s face, or how tightly her hands clinched on the back of a chair as she stood looking at her.
Mrs. La Rue had been dismissed by her employerearlier than usual, and finding Margery gone, had been to Lisette’s room to make inquiries for her.
“Are you sick?” Lisette asked, as Mrs. La Rue dropped suddenly into a chair when she heard where Margery had gone and with whom. “You look as if you had seen a ghost.”
Making an excuse that she was tired, and not feeling quite as well as usual, Mrs. La Rue soon went back to her own apartment, and kneeling down by the wooden chair before the fire, cried bitterly, as people only cry when some great wrong done in the past, or some terrible memory which they had thought dead and buried forever, rises suddenly from the grave and confronts them with all the olden horror.
“Reinette and Margery together, side by side!” she said. “Oh, if I could see it—seeher; but no, I have promised, and I must keep my vow. I dare not break it.”
For a long time she lay with her head upon the chair, and then remembering that Margery would soon be coming home and must not find her thus, she arose, and wiping the tear stains from her face, busied herself with preparations for the evening meal until she heard upon the stairs the bounding step which always sent a thrill of joy to her heart, and in a moment Margery came in with her blue eyes shining like stars and her cheeks glowing with excitement, as she talked of the wonderful things she had seen, and of Queenie, “who,” she said, “acted as if I was just as good as she, and her father so rich, too, with such a lovely chateau, and she was like a picture, as she sat talking to me on this hard old chair,” and she indicated the one by which her mother had knelt, and on which the tears were scarcely yet dried.
“Thisone? Did she sit onthis one?” Mrs. La Rue asked, eagerly, laying her hand caressingly on the chair where Queenie Hetherton had sat and talked to Margery.
“And what is the very best of all,” Margery continued, “she goes to an English school, and when I told her how much I wanted to learn English, she said she’d teaseher father for the money to pay for me, too; and she knew she’d get it, for he gives her every thing she wants. Oh, I do hope he will. I mean to ask God to-night to make him. Lisette says I must ask for what I want, and Jesus will hear and answer. Do you think he will? Does He answer you?”
“Oh, Margery, Margery, I never pray. I am too wicked, too bad. God would not hearme, but he will you: so pray, child, pray,” Mrs. La Rue replied, and seizing the little girl she hugged her passionately, and raining kisses upon her forehead and lips, released her as suddenly, and turned quickly away to hide her anguish from her.