CHAPTER XXX.TRYING TO READ THE PAGE.
The night set in dark and stormy even for November and the wind howled dismally through the tall elms which grew upon the common, while both sleet and rain were falling pitilessly, when Mr. Beresford left his office, equipped for an evening call. He was going to see Margery La Rue, whom he found alone, as her mother had retired to her room with a toothache and swollen face. Margery let him in herself, and looked fully the surprise she felt when she saw who her visitor was. It was not so much that he should come that night as that he should come at all which astonished the young girl, who, with a woman’s intuition, had read the proud man pretty accurately, and guessed that persons like her, whose bread was earned by their own hands, had not much attraction for him. But it was his early training, which was at fault, and not the real heart of the man himself. His mother had seldom done so much for herself as to arrange her own hair, and when her immense fortune slipped away from her, and left her comparatively poor, and compelled her sons, two as noble boys as ever called a woman mother, to choose professions and care for themselves, she could not bear the change, and with a feeling that she would rather die than live and work, she died, andvery few mourned for her. With such a mother and a long line of ancestry on her side, as proud and exclusive as herself, it is not strange that Mr. Beresford should have imbibed some notions not altogether consistent with democratic institutions. He thought a great deal of family and blood, and though he was always polite and courteous to Margery when they met, he had unconsciously made her feel the gulf between them, and she had good cause to gaze on him wonderingly as she opened the door, and held it open a moment as if expecting him to give her some message from Queenie, as he had done when Phil went away. Laughing good-humoredly as he stepped past her into the hall, he said:
“I am coming in, you see, though I do not wonder that a call on such a wild night as this surprises you. But it is the weather which brings me here. I believe I have had the blues or something to-day, and need to talk to some one, and as Phil is gone, and Reinette is sick, I have come to call on you. I hope I am not unwelcome.”
He was talking rather strangely, and not at all in a strain complimentary to Margery, who, nevertheless, passed it off pleasantly, and said, with her pretty accent, which struck Mr. Beresford with a degree of newness.
“Thank you, Mr. Beresford; I surely ought to feel honored to be No. 3. Let me see; you said that as Mr. Rossiter was gone, and Reinette sick, you were reduced to the alternative of coming here to be rid of the blues. Is that it? or have my French ears misinterpreted your English meaning?”
“That is the way it sounded, I will admit,” Mr. Beresford replied, “but I am a bungler anyway, so please consider that I have made you number one, for really I have been intending to call for some time.”
He took the seat she offered him, and moved it a little more in front of her, where he could look directly at her as she bent over her work, which, with his permission,she had resumed, and which, as it was a sacque for Miss Anna, must be finished as soon as possible.
How graceful every motion was, and how well her dress of black cashmere, with soft lace ruffles at her throat and sleeves, became her, and how very beautiful she was both in face and form, with her golden hair rippling over her finely shaped head, her dazzling complexion, her perfectly regular features, and, more than all, her large, clear, sunny blue eyes, veiled by long, fringed lashes, and shaded by eyebrows so heavy and black, that they seemed almost out of place with that hair of golden hue. But they gave her a novel anddistinguelook, and added to her beauty, which, now that he was studying her, struck Mr. Beresford as something remarkable, and made his eyes linger on the fair face with more admiration even than curiosity. But the likeness he sought for was not there, unless it were in the occasional toss of the head on one side—the significant shrug of the shoulders, or gestures of the hands—and something in the tone of the voice when it grew very earnest as she talked to him of Reinette, who was not like her in the least. In feature and complexion, Margery was the handsomer of the two. Mr. Beresford confessed that to himself with a kind of jealous pang, as if, in some way, a wrong were done the dark-faced, dark-eyed Queenie, who, put side by side with Margery La Rue, would, nevertheless, win every time, and make people see only herself, with her wonderful sparkle, and brightness, which threw everything else into the shade. Queenie was the diamond, and Margery the pearl, and they were not at all alike, and Mr. Beresford felt puzzled, and inclined to believe the agent in Mentone a slanderer, especially after he had talked with Margery awhile, of her friend.
“You have known Reinette a long time?” he said and she replied:
“Yes, a long time—ever since we were little girls—thoughit seems but yesterday since she climbed the narrow, winding stairs up to that low room, where I staid all day long with no company but the cat, and nothing besides my playthings to amuse me, except to look down into the narrow street below, the Rue St. Honore, and watch the carts, and carriages, and people as they passed, and wonder when mother would come home, and if she would bring me, as she sometimes did, a bon-bon, or a white, tendercroissant, which I liked so much better for my supper than our dark, sour bread.”
“Yes,” Mr. Beresford said, leaning forward and listening eagerly to what Margery was telling him of her early life, and wondering a little that she should be so communicative.
“Most girls would try to conceal the fact that they had once known such poverty,” he thought, but he did not know Margery La Rue, or guess that it was in part her pride which made her talk as she was talking.
She was naturally reserved and reticent with regard to herself, but to him, whose value of birth, and blood, and family connections she rightly guessed, she would speak openly, and show him that it was something more than a mere dressmaker—a sewing-woman—whom he was honoring with his society, and in whom he was interested in spite of himself. She divined that readily, by the kindling of his eyes when they met hers as she talked, and by some of those subtle influences by which a woman knows that the man she is talking with is entertained and pleased with herself as well as with what she is saying.
So, when he said to her, with a kind of pity in his tone, “And you were so desolate as that when Reinette found you?” she answered:
“Yes, more desolate than you can guess—you who have never known what poverty means in a large city like Paris. But I was not unhappy, either,” she added, quickly. “I had too much love and petting frommy mother for that. I was only lonely in her absence; for she worked at a hair-dresser’s and was gone all day, and I kept the house and got the meals for father till he died.”
“Your father—yes,” Mr. Beresford repeated. “What was he, what did he do, and when did he die?”
He seemed very eager in his questionings, and mistaking his meaning altogether, Margery’s cheeks flushed, but her voice was steady and clear as she replied:
“I do not know that he did anything. I think it is a fashion in France more than here for the women to work and the men to take their ease. At all events, father had no regular occupation that I know of. Sometimes he acted as guide to strangers, for he could speak a little English, and sometimes he was employed for a few days as waiter at some of the Duval restaurants, and once he took mother and me there to dine. That is the white day of my life, as connected with him. Reinette heard of me from old Lisette, the laundress, who lived on the floor below, and she came up to our humble room in her scarlet cloak and hood trimmed with ermine, and filled it with glory at once. You know what a halo of brightness seems to encircle her, and affect everything around her. And how she did sparkle and glow, and light up the whole room, as she sat there in that hard wooden chair with me standing awkwardly by, in my coarse high-necked working apron, with broom in hand, and gazing at her as if she had been a being from another sphere.”
How rapid and excitedly she talked, gesticulating with her hands, which were as small and white as those of any lady, and how large and bright her blue eyes grew, as she described that first interview with Reinette so vividly that Mr. Beresford could see the low room, far up the winding stairs, the humble furniture, the bare floor, the smoldering fire on the hearth, the wooden chair, the dark-eyed little girl in scarlet and ermine who sat there with the captured cat in her lap, talking to another childquite as beautiful as herself, though of another type of beauty, and clad in the coarse garments of the poor. He could see it all so plainly, and forgetting for a time why he was there, he listened still more intently, while Margery went on to tell him of the Champs d’Elysees, where she wore the scarlet cloak and played she was Mr. Hetherton’s little girl, while Queenie sat demurely at her side, clad in homely garments, and making believe that she was Margery La Rue, whose home was up the winding stairs in the Rue St. Honore.
“I think that one act bound me to her forever,” Margery said, “though it was the beginning of many make-believes and many deeds of kindness, for through Queenie’s influence her father paid my expenses in part at the English school which she attended, and where I learned to speak your language and all I know besides, and after that she stood my fast friend in everything and treated me more like a sister than an inferior, as I am, by birth and social position. I think her love has never failed me since the day she first came to me and brought the glorious sunlight with her. So, do you wonder that I love her? I would lay down my life for her, if need be—would sacrifice everything for her, and I sometimes wish that I might have the chance to show how much I love her, and would endure for her sake.”
Margery paused here, and with clasped hands, and eyes which had in them a rapt, far-away look, seemed almost to see looming on the horizon not far in the distance the something for which she longed, and which, when it came, would test her as few women have ever been tested in their love for another.
It was not possible that the dark shadow touched her now, although it was so near, and yet she shivered a little and drew a long breath as she at last came back to the present and turned her eyes upon Mr. Beresford, who said to her:
“Did you even see Queenie’s father?—did you know him, I mean—you or your mother?”
“No, neither of us,” Margery answered promptly. “I saw him once when Queenie and I were riding in the Bois, and she made him come and speak to me, but I did not like him much. He impressed me as one very proud and haughty, who only endured me for Queenie’s sake. He was fine-looking, though, and his manners were very elegant. Did you know him, Mr. Beresford?”
“Scarcely at all, as I was a mere boy when he went away, but I have heard much of him from the villagers; he was not very popular, I imagine,” Mr. Beresford replied, and then the conversation drifted into other channels, and they talked of Phil and Anna, and her engagement with the major, which was generally understood, but nothing more was said of Margery’s early life.
Mr. Beresford had not succeeded in reading the page just as he had expected to read it, and was a good deal puzzled and perplexed when, at rather a late hour, he said good-night to Margery, and went back to his rooms at the hotel, with his mind full of what she had told him of her life as connected with Reinette Hetherton, and full too with thoughts of herself, and after he had retired to his bed, and a feeling of drowsiness began to steal over him, there came to him another face than Queenie’s—a fairer face, with golden hair and eyes of blue—and in his troubled dreams the face hid Queenie’s from him, and a voice with more of a foreign accent than Queenie’s was sounding in his ears.
It was very late when he awoke, with a confused vision of black eyes and blue eyes dancing before him, and hastily dressing himself and swallowing his breakfast, he started for his office, where to his surprise he found Reinette Hetherton waiting for him.