The Bondwoman

CHAPTER I

Near Moret, in France, where the Seine is formed and flows northward, there lives an old lady named Madame Blanc, who can tell much of the history written here–though it be a history belonging more to American lives than French. She was of the Caron establishment when Judithe first came into the family, and has charge of a home for aged ladies of education and refinement whose means will not allow of them providing for themselves. It is a memorial founded by her adopted daughter and is known as the Levigne Pension. The property on which it is established is the little Levigne estate–the one forming the only dowery of Judithe Levigne when she married Philip Alain–Marquis de Caron.

There is also a bright-eyed, still handsome woman of mature years, who lives in our South and has charge of another memorial–or had until recently–a private industrial school for girls of her own selection. She calls herself a creole of San Domingo, and she also calls herself Madame Trouvelot–she has been married twice since she was first known by that name, for she was never the woman to live alone–not she; but while the men in themselves suited her, their names were uncompromisingly plain–did not attract her at all. She married them, proved a very good wife, but while one was named Johnson, and another Tuttle, the good wife persisted in being called Madame Trouvelot, either through sentiment or a bit of irony towards the owner of that name. But, despite her vanities, her coquetries, and certain erratic phases of her life, she was absolutely faithful to the trust reposed in her by the Marquise; and who so capable as herself of finding the poor girls who stood most in need of training and the shelter of charity? She, also, could add to this history of the woman belonging both to the old world and the new. There are also official records in evidence of much that is told here–deeds of land, bills of sale, with dates of marriages and deaths interwoven, changed as to names and places but–

There are social friends–gay, pleasure-loving people on both sides of the water–who could speak, and some men who will never forget her.

One of them, Kenneth McVeigh, he was only Lieutenant McVeigh then!–saw her first in Paris–heard of her first at a musicale in the salon of Madame Choudey. Madame Choudey was the dear friend of the Countess Helene Biron, who still lives and delights in recitals of gossip belonging to the days of the Second Empire. The Countess Helene and Mrs. McVeigh had been school friends in Paris. Mrs. McVeigh had been Claire Villanenne, of New Orleans, in those days. At seventeen she had married a Col. McVeigh, of Carolina. At forty she had been a widow ten years. Was the mother of a daughter aged twelve, and a six-foot son of twenty-two, who looked twenty-five, and had just graduated from West Point.

As he became of special interest to more than one person in this story, it will be in place to give an idea of him as he appeared in those early days;–an impetuous boy held in check, somewhat, by military discipline and his height–he measured six feet at twenty–and also by the fact that his mother had persisted in looking on him as the head of the family at an age when most boys are care-free of such responsibilities.

But the responsibilities had a very good effect in many ways–giving stability and seriousness to a nature prone, most of all, to pleasure-loving if left untrammelled. His blue eyes had a slumberous warmth in them; when he smiled they half closed and looked down on you caressingly, and their expression proved no bar to favor with the opposite sex. The fact that he had a little mother who leaned on him and whom he petted extravagantly, just as he did his sister, gave him a manner towards women in general that was both protecting and deferential–a combination productive of very decided results. He was intelligent without being intellectual, had a very clear appreciation of the advantages of being born a McVeigh, proud and jealous where family honor was concerned, a bit of an autocrat through being master over extensive tracts of land and slaves by the dozen, many of them the descendents of Africans bought into the family from New England traders four generations before.

Such was the personality of the young American as he appeared that day at Madame Choudey’s; and he looked like one of the pictured Norse sea kings as he towered, sallow and bronzed, back of the vivacious Frenchmen and their neighbors of the Latin races.

The solo of the musicale had just ended. People were thronged about the artiste, and others were congratulating Madame Choudey on her absolute success in assembling talent.

“All celebrities, my lad,” remarked Fitzgerald Delaven as he looked around. The Delavens and the McVeighs had in time long past some far-out relationship, and on the strength of it the two young men, meeting thus in a foreign country, became at once friends and brothers;–“all celebrities and no one so insignificant as ourselves in sight. Well, now!–when one has to do the gallant to an ugly woman it is a compensation to know she is wondrous wise.”

“That depends on the man who is doing the gallant,” returned the young officer, “I have not yet got beyond the point where I expect them all to be pretty.”

“Faith, Lieutenant, that is because your American girls are all so pretty they spoil you!–and by the same token your mother is the handsomest woman in the room.”

The tall young fellow glanced across the chattering groups to where the handsomest woman was amusing herself.

She certainly was handsome–a blonde with chestnut hair and grey eyes–a very youthful looking mother for the young officer to claim. She met his glance and smiled as he noticed her very courtier-like attendant of the moment, and raised his brows quizzically.

“Yes, I feel that I am only a hanger-on to mother since we reached France,” he confessed. “My French is of the sort to be exploited only among my intimates, and luckily all my intimates know English.”

“Anglo-Saxon,” corrected Delaven, and Lieutenant McVeigh dropped his hand on his friend’s shoulder and laughed.

“You wild Irishman!–why not emphasize your prejudices by unearthing the Celtic and expressing yourself in that?”

“Sure, if I did I should not call it the Irish language,” retorted the man from Dublin.

They both used the contested tongue, and were evidently the only ones in the room who did. All about them were the softened syllables of France–so provocative, according to Lord Lytton, of the tender sentiments, if not of the tender passion.

“There is Dumaresque, now,” remarked Delaven. “We are to see his new picture, you know, at the Marquise de Caron’s;–excuse me a moment,” and he crossed over to the artist, who had just entered.

Kenneth McVeigh stood alone surveying the strange faces about. He had not been in France long enough to be impervious to the atmosphere of novelty in everything seen and heard.

Back of him the soft voice of Madame Choudey, the hostess, could be heard. She was frankly gossiping and laughing a little. The name of the Marquise de Caron was mentioned. Delaven had told him of her–an aristocrat and an eccentric–a philanthropist who was now aged. For years herself and her son had been the patrons–the good angels of struggling genius, of art in every form. But the infamous 2d of December had ended all that. He was one of the “provisionally exiled;” he had died in Rome. Madame La Marquise, the dowager Marquise now, was receiving again, said the gossips back of him. The fact was commented on with wonder by Madame Choudey;–with wonder, frank queries, and wild surmises, by the little group around her; for the aged Marquise and her son Alain–dead a year since–had been picturesque figures in their own circle where politics and art, literature and religion, met and crossed swords, or played piquet! And now she was coming back, not only to Paris, but to society; had in fact, arrived, and the card Madame Choudey held in her white dimpled hand announced the first reception at the Caron establishment.

“After years of the country and Rome!” and Sidonie Merson raised her infantile brows and smiled.

“Oh, yes, it is quite true–though so strange; we fancied her settled for life in her old vine-covered villa; no one expected to see the Paris house opened after Alain’s death.”

“It is always the unexpected in which the old Marquise delights,” said big Lavergne, the sculptor, who had joined Sidonie in the window.

“Then how she must have reveled in Alain’s marriage–a death-bed marriage!”

“Yes; and to an Italian girl without a dot.”

“Oh–it is quite possible. The marriage was in Rome. Both the English and Americans go to Rome.”

“Italian! I heard it was an English or American!”

“Surely, not so bad as that!”

“But only those who have money;–or, if they have not the money, our sons and our brothers do not marry them.”

“Good!” and Lavergne nodded with mock sagacity. “We reach conclusions; the newly made Marquise de Caron is either not Anglo-Saxon or was not without wealth.”

“I heard from Dumaresque that she had attended English schools; that no doubt gives her the English suggestion.”

“Oh, I know more than that;” said another, eager to add to the knowledge of the group. “Between Fontainbleau and Moret is the Levigne chateau. Two years ago the dowager was there with a young beauty, Judithe Levigne, and that is the girl Alain married; the dowager was also a Levigne, and the girl an adopted daughter.”

“What is she like now? Has no one seen her?”

“No one more worldly than her confessor–if she possess one, or the nuns of the convent to which she returned to study after her marriage and widowhood.”

“Heavens! We must compose our features when we enter the presence!”

“But we will go, for all that! The dowager is too delightful to miss.”

“A religieuse and a blue stocking!” and the smile of Lavergne was accompanied by a doubtful shrug. “I might devote myself to either, if apart, but never to both in one. Is she then ugly that she dare be so superior?”

“Greek and Latin did not lessen the charm of Heloise for Abelard, Monsieur.”

Sidonie glanced consciously out of the window. Even the dust of six centuries refuses to cover the passion of Heloise, and despite the ecclesiastical flavor of the romance–demoiselles were not supposed to be aware–still–!

Lavergne beckoned to a fair slight man near the piano.

“We will ask Loris–Loris Dumaresque. He is god-son of the dowager. He was in Rome also. He will know.”

“Certainly;” and Madame Choudey glanced in the mirror opposite and leaned her cheek on her jeweled hand, the lace fell from her pretty wrist and the effect was rather pleasing. “Loris; ah, pardon me, since your last canvas is the talk of Paris we must perhaps say Monsieur Dumaresque, or else–Master.”

“The queen calls no man master,” replied the newcomer as he bent over the pretty coquette’s hand. “The humblest of your subjects salutes you.”

“My faith! You have not lost in Rome a single charm of the boulevardes. We feared you would come back a devotee, and addicted to rosaries.”

“I only needed them when departing from Paris–and you.” His eyes alone expressed the final words, but they spoke so eloquently that the woman of the world smiled; attempted to blush, and dropping her own eyes, failed to see the amusement in his.

“Your gallantry argues no lack of practice, Monsieur Loris,” she returned; glancing at him over her fan. “Who was she, during those months of absence? Come; confess; was she some worldly soul like the Kora of your latest picture, or was it the religieuse–the new marquise about whom every one is curious?”

“The Marquise? What particular Marquise?”

“One more particular than you were wont to cultivate our first season in Rome,” remarked Lavergne.

“Oh! oh! Monsieur Dumaresque!” and the fan became a shield from which Madame peered at him. Sidonie almost smiled, but recovered herself, and gave attention to the primroses.

“You see!–Madame Choudey is shocked that you have turned to saintliness.”

“Madame knows me too well to suppose I have ever turned away from it,” retorted Dumaresque. “Do not credit the gossip of Lavergne. He has worked so long among clays and marbles that he has grown a cold-blooded cynic. He distrusts all warmth and color in life.”

“Then why not introduce him to the Marquise? He might find his ideal there–the atmosphere of the sanctuary! I mean the new Marquise de Caron.”

“Oh!” Dumaresque looked from one to the other blankly and then laughed. “It is Madame Alain–the Marquise de Caron you call the devotee? My faith–that is droll!”

“What, then, is so droll?”

“Why should you laugh, Monsieur Loris? What else were we to think of a bride who chooses a convent in preference to society?”

“It was decided she must be very ugly or very devout to make that choice.”

“A natural conclusion from your point of view,” agreed Dumaresque. “Will you be shocked when I tell you she is no less a radical than Alain himself?–that her favorite prophet is Voltaire, and that her books of devotion are not known in the church?”

“Horror!–an infidel!–and only a girl of twenty!” gasped the demure Sidonie.

“Chut!–she may be a veteran of double that. Alain always had a fancy for the grenadiers–the originals. But of course,” he added moodily, “we must go.”

“Take cheer,” laughed Dumaresque, “for I shall be there; and I promise you safe conduct through the gates when the grenadier feminine grows too oppressive.”

“Do you observe,” queried Madame, slyly, “that while Monsieur Loris does speak of her religion, he avoids enlightening us as to her personality?”

“What then do you expect?” returned Dumaresque. “She is the widow of my friend; the child, now, of my dear old god-mother. Should I find faults in her you would say I am jealous. Should I proclaim her virtues you would decide I am prejudiced by friendship, and so”–with a smile that was conciliating and a gesture comprehensive he dismissed the subject.

“Clever Dumaresque!” laughed Lavergne–“well, we shall see! Is it true that your picture of the Kora is to be seen at the dowager’s tomorrow?”

“Quite true. It is sold, you know; but since the dowager is not equal to art galleries I have given it a rest in her rooms before boxing it for the new owner.”

“I envy him,” murmured Madame; “the picture is the pretty octoroon glorified. So, Madame, your god-mother has two novelties to present tomorrow. Usually it is so difficult to find even one.”

When Delaven returned he found Lieutenant McVeigh still in the same nook by the mantel and still alone.

“Well, you are making a lonesome time of it in the middle of the crowd,” he remarked. “How have you been amused?”

“By listening to comments on two pictures, one of a colored beauty, and one of an atheistical grand dame.”

“And of the two?”

“Of the two I should fancy the last not the least offensive. And, look here, Delaven, just get me out of that engagement to look at Dumaresque’s new picture, won’t you? It really is not worth while for an American to come abroad for the study of pictured octoroons–we have too many of the originals at home.”

CHAPTER II

Whatever the dowager’s eccentricities or heresies, she was not afraid of the sunlight, figuratively or literally. From floor to ceiling three great windows let in softened rays on the paneled walls, on the fluted columns of white and gold, and on the famous frescoes of the First Empire. She had no feeling for petite apartments such as appeal to many women; there must, for her, be height and space and long vistas.

“I like perspective to every picture,” she said. “I enjoy the groupings of my friends in my own rooms more than elsewhere. From my couch I have the best point of view, and the raised dais flatters me with its suggestion of a throne of state.”

She looked so tiny for a chair of state; and with her usual quaint humor she recognized the fact.

“But my temperament brings me an affinity with things that are great for all that,” she would affirm. “One does not need to be a physical Colossus in order to see the stars.”

The morning after her first reception she was smiling rather sardonically at a picture at the far end of the great salon–that of a very handsome young woman who laughed frankly at the man who leaned towards her and spoke. The man was Dumaresque.

“No use in that, Loris,” commented his god-mother, out of his hearing. “It will do an artist no harm, but it will end nowhere.”

Their attitude and their youth did make them appear sentimental; but they were not really so. He was only telling her what a shock she had been to those Parisians the day before.

“I understand, now, the regard of Madame Choudey and her pretty, prim niece, Sidonie. They will never forgive me.”

“You, Madame!”

“Me, Monsieur. Their fondness will preclude resentment towards you, but against myself they will feel a grievance that I am not as they pictured me. Come; you must tell Maman.”

The dowager nodded as one who understood it all.

“They will not forget you, that is sure,” she said, smiling; but the girl–for she was only a girl, despite the Madame–shrugged her shoulders.

“Myself, I care little for their remembrance,” she replied, indifferently; “they were only curious, not interested, I could see.”

“You put my picture in the shadow at all events,” protested Dumaresque, pointing to a large canvas hung opposite; “my picture over which art lovers raved until you appeared as a rival.”

“How extravagant you are, Monsieur Dumaresque, a true Gascon! To think of rivaling that!”

As she faced the canvas the dowager watched her critically, and nodded her approval to Dumaresque, who smiled and acquiesced. Evidently they were both well satisfied with the living picture of the salon.

The new Marquise de Caron had lived, probably, twenty years. She was of medium height, with straight, dark brows, and dark, long-lashed eyes. The eyes had none of the shyness that was deemed a necessity to beauty in that era of balloon skirts and scuttle bonnets under which beauty of the conventional order hid.

But that she was not conventional was shown by the turban of grey resting on her waved, dark hair, while the veil falling from it and mingling with the folds of her dress, suggested the very artistic draperies of the nuns.

Not a particle of color was in her apparel, and but little in her face; only the lips had that thread of scarlet sung of by Solomon, and the corners of them curved upwards a trifle as she surveyed the canvas.

The turban was loosened and held in her hands as she stood there looking. The picture evidently attracted her, though it did not please. At last she turned to the artist.

“Why do you paint pictures like that?”

“Like that? Pouf! You mean beautiful?”

“No, it is not beautiful,” she said, thoughtfully, as she seated herself on the dais by the dowager’s couch. “To be truly beautiful a thing must impress one with a sense of fitness to our highest perceptive faculties. A soulless thing is never beautiful.”

“What then, of dogs, horses, lions, the many art works in metal or on canvas?”

“You must not raise that wall against her words, Loris, unless you wish to quarrel,” said the dowager in friendly warning. “Judithe is pantheist enough to fancy that animals have souls.”

“But the true artist does not seek to portray the lowest expression of that soul,” persisted Dumaresque’s critic. “Across the Atlantic there are thousands who contend that a woman such as this Kora whom you paint, has no soul because of the black blood in her veins. They think of the dark people as we think of apes. It is all a question of longitude, Monsieur Dumaresque. The crudeness of America is the jest of France. The wisdom of France is the lightest folly of the Brahims; and so it goes ever around the world. The soul of that girl will weigh as heavily as ours in the judgment that is final; but, in the meantime, why teach it and others to admire all that allurement of evil showing in her eyes as she looks at you?”

“Judithe!” protested the dowager.

“Oh!–I do not doubt in the least, Maman, that the woman Kora looked just so when she sat for the picture,” conceded the girl; “but why not endeavor to awaken a higher, stronger expression, and paint that, showing the better possibilities within her than mere seductiveness?”

“What fervor and what folly, Marquise!” cried Dumaresque. “It is a speech of folly only because it is I whom you ask to be the missionary, and because it is the pretty Kora you would ask me to convert–and to what? Am I so perfect in all ways that I dare preach, even with paint and brush? Heavens! I should have all Paris laughing at me.”

“But Judithe would not have you that sort of extremist,” said the dowager, laughing at the dismay in his face. “She knows you do well; only she fears you do not exert yourself enough to perceive how you might do better.”

“She forgets; I did once; only a few weeks ago,” he said briefly; and the girl dropped her hands wearily and leaned her head against the dowager’s couch.

“Maman, our good friend is going to talk matrimony again,” she said plaintively; “and if he does, I warn you, though it is only mid-day, I shall go asleep;” and her eyes closed tightly as though to make the threat more effective.

“You see,” said the old lady, raising one chiding finger, “it is really lamentable, Loris, that your sentimental tendencies have grown into a steady habit.”

“I agree,” he assented; “but consider. She assails me–she, a saintly little judge in grey! She lectures, preaches at me! Tells me I lack virtue! But more is the pity for me; she will not remember that one virtue was most attractive to me, and she bade me abandon it.”

“Tell him,” said the girl with her eyes still closed, “to not miscall things; no one is all virtue.”

“Pardon; that is what you seemed to me, and I never before fancied that the admirable virtues would find me so responsive, when, pouf! with one word you demolished all my castle of delight and now condemn me that I am an outlaw from those elevating fancies.”

He spoke with such a comical air of self-pity that the old lady laughed and the young Marquise opened her eyes.

“A truce, Monsieur Loris; you are amusing, but you like to pose as one of the rejected and disconsolate when you have women to listen. It is all because you are just a little theatrical, is it not? How effective it must be with your Parisiennes!”

“My faith!” he exclaimed, turning to the dowager in dismay; “and only three months since she emerged from the convent! What then do they not teach in those sanctuaries!”

The girl arose, made him a mocking obeisance, and swinging the turban in her hand passed into the alcoved music room; a little later an Italian air, soft, dreamy, drifted to them from the keys of the piano.

“She will make a sensation,” prophesied Dumaresque, sagely.

“You mean socially? No; if left to herself she would ignore society; it is not necessary to her; only her affection for me brings her from her studies now. Should I die tomorrow she would go back to them next week.”

“But why, why, why? If she were unattractive one could understand; but being what she is–”

“Being what she is, she has a fever to know all the facts of earth and all the guesses at heaven.”

“And bars out marriage!”

“Not for other people,” retorted the dowager.

“But to what use then all these accomplishments, all this pursuit of knowledge? Does she mean to hide it all in some convent at last?”

“I would look for her rather among some savage tribes, doing missionary work.”

“Yes, making them acquainted with Voltaire,” he said, laughingly. “But you are to be envied, god-mother, in having her all to yourself; she adores you!”

The dark old face flushed slightly, and the keen eyes softened with pleasure.

“It was Alain’s choice, and it was a good one,” she said, briefly. “What of the English people you asked to bring today?”

“They are not English; one is American and one is Irish.”

“True; but their Anglo-Saxon makes them all English to me. I hear there are so many of them in Paris now; Comtesse Biron brings one today; there is her message, what is the name?”

Dumaresque unfolded the pink sheet, glanced at it and smiled.