Poor Margaret was by this time so inured to petty and daily disappointments, that when her friends returned at night rarely asked what success they had had in their search, though she clung with a fond belief to the chevalier"s often vaunted integrity, and would not allow the lawyer"s suspicions to enter her mind.
"Did you notice the pretty madam, your _vis-a-vis_ at _dejeuner_?" asked Calembours, as they descended together.
"Oh, yes, I have been thinking of her all the afternoon."
"_Ma foi!_ and so have I! General Legrange, who knows everybody, tells me she is Madame Hesslein, a young widow, whose husband was Plenipotentiary from the French Court to Austria; and I have been fortunate enough to find out also that she is a Frenchwoman--by gar! she is a Venus di Medicis! Ah!" roughly aspirated monsieur, and became silent with admiration.
There under the blazing gasalier, whose strong light might have brought into too bold relief the imperfections of other women, sat the fair stranger, serenely pecking at her viands, and seemingly unconscious of the general sensation which her beauty created, in fact, so absorbed in thought that she paid no heed to anything outside of the small circle formed by her own plate.
She was dressed in a dark green velvet evening dress, whose white lace bertha was carelessly pinned with a magnificent solitaire.
Her hair was combed out like a fleecy vail down her back, and glittered with diamond powder until it resembled the gorgeous plumage of a tropical bird.
She formed so bright a center to the room that every eye instinctively wandered that way to admire her glittering clothing and fascinating face; and yet again, Margaret took her seat opposite with some uneasy feeling weighing upon her now which had weighed upon her before.
Almost immediately the extraordinary green orbs were lifted from their meditative study, and Madame Hesslein bowed her recognition, and smiled with honeyed sweetness.
"She has some special purpose in making my acquaintance!" thought Margaret.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
NEWS OF ST. UDO BRAND.
Dinner over, the ladies scattered, some to their rooms, some to go walking--Margaret and Madame Hesslein simultaneously entered the drawing-room. They turned to each other, the glittering bird of Paradise, and the gentle ring-dove, with a resistless impulse of attraction, and each examined the other keenly.
"You are Miss Margaret Walsingham, a celebrity, even in America," quoth madame, blandly. "Your colonel was much talked of here for his bravery.
I am quite delighted to meet the woman who has fought so spiritedly for the colonel"s rights."
Margaret gazed earnestly at her; she was reading that artful simplicity of madame with regret, and pitying the fine woman whom the world had spoiled.
"Your praise is very disinterested, Madame Hesslein," returned she, simply. "I thank you for it. I am very strange here, and can"t tell what the people say about my affairs. I had hoped that they knew nothing about me."
"Pshaw! my good lady, you can"t expect to pa.s.s through life with your history and not excite remark," retorted Madame Hesslein, with a flirt of the jeweled fan. "No heroine does, be she a good or a bad one. Men must talk--give them something to talk about."
Margaret watched her spirited face with secret fascination.
"You are reading me," laughed madame, clanking her golden bracelet on her dainty wrist. "You are wondering what a woman of the world like me wants with a saint like yourself, are you not?"
"I am thinking that no doubt you have a purpose in view," said Margaret, struck by the unlovely shrewdness of the lady"s speech.
Madame Hesslein waved her dainty hands in graceful protest.
"Quite wrong, Miss Walsingham," she cried. "I have no purpose as yet, save the pleasant one of studying a nature which I cannot imitate. I have been celebrated in my day, but not as you; women are your worshippers; women cry, "n.o.ble, generous creature!" Women only envied me, and presumed to criticise; "twas men who gave me homage."
"Don"t jest, madame, upon my history; it may yet end in a tragedy!" said Margaret.
"Ah, ah!" breathed madame, warningly, "you are one of those great hearted, soft souled women who suffer affairs of the heart to trouble them. Don"t suffer affairs of the heart to trouble you. Griselda the patient. When one hope dies, pursue another, and have a new one every day. Ha! ha! Joliffe (my husband) used to say, "Honoria sees no trouble, for her heart is never at home to grant an interview.""
"Your husband is dead?" asked Margaret, coldly.
"Yes, and no. Dead to me these five years, though. Fact is, Miss Walsingham--don"t feel horror-stricken--that Joliffe was intolerably prosy; we had a quarrel, and I ran off. Why not? Since then we have got comfortably divorced, and I can marry as soon as I like again. Joliffe was so jealous. I must not drive to the general"s, I must not walk with a senator, I must eschew the military, and the best wits of the day are military men. Horrors! I must devote myself to Joliffe, and he only on the emba.s.sy at Washington."
Madame appealed impressively to the icy Margaret.
"General Legrange here declares that you are the widow of a Plenipotentiary of the French Court!" she said.
"Does he indeed?" cried madame, with the gusto of habitual vanity. "Then I sha"n"t contradict him--don"t you, Miss Walsingham. They must always talk about me wherever I go. I am accustomed to it; I let them say what they choose. I please myself, and the world gives me my way, I"ve been North and South, East and West, and although I have seen trouble, I have ever trodden over it; no woman has ever got into the wrong box so often and come out of it to a higher grade; no woman has ever borne so much scandal, and been popular in spite of it. I survive it all; I eat, drink, make merry--am feasted, courted, and adored, and all because I don"t let affairs of the heart vex me. I don"t mope, and muse, and turn melancholy as you (a good creature, too), are doing."
The fine, small face of Madame Hesslein shone with wicked animation; her thin, scarlet lips parted in two beauty curves with a string of pearls between, with small, glittering head poised on one side, the gorgeous parakeet studied the plain, tender creature before her, and laughed at such a contrast.
"Do you know why I am here?" queried Margaret, tremulously.
Madame Hesslein smiled and nodded.
"All New York knows why the sombre English dame is here," she jibed, "for your stupid lawyer has bored the city for news of your Colonel Brand."
"Mr. Davenport only does his duty."
Madame grimaced charmingly.
"Duty!" she mocked. "Oh, Juggernaut of good people"s lives, what unwilling victims do ye crush beneath your wheels in your heavenward march?"
"Have you been crushed?" asked Margaret, smiling.
"Oh, no; Mr. Davenport is too pompous to expect anything of a woman.
Stupid wretch!"
"Had you known St. Udo Brand," cried Margaret, blushing, "you could not laugh at his destruction. He was bitterly proud, but he was true as steel."
"Was he so?" breathed madam--and her green eyes grew black--"I should have liked to meet him, then. I have yet to meet the man who is as true as steel. Griselda, you are one who should win back a man--but, oh, you"ll never do it! never!"
A wild change swept over her fine face, her wondrous, globular eyes grew deep and pa.s.sionate, and her beautiful hands were clasped in covert anguish.
"I pity your sad life, madame, if you have proved all false," said Margaret, with feeling, "for there are good men on earth, I doubt not."
"The best die; the fairest, the most loved," said madame, faintly. "Miss Walsingham, I had one son--ah!"--she shivered and closed her eye--"and he died miserably. I loved him, I did love him, and he was my only consolation for many years." She dashed her tears away and looked up sternly. "You make me talk to you, with your soft, true face," she exclaimed, bitterly, "and I must not talk. But mind, I have told you nothing; you can"t say that I have narrated any of my history to you."
"I had not thought of saying so," replied Margaret.
"Ah, you are a good soul, and I like you," murmured madame, patting Margaret"s hand with a touch like falling rose-leaves. "So sweet, so heroic, so humble! You remind me of myself many years ago in old Austria, when I was in love with--my destroyer!"
Her face hardened, her green eyes glimmered with the deadly light of hate.
She turned off her momentary remorse with a heartless laugh, and rattled her _collier_ of golden lockets.