"And can you not confide it to me? Have I no right to ask for the confidence, Kate?" said he, with tenderness.
"Know you any one more deeply and sincerely your friend than I am, more ready to aid, protect, or counsel you?"
"But this I cannot--must not tell you," said she, in accents broken by sobbing.
"Let me know, at least, enough to refute the insolence of an imputation upon your conduct. I cannot tamely sit by and hear the slanderous stories that to-morrow or next day will gain currency through the town."
"I cannot, I cannot," was all that she could utter.
"If not me, then, choose some other defender. Unprotected and undefended you must not be."
"I need none, sir; none will asperse me!" said she, haughtily.
"What! you say this? while scarce five minutes since I saw you outraged, insulted in the open street?"
A burst of tears, long repressed, here broke from Kate; and for some minutes her sobs alone were heard in the silence.
"I will ask but one question more, Miss Dalton," said George, slowly, as the carriage pa.s.sed under the arched gateway of the Palace, "and then this incident is sealed to me forever. Is this secret whatever it be in your own sole keeping; or is your confidence shared in by another?"
"It is," murmured Kate, below her breath.
"You mean that it is shared?" asked he, eagerly.
"Yes, Mr. Jekyl at least knows--"
"Jekyl!" cried George, pa.s.sionately; "and is Alfred Jekyl your adviser and your confidant? Enough; you have told me quite enough," said he, dashing open the door of the carriage as it drew up to the house. He gave his hand to Kate to alight, and then, turning away, left her, without even a "good-bye," while Kate hurried to her room, her heart almost breaking with agony.
"I shall be late, Nina," said she, affecting an air and voice of unconcern, as she entered her room; "you must dress me rapidly."
"Mademoiselle must have been too pleasantly engaged to remember the hour," said the other, with an easy pertness quite different from her ordinary manner.
More struck by the tone than by the words themselves, Kate turned a look of surprise on the speaker.
"It is so easy to forget one"s self at Morlache"s, they say," added the girl, with a saucy smile; and although stung by the impertinence, Kate took no notice of the speech. "Mademoiselle will of course never wear that dress again," said Nina, as she contemptuously threw from her the mud-stained and rain-spotted dress she had worn that morning. "We have a Basque proverb, Mademoiselle, about those who go out in a carriage and come back on foot."
"Nina, what do you mean by these strange words and this still more strange manner?" asked Kate, with a haughtiness she had never before a.s.sumed towards the girl.
"I do not pretend to say that Mademoiselle has not the right to choose her confidantes, but the Principessa de San Martello and the d.u.c.h.essa di Rivoli did not think me beneath their notice."
"Nina, you are more unintelligible than ever," cried Kate, who still, through all the dark mystery of her words, saw the lowering storm of coming peril.
"I may speak too plainly, too bluntly, Mademoiselle, but I can scarcely be reproached with equivocating; and I repeat that my former mistresses honored me with their secret confidence; and they did wisely, too, for I should have discovered everything of myself, and my discretion would not have been fettered by a compact."
"But if I have no secrets," said Kate, drawing herself up with a proud disdain, "and if I have no need either of the counsels or the discretion of my waiting-woman?"
"In that case," said Nina, quietly, "Mademoiselle has only perilled herself for nothing. The young lady who leaves her carriage and her maid to pa.s.s three hours at Morlache"s, and returns thence, on foot, after nightfall, may truly say she has no secrets, at least, so far as the city of Florence is concerned."
"This is insolence that you never permitted yourself before," said Kate, pa.s.sionately.
"And yet, if I were Mademoiselle"s friend instead of her servant, I should counsel her to bear it."
"But I will not," cried Kate, indignantly. "Lady Hester shall know of your conduct this very instant."
"One moment, Mademoiselle, just one moment," said Nina, interposing herself between Kate and the door. "My tongue is oftentimes too ready, and I say things for which I am deeply sorry afterwards. Forgive me, I beg and beseech you, if I have offended; reject my counsels, disdain my a.s.sistance, if you will, but do not endanger yourself in an instant of anger. If you have but little control over your temper, I have even less over mine; pa.s.s out of that door as my enemy, and I am yours to the last hour of my life."
There was a strange and almost incongruous mixture of feeling in the way she uttered these words; at one moment abject in submission, and at the next hurling a defiance as haughty as though she were an injured equal.
The conflict of the girl"s pa.s.sion, which first flushed, now left her pale as death, and trembling in every limb. Her emotion bespoke the most intense feeling, and Kate stood like one spellbound, before her. Her anger had already pa.s.sed away, and she looked with almost a sense of compa.s.sion at the excited features and heaving bosom of the Spanish girl.
"You wrong yourself and me too, Nina," said Kate Dalton, at last. "I have every trust in your fidelity, but I have no occasion to test it."
"Be it so, Mademoiselle," replied the other, with a courtesy.
"Then all is forgotten," said Kate, affecting a gayety she could not feel; "and now let me hasten downstairs, for I am already late."
"The Prince will have thought it an hour, Mademoiselle," said the girl; the quiet demureness of her manner depriving the words of any semblance of impertinence. If Kate looked gravely, perhaps some little secret source of pleasure lay hid within her heart; and in the glance she gave at her gla.s.s, there was an air of conscious triumph that did not escape the lynx-eyed Nina.
"My Lady is waiting dinner, Miss Dalton," said a servant, as he tapped at the door; and Kate, with many a trouble warring in her breast, hastened downstairs, in all the pride of a loveliness that never was more conspicuous.
CHAPTER x.x.xVII. PROPOSALS.
KATE found Lady Hester, the Prince, and Mr. Jekyl awaiting her as she entered the drawing-room, all looking even more bored and out of sorts than people usually do who have been kept waiting for their dinner.
"Everybody has sworn to be as tiresome and disagreeable as possible to-day," said Lady Hester. "George said he"d dine here, and is not coming; Lord Norwood promised, and now writes me word that an unavoidable delay detains him; and here comes Miss Dalton, the mirror of punctuality when all else are late, a full half-hour after the time.
There, dear, no excuses nor explanations about all you have been doing, the thousand calls you "ve made, and shops you "ve ransacked. I "m certain you "ve had a miserable day of it."
Kate blushed deeply, and dreaded to meet Jekyl" s eye; but when she did, that little gla.s.sy orb was as blandly meaningless as any that ever rattled in the head of a Dutch doll. Even as he gave his arm to lead her in to dine, nothing in his manner or look betrayed anything like a secret understanding between them. A bystander might have deemed him a new acquaintance.
"Pet.i.ts diners" have, generally, the prerogative of agreeability; they are the chosen reunions of a few intimates, who would not dilute their pleasantry even by a single bore. They are also the bright occasions for those little culinary triumphs which never can be attempted in a wider sphere. Epigrams, whether of lamb or language, require a select and special jury to try them; but just in the same proportion as the success of such small parties is greater, so is their utter failure, when by any mischance there happens a breakdown in the good spirits or good humor of the company.
We have said enough to show that the ladies, at least, might be excused for not displaying those thousand attractions of conversation which all centre on the one great quality, ease of mind. The Prince was more than usual out of sorts, a number of irritating circ.u.mstances having occurred to him during the morning. A great sovereign, on whom he had lavished the most profuse attentions, had written him a letter of thanks, through his private secretary, enclosing a snuff-box, instead of sending him an autograph, and the first cla.s.s of the national order. His glover, in Paris, had forgotten to make his right hand larger than the left, and a huge packet that had just arrived was consequently useless. His chef had eked out a salmi of ortolans by a thrush; and it was exactly that unlucky morsel the Cardinal had helped himself to at breakfast, and immediately sent his plate away in disappointment. Rubion, too, his ninth secretary, had flatly refused to marry a little danseuse that had just come out in the ballet, a piece of insolence and rebellion on his part not to be tolerated; and when we add to these griefs an uncomfortable neckcloth, and the tidings of an insurrection in a Russian province where he owned immense property in mines, his state of irritability may be leniently considered.
Jekyl, if truth were told, had as many troubles of his own to confront as any of the rest. If the ocean he sailed in was not a great Atlantic, his bark was still but a c.o.c.klesh.e.l.l; his course in life required consummate skill and cleverness, and yet never could be safe even with that. Notwithstanding all this, he alone was easy, natural, and agreeable, not as many an inferior artist would have been agreeable, by any over-effort to compensate for the lack of co-operation in others, and thus make their silence and constraint but more palpable, his pleasantry was tinged with the tone of the company, and all his little smartnesses were rather insinuated than spoken. Quite satisfied if the Prince listened, or Lady Hester smiled, more than rewarded when they once both laughed at one of his sallies, he rattled on about the Court and the town talk, the little scandals of daily history, and the petty defections of those dear friends they nightly invited to their houses.
While thus, as it were, devoting himself to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the others, his real occupation was an intense study of their thoughts, what was uppermost in their minds, and in what train their speculations were following. He had long suspected the Prince of being attracted by Kate Dalton; now he was certain of it. Accustomed almost from childhood to be flattered on every hand, and to receive the blandest smiles of beauty everywhere, Midchekoff"s native distrust armed him strongly against such seductions; and had Kate followed the path of others, and exerted herself to please him, her failure would have been certain. It was her actual indifference her perfect carelessness on the subject was the charm to his eyes, and he felt it quite a new and agreeable sensation not to be made love to.
Too proud of her own Dalton blood to feel any elevation by the marked notice of the great Russian, she merely accorded him so much of her favor as his personal agreeability seemed to warrant; perhaps no designed flattery could have been so successful. Another feeling, also, enhanced his admiration of her. It was a part of that barbaric instinct which seemed to sway all his actions, to desire the possession of whatever was unique in life. Those forms or fancies of which nature stamps but one, and breaks the die, these were a pa.s.sion with him. To possess a bluer turquoise than any king or kaiser, to own an arab of some color never seen before, to have a picture by some artist who never painted but one; but whether it were a gem, a vase, a weapon, a diamond, or a dog, its value had but one test, that it had none its exact equal.
Now, Kate Dalton realized these conditions more than any one he had ever met. Her very beauty was peculiar; combining, with much of feminine softness and delicacy, a degree of determination and vigor of character that to Midchekoff smacked of queenly domination. There was a species of fierte about her that distinguished her among other women. All that he had seen done by an ill.u.s.trious t.i.tle and a diamond tiara, she seemed capable of effecting in the simplest costume and without an effort. All these were wonderful attractions to his eyes; and if he did not fall in love, it was simply because he did not know how. He, however, did what to him served as subst.i.tute for the pa.s.sion; he coveted an object which should form one of the greatest rarities of his collection, and the possession of which would give him another t.i.tle to that envy, the most delicious tribute the world could render him.
There were some drawbacks to his admiration; her birth was not sufficiently ill.u.s.trious. His own origin was too recent to make an alliance of this kind desirable, and he wished that she had been a princess; even de la main, gauche of some royal house. Jekyl had done his best, by sundry allusions to Irish greatness, and the blood of various monarchs of Munster and Conuaught, in times past; but the Prince was incredulous as to Hibernian greatness; probably the remembrance of an Irish diamond once offered him for sale had tinged his mind with this sense of disparagement as to all Irish magnificence. Still Kate rose above every detracting influence, and he thought of the pride in which he should parade her through Europe as his own.
Had she been a barb or a bracelet, an antique cup or a Sevres jar, he never would have hesitated about the acquisition. Marriage, however, was a more solemn engagement; and he did not quite fancy any purchase that cost more than mere money. Nothing but the possibility of losing her altogether could have overcome this cautious scruple; and Jekyl had artfully insinuated such a conjuncture. "George Onslow"s attentions were," he said, "quite palpable; and although up to this Miss Dalton did not seem to give encouragement, who could tell what time and daily intercourse might effect? There was Norwood, too, with the rank of peeress in his gift; there was no saying how an ambitious girl might be tainted by that bait." In fact, the Prince had no time to lose; and, although nothing less accorded with his tastes than what imposed haste, he was obliged to bestir himself on this occasion.
If we have dwelt thus long upon the secret thoughts of the company, it is because their conversation was too broken and unconnected for recording. They talked little, and that little was discursive. An occasional allusion to some social topic, a chance mention of their approaching departure from Florence, some reference to Como and its scenery, formed the whole; and then, in spite of Jekyl, whose functions of "fly-wheel" could not keep the machine a-moving, long pauses would intervene, and each lapse into a silence apparently more congenial than conversation. All this while Jekyl seemed to be reading the complex scheme of doubt, irresolution, and determination that filled Midchekoff"s mind. The stealthy glances of the Russian"s eyes towards Kate, the almost painful anxiety of his manner, to see if she noticed him while speaking, his watchful observance of her in her every accent and gesture, told Jekyl the struggle that was then pa.s.sing within him.
He had seen each of these symptoms before, though in a less degree, when the coveted object was a horse or a picture; and he well knew how nothing but the dread of a compet.i.tion for the prize would rouse him from this state of doubt and uncertainty.
The evening dragged slowly over, and it was now late, when Lord Norwood made his appearance. With a brief apology for not coming to dinner, he drew Jekyl to one side, and, slipping an arm within his, led him into an adjoining room.