Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame | Page 3

to his cousin.
"If I come to-morrow," he was saying, "you will be at home, Bertha?"
"Yes."
"Then, good-night,"--holding out his hand,--"only I wish so that you would go to the Aylmers instead of home. That prot��g��e of Mrs. Aylmer's--the little singing girl--would touch your heart with her voice. On hearing her, one thinks at once of some shy wild bird high in a clear sky,--far enough above earth to have forgotten to be timid."
"Yes," came quietly from the darkness within the carriage; "but I am too tired to care about voices just now. Good-night, Ralph!"
M. Renard's reply of "God knows, Paris does not," to Madame de Castro's query as to why Madame Villefort had married her husband, contained an element of truth, and yet there were numbers of Parisian-Americans, more especially the young, well-looking, and masculine, who at the time the marriage had taken place had been ready enough with sardonic explanations.
"There are women who are avaricious enough to sell their souls," they cried; "and the maternal Trent is one of them. The girl is only to blame for allowing herself to be bullied into the match."
"But the weak place in this argument," said M. Renard, "is, that the people are too rich to be greatly influenced by money. If there had been a title,--but there was no title."
Neither did Bertha Trent comport herself like a cowed creature. She took her place in society as Madame Villefort in such a manner as could give rise to no comment whatever; only one or two of the restless inquisitive wondered if they had not been, mistaken in her. She was, as I have said already, a childishly small and slight creature,--the kind of woman to touch one with suggestions of helplessness and lack of will; and yet, notwithstanding this, a celebrated artist--a shrewd, worldly-wise old fellow--who had painted her portrait, had complained that he was not satisfied with it because he had not done justice to "the obstinate endurance in her eye."
It was to her cousin, Ralph Edmondstone, he had said this with some degree of testiness, and Edmondstone had smiled and answered:--
"What! have you found that out? Few people do."
At the time of the marriage Edmondstone had been in Rome singeing his wings in the light of the eyes of a certain Marchesa who was his latest poetic passion. She was not his first fancy, nor would she be his last, but she had power enough for the time being to have satisfied the most exacting of women.
He was at his banker's when he heard the news spoken of as the latest item from American Paris, and his start and exclamation of disgust drew forth some cynical after-comment from men who envied him.
"Who?" he said, with indiscreet impatience. "That undersized sphynx of a Villefort? Faugh!"
But insignificant though he might be, it was M. Villefort who had won, and if he was nothing more, he was at least a faithful attendant. Henceforth, those who saw his wife invariably saw him also,--driving with her in her carriage, riding with her courageously if ungracefully, standing or seated near her in the shadow of her box at the Nouvelle Op��ra, silent, impassive, grave, noticeable only through the contrast he afforded to her girlish beauty and bloom.
"Always there!" commented a sharp American belle of mature years, "like an ugly little conscience."
Edmondstone's first meeting with his cousin after his return to Paris was accidental. He had rather put off visiting her, and one night, entering a crowded room, he found himself standing behind a girl's light figure and staring at an abundance of reddish-brown hair. When, almost immediately the pretty head to which this hair belonged turned with a slow, yet involuntary-looking movement toward him, he felt that he became excited without knowing why.
"Ah, Bertha!" he exclaimed.
She smiled a little and held out her hand, and he immediately became conscious of M. Villefort being quite near and regarding him seriously.
It was the perverseness of fate that he should find in Bertha Villefort even more than he had once seen in Bertha Trent, and there had been a time when he had seen a great deal in Bertha Trent. In the Trent household he had been a great favorite. No social evening or family festivity had seemed complete without his presence. The very children had felt that they had a claim upon his good-humor, and his tendency to break forth into whimsical frolic. Good Mrs. Trent had been wont to scold him and gossip with him. He had read his sonnets and metaphysical articles to Bertha, and occasionally to the rest; in fact, his footing in the family was familiar and firmly established. But since her marriage Bertha had become a little incomprehensible, and on that account a little more interesting. He was sure she had developed, but could not