Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame | Page 4

make out in what direction. He found occasion to reproach her sometimes with the changes he found in her.
"There are times when I hardly know you," he would say, "you are so finely orthodox and well controlled. It was not so with you once, Bertha. Don't--don't become that terrible thing, a fine lady, and worse still, a fine lady who is d��sillusion��e"
It baffled him that she never appeared much moved, by his charges. Certainly she lived the life of a "fine lady,"--a brilliant life, a luxurious one, a life full of polite dissipation. Once, when in a tenderly fraternal mood, he reproached her with this also, she laughed at him frankly.
"It is absinthe," she said. "It is my absinthe at least, and who does not drink a little absinthe--of one kind or another?"
He was sincerely convinced that from this moment he understood and had the right to pity and watch over her. He went oftener to see her. In her presence he studied her closely, absent he brooded over her. He became impatiently intolerant of M. Villefort, and prone to condemn him, he scarcely knew for what.
"He has no dignity--no perception," was his parental decision. "He has not even the delicacy to love her, or he would have the tenderness to sacrifice his own feelings and leave her to herself. I could do it for a woman I loved."
But M. Villefort was always there,--gravely carrying the shawls, picking up handkerchiefs, and making himself useful.
"Imb��cile!" muttered M. Renard under cover of his smile and his mustache, as he stood near his venerable patroness the first time she met the Villeforts.
"Blockhead!" stealthily ejaculated that amiable aristocrat. But though she looked grimly at M. Villefort, M. Renard was uncomfortably uncertain that it was he to whom she referred.
"Go and bring them to me," she commanded, "Go and bring them to me before some one else engages them. I want to talk to that girl."
It was astonishing how agreeable she made herself to her victims when she had fairly entrapped them. Bertha hesitated a little before accepting her offer of a seat at her side, but once seated she found herself oddly amused. When Madame de Castro chose to rake the embers of her seventy years, many a lively coal discovered itself among the ashes.
Seeing the two women together, Edmondstone shuddered in fastidious protest.
"How could you laugh at that detestable old woman?" he exclaimed on encountering Bertha later in the evening. "I wonder that M. Villefort would permit her to talk to you. She is a wicked, cynical creature, who has the hardihood to laugh at her sins instead of repenting of them."
"Perhaps that is the reason she is so amusing," said Bertha.
Edmondstone answered her with gentle mournfulness.
"What!" he said. "Have you begun to say such things? You too, Bertha"--
The laugh with which she stopped him was both light and hard.
"Where is M. Villefort?" she asked. "I have actually not seen him for fifteen minutes. Is it possible that Madame de Castro has fascinated him into forgetting me?"
Edmondstone went to his hotel that night in a melancholy mood. He even lay awake to think what a dreary mistake his cousin's marriage was. She had been such a tender and easily swayed little soul as a girl, and now it really seemed as if she was hardening into a woman of the world. In the old times he had been wont to try his sonnets upon Bertha as a musician tries his chords upon his most delicate instrument. Even now he remembered certain fine, sensitive expressions of hers which had thrilled him beyond measure.
"How could she marry such a fellow as that--how could she?" he groaned. "What does it mean? It must mean something."
He was pale and heavy-eyed when he wandered round to the Villeforts' the following morning. M. Villefort was sitting with Bertha and reading aloud. He stopped to receive their visitor punctiliously and inquire after his health.
"M. Edmondstone cannot have slept well," he remarked.
"I did not sleep at all," Edmondstone answered, "and naturally have a headache."
Bertha pointed to a wide lounge of the pouf order.
"Then go to sleep now," she said; "M. Villefort will read. When I have a headache he often reads me to sleep, and I am always better on awaking."
Involuntarily Edmondstone half frowned. Absurdly enough, he resented in secret this amiability on the part of M. Villefort toward his own wife. He was quite prepared to be severe upon the reading, but was surprised to be compelled to acknowledge that M. Villefort read wondrously well, and positively with hints of delicate perception. His voice was full and yet subtly flexible. Edmondstone tried to protest against this also, but uselessly. Finally he was soothed, and from being fretfully wide-awake suddenly passed into sleep as Bertha had commanded. How long his slumber