Jacqueline Part 7

"Oh! I beg pardon," she exclaimed, pausing on the threshold.

"One would think you would like to see me asleep," said Marien with some little embarra.s.sment.

"I never should have thought your bedroom would have been so pretty.

Why, it is as elegant as a lady's chamber," said Jacqueline, slipping into it as she spoke, with an exciting consciousness of doing something she ought not to do.

"What an insult, when I thought all my tastes were simple and severe,"

he replied; but he had not followed her into the chamber, withheld by an impulse of modesty men sometimes feel, when innocence is led into audacity through ignorance.

"What lovely flowers you have!" said Jacqueline, from within. "Don't they make your head ache?"

"I take them out at night."

"I did not know that men liked, as we do, to be surrounded by flowers.

Won't you give me one?"

"All, if you like."

"Oh! one pink will be enough for me."

"Then take it," said Marien; her curiosity alarmed him, and he was anxious to get her away.

"Would it not be nicer if you gave it me yourself?" she replied, with reproach in her tones.

"Here is one, Mademoiselle. And now I must tell you that I want to dress. I have to go out immediately."

She pinned the pink into her bodice so high that she could inhale its perfume.

"I beg your pardon. Thank you, and good-by," she said, extending her hand to him with a sigh.

"Au revoir."

"Yes--'au revoir' at home--but that will not be like here."

As she stood there before him there came into her eyes a strange expression, to which, without exactly knowing why, he replied by pressing his lips fervently on the little hand he was still holding in his own.

Very often since her infancy he had kissed her before witnesses, but this time she gave a little cry, and turned as white as the flower whose petals were touching her cheek.

Marien started back alarmed.

"Good-by," he said in a tone that he endeavored to make careless--but in vain.

Though she was much agitated herself she failed not to remark his emotion, and on the threshold of the atelier, she blew a kiss back to him from the tips of her gloved fingers, without speaking or smiling.

Then she went back to Fraulein Schult, who was still sitting in the place where she had left her, and said: "Let us go."

The next time Madame de Nailles saw her stepdaughter she was dazzled by a radiant look in her young face.

"What has happened to you?" she asked, "you look triumphant."

"Yes--I have good reason to triumph," said Jacqueline. "I think that I have won a victory."

"How so? Over yourself?"

"No, indeed--victories over one's self give us the comfort of a good conscience, but they do not make us gay--as I am."

"Then tell me--"

"No-no! I can not tell you yet. I must be silent two days more," said Jacqueline, throwing herself into her mother's arms.

Madame de Nailles asked no more questions, but she looked at her stepdaughter with an air of great surprise. For some weeks past she had had no pleasure in looking at Jacqueline. She began to be aware that near her, at her side, an exquisite b.u.t.terfly was about for the first time to spread its wings--wings of a radiant loveliness, which, when they fluttered in the air, would turn all eyes away from other b.u.t.terflies, which had lost some of their freshness during the summer.

A difficult task was before her. How could she keep this too precocious insect in its chrysalis state? How could she shut it up in its dark coc.o.o.n and r.e.t.a.r.d its transformation?

"Jacqueline," she said, and the tones of her voice were less soft than those in which she usually addressed her, "it seems to me that you are wasting your time a great deal. You hardly practise at all; you do almost nothing at the 'cours'. I don't know what can be distracting your attention from your lessons, but I have received complaints which should make a great girl like you ashamed of herself. Do you know what I am beginning to think?--That Madame de Monredon's system of education has done better than mine."

"Oh! mamma, you can't be thinking of sending me to a convent!" cried Jacqueline, in tones of comic despair.

"I did not say that--but I really think it might be good for you to make a retreat where your cousin Giselle is, instead of plunging into follies which interrupt your progress."

"Do you call Madame d'Etaples's 'bal blanc' a folly?"

"You certainly will not go to it--that is settled," said the young stepmother, dryly.

CHAPTER V. SURPRISES

In all other ways Madame de Nailles did her best to a.s.sist in the success of the surprise. On the second of June, the eve of Ste.-Clotilde's day, she went out, leaving every opportunity for the grand plot to mature. Had she not absented herself in like manner the year before at the same date--thus enabling an upholsterer to drape artistically her little salon with beautiful thick silk tapestries which had just been imported from the East? Her idea was that this year she might find a certain lacquered screen which she coveted. The Baroness belonged to her period; she liked j.a.panese things. But, alas! the charming object that awaited her, with a curtain hung over it to prolong the suspense, had nothing j.a.panese about it whatever. Madame de Nailles received the good wishes of her family, responded to them with all proper cordiality, and then was dragged up joyously to a picture hanging on the wall of her room, but still concealed under the cloth that covered it.

"How good of you!" she said, with all confidence to her husband.

"It is a picture by Marien!--A portrait by Marien! A likeness of Jacqueline!"

And he uncovered the masterpiece of the great artist, expecting to be joyous in the joy with which she would receive it. But something strange occurred. Madame de Nailles sprang back a step or two, stretching out her arms as if repelling an apparition, her face was distorted, her head was turned away; then she dropped into the nearest seat and burst into tears.

"Mamma!--dear little mamma!--what is it?" cried Jacqueline, springing forward to kiss her.

Madame de Nailles disengaged herself angrily from her embrace.

"Let me alone!" she cried, "let me alone!--How dared you?"

And impetuously, hardly restraining a gesture of horror and hate, she rushed into her own chamber. Thither her husband followed her, anxious and bewildered, and there he witnessed a nervous attack which ended in a torrent of reproaches:

Was it possible that he had, not seen the impropriety of those sittings to Marien? Oh, yes! No doubt he was an old friend of the family, but that did not prevent all these deceptions, all these disguises, and all the other follies which he had sanctioned--he--Jacqueline's father!--from being very improper. Did he wish to take from her all authority over his child?--a girl who was already too much disposed to emanc.i.p.ate herself. Her own efforts had all been directed to curb this alarming propensity--yes, alarming--alarming for the future. And all in vain! There was no use in saying more. 'Mon Dieu'! had he no trust in her devotion to his child, in her prudence and her foresight, that he must thwart her thus? And she had always imagined that for ten years she had faithfully fulfilled a mother's duties! What ingrat.i.tude from every one! Mademoiselle Schult should be sent away at once. Jacqueline should go to a convent. They would break off all intercourse with Marien. They had conspired against her--every one.

And then she wept more bitterly than ever--tears of rage, salt tears which rubbed the powder off her cheeks and disfigured the face that had remained beautiful by her power of will and self-control. But now the disorder of her nerves got the better of precautions. The blonde angel, whose beauty was on the wane, was transformed into a fury.

Her six-and-thirty years were fully apparent, her complexion appeared slightly blotched, all her defects were obtrusive in contrast with the precocious development of beauty in Jacqueline. She was firmly resolved that her stepdaughter's obtrusive womanhood should remain in obscurity a very much longer time, under pretence that Jacqueline was still a child.

She was a child, at any rate! The portrait was a lie! an imposture! an affront! an outrage!