The Bondwoman Part 1

The Bondwoman.

by Marah Ellis Ryan.

CHAPTER I.

Near Moret, in France, where the Seine is formed and flows northward, there lives an old lady named Madame Blanc, who can tell much of the history written here--though it be a history belonging more to American lives than French. She was of the Caron establishment when Judithe first came into the family, and has charge of a home for aged ladies of education and refinement whose means will not allow of them providing for themselves. It is a memorial founded by her adopted daughter and is known as the Levigne Pension. The property on which it is established is the little Levigne estate--the one forming the only dowery of Judithe Levigne when she married Philip Alain--Marquis de Caron.

There is also a bright-eyed, still handsome woman of mature years, who lives in our South and has charge of another memorial--or had until recently--a private industrial school for girls of her own selection. She calls herself a creole of San Domingo, and she also calls herself Madame Trouvelot--she has been married twice since she was first known by that name, for she was never the woman to live alone--not she; but while the men in themselves suited her, their names were uncompromisingly plain--did not attract her at all. She married them, proved a very good wife, but while one was named Johnson, and another Tuttle, the good wife persisted in being called Madame Trouvelot, either through sentiment or a bit of irony towards the owner of that name. But, despite her vanities, her coquetries, and certain erratic phases of her life, she was absolutely faithful to the trust reposed in her by the Marquise; and who so capable as herself of finding the poor girls who stood most in need of training and the shelter of charity? She, also, could add to this history of the woman belonging both to the old world and the new. There are also official records in evidence of much that is told here--deeds of land, bills of sale, with dates of marriages and deaths interwoven, changed as to names and places but--

There are social friends--gay, pleasure-loving people on both sides of the water--who could speak, and some men who will never forget her.

One of them, Kenneth McVeigh, he was only Lieutenant McVeigh then!--saw her first in Paris--heard of her first at a musicale in the salon of Madame Choudey. Madame Choudey was the dear friend of the Countess Helene Biron, who still lives and delights in recitals of gossip belonging to the days of the Second Empire. The Countess Helene and Mrs. McVeigh had been school friends in Paris. Mrs. McVeigh had been Claire Villanenne, of New Orleans, in those days. At seventeen she had married a Col. McVeigh, of Carolina. At forty she had been a widow ten years. Was the mother of a daughter aged twelve, and a six-foot son of twenty-two, who looked twenty-five, and had just graduated from West Point.

As he became of special interest to more than one person in this story, it will be in place to give an idea of him as he appeared in those early days;--an impetuous boy held in check, somewhat, by military discipline and his height--he measured six feet at twenty--and also by the fact that his mother had persisted in looking on him as the head of the family at an age when most boys are care-free of such responsibilities.

But the responsibilities had a very good effect in many ways--giving stability and seriousness to a nature p.r.o.ne, most of all, to pleasure-loving if left untrammelled. His blue eyes had a slumberous warmth in them; when he smiled they half closed and looked down on you caressingly, and their expression proved no bar to favor with the opposite s.e.x. The fact that he had a little mother who leaned on him and whom he petted extravagantly, just as he did his sister, gave him a manner towards women in general that was both protecting and deferential--a combination productive of very decided results. He was intelligent without being intellectual, had a very clear appreciation of the advantages of being born a McVeigh, proud and jealous where family honor was concerned, a bit of an autocrat through being master over extensive tracts of land and slaves by the dozen, many of them the descendents of Africans bought into the family from New England traders four generations before.

Such was the personality of the young American as he appeared that day at Madame Choudey's; and he looked like one of the pictured Norse sea kings as he towered, sallow and bronzed, back of the vivacious Frenchmen and their neighbors of the Latin races.

_The_ solo of the musicale had just ended. People were thronged about the artiste, and others were congratulating Madame Choudey on her absolute success in a.s.sembling talent.

"All celebrities, my lad," remarked Fitzgerald Delaven as he looked around. The Delavens and the McVeighs had in time long past some far-out relationship, and on the strength of it the two young men, meeting thus in a foreign country, became at once friends and brothers;--"all celebrities and no one so insignificant as ourselves in sight. Well, now!--when one has to do the gallant to an ugly woman it is a compensation to know she is wondrous wise."

"That depends on the man who is doing the gallant," returned the young officer, "I have not yet got beyond the point where I expect them all to be pretty."

"Faith, Lieutenant, that is because your American girls are all so pretty they spoil you!--and by the same token your mother is the handsomest woman in the room."

The tall young fellow glanced across the chattering groups to where the handsomest woman was amusing herself.

She certainly was handsome--a blonde with chestnut hair and grey eyes--a very youthful looking mother for the young officer to claim.

She met his glance and smiled as he noticed her very courtier-like attendant of the moment, and raised his brows quizzically.

"Yes, I feel that I am only a hanger-on to mother since we reached France," he confessed. "My French is of the sort to be exploited only among my intimates, and luckily all my intimates know English."

"Anglo-Saxon," corrected Delaven, and Lieutenant McVeigh dropped his hand on his friend's shoulder and laughed.

"You wild Irishman!--why not emphasize your prejudices by unearthing the Celtic and expressing yourself in that?"

"Sure, if I did I should not call it the Irish language," retorted the man from Dublin.

They both used the contested tongue, and were evidently the only ones in the room who did. All about them were the softened syllables of France--so provocative, according to Lord Lytton, of the tender sentiments, if not of the tender pa.s.sion.

"There is Dumaresque, now," remarked Delaven. "We are to see his new picture, you know, at the Marquise de Caron's;--excuse me a moment,"

and he crossed over to the artist, who had just entered.

Kenneth McVeigh stood alone surveying the strange faces about. He had not been in France long enough to be impervious to the atmosphere of novelty in everything seen and heard.

Back of him the soft voice of Madame Choudey, the hostess, could be heard. She was frankly gossiping and laughing a little. The name of the Marquise de Caron was mentioned. Delaven had told him of her--an aristocrat and an eccentric--a philanthropist who was now aged. For years herself and her son had been the patrons--the good angels of struggling genius, of art in every form. But the infamous 2d of December had ended all that. He was one of the "provisionally exiled;"

he had died in Rome. Madame La Marquise, the dowager Marquise now, was receiving again, said the gossips back of him. The fact was commented on with wonder by Madame Choudey;--with wonder, frank queries, and wild surmises, by the little group around her; for the aged Marquise and her son Alain--dead a year since--had been picturesque figures in their own circle where politics and art, literature and religion, met and crossed swords, or played piquet! And now she was coming back, not only to Paris, but to society; had in fact, arrived, and the card Madame Choudey held in her white dimpled hand announced the first reception at the Caron establishment.

"After years of the country and Rome!" and Sidonie Merson raised her infantile brows and smiled.

"Oh, yes, it is quite true--though so strange; we fancied her settled for life in her old vine-covered villa; no one expected to see the Paris house opened after Alain's death."

"It is always the unexpected in which the old Marquise delights," said big Lavergne, the sculptor, who had joined Sidonie in the window.

"Then how she must have reveled in Alain's marriage--a death-bed marriage!"

"Yes; and to an Italian girl without a dot."

"Oh--it is quite possible. The marriage was in Rome. Both the English and Americans go to Rome."

"Italian! I heard it was an English or American!"

"Surely, not so bad as that!"

"But only those who have money;--or, if they have not the money, our sons and our brothers do not marry them."

"Good!" and Lavergne nodded with mock sagacity. "We reach conclusions; the newly made Marquise de Caron is either not Anglo-Saxon or was not without wealth."

"I heard from Dumaresque that she had attended English schools; that no doubt gives her the English suggestion."

"Oh, I know more than that;" said another, eager to add to the knowledge of the group. "Between Fontainbleau and Moret is the Levigne chateau. Two years ago the dowager was there with a young beauty, Judithe Levigne, and that is the girl Alain married; the dowager was also a Levigne, and the girl an adopted daughter."

"What is she like now? Has no one seen her?"

"No one more worldly than her confessor--if she possess one, or the nuns of the convent to which she returned to study after her marriage and widowhood."

"Heavens! We must compose our features when we enter the presence!"

"But we will go, for all that! The dowager is too delightful to miss."

"A religieuse and a blue stocking!" and the smile of Lavergne was accompanied by a doubtful shrug. "I might devote myself to either, if apart, but never to both in one. Is she then ugly that she dare be so superior?"

"Greek and Latin did not lessen the charm of Heloise for Abelard, Monsieur."

Sidonie glanced consciously out of the window. Even the dust of six centuries refuses to cover the pa.s.sion of Heloise, and despite the ecclesiastical flavor of the romance--demoiselles were not supposed to be aware--still--!

Lavergne beckoned to a fair slight man near the piano.

"We will ask Loris--Loris Dumaresque. He is G.o.d-son of the dowager. He was in Rome also. He will know."

"Certainly;" and Madame Choudey glanced in the mirror opposite and leaned her cheek on her jeweled hand, the lace fell from her pretty wrist and the effect was rather pleasing. "Loris; ah, pardon me, since your last canvas is the talk of Paris we must perhaps say Monsieur Dumaresque, or else--Master."

"The queen calls no man master," replied the newcomer as he bent over the pretty coquette's hand. "The humblest of your subjects salutes you."

"My faith! You have not lost in Rome a single charm of the boulevardes.