The Bondwoman Part 2

"Why do you paint pictures like that?"

"Like that? Pouf! You mean beautiful?"

"No, it is not beautiful," she said, thoughtfully, as she seated herself on the dais by the dowager's couch. "To be truly beautiful a thing must impress one with a sense of fitness to our highest perceptive faculties. A soulless thing is never beautiful."

"What then, of dogs, horses, lions, the many art works in metal or on canvas?"

"You must not raise that wall against her words, Loris, unless you wish to quarrel," said the dowager in friendly warning. "Judithe is pantheist enough to fancy that animals have souls."

"But the true artist does not seek to portray the lowest expression of that soul," persisted Dumaresque's critic. "Across the Atlantic there are thousands who contend that a woman such as this Kora whom you paint, has no soul because of the black blood in her veins. They think of the dark people as we think of apes. It is all a question of longitude, Monsieur Dumaresque. The crudeness of America is the jest of France. The wisdom of France is the lightest folly of the Brahims; and so it goes ever around the world. The soul of that girl will weigh as heavily as ours in the judgment that is final; but, in the meantime, why teach it and others to admire all that allurement of evil showing in her eyes as she looks at you?"

"Judithe!" protested the dowager.

"Oh!--I do not doubt in the least, Maman, that the woman Kora looked just so when she sat for the picture," conceded the girl; "but why not endeavor to awaken a higher, stronger expression, and paint _that_, showing the better possibilities within her than mere seductiveness?"

"What fervor and what folly, Marquise!" cried Dumaresque. "It is a speech of folly only because it is I whom you ask to be the missionary, and because it is the pretty Kora you would ask me to convert--and to what? Am I so perfect in all ways that I dare preach, even with paint and brush? Heavens! I should have all Paris laughing at me."

"But Judithe would not have you that sort of extremist," said the dowager, laughing at the dismay in his face. "She knows you do well; only she fears you do not exert yourself enough to perceive how you might do better."

"She forgets; I did once; only a few weeks ago," he said briefly; and the girl dropped her hands wearily and leaned her head against the dowager's couch.

"Maman, our good friend is going to talk matrimony again," she said plaintively; "and if he does, I warn you, though it is only mid-day, I shall go asleep;" and her eyes closed tightly as though to make the threat more effective.

"You see," said the old lady, raising one chiding finger, "it is really lamentable, Loris, that your sentimental tendencies have grown into a steady habit."

"I agree," he a.s.sented; "but consider. She a.s.sails me--she, a saintly little judge in grey! She lectures, preaches at me! Tells me I lack virtue! But more is the pity for me; she will not remember that one virtue was most attractive to me, and she bade me abandon it."

"Tell him," said the girl with her eyes still closed, "to not miscall things; no one is all virtue."

"Pardon; that is what you seemed to me, and I never before fancied that the admirable virtues would find me so responsive, when, pouf!

with one word you demolished all my castle of delight and now condemn me that I am an outlaw from those elevating fancies."

He spoke with such a comical air of self-pity that the old lady laughed and the young Marquise opened her eyes.

"A truce, Monsieur Loris; you are amusing, but you like to pose as one of the rejected and disconsolate when you have women to listen. It is all because you are just a little theatrical, is it not? How effective it must be with your Parisiennes!"

"My faith!" he exclaimed, turning to the dowager in dismay; "and only three months since she emerged from the convent! What then do they not teach in those sanctuaries!"

The girl arose, made him a mocking obeisance, and swinging the turban in her hand pa.s.sed into the alcoved music room; a little later an Italian air, soft, dreamy, drifted to them from the keys of the piano.

"She will make a sensation," prophesied Dumaresque, sagely.

"You mean socially? No; if left to herself she would ignore society; it is not necessary to her; only her affection for me brings her from her studies now. Should I die tomorrow she would go back to them next week."

"But why, why, why? If she were unattractive one could understand; but being what she is--"

"Being what she is, she has a fever to know all the facts of earth and all the guesses at heaven."

"And bars out marriage!"

"Not for other people," retorted the dowager.

"But to what use then all these accomplishments, all this pursuit of knowledge? Does she mean to hide it all in some convent at last?"

"I would look for her rather among some savage tribes, doing missionary work."

"Yes, making them acquainted with Voltaire," he said, laughingly. "But you are to be envied, G.o.d-mother, in having her all to yourself; she adores you!"

The dark old face flushed slightly, and the keen eyes softened with pleasure.

"It was Alain's choice, and it was a good one," she said, briefly.

"What of the English people you asked to bring today?"

"They are not English; one is American and one is Irish."

"True; but their Anglo-Saxon makes them all English to me. I hear there are so many of them in Paris now; Comtesse Biron brings one today; there is her message, what is the name?"

Dumaresque unfolded the pink sheet, glanced at it and smiled.

"My faith; it is the mother of the young lieutenant whom I asked to bring, Madame McVeigh. So, she was a school friend of the Comtesse Helene, eh? That seems strange; still, this Madame McVeigh may be a French woman transplanted."

"I do not know; but it will be a comfort if she speaks French. The foreigners of only one language are trying."

Mrs. McVeigh offered no linguistic difficulties to the dowager who was charmed with her friend's friend.

"But you are surely not the English-Americans of whom we see so much these days? I cannot think it."

"No, Madame. I am of the French-Americans--the creoles--hence the speech you are pleased to approve. My people were the Villanennes of Louisiana."

"Ah! a creole? The creoles come here from the West Indies also--beautiful women. My daughter has had some as school friends; only this morning she was explaining to an English caller the difference between a creole and that personality;" and the dowager waived her hand towards the much discussed picture of Kora.

The fine face of the American woman took on a trace of haughtiness, and she glanced at the speaker as though alert to some covert insult.

The unconsciousness in the old face rea.s.sured her, though she could not quite banish coldness from her tones as she replied:

"I should not think such an explanation necessary in enlightened circles; the creole is so well known as the American born of the Latin races, while that," with a gesture towards the oriental face on the canvas, "is the offspring of the African race--our slaves."

"With occasionally a Caucasian father," suggested the dowager wickedly. "I have never seen this new idol of the ballet--Kora; but her prettiness is the talk of the studios, though she does not deny she came from your side of the sea, and has the shadows of Africa in her hair."

"A quadroon or octoroon, no doubt. It appears strange to find the outcasts of the States elected to that sort of notice over here--as though the old world, tired of civilization and culture, turned for distraction to the barbarians."

"Barbarians, indeed!" laughed the Countess Biron--the Countess Helene, as she was called by her friends. She laughed a great deal, knew a great deal, and never forgot a morsel of Parisian gossip. "This barbarian has only to show herself on the boulevards and all good citizens crane their necks for a glimpse of her. The empress herself attracts less attention."

The dowager clicked the lid of her snuff box and shrugged her shoulders.

"That Spanish woman--tah! As _Mademoiselle d'Industrie_ I do not see why she should claim precedence. The blonde Spaniard is no more beautiful than the brown American."