The Bondwoman Part 3

"For all that, Louis Napoleon has placed her among the elect,"

remarked the Countess Helene, with a mischievous glance towards the Marquise, each understanding that the mention of the Second Empire was like a call to war, in that salon.

"Louis!" and the dowager shrugged her shoulder, and made a gesture of contempt. "That accident! What is he that any one should be exalted by his favor? Mademoiselle de Montijo was--for the matter of that--his superior! Her family had place and power; her paternity was undisputed; but this Louis--tah! There was but one Bonaparte; that subaltern from Corsica; that meteor. He was, with all his faults, a worker, a thinker, an original. He would have swept into the sea the envious islanders across the channel to whom this Bonaparte truckled--this man called Bonaparte, who was no Bonaparte at all--a vulture instead of an eagle!"

So exclaimed the dowager, who carried in her memory the picture of the streets of Paris when neither women nor children were spared by the bullets and sabres of his slaughterers--the hyena to whom the clergy so bowed down that not a ma.s.s for the dead patriots could be secured in Paris, from either priest or archbishop, and the Republicans piled in the streets by hundreds!

Mrs. McVeigh turned in some dismay to the Countess Helene. The people of the Western world, the women in particular, knew little of the bitter spirit permeating the politics of France. The United States had very knotty problems of her own to discuss in 1859.

"Tah!" continued the dowager, "I startle you! Well, well--it profits nothing to recite these ills. Many a man, and woman, too, has been put to death for saying less;--and the exile of my son to remember--yes; all that! He was Republican--I a Legitimist; I of the old, he of the new. Republics are good in theory; France might have given it a longer trial but for this trickster politician, who is called Emperor--by the grace of G.o.d!"

"Do they add 'Defender of the Faith' as our cautious English neighbors persist in doing?" asked the girlish Marquise with a smile. "Your country, Madame McVeigh, has no such cant in its const.i.tution. You have reason to be proud of the great men, the wise, far-seeing men, who framed those laws."

Mrs. McVeigh smiled and sighed in self-pity.

"How frivolous American women will appear to you, Madame! Few of us ever read the const.i.tution of our country. I confess I only know the first line:--'When in the course of human events it becomes necessary,' but what they thought necessary to do is very vague in my mind."

Then, catching the glance of the Marquise bright with laughter, she laughed also without knowing well at what.

"Well; what is it?"

"Only that you are quoting from the Declaration of Independence, and fancy it the const.i.tution."

"That is characteristic of American women, too," laughed Mrs. McVeigh; "declarations of independence is one of our creeds. But I shall certainly be afraid of you, Marquise. At your age the learning and comparing of musty laws would have been dull work for me. It is the age for dancing and gay carelessness."

The Marquise smiled a.s.sent with her curious, dark eyes, in which amber lights shown. She had a certain appealing meekness at times--a sweet deference that was a marked contrast to the aggressiveness with which she had met Dumaresque in the morning. The Countess Helene, observing the deprecating manner with which she received the implied praise for erudition, found herself watching with a keener interest the girl who had seemed to her a mere pretty book-worm.

"She is more than that," thought the astute worldling. "Alain's widow has a face for tragedy, the address of an ingenue, and the _tout en semble_ of a coquette."

The dowager smiled at Mrs. McVeigh's remarks.

"She cares too little for dancing, the natural expression of healthy young animalism; but what can I do?--nothing less frivolous than a salon a-la-Madame D'Agoult is among her ambitions."

"Let us persuade her to visit America," suggested Mrs. McVeigh.

"I can, at least, prescribe a change promising more of joyous festivity--life on a Carolina plantation."

"What delight for her! she loves travel and new scenes. Indeed, Alain, my son, has purchased a property in your land, and some day she may go over. But for the brief remnant of my life I shall be selfish and want her always on my side of the ocean. What, child? you pale at the mention of death--tah! it is not so bad. The old die by installments, and the last one is not the worst."

"May it be many years in the future, Maman," murmured the young Marquise, whose voice betrayed a certain effort as she continued: "I thank you for the suggestion, Madame McVeigh; the property Maman refers to is in New Orleans, and I surely hope to see your country some day; my sympathies are there."

"We have many French people in the South; our own part of the land was settled originally by the cavaliers of France. You would not feel like a stranger there."

"Not in your gracious neighborhood, Madame;"--her face had regained its color, and her eyes their brilliant expression.

"And there you would see living pictures like this," suggested the Countess Helene; "what material for an artist!"

"Oh, no; in the rice fields of South Carolina they do not look like that. We have none of those Oriental effects in dress, you know. Our colored women look very sober in comparison; still they have their attractions, and might be an interesting study for you if you have never known colored folks."

"Oh, but I have," remarked the Marquise, smiling; "an entire year of my life was pa.s.sed in a school with two from Brazil, and one from your country had run away the same season."

"Judithe; child!"

The dowager fairly gasped the words, and the Marquise moved quickly to her side and sank on the cushion at her feet, looking up with an a.s.suring smile, as she caressed the aged hand.

"Yes, it is quite true," she continued; "but see, I am alive to tell the tale, and really they say the American was a most harmless little thing; the poor, imprisoned soul."

"How strange!" exclaimed Mrs. McVeigh; "do you mean as fellow pupils?--colored girls! It seems awful."

"Really, I never thought of it so; you see, so many planters'

daughters come from the West Indies to Paris schools. Many in feature and color suggest the dark continent, but are accepted, nevertheless.

However, the girl I mention was not dark. Her mother had seven white ancestors to one of black. Yet she confided her story to a friend of mine, and she was an American slave."

The dowager was plainly distressed at the direction of the conversation, for the shock to Mrs. McVeigh was so very apparent, and as her hostess remembered that slavery was threatening to become an inst.i.tution of uncompromising discord across the water, all reference to it was likely to be unwelcome. She pressed the fingers of the Marquise warningly, and the Marquise smiled up at her, but evidently did not understand.

"Can such a thing be possible?" asked Mrs. McVeigh, incredulously; "in that case I shall think twice before I send _my_ daughter here to school, as I had half intended--and you remained in such an establishment?"

"I had no choice; my guardians decided those questions."

"And the faculty--they allowed it?"

"They did not know it. She was represented as being the daughter of an American planter; which was true. I have reason to believe that my friend was her only confidant."

"And for what purpose was she educated in such an establishment?"

"That she might gain accomplishments enhancing her value as companion to the man who was to own her."

"Madame!"

"Marquise!"

The two exclamations betrayed how intent her listeners were, and how full of horror the suggestion. There was even incredulity in the tones, an initiative protest against such possibilities. But the Marquise looked from one to the other with unruffled earnestness.

"So it was told to me," she continued; "these accomplishments meant extra thousands to the man who sold her, and the man was her father's brother."

"No, no, no!" and Mrs. McVeigh shook her head decidedly to emphasize her conviction. "I cannot believe that at the present day in our country such an arrangement could exist. No one, knowing our men, could credit such a story. In the past century such abuses might have existed, but surely not now--in all my life I have heard of nothing like that."

"Probably the girl was romancing," agreed the Marquise, with a shrug, "for you would no doubt be aware if such a state of affairs had existence."

"Certainly."

"Then your men are not so clever as ours," laughed the Countess; "for they manage many little affairs their own women never suspect."

Mrs. McVeigh looked displeased. To her it was not a matter of cleverness, but of principle and morality; and in her mind there was absolutely no comparison possible without jarring decidedly on the prejudices of her Gallic friends, so she let the remark pa.s.s without comment.

"Yes," said the Marquise, rising, "when I heard the story of the girl Rhoda I fancied it one the white mistresses of America seldom heard."

"Rhoda?"

"Yes, that was the name the girl was known by in the school--Rhoda Larue--the Larue was a fiction; slaves, I am told, having no legal right to names."