Kitabı oku: «Little Nobody», sayfa 13

CHAPTER XLIII

Before the wedding-day rolled around Maud and her betrothed had persuaded Edith and Eliot to accompany them on their wedding-journey South. In fact, they were not hard to persuade, for Eliot, in a mood of desperation, felt almost ready to storm the convent walls and carry away his beloved, obdurate Una, while Edith was charmed at the idea of rushing so precipitately from the icy streets and freezing wind of Boston to the sunshine and flowers of a warmer clime.

So, one bright March morning, about six years from the time of Eliot's former visit to New Orleans, the party found themselves driving through the streets of the Crescent City to the palatial home of Pierre Carmontelle, which, during the two months of his betrothal to Maud, had been elegantly refitted for his bride.

New Orleans was in a great stir and bustle then, for it was the first year of the Southern Exposition. The city was crowded with visitors from all parts of the United States.

Maud and Edith were charmed with the quaint old city, and the warm, sweet air, and took the greatest pleasure in threading the Exposition grounds, exclaiming with delight when now and then they encountered the familiar faces of Northern friends, sight-seeing like themselves.

They were so busy daily "doing" the Exposition, that Eliot and Carmontelle did not get time to go down to the club, or they would have heard news that would have surprised them.

It came upon them suddenly one day, when, on leaving the Exposition grounds, the four came face to face with an entering couple—M. Remond, the wicked Frenchman, and the no less wicked Mme. Lorraine.

Madame was clinging to the arm of the dark-faced, elegant-looking Remond. She was in a tasteful Parisian costume, smiling and insolent, and looking not a day older than she did six years ago.

When she met the startled regard of those four pairs of eyes, she uttered an exclamation of amazement, and her cheek momentarily whitened through its rouge. The next instant her insolent courage returned. She smiled a bright, cold, conventional smile, bowed, and passed quickly on with her companion.

The others looked at each other with startled eyes.

"What does it mean?" queried Eliot Van Zandt, hoarsely.

"Let us call at the club to-night, and perhaps we can find out something," answered his brother-in-law.

They went accordingly, and great was the sensation created among their old friends by their reappearance after the lapse of years. Markham, the bachelor, was there, with some crow's-feet about the eyes and gray hairs in his brown locks to attest the flight of time. When questioned about Remond and Mme. Lorraine, he replied, laughing:

"Fancy their hardihood in coming here for their wedding-tour. They are married, you know."

"No!"

"Fact! It was announced in our papers two months ago. Married in Paris, and came here a week ago. I am told that they are staying at madame's house on Esplanade Street, but none of the Jockey Club has called on the wretches."

"One there is who will call," Carmontelle said, boldly. "What say you, Van Zandt? Shall we go to Esplanade Street and have it out with that fiendish woman?"

Eliot looked rather mystified, but he signified his assent.

"I will go, but—when?" he asked, and his friend answered:

"Now."

"Oh, I say, lads, put it off till to-morrow," cried the gay Markham. "I should like to go and back you up in the row, but I have an engagement for this evening."

"Sorry, but can't wait," Carmontelle answered. "Come, Eliot. Markham, adieu. You and the club will call at the Magnolias? Introduce you to my bride and her sister. Handsomest girls in Boston, and both geniuses."

"Thank you—only too happy to accept your kind invitation," Mr. Markham said, genially; and then they were out in the street, bound for the presence of the woman who had wrought such woe to Eliot Van Zandt and his lovely bride.

"Your object?" Eliot asked his friend, dubiously.

"Can you not guess? She shall tell us the tale she told Una that night in Boston, and we shall be the judges as to whether the barrier is great enough to separate you and your wife forever. Who knows but that Una, in her strange commingling of pride and humility, may have exaggerated the trouble?"

"I have always thought so—always believed that I could overthrow all her objections, and win her back if only I could have an interview with her again," Eliot said; then, sighing, "But I shall never have the chance. She will never come out of that grim convent again."

"Who knows? We will hope so, anyhow;" and then they were silent until their carriage drew up before the front of madame's well-remembered house, once so familiar to the club in the days when she was such a fascinating siren and kept all her wickedness carefully hidden in the background.

Lights glimmered brightly in the front of the house. The prim, ugly Mima opened the door to them and frowned darkly.

Was Mme. Lorraine at home? She took their cards and said, curtly, that she would see if Mme. Remond was in.

In another moment she came back and ushered them into the pretty salon. Remond was present, but retreated with a scowl upon their entrance.

The bride, all in silvery white silk cut décolleté, with diamonds shimmering on arms and breast, rose smilingly and bowed.

"This is an unexpected honor!" she said, with insolent empressement.

"You know to what cause to attribute the honor," Pierre Carmontelle said, icily.

"No," with a puzzled, inquiring tone; then, with a roguish ripple of laughter, "Ah, to congratulate me on my marriage, I suppose?"

CHAPTER XLIV

"Scarcely," answered Carmontelle, dryly, for Eliot Van Zandt seemed to have no words at his command. He could only gaze in horror at the vindictive woman. The former went on curtly, and in tones of calm authority: "We are here, madame, to hear from your own lips the strange story with which you sundered two loving hearts five years ago."

A sneer curled the lips of the handsome, heartless woman.

"You use romantic phrases, monsieur," she said.

"But true ones," he replied.

"Well?"

"We are waiting to hear the story you told Mr. Van Zandt's wife—the story that parted them," he answered again.

She shot a quick, inquiring glance at Eliot's agitated face.

"But you—you are divorced and married again, monsieur, are you not?"

"No," he answered; "I shall never have any other wife but her whom you drove from me by your treachery that night."

Madame was genuinely puzzled this time, for she exclaimed:

"But Mrs. Bryant Van Zandt told me you hated Little Nobody, and would have married her sister Ida, only for the circumstances that forced you into a hated marriage."

"It is false! I never loved Ida, nor one but the girl I made my wife!" exclaimed Eliot, indignantly; and his brother-in-law added:

"He loved Una from the first time he met her here, and when she was imprisoned with him in your secret cellar, she must have died of starvation but that he opened a vein in his arm and fed the dying girl with his own blood. Does not that prove the love he had for his wife?"

A bitter, ghastly change came over madame's rouged face, with a gasp, she reeled backward into a chair, and lifted her heavy eyes to Eliot's face.

"You loved her like that?" she cried; "and I—oh, I believed that you hated her! I was so glad, so glad! But—yes, it is better so; my revenge is more complete, for I have made you both suffer where I believed that it was only her heart I broke!"

"Fiend!" exclaimed Eliot.

And Carmontelle echoed:

"Fiend!"

The angry woman only laughed mockingly, as she said:

"Revenge is sweet! You scorned me, Eliot Van Zandt, for that slip of a girl, and now I have my pay!"

And throwing back her handsome head against the silken back of her chair, she laughed low and exultantly.

"We did not come here for recriminations, Madame Remond. We came, as I explained just now, to hear the story you told Una."

"Oui, monsieur; but your friend there will be sorry when he hears it. In fact, his Una wished him never to know it," madame said, maliciously.

"I have no doubt it was something very horrible, but doubtless it was an untruth. We wish to hear and judge for ourselves," was her opponent's undaunted reply.

She glared at him, and muttered something uncomplimentary beneath her breath, but he continued, coolly:

"Go on and tell us, please. We do not wish to detain your estimable husband much longer from his amiable bride!"

"Very well, then, since you will have it, here is Una's history in a nutshell: She is a child of shame."

"You told me that once before; also, that she was your child, but I did not believe you," answered Carmontelle.

She glared at him angrily, and said:

"Well, part of it was untrue, but so much the worse for the girl. She might better be my child than the offspring of a slave with a taint of African blood in her veins!"

"Woman!"

Eliot had sprung at her fiercely and clutched her white shoulder in a grasp like steel. He shook her wildly in a tempest of rage.

"Unsay that lie!" he hissed, fiercely, with blazing eyes. Madame turned, shrieking, to Carmontelle.

"Make him take his hands off me!" she panted, in terror. "Do not let him kill me for telling the truth!"

It looked indeed as if her life was in danger, for Eliot's face worked with fury, and sparks of fire seemed to flash from his angry eyes. It was with the greatest difficulty that Carmontelle dragged him away from the frightened woman and forced him into a seat.

"Be calm," he said. "Do not let her lies put you into a passion."

"Prove them lies if you can!" she screamed, losing her self-possession in anger at his incredulity.

"I shall certainly endeavor to do so," he replied, calmly. "But go on; finish the details of your story. So our Una was a slave's child, you say? Who, then, was her father?"

"You force me to disgrace the dead!" she flashed. "Very well, then, it was Monsieur Lorraine."

"Lorraine dead?" he exclaimed.

"Yes," sullenly.

"I remember Lorraine well. He was an exceedingly homely man. Una does not resemble him in the least," said aggravating Carmontelle.

Flashing him a fiery glance, she retorted:

"No, but she resembles her mother, the beautiful quadroon whom he gave me for a maid when I came to this house a bride the last year of the war. Una was a pretty little infant then, and the young quadroon, in a fit of jealous fury, told me all. Lorraine whipped her cruelly, and in her rage she stabbed herself to death. The world says that I made him jealous and drove him mad, but it is untrue. Remorse over the quadroon's death drove him inside the walls of a lunatic asylum." She paused a moment, then added: "I have told you now the simple truth, the same that I told the girl in Boston. She is the daughter of Monsieur Lorraine and his beautiful slave, and was in infancy a slave herself, until the failure of the Southern Confederacy freed her in common with all the other slaves."

She laughed aloud at the white horror of Eliot Van Zandt's face as he crouched upon a sofa at the further end of the room.

"A slave's child the bride of one of the proud, highly born Van Zandts! I am well avenged!" she exclaimed, fiendishly.

CHAPTER XLV

Carmontelle turned to his friend.

"Poor Una!" he said; "it is no wonder she fled in dismay, after hearing such a tale of horror. Come, let us go. We have heard all that madame's malignity can invent to torture two loving hearts, and the only task that remains to us is to prove it false."

"Which you will never do!" she exclaimed, with triumphant malice.

"Time will prove," he retorted, as he led the agitated Van Zandt out of the house, ignoring the ceremony of adieus to its mistress.

But his face grew very grave once they gained the darkness of the street. To himself he said, in alarm:

"Can her tale be true? It sounded very plausible."

To Eliot he said:

"I shall put this affair in the hands of one who will sift it to the bottom. Then, if Madame Remond has lied to us, she shall suffer for her sin."

"Poor Una! my poor little Una! How she must have suffered, bearing this bitter knowledge alone!" Eliot said, and a bursting sigh heaved his tortured breast.

"She was a wise little girl, at all events," Carmontelle answered, gravely. "Of course, if madame's tale be true, there was no other way proper for either, cruel as it seems to say it."

Eliot had no answer ready, but in his heart he knew that his friend spoke truly. Better, far better, that he and Una should suffer than to throw the blighting disgrace of his wife's parentage upon unborn descendants of the proud name of Van Zandt.

He could hardly share the incredulity of Carmontelle. Madame's story had been so plausible it had shaken his doubts. Now, indeed, it seemed to him that all hope was over. He and Una were indeed parted forever.

He went back to the Magnolias with his friend, and excusing himself from all society, went up to his room alone. He spent some time leaning from the window, his sad gaze roving over the moonlit city, thinking of Una, his lost bride, so near him that an hour's rapid walking would have borne him to her side, but sundered so widely apart from him by sorrow.

There came to him in the stillness a memory of the song he had sung to her so often, and which she had loved so well, "The Two Little Lives." How well it fitted now!

 
"Ah! for the morrow bringeth such sorrow,
Captured the lark was, and life grew dim;
There, too, the daisy torn from the way-side,
Prisoned and dying wept for him
Once more the lark sung; fainter his voice grew;
Her little song was hushed and o'er;
Two little lives gone out of the sunshine,
Out of this bright world for evermore."
 

"Poor little daisy!" Eliot sighed; then, bitterly, "Ah, if we had but died in prison that time, how blessed we should have been—never having this cruel knowledge to break our hearts!"

He flung himself down on the bed and tried to sleep. A disturbed slumber, mixed with frightful dreams, came to him. His head was hot, and his thirst was excessive. He rose several times and groped his way to the ice-pitcher, drinking greedily, until at last he had drained it all. In the morning they found him there delirious.

The old doctor shook his head.

"Brain fever!" he said. "He has had some terrible shock, I think, from the symptoms. I shall send you a trained hospital nurse, Carmontelle, for there must be careful nursing here if we bring the poor fellow out alive."

The nurse came, and was duly installed in his position, aided and abetted by Maud and Edith.

Carmontelle, after a day or two, stole away from the house long enough to consult his family lawyer on the subject of ferreting to the bottom the story the wicked Mme. Remond had told him of Una's birth.

At an early period of the narration of his story the lawyer became visibly excited.

"Go on. Tell me everything," he said, nervously, and Carmontelle obeyed.

When he had finished, Mr. Frayser cried out, eagerly:

"Upon my soul, Carmontelle, I believe the good Lord himself has sent you to me. You know I was Lorraine's lawyer?"

"I did not know it," was the answer.

"Yes," said Mr. Frayser; "and my client died a few months ago, in an insane asylum."

"So I was told by Madame Lorraine—or, as I should perhaps say, Remond."

"Yes, she married that wretch some time ago, and they came on here after Lorraine's death, to look after his property."

"Yes," said Carmontelle, rather indifferently. He was not much interested in the dead man's property.

"Lorraine was immensely rich, you know," continued Frayser. "Madame thought she would step into the money without let or hinderance. She wanted to sell all the property in New Orleans and get away with the spoils."

"Yes," absently.

The little lawyer smiled.

"Monsieur, you don't look much interested," he said; "but listen: Monsieur Lorraine left a box of private papers in my safe when he first employed me as his lawyer, at the time of his marriage to the actress. When I examined these papers, after his death, I found that the greater part of his wealth did not belong to him, but was held in trust for another person."

"Another person!" Carmontelle echoed, brightening up with sudden curiosity.

"A little child," continued Frayser, his little black eyes twinkling with fun at Carmontelle's eagerness.

"Go on, go on."

"It seems that Lorraine had an only sister who was married during the war to a very wealthy man, a colonel—mon Dieu! Carmontelle, what a coincidence! it was your own name—he was a Colonel Carmontelle!"

"And lived in Alabama—and was killed in battle just before the close of the war. He was my cousin!" exclaimed Carmontelle, excitedly.

"The same," replied the lawyer. "Well, his death was such a shock to his young wife that, when her little one was born, a month later, she died—of heart-break, or, at least, so say the letters of her friends, that were written from Alabama to summon him to come for the little orphan heiress."

"Una!" exclaimed Carmontelle, radiantly.

"Most likely," said the lawyer, smiling. "But permit me to go on with my prosaic story. According to these private papers, some of which are in the form of memorandums, Lorraine brought the babe to New Orleans with its negro nurse, and very soon afterward married, more for the child's sake than his own, and went to housekeeping on Esplanade Street."

"All is clear as day. Thank the good God, Una's stainless parentage is established, and I will go this day and bring her to the side of her suffering husband," Carmontelle exclaimed, joyously.

"I think you may safely do so," smiled the delighted lawyer. "But I have still more to tell you. The physician in charge at the asylum where Lorraine died wrote to me to come and make preparations for his burial. I went and heard a strange story. Lorraine, in his last illness, had recovered his reason and memory. He had dictated and signed a paper to be given to me. You shall read it yourself."

He brought out from his desk the paper, and Carmontelle eagerly ran over the contents.

Briefly, it was to the effect that Lorraine, just previous to the insanity that had overtaken him, had found out that his wife was false to him, and that she had married him only for the money which she believed to be his own. Realizing suddenly that he had made no arrangements by which his little niece would receive her inheritance, should he be suddenly stricken by death, and fearful of Mme. Lorraine's treachery in the matter, he had executed a will in which he left to the little Mary Carmontelle the whole of his own small patrimony, together with the wealth of her dead father. He had hidden the will in the library, intending to place it in Frayser's care, but his mind had suddenly gone wrong with the stress of trouble, and his removal by his wife to an insane asylum had put a sudden end to everything.

"Madame knows all this?" Carmontelle queried, looking up from the paper.

"Yes; for I confronted her with it when she came to me to settle up the property. She was as bold as brass, and declared that the child had died in infancy. I made a search in the library, all the same, for the missing will, but it could not be found. Doubtless that wicked woman has destroyed it. I would not take her word that the little heiress was dead, as she could offer no proof at all except the word of that grim maid-servant of hers, so I have been advertising in a number of papers for the child or young lady, as she is now, if living. You will see from that paper that I am appointed her guardian until her marriage."

"She has been married nearly six years. Dear little Una! she is my cousin, and the name I gave her when I adopted her as my daughter was really her own. It is the oddest thing, too, that the nuns at the convent baptized her Marie, her own name, but in the French form. Fact is certainly stranger than fiction!" exclaimed Maud's husband, in wonder and delight.

"It is wonderful, certainly," agreed Frayser, "and your visit to me to-day is one of the most wonderful things about it. I was beginning to give up all hope of finding the missing heiress, and Mme. Remond and her rascally husband were pressing me so furiously that I was beginning to fear I must make some concessions to them. But now all is made plain, and I can lay my hand on Lorraine's niece and heiress and oust her enemy from the place she has usurped so long. But I must tell you one thing, unless that missing will can be found, the ex-actress will make us trouble yet over Mrs. Van Zandt's inheritance."

"Never mind about the will now. What is money when it lies in our power to reunite the crushed hearts of that long-parted husband and wife. Let us get into my carriage and go and fetch Una away from her convent to the side of her sick husband!" cried Carmontelle.

"Agreed with all my heart!" answered Frayser.