By Frances Hodgson Burnett

Copyright, 1877

It was Madame who first entered the box, and Madame was bright with youthful bloom, bright with jewels, and, moreover, a beauty. She was a little creature, with childishly large eyes, a low, white forehead, reddish-brown hair, and Greek nose and mouth.

“Clearly,” remarked the old lady in the box opposite, “not a Frenchwoman. Her youth is too girlish, and she has too petulant an air of indifference.”

This old lady in the box opposite was that venerable and somewhat severe aristocrat, Madame de Castro, and having gazed for a moment or so a little disapprovingly at the new arrival, she turned her glasses to the young beauty’s companion and uttered an exclamation.

It was at Monsieur she was looking now. Monsieur had followed his wife closely, bearing her fan and bouquet and wrap, and had silently seated him self a little behind her and in the shadow.

“Ciel!” cried Madame de Castro, “what an ugly little man!”

It was not an unnatural exclamation. Fate had not been so kind to the individual referred to as she might have been—in fact she had been definitely cruel. He was small of figure, insignificant, dark, and wore a patient sphynx-like air of gravity. He did not seem to speak or move, simply sat in the shadow holding his wife’s belongings, apparently almost entirely unnoticed by her.

“I don’t know him at all,” said Madame de Castro; “though that is not to be wondered at, since I have exiled myself long enough to forget and be forgotten by half Paris. What is his name?”

The gentleman at her side—a distinguished-looking old young man, with a sarcastic smile—began with the smile, and ended with a half laugh.

“They call him,” he replied, “Le Monsieur de la petite Dame. His name is Villefort.”

“Le Monsieur de la petite Dame,” repeated Madame, testily. “That is a title of new Paris—the Paris of your Americans and English. It is villainously ill-bred.”

M. Renard’s laugh receded into the smile again, and the smile became of double significance.

“True,” he acquiesced, “but it is also villainously apropos. Look for yourself.”

Madame did so, and her next query, after she had dropped her glass again, was a sharp one.

“Who is she—the wife?”

“She is what you are pleased to call one of our Americans! You know the class,”—with a little wave of the hand,—“rich, unconventional, comfortable people, who live well and dress well, and have an incomprehensibly naïve way of going to impossible places and doing impossible things by way of enjoyment. Our fair friend there, for instance, has probably been round the world upon several occasions, and is familiar with a number of places and objects of note fearful to contemplate. They came here as tourists, and became fascinated with European life. The most overwhelming punishment which could be inflicted upon that excellent woman, the mother, would be that she should be compelled to return to her New York, or Philadelphia, or Boston, whichsoever it may be.”

“Humph!” commented Madame. “But you have not told me the name.”

“Madame Villefort’s? No, not yet. It was Trent—Mademoiselle Bertha Trent.”

“She is not twenty yet,” said Madame, in a queer, grumbling tone. “What did she marry that man for?”

“God knows,” replied M. Renard, not too devoutly, “Paris does not.”

For some reason best known to herself, Madame de Castro looked angry. She was a shrewd old person, with strong whims of her own, even at seventy. She quite glared at the pretty American from under her bushy eyebrows.

“Le Monsieur de la petite Dame!” she fumed. “I tell you it is low—low to give a man such names.”

“Oh!” returned Renard, shrugging his shoulders, “we did not give it to him. It was an awkward servant who dubbed him so at first. She was new to her position, and forgot his name, and being asked who had arrived, stumbled upon this bon mot: ‘Un monsieur, Madame—le monsieur de la petite dame,’’—and, being repeated and tossed lightly from hand to hand, it has become at last an established witticism, albeit bandied under breath.”

It was characteristic of the august De Castro that during the remainder of the evening’s entertainment she should occupy herself more with her neighbors than with the opera. She aroused M. Renard to a secret ecstasy of mirth by the sharp steadiness of her observation of the inmates of the box opposite to them. She talked about them, too, in a tone not too well modulated, criticising the beautifully dressed little woman, her hair, her eyes, her Greek nose and mouth, and, more than all, her indifferent expression and her manner of leaning upon the edge of her box and staring at the stage as if she did not care for, and indeed scarcely saw, what was going on upon it.

“That is the way with your American beauties,” she said. “They have no respect for things. Their people spoil them—their men especially. They consider themselves privileged to act as their whims direct. They have not the gentle timidity of Frenchwomen. What French girl would have the sang froid to sit in one of the best boxes of the Nouvelle Opéra and regard, with an actual air of ennui, such a performance as this? She does not hear a word that is sung.”

“And we—do we hear?” bantered M. Renard.

“Pouf!” cried Madame. “We! We are world-dried and weather-beaten. We have not a worm-eaten emotion between us. I am seventy, and you, who are thirty-five, are the elder of the two. Bah! At that girl’s age I had the heart of a dove.”

“But that is long ago,” murmured M. Renard, as if to himself. It was quite human that he should slightly resent being classed with an unamiable grenadier of seventy.

“Yes!” with considerable asperity. “Fifty years!” Then, with harsh voice and withered face melted suddenly into softness quite naïve, “Mon Dieu!” she said, “Fifty years since Arsène whispered into my ear at my first opera, that he saw tears in my eyes!”

It was at this instant that there appeared in the Villefort box a new figure,—that of a dark, slight young man of graceful movements,—in fact, a young man of intensely striking appearance. M. Villefort rose to receive him with serious courtesy, but the pretty American was not so gracious. Not until he had seated himself at her side and spoken to her did she turn her head and permit her eyes simply to rest upon his face.

M. Renard smiled again.

“Enter,” he remarked in a low tone,—“enter M. Ralph Edmondstone, the cousin of Madame.”

His companion asked no questions, but he proceeded, returning to his light and airy tone:—

“M. Ralph Edmondstone is a genius,” he said. “He is an artist, he is a poet, he is also a writer of subtile prose. His sonnets to Euphrasie—in the day of Euphrasie—awakened the admiration of the sternest critics: they were so tender, so full of purest fire! Some of the same critics also could scarcely choose between these and his songs to Aglæ in her day, or Camille in hers. He is a young man of fine fancies, and possesses the amiable quality of being invariably passionately in earnest. As he was serious in his sentiments yesterday, so he will be to-morrow, so he is to-day.”

“To-day!” echoed Madame de Castro. “Nonsense!”

Madame Villefort did not seem to talk much. It was M. Ralph Edmondstone who conversed, and that, too, with so much of the charm of animation that it was pleasurable even to be a mere looker-on.

One involuntarily strained one’s ears to catch a sentence,—he was so eagerly absorbed, so full of rapid, gracefully unconscious and unconventional gesture.

“I wonder what he is saying?” Madame de Castro was once betrayed into exclaiming.

“Something metaphysical, about a poem, or a passage of music, or a picture,—or perhaps his soul,” returned M. Renard. “His soul is his strong point,—he pets it and wonders at it. He puts it through its paces. And yet, singularly enough, he is never ridiculous—only fanciful and naïve. It is his soul which so fascinates women.”

Whether this last was true of other women or not, Madame Villefort scarcely appeared fascinated. As she listened, her eyes still rested upon his eager mobile face, but with a peculiar expression,—an expression of critical attention, and yet one which somehow detracted from her look of youth, as if she weighed his words as they fell from his lips and classified them, without any touch of the enthusiasm which stirred within himself.

Suddenly she rose from her seat ana addressed her husband, who immediately rose also. Then she spoke to M. Edmondstone, and without more ado, the three left the box,—the young beauty, a little oddly, rather followed than accompanied by her companions,—at the recognition of which circumstance Madame de Castro uttered a series of sharp ejaculations of disapproval.

“Bah! Bah!” she cried. “She is too young for such airs!—as if she were Madame l’Impératrice herself! Take me to my carriage. I am tired also.”

Crossing the pavement with M. Renard, they passed the carriage of the Villeforts. Before its open door stood M. Villefort and Edmondstone, and the younger man, with bared head, bent forward speaking to his cousin.

“If I come to-morrow,” he was saying, “you will be at home, Bertha?”

“Yes.”

“Then, good-night,”—holding out his hand,—“only I wish so that you would go to the Aylmers instead of home. That protégée of Mrs. Aylmer’s—the little singing girl—would touch your heart with her voice. On hearing her, one thinks at once of some shy wild bird high in a clear sky,—far enough above earth to have forgotten to be timid.”

“Yes,” came quietly from the darkness within the carriage; “but I am too tired to care about voices just now. Good-night, Ralph!”

M. Renard’s reply of “God knows, Paris does not,” to Madame de Castro’s query as to why Madame Villefort had married her husband, contained an element of truth, and yet there were numbers of Parisian-Americans, more especially the young, well-looking, and masculine, who at the time the marriage had taken place had been ready enough with sardonic explanations.

“There are women who are avaricious enough to sell their souls,” they cried; “and the maternal Trent is one of them. The girl is only to blame for allowing herself to be bullied into the match.”

“But the weak place in this argument,” said M. Renard, “is, that the people are too rich to be greatly influenced by money. If there had been a title,—but there was no title.”

Neither did Bertha Trent comport herself like a cowed creature. She took her place in society as Madame Villefort in such a manner as could give rise to no comment whatever; only one or two of the restless inquisitive wondered if they had not been, mistaken in her. She was, as I have said already, a childishly small and slight creature,—the kind of woman to touch one with suggestions of helplessness and lack of will; and yet, notwithstanding this, a celebrated artist—a shrewd, worldly-wise old fellow—who had painted her portrait, had complained that he was not satisfied with it because he had not done justice to “the obstinate endurance in her eye.”

It was to her cousin, Ralph Edmondstone, he had said this with some degree of testiness, and Edmondstone had smiled and answered:—

“What! have you found that out? Few people do.”

At the time of the marriage Edmondstone had been in Rome singeing his wings in the light of the eyes of a certain Marchesa who was his latest poetic passion. She was not his first fancy, nor would she be his last, but she had power enough for the time being to have satisfied the most exacting of women.

He was at his banker’s when he heard the news spoken of as the latest item from American Paris, and his start and exclamation of disgust drew forth some cynical after-comment from men who envied him.

“Who?” he said, with indiscreet impatience. “That undersized sphynx of a Villefort? Faugh!”

But insignificant though he might be, it was M. Villefort who had won, and if he was nothing more, he was at least a faithful attendant. Henceforth, those who saw his wife invariably saw him also,—driving with her in her carriage, riding with her courageously if ungracefully, standing or seated near her in the shadow of her box at the Nouvelle Opéra, silent, impassive, grave, noticeable only through the contrast he afforded to her girlish beauty and bloom.

“Always there!” commented a sharp American belle of mature years, “like an ugly little conscience.”

Edmondstone’s first meeting with his cousin after his return to Paris was accidental. He had rather put off visiting her, and one night, entering a crowded room, he found himself standing behind a girl’s light figure and staring at an abundance of reddish-brown hair. When, almost immediately the pretty head to which this hair belonged turned with a slow, yet involuntary-looking movement toward him, he felt that he became excited without knowing why.

“Ah, Bertha!” he exclaimed.

She smiled a little and held out her hand, and he immediately became conscious of M. Villefort being quite near and regarding him seriously.

It was the perverseness of fate that he should find in Bertha Villefort even more than he had once seen in Bertha Trent, and there had been a time when he had seen a great deal in Bertha Trent. In the Trent household he had been a great favorite. No social evening or family festivity had seemed complete without his presence. The very children had felt that they had a claim upon his good-humor, and his tendency to break forth into whimsical frolic. Good Mrs. Trent had been wont to scold him and gossip with him. He had read his sonnets and metaphysical articles to Bertha, and occasionally to the rest; in fact, his footing in the family was familiar and firmly established. But since her marriage Bertha had become a little incomprehensible, and on that account a little more interesting. He was sure she had developed, but could not make out in what direction. He found occasion to reproach her sometimes with the changes he found in her.

“There are times when I hardly know you,” he would say, “you are so finely orthodox and well controlled. It was not so with you once, Bertha. Don’t—don’t become that terrible thing, a fine lady, and worse still, a fine lady who is désillusionée”

It baffled him that she never appeared much moved, by his charges. Certainly she lived the life of a “fine lady,”—a brilliant life, a luxurious one, a life full of polite dissipation. Once, when in a tenderly fraternal mood, he reproached her with this also, she laughed at him frankly.

“It is absinthe,” she said. “It is my absinthe at least, and who does not drink a little absinthe—of one kind or another?”

He was sincerely convinced that from this moment he understood and had the right to pity and watch over her. He went oftener to see her. In her presence he studied her closely, absent he brooded over her. He became impatiently intolerant of M. Villefort, and prone to condemn him, he scarcely knew for what.

“He has no dignity—no perception,” was his parental decision. “He has not even the delicacy to love her, or he would have the tenderness to sacrifice his own feelings and leave her to herself. I could do it for a woman I loved.”

But M. Villefort was always there,—gravely carrying the shawls, picking up handkerchiefs, and making himself useful.

“Imbécile!” muttered M. Renard under cover of his smile and his mustache, as he stood near his venerable patroness the first time she met the Villeforts.

“Blockhead!” stealthily ejaculated that amiable aristocrat. But though she looked grimly at M. Villefort, M. Renard was uncomfortably uncertain that it was he to whom she referred.

“Go and bring them to me,” she commanded, “Go and bring them to me before some one else engages them. I want to talk to that girl.”

It was astonishing how agreeable she made herself to her victims when she had fairly entrapped them. Bertha hesitated a little before accepting her offer of a seat at her side, but once seated she found herself oddly amused. When Madame de Castro chose to rake the embers of her seventy years, many a lively coal discovered itself among the ashes.

Seeing the two women together, Edmondstone shuddered in fastidious protest.

“How could you laugh at that detestable old woman?” he exclaimed on encountering Bertha later in the evening. “I wonder that M. Villefort would permit her to talk to you. She is a wicked, cynical creature, who has the hardihood to laugh at her sins instead of repenting of them.”

“Perhaps that is the reason she is so amusing,” said Bertha.

Edmondstone answered her with gentle mournfulness.

“What!” he said. “Have you begun to say such things? You too, Bertha”—

The laugh with which she stopped him was both light and hard.

“Where is M. Villefort?” she asked. “I have actually not seen him for fifteen minutes. Is it possible that Madame de Castro has fascinated him into forgetting me?”

Edmondstone went to his hotel that night in a melancholy mood. He even lay awake to think what a dreary mistake his cousin’s marriage was. She had been such a tender and easily swayed little soul as a girl, and now it really seemed as if she was hardening into a woman of the world. In the old times he had been wont to try his sonnets upon Bertha as a musician tries his chords upon his most delicate instrument. Even now he remembered certain fine, sensitive expressions of hers which had thrilled him beyond measure.

“How could she marry such a fellow as that—how could she?” he groaned. “What does it mean? It must mean something.”

He was pale and heavy-eyed when he wandered round to the Villeforts’ the following morning. M. Villefort was sitting with Bertha and reading aloud. He stopped to receive their visitor punctiliously and inquire after his health.

“M. Edmondstone cannot have slept well,” he remarked.

“I did not sleep at all,” Edmondstone answered, “and naturally have a headache.”

Bertha pointed to a wide lounge of the pouf order.

“Then go to sleep now,” she said; “M. Villefort will read. When I have a headache he often reads me to sleep, and I am always better on awaking.”

Involuntarily Edmondstone half frowned. Absurdly enough, he resented in secret this amiability on the part of M. Villefort toward his own wife. He was quite prepared to be severe upon the reading, but was surprised to be compelled to acknowledge that M. Villefort read wondrously well, and positively with hints of delicate perception. His voice was full and yet subtly flexible. Edmondstone tried to protest against this also, but uselessly. Finally he was soothed, and from being fretfully wide-awake suddenly passed into sleep as Bertha had commanded. How long his slumber lasted he could not have told. All at once he found himself aroused and wide-awake as ever. His headache had departed; his every sense seemed to have gained keenness. M. Villefort’s voice had ceased, and for a few seconds utter, dead silence reigned. Then he heard the fire crackling, and shortly afterward a strange, startling sound—a sharp, gasping sob!

The pang which seized upon him was strong indeed. In one moment he seemed to learn a thousand things by intuition—to comprehend her, himself, the past. Before he moved he knew that Villefort was not in the room, and he had caught a side glimpse of the pretty blue of Bertha’s dress.