By some chance the train which took Katy and Miss Errington away brought Madame Felix, greatly surprised and delighted to meet Monsieur Haverleigh and le petit 414garçon, who she had no idea were in Lucerne. All this she said in very broken English for the benefit of Sam Slayton, who confided to Paul that Madame was an infernal liar and more dangerous than ever. Possibly Carl thought so too. It was such a change from Katy to this woman who, by her delicate flattery and tacit appeal for sympathy, had fascinated and controlled him against his better judgment. He had left Paris without letting her know where he was going, and had breathed freer when the Jura mountains divided him from her. When with her she absorbed him entirely and held him with cords he could neither understand nor loosen. Away from her, he could rebel against her influence and the ownership of him which her manner implied. He was her good American friend,—her adviser,—her brother, since she lost her dear Felix, whose name she never mentioned without her handkerchief going to her eyes in token of her sorrow.
At the Grand Hotel where she had spent much of her time since her husband’s death she had been sitting one evening with Carl in the court near some English people, a part of whose conversation they overheard as it related to themselves. “She has him sure,—more’s the pity;—her husband hasn’t been dead so very long;—he don’t look quite the chap to be roped in by a widow older than himself,” were the disjointed sentences Carl caught, and which Madame with all her ignorance of English understood. Carl flushed angrily and was about to move away when, with a shrug of her shoulders, Madame laid her hand on his arm and detained him, saying, “Stay where you are. I will go, if either; it is I they aim at, these nasty English. I hate them;—not to understand that we are friends, nothing more. Absurd to think different, and 415I so much older than you;—many years,—two, three, four perhaps. I am twenty-seven, and you? You are quite a boy compared to me.”
Carl did not reply. He knew she would never see thirty again, and he did not fancy being called a boy.
“I will go to Passy and bury myself, if it annoys you to be friends with me. Shall I?” she continued.
Carl told her he didn’t care a sou for the English or what they thought, and she was not to go to Passy on his account. She did go, however, the next day,—called there suddenly on business which took her to Marseilles. Left to himself Carl began to think, and as a result of the thinking he packed his trunks and left Paris without leaving his address at the hotel, an act for which Sam gave special thanksgiving and dropped a piece of money on the plate at St. Eustace’s, where he was in the habit of going to hear the music. If Carl hoped to be rid of Madame in this way he was mistaken, for she found his address at his banker’s and started at once for Lucerne.
“I believe she is the devil,” he said to himself when he saw her alight from the railway carriage, affecting a pretty air of invalidism as she came towards him.
She had been ill in Marseilles, she said, and her physician had ordered her to Switzerland for a change of air, “and here you are, at the Schweitzerhof, I suppose. All the swells go there. I was once there a month with dear Felix, but now,—” she hesitated a moment and then went on: “I did not write you the nature of the business which took me so suddenly to Passy and Marseilles. I knew your good heart would be so sorry for me. Felix was not as rich as I supposed. He has a brother to whom he owed a great deal of money and who had a mortgage on the chateau. He is there now, and I,—I am poor. I must go to the Cygne, where it is cheaper.”
416She said all this very rapidly, with a tear or two on her eyelashes, which might have dropped on her nose, if she had ever done so unbecoming and vulgar a thing as to let a tear stand upon that organ. She had the rare faculty to cry just when she wanted to, and also to keep her tears where they would do the most effective work. Naturally she did not go to the Cygne, but to the Schweitzerhof, and took a parlor and bedroom and seemed anything but poor. She was, however, very quiet, and mixed but little with any of the guests, except Carl. Over him she speedily resumed her influence to some extent. She was so bright and original and said such amusing things, and always made him feel at his best with her delicate flattery, which seemed so sincere that he could not resist her.
“Katy stands on so high a plane of puritanism that I can’t touch her with a ten-foot pole. I always feel like a cad with her, while with Julie I am satisfied and believe myself a pretty good fellow,” he thought, and drifted again into an atmosphere he knew was unhealthy and one which he would not like Katy to breathe.
Of himself he would not have told Julie that Katy had been there; but Madame heard of her from Paul, who was full of Katy, so beautiful, he said, and Carl loved her so much and sat with her under the chestnuts and rowed on the lake, and everything. Others than Paul talked of the lovely American who had sung for them one night in the parlor as no one had ever sung in Lucerne before. Every guest in the house had come in to hear her, while a crowd had gathered outside to listen. Madame smiled sweetly as she heard all this, but there was fierce jealousy in her heart of this young girl who had come between her and Carl. He might never marry her, she knew, but she would bind him to her with one of those Platonic friendships 417which French women delight in, and which would remove Katy from her path almost as effectually as marriage would have done.
“American women are so prudish,” she thought, “and cannot understand that a man and woman can be everything to each other and still be perfectly correct. Once let Katy believe there is something between us not quite au fait, and I have nothing to fear from her.”
Still Katy troubled her, and she felt an irresistible desire to talk of her to Carl, but always on the assumption that she was his sister and nothing more.
“They tell me your sister is very beautiful and sings divinely. I wish I might have seen her. You must be proud of her,” she said to him, and he answered, “She is beautiful, and I am proud of her.”
Madame understood at once that he would rather not discuss Katy with her, and her eyes shone for a moment with a dangerous light, as she said next, “You must love her very much?”
To this Carl made no answer, and Madame continued: “She was very young, I believe, when your mother went to The Elms, was she not?”
“Yes, very young,” Carl replied, wondering vaguely how Madame knew so much about The Elms as she sometimes seemed to know.
“Paul has told her a great deal, I dare say,” he thought, and then, at a sudden turn of Madame’s head and a lifting of her eyelids there came to him a misty kind of feeling, such as he had several times experienced, that somewhere he had seen just such a poise of the head and heard just such purring tones as belonged to Madame Felix.
He had never spoken to her about it, but now, glad of anything which would turn the conversation away from Katy, he asked abruptly if she were ever in America.
418“In America!” she answered with great energy. “Mon dieu! Jamais! America, Monsieur?—nothing could tempt me to cross the sea. I die upon the Channel. Why do you think I have been in America?”
“Because you remind me of some one I must have seen,” he said, “and just now when you were talking of Katy I could almost think who it was.”
“Impossible that you could have seen me. Impossible!” and Madame shook her head very decidedly, but said no more of Katy, either then or afterwards.
Carl was going to Homburg from Lucerne, and when he told Madame of his intention she declared it to be the very place where she was expecting to go, hoping the waters would do her good and where she knew of an inexpensive pension.
“I must retrench now,” she said. “Nearly every letter I get brings worse news than the one before with regard to my fortune, which I thought so large. I really ought not to have staid at this hotel, and but for the accident of meeting you should not.”
Carl understood her, and with his usual generosity offered to pay her bills, and when she declined with horror from putting herself in so questionable a position, especially as she had no Felix to protect her, he felt almost as if he had insulted her and promptly asked her pardon, offering as a loan what her self-respect would not allow her to take as a gift. This she accepted, and a week later found her in Homburg, whither Carl had preceded her by a few days.
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