Mrs. Rushmore’s delight was touching, for she could almost feel that Margaret had come to see her quite for her own sake, whereas she had pictured the ‘child,’ as she still called the great artist, spending most of her time in carrying on inaudible conversations with Logotheti under the trees in the lawn, or in the most remote corners of the drawing-room; for that had been the accepted method of courtship in Mrs. Rushmore’s young days, and she was quite ignorant of the changes that had taken place since then.
Half-an-hour later, Margaret was in her old room upstairs writing a letter, and Mrs. Rushmore had given strict orders that until further notice Miss Donne was ‘not at home’ for any one at all, no matter who might call.
When the letter already covered ten pages, Margaret laid down her pen and without the least pause or hesitation tore the sheets to tiny bits, inking her fingers in the process because the last one was not yet dry.
‘What a wicked woman I am!’ she exclaimed aloud, to the very great surprise of Potts, her English maid, who was still unpacking in the next room, the door being open.
‘Beg pardon, ma’am?’ the woman asked, putting in her head.
‘I said I was a wicked woman,’ Margaret answered, rising; ‘and what’s more, I believe I am. But I quite forgot you were there, Potts, or I probably should not have said it aloud.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ answered Potts meekly, and she went back to her unpacking.
Margaret had two maids, who were oddly suited to her two natures. She had inherited Alphonsine from her friend the famous retired soprano, Madame Bonanni, and the cadaverous, clever, ill-tempered, garrulous dresser was as necessary to Cordova’s theatrical existence as paint, limelight, wigs, and an orchestra. The English Potts, the meek, silent, busy, and intensely respectable maid, continually made it clear that her mistress was Miss Donne, an English lady, and that Madame Cordova, the celebrated singer, was what Mr. Van Torp would have called ‘only a side-show.’
Potts was quite as much surprised when she heard Miss Donne calling herself a wicked woman as Alphonsine would have been if she had heard Madame Cordova say that she sang completely out of tune, a statement which would not have disturbed the English maid’s equanimity in the very least. It might have pleased her, for she always secretly hoped that Margaret would give up the stage, marry an English gentleman with a nice name, and live in Hans Crescent or Cadogan Gardens, or some equally smart place, and send Alphonsine about her business for ever.
For the English maid and the French maid hated each other as whole-heartedly as if Cressy or Agincourt had been fought yesterday. Potts alluded to Alphonsine as ‘that Frenchwoman,’ and Alphonsine spoke of Potts as ‘l’Anglaise,’ with a tone and look of withering scorn, as if all English were nothing better than animals. Also she disdained to understand a word of their ‘abominable jargon’; and Potts quietly called the French language ‘frog-talk,’ but spoke it quite intelligibly, though without the least attempt at an accent. Nevertheless, each of the two was devoted to Margaret, and they were both such excellent servants that they never quarrelled or even exchanged a rude word — to Margaret’s knowledge. They treated each other with almost exaggerated politeness, calling each other respectively ‘Meess’ and ‘Mamzell’; and if Alphonsine’s black eyes glared at Potts now and then, the English maid put on such an air of sweetly serene unconsciousness as a woman of the world might have envied.
The letter that had been torn up before it was finished was to have gone to Lady Maud, but Margaret herself had been almost sure that she would not send it, even while she was writing. She had poured out her heart, now that she could do so with the consoling possibility of destroying the confession before any one read it. She had made an honest effort to get at the truth about herself by writing down all she knew to be quite true, as if it were to go to her best friend; but as soon as she realised that she had got to the end of her positive knowledge and was writing fiction — which is what might be true, but is not known to be — she had the weakness to tear up her letter, and to call herself names for not knowing her own mind, as if every woman did, or every man either.
She had written that she had done very wrong in engaging herself to Logotheti; that was the ‘wickedness’ she accused herself of, repeating the self-accusation to her astonished maid, because it was a sort of relief to say the words to somebody. She had written that she did not really care for him in that way; that when he was near she could not resist a sort of natural attraction he had for her, but that as soon as he was gone she felt it no longer and she wished he would not come back; that his presence disturbed her and made her uncomfortable, and, moreover, interfered with her art; but that she had not the courage to tell him so, and wished that some one else would do it for her; that he was not really the sort of man she could ever be happy with; that her ideal of a husband was so and so, and this and that — and here fiction had begun, and she had put a stop to it by destroying the whole letter instead of crossing out a few lines, — which was a pity; for if Lady Maud had received it, she would have told Mr. Van Torp that he needed no help from her since Margaret herself asked no better than to be freed from the engagement.
Logotheti did not come out to Versailles that afternoon, because he was plentifully endowed with tact where women were concerned, and he applied all the knowledge and skill he had to the single purpose of pleasing Margaret. But before dinner he telephoned and asked to speak with her, and this she could not possibly refuse. Besides, the day had seemed long, and though she did not wish for his presence she wanted something — that indescribable, mysterious something which disturbed her and made her feel uncomfortable when she felt it, but which she missed when she did not see him for a day or two.
‘How are you?’ asked his voice, and he ran on without waiting for an answer. ‘I hope you are not very tired after crossing yesterday. I came by Boulogne — decent of me, wasn’t it? You must be sick of seeing me all the time, so I shall give you a rest for a day or two. Telephone whenever you think you can bear the sight of me again, and I’ll be with you in thirty-five minutes. I shall not stir from home in this baking weather. If you think I’m in mischief you’re quite mistaken, dear lady, for I’m up to my chin in work!’
‘I envy you,’ Margaret said, when he paused at last. ‘I’ve nothing on earth to do, and the piano here is out of tune. But you’re quite right, I don’t want to see you a little bit, and I’m not jealous, nor suspicious, nor anything disagreeable. So there!’
‘How nice of you!’
‘I’m very nice,’ Margaret answered with laughing emphasis. ‘I know it. What sort of work are you doing? It’s only idle curiosity, so don’t tell me if you would rather not! Have you got a new railway in Brazil, or an overland route to the other side of beyond?’
‘Nothing so easy! I’m brushing up my Tartar.’
‘Brushing up what? I didn’t hear.’
‘Tartar — the Tartar language — T-a-r— ‘he began to spell the word.
‘Yes, I hear now,’ interrupted Margaret. ‘But what in the world is the use of knowing it? You must be awfully hard up for something to do!’
‘You can be understood from Constantinople to the Pacific Ocean if you can speak Tartar,’ Logotheti answered in a matter-of-fact tone.
‘I daresay! But you’re not going to travel from Constantinople to the Pacific Ocean — —’
‘I might. One never can tell what one may like to do.’
‘Oh, if it’s because Tartar is useful “against the bites of sharks,”’ answered Margaret, quoting Alice, ‘learn it by all means!’
‘Besides, there are all sorts of people in Paris. I’m sure there must be some Tartars. I might meet one, and it would be amusing to be able to talk to him.’
‘Nonsense! Why should you ever meet a Tartar? How absurd you are!’
‘There’s one with me now — close beside me, at my elbow.’
‘Don’t be silly, or I’ll ring off.’
‘If you don’t believe me, listen!’
He said something in a language Margaret did not understand, and another voice answered him at once in the same tongue. Margaret started slightly and bent her brows with a puzzled and displeased look.
‘Is that your teacher?’ she asked with more interest in her tone than she had yet betrayed.
‘Yes.’
‘I begin to understand. Do you mind telling me how old she is?’
‘It’s not “she,” it’s a young man. I don’t know how old he is. I’ll ask him if you like.’
Again she heard him speak a few incomprehensible words, which were answered very briefly in the same tongue.
‘He tells me he is twenty,’ Logotheti said. ‘He’s a good-looking young fellow. How is Mrs. Rushmore? I forgot to ask.’
‘She’s quite well, thank you. But I should like to know — —’
‘Will you be so very kind as to remember me to her, and to say that I hope to find her at home the day after to-morrow?’
‘Certainly. Come to-morrow if you like. But please tell me how you happened to pick up that young Tartar. It sounds so interesting! He has such a sweet voice.’
There was no reply to this question, and Margaret could not get another word from Logotheti. The communication was apparently cut off. She rang up the Central Office and asked for his number again, but the young woman soon said that she could get no answer to the call, and that something was probably wrong with the instrument of Number One-hundred-and-six-thirty-seven.
Margaret was not pleased, and she was silent and absent-minded at dinner and in the evening.
‘It’s the reaction after London,’ she said with a smile, when Mrs. Rushmore asked if anything was the matter. ‘I find I am more tired than I knew, now that it’s all over.’
Mrs. Rushmore was quite of the same opinion, and it was still early when she declared that she herself was sleepy and that Margaret had much better go to bed and get a good night’s rest.
But when the Primadonna was sitting before the glass and her maid was brushing out her soft brown hair, she was not at all drowsy, and though her eyes looked steadily at their own reflection in the mirror, she was not aware that she saw anything.
‘Potts,’ she said suddenly, and stopped.
‘Yes, ma’am?’ answered the maid with meek interrogation, and without checking the regular movement of the big brush.
But Margaret said no more for several moments. She enjoyed the sensation of having her hair brushed; it made her understand exactly how a cat feels when some one strokes its back steadily, and she could almost have purred with pleasure as she held her handsome head back and moved it a little in real enjoyment under each soft stroke.
‘Potts,’ she began again at last, ‘you are not very imaginative, are you?’
‘No, ma’am,’ the maid answered, because it seemed to be expected of her, though she had never thought of the matter.
‘Do you think you could possibly be mistaken about a voice, if you didn’t see the person who was speaking?’
‘In what way, ma’am?’
‘I mean, do you think you could take a man’s voice for a woman’s at a distance?’
‘Oh, I see!’ Potts exclaimed. ‘As it might be, at the telephone?’
‘Well — at the telephone, if you like, or anywhere else. Do you think you might?’
‘It would depend on the voice, ma’am,’ observed Potts, with caution.
‘Of course it would,’ assented Margaret rather impatiently.
‘Well, ma’am, I’ll say this, since you ask me. When I was last at home I was mistaken in that way about my own brother, for I heard him calling to me from downstairs, and I took him for my sister Milly.’
‘Oh! That’s interesting!’ Margaret smiled. ‘What sort of voice has your brother? How old is he?’
‘He’s eight-and-twenty, ma’am; and as for his voice, he has a sweet counter-tenor, and sings nicely. He’s a song-man at the cathedral, ma’am.’
‘Really! How nice! Have you a voice too? Do you sing at all?’
‘Oh, no, ma’am!’ answered Potts in a deprecating tone. ‘One in the family is quite enough!’
Margaret vaguely wondered why, but did not inquire.
‘You were quite sure that it was your brother who was speaking, I suppose,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes, ma’am! I looked down over the banisters, and there he was!’
Margaret had the solid health of a great singer, and it would have been a serious trouble indeed that could have interfered with her unbroken and dreamless sleep during at least eight hours; but when she closed her eyes that night she was quite sure that she could not have slept at all but for Potts’s comforting little story about the brother with the ‘counter-tenor’ voice. Yet even so, at the moment before waking in the morning, she dreamt that she was at the telephone again, and that words in a strange language came to her along the wire in a soft and caressing tone that could only be a woman’s, and that for the first time in all her life she knew what it was to be jealous. The sensation was not an agreeable one.
The dream-voice was silent as soon as she opened her eyes, but she had not been awake long without realising that she wished very much to see Logotheti at once, and was profoundly thankful that she had torn up her letter to Lady Maud. She was not prepared to admit, even now, that Konstantin was the ideal she should have chosen for a husband, and whom she had been describing from imagination when she had suddenly stopped writing. But, on the other hand, the mere thought that he had perhaps been amusing himself in the society of another woman all yesterday afternoon made her so angry that she took refuge in trying to believe that he had spoken the truth and that she had really been mistaken about the voice.
It was all very well to talk about learning Tartar! How could she be sure that it was not modern Greek, or Turkish? She could not have known the difference. Was it so very unlikely that some charming compatriot of his should have come from Constantinople to spend a few weeks in Paris? She remembered the mysterious house in the Boulevard Péreire where he lived, the beautiful upper hall where the statue of Aphrodite stood, the doors that would not open like other doors, the strangely-disturbing encaustic painting of Cleopatra in the drawing-room — many things which she distrusted.
Besides, supposing that the language was really Tartar — were there not Russians who spoke it? She thought there must be, because she had a vague idea that all Russians were more or less Tartars. There was a proverb about it. Moreover, to the English as well as to the French, Russians represent romance and wickedness.
She would not go to the telephone herself, but she sent a message to Logotheti, and he came out in the cool time of the afternoon. She thought he had never looked so handsome and so little exotic since she had known him. To please her he had altogether given up the terrific ties, the lightning-struck waistcoats, the sunrise socks, and the overpowering jewellery he had formerly affected, and had resigned himself to the dictation of a London tailor, who told him what he might, could, should, and must wear for each circumstance and hour of daily life, in fine gradations, from deer-stalking to a royal garden-party. The tailor, who dressed kings and made a specialty of emperors, was a man of taste, and when he had worked on the Greek financier for a few weeks the result was satisfactory; excepting for his almond-shaped eyes no one could have told Logotheti from an Englishman by his appearance, a fact which even Potts, who disapproved of Margaret’s choice, was obliged to admit.
Mrs. Rushmore was amazed and pleased.
‘My dear,’ she said afterwards to Margaret, ‘what a perfectly wonderful change! Think how he used to look! And now you might almost take him for an American gentleman!’
He was received by Mrs. Rushmore and Margaret together, and he took noticeable pains to make himself agreeable to the mistress of the house. At first Margaret was pleased at this; but when she saw that he was doing his best to keep Mrs. Rushmore from leaving the room, as she probably would have done, Margaret did not like it. She was dying to ask him qu
estions about his lessons in Tartar, and especially about his teacher, and she probably meant to cast her inquiries in such a form as would make it preferable to examine him alone rather than before Mrs. Rushmore; but he talked on and on, only pausing an instant for the good lady’s expressions of interest or approval. With diabolical knowledge of her weakness he led the conversation to the subject of political and diplomatic lions, and of lions of other varieties, and made plans for bringing some noble specimens to tea with her. She was not a snob; she distrusted foreign princes, marquises, and counts, and could keep her head well in the presence of an English peer; but lions were irresistible, and Logotheti offered her a whole menagerie of them, and described their habits with minuteness, if not with veracity.
He was telling her what a Prime Minister had told an Ambassador about the Pope, when Margaret rose rather abruptly.
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said to Mrs. Rushmore, by way of apology, ‘but I really must have a little air. I’ve not been out of the house all day.’
Mrs. Rushmore understood, and was not hurt, though she was sorry not to hear more. The ‘dear child’ should go out, by all means. Would Monsieur Logotheti stay to dinner? No? She was sorry. She had forgotten that she had a letter to write in time for the afternoon post. So she went off and left the two together.
Margaret led the way out upon the lawn, and they sat down on garden chairs under a big elm-tree. She said nothing while she settled herself very deliberately, avoiding her companion’s eyes till she was quite ready, and then she suddenly looked at him with a sort of blank stare that would have disconcerted any one less superlatively self-possessed than he was. It was most distinctly Madame de Cordova, the offended Primadonna, that spoke at last, and not Miss Margaret Donne, the ‘nice English girl.’
‘What in the world has got into you?’ she inquired in a chilly tone.
He opened his almond-shaped eyes a little wider, with an excellent affectation of astonishment at her words and manner.
‘Have I done anything you don’t like?’ he asked in a tone of anxiety and concern. ‘Was I rude to Mrs. Rushmore?’
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1232