CHAPTER II.
Van Zandt determined to keep his promise to call in Esplanade Street that evening. He felt a languid curiosity over Mme. Lorraine's charge, the daring girl whose whole young body was worth less to madame than one of the slender hoofs of her favorite Selim.
He arrived early, and was ushered into an exquisite little salon all in olive and gold—fit setting for madame's ripe, dusky beauty. She was alone, looking magnificent in ruby velvet with cream lace garnishing and ruby jewelry, and the smile with which she received him was welcome itself.
"Ah, mon ami! I was wondering if you would really come," she said, archly. "Sit here beside me, and tell me how you enjoyed the day?"
She swept aside her glowing draperies, and gave him a seat by her side on the olive satin sofa. He accepted it with an odd sensation of disappointment, despite her luring beauty and the sensuous comfort and luxury of the room, whose air was heavy with the perfume of flowers in vases and pots all about them.
He thought, disappointedly:
"Am I not to see her Little Nobody?"
Apparently not, for no one entered, and madame sat contentedly by his side, talking arch nothings to him, fluttering her fan coquettishly, and laughing at his careless repartee. Not a word all the while of her whom madame had sworn should pay for her madcap freak of to-day.
By and by came Carmontelle, Remond, and Markham. They laughed at finding Van Zandt before them.
"But, madame, where is your Little Nobody?" queried the gay Carmontelle. "We are come to lay our hearts at her feet. Know that she has supplanted you in the adoration of the Jockey Club. Her victory to-day makes us all her slaves."
Madame gave utterance to a light, mocking laugh as she touched the gilded bell-cord close to her hand, and all eyes turned to the door. Five, almost ten, minutes passed, then it was softly opened, and a girl came in with a silver salver heaped high with luscious tropical fruit.
Van Zandt recognized her as the winner of the race by the wealth of tawny golden hair that flowed down her back below her slim, girlish waist. He waited, with his eyes on the strange young face, for madame to speak some words of introduction, but none came. Just as any other servant might have entered, so was this girl permitted to enter. The fellows from the Jockey Club nodded familiarly at her, and received a sulky stare in return as she dispensed her fruit among them with impatient courtesy.
When she paused, last of all, before Mme. Lorraine, with her salver of fruit, she seemed first to observe the tall, fair man by her side. She started and fixed her big, solemn, dark eyes half wonderingly upon him, and for a second they gazed silently and curiously at each other.
He saw a girl of fifteen or so, very petite for her age, and made to look more so by the fashion of her dress, which consisted mainly of a loosely fashioned white embroidered slip, low in the neck, short in the sleeves, and so short in the skirt that it reached the verge of immodesty by betraying much more than the conventional limit of the tapering ankles and rounded limbs. Madame had evidently aimed more at picturesqueness than propriety in choosing her dress, and she had certainly attained her point. Anything more full of unstudied grace and unconscious beauty than the little serving-maid it would be hard to imagine. The contrast of tawny golden hair with dark eyes and slender, jetty brows, with features molded in the most bewitching lines, and form as perfect as a sculptor's model, made up a tout ensemble very pleasing to the journalist's observant eyes. There was but one defect, and that was a certain sullenness of eyes and expression that bespoke a fiery spirit at bay, a nature full of repressed fire and passion ready to burst into lava-flame at a touch, a word.
For her she saw a man of twenty-five or six, tall, manly, and handsome in a splendid intellectual fashion, with fair hair clustered above a grand white brow, blue-gray eyes bright and laughing, a fair mustache ornamenting lips at once firm and sweet, a chin that was grave and full of power in spite of the womanish dimple that cleft it—altogether a most attractive face, and one that influenced her subtly, for some of the sullenness faded from her face, and with brightening eyes she exclaimed, with all the freedom of a child:
"Oh, I know you at sight! You are madame's handsome Yankee, n'est ce pas?"
He rose, laughing, and with his most elaborate bow.
"Eliot Van Zandt, at your service," he said. "Yes, I am the Yankee. And you?"
He saw the sullen gleam come back into her eyes, as she answered curtly, and, as it seemed, with repressed wrath:
"Oh. I am Little Nobody, madame says. I have always been too poor to have even a name. Have some fruit, please."
Madame tittered behind her elaborate fan, and the members of the Jockey Club exchanged glances. Eliot took an orange mechanically, and then the girl put the salver down and turned to go.
But Mme. Lorraine's dark eyes looked over the top of her fan with sarcastic amusement.
"Remain," she said, with cold brevity; and the girl flung herself angrily down into a chair, with her hands crossed and her tiny slippers dangling. With uplifted eyes she studied intently the face of the stranger.
"Handsome, is he, madcap?" at length queried Carmontelle, full of amusement.
The large eyes turned on his face scornfully.
"Handsomer than any of the ugly old Jockey Club!" she replied, with decision.
"We shall all be very jealous of this Yankee," said Markham. "Here we have been adoring you ever since you were a baby, ma'amselle, and you throw us over in a bunch for the sake of this charming stranger. You are cruel, unjust." He began to hum, softly, meaningly:
"'Do not trust him, gentle lady,
Though his words be low and sweet;
Heed not him that kneels before thee,
Gently pleading at thy feet.'"
The song went no further, for the girl looked at him with large eyes of sarcastic amusement and said, curtly:
"If I had such an atrocious voice as yours, I should not try to sing."
A sally of laughter greeted the words, and the sulky countenance relaxed into a smile.
Van Zandt studied the young face closely, his artistic taste charmed by its bright, warm beauty, full of Southern fire and passion.
"How came she, the nameless child of a circus-rider, by her dower of high-bred, faultless beauty?" he thought, in wonder, noticing the dainty white hands, the
"Delicate Arab arch of her feet,
And the grace that, light and bright as the crest
Of a peacock, sits on her shining head;
And she knows it not. Oh, if she knew it!
To know her beauty might half undo it."
Mme. Lorraine, at his side, watched him with lowered lids and compressed lips. At last, tapping his arm with her fan, and smiling archly, she said, in an under-tone:
"Beautiful, is she not, mon ami? But—that is all. Her mind is a void, a blank—capable of nothing but the emotions of anger or hatred, the same as the brute creation. I have tried to educate her into a companion, but in vain; so she can never be more than a pretty toy to me—no more nor less than my Maltese kitten or my Spitz puppy, although I like to see her about me, the same as I love all beautiful things."
He heard her in amazement. Soulless—that beautiful, spirited-looking creature! Could it be? He saw the dark eyes lighten as the men began to praise her dauntless riding that day. They were very expressive, those large, almond-shaped eyes. Surely a soul dwelt behind those dark-fringed lids.