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CHAPTER XVII

Weary and footsore, she toiled on toward Esplanade Street, that was still far away.

She was but little used to walking, for Mme. Lorraine had never permitted her to leave the house, and her only excursions had been her stolen rides on the back of Selim, Mme. Lorraine's petted Arab. Her headlong pace at first began to tell on her now, and her steps grew slower and slower, while her slight figure and fair face attracted much attention from passers-by on the brightly lighted street, although her shy, frightened air protected her from insult from even the evil disposed. Her purity, so sweetly imaged on her young face, was a potent shield.

At length she emerged into Esplanade Street. She had been several hours making her way from the convent to this point.

It was nearing midnight, and the girl was vaguely frightened, although, in her almost infantile innocence and ignorance, she knew nothing of the "danger that walks forth with the night" in the streets of a great city. She had been more fortunate than she knew in escaping molestation and pursuit. Her chief fear had been of pursuit by the fanatical old priest, but her hurried glances behind her, from time to time, failed to discover any pursuer; and in a short while more she stood trembling before the dark, silent front of the house where her young life had been spent in semi-slavery as the plaything of giddy Mme. Lorraine.

A strange impulse seized her to turn and fly away; a stronger instinct rooted her to the ground.

"He is here! he must be here!" she murmured; "and I can not desert him, my good friend."

She stood there a few moments gazing at the closed door, then walked rapidly to the garden gate by which she had let Van Zandt through that memorable night. By a strange chance of fortune she had the key in her pocket.

Unlocking it softly, she let herself into the garden, and sunk down wearily on the rustic seat where she had fallen into such heavy sleep the night of her attempted abduction. Against her will her eyelids drooped, and slumber stole over her weary senses. The soft air coolly fanned her hot face, and the April dew fell heavily on her floating hair and thin summer dress; but, unconscious of the chill and dampness, she dreamed on until the first faint gray streak of dawn appeared in the east.

Then she woke suddenly, lifted her crouching figure, and looked about her. Memory rushed over her in a bewildering flood.

"I have been asleep when I ought to have been planning how to get into that house unperceived to search for him!" she thought, self-reproachfully.

She knew that there would be no great difficulty about the matter, because Mima was always very careless about fastening up the back part of the house. Being slight and agile, she made an easy entrance into the house by the united opportunities of a step-ladder and an unbolted back window.

With a throbbing heart and shining eyes, she found herself inside the house, and, as she believed, near to the kind Yankee friend in whom she took such an earnest interest.

Every one was asleep at this uncanny hour of the dawn, she knew. Lightly and fearlessly she went from room to room until she had explored the whole house in a fruitless quest for Eliot Van Zandt.

To her dismay and disappointment, her careful search was utterly unavailing, although from her knowledge of the house she was certain that she had left not a room unvisited. She had even peeped, by the aid of a hall-chair, into the transom over madame's door, and then into Mima's, too; but the sight of the latter placidly snoring among her pillows, and of madame slumbering sweetly, as if no unrepented sins lay heavy on her conscience, was all that rewarded her for her pains.

Disappointed and dismayed, she crept into an unused closet in the hall, and crouching in the cobwebby corner, gave herself up to such intense cogitation that the tired young brain succumbed again to weariness, and she drooped forward upon the hard floor fast asleep.

Day was far advanced when she roused herself, with a start, and again realized her situation. She heard steps and voices, and knew that the small family was awake and astir. Presently the hall clock chimed the hour of noon.

"I have been very lazy," she said to herself, "and—oh, dear, I am very hungry!"

She remembered then that the nuns had not given her any supper, because she had flatly refused to beg Father Quentin's pardon for her wilfulness.

"Never mind," she said valiantly to herself, "I must not remember that I am tired and hungry until I find my friend."

But hot tears came into the dark eyes, all the same. It was not pleasant to be tired and hungry and disappointed, and even in hiding like a dreadful criminal fearing to be captured.

Suddenly the swish of a silken robe trailed through the hall met her ears—Mme. Lorraine!

The fugitive could not resist the temptation to push the door ajar ever so little, and peep through the tiny aperture at her fair enemy.

And then something very strange happened.

Little Nobody, or Marie, as the nuns had called her, saw Mme. Lorraine stop abruptly at the end of the hall and press her white and jeweled hand upon a curious little ornate knob that appeared to form the center-piece of the carvings and panelings of the wainscoted wall. Instantly a section of the broad paneling glided backward through the solid wall, like a narrow door. Mme. Lorraine stepped lightly through the opening, and disappeared as the concealed door sprung quickly back into its place.

Like one stunned, the girl fell back into her place of hiding.

She had spent all her life in this strange house without a suspicion of the hidden room and the secret door, and its sudden discovery almost paralyzed her in the first moment.

But presently her reason returned to her, and she murmured with instant conviction:

"He is down there."

Following a sudden reckless impulse, and thinking nothing of consequences, she bounded from the closet and pressed her little hand upon the knob in the wall. At first it remained stationary, but when she pushed harder it yielded so suddenly as almost to precipitate her down a short flight of steps on which it opened. Recovering her balance, she stepped softly downward, and the narrow door slipped soundlessly into its place again, and as if impelled by a ghostly hand. But the fact was, that by some clever arrangement of springs beneath the first step, the slight pressure of her foot on the boards was sufficient to close it.

She found herself now on the narrow flight of steps, in thick darkness; but the momentary light that had glimmered through the open door had shown her a narrow passage and another door at the foot of the stairs.

Thrilling with curiosity, and without fear, the girl groped her way softly downward to the passage, starting as the murmur of voices came to her from the other side of the door.

"I was right. He is here!" she thought, and flung herself down on the floor in the darkness and listened with her ear against the door.

It was Mme. Lorraine's clear, bell-like voice that was speaking. It ceased its impassioned utterances at last, and a deep, rich, manly voice replied to her—a familiar voice that made Marie's heart beat tumultuously and a sweet, warm color glow in her cheeks.

"It is he," she whispered, forgetting hunger, weariness, everything unpleasant in exquisite relief and joy.

CHAPTER XVIII

Almost a week had elapsed since the last visit of Mme. Lorraine to Eliot Van Zandt.

During that time he had been very ill from the fever brought on by his agitation at her indiscreet announcement of the death of the girl in whom he had been so warmly interested.

All Mima's skill and care had been required to ward off a fatal consequence to this relapse, and the woman had sternly forbidden any more calls from her mistress during this critical state. Mme. Lorraine was so frightened that she was very obedient to the mandate; but now the embargo had been removed, and she was free to visit the fascinating patient.

He was better. Indeed, he was rapidly convalescing, owing to Mima's good nursing, aided by his youth and a strong constitution.

So, on this lovely April morning, madame had made herself beautiful by every device of art at her command, and hurried through the secret door to visit the wounded captive whom she held in durance vile.

Pale and wan, but exceedingly handsome still, Eliot Van Zandt lay upon a velvet lounge, his fair Saxon beauty thrown into strong relief by the dressing-gown of dark-blue silk that madame's care had supplied.

At the entrance of the superbly dressed and handsome woman, his dark brows met with a heavy frown.

"I gave orders, Madame Lorraine, that you should not be admitted again!" he exclaimed, with the frank petulance of convalescence.

Madame gave her graceful head an airy toss.

"No one can debar me from the privilege of entering any room in my own house," she replied, coolly.

"Your own house?" starting.

"Precisely," with a maddening smile; and for at least two minutes a dead silence reigned in the room that, with its swinging-lamp burning brightly, presented the appearance of night, although it was midday outside.

Then he exclaimed, angrily:

"I had already become convinced that there was something mysterious in my sojourn here. I have found out that I am in an underground apartment from which there is no apparent egress. I know that no living soul but yourself and your servant has been near me since I was ill. Am I, then, your prisoner?"

Smilingly, she replied:

"Do not call it by so harsh a word. It is true that you are in my house, hidden in an underground apartment; but it was for your own good that I brought you here. You had fatally wounded Remond, and the authorities were after you. I—I love you," falteringly. "I could not give you up to justice. So you are here—a prisoner, if you will, but a beloved and well cared-for one."

"Yes, I have received skillful care and attention from your servant. I thank you," very stiffly; "but now I am well, I desire to go."

"I am suspected of harboring you. My house is watched by officers of the law. Should you go out, you would be instantly arrested. Mon Dieu! that must not be!"

She looked at him with tender, pleading eyes.

He answered, curtly:

"If I have hurt Remond, I am willing to answer to the law for my crime committed in the defense of the weak and the helpless. I have no wish to shirk my punishment. You understand me now, and you will let me go. I demand my release!"

Clasping her jeweled hands together in pretended despair, she exclaimed:

"But, good Heaven! mon ami, I can not let you be so reckless. Think a moment what will happen if they take you into custody. If the man dies, you may be—hung!"

"I take all the risk; only show me the way out of my hated prison!" he exclaimed, impatiently; and, with sudden passion, Mme. Lorraine answered, boldly:

"Then, by Heaven, I will not! There is but one way by which you can ever leave this room, whose existence is known to no human being but Mima, myself, and you."

She saw him grow deathly pale to the roots of his hair, as he asked, with pretended coolness:

"And that way, my darling jailer?"

With something like a blush struggling through the cosmetics that covered her face, she replied firmly, although in a low voice:

"As my husband."

There was an awkward silence; the man was blushing for her; the dark-red flush went up to the roots of his hair; she saw it, and bit her lips. At last he said, with cool disdain:

"You have already a husband in an insane asylum."

She interrupted, eagerly:

"No, no—not my husband. I am free—that is, I was divorced by law from him years ago."

She came nearer; she flung herself, with a rustle of silk and heavy waft of patchouli, down by his side on the sofa. Looking up into his face with burning eyes, she exclaimed, wildly:

"Do not look so coldly and scornfully upon me! Since you came to New Orleans, you have changed all my life. I never loved before. I married Monsieur Lorraine for wealth and position, without a single heart-throb for the man. But you I love, you I have sworn to win. What is there unreasonable about it, that your eyes flash so proudly? You are handsome, it is true, but I also am beautiful. You are gifted, but you are poor, while I am rolling in wealth. I can take you from your drudging life and make your existence a dream of luxury and ease. That is generous, is it not? But you have bewitched me; you have changed all my nature; you have taught me to love."

"I never tried to do so," he replied, with unmoved coldness.

"Cold-hearted Yankee! have you no feeling, no pity?" she demanded, reproachfully. "Look at me fairly," plucking impatiently at his sleeve. "Am I not fair enough to teach you to love me?"

"No," he answered, curtly, shrinking from her touch, but looking straight into her impassioned eyes with cold, unmoved gray orbs.

"Perhaps you already love some one else?" she burst forth, jealously.

"No," in a cold, incisive voice.

A low laugh of triumph broke from her, and she exclaimed:

"Then I will not give you up. You shall be my husband."

He gave her an angry stare, but she continued, unheeding:

"To-night I leave New Orleans with my servant Mima. I have my reasons for this step. N'importe; they concern not you. I have made up my mind to be your wife, to bear your name, to go home with you to Boston. If you say the word, a priest shall be brought within the hour to make us one. Then we can escape together to-night and fly this fatal city which now holds imminent danger for you. Do you consent?"

He looked with his cold, disconcerting gaze full into her eyes.

"What if I refuse?" he queried.

"You are a Yankee all over—you answer one question with another," she said, with a faint, mirthless laugh. "But my alternative is so bitter I shrink from naming it. Tell me, are you going to make me your loving wife?"

"I would die first!" he responded, with passionate emphasis.

She looked up at him, pale with wrath and mortification, and hissed, angrily:

"You have chosen well, for it will come to that—to—to death!"

"You would murder me?" he exclaimed, with a start; and she answered, defiantly:

"If you can not be mine, no one else shall ever have your love or your name. If you persist in refusing my generous offer, I shall go away from here with Mima to-night; but I shall leave you in this cellar to starve and to die, and to molder into dust until the story of your mysterious disappearance that night has been forgotten of men."

"You could not be so inhuman!" he uttered, with paling lips.

"I can, and I will," laughing mockingly. "Take your choice now, monsieur—my time is limited. Shall it be love—or—death?"

With ineffable scorn, although his handsome features had waned to a marble pallor, he replied, in a voice of proud disdain:

"Such love—the love of a guilty, wicked woman like you, Madame Lorraine—leaves one no choice but death!"

CHAPTER XIX

He never forgot the glare of rage the angry woman fixed upon him for a moment.

Her eyes fairly blazed as she hissed, vindictively:

"You have made your choice, and mine is the last human face you will look upon. A few days of isolation in this dreary chamber, without food or drink, and you will go mad with horror and die of starvation. Adieu, monsieur. I wish you bon voyage to Hades!"

She made him a mocking courtesy, and swept to the door, tearing it open with such impetuous haste that the listener outside had no time to step aside, only to spring up wildly and confront the angry woman, who immediately uttered a shriek of horror and fled up the narrow stair-way, disappearing through the secret door in an incredibly short space of time.

In the darkness of the narrow passage she had taken the pale-faced, wild-eyed girl for a visitant from the other world, and had fled in fear and terror from the supposed ghostly presence.

In her terror she had forgotten to shut the door upon Van Zandt, and with starting eyes he witnessed the strange scene. For an instant he fancied, like Mme. Lorraine, that it was a spirit standing there in the gloom of the narrow passage, with face and form like that of the dead little Mlle. Nobody. Then reason came to his aid. He sprung from the sofa, and just as the secret door shut behind the frightened madame, he caught the girl's cold hand and drew her into the room.

"Oh, my little ma'amselle! So that wicked woman lied when she told me that you were dead!" he exclaimed.

She answered, vivaciously:

"No; for I have been dead and buried since I saw you, Monsieur Van Zandt. Don't you see that Madame Lorraine took me for a ghost? It was very fortunate for me, was it not?" and soft, sweet trills of laughter bubbled over her lips.

In her joy at finding him again, she forgot hunger, fear, and weariness.

And in her excitement and exhilaration she rapidly poured out all that had happened to her since that night, nearly two weeks ago, when he and Carmontelle had so ably prevented her abduction by Remond.

He listened in deepest interest; and if Mme. Lorraine could have seen the joy that sparkled in his expressive eyes, she would have felt like plunging a dagger into the white breast of the girl who had brought that joy there by her return, as it were, from the dead.

He laughed with her at the idea of Mme. Lorraine having fooled herself so cleverly in imagining Little Nobody a ghost.

"But you must not call me Little Nobody any longer. I am Marie now," she said, brightly.

"It is a sweet, pretty name," he replied; "but I wish I had been permitted to choose your name. It should have been something else—something unique, like yourself."

She did not know what the word unique meant. She looked at him curiously.

"What would you have called me?" she queried.

"Perhaps I will tell you some day," he replied, with an odd little sigh; and then he changed the subject by telling her how glad he was that she had been saved from death, and how thankful that she had come to save him from the tortures of death by starvation.

The dark eyes sparkled with eager joy.

"Ah, how pleasant it is to have a friend!" she said, naïvely. "First you saved me, now I am going to save you. I heard everything she said to you. Oh, how cruel and wicked she is! And it must be dreadful," shuddering, "to starve! I can fancy some of its horrors, for, do you know, Monsieur Van Zandt, I am very hungry now? I have had no supper nor breakfast."

"Poor child!" he exclaimed, and glanced at a covered waiter on a stand that contained the remains of his late breakfast. He drew off the dainty napkin, and she saw delicate rolls, broiled chicken, cold ham, preserves, fresh strawberries, chocolate and coffee, the whole flanked by a bottle of sherry.

"I had no appetite for my breakfast, and Mima did not come back to remove the tray," he said. "Dare I offer you the remains of the repast? The chocolate is cold, but I drank none of it; I preferred coffee. Likewise, the broiled chicken is untouched—in fact, I eat nothing but a roll."

"You shall see that I will do more justice to the fare than that," she laughed; and sitting down by the tray, she made a substantial meal, after which she declared herself much strengthened.

It was very pleasant to have this bright, hopeful young creature with him, in lieu of the loneliness and the cruel fate to which Mme. Lorraine had doomed him. He listened with interest to her pretty plans for his release. She told him how, in her drugged sleep, she had beheld him in this very room, attended by the big, ugly, but skillful Mima.

"Heaven must have sent you that vision," he said, with fervent gratitude. "Oh, how glad I am that I shall go free again into the world! I have sweet, young sisters little older than you, my child, who would grieve for me were I to die like this. Are you sure, quite sure, that you possess the secret of the opening of the hidden door?"

Marie started.

"It must be the same as that of the outside—must it not, monsieur?" she queried, with a confident air.

"I am not sure, but I hope it is," he replied, with a sudden dawning anxiety.

"I will go and see at once," she exclaimed, starting toward the door.

"No, no," he said, and held her back.

"But why?" she asked, turning on him her pretty, puzzled face.

With a smile, he answered:

"Do you not see that it would not be safe to venture to open the door while our enemies remain in the house? We must wait patiently here until night—until they are gone away. Then we shall be able to effect our escape unmolested."

He spoke more cheerfully than he felt. A strange dread was upon him. What if they should not be able to open the door at the head of the cellar stair-way?

What if he were indeed hopelessly immured within this prison, the life of the girl forfeited to the bravery and daring that had led her to seek and save him?

"Oh, I could bear it like a man, alone, but for her to perish under the slow agony of starvation—Heaven forbid it!" he groaned, but breathed not a word of his fears to the girl who was full of hope and eager expectancy, looking eagerly forward to the hour of their release.

In spite of his anxiety, he spent a not unpleasant day in the society of Marie. She was so lovely and so unique, in her total ignorance of the world, that she had a subtle charm for the man inured to the conventionalities of society. Then, too, she was constantly exciting his wonder by the general correctness of her language, although he knew that she was totally uneducated. But he easily accounted for this by recalling the fact that she had been brought up in constant contact with Mme. Lorraine and her visitors, and so unconsciously acquired the habit of correct speaking.

"What a contrast she is to that wicked woman!" he thought, looking admiringly at the eager, earnest, mobile face, so innocently frank, all the feelings of her pure soul mirrored in her limpid eyes. Recalling madame's story that the girl was low-born, he frowned, and said angrily to himself:

"I do not believe it. She has nothing low about her. There is some mystery about her origin, and Madame Lorraine does not choose to reveal it, that is all."

Certainly, no girl born with the blood of a hundred earls in her veins could have had better instincts or more innate refinement than this Little Nobody. She was innocently frank, but she was also charmingly shy and modest. She was child and woman exquisitely blended:

 
"Standing with reluctant feet
Where the brook and river meet,
Womanhood and childhood flee."
 

Although she had been overjoyed at finding the reported dead man alive, she had been very undemonstrative in her joy. She had not offered him a single caress, such as one so young might have done; she had not even seated herself near him. She contented herself with looking at him across the breadth of the room, not as one afraid, but with a perfectly natural reserve, and she preserved this frank, unembarrassed demeanor throughout the whole day, which did not seem long to either, although dinner and supper were among the things that were not. Neither one remembered it, neither one was conscious of any sensation of hunger.

"But how are we to know when night comes? It is always night down here," he said.

"It was about midday when I followed Madame Lorraine down here. Have you a watch?" she asked.

"Yes; and I have never permitted it to run down since I came here. It is now twenty minutes to four o'clock," he said.

"Then it is now afternoon. By and by, when the watch tells us it is nightfall, I will creep up the steps and listen for sounds in the hall. When I hear them go away, it will be the signal for us to open the secret door and escape," she said.

At eight o'clock, with her ear pressed against the secret paneled door, she heard mistress and maid going through the hall to the front door. It opened and shut. Marie heard distinctly the loud click of the key in the lock outside. They had gone, leaving their victim to perish, as they thought, by the slow pangs of starvation.

Van Zandt was close by her side; she turned to him eagerly.

"I have been feeling the door in the dark for a knob like that on the outside, but I can not find it," she said. "The surface seems perfectly smooth, not carved as on the outside. Will you bring the lamp, monsieur, and let us search for it?"

With a sinking heart, he obeyed her request, detaching the swinging-lamp from its bronze frame and taking it up the dark stair-way in his hand. Even then, in his eager anxiety, his artistic eye took note of the gleam of the light on the girl's picturesque masses of red-gold hair, as it waved in silken luxuriance over her shoulders.