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CHAPTER XXIII

In almost the last hour, when hope had deserted them, and they hourly expected death, succor had arrived. Van Zandt's singing had attracted attention at last, and now help was at hand.

When that ringing halloo came down the ventilating pipe, he almost swooned with the suddenness of his joy and relief; and it was Marie, who, with a sudden accession of frantic joy, screamed shrilly back:

"Halloo!"

A voice came quickly back—a familiar voice:

"Who is down there?"

This time Van Zandt answered:

"Two prisoners—Eliot Van Zandt and a lady. We are starving, dying! For God's sake, cut a hole quickly through the floor, and come to our aid!"

"Ay, ay!" said a hearty voice that belonged to none other than Pierre Carmontelle; and then the iron will that had sustained Van Zandt through those four dreadful days gave way, and he fell in a heavy swoon to the floor.

Marie could only moan helplessly:

"Hurry, hurry! he has fallen down. I fear he is dead!"

With all the haste that several eager men could make, it was almost half an hour before a square opening appeared in the ceiling large enough to admit a man's body. Then a faint light streamed into the dark underground chamber, fairly dazzling Marie's weak eyes.

Several eager pairs of eyes looked down, but they could detect nothing yet, so intense was the gloom below.

"It is dark as Erebus," said a voice—Markham's, Marie thought. "Van Zandt, where are you?"

Marie answered, with a sob:

"He is down on the floor, but he is very still, and I fear he is dead from starvation."

A lantern at the end of a rope came quickly down the aperture. A man's body followed it quickly—Carmontelle!

He came up to the bedside and looked with amazement into the wan, sweet face of the girl.

"Mon Dieu, it is Little Nobody! But what does it mean? I thought you dead. I saw you entombed!"

But he had to wait for his answer, for Marie very provokingly fainted dead away, and he had to halloo to Markham above for water and wine.

"I think fresh air would do better than either just now," was the reply. "Peste! what a hot, musty smell comes up that hole! Take her in your arms, Carmontelle, stand on a chair, and hand her up to me."

As the ceiling was low, this plan was effected without much difficulty; and Markham took the slight figure in his arms and carried her out to the cool, green garden, where the last beams of sunset were glinting on the shining leaves of the orange-trees and the tinkling waters of the fountains. The cool air and the refreshing water soon brought her back to life and hope again.

But Van Zandt was longer in recovering. He had kept up the longer, but his collapse, when it came, had been more complete. They found that the wound on his breast was still unhealed, and that there was a mysterious fresh wound upon his arm. The bandage had been knocked off in his fall, and the blood was pouring out in a crimson tide.

They stanched the wound, and at last brought him around so that, with the aid of three men, he could be hoisted through the hole in the wall. He was too weak to answer questions at first, and it was not until the next day that they learned the particulars of his imprisonment by Mme. Lorraine.

They were inclined to chaff him considerably over the madame's fatal penchant for his handsome face, and he bore it with all the equanimity he could. Indeed, their mirth seemed pleasant, although directed against himself, after those four solemn days in that dark, underground prison.

But interesting as they found his romantic story, it was tame beside that of Little Nobody, who, having had a good night's sleep, nourishing food, and a good woman to watch and soothe her restless slumbers, was so much refreshed by the next morning that she could tell her strange story with far more vivacity than could Van Zandt, whose lungs, from his constant singing and hallooing without food for four days, had terribly taxed his strength and endurance.

"If you had come even one hour later, I fear it would have been too late for me," he said, with a somber look in his gray eyes.

But it was owing to his persistent singing that he had been rescued at last, for, although Carmontelle had never given up the search for him, he had not dreamed that the wounded man was concealed in madame's house, although it was believed that she was cognizant of his fate.

"And this is how we chanced to find you," he said. "It was determined to arrest Madame Lorraine upon suspicion of complicity with Remond in making away with you. Markham and I volunteered to come with the officers to serve the warrant. As repeated ringings elicited no response, we thought something was wrong, and forced an entrance."

"And then?" Van Zandt queried, curiously.

"Oh, then we found not a living soul in the house, and were in a little, stuffy back room, like a servants' bedroom, debating what to do next, when the sound of your unearthly singing made the hair rise upon our heads in terror. We thought at first that it was something supernatural, it sounded so sweet and strange, coming, as it seemed, from the bowels of the earth, but presently Markham said that Van Zandt was a fine singer, and a wild suspicion came to me. I looked about and found a pipe fixed cleverly into the wall to secure ventilation, as it seemed to me, to some cellar-like apartment. I put my mouth to the hole and hallooed down it as loud as I could."

"And thereby saved two lives that were almost ended. How can I ever thank you and bless you enough, Carmontelle!" Van Zandt exclaimed, with emotion.

CHAPTER XXIV

Mme. Lorraine would have been chagrined indeed could she but have known what was transpiring in the house she had quitted so precipitately upon finding out that she was in danger of arrest upon suspicion of knowing the whereabouts of Eliot Van Zandt.

The despised Little Nobody was installed in madame's own luxurious chamber, with a capable elderly woman in attendance. Eliot Van Zandt occupied another room, equally elegant, and Carmontelle and Markham had also installed themselves temporarily in a guest-chamber. In the kitchen a temporary cook held sway until such time as the young journalist could be moved to his hotel. Just now he was prostrated on a bed of sickness, having suffered a relapse from the reopening of his wound through his exertions in hallooing and singing.

The cause of the slight wound upon his arm, which they had found freshly bleeding, he steadily declined to explain.

"It is a mere nothing—the scratch of a pen," he said, carelessly, and indeed it very soon healed. The wound on his breast was doing nicely, too, and he began to talk of leaving for home very soon—as soon as he was able to travel.

Carmontelle had written to his anxious sisters to calm their uneasy minds, and one day—it was a week after that tragic evening when he had rescued the prisoners—he held a very serious conversation with his friend over the subject of Little Nobody's future.

Van Zandt had sat up in an easy-chair that day for the first time, and Marie had come in to see him. She looked bright and well again, and the young man shuddered as he thought how near she had been to death that night in the underground prison.

"But for my timely thought, my terrible experiment, she must have been dead ere rescue came," he said to himself. "But she must never know. Perhaps she would shrink from me in horror did she but know the truth."

Carmontelle had been very quiet while she remained in the room. He had watched both narrowly. When she had gone, he said, gravely:

"Van Zandt, let us speak together as good men and true. Have you taken any thought for the little ma'amselle's future?"

Van Zandt started and grew a shade paler. He scarcely understood this abruptness, this seriousness.

"Her future?" he echoed, a little blankly. "I thought—I understood—that it was all planned out that night when we saved her. You were to educate her—afterward to make her your wife."

Carmontelle frowned, and said, sternly:

"Yes—but of course you understand that the plan is untenable now?"

He looked straight into Van Zandt's beautiful blue-gray eyes with such a meaning expression that in a moment there rushed over the young man's mind a comprehension of the truth. Flushing darkly, he exclaimed:

"Say no more. I understand you now," hoarsely; "you mean that—that noble child is—is compromised by her imprisonment with me those four long days?"

Carmontelle, with a fierce throb of jealousy at his heart, answered:

"Yes."

Then, after a moment's blank silence on both sides, he added, sighing heavily:

"Such is the cruel way of the world. For myself, Van Zandt, I know you are the soul of honor, chivalrous as the men of the South; and I can pay you no higher compliment than this. For her, I know she is pure as an angel. But—there is the cruel, carping world ready to point the finger of scorn always, and I—warmly as I love the girl—I could not have a bride of whom gossip could whisper even one blighting suspicion. The Carmontelles are very proud of their unblemished honor. I must not be the first to smirch it. I could have passed over her birth, her namelessness, for I could have given her my own proud name, and lifted her to my own station; but—this shadow from her misfortune in having shared your imprisonment is too dark for me to bear. My hopes are in ashes. Instead of being her husband, I must now claim the place of a father or a brother."

It was a long speech for Carmontelle, who did not ordinarily deal in long sentences. When it was finished he wiped the great drops of moisture from his brow and waited for Van Zandt to speak.

He did not have to wait long.

"I understand you," the young man said, with apparent quietude. "The generous child, by her nobility in coming to seek and to save me, sacrificed her own future. I must—marry her—to appease the proprieties."

With a quiver of pain and regret in his voice, Carmontelle said, gravely:

"Yes."

"I am ready to make her that poor reparation for all that she sacrificed for me," Van Zandt answered, instantly, and for a moment their hands met in a firm, close grip. Then the Southerner said sadly:

"My God, there is no other way, or I could not give up the sweet hopes that for a few hours delighted my soul. But we have talked it over at the club—my friends and hers—and have all agreed that since the whole affair was so widely known, there could be no other way out of it in honor for that poor child than by marriage with you. Van Zandt, you look strange! Do you take it so hard, then? Great Heaven! can it be that you have some prior engagement?"

"I am free—except from the claims of two young sisters, and the trammels of poverty," Van Zandt answered, quietly.

"Poverty, yes, I had thought of that; but she shall not be a burden to you. I am rich, very rich. I will pay the poor child's dowry. I will make it forty thousand dollars, and when I die she shall be my heiress."

"Stop!" Eliot Van Zandt said, with the first sternness he had shown. "You mistake me, Carmontelle; I will take no dowry with my young bride, save her own innocence and beauty."

"But I claim the right—"

"And I refuse to admit it."

And they looked stubbornly into each other's eyes.

CHAPTER XXV

Then Van Zandt said, sternly:

"I will have no one say that I was paid to take the girl of my choice. I am not rich, as you know, but I will toil harder now that I have such an object in life. She shall not go shabby or hungry, I promise you."

His voice was so full of feeling, despite its sternness, that Carmontelle was puzzled. He exclaimed:

"Your pride does you honor, Van Zandt. But—you said—the girl of your choice. I do not understand!"

Van Zandt hesitated, then said reluctantly:

"Believe me, I do not want to make you feel your loss more keenly by what I must now admit; but, Carmontelle, the reparation I must make to Ma'amselle Marie is not such that I need money to condone the sacrifice. I—I love her, although I have never dared own the truth to my own heart until this hour."

Through the breast of the elder man there went a pang of jealous pain, as he repeated, hoarsely:

"You love her?"

"Yes, since the first night I met her. But I scarcely dared own the truth to my own heart. What had I, the poor journalist, to do with that fair creature, whose beauty in itself was a rich dower? But now, when fate itself has given her to me, I can only rejoice."

"Rejoice, yes, that is best—much best," Carmontelle said, after a long, constrained pause. "It is best," he repeated again, more firmly.

"It was fate itself that gave her to me," Van Zandt said, solemnly; and in a burst of emotion he made clear the mystery of the wounded arm that had so puzzled his friend.

"She was dying, and I gave my own blood to save her life. It is my own life that leaps through her veins, that sends the light to her eyes, the color to her cheek. But it is my secret. She must never know."

"No, never; but by that noble sacrifice her life belongs to you, and I can be unselfish enough, Van Zandt, in my own disappointment, to wish that you may win her whole young heart!" Carmontelle exclaimed, lifted out of all selfish regrets by this strange revelation.

And then they planned it all out before Van Zandt lay down to rest, taking Marie's consent for granted—Marie, the simple, ignorant girl who could not have told you to save her life what those two words, love and marriage, meant.

She was as innocent as a babe over many things, poor Little Nobody!

And, to do Van Zandt justice, he revolted at the thought of taking her, as it seemed, willy-nilly; but the world, the great wicked world, left him, as Carmontelle said, no other way.

"I should have liked to woo and win my bride in the sweet old fashion," he thought, regretfully; then, with a new idea: "And what is there to hinder? The words of the marriage service will be almost meaningless terms to her untutored mind. I will take no advantage of the claims it will give me. I will hold her as sacred as an angel until I shall win her heart as well as her hand. At home I will place her in the school-room with my sisters. She shall have culture equal to her beauty, and I will work for her and worship her in silence until the child becomes a woman and her heart awakes from sleep."

The very next day he said to her gently:

"Ma'amselle Marie, I shall be going home to Boston in two more days."

She cried out regretfully:

"Oh, I am sorry; I am afraid I shall never see you any more!"

"Will you go with me, dear, and be my little wife?"

"I will go with you, yes; but—your wife—I do not understand," she said, in a puzzled tone, just as he had expected she would.

"You would live with me always," he began. "You would belong to me, you would bear my name, you would do as I wished you, perhaps, and—"

"Ah, your slave?" she interrupted, intelligently.

Serious as he felt, he could not forbear a laugh; but he said, gently:

"Not my slave, but my love, my darling, my treasure. I would never beat you, nor scold you, nor make your life sad, as Madame Lorraine did. I would be very kind to you always. Now, will you be my wife?"

She replied, with childish frankness:

"Yes, I will be your wife and go with you to your home. Then, perhaps, I will understand better your word, 'wife.'"

He smiled and stooped to kiss her, but she drew back quickly, her innate shyness taking alarm. He did not press her, only said to himself:

"My shy little wild bird, her heart is yet to win."

It seemed to him the strangest thing he had ever heard of, this taking for a wife a young, untutored creature who actually did not understand what the words love, marriage, and wife meant.

He told Carmontelle later of his thought. The Southerner was amused at the ignorance of the lovely girl—amused and sorry in one breath, and with a sigh of regret, he said:

"Happy is he who shall have the pleasure of teaching her the meaning of those tender words."

It was arranged that the marriage should take place just prior to Van Zandt's departure from New Orleans. Van Zandt himself undertook to make Marie understand the necessity for the marriage service that would make her his wife. She acquiesced readily, and asked that Father Quentin, the old priest at Le Bon Berger, be permitted to perform the ceremony.

Her romantic fancy immediately invested the affair with a halo of romance.

"I shall be a bride," she said, naïvely. "In madame's fashion books there are brides all in white, with veils on their heads. I shall be dressed like that, and the marriage shall be out in madame's garden by moonlight. All the Jockey Club shall come to see, and the nuns from the convent, too, if they choose."

Van Zandt said it should be just as she liked. He employed Marie's good nurse to buy the simple white India muslin dress and tulle veil. Also a pretty gray serge dress and straw hat for traveling.

Carmontelle presented her with a full set of large, lustrous pearls to be worn at the ceremony, and the rest of the Jockey Club, who had, since the day of Marie's splendid riding, felt almost a proud proprietorship in her, contributed a great box full of costly wedding-gifts—jewels, costly dressing-cases, perfume sets, glove-boxes full of tiny kid gloves—everything, in short, that they could think of on the spur of the moment, even adding a big photograph-album in ivory and silver containing fac-similes of their familiar faces.

Father Quentin, only too glad to be forgiven for his treachery to Carmontelle, came to perform the ceremony and bless the wedded pair. But before this auspicious event a difficulty had arisen.

A marriage license must be procured; but what name should be written in it for the nameless girl, Mme. Lorraine's Little Nobody?

Pierre Carmontelle came quickly to the rescue.

"I adopt Marie as my daughter. I am quite old enough to be her father. Let the name be written Marie Carmontelle," he said.

And so as Marie Carmontelle she was given into the keeping of her handsome young husband.

Everything was arranged as she wished. The priest grumbled at the oddity of the whole thing, but she was married, all the same, out in the beautiful garden, by moonlight, with the sweet scent of flowers all about her, and her young face pale with excitement and strange emotion. The Jockey Club came in a body to witness the wedding, and some brought sisters and friends, who were all agog over the romance of the affair, and said that the bride was as lovely as a dream, and that that wicked Mme. Lorraine ought to have been ashamed of herself for her cruel treatment of one so beautiful and innocent. The girl who but a little while ago had been friendless and nameless had suddenly come into a heritage of hosts of friends and one of the proudest names of New England.

There was no wedding banquet. When the bride had been congratulated by everybody, and even kissed by some of the beautiful, warm-hearted ladies who had come to witness her strange marriage, her female attendant whisked her off upstairs to change her white dress for a traveling one; then, in a few more minutes, and with the sound of kind adieus in her ears, she was in a carriage riding away from all that her old life had ever known, except Eliot Van Zandt, who sat by her side, her shy little hand in his, and called her his wife.

Soon they were on board the steamer that rocked at the wharf, soon they were sailing away on the breast of the broad Mississippi, leaving behind the glimmering lights and busy life of the quaint Crescent City, homeward bound, and Eliot Van Zandt, who little more than two months since had entered the harbor of New Orleans, careless, gay, and fancy-free, was taking home a bride to his ancestral home. He had asked himself rather nervously several times what his brother and sisters would say.

CHAPTER XXVI

He thought more and more on this subject, for Marie, her first timidity got over, began to ask him artless questions about his home.

He told her that his family consisted of five members. He had a brother older than himself, who was a lawyer in Boston. He was married, but had no children, and he lived in the old family mansion on Beacon Hill, with his two sisters, Maud and Edith, who were respectively nineteen and seventeen, and had not quit the school-room yet. The fifth person was Mrs. Wilson, their governess.

"Maud is the elder. She is quite talented, and is writing a novel," he said. "Edith is an embryo artist. My brother's wife is very pretty and fashionable. I hope you will like them all."

But a shudder crept over him at the thought of taking home a bride into that refined and cultured circle to place her in the school-room, to begin at the bottom of the ladder of learning. How shocked they would be, how his brother's wife would lift her pale brows in wonder! He dreaded her more than all the rest, for two reasons. One was that she had brought a little money into the once rich, but now impoverished Van Zandt family, and took airs on that account, and the other was that she had a pretty sister with a dot, and wanted to make a match between her and her brother-in-law. So Eliot fancied, and with some reason, that she would not take kindly to the new-comer.

The further he got away from New Orleans, the more he was tormented by his dread of his home-folks.

At last he made up his mind to give Marie some sight-seeing in New York, and to write to his brother, and, to some extent, prepare them for the shock they were to receive.

When the letter was written and posted, he felt better. He had explained matters and invoked their good-will for his simple child-wife. However much they were disappointed, they would respect his wishes, they would not be unkind to Marie.

So he gave himself up with a light heart to the pleasure of showing her the wonders of New York City.

Several days were spent there, and then he took her to Niagara Falls for a few days more. He judged by that time that they would have got over the shock in Boston, and be ready, perhaps, to receive Marie with equanimity.

In this hope, he took the train for Boston with his little bride.

Throughout their long journey Van Zandt had adhered to his manly resolve of treating his little bride simply as a dear friend or young sister until she should have awakened from a child into a woman and given her heart unreservedly with a wifely love.

On the steamer she had her separate state-room, at hotels her solitary suite of rooms, on the trains her comfortable Pullman sleeping-car, while the chivalrous young husband lounged away the long hours in a smoking-car with his favorite cigar. The young bride, in her ignorance and innocence, had not an idea but that this was the usual mode of procedure with husband and wife, and thoroughly enjoyed the long journey and the varied scenery through which she was being whirled. Its newness and the strong contrast to her Southern home made it all the more delightful. Eliot Van Zandt enjoyed her delight, her naïve questions, and even her utter ignorance of everything, although he sometimes caught himself wondering at the fact. But the truth was, that the girl's invariably well-chosen sentences, acquired from companionship with refined and well-bred people, made him often forget that she was totally uneducated, and that years of school-room drudgery yet lay before her ere she could take her place in the cultured world of Boston society.

"There is one comfort. She is exceedingly intelligent, quick, and receptive. She will learn very fast," he told himself.

One evening, at Niagara, when they sat together admiring the glorious falls by moonlight, she said to him, curiously:

"You said once that if you could have chosen my name, it would not have been Marie. Tell me what you would have called me?"

Turning to her with a smile, he replied:

"The name that I always fancied I should like for my wife to bear was the sweet one of Una—no sweeter, I know, than Marie, but I grew to love the name from reading Spenser's 'Faëry Queen.'"

Then he told her the pretty story, as well as he could, of the beautiful Una who personified Truth in the "Faëry Queen." She listened with sparkling eyes and eager interest.

"From this hour I shall be called Una," she exclaimed.

"But you have been baptized Marie," he said.

"It shall be Una Marie, then," she replied, in her pretty, positive fashion, and he was pleased to assent.

"From this hour, then, I shall call you Una, and you shall call me Eliot."

"But, monsieur—" deprecatingly.

"No more monsieurs," he replied, playfully. "They remind me too much of Madame Lorraine."

"It shall be Eliot, then, always," answered the little bride.