The Duchesse was playing impatiently with her glasses when I was
announced by the servant of ninety! Her face expressed some strong
feeling. I was not sure if it was tinged with displeasure or no. She
helped me to sit down, and then she began at once.
"Nicholas, explain yourself. You tell me you are engaged to your
secretary! So this has been going on all the time, and you have not told
me. I, who was your mother's oldest friend!"
"Dear Duchesse, you are mistaken, it has only just been settled. No one
was more surprised at my offer than Miss Sharp herself."
"You know her real name, Nicholas? And her family history? You have
guessed, of course, from my asking you for the twenty-five thousand
francs, that they were in some difficulty?"
"Yes, I know Alathea is the daughter of the Honorable Robert and Lady
Hilda Bulteel."
"She has told you all of the story, perhaps?--but you cannot know what
the money was for, because the poor child does not know it herself. It
is more just that I should inform you, since you are going to marry into
the family."
"Thank you, Duchesse."
She then began, and gave me a picture of her old friendship with Lady
Hilda, and of the dreadful calamity which had befallen in her going off
with Bobby Bulteel.
"It was one of those cases of mad love, Nicholas, which fortunately seem
to have died out of the modern world, though for the truth I must say
that one more séduisant than ce joli Bulteel, I have never met! One
could not, of course, acknowledge them for a crime like that, but I have
ever been fond of poor Hilda and that sweet little child. She was born
here, in this hotel. Poor Hilda came to me in her great trouble, and I
was in deep mourning myself then for my husband,--the house is large,
and it could all pass quietly."
I reached forward and took the Duchesse's hand and kissed it, and she
went on: "Alatheé is my godchild, one of my names is Alatheé. The poor little
one, she adored her father, in all those first years. They wandered much
and only came to Paris at intervals, and each time they came, a little
poorer, a little more troubled, and then after a lapse I heard those two
were born at Nice--wretched little decadents, when my poor Hilda was a
mass of nerves and disillusion. Alatheé was eleven then. It was, par
hazard, when she was about fourteen that she heard of her father's
crime. She was the gayest, most sweet child before that, through all
their poverty, but from that moment her character was changed. It
destroyed something in her spirit, one must believe. She set firmly to
education, decided she would be a secretary, cultivated herself, worked,
worked, worked! She worshipped her mother, and resented immensely her
father's treatment of her."