Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/257

Rh convinced of that fact. If you have any good Madeira in your cellars, I should like a glass or two, and the wing of a chicken, before I hear what my niece may have to say to me. I made a very poor breakfast some hours ago at the Lord Warden." Having expressed himself thus, the Marquis throws himself back in his easy-chair, yawns once or twice, and polishes Mark Antony with the corner of his handkerchief; he has evidently entirely dismissed the subject on which he has been speaking, and is ready for pleasant conversation.

At this moment the door is thrown open, and Valerie enters the room.

It is the first time Raymond has seen Valerie since the night of Mosquetti's story, and as his eyes meet hers he starts involuntarily.

What is it?—this change, this transformation, which has taken eight years off the age of this woman, and restored her as she was on that night when he first saw her at the Opera House in Paris. What is it? So great and marvellous an alteration, he might almost doubt if this indeed were she. And yet he can scarcely define the change. It seems a transformation, not of the face, but of the soul. A new soul looking out of the old beauty. A new soul? No, the old soul, which he thought dead. It is indeed a resurrection of the dead.

She advances to her uncle, who embraces her with a graceful and drawingroom species of tenderness, about as like real tenderness as ormolu is like rough Australian gold—as Lawrence Sterne's sentiment is like Oliver Goldsmith's pathos.

"My dear uncle! You received my letter, then?"

"Yes, dear child. And what, in Heaven's name, can you have to tell me that would not admit of being delayed until the weather changed?—and I am such a bad sailor," he repeats plaintively. "What can you have to tell me?"

"Nothing yet, my dear uncle"—the bright dark eyes look with a steady gaze at Raymond as she speaks—"nothing yet; the hour has not yet come."

"For mercy's sake, my dear girl," says the Marquis, in a tone of horror, "don't be melodramatic. If you're going to act a Porte-St.-Martin drama, in thirteen acts and twenty-six tableaux, I'll go back to Paris. If you've nothing to say to me, why, in the name of all that's feminine, did you send for me?"

"When I wrote to you, I told you that I appealed to you because I had no other friend upon earth to whom, in the hour of my anguish, I could turn for help and advice."

"You did, you did. If you had not been my only brother's only child, I should have waited a change in the wind before I crossed the Channel—I am such a wretched sailor! But life, as the religious party asserts, is a long sacrifice—I came!"