Read Online Monsieur Jonquelle by Melville Davisson Post - Free Book Online Page A

up on my shoulder, then round my neck. She hid her face to escape the smothering kisses; but she clung to me, murmuring something I did not understand. I held her with my left arm, put the hollow of my right hand under her chin, and turned her face out where I could see it.
    It was like the face of some dream woman rising out of a mirage of opium—the great wealth of glorious silken hair massed round it; the eyes closed; the sensitive red mouth trembling; and the delicate satin skin bloodless as a ghost. I kissed her again, bedding her soft throat in the trough of my hand.
    At that moment a great voice bellowed out inthe gorge under our feet. Madame Nekludoff wrenched herself out of my arms and sprang up. Far below us a big peasant slouched along a path through the reeds, on his way to Nice with a brace of pullets. He was lonely and had broken out into one of the booming songs of the carnival. He had a voice that would have filled the magnificent distances of opera; and all unconscious of us, having the great stage to himself, he bellowed notes that boomed through the cathedral of the hills.
    Madame Nekludoff stood breathing deeply and staring wide-eyed at the distant singer. She put her hands up to her hair and adjusted it with little deft touches. The color came and went in her face. Finally she went over to the little bank running along the aqueduct carpeted with dry grasses and sat down. She covered her face with her hands.
    There was something too personal and delicate in this simple act to intrude upon. She was so little and sweet, and the attitude so wistful and appealing, that I sat down on the grass beside her and waited with all the restraint that I could summon to my aid. It is not easily that one, a step across the sill from Paradise, waits at the door!
    Presently, with her hands remaining over her face, she began to speak hurriedly, her voicenervous, tense—running in and out of a whisper. And a story—big, vital, packed with tragedy—emerged. She etched it out with sure, deft strokes, leaving silences and inaudible words to furnish the background and the shadows. Her voice now scurried along like a frightened thing; now took the cover of silence; now crept along in the shadow of evil vaguely to be suggested; and then it became firm and sure, where a desperate resolution had been taken and carried out; and again fearful and hurried; then low and apprehensive.
    I got the story warm and pulsing with life, as though, by some divine surgery, the woman had been thrown on to the slab of an amphitheater and the thing vivisected out of her bosom; and I listened, motionless and without a sound. But this equanimity was but an aspect of the shell of the man, as the body sometimes in sleep lies prone and motionless while the mind within it lives the wildest life.
    She had been sold to the Grand Duke Dimitri Volkonsky, that abandoned and profligate noble whom the Czar had banished out of Russia. Why soften the term? Sold was the only word for it! Her mother she had never known. She had lived with a decayed aunt on a little wasting estate a hundred and fifty kilometers east of Moscow.
    She had been educated in a convent and very carefully watched over. Poverty seemed to lie about her, but there had been money enough to give her every comfort, even in the dreary convent. There was always something sinister in this extreme care—in the good quality of the food always somehow provided—in the fire that always burned in her room—in the exaggerated attention given to her person.
    Now and then her father came to visit her. He seemed to be a man of the world, always elegantly dressed; but she was not attracted to him, uneasy in his presence and always happy when he went away. His comings did not seem to be at the call of a paternal love for her. They appeared rather to be visits of inspection. He made the minutest inquiry into all the details of her daily life, and into her studies and accomplishments, and