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[Illustration: "I give you back the wedding ring."--_Page 400._]




THE BONDWOMAN

BY

MARAH ELLIS RYAN,

AUTHOR OF

"Told in the Hills," "A Pagan of the Alleghanies," etc.

CHICAGO AND NEW YORK:

RAND, McNALLY & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS.

MDCCCXCIX.




Copyright, 1899, by Rand, McNally & Co.

All rights reserved.

Entered at Stationers' Hall, London.




THE BONDWOMAN




CHAPTER I.


Near Moret, in France, where the Seine is formed and flows northward,
there lives an old lady named Madame Blanc, who can tell much of the
history written here--though it be a history belonging more to
American lives than French. She was of the Caron establishment when
Judithe first came into the family, and has charge of a home for aged
ladies of education and refinement whose means will not allow of them
providing for themselves. It is a memorial founded by her adopted
daughter and is known as the Levigne Pension. The property on which it
is established is the little Levigne estate--the one forming the only
dowery of Judithe Levigne when she married Philip Alain--Marquis de
Caron.

There is also a bright-eyed, still handsome woman of mature years,
who lives in our South and has charge of another memorial--or had
until recently--a private industrial school for girls of her own
selection. She calls herself a creole of San Domingo, and she also
calls herself Madame Trouvelot--she has been married twice since
she was first known by that name, for she was never the woman to live
alone--not she; but while the men in themselves suited her, their
names were uncompromisingly plain--did not attract her at all. She
married them, proved a very good wife, but while one was named
Johnson, and another Tuttle, the good wife persisted in being
called Madame Trouvelot, either through sentiment or a bit of irony
towards the owner of that name. But, despite her vanities, her
coquetries, and certain erratic phases of her life, she was
absolutely faithful to the trust reposed in her by the Marquise; and
who so capable as herself of finding the poor girls who stood most
in need of training and the shelter of charity? She, also, could
add to this history of the woman belonging both to the old world
and the new. There are also official records in evidence of much
that is told here--deeds of land, bills of sale, with dates of
marriages and deaths interwoven, changed as to names and places but--

There are social friends--gay, pleasure-loving people on both sides of
the water--who could speak, and some men who will never forget her.

One of them, Kenneth McVeigh, he was only Lieutenant McVeigh
then!--saw her first in Paris--heard of her first at a musicale in the
salon of Madame Choudey. Madame Choudey was the dear friend of the
Countess Helene Biron, who still lives and delights in recitals of
gossip belonging to the days of the Second Empire. The Countess Helene
and Mrs. McVeigh had been school friends in Paris. Mrs. McVeigh had
been Claire Villanenne, of New Orleans, in those days. At seventeen
she had married a Col. McVeigh, of Carolina. At forty she had been a
widow ten years. Was the mother of a daughter aged twelve, and a
six-foot son of twenty-two, who looked twenty-five, and had just
graduated from West Point.

As he became of special interest to more than one person in this
story, it will be in place to give an idea of him as he appeared in
those early days;--an impetuous boy held in check, somewhat, by
military discipline and his height--he measured six feet at
twenty--and also by the fact that his mother had persisted in looking
on him as the head of the family at an age when most boys are
care-free of such responsibilities.

But the responsibilities had a very good effect in many ways--giving
stability and seriousness to a nature prone, most of all, to
pleasure-loving if left untrammelled. His blue eyes had a slumberous
warmth in them; when he smiled they half closed and looked down on you
caressingly, and their expression proved no bar to favor with the
opposite sex. The fact that he had a little mother who leaned on him
and whom he petted extravagantly, just as he did his sister, gave him
a manner towards women in general that was both protecting and
deferential--a combination productive of very decided results. He was
intelligent