As she spoke, the wretch gazed at me with such an humble, childlike expression in her crafty black eyes, that I, poor simpleton, completely lost countenance.
I stammered a few French phrases--I should have found it more difficult to lie in German--assured her of my profound _estime_, and that she had made a deplorable _erreur_, and, with a low bow, was hurrying away, when I felt the arm that carried the candle seized in a firm clasp.
"I thank you for those noble words," said the smooth serpent, fixing her glittering eyes so intently on my face that I could not help lowering my own like a detected criminal.
"If you knew, _Monsieur Jean_, how happy your _sympathie_, your cordial warmth makes me! Ah, _mon ami_, I am not what I perhaps seem to you, a superficial, selfish creature, who avails herself of her position in this house to gain some advantage. If you knew how this dependence, this forbearance humiliates me! My youth was so brilliant, so happy! If any one had told me then that I should ever enter a foreign German household--"
And she now began to relate to me in French, with incredible fluency, the romance of her life, not more than half of which could I understand. But as, spite of my inexperience, I retained a sufficient degree of calmness to believe that even this half contained far more fiction than fact, I at last, relapsing into my former incivility, showed evident signs of impatience, and was just in the act of gently shaking off the hand that still held my arm, when her eyes filled with tears as she talked of her worshiped mother, and that honorable man, her father.
"You are exciting yourself too much, mademoiselle," I said. "It is late--you must go to rest--to-morrow, if you wish--"
Meantime I glanced into her room, which looked very untidy. The bed was already opened, and on the little night-table stood a candle which illumined the picture of the Madonna on the wall and a small black crucifix beneath it.
"Oh, _mon ami_!" she sobbed, pressing my arm as if she needed some support in her grief, "_si vous saviez! Mon c[oe]ur est si sensible--tous les malheurs de ma vie_--" and then came a fresh torrent of revelations of her most private affairs, till terror brought cold drops of perspiration to my forehead and, in my helplessness, I could finally think of no other expedient than to whisper: "Calm yourself, Mademoiselle Suzon! Somebody is coming--if we should be found here--!"