It was purposeless work, after
all. Had she not bronzes, and porcelains, and bric-a-brac, and objets
d'art in profusion in her Roman villa, her Parisian hotel, her great,
grim palace in Estremadura.
"Not one of those things do I want--not one shall I look at twice. The
money would have been better at the soldiers' hospital," she thought,
while her eyes dwelt on a chess-table near her--a table on which the
mimic hosts of Chasseurs and Arabs were ranged in opposite squadrons.
She took the White King in her hand and gazed at it with a certain
interest.
"That man has been noble once," she thought. "What a fate--what a cruel
fate!"
It touched her to great pity; although proud with too intense a pride,
her nature was exceedingly generous, and, when once moved, deeply
compassionate. The unerring glance of a woman habituated to the first
society of Europe had told her that the accent, the bearing, the tone,
the features of this soldier, who only asked of life "oblivion," were
those of one originally of gentle blood; and the dignity and patience of
his acceptance of the indignities which his present rank entailed on him
had not escaped her any more than the delicate beauty of his face as
she had seen it, weary, pale, and shadowed with pain, in the unconscious
revelation of sleep.
"How bitter his life must be!" she mused. "When Philip comes, perhaps
he will show some way to aid him. And yet--who can serve a man who only
desires to be forgotten?"
Then, with a certain impatient sense of some absurd discrepancy, of some
unseemly occupation, in her thus dwelling on the wishes and the burdens
of a sous-officier of Light Cavalry, she laughed a little, and put the
White Chief back once more in his place.
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