THE CHINK IN THE ARMOUR. Marie Belloc Lowndes
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She was sorry she had not taken off her wedding-ring. In England the wise woman always takes off her wedding-ring on going to see a fortune-teller. She was also rather glad that she had left her pearls in the safe custody of M. Girard. This little house in the Rue Jolie was a strange, lonely place.
Suddenly Madame Cagliostra began to speak in a quick, clear, monotonous voice.
Keeping her eyes fixed on the cards, which now and again she touched with a fat finger, and without looking at Sylvia, she said:
"Madame has led a very placid, quiet life. Her existence has been a boat that has always lain in harbour—" She suddenly looked up: "I spent my childhood at Dieppe, and that often suggests images to me," she observed complacently, and then she went on in quite another tone of voice:—
"To return to Madame and her fate! The boat has always been in harbour, but now it is about to put out to sea. It will meet there another craft. This other craft is, to Madame, a foreign craft, and I grieve to say it, rather battered. But its timbers are sound, and that is well, for it looks to me as if the sails of Madame's boat would mingle, at any rate for a time with this battered craft."
"I don't understand what she means," said Sylvia, in a whisper. "Do ask her to explain, Anna!"
"My friend asks you to drop metaphor," said the older woman, drily.
The soothsayer fixed her bright, beady little eyes on Sylvia's flushed face.
"Well," she said deliberately, "I see you falling in love, and I also see that falling in love is quite a new experience. It burns, it scorches you, does love, Madame. And for awhile you do not know what it means, for love has never yet touched you with his red-hot finger."
"How absurd!" thought Sylvia to herself. "She actually takes me for a young girl! What ridiculous mistakes fortune-tellers do make, to be sure!"
"—But you cannot escape love," went on Madame Cagliostra, eagerly. "Your fate is a fair man, which is strange considering that you also are a fair woman; and I see that there is already a dark man in your life."
Sylvia blushed. Bill Chester, just now the only man in her life, was a very dark man.
"But this fair man knows all the arts of love." Madame Cagliostra sighed, her voice softened, it became strangely low and sweet. "He will love you tenderly as well as passionately. And as for you, Madame—but no, for me to tell you what you will feel and what you will do would not be delicate on my part!"
Sylvia grew redder and redder. She tried to laugh, but failed. She felt angry, and not a little disgusted.
"You are a foreigner," went on Madame Cagliostra. Her voice had grown hard and expressionless again.
Sylvia smiled a little satiric smile.
"But though you are a foreigner," cried the fortune-teller with sudden energy, "it is quite possible that you will never go back to your own country! Stop—or, perhaps, I shall say too much! Still if you ever do go back, it will be as a stranger. That I say with certainty. And I add that I hope with all my heart that you will live to go back to your own country, Madame!"
Sylvia felt a vague, uneasy feeling of oppression, almost of fear, steal over her. It seemed to her that Madame Cagliostra was looking at her with puzzled, pitying eyes.
The soothsayer again put a fat and not too clean finger down on the upturned face of a card.
"There is something here I do not understand; something which I miss when I look at you as I am now looking at you. It is something you always wear—"
She gazed searchingly at Sylvia, and her eyes travelled over Mrs. Bailey's neck and bosom.
"I see them and yet they are not there! They appear like little balls of light. Surely it is a necklace?"
Sylvia looked extremely surprised. Now, at last, Madame Cagliostra was justifying her claim to a supernatural gift!
"These balls of light are also your Fate!" exclaimed the woman impetuously. "If you had them here—I care not what they be—I should entreat you to give them to me to throw away."
Madame Wolsky began to laugh. "I don't think you would do that," she observed drily.
But Madame Cagliostra did not seem to hear the interruption.
"Have you heard of a mascot?" she said abruptly. "Of a mascot which brings good fortune to its wearer?"
Sylvia bent her head. Of course she had heard of mascots.
"Well, if so, you have, of course, heard of objects which bring misfortune to their wearers—which are, so to speak, unlucky mascots?"
And this time it was Anna Wolsky who, leaning forward, nodded gravely. She attributed a run of bad luck she had had the year before to a trifling gift, twin cherries made of enamel, which a friend had given her, in her old home, on her birthday. Till she had thrown that little brooch into the sea, she had been persistently unlucky at play.
"Your friend," murmured Madame Cagliostra, now addressing herself to Anna and not to Sylvia, "should dispossess herself as quickly as possible of her necklace, of these round balls. They have already brought her ill-fortune in the past, they have lowered her in the estimation of an estimable person—in fact, if she is not very careful, indeed, even if she be very careful—it looks to me, Madame, as if they would end by strangling her!"
Sylvia became very uncomfortable. "Of course she means my pearls," she whispered. "But how absurd to say they could ever do me harm."
"Look here," said Anna Wolsky earnestly, "you are quite right, Madame; my friend has a necklace which has already played a certain part in her life. But is it not just because of this fact that you feel the influence of this necklace so strongly? I entreat you to speak frankly. You are really distressing me very much!"
Madame Cagliostra looked very seriously at the speaker.
"Well, perhaps it is so," she said at last. "Of course, we are sometimes wrong in our premonitions. And I confess that I feel puzzled—exceedingly puzzled—to-day. I do not know that I have ever had so strange a case as that of this English lady before me! I see so many roads stretching before her—I also see her going along more than one road. As a rule, one does not see this in the cards."
She looked really harassed, really distressed, and was still conning her cards anxiously.
"And yet after all," she cried suddenly, "I may be wrong! Perhaps the necklace has less to do with it than I thought! I do not know whether the necklace would make any real difference! If she takes one of the roads open to her, then I see no danger at all attaching to the preservation of this necklace. But the other road leads straight to the House of Peril."
"The House of Peril?" echoed Sylvia Bailey.
"Yes, Madame. Do you not know that all men and women have their House of Peril—the house whose threshold they should never cross—behind whose door lies misery, sometimes dishonour?"
"Yes," said Anna Wolsky, "that is true, quite true! There has been, alas! more than one House of Peril in my life." She added, "But what kind of place is my friend's House of Peril?"
"It is not a large house," said the fortune-teller, staring down at the shining surface of her table. "It is a gay, delightful little place, ladies—quite my idea of a pretty dwelling. But it is filled with horror unutterable to Madame. Ah! I entreat you"—she stared sadly at Sylvia—"to beware of unknown buildings, especially if you persist in keeping and in wearing your necklace."
"Do tell us, Madame, something more about my friend's necklace. Is it, for instance, of great value, and is it its value that makes it a source of danger?"
Anna Wolsky wondered very much what would be the answer to this question. She had had her doubts as to the genuineness of the pearls her friend wore. Pearls are so exquisitely imitated nowadays, and these pearls, if genuine, were of such great value!
At first she had not believed them to be real, then gradually she had become convinced of Sylvia's good faith. If the pearls were false, Sylvia