 | CHAPTER XIX.
MADAME DE FRONTIGNAC. The minister's wooing |  |
19. CHAPTER XIX.
MADAME DE FRONTIGNAC.
In the course of a day or two, a handsome carriage
drew up in front of Mrs. Scudder's cottage,
and a brilliant party alighted. They were Colonel
and Madame de Frontignac, the Abbé Léfon, and
Colonel Burr. Mrs. Scudder and her daughter, being
prepared for the call, sat in afternoon dignity
and tranquillity, in the best room, with their knitting-work.
Madame de Frontignac had divined, with the
lightning-like tact which belongs to women in the
positive, and to French women in the superlative
degree, that there was something in the cottage-girl,
whom she had passingly seen at the party,
which powerfully affected the man whom she loved
with all the jealous intensity of a strong nature,
and hence she embraced eagerly the opportunity to
see her, — yes, to see her, to study her, to dart her
keen French wit through her, and detect the secret
of her charm, that she, too, might practise it.
Madame de Frontignac was one of those women
seem to kindle up, even in the most prosaic apartment,
an atmosphere of enchantment. All the
pomp and splendor of high life, the wit, the refinements,
the nameless graces and luxuries of
courts, seemed to breathe in invisible airs around
her, and she made a Faubourg St. Germain of
the darkest room into which she entered. Mary
thought, when she came in, that she had never
seen anything so splendid. She was dressed in a
black velvet riding-habit, buttoned to the throat
with coral; her riding-hat drooped with its long
plumes so as to cast a shadow over her animated
face, out of which her dark eyes shone like jewels,
and her pomegranate cheeks glowed with the rich
shaded radiance of one of Rembrandt's pictures.
Something quaint and foreign, something poetic
and strange, marked each turn of her figure, each
article of her dress, down to the sculptured hand
on which glittered singular and costly rings, — and
the riding-glove, embroidered with seed-pearls, that
fell carelessly beside her on the floor.
In Antwerp one sees a picture in which Rubens,
who felt more than any other artist the glory of
the physical life, has embodied his conception of
the Madonna, in opposition to the faded, cold
ideals of the Middle Ages, from which he revolted
with such a bound. His Mary is a superb Oriental
sultana, with lustrous dark eyes, redundant
of a princely terrace, and bearing on her
hand, not the silver dove, but a gorgeous paroquet.
The two styles, in this instance, were both in the
same room; and as Burr sat looking from one to
the other, he felt, for a moment, as one would who
should put a sketch of Overbeck's beside a splendid
painting of Titian's.
For a few moments, everything in the room
seemed faded and cold, in contrast with the tropical
atmosphere of this regal beauty. Burr watched
Mary with a keen eye, to see if she were dazzled
and overawed. He saw nothing but the most innocent
surprise and delight. All the slumbering
poetry within her seemed to awaken at the presence
of her beautiful neighbor, — as when one, for
the first time, stands before the great revelations
of Art. Mary's cheek glowed, her eyes seemed to
grow deep with the enthusiasm of admiration, and,
after a few moments, it seemed as if her delicate
face and figure reflected the glowing loveliness of
her visitor, just as the virgin snows of the Alps
become incarnadine as they stand opposite the
glorious radiance of a sunset sky.
Madame de Frontignac was accustomed to the
effect of her charms; but there was so much love
in the admiration now directed towards her, that
her own warm nature was touched, and she threw
out the glow of her feelings with a magnetic
of her education so suddenly melt, never felt herself
so naturally falling into language of confidence
and endearment with a stranger; and as
her face, so delicate and spiritual, grew bright with
love, Madame de Frontignac thought she had never
seen anything so beautiful, and, stretching out her
hands towards her, she exclaimed, in her own language,
—
“Mais, mon Dieu! mon enfant, que tu es belle!”
Mary's deep blush, at her ignorance of the language
in which her visitor spoke, recalled her to
herself; — she laughed a clear, silvery laugh, and
laid her jewelled little hand on Mary's with a caressing
movement.
“He shall not teach you French, ma toute belle,”
she said, indicating the Abbé, by a pretty, wilful
gesture; “I will teach you; — and you shall teach
me English. Oh, I shall try so hard to learn!” she
said.
There was something inexpressibly pretty and
quaint in the childish lisp with which she pronounced
English. Mary was completely won over.
She could have fallen into the arms of this wondrously
beautiful fairy princess, expecting to be
carried away by her to Dream-land.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Scudder was gravely discoursing
with Colonel Burr and M. de Frontignac; and
the Abbé, a small and gentlemanly personage, with
hair, appeared to be absorbed in his efforts
to follow the current of a conversation imperfectly
understood. Burr, the while, though seeming to be
entirely and politely absorbed in the conversation
he was conducting, lost not a glimpse of the picturesque
aside which was being enacted between
the two fair ones whom he had thus brought together.
He smiled quietly when he saw the effect
Madame de Frontignac produced on Mary.
“After all, the child has flesh and blood!” he
thought, “and may feel that there are more things
in heaven and earth than she has dreamed of yet.
A few French ideas won't hurt her.”
The arrangements about lessons being completed,
the party returned to the carriage. Madame de
Frontignac was enthusiastic in Mary's praise.
“Cependant,” she said, leaning back, thoughtfully,
after having exhausted herself in superlatives, —
“cependant elle est dévote, — et à dix-neuf comment
cela se peut il?”
“It is the effect of her austere education,” said
Burr. “It is not possible for you to conceive how
young people are trained in the religious families
of this country.”
“But yet,” said Madame, “it gives her a grace
altogether peculiar; something in her looks went
to my heart. I could find it very easy to love her,
because she is really good.”
“The Queen of Hearts should know all that is
possible in loving,” said Burr.
Somehow, of late, the compliments which fell so
readily from those graceful lips had brought with
them an unsatisfying pain. Until a woman really
loves, flattery and compliment are often like her
native air; but when that deeper feeling has once
awakened in her, her instincts become marvellously
acute to detect the false from the true. Madame
de Frontignac longed for one strong, unguarded,
real, earnest word from the man who had stolen
from her her whole being. She was beginning to
feel in some dim wise what an untold treasure she
was daily giving for tinsel and dross. She leaned
back in the carriage, with a restless, burning cheek,
and wondered why she was born to be so miserable.
The thought of Mary's saintly face and tender
eyes rose before her as the moon rises on the
eyes of some hot and fevered invalid, inspiring
vague yearnings after an unknown, unattainable
peace.
Could some friendly power have made her at
that time clairvoyant and shown her the reality
of the man whom she was seeing through the
prismatic glass of her own enkindled ideality!
Could she have seen the calculating quietness in
which, during the intervals of a restless and sleepless
ambition, he played upon her heart-strings, as
one uses a musical instrument to beguile a passing
fear that the feelings he was pleased to excite
might become too warm and too strong, while as
yet his relations to her husband were such as to
make it dangerous to arouse his jealousy! And
if he could have seen that pure ideal conception
of himself which alone gave him power in the
heart of this woman, — that spotless, glorified image
of a hero without fear, without reproach, —
would he have felt a moment's shame and abasement
at its utter falsehood?
The poet says that the Evil Spirit stood abashed
when he saw virtue in an angel form! How
would a man, then, stand, who meets face to face
his own glorified, spotless ideal, made living by
the boundless faith of some believing heart? The
best must needs lay his hand on his mouth at
this apparition; but woe to him who feels no redeeming
power in the sacredness of this believing
dream, — who with calculating shrewdness uses this
most touching miracle of love only to corrupt and
destroy the loving! For him there is no sacrifice
for sin, no place for repentance. His very mother
might shrink in her grave to have him laid beside
her.
Madame de Frontignac had the high, honorable
nature of the old blood of France, and a touch
of its romance. She was strung heroically, and
educated according to the notions of her caste
that one can scarcely call that education which
teaches woman everything except herself, — except
the things that relate to her own peculiar womanly
destiny, and, on plea of the holiness of
ignorance, sends her without one word of just
counsel into the temptations of life. Incredible
as it may seem, Virginie de Frontignac had never
read a romance or work of fiction of which love
was the staple; the régime of the convent in this
regard was inexorable; at eighteen she was more
thoroughly a child than most American girls at
thirteen. On entrance into life, she was at first
so dazzled and bewildered by the mere contrast
of fashionable excitement with the quietness of
the scenes in which she had hitherto grown up,
that she had no time for reading or thought, — all
was one intoxicating frolic of existence, one dazzling,
bewildering dream.
He whose eye had measured her for his victim
verified, if ever man did, the proverbial expression
of the iron hand under the velvet glove. Under
all his gentle suavities there was a fixed, inflexible
will, a calm self-restraint, and a composed philosophical
measurement of others, that fitted him
to bear despotic rule over an impulsive, unguarded
nature. The position, at once accorded to him,
of her instructor in the English language and literature,
gave him a thousand daily opportunities
so restless and so perilous, and which a
good man approaches always with a certain awe.
It is said that he once asserted that he never beguiled
a woman who did not come half-way to
meet him, — an observation much the same as a
serpent might make in regard to his birds.
The visit of the morning was followed by several
others. Madame de Frontignac seemed to
conceive for Mary one of those passionate attachments
which women often conceive for anything
fair and sympathizing, at those periods when their
whole inner being is made vital by the approaches
of a grand passion. It took only a few visits to
make her as familiar as a child at the cottage;
and the whole air of the Faubourg St. Germain
seemed to melt away from her, as, with the pliability
peculiar to her nation, she blended herself
with the quiet pursuits of the family. Sometimes,
in simple straw hat and white wrapper, she would
lie down in the grass under the apple-trees, or
join Mary in an expedition to the barn for hen's
eggs, or a run along the sea-beach for shells; and
her childish eagerness and delight on these occasions
used to arouse the unqualified astonishment
of Mrs. Katy Scudder.
The Doctor she regarded with a naïve astonishment,
slightly tinctured with apprehension. She
knew he was very religious, and stretched her
She thought of Bossuet's sermons walking about
under a Protestant coat, and felt vaguely alarmed
and sinful in his presence, as she used to when
entering under the shadows of a cathedral. In
her the religious sentiment, though vague, was
strong. Nothing in the character of Burr had ever
awakened so much disapprobation as his occasional
sneers at religion. On such occasions she
always reproved him with warmth, but excused
him in her heart, because he was brought up a
heretic. She held a special theological conversation
with the Abbé, whether salvation were possible to
one outside of the True Church, — and had added
to her daily prayer a particular invocation to the
Virgin for him.
The French lessons, with her assistance, proceeded
prosperously. She became an inmate in
Mrs. Marvyn's family also. The brown-eyed, sensitive
woman loved her as a new poem; she felt
enchanted by her; and the prosaic details of her
household seemed touched to poetic life by her
innocent interest and admiration. The young Madame
insisted on being taught to spin at the great
wheel; and a very pretty picture she made of it,
too, with her earnest gravity of endeavor, her
deepening cheek, her graceful form, with some
strange foreign scarf or jewelry waving and flashing
in odd contrast with her work.
“Do you know,” she said, one day, while thus
employed in the north room at Mrs. Marvyn's, —
“do you know Burr told me that princesses used
to spin? He read me a beautiful story from the
`Odyssey,' about how Penelope cheated her lovers
with her spinning, while she was waiting for her
husband to come home; — he was gone to sea,
Mary, — her true love, — you understand.”
She turned on Mary a wicked glance, so full
of intelligence that the snowdrop grew red as the
inside of a sea-shell.
“Mon enfant! thou hast a thought deep in
here!” she said to Mary, one day, as they sat
together in the grass under the apple-trees.
“Why, what?” said Mary, with a startled and
guilty look.
“Why, what? petite!” said the fairy princess,
whimsically mimicking her accent. “Ah! ah! ma
belle! you think I have no eyes; — Virginie sees
deep in here!” she said, laying her hand playfully
on Mary's heart. “Ah, petite!” she said,
gravely, and almost sorrowfully, “if you love him,
wait for him, — don't marry another! It is dreadful
not to have one's heart go with one's duty.”
“I shall never marry anybody,” said Mary.
“Nevare marrie anybodie!” said the lady, imitating
her accents in tones much like those of a
bobolink. “Ah! ah! my little saint, you cannot
always live on nothing but the prayers, though
in a low tone, “don't you ever marry that good
man in there; priests should not marry.”
“Ours are not priests, — they are ministers,”
said Mary. “But why do you speak of him? —
he is like my father.”
“Virginie sees something!” said the lady, shaking
her head gravely; “she sees he loves little
Mary.”
“Of course he does!”
“Of-course-he-does? — ah, yes; and by-and-by
comes the mamma, and she takes this little hand,
and she says, `Come, Mary!' and then she gives
it to him; and then the poor jeune homme, when
he comes back, finds not a bird in his poor little
nest. Oh, c'est ennuyeux cela!” she said, throwing
herself back in the grass till the clover-heads
and buttercups closed over her.
“I do assure you, dear Madame!” —
“I do assure you, dear Mary, Virginie knows.
So lock up her words in your little heart; you
will want them some day.”
There was a pause of some moments, while the
lady was watching the course of a cricket through
the clover. At last, lifting her head, she spoke
very gravely, —
“My little cat! it is dreadful to be married to
a good man, and want to be good, and want to
love him, and yet never like to have him take
than when he is at home; and then to think how
different it would all be, if it was only somebody
else. That will be the way with you, if you let
them lead you into this; so don't you do it, mon
enfant.”
A thought seemed to cross Mary's mind, as
she turned to Madame de Frontignac, and said,
earnestly, —
“If a good man were my husband, I would
never think of another, — I wouldn't let myself.”
“How could you help it, mignonne? Can you
stop your thinking?”
Mary said, after a moment's blush, —
“I can try!”
“Ah, yes! But to try all one's life, — oh, Mary,
that is too hard! Never do it, darling!”
And then Madame de Frontignac broke out
into a carolling little French song, which started
all the birds around into a general orchestral accompaniment.
This conversation occurred just before Madame
de Frontignac started for Philadelphia, whither her
husband had been summoned as an agent in some
of the ambitious intrigues of Burr.
It was with a sigh of regret that she parted
from her friends at the cottage. She made them
a hasty good-bye call, — alighting from a splendid
barouche with two white horses, and filling their
for a last half-hour. When she bade good-bye to
Mary, she folded her warmly to her heart, and her
long lashes drooped heavily with tears.
After her absence, the lessons were still pursued
with the gentle, quiet little Abbé, who seemed the
most patient and assiduous of teachers; but, in
both houses, there was that vague ennui, that
sense of want, which follows the fading of one of
life's beautiful dreams! We bid her adieu for a
season; — we may see her again.
| CHAPTER XIX.
MADAME DE FRONTIGNAC. The minister's wooing | |