 | A passionate pilgrim |  |
Madame de Mauves.
1. I.
THE view from the terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye
is immense and famous. Paris lies spread
before you in dusky vastness, domed and fortified,
glittering here and there through her light vapors, and
girdled with her silver Seine. Behind you is a park
of stately symmetry, and behind that a forest, where
you may lounge through turfy avenues and light-checkered
glades, and quite forget that you are within
half an hour of the boulevards. One afternoon, however,
in mid-spring, some five years ago, a young man
seated on the terrace had chosen not to forget this.
His eyes were fixed in idle wistfulness on the mighty
human hive before him. He was fond of rural things,
and he had come to Saint-Germain a week before to
meet the spring half-way; but though he could boast
of a six months' acquaintance with the great city, he
never looked at it from his present standpoint without
a feeling of painfully unsatisfied curiosity. There were
just then was to miss some thrilling chapter of experience.
And yet his winter's experience had been
rather fruitless, and he had closed the book almost
with a yawn. Though not in the least a cynic, he
was what one may call a disappointed observer; and
he never chose the right-hand road without beginning
to suspect after an hour's wayfaring that the left would
have been the interesting one. He now had a dozen
minds to go to Paris for the evening, to dine at the
Café Brébant, and to repair afterwards to the Gymnase
and listen to the latest exposition of the duties of the
injured husband. He would probably have risen to
execute this project, if he had not observed a little
girl who, wandering along the terrace, had suddenly
stopped short and begun to gaze at him with round-eyed
frankness. For a moment he was simply amused,
for the child's face denoted helpless wonderment; the
next he was agreeably surprised. “Why, this is my
friend Maggie,” he said; “I see you have not forgotten
me.”
Maggie, after a short parley, was induced to seal
her remembrance with a kiss. Invited then to explain
her appearance at Saint-Germain, she embarked on a
recital in which the general, according to the infantine
method, was so fatally sacrificed to the particular, that
Longmore looked about him for a superior source of
was seated with another lady at the opposite end of
the terrace; so, taking the child by the hand, he led
her back to her companions.
Maggie's mamma was a young American lady, as
you would immediately have perceived, with a pretty
and friendly face and an expensive spring toilet. She
greeted Longmore with surprised cordiality, mentioned
his name to her friend, and bade him bring a chair
and sit with them. The other lady, who, though
equally young and perhaps even prettier, was dressed
more soberly, remained silent, stroking the hair of the
little girl, whom she had drawn against her knee.
She had never heard of Longmore, but she now perceived
that her companion had crossed the ocean with
him, had met him afterwards in travelling, and (having
left her husband in Wall Street) was indebted to him
for various small services.
Maggie's mamma turned from time to time and
smiled at her friend with an air of invitation; the
latter smiled back, and continued gracefully to say
nothing.
For ten minutes Longmore felt a revival of interest
in his interlocutress; then (as riddles are more amusing
than commonplaces) it gave way to curiosity about
her friend. His eyes wandered; her volubility was
less suggestive than the latter's silence.
The stranger was perhaps not obviously a beauty
nor obviously an American, but essentially both, on a
closer scrutiny. She was slight and fair, and, though
naturally pale, delicately flushed, apparently with recent
excitement. What chiefly struck Longmore in
her face was the union of a pair of beautifully gentle,
almost languid gray eyes, with a mouth peculiarly expressive
and firm. Her forehead was a trifle more
expansive than belongs to classic types, and her thick
brown hair was dressed out of the fashion, which was
just then very ugly. Her throat and bust were
slender, but all the more in harmony with certain
rapid, charming movements of the head, which she
had a way of throwing back every now and then, with
an air of attention and a sidelong glance from her
dove-like eyes. She seemed at once alert and indifferent,
contemplative and restless; and Longmore very
soon discovered that if she was not a brilliant beauty,
she was at least an extremely interesting one. This
very impression made him magnanimous. He perceived
that he had interrupted a confidential conversation,
and he judged it discreet to withdraw, having
first learned from Maggie's mamma — Mrs. Draper —
that she was to take the six-o'clock train back to
Paris. He promised to meet her at the station.
He kept his appointment, and Mrs. Draper arrived
betimes, accompanied by her friend. The latter, however,
again, giving Longmore time only to raise his hat.
“Who is she?” he asked with visible ardor, as he
brought Mrs. Draper her tickets.
“Come and see me to-morrow at the Hôtel de
l'Empire,” she answered, “and I will tell you all about
her.” The force of this offer in making him punctual
at the Hôtel de l'Empire Longmore doubtless never
exactly measured; and it was perhaps well that he did
not, for he found his friend, who was on the point of
leaving Paris, so distracted by procrastinating milliners
and perjured lingères that she had no wits left for disinterested
narrative. “You must find Saint-Germain
dreadfully dull,” she said, as he was going. “Why
won't you come with me to London?”
“Introduce me to Madame de Mauves,” he answered,
“and Saint-Germain will satisfy me.” All he had
learned was the lady's name and residence.
“Ah! she, poor woman, will not make Saint-Germain
cheerful for you. She 's very unhappy.”
Longmore's further inquiries were arrested by the
arrival of a young lady with a bandbox; but he went
away with the promise of a note of introduction, to be
immediately despatched to him at Saint-Germain.
He waited a week, but the note never came; and he
declared that it was not for Mrs. Draper to complain
of her milliner's treachery. He lounged on the terrace
and made a languid attempt to investigate the records
of the court of the exiled Stuarts; but he spent most
of his time in wondering where Madame de Mauves
lived, and whether she never walked on the terrace.
Sometimes, he finally discovered; for one afternoon
toward dusk he perceived her leaning against the parapet,
alone. In his momentary hesitation to approach
her, it seemed to him that there was almost a shade of
trepidation; but his curiosity was not diminished by
the consciousness of this result of a quarter of an hour's
acquaintance. She immediately recognized him on his
drawing near, with the manner of a person unaccustomed
to encounter a confusing variety of faces. Her
dress, her expression, were the same as before; her
charm was there, like that of sweet music on a second
hearing. She soon made conversation easy by asking
him for news of Mrs. Draper. Longmore told her that
he was daily expecting news, and, after a pause, mentioned
the promised note of introduction.
“It seems less necessary now,” he said — “for me,
at least. But for you — I should have liked you to
know the flattering things Mrs. Draper would probably
have said about me.”
“If it arrives at last,” she answered, “you must
come and see me and bring it. If it does n't, you must
come without it.”
Then, as she continued to linger in spite of the thickening
twilight, she explained that she was waiting for
her husband, who was to arrive in the train from Paris,
and who often passed along the terrace on his way
home. Longmore well remembered that Mrs. Draper
had pronounced her unhappy, and he found it convenient
to suppose that this same husband made her
so. Edified by his six months in Paris — “What else
is possible,” he asked himself, “for a sweet American
girl who marries an unclean Frenchman?”
But this tender expectancy of her lord's return undermined
his hypothesis, and it received a further
check from the gentle eagerness with which she turned
and greeted an approaching figure. Longmore beheld
in the fading light a stoutish gentleman, on the fair
side of forty, in a high light hat, whose countenance,
indistinct against the sky, was adorned by a fantastically
pointed mustache. M. de Mauves saluted his
wife with punctilious gallantry, and having bowed to
Longmore, asked her several questions in French. Before
taking his proffered arm to walk to their carriage,
which was in waiting at the terrace gate, she introduced
our hero as a friend of Mrs. Draper, and a fellow-countryman,
whom she hoped to see at home. M. de
Mauves responded briefly, but civilly, in very fair English,
and led his wife away.
Longmore watched him as he went, twisting his
he certainly would have been at a loss to account for.
The only conceivable cause was the light which M. de
Mauves's good English cast upon his own bad French.
For reasons involved apparently in the very structure
of his being, Longmore found himself unable to speak
the language tolerably. He admired and enjoyed it,
but the very genius of awkwardness controlled his
phraseology. But he reflected with satisfaction that
Madame de Mauves and he had a common idiom, and
his vexation was effectually dispelled by his finding on
his table that evening a letter from Mrs. Draper. It
enclosed a short, formal missive to Madame de Mauves,
but the epistle itself was copious and confidential.
She had deferred writing till she reached London,
where for a week, of course, she had found other
amusements.
“I think it is these distracting Englishwomen,” she
wrote, “with their green barege gowns and their white-stitched
boots, who have reminded me in self-defence
of my graceful friend at Saint-Germain and my
promise to introduce you to her. I believe I told you
that she was unhappy, and I wondered afterwards
whether I had not been guilty of a breach of confidence.
But you would have found it out for yourself,
and besides, she told me no secrets. She declared
she was the happiest creature in the world, and then,
delivered from such happiness. It 's the miserable
story of an American girl, born to be neither a slave
nor a toy, marrying a profligate Frenchman, who believes
that a woman must be one or the other. The
silliest American woman is too good for the best foreigner,
and the poorest of us have moral needs a
Frenchman can't appreciate. She was romantic and
wilful, and thought Americans were vulgar. Matrimonial
felicity perhaps is vulgar; but I think nowadays
she wishes she were a little less elegant. M. de
Mauves cared, of course, for nothing but her money,
which he 's spending royally on his menus plaisirs. I
hope you appreciate the compliment I pay you when
I recommend you to go and console an unhappy wife.
I have never given a man such a proof of esteem, and
if you were to disappoint me I should renounce the
world. Prove to Madame de Mauves that an American
friend may mingle admiration and respect better
than a French husband. She avoids society and lives
quite alone, seeing no one but a horrible French sister-in-law.
Do let me hear that you have drawn
some of the sadness from that desperate smile of hers.
Make her smile with a good conscience.”
These zealous admonitions left Longmore slightly
disturbed. He found himself on the edge of a domestic
tragedy from which he instinctively recoiled. To
seemed a sort of fishing in troubled waters. He
was a modest man, and yet he asked himself whether
the effect of his attentions might not be to add to her
tribulation. A flattering sense of unwonted opportunity,
however, made him, with the lapse of time, more
confident, — possibly more reckless. It seemed a very
inspiring idea to draw the sadness from his fair countrywoman's
smile, and at least he hoped to persuade
her that there was such a thing as an agreeable American.
He immediately called upon her.
2. II.
SHE had been placed for her education, fourteen
years before, in a Parisian convent, by a widowed
mamma, fonder of Homburg and Nice than of letting
out tucks in the frocks of a vigorously growing daughter.
Here, besides various elegant accomplishments, —the art
of wearing a train, of composing a bouquet, of presenting
a cup of tea, — she acquired a certain turn of the
imagination which might have passed for a sign of
precocious worldliness. She dreamed of marrying a
title, — not for the pleasure of hearing herself called
Mme. la Vicomtesse (for which it seemed to her that
she should never greatly care), but because she had
a romantic belief that the best birth is the guaranty
of an ideal delicacy of feeling. Romances are rarely
shaped in such perfect good faith, and Euphemia's
excuse was in the radical purity of her imagination.
She was profoundly incorruptible, and she cherished
this pernicious conceit as if it had been a dogma
revealed by a white-winged angel. Even after experience
had given her a hundred rude hints, she found
it easier to believe in fables, when they had a certain
facts. She believed that a gentleman with a long
pedigree must be of necessity a very fine fellow, and
that the consciousness of a picturesque family tradition
imparts an exquisite tone to the character. Noblesse
oblige, she thought, as regards yourself, and
insures, as regards your wife. She had never spoken
to a nobleman in her life, and these convictions were
but a matter of transcendent theory. They were the
fruit, in part, of the perusal of various ultramontane
works of fiction — the only ones admitted to the convent
library — in which the hero was always a legitimist
vicomte who fought duels by the dozen, but went
twice a month to confession; and in part of the perfumed
gossip of her companions, many of them filles
de haut lieu, who in the convent garden, after Sundays
at home, depicted their brothers and cousins as Prince
Charmings and young Paladins. Euphemia listened
and said nothing; she shrouded her visions of matrimony
under a coronet in religious mystery. She was
not of that type of young lady who is easily induced
to declare that her husband must be six feet high and
a little near-sighted, part his hair in the middle, and
have amber lights in his beard. To her companions
she seemed to have a very pallid fancy; and even the
fact that she was a spring of the transatlantic democracy
never sufficiently explained her apathy on social
the Crusaders who was to suffer her to adore him,
but like many an artist who has produced a masterpiece
of idealization, she shrank from exposing it to
public criticism. It was the portrait of a gentleman
rather ugly than handsome, and rather poor than rich.
But his ugliness was to be nobly expressive, and his
poverty delicately proud. Euphemia had a fortune of
her own, which, at the proper time, after fixing on her
in eloquent silence those fine eyes which were to
soften the feudal severity of his visage, he was to
accept with a world of stifled protestations. One condition
alone she was to make, — that his blood should
be of the very finest strain. On this she would stake
her happiness.
It so chanced that circumstances were to give convincing
color to this primitive logic.
Though little of a talker, Euphemia was an ardent
listener, and there were moments when she fairly hung
upon the lips of Mademoiselle Marie de Mauves. Her
intimacy with this chosen schoolmate was, like most
intimacies, based on their points of difference. Mademoiselle
de Muves was very positive, very shrewd,
very ironical, very French, — everything that Euphemia
felt herself unpardonable in not being. During
her Sundays en ville she had examined the world
and judged it, and she imparted her impressions to
enthusiasm and scepticism. She was moreover a
handsome and well-grown person, on whom Euphemia's
ribbons and trinkets had a trick of looking
better than on their slender proprietress. She had,
finally, the supreme merit of being a rigorous example
of the virtue of exalted birth, having, as she did,
ancestors honorably mentioned by Joinville and Commines,
and a stately grandmother with a hooked nose,
who came up with her after the holidays from a veritable
castel in Auvergne. It seemed to Euphemia
that these attributes made her friend more at home
in the world than if she had been the daughter of
even the most prosperous grocer. A certain aristocratic
impudence Mademoiselle de Mauves abundantly
possessed, and her raids among her friend's finery were
quite in the spirit of her baronial ancestors in the
twelfth century, — a spirit which Euphemia considered
but a large way of understanding friendship, — a
freedom from small deference to the world's opinions
which would sooner or later justify itself in acts of
surprising magnanimity. Mademoiselle de Mauves
perhaps enjoyed but slightly that easy attitude toward
society which Euphemia envied her. She proved herself
later in life such an accomplished schemer that
her sense of having further heights to scale must have
awakened early. Our heroine's ribbons and trinkets
and her appealing pliancy of character even more; but
the concluding motive of Marie's writing to her grandmamma
to invite Euphemia for a three weeks' holiday
to the castel in Auvergne, involved altogether superior
considerations. Mademoiselle de Mauves was indeed
at this time seventeen years of age, and presumably
capable of general views; and Euphemia, who was
hardly less, was a very well-grown subject for experiment,
besides being pretty enough almost to pre-assure
success. It is a proof of the sincerity of Euphemia's
aspirations that the castel was not a shock to her faith.
It was neither a cheerful nor a luxurious abode, but
the young girl found it as delightful as a play. It
had battered towers and an empty moat, a rusty drawbridge
and a court paved with crooked, grass-grown
slabs, over which the antique coach-wheels of the old
lady with the hooked nose seemed to awaken the
echoes of the seventeenth century. Euphemia was
not frightened out of her dream; she had the pleasure
of seeing it assume the consistency of a flattering presentiment.
She had a taste for old servants, old
anecdotes, old furniture, faded household colors, and
sweetly stale odors, — musty treasures in which the
Château de Mauves abounded. She made a dozen
sketches in water-colors, after her conventual pattern;
but sentimentally, as one may say, she was forever
sketching with a freer hand.
Old Madame de Mauves had nothing severe but her
nose, and she seemed to Euphemia, as indeed she was,
a graciously venerable relic of a historic order of things.
She took a great fancy to the young American, who
was ready to sit all day at her feet and listen to
anecdotes of the bon temps and quotations from the
family chronicles. Madame de Mauves was a very
honest old woman, and uttered her thoughts with
antique plainness. One day, after pushing back Euphemia's
shining locks and blinking at her with some
tenderness from under her spectacles, she declared,
with an energetic shake of the head, that she did n't
know what to make of her. And in answer to the
young girl's startled blush, — “I should like to advise
you,” she said, “but you seem to me so all of a piece
that I am afraid that if I advise you, I shall spoil you.
It 's easy to see that you 're not one of us. I don't
know whether you 're better, but you seem to me to
listen to the murmur of your own young spirit, rather
than to the voice from behind the confessional or to
the whisper of opportunity. Young girls, in my day,
when they were stupid, were very docile, but when
they were clever, were very sly. You 're clever
enough, I imagine, and yet if I guessed all your
secrets at this moment, is there one I shold have
to frown at? I can tell you a wickeder one than
any you have discovered for yourself. If you expect
listen too hard to that little voice I just spoke of, —
the voice that is neither the curé's nor the world's.
You 'll fancy it saying things that it won't help your
case to hear. They 'll make you sad, and when you 're
sad you 'll grow plain, and when you 're plain you 'll
grow bitter, and when you 're bitter you 'll be very
disagreeable. I was brought up to think that a
woman's first duty was to please, and the happiest
women I 've known have been the ones who performed
this duty faithfully. As you 're not a Catholic, I suppose
you can't be a dévote; and if you don't take life
as a fifty years' mass, the only way to take it is as a
game of skill. Listen: not to lose, you must, — I
don't say cheat; but don't be too sure your neighbor
won't, and don't be shocked out of your self-possession
if he does. Don't lose, my dear; I beseech you, don't
lose. Be neither suspicious nor credulous; but if you
find your neighbor peeping, don't cry out, but very
politely wait your own chance. I 've had my revanche
more than once in my day, but I 'm not sure that the
sweetest I could take against life as a whole would
be to have your blessed innocence profit by my experience.”
This was rather awful advice, but Euphemia understood
it too little to be either edified or frightened.
She sat listening to it very much as she would have
whose diction should picturesquely correspond to the
pattern of her mantilla and the fashion of her headdress.
Her indifference was doubly dangerous, for
Madame de Mauves spoke at the prompting of coming
events, and her words were the result of a somewhat
troubled conscience, — a conscience which told her at
once that Euphemia was too tender a victim to be
sacrificed to an ambition, and that the prosperity of
her house was too precious a heritage to be sacrificed
to a scruple. The prosperity in question had suffered
repeated and grievous breaches, and the house of De
Mauves had been pervaded by the cold comfort of an
establishment in which people were obliged to balance
dinner-table allusions to feudal ancestors against the
absence of side dishes; a state of things the more
regrettable as the family was now mainly represented
by a gentleman whose appetite was large, and who
justly maintained that its historic glories were not
established by underfed heroes.
Three days after Euphemia's arrival, Richard de
Mauves came down from Paris to pay his respects to
his grandmother, and treated our heroine to her first
encounter with a gentilhomme in the flesh. On coming
in he kissed his grandmother's hand, with a smile
which caused her to draw it away with dignity, and set
Euphemia, who was standing by, wondering what had
was but the beginning of a life of bitter perplexity, but
the reader is free to know that the smile of M. de
Mauves was a reply to a certain postscript affixed by
the old lady to a letter promptly addressed to him by
her granddaughter, after Euphemia had been admitted
to justify the latter's promises. Mademoiselle de
Mauves brought her letter to her grandmother for
approval, but obtained no more than was expressed in
a frigid nod. The old lady watched her with a sombre
glance as she proceeded to seal the letter, and suddenly
bade her open it again and bring her a pen.
“Your sister's flatteries are all nonsense,” she wrote;
“the young lady is far too good for you, mauvais sujet.
If you have a conscience you 'll not come and take
possession of an angel of innocence.”
The young girl, who had read these lines, made up a
little face as she redirected the letter; but she laid
down her pen with a confident nod, which might have
seemed to mean that, to the best of her belief, her
brother had not a conscience.
“If you meant what you said,” the young man whispered
to his grandmother on the first opportunity, “it
would have been simpler not to let her send the
letter!”
It was perhaps because she was wounded by this
cynical insinuation, that Madame de Mauves remained
stay, so that the latter's angelic innocence
was left entirely to the Baron's mercy. It suffered no
worse mischance, however, than to be prompted to intenser
eommunion with itself. M. de Mauves was the
hero of the young girl's romance made real, and so
completely accordant with this creature of her imagination,
that she felt afraid of him, very much as she
would have been of a supernatural apparition. He
was thirty-five years old, — young enough to suggest
possibilities of ardent activity, and old enough to have
formed opinions which a simple woman might deem it
an intellectual privilege to listen to. He was perhaps
a trifle handsomer than Euphemia's rather grim, Quixotic
ideal, but a very few days reconciled her to his
good looks, as they would have reconciled her to his
ugliness. He was quiet, grave, and eminently distinguished.
He spoke little, but his speeches, without
being sententious, had a certain nobleness of tone
which caused them to re-echo in the young girl's ears
at the end of the day. He paid her very little direct
attention, but his chance words — if he only asked her
if she objected to his cigarette — were accompanied by
a smile of extraordinary kindness.
It happened that shortly after his arrival, riding an
unruly horse, which Euphemia with shy admiration
had watched him mount in the castle yard, he was
skill, made him for a fortnight an interesting invalid,
lounging in the library with a bandaged knee. To
beguile his confinement, Euphemia was repeatedly
induced to sing to him, which she did with a little
natural tremor in her voice, which might have passed
for an exquisite refinement of art. He never overwhelmed
her with compliments, but he listened with
unwandering attention, remembered all her melodies,
and sat humming them to himself. While his imprisonment
lasted, indeed, he passed hours in her company,
and made her feel not unlike some unfriended artist
who has suddenly gained the opportunity to devote a
fortnight to the study of a great model. Euphemia
studied with noiseless diligence what she supposed to
be the “character” of M. de Mauves, and the more she
looked the more fine lights and shades she seemed to
behold in this masterpiece of nature. M. de Mauves's
character indeed, whether from a sense of being generously
scrutinized, or for reasons which bid graceful
defiance to analysis, had never been so amiable; it
seemed really to reflect the purity of Euphemia's interpretation
of it. There had been nothing especially to
admire in the state of mind in which he left Paris, — a
hard determination to marry a young girl whose charms
might or might not justify his sister's account of them,
but who was mistress, at the worst, of a couple of hundred
sentiment; if she pleased him, so much the better;
but he had left a meagre margin for it, and he would
hardly have admitted that so excellent a match could
be improved by it. He was a placid sceptic, and it
was a singular fate for a man who believed in nothing
to be so tenderly believed in. What his original faith
had been he could hardly have told you; for as he
came back to his childhood's home to mend his fortunes
by pretending to fall in love, he was a thoroughly
perverted creature, and overlaid with more
corruptions than a summer day's questioning of his
conscience would have released him from. Ten years'
pursuit of pleasure, which a bureau full of unpaid bills
was all he had to show for, had pretty well stifled the
natural lad, whose violent will and generous temper
might have been shaped by other circumstances to a
result which a romantic imagination might fairly accept
as a late-blooming flower of hereditary honor.
The Baron's violence had been subdued, and he had
learned to be irreproachably polite; but he had lost
the edge of his generosity, and his politeness, which in
the long run society paid for, was hardly more than a
form of luxurious egotism, like his fondness for cambric
handkerchiefs, lavender gloves, and other fopperies
by which shopkeepers remained out of pocket. In
after years he was terribly polite to his wife. He had
to him by the society into which his birth and
his tastes introduced him was marked by some peculiar
features. That which mainly concerns us is its classification
of the fairer half of humanity as objects not
essentially different — say from the light gloves one
soils in an evening and throws away. To do M. de
Mauves justice, he had in the course of time encountered
such plentiful evidence of this pliant, glove-like
quality in the feminine character, that idealism naturally
seemed to him a losing game.
Euphemia, as he lay on his sofa, seemed by no
means a refutation; she simply reminded him that
very young women are generally innocent, and that
this, on the whole, was the most charming stage of
their development. Her innocence inspired him with
profound respect, and it seemed to him that if he
shortly became her husband it would be exposed to a
danger the less. Old Madame de Mauves, who flattered
herself that in this whole matter she was being
laudably rigid, might have learned a lesson from his
gallant consideration. For a fortnight the Baron was
almost a blushing boy again. He watched from behind
the “Figaro,” and admired, and held his tongue.
He was not in the least disposed toward a flirtation;
he had no desire to trouble the waters he proposed
to transfuse into the golden cup of matrimony. Sometimes
him the oddest sense of being, or of seeming at least,
almost bashful; for she had a way of not dropping
her eyes, according to the mysterious virginal mechanism,
of not fluttering out of the room when she
found him there alone, of treating him rather as a
benignant than as a pernicious influence, — a radiant
frankness of demeanor, in fine, in spite of an evident
natural reserve, which it seemed equally graceless not
to make the subject of a compliment and indelicate
not to take for granted. In this way there was
wrought in the Baron's mind a vague, unwonted resonance
of soft impressions, as we may call it, which
indicated the transmutation of “sentiment” from a contingency
into a fact. His imagination enjoyed it; he
was very fond of music, and this reminded him of
some of the best he had ever heard. In spite of the
bore of being laid up with a lame knee, he was in a
better humor than he had known for months; he lay
smoking cigarettes and listening to the nightingales,
with the comfortable smile of one of his country neighbors
whose big ox should have taken the prize at a
fair. Every now and then, with an impatient suspicion
of the resemblance, he declared that he was
pitifully bête; but he was under a charm which braved
even the supreme penalty of seeming ridiculous. One
morning he had half an hour's tête-à-tête with his
for reasons of her own, Madame de Mauves had suddenly
summoned, and had left waiting in the drawing-room
while she rearranged her curls. His reverence,
going up to the old lady, assured her that M. le Baron
was in a most edifying state of mind, and a promising
subject for the operation of grace. This was a pious
interpretation of the Baron's momentary good-humor.
He had always lazily wondered what priests were good
for, and he now remembered, with a sense of especial
obligation to the abbé, that they were excellent for
marrying people.
A day or two after this he left off his bandages, and
tried to walk. He made his way into the garden and
hobbled successfully along one of the alleys; but in
the midst of his progress he was seized with a spasm
of pain which forced him to stop and call for help.
In an instant Euphemia came tripping along the path
and offered him her arm with the frankest solicitude.
“Not to the house,” he said, taking it; “farther on,
to the bosquet.” This choice was prompted by her
having immediately confessed that she had seen him
leave the house, had feared an accident, and had followed
him on tiptoe.
“Why did n't you join me?” he had asked, giving
her a look in which admiration was no longer disguised,
and yet felt itself half at the mercy of her
a gentleman. But it drew a breath which filled its
lungs for a long time afterward, when she replied
simply that if she had overtaken him he might have
accepted her arm out of politeness, whereas she wished
to have the pleasure of seeing him walk alone.
The bosquet was covered with an odorous tangle of
blossoming vines, and a nightingale overhead was shaking
out love-notes with a profuseness which made the
Baron consider his own conduct the perfection of propriety.
“In America,” he said, “I have always heard that
when a man wishes to marry a young girl, he offers
himself simply, face to face, without any ceremony, —
without parents, and uncles, and cousins sitting round
in a circle.”
“Why, I believe so,” said Euphemia, staring, and too
surprised to be alarmed.
“Very well, then,” said the Baron, “suppose our
bosquet here to be America. I offer you my hand,
à l'Américaine. It will make me intensely happy to
have you accept it.”
Whether Euphemia's acceptance was in the American
manner is more than I can say; I incline to think
that for fluttering, grateful, trustful, softly - amazed
young hearts, there is only one manner all over the
world.
That evening, in the little turret chamber which it
was her happiness to inhabit, she wrote a dutiful letter
to her mamma, and had just sealed it when she was
sent for by Madame de Mauves. She found this ancient
lady seated in her boudoir, in a lavender satin
gown, with all her candles lighted, as if to celebrate
her grandson's betrothal. “Are you very happy?”
Madame de Mauves demanded, making Euphemia sit
down before her.
“I 'm almost afraid to say so,” said the young girl,
“lest I should wake myself up.”
“May you never wake up, belle enfant,” said the
old lady, solemnly. “This is the first marriage ever
made in our family in this way, — by a Baron de
Mauves proposing to a young girl in an arbor, like
Jeannot and Jeannette. It has not been our way of
doing things, and people may say it wants frankness.
My grandson tells me he considers it the perfection
of frankness. Very good. I 'm a very old woman,
and if your differences should ever be as frank as your
agreement, I should n't like to see them. But I
should be sorry to die and think you were going to
be unhappy. You can't be, beyond a certain point;
because, though in this world the Lord sometimes
makes light of our expectations, he never altogether
ignores our deserts. But you 're very young and innocent,
and easy to deceive. There never was a man in
as you believe the Baron. But he 's a galant homme
and a gentleman, and I 've been talking to him to-night.
To you I want to say this, — that you 're to
forget the worldly rubbish I talked the other day
about frivolous women being happy. It 's not the
kind of happiness that would suit you. Whatever
befalls you, promise me this: to be yourself. The
Baronne de Mauves will be none the worse for it.
Yourself, understand, in spite of everything, — bad
precepts and bad examples, bad usage even. Be persistently
and patiently yourself, and a De Mauves will
do you justice!”
Euphemia remembered this speech in after years, and
more than once, wearily closing her eyes, she seemed
to see the old woman sitting upright in her faded finery
and smiling grimly, like one of the Fates who sees
the wheel of fortune turning up her favorite event.
But at the moment it seemed to her simply to have
the proper gravity of the occasion; this was the way,
she supposed, in which lucky young girls were addressed
on their engagement by wise old women of
quality.
At her convent, to which she immediately returned,
she found a letter from her mother, which shocked her
far more than the remarks of Madame de Mauves.
Who were these people, Mrs. Cleve demanded, who
asking her leave? Questionable gentlefolk, plainly;
the best French people never did such things.
Euphemia would return straightway to her convent,
shut herself up, and await her own arrival.
It took Mrs. Cleve three weeks to travel from Nice
to Paris, and during this time the young girl had no
communication with her lover beyond accepting a bouquet
of violets, marked with his initials and left by a
female friend. “I 've not brought you up with such
devoted care,” she declared to her daughter at their
first interview, “to marry a penniless Frenchman. I
will take you straight home, and you will please to
forget M. de Mauves.”
Mrs. Cleve received that evening at her hotel a visit
from the Baron which mitigated her wrath, but failed
to modify her decision. He had very good manners,
but she was sure he had horrible morals; and Mrs.
Cleve, who had been a very good-natured censor on
her own account, felt a genuine spiritual need to sacrifice
her daughter to propriety. She belonged to that
large class of Americans who make light of America in
familiar discourse, but are startled back into a sense of
moral responsibility when they find Europeans taking
them at their word. “I know the type, my dear,” she
said to her daughter with a sagacious nod. “He 'll not
beat you; sometimes you 'll wish he would.”
Euphemia remained solemnly silent; for the only
answer she felt capable of making her mother was that
her mind was too small a measure of things, and that
the Baron's “type” was one which it took some mystical
illumination to appreciate. A person who confounded
him with the common throng of her watering-place
acquaintance was not a person to argue with.
It seemed to Euphemia that she had no cause to plead;
her cause was in the Lord's hands and her lover's.
M. de Mauves had been irritated and mortified by
Mrs. Cleve's opposition, and hardly knew how to handle
an adversary who failed to perceive that a De
Mauves of necessity gave more than he received. But
he had obtained information on his return to Paris
which exalted the uses of humility. Euphemia's fortune,
wonderful to say, was greater than its fame, and
in view of such a prize, even a De Mauves could afford
to take a snubbing.
The young man's tact, his deference, his urbane insistence,
won a concession from Mrs. Cleve. The engagement
was to be suspended and her daughter was
to return home, be brought out and receive the homage
she was entitled to, and which would but too surely
take a form dangerous to the Baron's suit. They were
to exchange neither letters, nor mementos, nor messages;
but if at the end of two years Euphemia had
refused offers enough to attest the permanence of her
her again.
This decision was promulgated in the presence of the
parties interested. The Baron bore himself gallantly,
and looked at the young girl, expecting some tender
protestation. But she only looked at him silently in
return, neither weeping, nor smiling, nor putting out
her hand. On this they separated; but as the Baron
walked away, he declared to himself that, in spite of
the confounded two years, he was a very happy fellow,
— to have a fiancée who, to several millions of francs,
added such strangely beautiful eyes.
How many offers Euphemia refused but scantily
concerns us, — and how the Baron wore his two years
away. He found that he needed pastimes, and, as
pastimes were expensive, he added heavily to the
list of debts to be cancelled by Euphemia's millions.
Sometimes, in the thick of what he had once called
pleasure with a keener conviction than now, he put
to himself the case of their failing him after all; and
then he remembered that last mute assurance of her
eyes, and drew a long breath of such confidence as he
felt in nothing else in the world save his own punctuality
in an affair of honor.
At last, one morning, he took the express to Havre
with a letter of Mrs. Cleve's in his pocket, and ten
days later made his bow to mother and daughter in
unable to bring himself to view what Euphemia's
uncle, Mr. Butterworth, who gave her away at the
altar, called our great experiment in democratic self-government
in a serious light. He smiled at everything,
and seemed to regard the New World as a colossal
plaisanterie. It is true that a perpetual smile
was the most natural expression of countenance for a
man about to marry Euphemia Cleve.
3. III.
LONGMORE'S first visit seemed to open to him
so large an opportunity for tranquil enjoyment,
that he very soon paid a second, and, at the end of a
fortnight, had spent a great many hours in the little
drawing-room which Madame de Mauves rarely quitted
except to drive or walk in the forest. She lived in an
old-fashioned pavilion, between a high-walled court and
an excessively artificial garden, beyond whose enclosure
you saw a long line of tree-tops. Longmore liked
the garden, and in the mild afternoons used to move
his chair through the open window to the little terrace
which overlooked it, while his hostess sat just within.
After a while she came out and wandered through the
narrow alleys and beside the thin-spouting fountain,
and last introduced him to a little gate in the garden
wall, opening upon a lane which led into the forest.
Hitherward, more than once, she wandered with him,
bareheaded and meaning to go but twenty rods, but
always strolling good-naturedly farther, and often taking
a generous walk. They discovered a vast deal to
talk about, and to the pleasure of finding the hours
satisfaction of suspecting that he was a “resource” for
Madame de Mauves. He had made her acquaintance
with the sense, not altogether comfortable, that she
was a woman with a painful secret, and that seeking
her acquaintance would be like visiting at a house
where there was an invalid who could bear no noise.
But he very soon perceived that her sorrow, since sorrow
it was, was not an aggressive one; that it was not
fond of attitudes and ceremonies, and that her earnest
wish was to forget it. He felt that even if Mrs. Draper
had not told him she was unhappy, he would have
guessed it; and yet he could hardly have pointed to
his evidence. It was chiefly negative, — she never
alluded to her husband. Beyond this it seemed to
him simply that her whole being was pitched on a
lower key than harmonious Nature meant; she was
like a powerful singer who had lost her high notes.
She never drooped nor sighed nor looked unutterable
things; she indulged in no dusky sarcasms against
fate; she had, in short, none of the coquetry of unhappiness.
But Longmore was sure that her gentle
gayety was the result of strenuous effort, and that she
was trying to interest herself in his thoughts to escape
from her own. If she had wished to irritate his curiosity
and lead him to take her confidence by storm,
nothing could have served her purpose better than this
was a rare magnanimity in such ardent self-effacement,
and that but one woman in ten thousand was capable
of merging an intensely personal grief in thankless
outward contemplation. Madame de Mauves, he instinctively
felt, was not sweeping the horizon for a
compensation or a consoler; she had suffered a personal
deception which had disgusted her with persons.
She was not striving to balance her sorrow with some
strongly flavored joy; for the present, she was trying
to live with it, peaceably, reputably, and without scandal,
— turning the key on it occasionally, as you would
on a companion liable to attacks of insanity. Longmore
was a man of fine senses and of an active imagination,
whose leading-strings had never been slipped.
He began to regard his hostess as a figure haunted by
a shadow which was somehow her intenser, more authentic
self. This hovering mystery came to have for
him an extraordinary charm. Her delicate beauty
acquired to his eye the serious cast of certain blank-browed
Greek statues, and sometimes, when his imagination,
more than his ear, detected a vague tremor in
the tone in which she attempted to make a friendly
question seem to have behind it none of the hollow
resonance of absent-mindedness, his marvelling eyes
gave her an answer more eloquent, though much less
to the point, than the one she demanded.
She gave him indeed much to wonder about, and,
in his ignorance, he formed a dozen experimental
theories upon the history of her marriage. She had
married for love and staked her whole soul on it;
of that he was convinced. She had not married a
Frenchman to be near Paris and her base of supplies
of millinery; he was sure she had seen conjugal happiness
in a light of which her present life, with its
conveniences for shopping and its moral aridity, was
the absolute negation. But by what extraordinary
process of the heart — through what mysterious intermission
of that moral instinct which may keep
pace with the heart, even when that organ is making
unprecedented time — had she fixed her affections on
an arrogantly frivolous Frenchman? Longmore needed
no telling; he knew M. de Mauves was frivolous;
it was stamped on his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his
carriage. For French women Longmore had but a
scanty kindness, or at least (what with him was very
much the same thing) but a scanty gallantry; they
all seemed to belong to the type of a certain fine
lady to whom he had ventured to present a letter of
introduction, and whom, directly after his first visit
to her, he had set down in his note-book as “metallic.”
Why should Madame de Mauves have chosen
a French woman's lot, — she whose character had a
perfume which does n't belong to even the brightest
cost her nothing to transplant herself, — if she was
not oppressed with a sense of irreconcilable difference
from “all these people.” She was silent awhile, and
he fancied that she was hesitating as to whether she
should resent so unceremonious an allusion to her
husband. He almost wished she would; it would
seem a proof that her deep reserve of sorrow had a
limit.
“I almost grew up here,” she said at last, “and it
was here for me that those dreams of the future took
shape that we all have when we cease to be very
young. As matters stand, one may be very American
and yet arrange it with one's conscience to live in
Europe. My imagination perhaps — I had a little
when I was younger — helped me to think I should
find happiness here. And after all, for a woman,
what does it signify? This is not America, perhaps,
about me, but it 's quite as little France. France
is out there, beyond the garden, in the town, in the
forest; but here, close about me, in my room and” —
she paused a moment — “in my mind, it 's a nameless
country of my own. It 's not her country,” she
added, “that makes a woman happy or unhappy.”
Madame Clairin, Euphemia's sister-in-law, might
have been supposed to have undertaken the graceful
task of making Longmore ashamed of his uncivil jottings
Mauves, bringing example to the confirmation of precept,
had made a remunerative match and sacrificed
her name to the millions of a prosperous and aspiring
wholesale druggist, — a gentleman liberal enough
to consider his fortune a moderate price for being
towed into circles unpervaded by pharmaceutic odors.
His system, possibly, was sound, but his own application
of it was unfortunate. M. Clairin's head was
turned by his good luck. Having secured an aristocratic
wife, he adopted an aristocratic vice and began
to gamble at the Bourse. In an evil hour he lost
heavily and staked heavily to recover himself. But
he overtook his loss only by a greater one. Then he
let everything go, — his wits, his courage, his probity,
— everything that had made him what his ridiculous
marriage had so promptly unmade. He walked
up the Rue Vivienne one day with his hands in his
empty pockets, and stood for half an hour staring confusedly
up and down the glittering boulevard. People
brushed against him, and half a dozen carriages almost
ran over him, until at last a policeman, who had been
watching him for some time, took him by the arm and
led him gently away. He looked at the man's cocked
hat and sword with tears in his eyes; he hoped he
was going to interpret to him the wrath of Heaven, —
to execute the penalty of his dead-weight of self-abhorrence.
in the embrasure of a door, out of harm's way, and
walked away to supervise a financial contest between
an old lady and a cabman. Poor M. Clairin had
only been married a year, but he had had time to
measure the lofty spirit of a De Mauves. When night
had fallen, he repaired to the house of a friend and
asked for a night's lodging; and as his friend, who
was simply his old head book-keeper and lived in a
small way, was put to some trouble to accommodate
him, — “You must excuse me,” Clairin said, “but I
can't go home. I 'm afraid of my wife!” Toward
morning he blew his brains out. His widow turned
the remnants of his property to better account than
could have been expected, and wore the very handsomest
mourning. It was for this latter reason, perhaps,
that she was obliged to retrench at other points
and accept a temporary home under her brother's
roof.
Fortune had played Madame Clairin a terrible trick,
but had found an adversary and not a victim. Though
quite without beauty, she had always had what is
called the grand air, and her air from this time forward
was grander than ever. As she trailed about in
her sable furbelows, tossing back her well-dressed
head, and holding up her vigilant eye-glass, she
seemed to be sweeping the whole field of society and
Suddenly she espied it, ready made to her hand, in
poor Longmore's wealth and amiability. American
dollars and American complaisance had made her
brother's fortune; why should n't they make hers?
She overestimated Longmore's wealth and misinterpreted
his amiability; for she was sure that a man
could not be so contented without being rich, nor so
unassuming without being weak. He encountered her
advances with a formal politeness which covered a
great deal of unflattering discomposure. She made
him feel acutely uncomfortable; and though he was
at a loss to conceive how he could be an object of
interest to a shrewd Parisienne, he had an indefinable
sense of being enclosed in a magnetic circle, like the
victim of an incantation. If Madame Clairin could
have fathomed his Puritanic soul, she would have
laid by her wand and her book and admitted that he
was an impossible subject. She gave him a kind of
moral chill, and he never mentally alluded to her
save as that dreadful woman, — that terrible woman.
He did justice to her grand air, but for his pleasure
he preferred the small air of Madame de Mauves;
and he never made her his bow, after standing frigidly
passive for five minutes to one of her gracious overtures
to intimacy, without feeling a peculiar desire to
ramble away into the forest, fling himself down on
that there were any women in nature who did n't
please like the swaying tree-tops. One day, on his
arrival, she met him in the court and told him that
her sister-in-law was shut up with a headache, and
that his visit must be for her. He followed her into
the drawing-room with the best grace at his command,
and sat twirling his hat for half an hour. Suddenly
he understood her; the caressing cadence of her voice
was a distinct invitation to solicit the incomparable
honor of her hand. He blushed to the roots of his
hair and jumped up with uncontrollable alacrity; then,
dropping a glance at Madame Clairin, who sat watching
him with hard eyes over the edge of her smile, as
it were, perceived on her brow a flash of unforgiving
wrath. It was not becoming, but his eyes lingered
a moment, for it seemed to illuminate her character.
What he saw there frightened him, and he felt himself
murmuring, “Poor Madame de Mauves!” His
departure was abrupt, and this time he really went
into the forest and lay down on the grass.
After this he admired Madame de Mauves more
than ever; she seemed a brighter figure, dogged by a
darker shadow. At the end of a month he received a
letter from a friend with whom he had arranged a
tour through the Low Countries, reminding him of his
promise to meet him promptly at Brussels. It was
the zeal with which he had declared that the
journey must either be deferred or abandoned, — that
he could not possibly leave Saint-Germain. He took
a walk in the forest, and asked himself if this was
irrevocably true. If it was, surely his duty was to
march straight home and pack his trunk. Poor Webster,
who, he knew, had counted ardently on this
excursion, was an excellent fellow; six weeks ago he
would have gone through fire and water to join Webster.
It had never been in his books to throw overboard
a friend whom he had loved for ten years for a
married woman whom for six weeks he had — admired.
It was certainly beyond question that he was lingering
at Saint-Germain because this admirable married
woman was there; but in the midst of all this admiration
what had become of prudence? This was the
conduct of a man prepared to fall utterly in love. If
she was as unhappy as he believed, the love of such a
man would help her very little more than his indifference;
if she was less so, she needed no help and could
dispense with his friendly offices. He was sure, moreover,
that if she knew he was staying on her account,
she would be extremely annoyed. But this very feeling
had much to do with making it hard to go; her
displeasure would only enhance the gentle stoicism
which touched him to the heart. At moments, indeed,
it was indelicate to make a daily study of such
a shrinking grief. But inclination answered that some
day her self-support would fail, and he had a vision
of this admirable creature calling vainly for help. He
would be her friend, to any length; it was unworthy
of both of them to think about consequences. But he
was a friend who carried about with him a muttering
resentment that he had not known her five years
earlier, and a brooding hostility to those who had anticipated
him. It seemed one of fortune's most mocking
strokes, that she should be surrounded by persons
whose only merit was that they threw the charm of
her character into radiant relief.
Longmore's growing irritation made it more and
more difficult for him to see any other merit than this
in the Baron de Mauves. And yet, disinterestedly, it
would have been hard to give a name to the portentous
vices which such an estimate implied, and there
were times when our hero was almost persuaded
against his finer judgment that he was really the most
considerate of husbands, and that his wife liked melancholy
for melancholy's sake. His manners were perfect,
his urbanity was unbounded, and he seemed never
to address her but, sentimentally speaking, hat in hand.
His tone to Longmore (as the latter was perfectly
aware) was that of a man of the world to a man not
it made up in easy friendliness. “I can't thank you
enough for having overcome my wife's shyness,” he
more than once declared. “If we left her to do as she
pleased, she would bury herself alive. Come often,
and bring some one else. She 'll have nothing to do
with my friends, but perhaps she 'll accept yours.”
The Baron made these speeches with a remorseless
placidity very amazing to our hero, who had an innocent
belief that a man's head may point out to him the
shortcomings of his heart and make him ashamed of
them. He could not fancy him capable both of neglecting
his wife and taking an almost humorous view
of her suffering. Longmore had, at any rate, an exasperating
sense that the Baron thought rather less of
his wife than more, for that very same fine difference
of nature which so deeply stirred his own sympathies.
He was rarely present during Longmore's visits, and
made a daily journey to Paris, where he had “business,”
as he once mentioned, — not in the least with a
tone of apology. When he appeared, it was late in the
evening, and with an imperturbable air of being on the
best of terms with every one and everything, which
was peculiarly annoying if you happened to have a
tacit quarrel with him. If he was a good fellow, he
was surely a good fellow spoiled. Something he
had, however, which Longmore vaguely envied — a
polished by the traditions of centuries — an amenity
exercised for his own sake and not his neighbors' —
which seemed the result of something better than a
good conscience — of a vigorous and unscrupulous
temperament. The Baron was plainly not a moral
man, and poor Longmore, who was, would have been
glad to learn the secret of his luxurious serenity.
What was it that enabled him, without being a monster
with visibly cloven feet, exhaling brimstone, to
misprize so cruelly a lovely wife, and to walk about
the world with a smile under his mustache? It was
the essential grossness of his imagination, which had
nevertheless helped him to turn so many neat compliments.
He could be very polite, and he could doubtless
be supremely impertinent; but he was as unable
to draw a moral inference of the finer strain, as a
school-boy who has been playing truant for a week to
solve a problem in algebra. It was ten to one he
did n't know his wife was unhappy; he and his brilliant
sister had doubtless agreed to consider their companion
a Puritanical little person, of meagre aspirations
and slender accomplishments, contented with
looking at Paris from the terrace, and, as an especial
treat, having a countryman very much like herself to
supply her with homely transatlantic gossip. M. de
Mauves was tired of his companion: he relished a
too simple, too delicate; she had too few arts, too little
coquetry, too much charity. M. de Mauves, some day,
lighting a cigar, had probably decided she was stupid.
It was the same sort of taste, Longmore moralized, as
the taste for Gérôme in painting, and for M. Gustave
Flaubert in literature. The Baron was a pagan and
his wife was a Christian, and between them, accordingly,
was a gulf. He was by race and instinct a grand
seigneur. Longmore had often heard of this distinguished
social type, and was properly grateful for an
opportunity to examine it closely. It had certainly a
picturesque boldness of outline, but it was fed from
spiritual sources so remote from those of which he felt
the living gush in his own soul, that he found himself
gazing at it, in irreconcilable antipathy, across a dim
historic mist. “I 'm a modern bourgeois,” he said,
“and not perhaps so good a judge of how far a pretty
woman's tongue may go at supper without prejudice to
her reputation. But I 've not met one of the sweetest
of women without recognizing her and discovering that
a certain sort of character offers better entertainment
than Thérésa's songs, sung by a dissipated duchess.
Wit for wit, I think mine carries me further.” It was
easy indeed to perceive that, as became a grand seigneur,
M. de Mauves had a stock of rigid notions. He
would not especially have desired, perhaps, that his
duchesses in question, chiefly of recent origin; but he
held that a gentleman may take his amusement where
he finds it, that he is quite at liberty not to find it at
home; and that the wife of a De Mauves who should
hang her head and have red eyes, and allow herself to
make any other response to officious condolence than
that her husband's amusements were his own affair,
would have forfeited every claim to having her finger-tips
bowed over and kissed. And yet in spite of these
sound principles, Longmore fancied that the Baron was
more irritated than gratified by his wife's irreproachable
reserve. Did it dimly occur to him that it was
self-control and not self-effacement? She was a model
to all the inferior matrons of his line, past and to come,
and an occasional “scene” from her at a convenient
moment would have something reassuring, — would attest
her stupidity a trifle more forcibly than her inscrutable
tranquillity.
Longmore would have given much to know the
principle of her submissiveness, and he tried more
than once, but with rather awkward timidity, to sound
the mystery. She seemed to him to have been long
resisting the force of cruel evidence, and, though she
had succumbed to it at last, to have denied herself
the right to complain, because if faith was gone her
heroic generosity remained. He believed even that
expected too much, and of trying to persuade herself
out of her bitterness by saying that her hopes had
been illusions and that this was simply — life. “I
hate tragedy,” she once said to him; “I have a really
pusillanimous dread of moral suffering. I believe that
— without base concessions — there is always some
way of escaping from it. I had almost rather never
smile all my life than have a single violent explosion
of grief.” She lived evidently in nervous apprehension
of being fatally convinced, — of seeing to the end of
her deception. Longmore, when he thought of this,
felt an immense longing to offer her something of
which she could be as sure as of the sun in heaven.
4. IV.
HIS friend Webster lost no time in accusing him
of the basest infidelity, and asking him what he
found at Saint-Germain to prefer to Van Eyck and
Hemling, Rubens and Rembrandt. A day or two after
the receipt of Webster's letter, he took a walk with
Madame de Mauves in the forest. They sat down on
a fallen log, and she began to arrange into a bouquet
the anemones and violets she had gathered. “I
have a letter,” he said at last, “from a friend whom
I some time ago promised to join at Brussels. The
time has come, — it has passed. It finds me terribly
unwilling to leave Saint-Germain.”
She looked up with the candid interest which she
always displayed in his affairs, but with no disposition,
apparently, to make a personal application of his words.
“Saint-Germain is pleasant enough,” she said; “but
are you doing yourself justice? Won't you regret in
future days that instead of travelling and seeing cities
and monuments and museums and improving your
mind, you sat here — for instance — on a log, pulling
my flowers to pieces?”
“What I shall regret in future days,” he answered
after some hesitation, “is that I should have sat here
and not spoken the truth on the matter. I am fond
of museums and monuments and of improving my
mind, and I 'm particularly fond of my friend Webster.
But I can't bring myself to leave Saint-Germain without
asking you a question. You must forgive me if
it 's unfortunate, and be assured that curiosity was
never more respectful. Are you really as unhappy as
I imagine you to be?”
She had evidently not expected his question, and
she greeted it with a startled blush. “If I strike you
as unhappy,” she said, “I have been a poorer friend
to you than I wished to be.”
“I, perhaps, have been a better friend of yours than
you have supposed. I 've admired your reserve, your
courage, your studied gayety. But I have felt the
existence of something beneath them that was more
you — more you as I wished to know you — than they
were; something that I have believed to be a constant
sorrow.”
She listened with great gravity, but without an air
of offence, and he felt that while he had been timorously
calculating the last consequences of friendship,
she had placidly accepted them. “You surprise me,”
she said slowly, and her blush still lingered. “But
to refuse to answer you would confirm an impression
that one can sit comfortably talking about, is an
unhappiness with distinct limitations. If I were examined
before a board of commissioners for investigating
the felicity of mankind, I 'm sure I should be
pronounced a very fortunate woman.”
There was something delightfully gentle to him in
her tone, and its softness seemed to deepen as she
continued: “But let me add, with all gratitude for
your sympathy, that it 's my own affair altogether.
It need n't disturb you, Mr. Longmore, for I have
often found myself in your company a very contented
person.”
“You 're a wonderful woman,” he said, “and I admire
you as I never have admired any one. You 're
wiser than anything I, for one, can say to you; and
what I ask of you is not to let me advise or console
you, but simply thank you for letting me know you.”
He had intended no such outburst as this, but his
voice rang loud, and he felt a kind of unfamiliar joy
as he uttered it.
She shook her head with some impatience. “Let
us be friends, — as I supposed we were going to be, —
without protestations and fine words. To have you
making bows to my wisdom, — that would be real
wretchedness. I can dispense with your admiration
better than the Flemish painters can, — better than
Go join your friend, — see everything, enjoy
everything, learn everything, and write me an excellent
letter, brimming over with your impressions. I 'm
extremely fond of the Dutch painters,” she added with
a slight faltering of the voice, which Longmore had
noticed once before, and which he had interpreted as
the sudden weariness of a spirit self-condemned to play
a part.
“I don't believe you care about the Dutch painters
at all,” he said with an unhesitating laugh. “But I
shall certainly write you a letter.”
She rose and turned homeward, thoughtfully rearranging
her flowers as she walked. Little was said;
Longmore was asking himself, with a tremor in the
unspoken words, whether all this meant simply that
he was in love. He looked at the rooks wheeling
against the golden-hued sky, between the tree-tops,
but not at his companion, whose personal presence
seemed lost in the felicity she had created. Madame
de Mauves was silent and grave, because she was
painfully disappointed. A sentimental friendship she
had not desired; her scheme had been to pass with
Longmore as a placid creature with a good deal of
leisure, which she was disposed to devote to profitable
conversation of an impersonal sort. She liked him
extremely, and felt that there was something in him
needy French baron was the ripest fruit of time, she
had done very scanty justice. They went through the
little gate in the garden wall and approached the
house. On the terrace Madame Clairin was entertaining
a friend, — a little elderly gentleman with a white
mustache, and an order in his button-hole. Madame
de Mauves chose to pass round the house into the
court; whereupon her sister-in-law, greeting Longmore
with a commanding nod, lifted her eye-glass and
stared at them as they went by. Longmore heard
the little old gentleman uttering some old-fashioned
epigram about “la vieille galanterie Française,” and
then, by a sudden impulse, he looked at Madame
de Mauves and wondered what she was doing in such
a world. She stopped before the house, without asking
him to come in. “I hope,” she said, “you 'll consider
my advice, and waste no more time at Saint-Germain.”
For an instant there rose to his lips some faded
compliment about his time not being wasted, but it
expired before the simple sincerity of her look. She
stood there as gently serious as the angel of disinterestedness,
and Longmore felt as if he should insult
her by treating her words as a bait for flattery. “I
shall start in a day or two,” he answered, “but I won't
promise you not to come back.”
“I hope not,” she said simply. “I expect to be
here a long time.”
“I shall come and say good by,” he rejoined; on
which she nodded with a smile, and went in.
He turned away, and walked slowly homeward by
the terrace. It seemed to him that to leave her thus,
for a gain on which she herself insisted, was to know
her better and admire her more. But he was in a
vague ferment of feeling which her evasion of his
question half an hour before had done more to deepen
than to allay. Suddenly, on the terrace, he encountered
M. de Mauves, who was leaning against the
parapet finishing a cigar. The Baron, who, he fancied,
had an air of peculiar affability, offered him his fair,
plump hand. Longmore stopped; he felt a sudden
angry desire to cry out to him that he had the loveliest
wife in the world; that he ought to be ashamed
of himself not to know it; and that for all his shrewdness
he had never looked into the depths of her eyes.
The Baron, we know, considered that he had; but
there was something in Euphemia's eyes now that was
not there five years before. They talked for a while
about various things, and M. de Mauves gave a humorous
account of his visit to America. His tone was
not soothing to Longmore's excited sensibilities. He
seemed to consider the country a gigantic joke, and
his urbanity only went so far as to admit that it was
apologist for our institutions; but the Baron's
narrative confirmed his worst impressions of French
superficiality. He had understood nothing, he had
felt nothing, he had learned nothing; and our hero,
glancing askance at his aristocratic profile, declared
that if the chief merit of a long pedigree was to
leave one so vaingloriously stupid, he thanked his stars
that the Longmores had emerged from obscurity in
the present century, in the person of an enterprising
lumber merchant. M. de Mauves dwelt of course on
that prime oddity of ours, — the liberty allowed to
young girls; and related the history of his researches
into the “opportunities” it presented to French noblemen,
— researches in which, during a fortnight's stay,
he seemed to have spent many agreeable hours. “I
am bound to admit,” he said, “that in every case I
was disarmed by the extreme candor of the young
lady, and that they took care of themselves to better
purpose than I have seen some mammas in France
take care of them.” Longmore greeted this handsome
concession with the grimmest of smiles, and damned
his impertinent patronage.
Mentioning at last that he was about to leave Saint-Germain,
he was surprised, without exactly being flattered,
by the Baron's quickened attention. “I 'm very
sorry,” the latter cried. “I hoped we had you for the
wondered why M. de Mauves should care whether he
stayed or went. “You were a diversion to Madame de
Mauves,” the Baron added. “I assure you I mentally
blessed your visits.”
“They were a great pleasure to me,” Longmore said
gravely. “Some day I expect to come back.”
“Pray do,” and the Baron laid his hand urgently on
his arm. “You see I have confidence in you!” Longmore
was silent for a moment, and the Baron puffed
his cigar reflectively and watched the smoke. “Madame
de Mauves,” he said at last, “is a rather singular
person.”
Longmore shifted his position, and wondered whether
he was going to “explain” Madame de Mauves.
“Being as you are her fellow-countryman,” the
Baron went on, “I don't mind speaking frankly. She 's
just a little morbid, — the most charming woman in
the world, as you see, but a little fanciful, — a little
exaltée. Now you see she has taken this extraordinary
fancy for solitude. I can't get her to go anywhere, —
to see any one. When my friends present themselves
she 's polite, but she 's freezing. She does n't do herself
justice, and I expect every day to hear two or
three of them say to me, `Your wife 's jolie à croquer:
what a pity she has n't a little esprit.' You must
have found out that she has really a great deal. But
herself. She sits alone for hours poring over her
English books and looking at life through that terrible
brown fog which they always seem to me to fling over
the world. I doubt if your English authors,” the
Baron continued, with a serenity which Longmore
afterwards characterized as sublime, “are very sound
reading for young married women. I don't pretend to
know much about them; but I remember that, not long
after our marriage, Madame de Mauves undertook to
read me one day a certain Wordsworth, — a poet highly
esteemed, it appears, chez vous. It seemed to me that
she took me by the nape of the neck and forced my
head for half an hour over a basin of soupe aux choux,
and that one ought to ventilate the drawing-room before
any one called. But I suppose you know him, —
ce génie là. I think my wife never forgave me, and
that it was a real shock to her to find she had married
a man who had very much the same taste in literature
as in cookery. But you 're a man of general culture,”
said the Baron, turning to Longmore and fixing his
eyes on the seal on his watch-guard. “You can talk
about everything, and I 'm sure you like Alfred de
Musset as well as Wordsworth. Talk to her about
everything, Alfred de Musset included. Bah! I forgot
you 're going. Come back then as soon as possible and
talk about your travels. If Madame de Mauves too
good. It would enlarge her horizon,” — and M. de
Mauves made a series of short nervous jerks with his
stick in the air, — “it would wake up her imagination.
She 's too rigid, you know, — it would show her that
one may bend a trifle without breaking.” He paused
a moment and gave two or three vigorous puffs. Then
turning to his companion again, with a little nod and a
confidential smile: — “I hope you admire my candor.
I would n't say all this to one of us.”
Evening was coming on, and the lingering light
seemed to float in the air in faintly golden motes.
Longmore stood gazing at these luminous particles; he
could almost have fancied them a swarm of humming
insects, murmuring as a refrain, “She has a great deal
of esprit, — she has a great deal of esprit.” “Yes, she
has a great deal,” he said mechanically, turning to the
Baron. M. de Mauves glanced at him sharply, as if to
ask what the deuce he was talking about. “She has
a great deal of intelligence,” said Longmore, deliberately,
“a great deal of beauty, a great many virtues.”
M. de Mauves busied himself for a moment in lighting
another cigar, and when he had finished, with a
return of his confidential smile, “I suspect you of
thinking,” he said, “that I don't do my wife justice.
Take care, — take care, young man; that 's a dangerous
assumption. In general, a man always does his
a laugh, — “that we keep for the wives of other
men!”
Longmore afterwards remembered it in favor of the
Baron's grace of address that he had not measured at
this moment the dusky abyss over which it hovered.
But a sort of deepening subterranean echo lingered on
his spiritual ear. For the present his keenest sensation
was a desire to get away and cry aloud that M. de
Mauves was an arrogant fool. He bade him an abrupt
good-night, which must serve also, he said, as good-by.
“Decidedly, then, you go?” said M. de Mauves,
almost peremptorily.
“Decidedly.”
“Of course you 'll come and say good by to Madame
de Mauves.” His tone implied that the omission would
be most uncivil; but there seemed to Longmore something
so ludicrous in his taking a lesson in consideration
from M. de Mauves, that he burst into a laugh.
The Baron frowned, like a man for whom it was a
new and most unpleasant sensation to be perplexed.
“You 're a queer fellow,” he murmured, as Longmore
turned away, not foreseeing that he would think him
a very queer fellow indeed before he had done with
him.
Longmore sat down to dinner at his hotel with his
usual good intentions; but as he was lifting his first
set down his wine untasted. His revery lasted long, and
when he emerged from it, his fish was cold; but this
mattered little, for his appetite was gone. That evening
he packed his trunk with a kind of indignant
energy. This was so effective that the operation was
accomplished before bedtime, and as he was not in the
least sleepy, he devoted the interval to writing two
letters; one was a short note to Madame de Mauves,
which he intrusted to a servant, to be delivered the
next morning. He had found it best, he said, to leave
Saint-Germain immediately, but he expected to be
back in Paris in the early autumn. The other letter
was the result of his having remembered a day or
two before that he had not yet complied with Mrs.
Draper's injunction to give her an account of his
impressions of her friend. The present occasion seemed
propitious, and he wrote half a dozen pages. His
tone, however, was grave, and Mrs. Draper, on receiving
them, was slightly disappointed, — she would have
preferred a stronger flavor of rhapsody. But what
chiefly concerns us is the concluding sentences.
“The only time she ever spoke to me of her marriage,”
he wrote, “she intimated that it had been a perfect
love-match. With all abatements, I suppose most
marriages are; but in her case this would mean more,
I think, than in that of most women; for her love
was a hero of rose-colored romance, and he turns
out to be not even a hero of very sad-colored reality.
For some time now she has been sounding her mistake,
but I don't believe she has touched the bottom
of it yet. She strikes me as a person who is begging
off from full knowledge, — who has struck a truce
with painful truth, and is trying awhile the experiment
of living with closed eyes. In the dark she
tries to see again the gilding on her idol. Illusion of
course is illusion, and one must always pay for it;
but there is something truly tragical in seeing an
earthly penalty levied on such divine folly as this.
As for M. de Mauves, he 's a Frenchman to his fingers'
ends; and I confess I should dislike him for this
if he were a much better man. He can't forgive his
wife for having married him too sentimentally and
loved him too well; for in some uncorrupted corner
of his being he feels, I suppose, that as she saw him,
so he ought to have been. It 's a perpetual vexation
to him that a little American bourgeoise should have
fancied him a finer fellow than he is, or than he at
all wants to be. He has n't a glimmering of real
acquaintance with his wife; he can't understand the
stream of passion flowing so clear and still. To tell
the truth, I hardly can myself; but when I see the
spectacle I can admire it furiously. M. de Mauves,
that his wife was as corruptible as himself; and
you 'll hardly believe me when I tell you that he
goes about intimating to gentlemen whom he deems
worthy of the knowledge, that it would be a convenience
to him to have them make love to her.”
5. V.
ON reaching Paris, Longmore straightway purchased
a Murray's “Belgium,” to help himself to
believe that he would start on the morrow for Brussels;
but when the morrow came, it occurred to him that, by
way of preparation, he ought to acquaint himself more
intimately with the Flemish painters in the Louvre.
This took a whole morning, but it did little to hasten
his departure. He had abruptly left Saint-Germain,
because it seemed to him that respect for Madame de
Mauves demanded that he should allow her husband
no reason to suppose that he had understood him; but
now that he had satisfied this immediate need of delicacy,
he found himself thinking more and more ardently
of Euphemia. It was a poor expression of ardor
to be lingering irresolutely on the deserted boulevards,
but he detested the idea of leaving Saint-Germain five
hundred miles behind him. He felt very foolish, nevertheless,
and wandered about nervously, promising
himself to take the next train; but a dozen trains
started, and Longmore was still in Paris. This sentimental
tumult was more than he had bargained for,
whether it was a “passion.” He had never been fond
of the word, and had grown up with a kind of horror
of what it represented. He had hoped that when he
fell in love, he should do it with an excellent conscience,
with no greater agitation than a mild general
glow of satisfaction. But here was a sentiment compounded
of pity and anger, as well as admiration, and
bristling with scruples and doubts. He had come
abroad to enjoy the Flemish painters and all others;
but what fair-tressed saint of Van Eyck or Memling
was so appealing a figure as Madame de Mauves? His
restless steps carried him at last out of the long villa-bordered
avenue which leads to the Bois de Boulogne.
Summer had fairly begun, and the drive beside the
lake was empty, but there were various loungers on
the benches and chairs, and the great café had an air
of animation. Longmore's walk had given him an appetite,
and he went into the establishment and demanded
a dinner, remarking for the hundredth time, as
he observed the smart little tables disposed in the open
air, how much better they ordered this matter in
France.
“Will monsieur dine in the garden, or in the salon?”
asked the waiter. Long more chose the garden; and
observing that a great vine of June roses was trained
over the wall of the house, placed himself at a table
the whitest of linen, in the most shining of porcelain.
It so happened that his table was near a window,
and that as he sat he could look into a corner of the
salon. So it was that his attention rested on a lady
seated just within the window, which was open, face
to face apparently to a companion who was concealed
by the curtain. She was a very pretty woman, and
Longmore looked at her as often as was consistent
with good manners. After a while he even began
to wonder who she was, and to suspect that she was
one of those ladies whom it is no breach of good manners
to look at as often as you like. Longmore, too,
if he had been so disposed, would have been the more
free to give her all his attention, that her own was
fixed upon the person opposite to her. She was what
the French call a belle brune, and though our hero, who
had rather a conservative taste in such matters, had no
great relish for her bold outlines and even bolder coloring,
he could not help admiring her expression of basking
contentment.
She was evidently very happy, and her happiness
gave her an air of innocence. The talk of her friend,
whoever he was, abundantly suited her humor, for she
sat listening to him with a broad, lazy smile, and interrupted
him occasionally, while she crunched her bonbons,
with a murmured response, presumably as broad,
great deal of champagne and ate an immense number
of strawberries, and was plainly altogether a person
with an impartial relish for strawberries, champagne,
and what she would have called bêtises.
They had half finished dinner when Longmore sat
down, and he was still in his place when they rose.
She had hung her bonnet on a nail above her chair,
and her companion passed round the table to take it
down for her. As he did so, she bent her head to
look at a wine stain on her dress, and in the movement
exposed the greater part of the back of a very
handsome neck. The gentleman observed it, and observed
also, apparently, that the room beyond them
was empty; that he stood within eyeshot of Longmore,
he failed to observe. He stooped suddenly and
imprinted a gallant kiss on the fair expanse. Longmore
then recognized M. de Mauves. The recipient of
this vigorous tribute put on her bonnet, using his flushed
smile as a mirror, and in a moment they passed
through the garden, on their way to their carriage.
Then, for the first time, M. de Mauves perceived
Longmore. He measured with a rapid glance the
young man's relation to the open window, and checked
himself in the impulse to stop and speak to him. He
contented himself with bowing with great gravity as
he opened the gate for his companion.
That evening Longmore made a railway journey,
but not to Brussels. He had effectually ceased to
care about Brussels; the only thing he now cared
about was Madame de Mauves. The atmosphere of
his mind had had a sudden clearing up; pity and
anger were still throbbing there, but they had space
to rage at their pleasure, for doubts and scruples had
abruptly departed. It was little, he felt, that he
could interpose between her resignation and the unsparing
harshness of her position; but that little, if
it involved the sacrifice of everything that bound
him to the tranquil past, it seemed to him that he
could offer her with a rapture which at last made
reflection a wofully halting substitute for faith. Nothing
in his tranquil past had given such a zest to
consciousness as the sense of tending with all his
being to a single aim which bore him company on
his journey to Saint-Germain. How to justify his
return, how to explain his ardor, troubled him little.
He was not sure, even, that he wished to be understood;
he wished only to feel that it was by no fault
of his that Madame de Mauves was alone with the ugliness
of fate. He was conscious of no distinct desire
to “make love” to her; if he could have uttered the
essence of his longing, he would have said that he
wished her to remember that in a world colored gray
to her vision by disappointment, there was one vividly
it, however, without his coming back to remind her;
and it is not to be denied that, as he packed his valise
that evening, he wished immensely to hear the sound
of her voice.
He waited the next day till his usual hour of calling,
— the late afternoon; but he learned at the door
that Madame de Mauves was not at home. The servant
offered the information that she was walking in
the forest. Longmore went through the garden and
out of the little door into the lane, and, after half an
hour's vain exploration, saw her coming toward him
at the end of a green by-path. As he appeared, she
stopped for a moment, as if to turn aside; then recognizing
him, she slowly advanced, and he was soon
shaking hands with her.
“Nothing has happened,” she said, looking at him
fixedly. “You 're not ill?”
“Nothing, except that when I got to Paris I found
how fond I had grown of Saint-Germain.”
She neither smiled nor looked flattered; it seemed
indeed to Longmore that she was annoyed. But he
was uncertain, for he immediately perceived that in
his absence the whole character of her face had altered.
It told him that something momentous had
happened. It was no longer self-contained melancholy
that he read in her eyes, but grief and agitation
love of peace of which she had spoken to him, and
forced it to know that deep experience is never peaceful.
She was pale, and she had evidently been shedding
tears. He felt his heart beating hard; he seemed
now to know her secrets. She continued to look at
him with a contracted brow, as if his return had given
her a sense of responsibility too great to be disguised
by a commonplace welcome. For some moments, as
he turned and walked beside her, neither spoke; then
abruptly, — “Tell me truly, Mr. Longmore,” she said,
“why you have come back.”
He turned and looked at her with an air which
startled her into a certainty of what she had feared.
“Because I 've learned the real answer to the question
I asked you the other day. You 're not happy, —
you 're too good to be happy on the terms offered you.
Madame de Mauves,” he went on with a gesture which
protested against a gesture of her own, “I can't be
happy if you 're not. I don't care for anything so long
as I see such a depth of unconquerable sadness in your
eyes. I found during three dreary days in Paris that
the thing in the world I most care for is this daily
privilege of seeing you. I know it 's absolutely brutal
to tell you I admire you; it 's an insult to you to treat
you as if you had complained to me or appealed to me.
But such a friendship as I waked up to there” — and he
force, I assure you; and when forces are compressed
they explode. But if you had told me every trouble in
your heart, it would have mattered little; I could n't
say more than I must say now, — that if that in life
from which you 've hoped most has given you least,
my devoted respect will refuse no service and betray
no trust.”
She had begun to make marks in the earth with the
point of her parasol; but she stopped and listened to
him in perfect immobility. Rather, her immobility
was not perfect; for when he stopped speaking a faint
flush had stolen into her cheek. It told Longmore
that she was moved, and his first perceiving it was the
happiest instant of his life. She raised her eyes at
last, and looked at him with what at first seemed a
pleading dread of excessive emotion.
“Thank you — thank you!” she said, calmly enough;
but the next moment her own emotion overcame her
calmness, and she burst into tears. Her tears vanished
as quickly as they came, but they did Longmore a
world of good. He had always felt indefinably afraid
of her; her being had somehow seemed fed by a deeper
faith and a stronger will than his own; but her half-dozen
smothered sobs showed him the bottom of her
heart, and assured him that she was weak enough to be
grateful.
“Excuse me,” she said; “I 'm too nervous to listen
to you. I believe I could have faced an enemy to-day,
but I can't endure a friend.”
“You 're killing yourself with stoicism, — that 's my
belief,” he cried. “Listen to a friend for his own sake,
if not for yours. I have never ventured to offer you
an atom of compassion, and you can't accuse yourself
of an abuse of charity.”
She looked about her with a kind of weary confusion
which promised a reluctant attention. But suddenly
perceiving by the wayside the fallen log on
which they had rested a few evenings before, she went
and sat down on it in impatient resignation, and looked
at Longmore, as he stood silent, watching her, with a
glance which seemed to urge that, if she was charitable
now, he must be very wise.
“Something came to my knowledge yesterday,” he
said as he sat down beside her, “which gave me a supreme
sense of your moral isolation. You are truth
itself, and there is no truth about you. You believe in
purity and duty and dignity, and you live in a world
in which they are daily belied. I sometimes ask myself
with a kind of rage how you ever came into such
a world, — and why the perversity of fate never let me
know you before.”
“I like my `world' no better than you do, and it was
not for its own sake I came into it. But what particular
upon? I confess it sometimes seems to me that men
and women are very poor creatures. I suppose I 'm
romantic. I have a most unfortunate taste for poetic
fitness. Life is hard prose, which one must learn to
read contentedly. I believe I once thought that all
the prose was in America, which was very foolish.
What I thought, what I believed, what I expected,
when I was an ignorant girl, fatally addicted to falling
in love with my own theories, is more than I can begin
to tell you now. Sometimes, when I remember certain
impulses, certain illusions of those days, they take
away my breath, and I wonder my bedazzled visions
did n't lead me into troubles greater than any I have
now to lament. I had a conviction which you would
probably smile at if I were to attempt to express it to
you. It was a singular form for passionate faith to
take, but it had all of the sweetness and the ardor of
passionate faith. It led me to take a great step, and
it lies behind me now in the distance like a shadow
melting slowly in the light of experience. It has
faded, but it has not vanished. Some feelings, I am
sure, die only with ourselves; some illusions are as
much the condition of our life as our heart-beats.
They say that life itself is an illusion, — that this
world is a shadow of which the reality is yet to come.
Life is all of a piece, then, and there is no shame in
does n't greatly matter; it 's the fault, in part, of my
obstinacy. There have been times when I have been
frantically distressed, and, to tell you the truth, wretchedly
homesick, because my maid — a jewel of a maid
— lied to me with every second breath. There have
been moments when I have wished I was the daughter
of a poor New England minister, living in a little
white house under a couple of elms, and doing all the
housework.”
She had begun to speak slowly, with an air of
effort; but she went on quickly, as if talking were a
relief. “My marriage introduced me to people and
things which seemed to me at first very strange and
then very horrible, and then, to tell the truth, very
contemptible. At first I expended a great deal of
sorrow and dismay and pity on it all; but there
soon came a time when I began to wonder whether
it was worth one's tears. If I could tell you the
eternal friendships I 've seen broken, the inconsolable
woes consoled, the jealousies and vanities leading off
the dance, you would agree with me that tempers like
yours and mine can understand neither such losses nor
such compensations. A year ago, while I was in the
country, a friend of mine was in despair at the infidelity
of her husband; she wrote me a most tragical
letter, and on my return to Paris I went immediately
stranger things, I thought she might have recovered
her spirits. Not at all; she was still in despair, — but
at what? At the conduct, the abandoned, shameless
conduct of Mme. de T. You 'll imagine, of course,
that Mme. de T. was the lady whom my friend's husband
preferred to his wife. Far from it; he had
never seen her. Who, then, was Mme. de T.? Mme.
de T. was cruelly devoted to M. de V. And who was
M. de V.? M. de V. — in two words, my friend was
cultivating two jealousies at once. I hardly know
what I said to her; something, at any rate, that she
found unpardonable, for she quite gave me up.
Shortly afterward my husband proposed we should
cease to live in Paris, and I gladly assented, for I
believe I was falling into a state of mind that made
me a detestable companion. I should have preferred
to go quite into the country, into Auvergne, where my
husband has a place. But to him Paris, in some degree,
is necessary, and Saint-Germain has been a sort of
compromise.”
“A sort of compromise!” Longmore repeated.
“That 's your whole life.”
“It 's the life of many people, of most people of
quiet tastes, and it is certainly better than acute distress.
One is at loss theoretically to defend a compromise;
but if I found a poor creature clinging to one
make him lose his hold.” Madame de Mauves had
no sooner uttered these words than she smiled faintly,
as if to mitigate their personal application.
“Heaven forbid,” said Longmore, “that one should
do that unless one has something better to offer. And
yet I am haunted by a vision of a life in which you
should have found no compromises, for they are a perversion
of natures that tend only to goodness and rectitude.
As I see it, you should have found happiness
serene, profound, complete; a femme de chambre not a
jewel perhaps, but warranted to tell but one fib a day;
a society possibly rather provincial, but (in spite of
your poor opinion of mankind) a good deal of solid
virtue; jealousies and vanities very tame, and no particular
iniquities and adulteries. A husband,” he added
after a moment, — “a husband of your own faith and
race and spiritual substance, who would have loved
you well.”
She rose to her feet, shaking her head. “You are very
kind to go to the expense of visions for me. Visions
are vain things; we must make the best of the reality.”
“And yet,” said Longmore, provoked by what seemed
the very wantonness of her patience, “the reality, if
I 'm not mistaken, has very recently taken a shape
that keenly tests your philosophy.”
She seemed on the point of replying that his sympathy
in his eyes proved that it was founded on a devotion
to which it was impossible not to defer. “Philosophy?”
she said. “I have none. Thank Heaven!” she
cried, with vehemence, “I have none. I believe, Mr.
Longmore,” she added in a moment, “that I have
nothing on earth but a conscience, — it 's a good time
to tell you so, — nothing but a dogged, clinging, inexpugnable
conscience. Does that prove me to be indeed
of your faith and race, and have you one for which
you can say as much? I don't say it in vanity, for
I believe that if my conscience will prevent me from
doing anything very base, it will effectually prevent
me from doing anything very fine.”
“I am delighted to hear it,” cried Longmore. “We
are made for each other. It 's very certain I too shall
never do anything fine. And yet I have fancied that
in my case this inexpugnable organ you so eloquently
describe might be blinded and gagged awhile, in a fine
cause, if not turned out of doors. In yours,” he went
on with the same appealing irony, “is it absolutely
invincible?”
But her fancy made no concession to his sarcasm.
“Don't laugh at your conscience,” she answered gravely;
“that 's the only blasphemy I know.”
She had hardly spoken when she turned suddenly
at an unexpected sound, and at the same moment
which crossed their own at a short distance from
where they stood.
“It 's M. de Mauves,” said Euphemia directly, and
moved slowly forward. Longmore, wondering how she
knew it, had overtaken her by the time her husband
advanced into sight. A solitary walk in the forest was
a pastime to which M. de Mauves was not addicted,
but he seemed on this occasion to have resorted to it
with some equanimity. He was smoking a fragrant
cigar, and his thumb was thrust into the armhole of
his waistcoat, with an air of contemplative serenity.
He stopped short with surprise on seeing his wife and
her companion, and Longmore considered his surprise
impertinent. He glanced rapidly from one to the
other, fixed Longmore's eye sharply for a single instant,
and then lifted his hat with formal politeness.
“I was not aware,” he said, turning to Madame de
Mauves, “that I might congratulate you on the return
of monsieur.”
“You should have known it,” she answered gravely,
“if I had expected Mr. Longmore's return.”
She had become very pale, and Longmore felt that
this was a first meeting after a stormy parting. “My
return was unexpected to myself,” he said. “I came
last evening.”
M. de Mauves smiled with extreme urbanity. “It 's
knows the duties of hospitality.” And with another
bow he continued his walk.
Madame de Mauves and her companion returned
slowly home, with few words, but, on Longmore's part
at least, many thoughts. The Baron's appearance had
given him an angry chill; it was a dusky cloud reabsorbing
the light which had begun to shine between
himself and his companion.
He watched Euphemia narrowly as they went, and
wondered what she had last had to suffer. Her husband's
presence had checked her frankness, but nothing
indicated that she had accepted the insulting meaning
of his words. Matters were evidently at a crisis between
them, and Longmore wondered vainly what it
was on Euphemia's part that prevented an absolute
rupture. What did she suspect? — how much did she
know? To what was she resigned? — how much had
she forgiven? How, above all, did she reconcile with
knowledge, or with suspicion, that ineradicable tenderness
of which she had just now all but assured him?
“She has loved him once,” Longmore said with a sinking
of the heart, “and with her to love once is to commit
one's being forever. Her husband thinks her too
rigid! What would a poet call it?”
He relapsed with a kind of aching impotence into
the sense of her being somehow beyond him, unattainable,
he gave three passionate switches in the air with his
cane, which made Madame de Mauves look round.
She could hardly have guessed that they meant that
where ambition was so vain, it was an innocent compensation
to plunge into worship.
Madame de Mauves found in her drawing-room the
little elderly Frenchman, M. de Chalumeau, whom
Longmore had observed a few days before on the terrace.
On this occasion, too, Madame Clairin was entertaining
him, but as his sister-in-law came in she
surrendered her post and addressed herself to our hero.
Longmore, at thirty, was still an ingenuous youth,
and there was something in this lady's large coquetry
which had the power of making him blush. He was
surprised at finding he had not absolutely forfeited her
favor by his deportment at their last interview, and a
suspicion of her meaning to approach him on another
line completed his uneasiness.
“So you 've returned from Brussels,” she said, “by
way of the forest.”
“I 've not been to Brussels. I returned yesterday
from Paris by the only way, — by the train.”
Madame Clairin stared and laughed. “I 've never
known a young man to be so fond of Saint-Germain.
They generally declare it 's horribly dull.”
“That 's not very polite to you,” said Longmore, who
abashed.
“Ah, what am I?” demanded Madame Clairin,
swinging open her fan. “I 'm the dullest thing here.
They 've not had your success with my sister-in-law.”
“It would have been very easy to have it. Madame
de Mauves is kindness itself.”
“To her own countrymen!”
Longmore remained silent; he hated the talk. Madame
Clairin looked at him a moment, and then turned
her head and surveyed Euphemia, to whom M. de Chalumeau
was serving up another epigram, which she
was receiving with a slight droop of the head and her
eyes absently wandering through the window. “Don't
pretend to tell me,” she murmured suddenly, “that
you 're not in love with that pretty woman.”
“Allons donc!” cried Longmore, in the best French
he had ever uttered. He rose the next minute, and
took a hasty farewell.
6. VI.
HE allowed several days to pass without going
back; it seemed delicate not to appear to regard
his friend's frankness during their last interview
as a general invitation. This cost him a great effort,
for hopeless passions are not the most deferential; and
he had, moreover, a constant fear, that if, as he believed,
the hour of supreme “explanations” had come,
the magic of her magnanimity might convert M. de
Mauves. Vicious men, it was abundantly recorded,
had been so converted as to be acceptable to God,
and the something divine in Euphemia's temper would
sanctify any means she should choose to employ. Her
means, he kept repeating, were no business of his, and
the essence of his admiration ought to be to respect her
freedom; but he felt as if he should turn away into a
world out of which most of the joy had departed, if
her freedom, after all, should spare him only a murmured
“Thank you.”
When he called again he found to his vexation that
he was to run the gantlet of Madame Clairin's officious
hospitality. It was one of the first mornings of perfect
windows, was flooded with a sweet confusion of odors
and bird-notes which filled him with the hope that
Madame de Mauves would come out and spend half
the day in the forest. But Madame Clairin, with her
hair not yet dressed, emerged like a brassy discord in a
maze of melody.
At the same moment the servant returned with Euphemia's
regrets; she was indisposed and unable to see
Mr. Longmore. The young man knew that he looked
disappointed, and that Madame Clairin was observing
him, and this consciousness impelled her to give him a
glance of almost aggressive frigidity. This was apparently
what she desired. She wished to throw him off
his balance, and, if he was not mistaken, she had the
means.
“Put down your hat, Mr. Longmore,” she said, “and
be polite for once. You were not at all polite the
other day when I asked you that friendly question
about the state of your heart.”
“I have no heart — to talk about,” said Longmore,
uncompromisingly.
“As well say you 've none at all. I advise you to
cultivate a little eloquence; you may have use for it.
That was not an idle question of mine; I don't ask
idle questions. For a couple of months now that
you 've been coming and going among us, it seems to
sort.”
“I have certainly been very well treated,” said
Longmore.
Madame Clairin was silent a moment, and then —
“Have you never felt disposed to ask any?” she
demanded.
Her look, her tone, were so charged with roundabout
meanings that it seemed to Longmore as if even to
understand her would savor of dishonest complicity.
“What is it you have to tell me?” he asked, frowning
and blushing.
Madame Clairin flushed. It is rather hard, when
you come bearing yourself very much as the sibyl
when she came to the Roman king, to be treated as
something worse than a vulgar gossip. “I might tell
you, Mr. Longmore,” she said, “that you have as bad
a ton as any young man I ever met. Where have you
lived, — what are your ideas? I wish to call your
attention to a fact which it takes some delicacy to
touch upon. You have noticed, I supposed, that my
sister-in-law is not the happiest woman in the world.”
Longmore assented with a gesture.
Madame Clairin looked slightly disappointed at his
want of enthusiasm. Nevertheless — “You have formed,
I suppose,” she continued, “your conjectures on the
causes of her — dissatisfaction.”
“Conjecture has been superfluous. I have seen the
causes — or at least a specimen of them — with my
own eyes.”
“I know perfectly what you mean. My brother, in
a single word, is in love with another woman. I don't
judge him; I don't judge my sister-in-law. I permit
myself to say that in her position I would have
managed otherwise. I would have kept my husband's
affection, or I would have frankly done without it,
before this. But my sister is an odd compound; I
don't profess to understand her. Therefore it is, in a
measure, that I appeal to you, her fellow-countryman.
Of course you 'll be surprised at my way of looking at
the matter, and I admit that it 's a way in use only
among people whose family traditions compel them
to take a superior view of things.” Madame Clairin
paused, and Longmore wondered where her family traditions
were going to lead her.
“Listen,” she went on. “There has never been a
De Mauves who has not given his wife the right to
be jealous. We know our history for ages back, and
the fact is established. It 's a shame if you like, but
it 's something to have a shame with such a pedigree.
The De Mauves are real Frenchmen, and their wives
— I may say it — have been worthy of them. You
may see all their portraits in our Château de Mauves;
every one of them an `injured' beauty, but not one
bad taste to be jealous, and yet not one in a dozen
was guilty of an escapade, — not one of them was
talked about. There 's good sense for you! How they
managed — go and look at the dusky, faded canvases
and pastels, and ask. They were femmes d'esprit
When they had a headache, they put on a little rouge
and came to supper as usual; and when they had a
heart-ache, they put a little rouge on their hearts.
These are fine traditions, and it does n't seem to me
fair that a little American bourgeoise should come in
and interrupt them, and should hang her photograph,
with her obstinate little air penché, in the gallery of
our shrewd fine ladies. A De Mauves must be a De
Mauves. When she married my brother, I don't suppose
she took him for a member of a societé de bonnes
œuvres. I don't say we 're right; who is right? But
we 're as history has made us, and if any one is to
change, it had better be Madame de Mauves herself.”
Again Madame Clairin paused and opened and closed
her fan. “Let her conform!” she said, with amazing
audacity.
Longmore's reply was ambiguous; he simply said,
“Ah!”
Madame Clairin's pious retrospect had apparently
imparted an honest zeal to her indignation. “For a
long time,” she continued, “my sister has been taking
with the world, and shutting herself up to read the
`Imitation.' I've never remarked on her conduct, but
I 've quite lost patience with it. When a woman with
her prettiness lets her husband wander, she deserves
her fate. I don't wish you to agree with me — on the
contrary; but I call such a woman a goose. She must
have bored him to death. What has passed between
them for many months need n't concern us; what provocation
my sister has had — monstrous, if you wish —
what ennui my brother has suffered. It 's enough that
a week ago, just after you had ostensibly gone to
Brussels, something happened to produce an explosion.
She found a letter in his pocket — a photograph — a
trinket — que sais-je? At any rate, the scene was
terrible. I did n't listen at the keyhole, and I don't
know what was said; but I have reason to believe
that my brother was called to account as I fancy none
of his ancestors have ever been, — even by injured
sweethearts.”
Longmore had leaned forward in silent attention
with his elbows on his knees, and instinctively he
dropped his face into his hands. “Ah, poor woman!”
he groaned.
“Voilà!” said Madame Clairin. “You pity her.”
“Pity her?” cried Longmore, looking up with
ardent eyes and forgetting the spirit of Madame
you?”
“A little. But I 'm not acting sentimentally; I 'm
acting politically. I wish to arrange things, — to see
my brother free to do at he chooses, — to see Euphemia
contented. Do you understand me?”
“Very well, I think. You 're the most immoral
person I 've lately had the privilege of conversing
with.”
Madame Clairin shrugged her shoulders. “Possibly.
When was there a great politician who was not immoral?”
“Nay,” said Longmore in the same tone. “You 're
too superficial to be a great politician. You don't
begin to know anything about Madame de Mauves.”
Madame Clairin inclined her head to one side, eyed
Longmore sharply, mused a moment, and then smiled
with an excellent imitation of intelligent compassion.
“It 's not in my interest to contradict you.”
“It would be in your interest to learn, Madame
Clairin,” the young man went on with unceremonious
candor, “what honest men most admire in a woman, —
and to recognize it when you see it.”
Longmore certainly did injustice to her talents for
diplomacy, for she covered her natural annoyance at
this sally with a pretty piece of irony. “So you are
in love!” she quietly exclaimed.
Longmore was silent awhile. “I wonder if you
would understand me,” he said at last, “if I were to
tell you that I have for Madame de Mauves the most
devoted friendship?”
“You underrate my intelligence. But in that case
you ought to exert your influence to put an end to
these painful domestic scenes.”
“Do you suppose,” cried Longmore, “that she talks
to me about her domestic scenes?”
Madame Clairin stared. “Then your friendship is n't
returned?” And as Longmore turned away, shaking
his head, — “Now, at least,” she added, “she will have
something to tell you. I happen to know the upshot
of my brother's last interview with his wife.” Longmore
rose to his feet as a sort of protest against the
indelicacy of the position into which he was being
forced; but all that made him tender made him curious,
and she caught in his averted eyes an expression
which prompted her to strike her blow. “My brother
is monstrously in love with a certain person in
Paris; of course he ought not to be; but he would n't
be a De Mauves if he were not. It was this unsanctified
passion that spoke. `Listen, madam,' he cried
at last: `let us live like people who understand life!
It 's unpleasant to be forced to say such things outright,
but you have a way of bringing one down to the
rudiments. I 'm faithless, I 'm heartless, I 'm brutal,
revenge, console yourself; you 're too pretty a woman
to have anything to complain of. Here 's a handsome
young man sighing himself into a consumption for you.
Listen to the poor fellow, and you 'll find that virtue is
none the less becoming for being good-natured. You 'll
see that it 's not after all such a doleful world, and that
there is even an advantage in having the most impudent
of husbands.”' Madame Clairin paused; Longmore
had turned very pale. “You may believe it,” she
said; “the speech took place in my presence; things
were done in order. And now, Mr. Longmore,” — this
with a smile which he was too troubled at the moment
to appreciate, but which he remembered later with a
kind of awe, — “we count upon you!”
“He said this to her, face to face, as you say it to
me now?” Longmore asked slowly, after a silence.
“Word for word, and with the greatest politeness.”
“And Madame de Mauves — what did she say?”
Madame Clairin smiled again. “To such a speech
as that a woman says — nothing. She had been sitting
with a piece of needlework, and I think she had
not seen her husband since their quarrel the day
before. He came in with the gravity of an ambassador,
and I 'm sure that when he made his demande
en mariage his manner was not more respectful.
He only wanted white gloves!” said Madame
her stitches, and then without a word, without
a glance, she walked out of the room. It was just
what she should have done!”
“Yes,” Longmore repeated, “it was just what she
should have done.”
“And I, left alone with my brother, do you know
what I said?”
Longmore shook his head. “Mauvais sujet!” he
suggested.
“`You 've done me the honor,' I said, `to take
this step in my presence. I don't pretend to qualify
it. You know what you 're about, and it 's your own
affair. But you may confide in my discretion.' Do
you think he has had reason to complain of it?”
She received no answer; Longmore was slowly turning
away and passing his gloves mechanically round
the band of his hat. “I hope,” she cried, “you 're
not going to start for Brussels!”
Plainly, Longmore was deeply disturbed, and Madame
Clairin might flatter herself on the success of
her plea for old-fashioned manners. And yet there
was something that left her more puzzled than satisfied
in the reflective tone with which he answered,
“No, I shall remain here for the present.” The processes
of his mind seemed provokingly subterranean,
and she would have fancied for a moment that he
of asceticism.
“Come this evening,” she boldly resumed. “The
rest will take care of itself. Meanwhile I shall take
the liberty of telling my sister-in-law that I have
repeated — in short, that I have put you au fait.”
Longmore started and colored, and she hardly knew
whether he was going to assent or demur. “Tell her
what you please. Nothing you can tell her will
affect her conduct.”
“Voyons! Do you mean to tell me that a woman,
young, pretty, sentimental, neglected — insulted, if you
will —? I see you don't believe it. Believe simply
in your own opportunity! But for heaven's
sake, if it 's to lead anywhere, don't come back with
that visage de croquemort. You look as if you were
going to bury your heart, — not to offer it to a pretty
woman. You 're much better when you smile. Come,
do yourself justice.”
“Yes,” he said, “I must do myself justice.” And
abruptly, with a bow, he took his departure.
7. VII.
HE felt, when he found himself unobserved, in
the open air, that he must plunge into violent
action, walk fast and far, and defer the opportunity
for thought. He strode away into the forest, swinging
his cane, throwing back his head, gazing away into
the verdurous vistas, and following the road without
a purpose. He felt immensely excited, but he could
hardly have said whether his emotion was a pain or a
joy. It was joyous as all increase of freedom is joyous;
something seemed to have been knocked down
across his path; his destiny appeared to have rounded
a cape and brought him into sight of an open sea. But
his freedom resolved itself somehow into the need
of despising all mankind, with a single exception; and
the fact of Madame de Mauves inhabiting a planet
contaminated by the presence of this baser multitude
kept his elation from seeming a pledge of ideal bliss.
But she was there, and circumstance now forced
them to be intimate. She had ceased to have what
men call a secret for him, and this fact itself brought
with it a sort of rapture. He had no prevision that
position into which they had been thrown; it
might be but a cruel trick of destiny to make hope a
harsher mockery and renunciation a keener suffering.
But above all this rose the conviction that she could do
nothing that would not deepen his admiration.
It was this feeling that circumstance — unlovely as
it was in itself — was to force the beauty of her character
into more perfect relief, that made him stride
along as if he were celebrating a kind of spiritual festival.
He rambled at random for a couple of hours,
and found at last that he had left the forest behind
him and had wandered into an unfamiliar region. It
was a perfectly rural scene, and the still summer day
gave it a charm for which its meagre elements but half
accounted.
Longmore thought he had never seen anything so
characteristically French; all the French novels
seemed to have described it, all the French landscapists
to have painted it. The fields and trees
were of a cool metallic green; the grass looked as if
it might stain your trousers, and the foliage your
hands. The clear light had a sort of mild grayness;
the sunbeams were of silver rather than gold. A great
red-roofed, high-stacked farm-house, with whitewashed
walls and a straggling yard, surveyed the high road,
on one side, from behind a transparent curtain of
rushes and edged with gray aspens, occupied the opposite
quarter. The meadows rolled and sloped away
gently to the low horizon, which was barely concealed
by the continuous line of clipped and marshalled
trees. The prospect was not rich, but it had a frank
homeliness which touched the young man's fancy.
It was full of light atmosphere and diffused sunshine,
and if it was prosaic, it was soothing.
Longmore was disposed to walk further, and he
advanced along the road beneath the poplars. In
twenty minutes he came to a village which straggled
away to the right, among orchards and potagers. On
the left, at a stone's throw from the road, stood a
little pink-faced inn, which reminded him that he
had not breakfasted, having left home with a prevision
of hospitality from Madame de Mauves. In the
inn he found a brick-tiled parlor and a hostess in
sabots and a white cap, whom, over the omelette she
speedily served him, — borrowing license from the
bottle of sound red wine which accompanied it, —
he assured that she was a true artist. To reward his
compliment, she invited him to smoke his cigar in
her little garden behind the house.
Here he found a tonnelle and a view of ripening
crops, stretching down to the stream. The tonnelle
was rather close, and he preferred to lounge on a
not too hot. Here, as he rested and gazed and
mused, he fell into a train of thought which, in an
indefinable fashion, was a soft influence from the
scene about him. His heart, which had been beating
fast for the past three hours, gradually checked
its pulses and left him looking at life with a rather
more level gaze. The homely tavern sounds coming
out through the open windows, the sunny stillness
of the fields and crops, which covered so much vigorous
natural life, suggested very little that was
transcendental, had very little to say about renunciation,
— nothing at all about spiritual zeal. They
seemed to utter a message from plain ripe nature, to
express the unperverted reality of things, to say that
the common lot is not brilliantly amusing, and that
the part of wisdom is to grasp frankly at experience,
lest you miss it altogether. What reason there was
for his falling a-wondering after this whether a deeply
wounded heart might be soothed and healed by such
a scene, it would be difficult to explain; certain it
is that, as he sat there, he had a waking dream of
an unhappy woman strolling by the slow-flowing
stream before him, and pulling down the blossoming
boughs in the orchards. He mused and mused, and
at last found himself feeling angry that he could not
somehow think worse of Madame de Mauves, — or at
in a sentimental way he asked very little of life, —
he made modest demands on passion; why then
should his only passion be born to ill-fortune? why
should his first — his last — glimpse of positive happiness
be so indissolubly linked with renunciation?
It is perhaps because, like many spirits of the
same stock, he had in his composition a lurking
principle of asceticism to whose authority he had
ever paid an unquestioning respect, that he now felt
all the vehemence of rebellion. To renounce — to
renounce again — to renounce forever — was this all
that youth and longing and resolve were meant for?
Was experience to be muffled and mutilated, like an
indecent picture? Was a man to sti and deliberately
condemn his future to be the blank memory of
a regret, rather than the long reverberation of a joy?
Sacrifice? The word was a trap for minds muddled
by fear, an ignoble refuge of weakness. To insist
now seemed not to dare, but simply to be, to live
on possible terms.
His hostess came out to hang a cloth to dry on the
hedge, and, though her guest was sitting quietly
enough, she seemed to see in his kindled eyes a flattering
testimony to the quality of her wine.
As she turned back into the house, she was met by
a young man whom Longmore observed in spite of his
jovial fraternity of artists whose very shabbiness has
an affinity with the element of picturesqueness and
unexpectedness in life which provokes a great deal of
unformulated envy among people foredoomed to be
respectable.
Longmore was struck first with his looking like a
very clever man, and then with his looking like a very
happy one. The combination, as it was expressed in
his face, might have arrested the attention of even a
less cynical philosopher. He had a slouched hat and
a blond beard, a light easel under one arm, and an unfinished
sketch in oils under the other.
He stopped and stood talking for some moments to
the landlady with a peculiarly good-humored smile.
They were discussing the possibilities of dinner; the
hostess enumerated some very savory ones, and he
nodded briskly, assenting to everything. It could n't
be, Longmore thought, that he found such soft contentment
in the prospect of lamb chops and spinach and a
tarte à la crême. When the dinner had been ordered,
he turned up his sketch, and the good woman fell
a-wondering and looking off at the spot by the stream-side
where he had made it.
Was it his work, Longmore wondered, that made
him so happy? Was a strong talent the best thing in
the world? The landlady went back to her kitchen,
something, beside the gate which opened upon the path
across the fields. Longmore sat brooding and asking
himself whether it was better to cultivate an art than
to cultivate a passion. Before he had answered the
question the painter had grown tired of waiting. He
picked up a pebble, tossed it lightly into an upper
window, and called, “Claudine!”
Claudine appeared; Longmore heard her at the window,
bidding the young man to have patience. “But
I 'm losing my light,” he said; “I must have my
shadows in the same place as yesterday.”
“Go without me, then,” Claudine answered; “I will
join you in ten minutes.” Her voice was fresh and
young; it seemed to say to Longmore that she was as
happy as her companion.
“Don't forget the Chénier,” cried the young man;
and turning away, he passed out of the gate and followed
the path across the fields until he disappeared
among the trees by the side of the stream. Who was
Claudine? Longmore vaguely wondered; and was she
as pretty as her voice? Before long he had a chance
to satisfy himself; she came out of the house with her
hat and parasol, prepared to follow her companion.
She had on a pink muslin dress and a little white hat,
and she was as pretty as a Frenchwoman needs to be
to be pleasing. She had a clear brown skin and a
to some slow music, heard only by herself. Her hands
were encumbered with various articles which she
seemed to intend to carry with her. In one arm she
held her parasol and a large roll of needlework, and in
the other a shawl and a heavy white umbrella, such as
painters use for sketching. Meanwhile she was trying
to thrust into her pocket a paper-covered volume which
Longmore saw to be the Poems of André Chénier; but
in the effort she dropped the large umbrella, and uttered
a half-smiling exclamation of disgust. Longmore
stepped forward with a bow and picked up the
umbrella, and as she, protesting her gratitude, put out
her hand to take it, it seemed to him that she was unbecomingly
overburdened.
“You have too much to carry,” he said; “you must
let me help you.”
“You 're very good, monsieur,” she answered. “My
husband always forgets something. He can do nothing
without his umbrella. He is d'une étourderie —”
“You must allow me to carry the umbrella,” Longmore
said. “It 's too heavy for a lady.”
She assented, after many compliments to his politeness;
and he walked by her side into the meadow.
She went lightly and rapidly, picking her steps and
glancing forward to catch a glimpse of her husband.
She was graceful, she was charming, she had an air of
that a young artist would work none the worse
for having her seated at his side, reading Chénier's
iambics. They were newly married, he supposed, and
evidently their path of life had none of the mocking
crookedness of some others. They asked little; but
what need one ask more than such quiet summer days,
with the creature one loves, by a shady stream, with
art and books and a wide, unshadowed horizon? To
spend such a morning, to stroll back to dinner in the
red-tiled parlor of the inn, to ramble away again as the
sun got low, — all this was a vision of bliss which
floated before him, only to torture him with a sense of
the impossible. All Frenchwomen are not coquettes,
he remarked, as he kept pace with his companion.
She uttered a word now and then, for politeness' sake,
but she never looked at him, and seemed not in the
least to care that he was a well-favored young man.
She cared for nothing but the young artist in the
shabby coat and the slouched hat, and for discovering
where he had set up his easel.
This was soon done. He was encamped under the
trees, close to the stream, and, in the diffused green
shade of the little wood, seemed to be in no immediate
need of his umbrella. He received a vivacious rebuke,
however, for forgetting it, and was informed of what
he owed to Longmore's complaisance. He was duly
a seat on the grass. But Longmore felt like a marplot,
and lingered only long enough to glance at the young
man's sketch, and to see it was a very clever rendering
of the silvery stream and the vivid green rushes. The
young wife had spread her shawl on the grass at the
base of a tree, and meant to seat herself when Longmore
had gone, and murmur Chénier's verses to the
music of the gurgling river. Longmore looked awhile
from one to the other, barely stifled a sigh, bade them
good morning, and took his departure.
He knew neither where to go nor what to do; he
seemed afloat on the sea of ineffectual longing. He
strolled slowly back to the inn, and in the doorway
met the landlady coming back from the butcher's with
the lamb chops for the dinner of her lodgers.
“Monsieur has made the acquaintance of the dame
of our young painter,” she said with a broad smile, —
a smile too broad for malicious meanings. “Monsieur
has perhaps seen the young man's picture. It appears
that he has a great deal of talent.”
“His picture was very pretty,” said Longmore, “but
his dame was prettier still.”
“She 's a very nice little woman; but I pity her all
the more.”
“I don't see why she 's to be pitied,” said Longmore;
“they seem a very happy couple.”
The landlady gave a knowing nod.
“Don't trust to it, monsieur! Those artists, — ça
n'a pas de principes! From one day to another he
can plant her there! I know them, allez. I 've had
them here very often; one year with one, another year
with another.”
Longmore was puzzled for a moment. Then, “You
mean she 's not his wife?” he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. “What shall I tell
you? They are not des hommes sérieux, those gentlemen!
They don't engage themselves for an eternity.
It 's none of my business, and I 've no wish to speak
ill of madame. She 's a very nice little woman, and
she loves her jeune homme to distraction.”
“Who is she?” asked Longmore. “What do you
know about her?”
“Nothing for certain; but it 's my belief that she 's
better than he. I 've even gone so far as to believe
that she 's a lady, — a true lady, — and that she has
given up a great many things for him. I do the best
I can for them, but I don't believe she 's been obliged
all her life to content herself with a dinner of two
courses.” And she turned over her lamb chops tenderly,
as if to say that though a good cook could
imagine better things, yet if you could have but one
course, lamb chops had much in their favor. “I shall
cook them with bread crumbs. Voilà les femmes,
monsieur!”
Longmore turned away with the feeling that women
were indeed a measureless mystery, and that it was
hard to say whether there was greater beauty in their
strength or in their weakness. He walked back to
Saint-Germain, more slowly than he had come, with
less philosophic resignation to any event, and more of
the urgent egotism of the passion which philosophers
call the supremely selfish one. Every now and then
the episode of the happy young painter and the
charming woman who had given up a great many
things for him rose vividly in his mind, and seemed
to mock his moral unrest like some obtrusive vision
of unattainable bliss.
The landlady's gossip cast no shadow on its brightness;
her voice seemed that of the vulgar chorus of the
uninitiated, which stands always ready with its gross
prose rendering of the inspired passages in human action.
Was it possible a man could take that from a woman,
— take all that lent lightness to that other woman's
footstep and intensity to her glance, — and not give
her the absolute certainty of a devotion as unalterable
as the process of the sun? Was it possible that such a
rapturous union had the seeds of trouble, — that the
charm of such a perfect accord could be broken by anything
but death? Longmore felt an immense desire to
cry out a thousand times “No!” for it seemed to him
at last that he was somehow spiritually the same as the
soul of Euphemia de Mauves.
The heat of the sun, as he walked along, became
oppressive, and when he re-entered the forest he turned
aside into the deepest shade he could find, and stretched
himself on the mossy ground at the foot of a great
beech. He lay for a while staring up into the verdurous
dusk overhead, and trying to conceive Madame
de Mauves hastening toward some quiet stream-side
where he waited, as he had seen that trusting creature
do an hour before. It would be hard to say how well
he succeeded; but the effort soothed him rather than
excited him, and as he had had a good deal both of
moral and physical fatigue, he sank at last into a quiet
sleep.
While he slept he had a strange, vivid dream. He
seemed to be in a wood, very much like the one on
which his eyes had lately closed; but the wood was
divided by the murmuring stream he had left an hour
before. He was walking up and down, he thought,
restlessly and in intense expectation of some momentous
event. Suddenly, at a distance, through the
trees, he saw the gleam of a woman's dress, and hurried
forward to meet her. As he advanced he recognized
her, but he saw at the same time that she
was on the opposite bank of the river. She seemed
at first not to notice him, but when they were opposite
gravely and pityingly. She made him no motion that
he should cross the stream, but he wished greatly to
stand by her side. He knew the water was deep, and
it seemed to him that he knew that he should have
to plunge, and that he feared that when he rose to
the surface she would have disappeared. Nevertheless,
he was going to plunge, when a boat turned into the
current from above and came swiftly toward them,
guided by an oarsman, who was sitting so that they
could not see his face. He brought the boat to the
bank where Longmore stood; the latter stepped in,
and with a few strokes they touched the opposite
shore. Longmore got out, and, though he was sure he
had crossed the stream, Madame de Mauves was not
there. He turned with a kind of agony and saw that
now she was on the other bank, — the one he had
left. She gave him a grave, silent glance, and walked
away up the stream. The boat and the boatman resumed
their course, but after going a short distance
they stopped, and the boatman turned back and looked
at the still divided couple. Then Longmore recognized
him, — just as he had recognized him a few days before
at the café in the Bois de Boulogne.
8. VIII.
HE must have slept some time after he ceased
dreaming, for he had no immediate memory of
his dream. It came back to him later, after he had
roused himself and had walked nearly home. No
great ingenuity was needed to make it seem a rather
striking allegory, and it haunted and oppressed him
for the rest of the day. He took refuge, however, in
his quickened conviction that the only sound policy
in life is to grasp unsparingly at happiness; and it
seemed no more than one of the vigorous measures
dictated by such a policy, to return that evening to
Madame de Mauves. And yet when he had decided
to do so, and had carefully dressed himself, he felt an
irresistible nervous tremor which made it easier to
linger at his open window, wondering, with a strange
mixture of dread and desire, whether Madame Clairin
had told her sister-in-law that she had told him.....
His presence now might be simply a gratuitous cause
of suffering; and yet his absence might seem to imply
that it was in the power of circumstances to make
them ashamed to meet each other's eyes. He sat a
confusion of hopes and questionings. He felt at moments
as if he could throttle Madame Clairin, and yet
he could not help asking himself whether it was not
possible that she might have done him a service. It
was late when he left the hotel, and as he entered the
gate of the other house his heart was beating so that
he was sure his voice would show it.
The servant ushered him into the drawing-room,
which was empty, with the lamp burning low. But
the long windows were open, and their light curtains
swaying in a soft, warm wind, and Longmore stepped
out upon the terrace. There he found Madame de
Mauves alone, slowly pacing up and down. She was
dressed in white, very simply, and her hair was arranged,
not as she usually wore it, but in a single loose
coil, like that of a person unprepared for company.
She stopped when she saw Longmore, seemed slightly
startled, uttered an exclamation, and stood waiting
for him to speak. He looked at her, tried to say
something, but found no words. He knew it was
awkward, it was offensive, to stand silent, gazing; but
he could not say what was suitable, and he dared not
say what he wished.
Her face was indistinct in the dim light, but he
could see that her eyes were fixed on him, and he
wondered what they expressed. Did they warn him,
For an instant his head swam; he felt as if
it would make all things clear to stride forward and
fold her in his arms. But a moment later he was still
standing looking at her; he had not moved; he knew
that she had spoken, but he had not understood her.
“You were here this morning,” she continued, and
now, slowly, the meaning of her words came to him.
“I had a bad headache and had to shut myself up.”
She spoke in her usual voice.
Longmore mastered his agitation and answered her
without betraying himself: “I hope you are better
now.”
“Yes, thank you, I 'm better — much better.”
He was silent a moment, and she moved away to a
chair and seated herself. After a pause he followed
her and stood before her, leaning against the balustrade
of the terrace. “I hoped you might have been
able to come out for the morning into the forest. I
went alone; it was a lovely day, and I took a long
walk.”
“It was a lovely day,” she said absently, and sat
with her eyes lowered, slowly opening and closing her
fan. Longmore, as he watched her, felt more and more
sure that her sister-in-law had seen her since her interview
with him; that her attitude toward him was
changed. It was this same something that chilled the
the dozen passionate speeches which kept rising to his
lips into a kind of reverential silence. No, certainly,
he could not clasp her to his arms now, any more than
some early worshipper could have clasped the marble
statue in his temple. But Longmore's statue spoke at
last, with a full human voice, and even with a shade
of human hesitation. She looked up, and it seemed
to him that her eyes shone through the dusk.
“I 'm very glad you came this evening,” she said.
“I have a particular reason for being glad. I half
expected you, and yet I thought it possible you might
not come.”
“As I have been feeling all day,” Longmore answered,
“it was impossible I should not come. I have
spent the day in thinking of you.”
She made no immediate reply, but continued to open
and close her fan thoughtfully. At last, — “I have
something to say to you,” she said abruptly. “I want
you to know to a certainty that I have a very high
opinion of you.” Longmore started and shifted his
position. To what was she coming? But he said
nothing, and she went on.
“I take a great interest in you; there 's no reason
why I should not say it, — I have a great friendship
for you.”
He began to laugh; he hardly knew why, unless
she continued without heeding him.
“You know, I suppose, that a great disappointment
always implies a great confidence — a great hope?”
“I have hoped,” he said, “hoped strongly; but doubtless
never rationally enough to have a right to bemoan
my disappointment.”
“You do yourself injustice. I have such confidence
in your reason, that I should be greatly disappointed
if I were to find it wanting.”
“I really almost believe that you are amusing yourself
at my expense,” cried Longmore. “My reason?
Reason is a mere word! The only reality in the world
is feeling!”
She rose to her feet and looked at him gravely. His
eyes by this time were accustomed to the imperfect
light, and he could see that her look was reproachful,
and yet that it was beseechingly kind. She shook her
head impatiently, and laid her fan upon his arm with
a strong pressure.
“If that were so, it would be a weary world. I
know your feeling, however, nearly enough. You
need n't try to express it. It 's enough that it gives
me the right to ask a favor of you, — to make an
urgent, a solemn request.”
“Make it; I listen.”
“Don't disappoint me. If you don't understand me
just now that I had a very high opinion of you, I
meant it very seriously. It was not a vain compliment.
I believe that there is no appeal one may
make to your generosity which can remain long unanswered.
If this were to happen, — if I were to find
you selfish where I thought you generous, narrow
where I thought you large,” — and she spoke slowly,
with her voice lingering with emphasis on each of
these words, — “vulgar where I thought you rare, —
I should think worse of human nature. I should suffer,
— I should suffer keenly. I should say to myself
in the dull days of the future, `There was one man
who might have done so and so; and he, too, failed.'
But this shall not be. You have made too good an
impression on me not to make the very best. If you
wish to please me forever, there 's a way.”
She was standing close to him, with her dress
touching him, her eyes fixed on his. As she went on
her manner grew strangely intense, and she had the
singular appearance of a woman preaching reason
with a kind of passion. Longmore was confused, dazzled,
almost bewildered. The intention of her words
was all remonstrance, refusal, dismissal; but her presence
there, so close, so urgent, so personal, seemed a
distracting contradiction of it. She had never been so
lovely. In her white dress, with her pale face and
summer night. When she had ceased speaking, she
drew a long breath; Longmore felt it on his cheek,
and it stirred in his whole being a sudden, rapturous
conjecture. Were her words in their soft severity a
mere delusive spell, meant to throw into relief her
almost ghostly beauty, and was this the only truth,
the only reality, the only law?
He closed his eyes and felt that she was watching
him, not without pain and perplexity herself. He
looked at her again, met her own eyes, and saw a tear
in each of them. Then this last suggestion of his desire
seemed to die away with a stifled murmur, and her
beauty, more and more radiant in the darkness, rose
before him as a symbol of something vague which
was yet more beautiful than itself.
“I may understand you to-morrow,” he said, “but I
don't understand you now.”
“And yet I took counsel with myself to-day and
asked myself how I had best speak to you. On one
side, I might have refused to see you at all.” Longmore
made a violent movement, and she added: “In
that case I should have written to you. I might see
you, I thought, and simply say to you that there were
excellent reasons why we should part, and that I
begged this visit should be your last. This I inclined
to do; what made me decide otherwise was — simply
remember in future days, not that I had dismissed
you, but that you had gone away out of the fulness
of your own wisdom.”
“The fulness — the fulness!” cried Longmore.
“I 'm prepared, if necessary,” Madame de Mauves
continued after a pause, “to fall back upon my strict
right. But, as I said before, I shall be greatly disappointed,
if I am obliged to.”
“When I hear you say that,” Longmore answered,
“I feel so angry, so horribly irritated, that I wonder
it is not easy to leave you without more words.”
“If you should go away in anger, this idea of mine
about our parting would be but half realized. No, I
don't want to think of you as angry; I don't want even
to think of you as making a serious sacrifice. I want
to think of you as —”
“As a creature who never has existed, — who never
can exist! A creature who knew you without loving
you, — who left you without regretting you!”
She turned impatiently away and walked to the
other end of the terrace. When she came back, he
saw that her impatience had become a cold sternness.
She stood before him again, looking at him from head
to foot, in deep reproachfulness, almost in scorn. Beneath
her glance he felt a kind of shame. He colored;
she observed it and withheld something she was about
end of the terrace, and stood there looking away into
the garden. It seemed to him that she had guessed
he understood her, and slowly — slowly — half as the
fruit of his vague self-reproach, — he did understand
her. She was giving him a chance to do gallantly
what it seemed unworthy of both of them he should
do meanly.
She liked him, she must have liked him greatly, to
wish so to spare him, to go to the trouble of conceiving
an ideal of conduct for him. With this sense of her
friendship, — her strong friendship she had just called
it, — Longmore's soul rose with a new flight, and suddenly
felt itself breathing a clearer air. The words
ceased to seem a mere bribe to his ardor; they were
charged with ardor themselves; they were a present
happiness. He moved rapidly toward her with a feeling
that this was something he might immediately
enjoy.
They were separated by two thirds of the length of
the terrace, and he had to pass the drawing-room window.
As he did so he started with an exclamation.
Madame Clairin stood posted there, watching him.
Conscious, apparently, that she might be suspected
of eavesdropping, she stepped forward with a smile and
looked from Longmore to his hostess.
“Such a tête-à-tête as that,” she said, “one owes no
good manners.”
Madame de Mauves turned round, but she answered
nothing. She looked straight at Longmore, and her
eyes had extraordinary eloquence. He was not exactly
sure, indeed, what she meant them to say; but they
seemed to say plainly something of this kind: “Call
it what you will, what you have to urge upon me is the
thing which this woman can best conceive. What I
ask of you is something she can't!” They seemed,
somehow, to beg him to suffer her to be herself, and
to intimate that that self was as little as possible like
Madame Clairin. He felt an immense answering desire
not to do anything which would seem natural to
this lady. He had laid his hat and cane on the parapet
of the terrace. He took them up, offered his hand
to Madame de Mauves with a simple good night, bowed
silently to Madame Clairin, and departed.
9. IX.
HE went home and without lighting his candle
flung himself on his bed. But he got no sleep
till morning; he lay hour after hour tossing, thinking,
wondering; his mind had never been so active. It
seemed to him that Euphemia had laid on him in those
last moments an inspiring commission, and that she
had expressed herself almost as largely as if she had listened
assentingly to an assurance of his love. It was
neither easy nor delightful thoroughly to understand
her; but little by little her perfect meaning sank into
his mind and soothed it with a sense of opportunity,
which somehow stifled his sense of loss. For, to begin
with, she meant that she could love him in no degree
nor contingency, in no imaginable future. This was
absolute; he felt that he could alter it no more than
he could transpose the constellations he lay gazing at
through his open window. He wondered what it was, in
the background of her life, that she grasped so closely:
a sense of duty, unquenchable to the end? a love that
no offence could trample out? “Good heavens!” he
thought, “is the world so rich in the purest pearls of
forever, — poured away without a sigh into bottomless
darkness?” Had she, in spite of the detestable present,
some precious memory which contained the germ
of a shrinking hope? Was she prepared to submit to
everything and yet to believe? Was it strength, was
it weakness, was it a vulgar fear, was it conviction,
conscience, constancy?
Longmore sank back with a sigh and an oppressive
feeling that it was vain to guess at such a
woman's motives. He only felt that those of Madame
de Mauves were buried deep in her soul, and that
they must be of some fine temper, not of a base one.
He had a dim, overwhelming sense of a sort of invulnerable
constancy being the supreme law of her
character, — a constancy which still found a foothold
among crumbling ruins. “She has loved once,” he
said to himself as he rose and wandered to his window;
“that 's forever. Yes, yes, — if she loved again
she would be common.” He stood for a long time
looking out into the starlit silence of the town and
the forest, and thinking of what life would have
been if his constancy had met hers unpledged. But
life was this, now, and he must live. It was living
keenly to stand there with a petition from such a
woman to revolve. He was not to disappoint her,
he was to justify a conception which it had beguiled
swelled; he threw back his head and seemed to be
looking for Madame de Mauves's conception among
the blinking, mocking stars. But it came to him
rather on the mild night-wind, as it wandered in
over the house-tops which covered the rest of so many
heavy human hearts. What she asked he felt that
she was asking, not for her own sake (she feared nothing,
she needed nothing), but for that of his own
happiness and his own character. He must assent
to destiny. Why else was he young and strong, intelligent
and resolute? He must not give it to her to
reproach him with thinking that she had a moment's
attention for his love, — to plead, to argue, to break
off in bitterness; he must see everything from above,
her indifference and his own ardor; he must prove
his strength, he must do the handsome thing; he
must decide that the handsome thing was to submit
to the inevitable, to be supremely delicate, to spare
her all pain, to stifle his passion, to ask no compensation,
to depart without delay and try to believe
that wisdom is its own reward. All this, neither
more nor less, it was a matter of friendship with
Madame de Mauves to expect of him. And what
should he gain by it? He should have pleased her!
.... He flung himself on his bed again, fell asleep
at last, and slept till morning.
Before noon the next day he had made up his mind
that he would leave Saint-Germain at once. It
seemed easier to leave without seeing her, and yet
if he might ask a grain of “compensation,” it would
be five minutes face to face with her. He passed a
restless day. Wherever he went he seemed to see
her standing before him in the dusky halo of evening,
and looking at him with an air of still negation more
intoxicating than the most passionate self-surrender.
He must certainly go, and yet it was hideously hard.
He compromised and went to Paris to spend the rest
of the day. He strolled along the boulevards and
looked at the shops, sat awhile in the Tuileries gardens
and looked at the shabby unfortunates for whom
this only was nature and summer; but simply felt,
as a result of it all, that it was a very dusty, dreary,
lonely world into which Madame de Mauves was
turning him away.
In a sombre mood he made his way back to the
boulevards and sat down at a table on the great
plain of hot asphalt, before a café. Night came on,
the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found
occupants, and Paris began to wear that peculiar evening
look of hers which seems to say, in the flare of
windows and theatre doors, and the muffled rumble
of swift-rolling carriages, that this is no world for you
unless you have your pockets lined and your scruples
nor desires; he looked at the swarming city for
the first time with an easy sense of repaying its indifference.
Before long a carriage drove up to the
pavement directly in front of him, and remained standing
for several minutes without its occupant getting
out. It was one of those neat, plain coupés, drawn
by a single powerful horse, in which one is apt to
imagine a pale, handsome woman, buried among silk
cushions, and yawning as she sees the gas-lamps glittering
in the gutters. At last the door opened and
out stepped M. de Mauves. He stopped and leaned
on the window for some time, talking in an excited
manner to a person within. At last he gave a nod
and the carriage rolled away. He stood swinging his
cane and looking up and down the boulevard, with
the air of a man fumbling, as one may say, with the
loose change of time. He turned toward the café and
was apparently, for want of anything better worth his
attention, about to seat himself at one of the tables,
when he perceived Longmore. He wavered an instant,
and then, without a change in his nonchalant
gait, strolled toward him with a bow and a vague
smile.
It was the first time they had met since their encounter
in the forest after Longmore's false start for
Brussels. Madame Clairin's revelations, as we may
to his mind; he had another office for his emotions
than disgust. But as M. de Mauves came toward
him he felt deep in his heart that he abhorred him.
He noticed, however, for the first time, a shadow upon
the Baron's cool placidity, and his delight at finding
that somewhere at last the shoe pinched him, mingled
with his impulse to be as exasperatingly impenetrable
as possible, enabled him to return the other's greeting
with all his own self-possession.
M. de Mauves sat down, and the two men looked
at each other across the table, exchanging formal greetings
which did little to make their mutual serutiny
seem gracious. Longmore had no reason to suppose
that the Baron knew of his sister's revelations. He
was sure that M. de Mauves cared very little about
his opinions, and yet he had a sense that there was
that in his eyes which would have made the Baron
change color if keener suspicion had helped him to
read it. M. de Mauves did not change color, but he
looked at Longmore with a half-defiant intentness,
which betrayed at once an irritating memory of the
episode in the Bois de Boulogne, and such vigilant
curiosity as was natural to a gentleman who had intrusted
his “honor” to another gentleman's magnanimity,
— or to his artlessness. It would appear that
Longmore seemed to the Baron to possess these virtues
for the cloud deepened on his face, and he turned away
and frowned as he lighted a cigar.
The person in the coupé, Longmore thought, whether
or no the same person as the heroine of the episode
of the Bois de Boulogne, was not a source of unalloyed
delight. Longmore had dark blue eyes, of admirable
lucidity, — truth-telling eyes which had in his childhood
always made his harshest taskmasters smile at
his nursery fibs. An observer watching the two men,
and knowing something of their relations, would certainly
have said that what he saw in those eyes must
not a little have puzzled and tormented M. de Mauves.
They judged him, they mocked him, they eluded him,
they threatened him, they triumphed over him, they
treated him as no pair of eyes had ever treated him.
The Baron's scheme had been to make no one happy
but himself, and here was Longmore already, if looks
were to be trusted, primed for an enterprise more inspiring
than the finest of his own achievements. Was
this candid young barbarian but a faux bonhomme
after all? He had puzzled the Baron before, and this
was once too often.
M. de Mauves hated to seem preoccupied, and he
took up the evening paper to help himself to look
indifferent. As he glanced over it he uttered some
cold commonplace on the political situation, which
an ironical sally which made him seem for the moment
aggressively at his ease. And yet our hero was far
from being master of the situation. The Baron's ill-humor
did him good, so far as it pointed to a want
of harmony with the lady in the coupé; but it disturbed
him sorely as he began to suspect that it possibly
meant jealousy of himself. It passed through
his mind that jealousy is a passion with a double face,
and that in some of its moods it bears a plausible
likeness to affection. It recurred to him painfully
that the Baron might grow ashamed of his political
compact with his wife, and he felt that it would
be far more tolerable in the future to think of his
continued turpitude than of his repentance. The two
men sat for half an hour exchanging stinted small-talk,
the Baron feeling a nervous need of playing the
spy, and Longmore indulging a ferocious relish of his
discomfort. These rigid courtesies were interrupted
however by the arrival of a friend of M. de Mauves, —
a tall, pale, consumptive-looking dandy, who filled the
air with the odor of heliotrope. He looked up and
down the boulevard wearily, examined the Baron's
toilet from head to foot, then surveyed his own in the
same fashion, and at last announced languidly that the
Duchess was in town! M. de Mauves must come
with him to call; she had abused him dreadfully a
see him.
“I depend upon you,” said M. de Mauves's friend
with an infantine drawl, “to put her en train.”
M. de Mauves resisted, and protested that he was
d'une humeur massacrante; but at last he allowed
himself to be drawn to his feet, and stood looking
awkwardly—awkwardly for M. de Mauves—at Longmore.
“You 'll excuse me,” he said dryly; “you, too,
probably, have occupation for the evening?”
“None but to catch my train,” Longmore answered,
looking at his watch.
“Ah, you go back to Saint-Germain?”
“In half an hour.”
M. de Mauves seemed on the point of disengaging
himself from his companion's arm, which was locked
in his own; but on the latter uttering some persuasive
murmur, he lifted his hat stiffly and turned away.
Longmore packed his trunk the next day with dogged
heroism and wandered off to the terrace, to try and
beguile the restlessness with which he waited for evening;
for he wished to see Madame de Mauves for the
last time at the hour of long shadows and pale pink-reflected
lights, as he had almost always seen her.
Destiny, however, took no account of this humble plea
for poetic justice; it was his fortune to meet her on
the terrace sitting under a tree, alone. It was an hour
but as he took his place beside her a light breeze
stirred the leafy edges on the broad circle of shadow
in which she sat. She looked at him with candid
anxiety, and he immediately told her that he should
leave Saint-Germain that evening, — that he must bid
her farewell. Her eye expanded and brightened for a
moment as he spoke; but she said nothing and turned
her glance away toward distant Paris, as it lay twinkling
and flashing through its hot exhalations. “I have
a request to make of you,” he added. “That you think
of me as a man who has felt much and claimed little.”
She drew a long breath, which almost suggested
pain. “I can't think of you as unhappy. It 's impossible.
You have a life to lead, you have duties,
talents, and interests. I shall hear of your career.
And then,” she continued after a pause and with the
deepest seriousness, “one can't be unhappy through
having a better opinion of a friend, instead of a
worse.”
For a moment he failed to understand her. “Do
you mean that there can be varying degrees in my
opinion of you?”
She rose and pushed away her chair. “I mean,”
she said quickly, “that it 's better to have done nothing
in bitterness, — nothing in passion.” And she
began to walk.
Longmore followed her, without answering. But he
took off his hat and with his pocket-handkerchief
wiped his forehead. “Where shall you go? what
shall you do?” he asked at last, abruptly.
“Do? I shall do as I 've always done, — except
perhaps that I shall go for a while to Auvergne.”
“I shall go to America. I have done with Europe
for the present.”
She glanced at him as he walked beside her after
he had spoken these words, and then bent her eyes
for a long time on the ground. At last, seeing that
she was going far, she stopped and put out her hand.
“Good by,” she said; “may you have all the happiness
you deserve!”
He took her hand and looked at her, but something
was passing in him that made it impossible to return
her hand's light pressure. Something of infinite value
was floating past him, and he had taken an oath not
to raise a finger to stop it. It was borne by the strong
current of the world's great life and not of his own
small one. Madame de Mauves disengaged her hand,
gathered her shawl, and smiled at him almost as you
would do at a child you should wish to encourage.
Several moments later he was still standing watching
her receding figure. When it had disappeared, he
shook himself, walked rapidly back to his hotel, and
without waiting for the evening train paid his bill and
departed.
Later in the day M. de Mauves came into his wife's
drawing-room, where she sat waiting to be summoned
to dinner. He was dressed with a scrupulous freshness
which seemed to indicate an intention of dining
out. He walked up and down for some moments in
silence, then rang the bell for a servant, and went out
into the hall to meet him. He ordered the carriage
to take him to the station, paused a moment with his
hand on the knob of the door, dismissed the servant
angrily as the latter lingered observing him, re-entered
the drawing-room, resumed his restless walk, and at
last stepped abruptly before his wife, who had taken
up a book. “May I ask the favor,” he said with evident
effort, in spite of a forced smile of easy courtesy,
“of having a question answered?”
“It 's a favor I never refused,” Madame de Mauves
replied.
“Very true. Do you expect this evening a visit
from Mr. Longmore?”
“Mr. Longmore,” said his wife, “has left Saint-Germain.”
M. de Mauves started and his smile
expired. “Mr. Longmore,” his wife continued, “has
gone to America.”
M. de Mauves stared a moment, flushed deeply, and
turned away. Then recovering himself, — “Had anything
happened?” he asked. “Had he a sudden call?”
But his question received no answer. At the
announced dinner; Madame Clairin rustled in, rubbing
her white hands, Madame de Mauves passed
silently into the dining-room, and he stood frowning
and wondering. Before long he went out upon the
terrace and continued his uneasy walk. At the end
of a quarter of an hour the servant came to inform
him that the carriage was at the door. “Send it
away,” he said curtly. “I shall not use it.” When
the ladies had half finished dinner he went in and
joined them, with a formal apology to his wife for
his tardiness.
The dishes were brought back, but he hardly tasted
them; on the other hand, he drank a great deal of
wine. There was little talk; what there was, was
supplied by Madame Clairin. Twice she saw her
brother's eyes fixed on her own, over his wineglass,
with a piercing, questioning glance. She replied by
an elevation of the eyebrows, which did the office of a
shrug of the shoulders. M. de Mauves was left alone
to finish his wine; he sat over it for more than an
hour, and let the darkness gather about him. At last
the servant came in with a letter and lighted a candle.
The letter was a telegram, which M. de Mauves,
when he had read it, burnt at the candle. After five
minutes' meditation, he wrote a message on the back
of a visiting-card and gave it to the servant to carry
master suspected about the lady to whom the telegram
was addressed; but its contents puzzled him;
they consisted of the single word, “Impossible.” As
the evening passed without her brother reappearing
in the drawing-room, Madame Clairin came to him
where he sat, by his solitary candle. He took no
notice of her presence for some time; but he was the
one person to whom she allowed this license. At last,
speaking in a peremptory tone, “The American has
gone home at an hour's notice,” he said. “What does
it mean?”
Madame Clairin now gave free play to the shrug she
had been obliged to suppress at the table. “It means
that I have a sister-in-law whom I have n't the honor
to understand.”
He said nothing more, and silently allowed her to
depart, as if it had been her duty to provide him with
an explanation and he was disgusted with her levity.
When she had gone, he went into the garden and
walked up and down, smoking. He saw his wife sitting
alone on the terrace, but remained below strolling
along the narrow paths. He remained a long time.
It became late and Madame de Mauves disappeared.
Toward midnight he dropped upon a bench, tired,
with a kind of angry sigh. It was sinking into his
mind that he, too, did not understand Madame
Clairin's sister-in-law.
Longmore was obliged to wait a week in London for
a ship. It was very hot, and he went out for a day
to Richmond. In the garden of the hotel at which he
dined he met his friend Mrs. Draper, who was staying
there. She made eager inquiry about Madame de
Mauves, but Longmore at first, as they sat looking
out at the famous view of the Thames, parried her
questions and confined himself to small-talk. At last
she said she was afraid he had something to conceal;
whereupon, after a pause, he asked her if she remembered
recommending him, in the letter she sent to
him at Saint-Germain, to draw the sadness from her
friend's smile. “The last I saw of her was her smile,”
said he, — “when I bade her good by.”
“I remember urging you to `console' her,” Mrs.
Draper answered, “and I wondered afterwards whether
— a model of discretion as you are — I had n't given
you rather foolish advice.”
“She has her consolation in herself,” he said; “she
needs none that any one else can offer her. That 's for
troubles for which — be it more, be it less — our own
folly has to answer. Madame de Mauves has not a
grain of folly left.”
“Ah, don't say that!” murmured Mrs. Draper. “Just
a little folly is very graceful.”
Longmore rose to go, with a quick nervous movement.
“Don't talk of grace,” he said, “till you have
measured her reason.”
For two years after his return to America he heard
nothing of Madame de Mauves. That he thought of
her intently, constantly, I ned hardly say: most people
wondered why such a clever young man should not
“devote” himself to something; but to himself he
seemed absorbingly occupied. He never wrote to her;
he believed that she preferred it. At last he heard
that Mrs. Draper had come home, and he immediately
called on her. “Of course,” she said after the first
greetings, “you are dying for news of Madame de
Mauves. Prepare yourself for something strange. I
heard from her two or three times during the year
after your return. She left Saint-Germain and went
to live in the country, on some old property of her
husband's. She wrote me very kind little notes, but
I felt somehow that — in spite of what you said about
`consolation' — they were the notes of a very sad woman.
The only advice I could have given her was to
leave her wretch of a husband and come back to her own
land and her own people. But this I did n't feel free
to do, and yet it made me so miserable not to be able
to help her that I preferred to let our correspondence
die a natural death. I had no news of her for a year.
Last summer, however, I met at Vichy a clever young
Frenchman whom I accidentally learned to be a friend
of Euphemia's lovely sister-in-law, Madame Clairin. I
lost no time in asking him what he knew about
an old friend. `I congratulate you on possessing her
friendship,' he answered. `That 's the charming little
woman who killed her husband.' You may imagine
that I promptly asked for an explanation, and he proceeded
to relate to me what he called the whole story.
M. de Mauves had fait quelques folies, which his wife
had taken absurdly to heart. He had repented and
asked her forgiveness, which she had inexorably refused.
She was very pretty, and severity, apparently,
suited her style; for whether or no her husband had
been in love with her before, he fell madly in love with
her now. He was the proudest man in France, but
he had begged her on his knees to be readmitted to
favor. All in vain! She was stone, she was ice, she
was outraged virtue. People noticed a great change in
him: he gave up society, ceased to care for anything,
looked shockingly. One fine day they learned that he
had blown out his brains. My friend had the story
of course from Madame Clairin.”
Longmore was strongly moved, and his first impulse
after he had recovered his composure was to return
immediately to Europe. But several years have passed,
and he still lingers at home. The truth is, that in the
midst of all the ardent tenderness of his memory of
Madame de Mauves, he has become conscious of a
singular feeling, — a feeling for which awe would be
hardly too strong a name.
| A passionate pilgrim | |