 | II. A passionate pilgrim |  |
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.
| II. A passionate pilgrim | |