 | III. A passionate pilgrim |  |
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.
| III. A passionate pilgrim | |