 | V. A passionate pilgrim |  |
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.
| V. A passionate pilgrim | |