 | IX. A passionate pilgrim |  |
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.
| IX. A passionate pilgrim | |