upheld by the heel crooked at the chair-seat’s edge, the other gaunt
leg dangling across the upraised foot, the specter smiled on Margot
a bleak, Saturnine smile. Its face was greatly wasted; all the life
of it seemed gathered into the brilliant, terrible eyes, which blazed
with infernal light, in splendid scorn, without remorse, sardonical;
a countenance such as God alone endures to look upon unmoved; a
figure terrible.... Deity, deformed, might look like this, grotesquely
majestical, hideous, baleful, glorious, accursed, malign; an archangel,
fallen, outcast, depraved: Satan, god of the discontent.
A twisted smile wreathing his evil lips, with his chin hooked over his
hands,--a smile of cool confidence mingled with nonchalance, “Why not
try me?” he said.
* * * * *
Staring into the abyss of blinding terror and light which encircled
that thunder-scarred visage, with its thin, sleepless eyelids and
twisted, ironic smile, Margot shrank against the wall, shivering as
with cold; one hand shielding her blinded eyes, one groping along the
wall, she listened, breathlessly.
In a voice whose deep and hollow sound seemed part of the midnight
storm, Satan spoke.
“God has forgotten you; that is plain,” he said. “Then why not pray
unto me? I remember when God forgets.
“What did ye hope? That He who left Jesus to die on the cross, would
stoop to succor you? Nay, then; you have been cajoled. He has never so
much as kept one man from the withering breath of time, but leaves a
thousand ills on earth to work their wills upon him. Yet you thought He
would harken to you? _Fi donc!_ Neither for life nor death, nor angels,
nor principalities, nor for all the powers that ever were, or shall
forever be, will He alter for you, or for any, one iota of His law.
“Nay, though your heart break with its burden, not a jot of His law
shall be altered to ease your load.
“I have seen all the piety under the sun; and its wages are vanity.
What profit have you of all your labor; what recompense of your
toil? Heaven hath sent you sorrow; it hath not sent a cure, nor had
compassion upon you.
“If this be loving-kindness, why not try damnation awhile; not forfeit
riches, power, and place, for a fool’s hope of treasures in heaven?
“Doubtless the priest hath said unto you, ‘What shall it profit a man
if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ Faw! I say unto
you, ‘What profit hath a man, though he save his own soul, if he lose
his heart’s desire?’
“When you are dead and done for, and lie sleeping in the dust; when
worms destroy your body, when your days upon earth are become as
shadows, and you have no more a portion forever in anything under the
sun, what shall it profit you to have saved your soul at the cost of
your heart’s desire? Nay; ye have been cajoled! Your way is without
hope.
“But come unto me, ye anxious, whose hearts are bowed with care, and I
will give you your hearts’ desire! No man calls on me in vain; I turn
none empty away; the world is full of my mercies upon those who trust
in me; and my benefits fall like the summer rain on all who covenant
with me. Ask, and ye shall receive, whatsoever your hearts may wish;
yea, though it lie at the ends of the earth it shall be given unto
you; your house shall be full of good things, riches, and place, and
power; ye shall heap up gold like dust from the streets; ye shall have
your hearts’ desire!
“Come unto me, ye weary, whose hearts are bent with trouble; lay down
your burden, and follow me; I will give you your heart’s desire!”
Margot’s hand went up the wall a little way toward the crucifix, then
slipped back with fumbling fingers.
“Lord ... Lord!” she whispered hoarsely, “give me my heart’s desire!”
“And what is your heart’s desire?”
“That my daughter, Gabrielle, should be white to all eternity! All that
I have, and all that I am, will I give, ... yea, for this would I give
my soul.”
Satan smiled.
“Then lay down your burden, my daughter; you shall have your heart’s
desire!”
Margot, with a sobbing cry, laid down her life’s unbearable burden at
the feet of the Prince of the Powers of Darkness.
By his eternal damnation he swore she should have her heart’s desire;
by her rejected salvation she swore to abide by the covenant.
“_Consummatum est!_” he said, and was gone on the black blast.
The candles sent up a thin flare of flame and smoke, and went out in
utter darkness. Crouched on the floor against the wall Margot still
knelt in a stupor. A rat came out of a hole in the wall and gnawed at
her rosary. Dawn came in at the windows; the twilit gray grew pink. The
walls were blotched and spotted; everything exhaled an odor of mildew;
Margot still huddled upon the floor beneath the crucifix; over her head
the crucified Christ hung mute in His agony.
* * * * *
The flight of hours, the decline of day, the season’s turn, all things
which preface change are presages of parting, and, like the proximity
of the tomb, though wreathed in bloomy myrtle, are subtly fraught with
sadness and regret. All love’s farewells are so oppressed. Though
with absolute confidence in themselves and in each other, sure of the
imperishable structure of their love, a nameless apprehension fills
the hearts of all who part, and casts a melancholy shade on partings.
“Until to-morrow!” Ah, to-morrow! “To-morrow I will come again!” she
says. They go, with trembling hands, each, shaken by departure,
saying, “Shall we meet again?”
“To-morrow!” Gabrielle had said, as she took her lips away. “To-morrow
I will come again!” and was gone.
In the warm heart of the midsummer night he dreamed again among the
hedges, a boy’s dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart’s delight. Her
lips were pomegranate blossoms; her cheeks were wild peach flowers;
it was a boy’s dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart’s delight! Her
waist was as a willow-withe, her voice a bird in the deep wood calling;
her feet danced fantasies in his heart. He came all in the daze of a
boy’s dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart’s desire. With every
eager breath he drew in the hyacinthine fragrance of the night.
All day long, like a sullen army, a great cloud heaved and gloomed
along the west, with wind-blown vapors streaming around its thunderous
heights. All day long, in awe of it, men put off going here and there,
gave over plans, and stood oppressed by its tremendous imminence. The
day was darkened by the dominion of the cloud. At evening it rolled
off across the plain, obliterating leagues of lesser storms, with fire
stabbing at its breast, and distant bellowings of tremendous sound.
Heaving slowly against the twilight stars, rolling in sullen majesty
upon the gale, pale moonlight falling on its peaks, and the gray rain
trailing down below, in its heart innumerable lightnings, thunder
grumbling in its front, it left the drenched field to the moon. Beyond
the edge of the world it hung, gloomily brooding upon the splendor of
the night.
In the magic of the moonlight Lilac lane lay ghostly as a dream,
hushed, alluring, unfamiliar. The strange, white light of the immense
full moon lay dead on everything; the hedge-rows were hung with
the shadows and darkness of strange delight; the cicada chittered
in the almond tree; the great moths flapped heavily among the wet
moon-flowers; a slow, scarcely perceptible wind blew, languid-sweet,
hardly moving the heavy leaves of the magnolias; a gray bird pitched a
wild song somewhere deep within a hedge.
In Margot’s garden everything was wrapped in night’s singular fantasy.
In the pallor of the moonlight the garden lay like an enchanted realm
of goblin loveliness. The lilies stood as pale and chill as flowers
carved of marble; among the drowsy poppies hung garlands of nocturnal
vine whose folded blooms in chaplets clustered colorless in the pallid
moonshine. The whole place trembled in a pale, strange beauty which
the silence made lovelier still. Like an island in a silvery mist
Margot’s house stood blind asleep, its little windows curtained deep
with shadows, dim, blue, and dark, and on the woodwork of the door,
like petals of dismantled flowers, wax-wet, wind-blown, walked moths
thrown there by the whining wind, slowly blowing across leagues of
lonely marsh; and, among the moths, the glow-worms, faintly lighted and
phosphor-green, crawled up and down, up and down, to nowhere: it looked
like the door of the way to oblivion, so lonely it seemed and so still.
The garden was utterly empty; the house yard was deserted.
He looked; he listened; and his heart stood still; save for the
glow-worm and the moth there was nothing alive there but him. Like
the chill which creeps across the matted grass of evening in the last
fair days of autumn, full of the faded fragrance and haunted dusk of
fall, a wordless dread stole over him. The moonlight gleamed on the
cottage-wall with a singular, mournful splendor; a heavy wind began to
stir the trees; immensely mournful, faint and far-away, there came a
boom of thunder from beyond the rim of the world; joy all at once was
gone from the midsummer night; the haunting strangeness crept into his
heart. The place was full of the heavy fragrance of dead flowers. Here
and there a palsied rose, its faded leaves relaxed, broke, and fell
without a sound.
Under the fig-trees he paused a moment, undecided,--to listen,
shivering a little, and peering along the wall. There was no sound of
human life. Though the wind had set the great leaves stirring, all was
ghostly as a dream. One white star above the roof-peak sailed among
the broken clouds; the moon, desolate, splendid, hung in the magnolia,
mournfully gleaming through the black boughs; in the still air the
moonlight stood; the shadows lay like solid things upon the cottage
wall.
At the corner of the house he paused and listened again. In the
strange, unanswering silence a sense of disaster gripped him. There was
no sound anywhere; his heart almost ceased beating.
With premonition of catastrophe he ran along the wall:--nothing, but
windows, battened or curtained, blank as a blindman’s eyes; not a sign
of humanity.
Where he had dreamed to stand speechless with happiness, he stood
shaken by nameless fear.
Deep within the house he heard a relaxed beam “pung” with a sound
like a viol string softly struck by a hand in passing: the deep, slow
sound reverberated through the hollow house, and died away in vacant
whispering.
Through the crevice of the shutter he saw the cold moonlight fall along
the deserted floor. The house was absolutely empty.
* * * * *
There is a convent-school for orphaned girls kept by the nuns in New
Orleans. The loveliest girl seen there in years was Gabrielle Lagoux,
carried there between two nights, lest young love, like death, insist.
Dawn and departure. She had trembled like a leaf, half comprehending
only; her mother kissed her twice, in feverish haste, with lips like
dry leaves: that was their parting. Some one called “Gabrielle!” at the
door. The coach was at the gate. She stopped at the wicket, looked down
the lane, said a few words to the coachboy who guarded her gown from
the wheels: “Tell him,” she said, “that I love him. Tell him remember
me.” She paused again at the door of the coach, her foot on the step,
a dazed look in her eyes, saying, “Tell him not to forget me. I love
him!” The wheels rumbled over the cobbles. She never came back. When
she entered the coach young love was done for forever: she never saw
her golden lad again. Love beat his rose-red wings in vain; he could
not overtake the coach; for the coach was fate; all was over; his
dusty feet halted in the heat of the dusty road; “Good-by!... Good-by,
forever!”
Days became weeks, weeks months, months grew into years; she never came
again. She passed through the convent’s sheltering door, was safe from
mischance and folly; passed into a world remote of unfamiliar faces,
and forgot.
God made memory cruel, that men might know remorse; but the Devil
devised forgetfulness, anodyne of regret.
Reputed heiress to vast estates, provided with boundless means and
gifted with great beauty, coming to marriageable age in all the
freshness of her youthful loveliness, she was wedded to a wealthy
planter’s only son whose love for her was very great.
Pure happiness was theirs prolonged far beyond the honeymoon.
Surrounded by every creature comfort wealth could procure or affection
devise, secure in a faithful man’s unaltering love, she dwelt serene,
in a country where the fruits of the earth and the flowers of the
forest spread natural loveliness about fields of unsurpassed fertility.
She never knew winter, want, nor war; her years were filled with peace;
her estates increased to vast proportions; a thousand slaves were
happy, being hers. Admired for her beauty, greatly loved, she returned
an adoring husband’s devotion, and bore him children with eyes like
the morning and hair like wreathed flames. Her daughters married and
were fruitful, bearing children fair as an April day, with eyes like
the sky of the morning. For them, for her, the world rolled on in
unperturbed peace.
But she never saw her golden lad again.
* * * * *
Something inscrutable, deeper than whim, had come over Margot Lagoux.
Her work was oddly altered: it had more air, less ease; more spell,
less charm; more force, and less dexterity. The stuffs she chose no
longer were notable for the exquisite, wan delicacy which so becomes
the pallor of high-bred beauty; she took an incomprehensible joy in
vivid color; but what was gained in vividness was lost in harmony. Her
work retained distinction, but of a queer sort; reserve gave way to
novelty; simple beauty was replaced by meretricious charm; her taste,
which had been perfect, seemed suffering gradual corruption; her craft
was marred by crudities. Her turbans began to look as if there were
only barbaric plumes in the world, of parrakeets and cockatoos, trogons
and flamingos, gay toucan wings, and extraordinary quills; florid
colors and distempered stains were mingled in inharmonious contrast;
mango-yellow, peacock-green, Egyptian blue, and Congo scarlet, flaunted
their discordant tones together.
Style she had; but it was style _malade du rouvieux_; her trade-mark
had become gaucherie, her art artifice; good taste had departed.
Her work no more was garnished, but bedizened with excess, nowhere
restrained, but having unrestricted vent in tawdry fripperies. Her
handicraft was stamped by power and energy misapplied; the sole
distinction it had left was whimsical device. Everything she did was
like sweet wine soured, the worse for having been so much better. Her
bonnets were like songs in forced falsetto, every line slurred by
subtle default, every sweet note out; always too much or too little,
never the happy mean. Even the pearls or marguerites, which she had
formerly employed in bordures as trade-marks of her craft, had become
cheap beads of colored pottery and glass. In tarnished bowls, in
corners of obscure pawnshop windows, among the dead flies and the dust,
are still occasionally to be found beads, often called “margots” or
“margotons,” like those employed by Margot Lagoux in her practice of
millinery, but said to be thread-plummets employed by makers of lace.
One, a Greek dealer in old gold and stolen silver, tells the enquiring
traveler that these are Dead Sea pebbles, worn to their peculiar
shapes by the ceaseless fret of that gloomy sea. But beads like them,
grotesques, baroques, were laced on toques and turbans of her make, and
now and then were found among the laces on bonnets which had no need of
them: men, seeing them, narrowed their glances, and took new note of
the wearer. Those aware permitted none near or dear to adorn her person
with them.
A queerly degenerated taste marked everything that Margot did. With
singular obliquity she set everything awry; from rich goods produced
unspeakably poor results; and with cheap cunning vexed priceless stuffs
beyond recovery or repair.
Her custom fell from _vendre cher_ to _bon marché_. With the
diminishing stream of patronage the material in her shop went down
from _velours ras, velours façonné_, and _velours de soie_, to _velours
de coton_ and _coton croisé_, from velvet to velveteens. The air of
distinction which attracted gentility utterly faded away; the coarse,
crude stuffs and rude handiwork repelled the aristocratic. Calls for
her work became infrequent; more infrequent; came no more. One morning
the milliner’s shop was shut. It never was opened again. The stuffs on
the dusty shelves grew faded, discolored, and stained; cobwebs hung
from the mouldy walls; the trade which had known and frequented the
place knew it no more.
* * * * *
But out of this end, like a paradox, above the apparent wreck Margot
arose in prosperity: the Devil was good as his word.
She dwelt in a massive great house, a mansion, handsome, stately, and
somber, by a courtyard paved in marble, approached through a vaulted
tunnel lit by a dull-flaming torch and closed by an iron gate. From
the side of the court a staircase of marble rose to her private door,
ornate as a public office’s entry and massively carved in flowers;
stairs within, of blue-veined marble, went up through wide corridors
heavily panelled in dark Spanish wood. Beneath the house vast cellars
boomed and echoed; the chimneys rose like turrets grouped against the
darkling sky. The house throughout was furnished with every luxury
befitting persons of circumstance: broad hearths for the burning of
long wood in winter, vaulted corridors, burnished fittings of latten,
and jalousies of saffron-wood with retaining rosettes of porcelain;
mahogany tables of rare design, deep-carved, and adorned with brass.
Curtains of saffron-colored silk cinctured with gold braid hung from
the ceiling to the floor in heavy golden folds. Day was made night,
night day by many subterfuges, with blinds and saffron jalousies ironed
fast against the noon. By night the light shone out to the red stars,
and the house was full of the swift, rich sweeping of heavy silk
curtains waved by the wind, and the glow of the wax candles chequered
the courtyard below with gold. In the middle of the courtyard, at
the foot of the staircase, a fountain played in a yellow basin,
with a pleasant, incessant noise of whispering green water, falling
perpetually with a delicate patter over seven brown stone dolphins,
spouting from whose pouted mouths went up contending streams; the
waters gushed, white-laced, babbling, from the green-coppered vents in
the dolphins’ mouths, and descended in spray to the bowl below; and
under the bowl the drain-pipe murmured subterranean cool. About the
courtyard stood a row of crimson-flowered pomegranate-trees: through
the split brown rinds the garnet pulp and silver seeds showed, clotted
thick as crystals in a stone; and purple fruits in heavy clusters, of
myriad, uncounted drupes, hung from the superior privets ranged along
the courtyard wall, dropping green shadows, like vast laces, over the
blind-arched bricks below. A garden lay beyond the court, its gate
hung thick and deep with yellow roses, clinging to the iron lantern,
drooping and swaying in unconstrained festoons. Beyond the garden the
place debouched into a forgotten graveyard.
By night alive, by day the place was sunk in dreams, with lavish beauty
everywhere composed to sleep in sunlit sloth, luxurious and deep. The
place seemed fallen in a trance. The pigeons dozed along the eaves;
and on the grass below, where the garden stretched, the peacock slowly
danced his stiff and stately dance, an iris feather bubble, green as
jade, purple as wine, blue as lazuli. The courtyard seemed the very
home of sleep. The sun lay stupid on the silent walls and drowsily beat
on the blue-doored cellars shut with cautious bars, closed fast and
locked beneath the arcaded porch; the shadows of the slim pillars slept
in the graceful galleries. All was hushed but the peacock’s cry, while
that iridescent bubble, on toes black as ebony, danced, here and there,
there and here, his slow “pavone” among the yellow roses.
By night beneath the windows ancient tombs bared their sculptured
breasts to the stars and stared up at the golden arches; and dank,
black, cracked sarcophagi, chequered with light, laid broad their
time-worn, sculptured emblems and tragical inscriptions,--skulls with
wings, and urns, and hour-glasses whose un-refluent, palsied sands meet
measure of eternity kept with motionless registry, and stony garlands
of stone flowers which never bloomed, nor ever were sweet, as that
beneath them had been sweet to man’s all quivering sense. Here lay the
long dead, day and night, communicant in death; and wraiths of old
unhappiness rose sighing with regret, or dreamed, beneath the stones,
of love as futile as regret. The wind among the tombstones, like a
stream from a windy fountain, murmured among the pomegranate-trees,
stirred the shadows under the privets, rustled between the silken
curtains, whispering, much as dead men do, chill, wordless, fluttering
breaths of unsolved mystery. And when the wind from the graveyard
whispered, all the place stood listening, hushed. The wind from the
graveyard whispered among the saffron curtains; the ceaseless fountain
waters fell; else all was still but the peacock’s wild night-cry,
sounding through the unfathomable silence like the rending of an
illusion,--deep and singular and strange,--by a harsh trumpet’s blast.
Heh! The Devil keeps his promises in the way that suits him best.
* * * * *
Margot’s existence here was a thing apart from everything plebeian:
she was immensely wealthy; had riches such as are won by few, though
sought by many, plantations in the country, houses in town, money on
call in quantity that made great bankers bow; women to wait upon her,
deferential men, boys to run at her beck, maidservants, bond and free,
to go before her; her cellar was famous for its wines, her dress for
its wild and extravagant beauty; all that she touched she took; all
that she took she kept; everything that she kept increased beyond
the bounds of reason; she was spoken to with deference and referred
to with finesse. She had her carriage, lined with silk, with yellow
hammer-cloths and bands; in the license of her beauty she laughed at
sumptuary laws, and in her illegal equipage rolled insolently on; in
amber gown and canary turban fastened with a golden brooch, despite
the law, she rode the streets like a charioted queen; or, dressed in
wild, unstudied colors such as are used in Barbary, she wandered in her
garden in the after-hours of the day, making wreaths of the saffron
roses, a cockatoo upon her arm the color of a wild peach flower.
A shapely, splendid creature, with her handsome, heavy hands, neck like
a tower, glorious hair hanging rich beneath its turban, her embroidered
robe but carelessly worn and recklessly adjusted--oddly, the coarser
the more becoming,--a goddess made of beautiful earth, but coarse as
the cotton-flower, with confident face and insolent mien she took her
way through the streets with a supple stride which was the despair of
envious rivalry; hers was a regal beauty like the tiger’s loveliness.
With her face like beauty seen in dreams, incredible and untrue, she
went through the community like a lovely malady: even wise men’s souls
were troubled; sturdy hearts that had laughed at passion shook with the
fairness of her face; piety was troubled by her golden loveliness.
More than one sermon from Solomon’s Song was inspired by Rita Lagoux;
she was known as the woman with a face like a beautiful blasphemy.
Time but increased the wildness and singularity of her beauty: it
was gossiped about in the market-stalls; it was babbled about in the
streets.
Then a torpor fell on her loveliness, a dull and leaden look; her
beauty grew sullen and lowering as the flame of a fallen fire. Though
not much altered in appearance she was somehow greatly changed. Her
looks had lost something, no one could say what, gained something none
could define. It was not that she was less the unforgettable being she
had been, or that her sullen beauty made less mark on memory, but that
the ecstasy of beauty was replaced by a queer unrest. Though as never
before she was possessed of a singular comeliness, men began to regard
her with an odd uneasiness: there was a foreignness in her face, and
the look of alien things.