On the day that her daughter was married in far-away New Orleans,
Margot stood motionless by her mirror, staring at her own reflection.
The day seemed oddly overcast. Suddenly she burst into wild, shrill
laughter, cheerless and tragic, her body shaking, her hands wrung
together, turned away with an epithet, reversed the glass, and never
looked into a mirror again. Something had passed across her face like a
strange, ambiguous stain.
A shadow had fallen upon her like an unexpected dusk, or the dimness
under a passing cloud, and had overcast her beauty.
Not time with his pinching seam, nor age with its ugliness, but a
subtle and more peculiar change had come over Margot Lagoux.
There is a half-light in the hour of an eclipse which casts a weird
spell on the world, when the sun is but a narrow crescent at high noon
and the earth grows oddly dim in an untimely dusk. Such a dusk was
fallen upon Margot Lagoux.
Sultry beauty such as hers has ever an early afternoon; but this was
more than sultry beauty’s early afternoon. Not day, not darkness yet,
but dusk went with her everywhere like twilight in the woods. The sun
shone brightly everywhere along a sparkling world, but on Margot lay
a shadow, strange and sinister. As unbleached muslin sallows to dingy
isabella, as metal tarnishes from neglect, as white paper dulls in
the sun, as the spot on bruised fruit turns brown, Margot Lagoux was
changing; she was becoming tawny, swart, _bisblanc_ as the Creoles say.
Her golden-ruddy cheeks had turned a morbid olive-brown as if a somber
fountain were playing in her blood.
There were many women at that day on whom fate laid dreadful hands:
Louise Briaud, who was blinded by smallpox; Fanchette Bourie, whom God
pitied with death; Helene Richemont, the leper; Floride Biez, Doucie
Baramont, Francesca Villeponteaux, wrecked by disfiguring maladies.
God give them peace! But on none was laid so ruthless, unrelenting,
deliberate a hand as fell upon Rita Lagoux.
She changed like a portrait whose shadows, painted in bitumen, have
struck through and distempered the rest. Like a strange, nocturnal
creature she seemed to absorb the gloom. Her glorious eyes grew
jaundiced; her rose-brown lips grew dun; the delicate webs that joined
her fingers grew yellow as bakers’ saffron. Malice laughed at her
thickening lips.
Weeks turned months, months years; swarthy she grew and ugly. She
put aside beauty as a worn, bright garment, and took on grotesquery
stark and medieval as a Chinese teak-wood carving. She became both
grotesque and contorted, gross, misshapen, sullied and debased. The
old enchantment was gone like a necromancer’s spell. The perfect
gait had faltered down to a lurching trot, a hurrying waddle with
an irregular, unsure motion, hesitating a moment, then hastening on
with vague uncertainty. Her soft, sleepy laugh had grown violent, her
melodious voice coarse; of her fair face there was nothing left, no,
not remembrance even.
A young man came to her threshold one morning and looked in eagerly;
he would speak with Margot Lagoux: but “Is that Margot Lagoux?” he
asked, a curious look coming over his face,--that woman, obese, with
low brows, huge fat eyelids, round bare forehead, short, strained and
corded neck enormously thick, yellowed teeth irregularly shown between
thick, sallowed lips, cheeks wrinkled, flecked and blotched with brown
like spotted peaches. “No!” he said, hastily, shrinking away. “That
is not the woman I mean. The woman I meant was comely ... and had a
beautiful daughter named Gabrielle!” He turned away, shuddering.
She wore old rags for robes, an old _freloche_ upon her head, in nowise
restraining the unkempt coils of her hair hanging matted upon her neck.
Her cheeks hung slack and dark and dingy; her lusterless locks were
felted into a tangled web that had grown gray with lint; her frowsy
chin was stained as with walnut hulls. She was falling apart like an
old house with nobody living in it, swore black oaths with a foul
mouth, cursed all who crossed her path, ate like a beast food fit for
beasts, her fevered sun of glory set,--gone, gone, gone. Down she went,
like the stuffs in her shop, from _velours ras_ to _coton croisé_,
down, down to oblivion, down to the dusty corner of death. She spat in
the dirt: “_Je m’en fiche!_” she said.
* * * * *
She hated a priest, and never knelt at a confessional again.
She did not die in the great house where she had passed the days of her
power; every place she dwelt in sank into decay, the swifter where its
integrity seemed permanent and secure; nothing purged the ambiguous
spell which dragged them down together to the dust. The great house
stood a ruin above a ruined court, a wreck of its former pride and
splendor, black and foul; the fountain had fallen long ago, its pipes
strangled and eaten away to crusts of lead and thready ribs of iron
in the sand. Lilac lane was gone; there was no lane there any more,
and had been none for years; there was no trace of where it ran,
its hedge-rows or its gardens, or of Margot’s cottage other than a
mouldering heap of broken brick, bleak rafters of the fallen roof, and
one stark, fallen gable; of Gabrielle’s garden nothing remained.
Margot died in a dirty hovel in an unkempt alleyway, in the midst of
a negro quarter, where, if one beat a drum or caused an instrument of
an orchestra to sound, the people swarmed from the tenements like ants
out of a hill. The place was fallen and foul, and filled with beggary;
and that is the end of a tenement; for beggars are like distemper, the
place where they have lived is hard to cure. All the houses in the
alley were filthy; but none was filthy as hers.
There was a tremendous storm that night. Her house was ablaze with
light; the little tailor who lived next door said, “Aha! Mother Go-go
has company!” But the only person seen was one of the religious sort, a
tall man, with a face like an unpleasant taste.
The thunder was terrific; the storm wild beyond compare. The wind blew
with a sound like wild, gigantic laughter. “Ff-ff-ff!” went the gale;
the gusts howled through the tailor’s house; the whole place shook; the
blinds banged and crashed; the wind wailed, and sucked down the chimney
with a sound like awful weeping; the little tailor’s soul was filled
with a sense of enormous terror.
All night long the thunder rolled like the laughter of an angry god.
Dislodged by the tremendous concussions the cockroaches flew out of
the walls; and, in the morning, after the storm, the parrakeets which
lived in the trees were all turned gray as ashes.
The windows and doors of Old Mother Go-go’s house were standing open
wide. It was plain that they had stood open all night, and that the
rain had beaten into the house unopposed.
This, however, occasioned but brief surprise. When they peered in at
the door the rats were playing around the floor with the beads of a
broken rosary.
A priest came, hurrying in. He did not stay in long. When he came out
his face was white as a sheet and his lips were drawn and gray.
Those who prepare the dead came. They stood on the threshold peeping
and queerly looking in at the door.
A gray mist filled the place like a cloud, through which things were
visible. The rooms were damp as an old vault, and full of a death-like
smell; the walls were covered with green mould; the woodwork was
rotten. The candles had guttered and dripped and gone out; the floor
was bespattered with tallow. All around the rooms were coffers of
linen and lace, “_coffres très beaux, coffres mignons, de dressouer
compagnons; coffres de boys qui point n’empire; madres et jaunes comme
cire_.” All the coffers were open, and everything that was in them was
tossed wildly about the floor; not one piece of the lovely old stuffs,
as yellow as wax, but was blackened by showers of soot and trampled
under foot by the neighbor’s goat, the print of whose hoofs was
everywhere.
And Madame Margot?
Heh! God had designed her for tragedy; but here was comedy. Margot lay
stretched out on the floor, as black as ebony; dead, among the ashes
and soot, charred like a fallen star.
The coroner found that the woman had died of the visitation of God; but
Doe Gou, the tailor, said simply, “Has God feet like a goat?”
The bishop refused to have masses said for the repose of her pitiful
soul; and they would not allow her to be buried in St. Sebastian’s
graveyard. The potter’s field was the place for her; her color was too
peculiar.
Too black to be buried among the white, too white to lie down with
the black, she was buried, in secret, in her own garden, under the
magnolia-trees.
And that was the end of Madame Margot.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.