At nine o'clock the next morning Jacques de Wissant stood in his wife's
boudoir.
It was a strange and beautiful room, likely to linger in the memory of
those who knew its strange and beautiful mistress.
The walls were draped with old Persian shawls, the furniture was of red
Chinese lacquer, a set acquired in the East by some Norman sailing man
unnumbered years ago, and bought by Claire de Wissant out of her own
slender income not long after her marriage.
Pale blue and faded yellow silk cushions softened the formal angularity
of the wide cane-seated couch and low, square chairs. There was a deep
crystal bowl of midsummer flowering roses on the table, laden with
books, by which Claire often sat long hours reading poetry and volumes
written by modern poets and authors of whom her husband had only
vaguely heard and of whom he definitely disapproved.
The window was wide open, and there floated in from the garden, which
sloped away to the edge and indeed over the crumbling cliff, fragrant,
salt-laden odours, dominated by the clean, sharp scent thrown from huge
shrubs of red and white geraniums. The balls of blossom set against the
belt of blue sea, formed a band of waving tricolor.
But Jacques de Wissant was unconscious, uncaring of the beauty round
him, either in the room or without, and when at last he walked forward
to the window, his face hardened as his eyes instinctively sought out
the spot where, if hidden from his sight, he knew there lay the deep
transparent waters of the little bay which had been selected as
providing ideal quarters for the submarine flotilla.
He had eagerly assented to the sacrifice of his land, and, what meant
far more to him, of his privacy; but now he would have given much--and
he was a careful man--to have had the submarine station swept away,
transferred to the other side of Falaise.
Down there, out of sight of the Pavillon, and yet but a few minutes away
(if one used the dangerous cliff-stairway), dwelt Jacques de Wissant's
secret foe, for the man of whom he was acutely, miserably jealous was
Commander Dupré, of whose coming departure he as yet knew nothing.
The owner of the Pavillon de Wissant seldom entered the room where he
now stood impatiently waiting for his wife, and he never did so without
looking round him with distaste, and remembering with an odd, wistful
feeling what it had been like in his mother's time. Then "le boudoir de
madame" had reflected the tastes and simple interests of an
old-fashioned provincial lady born in the year that Louis Philippe came
to the throne. Greatly did the man now standing there prefer the room as
it had been to what it was now!
The heavy, ugly furniture which had been there in the days of his lonely
youth, for he had been an only child, was now in the schoolroom where
the twin daughters of the house, Clairette and Jacqueline, did their
lessons with Miss Doughty, their English governess.
Clairette and Jacqueline? Jacques de Wissant's lantern-jawed,
expressionless face quickened into feeling as he thought of his two
little girls. They were the pride, as well as the only vivid pleasure,
of his life. All that he dispassionately admired in his wife was, so he
sometimes told himself with satisfaction, repeated in his daughters.
Clairette and Jacqueline had inherited their mother's look of race, her
fastidiousness and refinement of bearing, while fortunately lacking
Claire's dangerous personal beauty, her touch of eccentricity, and her
discontent with life--or rather with the life which Jacques de Wissant,
in spite of a gnawing ache and longing that nothing could still or
assuage, yet found good.
The Mayor of Falaise looked strangely out of keeping with his present
surroundings, at least so he would have seemed to the eye of any
foreigner, especially of any Englishman, who had seen him standing
there.
He was a narrowly built man, forty-three years of age, and his
clean-shaven, rather fleshy face was very pale. On this hot August
morning he was dressed in a light grey frock-coat, under which he wore a
yellow waistcoat, and on his wife's writing-table lay his tall hat and
lemon-coloured gloves.
As mayor of his native town--a position he owed to an historic name and
to his wealth, and not to his very moderate Republican opinions--his
duties included the celebration of civil marriages, and to-day, it being
the 14th of August, the eve of the Assumption, and still a French
national fête, there were to be a great many weddings celebrated in the
Hôtel de Ville.
Jacques de Wissant considered that he owed it to himself, as well as to
his fellow-citizens, to appear "correctly" attired on such occasions. He
had a deep, wordless contempt for those of his acquaintances who dressed
on ceremonial occasions "à l'anglaise," that is, in loose lounge suits
and straw hats.
* * * * *
Suddenly there broke on his ear the sound of a low, full voice, singing.
It came from the next room, his wife's bedroom, and the mournful
passionate words of an old sea ballad rang out, full of a desolate pain
and sense of bitter loss.
The sound irritated him shrewdly, and there came back to him a fragment
of conversation he had not thought of for ten years. During a discussion
held between his father and mother in this very room about their adored
only son's proposed marriage with Claire de Kergouët, his father had
said: "There is one thing I do not much care for; she is, they say, very
musical, and Jacques, even as a baby, howled like a dog whenever he
heard singing!" And his mother had laughed, "_Mon ami_, you cannot
expect to get perfection, even for our Jacques!" And Claire, so he now
admitted unwillingly to himself, had never troubled him overmuch with
her love of music....
He knocked twice, sharply, on his wife's door.
The song broke short with an almost cruel suddenness, and yet there
followed a perceptible pause before he heard her say, "Come in."
And then, as Jacques de Wissant slowly turned the handle of the door, he
saw his wife, Claire, before she saw him. He had a vision, that is, of
her as she appeared when she believed herself to be, if not alone, then
in sight of eyes that were indifferent, unwatchful. But Jacques' eyes,
which his wife's widowed sister, the frivolous Parisienne, Madeleine
Baudoin, had once unkindly compared to fishes' eyes, were now filled
with a watchful, suspicious light which gave a tragic mask to his
pallid, plain-featured face.
Claire de Wissant was standing before a long, narrow mirror placed at
right angles to a window looking straight out to sea. Her short, narrow,
dark blue skirt and long blue silk jersey silhouetted her slender
figure, the figure which remained so supple, so--so girlish, in spite of
her nine-year-old daughters. There was something shy and wild, untamed
and yet beckoning, in the oval face now drawn with pain and
sleeplessness, in the grey, almond-shaped eyes reddened with secret
tears, and in the firm, delicately modelled mouth.
She was engaged in tucking up her dark, curling hair under a grey
yachting cap, and, for a few moments, she neither spoke nor looked round
to see who was standing framed in the door. But when, at last, she
turned away from the mirror and saw her husband, the colour, rushing
into her pale face, caused an unbecoming flush to cover it.
"I thought it was one of the children," she said, a little breathlessly.
And then she waited, assuming, or so Jacques thought, an air at once of
patience and of surprise which sharply angered him.
Then her look of strain, nay, of positive illness, gave him an uneasy
twinge of discomfort. Could it be anxiety concerning her second sister,
Marie-Anne, who, married to an Italian officer, was now ill of scarlet
fever at Mantua? Two days ago Claire had begged very earnestly to be
allowed to go and nurse Marie-Anne. But he, Jacques, had refused, not
unkindly, but quite firmly. Claire's duty of course lay at Falaise, with
her husband and children; not at Mantua, with her sister.
Suddenly she again broke silence. "Well?" she said. "Is there anything
you wish to tell me?" They had never used the familiar "thee" and "thou"
the one to the other, for at the time of their marriage an absurd whim
of fashion had ordained on the part of French wives and husbands a
return to eighteenth-century formality, and Claire had chosen, in that
one instance, to follow fashion.
She added, seeing that he still did not speak, "I am lunching with my
sister to-day, but I shall be home by three o'clock." She spoke with the
chill civility a lady shows a stranger. Claire seldom allowed herself to
be on the defensive when speaking to her husband.
Jacques de Wissant frowned. He did not like either of his wife's
sisters, neither the one who was now lying ill in Italy, nor his widowed
sister-in-law, Madeleine Baudoin. In the villa which she had hired for
the summer, and which stood on a lonely stretch of beach beyond the bay,
Madeleine often entertained the officers of the submarine flotilla, and
this, from her brother-in-law's point of view, was very far from
"correct" conduct on the part of one who could still pass as a young
widow.
In response to his frown there had come a slight, mocking smile on
Claire's face.
"I suppose you are on your way to some important town function?"
She disliked the town of Falaise, the town-folk bored her, and she hated
the vast old family house in the Market Place, where she had to spend
each winter.
"To-day is the fourteenth of August," observed Jacques de Wissant in his
deliberate voice; "and I have a great many marriages to celebrate this
morning."
"Yes, I suppose that is so." And again Claire de Wissant spoke with the
courteous indifference, the lack of interest in her husband's concerns,
which she had early schooled him to endure.
But all at once there came a change in her voice, in her manner. "Why
to-day--the fourteenth of August--is our wedding day! How stupid of me
to forget! We must tell Jacqueline and Clairette. It will amuse
them----"
She uttered the words a little breathlessly, and as she spoke, Jacques
de Wissant walked quickly forward into the room. As he did so his wife
moved abruptly away from where she had been standing, thus maintaining
the distance between them.
But Claire de Wissant need not have been afraid; her husband had his own
strict code of manners, and to this code he ever remained faithful. He
possessed a remarkable mastery of his emotions, and he had always showed
with regard to herself so singular a power of self-restraint that
Claire, not unreasonably, doubted if he had any emotions to master, any
passionate feeling to restrain.
All he now did was to take a shagreen case out of his breast pocket and
hold it out towards her.
"Claire," he said quietly, "I have brought you, in memory of our wedding
day, a little gift which I hope you will like. It is a medallion of the
children." And as she at last advanced towards him, he pressed a spring,
and revealed a dull gold medal on which, modelled in high relief, and
superposed the one on the other, were Clairette's and Jacqueline's
childish, delicately pure profiles.
A softer, kindlier light came into Claire de Wissant's sad grey eyes.
She held out a hesitating hand--and Jacques de Wissant, before placing
his gift in it, took that soft hand in his, and, bending rather
awkwardly, kissed it lightly. In France, even now, a man will often kiss
a woman's hand by way of conventional, respectful homage. But to Claire
the touch of her husband's lips was hateful--so hateful indeed that she
had to make an instant effort to hide the feeling of physical repulsion
with which that touch had suddenly engulfed her in certain dark recesses
of memory and revolt.
"It is a charming medallion," she said hurriedly, "quite a work of art,
Jacques; and I thank you for having thought of it. It gives me
great--very great pleasure."
And then something happened which was to her so utterly unexpected that
she gave a stifled cry of pain--almost it seemed of fear.
As she forced herself to look straight into her husband's face, the
anguish in her own sore heart unlocked the key to his, and she perceived
with the eyes of the soul, which see, when they are not holden, so much
that is concealed from the eyes of the body, the suffering, the dumb
longing she had never allowed herself to know were there.
For the first time since her marriage--since that wedding day of which
this was the tenth anniversary--Claire felt pity for Jacques as well as
for herself. For the first time her rebellious heart acknowledged that
her husband also was enmeshed in a web of tragic circumstance.
"Jacques?" she cried. "Oh, Jacques!" And as she so uttered his name
twice, there came a look of acute distress and then of sudden resolution
on her face. "I wish you to know," she exclaimed, "that--that--if I
were a wicked woman I should perhaps be to you a better wife!" Thanks to
the language in which she spoke, there was a play on the word--that word
which in French signifies woman as well as wife.
He stared at her, and uttered no word of answer, of understanding, in
response to her strange speech.
At one time, not lately, but many years ago, Claire had sometimes tried
his patience by the odd, unreasonable things she said, and once, stung
beyond bearing, he had told her so. Remembering those cold, measured
words of rebuke, she now caught with quick, exultant relief at the idea
that Jacques had not understood the half-confession wrung from her by
her sudden vision of his pain; and she swung back to a belief she had
always held till just now, the belief that he was dull--dull and
unperceptive.
With a nervous smile she turned again to her mirror, and then Jacques de
Wissant, with his wife's enigmatic words ringing in his ears, abruptly
left the room.
* * * * *
As if pursued by some baneful presence, he hastened through Claire's
beautiful boudoir, across the dining-room hung with the Gobelins
tapestries which his wife had brought him as part of her slender dower,
and so into the oval hall which formed the centre of the house.
And there Jacques de Wissant waited for a while, trying to still and to
co-ordinate his troubled thoughts and impressions.
Ah yes, he had understood--understood only too well Claire's strange,
ambiguous utterance! There are subtle, unbreathed temptations which all
men and all women, when tortured by jealousy, not only understand but
divine before they are actually in being.
Jacques de Wissant now believed that he was justified of the suspicions
of which he had been ashamed. His wife--moved by some obscure desire for
self-revelation to which he had had no clue--had flung at him the truth.
Yes, without doubt Claire could have made him happy--so little would
have contented his hunger for her--had she been one of those light women
of whom he sometimes heard, who go from their husbands' kisses to those
of their lovers.
But if he sometimes, nay, often heard of them, Jacques de Wissant knew
nothing of such women. The men of his race had known how to acquire
honest wives, aye, and keep them so. There had never been in the de
Wissant family any of those ugly scandals which stain other clans, and
which are remembered over generations in French provincial towns. Those
scandals which, if they provoke a laugh and cruel sneer when discussed
by the indifferent, are recalled with long faces and anxious whisperings
when a young girl's future is being discussed, and which make the
honourable marriage of daughters difficult of achievement.
Jacques de Wissant thanked the God of his fathers that Claire had
nothing in common with such women as those: he thought he did not need
her assurance to know that his honour, in the usual, narrow sense of the
phrase, was safe in her hands, but still her strange, imprudent words of
half-avowal racked him with jealous and, yes, suspicious pain.
Fortunately for him, he was a man burdened with much business, and so at
last he looked at his watch. Why, it was getting late--terribly late,
and he prided himself on his punctuality. Still, if he started now, at
once, he would be at the Hôtel de Ville a few minutes before ten
o'clock, the time when the first of the civil marriages he had to
celebrate that morning was timed to take place.
Without passing through the house, he made his way rapidly round by the
gardens to the road, winding ribbon-wise behind the cliffs, where his
phaeton was waiting for him; for Jacques de Wissant had as yet resisted
the wish of his wife and the advice of those of his friends who
considered that he ought to purchase an automobile: driving had been
from boyhood one of his few pleasures and accomplishments.
But as he drove, keeping his fine black bays well in hand, the five
miles into the town, and tried to fix his mind on a commercial problem
of great importance with which he would be expected to deal that day,
Jacques de Wissant found it impossible to think of any matter but that
which for the moment filled his heart to the exclusion of all else. That
matter concerned his own relations to his wife, and his wife's relations
to Commander Dupré.
This gentleman of France was typical in more than one sense of his
nation and of his class--quite unlike, that is, to the fancy picture
which foreigners draw of the average Frenchman. Reserved and cold in
manner; proud, with an intense but never openly expressed pride in his
name and of what the bearers of it had achieved for their country;
obstinate and narrow as are apt to be all human beings whose judgment is
never questioned by those about them, Jacques de Wissant's fetish was
his personal honour and the honour of his name--of the name of Wissant.
In his distress and disturbance of mind--for his wife's half confession
had outraged his sense of what was decorous and fitting--his memory
travelled over the map of his past life, aye, and even beyond the
boundaries of his own life.
Before him lay spread retrospectively the story of his parents'
uneventful, happy marriage. They had been mated in the good old French
way, that is, up to their wedding morning they had never met save in the
presence of their respective parents. And yet--and yet how devoted they
had been to each other! So completely one in thought, in interest, in
sympathy had they grown that when, after thirty-three years of married
life, his father had died, Jacques' mother had not known how to go on
living. She had slipped out of life a few months later, and as she lay
dying she had used a very curious expression: "My faithful companion is
calling me," she had said to her only child, "and you must not try, dear
son, to make me linger on the way."
Now, to-day, Jacques de Wissant asked himself with perplexed pain and
anger, why it was that his parents had led so peaceful, so dignified, so
wholly contented a married life, while he himself----?
And yet his own marriage had been a love match--or so those about him
had all said with nods and smiles--love marriages having suddenly become
the fashion in the rich provincial world of which he had then been one
of the heirs-apparent.
His old-fashioned mother would have preferred as daughter-in-law any one
of half a dozen girls who belonged to her own good town of Falaise, and
whom she had known from childhood. But Jacques had been difficult to
please, and he was already thirty-two when he had met, by a mere chance,
Claire de Kergouët at her first ball. She was only seventeen, with but
the promise of a beauty which was now in exquisite flower, and he had
decided, there and then, in the course of two hours, that this
demoiselle de Kergouët was alone worthy of becoming Madame Jacques de
Wissant.
And on the whole his prudent parents had blessed his choice, for the
girl was of the best Breton stock, and came of a family famed in the
naval annals of France. Unluckily Claire de Kergouët had had no dowry to
speak of, for her father, the Admiral, had been a spendthrift, and, as
is still the reckless Breton fashion, father of a large family--three
daughters and four sons. But Jacques de Wissant had not allowed his
parents to give the matter of Claire's fortune more than a regretful
thought--indeed, he had done further, he had "recognized" a larger dowry
than she brought him to save the pride of her family.
But Claire--he could not help thinking of it to-day with a sense of
bitter injury--had never seemed grateful, had never seemed to understand
all that had been done for her....
Had he not poured splendid gifts upon her in the beginning of their
married life? And, what had been far more difficult, had he not, within
reason, contented all her strange whims and fantasies?
But nought had availed him to secure even a semblance of that steadfast,
warm affection, that sincere interest and pride in his concerns which is
all such a Frenchman as was Jacques de Wissant expects, or indeed
desires, of his wedded wife. Had Claire been such a woman, Jacques' own
passion for her would soon have dulled into a reasonable, comfortable
affection. But his wife's cool aloofness had kept alive the hidden
fires, the more--so ironic are the tricks which sly Dame Nature
plays--that for many years past he had troubled her but very little with
his company.
Outwardly Claire de Wissant did her duty, entertaining his friends and
relations on such occasions as was incumbent on her, and showing
herself a devoted and careful mother to the twin daughters who formed
the only vital link between her husband and herself. But inwardly?
Inwardly they two were strangers.
And yet only during the last few months had Jacques de Wissant ever felt
jealous of his wife. There had been times when he had been angered by
the way in which her young beauty, her indefinable, mysterious charm,
had attracted the very few men with whom she was brought into contact.
But Claire, so her husband had always acknowledged to himself, was no
flirt; she was ever perfectly "correct."
Correct was a word dear to Jacques de Wissant. It was one which he used
as a synonym for great things--things such as honour, fineness of
conduct, loyalty.
But fate had suddenly introduced a stranger into the dull, decorous life
of the Pavillon de Wissant, and it was he, Jacques himself, who had
brought him there.
How bitter it was to look back and remember how much he had liked--liked
because he had respected--Commander Dupré! He now hated and feared the
naval officer, and he would have given much to have been able to despise
him. But that Jacques de Wissant could not do. Commander Dupré was still
all that he had taken him to be when he first made him free of his
house--a brilliant officer, devoted to his profession, already noted in
the Service as having made several important improvements in submarine
craft.
From the first it had seemed peculiar, to Jacques de Wissant's mind
unnatural, that such a man as was Dupré should be so keenly interested
in music and in modern literature. But so it was, and it had been owing
to these strange, untoward tastes that Commander Dupré and Claire had
become friends.
He now reminded himself, for the hundredth time, that he had begun by
actually approving of the acquaintance between his wife and the naval
officer--an acquaintance which he had naturally supposed would be of the
most "correct" nature.
Then, without warning, there came an hour--nay, a moment, when in that
twilight hour which the French call "'Twixt dog and wolf," the most
torturing and shameful of human passions, jealousy, had taken possession
of Jacques de Wissant, disintegrating, rather than shattering, the
elaborate fabric of his House of Life, that house in which he had always
dwelt so snugly and unquestioningly ensconced.
He had come home after a long afternoon spent at the Hôtel de Ville to
learn with tepid pleasure that there was a visitor, Commander Dupré, in
the house, and as he had come hurrying towards his wife's boudoir,
Jacques had heard Claire's low, deep voice and the other's ardent, eager
tones mingling together....
And then as he, the husband, had opened the door, they had stopped
speaking, their words clipped as if a sword had fallen between them. At
the same moment a servant had brought a lamp into the twilit room, and
Jacques had seen the ravaged face of Commander Dupré, a fair, tanned
face full of revolt and of longing leashed. Claire had remained in
shadow, but her eyes, or so the interloper thought he perceived, were
full of tears.
Since that spring evening the Mayor of Falaise had not had an easy
moment. While scorning to act the spy upon his wife, he was for ever
watching her, and keeping an eager and yet scarcely conscious count of
her movements.
True, Commander Dupré had soon ceased to trouble the owner of the
Pavillon de Wissant by his presence. The younger officers came and went,
but since that hour, laden with unspoken drama, their commander only
came when good breeding required him to pay a formal call on his nearest
neighbour and sometime host. But Claire saw Dupré constantly at the
Châlet des Dunes, her sister's house, and she was both too proud and too
indifferent, it appeared, to her husband's view of what a young married
woman's conduct should be, to conceal the fact.
This openness on his wife's part was at once Jacques' consolation and
opportunity for endless self-torture.
For three long miserable months he had wrestled with those ignoble
questionings only the jealous know, now accepting as probable, now
rejecting with angry self-rebuke, the thought that his wife suffered,
perhaps even returned, Dupré's love. And to-day, instead of finding his
jealousy allayed by her half-confidence, he felt more wretched than he
had ever been.
His horses responded to his mood, and going down the steep hill which
leads into the town of Falaise they shied violently at a heap of stones
they had passed sedately a dozen times or more. Jacques de Wissant
struck them several cruel blows with the whip he scarcely ever used, and
the groom, looking furtively at his master's set face and blazing eyes,
felt suddenly afraid.