As they entered on the smoother sward of the stately gardens a figure
came out of the deep shadow of clipped walls of bay and approached them.
'Is the Court over? At what decision has it arrived?' said the master
of Amyôt as he saluted the party and kissed the hand of his wife with a
graceful formality of greeting.
'It will have to sit for half a century if it be compelled to come to
any,' returned the châtelaine. 'We have said many pretty things about
love, Béthune in especial; but we met Lubin with Lisette loitering
behind their cows, and I fear the living commentary was truer to nature
than all our doctrines.'
'The only issue of its resolutions is that you are to give away a cow
and a maiden to the admirable lover,' said M. de Béthune. 'He crossed
our path just in time to point a moral for us: we were all sadly in
want of one.'
'Could you not agree then? Surely you chose a very simple subject?'
'It might be simple in the days of Philemon and Baucis. It is
sufficiently complicated now. Is the sentiment which sent d'Aubiac to
the scaffold, pressing a little blue velvet muff to his lips, the same
thing as the unpoetic impulse which makes the _femelle de l'homme_
sought by Tom, Dick, and Harry? You will admit that a vast field of the
most various emotions separates the two kinds of passion?'
'Certainly: there is a great difference between Montrose's Farewell and
Sir John Suckling's verses.'
'Precisely: so we came to no decision. We have all too much of the
terrible modern tendency to hesitation and melancholy. I do not know
why; unless it come from the conviction of all of us that love is
always melancholy when it is not absurd.'
'What a cruel sentiment!'
'A perfectly true assertion. The only loves respectable in tradition
are those which have ended wretchedly. Suppose Romeo had been happy;
or Stradella; what do you think the poets could have made of them?
Love must end somehow: if it end in tragedy its dignity is saved like
Cæsar's.'
'But why need it end? You, at least, have seen that through all
disappointments it can endure,' murmured he who had cited the love of
d'Aubiac for Marguerite.
She looked at him and shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.
'Love is, so unhappily, like a comet. It mounts to its perihelion,
increasing in splendour as it goes, and then slowly, little by
little, the glory departs, the sovereign of the skies grows less
and less, until at last there is no more sign of it anywhere, and
all is darkness. But the comet is not really gone; it has only
gone--elsewhere.'
Her slight delicate laugh robbed the speech of the melancholy which it
would otherwise have possessed.
'My wife believes in no constancy,' said Othmar.
She looked at him with her mysterious smile:
'I believe in Romeo's, I believe in Stradella's, because the kindness
of death saved them from the ridicule of forswearing themselves. What
a pity you did not come home a little sooner. You would have been
an invaluable ally to the sentimentalists headed by Béthune. He was
eloquent, but his cause was weak.'
'My cause was strong,' said the Duc de Béthune; 'it was my tongue which
lacked persuasiveness.'
'No, you were very poetical; you were only not convincing. My dear
friend, we are too scientific in these days for sentiment to have any
abiding place in us; we are pessimists, it is true, but we mourn for
ourselves, not for others. We are neither gay enough nor sad enough to
do justice to such discussions as this which we have tried to revive;
we are only bored. We do not take our fooling joyously or our sorrows
deeply. We are uneasily conscious that we are childish and unreal in
both. Then there is the incurable modern tendency to end everything
with a laugh _en gouailleur_, yet with tears in our eyes. We are always
ridiculing ourselves, yet we are always vexed that, ridiculous as we
are, we must still die.'
'At the present moment we must still eat,' said Othmar, as the boom of
a silver-toned gong came over the gardens in deep waves of sound.
It was nine o'clock, and that repast which had been used to be called
in the Valois Amyôt _arrière-grand-souper_, and was now called
'dinner,' awaited them.
There were some twenty-five guests then staying there; she did not
approve of immense house parties, and she restricted her house list to
the very choicest of her favourites and associates; she always asked
double the number of men to that of women, but she was proportionately
careful that the latter should be those whom men most liked and
admired; she was wholly above the petty envies and jealousies of her
sex. Her vanity rather consisted in having it said that she feared no
rivals.
As the deep boom of the gong sounded from the house, she and her
guests passed onward, and in their Valois dresses were soon seated in
the summer banqueting-room: a modern addition to the château, an open
loggia in the Italian style, with marble floor and marble columns, one
side open to the air, the other sides rich in white marble bas-reliefs
by French sculptors; the ceiling had been painted by Puvis de Chavannes
with the story of Europa. In each corner there were tall palms in large
square cases of white porcelain; the white columns were garlanded
by passion-flowers, which grew without; at either end there was a
fountain, their basins filled with gold fish and water-lilies; through
the columns the whole enchanting view of the west gardens was seen
stretching far away to where the Loire waters spread wide as a lake and
mirroring the newly-risen moon.
'I had it built,' she said, in answer to some one who complimented her
upon it. 'There is a great dining-hall and a small dining-room indoors,
but neither are fitted for summer evenings. It is a barbarism to be
shut up within four walls just as the moon rises and the nightingales
sing. The matter of food is always a distressingly coarse question;
nothing can really spiritualise or redeem it, but at least it may be
divested of some of its brute aspects. A delicate cuisine does that
for us in some measure, and the scene we have around us may do more.
The London and Paris habit of sitting in mere boxes, more or less well
decorated, is horrible. Perfect ease, vast space, and soft shadowy
distances are absolutely necessary to preserve illusions as we dine.'
And to that end she had caused to be built the loggia of Amyôt, with
as much celerity and breathless obedience to her commands as the
architects of the East showed a sultan of Bagdad or Benares when he
bade a palace of marble uprise from the sand. Her fine taste would
not have allowed her to hurt the architecture of Amyôt with any
incongruity, however much her caprices might have desired it; but the
marble loggia accorded in exterior with the Renaissance outline of the
château, and the tone of Primaticcio and the epoch of Jean Goujon had
been faithfully followed in its internal decoration.
'What a perfect place it is!' said one of her guests to her after
dinner.
She smiled.
'In August, yes. When the terraces are hung with ice, and the forests
black with winter storm, it is not so perfect. All places have their
season, like all lives.'
'There are some places, like some lives, which can never lose their
beauty.'
'Do you think so? I have never found them. When one knows every leaf,
every stone, every fence, the beauty of the place fades for us as it
does when one knows every impulse, every prejudice, every fault, and
every virtue of the life.'
'A melancholy truth--if it be a truth. Perhaps it is only half a one.
There are people who love their homes.'
'There are prisoners who have loved their cells! Amyôt is delightful
in many ways, but I have no more sense of home in it than a swallow
has in the eaves it builds under for one summer. You must go to the
vinedresser's wife in the cliff cabin on the river for _that_.'
'Then the vinedresser's wife has a jewel which the great châtelaine's
crown is without?'
'A jewel? Are you sure it is a jewel? I think there is much to be said
in favour of the restlessness of our world, it saves us from rust and
reflection; it makes us unprejudiced and cosmopolitan; it annihilates
nationalities and antipathies. I imagine, if Horace had lived now,
he would never have been still; he would have seen the farm in its
pleasantest season, and that only. He would have carried with him the
undying lamp of his enchanting temperament, and he would have been
happy anywhere.'
'But is it really incomprehensible to you, the love of home?'
'I think so. I have lived in too many places. We are a few months
here, a few months in Paris, a few weeks in the Riviera, a few weeks
in Russia, or Vienna, or London. It is impossible to carry about the
sense of home peripatetically with you as the snail carries his shell.
The sparrow feels it, the swallow does not. I have always had a number
of houses in which I spend a number of months, of weeks, of days. I
like each of them to be perfect in its own way, and I like each to have
copies of my favourite books in it: the sight of Goethe, of Molière, of
Horace makes one feel _chez soi_. That is as near "home" as I approach.
I imagine all happiness is much more a matter of temperament than of
place or of circumstance.'
'I do not believe you are happy even now!'
It was a personal speech, and too bold a one to be justified even by
intimate and privileged friendship. But she was moved to it by that
ever ready and pitiless self-analysis which made her as severe a critic
of herself as of others.
'Happy? Oh, I must be,' she said with a smile. 'Who on earth should
be happy if I am not? I have all the vulgar attributes of happiness
in profusion and all the more delicate ones too. If I am not so,
it can only be because my temperament is the very opposite of a
_porte-bonheur_ like Horace's. I have always expected too much of
everything and of everybody, and yet I am not at all what you would
call an imaginative person. I ought to be prosaically contented with
the world as it is. But I am not.'
It was a sultry and lovely August night. The sky was radiant and the
white lustre of the full moon shone over all the scene, making the
gardens, the terraces, the fountains, the parterres of flowers light as
day, and leaving the masses of the great forest which surrounded them
in deepest shadow. It was haunted ground, this stately and royal place
where both Marguerites had passed in turn summers dead three centuries
ago; where the one, witty, wise and faithful, had read the tales of her
Heptameron beneath its spreading oaks; and the other, lovely, perilous
and faithless, had gathered its roses and ruffled them, murmuring
the '_un peu--beaucoup--passionnément_,' as one passion hotly chased
another from her fickle breast, each scarce living the life of the
gathered rose.
The present châtelaine of Amyôt, leaning against one of the marble
columns of her summer dining-hall, and listening to the words of a
friend who dared tell her truths, looked out into the wide white
moonlight, on to the trellised rose walks, the turf smooth as velvet,
bordered with ground ivy; the marble statues standing against the high
walls of close-clipped evergreens; the deep and sombre forests which
held the heart of so many secrets, the story of so many lives and of
so many deaths, safe shut away for ever, dumb and dead in the eternal
mystery of its vernal solitudes. If she were not happy who should be?
But happiness--what an immense word!--or what a little one! A poet's
dream of paradise, or the peasant's contentment in the chimney-corner
and the pot of soup! Which you will--but never both at once.
She was as happy as a very analytical and fastidious nature can
possibly be, but at times her old enemy dissatisfaction looked in over
the flowers and through the golden air. She was pursued by her old
consciousness that the human race was after all exceedingly limited in
its capabilities, and the lives of men on the whole very wearisome.
There was with her that vague disappointment and dissatisfaction which
come to most of us when we have done what we wished to do. There is
a monotony even in what is most agreeable, which makes all happiness
dull after awhile. Priests tells us that this unpleasant weariness
is intended to detach us from the joys of earth, and philosophers
are content to find its solution in the physiology of the senses.
But whether explained sentimentally or scientifically, the result
is the same: that expectation makes up so large a component part of
pleasure that, when there is nothing new to expect, pleasure becomes so
attenuated as to be scarcely visible.
All loves which have been constant and become famous have been those
to which immense difficulties arose, where perils supplied the element
of an unending interest. It is when they can only behold each other in
the stolen hours of the moonlight, that Romeo and Giulietta are to each
other divinely fair. Were they condemned to face each other at dinner
every night for ten years, what divinity would be left for either in
the eyes of the other?
Habit and love cannot dwell together. As well ask the rose to flower
beneath a slab of stone.
'Happiness is not of this world,' she said, with a little dreamy
lingering smile. 'Is not that what your brethren are always telling us?'
Melville answered with a sigh:
'May this not prove that we may at least hope for it in some other?'
'Yes, I think,' she replied, rather to herself than to him, 'I think
with you; the strongest argument (if any are strong) in favour of the
future development of the soul, is the absolute impossibility for
anybody with any average mind to be content with what he or she finds
in human existence. Life is a pretty enough picture for people like
ourselves; it is sometimes a pageant, it is sometimes even a poem, but
it is all wonderfully unproductive and circumscribed. Except in a few
hours of passion or exultation, we are sensible of the flatness and
insufficiency of it all. We have ideals which may be only remembrance,
but if not must surely be prevision; ideals which, at any rate, are
larger and of another atmosphere than anything which belongs to earth.'
Her voice grew soft and dreamy, and had a tone in it of wistful regret.
It was not the mere dissatisfaction of the _ennuyée_ which moved her.
She had had her own way in life, and the success of it had become
monotonous.
'Yes,' she repeated with a little laugh, which was not very gay; 'I
suppose it must be the soul in us; that odd, unquiet, dissatisfied,
nameless thing inside us, which is always crying, "Give, give, give!"
and never gets what it wants. Our discontent must be the proof
of something in us meant for better things, just as the eternal
revolutions of Paris are the proof of its people's genius. What a
night it is! It wants Lorenzo and Jessica, but they are not here. There
are flirtations and intrigues enough indoors, but Lorenzo and Jessica
are not of our world. It is a pity. The moon seems to look for them.'
Then she left the marble loggia and went amongst her guests, who
were gathering together in the silver drawing-room, as the sounds of
music, in the ever-youthful 'Invitation à la Valse,' called them, with
midnight, to the ball-room. Gervase Melville strayed away by himself
through the moonlit aisles of roses.
'Always the pebble of _ennui_ in the golden slipper of pleasure,'
he thought. 'Perhaps life is, after all, more evenly balanced than
the wooden shoe and the ragged stocking will ever believe. Perhaps
in life, as they said to-day that it is in love, hunger is a happier
state than satiety. Perhaps, if Lorenzo had never married Jessica, he
would have written sonnets to her all his life, as Petrarca wrote them
to Laura! The Lady of Amyôt is the most interesting woman I have ever
known, but she is the one person on earth capable of making me doubt
the faith that I have lived and hope to die for; when I am amongst the
green savages of Formosa or the drunken Indians of Ottawa, I can still
believe in the human soul; but when I am with her I doubt--I doubt--I
doubt! She is as exquisitely organised as this gloxinia which is full
of dew and of moonbeams; but she believes that she will have only her
one brief passage on earth like the gloxinia--the glory of a day--and
alas! who shall prove that she is wrong? When she holds my creed in the
hollow of her white hand and smiles, it grows small and shrunken as a
daisy that is dead!'