and accepted as facts, although, as between women, the grain of salt
should have been used. Impatience waxed, until nearly every day some
one would ring the bell of the old residence, to ask when the mistress
was going to move in. And such affectionate messages! And people would
not, simply could not, be satisfied with the incomprehensible answers.
And then it leaked out. The old lady was simply waiting for everything
to arrive--furniture, toilets, carriage, etc.--to make a grand
_entrée_ into her old sphere; to come riding on a throne, as it were.
And still the time passed, and she did not come. Finally two of the
clever-heads penetrated the enigma: _mauvaise honte_, shyness--so long
out of the world, so old; perhaps not sure of her welcome. So they
determined to seek her out.
[Illustration: THE ROOM IN THE OLD GALLERY.]
"We will go to her, like children to a grandmother, etc. The others
have no delicacy of sentiment, etc. And she will thus learn who really
remember, really love her, etc."
Provided with congratulatory bouquets, they set forth. It is very hard
to find a dweller on the very sea-bottom of poverty. Perhaps that is
why the effort is so seldom made. One has to ask at grocers' shops,
groggeries, market-stalls, Chinese restaurants; interview corner
cobblers, ragpickers, gutter children. But nothing is impossible to
the determined. The two ladies overcame all obstacles, and needled
their way along, where under other circumstances they would not have
glanced, would have thought it improper to glance.
They were directed through an old, old house, out on an old, old
gallery, to a room at the very extreme end.
"Poor thing! Evidently she has not heard the good news yet. We will
be the first to communicate it," they whispered, standing before the
dilapidated, withered-looking door.
Before knocking, they listened, as it is the very wisdom of discretion
to do. There was life inside, a little kind of voice, like some one
trying to hum a song with a very cracked old throat.
The ladies opened the door. "Ah, my friend!"
"Ah, my friend!"
"Restored!"
"Restored!"
"At last!"
"At last!"
"Just the same!"
"Exactly the same!"
It was which one would get to her first with bouquet and kiss,
competition almost crowding friendship.
"The good news!"
"The good news!"
"We could not stay!"
"We had to come!"
"It has arrived at last!"
"At last it has arrived!"
The old lady was very much older, but still the same.
"You will again have a chance!"
"Restored to your friends!"
"The world!"
"Your luxuries!"
"Your comforts!"
"Comforts! Luxuries!" At last the old lady had an opportunity to slip
in a word. "And friends! You say right."
There was a pause--a pause which held not a small measure of
embarrassment. But the two visitors, although they were women of the
world, and so dreaded an embarrassment more than they did sin, had
prepared themselves even to stand this.
The old lady standing there--she was very much thinner, very much
bent, but still the same--appeared to be looking not at them, but at
their enumeration.
"Comfort!" She opened a pot bubbling on the fire. "Bouillon! A good
five-cent bouillon. Luxury!" She picked up something from a chair,
a handful of new cotton chemises. "Luxury!" She turned back her
bedspread: new cotton sheets. "Did you ever lie in your bed at night
and dream of sheets? Comfort! Luxury! I should say so! And friends! My
dear, look!" Opening her door, pointing to an opposite gallery, to
the yard, her own gallery; to the washing, ironing, sewing women, the
cobbling, chair-making, carpentering men; to the screaming, laughing,
crying, quarreling, swarming children. "Friends! All friends--friends
for fifteen years. Ah, yes, indeed! We are all glad--elated in fact.
As you say. I am restored."
The visitors simply reported that they had found the old lady, and
that she was imbecile; mind completely gone under stress of poverty
and old age. Their opinion was that she should be interdicted.
A DELICATE AFFAIR
"But what does this extraordinary display of light mean?" ejaculated
my aunt, the moment she entered the parlor from the dining-room. "It
looks like the kingdom of heaven in here! Jules! Jules!" she called,
"come and put out some of the light!"
Jules was at the front door letting in the usual Wednesday-evening
visitor, but now he came running in immediately with his own invention
in the way of a gas-stick,--a piece of broom-handle notched at the
end,--and began turning one tap after the other, until the room was
reduced to complete darkness.
"But what do you mean now, Jules?" screamed the old lady again.
"Pardon, madame," answered Jules, with dignity; "it is an accident. I
thought there was one still lighted."
"An accident! An accident! Do you think I hire you to perform
accidents for me? You are just through telling me that it was accident
made you give me both soup and gumbo for dinner today."
"But accidents can always happen, madame," persisted Jules, adhering
to his position.
The chandelier, a design of originality in its day, gave light by what
purported to be wax candles standing each in a circlet of pendent
crystals. The usual smile of ecstatic admiration spread over Jules's
features as he touched the match to the simulated wicks, and lighted
into life the rainbows in the prisms underneath. It was a smile that
did not heighten the intelligence of his features, revealing as it did
the toothless condition of his gums.
"What will madame have for her dinner tomorrow," looking benignantly
at his mistress, and still standing under his aureole.
"Do I ever give orders for one dinner, with the other one still on my
lips?"
"I only asked madame; there is no harm in asking." He walked away, his
long stiff white apron rattling like a petticoat about him. Catching
sight of the visitor still standing at the threshold: "Oh, madame,
here is Mr. Horace. Shall I let him in?"
"Idiot! Every Wednesday you ask me that question, and every Wednesday
I answer the same way. Don't you think I could tell you when not to let
him in without your asking?"
"Oh, well, madame, one never knows; it is always safe to ask."
The appearance of the gentleman started a fresh subject of excitement.
"Jules! Jules! You have left that front door unlocked again!"
"Excuse me," said Mr. Horace; "Jules did not leave the front door
unlocked. It was locked when I rang, and he locked it again most
carefully after letting me in. I have been standing outside all the
while the gas was being extinguished and relighted."
"Ah, very well, then. And what is the news?" She sank into her
arm-chair, pulled her little card-table closer, and began shuffling
the cards upon it for her game of solitaire. "I never hear any news,
you know. She [nodding toward me] goes out, but she never learns
anything. She is as stupid tonight as an empty bottle."
After a few passes her hands, which were slightly tremulous, regained
some of their wonted steadiness and brilliancy of movement, and the
cards dropped rapidly on the table. Mr. Horace, as he had got into
the habit of doing, watched her mechanically, rather absent-mindedly
retailing what he imagined would interest her, from his week's
observation and hearsay. And madame's little world revolved, complete
for her, in time, place, and personality.
It was an old-fashioned square room with long ceiling, and broad, low
windows heavily curtained with stiff silk brocade, faded by time into
mellowness. The tall white-painted mantel carried its obligation of
ornaments well: a gilt clock which under a glass case related some
brilliant poetical idyl, and told the hours only in an insignificant
aside, according to the delicate politeness of bygone French taste;
flanked by duplicate continuations of the same idyl in companion
candelabra, also under glass; Sèvres, or imitation Sèvres vases, and
a crowd of smaller objects to which age and rarity were slowly
contributing an artistic value. An oval mirror behind threw replicas
of them into another mirror, receiving in exchange the reflected
portrait of madame in her youth, and in the partial nudity in which
innocence was limned in madame's youth. There were besides mirrors on
the other three walls of the room, all hung with such careful intent
for the exercise of their vocation that the apartment, in spots,
extended indefinitely; the brilliant chandelier was thereby
quadrupled, and the furniture and ornaments multiplied everywhere
and most unexpectedly into twins and triplets, producing such
sociabilities among them, and forcing such correspondences between
inanimate objects with such hospitable insistence, that the effect was
full of gaiety and life, although the interchange in reality was the
mere repetition of one original, a kind of phonographic echo.
The portrait of monsieur, madame's handsome young husband, hung out
of the circle of radiance, in the isolation that, wherever they hang,
always seems to surround the portraits of the dead.
Old as the parlors appeared, madame antedated them by the sixteen
years she had lived before her marriage, which had been the occasion
of their furnishment. She had traveled a considerable distance over
the sands of time since the epoch commemorated by the portrait.
Indeed, it would require almost documentary evidence to prove that
she, who now was arriving at eighty, was the same Atalanta that had
started out so buoyantly at sixteen.
Instead of a cap, she wore black lace over her head, pinned with gold
brooches. Her white hair curled naturally over a low forehead. Her
complexion showed care--and powder. Her eyes were still bright, not
with the effete intelligence of old age, but with actual potency. She
wore a loose black sack flowered in purple, and over that a black lace
mantle, fastened with more gold brooches.
She played her game of solitaire rapidly, impatiently, and always won;
for she never hesitated to cheat to get out of a tight place, or
into a favorable one, cheating with the quickness of a flash, and
forgetting it the moment afterward.
Mr. Horace was as old as she, but he looked much younger, although
his dress and appearance betrayed no evidence of an effort in that
direction. Whenever his friend cheated, he would invariably call her
attention to it; and as usual she would shrug her shoulders, and say,
"Bah! lose a game for a card!" and pursue the conversation.
He happened to mention mushrooms--fresh mushrooms. She threw down
her cards before the words were out of his mouth, and began to call,
"Jules! Jules!" Mr. Horace pulled the bell-cord, but madame was
too excitable for that means of communication. She ran into the
antechamber, and put her head over the banisters, calling, "Jules!
Jules!" louder and louder. She might have heard Jules's slippered feet
running from the street into the corridor and up-stairs, had she not
been so deaf. He appeared at the door.
"But where have you been? Here I have been raising the house a
half-hour, calling you. You have been in the street. I am sure you
have been in the street."
"Madame is very much mistaken," answered Jules, with resentful
dignity. He had taken off his white apron of waiter, and was
disreputable in all the shabbiness of his attire as cook. "When madame
forbids me to go into the street, I do not go into the street. I was
in the kitchen; I had fallen asleep. What does madame desire?" smiling
benevolently.
"What is this I hear? Fresh mushrooms in the market!"
"Eh, madame?"
"Fresh mushrooms in the market, and you have not brought me any!"
"Madame, there are fresh mushrooms everywhere in the market," waving
his hand to show their universality.
"Everybody is eating them--"
"Old Pomponnette," Jules continued, "only this morning offered me a
plate, piled up high, for ten cents."
"Idiot! Why did you not buy them?"
"If madame had said so; but madame did not say so. Madame said, 'Soup,
Jules; carrots, rice,'" counting on his fingers.
"And the gumbo?"
"I have explained that that was an accident. Madame said 'Soup,'"
enumerating his menu again; "madame never once said mushrooms."
"But how could I know there were mushrooms in the market? Do I go to
market?"
"That is it!" and Jules smiled at the question thus settled.
"If you had told me there were mushrooms in the market--" pursued
madame, persisting in treating Jules as a reasonable being.
"Why did not madame ask me? If madame had asked me, surely I would
have told madame. Yesterday Caesar brought them to the door--a whole
bucketful for twenty-five cents. I had to shut the door in his face to
get rid of him," triumphantly.
"And you brought me yesterday those detestable peas!"
"Ah," shrugging his shoulders, "madame told me to buy what I saw. I
saw peas. I bought them."
"Well, understand now, once for all: whenever you see mushrooms, no
matter what I ordered, you buy them. Do you hear?"
"No, madame. Surely I cannot buy mushrooms unless madame orders them.
Madame's disposition is too quick."
"But I do order them. Stupid! I do order them. I tell you to buy them
every day."
"And if there are none in the market every day?"
"Go away! Get out of my sight! I do not want to see you. Ah, it is
unendurable! I must--I must get rid of him!" This last was not
a threat, as Jules knew only too well. It was merely a habitual
exclamation.
During the colloquy Mr. Horace, leaning back in his arm-chair, raised
his eyes, and caught the reflected portrait of madame in the mirror
before him--the reflection so much softer and prettier, so much more
ethereal, than the original painting. Indeed, seen in the mirror, that
way, the portrait was as refreshing as the most charming memory. He
pointed to it when madame, with considerable loss of temper, regained
her seat.
"It is as beautiful as the past," he explained most unnaturally, for
he and his friend had a horror of looking at the long, long past,
which could not fail to remind them of--what no one cares to
contemplate out of church. Making an effort toward some determination
which a subtle observer might have noticed weighing upon him all the
evening, he added: "And, apropos of the past--"
"_Hein_?" interrogated the old lady, impatiently, still under the
influence of her irascibility about the mushrooms.
He moved his chair closer, and bent forward, as if his communication
were to be confidential.
"Ah, bah! Speak louder!" she cried. "One would suppose you had some
secret to tell. What secrets can there be at our age?" She took up her
cards and began to play. There could be no one who bothered herself
less about the forms of politeness.
"Yes, yes," answered Mr. Horace, throwing himself back into his chair;
"what secrets can there be at our age?"
The remark seemed a pregnant one to him; he gave himself up to it. One
must evidently be the age of one's thoughts. Mr. Horace's thoughts
revealed him the old man he was. The lines in his face deepened into
wrinkles; his white mustache could not pretend to conceal his mouth,
worsened by the loss of a tooth or two; and the long, thin hand that
propped his head was crossed with blue, distended veins. "At the last
judgment"--it was a favorite quotation with him--"the book of our
conscience will be read aloud before the whole company."
But the old lady, deep in her game, paid no more heed to his quotation
than to him. He made a gesture toward her portrait.
"When that was painted, Josephine--"
Madame threw a glance after the gesture. The time was so long ago, the
mythology of Greece hardly more distant! At eighty the golden age of
youth must indeed appear an evanescent myth. Madame's ideas seemed to
take that direction.
"Ah, at that time we were all nymphs, and you all demigods."
"Demigods and nymphs, yes; but there was one among us who was a god
with you all."
The allusion--a frequent one with Mr. Horace--was to madame's husband,
who in his day, it is said, had indeed played the god in the little
Arcadia of society. She shrugged her shoulders. The truth is so little
of a compliment The old gentleman sighed in an abstracted way, and
madame, although apparently absorbed in her game, lent her ear. It is
safe to say that a woman is never too old to hear a sigh wafted in her
direction.
"Josephine, do you remember--in your memory--"
She pretended not to hear. Remember? Who ever heard of her forgetting?
But she was not the woman to say, at a moment's notice, what she
remembered or what she forgot.
"A woman's memory! When I think of a woman's memory--in fact, I do not
like to think of a woman's memory. One can intrude in imagination into
many places; but a woman's memory--"
Mr. Horace seemed to lose his thread. It had been said of him in
his youth that he wrote poetry--and it was said against him. It was
evidently such lapses as these that had given rise to the accusation.
And as there was no one less impatient under sentiment or poetry
than madame, her feet began to agitate themselves as if Jules were
perorating some of his culinary inanities before her.
"And a man's memory!" totally misunderstanding him. "It is not there
that I either would penetrate, my friend. A man--"
When madame began to talk about men she was prompted by imagination
just as much as was Mr. Horace when he talked about women. But what a
difference in their sentiments! And yet he had received so little, and
she so much, from the subjects of their inspiration. But that seems to
be the way in life--or in imagination.
"That you should"--he paused with the curious shyness of the old
before the word "love"--"that you two should--marry--seemed natural,
inevitable, at the time."
Tradition records exactly the same comment by society at the time on
the marriage in question. Society is ever fatalistic in its comments.
"But the natural--the inevitable--do we not sometimes, I wonder,
perform them as Jules does his accidents?"
"Ah, do not talk about that idiot! An idiot born and bred! I won't
have him about me! He is a monstrosity! I tell his grandmother that
every day when she comes to comb me. What a farce--what a ridiculous
farce comfortable existence has become with us! Fresh mushrooms in
market, and bring me carrots!"
The old gentleman, partly from long knowledge of her habit, or from an
equally persistent bend of his own, quietly held on to his idea.
"One cannot tell. It seems so at the time. We like to think it so; it
makes it easier. And yet, looking back on our future as we once looked
forward to it--"
"Eh! but who wants to look back on it, my friend? Who in the world
wants to look back on it?" One could not doubt madame's energy of
opinion on that question to hear her voice. "We have done our future,
we have performed it, if you will. Our future! It is like the dinners
we have eaten; of course we cannot remember the good without becoming
exasperated over the bad: but"--shrugging her shoulders--"since we
cannot beat the cooks, we must submit to fate," forcing a queen that
she needed at the critical point of her game.
"At sixteen and twenty-one it is hard to realize that one is arranging
one's life to last until sixty, seventy, forever," correcting himself
as he thought of his friend, the dead husband. If madame had ever
possessed the art of self-control, it was many a long day since she
had exercised it; now she frankly began to show ennui.
"When I look back to that time,"--Mr. Horace leaned back in his chair
and half closed his eyes, perhaps to avoid the expression of her
face,--"I see nothing but lights and flowers, I hear nothing but music
and laughter; and all--lights and flowers and music and laughter--seem
to meet in this room, where we met so often to arrange
our--inevitabilities." The word appeared to attract him.
"Josephine,"--with a sudden change of voice and manner,--"Josephine,
how beautiful you were!"
The old lady nodded her head without looking from her cards.
"They used to say," with sad conviction of the truth of his
testimony--"the men used to say that your beauty was irresistible.
None ever withstood you. None ever could."
That, after all, was Mr. Horace's great charm with madame; he was so
faithful to the illusions of his youth. As he looked now at her, one
could almost feel the irresistibility of which he spoke.
"It was only their excuse, perhaps; we could not tell at the time; we
cannot tell even now when we think about it. They said then, talking
as men talk over such things, that you were the only one who could
remain yourself under the circumstances; you were the only one who
could know, who could will, under the circumstances. It was their
theory; men can have only theories about such things." His voice
dropped, and he seemed to drop too, into some abysm of thought.
Madame looked into the mirror, where she could see the face of the one
who alone could retain her presence of mind under the circumstances
suggested by Mr. Horace. She could also have seen, had she wished it,
among the reflected bric-a-brac of the mantel, the corner of the frame
that held the picture of her husband, but peradventure, classing it
with the past which held so many unavenged bad dinners, she never
thought to link it even by a look with her emotions of the present.
Indeed, it had been said of her that in past, present, and future
there had ever been but the one picture to interest her eyes--the
one she was looking at now. This, however, was the remark of the
uninitiated, for the true passion of a beautiful woman is never so
much for her beauty as for its booty; as the passion of a gamester is
for his game, not for his luck.
"How beautiful _she_ was!"
It was apparently down in the depths of his abysm that he found the
connection between this phrase and his last, and it was evidently to
himself he said it. Madame, however, heard and understood too; in
fact, traced back to a certain period, her thoughts and Mr. Horace's
must have been fed by pretty much the same subjects. But she had
so carefully barricaded certain issues in her memory as almost to
obstruct their flow into her life; if she were a cook, one would
say that it was her bad dinners which she was trying to keep out of
remembrance.
"You there, he there, she there, I there." He pointed to the places on
the carpet, under the chandelier; he could have touched them with a
walking-stick, and the recollection seemed just as close.
"She was, in truth, what we men called her then; it was her eyes
that first suggested it--Myosotis, the little blue flower, the
for-get-me-not. It suited her better than her own name. We always
called her that among ourselves. How beautiful she was!" He leaned his
head on his hand and looked where he had seen her last--so long, such
an eternity, ago.