Longmore’s first visit seemed to open to him so large a range of quiet
pleasure that he very soon paid a second, and at the end of a fortnight
had spent uncounted hours in the little drawing-room which Madame de
Mauves rarely quitted except to drive or walk in the forest. She
lived in an old-fashioned pavilion, between a high-walled court and an
excessively artificial garden, beyond whose enclosure you saw a long
line of tree-tops. Longmore liked the garden and in the mild afternoons
used to move his chair through the open window to the smooth terrace
which overlooked it while his hostess sat just within. Presently she
would come out and wander through the narrow alleys and beside the
thin-spouting fountain, and at last introduce him to a private gate
in the high wall, the opening to a lane which led to the forest.
Hitherwards she more than once strolled with him, bareheaded and meaning
to go but twenty rods, but always going good-naturedly further and often
stretching it to the freedom of a promenade. They found many things to
talk about, and to the pleasure of feeling the hours slip along
like some silver stream Longmore was able to add the satisfaction of
suspecting that he was a “resource” for Madame de Mauves. He had made
her acquaintance with the sense, not wholly inspiring, that she was a
woman with a painful twist in her life and that seeking her acquaintance
would be like visiting at a house where there was an invalid who could
bear no noise. But he very soon recognised that her grievance, if
grievance it was, was not aggressive; that it was not fond of attitudes
and ceremonies, and that her most earnest wish was to remember it as
little as possible. He felt that even if Mrs. Draper hadn’t told him
she was unhappy he would have guessed it, and yet that he couldn’t
have pointed to his proof. The evidence was chiefly negative--she never
alluded to her husband. Beyond this it seemed to him simply that her
whole being was pitched in a lower key than harmonious Nature had
designed; she was like a powerful singer who had lost her high notes.
She never drooped nor sighed nor looked unutterable things; she dealt
no sarcastic digs at her fate; she had in short none of the conscious
graces of the woman wronged. Only Longmore was sure that her gentle
gaiety was but the milder or sharper flush of a settled ache, and that
she but tried to interest herself in his thoughts in order to escape
from her own. If she had wished to irritate his curiosity and lead him
to take her confidence by storm nothing could have served her purpose
better than this studied discretion. He measured the rare magnanimity
of self-effacement so deliberate, he felt how few women were capable of
exchanging a luxurious woe for a thankless effort. Madame de Mauves,
he himself felt, wasn’t sweeping the horizon for a compensation or a
consoler; she had suffered a personal deception that had disgusted her
with persons. She wasn’t planning to get the worth of her trouble back
in some other way; for the present she was proposing to live with
it peaceably, reputably and without scandal--turning the key on it
occasionally as you would on a companion liable to attacks of insanity.
Longmore was a man of fine senses and of a speculative spirit,
leading-strings that had never been slipped. He began to regard his
hostess as a figure haunted by a shadow which was somehow her intenser
and more authentic self. This lurking duality in her put on for him an
extraordinary charm. Her delicate beauty acquired to his eye the serious
cast of certain blank-browed Greek statues; and sometimes when his
imagination, more than his ear, detected a vague tremor in the tone in
which she attempted to make a friendly question seem to have behind it
none of the hollow resonance of absent-mindedness, his marvelling eyes
gave her an answer more eloquent, though much less to the point, than
the one she demanded.
She supplied him indeed with much to wonder about, so that he fitted, in
his ignorance, a dozen high-flown theories to her apparent history. She
had married for love and staked her whole soul on it; of that he was
convinced. She hadn’t changed her allegiance to be near Paris and her
base of supplies of millinery; he was sure she had seen her perpetrated
mistake in a light of which her present life, with its conveniences for
shopping and its moral aridity, was the absolute negation. But by what
extraordinary process of the heart--through what mysterious intermission
of that moral instinct which may keep pace with the heart even when this
organ is making unprecedented time--had she fixed her affections on an
insolently frivolous Frenchman? Longmore needed no telling; he knew that
M. de Mauves was both cynical and shallow; these things were stamped
on his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his voice, his gesture, his step. Of
Frenchwomen themselves, when all was said, our young man, full of nursed
discriminations, went in no small fear; they all seemed to belong to the
type of a certain fine lady to whom he had ventured to present a letter
of introduction and whom, directly after his first visit to her, he had
set down in his note-book as “metallic.” Why should Madame de Mauves
have chosen a Frenchwoman’s lot--she whose nature had an atmospheric
envelope absent even from the brightest metals? He asked her one day
frankly if it had cost her nothing to transplant herself--if she weren’t
oppressed with a sense of irreconcileable difference from “all these
people.” She replied nothing at first, till he feared she might think
it her duty to resent a question that made light of all her husband’s
importances. He almost wished she would; it would seem a proof that
her policy of silence had a limit. “I almost grew up here,” she said
at last, “and it was here for me those visions of the future took
shape that we all have when we begin to think or to dream beyond mere
playtime. As matters stand one may be very American and yet arrange it
with one’s conscience to live in Europe. My imagination perhaps--I had
a little when I was younger--helped me to think I should find happiness
here. And after all, for a woman, what does it signify? This isn’t
America, no--this element, but it’s quite as little France. France is
out there beyond the garden, France is in the town and the forest; but
here, close about me, in my room and”--she paused a moment--“in my mind,
it’s a nameless, and doubtless not at all remarkable, little country of
my own. It’s not her country,” she added, “that makes a woman happy or
unhappy.”
Madame Clairin, Euphemia’s sister-in-law, might meanwhile have been
supposed to have undertaken the graceful task of making Longmore ashamed
of his uncivil jottings about her sex and nation. Mademoiselle de
Mauves, bringing example to the confirmation of precept, had made
a remunerative match and sacrificed her name to the millions of a
prosperous and aspiring wholesale druggist--a gentleman liberal enough
to regard his fortune as a moderate price for being towed into circles
unpervaded by pharmaceutic odours. His system possibly was sound, but
his own application of it to be deplored. M. Clairin’s head was turned
by his good luck. Having secured an aristocratic wife he adopted an
aristocratic vice and began to gamble at the Bourse. In an evil hour he
lost heavily, and then staked heavily to recover himself. But he was
to learn that the law of compensation works with no such pleasing
simplicity, and he rolled to the dark bottom of his folly. There he felt
everything go--his wits, his courage, his probity, everything that had
made him what his fatuous marriage had so promptly unmade. He walked up
the Rue Vivienne with his hands in his empty pockets and stood half an
hour staring confusedly up and down the brave boulevard. People brushed
against him and half a dozen carriages almost ran over him, until at
last a policeman, who had been watching him for some time, took him by
the arm and led him gently away. He looked at the man’s cocked hat and
sword with tears in his eyes; he hoped for some practical application
of the wrath of heaven, something that would express violently his
dead-weight of self-abhorrence. The sergent de ville, however, only
stationed him in the embrasure of a door, out of harm’s way, and walked
off to supervise a financial contest between an old lady and a cabman.
Poor M. Clairin had only been married a year, but he had had time to
measure the great spirit of true children of the anciens preux. When
night had fallen he repaired to the house of a friend and asked for
a night’s lodging; and as his friend, who was simply his old head
book-keeper and lived in a small way, was put to some trouble to
accommodate him, “You must pardon me,” the poor man said, “but I can’t
go home. I’m afraid of my wife!” Toward morning he blew his brains out.
His widow turned the remnants of his property to better account than
could have been expected and wore the very handsomest mourning. It was
for this latter reason perhaps that she was obliged to retrench at other
points and accept a temporary home under her brother’s roof.
Fortune had played Madame Clairin a terrible trick, but had found an
adversary and not a victim. Though quite without beauty she had always
had what is called the grand air, and her air from this time forth was
grander than ever. As she trailed about in her sable furbelows, tossing
back her well-dressed head and holding up her vigilant long-handled
eyeglass, she seemed to be sweeping the whole field of society and
asking herself where she should pluck her revenge. Suddenly she espied
it, ready made to her hand, in poor Longmore’s wealth and amiability.
American dollars and American complaisance had made her brother’s
fortune; why shouldn’t they make hers? She overestimated the wealth and
misinterpreted the amiability; for she was sure a man could neither be
so contented without being rich nor so “backward” without being weak.
Longmore met her advances with a formal politeness that covered a
good deal of unflattering discomposure. She made him feel deeply
uncomfortable; and though he was at a loss to conceive how he could be
an object of interest to a sharp Parisienne he had an indefinable sense
of being enclosed in a magnetic circle, of having become the victim of
an incantation. If Madame Clairin could have fathomed his Puritanic soul
she would have laid by her wand and her book and dismissed him for an
impossible subject. She gave him a moral chill, and he never named her
to himself save as that dreadful woman--that awful woman. He did justice
to her grand air, but for his pleasure he preferred the small air of
Madame de Mauves; and he never made her his bow, after standing frigidly
passive for five minutes to one of her gracious overtures to intimacy,
without feeling a peculiar desire to ramble away into the forest, fling
himself down on the warm grass and, staring up at the blue sky, forget
that there were any women in nature who didn’t please like the swaying
tree-tops. One day, on his arrival at the house, she met him in the
court with the news that her sister-in-law was shut up with a
headache and that his visit must be for HER. He followed her into the
drawing-room with the best grace at his command, and sat twirling his
hat for half an hour. Suddenly he understood her; her caressing cadences
were so almost explicit an invitation to solicit the charming honour
of her hand. He blushed to the roots of his hair and jumped up with
uncontrollable alacrity; then, dropping a glance at Madame Clairin,
who sat watching him with hard eyes over the thin edge of her smile,
perceived on her brow a flash of unforgiving wrath. It was not pleasing
in itself, but his eyes lingered a moment, for it seemed to show off her
character. What he saw in the picture frightened him and he felt himself
murmur “Poor Madame de Mauves!” His departure was abrupt, and this time
he really went into the forest and lay down on the grass.
After which he admired his young countrywoman more than ever; her
intrinsic clearness shone out to him even through the darker shade cast
over it. At the end of a month he received a letter from a friend with
whom he had arranged a tour through the Low Countries, reminding him
of his promise to keep their tryst at Brussels. It was only after his
answer was posted that he fully measured the zeal with which he had
declared that the journey must either be deferred or abandoned--since he
couldn’t possibly leave Saint-Germain. He took a walk in the forest
and asked himself if this were indeed portentously true. Such a truth
somehow made it surely his duty to march straight home and put together
his effects. Poor Webster, who, he knew, had counted ardently on this
excursion, was the best of men; six weeks ago he would have gone through
anything to join poor Webster. It had never been in his books to throw
overboard a friend whom he had loved ten years for a married woman whom
he had six weeks--well, admired. It was certainly beyond question that
he hung on at Saint-Germain because this admirable married woman was
there; but in the midst of so much admiration what had become of his
fine old power to conclude? This was the conduct of a man not judging
but drifting, and he had pretended never to drift. If she were as
unhappy as he believed the active sympathy of such a man would help her
very little more than his indifference; if she were less so she needed
no help and could dispense with his professions. He was sure moreover
that if she knew he was staying on her account she would be extremely
annoyed. This very feeling indeed had much to do with making it hard
to go; her displeasure would be the flush on the snow of the high cold
stoicism that touched him to the heart. At moments withal he assured
himself that staying to watch her--and what else did it come to?--was
simply impertinent; it was gross to keep tugging at the cover of a book
so intentionally closed. Then inclination answered that some day her
self-support would fail, and he had a vision of this exquisite creature
calling vainly for help. He would just be her friend to any length, and
it was unworthy of either to think about consequences. He was a friend,
however, who nursed a brooding regret for his not having known her
five years earlier, as well as a particular objection to those who had
smartly anticipated him. It seemed one of fortune’s most mocking strokes
that she should be surrounded by persons whose only merit was that they
threw every side of her, as she turned in her pain, into radiant relief.
Our young man’s growing irritation made it more and more difficult for
him to see any other merit than this in Richard de Mauves. And yet,
disinterestedly, it would have been hard to give a name to the pitiless
perversity lighted by such a conclusion, and there were times when
Longmore was almost persuaded against his finer judgement that he was
really the most considerate of husbands and that it was not a man’s
fault if his wife’s love of life had pitched itself once for all in
the minor key. The Count’s manners were perfect, his discretion
irreproachable, and he seemed never to address his companion but,
sentimentally speaking, hat in hand. His tone to Longmore--as the latter
was perfectly aware--was that of a man of the world to a man not quite
of the world; but what it lacked in true frankness it made up in easy
form. “I can’t thank you enough for having overcome my wife’s shyness,”
he more than once declared. “If we left her to do as she pleased she
would--in her youth and her beauty--bury herself all absurdly alive.
Come often, and bring your good friends and compatriots--some of them
are so amusing. She’ll have nothing to do with mine, but perhaps you’ll
be able to offer her better son affaire.”
M. de Mauves made these speeches with a bright assurance very amazing to
our hero, who had an innocent belief that a man’s head may point out
to him the shortcomings of his heart and make him ashamed of them.
He couldn’t fancy him formed both to neglect his wife and to take the
derisive view of her minding it. Longmore had at any rate an exasperated
sense that this nobleman thought rather the less of their interesting
friend on account of that very same fine difference of nature which
so deeply stirred his own sympathies. He was rarely present during the
sessions of the American visitor, and he made a daily journey to Paris,
where he had de gros soucis d’affaires as he once mentioned--with an
all-embracing flourish and not in the least in the tone of apology. When
he appeared it was late in the evening and with an imperturbable air
of being on the best of terms with every one and every thing which was
peculiarly annoying if you happened to have a tacit quarrel with him.
If he was an honest man he was an honest man somehow spoiled for
confidence. Something he had, however, that his critic vaguely envied,
something in his address, splendidly positive, a manner rounded
and polished by the habit of conversation and the friction of full
experience, an urbanity exercised for his own sake, not for his
neighbour’s, which seemed the fruit of one of those strong temperaments
that rule the inward scene better than the best conscience. The Count
had plainly no sense for morals, and poor Longmore, who had the finest,
would have been glad to borrow his recipe for appearing then so to range
the whole scale of the senses. What was it that enabled him, short of
being a monster with visibly cloven feet and exhaling brimstone, to
misprize so cruelly a nature like his wife’s and to walk about the world
with such a handsome invincible grin? It was the essential grossness of
his imagination, which had nevertheless helped him to such a store of
neat speeches. He could be highly polite and could doubtless be damnably
impertinent, but the life of the spirit was a world as closed to him as
the world of great music to a man without an ear. It was ten to one
he didn’t in the least understand how his wife felt; he and his smooth
sister had doubtless agreed to regard their relative as a Puritanical
little person, of meagre aspirations and few talents, content with
looking at Paris from the terrace and, as a special treat, having a
countryman very much like herself to regale her with innocent echoes
of their native wit. M. de Mauves was tired of his companion; he
liked women who could, frankly, amuse him better. She was too dim, too
delicate, too modest; she had too few arts, too little coquetry,
too much charity. Lighting a cigar some day while he summed up his
situation, her husband had probably decided she was incurably stupid.
It was the same taste, in essence, our young man moralised, as the taste
for M. Gerome and M. Baudry in painting and for M. Gustave Flaubert and
M. Charles Baudelaire in literature. The Count was a pagan and his wife
a Christian, and between them an impassable gulf. He was by race and
instinct a grand seigneur. Longmore had often heard of that historic
type, and was properly grateful for an opportunity to examine it
closely. It had its elegance of outline, but depended on spiritual
sources so remote from those of which he felt the living gush in his own
soul that he found himself gazing at it, in irreconcileable antipathy,
through a dim historic mist. “I’m a modern bourgeois,” he said, “and
not perhaps so good a judge of how far a pretty woman’s tongue may go at
supper before the mirrors properly crack to hear. But I’ve not met
one of the rarest of women without recognising her, without making
my reflexion that, charm for charm, such a maniere d’etre is more
‘fetching’ even than the worst of Theresa’s songs sung by a dissipated
duchess. Wit for wit, I think mine carries me further.” It was easy
indeed to perceive that, as became a grand seigneur, M. de Mauves had a
stock of social principles. He wouldn’t especially have desired perhaps
that his wife should compete in amateur operettas with the duchesses in
question, for the most part of comparatively recent origin; but he held
that a gentleman may take his amusement where he finds it, that he
is quite at liberty not to find it at home, and that even an adoptive
daughter of his house who should hang her head and have red eyes and
allow herself to make any other response to officious condolence than
that her husband’s amusements were his own affair, would have forfeited
every claim to having her finger-tips bowed over and kissed. And yet in
spite of this definite faith Longmore figured him much inconvenienced
by the Countess’s avoidance of betrayals. Did it dimly occur to him that
the principle of this reserve was self-control and not self-effacement?
She was a model to all the inferior matrons of his line, past and to
come, and an occasional “scene” from her at a manageable hour would
have had something reassuring--would have attested her stupidity rather
better than this mere polish of her patience.
Longmore would have given much to be able to guess how this latter
secret worked, and he tried more than once, though timidly and awkwardly
enough, to make out the game she was playing. She struck him as having
long resisted the force of cruel evidence, and, as though succumbing to
it at last, having denied herself on simple grounds of generosity the
right to complain. Her faith might have perished, but the sense of her
own old deep perversity remained. He believed her thus quite capable
of reproaching herself with having expected too much and of trying to
persuade herself out of her bitterness by saying that her hopes had been
vanities and follies and that what was before her was simply Life. “I
hate tragedy,” she once said to him; “I’m a dreadful coward about having
to suffer or to bleed. I’ve always tried to believe that--without
base concessions--such extremities may always somehow be dodged or
indefinitely postponed. I should be willing to buy myself off, from
having ever to be OVERWHELMED, by giving up--well, any amusement you
like.” She lived evidently in nervous apprehension of being fatally
convinced--of seeing to the end of her deception. Longmore, when he
thought of this, felt the force of his desire to offer her something of
which she could be as sure as of the sun in heaven.