He must have slept some time after he ceased dreaming for he had no
immediate memory of this vision. It came back to him later, after he
had roused himself and had walked nearly home. No great arrangement was
needed to make it seem a striking allegory, and it haunted and oppressed
him for the rest of the day. He took refuge, however, in his quickened
conviction that the only sound policy in life is to grasp unsparingly
at happiness; and it seemed no more than one of the vigorous measures
dictated by such a policy to return that evening to Madame de Mauves.
And yet when he had decided to do so and had carefully dressed himself
he felt an irresistible nervous tremor which made it easier to linger
at his open window, wondering with a strange mixture of dread and desire
whether Madame Clairin had repeated to her sister-in-law what she had
said to him. His presence now might be simply a gratuitous annoyance,
and yet his absence might seem to imply that it was in the power of
circumstances to make them ashamed to meet each other’s eyes. He sat
a long time with his head in his hands, lost in a painful confusion of
hopes and ambiguities. He felt at moments as if he could throttle Madame
Clairin, and yet couldn’t help asking himself if it weren’t possible she
had done him a service. It was late when he left the hotel, and as he
entered the gate of the other house his heart beat so fast that he was
sure his voice would show it.
The servant ushered him into the drawing-room, which was empty and with
the lamp burning low. But the long windows were open and their light
curtains swaying in a soft warm wind, so that Longmore immediately
stepped out upon the terrace. There he found Madame de Mauves alone,
slowly pacing its length. She was dressed in white, very simply, and her
hair was arranged not as she usually wore it, but in a single loose coil
and as if she were unprepared for company. She stopped when she saw her
friend, showed some surprise, uttered an exclamation and stood waiting
for him to speak. He tried, with his eyes on her, to say something,
but found no words. He knew it was awkward, it was offensive, to stand
gazing at her; but he couldn’t say what was suitable and mightn’t say
what he wished. Her face was indistinct in the dim light, but he felt
her eyes fixed on him and wondered what they expressed. Did they warn
him, did they plead, or did they confess to a sense of provocation? For
an instant his head swam; he was sure it would make all things clear to
stride forward and fold her in his arms. But a moment later he was still
dumb there before her; he hadn’t moved; he knew she had spoken, but he
hadn’t understood.
“You were here this morning,” she continued; and now, slowly, the
meaning of her words came to him. “I had a bad headache and had to shut
myself up.” She spoke with her usual voice.
Longmore mastered his agitation and answered her without betraying
himself. “I hope you’re better now.”
“Yes, thank you, I’m better--much better.”
He waited again and she moved away to a chair and seated herself. After
a pause he followed her and leaned closer to her, against the balustrade
of the terrace. “I hoped you might have been able to come out for the
morning into the forest. I went alone; it was a lovely day, and I took a
long walk.”
“It was a lovely day,” she said absently, and sat with her eyes lowered,
slowly opening and closing her fan. Longmore, as he watched her, felt
more and more assured her sister-in-law had seen her since her interview
with him; that her attitude toward him was changed. It was this same
something that hampered the desire with which he had come, or at least
converted all his imagined freedom of speech about it to a final hush of
wonder. No, certainly, he couldn’t clasp her to his arms now, any more
than some antique worshipper could have clasped the marble statue in his
temple. But Longmore’s statue spoke at last with a full human voice and
even with a shade of human hesitation. She looked up, and it seemed to
him her eyes shone through the dusk.
“I’m very glad you came this evening--and I’ve a particular reason
for being glad. I half-expected you, and yet I thought it possible you
mightn’t come.”
“As the case has been present to me,” Longmore answered, “it was
impossible I shouldn’t come. I’ve spent every minute of the day in
thinking of you.”
She made no immediate reply, but continued to open and close her fan
thoughtfully. At last, “I’ve something important to say to you,” she
resumed with decision. “I want you to know to a certainty that I’ve
a very high opinion of you.” Longmore gave an uneasy shift to his
position. To what was she coming? But he said nothing, and she went on:
“I take a great interest in you. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t
say it. I feel a great friendship for you.” He began to laugh, all
awkwardly--he hardly knew why, unless because this seemed the very irony
of detachment. But she went on in her way: “You know, I suppose, that a
great disappointment always implies a great confidence--a great hope.”
“I’ve certainly hoped,” he said, “hoped strongly; but doubtless never
rationally enough to have a right to bemoan my disappointment.”
There was something troubled in her face that seemed all the while to
burn clearer. “You do yourself injustice. I’ve such confidence in your
fairness of mind that I should be greatly disappointed if I were to find
it wanting.”
“I really almost believe you’re amusing yourself at my expense,” the
young man cried. “My fairness of mind? Of all the question-begging
terms!” he laughed. “The only thing for one’s mind to be fair to is the
thing one FEELS!”
She rose to her feet and looked at him hard. His eyes by this time were
accustomed to the imperfect light, and he could see that if she was
urgent she was yet beseechingly kind. She shook her head impatiently and
came near enough to lay her fan on his arm with a strong pressure. “If
that were so it would be a weary world. I know enough, however, of your
probable attitude. You needn’t try to express it. It’s enough that your
sincerity gives me the right to ask a favour of you--to make an intense,
a solemn request.”
“Make it; I listen.”
“DON’T DISAPPOINT ME. If you don’t understand me now you will to-morrow
or very soon. When I said just now that I had a high opinion of you,
you see I meant it very seriously,” she explained. “It wasn’t a vain
compliment. I believe there’s no appeal one may make to your generosity
that can remain long unanswered. If this were to happen--if I were to
find you selfish where I thought you generous, narrow where I thought
you large”--and she spoke slowly, her voice lingering with all emphasis
on each of these words--“vulgar where I thought you rare, I should think
worse of human nature. I should take it, I assure you, very hard indeed.
I should say to myself in the dull days of the future: ‘There was ONE
man who might have done so and so, and he too failed.’ But this shan’t
be. You’ve made too good an impression on me not to make the very best.
If you wish to please me for ever there’s a way.”
She was standing close to him, with her dress touching him, her
eyes fixed on his. As she went on her tone became, to his sense,
extraordinary, and she offered the odd spectacle of a beautiful woman
preaching reason with the most communicative and irresistible passion.
Longmore was dazzled, but mystified and bewildered. The intention of
her words was all remonstrance, refusal, dismissal, but her presence
and effect there, so close, so urgent, so personal, a distracting
contradiction of it. She had never been so lovely. In her white dress,
with her pale face and deeply-lighted brow, she seemed the very spirit
of the summer night. When she had ceased speaking she drew a long
breath; he felt it on his cheek, and it stirred in his whole being
a sudden perverse imagination. Were not her words, in their high
impossible rigour, a mere challenge to his sincerity, a mere precaution
of her pride, meant to throw into relief her almost ghostly beauty, and
wasn’t this the only truth, the only law, the only thing to take account
of?
He closed his eyes and felt her watch him not without pain and
perplexity herself. He looked at her again, met her own eyes and saw
them fill with strange tears. Then this last sophistry of his great
desire for her knew itself touched as a bubble is pricked; it died away
with a stifled murmur, and her beauty, more and more radiant in the
darkness, rose before him as a symbol of something vague which was yet
more beautiful than itself. “I may understand you to-morrow,” he said,
“but I don’t understand you now.”
“And yet I took counsel with myself to-day and asked myself how I had
best speak to you. On one side I might have refused to see you at all.”
Longmore made a violent movement, and she added: “In that case I should
have written to you. I might see you, I thought, and simply say to you
that there were excellent reasons why we should part, and that I begged
this visit should be your last. This I inclined to do; what made me
decide otherwise was--well, simply that I like you so. I said to myself
that I should be glad to remember in future days, not that I had, in the
horrible phrase, got rid of you, but that you had gone away out of the
fulness of your own wisdom and the excellence of your own taste.”
“Ah wisdom and taste!” the poor young man wailed.
“I’m prepared, if necessary,” Madame de Mauves continued after a pause,
“to fall back on my strict right. But, as I said before, I shall be
greatly disappointed if I’m obliged to do that.”
“When I listen to your horrible and unnatural lucidity,” Longmore
answered, “I feel so angry, so merely sore and sick, that I wonder I
don’t leave you without more words.”
“If you should go away in anger this idea of mine about our parting
would be but half-realised,” she returned with no drop in her ardour.
“No, I don’t want to think of you as feeling a great pain, I don’t want
even to think of you as making a great sacrifice. I want to think of
you--”
“As a stupid brute who has never existed, who never CAN exist!” he broke
in. “A creature who could know you without loving you, who could leave
you without for ever missing you!”
She turned impatiently away and walked to the other end of the terrace.
When she came back he saw that her impatience had grown sharp and almost
hard. She stood before him again, looking at him from head to foot
and without consideration now; so that as the effect of it he felt his
assurance finally quite sink. This then she took from him, withholding
in consequence something she had meant to say. She moved off afresh,
walked to the other end of the terrace and stood there with her face to
the garden. She assumed that he understood her, and slowly, slowly, half
as the fruit of this mute pressure, he let everything go but the rage of
a purpose somehow still to please her. She was giving him a chance to do
gallantly what it seemed unworthy of both of them he should do meanly.
She must have “liked” him indeed, as she said, to wish so to spare him,
to go to the trouble of conceiving an ideal of conduct for him. With
this sense of her tenderness still in her dreadful consistency, his
spirit rose with a new flight and suddenly felt itself breathe clearer
air. Her profession ceased to seem a mere bribe to his eagerness; it was
charged with eagerness itself; it was a present reward and would somehow
last. He moved rapidly toward her as with the sense of a gage that he
might sublimely yet immediately enjoy.
They were separated by two thirds of the length of the terrace, and he
had to pass the drawing-room window. As he did so he started with an
exclamation. Madame Clairin stood framed in the opening as if, though
just arriving on the scene, she too were already aware of its interest.
Conscious, apparently, that she might be suspected of having watched
them she stepped forward with a smile and looked from one to the other.
“Such a tete-a-tete as that one owes no apology for interrupting. One
ought to come in for good manners.”
Madame de Mauves turned to her, but answered nothing. She looked
straight at Longmore, and her eyes shone with a lustre that struck him
as divine. He was not exactly sure indeed what she meant them to say,
but it translated itself to something that would do. “Call it what you
will, what you’ve wanted to urge upon me is the thing this woman can
best conceive. What I ask of you is something she can’t begin to!” They
seemed somehow to beg him to suffer her to be triumphantly herself,
and to intimate--yet this too all decently--how little that self was
of Madame Clairin’s particular swelling measure. He felt an immense
answering desire not to do anything then that might seem probable or
prevu to this lady. He had laid his hat and stick on the parapet of the
terrace. He took them up, offered his hand to Madame de Mauves with a
simple good-night, bowed silently to Madame Clairin and found his way,
with tingling ears, out of the place.