Foreign Floralia, _i.e._, that portion of Floralia which is not
indigenous to the soil, but has only flown south with the swallows,
is remarkable for a really godlike consciousness: it knows everything
about everybody, and all things, past, present, and to come, that ever
did, could, would, should, cannot, will not, or never shall happen; and
is aware of all things that have ever taken place, and of a great many
things that never have done so. It is much better informed about you
than you are yourself; knows your morals better than your confessor,
your constitution better than your doctor, your income better than
your banker, and the day you were born on better than your mother. It
is omniscient and omnipresent, microscopic and telescopic; it is a
court-edition of Scotland Yard, and a pocket-edition of the Cabinet Noir;
it speeds as many interrogations as a telegraph-wire, and has as many
mysteries as the agony column of a newspaper: only it always answers its
own questions, and has all the keys to its own mysteries, and, what is
still more comforting, always knows everything for “certain.”
It knows that you starve your servants because you are poor and like to
save on the butcher and baker; it knows that you overpay them because
you are rich and want them to keep your secrets; it knows that your
great-grandmother’s second cousin was hanged for forgery at Tyburn;
it knows that your silk stockings have cotton tops to them; it knows
that your heirloom guipure is imitation, made the other day at Rapallo;
it knows that your Embassy only receives you because—hush!—a great
personage—ah, so very shocking; it knows that you had green peas six
weeks before anybody else; it knows that you have had four dinner-parties
this week and are living on your capital; it knows that when you were
in Rome you only went to the Quirinal Wednesdays, because (_whisper,
whisper, whisper_)—oh, indeed it is perfectly true,—had it on the best
authority,—dreadful, incredible, but perfectly true.
In point of fact, there is nothing it does not know.
Except, to be sure, it never knows that Mrs. Potiphar is not virtuous, or
that Lady Messalina is not everything she should be; this it never knows
and never admits, because if it did it could not very well drink the
Potiphar champagne, and might lose for its daughters the Messalina balls.
Indeed, its perpetual loquacity, which is “as the waters come down at
Lodore,” has most solemn and impressive interludes of refreshing dumbness
and deafness when any incautious speaker, not trained to its ways, hints
that Mrs. Potiphar lives in a queer manner, or that Lady Messalina would
be out of society anywhere else; then indeed does Anglo-Saxon Floralia
draw itself up with an injured dignity, and rebuke you with the murmur
of—Christian charity.
In other respects, however, it has the soul of Samuel Pepys multiplied by
five thousand. It watched the progress of intimacy between Lady Hilda and
the ruined lord of Palestrina, and knew “all about it,”—knew a vast deal
more than the persons concerned, of course; it always does, or what would
be the use of talking?
Gossiping over its bonbons and tea in the many pleasant houses in which
the south-wintering northern swallows nestle, it knew that he and she had
been in love years and years before; the family would not let her marry
him because he was so poor; it was the discovery of his letters to her
that had killed poor old rich Vararlberg; he and her brother had fought
in the Bois,—indeed!—oh, yes, it was hushed up at the time, but it was
quite true, and he had shot her brother in the shoulder; the surgeon who
had attended the wounded man had told the physician who had attended
the sister-in-law of the cousin of the most intimate friend of the lady
who had vouched for this. There could not be better authority. But
there never was anything against her?—oh, dear me, no, never anything;
everybody said this very warmly, because everybody had been, hoped to be,
or at least would not despair of being, introduced to her and asked to
dinner. It was very romantic, really most interesting; they had not met
for nine years, and now!—ah, that explained all her coldness then, and
that extraordinary rejection of the Crown Prince of Deutschland, which
nobody ever had been able to understand. But was it not strange that he
had never tried to resume his old influence before? No; he was as proud
as he was poor, and, besides, they had quarreled after the duel with
her brother; they had parted one night very bitterly, after one of the
Empress’s balls at St. Cloud, out on the terrace there; but he had always
refused to give up her portrait; somebody had seen it upon his chest
when he had been stripped in the hospital after Custozza. Oh, yes, they
remembered that perfectly.
Altogether they made such a very pretty story that it was quite a pity
that it was not true, and that the subjects of it had never met until
the Duc de St. Louis had brought them face to face that winter. The one
real truth which did begin to embitter the life of the Lady Hilda and
lie heavy on her thoughts waking and sleeping was one that the garrulous
gossiping Pepys-like northern swallows, chirping so busily, did not guess
at all. Indeed, this is a sad fate which generally befalls gossip.
It is like the poor devil in the legend of Fugger’s Teuffelpalast at
Trent: it toils till cock-crow picking up the widely-scattered grains of
corn by millions till the bushel measure is piled high, and, lo! the five
grains that are _the_ grains always escape its sight and roll away and
hide themselves. The poor devil, being a primitive creature, shrieked and
flew away in despair at his failure. Gossip hugs its false measure and
says loftily that the five grains are of no consequence whatever.
The Duc de St. Louis, who had not got the five grains any more than they
had, yet who could have told them their bushelful was all wrong, like
a wise man, seeing the project of his affections in a fair way towards
realization,—at least, so he thought,—prudently abstained from saying one
word about it to any one. “Trop de zèle” spoiled everything, he knew,
from politics to omelettes, from the making of proselytes to the frying
of artichokes. A breath too much has before now toppled down the most
carefully built house of cards. When to let things alone is perhaps the
subtlest, rarest, and most useful of all knowledge.
A man here and there has it; it may be said that no woman has, has had,
or ever will have it. If Napoleon had had it he might have died at eighty
at St. Cloud instead of St. Helena. But genius, like woman, never has
been known to have it. For genius and caution are as far apart as the
poles.
“Tout va bien,” the Duc said to himself, taking off his hat to her when
he saw Della Rocca by her carriage, meeting them in discussion before
some painting or statue that she was about to buy, or watching them
_tête-à-tête_ on some couch of a ball-room, or in some nook of a gas-lit
grove of camellias.
“Tout va bien,” said the Duc, smiling to himself, and speeding on his way
to his various missions, reconciling angry ladies, making the prettiest
flatteries to pretty ones, seeking some unobtainable enamel, ivory,
or Elzevir, penning sparkling proverbs in verse, arranging costume
quadrilles, preventing duels and smiling on débutantes, adjusting old
quarrels and hearing new tenors; always in a whirl of engagements, always
courted and courteous, always the busiest, the wittiest, the happiest,
the most urbane, the most charming, the most serene person in all
Floralia. “Tout va bien,” said the Duc, and the town with him: the two
persons concerned were neither of them quite so sure.
Meanwhile, for a little space the name and fame and ways and wonders of
the Lady Hilda, which filled Floralia with a blaze as of electric lights,
quelling all lesser luminaries, were almost disregarded in a colossal
sentiment, a gigantic discussion, a debate which, for endless eloquence
and breathless conflict, would require the dithyrambs of Pindar meetly
to record,—the grave question of who would, and who would not, go to the
Postiche ball.
“Number One goes to dine with Number Two, only that he may say he did so
to Number Three,” some cynic has declared; but Floralia improves even on
this; before it goes to dine or dance, it spends the whole week in trying
to find out who all the Number Fours will be, or in declaring that if
such and such a Number Four goes it does not think it can go itself,—out
of principle; all which diversions while its time away and serve to amuse
it as a box of toys a child. Not that it ever fails to go and dine or
dance,—only it likes to discuss it dubiously in this way.
The Postiche ball was really a thing to move society to its depths.
The wintering-swallows had never been so fluttered about anything since
the mighty and immortal question of the previous season, when a Prince
of the Holy Roman Empire, a United Netherlands Minister, and a Duc
et Pair of France, had all been asked to dinner together with their
respective wives at an American house, and the hostess and all the
swallows with her had lived in agonies for ten days previously, torn to
pieces by the terrible doubts of Precedence; beseeching and receiving
countless counsels and counselors, and consulting authorities and quoting
precedents with the research of Max Müller and the zeal of Dr. Kenealy.
But the Postiche ball was a much wider, indeed almost an international
matter; because the Anglo-Saxon races had staked their lives that it
should be a success; and the Latin and Muscovite had declared that it
would be a failure; and everybody was dying to go, and yet everybody was
ashamed to go; a state of mind which constitutes the highest sort of
social ecstasy in this age of composite emotions.
Mr. and Mrs. Joshua R. Postiche, some said, were Jews, and some said
were Dutch, and some said were half-castes from Cuba, and some said
were Americans from Arkansas, and some said had been usurers, and some
gin-sellers, and some opium-dealers, and some things even yet worse;
at any rate they had amassed a great deal of money, and had therefore
got into society by dint of a very large expenditure and the meekest
endurance of insults; and had made an ancient palace as gaudy and garish
as any brand-new hotel at Nice or Scarborough, and gathered in it all the
cosmopolitan crowd of Floralia; some of the Italian planets and Muscovite
stars alone hanging aloof in a loftier atmosphere, to the very great
anguish of the Joshua R. Postiches.
The ball was to be a wonderful ball, and the cotillon presents were
whispered to have cost thirty thousand francs, and there were various
rumors of a “surprise” there would be at it, as poor Louis Napoleon used
to promise the Parisians one for the New Year. Louis Napoleon’s promises
always ended in smoke, but the surprise of the Joshua R. Postiches was
always to be reckoned on as something excellent:—salmon come straight
from the Scotch rivers; lobsters stewed in tokay du krone; French comic
actors fetched from Paris; some great singer, paid heaven knew what for
merely opening her mouth; some dove flying about with jewels in his beak
for everybody; or something of that sort, which showed that the Joshua R.
Postiches, wherever they had been “raised,” or even if they had kept a
drinking-bar and eating-shop in Havana, as some people said, were at all
events persons who knew the requirements of their own generation and the
way to mount into “La Haute.”
Why they wanted to get there no mortal could tell; they had no children,
and were both middle-aged; but no doubt, if you have not been used
to them, the cards of countesses are as balm in Gilead, and to see a
fashionable throng come up your staircase is to have attained the height
of human desire.
At any rate, the Joshua R. Postiches had set their souls on this sort of
social success, and they achieved it; receiving at their parties many
distinguished and infinitely bored personages who had nothing to do in
Floralia, and would have cut them in Paris, Vienna, or London with the
blandest and blankest stare of unconsciousness.
Madame Mila was on the point of adding herself to those personages.
“I _must_ go to the ball,” she said. “Oh, it will be the best thing of
the season except Nina Trasimene’s. I must go to the ball; but then I
can’t endure to know the woman.”
“Can’t you go without knowing her?” said the Lady Hilda. “That has been
done——”
Madame Mila did not feel the satire.
“Yes; one could do it in Paris or London; but not in a little place like
this,” she answered, innocently. “I must let them present her to me; and
I must leave a card. That is what’s so horrid. The woman is dreadful;
she murders all the languages; and the man’s always looking about for a
spittoon, and calls you my lady. They are too dreadful! But I must go to
the ball. Besides, our own people want Maurice to lead the cotillon. Now
Guido Salvareo is ill, there’s nobody that can come near Maurice——”
“But I suppose he would not dare to go if you were not there?”
“Of course he would not go; the idea! But I mean to go; I must go. I’m
only thinking how I can get out of knowing the woman afterwards. It’s
so difficult in a small place, and I am always so good-natured in those
things. I suppose it’s no use asking you to come, Hilda? else, if you
would, _you_ could cut them afterwards most deliciously, and I should do
as you did. Left to myself, I’m always too good-natured.”
“I would do most things to please you, my dear Mila,” answered her
cousin, “but I don’t think I can do that. You know it’s my rule never
to visit people that I won’t let visit me; and I don’t like murdered
languages, and being called ‘my lady.’”
“Oh, the people are horrid,—I say so,” answered the Comtesse. “I shall
have nothing to do with them, of course,—after their ball.”
“But surely it’s very low, Mila, that sort of thing. I know people do it
nowadays. But, really, to be a guest of a person you intend to cut next
day——”
“What does it matter? She wants my name on her list; she gets it; I’m not
bound to give her anything more. There is nothing unfair about it. She
has what she wants, and more than she could expect. Of course, all that
kind of persons must know perfectly well that we only go to them as we
go to the opera, and have no more to do with them than we have with the
opera door-keepers. Of course they know we don’t visit them as we visit
our own people But if snobbish creatures like those find pleasure in
entertaining us, though they know quite well what we think of them, and
how we esteem them, and why we go to them,—well, I don’t see that they
deserve anything better.”
“Nor I,” said the Lady Hilda. “Only I shouldn’t go to them; that’s all.
And it _is_ very funny, my love, that you, who have lived in all the
great courts of Europe, and have had your own embassy in London, should
care one straw for a ball at the Joshua R. Postiches’. Good gracious! You
must have seen about seventy thousand balls in your time!”
“I am only six years older than you, Hilda,” said she, tartly. “I suppose
you’ve been telling Della Rocca not to go to the Postiches’. Olga and
the Baroness and Madame Valkyria and scores of them have been trying to
persuade him all the week, because if he stay away so many of the other
men will; and none of us can stir him an inch about it. ‘On peut être de
très-braves gens,—mais je n’y vais pas,’ that is all he says; as if there
being ‘braves gens’ or not had anything to do with it; and yet I saw him
the other day with his hand on a contadino’s shoulder in the marketplace,
and he was calling him ‘carissimo mio.’”
“One of his own peasants, most likely,” said the Lady Hilda, coldly. “I
have never heard these Postiches even mentioned by M. Della Rocca, and I
certainly have nothing whatever to do with where he goes or doesn’t go.”
“He is always with you, at any rate,” said Madame Mila; “and if you would
make him go, it would only be kind of you. You see we want _everybody_ we
know, so that we may be sure to make the square dances only of our own
people, and not to see anything of anybody the Postiches may have asked
themselves. Little Dickie Dorrian, who’s managing it all, said to the
woman Postiche, ‘I’ll bring the English division if you’ll spend enough
on the cotillon toys; but I won’t undertake the Italians.’ Now, if Della
Rocca——”
“Would you want a new dress, Mila?” said the Lady Hilda; “I am sure you
must if you’re going to a woman you can’t know the next day.”
“I should like one, of course,” said the Comtesse, “but I’ve had thirty
new ones this season already—and what I owe Worth!—not to talk of the
Maison Roger——”
“Let me give you one,” said the Lady Hilda. “Worth will do anything at
short notice for either of us; and I must think this poor Postiche woman
ought to see you in a new dress, as she’s never to see you again.”
“You are a darling, Hilda!” said Madame Mila, with ardent effusion,
rising to kiss her cousin.
Lady Hilda turned to let the caress fall on the old guipure lace fichu
round her throat, and drew her writing-things to her to pen a telegram to
M. Worth.
“I suppose you don’t care to say what color?” she asked, as she wrote.
“Oh, no,” answered the Comtesse. “He remembers all the combinations I’ve
had much better than I do. You dictate to him a little too much; I’ve
heard him say so——”
“He never said so to me,” said the Lady Hilda, with a laugh. “Of course
I dictate to him. Whatever taste your dress-maker, man or woman, may
have,—and he has genius,—there are little touches which should always
come from oneself, and which can alone give originality. That is why
all that herd of women, who really do go to Worth but yet are nobodies,
look hardly the better for him; he thinks about us, and we think about
ourselves; but he doesn’t think about them, and, as they have no thoughts
themselves, the result is that they all look as conventional and similar
as if they were dolls dressed for a bazaar. Women ought to be educated to
more sense of color and form. Even an ugly woman ought to be taught that
it is her duty to make her ugliness as little disagreeable as possible.
If the eyes and the taste of women were cultivated by artistic study, an
ill-dressed woman would become an impossibility. If I were ever so poor,”
continued the Lady Hilda, impressively,—“if I were ever so poor, and had
to sew my own gowns, and make them of serge or of dimity, I would cut
them so that Giorgione or Gainsborough, if they were living, would be
able to look at me with complaisancy,—or at all events without a shudder.
It is not half so much a question of material as it is of taste. But
nowadays the people who cannot afford material have no taste; so that
after us, and the women whom Worth manages to make look decently in spite
of themselves, there is nothing but a multitude of hideously-attired
persons, who make the very streets appalling either by dreariness or
gaudiness:—they never have any medium. Now, a peasant-girl of the Marche,
or of the Agro Romana, or of the Pays de Vaud, is charming, because her
garments have beauty of hue in them, and that other beauty which comes
from perfect suitability and—— ah! come sta, Duca?”
She interrupted herself, and turned to Della Rocca, who was standing
behind her, the servant’s announcement of him having been unheard: it was
her day to receive.
“Oh that the rest of your sex, madame,” he said, after his salutations
were made, “could sit at your feet and take in those words of wisdom!
Yes, I heard most that you said; I can understand your tongue a little;
you are so right; it is the duty of every woman to make herself as full
of grace as she can; all cannot be lovely, but none need be unlovely.”
“Exactly; women are reproached with thinking too much about dress, but
the real truth is, they do not think enough about it,—in the right way.
They talk about it dreadfully, in the vulgarest fashion, but bring any
thought to it they don’t. Most women will wear anything if it be only
_de rigueur_. I believe if I, and Princess Metternich, and Madame de
Gallifet, and Madame Aguado, and a few like us wore that pea-green silk
coat and waistcoat which the Advanced Thought Ladies of America are
advocating as the best new kind of dress for women, that you would see
ten thousand pea-green coats and waistcoats blazing in the streets the
week afterwards.”
“Not a bad idea for the Cotton Costume ball,” said Madame Mila. “I will
have a pea-green coat and waistcoat, a tall hat, and hessians, and call
myself ‘Advanced Thought.’”
“To be completely in character, Mila, you must have blue spectacles, a
penny whistle, a phial full of nostrums, a magpie for your emblem, and a
calico banner, inscribed ‘Everything is Nothing!’——”
“Charming! It shall be the best thing there. Draw it for me, Della Rocca,
and I will send the sketch to Paris, so that it can all come in a box
together, magpie and all.”
He drew a sheet of paper to him, and sketched the figure in ink, with
spirit.
“You have all the talents; so many thanks,” said Madame Mila, looking
over his shoulder.
Della Rocca sighed.
“If I have them I have buried them, madame;—but indeed I can make no such
claim.”
“So many thanks,” echoed the Comtesse. “Pray don’t say a word about it,
or we shall have a dozen ‘Advanced Thoughts’ in calico. Hilda, I am just
going to Nina’s to see about the _Muscadins_. I have resolved we shall
play that piece or no other. I shall be back in ten minutes; ask Olga to
wait.” And Madame Mila wafted herself out of the room, and down-stairs to
the court-yard, where the coupé and the exemplary Maurice were waiting.
“How she does amuse herself!” said Lady Hilda, a little enviously.
“I wish I could do it! What _can_ it matter whether they play the
_Muscadins_ or anything else?”
“Plus on est fou, plus on rit,” said Della Rocca, sketching arabesques
with his pen. “Nay, that is too impolite in me to charming Madame Mila.
But, like all old proverbs, it is more true than elegant.”
“Do you know, madame,” he continued, with a little hesitation, “I have
often ventured to think that, despite your brilliancy, and your position,
and all your enviable fate, you are not altogether—quite happy? Am I
right? Or have I committed too great an impertinence to be answered?”
“No impertinence whatever,” said the Lady Hilda, a little wearily. “You
may be right; I don’t know; I am not unhappy, certainly,—I have nothing
to be unhappy about; but—most things seem very stupid to me. I confess,
Mila’s endless diversions and excitements are quite beyond me. There is
such a terrible sameness in everything.”
“Because you have no deeper interests,” he answered her. He still sat
near her at her writing-table beside the fire, and was playing with the
little jeweled boy who held her pen-wiper.
She did not answer him; and he continued:
“I think you have said yourself, madame, the cause why everything seems
more or less wearisome to you: you have ‘nothing to be unhappy about;’
that is, you have no one for whom you care.”
He thought that her proud delicate face colored a little; or it might be
the warmth from the fire of oak-logs and pine-cones.
“No; I don’t care about people,” she answered him, indifferently. “When
you have seen a person a few times, it is enough. It is like a book you
have read through: the interest is gone; you know the _mot d’énigme_.”
“You speak of society; I spoke of affections.”
The Lady Hilda laughed a little.
“I can’t follow you. I do not feel them. I like Clairvaux, my brother,
certainly, but we go years without seeing each other quite contentedly.”
“I spoke of affections,—other affections,” replied Della Rocca, with a
little impatience. “There is nothing else that gives warmth or color to
life. Without them there is no glow in its pictures, they are all painted
_en grisaille_. Pleasure alone cannot content any one whose character has
any force or mind, any high intelligence. Society is, as you say, a book
we soon read through, and know by heart till it loses all interest. Art
alone cannot fill more than a certain part of our emotions; and culture,
however perfect, leaves us unsatisfied. There is only one thing that can
give to life what your poet called the light that never was on sea or
land,—and that is human love.”
His eyes rested on her; and for once in her life her own eyes fell; a
troubled softness came for a moment on her face, dispersing all its
languor and its coldness. In another moment she recovered herself, and
smiled a little.
“Ah! you are _appassionato_, as becomes your country.”
Della Rocca looked at her with something of disappointment and something
of distaste. He rose, and approached the grand piano.
“You allow me?” he said, and touched a few of the chords. He sang very
low, and almost as it were to himself, a canzone of the people:
“Si tu mi lasci, lasciar non te voglio;
Se m’ abbandoni, ti vo seguitare;
Se passi il mare, il mar passare io voglio;
Se giri il mondo, il mondo vo’ girare,” etc.[1]
The words were very simple, but the melody was passionate and beautiful;
his voice, so low at first, rose louder, with all the yearning tenderness
in it with which the song is laden; and the soft sounds echoed through
the silent room, as they had echoed ten thousand times in moonlit nights
of midsummer, over the land where Romeo and Stradella and Francesca loved.
His voice sank softly into silence; and Lady Hilda did not move.
There was a mist that was almost like tears in her proud eyes; she gazed
into the fire, with her cheek leaning on her hand; she did not speak to
him; there was no sound but the falling of some burning wood upon the
hearth.
“The simplest contadina in the land would understand that,” he said, as
he rose; “and you, great lady though you are, cannot? Madame, there are
things, after all, that you have missed.”
“Go back and sing again,” she said to him, taking no notice of his words;
“I did not know you ever sang——”
“Every Italian does,—or well or ill,” he answered her. “We are born with
music in us, like the birds.”
“But in society who hears you?”
“No one. An atmosphere of gas, candles, ennui, perfume, heat, and inane
flatteries! ah no, madame; music is meant for silence, moonlight,
vine-paths, summer nights——”
“This is winter and firelight, a few arm-chairs and a great deal of
street-noise; all the same, go back and sing me more.”
She spoke indifferently and lightly, leaning her hand back on her chair,
and hiding a little yawn with her hand; she would not have him see that
he had touched her to any foolish, momentary weakness. But he had seen.
He smiled a little.
“As you command,” he answered, and he went back and made her music as she
wished; short love-lyrics of the populace, sonnets set to noble airs,
wild mournful boat-songs, and snatches of soft melodies, such as echo all
the harvest-time through the firefly-lighted corn,—things all familiar to
him from his infancy, but to her unknown, and full of the force and the
yearning of the passion which was unknown to her also, and in a certain
way derided by her.
He broke off abruptly, and came and leaned on the chimney-piece near
her, with his arm among the little pug-dogs in Saxe, and figures and
fountains in Capo di Monte, which she had collected in a few weeks from
the bric-à-brac people. He did not speak; he only looked at her where she
sat, with the firelight and the dying daylight on the silver-fox furs
fringing her dress, on the repoussé gold and silver work of her loose
girdle, on the ends of the old Spanish lace about her throat, on the
great rings that sparkled on her white fingers, which were lying so idly
clasped together on her lap.
“You sing very beautifully,” she said, calmly, at length, with her eyes
half closed and her head lying back on the chair-cushions. “It is very
strange you should be so mute in society.”
“I never sang to a crowd in my life, and never would. Music is an
impulse, or it is nothing. I could never sing save to some woman who——”
He paused a moment.
“Who was music in herself,” he added, with a smile: it was not what had
been upon his lips.
“Then you should not have sung to me,” she said, still with half-closed
eyes and a careless coldness in her voice. “I am all discord; have you
not found that out?—every woman is, nowadays; we have lost the secret of
harmony; we are always wanting to be excited, and never succeeding in
being anything but bored.”
“These are mere words, madame,” he answered her. “I hope they are not
true. By discord I think you only mean inconsistency. Pardon me, but
I think you are all so wearied because of the monotony of your lives.
I dare say that sounds very strangely to you, because you pursue all
the pleasures and all the extravagances that are obtainable. But then
all these are no novelties, they are merely habits. Habit is nothing
better than a harness, even when it is one silvered and belled. You have
exhausted everything too early: how can it have flavor? You pursue an
unvarying routine of amusement: how can it amuse? The life of the great
world is, after all, when we once know it well, as tiresome as the life
of the peasant,—perhaps more so. I know both.”
“All that may be right enough,” said the Lady Hilda, “but there is no
help for it, that I see. If the world is not amusing, that is not our
fault. In the Beau Siècle, perhaps, or in Augustan Rome——”
“Be very sure it was the same thing. An artificial life must grow
tiresome to any one with a mind above that of a parrot or a monkey. If
we can be content with it, we deserve nothing better. What you call your
discord is nothing but your dissatisfaction,—the highest part of you. If
it were not treason to say so, treason against this exquisite apparel,
I would say that you would be more likely to know happiness were you
condemned to the serge and the dimity you spoke of to Madame Mila an hour
ago.”
He had sunk on a stool at her feet as he spoke, and caressed the silver
fox and the gold girdle lightly; his hand touched hers in passing, and
her face grew warm. She put a feather screen between her and the fire.
“That is the old argument of content in the cottage, etc.,” she said,
with a slight laugh. “I do not believe in it in the least. If it be
‘best repenting in a coach-and-six,’ it must be best to be bored in an
arm-chair——”
“Perhaps. It is not I, certainly, who should praise poverty,” he said,
with some bitterness, and more sadness; “and, indeed, poverty or riches
has little to do with the question of happiness; happiness can come but
from one thing——”
“A good conscience? How terribly moral you are!”
“No:—from our emotions, from our passions, from our sympathies; in fine,
from Love.”
His hand still played with the gold fringe of the girdle as he sat at
her feet; his eyes were lifted to her face; his voice was very low;
in all his attitude and action and regard there were an unuttered
solicitation, an eloquence of unspoken meaning; she was silent;—then the
door opened; he dropped the girdle, and rose to his feet; there came
a patter of high heels, and a chime of swift aristocratic voices; and
into the room there entered the Princess Olga, attended by her constant
shadow, Don Carlo Maremma, with Lady Featherleigh behind her, accompanied
by _her_ attendant, Prince Nicolas Doggendorff.
“Ma chère, there is a regular riot going on at Nina’s,” said the
Princess Olga, advancing with both hands outstretched. “All about those
_Muscadins_. Mila has seceded in full form, and, of course, M. des
Gommeux with her. Blanche will only play if they have ‘_Il faut qu’une
porte_,’ etc., which is as old as the hills, and Mila won’t play at all
if Blanche be allowed to play anything. They have quarreled for life; so
have Mila and Nina. They are slanging each other like two street-boys.
Alberto Rimini is on his knees between them, and the Duc is declaring for
the five thousandth time that it is the last he will ever have to do with
theatricals. I left while I could escape with life. What a pity it is
that playing for charity always develops such fierce hostilities! Well,
Paolo, have you thought better of the Postiche ball? No? How stiff-necked
you are! I do believe Carlo will be the only Italian there!”
“It will be a distinction to inscribe on his tombstone, madame,” said
Della Rocca. “But then he goes under command——”
“And under protest,” murmured Don Carlo.
“Which does not count. When one is no longer a free agent——”
Princess Olga hit him a little blow with her muff.
“But why should you not go to the Postiches’? Just as you go to the
Veglione; it is nothing more.”
“Madame, I am very old-fashioned in my ideas, I dare say, but I confess I
think that no one should accept as a host a person he would never accept
as his guest. I may be wrong——”
“Of course you are wrong. That is not the question at all,” said Princess
Olga, who did not like people to differ with her. “Joshua R. Postiche
will never dream of being asked to shoot your wild ducks or your
partridges. All he wants is that you should just be seen going up his
staircase and drinking his champagne. Society is full of Postiches,—low
people, with a craze for entertaining high people. They don’t care how we
insult them, nor how we laugh at them, provided our cards lie in the bowl
in their hall. We take them at their own valuation, and treat them as we
treat the waiters at Spillman’s or Doney’s: we have paid the bill with
our cards.”
“That is to say, we have paid with our names,—which should represent all
the honor, dignity, and self-respect that we have inherited, and are
bound to maintain, for our own sakes and for those who may come after us.”
“Oh, mon Dieu, quel grand sérieux!” cried the princess, impatiently.
“But, of course, if you’ve been sitting with Hilda you have got more
stiff-necked than ever. What do you say, Hilda? Isn’t it ill-natured of
him? He need only walk in, bow once to the woman, and look on at the
edge of the ball-room for twenty minutes. The other men will go if he
will do as much as that.”
“I think M. della Rocca quite right not ‘to do as much as that,’” said
the Lady Hilda. “Why Society ever does as much as that, or half as much,
or anything at all, for Joshua R. Postiche, I can never tell. As it does,
to be consistent everybody should dine with the fruit-woman from the
street-corner, and play écarté with their own chimney-sweeps.”
“Oh, we shall come to that, madame,” said Nicolas Doggendorff. “At least,
if chimney-sweeping ever makes heaps of money; I don’t think it does; it
only chokes little boys.”
“Ce bon Monsieur Postiche sold rum and molasses,” murmured Don Carlo.
“What’s it to us what he sold?” said Lady Featherleigh. “We’ve nothing to
do with him; we’re only going to his ball. You talk as if we asked the
man to dinner.”
“What does the Archduchess Anna always say: ‘Où je m’amuse, j’y vais.’
So we do all. I hear he has been put up for the Club: is it true?” said
Princess Olga to Carlo Maremma.
“Yes; Krunensberg has put him up,” he answered her; “but he shall never
get into it, while there are any of us alive.”
“Et s’il n’y a qu’un, moi je serai celui-la,” quoted Della Rocca.
“But he has lent Krunensberg heaven knows what,—some say two million
francs,” said Lady Featherleigh.
Prince Krunensberg was a great personage, and, for a foreigner, of great
influence in the Club.
“Chère dame,” said Della Rocca, “if we elect all Krunensberg’s creditors
we shall have to cover three streets with our club-house!”
“Oh, my dear! I am half dead!” cried Madame Mila, flashing into the room,
gorgeous in the feathers of the golden pheasant, arranged in the most
exquisite combination on violet satin and bronze velvet, and throwing
her muff on one side of her and her parasol on the other, while Maurice
des Gommeux, who was the most admirable of upper servants, stooped
for them and smoothed their ruffled elegance. “I am half dead! Such a
scene I never went through in my life,—I, who hate scenes, and never
have any hardly even with Spiridion! Oh, has Olga told you? Yes; it is
horrible, infamous, intolerable!—after all I have done for that odious
Dumb Asylum,—and my costumes ordered for the _Muscadins_, and half the
part learnt! It is all Krunensberg’s doing,—and the Duc didn’t stand out
one-half as he should have done; and Blanche!—the idea—the little wretch
is made of wood, and can’t even open her mouth! As for Krunensberg, he
deserves to be shot! It is all his influence that has set Nina against
the _Muscadins_,—just to spite me! What I have gone through about this
wretched theatre,—and then to have that little chit of a Blanche set over
my head, a little creature, only married out of her convent last year,—it
is unbearable! of course neither I nor Des Gommeux shall play. Oh, here
comes the Duc. No, Duc, it is not the slightest use; if you have that
ridiculous musty old piece of De Musset’s, or if you have Blanche in it
at all, you don’t have Me in anything! A nice morning’s work you have
made of it! Nina and I shall never speak again.”
The Duc laid his hat aside; his delicate features were puckered, weary,
and troubled.
“Mais, madame, pardon!—mais vous avez toutes dit les choses les plus
affreuses!——”
“Women always do, Duc, when they are in a passion,” said Lady Hilda.
“There is nothing like a scene for discovering our real opinions of each
other. Why, you look actually—worried! I thought nothing ever ruffled you
by any chance whatever.”
“Madame,” said M. de St. Louis, stretching himself, with a sigh, in a
low chair beside her and the fire, “I have always sedulously cultivated
serenity. I believe serenity to be the whole secret of human health,
happiness, longevity, good taste, sound judgment, everything in point
of fact that is desirable in the life of a human being. But, alas! we
are all mortal, and our best plans are but finite. In an evil moment,
when Pandora’s box was packed, there was put in with it by the malice
of Mercury a detonating powder, called Amateur Rivalry. When all the
other discords were dispersed, this shot itself into the loveliest
forms and the gentlest bosoms; and where it explodes, the wisest man
stands helpless. He cannot reconcile the warring elements nor retain
any personal peace himself. I am the slave of Madame Mila; I adore the
dust of the exquisite shoes of Madame Nina; I am penetrated with the
most absolute devotion to Madame Blanche: when these heavenly graces
are ready to rend each other’s hair, what can I do? What can I be
except the most unhappy person upon earth? To reconcile ladies who are
infuriated is a hopeless dream; it were easier to make whole again a
broken glass of Venice. It makes one almost wish,” added the Duc, with a
second sigh,—“almost wish that Molière had never been created, or, being
created, had never written. But for Molière I doubt very much if the
Drama as an Art would have lingered on to the present time.”
“Console yourself, my dear Duc,” said Lady Hilda, “console yourself with
a line from Molière: ‘Cinq ou six coups de bâton entre gens qui aiment ne
font que ragaillardir l’amitié.’ Mila, Nina, and Blanche will kiss each
other to-morrow; they must, or what becomes of the great Contes de Mère
d’Oie Quadrille to open the Roubleskoff ball?”
“I shall never speak to either of them long as I live,” said Madame Mila,
still ruffling all her golden feathers in highest wrath. “As for the
quadrille, the Roubleskoff must do as they can. I do think Krunensberg
has made Nina perfectly odious; I never saw anybody so altered by a man
in my life. Well, there’s one thing, it won’t last. His ‘affairs’ never
do.”
“It will last as long as her jewels do,” said Carlo Maremma.
“Oh, no, he can’t be quite so bad as that.”
“Foi d’honneur!—since he left the Sant Anselmo you have never seen her
family diamonds except in the Paris paste _replica_, which she tells you
she wears for safety and because it is such a bore to have to employ
policemen in plain clothes at the balls——”
“Talk of policemen,” said Madame Mila, “they say we’re to have a caution
sent us from the Prefecture about our playing baccarat the other night
at the café: they say no gambling is allowed in the city—the idea!”
“While the State organizes the lotteries!—how very consistent!” said the
Lady Hilda.
“All your gaming is against the law, angels of my soul,” said Carlo
Maremma.
“Then we’ll all leave Floralia,” said Madame Mila. “The idea of not being
able to do what one chooses in one’s own rooms! There is one thing, we
can always go up to Roubleskoff’s;—they will never dare to caution him.
But what is the use of all this fuss?—everybody plays,—everybody always
will play.”
“The Prefect is much too wise a man ever to imagine he can prevent ladies
doing what they like,” said Maremma. “It is those tremendous losses of
young De Fabris the other night that have made a stir, and the Prefect
thinks it necessary to say something: he is afraid of a scandal.”
“Good gracious! As if anything filled a city half so well as a scandal!
Why don’t Floralia have a good gaming-place, like Monte Carlo? we
shouldn’t want to use our own rooms then——”
“I confess,” said the Duc, in his gentle, meditative voice, “I confess
that, like Miladi here, I fail to altogether appreciate the moral
horror of a game at baccarat entertained by a municipality which in its
legislation legalizes the lottery. All gaming may be prejudicial to
the moral health of mankind; it is certainly so to their purses; I am
prepared to admit, even in face of Madame Mila’s direst wrath, that all
forms of hazard are exceedingly injurious to the character and to the
fortunes of every person tempted by them. It may be impossible even to
exaggerate their baneful influences or their disastrous consequences. But
how can a government which publicly patronizes, sustains, and enriches
itself by lotteries have any logic in condemning the pastime of hazard in
a private drawing-room or a private club-house? I confess I cannot see
how they reconcile both courses. A government, whatever it be, should
never be an anomaly.”
“Lotteries are to us what bull-fighting is to Spaniards and revolutions
are to the French,” said Carlo Maremma. “Every nation has its especial
craze. The lottery is ours.”
“But is it for a government to intensify and pander to and profit by a
national insanity?” said Della Rocca, with much seriousness. “When Rome
bent to the yell of Panem et Circenses, the days of her greatness were
numbered. Besides, the Duc is quite right,—it is a ridiculous anomaly
to condemn games while you allow lotteries. Great harm may result from
private gambling,—greater still from the public gaming-tables,—but the
evil after all is not a millionth part so terrible as the evil resulting
from the system of public lotteries. The persons who are ruined by
ordinary gaming are, after all, persons who would certainly be ruined by
some vice or another. The compound of avarice and excitement which makes
the attraction of hazard does not allure the higher kinds of character;
besides, the vice does not go to the player; the player goes to the vice.
Now, on the contrary, the lottery attacks openly, and tries to allure in
very despite of themselves, the much wider multitude that is the very sap
and support of a nation: it entices the people themselves. It lures the
workman to throw away his wage, the student to spend his time in feverish
dreams, the simple day-laborer to consume his content in senseless
calculations that often bring his poor, empty brain to madness. The
lottery assails them in the street, is carried to them in their homes,
drops them some poor prize at first to chain them in torment forever
afterwards. It changes honesty to cunning, peace to burning desire,
industry to a perpetual waiting upon chance, manly effort to an imbecile
abandonment to the dictates of signs and portents and the expectancy of
a fortune which never comes. High-born gamblers are only the topmost
leaves of the tree of the State; they may rot away without detriment to
the tree; but the lottery lays the axe to the very trunk and root of it,
because it demoralizes the people.”
Lady Hilda listened and watched him as he spoke, with a grave and almost
tender meditation in her eyes, which M. de St. Louis saw, and, seeing,
smiled.
“Say all that in the Chamber, caro mio,” muttered Carlo Maremma.
“I would go to the Chambers to say it, or to worse places even, were
there any chance it would be attended to. Madame Mila, have I been so
unhappy as to have offended you?”
“I am a top leaf that may rot! I was never told anything so rude in my
life,—from you, too! the very soul of ceremonious courtesy.”
Della Rocca made peace with her in flowery flattery.
“Well, I shall play baccarat to-night in this hotel, just because the
Prefect has been so odious and done that,” said Madame Mila. “You will
all come home with me after the Roubleskoff’s dinner? Promise!”
“Of course,” said the Princess Olga.
“Of course,” said Lady Featherleigh.
“Of course,” said everybody else.
“And if the gendarmes come in?”
“We will shoot them!”
“No; we will give them champagne,—surer and more humane.”
“I wish the Prefect would come himself: I should like to tell him my
mind,” continued Madame Mila. “So impudent of the man!—when all the Royal
Highnesses and Grand Dukes and Duchesses in Europe only come to winter
cities for play. He _must_ know that.”
“My dear Mila, how you do put yourself out about it!” said the Lady
Hilda. “Send ten thousand francs to the public charities: you may play
all night long in the cafés then.”
“Madame, j’ai l’honneur de vous saluer,” murmured Della Rocca, bending
low before her.
When the door had closed upon him and left the others behind, a sudden
blankness and dullness seemed to fall on her: she had never felt the same
thing before. Bored she had often been, but this was not _ennui_, it was
a kind of loneliness: it was as if all about her grew gray and cold and
stupid.
More ladies came in, there were endless laughter and chatter; Princess
Olga wanted some tea, and had it; the other women cracked bonbons with
their little teeth like pretty squirrels cracking fir cones; they made
charming groups in the firelight and lamplight: they made plans for a
hundred diversions; they were full of the gayest of scandals; they
dissected in the most merciless manner all their absent friends; they
scolded their lovers and gave them a thousand contradictory orders;
they discussed all the news and all the topics of the day, and arranged
for dinner-parties, and driving-parties, and costume quadrilles, and
bazaar-stalls, and boxes at the theatre, and suppers at the cafés; and
agreed that everything was as dull as ditch-water, and yet that they
never had a minute for anything; and the Lady Hilda, with the jubilant
noise and the twittering laughter round her, thought how silly they all
were, and what a nuisance it was having a day,—only if one hadn’t a day
it was worse still, because then they were always trying to run in at all
hours on every day, and one was never free for a moment.
“Thank goodness, they are gone!” she said, half aloud, to the Saxe cups
and the Capo di Monte children on the mantel-piece, when the last flutter
of fur and velvet had vanished through the door, and the last of those
dearest friends and born foes had kissed each other and separated.
Left alone, she stood thinking, by the fire, with all the lights burning
behind her in that big, empty room. What she thought was a very humble
and pensive thought for so disdainful a lady. It was only,—
“Is it myself? or only the money?”
She stood some time there, motionless, her hand playing with the gold
girdle as his hand had done; her face was pale, softened, troubled.
The clock among the Saxe dogs and the Capo di Monte little figures chimed
the half-hour after six. She started as it struck, and remembered that
she was to dine at eight with the Princess Roubleskoff,—a big party for
an English royalty on his travels.
“Anyhow, it would be of no use,” she said to herself. “Even if I did wish
it, it could never be.”
And she was angry with herself, as she had been the night before; she was
impatient of these new weaknesses which haunted her. Nevertheless she was
more particular about her appearance that night than her maids had ever
known her be; she was very difficult to satisfy; tried and discarded four
wholly new confections of her friend Worth’s, miracles of invention and
of costliness, and at length had herself dressed quite simply in black
velvet, only relieved by all her diamonds.
“He said fair women should always wear black,” she thought: it was not
her Magister of Paris of whom she was thinking as the sayer of that wise
phrase. And then again she was angry with herself for remembering such a
thing and attiring herself in obedience to it, and would have had herself
undressed again only there was but one small quarter of an hour in which
to reach the Roubleskoff villa, a palace of the fairies four miles from
the south gate. So she went as she was, casting a dubious impatient
glance behind her at the mirrors.
“I look well,” she thought, with a smile, and her content returned.
She knew that he would be present at the dinner. There is no escaping
destiny in Floralia: people meet too often.
The dinner disappointed her.
She thought it very long and very stupid. She sat between the Grand
Duke of Rittersbähn and the Envoy of all the Russias, and Della Rocca
was not placed within her sight; and after the dinner the young English
prince would talk to no one but herself, delightedly recalling to her how
often she had bowled his wickets down when they had been young children
playing on the lawns at Osborne. She felt disloyally thankless for his
preference. He monopolized her. And as the rooms filled with the crowd
of the reception she merely saw the delicate dark head of Della Rocca
afar off, bent down in eager and possibly tender conversation with his
beautiful country-woman, the Duchess Medici-Malatesta. She felt angered
and impatient.
If she had sat alone and neglected, as less lovely women often do,
instead of being monopolized by a prince, with twenty other men sighing
to take his place when etiquette should permit them, she could scarcely
have been more ill-content.
Never in all her life had it befallen her to think angrily of another
woman’s beauty; and now she caught herself irritatedly conning, across
the width of the room, the classic profile and the immense jewel-like
eyes of the Malatesta Semiramis. Never in all her life had it happened
to her to miss any one thing that she desired, and now a strange sense
of loneliness and emptiness came upon her, unreasoned and unreasoning;
and she had such an impatience and contempt of herself too all the
while!—that was the most bitter part of it.
After all, it was too absurd——
As soon as the departure of the royal guests permitted any one to leave,
she went away, contemptuous, and ill at ease; half ignorant of what
moved her, and half unwilling to probe her own emotions further.
“Plus on est fou, plus on rit,” she murmured to her pillow two hours
later, with irritable disdain, as she heard Mme. Mila and her troop
noisily passing her door as they returned to their baccarat, which was to
be doubly delightful because of the Prefect’s interdict.
“I wish I had been born an idiot!” thought the Lady Hilda,—as indeed, any
one must do who finds himself burdened with aching brains in this best of
all possible worlds.
“Perhaps, after all, you were right,” said the Duc de St. Louis, driving
back into the town with Della Rocca that night. “Perhaps you were
right. Miladi is most lovely, most exquisite, most perfect. But she has
caprices,—there is no denying that she has caprices and extravagancies
which would ruin any one short of the despotic sovereign of a very
wealthy nation.”
The Duc was a very wise man, and knew that the escalier dérobé is the
only way that leads in conversation to any direct information. Their
demeanor had puzzled him, and he spoke accordingly with shrewd design.
Della Rocca heard him with a little annoyance.
“She has not more caprices than other women that I know of,” he answered.
“Her faults are the faults rather of her _monde_ than of herself.”
“But she has adopted them with much affection!”
“They are habits,—hardly more.”
“And you were correct too in your diagnosis when you saw her first,”
continued the Duc, pitilessly. “To me she is most amiable always; but to
the generality of people it must be admitted that she is not so amiable.”
“The amiability of most women,” replied Della Rocca, “is nothing more
than that insatiate passion for admiration which makes them show their
persons almost nude at Trouville, and copy the ways and manners of
_femmes entretenues_ in the endeavor to rival such with us. If they wish
to be decent, they do not dare to be; they must be popular and _chic_
before all.”
“You are severe, but perhaps you are right. Miladi is certainly above
all such vulgarities. Indeed, she is only a little too much above
everything——”
“It is better than to be below everything,—even below our respect,—as
most of our great ladies are.”
“Certainly. Still, she is a little—a little selfish.”
“How should she be otherwise? She is quite alone,—she has no one to care
for——”
“Most women make something to care for; she has many family ties, if she
cared for them,—but she does not. No; she is beautiful, charming, _grande
dame en tout_,—but I begin to think that it is well for the peace of
mankind that she remains so invulnerable. She would probably make any man
who loved her very unhappy if she married him.”
“If he were a weak man, not otherwise.”
“Pouf! Do you think any man would ever have control over _her_?”
“I am quite sure that she would never care for any man who had not.”
“He would be a very bold person,” murmured the Duc. “However, I am very
glad that you think more highly of her. You know, mon cher, what always
was my opinion as to yourself——”
Della Rocca colored, and saw too late that his companion had forced his
card from his hands in the most adroit manner. He busied himself with
lighting a cigar.
“For myself,” he said, coldly, “I can have no object in what I say. My
own poverty is barrier sufficient. But I should be unjust not to admit
what I think of her as a friend. I believe that the habits of the world
are not so strong with her that they can satisfy her; and I believe that
with her affections touched, with tenderer ties than she has ever known,
with a home, with children, with a woman’s natural life, in fact, she
would be a much happier and very different person. Mais tout cela ne me
regarde pas.”
The Duc glanced at him and laughed softly.
“Ça vous regarde de bien près—bon succès et bon soir!” he said, as he got
out of the carriage at his hotel.
“I told him to marry her,” he thought; “but if he expects to convert her
too, he must be the boldest and most sanguine man in Europe.”
Lady Hilda made up her mind that she was tired of Floralia, as she
meditated over her chocolate the next morning, after a night which
chloral had made pretty passable, only the baccarat people had screamed
so loudly with laughter on the other side of the corridor that they had
awakened her once or twice. Yes, she certainly was tired of it. If one
did take the trouble to go into society one might as well do it all for a
big world and not a little one. It was utter nonsense about her lungs in
Paris. She would go back. She would telegraph her return to Hubert.
Hubert was her maître-d’hôtel.
She did telegraph, and told herself that she would find immense interest
in the fresco paintings which were being executed in the ball-room of
that very exquisite hotel “entre cour et jardin,” which she had deserted
in Paris, and in making nooks and corners in her already overfilled
tables and cabinets for the tazze and bacini and ivories and goldsmith’s
work she had collected in the last two months; and decided that the
wall-decorations of the drawing-rooms, which were of rose satin with
Louis Quinze paneling, were all very barbarous, utterly incorrect, and
should never have been borne with so long, and should be altered at once;
the palest amber satin was the only possible thing, with silver mirrors
and silver cornices, and not a touch of gilding anywhere; the idea had
occurred to her before a picture in the galleries, where a silver casket
was painted against an amber curtain; she would have it done immediately,
and she would go back to Paris and have her old Thursday evenings again.
After all, Paris was the only place worth living in, and doctors were
always alarmists,—old women,—everything that was stupid, unless you were
very very ill, when they did seem to dilate into demi-gods, because of
course you were weakened with morphine and other stuff and did not want
to die; though you ought to want to die, being a Christian, if you were
in the very least degree consistent; since if you were quite sure that
the next world would be so very much better than this it was utterly
illogical to be afraid of going to it:——but then were you quite sure?
The Lady Hilda sighed. This dreadful age, which has produced communists,
petroleuses, and liberal thinkers, had communicated its vague
restlessness even to her; although she belonged to that higher region
where nobody ever thinks at all, and everybody is more or less devout
in seeming at any rate, because disbelief is vulgar, and religion is an
“affaire des mœurs,” like decency, still the subtle philosophies and sad
negations which have always been afloat in the air since Voltaire set
them flying had affected her slightly.
She was a true believer, just as she was a well-dressed woman, and had
her creeds just as she had her bath in the morning, as a matter of course.
Still, when she did come to think of it, she was not so very sure. There
was another world, and saints and angels and eternity, yes, of course;
but how on earth would all those baccarat people ever fit into it? Who
could by any stretch of imagination conceive Madame Mila and Maurice des
Gommeux in a spiritual existence around the throne of Deity?
And as for punishment and torment and all that other side of futurity,
who could even think of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor
flibbertigibbit inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gayly as a
child breaks his india rubber ball, and were as incapable of passion and
crime as they were incapable of heroism and virtue?
There might be paradise for virtue, and hell for crime, but what in the
name of the universe was to be done with creatures that were only all
Folly? Perhaps they would be always flying about, like the souls Virgil
speaks of, “suspensæ ad ventos,” to purify themselves; as the sails of a
ship spread out to dry. The Huron Indians pray to the souls of the fish
they catch; well, why not? a fish has a soul if Modern Society has one;
one could conceive a fish going softly through shining waters forever
and forever in the ecstasy of motion; but who could conceive Modern
Society in the spheres?
Wandering thus from her drawing-room furniture to problems of eternity,
and only succeeding in making herself unsettled and uncomfortable,
the Lady Hilda, out of tune with everything, put off her cashmere
dressing-gown, had herself wrapped in her sables, and thought she would
go out; it was just twelve o’clock.
Looking out of the window, she saw a lady, all sables like herself, going
also out of the hotel to a coupé, the image of her own.
“Who is that?” she asked of her favorite maid.
“That is Mdlle. Léa, Miladi,” said the maid. “She came last night. She
has the suite above.”
“How dare you mention her?” said the Lady Hilda.
The little accident filled up the measure of her disgust. Mdlle. Jenny
Léa was a young lady who had seduced the affections of an emperor, three
archdukes, and an untold number of the nobility of all nations; she was
utterly uneducated, inconceivably coarse, and had first emerged from a
small drinking-shop in the dens of Whitechapel; she was the rage of the
moment, having got a needy literary hack to write her autobiography,
which she published in her own name, as “Aventures d’une Anglaise;” the
book had no decency, and as little wit, but it professed to show up the
scandals of a great court, and it made some great men ridiculous and
worse, so eighty thousand copies of it had been sold over Europe, and
great ladies leaned from their carriages eager to see Mdlle. Jenny Léa
pass by them.
Mdlle. Jenny Léa, indeed, having put the finishing-stroke to her
popularity by immense debts and a forced sale of her effects in Paris,
was the sensation of the hour, only sharing public attention with the
Père Hilarion, a young and passionately earnest Dominican, who was making
a crusade against the world, in a noble and entirely vain fervor, from
the pulpits of all the greatest churches on the Continent. It was “the
thing” to go and hear Père Hilarion, weep with him and pray with him, and
then, coming out of the church doors, to read Jenny Léa and talk of her.
It is by these admirable mixtures that Society manages to keep itself
alive.
The Père Hilarion was breaking his great heart over the vileness and
the hopelessness of it all, as any one who has any soul in him must be
disposed to do. But to Society the Père Hilarion was only a sort of
mental liqueur, as Jenny Léa was an American “pick-me-up:” that was all.
Society took them indifferently, one after the other. Of the two, of
course it preferred Jenny Léa.
The Lady Hilda in supreme disgust went out in her sables, as Mdlle. Jenny
Léa in hers drove from the door.
“What good things sumptuary laws must have been!” she thought. “If such
creatures had to dress all in yellow, now, as I think they had once (or
was it Jews?), who would talk of them, who would look at them, who would
lose money about them? Not a soul. And to think that there have been
eighty thousand people who have bought her book!”
“Has anything offended you, madame? Who or what is so unhappy?” said the
voice of Della Rocca, as she crossed the pavement of the court between
the lines of bowing hotel functionaries, who had bent their spines double
in just the same way to Mdlle. Léa three minutes previously.
“Nothing in especial,” she answered him, coldly. “Those baccarat people
kept me awake half the night; I wish the gendarmes _had_ interfered. What
wretched weather it is!”
“It is a little cold; but it is very bright,” said Della Rocca, in some
surprise, for the day, indeed, was magnificent and seasonable. “I was
coming in the hope that I might be admitted, though I know it is too
early, and not your day, and everything that it ought not to be. But I
was so unfortunate last night; you were so monopolized——”
She deigned to smile a little, but she continued to move to her brougham.
“Your climate is the very Harpagon of climates. I have not seen one warm
day yet. I am thinking of returning to Paris.”
He grew very pale.
“Is not that very sudden?” he asked her; there was a great change in his
voice.
“Oh, no; I have my house there, as you know, and Monsieur Odissôt is
painting the ball-room in frescoes. I have quite a new idea for my
drawing-rooms, too; after all, furnishing is one of the fine arts; do you
like that young Odissôt’s talent? His drawing is perfection; he was a
pupil of Hippolyte Flandrin. Good-morning.”
She was in her coupé by this time, and he was obliged to close the door
on her; but he kept his hand upon it.
“Since you are leaving us so soon and so cruelly, madame, would you honor
my own old chapel frescoes as you promised?—they might give you some
ideas for your ball-room.”
Lady Hilda deigned to smile fairly and fully this time.
“Is that a satire or a profanity,—or both together?”
“It is jealousy of Camille Odissôt! I will go to Paris and paint your
frescoes, madame, if you will let me; I can paint in fresco and in
distemper; I was a student in the Academy of San Luca in my time.”
His words were light, and his manner also, but his eyes had an expression
that made the Lady Hilda color a little and look out of the other window
of her coupé.
“I must first call upon Olga; I have promised,” she answered,
irrelevantly. “But I will join you at your palace in an hour; perhaps she
will come with me; I should not like to leave, certainly, without having
seen your chapel. Au revoir.”
“If you do leave, madame, I follow!—to paint the ball-room.”
He shut the carriage door, and stood bareheaded in the wintry wind as the
impatient horses dashed away. When it had disappeared he put his hat on,
lighted a cigar, and strolled to his own house.
“She will not go to Paris,” he said to himself.
He knew women well.
In an hour and a half she arrived at his own gates, bringing the Princess
Olga with her.
She saw the grand old garden, the mighty staircases, the courts that once
held troops of armed men; she saw his own rooms, with their tapestries
that Flemish John Rosts had had the doing of so many centuries before;
she saw the exquisite dim silent chapel, whose walls, painted by the
Memmi in one portion and continued by Masaccio, were among the famous
things of the city. She was moved and saddened; softened too; after all,
the decay of a great race has an unutterable pathos; it will touch even a
vulgar mind; she, arrogant and fastidious as to birth, as though she had
been born before the ’89, was touched by it to the core.
She had heard, too, of how he lived; without debt, yet with dignity,
with the utmost simplicity and without reproach; there was something
in his fortunes which seemed to her worthier than all distinction and
success, something that stirred that more poetic side of her nature
which the world had never allowed to awake, but which had been born with
her nevertheless. She was serious and dreaming as she lingered in the
beautiful old chapel, under whose mosaic pavement there lay the dust of
so many generations of his race. He noticed her silence, and thought to
himself,—
“Perhaps she is thinking how base it is in a man as poor as I to seek a
woman so rich as herself;” but she was not thinking that at all as she
swept on in her sables, with her delicate cheeks like the lovely Niphétos
rose against the darkness of the fur.
That immortality which she had been doubting in the morning did not seem
so absurdly impossible here. There was religion in the place, a different
one to what she had known kneeling at the _messe des paresseux_ in the
Madeleine; the sort of religion that a woman only becomes aware of when
she loves.
She started and seemed to wake from a dream when Princess Olga suggested
that it was time to go. Princess Olga was a person of innumerable
engagements, who was always racing after half an hour without ever
catching it, like the Minister-Duke of Newcastle, and like ninety-nine
people out of every hundred in the nineteenth century. There was some
bric-à-brac the princess wanted somebody to cheapen for her; she bade him
come and do it; he complied willingly enough. They went all three to that
bric-à-brac shop, and thence to another, and yet another. Then Princess
Olga, who was used to a more brilliant part than that of the “terza
incommoda,” left them to themselves over the faïence and marqueterie.
Lady Hilda, who, despite all her fashion, liked walking like every
healthy woman, dismissed her horses, and walked the length of the
river-street, he with her. People meeting them began to make conjectures,
and bets, harder than ever; and Italian ladies, looking out of their
carriage windows, wondered for the five-millionth time at the freedom of
Englishwomen,—as indeed Italian ladies have good cause to do in far more
reprehensible liberties.
They walked down to the park and back again. It was growing dusk. She
went home to her hotel, and let him enter with her, and had some tea by
the firelight; all the while he made love to her with eyes and gesture
and word, as only an Italian can, and she avoided explicit declaration of
it and direct need to reply to it, with all the consummate tact that ten
years’ practice in such positions had polished in her.
It was a charming pastime,—were it nothing more. It was quite a pity when
Madame Mila entered unsuspecting, and full of new wrongs in the matter of
the Muscadins and fresh gossip concerning some forty people’s marriages,
divorces, debts, ignominies, and infamies. It is fortunate that there are
so many wicked people in Society; for if there were not, what would the
good people have to talk about? they would die of paralysis of the tongue.
“You will not leave us for Paris, yet?” he murmured, as he rose, with a
sigh, only heard by her ear.
She smiled, and balanced a Devoniensis tea-rose idly in her hands.
“Not just yet, if your weather prove better.”
He drew the tea-rose away from her fingers unseen even by the quick,
marmoset eyes of little Madame Mila, who as it chanced was busied making
herself a cup of tea. She let it go.
“You should have seen all the men looking after that horrible Léa,”
said Madame Mila, drinking her compound of cream and sugar, as the door
closed on him. “They have eyes for nothing else, I do think; and only
fancy her having the very suite above mine—it is atrocious! They say the
things at her sale fetched fabulous sums. Little pomatum and rouge pots,
five hundred francs each! They say she has fixed her mind on young Sant’
Andrea here; I suppose she has heard he is enormously rich. Oh, did you
know Gwendolen Doncaster has come? She has lost all her money at Monte
Carlo, and she has dyed her hair a nice straw color; she looks fifteen
years younger, I do assure you. Don is shooting in Dalmatia: of course
she abuses him,—poor old Don! I wonder how we should have got on if he
had married me, as he wanted. Gwen told me Lord Derbyshire has run off
with Mrs. Wheelskaitte—what he _can_ see in her! and those open scandals
are so stupid, where is the use of them? Surely you can do what you like
without calling all the world in to see you doing it. When a woman has
an easy husband she _never_ need compromise herself, and Wheelskaitte
certainly always was that. Oh, you never would know them, I remember,
because they were new people; she was an odious creature, and very ugly,
but they gave very good parties in London, and their cottage was as nice
a one as you could go to for Ascot. You used to like little Wroxeter,
did not you? he was such a pretty boy: he has just left Eton, and he is
wild to marry a girl out of a music-hall, so Gwen says. These creatures
get all the good marriages nowadays:—and two hundred new débutantes
waiting for the first Drawing-room this month! Have you seen the new
book, ‘Confessions d’un Feu-Follet’? Maurice has just brought it to me.
It is rivaling Jenny Léa; and they say it is worse,—quite unmentionable;
everybody is talking about it. It was out last week, and they have sold
five editions. The man called Bistrim in it is Bismarck. No; I don’t
know that it is witty. I don’t think things are witty nowadays. It is
horrible and _infect_; but you can’t put it down till you’ve done it. Old
Lady Manlever is dying at the Pace Hôtel here,—of undigested scandal,
Featherleigh says; but I believe it’s gastritis. What a nasty old woman
she has always been! I have just left a card with inquiries and regrets;
I do hope she won’t get better. I won ever so much at play last night. I
forgot to tell you so; I bought that _rocaille_ necklace on the Jewelers’
Bridge; it was only six thousand francs, and it really did belong to the
Comtesse d’Albany. It’s very pretty, too——”
So Madame Mila discoursed, greatly to her own satisfaction. She loved
so much to hear her own tongue, that she always chose the stupidest and
silliest of her lovers for her chief favors: a clever man had always
ideas of his own, and was sure to want to express them sometime or
another. All she desired were listeners and echoes. Discussion may be
the salt of life to a few, but listeners and echoes are the bonbons and
cigarettes that no woman can do without.
The Lady Hilda, sitting looking into the fire, with her eyes nearly
closed, murmured yes, and no, and indeed, in the proper places, and let
her run on, hearing not one word. Those fingers which had entangled
themselves so softly with her own withdrawing the tea-rose, had left a
magnetic thrill upon her,—a dreamy, lulling pleasure.
That evening the good Hubert received a second telegram contradicting
the first which had announced his mistress’s return, and putting off
that return indefinitely. The good Hubert, who was driving her best
horses, drinking her best wines, drawing large checks for accounts never
examined, and generally enjoying his winter, was much relieved, and
hastened to communicate the happy change to Monsieur Camille Odissôt,
whom the first telegram had also cast into great consternation, since
that clever but idle young gentleman, having been prepaid half the sum
agreed on for the fresco-painting, had been spending it joyously after
the tastes of young artists, assisted by a pretty brown actress, of the
Folies Marigny, and had not at that moment even begun to touch the walls
and the ceiling of the ball-room confided to his genius.
“But you had better begin, though she is not coming back,” said the
good Hubert, surveying the blank waste of prepared plaster. “Miladi is
not often out of temper, but when she is—ouf! I would as soon serve a
Russian. Better begin; paint your best, because she knows,—Miladi knows,
and she is hard to please in those things. Not but what I dare say as
soon as you have done it all she will take it into her head that it looks
too cold, or looks too warm, or will not compose well, or something or
other, and will cover it all up with silk and satin. But that will not
matter to you.”
“Not at all,” said Monsieur Camille, who, though he had been a pupil of
Flandrin, had learned nothing of that true master’s conscientiousness
in art, but was a clever young man of a new generation, who drew
beautifully, as mechanically as a tailor stitches beautifully, and was of
the very wise opinion that money was everything.