The next day was Ash Wednesday.
Madame Mila awoke too late for mass, and with a feverish throbbing in
her temples. She and the archduchess had only left the Veglione as the
morning sun came up bright and tranquil over the shining waters of the
river from behind the eastern hills.
Madame Mila yawned and yawned again a score of times, drank a little
green tea to waken herself, thought how horrid Lent was, and ran over in
her mind how much she would confess at confession.
She determined to repent her sins very penitently. She would only go to
musical parties, she would wear no low bodices, she would eat fish twice
a week,—the red mullets were really very nice,—and she would go for all
Holy Week _en retraite_: if she did all that, the most severe monitor
could not require her to give up Maurice.
Poor Maurice! she smiled to herself, in the middle of a yawn; how devoted
he was!—he only lived on her breath, and if she dismissed him would
kill himself with absinthe. She really believed it. She did not dream
that Maurice, submissive slave though he was, had his consolations for
slavery, and was at that moment looking into the eyes of the prettiest
artist’s model in Floralia.
It was the Day of Ashes, as all the bells of the city had tolled out far
and wide; and Madame Mila, over her green tea, really felt penitent. For
the post had brought her three terribly thick letters, and the letters
were bills; and the sum total that was wanted immediately was some sixty
thousand francs; and how could a poor dear little woman who had spent all
her money send that, or a tenth of it? and Spiridion wouldn’t,—he had
too many bills of Blanche Souris’ to pay; and poor Maurice couldn’t,—he
invariably lost at play much more than he possessed, after the manner of
his generation.
Madame Mila really cried about it, and felt ready to promise any amount
of repentance if she could get those sixty thousand francs this Lent.
“And to think of me running myself off my feet in that muslin apron
collecting for the poor!” she thought, with a sense that heaven behaved
very ill to her in return for her charities. “I suppose I must ask
Hilda,” she reflected: “she always does give when you ask her,—if that
man don’t prevent her now.”
For the champagne and the mask and the great joyousness of her soul had
prevented Madame Mila from observing any difference between her cousin
and Della Rocca, and, as he had left the box immediately after her
cousin, she had supposed that they had gone away together: why shouldn’t
they?
“I must ask Hilda to lend it me,” she said to herself.
To say “lend” was agreeable to her feelings,—not, of course, that there
was any serious necessity to repay between such near relatives; and she
sent her maid across the corridor to inquire when she could come into her
cousin’s room.
The maid returned with a little unsealed note which the Lady Hilda had
desired should be given to Madame Mila when she should awake. The note
only said, “I am gone to Rome for some few weeks, dear: write to me at
the Iles Britanniques if you want anything.”
“Good gracious! what can have happened?” said Madame Mila, in utter
amaze. “They must have quarreled last night.” And she proceeded to
cross-examine all the hotel people.
Lady Hilda had left by the morning train, and had not taken her
carriage-horses with her, only the riding-horses, and had kept on her
rooms at the Murat: that was all they knew.
“She is very uncertain and uncomfortable to have to do with,” thought
Madame Mila, in vague irritation. “Anybody else would have asked me to go
with her.”
A sudden idea occurred to her, and she sent her maid to find out if the
Duca della Rocca were in Floralia.
At his palace they said that he was.
“Dear me! perhaps he’ll go after her,” thought Madame Mila. “But I don’t
know why she’s so secret about it, and takes such precautions. Nobody’d
cut her for anything she might do so long as she’s all that money; and so
long as she don’t marry she can’t lose it.”
Madame Mila didn’t understand it at all. Her experience in the world
assured her that her cousin might have Della Rocca, or anybody else,
constantly beside her whenever she liked, and nobody would say
anything,—so long as she had all that money.
She felt that she was badly treated, that there was something not
confided to her, and also she certainly ought to have been asked to go
to Rome at her cousin’s expense. She was sulky and irritated.
“Hilda is so queer and so selfish,” she said to herself, and began a
letter to the Iles Britanniques with many tender endearments and much
pathos, and the most gracefully-worded appeal possible for the loan of
the sixty thousand francs.
She would have gone to Rome herself, being well aware that written
demands are much more easily repulsed than spoken ones. But she had no
money at all. She had lost a quarter’s income at play since she had been
in the town, and she could not pay the hotel-people till her husband
should send her more money, and he was hunting bears on the Pic du Midi
with Blanche Souris, established at Pau, and when that creature was with
him he was always very tardy in answering letters for money, bears or no
bears, and of course he would make the bears his excuse now.
Fairly overwhelmed, poor little Madame Mila had a long fit of hysterics,
and her maids had to send in great haste for ether and the Vicomte des
Gommeux.
She rallied by dinner-time enough to eat two dozen oysters, some lobster
croquettes, and some prawn soup, with a nice little bottle of Veuve
Cliquot’s sweetest wine; but still things were very dreadful, and on
the whole she was in the proper frame of mind for the Day of Ashes, and
in the confessional next morning sobbed so much that her confessor was
really touched, and was not too severe with her about her Maurice.