“C’est étonnant!” murmured the Duc de St. Louis softly to himself, the
same evening, standing on the steps of the Hôtel Murat, after assisting
in the morning at those various civil ceremonies and impediments with
which our beloved Italy, in her new character as a nation of Free
Thought, does her best to impede and deter all such as cling to so
old-world and pedantic a prejudice as marriage.
The dénouement of the drama which he himself had first set in action had
fallen upon him like a thunderbolt. He had had no conception of what
would happen. He had thought to enrich his friend by one of the finest
fortunes in Europe, and lo!—the Duc remained in an amazement and a sense
of humiliation from which he could not recover.
“C’est étonnant!” he murmured, again and again. “Who would ever have
believed that Miladi was a woman to beggar herself and play the romance
of the ‘world lost for love’? If I had only imagined!—if I had only
dreamed! I will never propose a marriage to any living being again;
never.”
“You have nothing to be so remorseful about, Duc,” said Lord Clairvaux,
with a sigh, himself utterly exhausted by all the law work that he had
been obliged to go through. “It is very funny, certainly,—she of all
women in the world! But they are happy enough, and he really is the only
living creature that ever could manage her. If anybody had ever told me
that any man would change Hilda like that!”
“Happy!” echoed M. de St. Louis, with his fin sourire. He was a man who
had no delusions; there were no marriages that were happy; some were
calm, that was the uttermost, and to remain calm required an immense
income; money alone was harmony.
Lord Clairvaux lighted a very big cigar, and grumbled that it had been
horrible to have to leave England in the Epsom month, but that he thanked
goodness that it was the last of her caprices that he would be worried
with; and he hoped that this Italian would like them when he had had a
year or two of them.
“I don’t know, though, but what it is the only sensible caprice she ever
had in her life; eh?” he added; “except buying Escargot and giving him
to me after the races,—you remember? Hang it, I’ve never seen such a
Chantilly before or since as that was!”
“We never do see such a race as the one that we happen to win,” murmured
M. de St. Louis.
“Of course it’s an awful cropper to take, and all that; but I’m not sure
but what she’s done a wise thing, though all the women are howling at
her like mad,” continued Lord Clairvaux; “a woman can’t live forever on
chiffons, you see.”
“Most women can—admirably. They buy at eighty as much white hair, the
coiffeurs tell me, as they buy blonde or black at twenty.”
“Ah, but they can’t, if they have a bit of heart or mind in them. Hilda
has both.”
“The case is so rare I could not prescribe for it: let us hope Miladi’s
own prescription will suit her,” said the Duc, whose serene good humor
was still slightly ruffled.
“Well, she always was all extremes and contraries,” said Lord Clairvaux.
“You never could say one minute what she wouldn’t do the next. By George!
you know there is nothing too odd for her to go in for; I should not
wonder an atom if when we come here two or three years hence, we find
her worshiping a curly Paolino, seeing to the silkworms, and studying
wine-making: she’s really tried everything else, you know.”
“Everything except happiness? Well, very few of us get any chance of
trying that, or would appreciate it if we did get it. Happiness,”
pursued the Duc, pensively, “must, after all, be almost as monotonous as
discontent,—when one is used to it. It is comforting to think so; for
there is very little of it. I cannot realize Miladi among the babies and
the wine-presses; but you may be right.”
“Well, you know she’s tried everything else,” repeated Lord Clairvaux.
“It will be like Julius Cæsar and his cabbage-garden.”
“You mean Diocletian,” said the Duc. “Do you leave to-night? We may as
well go as far as Paris together.”
And he turned back into the hotel to bid farewell to Madame Mila.
Madame Mila, who had made the religious and civil ceremonies gorgeous
in the last new anomalous anachronisms, with a classic clinging dress,
quite Greek in its cut, covered all over with the eyes out of peacocks’
feathers, and a cotte-de-maille bodice, stiff as pasteboard with gold and
silver embroideries, and who was now on the point of departure across
the Mont Cenis, covered up in the most wonderful of hooded cloaks trimmed
with the feathers of the Russian diver and the grebe; about one hundred
and fifty birds, happy, peaceful, and innocent under their native skies,
had died to trim the wrap, and it would probably be worn about half a
dozen times; for feathers are so very soon chiffonnés, as everybody knows.
“They are quite mad, both of them!” said the Countess, giving her small
fingers in adieu, and turning to see that Maurice had all the things she
wanted and was duly hooking them on to her ceinture of oxidized silver.
“Perhaps, madame,” said the Duc, who indeed thought so himself. “But if
a few people were not mad occasionally there would be no chance for the
sanity of the world.”
“Well, they will repent horribly, that is one comfort; she most of all,”
said Madame Mila, with asperity. “She ought to have been prevented;
treated for lunacy, you know; in France they would have managed it at
once with a _conseil de famille_. Maurice, you are screwing the top of
that flacon on all wrong: do take more care! She will repent horribly,
but she don’t see it now. Of course if she had had to lose the jewels
they would have brought her to reason. As it is, she don’t in the least
realize the horrible thing that she has done,—not in the least, not in
the least. When I said to her that she wouldn’t be able even to afford
Worth, she laughed, and answered that she would have one dress from
him every year for old friendship’s sake for the contadini’s vintage
balls, and that he would be sure to embroider her the loveliest Bacchic
symbolisms and put the cone of the thyrsus for buttons!—only fancy! She
could actually jest about _that_! How miserable she will be in three
months when she has come back to her senses; and how miserable she will
make _him_!”
“Chère Comtesse,” said the Duc, taking up his hat and cane, “everybody
repents everything. It is a law of Fate. The only difference is that some
people repent pleasantly and some unpleasantly. Let us hope that our
beautiful Duchess will repent pleasantly. Madame, j’ai l’honneur de vous
saluer—Bon voyage; au revoir.”
THE END.
FOOTNOTES
[1]
“Leavest thou me?—leave thee I will not.
Dost thou forsake me, yet will I follow thee.
Does the sea take thee?—the sea will I traverse.
Wilt thou wander the world, then a wanderer am I.”
[2] The old conservative party is so termed in Italy,—_codini_.