MADAME CLAIRE
by
SUSAN ERTZ
[Illustration: D. Appleton Logo]
D. Appleton And Company.
New York
MCMXXIII
Copyright, 1923, by
D. Appleton and Company
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Madame Claire
Chapter I. 1
Chapter II. 14
Chapter III. 26
Chapter IV. 41
Chapter V. 50
Chapter VI. 65
Chapter VII. 76
Chapter VIII. 85
Chapter IX. 97
Chapter X. 116
Chapter XI. 120
Chapter XII. 133
Chapter XIII. 144
Chapter XIV. 150
Chapter XV. 170
Chapter XVI. 176
Chapter XVII. 191
Chapter XVIII. 209
Chapter XIX. 227
Chapter XX. 243
Chapter XXI. 260
Chapter XXII. 266
Chapter XXIII. 282
Chapter XXIV. 303
Chapter XXV. 319
Chapter XXVI. 332
Novels of Supreme Literary Art.
Transcriber's Note.
Madame Claire
CHAPTER I
If you wish to be relieved from the worries of housekeeping; if you wish
to cultivate the society of retired army folk, or that of blameless
spinsterhood, ask for a room (inclusive terms) at the Kensington Park
Hotel, Kensington. It is unprogressive, it is Early Victorian--though of
late that term has lost some of its reproach--but it is eminently safe
and respectable.
Although neither of these qualities had ever particularly attracted Lady
Gregory--or Madame Claire, as her grandchildren called her--she found
herself at the age of seventy a candidate for admission. It was out of
the question for her to keep up the big house in Prince's Gardens after
her only son Eric married. Live with him she would not, valuing his love
for her and his own happiness too much to risk a ménage-à-trois with a
daughter-in-law--even a daughter-in-law of whom at that time she
approved. For Madame Claire not only faced facts squarely, but she had a
way of seeing under and around them as well, which greatly endeared her
to the more discriminating of her children and grandchildren.
It was eight years since Eric had married Louise Broughton, and eight
years since Madame Claire had come to live at the Kensington Park Hotel.
Her little suite was arranged with charming taste. Guests of the hotel
were not encouraged to furnish their own rooms, but Madame Claire had
succeeded little by little in ousting the hotel atrocities and had put
in their place some favorite pieces left from the sale of the house in
Prince's Gardens. Her meals were served in her sitting-room by Dawson,
her elderly maid, and there too she held her little court. She had a
great pity for other old ladies less fortunately placed, who were
obliged to be in, yet not of, the homes of their children or
grandchildren--"Always there, like pieces of furniture. Whereas," she
would say, "if my family wish to see me they must come to me, and make
an occasion of it."
A wonderful woman she was then at seventy-eight, with all her senses
very much on the alert. She read a great deal, but thought more, looking
out of her windows at the world. She usually dressed in gray or dark
blue, avoiding black which she said was only for the young. She was more
nearly beautiful at seventy-eight than at any other period of her life,
though she had always been a woman of great charm. She had been a loved
and invaluable wife to the late Sir Robert Gregory, whom the world knew
best as ambassador to Italy. She often said that for the connoisseur
there were only two countries, England and Italy.
When Robert Gregory died, leaving her a widow of sixty, she was
speedily--too speedily some said--sought in marriage by their lifelong
friend, Stephen de Lisle. That was eighteen years ago. Refused by her,
and perhaps made to feel just a little an old fool, he went abroad in
one of his black tempers, and she had not heard one word from him since.
It was a great sorrow to her, for both she and her husband had loved him
devotedly. The grandchildren, especially Judy and Noel, thought it a
delightful romance. They liked having a grandmother who had refused a
famous man at sixty and broken his heart. But it was a subject on which
she would permit no affectionate comment. It would have meant so much to
her to have had him as a dear contemporary and friend.
One foggy morning in late December when the whole world seemed bounded
by the thick yellow fog which pressed against her window panes, Dawson
brought her a letter bearing a French stamp. She knew the handwriting at
once, though it had been firmer in the old days. She read a few lines of
it, then stopped and turned to her maid who was busy about the room.
"Dawson," said Madame Claire in a voice that was far from steady,
"here's a letter from Mr. de Lisle."
"Oh, m'lady!" cried Dawson who loved surprises, "it's like a voice from
the grave, isn't it now?"
"He's not well," continued her mistress, reading on. "Gout he says, poor
old thing. He writes from Cannes, where he's gone for the sunshine. He
has to have a nurse. How he must hate it!"
"And you as strong and well as ever," exulted Dawson. It was a source of
peculiar joy to her when any of Madame Claire's contemporaries fell
victims to the maladies of old age, or that severest malady of all,
death. Her beloved mistress seemed to her then like the winner in a
great race, and who was she, Dawson, but the groom who tended and
groomed the racer? She thrilled with pride.
Madame Claire read the letter through to the end, and then went at once
to her desk, with as free a step, Dawson thought, as she had ever had.
"I must write to him immediately," she said, a flush on her old cheeks.
The letter took her several hours to write, because there was so much to
tell him. He kept it, as he kept all her letters, and when he died they
came into Eric's possession, and finally into the writer's.
"_My dear old Stephen,_" she wrote,
"_Nothing that has happened to me in the last ten years has given me
as much pleasure as your letter from Cannes. After a silence a fifth
of a century long, you have come alive for me again. Stephen,
Stephen! How am I to forgive you for that silence? But I do forgive
you, as you knew I would, and I thank you for the happiness you have
given me by breaking it._
"_I don't believe you have changed much, though you say you are an
invalid--gout, phlebitis, rheumatism! Infirm, crotchety old Stephen!
Infirm as to legs, but very active, I gather, as to brain, heart,
and temper. How I wish we might see each other! But you cannot
travel, and I--yes, I can, but I will not. I motor gently down to
my little house in Sussex in the summer, and back again in the
autumn, and that is enough. The rest of the time I dwell in peace
and security in three rooms here at the Kensington Park Hotel, and
it suits me very well._
"_How good it is that we can pick up the threads of our friendship
again! As far as I am concerned it has neither lapsed nor waned.
You say I dealt you a great blow. But, Stephen, how could you
expect Robert's widow, already a grandmother, to have married
again? That, my dearest friend, would have been an elderly folly
for which I would never have forgiven myself. You sulked badly,
Stephen, and I think now you owe it to your years and mine to
laugh. Do laugh! There is nothing like the mirth of old age, for
old age knows why it laughs._
"_You say you want me to write you about everything that concerns
myself. I know you are only trying to cover up your tracks here,
for the one you really want to hear about is Judy. I am well aware
of your elderly partiality for my granddaughter, with whom you fell
in love when she was seven--twenty years ago. But I don't intend to
pander to it at the expense of the others. Judy must take her turn
along with the rest._
"_Stephen, would you be young again? You, thinking of your gout and
your phlebitis, would cry 'Yes!' But don't you see that you would
merely be inviting gout and phlebitis again? For myself, the answer
is no, no, no! And I have been happy, too, and with reason. Not for
anything would I be blind again, uncertain, groping; feeling my
way, wondering where my duty lay, dreading the blows of fate before
they struck, valuing happiness too highly. That is life. Now the
turmoil has died down, confusion is no more. It's like sitting on a
quiet hilltop in the light of the setting sun. Fate cannot harm
me--I have lived. There is nothing to be feared, and there is
nothing to be expected except the kindly hand of death, and the
opening of another door. Perhaps one is a little tired, but the
climb, after all, was worth it, and one can think here, and listen
to the cries of birds, and the sound of the wind in the grass. The
lie of the land over which one has come taken a different aspect
and falls into a pattern. Those woods where one felt so lost--how
little they were, and how many openings they had, if one had only
gone forward, instead of rushing in blind circles...._
"_Gordon, my tactless grandson, said the other day that no one would
dream I was nearly eighty if it were not for the evidence of the
family tree. That did not please me. I take as much pride in being
nearly eighty as I once took in being sixteen. After all, being an
old woman is my rôle at present, and naturally it is a rôle I wish
to play well. Perhaps you'll say that I would accept old age less
philosophically if I were blind, or deaf, or bedridden. I wonder?
Even without all one's faculties, surely there are thoughts and
memories enough to furnish the mind. (Why, why, Stephen, don't we
cultivate _+CONTEMPLATION+_?) And that tantalizing veil that shuts us
off from the beyond should be wearing thin at our age, so that by
watching and waiting one should be able to catch glimpses of what
it hides._
"_And now you will say, 'For Heaven's sake stop moralizing and tell
me about Judy.'_
"_I hate describing people--especially those I love, but I will try.
She is lovely in her strange way, with moments of real beauty. I
say strange, because she follows no accepted rules. She is somber,
but lights up charmingly when she smiles. I suppose her mouth is
too wide, but I like it. She, is dark--the sort of girl who wears
tawny colors well. She has brains and humor and in responsiveness
is not even second to Eric. Her mother, my daughter Millicent whom
you will of course remember, is foolishly trying to goad her into
marriage. How I pity youth! It's so vulnerable! Judy tells me she
sometimes wakes at night in a sort of fever, hagridden by the
thought that she may have made a mess of her life by not marrying
this man or that, fearful that she may never meet the right one at
all, hating the thought of spinsterhood, and, she says, seeing
nothing else for it._
"_'What,' you may ask, 'are all the young men about?' Well, we lost
many of our best in the war, as you and I know full well, and Judy
expects--everything--And why not, as she has everything to give?
She is not a girl to make concessions easily. Noel, her younger
brother, is a great joy to her. Do you remember Noel, or can you
only remember Judy? He was a dear little boy in those days, with
his prickly, unusual notions, and his elfishness. He is not exactly
good-looking, but his height, and his extremely attractive smile
make him at least noticeable. He lost his left arm in France, and
is now finding it very difficult to fit into a job. His health was
so bad before the war that he had never settled down to anything,
and the doctors had frightened him and all of us into the belief
that a severe winter cold would kill him. Then the war came, and
three winters in the trenches made a new man of him._
"_Gordon, of course, went back to the Foreign Office, where he seems
perfectly happy. He will never fit his grandfather's shoes,
however. Robert had more wit in his little finger than Gordon has
in his handsome head--but it is a very handsome head._
"_Do you know that I am practicing great self-restraint? I have
hardly mentioned your godson Eric--for fear, perhaps, of saying too
much. He was away at school when you were last here, so he must be
a very shadowy figure to you. He might have been like a son to you
all these years, if only you had not cut yourself adrift from us
all. For five years, you say, you have been almost within a day's
journey of England without once crossing the Channel. And yet time
was when London was like a ball at your feet. Your great fault,
Stephen, is that you take defeat badly. I still believe that you
could have turned your political reverse at least into victory if
you had stayed._
"_At forty-one Eric is very like what Robert was at that age, but
more dynamic. Keep that word in mind if you would know him. He
infuses life into me through his voice, through his smile, through
his intensely blue eyes. He is impetuous and headlong--but headlong
always on the side of fairness. He has his father's quick grasp of
things. He is tremendously interested in what you say--in what he
says--and in you. When he smiles he makes you smile, when he laughs
you must laugh too. He treats me as if I were an interesting old
friend whom he likes, as well as his mother whom he loves._
"_His wife--he married Louise Broughton, the daughter of old Admiral
Broughton--doesn't in the least understand him. If I have a regret
in the world it is that. But I will tell you more about her another
time._
"_And now a few words about Millicent whom you knew as a sedate
young matron. She is still sedate. She is in fact the very
embodiment of all that is correct and conventional (I almost said
and dull) in the English character. By that I mean that she is
always well-poised and completely mistress of herself whether at
Court or in her nightdress in an open boat. (Where indeed she was,
poor thing, for she was torpedoed crossing from America during the
war. She had gone there to raise funds for the Belgians. An
eye-witness told me she presided all the time, especially when it
came to handing round the rum and biscuits. She was always a good,
if stiff, hostess. He said that her nightdress, barely covered by a
waterproof and a lifebelt, became by some miracle of deportment a
quite proper and suitable garment, and made the women who were
wrapped in furs look overdressed. I can imagine it perfectly.)_
"_I have never outgrown a feeling of amazement at having achieved
anything as correct as Millicent. She is always certain she is
right, and she never sees obstacles. When Gordon, Eric, and Noel
went to the war she never worried, but looked quite calmly to their
safe return, completely ignoring the awful and uncertain ground
between. I believe she thought that the Almighty had a special
mission to look after Pendletons and Gregorys. It seems she had
some grounds for her belief, only Judy says she forgot to
concentrate on Noel's arm._
"_John, her husband, is as negligible as ever. I cannot think what
you found in him to dislike, unless you, like Nature, abhor a
vacuum._
"_As for Connie--my poor Connie! Stephen, I don't know where she is,
nor whether she's alive or dead._
"_Get better of your gout and the other things, and come to England.
After all, there is no place like it. Although we are in the midst
of winter and coal is scarce and dear, and though the descendants
of the daughters of the horseleech have multiplied exceedingly and
cry louder than ever, 'Give, give, give!' And although even the
children nowadays seem to lisp in grumbles, for the grumbles come,
it is still the best country in the world and you must come back to
it and take it to your heart again before--but you hate the thought
of that, so I won't say the words._
"_I will write again next week; there is so much to tell you. So
good-bye, for now._
"CLAIRE."