When I entered the house my sister was going up the stair, the butler
was beyond in the drawing-room, and there was no other servant visible.
She was on the first step and the elevation gave precisely the height
that my sister ought to have received in the accident of birth. She
would have been wonderful with those four inches added--lacking beauty,
she had every other grace!
She spoke to me as I approached.
“Winthrop,” she said, “what was in the package that Madame Barras
carried away with her tonight?”
The query very greatly surprised me. I thought Madame Barras had carried
this package away with her several evenings before when I had put her
English bank-notes in my box at the local bank. My sister added the
explanation which I should have been embarrassed to seek, at the moment.
“She asked me to put it somewhere, on Tuesday afternoon.... It was
forgotten, I suppose.... I laid it in a drawer of the library table....
What did it contain?”
I managed an evasive reply, for the discovery opened possibilities that
disturbed me.
“Some certificates, I believe,” I said.
My sister made a little pretended gesture of dismay.
“I should have been more careful; such things are of value.”
Of value indeed! The certificates in Madame Barras' package, that had
lain about on the library table, were gold certificates of the United
States Treasury--ninety odd of them, each of a value of one thousand
dollars! My sister went:
“How oddly life has tossed her about.... She must have been a mere
infant at Miss Page's. The attachment of incoming tots to the older
girls was a custom.... I do not recall her.... There was always a string
of mites with shiny pigtails and big-eyed wistful faces. The older
girls never thought very much about them. One has a swarm-memory,
but individuals escape one. The older girl, in these schools, fancied
herself immensely. The little satellite that attached itself, with its
adoration, had no identity. It had a nickname, I think, or a number....
I have forgotten. We minimized these midges out of everything that could
distinguish them.... Fancy one of these turning up in Madame Barras and
coming to me on the memory of it.”
“It was extremely lucky for her,” I said. “Imagine arriving from the
interior of Brazil on the invitation of Mrs. Jordan to find that lady
dead and buried; with no friend, until, by chance, one happened on your
name in the social register, and ventured on a school attachment of
which there might remain, perhaps a memory only on the infant's side.”
My sister went on up the stair.
“I am glad we happened to be here, and, especially, Winthrop, if you
have been able to assist her.... She is charming.”
Charming was the word descriptive of my sister, for it is a thing of
manner from a nature elevated and noble, but it was not the word for
Madame Barras. The woman was a lure. I mean the term in its large and
catholic sense. I mean the bait of a great cosmic impulse--the most
subtle and the most persistent of which one has any sense.
The cunning intelligences of that impulse had decked her out with
every attractiveness as though they had taken thought to confound all
masculine resistance; to sweep into their service those refractory units
that withheld themselves from the common purpose. She was lovely, as the
aged Major Carrington had uttered it--great violet eyes in a delicate
skin sown with gold flecks, a skin so delicate that one felt that a kiss
would tear it!
I do not know from what source I have that expression but it attaches
itself, out of my memory of descriptive phrases, to Madame Barras. And
it extends itself as wholly descriptive of her. You will say that the
long and short of this is that I was in love with Madame Barras, but I
point you a witness in Major Carrington.
He had the same impressions, and he had but one passion in his life, a
distant worship of my sister that burned steadily even here at the
end of life. During the few evenings that Madame Barras had been in
to dinner with us, he sat in his chair beyond my sister in the
drawing-room, perfect in his early-Victorian manner, while Madame Barras
and I walked on the great terrace, or sat outside.
One had a magnificent sweep of the world, at night, from that terrace.
It looked out over the forest of pines to the open sea.
Madame Barras confessed to the pull of this vista. She asked me at what
direction the Atlantic entered, and when she knew, she kept it always in
her sight.
It had a persisting fascination for her. At all times and in nearly any
position, she was somehow sensible of this vista; she knew the lights
almost immediately, and the common small craft blinking about. To-night
she had sat for a long time in nearly utter silence here. There was a
faint light on the open sea as she got up to take her leave of us; what
would it be she wondered.