IV

Patience Forbes was a woman of science, an ornithologist. When she

died years ago she was recognized in America as one of the foremost

authorities on birds. I remember her death. Jane got the news in Paris.

It was at the time of the final struggle over Geneviève’s marriage. She

showed me her Aunt Patience’s will. It read:--“To my beloved niece Jane

Carpenter now known by the name of the Marquise de Joigny, I leave the

Grey House and everything in it except my collections and manuscripts.

These I leave to the Museum of St. Mary’s Plains. But the house and all

the furniture I leave to Jane in case she may some day want some place

to go.”

Jane looked at me with strange eyes that day.

“Isn’t it queer,” she said. “How could she have known?”

But I understand now that Patience Forbes was the only one who did

know. She must have been a shrewd woman. She must have followed Jane in

her mind all those years, with extraordinary accuracy considering the

little she had to go on. But she never betrayed her misgivings. There

is only that sentence in her will to indicate what she thought.

She was an imposing woman, plain of face, careless of her appearance

and masculine in build. Her nose was crooked, her neck scrawny and her

hands large and bony. But she had an air of grandeur. When she tramped

through the woods or across the open country that surrounded St. Mary’s

Plains, her field glasses and her camera slung across her shoulder, she

had in spite of her quaint bonnet and long black clothes the look of a

grizzled amazon. She would walk twenty miles in a day and frequently

did so. Many of the farmers round about knew her. They called her “the

bird lady” and asked her in to their kitchens for a glass of milk and

a slice of apple-pie, and often while sitting there with her bonnet

strings untied and her dusty skirt turned up on her knees, she would

receive gifts from sun-burned urchins who, knowing the object of her

pilgrimages would bring to her in the battered straw crowns of their

hats, rare birds’ eggs that they had discovered in the high branches of

trees or the secret fastnesses of tangled thickets.

She was the dominating personality in her own home. Her mother and

sisters were a little afraid of her. When her brother Bradford married

and she announced that she was going to hold classes in the parlour of

the Grey House and charge for them, they dared not object, although

they would have preferred going without the comforts that Bradford’s

shared income had provided rather than have a lot of strange people

invading the house.

It was characteristic of the family that they never spoke to Jane of

money and never gave her any idea that she was or ever would be an

heiress. She made her own bed in the morning, and sometimes if she were

not in too much of a hurry to get off to school she helped Aunt Minnie

with the others. On Saturday mornings she darned her own stockings,

or tried to, sitting on a low chair beside her grandmother, but this

was by way of a lesson in keeping quiet. I am afraid she took it as a

matter of course that Aunt Beth and her grandmother should mend her

clothes for her.

She gave a great deal of trouble. Not only was she always getting

into scrapes, but she was subject as well to storms of passion that

sometimes, as she realized later, seriously frightened her grandmother.

Her accidents--she had a great many little ones and one at least that

was serious--were episodes marked in her memory as rather pleasant

occasions that procured for her an extra amount of petting. There was a

high bookcase at the top of the stairs in a dark corner of the upper

hall, full of old and faded volumes. Here she spent hours together on

Sunday afternoons, sitting on the top of a step-ladder that she dragged

out of the housemaids’ cupboard. One day, finding among those dusty

little books a copy of Dante’s “Vita Nuova,” she became so absorbed

in the lovely poem, though it was only a lame translation in English

verse, that she began chanting the lines to herself, unconsciously

swaying backwards and forwards on her perch, until all at once the

ladder gave way beneath her, and she fell to the floor, breaking her

arm. The days that followed were among the happiest of her life. She

was installed in her Uncle Bradford’s room that gave out onto the

sunny back garden where a pear tree was in bloom. There, propped up in

the middle of the great white bed, her arm in a sling and not hurting

too much to spoil her voluptuous sense of her own importance, she

seemed to herself a romantic figure, and received Fan with benevolent

superiority, while deeply and deliciously she drank in with every

feverish throb of her passionate little heart the tender devotion

of the patient women who loved her. Her Aunt Patty slept on a cot

beside her at night; her Aunt Minnie brought her meals to her on the

daintiest of trays; her grandmother and her Aunt Beth came with their

sewing to sit with her in the afternoon. Often when she felt herself

dropping into a doze after lunch, before finally closing her eyes to

give herself up to the sleep that was creeping over her so softly, she

would for the pleasure of it open them again to look through her heavy

eyelids at her grandmother’s head that she could see above the foot

of the great bed outlined against the sunny light of the window; and

she would see the little old lady lift a finger to her pursed lips and

nod mysteriously smiling at Beth and glance towards the bed as much as

to say--“The child is dropping off, we mustn’t make a sound.” And the

child, with such a sense of security and peace as to convey to her in

after years the memory of a heavenly instant, would let herself float

blissfully out into the still waters of oblivion, knowing that she

would surely find them there when she awoke.

She was given the book, “La Vita Nuova” for her own, and lay in bed

dreaming of a poet who would one day love her as Dante had loved his

Beatrice.

It was about this time that Mrs. Carpenter began working out her

schemes with Philibert.

Jane was according to her own testimony subject to fits of such violent

temper that she scarcely knew what she was doing. At such moments she

frightened every one round her and herself as well. One evening stands

out in her memory as peculiarly dreadful. The family were gathered in

the drawing room before supper waiting for her, when she burst in on

them, her face as white as a sheet, and flung herself on her Aunt Patty

with the words--“I’ve killed a boy. Come quick. He was torturing a

beast. He’s out in the garden lying quite still.” And shuddering from

head to foot she dragged her aunt out after her. The boy was not dead,

but lay as a matter-of-fact unconscious on the path near the back gate.

Jane had knocked him down and half throttled him. There had been three

boys shooting with sling shots at a lame cat to whose leg they had

tied a tin can so that the wretched beast could not get out of range.

Jane had seen them from the window and had rushed to the rescue. The

affair made something of a stir in the town. It got into the papers.

The boy had to be taken to a hospital. Jane’s Uncle Bradford needed all

his influence to avert a public scandal. Unfortunately it was not the

first case of Jane’s violence that had come to the knowledge of the

neighbours. People talked of her as “that savage girl of Izzy’s” and

told their children they were not to play with her any more. She was

taken out of school for a time.

It is difficult to get at the exact meaning of this story. All that I

know is what Jane has told me herself, and she may have exaggerated

its social importance. At any rate, to her own mind it was an immense

and horrible disgrace. She felt herself a monstrosity, and for weeks

could not bear to go into the street. Her Aunt Patience too, had taken

a very serious view of the affair. She sent for Jane to come to her in

her study the next morning; the child was, I suppose, too nervous and

shaken that night to listen to anything in the way of reprimand, and

Aunt Patience showed her a riding whip on a peg in the corner against

the wall. It was a cowboy quirt, a braided leather thing with a long

lash.

“Jane,” said her Aunt Patty, “that quirt belonged to your father.

He left it here once long ago. It is yours. I have put it there on

that peg for you. I am giving it to you for a special purpose. When

a dreadful act is committed against a human being, some one has to

suffer, to make things equal. Usually the one who does the evil deed

is punished, but I can’t, Jane, punish you like that.” And here Aunt

Patty’s stern voice quavered. “I can’t because I can’t bear to. You are

my child. I love you too much. I have lain awake all night thinking

about it. When God is angry he punishes people he loves. He has the

right. He is wise and perfect. But I am not in the place of God to you,

and I can’t do it. I am going to do something quite different. I am

going to do it because something has got to be done, some one has got

to suffer for what you have done. You are to take that whip down now

from that peg and give me three lashes with it across my shoulders. I

am going to take your punishment on me because I think that will make

you understand. Do as I say.”

The child was terrified. In a kind of trance she took the leather

weapon in her shaking hands. Her aunt stood straight and still in the

middle of the room. “Do what I say, Jane,” she commanded again. Her

voice was awful. Jane advanced a step towards her as if hypnotized,

looked a long moment at the stern face, then suddenly collapsed in a

heap at those large plain feet in their worn flat slippers.

“I can’t, Aunt Patty,” she whispered. “I can’t! It’s enough. It’s

enough.”

After this Jane spent more and more time in her aunt’s company. The

dreadful experience drew them even closer together. Jane would almost

always accompany her aunt on her long tramps into the country, and

although as Patience so often said she never took any real interest

in the science of birds, she nevertheless became an adept at climbing

trees and going through thickets, and learned to imitate the songs of

birds in an astonishing way. This accomplishment indeed, she never

lost; even when she had long since forgotten all she learned about

Baltimore Orioles and Brown Thrushes and Scarlet Tanagers and the

migrations of birds in the spring time, and their marvellous intricate

manner of fabricating their nests, she could throw back her head and

fill the room wherever she might be with the most bewildering joyous

riot of warblings and twitterings and liquid trills. She became so

expert at this that sometimes she would play pranks on her aunt, and

climbing into the tree outside the study window, she would imitate

the song of some little feathered creature so perfectly that her Aunt

Patty would leave her work and tip-toe softly to the window only to be

greeted with a squeal of triumphant laughter.

The classes in bird lore that were held in the parlour were for Jane

little more than a chance of giggling with Fan in a corner. The

lectures indoors went on during the winter, but in the spring and

early summer Miss Forbes took her followers by train to a village on

the edge of the forest, and there, in the leafy fastnesses of those

sunny enclosed spaces would give her pupils demonstrated lectures.

Jane has told me that when following the sound of a bird’s note heard

overhead at a distance, her aunt’s face would become transfigured; a

little mystic smile would come over her plain features; she would sign

to her throng to make not the slightest noise, and silently her head

bent sideways and upwards, she would lead the way, stopping now and

then, her finger on her lips, to listen for the clear note that guided

her, until at last she would catch sight of her beauty, high up on a

swaying leafy bough, and all her being would strain upward towards that

tiny creature, and her face would light up with even a brighter joy,

and she would point a gaunt finger mutely at the object of her worship

as if calling attention to some lovely little celestial being. Then

if some one, as was always the case, made a sound and the bird flew

away, a shadow would fall on her face, her pose would relax and she

would turn to the heavy human beings about her, a dull disappointed

glance, looking at them all for a moment in deep reproach before she

recollected what she was there for, and began to tell them of the

habits and customs of the songster who had just disappeared over the

treetops.

On one occasion Fan went so far as to say these rambles were

ridiculous, and Jane flared up at once.

“My Aunt Patty ridiculous?” she cried out. “How dare you? She’s the

greatest ornithologist in the world, and I love her, I love her more

than all the outside world together and everything in it.”

When Jane was fifteen her grandmother died, and a year later her Aunt

Beth was married, and Jane, who was sixteen, had a white organdie

bridesmaid’s dress and carried a bouquet of pink roses, and after that

Aunt Minnie went away to be a Christian Science healer in New York, and

Jane was left alone in the Grey House with her Aunt Patty.

Her grandmother’s death left her with no impression of horror. The

little old lady had gone to sleep one day quietly in her accustomed

place by the window and had not wakened again, that was all. Aunt

Patty at the funeral in a long black veil, looked like some grand and

austere monument of grief, reminding her vaguely of a statue she had

seen somewhere of emblematic and national importance, but she made no

fuss over her sorrow, and told the child that night of her own mother’s

imminent arrival from Paris.

This was a piece of news sufficiently wonderful to offset completely

the effect of death in the house. Jane said to herself, “She is coming

to take me away to be with her at last.” And she went up and hid in her

room so that her Aunt Patty should not see how excited she was.

But Jane was mistaken. Such was not Mrs. Carpenter’s intention. She

had come to America on receiving her sister’s telegram partly out

of deference to her mother’s memory, partly to consult her lawyers,

and partly for the purpose of putting Jane in a fashionable American

boarding school. The sadness in Jane’s memory long connected with

those days has little to do with her grandmother’s funeral, but is the

lasting indelible impression of the discovery she made then, that her

mother did not like her.

Mrs. Carpenter came out with her ideas for her daughter abruptly on

the evening of her arrival. She had no idea that her daughter adored

her. Jane’s letters beginning “My darling Mummy” and ending “Your

loving daughter” had conveyed to her nothing of the writer’s emotion.

No doubt they bored her, and no doubt she supposed that they bored the

child who was obliged to write them. It would probably have seemed to

her incredible that a little girl who scarcely ever saw her should go

on wanting her for ten years from a distance of a couple of thousand

miles. If she justified herself to herself at all, I suppose she made

use of this argument: “Well, if I don’t care for her because she is

so dreadfully her father’s daughter, then that proves that I am too

different for her ever to care for me. The best thing for us both is

to leave her with people who won’t let her get on their nerves as she

would on mine.”

Mrs. Carpenter was not subtle, and she hated wasting time, so she

opened the subject at once sitting with Patience in the back parlour,

her slim silk-stockinged legs crossed easily, one smart foot dangling,

her modish head tilted back above the trim cravat of black crêpe and

white tulle that her French maid had fabricated for her during the

crossing, and a jewelled hand playing with Jane’s long pigtail. Her

sister Patience sat opposite her at her table, her head in her hands,

her bony fingers poked up among her meagre locks, and Jane took in that

evening with a kind of anguish of loyalty the contrast between the

two women. It seemed to her somehow very pitiful that her Aunt Patty

should be so ugly when her mother was so beautiful. With a childish

absence of any vestige of a sense of humour, she felt at one moment

ashamed for her aunt and almost angry with her mother, and then ashamed

for her mother and angry with her aunt.

“I wanted to tell you, Patty, that I think it would be a good thing now

for this big gawk of a girl to go to a finishing school in New York.

You’ll probably be giving up this house soon, and I don’t want her with

me yet awhile.”

Jane in talking to me of this moment said that she felt as if her

mother’s hand that was playing affectionately with her hair an instant

before had suddenly picked up a hammer and hit her on the head. For an

interval everything was blurred and dark in the room, with sparks that

seemed to be shooting out of her brain. It was her Aunt Patty’s face

that brought her back to her senses. It was a suffering, angry face,

and presently she heard Patience say--“I am not going to give up this

house, but I think you ought to take Jane to live with you. She wants

to go, and she’s right. You are her mother.”

But Izzy paid no attention to her older sister.

“That’s nonsense! Paris is no place for a girl of her age. What in the

world should I do with her? She’d be dreadfully in the way. Besides

she must learn how to walk and manage her hands before I show her to

people.”

The thing was done. Jane knew. She knew that her mother did not like

her and never had liked her, and she knew somehow that her mother did

not like her because she was ugly and reminded her of her father Silas

Carpenter. She knew too that her Aunt Patty had always known this,

and that her aunt loved her as her mother never would love her, and

that the mottled flush on her grim face was due in part to anger and

in part to the fear of losing her. She understood that her aunt had

determined to help her to attain her heart’s desire, even at the price

of losing herself the one thing more precious to her than anything in

the world. She dared not look at her mother and she could not speak,

and still she waited though incapable now of taking in the meaning of

their voices. She heard vaguely her aunt saying something about making

enough money by her lectures and publications to keep the house going,

but paid no attention. A question addressed directly to herself by her

mother at last roused her.

“Well, Jane, what do you say? Would you rather stay here alone with

your Aunt Patty than go to boarding school with a lot of jolly girls of

your own age?”

She did not hesitate then for an answer.

“Oh yes, if you can’t have me let me stay here,” and turning she cried,

“Keep me, Aunt Patty, keep me,” and flung herself into those long

trembling arms.

Mrs. Carpenter seems to have been mildly amused by this display of

affection. With her face buried in the black woollen stuff of her

aunt’s blouse, Jane heard her say--

“Well then, I leave it to you two. You can carry on as you like for the

next two or three years. When you are eighteen, Jane, you will make

your début in Paris society. You’ll want to bring Patty with you, I

suppose, when the time comes.”

Mrs. Carpenter left three days later. The subject of Jane’s future was

not broached again in her presence, but she heard the two women talking

about professors of French and Italian and dancing classes, and the

advantages of a saddle-horse and a pony cart. Her mother’s last words

to her were--

“Now make the most of your time and don’t run about all over the

country in the sun. Your complexion is the best thing about you.” And

yet she didn’t hate her mother. Her idea of her mother had not even

undergone for her any fundamental change. It was all the other way

round. It was her opinion of herself that had suffered. With the dogged

loyalty that seemed at times positively a sign of stupidity and was

to influence every important decision of her life, she defended her

mother to her own heart. If her mother did not like her it was because

she was not likeable, because her father had been a dreadful man and

had handed down to her some secret dangerous element of his own nature

that made her antagonistic and unpleasant to brilliant happy people.

Her Aunt Patty loved her because she was sorry for her. Her Aunt Patty

was different from her mother. She, too, was ugly and a little queer;

that was the bond between them. Poor Patience Forbes! Jane was to do

her justice later, but for the moment she almost hated the sympathy

between them, while her mother’s image like some magic adamant statue

possessing a supernatural inviolability remained for her persistently

and brilliantly the same. And when she was gone the question Jane put

her aunt represented the result of hours of heart-broken weeping in

which no whisper of a reproach had mingled.

“Aunt Patty,” she said, “how can I make my mother love me?” and her

Aunt Patty had replied rather grimly--

“By trying to be what she wants you to be, I suppose.”

It was after this that Jane began sleeping at night with a strip of

adhesive plaster across her mouth from her chin to her upper lip. Her

aunt must have known but she did not interfere. I can imagine her

standing over her niece’s bed when she came up from her protracted

studies in the library, with a lamp in her hand, a tall grizzled

figure in long ungainly black clothes, looking down at that sleeping

face with the court-plaster pasted across the mouth, and I can see her

weather-beaten face twist and tears well up in those shrewd intelligent

eyes, and I seem to hear her utter--“Poor Jane, my poor lamb. If you

could only take some interest in science. I don’t know what is to

become of you.”

V

I begin to feel uncertain in telling this story. I am not at all sure

that I have a just feeling for that American life of Jane’s. I have put

down the facts as she told them to me and have described the people

there as they came into being for me, from her talk, but how am I to

know that they were really like that? Perhaps had I seen them with my

own eyes I should have found them quite different: narrow, dull people

with shrill twanging voices and queer American mannerisms. It may be

that they would have bored me as they bored Mrs. Carpenter. St. Mary’s

Plains I have seen for myself, but what did I see? A railway station,

a few streets, a deep wide muddy river flowing by full of ships and

barges. The town expressed nothing to me. It remained enigmatic. Of

the hidden life going on in all those houses I knew nothing. I did not

even understand what I saw. There were billboards all about the railway

station advertising American products. Enormous nigger babies three

times life-size stared from wooden fences. The Gold Dust Twins? Why

gold dust, why twins, why nigger babies? How should I know? There were

other garish things: I seem to remember flags and red, white and blue

streamers festooning telegraph poles, in celebration I suppose of some

national holiday. It was all too foreign. I could not translate it to

myself. It made me feel very tired, and now this effort to recreate the

atmosphere makes me weary. It is such a strain for the imagination. I

know that my picture is incomplete and therefore false. I have touched

on the gentleness and good breeding of Jane’s people, on the quiet of

their God-fearing lives, but that word God-fearing: it is strange;

it suggests something stern and uncompromising that is very different

from anything we know in Paris. It suggests a great seriousness, a

bare nakedness before the mystery of the unknown, a challenge of fate

and an exaltation, of virtue. It affects me like a bleak wind. I turn

away from it with relief. I look out of my window with a sigh. There

is the good Abbé coming out of the convent gate. He has been hearing

confessions; he has been taking away the sins from burdened hearts and

tying them up into neat little bundles to be dropped into the Seine.

God bless him, and thank God for our wise old priesthood and our

wonderful beautiful old compromises, and thank God again for the jaunty

swing of that black cassock. Ugh! I feel better. The little street is

dim this morning. It has been raining. Dear, weary little old street--

There is no room here for American Puritanism. Paris is too old,

too wise to harbour such things. Was it that that haunted Jane? Did

she always see herself measured up to a fixed fine standard like a

flagpole, the flagpole of American idealism, with a banner floating

over her head, casting a shadow, purity, honesty, fear of God,

written on it in shining letters? Payment, atonement, the wages of

sin is death--old Mrs. Forbes reading out the words, believing but

not worrying, but Jane making them terribly personal, questioning,

puzzling, burying them in her mind. Heaven and hell; realities!

Our actions leading us toward one or the other. Patience Forbes

saying one had to suffer for a bad deed. The mystery about Jane’s

father--something curious about his death. He was an unhappy man, his

silence, she remembered it, she remembered him. She knew she was like

him in some inexplicable way that frightened her. A world of stern

simple values, all smoothed over for her by the gentleness and kindness

of those people, the Forbes. Of course they were gentle and kind. They

loved her. It was all right as long as she had them, but it was a

curious preparation for life with Izzy in Paris.

Izzy sent for Philibert on her return from America. She must have

talked to him about Jane. They must have had a curious conversation.

I am certain that it was then that they elaborated their plan. The

scheme was one of grand proportions. They became partners in a great

enterprise. Mrs. Carpenter was to supply her daughter, who had enough

money to realize even Philibert’s dreams, and he was to supply the

required knowledge, as well as the _billet d’entrée_ into the social

arena of Europe. These two suited each other perfectly. They knew what

they wanted and each saw in the other the means of getting it. Broadly

speaking they wanted the same thing, and if Philibert’s conception of

their common destiny was utterly beyond her that was just what made her

faith in him perfect. Audacious in her way, his audacity far outdid

hers: whatever her idea his was always much grander; he made her feel

beautifully humble by brushing away some of her most cherished hopes as

unworthy of their attention.

“A palace in Venice?” I seem to hear him say, perched on one of her

little straight gilt chairs, nursing his foot that was tucked under his

knee. “But every one has palaces in Venice. Why not a Venetian palace

in Paris, the Doge’s Palace itself, reproduced stone for stone, if that

takes your fancy?”

And she would catch her breath with the beauty of the idea. Not that

Philibert ever intended to do anything so silly as spoil a site in

Paris by such a freak of humour. He was a _farceur_ if you like, but

he had too much taste for that. He intended having his palace, and it

was to be of such supreme beauty as to draw pilgrims from all over

the world, but it was to be in harmony with its surroundings. The

allusion to the House of the Doges was just his little happy joke.

He was very cheerful in those days. People used to say--“Fifi does

have luck. Look at him. Who is it now that adores him? Was ever a man

so blatantly successful in his love affairs?” I must say he did have

the look of being happily in love. His smooth cheeks were pink, his

eyes, usually as expressionless as bits of blue enamel, were suffused

with light, and the soft flaxen fuzz that grew round the bald spot

on his head like the down on a little yellow gosling, seemed to

send off electricity. Never in all his immaculate dandyism had he

been so immaculate, his linen was superlative and the shine on his

little pointed boots was visible halfway down the street. There was a

giddy swing to his hurrying coat-tails, and he carried his shoulders

superbly. Almost, but not quite, he achieved the look of being taller.

And his contempt for the rest of us was of course greater than ever.

Born with a gnawing consciousness of his own genius, he had for years

been as exasperated as a Michael Angelo or a Paul Veronese forced by

lack of space and a sufficiency of paints to spend his time doing

little water-colour sketches: but he now saw himself on the way to

realizing his inspirations in all their splendid amplitude, and of

displaying before the eyes of men the finished gigantic masterpiece

of his art. For Philibert was an artist: even Ludovic and Felix and

Clémentine recognized that. He was an artist in life on a grand scale.

He dealt with men and women and clothes and string orchestras and food

and polished floors and marble staircases as a painter deals with the

colours on his palette, or perhaps more exactly as the theatrical

producer deals with stage properties. His stage was the world itself;

he produced his plays and his pageants and his _tableaux vivants_ in

the midst of the activities of society, and his actors, reversing the

method of our modern stage where the players come down across the

footlights to mingle with the audience, were selected by him from the

general public without their knowing it, and found themselves playing

a part in a scene he had created round them and for them as if by

magic. Audacious? Ah, but who could be more so? Who but Fifi would

have had the impertinence to take a real live king and make him, all

unconscious, play the principal part in a pantomime before a handful of

spectators? Mrs. Carpenter had dreamed of entertaining kings. Philibert

entertained them, but he did something much more extraordinary; he put

them into his play and made them entertain him.

Who in Paris will ever forget the night he threw open his door for the

Czar of all the Russias? Who does not remember how he stage-managed

the crowd outside, how troops of singers from the Opera mingled with

the mob far down the street and sang hymns of acclamation as the royal

guest approached his fairy palace, so illumined as to shine like a

single rosy jewel? And the golden carpet thrown down on the marble

stairs, and Jane standing alone at the top of that fantastic staircase,

like an emerald column, her train arranged by Philibert’s own clever

hands sweeping down the steps beneath her to add supernaturally to her

height, her strange face under its diadem of jewels looking as small

in the distance as the carved image cut out of a coin. Do people not

talk even now of that night, and allude to Philibert as the last of the

benevolent despots? “He was unique,” you can still hear them say it,

“there will never be any one like him. No one can amuse the world as he

did.” And no one ever will. The War has changed all that. François I.

was his father; the Medici were his forerunners; he was the last of his

kind.

But he refined on this sensational achievement. He went farther. Only

a few realized quite how far he did go. In his most brilliant days,

I was on the point of saying during the most brilliant period of his

reign, he played plays at which he himself was the sole spectator.

I remember the occasion when a certain popular Prince, heir at that

time to one of the most solid thrones in Europe, expressed a desire to

come and shoot at the Château de Ste. Clothilde. Mrs. Carpenter had

been all of a tremble with pleasure. It was the first royal visitor

to sleep under his roof. Philibert had restored our old place in the

country, and had in five years managed by a miracle to have there the

best partridge shooting in France. “You will have a large party for His

Royal Highness, I suppose?” Mrs. Carpenter had ventured timidly. How

humble and self-effacing she had grown by that time, poor thing. “Not

at all,” replied Philibert. “There will be no women and not more than

six guns.” And he added then with a sublime simplicity unequalled, I

believe, by any monarch or any court jester in history, “When royalty

comes to Ste. Clothilde for the shooting, there is another place laid

at table, that is all.”

Poor Izzy, she was completely at a loss. No longer could she attempt

to follow him. It was Jane who understood. She looked at him curiously

through her gleaming half-closed eyes; I remember the look, while she

breathed in a whisper--“Take care, you will have nothing left to live

for.” I remember the tone of that remark.

But I am anticipating too much. I meant to speak here merely of his

matrimonial expectations. These hopes gave his person an added lustre

and his fine family nose an accentuated sneer. Nevertheless he kept

them secret: no one knew that Mrs. Carpenter even had a daughter. She

never mentioned her to any of us. On the other hand she never mentioned

Philibert in her letters to Jane. It was part of the scheme. They had

worked it out completely between them to its smallest details. Jane

would be dangerously independent. She would be in no way answerable to

her mother for all that immense lot of money. It was best then that she

should suspect nothing. She would arrive, the Marquis de Joigny would

be presented to her and would fall in love with her at first sight.

Her mother would leave her free to choose for herself. Philibert made

himself responsible for the rest.

And, in the meantime, while these two master minds were at work, Jane

still waited in the Grey House for her mother to come and fetch her,

waited as the appointed time drew near with little of the old exultant

expectancy, but instead with nervous misgiving. She was afraid of not

pleasing her mother, she was in an agony at the thought of leaving her

Aunt Patience.

And I find myself now, as I sit here, painfully counting with suspended

breath the last days of Jane’s girlhood in St. Mary’s Plains. I see

them silently slipping by over her unconscious head as she sat in the

back garden among her Aunt Patty’s hollyhocks, or walked with her

French governess along the homely streets, swinging her school books

by a strap, humming a tune under her breath, her neat modest clothes

swinging to the rhythm of her beautiful young body, her strange little

ugly ardent face lifted to the sweet air in frank animal enjoyment.

Patience Forbes stands on the front stoop between the two wooden

pillars waiting for her to come running up the path, waiting for the

generous clasp of those strong young arms, waiting to feel once more

the contact of all that pure vital youthfulness, and I hear as they sit

down to supper opposite each other, with the tall candles lighted on

the old mahogany table and the hot muffins steaming under the folded

white napkin, the sound of the grandfather clock in the hall, ticking

out the last precious fleeting moments of their time together.

This is very painful, I will not linger over it. I bring myself back,

I falter, what then am I to think of? Where turn my attention? So much

is ugly. Ah, but Jane, why go any further? Is it not enough? Is it not

clear to you as it is to me? Is there any need to say more? Was it

not all just as I say? Now that you are back there at last alone, now

that we have lost you for ever, now that you have gone, irresistibly

drawn out of your splendour to the little shabby place you loved, what

is there to torment you? Philibert, Bianca? What have they to do with

you now? They hated you. How can you be beholden to people who did you

nothing but harm? But Jane, there were some of us who adored you, and

if you had told us everything, as you at last told me, we would have

loved you only the more.

* * * * * * * * *

I sometimes wonder whether Mrs. Carpenter ever suspected what a narrow

shave she had towards the end, and how all her plans very nearly came

to nothing at the moment of their fruition because of Bianca. It is

probable that she had little more idea of the danger than a vague

uneasy suspicion that Philibert for a time was distraught by some

influence whose source she ignored. She had met Bianca but did not

connect her with Philibert; knowing almost nothing in those days of

what she would have called Philibert’s family life. There was no one to

tell her that Philibert had once wanted to marry Bianca and that old

François had refused him as a suitor for his daughter’s hand because

of his lack of fortune. Izzy knew nothing about the strange intimacy

of these two. How should she? Philibert was not likely to tell her and

certainly none of the rest of us were in the habit of discussing with

her the private affairs of our families. My mother knew of course; she

doted on Bianca, and Claire, and all the family. They had all desired

the match. Bianca was a pearl that they collectively coveted, and when

things went wrong they had all been annoyed with the old rake her

father. Aunt Clothilde had gone so far as to rap him over the knuckles

with her fan one day when he took her out to dinner, and to say in

her best rude manner--“You’ve done a pretty thing, spoiling the lives

of those two children. And what’s Bianca got from her mother? Five

hundred thousand francs a year. Just so, and you will leave her the

same when you die, which will be before long at the pace you are going.

And Philibert has nothing but his debts, but then, who knows, I might

have given him something. I’m not so in love with him as some, but

still he’s my nephew, and the two of them were made for each other. Now

you’ll see, they’ll both turn out badly.” But François only laughed as

if he were enjoying a wicked joke that he was not going to share with

her. He was always like that, chuckling to himself in a sly sort of way

that made you creep and roused the curiosity of women. Sometimes he

would stare at me with his pale, red-rimmed, half-closed eyes and that

smile on his face as if my deformity was very amusing. I hated him. I

could have told them what kind of a father he was to Bianca.

In any case she was married a year later to her well-to-do nonentity,

and we all went to the wedding, and Aunt Clo, being a near relative,

walked in the _cortège_ with François and made faces behind her prayer

book. But Philibert was white as a sheet and kicked a wretched dog out

of the way as he came down the church steps with such violence that he

broke its paw. Bianca was, I remember, as lovely and serene as a lily.

She didn’t speak to Philibert at all the day she was married. She just

kept him standing there near her, not too near, during the reception,

as if he belonged to her, as if he were a flunkey of some sort, and

never once so much as looked at him. But she spoke to me. She asked

me why I had not proposed for her hand. “I might have accepted you,

you know” she said in that small reedy penetratingly sweet voice of

hers--“just to spite them all,”--and there wasn’t a trace of a smile on

her clear curving lips. Devil--she meant it for Philibert, of course,

and of course he heard.

My mother used to say that Bianca reminded her of a very young Sir

Galahad. Claire suggested half-mockingly St. Sebastian. I thought she

was like a fox, quick and cruel with a poisonous bite. As a matter

of fact, in those days she looked a harmless little thing. Her small

snow-white square face was sweetly modelled and framed as it was by a

cap of short black hair that was cut _à la Jeanne d’Arc_, it had the

look of a mediaeval Italian angel. Only her enormous eyes very blue and

deep and her voice gave her away. If one watched closely one caught

glimpses in those eyes of the invisible monster locked up in that light

smooth body; if one listened to her voice one heard it. She seemed to

know this, and much of the time she kept her eyes lowered. Cool and

aloof and monosyllabic she hid herself, her real self, calculating her

power and economical of it, deceptive, waiting till it should be worth

her while to disengage the magic that lurked in the smooth complexity

of her little person. Her voice was not a pure single note, but a

double reedy sound that had a penetrating harmony. One remembered it

with a haunting exasperation. It was rather high in pitch, and the

words it carried did not punctuate the sound of it, but seemed to be

strung like beads on a sustained vibrating chord as if on some double

coppery wire. Each word was distinct and beautifully enunciated by

her lips without interfering with the sound that flowed through them.

There was nothing guttural or emotional about Bianca’s voice, but it

was disturbing; it irritated and seemed to correspond to some secret

nerve-centre of pleasure in the listener’s brain.

I have watched her sometimes using her voice for special purposes of

her own, but for the most part in company she tried to subdue it, and

would often stop herself in the middle of one of her rapid speeches

with a little annoyed laugh. She would then look down and move away,

but even her floating stiffly off like a rigid little broomstick with a

pair of wings or wheels on the end of it had a strange charm.

Her gestures were very restrained. She had a way of holding attention

so closely when apparently doing nothing, that when she did make the

slightest movement it conveyed exactly what she intended it to convey.

Philibert was a connoisseur fit to appreciate her, and she knew it.

They had in their precocious youth recognized each in the other a

rare complementary quality, but even in the days when Bianca with

abbreviated skirts had let me make love to her, the affinity between

Philibert and herself had made her hate him. It was a curious

attraction I thought that made them constantly want to hurt each

other. I knew well enough that Bianca was only sweet to me in order to

make Philibert angry. Sometimes in the garden of our house, where we

played while François paid his respects of my mother, she would kiss

me, looking sideways at Philibert all the time, and he would pirouette

on one toe and pretend not to care, and would yell with laughter at

me and call out--“Don’t think she loves you. You’re crooked. You will

never be any better. You can’t do this. Look at me. She loves me.” And

Bianca would turn away from us and look at him as he told her to, and

say to him--“I don’t like you at all,” and then stalk away into the

drawing room where she would wheedle from her father a succession of

lumps of sugar soaked in cognac, and if we followed we would find her

rubbing her smooth little cheek up and down against François’ whiskers

and making little gurgling noises of pleasure. François was certainly

a queer kind of father. Philibert and I could have told tales about

that.--If it had only been lumps of sugar dipped in brandy--. We took

note with a kind of shocked envy. Once she took us down to the pantry

and showed us a bottle of “Triple Sec.” “That’s the nicest,” she said,

“it’s like honey fire.”

When she was ten he turned her loose in his library, or at any rate

finding her there with some dreadful book in her lap, only laughed.

Every one knows what that library contained. Rare editions, old

bindings, a priceless collection; bibliophiles came from far to finger

those volumes. François was a discriminating collector. But for

Bianca--no one discriminated for her. One can see her like a little

greedy white lamb browsing in the poisonous herbage of that field of

knowledge. She began with the memoirs of Casanova. She had picked it

out because it was by an Italian. She was always dreaming about Italy,

her mother’s country. Her mother had died while she was a baby, but

Bianca seemed to remember her. She often spoke about her, and every

Friday went with her governess to light a candle in St. Sulpice for

the repose of her spirit. As for her literary discoveries, Philibert

alone was aware of what she was up to, and even he didn’t know much

about it. Occasionally she would drop a hint, or lend a book. She would

never have admitted even to him that she read all the books she did

read. She understood Philibert perfectly. As she grew older she allowed

him to suspect that she was wise, but not too wise. She was willing to

be for him an object of mystification, but never of vulgar curiosity.

Gradually she grew conscious of a purpose in regard to Philibert, and

I believe that this purpose had something to do with her refusing to

marry him. For, after all, she could have brought her father round had

she tried to. No, it was not her idea to marry the man she liked. Her

idea was far more amusing than that.

What happened just before Jane’s arrival in Paris was simple enough.

Bianca had been married two years. She had been to Italy and had come

back to find Philibert thick as thieves with a great grey-headed

American, and she had asked herself what this meant. It didn’t take her

long to find out. She had a way of knowing what he was up to. Probably

he told her outright, and she was not pleased. For the moment she

did not like the idea of Philibert’s marrying any one, least of all

a colossal American fortune. She was far too clever to make a scene.

She had other means of getting her own way, and now out of caprice she

exerted them. I imagine her opening her monstrous eyes just a little

wider than usual and allowing Philibert to look into them. I can see

her move ever so slightly with a small jerk of the hips and upward

undulation of her slim body, and I watch her lean forward to allow the

faint suggestion of that magic essence of hers to disengage itself from

her person, through her lifted eyelids, through her sweet parted lips,

through the tips of her long delicate fingers, and I see Philibert

falter in his talk about the American girl, and silently watch her, and

get to his feet like a man in a dream and come close but not too close.

For a fortnight she kept him like that, in a trance; everywhere he

followed her.

Mrs. Carpenter lost him. It was during the month of May. Bianca went

about a good deal that Spring and was very much admired. It was at a

big afternoon affair that I saw her, standing with Philibert looking

out at the crowded gardens. She was very young still; she was nothing

more than a very thin slip of a thing with pretty little sticks of

legs and a pair of long delicate arms hanging close to her sides, the

fingers pressed against the folds of her slinky muslin frock. She

stood very still and rather stiff, her heels together and her lovely

head just tilted very slightly away from Philibert as if she had

drawn it back quickly and gently at the sound of a disturbing murmur,

or as if perhaps she were enticing that murmur, as yet unuttered,

from his lips. I watched them. They did not look at each other. Their

eyes traced parallel lines of vision before them over the heads of

the crowd. Nothing betrayed their deep communion save this common

stillness. I did not hear them speak or see their lips move, but I know

that Philibert was speaking; I learnt afterwards what it was he was

saying.

He was asking her to bolt with him.

It was the moment of supreme danger for Izzy Carpenter. The marvellous

edifice she had so carefully fashioned with Philibert hung suspended

by a thread. Like some great gorgeous glittering chandelier with a

thousand candles hoisted into the air by Bianca’s little finger, it

hung there swaying in space, held up to the ceiling of heaven by the

thread of her hesitation. Philibert, his hands behind him holding his

top hat and gloves against the neat back of his morning coat, watched

it. Through closed teeth he had spoken without looking at his companion

and now he waited in silence. If she assented the whole thing would be

dashed to the ground in a million pieces. He took in all that it meant

for him. Like one of those drunkards whose faculties are most keen

when they are under the influence of liquor, he saw with excruciating

clearness, through the superlative excitation of Bianca’s fascination

that was working upon him, the beauty and magnitude of the thing he was

sacrificing. And yet if she had said it, the word he awaited, he would

have turned away from all that débris with a sneer, so perfectly had

Bianca made him feel that she was worth it, worth anything, worth more

than even he, with his formidable imagination could conceive of.

She didn’t say it. She didn’t say anything. She merely lowered her

head after an instant’s utter stillness and floated away from him. I

wonder if there was the slightest of smiles on her lovely averted lips.

Perhaps not. Her smile was deep down in the well of her abysmal being.

She had had an inspiration. She had thought of something much more

amusing than what he proposed. She would reveal it to him later; there

was plenty of time. Or perhaps she would never reveal it to him at all,

but just make him do as she wished without letting him know that she

had thought of it long before. In any case she would leave him alone

now.

And so Mrs. Carpenter was saved and went to America to fetch Jane.