nothing to do with the length of time devoted by Monsieur Duchemin to
kicking idle heels in the town of Nant; where the civil authorities
proved considerate in a degree that--even making allowance for the
local prestige of the house of Montalais--gratified and surprised the
confirmed Parisian. For that was just what the good man was at heart
and would be till he died, the form in which environment of younger
years had moulded him: less French than Parisian, sharing the almost
insular ignorance of life in the provinces characteristic of the native
boulevardier; to whom the sun is truly nothing more or less than a
spotlight focussed exclusively on Paris, leaving the rest of France in
a sort of crepuscular gloom, the world besides steeped in eternal
night.
The driver-guide of La Roque turned out to have been a thorough-paced
scamp, well and ill-known to the gendarmerie; the wound sustained by
Monsieur d'Aubrac bore testimony to the gravity of the affair, amply
excusing Duchemin's interference and its fatal sequel; while the
statements of Mesdames de Sévénié et de Montalais, duly becoming public
property, bade fair to exalt the local reputation of André Duchemin to
heroic stature. And, naturally, his papers were unimpeachable.
So that he found himself, before his acquaintance with Nant was
thirty-six hours of age, free once more to humour the dictates of his
own sweet will, to go on to Nimes (his professed objective) or to the
devil if he liked. A freedom which, consistent with the native
inconsistency of man, he exercised by electing to stop over in Nant for
another day or two, at least; assuring himself that he found the town
altogether charming, more so even than Meyrueis--and sometimes
believing this fiction for as much as twenty minutes at a stretch.
Besides, the weather was unsettled ....
The inn, which went by the unpretending style of the Grand Hôtel de
l'Univers, he found clean, comfortable, and as to its cuisine
praiseworthy. The windows of the cubicle in which he had been
lodged--one of ten which sufficed for the demands of the itinerant
Universe--not only overlooked the public square and its amusing life of
a minor market town, but commanded as well a splendid vista of the
valley of the Dourbie, with its piquant contrast of luxuriant alluvial
verdure and grim scarps of rock that ran up, on either side the wanton,
glimmering river, into two opposed and overshadowing pinnacles of crag,
the Roc Nantais and the Roc de Saint Alban--peaks each a rendezvous
just then for hosts of cloud that scowled forbiddingly down upon the
peaceful, sun-drenched valley.
Moreover, even from the terrasse of the café below, one needed only to
lift one's eyes to see, afar, perched high upon a smiling slope of
green, with the highway to Millau at its foot and a beetling cliff
behind, the Château de Montalais. Seated on that terrasse, late in the
afternoon of his second day in Nant, discussing a Picon and a
villainous caporal cigarette of the Régie (to whose products a rugged
constitution was growing slowly reconciled anew) Duchemin let his
vision dwell upon the distant château almost as constantly as his
thoughts.
He was to dine there that very evening. Even taking into account the
signal service Duchemin had rendered, this wasn't easy to believe when
one remembered the tradition of social conservatism among French
gentlefolk. Still, it was true: Duchemin of the open road was bidden to
dine en famille at the Château de Montalais. In his pocket lay the
invitation, penned in the crabbed antique hand of Madame de Sévénié and
fetched to the hotel by a servitor quite as crabbed and antique:
Monsieur Duchemin would confer a true pleasure by enabling the ladies
of the château to testify, even so inadequately, to their sense of
obligation, etc.; with a postscript to say that Monsieur d'Aubrac was
resting easily, his wound mending as rapidly as heart could wish.
Of course Duchemin was going, had in fact already despatched his
acceptance by the hand of the same messenger. Equally of course he knew
that he ought not to go. For a man of his years he was, as a matter of
training and habit, amazingly honest with himself. He knew quite well
what bent his inclination toward visiting the Château de Montalais just
once before effecting, what he was resolved upon, a complete
evanishment from the ken of its people. He had yet to hold one minute
of private conversation with Eve de Montalais, he had of her no sign to
warrant his thinking her anything but utterly indifferent to him; and
yet....
No; he wasn't ass enough to dream that he was in love with the woman;
to the contrary, he was wise enough, knew himself well enough, to know
that he could be, easily, and would be, given half a chance to lose his
head.
His warning had been clear beyond mistake, in that hour in the motor
car on the road from La Roque to Nant, when Nature, as she sometimes
will, incautiously had shown her hand to one whom she herself had
schooled to read shrewdly, letting him discern what was her will with
him, the snare that was laid for his feet and in which he must soon
find himself trapped beyond extrication ... always providing he lacked
the wit and resolution to fly his peril, who knew through bitterest of
learning that love was never for him.
Now he had seen Madame de Montalais another time, and had found that
she fitted to the sweetest detail of perfection his ideal of Woman.
On the previous afternoon, meeting the ladies of the château by
arrangement in the bureau of the maire, Duchemin had sat opposite and
watched and listened to Eve de Montalais for upwards of two hours--as
completely devoted to covert study of her as if she had been the one
woman in the room, as if the girl Louise, Madame de Sévénié, and the
officials and functionaries of Nant had not existed in the same world
with her. And in that tedious and constrained time of formalities he
had learned much about her, but first of all, thanks to the
uncompromising light of day that filled the cheerless room, that
moonlight had not enhanced but rather tempered the charms of person
which had the night before so stirred his pulses.
Posed with consummate grace in a comfortless chair, a figure of slender
elegance in her half-mourning, she had narrated quietly her version of
last night's misadventure, an occasional tremor of humour lightening
the moving modulations of her voice. A deep and vibrant voice,
contralto in quality, hinting at hidden treasures of strength in the
woman whose superficial mind it expressed. A fair woman, slim but
round, with brown eyes level and calm, a translucent skin of matchless
texture, hair the hue of bronze laced with intimations of gold ...
Her story told, and taken down in longhand by a withered clerk, she
supplied without reluctance or trace of embarrassment such intimate
personal information as was necessary in order that her signature to
the document might be acceptable to the State.
Her age, she said, was twenty-nine; her birthplace, the City of New
York; her parents, Edmund Anstruther, once of Bath, England, but at the
time of her birth a naturalised citizen of the United States, and Eve
Marie Anstruther, née Legendre, of Paris. Both were dead. In June 1914
she had married, in Paris, Victor Maurice de Montalais, who had been
killed in action at La Fère-Champenoise on the ninth of September
following. Her home? The Château de Montalais.
On the hand she stripped in order to sign her deposition Duchemin saw a
blue diamond of such superb water that this amateur of precious stones
caught his breath for sheer wonder at its beauty and excellence and
worth. Such jewels, he knew, were few and far to seek outside the
collections of princes.
Out of these simple elements imagination reconstructed a tragedy, a
tragedy of life singularly close to the truth as he later came to learn
it, a story not at all calculated to lessen his interest in the woman.
Such women, he knew, are the product of a cultivation seldom to be
achieved by poverty. This one had been made before, and not by, her
marriage. Her father, then, had commanded riches. And when one knew, as
Duchemin knew, what delights New York has for young women of wealth and
fashion, one perceived a radiant and many-coloured background for this
drab life of a recluse, expatriate from the high world of her
inheritance, which Eve de Montalais must lead, and for the six years of
her premature widowhood must have led, in that lonely château, buried
deep in the loneliest hills of all France, the sole companion and
comfort of her husband's bereaved sister and grandmother, chained by
sorrow to their sorrow, by an inexorable reluctance to give them pain
by seeming to slight the memory of the husband, brother and grandson
through turning her face toward the world of life and light and gaiety
of which she was so essentially a part, isolate from which she was so
inevitably a thing existing without purpose or effect.
How often, Duchemin wondered, had she in hours of solitude and
restlessness felt her spirit yearning toward Paris, the nearest gateway
to her world, and had cried out: How long, O Lord! how long?...
The mellow resonance of a two-toned automobile horn, disturbing the
early evening hush and at the same time Duchemin's meditations,
recalled him to Nant in time to see a touring car of majestic
proportions and mien which, coming from the south, from the direction
of the railroad and Nimes, was sweeping a fine curve round two sides of
the public square. Arriving in front of the Hôtel de l'Univers it
executed a full stop and stood curbed yet palpitant, purring heavily:
an impressive brute of a car, all shining silver plate and lustrous
green paint and gold, the newest model of the costliest and best
automobile manufactured in France.
Instantly, as the wheels ceased to turn, a young man in the smartest
livery imaginable, green garnished with gold, leaped smartly from the
driver's seat, with military precision opened the door of the tonneau
and, holding it, immobilised himself into the semblance of a waxwork
image with the dispassionate eye, the firm mouth, and the closely
razored, square jowls of the model chauffeur. Rustics and townsfolk
were already gathering, a gaping audience, when from the tonneau
descended first a long and painfully emaciated gentleman, whose face
was a cadaverous mask of settled melancholy and his chosen toilette for
motoring (as might be seen through the open and flapping front of his
ulster) a tightly tailored light grey cutaway coat and trousers, with a
double-breasted white waistcoat, a black satin Ascot scarf transfixed
by a single splendid pearl, and spotless white spats.
His hand, as gaunt as a skeleton's, assisted to alight a young woman
whose brilliant blonde beauty, viewed for the first time in evening
shadows, was like a shaft of sunlight in a darkened room. A well-made
creature, becomingly and modishly gowned for motoring, spirited yet
dignified in carriage, she was like a vision of, as she was palpably a
visitation from, the rue de la Paix.
Following her, a third passenger presented the well-nourished, indeed
rotund, person of a Frenchman of thirty devoted to "le Sport"; as
witness his aggressively English tweeds and the single glass screwed
into his right eye-socket. His face was chubby, pink and white, his
look was merry, he was magnificently self-conscious and débonnaire.
Like shapes from some superbly costumed pageant of High Life in the
Twentieth Century this trio drifted, rather than merely walked like
mortals, across the terrasse and into the Café de l'Univers (which
seemed suddenly to shrink in proportion as if reminded of its
comparative insignificance in the Scheme of Things) where an awed staff
of waiters, led by the overpowered propriétaires, monsieur et madame
themselves, welcomed these apparitions from Another and A Better World
with bowings and scrapings and a vast bustle and movement of chairs and
tables; while all Nant, all of it, that is, that was accustomed to
foregather in the café at this the hour of the aperitif, looked on with
awed and envious eyes.
It was all very theatrical and inspiring--to Monsieur Duchemin, too;
who, lost in the shuffle of Nant and content to be so, murmured to
himself that serviceable and comforting word of the time, "Profiteers!"
and contemplated with some satisfaction his personal superiority to
such as these.
But there was more and better to come.
There remained in the car a mere average man, undistinguished but by a
lack of especial distinction, sober of habit, economical of gesture,
dressed in a simple lounge suit such as anybody might wear, beneath a
rough and ready-made motorcoat. When the car stopped he had stood up in
his place beside the chauffeur as if meaning to get out, but rather
remained motionless, resting a hand on the windshield and thoughtfully
gazing northwards along the road that, skirting the grounds of the
Château de Montalais, disappeared from view round the sleek shoulder of
a hill.
Now as the pattern chauffeur shut the door to the tonneau with the
properly arrogant slam, the man who lingered in the car nodded gravely
to some private thought, unlatched the door, got down, and turned
toward the café, but before following his companions of more brilliant
plumage paused for a quiet word with the chauffeur.
"We dine here, Jules," he announced in English.
Settling into place behind the wheel Jules saluted with fine finish and
deference.
"Very good, Mr. Phinuit, sir," he said meekly, in the same tongue. To
this he added, coolly, without the least flicker of a glance aside,
without moving one muscle other than those involved by the act of
speech, and in precisely the tone of respect that became his livery:
"What's the awful idea, you big stiff?"
Mr. Phinuit betrayed not the slightest sense of anything untoward in
this mode of address, but looked round to the chauffeur with a slow,
not unfriendly smile.
"Why," he said pleasantly--"you misbegotten garage hound--why do you
ask?"
In the same manner Jules replied: "Can't you see it's going to rain?"
Mr. Phinuit cocked a calm, observant eye heavenwards. Involuntarily but
unobtrusively, under cover of the little tubbed trees that hedged the
terrasse apart from the square, Duchemin did likewise, and so
discovered, or for the first time appreciated, the cause of the
uncommonly early dusk that loured over Nant.
Between the sentinel peaks that towered above the valley black
battalions of storm cloud were fraternising, joining forces, coalescing
into a vast and formidable army of ominous aspect.
"So it is," Mr. Phinuit commented amiably; indeed, not without a
certain hint of satisfaction. "Blessed if you don't see everything!"
"Well, then: what about it?"
"Why, _I_ should say you'd better find a place to put the car under
cover in case it comes on to storm before we're finished--and put up
the top."
"You don't mean to go on in the rain?" Jules protested--yet studiously
in no tone of protest.
"But naturally..."
"How do you get that way? Do you want us all to get soaked to our
skins?"
"My dear Jules!" Mr. Phinuit returned with a winning smile--"I don't
give a tupenny damn if we do." With that he went to join his company;
while Jules, once the other's back was turned, permitted himself, for
the sake of his own respect and the effect upon the assembled audience,
the luxury of a shrug that outrivalled words in expression of his
personal opinion of the madness that contemplated further travel on
such a night as this promised to be.
Then, like the well-trained servant that he was not, he meshed gears
silently and swung the car away to seek shelter, taking with him the
sympathy as well as the wonder of the one witness of this bit of
by-play who had been able to understand the tongue in which it was
couched; and who, knowing too well what rain in those hills could mean,
was beginning to regret that his invitation to the château had not been
for another night.
As for the somewhat unusual tone of the passage to which he had just
listened, his nimble wits could invent half a dozen plausible
explanations. It was quite possible, indeed when one judged Mr. Phinuit
by his sobriety in contrast with the gaiety of the others it seemed
quite plausible, that he was equally with Jules a paid employee of
those ostensible nouveaux riches: and that the two, the chauffeur and
the courier (or whatever Mr. Phinuit was in his subordinate social
rating) were accustomed to amuse themselves by indulging in reciprocal
abuse.
But what Duchemin could by no means fathom was the reason why Phinuit
should choose, and how he should rule the choice of his party, in the
face of such threatening weather, to stop in Nant for an early
dinner--with Millau only an hour away and the chances fair that before
the storm broke the automobile would reach the latter city with its
superior hotel and restaurant accommodations.
But it was after all none of the business of André Duchemin. He lighted
another cigarette, observing the group of strangers in Nant with an
open inquisitiveness wholly Gallic, therefore inconspicuous. The entire
clientèle of the Café de l'Univers was doing the same; Mr. Phinuit's
party was the focal point of between twenty and thirty pair of staring
eyes, and was enduring this with much equanimity.
Mr. Phinuit was conferring earnestly over the menu with madame la
propriétaire. The others were ordering aperitifs of a waiter. Through
the clatter of tongues that filled the café one caught the phrase
"veeskysoda" uttered by the monsieur in tweeds. Then the tall man
consulted the beautiful lady as to her preference, and Duchemin caught
the words "madame la comtesse" spoken in the rasping nasal drawl of an
American.
Evidently a person of rich humour, the speaker: "madame la comtesse"
was abruptly convulsed with laughter; the chubby gentleman roared; Mr.
Phinuit looked up from the carte with an enquiring, receptive smile;
the waiter grinned broadly. But the cause of all this merriment wore
only an expression of slightly pained bewilderment on his death-mask of
a face.
At that moment arrived the calèche which Duchemin had commanded to
drive him to the château; and with a ride of two miles before him and
rain imminent, he had no more time to waste.
VI
VISITATION
Dinner was served in a vast and sombre hall whose darkly panelled walls
and high-beamed ceiling bred a multitude of shadows that danced about
the table a weird, spasmodic saraband, without meaning or end,
restlessly advancing and retreating as the candles flickered, failed
and flared in the gusty draughts.
There was (Duchemin learned) no other means of illumination but by
candle-light in the entire château. The time-old structure had been
thoroughly renovated and modernised in most respects, it was furnished
with taste and reverence (one could guess whose the taste and purse)
but Madame de Sévénié remained its undisputed chatelaine, a belated
spirit of the ancien régime, stubbornly set against the conveniences of
this degenerate age. Electric lighting she would never countenance. The
telephone she esteemed a convenience for tradespeople and vulgarians in
general, beneath the dignity of leisured quality. The motor car she
disapproved yet tolerated because, for all her years, she was of a
brisk and active turn and liked to get about, whereas since the War
good horseflesh was difficult to find in France and men to care for it
more scarce still.
So much, and more besides, she communicated to Duchemin at intervals
during the meal, comporting herself toward him with graciousness not
altogether innocent of a certain faded coquetry. Having spoken of
herself as one born too late for her time, she paused and eyed him
keenly, a gleam of light malice in her bright old eyes.
"And you, too, monsieur," she added suddenly. "But you, I think, belong
to an even earlier day..."
"I, madame? And why do you say that?"
"I should have been guillotined under the Terror; but you, monsieur,
you should have been hanged long before that--hanged for a buccaneer on
the Spanish Main."
"Madame may be right," said Duchemin, amused. "And quite possibly I
was, you know."
Then he wondered a little, and began to cultivate some respect for the
shrewdness of her intuitions.
He sat on her left, the place of honour going by custom immemorial to
monsieur le curé of Nant. For all that, Duchemin declined to feel
slighted. Was he not on the right of Eve de Montalais?
The girl Louise was placed between the curé and her sister-in-law.
Duchemia could not have been guilty of the offence of ignoring her; but
the truth is that, save when courtesy demanded that he pay her some
attention, he hardly saw her. She was pretty enough, but very quiet and
self-absorbed, a slender, nervous creature with that pathetically eager
look peculiar to her age and caste in France, starving for the life she
might not live till marriage should set her free. A pale and
ineffective wraith beside Eve, whose beauty, relieved in candleglow
against the background of melting darkness, burned like some rare
exotic flower set before a screen of lustreless black velvet. And like
a flower to the sun she responded to the homage of his admiration
--which he was none the less studious to preserve from the sin
of obviousness. For he was well aware that her response was
impersonal; it was not his but any admiration that she craved as a
parched land wants rain.
Less than three months a wife, more than five years a widow, still
young and ardent, nearing the noontide of her womanhood, and immolated
in this house of perennial mourning, making vain oblation of her youth,
her beauty, the rich wine of life that coursed so lustily through her
being, upon the altar of a memory whose high priestess was only an old,
old woman....
He perceived that it would be quite possible for him, did he yield to
the bent of his sympathies, to dislike Madame de Sévénié most
intensely.
Not that he was apt to have much opportunity to encourage such a
gratuitous aversion: to-morrow would see him on the road again, his
back forever turned to the Château de Montalais....
Or, if not to-morrow, then as soon as the storm abated.
It was raging now as if it would never weaken and had the will to raze
the château though it were the task of a thousand years. From time to
time the shock of some great blast of air would seem to rock upon its
foundations even that ancient pile, those heavy walls of hewn stone
builded in times of honest workmanship by forgotten Sieurs de Montalais
who had meant their home to outlast the ages.
Rain in sheets sluiced the windows without rest. Round turrets and
gables the wind raved and moaned like a famished wild thing denied its
kill. Occasionally a venturesome gust with the spirit of a minor demon
would find its way down the chimney to the drawing-room fire and send
sparks in volleys against the screen, with thin puffs of wood smoke
that lingered in the air like acrid ghosts.
At such times the curé, sitting at piquet with Madame de Sévénié, after
dinner, would cough distressingly and, reminded that he had a bed to
reach somehow through all this welter, anathematise the elements, help
himself to a pinch of snuff, and proceed with his play.
Duchemin sat at a little distance, talking with Madame de Montalais
over their cigarettes. To smoking, curiously enough, Madame de Sévénié
offered no objection. Women had not smoked in her day, and she for her
part would never. But Eve might: it was "done"; even in those circles
of hidebound conservatism, the society of the Faubourg St. Germain,
ladies of this day smoked unrebuked.
Louise had excused herself--to sit, Duchemin had no doubt, by the
bedside of d'Aubrac, under the duenna-like eye of an old nurse of the
family.
Being duly encouraged, Duchemin talked about himself, of his wanderings
and adventures, all with discretion, with the neatest expurgations, and
with an object, leading cunningly round to the subject of New York.
At mention of it he saw a new light kindle in Eve's eyes. Her breath
came more quickly, gentle emotion agitated her bosom.
Monsieur knew New York?
But well: he had been there as a boy, again as a young man; and then
later, in the year when America entered the Great War; not since ...
"It is my home," said Eve de Montalais softly, looking away.
(One noted that she said "is"--not "was.")
So Duchemin had understood. Madame had not visited her home recently?
Not in many years; not in fact since nineteen-thirteen. She assumed the
city must have changed greatly.