_ His friend Webster meanwhile lost no time in accusing him of the basest
infidelity and in asking him what he found at suburban Saint-Germain to
prefer to Van Eyck and Memling, Rubens and Rembrandt. A day or two after
the receipt of this friend's letter he took a walk with Madame de Mauves
in the forest. They sat down on a fallen log and she began to arrange
into a bouquet the anemones and violets she had gathered. "I've a word
here," he said at last, "from a friend whom I some time ago promised to
join in Brussels. The time has come--it has passed. It finds me terribly
unwilling to leave Saint-Germain."
She looked up with the immediate interest she always showed in his
affairs, but with no hint of a disposition to make a personal
application of his words. "Saint-Germain is pleasant enough, but are you
doing yourself justice? Shan't you regret in future days that instead of
travelling and seeing cities and monuments and museums and improving
your mind you simply sat here--for instance--on a log and pulled my
flowers to pieces?"
"What I shall regret in future days," he answered after some hesitation,
"is that I should have sat here--sat here so much--and never have shown
what's the matter with me. I'm fond of museums and monuments and of
improving my mind, and I'm particularly fond of my friend Webster. But I
can't bring myself to leave Saint-Germain without asking you a question.
You must forgive me if it's indiscreet and be assured that curiosity was
never more respectful. Are you really as unhappy as I imagine you to
be?"
She had evidently not expected his appeal, and, making her change
colour, it took her unprepared. "If I strike you as unhappy," she none
the less simply said, "I've been a poorer friend to you than I wished to
be."
"I, perhaps, have been a better friend of yours than you've supposed,"
he returned. "I've admired your reserve, your courage, your studied
gaiety. But I've felt the existence of something beneath them that was
more YOU--more you as I wished to know you--than they were; some
trouble in you that I've permitted myself to hate and resent."
She listened all gravely, but without an air of offence, and he felt
that while he had been timorously calculating the last consequences of
friendship she had quietly enough accepted them. "You surprise me," she
said slowly, and her flush still lingered. "But to refuse to answer you
would confirm some impression in you even now much too strong. Any
'trouble'--if you mean any unhappiness--that one can sit comfortably
talking about is an unhappiness with distinct limitations. If I were
examined before a board of commissioners for testing the felicity of
mankind I'm sure I should be pronounced a very fortunate woman." There
was something that deeply touched him in her tone, and this quality
pierced further as she continued. "But let me add, with all gratitude
for your sympathy, that it's my own affair altogether. It needn't
disturb you, my dear sir," she wound up with a certain quaintness of
gaiety, "for I've often found myself in your company contented enough
and diverted enough."
"Well, you're a wonderful woman," the young man declared, "and I admire
you as I've never admired any one. You're wiser than anything I, for
one, can say to you; and what I ask of you is not to let me advise or
console you, but simply thank you for letting me know you." He had
intended no such outburst as this, but his voice rang loud and he felt
an unfamiliar joy as he uttered it.
She shook her head with some impatience. "Let us be friends--as I
supposed we were going to be--without protestations and fine words. To
have you paying compliments to my wisdom--that would be real
wretchedness. I can dispense with your admiration better than the
Flemish painters can--better than Van Eyck and Rubens, in spite of all
their worshippers. Go join your friend--see everything, enjoy
everything, learn everything, and write me an excellent letter, brimming
over with your impressions. I'm extremely fond of the Dutch painters,"
she added with the faintest quaver in the world, an impressible break of
voice that Longmore had noticed once or twice before and had interpreted
as the sudden weariness, the controlled convulsion, of a spirit self-
condemned to play a part.
"I don't believe you care a button for the Dutch painters," he said with
a laugh. "But I shall certainly write you a letter."
She rose and turned homeward, thoughtfully rearranging her flowers as
she walked. Little was said; Longmore was asking himself with an
agitation of his own in the unspoken words whether all this meant simply
that he was in love. He looked at the rooks wheeling against the golden-
hued sky, between the tree-tops, but not at his companion, whose
personal presence seemed lost in the felicity she had created. Madame de
Mauves was silent and grave--she felt she had almost grossly failed and
she was proportionately disappointed. An emotional friendship she had
not desired; her scheme had been to pass with her visitor as a placid
creature with a good deal of leisure which she was disposed to devote to
profitable conversation of an impersonal sort. She liked him extremely,
she felt in him the living force of something to which, when she made up
her girlish mind that a needy nobleman was the ripest fruit of time, she
had done too scant justice. They went through the little gate in the
garden-wall and approached the house. On the terrace Madame Clairin was
entertaining a friend--a little elderly gentleman with a white moustache
and an order in his buttonhole. Madame de Mauves chose to pass round the
house into the court; whereupon her sister-in-law, greeting Longmore
with an authoritative nod, lifted her eye-glass and stared at them as
they went by. Longmore heard the little old gentleman uttering some old-
fashioned epigram about "la vieille galanterie francaise"--then by a
sudden impulse he looked at Madame de Mauves and wondered what she was
doing in such a world. She stopped before the house, not asking him to
come in. "I hope you will act on my advice and waste no more time at
Saint-Germain."
For an instant there rose to his lips some faded compliment about his
time not being wasted, but it expired before the simple sincerity of her
look. She stood there as gently serious as the angel of
disinterestedness, and it seemed to him he should insult her by treating
her words as a bait for flattery. "I shall start in a day or two," he
answered, "but I won't promise you not to come back."
"I hope not," she said simply. "I expect to be here a long time."
"I shall come and say good-bye," he returned--which she appeared to
accept with a smile as she went in.
He stood a moment, then walked slowly homeward by the terrace. It seemed
to him that to leave her thus, for a gain on which she herself insisted,
was to know her better and admire her more. But he was aware of a vague
ferment of feeling which her evasion of his question half an hour before
had done more to deepen than to allay. In the midst of it suddenly, on
the great terrace of the Chateau, he encountered M. de Mauves, planted
there against the parapet and finishing a cigar. The Count, who, he
thought he made out, had an air of peculiar affability, offered him his
white plump hand. Longmore stopped; he felt a sharp, a sore desire to
cry out to him that he had the most precious wife in the world, that he
ought to be ashamed of himself not to know it, and that for all his
grand assurance he had never looked down into the depths of her eyes.
Richard de Mauves, we have seen, considered he had; but there was
doubtless now something in this young woman's eyes that had not been
there five years before. The two men conversed formally enough, and M.
de Mauves threw off a light bright remark or two about his visit to
America. His tone was not soothing to Longmore's excited sensibilities.
He seemed to have found the country a gigantic joke, and his blandness
went but so far as to allow that jokes on that scale are indeed
inexhaustible. Longmore was not by habit an aggressive apologist for the
seat of his origin, but the Count's easy diagnosis confirmed his worst
estimate of French superficiality. He had understood nothing, felt
nothing, learned nothing, and his critic, glancing askance at his
aristocratic profile, declared that if the chief merit of a long
pedigree was to leave one so fatuously stupid he thanked goodness the
Longmores had emerged from obscurity in the present century and in the
person of an enterprising timber-merchant. M. de Mauves dwelt of course
on that prime oddity of the American order--the liberty allowed the
fairer half of the unmarried young, and confessed to some personal study
of the "occasions" it offered to the speculative visitor; a line of
research in which, during a fortnight's stay, he had clearly spent his
most agreeable hours. "I'm bound to admit," he said, "that in every case
I was disarmed by the extreme candour of the young lady, and that they
took care of themselves to better purpose than I have seen some mammas
in France take care of them." Longmore greeted this handsome concession
with the grimmest of smiles and damned his impertinent patronage.
Mentioning, however, at last that he was about to leave Saint-Germain,
he was surprised, without exactly being flattered, by his interlocutor's
quickened attention. "I'm so very sorry; I hoped we had you for the
whole summer." Longmore murmured something civil and wondered why M. de
Mauves should care whether he stayed or went. "You've been a real
resource to Madame de Mauves," the Count added; "I assure you I've
mentally blessed your visits."
"They were a great pleasure to me," Longmore said gravely. "Some day I
expect to come back."
"Pray do"--and the Count made a great and friendly point of it. "You see
the confidence I have in you." Longmore said nothing and M. de Mauves
puffed his cigar reflectively and watched the smoke. "Madame de Mauves,"
he said at last, "is a rather singular person." And then while our young
man shifted his position and wondered whether he was going to "explain"
Madame de Mauves, "Being, as you are, her fellow countryman," this
lady's husband pursued, "I don't mind speaking frankly. She's a little
overstrained; the most charming woman in the world, as you see, but a
little volontaire and morbid. Now you see she has taken this
extraordinary fancy for solitude. I can't get her to go anywhere, to see
any one. When my friends present themselves she's perfectly polite, but
it cures them of coming again. She doesn't do herself justice, and I
expect every day to hear two or three of them say to me, 'Your wife's
jolie a croquer: what a pity she hasn't a little esprit.' You must have
found out that she has really a great deal. But, to tell the whole
truth, what she needs is to forget herself. She sits alone for hours
poring over her English books and looking at life through that terrible
brown fog they seem to me--don't they?--to fling over the world. I doubt
if your English authors," the Count went on with a serenity which
Longmore afterwards characterised as sublime, "are very sound reading
for young married women. I don't pretend to know much about them; but I
remember that not long after our marriage Madame de Mauves undertook to
read me one day some passages from a certain Wordsworth--a poet highly
esteemed, it appears, chez vous. It was as if she had taken me by the
nape of the neck and held my head for half an hour over a basin of soupe
aux choux: I felt as if we ought to ventilate the drawing-room before
any one called. But I suppose you know him--ce genie-la. Every nation
has its own ideals of every kind, but when I remember some of OUR
charming writers! I think at all events my wife never forgave me and
that it was a real shock to her to find she had married a man who had
very much the same taste in literature as in cookery. But you're a man
of general culture, a man of the world," said M. de Mauves, turning to
Longmore but looking hard at the seal of his watchguard. "You can talk
about everything, and I'm sure you like Alfred de Musset as well as
Monsieur Wordsworth. Talk to her about everything you can, Alfred de
Musset included. Bah! I forgot you're going. Come back then as soon as
possible and report on your travels. If my wife too would make a little
voyage it would do her great good. It would enlarge her horizon"--and M.
de Mauves made a series of short nervous jerks with his stick in the
air--"it would wake up her imagination. She's too much of one piece, you
know--it would show her how much one may bend without breaking." He
paused a moment and gave two or three vigorous puffs. Then turning to
his companion again with eyebrows expressively raised: "I hope you
admire my candour. I beg you to believe I wouldn't say such things to
one of US!"
Evening was at hand and the lingering light seemed to charge the air
with faintly golden motes. Longmore stood gazing at these luminous
particles; he could almost have fancied them a swarm of humming insects,
the chorus of a refrain: "She has a great deal of esprit--she has a
great deal of esprit." "Yes,--she has a great deal," he said
mechanically, turning to the Count. M. de Mauves glanced at him sharply,
as if to ask what the deuce he was talking about. "She has a great deal
of intelligence," said Longmore quietly, "a great deal of beauty, a
great many virtues."
M. de Mauves busied himself for a moment in lighting another cigar, and
when he had finished, with a return of his confidential smile, "I
suspect you of thinking that I don't do my wife justice." he made
answer. "Take care--take care, young man; that's a dangerous assumption.
In general a man always does his wife justice. More than justice," the
Count laughed--"that we keep for the wives of other men!"
Longmore afterwards remembered in favour of his friend's fine manner
that he had not measured at this moment the dusky abyss over which it
hovered. Hut a deepening subterranean echo, loudest at the last,
lingered on his spiritual ear. For the present his keenest sensation was
a desire to get away and cry aloud that M. de Mauves was no better than
a pompous dunce. He bade him an abrupt good-night, which was to serve
also, he said, as good-bye.
"Decidedly then you go?" It was spoken almost with the note of
irritation.
"Decidedly."
"But of course you'll come and take leave--?" His manner implied that
the omission would be uncivil, but there seemed to Longmore himself
something so ludicrous in his taking a lesson in consideration from M.
de Mauves that he put the appeal by with a laugh. The Count frowned as
if it were a new and unpleasant sensation for him to be left at a loss.
"Ah you people have your facons!" he murmured as Longmore turned away,
not foreseeing that he should learn still more about his facons before
he had done with him.
Longmore sat down to dinner at his hotel with his usual good intentions,
but in the act of lifting his first glass of wine to his lips he
suddenly fell to musing and set down the liquor untasted. This mood
lasted long, and when he emerged from it his fish was cold; but that
mattered little, for his appetite was gone. That evening he packed his
trunk with an indignant energy. This was so effective that the operation
was accomplished before bedtime, and as he was not in the least sleepy
he devoted the interval to writing two letters, one of them a short note
to Madame de Mauves, which he entrusted to a servant for delivery the
next morning. He had found it best, he said, to leave Saint-Germain
immediately, but he expected to return to Paris early in the autumn. The
other letter was the result of his having remembered a day or two before
that he had not yet complied with Mrs. Draper's injunction to give her
an account of his impression of her friend. The present occasion seemed
propitious, and he wrote half a dozen pages. His tone, however, was
grave, and Mrs. Draper, on reading him over, was slightly disappointed--
she would have preferred he should have "raved" a little more. But what
chiefly concerns us is the concluding passage.
"The only time she ever spoke to me of her marriage," he wrote, "she
intimated that it had been a perfect love-match. With all abatements, I
suppose, this is what most marriages take themselves to be; but it would
mean in her case, I think, more than in that of most women, for her love
was an absolute idealisation. She believed her husband to be a hero of
rose-coloured romance, and he turns out to be not even a hero of very
sad-coloured reality. For some time now she has been sounding her
mistake, but I don't believe she has yet touched the bottom. She strikes
me as a person who's begging off from full knowledge--who has patched up
a peace with some painful truth and is trying a while the experiment of
living with closed eyes. In the dark she tries to see again the gilding
on her idol. Illusion of course is illusion, and one must always pay for
it; but there's something truly tragical in seeing an earthly penalty
levied on such divine folly as this. As for M. de Mauves he's a shallow
Frenchman to his fingers' ends, and I confess I should dislike him for
this if he were a much better man. He can't forgive his wife for having
married him too extravagantly and loved him too well; since he feels, I
suppose, in some uncorrupted corner of his being that as she originally
saw him so he ought to have been. It disagrees with him somewhere that a
little American bourgeoise should have fancied him a finer fellow than
he is or than he at all wants to be. He hasn't a glimmering of real
acquaintance with his wife; he can't understand the stream of passion
flowing so clear and still. To tell the truth I hardly understand it
myself, but when I see the sight I find I greatly admire it. The Count
at any rate would have enjoyed the comfort of believing his wife as bad
a case as himself, and you'll hardly believe me when I assure you he
goes about intimating to gentlemen whom he thinks it may concern that it
would be a convenience to him they should make love to Madame de
Mauves." _