Madame De Mauves

“I was not aware,” he said, turning to Madame de Mauves, “that I might congratulate you on the return of monsieur.”

“You should at once have known it,” she immediately answered, “if I had expected such a pleasure.”

She had turned very pale, and Longmore felt this to be a first meeting after some commotion. “My return was unexpected to myself,” he said to her husband. “I came back last night.”

M. de Mauves seemed to express such satisfaction as could consort with a limited interest. “It’s needless for me to make you welcome. Madame de Mauves knows the duties of hospitality.” And with another bow he continued his walk.

She pursued her homeward course with her friend, neither of them pretending much not to consent to appear silent. The Count’s few moments with them had both chilled Longmore and angered him, casting a shadow across a prospect which had somehow, just before, begun to open and almost to brighten. He watched his companion narrowly as they went, and wondered what she had last had to suffer. Her husband’s presence had checked her disposition to talk, though nothing betrayed she had recognised his making a point at her expense. Yet if matters were none the less plainly at a crisis between them he could but wonder vainly what it was on her part that prevented some practical protest or some rupture. What did she suspect?—how much did she know? To what was she resigned?—how much had she forgiven? How, above all, did she reconcile with knowledge, or with suspicion, that intense consideration she had just now all but assured him she entertained? “She has loved him once,” Longmore said with a sinking of the heart, “and with her to love once is to commit herself for ever. Her clever husband thinks her too prim. What would a stupid poet call it?” He relapsed with aching impotence into the sense of her being somehow beyond him, unattainable, immeasurable by his own fretful logic. Suddenly he gave three passionate switches in the air with his cane which made Madame de Mauves look round. She could hardly have guessed their signifying that where ambition was so vain the next best thing to it was the very ardour of hopelessness.

She found in her drawing-room the little elderly Frenchman, M. de Chalumeau, whom Longmore had observed a few days before on the terrace. On this occasion too Madame Clairin was entertaining him, but as her sister-in-law came in she surrendered her post and addressed herself to our hero. Longmore, at thirty, was still an ingenuous youth, and there was something in this lady’s large assured attack that fairly intimidated him. He was doubtless not as reassured as he ought to have been at finding he had not absolutely forfeited her favour by his want of resource during their last interview, and a suspicion of her being prepared to approach him on another line completed his distress.

“So you’ve returned from Brussels by way of the forest?” she archly asked.

“I’ve not been to Brussels. I returned yesterday from Paris by the only way—by the train.”

Madame Clairin was infinitely struck. “I’ve never known a person at all to be so fond of Saint-Germain. They generally declare it’s horribly dull.”

“That’s not very polite to you,” said Longmore, vexed at his lack of superior form and determined not to be abashed.

“Ah what have I to do with it?” Madame Clairin brightly wailed. “I’m the dullest thing here. They’ve not had, other gentlemen, your success with my sister-in-law.”

“It would have been very easy to have it. Madame de Mauves is kindness itself.”

She swung open her great fan. “To her own countrymen!”

Longmore remained silent; he hated the tone of this conversation.

The speaker looked at him a little and then took in their hostess, to whom M. de Chalumeau was serving up another epigram, which the charming creature received with a droop of the head and eyes that strayed through the window. “Don’t pretend to tell me,” Madame Clairin suddenly exhaled, “that you’re not in love with that pretty woman.”

“Allons donc!” cried Longmore in the most inspired French he had ever uttered. He rose the next minute and took a hasty farewell.

VI

He allowed several days to pass without going back; it was of a sublime suitability to appear to regard his friend’s frankness during their last interview as a general invitation. The sacrifice cost him a great effort, for hopeless passions are exactly not the most patient; and he had moreover a constant fear that if, as he believed, deep within the circle round which he could only hover, the hour of supreme explanations had come, the magic of her magnanimity might convert M. de Mauves. Vicious men, it was abundantly recorded, had been so converted as to be acceptable to God, and the something divine in this lady’s composition would sanctify any means she should choose to employ. Her means, he kept repeating, were no business of his, and the essence of his admiration ought to be to allow her to do as she liked; but he felt as if he should turn away into a world out of which most of the joy had departed if she should like, after all, to see nothing more in his interest in her than might be repaid by mere current social coin.

When at last he went back he found to his vexation that he was to run the gauntlet of Madame Clairin’s officious hospitality. It was one of the first mornings of perfect summer, and the drawing-room, through the open windows, was flooded with such a confusion of odours and bird-notes as might warrant the hope that Madame de Mauves would renew with him for an hour or two the exploration of the forest. Her sister-in-law, however, whose hair was not yet dressed, emerged like a brassy discord in a maze of melody. At the same moment the servant returned with his mistress’s regrets; she begged to be excused, she was indisposed and unable to see Mr. Longmore. The young man knew just how disappointed he looked and just what Madame Clairin thought of it, and this consciousness determined in him an attitude of almost aggressive frigidity. This was apparently what she desired. She wished to throw him off his balance and, if she was not mistaken, knew exactly how.

“Put down your hat, Mr. Longmore,” she said, “and be polite for once. You were not at all polite the other day when I asked you that friendly question about the state of your heart.”

“I HAVE no heart—to talk about,” he returned with as little grace.

“As well say you’ve none at all. I advise you to cultivate a little eloquence; you may have use for it. That was not an idle question of mine; I don’t ask idle questions. For a couple of months now that you’ve been coming and going among us it seems to me you’ve had very few to answer of any sort.”

“I’ve certainly been very well treated,” he still dryly allowed.

His companion waited ever so little to bring out: “Have you never felt disposed to ask any?”

Her look, her tone, were so charged with insidious meanings as to make him feel that even to understand her would savour of dishonest complicity. “What is it you have to tell me?” he cried with a flushed frown.

Her own colour rose at the question. It’s rather hard, when you come bearing yourself very much as the sibyl when she came to the Roman king, to be treated as something worse than a vulgar gossip. “I might tell you, monsieur,” she returned, “that you’ve as bad a ton as any young man I ever met. Where have you lived—what are your ideas? A stupid one of my own—possibly!—has been to call your attention to a fact that it takes some delicacy to touch upon. You’ve noticed, I suppose, that my sister-in-law isn’t the happiest woman in the world.”

“Oh!”—Longmore made short work of it.

She seemed to measure his intelligence a little uncertainly. “You’ve formed, I suppose,” she nevertheless continued, “your conception of the grounds of her discontent?”

“It hasn’t required much forming. The grounds—or at least a specimen or two of them—have simply stared me in the face.”

Madame Clairin considered a moment with her eyes on him. “Yes—ces choses-la se voient. My brother, in a single word, has the deplorable habit of falling in love with other women. I don’t judge him; I don’t judge my sister-in-law. I only permit myself to say that in her position I would have managed otherwise. I’d either have kept my husband’s affection or I’d have frankly done without it. But my sister’s an odd compound; I don’t profess to understand her. Therefore it is, in a measure, that I appeal to you, her fellow countryman. Of course you’ll be surprised at my way of looking at the matter, and I admit that it’s a way in use only among people whose history—that of a race—has cultivated in them the sense for high political solutions.” She paused and Longmore wondered where the history of her race was going to lead her. But she clearly saw her course. “There has never been a galant homme among us, I fear, who has not given his wife, even when she was very charming, the right to be jealous. We know our history for ages back, and the fact’s established. It’s not a very edifying one if you like, but it’s something to have scandals with pedigrees—if you can’t have them with attenuations. Our men have been Frenchmen of France, and their wives—I may say it—have been of no meaner blood. You may see all their portraits at our poor charming old house—every one of them an ‘injured’ beauty, but not one of them hanging her head. Not one of them ever had the bad taste to be jealous, and yet not one in a dozen ever consented to an indiscretion—allowed herself, I mean, to be talked about. Voila comme elles ont su s’arranger. How they did it—go and look at the dusky faded canvases and pastels and ask. They were dear brave women of wit. When they had a headache they put on a little rouge and came to supper as usual, and when they had a heart-ache they touched up that quarter with just such another brush. These are great traditions and charming precedents, I hold, and it doesn’t seem to me fair that a little American bourgeoise should come in and pretend to alter them—all to hang her modern photograph and her obstinate little air penche in the gallery of our shrewd great-grandmothers. She should fall into line, she should keep up the tone. When she married my brother I don’t suppose she took him for a member of a societe de bonnes oeuvres. I don’t say we’re right; who IS right? But we are as history has made us, and if any one’s to change it had better be our charming, but not accommodating, friend.” Again Madame Clairin paused, again she opened and closed her great modern fan, which clattered like the screen of a shop-window. “Let her keep up the tone!” she prodigiously repeated.

Longmore felt himself gape, but he gasped an “Ah!” to cover it. Madame Clairin’s dip into the family annals had apparently imparted an honest zeal to her indignation. “For a long time,” she continued, “my belle-soeur has been taking the attitude of an injured woman, affecting a disgust with the world and shutting herself up to read free-thinking books. I’ve never permitted myself, you may believe, the least observation on her conduct, but I can’t accept it as the last word either of taste or of tact. When a woman with her prettiness lets her husband stray away she deserves no small part of her fate. I don’t wish you to agree with me—on the contrary; but I call such a woman a pure noodle. She must have bored him to death. What has passed between them for many months needn’t concern us; what provocation my sister has had—monstrous, if you wish—what ennui my brother has suffered. It’s enough that a week ago, just after you had ostensibly gone to Brussels, something happened to produce an explosion. She found a letter in his pocket, a photograph, a trinket, que sais-je? At any rate there was a grand scene. I didn’t listen at the keyhole, and I don’t know what was said; but I’ve reason to believe that my poor brother was hauled over the coals as I fancy none of his ancestors have ever been—even by angry ladies who weren’t their wives.”

Longmore had leaned forward in silent attention with his elbows on his knees, and now, impulsively, he dropped his face into his hands. “Ah poor poor woman!”

“Voila!” said Madame Clairin. “You pity her.”

“Pity her?” cried Longmore, looking up with ardent eyes and forgetting the spirit of the story to which he had been treated in the miserable facts. “Don’t you?”

“A little. But I’m not acting sentimentally—I’m acting scientifically. We’ve always been capable of ideas. I want to arrange things; to see my brother free to do as he chooses; to see his wife contented. Do you understand me?”

“Very well, I think,” the young man said. “You’re the most immoral person I’ve lately had the privilege of conversing with.”

Madame Clairin took it calmly. “Possibly. When was ever a great peacemaker not immoral?”

“Ah no,” Longmore protested. “You’re too superficial to be a great peacemaker. You don’t begin to know anything about Madame de Mauves.”

She inclined her head to one side while her fine eyes kept her visitor in view; she mused a moment and then smiled as with a certain compassionate patience. “It’s not in my interest to contradict you.”

“It would be in your interest to learn, madam” he resolutely returned, “what honest men most admire in a woman—and to recognise it when you see it.”

She was wonderful—she waited a moment. “So you ARE in love!” she then effectively brought out.

For a moment he thought of getting up, but he decided to stay. “I wonder if you’d understand me,” he said at last, “if I were to tell you that I have for Madame de Mauves the most devoted and most respectful friendship?”

“You underrate my intelligence. But in that case you ought to exert your influence to put an end to these painful domestic scenes.”

“Do you imagine she talks to me about her domestic scenes?” Longmore cried.

His companion stared. “Then your friendship isn’t returned?” And as he but ambiguously threw up his hands, “Now, at least,” she added, “she’ll have something to tell you. I happen to know the upshot of my brother’s last interview with his wife.” Longmore rose to his feet as a protest against the indelicacy of the position into which he had been drawn; but all that made him tender made him curious, and she caught in his averted eyes an expression that prompted her to strike her blow. “My brother’s absurdly entangled with a certain person in Paris; of course he ought not to be, but he wouldn’t be my brother if he weren’t. It was this irregular passion that dictated his words. ‘Listen to me, madam,’ he cried at last; ‘let us live like people who understand life! It’s unpleasant to be forced to say such things outright, but you’ve a way of bringing one down to the rudiments. I’m faithless, I’m heartless, I’m brutal, I’m everything horrible—it’s understood. Take your revenge, console yourself: you’re too charming a woman to have anything to complain of. Here’s a handsome young man sighing himself into a consumption for you. Listen to your poor compatriot and you’ll find that virtue’s none the less becoming for being good-natured. You’ll see that it’s not after all such a doleful world and that there’s even an advantage in having the most impudent of husbands.”’ Madame Clairin paused; Longmore had turned very pale. “You may believe it,” she amazingly pursued; “the speech took place in my presence; things were done in order. And now, monsieur”—this with a wondrous strained grimace which he was too troubled at the moment to appreciate, but which he remembered later with a kind of awe—“we count on you!”

“Her husband said this to her face to face, as you say it to me now?” he asked after a silence.

“Word for word and with the most perfect politeness.”

“And Madame de Mauves—what did she say?”

Madame Clairin smiled again. “To such a speech as that a woman says—nothing. She had been sitting with a piece of needlework, and I think she hadn’t seen Richard since their quarrel the day before. He came in with the gravity of an ambassador, and I’m sure that when he made his demande en mariage his manner wasn’t more respectful. He only wanted white gloves!” said Longmore’s friend. “My belle-soeur sat silent a few moments, drawing her stitches, and then without a word, without a glance, walked out of the room. It was just what she SHOULD have done!”

“Yes,” the young man repeated, “it was just what she should have done.”

“And I, left alone with my brother, do you know what I said?”

Longmore shook his head.

“Mauvals sujet!” he suggested.

“‘You’ve done me the honour,’ I said, ‘to take this step in my presence. I don’t pretend to qualify it. You know what you’re about, and it’s your own affair. But you may confide in my discretion.’ Do you think he has had reason to complain of it?” She received no answer; her visitor had slowly averted himself; he passed his gloves mechanically round the band of his hat. “I hope,” she cried, “you’re not going to start for Brussels!”

Plainly he was much disturbed, and Madame Clairin might congratulate herself on the success of her plea for old-fashioned manners. And yet there was something that left her more puzzled than satisfied in the colourless tone with which he answered, “No, I shall remain here for the present.” The processes of his mind were unsociably private, and she could have fancied for a moment that he was linked with their difficult friend in some monstrous conspiracy of asceticism.

“Come this evening,” she nevertheless bravely resumed. “The rest will take care of itself. Meanwhile I shall take the liberty of telling my sister-in-law that I’ve repeated—in short, that I’ve put you au fait”

He had a start but he controlled himself, speaking quietly enough. “Tell her what you please. Nothing you can tell her will affect her conduct.”

“Voyons! Do you mean to tell me that a woman young, pretty, sentimental, neglected, wronged if you will—? I see you don’t believe it. Believe simply in your own opportunity!” she went on. “But for heaven’s sake, if it is to lead anywhere, don’t come back with that visage de croquemort. You look as if you were going to bury your heart—not to offer it to a pretty woman. You’re much better when you smile—you’re very nice then. Come, do yourself justice.”

He remained a moment face to face with her, but his expression didn’t change. “I shall do myself justice,” he however after an instant made answer; and abruptly, with a bow, he took his departure.

VII

He felt, when he found himself unobserved and outside, that he must plunge into violent action, walk fast and far and defer the opportunity for thought. He strode away into the forest, swinging his cane, throwing back his head, casting his eyes into verdurous vistas and following the road without a purpose. He felt immensely excited, but could have given no straight name to his agitation. It was a joy as all increase of freedom is joyous; something seemed to have been cleared out of his path and his destiny to have rounded a cape and brought him into sight of an open sea. But it was a pain in the degree in which his freedom somehow resolved itself into the need of despising all mankind with a single exception; and the fact that Madame de Mauves inhabited a planet contaminated by the presence of the baser multitude kept elation from seeming a pledge of ideal bliss.

There she was, at any rate, and circumstances now forced them to be intimate. She had ceased to have what men call a secret for him, and this fact itself brought with it a sort of rapture. He had no prevision that he should “profit,” in the vulgar sense, by the extraordinary position into which they had been thrown; it might be but a cruel trick of destiny to make hope a harsher mockery and renunciation a keener suffering. But above all this rose the conviction that she could do nothing that wouldn’t quicken his attachment. It was this conviction that gross accident—all odious in itself—would force the beauty of her character into more perfect relief for him that made him stride along as if he were celebrating a spiritual feast. He rambled at hazard for a couple of hours, finding at last that he had left the forest behind him and had wandered into an unfamiliar region. It was a perfectly rural scene, and the still summer day gave it a charm for which its meagre elements but half accounted.

He thought he had never seen anything so characteristically French; all the French novels seemed to have described it, all the French landscapists to have painted it. The fields and trees were of a cool metallic green; the grass looked as if it might stain his trousers and the foliage his hands. The clear light had a mild greyness, the sheen of silver, not of gold, was in the work-a-day sun. A great red-roofed high-stacked farmhouse, with whitewashed walls and a straggling yard, surveyed the highroad, on one side, from behind a transparent curtain of poplars. A narrow stream half-choked with emerald rushes and edged with grey aspens occupied the opposite quarter. The meadows rolled and sloped away gently to the low horizon, which was barely concealed by the continuous line of clipped and marshalled trees. The prospect was not rich, but had a frank homeliness that touched the young man’s fancy. It was full of light atmosphere and diffused clearness, and if it was prosaic it was somehow sociable.

Longmore was disposed to walk further, and he advanced along the road beneath the poplars. In twenty minutes he came to a village which straggled away to the right, among orchards and potagers. On the left, at a stone’s throw from the road, stood a little pink-faced inn which reminded him that he had not breakfasted, having left home with a prevision of hospitality from Madame de Mauves. In the inn he found a brick-tiled parlour and a hostess in sabots and a white cap, whom, over the omelette she speedily served him—borrowing licence from the bottle of sound red wine that accompanied it—he assured she was a true artist. To reward his compliment she invited him to smoke his cigar in her little garden behind the house.

Here he found a tonnelle and a view of tinted crops stretching down to the stream. The tonnelle was rather close, and he preferred to lounge on a bench against the pink wall, in the sun, which was not too hot. Here, as he rested and gazed and mused, he fell into a train of thought which, in an indefinable fashion, was a soft influence from the scene about him. His heart, which had been beating fast for the past three hours, gradually checked its pulses and left him looking at life with rather a more level gaze. The friendly tavern sounds coming out through the open windows, the sunny stillness of the yellowing grain which covered so much vigorous natural life, conveyed no strained nor high-pitched message, had little to say about renunciation—nothing at all about spiritual zeal. They communicated the sense of plain ripe nature, expressed the unperverted reality of things, declared that the common lot isn’t brilliantly amusing and that the part of wisdom is to grasp frankly at experience lest you miss it altogether. What reason there was for his beginning to wonder after this whether a deeply-wounded heart might be soothed and healed by such a scene, it would be difficult to explain; certain it was that as he sat there he dreamt, awake, of an unhappy woman who strolled by the slow-flowing stream before him and who pulled down the fruit-laden boughs in the orchards. He mused and mused, and at last found himself quite angry that he couldn’t somehow think worse of Madame de Mauves—or at any rate think otherwise. He could fairly claim that in the romantic way he asked very little of life—made modest demands on passion: why then should his only passion be born to ill fortune? Why should his first—his last—glimpse of positive happiness be so indissolubly linked with renunciation?

It is perhaps because, like many spirits of the same stock, he had in his composition a lurking principle of sacrifice, sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake, to the authority of which he had ever paid due deference, that he now felt all the vehemence of rebellion. To renounce, to renounce again, to renounce for ever, was this all that youth and longing and ardour were meant for? Was experience to be muffled and mutilated like an indecent picture? Was a man to sit and deliberately condemn his future to be the blank memory of a regret rather than the long possession of a treasure? Sacrifice? The word was a trap for minds muddled by fear, an ignoble refuge of weakness. To insist now seemed not to dare, but simply to BE, to live on possible terms.

His hostess came out to hang a moist cloth on the hedge, and, though her guest was sitting quietly enough, she might have imagined in his kindled eyes a flattering testimony to the quality of her wine. As she turned back into the house she was met by a young man of whom Longmore took note in spite of his high distraction. He was evidently a member of that jovial fraternity of artists whose very shabbiness has an affinity with the unestablished and unexpected in life—the element often gazed at with a certain wistfulness out of the curtained windows even of the highest respectability. Longmore was struck first with his looking like a very clever man and then with his looking like a contented one. The combination, as it was expressed in his face, might have arrested the attention of a less exasperated reasoner. He had a slouched hat and a yellow beard, a light easel under one arm, and an unfinished sketch in oils under the other. He stopped and stood talking for some moments to the landlady, while something pleasant played in his face. They were discussing the possibilities of dinner; the hostess enumerated some very savoury ones, and he nodded briskly, assenting to everything. It couldn’t be, Longmore thought, that he found such ideal ease in the prospect of lamb-chops and spinach and a croute aux fruits. When the dinner had been ordered he turned up his sketch, and the good woman fell to admiring and comparing, to picking up, off by the stream-side, the objects represented.