The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 11
JILL walked rapidly back along the river road with no eyes for the evening loveliness. She realized that tea-time was past when she saw Amélie sitting on the wall in front of the Ecu d'Or in an evening mood of unaccustomed leisure. Poor, hardly driven Amélie on this pleasant vantage-ground, swung one foot, as Jill used to swing hers, and watched with fond eyes the gambols of a shrill-voiced little girl who was playing in the road.
Jill paused to greet her. 'Has Monsieur come in?' she asked.
Monsieur had returned an hour ago, Amélie informed her, looking up at the generous anglaise with approbation.
'And he's probably had no tea, either,' said Jill. 'Well, we'll enjoy our dinner so much the more. What is there for dinner, Amélie?'
'Ecrevisses; and an excellent blanquette de veau, Madame.'
'Is this your little girl?' Jill inquired, looking down at the child who wore a large red bow at the top of its plain little head and showed very grimy drawers under its short petticoats.
'Mais oui, Madame; c'est ma fille unique,' said Amélie proudly. 'Viens, Germaine, dis bonjour à la dame.' But Germaine only scampered away on her hob-nailed little boots.
'She looks very strong and happy,' said Jill. 'I didn't know you were married, Amélie.'
'Je suis fille-mère, Madame,' said Amélie with an air of modest pride, as though the state were one of special merit.
'Hallo, you scoundrel! Where's my tea?' called Graham from above. He had come out on the balcony and leaned there looking down at them.
'Scoundrel yourself! Where's mine?—It's too late for tea; we are to keep our appetites for écrevisses!' Jill returned. 'Well, au revoir, Amélie. I must see if a box of chocolates will tempt Germaine to make friends with me.'
Jill, going up the stairs and thinking of poor ugly Amélie and of her complacency, laughed a little. 'But how right it all is—for them,' she thought. 'They've each got their own little badge; their own little medal or pièce d'identité. They all grow, deep, deep, on their own soil. Grande dame; bourgeoise, or fille-mère. They each know their own place and are proud of it, more than any other people in the world. If you can't have a legitimate child, then make the best of an illegitimate one. Quite right, too,' Jill laughed, feeling that Amélie had justified Mademoiselle Ludérac still further, and pleased that it should be so. All the same, should she tell Dick of her discomfiture, or be contented, in silence, with feeling it was all for the best? She debated the point as she went along the passage and out to the balcony, but, as he turned his head and smiled at her, she felt, as always, that she must share everything with Dick, even discomfitures.
'Come. Sit down. Let's have a smoke and a talk,' she said, tossing her cap and gloves on a table; and when they had placed their chairs she said resolutely, 'Well, I've been snubbed.'
'By Mademoiselle Ludérac,' said Graham. He dryly smiled as he lighted his cigarette.
'Yes. She's been telling me, after we'd had the most wonderful talk, that we can't possibly be friends because friends must be parts of one's life, and that as we are going, while she stays, we can't be parts.'
'Did she include me in this rejection?' Graham inquired. 'That would be rather uncalled for, since I've made her no offers.'
'No; of course she didn't include you. And of course I've been an ass; trying to rush things. But you'd be just as keen as I am, I'm sure; if you knew all I know now.'
'Should I? What do you know?' And as Jill wondered where she should begin, Graham added, 'Where did you see her?'
'On the island. That was so wonderful, too. It all goes on being like the fairy-tale, Dick; but with something so much deeper in it than a fairy-tale;—except that fairy-tales are deep,' mused Jill, looking away for a moment over the river. 'I went down after being with the old lady, and there she was, walking under the poplars with a cat in her arms; just like the patron saint of Buissac, you know. What were those picture books one had when one was a child?—Boutet de Monvel's Jeanne d'Arc, and Chansons de France; it was like those. Everything was pale; the sky and the trees and the river; even her black dress looked pale; and she was bareheaded, like the little Jeanne d'Arc. It was. So queer, so beautiful. And she's had a saint's life, really. That came out in what the old lady told me. Her mother was mad, Dick.'
'Mad?' As she had echoed the old lady's word so Dick now echoed hers.
'Yes. But it was an accident.—I mean—Mademoiselle Ludérac isn't détrauqée, too. It was an accident and she wore a black patch over her eye and was very white and dressed in black. And she walked about the woods leaning on Marthe's arm. That was the way the old lady first saw them.—What's the matter, Dick?' Graham was looking at her strangely.
'Hadn't that woman who came round the house the other day a black patch over her eye?' he asked, and it was odd to hear how dry he kept his voice as he asked it.
'Why, Dick!—how absurd you are! What tricks your imagination does play you! That was Mademoiselle Ludérac herself, and I saw her two beautiful eyes as plainly as I see yours.'
'Yes. Of course you did. Of course I'm a fool.—But I seemed suddenly to remember, as you said it, that I'd seen it all before.'
'That's the way it works with you, my dear boy. You really must take care,' Jill smiled at him tenderly, 'or you'll get barmy.'
'Not with you to take care of me,' Graham smiled back. 'Go on with your story. You're full of it, I see.'
'Well, I don't want to upset you.'
'Upset me? I'm not upset,' said Graham. 'I'm only interested in the tricks my imagination can play me. Go on, Jill.'
'Well, the mother couldn't bear to be without her and fell into frenzies if Marthe left her.—Imagine what a life for a child, Dick.—And they were stoned once, here, in Buissac. That is like a saint, too, isn't it?'
Graham kept silence.
'It explains everything; everything one felt about her from the first,' said Jill. 'The grave—mad people are buried alone like that, perhaps;—and her coldness to you. And the feeling she gives one that she is set apart. She told me that she had never had a friend.'
Graham determinedly reacted against his impressionable mood. He tossed away his cigarette and lighted another and inquired, 'Does it really make her more amiable that she should have been so very unfortunate? It seems to me that the old lady has shown a good deal of courage in taking up such an unpopular person. I shouldn't have expected it of her, somehow. It makes one like her better. But it doesn't make me like her protégée the better that she shouldn't count her as a friend.'
'Well, she doesn't seem like a friend, exactly, does she? though I could see that she was dreadfully upset over Marthe and her mother. She's a patroness rather than a friend.'
'All the same, Mademoiselle Ludérac sounds to me, and looks to me, like a very hard young person.'
'You wouldn't have said so if you could have seen her holding that cat and talking about animals this afternoon.—And about history, and how cruel people had been to each other.—Oh, Dick, it's very, very strange;—but she makes me feel things I never felt before. She made me feel it was cruel to hunt foxes.'
'Did she indeed. Confound her cheek!'
'It wasn't cheek.—And you don't think so yourself, though you have got a prejudice against her.—She's gentle—gentle—and dreadfully sad. It's as if she'd been through everything and come out on the other side. I can't explain. You'd feel it even more than I do if you were with her, because you are cleverer and deeper than I am. I know I'm right about her.—She gives me the feeling I've had sometimes when I've been out at dawn;—everything so still and just one star and a thin little moon in the sky.—When she looks at you she makes you feel like that. And she seems to be seeing much more than just yourself. She seems to be seeing something that explains you. She might not be able to show it to you; but when you're with her you feel it's there. And she makes you long, more than anything, to be the self she's seeing. It's like heaven, you know.'
Dick was looking at her tremulous, lighted face as though he, too, were seeing it with that deeper vision. 'You're a darling, Jill,' he said.
He had put out his hand to her and she took it, murmuring, 'She does upset me.'
'She upsets us both a little, perhaps, in different ways. Black magic with me, and white with you. No doubt she's a remarkable young woman; but it's you who are the darling. You lend her all the poetry that's in yourself.'
'Poetry! In me, Dick!' Jill had to laugh though his words had brought unaccustomed tears to her eyes.
'You've been an embodiment of poetry ever since you began to talk about her. Your state of mind is poetry.—You're a queer people, you English, Jill. Here you are, a hard-headed, matter-of-fact, unimaginative, hunting girl; yet, give you a chance, push aside the woodland stone, and it's the well of English poetry that bubbles up out of the moss. There's always askylark waiting to sing in your sky.—She may be the silent sky, Jill;—but you are the sky with the skylark in it.'
Jill gazed at him and she murmured, 'Great Scott, Dick!' He made her extraordinarily happy. And he made her sad, too. Was it like the great landscape that afternoon, with the sense it brought of the accepted tragedy in all beauty? No, not quite that. The moment, as she sat there, holding Dick's hand, meeting his loving gaze, was beautiful and not to be forgotten; but Dick was sad. There was something autumnal in his look; something of remembrance. Like an autumn day, thought Jill, when one tries to capture and hold fast the beauty that is vanishing out of the world; so that when winter comes one shall not forget.