The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 14
SO, next morning, Graham walked up to the Manoir. It was still raining heavily and the weather gave to his change of programme a further relevancy. Impossible, in any case, to work out of doors to-day.
As he went, his coat turned up about his ears, his hands in his pockets, his eyes downcast, it was over the relevant aspects of his present undertaking that his mind was moving; lightly, as it were, and with careful footsteps. It was all absolutely relevant. It had been as easy to show frankness to Jill as to show duplicity to the old lady. He had said to Jill last night that he wanted to see something more of Mademoiselle Ludérac and Jill had completely understood, completely approved. Jill, it might even be said, urged him on. She wanted him, most insistently wanted him, to know and appreciate Mademoiselle Ludérac. So that was all right, thought Graham, turning off the highroad at the cemetery wall and beginning the steep ascent among the chestnut forests.
The grave, dark forest, its vistas swept by slanting rain, pitched his thoughts in a different key and set them to a different tempo. They went more heavily; they found their way, and their way was not always clear to find. But was not that all that his present enterprise really came to? He wanted to see Mademoiselle Ludérac. For he could never see her, never in the sense of possessing his vision; this was the lack, the failure that urged him on. There, among the rainswept vistas, he stopped and pondered. No; he could not see her face. To his potent, creative memory, the experience was a new one. Mademoiselle Ludérac was an aspect of nature and never before had nature evaded him. She was an aspect of nature and he had needed only, until now, to look upon such a one in order to possess its secret; for in the aspect was the secret and its discovery, its expression, was the artist's task and ecstasy. They were there, waiting in memory for his summons, because he had chosen to look at them, those significant aspects;—yet Mademoiselle Ludérac, whom he had chosen to look at for an hour, he could not summon. When he tried to see her, all that came clearly were her hands. It was as if her hands, helplessly, had allowed themselves to be mastered by his vision. He could see them placing the daffodils as if before a shrine; he could see them laid in mastery upon the harp; taking curious heraldic attitudes when thumb and little finger plucked at difficult chords; dissolved, while the arpeggios flowed from under them, into multiplied delicacies, or lay flat upon the strings, with a sudden mysterious urgency, to hush their golden whispering.
Why could he not see her face? He knew what it was like; accurately. He could have catalogued it; but he could not see it. Was it because of her eyes that he could not see her? When he looked at her, they met his look and gave him nothing; nothing;—not even retreat; not even denial. The nature he summoned was passive; it yielded itself up to his quest. Mademoiselle Ludérac's eyes, though they neither retreated nor denied, met his force with an equal potency.
All about her, last night, golden forms had been ranged, falling into a halo around her remote, melodious figure; daffodils, the colour of light, candleflames, the colour of daffodils, and the golden strings of her majestic instrument. The picture she made was there, waiting for him, and he would have possessed it had he but the key;—her eyes, her face. No;—he walked on and on;—he could not evoke it. He could only feel, not see it. Her gaze flowed from her eyes like the music from under her fingers, giving him a sense of breathlessness, of pain. It was as if he sought to take a daffodil into his hand and found that it was a flame.
But not only the opposing forces of her soul had thus baffled and blinded his memory. The music had been there and he could not listen while he saw, or see while he listened. With a sense of relief yet of haste, or pursuit, his thought plunged down another labyrinth. It had been the music, then, rather than her eyes. It was slight, it was thin, that music for Eurydice, but as he had listened it had brought back an old anguish. What was the sense of a lack in things that had haunted him since boyhood? This thirst for the reality under the appearance? Again and again he had evoked from enigmatic earth her essential harmonies, only to find when, in weariness and joy, he sought to grasp an abiding answer, that he had evoked a deeper enigma. For the beauty, born of nature and spirit, itself was dumb. Beauty arose before him; but her finger was on her lips. He was no Orpheus; he lamented no lost Eurydice. He felt, he sought; but he had never seen her.
But where was his thought now leading him? Graham felt himself turn back. And, as so often in his life, it was to Jill he turned. Dear Jill. Bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh; innocent earth; earth without its enigma. He never sought, since he had never needed, Jill. She was there too completely; his child, his playmate, his companion. With Jill he was at one with nature; with all that had been happy in his childhood. That was his good fortune;—but it had nothing to do with the self beneath appearance. It was an Eurydice that self needed; the habitant of another, and a deeper world; she who knew the secrets of the grave and the secrets—must it not be so?—of Elysium; of the eternal beauty that drew life on towards a perpetual contemplation.
'But what am I thinking of now?' said Graham to himself as he saw suddenly that the sycamores of the Manoir were below him. 'In Heaven's name let me rid myself of this folly. It's as if I were bewitched,' he thought. 'And I'm not going, at this time of my life, to confuse the ewig-weibliche with the Platonic forms!' Such, indeed, had never been his tendency. The loves of his youth had been ironically transient. And now, in passing through the Manoir gate, he could shake off the obsessing mood of the forest and tell himself that he had come, in the most literal, most dryly professional sense, to see Mademoiselle Ludérac. Let him but once possess her face, so that he could draw it from memory, and the mood would be exorcised. And there drifted dimly through his mind the outline of an ethereal, leaning head; a shape only, featureless; yet it gazed, as if on paradise, and he saw the backward lines of its windswept hair.
Though he had come so slowly—and hours, to his apprehension, seemed to have passed since he had said good-bye to Jill—the Manoir clock was just striking eleven when Joseph let him in. He made some affable remark about the bad weather as Joseph helped him off with his coat, but, answering never a word, Joseph only bowed his head in sad assent.
Madame de Lamouderie was the first object that met his eye on entering the drawing-room. She sat in readiness, in her bergère, her lips rouged, her cheeks powdered, her mantilla on her head; and his easel was in place and the portrait was upon it. But though she was ready, she showed no sparkle. She was grave, and almost distant.
'This is terrible weather, is it not?' she said, giving him her hand. 'It is brave of you indeed to venture out.—Madame Graham is well?'
'Yes, Jill's always well.'
'You are wise to cherish her.'
'I don't cherish her!' laughed Graham. 'You might as well talk of cherishing an oak-tree!'
'To me the simile she suggests is rather that of a rose.'
'Oh, I only spoke hygienically,' said Graham, all good-humour. 'If it comes to æsthetic analogies I can match you, I feel sure.'
'I thought that, æsthetically, Madame Graham did not interest you. I had even feared that you might look upon her only as a peach.'
Graham, at that, shot a glance at his old friend, and it conveyed a warning.
She changed the subject. 'We are all in readiness for you, you see. Marthe will be here directly. She is engaged, I think, in dusting my room. But she does not forget our hour. Ah, here she is,' and Graham, turning, saw that Mademoiselle Ludérac had entered.
She was in black, as always. It was for that, perhaps, that she had always the peasant look. All that he saw of her was that she was in black and that she bowed her head in answer to his murmured greeting.
'Have you any choice of a book?' asked Madame de Lamouderie, as he turned again to his easel, and he was aware that she observed maliciously something awkward in his demeanour. 'Marthe is ready to read us anything that we may choose.—Are you not, Marthe?'
Mademoiselle Ludérac made no reply to this question, conceiving, probably, that it required none.
'But I've nothing to do with the reading,' said Graham. 'It must be your choice. Or perhaps I may rely on Mademoiselle Ludérac to choose something that will absorb and delight you.' Graham looked towards the young woman.
'Ah, Marthe is my good angel, but she is not a magician,' said the old lady, who, evidently, was bent on making him feel her mood a bitter one. There is no book written that could absorb or delight me. A passing diversion; that is alone possible.—What have you, Marthe?'
Mademoiselle Ludérac was standing before a row of books set side by side on the table in the alcove. 'Shall we go on with "La Colline Inspirée"?' she inquired.
'Ah, non; I am weary of that Barrès! He is too intellectual.—Distinguished, but lifeless. I like people, not localities; it is always localities, or theories, he gives us.'
Graham saw that Mademoiselle Ludérac slightly smiled. The old lady's humour did not flourish in an unappreciative atmosphere.
'The new François Mauriac?'
'Ah, non, par exemple!' Madame de Lamouderie rejected the suggestion with even more emphasis. 'He is indeed of a dreariness, that young man!—He is like hot dust in the mouth. One imagines that one has found a tale of passion, of flesh and blood, and lo, before one knows where one is, all is tombs and dust and penitence! I do not relish these young Catholics.—I am indeed a diable dans leur bénitier!' the old lady laughed grimly; adding, 'Have you a volume of Maupassant?'
'Not much penitence, perhaps, but no lack of dust in him,' Graham remarked, sitting down before his work and aware that though his eyes were on it he did not see it. His thought was not behind his eyes. It was fixed on Mademoiselle Ludérac, standing at the other end of the room before the table; and at the blurred edge of his field of vision a tall blackness was her form and a narrow slip of white her hand, hanging against her skirt—'Always her hands!' thought Graham.
'But Maupassant is not dreary,' the old lady was saying, and it was reassuring to know that she could not guess that he was really looking at Mademoiselle Ludérac. 'Horrible, often; and amusing, to the extreme, but never dreary; and never, never edifying. What I most dislike is the attempt, surreptitiously, as it were, to edify.—Still, if you dislike him?'
'Oh, I don't dislike him. Only, are we not over with him a long time since?'
'You said the other day that you would like to hear "Dominique" again,' Mademoiselle Ludérac spoke and turned her head to glance at Madame de Lamouderie.
'Monsieur Graham will say that we are over with him even a longer time since!' Madame de Lamouderie replied.
'I've never read "Dominique,"' said Graham. 'But it provides you, surely, with no salt or spice.'
'You must not take me au pied de la lettre, Monsieur,' rejoined the old lady with her stately bitterness. 'My spices and salts would seem very insipid to your young palate!'—and once again she laughed, very grimly.
Graham, in spite of his devouring preoccupation, was amused by her ill-humour and, as his eyes now met hers, they showed so infectious a spark of mirth that, helplessly, Madame de Lamouderie smiled back at him.
'Do let us have "Dominique,"' he said.
'Let us have "Dominique," Marthe,' the old lady echoed.
Mademoiselle Ludérac, her book in her hand, passed behind Graham to seat herself at the window and as she went a low thud-thud from the hearth drew his attention to the old dog lying there, the black-and-white dog that he and Jill had seen on their first visit to the Manoir. He was of a nondescript breed, half spaniel, half retriever, with a broad silky head, laid flatly on his paws, and large dim eyes which followed Mademoiselle Ludérac to her place and dwelt upon her with devout, contented passion. He evidently could still see his adored mistress and she must have made some answering gesture of love, for the contentment deepened and again the tail thudded heavily.
'What a charming dog!' said Graham, mixing his grisaille on his palette.
'He is Marthe's dog,' said the old lady. 'She has had him for many years. She is, as you may observe, the centre of his life; but to me he is very kind when we are alone together in the winter, n'est-ce-pas, Médor?' and the old lady smiled at the dog, who, without moving his head, turned his eyes on her and once more, gently, thudded his tail, though with a lessened emphasis.
'Médor? He couldn't be anything but Médor, could he?—Is he one of Mademoiselle Ludérac's rescued animals?' Graham inquired. It was odd to speak of her as if she were not present. But it would, he felt, be even more odd to speak to her.
'Yes. She rescued him. He was tied up, day and night, at a farm. She used to go and see him; and sit with him. It touched the people's hearts, perhaps. At all events, Médor was sold to Marthe.'
Médor, hearing that he attracted so much attention, could remain passive no longer and, with a low, blissful grumbling, he rose and went slowly and stiffly across to where his mistress sat.
'Là, mon cher; là, mon bon chien,' Graham heard her whispering, while she fondled Médor's head. 'Couche-toi;—sois tranquil. You will not be as comfortable as by the fire.'
At this Graham got up, took the hearth-rug and laid it beside Mademoiselle Ludérac.—'So that Médor can be happy body and soul,' he commented and, not looking at him, her eyes on Médor, she murmured, 'Vous êtes trop aimable.'
'Well, now that Médor is settled, shall we read?' said Madame de Lamouderie who had observed this little scene with not unsympathetic eyes.
Graham sat down again at his easel and behind him Mademoiselle Ludérac raised her book and began to read. Her voice was calm and clear. The slow, silver rhythms of 'Dominique' circled through his consciousness and made him think of Gluck's Elysian fields. It was emotion not even recollected in tranquillity; or did not the slow pulse of memory beat softly beneath the current, presaging resuscitation? Half hypnotized, he listened, and met the ambiguous stare of the mournful old owl perched there before him. He held himself steady before Madame de Lamouderie. His mind was watchful and the alertness served his work. Steadily, accurately, his hand obeyed the bidding of his will.
'And now you may rest and we may talk,' he said at the end of a half-hour. Mademoiselle Ludérac rose and said that she would take ten minutes for her lamps. Médor followed her out of the room, and Graham and his old friend were left alone together.
Madame de Lamouderie showed no change of expression. She turned her eyes on the weather and remarked that they would soon be threatened by floods if the rain continued.
'I should like to see a flood, with corpses,' Graham smiled at her, leaning back and stretching his arms.
'Ah,' the old lady continued to gaze out of the window. 'You see life, I am aware, as a banquet for yourself. Other people's tragedies are your stimulants.'
'No, no; not at all,' Graham gently laughed. 'I am like you. I enjoy drama, I enjoy being in drama; not only observing it.'
This made her look at him. 'Yes, you enjoy drama,' she repeated, eyeing him. 'Whether that is like me! do not know. You enjoy danger. You enjoy playing with fire.'
'True.' Graham, his hands now locked behind his head, nodded at her. 'Fire is a delicious element.'
'I have seen a great deal of life,' the old lady went on, after they had contemplated each other for a moment. 'I have known a great many men, and I may tell you that those who play with fire always burn their fingers.'
'As mine are now being burned by you, you mean?' Graham cheerfully inquired. 'I gladly pay the price. The game is worth the candle.'
'I do not burn you,' the old lady continued, ignoring his levity. 'I do not even freeze you. I am your friend. I merely offer you a little cold water.'
'But why? I'm not fire!' laughed Graham. 'You mustn't judge me by all those ardent princes and diplomats of your youth! I'm an essentially stolid Britisher.' But he was not at ease. There was in the old lady's unexpected impersonality a note of genuineness that disturbed him.
'Stolid! Oh, no; you are not stolid!' Madame de Lamouderie returned with open mockery. 'Nor are you a mystic visionary. It is not the apparition of a Saint Cecilia you wait for, a Saint Cecilia among the pots and pans and dusters!—You are fire; and if you choose to run underground, do not imagine that I do not detect you!'
Graham kept his countenance with difficulty, for he was indeed confounded. 'You know,' he warned her, trying to maintain a rallying tone, 'if you won't be the kind of Goya I want you to be, you'll have to be another kind. Interesting, too; very; but not nearly so pleasing from your point of view, I'm sure. You are delightful in this mood, perfectly delightful; to me. But you won't be delighted with your portrait when you see what I shall have to make of you.'
'Make of me what you will, Monsieur. I am at your service. The sinner, by all means, after the saint.—I do not care for saints. Des gens forts louches; that is what I suspect them of being.—Shall we go on with our work?—Marthe!' called the old lady.
'But it's a jocund sinner I want; not a tragic one,' said Graham, and he smiled at her. 'Come, come;—we are friends, as you say. You are not going to be a menacing sky to me;—not a Cassandra; but my merry Sphinx of the hillside.'
A dim smile passed across her features at that. 'Ah, the poor old Sphinx! She was never merry.'
'She was. She is. And sphinxes are more to my taste than saints. You know that.'
'Do I know it? What do you really mean, you ambiguous young man?'
'Just as much as you do.'
'It is the Sphinx who should speak in riddles; not you.'
'The Sphinx should not ask questions, then. Come; shall we really get to work?'
'By all means.—Marthe!—She does not come.' But as she spoke Mademoiselle Ludérac entered.
'What do you think of my sketch, Mademoiselle?' Graham asked, without hesitation, as she passed behind his chair. To speak to her in this easy tone was to demonstrate to the old lady that he was not running underground.
She paused there, behind him. Solitudes; solitudes where violets grew; the breath of lonely spring-tide woods seemed wafted to him from her presence.
'Do I look a cheerful or a tragic sinner, Marthe?' the old lady inquired.
Mademoiselle Ludérac considered. The portrait is very interesting, but it does not flatter you, 'she said.
'And why should it flatter me? Monsieur Graham is no flatterer. Do you like it? That is the point.'
'I do not like the smile.—But the eyes I like, very much.'
'Are they eyes that, in youth, could have stirred men's hearts? Can you tell me that?'
Graham saw that Mademoiselle Ludérac smiled at her old friend over his head. 'Mais oui, mais oui,' she answered, 'and much more besides.'
'I ask for no more,' said the old lady.
'And what is wrong with the smile?' asked Graham.
'The moment of arrest that always followed any direct approach he ventured upon made itself felt; but Mademoiselle Ludérac found a full reply—'If it could be the smile she gave to Médor?'
'Ah, but she isn't looking at Médor, you must remember; she is looking at me,' said Graham. 'I should ask nothing better than that she should look at me as she looks at Médor!'
'Médor has no secrets!' the old lady rejoined and the sparkle of challenge shot from her eyes as they met his smile. 'Imitate Médor, and you shall be looked at as he is looked at!' She challenged him; but she was mollified, if ever so little.
Graham then painted, Mademoiselle Ludérac read, and, outside, the desperate day dashed itself against the window-panes. On his rug Médor, with a drowsy sigh, stretched himself to deeper slumbers, and presently Graham saw that the great eyes before him were closing. Tick-tock, he heard the old clock in the hall. The silver rhythms of Dominique flowed on; but Madame de Lamouderie had fallen asleep.
Graham continued to paint for a little while. He touched soft pallor on the folded hands and drew a line of rose along the tips. Then his hand was still. The reading paused; continued, paused again, and then ceased. Silence flowed around them. All the world was sleeping. 'Now I can turn and look at her,' thought Graham.
But another thought inhibited an impulse that had almost accomplished itself. How intolerable—for him, and for Mademoiselle Ludérac—how destructive of his position at the Manoir, if the old lady's eyes should open and find him so engaged. No; he could not risk it. His frame was taut with the strain of his repression, and a curious contraction tightened the muscles of the arm that held his palette; but he did not dare to turn. Behind him Mademoiselle Ludérac neither spoke nor moved. Médor slept, and Madame de Lamouderie slept; the clock ticked, loudly; softly; and it seemed suddenly to Graham that the silence was filled by a complicity of control. Did not she also wish him to look at her?
Madame de Lamouderie opened her eyes. She gazed at Graham for a moment, in astonishment; then, swiftly, over at Mademoiselle Ludérac. Her expression took on a sudden calm. 'Have I slept?' she inquired.
'For at least five minutes,' said Graham.
'It seems an hour to me. I am refreshed. And you, what have you done?'
'I've stared at you, and at my picture. Mademoiselle Ludérac, I suppose,' and, deliberately, Graham turned in his chair and looked at her, 'has stared at the rain.'
'Yes,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, and now, as her dark eyes rested upon him, he attempted to turn his desire at its very source, to refrain from the quest and concentrate his faculty in a cold, devouring intentness, so that her features should at last be stamped ineffaceably upon his brain. For one sliding instant he saw her; saw the long oval of her face; the clear, wide spaces in which her eyes were set, the rosy mauve that shaped her lips; but it was only for an instant. The vision slipped from him; the sharp flame burnt him; he saw her face no longer, but only felt a presence, pale, piteous, darkly preoccupied, yet still resisting; a presence that in this new guise had come nearer than ever before; so near that when her eyes removed themselves from his—and with a self-command at which he marvelled—it was as if from an actual contact.
'Bien. I shall not again transgress.'
He had almost forgotten Madame de Lamouderie, and from the blandness of her tone he could measure the degree of Mademoiselle Ludérac's self-command. She had sustained the old lady's scrutiny through a moment that would not have left his pulses pounding as they were had it not brought to her, also, some revelation. He had felt that piteousness in her because of all that was required of her in self-command. She feared him; she greatly feared him. To Madame de Lamouderie she had showed only calm; but to him she had betrayed her fear.
'I had pleasant dreams; very pleasant,' the old lady went on, as he took up his palette. 'I was walking in the garden of my childhood and Médor was by my side. I wore a broad straw hat tied with blue ribbons and Médor carried in his mouth a basket of strawberries. Continue, therefore, your tragic portrait. I am all at your service.'