The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 15
JILL had spent the morning at the Ecu d'Or, writing letters. They had taken a small salon, au premier, sparsely furnished with a carved centre-table, two red velvet chairs, a velvet sofa, and three bronzes on the mantelpiece; two of them vases encrusted with flowers and between these a galloping horse, a clock set in its chest, and on its back a rider clothed only in a turbulent scarf.
The day was so cold and so dreary that Jill had had a fire lighted and it was before the fire that Graham found her, stretched on the sofa, a cigarette between her lips; and, turning her head to look round at him, she said, 'Well?'
Graham came and stood at the head of the sofa. She could not see him as he stood there above her.
'What kind of time did you have?' she asked.
'The old lady was very cross with me,' said Graham after a moment.
'Of course she was,' said Jill.
'But I enjoyed her,' said Graham. 'She's such a clever old scoundrel.'
'Of course she is.—Not such a scoundrel, either. She's merely very human. And I'm sorry for her,' said Jill. 'It must be so bewildering to see you transfer your attention to someone else; just when she was having the time of her life with you.—Did Marthe Ludérac read?'
'Naturally. The old lady wouldn't have been cross if she hadn't read.'
'But I somehow thought she'd have prevented it; circumvented you by some trick or plan.'
'She'd have liked to, of course; only she was afraid of losing me altogether if she did,' Graham analysed the old lady's dilemma.
'Oh, it is too bad, you know. You're bound to her more than ever now;—I hope you realize that;—and to let her see she's not to lose you.'
'Ah, well, that will still depend on her; on her behaviour,' laughed Graham, enjoying, apparently, the gross complacency of his own attitude. But Jill felt something else under the complacency. He still stood above her.
'Did you get a talk with Marthe?' she now inquired.
'A talk? How should I?'
'Well, I suppose you couldn't, since the old lady was there. And after all,' said Jill, 'you didn't expect to talk to her, did you? All you expected was to look at her.'
'Well, I didn't look at her, either. She sat behind me.—How long to lunch?' he asked.
The bronze horseman stood, disconcertingly, above five o'clock.
'Only fifteen minutes, I think.—What an awful day!' Jill glanced at the windows.
'I shall have another walk this afternoon, all the same. I'm feeling a little liverish.'
'I don't think I'll go out. I'm feeling as if I'd caught a cold.'
'I don't wonder.' Graham now walked over to the window and looked out.
Jill, in the silence that followed, was asking herself whether she was really frightened. Dick and she were together. Together. Nothing was hidden between them. Why this strange breathlessness? Was it Dick who was frightened?—She steadied her nerves. It was like drawing at a rein.
Suddenly Graham came back, and sat down beside her and put his head on her shoulder. Jill's heart stood still.
'What would you feel about clearing out of all this, Jill?' he said.
'All this?'
'Yes. Buissac.'
'Are you tired of Buissac?'
'Yes, I think I am. Tired of the old woman. And tired of the young one.—They get on my nerves.'
It was Dick's superstition then. Only that. They must not yield to superstition; though a real fear it might be well to yield to. 'But the portrait?' said Jill.
'I'll chuck it.'
'It seems so cruel to chuck her.'
'I don't mind being cruel.'
'And all those pictures you've started. Don't you mind leaving them?'
'Yes, I mind, in a way. But what do you feel about it all?' Dick muttered.
It was difficult to know what she felt, with Dick's dear head pressed against her neck, his arm holding her across her breast. But Dick was not caressing her. He was taking refuge with her. And she, too, was afraid of Buissac now. She hated being afraid. She hated to yield to fear.
'What I feel is what you feel,' she said slowly, trying to think. 'I mean—it's all for you, of course, the places we stay at. If you want to go, so do I. What is there to keep us, if you really want to go?'
But as she spoke she knew that there was something that did keep her. Was it only her superstition, as against Dick's? Her white magic against his black mood? Marthe Ludérac kept her. She and Marthe Ludérac had something to do for each other. Was that only superstition? But it seemed like running away, it seemed like cowardice, to turn one's back not only on Marthe Ludérac's celestial secret, but on her tragedy.
Dick kept his face pressed into her shoulder. He was waiting for an answer.
'Have your walk first,' she found. 'Lunch will make a difference, too, perhaps. Don't forget that it's nothing new, Dick. You wanted to run away the other day, before—' She had been going to say, 'before you had seen Marthe Ludérac,' but she changed it to—'before you'd begun the portrait. If you run away now, I mean, it might become a habit!' and Jill tried to make her voice very light as she found this admonition. 'And it would be such an inconvenient habit. Think it over, by yourself, first, Dick. And then, if you really want to go, we will go.'
Graham felt that she was saying: 'Steady, old boy; steady.'
When after lunch, he had gone out into the rain—and they did not speak again of the decision she thus left to him—Jill lay down on the sofa. She had a headache. She did not want to read. A wood fire on a wet spring day was a pleasant thing to look at and she lay and looked at it.
Suddenly the door opened and Amélie's head, in uncouth fashion, appeared round it while her moist red hand held it ajar.
'Mademoiselle Ludérac demande à voir Madame.'
Jill sat up. An electric shock seemed to pass through her; a mingling of reluctance and delight.
Amélie thoughtfully surveyed her. 'I shall tell her that Madame is occupied?'
'No, no—of course not.—Tell her to come up,' said Jill. She rose to her feet. This was the solution, then. She could not decide. Dick could not decide. Marthe Ludérac would decide for them whether they were to stay on in Buissac.—'But what nonsense,' said Jill to herself. 'I shall soon become as dotty as poor Dick.'
She stood looking towards the door which Amélie had left ajar, and in a moment it was pushed softly open and Marthe Ludérac stood before her. She wore the black raincoat in which Jill had first seen her and a small black hat which made her face look strangely young. Her expression, too, was young. Everybody was frightened to-day. Marthe Ludérac was frightened.
'Oh, how wet you are!' Jill started forward after the involuntary pause in which they had contemplated each other. 'You are dripping wet!—Let me take this.'
Mademoiselle Ludérac, in an unresisting silence, submitted to her help. 'Sit down here, beside me,' said Jill; but, looking unseeingly around her, she took a chair at the table and Jill sank down again on the sofa opposite her.
'I wished to see you alone. I must speak with you,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac in a fixed, firm manner. 'I saw that your husband was gone.—Is it for long? Shall we be uninterrupted?'
'Yes, he's gone. He'll be gone for a long time. What is it? Has anything happened to trouble you?' asked Jill, and her voice trembled a little.
'No, nothing has happened. Nothing new has happened to trouble me.—It is you who trouble me,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, putting her hands, clasped together, on the table before her and fixing her eyes upon them. 'There is something you should know. I did not think I should have to speak of it. Not to another soul have I ever spoken of my life. But last night it came to me that you must know; for I cannot defend myself against you.' She checked herself. Her voice, too, was trembling. For a moment she sat silent, while Jill, motionless, gazed at her. Then she said, and her voice was firm again: 'It is this. My mother was a murderess.'
Jill, transfixed, gazed upon her.
'She killed my father,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, not raising her eyes from her knotted hands. 'It was what is called a crime passionnel. He loved another woman and she killed him and tried to kill herself.'
Jill sat and gazed upon the black, resolute figure; the pale, fixed face. As the meaning of the knife-like words came fully to her understanding, she saw that Mademoiselle Ludérac had come to cut herself away; to set herself apart again. It was severance she had come to ensure. And it was true that the sense of awe that descended upon Jill had in it an abyss-like element; as though the gulf of suffering revealed in the words did indeed divide them.
'Madame de Lamouderie told me that your mother was mad,' she said. This was all that she could find to say at first.
'I asked her what she had told you. It was kind of her to say no more; very kind,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac.
'She was so dreadfully sorry, of course. But I wish she could have told me everything. It would have spared you this,' said Jill. 'When you asked her, she could have told you that I knew. Then you need never have spoken about it, unless you felt you wanted to.'
At this Mademoiselle Ludérac sat silent, looking fixedly at her hands. She sat for some moments; then she rose. That is all. I will go now. You have been good to me. You will believe in my gratitude.'
Jill also rose and confronted her. 'But what do you think you have done? Do you think that I shall care for you the less because your mother killed your father?'
Across the table, arrested, with the glance, almost, of a trapped creature, Mademoiselle Ludérac met her eyes. It was what she had thought; or feared; or hoped;—for she seemed trapped rather than released. And, turning her eyes away, she murmured, darkly: 'You must not try to be my friend; I cannot have a friend. It is not a happy thing for you that you should have come to Buissac.'
'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.' It floated through Jill's mind; and with it Dick's face as she had seen it a little while before. It had not been a happy thing for Dick. Dick's intuition had been right. There was a dark tower; and Mademoiselle Ludérac had been shut into it since childhood. All the more reason to break down the doors, and let her out.
'But you see I am your friend,' she said, and tears came to her eyes. 'You can't get rid of me. You don't know what a friend is. You've lived so long shut up by yourself in the dark that you are afraid of the daylight. Friends do not love you the less because you've been unhappy. They love you the more. You may not care about me,' said Jill, while her voice trembled, 'but I shall care for you always.'
It may have been because she saw her tears and they weakened her too much, or it may have been with an overwhelming sense of woe, but Mademoiselle Ludérac sank down on her chair beside the table and leaned her face upon her hands. She said nothing. She made no sound. Jill did not think that she was crying. Perhaps she was thinking; thinking intently behind this last rampart. Jill, after a moment, came and sat down beside her.
'Let me tell you. It's so strange. I feel as if we were meant to meet, long ago. I've thought and thought about you and your mother. You've both been real to me since I saw her grave last autumn, with your roses on it. When Madame de Lamouderie told me about you, how she had first met you both in the woods, and how you led her—and loved her—it seemed to break my heart. I saw her portrait last night and it brought you both still nearer. It's just as if I'd known that little girl. You can't keep me away. You must let me share it with you. Nobody, since she's gone, has ever cared for you as I do.'
Marthe Ludérac was weeping now. No sob shook her. They were not passionate tears; but Jill saw them falling, falling, slowly, between her hands; and leaning closely to her she put her arms around her and drew her head upon her shoulder and murmured: 'Oh—my dear, dear Marthe!'
Marthe Ludérac lay on her shoulder and wept. 'Thank Heaven for this,' Jill was thinking. 'Thank Heaven we did not leave Buissac before this happened. She can never be so lonely again, now. Even if I have to leave her, she will know that I am there, and that I know, and love her.' And a beautiful sense of happiness, deeper, more beautiful, perhaps, than any she had ever felt, filled Jill's heart.
'No, there is no one like you,' she heard Marthe Ludérac say at last.
'Tell me about it. Don't you want to? Wouldn't it help? It's so dreadful to keep things to oneself always.'
A long time seemed to have passed, and as Jill questioned her thus, so gently, Marthe Ludérac took her hand and pressed it for a moment against her wet cheek, repeating. 'There is no one like you.'
'Will you tell me?' said Jill. 'Was she really mad? Or was that only what people thought.'
'No, she was not mad.' Helplessly, before Jill's tenderness, Marthe Ludérac suffered herself to be led forth, and her look, almost of astonishment, was indeed the look of one who can hardly believe in daylight. Wan with her tears, weak, gentle, she leaned on her hand and kept her eyes on Jill. 'Sometimes, the injury to her head gave her such pain that she became unconscious—or fell into a frenzy; but she was not really mad. That people thought her so was well for us; it gave us shelter.'
'But it kept people from you, dear Marthe.'
'But that was well. It was a veil, a cloak.—What could we have done with people?' said Marthe Ludérac in her weak, gentle voice.
'It must have been so lonely, so horribly lonely,' Jill murmured. 'Had you no one?—no one at all? Were there no relations to care what became of her and you?'
'No one at all. My grandmother, the one who lived here, died of grief, before my mother's trial came on. My father had lost his parents; two old aunts of his would have taken me, but they were my mother's enemies.'
'And you were so poor,' Jill mused on her. 'How did you manage all those years? You could not work then.'
'My mother had her little fortune; it almost all went to pay the expenses of her defence; but there was a little left.'
Jill wondered how she should question further; but Marthe Ludérac, after the pause which followed her last words, continued to speak. 'It was un crime passionnel,' she said. 'There were extenuating circumstances. That was why she was set at liberty. And to see her, half dying, appear before them, with her bandaged head; that, too, softened their hearts.'
'You were there? At her trial?'
'I was a witness.'
'But you were so young—'
'I had seen it all,' said Marthe Ludérac. 'Yes; I was young, but I think that from the beginning I had understood it all. Joseph and I, and the young woman's husband, were the chief witnesses.'
She needed no questioning. Jill saw that she would tell her everything. For the first time in her life she was speaking, without fear, openly, to another soul. She did not look at Jill. Her eyes, fixed on the window, reflected the grey, melancholy day; her words fell like the rain, softly and steadily; the sorrow of her voice was hushed to contemplation. 'My mother was always unhappy,' she said. That was the first thing I understood. The very nursery songs she sang to me came to me with the sense of melancholy. She was always afraid. She loved him so much;—and he was only kind to her. There was not a time that I can see, in looking back, when I did not know that her heart was breaking.'
'Oh, wasn't it all your dreadful way of getting married?' Jill murmured. 'Wasn't it a mariage de convenance? People don't expect love in marriage, so they have to find it somewhere else. I wonder tragedies don't happen oftener.'
Marthe Ludérac paused to consider this. 'Do they indeed happen more often with us than with the people who marry for love?' She considered and she put it away. 'I do not know. It is true that their marriage was arranged for them; by their mothers, who had been friends at school. But it had seemed a happy arrangement. My father, though he had no personal fortune, was a brilliant young scientist; his position was excellent; he was steady, devoted, serious. Had my mother loved him less, and had the other woman not come into their lives, they might have been happy. But it was not like that. It was a passion with her. She longed always for the love that he gave, at once, helplessly, to the other woman. I was only twelve when the other came. But I knew what was happening.'
'Who was she? Do you remember her? Is she still alive?'
'Do I remember her? I can see her now, as plainly as I see you—with her smiling face and little fur cap and collar up there on that great terrace you spoke of, above the cathedral, in Angoulême. It was so I first saw her; on a winter day, when I was walking with my father. Yes. She is still alive. Is it not strange, when they have been dead for so long? But she was not to blame,' said Marthe Ludérac. 'She was helpless, too.'
'But she was to blame!' said Jill indignantly. 'She took another woman's husband away from her.'
Again Marthe Ludérac paused and considered. 'She did not take him. He took her. He was full of charm and power. She was very young; the young wife, married from her convent, of an old man; our neighbour; a friend of my father's father. How can one blame her? I saw how she struggled and resisted. For a long year her resistance lasted. He struggled too. By nature he was a loyal man. I saw it all,' Marthe Ludérac repeated.
'And your mother—did she not see?'
'At first, nothing. It was her happiest year. Can you understand that? He was more loving to her through all that year than he had ever been. She was his refuge. I understood it well. It was because he was so full of fear—and of pity—that he clung to her with his passionate, agonized tenderness.'
Something shot into Jill's heart at that; not a thought, not even a recollection. It was only a trail of sharpness; a flickering light on the horizon; a far, shrill cry. Marthe Ludérac spoke on and held her mind.
'I was so young; but I knew when the struggle ceased. Not as a woman would know; but the essential; that my father was unfaithful; that they were lovers. I was terrified. I must have understood, instinctively, the dark forces in my mother's nature, and to what extremes they might carry her. I loved my father dearly; perhaps I loved him more than I loved her; but it was for her sake that I helped him to blind her still; a childish, half-conscious complicity. I was always there between them. One night, I remember, I pretended to be very ill—so that he should not leave her. But if she did not know, it was because she would not let herself. At the end everyone knew—Joseph, the friends who came to the house. I saw it in their faces. My father and his mistress must have seen it, too. Their hearts, too, must have been full of fear.'
Marthe Ludérac raised her hands and held them before her face and looked at them for a moment; then she bowed her forehead upon them. 'My father's mistress became enceinte. I did not understand what had happened to her, but I knew that she was desperate. I met her once, in the garden of the house. Their apartment was in the same house as ours. It was early spring, but very warm. She was walking under the trees in a pink dress. She must have seen the grief and pity in my face, for she took me by the hand and we walked up and down together, saying not a word. She was in despair. I knew it. It was soon after that, perhaps a few mornings after, that she came to see my father. She did not ask for my mother. She asked only to see my father. I was in the room opposite and saw Joseph let her into my father's bureau. I knew that she should not have come. I knew that there was danger. Joseph knew it, too. He stood and looked at me as if he would have asked me to do something; and then he went away, leaving me there. I was standing looking at the closed door when my mother came down the passage, very quickly as though she had been called. She did not ask me a question. She stopped short and fixed her eyes on my face, and then without one word she went into the bureau and shut the door. She found them in each other's arms. My father kept his pistols in a case on the bookshelves, next the door. She took the weapon and fired at my father and turned the second bullet against herself. All over the house the shots were heard. Then I went in and saw them.'
'Oh, no;—oh, no—' Jill muttered. She, too, hid her face.
'My father lay there, dead,' said Marthe Ludérac. 'His mistress knelt beside him. She wore the pink dress and when she staggered up all the front was covered with his blood. My mother was lying on a chair near the door. She was moaning, and half her face seemed shot away. That was how I found them.'
'What did you do?' Jill whispered.
'I held my mother. I called. There was no need to call. Everybody was running to us. Everybody had heard. The room at once was full of people. Joseph and his wife were there; and the old husband—crying—crying.—He took his wife away. He was tender to her; he is a good old man.—And the doctor and the police. They carried my mother to her room. I went with them. They always let me stay with her. They felt that I should be calm, and that they could trust me. From the first,' said Marthe Ludérac, and she put down her hands and turned her eyes on Jill, 'strength was given to me.'
Jill sat silent. The sense of awe, of distance, crept over her again. Her young, jocund face had a strained, strange look.
'I distress you too much,' said Marthe Ludérac, considering her gently. 'And now you have heard all my story.'
'No, no;—not all. I want to hear it to the end,' Jill said faintly, again putting her hand on Marthe Ludérac's. 'I want to hear how you and she lived here, when you brought her back. I want to hear what you did for all those years. You were not quite alone? You had Joseph. I did not know that Joseph was your servant.'
'Yes. He came from Buissac, with my mother, when she married. He has always been in my life, good Joseph. We could give them no money, but he and his wife, who was living then, followed us and took care of us. I do not know what would have become of us without them. All their little savings they spent in our service.'
'I thought he was Madame de Lamouderie's servant. But go on, dear Marthe. Your mother taught you the harp, you told me. She was well enough to teach you.'
'Yes; she was often well enough for that. It was her great solace. And as I grew older I could be more of a companion for her. I read to her. We walked a great deal in the woods; on the mountains; down on the island. The island was a favourite walk of hers; that is one reason why I love it so.—I was always with her; day and night. She could not bear to be left alone for one moment. The terror was always lying in wait for her, but, together, we could keep it at bay. At night we slept in the same bed and I held her in my arms till she could sleep. The terror came much nearer at night. Rest was difficult for her. She often wept and there was the frenzy to fear when she yielded to her grief. I used to sing to her; old songs—Sur le pont d'Avignon, Les Filles de La Rochelle—and she would at last fall asleep. Yes,' Marthe Ludérac repeated, now with a strange, stern calm, 'strength was given tome. We even had many happy hours together.'
This, then, was the celestial, thought Jill. She felt herself bathed in its terrible beauty.