The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 17
JILL on entering the drawing-room was at once aware, though the light was failing, of the gloomy, resentful gaze that the old lady fixed upon her. It was evidently Marthe who was expected, and her welcome would have been a chill one. When her advancing figure disclosed its identity, the change of expression on Madame de Lamouderie's face was almost ludicrous. Jill pressed her back into her chair as, impeded by the rug wrapped round her knees, she tried to struggle to her feet.
'No, no, don't get up,' she said, laughing. 'I've just come for a little chat.—I'll sit here. This will do beautifully.—It's such a dismal day. I wanted to hear some of your wonderful stories.'
'Ah—this is what it is to have a friend!—This is what it is to have a true friend!' said Madame de Lamouderie in tones of almost vindictive assertion. 'No one cares for me but you! I am abandoned by all the rest!'
'No, you're not,' Jill retorted, smiling upon her. 'I've just walked up with Mademoiselle Ludérac. She hasn't abandoned you, for one. And since it's probably going to go on raining, I expect you'll see Dick again to-morrow afternoon.'
These two pieces of information left the old lady gaping and, for the moment, at a loss.
'To-morrow afternoon? It is in the mornings that he has now elected to come.' She had seized, at all events, the happy implication.
'Well, I'm afraid he didn't find his plan succeeded. He didn't find you more cheerful when you were being read to, though he did find you most awfully amusing and witty.'
'Witty? He found me witty? Tant mieux!' The old lady, though aware of a change of fortune, spoke bitterly. 'He did not find me changed, that is certain. And why should he? I see Marthe day after day, month after month. I have no need to see more of her. It was him I wanted to see. And he knows it!'
'Well, it's all right now,' said Jill soothingly, though she was a little taken aback.
'Ah; is it indeed all right?' said the old lady. 'So you may say; and we shall see.—And what had Marthe to do with you that you came up together?' she added with a change of tone.
Jill considered her for a moment. Would one be able to go on being sorry for her, she wondered. This might be but the fretfulness of a sulky, froward child; but it might be something more unpleasant. There was a hint of peremptoriness in her question that she did not at all relish.
'Mademoiselle Ludérac came to see me,' she said, looking very gravely at her. 'She came to tell me the story of her life. She wanted me to know.'
Madame de Lamouderie as she heard these words showed an altered countenance. They sobered her. She was drawn outside the consideration of her own griefs. 'She told you?'
'Yes. About her father and her mother.'
'Why did she tell you?' said Madame de Lamouderie after a moment.
'She felt that I was fond of her and ought to know.'
Madame de Lamouderie looked into the fire. 'I should not have told you had I been she. I should tell nobody of such a thing.'
'Not even a friend? It seems to me just what one would tell to a friend.'
'No.' The old lady shook her head. 'Not even to a friend. What is a friend? What does Marthe know of you? Such avowals put one at a disadvantage.'
'A disadvantage? I don't understand you.'
'Our sorrows are always disadvantages to us,' said Madame de Lamouderie, and as she gazed into the smouldering fire she looked like a sibyl, old, wise, and sinister, drawn in black and silver on the failing day. They count against us with the world. They make us of so much less value and consequence.'
'Perhaps that was what Mademoiselle Ludérac thought. Perhaps that was why she felt I ought to know—lest I should think her of more consequence than she was!' Jill spoke with her measured gravity, though the form of her words was ironic. 'She can't think so now. It may be true of the world, what you say; but it's not true of decent people.'
'The world is made up of what you call decent people—des gens fort honnêtes.' Madame de Lamouderie could match Jill in gravity. It was a new aspect of herself she showed her as she sat there, brooding, with lowered eyes. 'Put them together, and they become a herd; and a herd is the cruellest thing in nature. It scents out weakness. It hunts it down and tramples on it. All sorrow is a weakness and weakness is the one thing one must not show the world if one wishes to keep one's skin whole and one's bones unbroken.' An extraordinary bitterness infused her voice.
'You and I could never treat Mademoiselle Ludérac like that, however many people you added to us,' said Jill. Madame de Lamouderie did not frighten her. The aspect of life she put before her was so alien to her apprehension that she felt it strange rather than dismaying. 'We'd protect her if the herd tried to trample her. We'd never trample too.'
'Ah, I do not know. I do not know,' the old lady repeated, not raising her eyes. 'Nor do you, ma petite. Human nature is a singular thing; and you are very ignorant of it, let me tell you. We all fear the herd. We all fear to oppose its impulses, lest we be victims.—Fear; ambition; jealousy;—which of us, to gain what we crave, or to avoid what we dread, would not take advantage of the disinherited creature? Marthe Ludérac has, through her misfortunes, been disinherited. No one will know her. No one will marry her. She has withered on the branch of life. Better that she should not draw attention to herself.'
Jill sat opposite the grim old creature. Her happy, tilted lips, her smiling eyes, were strangely hardened as she tried to think out a way of escape from these problems that she saw, for the first time, as menacing, yet that her heart so deeply contradicted. Unconsciously, as she pondered, she unknotted her silk scarf and threw it back over her shoulder, and the old lady, observing the gesture, raised her eyes and examined her, with a cold, profound scrutiny. Jill did not see it. Her eyes were on the fire.
'No; it's not true—' she said at last. 'It's not true, when people love each other. People do love each other. They do, often, sacrifice themselves for the sake of love. Even in Marthe's case, I don't believe they meant to be so cruel. It just happened so.'
'It would so happen—to the daughter of a murderess.'
'Her mother wasn't a common murderess. It was a pitiful crime. I expect lots of people were dreadfully sorry for her.'
'Ah, I do not blame her mother.' The old lady was terse indeed to-day.
'Well, I blame her. I'm dreadfully sorry for her; but I blame her. You ought not to kill your husband—even if he has been unfaithful to you!'
'Ought not!' Madame de Lamouderie laughed. 'Such "oughts" are straws in a conflagration when jealousy flames. It is precisely as I was telling you just now. We do not know ourselves till temptation comes. Madame Ludérac could not have known that she was capable of murder until she saw her rival in her husband's arms.'
'I suppose not. No, of course she couldn't.—But there must have been something wrong about her all the same. It was so senseless, so vindictive of her, wasn't it? What I mean,' Jill pondered, her eyes on the fire, 'is that she didn't really love him enough.'
'Not enough! You do not know what you are saying! Not enough! It was because she loved him too well!'
'Not in the way I mean. If she had loved him in the way I mean, she would have been able to understand a little;—and even be sorry for him, however miserable he had made her.'
'Sorry for him! Par exemple! No, in such a case I can see myself take up the pistol! But I should have shot his mistress first! And I am one who can love, let me tell you!'
Jill looked up at that. The great devouring eyes were on her and made her think of an astronomical photograph she had once seen; the dark disc of the sun with flames flickering round it. She could not interpret their gaze, but had she been of a timid and retreating nature she would have shrunk from it. Jill, however, was not disposed at any time to turn back before a five-barred gate.
'If you killed them, it wouldn't be because you loved so much, but because you didn't love enough,' she said, considering her opponent. 'If being in love was her excuse for killing him, then it was his excuse, too. He couldn't help it if he loved somebody else.'
'He could not help it!—And she could not help it! Well and good! So be it! But let us hear no more of blame and who was right and wrong!' cried the old lady. 'There is no right and wrong in such a case, to those who are composed of flesh and blood and not of eau sucrée. You do not know what love is. You have never felt passion. You are a child—a simple child! That has been made very plain to me more than once—for where there is no jealousy there is no passion.—These are dark themes, and since you do not understand them—or yourself—we will talk no more of them,' said Madame de Lamouderie, in such commanding tones that Jill gazed at her in astonishment. Not only was Madame de Lamouderie commanding her; but with a sub-flavour of insolence. She evidently believed her to be composed of eau sucrée. She was herself one of the people—Jill saw it in a flash of insight—who, in her ambiguous past, had scented out and trampled on weakness. Well, she had miscalculated her victim in this case.
Jill was not angry. She was displeased. She reflected for a moment and then rose. 'No; we won't talk about it any more. And it's time for me to go now. Good-bye,' she said.
It was almost pitiful, but almost repulsive, too, to see how quickly Madame de Lamouderie could crumble. Dismay withered her face; horror widened her eyes; her hands grasped the arms of her chair on either side. 'But you will not leave me like this? I have hardly seen you. You have talked of nothing but Marthe. Have you no longer any feeling for anyone but Marthe?' she cried. 'Do not go, not yet! I implore of you!'
'But, you know, I think you were rather rude,' said Jill, standing there above her with her hands in her pockets. 'I don't like people to be rude to me.'
'Rude to you! My angel! No! It would be impossible! It was carelessly that I spoke.' Madame de Lamouderie put out her hand and laid it on Jill's dress. 'It was not of you I was thinking . . . You are my ideal of all that is wise and enchanting in womanhood!—No; I am an unfortunate and embittered old woman, battered by the storms of life. You will not be so unkind as to punish me for my bad temper!'
'Of course I don't want to punish you—or anyone,' Jill said, and as Joseph at that moment entered with the tea-tray, she sank down again into her chair, murmuring, 'Only a few moments then, because I really must get back to Dick.'
'Tea?' said the old lady. Her cheek was darkly flushed. She turned her eyes on Joseph and spoke in a haggard voice. 'It is too early for tea. Five o'clock is the proper time, as I have had occasion to tell you before.'
'Mademoiselle ordered it for four,' said Joseph, unmoved, setting down the tray.
'It's quite right. I told her I couldn't stay, and she said she'd have it sent in at four,' Jill explained. 'She knows you like to give me tea.'
'She is thoughtful. She is considerate. She is my good angel,' said the old lady, still disarrayed, watching Joseph leave the room.
'She really is, you've hit the mark this time,' said Jill, laughing a little despite herself. 'You know it's very wrong of you to talk about being abandoned when you have her to care for you.'
'Do not lecture me! Do not preach to me! I cannot bear it! I can bear no more to-day!' cried the old lady. Her relief at having bridged the chasm that had threatened was so great that a shaft of archness shot into her glance, giving it the cajoling charm of a naughty, impenitent child's. 'Everything has gone against me to-day—to begin with your husband! He has a hard heart, that man! He is a bright, destructive Lucifer! Yes; I assert it! Even Marthe was unkind to me at lunch. She is not a saint, Marthe;—oh, no. You do not know how severely she can speak sometimes;—and with a gloomy brow. If you, too, go against me, take me au pied de la lettre, there will be nothing left for me to do but to cast myself down into the river from the precipice! And I warn you, you calm young Englishwoman, that I am sometimes near doing it! In old age the blood becomes cold and sluggish; the old cling torpidly to life. But I am not like the others. My blood can still rebel. You would not like to have the death of an old Frenchwoman—even of such a wicked, foolish old woman—on your conscience, would you?'
She had succeeded. She was making Jill laugh. She was happy, almost happy, in her triumph, if only for the fleeting moment.
'I suppose you are wicked,' said Jill. 'But you are certainly very charming. I can't get really angry with you.'
'Ah, that is what I like to hear! Let me be charming to you and I care not how wicked you may think me!—not even if you think me more wicked than I am! That may be so, you know. I may make myself out worse than the reality. Perhaps I am not really a murderess!'
'Oh, I don't mind your being a murderess—not one bit!' Jill assured her. 'It's not that sort of thing I mind.'
'Did I call you simple? Just now? When you were so displeased with me? You are simple; I repeat it. But you are also very shrewd, very wise and shrewd, my dear young friend. You are as well aware as the most sophisticated misanthrope that it is the large crimes of which we prefer to be thought capable, rather than the small, mean ones;—the crimes of the individual, not the crimes of the herd;—eh?'
'Yes. I suppose it's that,' Jill smiled, stirring her tea, for while she had listened to Madame de Lamouderie she had poured out tea for them both. The old lady had forgotten it in her absorption. 'It's nice, I suppose, to feel oneself a tiger, rather than a sheep.'
'Precisely. Think of me as a tigress. A lonely, sad old tigress, tamed by you,' said Madame de Lamouderie.