The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 19
SO Graham started. Spring had returned again. The river still roared under the wall; but the sky was cloudless, a vast, blue sky against which trees and cliffs and villages glittered in the wind and sunlight. But though so blue, so glittering, the day was tempestuous; a Vulcan chained; such a fury of implicit power lay beneath its gladness. The great wind came swooping down the gorges and the edges of the waves were sharp with gold and silver.
While Graham was still on the lower road he saw Marthe Ludérac descending to the island, high on the promontory. She was leading a goat—even at his distance he could see the careful, tentative steps of the creature as it followed her—and on her shoulder she carried a young kid.
Dark, slightly bent with her burden against the sky, she was like a woodcut of the Good Shepherd. Her silhouette, dark and far and small, seemed to belong to distant ages. He stood and watched her until she had disappeared in a lower fold of the cliff and then, slowly, he went forward.
He had but a little way to go before the road turned to climb the promontory; but he did not follow it. He paused for a moment, looking up at the cliff or out at the river, and then walked out onto the causeway. From where he stood he could not see the bridge that spanned the inner stream, but by now Marthe Ludérac must have crossed it and he descended to the meadow. If she were coming towards the island, he would meet her; if she was picketing her goat on the lower ground, he would join her. This was what Jill had asked him to do. He had demurred; but it was her wish.
As he rounded the promontory he saw her at some little distance before him, and, keeping close to the inner stream, he followed her. The stream, under the vast, looming curve of the cliff, was dark and still. He glanced down at it as he went and saw a sharp edge of blue reflected, deep down, and the far, high beak of the promontory cutting into it; and for a moment it made him dizzy and a little sick to see the inverted height.—Now she had put down the kid and it trotted nimbly yet unsteadily beside its bleating mother. The mother's cry came loudly, shaken by the wind and strangely echoing back from the rocky heights; a cry like the day, Graham felt—full of anxiety, anticipation, and brooding love.
Marthe Ludérac was approaching a little cabin at the furthest end of the meadow. Set small and low on its narrow strip of sunlit meadow between the poplar groves and the gigantic, looming cliff, it made him think of a cabin seen in a dream; the whole picture there before him, of which, with hallucinated vividness, he was suddenly aware, was like a dream, and its very colour seemed part of the fabric of his brain; the tawny sands, the sepia thickets, the blue and silver of the sky and poplars; and in the centre of its stupendous setting, the lonely cabin held the eye as if by some calm, secret significance. It seemed to him the loneliest thing he had ever looked upon; and the most familiar.
Mademoiselle Ludérac had gone round it, still leading the goat, and when she reappeared she was carrying a mallet and stake. She stood there in the sunlight, her skirts buffeted by the wind, and, as the kid tottered against her, she stooped and kissed the little animal on the forehead. A kid, thought Graham, was certainly one of the most endearing creatures in nature.
He had come slowly forward into the middle of the meadow now, leaving his shelter. There was a sound of water in the air; the deep roar of the great river, and the breathless rush of the outer stream that ran between the meadow and the island. He could not see this stream from where he walked, but he could hear its ardent voice, and high on a poplar a thrush broke into song. Hurried, loud, challenging rather than jubilant, the sudden notes startled him and seemed to knock at his heart.
He was close beside Mademoiselle Ludérac and still she had not seen him. She was finding difficulty with her mallet. She knelt on one knee, the rope twined round her arm, and twice, as she attempted to strike the stake, the goat moved away and the mallet drove into the ground.
'Let me help you,' said Graham.
She started violently, sprang upright, and stood gazing at him in an astonishment too great for alarm.
'Let me help you,' he repeated, and he put out his hand to take the mallet as he spoke. It touched hers. With another start, as violent as the first, she drew back and the mallet fell, with a sufficiently heavy blow, on Graham's foot.
'That is a little too severe, you know,' he remarked, picking up the implement and glancing at her where she stood above him.
At his words her strange blush, pale, yet as violent in its suddenness as her start had been, flooded her face. For a moment she could hardly speak. Then she uttered: 'I am sorry. I did not mean to be so clumsy.'
'Perhaps that makes it all the more cutting,' said Graham, smiling slightly; but with no merriment. He was aware of a feeling in himself that was like cruelty, and of the dry dispassionateness that had sustained him last evening through Jill's story; and all the time he felt, rather than heard, the thrush's hard notes knocking at his heart.
He stooped and drove in the stake. 'So. Is that as you wish it? May I put your mallet in the shed for you while you tie your animal?—Thank you.' The bitter smile, the bitter voice, left her speechless.
He found, as he went round the cabin, that his foot was, indeed, unpleasantly bruised, but he held himself from limping and put the mallet in its place. When he returned, the goat was safely tethered and the kid had laid itself down in a sunny nook among the bushes. Its little face looked up inquiringly at him as he passed it, innocently arch, with great limpid eyes and two soft buds on its forehead where the horns would be.
Graham and Mademoiselle Ludérac turned and walked side by side down the meadow. Both were silent; perfectly silent. Graham had clasped his hands on his stick behind his back and looked before him with an air of unconcern. Mademoiselle Ludérac, her arms tightly folded in her black shawl, turned her head away and seemed to watch the river. Above them towered the vast form of the promontory. Behind them the thrush sang loudly on, and the wind in the island poplars swept the branches against the sky to slanting lines of blue and silver.
As they neared the bridge, Graham glanced down at the stream and saw again the sharp blue edge of sky, the promontory beak. His dizzy panic gripped him for an uncanny moment and it seemed to him, while he looked, that they were entrapped between the two abysses and that escape was impossible. Then his eye fixed itself in astonishment, for deep in the stream, reflected on the far, high blue, a black blot was poised against the sky. From the stream he looked up at the sheer face of the cliff and saw that Madame de Lamouderie was standing at its topmost verge, looking down at them.
Leaning on her stick, there she stood. From their lifted faces, even at her distance, she must have seen that they saw her, but she made them no signal, nor did she for a moment move. Strangely ominous, strangely intent, did she appear; like a bird of prey hovering above its quarry. Then, hurriedly, as if in retreat, she turned away and it was as if the sky engulfed her.
Graham glanced at his companion. She was very pale. She did not look at him. And from her pallor, from their silence, from the bird-of-prey scrutiny that had enveloped them, a sober certainty came to him at last, like a stone laid on his heart, and made a mockery of his long pretence.
They had come to the bridge and, laying her hand on the rail, Mademoiselle Ludérac paused before crossing. 'Madame de Lamouderie had hoped to see you this afternoon. Madame Graham told her that she might see you.'
'Yes, I was going to her.'
All he could think of now were her eyes into which he was looking. He did not remember his excuse for being with her on the meadow.
'You will not still come?' said Mademoiselle Ludérac after another moment. Her finger-tips were whitened by the hard grip of her hand upon the rail.
'Do you think she will still care to see me?'
He could say nothing, she could say nothing, that did not discover them to each other. He heard the breathlessness under her careful, measured tones as she answered: 'It is because you are late that she was there. She will care very much to see you.'
'Then, since I am late, I will follow you,' said Graham. 'It would take me another half-hour to go round by the road.'
She made no reply and they crossed the bridge and began the steep ascent. She went before him. He could not see her face; he could only see the proud poise of her shoulders, wrapped in the black shawl, the proud, white neck, the proud, dark head. She seemed to glide upward. So familiar was the rugged path to her foot that it found with easy precision every ledge and level, and they went so swiftly that when they reached the promontory road they were forced to pause for breath. But even here they did not turn to look at the great view spread below them. As if with the shared impulse of escape, they stood side by side, breathing deeply and looking up at the further ascent that wound its way among deep fissures in the rock; and suddenly, as they stood there, Graham heard, far away, the note of a chiff-chaff, and remembered Jill.
'Jill is not well,' he said. He put out his hand and pushed it against the granite wall, still looking up. 'She asked me to find you on the island and tell you that she could not come.'
Mademoiselle Ludérac stood silent for a moment. He had found the words too late to do anything for himself, but to her they might still be helpful. They were helpful. She thought them over and her voice told him that they gave her refuge. 'It is not serious, I hope?'
'No; not serious. It's influenza. The doctor is seeing her. She must take care of herself for a week or two.'
'Would it please her if I should go to see her?'
'I think not; she would be afraid of infection for you.'
'I do not fear it.'
'I imagine that complete rest is the best thing for her.'
She stood for another moment, as if irresolute, and then went forward swiftly. The path now was so steep that they had to lay a hand here and there upon the tangled creepers that draped its walls. Once her foot slipped and she caught herself from falling. Graham stood still, making no attempt to aid her.
They reached the rocky eminence where Madame de Lamouderie had stood. It was not so precipitous as it looked from below. The vineyards sloped up from it and among them stood the dilapidated cottage.
Mademoiselle Ludérac paused. 'I am going to see a sick woman.'
Graham lifted his hat.
She stood there and her eyes met his. She nerved herself. 'You will tell Madame de Lamouderie why you came to find me?'
'That Jill sent me? Of course.'
He was facing her, his hat in his hand, and, as he said the words and looked into her eyes, he felt a hot flush mount to his forehead and beat in his throat. It was as sudden, as violent, as revealing, as hers had been. She stood there and observed it, helplessly, for another moment, then, with a murmured farewell, she moved swiftly away among the vineyards.