The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 20
WHEN Joseph opened to him Graham felt himself observed with a sidelong glance. 'Madame la comtesse is in the garden,' he said. 'She had given up seeing Monsieur to-day.'
'I'll go to her in the garden, then,' said Graham.
He crossed the hall and went out. The air was full of the songs of birds in the sunny, sheltered spaces. The garden had lost the waiting aspect it had in the autumn. Perhaps, thought Graham, as he saw the black figure at the end of the path, this was the encounter it had been waiting for. Yet this encounter did not seem significant. He felt that he was to deal very easily with the old lady. As he approached her it was with astonishment, incredulity, she watched him.
He raised his hat, smiling: 'We've met before—though you would not acknowledge me.'
The old lady wore her broad black hat. She had risen from the bench set against the garden wall and leaned upon her silver-headed stick as she surveyed him, still with incredulity, and without the trace of a smile. If he were to deal with her easily that was simply because he was so indifferent to her. As an antagonist she was not to be despised. She was calm, she was even majestic. He would have no coquettish plaints to withstand.
'I did not know that you wished to be recognized,' she said, after a moment. They had stood there in the sunlight, surveying each other.
'Why not, I wonder?' said Graham. 'I'm late, I know. But Jill is ill, poor child. She was to have met your friend on the island and asked me to go and find her there and explain why she couldn't come.' Thus, while the birds piped and whistled about them and the wind blew over the forest, did he cut the ground, so he imagined, from under the old lady's feet.
But she stood, majestically, and continued to survey him and a little vein of perplexity crept into his assurance. Had it been a trifle too bold? Had she detected in his voice a brazen note?
'Ah,' was all she said. And then: 'Shall we go in? You wish to continue your work?'
'Most certainly. If you will continue your kindness.'
Madame de Lamouderie laid her hand on his arm and they walked down the path and entered the house, in silence. At the foot of the stairs she stopped. 'I will be with you at once. I will take off my hat and be with you at once.'
In the drawing-room, where a fire was burning in readiness for his arrival, Graham placed his easel. Gloomily indeed the great eyes surveyed him from the canvas and the veil of perplexity, of uncertainty in him, ran more deeply as he looked at them. His story might avail to shield Mademoiselle Ludérac; but it would not avail to shield himself. There had been that in his demeanour, as they had walked down the meadow between the swollen streams that must inevitably engage a vulture's attention. Well, after all, what of it? He and Jill were soon leaving Buissac.
Madame de Lamouderie entered with an unremitting calm. She had arranged her hair, unaided, under the mantilla, and her lips were accurately rouged.
'I am grieved indeed to hear that my charming young friend is ill,' she said, going to her chair. 'I thought, yesterday, that she looked feverish.' She drew the mantilla forward over her shoulder and arranged the laces at her wrist.
'I'm afraid she caught this cold several days ago,' said Graham. 'If I had realized it she should have been put to bed at once. The only thing for a cold, isn't it?'
'She came, through sheer kindness, to see me,' said Madame de Lamouderie. 'It is a heart of gold she has. And it is too true'—she had taken her pose and Graham began to paint—'too true that she should not have come out. Already she had been harassed, troubled. You heard, perhaps, that my unfortunate Marthe had been ill-advised enough to tell her the story of her mother's disgrace.'
'Yes. So I heard. I do not think Jill felt it illadvised.'
'I differ from her, then,' said Madame de Lamouderie with composure. 'Ill-advised, unsuitable, I consider such confessions to be, and confessions unasked for: but reticence is a quality one does not often find among the lower orders. Your wife's interest had touched poor Marthe too much. She wished to make sure of it. Let that be her excuse.'
Graham made no reply. He painted in silence and Madame de Lamouderie, now, kept silence too.
When he paused the light had begun to wane. But he had done much. The old head looked out at him from the canvas with an astonishing vitality. He had thought so one-sidedly of his work that he was surprised to see how it had responded to the little he had to give.
'How do you like it?' he asked, turning the canvas to the old lady. She studied it, but, as he saw, with an attention as divided as his own had been. Even her vanity was in abeyance to-day. 'It is remarkable. It is magnificent. I am satisfied to have served your genius so well, Monsieur.—Is the sitting over for to-day? The light is altered, is it not? There is something of which I wish to speak to you.'
'Yes. I can stay a little.' Graham was taken aback by the deliberate request. But if there was anything to face, it would, he felt, be better to have it over.
'Put away your things, then,' said Madame de Lamouderie, and when he had done this, perhaps a trifle sulkily, for her attitude put him singularly at a disadvantage, she pointed to the low chair opposite her own on the other side of the hearth. 'Will you sit there?'
Graham sat himself down and folded his arms.
'It is about Marthe and your wife that I wish to speak to you,' said Madame de Lamouderie, looking, not at him, but, contemplatively, into the fire. 'You will not be surprised at my decision, for what I have to say will show you that if your wife is very much your affair, Marthe is very much mine. It is, in a sense, under my protection that she has lived, for some years, now—in so far as I can lend it to her.'
And what had Jill to do with it? So unexpected was her approach to her theme that Graham knew himself still more at a disadvantage; but, his chin on one hand, his elbow in the other, he sat as if much at ease and observed his hostess.
'You knew,' said Madame de Lamouderie, 'that I had already told your wife something of Marthe's history.'
'Yes,' said Graham, 'I knew about that.'
'It was all that I felt it wise to tell,' said Madame de Lamouderie, 'for I was alarmed lest in speaking of one thing, I should, inadvertently, reveal another.'
'Well, that alarm was unnecessary, wasn't it, since Mademoiselle Ludérac has now told all her history to Jill?'
'No,' said Madame de Lamouderie, slowly shaking her head, while her great eyes rested on the flames, 'no; she has not told all. I do not allude to her unhappy mother's drama. It is of Marthe's own story that I am now speaking and it is not one that she would ever tell your wife.'
A little pause fell in the darkening room and Graham felt himself suddenly retreat, as if from a dimly seen tentacle stretched forth towards him. 'In what way does Mademoiselle Ludérac's story concern me?' he coldly questioned.
'It concerns you in that it concerns your Jill,' said Madame de Lamouderie and her eyes lifted themselves for a moment and rested upon him. 'Some intimacies it is not suitable that she should be exposed to. She is singularly young; singularly confiding and inexperienced. Marthe would never tell her; nor could I; but to you I feel that I owe a complete avowal, since it is through me that your wife met my protégée.—You will do me the justice to remember that it was never as other than a performer for our entertainment that I introduced her.'
Graham now leaned back and locked his hands behind his head and looked heavily across at the old lady, and after a pause she took up her theme with the deliberate gravity that had, throughout, marked her manner.
'You know now all that need be known of my poor Marthe's lamentable girlhood. Her youth, the flower of her age, was spent in caring for a demented mother. She had no guidance; no protection; no instruction. Her family were free-thinkers; atheists;—religion meant nothing in their lives. They had none of the standards, none of the prejudices, even, of the upper classes. When Marthe's mother died, she went to Bordeaux to seek for work. She was not known there. It would have been impossible for her to return to Angoulême. And this was before I knew her. I could recommend her to none of those who might have warned and guarded her. She was alone in a strange city. She was poor and embittered. She had no religious faith. Can you blame her, Monsieur, can you feel surprised (she has a potent attraction—as you have recognized)—when I tell you that she yielded to the solicitations of her youth and of her indigence? It was in the last years of the war. Bordeaux was full of weary, desperate soldiers. She took lovers among them; many lovers. Passion had its way with her. Under that chill demeanour she has a temperament of fire and she burned her youth away.'
Graham had not stirred. He still sat, his hands locked behind his head, his eyes on his hostess; and first there came a self-protective instinct that told him to make no sign of shock; and then a deep, sick intimation of acquiescence; of relief. This was separation. This was safety. Marthe Ludérac was like himself. Not set apart; not a celestial mystery. He could now turn his back on her. Jill was saved; and he was saved. But he must say something to Madame de Lamouderie, and as he found his voice at last he knew that it betrayed, not relief, but the bitterness of a disillusion deeper than any thought could reach.
'How, with such a means of livelihood at her disposal, did she come to turn to teaching? Or does she teach? Are her winters at Bordeaux passed with lovers?'
The old lady paused. The light was waning. He could not clearly distinguish her features. They seemed to express a profound sadness; but he was not thinking of the old lady. He was thinking of himself and of what his voice betrayed. She slowly shook her head. 'It is over. I believe that it is over. There is great strength in Marthe. She has made me her promises. She came to know me. I did not shrink from her. I am not easily shocked by life. I have sympathy, Monsieur, for temperaments of fire. With my help she has been able to build up a new life.'
'But since she had embarked on that career,' said Graham, still trying for a light irony, 'it might seem more to her advantage if she were to continue it.—It's a dull life she leads here. The life of a musicteacher in Bordeaux must be dull. She is, as you say, most remarkably attractive; attractive enough to pick and choose. The profession of a courtesan, especially in France, offers very solid advantages.'
At that, immediately, with a repudiating, even a noble coldness, Madame de Lamouderie answered: 'You misinterpret me, Monsieur. Marthe was not a mere courtesan. She was not depraved. She was not mercenary. It was not to the rich only she gave herself; it was to the poor, also; to the poorest little poilu, if he could touch her heart. A man and a woman, I know it well, cannot see that question eye to eye; even when one is as old as I am and the other as young as you. Toa man, women are divided into the sheep and the goats; the innocent and the guilty. I do not feel it so. Marthe has lived the life that a not ignoble man may lead. She has loved freely—as her heart led her to love. There are degrees of disintegration and she was far from having reached the lowest. And, strange as it may seem to you, I respect Marthe Ludérac. I respect her courage; her strength of will. I cannot forget the beautiful devotion to her mother, nor what blood it is that runs in her veins, urging her towards destruction.'
Though she spoke so rightly, and with such a ring of just disdain, Graham did not show her any sign of approbation. He remained, apparently, unmoved, and his expression even betrayed an offensive scepticism. And still he was not thinking of the old lady. She was a crow, merely, that croaked from the battlement, and all the omens seemed hatefully to assent to her loathsome ditty. It was something dark as well as something radiant that had drawn him to Marthe Ludérac from the beginning. Something fateful, boding, had hung round her figure from the first moment when he had seen her coming like a ghost, all white and black, round the corner of the house. From the first he had known her attitude towards him to be ambiguous. But his bitterness was for himself. That he should have found meanings so mysterious for a reality so miserable;—his Eurydice, shining and immortal in her grave-clothes, only a pitiful little courtesan. Madame de Lamouderie sat there, her eyes upon him, and in her presence he could not probe the darkness that opened within him. The faint, haughty smile fixed upon his face was the veil he held between them.
But the old lady, impersonal, dispassionate, was to-day armed with a terrible prescience. Her next words seemed prompted by an unerring instinct. 'I have told you all this because of your Jill. I have felt, watching the events of these last days, that you might wish to withdraw her, tactfully, from an unsuitable intimacy. Marthe herself, I have seen it plainly—and in looking back you will concede it to her—has done her best to withdraw. She has the instinct of what is fitting. But it is not only that. I have my own responsibility towards Marthe. I should feel that I failed in it unless I went further and spoke very frankly to you, as an old woman may to a young man. Marthe lives here under my protection. I have seen that upon you she produces the effect she produces upon other men. And I must ask you to take no advantage of the frailty now fully exposed to you.'
'Advantage?'
Under brows of thunder Graham's eyes darted their dark flames towards her.
The old lady did not quail. 'I have revealed to you—before, I trust, she herself revealed it—that to my protégée the seduction of the other sex is as potent as hers for them. May I trust you not to yield to the appeal of such a proximity?'
Graham stared, blackly, for another moment. Then, violently, he started up from his chair.
'Are you suggesting that I might feel drawn to purchasing Mademoiselle Ludérac's favours?'
Madame de Lamouderie, unmoved, looked up at him, and in her eye he seemed now to detect a malevolent beam.
'You put it clearly, my young man.'
'I don't think you quite realize to whom you are speaking.'
'Mais, mon cher ami,' said the old lady, and her twisted smile distorted the lines of her mouth and the lid of one eye dropped until it covered the iris, 'I speak to a man—tout simplement.'
'I see. All right. You have made a mistake.'
Graham was turning from her, but her next words, spoken with no urgency, no change of tone, arrested his departure. 'I have made no mistake. You are a man, like another. You cannot pretend with me to be a sainte nitouche. You have had your mistresses; and perhaps as many as poor Marthe has had lovers. You cannot face me and tell me that because you have made a happy marriage you are incapable of desiring another woman.'
Graham faced her. 'I am in no humour for confessions. But of one thing you may be assured. Your protégée runs no risk from me. I am not a man to be tempted by a lady of such easy virtue.'
The old lady bowed her head. 'That is well. I thank you.'
And why should Madame de Lamouderie be treated as if she were guilty? He was aware of the question as he left her and the beam of recognized malevolence seemed to answer him. She had been glad to shatter his illusions, and whatever mitigations justice might find for her behaviour, all that he knew now was that he wanted to get away from her: be rid of her.
And she understood it well enough. He must concede her that. She made no effort to delay him. Had he demanded some final verification from her, none more convincing than her silence now could have been offered. She adored him: but jealousy had not been her motive; or how could she have endured to see him go like this?