The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 21
VEIL after veil, deepening as it descended towards the valley, the dusk was dropping between the forest arches. All the great wind had fallen and the twilight air was calm. As Graham walked down the winding road, a strange effect followed upon his anger and bewilderment. It was as if the evening, with death-like, gentle hands, soothed them away, and his soul was dispossessed of all the magic that had so tormented and intoxicated him. He had the feeling of awakening from a dream. There was hardly a root of living fact in his memory that might resist the chill, soft effacement. It had all been a dream; all except those moments on the island; so near that when he thought of them it was only as a knocking at his heart that they returned; a thrush's notes; a white hand from which the mallet dropped.
Why had he been so angry? The old lady had been right. She had seen the truth to which he had been blinding himself all these days and she had warned him. If she had been glad to warn him, if there had been vindictiveness in the impulse, that did not condemn her. He had given her too much to bear. If she were jealous, malevolent, untruthful, in this she had been right—to him; to Jill; and to her protégée.
Mademoiselle Ludérac's figure passed through his mind, shrouded, featureless, sunken to the wraith-like anonymity of the protégée. He would remember the word. It had a talismanic quality. A thing to be protected; a thing needing protection. That was the old lady's rightness. She had seen that he needed a talisman and she had given him one. All the agitation, the fear, the loud knocking at his heart were gone, and he could see the protégée as she was, a nameless, lamentable, fate-ridden creature.
His thought traversed, but from far above, like a bird above a lurid landscape, the wretched story that Madame de Lamouderie had unfolded. His gaze rested on no aspect of it, though from one darkly smouldering spot the faded heat seemed to reach up to him in his altitude and scorch, ever so slightly, his indifference.—Her heart had been touched even by 'the poorest little poilu.'—And remembering that, he remembered the start away from his inadvertent touch, that afternoon, of all her conscious flesh. She feared him, with reason; and she feared herself, with greater reason. From the beginning she had feared, as he had.
And now he hastened towards Jill; Jill who need never endure such complicities of comprehension. He was, at last, able to think of Jill as he had not thought of her for many days. He remembered yesterday and his weakness and wondered if it had really troubled her. She must have seen it as a passing whim or mood—things with which imperturbable Jill was familiar in him. No; Jill had not been touched. No shadow of his still-born infidelity rested upon her. Happy, innocent Jill. Never had he loved her as he loved her now, urged towards her by self-scorn; and by that sense of a dark reek on the air, the taint in his nostrils for which Jill's limpidity, as of mountain freshness, would be the antidote. Dear normal Jill, of earth and air and water. Let him never again wander after the infernal brightness of strange goddesses. Let dear earth suffice him.
Jill was asleep when he went in. She lay on her pillow, her cheek turned to her hand, and looked, with her tossed locks and parted lips, like a very young child. He bent over her, tenderly smiling, while tears rose to his eyes.
When she awoke, she asked him no question about his afternoon. That would have been strange, were it not that she was really ill, and the fever ran high that night. But she smiled dimly and gratefully upon him while he nursed her, and he felt that if any shadow had lurked he would have seen it.
He hardly left her for three days. When he went out, it was to walk in the opposite direction from the Manoir, up towards the river gorges, and deep relief was in him for the blessed interlude. It was only as the fever left her, as the days passed on, that he began to wonder at her silence; and to ask himself if she wondered at his. Jill did not even ask him why he was not going on with Madame de Lamouderie's portrait.
She could sit up now in bed, and knit and write letters, and he read aloud to her. It might have been a very happy time had it not been for the sense of tension, even of breathlessness, that affected him. It was at night, lying in the little room beside hers, that he seemed to recover, from his impressions of the day, a memory of tension in Jill, too, that only her smiling calm kept from being apparent when they were together. And, thinking of it at night, it became very strange to him to remember that she had never asked him one question about the Manoir and its inmates. It was as if her illness had washed from her mind the memory of what had too much discomposed it. Marthe Ludérac's story had too much discomposed her. That was what it came to. So Graham, lying awake at night, would tell himself.
Then, one evening, after tea, Amélie came up and said that Mademoiselle Ludérac was below and asked if she might see Madame.
It was hateful to Graham; it made him hate himself, to find that helplessly, involuntarily, he had started to his feet. He could not see her. That was the first thought that had come to him; before any thought of Jill. He could not see her. She would be hateful to see. Disgust and terror seemed evenly mingled in his impulse of flight. But Jill was looking over at him, strangely looking, and she said: 'Don't go. Stay. I want you to see her, too.'
The quiet and urgency of her voice reminded him of the afternoon when she had asked him to see Marthe Ludérac on the island, and he now wondered whether that had been to test his strength, and her own; to test the reality left to them. He stood still and leaned back against the mantelpiece. He stood in shadow so, for the electric lamp by the bedside cast but a dim penumbra beyond the lighted circle where Jill sat in her pink silk jacket.
Mademoiselle Ludérac just glanced at him as she came in, bowed her head, and went swiftly to Jill and took her hand and stood beside her, half turned from him. She wore a long black cloak and a small black hat, and all that he saw of her face was the pale line of her cheek. But he saw her white hand, holding Jill's. He watched it while she and Jill spoke together.
'You are better?'
How her voice startled him. It was as if he had forgotten it.
'Ever so much better.—How good of you to come.'
'I should have come before, had you needed me.—It is for Madame de Lamouderie that I have come.'
'She's sent you?—It was better for you not to come, wasn't it?—It's such a tiresome thing to catch, dear Marthe.'
'No; she has not sent me. I have come quite of my own initiative.—No, it is not to stay.—I must go back to her'—Jill had indicated a chair—'or she will miss me and she must not know that I have been with you.—It is only this. Now that you are better, could Monsieur Graham'—Mademoiselle Ludérac did not look towards him as she thus named him, but it was with perfect calm that she spoke—'come and see her, do you think? She is very much troubled, though she tries to hide it. I have told her that it is your illness that keeps him here, but she is very much troubled. It would touch your heart to see her. She has grown so thin and does not eat. Could he come, if only for a little while?' Mademoiselle Ludérac reiterated, and it did not seem strange to either of them that she spoke to Jill and not to Graham.
'But of course he will,' said Jill in her confident tone of reassurance. 'Poor old dear! Of course you will, Dick, won't you?—I'm quite all right now. You could go to-night, for a little while. It's as bright as day with the moon, isn't it? It will be so lovely in the forest.—You will go, Dick?'
'Yes. Certainly I'll go,' Graham answered.
He was looking at Mademoiselle Ludérac, who looked at Jill, and he found that he could look at her fixedly. For he saw now that, though there was to be a next chapter, it would be empty of her; even though it was not to be empty of Madame de Lamouderie. He would never find Mademoiselle Ludérac at the Manoir and he and Jill, indeed, could not have left Buissac without seeing their old friend.
'Oh—I thank you so much, so very much,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, continuing to look at Jill. 'It has made me unhappy to see her so shaken. It is a real devotion that she feels, and to be cut away from it, so suddenly, is perilous for her.—It is not kind to leave her so, when she cares so much—and without a word.'
And suddenly, listening to her, Graham was aware of a passionate resentment in Mademoiselle Ludérac's voice, and that she spoke through tears. It was natural that she should feel this solicitude. It was creditable to her. So Graham told himself, in dry, dispassionate phrases, while his eyes rested on Mademoiselle Ludérac's hand holding Jill's in the circle of light, and from far away he seemed to hear the hurried notes of a thrush and a rushing wind among the poplar tops. Strange, uncontrolled creature, indeed. She was angry with him for his neglect of her benefactress. And Jill was murmuring: 'Oh, dear, dear Marthe! I'm so sorry.—We're both so sorry.—He didn't mean to be unkind.'
'No, no;—he did not mean it.—He will tell her that he did not mean it.—A thousand thanks,' Mademoiselle Ludérac murmured, withdrawing her hand as if alarmed by her own betrayal of emotion. 'I will say nothing to her. She may believe, may she not, that it is quite spontaneously that Monsieur Graham comes? He will not mention me?—'
'No, of course he won't mention you. She shan't be troubled in any way.' Jill, as she spoke, put out her hand to her friend. 'But when shall I see you again, Marthe?'
Arrested in her departure, Mademoiselle Ludérac stood and looked down into Jill's sad eyes; their jocund carving made them all the sadder. 'When you are better. When you are strong again,' she said.
'But I am better. I shall get up to-morrow. It's so lovely now. We must hear our birds, Marthe.'
'Yes. Soon. Some day soon. We must hear them,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, and to Graham's ear it was soothingly that she spoke, as a parent speaks to a child who must not know that it is leaving for a long, long journey. And would she kiss Jill? Yes. Jill drew her down and she bent still further and pressed her lips on Jill's forehead, but it was Jill who put her arms around her neck and kissed her on the lips, murmuring, 'Dear, darling Marthe!'
So she was gone, swiftly, silently, as she had come.
Graham stood still before the fire. He had a sense of overwhelming danger.
'You don't mind my promising for you, Dick?' Jill lay back on her pillows and spoke softly. She was tired. She wished to hide from him how tired; but he saw. 'You had to go, hadn't you?—Poor old creature. You ought to have gone long before. You really could have.'
'Yes;—oh, yes, I could have,' said Graham. He hardly heard what he was saying. His mind was fixed in a strange impulse. The sense of overwhelming danger was imminent and if he yielded to the impulse it would put an end—to everything. 'You see, the last time I saw her—she made me rather sick,' he said, and he turned from Jill and laid his hands on the mantelpiece and looked down at the flames.
'Yes—I know,' Jill strangely murmured. 'I mean—she made me rather sick, too, the last time I saw her.'
'I didn't tell you, because you were ill and I was afraid it would upset you. But I may as well now,' said Graham, his eyes on the fire and his mind fixed in its impulse. 'She told me all Mademoiselle Ludérac's story. Partly jealousy, no doubt. But, partly, trying to be square, to us both. She felt I ought to know, because of your friendship with her protégée. She was really rather fine. And she is evidently devoted, heart and soul, to Mademoiselle Ludérac.'
Jill lay, very still, behind him.
'It's a wretched story,' said Graham, 'and it will make you feel sick, I'm afraid. But I think you ought to know. I believe she herself would like you to know. She's tried her best to keep you at arm's length, hasn't she?—Mademoiselle Ludérac has been a courtesan, Jill.'
There was no sound behind him for a moment. And then Jill's voice came.
'Madame de Lamouderie said Marthe had been a courtesan?'
'No; she didn't say it. I did. She said that she'd taken lovers. That when she went to Bordeaux, after her mother's death, she took lovers—indiscriminately; except for the fact that she wasn't merely mercenary. She was alone, and poor, and had no prejudices;—so Madame de Lamouderie put it. And if she felt drawn to a little poilu, she'd give herself to him as soon as to a rich man.' An extraordinary bitterness had come to Graham's voice.
'And you believed her?' came Jill's voice, after another moment.
'Yes,' said Graham. 'I believed her. Why shouldn't I believe her?'
'Because she's mad with love of you,' said Jill.
'I know that. She was glad to tell me, of course. But it wasn't jealousy. No; you'd have believed her if you had heard her. She was very angry with me for calling her penitent a courtesan. For she is reformed, it seems.'
'You believe it, because you've been like that yourself, Dick. You've been bad in that way and that's why you are able to believe it of Marthe.'
That was why, perhaps—Graham saw it in a sudden uncanny flash of insight, helped by Jill—he had heard that bitterness come into his own voice just now. The unchaste man can feel no spiritual tolerance for the unchaste woman.
'If it's true, in any way true,' Jill went on, weighing her words, 'it isn't in any way that you or Madame de Lamouderie could understand.'
'Draw it mild, Jill,' Graham muttered. 'I'm not such a satyr as all that.'
'No; you're not a satyr. But you believe that Marthe has been mauled about by horrible Frenchmen!—' Jill's voice broke at last; sobs came into it. He turned, slowly, to look at her. She was lying back on her pillow with burning cheeks, her eyes closed. And though the sobs had come she mastered them. Her chest heaved and was quiet again. 'Poor Dick,' she said.
It was so strangely that she said it that his heart stood still. She said it as if she understood all.
'I've made you ill. I've been a fool,' he muttered, not approaching her.
'No. I'm not ill. I'm better. I'm glad you told me. I shall get it straight,' Jill muttered.
'Don't try to have it out with the old woman, Jill,' said Graham, after a moment. He felt as if he were picking his footsteps, cautiously, past a fiery furnace that might open and devour him. He kept his eyes on Jill. But she did not open hers. It was, again, as if she understood. 'Let her alone. Let both of them alone. By God,' he muttered, turning to the fire again, 'I wish we'd never seen the place!'
'I don't. Because if we had never seen the place we'd never have seen Marthe.' Jill's voice was clear and unfaltering as she made this statement. 'I'm not afraid of Madame de Lamouderie. And you needn't be, either, Dick.'
'You still want me to go up and see her, then?' with what a feeble voice he spoke, standing there and looking down into the fire. Did not Jill despise him? He despised himself. 'You will be able to get up to-morrow. Let's go to-morrow, then, Jill. Let's clear out.'
But Jill was unfaltering. 'No. I will make it straight first,' she said. 'And of course you will go up to her. Because Marthe wants you to. Because Marthe's unhappy about her.—Now let me go to sleep for a little while.'