The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 22
THE drawing-room at the Manoir had not been put in readiness for his visit. That would have been to give Madame de Lamouderie a suspicion of the errand on her behalf. There were thin white tulips on the mantelpiece, but they glimmered, half effaced, in the shade of the oil lamp that stood beneath them; and there, in the circle of dreary light, sat the old lady, huddled together, like a disabled bat, under the folds of a long black shawl. Unaware, she sat, sunken in a drowsy, bitter torpor, and seeing her Graham remembered that he had once smelt a bat. The memory of the smell came back to him; bitter, sour, drowsy.
But the eyes that Madame de Lamouderie raised were not like a bat's eyes. He had walked up through the forest in bright, silver moonlight, and they made him think of the night; of melancholy, silver blackness.
The days of her loneliness had hollowed her face and strewn it with ashes; but her eyes were beautiful; and as he looked into them she was at once loathsome and attractive to his mind. She had struck at her own heart as deeply as at his.
'C'est vraiment vous?—Je pensais ne plus vous revoir,' was what she said.
Would not even Jill have seen that this was not a mere malignant liar, he wondered, as he stood there, silent, before her. Jill's face, with the closed eyes and burning cheeks, drifted across his mind. She had shut out the hateful vision he put before her; the vision of the old lady telling what she had told; the vision of himself, believing. But Jill had not said it was not true. She had only said that if it were true it was in a way that he and Madame de Lamouderie could not understand. That it was true, true in any way, was enough to keep him safe. So his mind ran, while he stood and looked deeply down into the black and silver eyes.
'Yes. It's I. Jill has been very ill, you know.—Why shouldn't you see me again?' he said.
She made no reply to that, and though he paused, waiting for what she might find to say, nothing came. She only continued to fix her great eyes upon him with an infinite sadness.
'And how are you?' he asked; coldly, but with formal interest.
Even to this the old lady did not, for a moment, reply. Then, slowly shaking her head, she answered: 'As you see me.'
Graham had taken the chair opposite her on the hearth, and stretching up his arms he locked his hands behind his head. So he had sat the last time he had seen her; when she had told him and he had believed.
He was thinking of Marthe Ludérac now, his eyes fixed on the fire. He seemed to see her walking in the forest, her figure flitting from black to silver through the tree-trunks. It was a beautiful spring night. It would pour balm into her heart; and with a rush, as of wings, the harp notes of the Orpheus music went through his own.
'You look sad,' he heard himself saying; how long after the old lady's words he did not know.
'So do you,' she said quietly.
'Which is the saddest, I wonder,' Graham seemed to muse. 'Youth or age? Remembrance, or presage, which is worst?'
'But one does not escape presage when one is old. One can still fear, even when one is old,' said Madame de Lamouderie with her quiet.
'Can one really? But there can't be much left to be afraid of; if one has no superstitions.'
'There is still life to be afraid of.'
'With so little of it left?'
'But we do not feel life as duration. You well know that. A tragedy may be concentrated in a bare half-hour, as well at the end of life as at the beginning. One minute, if it is sufficiently terrible, may blot out half a century. What was the suffering on the cross? Three hours. Yet it has shadowed two millenniums.'
Graham lifted his eyes at that and looked across at Madame de Lamouderie. He looked long. His look plunged into the night of her eyes, plunged and sank and brooded there. What was it between him and this old woman? He distrusted her; he disliked her; it might well be that he loathed her; yet in that night they were near. And her soul rose up and seemed to swim from great depths towards him; a drowned, dead soul, resuscitated by his gaze. It clung to him. He seemed to feel it fasten itself upon him and hide in him; like a bat; a bat creeping into its refuge and huddling there. Or was it not, rather, like a silver star rising up from the depths towards the companion star of his soul, bent to look down into the darkness? Bat, or star? Which?
'I wish I understood you,' he said, half hypnotized by her gaze and by the tension of his thought.
'You do,' said Madame de Lamouderie.
'No.' He shook his head. 'No; I don't. Because you don't understand yourself.'
'Which of us does?'
'Some of us have things out with ourselves. Some of us never do. I don't feel that you do. I feel, now'—he was thinking, thinking, his eyes on hers—'that you are having them out for me; not for yourself.'
'That is because I love you,' said Madame de Lamouderie.
'Yes. I know,' Graham replied. 'But that isn't enough. You must find more substance than that.'
Something dropped away from her gaze then; as if the resuscitated soul drowsed back again, sank down, reëntered its oblivion. Perhaps the words she had uttered, and that he had so quietly accepted, woke her too fully to the temporal order of existence. He watched the star sink, sink, out of sight while, almost with the shadow of an ashen smile, she said, 'It is all the substance I ask for.'
'You are my Undine, eh? I make or unmake you? Well; have it so, then. I can't make anything enduring out of someone I don't understand, you know.'
'Ah, but I do not wish to endure. When you pass from my life—as you soon must do—I know it well—my wish would be that my life, too, should pass, like the shadow when the sun has sunk.'
'I hope that's not true. I don't know when you speak the truth,' Graham muttered, for her voice moved him strangely. 'Let us go back to our theme. Remembrance and presage. Aren't there sweet things in remembrance, then?'
The old lady accepted the change of key. She looked away from him. She seemed to ponder, and, again with the ashen smile, she said, 'Yes; there are sweet things. I sometimes think for hours of my childhood. When one is old I imagine that one's childhood is always sweet to one. One lifts oneself up, up, on the tips of one's toes—and there, far away, over all the mists and morasses, it is just visible; so bright; so small; so long. Looking back it seems as Jong as all the rest that comes between.'
'Tell me about your childhood,' he said. And sitting there, wrapped in her long black shawl, obedient, acquiescent, blissful, weaving with skill and industry any spell that might keep him near her, she told him.
The small, bright kingdom with its long, long days rose up softly before him. The cathedral of a great beech forest in Normandy, with pale pillars through which, in March, one saw the pale blue sea. It was there she took him first. Daffodils were scattered thickly along its aisles; the woodmen ranged their faggots; children's clear voices rang, and little Belot, the white-and-gold spaniel, ran with them, barking; for the forest was part of their home and half a mile away, at the top of its tapis vert, the high Louis Quatorze château, pale pink, pale grey, with pigeonniers set at each angle of its garden, watched over them. In the village, down in the valley, the peasants still wore coifs, crimped, winged, folded. Riding her dappled horse in a flowing skirt and plume, Maman passed along the golden edges of the plain. Old Blaise the farmer took them through the basse-cour to see the new litter of little pigs; so young that their tiny ears seemed braided back and tied behind, like the hair of demure little convent girls, though their eyes were already sharp and wise as they glanced up sideways, sucking at their happy mother. The farmer's daughter gave them fresh bread, and cream out of a great brown earthern pot; bread, pearl-coloured, glutinous, delicious, with a thick brown crust like the edge of thatch on one of the cottages. Irises grew along the thatchridges, and their roots, boiled with the linen, sent the breath of wafted violets through your dreams at night.
In the school-room sat the young literature master, stately, sad, and ridiculous, with a collar like Monsieur de Lamartine's. He would come to the salon after dinner and read poetry aloud to Maman and Grand'mère and the aunts and cousins, while they embroidered. It was one of the great-aunts, always in black satin with lace falling from a black cap on her portly shoulders, who found a young wife for him, and they had been married from the château. Their son had made a great name for himself; and their daughter had been called after her—who was the great-aunt's favourite—Cécile Léonore. In the salon Maman had a golden cage full of tiny tropical birds, piping, chirruping, trilling, like mice, like tinkling, thread-like brooks. Tempted beyond her strength one day, small Cécile put a hand into the fluttering rainbow and seized a cordon-bleu. Maman found her holding it. There was a penitence that day of bread and water. But the penitence was nothing to the horror that had shot through her little chest as she had stood looking at the bright, warm, still creature lying dead on her palm.
In the garden on a soft June morning, Papa led her by the hand; so tall, so elegant; with favoris, and close-fitting trousers strapped under his shining shoes, and high stock collar. He named all the roses to her and picked a small pink bud and gave it to her and kissed her and said, 'It is like my little Cécile.'
And as the old lady talked, by the dying fire, the radiance of those vanished days rested on her. Her eyes were soft; her lips sweet. She was happy, happy and self-forgetting, Graham saw, and almost forgetful of him, though it was for him she wove her spell; so that, for the first time, beauty came to him from her. He was with her in her childhood; he was with the little Cécile Léonore, as he listened.
The clock in the hall, the brooding, mournful clock, struck ten. It was time to go. 'Yes. I'm afraid it's late. I must go back to Jill,' he said. He rose and stood above her.
'Shall I see you again?' she asked. It might have been indeed that she had reached the end of things and saw her sun sink.
'Yes. Yes,' he promised gravely. He wished he could keep her happy; without presage; with remembrance; with little Cécile in the beech forest. 'There's the portrait. We have that still to finish.'
She gazed up at him. 'We are to finish it?'
'We must finish it.' He saw that they must. For the first time, to-night, he saw that he owed her something.
'Good-night, then,' she said. She asked no question of when his time would be. And she said no word—ah! never a word, of Marthe Ludérac.
'Good-night.'
She rose to her feet and took her stick and prepared to go with him to the door.
'Shall I ring for Joseph?' he asked.
'No; Joseph is in Buissac, with his niece's family. And I will not wait for his return. I am tired. Would you lend me your arm to my room? The stairs at night are difficult for me.'
He gave her his arm and led her out. A night-light burned dimly in a saucer at the turning of the stair. He led her up and she sighed in going, stretching out her hand for the rail. She had aged terribly, he felt it anew, in these last eight days, and on his hard heart there fell a blow of pity, of self-reproach.
At the top of the stair he pushed aside a swinging baize door that gave on a dark passage; airless, thick with the smell of beeswax.
'Now to the right. There is a little flight of stairs,' said Madame de Lamouderie, and as they turned a corner the moonlight flooded in from a small high window and showed him the way. The passage beyond the three stairs, leading down, turned to darkness again, but an open lighted door was before them. The old lady's room waited in readiness for her. When he led her to the threshold he saw that two candles were burning on the toilet-table, a table all looped with muslin over pink and tied with wide pink ribbons. What a picture that would make, the old black figure before the pink, bedizened toilet-table.
And there they paused on the threshold, and Madame de Lamouderie was looking up at him.
'If you would kiss me, once.'
He did not give himself time to think. Had he thought, he might have been guilty of a graceless retreat or a lame apology. Immediately he said, 'But I am honoured,' and though, as he bent to her, he had time for a horrid vision of gripping old hands seizing him, withered old lips searching for his lips, he found, as he kissed her forehead, and then her cheek, holding her by the hand, that he had wronged her indeed. She stood mute; still; as if under an accolade.