The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 3
IT'S a day like a fairy-tale,' said Jill.
'A happy fairy-tale or a sad one?' Graham asked.
They were on their way to the Manoir, the green, lustrous glades of the chestnut forest opening before them as they climbed the mild ascent that led up from the river level. It was a beautiful walk, as Monsieur Michon had said, and the cool, sunny afternoon lay like a benediction over the splendid country.
'A happy one, of course,' said Jill. She turned her smiling eyes upon her husband, thinking that he looked a fitting hero to any fairy-tale. She was happy to be doing anything with Dick. So often she was alone; though Jill was seldom conscious of feeling lonely.
'Some fairy-tales are sinister, you know,' Graham objected. 'Perhaps if you'd seen the old lady you would feel that this one would be. She's rather witch-like and one can imagine her running a long needle into the princess's heart more easily, I'm afraid, than waving the wand for Cinderella.'
'But when princesses have the needles run into their hearts they come to life all right in the end,' said optimistic Jill. 'Fairy-tales may be sinister, but they always end well. I wasn't thinking so much of your old lady, though. It was just the feeling of starting on an adventure, with you. And everything being different from anything we've ever done before. It all feels different to-day.'
'Nice child,' Graham smiled at her. Jill's fundamental trust in life often amused and often touched him.
Halfway up the shoulder of the cliff the grande route swept suddenly to the left, on level ground, while, on the right, the ascent continued, more steeply, by a narrow, stony road.
'This must be the way she told me of,' said Graham. 'And it's quite true that one wouldn't care to take the car up it.'
But Jill had stopped short and was staring at a high wall that ran along the grande route.
Above it, bristling against the background of forest green, was an extraordinary array of what looked like nothing in the world so much as large tin tubs turned upside down and mounted on stilts. There were myriads of them; and amidst the quietly rustling solitudes they had a grisly look.
'What in Heaven's name is that?' said Jill.
'This,' said Graham, after a silent survey, 'is evidently the cemetery. Charming, isn't it?' He was less startled than Jill; perhaps because he was by nature more acquiescent in the grisly.
'The cemetery? Why?'
'Ask me another. We must go in and see.'
'I haven't the least wish to go in.—Are they baths?'
'Not at all. And few of those who repose beneath them ever, I imagine, knew a bath. They are temples. Shrines. Come along. It's rather picturesque. A variant on Velasquez's Les Lanzas.'
Reluctantly Jill followed him round to the high grille which yielded to his thrust.
They found themselves in a gravelled, orderly necropolis, a Galerie Lafayette, a Bon Marche of death. It seemed almost to display counters and to advertise good worth for the money. The poorer graves were sheltered by the high-perched tin tabernacles; the more opulent by stone chapels, railed across the front and displaying with sociable complacency their funereal altars, tablets, photographs, bead-wreaths, and vases filled with artificial flowers. There were streets of them, standing face to face. Some were solid and some were flimsy, but they all expressed the conviction that they were doing the right thing in the right way.
'It's like the gentleman with a ribbon across his chest who gets up, in evening clothes, and in broad daylight, at a French function, to make a speech,' Graham observed, sardonically gratified by a new experience. 'It civilizes death, you see, Jill; classifies it and introduces it to society. The tubs look industrial rather than rural, and are an invention, I expect, of the people who work in the quarries down the river.'
'I never imagined anything so horrible,' said Jill, standing to look from side to side with a dismay almost indignant. 'It will haunt my dreams.'
The cemetery was not all reclaimed from nature and dedicated to horror. In one corner—Jill observed it from where she stood—a broad space of grass still grew green and thick and the chestnut branches, over the wall, dropped their russet fruits upon it. She moved away, drawn towards this oasis.
There, against the wall, she saw another grave; different from all the rest. It was marked only by a heave of sod and by the simplest headstone; and, deep in the grass, the chestnut branches sweeping low above it, it had a solitary yet cradled look. Graham joined her as she stood beside it.
At the head three glass vases held sprays of autumn roses; faded, yet with a lingering colour; and a wreath of heather at the foot was still fresh. Marthe Ludérac was the name upon the stone, and above it: Priez pour elle. The dates showed that she had died six years before.
Jill and Graham stood, strangely silenced.
'Why is she all alone like this?' Jill whispered. 'She has gone as far away from the others as she could.'
'She shows her taste in that,' said Graham. 'But she was forty. Not young. We can't make a romance about her.'
'No; not a romance. But a tragedy, perhaps,' said Jill. 'I have a feeling that she was dreadfully unhappy.'
'Most people are, my dear. Even the people over there, under their tin tubs, suffered, you may be sure.'
'I have a feeling that she suffered differently,' said Jill. 'It's because she suffered differently that she's here, quite by herself; with no family about her.'
'She was a stranger in the place, perhaps.'
'Perhaps. But someone who lives here must have put the flowers. Marthe Ludérac. It's an unhappy name, I think.'
'I think it's rather a heroic name. Rather a cruel, strange name, too. It's gentle; and sword-like. Marthe Ludérac,' Graham repeated, while, in the calm sunlight, the chestnut branches rustled softly, over them and over the grave. 'A Marthe Ludérac might have been a provincial Royalist and fought against the Republican bands. She might have been drowned in the river down there—in a noyade; she might have been guillotined. It's a name to make history out of; there's a sound in it of disaster, and beauty.'
'But things like that couldn't have happened to this Marthe Ludérac,' the literal Jill objected. 'She died only six years ago.'
'Yes. She did. And she makes me uncomfortable. As you say, she was unhappy. Come; let's go away from her.'
They turned from the grave and retraced their steps, in silence, to the grille.
Now they took the road that led up among the chestnuts, for the grande route left the forest at the cemetery wall and swept in a noble curve round the promontory, far above the river. But in this narrow, stony track the trees grew closely overhead, and deep gullies, worn by the rains, ran on either side under crumbling banks of moss. Another turn showed them the forest, still climbing, while, on their left, the steep hillside dropped away, towards the river, in ledge after ledge of scantily growing vineyard. A dilapidated thatched cottage stood among the vineyards and a rough mountain-path led down from it and disappeared over the edge of rock. On their right they saw a copse of dark sycamores and rising above them were the chimneys of the Manoir.
The sycamores must have been planted about it some fifty years before and had not liked their situation, for they all grew sadly and grudgingly, pressed closely together and spreading, on tall grey stems, a roof of disconsolate green that shut out the sky. The Manoir stood behind high plastered walls, and when they passed through the gate, that clanged a loud bell at their passage, they found themselves before the saddest house.
It was long and low and damp and sombre, with two rows of windows looking out at the sycamores and a tiled roof dark with moss and lichen. Green stains ran down over the ochre-coloured walls and in the flower plots before it were only pale, degenerate Michælmas-daisies. One might have thought it uninhabited but for the barking of a dog. He stumbled round a corner of the house, old and half blind, and retreated precipitately on seeing them standing there. But at an upper window a head that Graham recognized appeared. It was quickly withdrawn and a voice was heard calling shrilly: 'Joseph! Joseph! On sonne! Dépêchez-vous!'
The voice descended, still calling, and running steps clattered and shuffled within as they stood before the door from which the paint had long since peeled and blistered. 'Le thé! Le thé!' called the voice in tones tragically imperative. 'Et n'oubliez pas le lait!'
Then, after an interval of silence, the door was slowly opened, and an old man, derelict, nondescript, morose, appeared in the doorway. He showed no sign of the excitement that reigned within and looked at them with an unmoved if unhostile gravity.
'Madame la comtesse est chez elle?' Jill inquired. After the sadness of the cemetery, she felt this scene restoring. It made her want to laugh and reminded her of 'Alice' and the frog gardener.
'Mais oui, mais oui,' he answered, as one who knew, with her, that the fact was self-evident; and, standing back to let them enter, 'Entrez donc, Monsieur et dame.'
He wore a tattered grey linen jacket, black-and-white checked trousers, black felt slippers, and, oddest touch, a frayed white tie very correctly placed. His face was sunken yet swollen, with folded lips and small bright eyes; his spare hair, combed carefully forward over his baldness, was still almost black, and he looked like an ancient though respectable rat emerging froma drain.
The hall they entered was high and empty. It was lighted by a glass door, through which one could see the apple-trees of a jardin potager, and by a tall window placed over the stairs. A faded, vast, pretentious battle-piece hung on a wall.
Joseph threw open a door and announced in impartial tones: 'Madame la comtesse descendra tout de suite.'
The drawing-room in which Graham and Jill found themselves was unlike any room that they had ever seen before. It was so chill and pale and formal that it seemed as far from life as the cemetery had been; further, even, for the cemetery commemorated past life while this room seemed full only of the memory of a past where no life had ever been. Yet, long and spacious, the northern light shining in from four windows upon its polished floors, a frieze of pallid water-lilies running round its dim green walls, it had the charm of a perfect consistency. Two sofas, symmetrically placed, and a dozen stiff carved chairs were upholstered in grey satin sprigged with green and purple. On a round mahogany table, its one leg hideously carved, stood a stereopticon with its box of photographs, a casket of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and a large gilt cage where a grey parrot, a bit of apple in his claw, paused from the act of eating to look at them with sideways head. There were accurately placed bookcases of carved ebony holding books bound in black and red, and round the walls hung a series of faintly tinted landscapes painted in water-colour and framed in gilt.
Graham looked about him, intently, while Jill's eyes turned to the battered bergère and small attendant table that stood near the fireplace. A dog-eared novel, a paper-knife, and a pair of spectacles lay on the table and beside them was a bowl of common kitchen-ware with a spoon in it. This had contained, Jill felt sure, the old lady's luncheon, and so human, so helpless, was the avowal of age and infirmity, poverty and loneliness, that the fireside group affected her as a voice speaking in the silence might have done; a voice speaking piteously.
From the bergère and the bowl she looked up at the marble mantelpiece. Above it a gilt mirror, reaching to the cornice, reflected all the light of the room, and on it stood a tall gilt clock, slowly ticking, two candelabra and two glass vases filled with sprays of fading autumn roses. As she saw them Jill's heart stood still.
She could not trace, for the moment of distress and mystery, the memory that so affected her. Then it came sharply. They were the same roses as those on Marthe Ludérac's grave, and arranged, surely, by the same hand. It must have been Madame de Lamouderie who had placed them there. She must have known Marthe Ludérac; and been fond of her; and sorry for her. And upon this background of mystery and pity and fidelity, as the door opened and the old lady entered, Jill first saw her.