The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 4
MADAME DE LAMOUDERIE wore her frayed and rusty black; but her hair had been hastily dressed under a black lace mantilla and instead of battered boots she wore high-heeled satin shoes. Her old lips were rouged, her old cheek smeared with white, and she advanced towards them, her ebony stick in her hand, with a very majestic manner.
Jill gazed at her; amazed; arrested. She was trying to see her as the friend of Marthe Ludérac and finding it difficult. It was Graham who guessed at the burning excitement that devoured her ancient heart and who interpreted the kindling of her eyes as they rested upon Jill. Her interest in art—he had seen it from the first—was as rudimentary as Jill's own; she had expected to see in his wife, perhaps, a raw, un-tempered young bohemian; and in Jill she recognized at once a denizen of the world; of the only world she cared about. She had not been able to place him; but Jill she placed at once, and her manner as she took her in, took in her mushroom-coloured silk, her hat and gloves and shoes, her air, burnished, finished, nonchalant, and kindly, became at once less majestic and more effusive; even a little too effusive. She greeted them; she begged them to be seated; and, smiling upon Jill, whom her great eyes continued to devour and to appraise,' she said: 'I must apologize to you, Madame, for the hovel in which you find me. I am very poor—disastrously poor—and I have found what refuge I could.'
'But I don't call this a hovel,' said Jill, looking thoughtfully at her; she was still occupied with her sense of difficult reconstruction. 'I call it rather grand. We live in hotels, usually, and have no real home at all.'
'This is a hotel to me. This is not my home. I rent it, merely, from a landlady who is also in summer my housekeeper, and who has just gone away—to Bordeaux; otherwise you would find me in a better state for welcoming you.' The old lady's eyes, as she spoke, fell on the kitchen bowl and she promptly picked it up and placed it out of sight on the other side of her chair. 'I spend my winter quite alone here, but for my maitre d'hôtel and a peasant woman who comes in to care for me.'
'This isn't your own setting, then,' said Graham; and Madame de Lamouderie's eyes left Jill to dwell on him with overt delight. 'I thought it all went with you.'
'Mais non; mais non,' said the old lady, correcting his ingenuous error almost tenderly. 'If you knew France better you would recognize in this the setting of the enriched petite bourgeoisie as it climbs towards the haute. My own home, in childhood, was one of the most princely châteaux of Normandy, and for many years, in Paris, my salon was celebrated for its splendour and beauty. I am not even of this province; although, on my father's side, we are related, many centuries ago, to the de la Mothe Fénelons.'
'Now I'm very sorry for that,' Graham smiled at the old lady, and Jill, looking at them both, felt again a sense of pity; 'for I thought that you belonged to that mountain-path with the vineyards beneath you and the menacing sky above.—Do you remember that you found my landscape menacing?—Nothing in Normandy is menacing; and that's what goes with your type, I assure you. I'd have liked to paint you there; or, if not there, then in this room, with the parrot in his cage beside you and your black lace mantilla. But if you disown it all like this, it leaves me without my picture.'
Jill felt sorrier than ever for Madame de Lamouderie as her great eyes endeavoured, almost tragically, to follow the significance of words so unexpected to her.
'Dick is only joking,' she assured her. 'He'd like to paint you anywhere.' And Jill spoke with conviction, for even she could see that the old lady was like a Goya.
'It's quite true!' Graham laughed. 'Though I'm not a portrait painter.'
Madame de Lamouderie looked from one to the other. As deeply as she had been disconcerted by the cruel suggestion that she had herself destroyed a possibility so marvellous, so was she now deeply relieved. She looked at Jill with gratitude and she smiled at Graham her half-provocative and half-supplicating smile: 'Vous êtes charmants tous les deux,' she assured them. 'But who could think of painting an ancient harridan like myself when he has before him a Hebe like the one I see. Madame, you are the true tête de keepsake type.'
Again Graham dropped his slow 'Ha-ha.' Graham's laugh was a singularly ungregarious affair. It did not take you into his confidence; it excluded you, rather, from all participation with the sources of his mirth. 'You don't know what you are talking about,' he told the poor old lady. 'The tête de keepsake has sloping shoulders and ringlets and a rosebud mouth. Why are French people always four or five generations behind the English period?—You still read Byron, I suppose, and imagine English life like the life in Dickens. Jill isn't interesting æsthetically; but she's not as bad as a tête de keepsake,' said the dispassionate husband, while Madame de Lamouderie's attention remained riveted upon him; 'Reynolds might have painted her, or Romney. But she isn't interesting in design or colour; while you are.'
Madame de Lamouderie glanced almost timidly at Jill as this preference was announced; but Jill was laughing.
'It's quite true. Artists, real ones, like Dick, never care to paint me. Only one ever did, and that was on a horse, and he did it because of the horse, not because of me: I went well with it. Character is what they like, you know, and I haven't any character.'
'But then, do they prefer a mummy to a beautiful young woman?' asked Madame de Lamouderie, and, still laughing, Jill said that perhaps they did. She herself was quite satisfied to have no character if it preserved her from looking like some of the ladies whom Dick's friends chose to paint.
Joseph at this point appeared with the tea-tray, very accurately disposed, with milk in its jug and a plate of petits beurres. The old lady's hands trembled as she poured out the tea and, observing the unexpected viands, the parrot, after watching her for a moment, burst forth with a short refrain, half croaked, half chanted:
Tout tourne, tout tourne—au cabaret!'
'What a lamb!' cried Jill, leaning round in her chair to gaze delightedly at him.
'Ah, he is a very clever bird, very clever indeed; he has said that verse ever since I knew him, and it is only when he sees food,' said Madame de Lamouderie, pleased by this appreciation of her pet. 'Oui, oui, mon Coco, tu suras du thé.—A little biscuit soaked in milk will enchant him.'
'Oh, may I give it to him?' said Jill. 'He's too attractive. And I do adore animals.'
'And so do I,' said the old lady, preparing the little sop for Coco, who continued to watch her closely, his head on one side. 'So do I. They are my only remaining joy. Here, Madame; give it to him. He will take it so prettily in his claw.' And as Madame de La mouderie handed her the saucer, still with a trembling hand, Jill felt that though she might be rather dreadful—and she felt her rather dreadful—there was something loveable about her.
'But do you mean it? Do you really mean that you would like to paint my portrait?' said the old lady, while Jill fed Coco, scrap—by scrap, through the bars of his cage. 'In my youth—at a time when you would have found me uninteresting in colour and design, Monsieur—the greatest artists of Europe disputed the privilege of painting me; but those days are long, long passed.'
'I'll come back and paint you in the spring,' said Graham.
'Oh—the spring! I shall not last till then.'
'Yes; yes, you will; you will last till spring for my sake,' said Graham, casting his glance of gloomy mirth upon her; and Jill saw that the poor old creature was bewildered by her felicity.
'But why spring?' she urged. 'Why do you go, just when I have found you both? It is our most beautiful season here, this month of October.'
'We're going south, worse luck,' said Graham. 'I had pneumonia last spring and Jill insists that I must have a winter on the Riviera.'
'Ah! Ienvy you. It is a paradise.'
'Not tome. I know it too well. I used to stay there when I was a boy with my mother.'
'He means that he doesn't find it interesting in colour or design,' Jill explained. 'This is the country Dick loves to paint.'
'And is it in England you live?' asked the old lady. 'You are recently married? You have children?'
'Married for five years; and no children,' said Jill. Children would not have done at all in her and Dick's life. 'We live in England when we live anywhere. Dick has a studio in London and we have three rooms over it. If you call this a hovel, I don't know what you would call our studio. They put the milk on the stair outside our door in the morning.'
'But you were not born in a studio with three rooms over it,' said the old lady, smiling caressingly upon her.' You were born—shall I tell you?, for I see it plainly—in one of your great, beautiful English countryseats with park and deer and village of retainers such as we read of—not only in Sir Walter'—and Madame de Lamouderie flashed a glance at Graham—'but in later writers, too. You have hunted the fox; you have been presented at Court; you have danced at great balls with the noblesse of your land.'
Jill was again laughing. 'Well, I have danced at a few balls; but the war put an end to most of those for me; and I've been presented at Court; and I certainly have hunted the fox;—that was a clever guess;—there's nothing I love so much. But all the rest is wrong; as wrong as can be,' Jill assured her, her jocund eyes upon her. 'No park; no deer; no retainers at all. Only a very small, very humdrum country-house:—I loved it, of course; because it was my home;—but it was quite ordinary and humdrum all the same.'
'Was? Is it yours no longer?'
'No; my father's dead now and my brother couldn't keep it up and sold it,' said Jill in a matter-of-fact tone. 'I haven't hunted for three years. I do get a mount now and then—when I go back.'
'It was I who put an end to it all for her,' said Graham. 'She'd be living in the country now and hunting and dancing with the noblesse if it weren't for me. You have before you an English romance. The beautiful young English heroine who falls in love with the needy painter and follows him to the studio where the milk is put outside on the stair in the morning. It's quite true, you know,' and Graham glanced affectionately at Jill as he spoke. 'She made as bad a match as possible in marrying me.'
The old lady gazed upon them, perplexed and rapturous. 'It was a mariage d'amour. And you have remained in love for five years. Do you realize that it is a rare feat that you have accomplished?'
'We find it a most normal occupation,' smiled Graham. 'But to change the subject—which Jill finds rather embarrassing—tell us about this room where you say you don't belong, but where you make such a subject for a painter. What sort of people do belong, then? Who put it all together and who lived here?'
'People of no consequence at all,' said Madame de Lamouderie, looking about her with a rather grim expression. 'A family called, tout simplement, Jacquard. A few generations back they were nothing but local peasants and they rose to be traders in Bordeaux.'
'But great French marshals began as plebeians sometimes; so I've been told on good authority,' Graham reminded her with his smile.
'Ah—so they may have started;—but they did not end as boutiquiers!' the old lady took up his challenge with equal gaiety. She was living. She was taking in draughts of life deeper than any she had tasted for years. She hugged the happy moment to her breast.
'It doesn't look like the room of what we should call boutiquiers.'
'Ah, our bourgeoisie gains taste in time;—if you call this taste.—Do you admire those water-lilies?—those bookcases?—and—bon Dieu!—those horrible books that were never read and never meant to be read by anybody?—And the Jacquards did not remain Jacquard undiluted. They married well; too well. It was their ambition that undid them. Impecunious daughters of the haute bourgeoisie—of the petite noblesse, even, on one occasion—stooped to the alliance, and few families can bear the burden of a succession of dowerless wives. You would not admire this room, Monsieur'—and again a certain vindictiveness came into the old lady's voice—'if you had to spend your winters in it alone.'
'I think it's rather horrible, too,' said Jill. 'It looks like a room that's never breathed. How do you keep warm? It's a northern aspect, isn't it?'
'It is a northern aspect. I do not keep warm. I perish with cold!' cried Madame de Lamouderie. 'Fortunately—or unfortunately—I am tough; so- lide. Branches are cut from the trees for my fire here, and sometimes I crouch over an oil stove, and sometimes, even, take refuge with Joseph in the kitchen. Oh, it is a miserable existence in the winter! But there are the animals. My landlady is fond of animals, and they are companions for me. A dog; a cat; a hare; all originally unfortunates; wounded, trapped, pursued; she finds them by an unerring instinct; even Coco was dying of a skin disease in a dirty shop in Bordeaux. We have cured him of that, and you see how intelligent he is. And I have books.—Not those.—She sends me books from Bordeaux. I devour them; romances, biographies, travels. So the time passes and in the spring she returns. Then it is not so bad. I have somebody to talk to.'
'And don't your southern windows look over the garden?' said Jill, always interested in aspects and utilities. 'May we see your garden before we go? The door at the end of the hall leads out, doesn't it?'
'Ah, it is nothing, the garden—nothing; but it has the southern aspect, that is true; and our bedrooms look over it; we preferred that to the larger, colder rooms on this side of the house. They are kept closed. They are haunted, I always feel. I never enter them. But you will not go so soon?'
'It's getting rather late. I'm afraid we must. You will see us again in the spring.' Jill was very sorry for the old lady and something in Graham's detached and smiling demeanour seemed to her a little inhuman. But Dick often struck her as rather inhuman. She determined that he should not be allowed to forget his promise about the portrait.
Madame de Lamouderie rose from her chair and took her stick. But she did not really need a stick, Jill observed. Though so old she was surprisingly upright and she moved forward on her high heels with a beautiful ease and majesty.
Graham looked about them as they went; he was more interested in the Manoir than in his old friend. 'That window up there is oddly placed,' he said, at the foot of the stair. 'It reminds me of a window in a Méryon.'
'It is a very difficult window to clean,' said the old lady. 'Almost impossible, as you will recognize. Joseph has to mount a ladder from the landing.' She opened the glass door and the sunny stretch of the garden was before them, a straight path, running between gnarled fruit-trees, from where they stood, to a bench placed against the wall at its farthest end. It was melancholy, meditative; yet not unhappy; it was too well tended for that, as Jill's practised eye recognized at once. The ancient trees were pruned; the borders dug; the autumn flowers that grew on either hand looked like the flowers of fifty years ago, but their soil was carefully weeded. Over the high walls was the chestnut forest. 'I should spend all my time in this garden if I lived here!' Jill exclaimed.
Graham stood looking about him, suddenly silent; and something brooding, remote, desolate, even, in his expression struck upon Jill with the sense of mystery that dear, familiar Dick at times roused in her. It was, she thought, as if he were a changeling and heard the distant carolling of a strange ancestry:—the fairy-tale, again. But everything to-day was fairy-tale, and she did not know now whether she could so confidently have told Dick that it was a happy one. There was something very strange in the still, sunny garden; in the still, black form of the old lady, there beside her; in Dick standing a little apart and gazing up the garden path as if he expected to see someone walking down it towards him.
'And here is another pet, you see,' said Madame de Lamouderie, pointing with her stick at a commodious hutch that stood in the sun against the house. 'Our hare; he has lost a leg; but he is quite tame, like Coco, and comes to one's call.—Yes; it is not bad, the garden; not bad. But it is too much for one woman and an old man like Joseph.'
'Does she work in the garden? Is she young, your landlady?' asked Jill, looking down at the old hare, who, stretched at full length against the sunny wall, was dozing, head back, with an air of heraldic dignity. 'I like her for taking care of so many unhappy creatures. I imagined her an old lady.'
'Like me?' Madame de Lamouderie leaned on her stick and shook her head, smiling. 'No, we are not all old here. Marthe is till young.'
'Marthe? Is her name Marthe?'
'Yes; her mother was a Jacquard,' said Madame de Lamouderie; 'but her name is Marthe Ludérac.'