The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 8
IT was three days later that Graham, carrying his easel, canvas, and painting utensils, went up to the Manoir. The day was fine and he had told Madame de Lamouderie that he would not come unless it rained; but he had spent the morning far down the river, painting from the bank, and, coming in late for lunch, as he often did, found Jill departed in the car. She would not be back till tea-time. So the moment seemed opportune for beginning the long-promised portrait of the old lady. But deeper than the sense of the opportune, the mood was upon him to test again upon his own nerves, unfortified by Jill, the uncanny quality he felt in the Manoir and its occupants; its unknown occupants. The old lady he did not feel uncanny. He understood her too well for that.
It was a lovely, melancholy spring day and a solitary thrush was fluting and calling in the chestnut forest. Most of the thrushes would have been shot and eaten during the winter, but that gave a wilder, sweeter potency to this surviving song.
Wild daffodils grew among the glades, and a powdering of violets rested like a soft blue cloud along the roadside. Already the mood of the other day seemed exorcised. His blood ran peacefully. How strange it was to know oneself at heart still so much the child of fears and visions. Thinking of the other day and of the foreboding that had seized him, took him far back into his childhood, linked him with the wild-eyed little boy who had rushed down from his room to take refuge with his father on a winter night, and who could never tell or explain what the dark fear—or presence—had been that had wakened him. But no; it had not been fear the other day. Not fear exactly.
Behind the reddening branches of the sycamores the Manoir to-day, freaked with swaying sunlight, looked like the happiest sort of Sickert; that, at best, was not very happy, to be sure; but the Manoir, too, seemed exorcised. If magic there were, it was no longer a dark magic. And no figure came round the house as he stood on the doorstep; no blind old dog. No woman with a pale face framed in black.
Joseph opened to his knock, and Joseph, too, showed signs of revival, looked as if the spring had penetrated to his doleful bones. Madame la comtesse, he told him, was upstairs in her room; he would apprise her of Monsieur's coming. Mademoiselle was in the salon. And so saying he ushered him in and Graham found himself face to face with Mademoiselle Ludérac.
She had, apparently, but just come in from a country walk, for a basket of the wild daffodils stood on the table and a number of vases, most of them already filled, were ranged about it. She was coming down the room, two vases in her hands, and for a moment she stopped short on seeing him, rather as she had stopped the other day when she had found him and Jill standing in uncertainty before the door. Then, bending her head in a grave acknowledgement of his presence, she went on with her task, expecting, evidently, neither to be spoken to nor to speak.
Graham was disconcerted by her demeanour. It was not that—though the silence in the presence of a visitor might have suggested it—of a mere housekeeper; not at all that of 'my landlady.' Rather, he felt, while he stood near the window at the other end of the room and watched her as she quietly moved here and there, placing her daffodils, it was the demeanour of a châtelaine when some man of affairs, unknown to her, is ushered in to wait for those who have cognizance of his business. She might be sauvage, she might be farouche, and in her attire and appearance she made him think of the young peasant woman; but she made him, in her demeanour, think still more of the châtelaine, and, as he watched her, these meagre analogies were enlarged by a host of vague, floating associations. Something in her tall form, in the close lines of her hair, bound in a braided knot, reminded him of the statue of a Roman lady. She wore a black sateen apron buttoning at neck and wrists, and her long white hands, as she placed the vases, took beautiful attitudes of fluent, tranquil grace. One could see those hands laid with mastery on the majestic strings of a harp; her harp stood in the corner; and, with the element of majesty in the picture she now evoked, it was a Saint Cecilia he saw, Saint Cecilia, the Roman lady, who lighted her pale tapers in a chamber dedicated to early Christian rites.
And while he saw all this, he seemed not to see her face at all; though he was aware of it as a whiteness, inaccessible to analogy; and it seemed to drift like a soft but dazzling light at which one could not look fixedly.
He heard Madame de Lamouderie's precipitate heels tapping down the stairs. They paused outside the door and it was almost, Graham felt, as if the enamoured old lady stood there for a moment to quiet the strong beating of her heart. Then she entered, with outstretched hands.
'Is it possible! You have come to do my portrait! Though it does not rain!' she cried, and she cast a glance at Mademoiselle Ludérac, but did not speak to her. If Mademoiselle Ludérac consented to remain in the place of the mere landlady, Madame de Lamouderie would leave her there. And she seemed, with her tranquillity, to consent; she carried two vases into a little alcove at the end of the room.
'I have not met your friend,' said Graham. He had felt, subconsciously, a sense of resentment while he watched Mademoiselle Ludérac, and he did not know, now that he became aware of it, whether it attached itself more to her or to her old protector.
'You have not met Marthe!' cried Madame de Lamouderie, as if it surprised her. 'Mais comment donc! She has not introduced herself! Come here, Marthe; come, ma cherie. I wish you to know Monsieur Graham; Monsieur Richard Graham, the celebrated painter of whom I have spoken to you. All Europe rings with his fame, so that you will not forget that this is a great day in your life. Mademoiselle Marthe Ludérac, Monsieur; my very dear young friend and companion. And I am to present you also to Madame Graham. I specially wish you to know Madame Graham.—It does not disarrange your plans that Monsieur Graham should come in the afternoons and paint my portrait here?—We will be very careful;—very quiet and tidy,' smiled the old lady with an odd effect of cajolery.
The young woman stood looking quietly, even appeasingly upon her, almost, Graham thought, as though she reminded her that with her, Marthe Ludérac, she might be reasonable. Never indeed had he seen his old friend in such a flurried humour. She was almost mincing, though so exuberant.
'I shall be charmed,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac in a gentle voice.
'Then come, Monsieur. Where will you place yourself? Where shall I sit? Am I dressed as you would have me?'
'Can I assist you?' Mademoiselle Ludérac asked as Graham, with an uncharacteristic clumsiness, overturned his easel in placing it.
'Oh;—thank you; thank you a thousand times.—I can manage perfectly,' he answered, and he felt, still more resentfully, that of the three Mademoiselle Ludérac was the only one who was natural and composed.
'And Marthe—our dear Coco; dead!' exclaimed the old lady, as she seated herself in the bergère. 'Monsieur Graham so specially wished to paint me with Coco beside me.—Is it not a disaster?—We have an assortment of animals, here, Monsieur, as I have told you; all Marthe's pets;—a hare; a dog; a cat; two cats now, are there not, Marthe?—would not one of those do as well?'
'I'm afraid not,' said Graham, smiling, and feeling himself somewhat restored as he set his canvas in its place and laid his utensils on the table. 'I don't see you with a hare in your arms; or a cat either. Coco, in design and colour and character, was what I needed; and since he has gone I shall do you without appurtenances.—But one thing you still have that I should like; the black lace for your head;—and, may I be frank?—the rouge for your lips. We need that for the Goya almost as much as your black eyes.'
The old lady trembled with excitement and gratification.
'Marthe'—she whispered, 'could you?—'
'But most certainly,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, and, smiling appeasingly as her eyes met the black eyes of the Goya, she left the room.
'She will get them,' whispered the old lady. 'She will give me all I need. She is my good angel.' So flustered was she, it was evident, that she hardly knew what she was saying.
Mademoiselle Ludérac returned with the lace mantilla, a box of powder, a stick of rouge, and a mirror, which she gave into the old lady's hand; but: 'No, no'; whispered Madame de Lamouderie, 'will you do me, Marthe?' And, still slightly smiling, but quite without mockery, Mademoiselle Ludérac, kneeling beside her, traced carefully, and with a practised hand, the red along the lips, and softly patted the withered cheeks with the powder-puff. Then, when she had adjusted the mantilla: 'Let me see,' the old lady said, still whispering; and Mademoiselle Ludérac again handed her the mirror so that she might survey herself therein. She looked for a long moment and gave it back with a sigh, whether of discouragement or satisfaction Graham could not tell. The little scene riveted his attention.
'Are you pleased with me?' the old lady asked humbly.
'You are beautiful,' said Graham, and he looked steadily at her, more aware, as he looked, of the tall form of the young woman beside her than of his sitter.
'Elle me rend belle. She is a magician. She does it for me when I go to Mass,' said the old lady, and her eyes left his for a moment to glance up in gratitude at Mademoiselle Ludérac.
'All is then well?' said the young woman.
'All is well?' Madame de Lamouderie questioned, her eyes on Graham.
'All is perfect; quite perfect,' said Graham, taking up his charcoal. He was wondering whether Mademoiselle Ludérac was going to remain with them and he felt that if she did so he would not be able to draw one significant line.
But, moving away, placing the two tall vases on the mantelpiece, she took her basket, passed a cloth over the table where the water had spilled, and went out, closing the door softly behind her.
Neither Graham nor Madame de Lamouderie spoke for some time after she had left them. Graham drew quickly, with bright, intent glances, and the old lady gazed with rapt docility at her painter. But as her breaths quieted, and her excitement dispersed itself in a general glow, her expression insensibly altered and he saw that his own old lady was returning to him, an old lady very different from Mademoiselle Ludérac's, or even Jill's; it was with him that she was her reallest self, and when her eyes met his it was as if there were a sense of complicity between them, a sense of entering a realm of experience from which such innocents were shut away.
'You look, as you sit there,' she told him, 'like a dear friend of my youth. A charming man; a finished homme du monde, but artist to his finger-tips. He had marvellous collections;—bronzes, gems, enamels; it was known throughout Europe. A splendid emerald I once possessed was his gift to me;—with my husband's sanction, bien entendu.'
Graham smiled but made no comment, and after a moment the old lady took up her tale. 'My husband and he had business enterprises together—alas, all unsuccessful; all ruinous. And he was my husband's second in several affairs of honour. He was, in fact, l'ami de la maison and at one time I thought that he aspired to the hand of my second daughter. But he confessed to me one day that he could never love the daughter while the mother was before his eyes. It will be difficult for you to believe it now, Monsieur, but in my youth I was beautiful.'
'I think I remember your telling us that all the greatest painters in Europe competed for the privilege of painting you,' said Graham. His was the faculty of saying ironic words with such detachment and courtesy that they seemed a tribute rather than an offence. The old lady, at all events, did not take these amiss.
'He, for a man, was what I was for a woman,' she went on, the melancholy yet pleasing retrospect softening her voice. 'Tall; superb; haughty. He had your eyes, your noble brow and chin. He had your gloom and fire. He was greatly feared, and greatly loved. Never again have I seen such an Apollo; till now.'
'And your husband was not jealous?'
'Ah, Monsieur,' said the old lady, 'he was furiously jealous. His jealousy wrecked my life.'
'I don't blame him,' said Graham, and he dropped his slow 'Ha-ha!'
'I should not be here to-day if it had not been for his insensate jealousy.' The old lady enlarged her theme while she basked in Graham's gaze. 'Not that Monsieur de Larbier was my only admirer.'
'Your husband should have felt that there was safety in such numbers,' said Graham, and he continued to laugh softly to himself.
The old lady, even in her most dramatic moods, rarely lost her warning sense of the ridiculous, and she cast upon him now a quick, measuring glance. 'Ah, Monsieur, it does not follow, you know, that there is always safety in numbers,' she rejoined, and with such a change of tone, with so much of edge and malice in her gaiety that Graham for a moment was disconcerted. 'Not unless they have the husband's sanction,' he found, and the old lady, her eyes and lips consenting to any sous-entendu he might choose to attribute to the word, replied with a 'Précisement.'
'And now, you know,' said Graham, still laughing, 'I must ask you to tell me no more engrossing stories for a little while; I can't do you justice and listen to you at the same time.—You will reward me for my industry and self-denial,' he added, seeing her face fall like that of a child reproved, 'by telling me, one by one, as the days go on, about all your admirers, sanctioned and unsanctioned.'
Madame de Lamouderie's mouth twisted to one side as it attempted to discipline its answering smile and she sat very silent indeed, while Graham, looking intently from her to his canvas, set down his lines and shadows. But silence, he soon realized, was to her a disintegrating element. Under his severely impersonal gaze she collapsed into a rather dreadful rigidity. Unless he let her talk he would not capture the meretricious drama, the tragic coquetry, the pitiful beauty of her fluid face. This haggard old owl, drooping on its perch, was an incubus rather than an inspiration. Not more than twenty minutes passed before he smiled upon her and told her that now she could take up her reminiscences. His smile was reflected back to him like sunrise from a bleak, grey cliff.
'But may I not now come and look?' she begged.
'You'll see nothing yet,' he warned her.
But she got up and came, leaning on her stick, to stand behind him and look at the strange pattern, simple, forcible, significant, displayed on the canvas. She stood there then, speechless; unable to summon one word of flattery.
'Well?' Graham turned his head to smile at her.
'It is a marvel!' she gallantly brought out.
'Not yet. But it will be good.'
'It is a work of genius! In so short a time!' the old lady continued.—'But—Dieu!—Am I so horrible as that?'
'Horrible!' Graham smiled his indignation. 'I call it already beautiful!'
'With the great black mark at the side of the nose; the black caverns under the eyes; the fissures in the neck!—Bien! It is so. I am old. I am horrible. You show me the death's head I am soon to be reduced to,' said the poor old lady with dismal acquiescence.
'But I shouldn't have cared to paint you if you hadn't been old. You are beautiful—in the way I care for—because you are old. You are like a silver medal exquisitely engraved by life;—every line shows what it's given; what it's taken away.—And the ivory, black, grey of your colouring; what is the russet and pink of youth to compare to it? One looks at a young face as one does at a peach. It means nothing.'
'Ah;—it means something you wish to take into your hands; to bite into,' said the old lady, and her glance, half mocking, half provocative, drifted down and rested on him. 'Do not tell me that you are so disinterested in peaches. You are not an old man with all that life has taken from him showing in his face.'
'Oh, peaches are all right, in their way'—again she slightly disconcerted him. 'They are fit for biting into,' he said; 'but that's not an æsthetic occupation.'
Madame de Lamouderie, at this, gave a high, quavering laugh. 'Ah—we are not æsthetic, then, we women! To be bitten into! That is all we ask.'
Graham maintained, with calm, the decorum that his companion seemed determined to assail. 'Of course it is; quite rightly; while you are young. That is why you are so uninteresting when you are young except—if you will pardon me—from the point of view of appetite.'
He was calm; he was decorous; but he saw that he made the old lady very happy. She stood looking down at him, leaning on her stick; and no conversation could have pleased her better.
'You have bitten into many peaches?' she now inquired. 'You also will tell me of your histories?'
'I am a faithful husband, Madame,' said Graham, with a certain dryness. 'Faithful husbands have no histories.'
'Ah, but seductive young painters—before they become husbands—before they are rangés—have them.'
'A husband as happy as I am forgets them.'
She felt, perhaps, the dryness. 'Bien,' she said, as though she committed a lesson to memory. 'Bien. You are a very happy husband. You do not need to tell me that. I will ask no more questions about forbidden fruits.' And she went back to her chair.
'All these smudges, these marks you object to,' said Graham very kindly, 'are only exaggerated indications of shadows and outlines. They won't look like that when I begin to paint, I promise you. You'll be surprised, I promise you, when you see your portrait. The Sleeping Beauty will recognize her waking self.'
Shaking her head a little and again with the slightly twisted smile, the old lady said, 'Vous êtes charmant.'
When Graham, an hour later, left the Manoir, the early evening was gathering, purpling the vistas of the chestnut forest. He smiled a little to himself, as he went, lighting a cigarette and thrusting his hands into his pockets; a tall, dark-headed figure, full of grace and power, moving swiftly through the evening. He saw his portrait—what it was to be; and already he could smile at that; already it was witty, cruel, beautiful, what he was doing. And he smiled in thinking of the old lady. What he had said of her to Jill, last autumn, was true, comically true; though Jill would never know it. He did not dislike her; not at all; he even enjoyed watching her antics as he would have enjoyed watching a dappled panther at the Zoo, when the dinner hour approaches and it leaps restlessly about its cage. But the memory of her and of her smiles made him feel that it would be specially pleasant to see Jill again. He wanted a draught of that fresh spring water. And, deeper than the reaction from the panther in its cage, he knew, as he walked down the winding road, a sense of relief, of escape. He had not seen Mademoiselle Ludérac again.
So he went quickly. But at the cemetery walls he paused. He paused, looking up at them, and went round to the gates and stood there, with head bent, considering; and then went in. He did not glance to right or left as he threaded his way rapidly among the mausoleums and in a moment he had reached the unspoiled space of grass that sloped down to the forest.
There was the solitary grave and it glimmered as if with pale tapers. It was just as he had known it would be after seeing her daughter lighting them in the room where this Marthe Ludérac once had lived. He stood and looked down at the wreath of daffodils laid upon the foot and the three tall vases at the head, filled with the flames of spring; and the spell, the presence, fell so strongly upon him that he seemed to see Mademoiselle Ludérac standing there, on the other side of the grave.
Jill had spread their tea at the window opening on the river. Tea was always an easy, pleasant ceremony on their wanderings and one never omitted. He and Jill had managed to make tea in the most unlikely places. Something about the pretty, domestic neatness of it all, the waiting caddy, the singing kettle, the plate of petits beurres, showed him that she had been confident of his return and as he went to her and kissed her he said: 'It is good to find you here.'
'Where else should you find me!' smiled Jill, looking up at him.
He kissed her again and ran his hand over her bright, short hair. 'Rather jolly, all the same, our life, isn't it, Jill?' he said.
Jill had been feeling depressed, had been thinking about England, but the mood was dispelled by Dick's loving gaze.
'I should rather say it was!' she replied. 'It sometimes almost frightens me to think how happy we are, when so many other people come such croppers.'
'Well, we're rather an exceptional couple, aren't we,' said Graham, going to his chair. 'We are exceptionally attractive, for one thing, so that it requires no effort for us to remain fond of each other. And we know how to arrange our lives, to cut out the inessential things that suffocate so many people, and to keep the essential.—Solitude; nature; work.'
Jill wondered what her work might be; but since, even at home, she had nothing that could accurately so be described, she only said: 'How did the portrait go? Was she pleased to see you?'
'Frightfully pleased. I've started well. Though it's difficult to keep her alive if one doesn't talk to her and flirt with her; but I manage it.'
'And Mademoiselle Ludérac? Did you see her?'
'Yes, I saw her.' Graham stretched across and took the cup of tea Jill gave him.
'Really and truly saw her? Not out of doors in a mackintosh and black shawl?'
'She was in a black apron, arranging the room.'
'Is she just a sort of housekeeper, then? Do tell me what you thought about her.'
'She's rather beautiful, I think,' said Graham. 'She has beautiful hands, and beautifully shaped shoulders.'
'And beautiful eyes. I saw them the other day. They seemed to be all I did see. They are the sort of eyes one could never forget. The sort one sees sometimes in a picture, that follow you, you know; as if they wanted to say something; and couldn't.'
'Well, I didn't notice her eyes.'
'Did you talk to her?'
'We exchanged a word or two. She was quite civil and correct. And she went up and got the old lady's cosmetics and painted her face for her. It was rather pretty to see. She's good to the old vulture.'
'Painted her! But how marvellous, Dick! How I wish I could have seen it. Like a big baby having its face washed?'
'Exactly. It was rather touching.'
'I'm glad you were touched, Dick. It's what you need, you know,' Jill assured him, smiling at him—'with that queer, hard heart of yours. Mademoiselle Ludérac is lovely then. I felt she would be, from the very beginning; from the moment I saw her mother's grave.'
But to this Graham returned, and with an effect of sudden harshness, 'Well, for my part, I must confess that I found her rather repellent.'