The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 9
JILL, next afternoon, said that she would go up to the Manoir with him and see if Mademoiselle Ludérac would have a walk with her.
'But I'm not going up to-day,' said Graham. 'It's not raining. Yesterday was an exception. I'm going up the mountains this afternoon.'
'I'll go alone, then. The old lady won't turn me out even if you don't come with me.'
'She'll fall upon your neck. But as for the young lady, you'll fail in your enterprise there, I warn you.' Graham was cleaning his palette and spoke with cheerful detachment; or what sounded like it.
'How do you mean, fail?' asked Jill, pulling on her silk cap.
'She's not a malleable young person. Not at all eager to make our acquaintance. She doesn't at all identify herself with her old patron's vagaries.'
'I don't care. I shall find out a way. I'm quite determined to know her,' said Jill. So she started forth alone.
She took the road to-day and reached the Manoir; but her hopes were again frustrated, for Joseph told her that Mademoiselle Ludérac had gone out. However, there was the old lady.
Madame de Lamouderie was evidently waiting and her disappointment in seeing Jill alone strove vainly to mask itself in delight. All the same, as Jill said to herself, half a loaf must be better than no bread; and, after a swift readjustment, the old lady was prepared to make the best of it. Her eye passed with its expression of avid attention over Jill's dress, new to her to-day, and charming in its tones of rosy cedar, its deft mingling of silks and wools.
'You are an incarnation of the springtime, Madame,' she told her. 'One understands your husband's devotion when one looks at you.'
'My husband's devotion!' Jill flushed a little, stared a little, and then laughed. That Graham should have expressed anything of his feeling for her to the old lady she knew to be impossible.
Madame de Lamouderie interpreted her silence as gratification. 'To see such a ménage restores one's faith in human nature,' she went on. 'You are too young, perhaps too innocent of life, to know how rare a thing it is for a wife, however captivating, to retain her husband's fidelity through years of marriage. But when I look at you, the miracle explains itself.'
'But we don't think fidelity a miracle in England,' said Jill, coolly if kindly.—'I wonder if you'd mind my smoking?'
'Mind? Not the least in the world. My daughter also smokes. All fashionable women smoke nowadays, as I am well aware.—So. He has returned to his mountains. I do not blame him. Why should he care to look at an old woman when he can look at mountains? He is a remarkable man, your husband, Madame; very remarkable. Full of power, charm, seduction.—But he is severe, too; very severe.'
'Dick severe? Do you think so?' And Jill laughed, leaning back her head, holding her cigarette lightly and looking from beneath her lashes at the old lady.
Madame de Lamouderie leaned forward with a mysterious smile. 'He frightens me,' she confided. 'I tremble before him!'
'But how horrid of Dick! What has he been doing?'
'He has done nothing,' said Madame de Lamouderie. 'It is I who do things: wrong things. I commit blunders. He makes me feel it.'
'I can't think of Dick as a mentor!' said Jill. 'You must snub him if he behaves badly. You mustn't let him frighten you.'
'Ah; it is easy for you to say so, young and beautiful as you are. If I could recover, if only for an hour, my lost youth, the tables might be turned, that I own!' said the old lady ruefully. 'As it is, his are all the advantages, and he makes me feel it. He does not come to-day because I have displeased him. I did not think so before; but it is clear to me now.'
'But you are quite, quite mistaken,' said Jill, and there was only kindness in her voice as she thus reassured her. 'I know you haven't displeased him. He'd have told me if you had. He's frightfully keen on your portrait, too. The only reason he hasn't come this afternoon is that it's such a splendid day for landscape. You know he told you he could only come when it rained.'
'True,' said the old lady, looking fixedly upon her. True. I perhaps torment myself needlessly.'
'I'm quite sure you do,' Jill smiled upon her. 'And really you mustn't take Dick so seriously. You'll turn his head.'
The old lady shook hers. 'No. Ah, no; I shall never turn his head.'
'Well, you mustn't expect me to regret that, must you!' laughed Jill, and at that the old lady, eyeing her again, laughed also, saying, 'Ah, I see that you are witty, as he is. And you do not frighten me. I will come to you always when I fear that he means to be unkind.'
'Agreed!' said Jill. 'Between us we'll keep him in his place.'
'Tell me,' said the old lady, happily now, settling herself in her bergère, 'more about yourselves; more about him. You will forgive my insistence. I am a lonely old woman and never again shall I see people like you and your husband. He intrigues me; I long to understand him. What is his history? What is his family? Will you tell me?—as if to a child who begged for a fairy-tale?'
'His family? Well, he had rather an unhappy time with his family. His father and mother didn't get on at all.'
'They are still living?'
'She is; but Dick's father died when he was a boy. He was Scotch; a clever Scotch journalist; very brilliant and excitable. I'm afraid he drank more than was good for him. Dick says it was because she made him so unhappy.'
'She was unfaithful to him?' Madame de Lamouderie suggested.
'Unfaithful! Dick's mother! Great Scott, no!' Jill had to laugh at the idea. 'She's a pattern of all the virtues. It was merely, I imagine, that his ways weren't her ways, and hers weren't his. He was a bohemian, and she was an American; of a very old family that she thinks a lot of. I always feel there's something to be said for her. She was only nineteen when she met him, on a steamer, when she was going back to America after being educated in a French convent. He was frightfully handsome and he carried her off her feet. But then he wanted her to stay off her feet, as it were; and she's not that sort of person. She needs to have her feet well on the ground. With as many roots as possible,' Jill laughed again, amused by her own simile. 'Well, she's got them now! She's married to a dismal, moth-eaten old baron and lives in a mouldy old château in Burgundy. And that is really what she likes. He's very bien né and bien pensant, and Dick's father was neither.'
'An American? Very rich, then? A millionaire?'
'Oh, no. She doesn't like millionaires. She likes old families.—American old families don't seem to mean much over here, do they?'
'They do not, indeed. One never hears of them. It is only of the American fortunes one hears,' said the old lady earnestly.
'I know. Well, from our point of view she certainly has something of a fortune; and that gave her the advantage when it came to bringing Dick up. She could do everything with him she liked; and the father could do nothing. He liked to wander about Europe with Dick, and see all sorts of queer people and read, and loiter generally, while Dick painted. Dick loved being with him. And she liked to keep him with her in Paris and Cannes and make him behave politely to old French dowagers in her salon. He was delicate, too. So that gave her another advantage. You wouldn't think it now, to look at him; but his chest was weak and the doctors said he must live a great deal in the south. Even now he doesn't do all sorts of things that most men do. He rides, but he doesn't swim. He plays tennis, but he never played cricket. He's really lived very little in England, though he went to Cambridge. He was just finishing at Cambridge when the war broke out.'
The old lady's mind evidently remained attached to the more illustrious parent.
'He is fond of his mother? He is often with her? Ile goes out much dans le monde?'
'He's with her as little as he possibly can be! No, he's not fond of her. He makes the most dreadful fun of her. He's really unkind, I think, for she does adore him. She's rather beautiful, still, with great cold grey eyes and a great high nose. Dick always says she's all nose and could smell out people's quarterings blindfolded!'
The old lady considered her. 'It is very unfortunate that ason should have so little reverence for his mother,' she observed.
'Yes. Itis. But Dick hasn't any reverence for anything.'
'Ah; he is a rebel; a libre penseur; one sees it in his face.—But a mother! In our eyes that is something set apart; something not to be criticized.'
'I know. It's awfully sweet of you. We're not like that,' said Jill. Though I myself get on awfully well with Mummy.'
She was thinking, with something of amusement, and something of indignation, of the deadly, relegating kindness with which her mother-in-law would place the poor old lady. 'Déclassée, my dear Jill; quite déclassée,' she would say, and Jill, who did not, as she would have said, give a hoot for the world, yet who had the shrewd sense of worldly values characteristic of her type, was well aware that such the old lady must be. It was apparent not so much in her situation as in her excesses and uncertainties of manner; her fumbling for an instinctive response that failed to come at a conscious bidding. Her innate pride, her innate dignity, still upheld her on the level way, as it were; but at an unexpected rise or fall of ground she tottered. 'Poor old thing,' thought Jill, lighting another cigarette and observing her hostess thoughtfully as she smoked; 'I'm glad we've come to make things a little jollier for her.' And she had always, behind every impression of Madame de Lamouderie, the memory, like a breath of sweetness lingering on the air, of her awaking under Dick's hand. Poor, poor old Sleeping Beauty; for that there was one under all the folly and flattery she felt sure.
'Tell me,' she said after their little pause, and the talk of Dick's mother had brought another mother to her mind, 'were you a friend of Madame Ludérac's?'
Madame de Lamouderie had, perhaps, been brooding on the aberrations revealed in her idol, but the question recalled her, with an almost apparent shock. 'Madame Ludérac?' she repeated. 'Who has spoken to you of her?'
'Nobody,' said Jill, surprised but not disconcerted by the old lady's sharpness of tone. 'I saw her grave last autumn, in the cemetery, and it was so different from all the other graves that it interested me; especially after coming up here and seeing where she lived.'
The old lady was looking at her with the shock still on her face. Then, slowly, her expression softened and she sat meditating with deep gravity. 'No, I did not know her,' she said; but she said it gently.
'She died before you came to Buissac?'
'No; she died after I came; six years ago. I did not know her; but I saw her. She was mad,' said Madame de Lamouderie.
'Mad?'
'Yes. Détraquée. I am glad the people have not talked to you. It is a sad history. It is sad for Marthe that it should be talked of.'
Jill was aware of feeling, for the first time, warmly fond of the old lady. 'No one has spoken to me at all. Would you rather not talk any more about it?'
'No,' said Madame de Lamouderie, after a moment. 'No; I do not mind telling you. You are not like those I mean: the vulgar rabble. She was mad; but it was the result of an accident; an accident to her head,' the old lady put her finger on her forehead above her eye. 'She was here for five years before her death; in Marthe's care. I first saw Marthe leading her among the woods;—she was hardly more than a child. It was terrible to see such a look on the face of a child. The mother leaned on her and she wore a black patch over her eye. She was as white as a ghost. All in black. Dieu!—it frightened me, the first time I saw them!'
It almost frightened Jill to hear her, and she remembered Dick's uncanny fear at the door after they had seen Mademoiselle Ludérac, white as a ghost—all in black—come round the corner of the house.
'But how wrong, how cruel, that such a thing should have been put on a child,' she said after a moment. 'Was there no older relation to help her?'
'No. No one. And the mother became frenzied if Marthe were not always beside her. They lived quite alone. They had no friends. All the village people feared the mad-woman and once stones were thrown at her and the child as they passed along the road.'
Madame de Lamouderie's face had sunken to such gloom that Jill repressed her own exclamations of anger. She regretted having evoked such memories. Yet, at the same time, she felt what was almost a sense of joy. Her intuition, then, about Mademoiselle Ludérac was well founded. She was a wonderful person. More than before she resolved to know her. If the old lady was Dick's occupation, Mademoiselle Ludérac should be hers. She would make friends with the solitary, tragic girl. There might be, after all, a meaning for her in Buissac.