THE STORY OF MADEMOISELLE LENORMANT
THEmonth of December ran itself out with a more ruffled mildness than November had done. For one thing, it was cold, blustering weather, and for days together ice sheeted the broad river. The boats and barges plied less frequently, and foot-passengers now rarely threaded the long boulevard from the city to the island bridge. Only the morning vans relieved us of a complete sense of separation from our fellows, and at odd intervals, the postman came, and carried a whiff of the outer world into our retreat. On Saturday we had the excitement of watching the laundresses wheel their barrows of linen across the bridge, and diminish with the distance upon the chill, bleak road, sometimes brightened by rays of winter sunshine. But for the rest we shared such desert stillness as might be found in the heart of an empty forest, instead of upon the edge of a busy and populous town.
Within the walls, life went pleasantly enough.My presence downstairs had served to tame Mademoiselle somewhat. She stood less impenetrably apart, and her discourse grew daily less impersonal. When walks upon the terrace and musing under the roof of the gallery meant perilous exposure, she would invite me upstairs to her ownappartement. This I enjoyed. It gave me a sense of fraternity in silence as well as companionable speech at discretion.
Her rooms were less spacious than those I occupied, but more comfortable, and not without a surprising effort at cosiness. In her salon a wood fire burned brightly, and the deep worn arm-chairs had an inviting aspect. Everything was faded, often frayed and rent, but the pictures were old and of some value, and books bulged out beyond their natural shelves, and overflowed upon the floor, and crowded the tables. Books, books everywhere,—old books, tattered books, dog-eared, dusty, and moth-eaten; wearing all a heavy, learned look, and suggestive of historical research. I laughingly remarked this to her one day, as I removed a big tome from the low chair I wished to sit upon. She blushed that soft pink flush belonging to faces habitually pallid. It made her look delightfullyyoung and interesting, and conveyed the hope to me that the last barrier of her glacial reserve was about to break down.
‘I have been for many years engaged upon research among these volumes,’ she admitted slowly, after a pause; ‘I am writing an important book.’
‘An important book?’ I cried interrogatively.
‘Yes: the life of the Emperor Julian. I regard him as the great Misunderstood of the Christian world, and I wish to rehabilitate him,’ she said; and there was such a touching and simple prayer for sympathy and encouragement in the glance she fixed on mine, that I had not the heart to remember that others had attempted the same task, and that no amount of learned eloquence and indignation would teach the Christian world to regard as desirable a better understanding of him they call the great Apostate.
‘Would it be an indiscretion to solicit information upon your plan of defence?’ I asked insidiously, with intent to force her into self-exposure. To me the character of the Emperor Julian was of comparative insignificance beside her own, but this fact I naturally kept to myself.
‘I shall bring him into noble relief by meansof Frederick the Great as a background—Frederick, that other famous and less reputable disciple of Marcus Aurelius. Have you ever remarked how alike and how unlike they were—one so sincere and the other so cynically insincere?’
Upon a dead island, without new books, or newspapers, or theatres, and but little out-door life, because of the ferocity of the weather, the Emperor Julian and Frederick the Great were as good subjects of discussion as any others, and I entered the lists in combative mood, fully equipped in argument and opinion, and captivated by the grim earnestness and complete guilelessness of the Imperial Pagan’s defender. Of modern literature she was, perhaps not unwisely, ignorant, and knew not of a man named Ibsen who, some years earlier, had also strayed upon this ground. She had been chiefly inspired by an abominable novel of a French Jesuit, over which she waxed exceedingly hot. Her anger was splendid, and I should have rejoiced to see the Jesuit, Julian’s traducer, confronted with this thin spiritual-looking lady, who thrilled from head to foot with generous hatred of all meanness and unfairness.
‘As a Christian, my defence will have more weight than if I were imbued with the cold agnosticism of the day,’ she added naïvely.
‘Surely,’ I assented, full of admiration, and more pleased to think of her as a Catholic eager to make atonement to an ancient enemy of her faith, than ‘the cold agnostic’ she dismissed in a tone of implied disapproval.
‘You wonder, perhaps, at the serious nature of my studies and labour,’ she observed. And then, upon a little explanatory nod and arch of delicate brow, ‘You see my father was a scholar, and as we lived here quite alone and rarely received visitors, it was impossible for him to avoid taking me into his confidence. And then, when his health began to fail him, it naturally devolved upon me to help him, as far as I could, and spare his eyes.’
Her glance travelled wistfully round the room, and a ray of mild recognition fell upon each big volume. It was not difficult to understand how vividly of the past they spoke to her, how eloquent of association was their wild disorder. In the high embrasure of the back window, which looked down upon the river, and showed a glimpse of the chimney-tops and tallspires of Beaufort, there was a dainty, blue-lined work-table, and near it a revolving book-stand and a rocking-chair. From where I sat, I could note that the books were modern—some of them were bound coquettishly, but the greater number were paper-covered. I was not wrong in supposing this to have been the favourite recess of the late Madame Vermont. The blue satin of the work-table betrayed her, and a hurried inspection of the backs of the books convinced me that her taste in literature was all that is most correct and elegant. No ancient tomes these. No bramble-strewn paths to historic research. Nothing whatever about the Emperor Julian; still less about Marcus Aurelius. Bourget, Feuillet, Gyp, Loti, Marcel Prévost, Anatole France and company: these were the friends of pretty Madame Vermont’s solitude, the entertainers of her frugal leisure. From the start, without description, word, or hint, I had understood Madame Vermont to be uncommonly pretty. I pictured her small, blonde, charmingly coquettish, and self-conscious. I endowed her with every conventional fascination, and felt sure that if I had been a man I should have adored her, like the rest.As a matter of fact, my imagined picture of her came very near reality. Only instead of fair hair, she had the loveliest brown that made a flossy network round a little rosebud of a face; her eyes were bewitchingly blue, limpid like a child’s, and her cheek was adorably hued. Just the conventional angelic being to turn male heads, and set their hearts in a flutter; just the sort of home idol to keep nurses and sisters—especially elder, grave, and sensible sisters—perpetually on their knees, and the domestic incensor perpetually filled with the freshest of perfumed flattery swung by the most abject adorers.
Now that the icy winds prevented us from sitting out in my gallery, Mademoiselle had grown accustomed to receive me upstairs. For there was no conquering her repugnance to my rooms. She found it less hard to walk with Joséphine to the cemetery than to sit and talk of other matters with a stranger in her dead sister’s house. Of me, however, she had grown fond:—at first in a furtive way, as if not quite sure that she was right in yielding to the weakness. Gradually she emerged from this quaint and insular uncertainty; saw that there was noshame attached to the discovery that a new face could delight her, and graciously abandoned herself to the influence of a full-blown affection.
Every morning Joséphine came down with Mademoiselle’s compliments, and her desire to be informed if I had slept well. Every afternoon I mounted to drink a cup of English tea with her, and listen to her last pages on the great Misunderstood, and sometimes maliciously spur her into passion by some sceptical raillery, which always brought pained reproach to her sad eyes and a slight flush to her pale face. She took everything in earnest, even my feeble jokes, which after a while, when she began to understand them, she would proceed to discuss in her own quaint, slow way.
‘I suppose it must be a matter of temperament, or perhaps it is an Irish peculiarity,’ she would say, and inspect me very seriously.
I assured her that the Irishman was not born who could not change his opinion at a moment’s notice for the fun of the thing, and in the midst of comedy fall foul upon tragedy for pure diversion’s sake. She shook her head despondently, and decided at once thatthere could be found no earnest scholars, no born leaders of men, in a band of amiable buffoons.
My moments of recreation and distraction were enjoyed with Gabrielle, when we walked round the desert island in search of adventures, or with elaborate care, tried to make each other understand the caprices of our wandering fancies in the alleys of the sad, mysterious garden. It was pure joy to feel the little hand clinging to my arm or lost in my palm like a soft, small bird, and hear the pretty patter of running steps alongside of my brisk strides. For, to atone for its late appearance, the winter was mortally cold, and there was no dallying with frozen toes and frost-bitten ears. But to make up for this foolish superiority of mine in the matter of steps, Gabrielle was indulgence itself to my decided inferiority upon imaginative ground. I certainly could not imagine so many things out of nothing, and it was clear that I could not make up so many charming adventures for Minette and Monsieur Con. But in my gross grown-up way, I was not an unsympathetic confidante for the grievances and perplexities of solitary childhood. Indeed, Gabrielle admitted,with off-hand majesty of look and deportment, that I was rather a nice and entertaining person for a little girl to talk to, not above the simple pleasures of play, and not beneath the romantic joys of story-telling. Now she loved her aunt; oh, yes, she certainly loved her aunt above and beyond all the world. But her aunt, you see, was so very solemn, and then she read so many books, she was quiteentichéeof those big, hard-looking books.Entichée, she admitted, in answer to my amused and not altogether edified surprise, was an expression she had caught from my servant Marie. It was Marie, she repeated imperiously, who said her aunt wasentichéeof books, and she was pleased to find it a very good word. She was the quaintest and drollest little philosopher and playmate melancholy middle-age could desire, and I am not without shrewd suspicion that I learnt more from her than she from me.
Of an evening, as I sat alone downstairs over my coffee, and snoozed comfortably over one of Mademoiselle’s books, or puffed a meditative cigarette in front of the bright wood fire, Joséphine would come down for a chat on her own account. It amused me to draw her out uponthe subject of Mademoiselle, and bit by bit I pieced her story together.
Monsieur Lenormant, the father of two girls, had had a serious political difference with his family, who were all staunch Bonapartists, while he stood by the republic, and flung his hat into the air whenever they played theMarseillaise. With no desire to parade this difference, and being a shy and sensitive man, despite his republican sympathies, he chose evasion by the road of retreat. He left Beaufort, where his family were an influence, and bought the old house on the island. Here few were likely to disturb him, and political temptation could not be expected to pursue him.
His ostensible excuse was the possession of scholarly tastes and indifference to the present. The death of his wife upon the birth of a second girl, Adèle, was seemingly a further inducement to seek the soothing shade of solitude. So the widower, accompanied by his wife’s confidential servant, Joséphine, and an old gardener, Marcel, drove out of Beaufort, with his children, his books, and his cats. In a little while he was settled and hard at work amongthe ancients, and the current world of republicans and Bonapartists alike forgot him.
There was a difference of five years between the children, and soon, too soon, little Henriette was established upon the semi-maternal, wholly self-sacrificing pedestal ofla grande sœur. All she had known of spontaneous childhood was before her mother’s death. Henceforth she was ‘mother’ herself, with Adèle for an adored and adorable small tyrant. While still in short frocks, her father, too, had got to rely on her, and cling to her as to a grown-up woman. He would gravely debate with her upon matters it was but humane to suppose she could understand nothing of. This may be an excellent school for training in abnegation and patient endurance, but it is a hard one. Henriette slipped into maturity without any of the sunshine of childhood across her backward path. She was an uncomplaining, studious little girl, and it is not surprising that Monsieur Lenormant should have gone to the grave without the remotest suspicion of the wrong he had done her. Did she not love her father devotedly? Did she not worship the pretty Adèle? And what more can any sane andreasonable young woman demand of life than ample opportunities for the practice of self-abnegation and the worshipping of others?
When Henriette was a slip of a girl and Adèle a child of ten, young Dr. Vermont, the only son of Monsieur Lenormant’s comrade of youth, came down to Beaufort from Paris, in the full blaze of university honours, and not without promise of future scientific renown, backed by a substantial income and solid provincial influence. This young man looked surprisingly well upon horseback, and found it good exercise to ride frequently from the town to the house of his father’s old friend upon the island. Arrived there, it amused him to notice Adèle, who was free of anything like bashfulness, and in return, thought him the nicest person she had ever seen. Meanwhile, a grave, tall girl, too thin for her ungraceful age, looked on with very different eyes. To her Dr. Vermont was the traditional Phœbus Apollo of girlhood. She knew nothing of romance, or novels, or poetry, but she felt the dawn of womanhood upon sight of him, and blushed in divine self-consciousness. She was a plain girl then—unfinished, unformed, andpainfully reserved; and it was not to be expected that such an elegant article of semi-Parisian make, as Dr. Vermont, should have an eye for material so crude and undeveloped. Had Dr. Vermont been thirty instead of twenty, he might have thought differently, but we all know how grandly exacting and dramatic twenty is. Whereas his conquest was not in the least astonishing. He was a fine-looking lad, with plenty of pluck and grace and worldly wisdom. He carried himself with a noble self-consciousness, was sufficiently attentive to his moustache to convince mankind of its supreme importance, and already his handsome dark eyes wore that look of mild scrutiny that never left them. Altogether a youth with justifiable pretensions and fascinations of an intellectual and bodily nature, and one by no means likely to learn to abate them by experience.
As the years went by, and the little women of the dark house by the river grew with them, the wealth of Monsieur Lenormant declined, and when Dr. Vermont, now a distinctivesomebodyin his profession, came down one summer, and rode out from Beaufort to see him, matters were so bad that he found it his duty to comeevery day during the rest of his vacation. Adèle was now sixteen, a lovely flower opening in the sun of romantic dreams. Can we wonder if Dr. Vermont’s glance rested on her in amazed admiration? Dr. Vermont said nothing, but he looked. He looked constantly, and his glances were not without eloquence for the maiden blushing vividly beneath them. All this Henriette saw, and loved her sister none the less, wished not the less heartily both her dear ones happiness and success, though her own misery came of it. Only Monsieur Lenormant understood nothing of the situation. His dream always had been to marry his favourite Henriette to his young friend Vermont, but death overtook him before he could accomplish it.
One evening, as Dr. Vermont sat beside him with his hand upon his pulse, the poor gentleman looked up at him anxiously.
‘I have written for a relative, a lady, to come and look after my girls, but you, François, I expect to be their real protector. I like to think of you as my daughter’s husband. She is a good girl, François, an excellent girl. She has been a devoted daughter, and an adoring sister. She will make the best of wives.’
‘I am sure of it,’ said Dr. Vermont musingly, as he glanced down to where the two girls were silently embroidering in the deep recess of a window above the river. He knew perfectly well which daughter he was expected to marry and which he intended to marry, but he kept his counsel, and gazed in soft approbation upon the charming profile of Adèle.
When he came next day, Monsieur Lenormant had departed from this world of marriage and giving in marriage, and the lady relative had arrived. A formal engagement with Adèle was speedily entered upon, and the Doctor took the train for Paris, a happy prospective bridegroom, with the advantage of being in no hurry to jump into domestic responsibilities. His betrothed was somewhat young, and meanwhile he would have leisure to pursue pleasure elsewhere, and nourish her placid love upon the most expensive boxes of sweets direct from Boissier, and instalments of light and elegant literature to teach her what to respect of life and from mankind.
The bride was eighteen and the groom twenty-eight, when they were married one spring morning in the Mairie and in theCathedral of Beaufort. That marriage still brought tears to Joséphine’s old eyes, and tempted her to unhabitual eloquence. How lovely the bride had looked!—too lovely, too delicate for health and long life. Eyes limpid like an angel’s, so sweetly blue and soft, a face upon which the tenderest breath would bring a stain of deepened colour, form slim and curved and dainty in every detail. The groom was proud, radiantly proud, perhaps not tender enough and unapprehensive of the rough winds of life for a creature so fragile and for bloom so evanescent. But he looked distinguished, well-bred, and eminently Parisian; and what more could provincial spectators desire?
A more interesting figure far was the grave, sad young lady, who smiled upon her happy sister through her tears, and could find words above the pain of a breaking heart to remind the groom that Adèle had always been petted and spoiled and cared, and fervently implore him to do the same by her, and treat her more like a child than a wife. The scene was clear before me. Mademoiselle, as she must have been at twenty-three, not pretty, but captivating enough for eyes not blinded by mere animalbeauty, as the Doctor’s were. And he, fatuous, sure of himself, at heart indifferent to others, and intoxicated with foolish marital satisfaction. Did he know that tragedy brushed his happiness that moment—softly, benignantly, with blessing instead of prayer, with gaze of hope instead of reproach?
Joséphine could tell me nothing, and it pleased me to believe that he understood, and some day might remember.
After some months in Paris, the little bride was brought back to the dark house by the river by an anxious husband, there to linger in the warmth of two loves, two devotions, waited upon, worshipped in vain. The opening of her baby’s eyes was the signal for the closing of her own. Not then, not then could Dr. Vermont be expected to understand. As far as I could gather from Joséphine’s account, he passionately loved his young wife. Her death crushed him for a while, and he walked the earth like one blind to the changes of seasons, blind to surrounding faces, and fronting a future that would remain for ever a blank. Mademoiselle came, and gently touched his hand to remind him that he was not alone in his sorrow.He neither felt the fraternity nor the unspoken tenderness. The paleness of her cheek held no eloquence of suffering for him; the sadness of her eyes left his heart untouched. As for the child, far from feeling a thrill of paternity upon sight of it, he desired never to behold it more. He would regard it henceforth as the cause of his moral ruin, the beginning of a broken and joyless life.
In this hard and sullen mood he returned to Paris, and Gabrielle grew up with Mademoiselle, without any knowledge of her father, who apparently had forgotten the existence of both.