By night alive, by day the place was sunk in dreams, with lavish beauty everywhere composed to sleep in sunlit sloth, luxurious and deep. The place seemed fallen in a trance. The pigeons dozed along the eaves; and on the grass below, where the garden stretched, the peacock slowly danced his stiff and stately dance, an iris feather bubble, green as jade, purple as wine, blue as lazuli. The courtyard seemed the veryhome of sleep. The sun lay stupid on the silent walls and drowsily beat on the blue-doored cellars shut with cautious bars, closed fast and locked beneath the arcaded porch; the shadows of the slim pillars slept in the graceful galleries. All was hushed but the peacock’s cry, while that iridescent bubble, on toes black as ebony, danced, here and there, there and here, his slow “pavone” among the yellow roses.
By night beneath the windows ancient tombs bared their sculptured breasts to the stars and stared up at the golden arches; and dank, black, cracked sarcophagi, chequered with light, laid broad their time-worn, sculptured emblems and tragical inscriptions,—skulls with wings, and urns, and hour-glasses whose un-refluent, palsied sands meet measure of eternity keptwith motionless registry, and stony garlands of stone flowers which never bloomed, nor ever were sweet, as that beneath them had been sweet to man’s all quivering sense. Here lay the long dead, day and night, communicant in death; and wraiths of old unhappiness rose sighing with regret, or dreamed, beneath the stones, of love as futile as regret. The wind among the tombstones, like a stream from a windy fountain, murmured among the pomegranate-trees, stirred the shadows under the privets, rustled between the silken curtains, whispering, much as dead men do, chill, wordless, fluttering breaths of unsolved mystery. And when the wind from the graveyard whispered, all the place stood listening, hushed. The wind from the graveyard whispered among the saffron curtains; the ceaseless fountainwaters fell; else all was still but the peacock’s wild night-cry, sounding through the unfathomable silence like the rending of an illusion,—deep and singular and strange,—by a harsh trumpet’s blast. Heh! The Devil keeps his promises in the way that suits him best.
Margot’s existence here was a thing apart from everything plebeian: she was immensely wealthy; had riches such as are won by few, though sought by many, plantations in the country, houses in town, money on call in quantity that made great bankers bow; women to wait upon her, deferential men, boys to run at her beck, maidservants, bond and free, to go before her; her cellar was famous for its wines,her dress for its wild and extravagant beauty; all that she touched she took; all that she took she kept; everything that she kept increased beyond the bounds of reason; she was spoken to with deference and referred to with finesse. She had her carriage, lined with silk, with yellow hammer-cloths and bands; in the license of her beauty she laughed at sumptuary laws, and in her illegal equipage rolled insolently on; in amber gown and canary turban fastened with a golden brooch, despite the law, she rode the streets like a charioted queen; or, dressed in wild, unstudied colors such as are used in Barbary, she wandered in her garden in the after-hours of the day, making wreaths of the saffron roses, a cockatoo upon her arm the color of a wild peach flower.
A shapely, splendid creature, with her handsome, heavy hands, neck like a tower, glorious hair hanging rich beneath its turban, her embroidered robe but carelessly worn and recklessly adjusted—oddly, the coarser the more becoming,—a goddess made of beautiful earth, but coarse as the cotton-flower, with confident face and insolent mien she took her way through the streets with a supple stride which was the despair of envious rivalry; hers was a regal beauty like the tiger’s loveliness.
With her face like beauty seen in dreams, incredible and untrue, she went through the community like a lovely malady: even wise men’s souls were troubled; sturdy hearts that had laughed at passion shook with the fairness of her face; piety was troubled byher golden loveliness. More than one sermon from Solomon’s Song was inspired by Rita Lagoux; she was known as the woman with a face like a beautiful blasphemy.
Time but increased the wildness and singularity of her beauty: it was gossiped about in the market-stalls; it was babbled about in the streets.
Then a torpor fell on her loveliness, a dull and leaden look; her beauty grew sullen and lowering as the flame of a fallen fire. Though not much altered in appearance she was somehow greatly changed. Her looks had lost something, no one could say what, gained something none could define. It was not that she was less the unforgettable being she had been, or that her sullen beauty made less mark on memory, but that the ecstasy of beauty was replacedby a queer unrest. Though as never before she was possessed of a singular comeliness, men began to regard her with an odd uneasiness: there was a foreignness in her face, and the look of alien things.
She looked like a portrait of herself painted in irony.
On the day that her daughter was married in far-away New Orleans, Margot stood motionless by her mirror, staring at her own reflection. The day seemed oddly overcast. Suddenly she burst into wild, shrill laughter, cheerless and tragic, her body shaking, her hands wrung together, turned away with an epithet, reversed the glass, and never looked into a mirror again. Something had passed across her face like a strange, ambiguous stain.
A shadow had fallen upon her likean unexpected dusk, or the dimness under a passing cloud, and had overcast her beauty.
Not time with his pinching seam, nor age with its ugliness, but a subtle and more peculiar change had come over Margot Lagoux.
There is a half-light in the hour of an eclipse which casts a weird spell on the world, when the sun is but a narrow crescent at high noon and the earth grows oddly dim in an untimely dusk. Such a dusk was fallen upon Margot Lagoux.
Sultry beauty such as hers has ever an early afternoon; but this was more than sultry beauty’s early afternoon. Not day, not darkness yet, but dusk went with her everywhere like twilight in the woods. The sun shone brightly everywhere along a sparkling world,but on Margot lay a shadow, strange and sinister. As unbleached muslin sallows to dingy isabella, as metal tarnishes from neglect, as white paper dulls in the sun, as the spot on bruised fruit turns brown, Margot Lagoux was changing; she was becoming tawny, swart,bisblancas the Creoles say. Her golden-ruddy cheeks had turned a morbid olive-brown as if a somber fountain were playing in her blood.
There were many women at that day on whom fate laid dreadful hands: Louise Briaud, who was blinded by smallpox; Fanchette Bourie, whom God pitied with death; Helene Richemont, the leper; Floride Biez, Doucie Baramont, Francesca Villeponteaux, wrecked by disfiguring maladies. God give them peace! But on none was laidso ruthless, unrelenting, deliberate a hand as fell upon Rita Lagoux.
She changed like a portrait whose shadows, painted in bitumen, have struck through and distempered the rest. Like a strange, nocturnal creature she seemed to absorb the gloom. Her glorious eyes grew jaundiced; her rose-brown lips grew dun; the delicate webs that joined her fingers grew yellow as bakers’ saffron. Malice laughed at her thickening lips.
Weeks turned months, months years; swarthy she grew and ugly. She put aside beauty as a worn, bright garment, and took on grotesquery stark and medieval as a Chinese teak-wood carving. She became both grotesque and contorted, gross, misshapen, sullied and debased. The old enchantment was gone like a necromancer’s spell. Theperfect gait had faltered down to a lurching trot, a hurrying waddle with an irregular, unsure motion, hesitating a moment, then hastening on with vague uncertainty. Her soft, sleepy laugh had grown violent, her melodious voice coarse; of her fair face there was nothing left, no, not remembrance even.
A young man came to her threshold one morning and looked in eagerly; he would speak with Margot Lagoux: but “Is that Margot Lagoux?” he asked, a curious look coming over his face,—that woman, obese, with low brows, huge fat eyelids, round bare forehead, short, strained and corded neck enormously thick, yellowed teeth irregularly shown between thick, sallowed lips, cheeks wrinkled, flecked and blotched with brown like spotted peaches. “No!” he said, hastily, shrinking away. “That isnot the woman I mean. The woman I meant was comely ... and had a beautiful daughter named Gabrielle!” He turned away, shuddering.
She wore old rags for robes, an oldfrelocheupon her head, in nowise restraining the unkempt coils of her hair hanging matted upon her neck. Her cheeks hung slack and dark and dingy; her lusterless locks were felted into a tangled web that had grown gray with lint; her frowsy chin was stained as with walnut hulls. She was falling apart like an old house with nobody living in it, swore black oaths with a foul mouth, cursed all who crossed her path, ate like a beast food fit for beasts, her fevered sun of glory set,—gone, gone, gone. Down she went, like the stuffs in her shop, fromvelours rastocoton croisé, down, down to oblivion, down tothe dusty corner of death. She spat in the dirt: “Je m’en fiche!” she said.
She hated a priest, and never knelt at a confessional again.
She did not die in the great house where she had passed the days of her power; every place she dwelt in sank into decay, the swifter where its integrity seemed permanent and secure; nothing purged the ambiguous spell which dragged them down together to the dust. The great house stood a ruin above a ruined court, a wreck of its former pride and splendor, black and foul; the fountain had fallen long ago, its pipes strangled and eaten away to crusts of lead and thready ribs of iron in the sand. Lilac lane was gone; there was no lane there any more, and hadbeen none for years; there was no trace of where it ran, its hedge-rows or its gardens, or of Margot’s cottage other than a mouldering heap of broken brick, bleak rafters of the fallen roof, and one stark, fallen gable; of Gabrielle’s garden nothing remained.
Margot died in a dirty hovel in an unkempt alleyway, in the midst of a negro quarter, where, if one beat a drum or caused an instrument of an orchestra to sound, the people swarmed from the tenements like ants out of a hill. The place was fallen and foul, and filled with beggary; and that is the end of a tenement; for beggars are like distemper, the place where they have lived is hard to cure. All the houses in the alley were filthy; but none was filthy as hers.
There was a tremendous storm thatnight. Her house was ablaze with light; the little tailor who lived next door said, “Aha! Mother Go-go has company!” But the only person seen was one of the religious sort, a tall man, with a face like an unpleasant taste.
The thunder was terrific; the storm wild beyond compare. The wind blew with a sound like wild, gigantic laughter. “Ff-ff-ff!” went the gale; the gusts howled through the tailor’s house; the whole place shook; the blinds banged and crashed; the wind wailed, and sucked down the chimney with a sound like awful weeping; the little tailor’s soul was filled with a sense of enormous terror.
All night long the thunder rolled like the laughter of an angry god. Dislodged by the tremendous concussions the cockroaches flew out of the walls;and, in the morning, after the storm, the parrakeets which lived in the trees were all turned gray as ashes.
The windows and doors of Old Mother Go-go’s house were standing open wide. It was plain that they had stood open all night, and that the rain had beaten into the house unopposed.
This, however, occasioned but brief surprise. When they peered in at the door the rats were playing around the floor with the beads of a broken rosary.
A priest came, hurrying in. He did not stay in long. When he came out his face was white as a sheet and his lips were drawn and gray.
Those who prepare the dead came. They stood on the threshold peeping and queerly looking in at the door.
A gray mist filled the place like a cloud, through which things were visible.The rooms were damp as an old vault, and full of a death-like smell; the walls were covered with green mould; the woodwork was rotten. The candles had guttered and dripped and gone out; the floor was bespattered with tallow. All around the rooms were coffers of linen and lace, “coffres très beaux, coffres mignons, de dressouer compagnons; coffres de boys qui point n’empire; madres et jaunes comme cire.” All the coffers were open, and everything that was in them was tossed wildly about the floor; not one piece of the lovely old stuffs, as yellow as wax, but was blackened by showers of soot and trampled under foot by the neighbor’s goat, the print of whose hoofs was everywhere.
And Madame Margot?
Heh! God had designed her for tragedy; but here was comedy. Margotlay stretched out on the floor, as black as ebony; dead, among the ashes and soot, charred like a fallen star.
The coroner found that the woman had died of the visitation of God; but Doe Gou, the tailor, said simply, “Has God feet like a goat?”
The bishop refused to have masses said for the repose of her pitiful soul; and they would not allow her to be buried in St. Sebastian’s graveyard. The potter’s field was the place for her; her color was too peculiar.
Too black to be buried among the white, too white to lie down with the black, she was buried, in secret, in her own garden, under the magnolia-trees.
And that was the end of Madame Margot.