11.Problems of BeautyIT was conceded even by the younger and most charming ladies of the neighborhood that the new Duchess of Puysange was quite good looking. The gentlemen of Poictesme appeared, literally, to be dazzled by any prolonged consideration of Melior’s loveliness: otherwise, as Florian soon noted, there was no logical accounting for the discrepancy in their encomia. Enraptured pæeans upon her eyes, for example, he found to differ amazingly and utterly in regard to such an important factor as the color of these eyes. This was, at mildest, a circumstance provocative of curiosity.Florian therefore listened more attentively to what people said of his wife; and he discovered that his fellows’ ecstasies over Melior’s hair and shape and complexion were not a whit less inconsistent. These envious babblers were at one in acclaiming as flawless the beauty which he had intrepidly fetched down from the high place: but in speaking of any constituent of this loveliness they seemed not to be talking of the same woman. Either her perfection actually did dazzle men so that they were bewilderedly aware of much such a beguiling and intoxicating brightness as Florian, on looking back, suspected Melior to have been in his own eyes before he married her, or else the appearance of this daughter of the Léshy was not to all persons the same. Well, this was queer: but it was not important. Florian at least was in no doubt of his wife’s appearance nor of his right to glory in it.So Florian tended to let this riddle pass unchallenged, and to quarrel with nothing, for Florian was very happy.He could not have said when or why awoke the teasing question if, after all, this happiness was greater than or different from that which he had got of Aurélie or Hortense or Marianne or Carola? Being married to a comparative stranger was, as always, pleasant; it was, in fact, delightful: but you had expected, none the less, of the love which had miraculously triumphed over time and all natural laws some sharper tang of bliss than ordinarily flavored your honeymoons. Still, at thirty-five, you were logical about the usual turning-out of expectations. And you were content: and Melior was beautiful; and among the local nobility this newDuchess of Puysange had made friends everywhere, and she was everywhere admired, however puzzlingly men seemed to word their praise of her loveliness.The newly married pair had journeyed uneventfully from Brunbelois to Florian’s home. The mute hairy persons brought Melior’s trunks in their cart; and St. Hoprig too came with them through Acaire, but no further. Florian had at last persuaded him of how untactful it would be for Hoprig to disrupt a simple and high-hearted faith that had thrived for so many hundred years, by appearing at Bellegarde in person. Florian had pointed out the attendant awkwardnesses, for the fetich no less than for the devotees. And Hoprig, upon reflection, had conceded that for a saint in the prime of life there were advantages in travelling incognito.So the holy man left them at the edge of the forest. “We shall meet again, my children,” the saint had said, with a smile, just as he vanished like a breaking bubble. It seemed to Florian that his heavenly patron had become a little ostentatious with miracles, but Florian voiced no criticism. Still, he considered the evanishment of the two hairy persons and their monstrous goats, an evanishment quite privately conducted in the stable to which they had withdrawn after uncarting Melior’s trunks, to be in much better taste.But Florian picked no open fault with Hoprig nor with anyone, for Florian was content enough just now. He began to see that his notions about Melior had been a trifle extravagant, that the strange loveliness which he had been adoring since boyhood was worn by a creature whose brilliance was of the body rather than of the intellect: however, he had not married her in order to discuss philosophy; and, with practise, it was easy enough to pretend to listen without really hearing her.All this was less worrying, less imminent, than the trouble he seemed in every likelihood about to have with his brother, on account of Raoul’s damnable wife. For Madame Marguerite de Puysange, as Florian now heard, was infuriated by his failure to appear at Storisende upon the twentieth of July, the day upon which he had been due to marry her sister: nor by learning that he had married somebody else was the unconscionable virago soothed. She considered a monstrous affront had been put upon them all, a deduction which Florian granted to be truly drawn, if that mattered. What certainly mattered was that the lean woman had no living adult male relatives. She would be at her husband to avenge this affront by killing Florian: and dear, plastic, good-natured Raoul so hated to deny anybody anything that the result of her coaxing andtears and nagging would probably be a decided nuisance....“That ring with the three diamonds in it,” Florian had said, “is deplorably old-fashioned—”“Yes, I suppose it is, sweetheart: but it was given me by a dear friend, and you know the sort of things they pick out, and, besides, I like to have it keeping me in mind of how ridiculously the best-meaning people may be sometimes,” his Melior had answered,—very happily, and nuzzling a very wonderfully soft cheek against his cheek.So he had let the matter stand....It was a nuisance, too, this news which Florian had received as to the great Cardinal Dubois, whom Florian had promised—as he regretted now to remember, in carelessly loose terms,—to offer as a Christmas present to Janicot. It appeared that during Florian’s stay at Brunbelois the over-gallant cardinal had been compelled to submit to an operation which deprived him of two cherished possessions and shortly afterward of his life. His death was a real grief to Florian, not as in itself any loss, but because, with Dubois interred at St. Roch, the greatest man living in France when Christmas came would be the Duc d’Orléans.Florian had long been fond of Philippe d’Orléans, and Florian loathed the thought of making a present of his friend’s life to a comparatively slight andambiguous acquaintance like Janicot. There seemed no way out of it, however, for Florian had in this matter given his word. But he regretted deeply that he had thus recklessly promised the greatest man in the kingdom instead of specifically confining himself to that selfish Dubois, who could without real self-denial have lived until December, and who could so easily have furthered everybody’s well-being by restricting his amours to ladies of such known piety and wholesomeness and social position as made them appropriate playfellows for a high prince of the Church.But all this was spilt milk. What it came to in the upshot was that Florian, through his infatuation for Melior, was already in a fair way to lose his most intimate and powerful friend and his only legitimate brother. It was a nuisance, for Florian disliked annoying either one of them, and thus to be burdened with the need of bereaving yourself of both appeared a positive imposition. But we cannot have all things as we desire them in this world, his common-sense assured him: and, in the main, as has been said, the incidental disappointments, now that he had attained his life’s desire, were tepid and not really very deep.For Melior was beautiful; after months of intimacy and fond research he could find no flaw in her beauty: and in other respects she proved to beas acceptable a wife as any of his own marrying that he had ever had. If she was not always reasonable, if sometimes indeed she seemed obtuse, and if she nagged a little now and then, it was, after all, what past experience had led him to expect alike in marriage and in liaisons. The rapture which he had known at first sight of her, the rapture of the mountain-top, was not, he assured himself, a delusion of which he had ever expected permanence....“But this remarkably carved staff, my darling—?”“Oh, it was one of my sister Mélusine’s old things. I would not be in the least surprised if it were magical—And while we are speaking about sisters, Florian, I do wish that black-faced one of yours would not look at me so hard and then shrug, because she has done it twice, in quite a personal way—”“Marie-Claire is a strange woman, my pet.”But that fretted him. He knew so well why Marie-Claire had shrugged....No, he had never, really, expected the rapture of the mountain-top to be permanent. Besides, he need not expect permanency of Melior. It was sad, of course, that when she had borne him a child, the child must be disposed of, and the mother must vanish, in accordance with Florian’s agreement with Janicot. But there was always some such condition attached to marriage between a mortal and anyof the Léshy, or some abstention set like a trap whereinto the unwary mortal was sure to flounder, and so lose the more than mortal helpmate. The union must always, in one way or another, prove transitory, as was shown by the sad history of the matrimonial ventures of Melior’s own sister, and of the knight Helias, and by many other honorable old precedents.And Florian now began to see that if the Melior whom he had adored since boyhood were thus lost to him in the fulltide of their love and happiness,—for these were still at fulltide, he here assured himself,—then he would retain only pleasant and heart-breaking and highly desirable memories. A great love such as his for his present wife ought, by all the dictates of good taste, to end tragically: to have it dwindle out into the mutual toleration of what people called a happy marriage would be anti-climax, it would be as if one were to botch a sublime and mellifluous sonnet with a sestet in prose.Melior, so long as she stayed unattainable, had provided him with an ideal: and Melior, once lost to him, once he could never hear another word of that continuous half-witted jabbering,—or, rather, he emended, of this bright light creature’s very diverting chat,—then his high misery would afford him even surer ground for a superior dissatisfaction with the simple catering of nature. So the company of his disenchanted princess, her company just for the present, could be endured with a composure not wholly saddened by that dreadful and permanent bereavement which impended.He reasoned thus, and was in everything considerate and loving. His devotion was so ardent and unremittent, indeed, that, when Florian left Bellegarde, Melior was forehandedly stitching and trimming baby-clothes. This was at the opening of December, and he was going to court in answer to a summons from the great Duke of Orléans.“It is rather odd,” observed Florian, “that it is at Philippe’s expressed desire I go to him. Eh, but one knows that shrewd old saying as to the gods’ preliminary treatment of those whom they wish to destroy.”“Still, if you ask me,” observed his wife,—not looking at him, but at her sewing,—“I think it is much better not to talk about the gods any more than is necessary, and certainly not in that exact tone of voice—” The break in speech was for the purpose of biting a thread.You saw, as she bent over this thread, the top of her frilly little lace cap efflorescent with tiny pink ribbons. You saw, as she looked up, that Melior was especially lovely to-day in this flowing pink robe à la Watteau over a white petticoat and a corsage of white ribbons arranged in a sort ofladder-work. There was now about her nothing whatever of the mediæval or the outré: from the boudoir cap upon her head to the pink satin mules upon her feet, this Melior belonged to the modern world of 1723: and the whiteness and the pinkness of her made you think of desserts and confectionery.“But what exact tone of voice,” asked Florian, smiling with lenient pride in his really very pretty duchess, “does my darling find injudicious?”“Why, I mean, as if you were looking at something a great way off, and smelled something you were not quite certain you liked. To be sure, now that we are both good Christians, we know that the other gods are either devils or else illusions that never existed at all—Father Joseph has the nicest possible manners, and just the smile and the way of talking that very often reminds me of Hoprig, and qualifies him to teach any religion in the world, even without stroking both your hands all the time, but in spite of that, as I told him only last Saturday, he will not ever speak out quite plainly about them—”“About your lovely hands, madame?”“Now, monsieur my husband, what foolish questions you ask! I mean, about whether they are devils or illusions. Because, as I told him frankly—”“Ah, now I comprehend. Yet, surely, these abstruse questions of theology—”She was looking at him in astonishment. “Why, but not in the least! I am not interested in theology, I merely say that a thing is either one way or the other: and, as I so often think, nothing whatever is to be gained by beating about the bush instead of being our own candid natural selves, and confessing to our ignorance, even if we happen to be priests, where ignorance is no disgrace—”“Doubtless, my dearest, you intend to convey to me—”“Oh, no, not for one instant!” And this bewitching seamstress was virtually giggling, quite as if there were some logical cause for amusement. “Anybody who called that dear old soft-soaper stupid would be much more mistaken, monsieur my husband, than you suspect. I merely mean that is one side of the question, a side which is perfectly plain. The other is that, as I have told him over and over again, it is not as if I had ever for a moment denied that Father and Mother are conservative, but quite the contrary—”Florian said: “Dearest of my life, I conjecture you are still referring to your confessor, the good Father Joseph. Otherwise, I must admit that, somehow, I have not followed the theme of your argument with an exactness which might, perhaps,have enabled me to form some faint notion as to what you are talking about.”And again the loveliest face in the world was marveling beneath that very pleasing disorder of little pink ribbons. “Why, I was talking about Father Joseph, of course, and about my wanting to know how my parents at their time of life could be expected to take up with new ideas. Oh, and I kept at him, too: because, even if they are worshipping devils up at Brunbelois, and doing something actually wicked when they sacrifice to Llaw Gyffes a few serfs that are past their work and are of no use to anybody, and no real pleasure to themselves,—which is a side you have to look at,—it would be a sort of comfort to be certain of the worst. Whereas, as for them, the poor dears, as I so often say, what you do not know about does not worry you—”“I take it, that you mean—”“Exactly!” Melior stated, with the most sagacious of nods. “Though, for my part, I feel it is only justice to say that such devils as my sister Mélusine used to have in now and again, in the way of sorcery, were quite civil and obliging. So far as looks go, it is best to remember in such cases that handsome is as handsome does, and I am sure they did things for her that the servants would never have so much as considered—”“But, still—”“Oh, yes, of course, we all know what a problem that is, at every turn, with your kindness and your consideration absolutely wasted: and in fact, as I so often think, if I could just have two rooms somewhere, and do my own cooking—” Another thread was bitten through by the loveliest teeth in the world.“You aspire to such simple pleasures, my wife, as are denied to a Duchess of Puysange. No, one must be logical. We have the duties of our estate. And among these duties, as I was just saying, I now discover the deplorable need of absenting myself from the delights of your society and conversation—”“I shall miss you, monsieur my husband,” replied Melior, abstractedly holding up a very small undershirt, and looking at it as if with the very weightiest of doubts, “of course. But still, it is not as if I cared to be travelling now, and, besides, there really is a great deal of sewing to be done for months to come. And with everything in this upset condition, I do hope that—if by any chance you are sitting on that other pair of scissors? I thought they must be there. Yes, I do hope that you will be most careful in this affair, because I already have enough to contend with. You ought to send the lace at once, though: and I suppose we might as wellhave pink yarn and ribbons, since the chances are equal in any event—”“But in what affair, delight of my existence, are you requesting me to be careful?”“Why, how should I know?” And Melior, he perceived, had still the air of one who is dealing patiently with an irrational person. “It is probably a very good thing that I do not, since you are plainly up to something with your friend Orléans which you want nobody to find out about. All men are like that: and, for my part, I have no curiosity whatever, because, as I so often think, if everybody would just attend to their own affairs—”He bowed and, murmuring “Your pardon, madame!” he left her contentedly sewing. It seemed to Florian a real pity that a creature in every way so agreeable to his eye should steadily betray and tease his ear. He did not find that, as wives average, his Melior was especially loquacious: it was, rather, that when she discoursed at any length, with her bewildering air of commingled self-satisfaction and shrewdness, he could never make out quite clearly what she was talking about: and as went intelligence, his disenchanted princess seemed to him to rank somewhere between a magpie and a turnip.This, upon the whole, adorable idiocy might have made it appear, to some persons, surprising thatMelior should divine, as she had so obviously divined, that Florian, in going to Philippe d’Orléans, was prompted by motives which discretion preferred to screen. But Florian had learned by experience that your wives very often astound you by striking the target of your inmost thinking, fair and full, with just such seemingly irrational shots of surmise. You might call it intuition or whatever else you preferred: no husband of any at all lengthy standing would be quick to call it accident. Rather, he would admit this to be a faculty which every married woman manifested now and then: and he would rejoice that, for the health of the world’s peace, such clairvoyancy was intermittent. Florian esteemed it to be just one of the inevitable drawbacks of matrimony that the most painstaking person must sometimes encounter discomfortable moments when his wife appears to be looking over his secret thoughts somewhat as one glances over the pages of a not particularly interesting book. So the experienced husband would shrug and would await this awkward moment’s passing, and the return of his wife’s normal gullibility and charm.Melior, too, then, had her instants of approach to wifely, if not precisely human, intelligence. And Melior was beautiful. There was no flaw anywhere in her beauty. This Florian repeated, over and over again, as he prepared for travel. Here, too,one must be logical. That ideal beauty which he had hopelessly worshipped, and had without hope hungered for, ever since his childhood, was now attained: and the goddess of his long adoration was now enshrined in, to be exact, the next room but one, already hemming diapers for their anticipated baby. Nobody could possibly have won nearer to his heart’s desire than Florian had come; he had got all and more than his highest dreaming had aspired to: and so, if he was now sighing over the reflection, it must be, he perceived, a sigh of content.Then he kissed his wife, and he rode away from Bellegarde, toward the vexatious duties which awaited him at court. Florian stopped, of course, to put up a prayer, for the success of his nearing venture into homicide, at the Church of Holy Hoprig. That ceremonial Florian could not well have omitted without provoking more or less speculation as to why the Duke of Puysange should be defaulting in a pious custom of long standing; nor, for that matter, without troubling his conscience with doubts if he was affording the country-side quite the good example due from one of his rank.Through just such mingled considerations of expediency and duty had Florian, since his return from Brunbelois, continued his giving to this church with all the old liberality, if with somewhat less comfort to himself. It was a nuisance to reflect that somany irregularities which Florian had believed compounded, to everybody’s satisfaction, had never been attended to at all by his patron saint. It was annoying to know that the church had got, and was continuing to get, from the estate of Puysange so many pious offerings virtually for nothing. Even so, replied logic, what was to be gained by arousing criticism or by neglecting your religious duties in a manner that was noticeable? Let us adhere to precedent, and then, if we can no longer count assuredly on bliss in the next world, we may at least hope for tranquillity in this one.So Florian, for the preservation of the local standards, now put up a fervent prayer to his patron saint in heaven; and reflected that, after all, the actual whereabouts, and the receptivity to petitions, of Holy Hoprig was none of Florian’s affair. A little wonder, however, about just where the saint might be doing what, was, Florian hoped, permissible, since he had found such wondering not to be avoided.Lizard crawling out of a pot
11.Problems of Beauty
11.Problems of Beauty
I
T was conceded even by the younger and most charming ladies of the neighborhood that the new Duchess of Puysange was quite good looking. The gentlemen of Poictesme appeared, literally, to be dazzled by any prolonged consideration of Melior’s loveliness: otherwise, as Florian soon noted, there was no logical accounting for the discrepancy in their encomia. Enraptured pæeans upon her eyes, for example, he found to differ amazingly and utterly in regard to such an important factor as the color of these eyes. This was, at mildest, a circumstance provocative of curiosity.
Florian therefore listened more attentively to what people said of his wife; and he discovered that his fellows’ ecstasies over Melior’s hair and shape and complexion were not a whit less inconsistent. These envious babblers were at one in acclaiming as flawless the beauty which he had intrepidly fetched down from the high place: but in speaking of any constituent of this loveliness they seemed not to be talking of the same woman. Either her perfection actually did dazzle men so that they were bewilderedly aware of much such a beguiling and intoxicating brightness as Florian, on looking back, suspected Melior to have been in his own eyes before he married her, or else the appearance of this daughter of the Léshy was not to all persons the same. Well, this was queer: but it was not important. Florian at least was in no doubt of his wife’s appearance nor of his right to glory in it.
So Florian tended to let this riddle pass unchallenged, and to quarrel with nothing, for Florian was very happy.
He could not have said when or why awoke the teasing question if, after all, this happiness was greater than or different from that which he had got of Aurélie or Hortense or Marianne or Carola? Being married to a comparative stranger was, as always, pleasant; it was, in fact, delightful: but you had expected, none the less, of the love which had miraculously triumphed over time and all natural laws some sharper tang of bliss than ordinarily flavored your honeymoons. Still, at thirty-five, you were logical about the usual turning-out of expectations. And you were content: and Melior was beautiful; and among the local nobility this newDuchess of Puysange had made friends everywhere, and she was everywhere admired, however puzzlingly men seemed to word their praise of her loveliness.
The newly married pair had journeyed uneventfully from Brunbelois to Florian’s home. The mute hairy persons brought Melior’s trunks in their cart; and St. Hoprig too came with them through Acaire, but no further. Florian had at last persuaded him of how untactful it would be for Hoprig to disrupt a simple and high-hearted faith that had thrived for so many hundred years, by appearing at Bellegarde in person. Florian had pointed out the attendant awkwardnesses, for the fetich no less than for the devotees. And Hoprig, upon reflection, had conceded that for a saint in the prime of life there were advantages in travelling incognito.
So the holy man left them at the edge of the forest. “We shall meet again, my children,” the saint had said, with a smile, just as he vanished like a breaking bubble. It seemed to Florian that his heavenly patron had become a little ostentatious with miracles, but Florian voiced no criticism. Still, he considered the evanishment of the two hairy persons and their monstrous goats, an evanishment quite privately conducted in the stable to which they had withdrawn after uncarting Melior’s trunks, to be in much better taste.
But Florian picked no open fault with Hoprig nor with anyone, for Florian was content enough just now. He began to see that his notions about Melior had been a trifle extravagant, that the strange loveliness which he had been adoring since boyhood was worn by a creature whose brilliance was of the body rather than of the intellect: however, he had not married her in order to discuss philosophy; and, with practise, it was easy enough to pretend to listen without really hearing her.
All this was less worrying, less imminent, than the trouble he seemed in every likelihood about to have with his brother, on account of Raoul’s damnable wife. For Madame Marguerite de Puysange, as Florian now heard, was infuriated by his failure to appear at Storisende upon the twentieth of July, the day upon which he had been due to marry her sister: nor by learning that he had married somebody else was the unconscionable virago soothed. She considered a monstrous affront had been put upon them all, a deduction which Florian granted to be truly drawn, if that mattered. What certainly mattered was that the lean woman had no living adult male relatives. She would be at her husband to avenge this affront by killing Florian: and dear, plastic, good-natured Raoul so hated to deny anybody anything that the result of her coaxing andtears and nagging would probably be a decided nuisance....
“That ring with the three diamonds in it,” Florian had said, “is deplorably old-fashioned—”
“Yes, I suppose it is, sweetheart: but it was given me by a dear friend, and you know the sort of things they pick out, and, besides, I like to have it keeping me in mind of how ridiculously the best-meaning people may be sometimes,” his Melior had answered,—very happily, and nuzzling a very wonderfully soft cheek against his cheek.
So he had let the matter stand....
It was a nuisance, too, this news which Florian had received as to the great Cardinal Dubois, whom Florian had promised—as he regretted now to remember, in carelessly loose terms,—to offer as a Christmas present to Janicot. It appeared that during Florian’s stay at Brunbelois the over-gallant cardinal had been compelled to submit to an operation which deprived him of two cherished possessions and shortly afterward of his life. His death was a real grief to Florian, not as in itself any loss, but because, with Dubois interred at St. Roch, the greatest man living in France when Christmas came would be the Duc d’Orléans.
Florian had long been fond of Philippe d’Orléans, and Florian loathed the thought of making a present of his friend’s life to a comparatively slight andambiguous acquaintance like Janicot. There seemed no way out of it, however, for Florian had in this matter given his word. But he regretted deeply that he had thus recklessly promised the greatest man in the kingdom instead of specifically confining himself to that selfish Dubois, who could without real self-denial have lived until December, and who could so easily have furthered everybody’s well-being by restricting his amours to ladies of such known piety and wholesomeness and social position as made them appropriate playfellows for a high prince of the Church.
But all this was spilt milk. What it came to in the upshot was that Florian, through his infatuation for Melior, was already in a fair way to lose his most intimate and powerful friend and his only legitimate brother. It was a nuisance, for Florian disliked annoying either one of them, and thus to be burdened with the need of bereaving yourself of both appeared a positive imposition. But we cannot have all things as we desire them in this world, his common-sense assured him: and, in the main, as has been said, the incidental disappointments, now that he had attained his life’s desire, were tepid and not really very deep.
For Melior was beautiful; after months of intimacy and fond research he could find no flaw in her beauty: and in other respects she proved to beas acceptable a wife as any of his own marrying that he had ever had. If she was not always reasonable, if sometimes indeed she seemed obtuse, and if she nagged a little now and then, it was, after all, what past experience had led him to expect alike in marriage and in liaisons. The rapture which he had known at first sight of her, the rapture of the mountain-top, was not, he assured himself, a delusion of which he had ever expected permanence....
“But this remarkably carved staff, my darling—?”
“Oh, it was one of my sister Mélusine’s old things. I would not be in the least surprised if it were magical—And while we are speaking about sisters, Florian, I do wish that black-faced one of yours would not look at me so hard and then shrug, because she has done it twice, in quite a personal way—”
“Marie-Claire is a strange woman, my pet.”
But that fretted him. He knew so well why Marie-Claire had shrugged....
No, he had never, really, expected the rapture of the mountain-top to be permanent. Besides, he need not expect permanency of Melior. It was sad, of course, that when she had borne him a child, the child must be disposed of, and the mother must vanish, in accordance with Florian’s agreement with Janicot. But there was always some such condition attached to marriage between a mortal and anyof the Léshy, or some abstention set like a trap whereinto the unwary mortal was sure to flounder, and so lose the more than mortal helpmate. The union must always, in one way or another, prove transitory, as was shown by the sad history of the matrimonial ventures of Melior’s own sister, and of the knight Helias, and by many other honorable old precedents.
And Florian now began to see that if the Melior whom he had adored since boyhood were thus lost to him in the fulltide of their love and happiness,—for these were still at fulltide, he here assured himself,—then he would retain only pleasant and heart-breaking and highly desirable memories. A great love such as his for his present wife ought, by all the dictates of good taste, to end tragically: to have it dwindle out into the mutual toleration of what people called a happy marriage would be anti-climax, it would be as if one were to botch a sublime and mellifluous sonnet with a sestet in prose.
Melior, so long as she stayed unattainable, had provided him with an ideal: and Melior, once lost to him, once he could never hear another word of that continuous half-witted jabbering,—or, rather, he emended, of this bright light creature’s very diverting chat,—then his high misery would afford him even surer ground for a superior dissatisfaction with the simple catering of nature. So the company of his disenchanted princess, her company just for the present, could be endured with a composure not wholly saddened by that dreadful and permanent bereavement which impended.
He reasoned thus, and was in everything considerate and loving. His devotion was so ardent and unremittent, indeed, that, when Florian left Bellegarde, Melior was forehandedly stitching and trimming baby-clothes. This was at the opening of December, and he was going to court in answer to a summons from the great Duke of Orléans.
“It is rather odd,” observed Florian, “that it is at Philippe’s expressed desire I go to him. Eh, but one knows that shrewd old saying as to the gods’ preliminary treatment of those whom they wish to destroy.”
“Still, if you ask me,” observed his wife,—not looking at him, but at her sewing,—“I think it is much better not to talk about the gods any more than is necessary, and certainly not in that exact tone of voice—” The break in speech was for the purpose of biting a thread.
You saw, as she bent over this thread, the top of her frilly little lace cap efflorescent with tiny pink ribbons. You saw, as she looked up, that Melior was especially lovely to-day in this flowing pink robe à la Watteau over a white petticoat and a corsage of white ribbons arranged in a sort ofladder-work. There was now about her nothing whatever of the mediæval or the outré: from the boudoir cap upon her head to the pink satin mules upon her feet, this Melior belonged to the modern world of 1723: and the whiteness and the pinkness of her made you think of desserts and confectionery.
“But what exact tone of voice,” asked Florian, smiling with lenient pride in his really very pretty duchess, “does my darling find injudicious?”
“Why, I mean, as if you were looking at something a great way off, and smelled something you were not quite certain you liked. To be sure, now that we are both good Christians, we know that the other gods are either devils or else illusions that never existed at all—Father Joseph has the nicest possible manners, and just the smile and the way of talking that very often reminds me of Hoprig, and qualifies him to teach any religion in the world, even without stroking both your hands all the time, but in spite of that, as I told him only last Saturday, he will not ever speak out quite plainly about them—”
“About your lovely hands, madame?”
“Now, monsieur my husband, what foolish questions you ask! I mean, about whether they are devils or illusions. Because, as I told him frankly—”
“Ah, now I comprehend. Yet, surely, these abstruse questions of theology—”
She was looking at him in astonishment. “Why, but not in the least! I am not interested in theology, I merely say that a thing is either one way or the other: and, as I so often think, nothing whatever is to be gained by beating about the bush instead of being our own candid natural selves, and confessing to our ignorance, even if we happen to be priests, where ignorance is no disgrace—”
“Doubtless, my dearest, you intend to convey to me—”
“Oh, no, not for one instant!” And this bewitching seamstress was virtually giggling, quite as if there were some logical cause for amusement. “Anybody who called that dear old soft-soaper stupid would be much more mistaken, monsieur my husband, than you suspect. I merely mean that is one side of the question, a side which is perfectly plain. The other is that, as I have told him over and over again, it is not as if I had ever for a moment denied that Father and Mother are conservative, but quite the contrary—”
Florian said: “Dearest of my life, I conjecture you are still referring to your confessor, the good Father Joseph. Otherwise, I must admit that, somehow, I have not followed the theme of your argument with an exactness which might, perhaps,have enabled me to form some faint notion as to what you are talking about.”
And again the loveliest face in the world was marveling beneath that very pleasing disorder of little pink ribbons. “Why, I was talking about Father Joseph, of course, and about my wanting to know how my parents at their time of life could be expected to take up with new ideas. Oh, and I kept at him, too: because, even if they are worshipping devils up at Brunbelois, and doing something actually wicked when they sacrifice to Llaw Gyffes a few serfs that are past their work and are of no use to anybody, and no real pleasure to themselves,—which is a side you have to look at,—it would be a sort of comfort to be certain of the worst. Whereas, as for them, the poor dears, as I so often say, what you do not know about does not worry you—”
“I take it, that you mean—”
“Exactly!” Melior stated, with the most sagacious of nods. “Though, for my part, I feel it is only justice to say that such devils as my sister Mélusine used to have in now and again, in the way of sorcery, were quite civil and obliging. So far as looks go, it is best to remember in such cases that handsome is as handsome does, and I am sure they did things for her that the servants would never have so much as considered—”
“But, still—”
“Oh, yes, of course, we all know what a problem that is, at every turn, with your kindness and your consideration absolutely wasted: and in fact, as I so often think, if I could just have two rooms somewhere, and do my own cooking—” Another thread was bitten through by the loveliest teeth in the world.
“You aspire to such simple pleasures, my wife, as are denied to a Duchess of Puysange. No, one must be logical. We have the duties of our estate. And among these duties, as I was just saying, I now discover the deplorable need of absenting myself from the delights of your society and conversation—”
“I shall miss you, monsieur my husband,” replied Melior, abstractedly holding up a very small undershirt, and looking at it as if with the very weightiest of doubts, “of course. But still, it is not as if I cared to be travelling now, and, besides, there really is a great deal of sewing to be done for months to come. And with everything in this upset condition, I do hope that—if by any chance you are sitting on that other pair of scissors? I thought they must be there. Yes, I do hope that you will be most careful in this affair, because I already have enough to contend with. You ought to send the lace at once, though: and I suppose we might as wellhave pink yarn and ribbons, since the chances are equal in any event—”
“But in what affair, delight of my existence, are you requesting me to be careful?”
“Why, how should I know?” And Melior, he perceived, had still the air of one who is dealing patiently with an irrational person. “It is probably a very good thing that I do not, since you are plainly up to something with your friend Orléans which you want nobody to find out about. All men are like that: and, for my part, I have no curiosity whatever, because, as I so often think, if everybody would just attend to their own affairs—”
He bowed and, murmuring “Your pardon, madame!” he left her contentedly sewing. It seemed to Florian a real pity that a creature in every way so agreeable to his eye should steadily betray and tease his ear. He did not find that, as wives average, his Melior was especially loquacious: it was, rather, that when she discoursed at any length, with her bewildering air of commingled self-satisfaction and shrewdness, he could never make out quite clearly what she was talking about: and as went intelligence, his disenchanted princess seemed to him to rank somewhere between a magpie and a turnip.
This, upon the whole, adorable idiocy might have made it appear, to some persons, surprising thatMelior should divine, as she had so obviously divined, that Florian, in going to Philippe d’Orléans, was prompted by motives which discretion preferred to screen. But Florian had learned by experience that your wives very often astound you by striking the target of your inmost thinking, fair and full, with just such seemingly irrational shots of surmise. You might call it intuition or whatever else you preferred: no husband of any at all lengthy standing would be quick to call it accident. Rather, he would admit this to be a faculty which every married woman manifested now and then: and he would rejoice that, for the health of the world’s peace, such clairvoyancy was intermittent. Florian esteemed it to be just one of the inevitable drawbacks of matrimony that the most painstaking person must sometimes encounter discomfortable moments when his wife appears to be looking over his secret thoughts somewhat as one glances over the pages of a not particularly interesting book. So the experienced husband would shrug and would await this awkward moment’s passing, and the return of his wife’s normal gullibility and charm.
Melior, too, then, had her instants of approach to wifely, if not precisely human, intelligence. And Melior was beautiful. There was no flaw anywhere in her beauty. This Florian repeated, over and over again, as he prepared for travel. Here, too,one must be logical. That ideal beauty which he had hopelessly worshipped, and had without hope hungered for, ever since his childhood, was now attained: and the goddess of his long adoration was now enshrined in, to be exact, the next room but one, already hemming diapers for their anticipated baby. Nobody could possibly have won nearer to his heart’s desire than Florian had come; he had got all and more than his highest dreaming had aspired to: and so, if he was now sighing over the reflection, it must be, he perceived, a sigh of content.
Then he kissed his wife, and he rode away from Bellegarde, toward the vexatious duties which awaited him at court. Florian stopped, of course, to put up a prayer, for the success of his nearing venture into homicide, at the Church of Holy Hoprig. That ceremonial Florian could not well have omitted without provoking more or less speculation as to why the Duke of Puysange should be defaulting in a pious custom of long standing; nor, for that matter, without troubling his conscience with doubts if he was affording the country-side quite the good example due from one of his rank.
Through just such mingled considerations of expediency and duty had Florian, since his return from Brunbelois, continued his giving to this church with all the old liberality, if with somewhat less comfort to himself. It was a nuisance to reflect that somany irregularities which Florian had believed compounded, to everybody’s satisfaction, had never been attended to at all by his patron saint. It was annoying to know that the church had got, and was continuing to get, from the estate of Puysange so many pious offerings virtually for nothing. Even so, replied logic, what was to be gained by arousing criticism or by neglecting your religious duties in a manner that was noticeable? Let us adhere to precedent, and then, if we can no longer count assuredly on bliss in the next world, we may at least hope for tranquillity in this one.
So Florian, for the preservation of the local standards, now put up a fervent prayer to his patron saint in heaven; and reflected that, after all, the actual whereabouts, and the receptivity to petitions, of Holy Hoprig was none of Florian’s affair. A little wonder, however, about just where the saint might be doing what, was, Florian hoped, permissible, since he had found such wondering not to be avoided.
Lizard crawling out of a pot