Chapter VII (2)

If she had sat alone and neglected, as less lovely women often do, instead of being monopolized by a prince, with twenty other men sighing to take his place when etiquette should permit them, she could scarcely have been more ill-content.

Never in all her life had it befallen her to think angrily of another woman’s beauty; and now she caught herself irritatedly conning, across the width of the room, the classic profile and the immense jewel-like eyes of the Malatesta Semiramis. Never in all her life had it happened to her to miss any one thing that she desired, and now a strange sense of loneliness and emptiness came upon her, unreasoned and unreasoning; and she had such an impatience and contempt of herself too all the while!—that was the most bitter part of it.

After all, it was too absurd——

As soon as the departure of the royal guests permitted any one to leave, she went away, contemptuous, and ill at ease; half ignorant of what moved her, and half unwilling to probe her own emotions further.

“Plus on est fou, plus on rit,” she murmured to her pillow two hours later, with irritable disdain, as she heard Mme. Mila and her troop noisily passing her door as they returned to their baccarat, which was to be doubly delightful because of the Prefect’s interdict.

“I wish I had been born an idiot!” thought the Lady Hilda,—as indeed, any one must do who finds himself burdened with aching brains in this best of all possible worlds.

“Perhaps, after all, you were right,” said the Duc de St. Louis, driving back into the town with Della Rocca that night. “Perhaps you were right. Miladi is most lovely, most exquisite, most perfect. But she has caprices,—there is no denying that she has caprices and extravagancies which would ruin any one short of the despotic sovereign of a very wealthy nation.”

The Duc was a very wise man, and knew that the escalier dérobé is the only way that leads in conversation to any direct information. Their demeanor had puzzled him, and he spoke accordingly with shrewd design.

Della Rocca heard him with a little annoyance.

“She has not more caprices than other women that I know of,” he answered. “Her faults are the faults rather of her _monde_ than of herself.”

“But she has adopted them with much affection!”

“They are habits,—hardly more.”

“And you were correct too in your diagnosis when you saw her first,” continued the Duc, pitilessly. “To me she is most amiable always; but to the generality of people it must be admitted that she is not so amiable.”

“The amiability of most women,” replied Della Rocca, “is nothing more than that insatiate passion for admiration which makes them show their persons almost nude at Trouville, and copy the ways and manners of _femmes entretenues_ in the endeavor to rival such with us. If they wish to be decent, they do not dare to be; they must be popular and _chic_ before all.”

“You are severe, but perhaps you are right. Miladi is certainly above all such vulgarities. Indeed, she is only a little too much above everything——”

“It is better than to be below everything,—even below our respect,—as most of our great ladies are.”

“Certainly. Still, she is a little—a little selfish.”

“How should she be otherwise? She is quite alone,—she has no one to care for——”

“Most women make something to care for; she has many family ties, if she cared for them,—but she does not. No; she is beautiful, charming, _grande dame en tout_,—but I begin to think that it is well for the peace of mankind that she remains so invulnerable. She would probably make any man who loved her very unhappy if she married him.”

“If he were a weak man, not otherwise.”

“Pouf! Do you think any man would ever have control over _her_?”

“I am quite sure that she would never care for any man who had not.”

“He would be a very bold person,” murmured the Duc. “However, I am very glad that you think more highly of her. You know, mon cher, what always was my opinion as to yourself——”

Della Rocca colored, and saw too late that his companion had forced his card from his hands in the most adroit manner. He busied himself with lighting a cigar.

“For myself,” he said, coldly, “I can have no object in what I say. My own poverty is barrier sufficient. But I should be unjust not to admit what I think of her as a friend. I believe that the habits of the world are not so strong with her that they can satisfy her; and I believe that with her affections touched, with tenderer ties than she has ever known, with a home, with children, with a woman’s natural life, in fact, she would be a much happier and very different person. Mais tout cela ne me regarde pas.”

The Duc glanced at him and laughed softly.

“Ça vous regarde de bien près—bon succès et bon soir!” he said, as he got out of the carriage at his hotel.

“I told him to marry her,” he thought; “but if he expects to convert her too, he must be the boldest and most sanguine man in Europe.”

Lady Hilda made up her mind that she was tired of Floralia, as she meditated over her chocolate the next morning, after a night which chloral had made pretty passable, only the baccarat people had screamed so loudly with laughter on the other side of the corridor that they had awakened her once or twice. Yes, she certainly was tired of it. If one did take the trouble to go into society one might as well do it all for a big world and not a little one. It was utter nonsense about her lungs in Paris. She would go back. She would telegraph her return to Hubert.

Hubert was her maître-d’hôtel.

She did telegraph, and told herself that she would find immense interest in the fresco paintings which were being executed in the ball-room of that very exquisite hotel “entre cour et jardin,” which she had deserted in Paris, and in making nooks and corners in her already overfilled tables and cabinets for the tazze and bacini and ivories and goldsmith’s work she had collected in the last two months; and decided that the wall-decorations of the drawing-rooms, which were of rose satin with Louis Quinze paneling, were all very barbarous, utterly incorrect, and should never have been borne with so long, and should be altered at once; the palest amber satin was the only possible thing, with silver mirrors and silver cornices, and not a touch of gilding anywhere; the idea had occurred to her before a picture in the galleries, where a silver casket was painted against an amber curtain; she would have it done immediately, and she would go back to Paris and have her old Thursday evenings again.

After all, Paris was the only place worth living in, and doctors were always alarmists,—old women,—everything that was stupid, unless you were very very ill, when they did seem to dilate into demi-gods, because of course you were weakened with morphine and other stuff and did not want to die; though you ought to want to die, being a Christian, if you were in the very least degree consistent; since if you were quite sure that the next world would be so very much better than this it was utterly illogical to be afraid of going to it:——but then were you quite sure?

The Lady Hilda sighed. This dreadful age, which has produced communists, petroleuses, and liberal thinkers, had communicated its vague restlessness even to her; although she belonged to that higher region where nobody ever thinks at all, and everybody is more or less devout in seeming at any rate, because disbelief is vulgar, and religion is an “affaire des mœurs,” like decency, still the subtle philosophies and sad negations which have always been afloat in the air since Voltaire set them flying had affected her slightly.

She was a true believer, just as she was a well-dressed woman, and had her creeds just as she had her bath in the morning, as a matter of course.

Still, when she did come to think of it, she was not so very sure. There was another world, and saints and angels and eternity, yes, of course; but how on earth would all those baccarat people ever fit into it? Who could by any stretch of imagination conceive Madame Mila and Maurice des Gommeux in a spiritual existence around the throne of Deity?

And as for punishment and torment and all that other side of futurity, who could even think of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor flibbertigibbit inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gayly as a child breaks his india rubber ball, and were as incapable of passion and crime as they were incapable of heroism and virtue?

There might be paradise for virtue, and hell for crime, but what in the name of the universe was to be done with creatures that were only all Folly? Perhaps they would be always flying about, like the souls Virgil speaks of, “suspensæ ad ventos,” to purify themselves; as the sails of a ship spread out to dry. The Huron Indians pray to the souls of the fish they catch; well, why not? a fish has a soul if Modern Society has one; one could conceive a fish going softly through shining waters forever and forever in the ecstasy of motion; but who could conceive Modern Society in the spheres?

Wandering thus from her drawing-room furniture to problems of eternity, and only succeeding in making herself unsettled and uncomfortable, the Lady Hilda, out of tune with everything, put off her cashmere dressing-gown, had herself wrapped in her sables, and thought she would go out; it was just twelve o’clock.

Looking out of the window, she saw a lady, all sables like herself, going also out of the hotel to a coupé, the image of her own.

“Who is that?” she asked of her favorite maid.

“That is Mdlle. Léa, Miladi,” said the maid. “She came last night. She has the suite above.”

“How dare you mention her?” said the Lady Hilda.

The little accident filled up the measure of her disgust. Mdlle. Jenny Léa was a young lady who had seduced the affections of an emperor, three archdukes, and an untold number of the nobility of all nations; she was utterly uneducated, inconceivably coarse, and had first emerged from a small drinking-shop in the dens of Whitechapel; she was the rage of the moment, having got a needy literary hack to write her autobiography, which she published in her own name, as “Aventures d’une Anglaise;” the book had no decency, and as little wit, but it professed to show up the scandals of a great court, and it made some great men ridiculous and worse, so eighty thousand copies of it had been sold over Europe, and great ladies leaned from their carriages eager to see Mdlle. Jenny Léa pass by them.

Mdlle. Jenny Léa, indeed, having put the finishing-stroke to her popularity by immense debts and a forced sale of her effects in Paris, was the sensation of the hour, only sharing public attention with the Père Hilarion, a young and passionately earnest Dominican, who was making a crusade against the world, in a noble and entirely vain fervor, from the pulpits of all the greatest churches on the Continent. It was “the thing” to go and hear Père Hilarion, weep with him and pray with him, and then, coming out of the church doors, to read Jenny Léa and talk of her. It is by these admirable mixtures that Society manages to keep itself alive.

The Père Hilarion was breaking his great heart over the vileness and the hopelessness of it all, as any one who has any soul in him must be disposed to do. But to Society the Père Hilarion was only a sort of mental liqueur, as Jenny Léa was an American “pick-me-up:” that was all. Society took them indifferently, one after the other. Of the two, of course it preferred Jenny Léa.

The Lady Hilda in supreme disgust went out in her sables, as Mdlle. Jenny Léa in hers drove from the door.

“What good things sumptuary laws must have been!” she thought. “If such creatures had to dress all in yellow, now, as I think they had once (or was it Jews?), who would talk of them, who would look at them, who would lose money about them? Not a soul. And to think that there have been eighty thousand people who have bought her book!”

“Has anything offended you, madame? Who or what is so unhappy?” said the voice of Della Rocca, as she crossed the pavement of the court between the lines of bowing hotel functionaries, who had bent their spines double in just the same way to Mdlle. Léa three minutes previously.

“Nothing in especial,” she answered him, coldly. “Those baccarat people kept me awake half the night; I wish the gendarmes _had_ interfered. What wretched weather it is!”

“It is a little cold; but it is very bright,” said Della Rocca, in some surprise, for the day, indeed, was magnificent and seasonable. “I was coming in the hope that I might be admitted, though I know it is too early, and not your day, and everything that it ought not to be. But I was so unfortunate last night; you were so monopolized——”

She deigned to smile a little, but she continued to move to her brougham.

“Your climate is the very Harpagon of climates. I have not seen one warm day yet. I am thinking of returning to Paris.”

He grew very pale.

“Is not that very sudden?” he asked her; there was a great change in his voice.

“Oh, no; I have my house there, as you know, and Monsieur Odissôt is painting the ball-room in frescoes. I have quite a new idea for my drawing-rooms, too; after all, furnishing is one of the fine arts; do you like that young Odissôt’s talent? His drawing is perfection; he was a pupil of Hippolyte Flandrin. Good-morning.”

She was in her coupé by this time, and he was obliged to close the door on her; but he kept his hand upon it.

“Since you are leaving us so soon and so cruelly, madame, would you honor my own old chapel frescoes as you promised?—they might give you some ideas for your ball-room.”

Lady Hilda deigned to smile fairly and fully this time.

“Is that a satire or a profanity,—or both together?”

“It is jealousy of Camille Odissôt! I will go to Paris and paint your frescoes, madame, if you will let me; I can paint in fresco and in distemper; I was a student in the Academy of San Luca in my time.”

His words were light, and his manner also, but his eyes had an expression that made the Lady Hilda color a little and look out of the other window of her coupé.

“I must first call upon Olga; I have promised,” she answered, irrelevantly. “But I will join you at your palace in an hour; perhaps she will come with me; I should not like to leave, certainly, without having seen your chapel. Au revoir.”

“If you do leave, madame, I follow!—to paint the ball-room.”

He shut the carriage door, and stood bareheaded in the wintry wind as the impatient horses dashed away. When it had disappeared he put his hat on, lighted a cigar, and strolled to his own house.

“She will not go to Paris,” he said to himself.

He knew women well.

In an hour and a half she arrived at his own gates, bringing the Princess Olga with her.

She saw the grand old garden, the mighty staircases, the courts that once held troops of armed men; she saw his own rooms, with their tapestries that Flemish John Rosts had had the doing of so many centuries before; she saw the exquisite dim silent chapel, whose walls, painted by the Memmi in one portion and continued by Masaccio, were among the famous things of the city. She was moved and saddened; softened too; after all, the decay of a great race has an unutterable pathos; it will touch even a vulgar mind; she, arrogant and fastidious as to birth, as though she had been born before the ’89, was touched by it to the core.

She had heard, too, of how he lived; without debt, yet with dignity, with the utmost simplicity and without reproach; there was something in his fortunes which seemed to her worthier than all distinction and success, something that stirred that more poetic side of her nature which the world had never allowed to awake, but which had been born with her nevertheless. She was serious and dreaming as she lingered in the beautiful old chapel, under whose mosaic pavement there lay the dust of so many generations of his race. He noticed her silence, and thought to himself,—

“Perhaps she is thinking how base it is in a man as poor as I to seek a woman so rich as herself;” but she was not thinking that at all as she swept on in her sables, with her delicate cheeks like the lovely Niphétos rose against the darkness of the fur.

That immortality which she had been doubting in the morning did not seem so absurdly impossible here. There was religion in the place, a different one to what she had known kneeling at the _messe des paresseux_ in the Madeleine; the sort of religion that a woman only becomes aware of when she loves.

She started and seemed to wake from a dream when Princess Olga suggested that it was time to go. Princess Olga was a person of innumerable engagements, who was always racing after half an hour without ever catching it, like the Minister-Duke of Newcastle, and like ninety-nine people out of every hundred in the nineteenth century. There was some bric-à-brac the princess wanted somebody to cheapen for her; she bade him come and do it; he complied willingly enough. They went all three to that bric-à-brac shop, and thence to another, and yet another. Then Princess Olga, who was used to a more brilliant part than that of the “terza incommoda,” left them to themselves over the faïence and marqueterie.

Lady Hilda, who, despite all her fashion, liked walking like every healthy woman, dismissed her horses, and walked the length of the river-street, he with her. People meeting them began to make conjectures, and bets, harder than ever; and Italian ladies, looking out of their carriage windows, wondered for the five-millionth time at the freedom of Englishwomen,—as indeed Italian ladies have good cause to do in far more reprehensible liberties.

They walked down to the park and back again. It was growing dusk. She went home to her hotel, and let him enter with her, and had some tea by the firelight; all the while he made love to her with eyes and gesture and word, as only an Italian can, and she avoided explicit declaration of it and direct need to reply to it, with all the consummate tact that ten years’ practice in such positions had polished in her.

It was a charming pastime,—were it nothing more. It was quite a pity when Madame Mila entered unsuspecting, and full of new wrongs in the matter of the Muscadins and fresh gossip concerning some forty people’s marriages, divorces, debts, ignominies, and infamies. It is fortunate that there are so many wicked people in Society; for if there were not, what would the good people have to talk about? they would die of paralysis of the tongue.

“You will not leave us for Paris, yet?” he murmured, as he rose, with a sigh, only heard by her ear.

She smiled, and balanced a Devoniensis tea-rose idly in her hands.

“Not just yet, if your weather prove better.”

He drew the tea-rose away from her fingers unseen even by the quick, marmoset eyes of little Madame Mila, who as it chanced was busied making herself a cup of tea. She let it go.

“You should have seen all the men looking after that horrible Léa,” said Madame Mila, drinking her compound of cream and sugar, as the door closed on him. “They have eyes for nothing else, I do think; and only fancy her having the very suite above mine—it is atrocious! They say the things at her sale fetched fabulous sums. Little pomatum and rouge pots, five hundred francs each! They say she has fixed her mind on young Sant’ Andrea here; I suppose she has heard he is enormously rich. Oh, did you know Gwendolen Doncaster has come? She has lost all her money at Monte Carlo, and she has dyed her hair a nice straw color; she looks fifteen years younger, I do assure you. Don is shooting in Dalmatia: of course she abuses him,—poor old Don! I wonder how we should have got on if he had married me, as he wanted. Gwen told me Lord Derbyshire has run off with Mrs. Wheelskaitte—what he _can_ see in her! and those open scandals are so stupid, where is the use of them? Surely you can do what you like without calling all the world in to see you doing it. When a woman has an easy husband she _never_ need compromise herself, and Wheelskaitte certainly always was that. Oh, you never would know them, I remember, because they were new people; she was an odious creature, and very ugly, but they gave very good parties in London, and their cottage was as nice a one as you could go to for Ascot. You used to like little Wroxeter, did not you? he was such a pretty boy: he has just left Eton, and he is wild to marry a girl out of a music-hall, so Gwen says. These creatures get all the good marriages nowadays:—and two hundred new débutantes waiting for the first Drawing-room this month! Have you seen the new book, ‘Confessions d’un Feu-Follet’? Maurice has just brought it to me. It is rivaling Jenny Léa; and they say it is worse,—quite unmentionable; everybody is talking about it. It was out last week, and they have sold five editions. The man called Bistrim in it is Bismarck. No; I don’t know that it is witty. I don’t think things are witty nowadays. It is horrible and _infect_; but you can’t put it down till you’ve done it. Old Lady Manlever is dying at the Pace Hôtel here,—of undigested scandal, Featherleigh says; but I believe it’s gastritis. What a nasty old woman she has always been! I have just left a card with inquiries and regrets; I do hope she won’t get better. I won ever so much at play last night. I forgot to tell you so; I bought that _rocaille_ necklace on the Jewelers’ Bridge; it was only six thousand francs, and it really did belong to the Comtesse d’Albany. It’s very pretty, too——”

So Madame Mila discoursed, greatly to her own satisfaction. She loved so much to hear her own tongue, that she always chose the stupidest and silliest of her lovers for her chief favors: a clever man had always ideas of his own, and was sure to want to express them sometime or another. All she desired were listeners and echoes. Discussion may be the salt of life to a few, but listeners and echoes are the bonbons and cigarettes that no woman can do without.

The Lady Hilda, sitting looking into the fire, with her eyes nearly closed, murmured yes, and no, and indeed, in the proper places, and let her run on, hearing not one word. Those fingers which had entangled themselves so softly with her own withdrawing the tea-rose, had left a magnetic thrill upon her,—a dreamy, lulling pleasure.

That evening the good Hubert received a second telegram contradicting the first which had announced his mistress’s return, and putting off that return indefinitely. The good Hubert, who was driving her best horses, drinking her best wines, drawing large checks for accounts never examined, and generally enjoying his winter, was much relieved, and hastened to communicate the happy change to Monsieur Camille Odissôt, whom the first telegram had also cast into great consternation, since that clever but idle young gentleman, having been prepaid half the sum agreed on for the fresco-painting, had been spending it joyously after the tastes of young artists, assisted by a pretty brown actress, of the Folies Marigny, and had not at that moment even begun to touch the walls and the ceiling of the ball-room confided to his genius.

“But you had better begin, though she is not coming back,” said the good Hubert, surveying the blank waste of prepared plaster. “Miladi is not often out of temper, but when she is—ouf! I would as soon serve a Russian. Better begin; paint your best, because she knows,—Miladi knows, and she is hard to please in those things. Not but what I dare say as soon as you have done it all she will take it into her head that it looks too cold, or looks too warm, or will not compose well, or something or other, and will cover it all up with silk and satin. But that will not matter to you.”

“Not at all,” said Monsieur Camille, who, though he had been a pupil of Flandrin, had learned nothing of that true master’s conscientiousness in art, but was a clever young man of a new generation, who drew beautifully, as mechanically as a tailor stitches beautifully, and was of the very wise opinion that money was everything.