Transcriber’s Note:
A Table of Contents has been added.
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

JANE—
OUR STRANGER

JANE—
OUR STRANGER

A NOVEL

BY

MARY BORDEN

AUTHOR OF “THE ROMANTIC WOMAN”

LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD.

First published, 1923
New Impressions January, February, March,
April, August, 1924

Printed in Great Britain by Woods & Sons, Ltd., London, N.1.

CONTENTS

PART I

I

It is a pity we do not die when our lives are finished. Jane may live another twenty years—a long time to wait, alone between two worlds. Jane is forty-three, I am five years older, Philibert is fifty-six, my mother nearly eighty, we are all alive, and strangely enough Maman is the only one whose life is not yet ended. Hers will not end till the moment of her death. She has been a wise artist. She is still embroidering delicately the pattern of her days; she still holds the many threads in her fingers. Quietly, exquisitely she will put in the last stitches. They will be the most beautiful of all; they will be her signature, the signature of a lady. Then she will close her eyes and commend her soul to God and the perfect work of her worldly wisdom will be finished.

As for me, I see no reason why I should not live on indefinitely just as I have done, and on the whole I am more comfortable here than in Purgatory, a place that I imagine to be like the suburbs of London. I see myself there, tapping with my crutch, along endless tramway lines between interminable rows of dingy perky villas. This little street in the Faubourg Saint Germain is much nicer. It is old and proud and secretive; a good street for a cripple to live in; it shelters and protects him. Once he has entered it he has no distance to go to get home. It is usually deserted and the great pale houses show discreet shuttered windows with no one behind the shutters to stare at him. I am Philibert’s crippled brother. Something went wrong with me before I was born. Nothing else of importance has ever happened to me, except Jane’s marrying my brother.

Jane loved this little street. She said that it told her the story of France and conveyed to her all the charm of the Paris she loved best, the proud gentle mysterious Paris of the 18th century that with all its fine reserved grandeur assumes modestly the look of a small provincial town.

I came to live here when Philibert sold our house in the Rue de Varenne that is just round the corner, and my mother went to her new apartment near the Étoile. That was twenty years ago, and very little has changed in the street since I came to these rooms at the bottom of this little courtyard between Constantine’s big white house and the Embassy. The little man who peddled bird-seed has vanished long ago, his voice is no more to be heard chanting, but other street vendors still come by with their sing-song calls. What indeed was there that could change, save perhaps old Madame Barbier’s grocery shop at the corner, tucked up against Constantine’s stable wall? But even Madame Barbier has remained the same. Her hair is as smooth and glossy black, her tight corsage as neat, and her trim window with its glass jars of honey and the nice bright boxes of groceries is as it always has been. A thrifty respectable woman is Madame Barbier, with a pleasant word for her neighbours. For the rest, on the opposite side of the street there is the convent, with its pointed roof and the chapel belfry showing above the wall, and there are the five big houses with their great gates that make up the whole length of the street. Not a long street—often when I turn into it at one end, I recognize a familiar figure going out of it at the other, the good Abbé perhaps going home after confessing the sisters in the convent, or old Madame d’Avrécourt in her shabby black jacket, her fine little withered face under her bonnet, wearing its habitual enigmatic smile. Monsieur l’Abbé says that her voluminous petticoats are heavy with the sacred charms she has sewn into the hems, and that may well be; I know that her devotion is very great and her interest in the outside world very small, and the sight of her is comforting to me.

It is so quiet here, and so confined. It is like a cloister—or a prison—I am glad of that.

Tonight, Good Friday night, I can hear the good sisters in the chapel singing. The mysticism of their haunting chant penetrates the walls of this old house, and tonight because of their lamenting, because of their dread disciplined agony of supplication, the street is immensely deep and high, whereas yesterday it was just small and dim and worldly, with its houses blinking over its walls, a proud battered deceiving old street, hiding the rare beauty of its dwellings, guarding the secrets of its families behind mute shutters, till the day it should crumble to pieces or an insolent government should turn it upside down like an ash-bin.

It never, of course, could get used to Jane. Who of us did get used to Jane? Did I myself? Wasn’t she a big troubling problem to us all till the very end? How could we not be afraid of her? Poor magnificent Jane—fine timid innocent child—dangerous nature woman—dreadful crying message from a new bellowing land—what was she? What was she not? How could she fit in here? She was as strange here as a leopard beautifully moving down the grey narrow pavement. How she used to frighten the good Abbé. I have seen him scuttle into a neighbouring doorway to let her pass, as if there were no room for him along the stones she walked so grandly. It was true. There was no room for any one but Jane when she came, and now that she is gone never to come back again, the place is as dreary and empty as an abandoned cemetery and the light is as insipidly pale as the half shadow in a sick room. She has left a sickness in this place, because she came here sometimes to see me—and won’t come any more.

And yet I stay on here. I shall stay here always. I have no reason to go anywhere now that I have been to America to see Jane, and have come back with the accurate awful knowledge of the great distance between us. Ah, that wide sea, that New York, a high cold gate into a strange over-powering country, those immense prairies, and those tiny farm houses, with tiny women watching the train; Jane, a tiny woman, Jane a speck, in a town that is a dot on the map. I will write down Jane’s story. I will remember it all, everything that she told me and everything that I saw, and will put it all down exactly with perfect precision and accuracy, and then, perhaps I shall understand her. Poor Jane—she wanted to understand life. She believed always that there was a reason for things, an ultimate reason and a purpose. She was no philosopher, she was a woman of faith. She should have been the wife of a pioneer, the wife of such a man as Isak, who went into the wilderness with a sack over his shoulder. Jane was made for such a man. I can see them together going out under the sky, he, grave, deep-chested, long-limbed, “a barge of a man,” and beside him a woman like a ship, moving proudly. And she married Philibert. Could any one who has ever seen her with Philibert miss the meaning of their extraordinary contrast? Philibert with his clever jaunty little body, his exaggerated elegance, his cold blue eyes and his impudent charm. She made him look like a toy man. She could have broken him in two with her hands. Why didn’t she? It is a long story. People say that American women are very adaptable, very imitative. Jane wasn’t. She never became the least like us, except in looks and that meant nothing. Paquin and Chéruit and Philibert did that for her almost at once, but her looks, even without their aid, were always a disguise, never a revelation of her self. Some women are all of a piece with their charming exteriors, Jane was a child cased in armour. As she grew older she learned to use it, she made it answer, but she used it to become something she was not. I call up her image as I write. I evoke Jane as she was that last year in Paris, the most elegant woman in Europe, the most stared at, and the most indifferent. I remember the cold hard nonchalance that so frightened people she did not like, and the brilliant metallic grace that rippled over her like gleaming light when she was pleased. I remember her excessive hauteur in public, the disdainful carriage of her strange head that was like a coin fashioned by some morose craftsman of Benvenuto Cellini’s time. I recall the sidelong glitter of her little green eyes. I remember her in public places, towering above other women like an idol, mute, glittering, enigmatic, her curious profile with its protruding lower lip, the tight close bands of jewels round her forehead. What a figure of splendour she was in those days, when Philibert had done breaking her heart; and when at the age of forty she had ceased to care and had reached the perfection of her physical type.

I think of her as she was when her mother brought her to Paris and married her to Philibert; a great strapping girl with a beautiful body and an ugly sullen face that deceived us all. How could one see behind it? Can one blame them? I alone caught a glimpse. And she developed slowly in our artificial soil. It took twenty years for her to become a woman of the world, une grande dame. That was what they made of her. I say they, but I suppose I mean primarily Philibert. It is horrible to think of how much Philibert had to do with making her what she finally was. And Bianca had a hand in it too. That is even worse.

We had realized the moment of Jane’s apotheosis. We had seen her beautifully and gravely spread her wings. We held our breath, waited entranced, and then, just then, she disappeared. Suddenly we lost her.

I refer, now, to our group, the little Bohemian group of kindred spirits who loved Jane; Ludovic, Felix, Clémentine and the others. Extraordinary that these friends of mine should have been the ones to love Jane best. They were a gay lot of sinners, quite impossible judged by any standard but their own. My mother only knew of their existence, through Clémentine. She has always been in the habit of discussing artists and writers as if they were dead. It was distressing to her that Clémentine who was related to her by blood and had married a Bourbon, should have held herself and her name so cheap as to consort with men and women of obscure origin and problematical genius. As for me, a man could do as he liked within measure, if he did not forget to keep up appearances. She regarded my friendship for my wonderful Ludovic and all the rest of them as a substitute for the more usual and less troublesome clandestine affairs of the ordinary bachelor. As I could never “faire la noce” like other men I was allowed these dissipations of the mind, but maman never forgave me for introducing Ludovic to Jane. Dearest mother—it was no use telling her that Ludovic was the greatest scholar of his day. I didn’t try to explain. After all Ludovic needed no championing from me. I had wanted to do something for Jane; I had wanted to relieve in some way the awful pressure of her big bleak dazzling situation. Hemmed in by the complications of my relationship to her, how many times had I not groaned over the fact that she had been married by that awful mother of hers to the head of our house and not to some one else’s devilish elder brother, instead of to mine, I had pondered and tormented myself over a way of helping her that would not give Philibert the chance of coming down on me and shutting the big strong door of his house in my face, and at length my opportunity had come. It had seemed to me that for her at last the battle was over, and that she had achieved the desolate freedom which we could turn into enjoyment. Fan Ivanoff was dead. Bianca had disappeared. As for Philibert, he had grown tired of bothering her. Her sufferings no longer amused him. Her loneliness was complete. Although still to my eyes a figure of drama while we were essentially merry prosy people, she appeared to me to have acquired that spiritual mastery of events which made her one of us. I had reckoned without her child, Geneviève.

How could I have understood then the fear with which she contemplated her daughter’s future? And even supposing that I had understood everything, and had the gift of seeing into that future and had beheld the shadow of that lovely monster Bianca swooping down on Jane again to drive her to extremity, even supposing I had known what was going to happen and how that would take her away from us forever, I still could have done nothing more than I did do. It had seemed to me that we could provide her with a refuge, and so we did for a time. If Paris were to offer her any reward, any consolation, any comfort, then such a reward and such comfort was, I felt sure, to be found in the sympathy of these people who had gravitated to one another, out of the heavy mass of humanity that populated the earth, like sparks flying upwards to meet above the smoke and heat of the crowd in a clear lighted space of mental freedom. I gave her the best I had; I gave her my friends; and if they thought she had come to them to stay, well then so did I. Our mistake lay in thinking that because we were sufficient to each other we must be sufficient to Jane as well. I do not believe it occurred to any one of us how little we really counted for her; I, at least never knew it until the other day. Actually I had never realized that her soul was always craving something more, something like a heavenly certitude or a divine revelation.

Conceited? I suppose we were; but then you see the world did knock at our door for admittance. We had all literary and artistic Europe to choose from, and we did realize the things we talked of. I mean that we translated our thoughts into things people could see, ballets, pictures, bits of music. We worked out our ideas for the mob to gape at, and our success could be measured by the bitter hostility of such people as Philibert, who fancied himself as a patron of the arts—a kind of François I—and found us difficult to patronize.

Jane realized our worth of course. She had a touching reverence for our ability. She saw clearly the distinct worlds represented by my mother, and Ludovic; the one exquisite and sterile, beautifully still as a sealed room with panelled walls inhabited by wax figures; the other disordered and merry, convulsed by riotous fancies, where daring people indulged their caprices, scoffed at facts and respected intellect.

What Jane did not realize was the humanity underlying this life of ours. She thought us uncanny, but she could have trusted us in her trouble. And we on our side did not know that we did not satisfy her. After all, for the rest of us our deep feeling of well-being in one another’s company was like a divine assurance, an absolute ultimate promise. It was all the heavenly revelation we needed. When we gathered round Clémentine’s dinner-table with the long windows opening out of the high shabby room into the shadowy garden where we could hear during the momentary hush of our voices the note of its flutey tinkling fountain, or when we settled deep in those large worn friendly chairs before Ludovic’s fire on a winter’s night, in the cosy gloom of his overcharged bookshelves, it would come to us over and over again, like the repeated sense of a divine conviction, that this exquisite essence of human intercourse was nothing less than what we had been born for.

Jane could never have had that feeling, but we thought she shared it with us. We did not know about that deep relentless urge in Jane that was as inevitable as the rising tide. We never took seriously enough her fear of God.

And so when she went away they thought—Ludovic and Clémentine and the rest of them—“She will be here tomorrow, she will come back just as she was, and she will find us just where she left us.” And they continued to talk about her as if she had left them but an hour before to go and show herself as she was often obliged to do in some great bright hideous salon. Her chair was always there by Ludovic’s fireside, and they took account in their discussions of her probable point of view, as if she’d been there with them. There was something touching in their expectancy. There was that in their manner to remind one of the simple fidelity of peasants who lay the place of the absent one every night at table. The truth did not occur to them, and I who wanted to be deceived let their confidence communicate itself to me. I told myself that they were right, that she was bound to come back, that they had formed in her the habit of living humourously as they did, that they had given her a taste for things she would not find elsewhere, and that she would never be content to live now in that big blank new continent across the Atlantic. The word Atlantic made me shiver. I must have had a premonition; I must have known that I was going to cross it, urged out upon that cold turbulent waste of horrid water by a forlorn hope and an anguished desire to see her once more.

I hugged to myself during those days of suspense my feeling of the irresistible appeal of my city. Had Jane not told me, one day on returning from Como, that in spite of the problems her life held for her here, she experienced nevertheless each time she went away such a poignant home-sickness for Paris, its streets, its sounds, its river-banks and its buildings, that she invariably came back in a tremor of fear, positively “jumpy” at the thought that perhaps during her absence it had changed or disappeared off the map altogether? If she felt like this after a month’s sojourn in Italy, what had I now to fear I asked myself? Had we not initiated her into the very secret heart of Paris? Was there a remnant of an old and lovely building that we had not shown her, or a fragment of sculpture or a picture worth looking at to which we had not introduced her? Had she not come to feel with us the difference of the temperature and tone of the streets, the excitement of the jangling boulevards, the bland oblivion of the Place de la Concorde, the ghostliness of the Place des Vosges, the intimate provincial secretiveness of our own old peaceable quarter? Had not Ludovic called into being for her out of the embers of his fire the historic scenes that had been enacted in all these and a hundred other places? Had he not made the whole rich fantastic past of our city unroll itself before her eyes? Was it a little thing to be allowed to drink at the source of so much humanized knowledge? Where in that new country of hers would she find so fanciful and patient and tender a friend as this great scholar?

So I piled up the evidence, and then when her letter came I knew that I had foreseen the truth, and when I took them the news and they all cried out to me—“Go and bring her back, and don’t come back without her”—I knew while their high commanding voices were still sounding in my ears that already I had made up my mind to go, and I knew too, lastly and finally, that I would not be able to bring her back.

She had enclosed in her letter to me a note for them which I gave to Clémentine, who read it and passed it on. One after another they scanned its meagre lines in silence. I saw that Ludovic’s hand was shaking. When he had finished he closed his eyes for a moment and his head jerked forward. I noticed in the light of the lamp how white he had grown in the last year, and how the yellow tint of his pallor had deepened. Clémentine said looking at me—“It is not intelligible. Perhaps you can explain.” And I was given the sheet of paper covered with Jane’s large careless scrawl:

“Dear Friends,” I read, “I am not coming back. I am here alone with the ghost of my Aunt Patty in the house where I lived as a child. It is a wooden house with a verandah at the back. There are snow-drifts on the verandah. I am trying to find out what it has all been about—my life, I mean. If I believed that I would understand over there on the other side of death, then perhaps I would not be bound to stay here now, but I know that Ludovic is right, and that the hope of eternal punishment like that of immortal bliss and satisfied knowledge is just the fiction of our vanity. My punishment is on me now, since among other things I have to give you up.

“Jane.”

They had cried out at me when I told them, but after reading the letter they were silent. It was as if they had been brushed by the wings of some strange fearful messenger from another world, as if some departed spirit were present. We might all have been sitting in the dark with invisible clammy hands touching our hair, so nervous had we become. The fall of a charred log in the fireplace made us jump.

Felix forced a laugh. “The ghost of her Aunt Patty,” he mocked dismally. “Now what does she mean by that?”

“Her Aunt Patty was the person who took care of her as a child. Miss Patience Forbes her name was. She seems to have been a remarkable character. Jane often spoke of her.”

My words only added to their mystification. An old maid in America, dead now, a remarkable character. What had she to do with them? What power had she over their brilliant courageous Jane? Were they nothing that they could be replaced by the wraith of an old puritan spinster?

The room seemed to grow chilly. Some one put a fresh log on the fire. A little fitful wind was whimpering at the windows. Now and then a gust of rain pattered against the glass with a light rapid sound like finger-tips tapping. Felix had wandered away down the long dim room, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched as he stood with his back to us, and his nose close to the packed shelves of books against the farther wall. The tiny gilt letterings on the old bindings glimmered faintly in the lamplight. He seemed to be searching among all those little dim signs for an explanation. Far away beyond the network of gardens and old muffling houses one heard from some distant street the hoot of a motor. From the translucent depths of gleaming glass cabinets the small mute mysterious figures of jewelled heathen gods and little bronze Buddhas and curious carved jade monsters looked out at us as if through sheets of water.

Under the aged shadowy eaves of that room, full of strange old symbols and rare books and still rarer manuscripts, where so many ideas and faiths and records had been sifted, examined and relegated to dusty recesses, its occupants remained silent, staring at the new disturbing object of their mystification. Clémentine, tucked into a corner of the sofa, her boyish head that she dyed such a bad colour, on her hand, scrutinized the tip of her foot that she held high as if for better observation, in one of her characteristic angular attitudes. Her slipper dangled loose from her toe; now and then she gave it a jerk of annoyance.

They tried to take in the meaning of what they had read. The emotional content of that scrawled page was so strange to them as to appear almost shocking. They were rather frightened. Here indeed their philosophy of laughter broke down, for they loved Jane and could not make fun of her superstitions.

“We were never hard on her. We treated her gently.”

“Even when her seriousness bored us we were patient.”

“She can’t have loved us. We have never really known her then, after all.”

Clémentine jerked about. “I was always wanting her to take lovers. She wanted me to give up mine. Poor child—we were friends all the same.”

Felix’s falsetto came down to us in a shrill wail of exasperation.

“But we never attacked her religion. We left her alone. We were good to her.”

Clémentine nodded. “Yes, we were good.”

I remembered the day I had first brought Jane to them, clothed in her silks and sables, glittering with the garish light of her millions and her high cold social activities. I had brought her straight from the preposterous palace she had let Philibert build her to this deep dim nook where we laughed and scoffed at the world she lived in. I had been nervous then. I had been afraid they would find her impossible. But they had seen through the barbarous trappings, intelligent souls that they were. Hadn’t she realized how they had honoured her? Hadn’t she known what dependable people they were?

I heard Clémentine say it again. “We were good, but she thought we were wicked because we broke the ten commandments. She thought a lot of the ten commandments.”

“It was the puritan spinster looking at us over her shoulder all the time.”

And still they pondered and puzzled, bewildered, depressed, at a loss, annoyed by their incapacity to picture to themselves even so much as the place where she was, alone at that moment. “St. Mary’s Plains, Mohican County, Michigan” was the address she gave. What an address to expect any one to take seriously. If it had been a joke the mixture of images would perhaps have conveyed something to them, but as a serious geographic sign they could do nothing with it. It had the character of a new glazed billboard, of a big glaring advertisement for some parvenu’s patent. To think of Jane sitting down away off there in the middle of a desert under it was too much for them. But the very outrageousness of the enigma helped them.

“She couldn’t do it from inclination,” some one of them said at last. “There must have been something terrible.”

Then it was that Ludovic startled us. He spoke slowly as if to himself.

“She was only beginning to learn how little conduct has to do with life. For others she had come to understand that what one does has little or no relation to what one is. I am convinced that she, poor child, is persuaded that she has committed some dreadful crime.”

But it was Clémentine who said the last word that I carried away with me.

“If she hadn’t married into your family,” she said, glaring out at me from the door of her taxi, “she would have been all right. Why, she should have chosen Philibert—”

“But, chérie amie, she didn’t. It was her mother who did it all.”

“Rubbish! She loved him. She loves him still.”

II

My mother was a Mirecourt. The family was of a prouder nobility than my father’s. Her people were of the Grand Chevaux de Lorraine. They fought with the English against the kings of France in the fourteenth century. One reads about them as fighters during several hundreds of years beginning with the Crusades. Sometimes they were on the right side, sometimes on the wrong. Later generations were not proud of the part they played in the siege of Orleans. But they were proud people and acted on caprice or in self-interest with a sublime belief in themselves. They did not like kings and were loth to give allegiance to any one. When Louis XI took away their lands, they went over to the king, but it is to be gathered from the letters of the time that they considered no king their equal. Richelieu was too much for them. He reduced them to poverty. To repair the damage the head of the family made a bourgeois marriage. They were sure of themselves in those days. Marrying money caused them no uneasiness nor fear of ridicule. My mother said one day when talking of Philibert and Jane—“We have done this sort of thing before but always with people of our own race who had a proper attitude. With foreigners one never knows.”

My father was a Breton. Anne of Brittany was the liege lady of his people. His aieux were worthy gentlemen who played an obscure but on the whole respectable part in history. An occasional spendthrift appeared now and then among them to add gaiety to their monotonous lives. The spendthrifts being few and the tenacity of the others very great, they amassed a considerable fortune and were ennobled by Louis XIV: a fact of which my aunt Clothilde used occasionally to remind us. Aunt Clothilde was my father’s sister. She had made a great match in marrying the first Duke of France, but she seemed to think nothing of that nor to have any consciousness of the obligations of her class. She made fun of the legitimists, scoffed at the idea of a restoration and despised the Duc d’Orleans for the way he behaved in England. She and my mother did not get on. My mother thought her vulgar. She was, but it didn’t detract from her being a very great lady. She was always enormously fat, a greedy, wicked old thing, with a ribald mind, but with a tremendous chic. Philibert called her La Gargantua. She was Rabelaisian somehow. I liked her. She never seemed conscious of my being different from other men, and she was kinder to Jane than the others.

There were a great many others. We made a large clan. It seemed strange to Jane that half the people in Paris were our cousins or uncles or aunts. But of course it is like that. One is related to everybody.

As a family we had the reputation of having very nice manners. It was thought that we knew very well how to make ourselves agreeable and what was more characteristic, how to be disagreeable without giving offense. My mother was reputed to be the only woman in Paris who could refuse an invitation to dinner in the same house six times running without making an enemy of its mistress. My mother was perpetually penning little plaintive notes of regret. She was greatly sought after and stayed very much at home. After my father’s death it became more and more difficult to get her to go anywhere, but she liked being asked so that she could refuse. The result was that she became something precious, inapproachable, a legend of good form and grace and she remained this always. I have on my table a miniature of her painted when she was married, at the age of eighteen. She was never a beauty. A slip of a thing, gentle and pale, with dark ringlets and very bright intelligent eyes. Her power of seduction was a thing that emanated from her like a perfume, indefinable and elusive. Claire, my sister, has the same quality.

One of my mother’s special pleasures as she grew older consisted in having her dinner in bed on some grand gala evening, and telling herself that she was the only lady of any importance in Paris who had refused to be present. Sometimes on such evenings she would send for me to come and sit with her for an hour. I would find her propped up on her pillows, her eyes glowing with animation under the soft old-fashioned frill of her voluminous boudoir cap, and presently I would become aware that she was submitting me to all the play of her wit and her charm, and I would know that out of a pure spirit of contradiction she was giving me, her poor ugly duckling, the treat that she had withheld from that brilliant gathering, whether to amuse me most or herself it would be difficult to tell. We understand each other. Her manner to me was always perfect. It was a beautiful and elaborate denial of the fact that my deformity was unpleasant to her. She went to a lot of trouble to pretend that she liked having me about. If she wanted a cab called in the rain and there wasn’t a servant handy—we didn’t have too many—it was a part of her delicacy to ask me to do it rather than have me think that she had my infirmity constantly on her mind. If she required an escort to some public place she would choose me rather than Philibert, but she would not always choose me, lest I should come to feel that she forced herself to do so. She had the humblest way of asking my advice, and then when she did not take it, went to the most childlike manœuvres to deceive me and make me think she had. When I came back from school in England, I remember wondering what she would do about me and her friends. She had an evening a week and received on these occasions a number of stiff old gentlemen and gossipy dowagers, a handful of priests and all the aunts and uncles and cousins. The question for her was whether she should inflict on me the penance of talking to these people in order to show me that she liked to have me about, or whether she would let me off attendance and trust to my superior understanding to assume that I was in her eyes presentable. I believe she would have decided on the latter bolder plan, had I not taken the matter out of her hands by asking her to excuse me. Her answer was characteristic.

“But naturally, mon enfant. You don’t suppose that I think these old people fit company for you. Only if it’s not indiscreet, tell me sometimes about your doings. I, at least, am not too old nor yet too young to be told.”

Dear mother. She would have gone to the length of imputing to me a dozen mistresses if she had thought that would help me. And yet in spite of it all, perhaps just because of it all, I knew that the sight of me was intolerable to her. But this I feel sure was a thing that she never knew that I knew. It was a part of my business in life never to let her find it out.

My being sent to England to school had been to me a proof. Though my father had taken the decision I knew it was to get me out of my mother’s way. It was not the habit of our family to send its sons abroad for their education. Philibert had had tutors at home. None of my cousins had gone away. We were as a clan not at all given to travelling. In the extreme sensitiveness that engulfed me like an illness during a certain period of my youth, I had told myself bitterly that I was banished because they could not abide the sight of me, but my bitterness did not last, thank God; and when after my father’s death I came home to live, I set myself to matching my mother’s delicacy with my own. I arranged to convey to her the impression of being always at hand and yet I managed to be actually in her presence a minimum of time. I did things for her that I could do without being aggravatingly near her; such things as running errands and visiting her lawyer and looking after her meagre investments, accumulating these duties while at the same time I withdrew more and more from sharing in her social activities.

I had kept, for reasons of economy and in order to be near her, my apartment in a wing of her house over the porter’s lodge, in that part of the building that screened the house from the street. My windows looked on the one side across the street into some gardens and on the other side into our court yard. From my dressing-room I had a view of my mother’s graceful front door with the wide shallow steps before it and the gravel expanse of the inner carriage drive. Sometimes when I came home in the evening, Madame Oui, the concierge’s wife, would tap on the glass in her door that was just opposite my own little entrance behind the great double portals that barred us into our stronghold, and would tell me that my mother had come in and would like to see me. Or I would find a note bidding me come to her lying on my table. She wrote me a great number of notes, sprightly amusing missives that reminded one of the fact that Frenchwomen have been for centuries mistresses in the art of letter-writing. They gave me the news, recounted the latest family gossip, contained tips as to how to behave if I came across an aunt who owed her money, or an uncle who had lent her some, warned me against this or that person whom she did not want to see any more, asked me to pay a call on one of her ancient followers who was in bed with a cold, enclosed a tiresome bill that she hadn’t the money to pay immediately, or implored me in witty phrases of complaint to use my influence with Philibert and try to get him away from some woman: in all of which matters I did my best to meet her wishes save as regarded my brother. “My influence with Philibert” was one of my mother’s least successful fictions. I wonder even now that she kept it up. I suppose it would have seemed to her shocking to admit even tacitly that her two sons never spoke to each other if they could help it. Yet she must have known that although he lived nominally in my mother’s house up to the time of his marriage I scarcely ever saw him unless at a distance in some crowded salon. The few mutual friends we possessed never asked us to dinner or lunch together, and strangely enough in the one place where we might often have happened to come across one another, that is in my mother’s own boudoir, we never did meet. My mother must have managed this. She must have manœuvred to prevent such encounters. She arranged to see us always separately and yet continued to talk to us, each to the other, as if she supposed that beyond her door we were amusing ourselves together, thick as thieves.

She would say—“I hear this latest friend of Philibert’s whom he has so made the mode this year, is really quite pretty. Tell me what she looks like,”—assuming me to be perfectly aware of this affair. Or—“Your brother’s new tailor is not successful at all. He gives him the most exaggerated shoulders. Fifi is not tall enough to stand it. I wish you would get him to go back to the old one.” Or even—“Tell me what your brother is up to. I never see him.” As if I knew what Philibert was up to.

My rare meetings with him took place at my sister’s. She used sometimes to have us at her house together. Her husband would bring him home to lunch unexpectedly, or I would drop in unbidden and find him there. Poor Claire had married the biggest automobile works in the country, and had been taken to Neuilly and shut up there in a gigantic villa. She was finding that it tasked her philosophical docility to the utmost to meet the demands of the uxorious individual who paid all her bills from his own cheque book and was generous only in the way of supplying her with babies. She had had four in six years, and her health was a source of anxiety to my mother, who was frankly exasperated by the turn her daughter’s affairs had taken.

“My dear,” she said to me one night on her return from Neuilly, “I supposed that that man had married Claire to get into society, and now that I’ve given her to him he has taken her off to the wilderness. I don’t know what to make of it. The poor child is wasting away. He simply never leaves her alone. They go to bed together every night at ten o’clock. It is horrible.”

Claire may have bemoaned her lot to my mother in those long tête-à-têtes of theirs, but she never complained to me, nor did she, I believe, to Philibert, who was in the habit of borrowing money from her large, oily, sleek-headed husband. She had some of my mother’s mannerisms, her little way of quickly moving her head backwards with the slightest toss; the same light flexible utterance; the same sigh and sudden droop of irrepressible languor. I believe her to be the only person of whom Philibert was ever unselfishly fond. She pleased him. Her physical frailty, appealed to his taste which was in reality so fastidious, however vulgar some of his amusements might be, and her mocking spirit was congenial to him. When one thought of Claire one thought of her dark shadowed eyes with the deep circles under them marking the tender cheeks, and her truly beautiful smile. She was a collection of odd beauties combined in a way to make one’s heart ache, but there was something sharp in her—something hurting. Lovely Claire, cynical siren, how caressingly she spoke to me, how she drew out of my heart its tenderness, and how often she disappointed me. Not brave enough to be happy, far too intelligent not to know what she was missing, she took refuge in self-mockery and when faced with a crisis subsided into complete passivity.

One evening in the early summer, more than twenty years ago now, I found a note from my mother tucked in the crack of my door asking me to come to her at once as she had news for me of the utmost importance. I found my sister with her, and something in the attitude of the two women, who were so closely akin as to reproduce each one the same physical pose under the stress of a deep preoccupation, conveyed to me a suspicion that Philibert had that moment skipped out through the long open window. They sat, each in a high brocaded chair, their heads thrown back against their respective cushions, their hands limp in their laps and their eyes half-closed. I thought for an instant that both had fainted. My mother was the first to make a sign. She lifted an arm and in silence pointed a finger at a chair for me.

“Your brother,” she said, when once I was seated, “has sold this house over my head. He is going to be married.”

“To a little American girl,” breathed Claire.

“The fortune is immense,” added my mother.

“The daughter of that awful smart Mrs. Carpenter,” said Claire, opening wide her eyes the better to take in the horror.

“She asked me three times to luncheon,” said my mother. “I have never seen her.”

I looked from one to the other—“But if the fortune is immense—” I ventured.

“It is all tied up,” wailed my mother. “Her trustees insist on his debts being paid beforehand. I understand nothing—but nothing.” Her head dropped forward. She pressed her thumb and forefinger against her worn eyelids. She began to cry.

Claire, with a strange sidelong look at her expressive of compassion and exasperation and wonder, got up and walked to the window and stood with her back to us looking out into the garden.

“I should have thought my son-in-law would have saved me this humiliation,” said my mother, fumbling with her left hand for her handkerchief. “But Claire says he has already lent Philibert very considerable sums.” I saw my sister’s slender figure stiffen. “What curious people Americans are. It seems that the father made such a will as passes belief. The child comes into the entire fortune but can only dispose of the income. The mother has an annuity, Claire says it must be a big one as she entertains a great deal. Why did you not tell me your brother was getting so dreadfully into debt? The girl is just eighteen. It appears that in America girls reach their majority at eighteen. Her name is Jane. A most unpleasant name. Philibert says she is not pretty. These mésalliances are so tiresome. If only he could have married that exquisite little Bianca. I shall be obliged to receive the mother. I am sure she has a very strong accent.”

My poor mother stretched out her hand to me. “What is to become of us?” she wailed gently. I felt very sorry for her. I understood that she was afraid of the invasion of a horde of big noisy strangers. I tried to comfort her. She seemed to me for the first time pitiful, and I saw that her youthfulness was after all, just one of the illusions she cast by the exercise of her will. It fell from her that evening as if it had been some gossamer veil destroyed by her tears.

Claire remained silent. Only once during all my mother’s broken lament did she speak, and then she said without turning—“I should have thought one such marriage in a family was enough.”

It transpired that Philibert needed five hundred thousand francs to put him straight, that the house was being sold for a million and that the remaining half was my mother’s, since they owned the property between them. He had brought her the deed of sale to sign that afternoon, and had gone away with the signature in his pocket. She said—“Naturally I could not refuse. It is not as if he could have sold half the building.”

I felt humiliated for my mother. It seemed to me that my brother had injured her in a most offensive way. There was a kind of indecency about the proceeding that made me ashamed. It was the kind of thing I had hoped we were none of us capable of doing. He was taking away from her not only her shelter and security, but a part of her own personality. It was as outrageous as if he had forced her to cut off her hair and had taken it round to a wigmaker to turn into a handful of gold. I saw that without that fine old house, so like her own self expressed in architecture, with its bland and graceful exterior and delicate ornamented rooms, she would lose a vital part of her entity. She was not one of those people whose public and private selves are distinct. The proud little bright-eyed lady who drove out of those stately doors in her brougham to dispense finely gradated smiles to the meticulously selected people of her acquaintance, and the passionate intriguing mother so given to subterfuges of kindness and ineffable make-believe of disinterested affection, were one and the same person. She had no special manner for the world. There was no homely naturalness for her to subside into, no loose woolly dressing-gown of conduct and no rough carpet slippers of laziness to don in the presence of her family or by her lonely self. What she was when in attendance on the Bourbons that she was in her own silent bedroom. Even about her weeping there was a certain style. Her tears were pitiful but not ugly. They had destroyed the illusion of her youthfulness, but they had not marred her elegance. There was measure and appropriateness and dramatic worth in her weeping. Her son had not broken her heart or her spirit; he had merely dragged off some of her clothing. She stood denuded, impoverished, a little shrunken in stature, that was all. It was that that enraged me. I said—“What a brute.” My mother pulled me up sharply.

“My son,” she said to me, with more of haughtiness than I had ever seen in her manner to any one of us. “I have consented to do what your brother has asked. I have approved of his conduct. That is sufficient.”

I felt then the finality, the hopelessness. I believe I smiled. The change was sudden. It had always been like that with mother. She might complain of Philibert but no one could criticize him to her.

“Ah, well,” I said, “if you have made up your mind to accept her—”

Mother lifted her head quickly. “Whom?”

“Your new daughter-in-law.”

I am almost sure that she turned pale. I cannot have imagined it. Her words too, gave me the same painful impression.

“I have accepted it, not her, as yet.”

And suddenly I thought of the girl, Jane Carpenter, whom I had not yet laid eyes on, with an immense pity.

“Yes,” said Claire, coming back to us, and looking at us with her least charming, most bitterly mocking air. “We prepare a nice welcome for her. I wonder how she will like us.”

But my mother had the last word.

“We shall, I presume, know how to make ourselves agreeable,” she said, putting away her handkerchief into her little silk bag. I saw that she would shed no more tears over the girl, Jane Carpenter.

III

Mrs. Carpenter was an American who apologized for her own country. She had found it incapable of providing a sufficient field of activity for her social talents and called it crude. The phrase on her lips was funny. There was much about her that was funny, since one could not in the face of her bright brisk self-satisfaction call her pathetic.

The flattery of such migrations as hers is mystifying to Parisians like myself, who know that our city is the most delightful place in the world, but do not quite understand why so many foreigners like Mrs. Carpenter should find it so. She seemed to derive an immense satisfaction from the fact that she lived in Paris. But why? Where lay the magic difference between her Paris and her New York? She had established herself in a large bright apartment in the Avenue du Bois de Bologne. Her rent was high, her furniture expensive, her table lavish, her motor had pale grey cushions and silver trimmings. All these things she could have had in New York. She might have paid a little more for them over there, but that would only have added to her pleasure. She liked to pay high prices for things. It may be that I am doing her an injustice. There were moments when her indefatigable pursuit of us all filled me with scornful pity and made me think that she did hide under her breezy successful manner a wistful and romantic admiration for things that were foreign and old, and a touching respect for things she did not understand. She once told me that she had wanted to take an old hotel in our quarter, something with atmosphere and a history and old-world charm. But somehow she had not found what she wanted. The houses she saw were dark and gloomy and insanitary. They were wonderfully romantic but they had no bathrooms. She had wanted one in particular, had wanted it awfully, but the owner had insisted on staying on in little rooms under the roof, which meant his using her front stairs, so at last she had given up the idea. Her apartment was certainly not gloomy. It glittered with gold—golden walls, gold plate, gilt chairs. She ended by liking it immensely, but was sometimes a little ashamed of being so pleased with it. Perhaps, at odd moments, she called it crude.

I used to go there sometimes, long before Jane came to Paris. I am sorry now that I did. Had I known Mrs. Carpenter was going to be, for me, Jane’s mother, I would not have gone. It is not nice to remember that I used to make fun of Jane’s mother, and accept her hospitality with amused contempt. We all did. She was to us an object of good-humoured derision. Poor old Izzy. She fed us so well; she begged us so continually to come. She seemed to derive such pleasure from hearing the butler announce our names. I am sure she believed that awful flat of hers to be the social centre of a very distinguished society. The more of a mixture the better to her mind:—Austrians, Hungarians, Poles,—she liked having princes about, and their dark furtive eyes and beautifully manicured hands filled her with joy. It was only after Philibert got hold of her that she began to understand that perhaps, after all, too cosmopolitan a salon was not quite the thing. Philibert took her in hand. He had learned somehow about Jane. He already had his idea.

And now I come upon a curious problem. I find that two distinct Mrs. Carpenters exist in my mind, and I cannot reconcile them. One was a beautiful romantic creature whom Jane—far away in the Grey House in St. Mary’s Plains—called mother and wrote to once a week and loved with a pure flame of loyalty; the other was Izzy Carpenter, whose loud voice and tall elastic fashionable figure was so well-known in Paris: Busy Izzy, who was run by Philibert, and a group of young ne’er-do-weels. I find it very difficult to realize that this jolly slangy woman, with curly grey hair and a blue eye that could give a broad wink on occasion, was identical with the figure of poetry Jane dreamed about night after night in her little restless cot at the foot of her Aunt Patty’s four-poster bed. It is disturbing to think that even about this decided hard-edged vivacious woman there should have been such a difference of opinion, such a contrast of received impressions as to make one wonder whether she had any corporeal existence at all. I think of that stern humorous spinster Patience Forbes comforting the child who was always asking questions about her mother; I think of her taking the aching young thing on her gaunt knees in the old rocking chair with its knitted worsted cushion, and lulling that troubled eager mind to rest with stories of her mother’s childhood.

I can see the grim face of Patience Forbes while she searches her memory for pleasant things about her heartless prodigal sister. She sits in a bay window looking out into the back garden where there is a sleepy twittering of birds. The trams thunder past up Desmoine’s Avenue. The milkman comes up the path; the white muslin curtains billow into the peaceful room that smells of lavender and mint. There is sunlight on the old mahogany. Jane’s great-grandmother, in an oval frame, looks down insipidly, her eyes mildly shining between the low bands of her parted hair. And Jane has her arms round her Aunt Patty, and her face, so unlike the gentle portrait, is troubled and brooding, a sullen ugly little face with something strange, half wild, that recalls her father and frightens the good woman who holds her close and goes on answering questions about her sister Isabel. And then I think of Mrs. Carpenter not as Jane’s mother, but as the daughter of old Mrs. Forbes of the Grey House, and I am again bewildered. Those people in St. Mary’s Plains, Jane’s grandmother, her aunts and her uncle, were people of sense and character and taste. Who that knew Izzy Carpenter would have thought it? Who that knew Jane could deny it? I suspect Mrs. Carpenter of having been ashamed of them. Jane’s loyalty saved her from any such stupidity.

When I went to St. Mary’s Plains the other day, Jane showed me, on the wall of her uncle’s study, an old print representing the first log cabin of the French settler who had come there across the Canadian border in 1780. In the picture a Red Indian carrying a tomahawk and capped with feathers skulks behind the trees at the edge of the clearing, and in the foreground a group of Noah’s Ark cattle are guarded by a man with a gun. Under the print is written—“St. Marie les Plaines,” and the signature “Gilbert de Chevigné.” It was a Monsieur de Chevigné from Quebec, Jane told me, who built the Grey House. The name had been corrupted to Cheney; the Cheneys were her grandmother’s people. Many of the families in St. Mary’s Plains traced a similar history. The town in growing had cherished the story of its French foundation and its social element had grown to believe that it had a special sympathy with our country. Its well-to-do people were constantly coming from and going to France. With an indifference bordering on contempt, and an ease that suggested the consciousness of special claims and opportunities, they would cross the really tremendous expanse of territory that lay between their thresholds and the Atlantic sea-board, ignoring the existence of Chicago, Buffalo, Boston, Philadelphia and New York, and set sail for Cherbourg. It was considered a perfectly natural occurrence and one scarcely worthy of self-congratulation for a girl from St. Mary’s Plains to marry a foreigner of real or supposed distinction, but those who neither married abroad nor at home, but were led astray by the vulgar attraction of some rich man from the far west or east were the subject of pitying criticism. Such had been the case with Jane’s mother. Silas Carpenter had come bearing down on St. Mary’s Plains, a wild man from the great west; like a bison or a moose breaking into a mild and pleasant paddock. Isabel Forbes, headstrong, discontented, covetous, had fallen to his savage charm, his millions and the peculiar oppressive magnetism of his silence, that seemed filled with the memories of unspeakable experiences. The first rush to the goldfields of California loomed in the background of his untutored childhood. Later he had gone to the Klondike. Gold—he had dug it out of the earth with his own great hands. Then he had taught himself oddly from books. A speculator, a gambler, he had a passion for music, and played the flute. A strange mixture. To please Isabel’s family he gave up poker, went to church, was married in a frock-coat. People said he had Indian blood in his veins. It seems possible. He had the long head and slanting profile and the mild voice characteristic of the race. Society in St. Mary’s Plains was genuinely sorry for Isabel’s family when she married him. But she went away to New York to live and was forgotten until on Silas’ sensational death her departure for Paris revived interest in her doings.

“The Grey House” as it was known in St. Mary’s Plains, had the benevolent patriarchal air of a small provincial manor. Built sometime in the seventies it had not had too many coats of paint during its lifetime, and its calm exterior with the double row of comfortable windows each flanked by a pair of shutters was weather-stained and worn like the visage of some bland unconcerned person of distinction who is not ashamed to look in his old age a little like a weather-beaten peasant. It stood well back from the street in the centre of a wide plot of ground not large enough to be called a park, though containing a few nice trees. The lawn indeed merged in the most sociable way into the grounds of other neighbouring houses and ran smoothly down in front to the edge of the public side-walk where there was no wall or railing of any kind. A scarcely noticeable sign beside the path that led from the street to the front porch with its two wooden pillars said “Keep off the grass.”

There were only two storeys to the Grey House and a garret with dormer windows in the grey shingled roof, the rooms of the ground floor being raised only a foot or two from the level of the street, so that Jane’s grandmother, sitting in her armchair by the living-room window could look up over the tops of her spectacles and see and recognize her acquaintances who often even at that comfortable distance would bow or lift their hats to the little old lady as they passed.

Every one in St. Mary’s Plains knew the Grey House. When one of the Misses Forbes went shopping, she would say “Send it to the Grey House, please,” and the young man in the dry goods’ store would answer—“Certainly, Miss Forbes, it’ll be right along. Mrs. Forbes is keeping well, I hope? Let me see, it’s ten years since I was in her Sunday-school class.” And Miss Minnie—it was usually Minnie who did the shopping—would smile kindly at the chatty young man who certainly did not mean any harm.

The occupants of that house were people content to stay at home, who did not always know what day of the month it was, and who found a deep source of well-being in the realization that tomorrow would be like today. I imagine those gentlewomen doing the same thing in the same way year after year, wearing the same clothes made by the same family dressmaker, and opposing to the disturbing menace of events the quiet obstinacy of their contentment. I watch them at night go up the stairs together at ten o’clock, kiss one another at the door of their mother’s room and go down the dim corridor, Patty staying behind like a sentinel under the gas-jet, her bony arm lifted, waiting to turn the light still lower once they were safe behind their own closed doors. Jane in her bed used to hear their voices saying, “Good-night, mother dear, pleasant dreams. Good-night, Minnie. Good-night.” And if the man of the house, Jane’s Uncle Bradford, were at his club playing whist, Beth, from the rosy interior of her cretonne chamber would be sure to call out—“I left the front door on the latch for Brad. I suppose it’s all right.” And Patience would say—“Who would burgle this house?” And Minnie would add—“I put his glass of milk in his room.” And then there would be silence disturbed only by the sound of footsteps moving to and fro behind closed doors. And Jane would wait drowsily for Aunt Patty to come in and say “Good gracious, child, not asleep yet? It’s past ten o’clock.”

To the Forbes family the doings of the outer world were a pleasant distant spectacle that interested and amused but made them feel all the happier to be where they were. When a letter arrived from Izzy bearing its Paris postmark, they would read it together, become pleasantly animated over the news and then settle down with relief at the thought that they didn’t have to go over there and do all those things. The letter would then be added to a package bound with an elastic band and put away in the secretary until some one came to call and asked how Isabel was getting on.

I seem to see them all, on these occasions, sitting there in their habitual attitudes. I imagine the little grandmother, with the letter open in her black silk lap, adjusting her spectacles on the slender bridge of her arched nose, and Jane on a footstool beside her, waiting to listen once more with absorbing interest to the extracts from her mother’s letter that she already knew by heart, and the two or three friends sitting round rather primly on the old mahogany chairs, and Aunt Beth with her embroidery on the horsehair sofa, and Aunt Minnie making the tea, and Aunt Patty teaching one of her birds to eat from her lips at the window, and perhaps Uncle Bradford, who has come home from his office, visible across the hall through the door in his study with some weighty volume on his knees, and a good cigar between his lips. I seem to hear the purring song of the tea kettle and the pleasant sound of voices calling one another intimate names. I see the faded carpet with its dimmed white pattern and the stiff green brocaded curtains in their high gilt cornices, and the pleasant mixture of heterogeneous objects selected for use and comfort. I have in my nostrils the perfume of roses opening out in the warmth of the room, and of the newly baked cakes made for tea by Aunt Minnie, and still another finer perfume, the faint fresh fragrance of the spirit of that little old lady who ruled the house in gentleness and was beloved in the town. A humourous little old lady who was not afraid of death, and believed in the clemency of a Divine Father. She liked Jane to read aloud to her while she knitted,—Trollope, Charles Lamb, Robert Burns, were her favourites, and she enjoyed a good tune on the piano, and would beat time with her knitting needles when Beth played a waltz. But on Sundays Beth played hymns and the servants came in after supper to sing with the family “Rock of Ages,” “Jesus Lover of my Soul,” “Abide with Me.” Jane liked those Sunday evenings. They made her feel so safe, was the way she put it.

All the inmates of the Grey House were God-fearing but Minnie was the most religious. She had a talent for cooking and a craving for emotional religious experience. The kitchen of the Grey House was a very pleasant place with a window that gave onto the back verandah, and often on summer mornings Aunt Beth who was young and pretty, would take her sewing out onto this back porch while Aunt Minnie in the kitchen was making cakes, and they would talk through the open window with Jane curled up in the hammock beside Beth’s work-table. Beth, would call out in her very high small voice that expressed her plaintive dependence and blissful confidence in the protected life she so utterly loved—“Minnie, Minnie!” and the sound of the egg-beater in the kitchen would cease, and Aunt Minnie would call through the open window in her lower, deeper tone—

“Yes, what do you say?”

“I forgot to tell you that Mrs. Blatchford asked me if I’d ask you to make six cakes for the Woman’s Exchange Fourth of July Sale.”

And Aunt Minnie would exclaim—

“Good gracious. Six angel cakes, that makes thirty-six eggs.” While beating up the whites of eggs for her famous cakes Minnie would ponder on the power of mind over matter, the healing of physical pain by faith, and the ultimate purifying grace of the Divine Spirit. One day she announced that she had joined the Christian Science Church. The family took the news seriously. Jane’s grandmother turned very white. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes and whispered—“Oh, Minnie dear, I’m so sorry.” Uncle Bradford brought his fist down on a table with a crash and shouted—“Don’t you do it, Minnie. These newfangled religions are no good.” Beth wept. Patience said “Hmph.”

Jane didn’t like the new look on her Aunt Minnie’s face, but the religious mystery behind it had a worrying fascination. She listened to the talk of her elders hoping to learn about this new faith, but it was characteristic of them not to argue or discuss things that affected them deeply, so she learned little, and she was afraid to ask her Aunt Patience who seemed somehow not at all patient with Minnie just now. So she was reduced to talking it all over with Fan, her friend, who lived next door. They would sit astride the fence that divided the two back gardens and talk about God and their elders.

“Aunt Minnie has got a new religion,” Jane announced. “Religions are funny things. I don’t think I like them but they do do things to you.”

“Pooh! I know. It’s not half so queer as Mormons and Theosophites and Dowyites.”

“What’s all that?”

“The Mormons have lots of wives. They live in Salt Lake City and practice bigamy. The Dowyites are in Chicago. There’s a big church there full of crutches of all the lame people Dowy has cured by miracle.”

“Well, Aunt Minnie says there’s no such thing as being lame or sick, and everything is a miracle.”

“He-he! I’m not a miracle”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Who made you?”

“My mother.”

“How?”

“I dunno.”

“Well, that’s a miracle.”

“Oh, Jane, you are a silly.”

“I’m not silly. I know you’ve got to have a religion or you can’t be good, but I don’t like it all the same.”

“Who wants to be good?”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d be afraid to die.”

Fan had a complete worldly wisdom that could cover most things, but she was obliged to admit, though with her nose in the air, that she, too, would be afraid to die if she went on being very bad up to the last minute.

Fan Hazeltine was an orphan. She lived with a stepfather who hated her and sometimes didn’t speak to her for a week. She and Jane had met on the back fence the day after Jane’s arrival in St. Mary’s Plains. Jane was six years old then, Fan eight, but I imagine that Fan was very much the same at that time, as when I met her twenty years later. She was always a wisp of a thing no bigger than an elf with a wizened face. Life gave her no leisure for expansion. She was one of those people who never had a chance to blossom out, but could just achieve the phenomenal business of continuing to exist by grit and the determination not to be downed. What she was in her stepfather’s inimical house that she remained in the larger inimical world, a small under-nourished undaunted creature, consumed with a thirst for happiness, hiding her hurts under an obstinate gaiety, a minute lonely thing steering her bark cleverly through stormy waters, keeping afloat somehow, sinking and struggling, her grim little heart hardening, her laughter growing shriller and louder as the years went by. There is no difficulty about understanding Fan. I can see her astride that fence, screwing up her face while she told Jane what she was going to do in the world, and I can see her set about doing it.

“I’m going to have a good time. You wait. You just wait. I tell you I’m going to have a good time—fun, fun, fun. That’s what I want.”

But Jane did not say what she wanted from life.

IV

Patience Forbes was a woman of science, an ornithologist. When she died years ago she was recognized in America as one of the foremost authorities on birds. I remember her death. Jane got the news in Paris. It was at the time of the final struggle over Geneviève’s marriage. She showed me her Aunt Patience’s will. It read:—“To my beloved niece Jane Carpenter now known by the name of the Marquise de Joigny, I leave the Grey House and everything in it except my collections and manuscripts. These I leave to the Museum of St. Mary’s Plains. But the house and all the furniture I leave to Jane in case she may some day want some place to go.”

Jane looked at me with strange eyes that day.

“Isn’t it queer,” she said. “How could she have known?”

But I understand now that Patience Forbes was the only one who did know. She must have been a shrewd woman. She must have followed Jane in her mind all those years, with extraordinary accuracy considering the little she had to go on. But she never betrayed her misgivings. There is only that sentence in her will to indicate what she thought.

She was an imposing woman, plain of face, careless of her appearance and masculine in build. Her nose was crooked, her neck scrawny and her hands large and bony. But she had an air of grandeur. When she tramped through the woods or across the open country that surrounded St. Mary’s Plains, her field glasses and her camera slung across her shoulder, she had in spite of her quaint bonnet and long black clothes the look of a grizzled amazon. She would walk twenty miles in a day and frequently did so. Many of the farmers round about knew her. They called her “the bird lady” and asked her in to their kitchens for a glass of milk and a slice of apple-pie, and often while sitting there with her bonnet strings untied and her dusty skirt turned up on her knees, she would receive gifts from sun-burned urchins who, knowing the object of her pilgrimages would bring to her in the battered straw crowns of their hats, rare birds’ eggs that they had discovered in the high branches of trees or the secret fastnesses of tangled thickets.

She was the dominating personality in her own home. Her mother and sisters were a little afraid of her. When her brother Bradford married and she announced that she was going to hold classes in the parlour of the Grey House and charge for them, they dared not object, although they would have preferred going without the comforts that Bradford’s shared income had provided rather than have a lot of strange people invading the house.

It was characteristic of the family that they never spoke to Jane of money and never gave her any idea that she was or ever would be an heiress. She made her own bed in the morning, and sometimes if she were not in too much of a hurry to get off to school she helped Aunt Minnie with the others. On Saturday mornings she darned her own stockings, or tried to, sitting on a low chair beside her grandmother, but this was by way of a lesson in keeping quiet. I am afraid she took it as a matter of course that Aunt Beth and her grandmother should mend her clothes for her.

She gave a great deal of trouble. Not only was she always getting into scrapes, but she was subject as well to storms of passion that sometimes, as she realized later, seriously frightened her grandmother. Her accidents—she had a great many little ones and one at least that was serious—were episodes marked in her memory as rather pleasant occasions that procured for her an extra amount of petting. There was a high bookcase at the top of the stairs in a dark corner of the upper hall, full of old and faded volumes. Here she spent hours together on Sunday afternoons, sitting on the top of a step-ladder that she dragged out of the housemaids’ cupboard. One day, finding among those dusty little books a copy of Dante’s “Vita Nuova,” she became so absorbed in the lovely poem, though it was only a lame translation in English verse, that she began chanting the lines to herself, unconsciously swaying backwards and forwards on her perch, until all at once the ladder gave way beneath her, and she fell to the floor, breaking her arm. The days that followed were among the happiest of her life. She was installed in her Uncle Bradford’s room that gave out onto the sunny back garden where a pear tree was in bloom. There, propped up in the middle of the great white bed, her arm in a sling and not hurting too much to spoil her voluptuous sense of her own importance, she seemed to herself a romantic figure, and received Fan with benevolent superiority, while deeply and deliciously she drank in with every feverish throb of her passionate little heart the tender devotion of the patient women who loved her. Her Aunt Patty slept on a cot beside her at night; her Aunt Minnie brought her meals to her on the daintiest of trays; her grandmother and her Aunt Beth came with their sewing to sit with her in the afternoon. Often when she felt herself dropping into a doze after lunch, before finally closing her eyes to give herself up to the sleep that was creeping over her so softly, she would for the pleasure of it open them again to look through her heavy eyelids at her grandmother’s head that she could see above the foot of the great bed outlined against the sunny light of the window; and she would see the little old lady lift a finger to her pursed lips and nod mysteriously smiling at Beth and glance towards the bed as much as to say—“The child is dropping off, we mustn’t make a sound.” And the child, with such a sense of security and peace as to convey to her in after years the memory of a heavenly instant, would let herself float blissfully out into the still waters of oblivion, knowing that she would surely find them there when she awoke.

She was given the book, “La Vita Nuova” for her own, and lay in bed dreaming of a poet who would one day love her as Dante had loved his Beatrice.

It was about this time that Mrs. Carpenter began working out her schemes with Philibert.

Jane was according to her own testimony subject to fits of such violent temper that she scarcely knew what she was doing. At such moments she frightened every one round her and herself as well. One evening stands out in her memory as peculiarly dreadful. The family were gathered in the drawing room before supper waiting for her, when she burst in on them, her face as white as a sheet, and flung herself on her Aunt Patty with the words—“I’ve killed a boy. Come quick. He was torturing a beast. He’s out in the garden lying quite still.” And shuddering from head to foot she dragged her aunt out after her. The boy was not dead, but lay as a matter-of-fact unconscious on the path near the back gate. Jane had knocked him down and half throttled him. There had been three boys shooting with sling shots at a lame cat to whose leg they had tied a tin can so that the wretched beast could not get out of range. Jane had seen them from the window and had rushed to the rescue. The affair made something of a stir in the town. It got into the papers. The boy had to be taken to a hospital. Jane’s Uncle Bradford needed all his influence to avert a public scandal. Unfortunately it was not the first case of Jane’s violence that had come to the knowledge of the neighbours. People talked of her as “that savage girl of Izzy’s” and told their children they were not to play with her any more. She was taken out of school for a time.

It is difficult to get at the exact meaning of this story. All that I know is what Jane has told me herself, and she may have exaggerated its social importance. At any rate, to her own mind it was an immense and horrible disgrace. She felt herself a monstrosity, and for weeks could not bear to go into the street. Her Aunt Patience too, had taken a very serious view of the affair. She sent for Jane to come to her in her study the next morning; the child was, I suppose, too nervous and shaken that night to listen to anything in the way of reprimand, and Aunt Patience showed her a riding whip on a peg in the corner against the wall. It was a cowboy quirt, a braided leather thing with a long lash.

“Jane,” said her Aunt Patty, “that quirt belonged to your father. He left it here once long ago. It is yours. I have put it there on that peg for you. I am giving it to you for a special purpose. When a dreadful act is committed against a human being, some one has to suffer, to make things equal. Usually the one who does the evil deed is punished, but I can’t, Jane, punish you like that.” And here Aunt Patty’s stern voice quavered. “I can’t because I can’t bear to. You are my child. I love you too much. I have lain awake all night thinking about it. When God is angry he punishes people he loves. He has the right. He is wise and perfect. But I am not in the place of God to you, and I can’t do it. I am going to do something quite different. I am going to do it because something has got to be done, some one has got to suffer for what you have done. You are to take that whip down now from that peg and give me three lashes with it across my shoulders. I am going to take your punishment on me because I think that will make you understand. Do as I say.”

The child was terrified. In a kind of trance she took the leather weapon in her shaking hands. Her aunt stood straight and still in the middle of the room. “Do what I say, Jane,” she commanded again. Her voice was awful. Jane advanced a step towards her as if hypnotized, looked a long moment at the stern face, then suddenly collapsed in a heap at those large plain feet in their worn flat slippers.

“I can’t, Aunt Patty,” she whispered. “I can’t! It’s enough. It’s enough.”

After this Jane spent more and more time in her aunt’s company. The dreadful experience drew them even closer together. Jane would almost always accompany her aunt on her long tramps into the country, and although as Patience so often said she never took any real interest in the science of birds, she nevertheless became an adept at climbing trees and going through thickets, and learned to imitate the songs of birds in an astonishing way. This accomplishment indeed, she never lost; even when she had long since forgotten all she learned about Baltimore Orioles and Brown Thrushes and Scarlet Tanagers and the migrations of birds in the spring time, and their marvellous intricate manner of fabricating their nests, she could throw back her head and fill the room wherever she might be with the most bewildering joyous riot of warblings and twitterings and liquid trills. She became so expert at this that sometimes she would play pranks on her aunt, and climbing into the tree outside the study window, she would imitate the song of some little feathered creature so perfectly that her Aunt Patty would leave her work and tip-toe softly to the window only to be greeted with a squeal of triumphant laughter.

The classes in bird lore that were held in the parlour were for Jane little more than a chance of giggling with Fan in a corner. The lectures indoors went on during the winter, but in the spring and early summer Miss Forbes took her followers by train to a village on the edge of the forest, and there, in the leafy fastnesses of those sunny enclosed spaces would give her pupils demonstrated lectures. Jane has told me that when following the sound of a bird’s note heard overhead at a distance, her aunt’s face would become transfigured; a little mystic smile would come over her plain features; she would sign to her throng to make not the slightest noise, and silently her head bent sideways and upwards, she would lead the way, stopping now and then, her finger on her lips, to listen for the clear note that guided her, until at last she would catch sight of her beauty, high up on a swaying leafy bough, and all her being would strain upward towards that tiny creature, and her face would light up with even a brighter joy, and she would point a gaunt finger mutely at the object of her worship as if calling attention to some lovely little celestial being. Then if some one, as was always the case, made a sound and the bird flew away, a shadow would fall on her face, her pose would relax and she would turn to the heavy human beings about her, a dull disappointed glance, looking at them all for a moment in deep reproach before she recollected what she was there for, and began to tell them of the habits and customs of the songster who had just disappeared over the treetops.

On one occasion Fan went so far as to say these rambles were ridiculous, and Jane flared up at once.

“My Aunt Patty ridiculous?” she cried out. “How dare you? She’s the greatest ornithologist in the world, and I love her, I love her more than all the outside world together and everything in it.”

When Jane was fifteen her grandmother died, and a year later her Aunt Beth was married, and Jane, who was sixteen, had a white organdie bridesmaid’s dress and carried a bouquet of pink roses, and after that Aunt Minnie went away to be a Christian Science healer in New York, and Jane was left alone in the Grey House with her Aunt Patty.

Her grandmother’s death left her with no impression of horror. The little old lady had gone to sleep one day quietly in her accustomed place by the window and had not wakened again, that was all. Aunt Patty at the funeral in a long black veil, looked like some grand and austere monument of grief, reminding her vaguely of a statue she had seen somewhere of emblematic and national importance, but she made no fuss over her sorrow, and told the child that night of her own mother’s imminent arrival from Paris.

This was a piece of news sufficiently wonderful to offset completely the effect of death in the house. Jane said to herself, “She is coming to take me away to be with her at last.” And she went up and hid in her room so that her Aunt Patty should not see how excited she was.

But Jane was mistaken. Such was not Mrs. Carpenter’s intention. She had come to America on receiving her sister’s telegram partly out of deference to her mother’s memory, partly to consult her lawyers, and partly for the purpose of putting Jane in a fashionable American boarding school. The sadness in Jane’s memory long connected with those days has little to do with her grandmother’s funeral, but is the lasting indelible impression of the discovery she made then, that her mother did not like her.

Mrs. Carpenter came out with her ideas for her daughter abruptly on the evening of her arrival. She had no idea that her daughter adored her. Jane’s letters beginning “My darling Mummy” and ending “Your loving daughter” had conveyed to her nothing of the writer’s emotion. No doubt they bored her, and no doubt she supposed that they bored the child who was obliged to write them. It would probably have seemed to her incredible that a little girl who scarcely ever saw her should go on wanting her for ten years from a distance of a couple of thousand miles. If she justified herself to herself at all, I suppose she made use of this argument: “Well, if I don’t care for her because she is so dreadfully her father’s daughter, then that proves that I am too different for her ever to care for me. The best thing for us both is to leave her with people who won’t let her get on their nerves as she would on mine.”

Mrs. Carpenter was not subtle, and she hated wasting time, so she opened the subject at once sitting with Patience in the back parlour, her slim silk-stockinged legs crossed easily, one smart foot dangling, her modish head tilted back above the trim cravat of black crêpe and white tulle that her French maid had fabricated for her during the crossing, and a jewelled hand playing with Jane’s long pigtail. Her sister Patience sat opposite her at her table, her head in her hands, her bony fingers poked up among her meagre locks, and Jane took in that evening with a kind of anguish of loyalty the contrast between the two women. It seemed to her somehow very pitiful that her Aunt Patty should be so ugly when her mother was so beautiful. With a childish absence of any vestige of a sense of humour, she felt at one moment ashamed for her aunt and almost angry with her mother, and then ashamed for her mother and angry with her aunt.

“I wanted to tell you, Patty, that I think it would be a good thing now for this big gawk of a girl to go to a finishing school in New York. You’ll probably be giving up this house soon, and I don’t want her with me yet awhile.”

Jane in talking to me of this moment said that she felt as if her mother’s hand that was playing affectionately with her hair an instant before had suddenly picked up a hammer and hit her on the head. For an interval everything was blurred and dark in the room, with sparks that seemed to be shooting out of her brain. It was her Aunt Patty’s face that brought her back to her senses. It was a suffering, angry face, and presently she heard Patience say—“I am not going to give up this house, but I think you ought to take Jane to live with you. She wants to go, and she’s right. You are her mother.”

But Izzy paid no attention to her older sister.

“That’s nonsense! Paris is no place for a girl of her age. What in the world should I do with her? She’d be dreadfully in the way. Besides she must learn how to walk and manage her hands before I show her to people.”

The thing was done. Jane knew. She knew that her mother did not like her and never had liked her, and she knew somehow that her mother did not like her because she was ugly and reminded her of her father Silas Carpenter. She knew too that her Aunt Patty had always known this, and that her aunt loved her as her mother never would love her, and that the mottled flush on her grim face was due in part to anger and in part to the fear of losing her. She understood that her aunt had determined to help her to attain her heart’s desire, even at the price of losing herself the one thing more precious to her than anything in the world. She dared not look at her mother and she could not speak, and still she waited though incapable now of taking in the meaning of their voices. She heard vaguely her aunt saying something about making enough money by her lectures and publications to keep the house going, but paid no attention. A question addressed directly to herself by her mother at last roused her.

“Well, Jane, what do you say? Would you rather stay here alone with your Aunt Patty than go to boarding school with a lot of jolly girls of your own age?”

She did not hesitate then for an answer.

“Oh yes, if you can’t have me let me stay here,” and turning she cried, “Keep me, Aunt Patty, keep me,” and flung herself into those long trembling arms.

Mrs. Carpenter seems to have been mildly amused by this display of affection. With her face buried in the black woollen stuff of her aunt’s blouse, Jane heard her say—

“Well then, I leave it to you two. You can carry on as you like for the next two or three years. When you are eighteen, Jane, you will make your début in Paris society. You’ll want to bring Patty with you, I suppose, when the time comes.”

Mrs. Carpenter left three days later. The subject of Jane’s future was not broached again in her presence, but she heard the two women talking about professors of French and Italian and dancing classes, and the advantages of a saddle-horse and a pony cart. Her mother’s last words to her were—

“Now make the most of your time and don’t run about all over the country in the sun. Your complexion is the best thing about you.” And yet she didn’t hate her mother. Her idea of her mother had not even undergone for her any fundamental change. It was all the other way round. It was her opinion of herself that had suffered. With the dogged loyalty that seemed at times positively a sign of stupidity and was to influence every important decision of her life, she defended her mother to her own heart. If her mother did not like her it was because she was not likeable, because her father had been a dreadful man and had handed down to her some secret dangerous element of his own nature that made her antagonistic and unpleasant to brilliant happy people. Her Aunt Patty loved her because she was sorry for her. Her Aunt Patty was different from her mother. She, too, was ugly and a little queer; that was the bond between them. Poor Patience Forbes! Jane was to do her justice later, but for the moment she almost hated the sympathy between them, while her mother’s image like some magic adamant statue possessing a supernatural inviolability remained for her persistently and brilliantly the same. And when she was gone the question Jane put her aunt represented the result of hours of heart-broken weeping in which no whisper of a reproach had mingled.

“Aunt Patty,” she said, “how can I make my mother love me?” and her Aunt Patty had replied rather grimly—

“By trying to be what she wants you to be, I suppose.”

It was after this that Jane began sleeping at night with a strip of adhesive plaster across her mouth from her chin to her upper lip. Her aunt must have known but she did not interfere. I can imagine her standing over her niece’s bed when she came up from her protracted studies in the library, with a lamp in her hand, a tall grizzled figure in long ungainly black clothes, looking down at that sleeping face with the court-plaster pasted across the mouth, and I can see her weather-beaten face twist and tears well up in those shrewd intelligent eyes, and I seem to hear her utter—“Poor Jane, my poor lamb. If you could only take some interest in science. I don’t know what is to become of you.”

V

I begin to feel uncertain in telling this story. I am not at all sure that I have a just feeling for that American life of Jane’s. I have put down the facts as she told them to me and have described the people there as they came into being for me, from her talk, but how am I to know that they were really like that? Perhaps had I seen them with my own eyes I should have found them quite different: narrow, dull people with shrill twanging voices and queer American mannerisms. It may be that they would have bored me as they bored Mrs. Carpenter. St. Mary’s Plains I have seen for myself, but what did I see? A railway station, a few streets, a deep wide muddy river flowing by full of ships and barges. The town expressed nothing to me. It remained enigmatic. Of the hidden life going on in all those houses I knew nothing. I did not even understand what I saw. There were billboards all about the railway station advertising American products. Enormous nigger babies three times life-size stared from wooden fences. The Gold Dust Twins? Why gold dust, why twins, why nigger babies? How should I know? There were other garish things: I seem to remember flags and red, white and blue streamers festooning telegraph poles, in celebration I suppose of some national holiday. It was all too foreign. I could not translate it to myself. It made me feel very tired, and now this effort to recreate the atmosphere makes me weary. It is such a strain for the imagination. I know that my picture is incomplete and therefore false. I have touched on the gentleness and good breeding of Jane’s people, on the quiet of their God-fearing lives, but that word God-fearing: it is strange; it suggests something stern and uncompromising that is very different from anything we know in Paris. It suggests a great seriousness, a bare nakedness before the mystery of the unknown, a challenge of fate and an exaltation, of virtue. It affects me like a bleak wind. I turn away from it with relief. I look out of my window with a sigh. There is the good Abbé coming out of the convent gate. He has been hearing confessions; he has been taking away the sins from burdened hearts and tying them up into neat little bundles to be dropped into the Seine. God bless him, and thank God for our wise old priesthood and our wonderful beautiful old compromises, and thank God again for the jaunty swing of that black cassock. Ugh! I feel better. The little street is dim this morning. It has been raining. Dear, weary little old street—

There is no room here for American Puritanism. Paris is too old, too wise to harbour such things. Was it that that haunted Jane? Did she always see herself measured up to a fixed fine standard like a flagpole, the flagpole of American idealism, with a banner floating over her head, casting a shadow, purity, honesty, fear of God, written on it in shining letters? Payment, atonement, the wages of sin is death—old Mrs. Forbes reading out the words, believing but not worrying, but Jane making them terribly personal, questioning, puzzling, burying them in her mind. Heaven and hell; realities! Our actions leading us toward one or the other. Patience Forbes saying one had to suffer for a bad deed. The mystery about Jane’s father—something curious about his death. He was an unhappy man, his silence, she remembered it, she remembered him. She knew she was like him in some inexplicable way that frightened her. A world of stern simple values, all smoothed over for her by the gentleness and kindness of those people, the Forbes. Of course they were gentle and kind. They loved her. It was all right as long as she had them, but it was a curious preparation for life with Izzy in Paris.

Izzy sent for Philibert on her return from America. She must have talked to him about Jane. They must have had a curious conversation. I am certain that it was then that they elaborated their plan. The scheme was one of grand proportions. They became partners in a great enterprise. Mrs. Carpenter was to supply her daughter, who had enough money to realize even Philibert’s dreams, and he was to supply the required knowledge, as well as the billet d’entrée into the social arena of Europe. These two suited each other perfectly. They knew what they wanted and each saw in the other the means of getting it. Broadly speaking they wanted the same thing, and if Philibert’s conception of their common destiny was utterly beyond her that was just what made her faith in him perfect. Audacious in her way, his audacity far outdid hers: whatever her idea his was always much grander; he made her feel beautifully humble by brushing away some of her most cherished hopes as unworthy of their attention.

“A palace in Venice?” I seem to hear him say, perched on one of her little straight gilt chairs, nursing his foot that was tucked under his knee. “But every one has palaces in Venice. Why not a Venetian palace in Paris, the Doge’s Palace itself, reproduced stone for stone, if that takes your fancy?”

And she would catch her breath with the beauty of the idea. Not that Philibert ever intended to do anything so silly as spoil a site in Paris by such a freak of humour. He was a farceur if you like, but he had too much taste for that. He intended having his palace, and it was to be of such supreme beauty as to draw pilgrims from all over the world, but it was to be in harmony with its surroundings. The allusion to the House of the Doges was just his little happy joke. He was very cheerful in those days. People used to say—“Fifi does have luck. Look at him. Who is it now that adores him? Was ever a man so blatantly successful in his love affairs?” I must say he did have the look of being happily in love. His smooth cheeks were pink, his eyes, usually as expressionless as bits of blue enamel, were suffused with light, and the soft flaxen fuzz that grew round the bald spot on his head like the down on a little yellow gosling, seemed to send off electricity. Never in all his immaculate dandyism had he been so immaculate, his linen was superlative and the shine on his little pointed boots was visible halfway down the street. There was a giddy swing to his hurrying coat-tails, and he carried his shoulders superbly. Almost, but not quite, he achieved the look of being taller. And his contempt for the rest of us was of course greater than ever. Born with a gnawing consciousness of his own genius, he had for years been as exasperated as a Michael Angelo or a Paul Veronese forced by lack of space and a sufficiency of paints to spend his time doing little water-colour sketches: but he now saw himself on the way to realizing his inspirations in all their splendid amplitude, and of displaying before the eyes of men the finished gigantic masterpiece of his art. For Philibert was an artist: even Ludovic and Felix and Clémentine recognized that. He was an artist in life on a grand scale. He dealt with men and women and clothes and string orchestras and food and polished floors and marble staircases as a painter deals with the colours on his palette, or perhaps more exactly as the theatrical producer deals with stage properties. His stage was the world itself; he produced his plays and his pageants and his tableaux vivants in the midst of the activities of society, and his actors, reversing the method of our modern stage where the players come down across the footlights to mingle with the audience, were selected by him from the general public without their knowing it, and found themselves playing a part in a scene he had created round them and for them as if by magic. Audacious? Ah, but who could be more so? Who but Fifi would have had the impertinence to take a real live king and make him, all unconscious, play the principal part in a pantomime before a handful of spectators? Mrs. Carpenter had dreamed of entertaining kings. Philibert entertained them, but he did something much more extraordinary; he put them into his play and made them entertain him.

Who in Paris will ever forget the night he threw open his door for the Czar of all the Russias? Who does not remember how he stage-managed the crowd outside, how troops of singers from the Opera mingled with the mob far down the street and sang hymns of acclamation as the royal guest approached his fairy palace, so illumined as to shine like a single rosy jewel? And the golden carpet thrown down on the marble stairs, and Jane standing alone at the top of that fantastic staircase, like an emerald column, her train arranged by Philibert’s own clever hands sweeping down the steps beneath her to add supernaturally to her height, her strange face under its diadem of jewels looking as small in the distance as the carved image cut out of a coin. Do people not talk even now of that night, and allude to Philibert as the last of the benevolent despots? “He was unique,” you can still hear them say it, “there will never be any one like him. No one can amuse the world as he did.” And no one ever will. The War has changed all that. François I. was his father; the Medici were his forerunners; he was the last of his kind.

But he refined on this sensational achievement. He went farther. Only a few realized quite how far he did go. In his most brilliant days, I was on the point of saying during the most brilliant period of his reign, he played plays at which he himself was the sole spectator. I remember the occasion when a certain popular Prince, heir at that time to one of the most solid thrones in Europe, expressed a desire to come and shoot at the Château de Ste. Clothilde. Mrs. Carpenter had been all of a tremble with pleasure. It was the first royal visitor to sleep under his roof. Philibert had restored our old place in the country, and had in five years managed by a miracle to have there the best partridge shooting in France. “You will have a large party for His Royal Highness, I suppose?” Mrs. Carpenter had ventured timidly. How humble and self-effacing she had grown by that time, poor thing. “Not at all,” replied Philibert. “There will be no women and not more than six guns.” And he added then with a sublime simplicity unequalled, I believe, by any monarch or any court jester in history, “When royalty comes to Ste. Clothilde for the shooting, there is another place laid at table, that is all.”

Poor Izzy, she was completely at a loss. No longer could she attempt to follow him. It was Jane who understood. She looked at him curiously through her gleaming half-closed eyes; I remember the look, while she breathed in a whisper—“Take care, you will have nothing left to live for.” I remember the tone of that remark.

But I am anticipating too much. I meant to speak here merely of his matrimonial expectations. These hopes gave his person an added lustre and his fine family nose an accentuated sneer. Nevertheless he kept them secret: no one knew that Mrs. Carpenter even had a daughter. She never mentioned her to any of us. On the other hand she never mentioned Philibert in her letters to Jane. It was part of the scheme. They had worked it out completely between them to its smallest details. Jane would be dangerously independent. She would be in no way answerable to her mother for all that immense lot of money. It was best then that she should suspect nothing. She would arrive, the Marquis de Joigny would be presented to her and would fall in love with her at first sight. Her mother would leave her free to choose for herself. Philibert made himself responsible for the rest.

And, in the meantime, while these two master minds were at work, Jane still waited in the Grey House for her mother to come and fetch her, waited as the appointed time drew near with little of the old exultant expectancy, but instead with nervous misgiving. She was afraid of not pleasing her mother, she was in an agony at the thought of leaving her Aunt Patience.

And I find myself now, as I sit here, painfully counting with suspended breath the last days of Jane’s girlhood in St. Mary’s Plains. I see them silently slipping by over her unconscious head as she sat in the back garden among her Aunt Patty’s hollyhocks, or walked with her French governess along the homely streets, swinging her school books by a strap, humming a tune under her breath, her neat modest clothes swinging to the rhythm of her beautiful young body, her strange little ugly ardent face lifted to the sweet air in frank animal enjoyment. Patience Forbes stands on the front stoop between the two wooden pillars waiting for her to come running up the path, waiting for the generous clasp of those strong young arms, waiting to feel once more the contact of all that pure vital youthfulness, and I hear as they sit down to supper opposite each other, with the tall candles lighted on the old mahogany table and the hot muffins steaming under the folded white napkin, the sound of the grandfather clock in the hall, ticking out the last precious fleeting moments of their time together.

This is very painful, I will not linger over it. I bring myself back, I falter, what then am I to think of? Where turn my attention? So much is ugly. Ah, but Jane, why go any further? Is it not enough? Is it not clear to you as it is to me? Is there any need to say more? Was it not all just as I say? Now that you are back there at last alone, now that we have lost you for ever, now that you have gone, irresistibly drawn out of your splendour to the little shabby place you loved, what is there to torment you? Philibert, Bianca? What have they to do with you now? They hated you. How can you be beholden to people who did you nothing but harm? But Jane, there were some of us who adored you, and if you had told us everything, as you at last told me, we would have loved you only the more.

* * * * * * * * *

I sometimes wonder whether Mrs. Carpenter ever suspected what a narrow shave she had towards the end, and how all her plans very nearly came to nothing at the moment of their fruition because of Bianca. It is probable that she had little more idea of the danger than a vague uneasy suspicion that Philibert for a time was distraught by some influence whose source she ignored. She had met Bianca but did not connect her with Philibert; knowing almost nothing in those days of what she would have called Philibert’s family life. There was no one to tell her that Philibert had once wanted to marry Bianca and that old François had refused him as a suitor for his daughter’s hand because of his lack of fortune. Izzy knew nothing about the strange intimacy of these two. How should she? Philibert was not likely to tell her and certainly none of the rest of us were in the habit of discussing with her the private affairs of our families. My mother knew of course; she doted on Bianca, and Claire, and all the family. They had all desired the match. Bianca was a pearl that they collectively coveted, and when things went wrong they had all been annoyed with the old rake her father. Aunt Clothilde had gone so far as to rap him over the knuckles with her fan one day when he took her out to dinner, and to say in her best rude manner—“You’ve done a pretty thing, spoiling the lives of those two children. And what’s Bianca got from her mother? Five hundred thousand francs a year. Just so, and you will leave her the same when you die, which will be before long at the pace you are going. And Philibert has nothing but his debts, but then, who knows, I might have given him something. I’m not so in love with him as some, but still he’s my nephew, and the two of them were made for each other. Now you’ll see, they’ll both turn out badly.” But François only laughed as if he were enjoying a wicked joke that he was not going to share with her. He was always like that, chuckling to himself in a sly sort of way that made you creep and roused the curiosity of women. Sometimes he would stare at me with his pale, red-rimmed, half-closed eyes and that smile on his face as if my deformity was very amusing. I hated him. I could have told them what kind of a father he was to Bianca.

In any case she was married a year later to her well-to-do nonentity, and we all went to the wedding, and Aunt Clo, being a near relative, walked in the cortège with François and made faces behind her prayer book. But Philibert was white as a sheet and kicked a wretched dog out of the way as he came down the church steps with such violence that he broke its paw. Bianca was, I remember, as lovely and serene as a lily. She didn’t speak to Philibert at all the day she was married. She just kept him standing there near her, not too near, during the reception, as if he belonged to her, as if he were a flunkey of some sort, and never once so much as looked at him. But she spoke to me. She asked me why I had not proposed for her hand. “I might have accepted you, you know” she said in that small reedy penetratingly sweet voice of hers—“just to spite them all,”—and there wasn’t a trace of a smile on her clear curving lips. Devil—she meant it for Philibert, of course, and of course he heard.

My mother used to say that Bianca reminded her of a very young Sir Galahad. Claire suggested half-mockingly St. Sebastian. I thought she was like a fox, quick and cruel with a poisonous bite. As a matter of fact, in those days she looked a harmless little thing. Her small snow-white square face was sweetly modelled and framed as it was by a cap of short black hair that was cut à la Jeanne d’Arc, it had the look of a mediaeval Italian angel. Only her enormous eyes very blue and deep and her voice gave her away. If one watched closely one caught glimpses in those eyes of the invisible monster locked up in that light smooth body; if one listened to her voice one heard it. She seemed to know this, and much of the time she kept her eyes lowered. Cool and aloof and monosyllabic she hid herself, her real self, calculating her power and economical of it, deceptive, waiting till it should be worth her while to disengage the magic that lurked in the smooth complexity of her little person. Her voice was not a pure single note, but a double reedy sound that had a penetrating harmony. One remembered it with a haunting exasperation. It was rather high in pitch, and the words it carried did not punctuate the sound of it, but seemed to be strung like beads on a sustained vibrating chord as if on some double coppery wire. Each word was distinct and beautifully enunciated by her lips without interfering with the sound that flowed through them. There was nothing guttural or emotional about Bianca’s voice, but it was disturbing; it irritated and seemed to correspond to some secret nerve-centre of pleasure in the listener’s brain.

I have watched her sometimes using her voice for special purposes of her own, but for the most part in company she tried to subdue it, and would often stop herself in the middle of one of her rapid speeches with a little annoyed laugh. She would then look down and move away, but even her floating stiffly off like a rigid little broomstick with a pair of wings or wheels on the end of it had a strange charm.

Her gestures were very restrained. She had a way of holding attention so closely when apparently doing nothing, that when she did make the slightest movement it conveyed exactly what she intended it to convey.

Philibert was a connoisseur fit to appreciate her, and she knew it. They had in their precocious youth recognized each in the other a rare complementary quality, but even in the days when Bianca with abbreviated skirts had let me make love to her, the affinity between Philibert and herself had made her hate him. It was a curious attraction I thought that made them constantly want to hurt each other. I knew well enough that Bianca was only sweet to me in order to make Philibert angry. Sometimes in the garden of our house, where we played while François paid his respects of my mother, she would kiss me, looking sideways at Philibert all the time, and he would pirouette on one toe and pretend not to care, and would yell with laughter at me and call out—“Don’t think she loves you. You’re crooked. You will never be any better. You can’t do this. Look at me. She loves me.” And Bianca would turn away from us and look at him as he told her to, and say to him—“I don’t like you at all,” and then stalk away into the drawing room where she would wheedle from her father a succession of lumps of sugar soaked in cognac, and if we followed we would find her rubbing her smooth little cheek up and down against François’ whiskers and making little gurgling noises of pleasure. François was certainly a queer kind of father. Philibert and I could have told tales about that.—If it had only been lumps of sugar dipped in brandy—. We took note with a kind of shocked envy. Once she took us down to the pantry and showed us a bottle of “Triple Sec.” “That’s the nicest,” she said, “it’s like honey fire.”

When she was ten he turned her loose in his library, or at any rate finding her there with some dreadful book in her lap, only laughed. Every one knows what that library contained. Rare editions, old bindings, a priceless collection; bibliophiles came from far to finger those volumes. François was a discriminating collector. But for Bianca—no one discriminated for her. One can see her like a little greedy white lamb browsing in the poisonous herbage of that field of knowledge. She began with the memoirs of Casanova. She had picked it out because it was by an Italian. She was always dreaming about Italy, her mother’s country. Her mother had died while she was a baby, but Bianca seemed to remember her. She often spoke about her, and every Friday went with her governess to light a candle in St. Sulpice for the repose of her spirit. As for her literary discoveries, Philibert alone was aware of what she was up to, and even he didn’t know much about it. Occasionally she would drop a hint, or lend a book. She would never have admitted even to him that she read all the books she did read. She understood Philibert perfectly. As she grew older she allowed him to suspect that she was wise, but not too wise. She was willing to be for him an object of mystification, but never of vulgar curiosity. Gradually she grew conscious of a purpose in regard to Philibert, and I believe that this purpose had something to do with her refusing to marry him. For, after all, she could have brought her father round had she tried to. No, it was not her idea to marry the man she liked. Her idea was far more amusing than that.

What happened just before Jane’s arrival in Paris was simple enough. Bianca had been married two years. She had been to Italy and had come back to find Philibert thick as thieves with a great grey-headed American, and she had asked herself what this meant. It didn’t take her long to find out. She had a way of knowing what he was up to. Probably he told her outright, and she was not pleased. For the moment she did not like the idea of Philibert’s marrying any one, least of all a colossal American fortune. She was far too clever to make a scene. She had other means of getting her own way, and now out of caprice she exerted them. I imagine her opening her monstrous eyes just a little wider than usual and allowing Philibert to look into them. I can see her move ever so slightly with a small jerk of the hips and upward undulation of her slim body, and I watch her lean forward to allow the faint suggestion of that magic essence of hers to disengage itself from her person, through her lifted eyelids, through her sweet parted lips, through the tips of her long delicate fingers, and I see Philibert falter in his talk about the American girl, and silently watch her, and get to his feet like a man in a dream and come close but not too close. For a fortnight she kept him like that, in a trance; everywhere he followed her.

Mrs. Carpenter lost him. It was during the month of May. Bianca went about a good deal that Spring and was very much admired. It was at a big afternoon affair that I saw her, standing with Philibert looking out at the crowded gardens. She was very young still; she was nothing more than a very thin slip of a thing with pretty little sticks of legs and a pair of long delicate arms hanging close to her sides, the fingers pressed against the folds of her slinky muslin frock. She stood very still and rather stiff, her heels together and her lovely head just tilted very slightly away from Philibert as if she had drawn it back quickly and gently at the sound of a disturbing murmur, or as if perhaps she were enticing that murmur, as yet unuttered, from his lips. I watched them. They did not look at each other. Their eyes traced parallel lines of vision before them over the heads of the crowd. Nothing betrayed their deep communion save this common stillness. I did not hear them speak or see their lips move, but I know that Philibert was speaking; I learnt afterwards what it was he was saying.

He was asking her to bolt with him.

It was the moment of supreme danger for Izzy Carpenter. The marvellous edifice she had so carefully fashioned with Philibert hung suspended by a thread. Like some great gorgeous glittering chandelier with a thousand candles hoisted into the air by Bianca’s little finger, it hung there swaying in space, held up to the ceiling of heaven by the thread of her hesitation. Philibert, his hands behind him holding his top hat and gloves against the neat back of his morning coat, watched it. Through closed teeth he had spoken without looking at his companion and now he waited in silence. If she assented the whole thing would be dashed to the ground in a million pieces. He took in all that it meant for him. Like one of those drunkards whose faculties are most keen when they are under the influence of liquor, he saw with excruciating clearness, through the superlative excitation of Bianca’s fascination that was working upon him, the beauty and magnitude of the thing he was sacrificing. And yet if she had said it, the word he awaited, he would have turned away from all that débris with a sneer, so perfectly had Bianca made him feel that she was worth it, worth anything, worth more than even he, with his formidable imagination could conceive of.

She didn’t say it. She didn’t say anything. She merely lowered her head after an instant’s utter stillness and floated away from him. I wonder if there was the slightest of smiles on her lovely averted lips. Perhaps not. Her smile was deep down in the well of her abysmal being. She had had an inspiration. She had thought of something much more amusing than what he proposed. She would reveal it to him later; there was plenty of time. Or perhaps she would never reveal it to him at all, but just make him do as she wished without letting him know that she had thought of it long before. In any case she would leave him alone now.

And so Mrs. Carpenter was saved and went to America to fetch Jane.

VI

Philibert had given himself a month in which to win Jane’s hand, and it took him five. I don’t know why I find any comfort in this fact, but I do. I am glad she kept him waiting. I am glad the two conspirators were uncomfortable, even for so short a time, and there is no doubt that they were uncomfortable. Jane paid no attention to her mother’s funny little friend, who wore corsets and high heels and used scent. She sized him up in a long grave glance that covered him from tip to toe and then seemed to forget about him. The truth was that she was absorbed in her mother. To her great delight she had found in that quarter an unexpected cordiality. It almost seemed as if her mother had decided to like her. She had never been half so nice.

And she fell in love with Paris.

Wonderful enchantress city, queen woman of cities! It had assumed to greet her its most charming and gentle aspect. She arrived one evening in June. She held her breath as she drove across the Place de la Concorde, where the light was silver and blue, and up the Champs Elysées towards the Arc de Triomphe that stood out against the sunset glow like a great and lovely gate into Heaven. She thought, so she told me afterwards, of the magic city under the sea in the poem by Edgar Allen Poe. The following morning she was up with the milkman and had slipped out of the house alone before any one was awake, and had walked from the Avenue du Bois down to the Tuileries Gardens and back again as the newsvenders were taking down the shutters of their kiosks. They smiled at her and nodded. A little morning breeze laughed in the trees. A woman came by wheeling a cart full of flowers. She filled her arms and arrived at her mother’s doorway breathless with pleasure. Mrs. Carpenter had the sense not to scold her, but she was obliged during the days that followed to engage a special duenna who could walk far enough and fast enough to keep up with her daughter. It appeared that Jane had read a good deal of French history. She visited churches, monuments and museums and made excursions to Versailles, la Malmaison, Fontainebleau. The Rue de la Paix amused her, she liked the clothes her mother bought her; but after a long morning at the dressmaker’s, standing to let little kneeling women drape silks on her young body, she would gulp down her lunch and start out again to explore, on foot, refusing to take the motor.

One day she turned into this little street. I saw her. I thought at first that she was a Russian, some young Cossack princess perhaps. Her dog, a Great Dane, walked beside her, his head close to her splendidly moving limbs. I had never seen any one walk like that. She came on, her head up, her arms down along her sides, and the wind, or was it the force of her own swift movement, made her garments flow back from her. It was the Victoire de Samothrace walking through the sunlit streets of Paris. I watched her approach with a strange excitement. Behind her trotted her valiant duenna, a hurrying little woman in black. And as the radiant white figure came nearer I saw that she was very young, scarcely more than a great glorious child, and her strange ugly face under her close white hat shaped like a helmet seemed to me, all glowing though it was with health, to be half asleep. When she was gone I turned back to my rooms and sat with my head in my hands thinking of how curious it was, the regal carriage of that fine free controlled body, and that face that did not know itself. I felt oppressed and exhilarated and somehow full of pity. It was dangerous to be like that, so young, so brave, so unknowing. Yes, an ugly face, but her walk was the most beautiful I had ever seen.

Through July Philibert made no progress with his suit. It was a puzzling problem for him and for Izzy. Mrs. Carpenter found herself the all too successful rival of the man she had selected for her daughter. Jane’s attitude was simple enough. She enjoyed everything immensely and felt that this was just what she had hoped to find. Her wonderful mother who had appeared at one time not to care for her was now giving her daily proofs of affection. And so she was happy. Mrs. Carpenter must have been nonplussed. The connection was obvious, for the more contented Jane was the less sign did she make of wanting anything else. She was delighted at being with her mother: how could it occur to her to want to get married?

And Philibert’s artfulness with women was of no use to him here. His professional tricks were wasted. He could only hold her attention by telling her about the things she looked at; histories, anecdotes, dissertations on art and architecture she would listen to with profound interest. She kept him for hours in the galleries of the Louvre discoursing on the great masters, and occasionally she would say with a sigh while he mopped his exhausted head—“How much you know.” It was the only tribute he got from her.

For August they went to Trouville. Monsieur Cornuché had not yet invented Deauville. The trip was very nearly Philibert’s undoing. He was very hard put to it, was our Philibert, during that month of August. And how he must have hated it. Nothing but sheer grit kept him going, nothing less than the most enormous prize would have induced him to put up with so much misery.

She rode, she swam, she played tennis, she hired a yacht and sailed it. He was most of the time quite literally out of breath with running after tennis balls, carrying golf clubs, galloping down the sands after her vanishing figure; and to add to his discomfiture some of his friends, those whom he could not be seen with under the circumstances, saw him all too often and laughed behind the screen of the little red and white bathing tents. I enjoy in retrospect his discomfiture. Such as it was it constituted for Jane an unconscious revenge. For a month she kept her mother and Philibert on pins and needles, and I believe that if her mother had not been constantly at hand to dress him up again and again in all the trappings of romance, that Jane would have found him finally and irretrievably ridiculous, just a poor exasperated absurd little man who was no good at games and got blue with cold in the water. For of course what saved Philibert in the end was Jane’s desire to please her mother.

Mrs. Carpenter was obliged to take a definite line. It had not been her intention to do so, but she found that she must if the plan were to come off at all. I don’t truly believe the woman was more double-faced than most. She would if one hauled her out of the grave to make her defence, put up, I suppose, a respectable argument. She would say that she had done what thousands of mothers do every day, and what all of them should do. She had picked out a husband whom she considered a brilliant match for her daughter and had married her to him. The only reason that obliged her to resort to subterfuge, and hers, she would say, was of the vaguest and slightest, was the girl’s complete financial independence. Her own extraordinary husband had given her no hold over her daughter, but had put everything into the hands of a trio of bumptious bigoted American citizens. What she really was doing when she had made her plans for Jane and then got her to fulfil them without knowing it, was not bamboozling the child, but getting the best of those horrid trustees. If it had not been for them and the grotesque will they kept waving in her face, she would have said to Jane simply, “Here, my darling, is the man I have chosen for you. You will be married in a month’s time.” But she couldn’t do that. She was forced to make her daughter take him of her own free choice, and so she would go on, briskly explaining that she had done it all for the best. Was it not a creditable desire on her part to see her child the leader of French society? And had not Jane subsequently become even more than that? Was there a town in America that did not read with envy the newspaper accounts of her triumphs? Did it not all come out quite as she had foreseen? If the two were not happy what did that prove? Just nothing at all beyond the tiresome truism that marriages always ended in making people hate each other.

Mrs. Carpenter had adopted a jocular easy manner with her daughter on bringing the girl to Europe that seemed to express her happy sense of their being comrades and equals. The rôle she assumed was that of an elder sister who was ready to give any amount of good-natured advice when asked for, but would in no way interfere with the freedom of the fortunate youngster. This was Izzy’s way of being careful and of making it impossible for Jane ever to turn round and say—“It was my mother who urged me to do it.” Fortunately for her peace of mind Jane hid nothing from her and was constantly asking for guidance.

It was Mrs. Carpenter’s habit to have her morning coffee in bed at nine o’clock after an hour’s massage, and to let Jane come and talk to her while she sipped it and ran through her letters. The girl would come in from an early ride, plunge into a cold bath, and all aglow and smelling of soap and youth would run to her mother’s wonderful scented bedroom where, draped in her dressing-gown, she would stretch herself out on a chaise-longue; and Izzy, under her lace coverlet, enjoying the sensation of her willowy figure rubbed down once more to smooth well-being, would encourage Jane to talk. It was her hour for getting together the data that she would hand on later in the day to Philibert.

Jane would say—“Our little Marquis was riding this morning. He joined me. His eyes looked puffy. They had funny little pouches under them.” And Mrs. Carpenter, who, with a languid finger turning the page of a letter, had pricked up her ears, would sigh inwardly and say aloud—

“The poor man must be tired. He has so many demands on him.” And then secretly irritated but maintaining a bland countenance, she would listen to the girl telling how she had given her would-be suitor a lesson in riding.

“You know, Mummy, he was really hurting that horse’s mouth dreadfully, and he didn’t seem to be sorry when I showed him. Do you think he is just a tiny bit cruel?”

And again Izzy would reply mildly, in defense of the absent one—“My darling, I know him to be the kindest man in the world.”

But Jane did not always by any means show interest in the Marquis de Joigny, and much as it annoyed Mrs. Carpenter to hear him criticized, it disturbed her even more when he was not mentioned at all for days together. Jane would bring with her a letter from her Aunt Patty and read aloud long extracts about St. Mary’s Plains and its tiresome doings, about Patience’s rheumatism and Patience’s bird lectures, and Uncle Bradford’s last new case, and the Mohican bank’s new building on Pawamak Street, and Aunt Beth’s housekeeping adventures in Seattle, until poor Izzy was bored to tears; or she would be full of the problems of Fan’s life with her Polish husband. She saw Fan much more often than her mother could have wished. One day she said—“I don’t think Fan is happy. I suppose it’s because she has married a Roman Catholic. It doesn’t seem to work very well, changing your religion.” And Izzy in alarm scribbled a note of warning and sent it to Philibert by a special messenger. She usually wrote to him on the days she couldn’t manage to see him. Somehow or other he must be kept every day, au courant. I can imagine these messages.

“The child’s head is full of Fan and her wretched Pole, and the effect of religion on marriage. Don’t for anything touch on the subject in talk. You had better keep away from churches when you take her out. She is disturbed by Fan’s money troubles and Ivanoff’s gambling. Don’t for heaven’s sake go near the Casino while we are here.”

It would be comic if it were not something else. I see my elder brother perusing these missives with fervour and tossing them away with exasperated petulance.

Go near the Casino? Had he done so? Was he not the perfect nursemaid?

It was Fan who told me about all this afterwards. She had been in Paris three years before Jane, had got herself brought over by some chance acquaintances who had paid her passage across the Atlantic, and had allowed her to benefit by their loose indifferent chaperonage once she got here. It was all she needed. In six months she had married Ivanoff and knew everybody in Paris who from her point of view was worth knowing. Mrs. Carpenter had been civil to her, but not friendly. Nevertheless it was in Izzy’s drawing room that she had met Ivanoff.

Ivanoff was one of Izzy’s satellites. She was one of the people he lived on. He could expect to win twenty thousand francs from her at Bridge during a winter. Besides that she gave him many meals and introduced him to other people who could be fleeced for more substantial sums. We all knew Ivanoff. His title was supposed not to bear too much looking into, and his estates in Poland were not, I believe, to be found on the map of that country, but he was very presentable and was renowned for his success with women. Fan fell in love with him promptly. He was big, he was dark, his brown face with its mongolian cast of feature, slanting eyes and thick sleek black hair seemed to her beautiful, and she believed that he had a deep romantic soul. Moreover he was a prince and he was like wax in her hands. She could not and did not resist him. Her stepfather made her an allowance of twenty-five thousand francs a year and showed no interest in what she did with it. There was no one to enquire into Ivanoff’s affairs or habits on Fan’s behalf. She was alone in the world and must make her own way. Life with Ivanoff would be a continual stream of parties; Monte Carlo, Paris, Biarritz, Deauville. The prospect glittered before her. Where could she have a good time if not in these gay haunts of pleasure? The thought of going back to St. Mary’s Plains made her feel sick.

She had been married a year or so when Jane joined her mother. Ivanoff was her slave. She could do anything with him except keep him from the gaming table. Her one worry was money, but she did not allow this to worry her much. Jane exasperated her that first summer. Fan felt herself much the wiser and years the older. Jane’s lamblike devotion to her mother “gave her fits.” And Jane seemed utterly indifferent to the enormous power of her money, she was too stupid, the way she let her mother and Philibert manage her. But Fan thought Philibert a great catch. She knew her Paris well enough to know that if Jane became Philibert’s wife her position would be immense. So she didn’t interfere, merely watched and laughed and thought Jane a fool not to see what Philibert was after.

October saw them all in Paris and Philibert not appreciably nearer his goal. Jane no longer ignored him, she now took him for granted, which was almost worse. He determined to be personal. It was not easy with Jane, but he must risk being thought impudent. One day he asked her what kind of a man she wanted to marry. She hesitated, thinking a moment. “A hero or a friend,” she answered. But when he said that he hoped he was her friend she smiled, refusing to take him seriously. The word hero however, gave him his cue. He had too much sense to try and pose as one himself, but the thought occurred to him that perhaps by telling her of other heroes who had belonged to his family and his country, some of the glamour of the past would touch him with a reflected brilliance for those candid romantic eyes. And the task was not uncongenial to him. He had a gift for story-telling and could gossip endlessly about historic personages. Where history was meagre he could rely upon his imagination. He began with the lovely story of Bayard and Du Guesclin and she listened with glowing eyes as he talked of those chivalrous knights. He had found the key. It was easy now to hold her attention. There followed hours and days filled with legend and anecdote, tales of brave chivalry and quaint custom. Philippe le Beau and Jeanne la Folle, Saint Louis, Henri IV, Clothilde de Joigny, the saintly lady whose name was still honoured in the family, Monseigneur de B—— who had had his tongue cut out during the Massacres de Septembre; it was a rich field, and one where he knew his way about, and to supplement his talk he gave her little books of folklore and poetry, and songs of the Troubadours, the poems of Ronsard, and found for her an old parchment copy in script of that charming anonymous ballad that begins “Gentils Galants de France.”

And Jane, delighted, treated him with a new attentive kindness. He had gained her confidence and had touched her imagination, but there again his success seemed to end. He could get no further. It did not occur to her to ask why he took such pains to supply her eager mind with lovely legends. And so he fretted and fumed once more. I can imagine him wracking his brains for a solution. The problem would have presented itself to him with simple brutality. How rouse the girl’s emotions without frightening her? He hit on a plan. Mrs. Carpenter took a box at the Opera. There under cover of the music Philibert whispered adroitly to romantic youth, told her on every note of the scale that she was young and wonderful, that life was full of magic mystery, that the throbbing of her heart was its response to the summons of love, and that some day a man would come to her and beg her to allow him to carry her up and out on the surging torrent of that inspiration into a heaven of pure delight.

It worked. Under the hypnotic influence of the orchestra with its disturbing rhythm and moving harmonies, ravished by the seeming beauty of those sentimental voices, soaring, floating, dropping deep to caress and moan and shiver, all unconscious of the mediocrity, the coarseness, the bold sensuality, her little being stirred, and her senses, waking slowly in their chaste prison responded to the appeal of the man behind her in the shadow, who took on a little the romantic look of the hero on the stage. She did not know what was happening to her. She would come out of the theatre in a daze and walk silently between her mother and Philibert to the carriage and sink back into her corner, her head throbbing, and through half-closed eyelids would gaze with confusion and fear and vague painful pleasure at the tall hat and white shirt-bosom of the man facing her in the intimate gloom, and as though the smoothly moving carriage were just another box for the continuation of the performance she would hear the same voice speaking to her that had mingled with all that music, and she would find it impossible to distinguish between her companion’s reality and the magic charm of the glorious fiction.

One night when he left them at their door after an evening of this kind, she heard him say to her mother who had lingered behind—“C’était très réussi ce soir,” and give a little dry laugh. She did not ask herself what he meant, but his tone struck her ear as discordant and she remembered it afterwards. It was one of the things that flashed up out of her memory when Philibert, some years later, wanting once and for all to answer her questions as to why he had married her, told her with his incomparable lucidity all about the way he and her mother had used her. He put it to her completely then, explaining to her the details of their method and summing it all up with the words—“At least half the credit was your Mamma’s. Though she did not seem to be doing much she was working all the same like a galley-slave. Of course it was not her duty to make love to you, but it was she who prepared your mind for the seed I sowed in it, and it was she who kept me informed of your mental progress. I say mental; you know what I mean. Call it anything you like, but give full credit to your charming mother for what she did for you. She showed signs of positive genius.”

Thus it was that they put their heads together, and after the successful experiment of the Opera evenings had run its course for a month, Jane’s manner began to change. She no longer came rollicking into the room of a morning like a great roystering puppy. She no longer talked so much or so freely, and sometimes, heavy-eyed and pale, as if she had not slept well, she would lie silently on her back staring at the ceiling, and blush crimson when asked what her thoughts were. These facts were reported faithfully to Philibert of course, also the incidents of the morning, when Jane got up with a bound and placed herself abruptly before her mother’s long mirror and cried with the accent of despair—“Am I always to be so ugly?”

But I imagine Mrs. Carpenter in telling Philibert did not finish the story. She had said to Jane—“No, my child, you can be considered a beauty if you want to. With that body your face doesn’t matter. Men will admire you, never fear; in fact I know one that does already.”

Jane at that had turned away from the glass and had come to the foot of her mother’s bed and had said earnestly, with a flood of crimson mantling her face and throat—“But it’s not a man’s admiration I’m thinking of, mother dear, it’s yours.” The child had then become speechless and had gulped strangely with the effort not to break down and had given it up and gone quickly out of the room.

If Mrs. Carpenter was touched she did not say so, and she never referred to the incident in her subsequent talks with Jane, limiting her remarks on the girl’s appearance to a voluble flow of worldly advice.

“Never go in for curls or ribbons or fluffiness. That’s not your style. If you must look like a Chinese mummy then look it even more than you do. Make the most of your queerness. People won’t know whether you are ugly or handsome, but they’ll be bound to look at you. That’s all that’s necessary. Anything is better than being unnoticed. That you never will be. Nonsense, you must get used to being stared at. Most girls like it. Wear your hair straight back and close to your head. Never mind your lower lip. Don’t make faces trying to draw it in. Stick it out rather. Carry your head high. Look as if you were proud of your profile. Your dresses should always be straight and stiff like an oblong box. That one you’ve got on is too soft, and there’s too much trimming. You will be able to wear any amount of jewellery later, but never let yourself be tempted by lace. You walk well, and your back, thank God, is as flat as a board. You’ll never need to wear corsets if you’re careful, but you must learn what to do with your hands. You’re always clenching your fists as if you were going to hit somebody. And I don’t like those boys’ pumps you wear; they’re too round at the toe.” And so on and so on. And Jane, rather bewildered, would try to make out from all this whether her mother herself liked the person she was giving advice to or not.

But in the end, in spite of all her cautiousness, Izzy was obliged to commit herself. Jane didn’t let her off. On the contrary she went straight to her one evening with the proposal Philibert had made her. It was late and Mrs. Carpenter was sitting in front of her fire, wondering whether she had been right in leaving the two alone together for so long in the drawing room. She had never left them alone before. It had been Philibert’s suggestion and she had agreed with some slight misgiving. It had occurred to her of a sudden that perhaps he would not have dared to make such a proposal to one of his own people, and she felt a flush of annoyance. Strange inconsistency on the part of a woman who had so thrown to the winds the spiritual decencies, but there you are; she was worried and mortified, and when Jane entered, turned to her with a warmer gesture than was her habit. The girl responded by kneeling at her side and winding her arms round the slim waist and saying—

“Do you really want me to do it, Mother dear?”

The question put in that way, suggesting as it did a keener insight on Jane’s part into her mother’s heart than had even been imagined by the latter, must have been startling. Mrs. Carpenter hesitated, hedged, was at a loss.

“What do you mean, child?”

But Jane was not to be put off.

“You know what I mean, Mummy darling. The question is, do you really want it? I told him that I would do what you said, and I mean it.” And then rather quaintly she added—“I don’t suppose Aunt Patty would approve of me. She likes independence. But I have made up my mind to do as you wish.”

There it was. Mrs. Carpenter was forced into it. Jane, all unknowingly, had her. It was no use asking the girl if she liked him: she only said she felt she undoubtedly would if she made up her mind to, and so at last after some more hesitating Izzy was obliged to say—

“Well, darling, since you will have it so, I must tell you that your acceptance of this distinguished man would make me very happy.” And Jane, still uncommunicative and by some marvellous instinct of profound youth hiding at last the tumultuous feelings of her heart, accepted her mother’s decision sweetly and calmly and went away to her room.

If she saw there in her mirror, as we are told girls do on such occasions, a new strange creature, the difference was in her case less fictitious than most. A very rapid transformation does seem to have come over her after this. It was as if in accepting Philibert she had walked bravely up to him and had given him the secret key to her soul, and as if in turn he had thrown a handful of dust in her eyes. The effect of the interchange was instantaneous. Philibert had seemed to her in the beginning, an old man, excessively foreign and occasionally ridiculous; he was now a hero. I cannot explain the change. I only know that it was so. The mystery of her girlhood remains to me a mystery. Who am I to understand her love for my detestable brother? Who am I to understand the love of any innocent girl for any man? I only know that Jane’s passion was derived from her own romantic nature and not from him. I have a feeling that had she once made up her mind to love an iron poker, she would have loved it with the same fire and the same ecstasy. At that period of her life the object of her affection was scarcely more real than a symbol. Philibert represented for her not himself but her dreams. It may be so with most young people. I do not know. But what Jane meant when she said to her mother that she was sure she would come to like him if she made up her mind to, was really that she knew she would adore him if with her mother’s approval, she let herself go, i. e., let her imagination control her feelings. What she wanted from her mother was not only an indication but a guarantee. Her mother’s consent to her marriage she took as a sign that she could gloriously give her heart its freedom.

And Jane’s heart now that he had won it was a surprise to Philibert. He had gone a-hunting for a dove or some timid sparrow, and he found himself with an eagle on his hands. He was expected to soar with this young companion that he had captured. There was no hesitation about Jane. Spreading wide the wings of her beautiful belief, she flew, she was making for heaven.

Poor, wonderful, ignorant Jane. It was to her of a simplicity. Since she knew now, because her mother had said so, that he was worth marrying, then he was worthy of all her confidence. Shyly but bravely she told him so. She spoke to him of God, of life with him after death, of sharing with him all her thoughts. She unbared to him her ideals, confessed her dreams, faltered out her fear of her own wild impulses, recounting to him simply the affair of the boy in St. Mary’s Plains she had almost killed. She told him all about the Grey House and her Aunt Patty and her grandmother’s death and her Aunt Minnie’s religious fanaticism. It is dreadful to think of. He has said that he was never so bored in his life. I have heard him say so, and of course he would have been. After a rubber or two at the Jockey, he would turn up at Izzy’s flat for tea and find Jane waiting for him, her face charged with grave confident sweetness. She would put a hand on each of his shoulders and kiss his lips, and then drawing him to a sofa beside her would hold his hand in both of hers and pour out to him the secrets of her heart, and he, beside himself with boredom, would listen and make his responses to the clear chant of her young voice singing its joy.

“We will be everything to each other, Philibert.”

“Yes, dear.”

“We will share each other’s thoughts.”

“Of course.”

“You will teach me how to love you.”

“I will.”

“And be worthy of you.”

“My darling.”

“Love is very wonderful, Philibert.”

“Yes, dear.”

“I feel one should be very much alone to understand. You and I alone. We must keep ourselves free to be alone together.”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes I am sorry that we have so much money.”

“Why, my darling?”