“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?”