A vast column of smoke rising spread like a brown cloud, pierced here and there by fantastic shafts of sunlight. It was a second sky, a murky dome reflecting the glow of the fire as if the under surface had been burnished; but above it soared the unchanging blue of the firmament, a thousand times fairer for the short-lived contrast. The strange hues of the smoke cloud, black and red, tawny and pale by turns, blurred and blending into each other, shrouded the burning vessel as it flared, crackled and groaned; the hissing tongues of flame licked up the rigging, and flashed across the hull, like a rumor of riot flashing along the streets of a city. The burning rum sent up blue flitting lights. Some sea god might have been stirring the furious liquor as a student stirs the joyous flames of punch in an orgy. But in the overpowering sunlight, jealous of the insolent blaze, the colors were scarcely visible, and the smoke was but a film fluttering like a thin scarf in the noonday torrent of light and heat.
The Othello made the most of the little wind she could gain to fly on her new course. Swaying first to one side, then to the other, like a stag beetle on the wing, the fair vessel beat to windward on her zigzag flight to the south. Sometimes she was hidden from sight by the straight column of smoke that flung fantastic shadows across the water, then gracefully she shot out clear of it, and Helene, catching sight of her father, waved her handkerchief for yet one more farewell greeting.
A few more minutes, and the Saint-Ferdinand went down with a bubbling turmoil, at once effaced by the ocean. Nothing of all that had been was left but a smoke cloud hanging in the breeze. The Othello was far away, the long-boat had almost reached land, the cloud came between the frail skiff and the brig, and it was through a break in the swaying smoke that the General caught the last glimpse of Helene. A prophetic vision! Her dress and her white handkerchief stood out against the murky background. Then the brig was not even visible between the green water and the blue sky, and Helene was nothing but an imperceptible speck, a faint graceful line, an angel in heaven, a mental image, a memory.
The Marquis had retrieved his fortunes, when he died, worn out with toil. A few months after his death, in 1833, the Marquise was obliged to take Moina to a watering-place in the Pyrenees, for the capricious child had a wish to see the beautiful mountain scenery. They left the baths, and the following tragical incident occurred on their way home.
“Dear me, mother,” said Moina, “it was very foolish of us not to stay among the mountains a few days longer. It was much nicer there. Did you hear that horrid child moaning all night, and that wretched woman, gabbling away in patois no doubt, for I could not understand a single word she said. What kind of people can they have put in the next room to ours? This is one of the horridest nights I have ever spent in my life.”
“I heard nothing,” said the Marquise, “but I will see the landlady, darling, and engage the next room, and then we shall have the whole suite of rooms to ourselves, and there will be no more noise. How do you feel this morning? Are you tired?”
As she spoke, the Marquise rose and went to Moina’s bedside.
“Let us see,” she said, feeling for the girl’s hand.
“Oh! let me alone, mother,” said Moina; “your fingers are cold.”
She turned her head round on the pillow as she spoke, pettishly, but with such engaging grace, that a mother could scarcely have taken it amiss. Just then a wailing cry echoed through the next room, a faint prolonged cry, that must surely have gone to the heart of any woman who heard it.
“Why, if you heard that all night long, why did you not wake me? We should have – ”
A deeper moan than any that had gone before it interrupted the Marquise.
“Some one is dying there,” she cried, and hurried out of the room.
“Send Pauline to me!” called Moina. “I shall get up and dress.”
The Marquise hastened downstairs, and found the landlady in the courtyard with a little group about her, apparently much interested in something that she was telling them.
“Madame, you have put some one in the next room who seems to be very ill indeed – ”
“Oh! don’t talk to me about it!” cried the mistress of the house. “I have just sent some one for the mayor. Just imagine it; it is a woman, a poor unfortunate creature that came here last night on foot. She comes from Spain; she has no passport and no money; she was carrying her baby on her back, and the child was dying. I could not refuse to take her in. I went up to see her this morning myself; for when she turned up yesterday, it made me feel dreadfully bad to look at her. Poor soul! she and the child were lying in bed, and both of them at death’s door. ‘Madame,’ says she, pulling a gold ring off her finger, ‘this is all that I have left; take it in payment, it will be enough; I shall not stay here long. Poor little one! we shall die together soon!’ she said, looking at the child. I took her ring, and I asked her who she was, but she never would tell me her name… I have just sent for the doctor and M. le Maire.”
“Why, you must do all that can be done for her,” cried the Marquise. “Good heavens! perhaps it is not too late! I will pay for everything that is necessary – ”
“Ah! my lady, she looks to me uncommonly proud, and I don’t know that she would allow it.”
“I will go to see her at once.”
The Marquise went up forthwith to the stranger’s room, without thinking of the shock that the sight of her widow’s weeds might give to a woman who was said to be dying. At the sight of that dying woman the Marquise turned pale. In spite of the changes wrought by fearful suffering in Helene’s beautiful face, she recognized her eldest daughter.
But Helene, when she saw a woman dressed in black, sat upright in bed with a shriek of horror. Then she sank back; she knew her mother.
“My daughter,” said Mme. d’Aiglemont, “what is to be done? Pauline!.. Moina!..”
“Nothing now for me,” said Helene faintly. “I had hoped to see my father once more, but your mourning – ” she broke off, clutched her child to her heart as if to give it warmth, and kissed its forehead. Then she turned her eyes on her mother, and the Marquise met the old reproach in them, tempered with forgiveness, it is true, but still reproach. She saw it, and would not see it. She forgot that Helene was the child conceived amid tears and despair, the child of duty, the cause of one of the greatest sorrows in her life. She stole to her eldest daughter’s side, remembering nothing but that Helene was her firstborn, the child who had taught her to know the joys of motherhood. The mother’s eyes were full of tears. “Helene, my child!..” she cried, with her arms about her daughter.
Helene was silent. Her own babe had just drawn its last breath on her breast.
Moina came into the room with Pauline, her maid, and the landlady and the doctor. The Marquise was holding her daughter’s ice-cold hand in both of hers, and gazing at her in despair; but the widowed woman, who had escaped shipwreck with but one of all her fair band of children, spoke in a voice that was dreadful to hear. “All this is your work,” she said. “If you had but been for me all that – ”
“Moina, go! Go out of the room, all of you!” cried Mme. d’Aiglemont, her shrill tones drowning Helene’s voice. – “For pity’s sake,” she continued, “let us not begin these miserable quarrels again now – ”
“I will be silent,” Helene answered with a preternatural effort. “I am a mother; I know that Moina ought not… Where is my child?”
Moina came back, impelled by curiosity.
“Sister,” said the spoiled child, “the doctor – ”
“It is all of no use,” said Helene. “Oh! why did I not die as a girl of sixteen when I meant to take my own life? There is no happiness outside the laws. Moina… you…”
Her head sank till her face lay against the face of the little one; in her agony she strained her babe to her breast, and died.
“Your sister, Moina,” said Mme. d’Aiglemont, bursting into tears when she reached her room, “your sister meant no doubt to tell you that a girl will never find happiness in a romantic life, in living as nobody else does, and, above all things, far away from her mother.”
VI. THE OLD AGE OF A GUILTY MOTHER
It was one of the earliest June days of the year 1844. A lady of fifty or thereabouts, for she looked older than her actual age, was pacing up and down one of the sunny paths in the garden of a great mansion in the Rue Plument in Paris. It was noon. The lady took two or three turns along the gently winding garden walk, careful never to lose sight of a certain row of windows, to which she seemed to give her whole attention; then she sat down on a bench, a piece of elegant semi-rusticity made of branches with the bark left on the wood. From the place where she sat she could look through the garden railings along the inner boulevards to the wonderful dome of the Invalides rising above the crests of a forest of elm-trees, and see the less striking view of her own grounds terminating in the gray stone front of one of the finest hotels in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
Silence lay over the neighboring gardens, and the boulevards stretching away to the Invalides. Day scarcely begins at noon in that aristocratic quarter, and masters and servants are all alike asleep, or just awakening, unless some young lady takes it into her head to go for an early ride, or a gray-headed diplomatist rises betimes to redraft a protocol.
The elderly lady stirring abroad at that hour was the Marquise d’Aiglemont, the mother of Mme. de Saint-Hereen, to whom the great house belonged. The Marquise had made over the mansion and almost her whole fortune to her daughter, reserving only an annuity for herself.
The Comtesse Moina de Saint-Hereen was Mme. d’Aiglemont’s youngest child. The Marquise had made every sacrifice to marry her daughter to the eldest son of one of the greatest houses of France; and this was only what might have been expected, for the lady had lost her sons, first one and then the other. Gustave, Marquis d’Aiglemont, had died of the cholera; Abel, the second, had fallen in Algeria. Gustave had left a widow and children, but the dowager’s affection for her sons had been only moderately warm, and for the next generation it was decidedly tepid. She was always civil to her daughter-in-law, but her feeling towards the young Marquise was the distinctly conventional affection which good taste and good manners require us to feel for our relatives. The fortunes of her dead children having been settled, she could devote her savings and her own property to her darling Moina.
Moina, beautiful and fascinating from childhood, was Mme. d’Aiglemont’s favorite; loved beyond all the others with an instinctive or involuntary love, a fatal drawing of the heart, which sometimes seems inexplicable, sometimes, and to a close observer, only too easy to explain. Her darling’s pretty face, the sound of Moina’s voice, her ways, her manner, her looks and gestures, roused all the deepest emotions that can stir a mother’s heart with trouble, rapture, or delight. The springs of the Marquise’s life, of yesterday, to-morrow, and to-day, lay in that young heart. Moina, with better fortune, had survived four older children. As a matter of fact, Mme. d’Aiglemont had lost her eldest daughter, a charming girl, in a most unfortunate manner, said gossip, nobody knew exactly what became of her; and then she lost a little boy of five by a dreadful accident.
The child of her affections had, however, been spared to her, and doubtless the Marquise saw the will of Heaven in that fact; for those who had died, she kept but very shadowy recollections in some far-off corner of her heart; her memories of her dead children were like the headstones on a battlefield, you can scarcely see them for the flowers that have sprung up about them since. Of course, if the world had chosen, it might have said some hard truths about the Marquise, might have taken her to task for shallowness and an overweening preference for one child at the expense of the rest; but the world of Paris is swept along by the full flood of new events, new ideas, and new fashions, and it was inevitable the Mme. d’Aiglemont should be in some sort allowed to drop out of sight. So nobody thought of blaming her for coldness or neglect which concerned no one, whereas her quick, apprehensive tenderness for Moina was found highly interesting by not a few who respected it as a sort of superstition. Besides, the Marquise scarcely went into society at all; and the few families who knew her thought of her as a kindly, gentle, indulgent woman, wholly devoted to her family. What but a curiosity, keen indeed, would seek to pry beneath the surface with which the world is quite satisfied? And what would we not pardon to old people, if only they will efface themselves like shadows, and consent to be regarded as memories and nothing more!
Indeed, Mme. d’Aiglemont became a kind of example complacently held up by the younger generation to fathers of families, and frequently cited to mothers-in-law. She had made over her property to Moina in her own lifetime; the young Countess’ happiness was enough for her, she only lived in her daughter. If some cautious old person or morose uncle here and there condemned the course with – “Perhaps Mme. d’Aiglemont may be sorry some day that she gave up her fortune to her daughter; she may be sure of Moina, but how can she be equally sure of her son-in-law?” – these prophets were cried down on all sides, and from all sides a chorus of praise went up for Moina.
“It ought to be said, in justice to Mme. de Saint-Hereen, that her mother cannot feel the slightest difference,” remarked a young married woman. “Mme. d’Aiglemont is admirably well housed. She has a carriage at her disposal, and can go everywhere just as she used to do – ”
“Except to the Italiens,” remarked a low voice. (This was an elderly parasite, one of those persons who show their independence – as they think – by riddling their friends with epigrams.) “Except to the Italiens. And if the dowager cares for anything on this earth but her daughter – it is music. Such a good performer she was in her time! But the Countess’ box is always full of young butterflies, and the Countess’ mother would be in the way; the young lady is talked about already as a great flirt. So the poor mother never goes to the Italiens.”
“Mme. de Saint-Hereen has delightful ‘At Homes’ for her mother,” said a rosebud. “All Paris goes to her salon.
“And no one pays any attention to the Marquise,” returned the parasite.
“The fact is that Mme. d’Aiglemont is never alone,” remarked a coxcomb, siding with the young women.
“In the morning,” the old observer continued in a discreet voice, “in the morning dear Moina is asleep. At four o’clock dear Moina drives in the Bois. In the evening dear Moina goes to a ball or to the Bouffes. – Still, it is certainly true that Mme. d’Aiglemont has the privilege of seeing her dear daughter while she dresses, and again at dinner, if dear Moina happens to dine with her mother. Not a week ago, sir,” continued the elderly person, laying his hand on the arm of the shy tutor, a new arrival in the house, “not a week ago, I saw the poor mother, solitary and sad, by her own fireside. – ‘What is the matter?’ I asked. The Marquise looked up smiling, but I am quite sure that she had been crying. – ‘I was thinking that it is a strange thing that I should be left alone when I have had five children,’ she said, ‘but that is our destiny! And besides, I am happy when I know that Moina is enjoying herself.’ – She could say that to me, for I knew her husband when he was alive. A poor stick he was, and uncommonly lucky to have such a wife; it was certainly owing to her that he was made a peer of France, and had a place at Court under Charles X.”
Yet such mistaken ideas get about in social gossip, and such mischief is done by it, that the historian of manners is bound to exercise his discretion, and weigh the assertions so recklessly made. After all, who is to say that either mother or daughter was right or wrong? There is but One who can read and judge their hearts! And how often does He wreak His vengeance in the family circle, using throughout all time children as His instruments against their mothers, and fathers against their sons, raising up peoples against kings, and princes against peoples, sowing strife and division everywhere? And in the world of ideas, are not opinions and feelings expelled by new feelings and opinions, much as withered leaves are thrust forth by the young leaf-buds in the spring? – all in obedience to the immutable Scheme; all to some end which God alone knows. Yet, surely, all things proceed to Him, or rather, to Him all things return.
Such thoughts of religion, the natural thoughts of age, floated up now and again on the current of Mme. d’Aiglemont’s thoughts; they were always dimly present in her mind, but sometimes they shone out clearly, sometimes they were carried under, like flowers tossed on the vexed surface of a stormy sea.
She sat on a garden-seat, tired with walking, exhausted with much thinking – with the long thoughts in which a whole lifetime rises up before the mind, and is spread out like a scroll before the eyes of those who feel that Death is near.
If a poet had chanced to pass along the boulevard, he would have found an interesting picture in the face of this woman, grown old before her time. As she sat under the dotted shadow of the acacia, the shadow the acacia casts at noon, a thousand thoughts were written for all the world to see on her features, pale and cold even in the hot, bright sunlight. There was something sadder than the sense of waning life in that expressive face, some trouble that went deeper than the weariness of experience. It was a face of a type that fixes you in a moment among a host of characterless faces that fail to draw a second glance, a face to set you thinking. Among a thousand pictures in a gallery, you are strongly impressed by the sublime anguish on the face of some Madonna of Murillo’s; by some Beatrice Cenci in which Guido’s art portrays the most touching innocence against a background of horror and crime; by the awe and majesty that should encircle a king, caught once and for ever by Velasquez in the sombre face of a Philip II., and so is it with some living human faces; they are tyrannous pictures which speak to you, submit you to searching scrutiny, and give response to your inmost thoughts, nay, there are faces that set forth a whole drama, and Mme. d’Aiglemont’s stony face was one of these awful tragedies, one of such faces as Dante Alighieri saw by thousands in his vision.
For the little season that a woman’s beauty is in flower it serves her admirably well in the dissimulation to which her natural weakness and our social laws condemn her. A young face and rich color, and eyes that glow with light, a gracious maze of such subtle, manifold lines and curves, flawless and perfectly traced, is a screen that hides everything that stirs the woman within. A flush tells nothing, it only heightens the coloring so brilliant already; all the fires that burn within can add little light to the flame of life in eyes which only seem the brighter for the flash of a passing pain. Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshness of a lake. There is not character in women’s faces before the age of thirty. The painter discovers nothing there but pink and white, and the smile and expression that repeat the same thought in the same way – a thought of youth and love that goes no further than youth and love. But the face of an old woman has expressed all that lay in her nature; passion has carved lines on her features; love and wifehood and motherhood, and extremes of joy and anguish, having wrung them, and left their traces in a thousand wrinkles, all of which speak a language of their own; then it is that a woman’s face becomes sublime in its horror, beautiful in its melancholy, grand in its calm. If it is permissible to carry the strange metaphor still further, it might be said that in the dried-up lake you can see the traces of all the torrents that once poured into it and made it what it is. An old face is nothing to the frivolous world; the frivolous world is shocked by the sight of the destruction of such comeliness as it can understand; a commonplace artist sees nothing there. An old face is the province of the poets among poets of those who can recognize that something which is called Beauty, apart from all the conventions underlying so many superstitions in art and taste.
Though Mme. d’Aiglemont wore a fashionable bonnet, it was easy to see that her once black hair had been bleached by cruel sorrows; yet her good taste and the gracious acquired instincts of a woman of fashion could be seen in the way she wore it, divided into two bandeaux, following the outlines of a forehead that still retained some traces of former dazzling beauty, worn and lined though it was. The contours of her face, the regularity of her features, gave some idea, faint in truth, of that beauty of which surely she had once been proud; but those traces spoke still more plainly of the anguish which had laid it waste, of sharp pain that had withered the temples, and made those hollows in her cheeks, and empurpled the eyelids, and robbed them of their lashes, and the eyes of their charm. She was in every way so noiseless; she moved with a slow, self-contained gravity that showed itself in her whole bearing, and struck a certain awe into others. Her diffident manner had changed to positive shyness, due apparently to a habit now of some years’ growth, of effacing herself in her daughter’s presence. She spoke very seldom, and in the low tones used by those who perforce must live within themselves a life of reflection and concentration. This demeanor led others to regard her with an indefinable feeling which was neither awe nor compassion, but a mysterious blending of the many ideas awakened in us by compassion and awe. Finally, there was something in her wrinkles, in the lines of her face, in the look of pain in those wan eyes of hers, that bore eloquent testimony to tears that never had fallen, tears that had been absorbed by her heart. Unhappy creatures, accustomed to raise their eyes to heaven, in mute appeal against the bitterness of their lot, would have seen at once from her eyes that she was broken in to the cruel discipline of ceaseless prayer, would have discerned the almost imperceptible symptoms of the secret bruises which destroy all the flowers of the soul, even the sentiment of motherhood.
Painters have colors for these portraits, but words, and the mental images called up by words, fail to reproduce such impressions faithfully; there are mysterious signs and tokens in the tones of the coloring and in the look of human faces, which the mind only seizes through the sense of sight; and the poet is fain to record the tale of the events which wrought the havoc to make their terrible ravages understood.
The face spoke of cold and steady storm, an inward conflict between a mother’s long-suffering and the limitations of our nature, for our human affections are bounded by our humanity, and the infinite has no place in finite creatures. Sorrow endured in silence had at last produced an indefinable morbid something in this woman. Doubtless mental anguish had reacted on the physical frame, and some disease, perhaps an aneurism, was undermining Julie’s life. Deep-seated grief lies to all appearance very quietly in the depths where it is conceived, yet, so still and apparently dormant as it is, it ceaselessly corrodes the soul, like the terrible acid which eats away crystal.
Two tears made their way down the Marquise’s cheeks; she rose to her feet as if some thought more poignant than any that preceded it had cut her to the quick. She had doubtless come to a conclusion as to Moina’s future; and now, foreseeing clearly all the troubles in store for her child, the sorrows of her own unhappy life had begun to weigh once more upon her. The key of her position must be sought in her daughter’s situation.
The Comte de Saint-Hereen had been away for nearly six months on a political mission. The Countess, whether from sheer giddiness, or in obedience to the countless instincts of woman’s coquetry, or to essay its power – with all the vanity of a frivolous fine lady, all the capricious waywardness of a child – was amusing herself, during her husband’s absence, by playing with the passion of a clever but heartless man, distracted (so he said) with love, the love that combines readily with every petty social ambition of a self-conceited coxcomb. Mme. d’Aiglemont, whose long experience had given her a knowledge of life, and taught her to judge of men and to dread the world, watched the course of this flirtation, and saw that it could only end in one way, if her daughter should fall into the hands of an utterly unscrupulous intriguer. How could it be other than a terrible thought for her that her daughter listened willingly to this roue? Her darling stood on the brink of a precipice, she felt horribly sure of it, yet dared not hold her back. She was afraid of the Countess. She knew too that Moina would not listen to her wise warnings; she knew that she had no influence over that nature – iron for her, silken-soft for all others. Her mother’s tenderness might have led her to sympathize with the troubles of a passion called forth by the nobler qualities of a lover, but this was no passion – it was coquetry, and the Marquise despised Alfred de Vandenesse, knowing that he had entered upon this flirtation with Moina as if it were a game of chess.
But if Alfred de Vandenesse made her shudder with disgust, she was obliged – unhappy mother! – to conceal the strongest reason for her loathing in the deepest recesses of her heart. She was on terms of intimate friendship with the Marquis de Vandenesse, the young man’s father; and this friendship, a respectable one in the eyes of the world, excused the son’s constant presence in the house, he professing an old attachment, dating from childhood, for Mme. de Saint-Hereen. More than this, in vain did Mme. d’Aiglemont nerve herself to come between Moina and Alfred de Vandenesse with a terrible word, knowing beforehand that she should not succeed; knowing that the strong reason which ought to separate them would carry no weight; that she should humiliate herself vainly in her daughter’s eyes. Alfred was too corrupt; Moina too clever to believe the revelation; the young Countess would turn it off and treat it as a piece of maternal strategy. Mme. d’Aiglemont had built her prison walls with her own hands; she had immured herself only to see Moina’s happiness ruined thence before she died; she was to look on helplessly at the ruin of the young life which had been her pride and joy and comfort, a life a thousand times dearer to her than her own. What words can describe anguish so hideous beyond belief, such unfathomed depths of pain?
She waited for Moina to rise, with the impatience and sickening dread of a doomed man, who longs to have done with life, and turns cold at the thought of the headsman. She had braced herself for a last effort, but perhaps the prospect of the certain failure of the attempt was less dreadful to her than the fear of receiving yet again one of those thrusts that went to her very heart – before that fear her courage ebbed away. Her mother’s love had come to this. To love her child, to be afraid of her, to shrink from the thought of the stab, yet to go forward. So great is a mother’s affection in a loving nature, that before it can fade away into indifference the mother herself must die or find support in some great power without her, in religion or another love. Since the Marquise rose that morning, her fatal memory had called up before her some of those things, so slight to all appearance, that make landmarks in a life. Sometimes, indeed, a whole tragedy grows out of a single gesture; the tone in which a few words were spoken rends a whole life in two; a glance into indifferent eyes is the deathblow of the gladdest love; and, unhappily, such gestures and such words were only too familiar to Mme. d’Aiglemont – she had met so many glances that wound the soul. No, there was nothing in those memories to bid her hope. On the contrary, everything went to show that Alfred had destroyed her hold on her daughter’s heart, that the thought of her was now associated with duty – not with gladness. In ways innumerable, in things that were mere trifles in themselves, the Countess’ detestable conduct rose up before her mother; and the Marquise, it may be, looked on Moina’s undutifulness as a punishment, and found excuses for her daughter in the will of Heaven, that so she still might adore the hand that smote her.
All these things passed through her memory that morning, and each recollection wounded her afresh so sorely, that with a very little additional pain her brimming cup of bitterness must have overflowed. A cold look might kill her.
The little details of domestic life are difficult to paint; but one or two perhaps will suffice to give an idea of the rest.
The Marquise d’Aiglemont, for instance, had grown rather deaf, but she could never induce Moina to raise her voice for her. Once, with the naivete of suffering, she had begged Moina to repeat some remark which she had failed to catch, and Moina obeyed, but with so bad a grace, the Mme. d’Aiglemont had never permitted herself to make her modest request again. Ever since that day when Moina was talking or retailing a piece of news, her mother was careful to come near to listen; but this infirmity of deafness appeared to put the Countess out of patience, and she would grumble thoughtlessly about it. This instance is one from among very many that must have gone to the mother’s heart; and yet nearly all of them might have escaped a close observer, they consisted in faint shades of manner invisible to any but a woman’s eyes. Take another example. Mme. d’Aiglemont happened to say one day that the Princesse de Cadignan had called upon her. “Did she come to see you!” Moina exclaimed. That was all, but the Countess’ voice and manner expressed surprise and well-bred contempt in semitones. Any heart, still young and sensitive, might well have applauded the philanthropy of savage tribes who kill off their old people when they grow too feeble to cling to a strongly shaken bough. Mme. d’Aiglemont rose smiling, and went away to weep alone.