Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

  “Very well. Believe what I tell you.”

  “You include only what you tell in words?”

  “Plainly, you are not troubled by timidity,” said the lady, laughing a second time.

  “On the contrary, it is excess of timidity. It makes me desperate and crude.”

  They had walked on, and now came up with the others. “Does he amuse you?” said Sylvia, in a low tone, as Cousin Walpole in his turn walked onward with the new-comer. “I heard you laughing.”

  “Yes; but he is not at all what you said. He is so shy and ill at ease that it is almost painful.”

  “Dear me!” said the aunt, with concern. “The best thing, then, will be for him to come and stay with us. You have so much company that it will be good for him; his shyness will wear off.”

  “I have invited him, but I doubt his coming,” said the lady of the manor.

  The outlook was a little terrace built out over the water. Mrs. Winthrop seated herself and took off her garden-hat (Mrs. Winthrop had a very graceful head, and thick, soft, brown hair). “Not so close, Gibbon,” she said, as the shaggy dog laid himself down beside her.

  “You call your dog Gibbon?” said Ford.

  “Yes; he came from Lausanne, where Gibbon lived; and I think he looks just like him. But pray put on your hat, Mr. Ford. A man in the open air, deprived of his hat, is always a wretched object, and always takes cold.”

  “I may be wretched, but I do not take cold,” replied Ford, letting his hat lie.

  “John does look very strong,” said Sylvia, with pride.

  “O fortunate youth—if he but knew his good-fortune!” said Cousin Walpole. “From the Latin, sir; I do not quote the original tongue in the presence of ladies, which would seem pedantic. You do look strong indeed, and I congratulate you. I myself have never been an athlete; but I admire, and with impartiality, the muscles of the gladiator.”

  “Surely, Cousin Walpole, there is nothing in common between John and a gladiator!”

  “Your pardon, Cousin Sylvia. I was speaking generally. My conversation, sir,” said the bachelor, turning to Ford, “is apt to be general.”

  “No one likes personalities, I suppose,” replied Ford, watching the last hues of the sunset.

  “On the contrary, I am devoted to them,” said Mrs. Winthrop.

  “Oh no, Katharine; you malign yourself,” said Sylvia. “You must not believe all she says, John.”

  “Mr. Ford has just promised to do that very thing,” remarked Mrs. Winthrop.

  “Dear me!” said Sylvia. Her tone of dismay was so sincere that they all laughed. “You know, dear, you have so much imagination,” she said, apologetically, to her cousin.

  “Mr. Ford has not,” replied the younger lady; “so the exercise will do him no harm.”

  The sky behind the splendid white mass of Mont Blanc was of a deep warm gold; the line of snowy peaks attending the monarch rose irregularly against this radiance from east to west, framed by the dark nearer masses of the Salève and Voirons. The sun had disappeared, cresting with glory as he sank the soft purple summits of the Jura, and sending up a blaze of color in the narrow valley of the Rhone. Then, as all this waned slowly into grayness, softly, shyly, the lovely after-glow floated up the side of the monarch, tingeing all his fields of pure white ice and snow with rosy light as it moved onward, and resting on the far peak in the sky long after the lake and its shores had faded into night.

  “This lake, sir,” said Cousin Walpole, “is remarkable for the number of persons distinguished in literature who have at various times resided upon its banks. I may mention, cursorily, Voltaire, Sismondi, Gibbon, Rousseau, Sir Humphry Davy, D’Aubigné, Calvin, Grimm, Benjamin Constant, Schlegel, Châteaubriand, Byron, Shelley, the elder Dumas, and in addition that most eloquent authoress and noble woman Madame de Staël.”

  “The banks must certainly be acquainted with a large amount of fine language,” said Ford.

  “And oh, how we have enjoyed Coppet, John! You remember Coppet?” said Miss Pitcher. “We have had, I assure you, days and conversations there which I, for one, can never forget. Do you remember, Katharine, that moment by the fish-pond, when, carried away by the influences of the spot, Mr. Percival exclaimed, and with such deep feeling, ‘Etonnante femme!’”

  “Meaning Mrs. Winthrop?” said Ford.

  “No, John, no; meaning Madame de Staël,” replied the little aunt.

  Mr. Ford did not take up his abode at Miolans, in spite of his aunt’s wish and Mrs. Winthrop’s invitation. He preferred a little inn among the vineyards, half a mile distant. But he came often to the villa, generally rowing himself down the lake in a skiff. The skiff, indeed, spent most of its time moored at the water-steps of Miolans, for its owner accompanied the ladies in various excursions to Vevey, Clarens, Chillon, and southward to Geneva.

  “I thought you had so much company,” he said one afternoon to Sylvia, when they happened to be alone. “I have been coming and going now for ten days, and have seen no one.”

  “These ten days were reserved for the Storms,” replied Miss Pitcher. “But old Mrs. Storm fell ill at Baden-Baden, and what could they do?”

  “Take care of her, I should say.”

  “Gilbert Storm was poignantly disappointed. He is, I think, on the whole, the best among Katharine’s outside admirers.”

  “Then there are inside ones?”

  “Several. You know Mr. Winthrop was thirty-five years older than Katharine. It was hardly to be expected, therefore, that she should love him—I mean in the true way.”

  “Whatever she might have done in the false.”

  “You are too cynical, my dear boy. There was nothing false about it; Katharine was simply a child. He was very fond of her, I assure you. And died most happily.”

  “For all concerned.”

  Sylvia shook her head. But Mrs. Winthrop’s step was now heard in the hall; she came in with several letters in her hand. “Any news?” said Miss Pitcher.

  “No,” replied the younger lady. “Nothing ever happens any more.”

  “As Ronsard sang,

  “‘Le temps s’en va, le temps s’en va, ma dame!

  Las! le temps non; mais nous nous en allons,’”

  said Ford, bringing forward her especial chair.

  “That is true,” she answered, soberly, almost sombrely.

  That evening the moonlight on the lake was surpassingly lovely; there was not a ripple to break the sheen of the water, and the clear outline of Mont Blanc rose like silver against the dark black-blue of the sky. They all strolled down to the shore; Mrs. Winthrop went out with Ford in his skiff, “for ten minutes.” Sylvia watched the little boat float up and down for twenty; then she returned to the house and read for forty more. When Sylvia was down-stairs she read the third canto of “Childe Harold”; in her own room she kept a private supply of the works of Miss Yonge. At ten Katharine entered. “Has John gone?” said the aunt, putting in her mark and closing the Byronic volume.

  “Yes; he came to the door, but would not come in.”

  “I wish he would come and stay. He might as well; he is here every day.”

  “That is the very point; he also goes every day,” replied Katharine.

  She was leaning back in her chair, her eyes fixed upon the carpet. Sylvia was going to say something more, when suddenly a new idea came to her. It was a stirring idea; she did not often have such inspirations; she remained silent, investigating it. After a while, “When do you expect the Carrols?” she said.

  “Not until October.”

  Miss Pitcher knew this perfectly, but she thought the question might lead to further information. It did. “Miss Jay has written,” pursued Mrs. Winthrop, her eyes still fixed absently on the carpet. “But I answered, asking her to wait until October, when the Carrols would be here.
It will be much pleasanter for them both.”

  “She has put them off!” thought the little aunt. “She does not want any one here just at present.” And she was so fluttered by the new possibilities rising round her like a cloud that she said good-night, and went up-stairs to think them over; she did not even read Miss Yonge.

  The next day Ford did not come to Miolans until just before the dinner hour. Sylvia was disappointed by this tardiness, but cheered when Katharine came in; for Mrs. Winthrop wore one of her most becoming dresses. “She wishes to look her best,” thought the aunt. But at this moment, in the twilight, a carriage came rapidly up the driveway and stopped at the door. “Why, it is Mr. Percival!” said Sylvia, catching a glimpse of the occupant.

  “Yes; he has come to spend a few days,” said Mrs. Winthrop, going into the hall to greet her new guest.

  Down fell the aunt’s cloud-castle; but at the same moment a more personal feeling took its place in the modest little middle-aged breast; Miss Pitcher deeply admired Mr. Percival.

  “You know who it is, of course?” she whispered to her nephew when she had recovered her composure.

  “You said Percival, didn’t you?”

  “Yes; but this is Lorimer Percival—Lorimer Percival, the poet.”

  Katharine now came back. Sylvia sat waiting, and turning her bracelets round on her wrists. Sylvia’s bracelets turned easily; when she took a book from the top shelf of the bookcase they went to her shoulders.

  Before long Mr. Percival entered. Dinner was announced. The conversation at the table was animated. From it Ford gathered that the new guest had spent several weeks at Miolans early in the season, and that he had also made since then one or two shorter visits. His manner was that of an intimate friend. The intimate friend talked well. Cousin Walpole’s little candle illuminated the outlying corners. Sylvia supplied an atmosphere of general admiration. Mrs. Winthrop supplied one of beauty. She looked remarkably well—brilliant; her guest—the one who was not a poet—noticed this. He had time to notice it, as well as several other things, for he said but little himself; the conversation was led by Mr. Percival.

  It was decided that they would all go to Coppet the next day—“dear Coppet,” as Sylvia called it. The expedition seemed to be partly sacred and partly sylvan; a pilgrimage-picnic. When Ford took leave, Mrs. Winthrop and Mr. Percival accompanied him as far as the water-steps. As his skiff glided out on the calm lake, he heard the gentleman’s voice suggesting that they should stroll up and down awhile in the moonlight, and the lady’s answer, “Yes; for ten minutes.” He remembered that Mrs. Winthrop’s ten minutes was sometimes an hour.

  The next day they went to Coppet; Mrs. Winthrop and Mr. Percival in the carriage, Sylvia and Cousin Walpole in the phaeton, and Ford on horseback.

  “Oh! isn’t this almost too delightful!” said Miss Pitcher, when they reached the gates of the old Necker château. Cousin Walpole was engaged in tying his horse, and Mr. Percival had politely stepped forward to assist her from the phaeton. It is but fair, however, to suppose that her exclamation referred as much to the intellectual influences of the home of Madame de Staël as to the attentions of the poet. “I could live here, and I could die here,” she continued, with ardor. But as Mr. Percival had now gone back to Mrs. Winthrop, she was obliged to finish her sentence to her nephew, which was not quite the same thing. “Couldn’t you, John?” she said.

  “It would be easy enough to die, I should say,” replied Ford, dismounting.

  “We must all die,” remarked Cousin Walpole from the post where he was at work upon the horse. He tied that peaceful animal in such intricate and unexpected convolutions that it took Mrs. Winthrop’s coachman, later, fully twenty minutes to comprehend and unravel them.

  The Necker homestead is a plain, old-fashioned château, built round three sides of a square, a court-yard within. From the end of the south side a long, irregular wing of lower outbuildings stretches towards the road, ending in a thickened, huddled knot along its margin, as though the country highway had refused to allow aristocratic encroachments, and had pushed them all back with determined hands. Across the three high, pale-yellow façades of the main building the faded shutters were tightly closed. There was not a sign of life, save in a little square house at the end of the knot, where, as far as possible from the historic mansion he guarded, lived the old custodian, who strongly resembled the portraits of Benjamin Franklin.

  Benjamin Franklin knew Mrs. Winthrop (and Mrs. Winthrop’s purse). He hastened through the knot in his shuffling woollen shoes, and unlocked the court-yard entrance.

  “We must go all through the dear old house again, for John’s sake,” said Sylvia.

  “Do not sacrifice yourselves; I have seen it,” said her nephew.

  “But not lately, dear John.”

  “I am quite willing to serve as a pretext,” he answered, leading the way in.

  They passed through the dark old hall below, where the white statue of Necker gleams in solitude, and went up the broad stairway, the old custodian preceding them, and throwing open the barred shutters of room after room. The warm sunshine flowed in and streamed across the floors, the dim tapestries, the spindle-legged, gilded furniture, and the Cupid-decked clocks. The old paintings on the walls seemed to waken slowly and survey them as they passed. Lorimer Percival seated himself in a yellow arm-chair, and looked about with the air of a man who was breathing a delicate aroma.

  “This is the room where the ‘incomparable Juliette’ danced her celebrated gavotte,” he remarked, “probably to the music of that old harpsichord—or is it a spinet?—in the corner.”

  “Pray tell us about it,” entreated Sylvia, who had seated herself gingerly on the edge of a small ottoman embroidered with pink shepherdesses on a blue meadow, and rose-colored lambs. Mrs. Winthrop meanwhile had appropriated a spindle-legged sofa, and was leaning back against a tapestried Endymion.

  Percival smiled, but did not refuse Sylvia’s request. He had not the objection which some men have to a monologue. It must be added, however, that for that sort of thing he selected his audience. Upon this occasion the outside element of John Ford, strolling about near the windows, was discordant, but not enough so to affect the admiring appreciation of the little group nearer his chair.

  “Madame de Staël,” he began, with his eyes on the cornice, “was a woman of many and generous enthusiasms. She had long wished to behold the grace of her lovely friend Madame Récamier, in her celebrated gavotte, well known in the salons of Paris, but as yet unseen by the exile of Coppet. By great good-fortune there happened to be in the village, upon the occasion of a visit from Madame Récamier, a French dancing-master. Madame de Staël sent for him, and the enchanted little man had the signal honor of going through the dance with the beautiful Juliette, in this room, in the presence of all the distinguished society of Coppet: no doubt it was the glory of his life. When the dance was ended, Corinne, carried away by admiration, embraced with transport—”

  “The dancing-master?” said Cousin Walpole, much interested.

  “No; her ravissante amie.”

  Cousin Walpole, conscious that he had made a mistake, betook himself to the portrait near by. “Superb woman!” he murmured, contemplating it. “Superb!”

  The portrait represented the authoress of Corinne standing, her talented head crowned by a majestic aureole of yellow satin turban, whose voluminous folds accounted probably for the scanty amount of material left for the shoulders and arms.

  “If I could have had the choice,” said Miss Pitcher, pensively gazing at this portrait, “I would rather have been that noble creature than any one else on history’s page.”

  Later they went down to the old garden. It stretched back behind the house for some distance, shut in by a high stone wall. A long, straight alley, shaded by even rows of trees, went down one side like a mathematical line; on the other there was some of the stiff land
scape-gardening of the last century. In the open space in the centre was a moss-grown fish-pond, and near the house a dignified little company of clipped trees. They strolled down the straight walk: this time Ford was with Mrs. Winthrop, while Sylvia, Mr. Percival, and Cousin Walpole were in front.

  “I suppose she used to walk here,” observed Mrs. Winthrop.

  “In her turban,” suggested Ford.

  “Perhaps she has sat upon that very bench—who knows?—and mused,” said Sylvia, imaginatively.

  “Aloud, of course,” commented her nephew. But these irreverent remarks were in undertone; only Mrs. Winthrop could hear them.

  “No doubt they all walked here,” observed the poet; “it was one of the customs of the time to take slow exercise daily in one of these dignified alleys. The whole society of Coppet was no doubt often here, Madame de Staël and her various guests, Schlegel, Constant, the Montmorency, Sismondi, Madame Récamier, and many others.”

  “Would that I too could have been of that company!” said Cousin Walpole, with warmth.

  “Which one of the two ladies would you have accompanied down this walk, if choice had been forced upon you?” said Mrs. Winthrop.

  “Which one?—Madame de Staël, of course,” replied the little bachelor, chivalrously.

  “And you, Mr. Percival?”

  “With the one who had the intellect,” replied the poet.

  “We must be even more lacking in beauty than we suppose, Sylvia, since they all chose the plain one,” said Katharine, laughing. “But you have not spoken yet, Mr. Ford: what would your choice have been?”

  “Between the two, there would hardly have been one.”

  “Isn’t that a little enigmatical?”

  “John means that he admires them equally,” explained the aunt.

  “That is it,” said her nephew.

  Lunch was spread upon the grass. Mrs. Winthrop’s coachman had made an impromptu carpet of carriage rugs and shawls. Percival threw himself down beside the ladies; Cousin Walpole, after trying various attitudes, took the one denominated “cross-legged.” Ford surveyed their group for a moment, then went off and came back with a garden bench; upon this he seated himself comfortably, with his back against a tree.