by George Moore
At that moment Morton saw her so clearly that the thought struck him that he had never seen her before. She appeared in that instant as a toy, a trivial toy made of coloured glass; and as a maleficent toy, for he felt if he played with it any longer that it would break and splinter in his fingers. ‘As brilliant, as hard, and as dangerous as a piece of broken glass.’ He wondered why he had been attracted by this bit of coloured glass; he laughed at his folly and went home certain that he could lose her without pain. But memory of her delicate neck and her wistful eyes suddenly assailed him; he threw himself over on his pillow, aching to clasp the lissome mould of her body — a mould which he knew so well that he seemed to feel its every shape in his arms; his nostrils recalled its perfume, and he asked himself if he would destroy his picture, ‘The Sheepfold,’ if, by destroying it, he could gain her. For six months with her in Italy he would destroy it, and he would not regret its destruction. But had she the qualities that make a nice mistress? Candidly, he did not think she had. He’d have to risk that. Anyhow, she wasn’t common like the others…. In time she would become common; time makes all things common.
‘But this is God-damned madness,’ he cried out, and lay staring into the darkness, his eyes and heart on fire. Visions of Mildred and Delacour haunted his pillow, he did not know whether he slept or waked; and he rose from his bed weary, heavy-eyed, and pale.
He was to meet her at eleven on the terrace by the fish-pond, and had determined to come to an understanding with her, but his heart choked him when he saw her coming toward him along the gravel path. He bought some bread at the stall for the fish; and talking to her he grew so happy that he feared to imperil his happiness by reproaches. They wondered if they would see the fabled carp in whose noses rings had been put in the time of Louis XIV. The statues on their pedestals, high up in the clear, bright air, were singularly beautiful, and they saw the outlines of the red castle and the display of terraces reaching to the edge of the withering forest. They were conscious that the place was worthy of its name, Fontainebleau. The name is evocative of stately days and traditions, and Mildred fancied herself a king’s mistress — La Pompadour. The name is a romance, an excitement, and, throwing her arms on Morton’s shoulders, she said:
‘Morton, dear, don’t be angry. I’m very fond of you, I really am…. I only stop with the Delacours because they amuse me…. It means nothing.’
‘If I could only believe you,’ said Morton, holding her arms in his hands and looking into her brown eyes.
‘Why don’t you believe me?’ she said; but there was no longer any earnestness in her voice. It had again become a demure insincerity.
‘If you were really fond of me, you’d give yourself.’
‘Perhaps I will one of these days.’
‘When… when you return to Barbizon?’
‘I won’t promise. When I promise I like to keep my promise…. You ask too much. You don’t realise what it means to a woman to give herself. Have you never had a scruple about anything?’
‘Scruple about anything! I don’t know what you mean…. What scruple can you have? you’re not a religious woman.’
‘It isn’t religion, it is — well, something…. I don’t know.’
‘This has gone on too long,’ he said, ‘if I don’t get you now I shall lose you.’
‘If you were really afraid of losing me you would ask me to marry you.’
Morton was taken aback.
‘I never thought of marriage; but I would marry you. Do you mean it?’
‘Yes, I mean it.’
‘When?’
‘One of these days.’
‘I don’t believe you. … You’re a bundle of falsehoods.’
‘I’m not as false as you say. There’s no use making me out worse than I am. I’m very fond of you, Morton.’
‘I wonder,’ said Morton. ‘I asked you just now to be my mistress; you said you’d prefer to marry me. Very well, when will you marry me?’
‘Don’t ask me. I cannot say when. Besides, you don’t want to marry me.’
‘You think so?’
‘You hesitated just now. A woman always knows. … If you had wanted to marry me you would have begun by asking me.’
‘This is tomfoolery. I asked you to be my mistress, and then, at your suggestion, I asked you to be my wife; I really don’t see what more I can do. You say you’re very fond of me, and yet you want to be neither mistress nor wife.’
A little dark cloud gathered between her eyes. She did not answer. She did not know what to answer, for she was acting in contradiction to her reason. Her liking for Morton was quite real; there were even moments when she thought that she would end by marrying. But mysterious occult influences which she could neither explain nor control were drawing her away from him. She asked herself, what was this power which abided in the bottom of her heart, from which she could not rid herself, and which said, ‘thou shalt not marry him.’ She asked herself if this essential force was the life of pleasure and publicity which the Delacours offered her. She had to admit that she was drawn to this life, and that she had felt strangely at ease in it. In the few days that she had spent with the Delacours she had, for the first time in her life, felt in agreement with her surroundings. She had always hated that dirty studio, and still more its dirty slangy frequenters.
And she lay awake a great part of the night thinking. She felt that she must act in obedience to her instinct whatever it might cost her, and her instinct drew her towards the Delacours and away from Morton. But her desire for Morton was not yet exhausted, and the struggle between the two forces resulted in one of her moods. Its blackness lay on forehead, between her eyes, and, in the influence of its mesmerism, she began to hate him. As she put it to herself, she began to feel ugly towards him. She hated to return to Barbizon, and when they met, she gave her cheek instead of her lips, and words which provoked and wounded him rose to her tongue’s tip; she could not save herself from speaking them, and each day their estrangement grew more and more accentuated.
She came down one morning nervously calm, her face set in a definite and gathering expression of resolution. Elsie could see that something serious had happened. But Mildred did not seem inclined to explain, she only said that she must leave Barbizon at once. That she was going that very morning, that her boxes were packed, that she had ordered a carriage.
‘Are you going back to Paris?’
‘Yes, but I don’t think I shall go to Melun, I shall go to Fontainebleau. I’d like to say good-bye to the Delacours.’
‘This is hardly a day for a drive through the forest; you’ll be blown to pieces.’
‘I don’t mind a little wind. I shall tie my veil tighter.’
Mildred admitted that she had quarrelled with Morton. But she would say no more. She declared, however, that she would not see him again. Her intention was to leave before he came down; and, as if unable to bear the delay any longer, she asked Cissy and Elsie to walk a little way with her. The carriage could follow.
The wind was rough, but they were burning to hear what Morton had done, and, hoping that Mildred would become more communicative when they got out of the village, they consented to accompany her.
‘I’m sorry to leave,’ said Mildred, ‘but I cannot stay after what happened last night. Oh, dear!’ she exclaimed, ‘my hat nearly went that time. I’m afraid I shall have a rough drive.’
‘You will indeed. You’d better stay,’ said Elsie.
‘I cannot. It would be impossible for me to see him again.’
‘But what did he say to offend you?’
‘It wasn’t what he said, it was what he did.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He came into my room last night.’
‘Did he! were you in bed?’
‘Yes; I was in bed reading. I was awfully frightened. I never saw a man in such a state. I think he was mad.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I tried to calm him. I felt that I must not l
ose my presence of mind. I spoke to him gently. I appealed to his honour, and at last I persuaded him to go.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I at last persuaded him to go.’
‘We can’t talk in this wind,’ screamed Elsie, ‘we’d better go back.’
‘We shall be killed,’ cried Cissy starting back in alarm, for a young pine had crashed across the road not very far from where they were standing, and the girls could hear the wind trumpeting, careering, springing forward; it rushed, leaped, it paused, and the whole forest echoed its wrath.
When the first strength of the blast seemed ebbing, the girls looked round for shelter. They felt if they remained where they were, holding on to roots and grasses, that they would be carried away.
‘Those rocks,’ cried Cissy.
‘We shan’t get there in time, the trees will fall,’ cried Elsie.
‘Not a minute to lose,’ said Mildred. ‘Come!’
And the girls ran through the swaying trees at the peril of their lives. And, as they ran, the earth gave forth a rumbling sound and was lifted beneath their feet. It seemed as if subterranean had joined with aerial forces, for the crumbling sound they had heard as they ran through the scattered pines increased; it was the roots giving way; and the pines bent, wavered, and fell this way and that. But about the rocks, where the girls crouched the trees grew so thickly that the wind could not destroy them singly; so it had taken the wood in violent and passionate grasp, and was striving to beat it down. But under the rocks all was quiet, the storm was above in the branches, and, hearing almost human cries, the girls looked up and saw great branches interlocked like serpents in the writhe of battle.
In half an hour the storm had blown itself out. But a loud wind shook through the stripped and broken forest; lament was in all the branches, the wind forced them upwards and they gesticulated their despair. The leaves rose and sank like cries of woe adown the raw air, and the roadway was littered with ruin. The whirl of the wind still continued and the frightened girls dreaded lest the storm should return, overtaking them as they passed through the avenue.
The avenue was nearly impassable with fallen trees, and Elsie said:
‘You’ll not be able to go to Fontainebleau to-day.’
‘Then I shall go to Melun.’
As they entered the village they met the carriage, and Mildred bade her friends good-bye.
XVIII.
In the long autumn and winter evenings Harold often thought of his sister. His eyes often wandered to the writing table, and he asked himself if he should write to her again. There seemed little use. She either ignored his questions altogether, or alluded to them in a few words and passed from them into various descriptive writing, the aspects of the towns she had visited, and the general vegetation of the landscapes she had seen; or she dilated on the discovery of a piece of china, a bronze, or an old engraving in some forgotten corner. Her intention to say nothing about herself was obvious.
In a general way he gathered that she had been to Nice and Monte Carlo, and he wondered why she had gone to the Pyrenees, and with whom she was living in the Boulevard Poissonier. That was her last address. The letter was dated the fifteenth of December, she had not written since, and it was now March. But scraps of news of her had reached him. One day he learnt from a paragraph in a newspaper that Miss Mildred Lawson had been received into the Church of Rome, he wrote to inquire if this was true, and a few days after a lady told him that she had heard that Mildred had entered a Carmelite convent and taken the veil. The lady’s information did not seem very trustworthy, but Harold was nevertheless seriously alarmed, and, without waiting for an answer to the letter he had written the day before, he telegraphed to Mildred.
‘I have not entered a convent and have no present intention of doing so.’
‘Could anything be more unsatisfactory,’ Harold thought. ‘She does not say whether she has gone over to Rome. Perhaps that is untrue too. Shall I telegraph again?’ He hesitated and then decided that he would not. She did not wish to be questioned, and would find an evasive answer that would leave him only more bewildered than before.
He hoped for an answer to his letter, but Mildred did not write, no doubt, being of opinion that her telegram met the necessity of the case, and he heard no more until some news of her came to him through Elsie Laurence, whom Harold met one afternoon as he was coming home from the city. From Elsie he learnt that Mildred was a great social success in Paris. She was living with the Delacours, she had met them at Fontainebleau. Morton Mitchell, that was the man she had thrown over, had introduced her to them. Harold had never heard of the Delacours, and he hastened to acquaint himself with them; Morton Mitchell he reserved for some future time; one flirtation more or less mattered little; but that his sister should be living with the Delacours, a radical and socialist deputy, a questionable financier, a company promoter, a journalist, was very shocking. Delacour was all these things and many more, according to Elsie, and she rattled on until Harold’s brain whirled. He learnt, too, that it was with the Delacours that Mildred had been in the South.
‘She wrote to me from some place in the Pyrenees.’
‘From Lourdes? she was there.’
A cloud gathered on Harold’s face.
‘She didn’t write to me from Lourdes,’ he said. ‘But Lourdes is, I suppose, the reason of her perversion to Rome?’
‘No; Mildred told me that Lourdes had nothing to do with it.’
‘You say that she now lives with these people, the Delacours.’
‘Yes; she’s just like one of the family. She invites her friends to dinner. She invited me to dinner. The Delacours are very rich, and Mildred is now all the rage in Paris.’
‘And Madame Delacour, what kind of a woman is she?’
‘Madame Delacour has very poor health, they say she was once a great beauty, but there’s very little of her beauty left. … She’s very fond of Mildred. They are great friends.’
The next time that Harold heard of Mildred was through his solicitors. In the course of conversation regarding some investments, Messrs. Blunt and Hume mentioned that Miss Lawson had taken 5000 pounds out of mortgage. They did not know if she had re-invested it, she had merely requested them to pay the money into her banking account.
‘Why did you not mention this to me before?’
‘Miss Lawson has complete control over her private fortune. On a former occasion, you remember, when she required five hundred pounds to hire and furnish a studio, she wrote very sharply because we had written to you on the subject. She spoke of a breach of professional etiquette.’
‘Then why do you tell me now about this 5000 pounds?’
‘Strictly speaking we ought not to have done so, but we thought that we might venture on a confidential statement.’
Harold thought that Messrs. Blunt and Hume had acted very stupidly, and he asked himself what Mildred proposed to do with the money. Did she intend to re-invest it in French securities? Or had the Roman Catholics persuaded her to leave it to a convent or to spend it in building a church? Or perhaps, Delacour and the Socialists have got hold of the money. But Mildred was never very generous with her money. … He stepped into a telegraph office and stepped out again without having sent a message. He wrote a long letter when he arrived home, and tore it up when he had finished it. It was not a case for a letter or telegram, but for an immediate journey. He could send a telegram to the office, saying he would not be there to-morrow; he remembered a business appointment for Friday, which could not be broken. But he could return on Thursday morning. … Arrive on Wednesday night, return on Thursday morning or Thursday night, if he did not succeed in seeing Mildred on Wednesday night. … Yes, that would do it, but it would mean a tedious journey on the coldest month of the year. But 5000 English pounds was a large sum of money, he must do what he could to save it. Save it! Yes, for he hadn’t a doubt that it was in danger. … He would take the train at Charing Cross to-morrow morning. … He would arrive in Pari
s about eight…. He would then go to his hotel, change his clothes, dine, and get to Mildred’s about nine or half- past.
This was the course he adopted, and on Wednesday night at half-past nine, he crossed the Rue Richlieu, and inquired the way to Boulevard Poissonier…. If Mildred were going to a ball he would be able to get half an hour’s conversation were her before she went upstairs to dress. If she were dining out, he could wait until she came in. She would not be later than eleven, he thought as he entered a courtyard. There were a number of staircases, and he at last found himself in the corridors and the salons of La voix du Peuple, which was printed and published on the first floor. He addressed questions to various men who passed him with proofs in their hands, and, when a door was opened on the left, he saw a glare of gas and the compositors bending over the cases.
Then he found his way to the floor above, and there doors were open on both sides of the landing; footmen hurried to and fro. He asked for Mademoiselle Lawson, and was led through rooms decorated with flowers. ‘They are giving a ball here to-night,’ he thought, and the footmen drew aside a curtain; and in a small end room, a boudoir dimly lighted and hung with tapestry and small pictures in gold frames, he found Mildred sitting on a couch with an elderly man, about fifty.
They seemed to be engaged in intimate conversation; and they rose abruptly, as if disconcerted by his sudden intrusion.
‘Oh, Harold,’ said Mildred…. ‘Why didn’t you write to say that you were coming vous tombez comme une tuile…. Permettez-moi, Monsieur Delacour, de vous presenter a won frere.’ Harold bowed and shook hands with the tall thin man with the high-bridged nose and the close- cut black hair, fitting close to his head. In the keen grey eyes, which shone out of a studiously formal face, there was a look which passed from disdain to swift interrogation, and then to an expression of courteous and polite welcome. M. Delacour professed himself delighted to make Harold’s acquaintance, and he hoped that Harold was staying some time in Paris. Harold regretted that he was obliged to return on the following morning, and M. Delacour’s face assumed an expression of disappointment. He said that it would have been his pleasure to make Harold’s stay as agreeable as possible. However, on the occasion of Harold’s next visit, M. Delacour hoped that he could stay with them. He went so far as to say that he hoped that Harold would consider this house as his own. Harold thanked him, and again expressed regret that he was obliged to leave the following morning. He noticed a slight change of expression on the diplomatist’s face when he mentioned that he had come over in a hurry to discuss some business matters with his sister. A moment later M. Delacour was smiling perfect approval and comprehension and moving towards the door. At the door he lingered to express a hope that Harold would stay for the ball. He said that Mildred must do her best to persuade her brother to remain.
