In and out of Three Normandy Inns Part 19

"Ah, but you see, I had so much to combat. You had a whole season, last summer, in which to play your game, your solemn game." Here the gay young widow rippled forth a pearly scale of treble laughter. "And I have had only a week, thus far!"

"Yes, but what time you make!"

And this time both ladies laughed, although, still, only one laughed well.

"Ah! those women--how they love each other," commented Renard, as he sat on the bench, swinging his legs, with his eyes following the two vanishing figures. "Only women who are intimate--Parisian intimates--can cut to the bone like that, with a surgeon's dexterity."

He explained then that the handsome brunette was a widow, a certain Baronne d'Autun, noted for her hunting and her conquests; the last on the latter list was Monsieur d'Agreste, a former admirer of the countess; he was somewhat famous as a scientist and socialist, so good a socialist as to refuse to wear his t.i.tle of duke. The other two gentlemen of the party, who had joined them now, the two hors.e.m.e.n, were the Comtes de Mirant and de Fonbriant. These latter were two typical young swells of the Jockey Club model; their vacant, well-bred faces wore the correct degree of fashionable pallor, and their manners appeared to be also as perfect as their glances were insolent.

Into these vacant faces the languid countess was breathing the inspiration of her smile. Enigmatic as was the latter, it was as simple as an infant's compared to the occult character of her glance. A wealth of complexities lay enfolded in the deep eyes, rimmed with their mystic darkened circlet--that circle in which the Parisienne frames her experience, and through which she pleads to have it enlarged!

A Frenchwoman and cosmetics! Is there any other combination on this round earth more suggestive of the comedy of high life, of its elegance and of its perfidy, of its finish and of its emptiness?

The men of the party wore costumes perilously suggestive of Opera Bouffe models. Their fingers were richly begemmed; their watch-chains were laden with seals and charms. Any one of the costumes was such as might have been chosen by a tenor in which to warble effectively to a _soubrette_ on the boards of a provincial theatre; and it was worn by these fops of the Jockey Club with the air of its being the last word in nautical fashions. Better than their costumes were their voices; for what speech from human lips pearls itself off with such crispness and finish as the delicate French idiom from a Parisian tongue?

I never quite knew how it came about that we were added to this gay party of breakfasters. We found ourselves, however, after a high skirmish of preliminary presentations, among the number to take our places at the table.

In the Chambre des Marmousets, Monsieur Paul, we found, had set the feast with the taste of an artist and the science of an archaeologist.

The table itself was long and narrow, a genuine fifteenth century table. Down the centre ran a strip of antique altar-lace; the sides were left bare, that the l.u.s.tre of the dark wood might be seen. In the centre was a deep old Caen bowl, with grapes and fuchsias to make a mound of soft color. A pair of seventeenth-century candelabres twisted and coiled their silver branches about their rich _repousse_ columns; here and there on the yellow strip of lace were laid bunches of June roses, those only of the rarer and older varieties having been chosen, and each was tied with a Louis XV love-knot. Monsieur Paul was himself an omniscient figure at the feast; he was by turns officiating as butler, carving, or serving from the side-tables; or he was crossing the court-yard with his careful, catlike tread, a bottle under each arm. He was also constantly appealed to by Monsieur d'Agreste or the count, to settle a dispute about the age of the china, or the original home of the various old chests scattered about the room.

"Paul, your stained gla.s.s shows up well in this light," the count called out, wiping his mustache over his soup-plate.

"Yes," answered Monsieur Paul, as he went on serving the sherry, pausing for a moment at the count's gla.s.s. "They always look well in full sunlight. It was a piece of pure luck, getting them. One can always count on getting hold of tapestries and carvings, but old gla.s.s is as rare as--"

"A pretty woman," interpolated the gay young widow, with the air of a connoisseur.

"Outside of Paris--you should have added," gallantly contributed the count. Everyone went on eating after the light laughter had died away.

The countess had not a.s.sisted at this brief conversation; she was devoting her attention to receiving the devotion of the two young counts; one was on either side of her, and both gave every outward and visible sign of wearing her chains, and of wearing them with insistance. The real contest between them appeared to be, not so much which should make the conquest of the languid countess, as which should outflank the other in his compromising demeanor. The countess, beneath her drooping lids, watched them with the indulgent indolence of a lioness, too luxuriously lazy to spring.

The countess, clearly, was not made for sunlight. In the courtyard her face had seemed chiefly remarkable as a triumph of cosmetic treatment; here, under this rich glow, the purity and delicacy of the features easily placed her among the beauties of the Parisian world. Her eyes, now that the languor of the lids was disappearing with the advent of the wines, were magnificent; her use of them was an open avowal of her own knowledge of their splendor. The young widow across the table was also using her eyes, but in a very different fashion. She had now taken off her straw hat; the curly crop of a brown mane gave the brilliant face an added accent of vigor. The _chien de race_ was the dominant note now in the muscular, supple body, the keen-edged nostrils, and the intent gaze of the liquid eyes. These latter were fixed with the fixity of a savage on Charm. She was giving, in a sweet sibilant murmur, the man seated next her--Monsieur d'Agreste, the man who refused to bear his t.i.tle--her views of the girl.

"Those Americans, the Americans of the best type, are a race apart, I tell you; we have nothing like them; we condemn them because we don't understand them. They understand us--they read us--"

"Oh, they read our books--the worst of them."

"Yes, but they read the best too; and the worst don't seem to hurt them. I'll warrant that Mees Gay--that is her name, is it not?--has read Zola, for instance; and yet, see how simple and innocent--yes--innocent, she looks."

"Yes, the innocence of experience--which knows how to hide," said Monsieur d'Agreste, with a slight shrug.

"Mees Gay!" the countess cried out across the table, suddenly waking from her somnolence; she had overheard the baroness in spite of the low tone in which the dialogue had been carried on; her voice was so mellifluously sweet, one instinctively scented a touch of hidden poison in it--"Mees Gay, there is a question being put at this side of the table you alone can answer. Pray pardon the impertinence of a personal question--but we hear that American young ladies read Zola; is it true?"

"I am afraid that we do read him," was Charm's frank answer. "I have read him--but my reading is all in the past tense now."

"Ah--you found him too highly seasoned?" one of the young counts asked, eagerly, with his nose in the air, as if scenting an indiscretion.

"No, I did not go far enough to get a taste of his horrors; I stopped at his first period."

"And what do you call his first period, dear mademoiselle?" The countess's voice was still freighted with honey. Her husband coughed and gave her a warning glance, and Renard was moving uneasily in his chair.

"Oh," Charm answered lightly, "his best period--when he didn't sell."

Everyone laughed. The little widow cried beneath her breath:

"_Elle a de l'esprit, celle-la_---"

"_Elle en a de trop_," retorted the countess.

"Did you ever read Zola's 'Quatre Saisons?'" Renard asked, turning to the count, at the other end of the table.

No, the count had not read it--but he could read the story of a beautiful nature when he encountered one, and presently he allowed Charm to see how absorbing he found its perusal.

"_Ah, bien--et tout de meme_--Zola, yes, he writes terrible books; but he is a good man--a model husband and father," continued Monsieur d'Agreste, addressing the table.

"And Daudet--he adores his wife and children," added the count, as if with a determination to find only goodness in the world.

"I wonder how posterity will treat them? They'll judge their lives by their books, I presume."

"Yes, as we judge Rabelais or Voltaire--"

"Or the English Shakespeare by his 'Hamlet.'"

"Ah! what would not Voltaire have done with Hamlet!" The countess was beginning to wake again.

"And Moliere? What of _his_ 'Misanthrope?' There is a finished, a human, a possible Hamlet! a Hamlet with flesh and blood," cried out the younger count on her right. "Even Mounet-Sully could do nothing with the English Hamlet."

"Ah, well, Mounet-Sully did all that was possible with the part. He made Hamlet at least a lover!"

"Ah, love! as if, even on the stage, one believed in that absurdity any longer!" was the countess's malicious comment.

"Then, if you have ceased to believe in love, why did you go so religiously to Monsieur Caro's lectures?" cried the baroness.

"Oh, that dear Caro! He treated the pa.s.sions so delicately, he handled them as if they were curiosities. One went to hear his lecture on Love as one might go to hear a treatise on the peculiarities of an extinct species," was the countess's quiet rejoinder.

"One should believe in love, if only to prove one's unbelief in it,"

murmured the young count on her left.

"Ah, my dear comte, love, nowadays, like nature, should only be used for decoration, as a bit of stage setting, or as stage scenery."

"A moonlight night can be made endurable, sometimes," whispered the count.

"A _clair de lune_ that ends in _lune de miel_, that is the true use to which to put the charms of Diana." It was Monsieur d'Agreste's turn now to murmur in the baroness's ear.

"Oh, honey, it becomes so cloying in time," interpolated the countess, who had overheard; she overheard everything. She gave a wearied glance at her husband, who was still talking vigorously to Charm and Renard.

She went on softly: "It's like trying to do good. All goodness, even one's own, bores one in the end. At Basniege, for example, lovely as it is, ideally feudal, and with all its towers as erect as you please, I find this modern virtue, this craze for charity, as tiresome as all the rest of it. Once you've seen that all the old women have woollen stockings, and that each cottage has f.a.gots enough for the winter, and your _role_ of benefactress is at an end. In Paris, at least, charity is sometimes picturesque; poverty there is tainted with vice. If one believed in anything, it might be worth while to begin a mission; but as it is--"

"The gospel of life, according to you, dear comtesse, is that in modern life there is no real excitement except in studying the very best way to be rid of it," cried out Renard, from the bottom of the table.