Books: Jacqueline, v3
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Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc) >> Jacqueline, v3
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Madame d'Avrigny was also transported to the sixth heaven, but
Jacqueline's presence somewhat marred her pleasure. When she first
perceived her she had shown great surprise. "You here, my dear?" she
cried, "I thought you safe with our own excellent Giselle."
"Safe, Madame? It seems to me one can be safe anywhere," Jacqueline
answered, though she was tempted to say "safe nowhere;" but instead she
inquired for Dolly.
Dolly's mother bit her lips and then replied: "You see I have not brought
her. Oh, yes, this house is very amusing--but rather too much so.
The play was very pretty, and I am sorry it would not do at my house.
It is too--too 'risque', you know;" and she rehearsed her usual speech
about the great difficulties encountered by a lady who wished to give
entertainments and provide amusement for her friends.
Meantime Pierrot, or rather Madame Strahlberg, had leaped over an
imaginary barrier and came dancing toward the company, shaking her large
sleeves and settling her little snake-like head in her large quilled
collar, dragging after her the Hungarian, who seemed not very willing.
She presented him to Madame d'Avrigny, hoping that so fashionable a woman
might want him to play at her receptions during the winter, and to a
journalist who promised to give him a notice in his paper, provided--
and here he whispered something to Pierrot, who, smiling, answered
neither yes nor no. The sisters kept on their costumes; Colette was
enchanting with her bare neck, her long-waisted black velvet corsage,
her very short skirt, and a sort of three-cornered hat upon her head.
All the men paid court to her, and she accepted their homage, becoming
gayer and gayer at every compliment, laughing loudly, possibly that her
laugh might exhibit her beautiful teeth.
Wanda, as Pierrot, sang, with her hands in her pockets, a Russian village
song: "Ah! Dounai-li moy Dounai" ("Oh! thou, my Danube"). Then she
imperiously called Jacqueline to the piano: --"It is your turn now," she
said, "most humble violet."
Up to that moment, Jacqueline's deep mourning had kept the gentlemen
present from addressing her, though she had been much stared at.
Although she did not wish to sing, for her heart was heavy as she thought
of the troubles that awaited her the next day at the convent, she sang
what was asked of her without resistance or pretension. Then, for the
first time, she experienced the pride of triumph. Szmera, though he was
furious at not being the sole lion of the evening, complimented her,
bowing almost to the ground, with one hand on his heart; Madame Rochette
assured her that she had a fortune in her throat whenever she chose to
seek it; persons she had never seen and who did not know her name,
pressed her hands fervently, saying that her singing was adorable.
All cried "Encore," "Encore!" and, yielding to the pleasure of applause,
she thought no more of the flight of time. Dawn was peeping through the
windows when the party broke up.
"What kind people!" thought the debutante, whom they had encouraged and
applauded; "some perhaps are a little odd, but how much cordiality and
warmth there is among them! It is catching. This is the sort of
atmosphere in which talent should live."
Being very much fatigued, she fell asleep upon the offered sofa, half-
pleased, half-frightened, but with two prominent convictions: one, that
she was beginning to return to life; the other, that she stood on the
edge of a precipice. In her dreams old Rochette appeared to her, her
face like that of an affable frog, her dress the dress of Pierrot, and
she croaked out, in a variety of tones: "The stage! Why not? Applauded
every night--it would be glorious!" Then she seemed in her dream to be
falling, falling down from a great height, as one falls from fairyland
into stern reality. She opened her eyes: it was noon. Madame Odinska
was waiting for her: she intended herself to take her to the convent,
and for that purpose had assumed the imposing air of a noble matron.
Alas! it was in vain! Jacqueline, was made to understand that such an
infraction of the rules could not be overlooked. To pass the night
without leave out of the convent, and not with her own family, was cause
for expulsion. Neither the prayers nor the anger of Madame Odinska had
any power to change the sentence. While the Mother Superior calmly
pronounced her decree, she was taking the measure of this stout foreigner
who appeared in behalf of Jacqueline, a woman overdressed, yet at the
same time shabby, who had a far from well-bred or aristocratic air.
"Out of consideration for Madame de Talbrun," she said, "the convent
consents to keep Mademoiselle de Nailles a few days longer--a few weeks
perhaps, until she can find some other place to go. That is all we can
do for her."
Jacqueline listened to this sentence as she might have watched a game of
dice when her fate hung on the result, but she showed no emotion.
"Now," she thought, "my fate has been decided; respectable people will
have nothing more to do with me. I will go with the others, who,
perhaps, after all are not worse, and who most certainly are more
amusing."
A fortnight after this, Madame de Nailles, having come back to Paris,
from some watering-place, was telling Marien that Jacqueline had started
for Bellagio with Mr. and Miss Sparks, the latter having taken a notion
that she wanted that kind of chaperon who is called a companion in
England and America.
"But they are of the same age," said Marien.
"That is just what Miss Sparks wants. She does not wish to be hampered
by an elderly chaperon, but to be accompanied, as she would have been by
her sister."
"Jacqueline will be exposed to see strange things; how could you have
consented--"
"Consented? As if she cared for my consent! And then she manages to say
such irritating things as soon as one attempts to blame her or advise
her. For example, this is one of them: 'Don't you suppose,' she said to
me, 'that every one will take the most agreeable chance that offers for a
visit to Italy?' What do you think of that allusion? It closed my lips
absolutely."
"Perhaps she did not mean what you think she meant."
"Do you think so? And when I warned her against Madame Strahlberg,
saying that she might set her a very bad example, she answered: 'I may
have had worse.' I suppose that was not meant for impertinence either!"
"I don't know," said Hubert Marien, biting his lips doubtfully, "but--"
He was silent a few moments, his head drooped on his breast, he was in
some painful reverie.
"Go on. What are you thinking about?" asked Madame de Nailles,
impatiently.
"I beg your pardon. I was only thinking that a certain responsibility
might rest on those who have made that young girl what she is."
"I don't understand you," said the stepmother, with an impatient gesture.
"Who can do anything to counteract a bad disposition? You don't deny
that hers is bad? She is a very devil for pride and obstinacy--she has
no affection--she has proved it. I have no inclination to get myself
wounded by trying to control her."
"Then you prefer to let her ruin herself?"
"I should prefer not to give the world a chance to talk, by coming to an
open rupture with her, which would certainly be the case if I tried to
contradict her. After all, the Sparks and Madame Odinska are not yet put
out of the pale of good society, and she knew them long ago. An early
intimacy may be a good explanation if people blame her for going too
far--"
"So be it, then; if you are satisfied it is not for me to say anything,"
replied Marien, coldly.
"Satisfied? I am not satisfied with anything or anybody," said Madame de
Nailles, indignantly. "How could I be satisfied; I never have met with
anything but ingratitude."
CHAPTER XVI
THE SAILOR'S RETURN
Madame D'Argy did not leave her son in ignorance of all the freaks and
follies of Jacqueline. He knew every particular of the wrong-doings and
the imprudences of his early friend, and even the additions made to them
by calumny, ever since the fit of in dependence which, after her father's
death, had led her to throw off all control. She told of her sudden
departure from Fresne, where she might have found so safe a refuge with
her friend and cousin. Then had not her own imprudence and coquetry led
to a rupture with the families of d'Etaples and Ray? She told of the
scandalous intimacy with Madame Strahlberg; of her expulsion from the
convent, where they had discovered, even before she left, that she had
been in the habit of visiting undesirable persons; and finally she
informed him that Jacqueline had gone to Italy with an old Yankee and his
daughter--he being a man, it was said, who had laid the foundation of his
colossal fortune by keeping a bar-room in a mining camp in California.
This last was no fiction, the cut of Mr. Sparks's beard and his
unpolished manners left no doubt on the subject; and she wound up by
saying that Madame d'Avrigny, whom no one could accuse of ill-nature,
had been grieved at meeting this unhappy girl in very improper company,
among which she seemed quite in her element, like a fish in water.
It was said also that she was thinking of studying for the stage with
La Rochette--M. de Talbrun had heard it talked about in the foyer of the
Opera by an old Prince from some foreign country--she could not remember
his name, but he was praising Madame Strahlberg without any reserve as
the most delightful of Parisiennes. Thereupon Talbrun had naturally
forbidden his wife to have anything to do with Jacqueline, or even to
write to her. Fat Oscar, though he was not all that he ought to be
himself, had some very strict notions of propriety. No one was more
particular about family relations, and really in this case no one could
blame him; but Giselle had been very unhappy, and to the very last had
tried to stand up for her unhappy friend. Having told him all this, she
added, she would say no more on the subject.
Giselle was a model woman in everything, in tact, in goodness, in good
sense, and she was very attentive to the poor old mother of Fred, who but
for her must have died long ago of loneliness and sorrow. Thereupon
ensued the poor lady's usual lamentations over the long, long absence of
her beloved son; as usual, she told him she did not think she should live
to see him back again; she gave him a full account of her maladies,
caused, or at least aggravated, by her mortal, constant, incurable
sorrow; and she told how Giselle had been nursing her with all the
patience and devotion of a Sister of Charity. Through all Madame
d'Argy's letters at this period the angelic figure of Giselle was
contrasted with the very different one of that young and incorrigible
little devil of a Jacqueline.
Fred at first believed his mother's stories were all exaggeration, but
the facts were there, corroborated by the continued silence of the person
concerned. He knew his mother to be too good wilfully to blacken the
character of one whom for years she had hoped would be her daughter-in-
law, the only child of her best friend, the early love of her son. But
by degrees he fancied that the love so long living at the bottom of his
heart was slowly dying, that it had been extinguished, that nothing
remained of it but remembrance, such remembrance as we retain for dead
things, a remembrance without hope, whose weight added to the
homesickness which with him was increasing every day.
There was no active service to enable him to endure exile. The heroic
period of the war had passed. Since a treaty of peace had been signed
with China, the fleet, which had distinguished itself in so many small
engagements and bombardments, had had nothing to do but to mount guard,
as it were, along a conquered coast. All round it in the bay, where it
lay at anchor, rose mountains of strange shapes, which seemed to shut it
into a kind of prison. This feeling of nothing to be done--of nothing
likely to be done, worked in Fred's head like a nightmare. The only
thing he thought of was how he could escape, when could he once more kiss
the faded cheeks of his mother, who often, when he slept or lay wakeful
during the long hours of the siesta, he saw beside him in tears. Hers
was the only face that he recalled distinctly; to her and to her only
were devoted his long reveries when on watch; that time when he formerly
composed his love verses, tender or angry, or full of despair. That was
all over! A sort of mournful resignation had succeeded his bursts of
excited feeling, his revolt against his fate.
This was Fred's state of mind when he received orders to return home--
orders as unexpected as everything seems to be in the life of a naval
man. "I am going back to her!" he cried. Her was his mother, her was
France. All the rest had disappeared as if into a fog. Jacqueline was a
phantom of the past; so many things had happened since the old times when
he had loved her. He had crossed the Indian Ocean and the China Sea; he
had seen long stretches of interminable coast-line; he had beheld misery,
and glory, and all the painful scenes that wait on warfare; he had seen
pestilence, and death in every shape, and all this had wrought in him a
sort of stoicism, the result of long acquaintance with solitude and
danger. He remembered his old love as a flower he had once admired as he
passed it, a treacherous flower, with thorns that had wounded him. There
are flowers that are beneficent, and flowers that are poisonous, and the
last are sometimes the most beautiful. They should not be blamed, he
thought; it was their nature to be hurtful; but it was well to pass them
by and not to gather them.
By the time he had debarked Fred had made up his mind to let his mother
choose a wife for him, a daughter-in-law suited to herself, who would
give her the delight of grandchildren, who would bring them up well, and
who would not weary of Lizerolles. But a week later the idea of this
kind of marriage had gone out of his head, and this change of feeling was
partly owing to Giselle. Giselle gave him a smile of welcome that went
to his heart, for that poor heart, after all, was only waiting for a
chance again to give itself away. She was with Madame d'Argy, who had
not been well enough to go to the sea-coast to meet her son, and he saw
at the same moment the pale and aged face which had visited him at
Tonquin in his dreams, and a fair face that he had never before thought
so beautiful, more oval than he remembered it, with blue eyes soft and
tender, and a mouth with a sweet infantine expression of sincerity and
goodness. His mother stretched out her trembling arms, gave a great cry,
and fainted away.
"Don't be alarmed; it is only joy," said Giselle, in her soft voice.
And when Madame d'Argy proved her to be right by recovering very quickly,
overwhelming her son with rapid questions and covering him with kisses,
Giselle held out her hand to him and said:
"I, too, am very glad you have come home."
"Oh!" cried the sick woman in her excitement, "you must kiss your old
playfellow!"
Giselle blushed a little, and Fred, more embarrassed than she, lightly
touched with his lips her pretty smooth hair which shone upon her head
like a helmet of gold. Perhaps it was this new style of hairdressing
which made her seem so much more beautiful than he remembered her, but it
seemed to him he saw her for the first time; while, with the greatest
eagerness, notwithstanding Giselle's attempts to interrupt her, Madame
d'Argy repeated to her son all she owed to that dear friend "her own
daughter, the best of daughters, the most patient, the most devoted of
daughters, could not have done more! Ah! if there only could be found
another one like her!"
Whereupon the object of all these praises made her escape, disclaiming
everything.
Why, after this, should she have hesitated to come back to Lizerolles
every day, as of late had been her custom? Men know so little about
taking care of sick people. So she came, and was present at all the
rejoicings and all the talks that followed Fred's return. She took her
part in the discussions about Fred's future. "Help me, my pet," said
Madame d'Argy, "help me to find a wife for him: all we ask is that she
should be like you."
In answer to which Fred declared, half-laughing and half-seriously, that
that was his ideal.
She did not believe much of this, but, following her natural instinct,
she assumed the dangerous task of consolation, until, as Madame d'Argy
grew better, she discontinued her daily visits, and Fred, in his turn,
took a habit of going over to Fresne without being invited, and spending
there a good deal of his time.
"Don't send me away. You who are always charitable," he said. "If you
only knew what a pleasure a Parisian conversation is after coming from
Tonquin!"
"But I am so little of a Parisienne, or at least what you mean by that
term, and my conversation is not worth coming for," objected Giselle.
In her extreme modesty she did not realize how much she had gained in
intellectual culture. Women left to themselves have time to read, and
Giselle had done this all the more because she had considered it a duty.
Must she not know enough to instruct and superintend the education of her
son? With much strong feeling, yet with much simplicity, she spoke to
Fred of this great task, which sometimes frightened her; he gave her his
advice, and both discussed together the things that make up a good man.
Giselle brought up frequently the subject of heredity: she named no one,
but Fred could see that she had a secret terror lest Enguerrand, who in
person was very like his father, might also inherit his character. Fears
on this subject, however, appeared unfounded. There was nothing about
the child that was not good; his tastes were those of his mother. He was
passionately fond of Fred, climbing on his lap as soon as the latter
arrived and always maintaining that he, too, wanted a pretty red ribbon
to wear in his buttonhole, a ribbon only to be got by sailing far away
over the seas, like sailors.
"A sailor! Heaven forbid!" cried Madame de Talbrun.
"Oh! sailors come back again. He has come back. Couldn't he take me
away with him soon? I have some stories about cabin-boys who were not
much older than I."
"Let us hope that your friend Fred won't go away," said Giselle. "But
why do you wish to be a cabinboy?"
"Because I want to go away with him, if he does not stay here--because I
like him," answered Enguerrand in a tone of decision.
Hereupon Giselle kissed her boy with more than usual tenderness. He
would not take to the hunting-field, she thought, the boulevard, and the
corps de ballet. She would not lose him. "But, oh, Fred!" she cried,
"it is not to be wondered at that he is so fond of you! You spoil him!
You will be a devoted father some day; your vocation is evidently for
marriage."
She thought, in thus speaking, that she was saying what Madame d'Argy
would like her to say.
"In the matter of children, I think your son is enough for me," he said,
one day; "and as for marriage, you would not believe how all women--
I mean all the young girls among whom I should have to make a choice--
are indifferent to me. My feeling almost amounts to antipathy."
For the first time she ventured to say: "Do you still care for
Jacqueline?"
"About as much as she cares for me," he answered, dryly. "No, I made a
mistake once, and that has made me cautious for the future."
Another day he said:
"I know now who was the woman I ought to have loved."
Giselle did not look up; she was devoting all her attention to
Enguerrand.
Fred held certain theories which he used to talk about. He believed in a
high, spiritual, disinterested affection which would raise a man above
himself, making him more noble, inspiring a disgust for all ignoble
pleasures. The woman willing to accept such homage might do anything she
pleased with a heart that would be hers alone. She would be the lady who
presided over his life, for whose sake all good deeds and generous
actions would be done, the idol, higher than a wife or any object of
earthly passion, the White Angel whom poets have sung.
Giselle pretended that she did not understand him, but she was divinely
happy. This, then, was the reward of her spotless life! She was the
object of a worship no less tender than respectful. Fred spoke of the
woman he ought to have loved as if he meant to say, "I love you;" he
pressed his lips on the auburn curls of little Enguerrand where his
mother had just kissed him. Day after day he seemed more attracted to
that salon where, dressed with more care than she had ever dressed
before, she expected him. Then awoke in her the wish to please, and she
was beautiful with that beauty which is not the insipid beauty of
St. Agnes, but that which, superior to all other, is seen when the face
reflects the soul. All that winter there was a new Giselle--a Giselle
who passed away again among the shadows, a Giselle of whom everybody
said, even her husband, "Ma foi! but she is beautiful!" Oscar de
Talbrun, as he made this remark, never thought of wondering why she was
more beautiful. He was ready to take offense and was jealous by nature,
but he was perfectly sure of his wife, as he had often said. As to Fred,
the idea of being jealous of him would never have entered his mind.
Fred was a relative and was admitted to all the privileges of a cousin
or a brother; besides, he was a fellow of no consequence in any way.
While this platonic attachment grew stronger and stronger between Fred
and Giselle, assisted by the innocent complicity of little Enguerrand,
Jacqueline was discovering how hard it is for a girl of good birth, if
she is poor, to carry out her plans of honest independence. Possibly she
had allowed herself to be too easily misled by the title of "companion,"
which, apparently more cordial than that of 'demoiselle de compagnie',
means in reality the same thing--a sort of half-servile position.
Money is a touchstone which influences all social relations, especially
when on one side there is a somewhat morbid susceptibility, and on the
other a lack of good breeding and education. The Sparks, father and
daughter, Americans of the lower class, though willing to spend any
number of dollars for their own pleasure, expected that every penny they
disbursed should receive its full equivalent in service; the place
therefore offered so gracefully and spontaneously to Mademoiselle de
Nailles was far from being a sinecure. Jacqueline received her salary on
the same footing as Justine, the Parisian maid, received her wages, for,
although her position was apparently one of much greater importance and
consideration than Justine's, she was really at the beck and call of a
girl who, while she called her "darling," gave her orders and paid her
for her services. Very often Miss Nora asked her to sew, on the plea
that she was as skilful with her fingers as a fairy, but in reality that
her employer might feel the superiority of her own position.
Hitherto Miss Nora had been delighted to meet at watering-places a friend
of whom she could say proudly, "She is a representative of the old
nobility of France" (which was not true, by the way, for the title of
Baron borne by M. de Nailles went no farther back than the days of Louis
XVIII); and she was still more proud to think that she was now waited on
by this same daughter of a nobleman, when her own father had kept a
drinking-saloon. She did not acknowledge this feeling to herself, and
would certainly have maintained that she never had had such an idea, but
it existed all the same, and she was under its influence, being very vain
and rather foolish. And, indeed, Jacqueline, would have been very
willing to plan trimmings and alter finery from morning to night in her
own chamber in a hotel, exactly as Mademoiselle Justine did, if she could
by this means have escaped the special duties of her difficult position,
which duties were to follow Miss Nora everywhere, like her own shadow, to
be her confidant and to act sometimes as her screen, or even as her
accomplice, in matters that occasionally involved risks, and were never
to her liking.
The young American girl had already said to her father, when he asked her
to give up her search for an entirely satisfactory European suitor, which
search he feared might drag on forever without any results: "Oh! I shall
be sure to find him at Bellagio!" And she made up her mind that there he
was to be sought and found at any price. Hotel life offered her
opportunities to exercise her instincts for flirtation, for there she met
many specimens of men she called chic, with a funny little foreign
accent, which seemed to put new life into the wornout word. Twenty times
a day she baited her hook, and twenty times a day some fish would bite,
or at least nibble, according as he was a fortune-hunter or a dilettante.
Miss Nora, being incapable of knowing the difference, was ready to
capture good or bad, and went about dragging her slaves at her chariot-
wheels. Sometimes she took them rowing, with the Stars and Stripes
floating over her boat, by moonlight; sometimes she drove them recklessly
in a drag through roads bordered by olive-groves and vineyards; all these
expeditions being undertaken under-pretence of admiring the romantic
scenery. Her father was not disposed to interfere with what he called "a
little harmless dissipation." He was confident his daughter's
"companion" must know what was proper, she being, as he said, accustomed
to good society. Were not all Italian ladies attended by gentlemen? Who
could blame a young girl for amusing herself? Meantime Mr. Sparks amused
himself after his own fashion, which was to sit comfortably, with his
feet up on the piazza rail of the hotel, imbibing strong iced drinks
through straws. But in reality Jacqueline had no power whatever to
preserve propriety, and only compromised herself by her associations,
though her own conduct was irreproachable. Indeed she was considered
quite prudish, and the rest of the mad crowd laughed at her for having
the manners of a governess. In vain she tried to say words of warning to
Nora; what she said was laughed at or resented in a tone that told her
that a paid companion had not the right to speak as frankly as a friend.
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