Balcony Stories Part 9

"No, madame. Surely I cannot buy mushrooms unless madame orders them.

Madame's disposition is too quick."

"But I do order them. Stupid! I do order them. I tell you to buy them every day."

"And if there are none in the market every day?"

"Go away! Get out of my sight! I do not want to see you. Ah, it is unendurable! I must--I must get rid of him!" This last was not a threat, as Jules knew only too well. It was merely a habitual exclamation.

During the colloquy Mr. Horace, leaning back in his arm-chair, raised his eyes, and caught the reflected portrait of madame in the mirror before him--the reflection so much softer and prettier, so much more ethereal, than the original painting. Indeed, seen in the mirror, that way, the portrait was as refres.h.i.+ng as the most charming memory. He pointed to it when madame, with considerable loss of temper, regained her seat.

"It is as beautiful as the past," he explained most unnaturally, for he and his friend had a horror of looking at the long, long past, which could not fail to remind them of--what no one cares to contemplate out of church. Making an effort toward some determination which a subtle observer might have noticed weighing upon him all the evening, he added: "And, apropos of the past--"

"_Hein_?" interrogated the old lady, impatiently, still under the influence of her irascibility about the mushrooms.

He moved his chair closer, and bent forward, as if his communication were to be confidential.

"Ah, bah! Speak louder!" she cried. "One would suppose you had some secret to tell. What secrets can there be at our age?" She took up her cards and began to play. There could be no one who bothered herself less about the forms of politeness.

"Yes, yes," answered Mr. Horace, throwing himself back into his chair; "what secrets can there be at our age?"

The remark seemed a pregnant one to him; he gave himself up to it. One must evidently be the age of one's thoughts. Mr. Horace's thoughts revealed him the old man he was. The lines in his face deepened into wrinkles; his white mustache could not pretend to conceal his mouth, worsened by the loss of a tooth or two; and the long, thin hand that propped his head was crossed with blue, distended veins. "At the last judgment"--it was a favorite quotation with him--"the book of our conscience will be read aloud before the whole company."

But the old lady, deep in her game, paid no more heed to his quotation than to him. He made a gesture toward her portrait.

"When that was painted, Josephine--"

Madame threw a glance after the gesture. The time was so long ago, the mythology of Greece hardly more distant! At eighty the golden age of youth must indeed appear an evanescent myth. Madame's ideas seemed to take that direction.

"Ah, at that time we were all nymphs, and you all demiG.o.ds."

"DemiG.o.ds and nymphs, yes; but there was one among us who was a G.o.d with you all."

The allusion--a frequent one with Mr. Horace--was to madame's husband, who in his day, it is said, had indeed played the G.o.d in the little Arcadia of society. She shrugged her shoulders. The truth is so little of a compliment The old gentleman sighed in an abstracted way, and madame, although apparently absorbed in her game, lent her ear. It is safe to say that a woman is never too old to hear a sigh wafted in her direction.

"Josephine, do you remember--in your memory--"

She pretended not to hear. Remember? Who ever heard of her forgetting?

But she was not the woman to say, at a moment's notice, what she remembered or what she forgot.

"A woman's memory! When I think of a woman's memory--in fact, I do not like to think of a woman's memory. One can intrude in imagination into many places; but a woman's memory--"

Mr. Horace seemed to lose his thread. It had been said of him in his youth that he wrote poetry--and it was said against him. It was evidently such lapses as these that had given rise to the accusation.

And as there was no one less impatient under sentiment or poetry than madame, her feet began to agitate themselves as if Jules were perorating some of his culinary inanities before her.

"And a man's memory!" totally misunderstanding him. "It is not there that I either would penetrate, my friend. A man--"

When madame began to talk about men she was prompted by imagination just as much as was Mr. Horace when he talked about women. But what a difference in their sentiments! And yet he had received so little, and she so much, from the subjects of their inspiration. But that seems to be the way in life--or in imagination.

"That you should"--he paused with the curious shyness of the old before the word "love"--"that you two should--marry--seemed natural, inevitable, at the time."

Tradition records exactly the same comment by society at the time on the marriage in question. Society is ever fatalistic in its comments.

"But the natural--the inevitable--do we not sometimes, I wonder, perform them as Jules does his accidents?"

"Ah, do not talk about that idiot! An idiot born and bred! I won't have him about me! He is a monstrosity! I tell his grandmother that every day when she comes to comb me. What a farce--what a ridiculous farce comfortable existence has become with us! Fresh mushrooms in market, and bring me carrots!"

The old gentleman, partly from long knowledge of her habit, or from an equally persistent bend of his own, quietly held on to his idea.

"One cannot tell. It seems so at the time. We like to think it so; it makes it easier. And yet, looking back on our future as we once looked forward to it--"

"Eh! but who wants to look back on it, my friend? Who in the world wants to look back on it?" One could not doubt madame's energy of opinion on that question to hear her voice. "We have done our future, we have performed it, if you will. Our future! It is like the dinners we have eaten; of course we cannot remember the good without becoming exasperated over the bad: but"--shrugging her shoulders--"since we cannot beat the cooks, we must submit to fate," forcing a queen that she needed at the critical point of her game.

"At sixteen and twenty-one it is hard to realize that one is arranging one's life to last until sixty, seventy, forever," correcting himself as he thought of his friend, the dead husband. If madame had ever possessed the art of self-control, it was many a long day since she had exercised it; now she frankly began to show ennui.

"When I look back to that time,"--Mr. Horace leaned back in his chair and half closed his eyes, perhaps to avoid the expression of her face,--"I see nothing but lights and flowers, I hear nothing but music and laughter; and all--lights and flowers and music and laughter--seem to meet in this room, where we met so often to arrange our--inevitabilities." The word appeared to attract him.

"Josephine,"--with a sudden change of voice and manner,--"Josephine, how beautiful you were!"

The old lady nodded her head without looking from her cards.

"They used to say," with sad conviction of the truth of his testimony--"the men used to say that your beauty was irresistible.

None ever withstood you. None ever could."

That, after all, was Mr. Horace's great charm with madame; he was so faithful to the illusions of his youth. As he looked now at her, one could almost feel the irresistibility of which he spoke.

"It was only their excuse, perhaps; we could not tell at the time; we cannot tell even now when we think about it. They said then, talking as men talk over such things, that you were the only one who could remain yourself under the circ.u.mstances; you were the only one who could know, who could will, under the circ.u.mstances. It was their theory; men can have only theories about such things." His voice dropped, and he seemed to drop too, into some abysm of thought.

Madame looked into the mirror, where she could see the face of the one who alone could retain her presence of mind under the circ.u.mstances suggested by Mr. Horace. She could also have seen, had she wished it, among the reflected bric-a-brac of the mantel, the corner of the frame that held the picture of her husband, but peradventure, cla.s.sing it with the past which held so many unavenged bad dinners, she never thought to link it even by a look with her emotions of the present.

Indeed, it had been said of her that in past, present, and future there had ever been but the one picture to interest her eyes--the one she was looking at now. This, however, was the remark of the uninitiated, for the true pa.s.sion of a beautiful woman is never so much for her beauty as for its booty; as the pa.s.sion of a gamester is for his game, not for his luck.

"How beautiful _she_ was!"

It was apparently down in the depths of his abysm that he found the connection between this phrase and his last, and it was evidently to himself he said it. Madame, however, heard and understood too; in fact, traced back to a certain period, her thoughts and Mr. Horace's must have been fed by pretty much the same subjects. But she had so carefully barricaded certain issues in her memory as almost to obstruct their flow into her life; if she were a cook, one would say that it was her bad dinners which she was trying to keep out of remembrance.

"You there, he there, she there, I there." He pointed to the places on the carpet, under the chandelier; he could have touched them with a walking-stick, and the recollection seemed just as close.

"She was, in truth, what we men called her then; it was her eyes that first suggested it--Myosotis, the little blue flower, the for-get-me-not. It suited her better than her own name. We always called her that among ourselves. How beautiful she was!" He leaned his head on his hand and looked where he had seen her last--so long, such an eternity, ago.

It must be explained for the benefit of those who do not live in the little world where an allusion is all that is necessary to put one in full possession of any drama, domestic or social, that Mr. Horace was speaking of the wedding-night of madame, when the bridal party stood as he described under the chandelier; the bride and groom, with each one's best friend. It may be said that it was the last night or time that madame had a best friend of her own s.e.x. Social gossip, with characteristic kindness, had furnished reasons to suit all tastes, why madame had ceased that night to have a best friend of her own s.e.x. If gossip had not done so, society would still be left to its imagination for information, for madame never tolerated the smallest appeal to her for enlightenment. What the general taste seemed most to relish as a version was that madame in her marriage had triumphed, not conquered; and that the night of her wedding she had realized the fact, and, to be frank, had realized it ever since. In short, madame had played then to gain at love, as she played now to gain at solitaire; and hearts were no more than cards to her--and, "Bah! Lose a game for a card!"

must have been always her motto. It is hard to explain it delicately enough, for these are the most delicate affairs in life; but the image of Myosotis had pa.s.sed through monsieur's heart, and Myosotis does mean "forget me not." And madame well knew that to love monsieur once was to love him always, in spite of jealousy, doubt, distrust, nay, unhappiness (for to love him meant all this and more). He was that kind of man, they said, whom women could love even against conscience.

Madame never forgave that moment. Her friend, at least, she could put aside out of her intercourse; unfortunately, we cannot put people out of our lives. G.o.d alone can do that, and so far he had interfered in the matter only by removing monsieur. It was known to notoriety that since her wedding madame had abandoned, destroyed, all knowledge of her friend. And the friend? She had disappeared as much as is possible for one in her position and with her duties.

"What there is in blue eyes, light hair, and a fragile form to impress one, I cannot tell; but for us men it seems to me it is blue-eyed, light-haired, and fragile-formed women that are the hardest to forget."

"The less easy to forget," corrected madam. He paid no attention to the remark.

"They are the women that attach themselves in one's memory. If necessary to keep from being forgotten, they come back into one's dreams. And as life rolls on, one wonders about them,--'Is she happy?

Is she miserable? Goes life well or ill with her?'"