The Custom of the Country Part 38

XXVII

She was still brooding over this last failure when one afternoon, as she loitered on the hotel terrace, she was approached by a young woman whom she had seen sitting near the wheeled chair of an old lady wearing a crumpled black bonnet under a funny fringed parasol with a jointed handle.

The young woman, who was small, slight and brown, was dressed with a disregard of the fas.h.i.+on which contrasted oddly with the mauve powder on her face and the traces of artificial colour in her dark untidy hair.

She looked as if she might have several different personalities, and as if the one of the moment had been hanging up a long time in her wardrobe and been hurriedly taken down as probably good enough for the present occasion.

With her hands in her jacket pockets, and an agreeable smile on her boyish face, she strolled up to Undine and asked, in a pretty variety of Parisian English, if she had the pleasure of speaking to Mrs. Marvell.

On Undine's a.s.senting, the smile grew more alert and the lady continued: "I think you know my friend Sacha Adelschein?"

No question could have been less welcome to Undine. If there was one point on which she was doggedly and puritanically resolved, it was that no extremes of social adversity should ever again draw her into the group of people among whom Madame Adelschein too conspicuously figured.

Since her unsuccessful attempt to win over Indiana by introducing her to that group, Undine had been righteously resolved to remain aloof from it; and she was drawing herself up to her loftiest height of disapproval when the stranger, as if unconscious of it, went on: "Sacha speaks of you so often--she admires you so much.--I think you know also my cousin Ch.e.l.les," she added, looking into Undine's eyes. "I am the Princess Estradina. I've come here with my mother for the air."

The murmur of negation died on Undine's lips. She found herself grappling with a new social riddle, and such surprises were always stimulating. The name of the untidy-looking young woman she had been about to repel was one of the most eminent in the impregnable quarter beyond the Seine. No one figured more largely in the Parisian chronicle than the Princess Estradina, and no name more impressively headed the list at every marriage, funeral and philanthropic entertainment of the Faubourg Saint Germain than that of her mother, the d.u.c.h.esse de Dordogne, who must be no other than the old woman sitting in the Bath-chair with the crumpled bonnet and the ridiculous sunshade.

But it was not the appearance of the two ladies that surprised Undine.

She knew that social gold does not always glitter, and that the lady she had heard spoken of as Lili Estradina was notoriously careless of the conventions; but that she should boast of her intimacy with Madame Adelschein, and use it as a pretext for naming herself, overthrew all Undine's hierarchies.

"Yes--it's hideously dull here, and I'm dying of it. Do come over and speak to my mother. She's dying of it too; but don't tell her so, because she hasn't found it out. There were so many things our mothers never found out," the Princess rambled on, with her half-mocking half-intimate smile; and in another moment Undine, thrilled at having Mrs. Spragg thus coupled with a d.u.c.h.ess, found herself seated between mother and daughter, and responding by a radiant blush to the elder lady's amiable opening: "You know my nephew Raymond--he's your great admirer."

How had it happened, whither would it lead, how long could it last? The questions raced through Undine's brain as she sat listening to her new friends--they seemed already too friendly to be called acquaintances!--replying to their enquiries, and trying to think far enough ahead to guess what they would expect her to say, and what tone it would be well to take. She was used to such feats of mental agility, and it was instinctive with her to become, for the moment, the person she thought her interlocutors expected her to be; but she had never had quite so new a part to play at such short notice. She took her cue, however, from the fact that the Princess Estradina, in her mother's presence, made no farther allusion to her dear friend Sacha, and seemed somehow, though she continued to chat on in the same easy strain, to look differently and throw out different implications. All these shades of demeanour were immediately perceptible to Undine, who tried to adapt herself to them by combining in her manner a mixture of Apex dash and New York dignity; and the result was so successful that when she rose to go the Princess, with a hand on her arm, said almost wistfully: "You're staying on too? Then do take pity on us! We might go on some trips together; and in the evenings we could make a bridge."

A new life began for Undine. The Princess, chained her mother's side, and frankly restive under her filial duty, clung to her new acquaintance with a persistence too flattering to be a.n.a.lyzed. "My dear, I was on the brink of suicide when I saw your name in the visitors' list," she explained; and Undine felt like answering that she had nearly reached the same pa.s.s when the Princess's thin little hand had been held out to her. For the moment she was dizzy with the effect of that random gesture. Here she was, at the lowest ebb of her fortunes, miraculously rehabilitated, reinstated, and restored to the old victorious sense of her youth and her power! Her sole graces, her unaided personality, had worked the miracle; how should she not trust in them hereafter?

Aside from her feeling of concrete attainment. Undine was deeply interested in her new friends. The Princess and her mother, in their different ways, were different from any one else she had known. The Princess, who might have been of any age between twenty and forty, had a small triangular face with caressing impudent eyes, a smile like a silent whistle and the gait of a baker's boy balancing his basket. She wore either baggy shabby clothes like a man's, or rich draperies that looked as if they had been rained on; and she seemed equally at ease in either style of dress, and carelessly unconscious of both. She was extremely familiar and unblus.h.i.+ngly inquisitive, but she never gave Undine the time to ask her any questions or the opportunity to venture on any freedom with her. Nevertheless she did not scruple to talk of her sentimental experiences, and seemed surprised, and rather disappointed, that Undine had so few to relate in return. She playfully accused her beautiful new friend of being cachottiere, and at the sight of Undine's blush cried out: "Ah, you funny Americans! Why do you all behave as if love were a secret infirmity?"

The old d.u.c.h.ess was even more impressive, because she fitted better into Undine's preconceived picture of the Faubourg Saint Germain, and was more like the people with whom she pictured the former Nettie Wincher as living in privileged intimacy. The d.u.c.h.ess was, indeed, more amiable and accessible than Undine's conception of a d.u.c.h.ess, and displayed a curiosity as great as her daughter's, and much more puerile, concerning her new friend's history and habits. But through her mild prattle, and in spite of her limited perceptions. Undine felt in her the same clear impenetrable barrier that she ran against occasionally in the Princess; and she was beginning to understand that this barrier represented a number of things about which she herself had yet to learn. She would not have known this a few years earlier, nor would she have seen in the d.u.c.h.ess anything but the ruin of an ugly woman, dressed in clothes that Mrs. Spragg wouldn't have touched. The d.u.c.h.ess certainly looked like a ruin; but Undine now saw that she looked like the ruin of a castle.

The Princess, who was unofficially separated from her husband, had with her her two little girls. She seemed extremely attached to both--though avowing for the younger a preference she frankly ascribed to the interesting accident of its parentage--and she could not understand that Undine, as to whose domestic difficulties she minutely informed herself, should have consented to leave her child to strangers. "For, to one's child every one but one's self is a stranger; and whatever your egarements--" she began, breaking off with a stare when Undine interrupted her to explain that the courts had ascribed all the wrongs in the case to her husband. "But then--but then--" murmured the Princess, turning away from the subject as if checked by too deep an abyss of difference.

The incident had embarra.s.sed Undine, and though she tried to justify herself by allusions to her boy's dependence on his father's family, and to the duty of not standing in his way, she saw that she made no impression. "Whatever one's errors, one's child belongs to one," her hearer continued to repeat; and Undine, who was frequently scandalized by the Princess's conversation, now found herself in the odd position of having to set a watch upon her own in order not to scandalize the Princess.

Each day, nevertheless, strengthened her hold on her new friends. After her first flush of triumph she began indeed to suspect that she had been a slight disappointment to the Princess, had not completely justified the hopes raised by the doubtful honour of being one of Sacha Adelschein's intimates. Undine guessed that the Princess had expected to find her more amusing, "queerer," more startling in speech and conduct.

Though by instinct she was none of these things, she was eager to go as far as was expected; but she felt that her audacities were on lines too normal to be interesting, and that the Princess thought her rather school-girlish and old-fas.h.i.+oned. Still, they had in common their youth, their boredom, their high spirits and their hunger for amus.e.m.e.nt; and Undine was making the most of these ties when one day, coming back from a trip to Monte-Carlo with the Princess, she was brought up short by the sight of a lady--evidently a new arrival--who was seated in an att.i.tude of respectful intimacy beside the old d.u.c.h.ess's chair. Undine, advancing unheard over the fine gravel of the garden path, recognized at a glance the Marquise de Trezac's drooping nose and disdainful back, and at the same moment heard her say: "--And her husband?"

"Her husband? But she's an American--she's divorced," the d.u.c.h.ess replied, as if she were merely stating the same fact in two different ways; and Undine stopped short with a pang of apprehension.

The Princess came up behind her. "Who's the solemn person with Mamma?

Ah, that old bore of a Trezac!" She dropped her long eye-gla.s.s with a laugh. "Well, she'll be useful--she'll stick to Mamma like a leech and we shall get away oftener. Come, let's go and be charming to her."

She approached Madame de Trezac effusively, and after an interchange of exclamations Undine heard her say "You know my friend Mrs. Marvell? No?

How odd! Where do you manage to hide yourself, chere Madame? Undine, here's a compatriot who hasn't the pleasure--"

"I'm such a hermit, dear Mrs. Marvell--the Princess shows me what I miss," the Marquise de Trezac murmured, rising to give her hand to Undine, and speaking in a voice so different from that of the supercilious Miss Wincher that only her facial angle and the droop of her nose linked her to the hated vision of Potash Springs.

Undine felt herself dancing on a flood-tide of security. For the first time the memory of Potash Springs became a thing to smile at, and with the Princess's arm through hers she shone back triumphantly on Madame de Trezac, who seemed to have grown suddenly obsequious and insignificant, as though the waving of the Princess's wand had stripped her of all her false advantages.

But upstairs, in her own room. Undine's courage fell. Madame de Trezac had been civil, effusive even, because for the moment she had been taken off her guard by finding Mrs. Marvell on terms of intimacy with the Princess Estradina and her mother. But the force of facts would rea.s.sert itself. Far from continuing to see Undine through her French friends'

eyes she would probably invite them to view her compatriot through the searching lens of her own ampler information. "The old hypocrite--she'll tell them everything," Undine murmured, wincing at the recollection of the dentist's a.s.sistant from Deposit, and staring miserably at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror. Of what use were youth and grace and good looks, if one drop of poison distilled from the envy of a narrow-minded woman was enough to paralyze them? Of course Madame de Trezac knew and remembered, and, secure in her own impregnable position, would never rest till she had driven out the intruder.

XXVIII

"What do you say to Nice to-morrow, dearest?" the Princess suggested a few evenings later as she followed Undine upstairs after a languid evening at bridge with the d.u.c.h.ess and Madame de Trezac.

Half-way down the pa.s.sage she stopped to open a door and, putting her finger to her lip, signed to Undine to enter. In the taper-lit dimness stood two small white beds, each surmounted by a crucifix and a palm branch, and each containing a small brown sleeping child with a mop of hair and a curiously finished little face. As the Princess stood gazing on their innocent slumbers she seemed for a moment like a third little girl scarcely bigger and browner than the others; and the smile with which she watched them was as clear as theirs. "Ah, si seulement je pouvais choisir leurs amants!" she sighed as she turned away.

"--Nice to-morrow," she repeated, as she and Undine walked on to their rooms with linked arms. "We may as well make hay while the Trezac s.h.i.+nes. She bores Mamma frightfully, but Mamma won't admit it because they belong to the same oeuvres. Shall it be the eleven train, dear?

We can lunch at the Royal and look in the shops--we may meet somebody amusing. Anyhow, it's better than staying here!"

Undine was sure the trip to Nice would be delightful. Their previous expeditions had shown her the Princess's faculty for organizing such adventures. At Monte-Carlo, a few days before, they had run across two or three amusing but una.s.sorted people, and the Princess, having fused them in a jolly lunch, had followed it up by a bout at baccarat, and, finally hunting down an eminent composer who had just arrived to rehea.r.s.e a new production, had insisted on his asking the party to tea, and treating them to fragments of his opera.

A few days earlier, Undine's hope of renewing such pleasures would have been clouded by the dread of leaving Madame de Trezac alone with the d.u.c.h.ess. But she had no longer any fear of Madame de Trezac. She had discovered that her old rival of Potash Springs was in actual dread of her disfavour, and nervously anxious to conciliate her, and the discovery gave her such a sense of the heights she had scaled, and the security of her footing, that all her troubled past began to seem like the result of some providential "design," and vague impulses of piety stirred in her as she and the Princess whirled toward Nice through the blue and gold glitter of the morning.

They wandered about the lively streets, they gazed into the beguiling shops, the Princess tried on hats and Undine bought them, and they lunched at the Royal on all sorts of succulent dishes prepared under the head-waiter's special supervision. But as they were savouring their "double" coffee and liqueurs, and Undine was wondering what her companion would devise for the afternoon, the Princess clapped her hands together and cried out: "Dearest, I'd forgotten! I must desert you."

She explained that she'd promised the d.u.c.h.ess to look up a friend who was ill--a poor wretch who'd been sent to Cimiez for her lungs--and that she must rush off at once, and would be back as soon as possible--well, if not in an hour, then in two at latest. She was full of compunction, but she knew Undine would forgive her, and find something amusing to fill up the time: she advised her to go back and buy the black hat with the osprey, and try on the crepe de Chine they'd thought so smart: for any one as good-looking as herself the woman would probably alter it for nothing; and they could meet again at the Palace Tea-Rooms at four. She whirled away in a cloud of explanations, and Undine, left alone, sat down on the Promenade des Anglais. She did not believe a word the Princess had said. She had seen in a flash why she was being left, and why the plan had not been divulged to her before-hand; and she quivered with resentment and humiliation. "That's what she's wanted me for...that's why she made up to me. She's trying it to-day, and after this it'll happen regularly...she'll drag me over here every day or two...at least she thinks she will!"

A sincere disgust was Undine's uppermost sensation. She was as much ashamed as Mrs. Spragg might have been at finding herself used to screen a clandestine adventure.

"I'll let her see... I'll make her understand," she repeated angrily; and for a moment she was half-disposed to drive to the station and take the first train back. But the sense of her precarious situation withheld her; and presently, with bitterness in her heart, she got up and began to stroll toward the shops.

To show that she was not a dupe, she arrived at the designated meeting-place nearly an hour later than the time appointed; but when she entered the Tea-Rooms the Princess was nowhere to be seen. The rooms were crowded, and Undine was guided toward a small inner apartment where isolated couples were absorbing refreshments in an atmosphere of intimacy that made it seem incongruous to be alone. She glanced about for a face she knew, but none was visible, and she was just giving up the search when she beheld Elmer Moffatt shouldering his way through the crowd.

The sight was so surprising that she sat gazing with unconscious fixity at the round black head and glossy reddish face which kept appearing and disappearing through the intervening jungle of aigrettes. It was long since she had either heard of Moffatt or thought about him, and now, in her loneliness and exasperation, she took comfort in the sight of his confident capable face, and felt a longing to hear his voice and unbosom her woes to him. She had half risen to attract his attention when she saw him turn back and make way for a companion, who was cautiously steering her huge feathered hat between the tea-tables. The woman was of the vulgarest type; everything about her was cheap and gaudy. But Moffatt was obviously elated: he stood aside with a flourish to usher her in, and as he followed he shot out a pink s.h.i.+rt-cuff with jewelled links, and gave his moustache a gallant twist. Undine felt an unreasoning irritation: she was vexed with him both for not being alone and for being so vulgarly accompanied. As the couple seated themselves she caught Moffatt's glance and saw him redden to the edge of his white forehead; but he elaborately avoided her eye--he evidently wanted her to see him do it--and proceeded to minister to his companion's wants with an air of experienced gallantry.

The incident, trifling as it was, filled up the measure of Undine's bitterness. She thought Moffatt pitiably ridiculous, and she hated him for showing himself in such a light at that particular moment. Her mind turned back to her own grievance, and she was just saying to herself that nothing on earth should prevent her letting the Princess know what she thought of her, when the lady in question at last appeared. She came hurriedly forward and behind her Undine perceived the figure of a slight quietly dressed man, as to whom her immediate impression was that he made every one else in the room look as common as Moffatt. An instant later the colour had flown to her face and her hand was in Raymond de Ch.e.l.les, while the Princess, murmuring: "Cimiez's such a long way off; but you WILL forgive me?" looked into her eyes with a smile that added: "See how I pay for what I get!"

Her first glance showed Undine how glad Raymond de Ch.e.l.les was to see her. Since their last meeting his admiration for her seemed not only to have increased but to have acquired a different character. Undine, at an earlier stage in her career, might not have known exactly what the difference signified; but it was as clear to her now as if the Princess had said--what her beaming eyes seemed, in fact, to convey--"I'm only too glad to do my cousin the same kind of turn you're doing me."

But Undine's increased experience, if it had made her more vigilant, had also given her a clearer measure of her power. She saw at once that Ch.e.l.les, in seeking to meet her again, was not in quest of a mere pa.s.sing adventure. He was evidently deeply drawn to her, and her present situation, if it made it natural to regard her as more accessible, had not altered the nature of his feeling. She saw and weighed all this in the first five minutes during which, over tea and m.u.f.fins, the Princess descanted on her luck in happening to run across her cousin, and Ch.e.l.les, his enchanted eyes on Undine, expressed his sense of his good fortune. He was staying, it appeared, with friends at Beaulieu, and had run over to Nice that afternoon by the merest chance: he added that, having just learned of his aunt's presence in the neighbourhood, he had already planned to present his homage to her.

"Oh, don't come to us--we're too dull!" the Princess exclaimed. "Let us run over occasionally and call on you: we're dying for a pretext, aren't we?" she added, smiling at Undine.

The latter smiled back vaguely, and looked across the room. Moffatt, looking flushed and foolish, was just pus.h.i.+ng back his chair. To carry off his embarra.s.sment he put an additional touch of importance; and as he swaggered out behind his companion, Undine said to herself, with a s.h.i.+ver: "If he'd been alone they would have found me taking tea with him."

Undine, during the ensuing weeks, returned several times to Nice with the Princess; but, to the latter's surprise, she absolutely refused to have Raymond de Ch.e.l.les included in their luncheon-parties, or even apprised in advance of their expeditions.

The Princess, always impatient of unnecessary dissimulation, had not attempted to keep up the feint of the interesting invalid at Cimiez. She confessed to Undine that she was drawn to Nice by the presence there of the person without whom, for the moment, she found life intolerable, and whom she could not well receive under the same roof with her little girls and her mother. She appealed to Undine's sisterly heart to feel for her in her difficulty, and implied that--as her conduct had already proved--she would always be ready to render her friend a like service.

It was at this point that Undine checked her by a decided word. "I understand your position, and I'm very sorry for you, of course," she began (the Princess stared at the "sorry"). "Your secret's perfectly safe with me, and I'll do anything I can for you...but if I go to Nice with you again you must promise not to ask your cousin to meet us."

The Princess's face expressed the most genuine astonishment. "Oh, my dear, do forgive me if I've been stupid! He admires you so tremendously; and I thought--"

"You'll do as I ask, please--won't you?" Undine went on, ignoring the interruption and looking straight at her under level brows; and the Princess, with a shrug, merely murmured: "What a pity! I fancied you liked him."