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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #69430 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69430)
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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of Madame Margot, by John Bennett
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: Madame Margot
-       A grotesque legend of old Charleston
-
-Author: John Bennett
-
-Release Date: November 26, 2022 [eBook #69430]
-
-Language: English
-
-Produced by: Charlene Taylor, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed
-             Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
-             produced from images generously made available by The
-             Internet Archive)
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MADAME MARGOT ***
-
-
-
-
-
-MADAME MARGOT
-
-
-
-
-  MADAME MARGOT
-
-  _A Grotesque Legend
-  of Old Charleston_
-
-  BY
-
-  JOHN BENNETT
-
-  [Illustration]
-
-  NEW YORK
-  THE CENTURY CO.
-  1921
-
-
-
-
-  Copyright, 1921, by
-  JOHN BENNETT
-
-  Printed in U. S. A.
-
-
-
-
-  TO
-
-  ... You, and you, and you,
-  ... who have gone greatly here
-  In friendship, making some delight, some true
-  Song in the dark, some story against fear.
-
-  ... Lovers yet shall tell the nightingale
-  Sometimes a song that we of old time made,
-  And gossips gathered at the twilight ale
-  Shall say, “Those two were friends,” or “Unafraid
-  Of bitter thoughts were those because they loved
-  Better than most.”
-
-  ... There in the midst of all those words shall be
-  Our names, our ghosts, our immortality.
-
-                                  --JOHN DRINKWATER.
-
-  _The above is reprinted by permission of the publishers._
-
-
-
-
-MADAME MARGOT
-
-
-
-
-MADAME MARGOT
-
-
-In an age so glorious, so rich and fine, and so be-starred with
-splendor that one almost forgets the bottomless abyss into which it
-plunged at last, there lived a woman in Charleston of whom a very odd
-story is told.
-
-The languid, lovely, tired old town was then a city brave and gay, with
-Mediterranean manners and Caribbean ways.
-
-The perfume of ten thousand flowers drifted upon the winds, which came
-and went over a thousand gardens, ebbing and flowing like the tide.
-
-Clouds of snowy gold and roses rolled across the sky, like the vast
-rotundas of a city builded of colored ivory. Slowly rising overhead, in
-windy and ethereal masses, they stood, carvings of pale porphyry upon a
-turquoise wall. The earth was transfigured with beauty.
-
-It was a golden age, when all things were fair; nothing had grown
-old; even the tragic and the terrible were comely then. Wonder lay
-on everything. Merely to exist was to be happy. It was a world of
-unextinguished youth; life was brimful to the lips with delight.
-
-In the gardens rare flowers bloomed, and rare fruits
-ripened,--pomegranates, oranges, medlars, figs, jujubes, and the purple
-Indian peach; and among the flowers, like winged flames, small and
-bright, sped the harlequins, the painted nonpareils, delicately beating
-the soft wind with their pied wings; while in the pomegranate-tree,
-among the dull bronze fruit, the mocking-bird sang his love and
-rapture. Through the green-hedged close, women, beautiful and stately,
-paced the shade, with men beside them, slender and straight, passionate
-and haughty, with fierce, bright eyes as ardent as the goshawk’s and
-as bold; and lovely girls, with dark hair and skins of alabaster, as
-graceful and as timid as fawns, and with fawn’s eyes, slipped among the
-green leaves like flowers alive.
-
-Those were charmed days indeed. The town has changed since then. The
-world seems to have grown weary and gray, and the hearts of men bitter.
-The young were younger then; the old not so sorry for everything as
-they have been since. Then, somehow, it seemed to be always summer
-morning, morning before the sun had burned the world to a dun crisp
-with his meridian heat, scorching bitter and blinding bright; before
-the advent of gasping afternoon with its languid leafage and evaporated
-sap. The calendar seemed to have paused among the daffodils, between
-the jessamine and the June, in that paradise of the year. The delicate
-and virginal camellia bloomed then, untarnished by rough wind or rain;
-its petals were sweet, which since then have grown so bitter. The
-elm-trees did not then bloom thrice for one green coat. And no one ever
-paused to think that no good and lovely thing exists on earth without
-its corresponding shadow.
-
-The world was full of the sound of sweet, flute-like voices of young
-women calling after their lovers; and the singing of small birds made
-slender, pleasant melodies among the cool myrtles. Life was simpler;
-perhaps more child-like though more passionate. Two who loved each
-other might walk together, hand in hand, along the path, singing their
-happiness, without reproach, save, perchance, from some lugubrious,
-gray-bearded presbyter mourning, among mossy tombstones, life’s
-evanescence.
-
-And happy youth was without a fault, unless it were a trivial one,
-some _péché mignon_, a guileless, guiltless, girlish sin, like kissing
-oneself in the looking-glass for lack of another lover.
-
-In all the town there were none so pretty, none so graceful or so
-sweet, as the golden girls of San Domingo. They flowed along the
-windy streets, their turbans nodding, like a stream of tulips. They
-fluttered down the byways in their white muslin dresses like bevies of
-butterflies. The loveliness of their slender bodies and the beauty of
-their youthful faces were far beyond all dull description; they were
-a bed of tiger-lilies in the sun. The earth loved the tread of their
-flying feet, which seemed to be forever dancing pastourelles; and the
-narrow lanes of the city laughed with the lilt of their Creole tongue.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Among the golden San Domingans the loveliest of all admittedly was
-Marguerite Lagoux, the milliner, by her patronage called Rita, by her
-familiars Margoton, by envious rivalry Madame Margot; and, after all
-was over and done, known merely as Old Mother Go-go.
-
-Hers was glorious physical loveliness in its fullest maturity. It was
-in an hour of inspiration the indolent god of beauty drew the lines on
-which her body was built.
-
-Her passionate, rich-colored, handsome face was like a line from an
-old enchantment which took men’s souls captive, then cast them away
-without the least regret, or with a Circean spell turned them into
-beasts. Her neck was a deep-colored, ivory tower poised perfectly
-over her breast. The dazzling, orange-tawny skin of her broad bust
-turned to golden-russet before it reached her cheeks, and was there
-flushed to dusky rose, like the skin of a ruddy-gold peach. In the
-burnt splendor of her cheek the darkly eloquent blood in her veins
-made its golden proclamation. Her mouth was long and strangely curved
-like a retroverted bow; the lips of a queer fruit-color, not crimson,
-carmine, nor magenta, but a little of all three. The upper lip was
-brief to a fault, and curled back on itself like a rich-pulped fruit
-which has parted in ripening. The full under-lip cast a heavier shade
-than the lips the old masters chose, when they painted a picture of the
-Madonna. Her hair, like a dark, uncertain cloud, fell down in heavy
-coils, gathered and knotted at the nape of the neck, bound there in a
-golden net; or lay in an unfilleted band across the broad, low brow,
-drawn back into braids over her ears, or collected into a turban tied
-with peculiar dexterity. Her body was cast in a glorious mould: she was
-tall; in figure perfect, and full of a stately, tiger-like grace, the
-envy of other women. She moved, when she walked, as an empress might if
-heaven but gave her grace, with an exquisite, perfect motion, devoid
-of every appearance of effort,--not striding, but seeming to glide like
-a swan swimming on untroubled water. In the sluggish grace of her heavy
-lips and deep-lidded, brooding eyes, she was as full of an indolent,
-sleepy beauty as midsummer afternoon. Dressed in bright merino,
-crimson, orange, and blue, with a kerchief of blood-colored silk around
-her head bound in oriental fashion, beads of amber around her neck, and
-in each ear a hoop of gold, she looked like a great golden lily dusted
-with _sang-dieu_.
-
-One day she was the lily; the next a yellow rose; and the next she was
-a tulip,--gold, crimson, purple and black. She was a Caribbean summer
-incarnate, of flower-blooms, thunder and gold. The passing traveler,
-seeing her, stopped while he caught his breath. There was something
-about her commanded attention besides her remarkable beauty. One spoke
-of Ducie Poincignon casually; but one spoke of Rita Lagoux with an
-accent.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Of all the milliners of her day Margot was first beyond compare. Her
-taste was perfect; her instinct for color was never at fault; her
-choice of fabrics exquisite. None equaled her in dexterity; she was
-like a marvelous spider weaving webs of gossamer. Those who sought
-beauty found it; her patrons were patrician; all of the very best
-employed her art; she had no successful competitor; beside her Eloise
-Couesnon was esteemed but maladroit.
-
-Margot’s shop was in King street, near Mignot’s Garden, a little above
-the Bend. She lived in a little alley known as Lilac lane, a narrow,
-crooked, private path between two large estates, which rambled into the
-interspace like a brown brook into a wood. Beneath high green hedges
-it wandered into the solitude, growing narrower as it went, until the
-hedge boughs, meeting, knit themselves together, interlacing their
-elastic, leafy twigs. There the baffled foot-path seemed to lose its
-way and to abandon every purpose for which foot-paths are designed,
-ran on a little, hesitated, crept on again uncertainly, then gave up
-hope and disappeared in a green perplexity. The unfamiliar traveler
-paused here, bewildered, and turned back to find a bolder thoroughfare;
-familiar feet alone pressed on through Lilac lane.
-
-Where the strait way vanished into the wilderness stood Margot’s
-cottage, tucked snug as a plum stone in a plum. Around it was a garden
-hedged by box and bay. Of all the hedges in Lilac lane the highest
-were Margot’s. They rose around her garden in an impenetrable thicket,
-tall, dark-tangled, dense and old, their green tops tossing against
-the blue beyond the reach of the hedger’s bill. Within lay a little
-tranquil space, withdrawn alike from curious gaze and the town’s brawl,
-and overshadowed by the wide boughs of two great magnolias, whose
-drowsy shade fell heavily on the sleepy oleanders and over the rows of
-tulips below, that lifted up their golden cups and filled the air with
-odor. Here day and night flowed by in undisturbed serenity; all noise
-was hushed and tumult quelled; the shyest wild birds nested here in
-perfect confidence, fear cast away and foes forgot. No place in all
-the town seemed more secure from rude intrusion. No apparition came by
-night, no terror by day; so quiet it was, so full of peace, it seemed a
-sanctuary withdrawn from the interrupting clash and rude alarms of the
-troubled world,--its tranquillity that of a convent close, with little,
-distant, ringing bells, recurrent chimes and subdued voices, muffled
-by distance, as of nuns chanting an office in the peaceful choir of a
-green-nooked nunnery.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Margot Lagoux had a daughter; her name was Gabrielle.
-
-Though Margot was lovely, Gabrielle was lovelier. They differed in
-beauty as pompadour-pink differs from brier-rose. Margot’s was a
-golden beauty; Gabrielle’s an ivory loveliness. Margot was a pottery
-figurine moulded with marvelous skill; Gabrielle a statuette of
-exquisite porcelain. Margot was like the summer sun, dazzling, opulent,
-sumptuous; Gabrielle like the young spring moon in her slender
-loveliness; the lines of her flowed one into the other like the lines
-of a song. Her hands were delicate and fine, their touch as light as
-flowers blown by the wind, which drift like a whisper across the face
-of the passer-by. Her feet were arched like a Spanish girl’s; her
-ankles were the loveliest things that ever sandal-ribbon bound; she
-walked like the wind of an April morning through meadows after rain.
-
-Her face, with its delicate high cheek-bones, was like the fair
-flower of Normandy; but her beauty was not Western, ’twas Eastern;
-it was like the pale Persian roses which blow by the gray-marbled
-waterways among the fallen pillars of the forgotten gardens of
-Istakhr,--roses of yesterday, full of yesterday’s unbearable
-loveliness, yesterday’s happiness, yesterday’s tragedy,--fragrant with
-passionate, heart-breaking perfume, piercingly sweet, with the pathos
-of swift-passing beauty, far keener than that of ruins and age. She was
-of a loveliness such as sometimes comes out of India unburned by the
-Indian sun, of which dreamers make dreams of unforgettable beauty.
-
-Her slender young body was like a piece of perfect ivory laid away to
-be carved. Her long, dark, tangled eye-lashes fell upon her cheeks like
-sudden gusts of darkening rain; her cheeks were japonica-color; her
-lips pale pomegranate-red; her hair ebony; her temples were traced with
-crocus-blue.
-
-Her cheeks japonica-color? They were the hue of peach flowers at dusk:
-God who gave them knew whence came both peach flower color and dusk.
-
-At every breath there came and went beneath her transparent skin a
-shadowy crimson under-dusk, ebbing and flowing with the beat of her
-heart like a somber, twilit tide,--San Domingo’s _sang de crépuscule_;
-and through her fingers the sunlight shone with a golden radiance like
-the glow of a rose through a glass of madeira.
-
-She might have been sister to Scheherazade in her exquisite, aquiline,
-high-born loveliness, a patrician beauty strangely like that of old
-French romance. Far and away beyond compare she was the loveliest
-girl in St. Finbar’s parish; and the faces of the young girls in St.
-Finbar’s made that ancient, dim, gray parish bloom like the gardens of
-Paradise.
-
-God, who knows everything, knows whence she had her exquisite, slender
-body, her aristocratic face, the dusky crimson tide, the touch of
-fantasy which made her lovely as a strain of wild, passionate music
-played on the deep strings of a gipsy violin.
-
-For, as the rarest beauty remains imperfect without a touch of
-strangeness, without something to haunt and to fret the mind,
-forbidding it to forget, there was a something almost, if not quite,
-fantastic, in Gabrielle’s loveliness--a touch of irregularity difficult
-to define--making her beauty more significant through being peculiar,
-more poignant through being strange. Something indefinite and
-conjectural tinged her being; the ghost of a vaguely intricate and
-tragical implication beneath her bright young innocence lurked shadowy
-and malign. Had her beauty been less perfect this, perhaps, had been
-less notable. Revealed in a casual attitude, for a moment startling in
-vividness, now for a moment it was lost, and now stole forth again in
-the stress of unstudied emotion to accent a passing mood.
-
-As one who, looking into her mirror, sees a face there not her own,
-Margot perceived in her daughter’s face an intricately blended
-likeness, to banish which into forgetfulness she strove desperately in
-vain,--the recollection of a wild, sweet, irrevocable hour whose memory
-was fear. Gabrielle’s beauty made her tremble.
-
-It is a perilous privilege for a girl to possess loveliness rising
-above her station in life; there is a price always to be paid for it,
-sorrow the common fee; such a heritage of beauty often proves but a
-legacy of shame,--a beauty built for destruction, a loveliness for
-scorn; haggard wisdom reaps in tears what innocence sowed with laughter.
-
-There was a thought from which Margot shrank as from a draught of
-poison: Gabrielle degraded and desolate. There was nothing to her more
-precious than her daughter’s innocence; nothing so important as her
-earthly happiness; these seemed to Margot even more necessary than her
-eternal peace.
-
-Yet ever a shadow hung over her child, from cradle to grave; her
-delicate grace and refinement were signatures of dread. Margot’s eyes
-hunted from side to side as do a deer’s hard pressed by the dogs--can
-one elude destiny?
-
-Where were the lovely and the fair she had known in her own youth?
-Dead, long ago; the graveyard sand lay cold upon their lips; their
-passion and their sweetness were forgotten long ago. Margot knew that
-youth and summer night are made for ecstasy. She knew, too, that in
-forgotten graveyards are many unmarked graves of hapless beauty.
-Looking into the mirror where life is stripped of its illusions, and
-truth stands stark and bare in its unmitigated ugliness, panic terror
-seized Margot.
-
-Was there no refuge, no escape, nor safety anywhere; no retreat, nor
-harbor, but in hopeless longing; always the far-off lightning and
-threatening of storm? Peering into the future she was filled with
-apprehension. In dreams she saw Gabrielle’s innocence hanging over a
-black abyss; in dreams saw a fawn torn by ravening wolves. She awoke,
-starting up, crying out! There was nothing but the night. Yet she arose
-from her bed, and, crouched by her crucifix, prayed for her daughter as
-she never had prayed for herself.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-At adolescence Gabrielle was a vision of delight. In temperament she
-was ardent as is a summer shower, which gives, when it gives, all that
-it has to give, in a rush of wind and rain. Unspoiled by knowledge,
-unruined by folly, too innocent to be perplexed by life’s anxieties,
-her soul mistook Earth for the pathway to Paradise, and nothing as yet
-had discovered her error. With her each hour began afresh the tale of
-life, a long, sweet, glad surprise.
-
-Rose-winged days and golden nights were come to Gabrielle, whose feet
-stood at the smiling gate of the Primrose Way. But Margot’s days and
-nights were filled with passionate anxiety, as with increasing doubts
-and fears she confronted destiny.
-
-The inner house-door gave upon a little paved court, where two twisted
-old fig-trees grew, many-branched candelabra, tipped in spring
-with green-leaved lights. Green-leaved shadows wavered below on a
-duck-pool’s marble bowl, stained green from the copper tenons which
-tied its stones together. Here ducks praised Jove with yellow bills,
-and splashed viridian wings. In the pool, glimmering, one saw the
-stuccoed cottage-wall, on the irregular surface of which old colors
-showed in broken chequers through the new until the wall was patched
-with unpremeditated beauty. Across the pool the silvery sunlight
-glimmered like a streak of flame. But the fairest thing reflected there
-was Gabrielle, dancing on the old stones which paved the court,--dances
-fantastic as her mood; sarabands to the stately rhythm of odd old
-songs, deliberately slow; canzons whose pathos was lost in a pirouette;
-minuets which mimicked the swallows overhead with their swift glissades
-among the trees and undulating sweeps among the flowers,--snatching
-the poppies as she passed, and thrusting them in her hair, and
-pausing at last like a wind-blown flower above her reflection in the
-pool,--Gabrielle, singing old songs by the world forgotten,--strains
-of wild beauty, that by wayward loveliness have a peculiar power to
-please, with old melodies, alluring and sweet; songs such as long ago
-stole the souls of saints determined upon salvation, and gave themes
-for many troubadour lays, of which, though all are lovely, the greater
-part are sad, being memories of loveliness departed into the dust: one
-of life’s paradoxes, that the memory of beauty should be bitter.
-
-Here, remote from the curious world, preserved by the cloistral hedges
-from prying indiscretion, flowed her secluded existence. Few ever saw
-her. Such as by chance observed her through some green interstice,
-dazzled by her beauty, hurried off to spread the tale of an enchanted
-princess in an enchanted wood; hedge-balked and bewildered, few had
-ever seen her twice; by which she had been the more thought of through
-being the less seen.
-
-Many had sought the courtyard; but none had found the way. Margot
-kept it a solitude lest Gabrielle suffer corruption, and around her
-maintained a veritable nunnery of care, hovered over her, and kept her
-as close withdrawn as a novice in a convent-garth.
-
-But beauty cannot be sequestered always safely anywhere. Cloistral life
-is very well for souls of cloistral nature and of the convent sort;
-but youth and spring hate convents, and will have life’s novitiate,
-or none. There is a crevice in every hedge, no matter how tall or how
-thick it may be, and through it, ever, Gabrielle peeps.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Spring followed winter; May’s warm slow, yellow, moonlit nights were
-come.
-
-Then Gabrielle grew tired and white. Her hand became tremulous; her
-light foot stumbled; she left off dancing in the garden. She sighed
-wistfully; her song ceased; her mouth showed scarcely a smile’s wasted
-ghost. Her eyes, like those of a wounded creature, followed everywhere;
-her tears flowed at nothing. She grew as languid as a withering flower.
-The light of her seemed going out. The pallor of her face and the
-feverish luster of her eyes startled and frightened Margot.
-
-Days dragged a laggard length; night still more oppressed her. She lay
-awake, whispering with dry lips she knew not what; calling she knew
-not whom; her trembling hands pressed against her breast. Fancies for
-which she found no name, thoughts for which she had no words, and
-visions inexpressible, would not let her sleep. Night after night she
-lay awake, consuming the hours with wonder; or, if she slept, awoke in
-tears, fell asleep to tears again, and waking, tear-wet, trembling,
-with darkened lids and drawn face, grew daily worse.
-
-Vague, moody wants annoyed her; the night was harassed by melancholy
-dreams; the day vexed with formless fancies.
-
-Walking alone in the garden, answerless questionings beset and
-frightened her; she listened where there was nothing to be heard;
-stared where there was nothing to be seen; found peace nowhere.
-
-Her heart ached with unreasoning pain; she grew as gusty as a storm;
-the speechless, inexplicable wonder within her breast throbbed like a
-festered thorn.
-
-Margot too well knew the cause: there was but one alleviation.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Spring, with its universal song, from grove and garden lifted up its
-deathless melody of bloomy verdure and warm-breathed sweetness. All
-living creatures voiced the universal theme: “Rejoice with the partner
-of thine heart in the happy days of thy youth!”
-
-The blue dove moaned out his heart’s desire; the copper beetle wooed
-and won his lady in the dust; butterflies and dragon-flies glittered
-in the wind, happy in their airy ecstasy--they fluttered among the
-hedges; they sported among the flowers--and all the earth rejoiced in
-having its heart’s desire. Thrush and mocker sang, “Passion, passion
-... heart-breaking passion!” to their pretty feathered paramours. From
-every spray the vireo cried shrill, in shreds of melody, “Heart’s
-desire! Heart’s desire!” In the fragrant green-bay the painted
-bunting’s love-call rang incessantly; while from the tufted grove
-arose the stirring chant of earth’s universal choir, the canticle, all
-passionate and shrill, of “Love, love, love!” and yet again of “Love!”
-
-How can one keep it from the heart of youth, that, all unknowing, yet
-numb with longing, breathlessly awaits its coming, and trembles like a
-leaf with the wordless yearning of unrecognized desire.
-
-Gabrielle was intoxicated with the passion of her own heart, without
-an object or an aim; her throat was almost choked with youth’s sweet,
-innocent desire; and, ever, within her shaking heart, the questioning
-wonder grew.
-
-“Mother,” she said wistfully, “what is it fills the world with music
-day and night? What is it makes the whole world sing?”
-
-“Happiness,” replied Margot, “and joy of the spring.”
-
-“Happiness?” rejoined Gabrielle. “If it be happiness, why does it make
-my heart ache? Why does spring hurt me so?”
-
-Margot, startled, sat staring, wrung with sudden fear.
-
-“And what is this love of which every one sings--we women most of all?”
-
-“The source of all wretchedness. Leave it alone!” cried Margot. She
-looked at her daughter in terror.
-
-“But,” replied Gabrielle, wondering, “if love be the source of all
-wretchedness, why is it’s song so sweet?”
-
-“Because fools have their folly!” cried Margot. “Love-songs are sweet
-to a lover, as folly is dear to a fool. Worship thy God,” she said
-harshly, “and leave foolishness to the fool!”
-
-“Love--foolishness?” said Gabrielle, puzzled. “You told me that God is
-love!” She turned the riddle over and over in her mind.
-
-“What ails you?” asked Margot.
-
-“Nothing,” said Gabrielle. But a flush stole up her cheeks. “How does
-a woman know, Mother, that she loves, so that she may say certainly,
-‘This is love’?”
-
-“By the utter despair that tears her heart in two.”
-
-“But, Mother,” protested Gabrielle, “they tell me that love is sweet!”
-
-“Sweet? As wormwood!” said Margot hoarsely. “It is nothing but fever
-and fret.”
-
-“Many I see who have it; but none who fret. Might I not know for myself
-a little of this pretty play of lovers and beloved?” besought Gabrielle.
-
-Margot looked at Gabrielle and trembled, seeing the shadow upon her,
-foreseeing the fate of her loveliness, perceiving indiscretion’s lips
-at the rim of the cup of terror. “What man has snared your silly
-heart?” she asked.
-
-Gabrielle stared at her. “Why should any man snare my heart?” she asked
-in pitiful wonder. “I have never harmed any man, nor any living thing.”
-She caught her breath. “Oh, Mother, feel my heart beating! It beats as
-if it would burst. Why does my heart beat so? Am I dying? Do you think
-that I must die? Yet, Mother, my heart is aching so that I would that
-I could die! Is not what God made good ... you told me that God was
-love ... was not mankind made by God ... and is not love the world’s
-delight?”
-
-“It is its direst misery,” said Margot bitterly. “God keep you from it.
-Two parts are pain, two sorrow, and the other two parts are death.”
-
-“I don’t fear death,” said Gabrielle. “Then why should I fear love?”
-
-“Because it is a lie,” cried Margot, beside herself. “I conjure you, by
-God’s sorrow, close your ears against it.”
-
-“How can I close my ears against it when I hear it in my sleep?”
-
-Margot’s delight in her daughter’s beauty was turned into bitterness.
-“Peace!” she cried. “And leave me. All this will pass away.” But, deep
-within, her heart said, “Never!” Innocence will be indiscreet. Sin
-alone is always clever. And in youth great things are lightly asked and
-lightly given. “Go!” she cried to Gabrielle.
-
-Gabrielle left the room. Margot buried her face in her hands.
-
-It is hard for woman to stand alone and to resist temptation forever.
-Soon or late the black moment comes; reason is off guard; prudence
-abandons her; caution is thrown to the winds: passion betrays. Here
-is an irremediable disease which baffles the skill of the physicians.
-Margot recoiled as she faced the future. Time had become a terror.
-Burning tears flowed down her cheeks. There is no woe so sickening
-as the monotone of fear, the shuddering, interior sense of impending
-catastrophe. Nor is it eased by the strange apathy which is granted
-to the doomed. Margot groaned in an agony, half remorse, half
-apprehension. Could God set so foul a seal upon so fair a thing?
-
-Again on a day Gabrielle came in from the garden, her eyes dry-burning
-and famine-bright. “Mother, give me a lover!” she cried. “Nietta
-Pascault has one!”
-
-“Then alas and alack for Nietta Pascault!” cried Margot.
-
-“But, Mother, he called her his heart’s delight; she did not speak, but
-she kissed him; and he kissed her until he must have bruised her lips;
-yet she did not seem to care ... rather she seemed to like it. And all
-he said was ‘Love me! Love me!’ and all she said was ‘Yes,’ and ‘Yes!’
-And when he kissed her she grew pale; I thought that she was dead, ...
-but he held her in his arms, Mother, and kissed her again and again, as
-though he would kiss her back to life. Will kisses bring one back from
-the dead? For, Mother, suddenly she opened her eyes as if she lived
-only for love; and then all he said was ‘Love me!’ and all she said was
-‘Yes!’”
-
-Margot’s heart fainted.
-
-Day after day Gabrielle knelt in the garden and plead for her heart’s
-desire. Night after night Margot crouched on her floor and prayed, in
-despair and agony, that it might not be given her. Heaven’s custodian
-mingled their prayers in fatal entanglement; one was answered, and one
-was not: he is responsible.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Sunset lay on Margot’s garden. The paths still shimmered with the
-day’s heat, though the lax grass lifted in the shadows. Nameless
-perfumes wandered among the drowsily-bending flowers; the odor of warm
-boxwood rose from the hedge. The hedge stood black against the sky; in
-its glistening, fragrant deeps small birds moved swiftly to and fro in
-curious agitation.
-
-Gabrielle, puzzling upon life’s unanswered riddle, stood listening to
-sounds beyond the hedge. Everywhere was the patter of hurrying feet,
-and the whisper of wordless laughter, mockingly borne on the evening
-wind. The air was full of the golden vision of light-footed maidens
-with fluttering garments, flying through Lilac lane, pursued by ardent
-and breathless lovers, eagerly following where they fled. The sound of
-laughter floated back along the narrow way, and the little faint echo
-of flying feet. It was that time of the year when all maids are sweet
-as freshly gathered flowers, and all men are a little mad. Even the
-earth, drab clod, was astir with the ecstasy of approaching night.
-
-Beneath the broad-boughed magnolia grew a pomegranate-tree whose
-branches shrouded the greater tree’s bole. The scarlet pomegranate
-flowers hung over Gabrielle; the green leaves folded her in. Faint
-color came fitfully over her cheek; her eyes roamed restlessly through
-the garden, but found no solace there. As she stood thus, brooding on
-life’s inexplicable theme, she was aware of a sudden shadow which fell
-on the grass beside her, and turned in voiceless terror.
-
-There was a face in the green hedge, smiling, two butterflies hovering
-over it,--a lad’s face, laughing and debonair, with yellow hair
-curling around it like crisp little golden flames; his cheeks were
-as ruddy and smooth as a child’s; his eyes were blue as the morning,
-swift and bright; the leaves stirred all around him as if to the beat
-of wings; there was confidence in his bearing, easy lordship and high
-pride.
-
-Gabrielle, startled and terrified, shrank back against the magnolia’s
-black bole, one trembling, hesitant hand extended in doubt.
-Speechless she stared at that bright, boyish face with its nimbus of
-sunlit, yellow hair, until her dry eyes gushed tears, dimming her
-sight,--stared in wonder and adoration.
-
-His eyes were audaciously bright as wild stars, incessantly roving,
-and alight with golden fire. He was tall, well-set and slender, with a
-beautiful, straight body; there was something godlike in his air as he
-leaned through the matted hedge, eagerly scanning her,--her pale rose
-cheeks, snowy gown, moth-green kerchief, her lips, her neck matching
-the ivory of the blossoms in her hair,--half-veiled by a screen of
-leafy green, dull gold and pomegranate flowers.
-
-She had bound her hair with a bit of gold braid which shone like an
-aureole round her brow, and in it had thrust two butterfly lilies,
-whiter than ivory; her eyes were wide open, round and unwinking,
-their frightened depths full of tears; her lips had fallen slightly
-apart to free her fluttering breath; she sighed, a little, shuddering
-sigh, and crossed her hands upon her breast. Her beauty startled him:
-delicate-frail, almost translucent in the golden sun, she seemed a
-being not of flesh and gross mortality, but a spirit by enchantment
-made visible, a dryad out of the ancient wood, a maiden saint stepped
-out of a missal or fled from a chapel window, with a halo around her
-brow. With her head poised like a flower; her little, perfect hands and
-feet; her ankles slim and beautiful; each line aristocratic; everything
-proclaiming patrician blood; nothing asserting a baser thing: saint,
-maid, dryad, nymph, or sprite, who could tell which?
-
-Silently drinking her loveliness he leaned through the hedge. Among the
-fire-colored flowers and green, her color was exquisite as the violet
-sky is, seen through yellow leaves.
-
-Again she sighed softly; stared at his face, and shivered a little. Was
-it a god or a man in the hedge? Had he sprouted out of the boxwood, or
-fallen from the clouds?
-
-The perfect beauty of her figure, outlined on green by her thin white
-gown, charmed and enchanted him. He stared at her, trying to focus
-her face more clearly upon his sight; her loveliness struck him dumb.
-She seemed a statue of ivory, hung with garlands of gold, crimson and
-green, half-hidden by a rood-screen of shimmering emerald. It seemed to
-him that he looked on more than mortal beauty.
-
-Leaning forward a little, one hand outstretched, one clasping her
-throat, she watched his face with its golden hair aglow in the last
-red sunlight. How could she tell if it were a god or a man,--that
-face with its shimmering locks like living fire around it, a gleaming
-nimbus whose dancing flames were fashioned of burnished gold, a face
-like a blazing seraph’s, or Ariel’s? She looked at that proud young
-countenance in wordless adoration.
-
-Her own face was now intensely bright with the sunset’s declining
-glory. Into the crevice between her lips the sunshine had slipped; her
-lips were translucent; her mouth was aglow as if she breathed ethereal
-fire.
-
-Suddenly he drew his breath with a sharply audible sound; for, as he
-gazed, longing seized the boy’s heart and wrung it bitterly.
-
-The flame which blazed in his bright eyes put an answering glow in her
-own. She was aware that her beauty had startled him. For the first time
-in her life she was awake to her own loveliness, a sense wonderful
-and sweet. A delicate, throbbing fire came fluttering up through her
-breast; a flush stole into her cheeks and warmed their ashy pallor. Her
-eyes met his: in his eyes were joy, surprise, and longing. His eyes
-met hers: and all her doubts went out in wordless joy. For, when she
-perceived that look in his face, she, too, was thrilled with longing;
-the silence sang; fire thrilled her heart; suddenly neck and cheeks
-flamed red.
-
-She answered his look with glorious eyes, humid, terrified, alight.
-Then her frightened eyes fell and her shy face. But, like a wave which
-breaks along a beach in a passionate surge, her heart rushed out to
-greet him.
-
-He saw her neck and her cheeks flame red; passion struck him to the
-heart. With a gesture of haughty but boyish humility he pushed through
-the hedge, seized the sheltering pomegranate branches, and swept
-them aside. She stood uncurtained before him. He gazed at her. “St.
-Jacques!” he cried. “Are you a living creature?”
-
-She regarded him for an instant with a look of undisguised terror,
-catching her breath with a sobbing sound right pitiful to hear; then
-her quivering, piteous face was made exquisite by tears.
-
-A back-wash of timidity held him silently staring at her,--a boy, hot
-and hasty, sure of himself, impulsively bold, but abashed,--admiration
-and longing ablaze in his eyes. Gabrielle stammered, but could not
-find words; her breast heaved and sank; she could not control it.
-Overwhelmed by the sudden strange rush of emotion, she swayed giddily,
-dizzily put out one hand to steady herself, and laid it upon his arm:
-a tremulous smile came over her face; her tears, like an April shower,
-were gone.
-
-His hand sought her other hand; found it; held it; thus their hands
-met. Half a step timidly they approached each other; then stood at a
-halt as if turned to stone. Her frightened breath was the only sound
-save the stirring of the night-wind in the dark boughs overhead.
-
-Shaking like a wind-blown leaf, “_Que désirez-vous de moi?_” she gasped.
-
-His voice, too, was trembling. “That you should love me a little, for
-pity’s sake, ... and quite forget to fear!”
-
-His voice seemed to Gabrielle godlike.
-
-“See, then ... I fear nothing.... I should as soon think of fearing the
-air we breathe!” she said, adoring her slender young demigod out of
-the hedge. Then suddenly she raised her hand and laid it caressingly on
-his cheek; her trembling fingers felt like flowers trailed across his
-face.
-
-He laughed. There was an infectious sweetness and merriment in his
-laughter. Then they laughed together, softly,--first love and joy are
-silent things.
-
-“You are the god of love,” she said, with infinite simplicity. “Else,
-how could you fly over the hedge?”
-
-Her flute-like voice was like the music of a half-awakened song, and
-exquisitely moving; her words trailed slowly like speech asleep.
-
-Again he laughed. “The god of love? _Bien!_ Then what shall I have that
-is godlike?”
-
-“What you will,” she said. “You may ask.” For the innocent are
-trustful as doves, helpless as the least creatures, weak as the small
-birds among the little branches.
-
-He drew a quick breath. “Most of all things on earth I would have a
-kiss from your mouth. Shall I have it?”
-
-“Yes,” she said. “Take it!” and put up her lips. So their mouths met. A
-thousand tingling darts of fire pierced through her as his lips touched
-hers.
-
-Her heart was wrung by that first kiss; for an instant it stood still;
-the blood had left it, and had fled through her like flame; she
-almost swooned. For first passion is like the wind in the blossoming
-locust-tree, too sweet to be easily breathed or borne; youth’s first
-caress is almost an agony. Gabrielle gasped; his lips had burned on
-hers like a celestial fire. Both shook as love’s consuming flame
-rushed through them.
-
-As he to her was first, so she to him; each gave the other life’s
-immaculate gift, the unmeasured, unmeasurable fire of love’s first
-embrace, that passionate anguish of delicate, uncalculated delight,
-ardent and boundless.
-
-Their lips hurried to the meeting. How could they delay? Youth and love
-brook no delays. Yet, as she felt his lips upon her own, she regarded
-him with a writhen countenance of unqualified terror. Love comes to
-the maiden spirit with sudden tumult, and strikes it, not as a blithe
-discovery, or an all-Elysian joy, but as a birth and an agony, from
-which, if the soul survives, comes unspeakable happiness. His lips
-sought hers and seeking, met; in the meeting her soul flew out at her
-mouth.
-
-The world seemed suddenly remote, withdrawn into the depths of
-uncalculated space. There remained but these two young, love-stunned
-souls, groping to each other in the garden under the shadow of the
-great magnolia-trees.
-
-The enchantment of love was upon them. The happy girl lay close upon
-his heart, and all she said was, “Love me! Love me!” and, “If ever
-I cease to love you perdition take my soul!” he said. With utter
-confidence her eyes looked up into his, glowing with a passion that
-knows no change; and all she said, as she lay against his heart, was,
-“Love me! Only love me!” That is all a woman asks. Her fingers stroked
-his yellow hair; the mere touch thrilled her with unspeakable happiness.
-
-Night came, and darkness voyaged the uncharted sky. Overhead the blue
-dome blazed with the innumerable stars and golden planets heaving up
-heaven’s arch; the tremulous green lamps of the fireflies filled the
-earth with twinkling constellations all around them. But the heavens
-and the earth were as nothing to them: love was there, and he, and
-she, and the utterly forgotten starlight. And where youth and love
-are, life, death, good or ill, the bright stars or the black mould, or
-better or worse, are nothing, and wisdom is of little worth.
-
-They gazed into each other’s eyes with wordless tenderness. Youth has
-not words, nor waits to find them; age finds words, and nothing else.
-
-Across the city boomed the hour,--at last.
-
-“Oh! I must go!”
-
-“Not yet! Not yet!”
-
-“But I must go. Good-night!”
-
-“Not yet!”
-
-“But I must go! Good-night! Good-night! I pray you, leave me go ... for
-truly I must go!”
-
-“You’ll come again?”
-
-“To-morrow.”
-
-“Show me the way into the garden,” he said. She showed him the
-quickest way in, kissed him, and was gone through the garden; for him
-the night was darkened, and the stars put out. Her breath was still
-upon his face, the smell of the flowers in his nostrils; and in his
-ears was the sound of her voice, calling after him, low and sweet,
-like a half-awakened song,--or was it but a bird which called, that
-softly-fluting, lonely note.
-
-And when he was gone the garden to Gabrielle was emptied of delight;
-but all her soul was singing.
-
-Her lips stung; her cheeks were on fire. Into the house she came, one
-little slipper upon its little foot, one slipper gone,--what became of
-that lost little slipper God knows!--and her stockinged foot was damp
-with the dew which had dripped from the leaves overhead. A flame was
-in her eyes which is in a maiden’s eyes but once, when love first lays
-his hands upon her heart. So transfigured was she, she seemed a winged
-creature. She loved; she was beloved; inarticulate ecstasy! Hands,
-feet, neck, and face told but one story. Her eyes shone like blazing
-stars; the roses had returned to her pale lips, the freshness to her
-wan cheeks.
-
-Margot watched her with narrowed eyes.
-
-“Mother, I am happy; so happy that I do not want to die; I want to live
-forever!”
-
-Margot eyed her narrowly. “What has changed your mind?”
-
-“I was walking in the garden,” rejoined Gabrielle, “and the god of love
-was there. He kissed me on my mouth, Mother; and oh, Mother, love is
-sweet!”
-
-Margot’s heart stopped beating. “Are you quite mad?” she said.
-
-Then the truth dawned upon her. She lost all sense of balance in the
-crossed tides of dismay. She strained her daughter to her heart,
-then thrust her away; dropped speech unuttered; gave a choked cry of
-despair, while her face went gray as ashes.
-
-She clutched Gabrielle by the arms, steadying herself, for she could
-scarcely have stood alone. She blinked like a person purblind, and
-peered into the girl’s wondering eyes. The lines of her face became
-furrows. “Oh, my God!” she whispered, “I should have known! I should
-have known!”
-
-Margot cowered as if to avoid a blow; her eyes dilated; yet she seemed
-incapable of seeing; her mouth fell open, she seemed to scream, yet
-made no sound but that of the whistling breath through her nostrils, as
-one who sustains the torture of the rack.
-
-She thrust Gabrielle from her. “Go!” she gasped, and struck herself on
-head and breast, crying out, “Mother of God! I should have known! Fool,
-fool, fool!” Then, as if stunned, her head fell down upon her breast.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-In the dark and breathless stillness of the night there was a stern,
-strange loveliness; and now something akin to terror, the terror of a
-child that dreams, and, waking in the darkness, cries out from dread
-of unknown things.
-
-An ill wind, which had been blowing since sunset with a far-off,
-moaning sound, had arisen to a melancholy, screaming note, with an
-extraordinary rumbling in the chimney. Clouds of soot and ashes, blown
-from the fireplace, whirled in drifts around the floor. The sound of
-distant thunder, the velocity of the wind, the increasing turmoil and
-confusion, filled the night with keen disease. A bird sped round the
-house with a shrill cry; the wind bellowed hoarsely in the chimney;
-the house shook with the blast; over the housetops could be heard
-the coming of the rain; the light of the flickering candles served
-only to increase the gloom; the draft from the window swelled out the
-print curtain and floated it half-way across the room, straining and
-whipping at its pole; the black magnolias bent, and rose, and bent
-again, as if beneath the beating of gigantic wings: it was close upon
-midnight.
-
-Before her crucifix Margot knelt, regardless of the storm, praying in
-anguish for the safety of her child. Ever before her imagining was
-Gabrielle, dishonored and betrayed, abandoned to scorn and poverty. Her
-hands twisted in desperate appeal.
-
-“Blessed St. Dominique, lover of souls, preserve my daughter!” she
-plead. She listened motionless; all that she heard was the roar of the
-wind.
-
-“Mary, Mother, great in grace, defend and preserve my child! Mary,
-Mother of Sorrows, have mercy upon my daughter!”
-
-Again she listened; but for the howl of the gale the silence was
-profound.
-
-“All ye Holy Virgins, intercede for us!” Her panting voice broke. “Lord
-of Compassion, hear me! Lord of Infinite Mercy, hear me! Have mercy
-upon my child! O Thou, Most Pitiful Lord of the Innocent, answer my
-prayer!”
-
-Again she listened. There was no sound but the roar of the storm, the
-creak of the house, and the gnawing of the great rats in the timbers
-of the wall. She cringed and shivered, and in extreme entreaty cried,
-“Lord, Seigneur Dieu, preserve and spare my child! You see her young
-and fair, her soul as pure as the flowers that bloom in Paradise! You
-breathed into her life; by your law she was made; but for you she
-never had been; dare you then let her fall?”
-
-But all was still. Heaven, to mortal anguish, seems intolerably serene,
-so far beyond comprehension is the inscrutable leisure of God. It was
-taking too long for her sorrow to reach the foot of the throne. She was
-seeking her daughter’s safety, though it should be at the hazard of her
-soul; but all she had was the bitterness of unanswered supplication.
-To hearts dismayed there is nothing so appallingly still as God. The
-confident faithful may await the ultimate reply; but the desperate
-storm heaven, they have not time to wait.
-
-She beat her breast; her hair was moist; her garments disarrayed;
-her voice grew sharp; by vicars, saints and intercessors, by all
-intermediaries, she plead with Almighty God to listen and to reply.
-There was no answer. “Mary, Mother of Sorrows!” she gasped. “Does God
-not understand?”
-
-Her appeal arose piercing shrill: “_Dieu, Dieu, Eternel Dieu, écoute
-mes cris! Hâte-toi de ma secourir! Hâte-toi d’elle delivrer! O Toi, qui
-écoutes la prière, aie pitié de nous! Ne tarde-pas! Écoute, mes cris!_”
-She waited; there was no answer; and suddenly her voice went up like
-the cry of delirium:
-
-“_O Dieu Très-haut, réveille-toi! Réveille-toi, mon Dieu!_” Then in a
-tone of amazement and pathos, “Mary, Mother of Sorrows,” she said, “do
-I have to explain to God?”
-
-She paused a moment while despair rose like a swelling flood; then
-through the darkness and the night went up a bitter cry: “_Seigneur
-Dieu! Tout-puissant Dieu! sois attentif à ma prière: tu m’arrosarez
-avec l’hysope, et je serai purifiée; vous me laveras, et je deviendrai
-plus blanche que la neige! Plus blanche que la neige, mon Dieu! Plus
-blanche que la neige! Gabrielle, ma fille, mon Dieu! plus blanche que
-la neige!_ Forgive in her my transgressions; pardon in her my sins;
-deliver her from her inheritance.... O my God!... let her be white!”
-
-A tremendous gust blew through the house; the wind sucked in the
-chimney with a sound like awful laughter; the blinds recoiled with
-thunderous shock; but from Heaven there was no answer.
-
-At this she cried out pitifully as He who long ago cried out the cry,
-which through unending ages shall stand archetype of despair: “_Mon
-Dieu, mon Dieu! pourquoi m’as-tu abandonné?_”
-
-The wind screamed round about her with the sound of many voices; far
-off arose a tumult as of many people running; borne on the wind came a
-torrent of hideous sound, not mad music, but awful dissonance, swiftly
-nearing, suddenly checked: after the clamor a silence like death; the
-room was fantastically still. Margot clung to the foot of the crucifix.
-“_Pourquoi, O Dieu, rejettes-tu?_” she asked in a voice grown shriveled
-and thin. She crouched a moment, motionless, her head on one side,
-listening. There was no reply. Heaven maintained its brassy silence.
-Her face went gray; her eyes were hard as stones; she turned her back
-on the crucifix, saying, “I will call upon You no more!”
-
-There was a queer shuffling sound as of footsteps in the entry. The
-candles sank to dull blue sparks devoid of radiance; yet, instead
-of darkness there was light. Outside was darkness, vast, pitmirk;
-inside, appalling light. All the place was stunned and blinded by an
-overwhelming light which cast no shadows anywhere, but, vehemently
-streaming, searched crack and cranny; not a crevice escaped. It lapped
-and flowed like waves, and penetrated everything; even the gross
-material of the walls, saturated by that flame, gave back a superfluous
-glow, a white excess of light, and every pointed thing within the room
-was peaked and capped with flame. Round and round the room a bewildered
-host of moths in little wavering flights and drops went fluttering,
-with a light rustle of powdery wings, and, among them, bats splashed
-through the light with a low, continuous whirr. Round and round, like
-froth-clots on flood-water swinging around a vortex, whirled slantbat
-and moth in a dizzy, irregular ring, in the midst of which, crouched in
-a high-backed chair, sat a shriveled, dead-alive, mummy-like figure, as
-thin and fleshless as a skeleton,--an apparition, sinister, white, and
-wasted as a corpse new-risen from the grave.
-
-Its chin upon its folded hands, its hands about one knee, the knee
-upheld by the heel crooked at the chair-seat’s edge, the other gaunt
-leg dangling across the upraised foot, the specter smiled on Margot
-a bleak, Saturnine smile. Its face was greatly wasted; all the life
-of it seemed gathered into the brilliant, terrible eyes, which blazed
-with infernal light, in splendid scorn, without remorse, sardonical;
-a countenance such as God alone endures to look upon unmoved; a
-figure terrible.... Deity, deformed, might look like this, grotesquely
-majestical, hideous, baleful, glorious, accursed, malign; an archangel,
-fallen, outcast, depraved: Satan, god of the discontent.
-
-A twisted smile wreathing his evil lips, with his chin hooked over his
-hands,--a smile of cool confidence mingled with nonchalance, “Why not
-try me?” he said.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Staring into the abyss of blinding terror and light which encircled
-that thunder-scarred visage, with its thin, sleepless eyelids and
-twisted, ironic smile, Margot shrank against the wall, shivering as
-with cold; one hand shielding her blinded eyes, one groping along the
-wall, she listened, breathlessly.
-
-In a voice whose deep and hollow sound seemed part of the midnight
-storm, Satan spoke.
-
-“God has forgotten you; that is plain,” he said. “Then why not pray
-unto me? I remember when God forgets.
-
-“What did ye hope? That He who left Jesus to die on the cross, would
-stoop to succor you? Nay, then; you have been cajoled. He has never so
-much as kept one man from the withering breath of time, but leaves a
-thousand ills on earth to work their wills upon him. Yet you thought He
-would harken to you? _Fi donc!_ Neither for life nor death, nor angels,
-nor principalities, nor for all the powers that ever were, or shall
-forever be, will He alter for you, or for any, one iota of His law.
-
-“Nay, though your heart break with its burden, not a jot of His law
-shall be altered to ease your load.
-
-“I have seen all the piety under the sun; and its wages are vanity.
-What profit have you of all your labor; what recompense of your
-toil? Heaven hath sent you sorrow; it hath not sent a cure, nor had
-compassion upon you.
-
-“If this be loving-kindness, why not try damnation awhile; not forfeit
-riches, power, and place, for a fool’s hope of treasures in heaven?
-
-“Doubtless the priest hath said unto you, ‘What shall it profit a man
-if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ Faw! I say unto
-you, ‘What profit hath a man, though he save his own soul, if he lose
-his heart’s desire?’
-
-“When you are dead and done for, and lie sleeping in the dust; when
-worms destroy your body, when your days upon earth are become as
-shadows, and you have no more a portion forever in anything under the
-sun, what shall it profit you to have saved your soul at the cost of
-your heart’s desire? Nay; ye have been cajoled! Your way is without
-hope.
-
-“But come unto me, ye anxious, whose hearts are bowed with care, and I
-will give you your hearts’ desire! No man calls on me in vain; I turn
-none empty away; the world is full of my mercies upon those who trust
-in me; and my benefits fall like the summer rain on all who covenant
-with me. Ask, and ye shall receive, whatsoever your hearts may wish;
-yea, though it lie at the ends of the earth it shall be given unto
-you; your house shall be full of good things, riches, and place, and
-power; ye shall heap up gold like dust from the streets; ye shall have
-your hearts’ desire!
-
-“Come unto me, ye weary, whose hearts are bent with trouble; lay down
-your burden, and follow me; I will give you your heart’s desire!”
-
-Margot’s hand went up the wall a little way toward the crucifix, then
-slipped back with fumbling fingers.
-
-“Lord ... Lord!” she whispered hoarsely, “give me my heart’s desire!”
-
-“And what is your heart’s desire?”
-
-“That my daughter, Gabrielle, should be white to all eternity! All that
-I have, and all that I am, will I give, ... yea, for this would I give
-my soul.”
-
-Satan smiled.
-
-“Then lay down your burden, my daughter; you shall have your heart’s
-desire!”
-
-Margot, with a sobbing cry, laid down her life’s unbearable burden at
-the feet of the Prince of the Powers of Darkness.
-
-By his eternal damnation he swore she should have her heart’s desire;
-by her rejected salvation she swore to abide by the covenant.
-
-“_Consummatum est!_” he said, and was gone on the black blast.
-
-The candles sent up a thin flare of flame and smoke, and went out in
-utter darkness. Crouched on the floor against the wall Margot still
-knelt in a stupor. A rat came out of a hole in the wall and gnawed at
-her rosary. Dawn came in at the windows; the twilit gray grew pink. The
-walls were blotched and spotted; everything exhaled an odor of mildew;
-Margot still huddled upon the floor beneath the crucifix; over her head
-the crucified Christ hung mute in His agony.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The flight of hours, the decline of day, the season’s turn, all things
-which preface change are presages of parting, and, like the proximity
-of the tomb, though wreathed in bloomy myrtle, are subtly fraught with
-sadness and regret. All love’s farewells are so oppressed. Though
-with absolute confidence in themselves and in each other, sure of the
-imperishable structure of their love, a nameless apprehension fills
-the hearts of all who part, and casts a melancholy shade on partings.
-“Until to-morrow!” Ah, to-morrow! “To-morrow I will come again!” she
-says. They go, with trembling hands, each, shaken by departure,
-saying, “Shall we meet again?”
-
-“To-morrow!” Gabrielle had said, as she took her lips away. “To-morrow
-I will come again!” and was gone.
-
-In the warm heart of the midsummer night he dreamed again among the
-hedges, a boy’s dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart’s delight. Her
-lips were pomegranate blossoms; her cheeks were wild peach flowers;
-it was a boy’s dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart’s delight! Her
-waist was as a willow-withe, her voice a bird in the deep wood calling;
-her feet danced fantasies in his heart. He came all in the daze of a
-boy’s dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart’s desire. With every
-eager breath he drew in the hyacinthine fragrance of the night.
-
-All day long, like a sullen army, a great cloud heaved and gloomed
-along the west, with wind-blown vapors streaming around its thunderous
-heights. All day long, in awe of it, men put off going here and there,
-gave over plans, and stood oppressed by its tremendous imminence. The
-day was darkened by the dominion of the cloud. At evening it rolled
-off across the plain, obliterating leagues of lesser storms, with fire
-stabbing at its breast, and distant bellowings of tremendous sound.
-Heaving slowly against the twilight stars, rolling in sullen majesty
-upon the gale, pale moonlight falling on its peaks, and the gray rain
-trailing down below, in its heart innumerable lightnings, thunder
-grumbling in its front, it left the drenched field to the moon. Beyond
-the edge of the world it hung, gloomily brooding upon the splendor of
-the night.
-
-In the magic of the moonlight Lilac lane lay ghostly as a dream,
-hushed, alluring, unfamiliar. The strange, white light of the immense
-full moon lay dead on everything; the hedge-rows were hung with
-the shadows and darkness of strange delight; the cicada chittered
-in the almond tree; the great moths flapped heavily among the wet
-moon-flowers; a slow, scarcely perceptible wind blew, languid-sweet,
-hardly moving the heavy leaves of the magnolias; a gray bird pitched a
-wild song somewhere deep within a hedge.
-
-In Margot’s garden everything was wrapped in night’s singular fantasy.
-In the pallor of the moonlight the garden lay like an enchanted realm
-of goblin loveliness. The lilies stood as pale and chill as flowers
-carved of marble; among the drowsy poppies hung garlands of nocturnal
-vine whose folded blooms in chaplets clustered colorless in the pallid
-moonshine. The whole place trembled in a pale, strange beauty which
-the silence made lovelier still. Like an island in a silvery mist
-Margot’s house stood blind asleep, its little windows curtained deep
-with shadows, dim, blue, and dark, and on the woodwork of the door,
-like petals of dismantled flowers, wax-wet, wind-blown, walked moths
-thrown there by the whining wind, slowly blowing across leagues of
-lonely marsh; and, among the moths, the glow-worms, faintly lighted and
-phosphor-green, crawled up and down, up and down, to nowhere: it looked
-like the door of the way to oblivion, so lonely it seemed and so still.
-The garden was utterly empty; the house yard was deserted.
-
-He looked; he listened; and his heart stood still; save for the
-glow-worm and the moth there was nothing alive there but him. Like
-the chill which creeps across the matted grass of evening in the last
-fair days of autumn, full of the faded fragrance and haunted dusk of
-fall, a wordless dread stole over him. The moonlight gleamed on the
-cottage-wall with a singular, mournful splendor; a heavy wind began to
-stir the trees; immensely mournful, faint and far-away, there came a
-boom of thunder from beyond the rim of the world; joy all at once was
-gone from the midsummer night; the haunting strangeness crept into his
-heart. The place was full of the heavy fragrance of dead flowers. Here
-and there a palsied rose, its faded leaves relaxed, broke, and fell
-without a sound.
-
-Under the fig-trees he paused a moment, undecided,--to listen,
-shivering a little, and peering along the wall. There was no sound of
-human life. Though the wind had set the great leaves stirring, all was
-ghostly as a dream. One white star above the roof-peak sailed among
-the broken clouds; the moon, desolate, splendid, hung in the magnolia,
-mournfully gleaming through the black boughs; in the still air the
-moonlight stood; the shadows lay like solid things upon the cottage
-wall.
-
-At the corner of the house he paused and listened again. In the
-strange, unanswering silence a sense of disaster gripped him. There was
-no sound anywhere; his heart almost ceased beating.
-
-With premonition of catastrophe he ran along the wall:--nothing, but
-windows, battened or curtained, blank as a blindman’s eyes; not a sign
-of humanity.
-
-Where he had dreamed to stand speechless with happiness, he stood
-shaken by nameless fear.
-
-Deep within the house he heard a relaxed beam “pung” with a sound
-like a viol string softly struck by a hand in passing: the deep, slow
-sound reverberated through the hollow house, and died away in vacant
-whispering.
-
-Through the crevice of the shutter he saw the cold moonlight fall along
-the deserted floor. The house was absolutely empty.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-There is a convent-school for orphaned girls kept by the nuns in New
-Orleans. The loveliest girl seen there in years was Gabrielle Lagoux,
-carried there between two nights, lest young love, like death, insist.
-
-Dawn and departure. She had trembled like a leaf, half comprehending
-only; her mother kissed her twice, in feverish haste, with lips like
-dry leaves: that was their parting. Some one called “Gabrielle!” at the
-door. The coach was at the gate. She stopped at the wicket, looked down
-the lane, said a few words to the coachboy who guarded her gown from
-the wheels: “Tell him,” she said, “that I love him. Tell him remember
-me.” She paused again at the door of the coach, her foot on the step,
-a dazed look in her eyes, saying, “Tell him not to forget me. I love
-him!” The wheels rumbled over the cobbles. She never came back. When
-she entered the coach young love was done for forever: she never saw
-her golden lad again. Love beat his rose-red wings in vain; he could
-not overtake the coach; for the coach was fate; all was over; his
-dusty feet halted in the heat of the dusty road; “Good-by!... Good-by,
-forever!”
-
-Days became weeks, weeks months, months grew into years; she never came
-again. She passed through the convent’s sheltering door, was safe from
-mischance and folly; passed into a world remote of unfamiliar faces,
-and forgot.
-
-God made memory cruel, that men might know remorse; but the Devil
-devised forgetfulness, anodyne of regret.
-
-Reputed heiress to vast estates, provided with boundless means and
-gifted with great beauty, coming to marriageable age in all the
-freshness of her youthful loveliness, she was wedded to a wealthy
-planter’s only son whose love for her was very great.
-
-Pure happiness was theirs prolonged far beyond the honeymoon.
-Surrounded by every creature comfort wealth could procure or affection
-devise, secure in a faithful man’s unaltering love, she dwelt serene,
-in a country where the fruits of the earth and the flowers of the
-forest spread natural loveliness about fields of unsurpassed fertility.
-
-She never knew winter, want, nor war; her years were filled with peace;
-her estates increased to vast proportions; a thousand slaves were
-happy, being hers. Admired for her beauty, greatly loved, she returned
-an adoring husband’s devotion, and bore him children with eyes like
-the morning and hair like wreathed flames. Her daughters married and
-were fruitful, bearing children fair as an April day, with eyes like
-the sky of the morning. For them, for her, the world rolled on in
-unperturbed peace.
-
-But she never saw her golden lad again.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Something inscrutable, deeper than whim, had come over Margot Lagoux.
-Her work was oddly altered: it had more air, less ease; more spell,
-less charm; more force, and less dexterity. The stuffs she chose no
-longer were notable for the exquisite, wan delicacy which so becomes
-the pallor of high-bred beauty; she took an incomprehensible joy in
-vivid color; but what was gained in vividness was lost in harmony. Her
-work retained distinction, but of a queer sort; reserve gave way to
-novelty; simple beauty was replaced by meretricious charm; her taste,
-which had been perfect, seemed suffering gradual corruption; her craft
-was marred by crudities. Her turbans began to look as if there were
-only barbaric plumes in the world, of parrakeets and cockatoos, trogons
-and flamingos, gay toucan wings, and extraordinary quills; florid
-colors and distempered stains were mingled in inharmonious contrast;
-mango-yellow, peacock-green, Egyptian blue, and Congo scarlet, flaunted
-their discordant tones together.
-
-Style she had; but it was style _malade du rouvieux_; her trade-mark
-had become gaucherie, her art artifice; good taste had departed.
-Her work no more was garnished, but bedizened with excess, nowhere
-restrained, but having unrestricted vent in tawdry fripperies. Her
-handicraft was stamped by power and energy misapplied; the sole
-distinction it had left was whimsical device. Everything she did was
-like sweet wine soured, the worse for having been so much better. Her
-bonnets were like songs in forced falsetto, every line slurred by
-subtle default, every sweet note out; always too much or too little,
-never the happy mean. Even the pearls or marguerites, which she had
-formerly employed in bordures as trade-marks of her craft, had become
-cheap beads of colored pottery and glass. In tarnished bowls, in
-corners of obscure pawnshop windows, among the dead flies and the dust,
-are still occasionally to be found beads, often called “margots” or
-“margotons,” like those employed by Margot Lagoux in her practice of
-millinery, but said to be thread-plummets employed by makers of lace.
-One, a Greek dealer in old gold and stolen silver, tells the enquiring
-traveler that these are Dead Sea pebbles, worn to their peculiar
-shapes by the ceaseless fret of that gloomy sea. But beads like them,
-grotesques, baroques, were laced on toques and turbans of her make, and
-now and then were found among the laces on bonnets which had no need of
-them: men, seeing them, narrowed their glances, and took new note of
-the wearer. Those aware permitted none near or dear to adorn her person
-with them.
-
-A queerly degenerated taste marked everything that Margot did. With
-singular obliquity she set everything awry; from rich goods produced
-unspeakably poor results; and with cheap cunning vexed priceless stuffs
-beyond recovery or repair.
-
-Her custom fell from _vendre cher_ to _bon marché_. With the
-diminishing stream of patronage the material in her shop went down
-from _velours ras, velours façonné_, and _velours de soie_, to _velours
-de coton_ and _coton croisé_, from velvet to velveteens. The air of
-distinction which attracted gentility utterly faded away; the coarse,
-crude stuffs and rude handiwork repelled the aristocratic. Calls for
-her work became infrequent; more infrequent; came no more. One morning
-the milliner’s shop was shut. It never was opened again. The stuffs on
-the dusty shelves grew faded, discolored, and stained; cobwebs hung
-from the mouldy walls; the trade which had known and frequented the
-place knew it no more.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-But out of this end, like a paradox, above the apparent wreck Margot
-arose in prosperity: the Devil was good as his word.
-
-She dwelt in a massive great house, a mansion, handsome, stately, and
-somber, by a courtyard paved in marble, approached through a vaulted
-tunnel lit by a dull-flaming torch and closed by an iron gate. From
-the side of the court a staircase of marble rose to her private door,
-ornate as a public office’s entry and massively carved in flowers;
-stairs within, of blue-veined marble, went up through wide corridors
-heavily panelled in dark Spanish wood. Beneath the house vast cellars
-boomed and echoed; the chimneys rose like turrets grouped against the
-darkling sky. The house throughout was furnished with every luxury
-befitting persons of circumstance: broad hearths for the burning of
-long wood in winter, vaulted corridors, burnished fittings of latten,
-and jalousies of saffron-wood with retaining rosettes of porcelain;
-mahogany tables of rare design, deep-carved, and adorned with brass.
-Curtains of saffron-colored silk cinctured with gold braid hung from
-the ceiling to the floor in heavy golden folds. Day was made night,
-night day by many subterfuges, with blinds and saffron jalousies ironed
-fast against the noon. By night the light shone out to the red stars,
-and the house was full of the swift, rich sweeping of heavy silk
-curtains waved by the wind, and the glow of the wax candles chequered
-the courtyard below with gold. In the middle of the courtyard, at
-the foot of the staircase, a fountain played in a yellow basin,
-with a pleasant, incessant noise of whispering green water, falling
-perpetually with a delicate patter over seven brown stone dolphins,
-spouting from whose pouted mouths went up contending streams; the
-waters gushed, white-laced, babbling, from the green-coppered vents in
-the dolphins’ mouths, and descended in spray to the bowl below; and
-under the bowl the drain-pipe murmured subterranean cool. About the
-courtyard stood a row of crimson-flowered pomegranate-trees: through
-the split brown rinds the garnet pulp and silver seeds showed, clotted
-thick as crystals in a stone; and purple fruits in heavy clusters, of
-myriad, uncounted drupes, hung from the superior privets ranged along
-the courtyard wall, dropping green shadows, like vast laces, over the
-blind-arched bricks below. A garden lay beyond the court, its gate
-hung thick and deep with yellow roses, clinging to the iron lantern,
-drooping and swaying in unconstrained festoons. Beyond the garden the
-place debouched into a forgotten graveyard.
-
-By night alive, by day the place was sunk in dreams, with lavish beauty
-everywhere composed to sleep in sunlit sloth, luxurious and deep. The
-place seemed fallen in a trance. The pigeons dozed along the eaves;
-and on the grass below, where the garden stretched, the peacock slowly
-danced his stiff and stately dance, an iris feather bubble, green as
-jade, purple as wine, blue as lazuli. The courtyard seemed the very
-home of sleep. The sun lay stupid on the silent walls and drowsily beat
-on the blue-doored cellars shut with cautious bars, closed fast and
-locked beneath the arcaded porch; the shadows of the slim pillars slept
-in the graceful galleries. All was hushed but the peacock’s cry, while
-that iridescent bubble, on toes black as ebony, danced, here and there,
-there and here, his slow “pavone” among the yellow roses.
-
-By night beneath the windows ancient tombs bared their sculptured
-breasts to the stars and stared up at the golden arches; and dank,
-black, cracked sarcophagi, chequered with light, laid broad their
-time-worn, sculptured emblems and tragical inscriptions,--skulls with
-wings, and urns, and hour-glasses whose un-refluent, palsied sands meet
-measure of eternity kept with motionless registry, and stony garlands
-of stone flowers which never bloomed, nor ever were sweet, as that
-beneath them had been sweet to man’s all quivering sense. Here lay the
-long dead, day and night, communicant in death; and wraiths of old
-unhappiness rose sighing with regret, or dreamed, beneath the stones,
-of love as futile as regret. The wind among the tombstones, like a
-stream from a windy fountain, murmured among the pomegranate-trees,
-stirred the shadows under the privets, rustled between the silken
-curtains, whispering, much as dead men do, chill, wordless, fluttering
-breaths of unsolved mystery. And when the wind from the graveyard
-whispered, all the place stood listening, hushed. The wind from the
-graveyard whispered among the saffron curtains; the ceaseless fountain
-waters fell; else all was still but the peacock’s wild night-cry,
-sounding through the unfathomable silence like the rending of an
-illusion,--deep and singular and strange,--by a harsh trumpet’s blast.
-Heh! The Devil keeps his promises in the way that suits him best.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Margot’s existence here was a thing apart from everything plebeian:
-she was immensely wealthy; had riches such as are won by few, though
-sought by many, plantations in the country, houses in town, money on
-call in quantity that made great bankers bow; women to wait upon her,
-deferential men, boys to run at her beck, maidservants, bond and free,
-to go before her; her cellar was famous for its wines, her dress for
-its wild and extravagant beauty; all that she touched she took; all
-that she took she kept; everything that she kept increased beyond
-the bounds of reason; she was spoken to with deference and referred
-to with finesse. She had her carriage, lined with silk, with yellow
-hammer-cloths and bands; in the license of her beauty she laughed at
-sumptuary laws, and in her illegal equipage rolled insolently on; in
-amber gown and canary turban fastened with a golden brooch, despite
-the law, she rode the streets like a charioted queen; or, dressed in
-wild, unstudied colors such as are used in Barbary, she wandered in her
-garden in the after-hours of the day, making wreaths of the saffron
-roses, a cockatoo upon her arm the color of a wild peach flower.
-
-A shapely, splendid creature, with her handsome, heavy hands, neck like
-a tower, glorious hair hanging rich beneath its turban, her embroidered
-robe but carelessly worn and recklessly adjusted--oddly, the coarser
-the more becoming,--a goddess made of beautiful earth, but coarse as
-the cotton-flower, with confident face and insolent mien she took her
-way through the streets with a supple stride which was the despair of
-envious rivalry; hers was a regal beauty like the tiger’s loveliness.
-
-With her face like beauty seen in dreams, incredible and untrue, she
-went through the community like a lovely malady: even wise men’s souls
-were troubled; sturdy hearts that had laughed at passion shook with the
-fairness of her face; piety was troubled by her golden loveliness.
-More than one sermon from Solomon’s Song was inspired by Rita Lagoux;
-she was known as the woman with a face like a beautiful blasphemy.
-
-Time but increased the wildness and singularity of her beauty: it
-was gossiped about in the market-stalls; it was babbled about in the
-streets.
-
-Then a torpor fell on her loveliness, a dull and leaden look; her
-beauty grew sullen and lowering as the flame of a fallen fire. Though
-not much altered in appearance she was somehow greatly changed. Her
-looks had lost something, no one could say what, gained something none
-could define. It was not that she was less the unforgettable being she
-had been, or that her sullen beauty made less mark on memory, but that
-the ecstasy of beauty was replaced by a queer unrest. Though as never
-before she was possessed of a singular comeliness, men began to regard
-her with an odd uneasiness: there was a foreignness in her face, and
-the look of alien things.
-
-She looked like a portrait of herself painted in irony.
-
-On the day that her daughter was married in far-away New Orleans,
-Margot stood motionless by her mirror, staring at her own reflection.
-The day seemed oddly overcast. Suddenly she burst into wild, shrill
-laughter, cheerless and tragic, her body shaking, her hands wrung
-together, turned away with an epithet, reversed the glass, and never
-looked into a mirror again. Something had passed across her face like a
-strange, ambiguous stain.
-
-A shadow had fallen upon her like an unexpected dusk, or the dimness
-under a passing cloud, and had overcast her beauty.
-
-Not time with his pinching seam, nor age with its ugliness, but a
-subtle and more peculiar change had come over Margot Lagoux.
-
-There is a half-light in the hour of an eclipse which casts a weird
-spell on the world, when the sun is but a narrow crescent at high noon
-and the earth grows oddly dim in an untimely dusk. Such a dusk was
-fallen upon Margot Lagoux.
-
-Sultry beauty such as hers has ever an early afternoon; but this was
-more than sultry beauty’s early afternoon. Not day, not darkness yet,
-but dusk went with her everywhere like twilight in the woods. The sun
-shone brightly everywhere along a sparkling world, but on Margot lay
-a shadow, strange and sinister. As unbleached muslin sallows to dingy
-isabella, as metal tarnishes from neglect, as white paper dulls in
-the sun, as the spot on bruised fruit turns brown, Margot Lagoux was
-changing; she was becoming tawny, swart, _bisblanc_ as the Creoles say.
-Her golden-ruddy cheeks had turned a morbid olive-brown as if a somber
-fountain were playing in her blood.
-
-There were many women at that day on whom fate laid dreadful hands:
-Louise Briaud, who was blinded by smallpox; Fanchette Bourie, whom God
-pitied with death; Helene Richemont, the leper; Floride Biez, Doucie
-Baramont, Francesca Villeponteaux, wrecked by disfiguring maladies.
-God give them peace! But on none was laid so ruthless, unrelenting,
-deliberate a hand as fell upon Rita Lagoux.
-
-She changed like a portrait whose shadows, painted in bitumen, have
-struck through and distempered the rest. Like a strange, nocturnal
-creature she seemed to absorb the gloom. Her glorious eyes grew
-jaundiced; her rose-brown lips grew dun; the delicate webs that joined
-her fingers grew yellow as bakers’ saffron. Malice laughed at her
-thickening lips.
-
-Weeks turned months, months years; swarthy she grew and ugly. She
-put aside beauty as a worn, bright garment, and took on grotesquery
-stark and medieval as a Chinese teak-wood carving. She became both
-grotesque and contorted, gross, misshapen, sullied and debased. The
-old enchantment was gone like a necromancer’s spell. The perfect
-gait had faltered down to a lurching trot, a hurrying waddle with
-an irregular, unsure motion, hesitating a moment, then hastening on
-with vague uncertainty. Her soft, sleepy laugh had grown violent, her
-melodious voice coarse; of her fair face there was nothing left, no,
-not remembrance even.
-
-A young man came to her threshold one morning and looked in eagerly;
-he would speak with Margot Lagoux: but “Is that Margot Lagoux?” he
-asked, a curious look coming over his face,--that woman, obese, with
-low brows, huge fat eyelids, round bare forehead, short, strained and
-corded neck enormously thick, yellowed teeth irregularly shown between
-thick, sallowed lips, cheeks wrinkled, flecked and blotched with brown
-like spotted peaches. “No!” he said, hastily, shrinking away. “That
-is not the woman I mean. The woman I meant was comely ... and had a
-beautiful daughter named Gabrielle!” He turned away, shuddering.
-
-She wore old rags for robes, an old _freloche_ upon her head, in nowise
-restraining the unkempt coils of her hair hanging matted upon her neck.
-Her cheeks hung slack and dark and dingy; her lusterless locks were
-felted into a tangled web that had grown gray with lint; her frowsy
-chin was stained as with walnut hulls. She was falling apart like an
-old house with nobody living in it, swore black oaths with a foul
-mouth, cursed all who crossed her path, ate like a beast food fit for
-beasts, her fevered sun of glory set,--gone, gone, gone. Down she went,
-like the stuffs in her shop, from _velours ras_ to _coton croisé_,
-down, down to oblivion, down to the dusty corner of death. She spat in
-the dirt: “_Je m’en fiche!_” she said.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-She hated a priest, and never knelt at a confessional again.
-
-She did not die in the great house where she had passed the days of her
-power; every place she dwelt in sank into decay, the swifter where its
-integrity seemed permanent and secure; nothing purged the ambiguous
-spell which dragged them down together to the dust. The great house
-stood a ruin above a ruined court, a wreck of its former pride and
-splendor, black and foul; the fountain had fallen long ago, its pipes
-strangled and eaten away to crusts of lead and thready ribs of iron
-in the sand. Lilac lane was gone; there was no lane there any more,
-and had been none for years; there was no trace of where it ran,
-its hedge-rows or its gardens, or of Margot’s cottage other than a
-mouldering heap of broken brick, bleak rafters of the fallen roof, and
-one stark, fallen gable; of Gabrielle’s garden nothing remained.
-
-Margot died in a dirty hovel in an unkempt alleyway, in the midst of
-a negro quarter, where, if one beat a drum or caused an instrument of
-an orchestra to sound, the people swarmed from the tenements like ants
-out of a hill. The place was fallen and foul, and filled with beggary;
-and that is the end of a tenement; for beggars are like distemper, the
-place where they have lived is hard to cure. All the houses in the
-alley were filthy; but none was filthy as hers.
-
-There was a tremendous storm that night. Her house was ablaze with
-light; the little tailor who lived next door said, “Aha! Mother Go-go
-has company!” But the only person seen was one of the religious sort, a
-tall man, with a face like an unpleasant taste.
-
-The thunder was terrific; the storm wild beyond compare. The wind blew
-with a sound like wild, gigantic laughter. “Ff-ff-ff!” went the gale;
-the gusts howled through the tailor’s house; the whole place shook; the
-blinds banged and crashed; the wind wailed, and sucked down the chimney
-with a sound like awful weeping; the little tailor’s soul was filled
-with a sense of enormous terror.
-
-All night long the thunder rolled like the laughter of an angry god.
-Dislodged by the tremendous concussions the cockroaches flew out of
-the walls; and, in the morning, after the storm, the parrakeets which
-lived in the trees were all turned gray as ashes.
-
-The windows and doors of Old Mother Go-go’s house were standing open
-wide. It was plain that they had stood open all night, and that the
-rain had beaten into the house unopposed.
-
-This, however, occasioned but brief surprise. When they peered in at
-the door the rats were playing around the floor with the beads of a
-broken rosary.
-
-A priest came, hurrying in. He did not stay in long. When he came out
-his face was white as a sheet and his lips were drawn and gray.
-
-Those who prepare the dead came. They stood on the threshold peeping
-and queerly looking in at the door.
-
-A gray mist filled the place like a cloud, through which things were
-visible. The rooms were damp as an old vault, and full of a death-like
-smell; the walls were covered with green mould; the woodwork was
-rotten. The candles had guttered and dripped and gone out; the floor
-was bespattered with tallow. All around the rooms were coffers of
-linen and lace, “_coffres très beaux, coffres mignons, de dressouer
-compagnons; coffres de boys qui point n’empire; madres et jaunes comme
-cire_.” All the coffers were open, and everything that was in them was
-tossed wildly about the floor; not one piece of the lovely old stuffs,
-as yellow as wax, but was blackened by showers of soot and trampled
-under foot by the neighbor’s goat, the print of whose hoofs was
-everywhere.
-
-And Madame Margot?
-
-Heh! God had designed her for tragedy; but here was comedy. Margot lay
-stretched out on the floor, as black as ebony; dead, among the ashes
-and soot, charred like a fallen star.
-
-The coroner found that the woman had died of the visitation of God; but
-Doe Gou, the tailor, said simply, “Has God feet like a goat?”
-
-The bishop refused to have masses said for the repose of her pitiful
-soul; and they would not allow her to be buried in St. Sebastian’s
-graveyard. The potter’s field was the place for her; her color was too
-peculiar.
-
-Too black to be buried among the white, too white to lie down with
-the black, she was buried, in secret, in her own garden, under the
-magnolia-trees.
-
-And that was the end of Madame Margot.
-
-
-
-
-TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
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-
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-
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-
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-<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Madame Margot</p>
-<p style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:0; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:1em;'>A grotesque legend of old Charleston</p>
-<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: John Bennett</p>
-<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: November 26, 2022 [eBook #69430]</p>
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-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
-<div class="chapter">
-<h1>MADAME MARGOT</h1>
-</div>
-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
-<div class="chapter">
-<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/titlepage.jpg" alt=""></div>
-</div>
-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
-<div class="titlepage">
-<p><span class="xxlarge"><span class="smcap">Madame Margot</span></span></p>
-
-<p><span class="large"><i>A Grotesque Legend<br>
-of Old Charleston</i></span></p>
-
-<p>BY<br>
-
-<span class="large">JOHN BENNETT</span></p>
-
-<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/titlepagelogo.jpg" alt=""></div>
-
-<p><span class="large">NEW YORK<br>
-THE CENTURY CO.<br>
-1921</span></p>
-</div>
-
-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<p class="center">Copyright, 1921, by<br>
-<span class="smcap">John Bennett</span><br>
-<br>
-<br>
-Printed in U. S. A.</p>
-</div>
-
-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<p class="center">TO</p>
-</div>
-
-<div class="poetry-container">
-<div class="poetry">
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="verse">... You, and you, and you,</div>
-<div class="verse">... who have gone greatly here</div>
-<div class="verse">In friendship, making some delight, some true</div>
-<div class="verse">Song in the dark, some story against fear.</div>
-</div>
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="verse">... Lovers yet shall tell the nightingale</div>
-<div class="verse">Sometimes a song that we of old time made,</div>
-<div class="verse">And gossips gathered at the twilight ale</div>
-<div class="verse">Shall say, “Those two were friends,” or “Unafraid</div>
-<div class="verse">Of bitter thoughts were those because they loved</div>
-<div class="verse">Better than most.”</div>
-</div>
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="verse">... There in the midst of all those words shall be</div>
-<div class="verse">Our names, our ghosts, our immortality.</div>
-</div>
-<div class="stanza">
-<div class="verseright">—<span class="smcap">John Drinkwater.</span></div>
-</div></div></div>
-
-<p class="center"><i>The above is reprinted by permission of the publishers.</i></p>
-
-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<p class="ph2">MADAME MARGOT</p>
-</div>
-
-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[3]</span>
-<p class="ph2">MADAME MARGOT</p>
-</div>
-
-<p>In an age so glorious, so rich and
-fine, and so be-starred with splendor
-that one almost forgets the bottomless
-abyss into which it plunged at last,
-there lived a woman in Charleston of
-whom a very odd story is told.</p>
-
-<p>The languid, lovely, tired old town
-was then a city brave and gay, with
-Mediterranean manners and Caribbean
-ways.</p>
-
-<p>The perfume of ten thousand flowers
-drifted upon the winds, which came and
-went over a thousand gardens, ebbing
-and flowing like the tide.</p>
-
-<p>Clouds of snowy gold and roses rolled<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[4]</span>
-across the sky, like the vast rotundas
-of a city builded of colored ivory.
-Slowly rising overhead, in windy and
-ethereal masses, they stood, carvings of
-pale porphyry upon a turquoise wall.
-The earth was transfigured with beauty.</p>
-
-<p>It was a golden age, when all things
-were fair; nothing had grown old; even
-the tragic and the terrible were comely
-then. Wonder lay on everything.
-Merely to exist was to be happy. It
-was a world of unextinguished youth;
-life was brimful to the lips with delight.</p>
-
-<p>In the gardens rare flowers bloomed,
-and rare fruits ripened,—pomegranates,
-oranges, medlars, figs, jujubes, and the
-purple Indian peach; and among the
-flowers, like winged flames, small and
-bright, sped the harlequins, the painted
-nonpareils, delicately beating the soft
-wind with their pied wings; while in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span>
-the pomegranate-tree, among the dull
-bronze fruit, the mocking-bird sang his
-love and rapture. Through the green-hedged
-close, women, beautiful and
-stately, paced the shade, with men beside
-them, slender and straight, passionate
-and haughty, with fierce, bright
-eyes as ardent as the goshawk’s and as
-bold; and lovely girls, with dark hair
-and skins of alabaster, as graceful and
-as timid as fawns, and with fawn’s eyes,
-slipped among the green leaves like
-flowers alive.</p>
-
-<p>Those were charmed days indeed.
-The town has changed since then. The
-world seems to have grown weary and
-gray, and the hearts of men bitter. The
-young were younger then; the old not
-so sorry for everything as they have
-been since. Then, somehow, it seemed
-to be always summer morning, morning<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span>
-before the sun had burned the world
-to a dun crisp with his meridian heat,
-scorching bitter and blinding bright;
-before the advent of gasping afternoon
-with its languid leafage and evaporated
-sap. The calendar seemed to have
-paused among the daffodils, between
-the jessamine and the June, in that
-paradise of the year. The delicate and
-virginal camellia bloomed then, untarnished
-by rough wind or rain; its petals
-were sweet, which since then have grown
-so bitter. The elm-trees did not then
-bloom thrice for one green coat. And
-no one ever paused to think that no
-good and lovely thing exists on earth
-without its corresponding shadow.</p>
-
-<p>The world was full of the sound of
-sweet, flute-like voices of young women
-calling after their lovers; and the singing
-of small birds made slender, pleasant<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span>
-melodies among the cool myrtles.
-Life was simpler; perhaps more child-like
-though more passionate. Two who
-loved each other might walk together,
-hand in hand, along the path, singing
-their happiness, without reproach, save,
-perchance, from some lugubrious, gray-bearded
-presbyter mourning, among
-mossy tombstones, life’s evanescence.</p>
-
-<p>And happy youth was without a
-fault, unless it were a trivial one, some
-<i>péché mignon</i>, a guileless, guiltless, girlish
-sin, like kissing oneself in the looking-glass
-for lack of another lover.</p>
-
-<p>In all the town there were none so
-pretty, none so graceful or so sweet, as
-the golden girls of San Domingo.
-They flowed along the windy streets,
-their turbans nodding, like a stream of
-tulips. They fluttered down the byways
-in their white muslin dresses like bevies<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>
-of butterflies. The loveliness of their
-slender bodies and the beauty of their
-youthful faces were far beyond all dull
-description; they were a bed of tiger-lilies
-in the sun. The earth loved the
-tread of their flying feet, which seemed
-to be forever dancing pastourelles; and
-the narrow lanes of the city laughed
-with the lilt of their Creole tongue.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>Among the golden San Domingans
-the loveliest of all admittedly was Marguerite
-Lagoux, the milliner, by her
-patronage called Rita, by her familiars
-Margoton, by envious rivalry Madame
-Margot; and, after all was over and
-done, known merely as Old Mother Go-go.</p>
-
-<p>Hers was glorious physical loveliness
-in its fullest maturity. It was in an<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>
-hour of inspiration the indolent god of
-beauty drew the lines on which her body
-was built.</p>
-
-<p>Her passionate, rich-colored, handsome
-face was like a line from an old
-enchantment which took men’s souls
-captive, then cast them away without
-the least regret, or with a Circean spell
-turned them into beasts. Her neck was
-a deep-colored, ivory tower poised perfectly
-over her breast. The dazzling,
-orange-tawny skin of her broad bust
-turned to golden-russet before it
-reached her cheeks, and was there
-flushed to dusky rose, like the skin of a
-ruddy-gold peach. In the burnt splendor
-of her cheek the darkly eloquent
-blood in her veins made its golden proclamation.
-Her mouth was long and
-strangely curved like a retroverted
-bow; the lips of a queer fruit-color, not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>
-crimson, carmine, nor magenta, but a
-little of all three. The upper lip was
-brief to a fault, and curled back on itself
-like a rich-pulped fruit which has
-parted in ripening. The full under-lip
-cast a heavier shade than the lips the old
-masters chose, when they painted a picture
-of the Madonna. Her hair, like
-a dark, uncertain cloud, fell down in
-heavy coils, gathered and knotted at
-the nape of the neck, bound there in a
-golden net; or lay in an unfilleted
-band across the broad, low brow, drawn
-back into braids over her ears, or collected
-into a turban tied with peculiar
-dexterity. Her body was cast in a glorious
-mould: she was tall; in figure perfect,
-and full of a stately, tiger-like
-grace, the envy of other women. She
-moved, when she walked, as an empress
-might if heaven but gave her grace, with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>
-an exquisite, perfect motion, devoid of
-every appearance of effort,—not striding,
-but seeming to glide like a swan
-swimming on untroubled water. In the
-sluggish grace of her heavy lips and
-deep-lidded, brooding eyes, she was as
-full of an indolent, sleepy beauty as
-midsummer afternoon. Dressed in
-bright merino, crimson, orange, and
-blue, with a kerchief of blood-colored
-silk around her head bound in oriental
-fashion, beads of amber around her
-neck, and in each ear a hoop of gold,
-she looked like a great golden lily dusted
-with <i>sang-dieu</i>.</p>
-
-<p>One day she was the lily; the next a
-yellow rose; and the next she was a
-tulip,—gold, crimson, purple and black.
-She was a Caribbean summer incarnate,
-of flower-blooms, thunder and gold. The
-passing traveler, seeing her, stopped<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>
-while he caught his breath. There was
-something about her commanded attention
-besides her remarkable beauty. One
-spoke of Ducie Poincignon casually;
-but one spoke of Rita Lagoux with an
-accent.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>Of all the milliners of her day Margot
-was first beyond compare. Her taste
-was perfect; her instinct for color was
-never at fault; her choice of fabrics exquisite.
-None equaled her in dexterity;
-she was like a marvelous spider weaving
-webs of gossamer. Those who
-sought beauty found it; her patrons
-were patrician; all of the very best employed
-her art; she had no successful
-competitor; beside her Eloise Couesnon
-was esteemed but maladroit.</p>
-
-<p>Margot’s shop was in King street,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>
-near Mignot’s Garden, a little above
-the Bend. She lived in a little alley
-known as Lilac lane, a narrow, crooked,
-private path between two large estates,
-which rambled into the interspace
-like a brown brook into a wood.
-Beneath high green hedges it wandered
-into the solitude, growing narrower as
-it went, until the hedge boughs, meeting,
-knit themselves together, interlacing
-their elastic, leafy twigs. There the
-baffled foot-path seemed to lose its way
-and to abandon every purpose for which
-foot-paths are designed, ran on a little,
-hesitated, crept on again uncertainly,
-then gave up hope and disappeared in a
-green perplexity. The unfamiliar traveler
-paused here, bewildered, and
-turned back to find a bolder thoroughfare;
-familiar feet alone pressed on
-through Lilac lane.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>Where the strait way vanished into
-the wilderness stood Margot’s cottage,
-tucked snug as a plum stone in a plum.
-Around it was a garden hedged by box
-and bay. Of all the hedges in Lilac
-lane the highest were Margot’s. They
-rose around her garden in an impenetrable
-thicket, tall, dark-tangled, dense
-and old, their green tops tossing against
-the blue beyond the reach of the hedger’s
-bill. Within lay a little tranquil
-space, withdrawn alike from curious
-gaze and the town’s brawl, and overshadowed
-by the wide boughs of two
-great magnolias, whose drowsy shade
-fell heavily on the sleepy oleanders and
-over the rows of tulips below, that lifted
-up their golden cups and filled the air
-with odor. Here day and night flowed
-by in undisturbed serenity; all noise was
-hushed and tumult quelled; the shyest<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>
-wild birds nested here in perfect confidence,
-fear cast away and foes forgot.
-No place in all the town seemed more secure
-from rude intrusion. No apparition
-came by night, no terror by day; so
-quiet it was, so full of peace, it seemed
-a sanctuary withdrawn from the interrupting
-clash and rude alarms of the
-troubled world,—its tranquillity that of
-a convent close, with little, distant, ringing
-bells, recurrent chimes and subdued
-voices, muffled by distance, as of nuns
-chanting an office in the peaceful choir
-of a green-nooked nunnery.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>Margot Lagoux had a daughter; her
-name was Gabrielle.</p>
-
-<p>Though Margot was lovely, Gabrielle
-was lovelier. They differed in beauty
-as pompadour-pink differs from brier-rose.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>
-Margot’s was a golden beauty;
-Gabrielle’s an ivory loveliness. Margot
-was a pottery figurine moulded
-with marvelous skill; Gabrielle a statuette
-of exquisite porcelain. Margot was
-like the summer sun, dazzling, opulent,
-sumptuous; Gabrielle like the young
-spring moon in her slender loveliness;
-the lines of her flowed one into the other
-like the lines of a song. Her hands
-were delicate and fine, their touch as
-light as flowers blown by the wind,
-which drift like a whisper across the
-face of the passer-by. Her feet were
-arched like a Spanish girl’s; her ankles
-were the loveliest things that ever
-sandal-ribbon bound; she walked like
-the wind of an April morning through
-meadows after rain.</p>
-
-<p>Her face, with its delicate high cheek-bones,
-was like the fair flower of Normandy;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>
-but her beauty was not Western,
-’twas Eastern; it was like the pale
-Persian roses which blow by the gray-marbled
-waterways among the fallen
-pillars of the forgotten gardens of
-Istakhr,—roses of yesterday, full of
-yesterday’s unbearable loveliness, yesterday’s
-happiness, yesterday’s tragedy,—fragrant
-with passionate, heart-breaking
-perfume, piercingly sweet, with the
-pathos of swift-passing beauty, far
-keener than that of ruins and age. She
-was of a loveliness such as sometimes
-comes out of India unburned by the Indian
-sun, of which dreamers make
-dreams of unforgettable beauty.</p>
-
-<p>Her slender young body was like a
-piece of perfect ivory laid away to be
-carved. Her long, dark, tangled eye-lashes
-fell upon her cheeks like sudden
-gusts of darkening rain; her cheeks were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>
-japonica-color; her lips pale pomegranate-red;
-her hair ebony; her temples
-were traced with crocus-blue.</p>
-
-<p>Her cheeks japonica-color? They
-were the hue of peach flowers at dusk:
-God who gave them knew whence came
-both peach flower color and dusk.</p>
-
-<p>At every breath there came and went
-beneath her transparent skin a shadowy
-crimson under-dusk, ebbing and flowing
-with the beat of her heart like a somber,
-twilit tide,—San Domingo’s <i>sang de
-crépuscule</i>; and through her fingers the
-sunlight shone with a golden radiance
-like the glow of a rose through a glass
-of madeira.</p>
-
-<p>She might have been sister to Scheherazade
-in her exquisite, aquiline, high-born
-loveliness, a patrician beauty
-strangely like that of old French romance.
-Far and away beyond compare<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>
-she was the loveliest girl in St. Finbar’s
-parish; and the faces of the young girls
-in St. Finbar’s made that ancient, dim,
-gray parish bloom like the gardens of
-Paradise.</p>
-
-<p>God, who knows everything, knows
-whence she had her exquisite, slender
-body, her aristocratic face, the dusky
-crimson tide, the touch of fantasy which
-made her lovely as a strain of wild, passionate
-music played on the deep strings
-of a gipsy violin.</p>
-
-<p>For, as the rarest beauty remains imperfect
-without a touch of strangeness,
-without something to haunt and to fret
-the mind, forbidding it to forget, there
-was a something almost, if not quite,
-fantastic, in Gabrielle’s loveliness—a
-touch of irregularity difficult to define—making
-her beauty more significant
-through being peculiar, more poignant<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>
-through being strange. Something indefinite
-and conjectural tinged her being;
-the ghost of a vaguely intricate and
-tragical implication beneath her bright
-young innocence lurked shadowy and
-malign. Had her beauty been less perfect
-this, perhaps, had been less notable.
-Revealed in a casual attitude, for a moment
-startling in vividness, now for a
-moment it was lost, and now stole forth
-again in the stress of unstudied emotion
-to accent a passing mood.</p>
-
-<p>As one who, looking into her mirror,
-sees a face there not her own, Margot
-perceived in her daughter’s face an intricately
-blended likeness, to banish
-which into forgetfulness she strove desperately
-in vain,—the recollection of a
-wild, sweet, irrevocable hour whose
-memory was fear. Gabrielle’s beauty
-made her tremble.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>It is a perilous privilege for a girl to
-possess loveliness rising above her station
-in life; there is a price always to be
-paid for it, sorrow the common fee; such
-a heritage of beauty often proves but a
-legacy of shame,—a beauty built for destruction,
-a loveliness for scorn; haggard
-wisdom reaps in tears what innocence
-sowed with laughter.</p>
-
-<p>There was a thought from which
-Margot shrank as from a draught of
-poison: Gabrielle degraded and desolate.
-There was nothing to her more
-precious than her daughter’s innocence;
-nothing so important as her earthly
-happiness; these seemed to Margot even
-more necessary than her eternal peace.</p>
-
-<p>Yet ever a shadow hung over her
-child, from cradle to grave; her delicate
-grace and refinement were signatures
-of dread. Margot’s eyes hunted from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>
-side to side as do a deer’s hard pressed
-by the dogs—can one elude destiny?</p>
-
-<p>Where were the lovely and the fair
-she had known in her own youth? Dead,
-long ago; the graveyard sand lay cold
-upon their lips; their passion and their
-sweetness were forgotten long ago.
-Margot knew that youth and summer
-night are made for ecstasy. She knew,
-too, that in forgotten graveyards are
-many unmarked graves of hapless
-beauty. Looking into the mirror where
-life is stripped of its illusions, and truth
-stands stark and bare in its unmitigated
-ugliness, panic terror seized Margot.</p>
-
-<p>Was there no refuge, no escape, nor
-safety anywhere; no retreat, nor harbor,
-but in hopeless longing; always
-the far-off lightning and threatening of
-storm? Peering into the future she
-was filled with apprehension. In<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>
-dreams she saw Gabrielle’s innocence
-hanging over a black abyss; in dreams
-saw a fawn torn by ravening wolves.
-She awoke, starting up, crying out!
-There was nothing but the night.
-Yet she arose from her bed, and,
-crouched by her crucifix, prayed for her
-daughter as she never had prayed for
-herself.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>At adolescence Gabrielle was a vision
-of delight. In temperament she was
-ardent as is a summer shower, which
-gives, when it gives, all that it has to
-give, in a rush of wind and rain. Unspoiled
-by knowledge, unruined by
-folly, too innocent to be perplexed by
-life’s anxieties, her soul mistook Earth
-for the pathway to Paradise, and nothing
-as yet had discovered her error.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>
-With her each hour began afresh the
-tale of life, a long, sweet, glad surprise.</p>
-
-<p>Rose-winged days and golden nights
-were come to Gabrielle, whose feet stood
-at the smiling gate of the Primrose
-Way. But Margot’s days and nights
-were filled with passionate anxiety, as
-with increasing doubts and fears she
-confronted destiny.</p>
-
-<p>The inner house-door gave upon a
-little paved court, where two twisted
-old fig-trees grew, many-branched candelabra,
-tipped in spring with green-leaved
-lights. Green-leaved shadows
-wavered below on a duck-pool’s marble
-bowl, stained green from the copper
-tenons which tied its stones together.
-Here ducks praised Jove with yellow
-bills, and splashed viridian wings. In
-the pool, glimmering, one saw the stuccoed
-cottage-wall, on the irregular surface<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span>
-of which old colors showed in
-broken chequers through the new until
-the wall was patched with unpremeditated
-beauty. Across the pool the silvery
-sunlight glimmered like a streak
-of flame. But the fairest thing reflected
-there was Gabrielle, dancing on the old
-stones which paved the court,—dances
-fantastic as her mood; sarabands to the
-stately rhythm of odd old songs, deliberately
-slow; canzons whose pathos was
-lost in a pirouette; minuets which mimicked
-the swallows overhead with their
-swift glissades among the trees and undulating
-sweeps among the flowers,—snatching
-the poppies as she passed, and
-thrusting them in her hair, and pausing
-at last like a wind-blown flower above
-her reflection in the pool,—Gabrielle,
-singing old songs by the world forgotten,—strains
-of wild beauty, that by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>
-wayward loveliness have a peculiar
-power to please, with old melodies,
-alluring and sweet; songs such as
-long ago stole the souls of saints determined
-upon salvation, and gave
-themes for many troubadour lays, of
-which, though all are lovely, the greater
-part are sad, being memories of loveliness
-departed into the dust: one of life’s
-paradoxes, that the memory of beauty
-should be bitter.</p>
-
-<p>Here, remote from the curious world,
-preserved by the cloistral hedges from
-prying indiscretion, flowed her secluded
-existence. Few ever saw her. Such as
-by chance observed her through some
-green interstice, dazzled by her beauty,
-hurried off to spread the tale of an enchanted
-princess in an enchanted wood;
-hedge-balked and bewildered, few had
-ever seen her twice; by which she had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>
-been the more thought of through being
-the less seen.</p>
-
-<p>Many had sought the courtyard; but
-none had found the way. Margot kept
-it a solitude lest Gabrielle suffer corruption,
-and around her maintained a
-veritable nunnery of care, hovered over
-her, and kept her as close withdrawn as
-a novice in a convent-garth.</p>
-
-<p>But beauty cannot be sequestered always
-safely anywhere. Cloistral life is
-very well for souls of cloistral nature
-and of the convent sort; but youth and
-spring hate convents, and will have
-life’s novitiate, or none. There is a crevice
-in every hedge, no matter how tall
-or how thick it may be, and through it,
-ever, Gabrielle peeps.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>Spring followed winter; May’s warm<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>
-slow, yellow, moonlit nights were come.</p>
-
-<p>Then Gabrielle grew tired and white.
-Her hand became tremulous; her light
-foot stumbled; she left off dancing in
-the garden. She sighed wistfully; her
-song ceased; her mouth showed scarcely
-a smile’s wasted ghost. Her eyes, like
-those of a wounded creature, followed
-everywhere; her tears flowed at nothing.
-She grew as languid as a withering
-flower. The light of her seemed
-going out. The pallor of her face and
-the feverish luster of her eyes startled
-and frightened Margot.</p>
-
-<p>Days dragged a laggard length;
-night still more oppressed her. She lay
-awake, whispering with dry lips she
-knew not what; calling she knew not
-whom; her trembling hands pressed
-against her breast. Fancies for which
-she found no name, thoughts for which<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>
-she had no words, and visions inexpressible,
-would not let her sleep. Night
-after night she lay awake, consuming
-the hours with wonder; or, if she slept,
-awoke in tears, fell asleep to tears
-again, and waking, tear-wet, trembling,
-with darkened lids and drawn
-face, grew daily worse.</p>
-
-<p>Vague, moody wants annoyed her;
-the night was harassed by melancholy
-dreams; the day vexed with formless
-fancies.</p>
-
-<p>Walking alone in the garden, answerless
-questionings beset and frightened
-her; she listened where there was nothing
-to be heard; stared where there was
-nothing to be seen; found peace nowhere.</p>
-
-<p>Her heart ached with unreasoning
-pain; she grew as gusty as a storm; the
-speechless, inexplicable wonder within<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>
-her breast throbbed like a festered
-thorn.</p>
-
-<p>Margot too well knew the cause:
-there was but one alleviation.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>Spring, with its universal song, from
-grove and garden lifted up its deathless
-melody of bloomy verdure and warm-breathed
-sweetness. All living creatures
-voiced the universal theme:
-“Rejoice with the partner of thine heart
-in the happy days of thy youth!”</p>
-
-<p>The blue dove moaned out his heart’s
-desire; the copper beetle wooed and won
-his lady in the dust; butterflies and
-dragon-flies glittered in the wind, happy
-in their airy ecstasy—they fluttered
-among the hedges; they sported among
-the flowers—and all the earth rejoiced
-in having its heart’s desire. Thrush and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>
-mocker sang, “Passion, passion ...
-heart-breaking passion!” to their pretty
-feathered paramours. From every
-spray the vireo cried shrill, in shreds of
-melody, “Heart’s desire! Heart’s desire!”
-In the fragrant green-bay the
-painted bunting’s love-call rang incessantly;
-while from the tufted grove
-arose the stirring chant of earth’s universal
-choir, the canticle, all passionate
-and shrill, of “Love, love, love!” and yet
-again of “Love!”</p>
-
-<p>How can one keep it from the heart
-of youth, that, all unknowing, yet numb
-with longing, breathlessly awaits its
-coming, and trembles like a leaf with
-the wordless yearning of unrecognized
-desire.</p>
-
-<p>Gabrielle was intoxicated with the
-passion of her own heart, without an
-object or an aim; her throat was almost<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>
-choked with youth’s sweet, innocent desire;
-and, ever, within her shaking
-heart, the questioning wonder grew.</p>
-
-<p>“Mother,” she said wistfully, “what
-is it fills the world with music day and
-night? What is it makes the whole
-world sing?”</p>
-
-<p>“Happiness,” replied Margot, “and
-joy of the spring.”</p>
-
-<p>“Happiness?” rejoined Gabrielle.
-“If it be happiness, why does it make
-my heart ache? Why does spring hurt
-me so?”</p>
-
-<p>Margot, startled, sat staring, wrung
-with sudden fear.</p>
-
-<p>“And what is this love of which every
-one sings—we women most of all?”</p>
-
-<p>“The source of all wretchedness.
-Leave it alone!” cried Margot. She
-looked at her daughter in terror.</p>
-
-<p>“But,” replied Gabrielle, wondering,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>
-“if love be the source of all wretchedness,
-why is it’s song so sweet?”</p>
-
-<p>“Because fools have their folly!”
-cried Margot. “Love-songs are sweet
-to a lover, as folly is dear to a fool.
-Worship thy God,” she said harshly,
-“and leave foolishness to the fool!”</p>
-
-<p>“Love—foolishness?” said Gabrielle,
-puzzled. “You told me that God is
-love!” She turned the riddle over and
-over in her mind.</p>
-
-<p>“What ails you?” asked Margot.</p>
-
-<p>“Nothing,” said Gabrielle. But a
-flush stole up her cheeks. “How does
-a woman know, Mother, that she loves,
-so that she may say certainly, ‘This is
-love’?”</p>
-
-<p>“By the utter despair that tears her
-heart in two.”</p>
-
-<p>“But, Mother,” protested Gabrielle,
-“they tell me that love is sweet!”</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>“Sweet? As wormwood!” said Margot
-hoarsely. “It is nothing but fever
-and fret.”</p>
-
-<p>“Many I see who have it; but none
-who fret. Might I not know for myself
-a little of this pretty play of lovers and
-beloved?” besought Gabrielle.</p>
-
-<p>Margot looked at Gabrielle and
-trembled, seeing the shadow upon her,
-foreseeing the fate of her loveliness,
-perceiving indiscretion’s lips at the rim
-of the cup of terror. “What man has
-snared your silly heart?” she asked.</p>
-
-<p>Gabrielle stared at her. “Why should
-any man snare my heart?” she asked in
-pitiful wonder. “I have never harmed
-any man, nor any living thing.” She
-caught her breath. “Oh, Mother, feel
-my heart beating! It beats as if it
-would burst. Why does my heart beat
-so? Am I dying? Do you think that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>
-I must die? Yet, Mother, my heart is
-aching so that I would that I could die!
-Is not what God made good ... you
-told me that God was love ... was not
-mankind made by God ... and is not
-love the world’s delight?”</p>
-
-<p>“It is its direst misery,” said Margot
-bitterly. “God keep you from it. Two
-parts are pain, two sorrow, and the
-other two parts are death.”</p>
-
-<p>“I don’t fear death,” said Gabrielle.
-“Then why should I fear love?”</p>
-
-<p>“Because it is a lie,” cried Margot,
-beside herself. “I conjure you, by
-God’s sorrow, close your ears against
-it.”</p>
-
-<p>“How can I close my ears against it
-when I hear it in my sleep?”</p>
-
-<p>Margot’s delight in her daughter’s
-beauty was turned into bitterness.
-“Peace!” she cried. “And leave me.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>
-All this will pass away.” But, deep
-within, her heart said, “Never!” Innocence
-will be indiscreet. Sin alone is
-always clever. And in youth great
-things are lightly asked and lightly
-given. “Go!” she cried to Gabrielle.</p>
-
-<p>Gabrielle left the room. Margot
-buried her face in her hands.</p>
-
-<p>It is hard for woman to stand alone
-and to resist temptation forever. Soon
-or late the black moment comes; reason
-is off guard; prudence abandons her;
-caution is thrown to the winds: passion
-betrays. Here is an irremediable disease
-which baffles the skill of the physicians.
-Margot recoiled as she faced
-the future. Time had become a terror.
-Burning tears flowed down her cheeks.
-There is no woe so sickening as the
-monotone of fear, the shuddering, interior
-sense of impending catastrophe.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>
-Nor is it eased by the strange apathy
-which is granted to the doomed. Margot
-groaned in an agony, half remorse,
-half apprehension. Could God set so
-foul a seal upon so fair a thing?</p>
-
-<p>Again on a day Gabrielle came in
-from the garden, her eyes dry-burning
-and famine-bright. “Mother, give me
-a lover!” she cried. “Nietta Pascault
-has one!”</p>
-
-<p>“Then alas and alack for Nietta Pascault!”
-cried Margot.</p>
-
-<p>“But, Mother, he called her his
-heart’s delight; she did not speak, but
-she kissed him; and he kissed her until
-he must have bruised her lips; yet she
-did not seem to care ... rather she
-seemed to like it. And all he said was
-‘Love me! Love me!’ and all she said
-was ‘Yes,’ and ‘Yes!’ And when he
-kissed her she grew pale; I thought that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>
-she was dead, ... but he held her in
-his arms, Mother, and kissed her again
-and again, as though he would kiss her
-back to life. Will kisses bring one back
-from the dead? For, Mother, suddenly
-she opened her eyes as if she lived only
-for love; and then all he said was ‘Love
-me!’ and all she said was ‘Yes!’”</p>
-
-<p>Margot’s heart fainted.</p>
-
-<p>Day after day Gabrielle knelt in the
-garden and plead for her heart’s desire.
-Night after night Margot crouched on
-her floor and prayed, in despair and
-agony, that it might not be given her.
-Heaven’s custodian mingled their prayers
-in fatal entanglement; one was answered,
-and one was not: he is responsible.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>Sunset lay on Margot’s garden. The
-paths still shimmered with the day’s<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>
-heat, though the lax grass lifted in the
-shadows. Nameless perfumes wandered
-among the drowsily-bending
-flowers; the odor of warm boxwood
-rose from the hedge. The hedge stood
-black against the sky; in its glistening,
-fragrant deeps small birds moved swiftly
-to and fro in curious agitation.</p>
-
-<p>Gabrielle, puzzling upon life’s unanswered
-riddle, stood listening to
-sounds beyond the hedge. Everywhere
-was the patter of hurrying feet, and the
-whisper of wordless laughter, mockingly
-borne on the evening wind. The air
-was full of the golden vision of light-footed
-maidens with fluttering garments,
-flying through Lilac lane,
-pursued by ardent and breathless lovers,
-eagerly following where they fled. The
-sound of laughter floated back along
-the narrow way, and the little faint echo<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>
-of flying feet. It was that time of the
-year when all maids are sweet as
-freshly gathered flowers, and all men
-are a little mad. Even the earth, drab
-clod, was astir with the ecstasy of approaching
-night.</p>
-
-<p>Beneath the broad-boughed magnolia
-grew a pomegranate-tree whose
-branches shrouded the greater tree’s
-bole. The scarlet pomegranate flowers
-hung over Gabrielle; the green leaves
-folded her in. Faint color came fitfully
-over her cheek; her eyes roamed
-restlessly through the garden, but found
-no solace there. As she stood thus,
-brooding on life’s inexplicable theme,
-she was aware of a sudden shadow which
-fell on the grass beside her, and turned
-in voiceless terror.</p>
-
-<p>There was a face in the green hedge,
-smiling, two butterflies hovering over<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>
-it,—a lad’s face, laughing and debonair,
-with yellow hair curling around it like
-crisp little golden flames; his cheeks
-were as ruddy and smooth as a child’s;
-his eyes were blue as the morning, swift
-and bright; the leaves stirred all around
-him as if to the beat of wings; there
-was confidence in his bearing, easy
-lordship and high pride.</p>
-
-<p>Gabrielle, startled and terrified,
-shrank back against the magnolia’s
-black bole, one trembling, hesitant hand
-extended in doubt. Speechless she
-stared at that bright, boyish face with
-its nimbus of sunlit, yellow hair, until
-her dry eyes gushed tears, dimming her
-sight,—stared in wonder and adoration.</p>
-
-<p>His eyes were audaciously bright as
-wild stars, incessantly roving, and
-alight with golden fire. He was tall,
-well-set and slender, with a beautiful,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>
-straight body; there was something
-godlike in his air as he leaned through
-the matted hedge, eagerly scanning her,—her
-pale rose cheeks, snowy gown,
-moth-green kerchief, her lips, her neck
-matching the ivory of the blossoms in
-her hair,—half-veiled by a screen of
-leafy green, dull gold and pomegranate
-flowers.</p>
-
-<p>She had bound her hair with a bit of
-gold braid which shone like an aureole
-round her brow, and in it had thrust two
-butterfly lilies, whiter than ivory; her
-eyes were wide open, round and unwinking,
-their frightened depths full of
-tears; her lips had fallen slightly apart
-to free her fluttering breath; she sighed,
-a little, shuddering sigh, and crossed her
-hands upon her breast. Her beauty
-startled him: delicate-frail, almost
-translucent in the golden sun, she<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>
-seemed a being not of flesh and gross
-mortality, but a spirit by enchantment
-made visible, a dryad out of the ancient
-wood, a maiden saint stepped out of a
-missal or fled from a chapel window,
-with a halo around her brow. With her
-head poised like a flower; her little, perfect
-hands and feet; her ankles slim
-and beautiful; each line aristocratic;
-everything proclaiming patrician blood;
-nothing asserting a baser thing: saint,
-maid, dryad, nymph, or sprite, who
-could tell which?</p>
-
-<p>Silently drinking her loveliness he
-leaned through the hedge. Among the
-fire-colored flowers and green, her color
-was exquisite as the violet sky is, seen
-through yellow leaves.</p>
-
-<p>Again she sighed softly; stared at his
-face, and shivered a little. Was it a
-god or a man in the hedge? Had he<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>
-sprouted out of the boxwood, or fallen
-from the clouds?</p>
-
-<p>The perfect beauty of her figure, outlined
-on green by her thin white gown,
-charmed and enchanted him. He stared
-at her, trying to focus her face more
-clearly upon his sight; her loveliness
-struck him dumb. She seemed a statue
-of ivory, hung with garlands of gold,
-crimson and green, half-hidden by a
-rood-screen of shimmering emerald. It
-seemed to him that he looked on more
-than mortal beauty.</p>
-
-<p>Leaning forward a little, one hand
-outstretched, one clasping her throat,
-she watched his face with its golden hair
-aglow in the last red sunlight. How
-could she tell if it were a god or a man,—that
-face with its shimmering locks
-like living fire around it, a gleaming
-nimbus whose dancing flames were fashioned<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>
-of burnished gold, a face like a
-blazing seraph’s, or Ariel’s? She
-looked at that proud young countenance
-in wordless adoration.</p>
-
-<p>Her own face was now intensely
-bright with the sunset’s declining glory.
-Into the crevice between her lips the
-sunshine had slipped; her lips were
-translucent; her mouth was aglow as if
-she breathed ethereal fire.</p>
-
-<p>Suddenly he drew his breath with a
-sharply audible sound; for, as he gazed,
-longing seized the boy’s heart and
-wrung it bitterly.</p>
-
-<p>The flame which blazed in his bright
-eyes put an answering glow in her
-own. She was aware that her beauty
-had startled him. For the first time in
-her life she was awake to her own loveliness,
-a sense wonderful and sweet. A
-delicate, throbbing fire came fluttering<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>
-up through her breast; a flush stole into
-her cheeks and warmed their ashy
-pallor. Her eyes met his: in his eyes
-were joy, surprise, and longing. His
-eyes met hers: and all her doubts went
-out in wordless joy. For, when she
-perceived that look in his face, she, too,
-was thrilled with longing; the silence
-sang; fire thrilled her heart; suddenly
-neck and cheeks flamed red.</p>
-
-<p>She answered his look with glorious
-eyes, humid, terrified, alight. Then her
-frightened eyes fell and her shy face.
-But, like a wave which breaks along a
-beach in a passionate surge, her heart
-rushed out to greet him.</p>
-
-<p>He saw her neck and her cheeks flame
-red; passion struck him to the heart.
-With a gesture of haughty but boyish
-humility he pushed through the hedge,
-seized the sheltering pomegranate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>
-branches, and swept them aside. She
-stood uncurtained before him. He
-gazed at her. “St. Jacques!” he cried.
-“Are you a living creature?”</p>
-
-<p>She regarded him for an instant with
-a look of undisguised terror, catching
-her breath with a sobbing sound right
-pitiful to hear; then her quivering,
-piteous face was made exquisite by
-tears.</p>
-
-<p>A back-wash of timidity held him silently
-staring at her,—a boy, hot and
-hasty, sure of himself, impulsively
-bold, but abashed,—admiration and
-longing ablaze in his eyes. Gabrielle
-stammered, but could not find
-words; her breast heaved and sank; she
-could not control it. Overwhelmed by
-the sudden strange rush of emotion, she
-swayed giddily, dizzily put out one hand
-to steady herself, and laid it upon his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>
-arm: a tremulous smile came over her
-face; her tears, like an April shower,
-were gone.</p>
-
-<p>His hand sought her other hand;
-found it; held it; thus their hands met.
-Half a step timidly they approached
-each other; then stood at a halt as if
-turned to stone. Her frightened breath
-was the only sound save the stirring of
-the night-wind in the dark boughs overhead.</p>
-
-<p>Shaking like a wind-blown leaf, “<i>Que
-désirez-vous de moi?</i>” she gasped.</p>
-
-<p>His voice, too, was trembling. “That
-you should love me a little, for pity’s
-sake, ... and quite forget to fear!”</p>
-
-<p>His voice seemed to Gabrielle godlike.</p>
-
-<p>“See, then ... I fear nothing....
-I should as soon think of fearing the air
-we breathe!” she said, adoring her slender<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>
-young demigod out of the hedge.
-Then suddenly she raised her hand and
-laid it caressingly on his cheek; her
-trembling fingers felt like flowers
-trailed across his face.</p>
-
-<p>He laughed. There was an infectious
-sweetness and merriment in his
-laughter. Then they laughed together,
-softly,—first love and joy are silent
-things.</p>
-
-<p>“You are the god of love,” she said,
-with infinite simplicity. “Else, how
-could you fly over the hedge?”</p>
-
-<p>Her flute-like voice was like the music
-of a half-awakened song, and exquisitely
-moving; her words trailed slowly like
-speech asleep.</p>
-
-<p>Again he laughed. “The god of
-love? <i>Bien!</i> Then what shall I have
-that is godlike?”</p>
-
-<p>“What you will,” she said. “You<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>
-may ask.” For the innocent are trustful
-as doves, helpless as the least creatures,
-weak as the small birds among
-the little branches.</p>
-
-<p>He drew a quick breath. “Most of
-all things on earth I would have a kiss
-from your mouth. Shall I have it?”</p>
-
-<p>“Yes,” she said. “Take it!” and put
-up her lips. So their mouths met. A
-thousand tingling darts of fire pierced
-through her as his lips touched hers.</p>
-
-<p>Her heart was wrung by that first
-kiss; for an instant it stood still; the
-blood had left it, and had fled through
-her like flame; she almost swooned. For
-first passion is like the wind in the blossoming
-locust-tree, too sweet to be
-easily breathed or borne; youth’s first
-caress is almost an agony. Gabrielle
-gasped; his lips had burned on hers
-like a celestial fire. Both shook as love’s<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>
-consuming flame rushed through them.</p>
-
-<p>As he to her was first, so she to him;
-each gave the other life’s immaculate
-gift, the unmeasured, unmeasurable fire
-of love’s first embrace, that passionate
-anguish of delicate, uncalculated delight,
-ardent and boundless.</p>
-
-<p>Their lips hurried to the meeting.
-How could they delay? Youth and
-love brook no delays. Yet, as she felt
-his lips upon her own, she regarded him
-with a writhen countenance of unqualified
-terror. Love comes to the maiden
-spirit with sudden tumult, and strikes
-it, not as a blithe discovery, or an all-Elysian
-joy, but as a birth and an
-agony, from which, if the soul survives,
-comes unspeakable happiness. His lips
-sought hers and seeking, met; in the
-meeting her soul flew out at her mouth.</p>
-
-<p>The world seemed suddenly remote,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>
-withdrawn into the depths of uncalculated
-space. There remained but these
-two young, love-stunned souls, groping
-to each other in the garden under the
-shadow of the great magnolia-trees.</p>
-
-<p>The enchantment of love was upon
-them. The happy girl lay close upon
-his heart, and all she said was, “Love
-me! Love me!” and, “If ever I cease to
-love you perdition take my soul!” he
-said. With utter confidence her eyes
-looked up into his, glowing with a passion
-that knows no change; and all she
-said, as she lay against his heart, was,
-“Love me! Only love me!” That is all
-a woman asks. Her fingers stroked his
-yellow hair; the mere touch thrilled her
-with unspeakable happiness.</p>
-
-<p>Night came, and darkness voyaged
-the uncharted sky. Overhead the blue
-dome blazed with the innumerable stars<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>
-and golden planets heaving up heaven’s
-arch; the tremulous green lamps of the
-fireflies filled the earth with twinkling
-constellations all around them. But the
-heavens and the earth were as nothing
-to them: love was there, and he, and she,
-and the utterly forgotten starlight.
-And where youth and love are, life,
-death, good or ill, the bright stars or
-the black mould, or better or worse, are
-nothing, and wisdom is of little worth.</p>
-
-<p>They gazed into each other’s eyes
-with wordless tenderness. Youth has
-not words, nor waits to find them; age
-finds words, and nothing else.</p>
-
-<p>Across the city boomed the hour,—at
-last.</p>
-
-<p>“Oh! I must go!”</p>
-
-<p>“Not yet! Not yet!”</p>
-
-<p>“But I must go. Good-night!”</p>
-
-<p>“Not yet!”</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>“But I must go! Good-night! Good-night!
-I pray you, leave me go ...
-for truly I must go!”</p>
-
-<p>“You’ll come again?”</p>
-
-<p>“To-morrow.”</p>
-
-<p>“Show me the way into the garden,”
-he said. She showed him the quickest
-way in, kissed him, and was gone
-through the garden; for him the night
-was darkened, and the stars put out.
-Her breath was still upon his face, the
-smell of the flowers in his nostrils; and
-in his ears was the sound of her voice,
-calling after him, low and sweet, like a
-half-awakened song,—or was it but a
-bird which called, that softly-fluting,
-lonely note.</p>
-
-<p>And when he was gone the garden to
-Gabrielle was emptied of delight; but
-all her soul was singing.</p>
-
-<p>Her lips stung; her cheeks were on<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>
-fire. Into the house she came, one little
-slipper upon its little foot, one slipper
-gone,—what became of that lost little
-slipper God knows!—and her stockinged
-foot was damp with the dew which
-had dripped from the leaves overhead.
-A flame was in her eyes which is in a
-maiden’s eyes but once, when love first
-lays his hands upon her heart. So
-transfigured was she, she seemed a
-winged creature. She loved; she was
-beloved; inarticulate ecstasy! Hands,
-feet, neck, and face told but one story.
-Her eyes shone like blazing stars; the
-roses had returned to her pale lips, the
-freshness to her wan cheeks.</p>
-
-<p>Margot watched her with narrowed
-eyes.</p>
-
-<p>“Mother, I am happy; so happy that
-I do not want to die; I want to live forever!”</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>Margot eyed her narrowly. “What
-has changed your mind?”</p>
-
-<p>“I was walking in the garden,” rejoined
-Gabrielle, “and the god of love
-was there. He kissed me on my mouth,
-Mother; and oh, Mother, love is sweet!”</p>
-
-<p>Margot’s heart stopped beating.
-“Are you quite mad?” she said.</p>
-
-<p>Then the truth dawned upon her.
-She lost all sense of balance in the
-crossed tides of dismay. She strained
-her daughter to her heart, then thrust
-her away; dropped speech unuttered;
-gave a choked cry of despair, while her
-face went gray as ashes.</p>
-
-<p>She clutched Gabrielle by the arms,
-steadying herself, for she could scarcely
-have stood alone. She blinked like a
-person purblind, and peered into the
-girl’s wondering eyes. The lines of her
-face became furrows. “Oh, my God!”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>
-she whispered, “I should have known!
-I should have known!”</p>
-
-<p>Margot cowered as if to avoid a blow;
-her eyes dilated; yet she seemed incapable
-of seeing; her mouth fell open,
-she seemed to scream, yet made no sound
-but that of the whistling breath through
-her nostrils, as one who sustains the torture
-of the rack.</p>
-
-<p>She thrust Gabrielle from her. “Go!”
-she gasped, and struck herself on head
-and breast, crying out, “Mother of
-God! I should have known! Fool,
-fool, fool!” Then, as if stunned, her
-head fell down upon her breast.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>In the dark and breathless stillness
-of the night there was a stern, strange
-loveliness; and now something akin to
-terror, the terror of a child that dreams,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>
-and, waking in the darkness, cries out
-from dread of unknown things.</p>
-
-<p>An ill wind, which had been blowing
-since sunset with a far-off, moaning
-sound, had arisen to a melancholy,
-screaming note, with an extraordinary
-rumbling in the chimney. Clouds of
-soot and ashes, blown from the fireplace,
-whirled in drifts around the floor. The
-sound of distant thunder, the velocity
-of the wind, the increasing turmoil and
-confusion, filled the night with keen
-disease. A bird sped round the house
-with a shrill cry; the wind bellowed
-hoarsely in the chimney; the house
-shook with the blast; over the housetops
-could be heard the coming of the rain;
-the light of the flickering candles served
-only to increase the gloom; the draft
-from the window swelled out the print
-curtain and floated it half-way across<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>
-the room, straining and whipping at its
-pole; the black magnolias bent, and
-rose, and bent again, as if beneath the
-beating of gigantic wings: it was close
-upon midnight.</p>
-
-<p>Before her crucifix Margot knelt, regardless
-of the storm, praying in
-anguish for the safety of her child.
-Ever before her imagining was Gabrielle,
-dishonored and betrayed, abandoned
-to scorn and poverty. Her hands
-twisted in desperate appeal.</p>
-
-<p>“Blessed St. Dominique, lover of
-souls, preserve my daughter!” she
-plead. She listened motionless; all that
-she heard was the roar of the wind.</p>
-
-<p>“Mary, Mother, great in grace, defend
-and preserve my child! Mary,
-Mother of Sorrows, have mercy upon
-my daughter!”</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>Again she listened; but for the howl
-of the gale the silence was profound.</p>
-
-<p>“All ye Holy Virgins, intercede for
-us!” Her panting voice broke. “Lord
-of Compassion, hear me! Lord of Infinite
-Mercy, hear me! Have mercy
-upon my child! O Thou, Most Pitiful
-Lord of the Innocent, answer my
-prayer!”</p>
-
-<p>Again she listened. There was no
-sound but the roar of the storm, the
-creak of the house, and the gnawing of
-the great rats in the timbers of the wall.
-She cringed and shivered, and in extreme
-entreaty cried, “Lord, Seigneur
-Dieu, preserve and spare my child!
-You see her young and fair, her soul as
-pure as the flowers that bloom in Paradise!
-You breathed into her life; by
-your law she was made; but for you she<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>
-never had been; dare you then let her
-fall?”</p>
-
-<p>But all was still. Heaven, to mortal
-anguish, seems intolerably serene, so far
-beyond comprehension is the inscrutable
-leisure of God. It was taking too long
-for her sorrow to reach the foot of the
-throne. She was seeking her daughter’s
-safety, though it should be at the
-hazard of her soul; but all she had was
-the bitterness of unanswered supplication.
-To hearts dismayed there is nothing
-so appallingly still as God. The
-confident faithful may await the ultimate
-reply; but the desperate storm
-heaven, they have not time to wait.</p>
-
-<p>She beat her breast; her hair was
-moist; her garments disarrayed; her
-voice grew sharp; by vicars, saints and
-intercessors, by all intermediaries, she
-plead with Almighty God to listen and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>
-to reply. There was no answer. “Mary,
-Mother of Sorrows!” she gasped.
-“Does God not understand?”</p>
-
-<p>Her appeal arose piercing shrill:
-“<i>Dieu, Dieu, Eternel Dieu, écoute
-mes cris! Hâte-toi de ma secourir!
-Hâte-toi d’elle delivrer! O Toi, qui
-écoutes la prière, aie pitié de nous! Ne
-tarde-pas! Écoute, mes cris!</i>” She
-waited; there was no answer; and suddenly
-her voice went up like the cry of
-delirium:</p>
-
-<p>“<i>O Dieu Très-haut, réveille-toi!
-Réveille-toi, mon Dieu!</i>” Then in a
-tone of amazement and pathos, “Mary,
-Mother of Sorrows,” she said, “do I
-have to explain to God?”</p>
-
-<p>She paused a moment while despair
-rose like a swelling flood; then through
-the darkness and the night went up a
-bitter cry: “<i>Seigneur Dieu! Tout-puissant<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span>
-Dieu! sois attentif à ma prière:
-tu m’arrosarez avec l’hysope, et je
-serai purifiée; vous me laveras, et je
-deviendrai plus blanche que la neige!
-Plus blanche que la neige, mon Dieu!
-Plus blanche que la neige! Gabrielle,
-ma fille, mon Dieu! plus blanche que la
-neige!</i> Forgive in her my transgressions;
-pardon in her my sins; deliver
-her from her inheritance.... O my
-God!... let her be white!”</p>
-
-<p>A tremendous gust blew through the
-house; the wind sucked in the chimney
-with a sound like awful laughter; the
-blinds recoiled with thunderous shock;
-but from Heaven there was no answer.</p>
-
-<p>At this she cried out pitifully as He
-who long ago cried out the cry, which
-through unending ages shall stand
-archetype of despair: “<i>Mon Dieu, mon
-Dieu! pourquoi m’as-tu abandonné?</i>”</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span>The wind screamed round about her
-with the sound of many voices; far off
-arose a tumult as of many people running;
-borne on the wind came a torrent
-of hideous sound, not mad music,
-but awful dissonance, swiftly nearing,
-suddenly checked: after the clamor a
-silence like death; the room was fantastically
-still. Margot clung to the foot
-of the crucifix. “<i>Pourquoi, O Dieu,
-rejettes-tu?</i>” she asked in a voice grown
-shriveled and thin. She crouched a
-moment, motionless, her head on one
-side, listening. There was no reply.
-Heaven maintained its brassy silence.
-Her face went gray; her eyes were hard
-as stones; she turned her back on the
-crucifix, saying, “I will call upon You
-no more!”</p>
-
-<p>There was a queer shuffling sound as
-of footsteps in the entry. The candles<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>
-sank to dull blue sparks devoid of radiance;
-yet, instead of darkness there was
-light. Outside was darkness, vast, pitmirk;
-inside, appalling light. All the
-place was stunned and blinded by an
-overwhelming light which cast no
-shadows anywhere, but, vehemently
-streaming, searched crack and cranny;
-not a crevice escaped. It lapped and
-flowed like waves, and penetrated
-everything; even the gross material of
-the walls, saturated by that flame, gave
-back a superfluous glow, a white excess
-of light, and every pointed thing within
-the room was peaked and capped
-with flame. Round and round the room
-a bewildered host of moths in little
-wavering flights and drops went fluttering,
-with a light rustle of powdery
-wings, and, among them, bats splashed
-through the light with a low, continuous<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>
-whirr. Round and round, like
-froth-clots on flood-water swinging
-around a vortex, whirled slantbat and
-moth in a dizzy, irregular ring, in the
-midst of which, crouched in a high-backed
-chair, sat a shriveled, dead-alive,
-mummy-like figure, as thin and
-fleshless as a skeleton,—an apparition,
-sinister, white, and wasted as a corpse
-new-risen from the grave.</p>
-
-<p>Its chin upon its folded hands, its
-hands about one knee, the knee upheld
-by the heel crooked at the chair-seat’s
-edge, the other gaunt leg dangling
-across the upraised foot, the specter
-smiled on Margot a bleak, Saturnine
-smile. Its face was greatly wasted; all
-the life of it seemed gathered into the
-brilliant, terrible eyes, which blazed
-with infernal light, in splendid scorn,
-without remorse, sardonical; a countenance<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[67]</span>
-such as God alone endures to
-look upon unmoved; a figure terrible....
-Deity, deformed, might look like
-this, grotesquely majestical, hideous,
-baleful, glorious, accursed, malign; an
-archangel, fallen, outcast, depraved:
-Satan, god of the discontent.</p>
-
-<p>A twisted smile wreathing his evil
-lips, with his chin hooked over his hands,—a
-smile of cool confidence mingled
-with nonchalance, “Why not try me?”
-he said.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>Staring into the abyss of blinding
-terror and light which encircled that
-thunder-scarred visage, with its thin,
-sleepless eyelids and twisted, ironic
-smile, Margot shrank against the wall,
-shivering as with cold; one hand shielding<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[68]</span>
-her blinded eyes, one groping along
-the wall, she listened, breathlessly.</p>
-
-<p>In a voice whose deep and hollow
-sound seemed part of the midnight
-storm, Satan spoke.</p>
-
-<p>“God has forgotten you; that is
-plain,” he said. “Then why not pray
-unto me? I remember when God forgets.</p>
-
-<p>“What did ye hope? That He who
-left Jesus to die on the cross, would
-stoop to succor you? Nay, then; you
-have been cajoled. He has never so
-much as kept one man from the withering
-breath of time, but leaves a thousand
-ills on earth to work their wills
-upon him. Yet you thought He would
-harken to you? <i>Fi donc!</i> Neither for
-life nor death, nor angels, nor principalities,
-nor for all the powers that ever<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[69]</span>
-were, or shall forever be, will He alter
-for you, or for any, one iota of His law.</p>
-
-<p>“Nay, though your heart break with
-its burden, not a jot of His law shall
-be altered to ease your load.</p>
-
-<p>“I have seen all the piety under the
-sun; and its wages are vanity. What
-profit have you of all your labor; what
-recompense of your toil? Heaven
-hath sent you sorrow; it hath not sent
-a cure, nor had compassion upon you.</p>
-
-<p>“If this be loving-kindness, why not
-try damnation awhile; not forfeit
-riches, power, and place, for a fool’s
-hope of treasures in heaven?</p>
-
-<p>“Doubtless the priest hath said unto
-you, ‘What shall it profit a man if he
-gain the whole world, and lose his own
-soul?’ Faw! I say unto you, ‘What
-profit hath a man, though he save his
-own soul, if he lose his heart’s desire?’</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[70]</span>“When you are dead and done for,
-and lie sleeping in the dust; when
-worms destroy your body, when your
-days upon earth are become as shadows,
-and you have no more a portion
-forever in anything under the sun,
-what shall it profit you to have saved
-your soul at the cost of your heart’s
-desire? Nay; ye have been cajoled!
-Your way is without hope.</p>
-
-<p>“But come unto me, ye anxious,
-whose hearts are bowed with care, and
-I will give you your hearts’ desire! No
-man calls on me in vain; I turn none
-empty away; the world is full of my
-mercies upon those who trust in me;
-and my benefits fall like the summer
-rain on all who covenant with me.
-Ask, and ye shall receive, whatsoever
-your hearts may wish; yea, though it
-lie at the ends of the earth it shall be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[71]</span>
-given unto you; your house shall be
-full of good things, riches, and place,
-and power; ye shall heap up gold like
-dust from the streets; ye shall have
-your hearts’ desire!</p>
-
-<p>“Come unto me, ye weary, whose
-hearts are bent with trouble; lay down
-your burden, and follow me; I will give
-you your heart’s desire!”</p>
-
-<p>Margot’s hand went up the wall a
-little way toward the crucifix, then
-slipped back with fumbling fingers.</p>
-
-<p>“Lord ... Lord!” she whispered
-hoarsely, “give me my heart’s desire!”</p>
-
-<p>“And what is your heart’s desire?”</p>
-
-<p>“That my daughter, Gabrielle, should
-be white to all eternity! All that I
-have, and all that I am, will I give, ...
-yea, for this would I give my soul.”</p>
-
-<p>Satan smiled.</p>
-
-<p>“Then lay down your burden, my<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[72]</span>
-daughter; you shall have your heart’s
-desire!”</p>
-
-<p>Margot, with a sobbing cry, laid
-down her life’s unbearable burden at the
-feet of the Prince of the Powers of
-Darkness.</p>
-
-<p>By his eternal damnation he swore
-she should have her heart’s desire; by
-her rejected salvation she swore to abide
-by the covenant.</p>
-
-<p>“<i>Consummatum est!</i>” he said, and
-was gone on the black blast.</p>
-
-<p>The candles sent up a thin flare of
-flame and smoke, and went out in
-utter darkness. Crouched on the floor
-against the wall Margot still knelt in
-a stupor. A rat came out of a hole in
-the wall and gnawed at her rosary.
-Dawn came in at the windows; the
-twilit gray grew pink. The walls were
-blotched and spotted; everything exhaled<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[73]</span>
-an odor of mildew; Margot still
-huddled upon the floor beneath the
-crucifix; over her head the crucified
-Christ hung mute in His agony.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>The flight of hours, the decline of
-day, the season’s turn, all things which
-preface change are presages of parting,
-and, like the proximity of the tomb,
-though wreathed in bloomy myrtle, are
-subtly fraught with sadness and regret.
-All love’s farewells are so oppressed.
-Though with absolute confidence in
-themselves and in each other, sure of
-the imperishable structure of their love,
-a nameless apprehension fills the hearts
-of all who part, and casts a melancholy
-shade on partings. “Until to-morrow!”
-Ah, to-morrow! “To-morrow I will
-come again!” she says. They go, with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[74]</span>
-trembling hands, each, shaken by departure,
-saying, “Shall we meet again?”</p>
-
-<p>“To-morrow!” Gabrielle had said, as
-she took her lips away. “To-morrow I
-will come again!” and was gone.</p>
-
-<p>In the warm heart of the midsummer
-night he dreamed again among the
-hedges, a boy’s dream, a dream of joy,
-a dream of heart’s delight. Her lips
-were pomegranate blossoms; her cheeks
-were wild peach flowers; it was a boy’s
-dream, a dream of joy, a dream of
-heart’s delight! Her waist was as a
-willow-withe, her voice a bird in the
-deep wood calling; her feet danced fantasies
-in his heart. He came all in the
-daze of a boy’s dream, a dream of joy,
-a dream of heart’s desire. With every
-eager breath he drew in the hyacinthine
-fragrance of the night.</p>
-
-<p>All day long, like a sullen army, a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[75]</span>
-great cloud heaved and gloomed along
-the west, with wind-blown vapors
-streaming around its thunderous
-heights. All day long, in awe of it, men
-put off going here and there, gave over
-plans, and stood oppressed by its tremendous
-imminence. The day was
-darkened by the dominion of the cloud.
-At evening it rolled off across the plain,
-obliterating leagues of lesser storms,
-with fire stabbing at its breast, and distant
-bellowings of tremendous sound.
-Heaving slowly against the twilight
-stars, rolling in sullen majesty upon the
-gale, pale moonlight falling on its
-peaks, and the gray rain trailing down
-below, in its heart innumerable lightnings,
-thunder grumbling in its front, it
-left the drenched field to the moon.
-Beyond the edge of the world it hung,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[76]</span>
-gloomily brooding upon the splendor of
-the night.</p>
-
-<p>In the magic of the moonlight Lilac
-lane lay ghostly as a dream, hushed,
-alluring, unfamiliar. The strange,
-white light of the immense full moon
-lay dead on everything; the hedge-rows
-were hung with the shadows and darkness
-of strange delight; the cicada chittered
-in the almond tree; the great
-moths flapped heavily among the wet
-moon-flowers; a slow, scarcely perceptible
-wind blew, languid-sweet,
-hardly moving the heavy leaves of the
-magnolias; a gray bird pitched a wild
-song somewhere deep within a hedge.</p>
-
-<p>In Margot’s garden everything was
-wrapped in night’s singular fantasy. In
-the pallor of the moonlight the garden
-lay like an enchanted realm of goblin
-loveliness. The lilies stood as pale and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[77]</span>
-chill as flowers carved of marble; among
-the drowsy poppies hung garlands of
-nocturnal vine whose folded blooms in
-chaplets clustered colorless in the pallid
-moonshine. The whole place trembled
-in a pale, strange beauty which the
-silence made lovelier still. Like an
-island in a silvery mist Margot’s house
-stood blind asleep, its little windows
-curtained deep with shadows, dim, blue,
-and dark, and on the woodwork of the
-door, like petals of dismantled flowers,
-wax-wet, wind-blown, walked moths
-thrown there by the whining wind,
-slowly blowing across leagues of lonely
-marsh; and, among the moths, the glow-worms,
-faintly lighted and phosphor-green,
-crawled up and down, up and
-down, to nowhere: it looked like the
-door of the way to oblivion, so lonely
-it seemed and so still. The garden was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[78]</span>
-utterly empty; the house yard was deserted.</p>
-
-<p>He looked; he listened; and his heart
-stood still; save for the glow-worm and
-the moth there was nothing alive there
-but him. Like the chill which creeps
-across the matted grass of evening in
-the last fair days of autumn, full of the
-faded fragrance and haunted dusk of
-fall, a wordless dread stole over him.
-The moonlight gleamed on the cottage-wall
-with a singular, mournful splendor;
-a heavy wind began to stir the
-trees; immensely mournful, faint and
-far-away, there came a boom of thunder
-from beyond the rim of the world;
-joy all at once was gone from the midsummer
-night; the haunting strangeness
-crept into his heart. The place was
-full of the heavy fragrance of dead
-flowers. Here and there a palsied rose,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[79]</span>
-its faded leaves relaxed, broke, and fell
-without a sound.</p>
-
-<p>Under the fig-trees he paused a moment,
-undecided,—to listen, shivering a
-little, and peering along the wall.
-There was no sound of human life.
-Though the wind had set the great
-leaves stirring, all was ghostly as a
-dream. One white star above the roof-peak
-sailed among the broken clouds;
-the moon, desolate, splendid, hung in
-the magnolia, mournfully gleaming
-through the black boughs; in the still
-air the moonlight stood; the shadows
-lay like solid things upon the cottage
-wall.</p>
-
-<p>At the corner of the house he paused
-and listened again. In the strange, unanswering
-silence a sense of disaster
-gripped him. There was no sound anywhere;
-his heart almost ceased beating.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[80]</span>With premonition of catastrophe he
-ran along the wall:—nothing, but windows,
-battened or curtained, blank as a
-blindman’s eyes; not a sign of humanity.</p>
-
-<p>Where he had dreamed to stand
-speechless with happiness, he stood
-shaken by nameless fear.</p>
-
-<p>Deep within the house he heard a relaxed
-beam “pung” with a sound like a
-viol string softly struck by a hand in
-passing: the deep, slow sound reverberated
-through the hollow house, and
-died away in vacant whispering.</p>
-
-<p>Through the crevice of the shutter he
-saw the cold moonlight fall along the
-deserted floor. The house was absolutely
-empty.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>There is a convent-school for orphaned
-girls kept by the nuns in New<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[81]</span>
-Orleans. The loveliest girl seen there
-in years was Gabrielle Lagoux, carried
-there between two nights, lest young
-love, like death, insist.</p>
-
-<p>Dawn and departure. She had trembled
-like a leaf, half comprehending
-only; her mother kissed her twice, in
-feverish haste, with lips like dry leaves:
-that was their parting. Some one called
-“Gabrielle!” at the door. The coach
-was at the gate. She stopped at the
-wicket, looked down the lane, said a few
-words to the coachboy who guarded her
-gown from the wheels: “Tell him,” she
-said, “that I love him. Tell him remember
-me.” She paused again at the
-door of the coach, her foot on the step,
-a dazed look in her eyes, saying, “Tell
-him not to forget me. I love him!”
-The wheels rumbled over the cobbles.
-She never came back. When she entered<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[82]</span>
-the coach young love was done for
-forever: she never saw her golden lad
-again. Love beat his rose-red wings in
-vain; he could not overtake the coach;
-for the coach was fate; all was over; his
-dusty feet halted in the heat of the dusty
-road; “Good-by!... Good-by, forever!”</p>
-
-<p>Days became weeks, weeks months,
-months grew into years; she never came
-again. She passed through the convent’s
-sheltering door, was safe from
-mischance and folly; passed into a
-world remote of unfamiliar faces, and
-forgot.</p>
-
-<p>God made memory cruel, that men
-might know remorse; but the Devil devised
-forgetfulness, anodyne of regret.</p>
-
-<p>Reputed heiress to vast estates, provided
-with boundless means and gifted
-with great beauty, coming to <span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[83]</span>marriageable
-age in all the freshness of her
-youthful loveliness, she was wedded to
-a wealthy planter’s only son whose love
-for her was very great.</p>
-
-<p>Pure happiness was theirs prolonged
-far beyond the honeymoon. Surrounded
-by every creature comfort
-wealth could procure or affection devise,
-secure in a faithful man’s unaltering
-love, she dwelt serene, in a country
-where the fruits of the earth and the
-flowers of the forest spread natural
-loveliness about fields of unsurpassed
-fertility.</p>
-
-<p>She never knew winter, want, nor
-war; her years were filled with peace;
-her estates increased to vast proportions;
-a thousand slaves were happy, being
-hers. Admired for her beauty,
-greatly loved, she returned an adoring
-husband’s devotion, and bore him children<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[84]</span>
-with eyes like the morning and hair
-like wreathed flames. Her daughters
-married and were fruitful, bearing children
-fair as an April day, with eyes like
-the sky of the morning. For them, for
-her, the world rolled on in unperturbed
-peace.</p>
-
-<p>But she never saw her golden lad
-again.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>Something inscrutable, deeper than
-whim, had come over Margot Lagoux.
-Her work was oddly altered: it had
-more air, less ease; more spell, less
-charm; more force, and less dexterity.
-The stuffs she chose no longer were
-notable for the exquisite, wan delicacy
-which so becomes the pallor of high-bred
-beauty; she took an incomprehensible
-joy in vivid color; but what was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[85]</span>
-gained in vividness was lost in harmony.
-Her work retained distinction, but of a
-queer sort; reserve gave way to novelty;
-simple beauty was replaced by meretricious
-charm; her taste, which had
-been perfect, seemed suffering gradual
-corruption; her craft was marred by
-crudities. Her turbans began to look
-as if there were only barbaric plumes in
-the world, of parrakeets and cockatoos,
-trogons and flamingos, gay toucan
-wings, and extraordinary quills; florid
-colors and distempered stains were
-mingled in inharmonious contrast;
-mango-yellow, peacock-green, Egyptian
-blue, and Congo scarlet, flaunted
-their discordant tones together.</p>
-
-<p>Style she had; but it was style <i>malade
-du rouvieux</i>; her trade-mark had become
-gaucherie, her art artifice; good
-taste had departed. Her work no more<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[86]</span>
-was garnished, but bedizened with excess,
-nowhere restrained, but having
-unrestricted vent in tawdry fripperies.
-Her handicraft was stamped by power
-and energy misapplied; the sole distinction
-it had left was whimsical device.
-Everything she did was like sweet wine
-soured, the worse for having been so
-much better. Her bonnets were like
-songs in forced falsetto, every line
-slurred by subtle default, every sweet
-note out; always too much or too little,
-never the happy mean. Even the pearls
-or marguerites, which she had formerly
-employed in bordures as trade-marks
-of her craft, had become cheap beads of
-colored pottery and glass. In tarnished
-bowls, in corners of obscure pawnshop
-windows, among the dead flies and the
-dust, are still occasionally to be found
-beads, often called “margots” or “margotons,”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[87]</span>
-like those employed by Margot
-Lagoux in her practice of millinery, but
-said to be thread-plummets employed
-by makers of lace. One, a Greek dealer
-in old gold and stolen silver, tells the
-enquiring traveler that these are Dead
-Sea pebbles, worn to their peculiar
-shapes by the ceaseless fret of that
-gloomy sea. But beads like them, grotesques,
-baroques, were laced on toques
-and turbans of her make, and now and
-then were found among the laces on
-bonnets which had no need of them:
-men, seeing them, narrowed their
-glances, and took new note of the
-wearer. Those aware permitted none
-near or dear to adorn her person with
-them.</p>
-
-<p>A queerly degenerated taste marked
-everything that Margot did. With
-singular obliquity she set everything<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[88]</span>
-awry; from rich goods produced unspeakably
-poor results; and with cheap
-cunning vexed priceless stuffs beyond
-recovery or repair.</p>
-
-<p>Her custom fell from <i>vendre cher</i> to
-<i>bon marché</i>. With the diminishing
-stream of patronage the material in her
-shop went down from <i>velours ras,
-velours façonné</i>, and <i>velours de soie</i>, to
-<i>velours de coton</i> and <i>coton croisé</i>,
-from velvet to velveteens. The air of
-distinction which attracted gentility
-utterly faded away; the coarse, crude
-stuffs and rude handiwork repelled the
-aristocratic. Calls for her work became
-infrequent; more infrequent; came no
-more. One morning the milliner’s
-shop was shut. It never was opened
-again. The stuffs on the dusty shelves
-grew faded, discolored, and stained;
-cobwebs hung from the mouldy walls;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[89]</span>
-the trade which had known and frequented
-the place knew it no more.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>But out of this end, like a paradox,
-above the apparent wreck Margot arose
-in prosperity: the Devil was good as
-his word.</p>
-
-<p>She dwelt in a massive great house, a
-mansion, handsome, stately, and somber,
-by a courtyard paved in marble,
-approached through a vaulted tunnel lit
-by a dull-flaming torch and closed by
-an iron gate. From the side of the court
-a staircase of marble rose to her private
-door, ornate as a public office’s entry
-and massively carved in flowers; stairs
-within, of blue-veined marble, went
-up through wide corridors heavily
-panelled in dark Spanish wood. Beneath
-the house vast cellars boomed and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[90]</span>
-echoed; the chimneys rose like turrets
-grouped against the darkling sky. The
-house throughout was furnished with
-every luxury befitting persons of circumstance:
-broad hearths for the burning
-of long wood in winter, vaulted corridors,
-burnished fittings of latten, and
-jalousies of saffron-wood with retaining
-rosettes of porcelain; mahogany tables
-of rare design, deep-carved, and
-adorned with brass. Curtains of saffron-colored
-silk cinctured with gold
-braid hung from the ceiling to the floor
-in heavy golden folds. Day was made
-night, night day by many subterfuges,
-with blinds and saffron jalousies ironed
-fast against the noon. By night the
-light shone out to the red stars, and the
-house was full of the swift, rich sweeping
-of heavy silk curtains waved by the
-wind, and the glow of the wax candles<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[91]</span>
-chequered the courtyard below with
-gold. In the middle of the courtyard,
-at the foot of the staircase, a fountain
-played in a yellow basin, with a pleasant,
-incessant noise of whispering green
-water, falling perpetually with a delicate
-patter over seven brown stone dolphins,
-spouting from whose pouted
-mouths went up contending streams;
-the waters gushed, white-laced, babbling,
-from the green-coppered vents in
-the dolphins’ mouths, and descended in
-spray to the bowl below; and under the
-bowl the drain-pipe murmured subterranean
-cool. About the courtyard
-stood a row of crimson-flowered pomegranate-trees:
-through the split brown
-rinds the garnet pulp and silver seeds
-showed, clotted thick as crystals in a
-stone; and purple fruits in heavy clusters,
-of myriad, uncounted drupes, hung<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[92]</span>
-from the superior privets ranged along
-the courtyard wall, dropping green
-shadows, like vast laces, over the blind-arched
-bricks below. A garden lay beyond
-the court, its gate hung thick and
-deep with yellow roses, clinging to the
-iron lantern, drooping and swaying in
-unconstrained festoons. Beyond the
-garden the place debouched into a forgotten
-graveyard.</p>
-
-<p>By night alive, by day the place was
-sunk in dreams, with lavish beauty
-everywhere composed to sleep in sunlit
-sloth, luxurious and deep. The place
-seemed fallen in a trance. The pigeons
-dozed along the eaves; and on the grass
-below, where the garden stretched, the
-peacock slowly danced his stiff and
-stately dance, an iris feather bubble,
-green as jade, purple as wine, blue as
-lazuli. The courtyard seemed the very<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[93]</span>
-home of sleep. The sun lay stupid on
-the silent walls and drowsily beat on the
-blue-doored cellars shut with cautious
-bars, closed fast and locked beneath the
-arcaded porch; the shadows of the slim
-pillars slept in the graceful galleries.
-All was hushed but the peacock’s cry,
-while that iridescent bubble, on toes
-black as ebony, danced, here and there,
-there and here, his slow “pavone”
-among the yellow roses.</p>
-
-<p>By night beneath the windows ancient
-tombs bared their sculptured
-breasts to the stars and stared up at
-the golden arches; and dank, black,
-cracked sarcophagi, chequered with
-light, laid broad their time-worn, sculptured
-emblems and tragical inscriptions,—skulls
-with wings, and urns, and
-hour-glasses whose un-refluent, palsied
-sands meet measure of eternity kept<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[94]</span>
-with motionless registry, and stony garlands
-of stone flowers which never
-bloomed, nor ever were sweet, as that
-beneath them had been sweet to man’s
-all quivering sense. Here lay the long
-dead, day and night, communicant in
-death; and wraiths of old unhappiness
-rose sighing with regret, or dreamed,
-beneath the stones, of love as futile as
-regret. The wind among the tombstones,
-like a stream from a windy fountain,
-murmured among the pomegranate-trees,
-stirred the shadows under the
-privets, rustled between the silken curtains,
-whispering, much as dead men
-do, chill, wordless, fluttering breaths of
-unsolved mystery. And when the wind
-from the graveyard whispered, all the
-place stood listening, hushed. The wind
-from the graveyard whispered among
-the saffron curtains; the ceaseless fountain<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[95]</span>
-waters fell; else all was still but the
-peacock’s wild night-cry, sounding
-through the unfathomable silence like
-the rending of an illusion,—deep and
-singular and strange,—by a harsh
-trumpet’s blast. Heh! The Devil
-keeps his promises in the way that suits
-him best.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>Margot’s existence here was a thing
-apart from everything plebeian: she
-was immensely wealthy; had riches such
-as are won by few, though sought by
-many, plantations in the country,
-houses in town, money on call in quantity
-that made great bankers bow;
-women to wait upon her, deferential
-men, boys to run at her beck, maidservants,
-bond and free, to go before
-her; her cellar was famous for its wines,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[96]</span>
-her dress for its wild and extravagant
-beauty; all that she touched she took;
-all that she took she kept; everything
-that she kept increased beyond the
-bounds of reason; she was spoken to
-with deference and referred to with
-finesse. She had her carriage, lined
-with silk, with yellow hammer-cloths
-and bands; in the license of her beauty
-she laughed at sumptuary laws, and in
-her illegal equipage rolled insolently
-on; in amber gown and canary turban
-fastened with a golden brooch, despite
-the law, she rode the streets like a
-charioted queen; or, dressed in wild, unstudied
-colors such as are used in
-Barbary, she wandered in her garden in
-the after-hours of the day, making
-wreaths of the saffron roses, a cockatoo
-upon her arm the color of a wild peach
-flower.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[97]</span>A shapely, splendid creature, with
-her handsome, heavy hands, neck like a
-tower, glorious hair hanging rich beneath
-its turban, her embroidered robe
-but carelessly worn and recklessly adjusted—oddly,
-the coarser the more
-becoming,—a goddess made of beautiful
-earth, but coarse as the cotton-flower,
-with confident face and insolent
-mien she took her way through the
-streets with a supple stride which was
-the despair of envious rivalry; hers was
-a regal beauty like the tiger’s loveliness.</p>
-
-<p>With her face like beauty seen in
-dreams, incredible and untrue, she went
-through the community like a lovely
-malady: even wise men’s souls were
-troubled; sturdy hearts that had
-laughed at passion shook with the fairness
-of her face; piety was troubled by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[98]</span>
-her golden loveliness. More than one
-sermon from Solomon’s Song was inspired
-by Rita Lagoux; she was known
-as the woman with a face like a beautiful
-blasphemy.</p>
-
-<p>Time but increased the wildness and
-singularity of her beauty: it was gossiped
-about in the market-stalls; it was
-babbled about in the streets.</p>
-
-<p>Then a torpor fell on her loveliness,
-a dull and leaden look; her beauty grew
-sullen and lowering as the flame of a
-fallen fire. Though not much altered
-in appearance she was somehow greatly
-changed. Her looks had lost something,
-no one could say what, gained
-something none could define. It was
-not that she was less the unforgettable
-being she had been, or that her sullen
-beauty made less mark on memory, but
-that the ecstasy of beauty was replaced<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[99]</span>
-by a queer unrest. Though as never
-before she was possessed of a singular
-comeliness, men began to regard her
-with an odd uneasiness: there was a
-foreignness in her face, and the look of
-alien things.</p>
-
-<p>She looked like a portrait of herself
-painted in irony.</p>
-
-<p>On the day that her daughter was
-married in far-away New Orleans,
-Margot stood motionless by her mirror,
-staring at her own reflection. The day
-seemed oddly overcast. Suddenly she
-burst into wild, shrill laughter, cheerless
-and tragic, her body shaking, her
-hands wrung together, turned away
-with an epithet, reversed the glass, and
-never looked into a mirror again.
-Something had passed across her face
-like a strange, ambiguous stain.</p>
-
-<p>A shadow had fallen upon her like<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[100]</span>
-an unexpected dusk, or the dimness under
-a passing cloud, and had overcast
-her beauty.</p>
-
-<p>Not time with his pinching seam, nor
-age with its ugliness, but a subtle and
-more peculiar change had come over
-Margot Lagoux.</p>
-
-<p>There is a half-light in the hour of
-an eclipse which casts a weird spell on
-the world, when the sun is but a narrow
-crescent at high noon and the earth
-grows oddly dim in an untimely dusk.
-Such a dusk was fallen upon Margot
-Lagoux.</p>
-
-<p>Sultry beauty such as hers has ever
-an early afternoon; but this was more
-than sultry beauty’s early afternoon.
-Not day, not darkness yet, but dusk
-went with her everywhere like twilight
-in the woods. The sun shone brightly
-everywhere along a sparkling world,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[101]</span>
-but on Margot lay a shadow, strange
-and sinister. As unbleached muslin
-sallows to dingy isabella, as metal tarnishes
-from neglect, as white paper
-dulls in the sun, as the spot on bruised
-fruit turns brown, Margot Lagoux was
-changing; she was becoming tawny,
-swart, <i>bisblanc</i> as the Creoles say. Her
-golden-ruddy cheeks had turned a morbid
-olive-brown as if a somber fountain
-were playing in her blood.</p>
-
-<p>There were many women at that day
-on whom fate laid dreadful hands:
-Louise Briaud, who was blinded by
-smallpox; Fanchette Bourie, whom
-God pitied with death; Helene Richemont,
-the leper; Floride Biez, Doucie
-Baramont, Francesca Villeponteaux,
-wrecked by disfiguring maladies. God
-give them peace! But on none was laid<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[102]</span>
-so ruthless, unrelenting, deliberate a
-hand as fell upon Rita Lagoux.</p>
-
-<p>She changed like a portrait whose
-shadows, painted in bitumen, have
-struck through and distempered the
-rest. Like a strange, nocturnal creature
-she seemed to absorb the gloom.
-Her glorious eyes grew jaundiced; her
-rose-brown lips grew dun; the delicate
-webs that joined her fingers grew yellow
-as bakers’ saffron. Malice laughed
-at her thickening lips.</p>
-
-<p>Weeks turned months, months years;
-swarthy she grew and ugly. She put
-aside beauty as a worn, bright garment,
-and took on grotesquery stark and
-medieval as a Chinese teak-wood carving.
-She became both grotesque and
-contorted, gross, misshapen, sullied
-and debased. The old enchantment was
-gone like a necromancer’s spell. The<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[103]</span>
-perfect gait had faltered down to a
-lurching trot, a hurrying waddle with
-an irregular, unsure motion, hesitating
-a moment, then hastening on with vague
-uncertainty. Her soft, sleepy laugh
-had grown violent, her melodious voice
-coarse; of her fair face there was nothing
-left, no, not remembrance even.</p>
-
-<p>A young man came to her threshold
-one morning and looked in eagerly; he
-would speak with Margot Lagoux: but
-“Is that Margot Lagoux?” he asked, a
-curious look coming over his face,—that
-woman, obese, with low brows, huge fat
-eyelids, round bare forehead, short,
-strained and corded neck enormously
-thick, yellowed teeth irregularly shown
-between thick, sallowed lips, cheeks
-wrinkled, flecked and blotched with
-brown like spotted peaches. “No!” he
-said, hastily, shrinking away. “That is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[104]</span>
-not the woman I mean. The woman I
-meant was comely ... and had a beautiful
-daughter named Gabrielle!” He
-turned away, shuddering.</p>
-
-<p>She wore old rags for robes, an old
-<i>freloche</i> upon her head, in nowise restraining
-the unkempt coils of her hair
-hanging matted upon her neck. Her
-cheeks hung slack and dark and dingy;
-her lusterless locks were felted into a
-tangled web that had grown gray with
-lint; her frowsy chin was stained as
-with walnut hulls. She was falling
-apart like an old house with nobody living
-in it, swore black oaths with a foul
-mouth, cursed all who crossed her path,
-ate like a beast food fit for beasts, her
-fevered sun of glory set,—gone, gone,
-gone. Down she went, like the stuffs
-in her shop, from <i>velours ras</i> to <i>coton
-croisé</i>, down, down to oblivion, down to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[105]</span>
-the dusty corner of death. She spat in
-the dirt: “<i>Je m’en fiche!</i>” she said.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb">
-
-<p>She hated a priest, and never knelt
-at a confessional again.</p>
-
-<p>She did not die in the great house
-where she had passed the days of her
-power; every place she dwelt in sank
-into decay, the swifter where its integrity
-seemed permanent and secure;
-nothing purged the ambiguous spell
-which dragged them down together to
-the dust. The great house stood a ruin
-above a ruined court, a wreck of its former
-pride and splendor, black and foul;
-the fountain had fallen long ago, its
-pipes strangled and eaten away to
-crusts of lead and thready ribs of iron
-in the sand. Lilac lane was gone; there
-was no lane there any more, and had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[106]</span>
-been none for years; there was no trace
-of where it ran, its hedge-rows or its
-gardens, or of Margot’s cottage other
-than a mouldering heap of broken
-brick, bleak rafters of the fallen roof,
-and one stark, fallen gable; of Gabrielle’s
-garden nothing remained.</p>
-
-<p>Margot died in a dirty hovel in an
-unkempt alleyway, in the midst of a
-negro quarter, where, if one beat a
-drum or caused an instrument of an orchestra
-to sound, the people swarmed
-from the tenements like ants out of a
-hill. The place was fallen and foul, and
-filled with beggary; and that is the end
-of a tenement; for beggars are like distemper,
-the place where they have lived
-is hard to cure. All the houses in the
-alley were filthy; but none was filthy
-as hers.</p>
-
-<p>There was a tremendous storm that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[107]</span>
-night. Her house was ablaze with light;
-the little tailor who lived next door said,
-“Aha! Mother Go-go has company!”
-But the only person seen was one of
-the religious sort, a tall man, with a
-face like an unpleasant taste.</p>
-
-<p>The thunder was terrific; the storm
-wild beyond compare. The wind blew
-with a sound like wild, gigantic laughter.
-“Ff-ff-ff!” went the gale; the
-gusts howled through the tailor’s house;
-the whole place shook; the blinds
-banged and crashed; the wind wailed,
-and sucked down the chimney with a
-sound like awful weeping; the little
-tailor’s soul was filled with a sense of
-enormous terror.</p>
-
-<p>All night long the thunder rolled like
-the laughter of an angry god. Dislodged
-by the tremendous concussions
-the cockroaches flew out of the walls;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[108]</span>
-and, in the morning, after the storm,
-the parrakeets which lived in the trees
-were all turned gray as ashes.</p>
-
-<p>The windows and doors of Old
-Mother Go-go’s house were standing
-open wide. It was plain that they had
-stood open all night, and that the rain
-had beaten into the house unopposed.</p>
-
-<p>This, however, occasioned but brief
-surprise. When they peered in at the
-door the rats were playing around the
-floor with the beads of a broken rosary.</p>
-
-<p>A priest came, hurrying in. He did
-not stay in long. When he came out
-his face was white as a sheet and his
-lips were drawn and gray.</p>
-
-<p>Those who prepare the dead came.
-They stood on the threshold peeping
-and queerly looking in at the door.</p>
-
-<p>A gray mist filled the place like a
-cloud, through which things were visible.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[109]</span>
-The rooms were damp as an old vault,
-and full of a death-like smell; the walls
-were covered with green mould; the
-woodwork was rotten. The candles had
-guttered and dripped and gone out; the
-floor was bespattered with tallow. All
-around the rooms were coffers of linen
-and lace, “<i>coffres très beaux, coffres
-mignons, de dressouer compagnons;
-coffres de boys qui point n’empire;
-madres et jaunes comme cire</i>.” All the
-coffers were open, and everything that
-was in them was tossed wildly about the
-floor; not one piece of the lovely old
-stuffs, as yellow as wax, but was blackened
-by showers of soot and trampled
-under foot by the neighbor’s goat, the
-print of whose hoofs was everywhere.</p>
-
-<p>And Madame Margot?</p>
-
-<p>Heh! God had designed her for
-tragedy; but here was comedy. Margot<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[110]</span>
-lay stretched out on the floor, as
-black as ebony; dead, among the ashes
-and soot, charred like a fallen star.</p>
-
-<p>The coroner found that the woman
-had died of the visitation of God; but
-Doe Gou, the tailor, said simply, “Has
-God feet like a goat?”</p>
-
-<p>The bishop refused to have masses
-said for the repose of her pitiful soul;
-and they would not allow her to be
-buried in St. Sebastian’s graveyard.
-The potter’s field was the place for her;
-her color was too peculiar.</p>
-
-<p>Too black to be buried among the
-white, too white to lie down with the
-black, she was buried, in secret, in her
-own garden, under the magnolia-trees.</p>
-
-<p>And that was the end of Madame
-Margot.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
-
-<div class="chapter">
-<div class="transnote">
-<p class="ph1">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:</p>
-
-<p>Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.</p>
-
-<p>Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.</p>
-
-<p>Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.</p>
-</div></div>
-
-<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MADAME MARGOT ***</div>
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