THE EXQUISITE MADAME DE BREVILLE
Poor Tanrade! Just as I felt
the future was all couleur de rose with him
it has changed to gloom unutterable.
Ah, les femmes! I should never
dare fall in love with a woman as exquisite as Alice
de Breville. She is too beautiful, too seductive,
with her olive skin, her frank smile, and her adorable
head poised upon a body much too well made. She
is too tender, too complex, too intelligent.
She has a way of mischievously caressing you with her
eyes one moment and giving an old comrade like myself
a platonic little pat on the back the next, which
is exasperating. As a friend I adore her, but
to fall in love with her! Ah, non, merci! I
have had a checkered childhood and my full share of
suffering; I wish some peace in my old age. At
sixteen one goes to the war of love blindly, but at
forty it is different. Our chagrins then plunge
us into a state of dignified desolation.
Poor Tanrade! I learned of the
catastrophe the other night when he solemnly entered
my abandoned house by the marsh and sank his big frame
in the armchair before my fire. He was no longer
the genial bohemian of a Tanrade I had known.
He was silent and haggard. He had not slept much
for a week; neither had he worked at the score of his
new opera or hunted, but he had smoked incessantly,
furiously a dangerous remedy with which
to mend a broken heart.
My poor old friend! I was so
certain of his happiness that night after dinner here
in the House Abandoned, when he and Alice had lost
themselves in the moonlight. Was it the moonlight?
Or the kiss she gave him as they stood looking out
over the lichen-stained wall of the courtyard to the
fairy marsh beyond, still and sublime wedded
to the open sea at high tide like a mirror
of polished silver, its surface ruffled now and then
by the splash of some incoming duck. He had poured
out his heart to her then, and again over their liqueur
and cigarettes at that fatal dinner of two at the
chateau.
All this he confessed to me as he
sat staring into the cheery blaze on my hearth.
Under my friendly but somewhat judicial cross-examination
that ensued, it was evident that not a word had escaped
Alice’s lips that any one but that big optimistic
child of a Tanrade could have construed as her promise
to be his wife. He confided her words to me reluctantly,
now that he realized how little she had meant.
“Come,” said I, in an
effort to cheer him, “have courage! A woman’s
heart that is won easily is not worth fighting for.
You shall see, old fellow things will be
better.”
But he only shook his head, shrugged
his great shoulders, and puffed doggedly at his pipe
in silence. My tall clock in the corner ticked
the louder, its brass pendulum glinting as it swung
to and fro in the light of the slumbering fire.
I threw on a fresh log, kicked it into a blaze, and
poured out for him a stiff glass of applejack.
I had faith in that applejack, for it had been born
in the moonlit courtyard years ago. It roused
him, for I saw something of his old-time self brighten
within him; he even made an attempt at a careless
smile the reminiscent smile of a philosopher
this time.
“What if I went to see her?” I remarked
pointblank.
“You! Mon Dieu!”
He half sprang out of the armchair in his intensity.
“Are you crazy?”
“Forgive me,” I apologized.
“I did not mean to hurt you. I only thought and
you are in no condition to reason that Alice
may have changed her mind, may regret having refused
you. Women change their minds, you know.
She might even confess this to me since there is nothing
between us and we are old friends.”
“No, no,” he protested.
“You are not to speak of me to Madame de Breville do
you understand?” he cried, his voice rising.
“You are not to mention my name, promise me
that.”
This time it was I who shrugged my
shoulders in reply. He sat gripping the arms
of his chair, again his gaze reverted stolidly to the
fire. The clock ticked on past midnight, peacefully
aloof as if content to be well out of the controversy.
“A drop more?” I ventured,
reaching for the decanter; but he stayed my arm.
“I’ve been a fool,”
he said slowly. “Ah! Mon Dieu! Les
femmes! Les femmes! Les femmes!”
he roared. “Very well,” he exclaimed
hotly, “it is well finished. To-morrow
I must go to Paris for the new rehearsals. I
have begged off for a week. Duclos is beside himself
with anxiety two telegrams to-day, the
last one imperative. The new piece must open at
the Folies Parisiennes the eighth.”
I saw him out to the gate and there
was a brave ring in his “bonsoir, mon vieux,”
as he swung off in the dusk of the starlit road.
He left the village the next day at
noon by the toy train, “the little get off-the-track,”
as we call it. Perhaps he wished it would and
end everything, including the rehearsals.
Bah! To be rehearsing lovelorn
shepherds and shepherdesses in sylvan dells.
To call a halt eighteen times in the middle of the
romantic duet between the unhappy innkeeper’s
daughter and the prince. To marry them all smoothly
in B flat in the finale, and keep the brass down and
the strings up in the apotheosis when the heart of
the man behind the baton has been cured of all love
and illusion for did he not tell me “It
is well finished”? Poor Tanrade!
Though it is but half a fortnight
since he left, it seems years since he used to come
into my courtyard, for he came and went as freely at
all hours as the salt breeze from the marsh.
Often he would wake me at daybreak, bellowing up to
my window at the top of his barytone lungs some stirring
aria, ending with: “Eh, mon vieux!
Stop playing the prince! Get up out of that and
come out on the marsh. There are ducks off the
point. Where’s Suzette? Where’s
the coffee? Sacristi! What a house. Half-past
four and nobody awake!”
And he would stand there grinning;
his big chest encased in a fisherman’s jersey,
a disreputable felt hat jammed on his head, and his
feet in a pair of sabots that clattered like a
farm-horse as he went foraging in the kitchen, upsetting
the empty milk-tins and making such a bedlam that
my good little maid-of-all-work, Suzette, would hurry
in terror into her clothes and out to her beloved
kitchen to save the rest from ruin.
Needless to say, nothing ever happened
to anything. He could make more noise and do
less harm than any one I ever knew. Then he would
sing us both into good humour until Suzette’s
peasant cheeks shone like ripe apples.
“It is not the same without
Monsieur Tanrade,” Suzette sighed to-day as
she brought my luncheon to my easel in a shady corner
of my wild garden a corner all cool roses
and shadow.
“Ah, no!” I confessed
as I squeezed out the last of a tube of vermilion
on the edge of my palette.
“Ah, no!” she sighed softly,
and wiped her eyes briskly with the back of her dimpled
red hand. “Ah, no! Parbleu!”
And just then the bell over my gate
jingled. “Some one rings,” whispered
Suzette and she ran to open the gate. It was the
valet de chambre from the chateau with a note
from Alice, which read:
DEAR FRIEND: It is lonely,
this big house of mine. Do come
and dine with me at eight.
Hastily, A. de
B.
Added to this was the beginning of
a postscript crossed out.
Upon a leaf torn from my sketchbook
I scribbled the answer:
GOOD DEAR CHARITABLE FRIEND:
The House Abandoned is a
hollow mockery without Tanrade. I’ll
come gladly at eight.
And Suzette brought it out to the
waiting valet de chambre whom she addressed
respectfully as “monsieur,” half on account
of his yellow-striped waistcoat and half because he
was a Parisian.
Bravo, Alice! Here then was the
opportunity I had been waiting for, and I hugged myself
over the fact. It was like the first ray of sunshine
breaking through a week of leaden sky. For a long
time I paced back and forth among the paths of the
snug garden, past the roses and the heliotrope down
as far as the flaming geraniums and the hollyhocks
and the droning bees, and back again by way of some
excellent salads and the bed of artichokes, while
I turned over in my mind and rehearsed to myself all
I intended to say to her.
Alice lonely! With a chateau,
two automobiles, and all Paris at her pretty feet!
Ha! ha! The symptoms were excellent. The
patient was doing well. To-night would see her
convalescent and happily on the road to recovery.
This once happy family of comrades should be no longer
under the strain of disunion, we should have another
dinner soon and the House Abandoned would ring with
cheer as it had never rung before. Japanese lanterns
among the fruit-trees of the tangled garden, the courtyard
full of villagers, red and blue fire, skyrockets and
congratulations, a Normand dinner and a keg of good
sound wine to wish a long and happy life to both.
There would be the same Tanrade again and the same
Alice, and they would be married by the cure in the
little gray church with the cracked bell, with the
marquis and the marquise as notables in the front
pew. In my enthusiasm I saw it all.
The lane back of the House Abandoned
shortens the way to the chateau by half a kilometre.
It was this lane that I entered at dusk by crawling
under the bars that divided it from the back pasture
full of gnarled apple-trees, under which half a dozen
mild-eyed cows had settled themselves for the night.
They rose when they caught sight of me and came toward
me blowing deep moist breaths as a quiet challenge
to the intruder, until halted by the bars they stood
in a curious group watching me until I disappeared
up the lane, a lane screened from the successive pastures
on either side by an impenetrable hedge and flanked
its entire length by tall trees, their tops meeting
overhead like the Gothic arches of a cathedral aisle.
This roof of green made the lane at this hour so dark
that I had to look sharp to avoid the muddy places,
for the lane ascended like the bed of a brook until
it reached the plateau of woodlands and green fields
above, commanding a sweeping view of marsh and sea
below.
Birds fluttered nervously in the hedges,
frightened at my approaching footsteps. A hare
sniffing in the middle of the path flattened his long
ears and sprang into the thicket ahead. The nightingales
in the forest above began calling to one another.
Two doves went skimming out of the leaves over my
head. Even a peacemaker may be mistaken for an
enemy. And now I had gained the plateau and it
grew lighter that gentle light with which
night favours the open places.
There are two crossroads at the top
of the lane. The left one leads to the hamlet
of Beaufort le Petit, a sunken cluster of farms
ten good leagues from Pont du Sable; the right one
swings off into the highroad half a mile beyond, which
in turn is met by the private way of the chateau skirting
the stone wall surrounding the park, which, as early
as 1608, served as the idle stronghold of the Duc
de Rambutin. It has seen much since then and
has stood its ground bravely under the stress of misfortune.
The Prussians hammered off two of its towers, and an
artillery fire once mowed down some of its oldest trees
and wrecked the frescoed ceiling and walls of the
salon, setting fire to the south wing, which was never
rebuilt and whose jagged and blackened walls the roses
and vines have long since lovingly hidden from view.
Alice bought this once splendid feudal
estate literally for a song the song in
the second act of Fremier’s comedy, which had
a long run at the Varietes three years ago, and
in which she earned an enviable success and some beautiful
bank-notes. Were the Duc de Rambutin alive
I am sure he would have presented it to her shooting
forest, stone wall, and all. They say he had
an intolerable temper, but was kind to ladies and
lap-dogs.
It was not long before I unlatched
a moss-covered gate with one hinge lost in the weeds a
little woebegone gate for intimate friends, that croaked
like a night-bird when it opened, and closed with a
whine. Beyond it lay a narrow path through a
rose-garden leading to the chateau. This rose-garden
is the only cultivated patch within the confines of
the wall, for on either side of it tower great trees,
their aged trunks held fast in gnarled thickets of
neglected vines. It is only another “house
abandoned,” this chateau of Alice’s, save
that its bygone splendour asserts itself through the
scars, and my own by the marsh never knew luxury even
in its best days.
“Madame is dressing,”
announced that most faithful of old servitors, Henri,
who before Alice conferred a full-fledged butlership
upon him in his old age was since his youth a stage-carpenter
at the Theatre Francais.
“Will monsieur have the goodness
to wait for madame in the library?” added
Henri, as he relieved me of my hat and stick, deposited
them noiselessly upon an oak table, and led me to
a portiere of worn Gobelin which he lifted for me
with a bow of the Second Empire.
What a rich old room it is, this silent
library of the choleric duke, with its walls panelled
in worm-eaten oak reflecting the firelight and its
rows of volumes too close to the grave to be handled.
Here and there above the high wainscoting are ancestral
portraits, some of them as black as a favourite pipe.
Above the great stone chimney-piece is a full-length
figure of the duke in a hunting costume of green velvet.
The candelabra that Henri had just lighted on the
long centre-table, littered with silver souvenirs
and the latest Parisian comedies, now illumined the
duke’s smile, which he must have held with bad
grace during the sittings. The rest of him was
lost in the shadow above the chimney-piece of sculptured
cherubs, whose missing noses have been badly restored
in cement by the gardener.
I had settled myself in a chintz-covered
chair and was idly turning the pages of one of the
latest of the Parisian comedies when I heard the swish
of a gown and the patter of two small slippered feet
hurrying across the hall. I rose to regard my
hostess with a feeling of tender curiosity mingled
with resentment over her treatment of my old friend,
when the portiere was lifted and Alice came toward
me with both white arms outstretched in welcome.
She was so pale in her dinner gown of black tulle
that all the blood seemed to have taken refuge in her
lips so pale that the single camellia thrust
in her corsage was less waxen in its whiteness than
her neck.
I caught her hands and she stood close
to me, smiling bravely, the tips of her fingers trembling
in my own.
“You are ill!” I exclaimed,
now thoroughly alarmed. “You must go straight
to bed.”
“No, no,” she replied,
with an effort. “Only tired, very tired.”
“You should not have let me come,” I protested.
She smiled and smoothed back a wave
of her glossy black hair and I saw the old mischievous
gleam flash in her dark eyes.
“Come,” she whispered,
leading me to the door of the dining room. “It
is a secret,” she confided, with a forced little
laugh. “Look!” And she pinched my
arm.
I glanced within the table
with its lace and silver under the glow of the red
candle-shades was laid for two.
“It was nice of you,” I said.
“We shall dine alone, you and
I,” she murmured. “I am so tired of
company.”
I was on the point of impulsively
mentioning poor Tanrade’s absence, but the subtle
look in her eyes checked me. During dinner we
should have our serious little talk, I said to myself
as we returned to the library table.
“It’s so amusing, that
little comedy of Flandrean’s,” laughed
Alice, picking up the volume I had been scanning.
“The second act is a jewel with its delicious
situation in which Francois Villers, the husband, and
Therese, his wife, divorce in order to carry out between
them a secret love-affair a series of mysterious
rendezvous that terminate in an amusing elopement.
Très chic, Flandrean’s comedy. It
should have a succès fou at the Palais Royal.”
“Madame is served,” gravely announced
Henri.
Not once during dinner was Alice serious.
Over the soup an excellent bisque of ecrevisses she
bubbled over with the latest Parisian gossip, the
new play at the Odeon, the fashion in hats.
With the fish she prattled on over the limitations
of the new directoire gowns and the scandal involving
a certain tenor and a duchess. Tanrade’s
defence, which I had so carefully thought out and
rehearsed in my garden, seemed doomed to remain unheard,
for her cleverness in evading the subject, her sudden
change to the merriest of moods, and her quick wit
left me helpless. Neither did I make any better
progress during the pheasant and the salad, and as
she sipped but twice the Pommard and scarcely
moistened her lips with the champagne my case seemed
hopeless. Henri finally left us alone over our
coffee and cigarettes. I had become desperate.
“Alice,” I said bluntly,
“we are old friends. I have some things
to say to you of of the utmost importance.
You will listen, my friend, will you not, until I
am quite through, for I shall not mention it again?”
She leaned forward with a little start
and gazed at me suddenly, with dilated eyes eyes
that were the next minute lowered in painful submission,
the corners of her mouth contracting nervously.
“Mon Dieu!” she
murmured, looking up. “Mon Dieu! But you
are cruel!”
“No,” I replied calmly. “It
is you who are cruel.”
“No, no, you shall not!”
she exclaimed, raising both ringless hands in protest,
her breath coming quick. “I I
know what you are going to say. No, my dear friend I
beg of you we are good comrades. Is
it not so? Let us remain so.”
“Listen,” I implored.
“Ah, you men with your idea
of marriage!” she continued. “The
wedding, the aunts, the cousins, who come staring
at you for a day and giving you advice for years.
A solemn apartment near the Etoile madame
with her afternoons monsieur with his club,
his maîtresse, his gambling and his debts the
children with their English governess. A villa
by the sea, tennis, infants and sand-forts. The
annual stupid voyage en Suisse. The inane
slavery of it all. You who are a bohemian, you
who live with all your freedom all
my freedom! Non, merci! I have seen all that!
Bah! You are as crazy as Tanrade.”
Alice, I cried, you think
“Precisely, my friend.”
She rose swiftly, crossed the room,
and before I knew it slipped back of my chair, put
both arms about my neck, kissed me, and burst into
tears.
“There, there, mon pauvre
petit,” she whispered. “Forgive
me I was angry we are not so
stupid as all that eh? We are not like
the stupid bourgeoisie.”
But it is not I ”
I stammered.
She caught her breath in surprise,
straightened, and slowly retraced her steps to her
vacant chair.
“Ah! So it is that?”
she said slowly, drawing her chair close to my own.
Then she seated herself, rested her chin in her hands,
and regarded me for some moments intently.
“So you have come for for
him?” she resumed, her breast heaving. “I
am right, am I not?”
“He loves you,” I declared.
“Do you think I am blind as to your love for
him? You who came to greet me to-night out of
your suffering?”
For some moments she was silent, her
fingers pressed over her eyes.
“Do you love him?” I insisted.
“No, no,” she moaned. “It is
impossible.”
Do you know, I continued, that he has not slept or hunted or smoked for a
week before he was forced to go to Paris? Can you realize what he suffers
now during days of exhausting rehearsals? He came to me a wreck, I said.
You have been cruel and you have
Again she had become deathly pale.
Then at length she rose slowly, lifted her head proudly,
and led the way back to the library fire.
“You must go,” she said. “It
is late.”
When the little boy of the fisherman,
Jean Tranchard, was not to be found playing with the
other barelegged tots in the mud of the village alleys,
or wandering alone on the marsh, often dangerously
near the sweep of the incoming tide, one could be
quite sure he was safe with Tanrade. Frequently,
too, when the maker of ballets was locked in his domain
and his servant had strict orders to admit no one neither
Monsieur le Cure nor the mayor, nor so intimate
a comrade as myself during such hours as
these the little boy was generally beside the composer,
his chubby toes scarcely reaching to the rungs of the
chair beside Tanrade’s working desk.
Though the little boy was barely seven
he was a sturdy little chap with fair curly hair,
blue eyes, and the quick gestures of his father.
He had a way of throwing out his chest when he was
pleased, and gesticulating with open arms and closed
fists when excited, which is peculiar to the race
of fishermen. The only time when he was perfectly
still was when Tanrade worked in silence. He
would then often sit beside him for hours waiting
until the composer dropped his pen, swung round in
his chair to the keyboard at his elbow, and while
the piano rang with melody the little boy’s
eyes danced. He forgot during such moments of
ecstasy that his father was either out at sea with
his nets or back in the village good-naturedly drunk,
or that his mother, whom he vaguely remembered, was
dead.
Tanrade was a so much better father
to him than his own that the rest of his wretched
little existence did not count. When the father
was fishing, the little boy cared for himself.
He knew how to heat the pot and make the soup when
there was any to make. He knew where to dig for
clams and sputtering crabs. It was the bread that
bothered him most it cost two sous.
It was Tanrade who discovered and softened these hard
details.
The house in which the fisherman and
the little boy live is tucked away in an angle of
the walled lane leading out to the marsh. This
stone house of Tranchard’s takes up as little
room as possible, since its front dare not encroach
upon the lane and its back is hunched up apologetically
against the angle of the wall. The house has but
two compartments the loft above stored
with old nets and broken oars, and the living room
beneath, whose dirt floor dampens the feet of an oak
cupboard, a greasy table, a chair with a broken leg,
and a mahogany bed. Over the soot-blackened chimney-piece
is a painted figure of the Virgin, and a frigate in
a bottle.
Monsieur le Cure had been
watching all night beside the mahogany bed. Now
and then he slipped his hand in the breast of his soutane
of rusty black, drew out a steel watch, felt under
a patchwork-quilt for a small feverish wrist, counted
its feeble pulse, and filling a pewter spoon with
a mixture of aconite, awakened the little boy who gazed
at him with hollow eyes sunken above cheeks of dull
crimson.
In the corner, his back propped against
the cupboard, his bare feet tucked under him, dozed
Tranchard. There was not much else he could do,
for he was soaked to the skin and half drunk.
Occasionally he shifted his feet, awakened, and dimly
remembered the little boy was worse; that this news
had been hailed to him by the skipper of the mackerel
smack, La Belle Elise, and that he had hauled
in his empty nets and come home.
As the gray light of dawn crept into
the room, the little boy again grew restless.
He opened the hollow eyes and saw dimly the black figure
of the cure.
“Tanne,” he whimpered. “Where
is he, Tanne?”
“Monsieur Tanrade will come,”
returned the cure, “if you go to sleep like
a brave little man.”
“Tanne,” repeated
the child and closed his eyes obediently.
A cock crowed in a distant yard, awakening
a sleek cat who emerged from beneath the bed, yawned,
stretched her claws, and walked out of the narrow
doorway into the misty lane.
The cure rose stiffly, went over to
the figure in the corner and shook it. Tranchard
started up out of a sound sleep.
“Tell madame when
she arrives that I have gone for Doctor Thevenet.
I shall return before night.”
“I won’t forget,” grumbled Tranchard.
“I have left instructions for
madame beside the candle. See that you keep
the kettle boiling for the poultices.”
The fisherman nodded. “Eh
ben! How is it with the kid?” he inquired.
“He does not take after his mother. Parbleu!
She was as strong as a horse, my woman.”
Monsieur le Cure did not
reply. He had taken down his flat black hat from
a peg and was carefully adjusting his square black
cravat edged with white beneath his chin, when Alice
de Breville entered the doorway.
“How is his temperature?”
she asked eagerly, unpinning a filmy green veil and
throwing aside a gray automobile coat.
Monsieur le Cure graciously
uncovered his head. “There has been no
change since you left at midnight,” he said gravely.
“The fever is still high, the pulse weaker.
I am going for Doctor Thevenet after mass. There
is a train at eight.”
Tranchard was now on his knees fanning
a pile of fagots into a blaze, the acrid smoke
drifting back into the low-ceiled room.
“I will attend to it,”
said Alice, turning to the fisherman. “Tell
my chauffeur to wait at the church for Monsieur le
Cure. The auto is at the end of the lane.”
For some minutes after the clatter
of Tranchard’s sabots had died away in
the lane, Alice de Breville and Monsieur le Cure
stood in earnest conversation beside the table.
“It may save the child’s
life,” pleaded the priest. There was a ring
of insistence in his voice, a gleam in his eyes that
made the woman beside him tremble.
“You do not understand,”
she exclaimed, her breast heaving. “You
do not realize what you ask of me. I cannot.”
“You must,” he insisted.
“He might not understand it coming from me.
You and he are old friends. You must,
I tell you. Were he only here the child would
be happy, the fever would be broken. It must be
broken and quickly. Thevenet will tell you that
when he comes.”
Alice raised her hands to her temples.
“Will you?” he pleaded.
“Yes,” she replied half audibly.
Monsieur le Cure gave a sigh of relief.
“God be with you!” said he.
He watched her as she wrote in haste
the following telegram in pencil upon the back of
a crumpled envelope:
MONSIEUR TANRADE,
Theatre des Folies Parisiennes, Paris.
Tranchard’s
child very ill. Come at once.
A. de Breville.
This she handed to the priest in silence.
Monsieur le Cure tucked it safely in the
breast of his cassock. “God be with you!”
he repeated and turned out into the lane. He
ran, for the cracked bell for mass had ceased ringing.
The woman stood still by the table
as if in a dream, then she staggered to the door,
closed it, and throwing herself on her knees by the
bedside of the sleeping boy, buried her face in her
hands.
The child stirred, awakened by her sobbing.
“Tanne,” he cried feebly.
“He will come,” she said.
Outside in the mist-soaked lane three
toothless fisherwomen gossiped in whispers.
Almost any day that you pass through
the village you will see a chubby little rascal who
greets you with a cheery “Bonjour”
and runs away, dragging a tin horse with a broken
tail. Should you chance to glance over my wall
you will discover the tattered remnants of two Japanese
lanterns hanging among the fruit-trees. They are
all that remain of a fête save the memory of two friends
to whom the whole world now seems couleur de rose.
“Hi, there! wake up! Where’s
Suzette? Where’s the coffee! Daylight
and not a soul up! Mon Dieu, what a house!
Hurry up, Mon vieux! Alice is waiting!”