The Old Countess

Front matter

By Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Houghton Mifflin Company Boston and New York

The Old Countess

The Old Countess

∵

YOU are an artist, Monsieur?'

Graham raised his eyes from his canvas and saw an old lady standing in the mountain-path beside him: gloomy, unresponsive eyes they were, and they did not soften for her; yet as he replied, 'I try to be,' they remained fixed upon her; for she was a surprising apparition.

Against the blue autumnal sky it was a Goya she made him think of; festive and sinister with her black ribbons and laces, her pallid, painted face and great owl-like eyes. She leaned, witch-like, on an ebony stick, and a broad hat, edged with lace, was tied, from beneath the brim, under her chin. Blue, black, sallow-white; in colour and design the picture of her was wonderful; and her eyes were wonderful; so old, yet so living and liquid; one iris half veiled by a piteous droop of the eyelid.

Graham continued to gaze at her, noting further that, though stately, she was frayed and almost dingy; her black kid boot gaped at the ankle where a button lacked and the laces at her wrist were tattered. She was so old that she might, in youth, have been a beauty of the Second Empire, with fan and wreath and crinoline, among satin upholstery and gilded consoles; yet that she was still susceptible to male attention was hade evident to him by the faintly provocative smile that hovered on her lips.

'You have made it very menacing,' she now remarked.

Her eyes were on him; his painting, he saw, was a mere pretext; yet she must have looked at it, and pretty carefully, before addressing him, for such a comment, from an old lady of the Second Empire, showed discernment.

'Menacing? What do you mean by that?' he questioned. He remained seated, mannerlessly enough; and he looked away from her to his picture, and then out over the majestic spaces of sky and cliff and river. Perched high as they were on the precipitous hillside, it was also against the sky that the old lady saw him, and she might well divine that when he looked at the landscape he forgot her.

Richard Graham was admirably handsome. The modelling of his brows and eyelids was Napoleonic and something also in the folded, ironic melancholy of his lips, his cold and brooding aspect; but his face showed no further Latin subtleties, and his rough, dark locks, short but ample nose, broad irises and powerful throat, gave to his head, in certain attitudes, a look of Robert Burns. He wore exceedingly well-cut coat and trousers of thin grey homespun; a white silk shirt; blue socks; blue silk handkerchief, and sleeve-links of flat gold;—on all of which details the old lady's eyes rested, successively and with an almost passionate attention. His demeanour was that of an artist, but his dress that of a man of fashion.

'To analyse a menace is difficult, is it not?' she said, as he cast his dark glance again upon her. 'Your sky is blue; it is full of sunlight; yet it is a tragic sky.'

'I always feel the sky in France rather tragic,' said Graham. 'It seems to relegate us; to have no use for us; none of the complicity that one feels in our caressing English skies.'

'Ah; I thought you English—though your French is so excellent.—An English artist who prefers to paint France rather than his own country. Bien, the old lady smiled. Her smile drew her drooping lid still lower; and her front teeth, still beautiful, though set in cavernous darkness, lent it a certain pathos. 'Perhaps that is what I felt in your picture. It relegates us. And not only its sky. Your very river is merciless.—Though indeed one does not expect mercy from a great river such as our Dordogne.'

'It's marvellous,' said Graham, gazing again before him. It was. He never recovered from the shock of splendour each seeing of it brought. Winding in majesty between its vast grey cliffs, its wooded gorges, it was to the earth what an eagle is to the sky; a presence; a power; possessing what encompasses it.

The old lady recalled his gaze. 'And it can be mer- ciless indeed. During the years that I have lived here I have seen three inundations. Corpses have rolled upon its flood.'

'Corpses? Really?' Graham laughed a little, looking up at her. She was probably a romancing old lady and the quality went with something meretricious he felt in her voice, dulcetly, beautifully as that enshrined her perfect French. It went with the Second Empire tradition, too, this evocation of swollen tides and helpless, livid forms; a poem by Victor Hugo; a picture by Géricault. 'Why didn't they get out of the way?'

'Ah, you do not know the force and fury of our great rivers when they are unchained by spring among the mountains. They can, suddenly, resistlessly, sweep all before them. They are, in that, like our French nation, led by a Napoleon. My maternal grandfather was one of Napoleon's marshals. We are of plebeian blood on my mother's side; but I think I am prouder of that soldier of fortune than of my crusading ancestors.—You fought in our great war, Monsieur?'

'Yes; I fought,' said Graham, amused. Something in her tone, slightly resentful perhaps of his incredulity and lightness, implied that it had been a privilege to fight for the France that Napoleon fought for, and to claim the war, the victory, as France's alone.

The old lady was silent for a moment, leaning on her stick.

'It's all to the good—your sweeping everything before you—as long as you don't wreck things, isn't it,' said Graham, and though he spoke kindly he was beginning to wish that she would move on. This wonderful French light enveloped the landscape like an incantation; but it was October; the days were getting short; it would change if they went on talking too long.

'You are staying at our little Buissac, Monsieur?' asked the old lady. She must guess that he wanted to go on painting; but she could not, yet, he felt, bring herself to leave him.

'Only for a week. We are on our way South.'

'You are not alone?'

'My wife is with me.'

'She, also, is an artist?'

'Far from it.' Graham smiled a little, streaking a tentative colour on his palette.

'She has other occupations while you paint?'

'She's fond of motoring. She's probably scouring the country at this moment.' Graham laid on his colour.

'It is a wild, a desolate country for a young woman to venture far afield in. You do not fear for her?'

'Fear for Jill!' Graham laughed. 'She went through the war, too. She drove an ambulance in the firing line most of the time. The Dordogne isn't likely to frighten her after that.' He looked up at the old lady—'May I bring her to see you one day before we go? I should like to go on talking;—but not now.'

The old lady seemed for a moment arrested by this suggestion, and her young man's casual, kindly tone showed her that, if not unaware of convention, he was at all events entirely indifferent to it. But her surprise was untouched by displeasure. Her smile, on the contrary, betrayed delight, a delight that wreathed itself in graciousness. 'I shall be most charmed to receive you. Come any day you please and you will find me waiting for you with a cup of tea; and it will be a cup of real tea, and at the proper time,' she smiled, 'though I, myself, from long seclusion, have lapsed into the habits of the province. I dine at midday, sup at dusk, and go to bed with the birds;—a sad existence, is it not, for a Parisienne?'

'That's all right, then,' said Graham. 'We'll come at tea-time. And where are we to come? And whom are we to ask for?'

'You must ask for the comtesse de Lamouderie; at the Manoir;—anyone will direct you.—It is down there I live;—beyond Buissac; beyond the cemetery; in the midst of the chestnut forest. A road leads up from the grande route. I am afraid it is in terrible disrepair; your car could never attempt it. But it is not far. You could come on foot.'

'If you can get as far as this—I think we certainly can!' laughed Graham. 'And what about your Do you feel it safe to wander about the country by yourself?' He had risen in farewell and doffed his hat.

'Oh, I!' the old lady laughed bitterly. 'There are no dangers where I am concerned. I ceased to be a woman many years ago.'

This, to Graham's Anglo-Saxon ears, was a piece of information as unexpected as it was unnecessary. He ignored it. 'You might break your leg, you know. You might meet a robber.—Well, au revoir.

'I have nothing to be robbed of, as you see.' The old lady opened her arms and displayed her ancient attire. 'I am a scarecrow. And if a dead scarecrow is found one day on a mountain-path—well, I should prefer that, to tell the truth, to holy water and holy oil and all the lugubrious paraphernalia of a deathbed.'

'I agree with you! I should too,' said Graham. Their dark eyes dwelt on each other for a moment. Something passed between them. He did not think he liked the old lady, but a smouldering ember of recklessness, ruthlessness, perhaps, looked out at him from her eyes and his own dark fires answered it. 'Don't die in the mountain-path till we meet again,' he said.

It was comical, pitiful, he reflected, after she had left him, to remember how the Second Empire glance had answered this final sally: a glance arch, triumphant. He had delighted her; enraptured her. Poor old creature. She was ravenously lonely.

Jill

BUISSAC lay along the banks of the great river, hardly more than a thin scattering of houses; the inn, with its cheerful garlanding of vines, at one end, a villa or two at the other. Halfway up the cliff a monstrous modern Mairie, with pompous wings and preposterous cupola, all but obliterated the Romanesque church, ancient, patient, tranquil, its dark carved porch whispering legends terrible or gentle, a mushroom-like clustering of chapels about its apse. The Mairie, Graham thought, as he descended into the village at sunset, looked like a blustering bully pushing an old nun into the gutter, and a sardonic smile curled his lip as he glanced up at the Liberté—Egalité—Fraternité, carved in challenging golden letters above its portals. He and Jill had already come into disdainful contact with some of the furtive officials who lurked within its airless chambers.

Higher still, on the wooded summits, a ruined medizval castle was poised like a falcon against the sky. Predatory falcon or hypocritical bully, which, he wondered, was the more malevolent presence. Though indeed the turbulent history of France, symbolized by castle and Mairie, had, he imagined, affected the remote, self-sufficing life of the little community rather as the seasons affected it; as much and as little. The level of the demand on life in such a place had always been so low that existence crept on, tranquilly, laboriously, throughout the centuries, unchanged by changing dynasties. That was the secret of happy living Graham reflected; to keep the level of demand low. On the level of Buissac life might be said to justify itself.

In front of the Ecu d'Or, on the wall that ran above the river, a young woman, dressed in mushroom-coloured silk, was lounging, a young woman with her hands in her pockets, a cigarette between her lips, an air of infinite if indolent good-humour, and Graham, as he saw her, felt her to be a further exemplification of happy living; for Jill's demand on life was certainly low in the sense that it was very simple. Yet the mystery of Jill was that anyone so rudimentary should seem to possess so much. Sitting there on her background of golden river and golden sky, unaware of appraisals, unconscious of æsthetic significances, the splendid evening permeated her, and she was a part of it all in a sense that the passionate yet impersonal attitude of the artist could never sink to—or attain. It seemed to belong to her as much as she to it.

She sat, as he approached her, not moving, and keeping her oddly smiling eyes upon him. Jill's very eyebrows partook of her smile; they drooped from their broad, quizzical lift over the bridge of her nose and the corners of her eyes drooped with them, while the corners of her mouth curled up. This gaiety of demeanour had in it no touch of coquetry or challenge; it was, rather, that of a school-boy, and of an English school-boy; for Jill was as English as a hawthorn hedge in May.

Her sunburned skin was almost as dark in tone as her tawny hair; but by nature it was fresh and pale. She had been motoring all day and her small, prominent nose was slightly blistered by the hot wind, and her small lips parched, so that she looked more than ever like a hardy boy. But it was so he liked best to see her.

He sat down on the wall beside her and felt, again, his old pleasure in her looks. It never failed him; just as her pleasure in his, he imagined, never failed her. It was with each other's looks that they had fallen in love five years ago, towards the end of the war, and he liked Jill's as well now as when he had first seen her, sitting above him, against a war-ravaged sky, in her ambulance lorry. Poor old Jill could hardly have foreseen that in the gallant, blood-stained young officer who had won her heart, almost without asking for it, she was to find nothing but a moody, incomprehensible artist. She was a girl to marry a soldier; not a girl to marry an artist; whereas he was as content with Jill now as he had been then; and asked nothing more from her.

Loyal, kind, unselfish, there was something endlessly dependable about her, something that made him think of her, in their relation, as riding a restive, cherished horse and saying: 'Steady, old boy; steady.' She had never had to say it explicitly; had perhaps never been aware of a need for holding him up; yet he knew that but for Jill's imperturbable confidence he might have fallen more than once into the disorders of his morose and rebellious youth.

'Any luck?' she asked him now, and it was characteristic of her to put his artistic activities in the category of sport. She would feel towards his canvas as towards a good basket of trout.

'Yes. Excellent. This country surpasses everything. Where have you been?'

'Oh, for miles; over the mountains. There are tablelands up there with endless birch-woods on them. And I found a great blue lake. But nothing's better than this. Nothing could be better than that river.'

From the river wall they gazed down the golden flood to where, beyond a beetling, wooded promontory, dark against the sunset, it turned in a vast curve and seemed to brood across the golden plains. Opposite Buissac the shores were less steep and russet vineyards climbed, from ledge to ledge of quiet hillside, above another hamlet, its evening cries faintly wafted.

At the turn of the river the promontory ran a long foot out into the stream, a green peninsula, its poplars shimmering against the sky. They could see that cattle grazed there, three cream-coloured cows, half dissolved in light, moving among the poplar groves.

'It's all so gentle; yet it's almost dreadful, too,' Jill murmured.

'Dreadful? How do you mean?'

'That great, dark cliff, hanging over everything like that; and everything being so vast; so much more than one can possibly need,' Jill said vaguely. 'Dreadful in a splendid way, of course. Terrible is a better word, perhaps.'

'Everything beautiful is more than one needs, my funny Jill. That's a definition of beauty, perhaps. Except that it's what one needs more than anything.'

'Yes. That's true,' Jill nodded. And her young face, its jocund lines wrested to gravity, took on a sudden strangeness.

An old peasant woman, wearing the austere black dress of the locality, passed along the dusty road, knitting as she led her flock of gaunt, disconsolate sheep.

'The only trouble with the place is the animals,' said Jill, following the sheep with her eyes. 'They all look half starved.'

'That old creature looks half starved herself,' said Graham. 'And by the way, I'm going to take you to tea with another old woman, and I shouldn't be surprised if she were half starved, too. I feel as if we ought to bring our bread and butter with us.'

'How did you pick up anyone in these parts who has tea?—There'll be boiled milk with it, I wager you.'

'She's an old countess, and she lives just beyond that promontory, I gather, for I think I make out chestnut forests on it. She appeared while I was painting and only asked to stay and talk all day. Rather beautiful; rather direful. I never saw anything like her. I only got rid of her at last by telling her I'd come to tea and bring you with me. If you ask me, I think she fell in love with me at first sight. It was a coup de foudre.

'Poor old girl! I don't blame her. I did, too,' laughed Jill, perhaps a trifle ruefully.

So they sat on till it was time to get ready for dinner, watched from the open windows of the Ecu d'Or by Monsieur and Madame Michon, by Camille the garçon, and by Amélie the maid-of-all-work, who was, Jill remarked, when she appeared once or twice at the door to wring out a torchon or sweep a heap of dust into the road, as gaunt as the sheep, and as unbeautiful.

Jill and Graham fulfilled the French tradition of the charming and eccentric English couple travelling unaccountably, light-heartedly, erratically through a country not their own. It was felt by Monsieur and Madame, by Camille and by Amélie, that there was no telling how long they would stay or how soon depart; it depended on nothing predictable, though in hopes of the happier possibility, Madame was roasting a fine fat duck for their dinner and Amélie saw to it that the English insatiability in regard to hot water was met by a steaming broc carried up to their rooms. They had come in a small, open car, yet Madame last night at dinner had worn pearls and Monsieur had an impressive set of toilet articles. They would, everybody felt it, be generous with tips and not critical of bills; and that they knew what they were eating, quite as well as if they had been French and not English, Monsieur Michon had observed when he himself waited on them.

That night when they sat, with coffee and cigarettes, on the balcony that overlooked the river, Monsieur Michon ventured to ask them if they were pleased with Buissac, and they said that they were very pleased.

'Is it over there that the comtesse de Lamouderie lives?' Graham asked, pointing towards the promontory.

'Madame la comtesse? Mais oui, Monsieur.' Monsieur Michon could not conceal his surprise. 'Monsieur knows Madame la comtesse?'

'I met her this afternoon. She lives at the Manoir, she told me, in chestnut woods.'

'Yes, but it is a rough road. Monsieur will not get the car to go up it.'

'So she said. One follows the highroad and turns off.'

'You cannot miss it, Monsieur. One turns off at the cemetery à mi-route. And one has a fine view of the river on the way. We seldom see Madame la comtesse here in Buissac; but once a year she appears at High Mass; so I am told,' Monsieur Michon added with discretion, proving himself to be with the Mairie against the Church. 'She is an eccentric old lady.'

'And do you have great floods here at Buissac?' Graham asked, idly interested in verifying his old friend's histories.

'Ah, not now, Monsieur. This is not the season.' Monsieur Michon was evidently alarmed lest a reputation for floods should make Buissac less attractive.

'No; not now. But in the spring. Are people often drowned?'

'Drowned, Monsieur?' Monsieur Michon spoke with repudiation. 'No one has been drowned at Buissac;—except a cow here and there. We have great floods; in the spring-time, in some years. But we know how to deal with them and no life is in danger.'

'No corpses, eh?' smiled Graham. 'They don't go floating down the current?'

Mais non; mais non. Monsieur Michon smiled indulgently now, perceiving his guest's humour. 'We do not deal in corpses here.'

The Cemetery

IT'S a day like a fairy-tale,' said Jill.

'A happy fairy-tale or a sad one?' Graham asked.

They were on their way to the Manoir, the green, lustrous glades of the chestnut forest opening before them as they climbed the mild ascent that led up from the river level. It was a beautiful walk, as Monsieur Michon had said, and the cool, sunny afternoon lay like a benediction over the splendid country.

'A happy one, of course,' said Jill. She turned her smiling eyes upon her husband, thinking that he looked a fitting hero to any fairy-tale. She was happy to be doing anything with Dick. So often she was alone; though Jill was seldom conscious of feeling lonely.

'Some fairy-tales are sinister, you know,' Graham objected. 'Perhaps if you'd seen the old lady you would feel that this one would be. She's rather witch-like and one can imagine her running a long needle into the princess's heart more easily, I'm afraid, than waving the wand for Cinderella.'

'But when princesses have the needles run into their hearts they come to life all right in the end,' said optimistic Jill. 'Fairy-tales may be sinister, but they always end well. I wasn't thinking so much of your old lady, though. It was just the feeling of starting on an adventure, with you. And everything being dif- ferent from anything we've ever done before. It all feels different to-day.'

'Nice child,' Graham smiled at her. Jill's fundamental trust in life often amused and often touched him.

Halfway up the shoulder of the cliff the grande route swept suddenly to the left, on level ground, while, on the right, the ascent continued, more steeply, by a narrow, stony road.

'This must be the way she told me of,' said Graham. 'And it's quite true that one wouldn't care to take the car up it.'

But Jill had stopped short and was staring at a high wall that ran along the grande route.

Above it, bristling against the background of forest green, was an extraordinary array of what looked like nothing in the world so much as large tin tubs turned upside down and mounted on stilts. There were myriads of them; and amidst the quietly rustling solitudes they had a grisly look.

'What in Heaven's name is that?' said Jill.

'This,' said Graham, after a silent survey, 'is evidently the cemetery. Charming, isn't it?' He was less startled than Jill; perhaps because he was by nature more acquiescent in the grisly.

'The cemetery? Why?'

'Ask me another. We must go in and see.'

'I haven't the least wish to go in.—Are they baths?'

'Not at all. And few of those who repose beneath them ever, I imagine, knew a bath. They are temples. Shrines. Come along. It's rather picturesque. A variant on Velasquez's Les Lanzas.

Reluctantly Jill followed him round to the high grille which yielded to his thrust.

They found themselves in a gravelled, orderly necropolis, a Galerie Lafayette, a Bon Marche of death. It seemed almost to display counters and to advertise good worth for the money. The poorer graves were sheltered by the high-perched tin tabernacles; the more opulent by stone chapels, railed across the front and displaying with sociable complacency their funereal altars, tablets, photographs, bead-wreaths, and vases filled with artificial flowers. There were streets of them, standing face to face. Some were solid and some were flimsy, but they all expressed the conviction that they were doing the right thing in the right way.

'It's like the gentleman with a ribbon across his chest who gets up, in evening clothes, and in broad daylight, at a French function, to make a speech,' Graham observed, sardonically gratified by a new experience. 'It civilizes death, you see, Jill; classifies it and introduces it to society. The tubs look industrial rather than rural, and are an invention, I expect, of the people who work in the quarries down the river.'

'I never imagined anything so horrible,' said Jill, standing to look from side to side with a dismay almost indignant. 'It will haunt my dreams.'

The cemetery was not all reclaimed from nature and dedicated to horror. In one corner—Jill observed it from where she stood—a broad space of grass still grew green and thick and the chestnut branches, over the wall, dropped their russet fruits upon it. She moved away, drawn towards this oasis.

There, against the wall, she saw another grave; different from all the rest. It was marked only by a heave of sod and by the simplest headstone; and, deep in the grass, the chestnut branches sweeping low above it, it had a solitary yet cradled look. Graham joined her as she stood beside it.

At the head three glass vases held sprays of autumn roses; faded, yet with a lingering colour; and a wreath of heather at the foot was still fresh. Marthe Ludérac was the name upon the stone, and above it: Priez pour elle. The dates showed that she had died six years before.

Jill and Graham stood, strangely silenced.

'Why is she all alone like this?' Jill whispered. 'She has gone as far away from the others as she could.'

'She shows her taste in that,' said Graham. 'But she was forty. Not young. We can't make a romance about her.'

'No; not a romance. But a tragedy, perhaps,' said Jill. 'I have a feeling that she was dreadfully unhappy.'

'Most people are, my dear. Even the people over there, under their tin tubs, suffered, you may be sure.'

'I have a feeling that she suffered differently,' said Jill. 'It's because she suffered differently that she's here, quite by herself; with no family about her.'

'She was a stranger in the place, perhaps.'

'Perhaps. But someone who lives here must have put the flowers. Marthe Ludérac. It's an unhappy name, I think.'

'I think it's rather a heroic name. Rather a cruel, strange name, too. It's gentle; and sword-like. Marthe Ludérac,' Graham repeated, while, in the calm sunlight, the chestnut branches rustled softly, over them and over the grave. 'A Marthe Ludérac might have been a provincial Royalist and fought against the Republican bands. She might have been drowned in the river down there—in a noyade; she might have been guillotined. It's a name to make history out of; there's a sound in it of disaster, and beauty.'

'But things like that couldn't have happened to this Marthe Ludérac,' the literal Jill objected. 'She died only six years ago.'

'Yes. She did. And she makes me uncomfortable. As you say, she was unhappy. Come; let's go away from her.'

They turned from the grave and retraced their steps, in silence, to the grille.

Now they took the road that led up among the chestnuts, for the grande route left the forest at the cemetery wall and swept in a noble curve round the promontory, far above the river. But in this narrow, stony track the trees grew closely overhead, and deep gullies, worn by the rains, ran on either side under crumbling banks of moss. Another turn showed them the forest, still climbing, while, on their left, the steep hillside dropped away, towards the river, in ledge after ledge of scantily growing vineyard. A dilapidated thatched cottage stood among the vineyards and a rough mountain-path led down from it and disappeared over the edge of rock. On their right they saw a copse of dark sycamores and rising above them were the chimneys of the Manoir.

The sycamores must have been planted about it some fifty years before and had not liked their situation, for they all grew sadly and grudgingly, pressed closely together and spreading, on tall grey stems, a roof of disconsolate green that shut out the sky. The Manoir stood behind high plastered walls, and when they passed through the gate, that clanged a loud bell at their passage, they found themselves before the saddest house.

It was long and low and damp and sombre, with two rows of windows looking out at the sycamores and a tiled roof dark with moss and lichen. Green stains ran down over the ochre-coloured walls and in the flower plots before it were only pale, degenerate Michælmas-daisies. One might have thought it uninhabited but for the barking of a dog. He stumbled round a corner of the house, old and half blind, and retreated precipitately on seeing them standing there. But at an upper window a head that Graham recognized appeared. It was quickly withdrawn and a voice was heard calling shrilly: Joseph! Joseph! On sonne! Dépêchez-vous!

The voice descended, still calling, and running steps clattered and shuffled within as they stood before the door from which the paint had long since peeled and blistered. Le thé! Le thé! called the voice in tones tragically imperative. Et n'oubliez pas le lait!

Then, after an interval of silence, the door was slowly opened, and an old man, derelict, nondescript, morose, appeared in the doorway. He showed no sign of the excitement that reigned within and looked at them with an unmoved if unhostile gravity.