Maeve

“ Maiden-poet, come with me
To the heaped up cairn of Maeve,
And there we'll dance a fairy dance
Upon a fairy's grave.
In and out among the trees,
Filling all the night with sound,
The morning, strung upon her star,
Shall chase us round and round.
What are we but fairies too,
Living but in dreams alone,
Or, at the most, but children still,
Innocent and overgrown? ”

“ But when the flowers were gathered and she and Mae emerged from the secret woods into the lonely twilight that sense of separation returned. Was she actually plainer than Mae, or was it her pride and sense of right that hid from men the inner beauty she possessed? How unseeing men were, and how brazen seemingly delicate Mae who did not hesitate to show her love to Charles. It had been sickening to witness his physical eagerness. Filthy sniffing animals.
I'm glad I said they were for poor Aunt Mabel too. It must be awful to be an old maid. ”

“ Longmore said nothing and M. de Mauves puffed his cigar reflectively and watched the smoke. "Madame de Mauves," he said at last, "is a rather singular person." And then while our young man shifted his position and wondered whether he was going to "explain" Madame de Mauves, "Being, as you are, her fellow countryman," this lady's husband pursued, "I don't mind speaking frankly. She's a little overstrained; the most charming woman in the world, as you see, but a little volontaire and morbid. ”

“ You see Lulu is so little, and I s'pose He thinks such a big girl as you ought to know better and give up more."
"Yes," said Mamie; "but, Belle, I don't know if I like to think God sees every thing I do. It's a little uncomfortable."
"When you're not good it is," answered Belle; "but that's the help, you see. And we can't help His seeing us whether we like it or not. And then you know if He sees when we're naughty, He knows right away when we're sorry too." ”

“ Longmore said with a sinking of the heart, "and with her to love once is to commit herself for ever. Her clever husband thinks her too prim. What would a stupid poet call it?" He relapsed with aching impotence into the sense of her being somehow beyond him, unattainable, immeasurable by his own fretful logic. Suddenly he gave three passionate switches in the air with his cane which made Madame de Mauves look round. She could hardly have guessed their signifying that where ambition was so vain the next best thing to it was the very ardour of hopelessness. ”

“ M. de Mauves busied himself for a moment in lighting another cigar, and when he had finished, with a return of his confidential smile, "I suspect you of thinking that I don't do my wife justice." he made answer. "Take care--take care, young man; that's a dangerous assumption. In general a man always does his wife justice. More than justice," the Count laughed--"that we keep for the wives of other men!"
Longmore afterwards remembered in favour of his friend's fine manner that he had not measured at this moment the dusky abyss over which it hovered. ”

“ Longmore," she said, "why you've come back." He inclined himself to her, almost pulling up again, with an air that startled her into a certainty of what she had feared. "Because I've learned the real answer to the question I asked you the other day. You're not happy--you're too good to be happy on the terms offered you. Madame de Mauves," he went on with a gesture which protested against a gesture of her own, "I can't be happy, you know, when you're as little so as I make you out. I don't care for anything so long as I only feel helpless and sore about you. ”

“ I doubt if your English authors,” the Count went on with a serenity which Longmore afterwards characterised as sublime, “are very sound reading for young married women. I don’t pretend to know much about them; but I remember that not long after our marriage Madame de Mauves undertook to read me one day some passages from a certain Wordsworth—a poet highly esteemed, it appears, chez vous. It was as if she had taken me by the nape of the neck and held my head for half an hour over a basin of soupe aux choux: I felt as if we ought to ventilate the drawing-room before any one called. ”

“ Lulu had heard that God lived in the sky; she had been told, too, that God loved her, and would take care of her; and the little creature startled her sister with the words,—
"Mamie, where are Dod?"
And across Mamie's mind flashed her watchword. "The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good."
"In every place!" Here, now, watching her and Lulu! For a moment it seemed to bring new terror to her, speaking, as it did, to her guilty conscience ”

“ Mademoiselle de Mauves was very positive, very shrewd, very ironical, very French--everything that Euphemia felt herself unpardonable for not being. During her Sundays en ville she had examined the world and judged it, and she imparted her impressions to our attentive heroine with an agreeable mixture of enthusiasm and scepticism. She was moreover a handsome and well-grown person, on whom Euphemia's ribbons and trinkets had a trick of looking better than on their slender proprietress. ”

“ The Comtesse de Mauves will be none the worse for it. Your brave little self, understand, in spite of everything--bad precepts and bad examples, bad fortune and even bad usage. Be persistently and patiently just what the good God has made you, and even one of us--and one of those who is most what we ARE--will do you justice!"
Euphemia remembered this speech in after-years, and more than once, wearily closing her eyes, she seemed to see the old woman sitting upright in her faded finery and smiling grimly like one of the Fates who sees the wheel of fortune turning up her favourite event. ”

“ Was it possible that so clear a harmony had the seeds of trouble, that the charm of so perfect union could be broken by anything but death? Longmore felt an immense desire to cry out a thousand times “No!” for it seemed to him at last that he was somehow only a graver equivalent of the young lover and that rustling Claudine was a lighter sketch of Madame de Mauves. The heat of the sun, as he walked along, became oppressive, and when he re-entered the forest he turned aside into the deepest shade he could find and stretched himself on the mossy ground at the foot of a great beech. ”

“ Madame Clairin stood framed in the opening as if, though just arriving on the scene, she too were already aware of its interest. Conscious, apparently, that she might be suspected of having watched them she stepped forward with a smile and looked from one to the other. "Such a tete-a-tete as that one owes no apology for interrupting. One ought to come in for good manners."
Madame de Mauves turned to her, but answered nothing. She looked straight at Longmore, and her eyes shone with a lustre that struck him as divine. ”

“ She liked him extremely, she felt in him the living force of something to which, when she made up her girlish mind that a needy nobleman was the ripest fruit of time, she had done too scant justice. They went through the little gate in the garden-wall and approached the house. On the terrace Madame Clairin was entertaining a friend--a little elderly gentleman with a white moustache and an order in his buttonhole. Madame de Mauves chose to pass round the house into the court ”

“ Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude,
Who lurked to spy and peer.
Cold he lies, as cold as stone,
With his clotted curls about his face:
The comeliest corpse in all the world
And worthy of a queen's embrace. ”

“ Perhaps, after all, Maümee had never loved me!
Many a sore heart had I suffered from this reflection. I could now bear it with more complacency; and yet, singular to say, it was this very reflection that awakened the memory of Maümee; and, whenever I dwelt upon it, produced the strongest revulsions of my own spasmodic love!
Wounded vanity! powerful as passion itself! thy throes are as strong as love. Under their influence, the chandeliers grow dim, and the fair forms flitting beneath lose half their brilliant beauty. My thoughts go back to the flowery land—to the lake—to the island—to Maümee. ”

“ My friend had the story of course from Madame Clairin."
Longmore was strongly moved, and his first impulse after he had recovered his composure was to return immediately to Europe. But several years have passed, and he still lingers at home. The truth is that, in the midst of all the ardent tenderness of his memory of Madame de Mauves, he has become conscious of a singular feeling--a feeling of wonder, of uncertainty, of awe. ”

“ But ah! to poor Mamie the whole world seemed so heartless, so cruel!
On, on, till she could no longer distinguish any thing more than the long line of hotels on the shore; the beach glistening on the one hand, the bare, stern rocks upon the other.
What was to become of them, herself and Lulu? Would they toss gently about in this way till they died of hunger, or would great [176] fishes come and eat them up? Or would some terrible storm arise, and the waves, now so gentle and playful, grow high and fierce, as she had seen them the other day, and swallow up their frail boat? ”

“ I was just wishing Maggie was here to give me a proverb to make a proverb-picture out of. Lily, do you know of one about a breakwater?"
"No," answered Lily, giving a violent tug to the stone which refused to be dislodged from its position,—"oh! you obstinate old thing, come out,—no, I don't, Belle. But why do you want one about a breakwater?"
"'Cause I think Mamie feels very naughty to her mamma about it," answered Belle. "She keeps saying how mean it is in her not to say she can go, and calls her foolish and stupid; and she says she will coax her papa to take her. ”

“ Madame Clairin rustled in, rubbing her white hands, Madame de Mauves passed silently into the dining-room, but he remained outside--outside of more things, clearly, than his mere salle-a-manger. Before long he went forth to the terrace and continued his uneasy walk. At the end of a quarter of an hour the servant came to let him know that his carriage was at the door. "Send it away," he said without hesitation. ”

“ Euphemia, as he lay on his sofa, struck him as by no means contradictory; she simply reminded him that very young women are generally innocent and that this is on the whole the most potent source of their attraction. Her innocence moved him to perfect consideration, and it seemed to him that if he shortly became her husband it would be exposed to a danger the less. Old Madame de Mauves, who flattered herself that in this whole matter she was very laudably rigid, might almost have taken a lesson from the delicacy he practised. ”

“ Belle, when that old black man gets to heaven, won't he make a queer, awfully ugly old angel?"
"He won't be black then," said Belle; "at least, I b'lieve he won't. But he's very good if he is so ugly; papa says so."
"How will he get white, I wonder?" queried Lily; "he's so awfully black; and such a mouth!"
Mamie was glad that the solving of this knotty question diverted the thoughts of her two little playmates from the subject of conscience and the all-seeing Eye of God. ”

“ You know it didn't look much like it this morning when you spoke so to your mother; but are you, really now?"
"Yes, I am," answered Mamie; "and I've [67] taken a watchword to help me, out of the Bible."
"That is a good plan," said Lily approvingly. "What is it?"
"The eyes of the Lord are in every place," repeated Mamie; "and this morning when I was mad because mamma wouldn't let me go to the breakwater, I just thought the eye of the Lord saw me then, and that stopped me. But I think mamma might have let me go, don't you?" ”

“ It is true that a perpetual smile was the most natural expression of countenance for a man about to marry Euphemia Cleve.
III
Longmore’s first visit seemed to open to him so large a range of quiet pleasure that he very soon paid a second, and at the end of a fortnight had spent uncounted hours in the little drawing-room which Madame de Mauves rarely quitted except to drive or walk in the forest. She lived in an old-fashioned pavilion, between a high-walled court and an excessively artificial garden, beyond whose enclosure you saw a long line of tree-tops. ”

“ Lulu, awed by this strange, new grief of her sister's into stillness likewise.
But the baby tired at last. She wanted home and mamma, or, at least, her nurse. The boat and the water had been all very wonderful at first, and had perhaps lent their charm to keep her quiet; but she was wearied of them now. She fretted a little; then, finding this failed to draw Mamie's attention, she spoke.
"Lulu want mamma. Lulu want no more water," she said plaintively.
"O darling! what shall I do? What will become of us?" answered Mamie, roused by her words from the sort of stupor into which she had fallen. ”

“ The sight of the faded beauty brought home to Mavis the vanity of earthly love, till she reflected that, had the one-time desire of her father's heart been gratified, the sorrow they would have shared in common would ever endear her to his heart, and keep her the fairest woman the earth possessed, for all the defacement time might make in her appearance. ”

“ But Mae was not in that mood to-night. She leaned out of the window all untroubled. If the sun could stand still off behind the world—as he is now—and the moon could stand still right before us—as she is now—and we could stay right here, we three. Why, no, Eric has gone in and is walking up and down nervously. Thus Mae thought, and was quiet. “What are you thinking about?” asked Norman. She told him naturally, with her eyes on his until she reached the words “and we.” Then her eyes fell, and she paused. ”

“ It seemed to our own young woman that these attributes made her friend more at home in the world than if she had been the daughter of even the most prosperous grocer. A certain aristocratic impudence Mademoiselle de Mauves abundantly possessed, and her raids among her friend’s finery were quite in the spirit of her baronial ancestors in the twelfth century—a spirit regarded by Euphemia but as a large way of understanding friendship, a freedom from conformities without style, and one that would sooner or later express itself in acts of surprising magnanimity. ”