CHAPTER XVIII
A DISAPPOINTMENT
By Friday, Madeleine was in a fever of nervousness. In the space of twenty-four hours, she would know God’s policy with regard to herself. Oh! could He not be made to realise that to deprive her of just this one thing she craved for would be a fatal mistake? Until she was sure of the love of Mademoiselle de Scudéry she had no energy or emotion to spare for other things. She reverted to her old litany:—‘Blessed Virgin, Mother of our Lord, give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry,’ and so on, which she repeated dozens of times on end.
This time to-morrow it would have happened; she would know about it all. Oh, how could she escape from remembering this, and the impossibility of fitting a dream into time? Any agony would be better than this sitting gazing at the motionless curtain of twenty-four hours that lay between herself and her fate. Oh, for the old days at Lyons! Then, she had had the whole of Eternity in which to hope; now, she had only twenty-four hours, for in their hard little hands lay the whole of time; before and after lay Eternity.
Madame Troguin had looked in in the morning and chattered of the extravagance of the Précieuses of her quarter. One young lady, for instance, imagined herself madly enamoured of Céladon of the Astrée, and had been found in the attire of a shepherdess sitting by the Seine, and weeping bitterly.
‘I am glad that our girls have some sense, are not you?’ she had said to Madame Troqueville, who had replied with vehement loyalty to Madeleine, that she was indeed. ‘They say that Mademoiselle de Scudéry—the writer of romances—is the fount of all these visions. She has no fortune whatever, I believe, albeit her influence is enormous both at the Court and in the Town.’
Any reference to Sappho’s eminence had a way of setting Madeleine’s longing madly ablaze. This remark rolled over and over in her mind, and it burnt more furiously every minute. She rushed to her room and groaned with longing, then fell on her knees and prayed piteously, passionately:—
‘Give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Give it me, dear Christ, take everything else, but give me that.’ And indeed this longing had swallowed up all the others from which it had grown—desire for a famous ruelle, for a reputation for esprit, for the entrée to the fashionable world. She found herself (in imagination) drawing a picture to Sappho of the Indian Islands and begging her to fly there with her.
At last Saturday came, and with it, at about ten in the morning, a valet carrying a letter addressed to Madeleine in a small, meticulous writing. It ran thus:—
‘MADEMOISELLE,—A malady so tedious and unpoetical, that had it not been given the entrée to the society of les mots honnêtes by being mentioned by several Latin poets, and having by its intrinsic nature a certain claim to royalty, for it shares with the Queen the power of granting “Le Tabouret”; a malady, I say, which were it not for these saving graces I would never dare to mention to one who like yourself embodies its two most powerful enemies—Youth and Beauty—has taken me prisoner. Mademoiselle’s quick wit has already, doubtless, solved my little enigma and told herself with a tear, I trust, rather than a dimple, that the malady which has so cruelly engaged me to my chair is called—and it must indeed have been a stoic that thus named it!—La Goutte! Rarely has this unwelcome guest timed his visit with a more tantalising inopportuneness, or has shown himself more ungallant than to-day when he keeps a poor poet from the inspiration of beauty and beauty from its true mate, wit. But over one circumstance at least it bears no sway: that circumstance is that I remain, Mademoiselle, Your sincere and humble servitor,
‘CONRART.’
In all this fustian Madeleine’s ‘quick wit’ did not miss the fact that lay buried in it, hard and sharp, that she was not to be taken to Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s that afternoon. She laughed. It had so palpably been all along the only possible climax. Of course. This moment had always been part of her sum of experience. All her life, her prayers, and placations had been but the remedies of a man with a mortal disease. As often in moments of intense suffering, she was struck by the strangeness of being contained by the four walls of a room, queer things were behind these walls, she felt, if she could only penetrate them.
Berthe ambled in under pretext of fetching something, looking espiègle and inquisitive.
‘Good news, Mademoiselle?’ she asked. But Madeleine growled at her like an angry animal, and with lips stretched from her teeth, driving her nails into her palms, she tore into her own room.
Once there, she burst into a passion of tears, banging her head against the wall and muttering, ‘I hate God, I hate God!’ So He considered, did He, that ‘no one could resist the workings of the inward Grace’? Pish for the arrogant theory; she would disprove it, once and for all. Jacques was right. He was a wicked and a cruel God. All the Jansenist casuistry was incapable of saving Him from the diabolic injustice involved in the First Proposition:—
‘Some of God’s Commandments it is impossible for the just to fulfil.’
In plain words, the back is not made for the burden. Oh, the cold-blooded torturer! And the Jansenists with their intransigeant consistency, their contempt of compromise, were worthy of their terrible Master.
So, forsooth, He imagined that by plucking, feather by feather, the wings of her hopes, He could win her, naked and bleeding, to Him and His service? She would prove Him wrong, she would rescind His decrees and resolve the chain of predestination. No, her soul would never be ‘tamed with frets and weariness,’ she would never ‘pursue, nor offer gifts,’ and, willy-nilly, she would never love, from the design on His cubes of wood no print of her life would be taken.
And then the sting of the disappointment pricked her afresh, and again she burst into a passion of tears.
Pausing for breath, she caught sight of the Crucifix above her bed. A feeling of actual physical loathing seized her for her simpering Saviour, with His priggish apophthegms and His horrid Cross to which He took such a delight in nailing other people. She tore down the Crucifix, and made her fingers ache in her attempt to break it. And then, with an ingenuity which in ordinary circumstances she never applied to practical details, she broke it in the door.
A smothered laugh disclosed Berthe crouching by the wall, her face more than usually suggestive of a comic mask. Madeleine was seized by a momentary fear lest she should prove a spy of the sinister ‘Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement’—that pack of spiritual bloodhounds that ran all heretics relentlessly to earth—and she remembered with a shudder the fate of Claude Petit and le Sieur d’Aubreville. But after all, nothing could hurt her now, so she flung the broken fragments in her face and ‘tutoied’ her back to the kitchen.
She went and looked at her face in the glass. Her eyes were tired and swollen and heavy, and she noted with pleasure the tragic look in them. Then a sense of the catastrophe broke over her again in all its previous force and she flung herself upon her bed and once more sobbed and sobbed.
Madame Troqueville, when she came in laden with fish and vegetables from the Halles, was told by Berthe with mysterious winks that she had better go to Mademoiselle Madeleine. She was not in the least offended by Madeleine’s unwonted treatment of her, and too profoundly cynical to be shocked by her sacrilege or impressed by her misery. With a chuckle for youth’s intenseness she had shuffled silently back to her work.
Madame Troqueville flew to Madeleine. Her entry was Madeleine’s cue for a fresh outburst. She would not be cheated of her due of crying and pity; she owed herself many, many more tears.
Madame Troqueville took her in her arms in an agony of anxiety. At first Madeleine kicked and screamed, irritated at the possibility of her mother trying to alleviate the facts. Then she yielded to the comfort of her presence and sobbed out that Conrart could not take her to Mademoiselle de Scudéry.
How gladly would Madame Troqueville have accepted this explanation at its face value! A disappointment about a party was such a poignant sorrow in youth and one to which all young people were subject. But although she welcomed hungrily any sign of normality in her child, deep down she knew that this grief was not normal.
‘But, my angel,’ she began gently, ‘Monsieur Conrart will take you some other time.’
‘But I can’t wait!’ Madeleine screamed angrily; ‘all my hopes are utterly miscarried.’
Madame Troqueville smiled, and stroked her hair.
‘’Tis foolish to rouse one’s spleen, and waste one’s strength over trifles, for ’twill not make nor mend them, and it works sadly on your health.’
Madeleine had been waiting for this. She ground her teeth and gave a series of short, sharp screams of tearless rage.
‘For my sake, my angel, for my sake, forbear!’ implored her mother.
‘I shall scream and scream all my life,’ she hissed. ‘’Tis my concern and no one else’s. Ba-ah, ou-ow,’ and it ended off in a series of shrill, nervous, persistent ‘ee’s.’
Madame Troqueville sighed wearily, and sat silent for some minutes.
There was a lull in the sobbing, and then Madame Troqueville began, very gently, ‘Dear, dear child, if you could but learn the great art of indifference. I know that....’
But Madeleine interrupted with a shrill scream of despair.
‘Hush, dear one, hush! Oh, my pretty one, if I could but make life for you, but ’tis not in my power. All I can do is to love you. But if only you would believe me ... hush! my sweet, let me say my say ... if only you would believe me, to cultivate indifference is the one means of handselling life.’
‘But I can’t!’
‘Try, my dearest heart, try. My dear, I have but little to give you in any way, for I cannot help you with religion, in that—you may think this strange, and it may be wicked—I have always had but little faith in these matters; and I am not wise nor learned, so I cannot help you with the balm of Philosophy, which they say is most powerful to heal, but one thing I have learned and that is to be supremely indifferent—in most matters. Oh, dear treasure....’
‘But I want, I want, I want things!’ cried Madeleine.
Madame Troqueville smiled sadly, and for some moments sat in silence, stroking Madeleine’s hair, then she began tentatively,—
‘At times I feel ... that “petite-oie,” as you called it, frightened me, my sweet. It caused me to wonder if you were not apt to throw away matters of moment for foolish trifles. Do you remember how you pleased old Madame Pilou by telling her that she was not like the dog in the fable, that lost its bone by trying to get its reflection, well....’
‘I said it because I thought it would please her, one must needs talk in a homely, rustic fashion to such people. Oh, let me be! let me be!’ To have her own words used against her was more than she could bear; besides, her mother had suggested, by the way she had spoken, that there was more behind this storm than mere childish disappointment at the postponement of a party, and Madeleine shrank from her obsession being known. I think she feared that it was, perhaps, rather ridiculous.
Madame Troqueville gazed at her anxiously for some minutes, and then said,—
‘I wonder if Sirop de Roses is a strong enough purge for you. Perhaps you need another course of steel in wine; and I have heard this new remedy they call “Orviétan” is an excellent infusion, I saw some in the rue Dauphine at the Sign of the Sun. I will send Berthe at once to get you some.’