The Custom of the Country (45 page)

‘My cousin’s extremely amusing, of course, but utterly mad and very
mal entourée
. Most of the people she has about her ought to be in prison or Bedlam: especially that unspeakable Madame Adelschein, who’s a candidate for both. My aunt’s an angel, but she’s been weak enough to let Lili turn the Hôtel de Dordogne into an annex of Montmartre. Of course you’ll have to show yourself there now and then: in these days families like ours must hold together. But go to the
réunions de famille
rather than to Lili’s intimate parties; go with me, or with my mother; don’t let yourself be seen there alone. You’re too young and good-looking to be mixed up with that crew. A woman’s classed – or rather unclassed – by being known as one of Lili’s set.’

Agreeable as it was to Undine that an appeal to her discretion should be based on the ground of her youth and good looks, she was dismayed to find herself cut off from the very circle she had meant them to establish her in. Before she had become Raymond’s wife there had been a moment of sharp tension in her relations with the Princess Estradina and
the old Duchess. They had done their best to prevent her marrying their cousin, and had gone so far as openly to accuse her of being the cause of a breach between themselves and his parents. But Ralph Marvell’s death had brought about a sudden change in her situation. She was now no longer a divorced woman struggling to obtain ecclesiastical sanction for her remarriage, but a widow whose conspicuous beauty and independent situation made her the object of lawful aspirations. The first person to seize on this distinction and make the most of it was her old enemy the Marquise de Trézac. The latter, who had been loudly charged by the house of Chelles with furthering her beautiful compatriot’s designs, had instantly seen a chance of vindicating herself by taking the widowed Mrs Marvell under her wing and favouring the attentions of other suitors. These were not lacking, and the expected result had followed. Raymond de Chelles, more than ever infatuated as attainment became less certain, had claimed a definite promise from Undine, and his family, discouraged by his persistent bachelorhood, and their failure to fix his attention on any of the amiable maidens obviously designed to continue the race, had ended by withdrawing their opposition and discovering in Mrs Marvell the moral and financial merits necessary to justify their change of front.

‘A good match? If she isn’t, I should like to know what the Chelles call one!’ Madame de Trézac went about indefatigably proclaiming. ‘Related to the best people in New York – well, by marriage, that is; and her husband left much more money than was expected. It goes to the boy, of course; but as the boy is with his mother she naturally enjoys the income. And her father’s a rich man – much richer than is generally known; I mean what
we
call rich in America, you understand!’

Madame de Trézac had lately discovered that the proper attitude for the American married abroad was that of a militant patriotism; and she flaunted Undine Marvell in the face of the Faubourg like a particularly showy specimen of
her national banner. The success of the experiment emboldened her to throw off the most sacred observances of her past. She took up Madame Adelschein, she entertained the James J. Rollivers, she resuscitated Creole dishes, she patronized negro melodists, she abandoned her weekly teas for impromptu afternoon dances, and the prim drawing-room in which dowagers had droned echoed with a cosmopolitan hubbub.

Even when the period of tension was over, and Undine had been officially received into the family of her betrothed, Madame de Trézac did not at once surrender. She laughingly professed to have had enough of the proprieties, and declared herself bored by the social rites she had hitherto so piously performed. ‘You’ll always find a corner of home here, dearest, when you get tired of their ceremonies and solemnities,’ she said as she embraced the bride after the wedding breakfast; and Undine hoped that the devoted Nettie would in fact provide a refuge from the extreme domesticity of her new state. But since her return to Paris, and her taking up her domicile in the Hôtel de Chelles, she had found Madame de Trézac less and less disposed to abet her in any assertion of independence.

‘My dear, a woman must adopt her husband’s nationality whether she wants to or not. It’s the law, and it’s the custom besides. If you wanted to amuse yourself with your Nouveau Luxe friends you oughtn’t to have married Raymond – but of course I say that only in joke. As if any woman would have hesitated who’d had your chance! Take my advice – keep out of Lili’s set just at first. Later … well, perhaps Raymond won’t be so particular; but meanwhile you’d make a great mistake to go against his people –’ and Madame de Trézac, with a ‘
Chère Madame
,’ swept forward from her tea-table to receive the first of the returning dowagers.

It was about this time that Mrs Heeny arrived with Paul; and for a while Undine was pleasantly absorbed in her boy. She kept Mrs Heeny in Paris for a fortnight, and between her more pressing occupations it amused her to listen to the
masseuse’s New York gossip and her comments on the social organization of the old world. It was Mrs Heeny’s first visit to Europe, and she confessed to Undine that she had always wanted to ‘see something of the aristocracy’ – using the phrase as a naturalist might, with no hint of personal pretensions. Mrs Heeny’s democratic ease was combined with the strictest professional discretion, and it would never have occurred to her to regard herself, or to wish others to regard her, as anything but a manipulator of muscles; but in that character she felt herself entitled to admission to the highest circles.

‘They certainly do things with style over here – but it’s kinder one-horse after New York, ain’t it? Is this what they call their season? Why, you dined home two nights last week. They ought to come over to New York and see!’ And she poured into Undine’s half-envious ear a list of the entertainments which had illuminated the last weeks of the New York winter. ‘I suppose you’ll begin to give parties as soon as ever you get into a house of your own. You’re not going to have one? Oh, well, then you’ll give a lot of big weekends at your place down in the Shatter-country – that’s where the swells all go to in the summer time, ain’t it? But I dunno what your ma would say if she knew you were going to live on with
his
folks after you’re done honeymooning. Why, we read in the papers you were going to live in some grand hotel or other – oh, they call their houses
hotels
, do they? That’s funny: I suppose it’s because they let out part of ’em. Well, you look handsomer than ever, Undine; I’ll take that back to your mother, anyhow. And he’s dead in love, I can see that; reminds me of the way –’ but she broke off suddenly, as if something in Undine’s look had silenced her.

Even to herself, Undine did not like to call up the image of Ralph Marvell; and any mention of his name gave her a vague sense of distress. His death had released her, had given her what she wanted; yet she could honestly say to herself that she had not wanted him to die – at least not to die like that … People said at the time that it was the hot weather – his
own family had said so: he had never quite got over his attack of pneumonia, and the sudden rise of temperature – one of the fierce ‘heat-waves’ that devastate New York in summer – had probably affected his brain: the doctors said such cases were not uncommon … She had worn black for a few weeks – not quite mourning, but something decently regretful (the dress-makers were beginning to provide a special garb for such cases); and even since her remarriage, and the lapse of a year, she continued to wish that she could have got what she wanted without having had to pay that particular price for it.

This feeling was intensified by an incident – in itself far from unwelcome – which had occurred about three months after Ralph’s death. Her lawyers had written to say that the sum of a hundred thousand dollars had been paid over to Marvell’s estate by the Apex Consolidation Company; and as Marvell had left a will bequeathing everything he possessed to his son, this unexpected windfall handsomely increased Paul’s patrimony. Undine had never relinquished her claim on her child; she had merely, by the advice of her lawyers, waived the assertion of her right for a few months after Marvell’s death, with the express stipulation that her doing so was only a temporary concession to the feeling of her husband’s family; and she had held out against all attempts to induce her to surrender Paul permanently. Before her marriage she had somewhat conspicuously adopted her husband’s creed, and the Dagonets, picturing Paul as the prey of the Jesuits, had made the mistake of appealing to the courts for his custody. This had confirmed Undine’s resistance, and her determination to keep the child. The case had been decided in her favour, and she had thereupon demanded, and obtained, an allowance of five thousand dollars, to be devoted to the bringing up and education of her son. This sum, added to what Mr Spragg had agreed to give her, made up an income which had appreciably bettered her position, and justified Madame de Trézac’s discreet allusions to her wealth. Nevertheless, it was one of the facts about which she
least liked to think when any chance allusion evoked Ralph’s image. The money was hers, of course; she had a right to it, and she was an ardent believer in ‘rights’. But she wished she could have got it in some other way – she hated the thought of it as one more instance of the perverseness with which things she was entitled to always came to her as if they had been stolen.

The approach of summer, and the culmination of the Paris season, swept aside such thoughts. The Countess Raymond de Chelles, contrasting her situation with that of Mrs Undine Marvell, and the fullness and animation of her new life with the vacant dissatisfied days which had followed on her return from Dakota, forgot the smallness of her apartment, the inconvenient proximity of Paul and his nurse, the interminable round of visits with her mother-in-law, and the long dinners in the solemn
hôtels
of all the family connection. The world was radiant, the lights were lit, the music playing; she was still young, and better-looking than ever, with a Countess’s coronet, a famous château and a handsome and popular husband who adored her. And then suddenly the lights went out and the music stopped when one day Raymond, putting his arm about her, said in his tenderest tones: ‘And now, my dear, the world’s had you long enough and it’s my turn. What do you say to going down to Saint Désert?’

I
N A
window of the long gallery of the Château de Saint Désert the new Marquise de Chelles stood looking down the poplar avenue into the November rain. It had been raining heavily and persistently for a longer time than she could remember. Day after day the hills beyond the park had been curtained by motionless clouds, the gutters of the long steep roofs had gurgled with a perpetual overflow, the opaque surface of the moat been peppered by a continuous pelting of big drops. The water lay in glassy stretches under
the trees and along the sodden edges of the garden-paths, it rose in a white mist from the fields beyond, it exuded in a chill moisture from the brick flooring of the passages and from the walls of the rooms on the lower floor. Everything in the great empty house smelt of dampness: the stuffing of the chairs, the threadbare folds of the faded curtains, the splendid tapestries, that were fading too, on the walls of the room in which Undine stood, and the wide bands of crape which her husband had insisted on her keeping on her black dresses till the last hour of her mourning for the old Marquis.

The summer had been more than usually inclement, and since her first coming to the country Undine had lived through many periods of rainy weather; but none which had gone before had so completely epitomized, so summed up in one vast monotonous blur, the image of her long months at Saint Désert.

When, the year before, she had reluctantly suffered herself to be torn from the joys of Paris, she had been sustained by the belief that her exile would not be of long duration. Once Paris was out of sight, she had even found a certain lazy charm in the long warm days at Saint Désert. Her parents-in-law had remained in town, and she enjoyed being alone with her husband, exploring and appraising the treasures of the great half-abandoned house, and watching her boy scamper over the June meadows or trot about the gardens on the pony his stepfather had given him. Paul, after Mrs Heeny’s departure, had grown fretful and restive, and Undine had found it more and more difficult to fit his small exacting personality into her cramped rooms and crowded life. He irritated her by pining for his Aunt Laura, his Marvell granny, and old Mr Dagonet’s funny stories about gods and fairies; and his wistful allusions to his games with Clare’s children sounded like a lesson he might have been drilled in to make her feel how little he belonged to her. But once released from Paris, and blessed with rabbits, a pony and the freedom of the fields, he became again all that a charming child should be, and for a time it amused her to share in his
romps and rambles. Raymond seemed enchanted at the picture they made, and the quiet weeks of fresh air and outdoor activity gave her back a bloom that reflected itself in her tranquillized mood. She was the more resigned to this interlude because she was so sure of its not lasting. Before they left Paris a doctor had been found to say that Paul – who was certainly looking pale and pulled-down – was in urgent need of sea air, and Undine had nearly convinced her husband of the expediency of hiring a châlet at Deauville for July and August, when this plan, and with it every other prospect of escape, was dashed by the sudden death of the old Marquis.

Undine, at first, had supposed that the resulting change could not be other than favourable. She had been on too formal terms with her father-in-law – a remote and ceremonious old gentleman to whom her own personality was evidently an insoluble enigma – to feel more than the merest conventional pang at his death; and it was certainly ‘more fun’ to be a marchioness than a countess, and to know that one’s husband was the head of the house. Besides, now they would have the château to themselves – or at least the old Marquise, when she came, would be there as a guest and not a ruler – and visions of smart house-parties and big shoots lit up the first weeks of Undine’s enforced seclusion. Then, by degrees, the inexorable conditions of French mourning closed in on her. Immediately after the long-drawn funeral observances the bereaved family – mother, daughters, sons and sons-in-law – came down to seclude themselves at Saint Désert; and Undine, through the slow hot crape-smelling months, lived encircled by shrouded images of woe in which the only live points were the eyes constantly fixed on her least movements. The hope of escaping to the seaside with Paul vanished in the pained stare with which her mother-in-law received the suggestion. Undine learned the next day that it had cost the old Marquise a sleepless night, and might have had more distressing results had it not been explained as a harmless instance of transatlantic oddness. Raymond
entreated his wife to atone for her involuntary
légèreté
by submitting with a good grace to the usages of her adopted country; and he seemed to regard the remaining months of the summer as hardly long enough for this act of expiation. As Undine looked back on them, they appeared to have been composed of an interminable succession of identical days, in which attendance at early mass (in the coroneted gallery she had once so glowingly depicted to Van Degen) was followed by a great deal of conversational sitting about, a great deal of excellent eating, an occasional drive to the nearest town behind a pair of heavy draught-horses, and long evenings in a lamp-heated drawing-room with all the windows shut, and the stout curé making an asthmatic fourth at the Marquise’s card-table.