'Precisely: so we came to no decision. We have all too much of the terrible modern tendency to hesitation and melancholy. I do not know why; unless it come from the conviction of all of us that love is always melancholy when it is not absurd.'
'What a cruel sentiment!'
'A perfectly true assertion. The only loves respectable in tradition are those which have ended wretchedly. Suppose Romeo had been happy; or Stradella; what do you think the poets could have made of them? Love must end somehow: if it end in tragedy its dignity is saved like Cæsar's.'
'But why need it end? You, at least, have seen that through all disappointments it can endure,' murmured he who had cited the love of d'Aubiac for Marguerite.
She looked at him and shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.
'Love is, so unhappily, like a comet. It mounts to its perihelion, increasing in splendour as it goes, and then slowly, little by little, the glory departs, the sovereign of the skies grows less and less, until at last there is no more sign of it anywhere, and all is darkness. But the comet is not really gone; it has only gone—elsewhere.'
Her slight delicate laugh robbed the speech of the melancholy which it would otherwise have possessed.
'My wife believes in no constancy,' said Othmar.
She looked at him with her mysterious smile:
'I believe in Romeo's, I believe in Stradella's, because the kindness of death saved them from the ridicule of forswearing themselves. What a pity you did not come home a little sooner. You would have been an invaluable ally to the sentimentalists headed by Béthune. He was eloquent, but his cause was weak.'
'My cause was strong,' said the Duc de Béthune; 'it was my tongue which lacked persuasiveness.'
'No, you were very poetical; you were only not convincing. My dear friend, we are too scientific in these days for sentiment to have any abiding place in us; we are pessimists, it is true, but we mourn for ourselves, not for others. We are neither gay enough nor sad enough to do justice to such discussions as this which we have tried to revive; we are only bored. We do not take our fooling joyously or our sorrows deeply. We are uneasily conscious that we are childish and unreal in both. Then there is the incurable modern tendency to end everything with a laugh en gouailleur, yet with tears in our eyes. We are always ridiculing ourselves, yet we are always vexed that, ridiculous as we are, we must still die.'
'At the present moment we must still eat,' said Othmar, as the boom of a silver-toned gong came over the gardens in deep waves of sound.
It was nine o'clock, and that repast which had been used to be called in the Valois Amyôt arrière-grand-souper, and was now called 'dinner,' awaited them.
There were some twenty-five guests then staying there; she did not approve of immense house parties, and she restricted her house list to the very choicest of her favourites and associates; she always asked double the number of men to that of women, but she was proportionately careful that the latter should be those whom men most liked and admired; she was wholly above the petty envies and jealousies of her sex. Her vanity rather consisted in having it said that she feared no rivals.
As the deep boom of the gong sounded from the house, she and her guests passed onward, and in their Valois dresses were soon seated in the summer banqueting-room: a modern addition to the château, an open loggia in the Italian style, with marble floor and marble columns, one side open to the air, the other sides rich in white marble bas-reliefs by French sculptors; the ceiling had been painted by Puvis de Chavannes with the story of Europa. In each corner there were tall palms in large square cases of white porcelain; the white columns were garlanded by passion-flowers, which grew without; at either end there was a fountain, their basins filled with gold fish and water-lilies; through the columns the whole enchanting view of the west gardens was seen stretching far away to where the Loire waters spread wide as a lake and mirroring the newly-risen moon.
'I had it built,' she said, in answer to some one who complimented her upon it. 'There is a great dining-hall and a small dining-room indoors, but neither are fitted for summer evenings. It is a barbarism to be shut up within four walls just as the moon rises and the nightingales sing. The matter of food is always a distressingly coarse question; nothing can really spiritualise or redeem it, but at least it may be divested of some of its brute aspects. A delicate cuisine does that for us in some measure, and the scene we have around us may do more. The London and Paris habit of sitting in mere boxes, more or less well decorated, is horrible. Perfect ease, vast space, and soft shadowy distances are absolutely necessary to preserve illusions as we dine.'
And to that end she had caused to be built the loggia of Amyôt, with as much celerity and breathless obedience to her commands as the architects of the East showed a sultan of Bagdad or Benares when he bade a palace of marble uprise from the sand. Her fine taste would not have allowed her to hurt the architecture of Amyôt with any incongruity, however much her caprices might have desired it; but the marble loggia accorded in exterior with the Renaissance outline of the château, and the tone of Primaticcio and the epoch of Jean Goujon had been faithfully followed in its internal decoration.
'What a perfect place it is!' said one of her guests to her after dinner.
She smiled.
'In August, yes. When the terraces are hung with ice, and the forests black with winter storm, it is not so perfect. All places have their season, like all lives.'
'There are some places, like some lives, which can never lose their beauty.'
'Do you think so? I have never found them. When one knows every leaf, every stone, every fence, the beauty of the place fades for us as it does when one knows every impulse, every prejudice, every fault, and every virtue of the life.'
'A melancholy truth—if it be a truth. Perhaps it is only half a one. There are people who love their homes.'
'There are prisoners who have loved their cells! Amyôt is delightful in many ways, but I have no more sense of home in it than a swallow has in the eaves it builds under for one summer. You must go to the vinedresser's wife in the cliff cabin on the river for that.'
'Then the vinedresser's wife has a jewel which the great châtelaine's crown is without?'
'A jewel? Are you sure it is a jewel? I think there is much to be said in favour of the restlessness of our world, it saves us from rust and reflection; it makes us unprejudiced and cosmopolitan; it annihilates nationalities and antipathies. I imagine, if Horace had lived now, he would never have been still; he would have seen the farm in its pleasantest season, and that only. He would have carried with him the undying lamp of his enchanting temperament, and he would have been happy anywhere.'
'But is it really incomprehensible to you, the love of home?'
'I think so. I have lived in too many places. We are a few months here, a few months in Paris, a few weeks in the Riviera, a few weeks in Russia, or Vienna, or London. It is impossible to carry about the sense of home peripatetically with you as the snail carries his shell. The sparrow feels it, the swallow does not. I have always had a number of houses in which I spend a number of months, of weeks, of days. I like each of them to be perfect in its own way, and I like each to have copies of my favourite books in it: the sight of Goethe, of Molière, of Horace makes one feel chez soi. That is as near "home" as I approach. I imagine all happiness is much more a matter of temperament than of place or of circumstance.'
'I do not believe you are happy even now!'
It was a personal speech, and too bold a one to be justified even by intimate and privileged friendship. But she was moved to it by that ever ready and pitiless self-analysis which made her as severe a critic of herself as of others.
'Happy? Oh, I must be,' she said with a smile. 'Who on earth should be happy if I am not? I have all the vulgar attributes of happiness in profusion and all the more delicate ones too. If I am not so, it can only be because my temperament is the very opposite of a porte-bonheur like Horace's. I have always expected too much of everything and of everybody, and yet I am not at all