The Custom of the Country (49 page)

‘I know it’s a disappointment. But our expenses have been unusually heavy this year.’

‘It seems to me they always are. I don’t see why we should give up Paris because you’ve got to make repairs to a dam. Isn’t Hubert ever going to pay back that money?’

He looked at her with a mild surprise. ‘But surely you understood at the time that it won’t be possible till his wife inherits?’

‘Till General Arlington dies, you mean? He doesn’t look much older than you!’

‘You may remember that I showed you Hubert’s note. He has paid the interest quite regularly.’

‘That’s kind of him!’ She stood up, flaming with rebellion. ‘You can do as you please; but I mean to go to Paris.’

‘My mother is not going. I didn’t intend to open our apartment.’

‘I understand. But I shall open it – that’s all!’

He had risen too, and she saw his face whiten. ‘I prefer that you shouldn’t go without me.’

‘Then I shall go and stay at the Nouveau Luxe with my American friends.’

‘That never!’

‘Why not?’

‘I consider it unsuitable.’

‘Your considering it so doesn’t prove it.’

They stood facing each other, quivering with an equal anger; then he controlled himself and said in a more conciliatory tone:

‘You never seem to see that there are necessities –’

‘Oh, neither do you – that’s the trouble. You can’t keep me shut up here all my life, and interfere with everything I want to do, just by saying it’s unsuitable.’

‘I’ve never interfered with your spending your money as you please.’

It was her turn to stare, sincerely wondering. ‘Mercy, I should hope not, when you’ve always grudged me every penny of yours!’

‘You know it’s not because I grudge it. I would gladly take you to Paris if I had the money.’

‘You can always find the money to spend on this place. Why don’t you sell it if it’s so fearfully expensive?’

‘Sell it? Sell Saint Désert?’

The suggestion seemed to strike him as something monstrously, almost fiendishly significant: as if her random word had at last thrust into his hand the clue to their whole unhappy difference. Without understanding this, she guessed it from the change in his face: it was as if a deadly solvent had suddenly decomposed its familiar lines.

‘Well, why not?’ His horror spurred her on. ‘You might sell some of the things in it anyhow. In America we’re not ashamed to sell what we can’t afford to keep.’ Her eyes fell on the storied hangings at his back. ‘Why, there’s a fortune in this one room: you could get anything you chose for those tapestries. And you stand here and tell me you’re a pauper!’

His glance followed hers to the tapestries, and then returned to her face. ‘Ah, you don’t understand,’ he said.

‘I understand that you care for all this old stuff more than you do for me, and that you’d rather see me unhappy and miserable than touch one of your great-grandfather’s armchairs.’

The colour came slowly back to his face, but it hardened into lines she had never seen. He looked at her as though the place where she stood were empty. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said again.

T
HE INCIDENT
left Undine with the baffled feeling of not being able to count on any of her old weapons of aggression. In all her struggles for authority her sense of the rightfulness of her cause had been measured by her power of making people do as she pleased. Raymond’s firmness shook her faith in her own claims, and a blind desire to wound and destroy replaced her usual business-like intentness on gaining her end. But her ironies were as ineffectual as her arguments,
and his imperviousness was the more exasperating because she divined that some of the things she said would have hurt him if any one else had said them: it was the fact of their coming from her that made them innocuous. Even when, at the close of their talk, she had burst out: ‘If you grudge me everything I care about we’d better separate,’ he had merely answered with a shrug: ‘It’s one of the things we don’t do –’ and the answer had been like the slamming of an iron door in her face.

An interval of silent brooding had resulted in a reaction of rebellion. She dared not carry out her threat of joining her compatriots at the Nouveau Luxe: she had too clear a memory of the results of her former revolt. But neither could she submit to her present fate without attempting to make Raymond understand his selfish folly. She had failed to prove it by argument, but she had an inherited faith in the value of practical demonstration. If he could be made to see how easily he could give her what she wanted perhaps he might come round to her view.

With this idea in mind, she had gone up to Paris for twenty-four hours, on the pretext of finding a new nurse for Paul; and the steps then taken had enabled her, on the first occasion, to set her plan in motion. The occasion was furnished by Raymond’s next trip to Beaune. He went off early one morning, leaving word that he should not be back till night; and on the afternoon of the same day she stood at her usual post in the gallery, scanning the long perspective of the poplar avenue.

She had not stood there long before a black speck at the end of the avenue expanded into a motor that was presently throbbing at the entrance. Undine, at its approach, turned from the window, and as she moved down the gallery, her glance rested on the great tapestries, with their ineffable minglings of blue and rose, as complacently as though they had been mirrors reflecting her own image.

She was still looking at them when the door opened and a servant ushered in a small swarthy man who, in spite of his
conspicuously London-made clothes, had an odd exotic air, as if he had worn rings in his ears or left a bale of spices at the door.

He bowed to Undine, cast a rapid eye up and down the room, and then, with his back to the windows, stood intensely contemplating the wall that faced them.

Undine’s heart was beating excitedly. She knew the old Marquise was taking her afternoon nap in her room, yet each sound in the silent house seemed to be that of her heels on the stairs.

‘Ah –’ said the visitor.

He had begun to pace slowly down the gallery, keeping his face to the tapestries, like an actor playing to the footlights.

‘
Ah –
’ he said again. To ease the tension of her nerves Undine began: ‘They were given by Louis the Fifteenth to the Marquis de Chelles who –’

‘Their history has been published,’ the visitor briefly interposed; and she coloured at her blunder.

The swarthy stranger, fitting a pair of eye-glasses to a nose that was like an instrument of precision, had begun a closer and more detailed inspection of the tapestries. He seemed totally unmindful of her presence, and his air of lofty indifference was beginning to make her wish she had not sent for him. His manner in Paris had been so different!

Suddenly he turned and took off the glasses, which sprang back into a fold of his clothing like retracted feelers.

‘Yes.’ He stood and looked at her without seeing her. ‘Very well. I have brought down a gentleman.’

‘A gentleman –?’

‘The greatest American collector – he buys only the best. He will not be long in Paris, and it was his only chance of coming down.’

Undine drew herself up. ‘I don’t understand – I never said the tapestries were for sale.’

‘Precisely. But this gentleman buys only things that are not for sale.’

It sounded dazzling and she wavered. ‘I don’t know – you were only to put a price on them –’

‘Let me see him look at them first; then I’ll put a price on them,’ he chuckled; and without waiting for her answer he went to the door and opened it. The gesture revealed the fur-coated back of a gentleman who stood at the opposite end of the hall examining the bust of a seventeenth-century field-marshal.

The dealer addressed the back respectfully. ‘Mr Moffatt!’

Moffatt, who appeared to be interested in the bust, glanced over his shoulder without moving. ‘See here –’

His glance took in Undine, widened to astonishment and passed into apostrophe. ‘Well, if this ain’t the darnedest –!’ He came forward and took her by both hands. ‘Why, what on earth are you doing down here?’

She laughed and blushed, in a tremor at the odd turn of the adventure. ‘I live here. Didn’t you know?’

‘Not a word – never thought of asking the party’s name.’ He turned jovially to the bowing dealer. ‘Say – I told you those tapestries’d have to be out and outers to make up for the trip; but now I see I was mistaken.’

Undine looked at him curiously. His physical appearance was unchanged: he was as compact and ruddy as ever, with the same astute eyes under the same guileless brow; but his self-confidence had become less aggressive, and she had never seen him so gallantly at ease.

‘I didn’t know you’d become a great collector.’

‘The greatest! Didn’t he tell you so? I thought that was why I was allowed to come.’

She hesitated. ‘Of course, you know, the tapestries are not for sale –’

‘That so? I thought that was only his dodge to get me down. Well, I’m glad they ain’t: it’ll give us more time to talk.’

Watch in hand, the dealer intervened. ‘If, nevertheless, you would first take a glance. Our train –’

‘It ain’t mine!’ Moffatt interrupted; ‘at least not if there’s a later one.’

Undine’s presence of mind had returned. ‘Of course there is,’ she said gaily. She led the way back into the gallery, half-hoping the dealer would allege a pressing reason for departure. She was excited and amused at Moffatt’s unexpected appearance, but humiliated that he should suspect her of being in financial straits. She never wanted to see Moffatt except when she was happy and triumphant.

The dealer had followed the other two into the gallery, and there was a moment’s pause while they all stood silently before the tapestries. ‘By George!’ Moffatt finally brought out.

‘They’re historical, you know: the King gave them to Raymond’s great-great-grandfather. The other day when I was in Paris,’ Undine hurried on, ‘I asked Mr Fleischhauer to come down some time and tell us what they’re worth … and he seems to have misunderstood … to have thought we meant to sell them.’ She addressed herself more pointedly to the dealer. ‘I’m sorry you’ve had the trip for nothing.’

Mr Fleischhauer inclined himself eloquently. ‘It is not nothing to have seen such beauty.’

Moffatt gave him a humorous look. ‘I’d hate to see Mr Fleischhauer miss his train –’

‘I shall not miss it: I miss nothing,’ said Mr Fleischhauer. He bowed to Undine and backed toward the door.

‘See here,’ Moffatt called to him as he reached the threshold, ‘you let the motor take you to the station, and charge up this trip to me.’

When the door closed he turned to Undine with a laugh. ‘Well, this beats the band. I thought of course you were living up in Paris.’

Again she felt a twinge of embarrassment. ‘Oh, French people – I mean my husband’s kind – always spend a part of the year on their estates.’

‘But not this part, do they? Why, everything’s humming up there now. I was dining at the Nouveau Luxe last night with the Driscolls and Shallums and Mrs Rolliver, and all your old crowd were there whooping things up.’

The Driscolls and Shallums and Mrs Rolliver! How carelessly he reeled off their names! One could see from his tone that he was one of them and wanted her to know it. And nothing could have given her a completer sense of his achievement – of the number of millions he must be worth. It must have come about very recently, yet he was already at ease in his new honours – he had the metropolitan tone. While she examined him with these thoughts in her mind she was aware of his giving her as close a scrutiny. ‘But I suppose you’ve got your own crowd now,’ he continued; ‘you always
were
a lap ahead of me.’ He sent his glance down the lordly length of the room. ‘It’s sorter funny to see you in this kind of place; but you look it – you always
do
look it!’

She laughed. ‘So do you – I was just thinking it!’ Their eyes met. ‘I suppose you must be awfully rich.’

He laughed too, holding her eyes. ‘Oh, out of sight! The Consolidation set me on my feet. I own pretty near the whole of Apex. I came down to buy these tapestries for my private car.’

The familiar accent of hyperbole exhilarated her. ‘I don’t suppose I could stop you if you really wanted them!’

‘Nobody can stop me now if I want anything.’

They were looking at each other with challenge and complicity in their eyes. His voice, his look, all the loud confident vigorous things he embodied and expressed, set her blood beating with curiosity. ‘I didn’t know you and Rolliver were friends,’ she said.

‘Oh
Jim
–’ his accent verged on the protective. ‘Old Jim’s all right. He’s in Congress now. I’ve got to have somebody up in Washington.’ He had thrust his hands in his pockets, and with his head thrown back and his lips shaped to the familiar noiseless whistle, was looking slowly and discerningly about him.

Presently his eyes reverted to her face. ‘So this is what I helped you to get,’ he said. ‘I’ve always meant to run over some day and take a look. What is it they call you – a Marquise?’

She paled a little, and then flushed again. ‘What made you do it?’ she broke out abruptly. ‘I’ve often wondered.’

He laughed. ‘What – lend you a hand? Why, my business instinct, I suppose. I saw you were in a tight place that time I ran across you in Paris – and I hadn’t any grudge against you. Fact is, I’ve never had the time to nurse old scores, and if you neglect ’em they die off like goldfish.’ He was still composedly regarding her. ‘It’s funny to think of your having settled down to this kind of life; I hope you’ve got what you wanted. This is a great place you live in.’

‘Yes; but I see a little too much of it. We live here most of the year.’ She had meant to give him the illusion of success, but some underlying community of instinct drew the confession from her lips.

‘That so? Why on earth don’t you cut it and come up to Paris?’

‘Oh, Raymond’s absorbed in the estates – and we haven’t got the money. This place eats it all up.’

‘Well, that sounds aristocratic; but ain’t it rather out-of-date? When the swells are hard-up nowadays they generally chip off an heirloom.’ He wheeled round again to the tapestries. ‘There are a good many Paris seasons hanging right here on this wall.’