And, look here, Delaven, just get me out of that engagement to look at Dumaresque’s new picture, won’t you? It really is not worth while for an American to come abroad for the study of pictured octoroons–we have too many of the originals at home.”
CHAPTER II
Whatever the dowager’s eccentricities or heresies, she was not afraid of the sunlight, figuratively or literally. From floor to ceiling three great windows let in softened rays on the paneled walls, on the fluted columns of white and gold, and on the famous frescoes of the First Empire. She had no feeling for petite apartments such as appeal to many women; there must, for her, be height and space and long vistas.
“I like perspective to every picture,” she said. “I enjoy the groupings of my friends in my own rooms more than elsewhere. From my couch I have the best point of view, and the raised dais flatters me with its suggestion of a throne of state.”
She looked so tiny for a chair of state; and with her usual quaint humor she recognized the fact.
“But my temperament brings me an affinity with things that are great for all that,” she would affirm. “One does not need to be a physical Colossus in order to see the stars.”
The morning after her first reception she was smiling rather sardonically at a picture at the far end of the great salon–that of a very handsome young woman who laughed frankly at the man who leaned towards her and spoke. The man was Dumaresque.
“No use in that, Loris,” commented his god-mother, out of his hearing. “It will do an artist no harm, but it will end nowhere.”
Their attitude and their youth did make them appear sentimental; but they were not really so. He was only telling her what a shock she had been to those Parisians the day before.
“I understand, now, the regard of Madame Choudey and her pretty, prim niece, Sidonie. They will never forgive me.”
“You, Madame!”
“Me, Monsieur. Their fondness will preclude resentment towards you, but against myself they will feel a grievance that I am not as they pictured me. Come; you must tell Maman.”
The dowager nodded as one who understood it all.
“They will not forget you, that is sure,” she said, smiling; but the girl–for she was only a girl, despite the Madame–shrugged her shoulders.
“Myself, I care little for their remembrance,” she replied, indifferently; “they were only curious, not interested, I could see.”
“You put my picture in the shadow at all events,” protested Dumaresque, pointing to a large canvas hung opposite; “my picture over which art lovers raved until you appeared as a rival.”
“How extravagant you are, Monsieur Dumaresque, a true Gascon! To think of rivaling that!”
As she faced the canvas the dowager watched her critically, and nodded her approval to Dumaresque, who smiled and acquiesced. Evidently they were both well satisfied with the living picture of the salon.
The new Marquise de Caron had lived, probably, twenty years. She was of medium height, with straight, dark brows, and dark, long-lashed eyes. The eyes had none of the shyness that was deemed a necessity to beauty in that era of balloon skirts and scuttle bonnets under which beauty of the conventional order hid.
But that she was not conventional was shown by the turban of grey resting on her waved, dark hair, while the veil falling from it and mingling with the folds of her dress, suggested the very artistic draperies of the nuns.
Not a particle of color was in her apparel, and but little in her face; only the lips had that thread of scarlet sung of by Solomon, and the corners of them curved upwards a trifle as she surveyed the canvas.
The turban was loosened and held in her hands as she stood there looking. The picture evidently attracted her, though it did not please. At last she turned to the artist.
“Why do you paint pictures like that?”
“Like that? Pouf! You mean beautiful?”
“No, it is not beautiful,” she said, thoughtfully, as she seated herself on the dais by the dowager’s couch. “To be truly beautiful a thing must impress one with a sense of fitness to our highest perceptive faculties. A soulless thing is never beautiful.”
“What then, of dogs, horses, lions, the many art works in metal or on canvas?”
“You must not raise that wall against her words, Loris, unless you wish to quarrel,” said the dowager in friendly warning. “Judithe is pantheist enough to fancy that animals have souls.”
“But the true artist does not seek to portray the lowest expression of that soul,” persisted Dumaresque’s critic. “Across the Atlantic there are thousands who contend that a woman such as this Kora whom you paint, has no soul because of the black blood in her veins. They think of the dark people as we think of apes. It is all a question of longitude, Monsieur Dumaresque. The crudeness of America is the jest of France. The wisdom of France is the lightest folly of the Brahims; and so it goes ever around the world. The soul of that girl will weigh as heavily as ours in the judgment that is final; but, in the meantime, why teach it and others to admire all that allurement of evil showing in her eyes as she looks at you?”
“Judithe!” protested the dowager.
“Oh!–I do not doubt in the least, Maman, that the woman Kora looked just so when she sat for the picture,” conceded the girl; “but why not endeavor to awaken a higher, stronger expression, and paint that, showing the better possibilities within her than mere seductiveness?”
“What fervor and what folly, Marquise!” cried Dumaresque. “It is a speech of folly only because it is I whom you ask to be the missionary, and because it is the pretty Kora you would ask me to convert–and to what? Am I so perfect in all ways that I dare preach, even with paint and brush? Heavens! I should have all Paris laughing at me.”
“But Judithe would not have you that sort of extremist,” said the dowager, laughing at the dismay in his face. “She knows you do well; only she fears you do not exert yourself enough to perceive how you might do better.”
“She forgets; I did once; only a few weeks ago,” he said briefly; and the girl dropped her hands wearily and leaned her head against the dowager’s couch.
“Maman, our good friend is going to talk matrimony again,” she said plaintively; “and if he does, I warn you, though it is only mid-day, I shall go asleep;” and her eyes closed tightly as though to make the threat more effective.
“You see,” said the old lady, raising one chiding finger, “it is really lamentable, Loris, that your sentimental tendencies have grown into a steady habit.”
“I agree,” he assented; “but consider. She assails me–she, a saintly little judge in grey! She lectures, preaches at me! Tells me I lack virtue! But more is the pity for me; she will not remember that one virtue was most attractive to me, and she bade me abandon it.”
“Tell him,” said the girl with her eyes still closed, “to not miscall things; no one is all virtue.”
“Pardon; that is what you seemed to me, and I never before fancied that the admirable virtues would find me so responsive, when, pouf! with one word you demolished all my castle of delight and now condemn me that I am an
