Chapter II: Part 2

By his eternal damnation he swore she should have her heart’s desire; by her rejected salvation she swore to abide by the covenant.

“_Consummatum est!_” he said, and was gone on the black blast.

The candles sent up a thin flare of flame and smoke, and went out in utter darkness. Crouched on the floor against the wall Margot still knelt in a stupor. A rat came out of a hole in the wall and gnawed at her rosary. Dawn came in at the windows; the twilit gray grew pink. The walls were blotched and spotted; everything exhaled an odor of mildew; Margot still huddled upon the floor beneath the crucifix; over her head the crucified Christ hung mute in His agony.

* * * * *

The flight of hours, the decline of day, the season’s turn, all things which preface change are presages of parting, and, like the proximity of the tomb, though wreathed in bloomy myrtle, are subtly fraught with sadness and regret. All love’s farewells are so oppressed. Though with absolute confidence in themselves and in each other, sure of the imperishable structure of their love, a nameless apprehension fills the hearts of all who part, and casts a melancholy shade on partings. “Until to-morrow!” Ah, to-morrow! “To-morrow I will come again!” she says. They go, with trembling hands, each, shaken by departure, saying, “Shall we meet again?”

“To-morrow!” Gabrielle had said, as she took her lips away. “To-morrow I will come again!” and was gone.

In the warm heart of the midsummer night he dreamed again among the hedges, a boy’s dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart’s delight. Her lips were pomegranate blossoms; her cheeks were wild peach flowers; it was a boy’s dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart’s delight! Her waist was as a willow-withe, her voice a bird in the deep wood calling; her feet danced fantasies in his heart. He came all in the daze of a boy’s dream, a dream of joy, a dream of heart’s desire. With every eager breath he drew in the hyacinthine fragrance of the night.

All day long, like a sullen army, a great cloud heaved and gloomed along the west, with wind-blown vapors streaming around its thunderous heights. All day long, in awe of it, men put off going here and there, gave over plans, and stood oppressed by its tremendous imminence. The day was darkened by the dominion of the cloud. At evening it rolled off across the plain, obliterating leagues of lesser storms, with fire stabbing at its breast, and distant bellowings of tremendous sound. Heaving slowly against the twilight stars, rolling in sullen majesty upon the gale, pale moonlight falling on its peaks, and the gray rain trailing down below, in its heart innumerable lightnings, thunder grumbling in its front, it left the drenched field to the moon. Beyond the edge of the world it hung, gloomily brooding upon the splendor of the night.

In the magic of the moonlight Lilac lane lay ghostly as a dream, hushed, alluring, unfamiliar. The strange, white light of the immense full moon lay dead on everything; the hedge-rows were hung with the shadows and darkness of strange delight; the cicada chittered in the almond tree; the great moths flapped heavily among the wet moon-flowers; a slow, scarcely perceptible wind blew, languid-sweet, hardly moving the heavy leaves of the magnolias; a gray bird pitched a wild song somewhere deep within a hedge.

In Margot’s garden everything was wrapped in night’s singular fantasy. In the pallor of the moonlight the garden lay like an enchanted realm of goblin loveliness. The lilies stood as pale and chill as flowers carved of marble; among the drowsy poppies hung garlands of nocturnal vine whose folded blooms in chaplets clustered colorless in the pallid moonshine. The whole place trembled in a pale, strange beauty which the silence made lovelier still. Like an island in a silvery mist Margot’s house stood blind asleep, its little windows curtained deep with shadows, dim, blue, and dark, and on the woodwork of the door, like petals of dismantled flowers, wax-wet, wind-blown, walked moths thrown there by the whining wind, slowly blowing across leagues of lonely marsh; and, among the moths, the glow-worms, faintly lighted and phosphor-green, crawled up and down, up and down, to nowhere: it looked like the door of the way to oblivion, so lonely it seemed and so still. The garden was utterly empty; the house yard was deserted.

He looked; he listened; and his heart stood still; save for the glow-worm and the moth there was nothing alive there but him. Like the chill which creeps across the matted grass of evening in the last fair days of autumn, full of the faded fragrance and haunted dusk of fall, a wordless dread stole over him. The moonlight gleamed on the cottage-wall with a singular, mournful splendor; a heavy wind began to stir the trees; immensely mournful, faint and far-away, there came a boom of thunder from beyond the rim of the world; joy all at once was gone from the midsummer night; the haunting strangeness crept into his heart. The place was full of the heavy fragrance of dead flowers. Here and there a palsied rose, its faded leaves relaxed, broke, and fell without a sound.

Under the fig-trees he paused a moment, undecided,--to listen, shivering a little, and peering along the wall. There was no sound of human life. Though the wind had set the great leaves stirring, all was ghostly as a dream. One white star above the roof-peak sailed among the broken clouds; the moon, desolate, splendid, hung in the magnolia, mournfully gleaming through the black boughs; in the still air the moonlight stood; the shadows lay like solid things upon the cottage wall.

At the corner of the house he paused and listened again. In the strange, unanswering silence a sense of disaster gripped him. There was no sound anywhere; his heart almost ceased beating.

With premonition of catastrophe he ran along the wall:--nothing, but windows, battened or curtained, blank as a blindman’s eyes; not a sign of humanity.

Where he had dreamed to stand speechless with happiness, he stood shaken by nameless fear.

Deep within the house he heard a relaxed beam “pung” with a sound like a viol string softly struck by a hand in passing: the deep, slow sound reverberated through the hollow house, and died away in vacant whispering.

Through the crevice of the shutter he saw the cold moonlight fall along the deserted floor. The house was absolutely empty.

* * * * *

There is a convent-school for orphaned girls kept by the nuns in New Orleans. The loveliest girl seen there in years was Gabrielle Lagoux, carried there between two nights, lest young love, like death, insist.

Dawn and departure. She had trembled like a leaf, half comprehending only; her mother kissed her twice, in feverish haste, with lips like dry leaves: that was their parting. Some one called “Gabrielle!” at the door. The coach was at the gate. She stopped at the wicket, looked down the lane, said a few words to the coachboy who guarded her gown from the wheels: “Tell him,” she said, “that I love him. Tell him remember me.” She paused again at the door of the coach, her foot on the step, a dazed look in her eyes, saying, “Tell him not to forget me. I love him!” The wheels rumbled over the cobbles. She never came back. When she entered the coach young love was done for forever: she never saw her golden lad again. Love beat his rose-red wings in vain; he could not overtake the coach; for the coach was fate; all was over; his dusty feet halted in the heat of the dusty road; “Good-by!... Good-by, forever!”

Days became weeks, weeks months, months grew into years; she never came again. She passed through the convent’s sheltering door, was safe from mischance and folly; passed into a world remote of unfamiliar faces, and forgot.

God made memory cruel, that men might know remorse; but the Devil devised forgetfulness, anodyne of regret.

Reputed heiress to vast estates, provided with boundless means and gifted with great beauty, coming to marriageable age in all the freshness of her youthful loveliness, she was wedded to a wealthy planter’s only son whose love for her was very great.

Pure happiness was theirs prolonged far beyond the honeymoon. Surrounded by every creature comfort wealth could procure or affection devise, secure in a faithful man’s unaltering love, she dwelt serene, in a country where the fruits of the earth and the flowers of the forest spread natural loveliness about fields of unsurpassed fertility.

She never knew winter, want, nor war; her years were filled with peace; her estates increased to vast proportions; a thousand slaves were happy, being hers. Admired for her beauty, greatly loved, she returned an adoring husband’s devotion, and bore him children with eyes like the morning and hair like wreathed flames. Her daughters married and were fruitful, bearing children fair as an April day, with eyes like the sky of the morning. For them, for her, the world rolled on in unperturbed peace.

But she never saw her golden lad again.

* * * * *

Something inscrutable, deeper than whim, had come over Margot Lagoux. Her work was oddly altered: it had more air, less ease; more spell, less charm; more force, and less dexterity. The stuffs she chose no longer were notable for the exquisite, wan delicacy which so becomes the pallor of high-bred beauty; she took an incomprehensible joy in vivid color; but what was gained in vividness was lost in harmony. Her work retained distinction, but of a queer sort; reserve gave way to novelty; simple beauty was replaced by meretricious charm; her taste, which had been perfect, seemed suffering gradual corruption; her craft was marred by crudities. Her turbans began to look as if there were only barbaric plumes in the world, of parrakeets and cockatoos, trogons and flamingos, gay toucan wings, and extraordinary quills; florid colors and distempered stains were mingled in inharmonious contrast; mango-yellow, peacock-green, Egyptian blue, and Congo scarlet, flaunted their discordant tones together.

Style she had; but it was style _malade du rouvieux_; her trade-mark had become gaucherie, her art artifice; good taste had departed. Her work no more was garnished, but bedizened with excess, nowhere restrained, but having unrestricted vent in tawdry fripperies. Her handicraft was stamped by power and energy misapplied; the sole distinction it had left was whimsical device. Everything she did was like sweet wine soured, the worse for having been so much better. Her bonnets were like songs in forced falsetto, every line slurred by subtle default, every sweet note out; always too much or too little, never the happy mean. Even the pearls or marguerites, which she had formerly employed in bordures as trade-marks of her craft, had become cheap beads of colored pottery and glass. In tarnished bowls, in corners of obscure pawnshop windows, among the dead flies and the dust, are still occasionally to be found beads, often called “margots” or “margotons,” like those employed by Margot Lagoux in her practice of millinery, but said to be thread-plummets employed by makers of lace. One, a Greek dealer in old gold and stolen silver, tells the enquiring traveler that these are Dead Sea pebbles, worn to their peculiar shapes by the ceaseless fret of that gloomy sea. But beads like them, grotesques, baroques, were laced on toques and turbans of her make, and now and then were found among the laces on bonnets which had no need of them: men, seeing them, narrowed their glances, and took new note of the wearer. Those aware permitted none near or dear to adorn her person with them.

A queerly degenerated taste marked everything that Margot did. With singular obliquity she set everything awry; from rich goods produced unspeakably poor results; and with cheap cunning vexed priceless stuffs beyond recovery or repair.

Her custom fell from _vendre cher_ to _bon marché_. With the diminishing stream of patronage the material in her shop went down from _velours ras, velours façonné_, and _velours de soie_, to _velours de coton_ and _coton croisé_, from velvet to velveteens. The air of distinction which attracted gentility utterly faded away; the coarse, crude stuffs and rude handiwork repelled the aristocratic. Calls for her work became infrequent; more infrequent; came no more. One morning the milliner’s shop was shut. It never was opened again. The stuffs on the dusty shelves grew faded, discolored, and stained; cobwebs hung from the mouldy walls; the trade which had known and frequented the place knew it no more.

* * * * *

But out of this end, like a paradox, above the apparent wreck Margot arose in prosperity: the Devil was good as his word.

She dwelt in a massive great house, a mansion, handsome, stately, and somber, by a courtyard paved in marble, approached through a vaulted tunnel lit by a dull-flaming torch and closed by an iron gate. From the side of the court a staircase of marble rose to her private door, ornate as a public office’s entry and massively carved in flowers; stairs within, of blue-veined marble, went up through wide corridors heavily panelled in dark Spanish wood. Beneath the house vast cellars boomed and echoed; the chimneys rose like turrets grouped against the darkling sky. The house throughout was furnished with every luxury befitting persons of circumstance: broad hearths for the burning of long wood in winter, vaulted corridors, burnished fittings of latten, and jalousies of saffron-wood with retaining rosettes of porcelain; mahogany tables of rare design, deep-carved, and adorned with brass. Curtains of saffron-colored silk cinctured with gold braid hung from the ceiling to the floor in heavy golden folds. Day was made night, night day by many subterfuges, with blinds and saffron jalousies ironed fast against the noon. By night the light shone out to the red stars, and the house was full of the swift, rich sweeping of heavy silk curtains waved by the wind, and the glow of the wax candles chequered the courtyard below with gold. In the middle of the courtyard, at the foot of the staircase, a fountain played in a yellow basin, with a pleasant, incessant noise of whispering green water, falling perpetually with a delicate patter over seven brown stone dolphins, spouting from whose pouted mouths went up contending streams; the waters gushed, white-laced, babbling, from the green-coppered vents in the dolphins’ mouths, and descended in spray to the bowl below; and under the bowl the drain-pipe murmured subterranean cool. About the courtyard stood a row of crimson-flowered pomegranate-trees: through the split brown rinds the garnet pulp and silver seeds showed, clotted thick as crystals in a stone; and purple fruits in heavy clusters, of myriad, uncounted drupes, hung from the superior privets ranged along the courtyard wall, dropping green shadows, like vast laces, over the blind-arched bricks below. A garden lay beyond the court, its gate hung thick and deep with yellow roses, clinging to the iron lantern, drooping and swaying in unconstrained festoons. Beyond the garden the place debouched into a forgotten graveyard.

By night alive, by day the place was sunk in dreams, with lavish beauty everywhere composed to sleep in sunlit sloth, luxurious and deep. The place seemed fallen in a trance. The pigeons dozed along the eaves; and on the grass below, where the garden stretched, the peacock slowly danced his stiff and stately dance, an iris feather bubble, green as jade, purple as wine, blue as lazuli. The courtyard seemed the very home of sleep. The sun lay stupid on the silent walls and drowsily beat on the blue-doored cellars shut with cautious bars, closed fast and locked beneath the arcaded porch; the shadows of the slim pillars slept in the graceful galleries. All was hushed but the peacock’s cry, while that iridescent bubble, on toes black as ebony, danced, here and there, there and here, his slow “pavone” among the yellow roses.

By night beneath the windows ancient tombs bared their sculptured breasts to the stars and stared up at the golden arches; and dank, black, cracked sarcophagi, chequered with light, laid broad their time-worn, sculptured emblems and tragical inscriptions,--skulls with wings, and urns, and hour-glasses whose un-refluent, palsied sands meet measure of eternity kept with motionless registry, and stony garlands of stone flowers which never bloomed, nor ever were sweet, as that beneath them had been sweet to man’s all quivering sense. Here lay the long dead, day and night, communicant in death; and wraiths of old unhappiness rose sighing with regret, or dreamed, beneath the stones, of love as futile as regret. The wind among the tombstones, like a stream from a windy fountain, murmured among the pomegranate-trees, stirred the shadows under the privets, rustled between the silken curtains, whispering, much as dead men do, chill, wordless, fluttering breaths of unsolved mystery. And when the wind from the graveyard whispered, all the place stood listening, hushed. The wind from the graveyard whispered among the saffron curtains; the ceaseless fountain waters fell; else all was still but the peacock’s wild night-cry, sounding through the unfathomable silence like the rending of an illusion,--deep and singular and strange,--by a harsh trumpet’s blast. Heh! The Devil keeps his promises in the way that suits him best.

* * * * *

Margot’s existence here was a thing apart from everything plebeian: she was immensely wealthy; had riches such as are won by few, though sought by many, plantations in the country, houses in town, money on call in quantity that made great bankers bow; women to wait upon her, deferential men, boys to run at her beck, maidservants, bond and free, to go before her; her cellar was famous for its wines, her dress for its wild and extravagant beauty; all that she touched she took; all that she took she kept; everything that she kept increased beyond the bounds of reason; she was spoken to with deference and referred to with finesse. She had her carriage, lined with silk, with yellow hammer-cloths and bands; in the license of her beauty she laughed at sumptuary laws, and in her illegal equipage rolled insolently on; in amber gown and canary turban fastened with a golden brooch, despite the law, she rode the streets like a charioted queen; or, dressed in wild, unstudied colors such as are used in Barbary, she wandered in her garden in the after-hours of the day, making wreaths of the saffron roses, a cockatoo upon her arm the color of a wild peach flower.

A shapely, splendid creature, with her handsome, heavy hands, neck like a tower, glorious hair hanging rich beneath its turban, her embroidered robe but carelessly worn and recklessly adjusted--oddly, the coarser the more becoming,--a goddess made of beautiful earth, but coarse as the cotton-flower, with confident face and insolent mien she took her way through the streets with a supple stride which was the despair of envious rivalry; hers was a regal beauty like the tiger’s loveliness.

With her face like beauty seen in dreams, incredible and untrue, she went through the community like a lovely malady: even wise men’s souls were troubled; sturdy hearts that had laughed at passion shook with the fairness of her face; piety was troubled by her golden loveliness. More than one sermon from Solomon’s Song was inspired by Rita Lagoux; she was known as the woman with a face like a beautiful blasphemy.

Time but increased the wildness and singularity of her beauty: it was gossiped about in the market-stalls; it was babbled about in the streets.

Then a torpor fell on her loveliness, a dull and leaden look; her beauty grew sullen and lowering as the flame of a fallen fire. Though not much altered in appearance she was somehow greatly changed. Her looks had lost something, no one could say what, gained something none could define. It was not that she was less the unforgettable being she had been, or that her sullen beauty made less mark on memory, but that the ecstasy of beauty was replaced by a queer unrest. Though as never before she was possessed of a singular comeliness, men began to regard her with an odd uneasiness: there was a foreignness in her face, and the look of alien things.

She looked like a portrait of herself painted in irony.

On the day that her daughter was married in far-away New Orleans, Margot stood motionless by her mirror, staring at her own reflection. The day seemed oddly overcast. Suddenly she burst into wild, shrill laughter, cheerless and tragic, her body shaking, her hands wrung together, turned away with an epithet, reversed the glass, and never looked into a mirror again. Something had passed across her face like a strange, ambiguous stain.

A shadow had fallen upon her like an unexpected dusk, or the dimness under a passing cloud, and had overcast her beauty.

Not time with his pinching seam, nor age with its ugliness, but a subtle and more peculiar change had come over Margot Lagoux.

There is a half-light in the hour of an eclipse which casts a weird spell on the world, when the sun is but a narrow crescent at high noon and the earth grows oddly dim in an untimely dusk. Such a dusk was fallen upon Margot Lagoux.

Sultry beauty such as hers has ever an early afternoon; but this was more than sultry beauty’s early afternoon. Not day, not darkness yet, but dusk went with her everywhere like twilight in the woods. The sun shone brightly everywhere along a sparkling world, but on Margot lay a shadow, strange and sinister. As unbleached muslin sallows to dingy isabella, as metal tarnishes from neglect, as white paper dulls in the sun, as the spot on bruised fruit turns brown, Margot Lagoux was changing; she was becoming tawny, swart, _bisblanc_ as the Creoles say. Her golden-ruddy cheeks had turned a morbid olive-brown as if a somber fountain were playing in her blood.

There were many women at that day on whom fate laid dreadful hands: Louise Briaud, who was blinded by smallpox; Fanchette Bourie, whom God pitied with death; Helene Richemont, the leper; Floride Biez, Doucie Baramont, Francesca Villeponteaux, wrecked by disfiguring maladies. God give them peace! But on none was laid so ruthless, unrelenting, deliberate a hand as fell upon Rita Lagoux.

She changed like a portrait whose shadows, painted in bitumen, have struck through and distempered the rest. Like a strange, nocturnal creature she seemed to absorb the gloom. Her glorious eyes grew jaundiced; her rose-brown lips grew dun; the delicate webs that joined her fingers grew yellow as bakers’ saffron. Malice laughed at her thickening lips.

Weeks turned months, months years; swarthy she grew and ugly. She put aside beauty as a worn, bright garment, and took on grotesquery stark and medieval as a Chinese teak-wood carving. She became both grotesque and contorted, gross, misshapen, sullied and debased. The old enchantment was gone like a necromancer’s spell. The perfect gait had faltered down to a lurching trot, a hurrying waddle with an irregular, unsure motion, hesitating a moment, then hastening on with vague uncertainty. Her soft, sleepy laugh had grown violent, her melodious voice coarse; of her fair face there was nothing left, no, not remembrance even.

A young man came to her threshold one morning and looked in eagerly; he would speak with Margot Lagoux: but “Is that Margot Lagoux?” he asked, a curious look coming over his face,--that woman, obese, with low brows, huge fat eyelids, round bare forehead, short, strained and corded neck enormously thick, yellowed teeth irregularly shown between thick, sallowed lips, cheeks wrinkled, flecked and blotched with brown like spotted peaches. “No!” he said, hastily, shrinking away. “That is not the woman I mean. The woman I meant was comely ... and had a beautiful daughter named Gabrielle!” He turned away, shuddering.

She wore old rags for robes, an old _freloche_ upon her head, in nowise restraining the unkempt coils of her hair hanging matted upon her neck. Her cheeks hung slack and dark and dingy; her lusterless locks were felted into a tangled web that had grown gray with lint; her frowsy chin was stained as with walnut hulls. She was falling apart like an old house with nobody living in it, swore black oaths with a foul mouth, cursed all who crossed her path, ate like a beast food fit for beasts, her fevered sun of glory set,--gone, gone, gone. Down she went, like the stuffs in her shop, from _velours ras_ to _coton croisé_, down, down to oblivion, down to the dusty corner of death. She spat in the dirt: “_Je m’en fiche!_” she said.

* * * * *

She hated a priest, and never knelt at a confessional again.

She did not die in the great house where she had passed the days of her power; every place she dwelt in sank into decay, the swifter where its integrity seemed permanent and secure; nothing purged the ambiguous spell which dragged them down together to the dust. The great house stood a ruin above a ruined court, a wreck of its former pride and splendor, black and foul; the fountain had fallen long ago, its pipes strangled and eaten away to crusts of lead and thready ribs of iron in the sand. Lilac lane was gone; there was no lane there any more, and had been none for years; there was no trace of where it ran, its hedge-rows or its gardens, or of Margot’s cottage other than a mouldering heap of broken brick, bleak rafters of the fallen roof, and one stark, fallen gable; of Gabrielle’s garden nothing remained.

Margot died in a dirty hovel in an unkempt alleyway, in the midst of a negro quarter, where, if one beat a drum or caused an instrument of an orchestra to sound, the people swarmed from the tenements like ants out of a hill. The place was fallen and foul, and filled with beggary; and that is the end of a tenement; for beggars are like distemper, the place where they have lived is hard to cure. All the houses in the alley were filthy; but none was filthy as hers.

There was a tremendous storm that night. Her house was ablaze with light; the little tailor who lived next door said, “Aha! Mother Go-go has company!” But the only person seen was one of the religious sort, a tall man, with a face like an unpleasant taste.

The thunder was terrific; the storm wild beyond compare. The wind blew with a sound like wild, gigantic laughter. “Ff-ff-ff!” went the gale; the gusts howled through the tailor’s house; the whole place shook; the blinds banged and crashed; the wind wailed, and sucked down the chimney with a sound like awful weeping; the little tailor’s soul was filled with a sense of enormous terror.

All night long the thunder rolled like the laughter of an angry god. Dislodged by the tremendous concussions the cockroaches flew out of the walls; and, in the morning, after the storm, the parrakeets which lived in the trees were all turned gray as ashes.

The windows and doors of Old Mother Go-go’s house were standing open wide. It was plain that they had stood open all night, and that the rain had beaten into the house unopposed.

This, however, occasioned but brief surprise. When they peered in at the door the rats were playing around the floor with the beads of a broken rosary.

A priest came, hurrying in. He did not stay in long. When he came out his face was white as a sheet and his lips were drawn and gray.

Those who prepare the dead came. They stood on the threshold peeping and queerly looking in at the door.

A gray mist filled the place like a cloud, through which things were visible. The rooms were damp as an old vault, and full of a death-like smell; the walls were covered with green mould; the woodwork was rotten. The candles had guttered and dripped and gone out; the floor was bespattered with tallow. All around the rooms were coffers of linen and lace, “_coffres très beaux, coffres mignons, de dressouer compagnons; coffres de boys qui point n’empire; madres et jaunes comme cire_.” All the coffers were open, and everything that was in them was tossed wildly about the floor; not one piece of the lovely old stuffs, as yellow as wax, but was blackened by showers of soot and trampled under foot by the neighbor’s goat, the print of whose hoofs was everywhere.

And Madame Margot?

Heh! God had designed her for tragedy; but here was comedy. Margot lay stretched out on the floor, as black as ebony; dead, among the ashes and soot, charred like a fallen star.

The coroner found that the woman had died of the visitation of God; but Doe Gou, the tailor, said simply, “Has God feet like a goat?”

The bishop refused to have masses said for the repose of her pitiful soul; and they would not allow her to be buried in St. Sebastian’s graveyard. The potter’s field was the place for her; her color was too peculiar.

Too black to be buried among the white, too white to lie down with the black, she was buried, in secret, in her own garden, under the magnolia-trees.

And that was the end of Madame Margot.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.