CHAPTER SIX
Félicie Louise Marie Joyselle was sitting in her bedroom, darning her husband's socks.
She sat in a straight-backed chair near the dressing-table, and a huge basket of mending of different kinds stood on the floor by her side. The room was very simple, for she loved the well-polished black-walnut furniture among which she had lived all her married life, and nothing would have induced her to change it for new, however beautiful.
The walls were adorned with religious prints, but on the space over the dressing-table, with its array of ebony and silver hair-brushes, was a group of old, faded photographs, evidently all of the same person—Joyselle; and over the chimney-piece hung four large oval photographs, in varnished black frames, picked out with narrow red stripes; quite evidently four middle-aged peasants in their best attire. Near the door a coloured crayon of Théo at the age of five, in plaid trousers, a short jacket, and a wide collar of crochetted lace, smiled sheepishly down at the world. There was a table covered with books of the kind whose gilt edges invariably stick together, because they are never opened, and on the little table on the left of the broad bed, with its scarlet counterpane and huge, soft-looking pillows, were an old black crucifix and two shabby prayer-books.
It was a plain, inartistic room, and the middle-aged woman whose holy of holies it had been for fifteen years was as old-fashioned and unbeautiful as it; yet there was, somehow, about the place a certain atmosphere of goodness and peace that cannot be described in words.
When Brigit Mead came in that afternoon she kissed Madame Joyselle as usual, and then taking off her hat and coat, drew up another stiff-backed chair and sat down.
"How are you, petite mère?" she asked gently, in French.
"I am well, as I always am, thank God. And you? And Tommy?"
"Tommy has a bad throat, but it is nothing. He sent his love. I am very fit."
Madame Joyselle cut her cotton, scrutinised her work closely, and laid the sock down and took up another.
"Such a man for wearing out socks. And always the heels," she remarked. "It would try the patience of anyone!"
"Does it try even yours?" asked Brigit.
The little woman looked up, her shrewd black eyes twinkling under their well-defined brows. "You have observed, then, that I am patient? But yes, my dear, God help the wife of an artist if she is not! He is terrible, my man, at times, but luckily I was born long-suffering. He has, too, a way of wrenching at button-holes in collars that tears them to bits, and desolates me."
"But——" began the girl, and then stopped.
All things considered, there was remarkably little constraint in her feelings for this good woman, but somehow at that moment she wished to change the subject.
Madame Joyselle, however, gave a gentle chuckle, and continued: "He was his most terrific yesterday! Like a lion with no self-control; it was very ridiculous."
Brigit started. Terrible, yes, but—it struck her as very unfitting for the great man's plain little wife to find him ridiculous. And Félicité, as her husband always called her, saw her start, and understood.
"Ah, yes, to you he is the great artist as well as Théo's father—hein? To me he is, of course, just—my husband. All men are, they say, different, but surely all husbands are much alike."
"There are certainly very few men like—him." Brigit took a sock out of the basket and looked at it absently. There was a short silence, during which Félicité did not speak, but she was watching her visitor in the glass. Then she said suddenly, with a certain briskness in her voice, "Shall I tell you about him? About my husband, you know, not about the great artist of—all you others."
Brigit nodded. "Yes, please do. Tell me about—long ago, in Normandy."
"Bien. It will interest you. You like him very much, don't you?" she added, suddenly, looking up and fixing the girl with her bright eyes.
"Like him? Indeed I do. I think him simply glorious," was the answer, given in a gushing voice, but for a moment the girl felt vaguely uneasy. During the last twelve weeks she had not, although seeing Joyselle's wife every day, learned to regard her as a real factor in the game. Joyselle, always tender and considerate of her, yet seemed to regard her as a kind of cross between a mother and a nurse, and she, never precisely retiring, and almost always present during Brigit's visits, appeared to be perfectly used to the rôle that he assigned her, and sat, usually silent, a kindly spectator of whatever might be going on.
This was the first time that Brigit had realised that she had a real personality, and the girl wondered at her own blindness, for every line in Madame Joyselle's face meant, she now saw, an individuality stronger rather than weaker than the average woman's, even in these days of clamorous individualism.
"Do tell me about him—when he was young," Lady Brigit Mead continued, her thick-looking white eyelids, eyelids that the hapless Mr. Babington compared in his twenty-second sonnet to magnolia-petals, drooping till her lashes made shadows on her cheeks.
And Félicité Joyselle told her story.
"He lived at St. Pol—a mile from Falaise on the way to Caen. His father was gamekeeper to M. de Cérisay. My father, Jacques Rion,—there is his picture to the right, with the beard,—was a tanner in Falaise. We were all poor, but it was very pleasant. Falaise is a beautiful city. Sometimes I used to think there was nothing so beautiful in London as the Place St. Gervais on a market-day in summer, with the fountain playing, and all the friendly people selling their wares. But that," she added simply, "was before I had seen the Albert Memorial. Victor's mother used to sell her fruit in the town, and her sister had married my uncle, anyway! and Victor used to come with her. The first time I remember seeing him, however, was at Mass. It was winter, and very cold, and he kept blowing his hands to warm them. I was twelve, and he about ten. He was a beautiful little boy. Then one day his father brought him to see his aunt—who had married Monsieur Chalumeau, my uncle, you see?—and I was there. And we went up to the castle. You have been there? It is where the Conqueror—who conquered England—was born, in a tiny little stone room high above the tower. You know the story of Arlette?" Brigit nodded, but she did not know. She wanted to hear about Joyselle.
"Bon. And then, when I was twenty, and he eighteen, he came back from Rouen where, did I tell you?—M. de Cérisay had sent him to learn to play the violin—and he told me he wanted me to marry him. He was very splendid then, with city clothes, and oil on his hair, and his hands smooth as a gentleman's.
"We were married at St. Gervais. Then he went back to Rouen and he studied again. That," she added, "was the worst time of my life."
"But why?"
The elder woman looked up. "Because—I was just getting to know him," she returned slowly, "and—he was very wild."
Brigit nodded sympathetically. "Poor you," she said in English.
"Yes. The music made him half-mad, and then he had friends who taught him to gamble. There were other things, too. Women. He was so handsome and so fascinating, and his success was just beginning, they all ran after him, and he enjoyed it. I," she added, "didn't. Then we went to Paris. That was bad, too, only Théo was on the way, which made things better. He was good to me during my illness—ah, very good; and beautiful it was to see the big strong man, mad with his music and his success, washing the little baby and dressing him. When Théo was two—Victor had been working with his violin since he was fourteen—we went to Berlin, and then began his craze for work. He used to work four and five hours at a time for months. Once his health gave way, and we were very poor, so he went to some place for a cure, and the little one and I stayed at home. Then he met a great Prince,—I can never remember his name,—and he invited us to stay with him. It was in a big castle near Munich. Victor loved it, but I was very miserable. I never went anywhere with him again."
"Why were you miserable, petite mère?" Brigit's voice was very gentle; she seemed to see the young violinist, handsome and, as his wife put it, driven half-mad by his music, the centre of attraction at the German castle, and his little plain wife sitting forlorn by herself, looking on.
"It was a Lady Créfinne Cranewitz,"—this name at least, she remembered! "This Créfinne (it means countess) was very beautiful, but too big; large all over like a statue, and blond. She used to wear one flower in her bosom at dinner, and then give it to him afterwards. Also she gave him a lock of her hair."
"And what did he give her?"
Félicité smiled placidly. "He gave her—his love. Ah, yes, he loved her, his Créfinne Gigantesque."
"But——"
The teller of the tale drew a blue silk sock over her hand and poked at the hole in its heel with a thoughtful needle. "He always loves them—for the time, my dear. He is of a sincerity, my man!"
Since the evening of the dragon-skin frock Brigit had done nothing to charm Joyselle; he saw her through his own eyes now, and she, knowing that the game was in her own hands, could afford to wait; when the day came when she wanted to hurt him or to further gratify her own love, she could make him love her almost in a moment. So, so far as she knew, he still enjoyed her beauty without arrière pensée, although he saw her through his own eyes, not Théo's. Yet now, at this phrase of his wife's, "He always loves them—for the time," she started, half angrily. When—if—the day came when he loved her, would this "clean old peasant," as Carron had called her, sit and darn his socks and say to herself—"for the time"?
"You are very—placid about it."
"Yes. In the beginning—no. Then I was jealous, and angry. But a jealous woman is always ridiculous, my child, and men are so vain that the implied homage upsets them. Many a woman has lost a man's love through showing jealousy. So—in time I got used to it, and tout passe," she continued comfortably.
"And you wouldn't mind now, if——" asked Brigit, her elbows on her knees, her chin on her hands.
Madame Joyselle laughed. "Wouldn't mind? Oh, ma chère! Just before you came, he had a very bad turn—it was an Italian actress—a pantomimiste, with the most beautiful arms in the world, and the face of a vicious little boy. And he? Épaté. His ties wouldn't tie, he got new shoes—fresh gloves every time he went to see her—scent, a new kind, very expensive—he sent her flowers by the cartload, and went every evening to see her act. Every day little mauve letters and wires from her (he always forgot to burn them, and I was afraid Toinon might see them), etc., etc., etc."
"And how did it end?" asked Brigit, her throat dry and hot. She hated the pantomimiste.
"End? My faith, my dear, it is of a simplicity, the end. You came."
"I came——"
"Yes. And he was so delighted with his new—daughter—that he promptly forgot his—love."
"But what did she do?"
"She made a fool of herself, poor thing; wrote, and telegraphed, and threatened to kill herself. So we sent Théo to see her, and she quieted down."
Brigit burst out laughing. "Sent Théo?"
"Yes. He always goes. He is very quiet and reasonable, you see."
"I see."
Madame Joyselle rose. "I must go and see about the dinner. Will you come? Ah, yes," as they went downstairs, "they are like that, the men. But Théo will be faithful to you, of that I am sure. He is like my people, and then, thank God, he is not an artist!"