The High Place: A Comedy of Disenchantment

by James Branch Cabell

11.
Problems of Beauty

T was conceded even by the younger and most charming ladies of the neighborhood that the new Duchess of Puysange was quite good looking. The gentlemen of Poictesme appeared, literally, to be dazzled by any prolonged consideration of Melior’s loveliness: otherwise, as Florian soon noted, there was no logical accounting for the discrepancy in their encomia. Enraptured pæeans upon her eyes, for example, he found to differ amazingly and utterly in regard to such an important factor as the color of these eyes. This was, at mildest, a circumstance provocative of curiosity.

Florian therefore listened more attentively to what people said of his wife; and he discovered that his fellows’ ecstasies over Melior’s hair and shape and complexion were not a whit less inconsistent. These envious babblers were at one in acclaiming as flawless the beauty which he had intrepidly fetched down from the high place: but in speaking of any constituent of this loveliness they seemed not to be talking of the same woman. Either her perfection actually did dazzle men so that they were bewilderedly aware of much such a beguiling and intoxicating brightness as Florian, on looking back, suspected Melior to have been in his own eyes before he married her, or else the appearance of this daughter of the Léshy was not to all persons the same. Well, this was queer: but it was not important. Florian at least was in no doubt of his wife’s appearance nor of his right to glory in it.

So Florian tended to let this riddle pass unchallenged, and to quarrel with nothing, for Florian was very happy.

He could not have said when or why awoke the teasing question if, after all, this happiness was greater than or different from that which he had got of Aurélie or Hortense or Marianne or Carola? Being married to a comparative stranger was, as always, pleasant; it was, in fact, delightful: but you had expected, none the less, of the love which had miraculously triumphed over time and all natural laws some sharper tang of bliss than ordinarily flavored your honeymoons. Still, at thirty-five, you were logical about the usual turning-out of expectations. And you were content: and Melior was beautiful; and among the local nobility this new Duchess of Puysange had made friends everywhere, and she was everywhere admired, however puzzlingly men seemed to word their praise of her loveliness.

The newly married pair had journeyed uneventfully from Brunbelois to Florian’s home. The mute hairy persons brought Melior’s trunks in their cart; and St. Hoprig too came with them through Acaire, but no further. Florian had at last persuaded him of how untactful it would be for Hoprig to disrupt a simple and high-hearted faith that had thrived for so many hundred years, by appearing at Bellegarde in person. Florian had pointed out the attendant awkwardnesses, for the fetich no less than for the devotees. And Hoprig, upon reflection, had conceded that for a saint in the prime of life there were advantages in travelling incognito.

So the holy man left them at the edge of the forest. “We shall meet again, my children,” the saint had said, with a smile, just as he vanished like a breaking bubble. It seemed to Florian that his heavenly patron had become a little ostentatious with miracles, but Florian voiced no criticism. Still, he considered the evanishment of the two hairy persons and their monstrous goats, an evanishment quite privately conducted in the stable to which they had withdrawn after uncarting Melior’s trunks, to be in much better taste.

But Florian picked no open fault with Hoprig nor with anyone, for Florian was content enough just now. He began to see that his notions about Melior had been a trifle extravagant, that the strange loveliness which he had been adoring since boyhood was worn by a creature whose brilliance was of the body rather than of the intellect: however, he had not married her in order to discuss philosophy; and, with practise, it was easy enough to pretend to listen without really hearing her.

All this was less worrying, less imminent, than the trouble he seemed in every likelihood about to have with his brother, on account of Raoul’s damnable wife. For Madame Marguerite de Puysange, as Florian now heard, was infuriated by his failure to appear at Storisende upon the twentieth of July, the day upon which he had been due to marry her sister: nor by learning that he had married somebody else was the unconscionable virago soothed. She considered a monstrous affront had been put upon them all, a deduction which Florian granted to be truly drawn, if that mattered. What certainly mattered was that the lean woman had no living adult male relatives. She would be at her husband to avenge this affront by killing Florian: and dear, plastic, good-natured Raoul so hated to deny anybody anything that the result of her coaxing and tears and nagging would probably be a decided nuisance....