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.