“But no more in touch with society,” remarked the attentive companion; “she accepts no invitations, and goes only to the galleries and theatres.”
“Um!––pictured people, and artificial people! Both have a tendency to make her an idealist instead of a realist.”
To Dumaresque she made the same remark, and suggested he should help find attractions for her in real life.
“She is too imaginative, and I do not want her to be of the romantic women; the craze for romance in life is what fills the columns of the journals with new scandals each month.”
“Madame Judithe is safe from that sort of romance,” declared her god-son. “Yet with her face and those glorious eyes one should allow her some flights in the land of the ideal. She suggests all old Italy at times, but she has never mentioned her family to me.”
“Because it was a topic which both Alain and I forbade her, when she was younger, to discuss. Naturally, she has not a joyous temperament and memories of her childhood can only have an unhappy effect, which accounts for our decision of the matter. Her father died before she could remember 57 him, and the mother, who was of Greek blood, not long after. A relative who arranged affairs left the daughter penniless. At the little chateau Levigne she was of great service to me when she was but sixteen. Madam Blanc, who tried to reach me in time, declares the child saved my life. It was a dog––a mad one. I was on the lawn when he broke through the hedge, snapped Alain’s mastiff, Ponto, and came straight for me. I was paralyzed with terror; then, just as he leaped at me, the child swung a heavy chair over her head. Tah! She looked like a young tigress. The dog was struck helpless, his back broken. The gardener came and killed him, and Ponto, too, was killed, when he showed that the bite had given him the poison. Ah, it was terrible, that day. Then I wrote Alain and we decided she should never leave us. I made over to her the income of the little Lavigne estate, thus her education was carried on, and when we went to Rome––well, Alain was not satisfied until he could do even more for her.”
The old lady helped herself to snuff and sighed. Her listener wondered if, after all, that death-bed marriage had been entirely acceptable to the mother. Some suggestion of his thought must have come to her, for she continued:
“Not that I disapproved, you must understand. No daughter could be more devoted. I could not be without her now. But I had a hope––a mother’s foolish hope––that perhaps it might be a love affair; that the marriage would renew his interest in life and thus accomplish what the physicians could not do––save him.”
“Good old Alain,” said Dumaresque, with real feeling in his tones. “He deserved to live and win her. I can imagine no better fortune for a man.”
“But it was an empty hope, and a sad wedding,” continued the dowager, with a sigh. “That was, to her, a day of 58 gloom, which to others is the one day to look forward to through girlhood and backward to from old age. Oh, yes; it is not so much to be wondered at that she is a creature of moods and ideals outlined on a background of shadow.”