The last of the three rooms was called the gold room. A piece of old gold embroidery hung from the ceiling to the floor and glimmered like pale sunshine on the darkest day. The sofa, the chairs, and the little gold bibelots scattered here and there in spare and isolated arrangements, struck the same note. There was a picture of Madame herself in this room as a young girl in an orchard in the sunshine; the colour centred in her golden hair, and the sunshine lit up her simple white muslin dress into a dazzling radiance. She had yellow roses in her hands. On the other wall opposite hung a Fra Angelico Madonna. There was gold in that picture too, the faint etherealized gold of Fra Angelico’s dreams; but somehow or other it would not harmonize with anything else. It seemed the only false note. It was as priceless as everything else that Madame Torialli had; it had cost her a year of her husband’s work; and yet the old saint’s dream refused to be invaluable or to associate with its surroundings. There it hung on the wall, a silent protest—a wandering, golden ghost that mocked urbane humanity and forced modernity to acknowledge a power in which it had refused to believe. Only Madame Torialli was insensible to the picture’s incongruity.
“I wanted just that shade,” she would say; “you see—the angel’s wing? I couldn’t have done without it.” And if those who listened to her saw more than the shade of colour in the angel’s wing they did not tell her so.
When Jean obeyed the written summons of Madame Torialli to call upon her to arrange his future work, he was led by the highest of all Torialli’s handsome functionaries up the marble staircase, and at length into the precincts of Madame Torialli’s “dull little rooms.” She was sitting in the silver room, apparently awaiting his coming. She was dressed in grey and wore a bunch of violets at her throat and at her waist. It seemed to Jean as if he had been led by some strange spell into moonlight, and now beheld the Lady of the Moon. Madame Torialli smiled at the dazzled bewilderment in Jean’s eyes.
“But you like my little things?” she said sweetly. “Well, then, look about you, there is plenty of time. I have very few, as you see, but such as they are, I, too, find them restful. Do you know that I have a little fancy that we go through three stages of existence. In the first we are very spiritual beings; the innocence of youth makes us hold all reality lightly. We long to be imprisoned in dreams and to escape the brutality of facts; we are led by a breeze to a flower, we go no further than a smile. Our hands tremble before what we dare not touch. This is the first stage. I find it pathetic when I see it in the faces of the very young. You and I have both passed that stage, Monsieur.”
Jean sat down near her. It was true that everything in her rooms was well worth looking at, but there was nothing in them that held his eyes like herself; this exquisite complicated being in silver and violets, with the same faint scent about her that Jean remembered in her letter, and eyes that were as simple as a child’s prayer. She lifted them smilingly to his.
“Shall I go on with my little parable?” she asked.
“But please,” said Jean. He was even conscious that his voice shook a little, it was such a delight to hear her speak. Her voice was like a silver bell.
“The second is more robust,” continued Madame smiling. “It is a passion for reality, for big emotions, for the crash and storm of the maturer senses. It is in this stage that everything happens to a man that can happen! I do not say it is the happiest of the three stages; it is perhaps the most interesting. At the end of it a man knows himself, and he knows also the reason of many things; but he does not tremble any more. The third stage—and it is at this that I have now arrived, Monsieur—is that he occupies himself with material things; he becomes a collector, a man with a hobby, a creature of comfortable habits and practical good sense. He builds himself on the desert island of his soul a charming little log cabin out of the wreck! I have invited you to see my little log cabin, Monsieur. I hope that you think I have done well with it?”
Madame Torialli’s gentle eyes smiled with a touching mixture of wistfulness and irony. Jean, looking at her with the quick, absorbed sympathy of his sensitive nature, felt that no one had ever done justice to Madame Torialli before; and this is a very dangerous feeling for a man to have about a woman.
“But come,” said Madame, leaning forward a little. “You are in the most interesting of the three stages, you know; let us talk a little about yourself. I found out quite by an accident the other day that I knew your uncle. Monsieur! may I add that I also knew your father?”