The Red Lily | Page 7

to-morrow, if you wish, to far distant places, to the odd
districts where the poor people live. I like the old streets where misery
dwells."
He promised to satisfy her taste, although he let her know that he
thought it absurd. The walks that she led him sometimes bored him,
and he thought them dangerous. People might see them.
"And since we have been successful until now in not causing gossip--"
She shook her head.
"Do you think that people have not talked about us? Whether they
know or do not know, they talk. Not everything is known, but
everything is said."
She relapsed into her dream. He thought her discontented, cross, for
some reason which she would not tell. He bent upon her beautiful,
grave eyes which reflected the light of the grate. But she reassured him.
"I do not know whether any one talks about me. And what do I care?
Nothing matters."
He left her. He was going to dine at the club, where a friend was
waiting for him. She followed him with her eyes, with peaceful
sympathy. Then she began again to read in the ashes.
She saw in them the days of her childhood; the castle wherein she had
passed the sweet, sad summers; the dark and humid park; the pond
where slept the green water; the marble nymphs under the
chestnut-trees, and the bench on which she had wept and desired death.
To-day she still ignored the cause of her youthful despair, when the
ardent awakening of her imagination threw her into a troubled maze of

desires and of fears. When she was a child, life frightened her. And
now she knew that life is not worth so much anxiety nor so much hope;
that it is a very ordinary thing. She should have known this. She
thought:
"I saw mamma; she was good, very simple, and not very happy. I
dreamed of a destiny different from hers. Why? I felt around me the
insipid taste of life, and seemed to inhale the future like a salt and
pungent aroma. Why? What did I want, and what did I expect? Was I
not warned enough of the sadness of everything?"
She had been born rich, in the brilliancy of a fortune too new. She was
a daughter of that Montessuy, who, at first a clerk in a Parisian bank,
founded and governed two great establishments, brought to sustain
them the resources of a brilliant mind, invincible force of character, a
rare alliance of cleverness and honesty, and treated with the
Government as if he were a foreign power. She had grown up in the
historical castle of Joinville, bought, restored, and magnificently
furnished by her father. Montessuy made life give all it could yield. An
instinctive and powerful atheist, he wanted all the goods of this world
and all the desirable things that earth produces. He accumulated
pictures by old masters, and precious sculptures. At fifty he had known
all the most beautiful women of the stage, and many in society. He
enjoyed everything worldly with the brutality of his temperament and
the shrewdness of his mind.
Poor Madame Montessuy, economical and careful, languished at
Joinville, delicate and poor, under the frowns of twelve gigantic
caryatides which held a ceiling on which Lebrun had painted the Titans
struck by Jupiter. There, in the iron cot, placed at the foot of the large
bed, she died one night of sadness and exhaustion, never having loved
anything on earth except her husband and her little drawing-room in the
Rue Maubeuge.
She never had had any intimacy with her daughter, whom she felt
instinctively too different from herself, too free, too bold at heart; and
she divined in Therese, although she was sweet and good, the strong
Montessuy blood, the ardor which had made her suffer so much, and

which she forgave in her husband, but not in her daughter.
But Montessuy recognized his daughter and loved her. Like most
hearty, full-blooded men, he had hours of charming gayety. Although
he lived out of his house a great deal, he breakfasted with her almost
every day, and sometimes took her out walking. He understood gowns
and furbelows. He instructed and formed Therese. He amused her. Near
her, his instinct for conquest inspired him still. He desired to win
always, and he won his daughter. He separated her from her mother.
Therese admired him, she adored him.
In her dream she saw him as the unique joy of her childhood. She was
persuaded that no man in the world was as amiable as her father.
At her entrance in life, she despaired at once of finding elsewhere so
rich a nature, such a plenitude of active and thinking forces. This
discouragement had followed her in the choice of a