Читать книгу The Transgression of Andrew Vane: A Novel - Carryl Guy Wetmore - Страница 6

Madame Raoul Palffy would, in all probability, have been intensely surprised and entirely incredulous had any one informed her that hers was an irritating personality. But the fact remained. She was flagrantly complacent, and her placidity enraged one immeasurably, and goaded nervous temperaments to the verge of frenzy. Tradespeople had been known to grit their teeth and swear almost audibly at her, and at least two guards upon the Métropolitain had lost their positions because her leisurely manner of locomotion had moved them irresistibly to breaches of the courteous treatment enjoined upon them by the General Manager's notice to the public.

Madame Palffy was a large, florid person with a partiality for jet and crimson velvet, and whose passing, much in the manner of a frigate under full sail, was apt to be fatal to fragile ornaments standing unwarily too near to table-edges. About her there was always a suggestion of imminent explosion, due to her chronic shortness of breath, the extreme snugness of her gowns, and the fashion in which her pudgy palms, unmercifully compressed into white gloves two sizes too small, crowded desperately out of the little ovals across which the top buttons yearned toward their proper holes. Harmoniously, her face was fat, and dappled all over with ruddy pink, with the eyes, nose, and mouth crowded together in the centre, as if for sociability's sake, or in fear of sliding off the smooth slopes of her cheeks and chin. Her hair, with its variety of puffs and curls, appeared to have been laid out by a landscape gardener.

As for Raoul Palffy, all that one was apt to remember about him was the fact that he had married a Miss Barrister of Worcester. He was as completely eclipsed by this injudicious proceeding as if he had been elected Vice-President of the United States. He closely resembled a frog on the point of suffocation. With a loyalty worthy of a better cause, he imbibed vast quantities of the wine of his native Bordeaux, and became each year more shockingly apoplectic in appearance. Out of his wife's sight, he swelled magnificently, like a red balloon, and, between ignorance and exaggeration, was hardly on bowing terms with veracity: in her presence, he was another man. It was more than anything as if some one had taken a pin to the red balloon. As a natural result of their relative assertiveness, the couple moved, for the most part, not in the French society to which Monsieur Palffy's connections warranted their aspiring, but in that of the Colony, where his wife's pretensions and her deplorable mismanipulation of her adopted tongue were less conspicuously burlesque. After twenty years of Paris, Madame Palffy still said nom de plume and café noir.

It was to renew acquaintance with parents so curiously contrasted that Margery Palffy had returned from ten years of almost continuous residence in the States. To say that she proved a surprise to them would be to do but faint justice to the mental perturbation with which they surveyed this tall, self-possessed young person, who was, in practically every particular, a total stranger. Her father, with his characteristic lack of enterprise, had promptly given her up. He had neither the faculty of rendering, nor that of inspiring, affection; and this his daughter seemed, from the very outset, to understand, and tacitly to accept. They rarely met, except at dinner, and then with such a desperate lack of common interests as prevented any interchange of conversation beyond the merest commonplaces. Madame Palffy, on the contrary, made an earnest, if inept, attempt to fill, in her daughter's life, a place which she had long since forfeited; and, to the best of her ability, Margery strove to meet her half-way. But the gap made by their years of separation was now too wide to be effectually bridged. Madame Palffy was artificial from the summit of her elaborate coiffure to the tips of her inadequately ample shoes: her daughter, in every detail of her sound and sensible make-up, was a convincing product of all that is best, sincerest, and most wholesome in American education. The two could no more mix than oil and water. It was to Mrs. Carnby and her husband that Margery turned for sympathy, with an instant recognition of qualities appealingly akin to her own: and these two received her with open arms. For them, three months had sufficed to render Margery Palffy indispensable, and the same period served to prove to the girl, not only her need of friendship, but that here lay the means of its satisfaction. As Madame Palffy complacently observed to Mrs. Carnby.

"I think that Margery feels that there's no place like home."

And as Mrs. Carnby replied, with extreme relish:

"I'm sure of it. It must be a most comforting conviction!"

Margery Palffy, whose attitude toward the society to which she was a comparatively recent recruit was sufficiently indicated by her desire to be called "Miss" instead of "Mademoiselle," was accustomed to reserve her Sunday afternoons for Mr. Carnby. They would go to the Bois, to walk and watch the driving, or take a bateau mouche to Suresnes and return, or even slip out to Versailles or St. Germain. Jeremy was a man of small enthusiasms, but he shared with his wife a profound affection, of the type which is always pathetic in the childless, for this tall, slender girl, as fresh and sweet as a ripe fig, grown on the family thistle of the Palffys. An impulse, which, in the light of its results, could only be regarded as an inspiration, had prompted Madame Palffy to send her daughter, at the age of nine, to be educated in the States. A sound and rational school in Connecticut, and ten vacations in the superbly invigorating air of the North Shore under the care of a sensibly indulgent aunt, had forthwith performed a miracle. A thin, brown child, with an affected lisp, was now grown straight and tall, with an eye to measure a putt or a friend, a hand which knew the touch of a tiller and a rein, and a voice to win a dog, a child, or a man. Margery Palffy was very beautiful withal, with her russet-brown hair, her finely chiselled features, and her confident smile. She impressed one immediately as having arranged her hair herself – by bunching it all up together, and then giving it one inspirited twist which accomplished more than all the system in the world. Some one – not her mother! – knew what kind of gown she ought to wear, but – what was more important – she knew how to wear it. One would have said that her eyes were by Helleu and her nose by George du Maurier. Men looked to their hearts when her mouth was open, and to their consciences when it was closed – tight-closed! A laugh to make them worship her, a frown to make them despise themselves, a suggestion that she was capable of giving all she would expect from another, a somewhat stronger suggestion that she would be apt to expect a considerable deal, very clean-cut, very sane, very good form – such was Margery Palffy at what might be called her worst. As for Margery Palffy at her best, as yet even the most casual of Colony gossips had never more than hinted at a love-affair.

Madame Palffy having attended two church services, and observed with gratification that her new bonnet was far more imposing than the bonnets, old and new, of her fellow worshippers, had now sought the seclusion of her Empire boudoir. She was, above all things, consistent. In this sacred spot she ventured to lay aside her society manner, but, beyond this, she made no concessions to privacy. Her lounging-gown would have been presentable at a garden-party, and she devoted five minutes to rearranging her hair, before sinking massively upon the chaise-longue, and giving her thoughts free rein.

An unusually brilliant week had drawn to a close the evening before. Madame Palffy's dinner-table had groaned beneath its burden of silver and chiselled glass, and her box at "Louise" had presented to the auditorium such a background of white linen and vicuna as had sent poisonous darts to the hearts of a dozen ambitious and observant mothers.

The reason was not far to seek. From the moment of her début, two months before, Margery Palffy had been a tremendous success. Her beauty, her novelty, her shrewd wit and unfailing gaiety had swept through the Colony as a sickle through corn. Madame Palffy smiled to herself as she reviewed the past few weeks. Her daughter's had been a name to conjure with.

But, almost immediately, the smile became a sigh. Beneath her satisfaction in Margery's triumph, the ambitious lady felt that there was something lacking – and that something was a complete understanding of the girl herself. Since her return from the States, her mother had been slowly and reluctantly forced to the conviction that there was that in her nature which it was beyond one's power to grasp, and her apparent frankness and simplicity made the failure to read her doubly hard to analyze. Her interest in life and the society world about her was unquestionable. Fresh and unspoiled, she trod the social labyrinth undeviatingly, received the flatteries, even the open devotion, of half a hundred men with caution, and remained – herself. And Madame Palffy, to whom social success was a guarantee of a status so little lower than the seraphim as to make the difference unworthy of consideration, looked with growing admiration upon that of her beautiful daughter, and treasured every evidence thereof deep in her pompous heart. The difficulty lay in the fact that Margery impressed not only the world in general by her dignity, but abashed her ambitious parent as well. Madame Palffy was content to have her daughter talk in parables, if she would, and be as impartial as justice itself, but afterwards, when the lights were out and the guests had departed, she wanted the parables explained and the preferences laid bare. And this was precisely the confidential relation which she had never been able to establish. In public she figured naturally as Margery's confidant and mentor. In private she was, in reality, hardly nearer to her than was the newest of her new acquaintances.