her marriage she had somewhat conspicuously adopted
her husband’s creed, and the Dagonets, picturing
Paul as the prey of the Jesuits, had made the mistake
of appealing to the courts for his custody. This
had confirmed Undine’s resistance, and her determination
to keep the child. The case had been decided
in her favour, and she had thereupon demanded, and
obtained, an allowance of five thousand dollars, to
be devoted to the bringing up and education of her
son. This sum, added to what Mr.
Spragg had agreed
to give her, made up an income which had appreciably
bettered her position, and justified Madame de Trezac’s
discreet allusions to her wealth. Nevertheless,
it was one of the facts about which she least liked
to think when any chance allusion evoked Ralph’s
image. The money was hers, of course; she had
a right to it, and she was an ardent believer in “rights.”
But she wished she could have got it in some other
way—she hated the thought of it as one more
instance of the perverseness with which things she
was entitled to always came to her as if they had
been stolen.
The approach of summer, and the culmination of the
Paris season, swept aside such thoughts. The
Countess Raymond de Chelles, contrasting her situation
with that of Mrs. Undine Marvell, and the fulness and
animation of her new life with the vacant dissatisfied
days which had followed on her return from Dakota,
forgot the smallness of her apartment, the inconvenient
proximity of Paul and his nurse, the interminable
round of visits with her mother-in-law, and the long
dinners in the solemn hotels of all the family connection.
The world was radiant, the lights were lit, the music
playing; she was still young, and better-looking than
ever, with a Countess’s coronet, a famous chateau
and a handsome and popular husband who adored her.
And then suddenly the lights went out and the music
stopped when one day Raymond, putting his arm about
her, said in his tenderest tones: “And now,
my dear, the world’s had you long enough and
it’s my turn. What do you say to going
down to Saint Desert?”
XXXVIII
In a window of the long gallery of the chateau de
Saint Desert the new Marquise de Chelles stood looking
down the poplar avenue into the November rain.
It had been raining heavily and persistently for a
longer time than she could remember. Day after
day the hills beyond the park had been curtained by
motionless clouds, the gutters of the long steep roofs
had gurgled with a perpetual overflow, the opaque surface
of the moat been peppered by a continuous pelting
of big drops. The water lay in glassy stretches
under the trees and along the sodden edges of the
garden-paths, it rose in a white mist from the fields
beyond, it exuded in a chill moisture from the brick
flooring of the passages and from the walls of the
rooms on the lower floor. Everything in the great
empty house smelt of dampness: the stuffing of
the chairs, the threadbare folds of the faded curtains,
the splendid tapestries, that were fading too, on
the walls of the room in which Undine stood, and the
wide bands of crape which her husband had insisted
on her keeping on her black dresses till the last
hour of her mourning for the old Marquis.
