The du Mauriers, page 11
Part Three
7
In the middle of March, 1834, Louise Busson received two letters from Paris. One was in her brother’s handwriting, and this she put aside for the moment; the other had been forwarded to her from her mother’s old apartment in the rue de la Lune, and bore a foreign postmark. She scanned it more closely, turning it over in her hand, and then, with a sudden sense of foreboding, she perceived that the stamp was an Indian one. The writing was unknown to her, but she knew that this was news of Godfrey at last.
Louise was alone in her room. Eugénie had driven out somewhere with her children, and the Duke was away from home. Whatever news the letter contained, she would have to bear it alone. She hesitated a moment, glancing at the statuette of the Blessed Virgin on her prie-dieu, and murmuring a prayer; then she broke the seal and opened the letter. If Godfrey was returning to her, and this letter announced his arrival, he would find her prepared.
The letter was brief, and the signature that of a stranger.
‘Madam,—I have to perform the unpleasant duty of informing you that Mr Godfrey Wallace died at this place in September last. It was his last request that I should inform you of it. Some obstacles arose, together with a want of opportunity, which prevented me from carrying out until now this afflicting duty.
‘I am, madam, your most obedient servant,
‘H. ELGAN,
‘Clerk, East India Company,
‘Bombay.’
That was all. No word of explanation. No mention of the illness. Not even a short account of how he had lived in India, of his business, of how he had earned his bread. Simply that he had died there. Nothing more than that. Whether he had suffered much, endured great hardships, repented of his former sins and come finally to God, she would never know. All that remained now for her to do was to have Masses said for his soul, and pray that they would meet in Purgatory. She would wear widow’s weeds, of course, until the end of her days. She began to cry softly to herself, thinking of the terrible finality of his death. There had always been the hope, somewhere in the depths of her heart, that he would come back to her—changed, no doubt, altered perhaps sadly for the worse, a drunkard even, or an incurable invalid, but at any rate he would have been her husband and they could have made a life together.
She had pictured herself in an attitude of mercy, bending over his recumbent form, soothing his poor brow. He would have been entirely dependent on her. Now she had not even the consolation of his grave to visit; the weekly pilgrimage was denied her. The only crumb of comfort lay in the stranger’s words. ‘It was his last request that I should inform you of it.’ So he had not forgotten her. He had clung to her at the end. She wondered what she had been doing at the actual moment of his death. Last September. The date not given. There had been a fête in Lisbon on the fifteenth, and a great procession through the streets, the carriages decorated. Banners had waved and the people had thrown flowers. She had followed the procession in a carriage, too, in company with a Portuguese gentleman—quite respectable, of course—but how heartless and terrible if it had happened on the day that Godfrey had died. She could not bear to think of it. Mechanically she took up her other letter and opened it, her brother’s familiar handwriting awaking no chord of response in her heart. Her thoughts were all for her poor dead husband.
‘… And so we intend to name him George, after Ellen’s brother, Louis, after myself, and Palmella, as a mark of respect towards your amiable friend and protector.’ What in heaven’s name was this, then? She hastily re-read the opening phrases of her brother’s letter. ‘You will rejoice to hear, dearest Louise, that Ellen gave birth to a son yesterday, the sixth of March. She stood the ordeal well, and the child is strong and beautiful. I have already dedicated him to science. May he live up to our expectations. Ellen’s mother crossed over from England to be with her for the event, and is full of her first grandchild, whom she declares to be the image of myself. We have all three been discussing his future, and realise the importance of a string of initials before his name….’
Dear Ellen, and Louis-Mathurin; how pleased she was that their union had been blessed with a child, and how selfish of her to be so wrapped up in her own sorrow that she had read the letter without understanding the content.
George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier—how noble it sounded! The child would at least have a good start in life, with such remarkable names. The Duke would be gratified, no doubt, at the mark of attention paid to his family. He took such a kindly interest in all that concerned the Busson relatives. Louise wiped away the tears that she had shed for her husband, and, lighting the candles on her prie-dieu, she knelt down to offer a prayer for her young nephew.
Meanwhile the infant himself lay asleep in his cradle, blissfully unaware of the excitement he had caused, still wrapped, for all he knew, in that lovely pre-natal darkness to which every man, in his lonelier moments, wishes to return. The Bussons had an apartment on the first floor at No. 80 in the Champs Elysées, quite close to Mrs Clarke’s former lodging, and with Ellen’s allowance from her mother and Louis-Mathurin’s occasional contributions they managed to live, if not lavishly, at least in reasonable comfort.
Ellen was a good manager, and careful. The latter was extremely necessary, as only a few months of marriage proved to her that Louis-Mathurin had no more idea of saving than a child in arms. It was as though the money sense, given in full to some and only in moderation to others, was in him entirely lacking.
He would set forth in the morning from the apartment ‘to work’, as he termed it, in his laboratory, very sunny-natured and happy, singing at the top of his voice, and with fifty francs or so in his pocket. When he returned to his luncheon at noon he would still be in the same excellent spirits, but the fifty francs would be gone. ‘Give me some of the housekeeping money, my love,’ he would say to Ellen, with an affectionate kiss. ‘I will return it to you directly I can get my loan back from Dupont, but he is such a forgetful fellow.’
‘You should not lend money to your friends,’ Ellen would complain. ‘It is a very bad principle.’
‘I know, dear heart, but I never can refuse a loan. I am too good-natured; I cannot hurt a fellow’s feelings. Besides, when my invention is accepted, we need never worry about lending money again. The whole world can live on us.’
‘I don’t know that I want to share my home with all the world,’ Ellen would say.
‘The trouble is,’ her husband would sigh, ‘that I was born to have possessions. Had the Revolution never shaken France, and had my father been rewarded properly for his loyalty, we would be living in our château now, with acres of land belonging to us, and as many servants to wait upon us as you wished. You would do nothing all day but play the harp. Heigho! How pleasant it would be. The peasants would bob to us as we passed in our coach, and I would fling them gold. Charlotte, are you not sorry that I am not a great landlord?’
He would lean back in his chair and address the one servant who waited at table now. She would giggle, and hang her head. ‘Oh, monsieur…’ she would simper, fumbling with her apron. ‘I should make you housekeeper, Charlotte,’ Louis would declare magnificently, ‘and you would have the right to behead the inferior servants if they displeased you.’ Louis-Mathurin would spear his meat as a hunter spears his game, and the little maid would giggle again. Louis-Mathurin adored an audience. Ellen would frown and look displeased. She did not approve of chatting to servants. It did not pay to be familiar. One always regretted it in the long run.
‘How does your business go?’ she would say to Louis, to change the subject.
‘It does not go at all,’ he would answer cheerfully; ‘but, then, I am used to that. It would astonish me if it were otherwise. However, in a month or so I hope to tell a very different story. I met a man this morning—in fact, we had a little refreshment in a café—and it appears that he has an uncle who has a very influential friend who would be just the person to show a practical interest in my invention. I am meeting this man again to-morrow, and we shall discuss the project further.’
‘You spend so much of your morning in these cafés,’ Ellen would say, ‘that it is small wonder you never do any business.’
‘Ah, but that is just where you are mistaken,’ he would assure her. ‘More business is done in a café than ever is done in an office. Everyone knows that. In fact, I am so well pleased with my morning’s work that I propose to take a holiday this afternoon. Let us drive out to St Cloud.’
‘But, Louis-Mathurin, the expense—the hiring of the carriage?’
‘Pooh! my love, who cares for such things? A Busson is above such wretched considerations as money. Old père Jean at the corner will take us, and I will pay him at the end of the week.’
And she would shake her head at him for his extravagance, forgiving him in her heart because he smiled so sweetly at her, conducting her to the fiacre later as though she were a queen and the fiacre a golden coach. But, all the same, she could not but worry privately at his total want of responsibility, his childish casting aside till tomorrow of the cares of to-day.
When her son was born, she hoped that the status of fatherhood would steady him, make him think more seriously of the urgent necessity of earning money; but, though Louis-Mathurin appeared delighted with his son, fondled him, kissed him, and even sang him to sleep occasionally, he did not mend his casual, impecunious ways. Ellen would not admit to herself that she was disappointed in him. She was too proud and too reserved. But the lurking regret was hidden in her all the same, and suffered for its repression. He was like the grasshopper in La Fontaine’s fable, who sang and amused himself all the summer, and made no provision for the winter. Yet no one would have been more hurt and astonished than Louis had she attacked him for his ways. He believed he worked very hard as he played with his strange-smelling chemicals in his funny little laboratory. She had gone with him sometimes, and watched him, observed his air of concentration, his pale-blue eyes fixed in utter contentment on his bottles and his instruments, humming a song under his breath; and to her there was something pathetic and childlike in the intensity of his interest. It hurt her; she had to turn away her head.
‘If only he would earn settled money in some steady profession,’ she thought, ‘and could keep this chemistry as a hobby’; and she began to plan for the child she was expecting, determined that she would find in her son—for of course it would be a boy—all that she lacked in her husband.
She had the tiger quality from the first—the fierce affection of a mother who has suffered a certain disappointment as a wife, mingled with the rather primitive selfish pride of any female who gives birth.
Ellen was not a young girl when she married, and she was over thirty-six when her son was born, therefore the event seemed to her of even greater importance than it would had she been in her first youth, with child-bearing comparatively easy. She had never expected to marry, never believed she would become a mother, and the very act of producing a child appeared to her stupendous, a tribute to her own powers, and a really brilliant piece of work.
The boy was beautiful, too. No round shoulders here, no nut-cracker features, but the snub nose and the crop of curls she would like to have possessed herself. There had never been such a child, of course. He was not only ten degrees handsomer than other babies—she felt quite sorry for Madame Painé’s baby next door, such a plain, pasty-faced little thing, quite bald too—but he was much more advanced. He cut his teeth earlier; he sat up straighter; he smiled sooner, though the doctor declared this to be wind—very unfeeling of him, thought Ellen, as if she could not recognise her own child’s smile when she saw it. She was determined to lavish upon him all the affection and interest that her own mother had never lavished upon her. She would not spoil him—she would be far too careful for that—but she would see that he had every quality necessary for his future happiness.
She, as a child, had been left to the care of servants; she had been obliged to bring herself up. Not so her son. Already she began to think out his education, what books he would read, what languages he would study, so that at an early age he might be a paragon of culture and learning and courtesy, a brilliant example of what a mother could do for the child she had borne.
The baby appeared to possess his father’s sunny temperament, which was perhaps as well, as a sulky disposition would be difficult to work upon, but she could only trust that he had not also inherited his father’s weaker qualities—his lack of money-sense, for instance, and his carelessness, and his habit of getting into debt. It sounded all very well in theory to be impracticable and a dreamer, but it did not make for success in the world, as far as Ellen could see. It would be as well if the boy had some of her own determination.
Meanwhile her mother, who had returned to England, kept writing to her suggesting that she and Louis should pay her a visit, bringing the baby with them, and why not have the christening ceremony over there, for as George Clarke was to be a godfather nothing could be more suitable? The Bussons played with the idea for a year, and finally, in the April of 1835, when the child was thirteen months old, they crossed to England and stayed at Rotherfield, in Sussex, where Mrs Clarke had taken a house, and there George Louis Palmella was given his string of Christian names and made a child of God into the bargain. His Uncle George had just been promoted, and everyone agreed that Captain Clarke sounded very well, though his mother declared that in her day, when she had influence, he would have been a colonel long ago. He was due for foreign service again before long, and the problem of ‘what is to become of mother?’ would arise once more, to be anxiously discussed between the brother and sister.
‘Why not live over here with her?’ urged the soldier. ‘The country air would be extremely beneficial to the child, and you would have an English nurse. I may as well tell you that I haven’t much desire to see my nephew grow into a Frenchman.’
‘How can we live in England when Louis-Mathurin has his work in Paris?’ said Ellen impatiently.
‘But, my dear sister, I have no wish to hurt your feelings, and I have the utmost regard for Louis—only, what exactly is his work?’
‘He has his laboratory,’ replied the sister, a little put out by the direct question; ‘he has made several contributions to science—and—and he was working on a new invention just before we came here.’
‘That rocket-to-the-moon idea?’ persisted Captain Clarke. ‘I have not heard him mention that very lately.’
‘I believe he has been obliged to give that up for the time,’ said Ellen shortly. ‘There was some technical difficulty… and of course our problem is always the same: no capital, no backing behind any enterprise.’
‘Do you find you manage comfortably on the allowance mother makes you?’ he asked her.
Ellen flushed, and avoided the direct question in his eyes. ‘Sometimes it is a little difficult,’ she said. ‘Louis is a child in many ways; he does not seem to understand the value of money.’
‘I thought he understood it very well,’ said her brother drily. ‘Since you have been here he has borrowed twenty pounds off me.’
The moment he uttered his words he regretted them. He saw that the shock was severe to Ellen, but because of her loyalty to her husband she would not betray it. Only her mouth tightened and her eyes looked darker than usual.
‘I am sorry for that,’ she said quietly. ‘You shall have the money at the end of the month, when my allowance is due.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘I don’t want it returned. I can well spare it. I don’t wish to hurt your feelings, or say a word against Louis. But, after all, mother makes the allowance to you, and it is not inconsiderable, and even a fool can see that you don’t spend the money on yourself….’
‘The child makes a difference, of course,’ said Ellen, her back to the wall. ‘His clothes, and his food, all his little necessities. You as a bachelor can have no idea of the expense of a child.’
‘I am sorry, Ellen; but I have always been plain-spoken, as you know. Living quietly as you do, you should manage very well on your allowance. But when it comes to supporting your husband as well, that is another matter. However, do not let us talk of it again. It is embarrassing to both of us. If you are ever in want, my dear, write privately to me.’
Ellen said nothing. Her heart was too full. She turned with relief to the child, who came into the room at this moment, swaying unsteadily on his little feet in a first attempt at a walk. He blundered along without seeing her, looking very vague and exactly like his father. When she swooped upon him and covered him with kisses, he said, ‘Papa, Papa,’ and looked over her shoulder, which hurt her unreasonably. Louis-Mathurin came bursting into the room, waving a letter in his hand, in a tremendous state of excitement. ‘Palmella has been made Portuguese Ambassador in Brussels,’ he shouted. ‘He and the whole family are leaving Lisbon in June, when he goes to take up his appointment. What a splendid thing for him, and how delighted he must be. Here is a letter from Louise, full of their plans.’ He looked as happy as a schoolboy as he crossed the room to his wife. She forced a smile, thinking of that twenty pounds he had borrowed from George; but her discomfort was lost on him; he sat down by her side and began reading the letter aloud.
‘Brussels, Brussels, who’s talking about Brussels?’ said Mrs Clarke, wandering in from the garden, swinging an absurd chapeau de paysan on a velvet ribbon.
Since she had lived in Sussex she had become passionately rustic, and went about dressed like a Watteau shepherdess, much to the confusion of her family. ‘I dote on Brussels,’ she declared, forcing a sticky sweetmeat into her grandson’s mouth when his mother was not looking. ‘You remember we went there in 1818, Ellen; you passed your twenty-first birthday there, I do believe. Such charming people. Most hospitable. Always giving parties. I can’t think why we ever left. I rather think I lost money at a gambling-table and had nothing left to pay our lodging bill, and that brute Fladgate would not send my dividend in advance…. An absurd fellow called François de Burgh followed me everywhere.’
