Her Rival

Author Unknown

A young lady was sauntering along the quay, by the side of the Seine, pausing at every one of the shelves of old books that lined the parapets, and now and then asking the price of some moth-eaten, battered volume from the equally moth-eaten and battered proprietor, meditating over his pipe, under the budding trees. She was very prettily and very daintily dressed, but her face and carriage showed so much quiet resolution and self-reliance that the boldest idlers of the boulevards would have been deterred from annoying her even in cynical Paris, and on the very boundary of the Latin Quarter. She was deep in a quaint little copy of La Bruyere, some sixty years old, which was offered at half a franc, when she heard a burst of light laughter not far from her ear, so strangely mingled of sweetness and a kind of haunting mockery that she involuntarily raised her eyes.

Approaching her were a young man and a girl, perhaps two or three years older than herself, and as near the perfection of physical beauty as it was possible for a woman to be, Miss De Forest acknowledged to herself with a strange pang. She had a profusion of pale chestnut hair, a skin of lilies and roses, large liquid eyes, a perfectly developed figure, and an undulating grace of motion which did not belong to the streets of Paris. She was perfectly well dressed; but while Miss De Forest, in her own toilet, displayed the happy medium between chic and dignity, characteristic of the demoiselle du meilleur monde of whatever nationality, the girl who suddenly confronted her with an impertinent glance had more the quality of chic than was strictly desirable. "She is not a lady," thought Miss De Forest: "a grisette, probably," and the jealousy pang deepened, for the man accompanying this girl—the man who had raised his hat without looking at her, while a faint color overspread his handsome features and clear skin—was the man of all others to Amy De Forest. She had loved Arthur Duncan for more than a year, had watched the ebb and flow of his genius, had encouraged him to new effort in his desponding hours, and shared with him the pleasure of his success. There had grown up between them a comradeship which, on her side, had ripened into something deeper, and on his had led to the thousand subtle marks of preference that may mean nothing or anything. And what, in other men, meant nothing seemed in Arthur Duncan to mean everything, so much so that Amy De Forest, clever, self-poised girl that she was, had come to believe in the absolute predominance in the scheme of her future life of this one figure. Only yesterday evening they had sat long together in the embrasure of the wide window that looked upon the gardens of the Luxembourg while the lamps sprang into light through the dusk; and when he went away, pleading an engagement in a friend's studio, he had lifted her hands to his lips in the darkness, and called her his better angel.

The girl bit her lips and opened the La Bruyere again—the bitter, healthy draught of the wit's cynicism acted upon her as a tonic, and kept back the starting tears. The lives of her men friends outside her mother's drawing room did not concern her, she thought; but it was hard that Arthur with his talk of aspiration toward an ideal, and the elevation of art above sordid realism, should find his inspiration in the soul of a grisette. And yet she could not blame him; the girl was beautiful—like a white rounded waterlily with dewy petals. Perhaps if she herself was a man—. She closed the book abruptly and paid the old bouquiniste for it, and then turned up a long avenue that leads past the Pantheon to the gardens of the Luxembourg. She liked those gardens better than the stately alleys of the Tuilleries. There was more of the flavor of old Paris of De Musset and Balzac. She liked the thread-bare students with their books, the knots of sewing-girls, the bourgeoise mothers and nurses, with the children playing around them; the old men with red ribbons in the button-holes of their rusty broadcloth coats.

The spring wind swept down the avenues, scented with flower odors from the market of St. Sulpice. Miss De Forest wandered on to where the great fountain stands, half dried, with the water shallow over the rock-work of its basin, and green wet beards dripping about the Tritons and Neptunes, and ivy throwing its arms out from the crevices of their shapes, and overhead, new leafing trees casting a tender twilight upon the quiet place. The voices of children came from the main avenue. Miss De Forest seated herself on the edge of the basin, and looked into the shallow water, yellow with the dead leaves in its bed. The reflection of her own face came back to her framed in the shadow boughs.

There had been times when its bright blue eyes and delicate outlines had seemed to her to fill all requirements of beauty, but now, darkened by the decaying leaves and with the memory of the splendid creature she had just seen rising before her, it seemed quite impossible that any man could ever regard her as beautiful.

"Pure physical beauty is best worth having," she thought with a sigh. And then she thought many things that a girl might think under the circumstances, but that poets set down in allegory—the world old problem of the two women struggling for authority over the soul of the one man, as old as history and legend—Tannhauser bound in the chains of Venus while his chaste Elizabeth awaited his return. All men solve it for themselves, and all women in one way or another bide the issue of it.

Miss De Forest fell to studying her daintily gloved little hands as they lay on her lap, and especially the place where, last night, Arthur Duncan's lips had rested. A shadow came between herself and the sunlight beyond the trees, and, glancing up, she saw before her the man she loved. She looked up at him with a smile slightly touched with the cynicism learned from the small book in her lap.

"What charming weather, is it not? The air is full of spring sounds to-day. I have been walking a long distance."

"Alone, Miss De Forest?"

"Yes; why not? I much prefer walking alone unless I have a very agreeable companion, and you know I am not a demoiselle francaise, to be bound by les convenances."

Were these two people, talking the smallest of some talk, the two who had parted the night before with the look in their meeting eyes that makes speech useless? A shadow had come between them—the shadow of a woman with limpid eyes and a shape like a pictured goddess. There was a moment's silence. A bird sang in the tree overhead, a leaf whirled down into the translucent water, the drops trickled from the green beard of the water-god.

"When will you come and see my picture, as you promised?"

"Whenever mamma will go with me. You know I cannot go to your studio alone."

There was a distant, haughty ring in her voice that Arthur Duncan had never heard before.

"I am going home," she said, rising. "I am tired—I have walked too far. Will you not come in this evening?"

"Thanks; I am sorry, but I have made an engagement which I can scarcely break."

"Ah!"

"May I take you to your door? The streets are now full of students and all kinds of people."

"Thanks; I have no fear. I do not think any one will trouble me."

***

Sitting that evening in the tender spring twilight among the flowers of the balcony, high above the street, with a boy artist on a low stool at her feet, looking up at the clouds of golden hair that was like a halo above her white gown, Amy De Forest asked her young page if he had seen Arthur Duncan of late.

"No one sees much of him now. He's engaged, the fellows say, in some sort of frightful love affair with a Spanish girl who dances at the Bullier. She posed for the picture he has just finished. The fellows say it's an awfully clever thing—sure to get in the Salon next year. He calls it 'The Goddess of Morning.'"

Yes, that was the name he had told her. So it was her rival she had met yesterday—a paid dancer at a students' ball! But, certainly, Arthur Duncan's artistic instincts were not at fault, for the girl was an ideal incarnate of morning dew and rosy cloud and vaporous sunlight. It gave her pleasure, despite her humiliation, to realise the truth and poetry of his conception.

"You have never been to the Bullier, of course, Miss De Forest? But a great many American girls do go—under veils, and well protected."

"I confess that I had always wished to go. I've no doubt, if I were a man, I should be a very dissipated one."

"For a little while, perhaps," said the wise young man at her feet; "but you would soon get tired of it—it is so frightfully monotonous, even in Paris. But if Mrs. De Forest would go, a dozen of us would form a battalion of escort for you."

"Does this girl dance there to-night?"

"Yes; three times a week, and dances divinely."

"What is her name?"

"Augustine. These waifs of Paris never had any surname."

"I should like to see her."

The lamps were lighted, more artists came in, and the conversation turned on Arthur Duncan's picture, which those who had seen it pronounced worthy of Lefebre himself.

"Mrs. De Forest," said the boy-artist, Guy Rainsford, "Miss De Forest has just confided to me an overwhelming desire to see the ball at Bullier. Won't you gratify her and come to-night? No one will recognise you under your veils, and here are eight strong men ready to protect you. We are all going. Think of all the good American folk—clergyman and deacons—who go to the Mabille, and certainly this is no worse."

Mrs. De Forest demurred a little, but finally consented. She had peculiar theories of education, which had, perhaps, given Amy the truthful healthy outlook upon life which she possessed in a remarkable degree for so young a woman. If she had none of the illusions that dwarf the mental vision of more romantic girls, she had pure and generous instincts, unbiased by fear of prejudice. What corruption could there be in a tawdry students' ball for a girl who had weighed the problems of life in her own mind, and found the balance in favor of law and order?

It was a noisy and motley scene they encountered—gaudy and common from necessity—but with some artistic quality in its fibre, born of the city and its people. Guy Rainsford felt Miss De Forest shrink as she clung to his arm.

"What is the matter, Miss De Forest? Are you afraid?"

"No; only sorry—only sorry for these poor people. I don't think I have a taste for dissipation, after all, Mr. Rainsford."

"I thought the sight of a little would cure you. If women, in general, could see something of life, they would soon lose that morbid admiration for fastness which troubles many of them. Ah! there is Augustine, dancing ; she is quite different from the rest."

The party forced its way through the crowd to within a few feet of its edge. In the space left for the dancers stood a shapely girl, with her fair chestnut hair rolled high above her head, her perfect arms and shoulders bared and adorned with the sequins of the Palais Royal, a scarlet bodice and a short skirt of yellow satin, flounced with black lace. There was a touch of paint on her lashes, and an artificial depth of color on her lovely cheek. The castanets rattled as she curved her arms above her head and twinkled her light feet, swaying her little body to and fro, till with her large, pale head, she looked like the round lily-cup swaying on the water's surface, to which Miss De Forest had that morning compared her. In the front of of the crowd stood Arthur Duncan, towering head and shoulders above his neighbors, his handsome face aglow, his eyes brilliant with excitement and eagerly following every curve of the dancer's motion.

"He has forgotten that I exist," thought Amy De Forest, bitterly, and she trembled from head to foot. "Take me home, Mr. Rainsford. Speak to mamma, please—the air here is stifling. I am sorry to take you away, but I do not feel able to stand."

Guy Rainsford took Mrs. De Forest and her daughter home and then returned to the ball. One of the other men told him that Arthur Duncan looked strangely troubled when he was informed that Miss De Forest had gone away ill with the atmosphere of the place.

When the dance was over Arthur stole away to the door of the dancer's dressing-room, and waited to take her home to her rooms, high up in one of the old houses frowned upon by the Sorbonne. The exercise and the applause of the crowd had heightened her beauty and made her absolutely dazzling in her radiant health and youth. Arthur, looking upon her as she sat over supper, drinking the red wine, mixing her salad with the hearty abandon of the peasant nature she had brought from the Pyrenees, felt strangely the pathos of the stern necessity which cast this perfect creature, this type of the world's youth and morning, under the wheels of the great Parisian death cart. The chimes of the Sorbonne struck the four quarters—soft, sweet little voices. In all his after life, wherever he found a guitar, his hand instinctively struck the four, sweet, small notes, and before him rose a vision of a woman enveloped in floating fair hair, with white robes loose about her shoulders, and large eyes just touched with slumber like the great pale morning star.

Miss De Forest visited his studio the following day. Her eyes were heavy, and dark shadows played about them. She, too, had heard the Sorbonne chimes strike the hour. A strange fascination led her to wish to see the pictured face that had done her so much of harm. When she saw the vaporous, buoyant shape, with its rounded outlines defined by the floating drapery, the long, fair hair curving among the clouds, the lovely, sensuous face softened to the evanescence and dewiness of a dream, she knew that she could never hope to rival with this wonderful creature. She congratulated Mr. Duncan cordially on the success of his work, and went home with a breaking heart.

When Mr. Duncan, that evening, took his way to Augustine's rooms, he found her gone. She had moved away that morning, the concierge said, taking everything with her. On the barge table at which she had sat at supper the night before, he found a note addressed to himself, and written in that half-French, half-Spanish idiom which had been so effective, coming from her full, red lips, and was no less so miss-spelt on paper.

"Mon Ami: Your picture is finished. You have no further need of me. I am tired of the Quartier, the artists, the dancing, the bad cooking. I have moved across the Seine into a higher sphere, mon cher. Do not try to follow me; it would be useless. I do not care a sou for you. I have deceived you a thousand times, as you have the pauvre petite demoiselle we met yesterday. I asked you if she were your fiancee. You said 'No;' but last night I saw her at the Bullier. Under her veil the great tears were in her eyes. She loves you, mi amigo. I can read faces. Marry her; make her happy. You will never do it while I remain near you, for I have five times her power over you c'est pour ca quege m'envole!"

He read and re-read the letter, folded it and put it in his pocket, gave one last glance about the room. When the chimes struck the quarter-hour, he started as from a dream, and went down stairs out into the night. He strolled along the quay, looked down into the rushing water that seemed to bear the burdens of weary hearts down to their resting place in the sea. A great star hung over Notre Dame, lambent and steady. Which was it like, Augustine or Amy—poor little Amy, who had watched and waited for him, all unconscious of Augustine's existence? That chapter of his life was closed. He wondered whether it was love he had felt for Augustine or the sensuous admiration of the artistic temperament. She had been to him his goddess of morning, and every fibre of his soul had been filled with the divine impulse of creation—she was his picture, his life, himself. And yet it was always her voice that sounded in his ear spurring him on to effort and success. He passed her house and saw a gleam of white in the moonlight among the flowers of her balcony. He would go in and tell her all.

He found her alone, sitting on a low chair among the pansies and heliotrope and early roses. They talked upon indifferent subjects, more and more remote from the one nearest their hearts. At length Arthur said, "I heard you were at the Bullier last evening, Miss de Forest."

"Yes—Mr. Rainsford persuaded mamma to go. I was eager to see the original of your picture. She is certainly very beautiful. It was the same person I saw you with yesterday, I think."

"Yes, she has left the Quartier and gone no one knows whither. She—Amy, will you put an end to all my doubts and falterings? Will you let me tell you that I love you? Will you be my wife, as you have always been my better angel?"

"I had fancied—indeed, I had been told—that you were very much in love with your model. You can scarcely love two women at once."

"She has gone for ever."

"And I am the pis aller? Thanks."

"Amy, I never loved her—it was simply that she was the ideal of my picture, and the two were so as one in my mind that I could not separate them. You, yourself, are artist enough to understand that. And I had no means of knowing that you loved me. Only Augustine herself told it to me." And then he read her those portions of the dancer's note that concerned herself.

Amy pondered long over it. She did not believe the dancer's word, that she did not care for Arthur, that she was tired of the Quartier. She had seen the lovely eyes fill with light when they fell upon him in the dance rhythm. And afterwards she heard, in some careless studio talk, that "the Spanish girl had been mad about Duncan." It was strange to her to think that the white flower of self sacrifice could bud and bloom in the soul of a paid dancer at a students' ball.

She forgave him, for she loved him; and if she had been a man herself, she doubted if her life would have been blameless. And the shadow of the Spanish dancer passed out from their lives.

***

A year passed. Arthur's picture had been hung on the line in the saloon, and he had oftener than his wife knew sauntered by, wondering if the Spanish girl would not hear of its being there, and come to look at her own beauty. She had never been heard of in the Quartier since she left it. More than one offer had been made for "Goddess of Morning," but Amy would not let it go—it had been her wedding gift from her husband.

Spring has come again. The Luxembourg gardens are filled as before with gay crowds—the streets of Paris were beautiful with flowers. One morning a man in an official dress brought a folded paper to Arthur as he worked in his studio. On it was written, "A Spanish woman, very ill in the hospital, begs to see M. le peintre Duncan. Will Monsieur have the complaisance to come to the poor soul?" He wrote a note to his wife, telling her of the circumstances, and went across Paris with the messenger, stopping only a moment for a few white waterlilies that a boy thrust into his hand in the market.

They showed him into a ward where women lay ill of consumption in all its stages, and in a cot near the window, where the spring sunlight streamed over her, he found Augustine, still lovely with the loveliness of approaching spirithood, but no longer the joyous goddess of morning; only a pale, fragile, large-eyed woman, whose life was almost ended.

"I knew you would come—you were always good. I wanted to see you before I died. I loved you when I left you, mon ami, I would have died for you; but you was not for me—a model—a paid dancer. I was wild in dissipation after I left the Quartier. I tried hard to kill myself, and I have succeeded. With my first sign of illness came desertion and poverty. The day I was brought here I had gone to see your picture, and I fell down before it."

He had laid the waterlilies within reach of her thin fingers; she took them up and caressed the fleshy leaves.

"They are like those I used to gather in my childhood, in a little village among the mountains. I wish I had never come to Paris. But then, I should never have met you. She is beautiful and good, your young wife, but she cannot love you as I did. Tiene! I am better. Perhaps I may live—my hair has not changed; you used to kiss it once, kiss it now—only once—she will not care—she has had you for a whole year, and I have hungered and thirsted for one touch of your hand."

There was a rustle of drapery in the path between the bed, and Amy stood suddenly by her husband's side, in her black dress and her sweet young matronhood, with flowers, violets and heliotropes, and pale roses in her hand. The sick woman raised herself.

"You here—his wife!"

"It was you who gave him to me," said Amy, in the soft, low notes that the year's love had brought into her voice.

"You were jealous of me once, madame," said the dancer. "You have no need to fear now."

Amy laid the flowers in her hand. "You will get well again, and you will leave Paris and live in the country among the flowers."

"Among the flowers—yes, in my own country—up in the mountains, where the lilies grow in the stream; O, yes—I shall go back." Her eyes grew bright, her face radiant; for one instant she was again the Aurora of the Quartier. Suddenly she cried, "I am choking! Some water! My medicine," and the life stream rose to her lips.

Arthur Duncan caught her in his arms, and Amy knelt by the poor bed. The fast dulling eyes met Arthur's. He touched her hair with his lips. The beautiful hand fell back on his arm, the beautiful shoulders, that had once shown above the scarlet bodice in the dance measure, were clothed with a scarlet that scorched the white lilies on her breast, even as Paris had blighted the pure white lily of her life.

Warragul Guardian, Thursday 23 June 1881, supplement page 2