“Look here,” Fairchild called suddenly. He had unswaddled a damp cloth from something and he now bent over his find. “Come here, Julius.” The Semitic man rose and joined him.
It was clay, yet damp, and from out its dull, dead grayness Mrs. Maurier looked at them. Her chins, harshly, and her flaccid jaw muscles with savage verisimilitude. Her eyes were caverns thumbed with two motions into the dead familiar astonishment of her face; and yet, behind them, somewhere within those empty sockets, behind all her familiar surprise, there was something else — something that exposed her face for the mask it was, and still more, a mask unaware. “Well, I’m damned,” Fairchild said slowly, staring at it. “I’ve known her for a year, and Gordon comes along after four days — Well, I’ll be damned,” he said again.
“I could have told you,” the Semitic man said. “But I wanted you to get it by yourself. I don’t see how you missed it; I don’t see how anyone with your faith in your fellow man could believe that anyone could be as silly as she, without reason.”
“An explanation for silliness?” Fairchild repeated. “Does her sort of silliness require explanation?”
“It shouts it,” the other answered. “Look how Gordon got it, right away.”
“That’s so,” Fairchild admitted. He gazed at the face again, then he looked at Gordon with envious admiration. “And you got it right away, didn’t you?”
Gordon was replenishing the glasses again. “He couldn’t have missed it,” the Semitic man repeated. “I don’t see how you missed it. You are reasonably keen about people — sooner or later.”
“Well, I guess I missed her,” Fairchild returned, and extended his tumbler. “But it’s the usual thing, ain’t it? Plantations and things? First family, and all that?”
“Something like that,” the Semitic man agreed. He returned to his chair and Fairchild sat again beside the water pitcher. “She’s a Northerner, herself. Married it. Her husband must have been pretty old when they married. That’s what explains her, I think.”
“What does? Being a Northerner, or marriage? Marriage starts and explains lots of things about us, just like singleness or widowhood does. And I guess the Ohio river can affect your destiny, too. But how does it explain her?”
“The story is that her people forced her to marry old Maurier. He had been overseer on a big place before the Civil War. He disappeared in ’63, and when the war was over he turned up again riding a horse with a Union Army cavalry saddle and a hundred thousand dollars in uncut Federal notes for a saddle blanket. Lord knows what the amount really was, or how he got it, but it was enough to establish him. Money. You can’t argue against money: you only protest.
“Everybody expected him to splurge about with his money: show up the penniless aristocracy, that sort of thing; work out some of the inhibitions he must have developed during his over-seer days. But he didn’t. Perhaps he’d got rid of his inhibitions during his sojourn at the war. Anyway, he failed to live up to character, so people decided that he was a moral coward, that he was off somewhere in a hole with his money, like a rat. And this was the general opinion until a rumor got out about several rather raw land deals in which he was assisted by a Jew named Julius Kauffman who was acquiring a fortune and an unsavory name during those years immediately following General Butler’s assumption of the local purple.
“And when the smoke finally cleared somewhat, he had more money than ever rumor could compute and he was the proprietor of that plantation on which he had once been a head servant, and within a decade he was landed gentry. I don’t doubt but that he had dug up some blueblood emigre ancestry. He was a small shrewd man, a cold and violent man; just the sort to have an unimpeachable genealogy. Humorless and shrewd, but I don’t doubt that he sat at times in the halls of his newly adopted fathers, and laughed.
“The story is that her father came to New Orleans on a business trip, with a blessing from Washington. She was young, then; probably a background of an exclusive school, and a social future, the taken-for-granted capital letter kind, but all somehow rather precarious — cabbage, and a footman to serve it; a salon in which they sat politely, surrounded by objects, and spoke good French: and bailiff’s men on the veranda and the butcher’s bill in the kitchen — gentility: evening clothes without fresh linen underneath. I imagine he — her father — was pretty near at the end of his rope. Some government appointment, I imaginev brought him south: hijacking privileges with official sanction, you know.
“The whole family seemed to have found our climate salubrious, though, what with hibiscus and mimosa on the lawn instead of bailiffs, and our dulcet airs after the rigors of New England; and she cut quite a figure among the jeunesse dorée of the nineties; fell in love with a young chap, penniless but real people, who led cotillions and went without gloves to send her flowers and glacé trifles from the rue Vendôme and sang to a guitar among the hibiscus and mimosa when stars were wont to rise. Old Maurier had made a bid, himself, in the meantime. Maurier was not yet accepted by the noblesse. But you can’t ignore money, you know: you can only protest. And tremble. It took my people to teach the world that. . And so—” The Semitic man drained his glass. He continued:
“You know how it is, how there comes a certain moment in the course of human events during which everything — public attention, circumstance, even destiny itself — is caught at the single possible instant, and the actions of certain people, for no reason at all, become of paramount interest and importance to the rest of the world? That’s how it was with these people. There were wagers laid; a famous gambler even made a book on it. And all the time she went about her affairs, her parties and routs and balls, behind that cold Dresden China mask of hers. She was quite beautiful then, they say. People always painting her, you know. Her face in every exhibition, her name a byword in the street and a toast at Antoine’s or the St. Charles. . But then, perhaps nothing went on behind that mask at all.”
“Of course there was,” said Fairchild quickly. “For the sake of the story, if nothing else.”
“Pride, anyway, I guess. She had that.” The Semitic man reached for the bottle. Gordon came and refilled his mug. “It must have been pretty hard for her, even if there was only pride to suffer. But women can stand anything—”
“And enjoy it,” Fairchild put in. “But go on.”
“That’s all. They were married in the Cathedral. She wasn’t a Catholic — Ireland had yet to migrate in any sizable quantities when her people established themselves in New England. That was another thing, mind you. And her horseless Lochinvar was present. Bets had been made that if he stayed away or passed the word, no one would attend at all. Maurier was still regarded — Well, imagine for yourself a situation like that: a tradition of ease unassailable and unshakable gone to pieces right under you, and out of the wreckage rising a man who once held your stirrup while you mounted. . Thirty years is barely the adolescence of bitterness, you know.
“I’d like to have seen her, coming out of the church afterward” They would have had a canopy leading from the door to the carriage: there must have been a canopy, and flowers, heavy ones — Lochinvar would have sent gardenias; and she, decked out in all the pagan trappings of innocence and her beautiful secret face beside that cold, violent man, graying now, but you have remarked how it takes the harlequinade of aristocracy to really reveal peasant blood, haven’t you? And her Lochinvar to wish her godspeed, watching her ankles as she got into the carriage.