by Ouida
“You’ve the secret, then, Colonel,” said I, laughing, “for you get a whole conservatory of the most delicious under the sun, and not a thorn, I’d bet, among them?”
“Or, at all events, my skin is hard enough not to be pricked,” smiled Sabretasche. “I think many men begin life, like the sand on the top of a drum, which obeys every undulation of the air from the notes of a violin near; they are sensitive and susceptible, shrinking at wrong or injury, easily moved, quickly touched. As years go on, the same men are like the same sand when it has been pressed, and hardened, and burnt in fusion heat, and exposed to frosty air, and made into polished, impenetrable glass, on which you can make no impression, off whose icy surface everything glides away, and which it is impossible to cut with the hardest and keenest of knives. The sand is the same sand; it is the treatment it has met with that has changed it. How I do prose to you, Arthur! — and of all the ills, a man has least right to inflict on another, are his own theories or ideas! Fill your glass, my boy, and pass me those macaroons. How can those poor creatures live who don’t know of the Marcobrunnen and Macaroons of existence? It is a good thing to have money, isn’t it? It not only buys us friends, but it buys us what is of infinitely more value — all the pleasant little agréments of life. I would not keep in the world at all if I did not lie on rose-leaves!”
Wherewith the Colonel nestled himself more comfortably into his arm-chair, laid his head on the cushions, closed his eyes, and smoked away at his perfumed hookah, the most fragrant and delicate, that ever came out of Persia.
On the 31st of December, Sabretasche and De Vigne, Curly and I (Curly had got his commission in the Cold-streams, and was the prettiest, daintiest, most flattered, and most flirted with young Guardsman of his time), went down by the express, through the snow-whitened fields and hedges, to Vigne, where, contrary to custom, its master was to take his bride on the first morning of the New Year. It was to be a very gay wedding. He, always liberal to excess, now perfectly lavish in his gifts, had followed the French fashion, he said, and given her a corbeille fit for a princess of Blood Royal, which the Trefusis, having no delicacy of appropriation, accepted as a right. There were to be twelve bridesmaids, not the quite exclusive, and ultra high-bred, young ladies who would have followed Adelina or Blanche Ferrers, but still very stylish-looking girls, acquaintances of the Trefusis. There were to be such a breakfast and such rejoicings, as had never before been seen, even at that proverbially magnificent place. Such a wedding was entirely contrary to De Vigne’s taste and ideas, but the more others had chosen to run down the Trefusis, the more did he delight to honour her, and therefore he had asked almost everybody he knew, and almost everybody went; for all who knew him wished him well, except his aunt and her daughters the Ladies Ferrers. They went because, else, the world might have said that they were disappointed he had not married Blanche; but very far from wishing him well, I think they fervently hoped he might repent his hasty step in sack-cloth and ashes, and their costly wedding presents were much like Judas’s kisses. Wedding presents singularly often are! As she writes the delicately mauve-tinted congratulatory note, wishing dearest Adeliza every joy that earth can give, and assuring her she is the very beau ideal of a perfect wife, is not Madame ten to one saying to her elder daughter, “How strange it is that Fitz should have been taken in — such a bold, flirty girl, and nothing pretty in her, to my taste?” And as we shake Fitz’s hand at our Club, telling him he is the luckiest dog going to have such a pretty girl, and such a lot of money by one coup, are we not fifty to one thinking, “Poor wretch! he’s glad of the tin, I suppose, to keep him out of the Queen’s Bench? But, by George; though I am hard up, I wouldn’t take one of those confounded Peyton women if I knew it! Won’t she just check him nicely, with her chequebook and her consols?”
One could hardly wonder that if the Trefusis had been proved a perfect Messalina or Frédégonde, no man in love with her would have given her up as she sat that last evening of the Old Year on one of the low couches beside the drawing-room fire at Vigne, looking with the ruddy glow of the fire-gleams upon her like one of Rubens’, or Guido’s, dark, glowing, voluptuous goddesses or sibyls. De Vigne was leaning over her with eyes for none but her. His mother sat opposite them both, delicate, graceful, fragile, with her diaphanous hands, and fair pure profile, and rich, soft, black lace falling in folds around her, her eyes yearningly fixed upon her son; while just behind her, playing écarté with Curly, who was devotedly fond of that little dangerous French game, was old Lady Fantyre, with her keen, wicked eye, and her rouged, withered cheek, and her fan and feathers, flowers and jewels, and her dress — décolletée at seventy-six!
“Look at De Vigne!” said Sabretasche to me. “His desires on the eve of fulfilment, he imagines his happiness will be also. How he bends over that chair, and looks down into her eyes, as if all his heaven hung there! Twelve months hence he will wish to God he had never looked upon her face.”
“Good Heavens, Colonel!” I cried involuntarily, “what evil, or horror, do you know of her?”
“None of her, personally,” said Sabretasche, with a surprised smile. “But is she not a woman; and is not De Vigne, poor fellow, marrying too early? With such premise my prophecy requires no diviner’s art to make it a very safe one. As great a contrast as that rouged, atrociously-dressed, abominable old orange-woman is to his own charming and graceful mother, will be De Vigne’s real future to his imaginary one. However, he is probably in Socrates’ predicament, whether he take a wife or not, either way he will repent; and he must be satisfied; he will have the handsomest woman in England! Few men have as much as that!”
“Ladies ought to hate you, sir,” said I, “instead of loving you as idolatrously as they do; for you certainly are their bitterest enemy.”
“Not I,” laughed Sabreta^che. “I am very fond of them, except when they try and hook my favourite friends, and then I would say to them, as Thales said to his mother, that in their youth men are too young to be fettered, and after their youth they are too old. I am sorry for De Vigne — very sorry; he is doing what in a little time, and for all his life through, he will long to undo. But he must have his own way; and perhaps, after all, as Emerson says, marriage may be an open question, as it is alleged from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution want to get out, and such as are out want to get in! Marriage is like a mirage: all the beauty it possesses lies in keeping at a distance from it.”
He moved away with that light laugh which always perplexed you as to whether he meant what he said in mockery or earnest, and began to arrange the pieces for a game at chess with one of the ladies. He was very right. His wife would be the woman of all others, from whom, in maturer years, De Vigne would be most certain to revolt. A man’s later loves, are sure to be widely distinct in style from his earlier. In his youth, he only asks for what charms his eyes and senses; in manhood — if he be a man of intellect at all — he will go further, and require interest for his mind, and response for his heart.
The last hour of the Old Year chimed at once from the bell-tower of Vigne, the belfry of the old village-church, and’the countless clocks throughout the house; as a little gold Bayadère on the mantel-piece struck the twelve strokes slowly and musically on her tambourine. Lady Flora, in her own boudoir, heard it with passionate tears, and on her knees, prayed for her son’s new future which this New Year heralded. De Vigne, alone in the library with his betrothed, heard it, and pressed his lips to hers, with words of rapturous delight, to welcome this New Year coming to them both. Sabretasche heard it as he leant over the chair of a lovely married woman, flirting à outrance, and bent backward to me as I passed him: “There goes the death-knell! The last day of freedom is over. Go and put on sackcloth and ashes, Arthur.”
The Colonel’s words weighed curiously upon me as I rose and dressed on the morning of New Year’s-day. I, a young fellow, who looked on life and all its chances as gaily as on a game at cricket, who should have come to this we
dding as I had gone to a dozen others, only to enjoy myself, drink the Aï and Sillery, and flirt with all the bridesmaids, dressed with almost as dead a chill upon me, I could not have told why, as if I had come to De Vigne’s funeral rather than to his marriage. There seemed little reason for regret, however, as I met him that morning coming out of his room, and held out his hand with his sunny smile. I wished him joy in very few words — I wished it him too well to be able to get up an eloquent or studied speech.
“Thank you, dear Arthur,” he answered, turning his door-handle with a joyous, light-hearted laugh; “I am sure all the fairies would come and bless my marriage if you’d anything to do with the ordering of them. Come in, old fellow, and have a cigar — my last bachelor smoke — it will keep me quiet till she is out of her maid’s hands. Faugh! how I hate the folly of wedding ceremonial! The idea of dressing up Love in white favours, and giving him bridecake!”
He smoked because, my dear young ladies, men accustomed to the horrid weed, can’t do without it, even on their wedding-day; but quiet he was not: he had at all times more of the tornado in him, than anything like the Colonel’s equable calm; and he was restless and excitable, and happy as only a man in the same cloudless and eager youth, with the same fearless and vehement passion, can ever be. He soon threw down his cigar, for a servant came to tell him that his mother would like to see him in her own room; and De Vigne, who had been ceaselessly darting glances at the clock, which, I dare say, seemed to him to crawl on its way, went out, joyous as Romeo’s,
Come what sorrow may
It cannot countervail this interchange of joy.
He never thought of Friar Laurence’s prophetic reply:
These violent delights have violent ends:
And in their triumph die; like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume!
By noon we were all ready.
In the dining-hall, with its bronzes and its deer-heads, and the regimental colours of his father’s regiment looped up between the two end windows with his helmet, sabre, and gloves above them, the breakfast, sumptuous enough to have done for St. James’s or the Tuileries, was set out, with its gold plate, its hot-house flowers, and its thousand delicacies; and in the private Chapel the wedding party was assembled, with the sun streaming brightly in, through the coloured light of the stained windows. It was a very brilliant gathering. There were the Marchioness of Malachite and the Ladies Ferrers, looking bored to the last extreme, and appearing to consider it too great an honour for the mosaic pavement to have the glory of bearing their footsteps. There were other dainty ladies of rank, friends of Lady Flora’s. There were the dozen bridesmaids in their gauzy dresses and their wreaths of holly or of forget-me-not; there were hosts of men, chiefly military, whose morning mufti threw in just enough shade among the bright dresses, as brilliant by themselves as a bouquet of exotics. There were, strangely enough, close together, bizarre, quick-eyed, queer old Lady Fantyre, and soft, fragile Lady Flora; and, there was De Vigne, standing near his mother, chatting and laughing with Sabretasche, but all his senses alive, to catch the first sound which should tell him, of the advent of his bride.
How well I can see him now, as if it were but yesterday, standing on the altar-steps — where his ancestors, through long ages past, had wedded noble gentlewomen and fair patrician girls from the best and bravest Houses in the land — I can see him now, standing erect, his head up, one hand in the breast of his waistcoat, his eyes, dark as night, brilliant and luminous with eagerness; a flush of excitement and anticipation on his face; not a shade, not a fear, seeming to rest upon him! His mother’s eyes were riveted on him, with a mournful tenderness, she could not, or did not care to conceal: her lips quivered; she looked at me, and shook her head. That wedding party was very brilliant, but there was a strange, dull gloom over it which everyone felt, yet none could explain; and little of the joyous lightheartedness which make “marriage-bells” proverbial for mirth and gaiety.
There was a very low but an irrepressible murmur of applause, as his bride swept silently up the aisle. Never had we seen her look so handsome. Her voluptuous form was shrouded in the shower of lace that fell around her, and about her, from her head, till it trailed behind her on the ground. The glowing damask-rose hue of her cheeks, not one whit the paler this morning, and the splendid brilliance of her eyes, were enhanced, not hidden, by the filmy floating veil. A wreath of orange-flowers, of course, was woven in her hair, and a ceinture of diamonds, worthy an imperial trousseau — one of the gifts of her lavish and bewitched lover — were jewels fitted to her. She was matchless as a dream of Rubens’; but I looked in vain, as her eyes rested on De Yigne’s, for one saving shadow of love, joy, natural emotion, tremulous feeling, to denote that he was not utterly thrown away; and only wedded to a priceless statue of responseless marble!
She passed up to the altar with her retinue of bridesmaids, in their snowy dresses and bright wreaths, into the light streaming from the painted windows. She stood beside him; and the service began; one of the Ferrers family, the Bishop of Southdown, read the few words which linked them for life with the iron fetters of the Church. Everyone who caught the glad, firm, eager tone of De Vigne’s “I wil!” remembers it to this day — remembers with what trusting love, what unhesitating promptitude he took that vow for “better or worse!” Prophetic words! which say, whatever ill may come of that rash oath sworn, there will be no remedy for it; no help, no repentance that will be of any avail; no furnace strong enough to unsolder the chains they forge for ever!
De Vigne passed the ring over her finger; they knelt down, and the priest stretched his hands over them, and forbade those whom God had joined together any Man to put asunder. And they rose — husband and wife.
They came down the altar steps, his face radiant, in its frank joy, its noble pride, looking down upon her with his brilliant eyes, now soft and gleaming; while she looked straight before her, her lips slightly parted with a smile, probably of triumph and of exultation that an interloper, an adventuress, was now the wife of the last of a haughty House, whose pride throughout lengthened centuries had ever been that all its men were brave and all its women chaste; that not a taint rested on its name, not a stain upon its blood, not a spot upon its shield.
We passed down the chapel into the vestry, he gazing down on her with all the eagerness of passion. But he had no answering glance of love. The day of acting, because the need for acting was over now. The register was open; he took the quill, and dashed down hastily his old ancestral name, passing it into her hand with fondly whispered words. She took it, threw back her veil, and wrote —
“LUCY TREFUSIS — OR — DAVIS.”
De Vigne was bending fondly over her, his lips touching her hair, with its virginal crown, as she wrote. With one great cry he suddenly sprang up, as men will do upon a battle-field when struck with their death-wound. Seizing her hands in his, he held her away from him, reading her face line by line, feature by feature, with the dim horror of a man in some vague dream of hideous agony. And she smiled up in his face; the smile of a fiend.
“Granville de Vigne, do you know me now?”
Aye! he knew her now. He still held her at arms’ length, staring down upon her, the truth in all its vile horror, its abhorred shame, eating gradually into his very life; seeming as it were to turn his warm blood to ice, and chill his very heart to stone. She laughed — a mocking derisive laugh, which broke strangely, coarsely, brutally, on the dead silence round them.
“Yes! Granville, yes my young lover, I am your Wife, of your own act, your own will. Do you remember the poor mistress you mocked at? Do you remember the summer day when you laughed at my vengeance? Do you remember, my husband? Before all your titled crowd, I take my revenge, that it may be the more complete. I would not wait for it, nor spare you one iota of your shame, nor let you keep it secret hidden in your heart! I renounce my own ambitions to humble you lower still. They are hearing us! All your haughty relatives, your fastidious friends,
who have tried so long to stop you in your mad passion. They listen to me! They see you dishonoured for ever in your eyes and theirs! They will go and tell the world, what you would never have told it, that the last of his Race has given his home, his honour, his mother’s place,.his father’s name — that proud name which only yesterday you told me no disgrace had ever touched, no bad blood ever borne! — to the despised love of his boyhood, his own cast-off low-born toy; a beggar’s child; a — —”
“PEACE!”
At that single word, hoarse as a death-cry in its unutterable agony, she was silenced perforce. The blood had left his lips, and cheeks, a blue and ghastly hue; and settled on his forehead in a dark and crimson stain — like the stain on his own honour. His eyes were set and fixed, as in some mortal torture, wide-open and vacant in their pain; his teeth were clenched as men clench them in their last struggle; and his hand was pressed upon his heart, as he gasped for breath, like one suffocated by a deadly grip that throttles him. In the horror of the moment, all round him were dumb and paralysed; even she, in her rancorous hate, paused, awe-stricken at the ruin she had wrought, silent before the anguish, shame, and loathing that convulsed his face, as he flung her from him with a wild shrill laugh. “Peace! woman — devil! or I shall have your life!”... But his mother threw herself before him. “Oh, God! he is mad! Stay, for my sake, stay!”
He strained her to his heart with convulsive force:
“Let me go — let me go!”
None could attempt to arrest him. He pushed his way through the crowd, hurling them aside, like a madman, and we heard the rapid rush of carriage-wheels as they rolled away — none knew where.