by Ouida
“With the idea that you were doing your very utmost to make the worst of ’em, Charlie!” laughed Sabretasche. “I don’t know the volume — Heaven forfend! — but the title sounds to me sneaky, as if it wanted to get the sweets out of both, yet compromise itself with neither.
Your sketch of Lady Molyneux is as true to life as one of Leech’s; but certainly her child is about as unlike her as could possibly be imagined.”
“Oh, by George! yes,” assented Montressor, heartily; “Vy hasn’t one bit of nonsense about her.”
“And she’s a divine waltzer — turn her round in a nutshell.”
“And can’t she ride!”
“And her voice is perfection.”
“And — she can talk!” added Sabretasche. “I will call in Lowndes-square to-morrow. So the — th is ordered home? We shall see De Vigne again?”
“Unless he exchange to a regiment still on active service,” said Pigott.
“He won’t do that,” I answered. “I heard from him last Marseilles mail, and he said he intended to return overland. Poor fellow! what ages it is since we’ve seen him!”
“It is ten years, isn’t it?” said Sabretasche, setting down his champagne-glass with half a sigh. “He has had some sharp work out there. I hope it has done him good. I never wished to see a man look as he looked last time I saw him.”
“Where’s his rascally wife?” asked Montressor.
“The Trefusis?” said I, impatiently, “I’ll never give her his name, though the law may. She is at Paris, cut by all his set of course, living with the Fantyre, in a dashing hotel in the Champs Elysées, keeping a green and gold Chasseur six feet high, and giving soirées to a certain class of untitled English and titled French, who don’t care a fig for her story, and care a good deal for her suppers.”
“She calls herself Mrs. De Vigne, I think!”
“She is Mrs. De Vigne,” said Sabretasche, with that bitter sneer which occasionally passed over his features. “You forget the sanctity, solemnity, and beauty of the marriage tie, my dear Montressor. You know it is too ‘holy’ to be severed, either by reason, justice, or common sense.”
“Holy fiddlesticks, Colonel,” retorted Montressor, contemptuously; “the best law for that confounded woman would have been Lynch law; and if I’d had my way, I would have taken her out of church that morning and shot her straight away out of hand.”
“Too handsome to be shot, Fred.”
“She will not be so handsome in a few years; she will soon grow coarse,” said the Colonel, that most fastidious of female critics. “She is the full-blown dashing style to strike youngsters, but there is not a single charm that will last.”
“Are there in any of them? None last long with you, Colonel, I fancy?”
Sabretasche laughed gaily.
“To be sure not!
‘Therefore is love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.’
Don’t you admit the truth of that?”
Six weeks or so after this, I was dining with Sabretasche at his own house — one of his charming, exclusive little dinner parties. The other men had just left; and the Colonel and I were sitting before the inner drawingroom fire, with the Cid stretched on the rug between us.
“What a sin it is that such a union should be valid,” said Sabretasche, talking of De Vigne. “I think I hear that wretched woman tell me, with her cold, triumphant smile, ‘Colonel Sabretasche, my father’s name was Trefusis, my mother’s name was Davis — one was a gentleman, the other a beggar-girl. I have as much, or as little, right to the one as to the other. Let your friend sue for a divorce, the law will not give it him.”
“Too true; the law will not Our divorce law is—”
“An inefficient, insufficient, cruel farce!” said Sabretasche, more energetically than I had ever heard him say anything in his life. “In an infatuated hour a man saddles himself with a she-devil like the Trefusis — a liar, a drunkard, a mad woman: what redress is there for him? None. All his life through he must drag on the same clog; fettering all his energies, crushing out all his hopes, chaining down his very life, festering at his very heart-strings. There, at his hearth, must sit the embodied curse — there, in his home, it must dwell — there, at his side, it must be, till God release him from it!”
I looked up at him in surprise, it was very unusual to see him so warm about anything. He took up his hookah again; yawned, and pointed to a marble statuette of his own chipping, on which the firelight was gleaming.
“Look at that little Venus Anadyomene, Arthur, with the firelight shining on her; quite Rembrandtesque, isn’t it? I’ll paint it so to-morrow.”
“Do, and give the picture to Violet Molyneux. But if you divorce for insanity, every husband sick of his wife can get a certificate of lunacy against her? If for drunkenness, what woman will be safe from having drams innumerable sworn to her? If for incompatibility of temper, after every little temporary quarrel, scores would fly to the divorce courts, and be heartily sorry for it after? Come, how would you redress it?”
“My dear fellow,” said Sabretasche, languidly, “I’m not in parliament I’m much too idle a man. You talk like a sage. I only feel — for poor De Vigne.”
“You don’t feel more for him than I, Colonel — the Jezebel of a woman! That such an union should be legal, is a disgrace. At the same time, divorce seems to me, of all the niceties of legislature, the most ticklish and unsatisfactory to adjust. If you were to shut the door on divorce, there is an evil unbearable; if you open it too wide, almost as much harm may accrue!”
“My dear Chevasney, you talk like a paterfamilias, a Solon of seventy, a moral machine without blood, or bones, or feelings,” said Sabretasche, impatiently. “I don’t care a straw for theories; I look at facts. Put yourself in the position, Arthur, and then sit in judgment. I take it if every man had to do that, the laws would be at once wiser and more lenient; whereas now, on the contrary, it is your man who has the stolen pieces in his pocket, who cries out the most vehemently for the thief to be hanged, hoping to throw off suspicion! Put yourself in the position! Now you are young and easily swayed, you fall in love — as you phrase it — with some fine figure or pretty face. Down you go headlong, never stopping to consider whether her mind is attuned to yours, her tastes in common with yours, her character such as will go well with yours, in the long intercourse that takes so much to make it harmony, so little to make it discord. You marry her; the honeymoon is barely out, before the bandage is off your eyes. We will suppose you see your wife in her true colours — coarse, perhaps low-bred, with not a fibre of her moral nature that is attuned to yours, not a chord in heart or mind that is in harmony with yours. She revolts all your better tastes, she checks all your wanner feelings, she debases all your higher instincts; union with her, humbles you in your own eyes; contact and association with her, lower your tone of thought, and imperceptibly draw you down to her own level. Your home is one ceaseless scene of pitiful jangle, or of coarser violence. She makes your house a hell, she peoples your hearth with fiends; she and her children — hideous likenesses of herself — bear your own name, and make you loathe it. Perhaps you meet one the utter contrast of her, the fond ideal in your youth of what your wife was to be; one in whom you realise all you might have been, all you might have done! You look on Heaven, and devils hold you back. You thirst for a purer life, and fiends mock at you and will not let you reach it. What escape is there for you? None but the grave! Realise this — realise it — and you will feel how as a prisoner lies dying for the scent of the fresh air, while the free man sits contentedly within; so a man, happily married, or not married at all, looks on the question of divorce in a very different light to a man fettered thus, with the torments of both Prometheus and Tantalus, the vulture gnawing at his vitals, the lost joys mocking’ him out of reach!”
His indolence was gone, his impassiveness changed to vivid earnestness; his melancholy eyes darkened and dilated: — I shuddered involunt
arily.
“You draw a terrible picture, Colonel, and a true enough one, no doubt, as many men would witness if one could see into their homes and hearts. But what I want to know is, how to redress it? What judge could dive into the hidden mysteries of human life, the unuttered secrets of mutual love or mutual hate? What judge could say where the blame lay; or, seeing only the surface, and hearing only the outside, weigh the just points of fitness or unfitness? Who can decide between man and woman? Who, seeing the little of the inner existence that is ever revealed in a law court, could judge between them? We know how mischievously absurd the divorce mania was in Germany? How Dorothea Veit broke with the best of husbands, on the plea of ‘want of sympathy,’ and went over to Frederick Schlegel; and how the Sensitive doctrine of which Schleiermacher was inaugurator, made it only necessary to be tied, to feel the want of being ‘sympathetically matched,’ and being untied again. Men would marry then as carelessly as they flirt now, and would, as soon as a pretty face had grown stale to their eye, find out that she was a vixen, a virago, addicted to gin, or anything that suited their purpose, though she might really have every virtue under heaven. Don’t you think that it is impossible, as long as human nature is so changeable, and shortsighted, or marriage numbered among our social institutions at all, to trim between too much liberty in it and too little?”
“Hush, hush, my good Arthur!” cried the Colonel, with a gesture of deprecation; “pray keep all that for the benches of St. Stephen’s some twenty years hence, it is far too chill, sage, and rational for me to appreciate it. I prefer feeling to reasoning — always have done. Possibly, the evils might accrue that you prophesy; but that does not at all disprove what I say, that the marriage fetters are at times the heaviest handcuffs men can wear; heavier than those which chain the galley-slave to his oar, for he has committed crime to justify his punishment, whereas a man tricked into marriage by an artful intrigante, or hurried into it by a mad fancy, has done no harm to any one — except himself! If you have such a taste for reason, listen to what John Milton — that grave, calm Puritan and philosophic Republican, the last man in the universe to let his passions run away with him — says on the score.” He stretched out his hand to a stand of books near him, and took out a Tetrachordon, bound, as all his books were, in cream-coloured vellum.
“Hear what John Milton says:— ‘Him I hold more in the way to perfection who foregoes an impious, ungodly, and discordant wedlock, to live according to peace, and love, and God’s institution, in a fitter choice; than he who debars himself the happy experience of all godly, which is peaceful conversation in his family, to live a contentious and unchristian life not to be avoided; in temptations not to be lived in; only for the false keeping of a most unreal nullity, a marriage that hath no affinity with God’s intentions, a daring phantasm, a mere toy of terror; awing weak senses, to the lamentable superstition of ruining themselves: the remedy whereof God in his law vouchsafes us; which, not to dare use, he warranting, is not our perfection, but is our infirmity, our little faith, our timorous and low conceit of charity; and in them, who force us to it, is their masking pride, and vanity, to seem holier and more circumspect than God.’ What do you say now? Can you deny the justice, the wisdom, the wide charity and reason of his arguments?
It is true he was unhappy with his wife, but he was a man to speak, not from passion, but from conviction. Milton was made of that stern stuff that would have you cut off your right hand if it offended you. In Rome he would have been a Virginius, a Cincinnatus; in the early Christians’ days, he would have died with Stephen, endured with Paul. He is not a man like myself, who do no earthly good that I know of, who am swayed by impulse, imagination, passion — a hundred thousand things, who have never checked a wish or denied a desire. Milton is one of your saints and heroes, yet even he has the compassionate wisdom to see that divorce would save many a man, whom an unfit union drives headlong to his ruin. He knows that it is cowardice and hypocrisy, and, as he says, a wish to seem holier and more circumspect than God, which makes your precisians forbid what nature and reason alike demand, and to which, if the Church and the Law forbade freedom ever so, men would find some means to pioneer their own way. You may cage an eagle out of the sunlight, but the bird will find some road to life, and light, and liberty; or die beating his wings in hopeless effort. — Look there! Good Heavens!”
I sprang up; he rose very quickly for his usual indolent movements. In the doorway stood De Vigne, and we grasped his hands silently, none of us speaking. The memory of that last scene in the chapel at his fatal Marriage Altar, was strong upon us all.
Then Sabretasche put his hand on his shoulder, pushed him gently into an arm-chair before the fire, and said, softly, as a man speaks to a woman, “Dear old fellow! there is no need for us to say welcome home!”
De Vigne looked up with something of his old smile, though it faded instantly.
“No need, indeed; and don’t say it I know you are both glad to see me, and let us forget that we have ever been separated. Arthur, old boy, if it wouldn’t sound an insult, I should tell you you were grown; and as for you, Colonel, you are not a whit altered; it is my belief you wouldn’t change if you lived as long as Sue’s Wandering Jew! They told me at the barracks, Arthur was dining with you, and so I came on straight. My luggage is still in the Fera, but I brought up some cheroots. Try them, both of you.”
We saw that he wished to sweep away the past, and avoid all allusion to his own fate; and we fell in with his humour. Smoking round the fire, we tried to ignore every painful subject; but as I looked at him, I found it hard not to utter aloud my curse on the woman who had sent him out into exile.
Ten long years had not passed without leaving their stamp upon him. His face had lost the glow, the bright eagerness, the rounded outline of his earlier youth. Pale he had always been, but now the pallor was that of marble, as if the hot young blood surging through his veins had been suddenly frozen; as when the first breath of winter checks the free, warm, vehement waters in their course, and chills them into ice. It was still the face of a man of wayward will, and strong passions, but of waywardness which had cost him dear, and of passions that were chained down perhaps for ever.
“You have seen good service out there, De Vigne,” begun Sabretasche, to lighten the gloom which was stealing upon us. “On my word we feel quite proud of you! What a lion you have been, old fellow.”
De Vigne smiled.
“I looked a lion because I was among puppy dogs! Yes, I saw good service, not so much, though, as I should have liked. Some of it was pretty sharp work, but we dawdled a whole year away at that miserable Calcutta court; if it had not been for pig-sticking I should never have borne it at all, but I got no end of spears. Then we went up to a hill station, where there was nobody but an old judge, and a missionary or two, who had been bankrupt shoemakers, and taken to dispensing Grace, as a means of getting a few shillings from those discerning Christians who sent them out, firmly crediting their assurances that they felt ‘specially called.’ There the hill deer, and the ortolans, and a tiger or two, kept us going; and then we were ordered off to have a shy at the mountain rebels. They fought magnificently, I must say. Ah! by Jove!” cried De Vigne, his eyes lighting up, “there at last I really lived. The constant danger, the ceaseless vigilance, the free life, the sharp service, roused me up, and gave me a zest for existence which I thought I had lost for ever.”
“Nonsense, nonsense!” cried the Colonel. “You will have zest enough in it again by-and-by. No man on the sunny side of forty has lost what he may not regain.”
“Except where one false step has murdered pride and ruined honour!” said De Vigne between his teeth. “Well, Sabretasche, what have you been doing all these years? Flirting, buying pictures and painting them, setting the fashion, and criticizing new singers, as usual, I suppose.”
“Don’t talk of the years!” cried Sabretasche, lifting his eyebrows. “If I see to-morrow I shall be forty-five. It is disagreeable to grow o
ld; one begins to doubt one’s attractions!”
“You are young enough! — and yet, I don’t know; it is a popular fallacy that time counts by years. One is old according to the style of one’s life, not the length of it.”
“I heard Violet Molyneux tell you last night, Colonel, that you were in the first prime of manhood. So take comfort,” said I.
He smiled. “Poor little fool!” he muttered, under his moustaches.
“Violet Molyneux — who is she?” asked De Vigne. “That’s a new name to me. Is she a daughter of Jockey Jack, as we used to call him?”
“Yes,” I answered; “and a lovely creature. She’s a fresh beauty, and a new love for Sabretasche, who worships him most devoutly, especially since she came to his studio this morning and saw his last painting of Esmeralda, and Djali.”
“Don’t crack me up, Arthur,” said Sabretasche, rather impatiently. “Jockey Jack has a daughter who knows how to talk, and sings well enough to please me (two especial miracles, as you can fancy, my dear De Vigne); but, certainly, both her tongue and her thorax do their business unusually well, and she is very lovely to boot. What have I been doing, did you say? Leading just the same life I have led for the last twenty years. Making love to scores of women, wasting my time over marble and canvas, heading a Hyde Park campaign, or directing a Richmond fête! Caramba! one gets tired of it.”
“Why lead it, then?”