by Ouida
“Because none are any better. Do my scientific friends, who absorb their energies in classifying a fossil encrinite; my parliamentary friends, who concentrate their energies in bribing the Unwashed; my philanthropic friends, who hoax the public, and get hoaxed themselves, by every text-quoting thief who has the knack, and the tact, to touch up their weak points; my literary friends, who write to line portmanteaus; my celebrated friends, who toil to get heart-disease, and three damning lines in history — do these, any of them, enjoy themselves one wit the more; or fail to say with Solomon, ‘Vanity of vanities — all is vanity?’ Tell me so — show me so, and I will begin their life to-morrow. Our vocation is to amuse ourselves, and slay our fellow-creatures by ‘way of intermediate pastime; and it is as good a one, for all I can see, as any other.”
“To slay our fellow-creatures!” cried De Vigne. “Come, come, put it a little more gracefully. To fight like Britons — to die for our colours. Something a little more poetic and patriotic!”
“Same thing, my dear De Vigne: only the wording different!”
“You like the same life as the Cid, Colonel,” said I, smiling. “To eat daintily, sleep warmly, lie on cushions without anybody to trouble you, and kill your game when the spirit moves you.”
“And love most truly, and do my duty, as far as I see it, most faithfully? No, no, Arthur, that doesn’t do for me at all; it’s not in my rôle.”
“You’ll write on the Cid’s grave,” said De Vigne, “as Byron wrote on Boatswain’s,
‘In life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend.’”
“Yes, indeed; and like him
‘I never had but one, and here he lies.’
The Cid,” said Sabretasche, drawing his dog’s ears through his hands— “the Cid is the only thing that cares for me.”
“For you, the adored of all women, the cher ami of all beauties, the ‘good fellow’ of every man worth knowing in town! What do you mean by only having a dog to care for you? The world would never believe you.”
“I mean what I say. Bon Dieu! how much does the world know of any of us?”
“Little enough,” said De Vigne, “but it is always of those of whom it knows least, that it will affect to know most; and the stranger you sit next at a dinner party is ten to one far better acquainted with your business than you are yourself. We shall hear you are to marry — what is her name? — Violet Molyneux soon.”
“Not I,” said Sabretasche; “at least you may hear it, but I shall live, and die, as I am now — alone! Who would care for reports? I can as soon imagine a man taking heed of every tuft of dandelion that passes him in the air, or every insect that crawls beneath his feet, as taking note of the reports that buzz round his career.”
“By Jove, yes!” cried De Vigne. “Out campaigning, one is free from all that trash. Before the cannon’s mouth men cannot stop to split straws; and with one’s own life on a thread, one cannot stop to ruin another’s character. I do not know how it is — I have read pretty widely, but philosophers never preached endurance to me as well as Nature. A few months ago I was camping out to net ortolans. Round us was the dense stretch of the forests and jungles; no wind, no sound, except the cry of the hill deer; nothing stirring, except now and then an antelope flitting like a ghost across the clearing, and, over it all, the southern stars. On my life, as I lay there by our watch-fire alone, with my pipe, it struck me that, if we would let her, Nature would be a truer teacher than creeds or homilies. Human life seems so small beside the vast life of great forests. The calm grand silence rebukes our own feverishness. We who fancy that the eyes of all the universe are on us, that we are the sole love and charge of its Creator, feel what ephemera we are in the giant scale of existence; what countless myriads of such as we have been swept from their place out of sight, and not a law of the spheres around been stirred, not a moment’s pause been caused, in the silent march of creation! Under men’s tutelage, I grow impatient and irritated. What gage have I that they know better than I? They rouse me into questioning their dogmas, into penetrating their mysteries, into searching out, and proving, the nullity of the truths they assume for granted; but under the teaching of Nature I am silent. I recognise my own inferiority. I grow ashamed of my own pride.”
“Aye!” answered Sabretasche. “A wayside flower, a sunny savannah, even a little bit of lichen on a stone in the Campagna, has taught one truer lessons than are taught in the forum or the pulpit Man sees so little of his fellow-man; he is so ready to condemn, so slow to sympathise with him, that, if he attempt to teach, he is far more apt to irritate than aid; but, to the voices of Nature, the bluntest sense can hardly fail to listen, and they speak in a tongue translatable alike to the Indian in his woods and the savant in his study.”
“But one is apt to lose sight of Nature in the hurry and conflict of actual every-day social life! Standing alone among the Alps, a man learns his own insignificance; but once back in the world, the first line of a favourable review, the first hurrah of an admiring constituency, the first applause that feeds his ear in the world he lives in, will give him back his self-appreciation, and he will find it hard not to fancy himself of the importance to the universe that he is to his clique. That is partly why I was unwilling to leave campaigning. There the jungle and the stars took me in hand, and there, by my camp-fire, I would listen to them, though God knows whether I be the better for it Here, on the contrary, men will be prating at me, and I shall chafe at them, and it will be a wonder if I do not kick out at some of them. My guerilla life suits me better than my fashionable one.”
“You are too good for it all the same,” said Sabretasche; “and if you should put the kicking process into execution, it will be a little wholesome chastisement for them, and a little sanitary exertion for you! Jungles and planets are grander and truer, sans doute, but Johannis-berger and Society are equally good for men in their way, and, besides — they are very pleasant!”
“Your acme of praise, Sabretasche,” laughed De Vigne. “I agree with you that human nature is, after all, the best book we can learn, only the study is irritating, and one sees so much en noir there, that if we look too long we are apt to fling away our lexicon, with a curse.”
“The best way, after all,” said the Colonel, with a cross between a yawn and a sigh, “is to take nothing seriously! Men and women are marionettes; learn the tricks of their wires and strings, and make them perform, at your will, tragedy, comedy, farce, whatever pleases your mood. Human life is a kaleidoscope, with which the wise man amuses himself; it has pretty pictures for the eye, if you know how to shake them up, and as for analysing it, pulling it to pieces, for being only bits of cork and burnt glass, and quarrelling with it for being trumpery instead of bona fide brilliants — cut bono? — you won’t make it any better.”
“Possibly; but I shall not be taken in by it.”
“My dear fellow, I think the time when we are taken in by it is the happiest part of our lives.”
“Maybe. His drum is no pleasure to a boy after he has broken it, and found the music is empty wind, with no mystery about it whatever! I say, what is your clock? Am I not keeping you from some engagement or other?”
“None at all,” answered Sabretasche, “and you will just sit where you are for the next four hours. Give me another cheroot, and take some more brandy. Is it likely we shall let you off early?”
We did not let him off early; and all the small hours had chimed before we had done talking, with the fire burning brightly, and the Cid lying full length between us, with his muzzle between his fore-pads, while De Vigne told us tales of his Indian campaign that roused even listless Sabretasche, and fired my blood like the war-note of the Long Roll, or the trumpet call of Boot and Saddle!
CHAPTER XII.
Sabretasche, having mowed down many Flowers, determines to spare one Violet.
FROM the hour he had left her in the vestry at Vigne church, De Vigne had never seen the woman who, by law, stood br
anded on him as his wife. His passion changed to loathing, and the hate wherewith he hated her was far greater than the love wherewith he had loved her. Could it be otherwise! Could any man feel anything but deadliest hate towards the woman who had outwitted and entrapped him, outraged his honour, shivered his pride to the dust, and shaped her vengeance in a form which must press upon him with a dead and ice-cold weight, strike from his path all the natural joys that bloom so brightly for a man so young; and stretch over his whole existence a shadow all the blacker that its giant upas-tree sprang from the forgotten seed of a boyish sin. He left her in the madness of his agony; and swore never to touch even her hand again. Passion changed to abhorrence, and what had charmed and intoxicated him with the sensual beauties of form, now filled him only with abhorrence and disgust He saw her bearing his own name, holding his own honour; coarse, cruel, ill-born, ill-bred, the pollution of her past life vainly covered with the varnish of society; and seeing her thus, knew that till one or other was in the grave this woman was his WIFE. Remorse, too, was added to his curse. His mother had died of that fatal blow which had struck at the root of her son’s peace and honour. She had been for some years aware, though she had never allowed De Vigne to be told of the frail tenure on which she held her life, that any sudden emotion or excitement might at any time be her death-blow: a secret she had kept with that silent heroism of which here and there women are found capable. As De Vigne left the chapel, Sabretasche had lifted her up in what he believed to be a fainting fit: it was a swoon, from which she never awoke, and her son was left to bear his curse alone.
I have seen men writhing in their death agony, I have seen women stretched across the lifeless body of their lover on the battle-field; I have seen the torture of human souls cooped up by shoals in hospital sick-wards; I have seen mortal suffering in almost all its phases — and they are varied and pitiful enough, — but I never saw any so silent and yet so awful as De Vigne’s, when we hurried after him up to town. When we found him, the Trefusis’s revenge had done its work upon him; lengthened years would not have quenched life, and light, and youth, as the remorse, the humiliation, the conflicting passions at war within him, had already done. The tidings we brought crowned the anguish that had entered into his life. Gently as Sabretasche broke it to him, I thought it would have killed him. His lips turned grey as stone, he staggered like a drunken man, and threw up his arms in his blind agony.
“My God! and I have murdered her!” — That was all he said. Under what throes his iron pride was bowed in his night watches beside the lifeless form of the mother whose love for him had slain her, no one knew.
He was alone in his doom, and I could only guess by my knowledge of him how madly he cursed the passions that had wrought his ruin, how long and silently the vulture of remorse gnawed his heart away, with the haunting memory of his folly and its fruit. —
As rapidly as possible he exchanged into the — th Hussars, and sailed for Scinde. He saw none of his old companions and acquaintance, save the Colonel and myself; he shunned all who had been witnesses of his marriage, all who knew of the stain upon his name. It is easy to bear the contempt and censure of the world when defiance of its laws brings fame and rapture; but its sneer may be hard even to a brave man to bear, when the world has cause to call him Fool, when it can triumph in vaunting its own superior penetration, in recalling its own wise prophecies of his fall, and in compelling him to make the most difficult of all confessions to a proud heart— “I was wrong!”
He commissioned Sabretasche to make arrangements with his wife, but all that the Colonel, consummate man of the world though he was, could do, was to exact that she should receive an allowance of two thousand a year, on condition that she never came to England. The Trefusis accepted it, possibly because she knew the law would not give her so much, and went to Paris and the Bads, leading a pleasant life enough I doubt not, but careful to make it far too proper a one — outwardly, at the least — to give him any chance of a divorce. Separated from him at the altar, she was still legally his wife and bore his name. By what miracle of metamorphosis, by what agency, assistance, or self-education, she had been enabled to change and exalt herself, we knew not then, nor till long afterwards. That De Vigne had not recognised her was scarce astonishing. In those long years the unformed girl of seventeen had changed into the mature beauty of five-and-twenty; she had grown taller, her form had developed, fashion, dress, and taste lent her beauty a thousand aids unknown to her in her earlier days. It was not wonderful that, having forgotten Lucy Davis, and almost all connected with her, he should fail to recognise her in so utterly different a sphere, so entirely altered as she was in feature, manner, station, and appearance; though how she had so metamorphosed herself I used to think over many and many a time, never able to find a solution.
At length, after ten years’ absence, De Vigne returned home to resume the social life he had so suddenly snapped asunder. To careless eyes he was much the same, but I felt that the whole man was changed. Reserved, sceptical of all truth and of all worth, his generous trust changed to chill suspicion, his fiery impetuosity chained down under a semblance of icy cynicism, his strong passions held down under an iron curb, the treachery of which he had been the victim seemed to have wholly altered his once frank, warm, and cordial nature.
“The fact is,” said Curly to me, as we were riding down Piccadilly to the Park, “De Vigne, poor fellow! is as frozen by this miserable mésalliance as the ships in the Arctic Seas. It would do him a world of good to fall in love again, but he won’t. Ah, by Jove, here he is! Beautiful creature, that mare of his is — three parts thorough-bred; and just ‘look at her wild eye. How are you! My dear fellow, I’m deucedly glad you’re come back!”
“Very kind of you, Curly,” laughed De Vigne, “but I’m not sure I re-echo you. A gallop in the cool night through the jungle is preferable to pacing up and down the Ride yonder.”
“Wait till the Ride is full,” replied Curly, “with all the gouty wits, and the dandy politicians, and the amazoned belles, and the intensely got-up stock-brokers, and the immensely showy livery-stable hacks, who would go so delightfully if they weren’t broken-winded, or knocked-kneed! Wait till the season, my good fellow — till you drink Seltzer as thirstily as a tired hound drinks water, till you spend the summer nights crushed up on the staircases, till you waste a couple of hundred giving a dinner to men and women who, having eaten your croustades, drive away to demolish your character, — wait till the season, and then you’ll admit the superiority of enjoyment to be found in Town! There’s nobody in it yet, except, indeed, Violet Molyneux.”
“Whom I have not seen,” said De Vigne; “but I will call, for I used to know her mother very well, an eminently religious flirt! I have a curiosity to see this young beauty, because she has Sabretasche’s good word.”
“A good word, by-the-by, that’s apt to do them as much damage in one way as his condemnation does in another. She little knows what a desperate Lothario he is. I wonder if he’ll ever marry?”
“I wonder if you’ll ever hang yourself, Curly?” said De Vigne, dryly. “I say, shall we go and call on the Molyneux now? May as well.”
“Do!” responded Curly.
Lady Molyneux was at home, a rare thing for that restless mosaic of religion and fashion, of decided “ton” and pronounced “piety;” and we found her, chatting with one of her beloved spiritual brothers, the Bishop of Campanile, a most pleasant bon viveur, by no means a Saint Anthony on the score of earthly temptations, while in a low chair sat Violet Molyneux talking to Sabretasche, who was listening to her with an air of half-indolent amusement, and magnetising her with the soft lustrous gaze of his mournful eyes, that had wound their way into so many women’s love.
Lady Molyneux welcomed us all charmingly; while there was a shadow of impatience in her daughter’s telltale eyes at having her talk interrupted: but the Colonel, who had a knack of monopolising a woman quietly, did not give up his seat, and soon resumed his discussion
with her, which it seemed was on the poets of the present day.
“What do you think of the ‘Idyls of the Lotus and the Lily?’” asked Violet of De Vigne, referring to the book they were discussing, the last mystical nonsense that had issued from the imagination of the pet rhymer of the day.
“I cannot say I think much,” smiled De Vigne. “To read that man’s works one wants a dictionary of all his unintelligible jargon, his ‘double-barrelled adjectives,’ his purposely-obscured meanings!”
“All that is treason here, De Vigne,” said Sabretasche, with a smile. “Miss Molyneux is the patron and champion of everything visionary, high wrought, and unintelligible to ordinary mortals. These raving individuals, ‘sad only for wantonness,’ strangely please dreamy young ladies and gentlemen ignorant of the true meaning, sorrows, and burdens of this ‘work-a-day world.’”
Violet made him a graceful révérence.
“Is that a hit at me? But you forget, that feeling — romance, as you are pleased to call it — has been the germ and nurse of all great writers. The swan must suffer before it sings. Did not his child-love inspire Dante? Would Petrarch have been all he is but for the ‘amort veementisstmo ma unico ed ones to?’ Did not his passion for Mary Chaworth have its influence for life upon the writings of Byron? And was not Leonora. d’Este to Tasso what Diana’s kiss was to Endymion?”
“And was not the domestic misery of Milton’s married life the inspiration of that tirade upon women in Adam’s speech?” asked Sabretasche quietly; “and but for Anne Hathaway, might we have ever had that oration of Posthumus:
‘Even to vice
They are not constant; but are changing still
One vice, but of a minute old, for one
Not half so old as that?’”
“Some better woman taught him, then,” cried Violet, “that from women’s eyes