by Ouida
‘Sparkles still the right Promethean fire.
They are the books, the arts, the academes
That show, contain, and nourish all the world!’”
Sabretasche bowed his head in acknowledgment of defeat.
“You have conquered me, as Rosaline conquered Biron!”
He said the words as he had said such things to scores of other women as lovely as Violet Molyneux; from anybody else she would have taken them at their value; at the Colonel’s glance her colour deepened.
“But don’t you think, Miss Molyneux, suggested De Vigne, “that when Tasso languished in Ferrara dungeons, he must have wished he had never seen the Este family! Don’t you fancy that Gemma Donati must have rather cancelled Dante’s good opinion of the beau sexe, and that his ‘wife of savage temper’ may have been a bitter tonic, rather than sweet balm to his genius? And as for Byron — well! Miss Milbanke was rather a thorn in his side, wasn’t she? And with all the romance in the world, I think, when he called on Mrs. Musters, he must have thought he had been rather a fool. What do you I say?”
“I say that you, have not a trace, not a particle, not an infinitesimal germ of romance!”
“Thank Heaven — no!” said De Vigne, with a, laugh.
I doubt, though, if the laugh was heartfelt I dare say he thought of the time when romance was hot and strong in him, and trust and faith strong tool “I pity you, then! Where I think you sceptical men err so much,” said Violet, turning her brilliant eyes on Sabretasche, “is in confounding false and true, good and bad, feeling with sentiment, genius with pretension. Why at one sweep condemn the expression of unusual feeling as sentiment, simply because it is unusual? Deep feeling is rare; but it does not follow that it is unreal. You tread on a thousand ordinary flowers — daisies, buttercups, cowslips, anemones — in an every-day walk; they are all fair, all full of life; but out of all the Flora, there is only one Sensitive Plant that shrinks and trembles at your touch. Yet, though the Sensitive Plant is organised so far more tenderly, it is no artificial offspring of mechanism, but as fresh and real and living a thing as any of the others!”
De Vigne and Curly were now chatting with Lady Molyneux, whose bishop had taken his congé. Sabretasche still sat by Violet a little apart.
“I believe you,” he said, gently; “there arc sensitive plants, so fresh and fair, that it is a sin they should ever have to shiver in rude hands, and learn to bend with the world’s breath. But live as long as we have, and you will know that the deep feeling of which you are thinking is never found in unison with the poetic and drivelling sentiment we ridicule. Boys’ sorrows vent themselves in words — men’s griefs are voiceless. If ever you feel — pray God you never may — vital suffering, you will find that it will never seek solace in confidences, never lament itself, but rather hug its torture closer, as the Spartan child hugged the fierce wolf-fangs. You will find the difference between the fictitious sorrows which run abroad proclaiming their own wrongs; and the grief which lies next the heart night and day, and, like the iron cross of the Romish priest, eats it slowly, but none the less surely, away.”
They were strange words to come from Vivian Sabretasche! Violet looked at him in surprise, and her laughing eyes grew sad and dimmed. He had forgotten for the moment where he was; at her earnest gaze he roused himself with the faintest tinge of colour on his face.
“I am going to ask you to do me a most intense kindness; would you mind singing me Hullah’s ‘Three Fishers?’ declare to you it has haunted me ever since I heard you sing it on Tuesday night; and it is so seldom I hear any music that is not a screech — rarely, indeed, anything that satisfies me as your songs do.”
“Oh yes, if you will sing me those Italian songs of yours. Major de Vigne, if you have no romance, I am quite sure you cannot care for music, so I give you full leave to talk to mamma as loudly as ever you like, I am going to sing only to Colonel Sabretasche.”
Sabretasche looked half-pleased, half-amused at the distinction accorded to him, and followed her to the back drawing-room, where he leaned on the piano looking down upon her, while Violet sang with one of the best gifts of nature a clear, bell-like, melodious voice, highly tutored, and as flexible and free as the song of a mavis in spring-time. I am not sure whether her mother was best pleased or not at that musical tête-à-tête, for Sabretasche had an universal reputation as a most unscrupulous libertine, and Lady Molyneux knew his character too well to think he was likely to be doing any more than playing with Violet, as the most attractive beauty in town. But then, again, his word was almost law in all matters of taste. He could injure Violet irretrievably by a depreciating criticism, and could make her of tenfold more marketable value by an approving word, for there were numbers of men who moulded themselves by his dictum. So Lady Molyneux let them alone.
I don’t suppose, however, that she noticed Violet drawing out a large bunch of her floral namesakes from a Bohemian glass, and lifting them up for Sabretasche to scent “Are they not delicious? They remind me of dear old Corallyne, when I used to gather them out of the fresh damp moss. Do you know Kerry, Colonel Sabretasche? No? Oh, you should go there; it is so beautiful, with its blue lakes, and its wild mountains, and its green, fragrant woodlands.”
“I should like it, I dare say,” said Sabretasche, smiling, “with you for my guide. I want some added charm now to give ‘greenness to the grass and glory to the flower.’ Once I enjoyed them for themselves, as you do; but as one gets on in life there is too silent a rebuke in nature for us to enjoy it unrestrainedly. Is Lord Molyneux’s estate in Kerry?”
“Don’t call it an estate,” laughed Violet; “it always amuses me so when I see it put down in the peerage. It is only miles and miles of moorland, with nothing growing on it but tangled wood and glorious wild-flowers. There are one or two cabins with inhabitants like kelpies. The house has been, perhaps, very grand when all we Irish were kings, and you Sassenachs, Roman slaves; but at the present moment, having lost three-quarters of its roof and nine-tenths of its timbers, having rats, and owls, and ghosts innumerable, no windows, and no furniture, you would probably think it more picturesque than comfortable, and feel more inclined to paint it than to live in it.”
“But you lived in it?”
“Ah! when I was a child; but it was a little better then. There was a comfortable room or two in it, and I was very happy there with my favourite governess and my little rough pony, when papa and mamma were up here or in Paris, and left us to ourselves in Corallyne. I wonder if I shall ever be as happy as I was there?”
“You are very happy here?” said Sabretasche, with a sort of pity for the joyous heart to which sorrow was yet but a name.
“Happy? Oh, yes; I enjoy myself, and I am always light-hearted; but I have things to annoy me here; the artifices and frivolities of society worry me. I want to say always what I think, and nobody seems to do it in the world.”
“The world would be in hot water if they did. But pray speak it to me.”
“I always do! Yes, I enjoy London life. I like the whirl, the excitement, the intellectual discussion, the vivid, real life men lead here. I should enjoy it entirely if I did not see too many hard cruel, worn faces under the fair smiling masks.”
“Pauvre enfant!” murmured Sabretasche. “Do you suppose there are any light hearts under the dominoes?”
“Yours is not a light one?”
“Mine!” echoed the Colonel, with a strange intonation; then he laughed his gay soft laugh. “If it be not, mademoiselle, you are the first who has had penetration enough to find it out I am quêteur of amusement in general to all my friends! There is De Vigne going, and so must I. I shall not thank you for your songs.”
“No!” she said, laughingly. “You would not have asked me to sing if you had not wished to hear me, for I know that on principle you never bore yourself.”
“Never. No one is worth such a self-sacrifice.”
“Not even I?”
“To suppose such a case, I m
ust first imagine you boring me, which just at present is an hypothesis not to be imagined by any stretch of poetic fancy,” laughed Sabretasche, as he held out his hand to bid her good morning.
She held the violets up to him.
“You have forgotten the flowers?”
“May I have them?”
He slipped them hastily into the breast of his waistcoat, and came forward to Lady Molyneux.
“Violet, my love,” began her mother, as the door closed on us, “Colonel Sabretasche comes here a great deal; I wish you would not be quite so — quite so — expansive with him.”
“Expansive! What do you mean?”
“I mean what I say, my dear Violet,” repeated the Viscountess, the milk of roses turning a little sour. “You treat him quite as familiarly as if he were your father or your lover. You need not colour, I don’t say he is the last; God forbid he should be, with his principles. I know he makes himself agreeable to you, but so, as every one will tell you, he has done for the last twenty years to any pretty woman that came across his path; and your speech to his friend De Vigne, about ‘singing only to Colonel Sabretasche,’ was not alone unmaidenly, it was absurd.”
“How so? I only cared for him to hear it and like it.”
“It was all very well for him to hear it and like it,” replied my lady, irritably — prominent piety has a queer knack of souring the temper— “his extreme fastidiousness makes his good word well worth having; the best way to make your opinion of value in society is to admire nothing, as he does! But, at the same time, it is a dear way of gaining his applause to keep all other men in the background while you are flirting with him. Before you saw him you liked Regalia, and Killury, and plenty of others, well enough; now you really attend to no one else.”
“All they can do is to ride, and waltz, and smoke; he has the genius of an artist. They think they please me by vapid flattery; he knows better. They are one’s subjects, he is one’s master!”
Lady Molyneux was seriously appalled by such an outburst She raised her eyebrows sarcastically:
“You admire Vivian Sabretasche very much, Violet? I should not advise you to say so, my dear.”
“Why not? it is the truth.”
“Few truths can be spoken,” replied the eminently religious, fashionable lady, coldly. “Why you had better not proclaim your very Quixotic admiration for Sabretasche, because he bears as bad a character for morality as he bears a good one for talent and fashion. What his life has been every one knows; he is a most unprincipled libertine. No one ever dreams of expecting anything serious of him; he is the last man in the universe to marry, but a flirtation with him may very greatly injure your prospects—”
“Oh, pray don’t! I am so sick of those words; they are so lowering, so pitiful, so conventional, making a market of oneself! I cannot bear to hear you speak so. As to his life, he has led the same life as most men, probably; but you need only look in his eyes to see whether anything base or cruel can attach itself to him.”
Her mother sighed, and sneered, and smiled unpleasantly.
“My love, the way you talk is too absurd. You forget yourself strangely. How is it possible for you to judge of the character of a man nearly fifty, a blasé man of the world, who was one of the greatest roués about town while you were a little child in the nursery; it is too ridiculous! But go and dress for dinner. The dear bishop, and Cavendish Grey, and Killury will dine here.”
“Poor sensitive plant, it would be a pity my hands should touch it and wither its freshness and fairness,” thought the Colonel, as he turned his tilbury from the door. “Vivian Sabretasche, I say, are you growing a fool? Don’t you know that the golden gates won’t open for you? You barred them yourself; you have no right to complain. Have you not been going to the bad all the days of your life? Have you not persuaded the world, ever since you lived in it, that you are a reckless, devil-may-care Don Juan, a smasher of the entire Decalogue? Why should you now, just because you have looked into that girl’s bright eyes, be trying to trick yourself and her into the idea that you possess such affairs as heart, and feeling, and regrets, because she, fresh to life, is innocent enough to have a taste for such nonsensei All folly — all folly! Back to your animate friends, horses and men, and your inanimate loves, chisel and palate, or you may grow a fool in your older years, as many wise men have done before. You’ve pulled up many fair flowers in your day, you can surely leave that one Violet in peace.”
“Open the door, Colonel Sabretasche, and let me out. It is of no use telling me not — I will!”
With which enunciation of her own self-will the Hon. Violet Molyneux sprang to the ground in St. James’s-street, just opposite the bay-window, to the unspeakable horror of her mother, and the excessive amusement of De Vigne and Sabretasche, who were driving in the Molyneux barouche. One of the powdered, whitewanded, six-feet-high plushes that swayed to and fro at the back of the carriage, having dismounted at some order of his mistress’s, had happened to push, as those noble and stately creatures are given to pushing every plebeian peripatetic, against a young girl passing on the pavement. The girl had with her a portfolio of pictures, which the abrupt rencontre sent out of her grasp, scattering its contents to the four winds of heaven, and to apologise was the work of a second with that perfectly courteous, but, according to her mamma and her female friends, much too impulsive and unconventional young beauty, the Hon. Violet, whose fatal lessons, learnt on the wild moorlands and among the fragrant woods of her beloved Corallyne, the aristocratic experiences of her single season had been sadly unable to unteach her.
“Ashton, how can you be so careless? Pick those drawings up immediately and very carefully,” said the young beauty, as, turning to the young girl, she apologised with polished courtesy for the accident her servant had caused, while the man, in disgusting violence to his own feelings, was compelled to bend his stately form, and even to so far fall from his pedestal of powdered propriety and flunkeyism grandeur, as to run — yes, absolutely run — after one of the sketches, which, wafted by a little breeze that must have been that mischievous imp Puck himself, ambled gently and tantalisingly down the street The young girl thanked her with as bright a smile as Violet’s, and votes were divided in the club windows as to which of the two was the most charming, though the one was a fashionable belle, with every adjunct of taste and dress, and the other an unprotected little thing walking with a woman servant in St James’s-street; an artist probably, or a governess. She took her portfolio (by this time men in the clubs were all looking on, heartily amused, and Sabretasche and De Vigne were picking up the pictures, on the back of which they had time to observe the initials “A.T., St Crucis-on-the-hill, Richmond Park,” with much more diligence than the grandiose flunkey;) thanked Violet with a low graceful bow, and was passing on, when she looked up at De Vigne. Her lips parted, her eyes darkened, her face brightened; she stood still a minute, then she came back: “Sir Folko!” But he neither saw nor heard her, his foot was on the step of the barouche; the footman shut the door with a clang, swung himself up on the footboard, and the carriage rolled away into Piccadilly.
“Violet, Violet! how you forget yourself, my love!” whispered Lady Molyneux, scandalised and horror-stricken. “I wish you would not be quite so impulsive. All the gentlemen in White’s were staring af you.”
“Let them stare, dear,” laughed Violet, merrily. “It is a very innocent amusement, it gives them a great deal of pleasure and does me no harm. What glorious blue eyes that girl had. You should laud me for my magnanimity in praising another woman so pretty.”
“For magnanimity in that line is not a virtue of your sex,” said De Vigne.
“You cynic! I don’t see why it should not be.”
“Don’t you? Did you, on your honour, then, fair lady, ever speak, well of a rival?”
“I never had one.”
“You never could,” whispered Sabretasche, bending forward to tuck the tiger-skin over her.
“But supposing you
had?” persisted De Vigne.
“I hope I should be above maligning her; but I am afraid to think how I should hate her.”
Violet’s eyes met the Colonel’s; her colour rose, and he incongruously enough turned his head away.
“If Miss Molyneux treats the visionary things of life so earnestly, what will she do when she comes to the realities?” laughed De Vigne.
Lady Molyneux sighed; on occasions she would play at tender maternity, but it did not sit well upon her.
“Ah! if we did not find some armour besides our own strength in our life pilgrimage, few of us women would be able to endure to the end of the Via Dolorosa.”
“True! Britomart soon finds a buckler studded with the diamonds of a good dower, or stiffened with the parchment-skins of handsome settlements; and, tender and gentle as she looks, manages to go through the skirmish very unscathed by dint of the vizor she keeps down so wisely, and the sharp lance of the tongue she keeps always in re& against friend and foe!” —
“What thrusts of the spear you deserve; you are worse than your friend, and he is bad enough!” cried Violet, looking rather lovingly, however, on the Colonel’ despite his errors. “I am sure if women take to lance and vizor, it is only in self-defence, for you would pierce us with your arrows if you could find a hole in our armour.”
“But here and there is a woman who unhorses us at once, and on whom it is a shame to draw our swords. Agnes Hotots are very rare, but when we do find them, Ringsdale is safe to go down before them,” said Sabretasche, with his eloquent glanae.
“I should think you have both of you been conquered or imprisoned some time or other by some Cynisca, or Maria de Jesu, whom you cannot forgive, and who makes you so bitter upon us all!” laughed Violet.
She said it in the gay innocence of her heart! Both were silent: and Violet instinctively felt that she had trodden on dangerous ground — then De Vigne laughed, though a curse would have been better in unison with his thoughts.