by Ouida
“If I sang ill I should never sing at all,” replied Sabretasche, carelessly, with that consciousness of power which true talent is as sure to have, as it is sure not to have undue self-appreciation. “I mean, however, in Miss Molyneux’s Aria; even you will admire that, De Vigne.”
Sabretasche was quite right; it was a treat to hear Violet Molyneux’s rich, passionate, bell-like voice. We had heard nothing like it of late; and Violet’s voice was really one which, as a professional, would have ranked her very high. Besides, there was a tone in it, a certain freshness and gladness, mingled with a strange pathos and passion, which moved even those among her auditors most blasés, most fastidious, and most ready to sneer, into silence and admiration.
“That is music,” said De Vigne, in the door of the music-room. “If she would sing at morning concerts I would forswear them no longer. Look at that fellow; if he be ever really caught at all, it will be by her voice.”
I looked at “that fellow,” being Sabretasche, who leaned against the organ, close to Violet Molyneux; his face was calm and impassive as ever, but his melancholy eyes were fixed upon her with such intense earnestness, that Violet, glancing up at him as she sang, coloured despite all her self-possession, and her voice was unsteady for half a note. Lauzun though the Colonel was, I believe Violet’s voice pleased him still more than her beauty. The latter beguiled the senses, as many others had before; the former beguiled the soul, a far rarer charm!
“You came late; half our concert was over!” said Violet to him, as they stood talking in a winter-garden, one of the whims — and a very charming whim, too — of the Puffdoff’s.
“I came in time to sing what I had promised, and to hear what I desired, your—”
“You did like itf.”
“Too well to compliment you on it. I ‘liked’ it as I liked, or rather I felt it — as I have felt, occasionally, the tender and holy beauty of Raphael, the hushed glories of a summer night, the mystical chimes of a starlit sea. Your voice did me good, as those things did, until the feverish fret and noise of practical life wore off their influence again.”
Violet gave a deep sigh of delight “You make me so happy! I often think that the doc-’ trine of immortality has no better plea than the vague yearning for something unseen and unconceived, the unuttered desire which rises in us, at the sound of true music. I have heard music at which I could have shed more bitter tears than any I have known, for I have had no sorrow, and which answered the restless passions of my heart better than any human mind that ever wrote.”
“Quite true; and that is why, to me, music is one of the strangest gifts to men. Painting creates, but creates by imitation. If a man imagine an angel, he must paint from the woman’s face that he loves best — the Fomarina sat for the Madonna. If he paint a god, he must take a man for model; anything different from man would be grotesque. We never see a Jupiter, or a Christ that is anything more than a fiercely-handsome, or a sadly-handsome man. Music, on the contrary, creates from a spirit-world of its own: the fable of Orpheus and its lyre is not wholly a fable. In the passionate crash and tumult of an overture, in the tender pathos of one low tenor note, in the full swell of a Magnificat, in a low sigh of a Miserere, the human heart throws off the frippery and worry of the world; the nobler impulses, the softer charity, the unuttered aspirations, that are buried, yet still live, beneath so much that is garish and contemptible, wake up; and a man remembers all he is and all he might have been, and grieves, as the dwellers in Arcadia grieved over their exile, over his better nature lost.”
“Ah,” answered Violet, her gay spirits saddened by the tone in which Sabretasche, ordinarily so careless, light, nonchalant, and unruffled, spoke, “if we were always what we are in such moments, how different would the world be! If human nature lasted what it is in its best moments, poets would have no need to fable of an Eden.”
Sabretasche looked down on her long and earnestly.
“Do you know that you are to me something as music is to you? When I am with you I am truer and better; I breathe a purer atmosphere. You make me for the time being, feel as I used to feel in my golden days. You bring me back enthusiasm, belief in human nature, noble aspirations, purer tastes, tenderer thoughts — in a word, you bring me back youth!”
Violet lifted her eyes to his full of the happiness his words gave her; and Sabretasche’s hand rested on hers as she played with a West Indian creeper clinging round the sides of a vase of myrtles. The colour wavered in the Parian fairness of her face; her eyes and lips were tremulous with a vague sense of delight and expectation, but — he took his hand away with a short quick sigh, and set himself to bending the creeper into order.
There was a dead silence, a disappointed shadow stole unconsciously over Violet’s tell-tale face. She looked up quickly.
“Why do you always talk of youth as a thing passed away from you? It is such folly. You are now in your best years.”
“It is past and gone from my heart.”
“But might it not have a resurrection?”
“It might, but it may not.”
Violet mused a moment over the anomalous reply.
“What curse have you on you?” she said, involuntarily.
Sabretasche turned his eyes on her filled with unutterable sadness.
“Do not rouse my demon; let him sleep while he can! But, Violet, when you hear about in the world of which you and I are both votaries — as hear you have done and will do — many tales of my past and my present, many reports and scandals circulated by my friends, believe them or not as you like by what you know of me; but believe, at the least, that I am neither so lighthearted nor so hard-hearted as they consider me. You are kind enough to honour me with your friendship; you’ will never guess how dearly I prize it; but there are things in my career which I cannot reveal to you, and against interest in me and my fate I warn you; it can bring you no happiness, for it can never go beyond friendship!”
It was a strange speech from a man to a woman; especially from a man famous for his conquests, to a woman famous for her beauty!
He saw a shiver pass over Violet’s form, and the delicate rose hue of her cheeks faded utterly. He sighed bitterly as he added, the blue veins rising in his calm white forehead:
“None to love me have I; I never had, I never may have!”
Great tears gathered slowly in Violet’s eyes, and despite all her self-control, fell down on the glowing petals of the West Indian flowers.
“But you will let me know more of you than anyone else does?” she said, in a hurried, broken voice. “You will not at least forbid me your friendship?”
“Friendship — friendship!” repeated Sabretasche, with a strange smile. “You do not know what an idle word, what a treacherous salve, what a vain impossibility is friendship between men and women! Yet if you are willing to give me yours, I will do my best to merit it, and to keep myself to it Now let us go. I like too well to be with you to dare be with you long.”
“What does Sabretasche mean with Molyneux’s daughter?” said De Vigne to me in a cabinet de peinture, De Vigne having only just escaped from the harpy’s clutch of the little Countess’s fairy fingers.
“How should I tell? He’s a confounded inconstant fellow, you know. He’s always flirting with some woman or other.”
“Flirtation doesn’t make men look as he looked while he listened to her. Flirtation amuses. Sabretasche is not amused here, but rather, I should say, intensely worried.”
“What should worry him? He could marry the girl if he wished.”
“How can you tell?”
“Well, I suppose so. The Molyneux would let him have her fast enough. Her mother wants to get her off; she don’t like two milliner’s bills. But you interesting yourself in a love affair! What a Saul among the prophets!”
“Spare your wit, Arthur. I never meddle with such tinder, I assure you. I am not overfond of my fellow-creatures, but I don’t hate them intensely enough to help them to marry. I say, have you not been sufficientl
y bored here? The concert is over. Let us go, shall we?”
“With pleasure. I say you have not paid your promised visit to little Tressillian. ’Tisn’t far; we might walk over, eh?”
“So we will. Are you after poor Alma’s chevelure dorée already?” laughed De Vigne. “Make her mistress of Longholme, Chevasney, and I’ll give her away to you with pleasure. I won’t be a party to other conditions, for her grandfather’s sake — her guardian’s sake, rather. By the way, I must make out whether she knows or not that the relationship was a myth.”
“Thank you. I have no private reason for proposing the call, except the always good and excellent one of passing the time and seeing a pretty woman. There is the Puffdoff coming after you again. Let’s get away while we can.”
We were soon out of that little bijou of a dower-house that shrined the weeds and wiles of the late Puffdoff’s handsome Countess, and smoking our cigars, as we walked across to Richmond.
Alma was sitting at her easel, with her back to the door, painting earnestly, with little Sylvo at her side. She was dressed prettily, inexpensively, I have no doubt, but somehow more picturesquely than many of the women in hundred guinea dresses and point worth a dowry — the picturesqueness of artistic taste, and innate refinement, which gave her the brilliance and grace of a picture. She turned rapidly at the closing of the door, sprang up, and ran towards De Vigne with that impulsiveness which always made her seem much younger than she was.
“Ah! you have come at last! I began to think you would cheat me as you cheated me of the yachting trip to Lorave; and yet I thought you would not disappoint me.”
“No, but I shall scold you,” said De Vigne, “for sitting there, wearing your eyes out — as Mrs. Lee phrases it — over your easel. Why do you do it?”
“It is my only companion,” pleaded Alma. “With my brush I can escape away into an ideal world, and shut out the real and actual, with all its harshness, trials, and privations. You know the sun shines only for me upon canvas; and besides,” she added, with a gay smile, “to take a practical view of it, I must make what talent I have into gold.”
“Poor little thing!” exclaimed De Vigne. It struck him, who had flung about thousands at his pleasure ever since he was a boy, as singular, and as somehow unjust, that this girl, young as she was, should have to labour for her living with the genius with which nature had endowed her so royally — genius the divine, the god-given, the signet-seal, so rare, so priceless, with which nature marks the few who are to ennoble and sanctify the mass!
“Ah! I am a poor little thing!” repeated Alma, with a moue mutine indicative of supreme self-pity and indignation at her fate. “I should love society; I see nothing but nurse and Sylvo. I love fun; I have nobody to talk to but the goldfinch. I hate solitude, and I am always alone. I should like beautiful music, beautiful pictures, gardens, statues, conservatories, luxuries.”
“More honour to you to bear it so well, Miss Tressillian,” said I.
“Oh, I don’t bear it well,” interrupted Alma. “I sometimes get as impatient as a bird beating its wings against a cage; I grow as restless in its monotony as you can fancy. I am not a philosopher, and never shall be.”
“Life will make you one in spite of yourself,” said De Vigne.
“Never! If I ever come to rose-leaves, I will lie down on them coûte qui coûte. As long as I can only get a straw mattress, there is not much virtue in renunciation.”
“But there are cankerous worms in rose-leaves,” smiled De Vigne.
“But who would ever enjoy the roses if they were always remembering that? Where is the good?”
“You little epicurean!” laughed De Vigne, looking at her amusedly. His remembrance of her as a child made him treat her with a certain gentle familiarity. “You would have a brief summer, like the butterflies. That sort of summer costs dear, when the butterfly lies dying on the brown autumn leaves, and envies the bee housed safely at home.”
“N’importe!” cried the little lady, recklessly. “The butterfly, at least, has enjoyed life, and the bee, I would bet, goes on humming and bustling all the year round, never knowing whether the fuchsias are red or white, as long as there is honey in them; only looking in orchises with an eye to business, and never giving a minute in his breathless toil to scent the heliotropes, or kiss the blue-bells, for their beauty’s sake!”
“Possibly not; but when the fuchsias and orchises, blue-bells and heliotropes, are withered and dried, and raked away by ruthless gardeners for the unpoetic destiny of making leaf mould; and the ground is frozen, and the trees are bare, and the wind whistles over the snow — how then? Which is the best off, butterfly or bee?”
“Hold your tongue!” laughed Alma. “You put me in mind of those horrible moral apologues, and that detestable incitement to supreme selfishness, ‘La cigale ayant chanté tout rété’ where the ant is made out a most praiseworthy person, but appears to me simply cruel and mean. But to answer you is easy enough. What good does the bee get from his hard work? Has his honey taken away from him for other people’s eating, and is smoked out of his house, poor little thing, by human monsters, whom, if he knew his power, he could sting to death! The butterfly, on the contrary, enjoys himself to the last, dies in the course of nature, and leaves others to enjoy themselves after him.”
“You did not lose your tongue in Lorave, Alma?” said De Vigne, with a grave air of solicitous interest.
With the little Tressillian he had a little of his old fun, something of his old laugh.
“No, indeed; and I should be very sorry if I had, for I love talking.”
“You need not tell us that,” smiled De Vigne.
“I will never talk to you again,” cried Alma, with supreme dignity: “or, rather, I never would if I were not too magnanimous to avenge an insult by such enormous punishment.”
“To yourself. Just so. You are quite right,” said De Vigne, with an amused smile. “What are you painting now, Alma? May we see?”
“I was drawing you,” she answered, turning the easel towards him. It was a really wonderful portrait from memory, done in pastels.
“My likeness? By Jove!” cried De Vigne, “what on earth put it into your head, petite, to do that?”
“I knew you would make a splendid picture — your face is beautiful,” answered Alma, tranquilly.
Whereon De Vigne went into a fit of laughter, the first real laughter that I had heard since his marriage-day.
“Why do you laugh?” asked Alma; “I only tell you the truth.”
At which gratifying assurance De Vigne laughed still more. The girl amused him, as Richelieu’s and Montaigne’s little cats amused them when they laid down the sceptre and the pen, and tied the string to their kitten’s corks. And thinking of her still merely as Tressillian’s little granddaughter, he was not on his guard with her as with other women, and treated her with cordiality and freedom.
“Well, Alma, I am extremely obliged to you. You have made a much handsomer fellow of me than Maclise would have done, I am afraid,” said he, smiling; “and if ever my picture is wanted side by side with Wellington’s, I hope, for the sake of creating an impression on posterity, that you will be kind enough to paint it for me.”
“It is not more handsome than you,” said Alma, resolutely. “It is too bad of you to laugh so, but that is like men’s ingratitude.”
“Don’t abuse us,” said De Vigne; “that is so stale a stage-trick! Women are eternally running after us, and eternally vowing that they would not stir a step for any of us. They spend their whole existence in trying to catch us, but their whole breath reiterating that they only take us out of compassion. If I hear a lady abuse or find fault with us, I know that her grapes ‘sont trop verts, et bons pour des goujats.’”
Alma laughed.
“Very probably. But I don’t abuse you. I prefer yours to my own sex. Your code of honour is far better than ours.”
“The generality of women have no notion of honour at all!” said De Vigne
; “they tell falsehoods and circulate scandals without being called to account for it, and the laxity of honour in trifles that they learn in the nursery and school-rooms corrode? their sense of’right towards others in all their after-life. A boy at school is soon taught that, however lax he may be in other things, it is ‘sneaky’ to peach, and learns a rough sort of Spartan honour; a girl, on the contrary, tells tales of her sisters unreproved, and hears mamma in her drawing-room take away the character of a ‘dearest friend’ whom she sees her meet the next moment with a caress and an endearment But modern society is too ‘religious’ to remember to be honourable; and is too occupied with proclaiming its ‘morality’ to have any time to give to common honesty.”
“As Sir John Lacquers taught us!”
“Lacquers and scores like him, whose slips are passed over because their scrip is inscribed with a large text and pilgrim’s purse full of Almighty Dollars. I think of publishing a ‘Manual of Early Lessons for Eminent Christians:’ I. Do good so that not only your right hand knows it, but all your neighbourhood likewise. II. Give as it is likely to be given unto you. III. Strain very hard at a sin the size of a gnat if it be your poor relation’s, and swallow one the size of a camel if it be your patron’s. IV. Never pray in your closet, as no one will be the wiser, but go as high as you can on the housetop, that society may think you the holiest man in Israel. V. Borrow of your friend without paying him, because he will not harm you, but give good interest to strangers, because they may have the law on you. VI. Judge severely, that gaining applause for your condemnation of others you may contrive to hide your own shortcomings. VII. Eat pâtés de foie gras in secresy, but have jours maigres in public, that men who cannot see you in secret may reward you openly! I could write a whole Paraphrase of the Gospel as used and translated by the ‘Church of England’ and other elect of the kingdom of Heaven; an election, by the way, exceedingly like that of Themistocles, where every man writes down his own name first, entirely regardless of lack of right or qualification for the honour!”
“But different in this respect,” said Alma, “that there the generals did remember to put Themistocles after them; whereas the shining lights of the different creeds are a great deal too occupied with securing their own future comfort to think of drawing any of their brothers up with them. The churches all take a cross for their symbol! they would be nearer the truth if they took the beam without the transverse; for egotism is more their point than self-sacrifice! But will you look at my pet-picture?”