by Ouida
So De Vigne had to introduce the Colonel, who dropped into an easy chair beside Alma, with his eyeglass up, and began to talk to her. He was a great adept in the art of “bringing out.” He had a way of hovering over a woman, and fixing his beautiful eyes on her, and talking softly and pleasantly, so that the subject under his skilful mesmerism developed talent that might otherwise never have gleamed out; and with Alma, who could talk with any and everybody on all subjects under the sun, from metaphysics and ethics to her kitten’s collar, and who would discuss philosophies with you as readily as she would chatter nonsense to her parrot, Sabretasche had little difficulty.
De Vigne let the Colonel have all the talk to himself, irritated at the sight of his immovable and inquiring eyeglass, and the sound of his low, tra?nante, musical voice. Now and then, amidst his conversation, the Colonel shot a glance at him, and went on with his criticisms on Art, sacred, legendary, and historic; and on painting in the mediæval and the modern styles, with such a deep knowledge and refined appreciation of his subject as few presidents of the R.A. have ever shown in their lectures.
At last De Vigne rose, impatient past endurance, though he could hardly have told you why.
“It is half-past six, Sabretasche; the turbot and turtle will be cold.”
The Colonel smiled:
“Thank you, my dear fellow; there are a few things in life more attractive than turtle or turbot. The men will wait; they would be the last to hurry us if they knew our provocation for delay.”
De Vigne could have found it in his heart to have kicked the Colonel for that speech, and the soft sweet glance accompanying it. “He will spoil that little thing,” he thought, angrily. “No woman’s head is strong enough to stand his and Curly’s flattery.”
“I like your little lady, De Vigne,” said Sabretasche, as they drove away. “She is really very charming, good style, and strikingly clever.”
“She is not mine” said De Vigne, with a haughty stare of surprise.
“Well! she will be, I dare say.”
“Indeed, no. I did not suppose your notions of my honour, or rather dishonour, were like Vane Castleton’s.”
“Nor are they, cher ami” said the Colonel, with that grave gentleness which occasionally replaced his worldly wit and gay ordinary tone. “But like him I know the world; and I know, as you would, too, if you thought a moment, that a man of your age cannot have that sort of friendly intercourse with a girl of hers, without its surely ripening into something infinitely warmer and more dangerous. You would be the first to sneer at an attempt at platonics in another; you are the last man in the world to dream of such follies yourself. Tied as you are, you cannot frequent her society without danger for her; and for you, probably remorse — at the least, satiety and regret. With nine men out of ten the result would be a liaison lightly formed and as lightly broken; but you have an uncommon nature, and a young girl like little Tressillian your warmth of heart would never let you desert I hate advising; I never do it to anybody. My life has left me little title to counsel men against sins and follies which I daily commit myself; nor do I count as sins many things the world condemns as such. Only here I see so plainly what will come of it, that I do not like you to rush into it blindfold and repent afterwards. Because you have had fifty such loves which cost you nothing, that is no reason that the fifty-first may not cost you some pain, some very great pain, in its formation or its severance—”
“You mean very kindly, Sabretasche, but there is no question of ‘love’ here,” interrupted De Vigne, with his impatient hauteur. “In the first place, you, so well read in woman’s character, might know she is far too frank and familiar with me for any fear of the kind. In another I have paid too much for passion ever to risk it again, and I hope I know too well what is due from honour and generosity to win the love of a young unprotected girl while I am by my own folly fettered and cursed by marriage ties. Sins enough I have upon my soul, God knows, but there is no danger of my erring here. I have no temptation; but if I had I should resist it; to take advantage of her innocence and ignorance of my history would be a blackguard’s act, to which no madness, even if I felt it, would ever make me condescend to stoop!”
De Vigne spoke with all the sternness and impatience natural to him when roused, spoke in overstrong terms, as men do of a fault they are sure they shall never commit themselves. Sabretasche listened, an unusual angry shadow gathering in his large soft eyes and a bitter sneer on his features, as he leaned back and folded his arms to silence and dolce.
“Most immaculate Pharisee! Remember a divine injunction, ‘Let him that standeth take heed lest he fall.’”
De Vigne cut his horses impatiently with the whip.
“I am no Pharisee, but I am, with all my faults and vices, a man of honour, I hope.”
Sabretasche answered nothing, but annoyance was still in his eyes, and a sneer still on his lips.
De Vigne had one striking fault, namely, that if advised not to do a thing, that thing would he go and do straightway; moreover, being a man of strong will and resolve, and very reliant on his own strength, he was apt, as in his fatal marriage, to go headlong, perfectly safe in his own power to guide himself, to judge for himself, and to draw back when it was needful. Therefore,.he paid no attention whatever to Sabretasche’s counsels, but, as it chanced, went down to see Alma rather more often than he had done before; for she had said how much she wished she could exhibit at the Water-Colour Society, which De Vigne, knowing something of the president, and of the society in general, had been able to manage for her.
“What should I do without you!” said Alma, fervently, to him one day, when he went there to tell her her picture was accepted. “You are so kind to me, Sir Folko!”
“I! Not at all, my dear child, I wish you would not exalt me to such a pinnacle. What will you say when I tumble down one day, and you see nothing of me but worthless shivers!”
“Reverence you still,” said Alma, softly. “A fragment of the Parthenon is worth a whole spotless and unbroken modern building. If my ideal were to fall, I should treasure the dust.”
“But, seriously,” he interrupted her, “I wish you would not get into the habit of rating me so high, Alma. I don’t in the least come up to it. You do not guess — how should you! — you cannot, even in fancy, picture the life that I, and men like me, lead; you cannot imagine the wild follies with which we drown our past, the reckless pleasures with which we pass our present, our temptations, our weaknesses, our errors; how should you, child as you are, living out of the world in a solitude peopled only with the bright fancies of your own pure imagination, that never incarnates the hideous fauns and beckoning bacchanals which haunt and fever ours?”
“But I can,” said Alma, earnestly, looking up to him. “I do not go into the world, it is true, but still I know the world to a certain extent Montaigne, Rochefoucauld, Rabelais, Goethe, Emerson, Bolingbroke, the translated classics, do you not think they teach me the world, or, at least, of what makes the world, Human Nature, better than the few hours at a dinner-table, or the gossip of morning calls, which you tell me is all girls in good society see of life! You know, Sir Folko, it always seems to me, that women, fenced in as they are, in educated circles, by boundaries which they cannot overstep, except to their own hindrance; screened from all temptations; deprived of all opportunity to wander, if they wished, out of the beaten track; should be gentle to your sex, whose whole life is one long temptation, and to whose lips is almost forced that Circean ‘cup of life’ whose flowers round its brim hide the poisons at its dregs. Women have, if they acknowledged them, passions, ambitions, impatience at their own monotonous rôle, longings for the living life denied to them; but everything tends to crush these down in them, has thus tended through so many generations, that it has come to be an accepted thing that they must be calm, fair, pulseless statues; and when here and there a woman dares to acknowledge that her heart beats, and that nature is not wholly dead within her, the world stares at her, a
nd rails at her, for there is no bite noire so terrible to the world as Truth! No, I can fancy your temptations, I can picture your errors and your follies, I can understand how you drink your poison one hour because you liked its flavour, and drink more the next hour to make you forget your weakness in having yielded to it at all. That my own solitude and imagination are only peopled with shapes bright and fair, I must thank Heaven and not myself. If I had been born in squalor and nursed in vice, what would circumstance and surroundings have made me! Oh, I think, instead of the Pharisee’s presumptuous ‘I thank God that I am holier than he,’ our thanksgiving should be, ‘I thank God that I have so little opportunity to do evil!’ and we should forgive, as we wish to be forgiven ourselves, those whose temptations, either from their own nature or from the outer world, have been so much greater than our own.”
Her voice was wonderfully musical, with a strange pathos in it; and her gesticulation had all the grace and fervour of her Southern origin. Her words sent a thrill to De Vigne’s heart; they were the first gentle and tolerant words he had heard since his mother had died. He had known but two classes of women; those who shared his errors and pandered to his pleasures, whose life disgusted, while their beauty lured him; and those whose illiberality, and whose sermons only roused him to more wayward rebellion against the social laws which they expounded. It touched him singularly to hear words at once so true, so liberal, and so humble, from one on whose young life he knew that no stain had rested; to meet with so much comprehension from a heart, compared with his own, as pure and spotless from all error as the snow-white roses in her windows, on which the morning dewdrops rested without soil. And at her words something of De Vigne’s old nature began to wake into new existence, as, after a long and weary sleep, the eyelids tremble before the soul arouses to the heat and action of the day.
A memory of the woman called his wife passed over him — he could scarcely tell why or how — with a cold chill, like the air of a pestilent charnel-house.
“Alma, if women were like you, men might be better than they are. Child, I wish you would not talk as you do. You wake up thoughts and memories that had far better sleep.”
She touched his hand gently:
“Sir Folko, what are those memories?”
He drew his hand away and laughed, not joyously, but that laugh which has less joy in it even than tears:
“Don’t you know a proverb, Alma— ‘N’éveillez pas le chat qui dort “But were the cat a tiger I would not fear it, if it were yours.”
“But I fear it.”
There was more meaning in that than Alma guessed. The impetuous passion that had blasted his life, and linked his name with the Trefusis, would be, while his life lasted, a giant whose throes and mighty will would always hold him captive in his chains!
He was silent; he sat looking out of the window by which he sat, and playing with a branch of the white rose. His lips were pressed together, his eyebrows slightly contracted, his eyes troubled, as if he were looking far away — which indeed he was — to a white headstone lying among fragrant violet tufts under the old elms at Vigne, with the spring sunshine, in its fitful lights and shadows, playing fondly round the name of the only woman who had loved him at once fondly and unselfishly.
Alma looked at him long and wistfully, some of his darker shadows flung on her own bright and sunny nature — as the yew-tree throws the dark shadows of its boughs over the golden cowslips that nestle at its roots.
At last she bent forward, lifting her soft frank eyes to his.
“Sir Folko, where are your thoughts? Tell me.”
Her voice won its way to his heart; he knew that interest, not curiosity, spoke in it, and he answered gently, “With my mother.”
It was the first time he had spoken of her to Alma — he never breathed her name to any one.
“You loved her dearly?”
“Very dearly.”
Alma’s eyes filled with tears, a passion very rare with her.
“Tell me of her,” she said softly.
“No. I cannot talk of her.”
“Because you loved her so much?”
“No. Because I killed her.”
This was the great remorse of his life; that his folly had cost him his name and, as he considered, his honour, was less bitter to him than that it had cost his mother’s life.
Alma, at his reply — uttered almost involuntarily under his breath — gazed at him, horror-stricken, with wild terror in her large eyes; yet De Vigne might have noticed that she did not shrink from, but rather drew the closer to him. Her expression recalled his thoughts.
“Not that, not that,” he said hastily. “My hand never harmed her, but my passions did. My own headlong and wilful folly sent her to her grave. Child! you may well thank God if Temptation never enter your life. No man has strength against it.”
For the first time De Vigne felt an inclination to disclose his marriage; to tell her what he would have told to no other living being: of all his own madness had cost him, of the fatal revenge the Trefusis had taken, of the headlong impetuosity which had led him to raise the daughter of a beggar-woman to one of the proudest names in England, of the fatal curse which he had drawn on his own head, and the iron fetters which his own hand had forged. The words were already on his lips, in another minute he would have bent his pride and laid bare his secret to her, if at that moment the door had not opened — to admit Alma’s late governess. —
Alma was very right — our life hinges upon Opportunity.
De Vigne never again felt a wish to tell her of his marriage. —
CHAPTER XVIII.
Paolo and Francesca.
MAY came; it was the height of the season; town was full; Her Majesty had given her first levée; Belgravia and Mayfair were occupied; the Ride and the Ring were full, too, at six o’clock every day, and the thousand toys with which Babylon amuses her grown babies were ready, among others the Exhibition of Fine Arts, where, on its first day, De Vigne and I went to lounge away an hour, chiefly for the great entertainment and fun afforded to persons of sane mind by the eccentricities of the pre-Raphaelite gentlemen.
In the entrance we met Lady Molyneux and her daughter, Sabretasche and his young Grace of Regalia with them. It was easy to see which the Viscountess favoured the most.
“Are you come to be disenchanted with’all living womanhood by the contemplation of Messrs. Millais and Hunt’s ideas, Major de Vigne?” asked Violet, giving him her hand, looking a very lovely sample of “living womanhood.” Ladies said she was very extravagant in dress. She might be; she was naturally lavish, and liked instinctively all that was graceful in form or colouring; but I only know she dressed perfectly, and, what was better, never thought about it.
“Perhaps we should suffer less disappointment if ladies were like Millais’s ideals,” smiled De Vigne. “From those rough, red-haired, long-limbed women we should never look for much perfection; whereas the faces and forms of our living beauties are rather like Belladonna, beautiful to look at, but destruction to approach or trust.”
“You are incorrigible!” cried Violet, with a tiny shrug of her shoulders, “and forget that if Belladonna is a poison to those who don’t know how to use it, it is a medicine and a balm to those who do.”
“But for one cautious enough to cure himself, how many unwary are poisoned for life!” laughed De Vigne. He said it as a jest, but a bitter memory prompted it. “Send that fellah to Coventry, Miss Molyneux, do,” lisped Regalia; “he’s so dweadfully rude.”
“Not yet; sarcasms are infinitely more refreshing than empty compliments,” said Violet, with a scornful flash of her brilliant eyes. The little Duke was idiot enough to attempt to flatter Violet Molyneux, to whom the pas in beauty and talent was indisputably given! “Colonel Sabretasche, take my catalogue, I have not looked into it yet, and mark all our favourites for me. I am going to enjoy the pictures now, and talk to nobody.”
A charming ruse on the young lady’s part to keep Sabretasche at
her side and make him talk to her, for they passed over eleven pictures, and lingered over a twelfth, while he discoursed on the Italian and French, the German and the English schools.
“Why have you never been to see me for four days!” asked Violet, standing before one of the glorious sea pieces of Stanfield.
Sabretasche hesitated a moment.
“I have had other engagements.”
Violet’s eyes flashed. “I beg your pardon, Colonel Sabretasche; not being capricious myself, it did not occur to me that you were so. However, if it be a matter of so little moment to you, it is of still less to me.”
“Did I not tell you,” whispered Sabretasche, “that I like too well to be with you to dare to be with you much. You cannot have forgotten our conversation at Richmond?”
“No,” she answered, hurriedly; “but you promised me your friendship, and you have no right to take it away. I do not pretend to understand you, I do not seek to know more than you choose to tell me, but since you once promised to be my friend, you have no right—”
“Violet, for God’s sake do not break my heart!” broke in Sabretasche, his voice scarcely above his breath, but full of such intense anguish that she was startled. “Your friend I cannot be; anything dearer I may not be. Forget me, and all interest in my fate. Of your interest in me I am utterly unworthy; and I would rather that you should credit all the evil that the world attributes to me, and, crediting it, learn to hate me, than think that I, in my own utter selfishness, had thrown one shade on your young life, mingled one regret with your bright future.”
They were both leaning against the rail; no one saw Violet’s face as she answered him.
“To speak of hate from me to you is folly, and it is too late to command forgetfulness. If you had no right to make me remember you, you have still less right to bid me forget you.”
“Violet, come and look at this picture of Lance’s, Regalia talks of buying it,” said her mother’s cold, slow, languid voice.