Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “At this time Sylvia’s brother came to Naples, a showy, handsome, vulgar young man, with none of her exterior delicacy, who had been my detestation in Montepulto. Naturally he came to his sister’s house, though he had no liking for me, for our antipathy was mutual; but he quartered himself on his sister, for he was poor, and had nothing to do. I generally, when I went to her after Castrone’s arrival, found him and some of his friends — rollicking, do-nothing, mauvais sujets, like himself — smoking and drinking there; while Sylvia, decked with her old smiles, and adorned in the rich dress it had been my delight to bestow on her, lay on her couch, flirting her fan or touching her guitar; her lovely voice had been one of her greatest charms for me; but, once married, she never let me hear it The men were odious to me, accustomed as I was to the best society of the old Italian noblesse, but I was so sick and heart-weary of the constant contentions which awaited me in my wife’s home, that I was glad of the presence of other persons to prevent a scene of passion and abuse. The chief visitor at Sylvia’s house was a friend of her brother’s — an artist of the name of Lani — a young fellow, exceedingly handsome, in a coarse, full-coloured style, though utterly detestable to me, with his loud voice, his vulgar foppism, and his would-be wit He pleased Sylvia, however; a fact to which I never attached any importance, for I was not at all of a suspicious or sceptical nature then, and I am never one of those who think that a woman must necessarily be faithless to her husband because she likes the society of another man; on the contrary, a husband’s hold on her affection must be very slight, if, to keep it, he must subject her to a seclusion almost conventual. Fidelity is no fidelity unless it has opportunity to swerve if it choose. So, to be jealous of Lani never occurred to me. I could not have stooped to it, had it even done so, for I held my own honour infinitely too high to dream that another could sully it My trust and my security were rudely destroyed! Six months more went on. Sylvia clamoured ceaselessly for the acknowledgment of our marriage; in vain I pleaded to her that my father was on his death-bed, that the physicians told me that the slightest mental shock would end his existence, and that as soon as ever I had lost him, which must be at farthest in a few months’ time, I would acknowledge her as my wife, and take her to England, where large property had just been left me. Such a plea would, you would think, have been enough for any woman’s heart. It availed nothing with her; she made it the occasion for such awful scenes of execration and passion as I pray Heaven I may never see in woman or man again. I refused to endanger my father’s life to please her caprices. The result was one so degrading to her, so full of shame and misery to me, that for several days I could not bring myself to enter her presence again. My love was gone, trampled down under her coarse and cruel invectives. In the place of my lovely and idolised wife I found a fiend: and I repented too late the irrevocable folly of an Early Marriage, the curse of so many men. When at last I went to what should have been my home, and was my hell, the windows of some of the rooms stood open; I walked up the gardens and through those windows into the rooms unannounced, as a man in his own house thinks he is at liberty to do. How one remembers trifles on such days of anguish as that was to me! I remember the very play of the sunshine on the ilex-leaves, I remember how I brushed the boughs of the magnolias out of my path as I went up the verandah steps! Unseen myself, I saw Lani and my wife: his arms were round her, her head upon his breast, and I caught words which, though insufficient for law, told me of her infidelity. God help me; what I suffered! Young, unsuspicious, acutely sensitive, painfully alive to the slightest stain upon my honour, to be displaced by this vulgar, low-bred rival. Great Heavens! how bitter was my shame.”

  Violet’s hands clenched on his in the horror of his wrongs:

  “Oh, my dearest, my dearest! Would to Heaven I could avenge you!”

  “Death has avenged me, my darling! Those few words which fell on my ear, in the first paralysed moment of the treachery which had availed itself of my unsuspecting hospitality to rob me of my honour, were sufficient for me. Even then I had memory enough to keep myself from stooping to the degradation of a spy, and from lowering myself before the man who had betrayed me. I went farther into the room, and they saw me. Lani had the grace to look guilty and ashamed; for only the day before he had asked me to lend him money, and I had complied. I remember being perfectly calm and self-possessed; one often is so in hours of the greatest suffering or excitement. I motioned him to the door; and he slunk like a hound afraid of a double thonging. He went out, and I was left alone — with my wife. Do you wonder that I have loathed and abhorred that title, holding it as a synonym with all that is base, and treacherous, and shameful — a curse from which there is no escape — a clog, rather than take which into his life a man had better forego all love, all pleasure, all passion — a mess of porridge with poison in the cup, for which he must give up all the priceless birthright of liberty and peace, never enjoyed and never valued till they are lost for ever, past recall?

  “Do you think there was any shame, remorse, repentance on her face, any regret for the abuse of all my confidence, any consciousness of the fidelity thus repaid, of the trust thus returned? No; in her face there was only a devilish laugh. She met me with a sneer and a scoff; she had the brazen falseness to deny her infidelity, for she knew that admission would divorce her and give me freedom; and when I taxed her with it, she only answered with invectives, with violence, insult, and opprobrium. It seemed as if a demon entered into her when she became possessed with that fearful and fiend-like passion. I will not sully your ears with all the disgraceful details of the scene where a woman gave reins to her fell passions, and forgot sex, truth, all things, even common decency of language or of conduct: suffice it, it ended in worse violence still. As I rose, to leave her for ever, and end the last of these horrible interviews, which destroyed all my self-respect, and withered all my youth, she sprang upon me like a tigress, and struck at my breast with a stiletto, which lay on a table near, among other things of curious workmanship. Strong as I was at that time, I could scarcely master her — a furious woman is more savage in her wrath than any beast of prey; she clung to me, yelling hideous words, and striking blindly at me with her dagger. Fortunately for me, the stiletto was old and blunt, and could not penetrate through the cloth of my coat. By sheer force I wrenched myself from her grasp, unclenched her fingers from the handle of the dagger, and left her prostrate, from the violence of her own passions, her beautiful hair unloosened in the struggle, her hands cut and torn in her own wild fencing with the stiletto, her eyes glaring with the ferocity of a tigress, her lips covered with foam. From that hour I never saw her face. — Last week I read the tidings of her death.”

  Sabretasche paused. He had not recalled the dread memory of his marriage without bitter pain; never till now had his lips breathed one word of his story to a living creature, and he could not lift the veil from the secret buried for twenty years without the murderous air from the tomb poisoning the free, pure atmosphere which he now breathed. All the colour fled from Violet’s lips and cheeks; she burst into convulsive sobs, and trembling painfully, shrank closer into his arms, as if the dead wife could come and claim him from her.

  Gently and tenderly he caressed and calmed her.

  “My precious one, I would not have told you my story if I had known how it would pain you. I did not like you to be in ignorance of my previous marriage, and I could not tell you the fact, without telling you also the history of the wretched woman who held from me the title you have promised me to bear. But do not let it weigh on you. Great as my wrongs were I can forgive them now. She can harm me no longer; and you will teach me in the sunshine of your presence to forget the deadly shadow of her past. I will tell you no more to-day, you look so pale. What will your mother say to me for sending away your brilliant bloom? She likes me little enough already! Do you wish me to go on? Then promise me to give me my old gay smiles; I should be sad, indeed, for my early fate to cast the slightest shade on your shadowless life! Well,
I left her as I said. It is useless to dwell on the anguish, the misery, the shame which had crowded into my young heart. To have my name stained, my wife stolen from me by that low-bred cur, and to know that to this woman I was chained, till one or other of us should be laid in the grave! — it was enough to drive a man of four-and-twenty to any recklessness or any crime. With that shame and horror upon me, I had to watch over the dying hours of my father. He died shortly afterwards in my arms, peacefully, as he had spent his life. I saw the grave close over one from whom I had never had an angry word or a harsh glance, and reckless and heartbroken I came to England. I took Counsel’s advice about my marriage; they told me it was perfectly legal and valid, and that the evidence, however morally or rationally clear, was not strong enough to dissolve the unholy ties which bound me to one whom in my heart I knew a virago, a liar, an adulteress, who would, if she could, have added murder to her list of crimes. Of her I never had heard a word. I left her, at once and for ever, to her lovers and her passions.”

  “Did the child die?” asked Violet. “I wish you had had no child, Vivian. I am jealous of everything that has ever been yours!... Pray God that I may live and make atonement to you!”

  “My darling!” he murmured fondly. “You need be jealous of nothing in my past; none have been to me what you are and will be. I never remembered the child. She was nothing to me; how could I even know that she was mine? But some years afterwards, they told me she had died in infancy. So best with such a mother! What could she but be now? I came to England, entered the army, and began the life I have led ever since, plunging into dissipation, to still the fatal memories that stirred within me; revenging myself on that sex whom I had before trusted and worshipped; gaining for myself the reputation, to which your mother and the rest of the world still hold, of an unscrupulous profligate; none guessing how my heart ached while my lips laughed; how, sceptical by force, I yet longed to believe; and how the heart of my boyhood craved to love and be loved. Three years after my arrival here, the sight of Castrone recalled to me the past in all its hideous horror. What errand think you he, shameless as his sister, came upon me? None less than to extort money from me by the threat, in Sylvia’s name, that she would come over to England and proclaim herself my wife. I was weak to yield his demand to him, and not to have the servants show him at once out of the house; but money was plentiful, his presence was loathsome; the idea of seeing that woman, of being forced to endure her presence, of having the mistress of young Lani known in England as my wife, was so horrible, that, without thinking, I snatched at the only means of security. I paid him what he asked — exorbitant, of course — and hung that other mill-stone round my neck for life! From that time, to within the last twelvemonth, her brother has come to me, whenever his or her exchequer failed; she was not above living on the husband she had wronged! For twenty years I kept my secret; ali I had to remind me of my fatal tie was the annual visit of Castrone. Can any one wonder that when I met you I forgot oftentimes my own fetters, and, what was worse, your danger? In my many loves I have only, I confess, sought pleasure and revenged myself on Sylvia’s sex — how could I think well or mercifully of women? But you roused in me something infinitely deeper, and more tender. In you the soft idyls of my lost dreams lived again; with you the grace and glory of my lost youth returned. Before, as a man of the world — bitterly as I felt the secret disgrace of it — I experienced no inconvenience from the tie. I wooed many lightly, won them easily, forsook them recklessly. None of the three could I do with you. They only charmed my senses; you won into my heart; they had amused me, you grew dear to me — a wide difference, Violet, in a woman’s influence upon a man. At first, I confess I flirted carelessly with you. But when the full beauties of your heart and mind unfolded themselves to me for the first time, I remembered mercy, even while I learnt that for the last time I loved! How great were my sufferings I need not tell you. Unable to bear the misery of constant intercourse with you, conscious in myself that if long under the temptation I should give way under it, and say words for which, when you knew all, you might learn to hate me—”

  “Oh, never, never!” whispered Violet, fondly. “I should always love you, come what might.”

  Sabretasche passed his hand fondly over her brow:

  “I knew well that you would. But it was the very consciousness that, if you loved, you would love very differently to the frivolous and inconstant women of our set, which roused me into mercy to you. I left for the south of France, to give myself time for reflection, or — vain hope! — to forget you, as I had forgotten many; to give you time to find, if it so chanced, some one who, more worthy of your attachment, would reward it with the legitimate happiness which the world smiles upon. In a week from leaving London I was in the Pyrenees, intending to stay there for some time for the sake of the sea-bathing; but the first evening I was at Biarritz, I took up over my chocolate an Italian newspaper — how it chanced to come there I know not — it was the ‘Nazionale’ of Naples. Among the deaths I read that of my wife! Great Heaven! that a husband’s first thoughts should be a thanksgiving for the death of the woman he once fondly loved, over whose sleep he once watched, and in whom he once reposed his name, his trust, his honour! I read it over and over again, the letters danced and swam before my eyes; I, whom the world says nothing can disturb or ruffle, shook in every nerve, as I leaned out into the evening air, dizzy and delirious with the rush of past memories, and future hopes, that surged over my brain! With that one fateful line I was free! No prisoner ever welcomed liberty with such rapturous ecstasy as I. The blight was off my life, the curse was taken from my soul, my heart beat free again as it had never done during the twenty long years that the bitter shame and misery of my marriage had weighed upon me. Love and youth and joy were mine again. A new existence, fresher and fairer, had come back to me. My cruel enemy, who had given my honour to a cur, and who had yet stooped to live on the money she robbed from the boy-husband she had wronged, was dead, and I at last was free — free to offer to you the fondest love man ever offered woman — free to receive at your hands the golden gifts, robbed from me for so long. Violet, — I know that I shall not ask for them in vain?”

  She lifted her face to his with broken words, in her eyes gleaming unshed tears; and as his lips lingered upon hers, the new youth and joy he coveted came back to Sabretasche, never, he fondly thought, to leave him again while both their lives should last.

  CHAPTER XX.

  One of the Summer Days before the Storm.

  THE Derby fell late that year. The day was a brilliant, sunshiny one, as it ought to be, for it is the sole day in our existence when we are excited, and do not, as usual, think it necessary to be bored to death to save our characters. We confess to a wild anxiety at the magic word “Start!” to which no other sight on earth could rouse us. We watch with thrilling eagerness the horses rounding the Corner as we should watch the beauty of no Galatea, however irresistible; and we see the favourite do the distance with enthusiastic intoxication, to which all the other excitements on earth could ‘never fire our blood! From my earliest recollection since I rode races with the stable boys at five years old, and was discovered indulging in that reprehensible pastime by my tutor (a mild and inoffensive Ch. Ch man, to whom “Bell’s Life” was a dead letter, and the chariotracing at Rome and Elis the only painful reading in the classics), my passion has been the Turf. The Turf! — there must needs be some strange attraction in our English sport. It has lovers more faithful than women ever win; it has victims, voluntary holocausts upon its altars, more numerous than any creed that ever brought men to martyrdom; its iron chains are hugged where other silken fetters have grown wearisome; its fascination lasts while the taste of the wine may pall and the beauty of feminine grace may satiate. Men are constant to its mystic charms where they tire of love’s beguilements; they give with a lavish hand to it what they would deny to any living thing. Olden chivalry, modern ambition, boast no disciples so faithful as the followers of the Turf; and,
to the Turf, men yield up what women whom they love would ask in vain; lands, fortunes, years, energies, powers; till their mistress has beggared them of all — even too often robbed them of honour itself!