Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  The Viscountess sat down on a low chair in a state of supercilious apathy. She cared nothing for pictures. The parrot’s talk, which was certainly very voluble, made her head ache, and Vane Castleton was infinitely too full of admiration of Alma to please her ladyship. De Vigne, when he had done the introductory part of the action, played with Sylvio, only looking up when Alma addressed him, and then answering her more distantly and briefly than his wont. He could have shot Castleton with great pleasure for the free glance of his bold light eyes, and such a murderous frame of mind rather spoils a man for society, however great he may generally be as a conversationalist!

  We, however, managed to keep up the ball of talk very gaily, even without him. It was chiefly, of course, upon art — turning on Alma’s pictures, which drew warm praises from Violet and Castleton, and, what was much more, from that most fastidious critic and connoisseur, the Colonel. We were in no hurry to leave. Castleton evidently thought the chevelure dorée charming; women were all of one class to him — all to be bought! some with higher prices and some with lower, and he drew no distinction between them, except that some were blondes and some brunes. Violet liked leaning against the old oak window-seat, scenting the roses, and listening to Sabretasche’s classic and charming disquisitions upon painting, and Alma herself was in her element with highly-bred and highly-educated people. We were in no hurry to go; but Lady Molyneux was, and was much too bored to stay there long.

  “You will come and see me?” said her daughter, holding out her hand to Alma. “Oh yes, you must.

  Mamma, is not Thursday our next ‘At Home’? Miss Tressillian would like to meet some of our celebrities, I am sure; and they would like to see her, for every one has admired her ‘Louis Dix-sept.’ Have you any engagement?”

  Of course Alma had none. She gave a glance at De Vigne, to see if he wished her to go, but as he was absorbed in teaching Sylvio to sit on his hind legs and hold a riding-whip on his nose, she found no responsive glance, and had to accept it without consulting him. Violet taking acceptance for granted, and her mamma, who did not care to contradict her before Sabretasche, joining languidly in the invitation, the Little Tressillian stood booked for the Thursday soirée in Lowndes-square.

  Violet bade her good-day, with that suave warmth which fashionable life could never ice out of her, and the Viscountess swept out of the room, and down the garden, in no very amiable frame of mind. She rather affected patronising artists of all kinds, and had brought out several protégés, though she unhappily dropped them as soon as their novelty had worn off; but to patronise a girl’s genius, whose face Vane Castleton admired, was a very different matter, for my lady was just now as much in love as she had ever been in love with anything, except herself, and there is no passion more exigeant and tenacious than the fancy of a woman, passée herself, for a young and handsome man! De Vigne was a little behind the rest as he left the room, and Alma called him back, her face full of the delight that Violet’s invitation had given her.

  “Oh, Sir Folko! I am so happy. Was it not kind of Miss Molyneux?”

  “Very kind indeed.”

  “Don’t you like me to go?”

  “I? What have I to do with it? On the contrary, I think you will enjoy yourself very much.”

  “You will be there, of course?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

  “Oh, you will,” cried Alma, plaintively. “You would not spoil all my pleasure, surely? But why have you spoken so little to me this morning?”

  “You have had plenty of others to talk to you,” said De Vigne, coldly. “At least, you have seemed very much amused.”

  “Sir Folko, that is very cruel,” cried Alma, vehemently. “You know as well as I can tell you, that if you are not kind to me, all the world can give me no pleasure.”

  “Nonsense! Good-bye, petite,” said De Vigne, hastily, but kindly, for his momentary irritation had passed, as he swung through the garden and threw himself across his horse.

  “What a little darling she is, Vivian!” said Violet, as they cantered along the road. “Don’t you think so?” Sabretasche laughed:

  “Really, I did not notice her much. There is but one ‘darling’ for me now.”

  “Deuced nice little thing, that!” said Castleton to me; “uncommonly pretty feet she has; I caught sight of one of them. I suppose she’s De Vigne’s game, bagged already probably, else, on my honour, I shouldn’t mind dethroning La Valdare, and promoting her. French women have such deuced extravagant ideas.”

  I believe if De Vigne had heard him he would have knocked Castleton straight off his horse! His cool way of disposing of Alma irritated even me a little, and I told him, a trifle sharply, that I thought he had better call on his “honour” to remember that Miss Tressillian had birth and education, and that she was hardly to be classed with the Anonyma of our acquaintance. To which Castleton responded with a shrug of his shoulders and a twist of his whiskers:

  “Bless your soul, my dear fellow, women are all alike! Never knew either you or De Vigne scrupulous before,” and rode on with the Viscountess, asking me, with a sneer, if I was “the Major’s gamekeeper?”

  De Vigne was very quick to act, but he was unwilling to analyse. It always fidgeted him to reason on, to dissect, and to investigate his own feelings; he was not cold enough to sit on a court-martial on his own heart, to cut it up and put it in a microscope, like Gosse over a trog or a dianthis, or to imitate De Quincey’s habit of speculating on his own emotions. He was utterly incapable of laying his own feelings before him, as an anatomist lays a human skeleton, counting the bones, and muscles, and points of ossification, it is true, but missing the flesh, the colouring, the quick flow of blood, the warm moving life which gave to that bare skeleton all its glow and beauty. De Vigne acted, and did not stop to ask himself why he did so nine times out of ten; therefore he never inquired, or thought of inquiring, why he had experienced such unnecessary and unreasonable anger at Castleton and Alma, but only felt remorsefully that he had lacked kindness in not sympathising with the poor child in her very natural delight at her invitation to Lowndes -square. Whenever he thought he had been unkind, if it were to a dog, he was not easy till he had made reparation; and not stopping to remember that unkindness from him might be the greater kindness in the end, he sent her down on Thursday morning the best bouquet the pick of Covent Garden could give him, clasped round with a parure of jewels, as delicate in workmanship as rare in value, with a line, “Wear them to-night in memory of your grandfather’s friendship for ‘Sir Folko.’”

  De Vigne’s virtues led him as often into temptation as other men’s vices. When he sent those flowers and pearls to the Little Tressillian, I am certain he had no deeper motive, no other thought, than to make reparation for his unkindness, and to give her as delicately as he could ornaments he knew that she must need. With him no error was foreplanned and premeditated. He might have slain you in a passion, perhaps, but he could never have stilettoed you in cold blood. There was not a taint of malice or design, not a trace of the “serpent nature” in his character.

  VOLUME II.

  CHAPTER I.

  How the olden Delirium awoke like a Giant from his Slumbers.

  THE Molyneux rooms in Lowndes Square were full, not crowded; the Viscountess knew too well the art of society to cram her apartments, as is the present habitude, till lords and ladies jostle and crush one another like so many Johns and Marys crowding before a fair — the rooms were full, and “brilliantly attended,” as the morning papers had it next day, for though they were of the fourth order of nobility, the Molyneux had as exclusive a set as any in town, and knew “everybody.”

  “Everybody!” Comprehensive yet exclusive phrase! meaning, in their lips, just the crème de la crème, and nothing whatever below it; meaning, in a Warden’s, all his Chapter; in a schoolgirl’s, all her school-fellows; in a leg’s, all the “ossy-men;” in an author’s, those who read him; in a painter’s, those who praise him; in a rector’s, those wh
o testimonialize and saint him! In addition to the haute volée of fashion there was the haute volée of intellect at the Viscountess’s Reception, for Lady Molyneux dearly loved to have a lion (though whether a writer who honours the nations, or an Eastern prince in native ugliness and jewellery, was perhaps immaterial to her!); and many of our best authors and artists were not only acquaintances of hers, but intimate friends of Sabretasche’s, who at any time threw over the most aristocratic crush for the simplest intellectual réunion, preferring, as he used to say, the God-given cordon of Brain to the ribbons of Bath or Garter.

  I went there early, leaving a dinner-party in Eaton Square sooner than perhaps I should have done, from a trifle of curiosity I felt to see how the “Little Tressillian” comported herself in her new sphere; and I confess I did not expect to see her quite so thoroughly at home, and quite so much of a star in her own way as I found her to be. I have told you she had nothing of Violet’s regular and perfect beauty — regular as a classic statue, perfect as an exquisitely-tinted picture — yet, someway or other, Alma told as well in her way as the lovely Irish belle in hers; told even better than the Lady Ela Ashburnington, our modern Medici Venus — but who, alas! like the Venus, never opens those perfectly-chiselled lips; or the exquisite Mrs. Tite Delafield, — whose form would rival Canova’s Pauline, if it weren’t made by her couturière: or even Madame la Duchesse de la Vieillecour, now that — ah me! — the sweet rose bloom is due to Palais Royal shops, and the once innocent lips only breathe coquetries studied beforehand, while her maid brushes out her long hair, and Gwen — pshaw! Madame la Duchesse — glances alternately from Octave Feuillet’s or Feydeau’s last novel to her Dresden-framed mirror.

  Yes, Alma won upon all; whether it was her freshness, whether it was her natural abandon, whether it was her unusual talent, wit, and gay self-possession (for if there is a being on earth whom I hate, ’tis Byron’s “bread-and-butter miss”), I must leave undetermined. Probably, it was that nameless something which one would think Mephistopheles himself had given some women, so surely and so unreasoningly do men go down before it, whether they will or no. The women sneered at her, and smiled superciliously, but that was of course! See two pretty women look at each other — there is defiance in the mutual regard, and each thinks in her own heart, “Je vais me frotter contre Wellington!” One might have imagined that those high-bred beauties, with their style and their Paris dress, their acknowledged beauty, and their assured conquests, could well have spared Alma a few of the leaves out of their weighty bay wreaths. Yet I believe in my soul they grudged her even the stalks, and absolutely condescended to honour her with a sneer (surest sign of feminine envy) when they saw not only a leaf or two, but a good many garlands of rose and myrtle going to her in the Olympic game of “Shining.”

  An R. A. complimented her on her talent, a Cabinet minister smiled at her repartee, a great littérateur exchanged mots with her, Curly fell more deeply in love with her than ever, Castleton was rapturous about her feet, very blasés men about town went the length of exciting themselves to ask her to dance, and Attachés and Guardsmen warmed into stronger admiration than their customary nil admirari-ism usually permitted about her. Yet she bent forward to me as I approached her with a very eager whisper:

  “Oh, Captain Chevasney! isn’t Major De Vigne coming?”

  I really couldn’t tell her, as I had not seen him all day, save for a few minutes in Pall Mall; and the disappointment on her face was amusing. But a minute afterwards her eyes flashed, the colour deepened in her cheeks.

  “There he is!” she said, with an under-breath of delight. And her attention to Curly, and Castleton, and the other men, began to wander considerably.

  There he was, leaning against the doorway, looking bored, I was going to say, but that is rather too affected a thing, and not earnest nor ardent enough for any feeling of De Vigne’s; it was rather the look of a man too impatient and too spirited for the quiet trivialities around him, who would prefer “fierce love and faithless war” to drawing-room flirtations and polite character-damning; the look of a horse who wants to be scenting powder and leading a charge, and is ridden quietly along smooth downs where nothing is stirring, with a curb which he does not relish. Ostensibly, he was chatting with a member of the Lower House; absolutely, he was watching Alma with that look in his eyes, caused, I think, by a certain peculiarity of dropping the lashes over them when he was angry, which made me fancy he was not overpleased to see the men crowding round the little lady.

  “He won’t come and speak to me. Do go and ask him to come,” whispered Alma, confidentially, to me.

  I laughed — he had not been more than three minutes in the room! — and obeyed her behest.

  “Your little friend wants you to go and talk to her, De Vigne.”

  He glanced towards her.

  “She is quite as well without any attention from me, considering the reports that have already risen concerning us, and she seems admirably amused as it is.”

  “Halloa! are we jealous?”

  “Jealous! Of what pray!” asked my lord, with supreme scorn.

  And moving across the room at once in Alma’s direction (without thinking of it, I had suggested the very thing to send him to her, in sheer defiance), he joined the group gathered round the Little Tressillian, whose radiant smile at his approach made Castleton sneer and poor Curly swear sotto voce under his moustaches. De Vigne, however, did not say much to her; he shook hands with her, said one or two things, and then talking with Tom Severn (whom Alma had attracted to her side) about the ties shot off at Hornsey Wood that morning, left the little lady so much to the other men, that though he was within a yard of her, she thought she preferred him in her studio at St. Crucis than in the crowded salons of that “set” of his in which she had wished to meet him.

  De Vigne talked to those about him, but he meanwhile watched her dancing, lightly and gracefully as a Spanish girl or an Eastern bayadère; watched her, the fact dawning on him, with a certain warning thrill, that she was not, after all, a little thing to laugh at, and play with, and pet innocently, as he did his spaniel, but a woman, as dangerous to men as she was attractive to them, who could no more be trifled with without the trifling falling back again upon the trifler than absinthe can be drunk like water, or opium eaten long without delirium.

  Certain jealousies surged up in his heart, certain embers that had slumbered long began to quicken into flame; the blood that he had tried to chill into ice-water rushed through his veins with something of its natural rapidity and fire. He had pooh-poohed Sabretasche’s earnest and my half-laughing counsels; he now heeded as little what ought to have roused him much more, the throbs of his own heart, and the passions stirring into life within him.

  She was a child; his own honour was guard sufficient against love growing up between them. So he would have said if he had ever reasoned on it. But he was not cold enough for such self-examination, and even now, though jealousy was waking up in him, he was wilfully blind to it, and to the irritation, which the sight of the other men crowding round and claiming her excited in him.

  “Don’t you mean to dance with me?” whispered Alma, piteously, as he passed her after the waltz was over.

  “I seldom dance,” he answered.

  It was the truth: waltzing used to be a passion with him, but since the Trefusis had waltzed his reason away, the dance had brought disagreeable associations with it.

  “But you must waltz with me!”

  “Hush! All the room will hear you,” said De Vigne, smiling in spite of himself. “Let me look at your list, then!”

  “Oh, I would not make any engagements. I might have been engaged ten deep, but I kept them all free for you.”

  “May I have the honour of the next waltz with you, then, Miss Tressillian?” asked De Vigne, in a louder tone, for the benefit of the people round.

  As he put his arm round her, and whirled her into the circle, he remembered, with a shudder at the memory, that the last woman
he had waltzed with was the Trefusis. In India wilder sports and more exciting amusements had filled his time, and since he had been in England he had chiefly frequented men’s society.

  “You had my note, Sir Folko?” was Alma’s first question. “I could never thank you for your beautiful gifts, I could never tell you what happiness they gave me.”

  “You have said far more than enough, petite,” said De Vigne, hastily.

  “No,” persisted Alma, “I could never say enough to thank you for all your lavish kindness to me.”

  “Nonsense,” laughed De Vigne. “I have given jewels to many other women, Alma, but none of them thought they had any need to feel any gratitude to me. The gratitude they thought was due to them for having allowed me to offer them the gift!”

  He spoke with something of a sneer, from the memory of how — to him, at least — women high and low, had ever been cheap, and worthless as most cheap things are; and the words cast a chill over his listener. For the first time the serpent entered into Alma’s Eden — entered, as in Milton’s apologue, with the first dawning knowledge of Passion. Unshed tears sprang into her eyes, making them flash and gleam as brilliantly as the gems he had given her.

  “If you did not give them from kindness,” she said, passionately, “take them back. My happiness in them is gone.”

  “Silly child!” said De Vigne, half smiling at her vehement tones. “Should I have given them to you if I had not cared to do so? On the contrary, I am always glad to give you any pleasures if I can. But do you suppose, Alma, that I have gone all my life without giving presents to any one till I gave them to you?”

  Alma laughed, but she looked, half vexed, up in his face even still: