by Ouida
Are laid within our bosoms but to perish!
He loved her better than himself.
“Ah! Violet, Time has leaden wings!” he whispered to her as, when they escaped unnoticed from the crowd, he led her through her own apartments, locked to the ingress of others. “A fortnight is not long, yet to me, while it keeps you from me, it seems eternity! Would to God you were mine now!”
The soft hue that wavered in her cheeks, the low sigh, love’s tenderest interpreter, that parted her lips, re-echoed his wish, though words were silent!
“You will love me thus always, Vivian,” she whispered, “never less tenderly, never less warmly, never calmly, chilly, as men learn, they say, to love women whom they have won?”
“Never, my own love! Calm, chill affections were death to me as to you. My love has ever been as warm as my native Southern suns; for you it will be as eternal.”
“Then what can part us?” murmured Violet, lifting her face to his, with a smile upon her lips, and in her eyes the joy secure from all terror and all tarnish. “No power on earth! And so well do we love, that if death took one, he would strike the other!”
“Hush!” whispered Sabretasche, fondly. “Why speak of death or sorrow, my dearest? Our fate is life and joy; and life and joy together! We love; and in that word all happiness earth can know is given to us both.” He paused, and the silence that is sweeter than any words supplied his broken words — cold interpreters at best of the heart’s most eloquent utterances.
When all his other guests had left the Dilcoosha, Lady Molyneux gave him the third seat in her carriage back to town. The summer dawn was very bright and still, with not a trace of human life abroad, save in some gardeners’ carts wending their way slowly to Covent Garden with their fresh pile of newly-gathered vegetables or fragrant load of nodding hothouse flowers — flowers destined to wither in the soft, cruel hand of some jewelled beauty, or droop and die, pining for their native sunlight, under the smoke-shroud of the Great City, as sweet natures and warm hearts shrink or harden, under the blight of a chili world, or the pressure of an uncongenial existence. There was no sign of human life, but the birds were lifting up sweet gushes of natural song, the dew was among the daisied grass, and the southerly wind was tossing the wayside boughs up in its play, and filling the air with a fragrance, brought miles and miles on its rapid wings from the free, fresh woodlands far away.
There was a soft beauty in the summer dawn that chimed sweet cadence with their thoughts as Violet and Sabretasche drove homewards; while Lady Molyneux — worked throughout the season for fashion’s sake as hard as Hood’s poor shirt-maker for very life — slept, though she would have denied it, tranquilly and well. They enjoyed the sweet daybreak as people do whose hearts are full of gladness; she, with that love of all fair things and that susceptibility to externals natural to youth and to a heart which has never yet known care; he, with that poetic keenness to all things in life and nature which had in boyhood made the mere murmur of the Mediterranean waves, or the setting of the sun, or the sighing of winds among the olive-groves, pleasure to his senses. When the future is fair to us, how fair looks the green and laughing earth!
And she looked up in her lover’s eyes:
“Oh, Vivian, how beautiful is life!”
“With love!”
Life and love were both beautiful to him as he whispered a farewell but for a few hours in Violet’s ear, bent his head for one soft hurried kiss from the lips whose caresses were consecrated to him, and descended from the carriage at the door of his house in Park-lane.
It was past six o’clock when he reached his home, and threw himself down on one of the couches of that favourite room of his on the ground-floor, which adjoined and opened into his studio, where the morning light fell full on his easel, on a portrait of Violet in pastel. He lay smoking his narghilé with that voluptuous indolence habitual to him — looking at the picture where his own art had recreated the beauty of his young love — feeling in memory the loving, lingering touch of her lips — and dreaming over that fresh happiness whose solitary reveries were dearer to him now than society or sleep.
His life had never seemed so sweet, the peace he had won so perfect; and when his servant rapped gently at the door, though infinitely too sweet-tempered, and, truth to tell, too lazy, to irritate himself about trifles, he was annoyed to be disturbed.
“I told you not to interrupt me till I rang for my chocolate.”
“I beg your pardon, Colonel,” answered his man, submissively. “I should not, but there is a person asking to see you upon business, and as he said it was of great importance, I did not know, sir, what would be best to do.”
“What is always best to do is to obey me to the letter — you can never be wrong then. The person could have waited. What is his name?”
“He would not give it, sir; he wished to see you.”
“I see no one before two o’clock in the day. Go tell him so.”
The man obeyed; but in a minute or two he returned.
“The gentleman will take no denial, Colonel. He begs you to see him.”
“What an impertinent fellow!” said Sabretasche, with surprise. “Tell him I will not see him,’that is sufficient I see no one who does not send in his card.”
“But sir — but—”
“Well, what? Speak out,” said Sabretasche, irritated at the disturbance. It seemed to let in the disagreeables of outer life.
“But, sir, he says his business concerns you, and — and Miss Molyneux, sir.”
The man hesitated — even servants living with Sabretasche caught something of his delicacy and refinement and he knew intuitively how the mention of her name would annoy his master. A flush of astonishment and anger rose over Sabretasche’s forehead. He was but too sensitive over Violet, perhaps, from what he considered as the deep disgrace of his first marriage, and he almost disliked to hear servants’ lips breathe his idol’s name. “Show him in,” he said briefly, signing the man away. His past had been too fateful for him to join in Violet’s cloudless and fearless trust in the future. One of the bitterest curses of sorrow is the fear that it leaves behind it; making us, with the sweetest cup to our lips, dread the unseen hand that will dash it down, hanging the funeral pall of the past over the most glittering bridal clothes of the present, and poisoning the sunshine that lies before us with the memory of those clouds which, having so often come before, must, it seems to us, come yet again. When sorrow has once been upon us, we have no longer faith in life — we have but Hope, and Hope, God-given as she is, is but fearful, and fluttering, and evanescent at her best.
He lay still; the sunlight falling upon him and upon the brilliant face on the easel at his side. Vulgar and cruel eyes looked in on the scene — at the luxurious and beautiful studio, where every trifle was a gem of art, and at the man with all his grace and beauty, all his delicate and artistic surroundings: and a vulgar and cruel mind gloated with delight on the desolation and torture it had power to introduce into that peaceful life. Sabretasche lifted his eyes indolently — as he did so the slight flush upon his face died away; he grew pallid as death. For he saw the man who was linked with his hours of greatest shame, of most bitter misery — the brother and the emissary of his faithless wife! Involuntarily he rose, fascinated by the sight of the man connected with the deepest wrong and greatest shame of his life; and the Italian looked at him with a smile that showed his glittering white teeth, as a hound, who has seized the noblest of Highland royals at bay, shows his in the cruel struggle.
“Signor Castrone, this is a very unexpected intrusion,” said Sabretasche, in Italian, with all the loathing that he felt for this scoundrel who had stooped to live upon gold wrung from the husband whom his own sister had wronged. “Your negotiations with me are at an end. Allow me to request you to withdraw,”
“Wait one moment, Signor Sabretasche,” answered the Neapolitan, with a cunning leer in his bright, sharp eyes. “Are our negotiations at an end?”
“
So entirely, that if you do not leave my presence I shall be compelled to bid my servants make you.”
The Italian laughed. The cold, contemptuous tone stung him, and gave him but the greater gusto for his task.
“Not so fast, buon’ amico, not so fast; we are brothers-in-law, remember! It would not do for us to quarrel.”
The blood crimsoned Sabretasche’s face up to his very temples.
“The tie you dare to mention, and appeal to ought to be your bitterest disgrace. Since you are dead to shame, I need feel none for you; and if you do not leave the room, my servants will compel you.”
“Per fede!” said the Italian, with a scoffing laugh. “You will scarcely call your household in to witness your connection with me. They can hear the secret if you choose; it matters nothing to me; only I fancied that now, of all times, you would rather have kept it underhand. You are going to be married, caro, I hear, to a lovely English aristocrat — is it so?”
Sabretasche answered nothing, but stretched out his hand to the bell-handle in the wall nearest him. He felt it was beneath him to bandy words with such a man as Giuseppe da’ Castrone, who, a sort of gentlemanlike lazzarone, half swindler, half idler, a Southern Bohémien, had lived on his wits till he had lost all the traces of better feeling with which he perhaps might have begun life. He touched Sabretasche’s wrist as the Colonel’s white, slender hand was approaching the bell. Sabretasche flung off the grasp as if it had been pollution; but before he could ring the Neapolitan interposed with a smile, half cunning, half malicious:
“Would it not have been wiser, Eccellenza, before you had taken one wife to have made sure you had lost the other?”
Despite his nerve and habitual impassiveness, Sabretasche started: a deadly anguish of dread fastened upon him.
“Yours is a very stale device,” he said, calmly. “Too melodramatic to extort money from me. If you want a few scudi to buy you maccaroni, or game away at dominoes, ask for them in plain words, and I may give you them out of charity.”
He stood leaning his arm upon the top of his easel; his tall and graceful figure erect; pride, scorn, loathing written on his features, and in the depths of his eyes; speaking gently and slowly, — but very bitterly! — in his low and silvery voice. The tone, the glance, woke all the malice that slept in the Italian’s heart for his sister’s high-born and high-souled husband. His eyes glittered like an angry animal’s; he dropped the smoother tone which he had used before, for one of coarse and malicious vindictiveness.
“Santa Maria! don’t take that proud tone with me, carissimo, or I may make you glad to change it, and ‘turn your threats into prayers! You are not quite so near happiness as you fancy, my fine gentleman. That is your young love’s picture, no doubt? Ah! it is a fair face; it will go hard to lose it, I dare say? It would go harder still if the proud, fastidious Vivian Sabretasche were tried for bigamy! It would not look pretty in the London papers, where his name has been so often as a leader of fashion and—”
Before he could end his sentence Sabretasche had sprung at him, rapidly and lightly as a panther, and seized him by the throat:
“Wretch, you lie! How dare you to insult me! By Heaven! if it were not too great honour for you, I would kill you where you stand!”
So fierce was the grasp of his white slender fingers in the passion into which his gentle nature was at length roused, that the Italian, almost throttled, struggled with difficulty from his hold.
“You fie!” said Sabretasche, flinging him off with a force that sent him reefing from him. “The woman whom you dare to recall as my wife is dead!”
“Per Dio, is she? You will find to the contrary, bel signor. Basta! but your hands have no baby’s grasp; you had better have joined them in prayer, best brother-in-law. If you many the English beauty, you will have two wives on your shoulders, and one has been more than you have managed!”
Sabretasche’s eyes were fixed upon him, fascinated by horror as an antelope by a rattlesnake. “Two wives — two wives!” he muttered incoherently, like a man in delirium. “She is dead, I tell you — she is dead.”
Then the sense, and transparent falsity, of what the Neapolitan had said came clearer to his mind, and, with an effort, he regained his calm and haughty tone, speaking slowly between his teeth. “Signor Castrone, once more I will request you, for your own sake, to leave this house quietly, without compelling me to the force I am loth to use. With her, the grave buries all past errors; but with you, I still shall treat as with any other swindler. I am not a likely person to be terrified by secret innuendoes or open insults. This time I will let you go — you are beneath my anger — but if you intrude yourself into this house, or venture to approach me again, I shall call in the law to rid me of a pest.”
Something in his voice, which, soft as it was in his native Italian, bore a subtle magic of command, had awed the coarser nature into silence while he spoke; but when he paused, Castrone broke out into a long, discordant, malicious laugh, jarring like jangled bells upon every nerve and chord in his listener’s heart.
“Diavolo! buon’ amico, it will be I more likely who will have the law upon you! Sylvia is alive — alive! and your lawful wife, from whom nothing but death can ever divorce you. I do not think she loves you well enough, milor, to let another woman reign in her stead, without making you pay the heaviest penalty she can, for your double marriage! Wait! you saw the death of a Sylvia da’ Castrone in an Italian paper, I dare say? You had the certificate of such a death from Naples? Very possibly, but her aunt Sylvia da’ Castrone died last May in Naples, and it was her obituary that you saw. If Sylvia died (as Santa Maria forbid!), it would be recorded as what she is, and what she will be while life lasts — the wife of Vivian Sabretasche. She lives — nay, she is in London, ready to proclaim her right to your name to your new love — or, if your union take place before she can do so, she will then prosecute you according to your English law. She was married in England, you remember; she has not lost the certificate, and the register is correct — I saw it but this morning. It is no idle tale, I tell you, buon’ amico. I know you too well to try and palm one off upon you unless I could substantiate it Your wife is alive, cognato mio! I fear me there will be some few difficulties in the way of marrying your young beauty?”
As the Italian spoke, his coarse, malicious laugh, like the hissing of a serpent, falling like seething fire on the listener’s heart, Sabretasche stood gazing upon him. In his parted lips, in his eyes wide open with the horror of amazement, on every feature, already blanched and wan, was marked the deadly anguish of despair, — then, as the full meaning of the words he heard cut gradually into his brain, his strength gave way, and he sank down upon his couch, covering his face with his hands, while cold drops of agony stood upon his brow, and a bitter cry broke from the great passion that had grown and strengthened and entwined itself around his heart, till it were easier to drain that heart of its life-blood than its love.
And the Neapolitan stood by, gloating at the ruin he had wrought. He had longed for years to revenge the silent scorn, the cutting contempt, the high-bred hauteur with which the man upon whose gold he had lived had treated him — he had thirsted for the time to come when Sabretasche should be humbled before him — when it should be his turn to hold the power which could at will remove or let fall the sword that hung above his victim’s head — when it should be his to see, writhing in anguish before him, the haughty gentleman at whose glance and whose word he had so often flinched and slunk away. He stood by and watched him, and Sabretasche had forgot all sense of his presence, all memory of the coarse, cruel eyes which looked on the grief of one who so long had persuaded the world that he valued life too little to give it aught but smiles; and Castrone laughed, the laugh of a demon, at his own fell work.
“Milor does not seem charmed to hear of his wife; it does not seem to bring him the connubial rapture one would expect.”
The jeer, the taunt, the mockery of his woe, stung to madness the heart of the man wh
o shrank even from the sympathy of friends, and who had oftentimes won the imputation of callousness of feeling, because he felt too deeply to bear to unveil his sorrows to the glare of daylight and the sneers of men.
Sabretasche started, as at the sharp touch of the knife searching a fresh wound, and shivered as if with the cold of death. He lifted his face, aged in those brief moments as by long years of woe, and there the brother of his wife read desolation enough to satiate a fiend.
“If this were your errand,” he said, with effort — and his voice was hollow almost to inarticulateness, “you have no further excuse for intrusion. I shall take means for verifying your story; and now begone, while I can keep my hands off you.”
“Here is your proof, Eccellenza!”
Sabretasche mechanically read the paper held out to him; it contained but two lines.
“If you will, you can see me once more to-day; — but only to remind you that while I live no other can call herself your Wife.”
Though he had not seen it for more than twenty long years, he knew the writing to be his wife’s. All hope died in him then; he knew that she lived — the woman who had wedded him to misery and disgrace; the woman who now came forward, after the absence and the silence of a score of years, to ban him from the better life to which a gentler and a purer hand was about to lead him.
“I see her!” he cried, his passionate anguish, his loathing hatred, breaking out in a rapid rush of words, “I see the woman who disgraced my name, who betrayed my love; who for twenty years has lived upon my gold, yet never addressed to me one word of repentance or remorse; never one word to confess her crimes; never one prayer to ask forgiveness of her sin! I see her! How dares she ask it? How dares she sign herself by the name she has polluted? Go! tell her that I will bribe her no more, that she is free to do her worst that devils can prompt her, that she may proclaim her marriage with me far and wide; I care not! She may write her lying story in all the papers if she will; she may persuade all England and all Italy that she is a fond, deserted wife, and I a cruel, faithless husband; she may bring my name into Law Courts if she choose to sue me for her maintenance; but tell her, once for all, I give her no more bribes. I disown her, though the world will not divorce me. Now go; go, I tell you, or by God I will not let you leave in peace!”