Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  The fierce but coward nature of the Neapolitan quailed before the passion of the usually gentle and impassive Englishman. He spoke softly, more timidly, smoothing down the coarseness of his tone.

  “But, signore, listen. If you feel thus towards my poor sister, and will not believe that your hatred to her is without cause, would you not rather that the world knew nothing of your marriage!”

  “Since it cannot be broken, all the world may know it I will bribe you no longer. Begone!”

  “Nay, one word — but one word, signore. If I could show you how you might still wed your young English love—”

  The fierce gesture of the listener warned him to hasten, if he would be heard; and Castrone’s instinct told him how sharper than a dagger’s thrust, and more bitter than poison to the man of reserve and refinement, was the rending of the veil of the one sacred temple by a coarse and sacrilegious hand!

  “Listen,” he said, in his sweet, swift language, with a glitter in his keen, bright eyes. “No one living knows of your union with my sister save ourselves; men do not dream that you are married, much less will they think of turning over registers for a date of more than twenty years ago. Your young love, her father, her friend, all your circle, need never know your wife is living unless you or Sylvia, or I tell them. If any question ever arose about your first marriage, your word would be amply sufficient. They would never insult a gentleman like Vivian Sabretasche by doubting him and prying into details of his past! Sylvia and I are poor; per Bacco, she has luxurious habits, and I — an Italian who is noble — cannot soil his hands with work! Signor mio, we are as poor as the rats in the Vicaria; and if, as you say, you will not support your wife as you have done hitherto, she must apply to your law for maintenance. She will do so, and, basta! it is no more than her rights; had she followed my counsels, she would not have let them lie unasserted so long. But she bids me make you this offer. If you will pay us down ten thousand — it is but a drop in the ocean out of all your wealth — we are very moderate; we will bind ourselves by every oath most sacred in your eyes and ours (and we Catholics keep our oaths; we are not blasphemers like your churchmen, who kiss the book in courts and perjure themselves five seconds after!) never to reveal your marriage. You may wed your young English aristocrat, she will never know that another lives who might dispute her title. Men say you love her strangely well — and you are more than half Southern, signor; yours will be no calm and frigid happiness, such as content the cold tame English! You need have no scruple, for, since you say you disown her, whatever the law decree, you must feel as divorced as though men’s words had unlocked your fetters, and — per Dio! if a score years’ separation is not divorce in Heaven’s sight, what is? Accept our offer — your marriage is virtually dissolved as though no tie of law existed; and long years of love and happiness await you with the woman you idolise! Refuse it, your marriage will be known all over England; and you will see your English love the wedded wife of some other and some happier-fated man! Choose, signor — the choice is very easy — you who have never hesitated to pay any price for Pleasure, will hardly refuse so small a price for Happiness! Choose, signor, you hold the game in your own hands.”

  With subtle ingenuity, devilish skill, was the temptation put! The Neapolitan watched the speeding of his poisoned arrows, and saw that they had hit their quarry. Sabretasche leaned against the wail, his lips pressed in to keep down the agony within him to which he would not give vent; a shiver passing over his frame which was burning with feverish passions; he breathed in quick, short gasps, as if panting for very life; while his eyes were fixed on that brilliant face, whose loving gaze turned on him from the canvas, tempted him, how fiercely! how pitilessly! as woman’s beauty has ever tempted man’s honour to its fall.

  There on the lifeless easel beamed the fair, fond face, pleading for her joy and his own. Before him stretched two lives; one radiant and blessed, full of the rest for which his heart was weary, the beloved companionship, that makes existence of beauty and of value; the other desolate, with no release from the chains that fettered him as the bonds which bound the living man to the dead corpse, no relief from the haunting passions, which would burn within, till stilled in the slumber of the grave! All wooed him to the one; all manhood rebelled against the other!

  All urged him to listen to his tempter — all — save the honour, which shrank from the stain of a Lie. He had paid down all prices save this for pleasure; he would not pay this now, even though the barter were hell for heaven. His eyes were still fastened upon her picture, and there her own answered his — clear, fond, true, even while tempting him his better angel still. He could not win her by wrong, woo her with deception; he loved her too well to wed her by a fraud, and the knightly soul that slept beneath the worldly exterior of the man of fashion and of pleasure, revolted from the shame of befraying a heart which trusted him, by concealment and by falsehood. He would not give her his name, knowing it was not hers; call her his wife, knowing the title was denied her; live with her day by day, knowing at every moment he had wronged her and deceived her; receive her innocent caresses, with the barrier of that deadly shadow between them, which, if she saw it not, could never leave his sight, nor rid him of its haunting presence. Deadly was the temptation — deadly its struggle. Great drops stood upon his brow, his lips turned white as in the agonies of death, his hands clenched as in the combat with some actual foe, and the anguish of his heart broke out in a bitter moan:

  “My God! I have no strength for this!”

  “Why endure it, then!” whispered the low, subtle voice of the Italian. “Freedom is in your own hands.” But the tempter had lost his power! — the man whom the world said denied himself no pleasure and no wish, and called a heartless and selfish libertine, put aside the joys which could only be bought with Dishonour. Again with the spring of a panther he leapt forward; the blood staining his face, and about his lips a black and ghastly hue, as he caught the Italian in his grip:

  “Hound! you tempt me to wrong her! — take your price!”

  He lifted him from the ground with his left hand, opened the door, and threw him down the steps that parted the studio from the corridor. The Italian lay there, stunned with the fall; Sabretasche closed the door upon him, and went in again alone — alone, in what a solitude!

  Long hours afterwards he re-issued from his chamber and entered his carriage, drawing down both blinds. A strange silence fell upon his house; many of his servants loved him, through a service of kindness on the one hand, and fidelity on the other, and they knew that some great sorrow had fallen on their master. The footmen in Lowndes-square, accustomed to his entrance, were about to show him, unasked, to the room where Violet was; but Sabretasche signed them back, and he went up the stairs to her chamber alone. At the door he paused — what wonder? Could his heart but fail him when he was about to quench all radiance from the eyes that took their brightness only from him? to carry the chill of death into a life which had hitherto not known even a passing shade? To say to the woman pledged to be his wife, “I am the husband of another!” It is no exaggeration that he would have gone with thanksgiving to his own grave; life could have no greater bitterness for him than this.

  Many moments passed; the time told off by the thick, slow throbs of his heart: — then he opened the door and entered.

  She looked up as the handle turned, dropped her book, and sprang forwards, her hands outstretched, her smile full of gladness; not even a trace of long passed shadows on the fair young brow that had never known care, or sorrow, or remorse. In her joy, not noticing the change upon his face, she welcomed him with fond words and fonder caresses, her arms stealing softly round his neck; and each touch of her lips, to him, like scorching fire.

  “Oh, Vivian!” she cried, “you said you would be here four hours ago? You know I don’t believe in military duties! I should be your only thought.”

  She looked up in his face as she spoke, and as she did so, her gay smile faded, and the sweet laughter fro
m her eye was quenched in the shadow that already fell upon her from the curse he bore.

  “O Heaven! what is it!” she gasped.

  He pressed her in his arms. “Hush, hush, or you will kill me.” —

  Then the colour fled from her face; her eyes grew full of pitiful fear and half-conscious anguish, like a startled deer catching the first distant ring of the hunters’ feet She hid her face upon his breast, and clung to him in dread of the unknown horror.

  He held her in his arms as if no earthly power should rend her from him; and his lips quivered with anguish. “I cannot tell you — the worst that could happen to us both has come! Would to God that I had died ere I linked your fate to mine!”

  Clinging to him more closely, she looked up into his eyes; there she read, or guessed, the truth, and, with a bitter wail, her arms unloosed their clasp, and she sank down from his embrace, lying on the ground in all her delicate beauty, stricken by her great grief, crushed and unconscious, like a broken flower in a tempest

  CHAPTER III.

  How a Woman woke Feud betwixt Palamon and Arcite.

  CAN you not fancy how eagerly all town, ever on the qui vive after scandal and gossip, darted like the vultures on a dying lion on the story of Vivian Sabretasche’s marriage? They were so outraged at its having been so long and carefully concealed, that those who collected scandals of their neighbours, as industriously and persistently as Paris chiffoniers their rags, grubbing for them often in quite as filthy places, revenged themselves for the wrong he had done them, by telling it, garbled and distorted in every way. Heaven knows through whom it first chiefly spread, whether from the lips of my Lady Molyneux, who hated him and loved the telling, or through his wife and her brother, who probably supplied the Court Talebearer, the St. James’s Tittletatler, and such-like journals, with vague, yet damning, versions that appeared in them, of the “Early history of a Colonel in the Queen’s Cavalry, well known in fashionable circles as a dilettante, a lion, and a leader of ton, who has recently sought the hand of a beautiful daughter of an Irish Peer, and would have led her to the altar in a few days’ time, but for the unhappy, yet, considering the circumstances, fortunate discovery of the existence of a first marriage, concealed by Colonel S. for the space of twenty years; during which period, it is said, the unfortunate wife has lived upon extraneous charity, denied even the ordinary necessities of existence by her unnatural husband, who, having wooed her in a passing caprice, abandoned her when one would have supposed his extreme youth might have preserved him from the barbarity, and we, the moral censors of the age, must say, however reluctantly, villainy of such a course!!”

  How it spread I cannot say. I only know it flew like wildfire. There were many who hated him, and all his “nearest friends” glutted over the story so long hidden from their inquiring eyes. Old dowagers mumbled it over their whist-tables, married beauties whispered it behind their fans, loungers gossiped of it in club-rooms; and in all was the version different Men in general took his part; but women — the soft-voiced murderers of so much fair fame — sided, without exception, against him; called him villain! betrayer! all the names in their sentimental vocabulary; pitied his “poor dear wife;” doubted not she was a sweet creature sacrificed and thrown away; lamented poor darling Violet’s fate, sighed over her infatuation for one against whom they had all warned her, and agreed that such a wretch should be excluded from society!

  “I knew it!” said Lady Molyneux, with calm satiric bitterness, and that air of superiority which people assume when they give you what Madame de Staël wisely terms that singular consolation, “Je Vavais bien dit!”

  “I knew it — I always told you what would come of that engagement — I was always certain what that man really was. To think of my sweet child running such a risk! If the marriage had taken place before this éclaircissement, I positively could not have visited my own daughter! Too terrible — too terrible!”

  “If it had, Helena,” answered her husband, “I think you might have ‘visited’ poor Vy without disgrace. She would have been, at least, faithful to one, which certain stories would say, my lady, you are not always so careful to be!”

  The Viscountess deigned no reply to the coarse insinuation, but covered her face in her handkerchief, only repeating:

  “I knew it! I knew it all along! If I had had my way, Violet would now be the honoured wife of one of the first Peers of the—”

  “If you did know it, madame,” interrupted Jockey Jack, sharply— “if you did know poor Sabretasche’s wife was alive, it’s a pity you did not tell us so. I won’t have him blamed; I tell you he’s a splendid fellow — a splendid fellow — and the victim of a rascally woman. He can’t marry Vy, of course — more fools those who make the laws! — but I won’t turn my back on him. He’s not the only husband who has very good motives for divorce, though the facts may not be quite clear to satisfy the courts.”

  With which fling at his wife, Jockey Jack, moved with more or less sympathy from personal motives for his daughter’s lover, took his hat and gloves, and banged out of the house, meeting on the door-step the Hon. Lascelles Fainéant, who had received that morning in his Albany chambers a delicate missive from his virtuous Viscountess commencing, “Ami choisi de mon cœur.”

  So the journals teemed, and the coteries gossiped, of depths they could neither guess at nor understand. Sabretasche’s fastidious delicacy could no longer shield him from coarse remark. The marriage which he considered disgrace, the love which he held as the most sacred part of his life, were the themes of London gossip, to be treated with a jeer, or, at best, with what was far more distasteful to him, pity. Scandal was, however, innocuous to him now; he was blind and deaf to all things, save his own anguish, and that of the woman who loved him.

  It was piteous, they tell me, to see the change in Violet under the first grief of her life — and such grief! Such a shock from a bright and laughing future to the utter desolation of a beggared present, has before now unseated intellects not perhaps the weaker for their susceptibility. From wild, disconnected utterances of passionate sorrow she would sink into a silent, voiceless suffering, worse to witness than any tears or laments. She would lie in Sabretasche’s arms, with her brighthaired head stricken to the dust, uttering low, plaintive moans that entered his very soul with stabs far keener than the keenest steel; then she would cling to him, lifting her blanched face to his, praying to him never to leave her, or shrink still closer to him, wishing she had died before she had brought sorrow on his head. It must have been a piteous sight — one to ring up from earth to Heaven to claim vengeance against the curse of laws that join hands set dead in wrath against each other, and part hearts formed for each other’s joy and linked by holiest love!

  It did not induce brain fever, or harm her so, belles lectrices. If we went down under every stroke in that way as novelists assume, we should all be loved of Heaven if that love be shown by early graves, as the old Greeks say.

  Violet’s young life flowed in her veins still purely and strongly under the dead weight that the mind bore. But for a day or so her reason indeed seemed in danger, both were alike perilous to it, her delirious agony or her mute tearless sorrow; and when her mother approached her, pouring in her common-place sympathies, Violet gazed at her with an unconscious look in those eyes, once so radiant with vivid intelligence, which made even Lady Molyneux shudder with a vague terror, and a consciousness of the presence of a grief far beyond her powers to cure or calm. Sabretasche alone had influence over her. With miraculous self-command and self-sacrifice, while his own heart was breaking, he calmed himself to calm her; he alone had any power to soothe her, and he would surrender the right to none.

  “You had better not see her again,” her father said o him one day— “much better not, for both of you. No good can come of it, much harm may. You will lot misunderstand me when I say I must put an end to your visits. It gives me intense regret. I have not known you these past months without learning to admire and to esteem you;
still, Sabretasche, you can well understand, that for poor Vy’s sake—”

  “Not see her again?” repeated Sabretasche, with something of his old sneering smile upon his worn, wearied, haggard features. “Are you human, Molyneux, that you say that coldly and calmly to a man who, to win your daughter, would brave death and shame, heaven and hell, yet who loved her better than himself, and would not do her wrong, even to purchase the sole paradise he craves, the sole chance of joy earth will ever again offer him.”

  “I know, I know,” answered Jockey Jack, hastily. “You are a splendid fellow, Sabretasche. I honour you from my soul. I have told my wife so, I would tell any one so. At the same time, it is just because, God help you! you have such a passion for poor Vy, that I tell you — and I mean it, too, and I think you must see it yourself — that you had far better not meet each other any more, and, indeed, I cannot, as her father allow it—”

  “No?” said Sabretasche, with a sternness and fierceness which Lord Molyneux had never imagined in his nature. “No? You side then, with those who think, because misfortune has overtaken a man, he must have no mercy shown him. Listen to me! You are taking dangerous measures. I tell you that, so well does Violet love me, that I have but to say to her, ‘Take pity on me, and give yourself to me,’ and I could make her leave you and her mother, her country and her friends, and follow me wherever I chose to lead her. If I exert my power over her, I believe that no authority of yours can or will keep her from me. It is not your word, nor society’s dictum, that holds me back; it is solely and entirely because, young, pure-hearted, devoted as she is, I will not wrong her trust in me, by turning it to my own desires. I will not let my passions blind me to what is right to her. I will not woo her in her youth to a path which, in maturer years, she might live to regret, and long to retrace. I will not do it. If I have not spared any other woman in my life, I will spare her. But, at the same time, I will not be parted from her utterly; I will not be compelled to forsake her in the hour of suffering I have brought upon her. As long as she loves me, I will not entirely surrender her to you or to any other man. You judge rightly; I dare not be with her long. God help me! I should have no strength. A field is open now to every soldier; if my Corps had not been ordered out, I should have exchanged, and gone on active service. My death would be the happiest thing for her; dead, I might be forgotten and — replaced; but for our farewell, eternal as it may be, I will choose my own hour. No man shall dictate or interfere between myself and Violet, who now ought to be — so near to one another!”