by Ouida
Right or wrong, however, he never had looked back in any course. His mind was made up — if Alma still loved him on hearing all — to take her to some southern solitude, and give up his life to her; if she reproached and condemned him, to fight in the Crimea till he fell — and nothing would have stirred either of his resolves. He rode at a gallop from London to Richmond — rode to the fevered thoughts that chased each other through his mind, many of them of bitter pain and sharp stinging regret, for to the man of honour it was no light trial to say to the woman who had trusted him, “I have deceived you!” — some of them of involuntary self-reproach at the memory of how little he had merited and fulfilled the trust Boughton Tressillian had placed in him, “as a man who will not misjudge my motives nor wrong my confidence.” Yet all fears were crossed, and all remorse silenced, and outweighed by that wild joy of which his nature was capable.
All more gloomy memories vanished, as shadows slink away before the noon, as he came within sight of Alma’s home. He pulled up his horse with such abruptness that the beast reared and fell back on his haunches; he threw himself off the saddle with a headlong impetuosity that might have lost him life or limb, flung the bridle over the post, and entered. The morning was grey and wet — strange contrast to the radiant summer night before — the birds were silent, the flowers were snapped off their stems, their scattered petals lying stained and trodden on the moist gravel; his hurried steps stamped the discoloured rose-leaves into the earth, and the dripping chesnut-boughs shook rain drops on him as he passed.
He brushed past the dank bushes in haste, careless, indeed unconscious, of the rain that fell upon him. With all the impatience of his nature he glanced up at the house as he approached. He expected to find her looking out for him, to see her eyes fixed wistfully upon the gate, and to watch the radiance of joy dawn upon her face as she beheld him. He wanted to see that her thoughts and moments were consecrated to him, in his absence as well as his presence, and to have in her joyous welcome and her rapid bound to meet him, sure evidence still of her love.
With a strange, disproportionate anxiety he brushed past the dripping boughs, ran up the steps of her bay-window, pushed open the glass door, and entered. There were her easel, her flowers, her little terrier, Pauline upon her stand pluming her feathers and congratulating herself on her own beauty, one of his own books, “Notre Dame,” open on her low chair, with some moss-roses flung down in a hurry on its leaves; her colours and brushes, and half-finished sketches scattered over the room — but the mistress and queen of it was absent There was no sweet welcome for him, no loving radiant face uplifted to his, no rapid musical voice to whisper in his ear earnest impassioned words, no soft caresses to linger on his lips, no warm young heart to beat against his own.
He glanced hastily round on the still deserted chamber, then opened the door and called her by her name. The house was low and not large, and he knew she would come at the sound of his voice as a spaniel at his master’s call. There was no reply; the building was silent as death, and his heart beat thickly with a vague and startled dread. He went on to the staircase and repeated her name; still there was no reply. Had she been anywhere in the house, small as it was, he knew she would have heard and answered him. A horrible unexplained fear fastened upon him, and he turned into a dark old-fashioned bedchamber, the door of which stood open, for in its farther window he caught sight of the old woman, her nurse, alone, in her wicker-chair, her head covered with her apron, rocking herself to and fro in the silent and querulous grief of age.
It is no metaphor that the beating of his heart stood still as he beheld her grief, which, mute as it was, spoke to him in a hundred hideous suggestions. She started up as his step rang on the bare floor, and wrung her hands, the tears falling down her wrinkled cheeks:
“Oh, sir! oh, sir! my poor young lady — my pretty darling—”
His hand clenched on her arm like an iron vice.
“My God! what has happened?”
“That ever I should live to see the day,” moaned the old woman. “That ever I couldn’t have died afore it. My pretty dear — my sweet little lady that I nursed on my knee when she was a little laughing—”
His grasp crushed on to her wrist, while his words broke from him inarticulate in his dire agony:
“Answer me — what is it? Where is she? Speak, do you hear?”
The woman heard him, and waved to and fro in the garrulous grief of her years.
“Yes, sir, yes; but I am half crazed. She’s gone — my poor dear darling!”
“Gone — dead?”
The hue of death itself spread over his face. He let go his hold upon her arm and staggered backwards, all life seeming to cease in the mortal terror of suspense and dread.
“No, sir — no, thank Heaven!” murmured the woman, blind to the agony before her in her own half-fretful sorrow. “Not dead, the pretty dear, though some,? dare say, would sooner see her in her coffin, and sure she might be happier in her grave than she’ll be now, poor child!”
The blood rushed back to his brain and heart; his strong nerves trembled, and he shook in every limb in the anguished agitation of that brief moment which seemed to him a ceaseless eternity of torture. If not dead she could not be lost to him; no human hand had power to take her from his arms!
He seized the garrulous woman in a grasp whose fervency terrified her:
“Where is she then? Speak — in a word — without that senseless babble.”
“Yes, sir, yes,” sobbed the old nurse, half lost in her quavering sorrow, but terrified at his manner and his tone. “She’s gone away, sir, with that soft, lying, purring villain — oh, Lord! what is his name? — that false, silky, girl-faced lord — a duke’s son they said he was — who was always hankering after her, and coming to buy pictures, and cared no more for pictures than that cat. She’s gone off with him, sir, and he’ll no more marry her than he’ll marry me; and he’ll leave her to starve in some foreign land, and I shall never see her face again. Oh, Lord! oh, Lord! sir, you men have much to answer for—”
“She’s gone! with him!”
If she had not been so wrapped in her own rambling regrets she must have noticed the unutterable anguish in his hoarse and broken words as he grasped her arm with almost the wild, unconscious ferocity of madness: “Woman, it is a vile plot — a lie! She has been trapped, deceived. She has not gone of her own will!”
“Yes, sir, she is — she’s gone of her own mind, her own choice,” moaned the old nurse.
“I tell you she did not — it is a lie,” swore De Vigne. “He has stolen her, tricked her, fooled her away. It is a lie, I tell you, and you have been bribed to forge it. He has decoyed her away, and employed you for his accomplice, to pass this tale on me. My God! if you do not acknowledge the truth I will find a way to make you!”
Terrified at his violence the old woman shook with fear, tears falling down her pale and withered cheeks.
“I tell you truth, sir — before Heaven I do. Do you think I should injure her, my pretty little lady, that I’ve loved like my own child ever since my poor master brought her from foreign lands, a little, lisping, goldenhaired thing] Do you think I should join in a plot against her, when I’ve loved her all her life? Don’t you think, sir, I’d be the first to screen her and the last to blame her? I tell you the truth, sir, and it breaks my heart in the telling. She went of her own free will, and nothing could stop her. She must have planned it all with him yesterday when he was here: the cruel villain! I knew he didn’t come after them pictures; but I never thought Miss Alma would come to this. She went of her own will, sir, she did — indeed! Lord Vane’s carriage came here between twelve and one this morning; not him in it, but his valet, and he asked straight for Miss Tressillian, and said he had a message for her, and went In to give it I thought nothing of it, so many people have been coming and going lately for the pictures: and indeed, sir, I thought he was your servant, for the man looked like one you used to send here, till my boy, Tom, came
in, and said he’d asked the coachman, and the coachman told him his master was the Duke of Tiara’s son. The man wasn’t there long before I heard Miss Alma run upstairs, and as I went across the passage I see her coming down them, with her little black hat on, and a cloak over her muslin dress; and a queer dread came over me, as it were, for I see her face was flushed, and she’d tears in her eyes, and a wild excited look; and I asked her where she was going. But she didn’t seem to hear me; and she brushed past me to where the man was standing. ‘I am ready,’ she says to him, very excited like; and then I caught hold of her — I couldn’t help it, sir — and I said, though I didn’t know where or why she was going, ‘Don’t go, Miss Alma! don’t go, my darling!’ But she turned her face to me, with her sweet smile — you know her pretty, imperious, impatient ways — T must, nurse!’ and I got hold of her, and kept on saying, ‘Don’t go, Miss Alma, don’t — tell me where you’re going, at least — do! — my dear little lady!’ But you know, sir, if she’s set her heart on a thing, it ain’t never easy to set her against it; and there was tears in her eyes. She broke away with that wilfulness she’s had ever since she was a little child: ‘I cannot stop, nurse — let me go!’ and she broke away, as I said and went down the garden path, sir, the man following after her, and she entered Lord Vane’s carriage, and the valet got up in front, and they drove away, sir, down the road; and that’s the last I ever see of my poor master’s darling, Heaven bless her! and she’ll be led into sorrow, and ruin, and shame, and she’ll think it’s all for love, poor child; and he’ll break her heart, and her high proud spirit, and then he’ll leave her to beg for her bread; for that bird’s better notions of work than she; and a deal fit she is to cope with the world, that’s so cold and cruel to them that go against it!” But long ere she ceased her garrulous grief, heedless of his presence or his absence in her absorbed sorrow for her lost darling, De Vigne had staggered from the chamber, literally blinded and stunned by the blow he had received. A sick and deadly faintness as after a vital wound stole over him, every shadow of colour faded from his face as on his marriage-day, leaving it a grey and ashy hue even to his very lips; his brain was dizzy with a fiery weight that seemed to press upon it; he felt his way, as if it were dark, into an adjoining room, and sank down upon its single sofa, all the strength of his vigorous manhood broken and cast down by his great agony. How great that agony was Heaven only knew.
He threw back, as a hideous nightmare, the thought that Alma could be false to him; that a girl so young, so frank, so fond, could be so arch an actress; that all those loving words, those sweet caresses, that earnest and impassioned affection lavished on him but a few short hours before, were all a lie. Yet the curse of evidence chimed strangely in; he recalled her blush at his mention of Castleton’s name; he remembered that his ex-valet, Raymond, had entered Castleton’s service on being discharged from his; the mere circumstance of her having left with anyone, for anywhere, without an explanation, a word, or a message to him — her lover, whom she had parted with so passionately the night before — these alone wrote out her condemnation, and shattered all hope before his eyes.
He sat there in as mortal anguish as man ever knew.
If wrong there had been in his acts and his thoughts it was fearfully and cruelly avenged, and the punishment far outweighed the sin. Across the midnight darkness of his mind gleamed lightning flashes of fiery thoughts. Once he started to his feet — in the delirium of jealousy he swore to find Castleton wherever he had hid, and make him yield her up, or fight for her till one or the other fell. But pride was not all dead in him — nor ever would be while he had life. Since she had gone to another, let another keep her!
And now it was that the great faults of De Vigne’s nature — hasty doubt and passionate judgment — came out and rose up against him, marring his life once more. That rank scepticism which one betrayal had engrafted on a nature naturally trusting and unsuspicious, never permitted him to pause, to weigh, to reflect; with the rapidity of vehement and jealous passion, from devoted faith in the woman he loved, he turned to hideous disbelief in her, and classed her recklessly and madly with the vilest and the falsest of her sex. Of no avail the thousand memories of Alma’s childlike purity and truth, which one moment’s thought would have summoned up in her defence; of no avail the fond and noble words spoken to him but the day before, which one moment’s recollection would have brought to his mind to vouch for her innocence, and set before him in its vile treachery the plot to which she had fallen victim; — of no avail! Passionate in every impulse, hasty in every judgment, too cruelly stung to remember in his madness any reason or any justice, he seized the very poison that was his death-draught, and grasped a lie as truth.
How long he sat there he never knew; time was a long blank to him; roll on as it might, it could only serve him in so far as it brought him nearer to his grave. His brain was on fire, his thoughts lost in one sharp, stinging agony that had entered into his life never to quit it; he sat there in dull stupor till her little dog, that had followed him up the stairs, and now crouched near him, awed as animals always are at the sight of human suffering, crept up and licked his hand, uttering a long, low whine, as if mourning for the one lost to them both. The touch roused him: how often, in happier days, before the curse of love rose up between them, had he smiled to see her playing like a child with her little terrier! The touch roused him, calling him back to the life charged with such unutterable woe. He lifted his head and looked around; the clouds had rolled away, and the evening sun, bursting out in all its glory, shone with cruel mockery into the little chamber which, as it chanced, was her own room. The lattice windows were open, and the wind swept in, stirring the muslin curtains of the little white bed where, night after night, her blue eyes had closed in sleep, as pure and sweet as a harebell folding itself to slumber. As he gazed around him, at all the trifles that spoke to him like living things of the woman he had loved and lost, the bitter agony of his soul was greater than he could bear; the fierce tension of his strained nerves gave way; with one cry to Heaven in his mortal anguish, he fell like a drunken man across the little couch, his brow resting on the pillow where her golden head had so often lain in childlike sleep, deep sobs heaving his breast, burning tears forcing themselves from his eyes, tears which seemed to wring his very life-blood from him in their fiery rain, yet tears which saved him in that horrible hour from madness.
* * * * *
That night he wrote thus briefly to the Major:
“DEAR DUNBAR, — I desire to exchange with you if it can be effected. There is no time to be lost.
“Yours sincerely,
“G. DE V.”
CHAPTER VI.
The Bridal Jewels go to the Mont de Piété.
IN their salon in the Champs Elysées, that crowded, gaudy, and much-bedizened room, sat as they had sat twelve months before, old Fantyre and the Trefusis, the old woman huddled up among a pile of cushions, shawls, and furs, with her feet on a chaufferette, older and uglier, with her wig awry, and her little piercing black eyes rolling about like a monkey’s as she drank her accustomed demie tasse, which, as I before observed, looked most suspiciously like cognac undefiled. The younger one, with her coarse, dashing, full-blown, highly tinted beauty not shown off to the best advantage, for it was quite early morning, madame n’était pas visible, of course, in common with all Parisiennes, whether Parisienne by birth or by adoption; and not being visible, the Trefusis had not thought it worth her while to dress, but hastily enveloped in a peignoir looked certainly, though she was a fine woman still, not exactly calculated to please any man’s taste, used to the sight, and the society, of delicate aristocrates.
“Well, my dear, ain’t he killed yeti” demanded old Fantyre, in her liveliest treble.
“No,” said the Trefusis, running her eye through the Returns of the 25th October. “Halkett, Nolan, Lord Fitzgibbon — lots of them — but—”
“Not the right one,” chuckled the old Fantyre, who, though she had h
er own private reasons for desiring De Vigne’s demise, as his property was so ruled beyond his power that a considerable portion must have come to his wife, had still that exquisite pleasure in the Trefusis’s mortification, which better people than the old Viscountess indulge in now and then at their friends’ expense. “Deuce take the man! Tiresome creature it is; shot and sabre carry off lots of pretty fellows out there. Why on earth can’t they touch him? And that beautiful creature, Vivian Sabretasche, is he all right!”
“Slightly wounded — that’s all.”
“How cross you are, my dear! If you must not wear widow’s weeds, I can’t help it, can I! They are not becoming, my dear — not at all; though if a woman knows how to manage ’em, she may do a good deal under her crape. Men ain’t afraid of a widow as they are of an unmarried woman, though Heaven knows they need be if they knew all; the ‘dear departed”s a capital dodge to secure a new pigeon. Mark my words, my dear, De Vigne won’t die just because you wish him!”
“Wish him!” reiterated the Trefusis. “How disagreeably you phrase things, Lady Fantyre!”
“Give ’em their right names, my dear! Yes, I believe that is uncommon disagreeable for most people,” chuckled the old woman. “In my time, you know, we weren’t so particular; if we did naughty things (and we did very many, my dear, almost as many as people do now!), we weren’t ashamed to call ’em by their dictionary names. Humbug’s a new-fangled thing, as well as a new-fangled word. They say we were coarse; I don’t know, I’m sure; I suppose we were; but I know we didn’t love things under the rose, and sneak out of ’em in daylight, as you nineteenth-century people do; our men, if they went to the casinoes at night, didn’t go to Bible meetings, and Maintenance-of-Immaculate-Society boards, and Regenerated Magdalen’s Refuges the next morning — as they do now-a-days. However, if we were more consistent, we weren’t so ‘Christian,’ I suppose! Lor’ bless me, what a deal of cant there is about in the world now; even you, whom I did think was pretty well as unscrupulous as anybody I ever met, won’t allow you’d have liked to see De Vigne among them Returns. I know when poor old Fantyre died, Lady Rougepot says to me, ‘What a relief, my dear!’ and I’m sure I never thought of differing from her for a minute! You’ve never had but one checkmate in your life, Lucy — with that little girl Trevelyan — Tressillian — what’s her name?”