by Ouida
“Little devil!” said the Trefusis, bitterly; she had not grown the choicest in her expressions, with constant contact with the Fantyre. “I saw her again the other day.”
“Here?”
“Yes; in the Rue Vivienne — in a carriage. I passed her quite close; she knew me again. I could tell that by the scorn there was in her eyes, and the sneer that came on her lips. Little fool! with the marriage certificate before her very eyes, she wouldn’t believe the truth. The scheme was so good, it deserved complete success. I hate that little thing — such a child as she looks to have put one down, and outgeneralled one’s plans.”
“Child!” chuckled old Fantyre; “she wasn’t so much of a child but what she could give you one of the best retorts I ever heard. ‘It was a pity you didn’t learn the semblance of a lady, to support you in the assumption of your rôle!’ Vastly good, vastly good; how delighted Selwyn would have been with that!”
“Little devil!” repeated the Trefusis again, “I hate the sight of that girl’s great dark-blue eyes. De Vigne shall never see her again if I can help it, little, contemptuous, haughty creature!”
“She’s a lady, ain’t she?” said the Fantyre, drily.
“I’m sure I don’t know. She is as proud as a princess though she’s nothing but an artist after all. Good gracious! Who is that?” said the Trefusis, as she heard a ring at the entrance, giving a hurried, dismayed glance at her négligée. “It can’t be Anatole nor De Brissac; they never come so early.”
“If they do, my dear, beauty unadorned, you know — —”
“Stuff!” said the Trefusis, angrily. “Beauty unadorned would get uncommonly few admirers in these days. Perhaps it’s nobody for us.”
As she spoke a servant entered, and brought her a piece of paper with a few words on it, unfolded and unsealed.
“What’s that, my dear?” asked Lady Fantyre, eagerly.
“Only my dressmaker,” said the Trefusis, with affected carelessness, but with an uneasy frown, which did not escape the quick old lady.
“Dressmaker?” chuckled the Fantyre, as she was left alone. “If you’ve any secrets from me, my dear, we shall soon quarrel. I’ve no objection whatever to living with you as long as you have that poor fellow’s two thousand a year, and we can make a tidy little income with you to attract the young men, and me to play whist and écarté with ’em; but if you begin to hold any cards I don’t see, I shall throw up the game, though we have played it some time together.”
While old Fantyre, who had this single virtue amongst all her vices, that she was candid about them, thus talked to herself over her cognac and coffee, the Trefusis had gone, demie-toilette and all, into the salle, where there awaited her a neat, slight, fair man, with a delicate badine and gold studs, who looked something between a valet, an actor, and a would-be-dandy — such as you may see by scores any day on the Boulevards, hanging about the Cafés, or lounging in the parterre of the Odéon.
He smiled, a curious slight smile, as the Trefusis entered.
“Vous voilà, Madame! Not en grande tenue to-day; too early for your pigeons, I suppose? I dare say you and the old lady make a very good thing out of it, though of course you only entertain immaculate society, or fear you should give the Major a chance to bring you up before a certain Law Court, eh?”
“What did you come for so soon again?” demanded the Trefusis, abruptly, with as scant courtesy as might te. “I have only five minutes to spare, you had better not waste it in idle talk.”
“What do I come for, ma belle? Now, what should I come for? What do I ever come for, pray?” returned her visitor, in nowise displeased, but rather amused at her annoyance.
“Money!” retorted the Trefusis. “You will get none today.”
The man laughed.
“Now why always keep up this little farce? Money I wish for — money you will give me. Why make the same amusing little denial of it every time?”
“It is no amusing little denial to-day, at all events,” said the Trefusis, coldly. “I have none left. I cannot give you what I have not.”
He laughed, and played a tattoo with the cornelian head of his cane.
“Very well, then I will go to the Major.”
“You cannot. He is in the Crimea.”
“To the Crimea I can go to-morrow, belle amie, in the service of a gentleman who has a fancy to visit it But I am tired of playing the valet, though it is amusing enough sometimes; and, indeed, as you pay so very badly, I have been thinking of writing to De Vigne, he will give me anything I ask, for my information.”
The Trefusis’s eyes grew fiercer, but she turned pale and wavered.
“A line of mine will tell the Major, you know, belle amie, and I don’t fancy he will be inclined to be very gentle to his wife, née Lucy Davis, eh?” he went on, amused to watch the changes on her face. “He will pay very highly, too — what are a few thousands to him? — he is as lavish as the winds; as proud as the devil, and hating Mme sa femme as he does, he will give me, I have no doubt, anything I ask. It will be a much better investment for me; I won’t trouble you any more, Lucy; I shall write to your husband at once.”
He rose, and took his hat; but the Trefusis interrupted him.
“Stay — wait a moment — how much do you want?”
“Fifty pounds now, and as much this day week?”
“Impossible! I have not half—”
“Glad to hear it, madame. The Major will be the much better paymaster. With his thousands I can get a life annuity, buy stock, take shares, do what I like, even — who knows? — become an eminently respectable member of society! Adieu! ma belle; when we next meet it may be in the Law Courts over the water.”
“You villain!” began the Trefusis savagely, with a fierce flash of her black eyes.
He laughed:
“Not at all; you have the monopoly of any villany there may be in the transaction. Adieu! what shall I say from you to the Major — any tender message?”
“Wait,” cried the Trefusis, hurriedly. “I have five naps — I could let you have more to-morrow; and — you could take one of my bracelets—”
“One! No, thank you, the other plan will be best for me. I am tired of these instalments, and De Vigne—”
“But — my diamonds, then — the ceinture he was fool enough to give me—” She tried to speak coldly, but there was a trembling eagerness in her manner which belied her assumed calmness.
“Fool, indeed! — and to think he was a man of the world! Your diamonds! — ma chère, you must be in strange fear, indeed, to offer me them. They must be worth no end, or they would not be the Major’s giving. Well, come — I am willing to spare you, if I can, for old acquaintance sake.”
When he left the house, he carried with him that diamond ceinture worthy of an Empress which De Vigne iad bought, in his lover’s madness, for his bride ten fears before, and took it up to the Mont de Piété. Two thousand a year was not a bad income, but the Trefusis’s dress, the Fantyre’s wines, the petits soupers, and her numerous Paris amusements, ran away with it very fast; and though écarté, vingt-et-un, and whist added considerably to their resources, the Trefusis was very often hard up, as people who have lived on their wits all their ives not unfrequently are. One would fancy such sharpening upon the grindstone of want might teach hem economy in prosperity; but I don’t think it often does; canaille ever glory in the ostentation of money, and paste hundreds in grand dinners, to — grudge the pine-apple. Besides, the Trefusis, too, had a drain on her exchequer, of which the world and even Argus-eyed old Fantyre was ignorant.
CHAPTER VII.
In the Chersonesus.
ALADYN and Devno! — those green stretching meadows, those rich dense forests, catching the golden glow of the sunshine of the East — those sloping hill-sides, with the clematis, and acacia, and wild vine clinging to them, and the laughing waters of lake and stream sleeping at their base — who could believe that horrible pestilential vapour stole up from them, like a murderer i
n the dark, and breathing fever, ague, and dysentery into the tents of a slumbering Army, stabbed the sleepers while they lay, unconscious of the assassin’s hand that was draining away their life and strength! Yet at the very names of Aladyn and Devno rise to memory days of futile longing and weary inaction, of negligence inconceivable, and ennui unutterable, of life spent for the lack of simplest common sense, and graves filled by a schoolboy greed for fruit — such fruit as in such a land was poison, when backed by a mad draught of raki. Days, when forbidden to seek another foe, Englishmen and Frenchmen went down powerless and spiritless before the cholera, which had its deadly grip upon them ere they heard its stealthy step. Days, when you could not stroll on the beach, without finding at your feet a corpse, hastily thrust into the loosened sand, for dogs to gnaw and vultures to make their meal, or look across the harbour without seeing some dead body floating, upright and horrible, in the face of the summer sun. Days when pestilence was abroad through the encampment from Monastir to Varna.
We went out to the Crimea gladly enough; most of us had a sort of indistinct panorama of skirmishes and excitement, of breathless charges and handsome Turkish women, of dangers, difficulties, and good tough struggles, pleasant as sport, but higher spiced; of a dashing, brilliant campaign, where we should taste real life and give hard hits, and win perhaps some honour, and where we should say, “Si l’on meurt, eh bien, tant pis!” in the gay words of the merry French bivouac-song. We thought of what our governors or grandsires had done in the Peninsula, and longed to do the same — we did not guess that as different as the bundles of linen, with wrinkled, hideous features, that the Tartars called women, were to the lovely prisoners from the convents of flaming Badajoz, would be the weary, dreary, protracted waiting while the batteries strove to beat in the walls of Sebastopol, to the brilliant and rapid assault by which Ciudad Rodrigo was won! I do not like to write of the Crimea; so many painful memories come up with its very name; memories such as all who were there must have by the score. Nothing personal prompts my anger; I liked the campaign well enough myself, having one of the very few tents that stood the hurricane, not missing more than nine-tenths of my letters, enjoying the exceptional blessing of something like a coat, and being now and then the happy recipient of a turkey, or some coffee that was not ground beans.
I was rewarded as much as any man could expect to be. I have a medal (shared in common with Baltic sailors who never saw the foe, save when securely anchored off Cronstadt) and clasps, like the privates of the Line, though I am not aware that any infantry man was present at the Balaklava charge. I am perfectly content myself, being independent of that very precarious thing “promotion for distinguished services.” But when I think of them all, my dead friends, whose bodies lie thick where the sweet wild lavender is blowing over the barren steppes of the Chersonese this summer’s day, I remember, wrathfully, how civilians, by their own warm hearths, sat and dictated measures by which whole regiments, starving with cold, sickened and died; and how Indian officers, used to the luxurious style of Eastern warfare and travel, asserted those privations to be “nothing,” which they were not called to bear; and I fear — I fear — that England may one day live to want such sons of hers as she let suffer and rot on the barren plains of the Crimea, in such misery as she would shudder to entail on a pauper or a convict Few of us will ever forget our first bivouac on the Chersonese soil — that pitiless drenching down-pour of sheets of ink-black water! What a night it was! De Vigne, ever reckless of weather, had not even a blanket to wrap round him, and lay in the puddles of which the morass-like earth was full, with the rain pouring down upon him, while Sabretasche, who had loved to surround himself with all that could lull the senses and shut out the harsher world, passed the night in a storm to which we should not expose a dog, in discomfort for which we should pity a beggar; — yet gave away the only shelter he had, a Highland plaid, to a young boy who had but lately joined, a little fellow with a face as fair as a girl’s, and who had barely seen seventeen summers, who was shivering and shuddering with incipient ague.
The stamp of their bitter fate was upon both those men; the wounds were too deadly and too recent to be yet skinned over; healed they deemed they never would be. How Violet and Sabretasche parted Heaven only knew; no human eyes had pried in upon them in that darkest hour; they had parted on the very day that should have been their marriage day; parted — whether ever to meet again on earth who could tell? His trial was known to all; even his own men, who had admired her fair face when she had driven up to the barracks, had caught some glimmering of it, and there was not one who did not, in his own way, reverence the Colonel’s sorrow.
De Vigne was yet more altered than he, and I saw with astonishment all the icy coldness which had grown on him after his fatal marriage, which had of late been dissipated, now closing round him again. I could but guess at the cause, when before the embarkation, I, knowing nothing, had asked him if he had been to bid Alma good-bye; and he had turned on to me, his face white as death, his eyes black as night:
“Never breathe that name to me again!”
I knew him too well to press questions upon him, and I was obliged to be content with my suspicions as to the solution. But I was pained to see the bitter gloom which had gathered round him again, too deeply for trouble, danger, excitement, or care of comment, to have any power to dissipate it He had an impatient, irritable hauteur to his men quite foreign to him, for to his soldiers he had always been invariably considerate; he was much more harsh and stem in his orders, for before he had abhorred anything like martinetism; and there was a settled gloom upon him with which, every now and then, it seemed as if the fiery nature in him were at war, struggling like the flames of a volcano within its prison of ice. From the time he took Dunbar’s place as Major of Ours, I never saw him smile; but I did see him now and then, when he was sitting smoking in the door of his tent, or riding beside me home from a dog-hunt or a hurdle-race, look across to where the sea lay, with a passionate agony in his eyes. All he seemed to live for was headlong and reckless danger, if he could have it The thing that roused him the most was when St. Arnaud, Bosquet, Forey, and their staff rode along the front of our columns before Alma, and we were told what the Marshal said to the 55th, “English, I hope you will fight well to-day!”
“By Heaven!” swore De Vigne, fiercely, “if I had been near that fellow, I would have told him we will fight as we fought at Waterloo!”
It was a bitter trial to him, as to us all, that the Cavalry could not do more on the 20th, when we sat in our saddles, seeing the serried columns of the Line dash. through the hissing waters, red with blood and foaming with the storm of shot, and force their way through the vineyards of the Alma — that little tortuous stream where we tasted blood for the first time on Crimean soil, whose name, with all his self-command, made De Vigne wince, more than a Cossack lance thrust through his side would have done. To have to sit through that day like targets for the Russians’ round shots, while their storm of balls tore through our lines, and ripped up our horses, was too quiet business for any of us.
We were weary of inaction; our Arm had had little or nothing to do; we were not allowed to push on the pursuit at Alma, nor the charge at Mackenzie’s Farm; we were stung by certain individual sneers that we were “too fine gentlemen for our work,” and we were longing to prove that if we were “above our business of collecting supplies for the army,” we could, if we had the chance, send home to England such a tale as would show them how cheaply the “fine gentlemen” of the Light Cavalry héld life when honour claimed it, and would cover our slanderers for ever in the shame of their own lives. And our time came at last, when we were roused by the notes of Boot and Saddle, and drawn up on the slopes behind the redoubts. The story of that day is well enough known in England. How brightly the sun shone that morning, dancing on the blue strip of sea, and flashing on the lines of steel gleaming and bristling below; on the solid masses of the Russians, with their glittering lances and sabres, and their
gay accoutred skirmishers whirling before their line of march like swallows in the air; on the fierce-eyed Zouaves lying behind the earthworks; on our Light and Heavy brigades in front of our camp; on Sir Colin’s Highlanders drawn up two deep; for the 93rd did not need to alter their line even to receive the magnificent charge of the Muscovite cavalry! How brightly the sun shone, — and how breathlessly we waited in that dead silence, only broken by the clink and the ring of the horses’ bits and the unsheathing of sabres, as the Russians came up the valley, those splendid masses of cavalry moving en echelon to the attack! Breathless every man on the slopes and in the valley; French and English; soldier and amateur; while the grand line of the Muscovite Horse rode on to the 93rd, who quietly awaited them, motionless and impenetrable as granite, firm and invulnerable as their own Highland sea-walls — awaited them, till their second volley, rolling out on the clear morning air, sent that splendid body of horse flying, shivered like sea-foam breaking on a rock. Then came the time for Scarlett and his Heavies — and all the lookers-on gathered up yonder on the heights, held their breath when Greys and Enniskilleners, with the joyous cheer of the one, and the wild shout of the other ringing through the air, rushed at the massive columns of the Russians, charged them, shaking their serried masses as a hurricane shakes the woodland trees, and closing with their second line as it came up to retrieve the lost honour of the priest-blessed lances, mingled pêle-mêle with them, reckless of all odds, cutting their way inch by inch through the dense squadrons closing round them — those “beautiful grey horses” pushing their road with that skill and daring which had once won them Napoleon’s admiration — till the ist Royals, with the 4th and 5th Dragoon Guards, dashed to the rescue, and sent the Russian columns flying over the plain, like a routed herd of cattle without a leader. How the lookers-on cheered, waving their caps in their hands and shouting rapturous applause, till the heights rang again, as the Brigadier and his Heavies rode back from their assault! — and De Vigne muttered, as he glanced down the line of our light brigade: