Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “You his wife!” she repeated, with a contempt which excited the savage nature of her listener, as the Trefusis had excited the slumbering fire of Alma’s character. “You his wife? Before pretending to such a title, you should first have learned the semblance of a lady to uphold you in the assumption of your rôle! Your impertinence in addressing me I shall not honour by resenting; but your ill-done plot, I must tell you, will scarcely pass current with me.”

  She spoke haughtily and impatiently, anger and disdain flashing from her expressive face, which never cared to attempt concealment of any thought passing through her mind.

  “Plot!” repeated the Trefusis, with a snarl on her lips like a hound catching hold of its prey. “You think it a plot, young lady? or do you only say so to brazen it out before a woman you have foully wronged? If it be a plot, what say you then to that?”

  Not letting go her hold upon it, she held before Al-r ma’s eyes the certificate of her marriage.

  “Read it!”

  Alma, who had never seen a document of the kind, saw only a printed paper, and put it aside with a haughty gesture; she would have none of this woman’s enforced confidences! But the Trefusis caught her little delicate wrist, and held the certificate so that Alma could not choose but see the names with that prolix preamble by which his Grace of Canterbury so graciously permits an Englishman to wed.

  Then Alma’s face grew white, even to her lips; for an instant her heart stopped with a dull anguish of horror, but, true to her allegiance, refused, even in the face of proof, the doubt that would dishonour him; no thought that was treachery to her lover should dwell in her mind, no stranger should whisper of him in his absence to her! She threw off the Trefusis’s hand as though it had been the gripe of an adder’s fangs, her soft eyes flashing like dark blue steel.

  “Leave my presence! Leave it! It is useless to seek to injure him with me.”

  As she spoke she rang the bell, and the single servant of the house responded to the summons; Alma bowed her head with the stately grace of an Empress signing to her Household, “Show this lady to the door.”

  For once in her life the Trefusis was baffled; she knew not how to play her next card, uncertain whether Alma was aware or unaware of her marriage to De Vigne. She had hoped to find a weak and timorous young girl, whom her dignity would awe and her story overwhelm, but she was cheated of her second revenge. Mortified and incensed she swung round, with her devil’s sneer upon her fine bold features; “Excuse me, Miss Tressillian, for my very misplaced pity! I fancied you a young and orphaned girl, whom knowledge of the truth might warn from an evil course; I regret to find one on whom all warnings are thrown away, and who gives insult where she should ask for pardon. No other motive than pity for you prompted my call I have been too often the victim of Major De Vi gne’s inconstancy, for it to have any longer power to wound me.”

  Then the woman, whom Church and Law termed his Wife, swept from the room, and the girl was left once more to her solitude. In that solitude the high-strung nerves gave way; while her sword and her shield were wanted she had done battle for him gallantly; but now that they were no longer needed her courage forsook her, and she lay on the couch sobbing bitterly. Tears had always been very rare with her, but of late they had found their way much oftener to the eyes which should have been as shadowless as the southern skies, whose hue they took; with passion, all other floodgates of the heart are loosed. Her wild rapture had its reaction; vehement joys ever pay their own price. She did not credit what the Trefusis had told her; her own quick perception, true in its deduction, though here not true in fact, knew that no really injured wife would have taken the tone of her visitor, nor such means of making her wrongs and her title known; there was something moreover false, coarse, cruel, which struck at once on her! delicate senses; she felt sure it was some slander, and the certificate a forgery; she had read of women who had taken similar revenge upon men. “So many must have loved him,” thought Alma, “and so many, therefore, will hate me as I should hate any who took him from me.” So she reasoned with that loyal love which, truer than the love that is fabled as blind, will, if it see a stain on its idol, veil it from all eyes, even from its own. Still it had left upon her a sort of vague dull weight; she felt afraid, she scarcely knew of what, a terror lest her new-won joys should leave her as suddenly as they had come to her: she would have given years of her young life to look in his eyes again, and hear his voice.

  Once more the roll of carriage-wheels interrupted the ceaseless fall of the heavy rain. Alma started up; dashing the tears from her flushed cheeks. She had suffered a good deal in her brief life, but she had never known anything like the terror which, crowding the pain of hours into a single minute, laid its leaden hand upon her when she saw not De Vigne but his servant Raymond alone approach.

  “Oh, my God! what has happened? He is ill!” she uttered, unconsciously: her nerves were unstrung by her interview with the Trefusis, and her imagination seized on all the evil that could have befallen him whom she loved so well.

  She stood with her hands clenched in the effort to repress the emotion she could not show to a servant, and as Raymond approached her, with the silken suavity which characterised that prize valet, he seemed, for once, to be hurried and anxious.

  “Madam,” he began, with one of the reverential salaams which would have qualified him to be groom of the chamber, “in riding home last evening, Major De Vigne was thrown from his horse.

  “Good God!.... is he hurt?”

  No presence could restrain the agony spoken in those few brief words.

  “Yes — much, madam,” said Raymond, hesitatingly. “The hurt might not perhaps be so severe, but inflammation, and consequently fever, have set in. He is at times unconscious, and at those times he is constantly speaking of you, Miss Tressillian; muttering your name, and calling you to come to him so incessantly, that the surgeon told me, if I knew who the lady was that the Major meant, to fetch her, for that his life depended on his being kept as calm as possible. So, madam, I ventured to come and inform you. I could not tell what to do. I hope I have done right? I brought the carriage in case you might be kind enough to come—”

  All the light died out of the face so radiant but a short time before! She was white as a corpse, save for the blue veins which stood out upon her temples and her hands. She gave one low, deep sob, tears would not come to her relief; and her throat was hoarse and dry as after a long illness, when she answered:

  “Right — quite right. I shall be ready in a moment” Alma’s love was infinitely too true, eager, and active, to stand still and weep. She never paused to reason or reflect; all she thought of was De Vigne in suffering, perhaps in danger. He wanted her — that was enough! She ran upstairs, her heart suffocated with the sobs to which she would not give way while he needed nerve and action to aid him — took her hat, threw a large cloak over her dress, and was beside the carriage in an instant.

  “The Major was riding towards Windsor, madam, so he is now at the nearest house to the place where he was thrown. It is many miles from here,” said Raymond, as he opened the door.

  Alma bent her head; her thoughts were too full to notice that the man had said on his entrance that his master was riding home, now that he had been going across to Windsor; or to remark the improbability of De Vigne’s having gone so far the previous night The door was shut, Raymond got upon the box, and the brougham rolled away, bearing them from St Crucis.

  The drive was through the heavy rain, which fell without cessation. She could not remember how far Windsor was from Richmond; she knew little or nothing of London or its environs, indeed of England itself, so secluded had her life been since she quitted Lorave; but the way seemed interminable. So horrible grew the long dreary drive, through roads so strange to her, in her fear and anxiety, with the ceaseless sigh and sob of the drenching rain, that Alma, impressionable as most enthusiastic natures are, became nervous and fearful, and excited to a vague and heavy dread of some approaching ev
il. All her radiant joy of the morning had died away. That dreary, solitary drive! how long it seemed; how horrible the grey, dark storm, the ceaseless roll of the wheels, the wearisome, unfamiliar road! Alma, as if conscious of her doom, cowered down in a corner of the carriage, like a young child fearful of the dark, looking back on the sweet past of yesterday, as beside the grave of one they have loved men look back on the time when the dead lips were smiling, and the closed eyes were bright The carriage stopped at last on the outskirts of Windsor, rolled through iron, scroll-gates under some dripping larch-trees, through small grounds, very ill kept, with long grass and flowers run wild, and a statue or two, moss-grown, grim, and broken: the very aspect of the place struck a fresh chill into her heart, and nothingin the house itself reassured her. It was a cross between an old country-house and a lorette’s villa, and had an untidy, dissipated, unpleasant look about it to one long used to the brilliant sunlight of Lorave. It seemed a house that might have seen dark stories and painful scenes, smothered from the light of justice, between those irregular and dirty walls. The carriage stopped again before a low side-door, and Alma now thought little of the house — only of the one who had sought its temporary asylum. She sprang from the brougham the instant Raymond let down the steps.

  “Where is your master?”

  “I will take you to him, madam, if you will have the kindness to follow me,” said that silky valet.

  Alma bent her head in acquiescence, and followed him through several crooked passages and tortuous corridors, through which she could not have found her way back unaided; at last he threw open the door of a room, and stood aside for her to enter. It was now nearly nine o’clock; the dense clouds and drenching rain had made it as dark in the country as though it were fully night; and in this chamber, of which the curtains before the windows at the far end were drawn, Alma could see nothing save the indistinct outline of a table and some chairs near her. She turned hastily to Raymond:

  “Is Major De Vigne—”

  But the valet had withdrawn, closing the door behind her, and she heard a sharp click like the turning of a key in a lock. Then — a deadly agony of fear came upon her, and she trembled from head to foot; horrid sights, sounds, thoughts, seemed to hover round her; she had had from infancy a strange terror of being alone in darkness, and she stretched out her hand with a pitiful cry:

  “Sir Folko — Granville — where are you?”

  In answer to her call a man’s form drew near, indistinct in the gloom, and in her ear a voice whispered: “My beautiful, my idolised Alma! there is one here who loves you dearer than him you call. If I have erred in bringing you hither, pardon at least a fault of too much love!”....

  A shriek of loathing, despair, horror, and anguish burst from Alma’s lips, ringing shrill and loud through the darkened room, — she knew that the speaker was Castleton! She struggled from his grasp, and mastering her terror with the courage which was planted side by side in her nature with so much that was poetic and susceptible, she turned on him haughtily:

  “Lord Vane, what do you think to gain by daring to insult me thus? Major de Vigne’s servant brought me here to see his master, who was dangerously hurt. I desire you to leave me, or, if this be your house, and you have one trace of a gentleman’s honour left in you, to tell me at once where I may find my friend?”

  Castleton could have laughed outright at the little fool’s simplicity, but he was willing to win her by gentle means if he could, perhaps, for there are few men entirely blunted and inured to shame; he scarcely relished the fiery scorn of the eyes that flashed upon him in the twilight.

  “Do not be so severe upon me,” he said, softly. “Surely one so gentle to all others may pardon an offence born from a passion to which she of all others should show some pity? I would have told you yesterday how madly I love you — and my love is no cold English fancy, Alma! — I love you, my divine little angel; and my idolatry has driven me perhaps to error, but an error such as women should surely pardon.”

  “Off! do not touch me!” cried Alma, fiercely, as his hand wandered towards the delicate form that he could crush in his grasp as a tiger’s fangs a young gazelle. “Your words are shame, your love pollution, your presence hateful! Insult me no more, but answer me, yes or no, where is my friend!”

  “De Vigne! The devil knows! He is with his wife, I dare say; he can’t hear you, and would not help you if he did.”

  “It is a lie!” moaned Alma, almost delirious with fear and passion. “He has no wife; and he will revenge for me all your dastard insults!”....

  “How will he hear of them, pretty one!” laughed Castleton, seizing her in his arms, while his hot breath sullied her cheeks. “Do you think, now I have you, I shall let you go again! I have hardly caged my bird only to let her fly! We shall clip your wings, loveliest, till you like your captivity too well to try and free yourself. You are mine now, Alma — who can save you!”

  “I shall never be yours — dastard! — coward!” gasped she, striking him a fierce blow with her clenched hands upon his eyes, in her agony, as she struggled in the iron grasp of his embrace, maddened by the loathsome kisses he branded on her lips — the abhorred caresses that seemed to pollute her with infamy and shame. Involuntarily he loosened his hold one moment, in the’ sharp pain and sudden blindness of the unexpected blow. That moment was enough for her; she wrenched herself from him, flew across the room, tore aside the curtain of one of the windows; — by good fortune it was open, and, without heeding what height she might fall, leaped from its low sill on to the ground without. The window was five feet off the lawn below, but happily for her there lay just where she alighted a large heap of cut grass — all that had been mown off the turf that morning having been gathered together just beneath the window. It broke her fall, but she lay stunned till Castleton’s voice from the chamber made her spring to her feet, like a hare that has lain down panting to rest in its run for life, and starts off again with every nerve quivering and every sense stretched, at the bay of the hounds in pursuit She sprang to her feet, and ran along the lawn. The grounds were a labyrinth to her, the light was dim and dusky, the rain still fell in torrents, but Alma’s single thought was to get away from that horrible house, to which she had been lured for such a horrible fate. She fled across the lawn, and through a grove of young firs, taking the first path that presented itself, the road through the plantation, which led her on about a quarter of a mile; she flew over the dank wet turf with the speed of a hunted antelope. Yet to her, with the dread of pursuit upon her, thinking every moment she heard steps behind her, feeling every instant in imagination the grasp of her hated lover and foe, it seemed as though leaden weights were on her ankles, and each step she took bare her a hundred steps backward. At the end of the plantation was a staken-bound fence, and a high gate, with spikes on its top rail. Her heart grew sick with terror: if she turned back she would fall into Castleton’s grasp as surely as a fox that doubles from a wall falls a victim to the pack. She knew he would pursue her; to retrace her steps would be to meet him, and Alma knew what mercy she would find at his hands. An old man, gathering up his tools after thinning the trees and loosening the earth round the roots, was near the gate, and to him Alma rushed:

  “Let me through! let me through, for God’s sake!” she gasped, her fingers clenching on his arm, the wild terror on her face telling her story without words.

  The old peasant, a hard-featured, kindly-eyed old man, looked at her in amazement “Poor bonny child, where would ye go?”

  “Let me through quick — quick, for the love of Heaven!” whispered Alma’, panting with her breathless race.

  Without another question the woodsman unlocked the gate, and let her pass; she flew through it with a murmured “God reward you!” and as he locked the padlock after her, and took up his axe and spade, he muttered to his own thoughts, “Castleton would flay me alive if he could for that; but I don’t care — she’s too bonnie a birdie for such an evil cage.”

  Once thr
ough the gate, she found herself where two cross roads met; ignorant which led back to London, she took the one on her right and ran on; the thick drops of the shower, that still fell fast and heavily on her golden hair, that had fallen dishevelled and unbound in her wrestling with Castleton; her heart beating, her delicate limbs, unused to all fatigue, already beginning to fail her, every nerve on the rack in the dread horror of pursuit, strained to such tension that not a bough cracked in the wind or a rain-drop splashed in the puddles but she thought it was his emissaries chasing her. On and on she ran, her hair streaming behind her, heavy and dank with water, her feet soaked and clogged with the weight of the mud gathered fresh with every step, and every sinew throbbing, cracking, aching with that merciless race from what was worse than death. At last she could do no more; with all her terror, all her spirit, ever much greater than her strength, Nature rebelled against the unnatural strain. She could not run, “but she walked on and on, halting for breath, toiling wearily, ready to sink down on the wet, cold earth, murmuring every now and then De Vigne’s name, or gasping a prayer to God. On she still went, she knew not where, only away — away — for ever from her abhorred pursuer.

  Tenderly nurtured, delicately bred, sensitive as a hot-house flower, this child of art, of love, of refinement, with her high-wrought imagination, her delicate mould of form and thought, her childlike fear of solitude in darkness, suffered tortures. On and on she dragged her weary way, till the dusky haze of rain and fog deepened to the denser gloom of night, and the storm ceased, and the moon came out over the glades of Windsor Forest. She had toiled on till she had reached the outskirts of the royal park, and as the moonlight shivered on the gaunt boughs and played on the wet leaves Alma stopped, powerless to stir again, and a deadly terror of something vague and unknown crept upon her, for her brain was strongly creative, her nerves tender, her mind steeped in poetry, romance, and out-of-the-world lore even from her childhood, when she had believed in fairies because Shakspeare and Milton wrote of them. A deadly terror came upon her; a hundred wild stories that she would have laughed at at another hour rose in chaos before her mind, bewildered already with the horrors of the past day. She was afraid to be alone with that vast silent forest, those cold, solemn stars! She was afraid of the night, of the stillness, of the solitude; she who but so few hours before had been gathered to her lover’s heart and sheltered in his arms, there, as she had thought, to find an asylum all her life. She was afraid; a cold trembling seized her, she looked wildly up at the gaunt boughs and silver foliage in the moonlight; no sound in the hushed night but the hooting of an owl or the clash of the horns of fighting stags. Hideous phantoms glared around; vile shapes gibbered in her ear. One sob rose in her throat, De Vigne’s name rang through the quiet woodlands and up to the dark skies, then she fell forward insensible on the tangled moss, her long bright hair trailing on the grass, her fair brow lying on the dank earth, her hands clenched on the gnarled roots.