by Ouida
Violet rose and leaned against the console, with her head erect, her little pearly teeth set tight, her lips closed in a haughty, scornful curve over them, her face very pale — pale, but resolute as Eponina’s or Gertrude von der Wart’s — and I think the martyrdom of endurance is worse than the martyrdom of action!
“I say what I am weary of saying — that it is useless, and will ever be useless, to urge me to the sin of infidelity, which you raise into a virtue because it is expedient! Let me alone! — it is all I ask. I go into society because you desire it; it is hard that you will persecute me on the one subject which is the most painful of all. Let me alone! — what I may suffer, I never intrude upon you. If you wish to be free from me — if I cost you anything you grudge — only allow me to work for myself — to go into the world, where for your sake I am not known, and, under another name, gain money for myself; I have often been told my voice would bring me more wealth than I should need. Only give me permission, I will never complain; but consent to be given over to Vallenstein, or any other man, I will not! To be sold by you to the highest bidder — to be forced into a union I should loathe — to be compelled to a marriage that would be infidelity to both! I know what you mean: an unwedded daughter is an expense, and, as society counts, somewhat a discredit If you feel it so, I am willing to support myself; if you allowed it, I should find no shame in that; but, once for all, I swear, that unless God will that I should ever marry him whom I love and honour, I will be no man’s wife. If you care nothing for my peace, if you will not listen to my prayers, if you will not pity me in my trial — at least, you will not seek to make me break my oath!”
Jockey Jack rose from his seat, and left the room; he felt it was his duty to upbraid her for her folly; but he had not the heart to do it, and — true Briton! — left the room, ashamed of the emotion which showed that all good and generous things were not wholly dead within him.
At the ball at the English Embassy that night all beauty paled before hers; men looking on it would have given ten years of their lives to win one smile from those lovely eyes, to have made one blush glow on that pure, colourless cheek; young, unnoticed débutantes looked at her as she passed them, with that crowd gathered round her which everywhere lingered on her step, and wished, with all the envy of women and all the fervour of their years, that they were she — the belle of Paris — in whose praise there was not one dissentient voice, in whom the most fastidious and hypercritical could not find a flaw. If they had seen the reverse picture, the Queen of Society without that crown which was so weary a weight upon her aching brows — if they had seen her that night, the flowers off her luxuriant hair, the glittering jewels off her arms, kneeling there by her bedside in solitude, which no human eyes profaned, they would have paused before they envied Violet Molyneux, courted, followed, worshipped though she was. If the world went home with most of us, I fear it would have sadder stories to tell than the cancans and the grivois tales in which its heart delights; the lips that sing our gayest barcarolles in society, often have barely strength enough to murmur a broken prayer in the solitude of their lonely hours, when the mask is off and the green curtain is down!
It was the beginning of April; the chesnuts of the Tuileries were just thrusting out their first green buds, bringing to Alma’s thoughts those chesnut-boughs at her old nurse’s home, under whose leafy shadows in the sunshine of two summers past she had drunk of that fatal intoxication, whose delirium is more rapturous, and whose awakening more bitter, than the dreams of the opium-eater. Meanwhile for one end she had worked unwearyingly. Violet had introduced her talent into notice among the dilettanti of Paris. Many were ready to admire anything that would win them favour with the English beauty; others really saw, and were struck with, the wonderful dash and vitality in the outlines, the delicacy and brilliance of the colouring; orders in plenty were given her, more than she could have completed in a dozen years, and Alma excluded herself from the society into which her own genius and Violet’s patronage would have introduced her, that she might work, with her art and her hands, and her rich glowing imagination, till she had money to take her to the Crimea to win him back, or die. Poor child! how few “win back” all that makes their life’s glory, whatever stake it be; yet we live — live to the full age of human life. When we woo death he comes not; when we bar the chamber-door, then he enters with his chill breath and stealthy step.
Her hoard was completed. Never did miser gaze on his treasure, never wife on her husband’s ransom, never captive on the warrant of his freedom, never author on the darlings of his brain, with fonder rapture, with more grateful joy, than Alma on the money won by her own hands, which was to bear her to her lover. The thousand miles seemed now but as a span; love would cross all the lands, bridge all the seas, that parted her from him! She would go to him, she would find him; she would risk all to see him once again, to kneel at his feet, to swear to him she was his, and his alone; to force him to believe her!
Alma looked at her precious gold that was to take her to his side, that was to bring him back to her; gold won by the head and hand for the service of the heart that was chained down, its high thoughts clogged, its beating wings fettered, its spirit bruised, but never beaten, by the curse of — want of money. It was won; the modern god without whose aid human life may struggle and fall and rise again, and again struggle and again fall, and go down at the last in the unequal fight of fight against might, talent against wealth, honesty against expediency, for all the world may care. It was won; and not an hour longer should any human force keep her from that distant goal whither for twenty weary months her heart had turned so constantly. She locked her money in a secret drawer (she — generous as the winds — had grown as careful of that treasure as any hoarding Dives!), and left her room to seek Violet Molyneux, and tell her she must leave her. It was impossible for her not to be grateful to Violet for the generous delicacy, the tact, the kindness with which she smoothed away all that her mother would have made painful in the position of any employée; and Violet grew fond of her, as all who knew the Little Tressillian were wont to do, even despite themselves, won by her winning, impulsive graceful ways, — natural to her as its songs to a bird, its vivacity to a kitten, its play in the evening wind to a flower.
She sat down in the inner drawing-room. She did not see Violet, and supposed her to be in her own boudoir, where the belle of Paris spent each day until two, denied to all, often in penning those letters, which were her lover’s only solace through the long Crimean nights.
Suddenly, however, she heard Rushbrooke Molyneux’s voice in the outer room.
“Vy, am I a good shot?” he was saying.
“You know you are,” answered his sister’s voice; she was probably surprised at so irrelevant a question.
“Very well; then if you won’t marry Vallenstein — the Dashers, you see, are coming home, and as soon as Colonel Sabretasche is in England I shall challenge him, he will meet me, and I shall shoot him here — just here, Vy — where life ceases instantaneously.”
A low cry of horror burst from his sister’s lips. Alma involuntarily rose and looked into the room; she saw that Violet had started from her brother’s side, her face blanched with amazement, and her eyes fastened on him with the fascination and the loathing with which a bird gazes up into a snake’s green fiery eyes.
“Great Heaven! you would do murder!”
“Murder! What an idea! Duelling is legitimate, in this country at least; and I dare say your lover will find his way to Paris, though he is such a ‘man of honour.’ Listen to me, Vy; seriously, you must be mad to be taking the veil, as it were, for a fellow who can’t marry you — for the best of all reasons, that he is another woman’s husband. It’s the greatest tomfoolery one ever heard. Why shouldn’t you do like any other girl — send this bosh of romance to the deuce and settle well. Any woman going would be wild to have a chance of winning Vallenstein. He’s an out-and-out better match than we could have looked for; and he’ll be very facile
, Violet; he will be an easy husband after a little time, and you can invite Sabretasche to your Court—”
“God help me! if my brother tempt me to double dishonour!”
The words broke from her almost unconsciously. She deigned no answer to him, but stood looking at him with such loathing and contempt, that Rushbrooke Molyneux, though he was far gone in shamelessness, shrank before it.
But like many such natures, coward at heart, he could bully a woman.
“Well, will you marry Prince Carl, or not?”
“I have told you once for all — no.”
Violet stood, her head just turned over her shoulder to him as she was about to leave the room; her calm, resolute, contemptuous tone stung him into irritation; and Rushbrooke had set his heart on his sister’s becoming Vallenstein’s wife, for certain pecuniary reasons of his own, having lost very heavily to the Prince at the French Derby, and over Baccarat.
“You are quite determined? Then I shoot Sabretasche dead four-and-twenty hours after I see him next. Come, Vy, choose: the wedding-ring for yourself, or the grave for your lover?”
He meant what he said — for the time at least; and Violet knew he was quite capable of doing all he said, and more, if he threatened it. Her love subdued her pride; in the frenzy of the moment she turned back and caught both her brother’s hands:
“Rushbrooke! are you utterly merciless — utterly brutal? Not to save my own life would I kneel to you; but to save his I would stoop lower, were it possible! I know that he would choose murder from you, rather than infidelity from me. If you take his life, you take mine; my existence is bound with his — you will scarcely brand yourself a fratricide?”
“Splendid acting, Vy,” said her brother, coldly. “You always did act well, though; you played in the Belvoir theatricals when you were only ten, I remember. Come, think better of it; marry Vallenstein, and your idol is safe from me. If you boast your love is so great, you might surely save the man’s life?”
“God help me!” moaned Violet “Will you marry Prince Carl?”
“No!”
“You will ‘murder’ Vivian Sabretasche then, as you term it?”
Another cry burst from Violet’s lips, forced out as from a woman on the rack of the Star Chamber or the Inquisition. Then she lifted her eyes to him, with deep dark circles under them, her face full of unutterable anguish, but with a strange nobility upon it “I would rather leave him in God’s hands than yours. HE will protect him from you! I have told you, I will never break my faith to him!”
“Very well! I will go and have a look at my pistols,” smiled her brother, as he rose.
But Violet’s courage gave way, she fell heavily forwards on a couch.
“My beloved! my beloved! God knows I would give my life for yours, but they shall never make me false to you! You would not wish it — you would not wish it, darling, — not to save your life—”
Alma could stay no longer; with one bound, like a young panther, she was in the room and kneeling beside Violet, while she turned her beaming, flashing eyes, full of their azure fire, upon Violet’s brother.
“She gave you your right title. Fratricide! You are more than that, you are a brute, and were I of your own sex, I would make you feel it, boasted duellist, or rather murderer, though you be. What is your sister’s marriage to you, that you should seek to force her into a union that she loathes? Prince Carl himself would cry shame on you. Go, go, and never come near your sister till you come to ask her pardon for your inhuman words and dastard act.”
With all her old passion, Alma spoke, like a little Pythoness in her wrath; every one of her words brought a flush of shame to his cheek, and he forgot that it was his mother’s dependent whom he should have cowed with a word and threatened with dismissal.
He left the room, murmuring something of Vallenstein, his friend — devotedly attached — Violet’s unfortunate attachment — only meant to frighten her, of course — nothing more — nothing more. Then he backed out; and Violet lifted her face with a painful tremulousness on the lips.
“Alma, I have not forgotten your definition of fidelity!”
The smile with which she spoke struck to her listener’s heart; and she looked up at her with an answering regard, that seemed to Violet like an angel promise, and prophecy, for the future:
“To those who are thus faithful reward will come!”
Violet tried to smile again, but her lips quivered in the effort, and she rose and left the room; while Alma, seizing the paper that Rushbrooke had flung down, tore it apart with breathless haste, remembering his words, “The Dashers are coming home.”
De Vigne had been much altered since Curly’s death. Curly’s words had let in one ray of hope, and he cursed the headlong impetuosity which had made him send her letter back unopened. There was hope, and sometimes De Vigne strove with all his force to shut it out, lest it should break in and fool him once again; at others he clung to it as men do to the only chance that makes their life of value. Heaven knows that if his love for Alma had been error, it brought him punishment enough. Whichever way it turned, he saw enough to madden him. If she were false to him, his life would be one long and bitter curse; if he had judged her too harshly, and his neglect and cruelty had driven her to desperation, and sent her, young, unprotected, attractive as she was to men, into the chill world to battle with poverty, he shuddered to think what might have been her fate, so delicate, so trusting, so easily misunderstood; if she were true to him, across the heaven that opened to him with that hope, there stretched the dark memory of the woman who bore his name.
His love for her had changed as near to hate as his nature, generous and inherently forgiving, would allow. He had loved her, but with the love that slew Desdemona, that murdered Mariamne; a love that would have perilled all for one caress of hers, but would have sent her to her grave rather than have seen a rival’s hand touch her, another’s lips come near her; a love inexorable as death, that must have all, or nothing.
But in those long winter nights, tossing on his camp bed, Curly’s words, like voices from the grave, recurred ceaselessly to him, and as a burst of tears — anguish in itself — yet relieves the still worse suffering of the brain, so gentler thoughts of Alma, a ray of hope, a gleam of trust, softened and relieved the bitter despair and hopeless agony of the past months. Was his own past so pure, his own life so perfect, that he had any right to cast a stone at her, even, though her error and her perfidy ‘had blasted all his peace? De Vigne remembered, with a pang, how Sabretasche had said to him, “Let him that standeth take heed lest he fall,” and how he had retorted, in the pride of his unassailed strength, that to win a young girl’s love, bound and fettered as he was, would be a blackguard’s act; yet his honour had gone down before his passion, and he had forgotten the ties that bound him, until, had she been true to him, it would have been useless to remember them.
If she had been false to him, if she had been Vane Castleton’s toy for the hour and the plaything of others since, he would try to find her, save her, shield her from her fate, even though to find her, and to leave her so, broke his own heart. If she had been true to him, and others had wronged her youth and her guilelessness, he would drag her from their clutches; and no matter into what depths of misery she had sunk, he would raise her up, avenge her, and if ever his name became his own again, give it, with his love and honour, to her in the sight of men. Across the darker passions of his soul gleamed the Pity and the Pardon he had once had need to ask of her. His love grew gentler, nobler, tenderer; and he thought, amidst the anguish of those still night-watches, “Who am I, to sit in judgment on her or any other?”
De Vigne had at last learnt a lesson that he had never learned before in all his life — he had learnt to love not only for himself”, but more purely, more holily, more unselfishly.
But at Constantinople — he whom all the army called by his Indian sobriquet of the Charmed Life, whom shot and shell, death and danger, had alike spared; who had ridden unharme
d out of the fatal mêlée before the guns of Balaklava, though the last to leave those doomed and death-haunted lines; — at Constantinople De Vigne was chained on a sick-bed by the bitterest of all our Crimean foes — the cholera. It was touch and go with him; his life was very nearly added to those ghastly Returns, which witnessed how much human life was lost out there by mismanagement and procrastination. Thank God, the strength of his constitution pulled him through at last, but the Dashers sailed for England without him. I got leave to stay with him. I would have been cashiered rather than leave him alone in the Scutari sick-wards in that pestilential place, which sounds so poetic and delicious with its long, lovely name, its Golden Horn, its glistening Bosphorus, its gleaming minarets, its Leilas, its Dudus, its bulbuls, and its beauty; but is, as all of us can witness, a very abomination for a sick man to dwell in, with its dirt, its fleas, its mosquitoes, its jabbering crowds chattering every lingo, its abominable little Turks with their eternal “Bono Johnny,” and its air rife with disease, malaria, and filth.
Sabretasche offered willingly to stay too.
“No, no; go to England, Sabretasche,” said De Vigne, signing the Colonel down towards him in one of his intervals of comparative ease. “Before long I hope to follow you, and you would do me much more service if you would — if you could — without bringing her name forward at all, learn something for me of—”
He stopped; he could not speak her name without a sharp spasm as of severe physical pain.
Sabretasche bent his head till his lips were close to De Vigne’s ear; it was the first time he had heard him allude to her throughout the campaign.
“Of Alma Tressillian?” he said, softly.
De Vigne signed him assent, and a silent pressure of his hand was bond enough between them. If Sabretasche had been like some eminent Christians of my acquaintance, he might have taken the occasion to exalt his own superior foresight in prophesying the trouble that would be born from De Vigne’s careless intimacy with the Little Tressillian; being nothing more than a “bon camarade,” with a generous mind, a kind heart, and a gentleman’s tact, he felt no temptation to do anything of the kind.