Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  Some three weeks after Ours had got under weigh for England, I was sitting by De Vigne’s couch reading to him from some of the periodicals my mother had sent me. It was Hamley of the Artillery’s “Lady Lee,” which ought to interest anybody if a novel ever can; but I doubt if De Vigne heard a word of it. He lay in one position; his head turned away from me, his eyes fixed on the light rosy eastern clouds, his right hand clenched hard upon the bed-clothes as though it would lift him perforce from that cruel inaction, as it had aided him so many times in life. I was glad that at that minute an old Indian comrade of his — come en route from Calcutta to England viâ Constantinople to have a look at the seat of war — was shown into his room; hoping that courtesy might rouse him more than Hamley’s lively story had power to do.

  The man was a major in the Cavalry (Queen’s — ça va sans dire), of the name of De Vine — a resemblance near enough, I dare say, to justify Mrs. Malaprop and Co in thinking them brothers, and the Heralds’ Office in making them out two branches of the same house.

  He sat and chatted some time of their old Scinde reminiscences; heartily sorry to see De Vigne knocked down as he was, and congratulating him warmly on the honours he had won — honours for which, in truth, though De Vigne cared very little, as long as he had had the delight of fighting well, and was thought to “have done his duty.”

  At last the man rose to go, and had bidden us goodbye, when he turned back:

  “I say, old fellow, I’ve forgotten the chief thing I came here to tell you. This letter of yours has been voyaging after me, sent from Calcutta to Delhi, and from Delhi to Rohilcunde, and God knows where, till it came to my hand about four months ago. I was just going to open it when I saw the g in the name, and the “Crimea,” which the donkeys at the Post-office overlooked. You see your correspondent has put you Hussars, I suppose that led to the mistake. It’s a lady’s writing: I hope the delay’s been no damage to your fair friend, whoever she be. I dare say you have ’em by scores from a dozen different quarters, so this one has been no loss. By George! it’s seven o’clock, and I’m to dine at the embassy. Good night, old fellow; I shall come and see you to-morrow.”

  Scrawled over with the different postscripts and addresses, so that nothing of the original address was visible save the “Major de Vigne,” Alma’s writing was recognised by him ere it had left the other’s hand; almost before the door had closed he wrenched it open, and turning away from me, read the many close-written and tear-blotted pages that she had penned to him on her sick-bed at Montressor’s. Knowing he would wish to read on unwitnessed, I left the room.

  He did read on, and, when he had read all, bowing his head upon his hânds, he wept like a woman. For in that hour of joy just won, for which his heart went up to God in trembling gratitude — between him, and the love that was his heritage and right as man, there stood the dark shadow, the relentless phantom of his Marriage. It is bitter, Heaven knows, to be alone in the Shadow of Death, with no ray of light to guide, no gleam of hope to aid us; but even more bitter than this is it to stand as he now stood, with the sudden gleam and radiance of a sunshine that he must never enjoy playing even at his very feet; — to stand as he now stood, fettered by irons that long ago his own hands had forged; held back by the Eumenides of his own headlong follies; divided from all he loved as by a great gulf, by the fell consequences of the Past; his own passions their own Nemesis.

  Would you know the poison that stung him in the cup of his joy? It was this single passage: “She told me she was your wife, Granville! — your wife! — that coarse, loud-voiced, cruel-eyed woman! But that at the moment I hated her so bitterly for her assumption, I could have laughed in her face! I could not help telling her it was a pity she did not learn the semblance of a lady to support her in her rôle; for I hated her so much for daring, even in pretence, to take your name — to venture to claim you. If it was wrong, I could not help it: I love you so dearly that I could never bear even an imaginary rival. That woman your wife! Not even when she showed me some paper or other she said was a marriage certificate, did a thought of belief in her story — which would have been disbelief in you — cross my mind for a moment; and when I discovered Vane Castleton’s cruel plot, and saw so plainly how this woman must have been an emissary of his to try and wean me from you, I thanked God that I had never been disloyal to you even with a thought I trusted you too well ever to believe that you would have kept such a secret from me. I loved you too fondly to wrong you in your absence by want of that faith which it is your right to expect and mine to give!”

  Those were the words that struck him more fiercely than any dagger’s thrust This was the wound which that soft and childlike hand, that would have been itself cut off rather than have harmed him, gave him in the very words that vowed her love. This is what chained him, Tantalus-like, from the heaven long yearned for, now so near, but near only to mock his fetters, to elude his grasp.

  He must stand before her and say, “Your faith was misplaced — that woman is my wife!”

  CHAPTER XIII.

  The Wife to whom Sabretasche was bound.

  THE first chesnut-leaves of the Tuileries were silvered in the moonlight, and the dark Seine wound under the gloomy bridges of the old town out under the wooded heights of St Germain, where the oaks that had listened to the love of Louise de la Vallière, were thrusting out their earliest spring-buds. It was night, and the deep calm heavens bent above, as if in tenderness for the fair white City that lay in the valley of the Seine, like one of the gleaming lilies of its own exiled Bourbons. Around it, in the grand old chase of St Cloud, in the forest aisles of Fontainebleau, among the silent terraces of Versailles and Neuilly, the night was calm, still, hushed to holy silence; whilst in the City of pleasures, of blood, of mirth, of death, of wit, of strife, in the City of Mirabeau and André Chénier, of Rivarol and St Just, of Marie Antoinette and Théroigne de Méricourt, the night was full of jests, and laughter, as the gas-flowers of Mabille were lit and the Imperial household thronged the palace of the Bourbons, and the crowds filled the Boulevards and the Cafés Chantants; the Chaumière and the Château des Fleurs, for Paris was awake, crowned with flowers, with laughter on her lips and sparkling in her eyes, gay as a young girl at her first ball — gay as she has ever been, even on the eve of her darkest tragedies, her most terrible hours.

  The soft spring night came down on Paris. Before the cheval-glass in her luxurious bedchamber, with jewels on her hair and in her bosom, stood the belle of its most aristocratic réunions, shuddering, even while her maid clasped the pearls upon her arm for a ball at Madame de la Vieillecouris, at the memory of those words from her brother’s lips, which bade her choose between infidelity or death. At the window of her own room, looking up to the clear stars that seemed to rebuke from their calm and holy stillness, the gay and feverish fret of the human life below, Alma Tressillian gazed on the spring night, her eyes brilliant with the radiance of hope; he was coming home — her lover, her idol; what could await her now but a return of that joy once so rudely shivered from her grasp? Not very many yards off, in her crowded and bizarre boudoir, where finery stood the stead of taste, and overloading passed for luxury, the Trefusis read the line in the English papers which announced the arrival of her husband’s troop, and threw it aside with an oath because the Crimea had not rid her of his life, and left her mistress of the portion of his wealth that would have come to her — for the law would have recognised her rights as his “wife,” and she was in difficulties and in debt. Underneath the windows, that shone bright with the wax-lights of Violet’s toilette-table, stood a woman, once as beautiful as she, but now haggard, tawdry, pitiful to look upon, begging of the passers-by for the coins which would procure her a draught of absinthe; that deadly tempter, that sure, slow, relentless murderer who, Jael-like, soothes us for the moment to drive the iron nail into our brain while we slumber, and whom, madman-like, we seek and crave the thirst for, though we know the end is death. Those four women — how unlike they were!
Dissimilar as night and dawn; as fragrant roses and dank nightshade; as the two spirits that in fable and apologue hover over our path, the one to lead us to a Gehenna, the other to an Eden; dissimilar enough, God knows. Yet the same stars looked down on them, the same men had loved them, and, in one chain of circumstances, Fate had bound and woven them together.

  That same night Sabretasche arrived in Paris. Rumours had reached him of Violet’s betrothal to the German Prince. Believe them for an instant he did not. But the rumour of her projected union struck him with a deadly chill; he realised, for the first time the possibility that, one day, if he could not claim her, another might He remembered women who had loved, perhaps, as fondly as she, who had gone to their husbands’ arms with hearts aching for another; and despite his faith, trembled for the treasure of which another man might rob him any moment, and he have no right or power to avenge the theft!

  He went to Paris as soon as his men were landed to learn what truth or untruth there was in this report; to look — if unseen himself — once more upon her, before another’s right should claim the beauty once promised as his own.

  It was midnight when he drove to where her people lived in the Champs Elysées.

  A carriage stood before the entrance, the door was wide open, the hall was bright with its wax-lights, the servants were moving to and fro, and in the full glare of the light he beheld that face, which with the din of war and death around had never for an hour ceased to haunt him. She stood there, unconscious of the eyes whose gaze she had often thought would have power to recall her from the tomb; a narrow band of gold and pearls clasped her wavy chesnut hair; her large eyes were darker and more brilliant still from the shadow beneath their lids; about her were all the grace and fascination of her surpassing loveliness; and as he looked on her, she crossed the pavement and entered the carriage, still unconscious that in the darkness of the night the heart she held so dear was beating close to hers!

  The carriage rolled down the Champs Elysées. Ere the door closed, Sabretasche went up to a servant and asked whither they went.

  The man told him to the Duchesse de la Vieillecour’s masked ball.

  Sabretasche remembered that on alighting in Paris that night he had met Léonce de la Vieillecour, the Due’s son by an early marriage, who had bidden him come and see his handsome stepmother at her bal masqué that night, to which the Colonel had given a hasty negative. Now he drove to his rooms, took a domino and a mask, and joined one of the most brilliant and amusing réunions of the season — a bal de Vopéra where all the revellers had pure descents and stately escutcheons, though not, perhaps, much more stainless reputations than the fair maskers of more “equivocal position,” who were treading the boards, and drinking the champagne, of the opera festivities.

  He moved through the rooms, threading his way through those brilliant butterflies who toil so wearily on the treadmill of fashion. As yet he saw not the one he sought; though now and then he heard from men as they passed by him praises of her beauty, praises which turned his blood to fire. Once, a violet domino powdered with violets in gold passed him quickly; jealousy quickened his senses, and, despite the mask, he recognised Carl of Vallenstein, with whom in days gone by he had drunk Johannisberg, and played écarté, and smoked Havannahs under the linden-trees of his summer palace in Saxony.

  He lost the Prince in the crowd; and still nowhere could he find her whom his eyes ached with longing to gaze upon again, and Léonce de la Vieillecour dragged him perforce to see the Duchess, to speak to Madame of the Crimea and of Curly.

  Gwen Brandling and Madame de La Vieillecour must truly have been two different beings, that she could talk with scarce a tremor of that terrible death-scene in the hospital of St Paul — talk of it flirting her fan, and glancing through her mask with those magnificent eyes, while the dance-music rang out in her ears! Did she really think so little of her brother, of the fair child with his golden curls and his gleeful laugh, who had played with her under the shadow of the lime-trees in their old home, long years before, when the world and its prizes were no more to her than the polished chesnuts lying at her feet, and no prophetic shadow foretold to him his dying hour in the horrors of Sebastopol? Did she really think no more of him, as she waltzed in that brilliant circle with the arms of a royal Prince around her? God knows! I will not judge her. Because there are no tears seen in our eyes, it does not follow we are dead to grief.

  The windows of the ball-room opened at the far end, on to a terrace overlooking the cool shadowy gardens of the hotel; and dropping the curtain of one of the windows behind him, Sabretasche escaping from the Duchess, stood a moment in the calm air. At the end of the terrace, having evidently quitted the ball-room as he had done by one of the twelve windows that opened on the terrace, stood a woman and a man. It was Violet; and beside her, bending towards her, the domino of Carl of Vallenstein, his mask in his hand, and on his impassive features an eagerness and a glow but very rarely wakened there.

  Not for his life could Sabretasche have stirred a step from where he stood; fascinated, basilisk-like, he gazed upon the woman he loved, and the man, whom the world said was soon to win from her the title by which, but two years before, he had hoped to have called her. He stood and gazed upon them, upon the one, whom he would have cherished so fondly; and upon the spoiler who might have stolen from him all he valued upon earth.

  They were speaking in French, and some of their words came to him where he stood.

  “That is your last resolvet.”

  “Yes, I am not ungrateful for the honour you would do me; but to accept it would be a crime in me and a treason to you. I know — I grieve to know — that others may have misled you, and not replied to you at the first as I bid them, and I sought this opportunity to tell you frankly, and once for all, that I can never be your wife.”

  “Because you love another!”

  “If I do, monseigneur, such knowledge should surely have prevented your seeking me as you have now done. I should have thought you too proud to wish for an unwilling bride.”

  “But I love you so tenderly, mademoiselle; I would win you at every risk, and if you give me your hand, I will do my best to make your heart mine too—”

  “It is impossible! Do not urge me further. Leave me, I beg of you. I shall never marry. I should have hoped my friends had made you understand this; but since they misled you, there was but one open and honourable course for me to pursue — to tell you at once, myself, that I can never be your wife, nor any other’s. Your words only pain me. Leave me, I entreat of you.”

  He was too true a gentleman to press her further; he bowed low, and left her.

  He lifted the curtain of one of the windows, and went back into the brilliantly-lighted ball-room; and Sabretasche was at last alone with the woman he loved.

  With yearning love he stretched out his arms, murmuring her name — that name which had been on his lips in so many dreams, broken by the din of hostile cannon. She turned, and, with a low faint cry, sprang forward, and fell upon his heart For awhile, in the joy of re-union, they forgot all save that they were together — save that he held her, with that heart beating against his which no man as yet had had power to win from him — save that he had come back to her from danger and suffering, out of the very shadow of the valley of death, from under the very stroke of the angel of destruction.

  On such a meeting we will not dwell; there is little such joy on earth, and what there is, is sacred. As, after a dream of the night in which those we have lost live again, and the days long gone by bloom once more for us with all their sunshine and their fragrance we awake in the grey dawn of the winter’s morning, with all the sorrow and the burden, the darkness and the weariness, of our actual life rushing back upon us; so they awoke to the memory that they had met only to part again — that they had had an interval of rest, given them only like the accused in the torture-room, even that they might live to suffer the more.

  They were forced to part! If it be hard to part a living m
ember from a quivering human body, is it not harder to sever from each other two human hearts such as nature formed to beat as one, and which are only torn asunder, at the cost of every quivering nerve, and every clinging fibre? Heaven knows, few enough hearts in this world beat in unison for those that do, to need be parted! And as the memory of their inexorable fate rose up before him, Sabretasche shuddered at the sight of that exquisite loveliness, condemned for his sake to a solitary and unblessed life, desolate as a widow, without even the title and the memories of a wife. Involuntarily he drew her closer to him — involuntarily he murmured:

  “Oh, my God! we cannot live thus!”

  What comfort had she to give him? None. She could only weep, clinging to him and vowing she would be true to him always — true to him whatever chanced.

  “‘True to me!’ And I have nothing to give you in return but suffering — I have nothing to reward you with but anguish and trial! If I could but bear your burden with mine! If I could but suffer alone—”

  “No, no,” she murmured vaguely, “not alone — not alone. What we suffer, let us suffer together. You would not have me cease to love you?”

  “My God! no. And yet, if I were not selfish, I should bid you forget me, and try to rejoice, if you obeyed. Violet, if ever you should” — and, despite all his effort, his voice was all but inaudible with the anguish and the tenderness he tried to hold down and rein in— “if you should think at any time it were possible to find happiness with another — if you fancy you could in other loves forget my fatal passion, which has been only doomed to. crowd your years with suffering — be happy; I will never reproach you. Do not think of what I shall suffer; no complaint of mine shall ever trouble you. I will try and thank God that he has not, through me, cursed the life dearer than my own, and in time, perhaps, I may learn to bless the one who has given you the joy I would have—”