by Ouida
He ceased; his voice was low and broken; he could not complete his generous speech; the great love in him overpowered every other feeling; he could not bid her go to another! Who amongst us would ask of any man to sign his own death-warrant? Who can wonder that he shrank from consigning himself to a living death, to an existence hopeless as the grave, with throes of mortal agony that would never cease as long as there were blood in his veins, and vitality in his heart?
She looked up in his face, the moonlight gleaming in her eyes, in which was the smile of a love without hope, yet faithful to the end — such a smile as a woman might give from the scaffold to one whom she would fain comfort to the last “Do you remember I said I was yours — yours for life and death — yours for ever? That vow is as sacred to me as though it were my marriage oath to you. Love, happiness, home — and with another? You can know me little, my own dearest, to speak so to me! Others have tried to urge me to infidelity. I never thought you would insult me too. Noble, generous, unselfish as your love is, I, who thought once to be your wife — I will be worthy of it, and I count sorrow from your hand far dearer than joy from any other’s!”
He could not answer her; he tried to thank her, but his voice failed him. To have such love as this given him, and to be forced by fate to live as though he had it not! — to leave her as though she were nothing to him, when, only grown dearer by absence, to part from her was to wrench away his very life!
His burden grew heavier than he could bear. With her words dawned the ideal of so fair a life! It rose up before his grasp with all its sweetest glories. The world — the world — what was that to them? he had but to stretch out his hand, and say to the woman who loved him, “Come!”
He became deathly pale; his head was drooped till his lips rested on hers; he stood immovable, save for the fast thick throbs of his heart, and the convulsive strength with which he pressed her against his breast. The physical conflicts he had of late passed through were peace, rest, child’s play, compared with this deadly struggle that waited for him in the first hour of his return!
Suddenly he lifted his head.
“I have no strength for this! Let us go into the world. I must put some shield between us and this torture.”
He spoke rapidly, almost harshly; it was the first time that his voice had ever lost its softness, his manner the tenderness natural to him at all times, and doubly gentle ever to her. She gave one heavy, hopeless sigh, and as he heard it he shivered from head to foot He dared no longer be with her alone, and he led her back into the crowded ball-room.
There were many masks worn that night, at that bal masqué of the Duchesse de la Vieillecour’s!
Escaping from the crowd he walked along under the calm April skies, careless of the groups that jostled him on the trottoir, from the gay students, chanting their chansons à boire, to the piteous outcasts whose last home would be the Morgue; from the light-hearted, bright-eyed grisette of the Quartier Latin, to the wretched chiffonnier of the Faubourg d’Enfer, stopping to carry rags and filth away as wealth. He walked along, wandering far, across the Pont Neuf, and into the old City, unconscious where he went, blind to the holy beauty of the midnight stars, deaf to the noisy laughter of the midnight revellers, till a shrill voice struck on his ear, the voice of a woman, “Limosina per la carità, signor!”
The language of his childhood and his youth always stirred a chord of tenderness and of regret in his heart For his fondest endearments Italian words rose to his lips, and in his hours of strongest passion, Italian was the language in which he would first and most naturally have spoken. Despite the chain that Italy had hung upon him, he loved her, and he loved her language, with one of the deep and mournful attachments with which we love what has cost us heavily, and which is yet dear to us. From his musings, that shrill voice, with its “Car if à, carità, signor!” startled him with a sudden shock. Perhaps something in the tones stung him with a vague pang of remembrance, a pang as of an old wound suddenly struck in the dark by an unseen hand. At any rate, involuntarily, for the sake of the Italian words, he stretched out his hand with the alms she begged.
The face was haggard, faded, stamped with the violence of a fiendish temper, inflamed with the passion for drink; the eyes red, the lips thin, the brow contracted, the hair grey and spare — the face of a virago, the face of a drunkard. Still, with an electric thrill of memory, it took him back to another face, twenty years younger, with delicate colouring, smooth brow, long shining hair, and dark voluptuous eyes — another, yet the same, marked and ruined even then with the stain of the same virago passions.
He gazed upon her, that dim and horrible memory struggling into birth by the light of the gas-lamp; her bloodshot eyes looked up at him; and thus, after twenty years, he and his faithless wife met once again in life.
He gazed upon her as men in ancient days gazed on the horrible visage of the Medusa, fascinated with a spell which, while they loathed it, held them tight bound there, to look till their eyes grew dim and their hearts sick unto death on what they dreaded and abhorred; fascinated, he gazed upon her, the woman who had betrayed him; fascinated, she gazed on him, the husband she had wronged. They recognised each other; the tie that had once bound them, the wrong that had once parted them, would have taught them to know each other, though twice twenty years had parted them; he who had wedded and loved her, she who had wedded and dishonoured him.
There they stood, in the midnight streets of Paris, face to face once more. They, husband and wife? They, those whom “God had joined together?” Oh! farce and folly and falsehood!
There they stood. The man, with his noble bearing, his delicate beauty, his generous and chivalric nature, his highly-cultured intellect, his fastidious tastes, his proud susceptibilities, sensitive to dishonour, incapable of a base thought or a mean act. And she — the beauty she had once owned distorted with the vile temper and ravings of a shrew; on face and form the stamp of a virago’s passions, of a conscience dead, of a brain besotted with the drink to which she had latterly flown as consoler and companion; a creature from whom a passerby would shrink with loathing; the type of lowest, most debased, most loathsome womanhood!
Yet these were husband and wife!
She looked up in his face — up into those melancholy and lustrous eyes, which seemed to her the eyes of an avenging angel.
All his wrongs, all the memories of that betrayal which had stung and eaten into his very soul — all the torture which his tie to this woman had brought on his head and on hers who was dearer than his life — all the joys of which this wife, so false to him, had robbed him — all the horror, the bitterness, the misery of his bondage to this woman — all rushed upon him at the sight of the wife to whom fate condemned him. His face grew stern, with bitterness rare with him. Wronged pride, outraged trust, violated honour, loathing, scorn, pity, an unspoken accusation, which was more full of reproach and rebuke than any words, were written on his face as, sick unto death, he turned involuntarily from her — deeply as she had erred to him, she was sunk too low for him to upbraid. With a shudder he turned from her; and at that instant with an inarticulate cry she fell down on the flagstone of the street Confused, and but half-conscious from the draught with which she had drugged her thoughts and satisfied the passion which had grown upon her, as the passion for drink grows ever on its victims; strongly imbued with the superstition of her country; while vague stray remnants of the miracles, the credulities, and the legends of her religion still dwelt in her mind too deep for any crime to uproot her belief in them; — the pale stem face of her husband, with the dark, melancholy, reproachful eyes that gazed upon her with a voiceless rebuke which touched her into remorse for the lengthened wrong her life had done him, seemed, as he stood suddenly before her in the faint cold light of the moon, as the face of an Avenging Angel beckoning her to the chastisement of her crimes. Debilitated and semi-delirious, her strength eaten and burnt away by the deadly absinthe, her mind hazy and clouded, impressionable to the superstitions
of her creed and country; struck with terror at what her weak mind fancied was a messenger of retribution from the heaven she alternately reviled, blasphemed, and dreaded; with a shrill cry of horror and appeal, she fell down at his feet, a helpless, motionless mass, lying still, death-like, huddled together in the cold, clear moonlight, on the glistening pavement, before the man her life had wronged.
His impulse was to leave her there; to fly for ever from the spectacle of the woman he had once loved fondly, and who had once slept innocently on his heart, thus lost and thus degraded; to leave for ever the presence of a wife who outraged every sense, every taste, every feeling, but to whom the law still bound him, because from a drunkard no divorce is granted!
But pity, duty, humanity stayed him. Though she was his enemy, she was a woman; though she had wronged him, she was now in want; though she had forsaken, betrayed, and robbed him of more than twenty long years’ peace and joy, she had once had his love. He had once vowed to cherish and protect her, and, though she had long ago lost all right or power to appeal to those vows, or that care, he would not leave her there, alone in the Paris streets at midnight, lying in the kennel like a dog.
A crowd had gathered round them in an instant — round the man with his patrician grace and beauty, and the woman lying at his feet, squalid and repulsive, all the more loathsome for the shadow of past loveliness that remained, showing all that nature would have left so fair, but for the vile human passions that had ruined and destroyed it. Among the crowd was a young medical student from the Quartier Latin, on his way from the Morgue, who stooped down to look at her as she lay.
A dark crimson stream was welling from her lips out on to the pavement, white and glistening in the moonlight With a sickening shudder her husband turned away. He had seen the horrors of war; he had looked on suffering and bloodshed with that calmness and tranquillity of nerve which soldiers learn perforce; but a sudden faintness seized him at the sight of that life stream which, perchance, bore with it the last throbs of an existence which was the curse of his own. The street faded from his view, the voices of men grew confused in his ear, the grey moonlight seemed to whirl round and round him in a dizzy haze, out of which glared and laughed in mocking horror the face of a fiend — the face of his Wife. His brain lost all consciousness; life seemed slipping from his grasp; he saw nothing, he heard nothing, he was conscious of nothing, save that horrible loathsome face close to his, with its wild bloodshot eyes dragging him with her down, down, down — away from life — into a vague hell of horror.
The night wind fanning his brow awoke him from his swoon; the voices around him seemed to bring with them a glad rush of free, healthful, welcome life; the delirium of his brain faded away in the clear light of the moon. The medical student answered the glance with which Sabretasche asked the question his lips refused to put into words.
“They have taken that poor woman, monsieur, to the Café Euphrosyne to see what is the matter with her before she goes to the hospital. My friend Lafitolle, a surgeon like myself, is with her.”
Sabretasche longed to leave the place, to go where he could run no risk of hearing, seeing, coming again in contact with the terrible phantom of the night — the phantom that was no spirit-form moulded by the fancies of his brain to be dissolved in the clear and sunny light of morning, but a dark and hopeless reality from which there was no awakening. But he knew by her beggar’s prayer that she must be in want, and his heart was too generous, too gentle, too full of knightly and chivalric feeling, ‘to leave her without aid to suffer, perhaps to die, homeless and destitute, in the hospital of a foreign city.
The Café Euphrosyne was a low and not overcleanly house in the by-street into which Sabretasche unconsciously had wandered; it was chiefly frequented by the small shopkeepers of the quartier; but the people of the house were good-hearted, good-natured, cheerful people — a man and his wife, with whom the world went very well in their own small part of it, and who, unlike the generality of people with whom the world goes well, were very ready and willing to aid, if they could, any with whom it went ill. Their café was open and lighted; merry suppers of students and workpeople were going on in one portion of it, and in another the good mistress of the house was venting pitiful exclamations and voluble compassion on the poor woman whom a water-carrier had lifted on his broad shoulders and borne into her house.
There lay the once beautiful Tuscan, surrounded by a crowd — the many curious, the few compassionate — the life-blood still dropping slowly from between her thin ashy lips, her blood-shot eyes closed, her haggard cheeks more hollow still from their leaden hue, the hair that he remembered so golden and luxuriant now thin and spare, and streaked with grey, far more so than her years warranted. As Sabretasche drew near the door of the chamber a murmur ran among the people that the English milord knew something of her, and on the strength of it the surgeon came forward to Sabretasche.
“Pardon, monsieur, but may I ask if you know anything of this poor woman, of her family, of where she comes from? If not, she shall go to the hospital!”
The flush of pain and of pride that passed over Sabretasche’s face, and then passed away, leaving it pallid as any statuary, did not escape the young student’s quick eyes.
“No,” he answered quickly. “Do not send her to the hospital. Let her remain here! I will defray the expenses.”
He took out his purse as he spoke, and at sight of the glittering gold within it, and the sum he tendered her out of it, Madame Riolette, though as little mercenary as a woman can be who lives by the money she makes, thought what an admirable thing it is to fall in by fate with an English milord; and immediately acquiesced in his wish for her to receive the stranger, and listened with the humblest respect while he bade her do all that was necessary.
He waited there, leaning against the door of the café, the night wind blowing on his fevered forehead, a thousand conflicting thoughts and feelings at war within him, till an older surgeon who had been brought thither came down the stairs. As he passed him, Sabretasche arrested him.
“Is she — will she—”
He paused; not to save his life could he have framed the question to ask if hers were in jeopardy; hers, dark with the wrong of twenty years to him; hers, so long the curse upon his own; hers, the sole bar between himself and happiness.
“Will she live?” guessed the surgeon. “No, not likely. She has poisoned herself with absinthe, poor wretch. I suppose you found her on the pavement, monsieur? It is very generous to assist her so liberally. Shocking thing that absinthe — shocking! Bonsoir, monsieur.”
The surgeon, without awaiting a reply to any of his questions, went off, impatient to return to the écarté he had left to attend his summons to the Café Euphrosyne, and Sabretasche still leaned against the door-post in the clear starlight, while the fresh rush of the night wind, and the noisy revelry from suppers, alike passed by him unheeded.
His heart throbbed, his pulse beat rapid time, his brain whirled with the tide of emotions that rushed through him. For more than twenty years he had not seen his wife; he had left her a young and beautiful woman, with the rounded form, the delicate outline, the luxuriant hair, the rich colouring of youth. As such he had always thought of her.
For more than a score of years his eyes had not rested on her, and the change which time had wrought, and temper and drink hastened, shocked him as a young child, laughing at its own gay, fair face in a mirror, would start, if in its stead he saw the worn and withered features he should wear in his old age.
This sudden resurrection of the memories of his youth; this sudden meeting with the wife so long unseen; this abrupt transition from the delicate, fresh, and exquisite loveliness of Violet Molyneux, to the worn, haggard, repulsive form of the woman who barred him from her; all these took a strange hold upon him, and struck him with a strange shock; such as I have felt coming out of the warm, bright, voluptuous sunshine of a summer’s day into the silent, damp, midnight gloom of a cavern. And side by side with this fa
ce, seen in the glare of the gaslight, with that harsh voice and shrill cry for alms, and those wild, bloodshot eyes lifted to his, rose the memory of the one so young, so fair, with its soft lips white with pain, and the clinging clasp of the fond hands, and the quiver in the low and tender voice, “I count sorrow from your hand dearer than joy from any other.” Side by side they rose before him; and with such delirium as they might know who, on the scaffold, putting up their last prayer to God, and taking their last look of the golden sunlight and the laughing earth, saw the pardon which beckoned them to life among their fellow-men from the very border of their grave, there came rushing through his heart and brain the thought of freedom — the freedom that would come with Death! To banish it he would have needed to be deity, not man.
He leaned there against the door, his thoughts mingling in strange chaos, death and life; at once going back to the buried past of his youth and on to the possible future of his manhood. The students brushing past him with their light French jests, going homewards after their merry supper, roused him to the actual moment; and ere the house closed for the night he turned and sought Madame Riolette, to bid her have all that might be necessary for the comfort and the care of her charge, and wait for no solace that money could bring, to soothe the dreary passage to the grave, of the woman whose life had blasted his.
She listened to his injunctions with the reverence which gleaming gold coins are sure to gain for their owner all the world over, and promised to give the sufferer every care and comfort — a promise she would have kept without any bribe, for she was full of the ready and vivacious kindness of her country.