by Ouida
“Monsieur would not like to speak to the poor woman?” she asked, hesitatingly.
“No — no,” said Sabretasche, hastily, with that flush of pain which every thought of his wife brought with it.
“But, monsieur,” went on Madame Riolette, submissively, her little head, with its white cap, and its ponderous earrings, hung bashfully down, afraid of seeming rude to his English milord, “if monsieur could speak Italian it would be such a kindness to the poor woman. No one in the house could, and since she had become conscious, she kept murmuring Italian words, and seemed so wretched no one could understand them. As monsieur had been already so nobly benevolent to her, if monsieur would not mind adding so greatly to his goodness—”
And Madame Riolette paused, awed to silence by the pallor and the sternness on his face. She thought he was angry with her for her audacity, and began a trembling apology. Poor woman! his thoughts were far enough away from her. A struggle rose within him; he had an unconquerable loathing and shrinking, from ever looking again upon the face of the woman who had wronged him; yet a strange mournful sort of pity awoke in him, as he heard of her muttering words in their mutual language in foreign ears upon her death-bed, and he thought of her young, lovely, as he had first seen her among the pale-green olive-groves of Montepulto.
He stood still some moments, his face’turned from the inquisitorial light of Madame Riolette’s hand-lamp; then he lifted his head:
“Lead the way.”
She led the way up a narrow staircase and along a little corridor, and opened for him a door through which he had to bend his head to pass, and ushered him into a chamber; small, it is true, but with all the prettiness and comforts she had been able to gather into it, and neither close nor hot, but full of the sweet evening air that had come in; blowing far from the olive-groves of the sufferer’s native Tuscany, across the purple Alps and the blue mountains of Auvergne, over the deep woods, and stretching meadows, and rushing rivers of the interior, till it came fresh and fragrant, laden with life and perfume, bearing healing on its wings to the heated, feverish, crowded streets of Paris.
Sabretasche took the lamp from the woman’s hand, and signed her to retire, a hint which Madame Riolette interpreted by seating herself by the little table in the window and taking out her knitting, pondering, acute Parisienne that she was, on what possible connexion there could be between the poor, haggard, wretched-looking woman on her bed, and the graceful, aristocratic milord Anglais.
By the light of the lamp in his hand, Sabretasche stood and gazed upon his wife, as she lay unconscious of his gaze, with her eyes closed, and scarcely a pulsation to be seen that could mark life from death. He looked upon her face, with the stamp of vicious and virago passion on every line, on the nervous hand that had been raised in their last parting against his life; the hand which bore on its finger the key that had locked the fetters of marriage round and about with such pitiless force, the badge of a life-long bondage, the seal that stamped the death-warrant of his liberty and peace! — the wedding-ring that in the joyous glow, and blindfold trust of youth he had placed there, his heart beating high, with all a lover’s tenderest thoughts, the sign as he then believed of life-long joy and union with a woman who loved him as well and as truly as he loved her! He thought of his bride as she had looked to him on his marriage morning in Tuscany, fair as woman could ever need to be, with the orange-flowers and myrtles gathered with the dews of dawn glittering upon them, wreathed among her rich and golden hair; he looked upon her now, with the work of twenty years stamped upon her face, twenty years of wrong, of evil, of debasing thought, of avaricious passions, in which she had lived on the money of the husband she had wronged, to spend it in the lowest of all vices, drink. He knew nothing of how those twenty years had been passed, but he could divine nearly enough, seeing the wreck and ruin they had wrought And he was tied to this woman! — if she rose from that bed of sickness, he was bound to her by law! His heart recoiled with horror, and sickened at the thought; reason, sense, nature revolted, outraged and indignant at the hideous bondage. He longed to call the world that condemned him to such, around him where he stood, and ask them how they dared to fetter him to such a wife, to such a tie; chaining him to more horrible companionship than those inflict who chain the living body to the festering corpse, never to be unloosed till welcome death release the prisoner, consigned to such horror unspeakable by his own kind, by his own fellow-men!
As he gazed upon her, the light of the lamp falling on her eyes aroused her from the semi-conscious trance into which she had fallen, weakened by the loss of blood, which, though not great, had taken away the little strength and power which she had, all vitality and health having been eaten gradually up by the poison she had loved and courted — poison slow, but ever sure.
Her eyes unclosed and fastened on him with a wild, vacant stare; then she covered her face with her hands, and cowered down among the bed-clothes in mortal terror, muttering trembling and disjointed words:
“Oh, Santa Maria! have mercy, have mercy! I have erred, I have sinned, I confess it! Send him away, send him away; he will kill me with his calm, sad eyes, they pierce into my soul! I was mad — I hated him — I knew not what I did. Oh, Mother of God, call him away! I am ready, I will come to the lowest hell if you will, so that I may not see him. His eyes, his eyes. — Holy Jesus, call him away!”
Her voice rose in a faint, shrill shriek, the phantasma of her brain was torture to her. She cowered down among the clothes, trembling and terror-stricken, before the gaze of the man she had betrayed, who, to her wandering brain, seemed like an avenging angel sent to carry her to an eternal abode among the damned.
“Poor soul, poor soul!” murmured Madame Riolette to her knitting-needles, “that’s how she’s been going on for the last hour. I wish the milord Anglais would let me send for the Père Lavoisier. If anybody can give rest to a weary sinner it is he.”
Sick at heart with the scene, and filled with a mournful pity for the wreck he saw before him, Sabretasche tried to calm her with some Italian words of reassurance and compassion; but the sound of her native language seemed only to excite her more wildly still. She glared at him; her dark eyes, bloodshot and opened wide, recalling to him their last parting, when they had glittered upon him with the fire of a tigress, and the hatred of a murderess. She sprang up with a convulsive movement and signed him frantically from her.
“Go away, go away! I know you; you are my husband; you are come from hell to fetch me. I have sinned against you, and I would sin again. I hate you’ — I hate you! Go to your northern love! but you can never marry her — you can never marry her. I am your wife. All the world will tell you so, and I will not let ‘you kill me. I will live — I will live, to curse you as I have—”
She sank back on her pillows, her little strength exhausted with the violence of her passions; her eyes still ‘glaring, but half consciously, on him — quivering, panting, foaming at the mouth like a wild animal after a combat; there was little of humanity, nothing of womanhood, left in her — and this woman was his wife.
She lay on the bed, her wild eyes fixed on him, breathing loudly and quickly, defiant, though powerless, like a wounded tigress, stricken down in her strength, but with the fell ferocious instinct still alive within her. Then she began again to shrink, and tremble, and cower before her own thoughts; and hiding her face in her hands, began to weep, murmuring some Latin words of the Church prayers, and calling on the Virgin’s aid.
“I have sinned — I have sinned; oh, Madre di Dio, save me, Fili Redempior mundi Deus, miserere nobis. What are the words — what are the words; will no one say them? I used to know them so well! I can remember nothing; perhaps I am dying — dying, unconfessed and unabsolved. Where is Padre Cyrillo, he would give me absolution? Let me confess, let me confess, O Santa Maria, before I die!”
Weary of the scene whose horrors he had no power to soften, heart-sick of the human degradation before him, Sabretasche turned to Madame Riolette:
“
Is there no priest you could summon?”
“Oh, yes, monsieur,” answered that good little Catholic, warmly. “There is the Père Lavoisier, the curé of Sainte Cécile, and so good a man! He will rise any hour, and go through any weather, to bring a ray of comfort to any soul; and he can speak her language, too, for he is half Italian.”
“Send for him,” said Sabretasche, briefly, “and show me to another room. You shall be well paid for all your trouble. I knew your patient in other days; I intend to remain here till the surgeon’s next visit.”
He spoke more briefly and hurriedly than was his wont; but Madame Riolette did not heed it. She would have been only too glad to have him always there, provided he paid as he had done that night, and ushered him with many apologies into the room which had lately witnessed the students’ supper. The scent of the air, reeking with stale wine, sickened him; and throwing open one of the small casements he sat down by the open window, leaning out into the cool, silent street, over whose high pointed roofs the grey dawn was growing lighter, and the morning stars larger. He felt a strange, irresistible fascination to stay there till he knew whether this life would revive to be again a curse to his; or whether the icy hand of death would unloose the fetters man refused to sever. Yet they were horrible hours — hours of fear and longing, of dread which seemed so hideously near akin to murder; of wild, delirious hope, which for his life he could not have chilled; horrible hours to him in which he waited to know whether with another’s death existence would bloom anew for him, and from another’s grave the flowers of hope spring up in all their glories.
He had bade Madame Riolette let him know when the surgeon had paid his next visit; and awaiting the medical man’s opinion, he sat by the open window, while the soft dawn grew clearer and brighter, and the sparrows began to twitter on the house-tops, and the hum of human life to awake in Paris. He sat there for what seemed to him an eternity, his nerves strung to tension, till every slight sound in the street below him, the taking down of the shop shutters, the cry of the water-carriers, the bark of the dogs, jarred upon his brain, and every minute passed heavily away as though it were a cycle of time. His heart beat fast and thick as a knock came on the panels of the door, and it was with difficulty he could steady his voice to give the permission to enter. He expected to see the surgeon; instead, he saw the curé of Sainte Cécile, a mild, silver-haired, gentle-voiced old man, of whom all Madame Riolette’s praise was true.
“May I speak to monsieur!”
“Certainly.”
“You know the sufferer to whom I was called?” Sabretasche bent his head; evasion of the truth never at any moment occurred to him.
“You are her husband?”
The blood rushed over his face; he shrank as from the insult of a blow from the abrupt question which told him that his connexion with the woman who dishonoured his name, who cursed his career, who blotted his escutcheon, and had now sunk so low that any honest day-labourer might have shrunk from acknowledging her as his wife, was no longer a secret, but known so widely that a stranger might unhesitatingly tax him with it “By whose authority do you put these questions to me?” he asked, with that careless hauteur which had made the boldest man among his acquaintance pause before he provoked Vivian Sabretasche.
“By no authority, monsieur,” replied the priest, mildly, “except that which commands me to do what I think right without regard to its consequences to me. Under the seal of confession I have heard the sufferer’s story; the one her life has sinned against is her husband; him she saw this night standing by her bedside; him she will never now rest without seeing again, to ask his pardon. When Madame Riolette told me of your benevolence to the poor woman who had been found dying in the street, I thought you must be he whom she implores Heaven to bring to her, that she may sue for his forgiveness before the grave closes over her—”
“Is she dying?” His voice was hoarse and inarticulate as he asked the brief question.
“Fast; when another night closes in — nay, most likely when noon is here, she will have ceased to live.” Sabretasche turned to the window, and leaned his forehead on his arm, the blood rushed like lightning through his veins, his breathing was quick and loud, like a man who, having borne a weary burden through a long day of heat and toil, flings it suddenly aside; and his lips moved with a single word, too low to stir the air, but full of inexpressible tenderness and thanksgiving, — the one word, “Violet!” Alone, he would have bowed his face upon his hands and wept like a woman; in the presence of another he turned with that calm and equable gravity which, until he had last loved, nothing had had power to disturb. The traces of deep and strong emotions were on his face, but he spoke as tranquilly as of old.
“You have guessed rightly; I am her husband by law, though I myself for twenty years have never held, nor would ever hold, myself as bound in any way by moral right to her. She has forfeited all claim or title to call me by such a name. Since you have heard her story — if she have told it you as truthfully as those of your creed profess to tell everything in their confession — you can judge that an interview between one who has caused, and another who has suffered from, a lifelong wrong, could be productive of peace to neither. I have cared for her, finding her suddenly ill in the streets; I have sent for medical aid; I have given Madame Riolette, and I now give you, full power to do everything that wealth can do to soothe and soften her last moments; beyond that, I do not recognise her as my wife, and I refuse to see again a woman who, when I left her, would have sought my life, and who, even now, drove me away from her with curses.”
He spoke calmly, but there was a set sternness on his face; compassion had made him act gently to his wife, but it had not banished the haughty and bitter wrath which wronged pride and outraged trust had ever awakened at her memory or her name.
“But, monsieur,” interrupted the old curé, gently, “if your wrongs are great, death will soon expiate them; if her errors to you are many, she will be soon judged by a God more merciful, we must all for our own sakes hope, than Man is ever to his fellows. I have just administered the last offices to her. I should scarcely have done that had she been still hardened and impenitent She repents; can any of us do more than that, monsieur? And have not all, even the very best, much of which we must repent if we have any conscience left? It is hardly fitting for us to sit in judgment on any other, when in ourselves we have much evil unexamined and unannealed, and, if there were no outer checks, but constant opportunity and temptation, crime enough in the purest of us to make earth a hell? Your wife repents, monsieur. She has something to confess to you, without which she cannot die in peace, not even in such peace as she may yet win, poor soul! A word from you will calm her, will give her the only comfort she can ever have this side the grave. You have very much to pardon; but oh, monsieur, when you lie on your own death-bed, you will thank God if you have conquered yourself, and not been harsh to her on hers.”
They were simple words. The curé of Sainte Cécile had never had much eloquence, and had been chosen for a crowded parish, where kind words and good deeds were more wanted, and better understood, than rounded periods and glowing tropes. They were simple words, but they touched the heart of his auditor, awaking all that was gentle, just, and tolerant in his nature. It was true. What was he, that he should judge? — what his life, that he had title to condemn another? It was the creed he had ever held in that fashionable world, where men and women sin themselves and redeem their errors by raking up scandal, and preaching moral sermons upon others, and seek to hide the holes in their own garments by hooting after another’s rags; it had ever been his creed that toleration, and not severity, was the duty of humanity, and he had sneered with his most subtle wit at those who, from the pulpit or the forum, rebuked the sins they in themselves covered, with their surplices, or their robes. Should he turn apostate from his creed now, when it called him to act up to it? Should he dare to be harsh to this woman, simply because it happened to be against himself that her errors had been
committed? He wavered a moment, then — his sense of clemency and justice conquered.
“You are right I have no title to judge her. I will see her, if you think it best.”
And the priest, as he looked up into his face, with its pale and delicate beauty, and its earnest and melancholy eyes, thought “what a noble heart this woman has wronged and thrown away.”
CHAPTER XIV.
Release.
ALONE, Sabretasche mounted the narrow staircase, entered the bed-chamber, and signed to Madame Riolette to leave him there — alone, by the grey faint light of the dawn, he drew near the death-bed of his wife, and stood silently beside her. The opiate the surgeon had given her in his second visit had soothed and calmed her; the wildness and ferocity of her eyes had gone, but the hand of death lay heavily upon her. She looked up once at him as he stood there, then covered her face with her hands and wept, not loudly or passionately, but long and unrestrainedly, like a child after a great terror.
“I hear that you wished to see me,” said Sabretasche, in that low, sweet, melodious tongue in which, long ago, among the orange-trees and olive-groves of Tuscany, he had vowed his love-words to her.
She lifted her eyes to his with a shrinking shame and terror that touched him to the core.
“I have wronged you — I have hated you — I have cursed you — I have stood between you and your happiness for twenty weary years,” she moaned. “You can, never forgive me — never — never; it were too much to hope! Yet I wanted to see you once before I die; I wanted to tell you all. Even though your last words be a curse upon me, I should have no right to complain. I have deserved it.”
“You need not fear my curse,” answered Sabretasche, slowly and with effort, as though speech were painful. “If I cannot say I forgive, I am not likely to insult you in your suffering with useless recrimination. We have been separated for one-and-twenty years; I am willing not to evoke the wrongs and dishonour of the past, but to part in such peace as memory will allow.”