by Ouida
He spoke gently, but with an involuntary sternness and a deep melancholy, so deep that it was an unconscious reproach, which struck with a keener pang into the heart of the woman who had wronged him than violent words of fierce upbraiding. She clenched her hands convulsively:
“Do not speak so gently, for God’s sake, or you will kill me! I would rather hear you curse, rebuke, reproach, upbraid me; anything rather than those low, soft tones. I have wronged you, hated you, lied to you; robbed you, betrayed you, dishonoured you; to speak so gently to me is to heap coals of fire on my head! I repent — I repent, God knows; but, at the eleventh hour, what value is my remorse? For twenty years I have wronged you; what good is it for me to tell you I repent when I am dying, and can harm you no longer if I would?”
Sabretasche was silent; her voice, her gestures, her words struck open his wounds afresh. He felt afresh the cruel, bitter sting of his betrayal; he thought of Violet, of all he had suffered, of all he had made her suffer; and his hatred fpr the woman who had stood so long between them flamed up in all its strength. He might have pardoned his own wrongs, but the sufferings of the one beloved by him — never!
His wife glanced upward at his averted face, and shivered at the dark look it wore:
“Madre di Dio! you will never forgive me?”
He was silent Again she repeated her passionate wailing prayer:
“Madre di Dio! you will never forgive me?”
He glanced at her with a shudder and a weary sickening sigh from his heart’s depths:
“I cannot!”
The words roused the evil in her, which the curé had thought those vain “last offices” had exorcised; the savage passion gleamed again in them, and she sprang up like a dying panther:
“No! because you love your English mistress! Would to Heaven I could live and keep you from her!”
“Silence!” broke in Sabretasche, so sternly that she started and trembled as she heard him. “Never dare to pollute her name with your lips! I came at your request, but not to be reproached or questioned. Your own conscience must accuse you of the wrong you did me. For more than twenty years you were content to live upon the gold of the husband you had betrayed. For more than twenty years you have been a clog upon my life, a stain upon my name, a festering wound in my side, a bar from all peace, all happiness; and yet because I could not prove, you would not even make the only reparation left in your power — acknowledgment of the wrong you knew had parted us!”
“But I acknowledge it now; I repent it now, Vivian! No one can do more than that!”
To the lips of the man of the world rose naturally the satire which was habitual. Yes! she confessed and repented now that life was ebbing from her grasp, revenge no longer possible, and acknowledgment unneeded; as people who have played their last card out on earth, turn frightened, with weakened nerve, to God, insulting Him and flattering their priests with “deathbed repentances!” and timorous recantations, which they would have laughed at in their day of better health and stronger brain! But he was too generous and too merciful to utter the sneer which rose involuntarily to his lips, to a woman helpless and dying, who, however bitterly she had betrayed him, was now powerless to harm. The wretched state of a creature he had once loved, struck him with keen pain; her suffering, her poverty, her degradation touched him, and he could not look on the utter wreck of what he had last seen, perfect in youth and beauty, without pity, in which his own hate was quenched, his own wrong avenged. He answered her more gently, and very sadly:
“I did not come here to reproach you. Your conscience must know the wrong you did me, and my own life has not been pure enough to give me any title to fling a stone at you.”
Well said! Libertine, sceptic, egotist, man of pleasure and fashion, as society called him, he could act up, with his most cruel enemy, to his doctrine of toleration. It is more than most do who preach louder and with more “orthodoxy!” But then Sabretasche did not pretend to be a saint; he was simply a man of honour! She looked at him long and wonderingly: to the fierce, inconstant, and vindictive Tuscan, this justice simply for the sake of justice, this toleration, given to her against his impulse, merely because he considered it her due, was new and very strange.
“You humble me bitterly,” she said, between her teeth. “But I have sinned; it is right punishment. I did wrong you. I wedded you because I was sick of being caged in Montepulto. I never loved you; and the solitude you seemed to think like Paradise sickened and annoyed me, till I succeeded in making it a Hell. I cared nothing for anything you cared for; your love of refinement was a constant restraint upon me; your mode of thought and feeling a constant annoyance to me. I grew to hate you, because you were too high, too delicate, too much of a gentleman for me; your superiority jarred upon me, I hated you for it. I hated you even for your affection, your gentleness, your generosity, your sweet temper, which were so many silent rebukes to me. I hated you still more when I loved Fulberto Lani.”
As she spoke her lover’s name, a shudder of dark loathing passed over his face; he thought of her paramour — coarse, illiterate, low-born, low-bred — and felt, fresh as though dealt him but yesterday, the sting of his wife’s infidelity.
“I hated you,” went on the Tuscan, rapidly, with the fictitious force given her from the opiate; “and when you surprised him with me, and taxed me, I would not confess to it, for I knew the confession would set you free, and I swore you should rue the fetters with which we had loaded each other. You left me. Well you might! Not long after Lani left me too; he was an idle, worthless, inconstant do-nothing, the lover of half the women in Naples, and faithful to none. Then — you know how, yearly, my brother extorted from you the money on which we lived? Pepe was extravagant; I ‘lived in gaiety and excitement, and sank lower and lower every day. I should have disgraced you, indeed, if our connexion had been declared to your aristocratic friends! I — a drunkard — yout wife! At last, after twenty years, we heard that you loved a young English girl; loved her more than you had done other women; loved her so that you would have married her.....”
She was touching on dangerous chords if she wanted his forgiveness! — his face grew dark, his soft sad eyes stern, and he turned involuntarily from her.
“When we heard that you were in love with her, and that you were going to the south of France, Pepe, unknown to you, followed, and laid in your way the Neapolitan journal with the death of my aunt Sylvia; he knew it was so worded that you would believe I was dead, would deem yourself free, and would marry again where you loved. He guessed rightly; then, thinking to get from you a heavy bribe for silence, he went to you to offer, if you married your young English love, never to betray your connexion with us. You refused. We could not understand your scruples. The signorina would never have known that her marriage was illegal, or that she was not really your wife. You refused, and we were beggared. I had no money to go to law against you to,ake you provide for me, as Pepe had threatened. We could bribe you no longer, and you went to the war in the East My brother left me to shift for myself as I might, when he could no longer make money by my name; and I was very poor — how poor you cannot think. I have sunk lower and lower, till you have found me a beggar in the streets of Paris. I have done you cruel wrong; I have given you hate for love, betrayal for trust; I have robbed you for twenty years; I have stood between you and your happiness, and gloried in the curse I was to you—”
She stopped, panting for breath, and exhausted; and Sabretasche stood looking out of the window at the dawn, as it rose clearer and brighter in the fair morning skies. It had been, indeed, God knows, a cruel wrong — a wrong which had stretched over all the years of his ‘prime — a wrong which had stolen all peace and joy from him, and from one far dearer than himself “Come here! Come nearer!” said his wife, in faint and hollow tones, as the temporary strength that her cordial had given her faded away.
His face was still white and sternly set as he turned -unwillingly.
“Look at me!” she moaned pit
eously, lifting to his the drawn, thin, sallow face, from which every trace of beauty had long departed; and as he looked he shuddered. “Now can you curse me? Has not life avenged you?”
He was silent; if life had avenged his wrongs on her, he felt that it had cursed him for no sin, chastised him for no error, since to this woman, at least, he had given affection and good faith, and had been rewarded by infidelity, ingratitude and hate!
“Say something to me, Vivian,” she moaned, in pitiful despair— “say something gentler to me! If you knew what it is to die with the curse of one we have injured on our heads! The past is so horrible, the future so dark! O God! Do not send me down into my grave with your curse upon me, to pursue me through eternity, to hunt me into hell!”
“Hush!” said Sabretasche, his low soft tones falling with a “peace, be still!” on the storm of remorse and misery before him. “Hush! I do not curse you — God forbid — I tell you my own life is not pure enough for me to have any right to condemn yours. If I cannot say that I forgive you — at least I will do my best to think as gently of you as I can, and to forget the past I cannot promise more.”
She caught his hands in hers; she wept, she thanked, she blessed him, with all the excitable vehemence of her national character. Weakened by suffering, terrified by death, she seemed to cling to but one thought, one hope — the forgiveness of the man whose love she had wronged from the hour she had stood with him at the marriage altar, so often the funeral pyre for all man’s hopes, and peace, and liberty; where, as by the priests of old, living human souls are offered up in cruel holocausts to a fanatic folly!
“I have but one thing more to tell you — I must hasten before my strength fails me,” she began, raising herself upon the pillows— “I want to speak to you, Vivian, of my child — your child—”
“The child of such a mother! — I will hear nothing of her!”
“Santa Maria! why?”
“Why? Dare you ask? How can I tell that she was mine? And even if she were, what sort of woman must she be, reared by you? You try my forbearance too far. I come here at your desire, I forgive you my own wrongs; but do more — be connected again with the past curse of my life, or recognise in the slightest way any one of the brood that conspired to stain my name, to rob me of my peace, and to bribe me to a lie; — give my name or my countenance to one bred up under the tutelage of those who, shameless themselves, betrayed me in my youth, and tempted me in my manhood to dishonour — once for all, I tell you, woman, that I will not!”
He spoke with more impatient anger and passionate bittemess than were often roused in his gentle and indolent nature. She had presumed too far on his forbearance! to try and farm on him a daughter of hers, probably Lani’s child, or, if his own, one, whose education and mode of life must have made such as he would blush for, such as he would loathe; — to be asked to give to such an one his name — the name that Violet Molyneux would take; — roused all that was haughtiest and darkest in his nature. She had gone too far. The very thought was hateful, abhorrent, loathsome!
“She was your child,” the Tuscan repeated eagerly— “I swear it, and I should hardly perjure myself on my death-bed! God knows whether she is living now or not; I cannot have harmed her, for I have not seen her ever since she was two years old. I put her out to nurse as soon as she was born, in a village near Naples, with a peasant-woman. Six months after her birth you and I parted, never to meet again till to-night! When the child was two years old her foster-mother brought her to me; she was going far away — I forget where — Calabria, I think, and she could keep her with her no longer. She was very lovely, poor little thing, but she reminded me of you.”
“Silence!” broke in Sabretasche, passionately. To have any link of the hated chain of the past cling about him still; to have any one of this loathsome Tuscan brood forced on him now, when death was nigh to relieve him from the shame which had festered into his soul so long, stung him beyond endurance. The child of such a mother! — what had he for her but hatred? “Silence! I will not hear her name. I will have none of her; if she press her claim on me I will refuse to acknowledge her. Whether or no she be daughter of mine, I disown her for ever, she is dead to me for ever. Great God! is the madness of my boyhood never to cease from pursuing me!”
The dying woman raised herself on her bed with eager thirsty haste to speak while yet her brain could serve her, while yet her lips could move:
“But you must hear me — you must! I cannot die in peace unless I tell you — she WAS your child!”
“My child or not — she was yours, and I disown her! My life shall not be shamed by her, my name shall not be polluted by her.”
“But hear me—”
“I will not. If she be mine, I will acknowledge no daughter of yours. You have dishonoured me enough; my future at least shall be free from you.”
“But hear her story — hear her story! You need never see her, never know her, but let me confess all to you — let me die in peace,” wailed the wretched woman, piteously. “Before her birth I never sinned to you; I would not lie now, now, on my death-bed, face to face with Satan and Hell! She was not like you, but she had something of your look sometimes, something of your smile; her voice was like yours, too, and — you were her father! and I hated the very sight of her face. She did not like me — how should she! I was a stranger to her. She was unhappy at the loss of her nurse; she was afraid of me; I dare say I was cruel to her. At that time an English gentleman, who was staying at Naples, saw her, and took a great fancy to her. His own little granddaughter, the same age as herself, had lately died; the only relative of any kind he had left to him. She pleased him very much; he fancied he could trace a resemblance between her and his dead grandchild, and, after a time, he offered to adopt her, and to take her to England, to bring her up as if she were his own; that she was not so, no one would know, for his son’s little girl, whose parents had both died since her birth, had been born in Italy, and had never been taken home. I was only too glad to be rid for ever of her, she made me think constantly of you, and I hated you more bitterly since I had wronged you. I let her go, poor little child! I had some conscience left, and I could not bear to hear her voice even in the distance; I could not bear to see her smile, for she seemed to haunt me and reproach me for the wrong I had done her father. I let her go with the Englishman; and I have never seen her since. God knows, wherever she has been, she has been better than she would have been with me. I have never seen her; but on Christmas-eve, at Notre Dame, a young girl tendered me charity, and as I looked in her face something struck me as like your child’s — as like what she might be as a woman. I do not know — it was very vague — but her smile made me think of you, and she gave me something of that sad, gentle, pitying look with which you had left me twenty years before. Most likely it was mere fancy — but it made me think of her and you. If I had not sent her from me, I should not be alone in my misery, as I am now!”
She ceased, and tears rolled slowly down her haggard cheeks. All her life this woman had thrown away the human love which had been offered her; without it her death-bed was very cheerless, with but two memories beside it — of the husband she had wronged and the child she had deserted.
“You never knew that English stranger, Vivian?” she asked, wistfully.
“What was his name?” asked Sabretasche, coldly.
“Tressillian.”
“Tressillian!” repeated Sabretasche, with an involuntary start— “Tressillian! And your daughter’s name?”
“Was Alma.”
“Alma Tressillian! Good God!”
And as things long forgotten recur to memory at a sudden touch akin to them, he remembered how we had noticed her resemblance to his mother’s portrait hanging in his drawing-room; how he himself had observed the likeness, though, occupied with other thoughts, it had made no impression upon him; Alma Tressillian his daughter! Little as he had noticed her, now, swift as thought, there came to his mind all he had ever seen or heard of
her; he remembered his two visits to St Crucis; he remembered her extraordinary talent for art — the genius inherited from himself; and — he remembered, too, what Carlton had told”that night in the Crimea, that she was the mistress of Vane Castleton. Was it true? Despite her education, her frankness, her apparent delicacy, had she, indeed, hid unseen within her the leaven of her mother’s nature? Had heartlessness, sensuality, treachery of character, been the sole inheritance his wife had bequeathed her child? As these memories and thoughts rushed rapidly and disconnectedly through his brain, she watched the swift changes of expression which swept over his face.
She grasped his arm eagerly:
“You have seen her — you know her, Vivian? What is she like now? Is she a true, fond, pure-hearted woman, or is she like me? Is she cursed with any of my vile passions? If she be, seek her out For the love of Heaven, find her and redeem her from her fate, if to do it you must tell her how low her mother has fallen; her mother, who loved her less than the very beasts of the field can love their offspring.”
To have told this dying wretched woman of that baseless scandal with Vane Castleton, of which he knew nothing, and which all his knowledge of human character made him doubt, would have been brutality. He answered her gently and soothingly:
“I have seen her; or, at least I have seen a lady whom I always heard was Mr. Tressillian’s granddaughter; not much of her, it is true, but sufficient to make me think her a ‘true, fond, pure-hearted woman’ — all that a mother might most long for her daughter to be. Will you swear to me before God that she was my child?”
With her national vehemence — that vehemence of expression which Alma had inherited from her — the Tuscan kissed the little ebony crucifix which Madame Riolette had placed before her:
“I swear it, Vivian, as I hope for pardon for my sins from that God whom my whole life has outraged!” Sabretasche silently bowed his head. He knew that though she might have lied to him the moment before, she would not have dared to swear a falsehood to him by that symbol, which her church had taught her to hold so sacred; and though at another hour he would have smiled at the superstition which made an oath sacred, where honour would have been broken ruthlessly; something, despite all his wrongs, touched him painfully in these hopeless last hours of the woman whom he once had loved in his warm, glad, poetic youth — that youth which she had quenched and ruined with the bitterness of betrayal, and bound down into bondage with the curse of iron chains.