Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  She asked one more question:

  “Where did you see her, Vivian?”

  “Twice at her own home, and once at the house of one of our English nobles.”

  “And was she happy?”

  “She seemed so.”

  “Thank God! You will never tell her about me — never mention me to her — never let her know that the mother who neglected her, fell so low and vile, that she was a beggar in the streets; a thing whom she passed by with a dole of charity, with a pitying shudder? Never tell her. Promise me you will not Why should she hear of me, only to know that I first hated and then disgraced her. Promise me, Vivian!”

  “I promise!”

  Little as she could understand him, she knew him too well to exact an oath from him.

  She looked at him wistfully.

  “You are very noble! You shame me more with your goodness than you have done with curses and reproaches.”

  “No,” answered Sabretasche, gently. “I have no claim to virtue. My life has been far too full of errors and self-indulgence, for me to have title left to give me right to condemn another. If you have sinned, so have I. No human beings are spotless enough to judge each other. As for curses, God forbid! They would be rancorous indeed, to follow you to the grave.”

  She gave a weary sigh; his forgiveness humbled and shamed her more than any upbraidings. Then her eyes closed, and she lay still. All the extraneous strength and vigour, given her by cordial and opium, had died away. She lay still, her breathing short and weak, her brow contracted, her limbs exhausted and powerless, the hand of death heavy upon her; her lips apart, her cheeks gray and hollow, her brain confused, and weighed down with the cloudy thoughts, and memories, and fears, which haunted her last hours.

  And Sabretasche stood beside her, musing on the strange accident which had led him to the death-bed of the woman who had made all the misery of his life; of that cruel and inexorable tie which had bound him for so long; of the deep, unsolved problem of human nature; that book written in such different language for every reader, that it is little marvel that every man thinks his own the universal tongue, and fails even to spell out his brother’s translation of it. This woman had hated him; he hid loathed her; they had been chained together by a rite the world chose to call indissoluble; they had been parted by a fierce and ineffaceable wrong; after twenty years’ severance, what could this man and woman, once connected by the closest tie, once parted by the hottest passions, know of each other? what could they read of each other’s heart? what could they tell or understand of each other’s temptations, sufferings, and errors? And yet Church and Law, in mock morality, God help us! had bound them together, till Death, more powerful and more kindly than their fellow-men, should come to the rescue aid release them!

  That lifelong union of Marriage! Verily, to enter into it, it needs a great and an abiding love.

  So he stood watching beside his dying wife. A future, fond and radiant, lay for him in the soft haze of coming years; yet, ere he turned to it, he paused a moment to look back to the past, to its sorrow, its sin, its trial, its conflict, its bitter wrongs. And with a new-born and unutterable happiness awaking in him, a saddened pity stole over him for the broken wreck of humanity which lay in its last feeble life-throbs before his eyes; an’ hatred, resentment, scorn, faded away, quenched in deep compassion. If his character had been hers, his inpulses, opportunities, education, temptation hers, how could he tell but what his sins had been like hers aim? They were such, indeed, to him, whose nature was generosity, and idol honour, as seemed darkest and most loathsome; but in that dying chamber he bowed his head, and turned his eyes away from them. Just and tolerant to the last, he held it not his office to condemn — row, above all, when Death came as his avenger.

  So he stood and watched beside his dying wife the woman who had wedded him only to emancipate himself from an irksome home, and who had been a ruthless barrier between himself and liberty and peace — stood and watched her, while without, the bright morning light dawned in the eastern skies, and the song of the birds made sweet music beneath the eaves, and the soft western winds swept in through the casement into the chamber of the dying; herald of the Life born for him, and come to him, out of Death. Suddenly her eyes unclosed with a vague, lifeless stare, and she awoke to semi-consciousness as the bells of Notre Dame chimed the hour of seven — awoke startled, dreamy, delirious.

  “Hark! there is the church-bell. What is i? Ah! I remember, we used to gather the lilies and the orange-flowers to dress up the high altar at home. I wish I could go there once — just once before I die, to see the vineyards, and the wheat-fields, and the olive-groves again. There are such sweet warm winds, such bright glowing skies — ah! I was happy, I was innocent, I was sinless there! Why are those bells ringing? Are they for early mass? No; it is the Angelus. I forgot! We must take lilies, plenty of lilies for the altar; but I must not touch them, I should soil them, the lilies are so pure so spotless, and I am so sunk, so polluted;.... the lilies would wither if my hands touched them, and the priests would thrust me from the altar, and the Virgin would ask me for my child. I used to pray; I cannot now! Hark! those bells are ringing, and I know the words, but I cannot say them — Help me, help me.

  Pray, pray; do you hear — pray.”

  With piteous agony the cry rang out on the still air of the breaking day, as the dews gathered gray and thick upon her brow, and the glazing mist came over her sight, and in the darkness of coming death she struggled for memory and prayer, as a child gropes in the gloom.

  “Pray — pray. What are the words? Say them — in pity — in mercy! He has forgiven; — God will forgive! Pray — pray!”

  And the voice of the man whom her life had wronged, fell softly on her ear through the dull, dizzy mists of death, as he bent over her and uttered with soothing pity the words of her Church, the prayer of her childhood, which from his lips to her was the seal of an eternal and compassionate Pardon: —

  Pater noster qui es in coelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum: adveniat regnum tu um; fiat voluntas tua sicut in cœlo et in terra; panem nostrum, quotidianum, da nobis hodie; et dimitte nobis débita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris; et ne nos inducas in tentationem sed libera nos à malo. Amen!

  Standing beside his dying wife, he spoke the prayer to the One Creator — the prayer which should have no Creeds; and as the old familiar words winged their way to her, bringing on their echoes, memories of days long past, and innocence long lost, the wild eyes grew tamer, the bent brow relaxed, the hardened lines of age and vice grew soft; and before the last Amen had left his lips, with one faint, broken, mournful sigh, — she died. And he standing beside her, bowed his head in reverence, before the great mystery of life and death; and thanked God that his last words to her had been of mercy and of pardon, that his last words had been to her, even as the words of Arthur unto Guinevere —

  All is passed; the sin is sinned; and I,

  Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God

  Forgives; do thou for thine own soul the rest.

  CHAPTER XV.

  In the Forest of Fontainebleau.

  ON the meeting of those so long held apart by the laws of Man, I need not dwell. Nothing now stood between them; and within a few days of the night that Sabretasche had arrived in Paris, Violet Molyneux became his wife.

  No empty conventionalities kept them apart; they cared nothing what the world wondered, nor how it talked; and they never thought of the malicious versions of their story, which were the one theme in Parisian salons. They went to the south of France for the whole of the coming year, to be away from that gay effervescing world of which both were weary; and, under the purple skies, in the golden air, and amidst the luxurious solitudes of the Midi, shut out from those who had caressed, adored, and slandered him, far from the fret and hum and buz of outer life, Sabretasche surrendered himself to that love which gave him back the dreams of his lost youth, and even as night slinks away before the fullness of the dawn, so the
shadows of his past fell behind him for evermore.

  * * * * *

  Sabretasche kept his promise. Alma never knew that it was to her own mother she had given charity after midnight mass at the doors of Notre Dame. All that had passed in that last interview with his dead wife, he told to Violet To find in Alma the daughter of her own lover — that child whom she had hated with the fond, jealous vehemence with which a woman who loves hates all or anything that has any tie to, or connection with, her lover, or shows that another has been as near to him as she; — was intensely painful to her.

  “Your child and hers!” she repeated. “I can never see her again! Do not ask me, I should never look upon her face without recalling her mother — the traitorous wife who could betray you!”

  That was her first impulse; but her sense of justice conquered this. If she had never known her before, nothing on earth would have induced her to see the daughter of his dead wife; and he noticed the involuntary shudder with which she first met Alma, after his relation of her connection with himself; but she was too generous and too just to allow the feeling influence; and in truth, for I do not wish to claim for her any virtue she does not possess, she was too full of trembling gratitude at her own joy to bear a harsh thought to any soul on earth.

  Bound by his promise to his wife, Sabretasche had been undecided whether or not to tell his daughter of the relation there was between them. It was almost impossible to do so without letting her learn, at least in some degree, what her mother’s character and life had been; her first questions so naturally would be about her mother, her dead mother, of whom she would be anxious to hear all. He had nothing to say but what would pain her; nothing but what would compel him to break his last promise to the dead. Moreover it would have seemed a useless cruelty to rend asunder the happy associations and belief of twenty years, to substitute in their stead, a parentage that must give her pain.

  He felt himself also, no pleasure at the discovery, nor any sudden affection for her sprung up in the night like a mushroom, after the custom of men who find unknown daughters in romances, and are prepared to be devoted to them, good or bad, interesting or uninteresting, from the simple fact of their being their own children. On the contrary, to know that there was one living who bore in her the blood of the wife who had been his curse, was keenly painful to him; and he shrank from any remembrance or acknowledgment to the world, of her tie to himself. But, for De Vigne’s sake, he had been interested in her before; and for this, he strove to conquer the repugnance that he felt to her from her mother; and wished to place her above the necessity of relying upon her talents, and to give her that position in the world, to which her adoption by Tressillian, as well as her relationship to himself, entitled her. To do this was difficult, without telling her what he wished to avoid; but he placed in Lord Molyneux’s hands (to whom he told all) a sum, sufficient to maintain her in affluence, which, relying on her ignorance of law, could be given her as a remnant of the property of her grandfather, suddenly repaid by those who had swindled him of it. And Alma heard the Viscount’s relation of her sudden inheritance, unsuspicious that any other story was concealed behind it; she was too ignorant of all legal matters to detect any flaw there might be in the tale; she knew her grandfather had lost an immense fortune in the bank, and in speculation; she was not surprised a small portion should be recovered unexpectedly. Indeed, beyond thanking Lord Molyneux for having so kindly interested himself in her concerns, the subject occupied but few of her thoughts; for the moment that she had seen Sabretasche in the salons of the Molyneux hotel, and that he had recognised her kindly and courteously, she had asked him for De Vigne, and he had told her that he had been detained in Scutari, and would soon come home, through Paris.

  “Is the curse of the marriage-tie to fall there, too!” thought Sabretasche. “How will it end for them both?”

  It was early morning when De Vigne arrived in Paris.

  Alma’s letter had sent new life and strength into his veins; from that hour he recovered sufficiently to be moved on board the yacht of a man we knew, who, having come cruising about the Bosphorus, offered to give us a run to Marseilles. The sea air completed the recovery which her letter had begun; he lay on the deck smoking, and breathing in with the fresh Mediterranean wind his old health and strength, and by the time the “Sea-foam” ran into harbour he was himself again.

  It was early morning when we reached Paris — a bright spring morning in May. After the discomfort, the dirt, the myriad disagreeables of Constantinople; after the mud and rain and snow and cheerlessness of the Crimea; how gay and pleasant looked those sunny streets of Paris, where primroses and violets cassi and lemonade, were being cried; where Polichinelle was performing, and char-à-bancs starting with light-hearted students for a day in the Bois du Boulogne; and everywhere around us we heard chattering’ laughing, voluble, musical, that silvery, pleasant language, as familiar to us as our own! What a contrast it was! — a contrast very agreeable, let a man be ever so voué au tambour, after nearly two years such campaigning as we had tasted in the Crimea!

  I drove at once to the Gare de Strasbourg on my way to England; De Vigne remained in Paris; he had an oath of vengeance to work out; a purpose to be wrought, that in the old Pagan creed he held as righteous. And, to keep the vow which he had sworn, he went straight from the Station to the Rue Lafitte, to a house which stood near the Maison Dorée, and of which the various floors were let to various English bachelors whose hivernages were annually Paris.

  Castleton sat in his chambers, smoking, breakfasting, reading the papers, and chatting with two of his particular chums, who had dropped in after keeping it up all the night through, in private salons of the Café Anglais. Castleton was hardly up to the mark that morning; he was annoyed and irritated at several things; first, that he had serious doubts as to the soundness of Lancer’s offleg, and if Lancer did not come in winner of the Derby, Lord Vane’s prospects would look blacker than would be desirable; in the second, the Ministry had behaved with the grossest ingratitude, by refusing him, through his father, a certain post he coveted, a piece of ill-natured squeamishness on their part, as they had but lately given a deanery to his brother, a spirit rather worse than himself; in the fourth, a larger number of little bills were floating about than was pleasant, and if there were not speedily a general election, by which he could slip into one of those neat little boroughs that were honoured by being kept in his Grace of Tiara’s pocket, he was likely to be troubled with more applications than he could, not alone meet that he never thought — but stave off to some dim future era. Altogether, Castleton was not in an over-good humour that morning; had sworn at his valet, and lashed his terrier till it howled, and found everything at cross purposes and a bore, from his chocolate, which was badly milled, to the news he had lately heard, that the woman whose childish hand had struck him for a coward’s deed, was in Paris with those who, if her lips revealed to them the outrage he had once attempted, would fearfully and bitterly avenge it on his head. So altogether things looked dark; and they looked no better when, on issuing from his chamber to go to the drag that awaited him in the street below, he came suddenly face to face with the man he hated and feared, because he was the man that Alma loved.

  They met abruptly on the stairs as the one was quitting, the other approaching, the landing-place — they met abruptly, with barely a foot between them — De Vigne and Vane Castleton; he who had insulted her past all forgiveness, and he who would not have seen a hair of her head injured without revenging it. Involuntarily, they both stood silent for a moment De Vigne looked at him, every vein a-flame with passion, recalling all that she had told him had been poured into her young ear in that horrible hour. His lips were pale, and set with a stem fixed purpose; his eyes burning with the hatred that was rioting within him; his right hand clenching hard on the ridingswitch he held, as if he longed to change it into a deadlier and more dangerous weapon. He seemed to hear Castleton’s hateful love-vows, and her piteous cry of terro
r and supplication; he seemed to see the loathsome caress with which he had dared to touch her lips; he seemed to feel her struggling, as if for life and death, in the vulture clutches of her hated foe! What wonder that his hand clenched on his whip, as if thirsting for that surer and deadlier weapon with which, in other days, his grandsires had defended their honour and their love!

  Castleton was no coward — had he been, the Tiara blood, bad though it might be in other ways, would have disowned him — yet at the eagle eyes that flashed so suddenly upon him, his own fell for an instant. But only for an instant; he recovered himself to have the first word, with a sneer on his lips and in his cold, light eyes:

  “De Vigne! My dear fellow, how are you? Didn’t know you were in France. Come to rest yourself from that deuced hard campaign, eh?”

  “No,” said De Vigne, between his teeth, which were set like a lion’s at sight of his foe. “I am come for a harder task — to try and teach a scoundrel what honour and dishonour mean!”

  His tones were too significant to leave Castleton in any doubt as to’ the application of his words. He drew in his lips with a nervous, savage twitch. He laughed, with a forced sneer.

  “Jealous! Are you come to bully me about that little girl of yours — what was her name — something with a Tre, I know? Really you will waste your wrath and your powder. I have nothing whatever to do with her; she did not take me in.”....