by Ouida
The words had barely passed his lips before De Vigne’s grasp was on him, tight, firm, relentless; he might with as much use have tried to escape from the iron jaws of a tiger seeking his prey, as from the grasp of the man who loved the woman he had insulted. De Vigne’s face was white with passion, his eyes burning with fiery anger, the wrath that was in him quivering and thrilling in every vein and sinew — to hear her name on that liar’s lips. He seized him in his iron grasp, and shook him like a little dog.
“Blackguard! that is the last of your dastard lies you shall ever dare to utter! You are too low for the revenge one man of honour takes upon another; you are only fit to be punished as one punishes a yelping mongrel or a sneaking hound!—”
Holding him there, powerless, in the grip of his left hand, he thrashed him with his riding-switch as a man would thrash a cur — thrashed him with all the passion that was in him, till the little whip snapped in two. Then he lifted him up as one would lift a dead rat or a broken bough, and threw him down the whole stone flight of the staircase: in his wrath, he seemed to have the strength of a giant.
Castleton lay at the foot of the stairs, stunned and insensible. His valet and the people of the house gazed on the scene, too amazed to interrupt it or aid him. His two friends standing in the street criticising the roans in his drag, rushed in at the echo of the fall. De Vigne stepped over his body, giving it a spurn with his foot as he passed.
“The deuce, De Vigne!” began one of them. “What’s up — what’s amiss?”
De Vigne laughed — a haughty sneer upon his face:
“Only a little lesson given to your friend, Lord Monckton. Few will disagree with me in thinking it wanted; if they do, I can be heard of at the Hôtel de Londres. Good day to you!”
As he walked out into the street to his horse, which was waiting for him, a small, sleek, fair man came up to him with a deferential ceremoniousness.
“I beg your pardon, Major, for intruding; but might I be allowed to inquire whether you received a letter from me when you were before Sebastopol?”
De Vigne signed him away with the broken handle of his whip:
“When I discharge my servants, I do not expect to be followed and annoyed with their impertinence.”
“I mean no impertinence, Major,” persisted the man, “and I should not be likely to intrude upon you without some warrant, sir. Did you read my letter?”
“Read it? Do you suppose I read the begging-letters with which rogues pester me? It is no use to waste your words here. Take yourself off!”
He spoke haughtily and angrily, as he put his foot in the stirrup; he remembered the share Raymond, then in Castleton’s employ, had taken in that vile plot, but he could not degrade her by bringing her name up to a servant, and lower himself by stooping to resent the mere hired villainy of Castleton’s abettor.
“It was not a begging-letter, Major. It would have told you something of great importance to you, sir, if you had chosen to read it.”
“Silence!” said De Vigne, as he threw himself across the saddle, shook the bridle from his grasp, and rode away up the Rue Lafitte, turning towards the hotel in the Champs Elysées, whence that letter, he had returned unread, he remembered had been dated by Alma, and bestowing no more thought on his quondam valet, in the passion that still flamed in him, despite his vengeance.
He could have slain Castleton, the man who would have robbed him of his one earthly treasure; who had robbed him of her for two years. He could have slain him, the man who had polluted her name by association with his; who had dared to profane those young lips with his loathed and brutal caresses. He could have slain him, as Moses slew the Egyptian, in the fiery wrath and hatred of the moment; but he refrained, as David refrained from slaying Saul, when the man who had wronged him lay in his power, sleeping and defenceless, in the still gloom of midnight Oh! mes frères, virtue lies not, as some think, in being too pure for temptation to enter into us, but rather in proportion to the strength of the seduction and the power of the temptation we resist If there be such to whom like temptation never come, happy for them, their path through life is safe and easy. If they never know the delicious perfume of the rose-garland, they never know the bitterness of the fennel and amarinth; yet closer to human sympathies and dearer to human hearts — nobler, wanner, more natural — is the man who loves and hates, errs, struggles, and repents; is quick to joy and quick to pain; who sins in haste, but is ever ready to atone, and who, though passing through the fire of his own thoughts, comes like gold worthier from the furnace.
Vane Castleton rose from that fall, sunk and degraded for ever. He had been thrashed by De Vigne as a hound by its keeper; he knew that stigma would cling to him as long as he lived. Monckton, his valet, his groom, the people of the house, had all seen it; seen him powerless in De Vigne’s grasp; seen him held and lashed, like a yelping puppy in a hunting-field. The tale would be told in circles of all classes; it would spread like wildfire. No food so dear to the generality as gossip — above all, gossip spiced with scandal — it would be known in his club, in his clique, all over town. Monckton lost no time in detailing, at the Circle, how “that dare-devil De Vigne pitched into poor Vane. Some row about a woman, I don’t know who; but I can swear to the severity of the thrashing; and he kicked him afterwards, by Jove! he did. Somebody should send it to the papers!”
Alma was amply revenged. Castleton’s debts, his difficulties, his bad odour in general, crowned by the story of a horsewhipping that he did not dare revenge, made it impossible to stay, cut by every man worth knowing: all his daily haunts, filled by old acquaintances, who either dropped him entirely, or shook him off as plainly as they could; every house where he was wont to dine or lounge away his hours, full of the story; Paris and London closed as effectually as though everybody had ostracised him. He did not wait his ostracism, but fearful lest law should take further cognisance of his attempted evil deed, slunk out of Paris before nightfall. He now usually lives about the Bads; his society is not what one of the ducal house of Tiara might reasonably expect, and they tell me there is no more dangerous hand at trapping young pigeons, and fleecing them of all their valuable feathers. It is rather an unworthy office for one of his order, but nature will out, and it will have the best of the game, and so — Vane Castleton, with a great name, a good position, and every chance to make fair running in the race of life if he had chosen; born with the nature of the bully, and the sharper in him, sank at last, despite all, to their level.
Arrived at the hotel in the Champs Elysées, De Vigne found, to his amazement, that it was Lord Molyneux’s, and was told, in words which were black letter to him, that Mademoiselle Tressillian was not there, but had gone to the Duchesse de La Vieillecour’s villa, the Diaman du Forêt, at Fontainebleau; “every one knew the villa; Monsieur would be certain to find it; and Made-. moiselle had left word that her address was to be given to anyone who called.” With which assurance the porter returned to his plate of onion soup inside his den; and De Vigne, bewildered, rode on to the Gare for Fontainebleau.
Minutes seemed to him hours; the train appeared to creep along its weary ironway; everything was strange to him. Her close acquaintance with the Molyneux appeared inexplicable. The letter that vowed her love to him had been written nearly two years before. Since then she might have changed; she might have loved some other; she might even have pledged herself to another man? He tortured himself with every form of dread and doubt, as the train dragged on till it stopped at Fontainebleau, the sun shining on the quiet French town, on the stately historic castle, on the deep majestic woods that saw the loves of Henri Quatre, the beauty of Gabrielle d’Estrées, the death of the grand Condé, and the despair of the man who, abandoned alike by his Courtiers whom he had ennobled, his Marshals whom he had created, and his People whom he had rescued from the bloody fangs of The Terror, signed the act of his abdication in his favourite palace, where that child was baptized who has lived to restore his name and to ascend his throne.
The train stopped, and he went at once to the Hôtel de la Ville de Lyon, where, fifteen or sixteen years before, he remembered giving a brilliant dinner to Rose Luillhier, then first dancer of the Opéra, a gay, flippant little blonde, whom he had driven round, in a four-inhand, by the Carrefour des Boux and Franchard to see the Roche qui Pleure, and had drunk champagne and sung Béranger songs, and enjoyed his Bacchanalia with all the joyous, careless revelry of spirits undamped and unwearied.
Now, Rose Luillhier was a faded, ugly, broken-down woman, who, falling through a trap-door, and ruining her beauty for ever, had been glad to keep a Mont de Piété in a small way, in a dingy, dark, loathsome hole in the Faubourg d’Enfer; and he — he dared not trust his present; he dared not look at his future!
He inquired the way to Madame de La Vieillecour’s maison de plaisance. It lay on the other side of the forest, to the south-west, they told him, and they had not a carriage left in the coach-house, nor a horse in the stable, there were so many pleasure parties to the forest or the palace in this month. He went to the Londres, to the Nord, to the Aigle Noir, to the Lion d’Or; all their conveyances were hired. It was a saint’s day and a holiday in Paris, and numerous parties of every grade, had come to spend the sweet spring-hours in the leafy shades, and majestic futaie, of Fontainebleau. He went to Nargein’s and to Bernard’s, in the Rue de France; but he could find no conveyance there. Impatient of delay, he asked how far it was to walk.
“Mais à peu près sept kilomètres, monsieur,” said the man of whom he inquired. “Voyez donc, monsieur! Vous partirez par la Barrière de Paris, suivrez le chemin de chasse jusqu’à la Batte des Aires, prendrez le sentier jusqu’au forêt du Gros Fouteau, après cela le sentier de l’Amitié, et aux Gorges de la Solle, monsieur—”
De Vigne heard no more of the Frenchman’s voluble and bewildering directions; a fierce oath broke from him under his breath, as three carriages swept past him. In the first sat a young Parisian lion, and — the woman who called herself his Wife! From under her parasol in pink silk and lace, as she leaned forward, full-blown, high-coloured, coarse, with a smile on her lips, and that vindictive triumph in her cruel eyes which he knew so well, he saw her face — that face unseen for eleven long years, since the day he had thrown her from him in the chapel of Vigne. He knew her in an instant, despite every alteration — and they were not few that time had made. — and faint and sick, he reeled against the wall of Nargein’s dwelling.
The Trefusis, the woman whom he so unutterably loathed, so fiercely hated! Was it prophetic that this fiend should for ever stand between him and the better angel of his life! She knew him, too, for she started visibly; then she leant forward and bowed to him, with a cruel, mocking, leering smile.
“Who’s that fine man, ma belle?” asked Anatole de Beauvoisier.
“My husband!” answered the Trefusis, with her coarse, harsh laugh.
Anatole had a great admiration for this handsome English woman, yet he estimated her rightly enough to murmur to himself, “Poor devil! Don’t I pity him!”
A deadly sickness came over De Vigne, and a fierce ungovernable thirst for vengeance on her entered into him. He hated her so unspeakably! That woman who stood an eternal bar between him, and love, and peace and honour!
He, broke from Nargein’s foreman with a hasty douceur, and took the route by the Barrière de Paris, trusting to memory to lead him across the forest, in the direction of the Diaman du Forêt. He followed the hunting-path that leads to the magnificent forest of the Grand Fouteau. It was now after noon, and the soft golden sunlight turned to bronze the giant bolls of the old oaks. All around him was hushed in the heart of the great royal forest; and the birds were singing in the dense foliage of those shadowy avenues, that had used to echo with the bay of hounds, the ring of horses’ hoofs, the mellow notes of hunting calls, when through their sunny glades the gay courtiers of Valois, Navarre, and Bourbon had ridden for the pleasure of the Chasse and the Curée. All was silent around him, save for the musical murmur, nameless yet distinguishable, as of the coming summer breathing its life and spirit into the tender leaves, the waving grasses, and the waters of lake and fountain, long chilled and silenced by the iron touch of the past winter. He strode along through the hunting-path, edged on one side with brushwood and on the other with the great forest trees, only thinking sufficiently of the way he went to take the paths that bore to the north-west, and struck into the Fulaci du Gros Fouteau, knowing that, by keeping to his left, he should come upon the road to Chailly, brushing his way hastily through the tangled forest-branches that had stood the sunshine and the storm of centuries. As he swung along, he glanced upwards to put aside the boughs; and — with an inarticulate cry, sprang forward.
Half sitting, half lying on the fallen trunk of a beech that had been struck by lightning a few days before, the sunshine falling down through the thick branches on her, he saw once more the woman he loved!
In another moment she was on his heart, clinging there as if no earthly power should ever part them, weeping and laughing in her agony of gladness, while he held her in his embrace, crushing her against his breast, their long caresses more eloquent than words. Then Alma raised her face to his, flushing with a bright rich glow, her arms clinging closer and closer round him:
“You do not doubt me now? You will never leave me — never?”
“Never, my God!” And as he poured out upon her in his kisses the passion which words were too cold and tame to utter, he forgot — utterly, entirely — that cold, cruel, jeering face which had passed him but an hour before, and — forgot, also, the ties that bound him.
Their joy was too deep for tranquillity; all she cared for was to look up into his eyes; all he cared for was to drink of the fresh sweet waters of human affection; to lavish on the only thing he loved all the pent-up wellsprings of his heart; to hold her there close — close, so that none could come to rob him of her a second time — the one lost to him for so long!
Do you wonder at him? Go and travel in Sahara, across that great, dreary, blinding, shadowless, hopeless plain of glaring yellow sand, where you see no living thing save the vulture whirling aloft awaiting some dead camel ere it can make its loathsome feast; travel with the thirst of the desert upon you, your throat parching, your eyes starting, your whole frame quivering with longing for the simple drop of water which your fellows fling away unvalued. When you came to the clear cool springs flowing under the friendly shadows of the banyans and the palms, would you have the courage to turn away and leave the draught untasted, and go back alone into the desert to die?
It was long before they could speak of what they had both suffered, when at last she told him all, more fully than her letter had done, of Castleton’s brutality, the dark fierce blood surged over his brow, and in his teeth he muttered a fierce oath.
“By Heaven! I wish I had not let him go with life!”
“What are you saying?” she whispered.
He kissed the lips he would not answer:
“Do not ask! To think that dastard villain dared to lay his hand upon you wakes crime in me! My darling, my precious one! to think that brute should have ventured to lure you in his hateful toils, should have polluted your ears with his loathsome vows, should have dared to touch your little hand with his—”
He stopped; his fierce anger overmastered him. To think the dastard love, which was poison to any woman, should have been breathed on her, on whom he would have had the summer wind never play too rudely; to think that his hated kiss should have ventured to touch those soft warm lips, pure as ungathered rose-leaves, which were consecrated wholly to himself!
“Do not grieve at it!” whispered Alma, caressingly. “Do not think of it. Now I have you I could pardon anything. When life is beautiful and God’s mercy great, one cannot harbour hard thoughts of any one? It is when we suffer that we could revenge.”
He pressed her closer to his heart:
“You are better than I, my little one!”
“No!
” she murmured passionately, “I am better than none; still less than you, noble as you are in thought and in deed, in heart and in soul. Ah! I loved and reverenced you before; but since your courage, your suffering, your daring, I love you more dearly, I reverence you more sacredly than ever, my love, my lord, my husband!”
As the last words fell on his ear, De Vigne started as at a mortal wound from the steel! That title from her lips struck him keenly, bitterly as any sword-thrust! To have to tell her he had deceived her, to have to give a death-blow to this unsuspicious confidence, this radiant, shadowless happiness with which she clung to him, as if, now they were together, life had brought her heaven upon earth; to have to quench the light in her sunny eyes, and tell her that another called him by that name!
The hand that held both hers trembled: the glow faded off his face; his heart turned sick; how could he tell her that for two long years the secret of his life had been withheld from her — that, married, he had gone to her as a free man — that, bound himself, he had won her love — that he had gone on from day to day, from week to week, with that fatal tie unacknowledged, that dark and cruel secret unconfessed? And she looked up in his face, as she clung to him, with such a world of worship, such eager joy in her brilliant, loving eyes, that seemed never to weary of gazing into his! And he had to say to her: “Your trust is unmerited! I have deceived you!”
Unconsciously the woman, who would have perilled her life to save him a single pang, struck a yet sharper blow to the just-opened wound! Noticing the gloom that gathered in his eyes, to dispel it, she laughed, with her old gay childlike insouciance:
“Yes! in one thing I am better than you; I haye more faith! You could think evil of me, but I never dreamt of doubting you. I would have disbelieved angels had they come to witness against you; in your absence none should dare to slander you to me; and if they had brought proofs of every force under the sun, I would have thrown them in their teeth as falsehoods and as forgeries, if they had stained your honour!”