by Ouida
She spoke, her rich low voice thrilling with that eloquence which always came to her when roused to deep emotion or to warm excitement. Yet — every one of those noble and tender words quivered like a knife in his heart! He bent his head till his brow rested on her hair; and the man, whose iron nerves had not quailed, nor pulse beat one shade quicker, before the deadly flame blazing from the thirty guns at Balaklava, shuddered as he thought, “How can I tell her that I have deceived her!”
“Stop, stop — for the love of Heaven,” he muttered, “or you will kill me!”
He felt his heart would break, his brain give way, if she said another word to add to the coals of fire she was heaping on his head! Her unconscious gladness, her noble faith, seemed to brand his soul with shame and suffering, which years would never have power to efface; — to have to answer her with what would quench and darken all her glad and generous faith, and, for aught he knew, turn her from him for ever.
Startled and terrified, she tried to look into his face; but his head was bent, so that she could see nothing save the blue veins swelling on his forehead.
“What have I said — what have I done?” she cried, piteously. “Speak to me, answer me, for Heaven’s sake!”
He did not answer her. What could he say? The veins on his temples grew like cords, and over his face stole that dead, gray pallor which had overspread it upon his marriage day. A vague and horrible terror came upon the woman who loved him. She threw her arms round his neck; she pressed her warm lips to his forehead, pale and lined with the bitter thoughts in his brain; she only thought of him then, never of herself.
“Tell me, what have I said — I, who would give my life to spare you the slightest pain?”
He seized her in his arms; he pressed her against his heart, throbbing to suffocation:
“My worshipped darling! do not speak gently to me! Hate me! Curse me!.... That woman — who came to you — is my wife!”
It was told at last — the stain on his name, the curse on his life, the secret kept so long! Her face was raised to his; its fair bloom changed to his own bloodless and lifeless pallor, her eyes wide open, with a vague, amazed horror in them. She scarcely understood what he had said; she could not realise it in the faintest shadow.
“Your wife!” she repeated, mechanically, after him. “Your wife! You are jesting, you are trying me; — it is not true!”
He held her closer to him, and rested his lips on her hair; he could not bear to see those fond, frank eyes gaze into his with that pitiful terror, that haunting, pleading earnestness, which would not believe even his own words against him!
“God forgive me, it is true!”
With a cry that rang through the forest silence, she bowed down before the blow dealt to her by the hand that she loved best. She did not weep, like most women, but the blood rushed to her face’, then left it white and colourless as death. She pressed her hand upon her heart, struggling for breath, looking up in his face as a spaniel that its master had slain would look up in his, the love outliving and pardoning the death-blow.
For the moment he thought he had killed her. Inan insanity of anguish he called upon her name; he covered her blanched lips with kisses; he vowed to God that he loved her dearer than any husband ever loved his wife; that he hated the woman who bore his name, whom he had left from the very altar! He called her his own, his love, his darling; he swore never to leave her while his life lasted; he besought her, if ever she had cared for him, to look at him, and tell him she forgave him!
She did not shrink from, but clung to, him, breathless, trembling, quivering with pain, like a delicate animal after a cruel blow.
“Forgive you! Yes! What would I not forgive! But—”
Her voice broke down in convulsive sobs, and she lay in his arms weeping unrestrainedly, with all the force and vehemence of her nature; while he bowed his head over her, and his own bitter, scorching tears fell on her golden hair. He let her weep on and on. He could not speak to her; he could only clasp her to him, murmuring broken earnest words of agonised remorse.
Once she looked up at him with those radiant eyes, from which he had quenched the light and glory:
“You do not love her? You cannot!”
There was her old vehemence in the question — as passionately he answered her:
“Love her! Great Heaven! no word could tell how I hate her; how I have hated her ever since that cursed day when she first took my name, to stain it and dishonour it. My precious one! my hate for her is as great as my love for you; greater it cannot be!”
“And yet — she is your wife! O God, have pity on us!”
Her lips turned white as if in bodily pain, her eyes closed, and she shivered as with great cold.
He pressed her against his heart; great drops of suffering stood upon his brow. It was an agony greater than death to him to see the misery on her face, and to know that he had brought it there — hé who would have sheltered her from every chill breath, guarded her from every touch of the sorrow common to all human kind!
“Would to Heaven I had died before my selfish passions brought my curse on your young head,” he muttered, as he bent over her. “You forgive me — but you cannot love me after I have deceived you! You cannot love me, false as I have been to truth and honour! God knows I meant no deliberate wrong. I never sought you as libertines will seek. I never knew I loved you till the day I spoke my love — the day we parted! I had gone on and on, without thinking that I lived a lie! You cannot love me after this; — nor pity me, though I have sunk so low?”
Breathless he waited for her answer — breathless and trembling, his face white as hers, his haughty lips quivering, his head bent and humbled, as he made the hardest, yet the noblest confession a proud man can ever make— “I was wrong!”
She lifted her face to his, in the first bitterness of her grief her thought was of him and not of herself.
“Love you? I must while my life lasts. Nothing Could change me to you; if you were to err, to alter, to fall as low as man can fall, if all the world stoned and hooted you, I would cling the closer to you, and we would defy it, or endure it — together!”
She spoke with her old vehemence, her arms twining close about his neck, her lips soft and warm against his cheek, her eyes gazing up into his, brilliant with the love that was the life of her life; then — the passion faded from her eyes, the glow from her face; with a convulsive sob her head drooped upon her breast, and she fell forward on his arm, weeping hopelessly, wearily, agonisedly, as women in the Crimea wept over their husband’s graves.
“God help me! I do not know what I say! If I am wrong, tell me; if I sin, slay me — but cease to love you I cannot!”
CHAPTER XVI.
The Crowning Temptation of a Tempted Life.
IN a few broken, earnest words, De Vigne told her the history of that fatal marriage-bond which had cost his mother’s life, stained his name, banished him from his home, cursed his life with a bitter and futile regret, and now brought misery on a life dearer than his own. And it touched him deeply to see, as she listened to his story, how utterly her own sorrow was merged into her grief for him; her misery at all he suffered in his cruel bondage; her loathing at the thought of all he had borne for those long years, in even nominal connexion with such as his wife was. It touched him deeply to see how her own wrongs faded away unremembered in her grief for him, and she was more dear, more dangerous to him in that hour of suffering, than in her gayest, sweetest, or most bewitching moments.
Wrapt in that silent communion, absorbed in the bitterness in which the first hours of their reunion were steeped, neither heard a footfall on the forest turf, nor saw the presence of one, who, drawing near them, looked on the completion of that vengeance which had struck its first blow so many years before, and now came to deal its last. They neither saw nor heard her, till her chill, coarse, harsh tones stirred the sweet, soft air.
“Miss Tressillian, two years ago you chose to disbelieve, or feign to disbelieve,
my claims upon your lover. Ask Major De Vigne now, in my presence, if he can dare to deny that I am his lawful and wedded wife!”
With a cry of horror, Alma looked up. With a fierce oath he sprang to his feet, standing at last face to face, as he had stood at the marriage-altar with the woman whom the Church and Law had made his wife. Thus they met at last in the silent aisles of the forest; thus they met at last, those two fierce foes whom the marriage-laws assumed to hold as “two whom God had joined together!” And she stood looking at him with a cruel laugh, a leering triumph in her eyes, a devilish sneer upon her lip, hating him still with a chill and ceaseless hate; while he gazed down upon her as men gazed upon the loathsome and accursed sight of the Lamia, while between them, clinging to his arm in terror, as if to shield him from the hatred of his deadliest enemy, was the woman he loved. On the one hand, the vile mistress who had cursed his life; on the other, the better angel, which had nestled in his heart to touch all its deeper chords, and waken all its purer love.
The Trefusis looked at him, and smiled; a smile that chilled his blood as the cold gleam of a dagger in the moonlight, chills the blood of a man, waking from sweet dreams to find himself fettered and bound in the clutches of his most cruel foe.
“Ask him, Miss Tressillian!” she said again. “You disbelieved me. See if Granville de Vigne, who in bygone days used to boast very grandly of his truth and honour, dare tell you a lie before my face, and say that I am not his Wife.”
Cold, swift, and haughty, rushed the words to Alma’s lips, with the scorn and fire latent in her Southern nature.
“He would not lower himself so far to your level, as even to conceal the truth. I know all! — and if the sorrow be his, the shame of his marriage rests solely upon you.”
She laughed, that coarse, harsh laugh which, with many other of the traces of her origin and her innate vulgarity, had crept out since, her aim attained, she had flung off that uncongenial gloss and varnish of refinement which she had assumed to lure her prey.
“You take the high hand, young lady! Well, you are wise to make the most of a bad bargain; and since you cannot be his wife, to pretend it is the more honourable post to be his mistress! I wish you joy; his love has ever been so very famous for its constancy!”
“Woman! silence!” broke in De Vigne, and even the Trefusis paused for the moment, and shrank from the lurid fire flashing from his eyes, the dark wrath gathered in his face. “Dare to breathe another of your brutal insults in her ear, and I swear your sex shall not shield you from my vengeance. You have wronged me enough. Your ribald jests shall never soil her purity! My love, my darling!” he whispered passionately, bowing his head over Alma, who still clung unconsciously to his arm, her colour changing, her face full of horror, terror, loathing, at the first coarse words that had ever been spoken to her — that had ever breathed to her of shame! “do not heed her; do not listen to her. She is a bold, bad woman. O God, forgive me! that I should have brought you to this!”
“Purity!” re-echoed the Trefusis, with her cold loud laugh. “Since when has that new idol had any attraction for you? In bygone days if the external pleased your senses, I never knew you care for over-cleanliness of mind and character! How long have you began to. learn platonics? The rôle will hardly suit you long, I fancy. If this pretty child likes to be added to the string of your cast-off loves, it is no concern of mine, though you are my husband.”
His face grew white as death; he forced to stand by and hear what he worshipped, insulted thus! With a fierce gesture, forgetful of her sex, he would have struck her in his wrath, his grief, his insulted pride, his maddened anguish; but Alma caught his arm:
“For my sake—”
“The low words, the touch of her hand, the sight of her upraised face, stood between him and his passion as no other thing on earth would have done. For “her sake” his arm dropped. The dark blood surged over his brow; and he put his hand upon his breast, as he had done at the marriage-altar, to keep down the storm of passions raging in his heart.
“Out of my sight, out of my sight,” he muttered in his teeth, “or by God I shall do what you will wish to your dying day undone!”
Something in the grand wrath of this tempestuous and fiery nature awed and stilled even her; a dogged sullenness overspread her face; she was foiled and mastered, and for the first time her revenge was wrested from her grasp. She could not turn what he now loved from him.
At that minute light laughter, lighter footsteps, low, gay voices, broke on their ear, and through the beech-boughs of the Gros Fouteau came Madame de La Vieillecour and her party. The Duchess recognised De Vigne with surprise; she saw, moreover, that they arrived at an untimely season on a painful scene; but coming forward with her hands outstretched, she welcomed him home with pleasant fluent words of congratulation.
It was well for him that he had learnt, long years before, the first lesson society gives its pupils: to smile when their hearts are breaking, to wear a tranquil, unmoved air while the vultures gnaw at their life-strings; or he could hardly have answered the new comers, while the stormy passions just aroused in all their fullest strength, raged and warred in his heart; while on the one side stood the woman he loved, on the other the wife he loathed!
“Come back to dine with us,” continued Madame de La Vieillecour; “the carriages are waiting. Alma, ma belle, you look ill; you are tired, and the sun has been too hot.”
She turned away with her gay party, talking to De Vigne, who instinctively followed, when suddenly on his ear the clear, cold, hard tones of the Trefusis (at whom, since his last words, he had not glanced, and whom Madame de La Vieillecour had not observed in the twilight of the forest, which was growing dark, now that the sun had set) hissed through the air, arresting all:
“Granville, may I trouble you for a few words before you leave? I thought it was not usual for a husband to accept an invitation before his wife’s face, in which she was not included!”
The Duchess turned quickly; the harsh and rapid English was lost on the rest of the party, but she, despite all her tact and high breeding, stared, first at the speaker, then at De Vigne.
“Mais! — quelle est donc cette femme!”
He did not hear her; he had swung round, his face, even to his lips, white with passion. Careless of all observers, Alma clasped both hands upon his arm:
“Do not go,” she whispered. “Come with me. Do not stay with her, if you love me!”
For once he was deaf to her prayer; his lips quivered in torture — to have that woman, bold, bad, low, hateful, all he knew her to be, stand there and claim him as her husband! “A few words with me!” he muttered deliriously. “Yes; we will have a few more words! By Heaven, they shall be such as you will remember to your grave.”
Alma clang to his arm, breathless, trembling, blanched with fear. “If you love me, do not stay! She will madden you, she will goad you to some crime! leave her to do her worst. She is beneath your vengeance!”
For the first time he was deaf to her entreaties — for the first time he would not listen to her voice. He put her hands off his arm, and answered her in the same low tone:
“I will rejoin you. Fear nothing from me: in all I do and say while my life lasts, I shall remember you. Go!”
He spoke gently, but too firmly for her to resist him, and turned to the Duchess.
“Allow me, Madame, to speak a few words with this person? I will rejoin you. You do not dine till nine?”
“No. I will leave horses for you at the entrance of the Gros Fouteau — au revoir!”
Certain indistinct memories arose in the Duchess’s mind of a story her brother, little Curly, had told her, long ago, of some unhappy and ill-assorted marriage which De Vigne had made; and she rapidly guessed all the truth. They went; a turn hid them from sight, and De Vigne was alone with his wife, in the twilight deepening around them. For a moment neither spoke. Perhaps the memory was too strong in both of twelve years before, when they had stood thus, face to face, before th
e marriage-altar, to take the marriage-vows — on one side a lie and a fraud, on the other a curse life-long and inexorable.
Alma knew him aright — this woman maddened him. She had set light to all the hottest passions in him, and they now flared and raged far beyond power of his to still them. His loathing for one who only bore his name to dishonour it, and only used the tie of wife to torture and insult him, overmastered reason and selfcontrol, and unloosed the bonds of all that was darker and most dangerous in his character.
She looked at him and laughed, with that coarse sneer which had been on her lips when she signed her name in the chapel at Vigne.
“So! Granville de Vigne, we have met at last! You have found my promised revenge no child’s play, no absurd bombast, as you fancied it, eh? You are my husband, my husband ‘until death us shall part.’ Do you remember the sweet words of the marriage service that bound us together for life? I have driven you from your home; I have made the memory of your mother weigh on you with the weight of murder; I have cheapened your name to the world and made it hateful to you; I stand a bar, as long as you and I shall live, to your peace and happiness. You laughed once when I vowed to be revenged on you; you can hardly laugh at it now!”
“Silence! fiend incarnate!” burst from De Vigne, the mad agony in him breaking bounds. “Oh! wretch, divorced in truth, from the day we stood together at the altar, evil enough I have done to God and man, but not enough to be cursed with you.”....
She laughed again — that coarse and brutal laugh which thrilled through his every nerve.
“No doubt you hate me hotly enough! You want your freedom, De Vigne. You want to wash off the stain from your name. You want to go back to your lordly home without my memory poisoning the air. You want your liberty, if only on the old plea for which you used to want all things that were not easy to get, because it is unattainable. Of course you hate me! Perhaps that gold-haired child whom I found you weeping over so pathetically, finding mere love an unprofitable connexion, wants to work on you to put your freedom in her hands, and you would fain be quit of me, to pay down the same price again for a new passion—”