by Ouida
With a fierce spring De Vigne seized her in his grasp, crushing her as in an iron vice.
“Dare to say one word of her again, and I shall forget your sex! Let her alone, I tell you, or by Heaven it may be worse for you than you ever dream!”
She quailed before the passion in his voice, the strength of the grip in which he held her. But her fiendish delight in goading him to fury outweighed her fear. She laughed again:
“Sullied! polluted! I fancy your protection will do that more completely than my pity, especially when you select for your inamorata one of Vane Castleton’s forsaken loves!”
An oath, so fierce, that it startled even her, stopped her in her jeering slander. The boiling oil was flung upon the seething flames, lashing them into fury. He was stung past all endurance, and the insult to the woman whom he knew as stainless as the virgin snow, goaded him to insanity; he neither knew nor cared in that moment what he did; the blood surged over his brain, and flamed in his veins like molten fire; he gripped her in his grasp as a tiger his prey.
“Woman, silence! Would to God you were of my sex, that I could wreak such vengeance on you as you should carry to the grave.”
Her fierce and cruel eyes laughed into his in the dull gray twilight, with leering triumph over the misery she caused.
“It is a pity there are laws as inexorable on murder as on marriage! You would not be the first husband who killed his wife when he fell in love with another woman—”
She stopped, stricken with sudden awe and fear, at the passion she had stung, and tortured, into being. As the iron gripe of his hands clenched harder and harder upon her, for the first time it flashed upon her that she was in his power — the power of the man she had so bitterly wronged, and whom she had now goaded on to reckless fury and despair! She knew his fiery passions — she knew his lion-like strength — she knew his long and unavenged wrongs; and she trembled, and shivered, and turned pale in his relentless grasp, for she was in his hands, and had aroused a tempest she knew not how to allay.
“Wretch, accursed! if you tempt me to wash out my wrongs, and slay you where you stand, your blood will be on your own head!”
His voice, as it hissed out in the horrible whisper, sounded strange even to his own ear, his brain thrilled and throbbed, flashes of fire danced before his eyes, through which he saw, cruel and hateful, the face of his temptress — of his wife! The pale heavens whirled around him, the giant forms of the forest trees seemed dark and ghastly shapes. His grasp tightened and tightened on her; she had no strength against him; her life was in his power, that life which only existed to do “him hideous wrong; that life which stood an eternal bar between him and love, and peace, and honour; that one human life which stood barring him out from all he coveted, and which in one flash of time he could snap, and still, and destroy for ever from his path, which its presence so long had cursed.
They were alone, shrouded and sheltered in the solitude of the coming night; in that dense forest, there were no eyes to see, no ears to listen, no voices to whisper whatever might be done under the cover of those silent beechwood shades.
That horrible hour of temptation! — coming on him when, with every passion stung to madness, his blood glowed ready to receive the poison! The night was still around them, there was not a sound save the sigh of the leaves; not a thing to look upon them, save the little crescent moon and the stars, which were arising slowly one by one. Night and Solitude — twin tempters — gathered round him; his heart stood still, his brain was on fire, his eyes blind and dizzy; alone, out of the gray and whirling haze around him he saw her mocking, fiendish gaze, and the voice of a fell Temptation whispered in his ear, “Her life is in your hands, revenge yourself. Wash out the stain upon your name, win back the liberty you crave, efface the loathsome insults on the woman you love. She stands between you and the heaven you crave — take the life that destroys your own. For your love she gave you fraud; for your trust betrayal; for your name, disgrace. Avenge it! Is it not just? One blow, never heard, and never known by any mortal thing, and you have freedom back, and love!”
His brain reeled; his grasp tightened and tightened upon her, too strong for her to have power or movement left The night whirled around him, the pale blue skies grew crimson as with blood, the great gnarled trunks of the trees seemed to mock and grin like horrid spirits, goading him to evil, his passions surged in madness through his veins; and clear and ghastly he seemed to hear a tempter’s voice: “Avenge your wrongs, and you are free!”
With a cry to God, a throe of agony, he flung the fell allurement from him, and threw her from his grasp. “Devil, temptress! thank your God, not me, I have not murdered you to-night!” She lay where he had thrown her, stunned, less by the fall than by the terror of the moment past — that moment of temptation which had seemed eternity to both. She lay there motionless, and he fled from her — fled as men flee from death or capture — fled from that crime which had lured him so nearly to its deadly brink; which so nearly had cursed and haunted his life with the relentless terror, the hideous weight, of a human life, silenced and shattered by his hand, lain by his deed in its grave, sent by his will from its rightful place and presence in the living, laughing earth, into the dark and deadly mysteries of the tomb.
He fled from the hideous temptation which had assailed him in that hour of madness — he fled from the devil of Opportunity to which so many sins are due, and from whose absence so many virtues date: flinging it away from him with a firm hand, not daring to stay to test his strength by pausing in its presence. He fled on and on, in the twilight gloom, through the trembling leaves, and evening shadows; he fled on under the gaunt boughs and tangled aisles of the woodland; dark passions warring and rioting within him. Dizzy with the whirling of his brain, every nerve strung to tension, and quivering and throbbing with the fierce torture of the ordeal past, he sank down at last as one whom the bloodhounds have chased, half conscious, on the cool fresh turf, with a cry of agony and thanksgiving: “My God! my God! I thank thee that my hands are stainless from this sin!”
The silver scimitar of the young moon rose over the forest, the twilight deepened, and the night came down on Fontainebleau, veiling town and woodland, lake and palace, in its soft and hallowing light; still he lay there, exhausted with the conflict; worn out with that fell struggle with temptation, where submission had been so easy, victory so hard. And as the twilight shadows deepened round him, and the dews gathered thicker, and the numberless soft voices of the night chimed through the silent forest glades, he thanked God that his heart was free, his hands stainless, from the guilt, which, if never known by his fellow-men, would yet have haunted him with its horrible presence throughout his life, poisoned the purest air he breathed, turned the fairest heaven that smiled on him into a hell, waked him from his sweetest sleep to start and shudder at the chill touch of remembered crime, and cursed his dying bed with a horror that would have pursued him to the very borders of his grave. He thanked God that for once in his life he had resisted the mad temptation of the hour, and thrust away the evil of Thought ere it had had time to fester into Deed; he thanked God that the dead weight of a human life was not upon his soul, to rise and drive him, Orestes-like, from every haven of rest, to damn him in his softest hours of joy, to make him shrink from the light of heaven, and tremble at the rustle of the trees, and quail before the innocent and holy beauty of the earth crimsoned with his guilt He thanked God that he could meet the innocent eyes of the woman he loved without a secret on his soul; that he could take her hands without staining them with the guilt on his; that he could hold her to his heart, without the deadly presence of that crime between them with which, to win her, he would have darkened earth, and burdened both their lives. He thanked God that he could stand there in the solemn aisles of the Forest and feel the wind fan his hair, and hear the sighing of the woodland boughs, and look upwards to the holy stillness of the skies without the myriad voices of the Earth and Heaven calling on him to answer for his guilt �
� that he could stand there under the fair evening stars, stainless from the guilt which had tempted him in the darkest hour of his life, able to look up with a clear brow, and a fearless conscience, into the pure eyes of night!
CHAPTER XVII.
Tried in the Fire, and Proven.
IT is strange how the outer world surrounds yet never touches the inner; how the gay and lighter threads of life intervene yet never mingle with those that are darkest and sternest, as the parasite clings to the forest tree, united yet ever dissimilar! From the twilight gloom of the silent forest, from solitude and temptation and suffering, De Vigne passed suddenly into the glitter and glow and brilliance, the light laughter and ringing jests, and the peopled salons of the Diaman du Forêt. From the dense woods and the stirless silence of the night, only haunted by the presence of the woman who had cursed his life, and well-nigh lured him to irrevocable and ineffaceable guilt, he came by abrupt transition into a gay and brilliant society, from which all sombre shadows were banished, and where its groups, laughing, jesting, flirting, carrying on the light intrigues of the hour, seemed for the time as though no sorrow or suffering, bitterness or passion, had ever intruded amongst them. Strange contrast! those glittering salons, and that dark and deadly solitude of the beech woods of the Gros Fouteau — not stranger than the contrast between the face which had lured him to crime and misery, in the dense shadow of the forest gloom, and the one on which he looked as, when away from the gaiety and the gossip, the light laughter and the subdued murmur of society, he drew her, after awhile, unnoticed, out on to the terrace which overlooked the wooded and stately gardens of the Diaman du Forêt, where the moonbeams slept on lawn and lake, avenue and statue, in the calm May night, that shrouded Fontainebleau, town and palace and forest, in its silvery mist.
Neither of them spoke; neither could have found voice to utter all that arose in their hearts at the touch of each other’s hand, the gaze of each other’s eyes, the sense of each other’s presence.
Dark and heavy upon them was the weight of that past hour. Silent they stood together in the solitude of the night that was calm, hushed, and peaceful, fit for a love either more tranquil, or more fully blessed, than theirs.
His voice was hoarse and broken as he spoke at last, bowing his head over her:
“I have sinned before Heaven and before thee. I have fallen very low!”
She did not answer him, she only lifted her eyes to his. By the silvery gleam of the night he could see the unswerving fidelity, after all, through all, promised him for all eternity while her heart should beat, and her eyes have life to gaze upon his face.
Now he knew, never again to doubt it, how unwearyingly, and how entirely, this imperishable and unselfish love which he had won, would cling around him to his dying day. The night was still, not a murmur stirred among the trees, not a breath moved upon the surface of the little lake, not a cloud swept across the pale pure stars, gleaming beyond in the blue heavens. The earth was hushed in deep repose, nature slept the solemn and tranquil sleep which no fret and wrath of man has power to weaken or arrest; while he, the mortal, with human love trembling on his lips, and human suffering quivering in his heart, told in broken earnest words the confession of that dire temptation which so nearly had ripened into crime. He laid his heart bare to her, with all its sins and weaknesses, its errors and its impulses, knowing that his trust was sacred, secure of sympathy, and tenderness, and pity. He spoke to her as men can never speak to men, as they can seldom speak to women. He told her of that darker nature born in him, as more or less in all, which had slumbered unknown, till opportunity awoke it; and which then, aroused in all its force, had wrestled with all that was merciful, gentle, and better within him. He told her of that fell Tempter of Thought which had arisen so suddenly in night and solitude, and whispered him to a deed that would give him back his freedom, avenge his wrongs, and shatter the fetters that weighed him down with their unmerited burden. He told how he had fled from it, how he had conquered it, how he had escaped with pure hands and stainless soul, to render thanks to God for his deliverance, in the solemn forest-aisles of that temple, where man best meets the mystery of Deity; which human hands never fashioned, and human creeds, and follies, and priestcraft cannot enter to lower and pollute.
He told her, laying bare to her all the deadly crime begotten in his heart, and so well-nigh wrought by his hand into the black guilt with which one human life stifles and tramples out another: then, he asked her: “Can you love me — after this!”
She lifted up her face, that was white as death where the light of the moon shone upon it; and her voice was low and tremulous, yet sustained with the great heroic tenderness which did not shrink from him in his sin, which did not recoil from him in his fell temptation, but which forgot and washed out its own wrong in the deep waters of an exhaustless love:
“I shall love you while I have life! I have said it; I can say no more. Let the world condemn you — you are the dearer to me!”
He crushed her closer in his arms.
“Great Heaven! Such love as yours binds us with stronger force, and consecrates holier tie, than any priestcraft can ever forge. She is not my wife. Reason, right, sense, justice, all divorced her from the very hour I left her at the altar, my bitter enemy, my relentless foe, who won me by deceit, who would have made my life a hell, who renders me a devil, not a man! She my wife! Great God, I renounce her!”
Alma, as the fierce words were muttered in his throat, clung to him, her voice low and dreamy, like the voice of one in feverish pain.
“She is no wife of yours; a woman that could hate you and betray you! A woman whom you left at the altar! How can they bind you to her!”
“They may! — I care not, save that she holds the name that should be yours. This was all that was wanting to fill up the measure of my hate for her. Let fools go babble of her claims upon me if they will! From the hour we parted at the altar I never saw her face until this night; from this night I divorce her before God. She is no wife of mine; her rights are mere legal quibbles, love never forged, fidelity never sanctified, God never blessed them! I claim my heritage of justice as a man — my right to live, to love, to taste the common happiness of my fellows. The very birds around us find their mates! Why are we, alone of all the earth, to be wrenched apart, and condemned to live and die asunder? Why are we, alone, to be forced to surrender all that makes life of joy and value? Alma! — surely we love well enough to defy the world together?”
He paused abruptly, his frame shook with the great passions in him, which were stronger than his strength; the words broke from him unawares — the words that would decide their fate! her face was flushed to a deep scarlet glow as he looked down on it by the silvery light of the moon, her hands closed tighter upon his, her lips quivered, and he felt her slight, delicate form tremble in his arms. She clung closer to him still, her breathing hurried and low, like broken, rapid sighs; her eyes, humid and dark as night, fell beneath his; that one word, “together,” stirred the depths of her heart, as the storm-winds the depths of the sea. Two years before, she would have scarce comprehended the extent of the sacrifice asked of her, more than Mignon or Haidee; scarce known more fully than they, all it called on her to surrender. Now she knew its meaning; knew that this man, who was thus pitilessly cursed for no crime, nor error, but simply for a mistake — the fatal and irrevocable mistake of early marriage — would be condemned by the world if he took his just heritage of freedom. She knew that, for a divine compassion, an imperishable love, she, who clung to him, would be laid by social law beneath a social ban, would be forbid by it from every sphere and every honour that were her due by birth, by intellect, by right. She knew her sacrifice. She knew that she should decide the destiny of her whole future; and the proud nature, though strong enough to defy both, was one to abhor any free glance, to resent every scornful word: the haughty and delicate spirit was one to feel keenly, yielding one inch of her just place. But — she loved, and the world was far from
her; she loved, and her life lay in his. Fidelity is the marriage-bond of God: the laws of man cannot command it, the laws of man are void without it. Would she not render it unto him, even to her grave? Would she not be his wife in the sight of Heaven? Suffering for him would be proudly borne, sacrifice to him would be gladly given. She would have followed him to the darkness of the tomb; she would have passed with him through the furnace of the fires; content, always content, so that her hands were closed on his, so that she had strength to look up to his face.
This is sin, say you? Verily, if it be so, it is the sublimest sin that ever outshone virtue!
He bent his head lower and lower, and his words were hoarse and few.
“Can you love me — enough for this?”
He felt a shudder as of icy cold run through her frame as she lay folded in his embrace. By the white light of the moon, he saw the scarlet blush upon her face waver, and burn, and deepen; quick, tremulous sighs heaved her heart; her arms wreathed and twined closer and closer about him; her eyes gleamed with an eternal love, as they met his own in the pale, soft radiance of the stars:
“You are my world, my all! Your will is mine!”
The words were spoken that would give her to him.
The whisper died away, scarce stirring the air; the fevered flush upon her face glowed warm, then changed to a marble whiteness. She clung to him closer still; and passionate tears, born from the strong emotions of the hour, welled slowly up, and fell from those eyes which she had first lifted to his when she was a little child, flinging flowers at him in the old library at Weivehurst. She loved him, she pitied him; she would forsake all to give him back that happiness of which another’s fraud had robbed him. She thought of nothing than save him; and if he had stretched out his hand and bade her follow him into the dark, cold shadows of the grave, she would have gone with him fondly, fearlessly, unselfishly, still thinking only of him; what comfort she could give, what trial share, what pain avert. She loved him. She was tried in the fire, and proven. The world, I say, was very far from Alma then — as far as the fret, and noise, and bustle of the city streets are from the fair and solemn stars of heaven.