by Ouida
“Come, come, there, my lady!” laughed Raymond. “Wait a bit. Don’t call us bad names. You can’t ride the high horse any more like that, and if you don’t take care what you say we’ll have you up for libel; we will, I assure you. Come, you used to be wide-awake once, and if you don’t keep a civil tongue in your head it may be the worse for you.”
“Lord Morehampton, will you endure this? I must appeal,” — began the Trefusis, turning again to that Noble Earl, who, with his double eye-glass in his eye, and his under-lip dropped in extreme astonishment, was too much amazed and too much annoyed, at such an unseemly and untimely interruption to his morning fête to take any part in the proceedings whatever. He was a little shy of her, indeed, and kept edging back slowly and surely. She was trembling now from head to foot with rage at her defeat, terror for the consequences of the esclandre, mad wrath and hatred that her prey had slipped from her leash.
Her husband interrupted her with a coarse laugh, before she could finish her sentence.
“You appeal to your cavalier servante, madame! Oh! if my Lord Morehampton like to protect you, I have no objection; it will take a good deal of trouble off my hands, and I only wish him joy of his bargain. And next time, Lucy, make sure your chickens are hatched before you begin to count them!”
At so summary a proposition from a husband, the Earl involuntarily drew back, blank dismay visible on his purple and supine features. The offer alarmed him! The Trefusis was a deuced handsome woman, but she was a deuced expensive one too, thought he, and he hardly desired to be saddled with her thus. Added to his other expenses, for a permanence, she would go very near to ruin him, not to mention tears, reproaches, and scenes from many other quarters; and “she is a very vixen of a temper!” reflected his lordship, wisely, as he edged a little further back, and left her standing alone — who is not alone in defeat!
The Trefusis looked round on the crowds as they hung back from her, with a scathing, defiant glance, her fierce black eyes seeming to smite and wither all they lit on; great savage lines gathered round her mouth and down her brow, that was dark with mortification and impotent chained-up fury. She glanced around, her lips twitching like a snared animal’s, her face ashy grey, save where the crimson rouge burned in two oval patches, flaring there like, streaks of flame, in hideous contrast to the deathly pallor of the rest She was defeated, outdone, humiliated; the frauds and schemes of twenty years fruitless and unavailing in the end; her victim free, her enemies triumphant! She glared upon us all, till the boldest women shrank away terrified, and the men shuddered as they thought what a fiend incarnate this their “belle femme” was! Then she gathered her costly lace around her. To do her justice, she was game to the last!
“Order my carriage!”
She was beaten, but she would not show it; and to her carriage she swept, her rich Chantilly gathered round her, her silks rustling, her perfume scenting the air, her trained dress brushing the lime-blossoms off the lawn, her step stately and measured, her head defiantly erect, leaving on the grass behind her the fragile ivory handle, symbol of her foiled vengeance — her impotent wrath — her dethroned sovereignty. There was a moment’s silence as she swept across the lawn, her tall Chasseur, in his dashing green and gold uniform, walking before her, her two footmen with their long white wands behind, and at her side, dogging her footsteps, with his sneer of retribution and his smile of vengeance, the valet who had claimed her as his wife. There was a moment’s silence; then the tongues were loosened, and her friends, and her rivals, and her adorers spake.
“Gad!” quoth my Lord of Morehampton, “she looked quite ugly, ‘pon my soul she did, with those great rouge spots on her cheeks. Curse it! how deuced shocking!”
“Mon Dieu, milord sneered Mademoiselle Papillon, “I congratulate you! Perhaps you will take the rôle of the third husband?”
“Better go and be Queen of the Greeks — deuced sharp woman!” said Lee Phillips.
“Always said that creature was a bad lot Plucky enough, though!” remarked Leslie Egerton, with his cigarette in his teeth.
“The biter bit!” chuckled old Fantyre. “Well, she was very useful to me, but she was always a bad lot, as you say, Leslie; horrid temper! She should have managed her game better. I’ve no patience with people who don’t make sure of their cards! Dear, dear! who’ll read me to sleep of a night?”
And the others all crowded round me, dirty old Fantyre peering closest of all, with her little bright, cunning, inquisitive eyes:
“Come, tell us, Chevasney, is it true?”
“I say, old fellow, what’s the row?”
So the world talks of us, either in our sorrows or our sins! They were full of curiosity, annoyance, amusement — as it happened to affect them individually; none of them stopped to regret the great lie, to remember the great wrong, to grieve for the debased human nature, and the bitter satire on the Holy Bond of Marriage, that stood out in such black letters in the new story which I added to their repertoire of scandals. Cancans amuse us; we never stop to recollect the guilt, the sorrow, or the falsehood that must give them their foundation-stone, their colouring, and their flavour! Mademoiselle Papillon was perchance nearest of all to the moral of the scene, when she shrugged her little plump shoulders: —
“Who would ever dare marry! It is a lottery in which all draw blanks. In love, one is an angel; in marriage a fiend! Paf! who would risk one’s neck in its halter!”
CHAPTER XX.
Valete.
THE spring sunshine which lit up the sparkling wines, and glittering toilets, and gorgeous liveries of the fête at Engheim, shining on the Trefusis’s parure of amethysts, and on the rich scarlet rouge of her cheeks — that flag of defiance which flaunted there in defeat as in victory! — shone at the same hour through the dark luxuriant foliage of the chesnuts at the Diaman du Forêt in Fontainebleau, on the lilac-boughs heavy with massed blossom, on the half-opened rosebuds clinging round the woodwork of the antique walls, and on the swallow’s nest nestled under the broad shadow of the eaves. A warm amber light lay on the earth, and in it the gnats were whirling at their play, and the early butterflies fluttering their saffron wings; whilst the distant chimes of a church clock afar off were ringing the quarters slowly, on the stillness which nothing broke. And out on the dark oaken sill of one of the windows, drooping her head upon her hands, while the light flickered down upon her hair through the network of the leaves, leant a woman, alone; heedless, in the depth of her own thought, of the play of the south wind, or the songs of the birds, as both made music about her. She was alone, nothing near her save the bee droning in the cup of the early I rose, or the yellow butterfly that settled on her hair unnoticed. Her head was bent, resting on her hand; her face was very pale, save when now and then a deep warm flush passed over it, suddenly to fade again as quickly; her eyes were dark and dreamy, with a yearning tenderness; and on her lips was a smile, mournful yet proud, as, half unconsciously, they uttered the words of her thoughts aloud: “I will not leave thee, no, nor yet forsake thee. Where thou goest, I will go; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God!”
They were the words of an oath — an oath to whose keeping she would dedicate her life, even though, to so keep it, that life should be in the world’s eyes condemned and sacrificed. She leant there against the dark wood-work, alone, the silence unbroken that reigned about her, save when the wind swept through the fragrant branches above, or the rush of a bird’s delicate wings cleft the air. Suddenly — in the stillness, while yet it was so distant that no other ear could have heard it — she caught a footfall, while its sound was so faint that it did not break the silence, as the spaniel catches the step of his master while yet afar off. She lifted her head with the wild, eager grace that was as natural to her as its freedom to a flower, her eyes growing dark and humid in their expectancy, her colour changing swiftly with the force of a joy so keen that it trenched on anguish, with the hot vivid flush of a love strong as the life in which it was embedded and entwined.
Then, with a low, glad cry, Alma sprang, swift as an antelope, to meet him, and to cling to him, as she would have clung to him through — evil and adversity, through the scorn of shame and the throes of death, through the taunts of the world, and the — ghastly terrors of the grave.
For many moments he could find no words even to tell her that which she never dreamed of, that which panted on his lips; he held her in his arms, crushing her in one long, close embrace, meeting as those meet who would not spend one hour of their lives asunder. For many moments he bent over her, speechless, breathless, straining her madly to him, spending on her lips the passion that found no fitting utterance in words; then, stifled and hoarse in its very agony of joy, his voice broke out:
“You will be my wife — thank God with me — I am free!”
* * * *
The day stole onward; faintly from the far distance swung the silvery sound of evening bells; the low south winds stirred amongst the lilac-blossoms, shaking their rich fragrance out upon the air; the bees hummed themselves to slumber in the hearts of folded roses; the mellow amber light grew deeper and clearer, while the day was passing onward, ere long to sink into night. And as the rays of the western sun through the parted network of the leaves fell about his feet, shining in the eyes of the woman he loved, and bathing her hair in light where it swept across his breast, De Vigne bowed his head in thanksgiving; not alone for the joy in which his life was steeped, not alone for his freedom from his deadly curse, but for that hour, past yet still so near; so near that still he sickened at it, as men at the memory of some horrible death they have but by a hair’s breadth escaped. That hour when, for the first time in all his wayward, headlong, vehement manhood, he had resisted; and flung off from him the crime which, yielded to but one fleeting instant, would, though never tracked or known by man, have made him taste fire in every kiss, quail before the light of every day, and start in the sweat of agony, and the terror of remembered guilt from his sweetest rest, his most delicious sleep. That horn in the forest solitude, when goaded, taunted, reviled maddened, he had been face to face with what he loathed, parted by her from what he loved, yet had had strength to fling her from him, unharmed and unchastised. — That hour which had been the crowning temptation of his life when he had had force to cast it behind him with a firm hand, and to flee from it — fearing himself, as the wisest and holiest amongst us, need do in those dark hours which come to all, when there is but a plank between us and the fathomless abyss of some great guilt.
And while the starlit night of the early summer stole onwards towards the earth, he bowed his head over the woman who had cleaved to him through all, and looking backward to his Past, thanked God.
CHAPTER XXI.
Adieu au Lecteur!
THE history is told! It is one simple enough and common enough in this world, and merely traces out the evil which accrued to two men in similar circumstances, although of different temperaments, from that error of judgment — an Early Marriage. Both my friends took advantage of their liberty, you see, to tie themselves again! I don’t say in that respect, “Go thou and do likewise,” ami lecteur, if you be similarly situated, but rather, if you are free — keep so! A wise man, they say, knows when he is well off.
In “The Times” the other day, I read among the deaths, “At Paris, in her ninety-seventh year, Sarah, Viscountess Fantyre.” Gone at last, poor old woman, under the sod, where shrewdness and trickery, rouge and trump cards, are of no avail to her, though she held by them to the last. She died as she had lived, I hear, sitting at her whist-table, be-wigged and be-rouged, gathering her dirty, costly lace about her, quoting George Selwyn, dealing herself two honours and six trumps, picking up the guineas with a cunning twinkle of her monkeyish eyes, when Death tapped her on the brain, and old Fantyre was carried off the scene in an apoplectic fit; while her partner, the Comte de Beaujeu, murmured over his tabatière, “Peste! Death is horribly ill-bred; he should have let us played the conqueror!”
What memoirs the old woman might have left us; dirty ones, sans doute, but what memoirs of intrigues, plots, scandals, schemes; what rich glimpses behind the cards, what amusing peeps beneath the purple! A great many people, though, are glad, I dare say, that the Fantyre experiences are not down in black and white, and no publisher, perhaps, would have been courageous enough to risk their issue. They would have blackened plenty of fair reputations had their gunpowder burst; they would have offended a world which loves to prate of its morals, cackle of its purity, and double-lock its chamber-doors; they would have given us keys to many skeleton cupboards, which we should have opened, to turn away more heart-sick than before!
Her protégée, the Trefusis, has in no wise gone off the scene, nor did she consent to drop down into a valet’s wife. Her exposure at Morehampton’s villa had been the most bitter thing life could have brought her, for she had read enough of Rochefoucauld to think with him, “le ridicule déshonore plus que le déshonneur.” She sought the friendly shadow of Notre Dame de Lorette. Fearing her husband no longer, she bribed him no more; and if you like to see her any day, walk down the Champs Elysées, or look out in the Pré Catalan for a carriage with lapis-lazuli liveries, dashing as the Montespan’s, and you will have pointed to you in a moment the full-blown magnificence (now certainly coarse, and I dare say only got up at infinite trouble from Blanc de Perle and Bulli’s best rouge) of the quasimilliner of Frestonhills. She has at present, en proie, a Russian prince, and thrives upon roubles. Her imperial sables are the envy of the Quartier; and as women who range under the Piratical Flag don’t trouble their heads with a Future, the Trefusis does not stop to think that she may end in a Maison Dieu, with a bowl of soupe maigre, when her beauty shall have utterly lost all that superb and sensual bloom which lured De Vigne in his hot youth to such deadly cost
A young man married is a man that’s marred.
How can the man fail to be so, who chooses his yokefellow for life, in all the blind haste, the crude taste of his earlier years, when taste in all things alters so utterly from youth to manhood? In what the youth thinks so wise, fair, excellent, half a score or a score years later on he sees but little beauty. I have heard young fellows in their college terms, utterly recant in June all they swore by religiously in January, equally earnest and sincere, moreover, in their recantation and their adoration! Taste, bias, opinion, judgment, all alter as judgment widens, taste ripens and sight grows keener from longer mixing amidst the world, and longer studying its varied views. God help, then, the man who has taken to his heart, and into his life, a wife who, fair in his eyes in all the glamour of love, all the “purpureal light of youth,” is as insufficient to him in his maturer years as are the weaker thoughts, the cruder studies, the unformed judgment, the boyish revelries of his youth. The thoughts might be well in their way, the studies beneficial, the judgment generous and just, the revels harmless, but he has outgrown them — gone beyond them — left them far behind him; and he can no more return to them, and find them sufficient for him, than he can return to the Gradus ad Pamassum of his first school-days.
So the wife, too, may be good in her way: he may strive to be faithful to her and to cleave to her as he has sworn to do; he may seek with all his might to come to her side, to bring back the old feeling, to join the broken chain, to find her all he needs and all he used to think her; he may strive with all his might to do this, but it is Sisyphus-labour; the scales have fallen from his eyes, he loves her no longer! It is not his fault; she belongs to the things of his youth which pleased a crude state, an immature judgment; he sees her now as she is, and she is far below him, far behind him; if he progress he goes on alone, if he fall back to her level, his mind deteriorates with every day that dawns! Would he bring to the Commons no arguments riper than the crude debates that were his glory at the Union; would he condemn himself in science never to discard the unsound theories that were the delight of his early speculations; would he deny himself the right to fling aside the moonshine philosophies, the cobweb met
aphysics that he wove in his youth, and forbid himself title to advance beyond them! Surely not! Yet he would chain himself through his lifelong to a yoke-fellow as unfit and insufficient to his older years, as ever the theories and thoughts of his youth can be; as fatal to his peace while he is bound to her, as they would be fatal to the mind they dwarfed, to the brain they crammed into a prison-cell!
In youth Rosaline seems very fair,
None else being by
Herself poised with herself in either eye.
A young man meets a young girl in society, or at the sea-side, or on the deck of a Rhine steamer; she has fresh colouring, bright blue eyes, or black ones, as the case may be, very nice ankles, and a charming voice. She is a pretty girl to everybody; to him, she is beautiful — divine! He thinks, over his pipe, that she is just his ideal of Œnone, if he be of a poetic turn; or meditates that she’s “a clipper of a girl, and, by Jupiter! what a pretty foot!” if of a material disposition. He falls in love with her, as the phrase goes; he flirts with her at water-parties, and pays her a few morning calls; he sees her trifling with a bit of fancy-work, and hears her pretty voice say a few things about the weather. A few glances, a few waltzes, a few tête-à-têtes, and he proposes. It is a pretty dream for a few months; an easy yoke, perhaps, for a few years; then gradually the illusions drop one by one, as the leaves drop from a shaken rose, loth, yet forced to fall. He finds her mind narrowed, bigoted, ill-stored, with no single thought in it akin to his own. What could he learn of it in those few morning calls, those few ball-room talks, when the glamour was on him, and he would have cared nothing though she could not have spelled his name: Or — he finds her a bad temper (when does temper ever show in society, and how could he see her without society’s controlling eye upon her?), snarling at her servants, her dogs, the soup, the east winds; meeting him with petulant acerbity, revenging on him her milliner’s neglect, her maid’s stupidity, her migraine, or her torn Mechlin! Or — he finds her a heartless coquette, cheapening his honour, holding his name as carelessly as a child holds a mirror, forgetting, like the child, that a breath on it is a stain; turning a deaf ear to his remonstrance; flinging at him, with a sneer, some died-out folly— “before I knew you, sir!” — that she has ferreted out; goading him to words that he knows, for his own dignity, were best unsaid, then turning to hysteria and se posant en martyre! Or — and this, I take it, is the worst case for both — the wife is a good wife, as many (ladies say most) wives are; he knows it, he feels it, he honours her for it, but — she is a bitter disappointment to him! He comes home worn-out with the day’s labour, but’ successful from it; he sits down to a tête-à-tête dinner; he tells her of the hard-won election, the hot-worded debate in the House, the issue of a great law case that he has brought off victorious, the compliment to his corps from the commander-in-chief, of the one thing that is the essence of his life and the end of his ambition; she listened with a vague, amiable, absent smile, but her heart is not with him, nor her ear. “Yes, dear — indeed — how very nice! But cook has ruined that splendid haunch. Do look! it is really burnt to a cinder!” She never gives him any more than that! She cannot help it; her mission is emphatically to “suckle fools and chronicle small-beer.” The perpetual drop, drop, of her small worries, her puerile pleasures, is like the ceaseless dropping of water on his brain; she is less capable of understanding him in his defeats, his victories, his struggles, than the senseless writing-paper, which, though it cannot respond to them, at least lets him score his thoughts on its blank pages, and will bear them unobliterated! Yet this disunion in union is common enough in this world, très-chers; when a man marries early it is too generally certain.