Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “I sent for you,” she continued hurriedly, her graceful languor and tranquillity for the first time stirred and quickened by emotion, almost by embarrassment. “It was very strange, it was very painful, for me to trust that child with such a message. But you know us of old; you know we do not forsake our friends for considerations of self-interest or outward semblance. We act as we deem right; we do not heed untrue constructions. There are many things I desire to say to you — —”

  She paused; he merely bent his head; he could not trust the calmness of his voice in answer.

  “First,” she continued, “I must entreat you to allow me to tell Philip what I know. You cannot conceive how intensely oppressive it becomes to me to have any secret from him. I never concealed so much as a thought from my brother in all my life, and to evade even a mute question from his brave, frank eyes makes me feel a traitress to him.”

  “Anything else,” he muttered. “Ask me anything else. For God’s sake, do not let him dream that I live!”

  “But why? You still speak to me in enigmas. To-morrow, moreover, before we leave, he intends to seek you out as what he thinks you — a soldier of France. He is interested by all he hears of your career; he was first interested by what I told him of you when he saw the ivory carvings at my villa. I asked the little vivandiere to tell you this, but, on second thoughts it seemed best to see you myself once more, as I had promised.”

  There was a slow weariness in the utterance of the words. She had said that she could not reflect on leaving him to such a fate as this of his in Africa without personal suffering, or without an effort to induce him to reconsider his decision to condemn himself to it for evermore.

  “That French child,” she went on rapidly, to cover both the pain that she felt and that she dealt, “forced her entrance here in a strange fashion; she wished to see me, I suppose, and to try my courage too. She is a little brigand, but she had a true and generous nature, and she loves you very loyally.”

  “Cigarette?” he asked wearily; his thoughts could not stay for either the pity or interest for her in this moment. “Oh, no! I trust not. I have done nothing to win her love, and she is a fierce little condottiera who disdains all such weakness. She forced her way in here? That was unpardonable; but she seems to bear a singular dislike to you.”

  “Singular, indeed! I never saw her until to-day.”

  He answered nothing; the conviction stole on him that Cigarette hated her because he loved her.

  “And yet she brought you my message?” pursued his companion. “That seems her nature — violent passions, yet thorough loyalty. But time is precious. I must urge on you what I bade you come to hear. It is to implore you to put your trust, your confidence in Philip. You have acknowledged to me that you are guiltless — no one who knows what you once were could ever doubt it for an instant — then let him hear this, let him be your judge as to what course is right and what wrong for you to pursue. It is impossible for me to return to Europe knowing you are living thus and leaving you to such a fate. What motive you have to sentence yourself to such eternal banishment I am ignorant; but all I ask of you is, confide in him. Let him learn that you live; let him decide whether or not this sacrifice of yourself be needed. His honor is an punctilious as that of any man on earth; his friendship you can never doubt. Why conceal anything from him?”

  His eyes turned on her with that dumb agony which once before had chilled her to the soul.

  “Do you think, if I could speak in honor, I should not tell you all?”

  A flush passed over her face, the first that the gaze of any man had ever brought there. She understood him.

  “But,” she said, gently and hurriedly, “may it not be that you overrate the obligations of honor? I know that many a noble-hearted man has inexorably condemned himself to a severity of rule that a dispassionate judge of his life might deem very exaggerated, very unnecessary. It is so natural for an honorable man to so dread that he should do a dishonorable thing through self-interest or self-pity, that he may very well overestimate the sacrifice required of him through what he deems justice or generosity. May it not be so with you? I can conceive no reason that can be strong enough to require of you such fearful surrender of every hope, such utter abandonment of your own existence.”

  Her voice failed slightly over the last words; she could not think with calmness of the destiny that he accepted. Involuntarily some prescience of pain that would forever pursue her own life unless his were rescued lent an intense earnestness, almost entreaty, to her argument. She did not bear him love as yet; she had seen too little of him, too lately only known him as her equal; but there were in her, stranger than she knew, a pity, a tenderness, a regret, an honor for him that drew her toward him with an indefinable attraction, and would sooner or later warm and deepen into love. Already it was sufficient, though she deemed it but compassion and friendship, to make her feel that an intolerable weight would be heavy on her future if his should remain condemned to this awful isolation and oblivion while she alone of all the world should know and hold his secret.

  He started from her side as he heard, and paced to and fro the narrow limits of the tent like a caged animal. For the first time it grew a belief to him, in his thoughts, that were he free, were he owner of his heritage, he could rouse her heart from its long repose and make her love him with the soft and passionate warmth of his dead Arab mistress — a thing that had been so distant from her negligence and her pride as warmth from the diamond or the crystal. He felt as if the struggle would kill him. He had but to betray his brother, and he would be unchained from his torture; he had but to break his word, and he would be at liberty. All the temptation that had before beset him paled and grew as naught beside this possibility of the possession of her love which dawned upon him now.

  She, knowing nothing of this which moved him, believed only that he weighed her words in hesitation, and strove to turn the balance.

  “Hear me,” she said softly. “I do not bid you decide; I only bid you confide in Philip — in one who, as you must well remember, would sooner cut off his own hand than counsel a base thing or do an unfaithful act. You are guiltless of this charge under which you left England; you endure it rather than do what you deem dishonorable to clear yourself. That is noble — that is great. But it is possible, as I say, that you may exaggerate the abnegation required of you. Whoever was the criminal should suffer. Yours is magnificent magnanimity; but it may surely be also false justice alike to yourself and the world.”

  He turned on her almost fiercely in the suffering she dealt him.

  “It is! It was a madness — a Quixotism — the wild, unconsidered act of a fool. What you will! But it is done; it was done forever — so long ago — when your young eyes looked on me in the pity of your innocent childhood. I cannot redeem its folly now by adding to it baseness. I cannot change the choice of a madman by repenting of it with a coward’s caprice. Ah, God! you do not know what you do — how you tempt. For pity’s sake, urge me no more. Help me — strengthen me — to be true to my word. Do not bid me do evil that I may enter paradise through my sin!”

  He threw himself down beside her as the incoherent words poured out, his arms flung across the pile of cushions on which he had been seated, his face hidden on them. His teeth clinched on his tongue till the blood flowed; he felt that if the power of speech remained with him he should forswear every law that had bound him to silence, and tell her all, whatever the cost.

  She looked at him, she heard him, moved to a greater agitation than ever had had sway over her; for the first time the storm winds that swept by her did not leave her passionless and calm; this man’s whole future was in her hands. She could bid him seek happiness dishonored; or cleave to honor, and accept wretchedness forever.

  It was a fearful choice to hold.

  “Answer me! Choose for me!” he said vehemently. “Be my law, and be my God!”

  She gave a gesture almost of fear.

  “Hush, hush! The woman
does not live who should be that to any man.”

  “You shall be it to me! Choose for me!”

  “I cannot! You leave so much in darkness and untold — —”

  “Nothing that you need know to decide your choice for me, save one thing only — that I love you.”

  She shuddered.

  “This is madness! What have you seen of me?”

  “Enough to love you while my life shall last, and love no other woman. Ah! I was but an African trooper in your sight, but in my own I was your equal. You only saw a man to whom your gracious alms and your gentle charity were to be given, as a queen may stoop in mercy to a beggar; but I saw one who had the light of my old days in her smile, the sweetness of my old joys in her eyes, the memories of my old world in her every grace and gesture. You forget! I was nothing to you; but you were so much to me. I loved you the first moment that your voice fell on my ear. It is madness! Oh, yes! I should have said so, too, in those old years. A madness I would have sworn never to feel. But I have lived a hard life since then, and no men ever love like those who suffer. Now you know all; know the worst that tempts me. No famine, no humiliation, no obloquy, no loss I have known, ever drove me so cruelly to buy back my happiness with the price of dishonor as the one desire — to stand in my rightful place before men, and be free to strive with you for what they have not won!”

  As she heard, all the warmth, all the life, faded out of her face; it grew as white as his own, and her lips parted slightly, as though to draw her breath was oppressive. The wild words overwhelmed her with their surprise not less than they shocked her with their despair. An intense truth vibrated through them, a truth that pierced her and reached her heart, as no other such supplication ever had done. She had no love for him yet, or she thought not; she was very proud, and resisted such passions; but in that moment the thought swept by her that such love might be possible. It was the nearest submission to it she had ever given. She heard him in unbroken silence; she kept silence long after he had spoken. So far as her courage and her dignity could be touched with it, she felt something akin to terror at the magnitude of the choice left to her.

  “You give me great pain, great surprise,” she murmured. “All I can trust is that your love is of such sudden birth that it will die as rapidly—”

  He interrupted her.

  “You mean that, under no circumstances — not even were I to possess my inheritance — could you give me any hope that I might wake your tenderness?”

  She looked at him full in the eyes with the old, fearless, haughty instinct of refusal to all such entreaty, which had made her so indifferent — and many said so pitiless — to all. At his gaze, however her own changed and softened, grew shadowed, and then wandered from him.

  “I do not say that. I cannot tell — —”

  The words were very low; she was too truthful to conceal from him what half dawned on herself — the possibility that, more in his presence and under different circumstances, she might feel her heart go to him with a warmer and a softer impulse than that of friendship. The heroism of his life had moved her greatly.

  His head dropped down again upon his arms.

  “O God! It is possible, at least! I am blind — mad. Make my choice for me! I know not what to do.”

  The tears that had gathered in her eyes fell slowly down over her colorless cheeks; she looked at him with a pity that made her heart ache with a sorrow only less than his own. The grief was for him chiefly; yet something of it for herself. Some sense of present bitterness that fell on her from his fate, some foreboding of future regret that would inevitably and forever follow her when she left him to his loneliness and his misery, smote on her with a weightier pang than any her caressed and cloudless existence had encountered. Love was dimly before her as the possibility he called it; remote, unrealized, still unacknowledged, but possible under certain conditions, only known as such when it was also impossible through circumstances.

  He had suffered silently; endured strongly; fought greatly; these were the only means through which any man could have ever reached her sympathy, her respect, her tenderness. Yet, though a very noble and a very generous woman, she was also a woman of the world. She knew that it was not for her to say even thus much to a man who was in one sense well-nigh a stranger, and who stood under the accusation of a crime whose shadow he allowed to rest on him unmoved. She felt sick at heart; she longed unutterably, with a warmer longing than had moved her previously, to bid him, at all cost, lay bare his past, and throw off the imputed shame that lay on him. Yet all the grand traditions of her race forbade her to counsel the acceptance of an escape whose way led through a forfeiture of honor.

  “Choose for me, Venetia!” he muttered at last once more.

  She rose with what was almost a gesture of despair, and thrust the gold hair off her temples.

  “Heaven help me, I cannot — I dare not! And — I am no longer capable of being just!”

  There was an accent almost of passion in her voice; she felt that so greatly did she desire his deliverance, his justification, his return to all which was his own — desired even his presence among them in her own world — that she could no longer give him calm and unbiased judgment. He heard, and the burning tide of a new joy rushed on him, checked almost ere it was known, by the dread lest for her sake she should ever give him so much pity that such pity became love.

  He started to his feet and looked down imploringly into her eyes — a look under which her own never quailed or drooped, but which they answered with that same regard which she had given him when she had declared her faith in his innocence.

  “If I thought it possible you could ever care — —”

  She moved slightly from him; her face was very white still, and her voice, though serenely sustained, shook as it answered him.

  “If I could — believe me, I am not a woman who would bid you forsake your honor to spare yourself or me. Let us speak no more of this. What can it avail, except to make you suffer greater things? Follow the counsels of your own conscience. You have been true to them hitherto; it is not for me, or through me, that you shall ever be turned aside from them.”

  A bitter sigh broke from him as he heard.

  “They are noble words. And yet it is so easy to utter, so hard to follow them. If you had one thought of tenderness for me, you could not speak them.”

  A flush passed over her face.

  “Do not think me without feeling — without sympathy — pity—”

  “These are not love.”

  She was silent; they were, in a sense, nearer to love than any emotion she had ever known.

  “If you loved me,” he pursued passionately— “ah, God! the very word from me to you sounds insult; and yet there is not one thought in me that does not honor you — if you loved me, could you stand there and bid me drag on this life forever; nameless, friendless, hopeless; having all the bitterness, but none of the torpor of death; wearing out the doom of a galley slave, though guiltless of all crime?”

  “Why speak so? You are unreasoning. A moment ago you implored me not to tempt you to the violation of what you hold your honor; because I bid you be faithful to it, you deem me cruel!”

  “Heaven help me! I scarce know what I say. I ask you, if you were a woman who loved me, could you decide thus?”

  “These are wild questions,” she murmured; “what can they serve? I believe that I should — I am sure that I should. As it is — as your friend—”

  “Ah, hush! Friendship is crueler than hate.”

  “Cruel?”

  “Yes; the worst cruelty when we seek love — a stone proffered us when we ask for bread in famine!”

  There was desperation, almost ferocity, in the answer; she was moved and shaken by it — not to fear, for fear was not in her nature, but to something of awe, and something of the despairing hopelessness that was in him.

  “Lord Royallieu,” she said slowly, as if the familiar name were some tie between them, some cause of excuse
for these, the only love words she had ever heard without disdain and rejection— “Lord Royallieu, it is unworthy of you to take this advantage of an interview which I sought, and sought for your own sake. You pain me, you wound me. I cannot tell how to answer you. You speak strangely, and without warrant.”

  He stood mute and motionless before her, his head sunk on his chest. He knew that she rebuked him justly; he knew that he had broken through every law he had prescribed himself, and that he had sinned against the code of chivalry which should have made her sacred from such words while they were those he could not utter, nor she hear, except in secrecy and shame. Unless he could stand justified in her sight and in that of all men, he had no right to seek to wring out tenderness from her regret and from her pity. Yet all his heart went out to her in one irrepressible entreaty.

  “Forgive me, for pity’s sake! After to-night I shall never look upon your face again.”

  “I do forgive,” she said gently, while her voice grew very sweet. “You endure too much already for one needless pang to be added by me. All I wish is that you had never met me, so that this last, worst thing had not come unto you!”

  A long silence fell between them; where she leaned back among her cushions, her face was turned from him. He stood motionless in the shadow, his head still dropped upon his breast, his breathing loud and slow and hard. To speak of love to her was forbidden to him, yet the insidious temptation wound close and closer round his strength. He had only to betray the man he had sworn to protect, and she would know his innocence, she would hear his passion; he would be free, and she — he grew giddy as the thought rose before him — she might, with time, be brought to give him other tenderness than that of friendship. He seemed to touch the very supremacy of joy; to reach it almost with his hand; to have honors, and peace, and all the glory of her haughty loveliness, and all the sweetness of her subjugation, and all the soft delights of passions before him in their golden promise, and he was held back in bands of iron, he was driven out from them desolate and accursed.