Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “Palma! What is she to me!”

  He rose and stood irresolute, impatient, bewildered. Go‐and leave her! He felt as he had felt in the garden of Giovoli, hearing her laughter on the other side of the wall as she was swung by other hands than his up in the golden fruit‐boughs. His face was burning; his heart was beating; his brain was giddy; he had spoken in all the earnestness of pain and truth. It seemed to him that she must loathe her life. It seemed to him that she must hate herself. He had spoken in full faith. He would have surrendered up his future years to hers, and served her faithfully for ever parted from her.

  But then she did not seem to see —

  The passion of his sorrow fell back from her as hot tears may fall back from the red smoothness of a rose‐leaf.

  She leaned backwards on the cushions of her couch; her hands were tightly clasped behind her head; her wide sleeves fell back from her arms to the shoulder; her face was turned upward, with her blue eyes watching him through half‐closed lids; her small scarlet mouth was but half shut, her breath came through it evenly as a child’s; she smiled a little.

  It maddened him to look on her.

  He could not stir one pulse of shame in her.

  He could only — leave her.

  So she said.

  Had he been older, harder, wiser, he would have left her then, without an effort to change the unchangeable, to pierce the impenetrable; or he would have tossed her away from him with such scorn, such force, such loathing, that, finding her master in him, the cowardice which sleeps in every woman would have awakened in her, and brought her trembling to his feet. But he was not old, nor hard, nor wise; his heart was weak with all the innocent affection of his childhood, and for the first time the loveliness of a woman made him blind and stupid. She was so much to him: she was Gemma, whom he had kissed a thousand times in babyhood, tumbling in the flower‐filled grasses of the green hillsides; and she was also the first woman whose look sent fire through his veins. She was near to him by a host of sinless memories; and she was sundered from him so utterly by sins so vile.

  The world held nothing for him but herself.

  To cleanse her from her golden corruption, to shake her conscience from its drugged apathy, to tear her away from the companions of her life, — to do all this and save her for the eternity that he believed in, the boy would have given up his own life and his own soul.

  All in a moment his art perished.

  When a human love wakes it crushes fame like a dead leaf, and all the spirits and ministers of the mind shrink away before it, and can no more allure, no more console, but, sighing, pass into silence and are dumb.

  She, lying back with her golden head on her clasped hands, watched him.

  She knew all he felt.

  “Leave me,” she said, with a slow soft smile. “You have your music, and the saints that you believe in, and Palma, who will pray with you. Why do you stay here? Go.”

  “I cannot go — not so.”

  She stung him with Palma’s name; poor, stupid, unlearned, bare‐foot Palma, treading the earth as the ox did and the mule.

  “Gemma! have you no conscience in you; no pain, no sorrow, no revolt against your fate?” he said, suddenly. “Oh, my dear! have I spoken to the winds? Is it because my words are weak that what I plead for seems so too? Gemma! — I cannot leave you to your fate. It is to leave you to drink poison as the very water of life, and to die a dog’s death at the end of all — a street dog’s, kicked and cursed. You speak of Palma. How can I look in Palma’s face, leaving her sister lost as you are lost? The very hills there would rebuke me. The very stones at home cry out. Oh, God! What shall I say? If He put no soul in you, how shall I?”

  She listened to the generous, foolish, noble, senseless words. Some of them stung her like thorns; some of moved her with wonder. He seemed to her such a fool — ah, heaven! such a fool. He spoke as children dream. Yet, innocently, he lashed her with a scourge of nettles; for he rejected her with all his infinite tenderness; for he spoke of her as of a lost, degraded, alien thing; for he would not see his kiss upon her lips.

  She rose on an impulse of rage to send him from her for ever; — he would not touch her! She, who saw princes sue and lords in feud for her, could have thrust her foot and spurned him from her presence in her fury at his innocently uttered scorn.

  When the heart is fullest of pain and the mouth purest with truth, there is a cruel destiny in things which often makes the words worst‐chosen and surest to defeat the end they seek.

  Each added word of his hardened more and more her will upon the course that she had set herself; stung all her warmest pride, and made more sure his doom with her.

  No angel from heaven, no miracle of light shining as in the steps of Paul, could ever have changed her much; but he, in all his innocence, struck the iron of her wilful vanity and beat it into sharpest steel.

  She rose erect on to her feet and thrust back the white wooden shutters before the casement nearest her, and let the dazzling effulgence of the intense noonlight pour on her, and bathe her in it, and turn the fairness of her hair to molten gold, the whiteness of her flesh to ivory, the flush of her cheeks to opal fires; her beautiful limbs shone in it like marble, her hair streamed against it till it was like an aureola of heaven, the ruthless light glanced on her and searched her everywhere, and found no flaw. Flowers droop in it; children pale in it; birds flee from it; but she bore it in all its intensity, and was but the more glorious in it.

  He gazed at her. She stood erect, golden and white against the burning sun.

  “Look at me!” she cried to him. “Look! — the light that kills all other things and pales all other beauties, does but make mine the greater. Look at me! The sun may shine on me, search me, pierce me, it can find no fault anywhere. Look — look — look! There is no blemish anywhere, I say — no flaw the sun can find. And you talk to me of penitence and pain! You talk to me of poverty and shame! You talk to me of going back to penance in a peasant’s hut, and letting rains and winds and snows beat on my body! Look at me! While I am this, you think I care for heaven? You are mad! Unlovely, loveless women may cling to priestly tales of it, as hungry curs hope, shivering, for a bone. I give it with an hour of myself. Gods — if there be gods — can do no more than!”

  The mighty blasphemy of her superb vanity seemed to him to burn through the golden light she stood in, as lightning through the sunbeams.

  With her arms uplifted in the exultation of her measureless arrogance, and her eyes with contemptuous challenge glancing through their amorous drooped lids, a sudden memory struck him.

  He cried aloud, as if some mortal hurt were done him in the flesh.

  “You were the dancer of Istriel! You are the creature they call Innocence”

  She looked him in the eyes straightly and serenely, her golden head erect under the nimbus of the noonday light.

  “Yes. Well, then? — what of that?”

  He gazed at her breathless; a great tearless sob choked him: then he fell down senseless at her feet.

  When he came to himself he was alone upon a bed in a darkened chamber. The wind was blowing over him; he heard birds singing.

  Long fasting, sleeplessness, and violent emotion — all had made him lose his consciousness for awhile; his brain was giddy still, the light swam before his eyes; he rose and staggered to the glass doors which stood open, and put the outer shutters aside and out into the air.

  An old negress stopped him; was he not too ill? Would he not wait? Her mistress — At the last word he put her hurriedly aside and hastened farther out; it was the house of this woman whom her world called, as the emperor his desert beast — Innocence. He could not stay in it; the air of it seemed to stifle him.

  Without well knowing what he did, he traversed the gardens with unsteady steps, the sunshine reeling and dancing before his half‐blind eyes; then, his limbs growing stronger and his sight clearer as the wind blew on him from the water, he pushed his way through the maze of fl
owering shrubs and thick‐set orange‐trees out of the gardens down on to the shore. He sat down stupidly in the shadow of a boat and leaned his forehead on his hands, and, do what he would, saw only her — standing against the light.

  She was the dancer of Istriel.

  “Well, what of that?” she had asked him.

  What of it, indeed. It made her neither better and no worse. It changed nothing. To have been the nude model of a painter was not more than to have been the willing wanton of the world.

  Yet it seemed more hideous to him.

  It brought her vileness home to him.

  It seemed to write her shame on earth and sky as on a scroll for every eye to read.

  This was a fancy; but the fancies of poets are their hell, when they cease to be their heaven. And they cease so soon.

  The dancer of Istriel had been seen by all the nations of the globe; that lovely, voluptuous, smiling thing, with her red blossom and her floating feet, had looked all mankind in the face and made them wish for her; to the boy she seemed sold to the whole earth — made harlot for all the peoples of the world.

  Istriel’s gold had bought his Rusignuolo. Istriel’s gold had purchased Gemma.

  He owed his fame — she, her ruin — to the same hand. So he thought. He exaggerated his own debt, and he shut his eyes against her lie, as such natures as his will ever do, to hurt themselves and keep their faith in their false gods.

  Where was Istriel?

  In an aimless, hopeless passion, he longed to find this man — this man who had taken her in her youngest youth and drawn every curve and coloured every hue of her fair frame so cruelly, and sent it out to let the eyes of all men gloat on it in public as they would. The crime of the painter against her seemed to him viler than all seduction. It seemed to him the very brutality of license; the very crown of outrage. The seducer fed but his own eyes with the beauty he unveiled; this man had fed ten million ravishers’ eyes with hers.

  It was the first passionate agony of his life. He had suffered before; but then with hope underneath him, bearing him up like the wings of some strong bird. He suffered now as those do who suffer without hope.

  All these years gone and Palma praying there in an undoubting faith, and all the while nothing on earth or heaven heeding; but all this vileness done beyond recall — beyond repair.

  Do what he would he could not change this thing the years had made her.

  Cry as he would to fate, no means could undo what had been done.

  Nothing could give him back Gemma — little fair Gemma, with unstained soul, sleeping as the lambs sleep in the bed of hay. And yet the loveliness of her burned him like so much flame.

  He hid his face in his hands and saw her always as he had seen her come cut from the waters in the dark night amongst the red roses.

  “Go, write a romance on me,” she had said to him. But he could no more have done it than he could have flown to the sun with the eagles.

  His brain seemed dead in him.

  He heard no longer sweet concord in the waters, and lisped numbers in the murmurs of the winds; he looked back at his self of yesterday and wondered where the power in him had gone; all in a moment his art and his fame and all his high desires seemed to grow as nothing to him.

  He shut his eyes and saw the fair limbs of a woman slowly moving through the shadows; a mouth that smiled a little, a bough of dark leaves and ruby buds, against a snow, white breast: — that was all he saw.

  His art: — where was it?

  It seemed to him like a dead thing. A sudden sense of vast immeasurable loss fell on him.

  He was terrified; he did not know what ailed him.

  In most men and women Love waking wakes, with itself, the soul.

  In poets Love waking kills it.

  Nature had been always to the boy so full of sympathy and solace. Beaten and hungry and overtasked in his childhood, he had been happy the moment that he had escaped alone into the open air on the breeze‐blown hillpaths, with the sighing of the pines above his head; nay, happy even if he could but be by any little narrow casement and see the line of the old town wall with the lichens and vetches clear against the sky and in their crevices the shining lizards sitting. But now mountain and lake and the autumnal glories of the woods could bring no consolation; they only seemed to him cruel; they had no heart in them, they did not care.

  The hideous universal sentence of corruption for the first time seemed to him written over all the things of earth and air.

  For she was vile.

  How the day passed he never knew.

  It rolled away somehow; the sky seemed like a sheet of fire; the sun for the first time burned him and hurt him; he saw nothing but the form of a woman.

  The man who had his opera at the town sought him and said:

  “Only think! — they will play your Lamia at the Apollo in Rome in Carnival. Only think! — and at San Carlo too. Here are your letters.”

  He stared at the speaker and thrust the papers away, and did not answer.

  He hardly understood.

  His music?

  It had been his religion. He was dead to it now. All in a day his innocent spiritual joys were withered up in him. What use was it? It could not alter her.

  In proportion to the absorption of any life in any art, so is the violence of its dethronement and oblivion of art when love has entered.

  It seemed to him that every note in all the world might be for ever mute, and he not care.

  It seemed to him that if they said he was a fool and let him die nameless and despised, it would be no matter to him.

  For he loved this fair foul thing; only he did not know it.

  After awhile mechanically he found his way into his own chamber.

  It was late in the day. The little room was filled with flowers that the village women, proud of having the young genius in their midst, had placed everywhere about. He did not notice them. But at the intense odour he shuddered a little; they made him think of the garden ways of Giovoli.

  Without knowing what he did he sat down to the piano which stood there.

  He began to play.

  A torrent of passion, a passion of tears, were in the music that he made with no sense of what he did; the abruptest changes from pain to rap‐ ture; the strongest and greatest harmonies; the most capricious transitions, the most bitter woe were in the sounds he drew; never in all his creations had he reached so great a height as now, when he created what he did not care to preserve, what he had no brain left to measure.

  By sheer instinct his nature cried aloud against its pain in the art that was inborn in him as its song in a bird.

  Then all at once he ceased and loathed it: what use was it? it was only a mockery; it could not alter her.

  Some of those who followed him and worshipped him — for he was never now without some of these parasites of success — standing outside his door, listened breathless in ecstasy; one or two, when the melody ceased, ventured in and kissed his hands, and cried to him:

  “You never were so great!”

  He looked at them dully.

  “What good is it?” he said to them; and he went into his inner room and barred the door against them.

  What good was it?

  He was scarcely more than twenty years old; he had a great future; he had put his name in all the mouths of men; he had all that, dreaming under the pines above Bruno’s house the night when the violin was broken, he had thought would be worth purchase by a whole long life of toil and poverty and renunciation and neglect.

  And all was unreal and useless to him now. It seemed as if his hands grasped ashes and his ears were full of the sound of empty winds mourning through desolate places.

  He went out in the air again.

  He could not rest indoors.

  He shook himself free, with impatience, of his disciples who would fain have accompanied him, and spoken to him of the coming reception of his operas down in Rome. He got away by himself to the shore of the lak
e; to the still and sombre shadows of a long‐deserted garden that had been his haunt in happier hours.

  There are times when the weakness of humanity falls back broken and heartsick before the iron wall of unchangeable circumstance, as a beaten seabird falls back from the stone face of the cliffs.

  It was so with him now.

  “If only I could save her!” he cried in his heart: and in his heart knew that he could not; not though he were to give his soul up for her own. Legends tell of such barters. Life does not know them.

  Gemma had been her own destiny. But such destiny was as immutable as though the gods of old had shaped it.

  She had stained her white marble red. Signa knew that though the stone should be washed seventy times seven and bruised into a million fragments, the dust would be never white again, but blood red always, — always.

  He had uttered his real thoughts to Gemma: to him she was like one leprous‐stricken. Her story had filled him with pity, but with horror.

  Bruno had taught him to hold wanton women accursed. Bruno, who again and again had fallen in their snares, had always bade him hold them like the deadly mushrooms that men gather for bread and find are death. Bruno, fearing the softness of the boy’s nature, had said always to him, “Poverty is bad, and hunger and sickness and sorrow and labour that has no end — these are all bad — but worse than any of these is it to be the slave of a woman who is unchaste.”

  He wandered all the day. It seemed to him as if it would never end. He saw nothing but the face of Gemma. The world which had seemed to him so beautiful was changed; heaven was cruel. It created loveliness only to pollute it and deform it afterwards.

  Out of his dreams he was brought face to face with facts that sickened him. All the old landmarks of his faith were gone. All the happy hopefulness of his nature was crushed. He was bewildered and sick at heart. And through it all he could not thrust away the personal beauty of the woman. Her gaze, her form, her breath, her smile, her sigh: — he could think of no other thing. It seemed to him as if she were in the air, in the clouds, in the water; her voice rang in his ears; she was so lovely — and yet she was so vile; — she was so much more than a woman and so much less.— “If only I could save her!” he said to himself, and then could have flung his forehead on the rock remembering that there was no way to make her other than she was; remembering that to be torn from shame is not to become innocent.