by Ouida
The passion which makes tyrannicides was in him now.
“I have lived righteously, and no good has come of it,” he said to himself. “If came can save him — crime shall be sweeter to me than all virtue.”
That was all he felt; dully, savagely, hopelessly, with that despair upon him which is irresponsible as madness.
He had given all his manhood to the boy, and surrendered all the hopes and ties and pleasures and tender follies which make the toil of manhood bearable, and soften creeping age of half its terrors — and one after another alien forces had arisen and taken the thing he had laboured for away from him.
His heart was hard. His blood was fire. Fate had been merciless and God been deaf. He grew merciless too, and stopped his ears to pity.
Pity!
Where was there any in all this wide world? The fiend sent a creature on to earth with a wooing mouth and a white body, and she ate up youth and innocence, and all pure desires, and all high endeavours, and devoured souls as swine the garbage; and from heaven there was never any sign.
The young day grew wider and brighter and redder in the sky. Nightingales sang in the gardens on the other side of the high walls. The wind rose fragrant with the smell of wet grass‐ways and of the laden orange boughs. He noticed nothing. The time had gone by with him when any sight or sound had power on him. He only waited — waited silently — drawn back within the shadow of the walls.
With the full morning the bolts of the gates were drawn back, there came forth a young man with a face strange to him, and rich garments, and a smile of triumph on his mouth; a little later came a woman, with brass buckets on her shoulders going to fetch water from the fountain in the public square a street or two beyond.
He, waiting for such a moment’s favouring chance, went within. The fresh dark gardens were deserted. There was a stone terrace with two flights of steps; winged lions; and grim marble masks. He ascended the stairs, and pushed back some great doors which were unlatched within. They yielded to his hand. He entered the silent house.
Two or three servants, drowsy or drunken, lay about on the couches in the great vaulted entrance whose white and red marbles gleamed in the golden glory of the slanting sunrays.
One of them raised himself sleepily, and stopped him with a stupid smile.
“Where do you go? — what would you do?”
Bruno pushed him aside:
“I go to my work,” he answered, and passed onward. The other, muttering, dropped back again into his vinous rest.
Bruno went on. Long corridors, empty banqueting rooms, chambers rich with sculptures and with frescoes, deserted splendours where the flowers were fading, and the morning shining through the crevices of closed shutters, all followed one on another like the tombs of dead Etrurian kings. All the household slept, after the long, gay amorous vigil of the night. He traversed the silent places as a living man traverses the solitude of sepulchres. He had no knowledge where to find the thing he sought; but he went on without a pause; he had grasped Evil by the hand; it guides unerringly.
His bare feet smote the bare marble and trode on, inexorable as the tread of time. After many chambers — the vast, beautiful, painted chambers of Rome, lofty as temples, and cool as the deep sea — he saw a door closed, with garlands of roses coloured on its panels under the morning sunbeams.
He thrust his strength against it; it resisted a moment, then gave way and opened noiselessly; a fierce exultant joy leaped up in his heart like a sudden flame; he had found his goal.
Here no daylight came; a little lamp was burning, a Cupid swung it from a chain; there was deep colour in the shadows everywhere; the gloom of the place was filled with aromatic odours.
He paused neither for the loveliness nor the stillness of it; he went through its fragrant darkness with the same slow calm steps. As destiny comes to men to strike, unhasting but unresting, so he went to her.
He paused a moment and looked on her. Her bed was white as sea‐foam is, it rose and sunk like billows under her; her loosened hair half covered her; her arms were cast above her head; her limbs were lightly crossed; she was one of those women who are most beautiful in sleep; and her sleep was soft and smiling and profound in its repose, as when she had slumbered on the nest of hay by Palma’s side in the old hut at Giovoli.
In her disarray, in her abandonment, in her deep dreamless rest, she was like a white rose just ruffled with the dew and wind, and shutting all the summer in its breast.
He stood and looked on her.
In her nude beauty she was to him sexless; in her perfect loveliness she was to him loathsome.
She was no woman; but all the evil, all the wrong, all the injustice, and all the mockery of human life made manifest in the flesh in her.
He stood and looked on her; at her red closed mouth, at her fair curled limbs, at her soft breast that rose and fell with the even measures of her peaceful breath.
Then he leaned forward and drew his knife from his belt, and, stooping, stabbed her through the heart — again and again and again — driving each stroke farther home.
She quivered a moment, then was still; she passed from sleep to death.
He went out, no man staying him, or asking him anything, into the broad bright daylight of the outer air.
“It was for him,” he said in his thoughts, and a great serenity was with him as of some duty done.
Man would slay him, and God would bid him burn in hell for ever: — what matter? — the boy was saved.
He went on, erect, in the full sunshine. Justice was done.
A deep, fierce, exultant calm was on him. He would perish — body and soul — but the boy was saved.
In the streets there were many people, and the multitudes were silent and afraid, and there was a sound as of weeping among women, and the stir and the press grew greater at each step; and through the crowds there was brought out in the living light of the joyous day an open bier; met followed mourning as once they followed Raffaele.
“What is it?” he asked, and paused, for a great fear fell upon him.
A woman answered him.
“His wanton was faithless, look you — and last night alone he knew it. So he slew himself — why not? She had killed all his soul in him. When Love is dead, one’s body best dies too.”
They brought the bier through the weeping crowds.
The face was uncovered to the light. It was the face of Signa.
They had folded his hands on his breast, and his eyes were closed as in slumber.
Love had killed him.
Why not? It is the only mercy that Love ever has.
CHAPTER XIX.
IN a warm cloudless morning, with the scent of wild flowers upon the wind, when the summer had drawn near, and the world was filled with life and light, they brought Bruno out into the public place of Rome to meet his death.
He was quite silent. He had been always silent.
When the sun smote his eyes, and the wind blew on his face, he shivered a little, that was all.
“It was all of no use,” he muttered. “It was all of no use.”
He mounted the scaffold with a firm step. He was unconscious what he did, but courage remained an instinct with him.
Priests could do naught for him. He repelled them. He had no remorse.
“I did what I could,” he said in his heart. “But it was all of no use — of no use.”
He looked a moment at the blue sky — at the fair sailing clouds — at the hills which rose between him and his old home — then he surrendered himself.
They bared his throat.
“Pray for your soul,” said some voice in his ear.
He looked straight upward at the sun.
“Let my soul burn for ever!” he said. “Save the boy’s.”
That was his prayer.
Then he bowed his head, and knelt.
The axe fell.
They flung his body in a ditch, and threw the quicklime on it, and the heavy earth.
That was the end.
The hills lie quiet and know no change; the winds wander amongst the white arbutus‐bells and shake the odours from the clustering herbs; the stone‐pines scent the storm; the plain out‐ spreads its golden glory to the morning light; the sweet chimes ring; the days glide on; the splendours of the sunsets burn across the sky, and make the mountains as the jewelled thrones of gods.
Signa, hoary and old, stands there unchanged; beholding the sun shine alike on the just and on the unjust.
Why not?
Signa can count her age by many centuries. Before the Latins were, she knew Etruria; but many as be her memories, she remembers no other thing than this, there is no justice that she knows of anywhere. Signa is wise. She lets this world go by; and sleeps.
THE END
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In a Winter City
This novel, subtitled A Sketch, was published in 1876 in London by Chapman and Hall, and in America and Leipzig by Bernhard Tauchnitz. The Winter City is in fact Florence, a city Ouida knew very well, but renamed Floralia for the novel. Elizabeth Lee, author of a memoir about Ouida in 1914, points out that the depiction of Italy in this text is less obvious than in some other works and that the story is universal enough to be set against any backdrop.
Lady Hilda Vorarlberg is “very serene, very contemptuous, very high bred.” She is beautiful and rich and has impeccable taste; Worth of Paris creates her gowns and she has the best houses in London and elsewhere; she is also rather disappointed in Floralia, with its rain, uncertain hotel cuisine and general lack of exquisite high taste (in her opinion) despite the plethora of art displays. She despises house parties with the English gentry – even with family – and resolutely refuses to marry, lest she must give up her wealth and independence. Lady Hilda is immune to passion and love, easily bored, listless and highbrow; “the proudest, handsomest, coldest woman in the world”, in other words, she has many of the characteristics typical of a rich aristocrat. Even the members of The Club, the most exclusive gathering place in Floralia, were in awe of her arrival. However, one man was not impressed – Paulo, Duc della Rocca. He is tall, handsome and urbane, but never vulgar in his expressions of taste; he is also attentive to the needs of his country estate, something Lady Hilda would never do. The two icons of taste and rank should have had much in common, but on meeting her, Rocca found her overdressed and too much a woman of the world to his liking, preferring (to the amusement of his high born friends) women with some innocence and simplicity.
Ouida goes on to describe the circle of rich people the two aristocrats inhabit. It is reminiscent of the French court at Versailles in its most superficial and irrelevant decades, with trivial activities such as card games and pointless outings blotting out emotional trauma, the women blindly following fashion (but always several steps behind Lady Hilda): “If it were chic to be devout, no doubt they would pass their life on their knees,” but “they know that a flavour of vice is as necessary to their reputation as great ladies…they affect a licence [even] if they take it not.” Theatre outings are not for cultural enlightenment; they are to see who else is in attendance and to be seen oneself. After such a theatre visit, Rocca invites Lady Hilda and her cousin to his ancestral home for the day and it is revealed that he is (for an aristocrat) impoverished; his friend, M de St Louis, urges him to seduce Lady Hilda to secure his financial future. Rocca begins to make plans; Lady Hilda is decidedly not his ideal and never before has a member of his family “sold” themselves to a lover for material gain, but he is confident he can make her his own and restore his family fortunes at the same time. He therefore sets about the slow seduction, overlooking her cynicism, coldness and their incompatibility; but will he succeed and make the woman who has never loved anyone, become a captive of her emotions – and can Floralia, a jewel in the crown of Italian culture, also work its magic on her?
There is much here that is reminiscent of similar portrayals of the “idle rich”, but it is not derivative. The atmosphere of ennui, conspicuous consumption regardless of the debt incurred and utter self absorption, is similar to that in the play Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Christopher Hampton) and much could be gained by comparing Ouida’s story with one of its descendants. Ouida has been accused by some modern critics of timidity in her critiques of privilege, but this story is a damning portrait of the upper classes; little wonder Ouida was seen at the time and by more modern critics too, as a fierce opponent of such lifestyles and as something of a social agitator — even though, ironically, her own style of living, when she had the income to do it, was extravagant and rarely in good taste.
The first edition’s title page
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
An 1880’s yellow back edition of the novel
CHAPTER I.
FLORALIA was once a city of great fame. It stands upon an historical river. It is adorned with all that the Arts can assemble of beauty, of grace, and of majesty. Its chronicles blaze with heroical deeds and with the achievements of genius. Great men have been bred within its walls; men so great that the world has never seen their like again.
Floralia, in her liberties, in her citizens, in her poets and painters and sculptors, once upon a time had few rivals, perhaps, indeed, no equals, upon earth.
By what strange irony of fate, by what singular cynical caprice of accident, has this fairest of cities, with her time-honoured towers lifted to her radiant skies, become the universal hostelry of cosmopolitan fashion and of fashionable idleness? Sad vicissitudes of fallen fortunes! — to such base uses do the greatest come.
It is Belisarius turned croupier to a gaming-table; it is Cæsar selling cigars and newspapers; it is Apelles drawing for the “Albums pour Rire;” it is Pindar rhyming the couplets for “Fleur de the it is Praxiteles designing costumes for a Calico-ball; it is Phidias forming the poses of a ballet!
Perhaps the mighty ghosts of mediæval Floralia do walk, sadly and ashamed, by midnight under the shadow of its exquisite piles of marble and of stone. If they do, nobody sees them: the cigarette smoke is too thick.
As for the modern rulers of Floralia, they have risen elastic and elated to the height of the situation, and have done their best and uttermost to degrade their city into due accordance with her present circumstances, and have destroyed as much as they dared of her noble picturesqueness and ancient ways. They have tacked on to her venerable palaces and graceful towers, stucco mansions and straight hideous streets, and staring walls covered with advertisements, and barren boulevards studded with toy trees that are cropped as soon as they presume to grow a leaf, and have striven all they know to fit her for her fortunes, as her inn-keepers, when they take an antique palace, hasten to fit up a smoking-room, and, making a paradise of gas jets and liqueurs, write over it “Il Bar Americano.”
It is considered very clever to adapt oneself to one’s fortunes; and if so, the rulers of Floralia are very clever indeed; only the stucco and the straight streets and the frightful boulevards cost money, and Floralia has no money and a very heavy and terrible debt; and whether it be really worth while to deface a most beautiful and artistic city, and ruin your nobles and gentry, and grind down your artizans and peasants, and make your whole province impoverished and ill-content for the mere sake of pleasing some strangers by the stucco and the hoardings that their eyes are used to at home; — well, that perhaps may be an open question.
The Lady Hilda Vorarlberg had written thus far when she got tired, left off, and looked out of the window on to the mountain-born and poet-hymned river of Floralia. She had an idea that she would write a novel; she was always going to do things
that she never did do.
After all they were not her own ideas that she had written; but only those of a Floralian, the Duca della Rocca, whom she had met the night before. But then the ideas of everybody have been somebody else’s beforehand, — Plato’s, or Bion’s, or Theophrastus’s; or your favourite newspaper’s; — and the Lady Hilda, although she had been but two days in the Winter City, had already in her first drive shuddered at the stucco and the hoardings, and shivered at the boulevards and the little shaven trees. For she was a person of very refined and fastidious taste, and did really know something about the arts, and such persons suffer very acutely from what the peculiar mind of your modern municipalities calls, in its innocence, “improvements.”
The Lady Hilda had been to a reception too the night before, and had gone with the preconceived conviction that a certain illustrious Sovereign had not been far wrong when she had called Floralia the Botany Bay of modern society; but then the Lady Hilda was easily bored, and not easily pleased, and liked very few things, almost none; — she liked her horses, she liked M. Worth, she liked bric-à-brac, she liked her brother, Lord Clairvaux, and when she came to think of it, — well, that was really all.
The Lady Hilda was a beautiful woman, and knew it; she was dressed in the height of fashion, i.e.., like a mediaeval saint out of a picture; her velvet robe clung close to her, and her gold belt, with its chains and pouch and fittings, would not have disgraced Cellini’s own working; her hair was in a cloud in front and in a club behind; her figure was perfect: M.
Worth, who is accustomed to furnish figures as well as clothes, had a great reverence for her; in her, Nature, of whom generally speaking he is disposed to think very poorly, did not need his assistance; he thought it extraordinary, but as he could not improve her in that respect, he had to be content with draping Perfection, which he did to perfection of course.