by Ouida
“Oh ho! — all that you find out already? You did not amuse her long?—”
“C’est une femme exagérée en tout,” pursued Della Rocca, disregarding.
“No! Exaggeration is vulgar — is bad taste.
Her taste is excellent — unexceptionable—”
“Exagérée en tout!” repeated Della Rocca, with much emphasis. “Dress — jewels — habits — temper — everything. She had three hundred pots of flowers in her room!”
“Flower-pots, pooh! — that is English. It is very odd,” pursued the Duc pensively, “but they really do like the smell of flowers.”
“Only because they cost so much to rear in their fogs. If they were common as with us, they would throw them out of the window as we do.”
“Nevertheless, send her three hundred pots more. Il faut commencer la cour, mon cher.” Della Rocca looked out into the rain.
“I have no inclination — I dislike a woman of the world.”
The Duc chuckled a little.
“Ah, ah! since when, caro mio?”
“There is no simplicity — there is no innocence — there is no sincerity—”
“Bah!” said the Due, with much disdain; “I do not know where you have got those new ideas, nor do I think they are your own at all. Have you fallen in love with a ‘jeune Mees’ with apple-red cheeks and sweatmeats in her pocket? Simplicity — innocence — sincerity. Very pretty. Our old friend of a million vaudevilles, L’Ingénue. We all know her. What is she in real truth? — A swaddled bundle of Ignorance. Cut the swaddling band — ugh! and Ignorance flies to Knowledge as Eve did, only Ignorance does not want to know good and evil: the evil contents her: she stops short at that. — Yes — yes, L’Ingénue will marry you that she may read Zola and Belot; that she may go to La Biche au Bois; that she may smoke cigars with young men; that she may have her dresses cut half-way down her spine; that she may romp like a half drunk harlot in all the cotillons of the year! Whereas your woman of the world, if well chosen—”
“Will have done all these things beforehand at some one else’s expense, and will have tired of them, — or not have tired — ; of the display of spine and of the cotillon she will certainly never have tired unless she be fifty—”
“That is not precisely what I mean,” said the Duc, caressing his small white moustache. “No; I said well chosen — well chosen. What it can matter to you whether your wife smokes with young men, or reads bad novels, or romps till breakfast, I do not see myself. There is a natural destiny for husbands. The unwise fret over it — the wise profit by it. But considering that you dislike these things in your own wife, however much you like and admire them in the wives of other persons, I would still say, avoid our friend of a million vaudevilles — la petite Mees de seize ans. Ignorance is not innocence, it is a great mistake to suppose that it even secures it. Your Mees would seize Belot and Zola à la reveille des noces — . Miladi yonder, for in stance, when they come to her from her bookseller’s, throws them aside, unread — —”
“There was a book of Zola’s on her table today —— — —”
“I would bet ten thousand francs that she had not gone beyond the title-page,” interrupted the Due, with petulance. “TASTE, mon cher Della Rocca, is the only sure guarantee in these matters. Women, believe me, never have any principle. Principle is a backbone, and no woman — except bodily — ever possesses any backbone. Their priests and their teachers and their mothers fill them with doctrines and conventionalities — all things of mere word and wind. No woman has any settled principles; if she have any vague ones, it is the uttermost she ever reaches, and those can always be overturned by any man who has any influence over her. But Taste is another matter altogether. A woman whose taste is excellent is preserved from all eccentricities and most follies. You never see a woman of good sense afficher her improprieties or advertise her liaisons as women of vulgarity do. Nay, if her taste be perfect, though she have weaknesses, I doubt if she will ever have vices. Vice will seem to her like a gaudy colour, or too much gold braid, or very large plaids, or buttons as big as saucers, or anything else such as vulgar women like. Fastidiousness, at any rate, is very good postiche for modesty: it is always decent, it can never be coarse. Good taste, inherent and ingrained, natural and cultivated, cannot alter. Principles — ouf! — they go on and off like a slipper; but good taste is indestructible; it is a compass that never errs. If your wife have it — well, it is possible she may be false to you; she is human, she is feminine; but she will never make you ridiculous, she will never compromise you, and she will not romp in a cotillon till the morning sun shows the paint on her face washed away in the rain of her perspiration. Virtue is, after all, as Mme de Montespan said, une chose tout purement géographique. It varies with the hemisphere like the human skin and the human hair; what is vile in one latitude is harmless in another. No philosophic person can put any trust in a thing which merely depends upon climate; but, Good Taste—”
The cab stopped at the club, and the Duc in his disquisition.
“Va faire la cour,” he said, paternally, to his companion as they went through the doors of their Cercle. “I can assure you, mon cher, that the taste of Miladi is perfect.”
“In dress, perhaps,” assented Della Rocca.
“In everything. Va faire la cour.”
Paolo, Duca della Rocca, was a very handsome man, of the finest and the most delicate type of beauty; he was very tall, and he carried himself with stateliness and grace; his face was grave, pensive, and poetic; in the largest assembly people who were strangers to him always looked at him, and asked, “Who is that?”
He was the head of a family, very ancient and distinguished, but very impoverished; in wars and civil war all their possessions had drifted away from them piece by piece, hence, he was a great noble on a slender pittance. It had always been said to him, and of him, as a matter of course, that he would mend his position by espousing a large fortune, and he had been brought up to regard such a transaction in the light of a painful but inevitable destiny.
But although he was now thirty-eight years of age, he had never seen, amongst the many young persons pointed out to him as possessing millions, anyone to whom he could prevail upon himself to sell his old name and title.
The Great Republic inspires, as it is well known, a passion for social and titular distinctions in its enterprising sons and daughters, which is, to the original flunkeyism of the mother country, as a Gloire de Dijon to a dog-rose, as a Reine Claude to a common blue plum. Nor are the pretty virgins whom the Atlantic wafts across, in any way afflicted with delicacy or hesitation if they can but see their way to getting what they want; and they strike the bargain, or their mothers do so for them, with a cynical candour as to their object which would almost stagger the manager of a Bureau de Manage.
Many and various were the gold-laden damsels of the West, who were offered, or offered themselves, to him. But he could not induce himself; — his pride, or his taste, or his hereditary instincts, were too strong for him to be able to ally himself with rag and bone merchants from New York, or oil-strikers from Pennsylvania, or speculators from Wall Street.
No doubt it was very weak of him; a dozen men of the great old races of Europe married thus every year, but Paolo della Rocca loved his name, as a soldier does his flag, and he could not brave the idea of possibly transmitting to his children traits and taints of untraceable or ignoble inherited influences.
Over and over again he allowed himself to be the subject of discussion amongst those ladies whose especial pleasure it is to arrange this sort of matters; but when from discussion it had been ready to pass into action, he had always murmured to his match-making friend —
“A little more time! — next year.”
“Bah! ce n’est qu’une affaire de notaire,” said his special protectress in these matters, a still charming Russian ex-ambassadress, who constantly wintered in Floralia, and who, having had him as a lover when he was twenty and she was thirty, felt quite a maternal interest
in him still as to his marriage and prospects.
Della Rocca was too much a man of the world and of his country not to be well aware that she spoke the truth; it was only an affair for the notaries, like any other barter; still he put it off; it would have to be done one day, but there was no haste, — there would always be heiresses willing and eager to become the Duchess della Rocca, Princess of Palmarola, and Marchioness of Tavignano, as his roll of old titles ran.
And so year by year had gone by, and he vaguely imagined that he would in time meet what he wanted without any drawbacks: a delusion common to everyone, and realised by no one.
Meanwhile, the life he led, if somewhat purposeless, was not disagreeable; being an Italian, he could live like a gentleman, with simplicity, and no effort to conceal his lack of riches; nor did he think his dignity imperilled because he did not get into debt for the sake of display; he would dine frugally without thinking himself dishonoured; refuse to join in play without feeling degraded; and look the finest gentleman in Europe without owing his tailor a bill.
For other matters he was somewhat désœuvré. He had fought, like most other young men of that time, in the campaign of ‘59, but the result (disappointed him; and he was at heart too honest and too disdainful to find any place for himself in that struggle between cunning and corruption, of which the political life of our regenerated Italy is at present composed. Besides, he was also too indolent. So for his amusement he went to the world, and chiefly to the world of great ladies; and for his duties made sufficient for himself out of the various interests of the neglected old estates which he had inherited; for the rest he was a man of the world; that he had a perfect manner, all society knew; whether he had character as well, nobody cared; that he had a heart at all, was only known to himself, his peasantry, and a few women.
CHAPTER III.
THE next morning the sun shone brilliantly; the sky was blue; the wind was a very gentle breeze from the sea; Lady Hilda’s breakfast chocolate was well made; the tea-roses and the heliotrope almost hid the magenta furniture and the gilded plaster consoles, and the staring mirrors. They had sent her in a new story of Octave Feuillet; M. de St. Louis had forwarded her a new volume of charming verse by Sully Prudhomme, only sold on the Boulevards two days before, with a note of such grace and wit that it ought to have been addressed to Elysium for Mme de Sévigné; the post brought her only one letter, which announced that her brother, Lord Clairvaux, would come thither to please her, after the Newmarket Spring Meeting, or perhaps before, since he had to see “Major Fridolin” in Paris.
On the whole, the next morning Lady Hilda, looking out of the hotel window, decided to stay in Floralia.
She ordered her carriage out early, and drove hither and thither to enjoy tranquilly the innumerable treasures of all the arts in which the city of Floralia is so rich.
A Monsignore whom she knew well, learned, without pedantry, and who united the more vivacious accomplishments of the virtuoso to the polished softness of the churchman, accompanied her. The Clairvaux people from time immemorial had been good Catholics.
Lady Hilda for her part never troubled her head about those things, but she thought unbelief was very bad form, and that to throw over your family religion was an impertinence to your ancestors. Some things in the ceremonials of her church grated on her aesthetic and artistic ideas, but then these things she attributed to the general decadence of the whole age in taste.
Her Monsignore went home to luncheon with her, and made himself as agreeable as a courtly churchman always is to every one; and afterwards she studied the Penal Settlement more closely by calling on those leaders of it whose cards lay in a heap in her anteroom, and amused herself with its mind and manners, its attributes and antecedents.
“After all, the only people in any country that one can trust oneself to know are the natives of it,” she said to herself, as she went to the weekly “day” of the infinitely charming Marchesa del Trasimene, nata Da Bolsena, where she met Della Rocca and M. de St. Louis, as everybody meets everybody else, morning, afternoon, and evening, fifty times in the twenty-four hours in Floralia, the results being antipathy or sympathy in a fatal degree.
In her girations she herself excited extreme attention and endless envy, especially in the breasts of those unhappy outsiders whom she termed the Penal Settlement.
There was something about her! — Worth Pingât and La Ferrière dressed the Penal Settlement, or it said they did. Carlo Maremma always swore that there was a little dressmaker who lived opposite his stable who could have told sad truths about many of these Paris-born toilettes; but no doubt Maremma was wrong, because men know nothing about these things, and are not aware that a practised eye can tell the sweep of Worth’s scissors under the shoulder-blades as surely as a connoisseur recognises the hand of Boule or Vernis Martin on a cabinet or an etui. At any rate, the Penal Settlement swore it was adorned by Worth, Pingât and La Ferrière in all the glories and eccentricities imaginable of confections, unies and mélangées, Directoire and Premier Empire, Juive and Louis Quinze; and if talking about a theory could prove it, certainly they proved that they bore all Paris on their persons.
But there was something about her — it was difficult to say what; perhaps it was in the tip of her Pompadour boot, or perhaps it hid in the back widths of her skirt, or perhaps it” lurked in the black sable fur of her dolman, but a something that made them feel there was a gulf never to be passed between them and this world-famed élégante.
Lady Hilda would have said her secret lay in her always being just a quarter of an hour in advance of the fashion. She was always the first person to be seen, in what six weeks afterwards was the rage: and when the rage came, then Lady Hilda had dropped the fashion. Hence she was the perpetual despair of all her sex — a distinction which she was quite human enough to enjoy in a contemptuous sort of way; as contemptuous of herself as of others; for she had a certain vague generosity and largeness of mind which lifted her above mean and small emotions in general.
She had been steeped in the world, as people call that combination of ennui, excitement, selfishness, fatigue, and glitter, which forms the various delights of modern existence, till it had penetrated her through and through, as a petrifying stream does the supple bough put in it. But there were little corners in her mind which the petrifaction had not reached.
This morning — it was half-past five o’clock in a November afternoon, and pitch dark, but of course it was morning still as nobody had dined, the advent of soup and sherry bringing the only meridian recognised in society — the Lady Hilda refreshed with a cup of tea from the samovar of her friend the Princess Olga Schouvaloff, who came yearly to her palace in the historical river-street of historical Floralia, and having been assured by Princess Olga, that if they kept quite amongst themselves, and never knew anybody else but the Floralian Russian and German nobility, and steadfastly refused to allow anybody else to be presented to them, Floralia was bearable — nay, even really agreeable, — she got into her coupé, and was driven through the gloom to her hotel.
Her head servant made, her two announcements: — Madame de Caviare had arrived that morning, and hoped to see her before dinner.
Lady Hilda’s brows frowned a little.
The Duca della Rocca had sent these flowers.
Lady Hilda’s eyes smiled a little.
They were only some cyclamens fresh from the country, in moss. She had regretted to him the day before that those lovely simple wood flowers could not be found at florists’ shops nor in flower women’s baskets.
After all, she said to herself, it did not matter that Mila had come; she was silly and not very proper, and a nuisance altogether; but Mila was responsible for her own sins, and sometimes could be amusing. So the Lady Hilda, in a good-humoured and serene frame of mind, crossed the corridor to the apartments her cousin had taken just opposite to her own.
“He is certainly very striking looking — like a Vandyke picture,” she thought to herself irrelevant
ly, as she tapped at her cousin’s door; those cyclamens had pleased her; yet she had let thousands of the loveliest and costliest bouquets wither in her anteroom every year of her life, without deigning to ask or heed who were even the senders of them.
“Come in, if it’s you, dear,” said Madame Mila, ungrammatically and vaguely, in answer to the tap.
The Countess de Caviare was an Englishwoman, and a cousin, one of the great West country Trehillyons whom everybody knows, her mother having been a Clairvaux. She had been grandly married in her first season to a very high and mighty and almost imperial Russian, himself a most good-humoured and popular person, who killed all his horses with fast driving, gambled very heavily, and never amused himself anywhere so well as in the little low dancing places round Paris.
Madame Mila, as her friends always called her, was as pretty a little woman as could be imagined, who enamelled herself to such perfection that she had a face of fifteen, on the most fashionable and wonderfully costumed of bodies; she was very fond of her cousin Hilda, because she could borrow so much money of her, and she had come to Floralia this winter because in Paris there was a rumour that she had cheated at cards — false, of course, but still odious.
If she had made a little pencil mark on some of the aces, where was the harm in that?
She almost always played with the same people, and they had won heaps of money of her.
Whilst those horrid creatures in the city and on the bourse were allowed to “rig the market,” and nobody thought the worse of them for spreading false news to send their shares up or down, why should not one poor little woman try to help on Chance a little bit at play?
She was always in debt, though she admitted that her husband allowed her liberally. She had eighty thousand francs a year by her settlements to spend on herself, and he gave her another fifty thousand to do as she pleased with: on the whole about one half what he allowed to Blanche Souris, of the Château Gaillard theatre.