by Ouida
“I should like one, of course,” said the Comtesse, “but I’ve had thirty new ones this season already — and what I owe Worth! — not to talk of the Maison Roger—”
“Let me give you one,” said the Lady Hilda. “Worth will do anything at short notice for either of us; and I must think this poor Postiche woman ought to see you in a new dress, as she’s never to see you again.”
“You are a darling, Hilda!” said Madame Mila, with ardent effusion, rising to kiss her cousin.
Lady Hilda turned to let the caress fall on the old guipure lace fichu round her throat, and drew her writing-things to her to pen a telegram to M. Worth.
“I suppose you don’t care to say what colour?” she asked as she wrote.
“Oh no,” answered the Comtesse. “He remembers all the combinations I’ve had much better than I do. You dictate to him a little too much; I’ve heard him say so—”
“He never said so to me,” said the Lady Hilda, with a laugh. “Of course I dictate to him. Whatever taste your dress-maker, man or woman, may have — and he has genius — there are little touches which should always come from oneself, and which can alone give originality. That is why all that herd of women, who really do go to Worth but yet are nobodies, look hardly the better for him; he thinks about us, and we think about ourselves; but he doesn’t think about them, and as they have no thought themselves the result is that they all look as conventional and similar as if they were dolls dressed for a bazaar. Women ought to be educated to more sense of colour and form. Even an ugly woman ought to be taught that it is her duty to make her ugliness as little disagreeable as possible. If the eyes and the taste of women were cultivated by artistic study, an ill-dressed woman would become an impossibility. If I were ever so poor,” continued the Lady Hilda impressively, “if I were ever so poor, and had to sew my own gowns, and make them of serge or of dimity, I would cut them so that Giorgione or Gainsborough, if they were living, would be able to look at me with complaisancy — or at all events without a shudder. It is not half so much a question of material as it is of taste. But nowadays the people who cannot afford material have no taste; so that after us, and the women whom Worth manages to make look decently in spite of themselves, there is nothing but a multitude of hideously-attired persons, who make the very streets appalling either by dreariness or gaudiness: — they never have any medium. Now a peasant girl of the Marche, or of the Agro Romana, or of the Pays de Vaud, is charming, because her garments have beauty of hue in them, and that other beauty which comes from perfect suitability and — Ah! come sta Duca?”
She interrupted herself, and turned to Della Rocca, who was standing behind her, the servant’s announcement of him having been unheard: it was her day to receive.
“Oh, that the rest of your sex, Madame,” he said, after his salutations were made, “could sit at your feet and take in those words of wisdom! Yes, I heard most that you said; I can understand your tongue a little; you are so right; it is the duty of every woman to make herself as full of grace as she can; all cannot be lovely, but none need be unlovely.”
“Exactly; women are reproached with thinking too much about dress, but the real truth is, they do not think enough about it — in the right way. They talk about it dreadfully, in the vulgarest fashion, but bring any thought to it they don’t. Most women will wear anything if it be only de rigueur. I believe if I, and Princess Mettemich, and Madame de Gallifet, and Madame Aguado, and a few like us wore that pea-green silk coat and waistcoat which the Advanced Thought Ladies of America are advocating as the best new kind of dress for women, that you would see ten thousand pea-green coats and waistcoats blazing in the streets the week afterwards—”
“Not a bad idea for the Cotton Costume ball,” said Madame Mila. “I will have a pea-green coat and waistcoat, a tall hat, and hessians; and call myself ‘Advanced Thought.’”
“To be completely in character, Mila, you must have blue spectacles, a penny whistle, a phial full of nostrums, a magpie for your emblem, and a calico banner, inscribed ‘Everything is Nothing!’—”
“Charming! It shall be the best thing there.
Draw it for me, Della Rocca, and I will send the sketch to Paris, so that it can all come in a box together, magpie and all.”
He drew a sheet of paper to him, and sketched the figure in ink, with spirit.
“You have all the talents — so many thanks,” said Madame Mila, looking over his shoulder. Della Rocca sighed.
“If I have them I have buried them, Madame — but, indeed, I can make no such claim.”
“So many thanks,” echoed the Comtesse. “Pray, don’t say a word about it, or we shall have a dozen ‘Advanced Thoughts’ in calico. Hilda, I am just going to Nina’s to see about the Muscadins. I have resolved we shall play that piece or no other. I shall be back in ten minutes, ask Olga to wait;” and Madame Mila wafted herself out of the room, and downstairs to the courtyard, where the coupé and the exemplary Maurice were waiting.
“How she does amuse herself!” said Lady Hilda, a little enviously. “I wish I could do it. What can it matter whether they play the Muscadins or anything else!”
“Plus on est fou, plus on rit,” said Della Rocca, sketching arabesques with his pen. “Nay, that is too impolite in me to charming Madame Mila. But, like all old proverbs, it is more true than elegant.”
“Do you know, Madame,” he continued, with a little hesitation, “I have often ventured to think that, despite your brilliancy, and your position, and all your enviable fate, you are not altogether — quite happy? Am I right? Or have I committed too great an impertinence to be answered?”
“No impertinence whatever,” said the Lady Hilda, a little wearily. “You may be right; I don’t know; I am not unhappy certainly; I have nothing to be unhappy about; but — most things seem very stupid to me. I confess Mila’s endless diversions and excitements are quite beyond me. There is such a terrible sameness in everything.”
“Because you have no deeper interests,” he answered her. He still sat near her at her writing-table beside the fire, and was playing with the little jewelled boy who held her pen-wiper. She did not answer him; and he continued “I think you have said yourself, Madame, the cause why everything seems more or less wearisome to you — you have ‘nothing to be unhappy about’; that is — you have no one for whom you care.”
He thought that her proud delicate face coloured a little; or it might be the warmth from the fire of oak-logs and pine-cones, “No; I don’t care about people,” she answered him indifferently. “When you have seen a person a few times — it is enough. It is like a book you have read through; the interest is gone; you know the mot d’énigme.”
“You speak of society; I spoke of affections.”
The Lady Hilda laughed a little.
“I can’t follow you. I do not feel them. I like Clairvaux, my brother, certainly, but we go years without seeing each other quite contentedly.”
“I spoke of affections, other affections,” replied Della Rocca, with a little impatience. “There is nothing else that gives warmth or colour to life. Without them there is no glow in its pictures, they are all painted en grisaille. Pleasure alone cannot content any one whose character has any force, or mind any high intelligence. Society is, as you say, a book we soon read through, and know by heart till it loses all interest. Art alone cannot fill more than a certain part of our emotions; and culture, however perfect, leaves us unsatisfied. There is only one thing that can give to life what your poet called the light that never was on sea or land — and that is human love.”
His eyes rested on her; and for once in her life her own eyes fell; a troubled softness came for a moment on her face, dispersing all its languor and its coldness. In another moment she recovered herself, and smiled a little.
“Ah! you are appassionato, as becomes your country.”
Della Rocca looked at her with something of disappointment and something of distaste; he rose and approached the grand piano.
“Si tu mi lasci, lasciar non ti voglio,
So m’ abbandoni, ti vo seguitare
Se passi il mare, il mar passare io voglio,
Se giri il mondo, il mondo vo’ girare,” &c.
The words were very simple, but the melody was passionate and beautiful; his voice, so low at first, rose louder, with all the yearning tenderness in it with which the song is laden; and the soft sounds echoed through the silent room, as they had echoed ten thousand times in moonlit nights of midsummer, over the land where Romeo and Stradella and Ariosto loved.
His voice sank softly into silence; and Lady Hilda did not move.
There was a mist that was almost like tears in her proud eyes; she gazed into the fire, with her cheek leaning on her hand; she did not speak to him; there was no sound but the falling of some burning wood upon the hearth.
“The simplest contadina in the land would understand that,” he said as he rose; “and you, great lady though you are, cannot? Madame, there are things, after all, that you have missed.”
“Go back and sing again,” she said to him, taking no notice of his words; “I did not know you ever sang—”
“Every Italian does; — or well or ill,” he answered her. “We are born with music in us, like the birds.”
“But in society who hears you?”
“No one. An atmosphere of gas, candles, ennui, perfume, heat, and inane flatteries! ah no, Madame — music is meant for silence, moonlight, vinepaths, summer nights—”
“This is winter and firelight, a few armchairs and a great deal of street noise; all the same, go back and sing me more.”
She spoke indifferently and lightly, leaning her hand back on her chair, and hiding a little yawn with her hand; she would not have him see that he had touched her to any foolish, momentary weakness. But he had seen. He smiled a little.
“As you command,” he answered, and he went back and made her music as she wished; short love lyrics of the populace, sonnets set to noble airs, wild mournful boat-songs, and snatches of soft melodies, such as echo all the harvest-time through the firefly-lighted corn: things all familiar to him from his infancy, but to her unknown, and full of the force and the yearning of the passion which was unknown to her also, and in a certain way derided by her.
He broke off abruptly, and came and leaned on the chimney-piece near her, with his arm amongst the little pug-dogs in Saxe, and figures and fountains in Capo di Monte, which she had collected in a few weeks from the bric-à-brac people. He did not speak; he only looked at her where she sat, with the firelight and the dying daylight on the silver fox-furs fringing her dress, on the repoussé gold and silver work of her loose girdle, on the ends of the old Spanish lace about her throat; on the great rings that sparkled on her white fingers, which were lying so idly clasped together on her lap.
“You sing very beautifully,” she said, calmly, at length, with her eyes half closed and her head lying back on the chair-cushions. “It is very strange you should be so mute in society.”
“I never sang to a crowd in my life, and never would. Music is an impulse, or it is nothing. I could never sing save to some woman who—”
He paused a moment.
“Who was music in herself,” he added with a smile; it was not what had been upon his lips.
“Then you should not have sung to me,” she said, still with half-closed eyes and a careless coldness in her voice. “I am all discord; have you not found that out? — every woman is, now-a-days; we have lost the secret of harmony; we are always wanting to be excited, and never succeeding in being anything but bored.”
“These are mere words, Madame,” he answered her, “I hope they are not true. By discord I think you only mean inconsistency. Pardon me — but I think you are all so wearied because of the monotony of your lives. I dare say that sounds very strangely to you, because you pursue all the pleasures and all the extravagances that are obtainable. But then all these are no novelties, they are merely habits. Habit is nothing better than a harness; even when it is one silvered and belled. You have exhausted everything too early; how can it have flavour? You pursue an unvarying routine of amusement: how can it amuse? The life of the great world is, after all, when we once know it well, as tiresome as the life of the peasant — perhaps more so. I know both.”
“All that may be right enough,” said the Lady Hilda, “but there is no help for it that I see. If the world is not amusing, that is not our fault. In the Beau Siècle, perhaps, or in Augustan Rome—”
“Be very sure it was the same thing. An artificial life must grow tiresome to any one with a mind above that of a parrot or a monkey. If we can be content with it, we deserve nothing better. What you call your discord is nothing but your dissatisfaction — the highest part of you. If it were not treason to say so, treason against this exquisite apparel, I would say that you would be more likely to know happiness were you condemned to the serge and the dimity you spoke of to Madame Mila an hour ago.”
He had sunk on a stool at her feet as he spoke, and caressed the silver fox and the gold girdle lightly; his hand touched hers in passing, and her face grew warm. She put a feather screen between her and the fire.
“That is the old argument of content in the cottage &c.,” she said, with a slight laugh. “I do not believe in it in the least. If it be ‘best repenting in a coach and six’ it must be best to be bored in an arm-chair—”
“Perhaps! It is not I, certainly, who should praise poverty!” he said, with some bitterness, and more sadness; “and, indeed, poverty or riches has little to do with the question of happiness; happiness can come but from one thing — .”
“A good conscience? How terribly moral you are.”
“No: — from our emotions, from our passions, from our sympathies; in fine, from Love.”
His hand still played with the gold gypsire of the girdle as he sat at her feet; his eyes were lifted to her face; his voice was very low; in all his attitude and action and regard there were an unuttered solicitation, an eloquence of unspoken meaning; she was silent: — then the door opened; he dropped the girdle, and rose to his feet; there came a patter of high heels, and a chime of swift aristocratic voices; and into the room there entered the Princess Olga, attended by her constant shadow, Don Carlo Maremma, with Lady Featherleigh behind her, accompanied by her attendant, Prince Nicolas Doggondorf.
“Ma chère, there is a regular riot going on at Nina’s,” said the Princess Olga, advancing with both hands outstretched. “All about those Muscadins. Mila has seceded in full form, and, of course, M. des Gommeux with her. Blanche will only play if they have ‘Il faut qu’une porte,’ &c., which is as old as the hills, and Mila won’t play at all if Blanche be allowed to play anything. They have quarrelled for life, so have Mila and Nina. They are slanging each other like two street boys. Alberto Rimini is on his knees between them, and the Due is declaring for the five thousandth time that it is the last he will ever have to do with theatricals. I left while I could escape with life. What a pity it is that playing for charity always developes such fierce hostilities. Well, Paolo, — have you thought better of the Postiche ball? No? How stiff-necked you are! I do believe Carlo will be the only Italian there!”
“It will be a distinction to inscribe on his tombstone, Madame,” said Della Rocca. “But then he goes under command —
“And under protest,” murmured Don Carlo. “Which does not count. When one is no longer a free agent—”
Princess Olga hit him a little blow with her muff.
“But why should you not go to the Postiches? Just as you go to the Veglione; it is nothing more.
“Madame, — I am very old-fashioned in my ideas, I dare say, but I confess I think that no one should accept as a host a person he would never accept as his guest. I may be wrong—”
“Of course you are wrong. That is not the q
uestion at all,” said Princess Olga, who did not like people to differ with her. “Joshua E. Postiche will never dream of being asked to shoot your wild ducks or your partridges. All he wants is that you should just be seen going up his staircase, and drinking his champagne. Society is full of Postiches: low people, with a craze for entertaining high people. They don’t care how we insult them, nor how we laugh at them, provided our cards lie in the bowl in their hall. We take them at their own valuation, and treat them as we treat the waiters at Spillman’s or Doney’s; we have paid the bill with our cards.”
“That is to say, we have paid with our names — which should represent all the honour, dignity, and self-respect that we have inherited, and are bound to maintain, for our own sakes and for those who may come after us.”
“Oh, mon Dieu, quel grand sérieux!” cried the Princess, impatiently. “But, of course, if you’ve been sitting with Hilda you have got more stiff-necked than ever. What do you say, Hilda? Isn’t it ill-natured of him? He need only walk in, bow once to the woman, and look on at the edge of the ball-room for twenty minutes. The other men will go if he will do as much as that.”
“I think M. della Rocca quite right not ‘to do as much as that,’” said the Lady Hilda. “Why Society ever does as much as that, or half as much, or anything at all, for Joshua R. Postiche, I can never tell. As it does, — to be consistent everybody should dine with the fruit woman from the street corner, and play écarté with their own chimney sweeps.”
“Oh, we shall come to that, Madame,” said Nicolas Doggondorf. “At least, if chimney sweeping ever make heaps of money; I don’t think it does; it only chokes little boys — .”
“Ce bon Monsieur Postiche sold rum and molasses,” murmured Don Carlo.
“What’s it to us what he sold?” said Lady Featherleigh. “We’ve nothing to do with him; we’re only going to his ball. You talk as if we asked the man to dinner.”
“What does the Archduchess Anna always say: ‘Où je m’amuse — j’y vais.’ So we do all. I hear he has been put up for the Club; is it true?” added the Princess to Carlo Maremma.