by Ouida
“Yes, Krunensberg has put him up,” he answered her, “but he shall never get into it, while there are any of us alive.”
“Et s’il n’y a qu’un, moi je serai celui-là,” quoted Della Rocca.
“But he has lent Krunensberg heaven knows what — some say two million francs,” said Lady Featherleigh.
Prince Krunensberg was a great personage, and, for a foreigner, of great influence in the Club.
“Chère dame,” said Della Rocca, “if we elect all Krunensberg’s creditors we shall have to cover three streets with our club-house!”
“Oh my dear! I am half dead!” cried Madame Mila, flashing into the room, gorgeous in the feathers of the golden pheasant, arranged on the most exquisite combination of violet satin, and bronze velvet, and throwing her muff on one side of her and her parasol on the other, while Maurice des Gommeux, who was the most admirable of upper servants, stooped for them and smoothed their ruffled elegance. “I am half dead! Such a scene I never went through in my life. I, who hate scenes, and never have any hardly even with Spiridion! Oh, has Olga told you? Yes; it is horrible, infamous, intolerable! — after all I have done for that odious Dumb Asylum — and my costumes ordered for the Muscadins, and half the part learnt! It is all Krunensberg’s doing — and the Duc didn’t stand out one half as he should have done; and Blanche! — the idea — the little wretch is made of wood, and can’t even open her mouth! As for Krunensberg, he deserves to be shot! It is all his influence that has set Nina against the Muscadins — just to spite me! What I have gone through about this wretched theatre — and then to have that little chit of a Blanche set over my head, a little creature, only married out of her convent last year; — it is unbearable; of course, neither I nor des Gommeux shall play. Oh, here comes the Duc; — no, Duc, it is not the slightest use! If you have that ridiculous musty old piece of De Musset’s, or if you have Blanche in it at all you don’t have Me in anything. A nice morning’s work you have made of it! Nina and I shall never speak again.”
The Duc laid his hat aside; his delicate features were puckered, weary, and troubled.
“Mais, Madame, pardon! — mais vous avez toutes dit les choses les plus affreuses!—”
“Women always do, Duc, when they are in a passion,” said Lady Hilda. “There is nothing like a scene for discovering our real opinions of one another. Why! you look actually — worried! I thought nothing ever ruffled you by any chance whatever.”
“Madame,” said M. de St. Louis, stretching himself, with a sigh, in a low chair beside her and the fire, “I have always sedulously cultivated serenity. I believe serenity to be the whole secret of human health, happiness, longevity, good taste, sound judgment, everything in point of fact that is desirable in the life of a human being. But, alas! we are all mortal, and our best plans are but finite. In an evil moment, when Pandora’s box was packed, there was put in with it by the malice of Mercury a detonating powder, called Amateur Rivalry. When all the other discords were dispersed, this shot itself into the loveliest forms and the gentlest bosoms; and where it explodes — the wisest man stands helpless. He cannot reconcile the warring elements nor retain any personal peace himself. I am the slave of Madame Mila; I adore the dust of the exquisite shoes of Madame Nina; I am penetrated with the most absolute devotion to Madame Blanche; — when these heavenly graces are ready to rend each other’s hair, what can I do? What can I be except the most unhappy person upon earth? To reconcile ladies who are infuriated is a hopeless dream; it were easier to make whole again a broken glass of Venice. It makes one almost wish,” added the Duc with a second sigh, “almost wish that Molière had never been created, or, being created, had never written. But for Molière I doubt very much if the Drama, as an Art, would have lingered on to the present time.”
“Console yourself, my dear Duc,” said Lady Hilda, “console yourself with a line from Molière: ‘Cinq ou six coups de bâton entre gens-qui s’aiment ne font que ragaillardir l’amitié.’ Mila, Nina, and Blanche will kiss each other to-morrow; they must, or what becomes of the great Contes de Mère d’Oie Quadrille to open the Roubleskoff ball next week?”
“I shall never speak to either of them as long as I live,” said Madame Mila, still ruffling all her golden feathers in highest wrath. “As for the quadrille — the Roubleskoff must do as they can. I do think Krunensberg has made Nina perfectly odious; I never saw anybody so altered by a man in my life. Well, there’s one thing, it won’t last. His ‘affairs’ never do.”
“It will last as long as her jewels do,” said Carlo Maremma.
“Oh, no, he can’t be quite so bad as that.”
“Foi d’honneur! — since he left the Sant’ Anselmo you have never seen her family diamonds except in the Paris paste replica, which she tells you she wears for safety, and because it is such a bore to have to employ policemen in plain clothes at the balls—”
“Talk of policemen!” said Madame Mila, “they say we’re to have a caution sent us from the Prefecture about our playing baccarat the other night at the café — they say no gambling is allowed in the city — the idea!”
“While the State organises the lotteries! — how very consistent,” said the Lady Hilda.
“All your gaming is against the law, angels of my soul,” said Carlo Maremma.
“Then well all leave Floralia,” said Madame Mila. “The idea of not being able to do what one chooses in one’s own rooms! — there is one thing, we can always go up to Roubleskoff’s; — they will never dare to caution him. But what is the use of all this fuss? — everybody plays — everybody always will play.”
“The Prefect is much too wise a man ever to imagine he can prevent ladies doing what they like,” said Maremma. “It is those tremendous losses of young De Fabris the other night that have made a stir, and the Prefect thinks it necessary to say something; he is afraid of a scandal.”
“Good gracious! As if anything filled a city half so well as a scandal! Why don’t Floralia have a good gaming place like Monte Carlo? we shouldn’t want to use our own rooms then —— —— — —”
“I confess,” said the Duc, in his gentle, meditative voice, “I confess that, like Miladi here, I fail to altogether appreciate the moral horror of a game at baccarat entertained by a municipality which in its legislation legalises the lottery. All gaming may be prejudicial to the moral health of mankind; it is certainly so to their purses. I am prepared to admit, even in face of Madame Mila’s direst wrath, that all forms of hazard are exceedingly injurious to the character and to the fortunes of every person tempted by them. It may be impossible even to exaggerate their baneful influences or their disastrous consequences. But how can a government which publicly patronizes, sustains, and enriches itself by lotteries, have any logic in condemning the pastime of hazard in a private drawing-room or a private club-house? I confess I cannot see how they reconcile both courses. A government, whatever it be, should never be an anomaly.”
“Lotteries are to us what bull-fighting is to Spaniards, and revolutions are to the French,” said Carlo Maremma. “Every nation has its especial craze. The lottery is ours.”
“But is it for a government to intensify and pander to, and profit by a national insanity?” said Della Rocca with much seriousness. “When Rome bent to the yell of Panem et Circences, the days of her greatness were numbered. Besides, the Duc is quite right — it is a ridiculous anomaly to condemn games while you allow lotteries. Great harm may result from private gambling — greater still from the public gamingtables — but the evil after all is not a millionth part so terrible as the evil resulting from the system of public lotteries. The persons who are ruined by ordinary gaming, are, after all, persons who would certainly be ruined by some vice or another. The compound of avarice and excitement which makes the attraction of hazard does not allure the higher kinds of character; besides, the vice does not go to the player — the player goes to the vice. Now, on the contrary, the lottery attacks openly, and tries to allure in very despite of themselves the
much wider multitude that is the very sap and support of a nation — it entices the people themselves. It lures the workman to throw away his wage — the student to spend his time in feverish dreams — the simple day-labourer to consume his content in senseless calculations that often bring his poor empty brain, to madness. The lottery assails them in the street, is carried to them in their homes, drops them some poor prize at first to chain them in torment for ever afterwards. It changes honesty to cunning, peace to burning desire, industry to a perpetual waiting upon chance, manly effort to an imbecile abandonment to the dictates of signs and portents, and the expectancy of a fortune which never comes. Highborn gamblers are only the topmost leaves of the tree of the State; they may rot away without detriment to the tree, but the lottery lays the axe to the very trunk and root of it, because it demoralises the people.”
Lady Hilda listened, and watched him as he spoke with a grave and almost tender meditation in her eyes; which M. de St. Louis saw, and seeing, smiled.
“Say all that in the Chamber, caro mio,” muttered Carlo Maremma.
“I would go to the Chambers to say it, or to worse places even, were there any chance it would be attended to. Madame Mila, have I been so unhappy as to have offended you?”
“I am a top leaf that may rot! I was never told anything so rude in my life — from you too! the very soul of ceremonious courtesy.”
Della Rocca made his peace with her in flowery flattery.
“Well, I shall play baccarat to-night in this hotel, just because the Prefect has been so odious and done that,” said Madame Mila. “You will all come home with me after the Roubleskoff’s dinner? Promise!”
“Of course,” said the Princess Olga.
“Of course,” said Lady Featherleigh.
“Of course,” said everybody else.
“And if the gendarmes come in?”
“We will shoot them!”
“No; we will give them champagne — surer and more humane.”
“I wish the Prefect would come himself — I should like to tell him my mind,” continued Madame Mila. “So impudent of the man! — when all the Royal Highnesses and Grand Dukes and Duchesses in Europe only come to winter cities for play. He must know that.”
“My dear Mila, how you do put yourself out about it,” said the Lady Hilda. “Send ten thousand francs to the public charities — you may play all night long in the cafés then.”
“Madame, j’ai l’honneur de vous saluer,” murmured Della Rocca, bending low before her.
When the door had closed upon him and left the others behind, a sudden blankness and dullness seemed to fall on her: she had never felt the same thing before. Bored she had often been, but this was not ennui, it was a kind of loneliness — it was as if all about her grew grey and cold and stupid.
More ladies came in, there were endless laughter and chatter; Princess Olga wanted some tea, and had it; the other women cracked bonbons with their little teeth like pretty squirrels cracking fir-cones; they made charming groups in the firelight and lamplight; they made plans for a hundred diversions; they were full of the gayest of scandals; they dissected in the most merciless manner all their absent friends; they scolded their lovers and gave them a thousand contradictory orders; they discussed all the news and all the topics of the day, and arranged for dinner parties, and driving parties, and costume quadrilles, and bazaar stalls, and boxes at the theatre, and suppers at the cafés; and agreed that everything was as dull as ditchwater, and yet that they never had a minute for anything; and the Lady Hilda with the jubilant noise and the twittering laughter round her, thought how silly they all were, and what a nuisance it was having a day — only if one hadn’t a day it was worse still, because then they were always trying to run in at all hours on every day, and one was never free for a moment.
“Thank goodness, they are gone!” she said, half aloud, to the Saxe cups and the Capo di Monte children on the mantelpiece, when the last flutter of fur and velvet had vanished through the door, and the last of those dearest friends and born foes had kissed each other and separated.
Left alone, she stood thinking, by the fire, with all the lights burning behind her in that big, empty room. What she thought was a very humble and pensive thought for so disdainful a lady. It was only —
“Is it myself? or only the money?”
She stood some time there, motionless, her hand playing with the gold girdle as his hand had done; her face was pale, softened, troubled.
The clock amongst the Saxe dogs and the Capo di Monte little figures chimed the half-hour after six. She started as it struck, and remembered that she was to dine at eight with the Princess Roubleskoff; a big party for an English royalty on his travels.
“Anyhow, it would be of no use,” she said to herself. “Even if I did wish it, it could never be.”
And she was angry with herself, as she had been the night before; she was impatient of these new weaknesses which haunted her. Nevertheless she was more particular about her appearance that night than her maids had ever known her be; she was very difficult to satisfy; tried and discarded four wholly new confections of her Mend Worth’s, miracles of invention and of costliness, and at length had herself dressed quite simply in black velvet, only relieved by all her diamonds.
“He said fair women should always wear black,” she thought: it was not her Magister of Paris of whom she was thinking as the sayer of that wise phrase. And then again she was angry with herself for remembering such a thing, and attiring herself in obedience to it, and would have had herself undrest again only there was but one small quarter of an hour in which to reach the Roubleskoff villa; a palace of the fairies four miles from the south-gate. So she went as she was; casting a dubious impatient glance behind her at the mirrors.
“I look well,” she thought with a smile, and her content returned.
She knew that he would be present at the dinner. There is no escaping destiny in Floralia: people meet too often.
The dinner disappointed her.
She thought it very long and very stupid. She sat between the Grand Duke of Rittersbàhn and the Envoy of all the Russias, and Della Rocca was not placed within her sight; and after the dinner the young English Prince would talk to no one but herself, delightedly recalling to her how often she had bowled his wickets down when they had been young children playing on the lawns at Osborne. She felt disloyally thankless for his preference. He monopolised her. And as the rooms filled with the crowd of the reception she merely saw the delicate dark head of Della Rocca afar off, bent down in eager and possibly tender conversation with his beautiful countrywoman, the Duchess Medici-Malatesta. She felt angered and impatient.
If she had sat alone and neglected, as less lovely women often do, instead of being monopolised by a prince, with twenty other men sighing to take his place when etiquette should permit them, she could scarcely have been more ill-content.
Never in all her life had it befallen her to think angrily of another woman’s beauty; and now she caught herself irritatedly conning, across the width of the room, the classic profile and the immense jewel-like eyes of the Malatesta Semiramis. Never in all her life had it happened to her to miss any one thing that she desired, and now a strange sense of loneliness and emptiness came upon her, unreasoned and unreasoning; and she had such an impatience and contempt of herself too all the while! — that was the most bitter part of it.
After all it was too absurd, —— —
As soon as the departure of the royal guests permitted anyone to leave, she went away, contemptuous, ill at ease, and out of temper with herself and all the world; half ignorant of what moved her, and half unwilling to probe her own emotions further.
“Plus on est fou, plus on rit,” she murmured to her pillow two hours later with irritable disdain, as she heard the voices of Mme. Mila and her troop noisily passing her door as they returned to their night-long baccarat, which was to be doubly delightful because of the Prefect’s interdict.
“I wish I had
been born an idiot!” thought the Lady Hilda — as, indeed, any one must do who finds himself burdened with aching brains in this best of all possible worlds.
“Perhaps, after all, you were right,” said the Duc de St. Louis, driving back into the town with Della Rocca that night. “Perhaps you were right. Miladi is most lovely, most exquisite, most perfect. But she has caprices — there is no denying that she has caprices and extravagancies which would ruin any one short of the despotic sovereign of a very wealthy nation.”
The Duc was a very wise man, and knew that the escalier dérobé is the only way that leads in conversation to any direct information. Their demeanour had puzzled him, and he spoke accordingly with shrewd design.
Della Rocca heard him with a little annoyance.
“She has not more caprices than other women that I know of,” he answered. “Her faults are the faults rather of her monde than of herself.”
“But she has adopted them with much affection!”
“They are habits — hardly more.”
“And you were correct too in your diagnosis when you saw her first,” continued the Due, pitilessly. “To me she is most amiable always; but to the generality of people, it must be admitted that she is not so amiable.”
“The amiability of most women,” replied Della Rocca, “is nothing more than that insatiate passion for admiration which makes them show their persons almost nude at Trouville, and copy the ways and manners of femmes entretenues in the endeavour to rival such with us. If they wish to be decent, they do not dare to be; they must be popular and chic before all.”
“You are severe, but perhaps you are right. Miladi is certainly above all such vulgarities. Indeed, she is only a little too much above everything—”
“It is better than to be below everything — even below our respect — as most of our great ladies are.”
“Certainly. Still, she is a little — a little selfish.”