by Ouida
They brought Saïd out of the great wooden sweet-smelling outhouse, and he raised her in silence to her saddle. He gave her a little knot of the fragrant leafless calycanthus with a few sprays of myrtle; she put it in her bosom; it was already dusk, and he saw the softened dimness of her eyes.
They rode down together in the declining light through the winding ways of the outlying country into, the town; it was quite dark when they reached the gates; they had ridden fast and spoken scarcely at all.
As he lifted her from Saïd in the gloom within the scarcely lighted street, he pressed her softly for one second in his arms, so that she felt the beating of his heart.
“A rive derci!” he murmured.
She left him in silence, and without rebuke.
“Is that you, Duca?” said the voice of Madame Mila in the darkness, as a carriage, gorgeous with amber and gold liveries and with Carnival camellias at the horses’ heads, pulled up with great noise and haste before the hotel door.
“Is that you, Duca? I am so glad; I wanted to speak to you. The Corso was horridly stupid. I don’t care a bit except for the pelting days, do you. I sprained my arm last year in Rome with the pelting, and I really blinded poor Salvareo for a week. Why, dear me, that’s Saïd! Have you and Hilda been riding together?”
“I met your cousin, Madame, by chance; she had lost her way. It is very easy to do so amongst our hills.”
“How very fortunate that you met her!” said Madame Mila, with a little saucy laugh. “She will kill herself riding that horrid Saïd some day — perhaps she will listen to you if you tell her not. What was it I wanted to say, — oh, I want a very good box for the Veglione. You are one of the directors of the opera, are you not?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Well, mind I have one; big enough to hold the supper table comfortably; and see Maurice about it, and dine with me tomorrow, will you? Nina and Olga and the usual people. Dear me, how these horses do fidget. How very nice that you should have met dear Hilda just when she’d lost her way! Good bye; but, of course, you’ll be at the Roubleskoffs’ to-night? I wish it wasn’t costume. I’m England, and I’m embroidered all over with Union Jacks; and I have a little Khedive on a gold stick that keeps tumbling up and down; and I carry a ship in full sail on the top of my head. I assure you it’s very trying to be a Naval Power. How ever I shall be able to waltz with that ship!—”
Della Rocca rode away in the darkness, as the skirts of Madame Mila vanished in the hotel doorway with the gleam of the golden-pheasant trimmings shining under the gas lamp.
He went home to his solitary dinner, and scarcely touched it, and barely even noticed his dog. He sat alone a long time, thinking, in the same room where, four months before, he had pondered on the Duc de St. Louis’s counsels, and had decided to himself that this woman, beautiful though she was, was arrogant, unimpressionable, extravagantly capricious, and in every way antagonistic to him.
Now, he was passionately in love with her himself; he knew that she was deeply moved by him; he believed that he had only to ask and have; and yet he hesitated.
It was the marriage of all other marriages for him; he had softened and subdued her in a manner which could not but intoxicate his vanity, though he had less vanity than most men; he did not distrust her character, because he believed that there was a vague lofty nobility in it, and a latent, though untouched, tenderness; of her caprices, of her changefulness, of her moods of contempt, and of impatience, he had no fear; he would substitute other emotions for them. And yet he hesitated; he was unresolved; he was doubtful whether to accept the empire he had obtained.
He would have concluded a marriage of interest as coldly and tranquilly as any other man with a woman to whom he was indifferent. But with this woman whose mere touch thrilled him to the heart, and whose imperious eyes had only grown gentle for his sake! — never had he felt his poverty so painfully as in this moment when supreme Fortune seemed to have smiled upon him.
Though he loved her with passion, he almost wished that he had never seen her face.
After all, though generous, she was arrogant; — sooner or later she might make him feel that the golden sceptre was hers and not his. To his temper, which, although gentle, was deeply ingrained with the pride which had been transmitted to him from many generations of a feudal nobility, such a possibility seemed unendurable. He sat still lost in thought till his lamp grew low, and the wind rising loud, shook the leaded panes of the old high windows.
“I suppose when Fortune does smile at us, we always quarrel with her so,” he thought, with some impatience of his own irresolution.
After all, what other man in Europe would not have been content?
He got up, caressed the dog, turned the lamp higher, and went into his bed-chamber.
“Get out the white mousquetaire dress,” he said to his old servant. “I will go to the Roubleskoff ball.”
All patrician Floralia was at the Roubleskoff ball, one of the last great entertainments of the expiring Carnival. In six more days there would come the Day of Ashes; and Floralia would repent her sins in sadness, — that is, with only musical parties, a dinner here and there, and no suppers at all; (perhaps a ball might be squeezed in once or twice by grace of the Russian Calendar, but, then, if you took advantage of that you were brouillé with all the codini at once).
He reached the Roubleskoff villa late, not so late but what he was in time to see the arrival of the woman who had sat with him at her feet, and talked with him of Meleager and the white narcissus flowers.
Lady Hilda entered like a sovereign, and drew all eyes on herself.
She was attired as Vittoria Colonna, and carried her purples and cloth of gold with more than royal grace; the colour on her cheek was heightened, her eyes had a dewy brilliancy; what they spoke to her she seemed hardly to hear.
He was as her shadow all the evening.
They were both feverishly happy; both curiously troubled. Neither cared to look onward.
Society there assembled said that it was a great thing for the Duca della Rocca; and wondered whether they would live most in Floralia or Paris.
“C’est moi qui a inspiré cela,” said the Duc de St. Louis, with much self-complacency, sitting down to the whist table; he was quite sure that all was right; he had seen the look in the eyes of both of them.
“She will compromise herself at last. Oh, what a comfort it will be!” thought little Madame Mila, carrying her frigate in full sail airily through the mazes of the cotillon, with a sleeveless bodice on, cut so low that it was really as good — or as bad — as if she had had nothing at all. She did not wish any harm, of course, only, really, Hilda, with a lover like other people, would be so much more natural and agreeable.
“But they will marry, people say,” suggested M. des Gommeux, to whom alone she confided these ideas.
“When do people ever say anything that is true?” said Madame Mila, with profound contempt, tossing her little head till the Naval Power of England was in jeopardy. She was irritated to hear Maurice even talk about marriage; it was an improper thing for him even to mention, considering his relation to herself. When he approached any young girl or marriageable woman of any sort, Madame Mila bristled like a little angry terrier that sees a cat; on the whole, she was still more exacting than Miles.
Rose The and Boulotte, and whereas in society he could escape from them, he could in nowise escape from her.
If it had been a question of marriage for her cousin, indeed, Madame Mila would have opposed it tooth and nail; she had a feeling, a very accurate one, that Della Rocca did not approve of herself, and that he would certainly never allow his wife, if he had one, to be very intimate with her. But Madame Mila knew what other people did not; that there could be no question of such a marriage for her cousin; and so she smiled on Della Rocca, and was always engaging him to dinner; because Lady Hilda, with her lover about her, like any one else, would be so much more humanized and natural, and would sympathise so much b
etter with other people.
That kind of virtue of Hilda’s — if it were virtue — was such an odd, chilly, unpleasant thing, she thought; to live in that way, with hundreds of men seeking her, and cold alike to them all, was something so very unnatural; it was almost as bad as being one of those queer women who wouldn’t tie their skirts back, or wear high heels, or dress their hair properly: — it was so strange, too, in a person who, in all other matters, was the very queen of fashion, the very head and front of the most perfect worldliness.
It was very late and daylight quite when Lady Hilda, contrary to her custom, left the ball; she had been happy with a warmth and feverishness of happiness altogether new to her; nothing more had passed between them, but they had been together all the night, although never alone.
She stood a moment in the doorway facing the daylight. Most women are ruined by such a test; she looked but the fairer for it, with the sunrise flush touching her cheeks, and the pearls and the diamonds in her hair.
“I may come to you early,” he murmured, as she paused that instant on the step.
“Yes — no. No: I shall be tired. Wait till the evening. You are coming to Mila.”
The words were a denial; but on her lips there was sweetness, and in her eyes a soft emotion as she moved onward and downward to the carriage.
He was not dissatisfied nor dismayed. As he drew the furs over her gold-laden skirts, his head bore lower and lower, and his lips touched her hand and her arm.
“The sun is up. I never am so late as this,” she said, as though she did not feel those kisses; but, by the clear light of the day-dawn, he saw the blood mantle over her throat and bosom, and the tremulous shadow of a smile move her mouth.
The horses sprang forward; he stood on the lower step, grave and lost in thought.
“Is it too early to offer felicitations, my friend?” said the Duc de St. Louis, passing to go homeward; he had been playing whist all night.
“I do not understand you,” he answered, with the tranquil falsehood of society.
The question annoyed him deeply. He loved this woman with all the tenderness and passion of his temperament, and loved her the more for the ascendency he had gained over her and the faults that he saw in her; he loved her generously, truly, and with purer desire than most men. Yet what would his love for her ever look to the world? — since he was poor.
Meanwhile she, with her fair hair tumbled about her pillows, and her gorgeous cloth of gold lying on a couch like a queen’s robes abandoned, slept restlessly, yet with a smile on her face, some few hours: when she awoke it was with a smile, and with that vague sweet sense of awakening to some great joy, which is one of the most precious gifts of happiness; dreamful misty sense of expectation and recollections blending in one, and making the light of day beautiful.
She lay still some time, awake, and yet dreaming, with half-closed eyelids and her thick hair loosened and covering her shoulders, and the sweet scent close at hand of a glassful of myrtle and calycanthus, that she had been very careful to tell them to set near her bed. Lazily, after awhile, she rang a little bell, and bade her maids open her shutters, the grand light of the noonday poured into the chamber.
“Give me a mirror,” she said to them.
When they gave her one,’ she looked at herself and smiled again: she was one of those women who are lovely when they wake: there are not many.
They brought her her chocolate, and she sipped a little of it, and lay still, looking at the myrtle and hearing the ringing of church bells from across the water; she was happy; it seemed to her that all her life before had not been happiness after all; — only pleasure.
An hour later her maid brought her a telegram. She opened it with a little impatience. Why should anything break in on her day dream?
It merely said that her brother was in Paris, and would come onward; and be with her that night. She let the papers fall, as though she were stung by an adder.
It recalled to her what she had forgotten.
CHAPTER X.
LORD CLAIRVAUX arrived in time for Madame Mila’s dinner. He was an affectionate and sunny-tempered man; he did not notice that his sister did not once say she was glad to see him.
Della Rocca did notice it, with that delicate unerring Italian perception, which is as fine as a needle and as subtle as mercury.
He saw, too, that something had come over her; some cloud; some change; she had lost much of her proud serenity, and she looked at him now and then with what seemed to him almost like contrition; she avoided being alone with him; he was troubled at it, but not alarmed; he knew very well that she loved him. He let her be.
An Italian has infinite passion, but he has also infinite patience in matters of love. Nor was he, now that he was assured of his power over her, wholly content to use it; if he married her, the world would always say that it was for her wealth. That means of raising his own fortunes which had seemed to him so material and legitimate all his life, now seemed to him unworthy and unmanly since he had grown to care for her. He knew that such riches as she possessed were precisely those with which he had always intended to rebuild the fallen greatness of his race; but since he had loved her it looked very different.
The charm of their intercourse to him was the ascendency he had won over her, the power that he had gained to lift her nature to a higher level: where would his influence be when he had once stooped to enrich himself by its means?
These fancies saddened him and checked him, and made him not unwilling to linger on about her, in all that indistinct sweetness of half-recognised and half-unspoken love.
The position, uncertain as it was, had its charm; he felt that this woman, with all her insolence and indifference and absorption by the world, was, in his hands, only a creature of emotions and of passions, who would flush at his touch, and grow unnerved under his gaze; he knew that he was very dear to her since, had he not been, for the audacity of his caresses he would have been driven out of her presence.
“Ama chi t’ama, e lascia dir la gente,” he said to himself in the wise burden of the people’s love-song; and he let destiny go as it would.
Meanwhile, she, dissatisfied, with a conscience ill at ease, and disinclined to look into the future, saw him morning, noon, and night, but avoided seeing him alone, and usually had her brother near.
Lord Clairvaux could only stay a week, and was utterly unconscious that his presence was unwelcome; he was taken to see the two Arab mares of Della Rocca; he was taken to Palestrina; he was taken to studios and chapels, which had no more interest for him than they would have had for a setter dog: but he was quite ignorant of why he was taken.
He did what Lady Hilda told him to do; he always did when he and she were together; he was a simple, kindly, honest gentleman, who regarded England as the universe, and all the rest of the world as a mere accident. His sister’s contempt for her country and his politics, her philosophy of indifferentism, her adoration of primitive art, her variable disdain, and her intellectual pharisaism had always seemed to him very wonderful, and not altogether comfortable; but he admired her in a hopeless kind of way, and it was not in his temper to puzzle over people’s differences of opinion or character.
“Hilda thinks all the old dead fellows were gods, and she thinks all of us asses,” he would say humbly. “I don’t know, you know, — she’s awfully clever. I never was. It may be so, only I never will believe that England is used up, as she says; and I like the east wind myself; and what she can see in those saints she’s just bought, painted on their tiptoes, or in those old crooked pots; — but if she’d stayed in the country, and hunted twice a week all winter, you know she would not have been like that.”
“It would have been a great pity had Miladi been anything save what she is,” said Della Rocca, to whom he expressed himself in this manner, in such French as he could command, and who was amused and astonished by him, and who took him a day’s wild fowl shooting in the marshes, and a day’s wild boar hunting in the next provi
nce, and wondered constantly why so kindly and gallant a gentleman should have been made by the good God so very stupid.
“Oh, you think so; I don’t,” said Lord Clairvaux. “Hilda isn’t my idea of a happy woman. I don’t believe she is happy. She spends half her life thinking how she will dress herself; and why will they dress now like the ruffs and things of Queen Elizabeth, and the effigies on the tombstones? and the other half she spends buying things she never looks at, and ordering things she dislikes when they’re done, and reading books that make her think her own countrymen are a mere lot of blockheads and barbarians. Not that I pretend to understand her; I never did; only I think if she didn’t think everybody else such a fool she’d be more comfortable.”
Della Rocca smiled.
“Pardon me, —— you will disturb the birds.”
Lord Clairvaux recollected that he ought not to talk of his sister to a stranger, and, bringing his gun to his shoulder, fired into a covey of wild ducks.
“What a handsome fellow that is, like an old picture,” he thought to himself, as he looked at Della Rocca, who sat in the prow of the boat; but he did not connect him in his thoughts with Lady Hilda in any way: for ten years he had got so tired of vainly wondering why this man and that did not please her, and had been made so vexed and perplexed by her rejection of the Prince of Deutschland, that he had ceased to think of her as a woman who could possibly ever care for anybody.
One night, however, when he had been there five days, he was walked about in the crowd of the Veglione by little Madame Mila, masked, and draped as black as a little beetle; and Madame Mila, who was getting tired of things standing still, and could no more help putting her tiny finger into all kinds of pasties, and making mischief in a kittenish way, than she could help going on enamelling since she had once begun it, laughed at him, teazed him, and told him, what startled him.
“But she isn’t here, and he is!” he gasped feebly, in protest at what he had heard, gazing over the motley crowd.