by Ouida
“Oh, my love — my love!” he murmured; that was all; but his arms stole about her, and his head drooped till his forehead rested on her knees.
For the moment she did not repulse him; she did not stir nor speak; she yielded herself to the embrace, mute and very pale, and moved to a strange tumult of emotion, whether of anger or of gladness she barely knew.
He lifted his head, and his eyes looked into hers till her own could look no longer.
“You love me?” he whispered to her, whilst his arms still held her imprisoned.
She was silent; under the purple knot of velvet at her breast, he saw her heart heave, her breath come and go; a hot colour flushed over all her face, then faded, and left her again pale as her white brocade.
“It were of no use if — if I did,” she muttered. “You forget yourself; — leave me.”
But he knelt there, looking, at her till the look seemed to burn her like flame; yet she did not rise: — she, the very hem of whose garment no man before him had ever dared to touch.
“You love me!” he murmured, and said the same thing again and again and again, in all the various eloquence of passion. She trembled a little under his close caress; the dusky red of the box whirled around her; the shouting of the multitude below beat like the sound of a distant sea on her ears.
As he kneeled at her feet she touched his forehead one moment with her hand in a gesture of involuntary tenderness.
“It is of no use,” she said, faintly again. “You do not understand — you do not know.”
“Yes: I do know,” he answered her.
“You know!” —
“Yes: your brother told me.”
“And yet?—”
“Since we love one another, is not that enough?”
She breathed like a person suffocated; she loosened herself from his arms, and drew away from him, and rose.
“It makes no change in you, then!” she said, wonderingly, and looked at him through a blinding mist, and felt sick and weary and bewildered, as she had never thought it possible to feel.
“Change in me? What change? save that I am freer to seek you — that is all. Oh, my empress, my angel! — is not love enough? Has your life without love contented you so well that you fear to face love alone?”
He still knelt at her feet and kissed her hands and her dress, as he spoke; he looked upward at the pale beauty of her face.
She shivered a little as with cold.
“That is folly,” she muttered. “You must know it is of no use. I could not live — poor.” The word stung him; he rose to his feet; he was silent. After all, what had he to offer her? he loved her — that was all.
She loosened the loose chain about her throat, and looked away beyond him at the lights of the theatre. With an effort she recovered her old indifferent cold manner.
“You have forgotten yourself: it is all folly: you must know that: you surprised me into — weakness — for a moment. But it is over now. Give me my mask, and take me to the carriage.”
“No!” — He leaned against the door, and looked down on her: all the rapture of expectancy and of triumph had faded from his face; the pallor and suffering of a great passion were on it; he had known that she loved the things of the world; but he had believed that she loved him more.
He was undeceived. He looked at this beautiful woman with the gold chain loosed about her throat, and the white brocaded lilies gleaming in the gloom, and only by a supreme effort did he subdue the bitterness and brutality which lie underneath all strong passions.
“One moment!” he said, as she moved to reach the door. “Can you say you have no love for me?”
Her colour varied.
“What is the use? Give me my mask.”
“Can you say you do not love me?”
She hesitated; she wished to lie and could not.
“I did not say that,” she murmured. “Perhaps if things were different — But, as it is — it is no use.”
The half-confession sufficed, it loosened his lips to passionate appeal; with all the eloquence natural to him and to his language, he poured out on her all the supplication, all the entreaty, all the persuasion, that he was master of; he lavished every amorous endearment that his language held; he painted the joys of great and mutual passion with a fervour and a force that shook her like a whirlwind; he upbraided her with her caprices, with her coldness, with her selfishness, till the words cut her like sharp stripes: he besought her by the love with which he loved her till the voluptuous sweetness of it stole over all her senses, and held her silent and enthralled.
He knelt at her feet, and held her hands in his.
“Does your life content you?” he said at the last. “Gan greatness of any sort content a woman without love? Can any eminence, or power, or possession make her happiness without love? Say that I am poor; that coming to me you would come to what in your sight were poverty; is wealth so great a thing measured against the measureless strength of passion? Are not the real joys of our lives things unpurchaseable? Oh, my love, my love! If you had no preference for me I were the vainest fool to urge you; but, as it is — does the world that tires you, the society that wearies you, the men and women who fatigue you — the adulation that nauseates you — the expenditure that after all is but a vulgarity in your sight — the acquisition that has lost its charm for you with long habit, like the toys of a child; are all those things so supreme with you that you can send me from you for their sake? Is not one hour of mutual love worth all the world can give?”
His arms held her close, he drew her down to him nearer and nearer till his head rested on her breast, and he felt the tumultuous throbbing of her heart. For one moment of scarce conscious weakness she did not resist or repulse him, but surrendered herself to the spell of his power. He moved her as no mortal creature had ever had strength to do; a whole world unknown opened to her with his touch and his gaze; she loved him. For one moment she forgot all else.
But all the while, even in the temporary oblivion to which she had yielded, she never dreamed of granting what he prayed.
The serenity and pride in her were shaken to their roots; she was humbled in her own sight; she was ashamed of the momentary delirium to which she had abandoned herself; she strove in vain to regain composure and indifference: come what would, he was near to her as no other man had ever been.
She drew her domino about her with a shudder, though the blood coursed like fever in her veins.
“You must hate me — or forget me,” she murmured, as she tried to take her mask from his hand. “You know it is no use. I could not live — poor. Perhaps you are right; all those things are habits, follies, egotisms — oh, perhaps. But such as they are — such as I am — I could never live without them.”
He stood erect, and his face grew cold.
“That is your last word, Madame?”
“Yes. What else should I say? No other—” her voice faltered a moment and grew very weak. “No other man will ever be anything to me, if that content you. But more — is impossible.”
He bowed low in silence, and gave her up her mask.
She felt afraid to look up at his face.
The door opened on them noisily; the Archduchess and Madame Mila were returning to refresh themselves with their supper ere descending again to fresh diversions. Behind them came the Duc de St. Louis and all the men of their party, and their servants with the tressels for the setting of the table in their box.
They were fuller than ever of laughter, mirth, high spirits, and riotous good humour; their white teeth shone under the lace of their loups, and their eyes sparkled through the slits. They had frightened some people, and teased more, and had been mistaken for two low actresses and jested with accordingly, and were as much flattered as the actresses would have been had they been taken for princesses.
The Lady Hilda prayed of the Archduchess’s goodness to be excused from awaiting the supper; she had been ill all day, and her headache was very severe. —
/> The Archduchess was in too high spirits to listen very much, or to care who went or who stayed.
“Take me to the carriage, Duc,” said Lady Hilda, putting her hand on the arm of M. de St. Louis.
Della Rocca held the door open for her. He bowed very low, once more, as she passed him.
CHAPTER XI.
THE next day was Ash Wednesday.
Madame Mila awoke too late for mass, and with a feverish throbbing in her temples. She and the Archduchess had only left the Veglione as the morning sun came up bright and tranquil over the shining waters of the river from behind the eastern hills.
Madame Mila yawned and yawned again a score of times, drank a little green tea to waken herself, thought how horrid Lent was, and ran over in her mind how much she would confess at confession.
She determined to repent her sins very penitently. She would only go to musical parties, she would wear no low bodices, she would eat fish twice a-week — the red mullets were really very nice — and she would go for all holy week en retraite: if she did all that, the most severe monitor could not require her to give up Maurice.
Poor Maurice! she smiled to herself, in the middle of a yawn; how devoted he was! — he only lived on her breath, and if she dismissed him would kill himself with absinthe. She really believed it. She did not dream that Maurice, submissive slave though he was, had his consolations for slavery, and was at that moment looking into the eyes of the prettiest artist’s model in Floralia.
It was the Day of Ashes, as all the bells of the city had tolled out far and wide; and Madame Mila, over her green tea, really felt penitent. For the post had brought her three terribly thick letters, and the letters were bills; and the sum total that was wanted immediately was some sixty thousand francs, and how could a poor dear little woman who had spent all her money send that or a tenth of it: and Spiridion wouldn’t — he had too many bills of Blanche Souris’ to pay; and poor Maurice couldn’t — he invariably lost at play much more than he possessed, after the manner of his generation.
Madame Mila really cried about it, and felt ready to promise any amount of repentance if she could get those sixty thousand francs this Lent.
“And to think of me running myself off my feet in that muslin apron collecting for the poor!” she thought, with a sense that heaven behaved very ill to her in return for her charities. “I suppose I must ask Hilda,” she reflected; “she always does give when you ask her — if that man don’t prevent her now.”
For the champagne and the mask and the great joyousness of her soul had prevented Madame Mila from observing any difference between her cousin and Della Rocca, and as he had left the box immediately after her cousin, she had supposed that they had gone away together — why shouldn’t they?
“I must ask Hilda to lend it me,” she said to herself.
To say lend was agreeable to her feelings, not of course that there was any serious necessity to repay between such near relatives; and she sent her maid across the corridor to enquire when she could come into her cousin’s room.
The maid returned with a little unsealed note which the Lady Hilda had desired should be given to Madame Mila when she should awake. The note only said: “I am gone to Rome for some few weeks, dear; write to me at the Iles Britanniques if you want anything.”
“Good gracious, what can have happened!” said Madame Mila, in utter amaze. “They must have quarrelled last night.” And she proceeded to cross-examine all the hotel people.
Lady Hilda had left by the morning train, and had not taken her carriage horses with her, only the riding horses, and had kept on her rooms at the Murat: that was all they knew.
“She is very uncertain ‘and uncomfortable to have to do with,” thought Madame Mila, in vague irritation. “Anybody else would have asked me to go with her.”
A sudden idea occurred to her, and she sent her maid to find out if the Duca della Rocca were in Floralia.
At his palace they said that he was.
“Dear me, perhaps he’ll go after her,” thought Madame Mila. “But I don’t know why she’s so secret about it, and takes such precautions. Nobody’d cut her for anything she might do so long as she’s all that money; and so long as she don’t marry she can’t lose it.”
Madame Mila did not understand it at all. Her experience in the world assured her that her cousin might have Della Rocca, or anybody else, constantly beside her whenever she liked, and nobody would say anything — so long as she had all that money.
She felt that she was badly treated, that there was something not confided to her, and also she certainly ought to have been asked to go to Rome at her cousin’s expense. She was sulky and irritated.
“Hilda is so queer and so selfish,” she said to herself, and began a letter to the Iles Britanniques; with many tender endearments and much pathos, and the most gracefully-worded appeal possible for the loan of the sixty thousand francs.
She would have gone to Rome herself, being well aware that written demands are much more easily repulsed than spoken ones. But she had no money at all. She had lost a quarter’s income at play since she had been in the town, and she could not pay the hotel people till her husband should send her more money, and he was hunting bears on the Pic du Midi, with Blanche Souris established at Pau, and when that creature was with him he was always very tardy in answering letters for money, bears or no bears, and of course he would make the bears his excuse now.
Fairly overwhelmed, poor little Madame Mila had a long fit of hysterics, and her maids had to send in great haste for ether and the Vicomte Maurice.
She rallied by dinner time enough to eat two dozen oysters, some lobster croquettes, an omelette aux fines herbes, and some prawn soup, with a nice little bottle of Veuve. Clicquot’s sweetest wine, the most maigre repast in the world, and one that must have satisfied even S. Francis had he been there; but still things were very dreadful, and on the whole she was in the proper frame of mind for the Day of Ashes, and in the confessional next morning sobbed so much that her confessor was really touched, and was not too severe with her about her Maurices, past, present, or to come.
CHAPTER XII.
IN three weeks’ time Lady Hilda returned from Rome.
She had been affectionately received by the Holy Father; she had been the idol of the nobles of the Black; she had bought a quantity of pictures, and marbles, and bronzes, and Castellani jewellery; she had gone to early mass every day, and ridden hard every day; she had thought Totila would have been more bearable than Signor Rosa, and she had shuddered at the ruined flora of the Colosseum and the scrapings and bedaubings of the Palace of the Cæsars.
She returned contemptuous, disgusted, tired of the age she lived in, and regretful that she bad not spared herself the sight of so much desecration. She conceived that Genseric or the Constable de Bourbon must have been much less painful than a syndicate and an army of bricklayers. She refused to go out anywhere on the score of its being Lent, and she meditated going to London for the season to that very big house in Eaton Square, which she honoured for about three months in as many years. She hated London, and its society was a mob, and its atmosphere was thickened soda-water, and no other place had such horrible endless dinner parties. Still she was going; — when? — oh, tomorrow or next week.
But to-morrow became yesterday, and next week became last week, and her black and white liveries were still airing themselves on the steps of the Murat, and her black horses still were trotting to and fro the stones of Floralia, bearing little Madame Mila hither and thither.
Their own mistress stirred out but little; it was damp weather, and she coughed, and she shut herself up with millions of hyacinths and narcissi, and painted a St. Ursula on wood for her chapel in Paris.
She painted well, but the St. Ursula progressed but slowly.
When she was alone she would let her palette fall to her side and sit thinking; and the bells would ring across the waters till she hated them.
What was the use of painting a St. Ursu
la? St. Ursula did not want to be painted; and all art was nothing but repetition: nobody had found out anything in colour really, since Giotto, though to be sure he could not paint transparencies or reflections. And she would leave her St. Ursula impatiently, and read Cavalcaselle and Zugler and Winckelmann and Rumohr and Passavant, and when she did go out would go to some little remote, unvisited chapel and sit for hours before some dim disputed fresco.
She would be in London next week, in its blaze of gas, jewels, luxury, and political discussion; she said that she liked these calm, dusky, silent places, alone with S. Louis and S. Giles and S. Jerome.
Madame Mila puzzled over her conduct in vain. She did not dare to ask anything, because there were those sixty thousand francs, and her cousin had helped her about them, and you cannot say very intrusive or impertinent things to a person who is lending you money; but it was very odd, thought Madame Mila incessantly, because she evidently was unhappy about the man, and wanted him, and yet must have sent him away. Of course she couldn’t have married him; but still there were ways of managing everything; and in Hilda’s position she really could do as she liked, and nobody ever would even have said a word.
Of course she would not have married him; that Madame Mila knew; but Society would have made no objection to his being about her always like her courier and her pug and the rest of her following; and if Society doesn’t object to a thing, why on earth should you not do it?
Il ne faut pas être plus royaliste que le roi: there cannot be the slightest necessity to be more scrupulous than the people that are round you; indeed, to attempt to be more so is to be disagreeable and tacitly impertinent to others.
There is a certain latitude, which taken, makes you look much more amiable. Madame Mila was kissed on both cheeks really with sincerity by many ladies in many cities, merely because her nice management of her Maurice made their Maurices easier for them, and their pleasant consciousness of her frailty was the one touch which made them all akin. Polyandry made easy is a great charm in Society — there is no horrid scandal for any one, and no fuss at all: Monsieur is content and Madame enjoys herself, everybody goes everywhere, and everything is as it should be.