by Ouida
“If that old man had lived, Hilda would have been glad to be like everyone else,” Madame Mila thought, with much impatience. “Of course, because she is quite free, she don’t care a bit to use her freedom.”
Madame Mila herself felt that although her passion for Maurice was the fifty-sixth passion of her soul, and the most ardent of all her existence, that even Maurice himself would have lost some of his attraction if he had lost the pleasant savour of incorrectness that attached to him, and if she had not had to take all those precautions about his going to another hotel, &c., &c., which enabled her to hold her place in courts and embassies, and made her friends all able to say with clear consciences, “Nothing in it, oh dear! nothing in it whatever!” Not that she cared about anyone believing that there was nothing in it; she did not even wish anybody to believe it; she only wanted it said — that was all; because, whilst it can be said, a woman “goes everywhere” still, and though Heloise or Francesca may be willing to “lose the world for love,” the Femme Galante has no notion of doing anything of the sort.
“She must have refused him?” the Duc de St. Louis said to her more than once, harassed by chagrin at the failure of his project, and by a curiosity which his good breeding forbade him to seek to satisfy at the fountain head.
“Oh, I daresay she did,” said Madame Mila. “Of course she did. But if she care for him, why should she send him away? — il y a des moyens pour tout. They are brouillés somehow, that is certain. Oh, yes — certain! He was here when Hilda came back, and we passed him one day in the street, and he took off his hat and bowed, and looked very cold and pale and went onwards; and he has never called once. Now you know he is gone to the Marshes, and after that they say he is going into Sicily to see after that brigand Pibro. It is not like an Italian to be so soon repulsed.”
“It is very like an Italian to be too proud to ask twice,” said the Due, and added with a little smile, “He never said anything to me. Only once lately he said that he was sure that Miladi would be a very different creature if she had home interests and children!”
“Good gracious!” said Madame Mila, “she was quite right to have nothing to do with him if he have that kind of ideas. How little he knows her too! Hilda is quite unnatural about children; quite horrid; she never speaks to them; and when she saw my dear little Lili dressed as Madame l’Archiduc for the babies’ fancy ball at the Elysée, what do you think she said? — she told me that I polluted the child’s brain before it could distinguish right from wrong, and that a mixture of Judic and Fashion at five years old was disgusting; and Lili looked lovely! — she was so prettily rouged, and Maurice had given her a necklace of pink pearls. But Hilda has no human feeling at all.”
“Della Rocca did not think so,” said the Duc.
“Della Rocca was in love,” said Madame Mila, scornfully, “with the beaux yeaux de sa cassette too; — as well. They may only have quarrelled, you know. Hilda is very disagreeable and difficult. By the way, Deutschland went after her to Rome, and proposed to her again.”
“Indeed! and she refused him again?”
“Oh, yes. She refuses them all. I did fancy she was touched by Della Rocca, but you see it came to nothing; she is as cold as a crystal. She likes to know that heaps of men are wretched about her, and she likes to study those dingy old paintings, and that is all she does like, or ever will like. She will be very unhappy as she grows older, and I dare say she will be quite capable of leaving all her money away from her family to build a cathedral, or found a School of Art.”
And Madame Mila, impatient, nodded to the Due, and dashed away in the victoria behind the white and black liveries. She was managing to enjoy her Lent after all: her mind being at rest about those sixty thousand francs, there was no occasion to be so very rigid; low bodices she did not wear, because she was a woman of her word; but then she had half a hundred divine confections, cut square, or adorned with ruffs, or open en cœur with loveliest lace and big bouquets of roses, to make that form of renunciation simpler; there was plenty going on, and little “sauteries,” which nobody could call balls, and pleasant gatherings, quite harmless, because only summoned for “music,” and altogether, what with the oasis of mi-Carême, and the prolongation of the Carnival in Russian houses, life was very endurable; and there were Neapolitan oysters to fast upon comfortably.
Heaven tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and it would be hard if Society did not soften penitence to the Femme Galante.
The Lady Hilda did keep her Lent, and kept it strictly, and was never seen at the “sauteries,” and rarely at the musical parties. But then everyone knew that she was dévote (when she was not slightly Voltairean), and it could not be expected that a woman going to reign in the vast world of London would put herself out to be amiable in Floralia. Yet, had they only known it, she loved Floralia in her own heart as she had never loved any other place upon earth. The beautiful small city set along its shining waters, with all the grace of its classic descent, its repose of contemplative art, its sanctity of imperishable greatness, had a hold upon her that no other spot under the sun could ever gain. If she thought others unworthy of it, she thought herself no less unworthy. It seemed to her that to be worthy to dwell in it, one needed to be wise and pure and half divine, even as St. Ursula herself.
And all the pride in her was shaken to the roots: she was full of a restless, dissatisfied humility; there were times when she hated herself, and was weary of herself to utter impatience. She shut herself up with her art studies and the old frescoes, because they pained her less than any other thing. She was passionately unhappy: though to other people she only seemed a trifle more cynical and more contemptuous than before, no more.
The easy morality with which her cousin would have solved all difficulty, was not possible to her. She would not have cheated the old dead man from whom her riches came, by evading him in the spirit of his will whilst adhering to the letter. Unless she gave up her riches, her lover could he nothing to her: and the thought of giving them up never even occurred to her as possible. She did not know it, because she was so very tired of so many things; but the great world she had always lived in was very necessary to her, and had absolute dominion over her; it became tiresome, as the trammels of empire do to a monarch; but to lay down her sceptre would have been an abdication, and an abnegation, impossible to her. And she despised herself because they were impossible; despised herself because to his generosity she had only responded with what at best was but a vulgar egotism; despised herself because she had been so weak that she had permitted his familiarities and his caresses unrebuked; despised herself for everything with that self scorn of a proud woman, which is far more intense and bitter than any scorn that she has ever dealt out upon others.
She had lived all her life on a height of unconscious, but no less absorbing, self-admiration. She had looked down on all the aims and objects and attainments and possessions of all other persons with a bland and superb vanity; she had been accustomed to regard herself as perfect, as others all united to tell her that she was; and her immunity from mean frailties and puerile emotions had given her a belief that she was lifted high above the passions and the follies of humankind; now, all of a sudden, she had dropped to the lowest depths of weakness and of selfishness — passion had touched her, yet had left her without its courage.
In those long, lonely, studious days in Lent, studying her religious art with wandering thoughts, she grew to hate herself; yet, to resign her empire for another’s sake never even distantly appeared to her as possible.
One day, in a little private chapel, where there were some fine dim works in tempera, only to be seen by earliest morning light, she was startled by seeing him near her; he was coming from the sacristy on business of the church; he looked at her quickly, and would have passed on with a silent salutation, but she approached him on an impulse which a moment later she regretted.
“Need you avoid me?” she said, hurriedly. “Surely — I go from here so soon — we might s
till be friends? People would talk less—”
He looked down on her with a cold severity which chilled her, like the passing of an icy wind.
“Madame,” he answered her? with a fleeting smile, “your northern lovers, perhaps, may have been content to accept such a position. I am, I confess, thankless. I thought you too proud to heed what ‘people said’; but if that trouble you — I go myself to Sicily to-morrow.”
Then he bowed very low once more, and, with his salutation to the altar, went on his way through the dusky shadows of the little chapel out into the morning sunshine of the street.
Her eyes grew blind with tears, and she sank down before a wooden bench upon her knees; yet could not pray there for the bitterness and tumult of her heart.
She found her master in him.
His passionless unpardoning gaze sank into her very soul, and seemed like a ruthless light, that showed her all the wretchedness of pride and self-love and vainest ostentations, which she had harboured there and set up as her gods.
She comprehended that she had wronged him, and that he would not forgive. After all — knowing what she knew, she had had no right to deal with him as she had done. She had allowed him to bask in the sun of a fool’s paradise; and then had awakened him rudely, and had sent him adrift. She had been ungenerous: she saw it, and hated her own fault with the repentance of a generous temper. She had gone through the world with but little heed for the pain of others; but his pain smote her conscience. After all, he had a title to upbraid her passionately; that he refrained from doing so made her own self-reproach the keener. There had been so many moments when with justice he might have felt certain that she loved him: and how could he guess the rest? She knew that she had wronged him; and she was humbled in her own sight; she had lost her own self-respect, and her own motives seemed to her but poor, and almost base.
No amorous entreaty, no feverish pursuit of her, had ever moved her so intensely as that silent condemnation, as that contemptuous rejection, of her poor half-hearted overture of peace.
When she left the chapel she loved him as she had never done before; yet it never occurred to her to abandon her riches for his sake. The habits and the ways of the world were too close about her; its artificial needs and imperious demands were too entirely her second nature; its admiration was too necessary to her, and her custom of deference to its conventional laws too much an instinct; she had been too long accustomed to regard the impulses of the heart as insane follies, and poverty of life as pain and madness.
The same evening he did leave the town for Sicily, where he had lands which, though beautiful, were utterly unproductive, and constantly harried by the system of brigandage, which paralysed the district. “He will get shot most likely. He has declared that he will not return without having captured Pibro,” said an Italian in her hearing, at a musical gathering, dedicated to the music of Pergolese. Pibro was a notorious Sicilian robber. The sweet chords sounded very harsh and jangled in her ears; she left early, and went home and took a heavy dose of chloral, which only gave her dark and dreary dreams.
“What miserable creatures we are!” she thought, wearily. “We cannot even sleep naturally — poor people can sleep; — they lie on hard benches, and dream with smiles on their faces.”
She got up and looked out at the moonlight on the river, and walked to and fro her chamber; a lofty, slender, white figure in the pale gleam of the lamp-rays.
A passionate, feverish, disordered pain consumed her. It terrified her. Would it be thus weeks, months, years — all her life?
“Perhaps it is the chloral that unnerves one,” she thought; “I will not take it any more.”
“Only fancy, ma chère,” said Madame Mila to her next morning, with the pretty cat-like cruelty of the Mila species, “only fancy — that poor dear Della Rocca is gone to his death in Sicily. So they say. There is a horrid brigand who has been hanging some of his farmers there to trees, and burning their cottages, Della Rocca’s farmers, you know; and he is gone to see about it, and to capture the wretched creature, — as if he could when all the soldiers and all the police have failed! He will be quite certain to be shot; isn’t it a pity? He is so handsome, and if he would marry that little American Spiffler girl with all her millions he might be very happy. That little Spiffler is really not unpresentable, and her people will give the largest dot ever heard of if they can get one of the very old titles; and they will make no difficulty about religion; they were Jumpers or Shakers or something themselves; he might send her to the Sacré Cœur for a year or two.”
“If he be gone to be shot, what use would the Spiffler dot be?” said Lady Hilda, with coolest calm, as on a subject not even of most remote interest, and she went on glazing a corner of the draperies of her St. Ursula with carmine.
“The marriage was proposed to him, I know,” continued Madame Mila, unheeded. “The Featherleighs undertook it, but he refused point blank. ‘Je ne me vends pas,’ was all he said. It was very rude, and really that little Spiffler might be made something of; those very tiny creatures never look vulgar, and are so easy to dress; as it is, I dare say Furstenberg will take her, if Nina will let him; it is on the tapis, and Della Rocca won’t come back alive, I suppose — isn’t it a harebrained thing to do? — there are gendarmes to look after the brigands, but it seems he has some fancy because they were his own people that suffered — but no doubt he told you all about it, as you and he are such friends.”
“He merely said he was going to Sicily,” said the Lady Hilda, languidly, still glazing her St. Ursula.
Madame Mila eyed her curiously.
“You look very pale, dear; I think you paint too much, and read too much,” she said, affectionately. “I wish you had tried to persuade him into this Spiffler affair; it would be just the marriage for him, and a girl of seventeen may be drilled into anything, especially when she has small bones and little colour and good teeth; if Furstenberg gets her he will soon train her into good form — only he will gamble away all her money, let them tie it up as they may; and they can’t tie it up very much if they want to make a high marriage. Good men won’t sacrifice themselves unless they get some control of the fortune. They wouldn’t have tied it at all with Della Rocca. Wouldn’t the little Spiffler have been better for him than Sicily?”
“It depends upon taste,” said the Lady Hilda, changing her brushes.
“Very odd taste,” said Madame Mila. “They say Pibro always cuts the heads off the men he takes, and sends them into Palermo — the heads you know — with lemons in their mouths like boars; isn’t it horrible? And Della Rocca intends going up after the monster in his very fastnesses upon the mountains! Fancy that beautiful head of his! — Really, dear, you do look very ill: when will you go to London?”
“Oh, some time next week.” —
She went to the window and opened it; the room swam round her, the sounds of the streets grew dull upon her ears.
“I wish you wouldn’t go till after the races,” said Madame Mila, placidly. “I mean to stay. The place is really very nice, though one does see the same people too often. Fancy poor Paolo ending like John the Baptist — the head in the charger, you know — I wonder you let him go, for you had a great deal of influence over him, and say what you like, the Spiffler girl would have been better. How can you keep that window open, with the tramontana blowing? — thanks so much for lending me the horses — goodness! what is the matter?”
Madame Mila paused frightened; for the first time in all her life Lady Hilda, leaning against the strong north wind, had lost her consciousness and had fainted.
“How very strange people are,” thought Madame Mila, when an hour later her cousin had recovered herself, and had attributed her weakness to the chloral at night and the scent of her oil paints. “If she cared for him like that, why didn’t she keep him when she had got him? — she might have hung him to her skirt like her châtelaine; nobody would ever have said anything; I do begin to think that with all her taste, and all her
cleverness, she has, after all, not so very much savoir faire.”
No one had much savoir faire to Madame Mila’s mind who did not manage always to enjoy themselves without scruples and also without scenes.
The house in London was ordered to be kept ready night and day, but no one went to occupy it. M. Camille Odissot, stimulated by dread of his patroness’s daily arrival in Paris, worked marvels of celerity upon the ballroom walls, and drew with most exquisite precision bands of Greek youths and maidens in the linked mazes of the dance, but none went to admire his efforts and execution. No fashionable newspapers announced the Lady Hilda s arrival in either city; she stayed on and on in Floralia.
“When I know that he is safe out of Sicily I will go,” she said to herself; and let the piles of letters and invitation cards lie and accumulate as they would.
She ceased to paint, and left the St. Ursula unfinished; he had sketched it out for her on the panel, and had first tinted it en grisaille. She had not the courage to go on with it; she changed her mode of life, and rode or drove all the day long in the sweet fresh spring weather. When she was not in the open air she felt suffocated. The danger which he ran was no mere exaggeration of her cousin’s malicious inventiveness, but was a fact, true and ghastly enough; no one heard of or from him, but his friends said that it was the most fatal madness that had led him to risk his life in the fastnesses of the Sicilian thieves.
“It is sheer suicide,” they said around her.
“What had he to do there? — if the law cannot enforce itself, leave it alone in its impotency. But he had some idea that because his own villages were amongst those who suffered most, it was his place to go there and do what the law cannot do: — he was always Quixotic, poor Paolo. The last thing heard of him was that he had left Palermo with an escort of men whom he had chosen and paid himself, and had gone up towards the mountains. His dead body will be the first tidings that we have; the monster Pibro has spies in all directions, and holds that district in a perfect reign of terror.”