Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  She went out into society as Easter came, and heard all that they said, and gave no sign of what she suffered. Worth sent her new marvels of the spring, and she wore them, and was endlessly courted and envied, and quoted and wondered at. She was a little chillier and more cynical than ever, and women observed with pleasure that she was looking ill and growing too thin, which would spoil her beauty. That was all. But she had never thought such pain possible in life as she endured now.

  “If he die it is I who will have killed him,” she said in her own heart night and day.

  Once she found herself in her long lonely rides near Palestrina, and met the old steward, and recognised him, and went into the sad, silent, deserted house; and listened to the old man’s stories of his beloved lord’s boyhood and manhood, and of the people’s clinging feudal attachment to him, and of his devotion to them in the time of the cholera pestilence.

  “There is not an old charcoal burner or a little goatherd on the estates that would not give his life for Prince Paolo,” the steward said to her, crying like a child because there was no news from Sicily.

  The same evening she went to a great Pasqua ball at the Trasimene villa. As they fastened the diamonds over her hair and in her bosom she felt to hate the shining, senseless, soulless stones; — they were the emblem of the things for which she had lost him; and at that very hour, for ought they knew, he might be lying dead on some solitary shore by the fair blue sea of Theocritus!

  With a heart sick with terror and uncertainty she went to the brilliant crowds of the Trasimene house; to the talk that was so frivolous and tedious, to the dances she never joined in, to the homage she was so tired of, to the monotonies and personalities and trivialities that make up society, M. de St. Louis hurried up to her:

  “Madame, quelle chance! — our new Herakles has slain his Dragon. Maremma has just had telegrams from Palermo. Della Rocca has positively captured the scoundrel Pibro, and taken him into the city, much wounded, but alive, and in the king’s gaol by this time. A fine thing to have done, is it not? Of course we shall all praise it, since it has succeeded; although, in truth, a madder exploit never was attempted. Paolo was ten days in the mountains living on a few beans and berries: he has received no hurt whatever; I should think they will give him the Grand Cordon of the Santissima Annunziata. It is really a superb thing to have done. The monster has been the terror of that district for ten years. Palermo went utterly mad with joy. It is quite a pity there is no Ariosto to celebrate such a feat. It is very Ariosto-like. Indeed, all the best Italians are so. Englishmen have long ceased to he in any manner Shakesperian; but Italians remain like their poets.”

  The Duc wandered away into the subtlest and most discursive analysis of the Ariostian school and of the national characteristics which it displayed and was nurtured on; but she had no ear to hear it:

  Outwardly she sat indifferent and calm, but her brain and her heart were in tumult with the sweetest, loftiest, grandest pride that she had ever known — pride without egotism, without vanity, without a thought of self; true pride, exultant in heroism, not the arrogant pride of self-culture, of self-worship, of self-love, not the paltry pride of rank and acquisition and physical perfection, not the pride of which all the while she had been half contemptuous herself. And then — his life was safe!

  Yet, had he stood before her then she must have given him the same answer — at least, she thought so.

  “What a fine thing to have done!” said Madame Mila, pausing by her in the middle of a waltz, with her brocade train ablaze with gold. “And now he can come back and marry the Spiffler girl. What do you say, Duc?”

  “He will never marry la petite Spiffler,” said the Duc, “nor any one else,” he added, with a glance of meaning at Lady Hilda.

  All eyes turned upon her. She played idly with her fan — one painted long ago by Watteau.

  “M. della Rocca has succeeded, so it is heroism,” she said, calmly. “Had he failed, I suppose it would have been foolhardiness.”

  “Of course,” said the Duc. “Surely, Madame, Failure cannot expect to use the same dictionary as Success?”

  “He must have the Santissima Annunziata, and marry the big Spiffler dot,” said Madame Mila.

  “Nay, Comtesse, that were bathos indeed, to make la petite Spiffler cousine du roi! Anyhow, let us rejoice that he is living, and that the old Latin race is still productive of heroes. I suppose we shall have details the day after to-morrow.”

  “Whatever could he do it for?” said Madame Mila, as she whirled away again in the encircling arm of her Maurice: to Madame Mila such trifles as duty, patriotism, or self-sacrifice could not possibly be any motive power amongst rational creatures. “Whatever could he do it for? — I suppose to soften Hilda. But he must know very little about her; she hates anything romantic; you heard she called it foolhardy. He never will be anything to her, not if he try for ten years. She cares about him after her fashion, but she cares much more about herself.”

  Lady Hilda did not sleep that night.

  She did not even lie down; dry-eyed and with fever in her veins, she sat by the window watching the bright pale gold of the morning widen over the skies, and the sea-green depths of the river catch the first sun-rays and mirror them.

  She was so proud of him — ah heaven, so proud! The courage of her temper answered to the courage of his action. It was Heraklean — it was Homeric — that going forth single-handed to do what the law could not or would not do, and set free from tyranny of brute force those poor tillers of the soil who could not help themselves. The very folly and madness of that utter disregard of peril moved her to reverence; she who had all her life been environed with the cool, calm, cautious, and circumspect customs of the world.

  For one moment it seemed to her possible to renounce everything for his sake. For one moment her own passion for the mere gauds and pomps and possessions of the world looked to her beside the simplicity and self-sacrifice of his own life so poor and mean that she shrank from it in disgust. For one moment she said to herself—” Love was enough.”

  He had been ready to give up his life for a few poor labourers, who had no other claim on him than that they lived upon the soil he owned; and she who loved him had not the courage to renounce mere worldly riches for his sake. She hated herself, and yet she could not change herself. She cared for power, for supremacy, for indulgence, for extravagance; she dreaded to hear the tittering mockery of the women she had eclipsed so long at all her present weakness; it was all so poor, so base, so unworthy, yet it enchained her: the world had been her religion; no one casts off a creed long held without hard and cruel strife.

  “Oh, my love, how far beneath you I am!” she thought, she whose pride had been a bye-word, and whose superb vanity had been an invulnerable armour.

  She could have kneeled down and kissed his hands for very humility; yet she could not resolve to yield.

  “I might see him once more, before I go,” she thought, and so coward-like she put the hour of decision from her. They must part, but she might see him once more first.

  She would go away of course, and her life in the Winter City would be with the things of the past, and she would grow used to the pain of dead passion, and feel it less with time — other women did, and why not she?

  So she said to herself; and yet at moments a sort of despair appalled her: what would her future be? Only one long empty void, in whose hollowness the “pleasures” of the world would rattle like dead bones. She began to understand that for a great love there is no death possible. It is like Ahasuerus the Jew: it must live on in torment for ever.

  And how she had smiled at all these things when others had spoken of them!

  The days passed slowly one by one; the beautiful city was in its spring glory, and ran over with the blossoms of flowers, as though it were the basket that Persephone let fall. The news-sheets were full of this deed which he had done in Sicily; she bought them all, down to the tawdriest little sheet that held his name, and r
ead the well-known story again and again a hundred and ten hundred times; his friends expected him to arrive in the town each day, but no one heard anything direct from himself.

  “It is strange he writes to none of us,” said Maremma; “can anything have happened?”

  “Oh, no; the papers would know it,” said the Duc de St. Louis.

  She overheard them, and listened with dry lips and a beating heart.

  Why did he write to no one? The news-sheets had announced that he had left Palermo for Floralia.

  “He may be coming back by the marshes,” someone else suggested; “he is reclaiming land there.”

  Perhaps he stayed away, she thought, because he had heard that she still remained in his native city.

  It was mid-April. Madame Mila was organising picnics under old Etruscan walls, and alfresco dinners in villa gardens, and she and her kind were driving out on the tops of drags, and playing baccarat upon anemone-studded lawns by moonlight, and driving in again, at or after midnight, singing Offenbach choruses, and going to the big Café in the town for supper and champagnes; be it in winter or summer, spring or autumn, town or country, youth or middle-age, Madame Mila and her kind, contrive to make no difference in their manner of life whatever; they would sing Schneider’s songs in the Tombs of the Prophets, they would eat lobster salad on Mount Olivet, and they would scatter their cigar ash over Vaucluse, Marathon, the Campo Santo, or the grave at Ravenna with equal indifference; they are always amused, and defy alike the seasons and the sanctities to stop them in their amusement.

  It was mid-April, and with the beginning of May would come the races, and with the races the Winter City would become the Summer City, and the winter-fashion always fled with one bound to fresh fields and pastures new, and left the town to silence, sunshine, roses, fruits, its own populace with their summer songs and summer skies, and perhaps here and there an artist or a poet, or some such foolish person, who loved it best so in its solitude.

  “Do come with us, Hilda,” said Madame Mila one mid-April morning.

  Madame Mila was attired in the simplest morning costume of cream-hued Sicilienne covered with écru lace, and she had a simple country Dorothy hat of cream-coloured velvet, lined bleu-de-ciel, with wreaths of delicate nemophilæ and convolvuli and floating feathers, set on one side of her head; Lancret might have painted her on a fan, or Fragonard on a cabinet; she was just going to drive out with five carriages full of her friends to a picnic at Guido Salvareo’s villa; they were to dine there, play lansquenet there, and come back in the small hours; they had all postillions, silk-jacketted, powdered, and with ribboned straw hats; the horses were belled, and the bells were jingling in the street; Madame Mila was in the most radiant spirits; she had won five hundred napoleons the night before, and had them all to adventure over again to-night.

  “Do come with us, Hilda,” she urged. “You do nothing but go those stupid long drives by yourself; it is very bad for you; and it will be charming to-day; Salvareo has such taste; it is really quite romantic to sit upon those anemones, and have the goats come and stare at you; and he always does things so well, and his cook is so good. Do come with us; I am sure it would do you good.”

  Lady Hilda looked up from the S. Ursula, which she was finishing:

  “My dear Mila! — you know perfectly well how I detest that kind of thing. Teresa’s songs, drag seats, and eager efforts to imitate the worst kind of women! — go to it, if it amuse you; but, with all gratitude, allow me to decline.”

  “How disagreeable you are!” said Madame Mila, pettishly. “One must do something with oneself all these long days: if it were Palestrina, I suppose you would go.”

  Lady Hilda deigned to give no reply. She touched in the gold background of her Saint. Madame Mila looked at her with irritation; no one likes to be despised, and she knew that her cousin did very nearly despise her, and all the ways and means of enjoyment in which her heart delighted.

  Lady Hilda, tranquilly painting there, annoyed her inexpressibly. Why should any woman be above the box-seats of drags and all their concomitant attractions?

  She took her revenge.

  “Do as you like of course, but you always do do that,” she said carelessly. “There are two seats vacant. St. Louis and Carlo Maremma were to have gone with us, but they went to Della Rocca instead. Oh, didn’t you know it? — he reached Palestrina two days ago very ill with marsh fever. It is fever and cholera and ague and all sorts of dreadful things all together. Isn’t it odd? — to have escaped all that danger in Sicily, and, then get this in the swamps coming back? Nobody knew it till late last night, when his steward got frightened, and sent in for the physicians. He is very bad, I believe — not likely to live. You know they go down under that — sometimes in twenty-four hours.”

  Lady Hilda seemed to reach her at a single step, though the distance of the room was between them.

  “Is that true? — or is it some jest?”

  Madame Mila, appalled, looked up into her face.

  “It is true, quite true. Oh, Hilda, take your hand off; you hurt me. How could I tell you would care about it like that.”

  “Is it true?” muttered her cousin again.

  “Indeed, indeed it is,” she whimpered trembling. “Oh let me go, you spoil my lace. If you cared for the man like that, why didn’t you keep him when you had got him? I know you could not have married him, but nobody would have said anything.”

  Lady Hilda put her out into the corridor, and closed the door and locked it within.

  Madame Mila, frightened, astonished, and outraged, went down to her Maurice, and the drag, and the ribboned and powdered postillions, and the horses with their jingling bells and plaited tails; the gay calvacade rattled off along the river-street towards the city gates as the clocks tolled three.

  Lady Hilda and S. Ursula were left alone.

  Within less than half-an-hour the black horses were harnessed and bore their mistress towards Palestrina. Never before moved by impulse, impulse alone governed her now; the impulse of despair and remorse. She cared nothing who saw her or who knew; for once she had forgotten herself.

  The long drive seemed eternity; she thought the steep winding mountain roads would never end; when Palestrina came in sight, pale and stately against its dark background of forest trees, she felt as if her heart would break. He had gone through all those perils afar off, only to be dying there!

  It was five o’clock by the convent chimes when they reached the crest of the hill on which the old place stood. The lovely hillside was covered with the blue and white of the wild hyacinths and gold of the wild daffodils. The lofty stone pines spread their dark green roofs above her head. Flocks of birds were singing, in the myrtle thickets, their sweet shrill evensong. The shining valley lay below like a cloud of amber light. The surpassing loveliness, the intense stillness of it all, made the anguish within her unbearable. What she had missed all her life long! —

  There was a chapel not far from the house set in the midst of the pines, with the cross on its summit touching the branches, and its doorway still hung round with the evergreens and flowers of its passed Easter feasts. There were men and women and children standing about on the turf in front of it; they were most of them crying bitterly.

  She stopped her horses there, and called a woman to her, but her lips would not frame the question. The woman guessed it: —

  “Yes, my beautiful lady,” she said, with many tears. “We have been praying for Prince Paolo. He is very ill, up yonder. The marsh sickness has got him. May the dear Mother of God save him to us. But he is dying, they say—”

  “We would die in his stead, if the good God would let us,” said one of the men, drawing near: the others sobbed aloud.

  She put out her hand to the man — the slender proud hand that she had refused to princes. Wondering, he fell on his knee and would have kissed her hand. She drew back in horror.

  “Do not kneel to me! I have killed him!” she muttered; and she urged her panting horses
forward to the house.

  She bade them tell the Duc de St. Louis to come to her upon the terrace. She leaned there tearless, white as death, still as marble; the beautiful, tranquil spring time all around, and the valley shining like gold in the light of the descending sun. It seemed to her that ages passed before the soft step of her old friend sounded near her: he was surprised and startled, but he did not show it.

  “There is still hope,” he hastened to say, ere she could speak. “Within the last hour he is slightly better; they give him quinine constantly. If the chills and shivering do not return, it is just possible that he may live. But—”

  His voice faltered in its serenity, and he turned his head away.

  “It is not likely?”

  Her own voice had scarcely any sound of its natural tone left in it, yet long habit was so strong with her that she spoke calmly.

  “It is not likely. This deadly marsh-poison is short and fierce. After the fatigue and fasting in Sicily it has taken fearful hold on him. But in an hour or two they will know — one way or the other.”

  “I will stay here. Come and tell me — often. And if — if the worst come — let me see him. Leave me now.”

  He looked at her, hesitated, then left her as she asked. He guessed all that passed in her thoughts; all that had gone before: and he knew that she was not a woman who would bear pity, and that she was best left thus in solitude.

  Like a caged animal she paced to and fro the long length of the stone terrace.

  She was all alone.

  The flower-like radiance of the declining day shone everywhere around, the birds sang, the dreamy bells rang in the Ave Maria from hill to hill, all was so still, so peaceful, so beautiful; yet with the setting of the sun, his life might go out in darkness.

  In her great misery, her soul was purified. The fire that consumed her burned away the dross of the world, the alloy of selfishness and habit and vain passions. “Oh, God! give me his life, and I will give him mine!” she cried in her heart all through those terrible hours; and yet recoiled in terror from the uselessness and daring of her prayer. What had she ever done that she could merit its fulfilment?