Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “You won’t wear so well as Hélène. You don’t take care of yourself,” the counsellor retorted, with a puff of smoke between each sentence.

  “WHAT!” screamed Lady Dolly, so that her voice rose above the din of all the other voices, — the sound of the waves, the click-clack of the high heels, and the noise of the band. Not take care of herself! — she! who had every fashionable medicine that came out, and, except at Trouville, never would be awakened for any earthly thing till one o’clock in the day.

  “You don’t take care of yourself,” said the counsellor. “No; you eat heaps of sweetmeats. You take too much tea, too much ice, too much soup, too much wine; too much everything. You—”

  “Oh! if you mean to insult me and call me a drunkard — !” said Lady Dolly, very hotly flushing up a little.

  “You smoke quite awfully too much,” pursued her companion immovably “It hurts us, and can’t be good for you. Indeed, all you women would be dead if you smoked right; you don’t smoke right; you send all your smoke out, chattering; it never gets into your mouth even, and so that saves you all; if you drew it in, as we do, you would be dead, all of you. Who was the first woman that smoked I often wonder?”

  “The idea of my not wearing as well as Hélène,” pursued Lady Dolly, unable to forget the insult. “Well, there are five-and-twenty years between us, thank goodness, and more!”

  “I say you won’t,” said the counsellor, “not if you go on as you do, screaming all night over those cards and taking quarts of chloral because you can’t sleep? Why can’t you sleep? I can.”

  “All the lower animals sleep like tops,” said Lady Dolly. “You seem to have been reading medical treatises, and they haven’t agreed with you. Go and buy me a ‘Petit Journal.’”

  The counsellor went grumbling and obedient — a tall, good-looking, well-built, and very fair Englishman, who had shot everything that was shoo table all over the known world. Lady Dolly smiled serenely on the person who glided to her elbow, and took the vacant place; a slender, pale, and graceful Frenchman, the Duc de Dinant of the vieille souche.

  “Dear old Jack gets rather a proser,” she thought, and she began to plan a fishing picnic with her little Duke; a picnic at which everybody was to go barefooted, and dress like peasants — real common peasants, you know, of course, — and dredge, didn’t they call it, and poke about, and hunt for oysters. Lady Dolly had lovely feet, and could afford to uncover them; very few of her rivals could do so, a fact of which she took cruel advantage, and from which she derived exquisite satisfaction in clear shallows and rock pools. “The donkeys! they’ve cramped themselves in tight boots!” she said to herself, with the scorn of a superior mind. She always gave her miniature feet and arched insteps their natural play, and therein displayed a wisdom of which it must be honestly confessed, the rest of her career gave no glimpse.

  The counsellor bought the “Petit Journal” and a “Figaro” for himself, and came back; but she did not notice him at all. A few years before the neglect would have made him miserable; now it made him comfortable — such is the ingratitude of man. He sat down and read the “Figaro” with complacency, while she, under her sunshade beamed on Gaston de Dinant, and on four or five others of his kind; youngsters without youth, but, as a compensation for the loss, with a perfect knowledge of Judic’s last song, and Dumas’ last piece of the last new card-room scandal, and the last drawing-room adultery; of everything that was coming out at the theatres, and of all that was of promise in the stables. They were not in the least amusing in themselves, but the chatter of the world has almost always an element of the amusing in it, because it ruins so many characters, and gossips and chuckles so merrily and so lightly over infamy, incest, or anything else that it thinks only fun, and deals with such impudent personalities. At any rate they amused Lady Dolly, and her Duc de Dinant did more; they arranged the picnic, — without shoes, that was indispensable, without shoes, and in real peasants things, else there would be no joke — they settled their picnic, divorced half-a-dozen of their friends, conjectured about another half-dozen all those enormities which modern society would blush at in the Bible but, out of it, whispers and chuckles over very happily; speculated about the few unhappy unknowns who had dared to enter the magic precincts of these very dusty sands; wondered with whom the Prince of Wales would dine that night, and whose that new yawl was, that had been standing off since morning flying the R.Y.S. flag; and generally diverted one another so well, that beyond an occasional passing spasm of remembrance, Lady Dolly had forgotten her impending trial.

  “I think I will go in to breakfast,” she said at last, and got up. It was one o’clock, and the sun was getting hot; the anemone-bed began to heave and be dispersed; up and down the planks the throng was thick still, the last bathers, peignoir-enwrapped, were sauntering from the edge of the sea. The counsellor folded his “Figaro,” and shut up his cigar-case; his was the useful but humble task to go home before her and see that the Moselle was iced, the prawns just netted, the strawberries just culled, and the cutlets duly frothing in their silver dish. The Duc de Dinant sauntered by her with no weightier duty than to gaze gently down into her eyes, and buy a stephanotis or a knot of roses for her bosom when they passed the flower-baskets.

  “What are they all looking at?” said Lady Dolly to her escort suddenly Bodies of the picturesque parti-coloured crowd were all streaming the same way, inland towards the sunny white houses, whose closed green shutters were all so attractively suggestive of the shade and rest to be found within. But the heads of the crowd were turning back seaward, and their eyes and eye-glasses all gazed in the same direction.

  Was it at the Prince? Was it at the President? Was it the Channel fleet had hove in sight? or some swimmer drowning, or some porpoises, or what? No, it was a new arrival. A new arrival was no excitement at Trouville if it were somebody that everybody knew. Emperors were common-place; ministers were nonentities; marshals were monotonous; princes were more numerous than the porpoises; and great dramatists, great singers, great actors, great orators, were all there as the very sands of the sea. But an arrival of somebody that nobody knew had a certain interest, if only as food for laughter. It seemed so queer that there should be such people, or that existing, they should venture there.

  “Who is it?” said Trouville, in one breath, and the women laughed, and the men stared, and both sexes turned round by common consent. Something lovelier than anything there was coming through them as a sunbeam comes through dust. Yet it wore nothing but brown holland! Brown holland at Trouville may be worn indeed, but it is brown holland transfigured, sublimated, canonised, borne, like Lady Dolly’s baptiste, into an apotheosis of écru lace and floss silk embroideries, and old point cravats, and buttons of repousse work, or ancient smalto; brown holland raised to the empyrean, and no more discoverable to the ordinary naked eye than the original flesh, fish, or fowl lying at the root of a good cook’s mayonnaise is discernible to the uneducated palate.

  But this was brown holland naked and not ashamed, unadorned and barbaric, without any attempt at disguise of itself, and looking wet and wrinkled from seawater, and very brown indeed beside the fresh and ethereal costumes of the ladies gathered there, that looked like bubbles just blown in a thousand hues to float upon the breeze.

  “Brown holland! good gracious!” said Lady Dolly, putting up her eyeglass. She could not very well see the wearer of it; there were so many men between them; but she could see the wet, clinging, tumbled skirt which came in amongst the wonderful garments of the sacred place, and to make this worse there was an old Scotch plaid above the skirt, not worn, thrown on anyhow, as she said pathetically, long afterwards.

  “What a guy!” said Lady Dolly “What a face!” said the courtiers; but they said it under their breath, being wise in their generation, and praising no woman before another.

  But the brown holland came towards her, catching in the wind, and showing feet as perfect as her own. The brown holland stretched two hands out to her
, and a voice cried aloud, “Mother! don’t you know me, mother?”

  Lady Dolly gave a sharp little scream, then stood still. Her pretty face was very blank, her rosy small mouth was parted in amaze and disgust.

  “IN THAT DRESS!” she gasped, when the position became clear to her and her senses returned.

  But the brown holland was clinging in a wild and joyous kind of horrible, barbarous way all about her, as it seemed, and the old Scotch plaid was pressing itself against her baptiste skirts.

  “Oh, mother! how lovely you are! Not changed in the very least! Don’t you know me. Oh dear! don’t you know me? I am Vere.”

  Lady Dolly was a sweet-tempered woman by nature, and only made fretful occasionally by maids’ contretemps, debts, husbands, and other disagreeable accompaniments of life. But, at this moment, she had no other sense than that of rage. She could have struck her sunshade furiously at all creation; she could have fainted, only the situation would have been rendered more ridiculous still if she had, and that consciousness sustained her; the sands, and the planks, and the sea, and the sun, all went round her in a whirl of wrath. She could hear all her lovers, and friends, and rivals, and enemies tittering; and Princess Hélène Olgarouski, who was at her shoulder, said in the pleasantest way —

  “Is that your little daughter, dear? Why she is quite a woman! A new beauty for Monseigneur.”

  Lady Dolly could have slain her hundreds in that moment, had her sunshade but been of steel. To be made ridiculous! There is no more disastrous destiny under the sun.

  The brown holland had ceased to cling about her, finding itself repulsed; the Scotch plaid had fallen down on the plank; there were two brilliant and wistful eyes regarding her from above, and one hand still stretched out shyly “I am Vere!” said a voice in which tears trembled and held a struggle with pride.

  “I see you are!” said Lady Dolly with asperity. “What on earth made you come in this — this — indecent way for — without even dressing! I expected you at night. Is that Fraulein Schroder? She should be ashamed of herself.”

  “I see no shame, Miladi,” retorted in guttural tones an injured German, “in that a long-absent and much-loving daughter should be breathless to flee to embrace the one to whom she owes her being—”

  “Hold your tongue!” said Lady Dolly angrily. Fraulein Schroder wore a green veil and blue spectacles, and was not beautiful to the eye, and was grizzle-headed; and the friends and lovers, and courtiers, and enemies, were laughing uncontrollably.

  “What an angel of loveliness! But a woman; quite a woman. She must be twenty at least, my dear?” said Princess Hélène, who always said the pleasantest thing she could think of at any time.

  “Vere is sixteen,” said Lady Dolly sharply, much ruffled, seeing angrily that the girl’s head in its sun-burnt sailor’s hat, bound with a black ribbon, was nearly a foot higher than her own, hung down, though it now was, like a rose in the rain.

  There was a person coming up from his mile swim in the sea, with the burnous-like folds cast about him more gracefully than other men were able ever to cast theirs.

  “How do you manage to get so much grace out of a dozen yards of bath towelling, Corrèze?” asked an Englishman who was with him.

  “C’est mon métier à moi d’être poseur” said the other, paraphrasing the famous saying of Joseph the Second.

  “Ah, no,” said the Englishman, “you never do poser; that is the secret of the charm of the thing. I feel like a fool in these spadilles and swathings; but you — you look as if you had just come up from a sacred river of the East, and are worthy to sing strophes to a Nourmahal.”

  “Encore une fois — mon métier” said the other, casting some of the linen folds over his head, which was exceedingly handsome, and almost line for line like the young Sebastian of Del Sarto. At that moment he saw the little scene going on between Lady Dolly and her daughter, and watched it from a distance with much amusement.

  “What an exquisite face that child has, — that lovely tint like the wild white rose, there is nothing like it. It makes all the women with colour look vulgar,” he said, after a prolonged gaze through a friend’s field-glass. “Who is she do you say? Miladi Dolly’s daughter? Is it possible? I thought Miladi was made herself yesterday in Giroux’s shop, and was kept in a wadded box when her mechanism was not wound up. Surely, it is impossible Dolly can ever have stooped to such a homely unartificial thing as maternity. You must be mistaken.”

  “No. In remote ages she married a cousin. The white wild rose is the result.”

  “A charming result. A child only, but an exquisite child. It is a pity we are in this costume, or we would go and be presented; though Miladi would not be grateful, to judge by her face now. Poor little Dolly! It is hard to have a daughter — and a daughter that comes to Trouville in August.”

  Then he who was a figure of grace even in white towelling, and had a face like Saint Sebastian, handed the field-glass back to his friend, and went to his hotel to dress.

  Meanwhile Lady Dolly was saying irritably: “Go home to my house, Vere, — the Chalet Ludoff. Of course you ought to have gone there first; why didn’t you go there first and dress? None but an idiot would ever have allowed you to do it. The idea! Walk on, pray — and as quickly as you can.”

  “We went to the house, but they said you were on the beach, and so, mother—”

  “Pray don’t call me mother in that way. It makes one feel like What’s-her-name in the ‘Trovatore,”’ said Lady Dolly, with a little laugh, that was very fretful. “And be kind enough not to stand here and stare; everybody is listening.”

  “What for should they not listen?” said Fraulein Schroder stoutly. “Can there be in nature a sweeter, more soul-inspiring, and of-heaven-always-blessed-emotion than the out-coming of filial love and the spontaneous flow of—”

  “Rubbish!” said Lady Dolly “Vere, oblige me by walking in; I shall be with you in a moment at the house. You’ll find Jack there. You remember Jack?”

  “What an angel! anyone would give her twenty years at least,” said Princess Hélène again. “But your German, in her blue glasses, she is a drôlesse—”

  “A very clever woman; dreadfully blue and conscientious, and all that is intolerable; the old duchess found her for me,” replied Lady Dolly, still half willing to faint, and half inclined to cry, and wholly in that state of irritation which Fuseli was wont to say made swearing delicious.

  “I always fancied — so stupid of me! — that your Vere was quite a little child, always at the Sacré Coeur,” continued the Princess musingly, with her sweetest smile.

  “I wish to heaven we had a Sacré Coeur,” said Lady Dolly devoutly. “We wretched English people have nothing half so sensible; you know that, Hélène, as well as I do. Vere is tall and very like her poor father and the old Duke.”

  “But Vere — surely that is not the name of a girl?”

  “It was her fathers. That was the old Duchess’s doing too. Of course one will call her Vera. Well, au revoir ma très chère, à ce soir.”

  “With nods and becks and wreathed smiles,” and many good-days and pretty words, poor Lady Dolly got away from her friends and acquaintances, and had the common luxury of hearing them all begin laughing again as soon as they imagined she had got out of earshot. Her young courtiers accompanied her, of course, but she dismissed them on the doorstep.

  “I can’t think of anything but my child to-day!” she said very charmingly. “So glad you think her nice-looking. When she is dressed, you know—” and she disappeared into her own house with the phrase unfinished, leaving all it suggested to her hearers.

  “Where’s Vere?” she said sharply to her counsellor, entering the breakfast-room, before the empty stove of which, from the sheer fire-place club-room habit of his race, that person stood smoking.

  “Gone to her room,” he answered. “You’ve made her cry. You were nasty, weren’t you?”

  “I was furious! Who wouldn’t have been? That vile dres
s! That abominable old woman! And kissing me too — me — on the beach!”

  Her companion smiled grimly.

  “She couldn’t tell that one mustn’t touch you when you’re ‘done up.’ You didn’t do up so much three years ago. She’ll soon learn, never fear.”

  “You grow quite horribly rude, Jack.”

  He smoked serenely.

  “And quite too odiously coarse.”

  He continued to smoke.

  She often abused him, but she never could do without him; and he was aware of that.

  “And what a height she is! and what her gowns will cost! and she must come out soon — and that horrid Hélène!” sobbed Lady Dolly, fairly bursting into tears. She had been so gay and comfortable at Trouville, and now it was all over. What comfort could there be with a girl nearly six feet high, that looked twenty years old when she was sixteen, and who called her “Mother!”

  “Don’t make a fuss,” said the counsellor from the stove. “She’s very handsome, awfully pretty, you’ll marry her in no time, and be just as larky as you were before. Don’t cry, there’s a dear little soul. Look here, the cutlets are getting cold, and there’s all these mullets steaming away for nothing. Come and eat, and the thing won’t seem so terrible.”

  Being versed in the ways of consolations, he opened a bottle of Moselle with an inviting rush of sound, and let the golden stream foam itself softly over a lump of ice in a glass. Lady Dolly looked up, dried her eyes, and sat down at the table.

  “Vere must be hungry, surely,” she said, with a sudden remembrance, twenty minutes later, eating her last morsel of a truffled timbâle. Come and eat, and the thing won’t seem so terrible.”

  The counsellor smiled grimly.