by Ouida
“May I swim here?” asked Vere.
“Of course; it’s the thing to do. Can you dive?”
“Oh yes! I am used to the water.”
“Very well, then. But wait; you can’t have any bathing-dress?”
“Yes. I brought it. Would you wish to see it? Keziah—”
Keziah was bidden to seek for and bring out the bathing-dress, and after a little delay did so.
Lady Dolly looked. Gradually an expression of horror, such as is depicted on the faces of those who are supposed to see ghosts, spread itself over her countenance and seemed to change it to stone.
“That thing!” she gasped.
What she saw was the long indigo-coloured linen gown — high to the throat and down to the feet — of the uneducated British bather, whose mind has not been opened by the sweetness and light of continental shores.
“That thing!” gasped Lady Dolly.
“What is the matter with it?” said Vere, timidly and perplexed.
“Matter? It is indecent!”
“Indecent?” Vere coloured all over the white rose-leaf beauty of her face.
“Indecent,” reiterated Lady Dolly. “If it isn’t worse! Good gracious! It must have been worn at the deluge. The very children would stone you! Of course I knew you couldn’t have any decent dress. You shall have one like mine made to-morrow, and then you can kick about as you like. Blue and white or blue and pink. You shall see mine.”
She rang, and sent one of her maids for one of her bathing costumes, which were many and of all hues.
Vere looked at the brilliant object when it arrived, puzzled and troubled by it. She could not understand it. It appeared to be cut off at the shoulders and the knees.
“It is like what the circus-riders wear,” she said, with a deep breath.
“Well, it is, now you name it,” said Lady Dolly amused. “You shall have one to-morrow.”
Veres face crimsoned.
“But what covers ones legs and arms?”
“Nothing! what a little silly you are. I suppose you have nothing the matter with them, have you? no mark, or twist, or anything? I don’t remember any when you were little. You were thought an extraordinarily well-made baby.”
Might one then go naked provided only one had no mark or twist? Vere wondered, and wondered at the world into which she had strayed.
“I would never wear a costume like that,” she said quietly after a little pause.
“You will wear what I tell you,” said her sweet little mother sharply; “and for goodness’ sake, child, don’t be a prude whatever you are. Prudes belong to Noah’s Ark, like your bathing-gown.”
Vere was silent.
“Is Mr. Vanderdecken here?” she asked at length, to change the theme, and, finding her mother did not speak again, who, indeed, was busy, thinking what her clothes were likely to cost, and also whether she would arrange a marriage for her with the young Duc de Tambour, son of the Prince de Chambrée. The best alliance she could thing of at the minute — but then the poor child had no dot.
“Mr. Vanderdecken?” said Lady Dolly waking to fact. “Oh, he is on the sea going somewhere. He is always going somewhere; it is Java or Japan, or Jupiter; something with a J. He makes his money in that sort of way, you know. I never understand it myself. Whenever people want money he goes, and he makes it because the people he goes to haven’t got any; isn’t it queer? Come here. Do you know, Vere, you are very pretty? You will be very handsome. Kiss me again, dear.”
Vere did so, learning, by a kind of intuition, that she must touch her mother without injuring the artistic work of the maids and the “little secrets.” Then she stood silent and passive.
“She is an uncomfortable girl,” thought Lady Dolly once more.
“And dear me, so like poor Vere! What a tall creature you are getting,” she said aloud. “You will be married in another year.”
“Oh no!” said Vere with a glance of alarm.
“You unnatural child! How on earth would you like to live if you don’t want to be married?”
“With the Fraulein in the country.”
“All your life! And die an old maid?”
“I should not mind.”
Lady Dolly laughed, but it was with a sort of shock and shudder, as an orthodox person laughs when they hear what is amusing but irreverent.
“Why do you say such things?” she said impatiently. “They are nonsense and you don’t mean them.”
“I mean them — quite.”
“Nonsense!” said Lady Dolly, who never discussed with anybody, finding asseveration answer all purposes very much better; as, indeed, it does in most cases. “Well, good-bye my love; you want to rest, and you can’t go out till you have something to wear, and I have an immense deal to do. Good-bye; you are very pretty!”
“Who was that gentleman I saw?” asked Vere, as her mother rose and kissed her once more on her silky fair hair. “Is he any relation of papa’s? He was very kind.”
Lady Dolly coloured ever so little.
“Oh! that’s Jack. Surely you remember seeing Jack three years ago at Homburg, when you came out to meet me there?”
“Is he a relation of ours?”
“No; not a relation exactly; only a friend.”
“And has he no name but Jack?”
“Of course. Don’t say silly things. He is Lord Jura, Lord Shetland’s son. He is in the Guards. A very old acquaintance, dear — recollects you as a baby.”
“A friend of my father’s then?”
“Well, no dear, not quite. Not quite so far back as that. Certainly he may have fagged for poor Vere at Eton perhaps, but I doubt it. Good-bye, darling. I will send you Adrienne. You may put yourself in her hands blindly. She has perfect taste.”
Then Lady Dolly opened the door, and escaped.
Vere Herbert was left to herself. She was not tired; she was strong and healthful, for all the white rose paleness of her fair skin; and a twelve hours’ tossing on the sea, and a day or two’s rumbling on the rail, had no power to fatigue her. Her grandmother, though a humdrum and a cat, according to Lady Dolly, had sundry old-fashioned notions from which the girl had benefited both in body and mind, and the fresh strong air of Bulmer Chase — a breezy old forest place on the Northumberland seashore, where the morose old duchess found a dower house to her taste — had braced her physically, as study and the absence of any sort of excitement had done mentally, and made her as unlike her mother as anything female could have been. The Duchess of Mull was miserly, cross-tempered, and old-fashioned in her ways and in her prejudices, but she was an upright woman, a gentlewoman, and no fool, as she would say herself. She had been harsh with the girl, but she had loved her and been just to her, and Vere had spent her life at Bulmer Chase not unhappily, varied only by an occasional visit to Lady Dolly, who had always seemed to the child something too bright and fair to be mortal, and to have an enchanted existence, where caramels and cosaques rained, and music was always heard, and the sun shone all day long.
She was all alone. The Fraulein was asleep in the next room. The maid did not come. The girl kneeled down by the window-seat and looked out through one of the chinks of the blinds. It was late afternoon by the sun; the human butterflies were beginning to come out again. Looking up and down she saw the whole sunshiny coast, and the dancing water that was boisterous enough to be pretty and to swell the canvas of the yachts standing off the shore.
“How bright it all looks!” she thought, with a little sigh; the salt fresh smell did her good, and Bulmer, amidst its slowly budding woods and dreary moors, and long dark winters, had been anything but bright. Yet she felt very unhappy and lonely. Her mother seemed a great deal farther away than she had done when Vere had sat dreaming about her on the side of the rough heathered hills, with the herons calling across from one marshy pool to another.
She leaned against the green blind and ceased to see the sea and the sky, the beach and the butterflies, for a little while, her tears were so full u
nder her lashes, and she did her best to keep them back. She was full of pain because her mother did not care for her; but, indeed, why should she care? said Vere to herself; they had been so little together.
She looked, almost without seeing it at first, at the picture underneath her; the stream, which gradually swelled and grew larger, beautifully-dressed fairy-like women, whose laughter every now and then echoed up to her. It was one unbroken current of harmonious colour, rolled out like a brilliant riband on the fawn-coloured sand against the azure sea.
“And have they all nothing to do but to enjoy themselves?” thought Vere. It seemed so. If Black Care were anywhere at Trouville, as it was everywhere else in the world, it took pains to wear a face like the rest and read its “Figaro.”
She heard the door underneath unclose, and from underneath the green verandah she saw her mother saunter out. Three other ladies were with her and half a dozen men. They were talking and laughing all at once, no one waiting to be listened to or seeming to expect it; they walked across the beach and sat down. They put up gorgeous sunshades and out-spread huge fans: they were all twitter, laughter, colour, mirth.
All this going to and fro of gay people, the patter of feet and flutter of petticoats, amused the girl to watch almost as much as if she had been amidst it. There were such a sparkle of sea, such a radiance of sunshine, such a rainbow of colour, that though it would have composed ill for a landscape, it made a pretty panorama.
Vere watched it, conjecturing in a youthful fanciful ignorant way all kinds of things about the persons who seemed so happy there. When she had gazed for about twenty minutes, making her eyes ache and getting tired, one of them especially attracted her attention by the way in which people all turned after him, as he passed, and the delight that his greeting appeared to cause those with whom he lingered. He was a man of such remarkable personal beauty that this alone might have been reason enough for the eager welcome of the listless ladies; but there was even a greater charm in his perfect grace of movement and vivacity and airy ease: he stayed little time with any one; but wherever he loitered a moment appeared to be the centre of all smiles. She did not know that he was her admirer of the noonday, who had looked at her as he had sauntered along in his bathing shroud and his white shoes; but she watched the easy graceful attitudes of him with interest as he cast himself down on the sand, leaning on his elbow, by a group of fair women.
“Can you tell me who that gentleman is?” she asked of her mothers head-maid, the inimitable Adrienne.
Adrienne looked and smiled, “Oh! that is M. de Corrèze.”
“Corrèze!” Veres eyes opened in a blaze of eager wonder, and the colour rose in her pale cheeks. “Corrèze! Are you sure?”
“But yes: I am quite sure,” laughed Adrienne. “Does mademoiselle feel emotion at the sight of him? She is only like all others of her sex. Ah! le beau Corrèze.”
“I have never heard him sing,” said Vere, very low, as if she spoke of some religious thing; “but I would give anything, anything, to do so. And the music he composes himself is beautiful. There is one ‘Messe de Minuit —
“Mademoiselle will hear him often enough when she is once in the world,” said Adrienne, good-naturedly. “Ah! when she shall see him in ‘Faust’ that will be an era in her life. But it is not his singing that makes the great ladies rave of him; it is his charm. Oh, quel philtre d’amour!”
And Adrienne quite sighed with despair, and then laughed.
Vere coloured a little; Keziah did not discourse about men being love-philtres.
“Measure me for my clothes; I am tired,” she said with a childish coldness and dignity, turning away from the window.
“I am entirely at mademoiselles service,” said Adrienne with answering dignity. “Whoever has had the honour to clothe mademoiselle has been strangely neglectful of her highest interests.”
“My clothes my highest interest! I never think about them!”
“That is very sad. They are really barbaric. If Mademoiselle could behold herself—”
“They are useful,” said Vere coldly; “that is all that is necessary.”
Adrienne was respectfully silent, but she shuddered as if she had heard a blasphemy. She could not comprehend how the young barbarian could have been brought up by a duchess. Adrienne had never been to Bulmer, and had never seen Her Grace of Mull, with her silver spectacles, her leather boots, her tweed clothes, her farm-ledgers, her studbooks, and her ever-open Bible.
“Measure me quickly,” said Vere. She had lowered the green jalousies, and would not look out any more. Yet she felt happier. She missed dark, old, misty Bulmer with its oakwoods by the ocean; yet this little gay room, with its pretty cretonne, cream-coloured, with pale pink roses, its gilded mirrors, its rose china, its white muslin, was certainly brighter and sunnier, and who could tell but what her mother would grow to love her some day?
At nine o’clock Lady Dolly, considering herself a martyr to maternity, ran into the little room where Vere was at tea with her governess; Lady Dolly was arrayed for the evening sauterie at the Casino, and was in great haste to be gone.
“Have you everything you like, darling?” she asked, pulling on her pearl-hued crispens. “Did you have a nice little dinner? Yes? Quite sure? Has Adrienne been to you? An excellent creature; perfect tastes. Dear me, what a pity! — you might have come and, jumped about tonight if you had had only something to wear. Of course you like dancing?”
“I dislike it very much.”
“Dear me! Ah well! you won’t say so after a cotillon or two. You shall have a cotillon that Zouroff leads: there is nobody better. Good night, my sweet Vera. Mind, I shall always call you Vera. It sounds so Russian and nice, and is much prettier than Vere.”
“I do not think so, mother, and I am not Russian.”
“You are very contradictory and opinionated; much too opinionated for a girl. It is horrid in a girl to have opinions. Fraulein, how could you let her have opinions? Good night, dear. I shall hardly see you to-morrow, if at all. We shall be cruising about in Jack’s yacht, and we shall start very early. The Grand Duchess will go out with us. She is great fun, only she does get in such a rage when she loses at play, that it is horrible to see. So sorry you must be shut up, my poor Vera!”
“May I not go out just for a walk?”
“Well, I don’t know — yes, really, I think you might; if it’s very early mind, and you keep out of everybody’s sight. Pray take care not a soul sees you.”
“Is not this better, then?” murmured the offender, glancing down on a white serge frock, which she had put on in the hope that it might please. It was a simple braided dress with a plain silver belt, and was really unobjectionable.
Lady Dolly scanned the garment with a critical air and a parti pris. Certainly it might have done for the morrow’s yachting, but then she did not want the wearer of it on the yacht. The girl would have to be every-where very soon, of course, but Lady Dolly put off the evil day as long as she could.
“It is the cut” she said, dropping her glass with a sigh. It can’t be Morgan’s?”
“Who is Morgan?” asked the child, so benighted that she had not ever heard of the great Worth of nautical costume.
“Morgan is the only creature possible for serge,” sighed Lady Dolly “You don’t seem to understand darling. Material is nothing, Make is everything. Look at our camelot and percale gowns that Worth sends us; and look at the satins and velvets of a bourgeoise from Asnières or a wine-merchant’s wife from Clapham! Oh, my dear child! cut your gown out of your dog’s towel or your horses’ cloths if you like, but mind Who cuts it: that is the one golden rule! But good-night, my sweetest. Sleep well.”
Lady Dolly brushed her daughter’s cheek with the diamond end of her earring, and took herself off in a maze of pale yellow and deep scarlet as mysteriously and perfectly blended as the sunset colours of an Italian night.
“She is really very pretty,” she said to her counsellor as he put her cloak round her a
nd pocketed her fan. “Really very handsome, like Burne-Jones’s things and all that, don’t you know.”
“A long sight prettier and healthier than any of ’em,” said the counsellor lighting his cigar; for he had small respect for the High Art of his period.
They went forth into the moonlit night to the Casino, and left Vere to the sleep into which she sobbed herself like a child as she still was, soothed at last by the sound of the incoming tide and the muttering of the good Fraulein’s prayers.
CHAPTER III.
Vera was awoke at five o’clock by tumultuous laughter, gay shrill outcries, and a sudden smell of cigar smoke. It was her mother returning home. Doors banged; then all grew still. Vere got up, looked at the sea and remembered that permission to go out had been given her.
In another hour she was abroad in the soft cool sunshine of early morning, the channel before her, and behind her the stout form of Northumbrian Keziah.
Trouvilain, as somebody has wittily called it, is not lovely. Were it not so celebrated, undoubtedly it would be called commonplace; but, in the very first light of morning, every spot on earth, except a manufacturing city, has some loveliness, and Trouvilain at day break had some for Vere. There were yachts with slender trim lines beautiful against the clear sky There were here and there provision boats pulling out with sailors in dark blue jerseys, and red capped. There were fleecy white clouds, and there were cool sands; cool now, if soon they would be no better than powder and dust. Along the poor planks that are the treadmill of fashion, Veres buoyant young feet bore her with swiftness and pleasure till she reached the Corniche des Roches Noires and got out into the charming green country.
She glanced at the water and longed to run into the shallows and wade and spread her limbs out, and float and swim, beating the sea with her slender arms and rosy toes as she had done most mornings in the cold, wind-swept, steel-grey northern tides of her old home.
But her bathing-costume had been forbidden, had even been carried away in bitter contempt by one of the French maids, and never would she go into the sea in this public place in one of those sleeveless, legless, circus-rider’s tunics: no, never, she said to herself; and her resolves were apt to be very resolute ones. Her old guardian at Bulmer Chase had always said to her: “Never say ‘no’ rashly, nor ‘yes’ either; but when you have said them, stand to them as a soldier to his guns.”