by Ouida
He had reassured her as to Keziah, after whom he had sent a fisher-boy. That the fisher-boy would ever find Keziah he did not in the least see any reason to believe; but he did not see any reason either why he should tell Vere so, to make her anxious and disturbed. The girl had such a lovely face, and her innocence and seriousness pleased him.
“Are you sure the boy will soon find my woman?” she asked him wistfully.
“Quite sure,” he answered. “He saw her himself a little while ago on the top of the cliff yonder. Do not be dismayed about that, and find some appetite for this homely fare. I have made requisitions like any Prussian, but the result is poorer than I hoped it might be. Try some cherries.”
The cherries were fine biggaroons, scarlet and white, and Vere was still a child. She drank her milk and ate them with keen relish. The morning was growing warm as the sun clomb higher in the heavens. She took off her hat, and the wind lifted the thick hair falling over her forehead; exertion and excitement had brought a flush of colour in her cheeks; the light and shade of the walnut leaves was above her head; little curly-headed children peeped behind the furze fence and the sweetbriar hedge; white-capped old women looked on, nodding and smiling; the sea was out of sight, but the sound and the scent of it came there.
“It is an idyl,” thought her companion; idyls were not in his life, which was one of unending triumphs, passions, and festivals, dizzily mingled in a world which adored him. Meanwhile it pleased him, if only by force of novelty, and no incident on earth could ever have found him unready.
“You love music?” he cried to her. “Ah! now if we were but in Italy in that dark little cottage there would sure to be a chitarra, and I would give you a serenade to your cherries; perhaps without one — why not, if you like it? But first, Mademoiselle Herbert, I ought to tell you who I am.”
“Oh! I know,” said Vere, and lifted her soft eyes to him with a cherry against her lips.
“Indeed?”
“Yes, I saw you on the plage yesterday, and Adrienne told me. You are Corrèze.”
She said the name tenderly and reverently, for his fame had reached her in her childhood, and she had often thought to herself, “If only I could hear Corrèze once!”
He smiled caressingly.
“I am glad that you cared to ask. Yes, I am Corrèze, that is certain; and perhaps Corrèze would be the name of a greater artist if the world had not spoilt him — your mammas world, mademoiselle. Well, my life is very happy, and very gay and glad, and after all the fame of the singer can never be but a breath, a sound through a reed. When our lips are once shut there is on us for ever eternal silence. Who can remember a summer-breeze when it has passed by, or tell in any aftertime how a laugh or a sigh sounded?”
His face grew for the moment sad and overcast — that beautiful face which had fascinated the eyes of the girl as it had done the gaze of multitudes in burning nights of enthusiasm from Neva to Tagus, from Danube to Seine.
Vere looked at him and did not speak. The gaze of Corrèze had a magic for all women, and she vaguely felt that magic as she met those eyes that were the eyes of Romeo and of Faust.
“What a lovely life it must be, your life,” she said timidly. “It must be like a perpetual poem, I think.”
Corrèze smiled.
“An artist’s life is far off what you fancy it, I fear; but yet at the least it is full of colour and of change. I am in the snows of Russia one day, in the suns of Madrid another. I know the life of the palaces, I have known the life of the poor. When I forget the latter may heaven forget me! Some day when we are older friends, Mademoiselle Herbert, I will tell you my story.”
“Tell me now,” said Vere softly, with her gaze beginning to grow intent and eager under the halo of her hair, and letting her cherries lie unheeded on her lap.
Corrèze laughed.
“Oh, you will be disappointed. I have not much of one, and it is no secret. I am Raphael de Corrèze; I am the Marquis de Corrèze if it were of any use to be so; but I prefer to be Corrèze the singer. It is much simpler, and yet much more uncommon. There are so many marquises, so few tenors. My race was great amongst the old noblesse de Savoie, but it was beggared in the Terror, and their lands were confiscated and most of their lives were taken. I was born in a cabin; my grandfather had been born in a castle; it did not matter. He was a philosopher and a scholar, and he had taken to the mountains and loved them. My father married a peasant girl, and lived as simply as a shepherd. My mother died early. I ran about barefoot and saw to the goats. We were on the Valais side of the Pennine Alps. I used to drive the goats up higher, higher, higher, as the summer drew on, and the grass was eaten down. In the winter an old priest, who lived with us, and my father, when he had leisure, taught me. We were very poor and often hungry, but they were happy times. I think of them when I go across the Alps wrapped up in my black sables that the Empress of Russia has given me. I think I was warmer in the old days with the snow ten feet deep all around! Can you understand that snow may be warmer than sables? Yes? Well, there is little to tell. One day, when it was summer, and travellers were coming up into the Pennine valleys, some one heard me sing, and said my voice was a fortune. I was singing to myself and the goats among the gentian, the beautiful blue gentian — you know it? No, you do not know it, unless you have roamed the Alps in May. Other persons came after him and said the same thing, and wanted me to go with them; but I would not leave my father. Who could stack wood for him, and cut paths through the snow, and rake up the chestnuts and store them? I did all that. I would not go. When I was fifteen he died. “Do not forget you are the last Marquis de Corrèze,” he said to me with his last breath. He had never forgotten it, and he had lived and died in the shadow of the Alps an honest man and a gentleman in his mountain hut. I passed the winter in great pain and trouble: it had been in the autumn that he had died. I could not resolve whether it would displease him in his grave under the snow that a Corrèze should be a singer; yet a singer I longed to be. With the spring I said to myself that after all one could be as loyal a gentleman as a singer as a soldier; why not? I rose up and walked down to the bottom of our ravine, where twice a week the diligences for Paris run; I found one going on the road; I went by it, and went on and on until I entered Paris. Ah! that entry into Paris of the boy with an artists ambition and a child’s faith in destiny! Why have they never written a poem on it? Once in Paris my path was easy; my voice made me friends. I went to Italy, I studied, I was heard, I returned to my dear Paris and triumphed. Well, I have been happy ever since. It is very much to say; and yet sometimes I long for the old winter nights, roasting the chestnuts, with the wall of snow outside!”
Vere had listened with eloquent dim eyes, and a fast beating heart; her cherries lying still uneaten on her lap. She gave a little quiet sigh as his voice ceased.
“You feel so about it because your father is dead,” she said very low, and under her breath. “If he were here to know all your triumphs—”
Corrèze bent down and touched her hand, as it hung forward over her knee, with his lips. It was a mere habitual action of graceful courtesy with him, but it gave the child a strange thrill. She had never seen those tender easy ceremonies of the South. He saw that he had troubled her, and was sorry.
“Eat your cherries, Mademoiselle Herbert, and I will sing you a song,” he said gaily, dropping a cherry into his own mouth, and he began to hum in his perfect melodious notes odds and ends of some of the greatest music of the world.
Then he sang with a voice only raised to one tenth of its power, the last song of Fernando, his lips scarcely parting as he sang, and his eyes looking away to the yellow gorse and the sheep-cropped grass, and the drifting clouds; giving to the air and sea what he often refused to princes.
For the great tenor Corrèze was a prince himself in his caprices.
The perfect melody that held multitudes enthralled, and moved whole cities to ecstasies, that dissolved queens in tears and made women weep like little children, w
as heard on the still sunny silence of the cliffs with only a few babies tumbling in the sandy grass, and an old woman or two sitting spinning at her door. Down in gay Trouville all his worshippers could not woo from him a note; the entreaties that were commands found him obdurate and left him indifferent; and he sang here to the lark that was singing over his head, because a girl of sixteen had lost her shoes and stockings, and he wished to console her.
When once the voice left his lips, he sang on, much as the lark did, softly and almost unconsciously; the old familiar melodies following one another unbidden, as in his childhood he had used to sing to the goats with the flush of the Alpine roses about his feet, and the snow above his head.
The lark dropped, as though owning itself vanquished, into the hollow, where its consort’s lowly nest was made. Corrèze ceased suddenly to sing, and looked at his companion. Vere was crying.
“Ah! my beautiful angel!” said an old peasant woman to him, standing close against the furze fence to listen; “do you come out of paradise to tell us we are not quite forgot there?”
Vere said nothing; she only turned on him her great soft eyes whilst the tears were falling unchecked down her cheeks.
“Mademoiselle,” said Corrèze, “I have had flattery in my time, and more than has been good for me; but who ever gave me such sweet flattery as yours?”
“Flattery!” murmured Vere. “I did not mean — oh! how can you say that? The woman is right — it is as if it came from the angels!”
“By a servant of angels most unworthy, then, said Corrèze, with a smile and sigh. “As for the woman — good mother, here is a gold piece that carries Paradise in it; or at least men think so. But I am afraid, myself, that by the time we have found the gold pieces we have most of us forgotten the way to Paradise.”
Vere was silent. She was still very pale; the tears stood on her lashes as the rain stands on the fringes of the dark passion-flower after a storm.
“Tell me your name, my angel,” said the old woman, with her hand on the coin.
“Raphael.”
“I will pray to St. Raphael for you; if indeed you be not he?”
“Nay; I am not he. Pray always, good soul; it is pleasant to think that some one prays for us. Those cries cannot all be lost.”
“Have you none to love you?” said the old woman. “That is odd, for you are beautiful.”
“I have many to love me — in a way. But none to pray that I know of — that is another affair. Mother, did you see that lark that sang on against me, and dropped to its nest at last?”
“I saw it.”
“Then have a heed that the boys do not stone, and the trappers net it.”
“I will. What is your fancy?”
“It is a little brother.”
The peasant woman did not understand, but she nodded three times. “The lark shall be safe as a king in his court. The plot he is in is mine. When you want a thing say to women you wish it — you do not want to say anything else.”
Corrèze laughed, and pulled down a rose from behind the sweet-briar. He held it out to Vere.
“If there were only a single rose here and there upon earth, men and women would pass their years on their knees before its beauty. I wonder sometimes if human ingratitude for beauty ever hurts God? One might fancy even Deity wounded by neglected gifts. What do you say?”
He plucked a little lavender and some sea-pinks, and wound them together with the rose.
“When the fools throw me flowers they hurt me; it is barbarous,” he said. “To throw laurel has more sense; there is a bitter smell in it, and it carries a sound allegory; but flowers! — flowers thrown in the dust, and dying in the gas-glare! The little live birds thrown at Carnival are only one shade worse. Ah! here is the lad that I sent to find your waiting-woman.”
The rose, the song, the magical charm seemed all dissolved before Vere as by the speaking of some disenchanter’s spell: the hardness and fearfulness of prosaic fact faced her.
The fisher-lad explained that he had been miles in search of the good woman, but he had not found her. Men he had lately met had told him they had seen such a figure running hard back to the town.
“What shall I do?” she murmured aloud. “I have been forgetting all the trouble that I have been to you. Show me the way back — only that — I can find it — I can go alone. Indeed I can, M. de Corrèze.”
“Indeed, you will do nothing of the kind,” said Corrèze. “Your woman is quite safe, you see, so you need fear nothing for her. No doubt she thinks you have gone that way home. Mademoiselle Herbert, if you will listen to me, you will not distress yourself, but let me take you in my little boat that is down there to Trouville. It is impossible that you should walk in those wooden shoes, and carriage or even cart there is none here. Come, it is half-past nine only now. The sun is still temperate; the sea is smooth. Come, I will row you home in an hour.”
“But I have been such a trouble to you.”
“May I never have worse burdens!”
“And my mother will be so angry.”
“Will she? Madame Dolly, a mother and angry! I cannot picture it; and I thought I knew her in every phase. My child, do not be so troubled about nothing. We will drift back slowly and pleasantly, and you shall be in your mother’s house before noon strikes. And everyone knows me. That is one of the uses of notoreity; it has many drawbacks, so it need have some compensations. Come. I rowed myself out here. I studied music a year in Venice when I was a lad, and learned rowing on the Lido from the fruit-girls. Come.”
She did not resist much more; she thought that he must know best. With the grey lavender and the rose at her throat, she went away from under the cherry trees; the old woman in her blue gown gave them her blessing; the lark left his nest and began to sing again; the sunny hour was over, the black steep head of the cliffs was soon between them and the little hamlet.
They walked down by an easier way to the shore. The little boat was rocking on a high tide.
“Can you steer?” said Corrèze.
“O, yes,” said Vere, who was learned in all sailing and boating, after a childhood passed by the rough grey waters of an iron coast.
He took the oars, and she the ropes. The sea was smooth, and there was no wind, not even a ruffle in the air; the boat glided slowly and evenly along.
He talked and laughed, he amused and beguiled her; he told her stories; now and then he sang low sweet snatches of Venetian boat-songs and rowing chaunts of the Lombard lakes and of the Riveria gulfs and bays; the sun was still cool; the sea looked blue to her eyes which had never beheld the Mediterranean. There were many craft in sight, pleasure and fishing vessels, and farther away large ships; but nothing drew near them save one old coble going in to Etretat from the nights dredging. It was an enchanted voyage to Vere, as the hamlet on the cliffs, and the homely lavender, and the cabbage rose, had all been enchanted things. She was in a dream. She wondered if she were really living. As she had never read but great and noble books, she thought vaguely of the Faerie Queen and of the Fata Morgana. And through the sunlight against the sea, she saw as in a golden halo the beautiful dreamy face of Corrèze.
At last the voyage was done.
The little boat grated against the sands of Trouville, and against the side of a yachts gig waiting there with smart sailors in white jerseys and scarlet caps, with “Ephemeris” in large blue letters woven on their shirts.
It was still early, earlier than it was usual for the fashionable idleness of the place to be upon the shore; and Corrèze had hoped to run his boat in on land unnoticed. But, as the crankiness of fate would have it, several people had been wakened before their usual hour. The yachts of a great channel race, after having been all night out towards the open ocean, had hove in sight on their homeward tack, and were objects of interest, as heavy bets were on them. Corrèze, to his annoyance, saw several skiffs and canoes already out upon the water round him, and several poppy-coloured and turquoise-coloured stripes adorning the bodies o
f human beings, and moving to and fro, some on the sand, some in the surf, some in the deeper sea.
There was no help for it, he saw, but to run the boat in, and trust to chance to take his companion unnoticed across the few hundred yards that separated the shore from the little house of Lady Dolly But chance chose otherwise.
As he steered through the still shallow water, and ran the boat up on the sand, there were some human figures, like gaily painted peg-tops, immediately swarming down towards him, and amongst them Lady Dolly herself; Lady Dolly with a penthouse-like erection of straw above her head to keep the sun off, and her body tightly encased in black and yellow stripes, till she looked like a wasp — if a wasp had ever possessed snowy arms quite bare and bare white legs.
Corrèze gave his hand to Vere to alight, and she set her little wooden shoes upon the dusty shore, and did not look up. The golden clouds seemed all about her still, and she was wondering what she could ever say to him to thank him enough for all his care.
A peal of shrill laughter pierced her ear and broke her musing.
“Corrèze, what nymph or naiad have you found? A mermaid in sabots! Oh! oh! oh!”
The laughter pealed and shrieked, as fashionable ladies’ laughter will, more often than is pretty; and then, through the laughter she heard her mothers voice.
“Ah — ha! Corrèze! So this is why you steal away from supper when the daylight comes?”
Corrèze, surrounded by the swarming and parti-coloured pegtops, lifted his head, comprehended the situation, and bowed to the ground.
“I have had the honour and happiness, madame, to be of a slight service to Mademoiselle Herbert.”
The group of pegtops was composed of Lady Dolly, the Princesse Hélène, a Princess Zephine, three other ladies, and several gentlemen, just come to the edge of the sea to bathe.
Vere gave one amazed glance at her mother and blushed scarlet. The glance and the blush were not for the shame of her own misdoing; they were for the shame of her mother’s attire. Vere, who had been overwhelmed with confusion at the loss of her shoes, was very far from comprehending the state of feeling which adopts a fashionable swimming costume as perfect propriety, and skips about in the surf hand in hand with a male swimmer, the cynosure of five hundred eye-glasses and lorgnons.