Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  She had seen the bathing-dress indeed, but though she had perceived that it was legless and armless, she had imagined that something must be worn with it to supplement those deficiencies, and she had not in any way reckoned the full enormity of it as it had hung limp over the back of a chair.

  But her mother!

  As the group of living human pegtops swarmed before her on the edge of the sea, and she realised that it was actually her mother, actually her dead fathers wife, who was before her, with those black and yellow stripes for all her covering, Vere felt her cheeks and brow burn all over as with fire. They thought she was blushing with shame at herself, but she was blushing for shame for them, and those tight-drawn rainbow-coloured stripes that showed every line of the form more than the kilted skirts and scant rags of the fisher-girls ever showed theirs. If it were right to come down to dance about in the water with half-a-dozen men around, how could that which she had done herself be so very wrong? The sea and the sands and the sky seemed to go round with her. She was only conscious of the anger sparkling from her mother’s eyes; she did not heed the tittering and the teasing with which the other ladies surrounded her companion.

  “Vere!” — Lady Dolly for the moment said nothing more. She stood blankly staring at her daughter, at the sunburnt hat, the tumbled hair, the wooden shoes; and at the figure of Corrèze against the sun.

  “You — with Corrèze!” she cried at length; and Corrèze, studying her pretty little face, thought how evil pretty women could sometimes look.

  “Mademoiselle Herbert had lost her maid, and her road, and her shoes,” he hastened to say with his most charming grace; “I have been happy enough to be of a little — too little — service to her. The fault was none of hers, but all of the tide; and, save the loss of the shoes, there is no mischief done.”

  “M. Corrèze has wasted his morning for me, and has been so very kind,” said Vere. Her voice was very low, but it was steady. She did not think she had done any wrong, but she felt bewildered, and was not quite sure.

  Her mother laughed very irritably.

  “Corrèze is always too kind, and always a preux chevalier. What on earth have you been doing, darling? and where are your women? and however could you be so quite too dreadfully foolish. I suppose you think life is like Alice in Wonderland? Jack, see her home, will you? and join us at the yacht and lock her up in her room, and the German with her. How good of you, dear Corrèze, to bore yourself with a troublesome child. If it were anybody else except you who had come ashore like this with my Vera I should feel really too anxious and angry. But, with you—”

  “Madame! I am too fortunate! If you deem me to be of any use, however, let me claim as a guerdon, permission to attend mademoiselle your daughter to her home.”

  “Jack, see her home, pray. Do you hear me,” said Lady Dolly again, sharply. “No — not you, Corrèze — you are quite too charming to be trusted. Jack’s like an old woman.”

  The Princesse Hélène smiled at the Princess Zephine.

  If old women are thirty years old, handsome in a fair bold breezy fashion, and six feet three in height, then was Lord Jura like them. He had come ashore from the “Ephemeris,” and was the only one of the party decently clad.

  “Why should she go home?” muttered Jura, “why may she not come with us — eh?”

  “Out of the question,” said Lady Dolly, very sharply.

  He was a silent man; he said nothing now; he strode off silently to Vere’s side, lifting his straw hat a little, in sign of his acceptance of his devoir.

  Vere made an inclination to her mother and the other ladies, with the somewhat stately deference that had been imposed on her at Bulmer Chase, and began to move toward the Chalet Lu doff, whose green blinds and gilded scroll balconies were visible in the distance. Corrèze bowed very low with his own matchless grace and ease, and began to follow them.

  “No; not you Corrèze; I cannot permit it. You are too fascinating — infinitely too fascinating — to play chaperon,” cried Lady Dolly once more. “Vera, when you get home go to your room, and stay there till I come. You have had enough liberty to-day, and have abused it shamefully.”

  Having screamed that admonition on the air, Lady Dolly turned to her friends the feminine pegtops, and entreated them not to think too badly of her naughty little puss — she was so young!

  In a few moments all the pegtops had jumped into the water, and the young Duc de Dinant was teaching Lady Dolly to execute in the waves a new dance just introduced in an operetta of Messieurs Meilhac and Hervé; a dance that required prodigious leaps and produced boisterous laughter. Vere did not look back once; she felt very ashamed still, but not of herself Jura did not address a word to her, except when they had approached the steps of the Chalet Ludoff; then he said, somewhat sheepishly, “I say — if she’s nasty don’t you mind. She can be; but it soon blows over—”

  Vere was silent.

  “Won’t you come out to-day,” he pursued. “I do so wish you would. It’s my tub, you know, and you would like it. Do come?”

  “Where?”

  “On my yacht. We are going to picnic at Villiers. The Grand Duchess is coming, and she is great fun, when she aren’t too drunk. Why shouldn’t you come? It seems to me you are shut up like a nun. It’s not fair.”

  “My mother does not wish me to come anywhere,” said Vere dreamily, heeding him very little. “There is the house. Go back to them, Lord Jura. Thanks.”

  Jura went back; but not until he had sent her up a pretty little breakfast, and the most innocent of his many French novels.

  “It is a beastly shame,” he said, as he walked towards the swimmers over the sands.

  Corrèze meanwhile, who had resisted all entreaties to bathe, and all invitations to pass the day on the “Ephemeris,” wended his way slowly towards his hotel.

  “She has claws, that pretty cat,” he said to himself, thinking of Lady Dolly. He had never very much liked her, and he detested her now in a petulant impetuous way that now and then broke up the sunny softness of his temper.

  “How sweet she is now; sweet as the sweetbriar, and as healthy,” he thought to himself. “How clear the soul, how clear the eyes! If only that would last! But one little year in the world, and it will be all altered. She will have gained some chic, no doubt, and some talent and tact; she will wear high-heeled shoes, and she will have drawn in her waist, and learned how to porter le sein en offrande, and learned how to make those grand grey eyes look languid, and lustrous, and terrible. Oh, yes, she will have learned all that. But then, alas! alas! she will have learned so much too. She will have learned what the sickly sarcasms mean, and the wrapt-up pruriencies intend, and what women and men are worth, and how politics are knavish tricks, and the value of a thing is just as much as it will bring, and all the rest of the dreary gospel of self. What a pity! what a pity! But it is always so. I dare say she will never stoop to folly as her pretty mother does; but the bloom will go. She will be surprised, shocked, pained; then, little by little, she will get used to it all — they all do — and then the world will have her, body and soul, and perhaps will put a bit of ice where that tender heart now beats. She will be a great lady, I dare say — a very great lady — nothing worse, very likely; but, all the same, my sweetbriar will be withered, and my white wild rose will be dead — and what will it matter to me? I dare say I shall be a musical box with a broken spring, lying in a dust of dried myrtle and musty laurels!” Lady Dolly danced, floated, bobbed like a cork, drifted languidly with her arms above her head, dived, and disappeared with only the rosy soles of her feet visible — did everything that a pretty woman and a good swimmer can do in shallow smooth water, with no breeze to mar her comfort. But she was in a very bad temper all the time.

  Jura did not improve it, when she came out of the water, by asking her, again, to let her daughter go with them in the “Ephemeris.”

  “Au grand jamais!” said Lady Dolly, quite furiously. “After such an exhibition of herself with a sin
ger! Are you mad?”

  She went home furious; changed her wet stripes for a yachting dress in sullen silence; refused to see the German governess, or to allow Veres door to be opened till she should return in the evening, and went down to the yacht in a state of great irritation, with a charming costume, all white serge and navy blue satin, with anchor buttons in silver, and a Norwegian belt hung with everything that the mind of man could imagine as going on to a girdle.

  The “Ephemeris” was one of the best yachts on the high seas; and had a good cook, wonderful wines, a piano, a library, a cabin of rosewood and azure, and deck hammocks of silk. Nevertheless, everything seemed to go wrong on board of her that day — at least to Lady Dolly. They got becalmed, and stuck stupidly still, while the steam yachts were tearing ahead in a cruel and jeering manner; then the sea got rough all in a moment; the lobster salad disagreed with her, or something did; a spiteful stiff wind rose; and the Grand Duchess borrowed her cigarette case and never returned it, and of course could not be asked for it, and it contained the only verbena-scented papelitos that there were on board. Then Jura was too attentive to the comfort of another woman, or she fancied, at any rate, that he was; and none of her especial pets were there, so she could not make reprisals as she wished; and Corrèze had obstinately and obdurately refused to come at all. Not that she cared a straw about Corrèze, but she hated being refused.

  “What a wax you’re in, Dolly!” said Lord Jura, bringing her some iced drinks and peaches.

  “When I’ve had three mad people sent to me!” she cried in a rage. “And I’ll be obliged to you, Jack, not to use slang to me.”

  Lord Jura whistled and went aft.

  “What a boor he grows!” thought Lady Dolly; and the “Ephemeris” was pitching, and she hated pitching, and the little Duc de Dinant was not on board because Jack wouldn’t have him; and she felt ill-used, furious, wretched, and hated the cook for making the lobster salad, and Vere for having been born.

  “A boy wouldn’t have been half so bad,” she thought. “He’d have been always away, and they’d have put him in the army. But a girl! It’s all very easy to say marry her, but she hasn’t any money, and the Mull people won’t give her any, and my own people can’t, and as for Mr. Vanderdecken, one might as well try to get blood out of a flint; and they may say what they like, but all men want money when they marry nowadays, even when they’ve got heaps more than they know what to do with themselves. What a horrid woman the Grand Duchess is. She’s drunk already, and it isn’t three o’clock!”

  “She’s going splendidly now,” said Jura, meaning the “Ephemeris,” that plunged and reared as if she were a mare instead of a schooner; and the fresh sou’easter that had risen sent her farther and farther westward towards the haze of distant seas.

  “I believe we’re going straight to America! what idiocy is yachting!” said Lady Dolly savagely, as the wind tore at her tiny multitudinous curls.

  Meanwhile, Vere, in religious obedience, had gone to the little chamber that was called by courtesy at the Chalet Ludoff a study, and submitting to be locked in, remained happy in the morning’s golden dream of sunshine, of song, of the sea, of the summer. She had found her lost Northumbrian safe, but in agonies of terror and self-reproach, and the amiable German for once very seriously angry But Vere was not to be ruffled or troubled; she smiled at all reproof, scarcely hearing it, and put her cabbage rose and her sprigs of lavender in water. Then she fell fast asleep on a couch, from fatigue and the warmth of the Norman sun, and dreamed of the blue gentian of the Alps that she had never seen, and of the music of the voice of Corrèze.

  When she awoke some hours had passed — the clock told her it was two. She never thought of moving from her prison. The ricketty white and gold door would have given way at a push, but to her it was inviolate. She had been reared to give obedience in the spirit as well as the letter.

  She thought no one had ever had so beautiful a day as this morning of hers. She would have believed it a dream, only there were her rose and the homely heads of the lavender.

  The German brought Euclid and Sophocles into the prison-chamber, but Vere put them gently away.

  “I cannot study to-day,” she said. It was the first time in her life that she had ever said so.

  The Fraulein went away weeping, and believing that the heavens would fall. Vere, with her hands clasped behind her head, leaned back and watched the white clouds come and go above the sea, and fancied the air was still full of that marvellous and matchless voice which had told her at last all that music could be.

  “He is the angel Raphael?” she said to herself. It seemed to her that he could not be mere mortal man.

  Her couch was close to the glass doors of the room, and they opened into one of the scroll-work balconies which embroidered the fantastic front of the Chalet Ludoff. The room was nominally upstairs, but literally it was scarcely eight feet above the ground without.

  It was in the full hot sunshine of early afternoon when the voice she dreamed of said softly, “Mademoiselle Herbert!”

  Vere roused herself with a start, and saw the arm of Corrèze leaning on the balcony and his eyes looking at her; he was standing on the stone perro below.

  “I came to bid you farewell,” he said softly. “I go to Germany to-night. You are a captive, I know, so I dared to speak to you thus.”

  “You go away!”

  To the girl it seemed as if darkness fell over the sea and shore.

  “Ah! we princes of art are but slaves of the ring after all. Yes, my engagements have been made many months ago: to Baden, to Vienna, to Moscow, to Petersburg; then Paris and London once more. It may be long ere we meet, if ever we do, and I dare to call myself your friend, though you never saw my face until this morning.”

  “You have been so good to me,” murmured Vere; and then stopped, not knowing what ailed her in the sudden sense of sorrow, loss, and pain, which came over her as she listened.

  “Oh altro!” laughed Corrèze, lifting himself a little higher, and leaning more easily on the iron of the balcony. “I found you a pair of wooden shoes, a cup of milk, and a cabbage rose. Sorry things to offer to an enchanted princess who had missed her road! My dear, few men will not be willing to be as good to you as you will let them be. You are a child. You do not know your power. I wonder what teachers you will have? I wish you could go untaught, but there is no hope of that.”

  Vere was silent. She did not understand what he meant. She understood only that he was going far away — this brilliant and beautiful stranger who had come to her with the morning sun.

  “Mademoiselle Herbert,” continued Corrèze, “I shall sound like a preacher, and I am but a graceless singer, but try and keep yourself ‘unspotted from the world.’ Those are holy words, and I am not a holy speaker, but try and remember them. This world you will be launched in does no woman good. It is a world of moths. Half the moths are burning themselves in feverish frailty, the other half are corroding and consuming all that they touch. Do not become of either kind. You are made for something better than a moth. You will be tempted; you will be laughed at; you will be surrounded with the most insidious sort of evil example, namely, that which does not look like evil one whit more than the belladonna berry looks like death. The women of your time are not, perhaps, the worst the world has seen, but they are certainly the most contemptible. They have dethroned grace; they have driven out honour; they have succeeded in making men ashamed of the sex of their mothers; and they have set up nothing in the stead of all they have destroyed except a feverish frenzy for amusement and an idiotic imitation of vice. You cannot understand now, but you will see it — too soon. They will try to make you like them. Do not let them succeed. You have truth, innocence, and serenity — treasure them. The women of your day will ridicule you, and tell you it is an old-fashioned triad, out of date like the Graces; but do not listen. It is a triad without which no woman is truly beautiful, and without which no man’s love for her can be pure. I would fain say
more to you, but I am afraid to tell you what you do not know; and woe to those by whom such knowledge first comes! Mon enfant, adieu.”

  He had laid a bouquet of stephanotis and orchids on the sill of the window at her feet, and had dropped out of sight before she had realized his farewell.

  When she strained her eyes to look for him, he had already disappeared. Tears blinded her sight, and fell on the rare blossoms of his gift.

  “I will try — I will try to be what he wishes,” she murmured to the flowers. “If only I knew better what he meant.”

  The time soon came when she knew too well what he meant. Now she sat with the flowers in her lap and wondered wearily, and sobbed silently, as if her heart would break.

  Corrèze was gone.

  CHAPTER IV.

  At sunset Lady Dolly returned, out of temper. They had been becalmed again for two hours, the sea all of sudden becoming like oil, just to spite her, and they had played to wile away the time, and the Grand Duchess had won a great deal of her money, besides smoking every one of her cigarettes and letting the case fall through the hatchway.

  “I will never go out with that odious Russian again — never! The manners of a cantinièrer and the claws of a croupier!” she said in immeasurable disgust of the august lady whom she had idolised in the morning; and she looked in at the little study, when she reached home, to allay her rage with making someone uncomfortable.

  “Are you sufficiently ashamed of yourself, Vera?” she said as she entered.

  Vere rose, rather uneasily, and with soft sad dewy eyes.

  “Why should I be ashamed, mother?” she said simply.

  “Why? why? you ask why? after compromising yourself, as you did this morning?”