by Ouida
“Compromise?”
Vere had never heard the word. Women who were compromised were things that had never been heard of at Bulmer.
“Do not repeat what I say. It is the rudest thing you can do,” said her mother sharply. “Yes, compromised, hideously compromised — and with Corrèze of all persons in the world! You must have been mad!”
Vere looked at her stephanotis and orchids, and her young face grew almost stern. “If you mean I did anything wrong, I did no wrong. It was all accident, and no one could have been so kind as — he — was.”
The ear of Lady Dolly, quick at such signs, caught the little pause before the pronoun.
“The world never believes in accidents,” she said chillily. “You had better understand that for the future. To be seen coming home in a boat early in the morning all alone with such a man as Corrèze would be enough to ruin any girl at the outset of her life — to ruin her!”
Veres eyes opened in bewildered surprise. She could not follow her mother’s thoughts at all, nor could she see where she had been in any error.
“Corrèze, of all men upon earth!” echoed her mother. “Good heavens! do you know he is a singer?”
“Yes,” said Vere softly; hearing all around her as she spoke the sweet liquid melody of that perfect voice which had called the skylark “a little brother.”
“A great singer, I grant; the greatest, if you like, but still a singer, and a man with a hundred love affairs in every capital he enters! And to come home alone with such a man after hours spent alone with him. It was madness, Vera; and it was worse, it was forward, impudent, unmaidenly!”
The girl’s pale face flushed; she lifted her head with a certain indignant pride.
“You must say what you will, mother,” she said quietly. “But that is very untrue.”
“Don’t dare to answer me” said Lady Dolly, “I tell you it was disgraceful, disgraceful, and goodness knows how ever I shall explain it away. Hélène has been telling the story to everybody, and given it seven-leagued boots already True! who cares what is true or what is not true — it is what a thing looks! I believe everybody says you had come from Havre with Corrèze!”
Vere stood silent and passive, her eyes on her stephanotis and orchids.
“Where did you get those extravagant flowers? Surely Jack never—” said Lady Dolly suspiciously.
“He brought them,” answered Vere.
“Corrèze? Whilst I was away?”
“Yes. He spoke to me at the balcony.”
“Well, my dear, you do Bulmer credit! No Spanish or Italian heroine out of his own operas could conduct herself more audaciously on the first day of her liberty. It is certainly what I always thought would come of your grandmother’s mode of education. Well, go upstairs in your bedroom and do not leave it until I send for you. No, you can’t take flowers upstairs; they are very unwholesome — as unwholesome as the kindness of Corrèze.”
Vere went, wistfully regarding her treasures; but she had kept the faded rose and the lavender in her hand unnoticed.
“After all, I care most for these,” she thought; the homely seaborn things that had been gathered after the songs.
When the door had closed on her Lady Dolly rang for her maître d’hôtel.
“Pay the Fraulein Schroder three months’ salary, and send her away by the first steamer; and pay the English servant whatever she wants and send her by the first steamer. Mind they are both gone when I wake. And I shall go to Deauville the day after tomorrow; probably I shall never come back here.”
The official bowed, obedient.
As she passed through her drawing-rooms Lady Dolly took up the bouquet of Corrèze and went to her own chamber.
“Pick me out the best of those flowers,” she said to her maid, “and stick them about all over me; here and there, you know.”
She was going to dine with the Duchesse de Sonnaz at Deauville.
As she went to her carriage the hapless German, quivering and sobbing, threw herself in her path.
“Oh, miladi miladi!” she moaned. “It cannot be true? You send me not away thus from the child of my heart? Ten years have I striven to write the will of God, and the learning that is better than gold, on that crystal pure mind, and my life, and my brain, and my soul I do give—”
“You should have done your duty,” said Lady Dolly, wrapping herself up and hastening on. “And you can’t complain, my good Schroder; you have got three months’ in excess of your wages,” and she drew her swan’s-down about her and got into her carriage.
“Now, on my soul, that was downright vulgar,” muttered John Jura. “Hang it all! it was vulgar!”
But he sighed as he said it to himself, for his experience had taught him that highborn ladies could be very vulgar when they were moved to be ill-natured.
Corrèze was at the villa.
She saw him a moment before dinner, and gave him her prettiest smile.
“Oh, Corrèze! what flowers! I stole some of them, you see. You would turn my child’s head. I am glad you are going to Baden!”
He laughed, and said something graceful and novel, turned on the old mater pulchra, filia pulchrior.
The dinner was not too long, and was very gay. After it everybody wandered out into the gardens, which were hung with coloured lamps and had musicians hidden in shrubberies, discoursing sweet sounds to rival the nightingales. The light was subdued, the air delicious, the sea glimmered phosphorescent and starlit at the end of dusky alleys and rose-hung walks. Lady Dolly wandered about with Sergius Zouroff and others, and felt quite romantic, whilst John Jura yawned and sulked; she never allowed him to do anything else while she was amusing herself.
Corrèze joined her and her Russians in a little path between walls of the quatre-saison rose and a carpet of velvety turf. The stars sparkled through the rose-leaves, the sound of the sea stole up the silent little alley. Lady Dolly looked very pretty in a dress of dead white, with the red roses above her and their dropped leaves at her feet. She was smoking, which was a pity — the cigarette did not agree with the roses.
“Madame,” cried Corrèze, as he sauntered on and disengaged her a little from the others, “I have never seen anything so exquisite as your young daughter. Will you believe that I mean no compliment when I say so?”
“My dear Corrèze! She is only a child!”
“She is not a child. What would you say, madame, if I told you that for a full five minutes I had the madness to think to-day that I would pay my forfeit to Baden and Vienna for the sake of staying here?”
“Heaven forbid you should do any such thing! You would turn her head in a week!”
“What would you say, madame,” he continued with a little laugh, disregarding her interruption, “what would you say if I told you that I, Corrèze, had actually had the folly to fancy for five minutes that a vagabond nightingale might make his nest for good in one virgin heart? What would you say, miladi?”
“My dear Corrèze, if you were by any kind of possibility talking seriously” —
“I am talking quite seriously — or let us suppose that I am. What would you say, miladi?”
“I should say, my dear Corrèze, that you are too entirely captivating to be allowed to say such things even in an idle jest, and that you would be always most perfectly charming in every capacity but one.”
“And that one is?”
“As a husband for anybody!”
“I suppose you are right,” said Corrèze with a little sigh. “Will you let me light my cigarette at yours?”
An hour later he was on his way to Baden in the middle hours of the starry fragrant summer night.
CHAPTER V.
Raphael de Corrèze had said no more than the truth of himself that morning by the sweetbriar hedge on the edge of the Norman cliffs.
All the papers and old documents that were needful to prove him the lineal descendant of the great Savoy family of Corrèze were safe in his bureau in Paris, but he spoke no more of them than
he spoke of the many love-letters and imprudent avowals that were also locked away in caskets and cabinets in the only place that in a way could be called his home, his apartment in the Avenue Marigny. What was the use? All Marquis and Peer of Savoy though he was by descent he was none the less only a tenor singer, and in his heart of hearts he was too keenly proud to drag his old descent into the notice of men merely that he might look like a frivolous boaster, an impudent teller of empty tales. Noblesse oblige, he had often said to himself, resisting temptation in his oft-tempted career, but no one ever heard him say aloud that paternoster of princes. His remembrance of his race had been always within him like a talisman, but he wore it like a talisman, secretly, and shy even of having his faith in it known.
Corrèze, with all his negligence and gaiety, and spoilt child of the world though he was, appraised very justly the worth of the world and his place in it.
He knew very well that if a rain-storm on a windy night were to quench his voice in his throat for ever, all his troops of lovers and friends would fall away from him, and his name drop down into darkness like any shooting star on an August night. He never deceived himself.
“I am only the worlds favourite plaything,” he would say to himself. “If I lost my voice, I should be served like the nightingale in Hans Andersens story. Oh! I do not blame the world — things are always so; only it is well to remember it. It serves, like Yorick’s skull, or Philip’s slave, to remind one that one is mortal.”
The remembrance gave him force, but it also gave him a tinge of bitterness, so far as any bitterness is ever possible to a sunny, generous, and careless nature, and it made him before everything an artist.
When he was very insolent to grand people — which he often was in the caprice of celebrity — those people said to one another “Ah! that is because he thinks himself Marquis de Corrèze.” But they were wrong. It was because he knew himself a great artist.
The scorn of genius is the most boundless and the most arrogant of all scorn, and he had it in him very strongly. The world said he was extravagantly vain; the world was wrong; yet if he had been, it would have been excusable. Women had thrown themselves into his arms from his earliest youth for sake of his beautiful face, before his voice had been heard; and when his voice had captured Europe there was scarcely any folly, any madness, any delirium, any shame that women had not been ready to rush into for his sake, or for the mere sight of him and mere echo of his song.
There is no fame on earth so intoxicating, so universal, so enervating, as the fame of a great singer; as it is the most uncertain and unstable of all, the most evanescent and most fugitive, so by compensation it is the most delightful and the most gorgeous; rouses the multitude to a height of rapture as no other art can do, and makes the dull and vapid crowds of modern life hang breathless on one voice, as in Greece, under the violet skies, men hearkened to the voice of Pindar or of Sappho.
The world has grown apathetic and purblind. Critics still rave and quarrel before a canvas, but the nations do not care; quarries of marble are hewn into various shapes, and the throngs gape before them and are indifferent; writers are so many that their writings blend in the public mind in a confused phantasmagoria where the colours have run into one another and the lines are all waved and indistinct; the singer alone still keeps the old magic power, “the beauty that was Athens’ and the glory that was Rome’s,” still holds the divine caduceus, still sways the vast thronged auditorium, till the myriads hold their breath like little children in delight and awe. The great singer alone has the old magic sway of fame; and if he close his lips “the gaiety of nations is eclipsed,” and the world seems empty and silent like a wood in which the birds are all dead.
It is a supreme power, and may well intoxicate a man.
Corrèze had been as little delirious as any who have drunk of the philtre of a universal fame, although at times it had been too strong for him, and had made him audacious, capricous, inconstant, and guilty of some follies; but his life was pure from any dark reproach.
“Soyez gentilhomme,” his father had said to him in the little hut on the Pennine Alps, with the snow-fields severing them from all other life than their own, and had said it never thinking that his boy would be more than at best a village priest or teacher; the bidding had sunk into the mind of the child, and the man had not forgotten it now that Europe was at his feet, and its princes but servants who had to wait his time; and he liked to make them wait. “Perhaps that is not gentilhomme” he would say in reproach to himself, but it diverted him and he did it very often; most often when he thought angrily that he was but like Hans Andersens nightingale, the jewelled one, that was thrown aside and despised when once its spring was snapped and broken. If he were only that, he was now at the moment when emperor and court thought nothing in heaven or on earth worth hearing but the jewelled nightingale, and “the crowds in the streets hummed his song.” Yet as the night train bore him through the level meadows, and cornfields glistening in the moonlight, and the hush of a sleeping world, his eyes were dim and his heart was heavy, and on the soft cushions of the travelling bed they had given him he could not find rest.
“The moths will corrupt her,” he thought, sadly and wistfully. “The moths will eat all that fine delicate feeling away, little by little; the moths of the world will eat the unselfishness first, and then the innocence, and then the honesty, and then the decency; no one will see them eating, no one will see the havoc being wrought; but little by little the fine fabric will go, and in its place will be dust. Ah, the pity of it! The pity of it! The webs come out of the great weavers loom lovely enough, but the moths of the world eat them all. One weeps for the death of children, but perhaps the change of them into callous men and worldly women is a sadder thing to see after all.”
His heart was heavy.
Was it love? No; he fancied not; it could not be. Love with him — an Almaviva as much off the stage as on it — had been a charming, tumultuous, victorious thing; a concession rather to the weakness of the women who sought him than to his own; the chief, indeed, but only one amongst many other distractions and triumphs.
It was not love that made his heart go out to that fair-haired child, with the thoughtful questioning eyes. It was rather pity, tenderness, reverence for innocence, rage against the world which would so soon change her; — poor little moth, dreaming of flying up to heavens light, and born to sink into earth’s commonest fires!
Corrèze did not esteem women highly. They had caressed him into satiety, and wooed him till his gratitude was more than half contempt; but in his innermost heart, where his old faiths dwelt unseen by even his best friends, there was the fancy of what a woman should be, might be, unspotted by the world, and innocent in thought, as well as deed.
Such a woman had seemed to him to be in the girl whom he had found by the sea, as the grand glory of the full white rose lies folded in the blush-rose bud.
It was too absurd!
Her mother had been right, quite right. The little frivolous, artificial woman, with her perruque and her papelitos, had said all that society would say. She had been wise, and he, in a passing moment of sentiment, a fool. He had scarcely really considered the full meaning of his own words, and where they would have led him had they been taken seriously.
He thought now of all the letters lying in those cabinets and caskets at Paris.
“What a burnt-sacrifice of notepaper I should have had to make!” he said to himself, and smoked a little, and tried to ridicule himself.
Was he, Corrèze, the lover of great rulers of society, the hero of a hundred and a thousand intrigues and romances, in love with a mere child, because she had serious eyes and no shoes and stockings? bewitched by a young girl who had sat half an hour beside him by a sweetbriar hedge on a cliff by the sea? It was too absurd.
From Baden there had come an impatient summons from a darkhaired duchess of the Second Empire, who fancied that she reigned over his life because he reigned over hers like a fatalit
y, an imperious and proud woman whom the lamps in the Avenue Marigny had shone on as she stole on foot, muffled and veiled, to hide her burning face on his breast; he thought of where she was waiting for him, and a little shudder of disgust went over him.
He threw open the window of his bed carriage, and leaned his head out, to meet the midnight wind.
The train was passing a little village, a few cottages, a pond, a mill, a group of willows silvery in the starlight. From the little green gardens there came a scent of sweetbriar and hedge roses.
“Shall I smell that smell all my life?” he thought impatiently.
CHAPTER VI.
Lady Dolly had a very dear friend. Of course she had five hundred dear friends, but this one she was really fond of; that is to say, she never said anything bad of her, and only laughed at her goodnaturedly when she had left a room; and this abstinence is as strong a mark of sincerity nowadays, as dying for another used to be in the old days of strong feelings and the foolish expression of them.
This dear friend was her dear Adine, otherwise Lady Stoat of Stitchley, who had just won the honour of the past years season by marrying her daughter (a beauty) to a young marquis, who, with the small exceptions of being a drunkard, a fool, and a brute, was everything that a mothers soul could desire; and all the mothers’ souls in the world had accordingly burned for him passionately, and Lady Stoat had won him.
Lady Stoat was as much revered as a maternal model of excellence in her time as the mother of the Gracchi in hers. She was a gentlelooking woman, with a very soft voice, which she never raised under any provocation. She had a will of steel, but she made it look like a blossoming and pliant reed; she was very religious and strongly ritualistic.
When Lady Dolly awoke the next morning, with the vague remembrance of something very unpleasant having happened to her, it was to this friend that she fled for advice as soon as she was dressed; having for that purpose to drive over to Deauville, where Lady Stoat, who thought Trouville vulgar, had a charming little place, castellated, coquettish, Gothic, Chinese, Moorish, all kinds of things, in a pretty pellmell of bonbon-box architecture, set in a frame of green turf and laurel hedges and round-headed acacias, and with blazing geranium beds underneath its gilded balconies and marqueterie doors. Lady Dolly had herself driven over in the Duc de Dinant’s panier with his four ponies, and while he went to find out some friends and arrange the coming races, she took her own road to the Maison Perle.