by Ouida
“Adine always knows,” she thought. She was really fond of her Adine, who was many years older than herself. But for her Adine, certain little bits of nonsense and imprudence in Lady Dolly’s feverish little life might have made people talk, and given trouble to Mr. Vanderdecken, absorbed as he might be in Java, Japan, or Jupiter.
Lady Stoat of Stitchley was one of those invaluable characters who love to do good for goods own sake, and to set things straight for the mere pleasure of being occupied. As some persons of an old-maidish or old-bachelor turn of mind will go far out of their way to smoothe a crease or remove a crumb, though neither be marring their own property, so would Lady Stoat go far out of her way to prevent a scandal, reconcile two enemies, or clear a tangled path. It was her way of amusing herself. She had a genius for management. She was a clever tactician, and her tactics interested her, and employed her time agreeably. If anyone in her world wanted a marriage arranged, a folly prevented, a disgrace concealed, or a refractory child brought to reason, Lady Stoat of Stitchley would do it in the very best possible manner.
“It is only my duty,” she would say in her hushed melodious monotonous voice, and nearly everybody thought Lady Stoat the modern substitute of a saint on earth.
To this saint now went Lady Dolly with her troubles and her tale.
“What can I do with her, dearest?” she cried plaintively, in the pretty little morning room, whose windows looked over the geranium beds to the grey sea.
Lady Stoat was doing crewel work; a pale, slight, gracefully made woman with small straight features, and the very sweetest and saddest of smiles.
“What young men are there?” said Lady Stoat, now in response, still intent on her crewel work. “I have not thought about them at all since the happiness of my own treasure was secured. By the bye, I heard from Gwen this morning; she tells me she has hopes — Our Mother in heaven has heard my prayers. Imagine, love, my becoming a grandmama! It is what I long so for! — just a silly old grandmama spoiling all her pets! I feel I was born to be a grandmama!”
“I am so glad, how very charming!” murmured Lady Dolly, vaguely and quite indifferent. “I am so terribly afraid Vere won’t please, and I am so afraid of this affair with Corrèze.”
“What affair? with whom?” asked Lady Stoat of Stitchley, waking from her dreams of being a grandmama.
Whereon she told it, making it look very odd and very bad indeed, in the unconscious exaggeration which accompanied Lady Dolly’s talk, as inevitably as a great streak of foam precedes and follows the track of a steamer.
Lady Stoat was rather amused than shocked.
“It is very like Corrèze, and he is the most dangerous man in the world; everybody is in love with him; Gwendolen was, but all that is nothing, it is not as if he were one of us.”
“He is one of us! He goes everywhere!”
“Oh! goes! — well; that is because people like to ask him — society is a pigstye — but all that does not alter his being a singer.”
“He is a marquis, you know, they say!”
“All singers are marquises, if you like to believe them. My dear Dolly, you cannot be serious in being afraid of Corrèze? If you are, all the more reason to marry her at once.”
“She is not the style that anybody likes at all nowadays,” replied Lady Dolly, in a sort of despair. “She is not the style of the day at all, you know. She had great natural distinction, but I don’t think people care for that, and they like chien. She will always look like a gentlewoman, and they like us best when we don’t. I have a conviction that men will be afraid of her. Is there anything more fatal? Vere will never look like a belle petite, in a tea-gown, and smoke, never! She has gone a hundred years back, being brought up by that horrid old woman. You could fancy her going to be guillotined in old lace like Marie-Antoinette. What can I do?”
“Keep her with you six months, dear,” said the friend, who was a woman of some humour. “And I don’t think poor Marie-Antoinette had any lace left to wear.”
“Of course I must keep her with me,” said Lady Dolly with exasperation, who was not a woman of humour, and who did not see the jest.
Lady Stoat reflected a moment. She liked arranging things, whether they closely concerned her or not.
“There is the Chambrées son?” she said hesitatingly.
“I know! But they will want such a dower, and Vere has nothing — nothing!”
“But if she be a beauty?”
“She will be beautiful; she won’t be a beauty; not in the way men like now. She will always look cold.”
“Do they dislike that? Not in their wives I think; my Gwen looks very cold,” said her friend; then added with an innocent impassiveness, “You might marry her to Jura.”
Lady Dolly laughed and coloured.
“Poor Jack! He hates the very idea of marriage; I don’t think he will ever—”
“They all hate it,” said Lady Stoat tranquilly “But they do it when they are men of position; Jura will do it like the rest. What do you think of Serge Zouroff?”
Lady Dolly this time did not laugh; she turned white underneath Piver’s bloom; her pretty sparkling eyes glanced uneasily.
“Zourofï!” she repeated vaguely, “Zouroff!”
“I think I should try,” answered Lady Stoat calmly. “Yes; I do think I should try. By the way, take her to Félicité; you are going there, are you not? It would be a great thing for you, dear, to marry her this year; you would find it such a bore in the season; don’t I know what it is! And for you, so young as you are, to go to balls with a demoiselle à marier! — my poor little puss, you would die of it.”
“I am sure I shall as it is!” said Lady Dolly; and her nerves gave way, and she cried.
“Make Zouroff marry her,” said Lady Stoat soothingly, as if she were pouring out drops of chloral for a fretful child.
“Make Zourofï!” echoed Lady Dolly, with a certain intonation that led Lady Stoat to look at her quickly.
“Has she done naughty things that she has not told me,” thought her confidante. “No, I do not fancy so. Poor little pussy! she is too silly not to be transparent.”
Aloud, she said merely:
“Zouroff is middle-aged now; Nadine would be glad to see him take any one; she would not oppose it. He must marry some time, and I don’t know anybody else so good as he.”
“Good!” ejaculated Lady Dolly faintly. She was still startled and agitated, and strove to hide that she was so. “Vere would never,” she murmured; “you don’t know her; she is the most dreadful child—”
“You must bring her to me,” said Lady Stoat.
She was very successful with girls. She never scolded them; she never ridiculed them; she only influenced them in a gentle, imperceptible, sure way that, little by little, made them feel that love and honour were silly things, and that all that really mattered was to have rank and to be rich, and to be envied by others.
Lady Stoat never said this; never said, indeed, anything approaching it, but all girls that she took any pains with learned it by heart, nevertheless, as the gospel of their generation.
It was her own religion; she only taught what she honestly believed.
A little comforted, Lady Dolly left her calming presence; met her little duke and breakfasted with him merrily at a hotel, and drove back to her own chalet to dress for a dinner at the Maison Normande.
The doors of Félicité would not open until the first day of September, and there were still some dozen days of August yet to pass, and on those days Vere was to be seen occasionally by her mothers side on the beach, and in the villas, and at the races at Deauville, and was clad by the clever directions of Adrienne in charming, youthful dresses as simple as they were elegant. She was taken to the Casino, where the highborn young girls of her own age read, or worked, or played with the petits chevaux; she was made to walk up and down the planks, where her innocence brushed the shoulders of Casse-une-croûte, the last new villany out in woman, and her fair cheeks felt the sa
me sunbeams and breeze that fell on all the faded pêches à quinze sous. She was taken to the bal des bébés, and felt a pang that was older than her years at seeing those little frizzed and furbelowed flirts of five, and those vain little simpering dandies of three.
“Oh, the poor, poor little children!” she thought, “they will never know what it is to be young!”
She, even in monastic old Bulmer, had been left a free, open-air, natural, honest child’s life. Her own heart here was oppressed and lonely. She missed her faithful old friends; she took no pleasure in the romp and racket that was round her; she understood very little of all that she saw, but the mere sight of it hurt her. Society, to this untutored child of the Northumbrian moors, looked so grotesque and so vulgar. This Trouville mob of fine ladies and adventuresses, princes and blacklegs, ministers and dentists, reigning sovereigns and queens of the theatres, seemed to her a Saturnalia of Folly, and its laugh hurt her more than a blow would have done.
Her mother took her out but little, and the less that she went the less troubled she was. That great mass of varicoloured, noisy life, so pretty as a spectacle, but so deplorable as humanity, dismayed and offended her. She heard that these ladies of Deauville, with their painted brows, their high voices, their shrill laughter, their rickety heels, were some of the greatest ladies of Europe; but, to the proud temper and delicate taste of the child, they seemed loathsome.
“You are utterly unsympathetic!” said her mother, disgusted, “frightfully unsympathetic! You are guindée positive, puritan! You have not a grain of adaptability. I read the other day somewhere that Madame Récamier, who was always called the greatest beauty of our great-grandmothers’ times, was really nothing at all to look at — quite ordinary; but she did smile so in everybody’s face, and listen so to all the bores, that the world pronounced her a second Helen. As for you — handsome though you are, and you really are quite beautiful they say — you look so scornful of everything, and so indignant at any little nonsense, that I should not wonder in the least if you never even got called a beauty at all.”
Lady Dolly paused to see the effect of the most terrible prediction that it was in female power to utter. Vere was quite unmoved; she scarcely heard.
She was thinking of that voice, clear as the ring of gold, which had said to her:
“Keep yourself unspotted from the world.”
“If the world is nothing better than this, it must be very easy to resist it,” she thought in her ignorance.
She did not know that from these swamps of flattery, intrigue, envy, rivalry, and emulation there rises a miasma which scarcely the healthiest lungs can withstand. She did not know that though many may be indifferent to the tempting of men, few indeed are impenetrable to the sneer and the smile of women; that to live your own life in the midst of the world is a harder thing than it was of old to withdraw to the Thebaid; that to risk “looking strange” requires a courage perhaps cooler and higher than the soldiers or the saints; and that to stand away from the contact and the custom of your “set” is a harder and a sterner work than it was of old to go into the sanctuary of La Trappe or Port Royal.
Autres temps, autres mœurs — but we too have our martyrs.
Félicité was a seaside chateau of the Princes Zouroff, which they had bought from an old decayed French family, and had transformed into a veritable castle of fairy-land. They came to it for about three months in as many years; but for beauty and loveliness it had no equal, even amongst the many summer holiday-houses scattered up and down the green coast, from Etretat to the Rochers de Calvados. This year it was full of people: the Princess Nadine Nelaguine was keeping open house there for her brother Sergius Zouroff. White-sailed yachts anchored in its bay; chasseurs in green and gold beat its woods; riding parties and driving parties made its avenues bright with colour and movement; groups like Watteau pictures wandered in its gardens; there was a little troupe of actors from Paris for its theatre; life went like a song; and Serge Zouroff would have infinitely preferred to be alone with some handsome Tschigan women and many flagons of brandy.
Madame Nelaguine was a little woman, who wore a wig that had little pretence about it; and smoked all day long, and read saletés with zest, and often talked about them; yet Madame Nelaguine could be a power in politics when she chose, could cover herself with diamonds and old laces, and put such dignity into her tiny person that she once crushed into utter nervousness a new-made empress, whom she considered varnish. She was wonderfully clever, wonderfully learned; she was cunning, and she could be cruel, yet she had in her own way a kind heart; she was a great musician and a great mathematician; she had been an ambassadress, and had distinguished herself at great courts. She had had many intrigues of all kinds, but had never been compromised by any one of them. She was considerably older than her brother and seldom approved of him.
“On peut se débaucher, mais on doit se débaucher avec de l’esprit” she would say: and the modern ways of vice seemed to her void of wit. “You are not even amused,” she would add. “If you were amused one could comprehend, but you are not. You spend your fortunes on creatures that you do not even like; you spend your nights in gambling that does not even excite you; you commit vulgarities that do not even divert you, only because everybody else does the same; you caricature monstrous vices so that you make even those no longer terrible, but ridiculous; and if you fight a duel you manage to make it look absurd, you take a surgeon with you! You have no passions. It is a passion that dignifies life, and you do not know anything about it, any of you; you know only infamy. And infamy is always so dull; it is never educated. Why do you copy Vitellius? Because you have not the wit to be either Horace or Caesar.”
But Sergius Zouroff did not pay any heed to his cleverer sister. His Uraline mines, his vast plains of wheat, his forests and farms, his salt and his copper, and all that he owned, were treasures well-nigh inexhaustible, and although prodigal he was shrewd. He was not a man to be easily ruined, and, as long as his great wealth and his great position gave him a place that was almost royal in the society of Europe, he knew very well that he could copy Vitellius as he chose without drawing any chastisement on him. In a cold and heavy way he had talent, and with that talent he contrived to indulge all excesses in any vice that tempted him, yet remain without that social stigma that has marked before now princes wholly royal.
“Everywhere they are glad to see me, and everybody would marry me to-morrow,” he would say, with a shrug of his shoulders, when his sister rebuked him.
To Félicité drove Lady Dolly with Vere by her side. Vere had been given a white dress and a broad hat with white drooping feathers; she looked very pale, her mother supposed it was with excitement.
She thought it the moment to offer a little maternal advice. “Now, dear, this will be quite going into the world for you. Do remember one or two things. Do try to look less grave; men hate a serious woman. And if you want to ask anything, don’t come to me, because I’m always busy; ask Adrienne or Lady Stoat. You have seen what a sweet dear motherly creature she is. She won’t mind telling you anything. There is a charming girl there, too, an American heiress, Fuschia Leach; a horrible name, but a lovely creature, and very clever. Watch her and learn all you can from her. Tout Paris lost its head after her utterly this last winter. She’ll marry anybody she chooses. Pray don’t make me ashamed of you. Don’t be sensational, don’t be stupid, don’t be pedantic; and, for mercy’s sake, don’t make any scenes. Never look surprised; never show a dislike to anybody; never seemed shocked, if you feel so. Be civil all round, it’s the safest way in society; and pray don’t talk about mathematics and the Bible. I don’t know that there’s anything more I can tell you: you must find it all out for yourself. The world is like whist, reading can’t teach it. Try not to blunder, that’s all, and — do watch Fuschia Leach.”
“Is she so very beautiful and good?”
“Good?” echoed Lady Dolly, désorientée and impatient. “I don’t know, I am sure. No, I shouldn’
t think she was, by any means. She doesn’t go in for that. She is a wonderful social success, and men rave about her. That is what I meant. If you watch her she will do you more good than I could if I had patience to talk to you for ever. You will see what the girl of your time must be if she want to please.”
Veres beautiful mouth curled contemptuously.
“I do not want to please.”
“That is an insane remark,” said Lady Dolly coldly. “If you don’t, what do you live for?”
Vere was silent. At dark old Bulmer she had been taught that there were many other things to live for, but she was afraid to say so, lest she should be “pedantic” again.
“That is just the sort of silly thing I hate to hear a girl say, or a woman either. Americans never say such things,” said Lady Dolly with vivacious scorn. “It’s just like your father, who always would go out in the rain when dinner was ready, or read to somebody who had the scarlet fever, or give the best claret to a ploughboy with a sore throat. It is silly; it is unnatural. You should want to please. Why were we put in this world?”
“To make others happier,” Vere suggested timidly, her eyes growing dim at her fathers name.
“Did it make me happier to have the scarlet fever brought home to me?” said Lady Dolly, irrelevantly and angrily “That is just like poor Vere’s sort of illogical reasonings; I remember them so well. You are exactly like him. I despair of you, I quite despair of you, unless Fuschia Leach can convert you.”
“Is she my age?”
“A year or two older, I think; she is perfect now; at five-and-twenty she will be hideous, but she will dress so well it won’t matter. I know for a fact, that she refused your cousin, Mull, last month. She was very right; he is awfully poor. Still, she’d have been a duchess, and her father kept a bar; so it shows you what she can do.”