by Ouida
“Ma chère, your lovely daughter did not appreciate my flowers or myself. She told me to tell you she was tired, and has gone to her room. She is beautiful, very beautiful; but I cannot say that she is complimentary.”
“She is only a child,” said Lady Dolly hurriedly; she was half relieved, half frightened. “She is rude!” she added regretfully. “It is the way she has been brought up. You must forgive her, she is so young.”
“Forgive her! Mais de boncœur! Anything feminine that runs away is only too delightful in these times,” said the Prince coolly. “Do not change her. Do not tease her. Do not try to make her like yourself. I prefer her as she is.”
Lady Dolly looked at him quickly Was it possible that already — ?
Sergius Zouroff was lying back in his chair with his eyes closed. He was laughing a little silently, in an unpleasant way that he had; he had spoken insolently, and Lady Dolly could not resent his insolence.
“You are very kind, Prince,” she said as negligently as she could behind her fan. “Very kind, to treat a child’s boutades as a girl’s charm. She has really seen nothing, you know, shut up in that old northern house by the sea; and she is as eccentric as if she were eighty years old. Quite odd in her notions, quite!”
“Shall we play?” said Zouroff.
They began to play, most of them, at a little roulette table. Musicians were interpreting, divinely, themes of Beethoven’s and Schumann’s; the great glass halls and marble courts of the flowers were open with all their array of bloom; the green gardens and gay terraces were without in the brilliancy of moonlight; the sea was not a score of yards away, sparkling with phosphorus and star-rays; but they were indifferent to all these things. They began to play, and heeded nothing else. The music sounded on deaf ears; the flowers breathed out odours on closed nostrils; the summer night spread its loveliness in vain; and the waters of salt wave and fresh fountain murmured on unheeded. Play held them.
Sergius Zouroff lost plenty of money to Lady Dolly, who went to bed at two o’clock, worried and yet pleased, anxious and yet exultant.
Veres room was placed next to hers.
She looked in before passing on to her own. The girl lay sound asleep in the sweet dreamless sleep of her lingering childhood, her hair scattered like gold on the pillows, her limbs in the lovely grace of a serene and unconscious repose.
Lady Dolly looked at her as she slept, and an uneasy pang shot through her.
“If he do mean that,” she thought, “I suppose it would be horrible. And how much too pretty and too innocent she would be for him — the beast!”
Then she turned away, and went to her own chamber, and began the toilsome martyrdom of having her perruque unfastened, and her night’s preparations for the morning’s enamel begun.
To women like Lady Dolly life is a comedy, no doubt, played on great stages and to brilliant audiences, and very amusing and charming, and all that; but alas! it has two dread passages in each short twenty-four hours; they are, the bore of being “done up,” and the bore of being “undone!”
It is a martyrdom, but they bear it heroically, knowing that without it they would be nowhere; would be yellow, pallid, wrinkled, even perhaps would be flirtationless, unenvied, unregarded, worse than dead!
If Lady Dolly had said any prayers she would have said, “Thank God for Piver!”
CHAPTER VII.
It was a very pretty life at Félicité.
The riding parties meeting under the old avenue of Spanish chestnuts and dispersing down the flowering lanes; the shooting parties, which were not serious and engrossing as in England, but animated and picturesque in the deep old Norman woods; the stately dinner at nine o’clock every night, like a royal banquet; the music which was so worthy of more attentive hearers than it ever got; the theatre, pretty and pimpant as a coquette of the last century; the laughter; the brilliancy; the personal beauty of the women assembled there; all made the life at Félicité charming to the eye and the ear. Yet amidst it all Vere felt very lonely, and the only friends she made were in the Irish horse that they gave her to ride, and in the big Russian hound that belonged to Prince Zouroff.
The men thought her lovely, but they could not get on with her; the women disliked her as much as they adored, or professed to adore, Fuschia Leach.
To Vere, who at Bulmer had been accustomed to see life held a serious, and even solemn thing — who had been accustomed to the gravity of age and the melancholy of a seafaring poor, and the northern tillers of a thankless soil — nothing seemed so wonderful as the perpetual gaiety and levity around her. Was there any sorrow in the world? Was life only one long laugh? Was it right to forget the woes of others as utterly as they were forgotten here? She was always wondering, and there was no one to ask.
“You are horribly in earnest, Vere,” said her mother pettishly. “You should go and live with Mr. Gladstone.”
But to Vere it seemed more horrible to be always laughing — and laughing at nothing. “When there are all the poor,” she thought, “and all the animals that suffer so.” She did not understand that, when these pretty women had sold china and flowers at a fancy fair for a hospital, or subscribed to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty, they had really done all that they thought was required of them, and could dismiss all human and animal pain from their mind, and bring their riding-horses home saddle-galled and spur-torn without any compunction.
To the complete innocence and honesty of the girl’s nature the discovery of what store the world set on all things which she had been taught to hold sacred, left a sickening sense of solitude and depression behind it. Those who are little children now will have little left to learn when they reach womanhood. The little children that are about us at afternoon tea and at lawn tennis, that are petted by house-parties and romped with at pigeon-shooting, will have little left to discover. They are miniature women already; they know the meaning of many a dubious phrase; they know the relative value of social positions; they know much of the science of flirtation which society has substituted for passion; they understand very thoroughly the shades of intimacy, the suggestions of a smile, the degrees of hot and cold, that may be marked by a bow or emphasised with a good-day. All the subtle science of society is learned by them instinctively and unconsciously, as they learn French and German from their maids. When they are women they will at least never have Eves excuse for sin; they will know everything that any tempter could tell them. Perhaps their knowledge may prove their safeguard, perhaps not; perhaps without its bloom the fruit to men’s taste may seem prematurely withered. Another ten years will tell. At any rate those we pet to-day will be spared the pang of disillusion when they shall be fairly out in a world that they already know with cynical thoroughness — baby La Bruyères and girl Rochefoucaulds in frills and sashes.
To Vere Herbert, on the contrary, reared as she had been upon grave studies and in country loneliness, the shocks her faiths and her fancies received was very cruel. Sometimes she thought bitterly she would have minded nothing if only her mother had been a thing she could have reverenced, a creature she could have gone to for support and sympathy.
But her mother was the most frivolous of the whole sea of froth around her — of the whole frivolous womanhood about her the very emptiest bubble.
Vere, who herself had been cast by nature in the mould to be a noble mother of children, had antique sacred fancies that went with the name of mother. The mother of the Gracchi, the mother of Bonaparte, the mother of Garibaldi, the many noble maternal figures of history and romance, were for ever in her thoughts; the time-honoured word embodied to her all sacrifice, all nobility, all holiness. And her mother was this pretty foolish painted toy, with false curls in a sunny circlet, above her kohl-washed eyes, with her heart set on a cotillon, and her name in the mouths of the clubs; whose god was her tailor, and whose gospel was Zola; whose life was an opera-bouffe, and who, when she costumed for her part in it, took “la moindre excuse pour paraître nue!” The thought of her mother, t
hus, hurt her, as in revolutions it hurts those who believe in Mary to see a Madonna spat upon by a mob.
Lady Stoat saw this, and tried, in her fashion, to console her for it.
“My dear, your mother is young still. She must divert herself. It would be very hard on her not to be allowed. You must not think she is not fond of you because she still likes to waltz.”
Vere’s eyes were very sombre as she heard.
“I do not like to waltz. I never do.”
“No, love? Well, temperaments differ. But surely you wouldn’t be so cruel as to condemn your mother only to have your inclinations, would you? Dolly was always full of fun. I think you have not fun enough in you, perhaps.”
“But my father is dead.”
“My dear, Queen Anne is dead! Henri Quatre est sur le Pont-Neuf.
What other news will you tell us? I am not saying, dear, that you should think less of your father’s memory It is too sweet of you to feel so much, and very, very rare, alas! for nowadays our children are so forgetful, and we are so little to them. But still you know your mama is young, and so pretty as she is, too, no one can expect her to shut herself up as a recluse. Perhaps, had you been always with her, things would have been different, but she has always been so much admired and so petted by everyone that it was only natural — only natural that—”
“She should not want me,” said Vere, as Lady Stoat paused for a word that should adequately express Lady Dolly’s excuses whilst preserving Lady Dolly’s dignity before her daughter. “Oh, my dear, I never meant that,” she said hastily, whilst thinking, “Quel enfant terrible!”
The brilliant Fuschia was inclined to be very amiable and cordial to the young daughter of Lady Dorothy Vanderdecken, but Vere repelled her overtures with a chilling courtesy that made the bright American “feel foolish.”
But Pick-me-up, as she was usually called in the great world, was not a person to be deterred by one slight, or by fifty. To never risk a rebuff is a golden rule for self-respect; but it is not the rule by which new people achieve success.
Fuschia Leach was delighted with her social success, but she never deceived herself about it.
In America her people were “new people” — that is to say, her father had made his pile selling cigars and drugs in a wild country, and her brothers were making a bigger pile killing pigs on a gigantic scale down west. In New York she and hers were deemed “shoddy” — the very shoddiest of shoddy — and were looked coldly on, and were left unvisited. But boldly springing over to less sensitive Europe, they found themselves without effort received at courts and in embassies, and had become fashionable people almost as soon as they had had time to buy high-stepping horses and ask great tailors to clothe them. It seemed very funny; it seemed quite unaccountable, and it bewildered them a little; but Fushia Leach did not lose her head.
“I surmise I’d best eat the curds while they’re sweet,” she said to herself, and she did eat them. She dressed, she danced, she made all her young men fetch and carry for her, she flirted, she caught up the ways and words and habits and graces of the great world, and adapted herself to her new sphere with versatile cleverness, but all the same she “prospected” with a keen eye all the land that lay around her, and never deceived herself “I look cunning, and I’m spry, and I cheek him, and say outrageous things, and he likes it, and so they all go mad on me after him,” she said to herself; meaning by her pronoun the great personage who had first made her the fashion. But she knew very well that whenever anything prettier, odder, or more “outrageous” than herself should appear she would lose her prestige in a day, and fall back into the ranks of the ten thousand American girls who overrun Europe.
“I like you,” she said to Vere unasked one day, when she found her alone on the lawn.
“You are very good,” said Vere with the coldness of an empress of sixty years old.
“I like you,” reiterated Miss Leach. “I like you because you treat ’em like dirt under your feet. That’s our way; but these Europeans go after men as the squir’ls jump after the cobs. You are the only one I have seen that don’t.”
“You are very amiable to praise me,” said Vere coldly.
The lovely Fuschia continued her reflections aloud.
“We’re just as bad when the Englishmen go over to us; that’s a fact. But with our own men we ain’t; we just make shoeblacks and scallyrags of them; they fetch and carry, and do as they’re told. What a sharp woman your mother is, and as lively as a katy-did. Now on our side, you know, the old folks never get at play like that; they’ve given over.”
“My mother is young,” said Vere, more coldly still.
Miss Leach tilted her chair on end.
“That’s just what’s so queer. They are young on into any age over here. Your mother’s over thirty, I suppose? Don’t you call that old? It’s Methuselah with us. But here your grandmothers look as cunning as can be, and they’re as skittish as spring-lambs; it’s the climate I surmise?”
Vere did not reply, and Miss Fuschia Leach, undaunted, continued her meditations aloud.
“You haven’t had many affairs, I think? You’re not really out are you?”
“No — affairs?”
“Heart affairs, you know. Dear me! why before I was your age, I was engaged to James Fluke Dyson, down Boston way.”
“Are you to marry him then?”
“Me? No — thanks! I never meant to marry him. He did to go about with, and it made Victoria Boker right mad. Then mother came to Europe: he and I vowed constancy and exchanged rings and hair and all that, and we did write to each other each mail, till I got to Paris; then I got more slack, and I disremembered to ask when the mails went out; soon after we heard he had burst up; wasn’t it a piece of luck?”
“I do not understand.”
“Piece of luck we came to Europe. I might have taken him over there. He was a fine young man, only he hadn’t the way your men have; not their cheek either. His father’d always been thought one of the biggest note-shavers in N’York City. They say it was the fall in silver broke him; any way, poor James he’s a clerk in a tea-store now.”
Vere looked at her in speechless surprise, Pick-me-up laughed all the more.
“Oh they are always at seesaw like that in our country. He’ll make another pile I daresay by next year, and they’ll all get on their legs again. Your people, when they are bowled over lie down; ours jump up; I surmise it’s the climate. I like your men best, though; they look such swells, even when they’re in blanket coats and battered old hats, such as your cousin Mull wears.”
“Is it true that Frank wished to succeed Mr. James Fluke Dyson?” Vere asked after a sore struggle with her disgust.
“Who’s Frank?”
“My cousin, Mull?”
“Is he Frank? Dear life! I always thought dukes were dukes, even in the bosom of their families. Yes; he was that soft on me — there, they all are, but he’s the worst I ever saw. I said no, but I could whistle him back. I’m most sorry I did say no. Dukes don’t grow on every apple-bough; only, he’s poor they say—”
“He is poor,” said Vere coldly, her disgust conquering all amusement.
“When I came across the Pond,” said Miss Leach, continuing her own reflections, “I said to mother ‘I’ll take nothing but a duke.’ I always had a kind o’ fancy for a duke. There’s such a few of them. I saw an old print once in the Broadway, of a Duchess of Northumberland, holding her coronet out in both hands. I said to myself then, that was how I’d be taken someday—”
“Do you think duchesses hold their coronets in their hands, then?”
“Well, no; I see they don’t; but I suppose one would in a picture?”
“I think it would look very odd, even in a picture.”
“What’s the use of having one, then? There aren’t coronations every day. They tell me your cousin might be rolling if he liked. Is it true he’d have five hundred pounds sterling a day if he bored for coal? One could live on that.”
/> “He would never permit the forest to be touched to save his life!” said Vere, indignantly with a frown and a flush. “The forests are as old as the days of Hengist and Horsa; the wild bulls are in them and the red deer; men crept there to die after Otterbourne; under one of the oaks, King James saw Johnie Armstrong.”
Fuschia Leach showed all her pretty teeth. “Very touchin’, but the coal was under them before that, I guess! That’s much more to the point. I come from a business-country. If he’ll hear reason about that coal, I’m not sure I won’t think twice about your cousin.”
Vere, without ceremony, turned away. She felt angry tears swell her throat and rise into her eyes.
“Oh! you turn up your nose!” said Fuschia Leach vivaciously. “You think it atrocious that new folks should carry off your brothers, and cousins, and friends. Well, I’d like to know where’s it worse than all your big nobility going down at our feet for our dollars? I don’t say your English do it so much, but they do do it, your younger sons, and all that small fry; and abroad we can buy the biggest and best titles in all Europe for a few hundred thousand dollars a year. That’s real mean! That’s blacking boots, if you please. Men with a whole row of crusaders at their backs, men as count their forefathers right away into Julius Caesar’s times, men that had uncles in the Ark with Noah, they’re at a Yankee pile like flies around molasses. Wal, now,” said the pretty American, with her eyes lighting fiercely and with sparks of scorn flashing out from them, “Wal, now, you’re all of you that proud that you beat Lucifer, but as far as I see there aren’t much to be proud of. We’re shoddy over there. If we went to Boston we wouldn’t get a drink, outside an hotel, for our lives. N’York, neither, don’t think because a man’s struck ile he’ll go to heaven with Paris thrown in; but look at all your big folk! Pray what do they do the minute shoddy comes their way over the pickle-field? Why they just eat it! Kiss it and eat it! Do you guess we’re such fools we don’t see that? Why your Norman blood and Domesday Book and all the rest of it — pray hasn’t it married Lily Peart, whose father kept the steamboat hotel in Jersey City, and made his pile selling soothers to the heathen Chinee? Who was your Marchioness of Snowdon if she weren’t the daughter of old Sam Salmon the note-shaver? Who was your Duchesse de Dagobert, if she weren’t Aurelia Twine, with seventy million dollars made in two years out of oil? Who was your Princess Buondelmare, if not Lotty Miller, who was born in Nevada, and baptized with gin in a miner’s pannikin? We know ’em all? And Blue Blood’s taken ’em because they had cash. That’s about it! Wal, to my fancy, there aren’t much to be proud of anyhow, and it aren’t only us that need be laughed at.”