by Ouida
“It is not,” said Vere, who had listened in bewilderment. “There is very much to be ashamed of on both sides.”
“Shame’s a big thing — a four-horse concern,” said the other with some demur. “But if any child need be ashamed it is not this child. There’s a woman in Rome, Anastasia W Crash; her father’s a coloured person. After the war he turned note-shaver and made a pile; Anastasia aren’t coloured to signify; she looks like a Creole, and she’s handsome. It got wind in Rome that she was going there, and had six million dollars a year safe; and she has that; its no lie. Well, in, a week she could pick and choose amongst the Roman princes as if they were bilberries in a hedge, and she’s taken one that’s got a name a thousand years old; a name that every school-girl reads out in her history-books when she reads about the popes! There! And Anastasia W Crash is a coloured person with us; with us we would not go in the same car with her, nor eat at the same table with her. What do you think of that?”
“I think your country is very liberal; and that your ‘coloured person’ has revenged all the crimes of the Borgias.”
The pretty American looked at her suspiciously.
“I guess I don’t understand you,” she said a little sulkily. “I guess you’re very deep, aren’t you?”
“Pardon me,” said Vere, weary of the conversation; “if you will excuse me I will leave you now, we are going to ride—”
“Ride? Ah! That’s a thing I don’t cotton to anyhow,” said Miss Fuschia Leach, who had found that her talent did not lie that way, and could never bring herself to comprehend how princesses and duchesses could find any pleasure in tearing over bleak fields and jumping scratching hedges. A calorifère at eighty degrees always, a sacque from Sirandin’s, an easy chair, and a dozen young men in various stages of admiration around her, that was her idea of comfort. Every thing out of doors made her chilly.
She watched Vere pass away, and laughed, and yet felt sorry. She herself was the rage because she was a great beauty and a great flirt; because she had been signalled for honour by a prince whose word was law; because she was made for the age she lived in, with a vulgarity that was chic, and an audacity that was unrivalled, and a delightful mingling of utter ignorance and intense shrewdness, of slavish submission to fashion and daring eccentricity in expression, that made her to the jaded palate of the world a social caviare, a moral absinthe. Exquisitely pretty, perfectly dressed, as dainty to look at as porcelain, and as common to talk to as a camp follower, she, like many of her nation, had found herself, to her own surprise, an object of adoration to that great world of which she had known nothing, except from the imaginative columns of “own correspondents.” But Fuschia Leach was no fool, as she said often herself, and she felt, as her eyes followed Vere, that this calm cold child with her great contemptuous eyes and her tranquil voice, had something she had not; something that not all the art of Mr. Worth could send with his confections to herself “My word! I think I’ll take Mull just to rile her!” she thought to herself; and thought, too, for she was good natured and less vain than she looked: “Perhaps she’d like me a little bit then — and then, again, perhaps she wouldn’t.”
“That girl’s worth five hundred of me, and yet they don’t see it!” she mused now, as she pursued Vere’s shadow with her eyes across the lawn. She knew very well that with some combination of scarlet and orange, or sage and maize upon her, in some miracle of velvet and silk, with a cigarette in her mouth, a thousand little curls on her forehead, the last slang on her lips, and the last news on her ear, her own generation would find her adorable while it would leave Vere Herbert in the shade. And yet she would sooner have been Vere Herbert; yet she would sooner have had that subtle, nameless, unattainable “something” which no combination of scarlet and orange, of sage and of maize, was able to give, no imitation or effort for half a lifetime would teach.
“We don’t raise that sort somehow our way,” she reflected wistfully.
She let the riding party go out with a sigh of envy — the slender figure of Vere foremost on a mare that few cared to mount — and went herself to drive in a little basket-carriage with the Princess Nelaguine, accompanied by an escort of her own more intimate adorers, to call at two or three of the maisonettes scattered along the line of the shore between Félicité and Villers.
“Strikes me I’ll have to take that duke after all,” she thought to herself; he would come to her sign she knew, as a hawk to the lure.
That day Prince Zouroff rode by Veres side, and paid her many compliments on her riding and other things; but she scarcely heard them. She knew she could ride anything, as she told him; and she thought everyone could who loved horses; and then she barely heard the rest of his pretty speeches. She was thinking, with a bewildered disgust, of the woman whom Francis Herbert, Duke of Mull and Cantire, was willing to make her cousin.
She had not comprehended one tithe of Pick-me-up’s jargon, but she had understood the menace to the grand, old, sombre border forests about Castle Herbert, which she loved with a love only second to that she felt for the moors and woods of Bulmer.
“I would sooner see Francis dead than see him touch those trees!” she thought, with what her mother called her terrible earnestness. And she was so absorbed in thinking of the shame of such a wife for a Herbert of Mull, that she never noticed the glances Zouroff gave her, or dreamed that the ladies who rode with her were saying to each other, “Is it possible? Can he be serious?”
Vere had been accustomed to rise at six and go to bed at ten, to spend her time in serious studies or open-air exercise. She was bewildered by a day which began at one or two o’clock in the afternoon, and ended at cockcrow or later. She was harassed by the sense of being perpetually exhibited and unceasingly criticised. Speaking little herself, she listened, and observed, and began to understand all that Corrèze had vaguely warned her against; to see the rancour underlying the honeyed words; the enmity concealed by the cordial smile; the hate expressed in praise; the effort masked in ease; the endless strife and calumny, and cruelty, and small conspiracies which make up the daily life of men and women in society. Most of it was still a mystery to her; but much she saw, and grew heartsick at it. Light and vain temperaments find their congenial atmosphere in the world of fashion, but hers was neither light nor vain, and the falseness of it all oppressed her.
“You are a little Puritan, my dear!” said Lady Stoat, smiling at her.
“Pray be anything else rather than that!” said Lady Dolly pettishly. “Everybody hates it. It makes you look priggish and conceited, and nobody believes in it even. That ever a child of mine should have such ideas!”
“Yes. It is very funny!” said her dear Adine quietly. “You neglected her education, pussy. She is certainly a little Puritan. But we should not laugh at her. In these days it is really very interesting to see a girl who can blush, and who does not understand the French of the Petits Journaux, though she knows the French of Marmontel and of Massillon.”
“Who cares for Marmontel and Massillon?” said Lady Dolly in disgust.
She was flattered by the success of Vere as a beauty, and irritated by her failure as a companionable creature. She was triumphant to see the impression made by the girl’s blending of sculptural calm and childlike loveliness. She was infuriated a hundred times a day by Vere’s obduracy, coldness, and unwise directness of speech.
“It is almost imbecility,” thought Lady Dolly, obliged to apologise continually for some misplaced sincerity or obtuse negligence with which her daughter had offended people.
“You should never froisser other people; never, never!” said Lady Dolly. “If Nero, and what — was — her name that began with an M, were to come in your world, you should be civil to them; you should be charming to them, so long as they were people that were received. Nobody is to judge for themselves, never. If society is with you, then you are all right. Besides, it looks so much prettier to be nice and charitable and all that; and besides, what do you know, you chit?”
> Vere was always silent under these instructions; they were but little understood by her. When she did froisser people it was generally because their consciences gave a sting to her simple frank words of which the young speaker herself was quite unconscious.
“Am I a Puritan?” Vere thought, with anxious self-examination. In history she detested the Puritans; all her sympathies were with the other side. Yet she began now to think that, if the Stuart court ever resembled Félicité, the Puritans had not perhaps been so very far wrong.
Félicité was nothing more or worse than a very fashionable house of the period; but it was the world in little, and it hurt her, bewildered her, and in many ways disgusted her.
If she had been stupid, as her mother thought her, she would have been amused or indifferent; but she was not stupid, and she was oppressed and saddened. At Bulmer she had been reared to think truth the first law of life, modesty as natural to a gentlewoman as cleanliness, delicacy and reserve the attributes of all good breeding, and sincerity indispensable to self respect. At Félicité, who seemed to care for any one of these things?
Lady Stoat gave them lip-service indeed, but, with that exception, no one took the trouble even to render them that questionable homage which hypocrisy pays to virtue.
In a world that was the really great world, so far as fashion went and rank (for the house-party at Félicité was composed of people of the purest blood and highest station, people very exclusive, very prominent and very illustrious), Vere found things that seemed passing strange to her. When she heard of professional beauties, whose portraits were sold for a shilling, and whose names were as cheap as red herrings, yet who were received at court and envied by princesses; when she saw that men were the wooed, not the wooers, and that the art of flirtation was reduced to a tournament of effrontery; when she saw a great duchess go out with the guns, carrying her own chokebore by Purdy and showing her slender limbs in gaiters; when she saw married women not much older than herself spending hour after hour in the fever of chemin de fer, when she learned that they were very greedy for their winnings to be paid, but never dreamt of being asked to pay their losses; when she saw these women with babies in their nurseries, making unblushing love to other womens husbands, and saw everyone looking on the pastime as a matter of course quite goodnaturedly; when she saw one of these ladies take a flea from her person and cry, Qui m’aime l’avale, and a prince of semi-royal blood swallow the flea in a glass of water, when to these things, and a hundred others like them, the young student from the Northumbrian moors was the silent and amazed listener and spectator, she felt indeed lost in a strange and terrible world; and something that was very like disgust shone from her clear eyes and closed her proud mouth.
Society as it was filled her with a very weariness of disgust, a cold and dreary disenchantment, like the track of grey mire that in the mountains is left by the descent of the glacier. But her mother was more terrible to her than all. At the thought of her mother Vere, even in solitude, felt her cheek burn with an intolerable shame. When she came to know something of the meaning of those friendships that society condones — of those jests which society whispers between a cup of tea and a cigarette — of those hints which are enjoyed like a bonbon, yet contain all the enormities that appalled Juvenal, — then the heart of Vere grew sick, and she began slowly to realise what manner of woman this was that had given her birth.
“My dear, your pretty daughter seems to sit in judgment on us all! I am sadly afraid she finds us wanting,” said the great lady who had signalised herself with utilising a flea.
“Oh, she has a dreadful look, I know,” said Lady Dolly distractedly “But you see she has been always with that odious old woman. She has seen nothing. She is a baby.”
The other smiled:
“When she has been married a year, all that will change. She will leave it behind her with her maiden sashes and shoes. But I am not sure that she will marry quickly, lovely as she is. She frightens people, and, if you don’t mind my saying so, she is rude. The other night when we had that little bit of fun about the flea she rose and walked away, turned her back positively, as if she were a scandalised dowager. Now, you know, that doesn’t do nowadays. The age of saints is gone by-”
“If there ever were one,” said Lady Dolly, who occasionally forgot that she was very high church in her doctrines.
“Vera would make a beautiful St. Ursula,” said Lady Stoatjoining them. “There is war as well as patience in her countenance; she will resist actively as well as endure passively.”
“What a dreadful thing to say!” sighed Lady Dolly.
The heroine of the flea erotic laughed at her.
“Marry her, my dear. That is what she wants.”
She herself was only one and twenty, and had been married four years, had some little flaxen bundles in nurses’ arms that she seldom saw, was deeply in debt, had as many adorers as she had pearls and diamonds, and was a very popular and admired personage.
“Why can’t you get on with people?” Lady Dolly said to Vere irritably, that day.
“I do not think they like me,” said Vere very humbly; and her mother answered very sharply and sensibly:
“Everybody is liked as much as they wish to be. If you show people you like them, they like you. It is perfectly simple. You get what you give my dear in this world. But the sad truth is, Vere, that you are unamiable.”
Was she in truth unamiable?
She felt the tears gather in her eyes. She put her hand on the hound Loris’s collar, and went away with him into the gardens; the exquisite gardens with the gleam of the sea between the festoons of their roses that no one hardly ever noticed except herself In a deserted spot where a marble Antinous reigned over a world of bigonias, she sat down on a rustic chair and put her arm round the dogs neck, and cried like the child that she was.
She thought of the sweetbriar bush on the edge of the white cliff — oh! if only Corrèze had been here to tell her what to do!
The dog kissed her in his own way, and was sorrowful for her sorrow; the sea wind stirred the flowers; the waves were near enough at hand for their murmuring to reach her; the quietness and sweetness of the place soothed her.
She would surely see Corrèze again, she thought; perhaps in Paris, this very winter, if her mother took her there. He would tell her if she were right or wrong in having no sympathy with all these people; and the tears still fell down her cheeks as she sat there and fancied she heard that wondrous voice rise once more above the sound of the sea.
“Mademoiselle Vera, are you unhappy? and in Félicité!” said a voice that was very unlike that unforgotten music — the voice of Sergius Zouroff.
Vere looked up startled, with her tears still wet, like dew.
Zouroff had been kindness itself to her, but her first disgust for him had never changed. She was alarmed and vexed to be found by him, so, alone.
“What frets you?” he said, with more gentleness than often came into his tones. “It is a regret to me as your host that you should know any regret in Félicité. If there be anything I can do, command me.”
“You are very good, monsieur,” said Vere hesitatingly. “It is nothing — very little, at least; my mother is vexed with me.”
“Indeed! Your charming mother, then, for once, must be in the wrong. What is it?”
“Because people do not like me.”
“Who is barbarian enough not to like you? I am a barbarian but—”
His cold eyes grew eloquent, but she did not see their gaze, for she was looking dreamily at the far-off sea.
“No one likes me,” said Vere wearily, “and my mother thinks it is my fault. No doubt it is. I do not care for what they care for; but then they do not care for what I love — the gardens, the woods, the sea, the dogs.”
She drew Loris close as she spoke, and rose to go. She did not wish to be with her host. But Zouroff paced by her side.
“Loris pleases you? Will you give him the happiness of being called yours
?”
Vere for once raised a bright and grateful face to him, a flush of pleasure drying her tears.
“Mine? Loris? Oh that would be delightful! — if mamma will let me.”
“Your mother will let you,” said Zouroff, with an odd smile. “Loris is a fortunate beast, to have power to win your fancy.”
“But I like all dogs—”
“And no men?”
“I do not think about them.”
It was the simple truth.
“I wish I were a dog!” said Serge Zouroff.
Vere laughed for a moment — a child’s sudden laugh at a droll idea; then her brows contracted a little.
“Dogs do not flatter me,” she said curtly.
“Nor do I — foi d’honneur! But tell me, is it really the fact that cruel Lady Dolly made you weep? In my house too! — I am very angry. I wish to make it Félicité to you, beyond any other of my guests.”
“Mamma was no doubt right, monsieur,” said Vere coldly. “She said that I do not like people, and I do not.”
“Dame! You have excellent taste then,” said Zouroff with a laugh. “I will not quarrel with your coldness, Mademoiselle Vera, if you will only make an exception for me?”
Vere was silent.
Zouroff’s eyes grew impatient and fiery.