by Ouida
“Will you not even like me a little for Loris’s sake?”
Vere stood still in the rose-path, and looked at him with serious serene eyes.
“It was kind of you to give me Loris, that I know, and I am grateful for that; but I will not tell you what is false, monsieur; it would be a very bad return.”
“Is she the wiliest coquette by instinct, or only the strangest child that ever breathed?” thought Zouroff as he said aloud, “Why do you not like me, mon enfant?”
Vere hesitated a moment.
“I do not think you are a good man.”
“And why am I so unfortunate as to give you that opinion of me?”
“It is the way you talk; and you kicked Loris one day last week.”
Serge Zouroff laughed aloud, but he swore a heavy oath under his breath.
“Your name in Russian means Faith. You are well named, Mademoiselle Vera,” he said carelessly, as he continued to walk by her side. “But I shall hope to make you think better things of me yet, and I can never kick Loris again, as he is now yours, without your permission.”
“You will never have that,” said Vere, with a little smile, as she thought, with a pang of compunction, that she had been very rude to a host who was courteous and generous.
Zouroff moved on beside her, gloomy and silent.
“Take my arm, mademoiselle,” he said suddenly, as they were approaching the chateau. Vere put her hand on his arm in timid compliance; she felt that she must have seemed rude and thankless. They crossed the smooth lawns that stretched underneath the terraces of Félicité.
It was near sunset, about seven o’clock; some ladies were out on the terrace, amidst them Lady Dolly and the heroine of the flea. They saw Zouroff cross the turf, with the girl in her white Gainsborough dress beside him, and the hound beside her.
Lady Dolly’s heart gave a sudden leap, then stopped its beats in suspense.
“Positively — I do — think—” murmured the lady of the flea; and then fell back in her chair in a fit of uncontrollable laughter.
Vere loosened her hand from her host’s arm as they ascended the terrace steps, and came straight to her mother.
“Monsieur Zouroff has given me Loris!” she cried breathlessly, for the dog was to her an exceeding joy. “You will let me have Loris, mamma?”
“Let her have Loris,” said Zouroff, with a smile that Lady Dolly understood.
“Certainly, since you are so kind, Prince,” she said charmingly. “But a dog! It is such a disagreeable thing; when one travels especially. Still, since you are so good to that naughty child, who gives all her heart to the brutes—”
“I am happy that she thinks me a brute too,” said Zouroff, with a grim smile.
The ladies laughed.
Vere did not hear or heed. She was caressing her new treasure.
“I shall not feel alone now with Loris,” she was saying to herself. The dull fierce eyes of Serge Zouroff were fastened on her, but she did not think of him, nor of why the women laughed.
Lady Dolly was vaguely perplexed.
“The girl was crying half an hour ago,” she thought. “Perhaps she is deeper than one thinks. Perhaps she means to draw him on that way. Anyhow, her way appears to answer — but it hardly seems possible — when one thinks what he has had thrown at his head and never looked at! And Vere! such a rude creature, and such a simpleton!”
Yet a sullen respect began to enter into her for her daughter: the respect that women of the world only give to a shrewd talent for finesse. If she were capable at sixteen of “drawing on” the master of Félicité thus ably, Lady Dolly felt that her daughter might yet prove worthy of her; might still become a being with whom she could have sympathy and community of sentiment. And yet Lady Dolly felt a sort of sickness steal over her as she saw the look in his eyes which Vere did not see.
“It will be horrible! horrible!” she said to herself. “Why did Adine ever tell me to come here?”
For Lady Dolly was never in her own eyes the victim of her own follies, but always that of someone else’s bad counsels.
Lady Dolly was frightened when she thought that it was possible that this scorner of unmarried women would be won by her own child. But she was yet more terrified when the probable hopelessness of any such project flashed on her.
The gift of the dog might mean everything, and might mean nothing.
“What a constant misery she is!” she mused. “Oh, why wasn’t she a boy? They go to Eton, and if they get into trouble men manage it all; and they are useful to go about with if you want stalls at a theatre, or an escort that don’t compromise you. But a daughter!...”
She could have cried, dressed though she was for dinner, in a combination of orange and deadleaf, that would have consoled any woman under any affliction.
“Do you think he means it,” she whispered to Lady Stoat, who answered cautiously, —
“I think he might be made to mean it.”
Dolly sighed, and looked nervous.
Two days later Loris had a silver collar on his neck that had just come from Paris. It had the inscription on it of the Troubadours motto for his mistress’s falcon:
“Quiconque me trouvera, qu’il me mène à ma maîtresse: pour récompense il la verra.”
Vere looked doubtfully at the collar; she preferred Loris without it.
“He does mean it,” said Lady Dolly to herself, and her pulses fluttered strangely.
“I’d have given you a dog if I’d known you wished for one,” said John Jura moodily that evening to Vere. She smiled and thanked him.
“I had so many dogs about me at Bulmer I feel lost without one, and Loris is very beautiful—”
Jura looked at her with close scrutiny.
“How do you like the giver of Loris?”
Vere met his gaze unmoved. “I do not like him at all,” she said in a low tone. “But perhaps it is not sincere to say so. He is very kind and we are in his house.”
“My dear! That we are in his house or that he is in ours is the very reason to abuse a man like a thief! You don’t seem to understand modern ethics,” said the heroine of the flea epic, as she passed near with a little laugh, on her way to play chemin de fer in the next drawing-room.
“Don’t listen to them,” said Jura hastily. “They will do you no good; they are all a bad lot here.”
“But they are all gentle-people?” said Vere in some astonishment. “They are all gentlemen and gentlewomen born.”
“Oh, born!” said Jura, with immeasurable contempt. “Oh yes! they’re all in the swim for that matter; but they are about as bad a set as there is in Europe; not but what it is much the same everywhere. They say the Second Empire did it. I don’t know if it’s that, but I do know that ‘gentlewomen,’ as you call it, are things one never sees nowadays anywhere in Paris or London. You have got the old grace, but how long will you keep it? They will corrupt you; and if they can’t, they’ll ruin you.”
“Is it so easy to be corrupted or to be ruined?”
“Easy as blacking your glove,” said Jura moodily Vere gave a little sigh. Life seemed to her very difficult.
“I do not think they will change me,” she said, after a few moments’ thought.
“I don’t think they will; but they will make you pay for it. If they say nothing worse of you than that you are ‘odd’ you will be lucky. How did you become what you were? You, Dolly’s daughter!”
Vere coloured at the unconscious contempt with which he spoke the last two words.
“I try to be what my father would have wished,” she said under her breath.
Jura was touched. His blue eyes grew dim and reverential.
“I wish to heaven your father may watch over you!” he said in a husky voice. “In our world, my dear, you will want some good angel — bitterly. Perhaps you will be your own, though. I hope so.”
His hand sought hers and caught it closely for an instant, and he grew very pale. Vere looked up in a little surprise.
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br /> “You are very kind to think of me,” she said with a certain emotion.
“Who would not think of you?” muttered Jura, with a darkness on his frank, fair, bold face. “Don’t be so astonished that I do,” he said, with a little laugh, whose irony she did not understand. “You know I am such a friend of your mother’s.”
“Yes,” said Vere gravely.
She was perplexed. He took up her fan and unfurled it.
“Who gave you this thing? It is an old one of Dolly’s, I bought it in the Passage Choiseul myself; it’s not half good enough for you now. I bought one at Christie’s last winter, that belonged to Maria Theresa; it has her monogram in opals; it was painted by Fragonard, or one of those beggars; I will send for it for you if you will please me by taking it.”
“You are very kind,” said Vere.
“That is what you say of Serge Zouroff!”
She laughed a little.
“I like you better than Monsieur Zouroff.”
Jura’s face flushed to the roots of his fair crisp curls.
“And as well as your favoured singer?”
“Ah no!— “Vere spoke quickly, and with a frown on her pretty brows. She was annoyed at the mention of Corrèze.
Lady Dolly approached at that moment — an apparition of white lace and nénuphars with some wonderful old cameos as ornaments.
“Take me to the tea-room, Jack,” she said sharply. “Clementine de Vrille is winning everything again; it is sickening; I believe she marks the aces!”
Jura gave her his arm.
Vere, left alone, sat lost in thought. It was a strange world. No one seemed happy in it, or sincere. Lord Jura, whom her mother treated like a brother, seemed to despise her more than anyone; and her mother seemed to say that another friend, who was a French Duchess, descended from a Valois, was guilty of cheating at cards!
Jura took the white lace and nénuphars into the tea-room. He was silent and preoccupied. Lady Dolly wanted pretty attentions, but their day was over with him.
“Is it true,” he said abruptly to her, “that Zouroff wants your daughter?”
Lady Dolly smiled vaguely.
“Oh! I don’t know; they say many things, you know. No; I shouldn’t suppose he means anything, should you?”
“I can’t say,” he answered curtly. “You wish it.”
“Of course I wish anything for her happiness.”
He laughed aloud.
“What damned hypocrites all you women are!”
“My dear Jura, pray: you are not in a guard-room or a club-room!” said Lady Dolly very seriously shocked indeed.
Lord Jura got her off his hands at length, and bestowed her on a young dandy, who had become famous by winning the Grand Prix in that summer. Then he walked away by himself into the smoking-room, which at that hour was quite deserted. He threw himself down on one of the couches, and thought — moodily, impatiently, bitterly.
“What cursed fools we are!” he mused. What a fool he had been ever to fancy that he loved the bloom of Piver’s powders, the slim shape of a white satin corset, the falsehoods of a dozen seasons, the debts of a little gamester, the smiles of a calculating coquette, and the five hundred things of like value, that made up the human entity, known as Lady Dolly.
He could see her, as he had seen her first; a little gossamer figure under the old elms, down by the waterside at Hurlingham, when Hurlingham had been in its earliest natal days of glory. There had been a dinner-party for a Sunday evening; he remembered carrying her tea, and picking her out the big strawberries under the cedar. They had met a thousand times before that, but had never spoken. He thought her the prettiest creature he had ever seen. She had told him to call on her at Chesham place; she was always at home at four. He remembered their coming upon a dead pigeon amongst the gardenias, and how she had laughed, and told him to write its elegy, and he had said that he would if he could only spell, but he had never been able to spell in his life. All the nonsense, all the trifles, came back to his memory in a hateful clearness. That was five years ago, and she was as pretty as ever: Piver is the true fontaine de jouvence. She was not changed, but he — he wished that he had been dead like the blue-rock amongst the gardenias.
He thought of a serious sweet face, a noble mouth, a low broad brow, with the fair hair lying thickly above it.
“Good God!” he thought, “who would ever have dreamt that she could have had such a daughter!”
And his heart was sick, and his meditation was bitter. He was of a loyal, faithful, dog-like temper; yet in that moment he turned in revolt against the captivity that had once seemed sweet, and he hated the mother of Vere.
A little later Lord Jura told his host that he was very sorry, regretted infinitely, and all that, but he was obliged to go up to Scotland. His father had a great house-party there, and would have no denial.
Alone, Lady Dolly said to him, “What does this mean? what is this for? You know you never go to Camelot; you know that you go to every other house in the kingdom sooner. What did you say it for? And how dare you say it without seeing if it suit me? It doesn’t suit me.”
“I put it on Camelot because it sounds more decent; and I mean to go,” said Lord Jura, plunging his hands in his pockets. “The truth is, Dolly, I don’t care to be in this blackguard’s house. He is a blackguard, and you’re wanting to get him.”
Lady Dolly turned pale and sick.
“What language! How is he any more a — what you say — than you are, or anybody else? And pray for what do I want him?”
The broad frank brows of Lord Jura grew stormy as he frowned.
“The man is a blackguard. There are things one can’t say to women. Everybody knows it. You don’t care; you want to get him for the child.”
“Vera? Good gracious! What is Vera to you if it be what you fancy?”
“Nothing!” said Lord Jura, and his lips were pressed close together, and he did not look at his companion.
“Then why — I should think she isn’t, indeed! — but why, in the name of goodness—”
“Look here, Dolly,” said the young man sternly. “Look here. I’m death on sport, and I’ve killed most things, from stripes in the jungle to the red rover in the furrows; I don’t affect to be a feeling fellow, or to go in for that sort of sentiment, but there was one thing I never could stand seeing, and that was a little innocent wild rabbit caught in a gin-trap. My keepers daren’t set one for their lives. I can’t catch you by the throat, or trottle Zouroff as I should a keeper if I caught him at it, so I go to Camelot. That’s all. Don’t make a fuss. You’re going to do a wicked thing, if you can do it, and I won’t look on; that’s all.”
Lady Dolly was very frightened.
“What do you know about Zouroff?” she murmured hurriedly.
“Only what all Paris knows; that is quite enough.”
Lady Dolly was relieved, and instantly allowed herself to grow angry.
“All Paris! Such stuff! As if men were not all alike. Really one would fancy you were in love with Vera yourself!”
“Stop that!” said Lord Jura sternly; and she was subdued, and said no more. “I shall go to-morrow,” he added carelessly; “and you may as well give me a book or a note or something for the women at Camelot; it will stay their tongues here.”
“I have a tapestry pattern to send to your sisters,” said Lady Dolly, submissive but infuriated. “What do you know about Sergius Zouroff, Jack? I wish you would tell me.”
“I think you know it all very well,” said Lord Jura. “I think you women know all about all the vices under the sun, only you don’t mind. There are always bookcases locked in every library; I don’t know why we lock ’em; women know everything. But if the man’s rich it don’t matter. If the fellows we used to read about in Suetonius were alive now, you’d marry your girls to them and never ask any questions — except about settlements. It’s no use my saying anything; you don’t care. But I tell you all the same that if you give your daughter when she’s
scarce sixteen to that brute, you might just as well strip her naked and set her up to auction like the girl in La Coupe ou La Femme!”
“You grow very coarse,” said Lady Dolly, coldly.
Lord Jura left the room, and, in the morning, left the house.
As the “Ephemeris” went slowly, in a languid wind, across the channel in the grey twilight, he sat on deck and smoked, and grew heavy-hearted. He was not a book-learned man, and seldom read anything beyond the sporting papers, or a French romance; but some old verse, about the Fates making out of our pleasant vices whips to scourge us crossed his mind, as the woods and towers of Félicité receded from his sight.
He was young; he was his own master; he was Earl of Jura, and would be Marquis of Shetland. He could have looked into those grand grey eyes of Vere Herbert’s with a frank and honest love; he could have been happy, only — only — only!
The Maria Theresa fan came from Camelot, but Jura never returned.
That night there was a performance in the little theatre; there was usually one every other night. The actors enjoyed themselves much more than the guests at Félicité. They all lived in a little maisonette in the park, idled through their days as they liked, and played when they were told. When his house-party bored him beyond endurance, Sergius Zouroff wandered away to that maisonette in his park at midnight.
That evening the piece on the programme was one that was very light. Zouroff stooped his head to Lady Dolly as they were about to move to the theatre.
“Send your daughter to her bed; that piece is not fit for her ears.”
Lady Dolly stared and bit her lip. But she obeyed. She went back and touched Veres cheek with her fan and caressed her.
“My sweet one, you look pale. Go to your room; you do not care much for acting, and your health is so precious—”
“He must mean it,” she thought, as they went into the pretty theatre, and the lights went round with her. The jests fell on deaf ears so far as she was concerned; the dazzling little scenes danced before her sight; she could only see the heavy form of Zouroff cast down in his velvet chair, with his eyes half shut, and his thick eyebrows drawn together in a frown that did not relax.
“He must mean it,” she thought. “But how odd! Good heavens! that he should care — that he should think — of what is fit or unfit!” And it made her laugh convulsively, in a sort of spasm of mirth, for which the gestures and jokes of the scene gave excuse.