by Ouida
Yet she had never felt so nearly wretched, never so nearly understood, what shame and repentance meant.
In the entr’acte Zouroff changed his place, and took a vacant chair by Lady Dolly, and took up her fan and played with it.
“Miladi, we have always been friends, good friends, have we not?” he said with the smile that she hated. “You know me well, and can judge me without flattery. What will you say if I tell you that I seek the honour of your daughters hand?”
He folded and unfolded the fan as he spoke. The orchestra played at that moment loudly. Lady Dolly was silent. There was a contraction at the corners of her pretty rosebud-like mouth.
“Any mother could have but one answer to you,” she replied with an effort. “You are too good and I am too happy!”
“I may speak to her, then, to-morrow, with your consent?” he added.
“Let me speak to her first,” she said hurriedly; “she is so young.”
“As you will, madame! Place myself and all I have at her feet.”
“What can you have seen in her! Good heavens!” she cried in an impulse of amaze.
“She has avoided me!” said Serge Zouroff, and spoke the truth: then added in his best manner, “And is she not your child?”
The violins chirped softly as waking birds at dawn; the satin curtain drew up; the little glittering scene shone again in the wax-light. Lady Dolly gasped a little for breath.
“It is very warm here,” she murmured. “Don’t you think if a window were opened. And then you have astonished me so—”
She shook double her usual drops of chloral out into her glass that night, but they did not give her sleep.
“I shall never persuade her!” she thought; gazing with dry, hot eyes at the light swinging before her mirror. The eyes of Vere seemed to look at her in their innocent, scornful serenity, and the eyes of Vere’s father too.
“Do the dead ever come back?” she thought; “some people say they do.”
And Lady Dolly, between her soft sheets, shivered, and felt frightened and old.
She was on the edge of a crime, and she had a conscience, though it was a very small and feeble one, and seldom spoke.
CHAPTER VIII.
Vere had been up with the sunrise, and out with Loris. She had had the pretty green park and the dewy gardens to herself; she had filled her hands with more flowers than she could carry; her hair and her clothes were fragrant with the smell of mown grass and pressed thyme; she stole back on tiptoe through the long corridors, through the still house, for it was only nine o’clock, and she knew that all the guests of Félicité were still sleeping.
To her surprise her mothers door opened, and her mothers voice called her.
Vere went in, fresh and bright as was the summer morning itself, with the dew upon her hair and the smell of the blossoms entering with her, into the warm oppressive air that was laden with the smells of anodynes and perfumes.
Her mother had already been made pretty for the day, and a lovely turquoise-blue dressing-robe enveloped her. She opened her arms, and folded the child in them, and touched her forehead with a kiss.
“My darling, my sweet child,” she murmured, “I have some wonderful news for you; news that makes me very happy, Vera—”
“Yes?” said Vere, standing with wide-opened expectant eyes, the flowers falling about her, the dew sparkling on her hair.
“Yes, too happy, my Vera, since it secures your happiness,” murmured her mother. “But perhaps you can guess, dear, though you are so very young, and you do not even know what love means. Vera, my sweetest, my old friend Prince Zouroff has sought you from me in marriage!”
“Mother!” Vere stepped backward, then stood still again; a speechless amaze, an utter incredulity, an unutterable disgust, all speaking in her face.
“Are you startled, darling,” said Lady Dolly, in her blandest voice.
“Of course you are, you are such a child. But if you think a moment, Vera, you will see the extreme compliment it is to you; the greatness it offers you; the security that the devotion of a—”
“Mother!” she cried again; and this time the word was a cry of horror — a protest of indignation and outrage.
“Don’t call me ‘mother’ like that. You know I hate it!” said Lady Dolly, lapsing into the tone most natural to her. “‘Mother! mother!’ as if I were beating you with a poker, like the people in the police reports. You are so silly, my dear; I cannot think what he can have seen in you, but seen something he has, enough to make him wish to marry you. You are a baby, but I suppose you can understand that. It is a very great and good marriage, Vera; no one could desire anything better. You are exceedingly young, indeed, according to English notions, but they never were my notions, and I think a girl cannot anyhow be safer than properly married to a person desirable in every way—”
Lady Dolly paused a moment to take breath; she felt a little excited, a little exhausted, and there was that in the colourless face of her daughter which frightened her, as she had been frightened in her bed, wondering if the dead came back on earth.
She made a little forward caressing movement, and would have kissed her again, but Vere moved away, her eyes were darkened with anger, and her lips were tremulous.
“Prince Zouroff is a coward,” said the girl, very low, but very bitterly. “He knows that I loathe him, and that I think him a bad man. How dare he — how dare he — insult me so!”
“Insult you!” echoed Lady Dolly, with almost a scream. “Are you mad? Insult you! A man that all Europe has been wild to marry these fifteen years past! Insult you! A man who offers you an alliance that will send you out of a room before everybody except actually princesses of the blood? Insult you! When was ever an offer of marriage thought an insult in society?”
“I think it can be the greatest one,” said Vere, still under her breath.
“You think! Who are you to think? Pray have no thoughts at all unless they are wiser than that. You are startled, my dear; that is, perhaps natural. You did not see he was in love with you, though everyone else did.”
“Oh, do not say such horrible words!”
The blood rushed to the child’s face, and she covered her eyes with her hands. She was hurt, deeply, passionately — hurt and humiliated, in a way that her mother could no more have understood than she could have understood the paths travelled by the invisible stars.
“Really you are too ridiculous,” she said impatiently “Even you, I should think, must know what love means. I believe even at Bulmer you read ‘Waverley.’ You have charmed Sergius Zouroff, and it is a very great victory, and if all this surprise and disgust at it is not a mere piece of acting, you must be absolutely brainless, absolutely idiotic! You cannot seriously mean that a man insults you when he offers you a position that has been coveted by half Europe.”
“When he knows that I cannot endure him,” said Vere with flashing eyes; “it is an insult; tell him so from me. Oh mother! mother! that you could even call me to hear such a thing.... I do not want to marry anyone; I do not wish ever to marry. Let me go back to Bulmer. I am not made for the world, nor it for me.”
“You are not, indeed!” said her mother in exasperation and disgust, feeling her own rage and anxiety like two strangling hands at her throat. “Nevertheless, into the world you will go as Princess Zouroff. The alliance suits me, and I am not easily dissuaded from what I wish. Your heroics count for nothing. All girls of sixteen are gushing and silly. I was too. It is an immense thing that you have such a stroke of good fortune. I quite despaired of you. You are very lovely, but you are old-fashioned, pedantic, unpleasant. You have no chic. You have no malleability. You are handsome, and that is all. It is a wonderful thing that you should have made such a coup as this before you are even out. You are quite penniless; quite, did you understand that? You have no claim on Mr. Vanderdecken, and I am not at all sure that he will not make a great piece of work when I leave him to pay for your trousseau, as I must do, for I can’t pay for
it, and none of the Herberts will; they are all poor and proud as church mice and though Zouroff will of course send you a corbeille, all the rest must come from me, and must be perfect and abundant, and from all the best houses.”
Vere struck her foot on the floor. It was the first gesture of passion that she had ever given way to since her birth.
“That is enough, mother!” she said aloud and very firmly. “Put it in what words you like to Prince Zouroff, but tell him from me that I will not marry him. I will not. That is enough.”
Then, before her mother could speak again, she gathered up the dew-wet flowers in her hand and left the room.
Lady Dolly shrugged her shoulders, and swore a naughty little oath, as if she had lost fifty pounds at bezique. She was pale and excited, offended and very angry, but she was not afraid. Girls were always like that, she thought. Only, for the immediate moment it was difficult.
She sat and meditated awhile, then made up her mind. She had nerved herself in the night that was just past to put her child in the brazen hands of Moloch because it suited her, because it served her, because she had let her little weak conscience sink utterly, and down in the deeps; and having once made up her mind she resolved to have her will. Like all weak people, she could be cruel, and she was cruel now.
When the midday chimes rang with music from the clock-tower, Lady Dolly went out of her own room downstairs. It was the habit at Félicité for the guests to meet at one o’clock breakfast — being in the country they thought it well to rise early. Serge Zouroff, as he met her, smiled.
“Eh bien?” he asked.
The smile made Lady Dolly feel sick and cold, but she looked softly into his eyes.
“Dear friend, do not be in haste. My child is such a child — she is flattered — deeply moved — but startled. She has no thought of any such ideas, you know; she can scarcely understand. Leave her to me for a day or two. Do not hurry her. This morning if you will lend me a pony carriage, I will drive over with her to Le Caprice and stay a night or so. I shall talk to her, and then—”
Zouroff laughed grimly.
“Ma belle, your daughter detests me; but I do not mind that. You may say it out; it will make no difference — to us.”
“You are wrong there,” said Lady Dolly so blandly and serenely that even he was deceived, and believed her for once to be speaking the truth. “She neither likes you nor dislikes you, because her mind is in its chrysalis state — isn’t it a chrysalis, the thing that is rolled up in a shell asleep? — and of love and marriage my Vera is as unconscious as those china children yonder holding up the breakfast bouquets. She is cold, you know; that you see for yourself—”
“Un beau défaut!”’
“Un beau défaut in a girl,” assented Lady Dolly. “Yes. I would not have her otherwise, my poor fatherless darling, nor would you, I know. But it makes it difficult to bring her to say ‘yes,’ you see; not because she has any feeling against you, but simply because she has no feeling at all as yet. Unless girls are precocious it is always so — hush — don’t let them overhear us. We don’t want it talked about at present, do we?”
“As you like,” said Zouroff moodily.
He was offended, and yet he was pleased; offended because he was used to instantaneous victory, pleased because this grey-eyed maiden proved of the stuff that he had fancied her. For a moment he thought he would take the task of persuasion out of her mother’s hands and into his own, but he was an indolent man, and effort was disagreeable to him, and he was worried at that moment by the pretensions of one of the actresses at the maisonette a mile off across the park.
“My Vera is not very well this morning. She has got a little chill,” volunteered Lady Dolly to Madame Nelaguine, and the table generally.
“I saw Miss Herbert in the gardens as I went to bed at sunrise,” said Fuschia Leach in her high far-reaching voice. “I surmise morning dew is bad for the health.”
People laughed. It was felt there was “something” about Vere and her absence, and the women were inclined to think that, despite Loris and the silver collar, their host had not come to the point, and Lady Dolly was about to retreat.
“After all, it would be preposterous,” they argued. “A child, not even out, and one of those Mull Herberts without a penny.”
“Won’t you come down?” said Lady Dolly sharply to Vere a little later.
“I will come down if I may say the truth to Prince Zouroff.”
“Until you accept him you will say nothing to him. It is impossible to keep you here boudant like this. It becomes ridiculous. What will all those women say!... I will drive you over to Laures. We will stay there a few days, and you will hear reason.”
“I will not marry Prince Zouroff,” said Vere.
After her first disgust and anger that subject scarcely troubled her. They could not marry her against her will. She had only to be firm, she thought; and her nature was firm almost to stubbornness.
“We will see,” said her mother drily. “Get ready to go with me in an hour.”
Vere, left to herself, undid the collar of Loris, made it in a packet, and wrote a little note, which said: —
“I thank you very much, Monsieur, for the honour that I hear from my mother you do me, in your wish that I should marry you. Yet I wonder that you do wish it, because you know well that I have not that feeling for you which could make me care for or respect you. Please to take back this beautiful collar, which is too heavy for Loris. Loris I will always keep, and I am very fond of him. I should be glad if you would tell my mother that you have had this letter and I beg you to believe me, Monsieur, yours gratefully, “VERE HERBERT.”
She read the note several times, and thought that it would do. She did not like to write more coldly, lest she should seem heartless, and though her first impulse had been to look on the offer as an insult, perhaps he did not mean it so, she reflected; perhaps he did not understand how she disliked him. She directed her packet, and sealed it, and called her maid.
“Will you take that to Monsieur Zouroff at once,” she said. “Give it to him into his own hands.”
The maid took the packet to her superior, Adrienne; Adrienne the wise took it to her mistress; Lady Dolly glanced at it and put it carelessly aside.
“Ah! the dogs collar to go to Paris to be enlarged? very well; leave it there; it is of no consequence just now.”
Adrienne the wise understood very well.
“If Mademoiselle ask you,” she instructed her underling, “you will say that Monsieur le Prince had the packet quite safe.”
But Vere did not even ask, because she had not lived long enough in the world to doubt the good faith even of a waiting-maid. At Bulmer the servants were old-fashioned, like the place, and the Waverley novels. They told the truth, as they wore boots that wanted blacking.
If the little note had found its way to Serge Zouroff it might have touched his heart; it would have touched his pride, and Vere would have been left free. As it was, the packet reposed amidst Lady Dolly’s pocket-handkerchiefs and perfumes till it was burnt with a pastille in the body of a Japanese dragon.
Vere, quite tranquil, went to Le Caprice in the sunny afternoon with her mother, never doubting that Prince Zouroff had had it.
She did not see him, and thought that it was because he had read her message and resented it. In point of fact she did not see him because he was in the maisonette in the park, where the feminine portion of the troop had grown so quarrelsome and so exacting that they were threatening to make him a scene up at the chateau.
“What are your great ladies better than we?” they cried in revolt. He granted that they were no better; nevertheless, the prejudices of society were so constituted that chateau and maisonette could not meet, and he bade their director bundle them all back to Paris, like a cage of dangerous animals that might at any moment escape.
“You will be here for the ball for the Prince de Galles?” said Princess Nelaguine to Lady Dolly; who nodded and laughed.
“To be sure; thanks; I only go for a few days, love.”
“Are we coming back?” said Vere, aghast.
“Certainly,” said her mother sharply, striking her ponies; and the child’s heart sank.
“But he will have had my letter,” she thought, “and then he will let me alone.”
Le Caprice was a charming house, with a charming châtelaine, and charming people were gathered in it for the sea and the shooting; but Vere began to hate the pretty picturesque women, the sound of the laughter, the babble of society, the elegance and the luxury, and all the graceful nothings that make up the habits and pleasures of a grand house. She felt very lonely in it all, and when, for sake of her beauty, men gathered about her, she seemed stupid because she was filled with a shy terror of them; perhaps they would want to marry her too, she thought; and her fair low brow got a little frown on it that made her look sullen.
“Your daughter is lovely, ma chère, but she is not sweet-tempered like you,” said the hostess to Lady Dolly, who sighed.
“Ah no!” she answered, “she is cross, poor pet, sometimes, and hard to please. Now, I am never out of temper, and any little thing amuses me that my friends are kind enough to do. I don’t know where Vera got her character; from some dead and gone Herbert, I suppose, who must have been very disagreeable in his generation.”
And that night and every night she said the same thing to Vere:
“You must marry Serge Zouroff;” and Vere every night replied, “I have told him I will not. I will not.”
Lady Dolly never let her know that her letter had been burned.
“Your letter?” she had said when Vere spoke of it. “No; he never told me anything of it. But whatever you might say, he wouldn’t mind it, my dear. You take his fancy, and he means to marry you.”
“Then he is no gentleman,” said the girl.