by Ouida
“May I go now?” said Vere.
“Certainly, love, if you wish, but you must let me talk to you again. I am sure you will change and please your mother — your lovely little mother! — whom you ought to live for, you naughty child, so sweet and so dear as she is.”
“She has never lived for me,” thought Vere, but she did not say so; she merely made the deep curtsey she had learned at Bulmer Chase, which had the serene and stately grace in it of another century than her own, and, without another word, passed out of the room.
“Quel enfant terrible!” murmured Lady Stoat, with a shiver and a sigh.
Lady Stoat was quite in earnest, and meant well. She knew perfectly that Sergius Zouroff was a man whose vices were such as the world does not care even to name, and that his temper was that of a savage bull-dog allied to the petulant exactions of a spoilt child. She knew that perfectly, but she had known as bad things of her own son-in-law, and had not stayed her own daughters marriage on that account.
Position was everything, Lady Stoat thought, the man himself nothing. Men were all sadly much alike, she believed. Being a woman of refined taste and pure life, she did not even think about such ugly things as male vice.
Lady Stoat was one of those happy people who only see just so much as they wish to see. It is the most comfortable of all myopisms. She had had, herself, a husband far from virtuous, but she had always turned a deaf ear to all who would have told her of his failings. “I do my own duty; that is enough for me,” she would answer sweetly; and, naturally, she wondered why other women could not be similarly content with doing theirs — when they had a Position. Without a position she could imagine, good woman though she was, that things were very trying; and that people worried more. As for herself, she had never worried, and she had no sympathy with worry in any shape. So that when Lady Dolly came to her weeping, excited, furious, hopeless, over her daughters wicked obstinacy, Lady Stoat only laughed at her in a gentle rallying way.
“You little goose! As if girls were not always like that! She has got Corrèze in her head still, and she is a difficult sort of nature, I grant. What does it matter after all? You only have to be firm. She will come to reason.”
“But I never, never could be firm,” sobbed Lady Dolly. “The Herberts are, I am not. And Vere is just like her father; when I asked him to have a stole and a rochet and look nice, nothing would induce him, because he said something about his bishop—”
Lady Stoat, in her superior wisdom, smiled once more.
“Was poor Vere so very low in the matter of vestments? How curious; the Herberts were Catholic until James the First’s time. But why do you fret so? The child is a beauty, really a beauty. Even if she persist in her hatred of Zouroff she will marry well, I am sure; and she must not persist in it. You must have common sense.”
“But what can one do?” said Lady Dolly in desperation. “It is all very easy to talk, but it is not such a little thing to force a girl’s will in these days; she can make a fuss, and then society abuses you, and I think the police can even interfere, and the Lord Chancellor if she have no father.”
And Lady Dolly sobbed afresh.
“Dear little goose!” said Lady Stoat consolingly, but rather wearied. “Of course nobody uses force; but there are a thousand pleasant ways — children never know what is best for them. We, who are their nearest and dearest, must take care of their tender, foolish, ignorant, young lives, committed to us for guidance. Gwendolen even was reluctant — but now in every letter she sends me she says, ‘Oh, mamma, how right you were!’ That is what your Vera will say to you, darling, a year hence, when she will have been Princess Zouroff long enough to have got used to him.”
Lady Dolly shivered a little at all that the words implied.
Her friend glanced at her.
“If Zouroff cause you apprehension for any reason I am unaware of,” she said softly; “there are others; though, to be sure, as your pretty child is portionless, it may be difficult—”
“No, it must be Zouroff,” said Lady Dolly, nervously and quickly. “She has no money, as you say; and everyone wants money nowadays.”
“Except a Russian,” said Lady Stoat, with a smile. “Then, since you wish for him, take him now he is to be had. But I would advise you not to dawdle, love. Men like him, if they are denied one fancy soon change to another; and he has all the world to console him for Vere’s loss.”
“I have told him he should have her answer in a day or two. I said she was shy, timid, too surprised; he seems to like that.”
“Of course he likes it. Men always like it in women they mean to make their wives. Then, in a day or two, you must convince her; that is all. I do not say it will be easy with her very obstinate and peculiar temperament. But it will be possible.”
Lady Dolly was mute.
She envied her dear Adine that hand of steel under the glove of velvet. She herself had it not. Lady Dolly was of that pliant temper, which, according to the temperature it dwells in, becomes either harmless or worthless. She had nothing of the maîtresse femme about her. She was always doing things that she wished were undone, and knotting entanglements that she could not unravel. She was no ruler of others, except in a coquettish, petulant fashion, of “Jack — and the rest.”
And she had that terrible drawback to comfort and impediment to success — a conscience, that was sluggish and fitful, sleepy and feeble, but not wholly dead. Only this conscience, unhappily, was like a very tiny, weak, swimmer stemming a very strong opposing tide.
In a moment or two the swimmer gave over, and the opposing tide had all its own way.
After dinner that evening, whilst the rest were dancing, Vere slipped away unnoticed to her own room, a little tiny turret-room, of which the window almost overhung the sea. She opened the lattice, and leaned out into the cool fragrant night. The sky was cloudless, the sea silvery in the moonlight; from the gardens below there arose the scent of datura and tuberose. It was all so peaceful and so sweet, the girl could not understand why, amidst it all, she must be so unhappy.
Since Zouroff had had her letter there was no longer any hope of changing his resolve by telling him the truth, and a sombre hatred began to grow up in her against this man, who seemed to her her tormentor and her tyrant.
What hurt her most was that her own mother should urge this horror upon her.
She could see no key to the mystery of such a wish except in the fact that her mother cruelly desired to be rid of her at all cost; and she had written a letter to her grandmother at Bulmer Chase — a letter that lay by her on the table ready to go down to the post-bag in the morning.
“Grandmama loves me in her own harsh way,” the child thought. “She will take me back for a little time at least, and then, if she do not like to keep me, perhaps I could keep myself in some way; I think I could if they would let me. I might go to the Fraulein in her own country and study music at Baireuth, and make a career of it. There would be no shame in that.”
And the thought of Corrèze came softly over her as the memory of fair music will come in a day dream.
Not as any thought of love. She had read no romances save dear Sir Walter’s, which alone, of all the erring tribe of fiction, held a place on the dark oak-shelves of the library at Bulmer.
Corrèze was to her like a beautiful fancy rather than a living being, — a star that shot across a summer sky and passed unseen to brighter worlds than ours.
He was a saint to the child — he who to himself was a sad sinner — and his word dwelt in her heart like a talisman against all evil.
She sat all alone, and dreamt innocently of going into the mystic German land and learning music in all its heights and depths, and living nobly, and being never wedded (“Oh, never, never!” she said to herself with a burning face and a shrinking heart); and some day meeting Corrèze, the wonder of the world, and looking at him without shame and saying, “I have done as you told me; I have never been burnt in the flame as you feared. Are you glad?”
It did not, as yet, seem hard to her to do so. The world was to her personified in the great vague horror of Serge Zouroff’s name, and it cost her no more to repulse it than it costs a child to flee from some painted monster that gapes at it from a wall.
This night, after Lady Stoat’s ineffectual efforts at conversion, Lady Dolly herself once more sought her daughter, and renewed the argument with more asperity and more callousness than she had previously shown.
Vere was still in her own chamber, trying to read, but, in truth, always thinking of the bidding of Corrèze, “Keep yourself unspotted from the world.”
Dreaming so, with her hands buried in the golden clustering hair, and her lids drooped over her eyes, she started at the voice of her mother; and, with pain and impatience, listened with unwilling ear to the string of reproaches, entreaties, and censure that had lately become as much the burden of her day as the morning-prayer at Bulmer had been, droned by the duchess’s dull voice to the sleepy household.
Vere raised herself and listened, with that dutifulness of the old fashion which contrasted so strangely in her, her mother thought, with her rebellion and self-willed character. But she grew very weary.
Lady Dolly, less delicate in her diplomacy than her friend had been, did not use euphuisms at all, nor attempt to take any high moral point. Broadly and unhesitatingly she painted all that Sergius Zouroff had it in his power to bestow, and the text of her endless sermon was, that to reject such gifts was wickedness.
At the close she grew passionate.
“You think of love,” she said. “Oh, it is of no use your saying you don’t; you do. All girls do. I did. I married your father. We were as much in love as any creatures in a poem. When I had lived a month in that wretched parsonage by the sea, I knew what a little fool I had been. I had had such wedding presents! — such presents! The queen had sent me a cachemire for poor papa’s sake; yet, down in that horrid place, we had to eat pork, and there was only a metal teapot! Oh, you smile! it is nothing to smile at Vere used to smile just as you do. He would have taken the cachemire to wrap an old woman up in, very probably; and he wouldn’t have known whether he ate a peach or a pig. I knew; and whenever they put that tea in the metal teapot, I knew the cost of young love. Respect your father’s memory? Stuff I am not saying anything against him, poor dear fellow; he was very good — in his way, excellent; but he had made a mistake, and I too. I told him so twenty times a day, and he only sighed and went out to his old women. I tell you this only to show you I know what I am talking about. Love and marriage are two totally different things; they ought never to be named together; they are cat and dog; one kills the other. Pray do not stare so; you make me nervous.”
“It is not wicked to love?” said Vere slowly.
“Wicked? no; what nonsense! It amuses one; it doesn’t last.”
“A great love must last, till death, and after it,” said the child, with solemn eyes.
“After it?” echoed Lady Dolly with a little laugh. “I’m afraid that would make a very naughty sort of place of Heaven. Don’t look so shocked, child. You know nothing about it. Believe me, dear, where two lovers go on year after year, it is only for Pont de Veyle’s reason to Madame de Deffand: “Nous sommes si mortellement ennuyes l’un de l’autre que nous ne pouvons plus nous quitter!”
Vere was silent. Her world of dreams was turned upside down, and shaken rudely.
“You have no heart, Vere; positively none,” said her mother bitterly, resuming all the old argument. “I can scarcely think you are my child. You see me wearing myself to a shadow for your sake, and yet you have no pity. What in heaven’s name can you want? You are only sixteen, and one of the first marriages in Europe opens to you. You ought to go on your knees in thankfulness, and yet you hesitate?”
“I do not hesitate at all,” said Vere quickly. “I refuse!”
She rose as she spoke, and looked older by ten years. There was a haughty resolve in her attitude that cowed her mother for an instant.
“I refuse,” she said again. “And, if you will not tell Monsieur Zouroff so yourself, I will tell him tomorrow. Listen, mother, I have written to Bulmer, and I will go back there. Grandmama will not refuse to take me in. I shall be a trouble and care to you no longer. I am not made for your world nor it for me. I will go. I have some talent, they have always said, and at least I have perseverance. I will find some way of maintaining myself. I want so little, and I know enough of music to teach it; and so at least I shall be free and no burden upon anyone.”
She paused, startled by her mother’s laughter; such laughter as she, in a later day, heard from Croizette when Croizette was acting her own deathbed on the stage of the Français.
Lady Dolly’s shrill, unnatural, ghastly laughter echoed through the room.
“Is that your scheme? To teach music? And Corrèze to teach you, I suppose? O la belle ideé! You little fool! you little idiot! how dare you? Because you are mad, do you think we are mad too? Go to Bulmer now? Never! I am your mother, and you shall do what I choose. What I choose is that you shall marry Zouroff.”
“I will not.”
“Will not? will not? I say you shall!”
“And I say that I will not.”
They confronted one another; the girl’s face pale, clear and cold in its fresh and perfect beauty, the woman’s grown haggard, fevered, and fierce in its artificial prettiness.
“I will not,” repeated Vere with her teeth closed. “And my dead father would say I was right; and I will tell this man to-morrow that I loathe him; and, since surely he must have some pride to be stung, he will ask for me no more then.”
“Vere! you kill me!” screamed her mother; and, in truth, she fainted, her pretty curly perruque twisting off her head, her face deathly pallid save for the unchanging bloom of cheek and mouth.
It was but a passing swoon, and her maid soon restored her to semi-consciousness and then bore her to her room.
“What a cold creature is that child,” thought Adrienne, of Vere.
“She sees miladi insensible, and stands there with never a tear, or a kiss, or a cry. What it is to have been brought up in England!”
Vere left alone, sat awhile lost in thought, leaning her head on her hands. Then she rang and bade them post the letter to Bulmer; the dark and drearsome, but safe and familiar home of her lost childhood.
The letter gone, she undressed and went to bed. It was midnight. She soon was asleep.
Innocent unhappiness soon finds this rest; it is the sinful sorrow of later years that stares, with eyes that will not close, into the hateful emptiness of night.
She slept deeply and dreamlessly, the moonbeams through the high window finding her out where she lay, her slender limbs, supple as willow wands, in calm repose, and her long lashes lying on her cheeks.
Suddenly she woke, startled and alarmed. A light fell on her eyes; a hand touched her; she was no longer alone.
She raised herself in her bed, and gazed with a dazzled sight and vague terror into the yellow rays of the lamp.
“Vere! It is I! it is I!” cried her mother with a sob in her voice. And Lady Dolly dropped on her knees beside the bed; her real hair dishevelled on her shoulders, her face without false bloom and haggard as the face of a woman of twice her own years.
“Vere, Vere! you can save me,” she muttered with her hands clasped tight on the girls. “Oh, my dear, I never thought to tell you; but, since you will hear no reason, what can I do? Vere, wake up — listen. I am a guilty, silly woman; guiltier, sillier, than you can dream. You are my child after all, and owe me some obedience; and you can save me. Vere, Vere! do not be cruel; do not misjudge me, but listen. You must marry Sergius Zouroff.”
It was dawn when Lady Dolly crept away from her daughters chamber; shivering, ashamed, contrite, in so far as humiliation and regret make up contrition; hiding her blanched face with the hood of her wrapper as though the faint, white rays of daybreak were spectators and witnesses against her.
Vere lay quite still, as she had fallen, upon her bed, her face upturned, her hands clenched, her shut lips blue as with great cold. She had promised what her mother had asked.
CHAPTER IX.
On the morrow it was known to all the guests of the house at which they were staying that the head of the Princes Zouroff was to marry the daughter of the Lady Dorothy Vanderdecken.
On the morrow Lady Dolly drove back to Félicité, with her daughter beside her.
She was victorious.
The sun was strong, and the east wind cold; she was glad they were so. The eyes of her daughter were heavy with dark circles beneath them, and her face was blanched to a deadly pallor, which changed to a cruel crimson flush as the turrets and belfries of the chateau of the Zouroffs came in sight above the woods of its park.
They had driven the eight miles from Le Caprice in unbroken silence.
“If she would only speak!” thought Lady Dolly; and yet she felt that she could not have borne it if her companion had spoken.
They drove round to a petit entré at the back of the house, and were met by no one but some bowing servants. She had begged in a little note that it might be so, making some pretty plea for Vere of maiden shyness. They were shown straight to their rooms. It was early; noonday. The chateau was quite still. At night the great ball was to be given to the English princes, but the household was too well trained to make any disturbance with their preparations. Down the steps of the great terrace there was stretched scarlet cloth, and all the face of the building was hung with globes and cressets of oil, to be lit at dark. These were the only outward signs that anything more brilliant than usual was about to take place.
“You will come to breakfast?” said Lady Dolly, pausing at the threshold of her room.
It was the first word she had said to Vere since the dawn, when they had parted, and her own voice sounded strange to her.