by Ouida
Paris, in the commencement of autumn was a desert, but she had a pretty apartment in the Avenue Josephine. The marriage was fixed to take place in November, and two months was not too much for all the preparations which she needed to make. Besides, Lady Dolly preferred that her daughter should see as few persons as possible. What was she afraid of? — she scarcely knew. She was vaguely afraid of everything. She was so used to breaking her words that a child’s promise seemed to her a thing as slight as a spiders gossamer shining in the dew.
It was safest, she fancied, for Vere to see no one, and to a member of the great world there is no solitude so complete as a city out of its season. So she shut Vere in her gilded, and silvered, and over-decorated, and over-filled, rooms in the Avenue Joséphine, and kept her there stifled and weary, like a woodland bird hung in a cage in a boudoir; and never let the girl take a breath of air save by her side in her victoria out in the Bois in the still, close evenings. Vere made no opposition to anything. When St. Agnes gave her young body and her fair soul up to torment, did she think of the shape of the executioners sword?
Lady Dolly was at this time much worried too about her own immediate affairs. Jura was gone to India on a hunting and shooting tour with two officers of his old regiment, and he had written very briefly to say so to her, not mentioning any period for his return. He meant to break it all off, thought Lady Dolly, with an irritated humiliation rankling in her. Two years before she would have been Didone infuriata; but time tempers everything, and there were always consolations. The young dandy who had won the Grand Prix was devoted and amusing; it could not be said that Jura had been either of late. She had got used to him, and she had not felt it necessary to be always en beauté for him, which was convenient. Besides there were heaps of things he had got into the way of doing for her, and he knew all her habits and tastes; losing him was like losing a careful and familiar servant. Still she was not inconsolable. He had grown boorish and stupid in the last few months; and, though he knew thousands of her secrets, he was a gentleman — they were safe with him, as safe as the letters she had written him.
But her vanity was wounded.
“Just because of that child’s great grey eyes!—” she thought angrily Classic Clytemnestra, when murdered by her son, makes a grander figure certainly, but she is not perhaps more deeply wounded than fashionable Faustina when eclipsed by her daughter.
“You look quite worn, poor Pussy!” said Lady Stoat tenderly, as she met her one day in Paris. “When you ought to be so pleased and so proud!”
Lady Stoat, who was very ingenious and very penetrating, left no means untried by which to fathom the reasons of the sudden change of Vere. Lady Stoat read characters too well not to know that neither caprice nor malleability were the cause of it.
“She has been coerced; but how?” she thought; and brought her microscope of delicate investigation and shrewd observation to bear upon the subject. But she could make nothing of it.
“I do what my mother wishes,” Vere answered her, and answered her nothing more.
“If you keep your secrets as well when you are married,” thought Lady Stoat, “you will be no little trouble to your husband, my dear.”
Aloud, of course she said only:
“So right, darling, so very right. Your dear little mother has had a great deal of worry in her life; it is only just that she should find full compensation in you. And I am quite sure you will be happy, Vere. You are so clever and serious; you will have a salon, I dare say, and get all the politicians about you. That will suit you better than frivolity, and give you an aim in society. Without an aim, love, society is sadly like playing cards for counters. One wants a lover to meet, a daughter to chaperone, a cause to advance, a something beside the mere pleasure of showing oneself. You will never have the lover I am sure, and you cannot have the daughter just yet; so, if I were you, I would take the cause — it does not matter what cause in the least — say England against Russia or Russia against England; but throw yourself into it, and it will amuse you, and it will be a safeguard to you from the dangers that beset every beautiful young wife in the world. It is a melancholy thing to confess, and a humiliating one, but all human beings are so made that they never can go on playing only for counters!”
And Lady Stoat, smiling her sweetest, went away from Vere with more respect than she had ever felt before for feather-headed little Pussy, since Pussy had been able to do a clever thing unaided, and had a secret that her friend did not know “Foolish Pussy!” thought her friend Adine. “Oh, foolish Pussy, to have a secret from me. And it takes such a wise head and such a long head to have a secret! It is as dangerous as a packet of dynamite to most persons.”
Aloud to Lady Dolly she said only:
“So glad, dear love, oh so glad! I was quite sure with a little reflection the dear child would see the wisdom of the step we wished her to take. It is such an anxiety off your mind; a girl with you in the season would have harassed you terribly. Really I do not know which is the more wearing: an heiress that one is afraid every moment will be got at by some spendthrift, or a dear little penniless creature that one is afraid will never marry at all; and, with Vere’s peculiar manners and notions, it might have been very difficult. Happily, Zouroff has only admired her lovely classic head, and has never troubled himself about what is inside it. I think she will be an astonishment to him — rather. But, to be sure, after six months in the world, she will change as they all do.”
“Vere will never change,” said Lady Dolly irritably, and with a confused guilty little glance at her friend. “Vere will always be half an angel and half an imbecile as long as ever she lives.”
“Imbeciles are popular people,” said Lady Stoat with a smile. “As for angels, no one cares for them much about modern houses, except in terra cotta.”
“It is not you who should say so,” returned Lady Dolly tenderly.
“Oh, my dear!” answered her friend with a modest sigh of deprecation. “I have no pretensions — I am only a poor, weak, and very imperfect creature. But one thing I may really say of myself, and that is, that I honestly love young girls and do my best for them; and I think not a few have owed their life’s happiness to me. May your Vere be of the number!”
“I don’t think she will ever be happy,” said Lady Dolly impatiently, with a little confused look of guilt. “She doesn’t care a bit about dress.”
“That is a terrible lacune certainly,” assented Lady Stoat with a smile. “Perhaps, instead, she will take to politics — those serious girls often do — or perhaps she will care about her children.”
Lady Dolly gave a little shudder. What was her daughter but a child? It seemed only the other day that the little fair baby had tumbled about among the daisies on the vicarage lawn, and poor dead Vere in his mellow gentle voice had recited, as he looked at her, the glorious lines to his child of Coleridge. How wretched she had been then! — how impatient of the straitened means, the narrow purse, the country home, the calm religious life! How wretched she would have been now could she have gone back to it! Yet, with the contradiction of her sex and character, Lady Dolly for a moment wished with all her soul that she had never left that narrow home, and that the child were now among the daisies.
One day, when they were driving down the Avenue Marigny, her mother pointed out to Vere a row of lofty windows au premier, with their shutters shut, but with gorgeous autumn flowers hanging over their gilded balconies; the liveried suisse was yawning in the doorway.
“That is where your Faust-Romeo lives,” said Lady Dolly, who could never bring herself to remember the proverb, let sleeping dogs lie. “It is full of all kinds of beautiful things, and queer ancient things too; he is a connoisseur in his way, and everybody gives him such wonderful presents. He is making terrible scandal just now with the young Grand-Duchess. Only to think of what you risked that day boating with him makes one shudder! You might have been compromised for life!”
Veres proud mouth grew very scornful, but she
made no reply.
Her mother looked at her and saw the scorn.
“Oh, you don’t believe me?” she said irritably; “ask anybody! an hour or two alone with a man like that ruins a girl’s name for ever. Of course it was morning, and open air, but still Corrèze is one of those persons a woman can’t be seen with, even!”
Vere turned her head and looked back at the bright balconies with their hanging flowers; then she said with her teeth shut and her lips turning white:
“I do not speak to you of Prince Zouroff’s character. Will you be so good as not to speak to me of that of M. de Corrèze.”
Her mother was startled and subdued. She wished she had not woke the sleeping dog.
“If she be like that at sixteen what will she be at six-and-twenty?” she thought. “She puts them in opposition already!”
Nevertheless, she never again felt safe, and whenever she drove along the Avenue Marigny she looked up at the house with the gilded balconies and hanging flowers to be sure that it gave no sign of life.
It did not occur to her that whatever Vere might be at six-and-twenty would be the result of her own teaching, actions, and example. Lady Dolly had reasoned with herself that she had done right after all; she had secured a magnificent position for her daughter, was it not the first duty of a mother?
If Vere could not be content with that position, and all its compensations, if she offended heaven and the world by any obstinate passions or imprudent guilt, if she, in a word, with virtue made so easy and so gilded, should not after all be virtuous, it would be the fault of Bulmer, the fault of society, the fault of Zouroff, the fault of Corrèze, or of some other man, perhaps, — never the fault of her mother.
When gardeners plant and graft, they know very well what will be the issue of their work; they do not expect the rose from a bulb of garlic, or look for the fragrant olive from a slip of briar; but the cultures of human nature are less wise, and they sow poison, yet rave in reproaches when it breeds and brings forth its like. “The rosebud garden of girls” is a favourite theme for poets, and the maiden, in her likeness to a half-opened blossom, is as near purity and sweetness as a human creature can be, yet what does the world do with its opening buds? — it thrusts them in the forcing house amidst the ordure, and then, if they perish prematurely, never blames itself. The streets absorb the girls of the poor; society absorbs the daughters of the rich; and not seldom one form of prostitution, like the other, keeps its captives “bound in the dungeon of their own corruption.”
CHAPTER X.
It was snowing in Vienna. Snow lay heavy on all the plains and roads around, and the Danube was freezing fast.
“It will be barely colder in Moscow,” said Corrèze, with a shiver, as he threw his furs about him and left the opera-house amidst the frantic cheers and adoring outcries of the crowd without, after his last appearance in Romeo e Giulietta. In the bitter glittering frosty night a rain of hothouse flowers fell about him; he hated to see them fall; but his worshippers did not know that, and would not have heeded it if they had. Roses and violets, hyacinth and white lilac, dropped at his feet, lined his path and carpeted his carriage as if it were April in the south, instead of November in Austria.
His hand had just been pressed by an emperors, a ring of brilliants beyond price had just been slid on his finger by an empress; the haughtiest aristocracy of the world had caressed him and flattered him and courted him; he was at the supreme height of fame, and influence, and fashion, and genius; yet, as he felt the roses and the lilies fall about him he said restlessly to himself:
“When I am old and nobody heeds me, I shall look back to this night, and such nights as this, as to a lost heaven; why, in heaven’s name, cannot I enjoy it now?”
But enjoyment is not to be gained by reflecting that to enjoy is our duty, and neither the diamonds nor the roses did he care for, nor did he care for the cheers of the multitude that stood out under the chill brilliant skies for the chance of seeing him pass down the streets. It is a rare and splendid royalty, too, that of a great singer; but he did not care for its crowns. The roses made him think of a little hedge-rose gathered by a sweetbriar bush on a cliff by a grey quiet sea.
With such odd caprices does Fate often smite genius.
He drove to the supper-table of a very great lady, beautiful as the morning; and he was the idol of the festivity which was in his honour; and the sweet eyes of its mistress told him that no audacity on his part would be deemed presumption — yet it all left him careless and almost cold. She had learned Juliet’s part by heart, but he had forgotten Romeo’s — had left it behind him in the opera-house with his old Venetian velvets and lace.
From that great lady’s, whom he left alone with a chill heart, empty and aching, he went with his comrades to the ball of the Elysium down in the subterranean vaults of the city, where again and again in many winters he had found contagion in the elastic mirth and the buoyant spirit of the clean-limbed, bright-eyed children of the populace, dancing and whirling and leaping far down under the streets to the Styrian music. But it did not amuse him this night; nor did the dancers tempt him; the whirl and the glow and the noise and the mirth seemed to him tedious and stupid.
“Decidedly that opera tires me,” he said to himself, and thought that his weariness came from slaying Tybalt and himself on the boards of the great theatre. He told his friends and adorers with petulance to let him be still, he wanted to sleep, and the dawn was very cold. He went home to his gorgeous rooms in a gorgeous hôtel, and lit his cigar and felt tired. The chambers were strewn with bouquets, wreaths, presents, notes; and amidst the litter was a great gold vase, a fresh gift from the emperor, with its two rilievi, telling the two stories of Orpheus and of Amphion.
But Corrèze did not look twice at it. He looked instead at a French journal, which he had thrown on his chair when his servant had roused him at seven that evening, saying that it was the hour to drive to the theatre. He had crushed the paper in his hand then and thrown it down; he took it up now, and looked again in a corner of it in which there was announced the approaching marriage of Prince Zouroff.
“To give her to that brute!” he murmured as he read it over once more. “Mothers were better and kinder in the days of Moloch!”
Then he crushed the journal up again, and flung it into the wood-fire burning in the gilded tower of the stove.
It was not slaying Tybalt that had tired him that night.
“What is the child to me!” he said to himself as he threw himself on his bed. “She never could have been anything, and yet—”
Yet the scent of the hothouse bouquets and the forced flowers seemed sickly to him; he remembered the smell of the little rose plucked from the sweetbriar hedge on the cliff above the sea.
The following noon he left Vienna for Moscow, where he had an engagement for twenty nights previous to his engagement at St. Petersburg for the first weeks of the Russian New Year.
From Moscow he wrote to Lady Dolly. When that letter reached Lady Dolly it made her cry; it gave her a crise des nerfs. When she read what he wrote she turned pale and shuddered a little; but she burnt what he wrote; that was all.
She shivered a little whenever she thought of the letter for days and weeks afterwards; but it changed her purpose in no way, and she never for one moment thought of acting upon it.
“I shall not answer him,” she said to herself. “He will think I have never had it, and I shall send him a faire part like anybody else. He will say nothing when the marriage is over. Absurd as it is, Corrèze is a gentleman; I suppose that comes from his living so much amongst us.”
Amongst the many gifts that were sent to swell the magnificence of the Zouroff bridal, there was one that came anonymously, and of which none knew the donor. It gave rise to many conjectures and much comment, for there was not even the name of the jeweller that had made it. It was an opal necklace of exquisite workmanship and great value, and, as its medallion, there hung a single rose diamond cut as a star; beneath
the star was a moth of sapphire and pearls, and beneath the moth was a flame of rubies. They were so hung that the moth now touched the star, now sank to the flame. It needed no word with it for Vere to know whence it came.
But she kept silence.
“A strange jewel,” said Prince Zouroff, and his face grew dark: he thought some meaning or some memory came with it.
It was the only gift amidst them all that felt the kisses and tears of Vere.
“I must sink to the flame!” she thought, “and he will never know that the fault is not mine; he will never know that I have not forgotten the star!”
But she only wept in secret.
All her life henceforth was to be one of silence and repression. They are the sepolte vive in which society immures its martyrs.
Some grow to like their prison walls, and to prefer them to light and freedom: others loathe them in anguish till death come.
The gift of that strange medallion annoyed Zouroff, because it perplexed him. He never spoke to Vere concerning it, for he believed that no woman ever told the truth; but he tried to discover the donor by means of his many servants and agents. He failed, not because Corrèze had taken any especial means to ensure secresy, but from simple accident.
Corrèze had bought the stones himself of a Persian merchant many years before, had drawn the design himself, and had given it to a young worker in gems of Galicia whom he had once befriended at the fair of Novgorod; and the work was only complete in all its beauty and sent to him when the Galician died of that terrible form of typhus which is like a plague in Russia. Therefore Zouroff’s inquiries in Paris were all futile, and he gradually ceased to think about the jewel.
Another thing came to her at that time that hurt her, as the knife hurt Iphigenia. It was when the crabbed clear handwriting she knew so well brought her from Bulmer Chase a bitter letter.