by Ouida
“You are your mothers child, I see,” wrote the harsh old woman, who had yet loved her so tenderly. “You are foolish, and fickle, and vain, and won over to the world, like her. You have nothing of my dead boy in you, or you would not sell yourself to the first rich man that asks. Do not write to me; do not expect to hear from me; you are for me as if you had never lived, and if, in your miserable marriage, you ever come to lose name and fame — as you may do, for loveless marriages are an affront to heaven, and mostly end in further sin — remember that you ask nothing at my hands. At your cry I was ready to open my hand to you and my heart, but I will never do so now, let you want it as you may. I pity you, and I despise you; for when you give yourself to a man whom you cannot honour or love, you are no better than the shameless women that a few weeks ago I would no more have named to you than I would have struck you a buffet on your cheek.”
Vere read the letter with the hot brazen glow of the Paris sun streaming through the rose silk of the blinds upon her, and each word stood out before her as if it were on fire, and her cheek grew scarlet as if a blow were struck on it.
“She is right! Oh, how right!” she thought, in a sort of agony. “And I cannot tell her the truth! I must never tell her the truth!”
Sin and shame, and all the horror of base passions had been things as unintelligible to her, as unknown, as the vile, miserable, frail women that a few roods off her in this city were raving and yelling in the wards of Ste. Pélagie. And now, all in a moment, they seemed to have entered her life, to swarm about her, to become part and parcel of her — and from no fault of hers.
“O mother, spare me! Let me take back my word!” she cried, unconsciously, as she started to her feet with a stab of awful pain in her heart that frightened her; it felt like death.
But in the rose-bright room all around her was silence.
Her grandmother’s letter lay at her feet, and a ray of the sun shone on the words that compared her to the hapless creatures whose very shame she even yet did not comprehend.
The door unclosed and Lady Dolly came in; very voluble, indifferent to suffering or humiliation, not believing, indeed, that she ever caused either.
Living with her daughter, and finding that no reproach or recrimination escaped Vere against her, Lady Dolly had begun to grow herself again. She was at times very nervous with Vere, and never, if she could help it, met her eyes, but she was successful, she was contented, she was triumphant, and the sense of shame that haunted her was thrust far into the background. All the vulgar triumphs of the alliance were sweet to her, and she did her best to forget its heavy cost. Women of her calibre soon forget; the only effort they have ever to make is, on the contrary, to remember. Lady Dolly had earnestly tried to forget, and had almost thoroughly succeeded.
She came now into the room, a pretty pearl grey figure; fresh from lengthened and close council with famous tailors.
“Vera, my sweet Vera, your sables are come; such sables! Nobody’s except the grand-duchesses’ will equal them. And he has sent bags of turquoises with them, literally sacks, as if they were oats or green peas! You will have all your toilette things set with them, and your ink-stands, and all that, won’t you? And they are very pretty, you know, set flat, very thick, in broad bands; very broad bands for the waist and the throat; but myself, I prefer — Who’s been writing to you? Oh, the old woman from Bulmer. I suppose she is very angry, and writes a great deal of nonsense. She was always horrid. The only thing she gave me when I married poor Vere was a black Bible. I wonder what she will send to you? Another black Bible, perhaps. I believe she gets Bibles cheap because she subscribes to the men that go out to read Leviticus and Deuteronomy to the negro babies!”
Vere bent and raised the letter in silence. The burning colour had gone from her cheeks; she tore the letter up into many small pieces and let them float out into the golden dust of the sunlight of Paris. Her word had been given, and she was its slave.
She looked at her mother, whom she had never called mother since that last night at the chateau of Abbaye aux Bois.
“Will you, if you please, spare me all those details?” she said simply. “Arrange everything as you like best, it will satisfy me. But let me hear nothing about it. That is all.”
“You strange, dear creature! Any other girl,” began Lady Dolly, with a smile that was distorted, and eyes that looked away.
“I am not as other girls are. I hope there is no other girl in all the world like me.”
Her mother made no answer.
Through the stillness of the chambers there came the sounds of Paris, the vague, confused, loud murmur of traffic and music, and pleasure and pain; the sounds of the world, the world to which Vere was sold.
The words of the old recluse of Bulmer were very severe, but they were very true, and it was because of their truth that they seared the delicate nerves of the girl like a hot iron. She did not well know what shame was, but she felt that her own marriage was shame; and as she rolled home from the Bois de Boulogne that night through the bright streets of Paris, past the Hôtel Zouroff that was to be her prison-house, she looked at the girls of the populace who were hurrying homeward from their workshops — flower-makers, glove-makers, clear-starchers, teachers of children, workers in factories — and she envied them, and followed them in fancy to their humble homes, and thought to herself: “How happy I would be to work, if only I had a mother that loved me, a mother that was honest and good!”
The very touch of her mothers hand, the very sound of her laugh, and sight of her smile, hurt her; she had known nothing about the follies and vices of the world, until suddenly, in one moment, she had seen them all incarnated in her mother, whose pretty graces and gaieties became terrible to her for ever, as the pink and white loveliness of a woman becomes to the eyes that have seen in its veiled breast a cancer.
Vere had seen the moral cancer. And she could not forget it, never could she forget it.
“When she was once beloved by my father — !” she thought; and she let her Bible lie unopened, lest, turning its leaves, she should see the old divine imprecations, the old bitter laws that were in it against such women as this woman, her mother, was.
One day in November her betrothed husband arrived from Russia. The magnificence of his gifts to her was the theme of Paris. The girl was passive and silent always.
When he kissed her hands only she trembled from head to foot.
“Are you afraid of me?” he murmured.
“No; I am not afraid.”
She could not tell him that she felt disgust — disgust so great, so terrible, that she could have sprung from the balcony and dashed herself to death upon the stones.
“Cannot you say that you like me ever so little now?” he persisted, thinking that all his generosity might have borne some fruit.
“No — I cannot.”
He laughed grimly and bitterly.
“And yet I dare take you, even as you are, you beautiful cold child!”
“I cannot tell you a falsehood.”
“Will you never tell me one?”
“No; never.”
“I do not believe you; every woman lies.”
Vere did not answer in words, but her eyes shone for a moment with a scorn so noble that Sergius Zouroff bent his head before her.
“I beg your pardon,” he said; “I think you will not lie. But then, you are not a maiden only; you are a young saint.”
Vere stood aloof from him. The sunshine shone on her fair head and the long, straight folds of her white dress; her hands were clasped in front of her, and the sadness in her face gave it greater gravity and beauty.
“I am a beast to hold her to her word!” he thought; but the beast in him was stronger than aught else and conquered him, and made him ruthless to her.
She was looking away from him into the blue sky. She was thinking of the words, “keep yourself unspotted from the world.” She was thinking that she would be always true to this man whom she loathed; always true;
that was his right.
“And perhaps God will let me die soon,” she thought, with her childish fancy that God was near and Death an angel.
Serge Zouroff looked at her, hesitated, bowed low, and left the room.
“I am not fit for her; no fitter than the sewer of the street for a pearl!” he thought, and he felt ashamed.
Yet he went to his usual companions and spent the night in drink and play, and saw the sun rise with hot red eyes; he could not change because she was a saint.
Only a generation or two back his forefathers had bought beautiful Persian women by heaping up the scales of barter with strings of pearls and sequins, and had borne off Circassian slaves in forays with simple payment of a lance left in the lifeless breasts of the men who had owned them: his wooing was of the same rude sort. Only being a man of the world, and his ravishing being legalised by society, he went to the great shops of Paris for his gems, and employed great notaries to write down the terms of barter.
The shrinking coldness, the undisguised aversion of his betrothed only whetted his passion to quicker ardour, as the shrieks of the Circassian captives, or the quivering limbs of the Persian slaves, had done that of his forefathers in Ukraine; and besides, after all, he thought, she had chosen to give herself, hating him, for sake of what he was and of all he could give. After all, her mother could not have driven her so far unless ambition had made her in a manner malleable.
Zouroff, in whose mind all women were alike, had almost been brought to believe in the honesty and steadfastness of the girl to whom he had given Loris, and he was at times disposed to be bitterly enraged against her because she had fallen in his sight by her abrupt submission; she seemed at heart no better than the rest. She abhorred him; yet she accepted him. No mere obedience could account for that acceptance without some weakness or some cupidity of nature. It hardened him against her; it spoilt her lovely, pure childhood in his eyes; it made her shudder from him seem half hypocrisy. After all, he said to himself, where was she so very much higher than Casse-une-Croûte? It was only the price that was altered.
When she came to know what Casse-une-Croûte was, she said the same thing to herself.
“Do you believe in wicked people, miladi?” he said the next evening to Lady Dolly, as they sat together in a box at the Bouffes.
“Wicked people? Oh dear no — at least — yes,” said Lady Dolly vaguely. “Yes, I suppose I do. I am afraid one must. One sees dreadful things in the papers; in society everybody is very much like everybody else — no?”
Zouroff laughed; the little, short, hard laugh that was characteristic of him.
“I think one need not go to the papers. I think you and I are both doing evil enough to satisfy the devil — if a devil there be. But, if you do not mind it, I need not.”
Lady Dolly was startled, then smiled.
“What droll things you say! And do not talk so of the — . It doesn’t sound well. It’s an old-fashioned belief, I know, and not probable they say now, but still — one never can tell—”
And Lady Dolly, quite satisfied with herself, laughed her last laugh at the fun of the Belle Hélène, and had her cloak folded round her, and went out on the arm of her future son-in-law Such few great ladies as were already in Paris, passing through from the channel coast to the Riviera, or from one chateau to another, all envied her, she knew; and if anybody had ever said anything — that was not quite nice — nobody could say anything now when in another fortnight her daughter would be Princess Zouroff.
“Really, I never fancied at all I was clever, but I begin to think that I am,” she said in her self-complacency to herself.
The idea that she could be wicked seemed quite preposterous to her when she thought it over. “Harmless little me!” she said to herself. True, she had felt wicked when she had met her daughter’s eye, but that was nonsense; the qualm had always gone away when she had taken her champagne at dinner or her ether in her bedroom.
A fortnight later the marriage of the head of the house of Zouroff was solemnised at the chapel of the English Embassy and the Russian church in Paris.
Nothing was forgotten that could add to the splendour and pomp of the long ceremonies and sacraments; all that was greatest in the great world was assembled in honour of the event. The gifts were magnificent, and the extravagance unbridled. The story of the corbeille read like a milliner’s dream of heaven; the jewels given by the bridegroom were estimated at a money value of millions of roubles, and with them were given the title-deeds of a French estate called Félicité, a free gift of love above and outside all the superb donations contained in the settlements. All these things and many more were set forth at length in all the journals of society, and the marriage was one of the great events of the closing year. The only details that the papers did not chronicle were that when the mother, with her tender eyes moist with tears, kissed her daughter, the daughter put her aside without an answering caress, and that when the last words of the sacrament were spoken, she, who had now become the Princess Zouroff, fell forward on the altar in a dead swoon, from which for some time she could not be awakened.
“So they have thrown an English maiden to our Tartar minotaur! Oh, what a chaste people they are, those English,” said a Russian Colonel of the Guard to Corrèze, as their sledge flew over the snow on the Newski Prospect.
Corrèze gave a shudder of disgust; he said nothing.
Critics in music at the opera-house that night declared then, and long after, that for the first time in all his career he was guilty of more than one artistic error as he sang in the great part of John of Leyden.
When the opera was over, and he sat at a supper, in a room filled with hothouse flowers and lovely ladies, while the breath froze on the beards of the sentinels on guard in the white still night without, Corrèze heard little of the laughter, saw little of the beauty round him. He was thinking all the while:
“The heaviest sorrow of my life will always be, not to have saved that child from her mother.”
CHAPTER XI.
Between the Gulf of Villafranca and that of Eza there was a white shining sunlit house, with gardens that were in the dreariest month of the year rich and red with roses, golden with orange fruit, and made stately by palms of long growth, through whose stems the blue sea shone. To these gardens there was a long terrace of white marble stretching along the edge of the cliff, with the waves beating far down below; to the terrace there were marble seats and marble steps, and copies of the Loves and Fauns of the Vatican and of the Capitol, with the glow of geraniums flamelike about their feet.
Up and down the length of this stately place a woman moved with a step that was slow and weary, and yet very restless; the step of a thing that is chained. The woman was very young and very pale; her skirts of olive velvet swept the white stone; her fair hair was coiled loosely with a golden arrow run through it; round her throat there were strings of pearls, the jewels of morning. All women envied her the riches of which those pearls were emblem. She was Vera, Princess Zouroff.
Vera always, now.
She moved up and down, up and down, fatiguing herself, and unconscious of fatigue; the sunny world was quiet about her; the greyhound paced beside her, keeping step with hers. She was alone, and there was no one to look upon her face and see its pain, its weariness, its disgust.
Only a week ago, she thought; only a week since she had fallen in a swoon at the altar of the Russian church; only a week since she had been the girl Vere Herbert. Only a week! — and it seemed to her that thousands of years had come and gone, parting her by ages from that old sweet season of ignorance, of innocence, of peace, of youth.
She was only sixteen still, but she was no more young. Her girlhood had been killed in her as a spring blossom is crushed by a rough hot hand that, meaning to caress it, kills it.
A great disgust filled her, and seemed to suffocate her with its loathing and its shame. Everything else in her seemed dead, except that one bitter sense of intolerable revulsion. All the r
evolted pride in her was like a living thing buried under a weight of sand, and speechless, but aghast and burning.
“How could she? how could she?” she thought every hour of the day; and the crime of her mother against her seemed the vilest the earth could hold.
She herself had not known what she had done when she had consented to give herself in marriage, but her mother had known.
She did not reason now. She only felt.
An unutterable depression and repugnance weighed on her always; she felt ashamed of the sun when it rose, of her own eyes when they looked at her from the mirror. To herself she seemed fallen so low, sunk to such deep degradation, that the basest of creatures would have had full right to strike her cheek, and spit in her face, and call her sister.
Poets in all time have poured out their pity on the woman who wakes to a loveless dishonour: what can the few words of a priest, or the envy of a world, do to lighten that shame to sacrificed innocence? — nothing.
Her life had changed as suddenly as a flower changes when the hot sirocco blows over it, and fills it with sand instead of dew. Nothing could help her. Nothing could undo what had been done. Nothing could make her ever more the clear-eyed, fair-souled child that had not even known the meaning of any shame.
“God himself could not help me!” she thought with a bitterness of resignation that was more hopeless than that of the martyrs of old; and she paced up and down the marble road of the terrace, wondering how long her life would last like this.
All the magnificence that surrounded her was hateful; all the gifts that were heaped on her were like insult; all the congratulations that were poured out on her were like the mockeries of apes, like the crackling of dead leaves. In her own sight, and without sin of her own, she had become vile.
And it was only a week ago!
Society would have laughed.
Society had set its seal of approval upon this union, and upon all such unions, and so deemed them sanctified. Year after year, one on another, the pretty, rosy, golden-curled daughters of fair mothers were carefully tended and cultured and reared up to grace the proud races from which they sprang, and were brought out into the great world in their first bloom like half-opened roses, with no other end or aim set before them as the one ambition of their lives than to make such a marriage as this. Whosoever achieved such was blessed.