Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  Pollution? Prostitution? Society would have closed its ears to such words, knowing nothing of such things, not choosing to know anything.

  Shame? What shame could there be when he was her husband? Strange fanciful exaggeration! — society would have stared and smiled.

  The grim old woman who studied her Bible on the iron-bound Northumbrian shores; the frivolous, dreamy, fantastic singer, who had played the part of Romeo till all life seemed to him a rose-garden, moonlit and made for serenades; these two might perhaps think with her, and understand this intense revolt, this passionate repugnance, this ceaseless sense of unendurable, indelible reproach. But those were all. Society would have given her no sympathy. Society would have simpered and sneered. To marry well; that was the first duty of a woman.

  She had fulfilled it; she had been fortunate; how could she fail to be content?

  A heavy step trod the marble terrace, and a heavy shadow fell across the sunlight; her husband approached her.

  “You are out without any shade; you will spoil your skin,” he said, as his eyes fell gloomily on her, for he noticed the shudder that passed over her as he drew near.

  She moved without speaking, where no sun fell, where the armless Cupid of the Vatican, copied in marble, stood amongst the rose of a hundred leaves.

  “How pale you are. That gown is too heavy for you. Do you like this place?”

  She said the word with an unconscious sound in it, that had the wonder of despair; despair which asked what was there left in all the world to like or love?

  “Do you like it, I say,” he repeated. “Most women rave about it. You seem as if it were a prison-house. Will you be always like that?”

  “The place is beautiful,” she said in a low tone. “Have I complained?”

  “No; you never complain. That is what annoys me. If you ever fretted like other women — but you are as mute as that marble armless thing. Sometimes you make me afraid — afraid — that I shall forget myself, and strike you.”

  She was silent.

  “Would that you did strike sooner than embrace me!” she thought; and he read the unuttered thought in her eyes.

  “I do love you,” he said sullenly, with some emotion. “You must know that; I have left no means untried to show it you.”

  “You have been very generous, monsieur!”

  “Monsieur! always monsieur! — it is ridiculous. I am your husband, and you must give me some tenderer word than that. After all, why cannot you be happy? You have all you want or wish for, and if you have a wish still unfulfilled, be it the maddest or most impossible, it shall be gratified if gold can do it, for I love you — you frozen child!” He bent his lips to hers; she shuddered, and was still.

  He kept his hand about her throat, and gathered one of the roses of a hundred leaves, and set it against the pearls and her white skin; then he flung it away into the sea roughly.

  “Roses do not become you; you are not a belle jardiniere; you are a statue. This place is dull, one tires of it; we will go to Russia.”

  “As you please.”

  “As I please! Will you say nothing else all your life? There is no pleasure in doing what one pleases unless there is some opposition to the doing it. If you would say you hated snow and ice, now, I would swear to you that snow and ice were paradise beside these sickly palms and tawdry flowers. Is there nothing you like? Who sent you that strange necklace of the moth?”

  “I do not know.”

  “But you imagine?”

  She was silent.

  “What is the meaning of it?”

  “I think the meaning is that one may rise to great ends, or sink to base ones.”

  “Has it no love-token, then; no message?”

  “No.”

  The red colour rose over her pale face, but she looked at him with unflinching gaze. He was but half satisfied.

  “And do you mean to rise or sink?” he said, in a tone of banter. “Pray tell me.”

  “I have sunk.”

  The words stung him, and his pride, which was arrogant and vain, smarted under them.

  “By God!” he said with his short hard laugh. “Did it never occur to you, my beautiful Vera, that you would do wiser not to insult me if you want to enjoy your life? I am your master, and I can be a bad master.”

  She looked at him without flinching, very coldly, very wearily.

  “Why will you ask me questions? The truth displeases you, and I will not tell you other than the truth. I meant no insult — unless it were to insult myself.”

  He was silent. He walked to and fro awhile, pulling the roses from their stems and flinging them into the gulf below. Then he spoke abruptly, changing the subject.

  “We will go to Russia. You shall see a ball in the Salle des Palmiers. The world is best. Solitude is sweet for lovers, but not when one of them is a statue — or an angel. Besides, that sort of thing never lasts a week. The world is best. You would make me hate you — or adore you — if we stayed on alone, and I wish to do neither. If you were not my wife it might be worth while; but as it is—”

  He threw another rose into the sea, as if in a metaphor of indifference.

  “Come to breakfast,” he said carelessly. “We will leave for Russia to-night.”

  As they passed down the terrace and entered the house, she moved wearily beside him with her face averted and her lips very pale.

  The Salle des Palmiers had no charm for her. She was thinking of the nightingale that was then singing in the Russian snows.

  If she saw Corrèze what could she say? The truth she could not tell him, and he must be left to think the moth had dropped into the earthly fires of venal ambitions and of base desires.

  “Could you not leave me here?” she said wistfully and a little timidly as she sat at the breakfast-table.

  He answered with his curt and caustic laugh.

  “I thank you for the compliment! No, my dear, one does not go through all the weariness and folly of marriage ceremonies to leave the loveliness one has purchased so hardly in a week! Have patience! I shall be tired of you soon, maybe. But not until you have shown your diamonds at an Imperial ball. Do not get too pale. The court will rally me upon my tyranny. You are too pale. A touch of your mother’s rouge will be advisable unless you get some colour of your own.”

  Vere was silent.

  Her throat seemed to contract and choke her. She set her glass down untouched.

  This was her master! — this man who would tire of her soon, and bade her rouge whilst she was yet sixteen years old!

  Yet his tyranny was less horrible to her than his tenderness.

  That night they left for Russia.

  A few days later the gossip of St. Petersburg, in court and café, talked only of two things — the approaching arrival of the new beauty, Princess Zouroff, with the opening of the long closed Zouroff Palace on the Newski Prospect; and of the immense penalty paid in forfeit by the great tenor, Corrèze, to escape the last twenty nights of his engagement in that city.

  “I had better forfeit half my engagement than lose my voice altogether,” said Corrèze impatiently, in explanation. “The thousands of francs I can soon make again; but if the mechanical nightingale in my throat give way — I must go and break stones for my bread. No! in this atmosphere I can breathe no longer. I pay — and I go to the south.”

  He paid and went; and St. Petersburg was half consoled for his departure by the entry on the following day of the Prince Zouroff, and of her whom all the world called now, and would call henceforward, Princess Vera.

  END OF VOLUME I

  VOLUME II.

  CHAPTER I.

  Again in the month of November, exactly one year after her marriage, a tall slender figure clothed in white, with white furs, moved to and fro very wearily under the palms of the Villa Nelaguine on the Gulf of Villafranca, and her sister-in-law, looking wistfully at her, thought:

  “I hope he is not cruel — I hope not. Perhaps it is only the death of the child that
has saddened her.”

  Vere read her thoughts and looked her in the eyes.

  “I am glad that the child died,” she said simply.

  The Princess Nelaguine shuddered a little.

  “Oh, my dear,” she murmured, “that cannot be. Do not say that; women find solace in their children when they are unhappy in all else. You have a tender fond heart, you would have—”

  “I think my heart is a stone,” said the girl in a low voice; then she added: “In the poem of ‘Aurora Leigh’ the woman loves the child that is born of her ruin; I am not like that. Perhaps I am wicked; can you understand?”

  “Yes, yes; I understand,” said the Princess Nelaguine hurriedly, and, though she was accounted in her generation a false and heartless little woman of the world, her eyes became dim and her hands pressed Veres with a genuine pity. Long, long years before Nadine Zouroff had herself been given to a loveless marriage, when all her life seemed to her to be lying dead in a soldier’s unmarked grave in the mountains of the Caucasus.

  “That feeling will change, though, be assured,” she said soothingly. “When we are very young all our sorrow is despair; but it does not kill us, and we live to be consoled. Once I felt like you — yes — but now I have many interests, many ties, many occupations, and my sons and daughters are dear to me, though they were not his; so will be yours, to you, in time.”

  Vere shuddered.

  “People are different,” she said simply; “to me it will always be the same.”

  She pulled a cluster of white roses, and ruffled them in her hands, and threw them down, almost cruelly.

  “Will those roses bloom again?” she said. “What I did to them your brother has done to me. I cannot be altered now. Forget that I have said anything; I will not again.”

  One year had gone by since Vere had been given, with the blessing of her mother and the benison of society, to the Minotaur of a loveless marriage. To herself she seemed so utterly changed that nothing of her old self was left in her, body or soul. To the world she only seemed to have grown lovelier, as was natural with maturer womanhood, and to have become a great lady in lieu of a graceful child.

  She was little more than seventeen now, but, herself, she felt as if centuries had rolled over her head.

  After her winter at the Imperial Court, she had been so changed that she would at times wonder if she had ever been the glad and thoughtful child who had watched the North Sea break itself in foam in the red twilight of Northumbrian dawns.

  She had a horror of herself.

  She had a horror of the world.

  But from the world and from herself there was now no escape.

  She was the Princess Zouroff.

  An immense disgust possessed her, and pervaded all her life; falling on her as the thick grey fog falls on a sunny landscape — heavy, dull, and nauseous.

  The loveliest and youngest beauty in the Salle des Palmiers, with the stars of her diamonds shining on her like the planets of a summer night, she was the saddest of all earthly creatures.

  The girl who had gone to bed with the sun and risen with it; who had spent her tranquil days in study and open-air exercise; who had thought it pleasure enough to find the first primrose, and triumph enough to write the three letters at the foot of a hard problem; who had gone by her grandmothers side to the old dusky church, where noble and simple had knelt together for a thousand years, and who had known no more of the evil and lasciviousness of the world at large than the white ox-eye opening under the oak glades; the girl who had been Vere Herbert on those dark chill Northumbrian shores was now the Princess Vera, and was for ever in the glare, the unrest, the fever, and the splendour, of a great society.

  Night was turned into day; pleasure, as the world construed it, filled each hour; life became a spectacle; and she, as a part of the spectacle, was ceaselessly adorned, arrayed, flattered, censured, and posed — as a model is posed for the painter. All around her was grand, gorgeous, restless, and insincere; there was no leisure, though there was endless ennui; and no time for reflection, though there were monotony and a satiety of sensation. Sin she heard of for the first time, and it was smiled at; vice became bare to her, but no one shunned it; the rapacity of an ignoble passion let loose and called “marriage” tore down all her childish ignorance and threw it to the winds, destroyed her self-respect, and laughed at her, trampled on all her modest shame, and ridiculed her innocence.

  In early autumn she had given birth to a son, who had lived a few hours, and then died. She had not sorrowed for its loss — it was the child of Sergius Zouroff. She thought it better dead. She had felt a strange emotion as she had looked on its little body, lying lifeless; but it was neither maternal love nor maternal regret; it was rather remorse.

  She had been then at Svir, on the shores of the Baltic, one of the chief estates of the Princes of Zouroff, which all the summer long had been the scene of festivities, barbaric in their pomp and costliness; festivities with which her husband strove to wile away the year which Imperial command had bade him pass, after marriage, on his hereditary lands.

  “Do not allow my mother to come to me!” she had said once with a passionate cry when the birth of the child had drawn near. It was the first time she had ever appealed in any way to her husband. He laughed a little grimly, and his face flushed.

  “Your mother shall not come,” he said hastily. “Do you suppose she would wish to be shut up in a sick room? Perhaps she might, though, it is true; miladi always remembers what will look well. One must do her the justice to say she always remembers that, at least. But no; she shall not come.”

  So it came to pass that her mother in her little octagon boudoir in Chesham Place, lined with old fans of the Beau Siècle, and draped with Spanish lace, could only weep a little with her bosom friends, and murmur, “My sweet child! — such a trial! — in this horrible weather by the Baltic — so cruel of the Emperor — and to think my health will not let me go to her!”

  Zouroff, who passionately desired a legitimate son, because he hated with a deadly hatred his next brother Vladimir, took the loss of the male child to heart with a bitterness which was only wounded pride and baffled enmity, but looked like tenderness beside the marble-like coldness, and passive indifference of his wife.

  Physicians, who always are too clever not to have a thousand reasons for everything, alleged that the change of climate and temperature had affected the health of the Princess Vera; and her husband, who hated Russia with all his might, urged this plea of her health to obtain a reduction of the time he had been ordered to remain on his own lands; and obtaining what he wished from the Tsar, returned in November to the French Riviera.

  He had purchased the villa of his sister from her, although it was called still the Villa Nelaguine. He had bought it in a mood of captious irritation with his wife, knowing that to Vere, reared in the cold, grey days and under the cloudy skies, and by the sombre seas of the dark north, the southern seaboard was oppressive in its languor and its light. Sometimes he liked to hurt her in any way he could; if her child had lived he would have made it into a whip of scorpions for her. Yet he always lavished on her so much money, and so many jewels, and kept her so perpetually in the front of the greatest of great worlds, that everybody who knew him said that he made a good husband after all; much better than anyone would have anticipated.

  He intended to stay at the villa on the Mediterranean for three months, and thither came, self-invited because she was so near — only at Paris — the Lady Dolly.

  Neither Zouroff nor his sister ever invited her to their houses, but pretty Lady Dolly was not a woman to be deterred by so mere a trifle as that.

  “I pine to see my sweet treasure!” she wrote; and Sergius Zouroff, knitting his heavy brows, said “Let her come,” and Vere said nothing.

  “What an actress was lost in your mother,” he added with his rough laugh; but he confused the talent of the comedian of society with that of the comedian of the stage, and they are very dissimilar.
The latter almost always forgets herself in her part; the former never.

  So one fine, sunlit, balmy day towards Christmas, Lady Dolly drove up through the myrtle wood that led to the Villa Nelaguine.

  It was noonday. The house guests were straying down from upstairs to breakfast in the pretty Pompeiian room, with its inlaid marble walls, and its fountains, and its sculpture, and its banks of hothouse flowers, which opened on to the white terrace, that fronted the rippling blue sea. On this terrace Zouroff was standing.

  He saw the carriage approaching in the distance through the myrtles.

  “C’est madame mère” he said, turning on his heel, and looking into the breakfast chamber. He laughed a little grimly as he said it.

  Vere was conversing with Madame Nelaguine, who saw a strange look come into her eyes; aversion, repugnance, contempt, pain, and shame all commingled. “What is there that I do not know?” thought the Princess Nadine. She remembered how Vera had not returned her mother’s embrace at the marriage ceremony.

  Sergius Zouroff was still watching the carriage’s approach, with that hard smile upon his face which had all the brutality and cynicism of his temper in it, and under which delicate women and courageous men had often winced as under the lash.

  “C’est madame mère” he said again, with a spray of gardenia between his teeth; and then, being a grand gentleman sometimes, when the eyes of society were on him, though sometimes being rough as a boor, he straightened his loose heavy figure, put the gardenia in his button-hole, and went down the steps, with the dignity of Louis Quatorze going to meet a Queen of Spain, and received his guest as she alighted with punctilious politeness and an exquisite courtesy.

  Lady Dolly ascended the steps on his arm.