by Ouida
She was dressed perfectly for the occasion; all a soft dove-hue, with soft dove-coloured feather trimmings, and silvery furs with a knot of black here and there to heighten the chastened effect, and show her grief for the child that had breathed but an hour. On her belt hung many articles, but chief among them was a small silver-bound prayer-book, and she had a large silver cross at her throat.
“She will finish with religion,” thought Zouroff; “they always take it last.”
Lady Dolly was seldom startled, and seldom nervous; but, as her daughter came forward on to the terrace to meet her, she was both startled and nervous.
Vera was in a white morning dress with a white mantilla of old Spanish lace about her head and throat; she moved with serene and rather languid grace; her form had developed into the richness of womanhood; her face was very cold. Her mother could see nothing left in this wonderfully beautiful and stately person of the child of eighteen months before.
“Is that Vere?” she cried involuntarily, as she looked upward to the terrace above.
“That is Vera,” said Sergius Zouroff drily. All the difference lay there.
Then Lady Dolly recovered herself.
“My sweet child! Ah the sorrow! — the joy!” murmured Lady Dolly, meeting her with flying feet and outstretched arms, upon the white and black chequers of the marble terrace.
Vere stood passive, and let her cold cheeks be brushed by those softly-tinted lips. Her eyes met her mothers once, and Lady Dolly trembled.
“Oh this terrible bise!” she cried, with a shiver; “you can have nothing worse in Russia! Ah, my dear, precious Vera! I was so shocked, so grieved! — to think that poor little angel was lost to us!”
“We will not speak of that,” said Vere in a low voice, that was very cold and weary. “You are standing in the worst of the wind; will you not come into the house? Yes; I think one feels the cold more here than in Russia. People say so.”
“Yes; because one has sunshades here, and one sees those ridiculous palms, and it ought to be warm if it isn’t,” answered Lady Dolly; but her laugh was nervous and her lips trembled and contracted as she thus met her daughter once more.
“She is so unnatural!” she sighed to Princess Nelaguine; “so unnatural! Not a word, even to me, of her poor dear little dead child. Not a word! It is really too painful.”
The Princess Nelaguine answered drily: “Your daughter is not very happy. My brother is not an angel. But then, you knew very well, chère madame, that he never was one.”
“I am sure he seems very good,” said Lady Dolly piteously, and with fretfulness. She honestly thought it.
Vere had enormous jewels, constant amusement, and a bottomless purse; the mind of Lady Dolly was honestly impotent to conceive any state of existence more enviable than this.
“To think what I am content with!” she thought to herself; she who had to worry her husband every time she wanted a cheque; who had more debts for dress and pretty trifles than she would pay if she lived to be a hundred; and who constantly had to borrow half-a-crown for a cup of tea at Hurlingham, or a rouleau of gold to play with at Monaco.
Those were trials indeed!
“I hope you realise that you are my mother-in-law,” said Zouroff, as Lady Dolly sat on his right hand, and he gave her some grapes at breakfast.
He laughed as he said it. Lady Dolly tried to laugh, but did not succeed.
“You are bound to detest me,” she said with an exaggerated little smile, “by all precedents of fiction and of fact.”
“Oh no!” said Zouroff gallantly; “never in fiction or in fact had any man so bewitching and youthful a mother-in-law. On my life, you look no older than Vera.”
“Oh-h!” said Lady Dolly, pleased but deprecatory. “Vera is in a grand style, you know. Women like her look older than they are at twenty, but at forty they look much younger than they are. That is the use of height and straight features, and Greek brows. When one is a little doll, like me, one must be resigned to looking insignificant always.”
“Is the Venus de Medici insignificant? she is very small,” said Zouroff still most gallantly; and he added, in a lower key, “You were always pretty, Dolly; you always will be. I am sorry to see that prayer-book; it looks as if you felt growing old, and you will be wretched if you once get that idea into your head.”
“I feel young,” said Lady Dolly sentimentally. “But it would sound ridiculous to pretend to be so.”
Her glance went to the graceful and dignified presence of her daughter.
“Vere is very handsome, very beautiful,” she continued hesitatingly. “But — but — surely she is not looking very well?”
“She is scarcely recovered,” said Zouroff roughly, and the speech annoyed him. He knew that his young wife was unhappy, but he did not choose for anyone to pity her, and for her mother, of all people, to do so! —
“Ah! to be sure, no!” sighed Lady Dolly. “It was so sad — poor little angel! But did Vera care much? I think not.”
“I think there is nothing she cares for,” said Zouroff savagely. “Who could tell your daughter would be a piece of ice, a femme de marbre? It is too droll.”
“Pray do not call me Dolly,” she murmured piteously. “People will hear.”
“Very well, madame mere!” said Zouroff, and he laughed this time aloud.
She was frightened — half at her own work, half at the change wrought in Vere.
“Who could tell she would alter so soon,” she thought, in wonder at the cold and proud woman who looked like a statue and moved like a goddess.
“To think she is only seventeen!” said Lady Dolly aloud, in bewilderment.
“To be married to me is a liberal education,” said her son-in-law, with his short sardonic laugh.
“I am sure you are very kind to her,” murmured poor little Lady Dolly, yet feeling herself turn pale under her false bloom. “The beast!” she said to herself with a shudder. “The Centaurs must have been just like him.” She meant the Satyrs.
“Sergius,” said Princess Nelaguine to her brother that night, “Vera does not look well.”
“No?” he answered carelessly. “She is always too pale. I tell her always to rouge. If she do not rouge in Paris, she will scarcely tell in a ball, handsome though she is.”
“Rouge at seventeen! You cannot be serious. She only wants to be — happy. I do not think you make her so. Do you try?”
He stared and yawned.
“It is not my métier to make women happy. They can be so if they like. I do not prevent them. She has ten thousand francs a month by her settlements to spend on her caprices — if it is not enough she can have more. You may tell her so. I never refuse money.”
“You speak like a bourgeois,” said his sister, with some contempt. “Do you think that money is everything? It is nothing to a girl like that. She gives it all to the poor; it is no pleasure to her.”
“Then she is very unlike her mother,” said the Prince Zouroff with a smile.
“She is unlike her, indeed! you should be thankful to think how entirely unlike. Your honour will be safe with her as long as she lives; but to be happy — she will want more than you give her at present, but the want is not one that money will supply.”
“She has been complaining?” said her brother, with a sudden frown.
Madame Nelaguine added with a ready lie: “Not a word; not a syllable. But one has eyes — and I do so wish you to be kind to her.”
“Kind to her?” he repeated, with some surprise. “I am not unkind that I know of; she has impossible ideas; they make me impatient. She must take me and the world as she finds us; but I am certainly not unkind. One does not treat ones wife like a saint. Perhaps you can make her comprehend that. Were she sensible, like others, she would be happy like them.”
He laughed, and rose and drank some absinthe.
His sister sighed and set her teeth angrily on the cigarette that she was smoking.
“Perhaps she will in time be happy an
d sensible like them,” she said to herself; “and then your lessons will bear their proper fruits, and you will be deceived like other husbands, and punished as you merit. If it were not for the honour of the Zouroffs I should pray for it!”
The Villa Nelaguine was full of people staying there, and was also but five miles distant from Monte Carlo.
Vere was never alone with her mother during the time that Lady Dolly graced the Riviera with her presence, carried her red umbrella under the palm-trees, and laid her borrowed napoléons on the colour.
No word of reproach, no word of complaint escaped her lips in her mothers presence, yet Lady Dolly felt vaguely frightened, and longed to escape from her presence, as a prisoner longs to escape from the dock.
She stayed this December weather at Villa fianca, where December meant blue sea, golden sunshine, and red roses, because she thought it was the right thing to do. If there had been people who had said — well, not quite nice things — it was better to stay with her daughter immediately on the return from Russia. So she did stay, and even had herself visited for a day or two by Mr. Vanderdecken on one of his perpetual voyages from London to Java, Japan, or Jupiter.
Her visit was politic and useful; but it cost her some pain, some fretfulness, and some apprehension.
The house was full of pleasant people, for Zouroff never could endure a day of even comparative solitude; and amidst them was a very handsome Italian noble, who was more agreeable to her than the Duc de Dinant had of late grown, and who was about to go to England to be attached to the embassy there, and who had the eyes of Othello with the manners of Chesterfield, and whom she made her husband cordially invite to Chesham Place. She could play as high as she liked, and she could drive over to Monaco when she pleased, and no life suited her better then this life; where she could, whenever she chose, saunter through the aloes and palms to those magic halls where her favourite fever was always at its height, yet where everything looked so pretty, and appearances were always so well preserved, and she could say to everybody, “They do have such good music — one can’t help liking Monte Carlo!”
The place suited her in every way, and yet she felt stifled in it, and afraid.
Afraid of what? There was nothing on earth to be afraid of, she knew that.
Yet, when she saw the cold, weary, listless life of Vere and met the deep scorn of her eyes, and realised the absolute impotency of rank, and riches, and pleasure, and all her own adored gods, to console or even to pacify this young wounded soul, Lady Dolly was vaguely frightened, as the frivolous are always frightened at any strength or depth of nature, or any glimpse of sheer despair.
Not to be consoled!
What can seem more strange to the shallow? What can seem more obstinate to the weak? Not to be consoled is to offend all swiftly forgetting humanity, most of whose memories are writ on water.
“It is very strange, she seems to one to enjoy nothing!” said Lady Dolly, one morning to Madame Nelaguine, when Prince Zouroff had announced at the noonday breakfast that he had purchased for his wife a famous historical diamond known in Memoirs and in European courts as the “Roc’s egg.” and Vere, with a brief word of thanks acknowledged the tidings, her mother thought indignantly, as though he had brought her a twopenny bunch of primroses.
“It is very strange!” repeated Lady Dolly “The idea of hearing that she had got the biggest diamond in all the world, except five, and receiving the news like that! Your brother looked disappointed, I think, annoyed, — didn’t you?”
“If he want ecstasies over a diamond he can give it to Noisette,” said Madame Nelaguine, with her little cold smile. “I think he ought not to be annoyed that his wife is superior to Noisette.”
“Was Vera always as cold as that at St. Petersburg before her child’s death?” pursued Lady Dolly, who never liked Madame Nelaguine’s smiles.
“Yes; always the same.”
“Doesn’t society amuse her in the least?”
“Not in the least. I quite understand why it does not do so. Without coquetry or ambition it is impossible to enjoy society much. Every pretty woman should be a flirt, every clever woman a politician; the aim, the animus, the intrigue, the rivalry that accompany each of those pursuits are the salt without which the great dinner were tasteless. A good many brainless creatures do, it is true, flutter through society all their lives for the mere pleasure of fluttering; but that is poor work after all,” added Madame Nelaguine, ignoring the pretty flutterer to whom she was speaking. “One needs an aim, just as an angler must have fish in the stream or he grows weary of whipping it. Now your Vera will never be a coquette because her temperament forbids it. She is too proud, and also men have the misfortune not to interest her. And I think she will never be a politician; at least, she is interested in great questions, but the small means by which men strive to accomplish their aims disgust her, and she will never be a diplomatist. In the first week she was in Russia she compromised Sergius seriously at the Imperial Court by praising a Nihilist novelist to the Empress!”
“Oh, I know!” said Lady Dolly, desperately. “She has not two grains of sense. She is beautiful and distinguished looking. When you have said that you have said everything that is to be said. The education she had with her grandmother made her hopelessly stupid, actually stupid!”
“She is very far from stupid, pardon me,” said Madame Nelaguine, with a delicate little smile. “But she has not your adaptability, chère madame. It is her misfortune.”
“A misfortune, indeed,” said Lady Dolly, a little sharply, feeling that her superiority was being despised. “It is always a misfortune to be unnatural, and she is unnatural. She takes no pleasure in anything that delights everyone else; she hardly knows serge from sicilienne; she has no tact because she does not think it worth while to have any. She will offend a king as indifferently as she will change her dress; every kind of amusement bores her, she is made like that. When everybody is laughing round her she looks grave, and stares like an owl with her great eyes. Oh, dear me; to think she should be my daughter! Nothing odder ever could be than that Vera should be my child.”
“Except that she should be my brothers wife,” said Madame Nelaguine, drily. Lady Dolly was silent.
The next day Lady Dolly took advantage of her husbands escort to leave the Villa Nelaguine for England; she went with reluctance, yet with relief. She was envious of her daughter, and she was impatient with her, and, though she told herself again and again that Vere’s destiny had fallen in a golden paradise, the east wind, that she hated, moaning through the palms seemed to send after her homeward a long-drawn despairing sigh — the sigh of a young life ruined.
Prince Zouroff stayed on in the south, detained by the seduction of the gaming-tables, until the Christmas season was passed; then, having won very largely, as very rich men often do, he left the Riviera for his handsome hôtel in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne; and Madame Nelaguine left it also.
Like many of their country people they were true children of Paris, and were seldom thoroughly content unless they were within sight of the dome of the Invalides.
He felt he would breathe more freely when from the windows of the railway carriage he should see the zinc roofs and shining gilt cupolas of his one heaven upon earth.
“Another year with only her face to look at, with its eyes of unending reproach, and I should have gone mad, or cut her throat,” he said in a moment of confidence to one of his confidants and parasites.
They had never been alone one day, indeed; troops of guests had always been about them; but it had not been Paris, Paris with its consolations, its charm, and its crowds.
In Paris he could forget completely that he had ever married, save when it might please his pride to hear the world tell him that he had the most beautiful woman in Europe for his wife.
“Can you not sleep? do not stare so with your great eyes!” said Prince Zouroff angrily to his wife, as the night train rushed through the heart of France, and Vere gazed out over the snow
-whitened moonlit country, as the land and the sky seemed to fly past her.
In another carriage behind her was her great jewel box, set between two servants, whose whole duty was to guard it.
But she never thought of her jewels; she was thinking of the moth and the star; she was thinking of the summer morning on the white cliff of the sea. For she knew that Corrèze was in Paris.
It was not any sort of love that moved her, beyond such lingering charmed fancy as remained from those few hours’ fascination. But a great reluctance to see him, a great fear of seeing him, was in her. What could he think of her marriage! And she could never tell him why she had married thus. He would think her sold like the rest, and he must be left to think so.
The express train rushed on through the cold calm night. With every moment she drew nearer to him — the man who had bidden her keep herself “unspotted from the world.”
“And what is my life,” she thought, “except one long pollution!”
She leaned her white cheek and her fair head against the window, and gazed out at the dark flying masses of the clouds; her eyes were full of pain, wide opened, lustrous; and, waking suddenly and seeing her thus opposite him, her husband called to her roughly and irritably with an oath: “Can you not sleep?”
It seemed to her as if she never slept now. What served her as sleep seemed but a troubled feverish dull trance, disturbed by hateful dreams.
It was seven o’clock on the following evening when they arrived in Paris. Their carriage was waiting, and she and Madame Nelaguine drove homeward together, leaving Zouroff to follow them. There was a faint light of an aurora borealis in the sky, and the lamps of the streets were sparkling in millions; the weather was very cold. Their coachman took his way past the opera-house. There were immense crowds and long lines of equipages.
In large letters in the strong gaslight it was easy to read upon the placards.
Faust.... CORRÈZE
The opera was about to commence.
Vere shrank back into the depths of the carriage. Her companion leaned forward and looked out into the night.