by Ouida
“Paris is so fickle; but there is one sovereign she never tires of — it is Corrèze,” said Madame Nelaguine, with a little laugh, and wondered to see the colourless cheek of her young sister-in-law flush suddenly and then grow white again.
“Have you ever heard Corrèze sing?” she asked quickly. Vere hesitated.
“Never in the opera. No.”
“Ah! to be sure, he left Russia suddenly last winter; left as you entered it,” said Madame Nelaguine, musing, and with a quick side-glance.
Vere was silent.
The carriage rolled on, and passed into the courtyard of the Hôtel Zouroff between the gilded iron gates, at the instant when the applause of Paris welcomed upon the stage of its opera its public favourite.
The house was grand, gorgeous, brilliant; adorned in the taste of the Second Empire, to which it belonged; glittering and over-laden, superb yet meretricious. The lines of servants were bowing low; the gilded gaseliers were glowing with light, there were masses of camellias and azaleas, beautiful and scentless, and heavy odours of burnt pastilles on the heated air.
Vere passed up the wide staircase slowly, and the hues of its scarlet carpeting seemed like fire to her tired eyes.
She changed her prison-house often, and each one had been made more splendid than the last, but each in its turn was no less a prison; and its gilding made it but the more dreary and the more oppressive to her.
“You will excuse me, I am tired,” she murmured to her sister-in-law, who was to be her guest, and she went into her own bedchamber and shut herself in, shutting out even her maid from her solitude.
Through the curtained windows there came a low muffled sound; the sound of the great night-world of that Paris to which she had come, heralded for her beauty by a thousand tongues.
Why could she not be happy?
She dropped on her knees by her bed of white satin, embroidered with garlanded roses, and let her head fall on her arms, and wept bitterly.
In the opera-house the curtain had risen, and the realisation of all he had lost was dawning upon the vision of Faust.
The voice of her husband came to her through the door.
“Make your toilette rapidly,” he said; “we will dine quickly; there will be time to show yourself at the opera.”
Vere started and rose to her feet.
“I am very tired; the journey was long.”
“We will not stay,” answered Prince Zouroff. “But you will show yourself. Dress quickly.”
“Would not another night—”
“Ma chère, do not dispute. I am not used to it.”
The words were slight, but the accent gave them a cold and hard command, to which she had grown accustomed.
She said nothing more, but let her maid enter by an inner door.
The tears were wet on her lashes, and her mouth still quivered. The woman saw and pitied her, but with some contempt.
“Why do you lament like that?” the woman thought; “why not amuse yourself?”
Her maids were used to the caprices of Prince Zouroff, which made his wife’s toilette a thing which must be accomplished to perfection in almost a moment of time. A very young and lovely woman, also, can be more easily adorned than one who needs a thousand artificial aids. They dressed her very rapidly in white velvet, setting some sapphires and diamonds in her bright hair.
“Give me that necklace,” she said, pointing to one of the partitions in one of the open jewel cases; it was the necklace of the moth and the star.
In ten minutes she descended to dinner. She and her husband were alone. Madame Nelaguine had gone to bed fatigued.
He ate little, but drank much, though one of the finest artists of the Paris kitchens had done his best to tempt his taste with the rarest and most delicate combination.
“You do not seem to have much appetite,” he said, after a little while. “We may as well go. You look very well now.”
He looked at her narrowly.
Fatigue conquered, and emotion subdued, had given an unusual brilliancy to her eyes, an unusual flush to her cheeks. The white velvet was scarcely whiter than her skin; about her beautiful throat the moth trembled between the flame and the star.
“Have you followed my advice and put some rouge?” he asked suddenly.
Vere answered simply, “No.”
“Paris will say that you are handsomer than any of the others,” he said carelessly. “Let us go.”
Vere’s cheeks flushed more deeply as she rose in obedience. She knew he was thinking of all the other women whom Paris had associated with his name.
She drew about her a cloak of white feathers, and went to her carriage. Her heart was sick, yet it beat fast. She had learned to be quite still, and to show nothing that she felt under all pain; and this emotion was scarcely pain, this sense that so soon the voice of Corrèze would reach her ear.
She was very tired; all the night before she had not slept; the fatigue and feverishness of the long unbroken journey were upon her, making her temples throb, her head swim, her limbs feel light as air. But the excitement of one idea sustained her, and made her pulses quicken with fictitious strength: so soon she would hear the voice of Corrèze.
A vague dread, a sense of apprehension that she could not have explained, were upon her; yet a delighted expectation came over her also, and was sweeter than any feeling that had ever been possible to her since her marriage.
As their carriage passed through the streets, her husband smoked a cigarette, and did not speak at all. She was thankful for the silence, though she fancied in it he must hear the loud fast beating of her heart.
It was ten o’clock when they reached the opera-house. Her husband gave her his arm, and they passed through the vestibule and passage, and up the staircase to that door which at the commencement of the season had been allotted to the name of Prince Zouroff.
The house was hushed; the music, which has all the ecstasy and the mystery of human passion in it, thrilled through the stillness. Her husband took her through the corridor into their box, which was next that which had once been the empress’s. The vast circle of light seemed to whirl before her eyes.
Vere entered as though she were walking in her sleep, and sat down.
On the stage there were standing alone Margherita and Faust.
The lights fell full upon the classic profile of Corrèze, and his eyelids were drooped, as he stood gazing on the maiden who knelt at his feet. The costume he wore showed his graceful form to its greatest advantage, and the melancholy of wistful passion that was expressed on his face at that moment made his beauty of feature more impressive. His voice was silent at the moment when she saw him thus once more, but his attitude was a poem, his face was the face she had seen by the sunlight where the sweetbriar sheltered the thrush.
Not for her was he Faust, not for her was he the public idol of Paris. He was the Saint Raphael of the Norman seashore. She sat like one spellbound gazing at the stage.
Then Corrèze raised his head, his lips parted, and uttered the Tu vuoi, ahime!
Che t’abbandoni.
It thrilled though the house, that exquisite and mysterious music of the human voice, seeming to bring with it the echo of a heaven for ever lost.
Women, indifferent to all else, would weep when they heard the voice of Corrèze.
Vere’s heart stood still; then seemed to leap in her breast as with a throb of new warm life. Unforgotten, unchanged, unlike any other ever heard on earth, this perfect voice fell on her ear again, and held her entranced with its harmony. The ear has its ecstasy as have other senses, and this ecstasy for the moment held in suspense all other emotion, all other memory.
She sat quite motionless, leaning her cheek upon her hand. When he sang, she only then seemed herself to live; when his voice ceased, she seemed to lose hold upon existence, and the great world of light around her seemed empty and mute.
Many eyes were turning on her, many tongues were whispering of her, but she was unconscious of th
em. Her husband, glancing at her, thought that no other woman would have been so indifferent to the stare of Paris as she was; he did not know that she was insensible of it; he only saw that she had grown very pale again, and was annoyed, fearing that her entry would not be the brilliant success that he desired it to be.
“Perhaps she was too tired to come here,” he thought with some impatience.
But Paris was looking at her in her white velvet, which was like the snows she had quitted, and was finding her lovely beyond compare, and worthy of the wild rumours of adoration that had come before her from the north.
The opera, meanwhile, went on its course; the scenes changed, the third act ended, the curtain fell, the theatre resounded with the polite applause of a cultured city.
She seemed to awake as from a dream. The door had opened, and her husband was presenting some great persons to her.
“You have eclipsed even Corrèze, Princess,” said one of these. “In looking at you, Paris forgot for once to listen to its nightingale. It was fortunate for him, since he sung half a note false.”
“Since you are so tired we will go,” said her husband, when the fourth act was over; when a score of great men had bowed themselves in and out of her box, and the glasses of the whole house had been levelled at the Russian beauty, as they termed her.
“I am not so very tired now!” she said wistfully.
She longed to hear that voice of Faust as she had never longed for anything.
“If you are not tired you are capricious, ma chère,” said her husband, with a laugh. “I brought you here that they might see you; they have seen you; now I am going to the club. Come.”
He wrapped her white feathery mantle round her, as though it were snow that covered her, and took her away from the theatre as the curtain rose.
He left her to go homeward alone, and went himself to the Rue Scribe.
She was thankful.
“You sang false, Corrèze!” said mocking voices of women gaily round him in the foyer. He was so eminent, so perfect, so felicitously at the apex of his triumph and art, that a momentary failure could be made a jest of without fear.
“Pardieu!” said Corrèze, with a shrug of his shoulders. “Pardieu! do you suppose I did not know it. A fly flew in my throat. I suppose it will be in all the papers to-morrow. That is the sweet side of fame.”
He shook himself free of his tormentors, and went to his brougham as soon as his dress was changed. It was only one o’clock, and he had all Paris ready to amuse him.
But he felt out of tone and out of temper with all Paris; another half-note false and Paris would hiss him — even him.
He went home to his house in the Avenue Marigny, and sent his coachman away.
“The beast!” he said to himself, as he entered his chamber; he was thinking of Sergius Zouroff. He threw himself down in an easy chair, and sat alone lost in thought; whilst a score of supper-tables were the duller for his absence, and more than one womans heart ached, or passion fretted, at it.
“Who would have thought the sight of her would have moved me so!” he said to himself in self-scorn. “A false note! — I!”
CHAPTER II.
In the bitter February weather all aristocratic Paris felt the gayer, because the vast Hôtel Zouroff, in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, had its scarlet-clad suisse leaning on his gold-headed staff at its portals, and its tribes of liveried and unliveried lacqueys languishing in its halls and ante-rooms; since these signs showed that the Prince and Princess were en ville, and that the renowned beauty of the Winter Palace had brought her loveliness and her diamonds to the capital of the world.
The Hôtel Zouroff, under Nadine Nelaguine, had been always one of those grand foreign houses at which all great people meet; a noble terra nullius in which all political differences were obliterated, and all that was either well born or well received met, and the Empire touched the Faubourg, and the Orléans princes brushed the marshals of the Republic. The Hôtel Zouroff had never been very exclusive, but it had always been very brilliant. Under the young Princess, Paris saw that it was likely to be much more exclusive, and perhaps in proportion less entertaining. There was that in the serene simplicity, the proud serious grace of the new mistress of it, which rallied to her the old régime and scared away the new “You should have been born a hundred years ago,” said her husband with some impatience to her. “You would make the house the Hôtel Rambouillet.”
“I do not care for the stories of ‘Figaro,’ at my dinner-table, and I do not care to see the romp of the cotillon in my ball-room; but it is your house, it must be ordered as you please,” she answered him; and she let Madame Nelaguine take the reins of social government, and held herself aloof.
But though she effaced herself as much as possible, that tall slender proud figure, with the grave colourless face that was so cold and yet so innocent, had an effect that was not to be defined, yet not to be resisted, as she received the guests of the Hôtel Zouroff; and the entertainments there, though they gained in simplicity and dignity, lost in entrain Vere was not suited to her century.
Houses take their atmosphere from those who live in them, and even the Hôtel Zouroff, despite its traditions and its epoch, despite its excess of magnificence and its follies of expenditure, yet had a fresher and a purer air since the life of its new princess had come into it.
“You have married a young saint, and the house feels already like a sacristy,” said the Duchesse de Sonnaz to Sergius Zouroff, “Ca nous obsède, mon vieux!”
That was the feeling of society.
She was exquisitely lovely; she had a great distinction, she knew a great deal and though she spoke seldom, spoke well, but she was obsédante; she made them feel as if they were in church.
Yet Paris spoke of nothing for the moment but of the Princess Zouroff. Reigning beauties were for the moment all dethroned, and, as Paris had for years talked of his racers, his mistresses, his play, and his vices, so it now talked of Sergius Zouroff’s wife.
That fair, grave, colourless face, so innocent yet so proud, so childlike yet so thoughtful, with its musing eyes and its arched mouth, became the theme of artists, the adoration of dandies, the despair of women. As a maiden she would have been called lovely, but too cold, and passed over. Married, she had that position which adorns as diamonds adorn, and that charm as of forbidden fruit, which piques the sated palate of mankind.
She was the event of the year.
Her husband was not surprised either at her fame or her failure.
He had foreseen both after the first week of his marriage. “She will be the rage for a season, for her face and her form,” he said to himself. “Then they will find her entêtée and stupid, and turn to some one else.” He honestly thought her stupid.
She knew Greek and Latin and all that, but of the things that make a woman brilliant she knew nothing.
Life seemed to Vere noisy, tedious, glaring, beyond conception; she seemed, to herself, always to be en scene; always to be being dressed and being undressed for some fresh spectacle; always to be surrounded with flatterers, and to be destitute of friends, never to be alone. It seemed to her wonderful that people who could rule their own lives chose incessant fatigue and called it pleasure. She understood it in nothing. That her mother, after twenty years of it, could yet pursue this life with excitement and preference seemed to her so strange that it made her shudder. There was not an hour for thought, scarcely a moment for prayer. She was very young, and she rose early while the world was still sleeping, and tried to gain some little time for her old habits, her old tastes, her old studies, but it was very difficult; she seemed to grow dizzy, tired, useless. “It was what I was sold to be,” she used to think bitterly. Her husband was fastidious as to her appearance, and inexorable as to her perpetual display of herself; for the rest he said nothing to her, unless it were to sharply reprove her for some oblivion of some trifle in etiquette, some unconscious transgression of the innumerable unwritten laws of society.
/> In the midst of the most brilliant circle of Europe, Vere was as lonely as any captured bird. She would have been glad of a friend, but she was shy and proud; women were envious of her, and men were afraid of her. She was not like her world or her time. She was beautiful, but no one would have ever dreamed of classing her with “the beauties” made by princely praise and public portraiture. She was as unlike them as the beauty of perfect statuary is unlike the Lilith and the Vivienne of modern painting.
Sometimes her husband was proud of that, sometimes he was annoyed at it. Soon he felt neither pride nor annoyance, but grew indifferent.
Society noticed that she seldom smiled. When a smile did come upon her face, it was as cold as the moonbeam that flits bright and brief across a landscape on a cloudy night. Very close observers saw that it was not coldness, but a melancholy too profound for her years that had robbed the light from her thoughtful eyes; but close observers in society are not numerous, and her world in general believed her incapable of any emotion, or any sentiment, save that of a great pride.
They did not know that in the stead of any pride what weighed on her night and day was the bitterness of humiliation — humiliation they would never have understood — with which no one would have sympathised; a shame that made her say to herself, when she went to her tribune at Chantilly, to see her husband’s horses run, “My place should be apart there with those lost women; what am I better than they?”
All the horror of the sin of the world had fallen suddenly on her ignorance and innocence as an avalanche may fall on a young chamois; the knowledge of it oppressed her, and made a great disgust stay always with her as her hourly burden.
She despised herself, and there is no shame more bitter to endure.
“You are unreasonable, my child,” said her sister-in-law, who, in a cold way, was attached to her, and did pity her. “Any other woman as young as yourself would be happy. My brother is not your ideal. No; that was not to be expected or hoped for; but he leaves you your own way; he is not a tyrant, he lets you enjoy yourself as you may please to do; he never controls your purse or your caprice. Believe me, my love, that, as the world goes, this is as nearly happiness as can be found in marriage — to have plenty of money and to be let alone. You want happiness, I know, but I doubt very much if happiness is really existent anywhere on earth, unless you can get it out of social success and the discomfiture of rivals, as most fortunate women do.