by Ouida
I think you are unreasonable. You are not offended? No?”
“Perhaps I am unreasonable,” assented Vere.
She never spoke of herself. Her lips had been shut on the day that she had accepted the hand of Sergius Zouroff, and she kept them closed.
She would have seemed unreasonable to everyone, as to Princess Nelaguine, had she done so.
Why could she not be happy?
With youth, a lovely face and form, the great world her own, and her riches boundless, why could she not be happy, or, at the least, amused and flattered?
Amusement and flattery console most women, but they had failed as yet to console her. By example or by precept everyone about her made her feel that they should do so. Upon the danger of the teaching neither her husband nor society ever reflected.
Young lives are tossed upon the stream of the world, like rose-leaves on a fast-running river, and the rose-leaves are blamed if the river be too strong and too swift for them, and they perish. It is the fault of the rose-leaves.
When she thought that this life must endure all her life, she felt a despair that numbed her, as frost kills a flower. To the very young, life looks so long.
To Sergius Zouroff innocence was nothing more than the virgin bloom of a slave had been to his father — a thing to be destroyed for an owners diversion.
It amused him to lower her, morally and physically, and he cast all the naked truths of human vices before her shrinking mind, as he made her body tremble at his touch. It was a diversion, whilst the effect was novel. Like many another man, he never asked himself how the fidelity and the chastity that he still expected to have preserved for him, would survive his own work of destruction. He never remembered that as you sow so you may reap. Nor if he had remembered would he have cared. Toute femme triche was engraved on his conviction as a certain doctrine. The purity and the simplicity, and the serious sense of right and wrong that he discovered in Vere bewildered him, and half-awed, half-irritated him. But that these would last after contact with the world, he never for a moment believed, and he quickly ceased to regard or to respect them.
He knew very well that his wife and his belles petites were creatures so dissimilar that it seemed scarcely possible that the same laws of nature had created and sustained them, the same humanity claimed them. He knew that they were as unlike as the dove and the snake, as the rose and the nightshade, but he treated them both the same.
There was a woman who was seen on the Bois who drove with white Spanish mules hung about with Spanish trappings, and had a little mulatto boy behind her dressed in scarlet. This eccentric person was speedily celebrated in Paris. She was handsome in a very dark, full-lipped, almond-eyed, mulattress fashion; she got the name of Casse-une-Croûte, and no one ever heard or cared whether she ever had had any other. Casse-une-Croûte, who was a mustang from over the seas, had made her début modestly with a banker, but she had soon blazed into that splendour in which bankers, unless they are Rothschilds, are despised. Prince Zouroff had seen the white mules, and been struck with them. Casse-une-Croûte had an apotheosis.
There was an actress who was called Noisette; she was very handsome too, in a red and white way, like Reubenss women; she too drove herself, but drove a mail-phaeton and very high-stepping English horses; she drank only Burgundy, but plenty of it; she had a hotel entre cour et jardin; on the stage she was very vulgar but she had du chien and wonderful drolleries of expression. Prince Zouroff did not care even to look at her, but she was the fashion, and he had taken her away from his most intimate friend; so, for years, he let her eat his roubles as a mouse eats rice, and never could prevail on his vanity to break with her, lest men should think she had broken with him.
In that unexplainable, instinctive way in which women of quick perceptions come to know things that no one ever tells them, and which is never definitely put before them in words, Princess Zouroff became gradually aware that Noisette and Casse-une-Croûte were both the property of her husband. The white mules or the mail-phaeton crossed her own carriage-horses a dozen times a week in the Champs Elysées, and she looked away not to see those women, and said in the bitter humiliation of her heart, “What am I better than either of them!” When either of them saw her, Casse-une-Croûte said, “V’ià la petite!” contemptuously. Noisette said, “Je mangerai même ses diamants à elle.”
“Sergius,” said Nadine Nelaguine one night, “in that wife that you neglect for your creatures you have a pearl of price.”
“And I am one of the swine, and best live with my kind,” said her brother savagely, because he was ashamed of himself, and angered with all his ways of life, yet knew that he would no more change them than will swine change theirs.
“You have married a young saint. It is infinitely droll!” said the Duchesse de Sonnaz, who was always called by her society Madame Jeanne, one day to Sergius Zouroff, as he sat with her in her boudoir that was full of chinoiseries, and Indian wares, and Persian potteries.
Jeanne de Sonnaz was a woman of thirty-three years old, and had been one of the few really great ladies who had condescended to accept the Second Empire. Born of the splendid Maison de Merilhac, and married to the head of the scarce less ancient Maison de Sonnaz, she belonged, root and branch, to the vieille souche, and her people all went annually to bow the knee at Frohsdorf. But Mdme. Jeanne, wedded at sixteen to a man who was wax in her hands, had no fancy for sacrifice and seclusion for the sake of a shadow and a lily. She was a woman who loved admiration and who loved display. She had condescended to accept the Second Empire, because it was the millennium of these her twin passions. She had known that it would not last, but she had enjoyed it while it did. “C’est un obus qui va s’éclater” she had always said cheerfully, but meanwhile she had danced on the shell till it exploded, and now danced on its debris.
The Duchesse de Sonnaz dressed better than any living being; was charming, without having a good feature in her face except her eyes, and was admired where Helen or Venus might have been overlooked. She was not very clever, but she was very malicious, which is more successful with society, and very violent, which is more successful with lovers. She had the power of being very agreeable. To the young Princess Zouroff she made herself even unusually so.
Vere did not notice that even a polite society could not help a smile when it saw them together.
“You have married a young saint; it is very droll,” the duchesse now said for the twentieth time to Zouroff. “But do you know that I like her? Is not that very droll too?”
“It is very fortunate for me,” said Zouroff drily, wondering if she were telling him a lie, and, if so, why she told one.
She was not lying; though, when she had first heard of his intended marriage, she had been beside herself with rage, and had even rung violently for them to send her husband to her that she might cry aloud to him, “you never revenge yourself, but you must and you shall revenge me.” Fortunately for the peace of Europe her husband was at the club, and by the time he had returned thence she had thought the better of it.
“What will you do with a saint?” she continued now. “It is not a thing for you. It must be like that White Swan in ‘Lohengrin.’”
“She is stupid,” said Zouroff; “but she is very honest.”
“How amusing a combination!”
“I do not see much of her,” Zouroff added with an air of fatigue. “I think she will be always the same. She does not adapt herself. It is a pity her children should not live. She is the sort of woman to be a devoted mother.”
“Quel beau role! and she is not eighteen yet,” said Madame de Sonnaz with amusement.
“It is what we marry good women for,” he said somewhat gloomily. “They never divert one; every one knows that. Elles ne savent pas s’encanailler.”
Jeanne de Sonnaz laughed again, but her face had an angry irony in it.
“Yes: nous nous encanaillons; that is our charm. A beautiful compliment. But it is true. It is the charm of our novels, of our thea
tres, of our epoch. Le temps nous enfante. Things manage themselves drolly. A man like you gets a young angel; and an honest, stupid, innocent soul like my poor Paul gets — me.”
Zouroff offered her no compliment and no contradiction; he was sitting gloomily amidst the chinoiseries and porcelains, but their intercourse had long passed the stage at which flattery is needful. He was glad for sake of peace that she was not an enemy of Veres; but he was annoyed to hear her praise his wife. Why did everyone regard the girl as sacrificed? It offended and annoyed him. She had everything that she could want. Hundreds of women would have asked no more admirable fate than was hers.
“She is of the old type; the old type pure are proud,” his friend pursued, unheeding his silence. “We want to see it now and then. She would go grandly to the guillotine, but she will never understand her own times, and she will always have a contempt for them. She has dignity; we have not a scrap, we have forgotten what it was like; we go into a passion at the amount of our bills; we play and never pay; we smoke and we wrangle; we have café-singers who teach us slang songs; we laugh loud, much too loud; we intrigue vulgarly, and, when we are found out, we scuffle, which is more vulgar still; we inspire nothing unless now and then a bad war or a disastrous speculation; we live showily, noisily, meanly, gaudily. You have said, ‘On sait s’encanailler? Well, your wife is not like us. You should be thankful.”
“All the same,” said Zouroff, with a shrug of his shoulders; “she is not amusing.”
“Oh, that is another affair. Even if she were, I do not believe you would go to your wife to be amused. I think you are simply discontented with her because she is not somebody else’s wife. If she were fast and frivolous you would be angry at that.”
“She is certainly not fast or frivolous!”
“Perhaps my friend — after all — it is only that she is not happy.”
It was the one little poison-tipped arrow that she could not help speeding against the man whose marriage had been an insult to a “friendship” of many years’ duration.
“If she were not a fool she would be perfectly happy,” he answered petulantly, and with a frown.
“Or if she understood compensations as we understood them,” said Mdme de Sonnaz, lighting a cigarette. “Perhaps she never will understand them. Or, perhaps, on the other hand, some day she will.”
“Vous plaisantez, madame” said Sergius Zouroff with a growl, as the duchess laughed.
A sullen resentment rose in him against Vere. He had meant to forget her, once married to her. The marriage had been a caprice; he had been moved to a sudden passion that had been heightened by her aversion and her reluctance; she did as well as another to bear children and grace his name; he had never meant to make a burden of her, and now everyone had agreed to speak of her as a martyr to her position.
Her position! he thought; what woman in Europe would not have been happy in it?
Vere herself might have fanciful regrets and fantastic sentiments; that he could admit; she was a child, and had odd thoughts and tastes; but he resented the pity for her — pity for her as being his — that spoke by the cynical lips of his sister and Jeanne de Sonnaz.
He began almost to wish that she would be brought to understand the necessity of de s’ encanailler. There are times when the very purity of a woman annoys and oppresses a man — even when she is his wife; perhaps most of all when she is so.
If she had disobeyed him or had any fault against him, he could still have found some pleasure in tyranny over her; but she never rebelled, she never opposed him. Obedience was all she had to give him, and she gave it in all loyalty; her grandmother had reared her in old-world ideas of duty that she found utterly out of place in the day she lived in, yet she clung to them as she clung to her belief in heaven.
Her whole nature recoiled from the man to whom she owed obedience, yet she knew obedience was his due, and she gave it. Although he would have borne with nothing less, yet this passive submission had begun to irritate him; his commands were caprices, wilful, changeable, and unreasonable. But as they were always obeyed, it ceased to be any amusement to impose them.
He began to think that she was merely stupid.
He would have believed that she was quite stupid, and nothing else, but for a certain look in her eyes now and then when she spoke, a certain gesture that occasionally escaped her of utter contempt and weariness. Then he caught sight for a moment of depths in Vere’s nature that he did not fathom, of possibilities in her character that he did not take into consideration.
Had she been any other mans wife, the contradiction would have attracted him, and he would have studied her temper and her tastes. As it was he only felt some irritation, and some ennui because his wife was not like his world.
“She is not amusing, and she is not grateful,” he would say; and each day he saw less of her and left her to shape her own life as she chose.
CHAPTER III.
In the chilly spring weather, Lady Dolly, sitting on one chair with her pretty little feet on another chair, was at Hurlingham watching the opening match of the year and saying to her friend Lady Stoat of Stichley; “Oh my dear, yes, it is so sad, but you know my sweet child never was quite like other people; never will be I am afraid. And she never did care for me. It was all that horrid old woman, who brought her up so strangely, and divided entirely from me in every way, and made a perfect Methodist of her, really a Methodist! If Vere were not so exquisitely pretty she would be too ridiculous. As she is so handsome, men don’t abuse her so much as they would if she were only just nice-looking. But she is very very odd; and it is so horrible to be odd! I would really sooner have her ugly. She is so odd. Never would speak to me even of the birth and death of her baby. Could you believe it? Not a word! not a word! what would you feel if Gwendolin... Goodness! the Duke and Fred have tied. Is it true, Colonel Rochfort? Yes? Thanks. A pencil, one moment; thanks. Ah, you never bet, Adine, do you? But, really, pigeon-shooting’s very stupid if you don’t. Talking of bets, Colonel Rochfort, try and get ‘two monkeys’ for me on Tambour-Battant to-morrow, will you? I’ve been told a thing about his trainer; it will be quite safe, quite. As I was saying, dear, she never would speak to me about that poor little lost cherub. Was it not sad — terrible? Of course she will have plenty of others; but still, never to sorrow for it at all — so unnatural! Zouroff felt it much more; he has grown very nice, really very nice. Ah! that bird has got away; the Lords will lose I am afraid, after all. Ah, my dear Lesterel, how are you? What are they saying of my child in Paris?”
The Marquis de Lesterel, secretary of legation, bowed smiling.
“Madame la Princesse has turned the head of ‘tout Paris.’ It was too cruel of you, madame; had you not already done mischief enough to men that you must distract them with such loveliness in your daughter?”
“All that is charming, and goes for nothing,” said Lady Dolly good-humouredly. “I know Vera is handsome, but does she take? Est-ce qu’elle a du charme? That is much more.”
“But certainly!” rejoined the French marquis with much emphasis; “she is very cold, it is true, which leaves us all lamenting; and nothing, or very little at least, seems to interest her.”
“Precisely what I expected!” said Lady Dolly despairingly. “Then she has not du charmer Nobody has who is not amused easily and amused often.”
“Pardon!” said the marquis. “There is charme and charme. There is that of the easily accessible and of the inaccessible, of the rosebud and of the edelweiss.”
“Does she make many friends there?” she continued, pursuing her inquiries, curiosity masked as maternal instinct. “Many women-friends, I mean; I am so afraid Vera does not like women much, and there is nothing that looks so unamiable.”
“It would be impossible to suspect the Princess of unamiability,” said the marquis quickly. “One look at that serene and noble countenance” —
“Very nice, very pretty; but Vere can be unamiable,” said her mother tartly. “Do tell me, is t
here any woman she takes to at all? Anyone she seems to like much?”
(“Anybody she is likely to tell about me?” she was thinking in the apprehension of her heart.)
“Madame Nelaguine” — began the young man.
“Oh her sister-in-law!” said Lady Dolly. “Yes, I believe she does like that horrid woman. I always hated Nadine myself — such an ordering sharp creature, and such a tongue! Of course I know the Nelaguine is never out of their house; but is there anybody else?”
A little smile came on the face of the Parisian.
“The Princess is often with Madame de Sonnaz. Madame Jeanne admires her very much.”
Lady Dolly stared a minute, and then laughed; and Lady Stoat even smiled discreetly “I wonder what that is for” murmured Lady Dolly vaguely, and, in a whisper to Lady Stoat, she added, “She must mean mischief; she always means mischief; she took his marriage too quietly not to avenge herself.”
“People forget nowadays; I don’t think they revenge,” said Lady Stoat consolingly “When did you see my poor darling last?” asked Lady Dolly aloud.
“At three o’clock last night, madame, at the Elysée. She looked like a Greek poet’s dream draped by Worth.”
“How very imaginative!” said Lady Dolly, a little jealously. “How could poor dear Worth dress a dream? That would tax even his powers! I hope she goes down to Surennes and chats with him quietly; that is the only way to get him to give his mind to anything really good. But she never cares about that sort of thing; never!”
“The Princess Zouroff knows well,” said the Marquis de Lesterel, with some malice and more ardour, “that let her drape herself in what she might, were it sackcloth and ashes, she would be lovelier in it than any other woman ever was on earth — except her mother,” he added with a chivalrous bow.