by Ouida
“What a horrid thing it is to be anybody’s mother! and how old it makes one feel— ‘shunt’ it as one may!” thought Lady Dolly as she laughed and answered, “You are actually in love with her, marquis! Pray remember that I am her mother, and that she has not been married much more than a year. I am very delighted that she does please in Paris. It is her home, really her home. They will go to Petersburg once in ten years, but Paris will see them every year of their lives; Zouroff can be scarcely said to exist out of it. I am so very sorry the boy died; it just lived to breathe and be baptized, you know; named after the Tsar. So sad! — oh, so sad! Who is that shooting now? Regy? Ah-h-h? The bird is inside the palings, isn’t it? Oh! that is superb! Just inside! — only just!”
And Lady Dolly scribbled again in a tiny betting-book, bound in oxydised silver, that had cost fifty guineas in Bond Street.
Lady Dolly was very fond of betting. As she practised it, it was both simple and agreeable. She was always paid, and never paid.
The ladies who pursue the art on these simplified principles are numerous, and find it profitable.
When Colonel Rochfort, a handsome young man in the Rifles, tried the next day to get her five hundred “on,” at Newmarket, the Ring was prudent; it would take it in his name, not in hers.
But the men of her world could not be as prudent — and as rude — as the Ring was. Besides, Lady Dorothy Vanderdecken was still a very pretty woman, with charming little tricks of manner and a cultured sagacious coquetry that was hard to resist; and she was very good company too at a little dinner at the Orleans Club, when the nightingales sang, or tête-à-tête in her fan-lined octagon boudoir.
Lady Dolly did not see much of her daughter. Lady Dolly had taken seriously to London. London had got so much nicer, she said, so much less starchy; so much more amusing; it was quite wonderful how London had improved since polo and pigeon-shooting had opened its mind. Sundays were great fun in London now, and all that old nonsense about being so very particular had gone quite out. London people, the very best of them, always seemed, somehow or other — what should one say? — provincial, after Paris. Yes, provincial; but still London was very nice, and Lady Dorothy Vanderdecken was quite a great person in it; she had always managed so well that nobody ever had talked about her.
“It is so horrid to be talked about, you know,” she used to say; “and, after all, so silly to get talked about. You can do just as you like if you are only careful to do the right things at the right time and be seen about with the right people. I am always so angry with those stupid women that are compromised; it is quite too dreadfully foolish of them, because, you know, really, nobody need be. People are always nice if one is nice to them.”
So, from New Year to Midsummer she was in the house in Chesham Place, which she made quite charming with all sorts of old Italian things and the sombre and stately Cinque Cento, effectively, if barbarously, mixed up with all the extravagancies of modern upholstery.
Lady Dolly’s house, under the combination of millinery and mediævalism, was too perfect, everybody said; and she had a new friend in her Sicilian attached to the Italian Legation, who helped her a great deal with his good taste, and sent her things over from his grim old castles in the Taormina; and it was a new toy and amused her; and her fancy-dress frisks, and her musical breakfasts, were great successes; and, on the whole, Lady Dolly had grown very popular. As for Mr. Vanderdecken, he was always stingy and a bear, but he knew how to behave. He represented a remote and peaceful borough, which he had bought as his wife bought a poodle or a piece of pâte tendre; he snored decorously on the benches of St. Stephens, and went to ministerial dinners, and did other duties of a rich man’s life; and, for the rest of his time, was absorbed in those foreign speculations and gigantic loans which constituted his business, and took him to Java, or Japan, or Jupiter so often. He was large, ugly, solemn, but he did extremely well in his place, which was an unobtrusive one, like the great Japanese bonze who sat cross-legged in the hall. What he thought no one knew; he was as mute on the subject of his opinions as the bonze was. In the new order of fashionable marriage a silence that must never be broken is the part allotted to the husband; and the only part he is expected to take.
On the whole Lady Dolly was very contented. Now and then Jura would give her a sombre glance, or Zouroff a grim smile, that recalled a time to her when she had been on the very brink of the precipice, on the very edge of the outer darkness, and the recollection made her quite sick for the moment. But the qualm soon passed. She was quite safe now, and she had learned wisdom. She knew how to be “so naughty and so nice” in the way that society in London likes, and never punishes. She had been very silly sometimes, but she was never silly now, and meant to never be silly any more. She tempered roulette with ritualism, and always went to St. Margaret’s church in the morning of a Sunday, if she dined down at the Orleans or at old Skindle’s in the evening. She had had a great “scare,” and the peril and the fright of it had sobered her and shown her the way she should go.
For Lady Dolly was always careful of appearances; she had no patience with people who were not. “It is such very bad form to make people talk,” she would always say; “and it is so easy to stop their mouths.”
Lady Dolly liked to go to court, to be intimate with the best people, to dine at royal tables, and to “be in the swim” altogether. Everybody knew she was a naughty little woman, but she had never been on the debateable land; she had never been one of the “paniers à quinze sous;” she had never been coldly looked on by anybody. She had never let “Jack,” or anybody who preceded or succeeded “Jack,” get her into trouble. She liked to go everywhere, and she knew that, if people once begin to talk, you may very soon go nowhere.
She was not very wise in anything else, but she was very wise in knowing her own interests. Frightened and sobered, she had said to herself that it was a horrible thing to get any scandal about you; to fall out of society; to have to content yourself with third-rate drawing-rooms; to have to take your gaieties in obscure continental towns; to reign still, but only reign over a lot of shady dubious déclassé people, some with titles and some without, but all “nowhere” in the great race. It was a horrible thing; and she vowed to herself that never, never, never, should it be her fate.
So she took seriously to the big house in Chesham Place, and her religion became one of the prettiest trifles in all the town.
With her brougham full of hothouse flowers, going to the Childrens Hospital, or shutting herself up and wearing black all Holy Week, she was a most edifying study. She maintained some orphans at the Princess Mary’s pet home, and she was never absent if Stafford House had a new charitable craze. She did not go into extremes, for she had very good taste; but only said very innocently, “Oh, all these things are second nature to me, you know; you know my poor Vere was a clergyman.”
If she did sing naughty little songs after dinner on the lawn at the Orleans; if the Sicilian attaché were always rearranging pictures or tapestries in her drawing-rooms; if she did bet and lose and never pay; if she did go to fancy frisks in a few yards of gossamer and her jewels, nobody ever said anything, except that she was such a dear little woman. It is such a sensible thing to “pull yourself together” and be wise in time.
Lord Jura, who was leading his old life, with Lady Dolly left out of it, stupidly and joylessly, because he had got into the groove of it, and could not get out, and who had become gloomy, taciturn, and inclined to drink more than was good for him, used to watch the comedy of Lady Dolly’s better-ordered life with a cynical savage diversion. When he had come back from his Asiatic hunting tour, which had lasted eighteen months, he had met her as men and women do meet in society, no matter what tragedies divide or hatreds rage in them; but she had seen very well that “Jack” was lost to her for ever. She did not even try to get him back; and when she heard men say that Jura was not the good fellow he used to be, and played too high and drank too deep for the great name he bore, she was pl
eased, because he had had no earthly right to go off in that rough way, or say the things he had said.
“I never see very much of Jura now,” she would say to her friends. “He is become so very farouche since that eastern trip; perhaps some woman — I said so to his dear old father last week — poor Jack is so good and so weak, he is just the man to fall a prey to a bad woman.”
The ladies to whom she said this laughed a little amongst themselves when they had left her, but they liked her all the better for ridding herself of an old embarrassment so prettily; it formed a very good precedent. Jura of course said nothing, except to his very intimate friends, who rallied him. To them he said, “Well I went to India, you know, and she didn’t like it, and when I came back she had got the Sicilian fellow with her. So I don’t bore her any more; she is a dear little woman; yes.”
For honour makes a lie our social life’s chief necessity, and Jura, having thus lied for honour’s sake, would think of the Princess Zouroff in Paris, and swear round oaths to himself, and go upstairs where they were playing baccarat, and signing fortunes and estates away with the scrawl of a watch-chain’s pencil.
“I think I could have made her happy if it hadn’t been impossible,” he would think sometimes. “She would always have been miles beyond me, and no man that ever lived would have been good enough for her; but I think I could have made her happy; I would have served her and followed her like a dog — anyway, I would have been true to her, and kept my life decent and clean; not like that brute’s.”
Then he would curse Sergius Zouroff, as he went home alone down St. James’s Street in the grey fog of early morning, sick of pleasure, weary of play, dull with brandy, but not consoled by it; knowing that he might have been a better man, seeing the better ways too late; loathing the senseless routine of his life, but too listless to shake off habit and custom, and find out any different or higher life.
He was Earl of Jura; he had a vast inheritance; he had good health and good looks; he was sound in wind and limb; he had a fair share of intelligence, if his mind was slow; in a few years, when he should succeed to his father, he would have a thousand pounds a day as his income. Yet he had got as utterly into a groove that he hated as any ploughman that rises every day to tread the same fields behind the same cattle; and habit made him as powerless to get out of it as his poverty makes the ploughman.
“London is the first city in the world, they say,” he thought, as he went down St. James’s in the mists that made a summer morning cheerless as winter, and as colourless. “Well, it may be, for aught I know; but, damn it all, if I don’t think the Sioux in the big swamps, or the hill tribes in the Cashgar passes, are more like men than we are. And we are all so used to it, we never see what fools we are.”
CHAPTER IV.
One morning the young Duke of Mull and Cantire arrived in Paris, where he was seldom seen, and chanced to find his cousin alone in her morning room at the Hôtel Zouroff.
He was a good-looking young man, with a stupid honest face; he dressed shabbily and roughly, yet always looked like a gentleman. He had no talents, but, to compensate, he had no vices; he was very simple, very loyal, and very trustful. He was fond of Vere, and had been dismayed at the marriage so rapidly arranged; but he had seen her at St. Petersburg, and was deceived by her coldness and calm into thinking her consoled by ambition.
“I am about to marry too,” he said with a shamefaced laugh, a little while after his entrance. “I have asked her again and she says ‘Yes.’ I ran down to Paris to tell you this.”
Vere looked at him with dismay.
“You do not mean Fuschia Leach?” she said quickly.
The young duke nodded.
“She’s quite too awfully pretty, you know; a fellow can’t help it.”
“She is pretty, certainly.”
“Oh, hang it, Vere, that’s worse than abusing her. You hate her, I can see. Of course I know she isn’t our form, but — but — I am very fond of her; dreadfully fond of her; and you will see, in a year or two, how fast she will pick it all up—”
Vere sat silent.
She was deeply angered; her chief fault was pride, an incurable pride of birth with all its prejudices, strong as the prejudices of youth alone can be.
“Won’t you say something kind?” faltered her cousin.
“I cannot pretend what I do not feel,” she said coldly. “I think such a marriage a great unworthiness, a great disgrace. This — this — person is not a gentlewoman, and never will be one, and I think that you will repent giving your name to her — if you do ever give it.”
“I give it most certainly,” said the young lover hotly and sullenly; “and if you and I are to be friends, dear, in the future, you must welcome her as a friend too.”
“I shall not ever do that,” said Vere simply; but the words, though they were so calm, gave him a chill.
“I suppose you will turn the forests into coal-mines now?” she added, after a moments pause. The young man reddened.
“Poor grandmamma!” said Vere wistfully, and her eyes filled with tears.
The stern old woman loved her grand-children well, and had done her best by them, and all they were fated to bring her in her old age were pain and humiliation.
Would the old duchess ever force herself to touch the flower-like cheek of Fuschia Leach with a kiss of greeting? Never, thought Vere; never, never!
“When all is said and done,” muttered the young duke angrily, “what is the utmost you can bring against my poor love? That she is not our form? That she doesn’t talk in our way, but says ‘cunning’ where we say ‘nice’? Is that a great crime? She is exquisitely pretty. She is as clever as anything — a prince of the blood might be proud of her. She has a foot for Cinderella’s slipper. She never tried to catch me, not she; she sent me about my business twice; laughed at me because I wear such old hats; she’s as frank as sunlight! God bless her!”
“I think we will not speak of her,” said Vere coldly. “Of course you do as you please. I used to think Herbert of Mull a great name, but perhaps I was mistaken. I was only a child. I am almost glad it has ceased to be mine, since so soon she will own it. Will you not stay to dinner, Monsieur Zouroff will be most happy to see you?”
“I will see your husband before I leave Paris,” said the young man, a little moodily, “and I am very sorry you take it like that, Vere, because you and I were always good friends at old Buhner.”
“I think you will find that everyone will take it like that — who cares for you or your honour.”
“Honour! — Vere, I should be so sorry to quarrel. We won’t discuss this thing. It is no use.”
“No. It is no use.”
But she sighed as she spoke; it was a link the more added to the heavy chain that she dragged with her now. Everyone seemed failing her, and all old faiths seemed changing. He was the head of her family, and she knew his uprightness, his excellence, his stainless honour — and he was about to marry Fuschia Leach.
The visit of her cousin brought back to her, poignantly and freshly, the pain of the letter written to her on her own marriage from Bulmer. A great longing for that old innocent life, all dull and sombre though it had been, came on her as she sat in solitude after he had left her, and thought of the dark wet woods, the rough grey seas, the long gallops on forest ponies, the keen force of the north wind beating and bending the gnarled storm-shaven trees.
What she would have given to have been Vere Herbert once again! never to have known this weary, gilded, perfumed, decorated, restless and insincere world to which she had been sold!
“Really I don’t know what to say,” said Lady Dolly, when, in her turn, she heard the tidings in London. “No, really I don’t. Of course you ought to marry money, Frank; an immensity of money; and most of these Americans have such heaps. It is a very bad marriage for you, very; and yet she is so very much the fashion, I really don’t know what to say. And it will drive your grandmother wild, which will be delightful; and these Americ
an women always get on somehow; they have a way of getting on; I dare say she will be Mistress of the Robes some day, and all sorts of things. She is horribly bad form; you don’t mind me saying so, because you must see it for yourself. But then it goes down, and it pleases better than anything; so, after all, I am not sure that it matters. And, besides, she will change wonderfully when she is Duchess of Mull. All those wild little republicans get as starchy as possible once they get a European title. They are just like those scatter-brained princes in history, that turn out such stern good-goody sort of despots, when once the crown is on their heads. Really, I don’t know what to say. I knew quite well she meant to get you when she went to Stagholme this October after you. Oh, you thought it was accident, did you? How innocent of you, and how nice! You ought to have married more money; and it is horrible to have a wife who never had a grandfather; but still, I don’t know, she will make your place very lively, and she won’t let you wear old hats. Yes — yes — you might have done worse. You might have married out of a music-hall or a circus. Some of them do. And, after all, Fuschia Leach is a person everybody can know.”
The young lover did not feel much comforted by this form of congratulation, but it was the best that any of his own family and friends had given him, and Lady Dolly quite meant to be kind.
She was rather glad herself that the American would be Duchess of Mull. She had hated all the Herberts for many a long year, and she knew that, one and all, they would sooner have seen the young chief of their race in his grave. Lady Dolly felt that in large things and in little, Providence, after treating her very badly, was at last giving her her own way.
The young Duke of Mull a month later had his way, and married his brilliant Fuschia in the teeth of the stiffest opposition and blackest anathemas from his family. Not one of them deigned to be present at the ceremony of his sacrifice except his aunt, Lady Dorothy Vanderdecken, who said to her friends: —