by Ouida
“I hate the thing quite as much as they all do, but I can’t be ill-natured, and poor Frank feels it so; and, after all, you know, he might have married out of a music-hall or a circus. So many of them do.”
People said what a dear little amiable woman she was; so different from her daughter, and, on the whole, the marriage, with choral service at the Abbey and the breakfast at a monster hotel where Mrs. Leach had a whole half of the first floor, was a very magnificent affair, and was adorned with great names despite the ominous absence of the Herberts of Mull.
“I’m glad that girl put my monkey up about the coal, and made me whistle him back,” thought the brilliant Fuschia to herself as the choir sang her epithalamium. “It’s a whole suit and all the buttons on; after all, a duchess is always a four-horse concern when she’s an English one; and they do think it some pumpkins at home. I’m afraid the money’s whittled away a good deal, but we’ll dig for that coal before the year’s out. Duchess of Mull and Cantire! After all it’s a big thing, and sounds smart.”
And the bells, as they rang, seemed to her fancy to ring that and that only all over London. “Duchess of Mull! Duchess of Mull!”
It was a raw, dark, rainy day, in the middle of March, as unpleasant as London weather could possibly be; but the shining eyes of the lovely Fuschia, and her jewels, and her smiles, seemed to change the sooty, murky, mists to tropic sunshine.
“How will you quarter the arms, Frank?” whispered Lady Dolly, as she bade her nephew adieu. “A pig gules with a knife in its throat, and a bottle argent of pick-me-up? — how nice the new blazonries will look!”
But the young duke had no ears for her.
Very uselessly, but very feverishly, the obligation to call Fuschia Leach cousin irritated the Princess Zouroff into an unceasing pain and anger. To her own cousin on the marriage she sent a malachite cabinet and some grand jade vases, and there ended her acknowledgment of it. She was offended, and did not conceal it.
When the world who had adored Pick-me-up as a maiden, found Pick-me-up as Duchess of Mull and Cantire as adorable as another generation had found Georgina Duchess of Devonshire, Veres proud mouth smiled with ineffable contempt.
“What will you, my love?” said Madame Nelaguine. “She is frightfully vulgar, but it is a piquante vulgarity. It takes.”
Vere frowned and her lips set close.
“She has made him sink coal shafts in the forest already; our forest!”
Madame Nelaguine shrugged her shoulders.
“It is a pity, for the forests. But we dig for salt; it is cleaner, prettier, but I am not sure that is more princely, salt than coal.”
“No Herbert of Mull has ever done it,” said Vere with darkening flashing eyes. “Not one in all the centuries that we have been on the Northumbrian seaboard, for we were there in the days of Otterbourne and Flodden. No man of them would ever do it. Oh, if you had seen that forest! and soon now it will be a blackened, smoking, reeking treeless waste. It is shameful of my cousin Francis.”
“He is in love still, and does what she tells him. My dear, our sex is divided into two sorts of women — those who always get their own way and those who never get it. Pick-me-up, as they call your cousin’s wife in London, is of the fortunate first sort. She is vulgar, ignorant, audacious, uneducated, but she takes, and in her way she is maîtresse femme. You have a thousand times more mind, and ten thousand times more character, yet you do not get your own way; you never will get it.”
“I would have lived on beechmast and acorns from the forest trees sooner than have sunk a shaft under one of them,” said Vere unheeding, only thinking of the grand old glades, the deep, still greenery, the mossy haunts of buck and doe, the uplands and the yellow gorze, that were to be delivered over now to the smoke-fiend.
“That I quite believe,” said her sister-in-law. “But it is just that kind of sentiment in you which will for ever prevent your having influence. You are too lofty; you do not stoop and see the threads in the dust that guide men.”
“For thirteen centuries the forest has been untouched,” answered Vere.
It was an outrage she could not forgive.
When she first met the Duchess of Mull after her marriage, Fuschia Leach, translated into Her Grace, said across a drawing-room, “Vera, I am going to dig for that coal. I guess we’ll live to make a pile that way.” Vere deigned to give no answer, unless a quick, angry flush, and the instant turning of her back on the new duchess could be called one. The young duke sat between them, awed, awkward, and ashamed.
“I will never forgive it,” his cousin said to him later. “I will never forgive it. She knows no better because she was born so — but you!”
He muttered a commonplace about waste of mineral wealth, and felt a poor creature.
“I think you’re quite right to dig,” said Lady Dolly in his ear to console him. “Quite right to dig; why not? I dare say your wife will make your fortune, and I am sure she ought if she can, to compensate for her papa, who helps people to ‘liquor up,’ and her brothers, who are in the pig-killing trade, pig-killing by machinery; I’ve seen a picture of it in the papers; the pigs go down a gangway, as we do on to the Channel steamers, and they come up hams and sausages. Won’t you have the pig-killers over? They would be quite dans le métier at Hurlingham. Of course she tells you to dig, and you do it. Good husbands always do what they’re told.”
For Lady Dolly detested all the Herberts, and had no mercy whatever on any one of them; and, in her way, she was a haughty little woman, and though she was shrewd enough to see that in her day aristocracy to be popular must pretend to be democratic, she did not relish any more than any other member of that great family, the connection of its head with the pig-killing brothers down west.
Yet, on the whole, she made herself pleasant to the new duchess, discerning that the lovely Fuschia possessed in reserve an immense retaliating power of being “nasty” were she displeased, so that sensible Lady Dolly even went the length of doing what all the rest of the Mull family flatly refused to do — she presented her niece “on her marriage.”
And Her Grace, who, on her first girlish presentation, when she had first come over “the pickle-field,” had confessed herself “flustered,” was, on this second occasion perfectly equal to it; carrying her feathers as if she had been born with them on her head, and bending her bright cheeks over a bouquet in such a manner that all London dropped at her feet. “If Sam and Saul could see me,” thought the American beauty, hiding a grin with her roses; her memory reverting to the big brothers, at that moment standing above a great tank of pigs’ blood, counting the “dead ‘uns” as they were cast in the caldrons.
“It is so very extraordinary. I suppose it is because she is so dreadfully odd,” said Lady Dolly of her daughter to Lady Stoat that spring, on her return from spending Easter in Paris. “But when we think she has everything she can possibly wish for, that when she goes down the Bois really nobody else is looked at, that he has actually bought the Roc’s egg for her — really, really, it is flying in the face of Providence for her not to be happier than she is. I am sure if at her age I might have spent ten thousand pounds a season on my gowns, I should have been in heaven if they had married me to a Caffre.”
“I never think you did your dear child justice,” said Lady Stoat gently. “No, I must say you never did. She is very steadfast, you know, and quite out of the common, and not in the least vulgar. Now, if you won’t mind me saying it, — because I am sure you do enjoy yourself, but then you are such a dear, enjouée, good-natured little creature that you accommodate yourself to anything — to enjoy the present generation one must be a little vulgar. I am an old woman, you know, and look on and see things, and the whole note of this thing is vulgar even when it is at its very best. It has been so ever since the Second Empire.”
“The dear Second Empire; you never were just to it,” said Lady Dolly, with the tears almost rising to her eyes at the thought of all she had used to enjoy in it.
> “It was the apotheosis of the vulgar; of the sort of blague and shamelessness which made De Morny put an Hortensia on his carriage panels,” said Lady Stoat calmly. “To have that sort of epoch in an age is like having skunk fur on your clothes; the taint never goes away, and it even gets on to your lace and your cachemires. I am afraid our grand-children will smell the Second Empire far away into the twentieth century, and be the worse for it.”
“I daresay there will have been a Fourth and a Fifth by then.”
“Collapsed windbags, I dare say. The richest soil always bears the rankest mushrooms. France is always bearing mushrooms. It is a pity. But what I meant was that your Vere has not got the taint of it at all; I fancy she scarcely cares at all about that famous diamond unless it be for its historical associations. I am quite sure she doesn’t enjoy being stared at; and I think she very heartily dislikes having her beauty written about in newspapers, as if she were a mare of Lord Falmouth’s or a cow of Lady Pigott’s; she is not Second Empire, that’s ah.”
“Then you mean to say I am vulgar!” said Lady Dolly, with some tartness.
Lady Stoat smiled, a deprecating smile, that disarmed all sufferers, who without it might have resented her honeyed cruelties.
“My dear! I never say rude things; but, if you wish me to be sincere, I confess I think everybody is a little vulgar now, except old women like me, who adhered to the Faubourg while you all were dancing and changing your dresses seven times a day at St. Cloud. There is a sort of vulgarity in the air; it is difficult to escape imbibing it; there is too little reticence, there is too much tearing about; men are not well-mannered, and women are too solicitous to please, and too indifferent how far they stoop in pleasing. It may be the fault of steam; it may be the fault of smoking; it may come from that flood of new people of whom ‘L’Etrangère,’ is the scarcely exaggerated sample; but, whatever it comes from, there it is — a vulgarity that taints everything, courts and cabinets as well as society. Your daughter somehow or other has escaped it, and so you find her odd, and the world thinks her stiff. She is neither; but no dignified long-descended point-lace, you know, will ever let itself be twisted and whirled into a cascade and a fouillis like your Bretonne lace that is just the fashion of the hour, and worth nothing. I admire your Vera very greatly; she always makes me think of those dear old stately hotels with their grand gardens in which I saw, in my girlhood, the women, who, in theirs, had known France before’30. Those hotels and their gardens are gone, most of them, and there are stucco and gilt paint in their places. And there are people who think that a gain. I am not one of them.”
“My sweetest Adine,” said Veres mother pettishly, “if you admire my child so much, why did you persuade her to marry Sergius Zouroff?”
“To please you, dear,” said Lady Stoat with a glance that cowed Lady Dolly. “I thought she would adorn the position; she does adorn it. It is good to see a gentlewoman of the old type in a high place, especially when she is young. When we are older, they don’t listen much; they throw against us the laudator temporis actif — they think we are disappointed or embittered. It is good to see a young woman to whom men still have to bow, as they bow to queens, and before whom they do not dare to talk the langue verte. She ought to have a great deal of influence.”
“She has none; none whatever. She never will have any,” said Lady Dolly, with a sort of triumph, and added, with the sagacity that sometimes shines out in silly people— “You never influence people if you don’t like the things they like; you always look what the boys call a prig. Women hate Vere, perfectly hate her, and yet I am quite sure she never did anything to any one of them; for, in her cold way, she is very good-natured. But then she spoils her kind things; the way she does them annoys people. Last winter, while she was at Nice, Olga Zwetchine — you know her, the handsome one, her husband was in the embassy over here some time ago — utterly ruined herself at play, pledged everything she possessed, and was desperate; she had borrowed heaven knows what, and lost it all. She went and told Vera. Vera gave her a heap of money sans se faire prier, and then ran her pen through the Zwetchine’s name on her visiting list. Zouroff was furious. ‘Let the woman be ruined,’ he said, ‘what was it to you; but go on receiving her; she is an ex-ambassadress; she will hate you all your life.’ Now what do you call that?”
“My friends of the old Faubourg would have done the same,” said Lady Stoat, “only they would have done it without giving the money.”
“I can’t imagine why she did give it,” said lady Dolly. “I believe she would give to anybody — to Noisette herself, if the creature were in want.”
“She probably knows nothing at all about Noisette.”
“Oh yes, she does. For the Zwetchine, as soon as she had got the money safe, wrote all about that woman to her, and every other horrid thing she could think of too, to show her gratitude, she said. Gratitude is always such an unpleasant quality, you know; there is always a grudge behind it.”
“And what did she say, or do about Noisette?”
“Nothing; nothing at all. I should never have heard of it, only she tore the Zwetchine letters up, and her maid collected them and pieced them together, and told my maid; you know what maids are. I never have any confidence from Vera. I should never dare to say a syllable to her.”
“Very wise of her; very dignified, not to make a scene. So unlike people now-a-days, too, when they all seem to think it a positive pleasure to get into the law-courts and newspapers.”
“No; she didn’t do anything. And now I come to think of it,” said Lady Dolly, with a sudden inspiration towards truthfulness, “she struck off the Zwetchine’s name after that letter, very likely; and I dare say she never told Zouroff she had had it, for she is very proud, and very silent, dreadfully so.”
“She seems to me very sensible,” said Lady Stoat. “I wish my Gwendolen were like her. It is all I can do to keep her from rushing to the lawyers about Birk.”
“Vera is ice,” said Lady Dolly.
“And how desirable that is; how safe!” said Lady Stoat, with a sigh of envy and self-pity, for her daughter, Lady Birkenhead, gave her trouble despite the perfect education that daughter had received.
“Certainly safe, so long as it lasts, but not at all popular,” said Lady Dolly, with some impatience. “They call her the Edelweiss in Paris. Of course it means that she is quite inaccessible. If she were inaccessible in the right way, it might all be very well, though the time’s gone by for it, and its always stiff, and nobody is stiff now-a-days; still, it might answer if she were only exclusive and not — not — so very rude all around.”
“She is never rude; she is cold.”
“It comes to the same thing,” said Lady Dolly, who hated to be contradicted. “Everybody sees that they bore her, and people hate you if they think they bore you; it isn’t that they care about you, but they fancy you find them stupid. Now, isn’t the most popular woman in all Europe that creature I detest, Fuschia Mull? Will you tell me anybody so praised, so petted, so sought after, so raved about? Because she’s a duchess? O, my love, no! You may be a duchess, and you may be a nobody outside your own county, just as that horrid old cat up at Bulmer has always been. Oh, that has nothing to do with it. She is so popular because everybody delights her, and everything is fun to her. She’s as sharp as a needle, but she’s as gay as a lark. I hate her, but you can’t be dull where she is. You know the prince always calls her ‘Pick-me-up.’ At that fancy fair for the poor Wallacks — whoever the poor Wallacks may be — the whole world was there. Vera had a stall, she loaded it with beautiful things, things much too good, and sat by it, looking like a very grand portrait of Mignards. She was superb, exquisite, and she had a bower of orchids, and a carved ivory chair from Hindostan. People flocked up by the hundreds, called out about her beauty, and — went away. She looked so still, so tired, so contemptuous. A very little way off was Fuschia Mull, selling vile tea and tea-cakes, and two-penny cigarettes. My dear, the whole world surged round tha
t stall as if it were mad. Certainly she had a lovely Louis Treize hat on, and a delicious dress, gold brocade with a violet velvet long waistcoat. Her execrable tea sold for a sovereign a cup, and when she kissed her cigarettes they went for five pounds each! Zouroff went up and told his wife: ‘A brioche there fetches more than your Saxe, and your Sèvres, and your orchids,’ he said. ‘You don’t tempt the people, you frighten them.’ Then Vera looked at him with that way — she has such a freezing way — and only said: ‘Would you wish me to kiss the orchids?’ Zouroff laughed. ‘Well, no; you don’t do for this thing, I see; you don’t know how to make yourself cheap.’ Now I think he hit exactly on what I mean. To be liked now-a-days you must make yourself cheap. If you want to sell your cigar you must kiss it.”
“But suppose she has no cigars she wants to sell?”
“You mean she has a great position, and need care for nobody? That is all very well. But if she ever come to grief, see how they will turn and take it out of her!”
“I never said she was wise not to be polite,” pleaded Lady Stoat. “But as to ‘coming to grief,’ as you say, that is impossible. She will always sit in that ivory chair.”
“I dare say; but one never knows, and she is odd. If any day she get very angry with Zouroff, she is the sort of temper to go out of his house in her shift, and leave everything behind her.”
“What a picture!” said Lady Stoat, with a shudder. Nothing appalled Lady Stoat like the idea of anyone being wrought upon to do anything violent. She would never admit that there could be any reason for it, or excuse.
She had been an admirable wife to a bad husband herself, and she could not conceive any woman not considering her position before all such pettier matters as emotions and wrongs.
When her daughter, who was of an impetuous disposition, which even the perfect training she had received had not subdued, would come to her in rage and tears because of the drunkenness or because of the open infidelities of the titled Tony Lumpkin that she had wedded, Lady Stoat soothed her, but hardly sympathised. “Lead your own life, my love, and don’t worry,” she would say. “Nothing can unmake your position, and no one, except yourself.” When her daughter passionately protested that position was not all that a woman wanted at twenty years old and with a heart not all trained out of her, Lady Stoat would feel seriously annoyed and injured. “You forget your position,” she would reply “Pray, pray do not jeopardise your position. Let your husband go to music-halls and creatures if he must; it is very sad, certainly, very sad. But it only hurts him; it cannot affect your position.” Farther than that the light she possessed could not take her.