Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  There was beauty in it, as there were those flowers blooming in that common street. The little picture of the father and daughter, serene and joyous in their humble chamber, in the midst of the gay, wild, ferocious riot of Paris, seemed like a little root of daisies blooming white amidst a battle-field.

  That night she went to her box at the Grand Opéra, and sat as far in the shadow as she could and listened to Corrèze in the part of Gennaro.

  “He does not forget that blind man,” she thought. “Does he ever remember me?”

  For she could never tell.

  From the time she had entered Paris she had longed, yet dreaded to meet, face to face, Corrèze.

  She saw him constantly in the street, in the Bois, in society, but he never approached her; she never once could be even sure that he recognised or remembered her. She heard people say that Corrèze was more difficult of access, more disinclined to accept the worship of society, than he had been before, but she could not tell what his motive might be; she could not believe that she had any share in his thoughts. His eyes never once met hers but what they glanced away again rapidly, and without any gleam of recognition. Again and again in those great salons where he was a petted idol, she was close beside him, but she could never tell that he remembered her. Perhaps his life was so full, she thought; after all, what was one summer morning that he should cherish its memory?

  Often in the conversations that went on around her, she heard his successes, his inconstancies, his passions of the past, slight or great, alluded to, laughed over, or begrudged. Often, also, she heard of other things; of some great generosity to a rival, some great aid to an aspirant of his art, some magnificent gift to a college made by the famous singer. Or, on the other hand, of some captiousness as of a too spoilt child, some wayward caprice shown to the powers of the State by the powers of genius, some brilliant lavishness of entertainment or of fancy. When she heard these things her heart would beat, her colour would change; they hurt her, she could not have told why.

  Meantime that one solace of her life was to see his genius and its triumphs, its plenitude and its perfect flower. Her box at the Grand Opéra was the only one of the privileges of her position which gave her pleasure. Her knowledge of music was deep and had been carefully cultured, and her well-known love for it made her devotion to the opera pass unremarked. Seldom could the many engagements made for her let her hear any one opera from its overture to its close. But few nights passed without her being in her place, sitting as far in the shadow as she could, to hear at least one act or more of “Fidelio,” of “Lucia,” of the “Prophète,” of the “Zauberflôte,” of “Faust,” or of the “11 Trovatore.” She never knew or guessed that the singer watched for her fair-haired head amidst the crowded house, as a lover watches for the rising of the evening planet that shall light him to his love.

  She saw him in the distance a dozen times a week, she saw him, not seldom, at the receptions of great houses, but she never was near enough to him to be sure whether he had really forgotten her, or whether he had only affected oblivion.

  Corrèze, for his own part, avoided society as much as he could, and alleged that to sing twice or three times a week was as much as his strength would allow him to do, if he wished to be honest and give his best to his impresario. But he was too popular, too much missed when absent, and too great a favourite with great ladies to find retirement in the midst of Paris possible. So that, again and again, it was his fortune to see the child he had sung to on the Norman cliffs announced to the titled crowds as Madame la Princesse Zouroff. It always hurt him. On the other hand he was always glad when, half-hidden behind some huge fan or gigantic bouquet, he could see the fair head of Vere in the opera-house.

  When he sang, he sang to her.

  “How is it you do not know Princess Vera?” said many of his friends to him; for he never asked to be presented to her.

  “I think she would not care to know an artist,” he would say. “Why should she? She is at the height of fame and fortune, and charm and beauty; what would she want with the homage of a singing-mime? She is very exquisite; but you know I have my pride; la probité des pauvres, et la grandeur des rois; I never risk a rebuff.”

  And he said it so lightly that his friends believed him, and believed that he had a fit of that reserve which very often made him haughtier and more difficult to persuade than any Roi Soleil of the lyric stage had ever been.

  “I am very shy,” he would say sometimes, and everybody would laugh at him. Yet, in a way, it was true; he had many sensitive fancies, and all in his temperament that was tender, spiritual, and romantic had centred itself in that innocent emotion which had never been love, which was as fantastic as Dantes, and almost as baseless as Keats’s, and was therefore all the more dear to him because so unlike the too easy and too material passions which had been his portion in youth.

  “It can do her no harm,” he would think, “and it goes with me like the angel that the poets write of, that keeps the door of the soul.”

  It was a phantasy, he told himself, but then the natural food of artists was phantasies of all kinds; and so this tenderness, this regret, went with him always through the gay motley of his changeful days, as the golden curl of some lost love, or some dead child, may lie next the heart of a man all the while that he laughs and talks, and dines, and drives, and jests, and yawns in the midst of the world.

  “It can do her no harm,” he said, and so he never let his eyes meet hers, and she could never tell whether he ever remembered that Vera Zouroff had once been Vere Herbert.

  And the weeks and the months rolled on their course, and Corrèze was always the Roi Soleil of his time, and Vere became yet of greater beauty, as her face and form reached their full perfection. Her portraits by great painters, her busts by great sculptors, her costumes by great artists, were the themes of the public press; the streets were filled to see her go by in the pleasure-capital of the world; amongst her diamonds the famous jewel of tragic memories and historic repute that was called the roc’s egg shone on her white breast as if she had plucked a planet from the skies. No day passed but fresh treasures in old jewels, old wares, old gold and silver from the sales of the Hôtel Drouot, were poured into her rooms with all the delicate charm about them that comes from history and tradition. Had she any whim, she could indulge it; any taste, she could gratify it; any fancy, she could execute it; and yet one day when she saw a picture in the Salon of a slave-girl standing with rope-bound wrists and fettered ankles, amidst the lustrous stuffs and gems of the harem, surrounded by the open coffers and glittering stones and chains of gold in which her captors were about to array her nude and trembling limbs, she looked long at it, and said to the master of oriental art who had painted it, “Did you need to go to the East for that?”

  She bought the picture, and had it hung in her bed-chamber in Paris; where it looked strange and startling against the pink taffetas, and the silver embroideries of the wall.

  “That is not in your usual good taste,” said her husband, finding that the painting ill agreed with the decorations of the room.

  Vere looked at him, and answered: “It suits any one of my rooms.”

  He did not think enough of the matter to understand; the picture hung there amidst the silver Cupids, and the embroidered apple-blossoms of the wall.

  “A painful picture, a horrible picture, like all Gérôme’s,” said her mother before it once.

  A very cold smile came on Veres mouth.

  “Yes,” she said simply, “we have no degradation like that in Europe, have we?”

  Lady Dolly coloured, turned away, and asked if Fantin had designed those charming wreaths of apple-blossoms and amorini.

  But it was very seldom that the bitterness, and scorn, and shame, that were in her found any such expression as in the purchase of the “Slave of the Harem.” She was almost always quite tranquil, and very patient under the heavy burden of her days.

  All the bitterness and humiliation of her he
art she choked down into silence, and she continued to live as she had done hitherto, without sympathy and in an utter mental isolation. She felt that all she had been taught to respect was ridiculous in the eyes of those who surrounded her; she saw all that she had been accustomed to hold in horror as sin made subject for jest and for intrigue; she saw that all around her, whilst too polite to deride the belief and the principles that guided her, yet regarded them as the cobwebs and chimeræ of childhood; she saw that the women of her world, though they clung to priests, and in a way, feared an offended heaven — when they recollected it — yet were as absolutely without moral fibre and mental cleanliness as any naked creatures of Pacific isles sacrificing to their obscene gods. All that she saw; but it did not change her.

  She was faithful, not because his merit claimed it, but because her duty made such faith the only purity left to her. She was loyal, not because his falseness was ever worthy of it, but because her nature would not let her be other than loyal to the meanest thing that lived.

  Chastity was to her as honour to the gentleman, as courage to the soldier. It was not a robe embroidered and worn for mere parade, and therefore easy to be lifted in the dark by the first audacious hand that ruffled it.

  “On se console toujours, we know,” her sister-in-law thought, who watched her keenly. “Still, there is an exception now and then to that rule as to any other, and she is one of those exceptions. It is strange, generally the great world is like æther, or any other dram-drinking; tasted once, it is sought for more and more eagerly every time, and ends in becoming an indispensable intoxication. But nothing intoxicates her, and so nothing consoles her. I believe she does not care in the least for being one of the very few perfectly lovely women in Europe. I believe her beauty is almost distasteful and despicable to her, because it brought about her bondage; and although it is an exaggerated way of looking at such things, she is right; she was bought, quite as barbarously as Gérôme’s slave. Only were she anybody else she would be reconciled by now — or be revenged. The only time I ever see her look in the least happy is at the opera, and there she seems as if she were dreaming; and once, at Svir, when we were driving over the plains in the snow, and they said the wolves were behind us — then she looked for the moment all brilliancy and courage; one would have said she was willing to feel the wolves’ breath on her throat. But in the world she is never like that. What other women find excitement to her is monotony. Pleasure does not please her, vanity does not exist in her, and intrigue does not attract her; some day love will.”

  And then Madame Nelaguine would pull the little curls of her perruque angrily and light her cigar, and sit down to the piano and compose her nerves with Chopin.

  “As for Sergius he deserves nothing,” she would mutter, as she followed the dreamy intricate melodies of the great master.

  But then it was not for her to admit that to anyone, and much less was it for her to admit it to his wife. Like most great ladies, she thought little of a sin, but she had a keen horror of a scandal, and she was afraid of the future, very afraid of it.

  “If she were not a pearl what vengeance she would take!” she thought again and again, when the excesses and indecencies of her brother’s career reached her ears.

  For she forgot that she understood those as the one most outraged by them was very slow to do.

  Vere still dwelt within the citadel of her own innocence, as within the ivory walls of an enchanted fortress. Little by little the corruption of life flowed in to her and surrounded her like a foetid moat, but, though it approached her it did not touch her, and often she did not even know that it was near. What she did perceive filled her with a great disgust, and her husband laughed at her.

  In these short months of her life in Paris she felt as though she had lived through centuries. Ten years in the old grey solitude of Bulmer would not have aged her morally and mentally as these brief months of the riot of society had done. She had drunk of the cup of knowledge of good and evil, and, though she had drunk with sinless lips, she could not entirely escape the poison the cup held.

  She hated the sin of the world, she hated the sensuality, the intrigue, the folly, the insincerity, the callousness of the life of society, yet the knowledge of it was always with her like a bitter taste in the mouth.

  It hurt her unceasingly; it aged her like the passing of many years.

  In the beginning of the time she had tried to get some threads of guidance, some words of counsel, from the man who was her husband, and who knew the world so well. The answers of Sergius Zouroff left her with a heavier heart and a more bitter taste. The chill cynicism, the brutal grossness, of his experiences tore and hurt the delicate fibres of her moral being, as the poisons and the knife of the vivisector tear and burn the sensitive nerves of the living organism that they mutilate.

  He did not intend to hurt her, but it seemed to him that her ignorance made her ridiculous. He pulled down the veils and mufflers in which the vices of society mask themselves, and was amused to see her shrink from the nude deformity.

  His rough, bold temper had only one weakness in it; he had a nervous dread of being made to look absurd. He thought the innocence and coldness of Vere made him look so.

  “They will take me for a mari amoureux,” he thought; and Madame de Sonnaz laughed, and told him the same thing fifty times a week. He began to grow impatient of his wife’s unconsciousness of all that went on around her, and enlightened her without scruple.

  He sat by her, and laughed at Judic and at Theo, and was angry with her that she looked grave and did not laugh; he threw the last new sensation in realistic literature on to her table, and bade her read it, or she would look like a fool when others talked. When a royal prince praised her too warmly, and she resented it, he was annoyed with her. “You do not know how to take the world,” he said impatiently. “It is myself that you make ridiculous; I do not aspire to be thought the jealous husband of the theatres, running about with a candle and crying aux voleurs!”

  When she came to know of the vices of certain great ladies who led the fashion and the world, she asked him if what was said were true.

  He laughed.

  “Quite true, and a great deal that is never said, and that is worse, is as true too.”

  “And you wish me to know them? to be friends with them?” she asked in her ignorance.

  He swore a little, and gave her a contemptuous caress, as to a dog that is importuning.

  “Know them? Of course; you must always know them. They are the leaders of society. What is their life to you or anybody? It is their husbands’ affair. You must be careful as to womens position, but you need not trouble yourself about their character.”

  “Then nothing that anyone does, matters?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “It depends on how the world takes it. You have a proverb in English about the man who may steal a horse and the man who must not look at the halter. The world is very capricious; it often says nothing to the horse-stealer, it often pillories the person that looks at the halter. You are not in it to redress its caprices. All you need be careful about is to know the right persons.”

  “The people that may steal the horses?” said Vere with the faint, fine smile that had no mirth in it, and was too old for her years; the smile that alone had ever come on her lips since her marriage.

  “The people that may steal the horses,” said Zouroff with a short laugh, not heeding her smile nor what seed his advice might sow.

  When he had left her that day she went into her bed-chamber and sat down before Gerôme’s “Slave of the Harem.”

  “The men of the east are better than these,” she thought. “The men of the east do veil their women and guard them.”

  What could he say, what reproach could he make, if she learned her lesson from his teaching, and learned it too well for his honour?

  A note was lying on her table from a great prince whom all the world of women loved to praise, and languished to be praised by; a note written by
himself, the first initiatory phrases of an adoration that only asked one smile from her to become passion. Such power of vengeance lay for her in it as there lies power of destruction in the slender, jewel-like head of the snake.

  She only had to write a word — name an hour — and Sergius Zouroff would taste the fruit of his counsels.

  The thought, which was not temptation because it was too cold, glided into her mind, and, for the moment, looked almost sweet to her because it seemed so just — that sad, wild justice which is all that any revenge can be at its best.

  She took the note and let it lie on her lap; the note that compromised a future king. She felt as if all her youth were dying in her; as if she were growing hard, and cruel, and soulless. What use were honour, and cleanliness, and dignity? Her husband laughed at them; the world laughed at them. Nothing mattered. No one cared.

  The voice of one of her maids roused her, asking, “Is there any answer from Madame to Monseigneur?”

  Vere lifted her eyes, like one who wakes from a feverish sleep. She pushed her hair back with a quick gesture and rose.

  “No; none,” she answered curtly; and she took the note, and lighted a match, and burned it.

  The slight cold smile came on her face.

  “After all,” she thought, “there is no merit in virtue, when sin would disgust one. I suppose the world is right to be capricious in its award. Since it is only a matter of temperament it is nothing very great to be guiltless. If one like one’s soul clean, like one’s hands, it is only a question of personal taste. There is no right and no wrong — so they say.”

  And her eyes filled, and her heart was heavy; for, to the young and noble, there is no desert so dreary to traverse as the vast waste of the world’s indifference. They would be strong to combat, they would be brave to resist, but in that sickly sea of sand they can only faint and sink and cease to struggle.

  It is harder to keep true to high laws and pure instincts in modern society than it was in days of martyrdom. There is nothing in the whole range of life so dispiriting and so unnerving as a monotony of indifference. Active persecution and fierce chastisement are tonics to the nerves; but the mere weary conviction that no one cares, that no one notices, that there is no humanity that honours, and no deity that pities, is more destructive of all higher effort than any conflict with tyranny or with barbarism.