by Ouida
Vere saw very well that if she stooped and touched the brink of vice — if she lent her ear to amorous compliment that veiled dishonour — if she brought herself to the level of the world she lived in, women would love her better, and her husband honour her none the less.
What would he care?
Perhaps he would not have accepted absolute dishonour, but all the temptations that led to it he let strew her path in all the various guises of the times.
That night there was a great costume ball at one of the legations. It had been talked of for months, and was to be the most brilliant thing of this kind that Paris had seen for many seasons. All the tailors of fashion, and all the famous painters of the day, had alike been pressed into the service of designing the most correct dresses of past epochs, and many dusty chronicles and miniatures in vellum in old chateaux in the country, and old libraries in the city, had been disturbed, to yield information and to decide disputes.
The Prince and Princess Zouroff were among the latest to arrive. He wore the dress of his ancestor in the time of Ivan 11, a mass of sables and of jewels. She, by a whim of his own, was called the Ice-spirit, and diamonds and rock crystals shone all over her from head to foot. Her entrance was the sensation of the evening; and as he heard the exclamations that awarded her the supreme place of beauty where half the loveliness of Europe had been assembled, that vanity of possession which is the basest side of passion revived in him, and made his sluggish pulses beat at once with the misers and the spendthrifts pleasure.
“Yes, you are right; she is really very beautiful,” whispered Jeanne de Sonnaz in his ear. “To represent Ice it is not necessarily to have chien.”
Zouroff frowned; he was never pleased with being reminded of things that he said himself.
The duchesse herself had chien enough for twenty women. She called herself a Sorceress, and was all in red, a brilliant, poppy-like, flame-like, Mephistophelian red, with her famous rubies, and many another jewel, winking like wicked little eyes all over her, while a narrow Venetian mask of black hid her ugliest features, and let her blazing eyes destroy their worlds.
As a pageant the great ball was gorgeous and beautiful; as a triumph few women ever knew one greater than that night was to Vere. Yet the hours were tiresome to her. When her eyes had once rested on the pretty picture that the splendid crowd composed, she would willingly have gone away. She felt what the easterns call an asp at her heart. The barrenness and loneliness of her life weighed on her; and it was not in her nature to find solace in levity and consolation in homage. Others might do so and did do so; she could not.
“Madame, what can you want to be content?” said an old wit to her. “You have rendered every man envious and every woman unhappy. Surely that is a paradise for you, from which you can look down smiling in scorn at our tears?”
Vere smiled, but not with scorn.
“I should be sorry to think I made anyone unhappy. As for my success, as you call it, they stare at the diamonds, I think. There are too many, perhaps.”
“Madame, no one looks at your diamonds,” said the old beau. “There are diamonds enough elsewhere in the rooms to cover an Indian temple. You are willfully cruel. But ice never moved yet for mortals.”
“Am I really ice?” thought Vere, as she sat amidst the changing groups that bent before her, and hung on her words. She did not care for any of them.
They found her unusually beautiful, and thronged around her. Another year it would be some one else; some one probably utterly unlike her. What was the worth of that?
There are tempers which turn restive before admiration, to which flattery is tiresome, and to which a stare seems impertinence. This was her temper, and the great world did not change it.
She moved slowly through the rooms with the roc’s egg gleaming above her breast, and all the lesser stones seeming to flash sun-rays from snow as she moved, while she held a fan of white ostrich feathers between her and her worshippers, and her train was upheld by two little De Sonnaz boys dressed as the pole star and the frost.
Her very silence, her defect usually to society, suited her beauty and her name that night; she seemed to have the stillness, the mystery, the ethereality of the Arctic night.
“One grows cold as you pass, madame,” whispered the great prince whom she had not answered that day; “cold with despair.”
She made him a deep curtsey. She scarcely heard. Her eyes had a misty brilliancy in them; she had forgotten his letter. She was wondering if her life would be always like this ball, a costly and empty pageant — and nothing more.
Into the crowd there came at that moment a Venetian figure with a lute. His clothes were copied from those of the famous fresco of Battista Zelotti; he looked like Giorgione living once more. Some great ladies, safe in the defence of their masks, were pelting him with blossoms and bon-bons. He was laughing, and defending himself with a gold caduceus that he had stolen from a friend who was a Mercury. He was surrounded by a maze of colours and flowers and white arms. He was hurrying onward, but a personage too great to be gainsaid or avoided called out to him as he passed: “My friend, what use is your lute since its chords are silent?”
“Monseigneur,” answered the Joueur-du-luth, “like the singer who bears it, it has a voice never dumb for you.”
They were in a long gallery away from the ball-room; the windows opened on the lamplit garden; the walls were tapestried; figures of archers and pages and ladies worked in all the bright fair colours of the Gobelin looms; there was a gilded estrade that opened on to a marble terrace, that in its turn led to lawns, cedar-circled, and with little fountains springing up in the light and shadow.
The Venetian lute-player moved a little backward, and leaned against the gild railing, with his back to the garden and the sky. He touched a chord or two, sweet and far-reaching, seeming to bring on their sigh all the sweet dead loves of the old dead ages. Then he sang to a wild melody that came from the Tchiganes, and that he had learnt round their camp-fires on Hungarian plains at night, while the troops of young horses had scoured by through the gloom, affrighted by the flame and song. He sang the short verse of Heine, that has all the woe of two lives in eight lines:
Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Norden auf kahler Hoh’:
Ihn schlafert; mit weisser Decke
Umhiillen ihn Eis und Schnee.
Er traumt von einer Palme,
Die fern im Morgenland
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennender Felsenwand.
As the first notes touched the air, Vere looked for the first time at the lute-player — she saw in him Corrèze. As for himself, he had seen her all night; had seen nothing else even while he had laughed, and jested, and paid his court to others.
He too had felt chill as she passed.
And he sang the song of Heine; of the love of the palm and the pine. The royal prince had, with his own hands, silently pushed a low chair towards Vere. She sat there and listened, with her face to the singer and the illumined night.
It was a picture of Venice.
The lute-player leaned against the golden balustrade; the silver of falling water and shining clouds were behind him; around against the hues of the Gobelins stood the groups of maskers, gorgeous and sombre as figures of the Renaissance. The distant music of the ballroom sounded like the echoes of a far-off chorus, and did not disturb the melody of the song, that hushed all laughter and all whispers, and held the idlest and the noisiest in its charm.
“Give us more, O nightingale;” said the great prince. “Son of Procris! I wish we were in the old times of tyranny that I could imprison you close to me all your life in a golden cage.”
“In a cage I should sing not a note, monseigneur. They are but bastard nightingales that sing imprisoned,” said Corrèze.
All the while he did not look at Vere directly once, yet he saw nothing except that fair, cold, grave face, and the cold lustre of the diamonds that were like light all over her.
“Is that reward, monseigneur? To be made to regret all ones life?” said Corrèze.
And where he still leaned against the rail, with the moonlit and lamplit gardens behind him, he struck a chord or two lingeringly on his lute as Stradella might have struck them under the shadow of St. Mark, and recited the “Nuit de Mai” of Alfred de Musset:
Poète, prends ton luth...
Le printemps naît ce soir...
The “Nuit d’Octobre” is more famous because it has been more often recited by great actors; but the “Nuit de Mai” is perhaps still finer, and is more true to the temper and the destiny of poets.
All the sweet intoxication of the spring-tide at evening, when “le vin de la jeunesse fermente cette nuit dans les veines de Dieu” is but the prelude to the terrible struggle that has its symbol in the bleeding bird dying before the empty ocean and the desert shore, having rent its breast and spent its blood in vain.
The superb peroration, which closes one of the noblest and most sustained flights of imagery that any poet of any nation has ever produced, rolled through the silence of the room in the magnificent melody of a voice, tuned alike by nature and by art to the highest expression of human feeling and of human eloquence.
Then his voice dropped low and stole, like a sigh of exhaustion, through the hush around him, in the answer of the poet; the answer that the heart of every artist gives soon or late to Fate.
O muse, spectre insatiable,
Ne m’en demande pas si long,
L’homme n’écrit rien sur le sable
A l’heure où passe l’aquilon.
J’ai vu le temps où ma jeunesse
Sur vos lèvres était sans cesse,
Prête à chanter comme un oiseau;
Mais j’ai souffert un dur martyre.
Et le moins que j’en pourrais dire,
Si je l’essayais sur ma lyre,
La briserait comme un roseau.
When the words sank into silence, the silence remained unbroken. The careless, the frivolous, the happy, the cynical, were all alike smitten into a sudden pain, a vague regret, and, for that passing moment, felt the pang the poet feels, always, till death comes to him.
Two great tears rolled down the cheeks of the loveliest woman there, and fell on the great diamonds. When the prince, who had shaded his eyes with his hand, looked up, the lute-player bowed low to him and glided through the crowd.
“And I was just about to present him to the Princess Zouroff,” said the royal personage, slightly annoyed and astonished. “Well, one must pardon his caprices, for we have no other like him; and perhaps his judgment is true. One who can move us like that should not, immediately on our emotion, speak to us as a mere mortal in compliment or commonplace. The artist, like the god, should dwell unseen sometimes. But I envy him if I forgive him.”
For he looked at the dimmed eyes of Vere.
CHAPTER V.
On the day following Corrèze left Paris to fulfil his London engagements; it was the beginning of May.
When his name disappeared from the announcements, and his person from the scenes of the Grand Opéra, then, and then alone, Vere began to realise all that those nights at the lyric theatre had been in her life.
When she ceased to hear that one perfect voice, the whole world seemed mute. Those few hours in each week had gone so far to solace her for the weariness, the haste, the barren magnificence, and the tiresome adulation of her world; had done so much to give her some glimpse of the ideal life, some echo of lost dreams, some strength to bear disillusion and disgust.
The utter absences of vanity in her made her incapable of dreaming that Corrèze avoided her because he remembered only too well. She fully thought he had forgotten her. What was a morning by the sea, with a child, in the over-full life of a man foremost in art and in pleasure, consecrated at once to the Muses and the world? She was quite sure he had forgotten her. Even as he had recited the “Nuit de Mai” his eyes had had no recognition in them. So she thought.
This error made her memory of him tender, innocent, and wistful as a memory of the dead, and softened away all alarm for her from the emotion that possessed her.
He was nothing to her — nothing — except a memory; and she was not even that to him.
Paris became very oppressive to her.
That summer Prince Zouroff, by Imperial command, returned to his estate in Russia, to complete the twelve months’ residence which had been commanded him.
They were surrounded by a large house party wherever they resided, and were never alone. Vere fulfilled the social duties of her high station with grace and courtesy, but he found her too cold and too negligent in society, and reproached her continually for some indifference to punctilio, some oblivion of precedence.
Neither her mind nor her heart was with these things. All of them seemed to her so trivial and so useless; she had been born with her mind and her heart both framed for greater force and richer interest than the pomp of etiquette and ceremonial, the victories of precedence and prestige.
They had made her a great lady, a woman of the world, a court beauty, but they could not destroy in her the temper of the studious and tender-hearted child who had read Greek with her dogs about her under the old trees of Buhner Chase. She had ceased to study because she was too weary, and she strove to steel and chill her heart because its tenderness could bring her no good; yet she could not change her nature. The world was always so little to her; her God and the truth were so much. She had been reared in the old fashion and she remained of it.
In the gorgeous routine of her life in Russia she always heard in memory the echo of the “Nuit de Mai.”
A great lassitude and hopelessness came over her, which there was no one to rouse and no one to dispel. Marriage could never bring her aught better than it brought her already — a luxurious and ornamented slavery; and maternity could bring her no consolation, for she knew very well that her children would be dealt with as tyrannically as was her life.
They remained that winter in Russia. The Duke and Duchesse de Sonnaz came there for a little time, and the Duchesse Jeanne wore out her silver skates at the midnight fetes upon the ice, a miracle of daring and agility, in her favorite crimson colours, with her sparkling and ugly face beaming under a hood of fur.
“Why does one never tire of you?” Zouroff muttered, as he waltzed with her over the Neva in one of the most gorgeous fêtes of the winter season.
Madame Jeanne laughed.
“Because I am ugly, perhaps, or because, as you said once, because, fai le talent de m’ encanailler. But then, so many have that.”
He said nothing, but as he felt her wheel and dart with the swiftness of a swallow, elastic and untiring as though her hips where swung on springs of steel, he thought to himself that it was because she never tired herself. “Elle se grise si bien” he said of her when he had resigned her to an officer of the guard, that night. To se griser with drink, or with play, or with folly, or with politics, is the talent of the moment that is most popular. To be temperate is to be stupid.
His wife, in her ermine folds, which clothed her as in snow from head to foot, and without any point of colour on her anywhere, with her grave proud eyes that looked like arctic stars, and her slow, silent, undulating movement, might have the admiration of the court and city, but had no charm for him. She was his own; he had paid a price for her that he at times begrudged, and she had humiliated him. In a sense she was a perpetual humiliation to him, for he was a man of intellect enough to know her moral worth, and to know that he had never been worthy to pass the threshold of her chamber, to touch the hem of her garment. At the bottom of his heart there was always a sullen reverence for her, an unwilling veneration for her sinlessness and her honour, which only alienated him farther f
rom her with each day.
“Why would you marry a young saint?” said his friend, the Duchesse Jeanne, always to him in derisive condolence.
Did he wish her a sinner instead? There were times when he almost felt that he did; when he almost felt that even at the price of his own loss he would like to see her head drop and her eyes droop under some consciousness of evil; would like to be able once to cast at her some bitter name of shame.
There were times when he almost hated her, hated her for the transparent purity of her regard, for the noble scorn of her nature, for the silence and the patience with which she endured his many outrages. “After all,” he thought to himself, “what right has she to be so far above us all? She gave herself to me for my rank, as the others gave themselves for my gold.”
That cold glittering winter passed like a pageant, and in the midst of it there came a sorrow to her that had in it something of remorse. The old Dowager Duchess at Bulmer died after a day’s illness; died in solitude, except for the faithful servants about her, and was buried under the weird bent oaks by the moors, by the northern sea. Vere lamented bitterly. “And she died without knowing the truth of me!” she thought with bitter pain; and there was no message of pardon, no sign of remembrance from the dead to console her. “We are an unforgiving race,” thought Vere, wearily. “I, too, cannot forgive. I can endure, but I cannot pardon.”
This loss, and the state of her own health, gave her reason and excuse for leaving the world a little while. She remained absent while her husband waltzed with the Duchesse Jeanne at Imperial balls and winter fetes, and gave suppers in the cafés of which the rooms were bowers of palms and roses, and the drinkers drank deep till the red sunrise.