Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  She remained in solitude in the vast, luxurious, carefully heated palace of the Zouroff princes, where never a breath of cold air penetrated. Her health suffered from that imprisonment in a hot-house, which was as unnatural to her as it would have been to one of the young oak trees of Bulmer Chase, or to one of its moor-born forest does.

  Another child was born to her, and born dead; a frail, pale, little corpse, that never saw the light of the world. She was long ill, and even the tediousness and exhaustion of lengthened weakness were welcome to her since they released her from the court, from society, and from her husband.

  When she was at length strong enough to breathe the outer air, the ice was broken up on the Neva, and even in Russia trees were budding, and grass pushing up its slender spears through the earth.

  The Duchesse de Sonnaz had long before returned to Paris, and Prince Zouroff had gone there for business. By telegram he ordered his wife to join him as soon as she was able, and she also travelled there with Madame Nelaguine when all the lilac was coming into blossom in the Tuileries and the Luxembourg gardens, and behind the Hôtel Zouroff in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne.

  A year had gone by; she had never seen the face of Corrèze.

  She had learned in midwinter by the public voice that he had refused all engagements in Russia, giving as the plea the injury to his throat from the climate in past seasons. She had seen by the public press that he had been singing in Madrid and Vienna, had been to Rome for his pleasure, and for months had been, as of old, the idol of Paris.

  As she entered the city it was of him once more that she thought.

  A flush of reviving life came into the paleness of her cheek, and a throb of eager expectation to her pulses as she thought that once more in the opera-house she would hear that perfect melody of the tones which had chanted the “Nuit de Mai.” It was May now, she remembered, and it was also night with her, one long dark hopeless night.

  “Voila la belle Princesse!” said a work-girl with a sigh of envy, as she chanced to stand by the great gilded gates of the Hôtel Zouroff, as Vere went through them in her carriage, lying back on the cushions of it with what was the lassitude of physical and mental fatigue, but to the work-girl looked like the haughty indolence and languor of a great lady. She was more beautiful than she had ever been, but she looked much older than she was; her youth was frozen in her, the ice seemed in her veins, in her brain, in her heart.

  Prince Zouroff met her at the foot of the staircase. He had been in Paris two months.

  “I hope you are not too tired?” he said politely, and gave her his arm to ascend the stairs. “You look terribly white,” he added, when they were alone, and had reached the drawing-room. “You will really have to rouge, believe me.”

  Then, as if remembering a duty, he kissed her carelessly.

  “I hope you will feel well enough to go to Orloff’s to-night,” he added; “I have promised that you will, and Worth tells me that he has sent you some new miracle expressly for it. The party is made for the Grand Duke, you know.”

  “I dare say I shall be well enough,” Vere answered him simply. “If you will excuse me, I will go to my room and lie down a little while.”

  She went to her bedchamber where the “Slave” of Gérôme hung on the wall.

  “All these came this morning and yesterday for madame,” said her maid, showing her a table full of letters, and notes, and invitation cards, and one large bouquet of roses amidst them.

  Roses had been around her all winter in Petersburg, but these were very lovely unforced flowers; all the varieties of the tea-rose in their shades and sizes, with their delicate faint smell that is like the scent of old perfumed laces, but in the centre of all these roses of fashion and culture there was a ring of the fragrant homely dewy cabbage rose, and in the very centre of these, again, a little spray of sweet-briar.

  Vere bent her face over their sweetness.

  “Who sent these?” she asked; and before she asked she knew.

  No one in the house did know. The bouquet had been left that morning for her. There was no name with it except her own name.

  But the little branch of sweet-briar said to her that it was the welcome of Corrèze, who had not forgotten.

  It touched and soothed her. It seemed very sweet and thoughtful beside the welcome of her husband, who bade her rouge and go to an embassy ball.

  “I always thought he had forgotten!” she mused, and, tired though she was, with her own hands she set the roses in a great cream-coloured bowl of Pesaro pottery of Casali di Lodi’s, and had them close beside her couch as she fell asleep.

  She who had so much pride had no vanity. It seemed strange to her that in his brilliant and busy life, full of its triumphs and its changes, he should remember one summer morning by the sea with a child.

  That night she went to the splendour of Prince Orloff’s fete; she did not rouge, but Paris found her lovelier than she had ever been; beneath the diamonds on her breast she had put a little bit of sweet-briar that no one saw. It seemed to her like a little talisman come out to her from her old lost life, when she and the world had been strangers.

  It was a great party in the Rue de Grenelle. Corrèze was there as a guest; he did not approach her.

  The next night she was in her box in the opera-house. Corrèze sang in the Prophète. She met the gaze of his eyes across the house, and something in their regard throbbed through her with a thrill like pain, and haunted her. He had never been in grander force or more wondrous melody than he was that night. The Duchesse de Sonnaz, who accompanied Vere, broke her fan in the vehemence and enthusiasm of her applause.

  “They say that there are two tenor voices, la voix de clairon et la voix de clarinette” she said. “The voice of Corrèze is the voix du clairon of an archangel.”

  Vere sighed, quickly and wearily.

  Jeanne de Sonnaz looked at her with a sudden and close scrutiny.

  “Was there not some story of her and Corrèze?” she thought.

  The next evening Corrèze was free.

  He dined at Bignon’s with some friends before going to the receptions of the great world. As they left the cafe about ten o’clock they saw Prince Zouroff enter with a companion and pass on to one of the private rooms; he was laughing loudly.

  “Who is with him to-night?” said one of the men who had dined with Corrèze. Another of them answered:

  “Did you not see her black eyes and her mouth like a poppy? It is Casse-une-Croûte.”

  Corrèze said nothing; he bade his friends goodnight and walked down the Avenue de l’Opéra by himself, though rain was falling and strong winds blew.

  If he had followed his impulse he would have gone back into Bignon’s, forced open the door of the cabinet particulier, and struck Sergius Zouroff. But he had no right!

  He returned to his own rooms, dressed, and went to two or three great parties. The last house he went to was the hotel in the Faubourg St. Germain of the Duc and Duchesse de Sonnaz.

  It was a great soirée for foreign royalties; Vere was present; the last injunction of her husband had been, as he had risen from the dinner-table: “Go to Jeanne’s by one o’clock to-night or she will be annoyed; you will say I am engaged; there is a club-meeting at the Ganaches.”

  Vere never disobeyed his commands.

  “I cannot love or honour you,” she had said to him once, “but I can obey you,” and she did so at all times.

  The night was brilliant.

  It recalled the best days of the perished Empire.

  The Princess Zouroff came late; Corrèze saw her arrive, and the crowds part, to let her pass, as they part for sovereigns; she wore black velvet only, she was still in mourning; her white beauty looked as though it were made of snow.

  “And he goes to a mulattress!” thought Corrèze.

  Later in the evening she chanced to be seated where there stood a grand piano in one of the drawing-rooms. He saw her from afar off; the Duchesse Jeanne passing him hurriedly was sa
ying to him at the time: “If only you had not the cruel selfish rule never to sing a note for your friends, what a charm of the bel imprévu you might give to my poor little ball!”

  Corrèze bowed before her. “Madame, my rules, like all laws of the universe, must yield to you!”

  He crossed the drawing-room to the piano.

  Corrèze had never consented to sing professionally in private houses.

  “The theatre is a different affair, but I do not choose my friends to pay me money,” he universally answered, and out of his theatre he was never heard, unless he sang for charity, or as an act of mere friendship. Even as a social kindness it was so rare that anyone could induce him to be heard at all, that when this night he approached the piano and struck a minor chord or two, the princely crowds hurried together to be near like the commonest mob in the world. Vere, only, did not move from where she sat on a low chair beneath some palms, and the four or five gentlemen about her remained still because she did so.

  She was some little distance from the instrument, but she saw him as he moved towards it more nearly than she had done since the recital of the “Nuit de Mai.”

  She saw the beautiful and animated face that had fascinated her young eyes in the early morning light on the rocks of the Calvados shore. He had not changed in any way; something of the radiance and gaiety of its expression was gone — that was all.

  He sat down and ran his hands softly over the keys in Schumanns “Adieu.” She could no longer see him for the plumes of the palms and blossoms of the azaleas, that made a grove of foliage and flowers which concealed the piano, and there was a courtly crowd of gay people and grand people gathered around him in silence, waiting for the first sound of that voice which, because it was so rarely heard, was so eagerly desired. Hour after hour in his own rooms he would sing to the old man Auber, whom he loved, or in the rough studios in the village of Barbisant he would give his music all night long to artists whose art he cared for, but by the world of fashion he was never heard out of the opera-house.

  He struck a few pathetic chords in B minor, and sang to a melody of his own a song of Heine:

  In mein gar zu dunkles Leben, the song of the singer who is “like a child lost in the dark.”

  Had she understood that he had a tale to tell? Had the song of Heine, that bewailed a vanished vision, carried his secret to her? He could not know.

  She sat quite still and did not lift her eyes. The crowd moved and screened her from his view.

  “Will she understand?” he thought, as the applause of the people around him followed on the breathless stillness of delight with which they had listened. He heard nothing that they said to him. He was looking at her in the distance, where she sat with the great white fan dropped upon her knee and her eyelids drooped over her eyes. He was thinking as he looked:

  “And that brute goes with a quadroon to a restaurant! And when she had a dead child born to her, he went all the while with Jeanne de Sonnaz to masked balls and court fetes on the ice!”

  Over his mobile face as he mused a dark shadow went; the shadow of passionate disgust and of futile wrath.

  His hands strayed a little over the keys, toying with memories of Chopin, and Beethoven, and Palestrina. Then to the air of a Salutaris Hostia that he had composed and sung for a great mass in Notre Dame years before, he sang clear and low as a mavis’s call at daybreak to its love the Prière of a French poet.

  She could not see him for the throngs of grand people and giddy people who surged about him in their decorations and their jewels, but the first notes of his voice came to her clear as a bird’s call at daybreak to its love.

  He sang to a melody in the minor of his own the simple pathetic verses of a young poet:

  Prière

  AH! si vous saviez comme on pleure

  De vivre seul et sans foyers,

  Quelquefois devant ma demeure

  Vous passeriez.

  Si vous saviez ce que fait naître

  Dans l’âme triste un pur regard,

  Vous regarderiez ma fenêtre,

  Comme au hasard.

  Si vous saviez quel baume apporte

  Au cœur la présence d’un cœur,

  Vous vous assoiriez sous my porte,

  Comme une sœur.

  Si vous saviez que je vous aime,

  Surtout si vous saviez comment,

  Vous entreriez peut-être même

  Tout simplement.

  His voice sank to silence as softly as a rose-leaf falls to earth. Then there arose, like the buzz of a thousand insects, the adoring applause of a polished society.

  Si vous saviez que je vous aime,

  Surtout si vous saviez comment,

  Vous entreriez peut-être même

  Tout simplement!

  The words had filled the room with their sweet ineffable melody, and had reached Vere and brought their confession to her.

  Her heart leaped like a bound thing set free; then a burning warmth that seemed to her like fire itself seemed to flood her veins. In some way the great crowd had parted and she saw the face of Corrèze for a moment, and his eyes met hers.

  He had told his tale in the language he knew best and loved the most.

  The next he was lost in the midst of his worshippers, who vainly implored him to return and sing again.

  Vere, tutored by the world she lived in, sat quite still, and let her broad fan of white feathers lie motionless in her hands.

  “Am I vile to have told her? Surely she must know it so well!” said Corrèze to himself as he sent his horses away and walked through the streets of Paris in the chill mists that heralded daylight. “Am I vile to have told her? Will she ever look at me again? Will she hate me for ever? Will she understand? Perhaps not. I sing a thousand songs; why should one have more meaning than another? She sees me play a hundred passions on the stage. Why should she believe I can feel one? And yet — and yet I think she will know, and perhaps she will not forgive; I fear she will never forgive.”

  He reproached himself bitterly as he walked home after midnight through the throngs of the Boulevards. He said to himself that if he had not seen Sergius Zouroff entering Bignon’s he would never so far have broken his resolution and failed in his honour. He reached his home, disturbed by apprehension and haunted with remorse. For an empire he would not have breathed a profane word in the ear of the woman who fulfilled his ideal of women, and he was afraid that he had insulted her.

  He did not go to his bed at all; he walked up and down his long suite of rooms in the intense scent of the hothouse bouquets which as usual covered every table and console in the chambers.

  For a lesser declaration than that, he had seen great ladies glide veiled through his doors; nay, they had come unasked.

  But he knew very well that she would never come one step on the way to meet him, even if she understood.

  And that she would even understand he doubted.

  The morning rose and the sun broke the mists, but its rays could not pierce through the olive velvet of his closed curtains. He walked to and fro, restlessly, through the artificial light and fragrance of his rooms. If she had been like the others, if he had heard her step on the stair, if he had seen that proud head veiled in the mask of a shameful secrecy, what would he have felt? — he thought he would have felt the instant rapture, the endless despair, that men felt in the old days who sold their souls to hell; the rapture that lived an hour, the despair that endured an eternity.

  When he threw back his shutters and saw the brightness of morning, he rang and ordered his horse and rode out into the Bois without breaking his fast; the rides were all moist with the night’s rain; the boughs were all green with young leaf; birds were singing as though it were the heart of the provinces. He rode fast and recklessly: the air was clear and fresh with a west wind stirring in it; it refreshed him more than sleep.

  As he returned two hours later he saw her walking in one of the allées des piétons; she was in black, with some old white laces
about her throat; before her were her dogs and behind her was a Russian servant. He checked his horse in the ride adjacent, and waited for her to pass by him.

  She did pass, bowed without looking at him, and went onward between the stems of the leafless trees.

  Then he thought to himself that she had understood, but he doubted that she ever would forgive.

  When she was quite out of sight he dismounted, gathered a late violet in the grass where she had passed him, and rode home.

  “She understood a little,” he thought, “enough to alarm, enough to offend her. She is too far above us all to understand more. Even life spent by the side of that brute has not tainted her. They are right to call her the ice-flower. She dwells apart in higher air than we ever breathe.”

  And his heart sank, and his life seemed very empty. He loved a woman who was nothing to him, who could be nothing to him, and who, even if ever she loved him, he would no more drag down to the low level of base frailties than he would spit upon the cross his fathers worshipped.

  The next night was the last of his engagement at the Grand Opéra. It was a night of such homage and triumph as even he had hardly known. But to him it was blank; the box that was Prince Zouroff’s was empty.

  He left Paris at daybreak.

  Vere did indeed, but imperfectly, understand. As the song had reached her ear a sudden flood of joy came to her with it; it had been to her as if the heavens had opened; she had for one moment realised all that her life might have been, and she saw that he would have loved her.

  When she reached the solitude of her chamber at home, she reproached herself; she seemed to herself to have sinned, and it seemed to her a supreme vanity to have dreamed of a personal message in the evening song of an eloquent singer. Did he not sing every night of love — every night that the public applauded the sorcery of his matchless music?

  That he might have loved her, she did believe. There was a look in his regard that told her so, whenever his eyes met hers across the opera-house, or in the crowds of the streets, or of society. But of more she did not, would not, think.