by Ouida
Perhaps some memory of that one summer morning haunted him as it haunted her, with the sad vision of a sweetness that might have been in life, and never would be now; perhaps a vague regret was really with him. So much she thought, but nothing more.
The world she lived in had taught her nothing of its vanities, of its laxities, of its intrigues. She kept the heart of her girlhood. She was still of the old fashion, and a faithless wife was to her a wanton. Marriage might be loveless, and joyless, and soulless, and outrage all that it brought; but its bond had been taken, and its obligations accepted; no sin of others could set her free.
Her husband could not have understood that, nor could her mother, nor could her world; but to Vere it was clear as the day, that, not to be utterly worthless in her own sight, not to be base as the sold creatures of the streets, she must give fidelity to the faithless, cleanliness to the unclean.
Even that caress she had given to the roses seemed to her treacherous and wrong.
CHAPTER VI.
Prince Zouroff stayed in Paris until the end of June. There was no place that he liked so well. Lady Dolly passed a few weeks at Meurice’s, and told her daughter with a little malice and a little pleasure, that the son to whom the Duchess of Mull had recently given birth, to the joy of all the Northumbrian border, had been baptised with the name of Vere, with much pomp at Castle Herbert.
“My name and my fathers!” said Vere with coldest indignation. “And her father sold drink and opium to miners!”
“And the brothers kill pigs — by machinery,” said her mother. “Certainly it is very funny. If Colomb us had never discovered America would all these queer things have happened to us? There is no doubt we do get ‘mixed,’ as the lovely Fuschia would say.”
Pick-me-up, as Duchess of Mull, had become even a greater success, were that possible, than Fuschia Leach had been. No fancy frisk, no little dinner, no big ball was anything without that brilliantly tinted face of hers, with the little impertinent nose, and the big radiant audacious eyes that had the glance of the street-arab, and the surprise of the fawn. Francis of Mull, tender, stupid and shy, lived in a perpetual intoxication at the wonder of his own possession of so much beauty, so much mirth, and so much audacity, and no more dreamed of opposing her wishes than, excellent young man that he was, he had ever dreamed of opposing his tutors and guardians. He was under her charm in a blind, dazed, benighted way that diverted her, and yet made her heartily sick of him; and she took the reins of government into her own hands and kept them. Not a tree was felled, not a horse was bought, not a farm lease was signed, but what the young duchess knew the reason why.
“I’ll stop all this beastly waste, and yet I’ll do it much finer, and get a lot more for my money,” she said to herself when she first went to the biggest house of all their houses, and she did so with that admirable combination of thrift and display of which the American mind alone has the secret.
The expenses of his household in six months had been diminished by seven thousand pounds, yet the Duke of Mull had entertained royalty for three days at Castle Herbert with a splendour that his county had never seen. She was not at all mean, except in charities, but she got her money’s worth.
“My dear old donkey, your wife didn’t go pricing sprats all down Broadway without knowing what to give for a red herring,” said Her Grace, in the familiar yet figurative language in which the great nation she had belonged to delights.
“Cooking accounts won’t go down with her,” said the bailiffs, and the butlers, the housekeepers, the stud-grooms, and the head gardeners, to one another with a melancholy unanimity at all her houses.
“Do you know, Vere, she is a great success,” said Lady Dolly one day “Very, very great. There is nobody in all England one quarter so popular.”
“I quite believe it,” said Vere.
“Then why won’t you be friends with her?”
“Why should I be?”
“Well, she is your cousin.”
“She is a woman my cousin has married. There is no possible relation between her and me.”
“But do you not think it is always as well to — to — be pleasant?”
“No, I do not. If no one else remember the oaks of the forests I do not forget them.”
“Oh, the oaks,” said Lady Dolly. “Yes, they are mining there; but they were nasty, damp, windy places, I don’t see that it matters.”
“What a terribly proud woman you are, Vera,” added the Princess Nadine, who was every whit as proud herself, “and yet you think so little of rank.”
“I think nothing of rank,” said Vere, “but I do think very much of race; and I cannot understand how men, who are so careful of the descent of their horses and hounds, are so indifferent to the contamination of their own blood.”
“If you had lived before ‘90 you would have gone very grandly to the guillotine,” said her sister-in-law.
“I should have been in good company,” said Vere; “it is difficult to live in it now-a-days.”
“With what an air you say that,” said Madame Nelaguine; “really sometimes one would think you were a marquise of a hundred years old, and in your childhood had seen your chateau burnt by the mob.”
“All my chateaux were burnt long ago,” said Vere, with a sigh that she stifled.
Madame Nelaguine understood.
Vere was glad when the warmth grew greater with the days of early summer, and her husband entering her morning-room, said abruptly:
“The Grand Prix is run to-morrow. You seem to have forgotten it. On Saturday we will go down to Félicité. You will invite Mdme de Sonnaz and Mdme de Merilhac, and anyone else that you please. Nadine will come, no doubt.”
A Zouroff horse won the Grand Prix, and Prince Zouroff was for once in a contented mood, which lasted all the next day. As the train ran through the level green country towards Calvados he said with good-humoured gallantry to his wife, “You have not invited me, Vera. The place is yours. I have no business in it unless you wish for me.”
“The place is always yours, and I am yours,” she answered in a low tone.
From a woman who had loved him the words would have been tender; from her, they were but an acknowledgment of being purchased. His humour changed as he heard them; his face grew dark; he devoted himself to Mdme. Jeanne, who was travelling with them; she had refused to stay at Félicité, however, and had taken for herself the little Chalet Ludoff at Trouville.
“You are a bear; but she makes you dance, Sergius,” whispered the duchess with malice.
Zouroff frowned.
“Bears do something besides dancing,” he muttered.
“Yes; they eat honey,” replied Mdme de Sonnaz. “You have had more honey than was good for you all your days. Now you have got something that is not honey.”
Vere, with her delicate straight profile against the light, sat looking at the green fields and the blue sky, and did not hear what was said.
“If she cared, or rather if she understood,” thought the Duchesse Jeanne, as she glanced at her; “she would rule him instead of being ruled; she could do it; but she would have to keep the bear on hot plates — as I did.”
Zouroff, screened behind “Figaro,” looked from one woman to the other.
“How grande dame she is,” he thought. “Beside her Jeanne looks bizarre, ugly, almost vulgar. And yet Vera bores me when she does not enrage me, and enrages me when she does not bore me; while with the other, one is always on good terms with one’s self.”
“I know what you were thinking, my friend,” whispered the duchess under cover of the noise and twilight of the Martainville tunnel. “But all the difference, I assure you, is that she is your wife and I am Paul’s. If she were not your wife you would be furiously in love with her, and were I your wife you would find me a chatte enragée with frightful green eyes.”
Zouroff laughed grimly. He did not tell her that his thoughts had been less complimentary than those she had attributed to him.
�
��I could find it in me to tell you your eyes were green when you spite me by not coming to Félicité,” he murmured instead.
Mdme. Jeanne twisted the “Figaro” about, and said: “Chut! We shall meet more freely at the little Ludoff house.”
Vere only heard the rustling of the “Figaro” sheet. She was looking at the clock-tower of St. Tourin, and the summer glory of the forest of Evreux.
Madame Jeanne stayed at Trouville. Vere, with her husband, drove in the panier, with four white ponies, that awaited them at the station, along the shady avenue that leads out of the valley of the Toucques toward Villiers. The sunshine was brilliant, the air sweet, the sea, when the rise of the road brought it into view, was blue as the sky, and the fishing fleets were on it. Vere closed her eyes as the bright marine picture came in sight, and felt the tears rise into them.
Only three years before she had been Vere Herbert, coming on the dusty sands below, with no more knowledge or idea of the world’s pomps, and vanities, and sins, and vices, than any one of the brighteyed deer that were now living out their happy lives under the oak shadows of Bulmer Chase. Only three years before!
Zouroff, lying back in the little carriage, looked at her through his half-shut eyelids.
“Ma chère!” he said with his little rough laugh, “we ought to feel very sweet emotions, you and I, returning here. Tell me are you à la hauteur de l’occasion? I fear I am not. Perhaps, after a glass of sherry, the proper emotion may visit me.”
Vere made no reply. Her eyes, wide-opened now, were looking straight forward; she drove her ponies steadily.
“What do you feel?” he persisted. “It is an interesting return. Pray tell me.”
“I have ceased to analyse what I feel,” she answered, in her clear cold voice. “I prefer to stifle it.”
“You are very courteous!”
“I think you have very often said yourself that courtesy is not one of the obligations of marriage. You ask me for the truth, I tell you the truth.”
“In three years of the world have you not learned a pretty lie yet!”
“No. I shall not learn it in twenty years.”
“Do you know that there are times when you answer me so that I could beat you like a dog?”
“I dare say.”
“Is that all you say?”
“What should I say? If you beat me, it would not hurt me much more than other things.”
Zouroff was silent. He saw that she drove her ponies on tranquilly, and that her blush-rose cheek neither flushed nor paled. Master of her body and mind, present and future, though he was, he had a sullen sense of her escaping him always, and he had as sullen a respect for her courage and her calmness.
“She could be a mother of young lions!” he thought, as Lamartine thought of Delphine Gay, and he felt bitter against her that his sons had died.
They reached Félicité as the sun set over the sea, where the low shores by Caen were hidden in a golden mist. The dressing bell was ringing in the Gothic clock tower; the tribe of canary-hued lacqueys were bending to the ground in the beautiful cedar-wood hall, with its pointed arches, and its illuminated shields, which had captivated the young eyes of Vere Herbert.
Madame Nelaguine had arrived before them, and her welcome, wit, and careful tact saved them from the terrors and the tedium of a tête-â-tête.
“Are you glad to come here, Vera?” she asked.
“I am glad to see the sea,” answered Vere. “But I am tired of moving from house to house. We have no home. We have only a number of hotels.”
“I think you will be happier than in Paris,” said the Princess Nadine. “You will have the trouble of a house party, it is true; but your mornings you can spend in your garden, your hothouses, with your horses, or on the sea; you will be freer.”
“Yes,” assented Vera. She did not hear; she was looking through the great telescope on the terrace down along the line of the shore; she was trying to discern amongst the broken confused indentations of the rocky beach the place where Corrèze had sung to her and to the lark. But the sea and land were blent in one golden glow as the sun went down behind the black cliffs of western Calvados, and she could discern nothing that she knew The dressing-bell was ringing, and she hurried to her rooms. Her husband was intolerant of any excuses of fatigue or indisposition, and always expected to see her in full toilette whether there was no one, or whether there were fifty persons, at his table. Sometimes it seemed to her as if all her life were consumed in the mere acts of dressing and undressing; the paradise of other women was her purgatory.
They dined alone, only enlivened by the ironies of the Princess Nadine, who, when she chose could be exceedingly amusing, if very acid in her satires; when dinner was over they went out on to the terrace where the moonlight was brilliant. Some gentlemen from the Chateau Villiers had ridden over to congratulate Prince Zouroff on the achievement of his racer. They were old friends of his, heroes and disciples of “le sport.” After a while they talked only of that idol. Vere sat looking at the moonlit Channel. Madame Nelaguine, within the room, was playing quaint mournful melodies of old German composers, and sad Russian folk-airs. Félicité was very peaceful, very lovely; on the morrow the glittering noisy feverish life of the great world would begin under its roof, with its house-party of Parisians and Russians.
“What a pity, what a pity! One has not time to breathe,” thought Vere, as she leaned her head against the marble balustrade, and rested her eyes on the sea.
“What a pity!” she thought, “the loveliest things in all creation are the sunrise and the moonlight; and who has time in our stupid life, that is called pleasure, to see either of them?”
A full moon made the narrow sea a sheet of silver; a high tide had carried the beach up to the edge of the black rocks; in the white luminous space one little dark sail was slowly drifting before the wind, the sail of a fishing or dredging boat. The calmness, the silence, the lustre, the sweet, fresh, strong sea-scent, so familiar to her in her childhood, filled her with an infinite melancholy.
Only three years, and how changed she was! All her youth had been burnt up in her; all hope was as dead in her heart as if she were already old.
She sat and thought, as the dreamy music from within united with the murmur of the sea; she had said truly that she now strove to stifle thought, but her nature was meditative, and she could never wholly succeed.
“Perhaps I am not right, perhaps I do not do all that I might,” she mused; and her conscience reproached her with harshness and hatred against the man whom she had sworn to honour.
“Honour!” she thought bitterly: what a world of mockery lay in that one little word.
Yet he was her husband; according to his light he had been generous to her; she would have to bear his children, and his name was her name for ever. It would be better if they could live in peace.
When his friends had ridden back to Villiers, and his sister was still dreamily wandering through many musical memories, Sergius Zouroff was standing on the terrace, looking seaward, and calculating how quickly his yacht would be able to come round on the morrow from Cherbourg. Midnight chimes were sounding softly from the Flemish carillon in the clock-tower of his chateau.
Vere looked at him, hesitated, then rose and approached him.
“Sergius,” she said in a low voice, “I spoke wrongly to you to-day; I beg your pardon.”
Zouroff started a little, and looked down in surprise at the proud delicate face of his wife as the moonlight fell on it.
“You are not going to make me a scene?” he said irritably and apprehensively.
On the lofty yet wistful mood of Vere the words fell like drops of ice. A momentary recollection had moved her to something like hope that her husband might make her duty less penance and less pain to her, by some sort of sympathy and comprehension. She had bent her temper to the concession of a humility very rare with her, and this was all her recompense. She checked the reply that rose to her lips, and kept her voice serene and l
ow.
“I do not wish to annoy you in any way,” she said simply; “I saw that I was wrong to-day; that I had failed in the respect I owe you: I thought I ought to confess it and beg your pardon.”
Zouroff stared at her with his gloomy sullen eyes. She looked very fair to him, as she stood there with the silvery rays of the moon on her bent face and her white throat and breast; and yet she had lost almost all charm for him, whilst the ugliness of Jeanne de Sonnaz kept his sluggish passions alive through many years. He stared down on her, scarcely thinking at all of her words, thinking only as men do every hour and ever century, why it was that the pure woman wearies and palls, the impure strengthens her chains with every night that falls. It is a terrible truth, but it is a truth.
“How lovely she is!” he thought, “her mouth is a rose, her eyes are stars, her breasts are lilies, her breath is the fragrance of flowers; and —
I like Casse-une-Croûte better, who is the colour of copper, and smells of smoke and brandy as I do!”
That was what he was thinking.
Vere looked away from his face outward to the sea, and laid her hand for a moment on his arm.
“It is three years ago,” she said wistfully, “I did not know very well what I did; I was only a child; now I do know — I would do otherwise. But there is no going back. I am your wife. Will you help me a little to do what is right? I try always—”
Her voice faltered slightly.
Her husbands mind came out from his thoughts of Casse-une-Croûte and Duchesse Jeanne, and realised that she was asking him for sympathy. He stared; then felt a passing heat of sullen shame; then thrust away the emotion and laughed.
“My dear,” he said, with the cynical candour that was rather brutality than sincerity, “three years ago we both made a great mistake. Everyone who marries says the same. But we must make the best of it. I am a rich man, and an indulgent one, and that must content you. You are a lovely woman, and a cold one, and that must content me. If you bear me living sons you will do all a wife wants to do, and if I pay your bills and allow you to amuse yourself in your own way I do not see that you can complain of me. The less we are alone, the less likely are we to quarrel. That is a conjugal maxim. And do not make me serious scenes of this sort. They tire me, and I have no wish to be rude to you. Will you not go to your room? You look fatigued.”