Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  Vere turned away, and went into the house. Her husband remained on the terrace sending the smoke of his great cigar out on to the moonlit sea-scented air.

  “She grows sentimental,” he said to himself, “it is better stopped at once. Can she not be content with her chiffons and her jewels?”

  The following day the Parisian contingent filled the chateau, and from morn till night, the mirth and movement of a gay house-party spoiled for the mistress of Félicité its woodland beauty and its seashore freshness.

  Never to escape from the world grew as wearisome and as terrible to Vere as the dust of the factory to the tired worker, as the roar of the city streets to the heart-sick sempstress. Never to escape from it; never to be alone with the deep peace of nature, with the meditations of great dead poets, with the charm of lonely and noble landscape — this seemed to her as sad and as dreary as, to the women who surrounded her, it would have seemed to have been condemned to a year without lovers and rivals, to a solitude without excitement, and intrigue, and success. To have a moment alone was their terror; never to have a moment alone was her torture. The difference of feeling made a gulf between her and them that no equality of beauty, and accomplishment, and position could bridge. There was no sympathy possible between Vere and the pretty painted people of her world. She had no standing-point in common with them, except her social rank. Their jargon, their laughter, their rivalries, their pleasures, were all alike distasteful to her. When she drove over with them to Trouville at five o’clock, and sat amidst them, within a stone’s throw of what the horrible pleasantry of society calls the jolies impures, she thought the levée that the proscribed sisterhood held on those sands was quite as good as the levée of the great ladies around her.

  In return women hated her. “She is so farouche,” they said. They only meant that she was chaste, with that perfect chastity of thought, as well as of act, which the whole tone and tenour of society destroys in its devotees, and ridicules in the few cases where it cannot be destroyed.

  Only Jeanne de Sonnaz professed to admire, nay to love, her. But then everyone knew that Madame Jeanne was a clever woman, who said nothing, and did nothing, without a reason.

  “Try to be amiable — if you know how to be amiable — with Madame de Sonnaz,” had been the command of Zouroff to his wife on the first day that she and the French duchess had met; and Vere had been indebted to the brilliant Parisienne for many a word of social counsel, many an indication of social perils, where the stiff frivolities of etiquette were endangered, or a difficult acquaintance required tact to conciliate or rebuff it. Vere believed innocently and honestly that Jeanne de Sonnaz liked her, and was angered with and reproached herself for not being sufficiently grateful, and being unable fully to return the regard.

  “I think she is not a good woman,” she said once, hesitatingly, to her sister-in-law.

  Madame Nelaguine smiled a little grimly, with a look that made her resemble her brother. “My dear, do not be too curious about goodness. If you inquire so much for it, it will lead you into as much trouble as the pursuit of the Sangréal did the knights of old; and I am afraid you will not find it. As for Jeanne, she is always in her chair at the Messe des Paresseux at St. Philippe, she turns a lottery wheel at fêtes for the poor, and her husband has always lived with her. What more can you want? Do not be too exacting.”

  Vere vaguely felt that Madame Nelaguine thought anything but well of her friend; but she got no more information, and Madame Jeanne came most days over to Félicité and said to all there, “How lovely is Vera! — odd, cold, inhuman, yes; but one adores her.”

  One morning Vere, risen several hours before her guests, felt a wistful fancy, that had often visited her, to try and find again that little nest of fishers’ cottages where she had eaten the cherries, and heard Corrèze sing in rivalry to the lark. It was a wish so innocent and harmless that she saw no reason to resist it; she had her ponies ordered while the day was still young, and drove out of her own park-gates down to Deauville and Trouville, and through them, and along the road to Villerville. At Villerville she left her ponies, and walked with no escort except Loris through the sea of greenery that covers the summit of the table-land of Calvados, while the salt sea washes its base.

  The name of this little village she had never known, but, guessing by the position it had been in above the sea, she knew that it must have been somewhere between Grand Bec and Villerville; and she followed various paths through orchards, and grass meadows, and cornfields divided by lines of poplars, and at last found the lonely place quite unchanged.

  The old woman who had called him Saint Raphael was knitting by the fence of furze; the cherry trees were full of fruit; the cabbage-roses were pushing their dewy heads against the tiny roses of the sweet-briar; sun-burnt children were dragging nets over the short grass; the lark was singing against the sky. Nothing had changed except herself.

  No one of them recognised her.

  The old woman gave her a frank good-morrow, and the children stared, but no one of them thought that this great lady, with the goldheaded cane, and the old lace on her white skirts, was the child that had sat there three years before, and drunk the milk in its wooden bowl, and worn the wooden shoes. She asked for a little water, and sat down by the sweet-briar hedge; she was thinking of Corrèze. He was seldom absent from her thoughts; but he remained so pure, so lofty, so ideal a figure in her fancy, that his empire over her memory never alarmed her.

  He was never to her like other men.

  She sat and listened, with divided attention, to the garrulity of the old white-capped woman, who went on knitting in the sun, against her wall of furze, and chattered cheerfully, needing no reply. They were hard times, she thought. People had said with the Republic there would be no poor, but she could see no difference herself; she had lived through many of them — meaning governments — but they were each as bad as the other, she thought. Bread was always dear. The moules were plentiful this year; the Republic had no hand in that; and the deep-sea fishing had been very fair too. Did madame see that lark? That little fool of a bird brought her in as much as the moules; a gentleman had taken such a fancy to it that he came and saw it was safe every summer, sometimes oftener; and he always left her five napoléons or more. There were so many larks in the world, or would be if people did not eat them; she could not tell what there was about hers, but the gentleman always gave her money because she let it live in the grass. Perhaps madame had heard of him; he had a beautiful face; he was a singer, they said; and to hear him sing — she had heard him once herself — it was like heaven being opened.

  Vere listened with undivided attention now, and her eyes grew soft and dim.

  “Does he remember like that?” she thought; and it seemed to her so strange that he should never have sought to speak to her.

  “Does he come for the lark only?” she asked.

  “He says so,” answered the old woman. “He always takes a rose and a bit of sweet-briar. The first day he was here there was a pretty girl with him, that he bought sabots for, because she had lost her shoes on the beach. Perhaps the girl may be dead. I have thought so sometimes; it cannot be only for the lark; and he sits here a long time, a long time — and he is sad. He was here a day in May — that was the last.”

  The warmth of a sudden blush came over her hearer’s proud face. She did not know what she felt; she felt a thrill of alarm, a strange pleasure, a vague trouble. She rose at once, and left a little money in the lean hand, as she bade the old peasant goodday, called Loris from his chase of chickens, and began to retrace her way to Villerville.

  The old woman looked after her along the flat path over the turf that went on under the apple trees, and through the wheatfields, till it joined the road to Grand Bee.

  “Now I think of it,” she muttered to her knitting needles. “That great lady has the eyes of that tired child who had the wooden shoes. Perhaps she is the same — only dead that way — dead of being stuffed with gold, as so many
of them are.”

  “Granny, that is the Russian Princess from Félicité,” said a fisherman who was coming up over the edge of the rocks, hanging his nets on the poles; and saw the tall slender figure of Vere going through the tall green corn.

  “Aye, aye!” said the old woman. “Well, she has given me a gold bit. Never was a bird that brought so much money from the clouds as my lark.”

  Her son laughed. “I saw your other lark in Trouville this morning; he had come by the Havre packet from England. He knew me, and asked for you all. He said he would only stay here an hour on his way to Paris, but would soon be back again, and then would come and see you. They took all my fish at the Roches Noires, just at a word from him to the porter in the hall!”

  “Tiens!” said the old woman thoughtfully, and she kept her thoughts to herself.

  “Where have you been, O ma belle matinâle,” said the Duchess Jeanne, as Vere went up the steps of the sea-terrace to enter the anteroom of Félicité, where the duchess, just downstairs at twelve o’clock, was breathing the morning air in the most charming of dressing gowns — a miracle of swan’s down and old Mechlin, with a knot here and there of her favourite cardinal red. She had passed the night there after a ball.

  Zouroff was with her; both were smoking.

  “I have been a long drive,” answered Vere; “you know I rise early.”

  “Where did you go?” asked Zouroff brusquely. “I object to those senseless, long drives in the country.”

  “I went as far as Villerville,” she answered. “I went to see a few fisher-people that live on the coast near there.”

  The hour before she would have said it without any other thought than what her words expressed.

  Now her remembrance of what the woman had said of Corrèze made her hesitate a little, and a certain colour came in her face, that both her husband and her guest noticed. It seemed to the exquisite and loyal truthfulness of her temper that she had been guilty of a thing even meaner than a falsehood — a reservation.

  “It was where I lost my way the first day I was with my mother,” she said; and turned to her husband, as making the explanation only to him. “Perhaps you remember? Everyone laughed about it at the time.”

  “I think I remember,” said Zouroff moodily. “It could scarcely be worth a pilgrimage.”

  “Unless she have a carte tendre du pays” said the duchess with a little laugh. “Oh, a million pardons, my sweet Vera; you never permit a jest, I know.”

  “I permit any jest if it be witty, and have no offence in it,” said Vere very coldly. “If you and the Prince will allow me, I will go indoors; I am a little tired and dusty, and Loris is more than a little.”

  “You had no intention in what you said, Jeanne?” muttered Zouroff to his companion, when Vere had entered the house. “You cannot possibly mean—”

  “Mean! Of your pearl of women, your white swan, your emblem of ice? What should I mean? It amused me to see her look angry; that is all. I assure you, if you made her angry much oftener, she would amuse you more. Do you know, do you know, mon vieux, I should never be in the least surprised, if a few years later, you were to become a jealous husband! How funny it will be. But really, you looked quite oriental in your wrath just now. Be more angry more often. Believe me, your wife will entertain you much more. Especially as she will never deserve it.”

  Leaving that recipe behind her, fraught with all the peril it might bear, Madame Jeanne dragged her muslins and her Mechlin over the marbles of the terrace, and went also within doors to attend to the thousand and one exigencies of a great spectacle which she had conceived, and was about to give to the world.

  It was a Kermesse for the poor — always for the poor.

  Madame Jeanne, who was a woman of energy, and did not mind trouble (she had been one of the leaders of a régime that dressed seven times a day), was the head and front, the life and soul, of her forthcoming Kermesse, and was resolute to leave no pains untaken that should make it the most successful fancy fair of its season. She had already quantities of royalties promised her as visitors. Poor Citron had pledged herself to preside at a puppet show; “toute la gomme, would be golden lambs to be shorn; and all the great ladies, and a few of the theatrical celebrities, were to be vendors, and wear the costumes and the jewellery of Flemish peasantry.

  “I have written to beg Corrèze to come, but he will not,” she said once in the hearing of Vere. “He used to be at Trouville every year, but he never comes now. I suppose some woman he cares about goes elsewhere.”

  She was very provoked, because she wanted to have a grand mass at Notre Dame des Victoires, and “quêter” afterwards; and if Corrèze would have sung some Noël or some Salutaris Hostia, it would have brought hundreds more napoléons into her plate for the poor; so, angrily, she abandoned the idea of the mass, and confined herself to the glories of the Kermesse.

  Vere, to whom the mingling of the poor with a fancy fair, and the confusion of almsgiving with diversion, always seemed as painful as it was grotesque, took no heed of all the preparations, and received in silence her husband’s commands to take a place in it. He was peremptory, and she was always obedient. She wrote to her people in Paris to send her down all that was necessary, and after that ceased to occupy herself with a folly she secretly disapproved; a mockery of the misery of the world which made her heart ache.

  The day before the first opening of this Kermesse, which was to eclipse every other show of the sort, Prince Zouroff, with his wife and sister, and most of their guests, drove over to Trouville to see the arrangements. Madame Jeanne had erected her pretty booths in the glades of the Comte d’Hautpoul, and had had that charming park conceded to her for her merry-go-rounds, her lotteries, her diseurs de bonnes aventures, her merry-andrews, and her other diversions. Madame Jeannes taste was the taste of that Second Empire, under which the comet of her course had reached its perihelion; but the effect of her taste in this little canvas city of pleasure was bright, brilliant, and picturesque, and the motley colours in which she delighted made a pretty spectacle under the green leaves of the trees. Every booth had the name of the lady who would officiate at it blazoned above; and, above the lottery-booth was written, “Madame de Sonnaz,” with a scarlet flag that bore her arms and coronet fluttering against the blue sky. The next was the Marquise de Merilhac’s, green and primrose, the next the Countess Schondorff’s, amber and violet; the next, of pale blue, with a pale blue pennon, and the arms and crown in silver, was the Princess Zouroff’s.

  “It is exceedingly pretty,” said Vere, as she stood before the little pavilion.

  There were about ten others, all in divers hues, with their pennons fluttering from tall Venetian masts. The pretty booths stood about in a semi-oval where the sward was green and the trees were tall. Servants were bringing in all the fanciful merchandise that was to be for sale on the morrow; a few gendarmes had been sent to protect the fair during the night; some children, with flying hair and fluttering skirts, and some baby-sailors, were at play on the real wooden horses which the duchess had had down from St. Cloud.

  “It is extremely pretty,” said Vere courteously to the projectress and protectress of it all, and her eyes glanced round the semi-circle. Immediately facing hers was a booth of white stripes and rose-colour, looped up with great garlands of pink roses; the flag above had no arms, but, instead, had a device in gold, a squirrel cracking nuts, with the motto, “Vivent le bracconniers!” It was a device known to tout Paris, except to Vere; but even she knew the name underneath, which she read in the glow of the late afternoon light, “Mademoiselle Noisette.”

  She stood in the entrance of her own pavilion and saw it. Her face grew very white, and a haughty indignation blazed in her grand, grave eyes.

  Madame Jeanne, standing by, and chattering volubly, with her eyeglasses up to her eyes, saw the look and rejoiced in her soul.

  “It will be amusing,” she said to herself. “How very angry quiet people can be!”

  Vere, however,
disappointed her. She made no scene; she remained still and tranquil, and, in a clear voice, gave a few directions to the servants who were arranging the contents of her own stalls.

  Madame Jeanne felt the pang an archer knows when, at a great public fete, the arrow aimed for the heart of the gold, misses its mark, and strikes the dust.

  It was to be chagrined like this that she, Duchesse de Sonnaz, and daughter of the mighty Maison du Merilhac, had stretched her Second Empire laxities so far as to permit on the grounds of her own Kermesse the Free Lances of the Paris Theatres!

  Nothing was said; nothing was done; Madame Jeanne felt cheated, and her Kermesse seemed already shorn of its splendour.

  Vere remained very calm, very still; she did not move outside the curtains of her own azure nest.

  “Guilt hath pavilions and no secrecy,” murmured the Princess Nadine, changing the well-known line by a monosyllable, as she glanced across at the pink and white booth with its peccant squirrel. But she murmured it only in the ear of a tried and trusty old friend, the Count Schondorff, who for more years than she would have cared to count had been her shadow and her slave, her major-domo and her souffredouleur. “I am so glad Vera takes it well,” she thought with relief.

  A little later there came into the pink tent a handsome woman in a black dress, with knots of pink; she had a dome-like pile of glistening hair, gorgeous beauty, a splendid bust; she looked like a rose-hued rhododendron made human.

  It was Noisette. She bustled and banged about rather noisily and laughed loudly with the men accompanying her, and scolded the servants unpacking her packages.