Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “Jealous!” All the blood of the Herberts of the Border leaped to fire in Veres veins. As she turned her face upon Madame de Sonnaz with unutterable scorn and indignation on it, the elder woman did that homage to her beauty which a rival renders so reluctantly, but which is truer testimony to its power than all a lover’s praise. Madame Jeanne gave a little teazing laugh.

  “Jealous, my fairest! why yes. If you were not jealous why should you have insisted on the woman’s absence?”

  “There can be no jealousy where there is only abhorrence,” Vere said quickly, with her teeth shut. “You do not seem to understand; one resents insults for oneself. An insult like that is to a woman like the insult that a blow is to a man.”

  Madame Jeanne shrugged her shoulders.

  “My love! Then we are all black and blue nous autres. Of course in theory you are quite right, but in practice no one feels in such a way; or, if anyone feels, she says nothing. But we will not discuss it. The woman is away. You must come now, because you said you would occupy your pavilion if hers were taken down. We do not take it down because there is not time; but we have given it to Corrèze. You know him — in society I mean? I think so?”

  “Scarcely,” said Vere; and she felt a glow of colour come over her face because she was sure that the note had come from him, and that the fisher pulling his boat had been one with the luteplayer of Venice.

  “She has known him, and she does not want to say so,” thought Madame Jeanne, swift to observe, swift to infer, and, like all experienced people, always apt to make the worst deductions.

  But the bells of the horses, harnessed like Flemish teams to the breaks and other carriages, were jingling in the avenue, and the tasselled and ribboned postilions were cracking their whips. There was little time to be lost, and she reluctantly let Vere escape her. As she drove along with Sergius Zouroff in his mail phaeton to Trouville, she gave him her own version of Veres conversation. She exaggerated some things and softened others; she gave him full cause to feel that his wife abhorred him, but she said nothing of Corrèze, because she was a prudent tactician, and never touched a fruit till it was ripe to fall.

  “It was possibly merely my fancy,” she reflected, as in all the whirl of her lottery, and all the pressure of her admiring throng, she found time to cast many glances at the tent of Corrèze, and saw that he was never beside his opposite neighbour. He was everywhere else — a miracle of persuasiveness, a king of caprice, the very perfection of a seller and a showman, dealing in children’s toys with half the shops of the Palais Royal emptied into his booth, and always surrounded by a crowd of children, on whom he rained showers of sparkling sweetmeats — but he was never beside the Princess Zouroff. He had taken down the pennon of Noisette, and its stead was one with his own device; a Love whose wings were caught in a thorny rose-bush. He told fortunes, he made himself a clairvoyant, he mystified his clients, and made them happy. He was dressed like a Savoyard, and carried an old ivory guitar, and sang strange, sweet, little ditties in a dulcet falsetto. He was the Haroun al Raschid of the Trouville Kermesse, and poured gold into its treasuries by the magic of his name and his voice, the contagion of his laughter and his gaiety. But he never once approached the Princess Zouroff; and no one could tell that, as he roamed about, with his five-year-old adorers flocking after him, or prophesied from a bowl of water the destinies of fair women, in his heart he was always saying, “Oh, my wild white rose! Why did I not gather you and keep you while I could. You are a great lady, and they all envy you, and all the while you are outraged and desolate!”

  Vere sat in her azure pavilion, and looked fitter to be a Lily of Astolat presiding at a tournament of knights. She bought most of her own things herself, and gave them away to children.

  The sun was strong, the heat was great, the chatter, the clamour, the many mingling and dissonant sounds, made her head ache, and the bright rainbow-like semicircle of tents, and the many colours of the changing multitude, often swam as in a mist before her eyes.

  Could it, after all, have been he who had warned her? she began to doubt. It was too improbable. Why should he care? She told herself that she had been conjecturing a vain and baseless thing. Why should he care?

  He was merely there, in the pavilion that was to have been Noisette s, because, no doubt, all artistes were his comrades; and he replaced the actress from the same good fellowship as he sold roses at Madame Lilas’ stall, and ivory carvings at Cécile Challon’s. It could have been nothing more.

  He never approached her. She could see his graceful head and throat above the throng, as he sold his puppets and his playthings; she could hear the thrill of his guitar, the echo of his voice, the delighted shouts of his child-troop, the laughter with which women pelted him with flowers as in Carnival time; she could see him nearly all day long, as he stood under Noisette’s rosy garlands, or wandered with jest and compliment through the fair. But to her he never came. At sunset he was missing. The flag, with the Love caught in the thorns of the roses, was down; a negro stood like a statue cut in ebony between the pink curtains of Noisettes tent. It was a slave of Soudan who had long been a free man in his service; a picturesque figure, well-known to Paris. He did not speak, but he had a scroll in his hands, a scroll that hung down, and on which was written, “Désolé de vous quitter; mais un pauvre luthier n’est pas maître de soi-même.”

  “It was charming of Corrèze,” said Madame de Sonnaz. “Very charming of him. He had only twenty-four hours of his own between the last night at Covent Garden and the royal fetes in Brussels. And he spent those twenty-four hours in answering my call and coming to help our Kermesse. He is gone to Belgium to-night. It was really charming. And the use he has been! the impetus he gave! the money he has got for us! I shall always be grateful to him.”

  Whilst she spoke, she thought nevertheless, “It is very eloquent that he should never have gone near her. They must understand each other very well, if at all. He never took all that trouble for nothing, and no mere accident could have been so perfectly apropos.”

  The house party and the host of Félicité dined at ten o’clock that night with her at the Chalet Ludoff.

  Vere, pleading great fatigue, drove homeward in the pale moonlight, through the cool air, sweet with the scent of apple-orchards and the sea. Madame Nelaguine accompanied her: neither spoke.

  In Paris at that hour Mademoiselle Noisette, arriving hot with the sun, enraged with the dust, furious at leaving Trouville, and ready for murder if she could not have vengeance, burst, as the hurricane and the storm burst over lake and mountain, into the peaceful retreat where the director of her theatre passed his leisure moments, and found that there was no new pensionnaire to play Julie Malmaison; that her greatness was on the same unapproachable pinnacle it had occupied ever since her début; that her director and her public alike were the most loyal and submissive of slaves; that, in a word, she had been hoaxed.

  “Qui donc a voulu me mystifier!” she screamed a thousand times, and plunged into abysses of suspicion, and was only pacified by promises of the Chef de Sûreté and his myrmidons. But she stormed, raged, cursed, wept, foamed at the mouth for half and hour, and then — forgot the Préfet de Police, and let herself be taken down to Enghien-les-Bains in time for dinner by a German Margrave, whom she pillaged from patriotism, and with whom she stayed a whole week.

  The Duchess Jeanne, excruciatingly tired as she was the next morning, felt her spirits good, and her limbs elastic, as she got into her red and black stripes and a red cap — vrai bonnet rouge, as she said — and displayed her skill in the waters of Trouville, and on them with her canoe. She had got a clue to follow; a mere misty, intangible thread at present, but still something on which to spin her web.

  “Corrèze was the hero of the adventure of the lost shoes and stockings, and what adventure is ever so sweet in a womans life as the first?” thought this experienced being, as she lay stretched out on the waves, or made her canoe shoot over them. “Corrèze comes for a few hours dow
n here; that very day she drives off before we are up, and makes her pilgrimage to the place of the lost shoes; when we interrogate her she colours and grows angry; he takes Noisettes pavilion — Noisette’s, whom he detests — I have heard artists say so a hundred times. He is charming, he is exquisite, he is adorable; and all within a few yards of Vere, to whom he nevertheless never speaks! Something there must be. The thing to do is to bring them near one another; then one would see, inevitably.”

  And, lying on her back on the sunny water, she resolved to do so. What did she want? She did not know precisely. She wanted to do what the moths do to ermine.

  CHAPTER VII.

  Pretty green lschl was growing dusky in the evening hours.

  Ischl, like a young girl, is prettiest in the morning. Its morning light is radiant and sweet; of the sunset it sees little or nothing, and its evenings are sad-coloured; the moon seems a long time coming up over these heights of pine-forest, but, when it does come, it is very fair, shining on the ripple of the rapid Traun with the lights of the houses on the banks twinkling in the moss-green surface of the stream, with every now and then a gentle splash breaking the silence as the ferry-boat goes over from side to side, or a washing-barge is moored in closer to the shore. lschl is calm, and sedate, and simple, and decorous, lschl is like some tender fair wholesome yet patrician beauty in a German picture, like the pretty aristocratic Charlotte in Kaulbach’s picture, who cuts the bread and butter, yet looks a patrician, lschl has nothing of the belle petite, like her sister of Baden, nothing of the titled coco dette like her cousin of Monaco. Ischl does not gamble or riot or conduct herself madly in any way; she is a little old-fashioned still, in a courtly way; she has a little rusticity still in her elegant manners; she is homely whilst she is so visibly of the fine feur of the vieille souche.

  She is like the noble dames of the past ages, who were so high of rank and so proud of habit, yet were not above the distilling-room and the spinning-wheel, who were quiet, serious, sweet, and smelt of the rose leaves with which they filled their big jars.

  Ischl goes early to bed and early rises.

  It was quite quiet on this August evening. It was very full, its throng was a polite and decorous one. Groups walked noiselessly up and down under the trees of the esplanade; music had long ago ceased from sounding; men and women sat out on the balconies with dimly-lit chambers behind them; but there was no louder sound than a dog’s bark, or a girl’s laughter, or the swish of an oar in the river.

  From the road of the north-east, and over the grey bridge, with its canopied saint, there came suddenly, with a sound of trampling hoofs, whips cracking in air, and clanging post horns, that harshly broke the repose of the twilight hour, a travelling carriage with four horses, containing two ladies and a dog.

  The carriage had come from Salzburg. It was open, for the night was mild, and, as a miracle of kindness, did not rain. A man, leaning in a casement of the Kaiserin Elizabeth, recognised both ladies and dog as the heavy landau rolled off the bridge across the road, then disappeared round the corner of the building. It was followed by another carriage full of servants. The host of the Kaiserin Elizabeth with all his officials small and great, precipitated themselves into the street, bowing bare-headed, as the fiery horses were pulled up before the door.

  The quick twilight fell; the valleys from dusky grew dark; the Traunwater began to look like a shoal of emeralds under the sunrays; a white round moon began to show itself behind the hills; the forms of people walking on the banks became indistinct, though the murmur of their voices and laughter grew clearer; otherwise it was so still that he who leaned over his balcony and saw the carriage arrive, could hear the swish of the barge-ropes as the water moved them, and the sound of a big dog lapping in the river underneath him.

  “It is destiny!” he said to himself “For two whole years I have avoided her, and fate, taking the shape of our physicians, sends us here!”

  He leaned over the balcony, and watched the water flow under the shadows of the houses and the trees.

  “Is it Duchesse Jeanne’s doing?” he thought, with that unreasoning instinct which in some men and women guides their fancy to true conclusions. “That is nonsense, though; what can she know? And yet I remember, at that ball, after the “Nuit de Mai,” she seemed to suspect something. She laughed; she told me I alone could thaw ice—”

  At that moment an Austrian march, stoutly brayed under the windows of the Kaiserin Elizabeth seemed to his ears to fill the night with discord.

  He started to his feet with impatience and with suffering, as the sounds grated in his ears, and rapidly shut his windows, one after another, to exclude the sound.

  “Where is Anatole?” he muttered irritably, as he paced the dull chambers allotted to him. He had arrived only twenty minutes earlier from Linz. He had not given his name, and for once found a spot where he was not known by sight to all. Instead of his servant, Anatole, one of the servants of the hotel tapped at the door, and, entering his chamber which he himself had only entered a few minutes before, presented him, with many apologies, a printed document to sign. It was the schedule and exordium with which, Ischl, in childlike faith in the integrity of humanity — or astute faith in its snobbery — requires from each of her visitors his declaration of rank and riches, and fines him that he may support her promenades and her trinkhalle according to his social means and place.

  He glanced at the paper absently, then took up his pen. Under the head of residence, he wrote un peu partout; under that of rank he wrote artiste, and under that which required the declaration of his name he wrote, “Corrèze.”

  Then he threw down five napoléons to pay his fees. “A droll document,” he said, as he pushed it away “It displays great astuteness; it never yet found, I am sure, anybody who sought immunity from its tax by declaring himself d’un rang inférieur, et hors de société. Really, your tax-paper does credit to the municipal knowledge of human nature.”

  The waiter smiled and took up the gold.

  “Monsieur gives this for the good of the town?”

  “For the good of the town or the good of yourself,” said Corrèze; “according as altruism or acquisitiveness prevails in your organisation.”

  The waiter, perplexed, bowed and pocketed the money.

  “Wait a moment. Shall I hear this noise every evening?”

  “The noise?” The waiter was perplexed.

  “You call it music, perhaps,” said Corrèze. “If I cannot have my windows open without hearing it I must go up into the mountains.”

  “Monsieur will hear it seldom,” said the waiter. “It is the chapelle de musique; it serenades royal personages; but monsieur will understand that such do not come every day.”

  “It is to be hoped not, if they have ears,” said Corrèze. “Who is it that they are serenading now?”

  “The Princess Zouroff has arrived.”

  “She is not royal.”

  “That is true, monsieur; but almost. The Prince Zouroff is so very rich, so very great.”

  “He is not here?”

  “No, monsieur.”

  “What rooms do they give her?”

  “Those immediately beneath monsieur. If they had not been engaged for the princess, monsieur should have had them,” said the youth, feeling that this princely artist should be lodged like an ambassador.

  “These do very well,” said Corrèze. “I shall not change them. You may go now. Order my dinner for nine o’clock, and send me my own man.”

  Silence had come again, and the chapelle de musique had gone its way after its last burst of that melody which the great singer called noise. The stillness was only broken by the sound of a boat passing, and the murmur of voices from people sauntering underneath.

  Corrèze threw himself into a chair that stood in the centre of the room.

  “I have honestly tried to avoid her,” he said to himself. “It is Fate!”

  His old and tried servant, Anatole, entered, and began to unpack his thing
s. Corrèze raised his head.

  “Put the guitar out,” he said, “and then go down and see the cook, and preserve me from what ills you can; you know what it is to dine where German is spoken.”

  Anatole took out the guitar-case and placed it by his master, then went obediently.

  He opened one of the casements and looked out; it had become almost dark; the tranquil pastoral loveliness was calm and dusky; lights twinkled on the opposite bank and up amongst the woods; the nearer casements were bright and ruddy above the stream; the murmur of voices came from under the indistinct leafy masses of the trees on the esplanade; the sound of oars in water made a pleasant ripple. It was a little too much like one of the scenes of his own theatres to please him perfectly; he preferred wilder scenery, more solitary places; at Ischl the glaciers and the ice-peaks, though really near, seem far away, and are seen but by glimpses. Yet it was so quiet, so innocent, so idyllic, it touched and soothed him.

  “After all,” he thought, “how much we lose in that hot-house we call the great world.”

  There was a balcony to his chamber. He leaned over it and looked down into the one beneath; there the dog, Loris, was lying, the starlight shining on his silver-grey hair; beside him on a chair there were a bouquet of Alpine roses and a large black fan.

  Corrèze felt his pulse beat quicker.

  “Kismet!” he said to himself, and the dreamy charm of a romantic fatalism began to steal on him. Pure accident has the ruling of most of our hours, but, in concession to our weakness or to our pride, we call it destiny, and we like to think its caprices are commands.

  “Now she shall have a serenade in truth; a better welcome than from the chapelle de musique,” he said to himself, and withdrew into his own room and took the guitar out of its case — a large Spanish guitar that he never travelled without, considering its melody a far better accompaniment for the voice than any piano could ever be. The organ has all the music of the spheres, and the violin all the emotions of the human heart; the organ is prayer, the violin is sorrow. The guitar, though but a light thing, has passion in it; passion and tenderness and all the caress of love; and, to those who have grown to care for it under southern skies and summer stars, it speaks of love and sighs for it; it has told its tale so often where the fireflies flash amongst the lemon blossoms and the myrtle.