by Ouida
He took up his guitar, and blew out all the many wax candles lighted in his honour, and sat down in the darkness of his chamber.
Then he began to sing; such song as no bribe could get from his lips unless he were in the mood to give it.
Scarcely had the first notes of that incomparable voice rung out clear as a golden bell upon the silent night, than the people sauntering on the bridge and before the hotel, paused to listen, and turned to one another, wondering and entranced.
“Who is that?” they cried to one another, and some one answered, “They say Corrèze came to-night.” Then they were quiet, listening, as in the north, where nightingales are few, people listen to them. Then several others from farther down and farther up the street joined them, and people came from under the trees, and from over the bridge; and soon a little crowd was gathered there, silent, delighted, and intent.
“It is Corrèze at his studies,” the people said one to another; and his voice, rising in its wonderful diapason clearer and clearer, higher and higher, rang over the water, and held all its hearers spell-bound. As a boat passed down the river the rowers paused; and as a long raft pushed its slow way through the silver of the moonlit ripples, the steersman unbidden, checked it, and remained still, lest any sound of rope or of chain should break the charm.
The Princess Zouroff, wearily resting in the salon beneath him, started as the first notes reached her, and rose to her feet and listened, her heart beating fast.
There was no other such voice in all the world. She knew that he was here as well as though she had seen his face. She went to the balcony and stepped out into the moonlight where the dog was, and the roses and the fan were on the chair, and leaned against the balustrade — a slender white figure with ermine drawn about her, and the moon rays shedding their silver around.
He was singing the “Salve Dimara.”
She grew very pale, and her fingers grasped the rail of the balcony till her rings hurt her skin.
Yet how happy she was!
The river ran by, with a sweet song of its own; the tranquil town seemed to sleep; the people gathered below were hushed and reverent; the fresh glad wind that lives in Alpine forests swept by, bringing the scent of the pine-wood with it.
He sang on, the chords of the guitar filling the pauses of the voice with a low dulcet sound, as if some answering echo sighed. The perfect melody was poured out as from some wild bird’s throat, seeming to thrill through the darkness and make it living and beautiful like the shadows of a night that veils the ecstasies of Love. She listened with her head bent and her face very pale. It was her welcome, and she felt that it was for her: for her alone.
He sang the “Salve Dimara” of that living master, who, whatever his weakness or his fault, has in his music that echo of human passion and of mortal pain, which more faultless composers, with their purer science, have missed. Then scarcely pausing, he sang from the music of the “Fidelio” and the “lphigenia,” music familiar and beloved with him as any cradle-song to a child; and he let all his heart go out in his voice, that poured itself into the silence of the summer evening, as though, like the nightingales, he sang because his heart would break if he were silent. Then, last of all, he sang his favourite song of Heine: the song of the palm-tree and the pine.
Suddenly, with one deep plaintive chord of the guitar, as if its strings were breaking with that last sweet sigh, his voice ceased; as the nightingale’s may cease all at once, when, amidst the roses, it tires of its very plenitude of power. There was the sound of a closing casement, then all was still.
The people, standing entranced below, were silent a moment or two, still in the trance of their wonder and delight; then, with one accord, they shouted his name with such a welcome as they never gave but to their own Kaiser. The Kaiser was great, but even he could not command that voice at will; and they had had the sweetness and the splendour of it all to themselves here, by the quiet Traun water, as if it were a bird’s song and no more.
They cheered him so loudly, and so loudly called on his name, that he could do no less than advance on his balcony, and thank them in their own tongue. Then he bade them good-night, and once more closed his window.
Below, Vere stood quite still, leaning back in the low chair with her fan spread between her face and the upraised eyes of the people. She felt tears fall slowly down her cheeks. Yet she was almost happy.
The fresh forest wind, rising and blowing the green moonlit water into rippling silver, seemed to echo around her the song of Heine; the song of the palm-tree and the pine.
The gay brusque tones of Jeanne de Sonnaz roused her almost roughly; the duchesse came out on to the balcony, muffled in a cloak of golden feathers.
“Ma chère, how charming! Of course you recognised the voice? and, to make sure, I sent the servants to ask. Now we shall never be dull. No one is dull where Corrèze can be seen. It is too charming! And how divinely he sang. I suppose he was only studying; though he must know all those things by heart. Perhaps he has heard we are underneath him.”
She spoke in apparent ignorance and surprise, heedlessly and gaily, but her quick eyes read a look that came into Vere’s, and for which she was searching. When she had suggested Ischl in August to Zouroff for his wife, she had known from Vienna that Corrèze was to pass through there.
“I do believe it is as I thought,” said Jeanne de Sonnaz to herself. “Is it possible that le bon diable has found the petite entrée after all? It would be diverting — and why not?”
When all Ischl awoke the next morning, the day was brilliant; the green river sparkled; coffee-cups tinkled on all the balconies; the washing-barges were full of white linen, and of women who laughed as they worked; ladies, old and young, were borne down the walk in their chairs; the little red and white ferry-boat trailed along its rope, leaving a track of sunshine; dogs swam; children ran about; pretty women, with high heels and high canes, sauntered under the trees; green and grey huntsmen went by, going towards the hills to slay izard and roebuck. It was all sylvan, tranquil, picturesque, Watteau-like. That there could be anywhere a world full of revolution, speculation, poverty, socialism, haste and noise, seemed impossible.
At Ischl life may be still a voyage à Cythère but not in the reckless and frivolous fashion of other places. All remains calm, placid and touched with the graceful decorum of another time than ours. The bright Viennese are gay indeed, as any butterflies can be; but Ischl is still Ischl, and not Trouville, not Monaco, not Biarritz. It is aristocratic, Austrian, and tranquil; and still belongs to an age in which Nihilism and the electric light were unknown.
“A place to doze and dream in, and how good that is!” thought Corrèze, as he stood out on his balcony an hour after sunrise. “What will the world be like when there are no such places? Horrible! but I shall be out of it; that is a supreme comfort.”
Yet, as he thought, so he did not realise that he would ever cease to be in the world — who does? Life was still young in him, was prodigal to him of good gifts, of enmity he only knew so much as made his triumph finer, and of love he had more than enough. His life was full — at times laborious — but always poetical and always victorious. He could not realise that the day of darkness would ever come for him, when neither woman nor man would delight him, when no roses would have fragrance for him, and no song any spell to rouse him. Genius gives immortality in another way than in the vulgar one of being praised by others after death; it gives elasticity, unwearied sympathy, and that sense of some essence stronger than death, of some spirit higher than the tomb, which nothing can destroy. It is in this sense that genius walks with the immortals.
Corrèze leaned over his balcony, and watched the emerald-hued Traun flow by, and the sun’s rays touch the woods behind the watermill upon the left. His life was of the world and in it, but the mountaineer’s love of nature remained with him. But it was not of the woods or the waters, or even of the pretty women who went by in their chairs to the Trinkhalle, that he was thinking now. He
was looking at the empty chair in the balcony underneath, and the fan that had lain there all night.
As he bent down and looked, a knot of edelweiss was flung upward, and fell at his feet, and a voice that he knew cried out to him, “Good morning, Corrèze! You serenaded us divinely last night. Come and breakfast with us at ten o’clock. We live by cock-crow here.”
The voice was the voice of Jeanne de Sonnaz, who came out on to the balcony that he had been told was Veres. Astonished, and not pleased, he returned some graceful compliment, and wondered how it was that she was there.
The duchesse looked up at him and laughed; her ugly face looked prettier than many womens. She was in a loose white gown that was all torrents and cascades of lace; she had a real moss-rose over her right ear, and at her bosom; she had little Chinese slippers on, all over pearls, with filagree butterflies that trembled above her toes.
“I cannot see you without craning my neck,” she cried to him. “You will come to breakfast. You will meet Vera Zouroff. You know her. Doctors say she is ill. I cannot see it. There was only one big salon free, so she and I have shared it. A pretty place. Were you here before? A little too like your own décor de scène? Well, perhaps, a valley with a river and chalets always has that look — Ems has it. I think it is terribly dull. I am glad you are here. Come to us at ten. We are all alone. I shall expect you to amuse us.”
Corrèze said some pretty nothings with that grace which charmed all women; they talked a little of people they knew, laughed a little, and were very agreeable. Then the duchesse went within, and Corrèze went for a stroll towards the Rettenbach mill.
“Now I shall see what there is between them,” she said to herself; and he said to himself, “How can that brute let her be with Jeanne de Sonnaz?”
Vere, tired, and having had sweet strange disturbed dreams, had slept later than her wont, then had gone out to the bath and the draught prescribed her; she thought they were useless; she felt well.
Some one dressed in white linen passed her, and bowed low: it was Corrèze. There was a child selling mountain flowers; she bought them and carried them on her knee; the polite crowd looked after her chair and whispered her name.
The band was playing under the trees; she did not hear it; she heard only the song of Heine.
When she returned there was almost a colour in her cheeks; she had a gown of white wool stuff and a silver girdle of old German work that had a silver missal hung on it.
“You look like Nillsons Marguerite!” said Jeanne de Sonnaz; “only you are too lovely and too haughty for that, my dear. By the way, I have secured Faust. He will come to breakfast.”
“M. de Corrèze?” said Vere with the colour leaving her face. “Why? why? — why did you ask him?”
“I asked him because it pleased me, because he is charming, because he serenaded us exquisitely; there are a hundred ‘becauses.’ You need not be alarmed, my love; Corrèze goes everywhere. He is a gentleman, though he is a singer. We always treat him so.”
Vere said nothing; she was angered with herself that she had seemed to slight him, and she was uncertain how to reply aught.
The sharp eyes of the Duchesse Jeanne watched her, and, as worldly-wise eyes are apt to do, saw very much that did not exist to be seen.
Vere stood mute, arranging her mountain flowers.
The servants announced Corrèze.
Vere was not conscious of the trouble, the gladness, the vague apprehension, and as vague hope that her face expressed; and which Jeanne de Sonnaz construed according to her own light, and Corrèze according to his.
“What will that diablesse think?” he said angrily to himself. “A hundred thousand things that are not, and never will be true!”
For his own part, the world had taught him very well how to conceal his feelings when he chose, and, in his caressing grace, that was much the same to all women, he had an impenetrable mask. But Vere had none. Vere was as transparent as only a perfectly innocent creature ever is; and the merciless eyes of Jeanne de Sonnaz were on them.
“You know the Princess Zouroff, I think?” said the latter negligently. “Was it Vera, or was it myself, that you serenaded so beautifully. An indiscreet question; but you know I am always indiscreet.”
“Madame,” said Corrèze whilst he bowed before Vere, and then turned to answer his tormentor, “truth is always costly, but it is always best. At the risk of your displeasure I must confess that I sang on no other sentiment than perfect exasperation with the chapelle de musique. That I serenaded yourself and Princess Zouroff was an accidental honour that I scarcely deserved to enjoy.”
“What a pretty falsehood, and how nicely turned,” thought Madame de Sonnaz, as she pursued persistently: “Then Vera was right; she said you did not know we were here. Nevertheless, you and she are old friends, I think, surely?”
Corrèze had taken his seat between them; he was closer to the duchesse; there was a little distance between him and Vere, whose eyes were always on the flowers that employed her fingers.
“I knew Madame la Princesse a little, very little, when she was a child,” he said with a smile. “Neither acquaintances nor court presentations before marriage count after it, I fear. Princess Vera at that time had a sailor hat and no shoes — you see it is a very long time ago.”
Vere looked up a moment and smiled. Then the smile died away into a great sadness. It was long ago, indeed, so long that it seemed to her as though a whole lifetime severed her, the wife of Sergius Zouroff, from the happy child that had taken the rose from the hand of Corrèze.
“No shoes! This is interesting. I suppose they were dredging, and she had lost herself. Tell me all about it,” said the high voice of Duchesse Jeanne; and Corrèze told her in his own airy graceful fashion, and made her laugh.
“If I did not tell her something, God knows what she would conjecture,” he said to himself; and then he sat down to the breakfast-table beside the open windows, and made himself charming in a gay and witty way that made the duchess think to herself: “She is in love, but he is not.”
Vere sat almost silent. She could not imitate his insouciance, his gaiety, his abandonment to the immediate hour, the skill with which he made apparent frankness serve as entire concealment.
She sat in a sort of trance, only hearing the rich sweet cadence of the voice whose mere laughter was music, and whose mere murmur was a caress.
The sunshine and the green water glancing through the spaces of the blinds, the pretty quaint figures moving up and down under the trees on the opposite bank; the scent of the mountain strawberries and the Alpine flowers; the fragrance of the pine-woods filling the air; the voice of Corrèze, melodious even in its laughter, crossed by the clear harsh imperious tones of Jeanne de Sonnaz; all seemed to Vere like the scenes and the sounds of a dream, all blent together into a sweet confusion of sunshine and shade; of silver speech and golden silence.
She had longed to meet him; she had dreaded to meet him. Month after month her heart had yearned and her courage had quailed; his eyes had said so much, and his lips had said nothing. They had been strangers so long, and now, all in a moment, he was sitting at her table in familiar intimacy, he who had sung the Prière of Sully Prudhomme.
Her eyes shone with unaccustomed light; her serious lips had a smile trembling on them; the coldness and the stillness which were not natural to her years, gradually changed and melted, as the snow before the sunbeam of summer; yet she felt restless and apprehensive. She wondered what he thought of her; if he condemned her in haste, as one amongst the many bought by a brilliant and loveless marriage; if he believed that the moth had forgotten the star and dropped to mere earthly fire?
She could not tell.
Corrèze was not the Saint Raphael who had given her the rose; he was the Corrèze of Paris, witty, brilliant, careless, worldly-wise, bent on amusing and disarming the Duchesse de Sonnaz.
Vere, who knew nothing of his motive, or of her peril, felt a chill of faint, intangible disappointment. She
herself had no duality of nature; she had nothing of the flexible, changeful, many-sided temper of the artist; she was always Vere, whether she pleased or displeased, whether she were happy or unhappy; whether she were king or peasant she was always what she had been born; always Vere Herbert, never Vera Zouroff, though church and law had called her so.
“She is like a pearl,” thought Corrèze, watching her; “she has nothing of the opal or the diamond; she does not depend on light; she never changes or borrows colour; she is like a pearl; nothing alters the pearl — till you throw it into the acid.”
Meanwhile, as he thought so, he was making Jeanne de Sonnaz shed tears of inextinguishable laughter at stories of his friends of the Comédie Français; for in common with all great ladies, her appetite was insatiable for anecdotes of the women whom she would not have visited, yet whom she copied, studied, and, though she would not have confessed it, often envied.
“Le diable est entré” thought the Duchesse Jeanne, ruffling the moss-rose amidst her lace, amused.
“Le diable n’entrera jamais,” thought Corrèze, who guessed very nearly what she was thinking.
Vere was almost always silent. Every now and then she found his soft, pensive eyes looking at her, and then she looked away, and her face grew warm.
What did he think of her? she was asking herself uneasily; he, who had bidden her keep herself unspotted from the world; he who had sent her the parable of the moth and the star, he, who filled her thoughts and absorbed her life more absolutely than she had any idea of, had said nothing to her since the day he had bade her farewell at Trouville.