by Ouida
Corrèze answered her in the same strain; and Vere listened, trying to detect in this gay and amiably cynical man of the world the saviour of Père Martin, the artist of the lyric drama, the hero of all her innocent memories and dreams. He was more kindred to her ideal when he grew more in earnest, and spoke of himself and his own art in answer to Jeanne de Sonnaz, who reproached him with apathy to the claims of Berlioz.
“No!” he said with some warmth; “I refuse to recognise the divinity of noise; I utterly deny the majesty of monster choruses; clamour and clangour are the death-knell of music, as drapery and so-called realism (which means, if it mean aught, that the dress is more real than the form underneath it!) are the destruction of sculpture. It is very strange. Every day art in every other way becomes more natural and music more artificial. Every day I wake up expecting to hear myself dénigré and denounced as old-fashioned, because I sing as my nature as well as my training teaches me to do. It is very odd; there is such a cry for naturalism in other arts — we have Millet instead of Claude; we have Zola instead of George Sand; we have Dumas fils instead of Corneille; we have Mercié instead of Canova; but in music we have precisely the reverse, and we have the elephantine creations, the elaborate and pompous combinations of Baireuth, and the Tone school, instead of the old sweet strains of melody that went straight and clear to the ear and the heart of man. Sometimes my enemies write in their journals that I sing as if I were a Tuscan peasant strolling through his corn — how proud they make me! But they do not mean to do so. I will not twist and emphasize. I trust to melody. I was taught music in its own country, and I will not sin against the canons of the Italians. They are right. Rhetoric is one thing, and song is another. Why confuse the two? Simplicity is the soul of great music; as it is the mark of great passions. Ornament is out of place in melody which represents single emotions at their height, be they joy, or fear, or hate, or love, or shame, or vengeance, or whatsoever they will. Music is not a science any more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds. I sing as naturally as other men speak; let me remain natural—”
“But you are too strong for it to matter what they say!”
Corrèze shrugged his shoulders.
“I am indifferent. Indifference is always strength. Just now I do as I like, to be sure, and yet I have the world with me. But that is only because I am the fashion. There is so much more of fashion than of fame in our generation. Fame was a grand thing, serious and solemn; the people gave it — such people as ran before Correggio’s Madonna, as before a heaven-descended thing, and made Catherine of Sienna a living possibility in their midst. It was a grand guerdon, given in grand times. It is too serious and too stern for us; we have only fashion; a light thing that you crown one day and depose the next; a marsh light born of bad gases that dances up to one moment, and dances away the next. Well, we have what we are worth; so much is certain.”
“Do you think we always have the fate we merit?” said Vere in a low tone.
Corrèze looked up, and she thought his soft eyes grew stern.
“I have usually thought so, Princess; — yes.”
“It is a cruel doctrine.”
“And a false one? Well — perhaps. So many side-winds blow; so many diseases are in the air; so many wandering insects, here to-day and gone to-morrow, sting the plant and canker it — that is what you mean? To be sure. When the aphis eats the rose it is no fault of the rose.”
“Zouroff is the aphis, I suppose,” thought Jeanne de Sonnaz as she looked at Vere. “Do not speak in parables, Corrèze. It is detestable. A metaphor always halts somewhere, like an American paper I read last week, which said, ‘Memphis is sitting in the ashes of woe and desolation, and our stock of groceries is running low!’ So Vera complains of fate and you of fame? — what ingratitude!”
“Fame, duchesse!” cried Corrèze. “Pray do not use such a gros mot to me. Michael Angelo has fame, and Cromwell, and Monsieur Edison, but a singer! — we are the most ephemeral of all ephemeridæ. We are at best only a sound — just a sound! When we have passed away into ‘the immemorial silences’ there is nothing left of us, no more than of the wind that blew through Corydon’s pipe.”
“Monsieur Edison will tell you that Corydon’s pipe will be heard a thousand years hence through the skill of science.”
“What horror!” said Corrèze. “I think I never should have courage to sing another note if I believed that I should echo through all the ages in that way.”
“And yet you say that you want fame.”
“I think I never said that, madame. I said fame is not a gift of our times; and if it were, a singer would have no title to it.”
“You have something very like it at all events. When half a city drags your carriage like a chariot of victory—”
“Caprice, madame; pure caprice,” said Corrèze. “I have happened for the moment to please them.”
“And what do Cæsars, and Napoleons, and other rulers do? — happen for the moment to frighten them. Yours is the prettier part to play.”
“A sugar-stick is prettier than a ramrod, but—”
“You do not deserve the Kaiserin’s strawberries,” said Jeanne de Sonnaz, tumbling the big berries nevertheless on to his plate.
“I never deserved anything, but I have had much,” said Corrèze. “Even Madame de Sonnaz, while she scolds, smiles on me — like Fortune.”
“Madame Vera neither smiles nor scolds,” said the duchess. “Perhaps she thinks Fortune and I have spoiled you.”
Vere broke biscuits for Loris, and seemed not to have heard. She felt herself colour; for, though she was a great lady, she was still very young. She could not follow his careless, easy banter, and its airy negligence hurt her. If he had sent her the jewelled metaphor of the moth and the star, how could he be altogether indifferent to her fate? She had felt that the song of Heine had been sung for her; yet now she began to doubt whether the meaning that she had given to it had not been her own delusion; whether the eloquence he had thrown into the German words had not been the mere counterfeit emotion of an artist, the emotion of his Gennaro, of his Edgardo, of his Romeo. It is the doubt with which every artist is wronged by those for whom he feels the most. Vere, as she doubted, felt wounded and disillusioned.
Breakfast ended, the duchesse made him sit out on the balcony under the awning; she made him smoke her cigarettes; she made him tell her more anecdotes of that artist life which she was convinced must be one long holiday, one untired carnival. Corrèze obeyed, and kept her amused. Vere sat within the window making lace, never caring to have her fingers quite idle.
Her heart had sunk; the shining river and the bright sunshine had grown dull; the old heavy burden of hopelessness and apathy had fallen on her again. She did not find her Saint Raphael, and she listened with pain as his laugh mingled with the shrill gay tones of the duchesse. Everyone seemed able to be happy, or at least light-hearted, except herself; it must be some fault in her, she thought.
Corrèze, even as his eyes seemed to glance out to the green river, or to fasten admiringly on the fouillis and moss-roses of his companion, in reality never ceased to see that figure which sat so still inside the window; with its white gown, its silver girdle, its proud bent head, its slender hands weaving the thread lace.
“My pearl, that they set in a hogs drinking trough!” he thought bitterly. “Alas, no! not mine! never mine! If only she were at peace it would not matter, but she is not; she never will be; they cannot kill her soul in her, though they try hard.”
“But do they ever really pay Felix for their dresses,” the duchesse was crying; “Or do they not think, like Sheridan, that to pay any debt is a waste of good money?”
At that moment some Austrians of the Court were announced — handsome young chamberlains and aides-de-camp — who came to pay their homage to the Princess Zouroff and her friend.
After a little while the duchesse monopolised them, as she had a talent for monopolising most things and most people;
and Corrèze, as he took his leave, found himself for one moment alone before Vere’s chair.
The duchesse and the Austrians were all out on the balcony, laughing rather noisily, and planning riding parties, dining parties, hunting, boating, and all other means of diversion that the simplicity of Ischl afforded.
Corrèze hesitated a moment, then touched the lace-work on her cushion.
“Work for fairies, Princess,” he said, as his fingers caressed the cobweb of thread.
“Very useless, I am afraid — as useless as the poor fairies are nowadays,” she answered, without looking up from it.
“Useless? Surely not? Is not lace one of the industries of the world?”
“Not as I make it, I think. It is better than sitting with idle hands, that is all. When I have made a few mètres, then I give them to any poor girl I meet; she could make better herself, but she is generally good-natured enough to be pleased—”
Her voice trembled a little as she spoke. The artist had made so much of her mental and spiritual life all through the past months, that it almost hurt her to have the man before her; to her he was the lover, the poet, the king, the soldier, the prophet, the cavalier of the ideal worlds in which he had become familiar to her. It was an effort to speak tranquilly and indifferently to him as to any other drawingroom idler.
“It would not require much good-nature to be grateful for any thing you gave,” said Corrèze with a smile. “I am rather learned in lace. I knew old women in Venice who even showed me the old forgotten point italien. May I show it to you? It is almost a lost art.”
His fingers, slender and agile, like the fingers of all artists, took up the threads and moved them in and out with skill.
“It is not man’s work,” he said, with a little low laugh, “but then you know I am an artist.”
“You say that as Courcy used to say ‘Je suis ni roi ni prince?”
“Perhaps! No doubt les rois et les princes laughed at Courcy.”
“I do not think they did. Courcy’s price always seemed to me so far above laughter.”
“You do not look at my point italien, madame,” said Corrèze.
Instead of looking down at his fingers with the threads on them she looked up and met his eyes. The blood flew into her fair face; she felt confused and bewildered; the frankness of her nature moved her lips.
“I have wanted to tell you always,” she said hurriedly; “to thank you — you sent me that necklace of the moth and the star?”
Corrèze bowed his head over the lace.
“You forgive my temerity?” he murmured.
“What was there to forgive? It was beautiful, and — and — I understood. But it was not my fault that I sank.”
Then she stopped suddenly; she remembered how much her words implied; she remembered all that they admitted of her marriage.
Corrèze gazed on her in silence. It had been a mystery to him always, a mystery of perplexity and pain, that the innocent, resolute, proud nature which he had discerned in Vere Herbert should have bent so easily and so rapidly under the teaching of her mother to the tempting of the world. Again and again he had said to himself that that child surely had a martyrs spirit and a heroines courage in her; yet had she succumbed to the first hour of pressure, the first whisper of ambition, like the weakest and vainest creature ever born of woman. He had never understood, despite all his knowledge of Lady Dorothy, the sudden and unresisted sacrifice of her daughter. Her words now startled and bewildered him; and showed him a deeper deep than any of which he had dreamed.
More versed in the worlds suspicions than she, he saw the keen glittering eyes of the Duchesse Jeanne studying them from the balcony, as she laughed and clattered with her chamberlains and soldiers. He released the threads of the lace, and replaced the pillow, and bowed very low.
“You do me too much honour, Princess,” he murmured, too gently for them to reach the keen ears of the brilliant spy of the balcony. “To accept my allegory was condescension; to interpret it was sympathy; to forgive it is mercy. For all three I thank you. Allow me—”
He bowed over her hand, which he scarcely touched, bowed again to Madame de Sonnaz, and then left the chamber.
Vere took up her lace-work, and began afresh to entangle the threads.
Her heart was heavy.
She thought that he condemned her; he seemed to her cold and changed.
“How that stupid lace absorbs you, Vera!” cried Jeanne de Sonnaz. “The Empress has sent to us to ride with her at four, and there is a little sauterie in the evening up there. You cannot refuse.”
CHAPTER VIII.
The next morning Corrèze, breakfasting at noon in the bay window of the bright Speiseaal that looks on the three-cornered Platz, and the trees on the esplanade, said to himself, “I ought to go away.”
But he did not resolve to go.
The night before he also had been summoned to the Schloss. He was famous for his captiousness to sovereigns, but he had been to this summons obedient, and had been welcomed by all, from their majesties to the big dog; and had taken his guitar, and sung, as he sang to please himself, and had been in his most brilliant and his most bewitching mood. In truth their majesties, charming and gracious and sympathetic though they were, had been of little account to him; what he had thought about, what he had sung to, was a tall slender form clothed in white, with waterlilies about her waist and throat, as though she were Undine. He approached her little; he looked at her always. The knowledge that she was there gave him inspiration; when he sang he surpassed himself; when he went away and strolled on foot down through the pine glades into the little town, he sang half aloud still; and an old forester, going to his work in the grey dawn told his wife that he had heard a Nix, with a voice like a nightingale, down in the heart of the woods.
He remained always a mountaineer at heart. The grey stillness and mist of the daybreak, the familiar smell of the pine-boughs, the innocent forest creatures that ran or flew before his feet, the gleam of snow on the peaks in the distance, the very moss at his feet bright with dew, all were delightful to him, and brought his boyhood back to him.
Yet his heart was heavy because he had seen the woman he could have loved; indeed, could no longer deny to himself that he did love her, and yet knew very well that she was as utterly lost to him as though she had been a wraith of the mountain snow that would vanish at the touch of the sunrise.
All things were well with him, and fortune spoiled him, as he had said.
As he sat at breakfast in the wide sunny window, and opened his “Figaro,” he read of the affection of Paris for him, the regret of a world which has, like a beautiful woman, so many to teach it forgetfulness, that any remembrance in absence is unusual homage. A courtier brought him from the court a silver casket of old niello work inlaid with precious stones, and having a miniature by Penicaudius in the lid, and what he cared for more, a bidding from the Kaiser to hunt chamois amongst the ice-peaks of the Dachstein at daybreak on the morrow The post arriving brought him little scented letters which told him, in language more or less welcome, that the universal regret of the many was shared in deeper and tenderer sentiment by the few; and some of these could not fail to charm his vanity, if they failed to touch his heart. Yet he had not much vanity, and he was used to all these favours of peoples, of sovereigns, of beauties. They rained on him as rose-leaves rain on grass in mid-summer; and it was the height of summer with him, and none of his rose-leaves were faded. Still —
“I ought to go,” he thought, and that thought absorbed him. He discerned the influence his presence had on Vere. He knew too well his power on women to mistake its exercise. He saw what she had not seen herself; he had long endeavoured to avoid her; he had long feared for them both, the moment when the accidents of society should bring them in contact. No vanity and no selfishness moved him; but an infinite compassion stirred in him, and an infinite sorrow.
“If I let myself love her, my life will be ruined. She will never be as others have
been. There will be nothing between us ever except an immense regret.” So he thought as he sat looking out on the sunshine that played on the silver and gold of the emperor’s casket.
At that moment they brought him from Madame de Sonnaz a note bidding him dine with her that night. Corrèze penned in reply a graceful excuse, pleading that he was to set out for the Dachstein at nightfall. “Who shall say that we need Nihilism,” he wrote in conclusion, “when a public singer scales ice-peaks with a Kaiser?”
His answer despatched, he lit another cigar, and watched the Traun water gleam under the old grey arches of the bridge.
“So she thinks I shall help her to her vengeance on Sergius Zouroff,” he thought. “Vous êtes mal tombée, duchessel.”
August noontide is cool enough in the duchy of Salzburg; he did not feel in the mood for the chatter of the casino and the humours of the Trinkhalle; for the pretty women in their swinging chairs and whist and écarté in the river balconies; there were half a hundred people here who in another half hour would seize on him beyond escape, as they trooped back from their morning exercise and baths. He bethought himself of an offer of horses made him by a Grand Duke staying there, sent a line to the Duke’s equerry, and, before his acquaintances had returned from the Trinkhalle, was riding slowly out on a handsome Hungarian mare, taking his road by chance, as he paced out of the little town, following the ways of the Traun as it flowed along towards Styria, with the wood-clothed hills rising to right and left.
There is a noble road that runs through the Weissbach Thai to the lake of Attersee. It is sixteen miles or more of forest-roadway. The woods are grand, the trees are giants, moss-grown with age, and set in a wilderness of ferns and flowers; the Weissbach rushes through them white with perpetual foam; the great hills are half light, half gloom beyond the branches, and there is the grey of glaciers, the aerial blue of crevasses, for ever shining behind the forest foliage, where the clouds lie on the mountains, where summer lightnings flash and summer rains drift like mist. The place is full of birds, and all wild woodland creatures; there is scarcely a habitation from one end of the road to the other. Where any wood has been cleared, there are tracks of lilac heather, and of broom; here and there is a cross telling of some sudden death from flood, or frost, or woodmans misadventure; under the broad drooping branches of the Siberian pines, countless little streams rise and bubble through the grasses; and at the end of it all there is the blue bright lake, blue as a mouse-ear, bright as a child’s eyes; the largest lake in all Austria; the Attersee.