by Ouida
And what could he say to her of it all? Nothing.
Midway in this dale of Weissbach there is a memorial cross, with a rude painting; the trees are majestic and gigantic there; there is a wooden bench; and a little way down, under the trees, there is the river broken up by rocks and stones into eddies and freshets of white foam.
“Rest here Princess,” said Corrèze. “You have walked several miles by this, and that stick parasol of yours is no alpenstock to help you much. Look at those hills through the trees; one sees here, if nowhere else, what the poets’
‘blue air’ means. Soon the sun will set, and the sapphire blue will be cold grey. But rest a few moments, and I will gather you some of that yellow gentian. You keep your old love of flowers, I am sure?”
Vere smiled a little sadly.
“Indeed, yes; but it is with flowers as with everything else, I think, in the world; one cannot enjoy them for the profusion and the waste of them everywhere. When one thinks of the millions that die at one ball! — and no one hardly looks at them. The most you hear anyone say is, ‘the rooms look very well to-night.’ And the flowers die for that.”
“That comes of the pretentious prodigality we call civilisation,” said Corrèze. “More prosaically it is just the same with food; at every grand dinner enough food is wasted to feed a whole street, and the number of dishes is so exaggerated that half of them go away untasted, and even the other half is too much for any mortal appetite. I do not know why we do it; no one enjoys it; Lazarus out of the alleys might, perhaps, by way of change, but then he is never invited.”
“Everything in our life is so exaggerated,” said Vere, with a sigh of fatigue, as she recalled the endless weariness of the state banquets, the court balls, the perpetual succession of entertainments, which in her world represented pleasure. “There is nothing but exaggeration everywhere; to me it always seems vulgarity. Our dress is overloaded like our dinners; our days are over-filled like our houses. Who is to blame? The leaders of society, I suppose.”
“Leaders like Madame Jeanne,” said Corrèze quickly.
She smiled a little.
“You are very angry with her!”
“Princess — frankly, I do not think she is a fit companion for you.”
“My husband thinks that she is so.”
“Then there is no more to be said, no doubt,” said Corrèze with his teeth shut. “For me to correct the judgment of M. Zouroff would be too great presumption.”
“You may be quite right,” said Vere. “But you see it is not for me to question; I have only to obey.”
Corrèze choked an oath into silence, and wandered a little way towards the water to gather another foxglove.
Vere sat on the low bench under the crucifix on the great tree; she had taken off her hat; she had the flowers in her lap; her dress was white; she had no ornament of any sort; she looked very like the child who had sat with him by the sweet-briar hedge on Calvados. Taller, lovelier, with a different expression on her grave, proud, face, and all the questioning eagerness gone for ever from her eyes; yet, for the moment, very like — so like, that, but for the gleam of the diamond circlet that was her marriage ring, he would have forgotten.
He came and leaned against one of the great trees, and watched the shadows of the leaves flutter on her white skirts. He realised that he loved her more than he had ever loved anything on earth — and she was the wife of Sergius Zouroff. She was no more Vere, but the Princess Vera, and her world thought her so cold that it had called her the edelweiss.
He forced himself to speak of idle things.
“After all,” he said aloud, “when all is said and done, I do believe the artistic life to be the happiest the earth holds. To be sure, there is a general feeling still that we do not deserve Christian burial, but that need not much trouble a living man. I think, despite all the shadows that envy and obtuseness, and the malevolence of the unsuccessful rival, and the absurdities of the incapable critic, cast upon its path, the artistic life is the finest, the truest, the most Greek, and so the really happiest. Artists see, and hear, and feel more than other people; when they are artists really, and not mere manufacturers, as too many are or become. My own art has a little too much smell of the footlights; I have too few hours alone with Beethoven and Mozart, and too many with the gaslit crowds before me. Yet it has many beautiful things in it; it is always picturesque, never mediocre. Think of my life beside a bankers in his parlour, beside a lawyers in the courts, they are like spiders, shut up in their own dust. I am like a swallow, who always sees the sun because he goes where it is summer.”
“It is always summer with you.” There was a tinge of regret and of wistfulness in her voice of which she was not conscious.
“It will be winter henceforward,” he thought as he answered: “Yes; it has been so. I have been singularly fortunate — perhaps as much in the temperament I was born with as in other things; for, if we escape any very great calamity, it is our own nature that makes it summer or makes it winter with us.”
“But if you were in Siberia,” said Vere with a faint smile; “could you make it summer there?”
“I would try,” said Corrèze. “I suppose Nature would look grand there sometimes, and there would be ones fellow-creatures. But then, you know, it has been my good fortune always to be in the sun; I am no judge of darkness. I dread it. Sometimes I wake in the night and think if I lost my voice all suddenly, as I may any day, how should I bear it? — to be living and only a memory to the public, as if I were dead — scarcely a memory even; there is no written record of song, and its mere echo soon goes off the ear. How should I bear it — to be dumb? to be dethroned? I am afraid I should bear it ill. After all, one may be a coward without knowing it.”
“Do not speak of it!” said Vere quickly, with a sense of pain. Mute! That voice which she thought had all the melody that poets dream of when they write of angels! It hurt her even to imagine it.
“It could not be worse than Siberia, and men live through that,” said Corrèze. “Have you not seen, Princess, at a great ball, some one disappear quickly and quietly, and heard a whisper run through the dancers of ‘Tomsk,’ and caught a look on some faces that told you a tarantass was going out into the darkness, over the snow, full gallop, with a political prisoner between his guards? Ah! it is horrible! When one has seen it it makes one feel cold, even at noon in midsummer to remember it.”
“Russia is always terrible,” said Vere, with a little shudder. “Nowhere on earth are there such ghastly contrasts; you live in a hothouse with your palms, and the poor are all around you in the ice; everything is like that.”
“And yet you are Russian;” said Corrèze a little cruelly and bitterly; for he had never forgiven her quick descent into her mothers toils, her quick acceptance of temptation. “You are certainly Russian. You are no longer Vere even; you are Princess Vera.”
“I am always Vere,” she said in a low tone. “They must call me what they will, but it alters nothing.”
“And Vera is a good name, too,” said Corrèze, bending his eyes almost sternly on hers. “It means Faith.”
“Yes; it means that.”
He glided into the grass at the foot of the tree, and sat there, leaning on his elbow, and looking towards her; it was the attitude in which she had seen him first upon the beach at Trouville.
He was always graceful in all he did; the soft afternoon light was upon his face; he had thrown his broad felt hat on the grass; a stray sunbeam wandered in the bright brown of his hair.
Vere glanced at him, and was about to speak; then hesitated — paused — at last unclosed her lips so long shut in silence.
“You remember that you bade me keep myself unspotted from the world?” she said suddenly. “I want to tell you, that I strive always to do so — yes, I do. I was never ruled by ambition and vanity — as you think. I cannot tell you more; but, if you understand me at all, you will understand that that is true.”
“I knew it without your
telling me.”
He ceased to remember that ever he had suspected her, or ever reproached her. It was a mystery to him that this proud, strong, pure nature should have ever been brought low by any force; but he accepted the fact of it as men in their faith accept miracles.
“She was such a child; who can tell what they did or said?” he mused, as an infinite tenderness and compassion came over him. This woman was not twenty yet, and she had tasted all the deepest bitterness of life, and all its outrages of passion and of vice!
She was to him like one of the young saints of old, on whom tyrants and torturers spent all the filth and fury of their will, yet could not touch the soul or break the courage of the thing that they dishonoured.
Women had not taught him reverence. He had found them frail when he had not found them base; but, as great a reverence as ever moved Gawaine or Sintram, moved him towards Vere now. He feared to speak lest he should offend her; it was hard to give her sympathy, even to give her comprehension, without seeming to offer her insult. He knew that she was too loyal to the man whose name she bore to bear to hear him blamed, with whatsoever justice it might be.
He was silent, while leaning on his arm, and looking down upon the cups and sceptres of the green moss on which he rested. If he looked up at her face he feared his strength of self-control would fail him, and his lips be loosened.
Vere bound together his wild flowers one by one. She longed for him to believe her guiltless of the low ambitions of the world; she could not bear that he should fancy the low temptations of the world’s wealth and rank had ever had power over her.
Yet she was the wife of Sergius Zouroff. What could she hope to make him think in face of that one fact?
Suddenly he looked up at her; his brilliant eyes were dim with tears, yet flashed darkly with a sombre indignation.
“I understand,” he said at last, his old habit of quick and eloquent speech returning to him. “I think I have always understood without words; I think all the world does. And that is why one half of it at least has no forgiveness for you — Princess.”
He added the title with a little effort; it was as a curb on his memory, on his impulse; he set it as a barrier between him and her.
“It is I who do not understand,” said Vere, with a faint smile, and an accent of interrogation. She did not look away from the wood-flowers. His eyes fed themselves on the lines of her delicate and noble features; he breathed quickly; the colour came into his face.
“No; you do not understand,” he said rapidly. “There is your danger. There is your weakness. Do you know what it costs to be an innocent woman in the world you live in? — the great world as it calls itself, God help us! To be chaste in mind and body, thought and deed, to be innocent in soul and substance, not merely with sufficient abstinence from evil not to endanger position, not merely with physical coldness that can deny the passions it is diverted to influence, but real chastity, real innocence, which recoils from the shadow of sin, and shrinks from the laughter of lust. Do you know what the cost of such are? I will tell you. Their cost is isolation — the sneer they are branded with is ‘out of fashion’ — no one will say it, perhaps, but all will make you feel it. If you be ashamed to go half clothed; if you be unwilling to laugh at innuendoes; if you be unable to understand an indecency in a song, or a gag at a theatre; if you do not find a charm in suggested filth; if you do not care to have loose women for your friends, however high may be their rank; if adultery look to you all the worse because it is a domestic pet and plaything; and if immorality seem to you but the more shameful because it is romped with at the children’s hour, danced with at the Queens ball, made a guest at the house-parties, and smuggled smilingly through the custom-officers of society — if you be so behind your time as this, you insult your generation; you are a reproach to it, and an ennui. The union of society is a Camorra or a Mafia. Those who are not of it must at least subscribe to it, and smile on it, or they are lost. There is your danger, my Princess of Faith. How can they forgive you, any one of them, the women who have not your loveliness and your mind, and to whom you are a perpetual, an unconscious, an inexorable rebuke? Clothed with innocence is metaphor and fact with you, and do you understand the women of your world so little yet as not to understand that they would pardon you the nakedness of vice much sooner than they ever will those stainless robes which you share with the children and the angels?”
He ceased; eloquence when he was moved was habitual as song had been to him in his childhood when he had gathered his sheep and goats on the green alp. He paused abruptly, because, had he spoken more, he would have uttered words that could never have been recalled, words that would have been set for ever between them like a gulf of flame.
Vere had listened; her face had flushed a little, then had grown paler than was even usual to her. She understood now well enough — too well; an intense sweetness and a vague shame came to her with his words; the one that he should read her soul so clearly, the other that he should know her path so dark, her fate so hateful.
She gathered the wood-flowers together and rose.
“I am far from the angels and you think too well of me,” she said, with a tremor in her voice. “I think the sun is setting; it grows late.”
Corrèze rose, with a sigh, to his feet, and raised her hat from the ground.
“Yes. It will soon be dark; very dark to me. Princess, will you think of what I said? will you be on your guard with your foes?”
“Who are they?”
“All women, most men. In a word, a world that is not fit for your footsteps.”
Vere was silent, thinking.
“I have more courage than insight,” she said, with a little smile, at last; “and it is easier to me to endure than to influence. I think I influence no one. It must be my fault. They say I am wanting in sympathy.”
“Nay, the notes around you are too coarse to strike an echo from you — that is all. You have a perfect sympathy with all that is noble, but they never give you that.”
“Let us move quickly, the sun is set,” she said, as she took her hat from him, and walked on down the forest road.
Neither spoke. In a little time they had reached the sluices, where the imprisoned timbers lay awaiting the weekly rush of the waters. There a little low carriage with some mountain ponies, lent her by the Court, was awaiting her.
Keeping his wild blossoms of the forest in one hand, she gave him the other.
“I shall see you to-morrow?” she asked, with the frank simplicity and directness of her nature.
He hesitated a moment, then answered: “To-night I go up into the Thorstein ice-fields; we may be away some days; but when I come down from the mountains, yes; certainly yes, madame, I will have the honour of saluting you once more. And I will bring you some edelweiss. It is the flower they call you after in Paris.”
“Do they? I did not know it. Adieu.”
Her little postilion, a boy from the Imperial stables, with a silver horn and a ribboned and tasselled dress, cracked his whip, and the ponies went away at a trot down towards the valley, whilst beyond, the last brightness of daylight was shining above the grey-white sheet of the Carl Eisfeld that rose in view.
Corrèze stood on the edge of the wilderness of timber, lying in disorder in the dry bed of the river, awaiting the loosening of the White Brook floods to float them to the Traun. Some birds began singing in the wood; as the sun set behind the glacier.
“They are singing in my heart too,” thought Corrèze, “but I must not listen to them. Heine knew the caprice and the tragedy of fate. He wrought no miracle to make the pine and the palm-tree meet.”
The days that followed dragged slowly over the head of Vere.
Ischl, in its nook between the hills, has always a certain sadness about it, and to her it seemed grown grey and very dull. The glaciers of Dachstein and Thorstein gleamed whitely afar off, and her thoughts were with the hunters underneath those buttresses of ice in the haunts of the steinbock and the vu
lture.
The perpetual clatter of the duchesses voluble tongue, and the chatter of society that was always about her — even here, in the heart of the Salzkammergut — wearied her and irritated her more than usual. She felt a painful longing for that soft deep voice of Corrèze, which to her never spoke a commonplace or a compliment, for the quick instinctive sympathy which he gave her without alarming her loyalty or wounding her pride.
“You are very dull, Vera,” said the duchesse impatiently, at length.
“I am never very gay,” said Vere coldly. “You knew that when you offered to accompany me.”
“Your husband wished us to be together,” said Madame Jeanne, a little angrily.
“You are very kind — to my husband — to so study his wishes,” said Vere, with a certain challenge in her glance. But the duchesse did not take up the challenge.
“Corrèze has told her something,” she thought.
To quarrel with Vere was the last thing she wished to do. She laughed carelessly, said something pleasant, and affected to be charmed with Ischl.
They went to the Imperial villa, rode a great deal, were courted by the notabilities as befitted one of the loveliest and one of the wittiest women of the time; and the five days slipped away, as the Traun water slid under its bridges and over its falls.
Vere began to listen wistfully for tidings of the return of the Kaisers hunting party. One morning at breakfast she heard that the Emperor had come back at daybreak. But of Corrèze there was nothing said.
Had it been any other memory than that of Corrèze she would have been disgusted and angered with herself at his occupation of her thoughts; but he so long had been to her an ideal, an abstraction, an embodiment of all high and heroic things, a living poem, that his absorption of her mind and memory had no alarm for her. He was still an ideal figure; now, when he was lost in the midst of the icefields of the Dachstein, as in winter when before her in the creations of Beethoven, of Mozart, and of Meyerbeer.