Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  She took her great bouquet in her hands and went slowly through the twilight of the church and towards the open doors. She was thinking of the little dog-rose gathered on the cliffs by the sea in Calvados.

  In another moment Corrèze stood before her in the dusk. A stray sunbeam wandering through the dusty panes of the window fell on his bright uncovered head.

  “I thought you were far way,” she said, with effort — her heart was beating. “I thought you were at the Hague?”

  He made a little gesture with his hand.

  “I shall be there. But could you think I would leave Austria so abruptly when you were in it? Surely not!”

  She was silent.

  In his presence, with the sweetness of his voice on her ear, all her old pure and perfect faith in him was strong as in the childish hour when she had heard him call the lark his little brother.

  “You wrote to Madame de Sonnaz—”

  “I wrote to Madame de Sonnaz many things that I knew she would not believe,” he rejoined quickly. “Oh, my Princess of Faith! one must fight the spirits of this world with worldly weapons, or be worsted. You are too true for that. Alas! how will the battle go with you in the end!”

  He sighed impatiently. Vere was silent.

  She but partly understood him.

  “Have you been amongst the glaciers all this time?” she asked at length.

  “No. I went to the Gitschthal in Carinthia. Do you know that yonder blue flower only grows there on the side of the Gartnerkogel, and nowhere else in all the breadth of Europe? I thought it was a fitter emblem for you than the edelweiss, which is bought and sold in every Alpine village. So I thought I would go and fetch it and bring it to you. The Gitschthal is very charming; it is quite lonely, and untrodden except by its own mountaineers. You would care for it. It made me a boy again.”

  “You went only for that?”

  “Only for that. What can one give you? You have everything. Prince Zouroff bought you the roc’s egg, but I think he would not care to climb for the Wolfinia. It is only a mountain flower.”

  Vere was silent.

  It was only a mountain flower, but, as he spoke of it, he gave it the meaning of the flower of Oberon.

  Had she any right to hear him? The dusky shadows of the church seemed to swim before her sight; the beauty of the Noël seemed still to echo on her ear.

  “How could you tell that I was here?” she murmured.

  He smiled.

  “That was very easy. I was in Ischl at daybreak. I would have sung a réveil under your window while the east was red, only Madame Jeanne would have taken it to herself. You go to Russia?”

  “In three days — yes.”

  Corrèze was silent.

  A slight shudder passed over him, as if the cold of Russia touched him.

  Suddenly he dropped on his knee before her.

  “I am but a singer of songs,” he murmured. “But I honour you as greater and graver men cannot do perhaps. More than I do, none can. They will speak idly of me to you, I dare say, and evil too, perhaps; but do not listen, do not believe. If you ever need a servant — or an avenger — call me. If I be living I will come. Alas! alas! Not I, nor any man, can save the ermine from the moths, the soul from the world; but you are in God’s hands if God there be above us. Farewell.”

  Then he kissed the hem of her skirts and left her.

  She kept the mountain flowers in her hand, and knew how her doubt had wronged him.

  Ten minutes later she left the church, hearing the voices of her friends. At the entrance she was met by Madame de Sonnaz, whose high silver heels and tall ebony cane, and skirts of cardinal red, were followed by an amazed group of Styrian children and women with their distaffs.

  “Where have you been, my dear?” asked Duchesse Jeanne. “We have missed you for hours. We have been on the river, and we are very hungry. I am dying for a quail and a peach. What is that dark blue flower; does that grow in the church?”

  A grey-headed English ambassador, Lord Bangor, who was in the rear of the duchesse, and was a keen and learned botanist, bent his eye-glasses on the rare blue blossom.

  “The Wolfinia!” he cried in delighted wonder. “The Wolfmia Carinthiana; that is the very phoenix of all flowers! Oh, Princess! if it be not too intrusive, may one beg to know wherever you got that treasure? Its only home is leagues away on the Gitschthal.”

  “It came from the Gitschthal; a boy brought it to me,” answered Vere; yet, though the words were literally true, she felt herself colour as she spoke them, because she did not say quite all the truth.

  Duchesse Jeanne looked at her quickly, and thought to herself, “Corrèze sent her those wild flowers, or brought them to her. I do not believe in La Haye.”

  Vere, indifferent to them all, stood in the church porch, with the soft grey light shed on her, and the alpine roses in her hands, and the spell of the Noël was still with her. “Lift up my soul,” prays the Psalmist — nothing will ever answer that prayer as music does.

  “What a beautiful creature she is,” said the old ambassador incautiously to the Duchesse Jeanne, as he looked at her, with that soft light from sunless skies upon her face.

  The Duchesse Jeanne cordially assented. “But,” she added with a smile, “people say so because she is faultlessly made, face and form; they say so, and there is an end. It is like sculpture; people go mad about a bit of china, a length of lace, a little picture, but no one ever goes mad about marble. They praise — and pass.”

  “Not always,” said the imprudent diplomatist, forgetful of diplomacy. “I think no one would pass here if they saw the slightest encouragement or permission to linger.”

  “But there is not the slightest. What I said — she is sculptural.”

  “How happy is Zouroff!”

  “Ah! Call no man happy till he is dead. Who knows if she will be always marble.”

  “She will never be a woman of the period,” said the old man with some asperity. “I think her portrait will never be sold in shops. So far she will for ever miss fame.”

  “It is amusing to see oneself in shops,” said Madame de Sonnaz. “Now and then I see a little crowd before mine; and the other day I heard a boy say — a boy who had a tray full of pipes on his head —

  ‘Tiens! Celle-ci; elle est joliment laide, mais elle est crâne, la petite; v’la!’ That was at my portrait.”

  “It is popularity, madame,” said the ambassador with a grave bow. “The boy with the pipes knew his period.”

  “And how much that is to know!” said the lady with vivacity. “It is better to be the boy with the pipes than Pygmalion. To know your own times, and adapt yourself to them, is the secret of success in everything from governing to advertising. Now-a-days a statesman has no chance unless he is sensational; a musician none unless he is noisy; an artist none unless he is either diseased or gaudy; a government none unless it is feverish, startling, and extravagant. It is the same with a woman. To be merely faultlessly beautiful is nothing, or next to nothing; you must know how to display it, how to provoke with it, how to tint it here and touch it there, and make it, in a word, what my boy with the pipes called me. I have not a good feature in my face, you know, and I have a skin like a yellow plum, that Piver can do nothing to redeem, and yet ninety-nine of the whole world of men will look at that perfect beauty of Princess Zouroff, praise her, and leave her to come to me. The boy with the pipes is a type of mankind, I assure you. Will you tell me, pray, why it is?”

  “Excuse me, madame,” said the old man, with another low bow. “To explain the choice of Paris is always a most painful dilemma; the goddesses are all so admirable—”

  “No phrases. You are old enough to tell me the truth; or, if you like, I will tell it to you.”

  “I should certainly prefer that.”

  “Well—”

  “Well?”

  “I will tell you, then, in her own husband’s words: elle ne sait pas s’encanailler.”

  And the duchesse, w
ith a cigarette in her mouth, laughed, and carried her cardinal red skirts, and her musical silver heels over the stones of Aussee to a raft on the river which the skill of her attendants had turned into a very pretty awning-shaded flower-decked barge, where their breakfast was spread in the soft grey air above the green water.

  Such women as Duchesse Jeanne or Lady Dolly are never in the country; they take Paris and London with them wherever they go.

  The old diplomatist sat silent through the gay and clamorous breakfast, looking often at Vere, beside whose plate lay the alpine roses, and in whose ruffled lace at her throat was the blue Wolfinia.

  “Good God! what an age we live in!” he thought. “In which a husband makes it a reproach to his wife that she does not understand how to attract other men! I do believe that we have sunk lower than the Romans of the empire; they did draw a line between the wife and the concubine. We don’t draw any. Perhaps, after all, the Nihilists are right, and we deserve cutting down root and branch in our corruption. The disease wants the knife.”

  He muttered something of his thoughts to his next neighbour, the young Prince Traoï.

  The young man nodded, smiled, and answered, “Duchesse Jeanne is quite right. Princess Vera is as beautiful as a Titian; but one gets tired of looking at a Titian that one knows will never come into the market. Or rather she is like a classic statue in one of the old patrician museums in Rome. You know nothing will ever get the statue into your collection; you admire and pass. The other day, at the Hôtel Drouot, there was a tobacco-pot in Karl Theodor porcelain, that was disputed by half Europe, and went at a fabulous price; the woman we like resembles that tobacco-pot; it is exquisite, but it can be got at, and anybody’s hand may go into it; and even in its beauty — for Karl Theodor is so beautiful — it is suggestive and redolent of a coarse pleasure.”

  “All that is very well,” said Lord Bangor; “but though it may explain the modern version of Paris’s choice, it does not explain why in marriage—”

  “Yes, it does,” said the younger man. “The Roman noble does not care a straw for the statues that ennoble his vestibule; if he saw them once being disputed in the Rue Drouot he would quicken into an owners appreciation. Believe me, the only modern passion that is really alive is envy. How should any man care for what is passively and undisputably his? To please us a woman must be hung about with other mens desires, as a squaw with beads.”

  “Then you, too, would wish your wife to savoir s’encanailler?”

  “Not my own wife,” said the young man with a laugh. “But then I belong to an old school, though I am young; Austrians all do.”

  “Whilst Russians,” said the old man savagely, “Russians are all Bussy Rabutins crossed with Timour Beg. By all, I mean of course the five or seven thousand of ‘personages’ that are all one sees of any nation in society. The nation, I dare say, is well enough, for it has faith, if its faith takes many odd shapes, and it can be very patient.”

  The Duchesse Jeanne called aloud to him that he must not talk politics at breakfast.

  Then the breakfast came to an end, with many fruits and sweetmeats and Vienna dainties left to be scrambled for by the Aussee water-babies; and the driving party of Madame de Sonnaz began their homeward way over the Potschen-Joch. The old ambassador contrived to saunter to the carriages beside Vere.

  “If I were a score of years younger, madame,” he said with a glance at the dark blue flower at her throat, “I would beg you to make me your knight and give me the Wolfinia for my badge. It is the only flower you ought to wear, for it is the only one really emblematic of you; the edelweiss, that they call you after in Paris, is too easily found — and too chilly. Have you liked the day; has it tired you very much?”

  “It takes a great deal to tire me physically,” said Vere. “I am stronger than they think.”

  “But mentally you tire soon, because the atmosphere you are in does not suit you; is it not so?”

  “I suppose so. I do not care for the chatter of the salons amidst the mountains.”

  “No —

  Le vent qui vient à travers les montagnes Me rendra fou — is a fitter spirit in which to meet the glaciers face to face. I think people either have a love of the mountains that is a religion, that is unutterable, sacred, and intense; or else are quite indifferent to them — like our friends. I know a man in whom they remain a religion despite all the counter-influences of the very gayest of worlds and most intoxicating of lives. I do not know whether you ever met him — I mean the singer Corrèze.”

  “Yes; I know him.”

  “He is a very keen mountaineer; he has a passion for the heights, not that of the mere climber of so many thousand feet, but rather of the dweller on the hills, whom nature has made a poet too. I saw him first when he was a little lad in the hills above Sion. You know people always say that part of his story is not true, but it is quite true. I am not aware why people who have not genius invariably think that people of genius lie; but they do so. I suppose Mediocrity cannot comprehend Imagination failing to avail itself of its resources! Three-and-twenty years ago, Princesse, I was already an old man, but more active than I am now. After a long and arduous season at my post I was allowing myself the luxury of an incognito tour, leaving my secretaries and servants at Geneva. No one enjoys the privacy and ease of such holidays like an old harness-worn public servant, and there is no harness heavier than diplomacy, though they do give it bells and feathers. One of those short — too short — summer days I had overwalked myself amongst the green Alps of the Valais, and had to rest at a considerable elevation, from which I was not very certain how I should get down again. It was an exquisite day; such days as only the mountains can give one, with that exhilarating tonic in the air that does worried nerves more good than all the physicians. Almost unconsciously I repeated aloud in the fulness of my heart, with a boyishness that I ought perhaps to have been ashamed of, but was not, the Thalysia; you will know it, Princesse; I have heard that you are a student that would have charmed Roger Ascham. As I murmured it to myself I heard a voice take up the Idyl, and continue with the song of Lycidas; a pretty childish voice, that had laughter in it, laughter no doubt at my surprise. I turned and saw a little fellow with a herd of goats; he was a beautiful child about nine or ten years old. His Greek was quite pure. I was very astonished, and questioned him. He told me he was called Raphael de Corrèze. As it was near evening he offered me to go down with him to his fathers hut, and I did so; and, as he trotted by my side, he told me that his father had taught him all he knew. He kept goats, he said, but he studied too. I was belated, and should have fared ill but for the hospitality of that mountain hut. I cannot tell you how greatly his father interested me. He was a scholar, and had all the look and bearing of a man of birth. He told me briefly how his father had taken to the mountains when the revolution ruined the nobility of Savoy. He was then in feeble health; he was anxious for the future of his boy, who was all alive with genius, and mirth, and music, and sang to me, after the simple supper, in the sweetest boyish pipe that it has ever been my lot to hear. I left them my name, and begged them to use me as they chose; but I never heard anything from them after the bright morning walk, when the boy guided me down into the high road for Sion. I sent him some books and a silver flute from Geneva, but I never knew that he got them. My own busy life began again, and I am shocked to say that I forgot that hut in the Alps, though that tranquil homely interior was one of the prettiest pictures which life has ever shown me. Many years afterwards, in Berlin, one night after the opera, going on to the stage with some of the princes to congratulate a new singer, who had taken the world by storm, the singer looked hard at me for a moment and then smiled. ‘I have the silver flute still, Excellency,’ he said. ‘I do hope you had the note I wrote you, to thank you for it, to Geneva.’ And then, of course, in that brilliant young tenor I knew my little goat-boy, who had quoted Theocritus, and wondered how I could have been so stupid as not to have remembered his name when I heard it in the
public mouth. So I, for one, know that is quite true that he is a mountaineer no less than he is an artist and a Marquis de Corrèze. They say he has been in Ischl; I wish I had known it, for I am always so glad to see him out of the whirl of cities, where both he and I, in our different ways, are too pressed for time to have much leisure for talk. He is a very charming companion, Corrèze. Forgive me, Princesse, for telling you such a long story. Prosiness is pardoned to age; and here are the carriages.”

  Vere had listened with changing colour, all the dejection and indifference passing from her face, and a light of pleasure and surprise shining in her frank grave eyes.

  “Do not apologise. You have interested me very much,” she said simply.

  And the astute old man noticed that, as she spoke, she unconsciously touched the blue mountain flower at her throat.

  “Improbable as it seems,” he thought to himself; “I would wager that it is Corrèze who gave her that Wolfinia. She is not as cold as they say. ‘Elle ne sait pas s’encanailler.’ No; and she will never learn that modern science. But there are greater perils for great natures than the bath of mud, that they never will take though it is the fashion. The bath of mud breaks nothing, and mesdames come out of it when they like white as snow. But these people fall from the stars, and break everything as they fall, in them and under them. She is half marble still; she is not quite awake yet; but when she is — when she is, I would not wish to be Prince Sergius Zouroff!”

  The party went homeward in the fresh mountain air, leaving the evening lights on Old Aussee lying amidst its many waters. Vere was very silent, her alpine roses lay in her lap, the Minuit Chrétien was on her ear. The sun had set when they descended into lschl. Her servants came to meet her, and said that her husband had arrived.

  “Quel preux chevalier de mari!” cried the Duchesse Jeanne with her shrill laughter, that was like the clash of steel.

  “Quel preux chevalier de mari,” repeated the Duchesse de Sonnaz to Prince Zouroff alone, as they stood on the balcony of the hôtel after dinner.