by Ouida
He laughed as he leaned over the balustrade smoking.
“Je l’ai toujours été, pour toi,” he whispered.
The Duchesse de Sonnaz gave him a blow with her pretty fan, that Fantin had painted with some Loves playing blind-man’s-buff Vere was inside the room; she was intent upon her lace-work. The shaded light of a lamp fell on the proud, mournful calmness of her face. She wore black velvet with a high ruff of old Flemish lace; she looked like a picture by Chardin.
Prince Zouroff sauntered in from the balcony and approached his wife.
“Vera,” he said suddenly to her, “they tell me you are great friends with that singing fellow Corrèze. Is it true?”
Vere looked up from her lace-work.
“Who say so?”
“Oh — people. Is it true?”
“I have seen M. de Corrèze little, but I feel to know him well.” She answered him the simple truth, as it seemed to be to herself. “Ah!” said Prince Zouroff, “then write and tell him to come to Svir. We must have some grand music for the Tsarewitch, and you can offer him five hundred more roubles a night than the Petersburg opera gives him; he can have his own suite of rooms, and his own table; I know those artists give themselves airs.”
Vere looked at him for a moment in astonishment, then felt herself grow cold and pale, with what emotion she scarcely knew.
“You had better let Anton write if you wish it,” she answered, after a little pause. Anton was his secretary. “But M. de Corrèze would not come; he has many engagements; and I believe he never goes to private houses unless he goes as a guest, and then, of course, there is no question of money.”
Zouroff was looking at her closely through his half-closed eyelids. He laughed.
“Nonsense. If an artist cannot be hired the world is coming to an end. They have no right to prejudices, those people; and, in point of fact, they only assume them to heighten the price. I prefer you should write yourself; you can give him any sum you like; but he shall come to Svir.”
Vere hesitated a moment, then said very calmly, “It is not for me to write; Anton always does your business; let him do this.”
The forehead of Zouroff grew clouded with a heavy frown; she had never contradicted or disobeyed him before.
“I order you to write, madame,” he said sternly. “There is an end.” Vere rose, curtsied, and passed before him to a writing-table. There she wrote:
“Monsieur, — My husband desires me to beg you to do us the honour of visiting us at Svir on the fifteenth of next month, when the Tsarewitch will have the condescension to be with us; I believe, however, that you will be unable to do us this gratification, as I think your time is already too fully occupied. All arrangements you may wish to make in the event of your acceding to his desire you will kindly communicate to M. Zouroff. I beg you to assure you of my distinguished consideration.
“Vera, Princess Zouroff.”
She wrote rapidly, addressed the letter, and handed it to her husband.
“Pooh!” he said, as he read it, and tore it up. “You write to the fellow as if he were a prince himself. You must not write to a singer in that fashion. Say we will pay him anything he choose. It is a question d’argent; there is no need for compliments and consideration.”
“You will pardon me, monsieur, I will not write with less courtesy than that.”
“You will write as I choose to dictate.”
‘No.” She spoke very quietly and took up her lace-work.
“You venture to disobey me?”
“I will not disobey any absolute command of yours, but I will not insult a great artist because you wish me to do so.”
There was a look of resolve and contempt on her face that was new to him. She had always obeyed his caprices with a passive, mute patience that had made him believe her incapable of having will or judgment of her own. It was as strange to him as if a statue had spoken, or a flower had frowned. He stared at her in surprise that was greater than his annoyance.
“Pardieu! what has come to you?” he said fiercely. “Take up your pen and write what I have spoken.”
“Napoléon, tu t’oublies!” quoted Duchesse Jeanne, as she came to the rescue with laugh. “My dear Prince, pardon me, but your charming wife is altogether in the right. Corrèze is a great artist; emperors kneel before him; it will never do to send for him as if he were an organ-grinder, that is, at least, if you want him to come. Besides, Vera and he are old friends; they cannot be expected to deal with one another like entrepreneur and employé, in the sledge-hammer style of persuasion, which seems to be your idea of beguiling stars to shine for you. Believe me, your wife is right. Corrèze will never come to Svir at all unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless as her friend, and yours.”
There was a little accent on the first pronoun that cast the meaning of many words into those few monosyllables.
Zouroff watched his wife from under his heavy eyelids.
Vere sat still, and composed, taking up the various threads of her lace-pillows. She had said what she had thought courage and courtesy required her to say; to the effect of what she had said she was indifferent, and she did not perceive the meaning in the duchess’s words — a pure conscience is often a cause of blindness and deafness that are perilous.
“When I have spoken—” began her husband, for he had the childishness of the true tyrant in him.
Madame de Sonnaz puffed some cigarette-smoke into his face.
“Oh, Cæsar; when you have spoken, what then? You have no serfs now, even in Russia. You can have none of us knouted. You can only bow and yield to a womans will, like any other man. Voyons! I will write to Corrèze. I have known him ever since he first set all Paris sighing as Edgardo, and I will insinuate to him gently that he will find a bouquet on his table each day with a million roubles about the stalks of it; that will be delicate enough perhaps to bring him. But do you really wish for him? That is what I doubt.”
“Why should you doubt it?” said the prince, with his sombre eyes still fastened on his wife.
Duchess Jeanne looked at him and smiled; the smile said a great many things.
“Because it will cost a great deal,” she said demurely, “and I never knew that the Tsarewitch cared especially for music. He is not Louis of Bavaria.”
Then she sat down and wrote a very pretty letter of invitation and cajolery and command, all combined. Vere never spoke; her husband paced up and down the room, angry at having been worsted, yet reluctant to oppose his friend Jeanne.
It was the first disobedience of Vere’s since she had sworn him obedience at the altar. It gave him a strange sensation, half of rage, half of respect; but the mingling of respect only served to heighten and strengthen the rage. He had been a youth when the emancipation was given by Alexander to his people; and in his boyhood he had seen his servants and his villagers flogged, beaten with rods, driven out into the snow at midnight, turned adrift into the woods to meet the wolves, treated anyhow, as whim or temper dictated on the impulse of a moments wrath. The instinct of dominion remained strong in him; it always seemed to him that a blow was the right answer to any restive creature, whether dog or horse, man or woman. He had seen women scourged very often, and going in droves from Poland to Siberia. He could have found it in his heart to throw his wife on her knees and strike her now. Only he was a man of the world and knew what the world thought of such violence as that; and, in his own coarse way, he was a gentleman.
Corrèze received the letter of Duchesse Jeanne one evening on the low sands of Schevening, where some of the noblest ladies of northern nobilities were spoiling and praising him, as women had done from the day of his début. Corrèze felt that he ought to have been content; he was seated luxuriously in one of the straw hive-like chairs, a lovely Prussian Furstin had lent him her huge fan, a Dutchwoman, handsome as Rubens’ wife, was making him a cigarette, and a Danish ambassadress was reading him a poem of François Coppée; the sea was rolling in, in big billo
ws, and sending into the air a delicious crisp freshness and buoyancy; all along the flat and yellow dunes were pleasant people, clever people, handsome people, distinguished people.
He ought to have been content. But he was not. He was thinking of green, cool, dusky, fir-scented Ischl.
The Danish beauty stopped suddenly in her reading. “You are not listening, Corrèze!” she cried aloud in some dismay and discomfiture.
“Madame,” said Corrèze gallantly, “Coppée is a charming poet, but I would defy anyone to think of what he writes when it is you who are the reader of it!”
“That is very pretty,” said the lovely Dane; “it would be perfect indeed; only one sees that you suppress a yawn as you say it!”
“I never yawned, or wished to yawn, in my life,” said he promptly. “I cannot understand people who do. Cut your throat, blow out your brains, drown yourself, any one of these — that is a conceivable impulse; but yawn! what a confession of internal nothingness! What a vapid and vacant windbag must be the man who collapses into a yawn!”
“Nevertheless, you were very near one then,” said the Danish beauty, casting her Coppée aside on the sand. “Compliments aside, you are changed, do you know? You are serious, you are preoccupied.”
At that moment his secretary brought him his letters. His ladies gave him permission to glance at them, for some were marked urgent. Amongst them was the letter of Madame de Sonnaz.
He read it with surprise and some anger. It was a temptation; and the writer had known very well that it was so.
He would not have touched the roubles of the master of Svir, and would not willingly even have broken his bread, yet he would have given everything he possessed to go, to be under the same roof with the wife of Zouroff; to see, to hear, to charm, to influence her; to sing his songs for her ear alone.
The rough great northern ocean came booming over the sands. Corrèze sat silent and with a shadow on his face.
Then he rose, wrote a line in a leaf of his notebook, gave it to his secretary to have telegraphed at once to Ischl. The line said merely:
“Mille remerciments. Très honoré. Impossible d’accepter à cause d’engagements. Tous mes hommages.”
The sea rolled in with a grand sound, like a chant on a great organ.
“It is very bourgeois to do right,” thought Corrèze; “but one must do it sometimes. Madame Jeanne is too quick; she plays her cards coarsely. All those Second Empire women are conspirators, but they conspire too hurriedly to succeed. My beautiful edelweiss, do they think I should pluck you from your heights? Oh! the Goths! Madame,” he said aloud, “do be merciful, and read me the harmonies of Coppée again. You will not? That is revengeful. Perhaps I did not attend enough to his charming verses. There is another verse running in my head. Do you know it? I think Sully Prudhomme wrote it. It is one of those things so true that they hurt one; and one carries the burden of them about like a sad memory.
“Dans les verres épais du cabaret brutal,
Le vin bleu coule à flots, et sans trêve à la ronde.
Dans le calice fin plus rarement abonde
Un vin dont la clarté soit digne du cristal.
Enfin, la coupe d’or du haut d’un piédestal
Attend, vide toujours, bien que large et profonde,
Un cru dont la noblesse à la sienne répond:
On tremble d’en souiller l’ouvrage et le métal.”
“Have your letters made you think of that poem?” asked his companion.
“Yes.”
“And where is the golden cup?”
“At the banquet of a debauchee who prefers ‘Les verres épais du cabaret brutal.’”
END OF VOL. II.
VOLUME III.
CHAPTER I.
A few weeks later they were at Svir.
Svir was one of the grandest summer palaces of the many palaces of the Princes Zouroff. It had been built by a French architect in the time of the great Catherine’s love of French art, and its appanages were less an estate than a province or principality that stretched far away to the horizon on every side save one, where the Baltic spread its ice-plains in the winter, and its blue waters to the brief summer sunshine. It was a very grand place; it had acres of palm-houses and glass-houses; it had vast stables full of horses; it had a theatre, with a stage as large as the Follies-Marigny’s; it had vast forests in which the bear and the boar and the wolf were hunted with the splendour and the barbarity of the royal hunts that Snyders painted; it was a Muscovite Versailles, with hundreds of halls and chambers, and a staircase, up which fifty men might have walked abreast; it had many treasures, too, of the arts, and precious marbles, Greek and Roman; yet there was no place on earth which Vere hated as she hated Svir.
To her it was the symbol of despotism, of brutal power, of soulless magnificence; and the cruelties of the sport that filled all the days, and the oppression of the peasantry by the police-agents which she was impotent to redress, weighed on her with continual pain. She had been taught in her girlhood to think; she knew too much to accept the surface gloss of things as their truth; she could not be content with a life which was a perpetual pageantry, without any other aim than that of killing time.
So much did the life at Svir displease her, and so indifferent was she to her own position in it, that she never observed that she was less mistress of it than was the Duchesse de Sonnaz, who was there with the Duc Paul, a placid sweet-tempered man, who was devoted to entomology and other harmless sciences. It was not Vere, but Madame Jeanne who directed the amusements of each day and night. It was Madame Jeanne who scolded the manager of the operetta troup, who selected the pieces to be performed in the theatre, who organised the hunting parties and the cotillons, and the sailing, and the riding. It was Madame Jeanne who, with her pistols in her belt, and her gold-tipped ivory hunting-horn, and her green tunic and trowsers, and her general franc-tireur aspect, went out with Sergius Zouroff to see the bears death-struggle, and give the last stroke in the wolfs throat.
Vere — to whom the moonlit curée in the great court was a horrible sight, and who, though she had never blenched when the wolves had bayed after the sledge, would have turned sick and blind at sight of the dying beasts with the hunters’ knives in their necks — was only glad that there was anyone who should take the task off her hands of amusing the large house-party and the morose humours of her husband. The words of Corrèze had failed to awaken any suspicion in her mind.
That the presence of Madame de Sonnaz at Svir was as great an insult to her as that of Noisette in the Kermesse pavilion never entered her thoughts. She only as yet knew very imperfectly her world.
“It is well she is beautiful, for she is only a bit of still life,” said Prince Zouroff very contemptuously to some one who complimented him upon his wife’s loveliness.
When she received their Imperial guests at the foot of her staircase, with a great bouquet of lilies of the valley and orchids in her hand, she was a perfect picture against the ebony and malachite of the balustrade — that he granted; but she might as well have been made of marble for aught of interest or animation that she showed.
It angered him bitterly that the luxury and extravagance with which she was surrounded did not impress her more. It was so very difficult to hurt a woman who cared for so little; her indifference seemed to remove her thousands of leagues away from him.
“You see it is of no use to be angry with her,” he said to his confidant, Madame Jeanne. “You do not move her. She remains tranquil. She does not oppose you, but neither does she alter. She is like the snow, that is so white and still and soft; but the snow is stronger than you; it will not stop for you.”
Madame Jeanne laughed a little.
“My poor Sergius! you would marry!”
Zouroff was silent; his eyebrows were drawn together in moody meditation.
Why had he married? he wondered. Because a child’s coldness, and a child’s rudeness had made her loveliness greater for a moment in his sight than any
other. Because, also, for Vere, base as his passion had been, it had been more nearly redeemed by tenderness than anything he had ever known.
“The snow is very still, it is true,” said Madame Jeanne musingly; “but it can rise in a very wild tourmente sometimes. You must have seen that a thousand times.”
“And you mean — ?” said Zouroff, turning his eyes on her.
“I mean that I think our sweet Vera is just the person to have a coup de tête, and to forget everything in it.”
“She will never forget what is due to me,” said Zouroff angrily and roughly.
Madame de Sonnaz laughed.
“Do you fancy she cares about that? what she does think of is what is due to herself. I always told you she is the type of woman that one never sees now — the woman who is chaste out of self-respect. It is admirable, it is exquisite; but all the same it is invulnerable; because it is only a finer sort of egotism.”
“She will never forget her duty,” said her husband peremptorily, as though closing the discussion.
“Certainly not,” assented his friend; “not as long as it appears duty to her. But her ideas of duty may change — who can say? And, mon cher, you do not very often remember yours to her!”
Zouroff blazed into a sullen passion, at which Madame de Sonnaz laughed, as was her wont, and turned her back on him, and lighted a cigar.
“After all,” she said, “what silly words we use! Duty! — honour! — obligation! ‘Tout cela est si purement géographique,’ as was said at Marly long ago. I read the other day of Albania, in which it is duty to kill forty men for one, and of another country in which it is duty for a widow to marry all her brothers-in-law. Let us hope our Vera’s views of geography will never change.”
They were standing together in one of the long alleys of the forest, which was resounding with the baying of hounds and the shouting of beaters. For all reply Sergius Zouroff put his rifle to his shoulder; a bear was being driven down the drive.