by Ouida
“A moi!” cried Madame Jeanne. The great brown mass came thundering through the brushwood, and came into their sight; she raised her gun, and sent a bullet through its forehead, and snatched Zouroff’s breech-loader from him, and fired again. The bear dropped; there was a quick convulsive movement of all its paws, then it was still for ever.
“I wish I could have married you!” cried Zouroff enthusiastically. “There is not another woman in Europe who could have done that at such a distance as we are!”
“Mon vieux, we should have loathed one another,” said Madame Jeanne, in no way touched by the compliment. “In a conjugal capacity I much prefer my good Paul.”
Zouroff laughed — restored to good humour — and drew his hunting-knife to give the customary stroke for surety to her victim. The day was beautiful in the deep green gloom and balmy solitude of the forest, which was chiefly of pines.
“Sport is very stupid,” said Madame Jeanne, blowing her ivory horn to call the keepers. “Vera is employing her time much better, I am sure; she is reading metaphysics, or looking at her orchids, or studying Nihilism.”
“Let me forget for a moment that Vera exists,” said her husband, with his steel in the bears throat.
Vere was studying Nihilism, or what has led to it, which comes to the same thing.
The only town near Svir was one of no great importance, a few miles inland, whose citizens were chiefly timber-traders, or owners of trading ships, that went to and from the Baltic. It had some churches, some schools, some war of sects, and it had of late been in evil odour with the government for suspected socialist doctrines. It had been warned, punished, purified, but of late was supposed to have sinned again; and the hand of the Third Section had fallen heavily upon it.
Vere this day rode over to it, to visit one of its hospitals; her mother, and other ladies, drove there to purchase sables and marten skins.
Lady Dolly had been so near — at Carlsbad, a mere trifle of a few hundred miles — that she had been unable to resist the temptation of running over for a peep at Svir, which she was dying to see, so she averred. She was as pretty as ever. She had changed the colour of her curls, but that prevents monotony of expression, and, if well done, is always admired. She had to be a little more careful always to have her back to the light, and there was sometimes about her eyes lines which nothing would quite paint away; and her maid found her more pettish and peevish. That was all; twenty years hence, if Lady Dolly live, there will be hardly more difference than that.
Her Sicilian had been also on the banks of the Teple — only for his health, for he was not strong — but he had been too assiduous in carrying her shawls, in ordering her dinners, in walking beside her mule in the firwoods, and people began to talk; and Lady Dolly did not choose to imperil all that the flowers for the Children’s Hospitals, and the early services at Knightsbridge, had done for her, so she had summarily left the young man in the fir woods, and come to Svir.
“I always like to witness my dear child’s happiness, you know, with my own eyes when I can; and in London and Paris both she and I are so terribly busy,” she said to her friends at Carlsbad.
Herself, she always recoiled from meeting the grave eyes of Vere, and the smile of her son-in-law was occasionally grim and disagreeable, and made her shiver; but yet she thought it well to go to their houses, and she was really anxious to see the glories of Svir.
When she arrived there, she was enraptured. She adored novelty, and new things are hard to find for a person who has seen as much as she had. The Russian life was, in a measure, different to what she had known elsewhere, the local colour enchanted her, and the obeisances and humility of the people she declared were quite scriptural.
The grandeur, the vastness, the absolute dominion, the half-barbaric magnificence that prevailed in this, the grandest summer palace of the Zouroffs, delighted her; they appealed forcibly to her imagination, which had its vulgar side. They appeased her conscience, too; for, after all, she thought, what could Vere wish for more? Short of royalty, no alliance could have given her more wealth, more authority, and more rank.
These Baltic estates were a kingdom in themselves, and the prodigal, careless, endless luxury, that was the note of life there, was mingled with a despotism and a cynicism in all domestic relations that fascinated Lady Dolly.
“I should have been perfectly happy if I had married a great Russian,” she often said to herself; and she thought that her daughter was both thankless to her fate and to her. Lady Dolly really began to bring herself to think so.
“Very few women,” she mused, “would ever have effaced themselves as I did; very few would have put away every personal feeling and objection as I did. Of course she doesn’t know — but I don’t believe any woman living would have done as I did, because people are so selfish.”
She had persuaded herself in all this time that she had been generous, self-sacrificing, even courageous, in marrying her daughter as she did; and when now and then a qualm passed over her, as she thought that the world might give all these great qualities very different and darker names, Lady Dolly took a little sherry or a little chloral, according to the time of day, and very soon was herself again.
To be able to do no wrong at all in one’s own sight, is one of the secrets of personal comfort in this life. Lady Dolly never admitted, even to herself, that she did any. If anything looked a little wrong, it was only because she was the victim to unkindly circumstance over which she had no control.
People had always been so jealous of her, and so nasty to her about money.
“It is all very well to talk about the saints,” she would say to herself, “but they never had any real trials. If the apostles had had bills due that they couldn’t meet, or St. Helen and St. Ursula had had their curls come off just as they were being taken in to dinner, they might have talked. As it was, I am sure they enjoyed all their martyrdom, just as people scream about being libelled in ‘Truth’ or ‘Figaro,’ and delight in having their names in them.”
Lady Dolly always thought herself an ill-used woman. If things had been in the least just, she would have been born with thirty thousand a year, and six inches more in stature.
Meanwhile she was even prettier than ever. She had undergone a slight transformation; her curls were of a richer ruddier hue, her eyelashes were darker and thicker, her mouth was like a little pomegranate bud. It was all Piver; but it was the very perfection of Piver. She had considered that the hues and style of the fashions of the coming year, which were always disclosed to her very early in secret conclave in the Rue de la Paix, required this slight deepening and heightening of her complexion.
“I do wish you would induce Vera to rouge a little, just a little. Dress this winter really will want it; the colours will all be dead ones,” she had said this day at Svir to her son-in-law, who shrugged his shoulders.
“I have told her she would look better; but she is obstinate, you know.”
“Oh-h-h!” assented Lady Dolly. “Obstinate is no word for it; she is mulish; of course, I understand that she is very proud of her skin, but it would look all the better if it were warmed up a little; it is too white, too fair, if one can say such a thing, don’t you know? And, besides, even though she may look well now without it, a woman who never rouges has a frightful middle-age before her. Didn’t Talleyrand say so?”
“You are thinking of whist; but the meaning is the same. Both are resources for autumn that it is better to take in summer,” said Madame Nelaguine, with her little cynical smile.
“Vera is very fantastic,” said the Duchesse Jeanne. “Besides, she is so handsome she is not afraid of growing older; she thinks she will defy Time.”
“I believe you can if you are well enamelled,” said Lady Dolly seriously.
“Vera will be like the woman under the Merovingian kings,” said Madame Nelaguine. “The woman who went every dawn of her life out into the forests at day break to hear the birds sing, and so remained, by angels’ blessing, perpetu
ally young.”
“I suppose there was no society in France in that time,” said Lady Dolly; “or else the woman was out of it. In society everybody has always painted. I think they found all sorts of rouge-pots at Pompeii, which is so touching, and brings all those poor dear creatures so near to us; and it just shows that human nature was always exactly the same.”
“The Etruscan focolare, I dare say, were trays of cosmetics,” suggested Madame Nelaguine sympathetically.
“Yes?” said Lady Dolly, whose history was vague. “It is so interesting, I think, to feel that everybody was always just exactly alike, and that when they complain of us it is such nonsense, and mere spite. Vera, why will not you rouge a little, a very little?”
“I think it a disgusting practice,” said her daughter, who had entered the room at that moment, dressed for riding.
“Well, I think so too,” said Madame Nelaguine with a little laugh. “I think so too, though I do it; but my rouge is very honest; I am exactly like the wooden dolls, with a red dab on each cheek, that they sell for the babies at fairs. Vera would be a sublime wax doll, no doubt, if she rouged; but, as it is, she is a marble statue. Surely that is the finer work of art.”
“The age of statues is past,” murmured the Duchess Jeanne. “We are in the puppet and monkey epoch.”
“It is all cant to be against painting,” said Lady Dolly. “Who was it said that the spider is every bit as artificial as the weaver?”
“Joseph le Maistre,” said Madame Nelaguine, “but he means—”
“He means, to be sure,” said Lady Dolly with asperity, “that unless one goes without any clothes at all, like savages, one must be artificial; and one may just as well be becomingly so as frightfully so; only I know frights are always thought natural, as snubbing, snapping creatures are thought so sweetly sincere. But it doesn’t follow one bit; the frights have most likely only gone to the wrong people to get done up.”
“And the disagreeable snappers and snubbers and snarlers?”
“Got out of bed the wrong end upwards,” said Lady Dolly, “or have forgotten to take their dinner-pills.”
“I begin to think you are a philosopher, Lady Dolly.”
“I hope I am nothing so disagreeable,” said Lady Dolly. “But at least I have eyes, and my eyes tell me what a wretched, dull, pawky-looking creature a woman that doesn’t do herself up looks like at a ball.”
“Even at twenty years old?”
“Age has nothing to do with it,” said Lady Dolly very angrily. “That is a man’s idea. People don’t paint because they’re old; they paint to vary themselves, to brighten themselves, to clear themselves. A natural skin may do very well in Arcadia, but it won’t do where there are candles and gas. Besides, a natural skin’s always the same; but when you paint, you make it just what goes best with the gown you have got on for the day; and as women grow older what are they to do? It is all very well to say ‘bear it,’ but who helps you to bear it? Not society, which shelves you; not men, who won’t look at you; not women, who count your curls if they are false, and your grey hairs if they are real. It is all very well to talk poetry, but who likes déchéance. It is all very well to rail about artificiality and postiche, but who forced us to be artificial, and who made postiche a necessity? Society; society; society. Would it stand a woman who had lost all her teeth and who had a bald head? Of course not. Then whose is the fault if the woman goes to the dentist and the hair-dresser? She is quite right to go. But it is absurd to say that society does not make her go. All this cry about artificiality is cant, all cant. Who are admired in a ball-room? The handsome women who are not young but are dressed to perfection, painted to perfection, coifféd to perfection, and are perfect bits of colour. If they come out without their postiche who would look at them? Mothers of boys and girls you say? Yes, of course they are; but that is their misfortune; it is no reason why they shouldn’t look as well as they can look, and, besides, nowadays it is only married women that are looked at, and children in short frocks, which is disgusting.”
Lady Dolly paused for breath, having talked herself into some confusion of ideas, and went away to dress and drive.
She forgot the wrongs of fate as she drove to Molv with the old ambassador Lord Bangor, who was staying there, and a charming young Russian of the Guard, whose golden head and fair beauty made her Sicilian seem to her in memory yellow and black as an olive; he had really had nothing good but his eyes, she reflected as she drove.
When she reached Molv she admired everything; the bearded priests, the churches, the bells, the pink and yellow houses, the Byzantine shrines. She was in a mood to praise. What was not interesting was so droll, and what was not droll was so interesting. If her companion of the Imperial Guard had not had a head like a Circassian chief, and a form like Hercules, she might perhaps have found out that Molv was ugly and very flat, dirty and very unsavoury, and so constituted that it became a pool of mud in winter, and in summer a shoal of sand. But she did not see these things, and she was charmed. She was still more charmed when she had bought her sealskins and sables at a price higher than she would have given in Regent Street; and, coming out opposite the gilded and painted frontage of the chief church, which was that of St. Vladimir, she saw a sad sight.
Nothing less than a score of young men and a few women being taken by a strong force of Cossacks to the fortress; the townspeople looking on, gathered in groups, quite silent, grieved but dumb, like poor beaten dogs.
“Dear me! how very interesting!” said Lady Dolly, and she put up her eye-glasses. “How very interesting! some of them quite nice-looking, too. What have they done?”
The Russian of the Guard explained to her that they were suspected of revolutionary conspiracies, had harboured suspected persons, or were suspected themselves: Nihilists, in a word.
“How very interesting!” said Lady Dolly again. “Now, one would never see such a sight as that in England, Lord Bangor?”
“No,” said Lord Bangor seriously; “I don’t think we should. There are defects in our constitution—”
“Poor things!” said Lady Dolly, a pretty figure in feuillemorte and violet, with a jewelled ebony cane as high as her shoulder, surveying through her glass the chained, dusty, heart-sick prisoners. “But why couldn’t they keep quiet? So stupid of them! I never understand those revolutionaries; they upset everything, and bore everybody, and think themselves martyrs! It will be such a pity if you do get those horrid principles here. Russia is too charming as it is; everybody so obedient and nice as they are at present, everybody kneeling and bowing, and doing what they’re told — not like us with our horrid servants, who take themselves off the very day of a big party, or say they won’t stay if they haven’t pine-apples. I think the whole social system of Russia perfect — quite perfect; only it must have been nicer still before the Tsar was too kind, and let loose all those serfs, who, I am quite sure, haven’t an idea what to do with themselves, and will be sure to shoot him for it some day.”
Lady Dolly paused in these discursive political utterances, and looked again at the little band of fettered youths and maidens, dusty, pale, jaded, who were being hustled along by the Cossacks through the silent scattered groups of the people. A local official had been wounded by a shot from a revolver, and they were all implicated, or the police wished to suppose them to be implicated, in the offence. They were being carried away beyond the Ourals; their parents, and brothers and sisters, and lovers knew very well that never more would their young feet tread the stones of their native town. A silence like that of the grave — which would perhaps be the silence of the grave — would soon engulf and close over them. Henceforth they would be mere memories to those who loved them: no more.
“They look very harmless,” said Lady Dolly, disappointed that conspirators did not look a little as they do on the stage. “Really, you know, if it wasn’t for these handcuffs, one might take them for a set of excursionists; really now, mightn’t we? Just that sort of jaded, dusty, uncomf
ortable look—”
“Consequent on ‘three shillings to Margate and back.’ Yes; they have a Bank holiday look,” said Lord Bangor. “But it will be a long Bank holiday for them; they are on their first stage to Siberia.”
“How interesting!” said Lady Dolly.
At that moment an old white-haired woman, with a piercing cry broke through the ranks, and fell on the neck of a young man, clinging to him for all that the police could do, till the lances of the Cossacks parted the mother and son.
“It is a sad state of things for any country,” said Lord Bangor; and the young captain of the Guard laughed.
“Well, why couldn’t they keep quiet?” said Lady Dolly. “Dear me! with all this crowd, however shall we find the carriage. Where is Vere, I wonder? But she said we need not wait for her. Don’t you think we had better go home? I shouldn’t like to meet wolves.”
“Wolves are not hungry in summer,” said Lord Bangor. “It is only the prison’s maw that is never full.”
“Well, what are they to do if people won’t keep quiet?” said Lady Dolly. “I’m sure those young men and women do not look like geniuses that would be able to set the world on fire. I suppose they are working people, most of them. They will do very well, I dare say, in Tomsk. Count Rostrow, here, tells me the exiles are beautifully treated, and quite happy; and all that is said about the quicksilver mines is all exaggeration; newspaper nonsense.”
“No doubt,” said Lord Bangor. “To object to exile is a mere bad form of Chauvinism.”
“Why couldn’t they keep quiet if they don’t like to go there?” she said again; and got into the carriage, and drove away out into the road over the plain, between the great green sea of billowy grasses, and the golden ocean of ripened grain; and, in time, bowled through the gilded gates of Svir; and ate her dinner with a good appetite; and laughed till she cried at the drolleries of a new operetta of Métra’s, which the French actors gave in the little opera-house.