Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

“Life is so full of contrasts in Russia; it is quite delightful; one can’t be dull,” she said to Lord Bangor, who sat beside her.

  “Life is full of contrasts everywhere, my dear lady,” said he. “Only, as a rule, we never look on the other side of the wall. It bores us even to remember that there is another side.”

  Vere that night was paler and stiller even than it was her wont to be. She went about amongst her guests with that grace and courtesy which never changed, but she was absent in mind; and once or twice, as the laughter of the audience rippled in echo to the gay melodies of Métra, a shiver as of cold went over her.

  “She must have heard something about Corrèze that has embarrassed her,” thought Madame de Sonnaz, but she was wrong.

  Vere had only seen the same sight that her mother had seen, in the little town of Molv.

  That night, when the house party had broken up to go to their apartments, and she had gained the comparative peace of her own chamber, Vere, when her maids had passed a loose white gown over her and unloosed her hair, sent them away, and went into the little oratory that adjoined her dressing-room. She kneeled down, and leaned her arms on the rail of the little altar, and her head on her arms; but she could not pray. Life seemed to her too terrible; and who cared? who cared?

  Riches had done their best to embellish the little sanctuary: the walls were inlaid with malachite and marbles; the crucifix was a wonderful work in ivory and silver; the priedieu was embroidered in silk and precious stones; there was a triptych of Luke von Cranach, and Oriental candelabra in gold. It was a retreat that had been sacred to the dead Princess Mania, her husbands mother, a pious and melancholy woman.

  Vere cared little for any of these things; but the place was really to her a sanctuary, as no one ever disturbed her there; even Zouroff never had presumed to enter it; and the painted casements, when they were opened, showed her the green plain, and, beyond the plain, the beautiful waters of the Baltic. Here she could be tranquil now and then, and try to give her thoughts to her old friends the Latin writers; or read the verse of George Herbert or the prose of Thomas à Kempis, and pray for force to bear the life she led.

  But to-night she could not pray.

  She was one of those who are less strong for the woes of others than for her own.

  She leaned her face upon her arms, and only wondered — wondered — wondered — why men were so cruel, and God so deaf.

  It was nearly two in the morning; through the painted panes the stars were shining; beyond the plain there was the silver of the dawn.

  Suddenly a heavy step trod on the marbles of the pavement. For the first time since their marriage, her husband entered the place of prayer. She turned, and half rose in astonishment, and her heart grew sick; she was not safe from him even here. He marked the instinct of aversion, and hated her for it; the time was gone by when it allured and enchained him.

  “Excuse me for my entrance here,” he said with that courtesy to which the presence of his wife always compelled him, despite himself. “I am exceedingly annoyed, compromised, disgusted. You were in Molv to-day?”

  “Yes; I rode there. I went to see your mothers hospital.”

  She had quite risen, and stood, with one hand on the altar rail, looking at him.

  “I hear that you saw those prisoners; that you spoke to them; that you made a scene, a scandal; that you gave one of the women your handkerchief; that you promised them all kinds of impossible follies. Be so good as to tell me what happened.”

  “Who spies upon me?” said Vere, with the colour rising to her face.

  “Spies! No one. If you choose to exhibit yourself in a public street, a hundred people may well see you. What did happen? Answer me.”

  “This happened. I met the prisoners. I do not believe any of them are guilty of the attempt to assassinate General Marcoloff. They are all very young, several were girls; one of the girls broke from the guards, and threw herself before me, sobbing and begging my help. Her arm was cut and bleeding, I suppose in fastening the chains; I took my handkerchief and bound it up; I promised her to support her mother, who is old and infirm. I spoke to them all and bade them try and bear their fate calmly. I wept with them, that I confess; but I was not alone — there were not many dry eyes in Molv. I believe all these young people to be quite innocent. I believe if the Emperor saw the things that are done in his name, he would not sanction them. That is all I have to tell you. It has haunted me all the evening. It is horrible that such tyrannies should be; and that we should dine, and laugh, and spend thousands of roubles in a night, and live as if no living creatures were being tortured near us. I cannot forget it; and I will do what I can to serve them.”

  She had never spoken at such a length to her husband in all the three years of her married life; but she felt strongly, and it seemed to her that here reticence would have been cowardice. She spoke quite tranquilly, but her voice had a depth in it that told how keenly she had been moved.

  Zouroff heard her with a scowl upon his brows; then he laughed contemptuously and angrily.

  “You believe!” he echoed. “What should you know, and why should you care? Will you learn to leave those things alone? A Princess Zouroff dismounting in the dust to bind up the wounds of a Nihilist convict! What a touching spectacle! But we will have no more of these scenes if you please; they are very unbecoming, and, more, they are very compromising. The Emperor knows me well, indeed, but enemies might carry such a tale to him; and he might see fit to suspect, to order me not to leave Russia, to imprison me on my estates. It is as likely as not that your theatrical vagaries may get bruited about at Court. I neither know nor care whether these creatures shot Marcoloff or abetted shooting at him; what I do care for is the dignity of my name.”

  Vere, standing beside the great ivory crucifix, with the draperies of plush and ermine falling about her, and her fair hair unbound and falling over her shoulders, turned her face more fully upon him. There was a faint smile upon her lips.

  “The dignity of your name!” she said merely; and the accent said the rest.

  The calm contempt pierced his vanity and his self-love, and made him wince and smart. The first sign she had given that the unworthiness of his life was known to her had been when she had ordered him to remove the pavilion of Noisette. He had always set her aside as a beautiful, blonde, ignorant, religious creature, and the shock was great to him to find in her a judge who censured and scorned him.

  “The dignity of my name,” he repeated sullenly and with greater insistence. “We were great nobles with the Dolgarouki, when the Romanoffs were nothing. I do not choose my name to be dragged in the dust because you are headstrong enough, or childish enough, to fancy some incendiaries and assassins are martyrs. Have politics, if you like, in Paris in your drawing-room, but leave them alone here. They are dangerous here, and worse than dangerous. They are low. I deny you nothing else. You have money at your pleasure, amusement, jewels, anything you like; but I forbid you political vulgarities. I was disgusted when I heard of the spectacle of this morning; I was ashamed” —

  “Is it not rather a matter for shame that we eat and drink, and laugh and talk, with all this frightful agony around us?” said Vere, with a vibration of rare passion in her voice. “The people may be wrong; they may be guilty; but their class have so much to avenge, and your class so much to expiate, that their offence cannot equal yours. You think I cannot understand these things? You are mistaken. There are suffering and injustice enough on your own lands of Svir alone to justify a revolution. I know it; I see it; I suffer under it; suffer because I am powerless to remedy it, and I am supposed to be acquiescent in it. If you allowed me to interest myself in your country, I would try not to feel every hour in it an exile; and the emptiness and nothingness of my life would cease to oppress and torment me—”

  “Silence!” said Zouroff, with petulance. “You may come here for prayer, but I do not come here for sermons. The emptiness of your life! What do you mean? You are young, and you are beaut
iful; and you have in me a husband who asks nothing of you except to look well and to spend money. Cannot you be happy? Think of your new cases from Worth s, and let political agitators keep the monopoly of their incendiary rubbish. You have been the beauty of Paris and Petersburg for three years. That should satisfy any woman.”

  “It merely insults me,” she answered him. “Society comes and stares. So it stares at the actress Noisette, so it stares at that nameless woman whom you call Casse-une-Croûte. Is that a thing to be proud of? You may be so; I am not. Men make me compliments, or try to make them, that I esteem no better than insults. Your own friends are foremost. They talk of my portraits, of my busts, of my jewels, of my dresses. Another year it will be someone else that they will talk about, and they will cease to look at me. They find me cold, they find me stupid. I am glad that they do; if they did otherwise, I should have lived to despise myself.”

  “Nom de Dieu!” muttered Zouroff; and he stared at her, wondering if she had said the names of Noisette and Casse-une-Croûte by hazard, or if she knew? He began to think she knew. He had always thought her blind as a statue, ignorant as a nun; but, as she stood before him, for the first time letting loose the disdain and the weariness that consumed her heart into words, he began slowly to perceive that, though he had wedded a child, she was a child no longer; he began to perceive that, after three years in the great world, his wife had grown to womanhood with all that knowledge which the great world alone can give.

  As she had said nothing to him, after the Kermesse, of the absence of Noisette, he had fancied her anger a mere boutade, due perhaps to pride, which he knew was very strong in her. Now he saw that his wife’s silence had arisen not from ignorance but from submission to what she conceived to be her duty, or perhaps, more likely still, from scorn; a scorn too profound and too cold to stoop to reproach or to reproof.

  “Why cannot you be like any other woman?” he muttered. “Why cannot you content yourself with your chiffons, your conquests, your beauty? If you were an ugly woman one could understand your taking refuge in religion and politics; but, at your age, with your face and figure! Good heavens! it is too ridiculous!”

  The eyes of Vere grew very stern.

  “That is your advice to me? to content myself with my chiffons and my conquests?”

  “Certainly; any other woman would. I know you are to be trusted; you will never let men go too far.”

  “If I dragged your name in the dust throughout Europe you would deserve it,” thought his wife; and a bitter retort rose to her lips. But she had been reared in other ways than mere obedience to every impulse of act or speech. She still believed, despite the world about her, that the word she had given in her marriage vow required her forbearance and her subjection to Sergius Zouroff — she was still of the “old fashion.”

  She controlled her anger and her disdain, and turned her face full on him with something pleading and wistful in the proud eyes that had still the darkness of just scorn.

  “You prefer the society of Noisette and Casse-une-Croûte; why do you need mine too? Since they amuse you, and can content you, cannot you let me be free of all this gilded bondage, which is but a shade better than their gilded infamy? You bid me occupy myself with chiffons and conquests. I care for neither. Will you give me what I could care for? This feverish frivolous life of the great world has no charm for me. It suits me in nothing; neither in health nor taste, neither in mind nor body. I abhor it. I was reared in other ways, and with other thoughts. It is horrible to me to waste the year from one end to the other on mere display, mere dissipation — to call it amusement is absurd, for it amuses no one. It is a monotony, in its way, as tiresome as any other.”

  “It is the life we all lead,” he interrupted her with some impatience. “There is intrigue enough in it to salt it, God knows!”

  “Not for me,” said Vere coldly, with an accent that made him feel ashamed. “You do not understand me — I suppose you never will; but, to speak practically, will you let me pass my time on one of your estates; if not here, in Poland, where the people suffer more, and where I might do good? I have more strengths of purpose than you fancy; I would educate the peasant children, and try and make your name beloved and honoured on your lands — not cursed, as it is now. Let me live that sort of life, for half the year at least; let me feel that all the time God gives me is not utterly wasted. I helped many in Paris; I could do more, so much more, here. I would make your people love me; and then, perhaps, peace at last would come to me. I am most unhappy now. You must have known it always, but I think you never cared.”

  The simplicity of the words, spoken as a child would have spoken them, had an intense pathos in them, uttered as they were by a woman scarcely twenty, who was supposed to have the world at her feet. For one moment they touched the cold heart of Zouroff, as once before at Félicité the uplifted eyes of Vere had touched him at their betrothal, and almost spurred him to renunciation of her and refusal of her sacrifice. And she looked so young, with her hair falling back over her shoulders, and behind her the white crucifix and the stars of the morning skies — and her child had died here at Svir.

  For the moment his face softened, and he was moved to a vague remorse and a vague pity; for a moment Noisette and Casse-une-Croûte, and even Jeanne de Sonnaz, looked to him vulgar and common beside his wife; for a moment les verres épais du cabaret brutal seemed tainted by the many lips that used them, and this pure golden cup seemed worthy of a god. But the moment passed, and the long habits and humours of a loose and selfish life resumed their sway within him; and he only saw a lovely woman whom he had bought as he bought the others, only with a higher price.

  He took the loose gold of her hair in his hands with a sudden caress and drew her into his arms.

  “Pardieu!” he said with a short laugh. “A very calm proposition for a separation! That is what you drive at, no doubt; a separation in which you should have all the honours as Princess Zouroff still! No, my lovely Vera, I am not disposed to gratify you, — so. You belong to me, and you must continue to belong to me, nilly-willy. You are too handsome to lose, and you should be grateful for your beauty; it made you mistress of Svir. Pshaw! how you shudder! You forget you must pay now and then for your diamonds.”

  There are many martyrdoms as there are many prostitutions that law legalises and the churches approve.

  She never again prayed in her oratory. The ivory Christ had failed to protect her.

  All the month long there was the pressure of social obligations upon her, the hot-house atmosphere of a Court about her, for imperial guests followed on those who had left a few days earlier, and there could be no hour of freedom for the mistress of Svir.

  Her mother was radiantly content; Count Rostrow was charming; and a Grand Duke found her still a pretty woman; play was high most nights; and the Sicilian was forgotten. All that troubled her was that her daughter never looked at her if she could help it, never spoke to her except on the commonplace courtesies and trifles of the hour. Not that she cared, only she sometimes feared other people might notice it.

  These days seemed to Vere the very longest in all her life. Her apathy had changed into bitterness, her indifference was growing into despair. She thought, with unutterable scorn, “If the world would only allow it, he would have Casse-une-Croûte here!”

  She was nothing more in her husbands eyes than Casse-une-Croûte was.

  All the pride of her temper, and all the purity of her nature, rose against him. As she wore his jewels, as she sat at his table, as she received his guests, as she answered to his name, all her soul was in revolt against him; such revolt as to the women of her world seemed the natural instinct of a woman towards her husband, a thing to be indulged in without scruple or stint, but which to her, in whom were all the old faiths and purities of a forgotten creed, seemed a sin.

  A sin! — did the world know of such a thing? Hardly. Now and then, for sake of its traditions, the world took some hapless boy, or some still yet unhappier
woman, and pilloried one of them, and drove them out under a shower of stones, selecting them by caprice, persecuting them without justice, slaying them because they were friendless. But this was all.

  For the most part, sin was an obsolete thing; archaic and unheard of; public prints chronicled the sayings and the doings of Noisette and Casse-une-Croûte; society chirped and babbled merrily of all the filth that satirists scarce dare do more than hint at lest they fall under the law. There was no longer on her eyes the blindness of an innocent unconscious youth. She saw corruption all around her; a corruption so general, so insidious, so lightly judged, so popular, that it was nearly universal; and amidst it the few isolated souls, that it could not taint and claim and absorb, were lost as in a mist, and could not behold each other.

  A dull hopelessness weighed upon her. Her husband had counselled her to lose herself in chiffons and in conquests!

  She knew very well he would not care if she obeyed him; nay, that he would perhaps like her the better. As he had often bade her put red upon her cheeks, so he would have awakened to a quicker esteem of her if he had seen her leaving ballrooms in the light of morning, with the ribbons of the cotillons on her breast, smiling on her lovers above the feathers of her fan, provoking with effrontery the gaze of passion, answering its avowals with smiling reproof that meant forgiveness, and passing gaily through the masque of society with kohl around her eyes, and a jest upon her mouth, and hidden in her bosom or her bouquet some royal lover’s note. He would have esteemed her more highly so. Perhaps, then, she might even have stood higher in his eyes than Casse-une-Croûte.

  She thought this, as she sat in the evening at his table, with her imperial guests beside her, and, before her eyes, the glow of the gold plate with the Zouroff crown upon it. She was as white as alabaster; her eyes had a sombre indignation in them; she wore her Order of St. Catherine and her necklace of the moth and the star.

  “If one did not keep to honour, for honours sake,” she thought, “what would he not make me! — I should be viler than any one of them.”