by Ouida
For, as she saw her husband’s face above that broad gleam of gold, the longing for one instant came over her, with deadly temptation, to take such vengeance as a wife can always take, and teach him what fruit his own teachings brought, and make him the byword and mock of Europe.
The moment passed.
“He cannot make me vile,” she thought. “No one can — save myself.”
As her breast heaved quicker with the memory, the ever trembling moth of the medallion rose and touched the star.
“An allegory or a talisman?” said one of the imperial guests who sat on her right hand, looking at the jewel.
“Both, sir,” answered Vere.
Later in the evening, when, after seeing a Proverbe exquisitely acted, the princes were for the present hour absorbed in the card-room, Madame Nelaguine lingered for a moment by her sister-inlaw. Vere had gone for an instant on to the terrace, which overlooked the sea, as did the terrace of Félicité.
“Are you well to-day, my Vera?”
“As well as usual.”
“I think Ischl did you little good.”
“Ischl? What should Ischl do for me? The Traun is no Lethe.”
“Will you never be content, never be resigned?”
“I think not.”
Madame Nelaguine sighed.
She had never been a good woman, nor a true one, in her world; but in her affection for her brother’s wife she was sincere.
“Tell me,” said Vere abruptly, “tell me — you are his sister, I may say so to you — tell me it does not make a womans duty less, that her husband forgets his?”
“No, dear — at least — no — I suppose not. No, of course not,” said Madame Nelaguine. She had been a very faithless wife herself, but of that Vere knew nothing.
“It does not change ones own obligation to him,” said Vere wearily, with a feverish flush coming over her face. “No; that I feel. What one promised, one must abide by; that is quite certain. Whatever he does, one must not make that any excuse to leave him?”
She turned her clear and noble eyes full upon his sisters, and the eyes of Madame Nelaguine shunned the gaze and fell.
“My dear,” she said evasively, “no, no; no wife must leave her husband; most certainly not. She must bear everything without avenging any insult; because the world is always ready to condemn the woman — it hardly ever will condemn the man. And a wife, however innocent, however deeply to be pitied, is always in a false position when she quits her husband’s house. She is déclassé at once. However much other women feel for her, they will seldom receive her. Her place in the world is gone, and when she is young, above all, to break up her married life is social ruin. Pray, pray do not ever think of that. Sergius has grave faults, terrible faults, to you; but do not attempt to redress them yourself. You would only lose caste, lose sympathy, lose rank at once. Pray, pray, do not think of that.”
Vere withdrew her hand from her sister-in-law’s; a shadow of disappointment came on her face, and then altered to a sad disdain.
“I was not thinking of what I should lose,” she said, recovering her tranquillity. “That would not weigh with me for a moment. I was thinking of what is right; of what a wife should be before God.”
“You are sublime, my dear,” said the Russian princess, a little irritably because her own consciousness of her own past smote her and smarted. “You are sublime. But you are many octaves higher than our concert pitch. No one now ever thinks in the sort of way that you do. You would have been a wife for Milton. My brother is, alas! quite incapable of appreciating all that devotion.”
“His power of appreciation is not the measure of my conduct,” said Vere, with a contempt that would have been bitter if it had not been so weary.
“That is happy for him,” said his sister drily “But, in sad and sober truth, my Vera, your ideas are too high for the world we live in; you are a saint raising an oriflamme above a holy strife; and we are only a rabble of common maskers — who laugh.”
“You can laugh.”
“I do not laugh, heaven knows,” said her sister-in-law, with a glisten of water in her shrewd, bright eyes, that could not bear the candid gaze of Vere. “I do not laugh. I understand you. If I never could have been like you, I revere you — yes. But it is of no use, my dear, no use, alas! to bring these true and high emotions into common life. They are too exalted; they are fit for higher air. Roughly and coarsely if you will, but truly, I will tell you there is nothing of nobility, nothing of duty, in marriage, as our world sees it; it is simply — a convenience, a somewhat clumsy contrivance to tide over a social difficulty. Do not think of it as anything else; if you do, one day disgust will seize you; your high and holy faiths will snap and break; and then—”
“And then?”
“Then you will be of all women most unhappy; for I think you could not endure your life if you despised yourself.”
“I have endured it,” said Vere in a low voice. “You think I have not despised myself every day, every night?”
“Not as I mean. The wrong has been done to you. You have done none. All the difference lies there — ah, such a difference, my dear! The difference between the glacier and the mud-torrent!”
Vere was silent. Then, with a shiver, she drew her wraps about her as the cold wind came over the sea.
“Shall we go in the house? It is chilly here,” she said to her sister-in-law.
CHAPTER II.
The two shooting-months passed at Svir; brilliantly to all the guests, tediously and bitterly to the mistress of the place. Lady Dolly had early vanished to see the fair of Nijni Novgorod with a pleasant party, and Count Rostrow for their guide; and had vague thoughts of going down the river and seeing the spurs of the Caucasus, and meeting her husband in St. Petersburg, where, so enraptured was she with the country, she almost thought she would persuade him to live. Duc Paul and Duchesse Jeanne had gone on a round of visits to friends in Croatia, Courland, and Styria. Troops of guests in succession had arrived, stayed at, and departed from, the great Zouroff palace on the Baltic; and, when the first snows were falling, Sergius Zouroff travelled back to his villa on the Riviera with no more preparation or hesitation than he would have needed to drive from the Barrière de l’Etoile to the Rue Helder.
“What a waste it all is!” thought his wife, as she looked at the grand front of Svir, its magnificent forests and its exquisite gardens. For ten months out of the year Svir, like Félicité, was like a hundred thousand castles and palaces in Europe; it served only for the maintenance and pleasure of a disorderly and idle troop of hirelings, unjust stewards, and fattening thieves of all sorts.
“What would you do with it if you had your way?” asked Madame Nelaguine.
She answered, “I would live in it; or I would turn it into a Russian St. Cyr.”
“Always sublime, my love!” said Madame Nelaguine, with a touch of asperity and ridicule.
The towers of Svir faded from Veres sight in the blue mists of evening; a few days and nights followed and then the crocketted pinnacles and metal roofs of the Riviera villa greeted her sight against the blue sky and the blue water of the gulf of Saint-Hospice.
“This is accounted the perfection of life,” she thought. “To have half a dozen admirably appointed hotels all your own, and among them all — no home!”
The married life of Vere had now begun to pass into that stage common enough in our day, when the husband and the wife are utter strangers one to another; their only exchange of words being when the presence of others compels it, and their only appearance together being when society necessitates it.
A sort of fear had fallen on Sergius Zouroff of her, and she was thankful to be left in peace. Thousands of men and women live thus in the world; never touch each others hand, never seek each others glance, never willingly spend five seconds alone, yet make no scandal and have no rupture, and go out into society together, and carry on the mocking semblance of union till death parts them.
Again and again V
ere on her knees in her solitude tried to examine the past and see what blame might rest on her for her failure to influence her husband and withhold him from vice, but she could see nothing that she might have done. Even had she been a woman who had loved him she could have done nothing. His feeling for her had been but a mere animal impulse; his habits were engrained in every fibre of his temper. If she had shown him any tenderness, he would have repulsed it with some cynical word; fidelity to his ear was a mere phrase, meaning nothing; honour in his creed was comprised in one thing only, never to shrink before a man. Even if she had been a woman who had cared for him she would have had no power to alter his ways of life. Innocent women seldom have any influence. Jeanne de Sonnaz could always influence Zouroff; Vere never could have done so, let her have essayed what she would. For be the fault where it may in our social system, the wife never has the power or the dominion that has the mistress.
A proud woman, moreover, will not stoop as low as it is necessary to do to seize the reins of tyranny over a fickle or sluggish tempered man; what is not faithful to her of its own will, a proud woman lets go where it may without effort, and with resignation, or with scorn, according as love or indifference move her to the faithless.
The first thing she saw on her table at Villafranca was a letter from her mother.
Lady Dolly had found the Caucasus quite stupidly like the Engadine; she thought St. Petersburg a huge barrack and hideous; the weather was horribly cold, and she was coming back to Paris as quickly as she could. She would just stay a day, passing, at the villa.
“Count Rostrow has not come up to her expectations of him,” thought Madame Nelaguine.
Vere said nothing.
If she could have prayed for anything, she would have prayed never to be near her mother. Lady Dolly was a living pain, a living shame, to her, now, even as she had been on that first day when she had stepped on shore from the boat of Corrèze, and seen the figure of her mother in the black and yellow stripes of the bathing-dress out in the full sunshine of Trouville.
But Lady Dolly wanted to forget the slights of Count Rostrow; wanted to play at Monaco; wanted to be seen by her English friends with her daughter; and so Lady Dolly, who never studied any wishes but her own, and never missed a point in the game of self she always played, chose to come, and as she drove up between the laurel and myrtle hedges, and looked at the white walls and green verandas of the villa, rising above the palms, and magnolias, and Indian coniferæ of its grounds, said to herself: “With three such places on three seas, and two such houses in Paris and St. Petersburg as she has, what on earth can she want to be happy?”
Honestly, she could not understand it. It seemed to her very strange.
“But she is within a stones throw of the tables, and she has oceans of money, and yet she never plays,” she thought again; and this seemed to her yet more unnatural still.
“She is very odd in all ways,” she thought in conclusion, as the carriage brushed the scent out of the bruised arbutus leaves as it passed.
Life for Vere was quieter on the Riviera than elsewhere. There were but few people in the house; these spent nearly the whole of their time at Monte Carlo; and she had many of her own hours free to do with as she chose.
Her husband never asked her to go to Monte Carlo. It was the one phase of the world that he spared her. In himself he felt that he did not care for those grand grave eyes to see him throwing away his gold, and getting drunk with the stupid intoxication of that idiotic passion, with his belles petites about him, and the unlovely crowd around. Vere lived within a few miles of the brilliant Hell under the Tête du Chien, but she had never once set foot in it.
The change from the strong air of the Baltic to the hot and languid autumn weather of the south affected her strength; she felt feverish and unwell. She had been reared in the fierce fresh winds of the north, and these rose-scented breezes and fragrant orange alleys seemed to stifle her in “aromatic pain.”
“Perhaps I grow fretful and fanciful,” she thought, with a sudden alarm and anger at herself. “What use is it for me to blame each place I live in? The malady is in myself. If I could only work, be of use, care for something, I should be well enough. If I could be free—”
She paused with a shiver.
Freedom for her could mean only death for her husband. To the sensitive conscience of Vere it seemed like murder to wish for any liberty or release that could only be purchased at such a cost as that.
Jeanne de Sonnaz could calmly reckon up and compare her chances of loss and gain if her placid Paul should pass from the living world; but Vere could do nothing of the kind. Although Sergius Zouroff outraged and insulted her in many ways, and was a daily and hourly horror to her, yet she remained loyal to him, even in her thoughts.
“I eat his bread, and wear his clothes, and spend his gold,” she thought bitterly “I owe him at least fidelity such as his servants give in exchange for food and shelter!”
There were times when she was passionately tempted to cast off everything that was his, and go out, alone and unaided, and work for her living, hidden in the obscurity of poverty, but free at least from the horrible incubus of an abhorred union. But the straight and simple rectitude in which she had been reared, the severe rendering of honour and of obligation in which she had been trained, were with her, too strongly engrained to let her be untrue to them.
“I must bide the brent,” she told herself, in the old homely words of the Border people; and her delicate face grew colder and prouder every day. The iron was in her soul; the knotted cords were about her waist; but she bore a brave countenance serenely. She could not endure that her world should pity her.
Her world, indeed, never dreamed of doing so. Society does not pity a woman who is a great lady, who is young, and who could have lovers and courtiers by the crowd if only she smiled once.
Society only thought her — unamiable.
True, she never said an unkind thing, or did one; she never hurt man or woman; she was generous to a fault, and, to aid even people she despised, would give herself trouble unending. But these are serious simple qualities that do not show much, and are soon forgotten by those who benefit from them. Had she laughed more, danced more, taken more kindly to the fools and their follies, she might have been acid of tongue and niggard of sympathy: society would have thought her much more amiable than it did now.
Her charities were very large, and they were charities often done in secresy to those of her own rank, who came to her in the desperation of their own needs, or their sons’ or their brothers’ debts of honour; but it would have served her in better stead with the world if she had stayed for the cotillons, or if she had laughed heartily when Madame Judic sang.
It would have been so much more natural.
“If she would listen to me!” thought her mother, in the superior wisdom of her popular little life. “If she would only kiss a few women in the morning, and flirt with a few men in the evening, it would set her all right with them in a month. It is no use doing good to anybody, they only hate you for it. You have seen them in their straits; it is like seeing them without their teeth or their wig; they never forgive it. But to be pleasant, always to be pleasant, that is the thing; and, after all, it costs nothing.”
But to be pleasant in Lady Dolly’s, and the worlds, meaning of the words was not possible to Vere — Vere, with an aching heart, an outraged pride, and a barren future; Vere, haughty, grave, and delicate of taste, to whom the whole life she led seemed hardly better or wiser than sitting out the glittering absurdities of the Timbale d’Argent or Niniche.
One warm day in December she had the unusual enjoyment of being alone from noon to night. All in the house were away at Monte Carlo, and Madame Nelaguine had gone for the day to San Remo to see her Empress. It was lovely weather, balmy and full of fragrance, cold enough to make furs needful at nightfall, but without wind, and with a brilliant sun.
Vere wandered about the gardens till she was tired; then, her eyes
lighting on her own felucca moored with other pleasure-boats at the foot of the garden-quay, she looked over the blue tranquil sea, went down the stairs, and pushed the little vessel off from shore. She had never lost her childish skill at boating and sailing. She set the little sail, tied the tiller-rope to her foot, and, with one oar, sent herself quickly and lightly through the still water. There was nothing in sight; the shore was as deserted as the sea. It was only one o’clock. The orange-groves and pine woods shed their sweet smell for miles over the sea. She ceased to row, and let the boat drift with the slight movement of the buoyant air.
She was glad to be alone — absolutely alone; away from all the trifling interruptions which are to some natures as mosquitoes to the flesh.
She passed a fishing-felucca, and asked the fisherman in it if the weather would hold; he told her it would be fine like that till the new year. She let the boat go on. The orangeries and pine woods receded farther and farther, the turrets of the villa grew smaller and smaller in the distance.
Air and sea, space and solitude, were delightful to her. Almost for the moment, going through that sparkling water, she realised her youth, and felt that twenty years were still not on her head. As she lay back in the little vessel, her shoulders resting on its silken cushions, the oar being idle, her eyes gazing wistfully into the depths of the azure sky, she did not see a canoe that, lying off the shore when she had taken the water, had followed her at a little distance.
Suddenly, with a quick, arrow-like dart, it covered the space dividing it from her; and came alongside of her boat.
“Princesse,” said the voice of Corrèze, “the sea is kind to me, whether it be in north or south. But are you quite wise to be so far out on it all alone?”
He saw the face, that never changed for all the praise of princes or the homage of courts, and always was so cold, grow warm and lighten with surprise and welcome, wonder in the great grave eyes, a smile on the proud mouth.