by Ouida
“You!” she said simply.
He had had much flattery and much honour in his life, but nothing that had ever seemed to him so sweet, so great, as that one word, and the accent of it.
“I!” he said simply too, without compliment. “I am a stormy petrel, you know; never at rest. I could not help hovering near your lonely sail in case of any sudden change of weather. These waters are very treacherous.”
“Are they?” said Vere without thinking. She grew confused; she thought of the Wolfinea, of the Kermesse, of her husbands invitation to Svir, of his last words in the Spitalkirche; of many things all at once; and the gladness with which she saw him startled her — it seemed so strange to be so glad at anything!
“The fisherman says this weather will last till the new year,” she said, feeling that her voice was not quite steady.
Corrèze had one hand on the side of her boat.
“The fisherman should know better than I, certainly,” he answered. “But they are over-sanguine sometimes; and there is a white look in the south that I do not like, as if Africa were sending us some squall. If I might venture to advise you, I would say turn your helm homeward. You are very far off shore.”
“You are as far.”
“I followed you.”
Vere was silent; she spent the next few moments in tacking and bringing the head of her little vessel landward once more.
“I thank you,” said Corrèze, as she obeyed him.
She did not ask him why.
“There is no tide, the clever people tell us, in the Mediterranean,” he continued. “But there is something that feels very unpleasantly like it sometimes, when a boat wants to go against the wind. You see a breeze has sprung up; that white cloud yonder will be black before very long.”
“Are we really very far from the land?”
“A mile or two. It will take some stiff rowing to get there.”
“But the sun is so bright—”
“Ah yes. I have seen the sun brilliant one moment, and the next the white squall was down in a fury of whirling mist and darkened air. Take your second oar.”
The wind began to stir, as he had foreseen, the white in the south grew leaden-coloured, the swell in the sea grew heavy. Vere took in her sail, and the resistance of the water to the oars grew strong for her hands.
“With your permission,” said Corrèze; and he balanced himself on his canoe, tied its prow to the stern of her boat, and leapt lightly into her little vessel.
“If it get rougher, that might have become harder to do,” he said apologetically; “and, in the sea that we shall soon have, you will be unable to both steer and row. Will you allow me to take your oars?”
She gave them to him in silence, and took the tiller ropes into her hands.
She saw that he was right.
An angry wind had risen, shrill and chill. The foam of the tideless sea was blowing around them like white powder scattered by a great fan. There was a raw, hard feeling in the air, a moment before so sunny and laden only with the scent of orange and pinewood. The sky was overcast, and some sea-birds were screaming.
Neither he nor she spoke; he bent with a will to his oars, she steered straight for the shore. The wind chopped and changed, and came now from the west and now from the mountains — either way it was against them.
He had taken a waterproof from his canoe and put it about her. “Never trust the sun when you come seaward,” he said with a smile. Without it, she would have been wet through from the spray, for her gown was only of ivory-white cashmere, and ill-fitted for rough weather.
Corrèze rowed on in silence, pulling hard against the heavy water.
Both thought of the morning on the sea in Calvados; and the memory was too present to both for either to speak of it.
“There is no real danger,” he said once, as the boat was swept by the rush of white water.
“I am not afraid; do you think I am?” said Vere with a momentary smile.
“No, I do not. Fear is not in your temper,” said Corrèze. “But most other women would be; the sea will soon stand up like a stone wall between us and the land.”
“Yes?” said Vere absently; she was thinking very little of the sea; then she added, with a sudden recollection, and a pang of self-reproach, “I was very imprudent; I am sorry; it is I who have brought you into this danger — for danger I think there must be.”
“Oh! as for that—” said Corrèze, and he laughed lightly. In his heart he thought, “To die with you — how sweet it would be! How right were the old poets!”
Peril, to a degree, there was, because it became very probable that the cockle-shell of a pleasure-boat might heel over in the wind and swell, and they might have to swim for their lives; and they were still a long way off the land. But neither of them thought much of it. He was only conscious that she was near him, and she was wondering why such deep peace, such sweet safety, always seemed to fall on her in his presence.
The sea rose, as he had said, and looked like a grey wall between them and the coast. Mists and blowing surf obscured the outlines of the land; but she held the head of the boat straight against the battling waves, and he rowed with the skill that he had learned of Venetians and Basque sea-folk in sudden storms; and, slowly but safely, at the last they made their way through the fog of foam, and whirling currents of variously driving winds, and brought the little vessel with the canoe rocking behind it, up on to the landing-stairs that she had left in the full flood of sunshine two hours before. There was no rain, but the sky was very dark, and the spray was being driven hither and thither in showers.
“Are you wet at all, Princesse?” he asked as they landed.
She turned on the steps and held out her hand.
“You have saved my life,” she said in a low voice. He bowed low over her hand, but did not touch it with his lips.
“I am happy,” he said briefly.
There was a crowd of servants and out-door men above on the head of the little garden-quay, Loris leaping and shouting in their midst, for all the household had discovered its mistress’s absence and the absence of the boat, and had been greatly alarmed; for if her world disliked her, her servants adored her, even while they were a little afraid of her.
“She is like no one else; she is a saint,” said the old Russian steward very often. “But if she be ever in wrath with you — ah, then it is as if St. Dorothea struck you with her roses and broke your back!”
Even as they landed the clouds burst, the rain began to fall in torrents, the sea leaped madly against the sea-wall of the gardens.
“You will come in and wait at least till the storm passes?” she said to Corrèze. He hesitated.
“Into Prince Zouroffs house!” he said aloud, with a shadow on his face.
“Into my house,” she said with a shade of rebuke in her tone.
“You are too good, madame; but, if you will permit me, I will seem ungrateful and leave you.”
The servants were standing around on the strip of variegated marble pavement that separated the sea-wall from the house. He only uttered such words as they might hear.
Vere looked at him with a wistful look in the haughty eyes that he would not see.
“You have saved my life,” she said again in a soft hushed voice.
“Nay, nay,” said Corrèze, “you have too many angels surely ever about your steps to need a sorry mortal! Princesse — adieu.”
“But you are staying near here?”
“A few days — a few hours. I am en route from Milan to Paris. I like Paris best when I am not on an Alp. Life should be tout ou rien. Either the boulevard or the hermitage.”
He did not tell her that he had come by the Riviera for sake of seeing the turrets of her home above the sea, for sake of the chance of beholding her walk by him in the sun upon the terrace above.
“Will you not wait and see — my husband?” she said a little abruptly, with a certain effort.
“I have not the honour to know Prince Zo
uroff.”
“He will wish to thank you—” the words seemed to choke her; she could not finish them.
Corrèze bowed with his charming grace.
“Princesse! When shall I persuade you that I have done nothing for which to be thanked! If I may venture to remind you of so prosaic a thing, your dress must be damp, and mine is wet through. I beseech you to change yours at once.”
“Ah! how thoughtless I am! But if you will not come in, will you accept a carriage or a horse?”
“Thanks, no; a quick walk will do me far more good. If you will give the canoe shelter I shall be very indebted; but for myself the shore in this wind is what will please me most. It will make me think of the old tourmentes of my home mountains. Princesse, once more — adieu.”
She gave him her hand; he bent over it; a mist came before her eyes that was not from the driving of the sea spray. When it cleared from her eyelids, Corrèze was gone.
“If I had entered the house with her I could not have answered for my silence. It was best to come away whilst I could,” he thought, as he went on along the Corniche, with the winds and the rains beating him back at each step, and, below him and beyond, the sea mass of white and grey steam and froth.
When Prince Zouroff returned from Monte Carlo, he brought several guests with him to dinner. He had won largely, as very rich men often do; he was in a good humour because he had been well amused; and he had been driven home by his orders at so terrific a pace in the storm that one horse had dropped dead when it reached the stables. But this was not a very uncommon occurrence with him; a carriage-horse did not matter; if it had been one of his racers it would have been a different business. That was all he said about it.
Vere went up to him after dinner and took him aside one moment.
“I was on the sea in the beginning of the storm.”
“What were you doing?”
“Rowing myself — all alone.”
“A mad freak! But nothing happened. All is well that ends well.”
“Yes.” Vere’s teeth were shut a little as she spoke, and her lips were pale. “It might not have ended so well — if it be well to live — had it not been for M. de Corrèze. He was in a canoe and warned me in time.”
“The singer?”
“M. de Corrèze.”
“Well, there is only one; you mean the singer? How came he near you?”
“I do not know.”
“And what did he do?”
“He saved my life.”
Sergius Zouroff looked wearied.
“You are always so emotional, ma chère. Do you mean he did anything I ought to acknowledge? Where is he to be found?”
“I do not know.”
“Oh, I can hear at the Cercle. But are you not talking in hyperboles?”
“I told you the fact. I thought you ought to know it.”
“Ah, yes,” said her husband, who was thinking of other things. “But he did not come to sing at Svir. I cannot forgive that. However, I will send him my card, and then you can ask him to dinner. Or send him a diamond ring — artists always like rings.”
Vere turned away.
“I remember hearing once,” said Lady Dorothy, approaching him, “that Corrèze had one thousand three hundred and seventy-six diamond rings, all given him by an adoring universe. You must think of something more original, Sergius.”
“Ask him to dinner,” said Prince Zouroff. “People do; though it is very absurd.”
Then he went to the card-room for écarté, thinking no more of his wife than he thought of his dead horse.
“Corrèze and the sea seem quite inseparable — quite like Leander,” said Lady Dolly, who had heard the whole story before dinner from her maid, when she too had returned from Monte Carlo. But she said it half under her breath, and did not dare speak of it to her daughter; she was haunted by the memory of the letter she had received from Moscow, the letter of Corrèze that she had burned and left unanswered.
“It is odd he should have been in that canoe just to-day, when we were all away,” she thought with the penetration of a woman who knew her world, and did not believe in accidents, as she had once said to her child. “And to say she does not know where he is — that is really too ridiculous. I am quite sure Vere never will do anything — anything — to make people talk, but I should not be in the least surprised if she were to insist on something obstinate and romantic about this man. She is so very emotional. Zouroff is right, she is always in the clouds. That comes of being brought up on those moors by that German, and Corrèze is precisely the person to answer these fancies — even in daylight at a concert he is so handsome, and even in dinner-dress he always looks like Romeo. It would really be too funny if she ever did get talked about — so cold, and so reserved, and so quite too dreadfully and awfully good as she is!”
And Lady Dolly looked down the drawing-rooms at her daughter in the distance, as Vere drew her white robes slowly through her salons; and she thought, after all, one never knew —
The next day Zouroffs secretary sent his masters card to the hotel where he learned that Corrèze was staying, and sent also an invitation to dinner at an early date. Corrèze sent his card in return, and a refusal of the invitation, based on the plea that he was leaving Nice.
When he had written his refusal, Corrèze walked out into the street. He met point-blank a victoria with very gaudy liveries, and, in the victoria, muffled in sables, sat a dark-skinned, ruby-lipped woman.
The brilliant and insouciant face of Corrèze grew dark, and he frowned.
The woman was Casse-une-Croûte.
“The brute,” he muttered. “If I sat at his table I should be choked — or I should choke him.”
As he went on he heard the gay people in the street laughing, and saw them look after the gaudy liveries and the quadroon.
“His wife is much more beautiful, and as white as a lily,” one man said. “That black thing throws glasses and knives at him sometimes, they say.”
“I protected her from Noisette. I cannot protect her here,” thought Corrèze. “Perhaps she will not know it; God send her ignorance.”
The talk of Nice was Casse-une-Croûte, who had arrived but a week or so before. She had a villa in the town, she had her carriage and horses from Paris, she spent about sixty napoleons a day, without counting what she lost at Monte Carlo; the city preferred her to any English peeress or German princess of them ah. When the correspondents of journals of society sent their budgets from Nice and Monaco, they spoke first of ah of Casse-une-Croûte — the Princess Zouroff came far afterwards with other great ladies in their chronicles.
When Casse-une-Croûte after supper set fire to Prince Zouroff’s beard, and shot away her chandelier with a saloon pistol, her feats were admiringly recorded in type. Vere did not read those papers, so she knew nothing; and the ignorance Corrèze prayed for her remained with her; she did not even know that Casse-une-Croûte was near her.
A little later in that day Corrèze met Lady Dolly at Monte Carlo. She greeted him with effusion; he was courteous, but a little cold. She felt it, but she would not notice it.
“So you saved my Veres life yesterday, Corrèze?” she said with charming cordiality. “So like you! Always in some beau role!”
“It would be a beau role, indeed, to have saved the Princess Zouroff from any danger; but it is not for me. I warned her of the change in the weather; that was ah.”
“You are too modest. True courage always is. I think you rowed her boat home for her, didn’t you?”
“Part of the way — yes. The sea was heavy.”
“She quite thinks you saved her life,” said Lady Dolly. “My sweet Vera is always a little exaltée, you know; you can see that if you look at her. One always rather expects to hear her speak in blank verse; don’t you know what I mean?”
“Madame, I have heard so much blank verse in my life that I should as soon expect frogs to drop from her lips,” answered Corrèze a little irritably. “No; I do not think
I know what you mean, the Princess Vera seems to me to play a very difficult part in the world’s play with an exquisite serenity, patience, and good taste.”
“A difficult part! Goodness! My dear Corrèze, she has only to look beautiful, go to courts, and spend money!”
“And forgive infidelity, and bear with outrage.”
His voice was low, but it was grave and even stern, as his face was. Lady Dolly, who was going up towards the great Palace of Play, stopped, stared, and put up a scarlet sunshade, which made her look as if she blushed.
“My dear Corrèze! I suppose people of genius are privileged, but otherwise — really — you have said such an extraordinary thing I ought not to answer you. The idea of judging between married people! The idea of supposing that Prince Zouroff is not everything he ought to be to his wife—”
Corrèze turned his clear lustrous eyes full on her.
“Miladi,” he said curtly, “I wrote you some truths of Prince Zouroff from Moscow long ago. Did you read them?”
“Oh — stories! mere stories!” said Lady Dolly vaguely and nervously, “you know I never listen to rumours; people are so horridly uncharitable.”
“You had my letter from Moscow then?”
“Oh yes, and answered it,” said Lady Dolly with aplomb. “I think you forgot to answer it,” said Corrèze quietly; “your answer was a faire part to the marriage.”
“I am sure I answered it,” said Lady Dolly once more, looking up into the scarlet dome of her umbrella.
“I told you and proved to you that the man to whom you wished to sacrifice your child was a mass of vice; of such vice as it is the fashion to pretend to believe shut up between the pages of Suetonius and Livy. And I offered, if you would give me your young daughter, to settle a million of francs upon her and leave the stage for her sake. Your answer was the faire part of the Zouroff marriage.”
“I answered you,” said Lady Dolly obstinately, “oh dear yes, I did. I can’t help it if you didn’t get it; and I had told you at Trouville it was no use, that idea of yours; you never were meant to marry — so absurd! — you are far too charming; and, besides, you know you are an artist; you can’t say you are not.”