by Ouida
“I am an artist,” said Corrèze, with a flash sombre and brilliant in his eyes that she could not front, “but I have never been a beast, and had I wedded your daughter I would not have been an adulterer.”
“Hus-s-sh!” said Lady Dolly, scandalised. Such language was terrible to her, though she did laugh at the Petit Duc and Niniche. “Hus-s-sh, hush — pray! Lady Dolly went on between the cactus and the palms and the myrtles looking dreamily up into the scarlet glow of her sunshade, and thinking that when you let artists and people of that sort into your world they were quite certain to froisser you sooner or later. “And I am sure he is in love with her still,” she thought as she joined some pleasant people and went up to the great building to hear the music, only for that; the music at Monte Carlo is always so good.
“As if I would ever have given my child to a singer!” she thought in the disgust of mingled virtue and pride.
At the entrance of the hall she met her son-in-law, who was coming out, having won largely.
“I forgot my purse, Sergius; lend me the sinews of war,” said Lady Dolly with a laugh.
He handed her some rouleaux.
“Some one would plunder me before I got through the gardens,” he said to himself as he sauntered on, “it may as well be Dolly as another.”
Lady Dolly went on and staked her gold. At the same table with her were Aimée Pincée of the Hippodrome, and Casse-une-Croûte; but Lady Dolly was not hurt by that either in pride or virtue.
The real Commune is Monte Carlo.
Meanwhile Corrèze did not approach Vere.
“If you ever need a servant or an avenger call me,” he had said to her, but he had known that she never would call him. From afar off he had kept watch on her life, but that was all.
She knew that he was near her, and the knowledge changed the current of her days from a joyless routine to a sweet yet bitter unrest. When the sun rose she thought, “shall I see him?” When it set she thought, “will he come to-morrow?” The expectation gave a flush of colour and hope to her life which with all its outward magnificence was chill and pale as the life of a pauper because its youth was crushed under the burden of a loveless splendour.
For the first time this warm winter of the southern seaboard, with its languid air, its dancing sunbeams, its odours of roses and violets and orange-buds seemed lovely to her. She did not reason; she did not reflect; she only vaguely felt that the earth had grown beautiful.
Once while the air was still dark with the shadows of night, but the sky had the red of the dawn, she, lying wide awake upon her bed, heard a voice upon the sea beneath her windows singing the Stella virgine, madre pescatore! of the Italian fisherman, and knew that the voice was his.
At that hour Sergius Zouroff was drinking brandy in the rooms of Casse-une-Croûte, while the quadroon was shooting the glass drops off her chandelier.
One day she went to see the village priest about some poor of the place, and sought him at the church of the parish. It was a little whitewashed barn, no more, but it had thickets of roses about it and a belt of striped aloes, and two tall palms rose straight above it, and beyond its narrow door there shone the sea. She went toward the little sacristy to speak to the priest. Madame Nelaguine was with her. They met Corrèze on the threshold. Mass was just over. It was the day of St. Lucy.
“Have you been to mass at our church and do not visit us?” cried Princess Nadine in reproach as she saw him; “that is not kind, monsieur, especially when we have so much for which to thank you; my brother would be very glad of an occasion to speak his gratitude.”
“Prince Zouroff owes me none, madame,” said Corrèze. Vere had been silent. “Is the little church yours?” he continued. “It is charming. It is almost as primitive as St. Augustine or St. Jerome could wish it to be, and it is full of the smell of the sea and the scent of the roses.
“It is the church of our parish,” said Madame Nelaguine; “we have our own chapel in the villa for our own priest, of course. Were you not coming to us? No? You are too farouche. Even to persons of your fame one cannot allow such willful isolation; and why come to this very gay seaboard if you want to be alone?”
“I came by way of going to Paris from Milano; indeed, in Paris I must be in a very few days; I have to see half a score of directors there. Which of the three seas that you honour with residence do you prefer, mesdames?”
“Why does Vere not speak to him, and why does he not look at her?” thought the Princess Nelaguine, as she answered aloud:
“Myself, I infinitely prefer the Mediterranean, but Vere persists in preferring the narrow colourless strip of the northern channel; it is not like her usual good taste.”
“The climate of Calvados is most like that which the Princess knew in her childhood,” Corrèze said with a little haste; “childhood goes with us like an echo always, a refrain to the ballad of our life. One always wants ones cradle-air. Were I to meet with such an accident as Roger did I would go to a goat-hut on my own Alps above Sion.”
“You would? how charming that would be for the goats and their sennerins!” said Madame Nelaguine as she caught a glimpse of the priests black soutane behind the roses and chased it through the hedge of aloes and caught the good man, who was very shy of this keen, quick, sardonic Russian lady.
“You might have been dead in those seas the other day — for me,” said Vere, in a low voice without looking at him as they stood alone.
“Ah! nothing so beautiful is in store for me, Princesse,” he answered lightly; “indeed, you overrate my services; without me no doubt you would have brought your boat in very well; you are an accomplished sailor.”
“I should have stayed out without noticing the storm,” said Vere, “and then — Loris would have been sorry, perhaps.”
Corrèze was silent.
He would not let his tongue utter the answer that rose to his lips.
“We are too afraid of death,” he said; “that fear is the shame of Christianity.”
“I do not fear it,” said Vere in a low tone; her eyes gazed through the screen of roses to the sea.
“And you have not twenty years on your head yet!” said Corrèze bitterly, “and life should be to you one cloudless spring morning only full of blossom and of promise—”
“I have what I deserve, no doubt.”
“You have nothing that you deserve.”
Madame Nelaguine came back to them with the priest.
“Why did you not come to Svir?” she asked of Corrèze, as the curate made his obeisance to Vere.
“I had not the honour to know your brother.”
“No; but I believe—”
“He offered to pay me? Oh yes. He was dans son droit in doing that; but I too had my rights, and amongst them was the right to refuse, and I took it. No doubt he did not know that I never take payments out of the opera-house.”
“I see! you are cruelly proud.”
“Am I proud? Perhaps, I have my own idea of dignity, a ‘poor thing, but my own.’ When I go into society I like to be free, and so I do not take money from it. Many greater artists than I, no doubt, have thought differently. But it is my fancy.”
“But other artists have not been Marquises de Corrèze,” said Madame Nelaguine.
“Nay, I have no title, Madame,” said Corrèze; “it was buried in another generation under the snows above Sion, and I have never dug it up; why should I?”
“Why should you, indeed? There is but one Corrèze, there are four thousand marquises to jostle each other in their struggles for precedence.”
He laughed a little as he bowed to her. “Yes, I am Corrèze tout court; I like to think that one word tells its own tale all over the world to the nations. No doubt this is only another shape of vanity, and not dignity at all. One never knows oneself. I do not care to set up my old couronne, it would be out of place in the theatres. But I like to think that I have it, and if ever I need to cross swords with a noble, he cannot refuse on the score of my birth.”
His face grew darker as he spoke, he pulled the roses from one another with an impatient action; the quick marmoset eyes of Madame Nelaguine saw that he was thinking of some personal foe.
“I suppose you have had duels before now?” she said indifferently.
“No,” answered Corrèze. “No man ever insulted me yet, and I think no man ever will. I do not like brawling; it is a sort of weakness with my fraternity, who are an irritable genus. I have always contrived to live in amity. But — there are offences for which there is no punishment except the old one of blood.”
He was thinking of what he had seen that night; Sergius Zouroff against the shoulder of Casse-une-Croûte playing at the roulette table whilst his wife was left alone. Madame Nelaguine looked at him narrowly; Vere was standing a little apart listening to the good priest’s rambling words.
“M. le Marquis,” she said with a little smile, “you are very well known to be the gentlest and sunniest of mortals, as well as the sweetest singer that ever lived. But — do you know — I think you could be very terrible if you were very angry. I think it is quite as well that you do not fight duels.”
“I may fight them yet,” said Corrèze, “and do not give me that title, madame, or I shall think you laugh at me. I am only Corrèze!”
“Only! ‘I am Arthur, said the King!’ Will you not be merciful in your greatness — and come and sing to us as a friend here, though you would not come as a guest to Svir?”
Corrèze was silent.
“Do come to-night, you would make me so proud; we have a few people,” urged the Princess Nadine; “and you know,” she added, “that to me your art is a religion.”
“You make it difficult indeed to refuse,” said Corrèze, “but I have not the honour to know Prince Zouroff.”
“With what an accent he says that honour!” thought the sister of Zouroff, but she said aloud: “That is my brothers misfortune, not his fault. Vere, ask this Roi Soleil to shine on our house? He is obstinate to me. Perhaps he will not be so to you.”
Vere did not lift her eyes, her face flushed a little as she turned towards him.
“We should be happy if you would break your rule — for us.”
She spoke with effort; she could not forget what he had said on his knees before her in the little church at Old Aussee. Corrèze bowed.
“I will come for an hour, mes princesses, and I will sing for you both.”
Then he made his adieu and went away.
Vere and her sister-in-law returned to the house. Madame Nelaguine was usually grave.
When they went home, they found the newspapers of the day; the lightest and wittiest of them contained a florid account of the rescue from a sea-storm of a Russian Princess by Corrèze. Without a name the Russian Princess was so described, that all her world could know beyond doubt who it was.
“Really position is a pillory nowadays,” said Madame Nelaguine angrily; “sometimes they pelt one with rose-leaves, and sometimes with rotten eggs, but one is for ever in the pillory!”
When Sergius Zouroff read it he was very enraged.
“Patience!” said his sister drily, when his wife was out of hearing. “In to-morrow’s number I daresay they will describe you and the quadroon.”
Then she added, “Corrèze will come here this evening; he will come to sing for me; you must not offer him anything, not even a ring, or you will insult him.”
“Pshaw!” said Zouroff roughly. “Why do you not get others to sing for you whom you can pay properly like artists? There are many.”
“Many singers like Corrèze? I am afraid not. But I induced him to come, not only for his singing, but because when he has saved your wife’s life, it is as well you should look thankful, even if you do not feel so.”
“You grow as romantic as she is, in your old age, Nadine,” said Zouroff, with a shrug of his shoulders.
“In old age, perhaps, one appreciates many things that one overlooks in one’s youth,” said the Princess unruffled, and with a little sigh. “Twenty years ago I should not have appreciated your wife perhaps much more than — you do.”
“Do you find her amusing?” he said with a little laugh and a yawn.
Later that day Vere drove out alone. Madame Nelaguine was otherwise occupied and her mother was away spending a day or two with a friend who had a villa at La Condamine. She had never once driven down the Promenade des Anglais since she had been on the Riviera this year, but this day her coachman took his way along that famous road because the house to which she was going, a house taken by Vladimir Zouroff, and at which his wife, a pretty Galician woman, lay ill, could not so quickly or so easily be reached any other way. She drove alone, her only companion Loris stretched on the opposite cushions, beside a basket of violets and white lilacs which she was taking to Sophie Zouroff. The afternoon was brilliant; the snow-white palaces, the green gardens, and the azure sea sparkled in the sunlight; the black Orloffs flew over the ground tossing their silver head-pieces and flashing their fiery eyes; people looked after them and told one another “That is the Princess Vera: look, that is the great Russian’s wife.”
Vere leaning back with Loris at her feet, had a white covering of polar bear-skins cast over her; she had on her the black sables which had been in her marriage corbeille; the black and white in their strong contrast enhanced and heightened the beauty of her face and the fairness of her hair; she held on her lap a great cluster of lilies of the valley “That beautiful pale woman is Prince Zouroffs wife; he must have strange taste to leave her for a negress,” said one man to another, as she passed.
There were many carriages out that day as usual before sunset; the black Russian horses dashed through the crowd at their usual headlong gallop, tossing their undocked manes and tails in restless pride. Close against them passed two bays at full trot; the bays were in a victoria; in the victoria was a woman, swarthy and lustrous-eyed, who wore a Russian kaftan, and had black Russian sables thrown about her shoulders; she was smoking; she blew some smoke in the air and grinned from ear to ear as she went past the Zouroff carriage; in her own carriage, lying back in it, was Sergius Zouroff.
A slight flush, that went over Veres face to her temples and then faded to leave her white as new fallen snow, was the only sign she gave that she had recognised her husband with the quadroon who was called Casse-une-Croûte. Another moment, and the black Orloffs, flying onward in a cloud of dust and flood of sunlight, had left the bays behind them. Vere bent her face over the lilies of the valley.
Half a mile further she checked their flight, and told the coachman to return home by another road instead of going onward to Sophie Zouroff’s.
When she reached the villa it was twilight — the short twilight of a winter day on the Mediterranean. She went up to her bed-chamber, took off her sables, and with her own hands wrapped them altogether, rang for her maid, and gave the furs to her.
“When the Prince comes in take these to him,” she said, in a calm voice; “tell him I have no farther use for them; he may have some.”
The woman, who was faithful to her, and knew much of the patience with which she bore her life, looked grave as she took them; she guessed what had happened.
It was six o’clock.
The Princess Nadine came for a cup of yellow tea in Veres dressing-room. She found her gentle and serious as usual; as usual a good listener to the babble of pleasant cynicism and philosophic commentaries with which Madame Nelaguine always was ready to garnish and enliven the news of the hour.
Madame Nelaguine did not notice anything amiss.
An hour later, when Zouroff came home to dress for dinner, the waiting-woman, who loved her mistress and was very loyal to her, took him the sables and the message.
He stared, but said nothing. He understood.
The Prince of Monaco and other princes dined at the Zouroff villa that evening. There was a dinner party of forty people in all. He did not see his wife until the dinner hour. Vere was pale with the extreme pallor that had come on
her face at sight of the quadroon; she wore white velvet and had a knot of white lilac at her breast, and her only ornaments were some great pearls given her by the Herberts on her marriage.
He stooped towards her a moment under pretext of raising a handkerchief she had dropped.
“Madame,” he said in a harsh whisper, “I do not like coups de théâtre, and with my actions you have nothing to do. You will wear your sables and drive on the Promenade des Anglais to-morrow. Do you hear?” he added, as she remained silent. Then she looked at him.
“I hear; but I shall not do it.”
“You will not do it?”
“No.”
Their guests entered. Vere received them with her usual cold and harmonious grace.
“Really she is a grand creature,” thought Zouroff, with unwilling respect, “but I will break her will; I never thought she had any until this year; now she is as stubborn as a mule.”
The long dinner went on its course, and was followed by an animated evening. Madame Nelaguine had always made the Zouroff entertainments more brilliant than most, from their surprises, their vivacity, and their entrain, and this was no exception to the rest.
That Prince Zouroff himself was gloomy made no cause for remark; he never put any curb on his temper either for society or in private life, and the world was used to his fits of moroseness. “The Tsar sulks” his sister would always say, with a laugh, of him; and so covered his ill-humour with a jest. This night she did not jest: her fine instincts told her that there was a storm in the air.
About eleven o’clock everyone was in the white drawing-room, called so because it was hung with white silk, and had white china mirrors and chandeliers. Two clever musicians, violinist and pianist, had executed some pieces of Liszt and Schumann; they were gone, and two actors from the Folies Dramatiques had glided in as Louis treize personages, played a witty little revue, written for the society of the hour, and had in turn vanished. Throughout the long white room — in which the only colour allowed came from banks and pyramids of rose-hued azaleas — there was on every side arising that animated babel of polite tongues which tells a hostess that her people are well amused with her and with themselves, and that the spectre of ennui is scornfully exorcised.