by Ouida
Suddenly the door opened, and the servants announced Corrèze.
“Quel bonheur!” cried Madame Nelaguine; and muttered to her brother, “Say something cordial and graceful, Sergius; you can when you like.”
Corrèze was bending before the mistress of the house; for the first time he saw the moth and the star at her throat.
“Present me to M. de Corrèze, Vera,” said her husband, and she did so.
“I owe you much, and I am happy to be able in my own house to beg you to believe in my gratitude, and to command it when you will,” said Zouroff, with courtesy and the admirable manner which he could assume with suavity and dignity when he chose.
“I was more weatherwise than a fisherman, monsieur; that is all the credit I can claim,” said Corrèze, lightly and coldly: everyone had ceased their conversation, men had lost their interest in womens eyes, the princes present grew eager, and were thrown into the shade. Corrèze had come. Corrèze, with the light on his poetic face, his grace of attitude, his sweet, far-reaching voice, his past of conquest, his present of victory, his halo of fame, his sorcery of indifference.
Corrèze stood by the side of his hostess, and there was a gleam of challenge in his eyes, usually so dreamy, this night so luminous; he was just as pale as she.
“I came to sing some songs to mesdames, your sister, and your wife,” said Corrèze, a little abruptly to Zouroff. “Is that your piano? You will permit me?”
He moved to it quickly “He knows why he is asked to come,” thought Zouroff, “but he speaks oddly; one would think he were the prince and I the artist!”
“He is a rarer sort of prince than you,” murmured Madame Nelaguine, who guessed his thoughts. “Do not touch him rudely, or the nightingale will take wing.”
Corrèze struck one loud chord on the notes, and through the long white room there came a perfect silence.
Not thrice in twelve months was he ever heard out of his own opera-houses.
He paused with his hands on the keys; he looked down the drawing-room, all he saw of all that was around him were a sea of light, a bloom of rose-red flowers, a womans figure in white velvet, holding a white fan of ostrich feathers in her hand, and with a knot of white lilac at her breast. He closed his eyelids rapidly one instant as a man does who is dazzled by flame or blinded with a mist of tears; then he looked steadily down the white room and sang a Noël of Felicien David’s.
Never in all his nights of triumph had he sung more superbly. He was still young, and his voice was in its perfection. He could do what he chose with it, and he chose to-night to hold that little crowd of tired great people hanging on his lips as though they were sheep that hearkened to Orpheus.
He chose to show her husband and her world what spell he could use, what power he could wield; a charm that their riches could not purchase, a sorcery their rank could not command. He was in the mood to sing, and he sang, as generously as in his childhood he had warbled his wood-notes wild to the winds of the mountains; as superbly, and with as exquisite a mastery and science as he had ever sung with to the crowded theatres of the great nations of the world.
The careless and fashionable crowd listened, and was electrified into emotion. It could not resist; men were dumb and women heard with glistening eyes and aching hearts; Sergius Zouroff, for whom music rarely had any charm, as he heard that grand voice rise on the stillness, clear as a clarion that calls to war, and then sink and fall to a sweetness of scarcely mortal sound, owned its influence, and as he sat with his head downward, and his heavy eyelids closed, felt dully and vaguely that he was vile, and Deity perchance not all a fable; and shuddered a little, and felt his soul shrink before the singers as Saul’s in its madness before David.
When Corrèze paused all were silent. To give him compliment or gratitude would have seemed almost as unworthy an insult as to give him gold.
Vere had not moved; she stood before the bank of azaleas quite motionless; she might have been of marble for any sign she gave.
Corrèze was silent; there was no sound in the white room except the murmur of the waves without against the sea-wall of the house.
Suddenly he looked up, and the brilliant flash of his gaze met Sergius Zouroff’s clouded and sullen eyes.
“I will sing once more,” said Corrèze, who had risen; and he sat down again to the piano. “I will sing once more, since you are not weary of me. I will sing you something that you never heard.”
His hands strayed over the chords in that improvisation of music which comes to the great singer as the sudden sonnet to the poet, as the burst of wrath to the orator. Corrèze was no mere interpreter of other men’s melody; he had melody in his brain, in his hands, in his soul.
He drew a strange pathetic music from the keys; a music sad as death, yet with a ring of defiance in it, such defiance as had looked from his eyes when he had entered, and had stood by the side of the wife of Zouroff.
He sang “La Coupe” of Sully Prudhomme; the “Coupe d’Or” that he had quoted on the sands by the North Sea at Schevening.
“Dans les verres épais du cabaret brutal Le vin bleu coule à flots, et sans trêve à la ronde.
Dans le calice fin plus rarement abonde, Un vin dont la clarté soit digne du cristal.
Enfin, la coupe d’or haut d’un piédestal Attend, vide toujours, bien que large et profonde, Un cru dont la noblesse à la sienne réponde:
On tremble d’en souiller l’ouvrage et le métal.”
He sang it to music of his own, eloquent, weird, almost terrible; music that seemed to search the soul as the rays of a lamp probe dark places.
The person he looked at while he sang was Sergius Zouroff.
Les verres épais du cabaret brutal!
The words rang down the silence that was around him with a scorn that was immeasurable, with a rebuke that was majestic.
Sergius Zouroff listened humbly as if held under a spell, his eyes could not detach their gaze from the burning scorn of the singer. Les verres épais du cabaret brutal!
The line was thundered through the stillness with a challenge and a meaning that none who heard it could doubt, and with a passion of scorn that cut like a scourge and spared not.
Then his voice dropped low, and with the tenderness of an unutterable yearning recited the verse he had not spoken by the sea.
“Plus le vase est grossier de forme et de matière, Mieux il trouve à combler sa contenance entière, Aux plus beaux seulement il n’est point de liqueur.”
There was once more a great silence. Vere still stood quite motionless.
Sergius Zouroff leaned against the white wall with his head stooped and his eyes sullen and dull, with an unwilling shame. Corrèze rose and closed the piano.
“I came to sing; I have sung; you will allow me to leave you now, for I must go away by daybreak to Paris.”
And though many tried to keep him, none could do so, and he went.
Vere gave him her hand as he passed out of the white drawingroom.
“I thank you,” she said very low.
The party broke up rapidly; there was a certain embarrassment and apprehension left on all the guests; there was not one there who had not understood the public rebuke given to Sergius Zouroff.
He had understood it no less.
But for his pride’s sake, which would not let him own he felt the disgrace of it, he would have struck the lips of the singer dumb. When the white room was empty, he paced to and fro with quick, uneven steps. His face was livid, his eyes were savage, his breath came and went rapidly and heavily; for the first time in all his years a man had rebuked him.
“You asked him here to insult me?” he cried, pausing suddenly before his wife. She looked him full in the face.
“No. There would be no insult in a poem unless your conscience made it seem one.”
She waited a moment for his answer, but he was silent; he only stared at her with a stifled, bitter oath; she made a slight curtsey to him, and left his presence without another word.
“You should honour his courage, Sergius,” said Madame Nelaguine, who remained beside him; “you must admit it was very courageous.”
A terrible oath was his answer.
“Courageous!” he said savagely at last. “Courageous? The man knows well enough that it is impossible for me to resent a mere song; I should be ridiculous, farceur, and he knows that I cannot fight him — he is a stage-singer—”
“He thinks himself your equal,” she answered quietly; “but probably your wife is right, it is only your conscience makes you see an insult in a poem.”
“My conscience!” — Sergius Zouroff laughed aloud; then he said suddenly, “Is he Veras lover?”
“You are a fool,” said the Princesse Nadine with tranquil scorn. “Your wife has never had any lover, and I think never will have one. And what lover would rebuke you? Lovers are like husbands — they condone.”
“If he be not her lover why should he care?”
Madame Nelaguine shrugged her shoulders.
“My dear Sergius, people are different. Some feel angry at things that do not in the least concern them, and go out of their way to redress wrongs that have nothing to do with them; they are the exaltés members of the world. Corrèze is one of them. Have you not said he is an artist? Now, I am no artist, and never am exaltée, and yet I also do not like to see the golden cup cast aside for the cabaret brutal. Good night.”
Then she too left him.
The next day Madame Nelaguine went up to her sister-in-law on the sea-terrace of the house. Vere was sitting by the statue of the wingless Love; she had a book in her hand, but she was not reading, her face was very calm, but there was a sleepless look in her eyes. The Princesse Nadine, who never in her life had known any mental or physical fear, felt afraid of her; she addressed her a little nervously.
“Have you slept well, love?”
“Not at all,” said Vere, who did not speak falsely in little things or large.
“Ah!” sighed Madame Nelaguine, and added wistfully, “Vera, I want to ask you to be still patient, to do nothing in haste; in a word, to forgive still if you can. My dear, I am so pained, so shocked, so ashamed of all the insults my brother offers you, but he has had a lesson very grandly given, — it may profit him, it may not; but in any way, Vera, as a woman of the world who yet can love you, my love, I want to entreat you for all our sakes, and your own above all, not to separate yourself from my brother.”
Vere, who had her eyes fixed on the distant snows of the mountains of Esterelle, turned and looked at her with a surprise and with something of a rebuke.
“You mean? — I do not think I understand you.”
“I mean,” murmured her sister-in-law almost nervously, “do not seek for a divorce.”
“A divorce!”
Vere echoed the words in a sort of scorn.
“You do not know me much yet,” she said calmly. “The woman who can wish for a divorce and drag her wrongs into public — such wrongs! — is already a wanton herself; at least I think so.”
Madame Nelaguine breathed a little quickly with relief, yet with a new apprehension.
“You are beyond me, Vera, and in your own way you are terribly stern.”
“What do you wish me to be?” said Vere tranquilly. “If I were of softer mold I should make your brothers name the shame of Europe. Be grateful to my coldness; it is his only shield.”
“But you suffer—”
“That is nothing to anyone. When I married Prince Zouroff I knew very well that I should suffer always. It is not his fault; he cannot change his nature.”
His sister stood beside her and pulled the yellow tea-roses absently.
“You are altogether beyond me,” she said hurriedly, “and yet you are not a forgiving we man, Vera?”
“Forgiveness is a very vague word; it is used with very little thought. No, I do not forgive, certainly But I do not avenge myself by giving my name to the mob, and telling the whole world things that I blush even to know!”
“Then you would never separate yourself from Sergius?”
“I may leave his roof if he try me too far, I have thought of it; but I will never ask the law to set me free from him. What could the law do for me? It cannot undo what is done. A woman who divorces her husband is a prostitute legalised by a form; that is all.”
“You think fidelity due to the faithless?”
“I think fidelity is the only form of chastity left to a woman who is a wife; the man’s vices cannot affect the question. I abhor your brother, I could strike him as a brave man strikes a coward, but I have taken an oath to him and I will be true to it. What has the law to do with one’s own honour?”
“It is happy for him that you have such unusual feeling,” said Madame Nelaguine with a little acrimony, because she herself had been far from guiltless as a wife. “But your knight? your defender? your hero with the golden nightingale in his throat, are you as cold to him? Did you not see that while he sang his heart was breaking, and he would have been glad if his song had been a sword?”
They were imprudent words and she knew it, yet she could not resist the utterance of them; for even in her admiration of Vere a certain bitterness and a certain impatience moved her against a grandeur of principle that appeared to her strained and out of nature.
Vere, who was sitting leaning a little back against the sea-wall, raised herself and sat erect; a warmth of colour came upon her face, her eyes grew angered and luminous.
“I will not affect to misunderstand you,” she said tranquilly, “but you misunderstand both him and me. Long, long ago I think he could have loved me, and I — could have loved him. But fate had it otherwise. He is my knight, you say — perhaps — but only as they were knights in days of old, without hope and without shame. I think you had no need to say this to me, and, perhaps, no right to say it.”
The Princess Nadine touched her hand reverently. “No, I had no right, Vera. But I thank you for answering me so. Dear — you are not of our world. You live in it, but it does not touch you. Your future is dark, but you bear the lamp of honour in your hand. We think the light old-fashioned and dull, but it burns in dark places where we, without it, stumble and fall. Corrèze did not sing in vain; my brother, I think, will say no more to you of the sables and the Promenade des Anglais.”
“It matters very little whether he does or no,” said Vere, “I should not drive there, and he knows it. Will you be so good as not to speak to me again of these things? I think words only make them harder to bear, and seem to lower one to the level of the women who complain.”
“But to speak is so natural—”
“Not to me.”
It was three o’clock in the December day; the mistral was blowing, although in this sheltered nook of the bay of Villafranca it was but little felt, the sky was overcast, the waves were rolling in heavy with surf, little boats, going on their way to Sans Soupir or Saint Jean, ploughed through deep waters.
Vere moved towards the house.
Madame Nelaguine went down towards the garden to visit the young palms she was rearing for the palace in the Newski Prospect, where heated air was to replace the lost south to them, as the fever of society replaces the dreams of our youth.
Her husband met Vere in the entrance and stopped her there; his face was reddened and dark; his heavy jaw had the look of the bulldog’s; his eyes had a furtive and ferocious glance; it was the first time they had met since she had curtsied to him her good-night. He barred her way into the entrance chamber.
“Madame, the horses are ready,” he said curtly, “go in and put on your sables.”
She lifted her eyes, and a great contempt spoke in them; with her lips she was silent.
“Do you hear me?” he repeated, “go in and put on your sables; I am waiting to drive with you.”
“Along the Promenade des Anglais?” she said, very calmly.
“On the Promenade des Anglais,” repeated Zouroff; “do you need twice telling?”
&nbs
p; “Though you tell me a hundred times, I will not drive there.”
He swore a great oath.
“I told you what you were to do last night. Last night you chose to have me insulted by an opera-singer; do you suppose that changed my resolve? When I say a thing it is done; go in and put on your sables.”
“I will never put them on again; and I will not drive with you!”
Rage held him speechless for a moment. Then he swore a great oath.
“Go in and put on your sables, or I will teach you how a Russian can punish rebellion. You insulted me by the mouth of an opera-singer, who had your orders no doubt what to sing. You shall eat dust to-day; that I swear.”
Vere gave a little gesture of disdain.
“Do you think you can terrify me?” she said tranquilly. “We had better not begin to measure insults. My account against you is too heavy to be evenly balanced on that score.”
The calmness of her tone and of her attitude lashed him to fury.
“By God! I will beat you as my father did his serfs!” he muttered savagely, as he seized her by the arm.
“You can do so if you choose. The Tsar has not enfranchised me. But make me drive as you say, where you say, that is beyond your power.”
She stood facing him on the terrace; the angry sea and clouded sky beyond her. Her simple dignity of attitude impressed him for an instant with shame and with respect; but his soul was set on enforcing his command. She had had him humiliated by the mouth of a singer; and he was resolved to avenge the humiliation; and having said this thing, though he was ashamed of it, he would not yield nor change.
He pulled her towards him by both hands, and made her stand before him.
“You shall learn all that my power means, madame. I am your master; do you deny me obedience?”
“In things that are right, no.”
“Right — wrong! What imbecile’s words are those? I bid you do what I choose. You insulted me by your singers mouth last night; I will make you eat dust to-day.”
Vere looked him full in the face.