by Ouida
Except the conventional phrase that society in the presence of servants necessitated, Zouroff preserved an unbroken silence to her; he was gloomy but taciturn, now and then under his bent brows his eyes watched her furtively. This forbearance was only a lull in the storm, such a peace as came over the gulf beneath her windows after storm, when the waves sank for an hour at noon to rise in redoubled fury and send the breakers over the quay at sunrise. As for her, the golden cup was now full, but was full with tears.
Would she have had it empty?
She was not sure.
The echo of that one song seemed always on her ear; in the dreams of her troubled sleep she murmured its words; the singer seemed to her transfigured, as to a woman bound in martyrdom, in days of old, seemed the saint with sword and palm that rode through fiery heats and living walls of steel to release her from the stake or wheel. “The woman in Calvados called him the Angel Raphael,” she thought with dim eyes.
It was still midwinter when Sergius Zouroff, several weeks before his usual time, abruptly left the villa of Villafranca, and went with his wife and sister to his hotel in Paris. Zouroff had taken a bitter hatred to this place where the only reproof he had ever endured, the only challenge he had ever received, had been cast at him publicly and in suchwise that he could not resent nor avenge it. When he drove through the streets of Monaco or the streets of Nice, he thought he saw on every face a laugh; when he was saluted by his numerous acquaintances he heard in the simplest greeting a sound of ridicule; when a song was hummed in open air he fancied it was the song of the Coupe d’Or. In impatience and anger he took his household to Paris.
A great emotion, a sort of fear came upon Vere as she once more saw the walls of her house in Paris.
For in Paris was Corrèze.
To the honour and loyalty of her soul it seemed to her that she ought never to see his face or hear his voice again. She would have been willing could she have chosen to have gone far away from all the luxuries and homage of the world, to be buried in humility and obscurity, labouring for God and man, and bearing always in her memory that song which had been raised like a sword in her defence.
When at the end of the long cold journey — long and cold, despite all that wealth could do to abridge, and luxury to rob it of its terrors — she saw the pale January light of a Paris morning shine on the “Slave of Gérôme” in her bedchamber, on the table beneath the picture was a great bouquet of roses; with the roses was a little sprig of sweetbriar.
To be in leaf in the winter she knew that the little homely cottage plant must have had the care of hot-house science. She did not need to ask who had sent her that welcome once more.
She bent her face down on the roses and her eyes were wet. Then she put them away and fell on her knees and prayed the old simple prayer — simple and homely as the sweetbriar — to be delivered from evil.
At the same time her husband, who had driven not to his own house but straight to the Faubourg St. Germain, was standing amidst the gay chinoiseries of the Duchesse Jeanne’s famous boudoir. The Duchesse was laughing and screaming; he was looking down with bent brows.
“Oh, can you think for a moment the story is not known to all Paris!” she was crying. “How could you — how could you — with a hundred people there to hear? My dear, it was only I who kept it out of ‘Figaro’! Such a lovely story as it was, and of course they made it still better. My dear, how stupid you are, blind as a bat, as a mole! To be sure we are all dying now to see the first signs of your conversion. How will you begin? Will you go to church, will you drive your mother-in-law round the lake, will you take an oath never to enter a café? Do tell me how you mean to begin your reformation? It will be the drollest thing of the year!”
“Il vous plait de plaisanter” I said her visitor stiffly, between his shut teeth.
When he left the Hôtel de Sonnaz, the half-formed resolution which he had made to be less unworthy of his wife had faded away; he felt galled, stung, infuriated. Casse-une-Croûte, and the other companions of his licentious hours, found him sullen, fierce, moody. When they rallied him he turned on them savagely, and made them feel that, though he had chosen to toy with them and let them stuff themselves with his gold, he was their master and their purchaser — a tyrant that it was dangerous to beard, a lion with whom it was death to play.
There was strength in his character, though it had been wasted in excesses of all kinds and in a life of utter selfishness and self-indulgence; and this strength left in him a certain manliness that even his modes of life and all his base habits could not utterly destroy; and that latent manliness made him yield a sullen respect to the courageousness and unselfishness of the woman who was his wife and his princess before the world, but in fact had been the victim of his tyrannies and the martyr of his lusts.
There were times when he would have liked to say to her, “forgive me, and pray for me.” But his pride withheld him, and his cynical temper made him sneer at himself. He dreaded ridicule. It was the only dread that was on him. He could not endure that his world should laugh; so, uniting more display and effrontery than ever, he paraded his vices before that world, and all the while hated the panderers to them and the associates of them. He thought if he lived more decently, that the whole of Europe would make a mock of it, and say that he had been reformed by the rebukes of Corrèze. So he showed himself abroad with the verres épais du cabaret brutal, though they grew loathsome to him, and revenged himself on them by crushing their coarse frail worthlessness with savage harshness.
Vere could not tell the strange sort of remorse which moved him. She saw herself daily and hourly insulted, and bore it as she had done before. So long as he asked no public degradation of herself, like that which he had commanded on the Promenade des Anglais, she was passive and content, with that joyless and mournful contentment which is merely the absence of greater evils.
Although they only met in society there was a sort of timidity in the manner of Sergius Zouroff to his wife, a gentleness and a homage in his tone when he addressed her. Vere, who shrank from him rather more than less, did not perceive it, but all others did. “Will Zouroff end with being in love with his wife?” his friends said, with a laugh. The Duchesse Jeanne heard it said on all sides of her. “Will he be a good husband after all?” she thought angrily; and her vanity rose in alarm like the quills of the bruised porcupine.
She attempted a jest or two with him, but they fell flat; there came an anxious sparkle in his gloomy eyes that warned her off such witticisms. She was perplexed and irritated. “After all, it will be very diverting if you should end as le mari amoureux?” she could not resist saying at hazard one day. Zouroff looked down, and his face was very grave.
“Let me alone. I can be dangerous; you know that. No, I am not in love with my wife; one is not in love with marble, however beautiful the lines of it. But I respect her. It is very odd for me to feel respect for any woman. It is new to me.”
“It is a very creditable emotion,” said the Duchesse, with a little sneer. “But it is rather a dull sentiment, is it not?”
“Perhaps,” said Zouroff, gloomily.
A sort of uneasiness and anxiety was upon him. Something of the feeling that had touched him for the child Vere at Félicité moved him once more before his wife; not passion in any way, but more nearly tenderness than it had ever been in his nature to feel for any living thing. He had always thought that he had bought her as he had bought the others, only par le chemin de la chapelle, and he had had a scorn for her that had spoiled and marred his thoughts of her. Now that he knew her to be the martyr of her mothers schemes, a pity that was full of honour rose up in him. After all, she was so innocent herself, and he had hurt her so grossly; hurt her with an injury that neither sophistry nor gold could make the less.
He was a coarse and brutal man; he had had his own will from childhood upon men and women, slaves and animals. He was cruel with the unthinking, unmeasured cruelty of long self-indulgence; but he was a gentleman in
certain instincts, despite all, and the manhood in him made him feel a traitor before Vere. A kind of reverence that was almost fear came into him before her; he seemed to himself unworthy to cross the threshold of her room.
The leopard cannot change his spots, nor the Ethiopian his skin, nor could he abandon habits and vices engrained in all the fibre of his being; but he began to feel himself as unfit for his wife’s young life as a murderer to touch the Eucharist. She could not imagine anything of the thoughts and the remorse that moved him. She only saw that he left her alone and ceased to vent his tyrannies upon her. She was thankful. The hours and the weeks that passed without her seeing him were the most peaceful days of her life. When he addressed her with gentleness she was alarmed, she was more afraid of caresses than of his curses. He saw this fear in her, and a vague half sullen sadness began to enter into him. He began to understand that he owned this woman body and soul, and yet was further from her than any other creature, because no other had outraged her so deeply as he had done.
He was a man who heeded his sins not at all, and even of crime thought little. He had the absolute disbelief and the profound moral indifference of his century; but his offences against Vere he had been made to feel, and it rendered him in her presence also timid, and in her absence almost faithful. He had gathered the edelweiss and he knew that his love was only fit for the brambles and poison-berries.
The season passed away wearily to Vere; an intense pain and a vague terror were always with her. She went out into the world as usual, but it seemed to her more than ever the most monotonous, as it was the most costly, way of destroying time. She was in her tribune at Chantilly, in her carriage in the Bois, in her diamonds at Embassies, and she received that homage which a woman of her loveliness and her position is always surrounded by, however indifferent be her mood or unwilling her ear.
But the whole life seemed to her more than ever a disease, a fever, a strained and unwholesome folly. She strove more and more to escape from it and from herself by labour amidst the poor and tenderness for them.
“You should be canonized, Vera!” said her sister-in-law to her, with a little cynical impatience; to her brother, Madame Nelaguine said with moist eyes, “Sergius, one day you will see the red and white roses of Paradise in your wife’s lap as her husband did in St. Elizabeth’s.”
Zouroff was silent.
“Alas! alas! the age of miracles is past,” thought his sister. “Good works bring their own fruits, to those capable of them, in peace of mind and innocence of soul, that I believe; but the world has ceased to adore; the very priests have ceased to believe; the ways of sin are not death but triumph; and the poor do not love the hand that feeds them; they snatch and tear, then snarl and bite, like a street cur. Alas! alas! où sont les neiges d’antan!”
Meanwhile her mother Vere did not see at that time. She was thankful.
Lady Dolly was one of the five hundred leaders of English society, and could not leave her duties. She was more popular than ever before. Her balls were the prettiest of the year, and people could breathe at them; she was exclusive yet always amiable; she knew how to unite a social severity with a charming good-nature; she began to call herself old with the merriest little laugh in the world, and she began to doubt whether she still ought to dance. “A dear little woman,” said the world; and everyone pitied her for having a daughter who was cold, who was austere, and who had so little affection for her.
“My Vere does not love me. It comes from my own fault, no doubt, in letting her be away from me in her childhood,” said Lady Dolly softly, to her intimate friends; and her eyes were dim and her voice pathetic.
There were only two persons who did not believe in her in all her London world. These were a rough, gloomy, yet goodnatured man, who was no longer Lord Jura, but Lord Shetland; and Fushcia, Duchess of Mull.
“Guess she’s all molasses,” said her Grace, who in moments of ease returned to her vernacular, “but my word! ain’t there wasps at the bottom.”
“After all, poor little Pussy is not the simpleton I thought her,” Lady Stoat of Stitchley, with a sigh of envy, for her own unerring wisdom and exquisite tact and prudence had not been able to avert exposure and scandal from her own daughter, who was living with a French actor in Italy, while Lord Berkhampstead was drinking himself to death on brandy.
A few days after their arrival, Corrèze had left Paris. For the first time in his life he had refused to play in Paris on his arrival from the south, and had signed a four months’ engagement with Vienna and Berlin. “They will say you are afraid to meet Prince Zouroff,” said an old friend to him. “They may say it if they please,” answered Corrèze, wearily, and with a movement of disdain.
He knew that his indignation and his disguise had carried him into an imprudence, an imprudence that he regretted now that the story of “La Coupe d’Or” had flown through society, regretted it lest it should annoy or compromise her; and for her sake he would not stay where she was.
He knew how the tongues of the world wagged with or without reason at a mere whisper, and he knew that there were so many who would rejoice to see the pure, cold, snow-white purity of Vere’s name fall into the mud of calumny; rejoice out of sheer wantonness, mere purposeless malice, mere love of a new sensation. “Blessed are the pure of spirit” says the Evangelist, but society says it not with him.
He loved her; but it was an emotion no more akin to the noble, tender, and self-denying love of other days than to the shallow sensualities of his own.
He had been satisfied with intrigue, surfeited with passion; underlying the capriciousness of a popular idol, and the ardour of an amorous temper, there were the patience and the loyalty of the mountaineer’s heart in him. Whosoever has truly loved the Alpine heights in early youth, keeps something of their force and something of their freshness and their chastity in his soul always. Corrèze was an artist and a man of the world; but he had been first and was still, under all else, a child of nature; and he would utterly deny that nature was the foul thing that it is now painted by those who call themselves realists. He denied that a drunkard and a prostitute are all who are real in the world.
“When the soldier dies at his post, unhonoured and unpitied, and out of sheer duty, is that unreal because it is noble?” he said one night to his companions. “When the sister of charity hides her youth and her sex under a grey shroud, and gives up her whole life to woe and solitude, to sickness and pain, is that unreal because it is wonderful? A man paints a spluttering candle, a greasy cloth, a mouldy cheese, a pewter can; ‘how real!’ they cry. If he paint the spirituality of dawn, the light of the summer sea, the flame of arctic nights, of tropic woods, they are called unreal, though they exist no less than the candle and the cloth, the cheese and the can. Ruy Bias is now condemned as unreal because the lovers kill themselves; the realists forget that there are lovers still to whom that death would be possible, would be preferable, to low intrigue and yet more lowering falsehood. They can only see the mouldy cheese, they cannot see the sunrise glory All that is heroic, all that is sublime, impersonal, or glorious, is derided as unreal. It is a dreary creed. It will make a dreary world. Is not my Venetian glass with its iridescent hues of opal as real every whit as your pot of pewter? Yet the time is coming when everyone, morally and mentally at least, will be allowed no other than a pewter pot to drink out of, under pain of being ‘writ down an ass’ — or worse. It is a dreary prospect.”
And he would not be content with it. There were the Ruy Blas and the Romeo in him as there are in all men who are at once imaginative and ardent. He had the lover in him of southern lands, of older days. He would watch in long hours of cold midnight merely to see her image go by him; he would go down to the cliff on the northern coast only to gather a spray of sweetbriar on the spot where he had seen her first; he would row in rough seas at dark under her villa wall in the south for the sake of watching the light in her casement; his love for her was a religion with him, simple, intense, and noble; it wa
s an unending suffering, but it was a suffering he loved better than all his previous joys. When he saw her husband in haunts of vicious pleasure, he could have strangled him for very shame that he was not worthier of her. When he saw him beside the dusky face of the quadroon, he could have dragged him from his carriage and hurled him under the feet of the wife he outraged.
In one of the few days before his departure he passed Sergius Zouroff on the Boulevard des Italiens. Corrèze stood still to let him speak if he would. Zouroff looked away and walked onward without any sign, except of anger, from the sudden sullen gleam in his half-shut eyes.
The arrogance of a man whose birth was higher, because his race had been greater, than the Romanoffs’, made it impossible for him to imagine that Corrèze could be his enemy or his rival.
He thought the singer had only sung what had been commanded him. He thought the rebuke to him had been his wife’s, and Corrèze only its mouthpiece.
Still he hated him; he avoided him; he would have liked to wring the throat of that silver-voiced nightingale.
Corrèze suffered bitterly to do nothing, to go away, to go as if he were a coward; yet he did it lest the world should speak of her — the light and cruel world to which nothing is sacred, which makes a joke of man’s dishonour and a jest of woman’s pain.
He did it, and went and sang in the cities of the north with an aching heart. This is always the doom of the artist: the world has no pity. Its children must not pause to weep nor go aside to pray. They must be always in the front, always exerting all their force and all their skill before their public, or they pass from remembrance and perish. The artist, when he loves, has two mistresses, each as inexorable as the other.
Corrèze could not abandon his art; would not abandon it more than a yearling child will leave its mother. It was all he had. It was a delight to him, that empire of sound which came of a perfect mastery, that consciousness and clearness of genius. Without the listening crowds, the glittering houses, the nights of triumph, he might have been only dull and lonely; but without the delight of melody, the command of that song which had gone with him all his life, as a nightingale’s goes with it till it dies, he would have been desolate.