by Ouida
Therefore in the keen cold of the northern winter and their tardy, niggard spring, he sang, as the nightingale sings, even while its lover lies shot under the leaves; and the multitudes and their leaders alike adored him. In Vienna the whole city saluted him as it salutes its Kaiser, and in the vast barrack of Berlin the blare of trumpets and the clash of arms were forgotten for one soft voice that sang under Gretchen’s cottage-window.
“After all, when one has known this, one has known human greatness surely,” he thought wistfully, as he stood on his balcony in the keen starlight of northern skies, and saw vast throngs fill the square beneath him and all the streets around, and heard the mighty hoch, that northern lungs give for their emperors and their armies ring, through the frosty air for him.
Yet a mist came over his eyes that obscured the torch-glare and the gathered multitudes, and the buildings that were so white and so vast in the moonlight. He thought that he would have given all his triumphs, all his joys — nay, his very voice itself — to undo the thing that had been done, and make the wife of Sergius Zouroff once more the child by the sweetbriar hedge on the cliff.
Though for all the world he was a magician, he had no sorcery for himself. He was but a man, like all the others, and to himself he seemed weaker than all the rest. The bonds of the world bound him — the bonds of its conventions, of its calumnies, of its commonplaces. He could not strike a blow for her honour that the world would not construe to her shame.
“And who knows but that if she knew that I loved her, she too might never forgive,” he thought wearily; and the flowers flung to him through the frost seemed but weeds, the multitude fools, the rejoicing city a madhouse.
When Fame stands by us all alone, she is an angel clad in light and strength; but when Love touches her she drops her sword, and fades away, ghostlike and ashamed.
His sacrifice was of little use. There were too many women jealous of him, and envious of her, for the story of the “Coupe d’Or” not to be made the root and centre of a million falsehoods.
You may weep your eyes blind, you may shout your throat dry, you may deafen the ears of your world for half a lifetime, and you may never get a truth believed in, never have a simple fact accredited. But the lie flies like the swallow, multiplies itself like the caterpillar, is accepted everywhere, like the visits of a king; it is a royal guest for whom the gates fly open, the red carpet is unrolled, the trumpets sound, the crowds applaud.
Jeanne de Sonnaz laughed a little, shrugged her shoulders, then said very prettily that everyone knew there was nothing; Vere was a saint. And then the thing was done.
Who said it first of all no one ever knew. Who ever sees the snake-spawn, the plague-mist gather? The snake-brood grows and comes out into the light, the plague-mist spreads and slays its thousands — that is enough to see.
Who first whispered through the great world the names of the Princess Zouroff and the singer Corrèze together? No one could have told. All in a moment it seemed as if everyone in society were murmuring, hinting, smiling, with that damnable smile with which the world always greets the approach of a foul idea.
A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.
“An old love, an early love,” so they muttered; and the fans and the cigarettes made little breaks and waves in the air, as much as to say it was always so. You could say what you liked — they murmured — when people were so very cold, so very proud, so very proper; there was always some cause. An old love — ah? that was why she was so fond of music! Then society laughed; its inane cruel chirping laughter, when it smells a sin.
She had many foes. When those calm, deep, disdainful eyes had looked through the souls of others, those other souls — so often mean and shameless with paltry lusts or swollen with paltry forms of pride — had shrunk under that glance, and hated the one who all innocently gave it; when her serene simplicity and her grave grace had made the women around her look merely dolls of the Palais Royal toyshops, and the fantastic frivolity of her epoch seem the silliest and rankest growth of an age in nothing over wise — then, and for that alone, she had become beset by enemies unseen and unsuspected, but none the less perilous for their secresy. When women had called her farouche in their drawing-room jargon, they had only meant that she was chaste, that she was grave, that folly did not charm her, and that she was a rebuke to themselves.
That under the snow there should be mud; that at the heart of the wildrose there should not be not one worm, but many; that the edelweiss should be rotten and worthless after all — what joy! The imagined joy of angels over one who repents can never be one-thousandth part so sweet and strong as the actual joy of sinners over one purity that falls.
So she had always been a falsehood like them all! So Corrèze had always been her lover! All the grand ladies and all the pretty ladies in the great world laughed gingerly, and tittered with that titter, which in Mary Jane and Louison one would call vulgar; and, in their nest of new knicknackery and old art, cooed together and soothed each others’ ruffled plumage, and agreed that they were none of them surprised.
Meanwhile Vere knew nothing, and went on her way with calm, proud feet, unwitting that amongst the ermine of her mantle of innocence the moths of slander were at work. Who first said it? No one knew. Perhaps her mother engendered it by a sigh. Perhaps her husbands friend begot it by a smile. No one could ever tell. Only society talked. That was all. Society talked. It means as much as when in Borgia’s days they said, “To-night the Pope sups with you.” Lady Dolly heard, as women like her hear everything. “Are they saying this? I always thought they would say it,” she thought, and was vaguely disquieted, and yet not ill-pleased. When she had caught the first rumour of it one afternoon, in a whisper never meant for her ears, she had gone back to her dressing-room to get ready for a dinner at an embassy, and had been good-nature itself to her maid, easily pleased with her curls, and quite indifferent as to what jewels they gave her. “Anything looks well with white,” she had said dreamily, and her maid thought she must have got another “affair” on the wind. But she was only feeling a sort of velvety content in the ultimate justice of things. “She has been so cruel to me,” she thought, really, honestly thought it. “She has always been so cold and so grave, and so very unpleasant, and always looked really as if one were no better than one should be; it would be very funny if she gets a few ‘nasty ones,’ as the boys say, herself; it really will be no more than she deserves. And, besides, people don’t like that sort of manner, that sort of way she has with her eyelids, as if one were something so very bad and queer if one just happen to say the least little thing that she fancies not quite correct; nobody does like it, it is so very unsympathetic; women are sure to pay her out if they get the least chance, and men will be quite as delighted to hear it. It is such a mistake not to make yourself pleasant, not to be like everybody else and always amiable. Such heaps of people will always take your part if you have been amiable. I wonder if it is true? No, of course it isn’t true. I don’t believe Corrèze ever kissed the back of her hand. But it will be very funny if she should get talked about; very sad, but so funny too!” And Lady Dolly’s mind drifted complacently and comfortably over a long series of years, in which she had skated on the very thinnest ice without ever getting a drenching, and had had all the four winds of heaven blowing “stories” about her like a scattered pack of cards, and yet had never been the worse for any one of them. “It is because I have always been so pleasant to them all,” thought Lady Dolly complacently, and indeed she always had been.
She had said very ill-natured things when they were safe to be said; she had laughed at nearly everybody when their backs were turned; she had often amused herself with putting spokes in the wheels of happy marriages, of promising courtships, of social ambitions, of youthful careers; but she had done it all merely as a squirrel steals nuts, and she had always been pleasant to women; always kissed them, always caressed them, always confided, or always seemed to confide, in t
hem, and above all had always made them think her both silly and successful, a union of the two most popular social qualities. “Vere never would kiss any of them,” she thought, with the contempt that an old diplomatist feels for an obstinate politician who will not understand that language is given to us to conceal our thoughts; and she drew her gloves up to the elbow and took her big fan and went to her party with a complacent feeling of superiority and expectation. “It would be very horrid, of course,” she thought, “and of course it would be dreadful if there were any scene; and I am not very sure what the Russian laws are if it were to come to any séparation du corps et de biens; I but still if she were to get a fright one couldn’t altogether be sorry. It would teach her that she was only made of the same stuff as other people.”
For what with the many years of separation from her daughter, and the sense of shame that perpetually haunted her for the sacrifice she had made of Vere’s fair life, Lady Dolly had almost grown to hate her. She was always envying, fearing, disliking the pale, cold, beautiful woman whose diamonds outshone her own as the sun outshines the lamps; Vere was not one tithe so much her dead husbands child as she was the Princess Zouroff, and there were many times when Lady Dolly caught herself, thinking of her only as the Princess Zouroff, as a social rival and a social superior, and, as such, hating her and forgetting, quite forgetting, that she had ever been a little flowerlike baby that had owed life to herself. “Vere has been so cruel to me,” she would think, “and so very unforgiving.”
For Lady Dolly, true woman of the times, always thought that those whom she had wronged were cruel to her. Why would they not forget? She herself could always forget.
“It shows such a bad disposition to resent and remember so long,” she would say to herself; life was too short for long memories. “Give me the art of oblivion,” cried Themistocles; Lady Dolly had learned the art, or rather had had the power born in her, and forgot, as naturally as birds moult in autumn, her sins, her follies, her offences, and her friends.
Only one thing she never forgot, and that was a wound to her vanity — and no one ever looked at her when her daughter was nigh.
Zouroff, who did not know “society talked,” still felt abashed before the presence of his wife; he felt as Louis of Hungary felt when he saw the celestial roses in the lap of that saintly queen to whom Madame Nelaguine compared Vere.
Since the day when her mother’s name had been spoken between them, he had never seen his wife alone one moment, and never had fairly met her glance.
Yet when they were in the same room in society his eyes followed her as they had never done before, wistfully, sombrely, wonderingly. Jeanne de Sonnaz said to herself: “He will end as le mari amoureux,” and so thinking spoke to him one morning early, when he was sitting in that little yellow boudoir, with all its Chinese idols, and Chinese work, which was so curiously unlike all the rest of the dark old hotel of the Renaissance, which a Duc de Sonnaz had built under Francis I. With all her cleverest tact she brought uppermost the name of Corrèze, and dropped little hints, little suggestions, harmless yet pregnant, as she leaned back in her low chair, smoking a cigarette with her cup of coffee.
Zouroff grew irritated at last, but he did not know how to express his irritation without appearing absurd in her sight, or provoking her laughter.
“My dear, you must be blind not to see that there is some sentiment between Vera and this lyric Bossuet, who made your piano his pulpit,” she continued, as he muttered something not very intelligible. “When he refused to come to Svir you might have known. What singer without a motive refuses a mountain of roubles? Besides, he was at Ischl. I did not tell you — why should I tell you — but he serenaded her adorably, he climbed to impossible altitudes to get her flowers; he went away in the oddest, most abrupt fashion. My dear Sergius, you are a brute, a bat, a mole—”
“Pshaw! the man is only a mime, a mime with a thrush’s pipe,” said Zouroff, with rough scorn. “Do you suppose she would descend—”
“C’est convenu” interrupted Madame Jeanne; “Oh, c’est convenu.
Your wife is the pearl of her sex, she is a second Madame Saint Elizabeth, all the world knows that; when we see her at dinner we expect an angel to fill her glass with the wine of Paradise; oh yes, you cannot suppose I mean the slightest indiscretion in her. Vera is incapable of an indiscretion, so incapable, that in a less beautiful woman such extreme goodness would make her utterly uninteresting; but still, for that very reason she is just the sort of person to cling to an idea, to preserve a sentiment like a relic in a silver box; and I have always heard, if you have not, that Corrèze is her idea, is her relic.”
Zouroff listened gloomily; he did not as yet believe her, yet a dark sense of jealousy began to burn in him as slow matches burn; a little spark slowly creeping that in time will fire a city. It was scarcely jealousy so much as it was offence, and irritated incredulity, and masterful possession stung by idea of invasion.
But as yet he believed nothing; he smiled a little moodily.
“Your imagination runs away with you,” he said curtly. “Vera was sixteen years old when I married her; English girls, ma chère, do not have affairs at that age, even if, at the same hour in France, Cupid creep behind the lexicons and missals.”
Jeanne de Sonnaz was angry in her turn. When she had been sixteen at her convent she had been very nearly causing a terrible scandal with a young lieutenant of Chasseurs, whom her powerful family succeeded in having discreetly ordered to Africa; she had not thought that Sergius Zouroff knew aught of that silly old story.
“I did not speak of Cupid or of anything so demoralising and démodé” she said carelessly. “I know there was some story, I remember it very well, something romantic and graceful of Corrèze and your wife, when she was a girl — a very young girl; I think he saved her life, I am not sure; but I know that she thinks him a guardian angel. Pray did you know that it was his interposition that sent Noisette back to Paris that day of our fancy-fair?”
Zouroff swore a savage oath. “What accursed interference; what insolent audacity! Are you sure?”
“Corrèze is as insolent as if he were a prince of the blood. More so, for they must please to reign but he reigns to please — himself,” said Madame Jeanne with a little laugh. “Did you never know that of Noisette? O how stupid men are! I guessed it and I found it out. Women always can, when they choose, find out anything. Corrèze is always taking the part of knight to your wife; he kills the dragons and chases the robbers, and is always there when she wants him; did he not save her from the storm off Villafranca?”
Zouroff paced to and fro the room to the peril of the brimborions and bric-à-brac. There was a heavy frown on his brows; he remembered the storm of Villafranca only too well since it had preceded the song of the “Golden Cup.”
“I do not believe it,” he said doggedly, for he did not.
“So much the better,” said his friend drily.
“I always notice,” she added after a little pause, “that very cynical and sceptical people (you are very sceptical and very cynical) never do believe in a simple truth that stares them in the face. I am not saying the least harm of your wife — where is the harm? She is of an exalted temperament; she takes life like a poem, like a tragedy; she is a religious woman who really believes in sins just as our peasantry in “la Bretange bretonnante” believe in spirits and saints; she will never do any harm whatever. But for that very reason she shut her relic up in her silver box and worships it at home. Corrèze is always worshipped, though not always so spiritually. No one ever worships you, my dear, you are not of that order of men. Why do you look so angry? You should be thankful. It is very nice that your wife should admire a relic; she might, you know, be dragging your name across Europe at the coat tails of a dozen young dragoons, and though you could shoot them, no doubt, that is always very ridiculous. It is so impossible for husbands at any time not to look ridiculous. You must have looked very so when Corrèze was singing that song; oh, I sh
all regret to the last day of my life that I was not there!”
Madame Jeanne leaned back and laughed aloud, with her hands behind her head and her eyes shut.
Zouroff continued to pace to and fro the little pretty crowded chamber.
“You will break some of my idols,” she said when she had done laughing. “I hope I have not broken one of your idols? How could one ever suppose you cared for your wife?”
“It is not that,” said Zouroff roughly; he was shaken, disturbed, enraged; he did not know what to think, and the vanity and the arrogance that served him in the stead of pride were up in arms.
“Of course, yes; it is that,” said Madame Jeanne coolly; “I always wondered you were so indifferent to her; she is so handsome. And I always thought that if she ever loved anyone else you would be madly in love with her once more, or rather much more than you were at first.”
Zouroff made a gesture so savage as he motioned her to silence, that even her tongue ceased for a moment its chatter.
“One must not say too much” she thought, “or he will go and do something premature.”
“What does it matter,” she said, consolingly; “a woman who is so much left to herself as Vera is, will be certain to find some compensation for all you deny her. You clumsy Baltic bear! you do not understand women. Believe me it is very dangerous to marry a mere girl, a child, hurl all her illusions and all her modesties away in one month, and then leave her all alone with the reflections you have inspired and the desires you have awakened. I am no moralist, mon ami, as you know, but that I do say. It is true ten thousand times in ten years — and ten thousand times the result is the same. Were the Princess Zouroff to have a lover, Corrèze or any other, you could not complain. It would simply be the natural sequence of your own initiations. As it is, you must be thankful that she is Madame Saint Elizabeth. You are not more ridiculous than the world is; mothers screen their daughters from every hint and every glimpse of impropriety, and then they marry them and think no harm can come of it. Can a bishops blessing muzzle senses once éveillés passions once let loose? Vera is faithful to you as yet. But if she were not, could you blame her? Can you expect a woman of her years to live the life of a nun when you have treated her as if she were a fille de joie? Be reasonable. You cannot tear the skin off a peach, and then complain that it does not retain its bloom. Yet that is what you and all men do. It is unutterably absurd. Some one will do it with my Berthe and my Claire, and I shall hate the some one; for I love my little girls. Yes, I do! While you know very well that she is—”