by Ouida
“You preach very eloquently!” said Zouroff, with his face flushed and his thick eyebrows drawn together.
“I preach what I know,” said his friend; “what I have observed as I say a thousand times ten thousand times — men teach lubricity and expect chastity. It is really too ridiculous. But it is what we call the holiness of marriage. Now, will you please to go away? Paul has a ‘fusion’ breakfast of all the parties, and I want to dress.”
“But—”
“Go away!” said Madame Jeanne, imperiously, with a little stamp of her slipper.
Zouroff, who even to his own autocratic master was seldom obedient, took his leave, and went. She had made his blood hot with rage, his head dull with suspicion. He threw himself into his carriage and drove through the streets of Paris in moody reflection. Uttered by a virtuous woman, the words he had heard would have made no more impression than any court sermon that he had to sit throughout and hear in an imperial chapel; but spoken by Jeanne de Sonnaz they smote him hardly.
A better emotion than was usual with her, had moved her in speaking them, a sense of justice towards the absent woman whom she had yet all the will in the world to destroy; and the bitterness of them was an unwilling witness from a femme galante to which he could not attach either favouritism or prejudice, and so weighed on him and smote him heavily. A rebuke even from St. John of the Golden Mouth would have left him callous and scoffing, but a condemnation from the lips of one of the companions of his sins and follies — one of the worldliest of this world — made him wince under its justice; and he knew that his sins against his wife were heavier and grosser than even Jeanne de Sonnaz knew or guessed.
The sullen remorse that had brooded in him ever since the day on the terrace at Villafranca deepened and darkened over him. There was cruel and coarse blood in his veins, the blood of a race that through long centuries had passed their lives in passion, in tyranny, and in deeds of violence, denying no impulse, fearing no future. But there was manliness in him also, though weakened, depraved, and obscured; and this manliness made him feel a coward beside Vere.
A curious jealousy took possession of him, which was half hatred and half remorse. He felt like one of those princes who own a classic and world-renowned statue, and shut it in a cabinet, and never care to look at it, yet who being menaced with its loss, suddenly rise to fury, and feel beggared. Not because the classic marble was any joy or marvel to themselves, but because the world had envied it to them vainly, and it had made their treasure-house the desired of others. He suddenly realised that the loss of his wife would, like that of the statue, make him poor in the eyes of Europe, and leave his palaces without their chief ornament. He did not, as yet, believe himself menaced. Like most men of vicious lives, he was never deceived as to a womans innocence. He knew his wife to be as innocent as the little dead children she had borne in her bosom. But how long would she be so?
And if she ceased to be so, truth, by those often untrue lips of Jeanne de Sonnaz, had told him that the fault would lie at his own door, that he would reap as he had sown.
As he drove through the streets amidst the noise of Paris, he saw nothing of the glitter and the movement round him — he saw Vere in her white childish loveliness, as he had seen her on her wedding night.
That evening, when he returned to make his toilette for a great dinner at the Russian Embassy, he was gloomy, perplexed, irresolute. It was towards the close of the season; the evening was hot; the smell of the lilacs in the garden filled all the air; over where ruined St. Cloud lay there was a mist that seemed full of rain and thunder.
For the first time for months he bade the women ask his wife if she could receive him in her room, and he entered it. Vere was standing beneath the picture of Gérôme; she was already dressed. She wore white velvet, a stuff which she preferred, and whose subtle shades of white it would have been the delight and the despair of Titian and Paul Veronese to reproduce on canvas or on panel. She wore the great Russian Order of St. Catherine. About her throat she had coils of pearls, and under these hung the medallion of the moth and the star.
Zouroff approached her with a roughness that concealed an unusual nervousness. His eyes fell on the necklace, and his anger, that was half against himself and half against her, seized on the jewel as a scapegoat.
“Who gave you that?” he said, abruptly.
She answered:
“I think I ought not to say. When you asked me long ago I did not know.”
“Your singer sent it you. Take it off.”
She hesitated a moment, then unclasped it. She believed in the old forgotten duty of obedience still.
“Give it to me.”
She gave it him.
Zouroff threw it on the ground, and set his heel on it, and stamped the delicate workmanship and the exquisite jewels out of all shape and into glittering dust.
Vere did not move a muscle. Only her face grew cold like a stone mask with unutterable scorn.
“A Princess Zouroff does not need to go to the properties of a theatre for her jewels,” he said, in a thick, hoarse voice. “As I have treated that jewel, so I will treat the man, if ever you let him enter your presence again. You hear?”
“I hear.”
All colour had gone from her lips, but her face remained cold and calm.
“Well?” said her husband, roughly, already, in a measure, ashamed of his violence, as the diamond star covered the carpet beneath his feet with sparkling atoms.
“What do you want me to say? I am your wife, and you can offend me in any way, and I cannot resent it. There is no use in saying what I think of that.”
He was silent, and in a measure subdued. He knew very well that his violence had been cowardly and unworthy, that he had disgraced his name and place, that he had been a coward and no gentleman. His new-born sense of fear and veneration of her struggled with his incensed vanity and his irritated suspicions.
“Vera,” he muttered, only half-aloud. “Before God, if you would let me, I could love you now!”
She shuddered.
“Spare me that, at least!”
He understood, and was silenced. He glanced at her longingly, sullenly, furtively. The shattered jewel lay at his feet.
“What is that singer to you?” he said, abruptly.
“A man who honours me. You do not.”
“Were he only of my rank I would insult him, and shoot him dead.”
Vere was silent.
“What do you say?” he muttered, impatient of her silence.
“He is of your rank, and he can defend himself. His hand is clean, and so also is his conscience.”
“Will you swear he is no lover of yours?”
Her eyes flashed, but she took the book of prayer lying on her table, kissed it, and said:
“I swear that, certainly.”
Then she laid the book down, and with an accent he had never heard from her, she turned suddenly on him, in a passion of indignation that transformed her coldness into fire.
“How dare you? how dare you?” she said, with a vibration in her voice that he had never heard there. “Now that you have done me the last insult that a man can pass upon his wife, be satisfied, and go.”
Then she put her hand out, and pointed to the door.
He lingered, dazed and fascinated by that new power in her glance, that new meaning in her voice.
“Women change like that when they love,” he said to her aloud. “Are you not of the new school, then? You know very well you have no fidelity from me. Why should you be faithful to me? They say you need not be.”
She seemed to him transfigured and risen above him; her fair face had the glow of holy scorn of just wrath still on it.
“Are your sins the measure of my duty?” she said, with unutterable contempt. “Do you think if it were only for you, for you, that I were decent in my life and true to my obligation, I should not years ago have failed, and been the vilest thing that lives? You do not understand. Have you never heard of self-r
espect, of honour, and of God?”
The words touched him, and the look upon her face awed him for an instant into belief in her and belief in heaven; but against his instinct and against his faith the long habit of a brutal cynicism and a mocking doubt prevailed, and the devil in him, that had so long lived with the vile and the foolish of his world, drove him to answer her with a bitter sneer.
“Your words are grand,” he said to her, “and I believe you mean them. Yes, you do not lie. But those fine things, my princess, may last so long as a woman is untempted. But so long only. You are all Eve’s daughters!”
Then he bowed and left her. He hated himself for the thing he had said, but he could not have stayed the devil in him that uttered it. If his wife betrayed him that night he knew that he would have no title to condemn her; yet he thought, as he went from her presence, if she did — if she did — he would slit the throat of her singing-bird, or of any other man, if any other it were.
Vere stood erect, a sombre disgust and revolt in her eyes. Her husband had said to her, “thou fool! all sin alike; do thou likewise.”
In a few moments she stooped and raised the fragments of the jewels and the twisted and broken goldsmiths work. It was all shattered except the sapphire moth.
She shut the moth and all the shining brilliant dust in a secret drawer of her jewel-case, then rang for her women. In another twenty minutes she entered her carriage, and drove in silence with her husband beside her to the Rue de Grenelle.
“Le Prince et la Princesse Zouroff!” shouted the lackeys, standing in a gorgeous line down the staircase of the Embassy.
CHAPTER IV.
It was an April night when the necklace of the moth and the star perished under the heel of Zouroff; there were two months more through which the life in Paris lasted, for Zouroff adored the boulevards, even in summer months; the asphalte had a power to charm him that even the grass of his forest drives never rivalled, and the warm nights of spring and early summer found him driving down the Champs Elysées to and fro his various haunts, his carriage lamps adding two stars the more to its long river of light.
Coming home in the full daylight from his pleasures he would at times meet his wife going out in the clear hours of the early forenoon. He asked her once roughly where she was going, and she told him, naming the poorest quarter on the other side of the Seine.
“Why do you go to such a place?” he asked her as she stood on the staircase.
“There are poor there, and great misery,” she answered him reluctantly; she did not care to speak of these things at any time.
“And what good will you do? You will be cheated and robbed, and even if you are not, you should know that political science has found that private charity is the hotbed of all idleness.”
“When political science has advanced enough to prevent poverty, it may have the right to prevent charity too,” she answered him, with a contempt that showed thought on the theme was not new to her. “Perhaps charity — I dislike the word — may do no good; but friendship from the rich to the poor must do good; it must lessen class hatreds.”
“Are you a socialist?” said Zouroff with a little laugh, and drew back and let her pass onward. They were the first words he had spoken to her alone since the night he had destroyed the necklace, and even now they were not unheard; for there were half a score of servants on the stairs and in the vestibule below Vere went out to her little brougham in the fresh air of the warm lilac-scented morning as the clock struck ten.
Her husband took his way to his own set of rooms, rich with oriental stuffs and weapons, and heavy with the fumes of his tobacco. He thought of what his sister had said of St. Elizabeth and the roses of Paradise; he thought too of what Jeanne de Sonnaz had said. His wife was greatly changed.
She seemed to him to have aged ten years all suddenly; not in the fair beauty of her face, but in her regard, in her tone, in her look. Was she like the young royal saint of Hungary, or was she like all women, as he knew them? He had the careless, half-conscious, but profound belief in depravity that is the note of the century; he thought all women coquines. That his wife was different to the rest he had believed; but that she was incapable of deceiving him he was in no way sure. Sooner or later they all went the same road, so he thought. He began to doubt that she told him the truth as to these errands of her morning hours; his sister believed in them indeed, but what should his sister know, who was never out of her bed till noon was past?
Vere had no physical fear, and at times she penetrated into the darkest and roughest quarters of Paris; the quarters that belch out those hidden multitudes that make revolution anarchy, and shatter in dust and blood the visions of patriots. But she was safe there, though once she heard one man say to another, “Diantre! what a sight it would be, that lovely head on a scaffold.” She turned and looked at him with a smile: “I think I should know how to die, my friend; are you quite sure that you would?”
As this worst form of suspicion, that of the tyrant who trembles, grew upon him, he did what he knew was low and vile and beneath him — he had her watched in these daily hours of absence. He excused his vigilance to those who had the task by the expression of his fears for her safety from the rude and ferocious classes amongst whom she went. They brought him the weekly report of all she did, minute by minute, in all its trifling details; the courage and the self-sacrifice of that thankless labour, the self-devotion and patience of that charity, were before him in a chronicle she would never have written herself He was astonished; he was ashamed. The superstition that underlies the worldly wisdom of the aristocratic Russian, as it permeates the kindly stupidity of the Russian peasant, began to stir in him and trouble him. He began to think she was a holy creature. Though he had no faith, he had that vague religious fear, which often survives the death of all religious beliefs with those who have been educated in strict rituals, as he had been.
When June came they went to Félicité. It was the same thing every year. The world went with them. To her it seemed always as if they were perpetually on the stage before an audience; the audience varied, but the play was always the same.
She would have given ten years of her life for a few weeks’ rest, silence, solitude, with “plain living and high thinking,” and time to watch the clouds, the showers, the woodlands, the ways of birds and beasts, the loves of the bees and the flowers. But she never had one day even to herself. There was always on her ear the murmur of society; always, like the shadow on the sun-dial, some duty that was called pleasure, obscuring each hour as it came.
It was a bright Norman summer, the weather clear and buoyant, the country a sea of apple-blossoms. Once or twice she got away by herself, and went to the little cluster of cabins on the head of the cliffs beyond Villerville. The old woman was there — always knitting, always with a white cap and a blue linen gown, against the wall of furze.
“The lark is dead,” she said, with a shake of the head. “It was no fault of mine, my Princesse; a boy with a stone one day — ah! ah! — how shall I tell the gentleman when he comes? He has not been yet this summer; he was here in midwinter — oh, quite midwinter — and he said he was going away into the north somewhere. Jesu-Maria! the heaps of cent-sous pieces he gave me to take care of that lark!” The shrewd old woman under the white roof of her cap watched the face of her “Princesse.”
“I want to know if she cares too,” she thought. “But that beautiful angel could not fail to be loved.”
Vera went away slowly through the high grove, even under the shade of the apple-blossoms. How long ago, — it seemed long as a century — since she had been the child listening, with her heart in her eyes, to the song of the lark that was dead!
Her husband said to her sharply that day, after her return, “Where were you this morning? You were hours away.”
“I drove to Villerville,” she answered him.
“There is a shrine near there, I think?” added Madame Jeanne, with apparent simplicity.
The sombre thoug
hts of Zouroff caught her insinuation.
“I know of no remarkable shrine,” replied Vere, who did not imagine any double meaning in the words. “There is none nearer than Val de Grâce.”
Her husband was silent. The Duchesse rose, and hummed a little song then being sung by Jane Hading: Vous voulez vous moquer de moi.
This year Madame Jeanne stayed at Félicité. Why not? She had her little girls Berthe and Claire with her, and her husband came now and then, and would come for a longer time when the bouquets of pheasants would begin to fall in the drives of the park.
“Pourquoi pas?” she had said, when Zouroff had begged her to stay in his house, instead of taking a villa at Trouville.
“You would not last year,” he said, with a man’s stupidity.
“Last year was last year,” said the Duchesse drily; and she came over and had all the south wing of the chateau for herself and her Berthe and Claire and their governesses. She was really fond of her children.
The papers of that day spoke of Corrèze. He was in Stockholm.
“That is far enough; she cannot have met him,” thought the Duchesse. “Villerville must be a pilgrimage of remembrance. There are women who can live on memories. It must be like eating nothing but ices and wafers. A bon bouillon and a little burgundy is better.”