Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  Vere had given her word to her husband and her oath; she never supposed that he could doubt either. If Corrèze had come before her in that time she would have said to him with loyal firmness, “I must not see you; my husband has forbidden me.” She was steadfast rather than impassioned; honour was the first law of life to her; that love should stoop to tread in secret ways and hide in secret places seemed to her as shameful, nay grotesque, as for a sovereign to hide in a cellar or flee in disguise. The intrigues she saw perpetually, in which her world spent its time, as the spiders theirs in weaving webs, had no savour, no sweetness, for her. Its roots were set in treachery or cowardice — in either, or in both. All the tenderness that was in her nature Corrèze had touched; all her gratitude and all her imagination were awakened by him; she knew that the sorrow of a love that might have been sweet and happy in their lives was with them both, in sad and hopeless resignation. Yet if he had come before her now she would have said to him, “I cannot see you, it would be disloyal.”

  For the old lovely quality of loyalty, which day by day is more and more falling out from the creeds of men and women, was very strong in her; and failure in it seemed to her like “shame, last of all evils.”

  To Jeanne de Sonnaz this was very droll. So droll that it was impossible for her to believe in it. She believed in realism, in the mouldly cheese and the pewter can; she did not believe in Ruy Blas. She watched Vere narrowly, but she failed to understand her.

  “How the affair drags!” she thought, with some impatience. “Can they really be the lovers of romance who separate themselves by a thousand leagues, and only love the more the more they are divided? It is droll.”

  So she kept the snake of suspicion alive and warm in his bosom.

  “You were wrong,” said Zouroff with some triumph to her; “you were wrong. The man is in Norway and Sweden.”

  “I may be,” said the Duchesse meditatively. “But people come back from Norway and Sweden, and I never said, you will remember, that he was more to your wife than her knight, her ideal, her souvenir. I never meant more than that. Wait until he shall return, then you will see.”

  Then he told her how he had destroyed the necklace. For years he had been in the habit of telling her such things, and now he sacrificed his wife to that habit of confidence in another woman.

  “You see you were wrong,” he added; “had she borne any sentiment towards him would she have seen his jewels destroyed? She is not spiritless.”

  “No, she is not spiritless,” said Madame Jeanne thoughtfully. “No, certainly she is not that. But, in the old houses of the Faubourg, Sergius, I meet a phantom of the past that we know nothing about; a phantom that is made a deity and rules their lives like their love of Henri Cinq; a mere ghost, but still potent to omnipotence, and we know nothing about it; they call it Principle. I suppose your wife may keep that old démodé ghost by her too, and may be ruled by it. I have heard of such things. Oh, we have no principle, we have only convenience and impulse, and act either one or the other. But I assure you such a thing exists.”

  “Scarcely in a woman,” said Zouroff with a contemptuous laugh.

  “Sooner in a woman than a man, for that matter. But of course it will not last for ever. Your wife is human, and she will not pardon you that ruined locket.”

  “She said nothing, or very little.”

  “Said!” echoed Madame de Sonnaz with scorn, “you are used to us, and to your creatures. Do you think a woman of her temperament would scream as we, or swear as they do, would go into hysterics, or would tear your beard?”

  “You seem to admire my wife,” he said with irritation.

  Jeanne de Sonnaz smiled. “You know I always did. I admire her as one admires Racine, as one admires the women of Port Royal, the paintings of Flandrin, the frescoes of Michael Angelo. It is quite unattainable, quite unintelligible to me, but I admire dumbly and without comprehension. Only I told you that you never should have married a saint, and you never should. I am sorry you destroyed her medallion. It was brutal of you, and bourgeois.”

  “And she will remember it,” she added, after a pause, as she gathered up her silks, with which she was working an altar screen for her parish church at Ruilhières, “be very sure of that. Vera is not a woman who forgets. I should box your ears, shake you, and laugh at it all next day, but she would be passive and yet never forget, nor forgive. Chut! There she is!”

  Vera at that moment entered the room in which Madame Jeanne was working; her husband moved with a guilty consciousness away, but she had heard nothing.

  “Princesse, tell me,” said Madame de Sonnaz, “do you forgive easily? I think not.”

  “Forgive?” said Vera absently “Is there any question of it? It is for those who offend to ask me that.”

  “Do you hear, Sergius?” said his friend with a little laugh. “I should like to hear your mea culpa.”

  For the first time an angry doubt came into the mind of Vera, the doubt that her husband spoke of her with Jeanne de Sonnaz. She looked at them both quickly and haughtily, then said very clearly: “If Monsieur Zouroff know anything that he desires me to pardon he can speak for himself without an ambassadress, and without a listener. I came to ask you to allow Berthe and Claire to come out with me on the sea.”

  “How good you are to those children, but you will inoculate them with your own sea phrenzy,” answered the duchesse with a little laugh. “Of course they may go.”

  Zouroff had already gone from the room, angry with his friend, more angry with his wife. Madame Jeanne rose a little impetuously, dragging to the ground the artistic embroideries of the shield she was working.

  “Vera,” she said, with candour in her voice and honesty in her regard, “do not be angry. I am so old a friend of Sergius — he has told me how he tore off your locket and destroyed it. I am so sorry; so very sorry; so is he. But, alas! men are always the same; they are all brutes we know, and — Vera — he is very jealous of your singer.”

  Vera’s face grew very stern.

  “Has he commanded you to speak to me on his behalf?”

  “No, my dear — not that; he would scarcely do that in plain words. But I am an old friend, and I am sorry. Of course it is too absurd; but he is very jealous. Be careful; men of his race have done mad and cruel things in their time. Do not provoke him. Do not see Corrèze.”

  “You mean well, madame,” said Vera in tones of ice. “But you err in taste and wisdom, and I think your zeal outstrips your orders. I scarcely think even my husband can have charged you with his threats to me.”

  “Threats? who spoke of threats? A warning—”

  “A warning then, but none the less an insult. You are in my house, so I can say nothing. Were I in yours I would leave it. Your children are waiting in impatience — excuse me.”

  Madame Jeanne looked after her as she went through the glass doors on to the sea-terrace, where the pretty little figures of Berthe and Claire were dancing to and fro in the sunlight. Madame Jeanne drew her tapestry-frame towards her, and proceeded to fill in the lilies of St. Cunigonde. She smiled as she bent her head over the frame.

  “If I have ever known my sex,” she thought— “if I have ever known my sex, a word will go over the north sea, and Corrèze will come from his Norwegian summer to a Norman one, and then — and then — there will be droll things to see. It is like watching the curtain rise in the Ambigu — there is sure to be melodrama.”

  Melodrama amused her; amused her more than comedy. She had no belief in quiet passion or quiet grief herself, no more than she had in quiet principles.

  Vera went out to sea with the little children, and in the mellow sunshine and the sweet orchard-scented air her face was dark with anger and with disgust, and her heart heaved in a bitter rage and rebellion.

  Her husband spoke of her to another woman — discussed her acts with another mans wife! “Oh the coward, the coward!” she said very low between her set teeth; it was the blackest word that her language held. That he shou
ld have broken her medallion and insulted her with doubt, was insult enough for a lifetime. But that he should relate the affront, and breathe the suspicion, to another woman seemed to her the very last baseness of life.

  “If he were here!” she murmured, with a sudden newborn consciousness in her, as her eyes filled with scalding tears, and her heart heaved with indignation. For the first time an indefinite yearning rose in her to place her hand in the hand of Corrèze, and say “avenge me!” Yet had he even stood before her then she would not have said it, she would have bidden him go and leave her.

  For what Madame Jeanne called a phantom was always beside her in her path — the phantom of old-world honour, the wraith of dead heroical days.

  She leaned against the rail and watched the sea run by the vessel’s side, and felt the quiet slow tears of a great anguish fill her eyes and wet her cheeks.

  “Do not cry: you are too pretty to cry,” said little Claire, who was a soft and tender child; and Berthe, who was older and cleverer and harder, said, “You should not cry; it spoils the eyes.” Then she added reflectively, “Maman ne pleure jamais.”

  The small yacht they were in ran with the breeze through the sweet fresh air. It was a nautical toy, perfect in its way, that had been given to Vere by her husband when the estate of Félicité was settled upon her; the children had wanted to go to the Vaches Noires and search for mussels, and the little ship skirted the coast as lightly as a sea-gull, the merry little girls scudding about its deck like kittens and climbing its cordage like squirrels, while their mother — their mother who never cried — remained in the garden of Félicité with a cigar in her teeth, her person stretched full length in a low-hung silk hammock, a circle of gentlemen around her, and amidst them her host, so charmed by the dexterity of her coquetteries, and so diverted by the maliciousness of her pleasantries, that the old passion, which a dozen years before she had awakened in him, perhaps the worst, as it was in a sense the strongest and most durable, he had ever known, revived in him sufficiently for jealousy, and held him by her side.

  It was low water when they reached that part of the Vaches Noires which lies underneath what is called the desert. The strangely shaped rocks towered above, beyond, the sea was blue and smooth, the sand was wet, the children’s équille fishing promised well. A little boat took them off the yacht to the uncovered beach, and Berthe and Claire, with naked little legs, and their forks shaped like the real fisherfolk’s, and their bright hair flying, forgot that they were little aristocrats and Parisiennes and became noisy, joyous, romping, riotous children, happy in their sport and the fine weather. At that part of the rough shore there was no one near except some peasants digging for their livelihood, as the little girls were digging for play, at the silvery hermits’ holes in the sands. There were fetes at Houlgate which kept the summer crowd that day from the distant rocks. Berthe and Claire, agile as they were, were no match for the agility of the lords of the soil, and the pastime absorbed and distracted them. Vere, seeing them so happy, left them in the care of her old skipper, who was teaching them the mysteries of the sport, and sat down under the sombre amphitheatre of the rocks.

  She was fond of the children, but this day their shouts and their smiles alike jarred on her; she had learned for the first time that it was with their mother that her husband discussed her acts and thoughts. She sat quite alone in a sheltered spot, where the slate of the lower formation had been hollowed by the winter waves at high tides into a sort of niche; she thought of the day when, older in years than these little children, but younger in heart than even they were now, she had come on these shores in her old brown holland skirts. It was just such weather as it had been then; clear, cloudless, with a sunlit sea, and an atmosphere so free from mist that the whole line of the far-reaching coast, now become so familiar to her sight, was visible in all its detail, from the mouth of Seine to the mouth of Orne.

  Her heart was very weary.

  The distant laughter of the little children borne to her ear by the wind, jarred on her. Where were the use of honour and good faith? They smelt sweet, like a wholesome herb, in her own hand, but in all her world none set any store on them. She was free to throw them aside if she chose. She would be more popular, find more sympathy, nay, to her husband himself would seem more human and more truthful if she did so. The sense of life’s carelessness, impotency for good, and frightful potency for evil, weighed on her like a stone. Her husband had said to her that women were only loyal till they were tempted; was it so? Was honour so poor a thing? she thought. In dark old Bulmer the now dead woman had taught her to think honour a sword like Britomart’s, that in a maidens hand might be as potent and as strong as in a knight’s. What was the poor frail empty thing that bent at a touch and broke? She thought what they called honour must surely be no finer or better thing than a mere dread of censure, a mere subserviency to opinion; a thing without substance or soul, a mere time-service and cowardice.

  A fisherman came by her with his load of mussels and little eels going on to Bougeval. He pointed up above her head and said, in his Froissart-like accent:

  “There will be a broken neck up yonder, unless our Lady interferes.”

  Vere, alarmed for the children, who were out of sight, looked upward; she saw a man coming down the precipitous cliffs from the country above.

  Her heart stood still; her blood ran cold; she recognised Corrèze.

  The fisherman stood staring upward; the descent was one which the people themselves would never have attempted; where the face of the dark stone was a sheer declivity, broken into sharp peaks and rough bastions, on which there seemed scarce a ledge for a sea-bird to perch on, Corrèze was descending with the sure foot that in his boyhood had let him chase the ibex and the boudequin of the Alps of Dauphiné and Savoy, and had let him in later years hunt the steinbock of Styria and Carinthia in its highest haunts. Vere, risen to her feet, stood like the fisherman gazing upward. She was like stone herself; she neither moved nor cried out; she scarcely breathed. She looked upward, and in those few moments all the horrors of death passed over her.

  Was it an instant, or an hour? she never knew. One moment he was in the air, hanging as the birds hang to the face of the cliff, beneath him only the jagged points of a thousand pinnacles of rock: the next he stood before her, having dropped lightly and easily on the sands, while the peasant gasping, muttered his paternosters in incoherent awe.

  Corrèze was very pale, and his lips trembled a little; but it was not the perilous descent of the rocks that had shaken him, it was the look which he saw on her face. If he had dared; nay, had she been any other woman, he would have said, “You cannot deny it now; you love me.”

  Their eyes met as they stood together on the same coast where they had first seen one another, when he was gay and without sorrow, and she was a child. They knew then that they loved each other, as they had not known it when he had sung in the Paris salon:

  Si vous saviez que je vous aime, Surtout si vous saviez comment —

  For between them there then had been doubt, hesitation, offence, uncertainty; but now the great truth was bare to them both, and neither dreamed of denying it.

  Yet he only said as he uncovered his head, “Forgive me, Princesse; I fear I startled you.”

  “You startled me,” she answered mechanically “Why run such a frightful danger?”

  “It is none to me; the rocks are safer than the ice-walls. I was above and I saw you: there was no other way.”

  The fisherman had shouldered his creel and was trudging homeward; he paused abruptly, he stood before her still bareheaded, he was very pale.

  Without being conscious what she did she had seated herself again on the ledge of slate, the sea and the shore blended dizzily before her eyes.

  Corrèze watched her anxiously, pitifully; his courage failed him, he was afraid of this woman whom he loved, he who had been always, in love, victorious.

  “Have I displeased you?” he murmured humbly. “I have come straight
from Norway; I thought I might take one hour on this coast before going to Paris; I heard that you were here. I have been an exile many months—”

  She stopped him with a gesture.

  “I will not affect to misunderstand, there is no good in affectation; but do not speak so to me. I cannot hear it. I thank you for your courage at Villafranca, I am not ungrateful; but we must not see each other — unless it be in the world.”

  “You did not say that at Villafranca.”

  “My husband had not then said it to me.”

  Corrèze moved and faltered a little, as if he had been struck a blow.

  “You obey Prince Zouroff!” he exclaimed with disdain, and petulance, and passion.

  “I obey the word I gave Prince Zouroff.”

  Silence fell between them.

  Vere was very pale; she was still seated; there was sort of faintness on her; she had no time for thought or resolution, she only clung by instinct to one of the creeds of her childhood, the creed that a promise given was sacred.

  Corrèze stood beside her checked, mortified, chafed, and humbled. He, the most eloquent, the most ardent, lover of his time, was mute and wounded, and could find no word at the instant that could speak for him. He was struck dumb, and all the vivid imagining, the fervent persuasiveness, the poetical fluency that nature had given to him and art had perfected, fled away from him as though they had never been his servants to command, and left him mute and helpless.

  Vere looked away from him at the blue shining sea.

  “If you think of me,” she said slowly, “if you think of me as you thought when you sang the Coupe d’Or, you will go now.”

  “With no other word?”

  “My life is hard enough,” she murmured; “do not make it harder.”

  There was an unconscious appeal in the words that, from a woman so proud and so silent, touched him to the quick. All his passions longed to disobey her, but his tenderness, his chivalry, his veneration, obeyed.