by Ouida
“You shall never go for her.”
“I shall go for myself. You are a brute, you are an idiot; you understand nothing. I will be summoned — Paul can be ill, or Ruilhières on fire — something, anything, so that no one knows.”
“You shall not go, you will humiliate me; she will think—”
“What do I care for your humiliation? I care to avert my own. Pshaw! Do you suppose I would stay an hour in this house if your wife were out of it? Do you suppose I would risk my good name, and make myself a scandal to the Faubourg? Good heavens! how little you know me after all these years. I shall obey your wife and go; she is the soul of honour in her own odd way. She will say nothing if I go. My name shall not serve her as a chisel to cut her fetters. Oh, what fools men are, what dolts, what mules! Why could you not bring her note to me, and ask me what to do? Instead, you must go and strike her! Do you suppose her women will not know? An accident! Who believes in accidents? All the house will know it before noon. Oh imbecile! You would marry a young saint, a creature from another world — it was sure to end like this. Go, go! or my women will see you, and it will be worse; go, and in a minute or two I shall send you word that Paul is dying. Go! Thank you? I? — no, why should I thank you? I never bade you be cruel to your wife or strike her; I always bade you treat her as a saint. She is one, though how long—”
“I struck her because she insulted you.”
“She was right enough to insult me; she is more right still when she insults you. Now go!”
With sullen subjection he went; he learned what gratitude was from the women of his world. In half an hour’s time there was some confusion in the well-ordered household of Félicité, for the Duchesse de Sonnaz, her children, their servants and her own, were departing in hot haste; it was said that M. le Duc was lying ill of sunstroke at their chateau of Ruilhières, in the department of Morbihan.
Lying sick and blind on her bed, Vere heard the sound of the horses’ feet.
“It is Madame la Duchesse who is leaving,” said her maid, who from the other side of the closed door had heard all that had passed between Sergius Zouroff and his wife.
Vere said nothing.
It was the first day of shooting; there was a great breakfast, to which many sportsmen of the neighbourhood came; there were battues on a large scale in the woods; there were noise and movement and the sound of many steps throughout the chateau, and out on the terrace, under her windows; now and then she heard her husband’s voice; then after a while all was still; there was the echo of distant shots from the woods, that was all. The day wore away. Her women told the ladies of the house party that the Princess had a severe headache from a fall.
Towards evening she rose, and was dressed. The pain had lulled in a measure, and the faintness had passed away. She wished to avoid comment, to cover the departure of Jeanne de Sonnaz. Under the pale yellow roses of the bouquet at her bosom there was a broad black bruise. The evening passed as usual. The house party suspected nothing; Vere’s women were discreet, and the surprise, the sorrow, the bewilderment of Jeanne de Sonnaz at what she had said were the sudden tidings from Ruilhières had been so natural, that the few people who had seen her at her departure had been deceived into believing those tidings true. The evening passed smoothly; a little operetta in the little theatre filled two of its hours, and if the mistress of Félicité looked pale and spoke little, she often did that. Zouroff never looked at his wife and never addressed her. But that also was not rare enough to be any matter for notice.
Vere underwent the fatigue of the night without faltering, though she was in physical pain, and at times a sickly sense of faintness came over her.
She was thankful when the men went to the smoking-room, the women to their bed-chambers, and she was free to be alone and rest. On the table in her own room there lay a letter. She shuddered a little, for she recognised the loose, rude handwriting of her husband. She was tired of pain and of insult, and she had little hope of any other thing.
She sat down and read it.
“You have had your own way,” he wrote to her. “The only woman whom I care for has been driven away by you. Do not suppose you have gained any victory; you will pay the cost of the affront you have dared to pass on her. I shall not speak to you again if we meet here a thousand times. I wish to avoid a scandal for the present at least, not for your sake, but for hers. So I write to you now. You were about to leave this house. You will leave it. As soon as this circle of guests breaks up, the day after to-morrow, you will leave it. You will go to an estate of mine in Poland, Walrien and Ivan will accompany you, and you can take your women of course. There you will remain. If you wish to escape, you can sue me for a divorce. Whenever you do so, I shall not oppose it.
(Signed)
“SERGIUS NICOLAIVITCH, Prince ZOUROFF.”
CHAPTER V.
In one of the most desolate parts of the country of Poland, there were vast estates of the Princes Zouroff, conferred on them at the time of the partition of that unhappy land between Christian sovereigns. They were vast, lonely districts, with villages few and scantily populated; immense plains of grain and grass, and swamps of reedy wildernesses, and dim, sandy forests of pines, straight, and colourless, and mournful.
In the heart of all these — whose yield made up no slight sum in the immense riches of the Russian Princes who owned them, and spent their produce on the pavement of Paris and St. Petersburg — there stood a large, lofty building, which had been once a fortified monastery, and had served for a century as the scarcely ever visited castle of the Zouroffs.
It was of immense extent. It had no architectural beauty; and, from its many narrow windows there was no outlook except on one side to the interminable woods of pine, and on the other over the plains and marshes, through which a sullen, yellow river crept. Within, it was decorated as it had been decorated by Ivan Zouroff at the time of the abdication of Stanislas Augustus; Zouroff having hanged the peasants on the pine trees, and made the corn-lands red, before sunset and harvest-time, with blood, and in such wise pleased his imperial mistress.
From the gay, gorgeous interior, and the sunlit gardens and sea terraces of the Norman chateau, Sergius Zouroff sent his wife to this place, amidst the desolation of a province, then bleeding afresh from the terrorism that strove to stamp out the Nihilists.
Vere left Félicité without protest. Félicité was hers by settlement, but she did not urge that fact. She accepted the commands of her husband, and travelled across Europe in almost unbroken silence, accompanied by the attendants he had selected, by her women, and by the dog Loris.
When she had read her husbands letter, her first impulse had been to refuse, and to disobey him; to go away with her own jewels, and no single thing of his, and gain her own bread in some way in solitude, as she had intended to do if Jeanne de Sonnaz had remained in her house. Then, on later and calmer thought, she accepted the banishment to Poland. Her pride made her willing to avoid all scandal, her principle made her deem it still right to obey her husband. She had asked him once to let her live on his estates, out of the world; she considered she had the request granted, though in a savage and bitter way. As to the condition that he made her return dependent on — she lifted her head, and drew herself erect, with the haughty resolve that she was capable of when stung and roused. Sooner than receive Jeanne de Sonnaz in her house, or ever salute her as a friend, she said to herself that she would live and die on the Polish plains. She did not answer; she did not protest or rebuke; she neither wrote nor spoke to her husband in the fortnight that followed; she entertained her guests with her usual calm, cold grace, and when the last of them had left, and the day of her departure arrived, she went away tranquilly, as though she went of her own will, and in her own way, taking the dog Loris.
Zouroff had not been surprised.
Though he could ill appreciate her character, he did not misunderstand it. “She may break, she will never bend,” he thought, as careful always of the outside observances of
courtesy, he bade her a courtly farewell before his household.
“I am his prisoner!” she thought, as a week later she entered the austere gloom of Szarisla. But sooner than release herself on the terms he offered, she said in her heart that Poland should be her tomb, as it had been that of so many martyrs. Martyrs to an idea, the world said of those. It would have said the same of her.
To her mother, and her friends, and all society, Sergius Zouroff explained that his wife had long asked him to allow her to pass some months on his northern estates, to establish a school, and improve the moral condition of the peasantry, and at last he had consented; it was an insanity, he added, but an innocent one; she was a saint.
“Alas! alas! what has happened?” thought his sister, “what has happened? Oh, why was I not at Félicité!”
But she was the only one who feared or wondered — the Princess Vera had always been so strange; and she was a saint.
To Jeanne de Sonnaz alone Zouroff said, with his gloomy eyes full of sombre ferocity, “Je vous venge.”
To her sister-in-law, and to the few to whom she ever wrote, Vera said always, in her brief letters, “I am tired of the world, as you know; I am glad of this retreat. It is desolate, and very dull, but it is peace.”
Madame Nelaguine, with her eyes sparkling with rage, and all her little person erect in indignant dignity, reproached her brother in a torrent of rebuke and censure. “I imagine very well what happened,” she said to him. “You would have Jeanne de Sonnaz under the same roof with Vere.”
“Respect my friends name,” said Zouroff, with savage authority, “or you and I never meet again. Vere is a saint, you say. Well, she has her wish; she goes into retreat. Would it please you better if she were living with Corrèze?”
“Corrèze — he is nothing to her!” said Madame Nelaguine hotly.
Zouroff shrugged his shoulders. “Some think otherwise,” he answered.
“You are a brute, and you are a coward — a malignant coward!” said his sister. “You outrage your wife in every way, and you must even dare to soil her innocence with suspicion.”
“If it be suspicion only time will show,” said Zouroff. “Go and live at Szarisla yourself, if you pity my wife so much.”
But Madame Nelaguine, who loved the world, and could not live without its excitements and its intrigues, could not face that captivity in the Polish plain, though all the heart she had in her yearned towards her brothers wife.
“Will you imprison her all her life?” she cried.
Zouroff answered with impatience and fatigue, “She will remain there until she receives my friend with respect.”
“You are a brute,” said his sister once more.
“I protect Jeanne, and I avenge her,” said Zouroff obstinately. He fancied that his honour was involved in the defence of his mistress.
“Jeanne!” echoed his sister with unutterable scorn. “You might as well defend and avenge your quadroon.”
But she knew very well that she might as well seek to shake the Ural mountains at their base as change the obstinacy of her brother.
Jeanne de Sonnaz had gained the empire over him of a re-awakened passion; the empire of a strong woman over an indolent man; of a mistress once deserted, and so doubly tenacious of her hold. There was no beauty in her, and no youth; but she had the secret of dominion over men. She cowed this tyrant, she subdued this man, who, to the self-will of long self-indulgence, had the moral feebleness and inertness of the Slav temperament; she railed at him, jeered at him, commanded him, yet fascinated him. He knew her to be worthless, faithless, never wholly his, nor wholly any ones, yet she held him. “After all, she is the woman I have loved best,” he said to himself; and believed it, because she had the gift of exciting all that was worst in him, and subduing his fierce impulses to her own will and whim.
When he had married, Jeanne de Sonnaz, who beyond all things valued her position, and loved the world, had kept her peace because she did not choose to jeopardize her name, or gain the ridicule of her society. But she had always said to herself, “Je me vengerai.” She kept her word.
Vere was in her captivity at Szarisla; and the Duchesse de Sonnaz — moving from one chateau to another, and entertaining circles of guests for the shooting at their own mighty place of Ruilhières — said easily in the ear of the two or three great ladies who were her most intimate associates, that there had been a scene at Félicité; she had tried to mediate between her old friend and his wife, but vainly, so far as peace went; Zouroff had forbidden the Princess to receive Corrèze, and Corrèze had been found there at evening in the gardens; oh, there was nothing serious — Vera was a young saint — but all the same there had been a scene, and Zouroff had sent his wife to Szarisla.
Then the two or three whom she told told others, and so the tale ran, and grew as it ran, and was believed. The world was satisfied that the Princess Zouroff was in penitence in Poland.
“I think they were lovers many years ago. I remember, when she was a mere child, seeing her in a boat with Corrèze; she had come from Havre with him; her mother was distracted. I suppose Zouroff and the Nelaguine knew nothing of it,” said the Princess Hélène Olgarousky, who made one of the brilliant autumn party at Ruilhières where Zouroff was not.
“Be sensible, mon ami,” had said the Duchesse Jeanne; “now your wife is away I cannot receive you — it would not do. Oh, in winter, when we are all in Paris again, you may come and see Paul as usual. But stay at Ruilhières you will not; no — no — no. Three times, No!”
She had no beauty, and no youth, she had no heart, and no conscience; she had been his friend for fifteen years, and he usually tired of any woman in less than fifteen days. Yet Sergius Zouroff chafed at the interdiction to stay at Ruilhières, as though he were eighteen, and she seen but an hour before; and found himself waiting with impatience for the moment of his return to Paris, with a vague sense that without this woman life was stupid, empty, and purposeless.
He missed the goad to his senses and his temper with which she knew so well how to guide him, as the tamed elephant turned loose misses the prick of the mahout’s steel. But she, who knew that the elephant too long left to himself turns wild, and comes never again to his mahouts call, took care not to leave Zouroff too much to himself. When the first shooting-party broke up at Ruilhières, she left Duc Paul with some men to slay the pheasants, and went, for the sake of little Claire, who was not strong, to Arcachon and to Biarritz.
There Zouroff went occasionally when she would allow him. He went alone. He would no more have dared to take the mulattress or any other newer toy within sight of Jeanne de Sonnaz now, than he would have dared to take them into his Tsarinas presence.
He had insulted his wife, but he dared not insult his mistress. She spoke to him often of his wife.
“You cannot keep Vera in Poland all winter,” she said one day in the fragrant alleys of Arcachon while Berthe and Claire played before them with little silk balloons.
“I shall do so,” he said gloomily.
“Impossible! They will call you a tyrant, an ogre, a fiend. You must have her in Paris.”
“Not unless she receives you.”
“Do not make me ridiculous, I beg of you,” she said with some impatience. “You mean, — if she will consent not to receive Corrèze.”
Zouroff was silent. He knew that he did not mean that. But it was the fiction which his ruler had set up between them.
“That is why you have sent her to Szarisla,” continued Jeanne de Sonnaz. “All the world knows that, though of course we put a fair face on it. The idea of talking of her not receiving me. If she did not receive me, Paul would have to shoot you, which would have its inconveniences — for you and Paul.”
She laughed a little, and impaled a blue butterfly on the sharp point of her tortoiseshell cone. Zouroff still said nothing; a sort of vague remorse touched him for a moment, as little Claire, whose balloon was entangled in a shrub, cried out, “Where is the princess? Why is she
never with us now? She would get down my balloon. You are too cross.”
Zouroff released the toy, and said roughly, “Run to your sister, Claire, you tease us.”
“Madame Vera never said I teased,” said the child sullenly, with a pout, as she obeyed, and joined her elder sister.
“Where is Corrèze?” said her mother.
“Nom empesté!” swore Zouroff, “how should I know where a singer may be?”
“It is very easy to know where a great singer is. Comets are watched and chronicled. He was shooting in Styria, at Prince Hohenlohe’s, last month. Why do you not know? Do you have no reports from Szarisla?”
“He is not there,” said Zouroff angrily. He hated his wife, but he was jealous of her honour, even though it would, in a sense, have gratified him to be able to say to her, “You are no higher than the rest.”
“He may not be there,” said the Duchesse de Sonnaz carelessly. “On the other hand, it is not very far from Styria to Poland, and he is singing nowhere in public this autumn. Are your reports to be trusted?”
“Ivan would tell me anything,” said Zouroff moodily. “He writes me weekly of her health; he says nothing happens; no one goes—”
“Ivan is incorruptible, no doubt,” said Jeanne de Sonnaz, a little drily.
“What do you mean?”
“You are always asking me what I mean? I am no Sphinx, my dear friend, I am very transparent. I mean, that since your wife is there, it seems to me improbable that she does not, or will not, see Corrèze—”
Zouroff ground his heel on the turf with impatience, but he kept silent.
“I think it would be worth your while to make sure that she does not see Corrèze. I am quite aware that if they do meet, it will be merely a knight meeting a saint, —
Pauvres couples, à l’âme haute, Qu’une noble horreur de la faute Empêche seule d’être heureux. and that he will —
Baise sa main sans la presser:
Comme un lis facile à blesser Qui tremble à la moindre secousse — and all the rest. But still — if only as a moral phenomenon, it might be worth watching, and Ivan, on whom you depend, is, though a very superior servant, still only a servant.”