by Ouida
“What would you have me do? Go myself?”
“Yes, I think you should go yourself. It would prevent people saying unpleasant things or untrue ones. You must have your wife back in Paris, or you must be very certain of all that passes at Szarisla, or you may be made to play a foolish part — a part you would not like to play, when you have shut your wife up in it for her safety.”
“Jeanne,” said Zouroff gloomily, with his eyes fixed on the turf they were treading. “There is no one to hear, and we may speak as we mean; Vera does not return to me until she consents to receive you; there is no question of her honour; she will have that intact as if she were in a convent; she is made like that; she is no ‘lis facile à blesser,’ she is made of steel. She knows everything, and she will no longer know you. To protect your name I exile her. She may live and die in Poland.”
She heard him, knowing very well that he said the simple fact, yet her eyes grew angry, and her teeth shut tight.
“You are all imbeciles, you Russians,” she said contemptuously. “You have only one remedy for all diseases — Siberia! It does not cure all diseases; Nihilism shows that. Corrèze is your best friend since you want to be free.”
“If he set foot in Szarisla he shall be beaten with rods!”
Jeanne de Sonnaz, as they passed under the tamarisk trees, looked at him coldly, and crossed her hands lightly on her gold-headed cane as she leaned on it.
“On my word I do not understand you. Are you in love with your wife?”
“Jeanne!”
“I do not accept divided homage,” said his friend with close-shut teeth; “and jealously is a form of homage. Perhaps the truer form.”
“One may be jealous of ones honour—”
“You have none,” said Jeanne de Sonnaz coolly. “Your wife told you so long ago. You have rank, but you have not honour. You do not know what it means. My poor Paul does, but then he is stupid and arriéré. I think if I told Paul to kill you, it might perhaps arrange things — and then how happy they would be, these —
Purs amants sur terre égarés!”
Zouroff looked at her fixedly; his face grew anxious, sullen, and pale.
“Jeanne, say out; what is it you want me to do?”
“I want to reconcile your wife and you, of course,” said Jeanne de Sonnaz, driving her cane through the yielding turf. “That, of course, first of all, if possible. If impossible, I would have you divorced from her. Things, as they are, are ridiculous; and,” she added, in a lower breath, as the children and their balloons drew near, running against the wind, “and they may in time compromise me, which I do not choose to permit.”
Zouroff understood what she required of him; and he felt a coward and a brute, as his sister had called him.
The lily might not be so easy to bruise, but it was easy to soil it.
“Corrèze is certainly in Styria,” she added, as the children joined them.
Zouroff stood looking down on the green turf and the bright blossoms of the asters with moody eyes; he was thinking — what beast of prey was ever so hard of grip, so implacable in appetite, as a cruel woman? And yet this woman held him.
He dared not disobey, because he could not bear to lose her.
That autumn day, so sunny, balmy, and radiant in the sheltered gardens and forests of Arcachon, was winter at Szarisla. Sudden storms and heavy falls of snow had made the forests bare, the plains white; the winds were hurricanes, the thermometer was at zero, and the wolves ranged the lonely plateaux and moorlands in bands, hungered and rash. Szarisla in autumn was colder and drearier than Félicité could ever be in mid-winter, and the great, bare pile of the castle buildings rose black and sombre from out the unbroken world of whiteness.
There was an equally unchangeable melancholy around; it was in the midst of a district intensely and bitterly national; the Princes Zouroff were amongst the most accursed names of Poland, and the few, far-scattered nobles who dwelt in the province would no more have crossed the threshold of Szarisla than they would have kissed the cheek of Mouravieff, or the foot of the Gospodar. Vere lived in absolute solitude, and knew that it was as virtually also a captivity as was ever that of Mary, or of Arabella, Stuart.
Of course she was the Princess Vera, the mistress of Szarisla nominally and actually, but none the less she knew that every hour was watched, that every word was listened to, and that, whilst there was obsequious deference to all her commands, yet, had she expressed a wish to leave the place, she would have been reverentially entreated to await the wishes of the Prince, and would not have a found a man in her stables bold enough to harness her horses for her flight.
She had arrived there late one evening, and, despite the fires, the lights, the torches in the courts, the large household assembled in the entrance, a chill like that of the catacombs seemed around her, and she had felt that living she entered a grave.
Szarisla was an absolute solitude. The nearest town was a three days’ journey of long, bad roads; and the town, when reached, was an obscure and miserable place. The peasantry were sullen and disaffected. The district was under the iron heel of a hated governor, and its scanty population was mute in useless and gloomy resentment. She had no friend, no society, no occupation save such as she chose to make for herself; she was waited upon with frigid ceremonial and etiquette, and she was conscious that she was watched incessantly. Many women would have lost their senses, their health, or both, in that bitter weariness of blank, chill, silent days.
Vere, whose childish training now stood her in fair stead and service, summoned all her courage, all her pride, and resisted the depression that was like a malady, the lassitude that might be the precursor of mental or bodily disease. She rode constantly, till the snow fell; when the snow came, and the frost, she had the wild young horses put in the sleigh, and drove for leagues through the pine woods, and over the moorlands. Air and movement were, she knew, the only true physicians. Little by little she made her way into the homes, and into the hearts of the suspicious and disaffected peasantry; it was slow work, and hard, and thankless, but she was not easily discouraged or rebuffed. She could do little, for she was met at all times in her wishes for charity by the adamantine barrier of “the prince forbids it;” she had no more power, as she bitterly realised, than if she had been his serf. But all that personal influence could do, she did; and that was not little. She was the first living creature who had borne the name of Zouroff that had not been loathed and cursed at Szarisla.
Personal beauty is a rare sorcery, and when the fair face of the Princess Vera looked on them through the falling snow in the forests, or the dim light of their own wood cabins, the people could not altogether shut their hearts to her, though she bore the accursed name.
She was very unhappy; wearily and hopelessly so, because she saw no possibility of any other life than the captivity here, or the yet more arduous captivity of the great world, and in her memory she always heard the song,
Si vous saviez que je vous aime,
Surtout si vous saviez comment!
But she would not let her sorrow and her pain make slaves of her.
The wild and frequent storms of wind and snow tried her most hardly, because they mewed her in those gloomy rooms, and sunless corridors, which had seen so much human tyranny and human woe, and the long, black nights, when only the howl of the hurricane and the howl of the wolves were heard, were very terrible; she would walk up and down the panelled rooms through those midnight hours, that seemed like an eternity, and wondered if her husband had wished to drive her mad that he had sent her here. Her French women left her, unable to bear the cold, the dreariness, the loneliness; she had only Russians and Poles about her. At times in those lonely, ghastly nights, made hideous by the moans of the beasts and the roar of the winds, she thought of the Opera-house of Paris; she thought of the face of Faust. Then in that emptiness and darkness of her life she began to realise that she loved Corrèze; began to understand all that she cost to him in pain and vain regret.<
br />
If she would receive Jeanne de Sonnaz she could go back; go back to the splendour, the colour, the light of life; go back to the world where Corrèze reigned, where his voice was heard, where his eyes would answer hers. But it never once occurred to her to yield.
Now and then the truth came to her mind that Sergius Zouroff had sent her to this solitude not only as a vengeance, but as a temptation. Then all the strength in her repelled the very memory of Corrèze.
“Would my husband make me like Jeanne de Sonnaz,” she thought with a shudder of disgust, “so that I may no longer have the right to scorn her?”
And she strove with all her might to keep her mind calm and clear, her body in health, her sympathies awake for other sorrows than her own.
She studied the dead languages, which she had half forgotten, with the old priest of Szarisla, and conjured away the visions that assailed her in those endless and horrible nights, with the sonorous cadence of the Greek poets; and in the daytime, when the frost had made the white world firm under foot, passed almost all the hours of light sending her fiery horses through the glittering and rarefied air.
So the months passed, and it was mid-winter. Letters and journals told her that the gay world went on its course, but to her it seemed as utterly alien as it could do to any worker in the depths of the salt or the quicksilver mines that supplied his wealth to Prince Zouroff. The world had already forgotten her. Society only said, “Princesse Vera is passing the winter in Poland; so eccentric; but she was always strange and a saint;” and then, with the usual little laugh, Society added, “There is something about Corrèze.”
But the world does not long talk, even calumniously, of what is absent.
Prince Zouroff was on the boulevards; he gave his usual great dinners; he played as usual at his clubs; he entered his horses as usual for great races; the world did not concern itself largely about his wife.
She was in Poland.
She committed the heaviest sin against Society, the only one it never pardons. She was absent. No one had even the consolation to think that she had her lover with her.
Corrèze was singing in Berlin.
Madame Nelaguine, forcing herself to do what she loathed, went across Europe in the cold, wet weather as swiftly as she could travel, and visited Szarisla.
She strove to persuade her sister-in-law to accept the inevitable, and return to the Hôtel Zouroff and such consolations as the great world and its homage could contain.
“Be reasonable, Vera,” she urged, with the tears standing in her keen, marmoset-like eyes. “My dear, society is made up of women like Jeanne de Sonnaz. Receive her, what does it matter? It is not as if you loved your husband, as if your heart were wounded. Receive her. What will it cost you? You need never even see her in intimacy. Go to her on her day, let her come to you on yours. Show yourself half an hour at her balls, let her show herself at yours. That is all. What does it amount to? what does it cost? Nothing.”
“Little, no doubt,” answered Vere. “Only — all ones self-respect.” And she was not changed or persuaded.
“I shall live and die here, very likely,” she said at last, weary of resistance. “It is as well as any other place. It is better than Paris. Your brother has sent me here to coerce me. Go back and tell him that force will not succeed with me. I am not a coward.”
Madame Nelaguine, grieved and yet impatient, shuddered, and left the bleakness and loneliness of Veres prison-house with relief, and hurried home to the world and its ways, and said impetuously and bitterly to her brother, “Do not darken my doors, Sergius, while your wife is shut in that gaol of ice. Do not come to me, do not speak to me. You are a brute. Would to heaven Jeanne de Sonnaz were your wife; then you would be dealt with aright! Are you mad? do you wish to make her faithless? Can you think she will bear such a life as that? Can you leave a woman as young as she without friends, lovers, children, and expect her to change to snow, like the country you shut her in? — are you mad? If she shame herself there any way — any way — can you blame her? Can you take a girl, a child, and teach her what the passions of men are, and then bid her lead a nuns life just when she has reached the full splendour and force of her womanhood — ?”
“She is a saint, you say,” he answered with a smile; and he and his sister never spoke from that hour. In the boudoir of the Faubourg St. Germain his friend knew well how to surround him with an influence which little by little isolated him, and alienated him from all who had the courage to speak of his wife.
Jeanne de Sonnaz had one set purpose, the purpose which she had let him see in her at Arcachon; and until she should succeed in it she suffered no hand but her own to guide him.
The lily might have a stem of steel, and never be bent; but it could be broken.
Soilless though it might remain in its solitude amidst the snow, it should be broken; she had said it in her soul.
“Ce que femme veut, l’homme veut,” was the proverb as her experience read it.
All that there had been of manliness in Sergius Zouroff’s nature resisted her still in this thing that she sought; he still had a faith in his wife that his anger against her did not change; in his eyes Vere was purity incarnate, and he could have laughed aloud in the face of suspicion. To ruin by open doubt and calumnious accusation a creature he knew to be sinless, seemed to him so vile that he could not bring himself to do an act so base.
He sent her into captivity, and he kept her there without mercy, but to hem her in with falsehood, to dishonour her by affected belief in her dishonour, was a lower deep than he could stoop to, even at the bidding of his mistress.
That her solitude was the sharpest and most terrible form of temptation he knew well, and he exposed her to it ruthlessly; willing she should fall, if to fall she chose. But whilst she was innocent, to assume and assert her guilty was what he would not do. Nay, there were even times, when the fatal drug of Jeanne de Sonnaz’s presence was not on him, that he himself realised that he was a madman, who cast away the waters of life for a draught of poison, a jewel for a stone.
But he thrust aside the thought as it arose. He had surrendered himself to the will of his mistress. He had put his wife away for ever.
CHAPTER VI.
One day, when the snow was falling, a traveller reached the gates of Szarisla.
He was wrapped in fur from head to foot; he wished to see the Princesse Zouroff.
“No one sees her,” answered the guardian of the gates; “it is the Prince’s order.”
“But I am a friend; will you not take my name to her?”
“I will not. No one enters; it is the Prince’s order.”
To the entreaties of the stranger, and to his gold, the custodian of the entrance-way was obdurate. In his boyhood he had felt the knout, and he dreaded his master.
The stranger went away.
The next day was the Immaculate Conception. At Szarisla the Catholic religion was permitted by a special concession of a French princess Zouroff, and its functions were still allowed by her descendants.
There was no other church for the peasants than that which was part of the great building, once the monastery of Szarisla. They all flocked to it upon holy days. It was sombre and ill lit, but gorgeous in Byzantine colour and taste from the piety of dead Zouroff princes.
The peasantry went over the snow through its doors; the stranger went with them; the mistress of Szarisla was at the midday mass, as well the household.
In the stillness, after the elevation of the host, a voice arose, and sang the Salutaris Hostia.
A warmth like the glow of summer ran through all the veins of Vere; she trembled; her face was lifted for one moment, then she dropped it once more on her hands.
The peasants and the household, awe-struck and amazed, listened with rapt wonder to what they thought was the song of angels; they could not see the singer. Kneeling as in prayer, with her face hidden, the mistress of Szarisla, who was also the captive of Szarisla, never moved.
The di
vine melody floated through the dimness and the stillness of the lonely Polish church; the priest stood motionless; the people were mute; some of them wept in ecstasy. When it ceased, they prostrated themselves on the earth. They believed that the angels of God were amongst them.
Vere arose slowly and stood pale and still, shrouded from head to foot in fur.
She looked towards the shadows behind the altar. There she saw Corrèze, as she had known that she would see him.
He came forward and bowed low. His eyes had a timidity and a fear in the wistfulness of their appeal to her.
They stood before each other, and were silent.
“Is this how you obey me?” her glance said to him without words.
“Forgive me,” he murmured aloud.
By this time the people had arisen, and were gazing at him, amazed to find him but a mortal man.
Vere turned to the priest, and her voice trembled a little; “You are not angry, father? Will you not rather thank this — traveller? — he is known to me.”
In Latin the priest spoke his admiration and his thanks, and in Latin the singer replied.
Vere looked at him, and said simply, “Come.”
Corrèze obeyed her, and moved by her side. He dared not touch her hand, or speak any word that might offend her. He could see nothing of her face or form for the black furs that swept from her head to her feet. She passed into the sacristy with a passing word to the priest. She threw the heavy door close with her own hands, and let the furs fall off her in a heap upon the floor.
Then for the first time she looked at him.
“Why do you come? It is unworthy—”
He moved as if a blow had been struck him, his eyes, longing and passionate, burned like stars; he too cast his furs down; he stood before her with a proud humiliation in his attitude and his look.