by Ouida
With any other woman he would have let loose a torrent of abuse; with her he was sullen but apparently pacified.
After all they were old letters, and he could not very clearly remember whose letters had been shut away in that old tortoise-shell casket.
“I thought men always burnt these things,” said Jeanne de Sonnaz. “But, indeed, if women are foolish enough to write them they deserve to be unfortunate enough to have them kept. I never wrote to any man, except to Paul himself — and Worth.”
“You are a model of virtue,” said her companion, grimly.
“I am something better,” said his friend. “I am a woman of sense. Apropos, how long will this retreat in Poland last? It cannot go on; it becomes absurd. The world is already talking. The place of the Princess Zouroff is in the Hôtel Zouroff.”
“It cannot be her place,” said Zouroff, savagely. “She is — she is — obdurate still. I suppose she is content; the frost has broken, the weather is good even there.”
Jeanne de Sonnaz looked him in the eyes.
“Weather is not all that a woman of twenty requires for her felicity. The whole affair is absurd; I shall not permit it to go on. I say again, what I said last year at Arcachon. It may end in compromising me, and that I will not have. You must take your wife back to your house here, and live with her later at Félicité, or you must prove to society that you are justified in separating from her; one or the other. As it is you are ridiculous, and I — I am suspected. Faut en finir.”
Zouroff turned away and walked gloomily to and fro the chamber.
“I will not take her back,” he muttered. “Besides — probably — she would not come.”
He dared not say to his companion that he could not insist on his wife’s return without an open scandal, since she would for ever refuse to receive or to visit the Duchesse de Sonnaz, once her guest and her friend.
“Besides, probably, she would not come!” echoed Jeanne de Sonnaz, with a shrill laugh that made his sullenness rage. “My poor bear! is that all your growls and your teeth can do for you? You cannot master a woman of twenty, who has nothing in the world but what you gave her at your marriage. Frankly, it is too ridiculous. You must make a choice if you would not be the laughing stock of society; either you must have your wife here in Paris before all the world, and I will be the first to welcome her, or you must justify your separation from her; one of the two.”
“I shall do neither!”
“Then, mon ami, I shall be very sorry indeed, because we have been friends so long, but unless you do one or the other, and that speedily, I shall be obliged with infinite regret to side with your sister and all the House of Herbert against you. I shall be obliged to close my doors to you; I cannot know a man who is cruel to an innocent wife. There! you know I do what I say. I will give you a week, two weeks, to think of it. Afterwards I shall take my course according to yours. I shall be very sorry not to see you any more, my dear Sergius; but I should be more sorry if the world were to think I supported you in injustice and unkindness to Princess Zouroff. Please to go now; I have a million things to do, and a deputation about my crèche is waiting for me downstairs.”
Sergius Zouroff went out of her house in a towering passion; yet it never occurred to him to separate from his tormentor. She had an empire over him that he had long ceased to resist; he could no more have lived without seeing Jeanne de Sonnaz than he could live without his draughts of brandy, his nights of gambling. As there is love without dominion, so there is dominion without love.
He knew very well that she never wasted words; that she never made an empty menace. He knew that her calculations were always cool and keen, and that when she thought her own interests menaced, she was pitiless. She would keep her word; that he knew well. What could he do? It was impossible to recall his wife, since he knew that his wife would never receive Jeanne de Sonnaz. The presence of his wife in Paris could only complicate and increase the difficulties that surrounded him; had he not banished her to Poland for that very cause? He cursed the inconsistencies and insolences of women. The submission of his wife to his will and his command had softened his heart towards her; he had vague impulses of compassion and of pardon towards this woman who was so unyielding in her dignity, so obedient in her actions, so silent under her wrongs. As the year before, after he had found her the victim of her mother’s falsehood, some better impulse, some tenderer instinct than was common with him had begun once more to move him towards that mute captive of his will at Szarisla. But Jeanne de Sonnaz had always been careful to smother those impulses at their birth under ridicule; to arouse in their stead anger, impatience, and the morbidness of a vague jealousy. Without the influence of Jeanne de Sonnaz Zouorff would have loved his wife; not nobly, because he was not noble, nor faithfully, because he could not be otherwise than inconstant; but still, with more honesty of affection, more indulgence, and more purity, than he had ever had excited in him by any other creature. But perpetually, as that better impulse rose, she had been at hand to extinguish it by irony, by mockery, or by suggestion. He left her house, now, in bitter rage, which in justice should have fallen on her, but by habit fell instead upon his absent wife. Why could not Vere have been like any other of the many highborn maidens of whom he could have made a Princess Zouroff, and been indifferent and malleable, and wisely blind, and willing to kiss Jeanne de Sonnaz on the cheek, as great ladies salute each other all over the world, no matter what feuds may divide or rivalries may sting them? Why must she be a woman unfitted for her century, made only for those old legendary and saintly days when the bread had changed to roses in St. Elizabeth’s hands?
A devilish wish that he was ashamed of, even as it rose up in him, came over him, without his being able to drive it away. He wished he could find his wife guilty. He knew her as innocent as children unborn; yet almost he wished he could find her weak and tempted like the rest.
His course would then be easy.
Throughout the adulation of the world she had remained untempted, and she remained so still, in that solitude, that dulness, that captivity which would have driven any other to summon a lover to her side before a month of that joyless existence had flown. But then she had no lover. He was certain she had none. Not all the mockery and insistence of his mistress could make him seriously credit any infidelity, even of thought or sentiment, in Vere. “And had she one I would strangle him to-morrow,” he thought, with that vanity of possession which so sadly and cruelly survives the death of passion, the extinction of all love. Justify your separation from her, said his friend; but how; Sergius Zouroff was not yet low enough to accuse falsely a woman he believed from his soul to be innocent. He was perplexed, and bitterly angered against her, against himself, against all the world. He had meant to break her spirit and her will by her exile; he had never dreamed that she would bear it in patience and in silence; knowing women well, he had fully expected that the strength of her opposition would soon wear itself out, that she would soon see that to meet Jeanne de Sonnaz in society and exchange the commonplaces of courtesy and custom was preferable to a life in the snows of the north, with no one to admire her loveliness, no pleasure to beguile her days and nights; he had thought that one single week of the winter weather, with its lonely evenings in that deserted place, would banish all power of resistance in his wife. Instead of this, she remained there without a word, even of regret or of protest.
He was enraged that he had ever sent her into exile. He would not retreat from a step he had once taken; he would not withdraw from a position he had thought it for his dignity to assume. But he felt that he had committed the worst of all errors in his own sight; an error that would end in making him absurd in the eyes of the world. He could not keep his wife for ever at Szarisla; society would wonder, her family would murmur; even his Empress, perhaps, require explanation: and what excuse could he give? He could not say to any of these, “I separate from her because she has justly thought herself injured by Jeanne de Sonnaz.”
As, lost in sullen meditation, he went down the Rue Scribe to go to his favourite club, he passed close by Corrèze.
Corrèze was walking with a German Margrave, who nodded to Zouroff with a little greeting, for they were friends; Corrèze looked him full in the face, and gave him no salutation.
The insolence (as it seemed to him) filled up the measure of his wrath.
“I will slit the throat of that nightingale,” he muttered as they passed.
At that moment a friend stopped him in some agitation. “Good heavens, have you not heard? Paul de Sonnaz is dead; his horse has thrown him just before the door of the club. He fell with his head on the kerbstone; his neck is broken.”
Zouroff, without a word, went into the Jockey Club and into the chamber upstairs, whither they had borne the senseless frame of the Duc de Sonnaz, who had died in an instant, without pain. Zouroff looked down on him, and his own face grew pale and his eyes clouded. Paul de Sonnaz had been a good, simple, unaffected man, bon prince always, and unconscious of his wrongs; docile to his wife and blinded by her, cordial to his friends and trustful of them.
“Poor simpleton! he was very useful to me,” muttered Zouroff, as he stood by the inanimate body of the man he had always deceived. It was of himself he thought, in the unchangeable egotism of a long life of self-indulgence.
When Zouroff went to his own house that day he found the usual weekly report from his faithful servant Ivan. Ivan affirmed that all things went on as usual and nothing happened, but ventured to add:
“The climate does not seem to suit the princess. She rides a great deal, but she appears to lose strength, and the women say that she sleeps but little.”
His sister came to him a little later in that day.
“It is of no use for us to quarrel, Sergius,” she said to him. “I shall do Vera no good in that way. I am anxious; very anxious; she writes to me as of old, quite calmly; but Ivan writes, on the other hand, that she is ill and losing strength. Why do you not recall her? Paul de Sonnaz is dead; his wife must for some time be in retreat. Vera is your shield and safety now; without her, Jeanne would marry you.”
Zouroff frowned.
“My wife can always return if she please,” he said evasively.
Would she return?
He could not see the Duchesse de Sonnaz, who was surrounded by her family, and that of her husband, in the first hours of her bereavement; and without her counsels, her permission, he dared do nothing.
“I will write to Vera,” he promised his sister; but she could not persuade him to write then and there. “Szarisla is healthy enough,” he answered, impatient of her fears. “Besides, a woman who can ride for many hours a day cannot be very weak.”
He knew Szarisla was a place that was trying to the health of the strongest by reason of its bitter cold springs and its scorching summers, with the noxious exhalation of it marshes. But he would not confess it.
“She could return if she chose,” he added, to put an end to the remonstrances of the Princess Nelaguine. “As for her health, if you are disturbed about it send any physician you like that you employ to see her; she had never been so well as she was before the birth of that dead child in Russia.”
“I shall not send a physician to her as if she were mad,” answered his sister with anger.
“Send Corrèze,” said Zouroff with a sardonic little laugh which he knew was vile.
“Would you had died yourself, Sergius, instead of that poor imbecile, whom you cheated every hour that he lived!”
Zouroff shrugged his shoulders. “I regret Paul — pauvre garcon!” he said simply, and said the truth.
“Why do you not regret your own sins?”
“They are the only things that have ever amused me,” he replied with equal truth. “And I thought you were an esprit fort, Nadine; I thought your new school of thinkers had all agreed that there is no such thing as sin any more; nothing but hereditary bias, for which no one is responsible. If we are not to quarrel again, pray make me no scenes.”
“We will not quarrel; it is childish. But you promise me to recall your wife?”
“I promise you — yes.”
“When I shall have seen Jeanne,” he added in his own thoughts.
Nadine Nelaguine went to her own house angered, dissatisfied and anxious. She was a clever woman, and she was penetrated with the caution of the world, as a petrified branch with the lime that hardens it. She smiled cheerfully always when she spoke of her sister-in-law, and said tranquilly in society that she had not Vera’s tastes, she could not dedicate herself to solitude and the Polish poor as Vera did. She kept her own counsel and did not call in others to witness her pain or her dilemma. She knew that the sympathy of society is chiefly curiosity, and that when it has any title to pity it is quite sure to sneer.
She held her peace and waited, but her often callous heart ached with heavy regret and anxiety.
“She has so much to endure!” she thought with hot tears in her sharp keen eyes. “So much, so much! — and it will pass her patience. She is young; she does not know that a woman must never resist. A woman should only — deceive. It is Jeanne’s work, all her work; she has separated them; I knew well that she would. Oh, the fool that he is — the fool and the brute! If I, and Jeanne, and Lady Dorothy, and all the women that are like us, were eaten by dogs like Jezebel the world would only be the better and the cleaner. But Vera, my lily, my pearl, my saint!—”
In Poland the slow cold spring was leaden-footed and grey of hue.
In the desolate plains that stretched around Szarisla the country slowly grew green with the verdure of budding corn and the yellow river outspread its banks, turbulent and swollen with the melted snows.
She knew what it was to be alive, yet not to live. If it had not been for the long gallops over the plains through the cold air which she forced herself to take for hours every day, she would scarcely have known she was even alive. Little by little as time went on and the household found that she remained there, and that her husband never visited her, the impression gained on all the people that she had been sent there either as captive or as mad; and a certain fear crept into them, and a certain dislike to be alone with her, and timidity when she spoke, came upon them. She saw that shrinking from her, and understood what their fancy about her was. It did not matter, she thought, only it hurt her when the little children began to grow afraid too, and flee from her.
“I suppose I am mad,” she thought, with a weary smile. “The world would say so, too; I ought to go back to it and kiss Jeanne de Sonnaz on both cheeks.”
But to do so never occurred to her for one moment as any temptation.
She was made to break, perhaps, but never to bend.
One day in the misty spring weather, which seemed to her more trying than all the ice and snow of winter, there came over the plains, now bright with springing grasses or growing wheat, a troika, with hired horses, that was pulled up before the iron-bound doors of Szarisla.
From it there descended a very lovely woman, with an impertinent, delicate profile, radiant, audacious eyes, and a look that had the challenge of the stag with the malice of the marmoset.
When the servants on guard opposed her entrance with the habitual formula, “The Prince forbids it,” she thrust into their faces a card signed Sergius Zouroff.
On the card was written, “Admit to Szarisla the Duchess of Mull.”
The servants bowed to the ground, and ushered the bearer of that irresistible order into the presence of their mistress, without preparation or permission.
Vere was sitting at a great oak table in one of the high embrasured windows; the dog was at her feet; some Greek books were open before her; the white woollen gown she wore fell from her throat to her feet, like the robe of a nun; she had no ornament except her thick, golden hair coiled loosely about her head.
Before she realised that she was not alone her cousin’s wife stood before her, brilliant in colour as an enamel of Petitot, or a Saxe figure of Kaendle
r; radiant with health, with contentment, with animation, with the satisfaction with all existent things, which is the most durable, though not the most delicate, form of human happiness. Vere rose to her feet, cold, silent, annoyed, angered; she was in her own house, at least her own since it was her husband’s; she could say nothing that was discourteous; she would say nothing that was welcome. She was astonished and stood mute, looking down from the height of her noble stature on this brilliantly-tinted, porcelainlike figure. For the only time in all her life she who was Pick-me-up in the world of fashion was made nervous and held mute.
She was impudent, daring, clever, vain, and always successful; yet, for the moment, she felt like a frightened child, like a chidden dog, before the amazed cold rebuke of those grand, grey eyes that she had once envied to the girl Vere Herbert.
“Well! you don’t seem to like the look of me,” she said at last, and there was a nervous quiver in her high, thin voice. “You can’t be said to look pleased no-way, and yet I’ve come all this way only just to see you; there aren’t many of the others would do as much.”
“You have come to triumph over me!” thought her hearer, but, with the stately old-world courtesy that was habitual to her, she motioned to her cousin’s wife to be seated near her and said, coldly: “You are very good; I regret that Szarisla can offer you little recompense for so long a journey. My cousin is well?”
“Frank’s first rate, and the child too,” said Fuschia, Duchess of Mull, with a severe effort to recover the usual lightheartedness, with which she faced all things and all subjects, human and divine. “I called the boy after you, you know, but you never took any notice. Goodness! if it’s not like a convent here; it’s a sort of Bastille, isn’t it, and the windows are all barred up, and I thought they’d have never let me in; if I hadn’t had your husband’s order they never would have done till the day of doom; it’s very hard on you.”