by Ouida
“My husband sent you here?” said Vere, with her teeth closed; she felt powerless before a studied insult.
“Sent me? My, no! I don’t do things for people’s sending,” said the young duchess, with some asperity, and her natural courage reviving in her. “We were bound to come to Berlin, because of Ronald Herbert’s marriage; he is marrying a Prussian princess — didn’t you know of that? Doesn’t your husband forward you on your letters? And I said to myself when I’m as near as that, I will go on to Poland and see her, so I got that order out of your husband; he didn’t like it, but he couldn’t say no very well anyhow; we saw him as we came through Paris.”
“You were very good to take so much trouble,” said Vere, but her eyes said otherwise. Her eyes said, “Why do you come to offend me in my solitude and insult me in my captivity?”
But in truth her visitor was innocent of any such thought. Human motives are not unmixed, and in the brilliant young duchess there had been an innocent vanity — a half-conscious conceit — in showing this high-born and high-bred woman, who had always disdained her, that she was above revenge and capable of a noble action. But beyond all vanity and conceit were the wish to make Vere care for her, the indignation at tyranny of a spirited temper, and the loyal impulse to stand by what she knew was stainless and aspersed.
Fuschia Mull, having once recovered her power of speech, was not silenced soon again. She had seated herself opposite the high window, her bright eyes studied the face of Vere with a curiosity tempered by respect and heightened by wonder; she could flirt with princes and jest with sovereigns, and carry her head high in the great world with all the insolence of a born coquette and a born revolutionary, and since the day when she had become a duchess she had never ceased to assert herself in all the prominence and all the audacity that distinguished her; yet before this lonely woman she felt shy and afraid.
“You aren’t a bit glad to see me,” she said, with a little tremour in her words, that flowed fast from the sheer habit of loquacity. “You never would take to me. No; I know. You’ve never forgiven me about that coal, nor for my marrying your cousin. Well, that’s natural enough; I don’t bear malice. There wasn’t any cause you should like me, though I think you’d like the baby if you saw him; he’s a real true Herbert, but that’s neither here nor there. I wanted to see you because you know they say such things in Paris and London, and all the others are such poor dawdles; they’ll never do anything. Even Frank himself says I shouldn’t interfere between husband and wife; but people always say you shouldn’t interfere when they only mean you may do yourself a mischief, and I never was one to be afraid—”
She paused a moment, and her bright eyes roamed over the dark oak panelled monastic chamber, with its carpet of lambs’ skins, and beyond its casements the flat and dreary plains and the low woods of endless firs.
“My!” she said, with a little shiver, “if it aren’t worse than a clearin’ down West! Well, he’s a brute, anyhow—”
Vere looked at her with a regard that stopped her.
“It is my own choice,” she said, coldly.
“Yes! I know it is your own choice in a way,” returned the other with vivacity; “that is what I wanted to say to you. I told Frank the other day in Berlin, ‘She never liked me, and there wasn’t any particular reason why she should; but I always did like her, and I don’t mean to stand still and see her put upon.’ You don’t mind me speaking so? — you are put upon because you are just too good for this world, my dear. Don’t look at me so with your terrible eyes; I don’t mean any offence. You know they say all sorts of things in society, and some say one thing and some another; but I believe as how the real fact is this, isn’t it? Your husband has sent you here because you would not receive Madame de Sonnaz?”
“That is the fact — yes.”
‘Well, you are quite right. I only know if the duke — but never mind that. You know, or perhaps you don’t know, that in the world they say another thing than that; they say Prince Zouroff is jealous of that beautiful creature, Corrèze—”
“I must request that you do not say that to me.”
“Well, they say it in your absence, some. I thought I’d better tell you. That Sonnaz woman is a bad lot; poisonous as snakes in a swamp she is and of course she bruits it abroad. I cannot make out what your husband drives at; ‘guess he wants you to divorce him; but it aren’t him so much as it’s that snake. Men are always what some woman or other makes them. Now you know this is what I came to say. I know you don’t like me, but I am the wife of the head of your father’s house, and nothing can change that now, and in the world I’m some pumpkins — I mean they think a good deal of me. Now what I come to ask you is this, and the duke says it with me with all his heart. We want you to come and live with us at Castle Herbert, or in London, or wherever we are. It will shut people’s mouths. It will nonsuit your husband, and you shall never see that hussy of the Faubourg in my house, that I promise you. Will you do it? Will you? Folks mind me, and when I say to them the Princess Zouroff stays with me because her husband outrages her, the world will know it’s a fact. That’s so.” She ceased, and awaited the effect of her words anxiously and even nervously; she meant with all sincerity all she said.
Into Veres colourless face a warmth came; she felt angered, yet she was touched to the quick. She could not endure the pity, the protection; yet the honesty, and the hospitality, and the frank kindness moved her to emotion.
None of her own friends, none of those who had been her debtor for many an act of kindness or hour of pleasure, had ever thought to come to her in her exile; and the journey was one long and tedious, involving discomfort and self-sacrifice, and yet had had no terrors for this woman, whose vulgarities she had always treated with disdain, whose existence she had always ignored, whose rank she had always refused to acknowledge.
“You aren’t angry?” said the other humbly.
“Angry? Oh, no; you have been very good.”
“Then you will come with us? Say! Your cousin will be as glad as I.”
She was silent.
“Do come!” urged the other with wistful eagerness. “We are going straight home. Come with us. Of course your mother ought to be the one, but then she’s — ; it’s no use thinking of her, and, besides, they wouldn’t believe her; they’ll believe me. I don’t lie. And you know I’m an honest woman. I mean to be honest all my days. I flirt, to be sure, but Lord, what’s that. I’d never do what my boy would be sorry I had done, when he grows big enough to know. You needn’t be afraid of me. I aren’t like you. I never shall be. There is something in the old countries, — but I’ll be true to you, true as steel. Americans aren’t mean!”
She paused once more, half afraid, in all her omnipotent vanity, of the answer she might receive.
Vere was still silent. The great pride natural to her was at war with the justice and generosity that were no less her nature. She was humiliated; yet she was deeply moved. This woman, whom she had always despised, had given her back kindness for unkindness, honour for scorn.
With a frank and gracious gesture she rose and put out her hand to her cousin’s wife.
“I thank you. I cannot accept your offer, but I thank you none the less. You revenge yourself very nobly; you rebuke me very generously. I see that in the past I did you wrong. I beg your pardon.”
Into the radiant, bold eyes of Fuschia Mull a cloud of sudden tears floated.
She burst out crying.
When she went away from Szarisla in the twilight of the sultry day she had failed to persuade Vere, yet she had had a victory.
“You are a saint!” she said, passionately, as she stood on the threshold of Vere’s prison-house. “You are a saint, and I shall tell all the world so. Will you give me some little thing of your own just to take home to my boy from you? I shall have a kind of fancy as it will bring him a blessing. Its nonsense maybe, but still—”
Vere gave her a silver cross.
The long, empty, colourless da
ys went by in that terrible monotony which is a blank in all after remembrance of it. Since the footsteps of Corrèze had passed away over the snow a silence like death seemed to reign round her. She noticed little that was around her; she scarcely kept any count of the flight of time; it seemed to her that she had died when she had sent him from her to the world — the world that she would never revisit. For she knew her husband too well not to know that he would never change in the thing he demanded, and to purchase freedom by the humiliation of public tribunals was impossible to a woman reared, in her childhood, to the austere tenets of an uncompromising honour, an unyielding pride.
“I can live and die here,” she mused often. “But I will never meet his mistress as my friend, and I will never sue for a divorce.”
When Sergius Zouroff from time to time wrote her brief words bidding her reconsider her choice she did not consider for a moment; she tore up his message.
The worst bitterness of life had passed her when she had bidden Corrèze depart from her. After that, all seemed so easy, so trivial, so slight and poor.
If her husband had sent her into poverty and made her work with her hands for her bread, it would have seemed no matter to her. As the summer came, parching, dusty, unhealthy, after the bitterness of the cold and the dampness of the rainy season, her attendants grew vaguely alarmed, she looked so thin, so tall, so shadowy, her eyes had such heavy darkness under them, and she slept so little. As for the world, it had already almost forgotten her; she was beautiful but strange; she had always been strange, society said, and she chose to live in Poland.
She thought of society now and then, of all that hurry and fever, all that fuss and fume of precedence, all that insatiable appetite for new things, all that frantic and futile effort at distraction, all that stew of calumny and envy and conflict and detraction which together make up the great world; and it all seemed to her as far away as the noise of a village fair in the valley seems to the climber who stands on a mountain height. Was it only one year ago that she had been in it? — it seemed to her as if centuries had passed over her head, since the gates of Szarisla had closed behind her, and its plains and its pinewoods had parted her from the world.
Even still the isolation was precious to her. She accepted it with gratitude and humility.
“If I were seeing him daily in the life of Paris,” she thought, “who can tell — I might fall into concealment, deception, falsehood — I might be no stronger than other women, I might learn to despise myself.”
And the gloom and the stillness and the lonely unlovely landscapes, and the long empty joyless days were all welcome to her; they saved her from herself. Her loveliness was unseen, her youth was wasting, her portion was solitude, but she did not complain. Since she had accepted this fate she did not murmur at it. Her women wondered at her patience as the exiled court of exiled sovereigns often wonder at their rulers’ fortitude.
One day at the close of the month of May, she sat by herself in the long low room, which served her as her chief habitation. She had come in from her ride over the level lands, and was tired; she was very often tired now; a dull slight rain was veiling the horizon always dreary at its best; the sky was grey, the air was heavy with mist.
It was summertime, and all the plains were green with grass and grain, but it was summer without colour and without warmth, dreary and chilly: it was seven o’clock; the sun was setting behind a mass of vapour; she thought of Paris at that hour at that season; with the homeward rolling tide of carriages, with the noise, the laughter, the gaiety; with the light beginning to sparkle everywhere before the daylight had faded, with music on the air, and the scent of the lilacs, and the last glow of the sun shining on the ruined Tuileries. Had she ever been there with the crowd looking after her as her horses went down the Champs Elysées? — it seemed impossible. It seemed so far away.
By the papers that came to her she knew that Corrèze was still there; there in the city that loved him, where his glance was seduction, and his hours were filled with victories; she knew that he was there, she read of the little chateau at Marly, she comprehended why he chose to live so, in the full light of publicity, for her sake. She thought of him this evening, in that dull grey light which spread like a veil over the mournful plains of Poland. Would he not forget as the world forgot her? why not? She had no pride for him.
At that moment as the day declined, a servant brought her letters.
Letters came to Szarisla but twice in the week fetched by a horseman from the little town. The first letter she took out of the leather sack was from her husband. It was very brief. It said merely:
“Paul de Sonnaz died suddenly last week. If you will consent to pay a visit of ceremony and respect to his wife in her retirement at Ruilhières, I shall welcome you to Paris with pleasure. If not, if you still choose to disobey me and insult me, you must remain at Szarisla, which I regret to hear from Ivan does not appear to suit your health.”
There was nothing more except his signature.
The letter was the result of the promise he had given to his sister. Vere tore it in two.
The next she opened was a long and tender one from Nadine Nelaguine urging deference to his wishes, and advising concession on this point of a mere visit of condolence to Ruilhières, with all the arguments that tact and affection and unscrupulousness could together supply to the writer.
The next three or four were unimportant, the last was a packet addressed in a hand unknown to her.
She opened it without attention.
Out of the cover fell three letters in her mother’s handwriting.
Wondering and aroused, she read them. They were letters ten years old. Letters of her mother to Sergius Zouroff; letters forgotten when others were burned the week before his marriage; forgotten and left in the tortoise-shell casket.
At ten o’clock on the following night as Prince Zouroff sat at dinner in the Grand Circle a telegram was brought to him. It was from his wife.
“Never approach me: let me live and die here.”
CHAPTER VIII.
Szarisla had hidden many sad and many tragic lives.
It hid that of Vere.
To her husband she had perished as utterly as though she was dead. From remote districts of the north, news travels slowly; never travels at all, unless it be expressly sent; Vere had so seldom written to anyone that it scarcely seemed strange that she now never wrote at all. The world had almost ceased to inquire for her; it thought she had withdrawn herself into retirement from religious caprice, or from morbid sentiment, or from an unreturned passion, or that she had been sent into that exile for some fault; whenever women spoke of her they preferred to think this, they revived old rumors. For the rest, silence covered her life.
Her sister-in-law wept honest tears, reviled her brother with honest rage, but then played musical intricacies, or gambled at bezique, and tried to forget that the one creature her cynical heart yearned over, and sighed for, was away in that drear captivity in the Polish plains.
“If I went and lived with her,” thought Nadine Nelaguine, “I should do her no good, I should not change her: she is taillée dans le marbre, I should alter her in nothing, and I should only be miserable myself.”
In country houses of England and Scotland her mother went about through summer and autumn unchanged, charming, popular, and said with a little smile and a sigh, “Oh! my dear child — you know she is too good — really too good — wastes all her life in Poland to teach the children and convert the Nihilists; she is happiest so she assures me; you know she was always so terribly serious; it was Bulmer that ruined her!”
And she believed what she said.
Jeanne de Sonnaz mourned at Ruilhières in the austere severity of a great lady’s widowhood in France, heard mass every day with her little blonde and brown-headed girls and boys about her in solemn retreat, yet kept her keen glance on the world, which she had quitted perforce for a space, and said to herself, annoyed and baffled, “When will he cease t
o live at Marly?”
For Corrèze was always there.
Sergius Zouroff had been to Russia. He only went to Livadia, but the world thought he had been to his wife. He returned, and kept open house, at a superb chasse he had bought in the Ardennes. When people asked him for his wife, he answered them briefly that she was well; she preferred the north.
Félicité was closed.
The old peasant stood by her wall of furze and looked in vain along the field paths under the apple-blossoms.
“Now the lark is dead,” she said to her son, “neither of the two comes near.”
So the months fled away.
When the autumn was ended, Corrèze, who was always at his little chateau with other artists about him, said to himself, “Have I not done enough for obedience and honour? I must see her, though she shall never see me.”
Corrèze lived his life in the world obedient to her will, but men and women went by him like shadows, and even his art ceased to have power over him.
He was a supreme artist still, since to the genius in him there was added the culture of years, and the facility of long habit. But the joy of the artist was dead in him.
All his heart, all his soul, all his passion, were with that lonely life in the grey plains of Poland, whose youth was passing in solitude, and whose innocence was being slandered by the guilty.
“I obey her;” he thought, “and what is the use? Our lives will go by like a dream, and we shall be divided even in our graves, the world will always think she has some sin — she lives apart from her husband!”
He chafed bitterly at his doom; he grew feverish and nervous; he fancied in every smile there was a mockery of her, in every word a calumny; once he took up a public print which spoke of himself and of his retreat at Marly, and which with a hint and a veiled jest, quoted that line which Jeanne de Sonnaz had by a laugh wafted through Paris after his name.