by Ouida
“Pur amant sur terre égaré!”
Corrèze crushed the paper in his hand, and threw it from him and went out: he longed to do something, to act in some way, all the impetuosity and ardour of his temper were panting to break from this thraldom of silence and inaction.
He would have struck Sergius Zouroff on the cheek in the sight of all Paris, but he had no title to defend her.
He would only harm her more.
She was the wife of Zouroff, and she accepted her exile at her husband’s hands; he had no title to resent for her what she would not resent for herself.
“I am not her lover, he thought bitterly; “I am nothing but a man who loves her hopelessly, uselessly, vainly.”
It was late in autumn, and ghastly fancies seized him, vague terrors for her, that left him no sleep and no rest, began to visit him. Was she really at Szarisla? Was she indeed living? He could not tell. There were disturbances and bloodshed in the disaffected provinces; winter had begun there in Poland, the long, black silence of winter, which could cover so many nameless graves; he could bear absence, ignorance, apprehension no longer; he went to sing twenty nights in Vienna, and then in Moscow.
“There I shall breathe the same air,” he thought.
He went over the Alps, by way of the Jura and Dauphiné; he thought as he passed the peaceful valleys and the snow-covered summits that had been so familiar to him:
“If I could only dwell in the mountains with her, and let the world and fame go by!”
Then he reproached himself for even such dishonour to her as lay in such a thought.
“What am I that she should be mine?” he mused. “I have been the lover of many women, I am not worthy to touch her hand. The world could not harm her — would I?”
In Vienna he had brilliant successes. He thought the people mad. To himself he seemed for ever useless, and powerless for art, his voice sounded in his ears like a bell muffled and out of tune. The cities rejoiced over him and feasted and honoured him; but it seemed to him all like a dream; he seemed only to hear the beating of his own heart that he wished would break and be at peace for ever.
From Moscow he passed away, under public plea that he was bound for Germany, towards those obscure, dull, unvisited plains, that lie towards the borders of East Prussia and the Baltic sea, and have scarce a traveller to notice them, and never a poet or historian to save them from the nations’ oblivion, but lie in the teeth of the north wind, vast, ill-populated, melancholy, with the profound unchangeable wretchedness of a captive people.
Once more he saw the wide grey plains that stretched around Szarisla.
For days and weeks he lingered on in the miserable village which alone afforded him a roof and bed; he passed there as a stranger from the south buying furs; he waited and waited in the pinewoods merely to see her face. “If I can see her once drive by me, and she is well, I will go away,” he said to himself, and he watched and waited. But she never came.
At length he spoke of her to the archimandrite of the village, as a traveller might of a great princess of whom hearsay had told him. He learned that she was unwell, and rarely left the house.
Corrèze, as he heard, felt his heart numb with fear, as all nature was numbed with frost around him.
He could not bring himself to leave. The village population began to speak with wonder and curiosity of him; he had bought all the fur they had to sell, and sent them through into Silesia; they knew he was no trader, for he never bargained, and poured out his roubles like sand; they began to speak of him, and wonder at him, and he knew that it was needful he should go. But he could not; he lived in wretchedness, with scarcely any of the necessaries, and none of the comforts of life, in the only place that sheltered travellers, but from that cabin, he could see the stone walls of her prison-house across the white sea of the snow-covered plains; it was enough. The spot was dearer to him than the gay, delirious pleasures of his own Paris. In the world wherever he chose to go, he would have luxury, welcome, amusement, the rapture of crowds, the envy of men, the love of women, all the charm that success and art and fame can lend to life at its zenith. But he stayed on at Szarisla for sake of seeing those pale stern walls that rose up from the sea of snow.
Those walls enclosed her life.
The snow had ceased to fall, the frost had set in, in its full intensity; one day the sun poured through the heavy vapours of the cloud-covered sky.
He went nearer the building than he had ever done. He thought it possible the gleam of the sun might tempt her into the open air.
He stood without the gates and looked; the front of the great sombre pile seemed to frown, the casements had iron stanchions; the doors were like the doors of a prison.
“And that brute has shut her here!” he thought, “shut her here while he sups with Casse-une-Croûte!”
Suddenly he seemed to himself to be a coward, because he did not strike Sergius Zouroff, and shame him before the world.
“I have no right,” he thought. “But does a man want one when a woman is wronged?”
He stood in the shadow of some great Siberian pines, a century old, and looked “his heart out through his eyes.”
As he stood there, one person and then another, and then another, came up and stood there, until they gathered in a little crowd; he asked, in their own tongue, of one of them why they came; they were all poor; the man who was a cripple said to him: “The Princess used to come to us while she could; now she is ill we come to her; she is strong enough sometimes to let us see her face, touch her hand; the sun is out; perhaps she will appear to-day; twice a week the charities are given.”
Corrèze cast his furs close about him, so that his face was not seen, and stood in the shadow of the great gateway The doors of the building opened; for a moment he could see nothing; his eyes were blind with the intensity of his desire and his fear.
When the mist passed from his sight he saw a tall and slender form, moving with the grace that he knew so well, but very wearily and very slowly, come out from the great doors, and through the gates; the throng of cripples and sufferers and poor of all sorts fell on their knees and blessed her.
He kneeled with them, but he could not move his lips to any blessing; with all the might of his anguish he cursed Sergius Zouroff.
Vere’s voice, much weakened, but grave and clear as of old, came to his ear through the rarified air.
“My people, do not kneel to me; you know it pains me. It is long since I saw you; what can I do?”
She spoke feebly; she leaned on a tall cane she bore, and as she moved the thick veil from about her head, the man who would have given his life for hers saw that she was changed and aged as if by the passing of many years. He stifled a cry that rose to his lips, and stood and gazed on her.
The poor had long tales of woe; she listened patiently, and moved from one to another, saying a few words to each; behind her were her women, who gave alms to each as she directed them. She seemed to have little strength; after a time she stood still, leaning on her cane, and the people grouped about her, and kissed the furs she wore.
Corrèze went forward timidly and with hesitation, and kneeled by her, and touched with his lips the hem of the clothes.
“What do you wish?” she said to him, seeing in him only a stranger, for his face was hidden; then as she looked at him a tremor ran through her; she started, and quivered a little.
“Who are you?” she said quickly and faintly; and before he could answer muttered to him, “Is this how you keep your word? — you are cruel!”
“For the love of God let me see you alone, let me speak one word,” he murmured, as he still kneeled on the frozen snow. “You are suffering? you are ill?”
She moved a little away, apart from the people who only saw in him the traveller they knew, and thought he sought some succour from the mistress of Szarisla. He followed her.
“You promised—” she said wearily, and then her voice sank.
“I promised,” he murmured, “an
d I had not strength to keep it; I will go away now that I have seen you. But you are ill, this country kills you, your people say so; it is you who are cruel.”
He could scarcely see her in the veils, and the heavy fur-lined robes that screened her from the cold; he could only see the delicate cheeks grown thin and wan, and the lustrous eyes that were so weary and so large.
“I am not ill; I am only weak,” she said, while her voice came with effort. “Oh, why did you come? It was cruel!”
She dropped her hood over her face; he heard her weeping — it was the first time he had ever seen her self-control broken.
“Why cruel?” he murmured. “Dear God! how can I bear it? You suffer; you suffer in health as well as in mind. What do you do with your life? — is it to perish here, buried in the snow like a frozen dove’s? He is a brute beast; what need to obey him? what need to be faithful — ?”
“Hush — hush! there has been sin enough to expiate. Let me live and die here. Go — go — go!”
Corrèze was silent. He gazed at her and loved her as he had never loved her or any other; and yet knew well that she was right. Nay, he thought almost better could he bear the endless night of perpetual separation than be the tempter to lead that fair life down into the devious ways of hidden intrigue, or out into the bald and garish glare of open adultery.
“O my love, my empress, my saint!” he murmured, as all his soul that yearned for her gazed from his aching eyes. “Long ago I said cursed be those who bring you the knowledge of evil. Others have brought it you; I will not bring more. I love you; yes; what of that? I have sung of love all my days, and I have sworn it to many, and I have been its slave often, too often; but my love for you is as unlike those passions as you are unlike the world. Yet you ask me to leave you here in the darkness of these ghastly winters; in the midst of an alien people that curse the name you bear; alone amidst every peril, surrounded by traitors and spies? Ask me any other thing; not that!”
“It must be that,” she said; her voice was below her breath, but it was firm.
“No, no — not that, not that!” he cried passionately; “any other thing; not that! Let me stay where I see the roof that shelters you. Let me stay where I breathe the same air as you breathe. Let me stay where, from a distance in the forests, I can watch your horses go by and see the golden gleam of your hair on the mists; I will perish to the world; I will be dead to men; I will come and live here as a hunter or a woodcutter, as a tiller of the fields — what you will; but let me live where I know all that befalls you, where I can be beside you if you need me, where I can kiss the wind as it blows, because in its course it touched your cheek—”
In all the strength of his passion, in all the melody of his voice, the eloquence that was as natural to him as song to a bird poured itself out in that prayer. Only to dwell near her — never to touch her hand, never to meet her eyes, but to be near her where she dwelt, in this land of frost, of silence, of darkness, of danger, of sorrow — that was all he asked. And all the tenderness that was in her, all the youth, all the womanhood, all the need of sympathy and affection that were in her longed to grant his prayer.
To have him remain within call; to feel that in that dark, lone, wintry desert his heart was beating and his courage was watching near her; to think that when the chill stars shone out of the midnight clouds they would shine on some lonely forest cabin where this one creature who loved her would be living in obscurity for her sake; — this was so sweet a thought she dared not look at it, lest her force should fail her. She gathered all her strength. She remembered all that his life was to him — so gay, so great, so full of love, and honour, and triumph, — would she be so weak, so wicked, in her selfishness as to take him from the world for her, to be his living grave, to make him bankrupt in genius, in art, in fame?
She thrust the temptation from her as though it were a coiling snake.
“You mean the thing you say,” she murmured faintly. “Yes; and I am grateful; but all that can never be. All you can do for me is — to leave me.”
“How can I leave you — leave you to die alone? What need — what use is there in such a waste of life? No! what you bid me do, I do. I will keep the word I gave you; if you tell me to go, I go, but for the pity of heaven, think first what it is you ask; think a little of what I suffer.”
“Have I not thought?”
She put her hands out feebly towards him.
“If you love me indeed, leave me; there is sin enough, shame enough, spare me more. If indeed you love me, be my good angel — not my tempter!”
He was pierced to the heart; he, the lover of so many women, knew well that moment in the lives of all women who love, and are loved, when they sink in a trance of ecstasy and pain, and yield without scarce knowing that they yield, and are as easily drawn downward to their doom as a boat into the whirlpool. He saw that this moment had come to her, as it comes to every woman into whose life has entered love. He saw that he might be the master of her fate and her.
For an instant the temptation seized him, like a flame that wrapped him in its fire from head to foot. But the appeal to his strength and to his pity called to him from out that mist and heat of passion and desire. All that was generous, that was chivalrous, that was heroic, in him, answered to the cry. All at once it seemed to him base — base, with the lowest sort of cowardice — to try and drag the pure and lofty spirit to earth, to try and make her one with the women she abhorred. He took her hands, and pressed them close against his aching heart.
“Better angels than I should be with you,” he murmured; “but at least I will try and save you from devils. No man’s love is fit for you.
I will go, and I will never return.”
He stooped, and with tremulous lips touched her hands; then once more he left her, and went away over the frozen snow.
CHAPTER IX.
Without pause Corrèze travelled straight to Paris.
He reached there late, and had barely time to dress and pass on to the stage.
It was the opera of “Romeo and Giulietta.”
He knew its music as a child knows its cradle-song.
He played, acted, and sang, from one end to the other of the long acts perfectly, but without any consciousness of what he did.
“I am the mechanical nightingale,” he thought, bitterly: the crowded opera-house swam before his eyes.
“Are you ill, Corrèze?” murmured the great songstress, who was his Juliet.
“I am cold,” he answered her. It seemed to him as if the cold of those bitter plains, which were the prison of Vere, and might be her tomb, had entered his blood and frozen his very heart.
When he went to his carriage the streets were lined with the throngs of a city that loved him. They pressed to see him, they shouted his name, they flung bouquets of flowers on to him; he was their Roi Soleil, their prince of song. He wondered was he mad, or were they? His voice felt strangled in his throat; he saw nothing of the lighted streets and the joyous multitude, he saw only the piteous eyes of the woman he loved as she had said to him —
“Be my angel, not my tempter!”
“I cannot be her angel,” he said to himself. “But I will try and save her from devils.”
In all his life before he had never been at a loss. He had never known before what doubt meant, or What hell it is in waiting to abide.
His victories had all been facile, his love had all been swift and smooth, his career had been a via triumphalis without shadow, he had been happy always, he had had romance in his life, but no grief, no loss, no regret; he had been the spoiled child of fate and of the world.
Now the fatal tenderness, the unavailing regret, which had been no darker than a summer cloud when he had passed away from the shores of Calvados, leaving the child, Vere Herbert, in her mothers hands, had now spread over all his present and hung over all the horizon of his future in a sunless gloom that nothing would ever break or lighten.
And he was powerless!
If he
could have acted in any way he would have been consoled. The elasticity and valour of his temperament would have leapt up to action like a bright sword from the scabbard. But he could do nothing. The woman he adored might perish slowly of those nameless maladies which kill the body through the mind; and he could do nothing.
He would not tempt her, and he could not avenge her.
He who knew the world so intimately, who had seen a million times a laugh, a hint, a word, destroy the honour of a name, knew well that he would but harm her more by any defence of her innocence, any protest against the tyranny of her husband.
Though he gave his life to defend her fair fame, the world would only laugh.
He drove through the brilliant streets of Paris at midnight, and shut his eyes to the familiar scenes with a heartsick weariness of pain. He loved cette bonne ville de Paris, which had smiled on him, played with him, pampered with him, as a mother her favourite child; which always lamented his departure when he left it, which always welcomed him with acclamation when he returned. He loved it with affection, with habit, with the strength of a thousand memories of his glory, of his pleasure, of his youth; yet as he drove through it, almost he cursed it; Paris sheltered the vices of Sergius Zouroff, and worshipped his wealth.
He entered the club of the Grand Circle after the opera. He wished to gather tidings of the husband of Vere and of what the world said of her in her exile.
In one of the rooms Zouroff was seated, his hat was on the table beside him; he was speaking with the Marquis de Merilhac. As Corrèze entered, Zouroff rose and put his hat on his head. “Let us go to a club where there are no comedians,” he said in a loud voice to Hervé de Merilhac, and went out. It was an insolence with intention; in the Ganaches men keep their heads uncovered.
All who were present looked at Corrèze. He took no notice. He spoke to his own acquaintances; the insult had no power to move him since he had so long kept his arm motionless, and his lips mute, for her sake.
Some men who knew him well and were curious, made a vague apology for the Russian Prince.