by Ouida
It had been written by a ready writer in the Rue Meyerbeer, but its biting irony, its merciless raillery, its gay incredulity, its sparkling venom, had been inspired from the retreat of Ruilhières.
Corrèze turned into Bignon’s, which he was passing, and read it sitting in the light of the great salon.
It would have hurt him less to have had a score of swords buried in his breast.
“If I avenge her I shall but darken her name more!” he thought, in that agony of impotence which is the bitterest suffering a bold and fervent temper can ever know.
At that moment Sergius Zouroff entered; he had both men and women with him. Amongst the women were a circus-rider of the Hippodrome, and the quadroon Casse-une-Croûte.
It was midnight.
Corrèze rose to his feet, at a bound, and approached the husband of Vere.
With a movement of his hand he showed him the article he had read.
“Prince Zouroff,” he said, between his teeth. “Will you chastise this as it merits, or do you leave it to me?”
Zouroff looked at him with a cold stare. He had already seen the paper. For the moment he was silent.
“I say,” repeated Corrèze, still between his teeth. “Do you avenge the honour of the Princess Zouroff? I ask you in public, that your answer may be public.”
“The honour of the Princess Zouroff!” echoed her husband, with a loud laugh. “Mais — c’est à vous, monsieur!”
Corrèze lifted his hand and struck him on the cheek.
“You are a liar, you are a coward, and you are an adulterer!” he said, in his clear, far-reaching voice, that rang like a bell through the silence of the assembled people; and he struck him three times as he spoke.
CHAPTER X.
To Szarisla, in the intense starlit cold of a winters night, a horseman, in hot-haste, brought a message that had been borne to the nearest city on the electric wires, and sent on by swift riders over many versts of snow and ice.
It was a message from Sergius Zouroff to his wife, and her women took it to her when she lay asleep; the troubled, weary sleep that comes at morning to those whose eyes have not closed all night.
It was but a few words.
It said only: “I have shot your nightingale in the throat. He will sing no more!”
She read the message.
For a few moments she knew nothing; a great darkness fell upon her and she saw nothing; it passed away, and the native courage and energy of her character came to life after their long paralysis.
She said no word to any living creature. She lay quite still upon her bed, her hand crushed upon the paper. She bade her women leave her, and they did so, though they were frightened at her look, and reluctant.
It was an hour past midnight.
When all was again still she arose, and clothed herself by the light of the burning lamp. No man can suffer from insult as a woman does who is at once proud and innocent. A man can avenge himself at all times, unless he be a poltroon indeed; but to a woman there is no vengeance possible that will not make her seem guiltier in the eyes of others, and more deeply lowered in her own. As Vere rose and bound her hair closely about her head, and clothed herself in the furs that were to shelter her against the frightful frost, all her veins were on fire with a consuming rage that for the moment almost burnt out the grief that came with it.
She had been made a public sport, a public shame, by her husband, who knew her innocent, and faithful, and in temptation untempted! She had been sacrificed in life, and peace, and name, and fame, to screen the adulterous guilt of another woman! All the courage in her waked up in sudden resurrection; all the haughty strength of her character revived under the unmerited scourge of insult.
They should not dishonour her in her absence. They should not lie without her protest and her presence. He who was also guiltless should not suffer alone. Perhaps already he was dead. She could not tell; she read the message of her husband as meaning death; she said to herself, “Living, I will console him; dead, I will avenge him.”
She drew the marriage-ring off her hand, and trampled it under her foot as Sergius Zouroff had trodden the Moth and the Star.
There is a time in all patience when it becomes weakness; a time in all endurance when it becomes cowardice; then with great natures patience breaks and becomes force, endurance rises, and changes into action.
She, proud as great queens are, and blameless as the saints of the ages of faith, had been made the sport of the tongues of the world; and he who had loved her as knights of old loved, in suffering and honour, was dead, or worse than dead.
The fearlessness of her temper leapt to act, as a lightning-flash springs from the storm-cloud to illumine the darkness. “I am not a coward,” she said with clenched teeth, while her eyes were dry. She prepared for a long and perilous journey. She put on all her fur-lined garments. She took some rolls of gold, and the papers that proved her identity as the wife of Prince Zouroff, and would enable her to pass the frontier into East Prussia. With these, holding the dog by the collar, she took a lamp in her hand and passed through the vast, dark, silent corridors, that were like the streets of a catacomb. There was no one stirring; the household slept the heavy sleep of brandy-drinkers. No one heard her step down the passages and staircase. She undid noiselessly the bolts and bars of a small side door and went out into the air. It was of a piercing coldness.
It was midwinter and past midnight. The whole landscape was white and frozen. The stars seemed to burn in the steel-hued sky. She went across the stone court to where the stables lay. She would rouse no one, for she knew that they would to a man obey their Prince and refuse to permit her departure without his written order. She went to the stalls of the horses. The grooms were all asleep. She led out the two that she had driven most often since her residence at Szarisla. Her childish training was of use to her now. She harnessed them. They knew her well and were docile to her touch, and she put them into the light, velvet-lined sledge in which she had been used to drive herself through the fir forests and over the plains.
Her feebleness and her feverishness had left her. She felt strong in the intense strength which comes to women in hours of great mental agony. Her slender hands had the force of a Hercules in them. She had driven so often through all the adjacent lands that the plains were as well known to her as the moors of Bulmer had been to her in her childhood. The sledge and the horses’ hoofs made no sound on the frozen snow. She entered the sledge, made the dog lie covered at her feet, and, with a world to the swift young horses, she drove them out of the gates and into the woods, between the aisles of birch and pine. The moonlight was strong; the moon was at the full. The blaze of northern lights made the air clear as day. She knew the road and took it unerringly. She drove all night long. No sense of mortal fear reached her. She seemed to herself frozen as the earth was. The howl of wolves came often on her ears in the ghastly solitude of the unending lines of dwarfish and storm-rift trees. At any moment some famished pack might scent her coming on the air and meet her, or pursue her, and then of her life there would be no more trace than some blood upon the snow, that fresher snow would in another hour obliterate. But she never thought of that. All she thought of was of the voice which for her was mute for ever.
When in the faint red of the sullen winter’s dawn she arrived at the first posting village with her horses drooping and exhausted, the postmaster was afraid to give her other horses to pass onward. She could show him no order from Prince Zouroff, but she had gold with her, and at length induced him to bring out fresh animals, leaving her own with him to be sent back on the morrow to Szarisla. The postmaster was terrified at what he had done, and shuddered at what might be his chastisement; but the gold had dazzled him. He gazed after her as the sledge flew over the white ground against the crimson glow of the daybreak and prayed for her to St. Nicholas.
Driving on and on, never pausing save to change her horses, never stopping either to eat or rest, taking a draught of tea and an atom of br
ead here and there at a posthouse, she at length reached the frontiers of East Prussia.
Corrèze lay on his bed in his house at Paris. Crowds, from princes and senators and marshals to workmen and beggars and street-arabs, came and asked for him, and the people stood in the street without, sorrowful and anxious. For the first news they had heard was that he would die; then they were told that the hemorrhage had ceased, that it was possible he might live, but that he would never sing again.
Paris heard, and wept for its darling — wept yet more for its own lost music.
The days and the weeks went on, and the first emotion and excitement waned in time. Then the Crown-Prince of Germany came into the city; there were feasts, reviews, illuminations. Paris, as she forgot her own wrongs, forgot her mute singer, lying in his darkened room; and the bouquets in his hall were faded and dead. No one left fresh ones. Only some score of poor people, amongst them a blind man and a little ugly girl, hung always, trembling and sobbing, about his doors, afraid lest their angel should unfold his wings and leave them for the skies.
Corrèze lay in his darkness, dumb.
He had been shot in the throat; he himself had fired in the air.
When he had fallen, with the blood filling his mouth, he had found voice to say to his adversary: “Your wife is faultless!”
Sergius Zouroff had looked down on him with a cold and fierce contentment.
“I have done you the honour to meet you, but I am not your dupe,” he had said, as he turned away: and yet in his soul he knew — knew as well as that the heavens were above him — that this man, whom he believed to be dying, spoke the truth.
They had met in the garden of the house of Corrèze. They had taken only their seconds with them. It had all been arranged and over by sunrise. Sergius Zouroff had hastened out of the city, and over the frontiers, to make his peace with his sovereign in his own country. Corrèze had been carried into his own house and laid in his own bedchamber. Their friends, according to the instructions given them previously, had sent to the newspapers of the hour a story of an accident that had occurred in playing with a pistol; but it had been soon suspected that this was but a cover to a hostile account, and rumours of the truth had soon run through Paris, where the scene at Bignon’s had been the sensation of the hour.
He lay now in the gloom and silence of his chamber. Sisters of charity were watching him: it was twilight there, though outside in Paris the sun was shining on multitudes of people and divisions of troops as the city flocked to a review in the Champ de Mars.
He could not speak; they would save his life, perhaps, but he knew that they could never save his voice.
As a singer he was dead.
All the joys of his art and all its powers were perished for evermore, all the triumph and the ecstasy of song were finished as a tale that was told; all the fame of his life and its splendour were snapped asunder in their prime and perfection, as a flower is broken off in full blossom.
“And I did her no good!” he thought; he had lost all and he had done nothing!
He was half delirious; his sight languidly recognised the familiar room about him, and watched the stray lines of sunshine glimmer through the shutters; but his mind was absorbed and full of dull feverish dreams; he thought now of St. Petersburg, with the rain of hothouse flowers on the ice in his nights of triumph, now of the Norman sunshine with the common roses blooming against the fence of furze, now of the bleak snow-plains of Szarisla. All was confused to him and showed like figures in a mist. Sometimes he thought that he was already dead, already in his tomb, and that about him the crowds of Paris were singing his own Noël. Sometimes he thought that he was in hell walking with Dante and with Virgil, and that devils tried to hold him down as he strove to cry aloud to Christ: “Lord, she is innocent!”
All the while he was mute; he could scarcely breathe, he could not speak.
Unconscious though they thought him, he heard them say around his bed: “he may speak again, perhaps, but he will never be able to sing a note.”
They thought him deaf as well as dumb. But he heard and understood.
In his fever and his suffering he said always in his heart: “If only she will think that I did well!”
Then he would grow delirious again and forget, and he fancied that he was called to sing to the people and that his mouth was closed with steel.
The wintry sunshine was brilliant and clear; it was in the afternoon; through the dusk of his room there came the distant sounds of trumpets, and the boom of the cannon of the Invalides. All else was still.
All Paris was interested with the pleasure of a spectacle; the streets were deserted, the houses were emptied, all the city was in the Champ de Mars, and on the cold clear air bursts of distant sounds from clashing cymbals and rolling drums came into the chamber of Corrèze, whom Paris had forgotten.
At the Gare de l’Est with other travellers at that moment, there descended from a sleeping-carriage a woman clothed in furs, and with a dog in a leash beside her.
She walked quickly, and with a haughty movement across the crowded waiting-room; she was alone except for her dog. Her face was very white, her eyes seemed to burn as the stars did in the Polish frost. She was praying with all the might of prayer in her soul.
She might be too late to see him living; too late to tell him that she loved him; she, for whose sake, and in whose defence, he had found death, or worse than death!
All the courage, all the fearlessness, all the generosity, of her soul had leaped up into life and movement; she had ceased to remember herself or the world, she only prayed to heaven, “Grant him his life! his beautiful life, that is like sunlight upon earth!”
She had come across the middle of Europe in the winter weather, over the snow plains and the frozen rivers, unaided, unaccompanied, making no pause, taking no rest either by night or day, as she had come through Poland.
She descended into the noise and dirt of the streets; she who had never been a yard on foot, or unattended, in a city The movement around her seemed to her ghastly and horrible. Could he lie dying, and the city he loved not be still and stricken a moment?
She mingled with the crowds and was soon lost in them, she who had always gone through Paris with pomp and splendour; she at whose loveliness the mob had always turned to look; she who had been the Princess Zouroff.
The day was drawing to its close; the troops were returning, the multitudes were shouting. In his darkened room Corrèze, disturbed and distressed by the sounds, moved wearily and sighed.
The door of his chamber opened and Vere entered.
She threw her furs and coverings off her as she moved and came to the sisters of charity. The lassitude, the weakness, the sickness which had weighed on her, and suffocated her youth in her, were gone; there was a great anguish in her eyes, but she moved with her old free, proud grace, she bore herself with the courage of one whose resolve is taken and whose peace is made.
“I am the woman for whom he fought,” she said to the nuns. “My place is with you.”
Then she went to the side of his bed and kneeled there.
“It is I,” she said in a low voice.
From the misty darkness of pain and delirium his senses struggled into life; his eyes unclosed and rested on her face, and had such glory in them as shone in the eyes of martyrs who saw the saints descend to them.
He could not speak, he could only gaze at her.
She bent her proud head lower and lower and touched his hand with hers.
“You have lost all for me. If it comfort you — I am here!”
CHAPTER XI.
In the heart of the Alps of the Valais there lies a little lake, nameless to the world but beautiful; green meadows and woods of pine and beech encircle it, and above it rise the snow mountains, the glory nearest heaven that earth knows.
A road winds down between the hills to Sion but it is seldom traversed; the air is pure and clear as crystal, strong as wine; brooks and torrents tumble through a wilderness
of ferns, the cattle-maiden sings on the high grass slopes, the fresh-water fisherman answers the song from his boat on the lake, deep down below and darkly green as emeralds are.
The singer, who is mute to the world for ever, listens to the song without pain, for he is happy.
His home is here, above the shadowy water, facing the grand amphitheatre of ice and snow, that at daybreak and at sunset flash like the rose, glow like the fires of a high altar. It is an old house built to resist all storms, yet open for the sun and summer. Simple, yet noble, with treasure of art and graces of colour, and the gifts of kings, and emperors, and cities, given in those years that are gone for ever to Corrèze. The waters wash its walls, the pine-woods shelter it from the winds, its terraces face the Alps.
Here, when the world is remembered, it seems but a confused and foolish dream, a fretting fever, a madness of disordered minds and carking discontent. What is the world beside Nature, and a love that scarcely even fears death since it believes itself to be immortal.
He leans over the stone balustrade of his terrace and watches the rose-leaves, shaken off by the wind, drop down into the green water far below, and float there like pink shells. On a marble table by him there he some pages of written music, the score of an opera, with which he hopes to achieve a second fame in the kingdom of music which knows him no more. A great genius can never altogether rest without creation, and he is yet young enough to win the ivy-crown twice over in his life.
In the sunset light a woman, with a dog beside her, comes out on to the terrace. She is clothed in white, her face has regained its early loveliness, her eyes have a serious sweet luminance; on her life there will be always the sadness of a noble nature that has borne the burden of others’ sins, of a grand temper that has known the bitterness of calumny, and has given back an unjust scorn with a scorn just and severe; those shadows all the tenderness, the reverence, the religious homage of a man’s surpassing love can never wholly banish from her.