by Ouida
She put the letters down, one on another, and her face had a great blankness of horror on it. Like Yseulte, this child had died for him, through her.
She shuddered as with cold in the warm fragrant air of her room, and large tears sprang into her eyes.
She could not doubt now.
She locked her doors, and no one entered there for an hour.
CHAPTER LIV.
When that time had passed she descended the grand staircase and joined her friends in the conservatories; the tea roses renewed in the white velvet of her corsage, the great pearls lying on her white soft breast. No one was aware of anything changed in her manner or aspect. Twice or thrice she looked nervously at the doors; that was all; she was afraid of seeing her husband enter.
When he came she looked away from him, and Blanche de Laon, who was near her, saw a certain tremor on her lips, and thought with victorious pleasure, though uncertain of the cause: Ça vous blesse, hein? Ça vous blesse?
At the long dinner she was somewhat silent and absorbed, but her world was used to her caprices, and knew that she was seldom pleased long. Men endeavoured all the more to amuse her. They thought that they succeeded. They did not know that instead of the brilliant room, the faces of her friends, the flowers and fruits of the table, and the frescoes of the walls, she only saw a little low dark chamber with a girl dying miserably in it, like a strangled dog, as the moon rose.
She had never believed in sacrifice or in remorse, or if forced to believe in them she had said with disdain, ‘What melodrama!’ But she believed now.
Shame and remorse approached the delicate hauteur of her life and touched it for the first time. What she had thought so low had humbled her.
The dinner seemed very long to her, the evening slow to pass; the burden of the world can be at times as heavy as the travail of the poor; there were the usual pastimes, and wit, and gaiety; Paul of Lemberg was there, and the ineffable sweetness of his music thrilled through the flower-scented air; people laughed low, and played high, and made love in shadowy corners; it was all pretty, and graceful, and amusing. But she, amidst it all, only heard a voice which cried to her:
‘Why will you not believe?’
She only saw a grave made in dark wet earth, and a girl’s body thrust into it in cruel haste, and sods thrown in one on another on the lifeless limbs, the dull hair, the disfigured throat; it was horrible — horrible! Why had she not left her alone in the gay sunshine, under the orange trees, by the blue water?
With all the pressure and the distraction of society upon her she was endlessly pursued by the self-accusation which had been brought to her by those simple lines traced by a dying child.
A consciousness of the supreme good fortune with which fate had always lightened her own life, came to her, for the first time, with a sense of unworthiness and ingratitude in herself. A consciousness of the greatness of the gifts she had received, and of the little she had given in return, smote her heart with a vague repentance and a vague fear. What had she done with all those lives which had been put into her hands, with all the loyalty and the devotion which had been spent on her oftentimes, without receiving from her even a passing pity in recognition of it? Would not life tire one day of blessing her, when she gave no benediction in return?
She had always cared so little, she had been always so indifferent and so dissatisfied. Would fate not strike her with a rough, wild justice, if it took from her her children, her husband, her intellect, her fortune, her beauty? Would not destiny be only fair and honest if it forced her on her knees beside some death-bed of some creature well-beloved, and said to her: —
‘You have never been content in happiness; henceforward you shall dwell with sorrow.’
Fear touched her for the sole time in her victorious and indifferent life; she was afraid lest one day she should stand alone with only the graves of what had been once dear to her as her companions and her friends: one day when youth and power and beauty and wit would all be gone from her: —— like the great sovereigns of the world, she shuddered to remember that she was mortal.
With all her philosophy and epigram, she had discoursed full many a time of the only cruel certainty life holds: the certainty that tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe. She had played with the dread problems which Time, the merciless master of the highest, sets before all his scholars with no solution to them possible to the clearest brains. And whilst she had toyed with their subtleties, this child had had the courage to cut the knot and pass away for ever to the eternal night of nothingness!
Some perception of the utter selfishness of her whole existence smote her as she sat alone in the stillness of the after-midnight hours.
These children dwarfed her in her own sight. They had been mere children, both of them, foolish, romantic, unwise, exaggerated: but they had been in a way sublime. And he had loved neither of them. He had only loved her who had left his heart empty, his affections cold, his life dissatisfied and solitary.
For the first time since she had thought at all, a passionate repentance and regret came on her; a sense of her own cruelty weighed heavily upon her. Why had she not been more tolerant, more merciful, more willing to acknowledge that innocence and generosity of which she had been so unwillingly conscious all the while that Damaris Bérarde had stood before her? Why had she not been guided by that serenity and tolerance of judgment on which she had so long prided herself; why had she crushed to the earth with the weight of her scorn, and her rank, and her place as his wife, this lonely creature who had loved him so humbly, so silently, so perfectly?
There was a greatness in her own nature, obscured as it was by the languors of self-love and the vanities of the world, which forced her to recognise the greatness of the simple words sent to her. She herself, in her anger, in her incredulity, in her cruelty, seemed to her own eyes very poor beside them. She had judged as the common herd always judged: coarsely, superficially, brutally. No better.
She was humbled in her own eyes. The sentimentalists had conquered throughout, they had been greater than she!
Poor Mignon, with her heart breaking in a love which she dared not avow, which no one wanted!
A few kind words might have saved her; might have healed the bruised child’s heart and made it strong for the burden of life; and she had not spoken those words.
If she had read this story in a book of poems, if she had seen it unfolded on the scene of a pastoral as of an opera, it would have touched her; but as it had been in real life she had not cared; because the living, throbbing, aching nerves had been alive before her she had not cared; she had turned away, and had left them to bleed to death as they would — as they might.
A sense of guilt was upon her. She felt as though she had killed some humble, wounded animal which had crept to her feet for safety. She had always declared that genius was sacred to her; and now she had dealt with it as a mere common noxious thing, and driven it away from her to perish.
‘And we are such wretched shallow egotists,’ she thought. ‘I grieve for her now, and I know that she has been greater than I shall ever be, and I know that we have killed her — he and I and the world which had no place for her; and yet how often shall I remember her, how often shall I be gentler to others for her sake? — once or twice, whilst the memory of her is warm perhaps — no more; one has no time.’
Rosselin would remember every hour of all such few days as might remain to him on earth; but no one else.
‘Oh, foolish child,’ she thought, ‘to die for that! Why not have lived, and reigned over the souls of men, and put a curb on the slavering mouth of the fawning world! It is never worth an hour of sacrifice.’
Yet all overwrought, unwise, useless, as such sacrifice was, it had a nobility in it which awed her, and a generosity which made her own egotism seem poor and pale beside it.
‘Make him happier.’
The unselfish prayer of the dead girl touched her conscience and her heart as no rebuke would ever have done. She had the
power to do so still; that she did not doubt. He was hers in every way if she chose to stretch her hand out to him.
A sense of the infinite patience, and fidelity, and devotion of the great love which he had always borne her from the first hour his eyes had met hers came to her with the force of a reproach from the grave itself. His submission to her caprices, his constancy under her neglect, his instant response to the faintest kindness from her, his unchangeable tenderness which outlived the many mortal wounds she dealt to it; all these came to her memory with a sense of her own debt to them, of their own sweetness and patience, and long suffering. In him she could if she chose find a friend, whom no fault of hers would alienate, and no passing of time make weary. She had had too much love given to her in her life; she saw that she had been too careless of this, the greatest gift life holds: and death had come too often where she passed.
The chill of its ghastly presence seemed with her as she moved through the silent house in the still small hours. This child had had force in her youth to seek death, but she feared it: she who had feared nothing on earth or in heaven.
When all the guests were gone to their chambers, and the great house was still, she did what she had never once done in the years of their marriage: she went to seek Othmar instead of sending her women to summon him. She had on her pale rose satin chamber-gown, and even in that moment, with an impulse of care for her person and its charms, a coquetry which would never cease in her whilst she had breath, she paused a moment before one of the mirrors, and glanced lingeringly at her own reflection, and put some fresh roses in her bosom. Had she been on her way to the scaffold she would have done the same: had the same remembrance of her own power to charm.
As she passed one of the great windows of the hall, she looked at the night without. The moon, which rose late, being on its decline, poured its whole light over the gardens and the forests beyond. A white owl flew through the clear air; the shadow of the great palace fell black over the silvered grass, distant bells for daybreak prayer were ringing very far away over the hushed country.
And the night before, ‘as the moon rose,’ Damaris Bérarde had died in her narrow chamber, in all her beauty and strength, in all the height of her dreams and hopes, in all the vigorous promise of life which had been as full and as fair in her as was now the promise of spring in the woods: and these were all gone for ever and for ever, the body laid in the earth to perish, and the tender and valiant soul passed away like a dew that dries up before the heats of the noonday.
‘Heaven spare such death to you and yours!’
She remembered the words with the first sense of terror her nature had ever known. They seemed less like a prayer for good than like a menace of evil. She thought of the fair lives of her children: not fairer than had been this other young life which she had first seen under the starry orange flowers above the edge of the sea.
Why could she not have left her alone?
She passed through the length of the quiet building to her husband’s rooms. He was writing at a writing-table with his back turned to her, and did not raise his head at the sound of the unclosing door.
But as the sweet rose-scent came towards him on the air, a consciousness of her presence came with it: he started violently and rose to his feet. He was very pale as he bowed low before her, then stood waiting for her to speak. She was silent some moments.
To her temper so imperious, so arrogant, so indifferent, to praise or blame, it was not without great effort that she could say what she had come to say.
A strong emotion moved her. She had never believed it possible for her conscience to pain her, for her heart to ache with self-reproach, as they did now.
‘Make him happier.’
The childish words haunted her. After all, what had she ever given him in return for the supreme devotion of his life? A few hours of physical ecstasy; and years of indifference, mockery, and neglect.
‘Make him happier.’
To her critical intelligence and satiated mind, happiness in such simple reading of the word could not exist; it needed faith, it needed ignorance, it needed youth; it is never possible to those whose passions demand what nothing mortal can satisfy. Yet some reparation she knew she might still give to him; some gentleness, some sympathy, some response. These children who had loved him so well should not have died wholly in vain.
She leaned towards him, and the fragrance of the roses in her breast swept with dreamy sweetness over him.
‘I came to ask your pardon,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I wronged you, I insulted you — —’
He bowed low, and his lips, as they touched her hand, were very cold.
‘Pardon is no word between you and me,’ he said wearily. ‘How could you doubt me? Had I ever lied to you, or to anyone?’
‘No: I was wrong.’
Her proud mouth trembled.
‘How much or how little shall I tell him?’ she thought; ‘men are such children!’
He looked at her with hesitation; and a great and sudden joy touched his life.
‘Do you love me at all, then?’ he said with wonder and with doubt.
She smiled a little: her old slight mysterious smile!
‘I suppose so — since I doubted you. Love is always blind!’
Toxin
CONTENTS
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
The original frontispiece
I.
OH! my necklace!” cried a fair woman as she leaned over the side of her gondola.
A string of opals, linked and set in gold, had been loosened from her throat, and had slid down into the water of the lagoon, midway between the Lido and the city of Venice. But the gondola was moving swiftly under the impulsion of a rower fore and aft, and, though they stopped a few moments after at her cry, the spot where it had fallen was already passed and left behind. She was vexed and provoked. She had many jewels, but the opal necklace was an heirloom, and of fine and curious workmanship. The gondoliers did their best to find it, but in vain. They were in the deeper water of the sailing roads, which were marked out by the lines of poles, and the necklace, a slight thing, had been borne away by the current setting in from the open sea.
It was a pale afternoon in late summer; the heat was still great; the skies and the waters were of the same soft, dreamy, silvery hue, and the same transparency and ethereality were on the distant horizons of the hills, west and east. The only colour there was came from the ruddy painted sails of some fruit-laden market boats which were passing to leeward.
Neither of the men could swim; many Venetians cannot; but they got over the side, and waded up to their waists in the water, and with their oars struck and sounded the sandy bottom, whilst she encouraged them with praise and extravagant promise of reward. Their efforts were of no avail. The lagoon, which has been the grave of so many, kept the drowned opals.
“We will go back and send divers,” she said to her men who, wet to their waists, were well content to turn the head of the gondola back to the city.
They wore white clothes with red sashes and red ribbons round their straw hats; they were in her private service; they steered quickly home again over the calm water-way, and in and out the crowded craft by the Schiavone past the Customs House, and S.
Giorgio, and the Salvatore, until they reached a palace on the Grand Canal, which was their mistress’s residence, with poles painted red and white, with coronets on their tops, marking the landing stairs in the old Venetian fashion.
“I have lost my opals in the water!” she cried to a friend who was on one of the balconies of the first floor.
“I am glad you have lost them,” replied her friend. “They are stones of misfortune.”
“Nonsense! They were beautiful, and t
hey were Ninetta Zaranegra’s, poor Carlo’s great-great-grandmother; they were one of her nuptial presents a hundred and twenty years ago. I must have the men dive and dredge till they are found. The water is so shallow. I cannot think how the collar can have vanished so completely in such a moment of time.”
She ascended her palace steps, and dismissed her gondoliers with a gesture, as she paused in the entrance-hall to tell her major-domo of her loss, and consult him as to the best means to recover the necklace. The hall was painted in fresco, with beautiful Moorish windows, and a groined and gilded ceiling, and a wide staircase of white marble, uncarpeted. Opposite the entrance was a latticed door through which was seen the bright green of acacias, cratægus, and laurel growing in a garden.