Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  And the Cantab took himself off, congratulating himself on the adroit manner in which he had cut the Gordian knot that the General had muddled up so inexplicably in his unpropitious match-making.

  Keane lay back in his chair some minutes, very still; then he rose to dine in hall, pushing away his books and papers, as if throwing aside with them a dull and heavy weight. The robins sang in the leafless backs, the sun shone out on the sloppy streets; the youth he thought gone for ever was come back to him. Oh, strange stale story of Hercules and Omphale, old as the hills, and as eternal! Hercules goes on in his strength slaying his hydra and his Laomedon for many years, but he comes at last, whether he like it or not, to his Omphale, at whose feet he is content to sit and spin long golden threads of pleasure and of passion, while his lion’s skin is motheaten and his club rots away.

  Little Fay sat curled up on the study hearth-rug, reading a book her late guest had left behind him — a very light and entertaining volume, being Delolme “On the Constitution,” but which she preferred, I suppose, to “What Will He Do With It?” or the “Feuilles d’Automne,” for the sake of that clear autograph, “Gerald Keane, King’s Coll.,” on its fly-leaf. A pretty picture she made, with her handsome spaniels; and she was so intent on what she was reading — the fly-leaf, by the way — that she never heard the opening of the door, till a hand drew away her book. Then Fay started up, oversetting the puppies one over another, radiant and breathless.

  Keane took her hands and drew her near him.

  “You do not hate me now, then?”

  Fay put her head on one side with her old wilfulness.

  “Yes, I do — when you go away without any notice, and hardly bid me good-bye. You would not have left one of your men pupils so unceremoniously.”

  Keane smiled involuntarily, and drew her closer.

  “If you do not hate me, will you go a step farther — and love me? Little Fay, my own darling, will you come and brighten my life? It has been a saddened and a stern one, but it shall never throw a shade on yours.”

  The wild little filly was conquered — at last, she came to hand docile and subdued, and acknowledged her master. She loved him, and told him so with that frankness and fondness which would have covered faults far more glaring and weighty than Little Fay’s.

  “But you must never be afraid of me,” whispered Keane, some time after.

  “Oh, no!”

  “And you do not wish Sydie had never brought me here to make you all uncomfortable?”

  “Oh, please don’t!” cried Fay, plaintively. “I was a child then, and I did not know what I said.”

  “‘Then,’ being three months ago, may I ask what you are now?”

  “A child still in knowledge, but your child,” whispered Fay, lifting her face to his, “to be petted and spoiled, and never found fault with, remember!”

  “My little darling, who would have the heart to find fault with you, whatever your sins?”

  “God bless my soul, what’s this?” cried a voice in the doorway.

  There stood the General in wide-awake and shooting-coat, with a spade in one hand and a watering-pot in the other, too astonished to keep his amazement to himself. Fay would fain have turned and fled, but Keane smiled, kept one arm round her, and stretched out his hand to the governor.

  “General, I came once uninvited, and I am come again. Will you forgive me? I have a great deal to say to you, but I must ask you one question first of all. Will you give me your treasure?”

  “Eh! humph! What? Well — I suppose — yes,” ejaculated the General, breathless from the combined effects of amazement and excessive and vehement gardening. “But, bless my soul, Keane, I should as soon have thought of one of the stone cherubs, or that bronze Milton. Never mind, one lives and learns. Mind? Devil take me, what am I talking about? I don’t mind at all; I’m very happy, only I’d set my heart on — you know what. More fool I. Fay, you little imp, come here. Are you fairly broken in by Keane, then?”

  “Yes,” said Miss Fay, with her old mischief, but a new blush, “as he has promised never to use the curb.”

  “God bless you, then, my little pet,” cried the General, kissing her some fifty times. Then he laughed till he cried, and dried his eyes and laughed again, and grunted, and growled, and shook both Keane’s hands vehemently. “I was a great fool, sir, and I dare say you’ve managed much better. I did set my heart on the boy, you know, but it can’t be helped now, and I don’t wish it should. Be kind to her, that’s all; for though she mayn’t bear the curb, the whip from anybody she cares about would break her heart. She’s a dear child, Keane — a very dear child. Be kind to her, that’s all.”

  On the evening of January 13th, beginning the Lent Term, Mr. Sydenham Morton sat in his own rooms with half a dozen spirits like himself, a delicious aroma surrounding them of Maryland and rum-punch, and a rapid flow of talk making its way through the dense atmosphere.

  “To think of Granite Keane being caught!” shouted one young fellow. “I should as soon have thought of the Pyramids walking over to the Sphinx, and marrying her.”

  “Poor devil! I pity him,” sneered Henley of Trinity, aged nineteen.

  “He don’t require much pity, my dear fellow; I think he’s pretty comfortable,” rejoined Sydie. “He did, to be sure, when he was trying to beat sense into your brain-box, but that’s over for the present.”

  “Come, tell us about the wedding,” said Somerset of King’s. “I was sorry I couldn’t go down.”

  “Well,” began Sydie, stretching his legs and putting down his pipe, “she — the she was dressed in white tulle and — —”

  “Bother the dress. Go ahead!”

  “The dress was no bother, it was the one subject in life to the women. You must listen to the dress, because I asked the prettiest girl there for the description of it to enlighten your minds, and it was harder to learn than six books of Horace. The bridesmaids wore tarlatane à la Princesse Stéphanie, trois jupes bouillonnées, jupe desous de soie glacée, guirlandes couleur dea yeux impériaux d’Eugénie, corsets décolletés garnis de ruches de ruban du — —”

  “For Heaven’s sake, hold your tongue!” cried Somerset. “That jargon’s worse than the Yahoos’. The dead languages are bad enough to learn, but women’s living language of fashion is ten hundred times worse. The twelve girls were dressed in blue and white, and thought themselves angels — we understand. Cut along.”

  “Gunter was prime,” continued Sydie, “and the governor was prime, too — splendid old buck; only when he gave her away he was very near saying, ‘Devil take it!’ which might have had a novel, but hardly a solemn, effect. Little Fay was delightful — for all the world like a bit of incarnated sunshine. Keane was granite all over, except his eyes, and they were lava; if we hadn’t, for our own preservation, let him put her in a carriage and started ’em off, he might have become dangerous, after the manner of Etna, ice outside and red-hot coals within. The bridesmaids tears must have washed the church for a week, and made it rather a damp affair. One would scarcely think women were so anxious to marry, to judge from the amount of grief they get up at a friend’s sacrifice. It looks uncommonly like envy; but it isn’t, we’re sure! The ball was like most other balls: alternate waltzing and flirtation, a vast lot of nonsense talked, and a vast lot of champagne drunk — Cupid running about in every direction, and a tremendous run on all the amatory poets — Browning and Tennyson being worked as hard as cab-horses, and used up pretty much as those quadrupeds — dandies suffering self-inflicted torture from tight boots, and saying, like Cranmer, when he held his hand in the fire, that it was rather agreeable than otherwise, considering it drew admiration — spurs getting entangled in ladies’ dresses, and ladies making use thereof for a display of amiability, which the dragoons are very much mistaken if they fancied continued into private life — girls believing all the pretty things said to them — men going home and laughing at them all — wallflowers very black, women engaged ten deep very sunshiny —
the governor very glorious, and my noble self very fascinating. And now,” said Sydie, taking up his pipe, “pass the punch, old boy, and never say I can’t talk!”

  THE STORY OF A CRAYON-HEAD;

  OR,

  A DOUBLED-DOWN LEAF IN A MAN’S LIFE.

  I was dining with a friend, in his house on the Lung’ Arno (he fills, never mind what, post in the British Legation), where I was passing an autumn month. The night was oppressively hot; a still, sultry sky brooded over the city, and the stars shining out from a purple mist on to the Campanile near, and the slopes of Bellosguardo in the distance. It was intensely hot; not all the iced wines on his table could remove the oppressive warmth of the evening air, which made both him and me think of evenings we had spent together in the voluptuous lassitude of the East, in days gone by, when we had travelled there, fresh to life, to new impressions, to all that gives “greenness to the grass, and glory to the flower.”

  The Arno ran on under its bridge, and we leaned out of the balcony where we were sitting and smoking, while I tossed over, without thinking much of what I was doing, a portfolio of his sketches. Position has lost for art many good artists since Sir George Beaumont: my friend is one of them; his sketches are masterly; and had he been a vagrant Bohemian instead of an English peer, there might have been pictures on the walls of the R. A. to console one for the meretricious daubs and pet vulgarities of nursery episodes, hideous babies, and third-class carriage interiors, which make one’s accustomed annual visit to the rooms that once saw the beauties of Reynolds, and Wilson, and Lawrence, a positive martyrdom to anybody of decent refinement and educated taste. The portfolio stood near me, and I took out a sketch or two now and then between the pauses of our conversation, looking lazily up the river, while the moonlight shone on Dante’s city, that so long forgot, and has, so late, remembered him.

  “Ah! what a pretty face this is! Who’s the original?” I asked him, drawing out a female head, done with great finish in pastel, under which was written, in his own hand, “Florelle.” It was a face of great beauty, with a low Greek brow and bronze-dark hair, and those large, soft, liquid eyes that you only see in a Southern, and that looked at you from the sketch with an earnest, wistful regard, half childlike, half impassioned. He looked up, glanced at the sketch, and stretched out his hand hastily, but I held it away from him. “I want to look at it; it is a beautiful head; I wish we had the original here now. Who is she?”

  As I spoke — holding the sketch up where the light from the room within fell on what I had no doubt was a likeness of some fair face that had beguiled his time in days gone by, a souvenir of one of his loves more lasting than souvenirs of such episodes in one’s life often are, if merely trusted to that inconstant capricieuse, Memory, — I might have hit him with a bullet rather than asked him about a mere etude à deux crayons, for he shuddered, and drank off some white Hermitage quickly.

  “I had forgotten that was in the portfolio,” he said, hurriedly, as he took it from me and put it behind him, with its face against the wall, as though it had been the sketch of a Medusa.

  “What do you take it away for? I had not half done looking at it. Who is the original?”

  “One I don’t care to mention.”

  “Because?”

  “Because the sight of that picture gives me a twinge of what I ought to be hardened against — regret.”

  “Regret! Is any woman worth that?”

  “She was.”

  “I don’t believe it; and I fancied you and I thought alike on such points. Of all the women for whom we feel twinges of conscience or self-reproach in melancholy moments, how many loved us? Moralists and poets sentimentalize over it, and make it a stalking-horse whereby to magnify our sins and consign us more utterly to perdition, while they do for themselves a little bit of poetic morality cheaply; but in reality there are uncommonly few women who can love, to begin with, and in the second, vanity, avarice, jealousy, desires for pretty toilettes, one or other, or all combined, have quite as much to do with their ‘sacrifice’ for us as anything.”

  “Quite true; but — there are women and women, perhaps, and it was not of that sort of regret that I spoke.”

  “Of what sort, then?”

  He made me no reply: he broke the ash off his Manilla, and smoked silently some moments, leaning over the balcony and watching the monotonous flow of the Arno, with deeper gloom on his face than I remembered to have seen there any time before. I was sorry I had chanced to light upon a sketch that had brought him back such painful recollections of whatever kind they might be, and I smoked too, sending the perfumed tobacco out into the still sultry night that was brooding over Florence.

  “Of what sort?” said he, abruptly, after some minutes’ pause. “Shall I tell you? Then you can tell me whether I was a fool who made one grand mistake, or a sensible man of the world who kept himself from a grand folly. I have been often in doubt myself.”

  He leaned back, his face in shadow, so that I could not see it, while the Arno’s ebb and flow was making mournful river-music under our windows, — while the purple glories of the summer night deepened round Giotto’s Tower, where, in centuries past, the Immortal of Florence had sat dreaming of the Paradiso, the mortals passing by whispering him as “the man who had seen hell,” and the light within the room shone on the olives and grapes, the cut-glass and silver claret-jugs, the crimson Montepulciano and the white Hermitage, on the table, as he told me the story of the head in crayons.

  “Two years ago I went into the south of France. I was chargé d’Affaires at —— then, you remember, and the climate had told upon me. I was not over-well, and somebody recommended me the waters of Eaux Bonnes. The waters I put little faith in, but in the air of the Pyrenees, in the change from diplomacy to a life en rase campagne, I put much, and I went to Eaux Bonnes accordingly, for July and August, with a vow to forswear any society I might find at the baths — I had had only too much of society as it was — and to spend my days in the mountains with my sketching-block and my gun. But I did not like Eaux Bonnes; it was intensely warm. There were several people who knew me really; no end of others who got hold of my name, and wanted me to join their riding-parties, and balls, and picnics. That was not what I wanted, so I left the place and went on to Luz, hoping to find solitude there. That valley of Luz — you know it? — is it not as lovely as any artist’s dream of Arcadia, in the evening, when the sunset light has passed off the meadows and corn-lands of the lower valley, and just lingers golden and rosy on the crests of the mountains, while the glow-worms are coming out among the grasses, and the lights are being lit in the little homesteads nestling among their orchards one above another on the hill-sides, and its hundred streams are rushing down the mountains and under the trees, foaming, and tumbling, and rejoicing on their way! When I have had my fill of ambition and of pleasure, I shall go and live at Luz, I think.

  “When! Well! you are quite right to repeat it ironically; that time will never come, I dare say, and why should it? I am not the stuff to cogitate away my years in country solitudes. If prizes are worth winning, they are worth working for till one’s death; a man should never give up the field while he has life left in him. Well! I went to Luz, and spent a pleasant week or so there, knocking over a few chamois or izards, or sketching on the sides of the Pic du Midi, or Tourmalet, but chiefly lying about under the great beech-trees in the shade, listening to the tinkle of the sheep-bells, like an idle fellow, as I meant to be for the time I had allotted myself. One day — —”

  He stopped and blew some whiffs from his Manilla into the air. He seemed to linger over the prelude to his story, and shrink from going on with the story itself, I thought; and he smothered a sigh as he raised himself.

  “How warm the night is; we shall have a tempest. Reach me that wine, there’s a good fellow. No, not the Amontillado, the Château Margaux, please; one can’t drink hot dry wines such a night as this. But to satisfy your curiosity about this crayon study. — One day I thought I would
go to Gavarnie. I had heard a good deal, of course, about the great marble wall, and the mighty waterfalls, the rocks of Marboré, and the Brêche de Roland, but, as it chanced, I had never been up to the Cercle, nor, indeed, in that part of the Midi at all, so I went. The gods favored me, I remember; there were no mists, the sun was brilliant, and the great amphitheatre was for once unobscured; the white marble flashing brown and purple, rose and golden, in the light; the cascades tumbling and leaping down into the gigantic basin; the vast plains of snow glittering in the sunshine; the twin rocks standing in the clear air, straight and fluted as any two Corinthian columns hewn and chiselled by man. Good Heaven! before a scene like Gavarnie, what true artist must not fling away his colors and his brushes in despair and disgust with his own puerility and impotence? What can be transferred to canvas of such a scene as that? What does the best beauty of Claude, the grandest sublimity of Salvator, the greatest power of Poussin, look beside Nature when she reigns as she reigns at Gavarnie? I am an art worshipper, as you know: but there are times in my life, places on earth, that make me ready to renounce art for ever!

  “The day was beautiful, and thinking I knew the country pretty well, I took no guides. I hate them when I can possibly dispense with them. But the mist soon swooped down over the Cercle, and I began to wish I had had one when I turned my horse’s head back again. You know the route, of course? Through the Chaos — Heaven knows it is deserving of its name; — down the break-neck little bridle-path, along the Gave, and over the Scia bridge to St. Sauveur. You know it? Then you know that it is much easier to break your neck down it than to find your way by it, though by some hazard I did not break my neck, nor the animal’s knees either, but managed to get over the bridge without falling into the torrent, and to pick my way safely down into more level ground; once there, I thought I should easily enough find my way to St. Sauveur, but I was mistaken: the mists had spread over the valley, a heavy storm had come up, and, somehow or other, I lost the way, and could not tell where I was, whether St. Sauveur was to the left or the right, behind me or in front of me. The horse, a miserable little Pyrenean beast, was too frightened by the lightning to take the matter into his hands as he had done on the road through the Chaos, and I saw nothing for it but to surrender and come to grief in any way the elements best pleased; swearing at myself for not having stayed at the inn at Gavarnie or Gedre; wishing myself at the vilest mountain auberge that ever sheltered men and mules pêle-mêle; and calling myself hard names for not having listened to my landlady’s dissuasions of that morning as I left her door, from my project of going to Gavarnie without a guide, which seemed to her the acme of all she had ever known or heard of English strangers’ fooleries. The storm only increased, the great black rocks echoing the roll of the thunder, and the Gave lashing itself into fury in its narrow bed; happily I was on decently level ground, and the horse being, I suppose, tolerably used to storms like it, I pushed him on at last, by dint of blows and conjurations combined, to where, in the flashes of the lightning, I saw what looked to me like the outline of a homestead: it stood in a cleft between two shelving sides of rock, and a narrow bridle-path led up to it, through high yews and a tangled wilderness of rhododendrons, boxwood, and birch — one of those green slopes so common in the Pyrenees, that look in full sunlight doubly bright and Arcadian-like, from the contrast of the dark, bare, perpendicular rocks that shut them in. I could see but little of its beauty then in the fog that shrouded both it and me, but I saw the shape and semblance of a house, and urging the horse up the ascent, thundered on its gate-panels with my whip-handle till the rocks round echoed.