by Ouida
The Priest of Languedoc watched her, the relentless fangs of passion gnawing his heart, as the wolf the Spartan. For the first time he was forgotten! His idol passed him carelessly, gave him no glance, no smile, but lavished a thousand coquetries on Saint-Elix, on De Rohan-Soubise, on the boy Vermandois, — on any who sought them. Once he addressed her. Madame la Marquise shrugged her snow-white shoulders, and arched her eyebrows with petulant irritation, and turned to laugh gayly at Saint-Elix, who was amusing her, and La Montespan, and Madame de Thianges, with some gay mischievous scandal concerning Madame de Lesdiguières and the Archbishop of Paris; for scandals, if not wholly new are ever diverting when concerning an enemy, especially when dressed and served up with the piquant sauce of wit.
“I no longer then, madame, lead a dog’s life in jealousy of this priest?” whispered Saint-Elix, after other whispers, in the ear of Madame la Marquise. The Vicomte adored her, not truly in Languedoc fashion, but very warmly — à la mode de Versailles.
The Marquise laughed.
“Perhaps not! You know I bet Mme. de Montevreau that I would conquer him. I have won now. Hush! He is close. There will be a tragedy, mon ami!”
“M. le Vicomte, if you have the honor of a noble, the heart of a man, you fight me to-night. I seek no shelter under my cloth!”
Saint-Elix turned as he heard the words, laughed scornfully, and signed the speaker away with an insolent sneer:
“Bah! Révérend Père! we do not fight with women and churchmen!”
The fête was ended at last, the lights that had gleamed among the limes and chestnuts had died out, the gardens and salons were emptied and silent, the little Cupid had laid aside his weighty jewelled wings, the carriages with their gorgeous liveries, their outriders, and their guards of honor, had rolled from the gates of Petite Forêt to the Palace of Versailles. Madame la Marquise stood alone once more in the balcony of her salons, leaning her white arms on its gilded balustrade, looking down on to the gardens beneath, silvered with the breaking light of the dawn, smiling, her white teeth gleaming between her parted rose-hued lips, and thinking — of what? Who shall say?
Still, still as death lay the gardens below, that an hour ago had been peopled with a glittering crowd, re-echoing with music, laughter, witty response, words of intrigue. Where the lights had shone on diamonds and pearl-broidered trains, on softly rouged cheeks, and gold-laced coats, on jewelled swords and broideries of gold, the gray hue of the breaking day now only fell on the silvered leaves of the limes, the turf wet with dew, he drooped heads of the Provence roses; and Madame la Marquise, standing alone, started as a step through the salon within broke the silence.
“Madame, will you permit me a word now?”
Gaston de Launay took her hands off the balustrade, and held them tight in his, while his voice sounded, even in his own ears, strangely calm, yet strangely harsh:
“Madame, you love me no longer?”
“Monsieur, I do not answer questions put to me in such a manner.”
She would have drawn her hands away, but he held them in a fierce grasp till her rings cut his skin, as they had done once before.
“No trifling! Answer — yes or no!”
“Well! ‘no,’ then, monsieur. Since you will have the truth, do not blame me if you find it uncomplimentary and unacceptable.”
He let go her hands and reeled back, staggered, as if struck by a shot.
“Mon Dieu! it is true — you love me no longer! And you tell it me thus!”
Madame la Marquise, for an instant, was silenced and touched; for the words were uttered with the faint cry of a man in agony, and she saw, even by the dim twilight of dawn, how livid his lips turned, how ashy gray grew the hue of his face. But she smiled, playing with Osmin’s new collar of pearls and coral.
“Tell it you ‘thus’? I would not have told it you ‘thus,’ monsieur, if you had been content with a hint, and had not evinced so strong a desire for candor undisguised; but if people will not comprehend a delicate suggestion, they must be wounded by plainer truths — it is their own fault. Did you think I was like a little shepherdess in a pastoral, to play the childish game of constancy without variations? Had you presumption enough to fancy you could amuse me for ever — —”
He stopped her, his voice broken and hoarse, as he gasped for breath.
“Silence! Woman, have you no mercy? For you — for such as you — I have flung away heaven, steeped myself in sin, lost my church, my peace, my all — forfeited all right to the reverence of my fellows, all hope for the smile of my God! For you — for such as you — I have become a traitor, a hypocrite, an apostate, whose prayers are insults, whose professions are lies, whose oaths are perjury! At your smile, I have flung away eternity; for your kiss, I have risked my life here, my life hereafter; for your love, I held no price too vast to pay; weighed with it, honor, faith, heaven, all seemed valueless — all were forgotten! You lured me from tranquil calm, you broke in on the days of peace which but for you were unbroken still, you haunted my prayers, you placed yourself between Heaven and me, you planned to conquer my anchorite’s pride, you wagered you would lure me from my priestly vows, and yet you have so little mercy, that when your bet is won, when your amusement grows stale, when the victory grows valueless, you can turn on me with words like these without one self-reproach?”
“Ma foi, monsieur! it is you who may reproach yourself, not I,” cried his hearer, insolently. “Are you so very provincial still, that you are ignorant that when a lover has ceased to please he has to blame his own lack of power to retain any love he may have won, and is far too well-bred to utter a complaint? Your language is very new to me. Most men, monsieur, would be grateful for my slightest preference; I permit none to rebuke me for either giving or withdrawing it.”
The eyes of Madame la Marquise sparkled angrily, and the smile on her lips was a deadly one, full of irony, full of malice. As he beheld it, the scales fell at last from the eyes of Gaston de Launay, and he saw what this woman was whom he had worshipped with such mad, blind, idolatrous passion.
He bowed his head with a low, broken moan, as a man stunned by a mortal blow; while Madame la Marquise stood playing with the pearl-and-coral chain, and smiling the malicious and mischievous smile that showed her white teeth, as they are shown in the portrait by Mignard.
“Comme les hommes sont fous!” laughed Madame la Marquise.
He lifted his eyes, and looked at her as she stood in the faint light of the dawn, with her rich dress, her gleaming diamonds, her wicked smile, her matchless beauty; and the passion in him broke out in a bitter cry:
“God help me! My sin has brought home its curse!”
He bent over her, his burning lips scorching her own like fire, holding her in one last embrace, that clasped her in a vice of iron she had no power to break.
“Angel! devil! temptress! This for what I have deemed thee — that for what thou art!”
He flung her from him with unconscious violence, and left her — lying where she fell.
The gray silvery dawn rose, and broke into the warmth and sunlight of a summer day; the deer nestled in their couches under the chequered shadows of the woodlands round, and the morning chimes were rung in musical carillons from the campanile of the château; the Provence roses tossed their delicate heads, joyously shaking the dew off their scented petals; the blossoms of the limes fell in a fragrant shower on the turf below, and the boughs, swayed softly by the wind, brushed their leaves against the sparkling waters of the fountains; the woods and gardens of Petite Forêt lay, bright and laughing, in the mellow sunlight of the new day to which the world was waking. And with his face turned up to the sky, clasped in his hand a medallion enamel on which was painted the head of a woman, the grass and ferns where he had fallen stained crimson with his life-blood, lay a dead man, while in his bosom nestled a little dog, moaning piteous, plaintive cries, and vainly seeking its best to wake him to the day that for him would never dawn.
When her household,
trembling, spread the news that the dead priest had been found lying under the limes, slain by his own hand, and it reached Madame la Marquise in her private chambers, she was startled, shocked, wept, hiding her radiant eyes in her broidered handkerchief, and called Azor, and bade him bring her her flask of scented waters, and bathed her eyes, and turned them dazzling bright on Saint-Elix, and stirred her chocolate and asked the news. “On peut être êmue aux larmes et aimer le chocolat,” thought Madame la Marquise, with her friend Montespan; — while, without, under the waving shadow of the linden-boughs, with the sunlight streaming round him, the little dog nestling in his breast, refusing to be comforted, lay the man whom she had murdered.
The portrait of Mignard still hangs on the walls of the château, and in its radiant colors Madame la Marquise still lives, fair type of her age, smiling her victorious smile, with the diamonds shining among her hair, and her brilliant eyes flashing defiance, irony, and coquetry as of yore, when she reigned amidst the beauties of Versailles; — and in the gardens beyond in the summer nights, the lime-boughs softly shake their fragrant flowers on the turf, and the moonlight falls in hushed and mournful calm, streaming through the network of the boughs on to the tangled mass of violets and ferns that has grown up in rank luxuriance over the spot where Gaston de Launay died.
Beatrice Boville and Other Stories
CONTENTS
BEATRICE BOVILLE.
A LINE IN THE “DAILY.”
HOLLY WREATHS AND ROSE CHAINS.
SILVER CHIMES AND GOLDEN FETTERS.
SLANDER AND SILLERY.
SIR GALAHAD’S RAID.
REDEEMED.
OUR WAGER.
OUR COUNTRY QUARTERS.
A LEAF IN THE STORM
BEATRICE BOVILLE.
I. OF EARLSCOURT’S FIANCEE.
“To compass her with sweet observances, To dress her beautifully and keep her true.”
That, according to Mr. Tennyson’s lately-published opinion, is the devoir of that deeply-to-be-pitied individual, l’homme marié. Possibly in the times of which the Idyls treat, Launcelot and Gunevere might have been the sole, exceptional mauvais sujets in the land, and woad, being the chief ingredient in the toilet-dress, mightn’t come quite so expensive. But nowadays “sweet observances,” rendered, I presume, by gifts from Hunt and Roskell’s and boxes in the grand tier, tell on a cheque-book so severely; “keeping her true” is such an exceedingly problematical performance, to judge by Sir C. C.’s breathless work, and “dressing her beautifully” comes so awfully expensive, with crinoline and cashmeres, pink pearls, and Mechlin, and the beau sexe’s scornful repudiation, not alone of a faded silk, like poor Enid’s, but of the handsomest dress going, if it’s damned by being “seen twice,” that I have ever vowed that, plaise à Dieu, I will never marry, and with heaven’s help will keep the vow better than I might most probably keep the matrimonial ones if I took them. Yet if ever I saw a woman for whom I could have fancied a man’s committing that semisuicidal act, that woman was Beatrice Boville. Not for her beauty, for, except one of the loveliest figures and a pair of the most glorious eyes, she did not claim much; not for her money, for she had none; not for her birth, for on one side that was somewhat obscure; but for herself; and had I ever tried the herculean task of dressing anybody beautifully and keeping anybody true, it should have been she, but for the fact that when I knew her first she was engaged to my cousin Earlscourt. We had none of us ever dreamt he would marry, for he had been sworn to political life so long, given over so utterly to the battle-ground of St. Stephen’s and the intrigues of Downing Street, that the ladies of our house were sorely wrathful when they heard that he had at last fallen in love and proposed to Beatrice Boville, who, though she was Lady Mechlin’s niece, was the daughter of a West Indian who had married her mother, broken her heart, spent her money, deserted her, and never been heard of since; the more wrathful as they had no help for themselves, and were obliged to be contented with distinguishing her with refreshing appellations of a “very clever schemer,” evidently a “perfect intrigante,” and similar epithets with which their sex is driven for consolation under such trying circumstances. It’s a certain amount of relief to us to call a man who has cut us down in a race “a stupid owl; very little in him!” but it is mild gratification to that enjoyed by ladies when they retaliate for injury done them by that delightful bonbon of a sentence, “No doubt a most artful person!” You see it conveys so much and proves three things in one — their own artlessness, their enemy’s worthlessness, and their victim’s folly. Being with Earlscourt at the time of his “singularly unwise, step,” as they phrased it, I knew that he wasn’t trapped in any way, and that he was loved irrespectively of his social rank; but where was the good of telling that to deeply-injured and perforce silenced ladies? “They knew better;” and when a woman says that, always bow to her superior judgment, my good fellow, even when she knows better than you what you did with yourself last evening, and informs you positively you were at that odious Mrs. Vanille’s opera supper, though, to the best of your belief, you never stirred from the U. S. card-room; or you will be voted a Goth, and make an enemy for the rest of your natural life.
In opposition to the rest of the family, I thought (and you must know by this time, amis lecteurs, that I hardly think marriage so enjoyable an institution as some writers do, but perhaps a little like a pipe of opium, of which the dreams are better than the awakening) — I thought that he could hardly have done better, as far as his own happiness went, as I saw her standing by him one evening in the window of Lady Mechlin’s rooms at Lemongenseidlitz, where we all were that August, a brilliant, fascinating woman already, though then but nineteen, noble-hearted, frank, impetuous, with something in the turn of her head and the proud glance of her eyes, that told you, you might trust her; that she was of the stuff to keep her word even to her own hinderance; that neither would she tell a lie, nor brook one imputed to her; that she might err on the side of pride, on the side of meanness never; that she might have plenty of failings, but not anything petty, low, or ungenerous among them. The evening sun fell on them as they stood, on her high, white forehead, with its chestnut hair turned off it as you see it in old pictures, which Earlscourt was touching caressingly with his hand as he talked to her. They seemed well suited, and yet — his fault was pride, an unassailable, unyielding pride; hers was pride, too, pride in her own truth and honor, which would send you to the deuce if you ever presumed to doubt either; and I wondered idly as I looked at them, whether those two prides would ever come in conflict, and if so, whether either of them would give in in such a case — whether there would be submission on one side or on both, or on neither? Such metaphysical and romantic calculations are not often my line; but as they stood together, the sun faded off, and a cold, stormy wind blew up in its stead, which, perhaps, metaphorically suggested the problem to me. As one goes through life one gets up to so many sunny, balmy, cloudless days, and so often before the night is down gets wetted to the skin by a drenching shower, that one contracts an uncomfortable habit when the sun does shine, of looking out for squalls, a fear that, sans doute, considerably damps the pleasures of the noon. But the fear is natural, isn’t it, more’s the pity, when one has been often caught?
I chanced to ask her that night what made her so fond of Earlscourt. She turned her fearless, flashing eyes half laughingly, half haughtily on me, the color brighter in her face:
“I should have thought you would rather have asked how could I, or any other woman whom he stooped to notice, fail to love him? There are few hearts and intellects so noble: he is as superior to you ball-room loungers, you butterfly flutterers, as the stars to that chandelier.”
“Bien obligé!” laughed I. “But that is just what I meant. Most young ladies are afraid of him; you never were?”
She laughed contemptuously.
“Afraid! You do not know much of me. It is precisely his giant intellect that first drew me to him, when I heard his speech on the Aust
rian question. Do you remember how the Lords listened to him so quietly that you could have heard a feather fall? I like that silence of theirs when they hear what they admire, better than I do the cheers of the other house. Afraid of him! What a ludicrous idea! Do you suppose I should be afraid of any one? It is only those who are conceited or cowardly, who are timid. If you have nothing to assume, or to conceal, what cause have you to fear? I love, honor, reverence Lord Earlscourt, God knows; but fear him — never!”
“Not even his anger, if you ever incurred it?” I asked her, amused with her haughty indignation.
“Certainly not. Did I merit it, I would come to him frankly, and ask his pardon, and he would give it; if I did not deserve it, he would be the one to repent.”
She looked far more attractive than many a handsomer woman, and infinitely more noble than a more tractable one. She was admirably fitted for Earlscourt, if he trusted her; but it was just possible he might some day mistrust and misunderstand her, and then there might be the devil to pay!
II. THE FIRST SHADOW.
Lemongenseidlitz was a charming little Bad. Beatrice Boville and her aunt Lady Mechlin, Earlscourt and I, had been there six weeks. His brother peers — of whom there were scores at Lemongenseidlitz — complimented Earlscourt on his fiancée.
“So you’re caught at last?” said an octogenarian minister, who was as sprightly as a schoolboy. “Well, my dear fellow, you might have gone higher, sans doute, but on my honor I don’t think you could have done better.”
It was the universal opinion. Beatrice was not the belle of the Bad, because there were dozens of beautiful women, and beautiful she was not; but she was more admired than any of them, and had Earlscourt wanted voices to justify his choice he would have had them, but he didn’t; he was entirely independent of the opinions of others, and had he chosen to set his coronet on the brows of a peasant girl, would have cared little what any one thought or said. We all of us enjoyed that six weeks. Lady Mechlin lost to her heart’s content at roulette, and was as complacent over her losses as any old dowager could be. Beatrice Boville shone best, as nice natures ever do, in a sunny atmosphere; and if she had any faults of impatient temper or pride, there was nothing to call them forth. Earlscourt, cold politician though he’d been, gave himself up entirely to the warmer, brighter existence, which he found in his new passion; and I, not being in love with anybody, made the pleasantest love possible wherever I liked. We all of us found a couleur de rose tint in the air of little Lemongenseidlitz, and I’d quite forgotten my presentiment, when, one night at the Kursaal, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand came up on the sunny horizon, and put me in mind of it.