by Ouida
In an agony of suspense he bent his head to listen for her answer. Tears rained down her cheeks as she put her arms round his neck, and whispered:
“Why ask? Are you not all the world to me? I should love you little if I condemned you for any errors of your past. I know your warm and noble heart, and I trust to it without a fear. There is no doubt between us now!”
Oh, my prudent and conventional young ladies, standing ready to accuse my poor little Nina, are you any wiser in your generation? You who have had all nature taken out of you by “finishing,” whose heads are crammed with “society’s” laws, and whose affections are measured out by rule, who would have been cold, and dignified, and read Ernest a severe lesson, and sent him back hopeless and hardened to go ten times worse than he had gone before — believe me, that impulse points truer than “the world,” and that the dictates of the heart are better than the regulations of society. Take my word for it, that love will do more for a man than lectures; and faith in him be more likely to keep him straight than all your moralising; and before you judge him severely for having drunk a little too deep of the Sillery of life, remember that his temptations are not your temptations, nor his ways your ways, and be gentle to dangers which society and custom keep out of your own path. The stern thorn crows you offer to us when we are inclined to ask your absolution, are not the right means to win us from the rose wreaths of our bacchanalia.
Nina, as you see, loved her Lion too well to remember dignity, or take her stand on principle; and gallantly did the young lady stand the bombardment from all sides that sought to break her resolutions and crush her “misplaced affections.” Gordon chanced to come in that day and light upon Ernest, and the fury into which he worked himself ill beseemed so respectable a pharisee. Vaughan kept tranquilly haughty, and told the banker, calmly, that he “thanked God he had his daughter’s love, and his money he would never have stooped to accept.” Gordon forbade him the house, and carried Nina back to England; but before she went they had a parting interview, in which Ernest offered to leave her free. But such freedom would have been worse than death to Nina, and, before they separated, she told him that in three months more she should be of age, and then, come what might, she would be his if he would take her without wealth. Take her he would have done from the arms of Satanus himself, but to disentangle himself from all his difficulties was a task that beat the Augean stables hollow. The three months of his probation he worked hard; he sold off all his pictures, his stud, and his meubles; he sold, what cost him a more bitter pang, his encumbered estates in Surrey; he paid off all his debts, Bluette’s twenty thousand francs included; and shaking himself free of the accumulated embarrassments of fifteen years, he crossed the water to claim his last love. No poor little Huguenot was ever persecuted for her faith more than poor little Nina for her engagement. Every relative she had thought it his duty to write admonitory letters, plentifully interspersed with texts. Eusebius and his 4000l. a year, and his perspective bishopric, were held up before her from morning to night; the banker, whose deception in the Mélusine had turned him into sharper vinegar than before, told her with chill stoicism that she must of course choose her own path in life, but that if that path led her into the Chaussée d’Antin, she need never expect a sou from him, for all his property would be divided between her two brothers. But Nina was neither to be frightened nor bribed. She kept true to her lover, and disinherited herself.
They were married a week or two after Nina’s majority; and Gordon knew it, though he could not prevent it. They did not miss the absence of bridesmaids, bishop, déjeûner, and the usual fashionable crowd. It was a marriage of the heart, you see, and did not want the trappings with which they gild that bitter pill so often swallowed now-a-days — a “mariage de convenance.” Nina, as she saw further still into the wealth of deep feeling and strong affection which, at her touch, she had awoke in his heart, felt that money, and friends, and the world’s smile were well lost since she had won him. And Ernest — Ernest’s sacrifice was greater; for it is not a little thing, young ladies, for a man to give up his accustomed freedom, and luxuries, and careless vie de garçon, and to have to think and work for another, even though dearer than himself. But he had long since seen so much of life, had exhausted all its pleasures so rapidly, that they palled upon him, and for some time he had vaguely wanted something of deeper interest, of warmer sympathy. Unknown to himself, he had felt the “besoin d’être aimé” — a want the trash offered him by the women of his acquaintance could never satisfy — and his warm, passionate nature found rest in a love which, though the strongest of his life, was still returned to him fourfold.
After some months of delicious far niente in the south of France, they came back to Paris. Though anything but rich, he was not absolutely poor, after he had paid his debts, and the necessity to exertion rousing his dormant talents, the Lion turned littérateur. He was too popular with men to be dropped because he had sold his stud or given up his petits soupers. The romance of their story charmed the Parisians, and, though (behind his back) they sometimes jested about the “Lion amoureux,” there were not a few who envied him his young love, and the sunshine that shone round them in his inexpensive appartement garni.
Ernest was singularly happy — and suddenly he became the star of the literary, as he had been of the fashionable world. His mots were repeated, his vaudevilles applauded, his feuilletons adored. The world smiled on Nina and her Lion; it made little difference to them — they had been as contented when it frowned.
But it made a good deal of difference across the Channel. Gordon began to repent. Ernest’s family was high, his Austrian connexions very aristocratic: there would be something after all in belonging to a man so well known. (Be successful, ami lecteur, and all your relatives will love you.) Besides, he had found out that it is no use to put your faith in princes, or clergymen. Eusebius had treated him very badly when he found he could not get Nina and her money, and spoke against the poor banker everywhere, calling him, with tender pastoral regret, a “worldly Egyptian,” a “Dives,” a “whitened sepulchre,” and all the rest of it.
Probably, too, stoic though he was, he missed the chevelure dorée; at any rate, he wrote to her stiffly, but kindly, and settled two thousand a year upon her. Vaughan was very willing she should be friends with her father, but nothing would make him draw a sou of the money. So Nina — the only sly thing she ever did in her life — after a while contrived to buy back the Surrey estate, and gave it to him, with no end of prayers and caresses, on the Jour de l’An.
“And you do not regret, my darling,” smiled Ernest, after wishing her the new year’s wishes, “having forgiven me for once drinking too much Sillery, and all the other naughty things of my vie de garçon?”
“Regret!” interrupted Nina, vehemently— “regret that I have won your love, live your life, share your cares and joys, regret that my existence is one long day of sunshine? Oh, why ask! you know I can never repay you for the happiness of my life.”
“Rather can I never repay you,” said Vaughan, looking down into her eyes, “for the faith that made you brave calumny and opposition, and cling to my side despite all. I was heart-sick of the world, and you called me back to life. I was weary of the fools who misjudged me, and I let them think me what they might.”
“Ah, how happy you make me!” cried Nina. “I should have been little worthy of your love if I had suffered slander to warp me against you, or if any revelations you cared enough for me to make of your past life, had parted us:
Love is not love That alters where it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove.
There, monsieur!” she said, throwing her arms round him with a laugh, while happy tears stood in her eyes— “there is a grand quotation for you. Mind and take care, Ernest, that you never realise the Ruskinstone predictions, and make me repent having caught and caged such a terrible thing as a hunted Paris Lion!”
SIR GALAHAD’S RAID.
AN ADVENTURE ON TH
E SWEET WATERS.
For the punishment of my sins may the gods never again send me to Pera! That I might have plenty on my shoulders I am frankly willing to concede; all I protest is, that when one submissively acknowledges the justice of ones future terminating in Tophet, it comes a little hard to get purgatory in this world into the bargain. Purgatory lies perdu for one all over the earth. I have had fifty times more than my share already, and the gout still remains an untried experience, a Gehenna grimly waiting to avenge every morsel of white truffle and every glass of comet claret with which I innocently solace my frail mortality. Purgatory! — I have been chained in it fifty times; et vous?
When you rush to a Chancellérie, with the English Arms gorgeous above its doorway, on the spur of a frightfully mysterious and autocratic telegram, that makes it life or death to catch the train for England in ten minutes, and have time enough to smoke about two dozen very big cheroots, cooling your heels in the bureau, and then hear (when properly tortured into the due amount of frantic agony for the intelligence to be fully appreciated) that his Excellency is gone snipe-shooting to —— , and that the First Secretary is in his bath, and has given orders not to be disturbed; your informant languidly pricking his cigar with his toothpick, and politely intimating, by his eyebrows, that you and your necessities may go to the deuce — what’s that? When you are doing the sanitary at Weedon, by some hideous conjunction of evil destinies, in the very Ducal week itself, and thinking of the rush with which Tom Alcroft will land the filly, or the close finish with which Fordham will get the cup, while you are not there to see, are sorely tempted to realize the Parisian vision of Anglo suicide, and load the apple-trees with suspended human fruit; — what’s that? When, having got leave, and established yourself in cosy hunting-quarters, with some cattle not to be beat in stay, blood, and pace, close to a killing pack that never score a blank day, there falls a bitter, black frost, locking the country up in iron bonds, and making every bit of ridge and furrow like a sheet of glass — what’s that?
Bah! I could go on ad infinitum, and cite “circles of purgatory” in which mortal man is doomed to pass his time, beside which Dante’s Caïna, Antenora, and Ptolomea sink into insignificance. But of all Purgatories, chiefest in my memory, is —— Pera. Pera in the old Crimean time — Pera the “beautiful suburb” of fond “fiction” — Pera, with the dirt, the fleas, the murders, the mosquitoes, the crooked streets, the lying Greeks, the stench, the hubbub, the dulness, and the everlasting “Bono Johnny.”
“Call a dog Hervey, and I shall love him,” said Johnson, so dear was his friend to him:— “call a dog Johnny, and I shall kick him,” so abominable grew that word in the eternal Turkish jabber! Tell me, O prettiest, softest-voiced, most beguiling, feminine Æothen, in as romantic periods as you will, of bird-like feluccas darting over the Bosphorus, of curled caïques gliding through fragrant water-weeds; of Arabian Nights reproduced, when up through the darkness peals the roll of the drums calling the Faithful to prayers; of the nights of Ramadan, with the starry clusters of light gleaming all down Stamboul, and flashing, firefly-like, through the dark citron groves; — tell me of it as you will, I don’t care; you may think me a Goth, ce m’est bien égal, and you were not in cavalry quarters at Pera. I wasn’t exacting; I did not mind having ants in my jam, nor centipedes in my boots, nor a shirt in six months, nor bacon for a luxury that strongly resembled an old file rusted by sea-water, nor any little trifle of that sort up in the front; all that is in the fortune of war: but I confess that Pera put me fairly out of patience, specially when a certain trusty friend of mine, who has no earthly fault, that I wot of, except that of perpetually looking at life through a Claude glass (which is the most aggravating opticism to a dispassionate and unblinded mind that the world holds), would poetize upon it, or at least on the East in general, which came pretty much to the same thing.
The sun poured down on me till (conscience, probably) I remembered the scriptural threat to the wicked, “their brains shall boil in their skulls like pots;” — Sir Galahad, as I will call him, would murmur to himself, with his cheroot in his teeth, Manfred’s salut to the sun, looking as lovingly at it as any eagle. Mosquitoes reduced me to the very borders of madness, — Sir Galahad would placidly remark, how Buckland would revel here in all those gorgeous beetles. A Greek told crackers till I had to double-thong him like a puppy, — Sir Galahad would shout to me to let the fellow alone, he looked so deuced picturesque, he must have him for a study. I made myself wretched in a ticklish caïque, the size of a cockle-shell, where, when one was going full harness to the Great Effendi’s, it was a moral impossibility to be doubled without one’s sash swinging into the water, one’s sword sticking over the side, and the liveliest sensation of cramp pervading one’s body, — Sir Galahad, blandly indifferent, would discourse, with superb Ruskin obscurity, of “tone,” and “coloring,” and “harmonized light,” while he looked down the Golden Horn, for he was a little Art-mad, and painted so well that if he had been a professional, the hanging committee would have shut him out to a certainty.
Now he was a good fellow, a beau sabreur, who had fetched some superb back strokes in the battery at Balaclava, who could send a line spinning, and land his horse in a gentleman riders’ race, and pot the big game, and lead the first flight over Northamptonshire doubles at home, as well as a man wants to do; but I put it to any dispassionate person, whether this persistent poetism of his, flying in the face of facts and of fleas, was not enough to make anybody swear in that mosquito-purgatorio of Pera?
Sir Galahad was a capital fellow, and the men would have gone after him to the death; the fair, frank, handsome face, a little womanish perhaps, was very pleasant to look at, and he got the Victoria not long ago for a deed that would suit Arthur’s Table; but in Pera, I avow, he made me swear hard, and if he would just have set his heel on his Claude glass, cursed the Turks, and growled refreshingly, I should have loved him better. He was philosophic and he was poetic; and the combination of temperaments lifted him in a mortifying altitude above ordinary humanity, that was baked, broiled, grumbling, savage, bitten, fleeced, and holding its own against miserable rats, Greeks, and Bono Johnnies, with an Aristides thieving its last shirt, and a Pisistratus getting drunk at its case-bottle! That sublime serenity of his in Pera ended in making me unholy and ungenerous; if he would but have sworn once at the confounded country, I should have borne it, but he never did, and I longed to see him out of temper, I pined and thirsted to get him disenchanted. “Tout vient a point, à qui sait attendre,” they say; a motto, by the way, that might be written over the Horse Guards for the comfort of gloomy souls, when, in the words of the Psalmist, “Promotion cometh neither from the south, nor from the east, nor from the west” — by which lament one might conclude David of Israel to have been a sufferer by the Purchase-system!
“Delicious!” said Sir Galahad, sending a whiff of Turkish tobacco into the air one morning after exercise, when he and I, having ridden out a good many miles along the Sweet Waters, turned the horses loose, bought some grapes and figs of an old Turk, dispossessed him of his bit of cocoa-matting, and flung ourselves under a plane-tree. And the fellow looked round him through his race-glass at the cypress woods, the mosques and minarets, the almond thickets, the “soft creamy distance,” as he called it in his argot d’atelier, and the Greek fishermen near, drawing up a net full of silvery prismatic fishes, with a relish absolutely exasperating. Exasperating — when the sun was broiling one’s brain through the linen, and there wasn’t a drop of Bass or soda and B to be got for love or money, and one thought thirstily of days at home in England, with the birds whirring up from the stubble in the cool morning, and the cold punch uncorked for luncheon, under the home woods fringing the open.
“One wants Hunt to catch that bit of color,” murmured Sir Galahad, luxuriously eying a mutilated Janissary’s tomb covered with scarlet creepers.
“Hunt be hanged!” said I (meaning no disrespect to that eminent Pre-Raphaelite, whose “Lig
ht of the World” I took at first sight to be a policeman going his night rounds, and come out in his shirt by mistake; by the way, it is a droll idea to symbolize the “light of the world” by a watchman with a dark lantern, lux in tenebras with a vengeance!). “Give me the sweet shady side of Pall Mall, and the devil may take the Sweet Waters. What’s the Feast of Bairam beside the Derby-day, or your confounded coloring beside a well-done cutlet? What’s lemonade by Brighton Tipper, and a veiled bundle by a pretty blonde, and an eternity of Stamboul by an hour of Piccadilly?”
Sir Galahad smiled superior, and shied a date at me.
“Goth! can’t you be content to feed like the Patriarchs and live an idyl?”
“No! I’d rather feed like a Parisian and live an idler! Eat grapes if you choose; I agree with Brillat-Savarin, and don’t like my wine in pills.”
“My good fellow, you’re all prose.”
“And you’re all poetry. You’re as bad as that pretty little commissariat girl who lisped me to death last night at the Embassy with platitudes of bosh about the ‘poetry of marriage.’”
“The deuce!” said Sir Galahad, with a whistle, “that must be like most other poetry nowadays — uncommon dull prose, sliced up in uneven lengths! Didn’t you tell her so?”
“Couldn’t; I should have pulled the string for a shower-bath of sentiment! When a woman’s bolted on romance you only make the pace worse if you gall her with the curb of common sense. When romance is in, reason’s out, — excuse the personality!”