Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “That is very beautiful; and I am sure that you mean it now. But it could not last. You are a very proud man; you are gentilhomme de race. It would in time become intolerable to you if you believed that any one living man had any title to point a finger of scorn at you. You have a right to know what my relations were with Lord Gervase: it is necessary for all the peace of our future that you should know everything, — know that there is nothing more left for you to know. You can only be convinced of that if you yourself hear what I say to him. Go; and wait there.”

  Brandolin hesitates. To listen unseen is a part which seems very cowardly to him, and yet she is right, no doubt; all the peace of the future may depend on it. He is ready to pledge himself blindly in the dark in all ways, but he knows that she, in forbidding him to do so, speaks the word of wisdom, of foresight, and of truth.

  “Go,” she repeats. “Men have a thousand ways of proving the truth of whatever they say; we have none, or next to none. If you refuse me this, the sole poor evidence that I can produce, I will never be to you anything that you now wish. Never; that I swear to you.”

  He hesitates, and looks at her with a long inquiring regard. Then he bows, and goes.

  After all, she is within her rights. She has no other means to show him with any proof what this man whose name is so odiously entangled with her own has, or has not, been to her.

  The house is still quite silent, and no one is likely to come into those rooms until much later. Every syllable said in the small library can be heard in any part of the larger one. He stands in the embrasure of one of the windows, the velvet curtains making a screen behind him. He seems to wait for hours; in reality only five minutes have passed when he hears the door of the great library open, and Gervase passes quickly through the apartment without seeing him, and goes on into the one where she awaits his coming.

  “Are you really risen so early?” she says, with a sarcastic coldness in her voice. “I remembered afterwards that it was too cruel to name to you any hour before noon.”

  “You are unkind,” he answers. “To hear what I hope to hear, you may be sure that I would have gone through much greater trials than even rising with the lark, had you commanded it.”

  His words are light, but his accent is tender and appealing.

  “What do you hope to hear?” she asks, abruptly. The question embarrasses him and sounds cold.

  “I hope to hear that you pardon me the past and will deign to crown my future.”

  “I pardon you the past, certainly. With neither your present nor your future have I anything to do.”

  “You say that very cruelly, — so cruelly that it makes your forgiveness more unkind than your hatred would be.”

  “I intend no unkindness. I merely wish to express indifference. Perhaps I am even mistaken in saying that I entirely forgive you. When I remember that you once possessed any influence over me, I scarcely do forgive you, for I am forced to despise myself.”

  “Those are very hard words! Perhaps in the past I was unworthy of having known and loved you; but if you will believe in my regret, and allow me occasion to atone, you shall never repent of your indulgence. Pray hear me out, Xenia — —”

  “You cannot call me by that name. It is for my friends: you are not numbered among them.”

  “I would be much more than your friend. If you will be my wife.”

  “It is too late,” she replies, and her voice is as cold as ice.

  “Why too late? We have all the best of our lives unspent before us.”

  “When I say too late, I mean that if you had said as much to me after the death of Prince Sabaroff I should have accepted your hand, and I should have spent the whole remainder of my existence in repenting that I had done so; for I should soon have fathomed the shallowness of your character, the artificiality and poverty of your sentiments, the falseness of your mind, and I should speedily have hated both myself and you.”

  “You are not merciful, madame!”

  He is bitterly humbled and passionately incensed.

  “Were you merciful?” she asks him, with the sound of a great anger, carefully controlled, vibrating in her voice. “I was a child, taken out of a country convent, and married as ignorantly as a bird is trapped. I had rank, and I was burdened by it. I was in a great world, a great court, and I was terrified by them. The man I had been given to was a gambler, a drunkard, and a brute. He treated me in private as he had treated the women captured in Turkestan or sold as slaves in Persia. You knew that: you were his intimate associate. You used your opportunities to interest me and win your way into my confidence. I had no one in the whole world that I could trust. I did trust you.”

  She pauses a moment.

  Gervase does not dare reply.

  “You were so gentle, so considerate, so full of sympathy; I thought you a very angel. A girl of sixteen or seventeen sees the face of St. John in the first Faust who finds his way into her shut soul! You made me care for you; I do not deny it. But why did I care? Because I saw in you the image of a thousand things you were not. Because I imagined that my own fanciful ideal existed in you, and you had the ability to foster the illusion.”

  “But why recall all this?” he says, entreatingly. “Perhaps I was unworthy of your innocent attachment, of your exalted imaginations; I dare not say that I was not; but now that I meet you again, now that I care for you ten thousand — ten million times more — —”

  “What is that to me?” she says, with almost insolent coldness. “It was not I who loved you, but a child who knew no better, and whose heart was so bleeding from the tortures of another man that the first hand which soothed it could take it as one takes a wounded bird! But when my eyes opened to your drift and your desires, when I saw that you were no better than other men, that you tried to tempt me to the lowest forms of intrigue under cover of your friendship with my husband, then, child though I was, I saw you as you were, and I hid myself from you! You thought that Sabaroff exiled me from his jealousy of you to the northern estates; but it was not so. I entreated him to let me leave Petersburg, and he had grown tired of torturing me and let me go.”

  “You blame me for being merely human. I loved you not better but not worse than men do love.”

  “I blame you for having been insincere, treacherous, dishonest. You approached me under cover of the most delicate and forbearing sympathy and reverence, and you only wore those masks to cover the vulgar designs of a most commonplace Lothario. Of course, now I know that one must not play with fire unless one is willing to be burned. I did not know it then. I was a stupid, unhappy, trembling child, full of poetic fancies, and alone in a dissolute crowd. When you could not make me what you wished to make me, I seemed very tame and useless to you. You turned to more facile women, no doubt, and you left Russia.”

  “I left Russia under orders; and I wrote to you. I wrote to you repeatedly. You never answered.”

  “No; I had no wish to answer you. I had seen you as you were, and the veil had fallen from my eyes. I burnt your letters as they came to me. But after the death of Prince Sabaroff you were careful to write no more.”

  Gervase colors hotly; there is an accent in the words which makes them strike him like whips.

  “If you had written to me after that,” she continues, “perhaps I should have answered you; perhaps not: I cannot tell. When you knew that I was set free you were silent; you stayed away, I know not where. I never saw you again; I never heard from you again. Now I thank you for your neglect and oblivion, but at the time I confess that it made me suffer. I was very young still, and romantic. For a while I expected every month which melted the snow would bring you back. So much I admit, though it will flatter you.”

  It does not flatter him as she says it; rather it wounds him. He has a hateful sense of his own impotency to stir her one hand’s breadth, to breathe one spark of warmth into those ashes gone cold forever.

  “I do not think,” she continues, “that I ever loved you in the sense that women can lo
ve; but you had the power to make me suffer, to feel your oblivion, to remember you when you had forgotten me. When I went into the world again I heard of your successes with others, and gradually I came to see you in your true light, and, almost, the drunken brutality of Prince Sabaroff seemed to me a manlier thing than your half-hearted and shallow erotics had been. Now, when we meet again by pure hazard in the same country house, you do me the honor to offer me your hand after eight years. I can only say, as I have said before, that it is seven years too late!”

  “Too late, only because Lord Brandolin now is everything to you.”

  “Lord Brandolin may possibly be something to me in the future. But, if Lord Brandolin did not exist, if no other living man existed, be sure that it would make no difference to me — or to you.”

  “Is that your last word?”

  “Yes.”

  Pale and agitated as no other woman had ever seen him, Gervase bows low and leaves her abruptly, pushing open one of the glass doors on to the garden and closing it with a clash behind him.

  Xenia Sabaroff goes towards the large library, her silvery train catching the lights and shadows as she goes.

  Brandolin meets her with his hands outstretched.

  “You are content, then?” she asks.

  “I am more than content, — if I may be allowed to atone to you for all that you have suffered.”

  His own eyes are dim as he speaks.

  “But you know that the world will always say that he was my lover?”

  “I do not think that the world will say it — of my wife; but, if it do, I, at least, shall not be troubled.”

  “You have a great nature,” she says, with deep emotion.

  Brandolin smiles. “Oh, I cannot claim so much as that; but I have a great love.”

  “I’m awfully glad that prig’s got spun,” says George Usk, as Gervase receives a telegram from the Foreign Office which requires his departure from Surrenden at four o’clock that afternoon.

  “Spun! What imagination!” says his wife, very angrily. “Who should have spun him, pray will you tell me?”

  “We shall never hear it in so many words,” says Usk, with a grim complacency, “but I’ll swear, if I die for it, that he’s asked your Russian friend to marry him and that she’s said she won’t. Very wise of her, too. Especially if, as you imply, they carried on together years ago: he’d be eternally throwing it in her teeth: he’s what the Yanks call a ‘tarnation mean cuss.’”

  “I never implied anything of the sort,” answers the lady of Surrenden, with great decorum and dignity. “I never suppose that all my friends are all they ought to be, whatever yours may leave to be desired. If he were attached long ago to Madame Sabaroff, it is neither your affair nor mine. It may possibly concern Lord Brandolin, if he have the intentions which you attribute to him.”

  “Brandolin can take care of himself,” says Usk, carelessly. “He knows the time of day as well as anybody, and I don’t know why you should be rough on it, my lady: it will be positively refreshing if anybody marries after one of your house-parties; they generally only get divorced after them.”

  “The Waverleys are very good friends still, I believe,” says Dorothy Usk, coldly.

  The reply seems irrelevant, but to the ear of George Usk it carries considerable relevancy.

  He laughs a little nervously. “Oh, yes: so are we, aren’t we?”

  “Certainly,” says the mistress of Surrenden.

  At the first Drawing-room this year, the admired of all eyes, and the centre of all comment, is the Lady Brandolin.

  Street Dust

  CONTENTS

  Street Dust

  Letta

  A Little Thief

  The Fig Tree

  Gerry’s Garden

  Street Dust

  Their mother was dead.

  She had lived only thirty years, and a few months; but she had died before her time, as so many do, of over-toil and little food, some days no food at all, only grass seeds and leaves of wild sage. She was dead; a mere skeleton, brown and dry as a mummy, lying on her bed of dry ferns, from which swarms of lice and fleas were hurrying in their knowledge of and horror of a lifeless thing; only the torpid flies remained, gathering together in black dots upon her as the day advanced.

  Her two children, who had seen her die, and had exhausted themselves in shrieks and sobs, went up to her again and kissed her and pressed their heads against her body. But there was no warmth, no response.

  “She must be dead — dead — dead,” said the elder of them; and then they fell again to weeping, and they screamed loudly and long. But the echoes of their screams were the only answer that they had.

  The day was now bright, and the great grass plains were hushed in their morning calm. A little greenfinch was hopping to and fro on a slab of broken marble, pecking at some seed or insect invisible to any eyes except his own: the small bird was the only living thing near.

  The woman had come there three years earlier. She had been the wife or leman of a shepherd who had had some share, through his revelations, in the capture of a noted brigand whose head-quarters had been at Palombaro. For that share the shepherd had been quieted for ever, by a dagger stroke between the shoulders, one evening as he took his flocks to drink at the Anio water.

  Life in Palombaro was no longer safe or possible for the family known to belong to him. She left the town stealthily and in terror, carrying with her a new-born male child, whilst her two elder children toiled after her as best they could, carrying a few cooking vessels and a bundle of clothes. She went on and on, on and on, down into the Campagna and across it to the south, resting as she could under thickets or amongst buried tombs, scarcely knowing what she did for the grief which was within her for her murdered love, and the torturing knowledge that he had deserved his end, having been a traitor, or at best a telltale: there is no other crime so dark in these parts as to speak of things which are hidden, and to aid the law against an outlaw.

  For some time she dared not show herself by daylight, but at last she found a deserted hut built up out of rushes and brackens by the side of some blocks of tufa, once portions of a tomb; and here, finding herself left undisturbed, she ventured to remain with her two elder children; the little male had died of exposure and fevered milk in the earliest days of her flight. In this hut, under the Mons Sacer, she dwelt three years, getting a few coins by gathering the flowers of the plains and taking them to Rome, which was within sight at a few miles’ distance; this she did from the beginning of winter until the beginning of summer; in summer there were no buyers in the city, and there was no one on the plains except a very few, widely scattered, fever-stricken peasants as miserable as herself.

  The children, to whom she gave almost all she could get to eat, did not suffer greatly; but she did. From a stout, strong, bright-eyed, red-cheeked woman, she became a mere skeleton, hectic, parched, always thirsty, always racked by a deep-set painful cough and rheumatic pangs. She went into the city, with the flowers which the children gathered, all through a fourth winter; and then in the great heats took to her bed, such as it was, and could do no more; the malarial disease had seized her. It was now the beginning of another winter; and she lay dead on the dead ferns, and the sense of death stole like the cold of the air into the two children, who were now alone on earth.

  They were aged now twelve and ten years respectively; they were called Prisca and Petronilla. But for their squalor, their fleshlessness, and their sunburnt, unwashed skins, they would have been handsome children, and their eyes were large, and, when they were not filled with tears, glowed like the lamps lit before shrines and tabernacles in old mediæval streets. They had loved their mother with that selfish, unconscious love which is all that good mothers usually receive. She had been their all; she had been like a divinity to them, bringing them all the nourishment and succour that they ever got. Sometimes they had gone with her into the city, but usually she had left them in the hut, for the way was long, and the st
ress in the streets dangerous; and then how they had watched for her as the sun went down behind the great dome, which afar off rose dark on the horizon! How they had run to meet her! How happy they had been when they had seen her returning over the turf in the late evening light — a poor, ragged, dusty, wayworn figure, but to them so dear, such a harbinger of food, of joy, of safety! For when they were alone they were afraid.

  And now they were alone for ever: some vague sense of that immense, irremediable loss, that life-long solitude, weighed on their ignorance. They had seen their father brought home dead, a dark red wound gaping between his brown shoulder blades; but then their mother had remained, they had not been alone. No one would come ever now to them, they knew; no one ever came there. No one probably even knew that there were human creatures under that wattle cone beneath the tufa ruin. Once they had seen some horses and riders pass within sight, going at full stride over the grass: their mother had told them it was the Roman hunt, and bade them mark the pretty piebald and skewbald-coated hounds plunging amongst the brushwood; but that was all, and was two winters past. She had hidden herself and them with care, and had never lighted a fire of brambles on the floor of the beaten earth, except when night had fallen, and the white smoke could not be seen.

  They mourned, and wailed, beside her all that day, and all the following night, and, as the sun rose on the second day, Prisca, who was the elder, said to her sister: —

  “There is nothing to eat.”

  They had finished the one half-loaf of black bread and the remains of cold maize porridge: there was nothing more.

  Petronilla only sobbed.

  “It is bad not to eat,” said Prisca.

  “It is bad,” moaned Petronilla, as she rocked herself to and fro on the floor. She was not intelligent; she was the mere echo of her sister.

  “We must go and gather flowers,” said Prisca; but her eyes rested wistfully on the dead body. They could not gather flowers, and go and sell them, without leaving their dead mother.