Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 317
“We may well be threatened then in this day with universal equality!” said the Lady Hilda, hiding a very small yawn behind her fan.
“Nay, Madame,” said Della Rocca. “In this day the nobles do not even do so much as to lead a wrong taste; they accept and adopt every form of it, as imposed on them by their tailors, their architects, their clubs, and their municipalities, as rocaille was imposed by the cabinetmakers.”
“How fearfully serious you all are!” said Madame de Caviare. “There is that dreadful Canadian woman standing up — what rubies! how fond vulgar women always are of rubies. That passe-partout of hers is rather pretty; gold thread on blondine satin, is it not, Hilda? My glass is not very strong—”
Lady Hilda looked through her glass, and decided the important point in the affirmative.
“How she is rouged!” pursued the Countess. “I am sure Altavante did not lay that on; he is much too artistic. Maurice, have you a cigarette?”
“It is not allowed, ma chère,” said the Lady Hilda.
“Pooh!” said Madame de Caviare, accepting a little delicate paper roll. “It was very kind of you, Hilda, to remind me of that; you wished me to enjoy it. Won’t you have one too?”
Lady Hilda said “No” with her fan.
“If the Rocaille brought the Revolution, Duc,” she asked, “what will our smoking bring? — the end of the world?”
“It will bring animosity of the sexes, abolition of the marriage laws, and large increase of paralysis,” replied M. de St. Louis with great decision.
“You have answered me without a compliment — what flattery to my intelligence.”
“Miladi, I never flatter you. I am not in the habit of imitating all the world.”
“You look severe, Della Rocca,” said Madame Mila. “Do you disapprove of women smoking?”
“Madame, a woman of grace lends grace to all she does, no doubt.”
“That is to say, you don’t approve it?”
“Madame, I merely doubt whether Lionardo would have painted Mona Lisa had she smoked.”
“What a good idea you give me! — I will be painted by Millais or Cabanel, smoking. It will be novel. The cigar shall be in my mouth. I will send you the first photograph. Ah! there is Nordlingen; he will come over here, and he is the greatest bore in Europe. You know what your King here said, when Nordlingen had bored him at three audiences about heaven knows what. ‘I never knew the use of sentinels before; let that man be shot if he ask audience again!’ We cannot shoot him; let us go to supper. Duc, you will follow us, with M. des Gommeux? — and you, too, Della Rocca? There is that odious Canadian woman going; let us make haste; I should like to see that blondine cloak close; I shall know whether it looks like Worth or Pingât.”
She passed out on the Duc’s arm, and the Lady Hilda accepted Della Rocca’s, while the well-trained Maurice, who knew his duties, rushed to find the footmen in the vestibule, and to arrest another gilded youth and kindred spirit, a M. des Poisseux, whom Madame Mila had espied in the crowd, and charged him to bring with him to supper. Madame Mila preferred, to all the world, the young men of her world of five and twenty or less; they had no mind whatever, they had not character enough to be jealous, and they were as full of the last new scandals as any dowager of sixty.
“They talk of the progress of this age: contrast M. de St. Louis with M. des Gommeux and M. des Poisseux!” said the Lady Hilda, with her little contemptuous smile.
Della Rocca laughed.
“You make me for the first time, Madame, well content to belong to what the Gommeux and the Poisseux would call a past generation. But there are not many like our friend the Duc; he has stepped down to us from the terraces of Marly; I am certain he went to sleep one night after a gavotte with Montespan, and has only just awakened.”
The supper was gay and bright; Lady Hilda, rejecting chicken and champagne, and accepting only ice-water and cigarettes, deigned to be amusing, though sarcastic, and Madame Mila was always in one of the two extremes — either syncope, sal volatile, and hysterics, or laughter, frolic, smoke and risque stories.
She and her sisterhood spend their lives in this see-saw; the first state is for the mornings, when they remember their losses at play, their lovers’ looks at other women, the compromising notes they have written, and how much — too much to be safe — their maids knew of them; the second state is for the evenings, when they have their war-paint on, have taken a little nip of some stimulant at afternoon tea, are going to half-a-dozen houses between midnight and dawn, and are quite sure their lovers never even see that any other women exist.
“He could not have a better illustration of the difference between a woman with taste and a woman without it,” thought the Duc de St. Louis, surveying the two; the Countess had a million or two of false curls in a tower above her pretty tiny face, was almost as décolletée as a Greuze picture, chirped the fashionable slang of the boulevards and salons in the shrillest and swiftest of voices, and poured forth slanders that were more diverting than decorous.
Lady Hilda was dressed like a picture of Marie Antoinette, in 1780; her rich hair was lifted from her low fair forehead in due keeping with her costume, she swept aside her cousin’s naughty stories with as much tact as contempt, and spoke a French which Marie Antoinette could have recognised as the language in which Voltaire once scoffed, and André Chénier sighed. To be sure, she did smoke a little, but then even the most perfect taste cannot quite escape the cachet of its era.
“It was not necessary, my friend, to say that your place was so poor,” said M. de St. Louis, as they went out of the hôtel together; he had known his companion from boyhood.
“I am not ashamed of my poverty,” said Della Rocca, somewhat coldly. “Besides,” he added, with a laugh which had not much mirth in it, “our poverty is as well known as that of the city. I think the most dishonest Della Rocca could not conceal it by any adroitness, any more than Floralia could conceal her public debt.”
“That may be, but neither you nor the town need proclaim the state of your affairs,” said the Duc, who never gave up an opinion. “You should let her be interested in you before you make it so evident; such silence is quite permissible. You need say nothing; you need hide nothing; you need only let things alone.”
“My dear Duc,” said Della Rocca, with a laugh that had melancholy in it and some irritation, “think for one moment of that woman’s position, and say could anything ever induce her to change it — except one thing? Riches could add nothing to her; the highest rank could scarcely be any charm to her; she has everything she can want or wish for; — if she had the power of wishing left, which I doubt. The only spell that might enchain her would be love, if she have any capacity to feel it, which I doubt also. Well — granted love aroused, — what would poverty or riches in her lover matter to one who has secured for ever a golden pedestal of her own from which to survey the woes of the world? She refused the Prince of Deutchsland; that I know, since he told me himself; and men do not boast of rejections; — what position, pray, would ever tempt her since she refused Deutchsland? and he has all personal attractions, too, as well as his future crown.”
“Still, granting all that, to make your lack of fortune so very conspicuous is to render your purpose conspicuous also, and to draw her attention to it unwisely,” said the Duc, who viewed all these matters calmly, as a kind of mixture of diplomacy and business.
“Caro mio!” said Della Rocca lightly, as he descended the last step. “Be very sure that if I ever have such a purpose, your Lady Hilda has too much wit not to perceive it in a day. But I have not such a purpose. I do not like a woman who smokes.”
And with a good night he walked away to his own house, which was a street or two distant. The Duc chuckled, no wise discomfited.
“An Italian always swears he will never do the thing he means to do in an hour,” the Duc reflected as he got in his cab.
The Della Rocca Palace was let to many tenants and in various divisions; he himself retained only a few chambers looking upon the old quiet green garden, high walled, dark with ilex, and musical with fountains.
He crossed the silent courts, mounted the vast black stairways, and entered his solitary rooms. There was a lamp burning; and his dog got up and welcomed him. He slipped on an old velvet smoking coat, lighted a cigar, and sat down: the councils and projects of M. de St. Louis were not so entirely rejected by him as he had wished the Duc to suppose.
He admired her; he did not approve her; he was not even sure that he liked her in any way; but he could not but see that here at last was the marriage which would bring the resurrection of all his fortunes.
Neither did he feel any of the humility which he had expressed to M. de St. Louis. Though she might be as cold as people all said she was, he had little fear, if he once endeavoured, that he would fail in making his way into her graces. With an Italian, love is too perfect a science for him to be uncertain of its results.
Besides, he believed that he detected a different character in her to what the world thought, and she also thought was her own. He thought men had all failed with her because they had not gone the right way to work. After all, to make a woman in love with you was easy enough. At least he had always found it so.
She was a woman, too, of unusual beauty, and of supreme grace, and a great alliance; her money would restore him to the lost power of his ancestors, and save a mighty and stainless name from falling into that paralysis of poverty and that dust of obscurity, which are, sooner or later, its utter extinction. She seemed cast across his-path by a caress of Fortune, from which it would be madness to turn aside. True, he had a wholly different ideal for his wife; he disliked those world-famous élégantes; he disliked women who smoked, and knew their Paris as thoroughly as Houssaye or Dumas; he disliked the extravagant, artificial, empty, frivolous life they led; their endless chase after new excitements, and their insatiable appetite for frissons nouveaux; he disliked their literature, their habits, their cynicism, their ennui, their sensuality, and their dissipations; he knew them well, and disliked them in all things; what he desired in his wife were natural emotions, unworn innocence, serenity, simplicity, and freshness of enjoyment; though he was of the world, he did not care very much for it; he had a meditative, imaginative temperament, and the whirl of modern society was soon wearisome to him; on the other hand, he knew the world too well to want a woman beside him who knew it equally well.
On the whole, the project of M. de St. Louis repelled as much as it attracted him. Yet his wisdom told him that it was the marriage beyond all others which would best fulfil his destiny in the way which from his earliest years he had been accustomed to regard as inevitable; and, moreover, there was something about her which charmed his senses, though his judgment feared and in some things his taste disapproved her.
Besides, to make so self-engrossed a woman love; — he smiled as he sat and smoked in the solitude of his great dim vaulted room, and then he sighed impatiently.
After all, it was not a beau rôle to woo a woman for the sheer sake of her fortune; and he was too true a gentleman not to know it. And what would money do for him if it were hers and not his? — it would only humiliate him, — he felt no taste for the position of a prince consort, — it would pass to his children certainly after him, and so raise up the old name to its olden dignity; but for himself —
He got up and walked to the window; the clear winter stars, large before morning, were shining through the iron bars and lozenged panes of the ancient casement; the fountain in the cortile was shining in the moonlight; the ducal coronet, carved in stone above the gateway, stood out whitely from the shadows.
“After all, she would despise me, and I should despise myself,” he thought; the old coronet had been sadly battered in war, but it had never been chaffered and bought.
CHAPTER IV.
“WHAT do you think of Della Rocca, Hilda,” asked Madame Mila at the same hour that night, toasting her pink satin slipper before her dressing-room fire.
Lady Hilda yawned, unclasping her riviere of sapphires.
“He has a very good manner. There is some truth in what Olga Schouvaloff always maintains, that after an Italian all other men seem boors.”
“I am sure Maurice is not a boor!” said the Countess, pettishly.
“Oh no, my dear; he parts his hair in the middle, talks the last new, unintelligible, aristocratic argot, and has the charms of every actress and dancer in Paris catalogued clearly in a brain otherwise duly clouded, as fashion requires, by brandy in the morning and absinthe before dinner! Boors don’t do those things, nor yet get half as learned as to Mile. Rose the and la Petite Boulotte.”
Madame Mila reddened angrily.
“What spiteful things to say; he never looked at that hideous little Boulotte, or any of the horrible creatures, and he never drinks; he is a perfect gentleman.”
“Not quite that, ma chère; if he had been, he would never have let himself be called bon enfant by your husband!”
Madame Mila raged in passionate wrath for five minutes, and then began to cry a little, whimperingly.
Lady Hilda gathered up her riviere, took her candlestick, and bade her good night.
“It is no use making that noise, Mila,” she said coolly. “You have always known what I think, but you prefer to be in the fashion; of course you must go on as you like; only please to remember, — don’t let me see too much of Des Gommeux.”
Madame Mila, left alone to the contemplation of her pink slippers, fumed and sulked and felt very angry indeed; but she had borrowed a thousand pounds some six or eight times from the Lady Hilda to pay her debts at play; and of course it was such a trifle that she had always forgotten to pay it again, because if ever she had any ready money there was always some jeweller, or man dressmaker, or creditor of some kind who would not wait; and then, though it was not her fault, because she played as high as she could any night she got a chance to do so, somehow or other she generally lost, and never had a single sou to spare; — so she muttered her rage to the pink slippers alone, and decided that it was never worth while to be put out about the Lady Hilda’s “ways.”
“She is a bit of ice herself,” she said to her slippers, and wondered how Lady Hilda or anybody else could object to what she did, or see any harm in it. Maurice always went to another hôtel.
Mme. Mila lived her life in a manner very closely resembling that of the horrible creatures Mlles. Bose the and Boulotte; really, when compared by a cynic there was very little difference to be found between those persons and pretty Madame Mila. But Rose the and Boulotte of course were creatures, and she was a very great little lady, and went to all the courts and embassies in Europe, and was sought and courted by the very best and stiffest people, being very chic and very rich, and very lofty in every way, and very careful to make Maurice go to a different hôtel.
She had had twenty Maurices in her time indeed, but then the Count de Caviare never complained, and was careful to drive with her in the Bois, and pass at least three months of each year under the same roof with her, so that nobody could say anything; it being an accepted axiom with Society that when the husband does not object to his own dishonour, there is no dishonour at all in the matter for any one. If he be sensitive to it then indeed you must cut his wife, and there will be nothing too bad to be said of her; but if he only do but connive at his own shame himself, then all is quite right, and everything is as it should be.
When the Prince of Cracow, with half Little Russia in his possession, entertains the beautiful Lady Lightwood at a banquet at his villa at Frascati, Richmond, or Auteuil, a score of gilded lackeys shout “La voiture de Madame la Comtesse!” the assembled guests receive her sweet good night, the Prince of Cracow bows low, and thanks her for the honour she has done to him; she goes out at the hall door, and the carriage bowls away with loud crash and fiery steeds, and rolls on its way out of the park-gates. Society is quite satisfied. Society knows very well that a million roubles find their yearly way into the empty pockets of Lord Lightwood, and that a little later the carriage will sweep round again to a side-door hidden under the laurels wide open, and receive the beautiful Lady Lightwood: but what is that to Society? It has seen her drive away; that is quite sufficient, everybody is satisfied with that.
If you give Society very good dinners, Society will never be so ill-bred as to see that side-door under your laurels.
Do drive out at the hall-door; — do; — for sake of les Bienséances — that is all Society asks of you; there are some things Society feels it owes to Itself, and this is one of them.
Of course, whether you come back again or not, can be nobody’s business.
Society can swear to the fact of the hall-door.
Madame Mila was attentive to the matter of the hall-door; indeed, abhorred a scandal; it always made everything uncomfortable. She was always careful of appearances. Even if you called on her unexpectedly, Des Gommeux was always in an inner room, unseen, and you could declare with a clear conscience that you never found him alone with her, were the oath ever required in any drawing-room in defence of her character. Of course, you have no sort of business with who or what may be in inner rooms; Society does not require you to search a house as if you were a detective.
If you can say airily, “Oh, there’s nothing in it; I never see him there,” Society believes you, and is quite satisfied: that is, if it wish to believe you; if it do not wish, nothing would ever satisfy it. No, not though there rose one from the dead to bear witness.
Madame Mila would not have done anything to jeopardise her going to Courts, and having all the Embassies to show her jewels in, for any thing that any man in the whole world could have offered her.
Madame Mila thought a woman who left her husband and made a scandal, a horrid creature; nay, she was worse, she was a Blunder, and by her blunder made a great deal of unpleasantness for other and wiser women. After a stupid, open thing of that kind, Society always gets so dreadfully prudish for about three months, that it is disagreeable for everybody. To run off with a man, and lose your settlements, and very likely have to end in a boarding-house in Boulogne? — could anything be more idiotic?
