Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 34
Sternly and passionately as he had spoken, his lips quivered, his voice sank to a hoarse whisper, and he turned his head away from the gaze of his fellow-man. The honest heart of blunt, simple, obtuse Jockey Jack, stirred for once into sympathy with the susceptible, sensitive, passionate nature beside him. He was silent for a moment, revolving in his mind the strange problem of this deep and tender love his daughter had awakened, musing over a character so unlike his own, so far above any with which he had come in contact Then he stretched out his hand with a sudden impulse:
“Have your own way, you are right enough. I put more faith in your honour than in bars and bolts. If you love Violet thus, I can’t say you shall not see her; her heart’s nigh broken as it is. God help you both! I’ll trust you with her as I would myself!”
I think Sabretasche had pledged himself to more than he could have fulfilled. It would have been beyond the strength of man to have seen her brilliant and laughing eyes heavy with tears wrung from her heart’s depths, her head, with its wealth of chesnut hair, bowed and bent with the weight of an anguish too great to bear; to have heard the low moan with which she would lie for hours on the cushions of her boudoir, like a summer rose snapped off in the fury of a tempest — to have been tortured with the touch of her hands clinging to him, with her wild entreaties to him not to leave her, with her words in calmer moments promising eternal fidelity to him, and vowing to keep true to him, true as though she were his wife — it had been more than the strength of man to have endured all this, and kept his word so constantly in sight as never to whisper to her of possible joy, never to woo her to a forbidden future.
He did keep it, with iron nerve and giant self-subjection, wonderful indeed in one, born in the voluptuous South, and accustomed to an existence, if of most refined, still of most complete, self-indulgence. He did keep it, though his heart would have broken — if hearts did break — in the agony crowded into those few brief days. Had his torture lasted longer, I doubt if he would have borne up against it; for, strong as his honour was, his love was stronger still. But the English and French troops were gathering in the East; months before, the. Guards had tramped through London streets in the grey of the morning, with their band playing their old cheery tunes, and their Queen wishing them God speed. For several months in Woolwich Dockyards transports had been filling and ships weighing anchor, and decks crowding with line on line of troops. Already through England, after a forty years’ peace, the military spirit of the nation had awoke; the trumpet-call rang through the country, sounding far away through the length and breadth of the land, arousing the slumbering embers of war that had slept since Waterloo; already bitter partings were taking place in stately English homes, and by lowly farmstead hearths; and young gallant blood warmed for the strife, longing for the struggle to come, and knowing nothing of the deadly work of privation and disease, waiting, and chafing, and dying off under inaction, that was to be their doom. Ours were ordered to the Crimea with but a fortnight’s time for preparation; where sharp work was to be done the Dashers were pretty sure to be in request. We were glad enough to catch a glimpse of active service and real life, after long years of dawdling in London drawing-rooms, and boring ourselves with the routine of pleasures of which we had long tired. We had plenty to do in the few days’ notice; fresh harness, fresh horses, new rifles, and old liaisons; cases of Bass and Cognac; partings with fair women; buying in camp furniture; burning the souvenirs of half a dozen seasons; the young ones thinking of Moore and Byron, the Bosphorus and veiled Haidées — we of Turkish tobacco, Syrian stallions, Miniés, and Long Enfields. We had all plenty to do, and the Crimea came to us as a good bit of fun, to take the place that year of the Western Highlands, the English open, or yachting up to Norway, or through the Levant “Colonel Brandling wishes to speak to you, Major,” said his man to De Vigne, one morning when Granville was dressing, after exercising his troop up at Wormwood Scrubs.
“Colonel Brandling? Ask him if he’d mind coming up to me here, if he’s in a hurry,” answered De Vigne.
He did not bear Curly the greatest good will since seeing him under the chesnut-trees at St. Crucis — where, by the way, he himself had not been since.
“May I come in, old fellow?” asked Curly’s voice at the door.
“Certainly. You are an early visitor, Curly,” said De Vigne, rather curtly. “I thought you’d prefer coming up here instead of waiting ten minutes while I washed my hands and put myself en bourgeois.”
“Yes, I have come early,” began Curly, so abstractedly that De Vigne swung round, and noticed with astonishment that his light-hearted Frestonhills pet seemed strangely down in the mouth. Curly was distrait and absent; he looked worried, and there were dark circles beneath his eyes as of a man who has passed the night tossing on his bed to painful thoughts.
“What’s the matter, Curly?” asked De Vigne. “Has Heliotrope gone lame, Lord Ormolu turned crusty, Eudoxie Lemaire deserted you, or what is it?”
Curly smiled, but very sadly.
“Nothing new; I have made a fool of myself, that’s all.”
“And are come to me for auricular confession? What is the matter, Curly?”
“Imprimis, I have asked a woman to be my wife,” answered Curly, with a nervous laugh, playing with the bouquet bottles on the table.
De Vigne started perceptibly; he looked up with a rapid glance of interrogation, but he did not speak, except a rather haughty and impatient “Indeed!”
Curly did not notice his manner, he was too ill at ease, too thoroughly absorbed in his own thoughts, too entirely at a loss, for the first time in his life, how to express what he wanted to say. Curly had often come to De Vigne with the embarrassments and difficulties of his life; when he had dropped more over the Oaks than he knew exactly how to pay, or entangled himself where a tigress grip held him tighter than he relished; but there are other things that a man cannot so readily say to another.
“Well!” said De Vigne, impatient at his silence, and more anxious, perhaps, than he would have allowed to hear the end of these confessions. “Certainly the step shows no great wisdom. Who has bewitched you into it?”
“You can guess, I should say.”
“Not I; I am no Oedipus; and of all riddles, men’s folly with women is the hardest to read.”
“Yet you might Who can be with her and resist her—”
“Her? — who? Speak intelligibly, Curly,” said De Vigne, irritably. “Remember your lover’s raptures are Arabic to me.”
“In a word then,” said Curly, hurriedly, “I love Alma Tressillian, and I have told her so.”
De Vigne’s eyebrows contracted, his lips turned pale, and he set them into a hard straight line, as I have seen him when suffering severe physical pain.
“She has accepted you, of course?”
Had Curly been less preoccupied, he must have thought how huskily and coldly the question was spoken.
Curly shook his head.
“No?” exclaimed De Vigne, his eyes lighting up from their haughty impassibility into passionate eagerness.
“No! Plenty of women have loved me, too; yet when I am more in earnest than I ever was, I can awaken no response. I love her very dearly, Heaven knows. I would give her my name, my rank, my riches, were they a thousand times greater than they are. Good Heavens! it seems very bitter that love like mine should count for nothing, when other men, only seeking to gratify their passions or gain their own selfish ends, win all before them.”
His voice trembled as he spoke! his gay and careless spirits were beaten down; for the first time in his bright butterfly life Sorrow had come upon him. Its touch is death, and its breath the chill air of the charnel-house, even when we have had it by us waking and sleeping, in our bed and at our board, peopling our solitude and poisoning our Falernian, rising with the morning sun and with the evening stars; — how much heavier then must be the iron hand, how much more chill its breath, ice cold as the air of a grave, to one who has never known its presence!
Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass,
Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.
Curly’s voice trembled; he leaned his arm on the dressing-table, and his head upon his hand; his rejection had cut him more keenly to the heart than he cared another man should see. De Vigne stood still, an eager gladness in his eyes, a faint flush of colour on his face, his heart beating freely and his pulses throbbing quickly; that vehement and exultant joy of which his nature was capable, stirred in him at the thought of Curly’s rejection. We never know how we value a thing till its loss is threatened!
He did not answer for some moments; then he laid his hand on Curly’s shoulder with that old gentleness he had always used to his old Frestonhills favourite.
“Dear old fellow, it is hard. I am very—”
He stopped abruptly, he would have added, “sorry for you,” but De Vigne knew that he was not sorry in his heart, and the innate truth that was in the man checked the lie that conventionality would have pardoned.
Curly threw off his hand and started to his feet. Something in De Vigne’s tone struck on his lover’s keen senses with a suspicion that before had never crossed him, absorbed as he had been in his own love for the Little Tressillian, and his own hopes and fears for his favour in her eyes.
“Spare yourself the falsehood,” he said, coldly, as he had never spoken before to his idolized “senior pupil.”
“Commiseration from a rival is simply insult.”
“A rival?” repeated De Vigne, that fiery blood of his always ready — too ready, at times — to rise up in anger.
“Yes, and a successful one, perhaps,” said Curly, as hotly, for at the sting of jealousy the sweetest temper can turn into hate. “You could not say on your honour, De Vigne, that my rejection by her gives you pain. If you did your face would belie you! You love her as well as I; you are jealous over her; perhaps you have already taken advantage of her youth and her ignorance of the world and her trust in you, to sacrifice her to your own inconstant passions—”
“Silence!” said De Vigne, fiercely. “Your very supposition is an insult to my honour.”
“Do you care nothing for her, then?”
The dark blood of his race rose over De Vigne’s forehead; his eyes lighted; he looked like a lion longing to spring upon his foe. He to have his heart probed rudely like this — to endure to have his dearest secrets dragged to daylight — he to be questioned, counselled, arraigned in accusation by another man! Curly had forgotten his character, or he would have hardly thought to gain his secret by provocation and condemnation. De Vigne restrained his anger only by a mighty effort of will, and he threw back his hand with that gesture, habitually expressive with him of contemptuous irritation.
“If you came here to cross-question me, you were singularly unwise. I am not very likely to be patient under such treatment Whatever my feelings might be on any subject of the kind, do you suppose it is probable I should confide them to you!”
So haughtily careless was his tone, that Curly, catching at straws as men in love will do, began to hope that De Vigne, cold and cynical as he had been to women ever since his fatal marriage, might, after all, be indifferent to his protégée.
“If it be an insult to your honour, then,” he said, eagerly, “to hint that you love her, or think of her otherwise than as a sister, you can have no objection to do for me what I came to ask of you.”
“What is that!” asked De Vigne, coldly. He could not forgive Curly any of his words; if he resented the accusation of loving Alma, because it startled him into consciousness of what he had been unwilling to admit to himself, he resented still more the supposition that he cared for Alma as a sister, since it involved the deduction that she might love him — as a brother! And that fraternal calmness of affection ill chimed in with an impetuous nature that knew few shades between hate and love, between profound indifference or entire possession!
“Alma rejected me!” answered poor Curly; all the unconscious dignity of sorrow was lent to his still girlish and Greek-like beauty, and a sadness strangely calm and deep for his gay insouciant character had settled in his blue eyes. “I offered her what few men would have thought it necessary to offer her, unprotected as she is. Yet she rejected me, though gently and tenderly, for she has nothing harsh in her. But sometimes we know a woman’s refusal is not positive. I thought that perhaps (you have great influence over her) you could put this before her; persuade her at the least not to deny me all hope; plead my cause with her; ask her to let me wait! If it were even as long as Jacob for Rachel, I would bear it. I would try to be more worthy of her, to make her fonder of me. I would shake off the idleness and uselessness of my present life. I would gain a name that would do her honour. I would do anything, everything, if only she would give me hope!”
He spoke fervently and earnestly; pale as death with the love that brought no joy! his delicate girlish face stamped pitifully with the anguish of uncontrollable anxiety yet with a new nobility upon it from the chivalric honour and high devotedness which Alma had awakened in him.
He was silent — and De Vigne as well. De Vigne leaned against one of the windows of his bedroom, his face turned away from Curly, and his eyes fixed on the gay street below. Curly’s words stirred him strangely; they revealed his own heart to him; they contrasted with such love as he had always known; they stung him with the thought, how much better sheltered from the storms of passion and the chill blasts of the world in Curly’s bosom than in his own, would be this fragile and soft-winged little dove, now coveted by both.
Curly repeated his question in low tones.
“De Vigne, will you do it? Will you plead my cause with her! If she be so little to you it will cost you nothing!”
Again he did not answer, the question struck too closely home. It woke up in all its force the passion which had before slumbered in some unconsciousness. When asked to give her to another, he learned how dear she was to him himself. Hot and jealous by nature as a Southern, how could he plead with her to give the joys to his rival of which a cruel fate had robbed him! how could he give the woman he would win for himself, away to the arms of another!
“Answer me, De Vigne. Yes or no!”
“No!”
And haughtily calm as the response was, in his heart went up a bitter cry, “God help me. I cannot!”
“Then you love her, and have lied!”
De Vigne sprang forward like a tiger at the hiss of the murderous and cowardly bullet that has roused him from his lair; the fire of just anger now burned in his dark eyes, and his teeth were set like a man who holds his vengeance with difficulty in check. Involuntarily he lifted his right arm; another man he would have struck down at his feet for that dastard word. But with an effort — how great only those who knew his nature could appreciate — he held his anger in, as he would have held a chafing and fiery horse with iron hand upon its reins.
“Your love has maddened you, or you would scarcely have dared to use that word to me. If I did not pity you, and if I had not liked you since you were a little fair-faced boy, I should make you answer for that insult in other ways than speech. If I were to love any woman, what right have you to dictate to me my actions or dispute my will! You might know of old that I suffer no man’s interference with me and mine.”
“I have no power to dispute your will,” interrupted Curly, “nor to arrest your actions. Would to Heaven I had But as a man who loves her truly and honourably himself, I will tell you, whether I have a right or no, that no prevarication on your part hides from me that you at least share my madness. I will tell you, too, though you slew me to-morrow for it, that she is too pure to be made the plaything of your fickle passions, and cast off when you are weary of her face and seek a newer mistress. I will tell you that the man who wrongs her trust in him, and betrays her guileless frankness, will carry a sin in his bosom greater than Cain’s fratricide. I will tell you that, if you go on as you have done from day to day concealing your marriage, yet knitting her heart to yours — if you do not at once reveal your history to her, and leave her free to act for herself, to love you or to leave you, to save herself from you or to sacrifice herself for you, as she please, that for all your unstained name and unsuspected honour, I shall call you a coward!”
“My God!” muttered De Vigne, “that I should live to hear another man speak such words to me. I wonder I do not kill you where you stand!”
I wonder, too, he kept down his wrath even to the point he did, for De Vigne’s nature had no trace of the lamb in it, and to attack his honour was a worse crime than to attack his life. Deadly passion was between those two men then, sweeping away all ancient memories of boyish days, all gentler touches of brighter hours and kinder communion. Their eyes met — fierce, steady, full of fire, and love, and hate; De Vigne’s hand clenched harder on his breast, and with the other he signed him to the door. The wildest passions were at war within him; his instinct thirsted to revenge the first insult he had ever known, yet his kingly soul at the daring that defied him yielded something like that knightly admiration with which the Thirty looked upon the Thirty when the sun went down on Camac.
