Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 424
“I said we had better not measure insults; I have had too many to count them, but at last they may pass ones patience — yours has passed mine.”
“Body of Christ!” he cried savagely, “what were you? Did I not buy you? What better are you than that other woman who has my sables except that I bought you at a higher cost? Have you never thought of that? You high-born virgins who are offered up for gold, how are you so much nobler and higher than the jolies impures whom you pretend to despise?”
“I have thought of it every day and night since I was made your wife. But you know very well that I did not marry you for either rank or riches, neither for any purpose of my own.”
“No? For what did you then?”
Vere’s voice sank very low, so low that the sound of the sea almost drowned it.
“To save my mother — you know that.”
The face of her husband changed, and he let go his hold of her wrists.
“What did she tell you?” he muttered; “what did she tell you?”
“She told me she was in your debt; that she could not pay you; that you had letters of hers to some one — she did not say to whom — that placed her in your power; and you had threatened to use your power unless I — But you must know all that very well; better than I do. It seemed to me right to sacrifice myself; now I would not do it; but then I was such a child, and she prayed to me in my fathers name—”
She paused suddenly, for Zouroff laughed aloud; a terrible jarring laugh that seemed to hurt the peace and silence around.
“What a liar! what a liar always!” he muttered, “and with it all how pretty, and empty-headed, and harmless she looks — my Lady Dolly!”
Then he laughed again.
“Was it not true?” said Vere.
A great cold and a great sickness came over her: the look upon her husbands face frightened her as his rage had had no power to do.
“True? was what true?”
“That she was in your power?”
His eyes did not meet hers.
“Yes — no. She had had plenty of my money, but that was no matter,” he answered her in a strange forced voice, “she — she had paid me; there was no cause to frighten you, to coerce you.”
Then he laughed again — a dissonant cruel laugh, that hurt his wife more than the bruise he had left upon her wrists.
“Was it not true?” she muttered again wearily; she trembled a little.
“Be quiet!” said her husband roughly, with the colour passing over his face again like a hot wind, “do not talk of it; do not think of it; she wished you to marry me, and she was — well, in a sense she was afraid, and wished to muzzle me. Ah! those dainty ladies! and they think to meet the lionnes in the Passage des Anglais is pollution!”
Then he laughed yet again.
Vere felt a faintness steal over her, she felt terror — she knew not of what nor why.
“Then my mother deceived me!”
His eyes looked at her strangely in a fleeting glance.
“Yes, she deceived you!” he said briefly. “In a sense she was afraid of me; but not so — not so.”
His dark brows frowned, and his face grew very troubled and full of a dusky red of shame. Vere was mute.
“It is of no use speaking of it now; your mother never could be true to anyone,” he said, with an effort. “I am — sorry. You were misled — but it is of no use now — it is too late. Give the sables to the first beggar you meet. That damned singer was right last night; you are a cup of gold and I — like best the trough where the swine drink!”
Vere stood motionless and mute, a vague terror of some unknown thing unnerved her and paralysed her dauntless courage, her proud tranquillity; she felt that for her mother this man who was before her had a scorn as boundless as any he could feel for the basest creatures of the world: and for once she was a coward, for once she dared not ask the truth.
Zouroff stood still a moment, looked at her wistfully, then bowed to her with deep respect, and turned away in silence. A little while later he was driving rapidly through Eza to the Casino of Monte Carlo.
His sister came to Vere anxiously as she saw his horses drive away.
“I hope he was not violent, my dear?”
“No.”
“And he did not speak of your driving on that road?”
“He did not enforce it.”
Vere spoke feebly, her teeth chattered a little as with cold; she had sat down by the balustrade of the terrace and had a stupefied look like the look of some one who has had a blow or fall.
“I am thankful my children died at their birth,” she said after some moments, in a voice so low that it scarcely stirred the air.
Then she got up, drew a shawl about her and went once more towards the house; a great darkness was upon her; she felt as in the Greek tragedies which she had read in her childhood, those felt who were pursued, innocent, yet doomed by the Furies for their mother’s sins.
Meanwhile, her husband was driving against the hot south-east wind across the Place du Palais of Monaco.
He was thinking— “the quadroon is a beast of prey but she is honesty itself beside half the women in society, the delicate dainty dames that we flirt with in the ballroom alcoves, and lift our hats to as they go by in the parks!”
A little while later he went up the steps of the great temple of Hazard. He met the mother of Vere coming out between the columns from the vestibule; it was sunset, she had been playing since three o’clock and had amused herself, she had won a thousand francs or so; she was going home to dinner contented and diverted. She was still staying with her friends at the villa of the Condamine. She looked like a little Dresden figure, she had a good deal of pale rose and golden brown in her dress, she had a knot of pink roses in her hand, and had above her head a large pink sunshade. Casse-une-Croûte had been playing very near her at the table, but Lady Dolly did not mind these accidents, she was not supposed to know Casse-une-Croûte by sight from any other unrecognisable person amongst the pilgrims of pleasure.
“The ponies are waiting for you, madame,” said her son-in-law as he met her, and took her from her little attendant group of young men, and sauntered on by her side down by the marble stairs.
There was a gorgeous sunset over sea and sky, the thickets of camellias were all in gorgeous blossom, the odorous trees and shrubs filled the air with perfume, some music of Ambroise Thomas was floating on the air in sweet distant strains, throngs of gay people were passing up and down; the great glittering pile rose above them like a temple of Moorish art.
“I have won a thousand francs, quel bonheur!” cried Lady Dolly.
“Quel bonheur,” repeated Zouroff; “I suppose that sunshade did not cost much more?”
“Not half as much,” said Lady Dolly seriously; “these stones in the handle are only Ceylon garnets.”
Zouroff did not look at her, his face was flushed and gloomy He turned a little aside at the foot of the steps into one of the winding walks and motioned to a marble bench: “Will you sit there a moment, the ponies can wait; I want to say a word to you that is better said here.”
Lady Dolly put her bouquet of roses to her lips and felt annoyed. “When people want to speak to one, it is never to say anything agreeable,” she thought to herself, “and he looks angry; perhaps it is because that Casse-une-Croûte was at my elbow — but I shall not say anything to Vere, I never make mischief; he must surely know that.”
“Why did you induce your daughter to marry me by false representations?” said Zouroff abruptly.
“False what?” echoed Lady Dolly vaguely.
“You deceived me and you deceived her,” said Zouroff. — Lady Dolly laughed nervously.
“Deceived! What a very low hysterical sort of word; and what nonsense!”
“You deceived her,” he repeated, “and you cannot deny it; you told her nothing of the truth.”
“The truth?” said Lady Dolly growing very pale and with a nervous contraction at the end corners of her mouth, “Who ever does tell the truth? I don’t know anybody—”
“Of course you could not tell it her,” said Zouroff, who also had grown pale, “but you forced her to your purpose with a lie — that was perhaps worse. You knew very well that I would not have had her driven to me so; you knew very well that I supposed her bought by ambition like any other; you did a vile thing—”
“You turned preacher!” said Lady Dolly, with a little shrill angry laugh, “that is really too funny, and you are speaking not too politely. You sought Veres hand, I gave it you; I really do not know—”
“But I never bid you force her to me by a lie! You never feared me — you — you were no more in fear of me than of half a score of others; besides, you know very well that no man who is not a cur ever speaks—”
“I was afraid; I thought you would be furious unless she married you; when men are angry then they speak; how could I tell? You wished that thing, you had it; you are very ungrateful, and she too.”
Lady Dolly had recovered herself; she had regained that effrontery which was her equivalent for courage; she had no conscience, and she did not see that she had done so much that was wrong. After all, what was a sin? — it was an idea. In her way she was very daring. She would kneel at the flower-services and weep at the Lenten ones, but she did not believe a word of all her prayers, and penance; they looked well, so she did them; that was all.
For the moment she had been frightened, but she was no longer frightened. What could he do, what could he say? When she could not be punished for it, guilt of any sort lay very lightly on her head. She knew that he was powerless, and she lost the fear with which the strong rough temper of Sergius Zouroff had often really moved her in an earlier time.
The contraction at the corners of her mouth still remained and quivered a little, but she recovered all her coolness and all that petulant impudence which was perhaps the most serviceable of all her qualities.
“You are very rude,” she said, “and you are very thankless. You are a very faithless husband, and I know everything and I say nothing, and I come and stay in your house and you ought to thank me, yes, you ought to thank me. I do not know what you mean when you say I used force with my daughter; you could see very well she detested you and yet you chose to insist, whose fault was that? You have been generous, I do not deny that, but then you are just as much so to creatures — more so! I think you have spoken to me abominably; I am not used to that sort of language, I do not like being rebuked when I have always acted for the best if the results did not repay me my sacrifices. As for your imagining I wanted so very much to marry Vere to you, I can assure you I need not have done so, I could have married her at that very same time to Jura if I had chosen.”
“To Jura?”
Zouroff looked at her, then burst into a bitter laughter that was more savage than any of his oaths.
“You are an extraordinary woman!” he said with a little short laugh.
“I don’t know why you should say that,” said Lady Dolly, “I don’t know why you should say that; I am sure I am exactly like everybody else; I hate singularity, there is nothing on earth so vulgar; I do not know whatever I have done to deserve the insult of being called ‘extraordinary.’ I hate people who drive at things. I always detest conundrums and acrostics, perhaps I am too stupid for them; I would rather be stupid than extraordinary, it is less voyant!’
He stared down on her gloomily for awhile, while the laugh rattled in his throat with a cynical sound that hurt her nerves.
“You are a wonderful woman, Miladi, I never did you justice, I see,” he said curtly; “Zola will want a lower deep before long, I suppose; he will do well to leave his cellars for the drawing-rooms.”
“What do you mean?” said Lady Dolly, opening innocent eyes of surprise.
Zouroff paced slowly by her side; he was silent for some moments, then he said abruptly, “Pardon me if I do not ask you to return to my house, you and your daughter should not be sheltered by the same roof.”
Lady Dolly’s pretty teeth gnawed her under lip to keep in her fury; she could not rebuke, and she dared not resent it.
“We had better not quarrel,” she said feebly, “people would talk so terribly.”
“Of course we will not quarrel,” said her son-in-law with his cynical smile, “whoever does quarrel in our world? Only — you understand that I mean what I say.”
“I am sure I understand nothing that you mean to-day,” said Lady Dolly, with a little feeble, flitting laugh.
Then in unbroken silence they went to where the ponies waited.
“You are too cruel to us not to return,” said Zouroff publicly, for the sake of the world’s wide-open ears, as she went to her carriage on his arm.
“I cannot stand your mistral,” said Lady Dolly, also for the world, and, in his ear, added with an injured sweetness, “and I do not like reproaches, and I never deserve them.”
Lady Dolly drove home to La Condamine, where she was staying with the Marquise Pichegru, and, when she was all alone, behind the ponies, shuddered a little, and turned sick, and felt for a moment as if the leaden hand of a dark guilt lay on her conscience; her nerves had been shaken, though she had kept so calm a front, so cool a smile; she had been a coward, and she had sacrificed the child of her dead husband, because in her cowardice she had feared the resurrection to her hurt of her own bygone sins, but she had never thought of herself as a wicked woman. In her frothy world there is no such thing as wickedness, there is only exposure; and the dread of it, which passes for virtue.
She lived, like all women of her stamp and her epoch in an atmosphere of sugared sophisms; she never reflected, she never admitted, that she did wrong; in her world nothing mattered much unless, indeed, it were found out, and got into the public mouth.
Shifting as the sands, shallow as the rain-pools, drifting in all danger to a lie, incapable of loyalty, insatiably curious, still as a friend and ill as a foe, kissing like Judas, denying like Peter, impure of thought, even where by physical bias or politic prudence, still pure in act, the woman of modern society is too often at once the feeblest and the foulest outcome of a false civilisation. Useless as a butterfly, corrupt as a canker, untrue to even lovers and friends because mentally incapable of comprehending what truth means, caring only for physical comfort and mental inclination, tired of living, but afraid of dying; believing some in priests, and some in physiologists, but none at all in virtue; sent to sleep by chloral, kept awake by strong waters and raw meat; bored at twenty, and exhausted at thirty, yet dying in the harness of pleasure rather than drop out of the race and live naturally; pricking their sated senses with the spur of lust, and fancying it love; taking their passions as they take absinthe before dinner; false in everything, from the swell of their breast to the curls at their throat; — beside them the guilty and tragic figures of old, the Medea, the Clytemnæstra, the Phædra look almost pure, seem almost noble.
When one thinks that they are the only shape of womanhood that comes hourly before so many men, one comprehends why the old Christianity which made womanhood sacred dies out day by day, and why the new Positivism, which would make her divine, can find no lasting roost.
The faith of men can only live by the purity of women, and there is both impurity and feebleness at the core of the dolls of Worth, as the canker of the red phylloxera works at the root of the vine.
But there is “no harm” in them, that is the formula of society; there is “no harm” in them; they have never been found out, and they are altogether unconscious of any guilt.
They believe they have a conscience as they know they have a liver, but the liver troubles them sometimes; the conscience is only a word.
Lady Dolly had been a very guilty woman, but she never thought so. Perhaps in real truth the shallow-hearted are never really guilty. “They know not what they do” is a plea of mercy which they perchance deserve even no less than they need it.
A day or two later she made some excuse, and left the Riviera.
“After all,” she thought to herself as the train ran into the heart of the rocks, and the palm trees of Monte Carlo ceased to lift their plumes against the sky, “after all it was quite true what I did tell her; I used to be horribly afraid of him, he can be such a brute. I never was really at ease till I saw my letters on the back of the fire; he can sulk, he can rage, he can quarrel with me if he choose, but he never can do me any harm. If he be ever so unpleasant about me, people will only laugh and say that a man always hates his wife’s mother, and I really am Veres mother, odd as it seems; I think I look quite as young as she does; it is such a mistake, she will never paint, she puts ten years on herself.”
Then she took the little glass out of her travelling bag, and looked at her face; it was pretty, with soft curls touching the eyebrows under a black saucer of a hat with golden-coloured feathers; she had a yellow rose at her throat, linked into her racoon fur; she was satisfied with what she saw in the mirror; when she got into her train she found a charming young man that she knew a little going the same way, and she gave him a seat in her coupé, and flirted pleasantly all the way to Lyons.
“What a mistake it is to take life au grand sérieux,” she thought; “now if poor Vere were not so tragic, I think she might be the happiest woman in the world — still.”
But then Vere could not have flirted with a chance young man in a coupé, and given him a yellow rose with the whisper of a half-promised rendezvous as they parted; these are the capabilities that make happy women.
CHAPTER III.
In the house on the Gulf of Saint-Hospice a heavy gloom reigned.
Life ran the same course as usual, society came and went, people laughed and talked, guests were gathered and were dispersed, but there was a shadow in the house that even the ceremonies and frivolities of daily custom could not altogether hide or dissipate. Sergius Zouroff was taciturn and quarrelsome, and it taxed all the resources of his sisters tact and wit and worldly wisdom to repair the harm and cover the constraint produced by his captious and moody discourtesies. To his wife he said nothing.
