Delphi collected works o.., p.432
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 432
The stranger went away.
The next day was the Immaculate Conception. At Szarisla the Catholic religion was permitted by a special concession of a French princess Zouroff, and its functions were still allowed by her descendants.
There was no other church for the peasants than that which was part of the great building, once the monastery of Szarisla. They all flocked to it upon holy days. It was sombre and ill lit, but gorgeous in Byzantine colour and taste from the piety of dead Zouroff princes.
The peasantry went over the snow through its doors; the stranger went with them; the mistress of Szarisla was at the midday mass, as well the household.
In the stillness, after the elevation of the host, a voice arose, and sang the Salutaris Hostia.
A warmth like the glow of summer ran through all the veins of Vere; she trembled; her face was lifted for one moment, then she dropped it once more on her hands.
The peasants and the household, awe-struck and amazed, listened with rapt wonder to what they thought was the song of angels; they could not see the singer. Kneeling as in prayer, with her face hidden, the mistress of Szarisla, who was also the captive of Szarisla, never moved.
The divine melody floated through the dimness and the stillness of the lonely Polish church; the priest stood motionless; the people were mute; some of them wept in ecstasy. When it ceased, they prostrated themselves on the earth. They believed that the angels of God were amongst them.
Vere arose slowly and stood pale and still, shrouded from head to foot in fur.
She looked towards the shadows behind the altar. There she saw Corrèze, as she had known that she would see him.
He came forward and bowed low. His eyes had a timidity and a fear in the wistfulness of their appeal to her.
They stood before each other, and were silent.
“Is this how you obey me?” her glance said to him without words.
“Forgive me,” he murmured aloud.
By this time the people had arisen, and were gazing at him, amazed to find him but a mortal man.
Vere turned to the priest, and her voice trembled a little; “You are not angry, father? Will you not rather thank this — traveller? — he is known to me.”
In Latin the priest spoke his admiration and his thanks, and in Latin the singer replied.
Vere looked at him, and said simply, “Come.”
Corrèze obeyed her, and moved by her side. He dared not touch her hand, or speak any word that might offend her. He could see nothing of her face or form for the black furs that swept from her head to her feet. She passed into the sacristy with a passing word to the priest. She threw the heavy door close with her own hands, and let the furs fall off her in a heap upon the floor.
Then for the first time she looked at him.
“Why do you come? It is unworthy—”
He moved as if a blow had been struck him, his eyes, longing and passionate, burned like stars; he too cast his furs down; he stood before her with a proud humiliation in his attitude and his look.
“That is a harsh word,” he said simply; “I have been in this district for weeks; I have seen you pass with your swift horses; I have been in your church before now; when you are imprisoned here do you think I could live elsewhere, do you think I could sing in gay cities? For some months I knew nothing; I heard that you were on your Russian estates, and nothing more; when I was in Styria five weeks ago, I heard for the first time that you were in Poland. A man who knew your husband spoke of Szarisla as no place for a woman. Then I came. Are you offended? Was I wrong? You cannot be here of your own will? It is a prison. When I rang at the gates they told me it was the Prince’s order that you should see no one. It is a captivity!”
Vere was silent.
“You should not have come,” she said with an effort; “I am alone here; it was ungenerous.”
The blood mounted to his face.
“Cannot you make excuse?” he murmured. “I know what Russians are; I know what their tyrannies are; I trembled for you, I knew no rest night or day till I saw the walls of Szarisla, and then you passed by me in the woods in the snow, and I saw you were living and well; then I breathed again, then all the frozen earth seemed full of spring and sunshine. Forgive me; — how could I lead my life singing in cities, and laughing with the world, while I thought you were alone in this hotbed of disaffection, of hatred, of assassination, where men are no better than the wolves? For the love of heaven, tell me why you are here! Is it your husbands madness, or his vengeance?”
She was silent still. He looked at her and stooped, and said very low: “You learned the truth of Jeanne de Sonnaz. Was it that?”
She gave a gesture of assent. The hot colour came into her averted face.
Corrèze stifled a curse in his throat, “It is a vengeance then?”
“In a sense, perhaps,” she answered with effort. “I will not receive her. I will never see her again.”
“And your banishment is her work. But why imprison yourself? If you resisted, you would have all Europe with you.”
“I obey my husband,” said Vere simply, “and I am in peace here.”
“In peace? In prison! We spoke once of Siberia; this is a second Siberia, and he consigns you to it in your innocence, to spare the guilty! Oh my God!” —
His emotion choked him as if a hand were at his throat; he gazed at her and could have fallen at her feet and kissed them.
“Noble people, and guiltless people, live in Siberia, and die there,” said Vere with a faint smile. “It is not worse for me than for them, and the spring will come sometime; and the peasantry are learning not to hate me; it is a better life than that of Paris.”
“But it is a captivity! You cannot leave it if you would; he does not give you the means to pass the frontier.”
“He would prevent my doing so, no doubt.”
“It is an infamy! It is an infamy. Why will you bear it, why will you not summon the help of the law against it?”
“If a man struck you, would you call in the aid of the law?”
“No. I should kill him.”
“When I am struck, I am mute: that is a womans courage; a mans courage is vengeance, but ours cannot be.”
Corrèze sighed: a heavy, passionate, restless sigh, as under a weighty burden.
“A man may avenge you,” he muttered.
“No man has any title,” she said a little coldly. “I am the wife of Prince Zouroff.”
A greater coldness than that of the ice world without, fell on the heart of her hearer. He did not speak for many moments. The snow fell; the wind moaned, the grey dull atmosphere seemed between him and the woman he loved, like a barrier of ice.
He said abruptly, almost in a whisper: “The world says you should divorce him; you have the right—”
“I have the right.”
“Then you will use it?”
“No — no,” she answered after a pause. “I will not take any public action against my husband.”
“He wishes you to divorce him?”
“No doubt. I shall be here until I do so.”
“And that will be—”
“Never.”
“Never?”
She shook her head.
“I think,” she said in a very low tone, “if you understand me at all, you understand that I would never do that. Those courts are only for shameless women.”
He was silent. All that it was in his heart to urge, he dared not even hint. A great anguish seemed to stifle speech in him. He could have striven against every other form of opposition, but he could not strive against this which sprang from her very nature, from the inmost beauty and holiness of the soul that he adored.
The salt tears rose in his eyes.
“You have indeed kept yourself unspotted from the world!” he said wearily, and then there was silence.
It lasted long; suddenly he broke it, and all the floodgates of his eloquence were opened, and all the suffering and the worship that were in him broke up to light.
“Forgive me,” he said passionately. “Nay, perhaps you will never forgive, and yet speak I must. What will you do with your life? Will you shut it here in ice, like an imprisoned thing, for sake of a guilty and heedless man, a coarse and thankless master? Will you let your years go by like beautiful flowers whose blossom no eyes behold? Will you live in solitude and joylessness for sake of a brute who finds his sport in shame? Your marriage was an error, a frightful sacrifice, a martyrdom, will you bear it always, will you never take your rights to liberty and light, will you never be young in your youth?”
“I am his wife,” said Vere simply; “nothing can change that.” She shuddered a little as she added: “God himself cannot undo what is done.”
“And he leaves you for Jeanne de Sonnaz!”
“I rule my life by my own measure, not his. He forgets that he is my husband, but I do not forget that I am his wife.”
“But why remember it? He has ceased to deserve the remembrance — he never deserved it — never in the first hour of your marriage to him.”
Vere’s face flushed.
“If I forgot it, what should I be better than the wife of Paul de Sonnaz?”
“You are cruel!”
“Cruel?”
“Cruel — to me.”
He spoke so low that the words scarcely stirred the air, then he knelt down on the ground before her and kissed the hem of her gown.
“I dare not say to you what I would say; you are so far above all other women, but you know so well, you have known so long, that all my life is yours, to use or throw away as you choose. Long ago I sang to you, and you know so well, I think, all that the song said. I would serve you, I would worship you with the love that is religion, I would leave the stage and the world and art and fame, I would die to men, if I might live for you—”
She shook as she heard him, as a tall lily-stem shakes in a strong wind; she sighed wearily; she was quite silent. Was she insulted, angered, alienated? He could not tell. His ardent and eloquent eyes, now dim and feverish, in vain sought hers. She looked away always at the grey misty plain, the wide waste, treeless and sunless, swept with low driving clouds.
“You knew it always?” he muttered at length; “always, surely.”
“Yes.”
The single word came painfully and with hesitation from her lips; she put her hand on her heart to still its beating; for the first time in all her years she was afraid, and afraid of herself.
“Yes,” she said once more. “I knew it lately — but I thought you never would speak of it to me. You should have been silent always — always; if I were indeed a religion to you, you would have been so. Men do not speak so of what they honour. Am I no better than my husbands mistresses in your eyes?”
She drew herself erect with a sudden anger, and drew the skirt of her gown from his hands; then a shiver as of cold passed over her, a sob rose in her throat; she stood motionless, her face covered with her hands.
He wished he had died a thousand deaths ere he had spoken. He rose to his feet and stood before her.
“Since the day by the sea that I gathered you the rose, I have loved you; where is the harm? All the years I have been silent. Had I seen you in peace and in honour I would have been silent to my grave. I have been a sinner often, but I would never have sinned against you. I would never have dared to ask you to stoop and hear my sorrow, to soil your hand to soothe my pain. I saw you outraged, injured, forsaken, and your rivals the base creatures that I could buy as well as he if I chose, and yet I said nothing; I waited, hoping your life might pass calmly by me, ready, if of any defence or any use I could be. What was the harm or the insult in that? You are the golden cup, holy to me; he drinks from the cabaret glasses; can you ask me, a man, and not old, and with life in my veins and not ice, to be patient and mute when I see that, and find you in solitude here?”
He spoke with the simplicity and the strength of intense but restrained emotion. All the passion in him was on fire, but he choked it into silence and stillness; he would not seem to insult her in her loneliness.
Vere never looked at him. All the colour had left her face, her hands were crossed upon her breast above the mark which her husbands blow had left there; she stood silent.
She remembered her husbands words: “All women are alike when tempted.” For the first time in her pure and proud life temptation came to her assailing her with insidious force.
“What do you ask?” she said abruptly at last. “Do you know what you ask? You ask me to be no better a thing than Jeanne de Sonnaz! Go — my life was empty before; now it is full — full of shame. It is you who have filled it. Go!”
“These are bitter words—”
“They are bitter; they are true. What is the use of sophism? You love me; yes; and what is it you would have me do? cheat the world with hidden intrigue, or brave it with guilty effrontery? One or the other; what else but one or the other could love be now for us?”
Then, with a sudden recollection of the only plea that would have power to persuade or force to move him, she added.
“To serve me best — go back to Paris; let Jeanne de Sonnaz hear you in all your glory there.”
He understood.
He stood silent, while the large tears stood beneath his drooping eyelids.
“I would sooner you bade me die.”
“It is so easy to die,” she said, with a passing weary smile. “If — if you love me indeed — go.”
“At once?”
She bent her head.
He looked at her long; he did not touch her; he did not speak to her; and he went. The door of the church closed with a heavy sound behind him.
His footsteps were lost upon the snow.
When the old priest entered the building he found the mistress of Szarisla kneeling before the altar.
She remained so long motionless that at length the old man was frightened and dared to touch her.
She was insensible.
Her household thought she had fainted from the cold.
CHAPTER VII.
TEN DAYS LATER Corrèze sang in the midnight mass of Notre Dame. The face of the Duchesse de Sonnaz clouded. “C’est une impasse,” she muttered.
The winter went on its course and the spring-time came.
Corrèze remained in Paris.
He sang, as of old, and his triumphs were many, and envy and detraction could only creep after him dully and dumbly. For the summer he took a little chateau in the old-world village of Marly-le-Roi; and, there, gathered other artists about him. The world of women found him changed. He had grown cold and almost stern; amours he had none; to the seductions that had of old found him so easy a prey he was steeled.
In him, this indifference was no virtue. All women had become without charm to him. The dominion of a noble and undivided love was upon him; that love was nothing but pain; yet the pain was sacred to him. His lips would never touch the golden cup, but the memory of it forbade him to drink of any earthly wines of pleasure or of vanity.
His love, like all great love, was consecration.
“He will end in a monastery,” said the neglected Delilahs; and Sergius Zouroff heard them say it.
A sombre jealousy began to awaken on him as it had awakened at the sight of the necklace of the moth on the breast of Vere. What right had this singer to be faithful to the memory of his wife while he to his wife was faithless?
“Pur amant sur terre égaré!” murmured Jeanne de Sonnaz again, with a little laugh, when she saw Corrèze passing out of the opera-house alone, and added in the ear of Zouroff: “How he shames you! Are you not ashamed?”
Zouroff grew sullen and suspicious. He began to hate the sight of the face of Corrèze, or that of the letters of his name on the walls of Paris. It seemed to him that all the world was filled with this nightingale’s voice. As the horses of Corrèze passed him on the Boulevards, as Corrèze entered the St. Arnaud or the Mirliton, when he was himself in either club; when the crowds gathered and waited in the streets, and he heard it was to see Corrèze pass by after some fresh success in his art, then Zouroff began to curse him bitterly.
There was a regard in the eyes of Corrèze when they glanced at his that seemed to him to say with a superb scorn: “I am faithful to your wife. And you?”
This hatred slumbered like a dull and sullen fire in him, but it was a living fire, and the lips of Jeanne de Sonnaz fanned it and kept it alive. With ridicule, with hint, with conjecture, with irony, one way or another she stung him a hundred times a week with the name of Corrèze.
“She is in Poland, he is in Paris; what can you pretend there can be between them?” he said to her once, in savage impatience. Then she smiled.
“Distance is favourable to those loves of the soul. Did I not quote you Sully Prudhomme’s Purs amants sur terre égarés!”
Once in that spring-time Zouroff wrote one line to his wife.
“If you are tired of Szarisla you know on what terms you can return to Paris.”
He received no answer.
He was perplexed.
It seemed to him impossible that she could have courage, patience and strength, to remain in that solitude.
“It is obstinacy,” he said. “It is stubbornness!”
“It is love,” said Jeanne de Sonnaz, with a little smile.
Zouroff laughed also, but he chafed.
“Love! for the wolves or for the Poles?”
“It is love,” said his friend. “It is the same love that makes Corrèze live like an anchorite in the midst of Paris, which makes your wife live like a saint at Szarisla. It is their idea of love, it is not mine or yours. It is the dissipation of the soul. Have you never heard of it?
Aux ivresses même impunies
Vous préférez un deuil plus beau,
Et vos lèvres même au tombeau
Attendent le droit d’être unies.
When our poet wrote that he saw, or foresaw, the tragic and frigid loves of your wife and Corrèze. What can you do? It is of no use to swear. You cannot cite them aux tribunaux for a merely spiritual attraction, for a docile and mournful passion that is en deuil.”
