Delphi collected works o.., p.982
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 982
When he came back to his home he carried its price in his hands — thirty francs in three paper notes. He held them out to Lizina.
‘All is well with it; it is to stand in a beautiful place, close to falling water, half in shade, half in sun, as it likes best. Oh, all is well with it, dear! do not be afraid.’ Then his voice failed him, and he sobbed aloud.
The child took the money. She had a little bundle in her hand, and she had put on the only pair of shoes she possessed.
‘Clean yourself, father, and come — come quickly,’ she said in a little hard, dry, panting voice.
‘Oh wait, wait, my angel!’ he cried piteously through his sobs.
I cannot wait,’ said the child, ‘not a minute, not a minute. Clean yourself and come.’
In an hour’s time they were in the train. The child did everything — found the railway-station, asked the way, paid their fares, took their seats, pushing her father hither and thither as if he were a blind man. He was dumb with terror and regret; he resisted nothing. Having sold the tree, there seemed to him nothing left for him to do. Lizina obeyed him no more — she commanded.
People turned to look after this little sick girl with death written on her face, who spoke and moved with such feverish decision, and dragged after her this thin dumb man, her small lean hand shut with nervous force upon his own. All the way she ate nothing; she only drank thirstily of water whenever the train stopped.
The novelty and strangeness of the transit, the crowd, and haste, and noise, the unfamiliar scenes, the pressure of unknown people, and the stare of unknown eyes — all which was so bewildering and terrible to her father, had no effect upon her. All she thought of was to get to the place of which the name was written on the scrap of paper which she had shown at the ticket-office, and which she continued to show mutely to anyone who spoke to her. It said everything to her; she thought it must say everything to everyone else.
Nothing could alarm her or arrest her attention. Her whole mind was set on her goal.
‘Your little lady is very ill!’ said more than one in a crowded railway-waggon, where they jammed one on to another, thick as herrings in a barrel.
‘Ay, ay, she is very ill,’ he answered stupidly; and they did not know whether he was unfeeling or daft. He was dizzy and sick with the unwonted motion of the train, the choking dust, the giddy landscape which seemed to run past him, earth and sky together; but on Lizina they made no impression, except that she coughed almost incessantly. She seemed to ail nothing and to perceive nothing. He was seized with a panic of dread lest they should be taken in some wrong direction, even out of the world altogether; dreaded fire, accident, death, treachery; felt himself caught up by strong, invisible hands, and whirled away, the powers of heaven or hell alone knew where. His awful fear grew on him every moment greater and greater; and he would have given his soul to be back safe on the sand of the river at his home.
But Lizina neither showed nor felt any fear whatever.
The journey took the whole day and part of the ensuing night; for the slow cheap train by which they travelled gave way to others, passed hours motionless, thrust aside and forgotten, and paused at every little station on the road. They suffered from hunger and thirst, and heat and draught, and fatigue and contusion, as the poor cattle suffered in the trucks beside them. But the child did not seem to feel either exhaustion or pain, or to want anything except to be there — to be there. The towns, the mountains, the sea, the coast, all so strange and wonderful to untravelled eyes, had no wonder for her. She only wanted to get beyond them, to where it was that Cecco lay. Every now and then she opened her bundle and looked at the little twig of the lemon-tree.
Alarmed at her aspect, and the racking cough, their companions shrank away from them as far as the crowding of the waggon allowed of, and they were left unquestioned and undisturbed, whilst the day wore on and the sun went down into the sea and the evening deepened into night.
It was dawn when they were told to descend; they had reached their destination — a dull, sun-baked, fever-stricken little port, with the salt water on one side of it, and the machia and marsh on the other.
Lizina got down from the train, holding her little bundle in one hand and in the other her father’s wrist. Their limbs were bruised, aching, trembling, their spines felt broken, their heads seemed like empty bladders, in which their brains went round and round; but she did not faint or fall — she went straight onward as though the place was familiar to her.
Close to the desolate, sand-strewn station there was a fort of decaying yellow stone, high walls with loopholes, mounds of sand with sea-thistle and bryony growing in them; before these was the blue water, and a long stone wall running far out into the water. To the iron rings in it a few fisher boats were moored by their cables. The sun was rising over the inland wilderness, where wild boars and buffalo dwelt under impenetrable thickets. Lizina led her father by the hand past the fortifications to a little desolate church with crumbling belfry, where she knew the burial-ground must be. There were four lime-washed walls, with a black iron door, through the bars of which the graves within and the rank grass around them could be seen. The gate was locked; the child sat down on a stone before it and waited. She motioned to her father to do the same. He was like a poor steer landed after a long voyage in which he has neither eaten nor drank, but has been bruised, buffeted, thrown to and fro, galled, stunned, tormented. They waited, as she wished, in the cool dust of the breaking day. The bell above in the church steeple was tolling for the first Mass.
In a little while a sacristan came out of the presbytery near the church, and began to turn a great rusty key in the church door. He saw the two sitting there by the graveyard, and looking at them over his shoulder, said to them, ‘You are strangers — what would you?’
Lizina rose and answered him: ‘Will you open to me? I come to see my Cecco, who lies here. I have something to give him.’
The sacristan looked at her father.
‘Cecco?’ he repeated, in a doubtful tone.
‘A lad of Royezzano, a soldier who died here,’ said Fringuello, hoarsely and faintly, for his throat was parched and swollen, and his head swam. ‘He and my child were playmates. Canst tell us, good man, where his grave is made?’
The sacristan paused, standing before the leathern curtain of the church porch, trying to remember. Save for soldiers and the fisher folk, there was no one who either lived or died there; his mind went back over the winter and autumn months, to the last summer, in which the marsh fever and the pestilential drought had made many sicken and some die in the fort and in the town.
‘Cecco? Cecco?’ he said doubtfully. ‘A Tuscan lad? A conscript? Ay, I do recall him now. He got the tertian fever and died in barracks. His reverence wrote about him to his family. Yes, I remember. There were three soldier lads died last year, all in the summer. There are three crosses where they lie. I put them there; his is the one nearest the wall. Yes, you can go in; I have the key.’
He stepped across the road and unlocked the gate. He looked wonderingly on Lizina as he did so. ‘Poor little one!’ he muttered, in compassion. ‘How small, how ill, to come so far!’
Neither she nor her father seemed to hear him. The child pressed through the aperture as soon as the door was drawn ajar, and Fringuello followed her. The burial-ground was small and crowded, covered with rank grass, and here and there sea-lavender was growing. The sacristan led them to a spot by the western wall where there were three rude crosses made of unbarked sticks nailed across one another. The rank grass was growing amongst the clods of sun-baked yellow clay; the high white wall rose behind the crossed sticks; the sun beat down on the place: there was nothing else.
The sacristan motioned to the cross nearest the wall, and then went back to the church, being in haste, as it was late for matins. Lizina stood by the two poor rude sticks, once branches of the hazel, which were all that marked the grave of Cecco.
Her father, uncovering his head, fell on his knees.
The child’s face was illuminated with a strange and holy rapture. She kissed the lemon bough which she held in her hand, and then laid it gently down upon the grass and clay under the wall.
‘I have remembered, dear,’ she said softly, and knelt on the ground and joined her hands in prayer. Then the weakness of her body overcame the strength of her spirit; she leaned forward lower and lower until her face was bowed over the yellow grass. ‘I came to lie with you,’ she said under her breath; and then her lips parted more widely with a choking sigh, the blood gushed from her mouth, and in a few minutes she was dead.
They laid her there in the clay and the sand and the tussocks of grass, and her father went back alone to his native place and empty room.
* * * * *
One day on the river-bank a man said to him:
‘It is odd, but that lemon-tree which you sold to my master never did well; it died within the week — a fine, strong, fresh young tree. Were there worms at its root, think you, or did the change to the open air kill it?’
Fringuello, who had always had a scared, wild, dazed look on his face since he returned from the sea-coast, looked at the speaker stupidly, not with any wonder, but like one who hears what he has long known but only imperfectly understands.
‘It knew Lizina was dead,’ he said simply; and then thrust his spade into the sand and dug.
He would never smile nor sing any more, nor any more know any joys of life; but he still worked on from that habit which is the tyrant and saviour of the poor.
THE END
A House Party (1887)
CONTENTS
A House-Party
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
A House-Party
CHAPTER I.
IT IS AN August morning. It is an old English manor-house. There is a breakfast-room hung with old gilded leather of the times of the Stuarts; it has oak furniture of the same period; it has leaded lattices with stained glass in some of their frames, and the motto of the house in old French, “J’ay bon vouloir,” emblazoned there with the crest of a heron resting in a crown. Thence, windows open on to a green, quaint, lovely garden, which was laid out by Monsieur Beaumont when he planned the gardens of Hampton Court. There are clipped yew-tree walks and arbors and fantastic forms; there are stone terraces and steps like those of Haddon, and there are peacocks which pace and perch upon them; there are beds full of all the flowers which blossomed in the England of the Stuarts, and birds dart and butterflies pass above them; there are huge old trees, cedars, lime, hornbeam; beyond the gardens there are the woods and grassy lawns of the home park.
The place is called Surrenden Court, and is one of the houses of George, Earl of Usk, — his favorite house in what pastoral people call autumn, and what he calls the shooting season.
Lord Usk is a well-made man of fifty, with a good-looking face, a little spoilt by a permanent expression of irritability and impatience, which is due to the state of his liver; his eyes are good-tempered, his mouth is querulous; nature meant him for a very amiable man, but the dinner-table has interfered with, and in a measure upset, the good intentions of nature: it very often does. Dorothy, his wife, who is by birth a Fitz-Charles, third daughter of the Duke of Derry, is a still pretty woman of thirty-five or -six, inclined to an embonpoint which is the despair of herself and her maids; she has small features, a gay expression, and very intelligent eyes; she does not look at all a great lady, but she can be one when it is necessary. She prefers those merrier moments in life in which it is not necessary. She and Lord Usk, then Lord Surrenden, were greatly in love when they married; sixteen years have gone by since then, and it now seems very odd to each of them that they should ever have been so. They are not, however, bad friends, and have even at the bottom of their hearts a lasting regard for each other. This is saying much, as times go. When they are alone they quarrel considerably; but then they are so seldom alone. They both consider this disputatiousness the inevitable result of their respective relations. They have three sons, very pretty boys and great pickles, and two young and handsome daughters. The eldest son, Lord Surrenden, rejoices in the names of Victor Albert Augustus George, and is generally known as Boom.
They are now at breakfast in the garden-chamber; the china is old Chelsea, the silver is Queen Anne, the roses are old-fashioned Jacqueminots and real cabbage roses. There is a pleasant scent from flowers, coffee, cigarettes, and newly-mown grass. There is a litter of many papers on the floor.
There is yet a fortnight before the shooting begins; Lord Usk feels that those fifteen days will be intolerable; he repents a fit of fright and economy in which he has sold his great Scotch moors and deer-forest to an American capitalist; not having his own lands in Scotland any longer, pride has kept him from accepting any of the many invitations of his friends to go to them there for the Twelfth; but he has a keen dread of the ensuing fifteen days without sport.
His wife has asked her own set; but he hates her set; he does not much like his own; there is only Dulcia Waverley whom he does like, and Lady Waverley will not come till the twentieth. He feels bored, hipped, annoyed; he would like to strangle the American who has bought Achnalorrie. Achnalorrie, having gone irrevocably out of his hands, represents to him for the time being the one absolutely to be desired spot upon earth. Good heavens! he thinks, can he have been such a fool as to sell it?
When he was George Rochfort, a boy of much promise going up to Oxford from Eton, he had a clever brain, a love of classics, and much inclination to scholarly pursuits; but he gradually lost all these tastes little by little, he could not very well have said how; and now he never hardly opens a book, and he has drifted into that odd, English habit of only counting time by the seasons for killing things. There is nothing to kill just now except rabbits, which he scorns, so he falls foul of his wife’s list of people she has invited, which is lying, temptingly provocative, of course, on the breakfast-table, scribbled in pencil on a sheet of note-paper.
“Always the same thing!” he says, as he glances over it. “Always the very worst lot you could get together, and there isn’t one of the husbands or one of the wives!”
“Of course there isn’t,” says Lady Usk, looking up from a Society newspaper which told her that her friends were all where they were not, and fitted all the caps of scandal on to all the wrong heads, and yet from some mysterious reason gave her amusement on account of its very blunders.
“I do think,” he continues, “that nobody on earth ever had such absolutely indecent house-parties as yours!”
“You always say these absurd things.”
“I don’t think they’re absurd. Look at your list: everybody asks that he may meet somebody whom he shouldn’t meet!”
“What nonsense! As if they didn’t all meet everywhere every day, and as if it mattered!”
“It does matter.”
He has not been a moral man himself, but at fifty he likes to faire la morale pour les autres. When we are compelled to relinquish cakes and ale ourselves, we begin honestly to believe them indigestible for everybody; why should they be sold, or be made, at all?
“It does matter,” he repeats. “Your people are too larky, much too larky. You grow worse every year. You don’t care a straw what’s said about ’em so long as they please you, and you let ’em carry on till there’s the devil to pay.”
“They pay him, — I don’t; and they like it.”
“I know they like it, but I don’t choose you should give ’em opportunity for it.”
“Oh, nonsense!”
“Not nonsense at all. This house is a kind of Agapemone, a sort of Orleans Club.”
“You ought not to be bored in it, then.”
“One is always bored at one’s own place. I tell you I don’t like your people. You ask everybody who wants to meet somebody else; and it’s never respectable. It’s a joke at the clubs. Jack’s always saying to his Jill, ‘We’ll get Lady Usk to ask us together,’ and they do. I say it’s indecent.”
“But, my dear, if Jack sulks without his Jill, and if Jill’s in bad form without Jack, one must ask them together. I want people to like me and to enjoy themselves.”
“Enjoy themselves! That means flirting till all’s blue with somebody you’d hate if you’d married her.”
“What does that matter, so long as they’re amused?”
“What an immoral woman you are, Dolly! To hear you — —”
“I only mean that I don’t think it matters; you know it doesn’t matter; everybody’s always doing it.”
“If you’d only ask some of the women’s husbands, some of the men’s wives — —”
“I couldn’t do that, dear. I want people to like my house!”
“Just as I say — you’re so immoral.”
“No, I’m not. Nobody ever pays a bill for me, except you.”
“Enviable distinction! Pay! I think I do pay! Though why you can’t keep within your pin-money — —”
“Pin-money means money to buy pins. I did buy two diamond pins with it last year, eight hundred guineas each.”
“You ought to buy clothes.”
“Clothes! What an expression! I can’t buy a child’s frock even; it all goes in little things, and all my own money too; wedding-presents, christening-presents, churches, orphanages, concerts; and it’s all nonsense you’re grumbling about my bills to Worth and Elise and Virot; Boom read me a passage out of his Ovid last Easter, in which it describes the quantities of things that the Roman women had to wear and make them look pretty; a great deal more than any of us ever have, and their whole life was spent over their toilets, and then they had tortoise-shell steps to get down from their litters, and their dogs had jewelled collars; and liking to have things nice is nothing new, though you talk as if it were a crime and we’d invented it!”
