Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida / Selected from the Works of Ouida

WANDA.

A man cast forth from his home is like a ship cut loose from its anchor and rudderless. Whatever may have been his weakness, his offences, they cannot absolve you from your duty to watch over your husband's soul, to be his first and most faithful friend, to stand between him and his temptations and perils. That is the nobler side of marriage. When the light of love is faded, and its joys are over, its duties and its mercies remain. Because one of the twain has failed in these the other is not acquitted of obligation.

"Choose some career; make yourself some aim in life; do not fold your talents in a napkin; in a napkin that lies on the supper-table at Bignon's. That idle, aimless life is very attractive, I daresay, in its way, but it must grow wearisome and unsatisfactory as years roll on. The men of my house have never been content with it; they have always been soldiers, statesmen, something or other beside mere nobles."

"But they have had a great position."

"Men make their own position; they cannot make a name (at least, not to my thinking). You have that good fortune; you have a great name; you only need, pardon me, to make your manner of life worthy of it."

"Cannot make a name? Surely in these days the beggar rides on horseback in all the ministries and half the nobilities;"

"You mean that Hans, Pierre, or Richard becomes a count, an excellency, or an earl? What does that change? It alters the handle; it does not alter the saucepan. No one can be ennobled. Blood is blood; nobility can only be inherited; it cannot be conferred by all the heralds in the world. The very meaning and essence of nobility are descent, inherited traditions, instincts, habits, and memories—all that is meant by noblesse oblige."

"Men are always like Horace," said the princess. "They admire rural life, but they remain for all that with Augustus."

I read the other day of some actresses dining off a truffled pheasant and a sack of bonbons. That is the sort of dinner we make all the year round, morally—metaphorically—how do you say it? It makes us thirsty, and perhaps—I am not sure—perhaps it leaves us half starved, though we nibble the sweetmeats, and don't know it.

"Your dinner must lack two things—bread and water."

"Yes; we never see either. It is all truffles and caramels and vins frappÉs."

"There is your bread."

She glanced at the little children, two pretty, graceful little maids of six and seven years old.

"Ouf!" said the Countess Branka. "They are only little bits of puff paste, a couple of petits fours baked on the boulevards. If they be chic, and marry well, I for one shall ask no more of them. If ever you have children, I suppose you will rear them on science and the Antonines?"

"Perhaps on the open air and Homer."

Cannot you make them understand that we are not public artists to need rÉclames, nor yet sovereigns to be compelled to submit to the microscope? Is this the meaning of civilisation—to make privacy impossible, to oblige every one to live under a lens?

The world was much happier when distinctions and divisions were impassable. There are no sumptuary laws now. What is the consequence? That your bourgeoise ruins her husband in wearing gowns fit only for a duchess, and your prince imagines it makes him popular to look precisely like a cabman or a bailiff.

A great love must be as exhaustless as the ocean in its mercy, and as profound in its comprehension.

What was love if not one long forgiveness? What raised it higher than the senses if not its infinite patience and endurance of all wrong? What was its hope of eternal life if it had not gathered strength in it enough to rise above human arrogance and human vengeance?

There is an infinite sense of peace in those cool, vast, unworn mountain solitudes, with the rain-mists sweeping like spectral armies over the level lands below, and the sun-rays slanting heavenward, like the spears of an angelic host. There is such abundance of rushing water, of deep grass, of endless shade, of forest trees, of heather and pine, of torrent and tarn; and beyond these are the great peaks that loom through breaking clouds, and the clear cold air, in which the vulture wheels and the heron sails; and the shadows are so deep, and the stillness is so sweet, and the earth seems so green, and fresh, and silent, and strong. Nowhere else can one rest so well; nowhere else is there so fit a refuge for all the faiths and fancies that can find a home no longer in the harsh and hurrying world; there is room for them all in the Austrian forests, from the Erl-King to Ariel and Oberon.

"You think any sin may be forgiven?" he said irrelevantly, with his face averted.

"That is a very wide question. I do not think St. Augustine himself could answer it in a word or in a moment. Forgiveness, I think, would surely depend on repentance."

"Repentance in secret—would that avail?"

"Scarcely—would it?—if it did not attain some sacrifice. It would have to prove its sincerity to be accepted."

"You believe in public penance?" said Sabran, with some impatience and contempt.

"Not necessarily public," she said, with a sense of perplexity at the turn his words had taken. "But of what use is it for one to say he repents unless in some measure he makes atonement?"

"But where atonement is impossible?"

"That could never be."

"Yes. There are crimes whose consequences can never be undone. What then? Is he who did them shut out from all hope?"

"I am no casuist," she said, vaguely troubled. "But if no atonement were possible I still think—nay, I am sure—a sincere and intense regret which is, after all, what we mean by repentance, must be accepted, must be enough."

"Enough to efface it in the eyes of one who had never sinned?"

"Where is there such a one? I thought you spoke of heaven."

"I spoke of earth. It is all we can be sure to have to do with; it is our one poor heritage."

"I hope it is but an antechamber which we pass through, and fill with beautiful things, or befoul with dust and blood, at our own will."

"Hardly at our own will. In your antechamber a capricious tyrant waits us all at birth. Some come in chained; some free."

"Do not compare the retreat of the soldier tired of his wounds, of the gambler wearied by his losses, with the poet or the saint who is at peace with himself and sees all his life long what he at least believes to be the smile of God. Loyola and Francis d'Assisi are not the same thing, are not on the same plane."

"What matter what brought them," she said softly, "if they reach the same goal?"

"You bade me do good at Romaris. Candidly, I see no way to do it except in saving a crew off a wreck, which is not an occasion that presents itself every week. I cannot benefit these people materially, since I am poor; I cannot benefit them morally, because I have not their faith in the things unseen, and I have not their morality in the things tangible. They are God-fearing, infinitely patient, faithful in their daily lives, and they reproach no one for their hard lot, cast on an iron shore and forced to win their scanty bread at the risk of their lives. They do not murmur either at duty or mankind. What should I say to them? I, whose whole life is one restless impatience, one petulant mutiny against circumstance? If I talk with them I only take them what the world always takes into solitude—discontent. It would be a cruel gift, yet my hand is incapable of holding out any other. It is a homely saying that no blood comes out of a stone; so, out of a life saturated with the ironies, the contempt, the disbelief, the frivolous philosophies, the hopeless negations of what we call Society, there can be drawn no water of hope and charity, for the well-head—belief—is dried up at its source. Some pretend, indeed, to find in humanity what they deny to exist as Deity, but I should be incapable of the illogical exchange. It is to deny that the seed sprang from a root; it is to replace a grand and illimitable theism by a finite and vainglorious bathos. Of all the creeds that have debased mankind, the new creed that would centre itself in man seems to me the poorest and the most baseless of all. If humanity be but a vibrion, a conglomeration of gases, a mere mould holding chemicals, a mere bundle of phosphorus and carbon, how can it contain the elements of worship? what matter when or how each bubble of it bursts? This is the weakness of all materialism when it attempts to ally itself with duty. It becomes ridiculous. The carpi diem of the classic sensualists, the morality of the 'Satyricon' or the 'Decamerone,' are its only natural concomitants and outcome; but as yet it is not honest enough to say this. It affects the soothsayer's long robe, the sacerdotal frown, and is a hypocrite."

In answer she wrote back to him:

"I do not urge you to have my faith: what is the use? Goethe was right. It is a question between a man and his own heart. No one should venture to intrude there. But taking life even as you do, it is surely a casket of mysteries. May we not trust that at the bottom of it, as at the bottom of Pandora's, there may be hope? I wish again to think with Goethe that immortality is not an inheritance, but a greatness to be achieved like any other greatness, by courage, self-denial, and purity of purpose—a reward allotted to the just. This is fanciful, may be, but it is not illogical. And without being either a Christian or a Materialist, without beholding either majesty or divinity in humanity, surely the best emotion that our natures know—pity—must be large enough to draw us to console where we can, and sustain where we can, in view of the endless suffering, the continual injustice, the appalling contrasts, with which the world is full. Whether man be the vibrion or the heir to immortality, the bundle of carbon or the care of angels, one fact is indisputable: he suffers agonies, mental and physical, that are wholly out of proportion to the brevity of his life, while he is too often weighted from infancy with hereditary maladies, both of body and of character. This is reason enough, I think, for us all to help each other, even though we feel, as you feel, that we are as lost children, wandering in a great darkness, with no thread or clue to guide us to the end."

"We do not cultivate music one-half enough among the peasantry. It lightens labour; it purifies and strengthens the home life; it sweetens black bread. Do you remember that happy picture of Jordaens' 'Where the old sing, the young chirp,' where the old grandfather and grandmother, and the baby in its mother's arms, and the hale five-year-old boy, and the rough servant, are all joining in the same melody, while the goat crops the vine-leaves off the table? I should like to see every cottage interior like that when the work was done. I would hang up an etching from Jordaens where you would hang up, perhaps, the programme of Proudhon."

Then she walked back with him through the green sun-gleaming woods.

"I hope that I teach them content," she continued. "It is the lesson most neglected in our day. 'Niemand will ein Schuster sein; Jedermann ein Dichter.' It is true we are very happy in our surroundings. A mountaineer's is such a beautiful life, so simple, healthful, hardy, and fine; always face to face with nature. I try to teach them what an inestimable joy that alone is. I do not altogether believe in the prosaic views of rural life. It is true that the peasant digging his trench sees the clod, not the sky; but then when he does lift his head the sky is there, not the roof, not the ceiling. That is so much in itself. And here the sky is an everlasting grandeur; clouds and domes of snow are blent together. When the stars are out above the glaciers how serene the night is, how majestic! even the humblest creature feels lifted up into that eternal greatness. Then you think of the home-life in the long winters as dreary; but it is not so. Over away there, at Lahn, and other places on the Hallstadtersee, they do not see the sun for five months; the wall of rock behind them shuts them from all light of day; but they live together, they dance, they work. The young men recite poems, and the old men tell tales of the mountains and the French war, and they sing the homely songs of the Schnader-hÜpfeln. Then when winter passes, when the sun comes up again over the wall of rocks, when they go out into the light once more, what happiness it is! One old man said to me, 'It is like being born again!' and another said, 'Where it is always warm and light I doubt they forget to thank God for the sunshine;' and quite a young child said, all of his own accord, 'The primroses live in the dusk all the winter, like us, and then when the sun comes up we and they run out together, and the Mother of Christ has set the water and the little birds laughing.' I would rather have the winter of Lahn than the winter of Belleville."

If the Venus de Medici could be animated into life women would only remark that her waist was large.

Tedium is the most terrible and the most powerful foe love ever encounters.

"Life is after all like baccarat or billiards," he said to himself. "It is no use winning unless there be a galerie to look on and applaud."

Time hung on his hands like a wearisome wallet of stones.

When all the habits of life are suddenly rent asunder, they are like a rope cut in two. They may be knotted together clumsily, or they may be thrown altogether aside and a new strand woven, but they will never be the same thing again.

The greatness of a great race is a thing far higher than mere pride. Its instincts are noble and supreme, its obligations are no less than its privileges; it is a great light which streams backward through the darkness of the ages, and if by that light you guide not your footsteps, then are you thrice accursed, holding as you do that lamp of honour in your hands.

Even to those who care nothing for Society, and dislike the stir and noise of the world about them, there is still always a vague sense of depression in the dispersion of a great party; the house seems so strangely silent, the rooms seem so strangely empty, servants flitting noiselessly here and there, a dropped flower, a fallen jewel, an oppressive scent from multitudes of fading blossoms, a broken vase perhaps, or perhaps a snapped fan—these are all that are left of the teeming life crowded here one little moment ago. Though one may be glad they are gone, yet there is a certain sadness in it. "Le lendemain de la fÊte" keeps its pathos, even though the fÊte itself has possessed no poetry and no power to amuse.

In every one of her villages she had her schools on this principle, and they throve, and the children with them. Many of these could not read a printed page, but all of them could read the shepherd's weather-glass in sky and flower; all of them knew the worm that was harmful to the crops, the beetle that was harmless in the grass; all knew a tree by a leaf, a bird by a feather, an insect by a grub.

Modern teaching makes a multitude of gabblers. She did not think it necessary for the little goat-herds, and dairymaids, and foresters, and charcoal-burners, and sennerins, and carpenters, and cobblers, to study the exact sciences or draw casts from the antique. She was of opinion, with Pope, that "a little learning is a dangerous thing," and that a smattering of it will easily make a man morose and discontented, whilst it takes a very deep and lifelong devotion to it to teach a man content with his lot. Genius, she thought, is too rare a thing to make it necessary to construct village schools for it, and whenever or wherever it comes upon earth, it will surely be its own master.

She did not believe in culture for little peasants who have to work for their daily bread at the plough-tail or with the reaping-hook. She knew that a mere glimpse of a Canaan of art and learning is cruelty to those who never can enter into and never even can have leisure to merely gaze on it. She thought that a vast amount of useful knowledge is consigned to oblivion whilst children are taught to waste their time in picking up the crumbs of a great indigestible loaf of artificial learning. She had her scholars taught their "ABC," and that was all. Those who wished to write were taught, but writing was not enforced. What they were made to learn was the name and use of every plant in their own country; the habits and ways of all animals; how to cook plain food well, and make good bread; how to brew simples from the herbs of their fields and woods, and how to discern the coming weather from the aspect of the skies, the shutting-up of certain blossoms, and the time of day from those "poor men's watches," the opening flowers. In all countries there is a great deal of useful household and out-of-door lore that is fast being choked out of existence under books and globes, and which, unless it passes by word of mouth from generation to generation, is quickly and irrevocably lost. All this lore she had cherished by her school-children. Her boys were taught in addition any useful trade they liked—boot-making, crampon-making, horse-shoeing, wheel-making, or carpentry. This trade was made a pastime to each. The little maidens learned to sew, to cook, to spin, to card, to keep fowls and sheep and cattle in good health, and to know all poisonous plants and berries by sight.

"I think it is what is wanted," she said. "A little peasant child does not need to be able to talk of the corolla and the spathe, but he does want to recognise at a glance the flower that will give him healing and the berries that will give him death. His sister does not in the least require to know why a kettle boils, but she does need to know when a warm bath will be good for a sick baby or when hurtful. We want a new generation to be helpful, to have eyes, and to know the beauty of silence. I do not mind much whether my children reap or not. The labourer that reads turns Socialist, because his brain cannot digest the hard mass of wonderful facts he encounters. But I believe every one of my little peasants, being wrecked like Crusoe, would prove as handy as he."

"Can you inform me how it is that women possess tenacity of will in precise proportion to the frivolity of their lives? All these butterflies have a volition of iron."

"It is egotism. Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. That is in itself a great force; they do not waste their energies in considering the good of others."

"I am not like you, my dear Olga," she wrote to her relative the Countess Brancka. "I am not easily amused. That course effrÉnÉe of the great world carries you honestly away with it; all those incessant balls, those endless visits, those interminable conferences on your toilettes, that continual circling of human butterflies round you, those perpetual courtships of half a score of young men; it all diverts you. You are never tired of it; you cannot understand any life outside its pale. All your days, whether they pass in Paris or Petersburgh, at Trouville, at Biarritz, or at Vienna or Scheveningen, are modelled on the same lines; you must have excitement as you have your cup of chocolate when you wake. What I envy you is that the excitement excites you. When I was amidst it I was not excited; I was seldom ever diverted. See the misfortune that it is to be born with a grave nature! I am as serious as Marcus Antoninus. You will say that it comes of having learned Latin and Greek. I do not think so; I fear I was born unamusable. I only truly care about horses and trees, and they are both grave things, though a horse can be playful enough sometimes when he is allowed to forget his servitude. Your friends, the famous tailors, send me admirably-chosen costumes which please that sense in me which Titians and Vandycks do (I do not mean to be profane); but I only put them on as the monks do their frocks. Perhaps I am very unworthy of them; at least, I cannot talk toilette as you can with ardour a whole morning and every whole morning of your life. You will think I am laughing at you; indeed I am not. I envy your faculty of sitting, as I am sure you are sitting now, in a straw chair on the shore, with a group of boulevardiers around you, and a crowd making a double hedge to look at you when it is your pleasure to pace the planks. My language is involved. I do not envy you the faculty of doing it, of course; I could do it myself to-morrow. I envy you the faculty of finding amusement in doing it, and finding flattery in the double hedge."

"No doubt a love of nature is a triple armour against self-love. How can I say how right I think your system with these children? You seem not to believe me. There is only one thing in which I differ with you; you think the 'eyes that see' bring content. Surely not! surely not!"

"It depends on what they see. When they are wide open in the woods and fields, when they have been taught to see how the tree-bee forms her cell and the mole her fortress, how the warbler builds his nest for his love and the water-spider makes his little raft, how the leaf comes forth from the hard stem and the fungi from the rank mould, then I think that sight is content—content in the simple life of the woodland place, and in such delighted wonder that the heart of its own accord goes up in peace and praise to the Creator. The printed page may teach envy, desire, coveteousness, hatred, but the Book of Nature teaches resignation, hope, willingness to labour and live, submission to die. The world has gone farther and farther from peace since larger and larger have grown its cities, and its shepherd kings are no more."

She remained still, her hands folded on her knees, her face set as though it were cast in bronze. The great bedchamber, with its hangings of pale blue plush and its silver-mounted furniture, was dim and shadowy in the greyness of a midwinter afternoon. Doors opened, here to the bath and dressing chambers, there to the oratory, yonder to the apartments of Sabran. She looked across to the last, and a shudder passed over her; a sense of sickness and revulsion came on her.

She sat still and waited; she was too weak to go farther than this room. She was wrapped in a long loose gown of white satin, lined and trimmed with sable. There were black bearskins beneath her feet; the atmosphere was warmed by hot air, and fragrant with some bowls full of forced roses, which her women had placed there at noon. The grey light of the fading afternoon touched the silver scrollwork of the bed, and the silver frame of one large mirror, and fell on her folded hands and on the glister of their rings. Her head leaned backward against the high carved ebony of her chair. Her face was stern and bitterly cold, as that of Maria Theresa when she signed the loss of Silesia.

He approached from his own apartments, and came timidly and with a slow step forward. He did not dare to salute her, or go near to her; he stood like a banished man, disgraced, a few yards from her seat.

Two months had gone by since he had seen her. When he entered he read on her features that he must leave all hope behind.

Her whole frame shrank within her as she saw him there, but she gave no sign of what she felt. Without looking at him she spoke, in a voice quite firm, though it was faint from feebleness.

"I have but little to say to you, but that little is best said, not written."

He did not reply; his eyes were watching her with a terrible appeal, a very agony of longing. They had not rested on her for two months. She had been near the gates of the grave, within the shadow of death. He would have given his life for a word of pity, a touch, a regard—and he dared not approach her!

She dared not look at him. After that first glance, in which there had been so much of horror, of revulsion, she did not once look towards him. Her face had the immutability of a mask of stone; so many wretched days and haunted nights had she spent nerving herself for this inevitable moment that no emotion was visible in her; into her agony she had poured her pride, and it sustained her, as the plaster poured into the dry bones at Pompeii makes the skeleton stand erect, the ashes speak.

"After that which you have told me," she said, after a moment's silence in which he fancied she must hear the throbbing of his heart, "you must know that my life cannot be lived out beside yours. The law gives you many rights, no doubt, but I believe you will not be so base as to enforce them."

"I have no rights!" he muttered. "I am a criminal before the law. The law will free you from me, if you choose."

"I do not choose," she said coldly; "you understand me ill. I do not carry my wrongs or my woes to others. What you have told me is known only to Prince VÁsÁrhely and to the Countess Brancka. He will be silent; he has the power to make her so. The world need know nothing. Can you think that I shall be its informant?"

"If you divorce me"—— he murmured.

A quiver of bitter anger passed over her features, but she retained her self-control.

"Divorce? What could divorce do for me? Could it destroy the past? Neither Church or Law can undo what you have done. Divorce would make me feel that in the past I had been your mistress, not your wife, that is all."

She breathed heavily, and again pressed her hand on her breast.

"Divorce!" she repeated. "Neither priest nor judge can efface a past as you clean a slate with a sponge! No power, human or divine, can free me, purify me, wash your dishonoured blood from your children's veins."

She almost lost her self-control; her lips trembled, her eyes were full of flame, her brow was black with passion. With a violent effort she restrained herself; invective or reproach seemed to her low and coarse and vile.

He was silent; his greatest fear, the torture of which had harassed him sleeping and waking ever since he had placed his secret in her hands, was banished at her words. She would seek no divorce—the children would not be disgraced—the world of men would not learn his shame; and yet as he heard a deeper despair than any he had ever known came over him. She was but as those sovereigns of old who scorned the poor tribunals of man's justice because they held in their own might the power of so much heavier chastisement.

"I shall not seek for a legal separation," she resumed; "that is to say, I shall not, unless you force me to do so to protect myself from you. If you fail to abide by the conditions I shall prescribe, then you will compel me to resort to any means that may shelter me from your demands. But I do not think you will endeavour to force on me conjugal rights which you obtained over me by a fraud."

All that she desired was to end quickly the torture of this interview, from which her courage had not permitted her to shrink. She had to defend herself because she would not be defended by others, and she only sought to strike swiftly and unerringly so as to spare herself and him all needless or lingering throes. Her speech was brief, for it seemed to her that no human language held expression deep and vast enough to measure the wrong done to her, could she seek to give it utterance.

She would not have made a sound had any murderer stabbed her body; she would not now show the death-wound of her soul and honour to this man who had stabbed both to the quick. Other women would have made their moan aloud, and cursed him. The daughter of the Szalras choked down her heart in silence, and spoke as a judge speaks to one condemned by man and God.

"I wish no words between us," she said, with renewed calmness. "You know your sin; all your life has been a lie. I will keep me and mine back from vengeance; but do not mistake—God may pardon you, I never! What I desired to say to you is that henceforth you shall wholly abandon the name you stole; you shall assign the land of Romaris to the people; you shall be known only as you have been known here of late, as the Count von Idrac. The title was mine to give, I gave it you; no wrong is done save to my fathers, who were brave men."

He remained silent; all excuse he might have offered seemed as if from him to her it would be but added outrage. He was her betrayer, and she had the power to avenge betrayal; naught that she could say or do could seem unjust or undeserved beside the enormity of her irreparable wrongs.

"The children?" he muttered faintly, in an unuttered supplication.

"They are mine," she said, always with the same unchanging calm that was cold as the frozen earth without. "You will not, I believe, seek to enforce your title to dispute them with me?"

He gave a gesture of denial.

He, the wrong-doer, could not realise the gulf which his betrayal had opened betwixt himself and her. On him all the ties of their past passion were sweet, precious, unchanged in their dominion. He could not realise that to her all these memories were abhorred, poisoned, stamped with ineffable shame; he could not believe that she, who had loved the dust that his feet had brushed, could now regard him as one leprous and accursed. He was slow to understand that his sin had driven him out of her life for evermore.

Commonly it is the woman on whom the remembrance of love has an enthralling power when love itself is traitor; commonly it is the man on whom the past has little influence, and to whom its appeal is vainly made; but here the position was reversed. He would have pleaded by it; she refused to acknowledge it, and remained as adamant before it. His nerve was too broken, his conscience was too heavily weighted, for him to attempt to rebel against her decisions or sway her judgment. If she had bidden him go out and slay himself he would gladly have obeyed.

"Once you said," he murmured timidly, "that repentance washes out all crimes. Will you count my remorse as nothing?"

"You would have known no remorse had your secret never been discovered!"

He shrank as from a blow.

"That is not true," he said wearily. "But how can I hope you will believe me?"

She answered nothing.

"Once you told me that there was no sin you would not pardon me!" he muttered.

She replied:

"We pardon sin; we do not pardon baseness."

She paused and put her hand to her heart; then she spoke again in that cold, forced, measured voice, which seemed on his ear as hard and pitiless as the strokes of an iron hammer, beating life out beneath it.

"You will leave Hohenszalras; you will go where you will; you have the revenues of Idrac. Any other financial arrangements that you may wish to make I will direct my lawyers to carry out. If the revenues of Idrac be insufficient to maintain you"——

"Do not insult me—so," he murmured, with a suffocated sound in his voice, as though some hand were clutching at his throat.

"Insult you!" she echoed with a terrible scorn.

She resumed with the same inflexible calmness,

"You must live as becomes the rank due to my husband. The world need suspect nothing. There is no obligation to make it your confidante. If any one were wronged by the usurpation of the name you took it would be otherwise, but as it is you will lose nothing in the eyes of men; Society will not flatter you the less. The world will only believe that we are tired of one another, like so many. The blame will be placed on me. You are a brilliant comedian, and can please and humour it. I am known to be a cold, grave, eccentric woman, a recluse, of whom it will deem it natural that you are weary. Since you allow that I have the right to separate from you—to deal with you as with a criminal—you will not seek to recall your existence to me. You will meet my abstinence by the only amends you can make to me. Let me forget—as far as I am able—let me forget that ever you have lived!"

He staggered slightly, as if under some sword-stroke from an unseen hand. A great faintness came upon him. He had been prepared for rage, for reproach, for bitter tears, for passionate vengeance; but this chill, passionless, disdainful severance from him for all eternity he had never dreamed of; it crept like the cold of frost into his very marrow; he was speechless and mute with shame. If she had dragged him through all the tribunals of the world she would have hurt him and humiliated him far less. Better all the hooting gibes of the whole earth than this one voice, so cold, so inflexible, so full of utter scorn!

Despite her bodily weakness she rose to her full height, and for the first time looked at him.

"You have heard me," she said; "now go!"

But instead, blindly, not knowing what he did, he fell at her feet.

"But you loved me," he cried, "you loved me so well!"

The tears were coursing down his cheeks.

She drew the sables of her robe from his touch.

"Do not recall that," she said, with a bitter smile. "Women of my race have killed men before now for less outrage than yours has been to me."

"Kill me!" he cried to her. "I will kiss your hand."

She was mute.

He clung to her gown with an almost convulsive supplication.

"Believe, at least, that I loved you!" he cried, beside himself in his misery and impotence. "Believe that, at the least!"

She turned from him.

"Sir, I have been your dupe for ten long years; I can be so no more!"

Under that intolerable insult he rose slowly, and his eyes grew blind, and his limbs trembled, but he walked from her, and sought not again either her pity or her pardon.

On the threshold he looked back once. She stood erect, one hand resting upon the carved work of her high oak chair; cold, stately, motionless, the furred velvets falling to her feet like a queen's robes.

He looked, then passed the threshold and closed the door behind him.

THE END.

FOOTNOTE

[A]The river Derwent.

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