MOTHS.
29
last twenty nights of his engagement in that
city.
'"' I had better forfeit half my engagement
than lose my voice altogether," said Corrèze, im
patiently, in explanation. '.' The thousands of
francs I can soon make again, but if the me-
chanical nightingale in my throat give way, I
must go and break stones for my bread. No:
in this atmosphere I can breathe no longer. I
pay,—and I go to the South."
He paid and went, and St. Petersburg was
half consoled for his departure by the entry on
the following day of Prince Zouroff, and of her
whom all the world called now, and would call
henceforward, Princess Vera.
CHAPTER   XIII.
Again in the month of November, exactly
one year after her marriage, a tall slender figure,
clothed in white, with white fursj moved to and
fro very wearily under the palms of the Villa
Nelaguine on the Gulf of Villafranca, and
her sister-in-law, looking wistfully at her,
thought,—
" 1 hope he is not cruel, I hope not. Perhaps
it is only the death of the child that has sad-
dened her "
Vere read her thoughts and looked her in the
eyes.
"lam glad that the child died," she said,
simply.
The Princess Nelaguine shuddered a little.
"Oh, my dear," she murmured, "that can-
not be! Do not say that women find solace in
their children when they are unhappy in all
else. You have a tender, fond heart; you would
have------"
"I think my heart is a stone," said the girl,
in a low voice, then she added, " In the poem
of ' Aurora Leigh ' the woman loves the child
that is born of her ruin, I am not like that.
Perhaps I am wicked, can you understand?"
"Yes, yes; I understand," said the Princess
Nelaguine, hurriedly, and, though she was ac-
counted in her generation a false and heartless
little woman of the world, her eyes became dim
and her hands pressed Vere's with a genuine
pity Long, long years before, Nadine Zouroff
had herself been given to a loveless marriage,
when all her life seemed to her to be lying dead
in a soldier's unmarked grave in the mountains
of Caucasus.
"That feeling will change, though, be as-
sured," she said, soothingly. "When we are
very young, all our sorrow is despair, but it
does not kill us, and we live to be consoled
Once I felt like you,—yes; but now I have many
interests, many ties, many occupations, and my
eons and daughters are dear to me, though they
were not his: so will be yours, to you, intime."
Vere shuddered
" People are different," she said, simply: "to
me it will almost be the same "
She pulled a cluster of white roses, and ruffled
them m her hands, and threw them down, al-
most cruelly
"Will those roses bloom again?" she said.
" What I did to them your brother has done to
me. It cannot be altered now. Forget that I
have said anything: I will not again.
One year had gone by since Vere had been
given, with the blessing of her mother and the
oenison of society, to the Minotaur of a loveless
marriage To herself she seemed so utterly
shanged that nothing of her old self was left in
her, body or soul. To the world she only
seemed to have grown lovelier, as was natural
with maturer womanhood, and to have become
a great lady in lieu of a graceful child.
She was little more than seventeen now, but,
herself, she felt as if centuries had rolled over
her head/------
I' After her winter at the Imperial court, she
had been so changed that she would at times
wonder if she had ever been the glad and
thoughtful child who had watched the North
Sea break itself in foam in the red twilight of
Northumbrian dawns.
She had a horror of herself.
She had a horror of the world.
But from the world and from herself there
was now no escape.
She was the Princess Zouroff.
An immense disgust possessed her, and per-
vaded all her life, falling on her as the thick
gray fog falls on a sunny landscape,—heavy,
3ull, and nauseous.
The loveliest and youngest beauty in the Salle
des Palmiers, with the stars of her diamonds
shining on her like the planets of a summer
night, she was the saddest of all earthly creat-
ures.
The girl who had gone to bed with the sun
and risen with it, who had spent her tranquil
days iu study and open-air exercise, who had
thought it pleasure enough to find the first prim
rose, and triumph enough to write the three let-
ters at the foot of a hard problem, who had gone
by her grandmother's side to the old dusky
church where noble and simple had knelt to-
gether for a thousand years, and who had known
no more of the evil and lasciviousness of the
world at large than the white ox-eye opening
under the oak glades,—the girl who had been
Vere Herbert on those dark chill Northumbrian
shores was now the Princess Vera, and was for-
ever in the glare, the unrest, the fever, and the
splendor of a great society.
Night was turned into day; pleasure, as the
world construed it, filled each hour, life became
a spectacle, and she, as a part of the spectacle,
was ceaselessly adorned, arrayed, flattered,
censured, and posed,—as a model is posed for
the painter. All around her was grand, gorge-
ous, restless, and insincere; there was no leis-
ure, though there was endless ennui, and no
time for reflection, though there were monot-
ony and a satiety of sensation Sin she heard
of for the first time, and it was smiled at; vice
became bare to her, but no one shunned it; the
rapacity of an ignoble passion let loose and
called " marriage " tore down all her childish
ignorance and threw it to the winds, destroyed
her self-respect and laughed at her, trampled on
all her modest shame, and ridiculed her inno-
cence.
In early autumn she had given birth to a son,
who had lived a few hours, and then died.
She had not sorrowed for its loss- it was the
child of Sergius Zouroff She thought it better
dead. She had felt a strange emotion as she
had looked on its little body, lying lifeless; but
it was neither maternal love nor maternal re-
gret . it was rather remorse.
She had been then at Suir, on the shores of
the Baltic, one of the chief estates of the
Princes of Zouroff, which all the summer long
had been the scene of festivities, barbaric in
their ponip and costliness,—festivities with
whicli her husband strove to while away the
year which Imperial command had bidden him
pass, after marriage, on his hereditary lands.
"Do not allow my mother to come to me!"
she had said, once, with a passionate cry, when
the birth of the child had drawn near. It
was the first time she had ever appealed in any
way to her husband. He laughed a little
grimly, and his face flushed.
" Your mother shall not come," he said, hast
ily. " Do you suppose she would wish to be
shut up in a sick-room? Perhaps she might,
though, it is true : miladi always remembers
what will look well. One must do her the jus-
tice to say she always remembers that, at least.
But no; she shall not come."
So it came to pass that her mother in her lit-
tle octagon boudoir in Chesham Place, lined
with old fans of the Beau Siècle and draped
with Spanish lace, could only weep a little with
her bosom friends, and murmur, "My sweet
child!—such a trial!—in this horrible weather
by the Baltic!—so cruel ofthe Emperor—and to
think my health will not let me go to her!"
Zouroff, who passionately desired a legitimate
son, because he hated with a deadly hatred his
next brother Vladimir, took the loss of the male
child to heart with a bitterness which was only
wounded pride and baffled enmity, but which
looked like tenderness beside the marble-like
coldness and passive indifference of his wife
Physicians, who always are too clever not to
have a thousand reasons for everything, alleged
that the change of climate and temperature had
affected the health of the Princess Vera; and
her husband, who hated Russia with all_ his
might, urged his plea of her health to obtain a
reduction of the time he had been ordered to re-
main on his own lands, and, obtaining what he
wished from the Czar, returned in November to
the French Riviera.
He had purchased the villa of his sister from
her, although it was called still the Villa Nela-
guine. He had bought it in a mood of captious
irritation with his wife, knowing that to Vere,
reared in the cold gray days and under the
cloudy skies and by the somber seas of the dark
North, the Southern'sea-board'was oppressive in
its languor and its light. Sometimes he liked to
hurt her in any way he could: if her child had
lived, he would have made ,it into a whip   of
scorpions for her. Yet he always lavished on
her so much money and so many jewels, and
kept her so perpetually in the front of the great-
est of great worlds, that everybody who knew
him said that he made a good husband after all,
—much better than any one would have antici-
pated.
He intended to stay at the villa on the Med-
iterranean for three months, and thither came,
self-invited because she was so near,—only at
Paris,—the Lady Dolly.
Neither Zouroff nor his sister ever invited her
to their houses, but pretty Lady Dolly was not
a woman to be deterred by so mere a trifle as
that.
"I pine to see my sweet treasure!" she wrote;
and Sergius Zouroff, knitting his heavy brows,
said, " Let her come," and Vere said nothing.
"What an actress was lost in your mothei !"
he added, with his rough laugh; but he con-
fused the talent of the comedian of society with
that of the, comedian of the stage, and they are
very dissimilar. The latter almost always for-
gets herself in her part; the former never.
So, one fine, sunlit, balmy day towards
Christmas, Lady Dolly drove up through the
myrtle wood that led to the Villa Nelaguine.
It was noon-day. The house-guests were
straying down from up-stairs to breakfast in the
pretty Pompeiian room, with its inlaid marble
walls, and its fountains, and its sculpture, and
its banks of hot-house flowers, which opened
on to the white terrace, that fronted the rip-
pling blue sea. On the terrace Zouroff was
standing.
He saw the carriage approaching in the dis-
tance through the myrtles.
"C'est madame mère," he said, turning on his
heel, and looking into the breakfast chamber.
He laughed a little grimly as he said it.
Vere was conversing with Madame Nelaguine,
who saw a strange look come into her eyes,—
aversion, repugnance,contempt, pain, and shame
all commingled. " What is there that I do not,
know?" thought the Princess Nadine. She re-
membered how Vera had not returned her
mother's embrace at the marriage-ceremony.
Sergius Zouroff was still watching the car-
riage's approach, with that hard smile upon his
face which had all the brutality and cynicism
of his temper in it, and under which delicate
women and courageous men had often winced
as under the lash.
" C'est madame mère," he said, again, with -.
spray of gardenia between his teeth; and then,
being a grand gentleman sometimes, when the
eyes of society were on him, though sometimes
being rough as a boor, he straightened his loose
heavy figure, put the gardenia in his button-
hole, and went down the steps, with the dignity
of Louis Quatorze going to meet a Queen of
Spain, and received his guest, as she alighted,
with punctilious politeness and an exquisite
courtesy.
Lady Dolly ascended the steps on his arm.
She was dressed perfectly for the occasion,—
all a soft dove-hue; with soft dove-colored
feather-trimmings, and silvery furs, with a knot
ofiblack here and there to heighten;the chastened
effect and show her grief for the child that had
breathed but an hour. On her belt hung many
articles, but chief among them was a small sil-
ver-bound prayer-book, and she had a large sil-
ver cross at her throat.
" She will finish with religion," thought Zou-
roff: " they always take it last."
Lady Dolly was seldom startled, and seldom
nervous; but, as her daughter came forward on
to the terrace to meet her, she was both startled
and nervous.
Vera was in a white morning dress, with a
white mantilla of old Spanish lace about her
head aud throat; she moved with serene and
rather languid grace; her form had developed
into the richness" of womanhood ; her face was
very cold. Her mother could see nothing left in
this wonderfully beautiful and stately person of
the child of eighteen months before.
" Is that Vere?" she cried, involuntarily, as
she looked upward to the terrace above.
" That is Vera," said Sergius Zouroff, dryly.
All the difference lay there.
Then Lady Dolly recovered herself.
' ' My sweet child ! Ah, the sorrow !—the joy !"
murmured Lady Dolly, meeting her with flying
feet and outstretched arms, upon the white ana
black chequers of the marble terrace.
Vere stood passive and let her Cold cheeks be
brushed by those softly tinted lips. Her eyes
met her mother's once,and Lady Dolly trembled.
"Oh, this terrible bise!" she cried, with a