50 MOTHS. h "M. de Corrèze?" said Vere, with the color lea vi ng her face. ' ' Why ? why ?—why did you ask him?" \I asked him because it pleased me, because he is charming, because he serenaded us ex- quisitely; there are a hundred 'becauses.' You need not be alarmed, my love: Corrèze goes everywhere. He is a gentleman, though he is a singer. We always treat him so." Vere said nothing; she was angered with her- self that she had seemed to slight him, and she was uncertain how to reply aught. The sharp eves of the Duchess Jeanne watch- ed her, and, as worldly-wise eyes are apt to do, saw very much that did not exist to be seen. Vere stood mute, arranging her mountain- flowers.' The servants announced Corrèze. Vere was not conscious of the trouble, the gladness, the vague apprehension, and as vague hope, that her face expressed, and which Jeanne de Sonnaz construed according to her own light, and Corrèze according to his. " What will that diablesse think?" he said an- grily to himself "A hundred thousand things that are not, and never will be, true!" For his own part, the world" had taught him very well how to conceal his feelings when he chose, and in his caressing grace, that was much the same to all women, he had an impenetrable mask. But Vere had none. Vere was trans- parent as only a perfectly innocent creature ever is; and the merciless eyes of Jeanne de Sonnaz were on them. "You know the Princess Zouroff, I think?" said the latter, negligently. " Was it Vera, or was it myself that you serenaded so beautifully? An indiscreet question; but you know I am al- ways indiscreet." "Madame," said Corrèze, whilst he bowed before Vere, and then turned to answer his tor- mentor, " truth is always costly, but it is always best. At the risk of your displeasure, I must confess that I sang on no other sentiment than perfect exasperation with the chapelle de mu- sique. That I serenaded yourself and Princess Zouroff was an accidental honor that I scarcely deserved to enjoy " "What a pretty falsehood, and how nicely turned!" thought Madame de Sonnaz, as she pursued persistently, "Then Vera was right:] she said that you did not know that we were here. Nevertheless, you and she are old friends, I think, surely?" Corrèze had taken hi3 seat between them; he was close to the duchess; there was a little distance between him and Vere, whose eyes were always on the flowers that employed her fingers. " I knew Madame la Princesse a little, very little, when she was a child," he said, with a smile. "Neither acquaintances nor court presentations before marriage count after it, I fear Princess Vera at that time had a sailor hat and no shoes: you see it is a very long time ago. " Vere looked up a moment and smiled. Then the smile died away into a great sadness. It was long ago, indeed, so long that it seemed to her as though a whole lifetime severed her, the wife of Sergius Zouroff, from the happy child that had taken the rose from the hand of Corrèze. " No shoes! This is interesting. I suppose they were dredging, and she had lost herself. Tell me all about it," said the high voice of Duchesse Jeanne; and Corrèze tokl her in his own airy graceful fashion, and made her laugh. " If I did not tell her something, God knows what she would conjecture," he said to himself; and then he sat down to the breakfast-table be side the open windows, aud made himself charming in a gay and witty way that made the duchess think to herself, " She is in love, but he is not." Vere sat almost silent. She could not imi- tate his insouciance, his gayety, his abandon- ment to the immediate hour, the skill with which he made apparent frankness serve as entire concealment. She sat iu a sort of trance, only hearing the rich sweet cadence of the voice whose mere laughter was music and whose mere murmur was a caress. The sunshine and the green water glancing through the spaces of the blinds, the pretty quaint figures moving up and down under the trees on" the opposite bank, the scent of the mountain strawberries and the Alpine flowers, he fragrance of the pine woods filling the air, fhe voice of Corrfeze, melodious even in its laughter, crossed by the clear, harsh, imperious tones of Jeanne de Sonnaz,—all seemed to Vere like the scenes and the sounds of a dream, all blent together into a sweet confusion of sun- shine and shade, of silver speech and golden She had longed to meet him; she had dreaded to meet him. Month after month her heart had yearned and her courage had quailed; his eyes had said so much, and his lips had said nothing. They had been strangers so long, and now, all in a moment, he was sitting at her table in familiar intimacy, he who had sung the "Prière" of Sully-Prudhomme. Her eyes shone with unaccustomed light; her serious lips had a smile trembling on them; the coldness and the stillness which were not nat- ural to her years gradually changed and melted, as the snow before the sunbeams of summer: yet she felt restless and apprehensive. She wondered what he thought of her; if he con- demned her in haste, as one among the many bought by a brilliant and loveless marriage; if hë believed that the moth had forgotten the star and dropped to mere earthly fire? She could not tell. Corrèze was not the Saint Raphael who had given her the rose; he was the Corrèze of Paris, witty, brilliant, careless, worldly-wise, bent on amusing and disarming the Duchesse de Son- naz. Vere, who knew nothiug of his motive, or of her peril, felt a chill of faint, intangible disap- pointment. She herself had no duality of nat- ure; she had nothing of the flexible, changeful, many-sided temper of the artist; she was al ways Vere, whether she pleased or displeased; whether she were happy or unhappy; whether she were with king or peasant she was always what she had been born, always Vere Herbert, never Vera Zouroff, though church and law had'called her so. . ""She is like a pearl," thought Corrèze, watching her; "she has nothing of the opal or the diamond; she does not depend on light; she never changes or borrows color; she is like a pearl; nothing alters the pearl,—till you throw it into the acid." Meanwhile, as he thought so, he was making Jeanne de Sonnaz shed tears of inextinguish- able laughter at stories of his friends of the Comédie Française; for, in common with all great ladies, her appetite was insatiable for anecdotes of the women whom she would not have visited, yet whom she copied, studied, and, though she would not have confessed it, often envied. " Le diable est entre," thought the Duchesse Jeanne, ruffling the moss rose amidst her lace, amused. " Le diable n'entrera jamais,"/thought Cor- rèze, who guessed very nearly what she was thinking. Vere was almost always silent. Every now and then she found his soft, pensive eyes look- ing at her, and then she looked away and her face grew warm. What did he think of her? she was asking herself uneasily; he, who had bidden her keep herself unspotted from the world ; he, who had sent her the parable of the moth and the star; he, who filled her thoughts and absorbed her life more absolutely than she had any idea of, had said nothing to her since the day he had bidden her farewell at TrouviUe. Corrèze kept up the conversation with the duchess in her own gay strain; and Vere listen- ed, trying to detect in this amiably cynical man of the world the savior of Père Martin, the art- ist of the lyric drama the hero of all her inno- cent memories and dreams. He was more kindred to her ideal when he grew more in earnest, and spoke of himself and his own art in answer to Jeanne de Sonnaz,who reproached him with apathy to the claims of Berlioz. "No," he said, with some warmth, " Irefuse to recognize the divinity of noise : I utterly deny the majesty of monster choruses; clamor and clangor are the death-knell of music, as drapery and so called realism (which means, if it mean aught, that the dress is more real than the form underneath it) are the destruction of sculpture. It is very strange. Every day art in every other way becomes more natural and music more artificial. Every day I wake up ex- pecting to hear myself dénigré and denounced as old-fashioned because I sing as my nature as well as my training teaches me to do. It is very odd; there is such a cry for naturalism in other arts; we have Millet instead of Claude; we have Zola instead of George Sand; we have Dumas fils instead of Corneille; we have Mercié in- stead of Canova; but in music we have pre- cisely the reverse, and wo have the elephantine creations, the elaborate an.1 pompous combina- tions of Baireuth and th6 Tone school, instead of the old sweet strains of melody that went straight and clear to the ear and the heart of man. Sometimes my ejemies write in their journals that I sing as if I were a Tuscan peas- ant strolling through his corn : how proud they make me! But they do not mean to do so. I will not twist and emphasize. I trust to melo- dy. I was taught music in its own country, and I will not sin against the canons of the Italians. They are right. Rhetoric is one thing, and song is another. Why confuse the two? Simplicity is the soul of great music, as it is the mark of great passions. Ornament is out of place in melody which represents single emo- tions at their height, be they joy, or fear, or hate, or love, or shame, or vengeance,'or what- soever they will. Music is nota science any more than pootry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds. I sing as naturally as other men speak; let me remain natural------" "But you are too strong for it to matter what they say I" Corrèze shrugged his shoulders. "lam indifferent. Indifference is always strength. Just now I do as I like, to be sure, and yet I have the world with me. But that is only because I am the fashion. There is so much more of fashion than of fame in our gen- eration. Fame was a grand thing, serious and solemn; the people gave it,—such people as ran before Correggio's Madonna as before a heaven- descended thing, and made Catherine of Siena a living possibility in their midst. It was a grand guerdon, given in grand times. It is too serious and too stern for us; we have only fash- ion,—a light thing that you crown one day and depose the next, a marsh-light born of bad gases that dances up to one one moment and dances away the next. Well, we have what we are worth; so much is certain." "Do you think we always have the fate we merit?" said Vere, in a low tone. •• Corrèze looked up, and she thought his soft eyes grew stern. " I have usually thought so, princess;—yes." " It is a cruel doctrine." "And a false one? Well,—perhaps. So many side-winds blow; so many diseases are in the air; so many wandering insects, hereto-day and gone to-morrow, sting the plant and canker it: that is what you mean? To be sure. When the aphis eats the rose it is no fault of the rose." "Zouroff is the aphis, I suppose," thought Jeanne de Sonnaz as she looked at Vere. "Do not speak in parables, Corrèze. It is detestable. A metaphor always halts somewhere, like an American paper I read last week, which said, ' Memphis is sitting in the ashes of woe and desolation, and our stock of groceries ic running low !' So Vera complains of fate and you of fame!—what ingratitude!" "Fame, duchess!" cried Corrèze. " Pray do not use such a gros mot to me. Michael Angelo has fame, and Cromwell, and Monsieur Edison, but a singer!—we are the most ephemeral of all ephemeridse. We are at best only a sound,— just a sound When we have passed away into ' the immemorial silences' there is nothing left of us, no more than of the wind that blew through Corydon's pipe." "Monsieur Edison will tell you that Cory- don's pipe will be heard a thousand years henc« through the skill of science." "What horror!" said Corrèze. "Ithink I never should have courage to sing another note if I believed that I should echo through all th« ages in that way." "And yet you say that you want fame." " I think I neversaid that, madame. I said fame is not a gift of our times; and, if it were, a singer would have no title to it." "You have something very like it, at all events. When half a city drags your carriags like a chariot of victory------" " Caprice, madame; pure caprice," said Cor- rèze. "I have happened for the moment to please them." "And what do Cœsars, and Napoleons, and other rulers do?—happen for the moment to frighten] them. Yours is the prettier part to play." " A sugar-stick is prettier than a ramrod, but-------¦" " You do not deserve the Kaiserinn's straw- berries," said Jeanne de Sonnaz, tumbling tha big berries nevertheless on to his plate.