84
MOTHS.
;
They were letters ten years old,—letters of her
mother to Sergius Zouroff; letters forgotten
when others were burned the week before his
marriage; forgotten, and left in the tortoise-
shell casket.
At ten o'clock on the following night, as
Prince Zouroff sat at dinner in the Grand Circle
a telegram was brought to him. It was from
his wife:
"Never approach me: let me live and die
Jiere."
CHAPTER XXIX.
Szarisla had hidden many sad and many
tragic lives.
It hnd that of Vere.
To her husband she had perished as utterly
as though she was dead. From remote districts
of the North, news travels slowly,—never trav-
els at all, unless it be expressly sent: Vere had
so seldom written to any one that it scarcely
seemed strange that she now never wrote at all.
The world had almost ceased to inquire for her;
it thought she had withdrawn herself into re-
tirement from religious caprice, or from moibid
sentiment, or from an unreturned passion, or
that she had been sent into that exile for some
fault: whenever women spoke of her they
preferred to think this, they revived old ru-
mors.    For the rest, silence covered her life.
Her sister in law wept honest tears, reviled
her brother with honest rage, but then played
musical intricacies, or gambled at bezique, and
tried to forget that the one creature her cyn-
ical heart yearned over, and sighed for, was
away in that drear captivity in the Polish
plains.
"If I went and lived with her," thought
Nadine Nelaguine, " I should do her no good,
I should not change her: she is taillée dans le
marbre. 1 should alter her in nothing, and I
should only be miserable myself."
In country houses of England and Scotland
her mother went about through summer and
autumn unchanged, charming, popular, and
said, with a little smile and a sigh, 'Oh! my
dear child—you know she is too good,—really
too good—wastes all her time in Poland to teach
the children and convert the Nihilists, she is
happiest so, she assures me. You know she
was always so terribly serious: it was Bulmer
that ruined her I"
And she believed what she said.
Jeanne de Sonnaz mourned at Ruilhières in
tne austere severity of a great lady's widow-
¦ hood in France, heard mass every day with her
little blonde aud brown-headed girls and boys
about her in solemn retreat, yet kept her keen
glance on the world, which she had quitted
perforce for a space, and said to herself, an-
noyed and baffled, " When will he cease to live
at Marly?"
For Corrèze was always there.
.Sergius Zouroff had been to Russia. He only
-went to Livadia, but the world thought he had
been to his wife. He returned, and kept open
house, at a superb chasse he had bought in the
Ardennes. When people asked him for his
wife, he answered them briefly that she was
well : she preferred the North.
Félicité was closed.
The old peasant stood by her wall of furze
and looked in vain along the field-paths under
the apple-blossoms.
" Now the lark is dead," she said to her son,
"" neither of the two comes near."
So the months fled away.
When the autumn was ended, Corrèze, who
-wasalwaysat his little château with other artists
about him, said to himself, "Have I not done
enough for obedience and honor? I must see
her, though she shall never see me."
Corrèze lived his life in the world obedient to
her will, but men and women went by him like
shadows, and even his art ceased to have power
over him.
He was a supreme artist still, since to the ge-
nius in him there was added the culture of years
and the facility of long habit. But the joy of
the artist was dead in him.
All his heart, all his soul, all his passion, were
with that lonely life in the gray plains of Po
land, whose youth was passing in solitude and
whose innocence was being slandered, by the
guiltv.
" Î obey her," he thought, " and what is the
use? Our lives will go by like a dream, and we
shall be divided even in our graves, the world
will always think she has some sin—she lives
apart from her husband!"
He chafed bitterly at his doom ; he grew fe-
verish and nervous; he fancied in every smile
there was a mockery of her, in every word a
calumny. Once he took up a public print whicli
spoke of himself and of his retreat at Marly,
and wliich, with a hint and availed jest, quoted
that line which Jeanne de Sonnaz had by a
laugh wafted through Paris after his name:-
" Pur amant sur terre égaré!"
Corrèze crushed the paper in his hand and
threw it from him, and went out: he longed to
do something, to act in some way; all the im-
petuosity and ardor of his temper were pant-
ing to break from this thraldom of silence and
: inaction.
He would have struck Sergius Zouroff on the
¦ cheek in tbe sight of all Paris, but he had no
title to defend ber.
He would only harm her more.
She was the wife of Zouroff, and she accepted
her exile at her husband's hands: he had no title
to resent for her what she would not resent for
herself.
"lam not her lover," he thought, bitterly
' "I am nothing but a man who loves her hope-
lessly, uselessly, vainly."
It was late in autumn, and ghastly fancies
seized him: vague terrors for her, that left him
no sleep and no rest, began to visit him. Was
she really at Szarisla? Was she indeed living?
He could not tell. There were disturbances
and bloodshed in the disaffected provinces;
winter had begun there in Poland, the long,
black silence of winter, which could cover so
many nameless graves. He could bear absence,
ignorance, apprehension, no longer: he went to
sing twenty nights in Vienna and ten in Mos-
cow.
"There I shall breathe the same air,"  he
' thought.
He went over the Alps, by way of the Jura
and Dauphine: he thought, as he passed the
peaceful valleys and the snow-covered summits
that had been so familiar in childhood to
him,—.
" If I could only dwell in the mountains with
her, and let the world and fame go by!"
Then he reproached himself for even such dis-
honor to her as lay in such a thought.
"What am I, that she should be mine?" he
mused.      "I have been  the lover   of   many
women, I am  not worthy to touch her hand.
j The world could not harm her: would I?"
In Vienna he had brilliant successes. He
thought the people mad. To himself he seemed
forever useless and powerless for art: his voice
sounded in his ears like a bell muffled and out of
tune. The cities rejoiced over him and feasted
and honored him; but it seemed to him all like
a dream -,-he seemed only to hear tbe beating
of his own heart,'"that he wished would break
and be at peace forever.
From Moscow he passed away, under public
plea that he was bound for Germany, towards
those obscure, dull, unvisited lands that lie to-
wards the borders of East Prussia and the Baltic
Sea, and have scarce a traveler to visit them,
and never a poet or historian to save them from
the nations' oblivion, but He in the teeth of the
north wind, vast, ill-populated, melancholy with
the profound unchangeable wretchedness of a
captive people.
Once more he saw the wide gray plains that
| stretched around Szarisla.
For days and weeks he lingered on in the mis-
j érable village which alone afforded him a roof
i and bed; he passed there as a stranger from the
South buying furs; he waited and waited in the
pine woods merely to see her face.    "If I can
see her once drive by me, and she is well, I will
go away," he said to himself, and he watched
i and waited.    But she never came.
At length he spoke of her to the archimandrite
, of the village, as a traveler might of a great
princess of whom hearsay had told him.    He
learned that she was unwell and rarely left the
¦house.
Corrèze, as he heard, felt his heart numb with
fear, as all nature was numbed with frost around
him.
He could not bring himself to leave. The
I village population began to speak with wonder
and curiosity of him, he had bought all the furs
they had to sell, and sent them through into Si-
lesia; they knew he was no trader, for he never
bargained, and poured out his roubles like sand;
they began to speak of him, and wonder at him,
and he knew that it was needful he should go.
But he could not: he lived in wretcheduèss,
1 with scarcely any of the necessaries, and none
of thej comforts, of life in ' the only place that
sheltered travelers, but from that cabin he could
see the stone walls of her prison house across
the white sea of the snow covered plains; it was
enough. The spot was dearer to him than the
gay, delirious pleasures of his own Paris. In
the world, wherever he chose to go, he would
have luxury, welcome, amusement, the rapture
of crowds, the envy of men, the love of women,
all the charm that success and art and fame can
lend to life at its zenith. But he staid on at
Szarisla for the sake of seeing those pale, stern
walls that rose up from the sea of snow.
Those walls inclosed her life.
The snow had ceased to fall, the frost had set
in, in its full intensity; one day the sun poured
through the heavy vapors of the cloud-covered
sky.
He went nearer the building than he had ever
done. He thought it possible the gleam of the
sun might tempt her to the open air.
He stood without the gates and looked: the
front of the great somber pile seemed to frown;
the casements had iron stanchions; the doors
were like the doors of a prison.
"And that brute has shut her here!" he
thought,—" shut her here while he sups with
Casse-une-Croûte !"
Suddenly he seemed to himself to be a coward,
because he did not strike Sergius Zouroff and
shame him before the world.
' ' I have no right, " he thought. ' ' But does a
man want one when a woman is wronged?"
He stood in the shadow of some great Siberian
pines, a century old, and looked " his heart out
through his eyes."
As he stood there, one person and then an-
other and then another came up and stood there,
until they gathered in a little crowd. He asked,
in their own tongue, of one of them why they
came: they were all poor; the man who was a
cripple said to him, "The princess used to come
to us while she could, now she is ill we come to
her; she is strong enough .sometimes to let us
see her face, touch her hand; the sun is out;
perhaps she will appear to-day, twice a week the
charities are given."
Corrèze cast his furs close about htm, so that
his face was not seen, and stood in the shadow
of the gateway.
The doors of the building opened ; for a mo-
ment he could see nothing; his eyes were blind
with the intensity of his desire and his fear.
When the mist passed from his sight he saw
a tall and slender form, moving with the grace
that he knew so well, but very wearily and very
slowly, come out from the great doors, and
through the gates; the throng of cripples and
sufferers and poor of all sorts fell on their knees
and blessed her.
He kneeled with them, but he could not move
his lips to any blessing: with all the might of
his anguish he cursed Sergius Zouroff.
Vere's voice, much weakened, but grave and
clear as of old, came to his ear through the rare-
fied air:
"My people, do not kneel to me: you know
it pains me. It is long since I saw you: what
can I do?"
She spoke feebly; she leaned on a tall cane
she bore, and as she moved the thick veil from
about her head, the man who would have given
his life for hers saw that she was changed and
aged as if by the passing of many years. He
stifled a cry that rose to his lips, and stood and
gazed on her.
The poor had long tales of woe; she listened
patiently, and moved from one to another, say-
ing a few words to each; behind her were her
women, who gave alms to each as she directed
them. She seemed to have little strength ; alter
a time she stood still, leaning on her cane, and
the people grouped about her, and kissed the
furs she wore.
Corrèze went forward timidly and wiih hesi-
tation, and kneeled by her, and touched with
his lips the hem of her clothes.
" What do you wish?" she said to him, see-
ing in him only a stranger, for his face was
hidden; then as she looked at him a tremor
ran through her; she started and quivered a
little.
" Who are you?" she said quickly and faintly,
and before he could answer, muttered to him
"Is this how you keep your word?—you are
cruel."                                                      ,
"For the love of God let me see you alone,
let me speak one word," he murmured, as he
still kneeled on the frozen snow. " You are
suffering? you are ill?"
She moved a little away, apart from the peo-