MOTHS.
11
" I ted you it was disgraceful, disgraceful, and
goodness knows how ever I shall explain it
away Hélène has been telling the story to
everybody, and given it seven-leagued boots
already. True! who cares what is true, or
what is not true: it is what a thing loolcs! I
believe everybody says you had come from
Havre with Corrèze!"
Vere stood silent and passive, her eyes on
her stephanotis aud orchids.
" Where did» you get those extravagant flow-
ers!   Surely Jack never------" said Lady Dolly,
suspiciously.
." He brought them," answered Vere.
" Corrèze?    Whilst I was away?"
" Yes.    He spoke to me at the balcony."
" Well, my dear, you do Bulmer creditl   No
Spanish   or Italian   heroine  out of   his  own
operas could conduct herself more audaciously
on the first day of her liberty.    It is certainly
what I always thought would come of your
grandmother's mode of education.     Well, go
up-^lairs in your bedroom, and do not leave it
until I send for you.    No, you can't take flow-
ers up-stairs; they are very unwholesome,—as
unwholesome as the kindness of Corrèze."
Vere weut, wistfully regarding her treasures,
but she had kept the faded rose and the laven-
der in her hand unnoticed.
"After all, I care most for these," she
thought,—the homely sea-born things that had
been gathered after the songs.
When the door had closed on her, Lady Dolly
rang for her maître-d'hôtel. •
"Pay the Fraulein Schroder three months'
salary, and send her away bv the first steamer;
and pay the English servant whatever she
wants, and send her by the first steamer. Mind
they are both gone when I wake. And I shall
go to Deauville the day after to-morrow: prob-
ably I shall never come back here."
The official bowed, obedient.
As she passed through her drawing rooms,
Lady Dolly took up the bouquet of Corrèze
and went to her own chamber.
" Pick me out the best of those flowers," she
sairl to her maid, "and stick them about all
over me; here and there, you know."
She was going to dine with the Duchess de
Sonnaz at Deauville.
As she went to her carriage, the hapless Ger-
man, quivering and sobbing, threw herself in
her path.
"Oh, miladi! miladi!" she moaned. "It
cannot be true? You send me not away thus
from the child of my heart? Ten years have I
striven to write the will of God, and the learn-
ing that is better than gold, on that crystal pure
mind, and my life, and ifey brain, and my soul
I do give------"                     7
" You should have done your duty," said
Lady Dolly, wrapping herself up and hastening
on "Anil you can't complain, my good
Schroder; you have got three months' in excess
of your wages." And she drew her swan's-
down about her and got into her carriage.
"Now, on my soul, that was downright vul-
gar." muttered John Jura.    "Hang it all, it j
was vulgar!"
But he sighed as he said it to himself, for his !
experience had taught him that high-born ladies
could be very vulgar when they were moved to
be ill-natured.
Corrèze was at the villa.
She saw him a moment before dinner, and
gave him her prettiest smile.
"Oh, Corrèze! what flowers! I stole some
of them, you see. You would turn my child's
head.    I am glad you are going to Baden !"
He laughed, and said something graceful and
novel, turned on the old mater pulchra, filia
pulchrior.
The dinner was not too long and was very
gay. After it everybody wandered out into the
gardens, which were hung with colored lamps
and had musicians hidden in shrubberies, dis-
coursing sweet sounds to rival the nightingales.
The light was subdued, the air delicious, the
sea glimmered phosphorescent and starlit at the
end of dusky alleys and rose-hung walks. Lady
Dolly wandered about with Sergius Louroff and
others, and felt quite romantic, whilst John
Jura yawned and sulked; she never allowed
him to do anything else while she was amusing
herself.
Corrèze joined her and her Russians in a little
path between walls of the quatre saison rose
and a carpet of velvety turf. The siars sparkled
through the rose-leaves, the sound of the sea
stole up the silent little alley. Lady Dolly
looked very pretty in a dress of dead white,
with the red roses above her and their dropped
leaves at her feet. She was smoking,—"whicli
was a pity: the cigarette did not agree with the
roses.
"Madame," cried Corrèze, as he sauntered on
and disengaged her a little from the others, " I
have never seen anything so exquisite as your
young daughter. Will you believe that I mean
no compliment when 1 say so."
" My dear Corrèze!    She is only a child!' '
"Sheis not a child. What would you say,
madame, if I told you that for full five minutes
I had the madness to think to-day that I would
pay my forfeit to Baden and Vienna for the
sake of staying here?"
"Heaven forbid you should do any such
thing!    You would turn her head in a week!"
"What would you say, madame," he con-
tinued, with a little laugh, disregarding her in-
terruption, " what would you say if I told you
that I, Corrèze, had actually had the folly to
fancy for five minutes that a vagabond nightin-
gale might make his nest for good in one virgin
heart?    What would you say, miladi?"
"My dear Corrèze, if you were by any kind
of possibility talking seriously------"
"I am talking "quite seriously,—or let us
suppose that I am. What would you say,
miladi?"
" I should say, my dear Corrèze, that you are
too entirely captivating to be allowed to say
such things even in an idle jest, and that you
would be always most perfectly charming" in
every capacity but one."                 «
"And that one is?"
" As a husband for anybody!"
" I suppose you are right," said Corrèze, with
a little sigh. " Will you let me light my
cigarette at yours?"
An hour later he was on his way to Brussels
in the middle hours of the starry fragrant sum-
mer night.
Corrèze. "   But they were wrong.    It was be-
cause he knew himself a great artist.
The scorn of genius is the most boundless
and the most arrogant of all scorn, and he had
it in him very strongly. The world said he
was extravagantly vain; the world was wrong;
yet if he had been, it would have been excusa-
ble. Women had thrown themselves into his;
arms from his earliest youth for the sake of his.
beautiful face, before his voice had been heard;
aud when his voice had captured Europe there
was scarcely any folly, any madness, any deli-
rium, any shame, that women had not been
ready to rush into for his sake, or for the mere
sight of him and mere echo of his song.
There is no fame on earth so intoxicating, so
universal, so enervating, as the fame of a great
singer: as it is the most uncertain and unstable
of all, the most evanescent and most fugitive,
so by compensation is it the most delightful and
the most gorgeous,—rouses the multitude to a
height of rapture as no other art can do, and
makes the dull and vapid crowds of modern
life hang breathless on one voice, as in Greece,
under the violet skies, men hearkened to the
voice of Pindar or of Sappho.
The world has grown apathetic and purblind.
Critics still rave aud quarrel before a canvas,
rbut the nations do not care; quarries of marble
are hewn into various shapes, and the throngs
gape before them and are indifferent; writers
are so many that their writings blend in the
public mind in a confused phantasmagoria where
the colors have run into one another and the
lines are all waved and indistinct; the singer
alone still keeps the old magic power, "the
beauty that was Athens' and the glory that was
Rome's," still holds the divine caduceus, still
sways the vast thronged auditorium, till the
myriads hold their breath like little childreu in
delight and awe. The great singer alone has the
old magic sway of fame; and if he close his
lips "the gayety of nations is eclipsed," and
the world seems empty and silent like a wood in
which the birds are all dead.
It is a supreme power, and may well intoxi-
cate a man.
Corrèze had been as little delirious as any who
have drunk of the philtre of a universal fame,
although at times it had been too strong for
him, and had made him audacious, capricious,
but his
CHAPTER VI.
Raphael de Correze had said no more
than the truth of himself that morning by the
sweet-brier hedge on the edge of the Norman
cliffs.
All the papers and old documents that were
needful to prove him the lineal descendant of j inconstant, and guilty of some follies
the great Savoy family of Corrèze were safe in life was pure from any dark reproach,
his bureau in Paris, but bespoke no more of | " Soyez gentilhomme," his fatiier had said to
them than he spoke of the many love-letters and i him in the little hut on the Pennine Alps, with
imprudent avowals that were also locked away ! the snow-field severing them from all other life
in caskets and cabinets in the only place that in I than their own, and had said it never thinking
any way could be called his home, his apart- that his boy would be more than at best a vil-
ment in the Avenue de l'Empereur. What was ; lage priest or teacher; the bidding had sunk into
the use? All Marquis and Peer of France ' the mind of the child, and the man had not for-
though he was by descent, he was none the less j gotten it now that Europe was at his feet, and
only a tenor singer, and in his heart of hearts ! its princes but servants who had to wait his time,
he was too keenly proud to drag his old descent J and he liked to make them wait. " Perhaps
into the notice of men merely that he might that is not gentilliomme," he would say in re-
look like a frivolous boaster, an impudent teller [ proach to himself, but it diverted him, and he
of empty tales. Noblesse oblige, he had often 'did it very often,—most often when he thought
said to himself, resisting temptation in his oft-| angrily that he was but like Hans Andersen's
nightingale, the jeweled one that was thrown
aside and despised when once its spring was
tempted career, but no one ever heard him say
aloud that paternoster of princes. His remem-
brance of his race had been always with him
like a talisman, but he wore it like a talisman,
secretly, and shy even of having his faith in it
known.
Corrèze, with all his negligence and gayety,
and spoilt child of the worïd though he was,
appraised very justly the worth of the world
and his place in it.
He kuew very well that if a rain-storm on a
windy night were, to quench his voice in his
throat forever, all his troops of lovers and
friends would fall away from him, and his
name drop down into darkness like any shoot-
ing star on an August night. He never deceived
himself.
I am only the world's favorite plaything,
snapped and broken. If he were only that, he
was now at the moment when emperor and
court thought nothing in heaven or on earth
worth hearing but the jeweled nightingale, and
" the crowds in the streets hummed his song."
Yet as the night train bore him through the level
meadows, and corn fields glistening in the moon-
light, and the hush of a sleeping world, his
eyes were dim and his heart was heavy, and on
the soft cushions of the traveling-bed they had
given him he could not fiud rest.
"The moths will corrupt her," he thought,
sadly and wistfully. " The moths will eat all
that fine delicate feeling away, little by little;
the moths of the world will eat the unselfish-
ness first, and then the innocence, and then the
he would say to himself. "If I lost my voice \ honesty, and then the decency; no one will see
I should be served like the nightingale in Hans : them eating, no one will see the havoc being
Andersen's story. Oh, I do not blame the ! wrought; but little by little the fine fabric will
world; things are always so; only it is well to ! go, and in its place will be dust. Ah, the
remember it. It serves, like Yorick's skull, ! pity of it! Tbe pit}'of it! The webs come out
or Philip's slave, to remind one that one is mor- ! of the great weaver's loom lovely enough, but
tal."                                                                        ! the moths of the world eat them all. One weeps
The remembrance gave him force, but it also I for the death of children, but perhaps the change
gave him a tinge of bitterness, so far as any '¦ of them into callous men and worldly women is
bitterness is ever possible to a sunny, generous, i a sadder thiug to see after all."
and  careless  nature, and it made him before j    His heart was heavy,
everything an artist.                                                   " Was it love?    No:  he fancied not; it could
When he was very insolent to grand people ' not be. Love with him—an Almavia as much
—wliich he often was in the caprice of celeb- I off the stage as on it—had been a charming,
rity—those people said to one another, "Oh, tumultuous, victorious thing; a concession
that is because he thinks himself Marquis de   rather to the  weakness of   the   women   who