26
MOTHS.
I
angel and half an imbecile as long as ever she
lives."
"Imbeciles are popular people," said Lady
Stoat, with a smile. "As for angels, no one
cares for them much about modern houses, ex
cept in terra cotta. "
" It is not you who should say so," returned
Lady Dolly, tenderly.
"Oh, my dear," answered her friend, with a
modest sigh of depreciation, "I have no pre-
tensions: I am only a poor, weak, and very im-
perfect creature. But- one thing I may really
say of myself, and that is, that 1 honestly love
young girls and do my best for them; and I
think not a few have owed their life's happiness
to me.    May your Vere be of the number!"
" I don't think she will ever be happy," said
Lady Dolly, impatiently, with a little confused
look of guilt. " She doesn't care a bit about
dress."
" That is a terrible lacune, certainly," assent-
ed Lady Stoat, with a smile. "Perhaps, in-
stead, she will take to politics,—those serious
girls often do,—or perhaps she will care about
her children."
Lady Dolly gave a little shudder. What was
her daughter but her child? It seemed only the
other day that the little fair baby had tumbled
about among the daisies on the vicarage lawn,and
poor dead Vere in his mellow gentle voice had
recited, as he looked at her, the glorious lines
to his child of Coleridge. How wretched she
had been then !—how impatient of the straight-
ened means, the narrow purse, the country
home, the calm religious life! How wretched
she would have been now could she have gone
back to it! Yet, with the contradiction of her
sex and character, Lady Dolly for a moment
wished with all her soul that she had never left
that narrow home, and that the child were now
among the daisies.
One day, when they were driving down the
Avenue Marigny, her mother pointed out to
Vere a row of lofty windows au premier, with
'heir shutters shut, but with gorgeous autumn
lowers hanging over their gilded balconies; the
» iveried Suisse was yawning in the doorway.
"That is where your Faust-Romeo lives,"
said Lady Dolly, who could never bring herself
to remember the proverb, "Let sleeping dogs
lie." "It is full of all kinds of beautiful things,
and queer ancient things too: he is a connois-
seur in his way, and everybody gives him such
wonderful presents. He is making terrible
scandal just now with the young grand duchess.
Only to think of what you risked that day boat-
ing with him makes one shudder! You might
have been compromised for life!"
Vere's proud mouth grew very scornful, but
she made no reply.
Her mother looked at her and saw the scorn.
"Oh, you don't believe me?" she said,
irritably. "Ask anybody! an hour or two
alone with a man like that ruins a girl's name
forever. Of course it was morning, and open
air, but still Corrèze is one of those persons a
woman can't be seen with, even!"
Vere turned her head and looked back at the
bright balconies with their hanging flowers;
then she said, with her teeth shut and her lips
turning white,—
" I do not speak to you of Prince Zouroff s
character. Will you be so good as not to speak
to me of that of M. de Corrèze?"
Her mother was startled and subdued. She
wished she had not woke the sleeping dog.
"If she be like that at sixteen, what will she
be at six-and-twenty?" she thought. " She
puts them in opposition already!"
Nevertheless, she never again felt safe, and
whenever she drove along the Avenue Marigny
she looked up at the house with the gilded
balconies and hanging flowers to make sure that
it gave no sign of life.
It did not occur to her that whatever Vere
might be at six-and-twenty would be the result
of her own teaching, actions, and example.
Lady Dolly had reasoned with herself that she
had done right after all: she had secured a mag-
nificent position for her daughter, was it not the
first duty of a mother?
If \ ere could not be content with that position,
and all its compensations, if she offended heaven
and the world by any obstinate passions or im-
prudent guilt, if she, in a word, with virtue
made so easy and so gilded, should not after all
be virtuous, it would be the fault of Bulmer,
the fault of society, the fault of Zouroff, the
fault of Corrèze, or of some other man, perhaps,
—never the fault of her mother.
When gardeners plant and graft, they know
very well what will be the issue of their work ;
they do not expect the rose from a bulb of gar-
lic, or look for the fragrant olive from a slip of
brier; but the culturers of human nature are less
wise, and they sow poison and rave in re-
proaches, when it breeds and brings forth its
like. "The rosebud garden of girls" is a
favorite theme for poets, and the maiden, in her
likeness to a half-opened blossom, is as near
purity and sweetness as a human creature can
be; yet what does the world do with its open-
ing buds?—it thrusts them in the forcing-house
amidst the ordure, and then, if they perish pre-
maturely, never blames itself. The streets
absorb the girls of the poor; society absorbs the
daughters of the rich; and not seldom one form
of prostitution, like the other, keeps its captives
" bound in the dungeon of their own corrup-
tion."
CHAPTER XL
It was snowing in Vienna. Snow lay heavy
on all the plains and roads around, and the Dan-
ube was freezing fast.
" It will be barely colder in Moscow," said
Corrèze, with a shiver, as he threw his furs
about him, and left the opera-house amidst the
frantic cheers and adoring outcries of the crowd
without, after his last appearance in " Borneo e
Giulietta." In the bitter glittering frosty aight
a rain of hot-house flowers fell about him; he
hated to see them fall; but his worshipers did
not know that, and would not have heeded it if
they had. Roses and violets, hyacinth and
white lilac, fell about his feet, lined his path,
and carpeted his carriage as if it were April in
the south, instead of November in Austria.
His hand had just been pressed by an emper-
or's, a ring of brilliants beyond price had just
been slid on his finger by an empress; the
haughtiest aristocracy of the world had caressed
him and flattered him and courted him* he was
at the supreme height of fame, and Influence,
and fashion, and genius; yet, as he felt the
roses and the lilies fall about him he said rest-
lessly to himself,—
" When I am old and nobody heeds me, I
shall look back to this night, and such nights
as this, as to a lost heaven ; why, in heaven's
name, cannot I enjoy it now?"
* But enjoyment is not to be gained by reflect-
ing that to enjoy is our duty, and neither the
diamonds nor the roses did he care for, nor did
he care for the cheers of the multitude that
stood out under the chill brilliant skies for the
chance of seeing him pass down the streets. It
is a rare and splendid royalty, too, that of a
freat singer; but he did not care for its crowns,
he roses made him think of a little hedge rose
gathered by a sweet-brier bush on a cliff by a
gray quiet sea.
With such odd caprices does Fate often smite
genius.
He drove to the supper-table of a very great
lady, beautiful as the morning; and he was the
idol of the festivity which was in his honor;
and the sweet eyes of its mistress told him that
no audacity on his part would be deemed pre-
sumption : yet it all left him careless and almost
cold. She had learned Juliet's part by heart,
but he had forgotten Romeo's,—had left it be-
hind him in the opera-house with his old Vene-
tian velvets and lace.
From that great lady's, whom he left alone
with a chill heart, empty and aching, he went
with his comrades to the ball of the Elysium
down in the subterranean vaults of the city,
where again and again in many winters he had
found contagion in the elastic mirth and the
buoyant spirit of the clean-limbed, bright-eyed
children of the populace, dancing and whirling
and leaping far down under the streets to the
Styrian music. But it did not amuse him this
night; nor did the dancers tempt him; the
whirl and the glow and the noise and the mirth
seemed to him tedious and stupid.
" Decidedly that opera tires me," he said to
himself, and thought that his weariness came
from slaying Tybalt and himself on the boards
of the great theater. He told his friends and
adorers with petulance to let him be still, he
wanted to sleep, and the dawn was very cold.
He went home to his gorgeous rooms in a
gorgeous hotel, and lit his cigar and felt tired.
The chambers were strewn with bouquets,
wreaths, presents, notes; and amidst the litter
was a great gold vase, a fresh gift from the em-
peror, with its two rilievi, telling the two stories
of Orpheus' and of Amphion.
But Corrèze did not look twice at it. He-
looked instead at a French journal, which he
had thrown on his chair when his servant had
roused him at seven that evening, saying that it
was the hour to drive to the theater. He had
crushed the paper in his hand then and thrown
it down; he took it up now, and looked again
in a corner of it in which there was announced
the approaching marriage of Prince Zouroff.
"To give her to that brute!" he murmured,,
as he read it over once more. " Mothers were-
better and kinder in the days of Moloch!"
Then he crushed the journal up again, and
flung it into the wood-fire burning in the gilded,
tower of the stove.
It was not slaying Tybalt that had tired him
that night.
"What is the child to me?" he said to him-
self, as he threw himself on his bed. " She
never could have been anything, and yet------"
Yet the scent of the hot-house bouquets and
the forced flowers seemed sickly to him ; he re-
membered the smell of the little rose plucked
from the sweet-brier hedge on the cliff above-
the sea.
The following noon he left Vienna for Mos-
cow, where he had an engagement for twenty
nights previous to his engagement at St. Peters-
burg for the first weeks of the Russian New
Year.
From Moscow he wrote to Lady Dolly. When
the letter reached Lady Dolly it made her cry ;
it gave her a crise des nerfs. When she read
what he wrote she turned pale and shuddered
a little; but she burnt what he wrote; that was-
all.
She shivered a little whenever she thought of
that letter for days and weeks afterwards; but
it changed her purpose in no way, and she-
never for one moment thought of acting upon it,
"I shall not answer him," she said to her-
self. "He will think I have never had it, and
I shall send him a faire part like anybody else.
He will say nothing when the marriage is oyer.
Absurd as it is, Corrèze is a gentleman ; I sup-
pose that comes from his living so much among
us."
Among the many gifts that were sent to swell
the magnificence of the Zouroff bridal, there
was one that came anonymously, and of which,
none knew the donor. It gave rise to many
conjectures and much comment, for there was-
not even the name of the jeweler that had.
made it. It was an opal necklace of exquisite-
workmanship and great value, and as its me-
dallion, there hung a single rose diamond cut as-
a star; beneath the star was a moth of sapphire
and pearls, and beneath the moth was a flame
of rubies. They were so hung that the moth
now touched the star, now sank to the flame.
It needed no words with it for Vere to know
whence it came.
But she kept silence.
" A strange jewel," said Prince Zouroff, and
his face grew dark : he thought some meaning
or some memory came with it.
It was the only gift amidst them all that felt
the kisses and tears of Vere.
" I must sink to the flame!" she thought, "and
he will never know that the fault is not mine;,
he will never know that I have not forgotten
the star!"
But she only wept in secret.
All her life henceforth was to be one of si-
lence and repression. They are the sepolte vive
in which society immures its martyrs.
Some grow to like their prison-walls and to
prefer them to light and freedom: others loath
them in anguish till death come.
The gift of that strange medallion annoyed
Zouroff, because it perplexed him. He never
spoke to Vere concerning it, for he believed
that no woman ever told the truth; but he tried
to discover the donor by means of his many
servants and agents. He failed, not because
Corrèze had taken any especial means to insure
secrecy, but from simple accident.
Corrèze had bought the stones himself of a
Persian merchant many years before, had
drawn the design himself, and had given it to a
young worksr in gems of Galicia whom he had
once befriended at the fair of Novgorod ; and
the work was only complete in all its beauty
and sent to him when the Galician died ofthat
terrible form of typhus which is like a plague
in Russia. Therefore Zouroff's inquiries in
Paris were all futile, and he gradually ceased
to think about the jewel.
Another thing came to her at that time that
hurt her, as the knife hurt Iphigenia. It was
when the crabbed clear handwriting she knew