“They say,” the great assassin who slays as many thousands as ever
did plague or cholera, drink or warfare; “they say,” the thief of
reputation, who steals, with stealthy step and coward’s mask, to filch
good names away in the dead dark of irresponsible calumny; “they say,”
a giant murderer, iron-gloved to slay you, a fleet, elusive, vaporous
will-o’-the-wisp when you would seize and choke it; “they say,” mighty
Thug though it be which strangles from behind the purest victim, had not
been ever known to touch the Lady Hilda.
She seemed very passionless and cold; and no one ever whispered that she
was not what she seemed. Possibly she enjoyed so unusual an immunity,
first, because she was so very rich; secondly, because she had many male
relations; thirdly, because women, whilst they envied, were afraid of
her. Anyway, her name was altogether without reproach; the only defect
to be found in her in the estimate of many of her adorers.
Married without any wish of her own being consulted, and left so soon
afterwards mistress of herself and of very large wealth, she had remained
altogether indifferent and insensible to all forms of love. Other women
fell in love in all sorts of ways, feebly or forcibly, according to their
natures, but she never.
The passions she excited broke against her serene contempt, like surf
on a rocky shore. She was the despair of all the “tueurs des femmes” of
Europe.
“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” she said to her brother once, when she
had refused the hereditary Prince of Deutschland; “I can do exactly as
I like; I have everything I want; I can follow all my own whims; I am
perfectly happy; why ever should I alter all this? What could any man
ever offer me that would be better?”
Lord Clairvaux was obliged to grumble that he did not know what any man
could.
“Unless you were to care for the man,” he muttered, shamefacedly.
“Oh!—h!—h!” said the Lady Hilda, with the most prolonged delicate and
eloquent interjection of amazed scorn.
Lord Clairvaux felt that he had been as silly and rustic as if he were a
plowboy. He was an affectionate creature himself, in character very like
a Newfoundland dog, and had none of his sister’s talent and temperament;
he loved her dearly, but he was always a little afraid of her.
“Hilda don’t say much to you, but she just gives you a look, and don’t
you sink into your shoes!” he said once to a friend.
He stood six feet three without the shoes, to whose level her single
glance could so pathetically reduce him.
But, except before herself, Lord Clairvaux, in his shoes or out of them,
was the bravest and frankest gentleman that ever walked the earth; and
the universal recollection of him and of his unhesitating habit of
“setting things straight” probably kept so in awe the calumny-makers that
he produced the miracle of a woman who actually was blameless getting
the credit of being so. Usually snow is deemed black, and coal is called
swans’-down, with that refreshing habit of contrariety which alone saves
society from stagnation.
It never occurred to her what a tower of strength for her honor was that
good-looking, good-tempered, stupid, big brother of hers, who could not
spell a trisyllable were it ever so, and was only learned in racing-stock
and greyhound pedigrees; but she was fond of him in a cool and careless
way, as she might have been of a big dog, and was prodigal in gifts to
him of great winners and brood mares.
She never went to stay with him at Broomsden; she disliked his wife,
her sister-in-law, and she was always bored to death in English
country-houses, where the men were out shooting all day, and half asleep
all the evening. The county people, the salt of the earth in their
own eyes, were infinitesimal as ants in hers. She detested drives in
pony-carriages, humdrum chitchat, and afternoon tea in the library; she
did not care in the least who had bagged how many brace; the details of
fast runs with hounds were as horribly tiresome to her as the boys home
from Eton; and she would rather have gone a pilgrimage to Lourdes than
have descended to the ball, where all sorts of nondescripts had to be
asked, and the dresses positively haunted her like ghosts.
Five years before, at Broomsden, she had taken up her candlestick after
three nights of unutterable boredom between her sister-in-law and a
fat duchess, and had mentally vowed never to return there. The vow she
had kept, and she had always seen Clairvaux in Paris, in London, in
Baden,—anywhere rather than in the home of their childhood, towards which
she had no tenderness of sentiment, but merely recollections of the
fierce tyrannies of many German governesses.
She would often buy him a colt out of the Lagrange or Lafitte stables,
and always send half Boissier’s and Siraudin’s shops to his children at
Christmas-time. That done, she considered nothing more could be expected
of her; it was certainly not necessary that she should bore herself.
To spend money was an easy undemonstrative manner of acknowledging the
ties of nature, which pleased and suited her. Perhaps she would have been
capable of showing her affection in nobler and more self-sacrificing
ways; but then there was nothing in her circumstances to call for that
kind of thing; no trouble ever came nigh her; and the chariot of her life
rolled as smoothly as her own victoria _à huit ressorts_.
For the ten years of her womanhood the Lady Hilda had had the command of
immense wealth. Anything short of that seemed to her abject poverty. She
could theorize about making herself into Greuze or Gainsborough pictures
in serge or dimity; but, in fact, she could not imagine herself without
all the black sables and silver fox, the velvets and silks, the diamonds
and emeralds, the embroideries and laces, that made her a thing which
Titian would have worshiped.
She could not imagine herself for an instant without power of limitless
command, limitless caprice, ceaseless indulgence, boundless patronage,
and all the gratifications of whim and will which go with the possession
of a great fortune and the enjoyment of an entire irresponsibility.
She was bored and annoyed very often indeed because Pleasure is not as
inventive a god as he ought to be, and his catalogue is very soon run
through; but it never by any chance occurred to her that it might be her
money which bored her.
When, on a very dreary day early in November, Lady Hilda, known by repute
all over Europe as the proudest, handsomest, coldest woman in the world,
and famous as an _élégante_ in every fashionable city, arrived at the
Hôtel Murat, in the town of Floralia, and it was known that she had come
to establish herself there for the winter (unless, indeed, she changed
her mind, which was probable), the stir in the city was extraordinary.
She brought with her several servants, several carriage-horses, immense
jewel-cases, and a pug dog. She was the great arrival of the season.
There was a Grand Duchess of Dresden, indeed, who came at the same time,
but she brought no horses; she hired her _coupé_ from a livery-stable,
and her star, notwithstanding its royalty, paled in proportion. Besides,
the Grand Duchess was a very little, shabby, insignificant person,
who wore black stuff dresses, and a wig without any art in it. She was
music-mad, and Wagner was her prophet. The Club took no account of her.
There is a club in Floralia, nay, it is the Club,—all other clubs being
for purposes gymnastic, patriotic, theatric, or political, and out of
society altogether.
The Club is very fond of black-balling, and gives very odd reasons for
doing so, instead of the simple and true one, that it wants to keep
itself to itself. It has been known to object to one man because his hair
curled, and to another because he was the son of a king, and to another
because his boots were not made in Paris. Be its reasons, however, good,
bad, or indifferent, it pleases itself; by its fiat newly-arrived women
are exalted to the empyrean or perish in obscurity, and its members are
the cream of masculine Floralia, and spend all fine afternoons on the
steps and the pavement, blocking up the passage-way in the chief street,
and criticising all equipages and their occupants.
When the Lady Hilda’s victoria, with the two blacks, and the white and
black liveries, swept past the Club, there was a great stir in these
philosophers of the stones. Most knew her by sight very well; two or
three knew her personally, and these fortunate few, who had the privilege
to raise their hats as that carriage went by, rose immediately in the
esteem of their fellows.
“Je n’ai jamais rien connu de si épatante,” said the French Duc de St.
Louis, who belongs to a past generation, but is much more charming and
witty than anything to be found in the present one.
“Twelve hundred and fifty thousand francs a year,” murmured the Marchese
Sampierdareno, with a sigh. He was married himself.
“Here is your ‘affaire,’ Paolo,” said Don Carlo Maremma to a man next him.
The Duca della Rocca, to whom he spoke, stroked his moustache, and smiled
a little.
“She is a very beautiful person,” he answered; “I have seen her before at
the Tuileries and at Trouville, but I do not know her at all. I was never
presented.”
“That will arrange itself easily,” said the Duc de St. Louis, who was one
of those who had raised their hats; “Maremma is perfectly right; it is in
every way the very thing for you. Moi, je m’en charge.”
The Duca della Rocca shrugged his shoulders a very little, and lighted a
fresh cigar. But his face grew grave, and he looked thoughtfully after
the black horses and the white and black liveries.
At the English reception that night, which the Lady Hilda disdainfully
likened in her own mind to a penal settlement, M. de St. Louis, whom she
knew very well, begged to be permitted to present to her his friend the
Duca della Rocca.
She was dressed like a mediæval saint of a morning; at night she was a
mediæval princess.
She had feuille-morte velvet slashed with the palest of ambers; a
high fraise; sleeves of the Renaissance; pointed shoes, and a great
many jewels. Della Rocca thought she might have stepped down out of a
Giorgione canvas, and ventured to tell her so. He gave her the carte du
pays of the penal settlement around her, and talked to her more seriously
for some considerable time. Himself and the Duc de St. Louis were the
only people she deigned to take any notice of; and she went away in an
hour, or rather less, leaving a kind of flame from her many jewels behind
her, and a frozen sense of despair in the hearts of the women, who had
watched her, appalled yet fascinated.
“Mais quelle femme impossible!” said Della Rocca, as he went out into the
night air.
“Impossible! mais comment donc?” said the Duc de St. Louis, with vivacity
and some anger.
The Duc de St. Louis worshiped her, as every year of his life he
worshiped three hundred and sixty-five ladies.
“Impossible!” echoed Della Rocca, with a cigar in his mouth.
Nevertheless, the next day, when the rain was falling in such torrents
that no female creature was likely to be anywhere but before her fire,
he called at the Hôtel Murat, and inquired if Miladi were visible, and,
being admitted, as better than nothing, as she would have admitted the
bric-à-brac man, followed the servant up-stairs, and walked into an
atmosphere scented with some three hundred pots of tea-roses, lilies of
the valley, and hothouse heliotrope.
“Ah, ah! you have been to see her. Quite right,” said the Duc de St.
Louis, meeting him as he came down the steps of the hotel in the rain,
when it was half-past five by the clock. “I am going also so soon as I
have seen Salvareo at the Club about the theatricals; it will not take
me a moment. Get in my cab; you are going there too? How is Miladi? You
found her charming?”
“She was in a very bad humor,” replied Della Rocca, closing the cab door
on himself.
“The more interesting for you to put her in a good one.”
“Would either good or bad last ten minutes?—you know her: I do not, but I
should doubt it.”
The Duc arranged the fur collar of his coat.
“She is a woman, and rich; too rich, if one can say so. Of course she has
her caprices——”
Della Rocca shrugged his shoulders.
“She is very handsome. But she does not interest me.”
The Duc smiled, and glanced at him.
“Then you probably interested her. It is much better you should not be
interested. Men who are interested may blunder.”
“She is vain,—she is selfish,—she is arrogant,” said Della Rocca, with
great decision.
“Oh ho!—all that you find out already? You did not amuse her long?——”
“C’est une femme exagérée en tout,” pursued Della Rocca, disregarding.
“No! Exaggeration is vulgar,—is bad taste. Her taste is
excellent,—unexceptionable——”
“Exagérée en tout!” repeated Della Rocca, with much emphasis.
“Dress,—jewels,—habits,—temper—everything. She had three hundred pots of
flowers in her room!”
“Flower-pots, pooh!——that is English. It is very odd,” pursued the Duc,
pensively, “but they really do like the smell of flowers.”
“Only because they cost so much to rear in their fogs. If they were
common as with us, they would throw them out of the window as we do.”
“Nevertheless, send her three hundred pots more. Il faut commencer la
cour, mon cher.”
Della Rocca looked out into the rain.
“I have no inclination; I dislike a woman of the world.”
The Duc chuckled a little.
“Ah, ah! since when, caro mio?”
“There is no simplicity; there is no innocence; there is no sincerity—”
“Bah!” said the Duc, with much disdain; “I do not know where you have got
those new ideas, nor do I think they are your own at all. Have you fallen
in love with a ‘jeune Mees’ with apple-red cheeks and sweetmeats in her
pocket? Simplicity,—innocence,—sincerity. Very pretty. Our old friend of
a million vaudevilles, L’Ingenue. We all know her. What is she in real
truth?—A swaddled bundle of Ignorance. Cut the swaddling-band—ugh! and
Ignorance flies to Knowledge as Eve did, only Ignorance does not want to
know good and evil: the evil contents her: she stops short at that. Yes,
yes, L’Ingenue will marry you that she may read Zola and Belot; that she
may go to La Biche au Bois; that she may smoke cigars with young men;
that she may have her dresses cut half-way down her spine; that she may
romp like a half-drunk harlot in all the cotillons of the year! Whereas
your woman of the world, if well chosen——”
“Will have done all these things beforehand at some one else’s expense,
and will have tired of them,—or not have tired; of the display of spine
and of the cotillon she will certainly never have tired unless she be
fifty——”
“That is not precisely what I mean,” said the Duc, caressing his small
white moustache. “No; I said well chosen,—well chosen. What it can matter
to you whether your wife smokes with young men, or reads bad novels, or
romps till breakfast, I do not see myself. There is a natural destiny
for husbands. The unwise fret over it, the wise profit by it. But,
considering that you dislike these things in your own wife, however much
you like and admire them in the wives of other persons, I would still
say, avoid our friend of a million vaudevilles,—la petite Mees de seize
ans. Ignorance is not innocence; it is a great mistake to suppose that
it even secures it. Your Mees would seize Belot and Zola à la réveille
des noces——. Miladi, yonder, for instance, when they come to her from her
bookseller’s, throws them aside, unread——”
“There was a book of Zola’s on her table to-day——”
“I would bet ten thousand francs that she had not gone beyond the
title-page,” interrupted the Duc, with petulance. “TASTE, mon cher Della
Rocca, is the only sure guarantee in these matters. Women, believe me,
never have any principle. Principle is a backbone, and no woman—except
bodily—ever possesses any backbone. Their priests and their teachers
and their mothers fill them with doctrines and conventionalities,—all
mere things of word and wind. No woman has any settled principles; if
she have any vague ones, it is the uttermost she ever reaches, and those
can always be overturned by any man who has any influence over her. But
Taste is another matter altogether. A woman whose taste is excellent
is preserved from all eccentricities and most follies. You never see
a woman of good sense _afficher_ her improprieties or advertise her
liaisons as women of vulgarity do. Nay, if her taste be perfect, though
she have weaknesses, I doubt if she will ever have vices. Vice will seem
to her like a gaudy color, or too much gold braid, or very large plaids,
or buttons as big as saucers, or anything else such as vulgar women
like. Fastidiousness, at any rate, is very good _postiche_ for modesty:
it is always decent, it can never be coarse. Good taste, inherent and
ingrained, natural and cultivated, cannot alter. Principles—ouf!—they
go on and off like a slipper; but good taste is indestructible; it is a
compass that never errs. If your wife have it—well, it is possible she
may be false to you; she is human, she is feminine; but she will never
make you ridiculous, she will never compromise you, and she will not romp
in a cotillon till the morning sun shows the paint on her face washed
away in the rain of her perspiration. Virtue is, after all, as Mme. de
Montespan said, une chose tout purement géographique. It varies with the
hemisphere like the human skin and the human hair; what is vile in one
latitude is harmless in another. No philosophic person can put any trust
in a thing which merely depends upon climate; but Good Taste——”
The cab stopped at the Club, and the Duc in his disquisition.
“Va faire la cour,” he said, paternally, to his companion as they went
through the doors of their Cercle. “I can assure you, mon cher, that the
taste of Miladi is perfect.”
“In dress, perhaps,” assented Della Rocca.
“In everything. Va faire la cour.”
Paolo, Duca della Rocca, was a very handsome man, of the finest and the
most delicate type of beauty; he was very tall, and he carried himself
with stateliness and grace; his face was grave, pensive, and poetic; in
the largest assembly people who were strangers to him always looked at
him, and asked, “Who is that?”
He was the head of a family, very ancient and distinguished, but very
impoverished; in wars and civil war all their possessions had drifted
away from them piece by piece: hence he was a great noble on a slender
pittance. It had always been said to him, and of him, as a matter of
course, that he would mend his position by espousing a large fortune, and
he had been brought up to regard such a transaction in the light of a
painful but inevitable destiny.
But, although he was now thirty-eight years of age, he had never seen,
among the many young persons pointed out to him as possessing millions,
any one to whom he could prevail upon himself to sell his old name and
title.
The Great Republic inspires, as it is well known, a passion for social
and titular distinctions in its enterprising sons and daughters, which
is, to the original flunkeyism of the mother country, as a Gloire de
Dijon to a dog-rose, as a Reine Claude to a common blue plum. Nor are
the pretty virgins whom the Atlantic wafts across in any way afflicted
with delicacy or hesitation if they can but see their way to getting what
they want; and they strike the bargain, or their mothers do so for them,
with a cynical candor as to their object which would almost stagger the
manager of a Bureau de Mariage.
Many and various were the gold-laden damsels of the West who were
offered, or offered themselves, to him. But he could not induce himself;
his pride, or his taste, or his hereditary instincts, were too strong
for him to be able to ally himself with rag- and bone-merchants from New
York, or oil-strikers from Pennsylvania, or speculators from Wall Street.
No doubt it was very weak of him; a dozen men of the great old races of
Europe married thus every year; but Paolo della Rocca loved his name as
a soldier does his flag, and he could not brave the idea of possibly
transmitting to his children traits and taints of untraceable or ignoble
inherited influences.
Over and over again he allowed himself to be the subject of discussion
among those ladies whose especial pleasure it is to arrange this sort of
matters; but when from discussion it had been ready to pass into action,
he had always murmured to his match-making friend,—
“A little more time!—next year.”
“Bah! ce n’est qu’une affaire de notaire,” said his special protectress
in these matters, a still charming Russian ex-ambassadress, who
constantly wintered in Floralia, and who, having had him as a lover when
he was twenty and she was thirty, felt quite a maternal interest in him
still as to his marriage and prospects.
Della Rocca was too much a man of the world and of his country not to
be well aware that she spoke the truth; it was only an affair for the
notaries, like any other barter; still, he put it off; it would have
to be done one day, but there was no haste,—there would always be
heiresses willing and eager to become the Duchess della Rocca, Princess
of Palmarola, and Marchioness of Tavignano, as his roll of old titles ran.
And so year by year had gone by, and he vaguely imagined that he would
in time meet what he wanted without any drawbacks: a delusion common to
every one, and realized by no one.
Meanwhile, the life he led, if somewhat purposeless, was not
disagreeable; being an Italian, he could live like a gentleman, with
simplicity, and no effort to conceal his lack of riches, and did not
think his dignity imperiled because he did not get into debt for the sake
of display; he would dine frugally without thinking himself dishonored;
refuse to join in play without feeling degraded; and look the finest
gentleman in Europe without owing his tailor a bill.
For other matters he was somewhat _désœuvré_. He had fought, like most
other young men of that time, in the campaign of ’59, but the result
disappointed him; and he was at heart too honest and too disdainful
to find any place for himself in that struggle between cunning and
corruption of which the political life of our regenerated Italy is at
present composed. Besides, he was also too indolent. So for his amusement
he went to the world, and chiefly to the world of great ladies; and for
his duties made sufficient for himself out of the various interests of
the neglected old estates which he had inherited; for the rest he was a
man of the world; that he had a perfect manner, all society knew; whether
he had character as well, nobody cared; that he had a heart at all, was
only known to himself, his peasantry, and a few women.