Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 55

The word fell down upon the silence, and the hiss of a shrill cicada echoed to it like a devil's laugh. Their eyes met, and in the gaze of the one was a compa.s.sionate pardon, but in the gaze of the other a relentless l.u.s.t.

And the sun sank slowly downward beyond the barrier of purple cloud, pa.s.sing away from earth.

"Two!"

Again the single word dropped out upon the stillness, marking the flight of the seconds; again the hoot of the cicada echoed it, laughing hideously from its noisome marsh.

And the sun sank slowly, still slowly, nearer and nearer to its shroud of mist, bearing with it all that lingered of the day.

"Three!"

The white death-signal flickered in the breeze, and the last golden rays of the sun were still above the edge of the storm-cloud.

There was yet time.

But the warning was not read: there was the a.s.sa.s.sin's devilish greed within Strathmore's soul, the a.s.sa.s.sin's devilish smile upon his lips; the calmness of his face never changed, the tranquil pulse of his wrist never quickened, the remorseless gleam of his eyes never softened. It was for him to fire first, and the doom written in his look never relaxed. He turned--in seeming carelessness, as you may turn to aim at carrion bird--but his shot sped home.

One moment Erroll stood erect, his fair hair blowing in the wind, his eyes full open to the light; then--he reeled slightly backward, raised his right arm, and fired in the air! The bullet flew far and harmless amidst the forest foliage, his arm dropped, and without sign or sound he fell down upon the sodden turf, his head striking against the earth with a dull echo, his hands drawing up the rank herbage by the roots, as they closed convulsively in one brief spasm.

He was shot through the heart.

And the sun sank out of sight, leaving a dusky, sultry gloom to brood over the noxious brakes and sullen stagnant waters, leaving the world to Night, as fitting watch and shroud of Crime; and those who stood there were stricken with a ghastly horror, were paralysed by a vague and sudden awe, for they knew that they were in the presence of death, and that the hand which had dealt it was the hand of his chosen friend. But he, who had slain him, more coldly, more pitilessly than the merciful amongst us would slay a dog, stood unmoved in the shadow, with his ruthless calm, his deadly serenity, which had no remorse as it had had no mercy, while about his lips there was a cold and evil smile, and in his eyes gleamed the lurid flame of a tiger's triumph--the triumph when it has tasted blood, and slaked its thirst in life.

_"Voyez!--il est mort!"_

The words, uttered in his ear by Valdor, were hoa.r.s.e and almost tremulous; but he heard and a.s.sented to them unmoved. An exultant light shone and glittered in his eyes; he had avenged himself and her! Life was the sole price that his revenge had set; his purpose had been as iron, and his soul was as bronze. He went nearer, leisurely, and stooped and looked at the work of his hand. In the gloom the dark-red blood could yet be clearly seen, slowly welling out and staining the clotted herbage as it flowed, while one stray gleam of light still stole across, as if in love and pity, and played about the long fair hair which trailed amidst the gra.s.s.

Life still lingered, faintly, flickeringly, as though both to leave for ever that which one brief moment before had been instinct with all its richest glory; the eyes opened wide once more, and looked up to the evening skies with a wild, delirious, appealing pain, and the lips which were growing white and drawn moved in a gasping prayer:

"Oh, G.o.d! I forgive--I forgive. He did not know"----

Then his head fell back, and his eyes gazed upward without sight or sense, and murmuring low a woman's name, "Lucille! Lucille!" while one last breath s.h.i.+vered like a deep-drawn sigh through all his frame--he died. And his murderer stood by to see the shudder convulse the rigid limbs, and count each lingering pang--calm, pitiless, unmoved, his face so serene in its chill indifference, its brutal and unnatural tranquillity, whilst beneath the drooped lids his eyes watched with the dark glitter of a triumphant vengeance the last agony of the man whom he had loved, that the two who were with him in this ghastly hour shrank involuntarily from his side, awed more by the Living than the Dead.

Almost unconsciously they watched him, fascinated basilisk-wise, as he stooped and severed a long flake of hair that was soiled by the dank earth and wet with the dew: unarrested they let him turn away with the golden lock in his hand and the fatal calm on his face, and move to the spot where his horse was waiting. The beat of the hoofs rang m.u.f.fled on the turf, growing fainter and fainter as the gallop receded. Strathmore rode to her whose bidding had steeled his arm, and whose soft embrace would be his reward; rode swift and hard, with his hand closing fast on the promised pledge of his vengeance; while behind him, in the shadows of the falling night, lay a man whom he had once loved, whom he had now slain, with the light of early stars breaking pale and cold, to s.h.i.+ne upon the oozing blood as it trailed slowly in its death-stream through the gra.s.ses, staining red the arid turf.

And the sun had gone down upon his wrath.

Mes freres! it is well for us that we are no seers! Were we cursed with prevision, could we know how, when the idle trifle of the present hour shall have been forged into a link of the past, it will stretch out and bind captive the whole future in its bonds, we should be paralysed, hopeless, powerless, old ere we were young! It is well for us that we are no seers. Were we cursed with second sight, we should see the white shroud breast-high above the living man, the phosphor light of death gleaming on the youthful radiant face, the feathery seed, lightly sown, bearing in it the germ of the upas-tree; the idle careless word, daily uttered, carrying in its womb the future bane of a lifetime; we should see these things till we sickened, and reeled, and grew blind with pain before the ghastly face of the Future, as men in ancient days before the loathsome visage of the Medusa!

Contretemps generally have some saving crumbs of consolation for those who laugh at fate, and look good-humouredly for them; life's only evil to him who wears it awkwardly, and philosophic resignation works as many miracles as Harlequin; grumble, and you go to the dogs in a wretched style; make _mots_ on your own misery, and you've no idea how pleasant a _trajet_ even drifting "to the bad" may become.

The statue that Strathmore at once moulded and marred was his life: the statue which we all, as we sketch it, endow with the strength of the Milo, the glory of the Belvedere, the winged brilliance of the Perseus!

which ever lies at its best; when the chisel has dropped from our hands, as they grow powerless and paralysed with death; like the mutilated torso; a fragment unfinished and broken, food for the ants and worms, buried in the sands that will quickly suck it down from sight or memory, with but touches of glory and of value left here and there, only faintly serving to show what _might have been_, had we had time, had we had wisdom!

With which satirical reflection on his times and his order drifting through his mind, Strathmore's thoughts floated onward to a piece of statecraft then numbered among the delicate diplomacies and intricate embroglie of Europe, whose moves absorbed him as the finesses of a problem absorb a skilful chess-player, and from thence stretched onwards to his future, in which he lived, like all men of dominant ambition, far more than he lived in his present. It was a future brilliant, secure, brightening in its l.u.s.tre, and strengthening in its power, with each successive year; a future which was not to him as to most wrapped in a chiaroscuro, with but points of luminance gleaming through the mist, but in whose cold glimmering light he seemed to see clear and distinct, as we see each object of the far-off landscape stand out in the air of a winter's noon, every thread that he should gather up, every distant point to which he should pa.s.s onward; a future singular and characteristic, in which state-power was the single ambition marked out, from which the love of women was banished, in which pleasure and wealth were as little regarded as in Lacedaemon, in which age would be courted, not dreaded, since with it alone would come added dominion over the minds of men, and in which, as it stretched out before him, failure and alteration were alike impossible. What, if he lived, could destroy a future that would be solely dependent on, solely ruled by, himself? By his own hand alone would his future be fas.h.i.+oned; would he hew out any shape save the idol that pleased him? When we hold the chisel ourselves, are we not secure to have no error in the work? Is it likely that our hand will slip, that the marble we select will be dark-veined, and brittle, and impure, that the blows of the mallet will s.h.i.+ver our handiwork, and that when we plan a Milo--G.o.d of strength--we shall but mould and sculpture out a Laoc.o.o.n of torture? Scarcely; and Strathmore held the chisel, and, certain of his own skill, was as sure of what he should make of life as Benvenuto, when he bade the molten metal pour into the shape that he, master-craftsman, had fas.h.i.+oned, and gave to the sight of the world the Winged Perseus. But Strathmore did not remember what Cellini did--that one flaw might mar the whole!

In the little _millefleurs_-scented billet lay, unknown to its writer as to him, the turning-point of his life! G.o.d help us! what avail are experience, prescience, prudence, wisdom, in this world, when at every chance step the silliest trifle, the most commonplace meeting, an invitation to dinner, a turn down the wrong street, the dropping of a glove, the delay of a train, the introduction to an unnoticed stranger, will fling down every precaution, and build a fate for us of which we never dream? Of what avail for us to erect our sand-castle when every chance blast of air may blow it into nothing, and drift another into form that we have no power to move? Life hinges upon hazard, and at every turn wisdom is mocked by it, and energy swept aside by it, as the battled d.y.k.es are worn away, and the granite walls beaten down by the fickle ocean waves, which, never two hours together alike, never two instants without restless motion, are yet as changeless as they are capricious, as omnipotent as they are fickle, as cruel as they are countless! Men and mariners may build their bulwarks, but hazard and the sea will overthrow and wear away both alike at their will--their wild and unreined will, which no foresight can foresee, no strength can bridle.

Was it not the mere choice between the saddle and the barouche that day when Ferdinand d'Orleans flung down on second thoughts his riding-whip upon the console at the Tuileries, and ordered his carriage instead of his horse, that cost himself his life, his son a throne, the Bourbon blood their royalty, and France for long years her progress and her peace? Had he taken up his whip instead of laying it aside, he might be living to-day with the sceptre in his hand, and the Bee, crushed beneath his foot, powerless to sting to the core of the Lily! Of all strange things in human life, there is none stranger than the dominance of Chance.

He landed and went into Silver-rest in the morning light. Far as the eye could reach stretched the deep still waters of the bay; the white sails of his yacht and of the few fis.h.i.+ng skiffs in the offing stood out distinct and glancing in the sun; over the bluffs and in all the clefts of rock the growing gra.s.s blew and flickered in the breeze; and as he crossed the sands the air was fragrant with the scent of the wild flowers that grew down to the water's edge. But to note these things a man must be in unison with the world; and to love them he must be in unison with himself. Strathmore scarce saw them as he went onward.

If a military man's friend dies who had the step above him, his first thought is "Promotion! deucedly lucky for me!" His next, "Poor fellow, what a pity!" always comes two seconds after. I understand Voltaire. If your companion's existence at table makes you have a dish dressed as you don't like it, you are naturally relieved if an apoplectic fit empties his chair, and sets you free to say, "_Point de sauce blanche!_" All men are egotists, they only persuade themselves they are not selfish by swearing so often, that at last they believe what they say. No motive under the sun will stand the microscope; human nature, like a faded beauty, must only have a _demi-lumier_; draw the blinds up, and the blotches come out, the wrinkles show, and the paint peels off. The beauty scolds the servants--men hiss the satirists--who dare to let in daylight!

The Frenchwoman prides herself on being thought unfaithful to her husband; the Englishwoman on being thought faithful to him; but though their theories are different, their practice comes to much the same thing.

_FRIENDs.h.i.+P._

When Zeus, half in sport and half in cruelty, made man, young Hermes, who, as all Olympus knew, was for ever at some piece of mischief, insisted on meddling with his father's work, and got leave to fas.h.i.+on the human ear out of a sh.e.l.l that he chanced to have by him, across which he stretched a fine cobweb that he stole from Arachne. But he hollowed and twisted the sh.e.l.l in such a fas.h.i.+on that it would turn back all sounds except very loud blasts that Falsehood should blow on a brazen horn, whilst the impenetrable web would keep out all such whispers as Truth could send up from the depths of her well.

Hermes chuckled as he rounded the curves of his ear, and fastened it on to the newly-made human creature.

"So shall these mortals always hear and believe the thing that is not,"

he said to himself in glee--knowing that the box he would give to Pandora would not bear more confused and complex woes to the hapless earth than this gift of an ear to man.

But he forgot himself so far that, though two ears were wanted, he only made one.

Apollo, pa.s.sing that way, marked the blunder, and resolved to avenge the theft of his milk-white herds which had led him such a weary chase through Tempe.

Apollo took a pearl of the sea and hollowed it, and strung across it a silver string from his own lyre, and with it gave to man one ear by which the voice of Truth should reach the brain.

"You have spoilt all my sport," said the boy Hermes, angry and weeping.

"Nay," said the elder brother with a smile. "Be comforted. The brazen trumpets will be sure to drown the whisper from the well, and ten thousand mortals to one, be sure, will always turn by choice your ear instead of mine."

Women never like one another, except now and then an old woman and a young woman like you and me. They are good to one another amongst the poor, you say! Oh, that I don't know anything about. They may be.

Barbarians always retain the savage virtues. In Society women hate one another--all the more because in Society they have to smile in each other's faces every night of their lives. Only think what that is, my dear!--to grudge each other's conquests, to grudge each other's diamonds, to study each other's dress, to watch each other's wrinkles, to outs.h.i.+ne each other always on every possible occasion, big or little, and yet always to be obliged to give pet names to each other, and visit each other with elaborate ceremonial--why, women _must_ hate each other!

Society makes them. Your poor folks, I daresay, in the midst of their toiling and moiling, and scrubbing and sc.r.a.ping, and starving and begging, do do each other kindly turns, and put bread in each other's mouths now and then, because they can scratch each other's eyes out, and call each other hussies in the streets, any minute they like, in the most open manner. But in Society women's entire life is a struggle for precedence, precedence in everything--beauty, money, rank, success, dress, everything. We have to smother hate under smiles, and envy under compliment, and while we are dying to say "You hussy," like the women in the streets, we are obliged, instead of boxing her ears, to kiss her on both cheeks, and cry, "Oh, my dearest--how charming of you--so kind!"