Ouida

“ I know people, when they are married, are always glad to get away from one another; they are always flirting with other people. But I should be miserable if I thought it would ever be like that with Piero and me. I worship his very shadow, and he does—or he did—worship mine. Why should that change? Why should it not go on forever, as it does in poems? If it can't, why doesn't one die?
From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg, to the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset.
What a goose you are, you dearest Gladys! You were always like that. ”

“ There is not a plain woman among the guests of Surrenden: some are even far beyond the average of good looks, and all have that chic which lends in itself a kind of beauty to the woman of the world. But the handsomest of them all, Nina Curzon herself, pales beside the beautiful pallor of the Russian lady, contrasted as it is with the splendor of her jewels, the red rose of her lips, and the darkness of her eyelashes and eyes. ”

“ Affect enjoyment if you feel it not, and try to remember, beyond everything, that affection is not to be retained or revived by either coercion or lamentation. Once dead, it is not to be awakened by all the "crooning" of its mourner. It is a corpse for ever and aye. Myself, I fail to see how you could expect a young Italian, who has all the habits of the great world and the memories of his vie de garçon, to be cheerful or contented in a wet June in an isolated English country house, with nobody to look at but yourself. ”

“ To change their residence never occurs to such people as these: they are fixed, like the cypress-trees, in the ground, and dream no more than they of new homes. Like the tree, they never change till death fells them. Generosa continued to pour out her woes, leaning against the pillar of the porch, and playing with a twig of pomegranate, whose buds were not more scarlet than her own lips; and Gesualdo continued to press on her his good counsels, knowing all the while that he might as well speak to the swallows under the church eaves, for any benefit that he could effect. ”

“ There have been very many martyrs to the sense that they ought to smile at virtue when they hate it, but Dorothy Usk's martyrdom is of a precisely opposite kind: she forces herself to seem to approve the reverse of virtue whilst she detests it. Anything is better, in her creed, than looking odd; and nowadays you do look so odd and so old-fashioned if you make a fuss about anything. Still, in her heart of hearts she feels excessively vexed, because it is quite apparent to her that Gervase knows something very much to the disadvantage of her new acquaintance. ”

“ Lady Usk coming out of the garden-room down the steps of one of the low windows spares Brandolin the continuation of the lament. She looks pretty; mindful of her years, she holds a rose-lined sun-umbrella over her head; the lace and muslin of her breakfast-gown sweep the lawn softly; she has her two daughters with her, the Ladies Alexandra and Hermione, known as Dodo and Lilie. She welcomes Brandolin with mixed feelings, though with unmixed suavity. She is glad to see him because he amuses Usk, and is a person of wit and distinction whom everybody tries to draw to their houses ”

“ She is as blonde as the dawn and as pure as a pearl. It seems to me that I have never loved any woman at all in my life before. To love her is like plunging one's hand in cool spring-water on a midsummer noon. She is such repose; such innocence; such holiness! In the midst of this crowded, over-colored, vulgar London life—for it is very vulgar at its highest—she seems like some angel of purity. I saw her first standing with a knot of roses in her hand under a cedar-tree, at one of their afternoon clubs on the river. She was drinking a cup of tea: they are always drinking tea. ”

“ The Babe is silent: he does not venture to ask any more, and he has a humiliating feeling that he is not first in the thoughts of Madame Sabaroff,—nay, that, though his rose is in her gown and her hand upon his shoulder, she has almost, very nearly almost, forgotten him.
Brandolin does not attempt to follow her. Her great charm for him consists in the power she possesses of compelling him to control his impulses. He walks away by himself through the green shadows of the boughs, wishing for no companionship save hers. ”

“ Brandolin has listened in silence, conscious of a troubled pleasure within himself, which is invariably the herald of one of those attachments which have so often at once embellished and disturbed his existence.
Like all romantic people, his heart is much younger than his years. It has not been scarred by any one of those tragic passions which, like fire on a hill-side, wither up all green things, so that not a blade of grass will grow where it has passed. He has usually found love only the most agreeable of pastimes. ”

“ A very quiet little place, far away from cities and railways, dusty and uncomely in itself, but blessed in the abundant light and the divine landscape which are around it, and of which no one in it ever thought, except this simple young priest, Gesualdo Brasaïlo.
Of all natural gifts, a love of natural beauty surely brings most happiness to the possessor of it,—happiness altogether unalloyed and unpurchasable, and created by the mere rustle of green leaves, the mere ripple of brown waters. It is not an Italian gift at all, nor an Italian feeling ”

“ But even then the slur and stain of an imputed, though unproved, crime would always rest upon her and make her future dark, her name a by-word in her birthplace. Yes, after what her lover had said, no mere acquittal, leaving doubt and suspicion behind it, would give her back to the light and joy of life. Every man's hand would be against her; every child would point at her as the woman who had been accused of the assassination of her husband.
One day he sought Falko Melegari when the latter was making up the accounts of his stewardship at an old bureau in a deep window-embrasure of the villa. ”

“ Every one is amused, but the hours seem very slow to him: Gervase scarcely leaves her side at all, and Brandolin, with all his chivalrous refusal and unchanging resolution to allow no shadow of doubt to steal over him, feels the odious whispers he has heard and the outspoken words of Litroff recur to his memory and weigh on him like the incubus of a nightmare. With a sensation of dread, he realizes that it is possible, do what he may, that they may haunt him so all his life. A man may be always master of his acts, but scarcely always of his thoughts. ”

“ Lady Usk interposes, hastily, to repress more reminiscences, "that you need be afraid of the young girls of our time being innocent: they are éveillées enough, heaven knows, and experienced enough in all conscience."
"Oh, but that is odious," says Brandolin, with disgust. "The girls of the day are horrible; nothing is unknown to them; they smoke, they gamble, they flirt without decency or grace, their one idea is to marry for sake of a position which will let them go as wild as they choose, and for the sake of heaps of money which will sustain their unconscionable extravagance. ”

“ He has got his opportunity, but it vexes him; he has an impression that his companions will soon drift into forgetting both him and his garden. Since the approach of Brandolin the latter has said nothing.
The children's gardens are in a rather wild and distant part of the grounds of Surrenden. It is noon; most people staying in the house are still in their own rooms; it is solitary, sunny, still; a thrush is singing in a jessamine thicket, there is no other sound except that of a gardener's broom sweeping on the other side of the laurel hedge. ”

“ There is here a great friend of his, a Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva. She is very gay too; she is always perfectly dressed, and chattering from morning to night in shrill Italian or voluble French. She is the cynosure of all eyes as she goes to swim in a rose-colored maillot, with an orange-and-gold Eastern burnous flung about her artistically. She has that wonderful Venetian coloring which can stand a contrast and glow of color which would simply kill any other woman. She is very tall, and magnificently made, and yet uncommonly graceful. ”

“ From the terraces of the villa he could see the mill a mile farther down the stream, and he would pass half the short nights of the summer looking at the distant lights in it.
He was only five-and-twenty, and he was passionately in love with all the increased ardor of a forbidden passion.
He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, was well-made and very tall; in character he was neither better nor worse than most men of his age, but as a steward he was tolerably honest, and as a lover he was thoroughly sincere. ”

“ In the moonlight there stood tall and straight a column of green leaves: it was the stately Lombardy poplar, which was spared by the hatchet, because Marca was, so far as it understood anything, loyal in its regret for the days that were gone. Many birds which had been for hours sound asleep in its boughs flew out with a great whirr of wings and with chirps of terror as the footfall of Gesualdo awakened and alarmed them. He set his lantern down on the ground, for the rays of the moon did not penetrate as far as the deep gloom the poplars threw around them, and began to dig. ”

“ The crickets were chirping, the lizards were gliding, the butterflies were flying above the ripe corn, the reapers were out among the wheat, and the tall stalks were swaying and falling under the sickle. Through the little windows of his sacristy Don Gesualdo, the young vicar of San Bartolo, in the village of Marca, looked with wistful eyes at the hill-side which rose up in front of him, seen through a frame of cherry-boughs in full fruit. The hill-side was covered with corn, with vines, with mulberry-trees; the men and women were at work among the trees, it was the first day of harvest ”

“ She does not come into the library at the tea-hour; there is a large dinner that night; county people are there, as well as the house-party. He has to take in a stupid woman, wife of the Lord-Lieutenant, who thinks him the most absent-minded and unpleasant person she has ever known, and wonders how he has got his reputation as a wit. He is so seated that he cannot even see Xenia Sabaroff, and he chafes and frets throughout the dinner, from the bisque soup to the caviare biscuit, and thinks what an idiotic thing the habits of society have made of human life. ”

“ It was utter madness to suppose that such a man, tender as a woman, timid as a sheep, gentle as a spaniel, could possibly have stabbed Tasso Tassilo to the death within a few roods of his own church, almost on holy ground itself. And yet the idea grew and grew in the mind of Generosa's lover until it acquired all the force of an actual conviction. We welcome no supposition so eagerly as one which accords with and intensifies our own prejudices. ”

“ At dinner, Xenia Sabaroff does not speak much: she has a dreamy look, almost a fatigued one.
Brandolin is opposite to her: as there are no ornaments or flowers on the table higher than eight inches, he can contemplate her at his leisure across the field of shed rose-leaves which is between them. Finding that she is so silent, he talks in his best fashion, in his most reckless, antithetical, picturesque manner: he perceives he gains her attention, though he never directly addresses her.
He also makes Mr. Wootton furious. Mr. Wootton has half a dozen good stories untold. ”

“ Usk discourses of Achnalorrie with breathless eloquence, as of a lover eulogizing the charms of a mistress forever lost to him.
Brandolin listens with admirable patience, and affects to agree that the vision of the American crawling on his stomach over soaking heather in a thick fog for eight hours after a "stag of ten" is a vision of such unspeakably enviable bliss that it must harrow the innermost soul of the dispossessed lord of the soil. ”

“ But there are exceptions to all rules: there are poetic natures everywhere, though everywhere rare: Gesualdo was the exception in Marca and its neighborhood, and evening after evening saw him in the summer weather strolling through the fields, his breviary in his hand, but his heart with the dancing fire-flies, the quivering poplar leaves, the tall green cane, the little silvery fish darting over the white stones of the shallow river-waters. ”

“ A man may be a great hero and yet may have an unseemly passion or an unpaid tailor. But the British public does not understand this. It invariably overlooks the man's greatness, and only sees the lady or the tailor who compromises him. It thinks—unhappily or happily, as you please to consider—that genius should keep the whole ten commandments. Now, genius is conspicuous for breaking them."
Mr. Wootton here knocks a little ash off his cigar, and smiles like a man who has said something neatly.
"It is the first time I ever heard you compliment genius," murmurs Lawrence Hamilton. ”

“ The French novels have enabled me to discover that my angel is very easily ruffled. In fact, she is that touchy thing, a saint. I had no idea that she was a saint when I saw her drinking her cup of tea in that garden on the Thames. True, she had her lovely little serene, holy, noli-me-tangere air; but I thought that would pass. It does not pass. And when I wanted her to laugh with me at "Autour du Mariage," she blushed up to the eyes, and was offended. What am I to do? I am no saint. I cannot pretend to be one. I am not worse than other men, but I like to amuse myself. ”

“ I tell you Tassilo is not a man to take his dishonor quietly."
"Who cares what Tassilo does?" said the young steward, petulantly. "If he touches a hair of her head I will make him die a thousand deaths."
"All those are words," said Gesualdo. "You cannot mend one crime by another, and you cannot protect a woman from her husband's just vengeance. There is only one way by which to save her from the danger you have dragged her into. It is for you to go away." ”

“ It always rolls itself up like a hedgehog, with all its prickles out, turning forever round and round on the axle of its own self-admiration. If you go to Trouville, and wherever else you do go, en martyr, my dear, you will give the mischievous duchess, if she be mischievous, a terrible advantage over you at starting. If you mean to be silent, unpleasant, and enwrapped in a gloomy contemplation of your own merits and wrongs, don't blame him if he spend his time at the Casino with his friend, or somebody worse. ”