Ouida

“ Woe is me!”
“And do you think,” said Ouida, with infinite tenderness, “that I regret you?”
“That is the very thought that sears my soul. I know my wrong to you. Yet through it all your brave smile [Pg 93] remains. Oh! for the power to blot out the past; to dower you with the past.”
“I would refuse the gift,” said Ouida, “if I could not share my life with you. You seem fevered tonight, love. Any good results today?” ”

“ He stood and looked with a sinking heart on the quiet, moonlit country, and the winding course of the water where it flowed, now silvery in the light, now black in the gloom, passing rapidly through the heather and the sallows under the gigantic masses of the Etruscan walls. It seemed to him to the full as terrible as to Adone; but it did not seem to him so utterly impossible, because he knew more of the ways of men and of their unhesitating and immeasurable cruelty whenever their greed was excited. ”

“ On the impulse of the ungovernable pain which the other's presence had been, he had bidden him leave Africa at once; now he almost wished he had bid him stay. There was a weary, unsatisfied longing for some touch of love or of gratitude from this usurper, whom he had raised in his place. He would have been rewarded enough if one sign of gladness that he lived had broken through the egotism and the stricken fear of the man whom he remembered as a little golden-headed child, with the hand of their dying mother lying in benediction on the fair, silken curls. ”

“ But its real favorite, its admitted pride and delight, is Ouida. The "genteel young ladies of the counter," and their hard-working sisterhood of dressmakers and milliners and lodging-house keepers, all accept Ouida as a literary oracle. "They quite agree with herself that she is a woman of genius. They recognize in her the embodiment of their own inexpressible imaginings of aristocratic people and things. ”

“ To-day it could not hold her. “The Madcap” was upstairs, and beyond it an unlimited supply of twopenny volumes and Ouida. Red-bound volumes of Ouida on the bottom shelf had sent her eyes quickly back to the safety of the upper rows. Through the whole of tea-time she was quietly aware of a discussion going on at the back of her mind as to who it was who had told her that Ouida’s books were bad; evil books. She remembered her father’s voice saying that Ouida was an extremely able woman, quite a politician. Then of course her books were all right, for grown-up people. ”

“ A great peace, a great freshness, were on the water and the land.
"Oh Lord, what fools we are!" thought the old woman. "The earth makes itself anew for us with every dawn, and our own snarling, and fretting, and mourning cloud it all over for us, and we only see our own silly souls!"
Soon, before the sun was rising, Adone came in sight, passing with firm, accustomed step across the undressed trunks of trees which were here thrown across the river to make a passage lower down the stream than the bridge of Ruscino. ”

“ She heard and shivered, and looked at the bed of straw, and on the great canvas of the Barabbas.
Before another day had come and gone, he would lie in the common ditch of the poor, and the work of his hand would be withered, as a scroll withers in a flame.
If she tried once more? If she sought human pity, human aid? Some deliverance, some mercy—who could say?—might yet be found, she thought. The gods were dead; but men,—were they all more wanton than the snake, more cruel than the scorpion? ”

“ She moved forward as her servant announced him; she saw him pause there like one spell-bound, and thought it the hesitation of one who felt sensitively his own low grade in life. She came toward him with the silent, sweeping grace that gave her the carriage of an empress; her voice fell on his ear with the accent of a woman immeasurably proud, but too proud not to bend softly and graciously to those who were so far beneath her that, without such aid from her, they could never have addressed or have approached her. ”

“ He looked at her more closely, though she wearied him.
“Where have you got your ironies, Cigarette? You are so young.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Bah! one is never young, and always young in camps. Young? Pardieu! When I was four I could swear like a grenadier, plunder like a prefet, lie like a priest, and drink like a bohemian.”
Yet—with all that—and it was the truth, the brow was so open under the close rings of the curls, the skin so clear under the sun-tan, the mouth so rich and so arch in its youth! ”

“ A tremor shook his frame from head to foot.
"I knew it was some deviltry," he muttered. "Oh, Lord! oh, Lord! would that I had made the oxen trample them into thousand pieces! They ought never to have left my field alive!"
"Hush, hush!" said the priest sternly. "I cannot have such language in my house. Compose yourself."
Adone raised his head; his eyes were alight as with fire; his face was darkly red.
"What, sir! You tell me the river is to be taken away from us, and you ask me to be calm! It is not in human nature to bear such a wrong in peace. Take away the Edera! ”

“ He rose and left his easel and threw himself at her feet on the grass; he took the little wooden shoes in his hands as reverently as he would have taken the broidered shoes of a duchess; he looked up at her with tender, smiling eyes.
"Poor little Bébée!" he said again. "Did I frighten you indeed? Nay, that was very base of me. We will not spoil our summer holiday. There is no such thing as a fiend, my dear. There are only men—such as I am. Say the daisy spell over for me, Bébée. See if I do not love you a little, just as you love your flowers." ”

“ He dared not tell his friend of the passionate propaganda which he had begun up and down the course of the Edera, striving to make these stocks and stones stir, striving to make the blind see, the deaf hear, the infirm rise and leap.
"Let us go and make music," said the priest at last. "That will not harm any one, and will do our own souls good. It is long since I heard your voice."
"It will be longer," thought Adone, as he answered: "Excuse me, sir; I cannot think of any other thing than this great evil which hangs over us. ”

“ No one else was sleeping in the house; all was dark, and she had not even a match or a tinder-box; but she felt her way to the outer door, unlocked it, as she had been used to unlock the door at the Terra Vergine, and in another moment ran down the steep and stone street. She laughed as the wind from the river blew against her lips, and brought her the fragrance of Adone's fields.
"I shall be in time!" she thought, as she ran down a short cut which led, in a breakneck descent, over the slope of what had once been the glacis of the fortress, beneath the Rocca to the bridge. ”

“ Yet he labored here at the corn-mill of Admetus; and watching him at his bondage there stood the slender, slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a slow mocking smile upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his keen eyes, even as though he cried:
"O brother, who would be greater than I! For what hast thou bartered to me the golden rod of thy wealth, and thy dominion over the flocks and the herds? For seven chords strung on a shell—for a melody not even thine own! For a lyre outshone by my syrinx hast thou sold all thine empire to me! ”

“ And they thronged round her, and adored the silver waist buckles; and when Bébée got fairly to her stall, and traffic began, she thought once more that nobody's feast day had ever dawned like hers.
When the chimes began to ring all over the city, she could hardly believe that the carillon was not saying its "Laus Deo" with some special meaning in its bells of her.
The morning went by as usual; the noise of the throngs about her like a driving of angry winds, but no more hurting her than the angels on the roof of St. Gudule are hurt by the storm when it breaks. ”

“ It was in the tent of Ilderim now that he reclined, looking outward at the night where flames were leaping ruddily under a large caldron, and far beyond was the dark immensity of the star-studded sky; the light of the moon strayed in and fell on the chestnut waves of his beard, out of which the long amber stem of an Arab pipe glittered like a golden line, and on the skin—fair, despite a warm hue of bronze—and the long, slumberous softness of the hazel eyes, were in so marked a contrast of race with the eagle outlines of the Bedouins around. ”

“ He has never forgotten you. So often now he will still speak of you! He is in your camp. We are traveling together. He will be here this evening. What delight it will give him to know his dearest friend is living! But why—why—have kept him ignorant, if you were lost to all the world beside?”
Still he answered her nothing. The truth he could not tell; the lie he would not. She paused, waiting reply. Receiving none, she spoke once more, her words full of that exquisite softness which was far more beautiful in her than in women less tranquil, less chill, and less negligent in ordinary moments. ”

“ On the eighth night he paused a little longer by her in the gloom.
"He dies there," he said, slowly resting his tranquil, musing gaze upon the bed of straw. "It is a pity. So little would save him still. A little wine, a little fruit, a little skill,—his soul's desire when his sense returns. So little—and he would live, and he would be great; and the secret sins of the Barabbas would scourge the nations, and the nations, out of very fear and very shame, would lift their voices loud and hail him prophet and seer." ”

“ Ouida was entertaining. Her approach was satisfactorily unpretentious. She wrote about high life, the very rich—and who wanted to read about any other kind of life? Certainly not the rich, or the middle classes, or the poor . . . Neither the rich nor the poor were interested in reading about the poor except in the form of the Cinderella legend and that had been done too often. . . . Ouida's characters had amusing adventures; they were cut out of coloured paper to be pinned on as the composition directed. I think, Campaspe began to reason, that Waldo Frank should read Ouida. ”

“ About an hour after noon a voice addressed her,—
"Have you more moss-roses for me?"
Bébée looked up with a smile, and found some. It was her companion of the cathedral. She had thought much of the red shoes and the silver clasps, but she had thought nothing at all of him.
"You are not too proud to be paid to-day?" he said, giving her a silver franc; he would not alarm her with any more gold; she thanked him, and slipped it in her little leathern pouch, and went on sorting some clove-pinks. ”

“ She knitted her pretty brows, standing there in his path with her pistols thrust in her sash, and her hands resting lightly on her hips, as a good workman rests after a neatly finished job, and her dainty fez set half on one side of her brown, tangled curls, while upon them the intense luster of the moonlight streamed, and in the dust, well-nigh at their feet, lay the gaunt, while-robed form of the dead Arab, with the olive, saturnine face turned upward to the stars. ”

“ Of all the studies he made from her—he all the while cold to her as any priest of old to the bird that he seethed in its blood on his altars of sacrifice,—those which were slightest of all, yet of all pleased him best, were those studies which were fullest of that ruthless and unsparing irony with which, in every stroke of his pencil, he cut as with a knife into the humanity he dissected.
In the first, he painted her in all the warm, dreaming, palpitating slumber of youth, asleep in a field of poppies: thousands of brilliant blossoms were crushed under her slender, pliant, folded limbs ”

“ It was in the village of Massarosa, near Viareggio, that that much-abused and very abusive old lady, Ouida, the Marquis de la Ramée, died in January, 1908. Since 1877 she had made Italy her home, and for years she had lived here alone, not in poverty or misery, for she had a “civil pension” which was more than sufficient to keep the wolf from the door. She died miserable and alone however. Ouida was a more real, more charitable person than she was given credit for being. ”

“ They concern only myself."
"None of our rights concern only ourselves. What are those which you claim in special on the Edera water?"
Adone was silent for a few moments; he was astonished and embarrassed; he had never reflected on the legal side of his claim to the river; he had grown up in love and union with it; such affections, born with us at birth, are not analysed until they are assailed.
"You are strangers," he replied. "But what right do you question me? I was born here. What is your errand?"
"You must be Adone Alba?" said the person, as if spokesman for the others. ”

“ She smiled and rose. 'My dear Otho, jealousy is a very ugly, useless, and unwise passion. The world decided, as soon as ever I was presented to it, that I had no such thing as a heart. You have always persisted in supposing that I have, but very likely the world is more right than you.'
'May I not hope at least that I have a place in it?' murmured Othmar, and he bent towards her with much of a lover's ardour. ”

“ Of how carelessly she would dash through under a raking fire, to take a draught of water to a dying man. Of how she had sat by an old Grenadier's death-couch, to sing to him, refusing to stir, though it was a fete at Chalons, and she loved fetes as only a French girl can. Of how she had ridden twenty leagues on a saddleless Arab horse, to fetch the surgeon of the Spahis to a Bedouin perishing in the desert of shot-wounds. ”