Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 37

Fame has only the span of a day, they say. But to live in the hearts of the people--that is worth something.

Keep young. Keep innocent. Innocence does not come back: and repentance is a poor thing beside it.

The chimes of the monastery were ringing out for the first ma.s.s; deep bells of sweet tone, that came down the river like a benediction on the day. Signa kneeled down on the gra.s.s.

"Did you pray for the holy men?" Bruno asked him when they rose, and they went on under the tall green quivering trees.

"No," said Signa under his breath. "I prayed for the devil."

"For him?" echoed Bruno aghast; "what are you about, child? Are you possessed? Do you know what the good priests would say?"

"I prayed for him," said Signa. "It is he who wants it. To be wicked _there_ where G.o.d is, and the sun, and the bells"----

"But he is the foe of G.o.d. It is horrible to pray for him."

"No," said Signa, st.u.r.dily. "G.o.d says we are to forgive our enemies, and help them. I only asked Him to begin with His."

Bruno was silent.

_TRICOTRIN._

At every point where her eyes glanced there was a picture of exquisite colour, and light, and variety.

But the scene in its loveliness was so old to her, so familiar, that it was scarcely lovely, only monotonous. With all a child's usual ignorant impatience of the joys of the present--joys so little valued at the time, so futilely regretted in the after-years--she was heedless of the hour's pleasure, she was longing for what had not come.

On the whole, the Waif fared better, having fallen to the hands of a vagabond philosopher, than if she had drifted to those of a respected philanthropist. The latter would have had her glistening hair shorn short, as a crown with which that immortal and inconsistent socialist Nature had no justification in crowning a foundling, and, in his desire to make her fully expiate the lawless crime of entering the world without purse or pa.s.sport, would have left her no choice, as she grew into womanhood, save that between sinning and starving. The former bade the long fair tresses float on the air, sunny rebels against bondage, and saw no reason why the childhood of the castaway should not have its share of childish joyousness as well as the childhood prince-begotten and palace-cradled; holding that the fresh life just budded on earth was as free from all soil, no matter whence it came, as is the brook of pure rivulet water, no matter whether it spring from cla.s.sic lake or from darksome cavern.

The desire to be "great" possessed her. When that insatiate pa.s.sion enters a living soul, be it the soul of a woman-child dreaming of a coquette's conquests, or a crowned hero craving for a new world, it becomes blind to all else. Moral death falls on it; and any sin looks sweet that takes it nearer to its goal. It is a pa.s.sion that generates at once all the loftiest and all the vilest things, which between them enn.o.ble and corrupt the world--even as heat generates at once the harvest and the maggot, the purpling vine and the lice that devour it.

It is a pa.s.sion without which the world would decay in darkness, as it would do without heat, yet to which, as to heat, all its filthiest corruption is due.

A woman's fair repute is like a blue harebell--a touch can wither it.

Viva had gained the "great world;" and because she had gained it all the old things of her lost past grew unalterably sweet to her now that they no longer could be called hers. The brown, kind, homely, tender face of grand'mere; the gambols of white and frolicsome Bebe; the woods where, with every spring, she had filled her arms with sheaves of delicate primroses; the quaint little room with its strings of melons and sweet herbs, its glittering bra.s.s and pewter, its wood-fire with the soup-pot simmering above the flame; the glad free days in the vineyard and on the river, with the winds blowing fragrance from over the clover and flax, and the acacias and lindens; nay, even the old, quiet, sleepy hours within the convent-walls, lying on the lush unshaven gra.s.s, while the drowsy bells rang to vespers or compline,--all became suddenly precious and dear to her when once she knew that they had drifted away from her for evermore.

Then he bent his head, letting her desire be his law; and that music, which had given its hymn for the vintage-feast of the Loire, and which had brought back the steps of the suicide from the river-brink in the darkness of the Paris night, which sovereigns could not command and which held peasants entranced by its spell, thrilled through the stillness of the chamber.

Human in its sadness, more than human in its eloquence, now melancholy as the Miserere that sighs through the gloom of a cathedral at midnight, now rich as the glory of the afterglow in Egypt, a poem beyond words, a prayer grand as that which seems to breathe from the hush of mountain solitudes when the eternal snows are lighted by the rising of the sun--the melody of the violin filled the silence of the closing day.

The melancholy, ever latent in the vivid natures of men of genius, is betrayed and finds voice in their Art. Goethe laughs with the riotous revellers, and rejoices with the summer of the vines, and loves the glad abandonment of woman's soft embraces, and with his last words prays for Light. But the profound sadness of the great and many-sided master-mind thrills through and breaks out in the intense humanity, the pa.s.sionate despair of Faust; the melancholy and the yearning of the soul are there.

With Tricotrin they were uttered in his music.

"Let me be but amused! Let me only laugh if I die!" cries the world in every age. It has so much of grief and tragedy in its own realities, it has so many bitter tears to shed in its solitude, it has such weariness of labour without end, it has such infinitude of woe to regard in its prisons, in its homes, in its battlefields, in its harlotries, in its avarices, in its famines; it is so heart-sick of them all, that it would fain be lulled to forgetfulness of its own terrors; it asks only to laugh for awhile, even if it laugh but at shadows.

"The world is vain, frivolous, reckless of that which is earnest; it is a courtesan who thinks only of pleasure, of adornment, of gewgaws, of the toys of the hour!" is the reproach which its satirists in every age hoot at it.

Alas! it is a courtesan who, having sold herself to evil, strives to forget her vile bargain; who, having washed her cheeks white with saltest tears, strives to believe that the paint calls the true colour back; who, having been face to face for so long with blackest guilt, keenest hunger, dreadest woe, strives to lose their ghosts, that incessantly follow her, in the tumult of her own thoughtless laughter.

"Let me be but amused!"--the cry is the aching cry of a world that is overborne with pain, and with longing for the golden years of its youth; that cry is never louder than when the world is most conscious of its own infamy.

In the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine Empire, in the Second Empire of Napoleonic France, the world, reeking with corruption, staggering under the burden of tyrannies, and delivered over to the dominion of l.u.s.t, has shrieked loudest in its blindness of suffering, "Let me only laugh if I die!"

Not as others! Why, my Waif? Is your foot less swift, your limb less strong, your face less fair than theirs? Does the sun s.h.i.+ne less often, have the flowers less fragrance, does sleep come less sweetly to you than to them? Nature has been very good, very generous to you, Viva. Be content with her gifts. What you lack is only a thing of man's invention--a quibble, a bauble, a Pharisee's phylactery. Look at the river-lilies that drift yonder--how white they are, how their leaves enclose and caress them, how the water buoys them up and plays with them! Well, are they not better off than the poor rare flowers that live painfully in hothouse air, and are labelled, and matted, and given long names by men's petty precise laws? You are like the river-lilies. O child, do not pine for the gla.s.s house that would enn.o.ble you, only to force you and kill you?

Wrong to be proud, you ask? No. But then the pride must be of a right fas.h.i.+on. It must be the pride which says, "Let me not envy, for that were meanness. Let me not covet, for that were akin to theft. Let me not repine, for that were weakness." It must be the pride which says, "I can be sufficient for myself. My life makes my n.o.bility; and I need no accident of rank, because I have a stainless honour." It must be pride too proud to let an aged woman work where youthful limbs can help her; too proud to trample basely on what lies low already; too proud to be a coward, and shrink from following conscience in the confession of known error; too proud to despise the withered toil-worn hands of the poor and old, and be vilely forgetful that those hands succoured you in your utmost need of helpless infancy!

Philosophy, Viva, is the pomegranate of life, ever cool and most fragrant, and the deeper you cut in it the richer only will the core grow. Power is the Dead-Sea apple, golden and fair to sight while the hand strives to reach it, dry grey ashes between dry fevered lips when once it is grasped and eaten!

Pleasure is but labour to those who do not know also that labour in its turn is pleasure.

Happy! As a mollusc is happy so long as the sea sweeps prey into its jaws; what does the mollusc care how many lives have been s.h.i.+pwrecked so long as the tide wafts it worms? She has killed her conscience, Viva; there is no murder more awful. It is to slay what touch of G.o.d we have in us!

Have I been cruel, my child? Your fever of discontent needed a sharp cure. Life lies before you, Viva, and you alone can mould it for yourself. Sin and anguish fill nine-tenths of the world: to one soul that basks in light, a thousand perish in darkness; I dare not let you go on longer in your dangerous belief that the world is one wide paradise, and that the high-road of its joys is the path of reckless selfishness. Can you not think that there are lots worse than that of a guiltless child who is well loved and well guarded, and has all her future still before her?