54
MOTHS.

disappear quickly and quietly, and heard a
whisper run through the dancers of ' Tmsk,'
and caught a look on some few faces that told
you a tarantass was going out into the dark-
ness, over the snow, full gallop,- with a political
prisoner between his guards? Ah, it is horri-
ble! When one has seen it, it makes one feel
cold, even at noon in midsummer, to remem-
ber it "
"Russia is always terrible," said Vere, with
a little shudder. "Nowhere on earth are
there such ghastly contrasts: you live in a hot-
house witli your palms, and the poor are all
round you in the ice; everything is like that."
"And yet you are Russian," said Corrze, a
little cruelly and bitterly: for he had never for-
given her quick descent into her mother's toils,
her quick acceptance of temptation. "You are
certainly Russian. You are no longer Vere
even: you are Princess Vera."
" I am always Vere," she said, in alone tone.
" They must "call me what they will, but it
alters nothing."
"And Vera is a good name, too," said Cor-
rze, bending his eyes almost sternly on hers.
"It means Truth."
" Yes; it means that."
He glided into the grass at the foot of the
tree, and sat there, leaning on his elbow, and
lookiug towards her: it was the attitude in
which she had seen him first upon the beach at
TrouviUe.
He was always graceful in all he did; the
soft afternoon light was upon his face; he had
thrown his broad felt hat on the grass; a stray
sunbeam waudered in the bright brown of her
hair.
Vere glanced at him, and was about to speak,
then hesitated,paused,at last unclosed her
lips so long shut in silence.
" You remember that you bade me keep my-
self unspotted from the world?" she said, sud-
denly, " I want to tell you that I strive always
to do so; yes, I do. I was never ruled by am-
bition and" vanity,as you think. I cannot tell
you more; but, if you understand me at all, you
will understand that that is true."
" I knew it without your telling me."
He ceased to remember that ever he had'sus-
pected her or ever reproached her. It was a
mystery to him that this proud, strong, pure
nature should have ever been brought low by
any force; but he accepted the fact of it as men
in their faith accept miracles.
"She was such a child; who can tell what
they did or said?" he mused, as an infinite ten-
derness and compassion came over him. This
woman was not twenty yet, and she had tasted
all the deepest bitterness of life and all its out-
rages of passion and of vice!
She was to him Hke one of the young saints
of old. on whom tyrants and torturers spent all
the filth and fury of their will, yet could not
touch the soul or break the courage of the thing
that they dishonored.
Women had not taught him reverence; he
had found them frail when he had not found
them base; but as great a reverence as ever
moved Gawaine orSintram moved him towards
Vere now. He feared to speak, lest he should
offend her; it was hard to give her sympathy,
even to give her comprehension, without seem-
ing to offer her insult. He knew that she was
too loyal to the man whose name she bore to
bear to hear him blamed, with whatsoever jus-
tice it might be.
He was silent, while leaning on his arm and
looking down upon the cups and scepters of the
green moss on which he rested. If he looked
up at her face he feared his strength of self-
control would fail him and his lips be loosened.
Vere bound together his wild flowers one by
one. She longed for him to believe her guilt-
less of the low ambitions of the world ; she could
not bear that he should fancy that the low
temptations of the world's wealth and rank had
ever had power over her.
Yet she was the wife of Sergius Zouroff.
What could she hope to make him think in face
sf that one fact?
Suddenly he looked up at her; his brilliant
yes were dim with tears, yet flashed darkly
with a somber indignation.
" I understand,"he said, at last, his old habit
of quick and eloquent speech returning to him.
"I think I have always understood without
words; I think all the world does. Aud that is
why one half of it at least has no forgiveness
for you. princess."
He added the title with a little effort; it was
as a curb on his memory, on his impulse; he set
it as a barrier between him and her.
" It is I who do not understand," said Vere,
with a faint smile, and an accent of interroga-
tion. She did not look away from the wood-
flowers. His eyes fed themselves on the lines
of her delicate and noble features; he breathed
quickly; the color came into his face.
"No, you do not understand," he said,
rapidly. "There is your danger. There is
your weakness. Do y'ou know what it costs
to be an innocent woman in the world you
live in?the great world, as it calls itself, God
help us. To be chaste in mind and body,
thought and deed, to be innocent in soul and
substance, not merely with sufficient absti-
nence fiom evil not to endanger position, not
merely with physical coldness that can deny
the passions it is diverted to influence, but
real chastity, real innocence, which recoils
from the shadow of sin anil shrinks from the
laughter of lust. Do you know what the cost
of such is? I will tell you. Their cost is iso-
lation; the sneer they are branded with is 'out
of fashion :' no one will say it, perhaps, but all
will make you feel it. If you be ashamed to go
half clothed, if you be unwilling to laugh at
innuendoes, if you be unable to understand an
indecency in a"song, or a gag at a theater, if
you do not find a charm in suggested filth, if
you do not care to have loose women for your
friends, however high may be their rank, if
adultery look to you all the worse because it is
a domestic pet and plaything, and if immoral-
ity seem to you but the more shameful because
it is romped with at the children's hour, danced
with at the queen's ball, made a guest at the
house-parties, and smuggled smiling y through
the custom-officers of society,if you be so be-
hind your time as this, you insult your genera-
tion ; you are a reproach to it, and an ennui.
The union of society is a Camorra or Mafia.
Those who are not of it must at least subscribe
to it and smile ou it, or they are lost. There is
your danger, my Princess of Truth. How can
they forgive you, any one of them, the women,
who have not your ioveliness and your mind,
and to whom you are a perpetual, an uncon-
scious, an inexorable rebuke? Clothed with in-
nocence is metaphor and fact with you: and do
you understand the women of your world so
little yet as not to understand that they would
pardon you the nakedness of vice much sooner
than they ever will those stainless robes you
share with the children and the angels?"
He ceased; eloquence when he was moved
was habitual as song had been to bim in his
childhood when he had gathered his sheep and
goats on the green alp. He paused abruptly,
because, had he spoken more, he would have
uttered words that could never have been re-
called, words that would have been set forever
between them like a gulf of flame.
Vere had listened; her face had flushed a
little, then had grown paler than was even usual
to her. She understood well enough,too well ;
an intense sweetness and a vague shame came
to her with his words,the one that he should
read her soul so clearly, the other that he should
know her path so dark, her fate so hateful.
She gathered the wood flowers together and
rose.
"I am far from the angels, and you think too
well of me," she said, with a tremor in her
voice. "I think the sun is setting; it grows
late."
Corrze rose, with a sigh, to his feet, and raised
her hat from the ground.
"Yes. It will soon be dark,very dark to
me. Princess, will you think of what 1 said?
will you be on your guard with your foes?"
"Who are they?"
" All women, most men. In a word, a world
that is not fit for your footsteps."
Vere was silent, thinking.
" I have more courage than insight," she said,
with a little smile, at last; "and it is easier to
me to endure than to influence. I think I influ-
ence no one. It must be my fault. They say
I am wanting in sympathy."
"Nay, the notes around you are too coarse
to strike an echo from you: that is all. You
have a perfect sympathy with all that is noble,
but they never give you that."
" Let us move quickly: the sun is set," she
said, as she took her hat from him, and walked
on down the forest road.
Neither spoke. In a little time they had
reached the sluices, where the imprisoned tim-
bers lay awaiting the weekly rush of the walers.
There a little low carriage with some mountain
ponies, lent her by the court, was awaiting her.
Keeping his wild blossoms of the forest in
one hand, she gave him the other.
"I shall see you to-morrow?" she asked, with
the frank simplicity and directness of her
nature.
He hesitated a moment, then answered, "To-
night I go up iuto the Thorstein ice-fields;
we may be away some days; but when I come
down from the mountains, yes; certainly yes,
madame, I will have the honor of saluting you
once more. And I will bring you some edel-
weiss. It is the flower they call you after in
Paris."
"Do they?    I did not know it.    Adieu."
Her little postilion, a boy from the Imperial
stables, with a silver horn and a ribboned and
tasseled dress, cracked his whip, and the
ponies went away at a trot down towards the
valley, whilst beyond, the last brightness of
daylight was shining above the gray-white
sheet of the Carl Eisfeld that rose in view.
Corrze stood on the edge of the wilderness
of timber, lying iu disorder in the dry bed of
the river, awaiting the loosening of the White
Brook floods to float ihem to the Traun. Some
birds began singing in the wood, as the sun set
behind the glacier.
" They are singing in my heart too," thought
Corrze, " but I must not listen to them. Heine
knew the caprice and the tragedy of fate. He
wrought no miracle to make the pine and the
palm tree meet."
The days that followed dragged slowly over
the head of Vere.
i Ischl, in its nook between the hills, has always
a certain sadness about it, and to her it seemed
grown gray and very dull. The glaciers of
Dachstein and Thorstein gleamed whilely afar
off, and her thoughts were with the hunters
underneath those buttresses of ice in the haunts
of the steinbock and the vulture.
The perpetual clatter of the duchess's voluble
tongue, and the chatter of society that was
always about her,even here, in the heart of
the Salzkammargiit,wearied her and irritated
her more than usual. She felt a painful long-
ing for that soft deep voice of Corrze, which
to her never spoke a commonplace or a compli-
ment, for the quick instinctive sympathy
which he gave her without alarming her loyalty
or wounding her pride.
" You are very dull, Vera," said the duchess,
impatiently, at length.
"I am never very gay," said Vere, coldly.
" You knew that when you offered to accom-
pany me."
" Your husband wished us to be together,"
said Madame Jeanne, a little angrily.
" You are very kindto my husbandto so
study his wishes," said Vere, with a certain chal-
lenge in her glance. But the duchess did not
take up the challenge.
" Corrze has told her something," she
thought.
To quarrel with Vere was the last thing she
wished to do. She laughed carelessly, said
something pleasant, and affected to be charmed
with Ischl.
They went to the Imperial villa, rode a great
deal, were courted by the notabilities as befitted
one of the loveliest and one of the wittiest
women of the time; and the five days slipped
away, as the Traun water slid under its bridges
j and over its falls.
Vere began to listen wistfully for tidings of
the return of the Kaiser'f hunting-party. One
morning at breakfast she heard that the Em-
peror had come back at daybreak. But of
Corrze there was nothing said.
Had it been any other memory than that of
Corrze, she would have been disgusted and
angered with herself at his occupation of her
thoughts; but he so long had been to her an
ideal, an abstraction, an embodiment of all
high and heroic things, a living poem, that his
absorption of her mind and memory had no
alarm for her. He was still an ideal figure,
now when be was lost in the mists of the ice-
fields of tbe Dachstein, as in winter when
before her in the creations of Beethoven, of
Mozart, and of Meyerbeer.
A little later that morning a jager brought to.
the Kaiser-inn hotel a grand golden eagle, shot
so that it died instantaneously, and had been
picked up upon the snow in all its beauty of
plumage, without a feather ruffled. He brought
also a large cluster of Edelweiss from the sum-
mit of Thorstein, and a letter. The letter was to
Madame de Sonnaz from Corrze.