Though convalescent, I was still too feeble to think of saddle-work; and the Hospoza Volhonski had no means of transmitting me otherwise than mounted, or of having me--even when able to travel--guided to the British camp, without aid from her brother, of whom we had no tidings for weeks; so the time slipped away at Yalta pleasantly enough for me. To conceal me entirely from all the visitors who came there was an impossibility; thus, though dressed in plain clothes now, and generally passing for a German shut out from business at Sebastopol, I ran hourly risks of suspicion and discovery. Some of Volhonski's abrupt and ill-judged remarks, or some perhaps of mine, which had escaped me when delirious under the double effect of wound and wine, rendered Valerie a little reserved in her demeanour towards me for the first day or two after I was able to leave my room; but she was so frank in nature and so gay in spirit, that this unusual mood rapidly wore away. We had many visitors from the Valley of Inkermann and from Sebastopol itself, as the city was left unblockaded on one side; and the tidings they brought us--tidings which we eagerly devoured--varied strangely. Once we were informed that it had been assaulted, and that all the outworks were in the hands of the Allies; next we heard that another Inkermann had been fought--that the Allies had been scattered and the siege raised; that the Austrians had entered Bulgaria; that torpedoes had blown up the sunken ships; and that the British fleet was actually in the harbour, shelling the town and burning it with rockets and red-hot shot. But all reports converged in one unvarying tale--the dreadful sufferings of our soldiers among the snow in the trenches, where young men grew gray, and gray-haired men grew white with misery. And so the Christmas passed; and when the Russian bells by hundreds rang the old year out from the spires, the forts, and the ships that lay above the booms and bridge of boats, the new year's morning saw the black cross of St. Andrew still waving defiantly on the Mamelon, and Redan, and all the forts of Sebastopol.
Once among our visitors came Prince Menschikoff himself, Valerie advised my non-appearance, much to my relief; but I heard the din of voices, the laughter, and the sound of music in the salon or great dining-room where a déjeûner was served for him and his staff, while the band of the Grand Duchess Olga's Hussars were stationed in the marble vestibule, and played the grand national anthem of Russia and Luloff's famous composition, Borshoe zara brangie--God save the Emperor. After the Prince's departure we had the huge mansion entirely to ourselves again, and any longings I might have to rejoin the Welsh Fusileers and share the dangers they underwent, together with my natural anxiety to hear of my friends in their ranks, I was compelled to stifle and seek to forget, when tidings came that a great body of Tchernimorski Cossacks had formed a temporary camp between Yalta and the head of the long Baidar Valley, thus, while they remained, completely cutting off all my chances of reaching either Balaclava or the Allied camp; so there was nothing for me now but to resign myself to a protracted residence in the same luxurious mansion with the brilliant Valerie (and her watchful chaperone), with the somewhat certain chance of losing my heart in the charms, of her society. Madame Tolstoff assuredly kept guard over us with Argus eyes; but a few of the devices in the heart that laugheth at locksmiths enabled me to elude her at times; while, fortunately for me, the language we spoke was perfectly unknown to her; yet "the Tolstoff," as I used to call her, seemed, I knew not why, to exercise considerable control over Valerie. In her youth she had been carried off by Schamyl's mountaineers from a Russian outpost, and was a detained for three years in the Caucasian chief's seraglio, where, with all my heart, I wished her still. But while enjoying all the good things of this life at Yalta--grapes, melons, and pineapples from Woronzow's hothouses at Alupka, oysters from Hamburg, pickled salmon from Ladoga, sterlit from the Volga, sturgeon from the Caspian Sea, reindeer's tongue from Archangel, Crimean wines that nearly equalled champagne, imitation Sillery from the Don, Cliquot, Burgundy, and Bordeaux,--I thought often with compunction of the wretched rations and hard fare of our poor fellows who were starving in the winter camp. Volhonski was wealthy, and thus his sister and her attendants were able to command every luxury. His rank was high, for he claimed, as usual with all the Russian nobles of the first tchinn or class, to be descended from Ruric the Norman--Ruric of Kiev and Vladimir--who, more than a thousand years ago, founded the dynasty by which Muscovy was governed prior to the accession of the Romanoffs. All the best families in the land boast of a descent from Gedemine the Lithuanian, or from this Ruric and his followers; a weakness common also to the English aristocracy, whose genealogical craze is a real or supposed descent from those who were too probably the offscourings of Normandy. Beauty belongs peculiarly to neither race nor nation; yet somehow Valerie seemed to me, in her bearing and style, the embodiment of all that was noble and lovely; and though always graceful, her air and sometimes the carriage of her head seemed haughty--even defiant.
In the many opportunities afforded by propinquity and close residence together in the same house, and by our speaking a language which we alone understood, I know not all I said to her then, nor need I seek to remember it now; suffice it, that softly and imperceptibly the sentiments of those who love are communicated and adopted; and so it was with me. She was catching my heart at the rebound--at the ricochet, as we might say in the trenches. I was beginning to learn that there were other women who might love me--others whom I might love, and who were not worshippers of Mammon, like--ah, well--Estelle Cressingham. If Pottersleigh died or broke his old neck in the hunting-field, where he sometimes rashly ventured, would Estelle--I thrust her image aside, and turned all my thoughts to Valerie; yet my second choice seemed, by the peculiarity of our circumstances, a more ambitious one and more hopeless of attainment than the first. Daily, however, I strove to win her heart and to inspire her with that pure passion which, as a casuist affirms, can only be felt by the pure in spirit, as all virtues are closely connected with each other, and the tenderness of the heart is one of them. Was the devil at my elbow, or my evil angel, if such things be, whispering in my ear? Or how was it, that whenever I grew tender with Valerie, the image of Estelle came revengefully, yet sadly, to memory, as of an idol shattered, but certainly not by me? Oddly enough I still wore her ring on my finger--the single pearl set in blue and gold enamel--a gift I had as yet no means of restoring, and could not give away. "Have you ever looked at a portrait till it haunted you?" asks a writer. "Have you ever seen the painted face of one, it may be, who was an utter stranger to you, yet that seemed to fill your mind with a sort of recognition that sent you out over the sea of speculation, wondering where you had seen it before, or when you would see it again? The eyes talk to you and the lips tell you a dreamy story."
Such, then, was the haunting character of the face of Valerie. Her beauty and her graces of manner filled up all my thoughts, and her strange dark eyes seemed to say that if it was impossible we had known each other in the years that were past, we might be dear enough to each other in the future; and I hoped in my heart that ours should be one; thus yielding blindly to the influence, to the charm of her presence and the whole situation. Once she was at the piano, and sang to me with wonderful grace and brilliance "The Refusal," a Russian gipsy song, in which a young man makes many desperate professions and promises of love to a giddy young beauty, who laughs at them and rejects him, because she values nothing so much as her own liberty. When turning the leaves for her, the pearl ring of Estelle--a ring so evidently that of a lady--caught her attention, and I saw Valerie's colour heighten as she did so. I instantly drew it off; I felt no compunction in doing so then, and said, "You admire this ring, apparently?"
"Nay--do not say so, please," said she, bending over the instrument; "when a lady admires thus, it seems only another fashion of coveting."
"In this instance that were useless," said I, laughing, "as the ring is not mine to bestow; otherwise I should glory in your accepting it."
"Is it your wife's?"
"My wife's!"
"Yes. Have you one in that wretched little island of yours?" she continued, sharply.
"No," I replied, delighted by this undisguised little ebullition of jealousy.
"To whom does it belong, then?"
"The wife of another, to whom it shall be restored in England."
"This is very strange--it has, then, a history?" said she, bending her dark eyes on mine.
"Yes."
"And this history--what is it?"
"I cannot--dare not tell you."
"Indeed!" Her black lashes drooped for a moment, and she passed a white hand nervously over her golden braids. "And wherefore?"
"It would be to reveal the secrets of another."
"Another whom you love?" she asked, hurriedly, while her teeth seemed to glitter as well as her eyes, for her lips were parted.
"No, no; on my honour, no!" said I, laying my right hand on my breast, and feeling that then I spoke but the truth and without the equivocation, to which her questions were forcing me. Then Valerie seemed to blush with pleasure, and my heart beat lightly with joy. I should certainly have done something rash; but the inevitable Madame Tolstoff was in the room, embroidering a smoking cap for her son the colonel, then in command of the 26th at Sebastopol; so I was compelled to content myself by simply touching the hand of Valerie, and by caressing it tenderly, while affecting to admire a beautiful opal ring she wore, and urging her to continue her music. The whole episode partook somewhat of the nature of a scene between us, and even the usually self-possessed Valerie seemed a little confused, as she once more laid her tapered fingers on the ivory keys.
"I am very far from perfect in my music, or anything else, perhaps," she said.
"Do not say so," I whispered; "yet had you been more perfect than you are, I think no other woman in this world would have had the chance of a lover."
"How--why?"
"All men would be loving you, and you only."
"This is more like the inflated flattery of a Frenchman than the speech of a sober Briton," said Valerie, a little disdainfully.
"Does it displease you?"
"Yes, certainly."
"Why?"
"People don't love when they flatter," was the pretty pointed and coquettish response, and preluded an air with a crash on the keys, thus interrupting something I was about to say--heaven only knows what--a formal declaration, I fear.
"You admired my opal. Listen to the story of its origin; I doubt if the story of your ring is half so pretty," said she. And then she sang in English the following song, which she had been taught by her governess, a song the author of which I have never been able to discover; but then and there, situated as I was, the English words came deliciously home to my heart, and I quote them now from memory:--
"A dew-drop came, with a spark of flame
It had caught from the sun's last ray,
To a violet's breast, where it lay at rest,
Till the hours brought back the day.
With a blush and a frown a rose look'd down,
But smiled at once to view,
With its colouring warm, her own bright form
Reflected back by the dew!
Then a stolen look the stranger took
At the sky so soft and blue,
And a leaflet green, with its silvery sheen,
Was seen by the idler, too.
As he thus reclined, a cold north wind
Of a sudden blew around,
And a maiden fair, who was walking there,
Next morning an opal found!"
I ventured to pat her shoulder approvingly. I glanced furtively round; the Tolstoff had gone out of the room, and somehow my arm slipped round Valerie, who looked up at me, smiling archly, yet she said, firmly,
"Pray don't."
"How much longer am I to keep this silence?" I asked.
"How--what silence?"
"To be thus in suspense, Valerie," I added, lowering my voice and bending my face towards her ear.
Her smile passed away, her white lids drooped, and perplexity and trouble stole over her eyes, as she drew her head back.
"I do not know what you mean, or whither your conversation tends," she said.
"You know that I love you!"
"No, I don't."
"You must have seen it--must have guessed it--since the happy hour in which I first saw you."
"Do not speak to me thus, I implore you," said she, colouring deeply, and covering her face with her beautiful hands.
"Why, Valerie, dearest, dearest Valerie?"
"I must not--dare not listen to you."
"Dare not?"
"I speak the truth," said she, and her breast heaved.
"Will you marry me, Valerie?"
"I cannot marry you."
"Why?"
"O heavens, don't ask me! But enough of this; and here comes Madame Tolstoff, to announce that the samovar--the tea-urn--is ready."
In my irritation I muttered something that she of the red sarafan, Madame Tolstoff, would not wish graved on her tombstone, and resumed my previous task of turning the leaves at the piano; but Valerie sang no more then, and for two entire days gave me no opportunity of learning why she had received my declaration in a manner so odd and unexpected. I could but sigh and conjecture the cause, and recall the words of her brother on the night he first met me at Yalta; and if it were the case that a convent proved the only barrier, I was not without hopes of smoothing all such scruples away.
