Moths by Ouida — page 243: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

WN _ MOTHS. 239 behind her, Vere still sat on, forgetful of the ‘gay people who were carrying their coquetries, their jealousies, and their charms on to the Traun water. She had everything that in the world’s esteem is worth having; the poor, looking at her, envied her as one of those who walk on velvet and never feel the stones She had youth, she had beauty, she had a great position; yet, as she sat there, she herself envied the life of the poor. It was real; it was in earnest; it had the affections to sustain and solace it. What a noble figure that woman, rowing her sick boy down the river in the autumn rains, looked to her beside her own mother! Unconsciously she stretched out her arms into the vacant air, those slender beautiful white arms, that Paris said were sculp- turally faultless, and that her husband liked to see bare to the shoulder at her balls, with a circle of diamonds clasping them: she felt they would have force in them to row through the rains “sat eeerney the flood, if the boat bore a freight that she oved. But love was impossible for her. At the outset of her life the world had given her all things ex- cept that one. They had shut her in a golden cage: what matter if the’ bird starved within? It would be the bird’s ingratitude to fate. Even if her offspring lived—she shuddered as she thought of it—they would be his, they would have his passions and his cruelties ; they would be taken away from her, reared in creeds and in ways alien to her; they would be Zouroff princes whose baby tyrannies would find a hundred sycophants, not her little simple children to lead in her own hand up to God. As she sat there the sound of the organ arose, and rolled softly through the church. It was a time-worn instrument, and of little volume and power, but therise and fall of the notessounded solemn and beautiful in this old mountain church. The player was playing the Requiem of Mozart. : When the last chords thrilled away in silence, of that triumph of a mortal over the summons of death, a voice rose alone and sang the Minuit Chretien of Adam. She started and looked round into the gloom of the gray church, She saw no one; but the voice was that of Correze. Then she sat motionless, following the beauty of the Noel as it rose higher and higher, as though the angels were bearing the singer of it away from earth, as the angels of Orcagna bear on their wings the disembodied souls. For a while the church was filled with the glory of rejoicing, with the rapture of the earth made the cradle of God: then all at once there was silence. His voice had not seemed to cease, but rather to float farther and farther above until it reached the clouds and grew still from the fullness of an unimaginable joy, of an unutterable desire fulfilled. One or two minor chords of the organ, faint as sighs, followed, then they too were still. Vere sat motionless. Surprise, wonder, curiosity, were far away from, her; all minor emotions were lost in that infinite sense of consolation and of wee ‘ ‘S comicboo co >» x =) a - “ten « Gams y > ° ~ Se a . ap eg te », Sa =