Moths by Ouida — page 308: what you’re looking at

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

are 804 MOTHS. - figion with him, simple, intense, and noble; it was an unending suffering, but it was a suffering he loved better than all his pre- vious joys. When he saw her husband in haunts of vicious pleas- ure, he could have strangled him for very shame that he was not worthier of her. When he saw him beside the dusky face of the quadroon, he could have dragged him from his carriage and | hurled him under the feet of the wife he outraged. In one of the few days before his departure he passed Sergius Zouroft on the Boulevard des Italiennes. Correze stood still to let him speak if he would. Zouroff looked awa, and walked on: ward without any sign, except of anger, from the sudden sullen gleam in his half-shut eyes. The arrogance of a man whose birth was higher, because his race had been greater, than the Romanofis’, made it impossible for him to imagine that Correze could be his enemy or his rival. He thought the singer had only sung what had been com manded him. He thought the rebuke te him had been his wife’s, and Correze only its mouth-piece. Still, he hated him; he avoided him; he would have liked to wring the throat of that silver-voiced nightingale. It cost Correze bitterly to do nothing, to go away, to go as if he were a coward; yet he did it, lest the world. should speak of her— the light and cruel world to which nothing is sacred, which makes a joke of man’s dishonor and a jest of woman’s pain. He did it, and went and sang in the cities of the North with an aching heart? This is always the doom of the artist; the world has no pity. Its children must not pause to weep, nor go aside to pray. They must be always in the front, always exerting all - their force and all their skill before their public, or they pass from remembrance and perish. The artist, when he loves, has two mistresses, each as inexorable as the other. Correze could not abandon his ari—would not abandon it, any more than a yearling child will leave its mother. It was all he had. It was adelight to him, that empire of sound that came of a perfect mastery, that consciousness and clearness of genius. Without the listening crowds, the glittering houses, the nights of triumph, he might have been only dull and lonely; but with- out the delight of melody, the command of that song which had gone with him all his life, asa nightingale’s goes with it till it dies, he would have been desolate. Therefore in the keen cold of the Northern winter and their tardy, niggard spring, he sang as the nightingale sings, even while its lover lies shot under the leaves; and the multitude and their leaders alike adored him. In Viennathe whole city saluted him as it salutes its Kaiser, and in the vast barrack of Berlin the blare of trumpets and the clash of arms were forgotten for one soft voice that sang under Gretchen’s cottage-window. ‘‘ After all, when one has known this, one has known human greatness, surely,” he thought, wistfully, as he stood on his bal- cony in the keen starlight of Northern skies, and saw vast throngs fill the square beneath him and all the streete around, and heard the mighty hoch! that Northern lungs give for their emperors and their armies ring through the frosty aix for him, | com (e 900 SJEO } é => ey “. * ri