by Ouida
As she swung herself on her rocking-chair and began to see with the eyes of her mind a hundred improvements which she would instantly have effected whether the terms of the contract allowed of it or not, she saw coming within the range of her unassisted eyesight a large and stately schooner, with canvas white as snow bellying in the breeze. She drew on her long loose tan-coloured glove cheerfully, and said aloud:
‘After all, it is better than an hotel. There is no noise, and nobody to stare at one. I daresay we shall get through three months without cutting each other’s throats.’
Lady Brancepeth turned and looked out to sea, and saw the schooner, and smiled discreetly; she said as discreetly:
‘I am so glad, dear, you won’t fret yourself too much about the place; after all, you are not going to live in it for a lifetime; and though, no doubt, it is utterly wrong, and would give Oscar Wilde a sick headache, yet one must confess it is pretty and suits the sunshine.’
The trees had been cut, so that openings in their boughs allowed the sea to be seen from any point of the terrace. Princess Nadine from under her sunshade watched the stately yacht draw nearer and nearer over the shining path of the waters, and drop anchor some half mile off the shore; then she saw a gig lowered, with red-capped white-shirted sailors to man it, and a figure which she recognised descended over the schooner’s side into the stern of the boat, which thereupon left the vessel, and was pulled straight towards La Jacquemerille. Neither she nor Lady Brancepeth appeared to notice it; they talked chiffons, and read their newspapers; but the long boat came nearer and nearer, until the beat of the oars sounded directly under the walls of La Jacquemerille, and the rowers were too close at hand to be seen. But the Princess Nadine heard the rattle of the oars in the rowlocks, the shock of its keel against the sea stairs below, which she could not see for the tangle of pyracanthus and mahonia and many another evergreen shrub, covering the space between the terrace and the shore; she heard a step that she knew very well, the sound of which moved her to a slight sense of anticipated amusement, and a stronger sense of approaching weariness, and she turned her head a little, with a gracious if indifferent welcome in her eyes, as a man ran up the stairs at the end of the terrace, and came along the marble floor in the sunshine — a young man, tall, fair, athletic, with a high-bred look and handsome aquiline features.
‘You have had a very quick run, surely?’ said the Princess Napraxine, stretching out her tan glove.
‘Well, we did all we knew, and crammed on every stitch we had,’ the new comer answered, as he kissed the tips of the glove, and murmured in a lower tone, ‘Were you not here?’
Then he crossed over to where Lady Brancepeth sat, and kissed her cheek with a brother’s indifference.
‘Dear Wilkes, are you all right?’ he said as he took up a majolica stool and seated himself between them.
‘Take that bamboo chair, Geraldine,’ asked the Princess. ‘That china stool does not suit your long legs at all. How many hours really have you been coming from Genoa? I am fearfully angry with you, by the way; how could you take this place?’
‘Because you told me,’ answered Lord Geraldine, staring hard. ‘What was the command? Take it, coûte que coûte. Not an “if”; not a “perhaps”; not a “but.” Wilkes, do you not call that too cruel?’
‘My dear Ralph,’ said Lady Brancepeth, ‘any woman’s instructions should always be construed so liberally that a margin is left for her at the eleventh hour to change her mind. But do not distress yourself. I do not think Mme. Napraxine really dislikes the place. It is only her way. When she has bought a thing she always finds a flaw in it. It is her habit to condemn everything. She is a pessimist from sheer want of ever having had real disappointment.’
‘Look at the house. It speaks for itself,’ said the Princess, contemptuously. ‘Why did you not telegraph and say that it was a patchwork of every known order of architecture? I would have told you to break off negotiations.’
‘But you had seen the photographs.’
‘Photographs! Would you know your own mother from a photograph if you had not been told beforehand whose it was?’
‘I am so sorry,’ murmured Geraldine, as he turned round and gazed at the offending building. ‘It is a pretty place, surely? not classical or severe, certainly; but cheery and picturesque. I looked all over it conscientiously, I give you my word, and it is really in very good taste inside; much better than one could have hoped for in a maison meublée.’
‘Oh, it is Wilkes, not I, who finds it so irretrievably bad,’ said the Princess Napraxine, with tranquil mendacity; ‘but if it be too bad one can always go to an hotel, only in an hotel one can never sleep at night for the omnibuses, and the banging of other people’s luggage, and if I do not sleep I can do nothing. Here I should fancy it is perfectly quiet?’
‘Quiet as the grave, unless the sea is howling. But Monte Carlo is just behind that cliff there; with fast horses you can drive over in twenty-six minutes — I timed it by my watch. You can have a score of people to dinner every evening if you like.’
The Princess raised her eyebrows with a gesture signifying that this prospect was not one of unmitigated happiness; and Lady Brancepeth, alleging that the sun was rather too warm for her north-country bones, went away into the house, being of opinion that three was no company; her brother drew his bamboo-chair nearer his hostess, and took the tan glove with the wrist it inclosed in a tender grasp.
‘So you do not like the poor place? I am truly grieved!’
She drew her hand away so dexterously that she left the loose empty glove in his fingers, and he looked foolish.
‘No; I thought of going away to-morrow,’ she continued, without any regard to his dejection; ‘I do not like palms that have the toothache, and marble pillars that have married wooden balconies. But your sister, who always opposes me, is so certain I shall go that it is very probable I shall stop.’
‘Admirable feminine logic! No doubt the poor house is utterly wrong, though it has been the desire of everybody on the Riviera ever since it was built. I felt sure you would have been more comfortable in a good hotel at Nice, and if I had ventured to volunteer an opinion, I should have said so. Wilkes is quite right; you will be bored to death here.’
‘She is quite wrong; she does not like the place herself,’ said Princess Napraxine, with decision, while she took back her glove peremptorily. ‘I do — at least in a way. The oranges look jaundiced, and the palms rheumatic, but those are trifles. They do say it hailed yesterday, and the water in the washing-basin in the coupé lit was frozen last night as we came into Ventimiglia; but I saw a scorpion on the wall this morning, and heard a mosquito, so I am convinced it is the south of the poets, and am prepared for any quantity of proper impressions, only they are slow in coming to me; it is so excessively like the Krimea, terrace and all. Should not you go in and see if Platon be awake?’
‘I am convinced he is asleep. It is not quite one o’clock, and you arrived in the night, didn’t you?’
‘Yes; but he will get up, because he will want to be off to Monte Carlo. He will spend his life there and send over expresses every hour for fresh rouleaux. When he is near a gaming-table he is so happy.’
‘Enviable faculty!’
‘It is my faculty too. But I try against it; he doesn’t. Men never try to resist anything.’
Geraldine murmured words to the effect that his life was one long compulsory resistance, and his eyes completed the uncomplete sentences.
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said his hostess. ‘You know I do not like madrigaux; and an Englishman always looks so clumsy when he is making them. Make me a cigarette instead.’
‘Always cruel!’ murmured her companion, obediently rolling up Turkish tobacco.
‘Always kind,’ said the Princess. ‘People who are kind to men and children never spoil them. Where will your schooner stay? There is no dock, or quay, or whatever you call it, here. These places always ought to have one of their own.’
> ‘How can they when the rocks go sheer down into deep water? No, I must keep her off Villefranche or Monaco. She can be round in half an hour — at your disposition, of course, like her owner.’
‘If she be not more manageable than her owner — —’
‘Oh, Nadine! When I only live to obey your orders, and never even receive a smile in return!’
‘Ah, if you want reward there is no longer any merit! And do not call me by my name in that manner; you will do it some day before Platon.’
‘He doesn’t mind.’
‘No, of course he does not mind; but I do, which is more to the purpose.’
‘You are very unkind to-day, princess. This unhappy Jacquemerille! it is grievous that you don’t like it; the gardens are really pretty, and the view is superb.’
‘You talk like an auctioneer; go and find the gardener and tell him to untie those palms.’
‘Pray don’t send me away yet.’
‘Is that what you call your docility?’
His hand stole towards hers again.
‘Do tell me, princess,’ he murmured timidly. ‘You will stay now that you are here, will you not?’
‘How can I answer for the duration of my fancies? Perhaps I may, if you amuse me well enough.’
‘I would rather interest you.’
‘Ah, my friend, that is quite impossible. Even to be amused is hard enough, when one is not in the humour. When one is in the humour, it is even fun to go out fishing; when one is not, one is dull even at a masked ball at Petersburg. We are like the cuttle-fish, we make our sphere muddy with our own dulness. How would you suggest that I should find any interest here? There will be no society except some gouty statesmen and some sickly women, a few yachtsmen, a pigeon-shooter or two, and quantities of people one cannot know.’
‘There will be heaps of people who know you,’ said Geraldine, almost with a groan; ‘at least, if you deign to allow them the entrée of La Jacquemerille. If I might presume to advise, the place is all to itself, they cannot come if you do not invite them. It is as nearly simple nature here as a mondaine and an élégante like you can ever bring herself to go. You have the sea at your feet and the mountains at your back; you can have absolute repose and leisure unless you wilfully bring a horde of men and women from Nice and Monaco. You are so clever; you might make endless sketches. If I were you, I should make it the occasion to get away from the world a little; if the world you must have, I should take it in the Avenue Josephine instead of at La Jacquemerille.’
The Princess laughed languidly, and looked at her cigarette.
‘You want a solitude à deux, I daresay! But you see there are Platon and Wilkes against that, not to mention my own inclinations.’
‘Pray, be serious.’
‘Why? When one is in the mood to be serious, one does not take a nondescript toy within five miles of Nice. I daresay you are right; a quiet life for a little while would be very wholesome, it would certainly be a novelty, but it would be beyond me. I am not a stupid woman, I am not a silly woman certainly; no, I am quite convinced I have a brain, though as for a soul, I don’t know, and I am afraid I don’t very much care. A brain, however, I have; Wilkes is even unkind enough to call me learned. But still, my dear Ralph, I am, as you observed, that much-abused animal, a mondaine. When once we belong to the world can we ever get rid of the world? Jamais! au grand jamais! If we try to drink spring water, we put it somehow or other in a liqueur glass. If we smell at a hedge-rose, somehow or other Piver has got in it before us, and given it the scent of a sachet.’
‘You are very witty, but — —’
‘I don’t care in the least for “buts,” and I have no pretensions to wit; I leave wit and whist to the dowagers. No; when we are once of the world worldly, we never get rid of the world again. It is our old man of the sea pickaback with us for ever? Who can lead a meditative life that dines twice a day, as we all practically do, and eats of twenty services? When we prattle about nature, and quote Matthew Arnold, we are as artificial as the ribboned shepherdesses of Trianon; and what we call our high art is only just another sort of jargon. Suppose I followed your recipe and tried living quietly here, which means asking nobody to dinner, what would happen? Wilkes would go away, Platon would sulk or do worse, and you and I should yawn in each other’s faces. It is not that I have no brain, I have even a soul — if anybody has — but I began the other way, you know. It is like taking chloral; if once you do it you cannot leave off. Society is entirely like chloral; it gives you pleasant titillations at first and just the same morne depression afterwards, and yet you cannot do without it.’
‘I hope you do without chloral; wait another twenty years at any rate before you poison yourself.’
‘Twenty years! I wonder what we shall be like by then? I daresay I shall be an incurable hypochondriac, and you will have several tall boys at Eton. Perhaps your son will be falling in love with my daughter, and you and I shall be quarrelling about the settlements.’
‘Nadine!’
He drew his chair very near indeed, and looked straight into her eyes. The Princess looked up at the blue sky, serenely indifferent.
‘That is all nonsense, you know,’ she said, with a little affected asperity, but she smiled even if she felt more inclined to yawn. At that moment there issued from one of the many glass doors of the nondescript house her husband, Platon Nicholaivitch Napraxine.
‘My dear Ralph, I am very glad to see you,’ he said cordially, in the tongue of the boulevards, which every gently born Russian has taken as his own. ‘You came round in your “tub,” as you call her? You have found the Princess dissatisfied with the house? She is always dissatisfied with everything, alas! The house is well enough; the bathrooms are small, and there is no billiard-room; but otherwise I see no defect. Breakfast is waiting and Lady Brancepeth also. Will you come?’
His wife rose languidly, and taking the arm of Lord Geraldine, drew her skirts of India muslin, Flemish lace, and primrose satin, over the marble pavement of the terrace to the house. Prince Napraxine stood a moment with his cigar in his mouth, looking south and east over the sparkling sea, then, with his hands in his pockets, sauntered also towards the house.
He was a tall, loosely-built man, with an ugly and frankly Kalmuck face, redeemed by an expression of extreme good humour; he was about thirty years of age, and had the air of a person who had always done what he chose, and had always been obeyed when he spoke; but this air changed curiously whenever he looked at his wife; he had then the timid and almost supplicating expression of a big dog, anxious to please, but afraid to offend.
‘Let us go and eat Milo’s red mullets,’ she said now.
‘Milo? Is that the cook? Can he do a bouillabaisse, I wonder?’ he replied.
Their chef had been taken ill, as the train had touched Bordighera, and their agent had hastily supplied his place so far as it is ever possible to supply that of a great and almost perfect creature experienced in all the peculiarities and caprices in taste of those to whom his art is consecrated.
The Princess took no notice of her lord’s blunder; indeed, she seldom answered his remarks at any time; she drew her primrose satin and soft muslin over the sill of the French window, and seated herself at an oval table, gay with fine china, with flowers and fruit, and with a Venice point lace border to its table cloth, which was strewn with Parma violets and the petals of orange-blossoms. She had Geraldine on her right hand and her back to the light. She had an ermine bag holding a silver globe of warm water for her feet, and a chair that was the perfection of ease. The dining-room was small, but very pretty, with game and autumn flowers painted on its panels, and shutters, with hangings of olive velvet and cornices of dead gold, and on the ceiling a hunting scene of Fontainebleau à la Henri IV.
She began to think seriously that after all La Jacquemerille would do very well for the winter. It was utterly absurd, to be sure, outside, but it was comfortable within; and, indeed, had considerable taste displayed in it,
the American having wisely mistrusted his own tendencies and left the whole arrangement to French artists, who had robbed him ruthlessly, but who had made each of his apartments as perfect in its way as a Karl Theodor plate.
‘I think I shall buy it,’ said the Princess to her companions; indifferent to her own inconsistencies.
‘Wait a little,’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘Don’t rush from hatred to adoration. There may be all sorts of things the matter with the drains. The calorifères may be wrong. The cellars may be damp. The windows may rattle. The kitchens may be too far or too near. At the end of the winter you will know all its defects and all its virtues. Houses are like friendships, there is hardly one in a thousand worth a long lease.’
‘Wilkes is always cynical,’ said her brother.
‘And nobody is a stauncher friend,’ said the Princess. ‘Why will she make herself out a cynic?’
‘A cynic? Because I am prudent?’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘If you sigh all the winter because the house is not yours you will enjoy it. If you buy it you will discover that it is uninhabitable at once.’
‘Nadine is never long pleased,’ said her husband.
‘What does Matthew Arnold say?’ answered the Princess, ‘that the poet is never happy, because in nature he wants the world, and in the world he longs for nature. Now, I am not a poet, but still I am a little like that. What you are pleased to call my discontent is a certain restless sensation that our life — which we think the only life — is a very ridiculous one; and yet I am quite incapable of leading any other — for more than a week. I remember, Geraldine, that you remarked once that it was this fool of a world which makes fools of us all. There was a profound truth in the not very elegant speech.’