Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  ‘All your preaching and mine will not alter them,’ she continued. ‘It is an extraordinary thing; neither Platon nor Lord Geraldine cares a straw for money; neither of them would awake a whit merrier if their fortunes were quadrupled to-morrow; and yet they find absolute intoxication in playing for money! What an inexplicable anomaly! Othmar is far more consistent. He despises his own fortune and the table of M. Blanc with equal sincerity.’

  ‘I do not despise wealth, I dislike it,’ said Othmar.

  ‘Why should you do either?’ said Melville. ‘Look at the immense potentialities of great riches.’

  ‘That is what I said this morning,’ continued Princess Nadine.

  ‘Surely great riches help one very nearly to happiness,’ continued Melville. ‘I do not mean from the bourgeois point of view, but simply because they remove so many material obstacles in the way of happiness. There can be hardly any great difficulties for a very rich man. He goes where he chooses, he can purchase whatever he desires; there are swept aside from his path for ever all the thousand and one annoyances and hindrances which beset the man who is not rich. Only imagine a person who cannot reach his dying child because he has not money enough for the journey; imagine another who has his homestead made intolerable to him by the erection of a steam-mill, and yet is obliged to end his days in it because he cannot afford to move; imagine yet another with weak lungs, who would recover his strength if he could take a house in the country, in the south, and yet cannot leave his business, which chains him to a city in the north. Those are the sort of sorrows from which wealth sets free a man or a woman. One may say roughly, I think, that if his health be good, a very rich person is exempt from all other misfortunes than those which come to him from his affections or his friendships; his troubles are, in a word, entirely those of sentiment.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Nadine Napraxine.

  ‘Un seul être est mort et tout est dépeuplé!’

  murmured Othmar; ‘you will not allow, or cannot comprehend that, Princess?’

  ‘I can imagine that a man might fancy so for twenty-four hours; but even if the fancy endure, a rich man can enjoy his desolation while a poor man cannot. Part of the advantages of the rich man consists in his having the leisure and the luxury to muse upon his own unhappiness. I think you forget what a great happiness that is!’

  ‘You believe neither in love nor in sorrow,’ said Othmar, abruptly.

  ‘I am aware they exist, if you mean that,’ she replied; ‘but their existence chiefly depends upon the imagination.’

  Othmar gave an impatient gesture.

  ‘And, like all pleasures of the imagination,’ she added, ‘require leisure for their development. The rich man or woman enjoys that leisure, and if he or she like to raise a gigantic mushroom under glass, in the way of exaggerated affections or sentimental regrets, they are at liberty to do so. Besides, surely, no one can deny that there is a captivating sense of power in vast riches; the fancy can take endless flights in that golden sphere; we do not know that delight, because, though people think us rich, in reality we are no such thing, in reality our expenses keep for ever ahead of our income, as I think they do with most people; but Othmar, who is actually, positively, fabulously rich, who is all alone, who spends nothing on himself — at least, he used to spend nothing — why, he could build you a cathedral, Monsignore Melville, in every city of the world of jasper and chalcedony, whatever they are, and never be a sou the poorer for doing it.’

  ‘Are you inclined, Count Othmar?’ said Melville.

  ‘If it would make all men like you I should be so,’ said Othmar. ‘But I regret to see that the Princess Napraxine has apparently retained only one recollection of me, and that one is of my “wall of ingots,” as she termed it, which appears to separate me from her sympathies.’

  ‘Did you hear that?’ she said, not very well pleased, though it was not in human power to confuse her. ‘We will let those people go to Monte Carlo, and we will have a run before the wind and leave you and Monsignore at Nice.’

  ‘But it is not my own yacht.’

  ‘But it is mine when I am in it, and I invite you both. Come.’

  Othmar hesitated till she gave him a little look, one brief fleeting look. Two years seemed to have fled away; he was again on the staircase of the Grand Opéra, she gave him her fan to carry, she had on a cloak of soft white feathers, a gardenia dropped out of her bouquet, he picked it up; in the whole glittering mass of Paris he only saw that one delicate face, pale as a narcissus, with two wonderful liquid eyes like night; and, with a sort of shock, he recollected himself, and realised that he was standing on the terrace of La Jacquemerille beside a woman whom he had vowed to put out of his life for ever and aye.

  ‘Come!’ said Princess Nadine, and he did not resist her.

  He followed in her shadow down the flight of marble steps leading to the sea; while Geraldine, with a tempestuous rage stifled in his heart, drove Napraxine (who never drove himself), as furiously as Russian horses can be driven, along the sunny road, shaded with olives and caruba trees, which led from La Jacquemerille to the gambler’s paradise a few miles westward on the shore.

  ‘When boys sulk, they should always be punished,’ thought the Princess Nadine with silent diversion, as she heard the plunge and rush of the horses on the other side of the gardens, and divined that their driver was already repenting of the moment of petulance and of jealousy in which he had exiled himself from her presence, and condemned himself to the society of her lord.

  ‘Poor Platon is the dullest of companions, and Geraldine thinks it dans son rôle to detest him; and yet he goes with him by way of showing his pique against Othmar. How stupid, how intensely stupid!’ she thought, with exceeding amusement to herself, as she descended the water-stairs and stepped into Geraldine’s boat.

  It was droll to her that anybody should either detest or envy her husband, he was so infinitesimally little in her own life. She readily did justice to his good humour, his loyalty, his courage, and his honesty; but those qualities were all obscured by his dulness and heaviness, and also by the simple fact that he was her husband, as the good points in a landscape are blotted out by a fog. ‘Dogs’ virtues! all of them,’ she called them, with a mixture of esteem and impatience, of appreciation and contempt.

  The boat glided through a quarter of a mile of blue water, and brought them to the side of Geraldine’s yacht, a beautiful racer-like schooner with canvas white as foam, and flying the pennon of Cowes.

  ‘My poor “Berenice” was once as elegant and spotless as this,’ said Othmar, ‘but she has been through sore stress of weather. Her sails are rags, her sides are battered, her rudder is gone. She made a sorry spectacle when we hove to last night, but I am attached to her. I shall not buy another yacht.’

  ‘You always take things so seriously,’ said Princess Nadine. ‘A yacht is a toy like any other; when one is broken get another. Why should you be attached to a thing of teak and copper?’

  ‘She has served me well,’ he said simply. ‘You do not understand attachment of any kind, Princess.’

  ‘It is only an amiable form of prejudice. Certainly I do not understand why you should be attached to a thing made of wood and metal.’

  ‘Or to a thing made of flesh and blood! I believe that is equally ridiculous in the eyes of Madame Napraxine,’ said Othmar, with some bitterness. ‘May I ask, how are your children?’ he added after a pause.

  ‘My two ugly little boys? Oh, quite well; they are never anything else. They are as strong as ponies. They are very ugly; they have the Tartar face, which is the ugliest in Europe; they are so like Platon that it is quite absurd.’

  Othmar was silent; the words did not seem to him in her usual perfectly good taste. They did not accord with the delicate narcissus-like face of their speaker.

  ‘I remember that you never cared for your children,’ he said, and added, after a pause, ‘Nor for anything that had the misfortune to love you.’

  ‘I
do not think the children love me at all,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Why should they? Their father they adore because he adores them. It is always quid pro quo in any love.’

  ‘Not always,’ said Othmar, curtly.

  ‘Ah, you love me still,’ thought Princess Nadine, without astonishment.

  Aloud she said, ‘It must be, or the thing is absurd, it dies a natural death, or rather, is starved to death; nothing one-sided has any strength.’

  ‘I think you have seen many living proofs to the contrary,’ he answered. ‘But pride may strangle a love which is not shared; it is a violent death, but a sure one.’

  ‘Why will men always talk of love?’ she said, with some impatience. ‘After all, how little place it takes up in real life! ambition, society, amusement, politics, money-making, a hundred things, take up a hundredfold more space.’

  ‘It is not to every one the unnecessary molecule that it is to Madame Napraxine,’ said Othmar. ‘You have seen a glass of water touched by a single drop of quinine? It is only a drop, but it embitters the whole glassful. So do the attachments of life embitter it.’

  ‘If you put the drop in, no doubt,’ said Princess Napraxine, drily.

  ‘Or if some one else put it in,’ muttered Othmar, ‘before one knows what one drinks.’

  ‘Oh! one must never let others meddle with one, even in drinking a glass of water,’ replied his tormentor. She knew very well that he meant to reproach her, but she bore the reproach lightly. If the remembrance of her embittered any man’s existence it was not her fault; it was the fault of those who would not be content with adoring her as the poor people of this sea-shore adored their Madonna shut away behind a glass case.

  ‘By the way, Othmar, have you not a villa here?’ she said, suddenly remembering the fact. ‘I believe you have five hundred and fifty-five houses altogether, have you not? Is there not some place near Nice that belongs to you?’

  ‘S. Pharamond? Yes. It is where I slept last night. My father bought some olive and pine wood and built the house in the midst of them. It has a fine view seaward.’

  ‘Then we shall be neighbours?’

  ‘If I do not go to Paris.’

  ‘Of course you will go to Paris, but you will go one day and come back another, like everybody else at this season; though, to be sure, I dare say you are longing for the smell of the asphalte after a cycle of Cathay?’

  ‘No; the asphalte is not necessary to me. It is more monotonous, on the whole, than the desert.’

  ‘Ah! you were never a Parisien parisiennant; you were always in revolt against something or another, though one never could understand very well what. When you condescended to our amusements, it was with the air of a man who, to please a child, plays with tin soldiers; that sort of air of contemptuous condescension has made you many enemies. There is nothing makes the world so angry as indifference to what it thinks delightful.’

  ‘You have offended it in that way yourself, Princess.’

  ‘Often; but not quite with your insolence. A man who prefers his library to the clubs is beyond all pardon; and, besides, I am seen everywhere where it is worth while to be seen; you are — or were — generally conspicuous by your absence.’

  ‘I imagine the world has grown as indifferent to me as I am to it, and having forgotten has so forgiven me. I have been away eighteen months.’

  ‘The world never forgets its rich men, my dear Othmar. It may forget its great ones. Will forget them, indeed, unless they have a drum beaten very loudly before them. You might be great, I think, if you liked; you have so many talents, so much power.’

  ‘I might buy a kingdom the size of Morocco or Montenegro? Very likely: such sovereignty does not attract me.’

  ‘Of course I do not mean that: you do not want to be a Prince Floristan; you do not love the race of princes well enough. But were I you I should set some great ambition before me.’

  ‘Pardon me; you would do no such thing if you were in my position. You would feel, as I feel, the numbing influence of what you called just now the “blank wall of ingots.” When you can buy men you do not estimate them highly enough either to serve or rule them. I have all I can possibly want — materially. I have no reason to seek anything.’

  ‘Why do English nobles enter public life? They want nothing, materially, either. Some of them are of rank, also, so high in place that nothing can be added to their position.’

  ‘God knows why they do,’ said Othmar, ‘except that I think the Englishman is an animal like the beaver, not happy without work. Besides, I think they imagine that they serve their country, a delusion, but an honourable one, which must make them very happy. As I have no country I cannot be attached to it.’

  ‘You could choose one; you are allied to several.’

  ‘That would not be the same thing. To adore the motherland one must have known no arms, no hearts but hers; no country is more than a stepmother to me.’

  ‘You are a very much envied man, Othmar, but you are not a happy man.’

  He looked her straight in the eyes.

  ‘I have been unhappy, but I have conquered my folly. It is ingratitude to fate to be wretched while one has health and strength and no material cares to contend with.’

  ‘All the same, you are not happy now,’ she thought, but she said, with her sweetest smile, ‘You admit that you have all you want materially; all the rest is a dream, not worth keeping awake about for one hour. By the way, as you speak of countries — you are French now by law, I think?’

  ‘My grandfather was naturalised for his own interests, as you know; but our people were Croat peasants.’

  ‘I know I have heard you always say so; but I believe it is a fable. You do not come from any peasantry; besides, surely Sclavonia is old enough and dim enough to give you any mystical heroic ancestry you may prefer.’

  ‘They might be robbers,’ said Othmar, ‘I do not know. There is not much to choose.’

  ‘Everybody who is noble comes from robbers of some sort,’ said Princess Napraxine; ‘what were the Hohenstauffen, the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg, the Grimaldi, the Montefeltro, the Colonna? Robbers all, sitting on high in their fortresses, and swooping down like hawks on the fords, on the highways, on the moorlands, on the forests, on the little towns below them. You may be quite sure that is what your people did in Croatia.’

  ‘You are very kind to try and console me,’ said Othmar. ‘Nobility, I think, consists in being able to trace the past of your forefathers and to have your charters; the past of mine is lost in darkness, and my charters are lost with them. Truthfully we can only date from 1767, when Marc Othmar, who dealt in horses, began to lend money in Agram. It is not a lofty beginning; it is not even a creditable one. But I do not think that to pretend that Marc Othmar, the horse dealer or horse stealer, was a hero and saint would mend matters. I accept him as what he was, but I cannot be proud of him; even sometimes I am on the eve of cursing him; at all events, of wishing he had never existed.’

  ‘My dear Othmar, you are very strange sometimes — —’

  ‘Am I? One is never content with what one has. There is nothing strange in that. If you will deign to remember me at all, you will remember that I was never pleased with being the head of the house of Othmar; I would give all its millions for an unblemished descent.’

  ‘Then you are ungrateful to your fortunes, and do not understand your own times.’

  ‘Perhaps I understand them too well, and that is why I despise what they over-estimate.’

  ‘And over-estimate yourself what they have found worth but little. Look at most of our contemporaries and associates. Have their unblemished names served them in much? How many have remembered that noblesse oblige? How many of them ally themselves with the mud of the earth for the sake of large dowries? how many mortgage their old lands till they have not a sod left which they can call their own? how many waste all their energies and all their health in a routine of miserable and stupid follies which are hardly even to be dignified
as vice?’

  She spoke with animation; her cheeks had a faint flush, delicate as that of the waxen bells of the begonia flowers, her eyes were full of light. Othmar looked at her with a passion of regret. If only she had loved him, he thought he could have conquered the world, have renewed the impossibilities of Alexander, have done all that visionary boys dream of doing as they read their Euripides or their Æschylus in a summer noon under blossoming lime trees.

  ‘You will take from Rome what you yourself have carried there,’ says a German writer, and it is with love the same thing; you take from it what you carry to it, you get out of it so much spirituality, and no more, than you bear thereto. To others Nadine Napraxine was a coquette, a mondaine, a mere élégante of the elegant world; but to him she was the one woman of the earth; she could have inspired him with any heroism, she could have moved him to any sacrifice, she could have compensated him for any loss; he saw in her a million possibilities which no one ever saw, which might be only the fruits of his imagination, but yet were wholly real to him, unspeakably lovely and attractive. She had offended him, alienated him, treated his ardour and his earnestness as a baby treats its toys, and his reason condemned her inexorably and often; yet she was the one woman on earth for him, and he had tried to hate her, to drive her out of his memory, and had thought that he succeeded, and had only failed.

  ‘If you were like other men of your generation,’ she pursued, ‘you would be much more content. You do not care for any of the things which fill up their time. You have magnificent horses, but you never race with them, you never even hunt. You care nothing for cards, or for any games of hazard. You do not shoot except, as you justly observed, a fellow-creature now and then when he provokes you. You do not care to have yourself talked about, which is the supreme felicity of the age you live in; your solitary extravagance is to have operas and concerts given in your own houses with closed doors, like Ludwig of Bavaria, and that seems rather an eccentricity than an extravagance to the world at large. You are a great student, but you care about the contents of your books, not about the binding or the date of their edition, so that you never commit the follies of a bibliophile. You do not care about any of your fine places; you have an idea that you would like a cottage just because you are tired of palaces. You vex women by your indifference to their attractions, and men by your indifference to their pursuits. Because circumstance has made you a conspicuous person with an electric light always upon you, you sigh to be an homme d’intérieur, with no light on you at all except that of your own hearth. It is Louis Seize and the locksmith, Domitian and the cabbage-garden, Honorius and the hens, over again. History always repeats itself, and how one wishes that it did not!’