by Ouida
‘I fear you will find it a dull story,’ said he, as they left the quay and passed up a steep path, always under the shadow of the trees.
‘What a misfortune for him that he inherited so much! It prevents him enjoying any thing,’ she said to Melville; who replied, a little drily:
‘I do not think it is what he inherited which prevents his enjoyment, Princess; it is more probably what he encountered and sighed for vainly. Life holds many of these ironies.’
‘If I were he,’ she continued, ignoring the reply, ‘I should care for nothing but that power which he, in common with other great capitalists, possesses. To be able to make a war possible or impossible by the mere inclining of your wand of gold — that must be the most interesting of all possible kinds of influence.’
‘Yes, the financier is the modern Merlin, but then there is Vivien — —’
‘In Mr. Tennyson’s poem, not out of it,’ said Princess Nadine, sceptically; but she knew very well that Vivien was then walking under the shade of her own great red parasol, with its group of humming-birds embroidered on its left side.
The pathway ascended steeply through the woods, bordered with datura and geranium, which were still blossoming gaily; here and there was a wooden bench, a majolica seat, a little statue; the ground was of shining shingle; it had been kept in perfect order, awaiting its owner, for ten years. After about a quarter of a mile it ended on a level space of the red rock up which it had climbed. Here had been laid out a fairy-like and fantastic garden, lawns, palms, fountains, walls of shrubs, and groves of camellias and azaleas, spreading before a château, which was, in architecture, a miniature Maintenon, and in position stood high enough to look over the sea in front of it.
‘What a delicious place!’ said Nadine; ‘and in a month or two, when all those azaleas flower — if I had known you had owned such a bijou, I would have told you to lend it to us. It makes La Jacquemerille a mere trumpery toy.’
‘I would lend you nothing,’ said Othmar, in her ear; ‘I would have given you everything — once.’
Then he added aloud, ‘This is somewhat trumpery also, I fear; modern things are so apt to have that look. They are like the articles de Paris, which cost enormously, but are only plush and ormolu after all. However, Viollet le Duc built this house; so it may be a little better than its neighbours. Only I should like statelier and simpler gardens myself; I should like high box hedges and old-fashioned plants. But I suppose they would not go with the Mediterranean.’
‘You like anything simple and homely; you will have to marry Margot, or Phœbe, or Grethel, off a farm,’ said the Princess, with some contempt. She was a hothouse flower herself, and despised thyme and dog-roses.
‘I might do worse,’ said Othmar, as he ushered them into the house, which contained some wonderful china, some admirable modern pictures, some fine statuary, and more French luxury than its master cared to have surround him.
‘It is exquisite,’ said the Princess, after wandering through it, and returning to a room opening on the gardens; a room hung with tawny plush, embroidered with white roses and blue irises. The chairs and couches matched the walls, a gilt cornice ran round the oval ceiling, which was painted in tempera with the story of Undine. ‘How many more houses have you, Othmar, standing like so many open empty caskets waiting for you to put the jewel of life into them? Really, how many have you? Come, tell me!’
‘I have too many,’ said Othmar. ‘But excess always carries its own retribution; amongst them all I have no home; none that I feel home-like. I can imagine what it is — a chez soi that one cares about and desires to return to — but I do not possess it.’
‘Make it,’ said Melville; ‘that is always in the power of every man who is not a priest.’
‘I suppose it is,’ said Othmar. ‘But it has never seemed very easy to me. The fire of the hearth is like the coal from the altar: it comes from heaven, and can scarcely be commanded.’
He glanced as he spoke at Nadine Napraxine, who was lying back against the golden gleams of the plush of her couch; she had a tea-rose in her hand which she had plucked from the gardens. She looked dream-like and ethereal. She had on her lips that little smile which meant so much and yet said nothing, and was half compassion and half disdain, and partially, also, amusement. If she had been mistress here and in all his other houses, he thought, each one of them would have been Eden to him. But that had not been Melville’s meaning.
At that moment his servants brought in the tea noiselessly and quickly: little Saxe cups, frosted cakes, forced strawberries, appearing on great old plateaux of gold, — as though he had been served there every day instead of having been absent ten years.
‘Really, Othmar, you have a little of the Haroun Alraschid, though you do not care for your throne,’ said Melville: ‘who would have imagined that returning from Asia last night you would have tea all ready made for your friends?’
‘My friends reconcile me to my house,’ said Othmar; ‘you will leave almost a perfume of home behind you, these rooms will seem lonely no more.’
‘The rooms are quite perfect,’ said Princess Nadine, ‘but still I think we will have our tea out of doors; the sun is still brilliant. We have now and then little fits of rurality; when we have those we sit on a terrace and take tea; that is as near rusticity as we care to go.’
She walked through one of the doorways into the air as she spoke.
To Othmar the golden-coloured room with its white roses and blue irises seemed to grow dark as she left it.
As she passed out to the gardens his people brought him a note; it was inside a silver-grey envelope, with a silver couronne upon it, and on a silver-grey card was written a very pressingly worded invitation to dinner the following night with his neighbours the Duc and Duchesse de Vannes. They had just heard of his arrival; they would have a few people; they begged him not to be formal, &c. &c. The château nearest to him was Millo, their favourite winter retreat; a gorgeous and fantastic place, with many a gilded cupola and shining dome which caught the sunshine from the sea, amidst groves of magnolia and woods of ilex. He had not been to Millo for ten years. When he had been last there the Duc had been just married to a famous beauty, and he had known them very well in Paris ever since that time. They were not people for whom he cared much: Alain de Vannes was a sporting man, and his wife was one of the leaders of fashion, with half a hundred lovers given to her, rightly or wrongly, by report. They were, however, legitimist in politics to the backbone. Neither of their families had ever pandered to Emperor or Elysée, and they were, despite their easy morals and their profound indifference to each other, exceedingly exclusive, and, with all their nonchalance, even arrogant.
‘It must be a strange house for that poor little girl,’ he thought as he threw the card aside, and remembered the Greuze face in the Venetian red boat. Millo was not more than a mile off him, at one point their woods and his joined, and looking from his terrace any day he could see the gilded minarets and the varicoloured tiles of their villas shining in the light against billows of dark evergreen foliage.
‘How soon they know you are here!’ said Nadine Napraxine, as he spoke of the invitation to her. ‘You will go, of course; you cannot have any engagements?’
‘Will you be there?’
‘I do not know; yes, perhaps. I never make up my mind until the last hour. People say it is cruel when they have dinners; it leaves a place blank; but how can you be sure what you wish to do until the moment comes? I detest dinners. When we have really become civilised we shall each of us eat in solitude, or, at the least, each behind his own screen. Why should one of the unloveliest of the operations of nature be performed in public? The flowers, and the plate, and the footmen cannot really embellish it; indeed, they only make it the more grotesque.’
‘How droll you are, Nadine!’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘You have certainly a monopoly of singular ideas.’
‘I wish my ideas were general,’ answered the Princess. ‘When the world has re
ally refined itself it will look on our eating in society as we look now on savages eating with their fingers. Some of our friends cannot even have a little love affair but they must go and eat prawns, and quails, and petits fours together in a café; and if a hero comes home from a war anywhere his countrymen at once make him eat and drink in public by way of showing their respect for him. The whole thing is absurd. The only creature that is not offensive when it eats is a bird. Just one little dive in a rose, or under a vine-leaf, and it has breakfasted. But we! — —’
‘When a very pretty woman eats a strawberry, the bird is not very much her superior,’ murmured Melville.
‘Reverend father,’ said the Princess, ‘you have no business to know whether one is pretty or not. Fruit, perhaps, does keep something of the golden age about it; but our dinners! — were I a man I would never see the woman I admired taking her share of diseased livers, tortured fish, slaughtered songsters. They are fond of writing nowadays about a higher humanity which will succeed to ours; but my idea of it would be that it should be fed like Fénelon’s islanders by only breathing sweet odours. That would be even better than the bird’s dip in the rose.’
‘Then you will not go to Millo?’ persisted Othmar.
‘Who knows what one may do in twenty-four hours?’
The servants had carried the gold trays out into the garden after her. Melville and Lady Brancepeth, who were more comfortable in the embrace of their plush couches, returned within-doors; Othmar drew his chair nearer to hers, and offered her a cigarette.
‘Rurality always wants this consolation, Princess,’ he said, as he did so.
‘Thanks; not till I have finished my strawberries. They are delicious. How do you manage your households? If we go home unexpectedly anywhere we always find the servants away, the major-domo drunk, the house topsy-turvy, and not a thing to eat within twenty miles. How did you keep them at this point of perfection?’
‘They are never sure that I may not arrive at any moment. If servants be not ready at any hour of the day or night they are not worth their salt. Then I have very faithful stewards — —’
‘One marvel does not explain another. The fidelity is perhaps more astonishing than the perpetual readiness.’
‘I reward fidelity; most people limit themselves to accepting it. If you do not pay your servant well he will help himself.’
‘I am sure we pay — pay endlessly. Platon spends Heaven knows what on the servants, but he gets only a mob of rogues, who rob him right and left.’
‘I have no right to suppose the Prince less wise than myself; but perhaps there is other payment as well as money in which he does not deal. I let the humblest man in my service have plenty of hope; there is no moral tonic so bracing; each of them knows that he may rise if he only deserve it. Then, again, I am heedful to have my house-stewards men of high character; a house-steward is one’s viceroy — one cannot be too careful in choosing him.’
‘I should never have supposed you cared about those things, Othmar,’ she said, in much surprise, as she stared at him, a strawberry held uneaten against her lips.
‘One must think about them or be at war with one’s conscience,’ he answered. ‘That is the tedium of life; its duties are so inexorable and so wearisome.’
‘Is an easy conscience absolutely necessary to you?’
‘No; I could easily imagine circumstances under which a guilty one would make me carry it lightly.’
A gleam of the old passionate emotion which she had once known in him passed for a moment into his eyes with gloom and fire mingled. He repressed it; he did not wish her to believe that she had still the power over his life which she actually possessed. He heard her voice saying always, ‘I will have no melodramatic passions to disturb me; they are absurd, they are out of date, they are tiresome.’
And she had said it out of no virtue, only out of sheer shallowness and indifference.
‘That is a very shocking sentiment,’ she said demurely now, as she ate another strawberry. ‘At least, one is bound to say so; Monsignore in there would certainly say so. Indeed, from Monsignore’s point of view, one would certainly think it so; but as all we modern people, whatever church we ostensibly belong to, are all so completely of one mind that we know we are only automata, made up of nerve-centres and different gases, I do not see why we should necessarily have consciences at all, do you? Why should we have one any more than the zostera from which I named that yacht?’
‘Only because the zosteræ have no traditions of a conscience, all men have.’
‘All men? Savages have not, primitive races have not; and how should we know whether the zostera has or has not? She may have a very perfect system of ethics, sitting on her rocks in reach of the tide — I should think, indeed, she had a sort of Buddhism.’
‘You named that yacht?’ he said abruptly.
‘Yes; Geraldine had her built last year. He is not like you; he has not a superstition that one is bound to go on sailing in the same ship all one’s life, however old-fashioned she may grow.’
‘Lord Geraldine has many superiorities over me. He has the patience to play at Platonic cicisbeism as children play for counters,’ said Othmar, with a brusque contempt.
‘That is neither a well-bred speech nor a true one,’ said Nadine Napraxine very calmly, as she set down her cup.
‘Its breeding I cannot defend, its truth I do,’ he answered coldly. ‘There are men who can spend their lives carrying a woman’s fan, and ask for nothing more at her hands; they have merits, no doubt, but they are not those which I appreciate.’
‘Poor Ralph! if he heard you!’ she said, with a little yawn which she could not control, though she tried to stifle it with a cigarette. ‘He thinks himself far more manly than you because he shoots fur and feather, and you do not kill anything — except a man now and then!’
‘I may yet add to the list of the latter,’ said Othmar.
‘The Mongolians have made you very savage,’ she said, as she lighted the cigarette. ‘And you used to be so gentle.’
‘I used to be many things that I have ceased to be since the twentieth of April a year and eight months ago,’ said Othmar.
She had forgotten the date which he remembered so accurately, the date of the day on which they had parted in her own room in Paris, with the smell of the lilac of the avenue coming in through the open windows, and the sunset rays, as they came through the rose-coloured blinds, touching her fair face, and the curl of her long dark lashes, and the beautiful mouth with the little cruel languid smile on it as she had said, ‘I will have no melodramatic passions to disturb me.’
She looked at him now with the demure un-selfconsciousness of a child.
‘Ah! I never could remember dates,’ she murmured. ‘I was the despair of all my governesses, I had such a bad memory.’
‘It is convenient sometimes,’ said Othmar, a little bitterly. Why were all those past hours written on his remembrance as the chisel writes on stone, whilst she had shaken off their memories as a bird shakes a summer rain off its wings?
‘And how,’ he added with an effort, ‘with such a defective brain as you describe, have you become one of the most cultured women of Europe? Does forgetfulness of — dates — enhance the power of acquiring other knowledge?’
‘I think it leaves the brain freer,’ she answered, in that serene way which she had with her when she was intending that a man should never forget her whatever she might choose to forget.
‘No doubt,’ he said impatiently. ‘No doubt learned women have never been very tender ones.’
‘Learned! what a terrific word. Would you call a mere poor frivolous mondaine like me by the same word that described Lady Jane Grey and Mrs. Somerville? I know a few languages; I had bonnes of every nation when I was a baby; and I have read Schopenhauer and Herbert Spencer, and I assure you that one bored me as much as the other. But learned! would a bas bleu eat your strawberries or smoke your cigarettes?’
‘Or take all my hea
rt and my soul out of me?’ he thought, as he answered, ‘No; certainly your one great science, Madame, was never learned either in the nursery, or out of Schopenhauer and Herbert Spencer. It is the perfection of high art; and you, like all supreme artists, cannot pause to remember what your studies may cost to your subjects.’
She did not ask him what art or science he meant; she lighted a second cigarette and said, in her sweetest voice, ‘I do not think you are quite so even-tempered as you used to be, Count Othmar. Look, the sun is low; it is time to be going homeward. What are Monsignore and Evelyn doing? Will you call them, please?’
‘Stay yet a little while; I have not seen you for so long,’ he murmured, ashamed and irritated at his own weakness in letting the words escape him.
‘Naturally you have not,’ she said, with a gay laugh, ‘since you have been in Asia and I in Europe. Why did you go to Asia? People do not do that sort of thing nowadays. If they be annoyed they walk down to their club and play hard, or they ride a horse at a steeplechase, and in a week they think no more about it. And why did you have that duel with de Sénélac? It was very imprudent. I had told you I could not bear that kind of melodrama. Nobody knew certainly, but that was only because they were all stupid; any one might have known. And Sénélac never left his bed for six months; and have you heard that he will limp, they say, for ever?’
Othmar, with a gesture, intimated that the misfortune of his late adversary was a matter of utter indifference.
‘If you be sorry that he limps,’ he said impatiently, ‘be sorry that you gave him your bouquet to carry. Princess, you are very fond of psychological studies, but you do not like to be reminded of what others pay for them. You know well enough what men suffer for you, and through you, but you do not choose ever to blame yourself for making them do so. The world has not changed; the mode of expression may have altered, but men feel as they felt in the days of David or of Æschylus. Love is what it was then, a mere passing pleasure or pain to many, but to some the herald of heaven or of hell, the begetter of heroism or of crime.’