by Ouida
‘The gum and I were made as we are by nature. Blame nature. The men and the flies would do worse if they did not do that. And pray do not talk about my lovers; I have none.’
‘You have no serfs in Russia, but you have moujiks; and it is still much the same thing, as far as their submission goes.’
‘You are really too sarcastic, Wilkes. Was Cri-Cri’s champagne bad? Surely not. But there must be something you have not digested. Perhaps it is the caviare sandwiches. Here we are, at home. Do go to bed and dream of your gum, your rabbit, and your bottle of morphine. None of these things can swim, but I, who am a combination of them, can; and I shall be swimming under your window whilst you sleep.’
The carriage stopped at the foot of the terrace of La Jacquemerille, and she descended, aided by Geraldine, who, with her husband, had arrived a few minutes earlier.
Lady Brancepeth hurried indoors, conscious, with the consciousness of thirty-five years, that the morning light was not becoming after a ball. Nadine Napraxine, with the equally conscious immunity of an exquisite complexion, and of that kind of beauty which is like a sea-shell, unwound the lace from about her delicate head, and paused in the doorway, looking seaward.
‘I shall not go to bed,’ she said, as the rays of the sunrise touched the gilded pinnacles and vanes of La Jacquemerille. ‘I shall go and get into a peignoir, then breakfast, and then bathe. It is so stupid to go to bed when the sun is up. Platon, you look like a bear awaked before he has done hybernating. Did you not get sleep enough in de Vannes’ fumoir?’
‘I never get sleep enough,’ replied Napraxine, good-humouredly but drowsily; ‘and you do a very foolish thing if you stand there, Princess, in a frost, at seven o’clock, after five hours of the cotillon!’
‘There is no frost; look at the geraniums; and I never take cold; that is not my malady at all; I am not so silly.’
Napraxine opened his sleepy eyes.
‘When you cannot live in Russia because the tubercles on your lungs — —’
‘Dr. Thiviers is responsible for the tubercles. One is obliged to say something civil to get away from a Court. It is always safe to say one suffers with one’s lungs; nobody can ask to look at them. Pray go to bed, and dream of Nirvana, if you know what it means.’
The Prince obeyed, and disappeared yawning. Geraldine remained, gazing at this elegant figure on the marble step, with its sortie du bal of ermine and gold silk folded about it, and the face with its hue of a white tea-rose, which could defy so surely the searching morning light.
She glanced at him in return, and laughed. ‘How droll you look with your claque and your ulster; you are not harmonious with the landscape, my friend; and you look sulky. The ball seems to have disagreed with all of you; yet it was a very good ball, as balls go; it is impossible to give any variety to a ball. Balls and funerals, ça se ressemble trop.’
She drew the ermine over her pretty chin, the diamonds sparkled in her hair; the bouquet of gardenias swung in her hand. The eyes of Geraldine grew very sombre and covetous.
‘I am sorry I am a blot on the scene,’ he said, moodily. ‘Englishmen are always unpicturesque. I stood still and gazed at you all night, but no doubt I only looked like a policeman or a fool — —’
‘Or both,’ she murmured, with a smile.
He continued unheedingly, ‘While your friend Othmar, who did precisely the same thing, looked, of course, to you and to everybody, like a Titian resuscitated.’
‘Othmar is not especially like any Titian that I have ever seen,’ said Madame Napraxine, ‘but he knows how to stand with grace, which no Englishman ever did know yet. You are quite right; your people do not “compose” well, except when they are in the hunting-field, or playing some very rough game; but you need not souffler for compliments; you are very good-looking — in your way.’
‘Thanks,’ muttered Geraldine, in a tone which would have better suited an imprecation.
Othmar had not danced once with her; he had indeed only moved reluctantly through a contre-danse with his hostess; but the unerring instinct of jealousy made the envy of Geraldine fasten on him rather than on any other of the crowd for whom the ball at Millo had only meant Princess Napraxine.
‘It is a little chilly,’ said the Princess as she turned from the open door.
Geraldine caught her hand which held the fan: ‘If you would but believe all that your life is to us, you would not run such mad risks as this raw cold fog after a ball! Had I been Platon, I would have carried you to your room by main force.’
The face of Nadine Napraxine grew very cold.
‘You are not Prince Napraxine — happily for myself and yourself; and I do not like impertinences. Go and smoke, and recover your good manners.’
‘You were kinder to me before Othmar came home!’ said Geraldine, with injudicious reproach.
‘You have very bad manners,’ said the Princess calmly, as she gathered up her ermine and drew her flower-laden train over the little hall and up the staircase.
She smiled as she passed upward.
‘How babyish they all are!’ she reflected. ‘As if to complain of another man were not the very way to cement a woman’s preference for him, — if she had any preference. That poor boy has no tact; if his sister had not said anything about him I would send him away; he is a bore. To be sure, he is here to take Platon off one’s hands, and smoke with him. All men are tiresome when you have known them a month or so; all human beings are tiresome. Nobody ever tires of me, and I tire of everybody. Perhaps — —’
She remembered that Othmar had alone never tired her; he had been too romantic, too presuming, too prone to fancy he had rights and wrongs; but he had never wearied her. Most men were so absurd when they were enamoured of her, but he was not so; a little too, like Ruy Blas perhaps a little too inclined to be serious and impassioned, to the vieux jeu in a word; but still he had kept his grace and kept his dignity. He kept them still; he would not let her play with him. She was the one woman on earth for him; but he did not become her slave.
She had her bath and wrapped herself in a loose gown of satin and lace and went out into the garden with a rose-coloured hood over her head. It was certainly cold, and the mists had not altogether cleared; but it was a point of honour with her to do what her physician and her friends denounced as most dangerous.
‘Platon is snoring,’ she thought contemptuously, as she glanced over the closed shutters. ‘And I dare say Geraldine snores too, if one only knew. I dare say they both took soda and brandy. Men are certainly unlovely creatures. As long as we are young we are a little better than they; we look pretty asleep, and we don’t snore. How maquillée poor Cri-Cri was last night, and then she really throws her heart into the affair with de Prangins; nothing ever ages a woman like that; and I am quite sure he does not care a straw about her.’
She walked up and down her terrace, trailing her rose-coloured skirts over the marble; she was a little sleepy, a little bored; but she wished to show to her friends that she could dance all night and breakfast out of doors without more fatigue than a nightingale, after singing all night, feels as he trips across the grass at sunrise.
She thought, with a little amusement, that, if Geraldine were really as wasting with despair as he professed to be, he would have been out of bed still on the mere chance of her reappearance. The various degrees of passions in her lovers diverted her; she had no vanity; she could dissect and weigh their emotions with perfect accuracy and philosophise upon them with a clearness of understanding wholly beyond the reach of vain woman. Analysis diverted her much more than conquest. Some had loved her tragically, some had died through her if not for her; she had had genuine triumphs, great enough and costly enough to satisfy the pride of anyone; therefore she could amuse herself very well with the contradiction when somebody, who declared that he only lived for her, nevertheless drank his claret with relish; or somebody else, who was for ever at her feet, nevertheless ceased not to be critical of his cigars.
; ‘Poor Othmar!’ she thought now; ‘he would stay sleepless in the street all night on the chance of seeing my shadow on a window blind!’
That was the vieux jeu; romanticism which did not suit their world; which even made her impatient of it as indifferent people are always impatient of earnestness. But it was fine after all: finer than Geraldine’s sulkiness which let him go to sleep.
The air was very cold, but the morning was fair, and the mists were lifting higher and higher every moment; as her skirts brushed the bay hedge it gave forth a sweet odour, snowdrops and hepatica blossomed under the big aloes, and ground ivy was green about the stems of the palms; the mountains grew the hue of summer roses under the sun’s approach, then paled into amethyst and pearly grey; it was intensely quiet, there was no sound but of some unseen gardener sweeping up dead leaves; the yellow wings of an oriole flashed among the glossy leaves of a pitosperum.
‘The world looks as if God washed it clean every morning,’ she thought. ‘It gets soiled before noon. Decidedly it is only the birds who are innocent enough for the sunrise.’
The latent sadness of the Russian character was in her, beneath her insouciance and her pessimism and her irony: sometimes she wished she had not been born to that world in which she lived, where there is no pause for reflection, but only a continuous succession of spectacles, excitations, revelries, where no one is ever alone, where no one has ever time to note a wild flower grow or a sun sink to the west, where the babble of society is for ever on the ear, and Nature has no place at all except as a décor de théâtre of which no one thinks more than the actor thinks of the painted canvas behind him with its bridge or its garden or its windmill.
‘I do believe I should have liked to have been a poor woman and have married such a man as Millet or Corot,’ she thought to herself now as she walked along the alley of bay that ran parallel with the sea. Then she laughed at the idea of herself, living in a cottage in a French wood, without any lace, without any diamonds, without any toilettes, looking for a dusty footsore artist coming home through the trees to his pot au feu. Somehow the artist in her fancy had the features of Othmar, — of Othmar, who was a prince of the Bourses and could no more escape the world than she could!
It scarcely surprised her when she saw him in person, as though her thoughts had compelled him to come thither. He was alone, in a little boat, which drifted slowly past the sea-terrace of La Jacquemerille; his hands rested idly on the oars, and his eyes were looking upward at the house.
She leaned down through one of the openings of the wall of clipt bay, and thrust her rose satin hood over the water:
‘Is it you, Othmar?’ she said to him. ‘What are you doing on the sea at eight o’clock? How astonished you look! Do you wonder what I am doing in the open air? They are all asleep comfortably, though they think I am courting death. Row to the stairs; you can breakfast with me.’
He hesitated, looking up at her with his head uncovered and his eyes dazzled by the delicate face that was peering forth from the framework of close-sheared bay boughs.
‘Come!’ said Madame Napraxine. Her voice could be very imperious, and was so now.
He obeyed in silence, passed to the landing-place a hundred yards farther down, and in five minutes’ time approached her under the arched roof of the bay charmille.
‘But you were only back from the ball an hour or less!’ he said, as he bowed before her.
‘I was not inclined to go to bed; the morning is fine. You are up betimes, too. When did you leave Millo?’
‘I left when you did,’ said Othmar, with significance in the brevity of the reply.
‘Then you cannot have breakfasted either. You will breakfast with me; I was just going back to the house.’
It was precisely the sort of coup de scène which would amuse her; her husband and Geraldine lounging downstairs, late, cross, and easily ruffled, to find her alone with their neighbour from S. Pharamond. It was one of those amusing little incidents which Providence, who, she was sure, was kind to her, was always sending her to relieve the monotony of human life.
‘What were you doing under the sea wall?’ she pursued. ‘Is it your habit, too, never to go to bed? You must have been rowing some time. We are two sea leagues at least from your place. What did you think of Cri-Cri’s ball? That new figure with the coloured hoops was pretty; but the Duc leads a cotillon better than anyone.’
‘Admirable pre-eminence!’ said Othmar. ‘I saw you with the coloured hoops. You made them look as if Ariel had just brought them from Titania. But I do not think the charm was in the hoops themselves.’
‘If you had cared to lead a cotillon, Othmar, you might have been a happier man.’
‘That I do not doubt; the frivolous faculty is a very happy one.’
‘At all events, though you despise it, you are indulgent to it. You gave us superb presents at your own fête. Come in to breakfast. I would not admit it if Platon were here, but it is cold.’
‘And surely it is not very wise to be in the cold after a ball?’
‘That is what they all said, so I came. I have not much sympathy with children, but I do understand why they like to do a thing for no other reason than that they are told not to do it. My physicians pretend that morning air is as bad as damp shoes, but I believe they say that to be agreeable to their patients who turn night into day. It is not only Molière’s doctors who are charlatans. I imagine it is the perpetual affectation of sympathy which doctors are compelled to put on which makes them hypocrites. Come into the house.’
He went on in silence beside her along the bay path. He could not easily talk of trifles with her; she had filled all his life for two whole years; he loved her as he had loved no other woman. When he had returned home from the Millo ball, he had bathed and swam in the little bay of S. Pharamond, and then had rowed himself along the coast in that vague irresistible desire to pass near where she dwelt which every true lover feels.
He had resolved to emancipate himself from her power; as he had watched her through the night he had told himself that to care for her was to waste life on a baseless and ungrateful dream. Yet, when she had looked down from her evergreen rampart, and had said ‘Come,’ he had been unable to resist.
As he paced beside her now, the delicate perfume of her laces, the floating, indefinite lines of the rose-satin draperies, the glimpse of her profile which the hood showed, her slender feet in their rose-coloured pearl-sewn slippers, which stepped so lightly over the shining shingle of the paths — one and all they conquered his calmness and his resolves, as the fumes of new wine mount over the brain and move the senses. She walked on, provocative as Venus, unattainable as Una, speaking idly of this thing and of that, knowing very well what made his answers all at random and his colour changeful. Other women might need to use all the arts of conquest; might need to woo with their eyes, to charm with their smiles, to solicit with their glances. She had no such vulgar fashions; she moved, spoke, looked, as the moment actuated her, and noticed her lovers hardly more than she noticed the little dog that ran after her skirts. To exist and to be seen was enough to secure her more victories than she chose to count.
If she noticed Othmar more than others it was because he had gone away from her, he had rebuked her, he had appeared to defy her, and he had dared to tell her he loved her with more reproach, and more bitterness of soul than any other had ever done. She did not intend to accept his life, or to give him hers; but she did intend that his should be unable to detach itself. And all the while she talked to him with that easy, even kindness, as of a friend, with those light philosophies of a woman of the world, which were to the passions of a man as ether spray thrown upon a lava-flood; and she took him into breakfast with her as though he were her brother.
She occasionally drank her chocolate in a boudoir opening on to the terrace; a little nest of white satin and looking-glass and Saxe china; the ceiling was a mirror painted with little doves and flowers; the carpet was of lambskins; the corners were filled wi
th azaleas, rose and white, like her gown. She looked only a larger flower as she sank down on one of the couches. The chocolate was served on Moorish trays, in Turkish cups, by a little negro who, gorgeous in his dress and immovable as a statue, was often taken by new comers for an enamelled bronze cast by Barbédienne, so motionless did he squat before the door of any room she occupied. Othmar almost envied that little African menial the right he had to see his mistress pass and repass a hundred times a day. Nadine, in her nonchalant way, was kind to the boy.
‘He will die of pneumonia, — they always do,’ she said now. ‘Poor dusky little beetles, they only live by their hot sand and their hot sun; to be sure, our houses inside are as hot as Africa, but outside, the east wind blows, and one day it will blow too much for Mahmoud. I suppose it would be a terrible thing for civilisation if the East ever again surged over the West; but the East has very much to avenge, and I am not sure that civilisation would be any great loss. It has discovered that man is only a sort of hotbed for bacteria, and that butter can be made out of river mud, and coffee out of powdered tan.’
She had taken the hood off her head; she was as charming as a child freshly out of a bath, with her eyes brilliant and her cheeks a little warmed by the transition from the chill air of early morning to the room heated to 30° Réaumur. She had tossed herself backwards amongst the white satin cushions. Her eyes, which were like onyx, dwelt on him with a gleam of amusement; her beautiful mouth had the smile which was so enigmatical, so gay, and yet so cold. She had had a different smile when she had said to little Mahmoud, ‘Cover yourself warmly here; though the sun shines, it is not African.’
‘What has that black brat done that you are so merciful to him?’ asked Othmar.
She replied: ‘That black brat is a victim of civilisation. I hate civilisation, as you know. It even adulterates truffles.’