by Ouida
‘Did you ever smile so kindly on your own children?’
‘I cannot say. I do not count my smiles. That poor little slave is interesting, he is an exile, and he will die in a year or two; my children are insufferably uninteresting; they have unchangeable health, intense stupidity, and will grow up to have every desire fulfilled, every caprice gratified, and to become that irresponsible, useless, tyrannical, anachronism — a Russian noble. Perhaps they will be good soldiers and kill a score of Asiatics. Perhaps they will only drink brandy, and gamble.’
Othmar did not reply; he was looking at the exquisite grace of her form, the tea-rose tint of her cheeks. Was it possible that she could be the mother of two stout, ugly, Tartar-faced boys? It seemed to him a profanation; a hideous incongruity. He did not like to think of it. If she had had a child at all it should have been some blossom-like creature, sharing her own grace as the catkin shares the willow’s. The subtlest charm about her was that ethereality, as of a virginal goddess, which was blent in her with all the finesses of seduction and of mind. The boldest man felt that in Nadine Napraxine the senses had hardly more empire than in the ivory Venus of the Greeks.
The eyes of Othmar dwelt on her now yearningly, sombrely, wistfully.
‘It is of no use,’ he said, abruptly. ‘I did wrong to come here. If you wish for men who can, whilst they adore you, sit and drink chocolate and talk epigrams, seek elsewhere; I am not one of them. I can wear a mask, but it must be of iron, not of velvet.’
‘The iron mask was of velvet,’ said she, correcting him, unmoved by the repressed passion in his voice. ‘All our illusions vanish under the electric light of history, and the iron mask is one of them. I daily expect to hear that Marie Antoinette was never guillotined, but succumbed at seventy to dropsy at Schönbrunn; we know it is proved that Jeanne d’Arc married and died, bonne bourgeoise, at Orleans, and her family enjoyed a pension for three generations from the town. It is very distressing, but it is all proved from the archives. Why shouldn’t you drink chocolate? Perhaps you do not like it. Men like nothing that has sugar in it, except flattery. Ring. They will bring you anything else.’
Othmar looked at her without speaking. Something of the impotent rage against her with which he had left her in Paris awoke in him under the sting of her ever dulcet tones, in which a little tone of mockery could be felt rather than heard.
He rose abruptly.
‘Have you never loved anyone?’ he asked.
She lifted her eyebrows with impatience and astonishment.
‘Vous voila emballé! Dear Othmar, I should like you so much if you would not always revert to that old theme. You are a man of the world, or you ought to be one. Be amusing, even be instructive if you like; I do not mind being instructed, but do not be romantic. Nobody is nowadays; not even the novelists.’
Othmar appeared scarcely to hear her.
‘Did you never love anyone?’ he repeated.
She laughed a little.
‘You speak as if I were forty years old, with a cabinet full of old letters and faded roses! No; I never loved anybody, not even Platon!’
The notion suggested in her last words tickled her fancy so much that she laughed outright.
‘I suppose,’ she continued, ‘somewhere in the world there are women who have loved Platon; but it seems too funny. He is always eating when he is not drinking; he is always smoking when he is not sleeping; admettons, donc, that Cupid must fly from his presence. How grave you look. I believe you have something of the Eastern in you, and think that all women should be prostrate before their husbands. There is a good deal of that idea among the moujiks; it must be very agreeable — for the man.’
‘Why did you marry him?’ said Othmar, gloomily; it hurt his sense of honour to speak of Napraxine in Napraxine’s house; yet he could not repress the question.
‘Oh, my friend, why do girls always marry?’ she said, indifferently. ‘Because the marriage is there; because the families have arranged it; because one does not know; because one wishes for freedom, for jewels, for the world; because one does not care to be a fillette, chaperoned at every step. There are many reasons that make one marry: it is the thing to do — everyone does it; when a girl sees the young married women, she sees them flirted with, sought, monopolising everything; it is like standing behind a shut door and hearing people laughing and singing on the other side, while you cannot get to them; besides, Platon did as well as anybody else, he is more good-natured than most; he never interferes; he is very peaceable — —’
‘How long ago is it? Five years — six? Why could I not meet you before?’
She smiled, not displeased.
‘It is seven years. Oh, I do not think it would have done at all; you are too arrogant; we should have quarrelled before a month was out. Besides, I should have tormented you to do all manner of impossibilities; with your immense power, I should have expected you to buy me an empire.’
Othmar was very pale; the possibility of which she jested so airily was one he could not think of without a mist before his eyes, a quickening of his heart. He hesitated to say what rose to his lips; she would only call it vieux jeu.
‘I think you might be a great man, Othmar, if you were not Othmar,’ she pursued.
‘I do not feel the capabilities,’ he replied.
‘That is because you are what you are,’ she answered. ‘You are something like a king of England. A king of England might have all the talents, but he could never be a great man because his position binds him hand and foot, and makes a lay figure of him. You are not a lay figure, but the very fact that you are Otho Othmar prevents your being anything besides. I think, if I were you, I should buy some great sunshiny fantastic eastern kingdom, and reign there; you might lead the life of a Haroum Alraschid, and forget all about our stupid Europe with its big dinners, its blundering politics, its unreal religions, and its hideous dress.’
‘A charming dream — if you were with me.’
‘Oh, no; you would not want me; you would have two thousand slaves, each more beautiful than the others.’
‘All my life I shall want you!’
He spoke under his breath. He was leaning back in his chair; his face was cold, almost stern, but his eyes were ardent and full of passion. All night at Millo he had sworn to himself that never again would he succumb to her influence or allow her to triumph in the power she possessed over him, but in her presence he was unnerved, and unable to keep silent. She, lying back amongst her cushions, glanced at him under her long lashes, and understood very well the strife which went on in his soul; the pride of manhood which combatted the impulses of passion; the impetus which could not be resisted, the impatience of his own weakness which vibrated through his confession.
‘What was the use of your going to Mongolia; you could not escape me,’ she thought, with a little of that contemptuous indulgence which she always felt for her lovers’ follies, and a little of a newer and more personal gratification; for Othmar touched a certain chord in her mind, a certain pulse in her heart, which others had not done. There was nothing commonplace or trivial in him. There was a vague power, unused but existent, which commanded her respect. Nadine Napraxine despised the world too heartily herself not to have sympathy with the indifference he felt for his own potentialities and possessions. He was one of the masters of the world, and he only wished for one thing on earth — herself. There was a flattery in that which pleased even her, sated with compliment though she was. There were moments when she thought that if she had met him before, as he said, there would have been less ennui and more warmth in her life. ‘Only we should have been so sure to have tired of each other,’ she reflected. ‘People always do; it is the fault of marriage; it compels people at the onset to see so much of one another that they have nothing new left with which to meet the future. If you heard the best of Bach every day, you would get to hate Bach as intensely as you hate a street organ; the music would still be perfect, but it could not withstand incessant repetitio
n. We should have been quite idylically in love for a few months; I am sure we should; but then we should have each gone our several ways, and in the end he would have been hardly better than Platon.’
Aloud, however, she only said, with a little smile:
‘You should never say things straight out like that, Othmar. You should never go beyond a suggestion. The world has spoilt you so greatly that it has let you get blunt. It is a pity. When I talk to people I always feel as Boucher said he felt when he talked with his lady-love. “J’aime tout ce qu’elle va dire; je n’aime rien qu’elle dit.” If we could only always remain at the stage when we are just going to speak!’
Othmar did not reply. His face was very pale; it had a set stern look, as though he exercised great self-repression. He was angered against himself for being there; for having let her lead him thither merely to be made the sport of her subtle and sarcastic intelligence. It seemed to him that if his passion were unwelcome to her his presence should be unwelcome too.
She guessed his thoughts with that rapid intuition which is the gift of such minds as hers.
‘Oh, I am not like that,’ she said, with some unspoken amusement; ‘I am not startled at a confession like yours, as a horse starts at a pistol shot. It seems to me that men are never happy unless they are talking in that kind of way to some woman who does not belong to them. They are so like children! In Petersburg, last year, I saw Sachs crying for a sentinel’s cartouche-box because he could not have it. He had all Giroux’s shop in his own nursery, but that did not do. You are like Sachs. Ought I to ring the bell and dismiss you? Why should I? I do not think so. Only very primitive beings take fright at declarations. Besides, you made me so many in Paris, and then you went to the Mongols. I never knew why you went to the Mongols; why did you go?’
‘Wounded brutes always get away somewhere to be unseen as long as their wound bleeds,’ said Othmar, with some bitterness.
‘How Sachs cried for that cartouche-box!’ she said, as she lit a cigarette. ‘His women scolded him, but I said to them, “Why do you scold him? He is a male creature; therefore he must weep for what he cannot get.” Some children cry for the moon; a moon, or a cartouche-box, or a woman, the principle is the same.’
Othmar rose and approached her. He seemed scarcely to have heard her jest.
‘Nadége, hear me a moment,’ he said, in a low tone, through whose enforced calmness there was the thrill of an intense passion. ‘You are not alarmed at declarations; they are nothing to you, you neither requite nor reject them; they amuse you, that is all. You are used to do just what you please with men; I understand that you despise them so far as you deign to think of them seriously.’
‘Despise, no!’ she said, with a little gesture of depreciation; ‘that is too strong. Why should I despise them for acting according to their natures? I do not desire cartouche-boxes myself, but I did not despise Sachs.’
‘I told you in Paris,’ pursued Othmar, ‘that I would not add one to the list of those whom you have made ridiculous in the eyes of the world. I will be all to a woman, or nothing to her. You would have let me swell the cortège that marks your triumphal passage; you would have let me fill the place that Lord Geraldine occupies now. You would have allowed me to drive with you, dine with you, come in and out of your house, take your husband away when he bored you, do everything that Lord Geraldine is permitted to do now; and you would have repaid me as you repay him, by a little laugh, a smile now and then, a vague liking which would have grown, little by little, into contempt! I would not accept that place in your household. I would not then. I left you, though it cost me more than you would ever know or pity, for you do not understand what love is. I went away; I desired to escape from you. I did escape. I desired also to forget you, but I could not forget. You are not a woman who can be forgotten; you are like one of those miséricordes with which they stabbed men in the Valois days, that look like mere threads of silver sheathed in velvet, and yet can go home through breast and bone, and kill more surely than swords that are as high as a man’s shoulder — —’
He paused a moment; he breathed quickly and heavily; she looked up, holding her little cigarette suspended:
‘I am like a great many things,’ she murmured; ‘I thought Wilkes exhausted all possibilities in comparison this morning. Go on! you are very entreprenant, but it rather becomes you; you may go on if you like.’
He dropped on his knee beside her:
‘No, I would not be what Geraldine is; you tolerate him now, to scorn him immeasurably hereafter. His own weakness will be the measure of your scorn. He has never dared to say to you what I said to you in Paris, what I say now: love me, or I will not see your face again, except as society may compel me to see it in a crowd. Listen, Nadine! I love you, only you; I never thought to love any woman so; but I love you as men did in the old times, and there is nothing I will not surrender to you save my own self-respect. If to meet you, to touch your hand, to hear your voice, I must come and go like a dog in your husband’s house, petted one day, chidden the next, absurd in my own sight and emasculated in the sight of others, I will wrench my love for you out of my life if my life goes with it! Last night I heard someone who did not know him inquire who Geraldine was; someone else answered him, “Oh, that is one of Princess Napraxine’s ensorcelés; she never looks at him, but he is content to follow her shadow.” You know me very little if you believe I would ever let the world speak of me like that. I told you in Paris I would never be the trembling valet of a bloodless Platonism!’
She looked at him, and a gleam of admiration passed into her eyes for a moment; she breathed a trifle more quickly; she thought to herself: ‘He is superb when he looks and speaks like that! C’est un homme celui-là!’
She did not speak, she leaned back amongst her cushions with a little look of expectancy upon her face; the whole thing pleased her, as some admirable piece of acting on the boards of the Théâtre Français pleased at once her eye, her ear, and her taste.
But Othmar was passionately in earnest; all his heart was in his lips, all his passions had found voice. He could scarcely see her for the red mist that swam before his eyes, for the tumult of his senses. He dropped on his knee beside her.
‘Nadine,’ he murmured, as his forehead touched her hand, ‘I have told you what I will not do; let me tell you what I will do. I will do as you say, I will buy some sunlit kingdom far away in the heart of Asia, and I will take you to it and obey every breath of your mouth as my one divine law. I will turn my back on Europe once and for ever; I will let men call me a coward, a fool, an infidel; what they will; I will give all my present and all my future to you and to you alone; all I possess shall only exist to minister to you; I will be your slave, body and mind and will; but only so — only if you give yourself to me as absolutely in return, only if you come with me where nothing of this world which we have known shall pursue us to remind me that you were ever else than mine.’
His forehead burned her hand as it touched her, his voice was passionate in its emotion and eloquence, his heart beat so loudly that it was audible in the stillness around them. For once she was touched, almost awed; for once the electricity of the passion she excited communicated something of its fire and thrill to her. She was silent a few moments, her eyelids closed, her lips parted, she felt a vague pleasure in the contact of this intense and imperious love. He saw upon her delicate features a change of colour, a flicker of emotion, which no one else had ever seen there; but she motioned him farther away from her with that dislike to any concession and that sensitive hauteur which but added to her charm.
She smiled a little, but there was an accent which was almost tenderness in her voice as she said to him: ‘C’est de ne rien perdre de beaucoup prier! You evidently have belief in that saying. It is to ask a very great deal, but then you would give a great deal in your turn. Go away now; I will think. No, I shall not answer you; I want time for thought. Be satisfied that I am not offended, and go. I ought to be so, I suppose
, but I am not. Go.’
‘I may come back?’
His heart beat eagerly and exultantly. He was not refused or dismissed! ‘Château qui parle, femme qui écoutee’ — the old proverb drifted through his thoughts, all confused as they were in a tumult of hope and desire, and triumph and doubt. A moment’s hesitation from her was more concession than a thousand caresses from a humbler woman.
‘I may come back?’ he repeated, as she remained silent.
‘If you like, we shall meet in other places; yes, you may return in a fortnight — at this time — in this room, then I will tell you.’
‘In a fortnight!’ — it seemed to him to be ten years.
‘Be thankful for so much,’ she said, as she gave him the tips of her fingers. ‘Now go. Mahmoud is in the antechamber.’
He kissed her hand with lips that burned like fire, bowed low and obeyed her. Nadine Napraxine remained motionless, her eyes were closed, her mouth smiled; she seemed to dream.
VOLUME II.
CHAPTER XIV.
When her husband and her guests came downstairs at one o’clock, they found the Princess Nadine looking her loveliest.
‘Oh, you lazy people!’ she cried to them. ‘Are you any the better for sleeping like that? Look at me. I have been swimming half an hour; I have dictated twenty letters; I have scolded the gardeners, and I have seen three boxes from Worth unpacked; it is only one o’clock, and I can already feel as good a conscience as Titus. I have already saved my day.’
‘I daresay you have only been doing mischief,’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘I should like to see the letters before I judge of the excellence of your actions.’
‘Anyone might see the letters; they are all orders, or invitations, or refusals of invitations; quite stupid, but very useful; epistolary omnibus horses driven by the secretary. When I had done with them, I had my half hour’s swim. What nonsense the doctors talk about not swimming in winter: the chill of the water is delicious. In summer one always fancies the sea has been boiled. Platon, if you had not gone to bed, you would have seen your friend Othmar. He was here for half an hour.’