by Ouida
‘Othmar!’ exclaimed the Prince. ‘Here at that time of the morning?’
‘He does not want to go to sleep,’ she retorted. ‘He had his chocolate with me, and then rowed himself back to S. Pharamond and Baron Fritz.’
Lady Brancepeth glanced at her.
‘You have certainly done a great deal, Nadine, while we have been only dozing,’ she said drily. The Princess looked at her good-humouredly, with her little dubious smile.
‘There is always something to do if one only look for it. You feel so satisfied with yourself too when you have been useful before one o’clock.’
‘Othmar!’ repeated the Prince. ‘If I had known, I would have come downstairs.’
‘My dear Platon, you would have done nothing of the kind; you would have sworn at your man for disturbing you, and would have turned round and gone to sleep again. Besides, what do you want with Othmar? You do not care about “getting on a good thing,” nor even about suggesting a loan for Odessa.’
‘I like Othmar,’ said Napraxine with perfect sincerity. His wife looked at him, with her little dubious smile. ‘It is always so with them,’ she thought. ‘They always like just the one man of all others —— !’
‘I suppose, if I had done quite what I ought, I should have asked Othmar to “put me on” something,’ she said aloud. ‘It is not every day that one has one of the masters of the world all alone at eight o’clock in the morning.’
‘The masters of the world always find their Cleopatras,’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘At La Jacquemerille, perhaps, as well as in Egypt.’
‘Cleopatra must have been a very stupid woman,’ said Nadine Napraxine, ‘to be able to think of nothing but that asp!’
‘I do not know that it was so very stupid; it was a good réclame. It has sent her name down to us.’
‘Anthony alone would have done that. A woman lives by her lovers. Who would have heard of Héloïse, of Beatrice, of Leonora d’Este? — —’
‘You are very modest for us. Perhaps without the women the men might never have been immortal.’
‘I cannot think why you sent Othmar away,’ repeated Prince Napraxine. ‘I wanted especially to know if they take up the Russian loan — —’
‘I did not send him away, he went,’ replied his wife, with a little smile; ‘and you know he will never allow anyone to talk finance to him.’
‘That is very absurd. He cannot deny that his House lives by finance.’
‘He would certainly never deny it, but he dislikes the fact; you cannot force it on him, my dear Platon, in the course of breakfast chit-chat. I am sure your manners are better than that. Besides, if you did commit such a rudeness, you would get nothing by it. I believe he never tells a falsehood, but he will never tell the truth unless he chooses. And I suppose, too, that financiers are like cabinet ministers — they have a right to lie if they like.’
‘I am sure Othmar does not lie,’ said Napraxine.
‘I dare say he is as truthful as most men of the world. Truth is not a social virtue; tact is a much more amiable quality. Truth says to one, ‘You have not a good feature in your face;’ tact says to one, ‘You have an exquisite expression.’ Perhaps both facts are equally true; but the one only sees what is unpleasant, the other only sees what is agreeable. There can be no question which is the pleasanter companion.’
‘Othmar has admirable tact — —’
‘How your mind runs upon Othmar! Kings generally acquire a great deal of tact from the obligation to say something agreeable to so many strangers all their lives. He is a kind of king in his way. He has learnt the kings’ art of saying a few phrases charmingly with all his thoughts elsewhere. It is creditable to him, for he has no need to be popular, he is so rich.’
‘Ask him to dinner to-morrow or Sunday.’
‘If you wish. But he will not come; he dislikes dinners as much as I do. It is the most barbarous method of seeing one’s friends.’
‘There is no other so genial.’
She rose with a little shrug of her shoulders. She seldom honoured Napraxine by conversing so long with him.
‘Order the horses, Ralph,’ she said to Lord Geraldine; ‘I want a long gallop.’
‘She has had some decisive scene with Othmar,’ thought Lady Brancepeth, ‘and she is out of humour; she always rides like a Don Kossack when she is irritated.’
‘There is no real riding here,’ said the Princess, as she went to put on her habit. ‘One almost loves Russia when one thinks of the way one can ride there; of those green eternal steppes, those illimitable plains, with no limit but the dim grey horizon, your black Ukrane horse, bounding like a deer, flying like a zephyr; it is worth while to remain in Russia to gallop so, on a midsummer night, with not a wall or a fence all the way between you and the Caspian Sea. I think if I were always in Russia I should become such a poet as Maïkoff: those immense distances are inspiration.’
She rode with exquisite grace and spirit; an old Kossack had taught her, as a child, the joys of the saddle, on those lonely and dreamful plains, which had always held since a certain place in her heart. That latent energy and daring, which found no scope in the life of the world, made her find pleasure in the strong stride of the horse beneath her, in the cleaving of the air at topmost speed. The most indolent of mondaines at all other times, when she sprang into the saddle as lightly as a bird on a bough, she was transformed; her slender hands had a grip of steel, her delicate face flushed with pleasure, the fiery soul of her fathers woke in her — of the men who had ridden out with their troopers to hunt down the Persian and the Circassian; who had swept like storm-clouds over those shadowy steppes which she loved; who had had their part or share in all the tragic annals of Russia; who had slain their foes at the steps of the throne, in the holiness of the cloister; who had been amongst those whose swords had found the heart of Cathrine’s son, and whose voices had cried to the people in the winter’s morning, ‘Paul, the son of Peter, is dead; pray for his soul!’ If she were cruel — now and then — was it not in her blood?
Meanwhile Yseulte was helping her foster-mother to pack tea-roses, to go to England for a great ball, in their little hermetically-sealed boxes. The roses were not wholly opened before they were thus shut away from light and air into darkness. They would not wither in their airless cells, but they would pale a little in that dull sad voyage from the sunshine to the frost and fog. As she laid the rosebuds, — pink, white, and pale yellow, — one by one on their beds of moss, she thought for the first time wistfully that her fate was very like theirs; only the rosebuds, perhaps, when they should be taken out of their prisons at their journey’s end, though they would have but a very few hours of life before them, yet would bloom a little, if mournfully, in the northern land, and see the light again, if only for a day. But her life would be shut into silence and darkness for ever; she would not even live the rose’s life ‘l’espace d’un matin.’
CHAPTER XV.
When Othmar went out from her presence, he was more near to happiness than he had been in his whole thirty years of life. He was filled with vivid, palpitating, intoxicated hope. He was passionately in love, and almost he believed himself beloved in return. As much as she had allowed to him she had certainly allowed to no living man. The very force of his passion, which had driven him to scorn the conventional court which he might have paid her in common with so many others — the spaniel’s place of Geraldine, the slave’s place of Boris Seliedoff — rendered him as willing to set no limits to the sacrifices which she should be free to exact from him, and he be proud to make. Only he would never share her, even in nominal union with her lawful lord. He would be all to her, or nothing.
He loathed the conventional adulteries of his time and of his society; he sighed, impatiently for the means to prove that the old fearless, high-handed, single-hearted passion which sees in the whole teeming world only one life, was not dead, but lived in him for her.
He foresaw all the loss of freedom and of fair repute which w
ould be entailed on him by the surrender of his life to her; he knew well that she was a woman who would be no docile companion or unexacting mistress; he knew that there were in her the habits of dominance, the instincts of egotism, and that esprit gouailleur which compelled her, almost despite herself, to jest at what she admired, to ridicule her better emotions, to make a mockery of the very things which were the dearest to her. He did not because he loved her become blind to all that was cold, merciless, and capricious in her nature; he was conscious that she would never lose her own identity in any passion, never surrender her mind, even if she gave her person, to any lover; he knew that she would always remain outside those tropic tempests of love which she aroused and controlled, and which offended her or flattered her, according to the mood in which they found her.
He knew all these things, and was aware that his future would not be one of peace. But he loved her, and agitation, jealousy, suffering beside her would, he felt, be sweeter to him than any repose beside another. Even these defects, these dangers, which he clearly perceived, added to her sorcery for him. It is the mistress who is indifferent who excites the most vehement desires; and, by reason of his great fortunes, women had been always to him so facile, so eager, and so easily won, that the coldness of Nadine Napraxine, which he knew was a thing of temperament, not of affectation, had but the more irresistible power over him. The very sense with which she impressed everyone, himself as well as others, of being no more to be held or relied upon than the snowflake, to which her world likened her, attracted a man who had, from his boyhood, been wearied by the adulation, insistence, and sycophancy of almost all who approached him.
The few days of his probation passed slowly over his head, seeming as though they would never end. He was restless, feverish, and absent of mind; Friederich Othmar, who, contrary to all his usual habits, remained at S. Pharamond, tranquilly ignoring the visible impatience of his host at his unasked presence, was sorely troubled by the alternate exhilaration and anxiety of spirit which all the reserve and self-possession of Othmar himself could not wholly conceal from the penetration of a person accustomed to divine and dive into the innermost recesses of the minds of men.
‘What, in God’s name, is he meditating?’ thought his uncle. ‘Some insanity probably. I should believe he was about to disappear from the world with Madame Napraxine if I were not so persuaded that her pride and her selfishness will never permit her to commit a folly for anyone. Morality is nothing to her, but her position is a great deal; her delight in being insolent will never allow her to lose the power of being so.’
So accurately did this man of the world read a character which baffled most persons by its intricacy and its anomalies.
To Friederich Othmar human nature presented many absurdities but few secrets.
He remained at S. Pharamond, despite his own abhorrence of any place which was not a capital. He passed his mornings in the consideration of his correspondence and his telegraphic despatches, but in the later hours of the day and in the evenings he was that agreeable member of society whom society had known and courted for so many years; and beneath his pleasant subacid wit and his admirable manner his acute penetration was for ever en vedette to penetrate his nephew’s purpose and preoccupation. But a lover, on his guard, will baffle an observer whom the keenest of statesmen would, in vain, seek to deceive or mislead, and the Baron learned nothing of Othmar’s inmost thoughts. Although Othmar and Nadine Napraxine met twice or thrice in his presence at other people’s houses, and once at S. Pharamond itself, where some more choice music was given one evening, the acute blue eyes of the elder man failed to read the understanding which existed between them. All he saw was that she appeared to treat Othmar, before others, with more raillery and more nonchalance than usual. He remarked that Othmar did not seem either hurt or surprised at this.
‘Since he is as much in love with her as ever, he must be aware of some intimacy between them which renders him comparatively insensible to her treatment of him in society,’ thought the sagacity of his uncle, who was alarmed and disquieted by a fact which would have reassured less fine observers — the fact that the master of S. Pharamond did not once, during fifteen days, cross the mile or two of olive-wood, orange orchard, and hanging field which alone separated him from La Jacquemerille.
‘No love is so patient but on some promise,’ he reflected. He knew the romantic turn of Othmar’s character, and he feared its results as others would fear the issue of some mortal or hereditary disease. A week or two previous the ministers then presiding over the fortunes of France had met, at his little house in the Rue du Traktir, the representatives of two great Powers, and in the newspapers of the hour that informal meeting, which had led to many important results, had been called the Unwritten Treaty of Baron Fritz; and yet, at such a moment, instead of being entranced with such influence as such a nickname implied to his House, instead of being occupied with the power, the might, and the mission of the Othmars, which that gathering around the library-table in the Rue du Traktir displayed for the ten thousandth time to the dazzled eyes of suppliant and trembling Europe, Otho himself could only think of a woman with larger eyes and smaller hands than usual, but a woman absolutely useless to him in any ambitions — likely, rather, to be his ruin in all ways!
‘I could understand it were she one of the great political forces of the world. Some women are that, and might so, to us, be of very high value,’ thought Friederich Othmar, ‘but Madame Napraxine is as indifferent to all political movement as if she were made of the ivory and mother-of-pearl which her skin resembles. If she be anything, she is that horrible thing a Nihilist, only because Nihilism embodies an endless and irreconcilable discontent, which finds in her some secret corner of vague sympathy. But for politics in our meaning of the word she has the most complete contempt. What did she say to me the other day? “I am a diplomatist’s daughter. I have seen the strings of all your puppets. I cannot accept a Polichinelle for a Richelieu, as you all do.” And she declared that if there were no statesmen at all, and no journalists, life would go smoothly; everybody would attend to their own affairs, the world would be quiet, and there would be no wars. What but disaster can such a woman with such views bring into the life of Otho, already paralysed as it is by poco-curantism?’
He asked the question of himself in his own meditations, and could give himself no answer save one which grieved and alarmed him.
Othmar himself bestowed on his guest but little thought except a passing impatience that his uncle should have taken that moment, of all others, to instal himself at S. Pharamond.
He had not the cynicism nor the insouciance of the woman he adored. He did not attempt any sophisms with his own conscience. He knew that to do a man dishonour was to do him a violence unkinder, and perhaps even in a way baser, than to take his life. But he was ready to pledge himself to that which, unlike her, he still considered was a sin. He was entirely mastered by a force of passion which she could have understood by the subtlety of her intelligence, but was not likely ever to share by any fibre of her nature. He was lost in that whirlpool of emotion, anticipation, and fear which carried his inner life away on it, although his outer life remained in appearance calm enough for no eyes save those of the Baron to penetrate the disguise of his serenity.
Yseulte he had forgotten.
The simple and innocent tenderness which she had momentarily aroused in him could not hold its place beside the overwhelming passion which governed him, more than a slender soft-eyed dove can dispute possession with the fierce, strong-pinioned falcon. Once or twice he saw her and spoke to her with kindness, but his thoughts were far away from her, and he did not linger beside her, although each time he chanced to meet her on the way to her foster-mother’s, in lonely lovely country paths, which might well have tempted him to tarry.
On the thirteenth day of his probation, the priest’s gown which, to please her, he had ordered for the church of S. Pharamond, arrived at the château, and, his attention being d
rawn to it by his servants, he remembered his promise to her. It was the last day of the year. A passing remembrance of pity came over him as he thought of her; she was so entirely alone, and she would go to the life of the cloister; a fancy came to him to do some little thing to give her pleasure; a mere evanescent breath of innocent impulse, which passed like the cool breeze of an April day, sweet with scent of field flowers, across the heated atmosphere of desire and expectation in which his soul was then living. Conventional etiquette had seldom troubled him greatly; he had always enjoyed something of that sense which princes have, that whatever he did the world would condone. A man of the exceptional power which he possessed can always exercise on his contemporaries more or less of his own will. Whatever he might have done no one would have said of him anything more severe than that he was singular.
When he went into Nice that day he chanced to see a very pretty thing, modern, but admirable in taste and execution, a casket of ivory mounted on silver, with a little angel in silver on the summit. On its sides were painted in delicate miniatures reproductions of Fra Angelico and Botticelli. It was signed by a famous miniaturist, and cost ten thousand francs. Othmar, to whom the price seemed no more than ten centimes, bought it at once.
‘It will please her,’ he thought. ‘It shall go to her with the soutane;’ and he sent it with the vestment to Millo, addressed to Mademoiselle de Valogne. His knowledge of etiquette told him that he ought to send it, if he sent it at all, through the Duchesse; but he did not choose to obey etiquette; he had discarded social rules, more or less, all his life, according to his inclination, and people had not resented his rebellion simply because he was who he was. He utterly disobeyed etiquette now, and sent his present direct to Yseulte very early on the morning of the New Year.