by Ouida
‘Why?’ she repeated, with the same serenity, and with a kind of indulgence as to a wayward, imperious child. ‘Oh, for so many reasons! — not at all, believe me, from any kind of hesitation about Platon; he would do very well without me, though he would try to kill you, I suppose, because men have such odd ideas; besides they are always fretting about what the world thinks, just as when they play billiards they think about the opinion of the galerie; no, not for that, believe me; that is not my kind of feeling at all; but I have thought over it all very much, and I have decided that it would not do — for me. I should be irritable and unhappy in a false position, because I should have lost the power to shut my doors, other people would shut theirs instead; I should be quite miserable if I could not be disagreeable to persons whom I did not care to know, and no one in a false position ever dares be that; they smile, poor creatures, perpetually, like so many wax dolls from Giroux’s. Of course the moral people say it is the loss of self-respect which makes them so anxious to please, but it is not that: it is really the sense that it is of no use for them to be rude any more, because their rudeness cannot vex anybody. I quite understand Marie Antoinette; I should not mind the scaffold in the least, but I should dislike going in the cart. “Le roi avait une charrette,” you remember.’
Othmar had risen; as she glanced up at him, even over her calm and courageous temperament, a little chill passed that was almost one of alarm. Yet her sense of pleasure was keener than her fear: men’s souls were the chosen instrument on which she chose to play; if here she struck some deeper chords than usual, the melody gained for her ear. Profound emotions and eager passions were unknown to her in her own person, but they constituted a spectacle which diverted her if it did not weary her — the chances depended upon her mood. At this moment they pleased her; pleased her the more for that thrill of alarm, which was so new to her nerves.
Othmar did not speak: all the strength which was in him was taxed to its breaking point in the effort to restrain the passionate reproaches and entreaties which sprang to his lips, the burning tears of bitter disillusion and cruel disappointment which rushed to his sight and oppressed his breath. What a fool, what a madman, he had been again to throw down his heart like a naked, trembling, panting thing at her feet to be played with by her.
‘How well he looks like that!’ she thought. ‘ Most men grow red when they are so angry, but he grows like marble, and his eyes burn — there are great tears in them — he looks like Mounet-Sully as Hippolytus.’
Once more the momentary inclination came over her to trust herself to that stormy force of love which might lead to shipwreck and might lead to paradise; there were a beauty, a force, a fascination for her about him as he stood there in his silent rage, his eyes pouring down on her the lightnings of his reproach; but the impulse was not strong enough to conquer her; the world she would have given up with contemptuous indifference, but she would not surrender her own power to dictate to the world.
Her soft tranquil voice went on, as a waterfall may gently murmur its silvery song while a tempest shakes the skies.
‘I know you think that love is enough, but I assure you I should doubt it, even if I did — love you. Rousseau has said long before us that love lacks two things, — permanence and immutability; they seem to me synonymous, and I do not think that their absence is a defect; I think it even a merit. Yet, as they are absent, it cannot be worth while to pay so very much for so very defective a thing.’
‘God forgive you!’ cried her lover in passionate pain. ‘You betray me with the cruelest jest that woman ever played off on man, and you think that I can stand still to hearken to the pretty tinkling bells of a drawing-room philosophy!’
‘You do not stand still,’ she answered languidly, ‘you walk to and fro like a wounded panther in a cage. I have in no way betrayed you, and I am not jesting at all. I am saying the very simplest truth. You have asked me to do a momentous and irrevocable thing; and I have answered you truthfully that I should not shrink from it if I were convinced that I should never regret it. But I am not convinced — —’
‘If you loved me you would be so!’ he said in a voice which was choked and almost inaudible.
‘Ah! — if!’ said Nadine Napraxine with a smile and a little sigh. ‘The whole secret lies in that one conjunction!’
His teeth clenched as he heard her as if in the intolerable pain of some mortal wound.
‘Besides, besides,’ she murmured, half to herself and half to him, ‘my dear Othmar, you are charming. You are like no one else; you please me; I confess that you please me, but you could not ensure me against my own unfortunate capacity for very soon tiring of everybody, and, — I have a conviction that in three months’ time I should be tired of you!’
A strong shudder passed over him from head to foot, as the words struck him with a greater shock than the blow of a dagger in his side would have given. He realised the bottomless gulf which separated him from the woman he adored, — the chasm of her own absolute indifference.
He, in his exaltation, was ready to give up all his future and fling away all his honour for her sake, and would have asked nothing more of earth and heaven than to have passed life and eternity at her feet; and she, swayed momentarily towards him by a faint impulse of the senses and the sensibilities, yet could draw back and calmly look outward into that vision of the possible future, which dazzled him as the mirage blinds and mocks the desert-pilgrim dying of thirst; she, with chill prescience could foresee the time when his presence would become to her a weariness, a chain, a yoke-fellow tiresome and dull!
She looked at him with a momentary compassion.
‘Dear Othmar, I am quite sure you have meant all you said,’ she murmured softly. ‘But, believe me, it would not do; it would not do for you and me, if it might for some people. I am not in the least shocked. I think your idea quite beautiful, like a poem; but I am certain it would never suit myself. I tire of everything so quickly, and then you know I am not in love with you. One wants to be so much in love to do that sort of thing, we should bore one another so infinitely after the first week. Yes, I am sure we should, though I know you are quite sincere in saying you would like it.’
Then, still with that demure, satisfied, amused smile, she turned away and lifted up the Moorish chocolate pot and poured out a little chocolate into her cup.
‘It has grown cold,’ she said, and tinkled a hand-bell which was on the tray to summon Mahmoud.
Othmar, who had sprung to his feet and stood erect, seized her wrist in his fingers and threw the bell aside.
‘There is no need to dismiss me,’ he said in a low tone. ‘Adieu! You can tell the story to Lord Geraldine.’
His face was quite colourless, except that around his forehead there was a dusky red mark where the blood had surged and settled as though he had been struck there with a whip.
He bowed low, and left her.
She stood before the Moorish tray and its contents with a sense of cold at her heart, but her little self-satisfied smile was still on her mouth.
‘He will come back,’ she thought. ‘He came back before; they always come back.’
She did not intend to go with him to Asia, but she did not, either, intend to lose him altogether.
‘He was superb in his fury and his grief,’ she thought, ‘and he meant every word of it, and he would do all that he said, more than he said. Perhaps it hurt him too much, perhaps I laughed a little too soon.’
She was like the child who had found its living bird the best of all playthings, but had forgotten that its plaything, being alive, could also die, and so had nipped the new toy too cruelly in careless little fingers, and had killed it.
CHAPTER XVII.
Othmar, as he left La Jacquemerille, forgot the boat in which he had come thither. He walked mechanically through the house, and out by the first gate which he saw before him. He was in that state of febrile excitation in which the limbs move without the will in an instinctive effort to find outlet
to mental pain in bodily exertion. The gate he had passed through opened into a little wood of pines, whence a narrow path led upward into the hills above. With little consciousness of what he did, he ascended the mule-road which rose before him, and the chill of the morning air, as it blew through the tops of the swaying pines, was welcome to him. He had that cruel wound within him which a proud man suffers from when he has disclosed the innermost secrets of his heart in a rare moment of impulse, and has seen them lightly and contemptuously played with for a jest.
He had gone through life receiving much adulation but little sympathy, and giving as little confidence; in a moral isolation due to the delicacy of his own nature and to the flattery he received, which had early made him withhold himself from intimate friendships, fearing to trust where he would be only duped.
To her, in an unguarded hour, he had shown the loneliness and the longing which he felt, he had disclosed the empty place which no powers or vanities of the world could fill; he had staked the whole of his peace on the caprice of one woman, and he knew that, in the rough phrase which men would have used to him, he had been made a fool of in return; he had betrayed himself, and had nothing in return but the memory of a little low laughter, of a tranquil voice, saying: ‘Tout cela c’est le vieux jeu!’
He never knew very well how that day of the 2nd of January passed with him. He was sensible of walking long, of climbing steep paths going towards the higher mountains, of drinking thirstily at a little woodland fountain, of sitting for hours quite motionless, looking down on the shore far below, where the blue sea spread in the sunlight, and the towers of S. Pharamond were mere grey points amidst a crowd of evergreen and of silvery-leafed trees.
There was an irony in the sense that he could have purchased the whole province which lay beneath his feet, could have bought out the princeling who reigned in that little kingdom under old Turbia, as easily as he could have bought a bouquet for a woman, could have set emperors to war with one another by merely casting his gold into the scales of peace, could have created a city in a barren plain with as little effort as a child builds up a toy village on a table, and yet was powerless to command, or to arouse, the only thing on earth which he desired, one whit of feeling in the woman he loved!
It was late in the afternoon when he took his way homeward, having eaten nothing, only drunk thirstily of water wherever a little brook had made a well amongst the tufts of hepatica in the pine woods. He was a man capable of a spiritual love; if she had remained aloof from him for honour’s sake, but had cared for him, he would not have demurred to her choice, but would have accepted his fate at her hands and would have served her loyally with the devotion of a chivalrous nature.
All the passion, the pain, as of a boy’s first love, blent in him with the bitter revolts of mature manhood. He believed that Nadine Napraxine had never intended more than to amuse herself with his rejection; he believed that for the second time he had been the toy of an unscrupulous coquette. Whatever fault there might be in his love for her, it was love — absolute, strong, faithful, and capable of an eternal loyalty; he had laid his heart bare before her, and had meant in their utmost meaning all the words which he had uttered, all the offers which he had made. Despite his knowledge of her, he had allowed himself to be beguiled into a second confession of the empire she possessed over him, and for the second time he had been not alone rejected, but gently ridiculed with that quiet amused irony which had been to the force and heat of his passion like a fine spray of ice-cold water falling on iron at a white-heat. She had not alone wounded and stung him: she had humiliated him profoundly. If she had rejected him from honour, duty, or love for any other, he would have borne what men have borne a thousand times in silence, and with no sense of shame; but he was conscious that in her absolute indifference she had drawn him on to the fullest revelation of all he felt for her, only that her ready satire might find food in his folly, and her fine wit play with his suffering, as the angler plays the trout. She seemed to him to have betrayed him in the basest manner that a woman could betray a man who had no positive right to her loyalty. She had known so well how he loved her. He had told her so many times; unless she had been willing to hear the tale again, why had she bidden him come there in that charmed solitude in the hush and freshness of the early morning? When women desire not love, do they seat their lover beside them when all the world sleeps? He had been cheated, laughed at, summoned, and then dismissed; his whole frame thrilled with humiliation when he recalled the smiling subdued mockery of her voice as she had dismissed him.
He had been willing to give her his life, his good repute, his peace, his honour, his very soul; and she had sent him away with the calm, cool, little phrases with which she would have rejected a clumsy valser for a cotillon!
He had little vanity, but he knew himself to be one of those to whom the world cringes; one of those of whom modern life has made its Cæsars; he knew that what he had been willing to surrender to her had been no little thing; that he would have said farewell to the whole of mankind for her sake, and would have loved her with the romantic devoted force and fealty of a franker and fiercer time than his own; and she had drawn him on to again confess this, again offer this, and all it had seemed to her was vieux jeu, an archaic thing to laugh at, to yawn at, to be indulgent to, and tired by, in a breath!
He was a very proud man, and a man who had seldom or never shown what he either desired or suffered, yet he had laid his whole heart bare to her; and she, the only living being who had either power over him, or real knowledge of him, had looked at him with her little cool smile, and said, ‘In three months I should be tired of you.’
If, when the knight had killed his falcon for his lady, she had scoffed at it and thrown it out to feed the rats and sparrows he would have suffered as Othmar suffered now. He had killed his honour and his pride for her sake, and she had held them in her hands for a moment, and then had laughed a little and had thrown them away.
Where he sat all alone he felt his cheeks burn with the sense of an unendurable mortification. At this moment, for aught he knew, she, with her admirable mimicry and her merciless sarcasm, might be reacting the scene for the diversion of her companions! Passion was but vieux jeu; it could expect no higher distinction than to be ridiculed as comedy by a witty woman. Did not the universe only exist to amuse the languor of Nadine Napraxine?
The world, had it heard the story, would have blamed him for an unholy love, and praised her for her dismissal of it; but he knew that he had been as utterly betrayed as though he had been sold by her into the hands of assassins. She had drawn him on, and on, and on, until all his life had been laid at her feet, and then she had looked at it a little, carelessly, idly, and had said she had no use for it, as she might have said so of any sea-waste washed up on the sea-steps of her terrace with that noon.
Of course the world would have praised her; no doubt the world would have blamed him; but he knew that women who slay their lovers after loving them do a coarser but a kinder thing.
It was almost dark as he descended the road to S. Pharamond, intending when he reached home to make some excuse to his uncle and leave for Paris by the night express or by a special train. The path he took led through the orange-wood of Sandroz, which fitted, in a triangular-shaped piece of ground, between the boundaries of his own land and that of Millo. Absorbed as he was in his own thoughts, he recognised with surprise the figure of Yseulte as he pushed his way under the low boughs of the orange trees, and saw her within a yard of him. She was with the woman Nicole.
She did not see him until he was close to her, where she sat on a low stone wall, the woman standing in front of her. When she did so, her face spoke for her; it said what Nadine Napraxine’s had never said. The emotion of joy and timidity mingled touched him keenly in that moment, when he, with his millions of gold and of friends, had so strongly realised his own loneliness.
‘She loves me as much as she dare — as much as she can, without being conscious of it,’ he
thought, as he paused beside her. She did not speak, she did not move; but her colour changed and her breath came quickly. She had slipped off the wall and stood irresolute, as though inclined to run away, the glossy leaves and the starry blossoms of the trees consecrated to virginity were all above her and around her. She glanced at him with an indefinite fear; she fancied he was angered by the return of the casket; he looked paler and sterner than she had ever seen him look.
He paused a moment and said some commonplace word.
Then he saw that her eyes were wet with tears, and that she had been crying.
‘What is the matter?’ he said, gently. ‘Has anything vexed you?’
‘They are sending her away,’ said Nicole Sandroz, with indignant tears in her own eyes, finding that she did not reply for herself. ‘They are sending her to the Vosges, where, as Monsieur knows very well, I make no doubt, the very hares and wolves are frozen in the woods at this month of the year.’
‘Are you indeed going away?’ he asked of Yseulte herself.
She did not speak: she made a little affirmative gesture.
‘Why is that? Bois le Roy, in this season, will be a cruel prison for you.’
‘My cousin wishes it,’ said the girl; she spoke with effort; she did not wish to cry before him; the memory of all that her cousin had said that morning was with her in merciless distinctness.
Nicole broke out in a torrent of speech, accusing the tyrants of Millo in impassioned and immoderate language, and devoting them and theirs to untold miseries in retribution.
Yseulte stopped her with authority; ‘You are wrong, Nicole; do not speak in such a manner, it is insolent. You forget that, whether I am in the Vosges or here, I equally owe my cousin everything.’