by Ouida
She paused; she was no more than a child. Her departure was very cruel to her; she had been humiliated and chastised that day beyond her power of patience; she had said nothing, done nothing, but in her heart she had rebelled passionately when they had taken away her ivory casket. They had left her the heart of a woman in its stead.
Othmar was ignorant that his casket, fateful as Pandora’s, had been returned, but he divined that his gift had displeased those who disposed of her destiny, and had brought about directly or indirectly her exile from Millo.
‘When do you go?’ he asked abruptly.
‘To-morrow.’
As she answered him the tears she could not altogether restrain rolled off her lashes. She turned away.
‘Let us go in, Nicole,’ she murmured. ‘You know Henriette is waiting for me.’
‘Let her wait, the cockered-up Parisienne, who shrieks if she see a pig and has hysterics if she get a spot of mud on her stockings!’ grumbled Nicole, who was the sworn foe of the whole Paris-born and Paris-bred household of Millo. But Yseulte had already moved towards the house. When she had gone a few yards away, however, she paused, returned, and approached Othmar. She looked on the ground, and her voice trembled as she spoke: ‘I ought to thank you, M. Othmar — I do thank you. It was very beautiful. I would have kept it all my life.’
‘Ah!’ said Othmar.
He understood; he was moved to a sudden anger, which penetrated even his intense preoccupation. He had meant to do this poor child a kindness, and he had only done her great harm.
Yseulte had turned away, and had gone rapidly through the orange-trees towards the house.
‘She is not happy?’ said Othmar to her foster-mother, whose tongue, once loosed, told him with the eloquence of indignation of all the sorrows suffered by her nursling. ‘And they will make her a nun, Monsieur!’ she cried; ‘a nun! That child, who is like a June lily. For me, I say nothing against the black and grey women, though Sandroz calls them bad names. There are good women amongst them, and when one lies sick in hospital one is glad of them; but there are women enough in this world who have sins and shame to repent them of to fill all the convents from here to Jerusalem. There are all the ugly ones too, and the sickly ones and the deformed ones, and the heart-broken; for them it is all very well; the cloister is home, the veil is peace, they must think of heaven, or go mad; it is best they should think of it. But this child to be a nun! — when she should be running with her own children through the daisies — when she should be playing in the sunshine like the lambs, like the kids, like the pigeons!’ ——
Othmar heard her to the end; then without answer he bade her good-day, and descended the sloping grass towards his house.
‘They say he has a million a year,’ said Nicole to herself, as she looked after him. ‘Well, he does not seem to be happy upon it. The lads that bring up the rags on their heads from the ships look gayer than he, all in the stench and the muck as they are, and never knowing that they will earn their bread and wine from one day to another.’
She kicked a stone from her path, and hurried after her nursling.
Othmar went quickly on to his own woods. ‘They could not even let her have that toy,’ he thought with an emotion, vague but sincere, outside the conflict of passion, wrath, and mortification which Nadine Napraxine had aroused in him. He saw the sudden happiness, so soon veiled beneath reserve and timidity, which had shone on the girl’s face as she had first seen him under the orange boughs. He saw her beautiful golden eyes misty with the tears she had had too much courage to shed; he saw her slender throat swell with subdued emotion as she had approached him and said shyly, ‘I would have kept it all my life.’
All her life, — in the stone cell of some house of the Daughters of Christ or the Sisters of St. Marie!
‘To love is more, yet to be loved is something,’
he thought. ‘What treasures for one’s heart and senses are in her — if one could only care!’
CHAPTER XVIII.
When he reached home that evening he found on his writing-table the ivory casket and the letter of Madame de Vannes. In the pain and the passion which wrestled together against his manhood in him, he scarcely heeded either, yet they brought before his memory the face of Yseulte, and the sound of her soft grave voice with that sweet thrill of youth in it which is like the thrill of the thrush’s in the woods at spring-time. She had youth, but she would have no spring-time.
And in the strong and impotent rage which consumed him, in the pain of bruised and aching nerves, and the sickening void which the certain loss of what alone is loved brings with it, Othmar, seeing the ivory casket, and glancing at the letter which he had had no patience to read through, thought to himself, ‘The child loves me; she will have a wretched life; what if I try to forget? They threw virgins to the Minotaur. Shall I try to appease with one this cruel fire of love, which leaves me no peace or wisdom?’
It was the act of a madman to attempt to make one woman take the place of another to the senses or to the heart, but in that moment he was not master of himself. He was only sensible of a cruel insult which he had received from the hand he loved best on earth; of a cruel betrayal which was but the more merciless because wrought with so sweet a smile, so apparent an unconsciousness, so seemingly innocent a malice.
He passed the night and the next morning locked in his own room; when he left it, and met the Baron Friederich, he said to him:
‘I have thought over all you said the other day. You are right, no doubt. Will you go across to our neighbours at Millo and ask of them the honour of the hand of their cousin, of Mademoiselle de Valogne?’
The Baron stared at him with a little cry of amaze.
‘For you?’ he stammered.
‘For me,’ said Othmar. ‘What have you said yourself? I do not want wealth; I want good blood, beauty, and innocence; they are all possessed by Mademoiselle de Valogne. Go; your errand will please them. They will pardon some breach of etiquette. It will be a mission which you will like.’
As the Baron, a little later, rolled through the gates of Millo in full state, his shrewd knowledge of men and their madnesses made him think:
‘So the Princess Napraxine evidently will have nothing to say to him! A la bonne heure! There are some honest women left then amongst the great ladies. She could so easily have ruined him! He takes a droll way to cure himself, but it is not a bad one. The worst is, that this sort of cure never lasts long, and when she can make the unhappiness of two persons, instead of only the happiness of one, perhaps Madame la Princesse will be tempted to make it!’
CHAPTER XIX.
On the following day Platon Napraxine drove home from Monte Carlo at sunset with a piece of news to carry there which amused and unusually animated him.
He went up the stone stairs of the terrace of La Jacquemerille with the quick step of one who is eager to deliver himself of his tidings, and approached, with a rapidity unfrequent with him, the spot where his wife sat with her guests under the rose and white awning beside the marble balustrade and the variegated aloes.
The Princess Nadine was also full of unwonted animation; her cheek had its sea-shell flush, her eyes a vague and pleased expectancy; she was laughing a little and listening a good deal; besides her usual companions, she had there a group of Austrian and Russian diplomatists and some Parisian boulevardiers. They were just taking their leave as she was taking her tea, but it was not very greatly of them that she was thinking: she was thinking as she heard the roll of her husband’s carriage wheels beneath the carouba trees; — — ‘Ten to one Othmar will return with him.’
She lost her gay expression as she saw that he was alone.
All the day she had expected the man whom she had banished to return. She was accustomed to spaniels who crawled humbly up after a beating to solicit another beating rather than remain unnoticed. She had dismissed a certain apprehension which had told her that she had gone too far with the reflection that a man who loved her once did
so for ever, and that, as he had returned from Asia, so he would return this morning, however great his offence or his humiliation might have been.
‘He is more romantic than most,’ she had thought, ‘but after all, he must be made of the same stuff.’
Napraxine approached her hurriedly, and scarcely giving himself time to formally greet the gentlemen there, cried to her aloud:
‘Ecoutez donc, Madame! You will never guess what has happened.’
‘It is of no use for us to try then,’ said his wife. ‘You are evidently gonflé with some tremendous intelligence. Pray unburden yourself. Perhaps the societies for the protection of animals have had Strasburg pâtés made illegal?’
‘I have seen the Duchesse, I have seen Baron Fritz, I have seen Melville,’ answered her husband impetuously and triumphantly, ‘and they all say the same thing, so that there cannot be a doubt that it is true. Othmar marries that little cousin of Cri-Cri: the one of whom they meant to make a nun. What luck for her! But they say she is very beautiful, and only sixteen.’
The people assembled round her table raised a chorus of exclamation and of comment. Napraxine stood amidst them, delighted; his little social bomb had burst with the brilliancy and the noise that he had anticipated.
Nadine Napraxine turned her head with an involuntary movement of surprise.
‘Othmar!’ she repeated; her large black eyes opened fully with a perplexed expression.
‘It must be the girl who was in the boat,’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘She was very handsome.’
Geraldine looked at Madame Napraxine with curiosity, eagerness, and gratification.
‘Who told you, Platon?’ she asked, with a certain impatience in her voice.
‘Three of them told me; Melville first, then Cri-Cri herself, in the Salle de Jeu. She did not seem to know whether to be affronted or pleased. She said the whole thing was a great surprise, but that she could not refuse Othmar; she declared that her projects were all upset, that her young cousin had been always destined to the religious life; that she regretted to have her turned from her vocation; in short, she talked a great deal of nonsense, but the upshot of it all was that Baron Fritz had made formal proposals, and that she had accepted them. In the gardens, coming away, I met the Baron himself; he was in a state of ecstasy; all he cares for is the perpetuation of the name of Othmar; but he declares that Mademoiselle de Valogne is everything he could desire, that she was excessively timid, and scarcely spoke a word when they allowed him to see her for five minutes, but that it was a very graceful timidity, and full of feeling.’
‘Baron Fritz in the operatic rôle of Padrone d’Amore is infinitely droll,’ said Nadine, with a little cold laugh.
‘Of course Othmar was obliged to marry some time,’ continued Napraxine, who did not easily abandon a subject when one pleased him. ‘And he is — how old is he? — I saw the Baron as I left; he is delighted. He says the poor child fainted when they told her she was to be saved from a religious life.’
‘My dear Platon,’ said his wife impatiently, ‘ we can read Daudet or Henri Greville when we want this sort of thing. Pray, spare us. I hope Baron Fritz explained to her that all she is wanted for is to continue a race of Croatian money-lenders which he considers the pivot of the world. If she fail in doing that he will counsel a divorce, à la Bonaparte.’
‘He might marry an archduchess,’ said one of the diplomatists. ‘Surely, it is throwing himself away.’
‘It must be for love,’ said Geraldine, with an ironical smile.
‘The de Valogne was a great race, but impoverished long ago,’ said a Russian minister. ‘ I think, if he had married at all, he should have made an alliance which would have brought him that unassailably great rank which is usually the ambition of all financiers. For a man of his position to make a mere romantic mariage d’amour is absurd — out of place; — and who knows if it be even that?’ he pursued, with an involuntary glance at the Princess Napraxine.
‘Why on earth should we doubt it?’ said her husband. ‘It cannot be anything else, and they say the girl is quite beautiful. Surely, if anyone can afford to marry to please himself, that one is Othmar.’
‘At any rate, it is his own affair,’ said Nadine, in a voice which was clear and sweet, but cold as steel. ‘I cannot see why we should occupy ourselves about it, or why you should have announced it as if it were the dissolution of the world.’
‘Mademoiselle de Valogne is very beautiful,’ said Geraldine, ‘I have seen her once at Millo. Why should they pretend to hesitate?’
‘They hesitated because she is vouée à Marie,’ replied Napraxine, ‘and also the de Vannes and the de Creusac scarcely recognise the princes of finance as their equals. Still the marriage is magnificent; they felt they had no right to regret it since it fell to them from heaven.’
‘Do you still believe, Platon, that heaven has anything to do with marriage?’ said his wife, with her little significant smile; a slight colour had come upon her cheeks, tinging them as blush-roses are tinged with the faintest flush; her eyes retained their astonished and annoyed expression, of which her husband saw nothing.
‘Heaven made mine at least,’ he said, with his unfailing good-humour, and a bow in which there was some grace.
‘Louis Quatorze could not have answered better,’ said Nadine. ‘I cannot say I see the hand of heaven myself in it, but if you do, so much the better. “Les illusions sont des zéros, mais c’est avec les zéros qu’on fait les beaux chiffres.”’
‘I do not know whether Mademoiselle de Valogne has illusions, but her settlements will certainly have de beaux chiffres,’ continued Napraxine, who was still full of the tidings he had brought. ‘Did Othmar say nothing to you the other morning of what he intended to do?’
‘Nothing; why should he? I am no relation of his or of Mademoiselle de Valogne.’
‘He might have done so; he was a long time alone with you. Perhaps he did not know it himself.’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘It seems a coup de tête. Madame de Vannes told me that he had only seen her cousin four times.’
‘That is three times more than is necessary.’
‘They say the girl is very much in love with him, and burst into tears when they told her of his proposals.’
‘Oh, my dear Platon! That the girl marries Othmar one understands; she would be an imbecile, a lunatic, to refuse; but that she weeps because she will enjoy one of the hugest fortunes in Europe — do not make such demands on our credulity!’
‘They say their acquaintance has been an idyl; quite hors d’usage; they both met in his gardens by chance, and he — —’
‘Chance? I thought it was heaven? You may be quite sure neither had anything to do with it. Aurore is a very clever woman; she knew very well what she did when she brought her cousin down to Millo this winter; if the girl had been honestly vouée à Marie, would they have had her in the drawing-room after their dinner-parties? Ralph says he has seen her there.’
‘Well, if it were a conspiracy, it has succeeded.’
‘Of course it has succeeded. When women condescend to conspire, men always fall. Our Russian history will show you that.’
Being, however, an obstinate man, who always adhered to his own opinion, even in trifles which in no way concerned him, Napraxine reiterated that Baron Fritz had expressed himself satisfied that the girl was in love with his nephew.
‘And why not?’ he said stoutly, with more courage than he usually showed. ‘Most women would soon care for Othmar if he wished them to do so.’
‘Oh, grand dada!’ murmured Nadine, in supreme disdain, whilst her eyes glanced over him for a moment with an expression which, had he been wise enough to read it, would have made him less eager to extol the absent.
‘After all,’ she said aloud, ‘what is his marriage to us, that we should talk about it? I suppose it is the sole act of his life which would have no effect on the Bourses. We get into very base habits of discussing our neighbours’
affairs. Let us say, once for all, that he has done a very charitable action, and that we hope it will have a happy result: e basta! We will call at Millo to-morrow. I am curious to see the future Countess Othmar.’
‘They say she is very shy.’
‘Oh, we all know Ste. Mousseline,’ said Nadine Napraxine, with scorn. ‘Besides, convent-reared girls are all of the same type. I only hope Cri-Cri will not assume any hypocritical airs of regret before me; the only regret she can really have is that Blanchette was not old enough to have won this matrimonial Derby.’
‘You always speak so slightingly of Othmar,’ said Napraxine, with some reproach.
‘I really thought I paid him a high compliment,’ said his wife.
‘Why has he done it?’ said one of the Russian diplomatists to another, when they had taken leave of the Princess and her party.
‘I imagine that Madame Napraxine piqued him,’ said another. ‘You know he has been madly in love with her for two years.’
‘She does not seem to like his marriage.’
‘They never like it,’ returned the Russian minister. ‘They may not look at you themselves, but they never like you to look at any one else.’
‘If he marry her because he is in love elsewhere, and if she have the Princess Nadine for an enemy at the onset, this poor child’s path will not be of roses.’
‘She will be almost the richest woman in Europe; that must suffice.’
‘That will depend on her character.’
‘It will depend a little on whether she will be in love with her husband. If she be not, all may go smoothly.’
‘Do you know what I thought as I looked at Madame Napraxine just now?’ said the younger man. ‘I thought of that Persian or Indian tale where the woman, leaning over the magic cup, dropped a pearl from her necklace into it, and spoilt the whole charm for all eternity. I dare say it will be only a pearl which she will drop into Othmar’s future life, but it will spoil the whole charm of it for ever and ever.’