by Ouida
‘You never liked her,’ said the elder man. ‘She is a woman capable of an infinitude of things, good and bad. She has the misfortune to have a very excellent and very stupid husband. There is nothing so injurious for a clever woman. A bad man who had ill-treated her would not have done her half as much harm. She would have had courage and energy to meet an unhappy fate superbly. But a perfectly amiable fool whom she disdains from all the height of her own admirable wit, coupled with the habits of our idiotic world, which is like a mountain of wool steeped in opium, into which the strongest sinks indolent and enfeebled, have all tended to confirm her in her egotism and her disdain, and to send to sleep all her more noble impulses. Whatever men may be, women can only be “saved by faith,” and what faith has Nadine Napraxine except her perfect faith in her own irresistible and incomparable power over her innumerable lovers?’
‘Well,’ said the younger man, ‘if she chose to drop that pearl in, as I said, I would not give much for the chances of Othmar’s wife against her. I have seen the girl. She is very lovely, serious, simple; no match at all against such a woman as Princess Napraxine.’
‘She will have the advantage of youth, and also — which, perhaps, will count for something with such a man as Othmar, though it would not with most men — she will be his wife.’
‘Perhaps. He has been always eccentric,’ rejoined the other.
Watching her with all the keen anxiety of jealousy Geraldine had been unable to discover that the intelligence of Othmar’s marriage caused her any more surprise or interest than any other of the hundred and one items of news which make up the daily pabulum of society. But then he knew very well that she was of such a character that though she might have suffered intolerably she would have shown no sign of it any more than she would have shown any fear had a dozen naked sabres been at her breast.
Left alone beside his sister for a moment, he said to her, with doubting impatience: ‘Does she care, do you think?’
‘What affair is it of yours if she does?’ returned Lady Brancepeth. ‘Does she ever care for anything? And why should she care here? Othmar has been known to be violently in love with her — as you are — but no one has ever had the slightest reason to suppose that she had any feeling in return for him. He does a foolish thing in marrying one woman while he loves another. Some men have faith in that cure. Myself I should have none. But whatever his reasons for this sudden choice of Mdlle. de Valogne, I imagine that his marriage is a matter of as perfect indifference to Nadine as your own would be.’
Geraldine grew red, and his mortification kept him silent. But the insight of a man in love told him that his keen-eyed sister was for once in error.
Nadine Napraxine herself had gone to her own rooms to change her gown for dinner, but she dismissed her maids for twenty minutes and threw herself on a couch in her bedroom. She was herself uncertain what she felt, and angered that she should feel anything. She was conscious of a sense of offence, irritation, amazement, almost chagrin, which hurt her pride and alarmed her dignity. If a month before she had been told that Othmar was dead, she would have felt no more than a momentary regret. But the strength of his passion in the morning interviews with her had touched some fibre, some nerve in her, which had been dumb and numb before. Again and again she had recalled the accents of his voice, the sombre fire and pathetic entreaty of his eyes; they had not moved her at the time to anything more than the vague artistic pleasure which she would have taken in any emotion admirably rendered in art or on the stage, but in remembrance they had haunted her and thrilled through her with something more nearly resembling response than had ever been aroused in her.
The expectation of his return had been as strong as certainty; the sense that she had gone too far with him had heightened the interest with which she had awaited her next meeting with him. One of the greatest triumphs of her fascination had been the power she had exercised over him. She was the only living person who could say to this man, who could have purchased souls and bodies as he could have purchased strings of unpierced pearls if he had chosen: ‘You desire something of which you will never be master.’
That she had had influence enough on such a career as his to drive him out from the world where all his interests, pursuits, and friendships lay, had pleased her with more keenness in her pleasure than similar victories often gave her. She had seen his return to Europe with amusement, even with derision; she had seen at a glance that he had fled in vain from her; she had been diverted, but she had remained indifferent.
In those morning hours when he had addressed her with an almost brutal candour, he had taken a hold upon her admiration which he had never gained before. His accents had lingered on her ear; his regard had burned itself into her remembrance; she had begun to look forward to his next approach, after her rejection, with something more than the merely intellectual curiosity with which before she had studied the results of her influence upon him. The news of his intended marriage came to her with a sense of surprise and of affront which was more nearly regret than any sentiment she had ever experienced. It seemed to her supremely ridiculous that a man who adored her should seek or hope to find any oblivion elsewhere; she even understood that it was no such hope which had actuated him, but rather his wounded pride which had rebelled against herself and been unwilling to allow the world to consider him her slave. Of the more delicate and more tender motives which had led him towards Yseulte de Valogne she could know nothing; but of those more selfish and embittered ones she comprehended accurately all the sources and all the extent.
‘He does it to escape me,’ she thought as she sat in solitude, while the last faint crimson of the winter’s sunset tinged the light clouds before her windows; a smile came slowly on her beautiful mouth, — a smile, proud, unkind, a little bitter. There was resentment in her, and there was also pain, two emotions hitherto strangers to her heart; but beyond these, and deeper than these, there was a caustic contempt for the man’s cowardice in seeking asylum in an unreal love, in endeavouring to cheat himself and another into belief in a feigned passion.
‘I thought him more brave!’ she said bitterly to herself. ‘He is like a beaten warrior who makes a rampart of a virgin’s body!’
And yet, in that moment she was nearer love for him than she had ever been before.
CHAPTER XX.
Blanchette was dancing round her cousin in the twilight of the January day, making her pied de nez triumphantly, but pausing every now and then to look up in her face with her habitual inquisitiveness, yet with a respect quite new to her.
‘Tiens, tiens, tiens!’ she was crying in her little shrill voice, like the tiniest of silver trumpets. ‘To think you are going to be married after all! You will be ever so much richer than mamma, they say; you will be as rich as all the Juiverie put together, and you will be as great a lady as all the grandes dames. You will have as many jewels as Madame de Talleyrand; you will have as many horses and houses as Madame de Sagan; you will have two new gowns every day if you like. Have you seen the Hôtel Othmar? I have seen it; it is as big as the Louvre. What will you ask him for first? If I were you, I should ask him for a rope of pearls, all as big as pigeons’ eggs. What are the Othmar liveries? I never saw them; the state liveries, I mean. I like canary-colour best, and Louis Treize tricornes. What will he settle on you? He will give you what you wish; I heard mamma say so. Make him give you S. Pharamond for your very own. I am sure you will not get half you might, you are such a silly little snipe; you are as tall as a Venetian mast on a feast day, but you are a simpleton. You cried when mamma told you he would marry you. The idea! You should have danced for joy. It would be delicious to marry him if he were as old as the hills and as ugly as Punch, but he is not old and he is handsome: all that par-dessus le panier, and thirty thousand francs a day, Julie says; and Brown and Schemmitz wanted to kiss your hand! What fun you would make of them if you were me. You should skip and shout all day; — I should. To be sure, he is dans la finance, but they are the only ro
yalties nowadays; I have heard mamma say so. Whatever can he see in you? You are pretty and tall, but you don’t know it; you stand and stare like an owl with your big eyes. What can he want with you? He will give you everything, he must be a simpleton, too! he might marry somebody quite great; none of them can imagine what he wants you for — —’
‘Oh, Blanchette!’ said Yseulte de Valogne, with a look of pain, as she tried to silence her little tormentor, whose words she only vaguely heard as she stood lost in the golden mists of an incomparable dream.
‘Vrai!’ said the cruel little child. ‘Nobody can think what he can see in you. It is Madame Napraxine whom he loves.’
Yseulte coloured with sudden anger, and a look of severity and sternness came on her youthful face, while its happy wistful eyes lost their light and grew cold:
‘You must not say these things, Blanchette,’ she said sternly; ‘you may laugh at me as you like, but you must respect M. Othmar.’
The red deepened in her cheeks as she spoke, and realised that she had the right to defend his name thus. She was thinking in herself as she did so: ‘If it were true, if I thought it were true, I would bury myself in the convent for ever.’
The quick little mind of Blanchette divined the direction of her thoughts, and dearly as the child loved to do mischief and to torment, she loved her own pleasure and gain better. She had no wish for this beau mariage to be broken off, as she foresaw from it endless diversion, gifts, and bonbons for herself.
‘Othmar will give us each at least a medallion with diamonds on the back,’ she reflected; and she was conscious, too, that if the marriage fell through by any doing of hers, her mother would be unsparing in her punishment, of which not the least portion would be banishment to Bois de Roy; for Blanchette adored her spring-time in Paris, her summer months at Deauville and Homburg and Biarritz, her wagers on the petits chevaux, her exploits in the water, and the many whispers of scandals and naughty witticisms which she caught, when apparently engrossed with her toy balloon or her ball, behind the chairs of her mother and other great ladies on the sand by the sea or under the trees of the fashionable inland baths.
With a rapid remembrance of all that she herself would lose if there were no grand wedding at which she would assist at the Madeleine or S. Philippe du Roule, she threw her arms about her cousin with her most coaxing câlinerie: ‘It was only my fun,’ she whispered; ‘ pray don’t tell any one, chérie. It was years and years ago that they laughed about Madame Napraxine; of course, it is you he loves now. Why should he marry you if he did not? He could marry anywhere, anybody, — mamma says so. And you are handsome, if you would only think it! Mamma says when you shall have been married a week, and have all your jewels you will be superb.’
Her cousin’s face flushed more warmly till it was the hue of those Charles Raybaud roses which she had used to pack for Nicole. Her heart beat in that tumult of emotion, of joy, and of vague, most sweet, fear, in which she had lived for the last twenty-four hours. She thought: ‘Why, if he did not care for me, why, indeed, should he seek me?’
It seemed marvellous to her that it should be so, but she could not doubt it.
She had only seen him for ten minutes that morning, in the presence of the Duchesse de Vannes, but though her confusion had been too great to let her eyes meet his, the few soft grave words he had spoken, and the touch of his lips on her hand, had left with her an ineffable sense of protection and affection received. If it were not for love, why should he have paused on his way to thrust back the gates of the convent and take her to himself?
As for herself, the timid, pure, half-unconscious feeling which he had awakened in her was growing in strength with every hour now that it had recognised its own existence and been permitted its expansion without shame. It remained as shy and fearful as a freshly captured wood-dove, but it had in it all the elements of an intense and devoted passion.
She did not hear the child’s chatter, which rippled on like a little brook, asking her a thousand questions of what she would do, of what she would wear, of what she would give away. Blanchette was herself half sympathetic, half envious; disposed to resent her cousin’s sudden and splendid change of destiny, yet inclined to rejoice in it, as it would secure to herself a spectacle, a new costume, and a costly gift. She kept looking at the girl critically, with her head on one side, and affecting to help her only hindered her, as she dressed for the first ceremonious dinner at which she had ever assisted.
‘To think you can dress yourself; how queer!’ cried the little censor. ‘I cannot put on a stocking, nor Toinon either. I never mean to do it. Mamma could not to save her life. How many women will you have? Two? three? Never let your maids carry your jewel-box; have it always put in the train by your major-domo, between two footmen. Mamma says all the robberies are done by the maids. What are you going to put on? You have only white frocks. Don’t you long to wear satin and velvet? Oh, you are so stupid; you ought to marry a shepherd, and wear lambs’-wool that you spun yourself. You must not be so simple. A Countess Othmar ought to be very magnificent. The finance is nothing if it do not look gorgeous. Oh, what are you doing? You must not put a black sash on; you are a fiancée. Have you got nothing but black? Wait a minute; I will run and get one of mine.’
‘I have always worn something black or grey since my grandmother died,’ said Yseulte, a little sadly.
But Blanchette made a pirouette.
‘Henri IV. est sur le Pont-Neuf!’ she cried. ‘Oh, you silly! You were Cendrillon yesterday; now you are the prince’s betrothed. Yesterday you were a little brown grub; now you are a butterfly. I will go and get my sash.’
The child flew out of the room and left Yseulte standing before the mirror, looking shyly at her own reflection as though she saw a stranger. She felt, indeed, a stranger to herself; so long she had been resigned to the religious life, so long she had been accustomed to regard obscurity, neglect, sadness, loneliness, as her natural lot; so long she had been trained to submission, lectured to the shade and the silence of resignation, that to be thus suddenly called out into the light, and lifted on to a pedestal, dazzled and almost paralysed her.
It seemed to her as though it could never be herself, Yseulte de Valogne, to whom her cousin had said, with an admiration that was almost reverence: ‘You will be the most enviable woman in Europe. Do you understand all you have done for yourself?’
She did not understand it; she only understood that he had rescued her from the conventual life, and that he loved her — surely he loved her, or he would not wish? ——
Blanchette flew back into the room, accompanied by the maid Françoise.
‘Yseulte! Yseulte!’ she shrieked, waving a blue sash in one hand and with the other clasping to her a square parcel tied with silver cord. ‘Here is something he sends you: Françoise was bringing it. Open it quick, quick. Oh, what a happy creature you are, and you only stand and stare like the statues in the Luxembourg! Open it quick! It is sure to be something worth thousands and thousands of francs.’
‘Hush, Blanchette!’ said the girl, with a look of pain, as she took the packet and undid its covering. Within was the ivory casket; and within the casket was a necklace of great pearls.
A little note lay on them, which said merely: —
‘No one can dispossess you of the casket now. Receive what is within as a symbol of your own innocence and of my reverence for it. — Yours, with devotion, Othmar.’
On the other side of the paper was written more hastily:— ‘Pardon me that I must leave immediately after dinner for Paris and shall not see you for a few days. I have explained to the Duchesse.’
Yseulte grew very pale. If the eyes of her little tormentor and of the woman Françoise had not been on her, she would have kissed his note and fallen on her knees and wept. As it was, she stood still in silence, reading the lines again and again, with sweet, warm tears in her eyes. It was Blanchette who took out the pearls and held them up in the lamplight, and appraised their value with th
e keenness of a jeweller and screamed in rapture over their size and colour.
‘They are the pigeon’s eggs!’ she cried, ‘ and four ropes of them; they must be worth an empire. They are as fine as mamma’s, and she has only three rows. I will marry into the finance myself. Oh, what a happy creature you are! Brown says it all came out of your going to gather flowers in his garden. Is that true? How clever it was of you! Who would ever have believed you were so clever, with your silent ways and your countryfied scruples. Let me see his note? You will not? What nonsense! You must put the pearls on. Let me fasten them. Four ropes! They are fit for a Court ball. What a corbeille he will send you!’
As she chattered she clasped it round the throat of her cousin, who grew red, then white, as the pearls touched her skin. They made her realise the immense change which one short day had made in her lot. They made her realise that Othmar henceforth was her lover.
While Blanchette chirped and skipped around her, directing her toilette with the accurate instinct in decoration of a little Parisienne, the eyes of the girl were suffused with unshed tears of gratitude and tremulous joy.
‘What can I render thee, O princely giver?’
she was saying in her heart, although she had never read the Portuguese sonnets; while her little cousin babbled on of jewels and ball-dresses, and horses and establishments, and dowries and settlements, and the régime dotal, and all the many matters which meant marriage to the precocious comprehension of Blanchette.
‘You will have your box at all the theatres, will you not? You have never been to a theatre, but I have. Mind that you go the evening after your marriage. When will your marriage be? I heard mamma say that he wished it to be very soon: but then there is all your lingerie, and all your gowns to be made. I suppose mamma will give you your trousseau; she must. Oh, how happy you ought to be, and you look just as grave as an owl! Nobody would guess you were going to be the Countess Othmar. Do you know that he could be made a prince if he liked? You have never learned to ride, Yseulte. What a pity! It is so chic to ride early in the Bois. Well, you will have a coupé for the early morning, and then you will have a Daumont for the afternoon, of course. There is nothing so pretty as postillions in velvet jackets and caps — if you only knew what colour his liveries are? Won’t you have out-riders? I do not know, though, whether you can; I think it is only ambassadresses and princesses of the blood who may have out-riders —— You might have a special train every day,’ continued Blanchette, exciting herself with her own visions. ‘There is nothing such fun as a special train; we had one when grandmère was dying at Bois le Roy all in a moment and wanted to see us; it is so diverting to go on, on, on, through all the stations, past all the other trains, never stopping — pr-r-r-rut!’