by Ouida
‘Oh, hush, Blanchette! What do I care about those things?’ murmured Yseulte, as she put his note into the casket, locked it, and slipped the little silver key in her bosom, blushing very much as she did so.
It seemed so very wonderful to her that such lines should have been written to her. She wanted to be all alone to muse upon the marvel of it. She remembered a little nook in the convent garden where a bench was fixed against the high stone wall, under the branches of an old medlar tree; a place that she had gone to with her sorrows, her fancies, her visions, her tears, very often; she would have liked to have gone now to some such quiet and solitary nook, to realise in peace this miracle which had been wrought for her. But that was impossible; they had ordered her to dine with them at eight — her first great dinner. She must submit to be gazed at, commented on, complimented, felicitated.
The sensitive, delicate nature of the child shrank from the publicity of her triumph; but she understood that it was her duty, that henceforth these things would be a prominent portion of her duties; the wife of Othmar could not live shut away from the world.
Blanchette tossed her golden head with immeasurable contempt.
‘It is all “those things” that make a grand mariage. If you think you do not care now, you will care in a year’s time. Mamma said so. Mamma said you will be just like anybody else when you shall have been in the world six months.’
Yseulte shook her head with a smile, but she sighed a little also; it pained her that the world, and all it gave, was so intermingled with this beautiful, incredible, dream-like joy which had come to her like some vision brought by angels. In the singleness and sincerity of her young heart she thought: ‘Ah! if only he were poor! — how I wish he were poor! — then they would know and he! — —’
But he was not poor, and he had sent her pearls worthy of an empress, and Blanchette was dancing before her in envy, longing to be sixteen years old too and betrothed to an archi-millionaire.
She cast one last timid glance at herself and at the great pearls lying beneath the slender ivory column of her throat, then she drew on her long gloves, and went, with a quickly-beating heart, down the staircase, Blanchette shouting after her Judic’s song, —
On ne peut pas savoir ce que c’est,
Ce que c’est,
Si on n’a pas passé par là!
which the child had caught up from the echoes of the boulevards, and sang with as much by-play and meaning as Judic herself could have put into it.
There were some twenty people assembled in the oval drawing-room when Yseulte entered it. It was not of them she was afraid: it was of seeing Othmar before them. There was a murmur of admiration as she appeared in her childish white dress, with the superb necklace on, which a queen might have worn at a Court ball. Her shyness did not impair her grace; the stateliness and pride which were in her blood gave her composure even in her timidity; her eyes were dark and soft with conflicting feelings, her colour came and went. She never spoke audibly once in answer to all the compliment and felicitation she received, but she looked so lovely and so young that no one quarrelled with her silence. When Othmar gave her his arm she trembled from head to foot, but no one noticed it save Othmar himself.
‘Do not be afraid of me, my child,’ he murmured, and for the first time she took courage and looked at him with a rapid glance that was like a beam of sunlight. The look said to him, ‘I am not afraid, I am grateful; I love you, only I dare not say so, and I hardly understand what has happened.’
The dinner seemed both to her and to him interminable; she was quite silent through it, and ate nothing. She was conscious of a sullen gaze which her cousin, de Vannes, fastened on her, and which made her feel that, by him, she was unforgiven. She was confused by the florid speech made to her by the Baron Friederich, who was so enchanted by her that he put no measure to his audible admiration. Othmar, seated beside her, said very little. The party was gay, and the conversation animated. The silence of each of them passed unnoticed. The Duchesse, who alone remarked it, said to Raymond de Prangins:
‘It is their way of being in love; it is the old way, which they have copied out of Lamartine and Bernardin de St. Pierre. It is infinitely droll that Othmar should play the sentimental lover, but he does. I want Nadine Napraxine to see him like that. I asked her to dinner, but they had a dinner party at home. She sent me a little line just now, promising, if her people were gone, to come for an hour in the evening. The child looks well, does she not? What jewels he has given her! They are bigger than mine. It is the least he can do; the Finance is bound to buy big jewels. Who would ever have supposed he would have seen anything in that baby, that convent mouse? To be sure, she is handsome. Such a marriage for that little mouse to make! a mere baby like that, a child proud of being the médaillon of her convent yesterday! After all, nothing takes some men like that air of innocence, which bores them to death as soon as they have put an end to it. It is like dew; it is like drinking milk in the meadow in the morning; we don’t care for the milk, but the doctors say it is good for us, and so —— I wonder what she is thinking about. About her gowns, I dare say, or about her jewels. She is just like a vignette out of “Paul et Virginie.” She need not pretend to be in love with him; no one will believe in it; he will not believe in it himself; he is too rich. What can he have seen in her more than in five thousand other fillettes he might have married? To be sure she is handsome. She will be handsomer — —’
She put up her eyeglass and looked down the table at her young cousin with amusement and envy, mingled as they mingled in little Blanchette. The amusement was at the girl’s evident embarrassment, the envy was of her youth, of her complexion, of her form, of all which told her own unerring instincts that Yseulte in a few years, even in a few months, would be one of the most beautiful women of her world.
And she said angrily to de Prangins, ‘Some men like children; it is as boys like green apples.’
‘At least the green apples are not painted,’ thought the young man as he murmured aloud a vague compliment. Raymond de Prangins, like most men of his age, had never looked twice at a fillette; he had been three weeks in the same house with this child and had never addressed a word to her or noticed whether her eyes were black or brown; but now that she had become the betrothed wife of Othmar, the charm of the forbidden fruit had come to her; she had suddenly become an object of interest in his sight; he was never tired of finding out her beauties, he was absorbed in studying the shape of her throat, the colour of her hair, the whiteness of her shoulders, which came so timidly and with a little shiver, like shorn lambs, out of the first low bodice that she had ever worn. To know that she was about to belong to another man, gave her all at once importance, enchantment, and desirability in his sight.
CHAPTER XXI.
Immediately that the dinner was over Othmar made his excuses and left Millo to take the night express to Paris. When once she knew that he was absent, she lost all fear.
Her innocent love was at that stage when the presence of a lover is full of trouble and alarm, and the happiest hours are those in which his absence permits its dreams to wander about her memory undisturbed. When he was there he was still, to her, a stranger whose gaze embarrassed her, whose touch confused her, whose association with herself was unfamiliar and unreal; but, away from him, there was nothing to check or dismay those spiritual and poetic fancies which had lodged their ideal in him. No one of those around her would ever have imagined that she had these fancies, or would have understood them in the slightest degree; they only thought that she was very naturally enraptured to be chosen by a very rich man, and did not doubt that in her mind she was musing, as Blanchette had suggested, on the colour of her liveries, the number of her horses, the places of her residence, and the prospect of her jewels.
Baron Fritz, who made her blush with the fervour of his compliments, and was so delighted with her that he could not cease from gazing at her as though she were a water-colour of Copley Fielding’s, was alone suf
ficiently sympathetic, despite all his seventy years of cynicism, to perceive that the things of this world had little place in her thoughts, and he thought to himself as he looked at her:
‘Will Otho be wise enough to appreciate all that? He will have the carnation in its bud, the peach in its flower; he will make just what he pleases of them; the worse will be if he should leave them altogether alone: then the carnation will unfold, the peach will ripen and come out into fruit unnoticed, and if he be an ingrate, they will both come to their perfection for someone else — which will be a pity. The child is in love with him — parbleu! — he does not deserve it; he only cares for his Russian woman, his hothouse narcissus; he only wants to cure himself of Nadine Napraxine; as if one blush of this child’s cheek were not worth a century of Madame Napraxine’s languor!’
And he felt a passing regret that he was not forty years younger and in the place of his nephew.
After dinner he seated himself beside Yseulte, and talked to her of Othmar, of his boyhood, of his talents, of his opportunities, and of his destinies, with so much tact and so much skill that she was moved to an affectionate gratitude towards the speaker and to a sense of infinite awe before all the ambitions and responsibilities with which he filled her future.
‘She is a baby, but she is not a fool,’ thought the wise old man. ‘When the love fever has passed, we shall make of her just what we want, provided only that she has influence over Otho. But will she have any? In marriage there is always one who rules the other: “un qui se baisse, et l’autre qui tend la joue”: and it is always the one who cares who goes under.’
Even as he had eaten his truffles and drunk the fine wines grown on the de Vannes’ estates in Gironde, he had been more troubled by an impersonal anxiety than he had ever allowed himself to be in the whole course of his existence. The child had sat opposite to him, looking so youthful beside the faces, more or less maquillées, of the women around her, with her soft surprised eyes, happy as those of a child that wakes from sleep, and her colour coming and going, delicate and warm: ‘And he will not stay here to see, just because the desire for another woman is in him like a fly in the ear of a horse!’ had thought the Baron impatiently. He guessed very accurately that the departure of Othmar was due to a restless unwillingness to face the fate which he had voluntarily made for himself.
He himself had had no heed of Othmar’s marriage except as a means of legally continuing his race; his only notion of a woman was Napoleon’s, that she should bear many children; but as he looked at Yseulte de Valogne, something kinder and more pitiful stirred in his selfish old heart; she seemed to him too good to be sacrificed so; he understood that there would be other things than money and children which this sensitive plant would want; and worldly, unemotional, and unprincipled as he was, Baron Fritz was the only person present who divined something of the dreams which she was dreaming and felt a compassionate regret for them, as for flowers which opened at dawn to die perforce at noonday.
About eleven o’clock in the evening, when Yseulte was beginning to feel her eyelids grow heavy, and was thinking wistfully of her little white bed amidst the murmur of conversation unintelligible to her and the stare of inquisitive eyes, she heard with a little thrill of an emotion quite new to her the voice of the groom of the chambers, which announced Madame la Princesse Napraxine.
Jealousy she was too young, too simple, and too innocent to know; but a strange eagerness and an unanalysed pain moved her as she saw the woman whom they said that Othmar loved.
‘Is that really Madame Napraxine?’ she said in a low voice to the Baron, who was beside her.
‘Who has told you of Madame Napraxine?’ he thought, as he answered her: ‘Yes! that is the name of the lady coming in now; she is a famous European beauty, though to my taste she is too slender and too pale.’
The girl did not reply; her eyes followed the trail of Princess Nadine’s pale primrose-coloured skirts laden with lace, and fastened here and there with large lilies and lilac. Before that inimitable grace, that exquisite languor and ease, that indescribable air of indifference and of empire and of disdain which made the peculiar power of Nadine Napraxine, the poor child felt her own insignificance, her own childishness, her own powerlessness; she fancied she must look rustic, awkward, stupid: she grew very pale, and her throat swelled with pain under her lover’s pearls.
‘It is too early for you to have that adder in your breast,’ thought Friederich Othmar, as he watched her. ‘What a coward he was to go away, instead of standing his ground beside you! After all, why is everyone so afraid of this Russian woman?’
Aloud, he only said: ‘The Princess is coming to you; courage, mon enfant. A woman of the world is certainly an alarming animal, but you will have to meet many such, and you will be one yourself before very long.’
‘Fillette, come and be presented to Mme. Napraxine; she wishes it,’ said her cousin at that moment in her ear. The girl shrank back a little, and the colour came into her face; she rose, nevertheless, obediently.
Nadine Napraxine came half-way to meet her, with an indulgent little smile, of which the compassion and disdain penetrated the inmost soul of Yseulte with a cruel sense of inferiority. Yet had she not been so humble and so embarrassed she might have seen a look of surprise in the eyes of her rival. Nadine saw at a glance that in this child there was no ‘Sainte Mousseline’ to be easily derided and contemned.
‘How beautiful a woman she will be in a year or two!’ she thought, with that candour which was never lacking in her in her judgments of her greatest foes. ‘He is going to possess all that, and he only sighs in his soul for me! — what fools men are!’
While she so thought, she was still smiling as she came to meet Yseulte with that slow, soft, indescribable grace of which she had the secret.
‘I am an old friend of Count Othmar’s; you must let me be yours in the future,’ she said with gracious kindliness. ‘Shall I offend you if I venture to say that I am sure he is a very happy and fortunate person? I dare say I shall please you better if I say that he deserves to be so.’
The girl could not have found words to answer to save her life. Instinctively she made her grand eighteenth-century curtsy in acknowledgment. She was very pale; her heart seemed to sink within her as she realised all the charm of this her rival.
Mme. de Vannes murmured a few amiable words, and left them opposite to one another; the girl trembled despite herself, as those indolent lustrous eyes scanned her with merciless investigation and smiled at her embarrassment.
It was her first experience of that obligation, so constant in the world, to meet what is dreaded and disliked with suavity and compliment.
‘I am a great friend of your cousin, too,’ continued Nadine Napraxine, with all the amiable condescension of a woman of the world to a child. ‘We shall be sure to meet constantly in the years to come, which will leave you so young and make us so old! Where have you lived? In an old Breton convent? I wish I had lived in a Breton convent too! Come and sit by me and talk to me a little. Do you know that I am here to-night on purpose to see you. I had a tiresome dinner, all of Russian people, or I should have come here earlier.’
She drew the girl down beside her on a sofa with that pretty imperiousness of which women as well as men often felt the charm and the command. She was most kindly, most gentle, most flattering, yet Yseulte suffered under all her gracious compliments as under the most poignant irony. She answered in monosyllables and at random; she was ill at ease and confused, she looked down with the fascination of a bird gazing at a snake on the hand which held hers, such a slender hand in its tan-coloured glove and with its circles of porte-bonheurs above the wrist, and its heavy bracelets crowding one another almost to the elbow.
She would not have spoken more than Yes or No to save her life, and she said even these in the wrong places; but Nadine Napraxine did not make the mistake of thinking her stupid, as less intelligent women would have done.
She studied her curiously whil
st she continued to speak those amiable and careless nothings which are the armoury of social life; toy weapons of which the young know neither the use nor the infinite value. She had all the kindly condescension, the good-humoured, amused indulgence, of a grown woman of the world for a schoolgirl; by dates she was only seven years older than Yseulte de Valogne, but in experience and knowledge she was fifty years her senior.
‘Elle est vraiment très bien,’ she said, as she turned away from the girl and took the arm of Friederich Othmar. ‘At present she is like a statue in the clay, like a sketch, like a magnolia flower folded up; but Othmar will change all that. You must be so glad; his marriage must have been such an anxiety to you. Suppose he had married a Mongol! What would you have done?’
‘It was not precisely of the Mongol that I was most afraid, Madame,’ replied the Baron. ‘ Do you think too that a marriage is a termination to anyone’s anxieties? Surely, the dangerous romance begins afterwards in life as in novels.’