by Ouida
‘It would be very dull reading in either if it did not,’ said Madame Napraxine. ‘But we will hope that Mademoiselle and your nephew will read theirs together, and eschew the dangers; that is possible sometimes; and she will have one great advantage for the next five years; she will be handsomer every year.’
‘It will be a great advantage if he find her so, but perhaps only others will find her so; marriage does not lend rose-coloured spectacles to its disciples,’ thought the Baron, as he answered aloud, ‘There can be no one’s opinion that he could value as much as he is sure to do that of Madame Napraxine.’
‘I imagine my opinion matters nothing at all to him,’ she answered, with her enigmatical smile. ‘But when I see him I shall certainly be able to congratulate him with much more truth than one can usually put into those conventionalities. Mademoiselle de Valogne is very beautiful.’
The Baron sadly recalled the saying of that wise man who was of opinion that it makes little difference after three months whether your wife be a Venus or a Hottentot; but he did not utter this blasphemy to a lovely woman.
The girl remained on her sofa gazing wistfully after this élégante who had all the knowledge which she lacked, and who impressed her so sadly with an indefinite dull sense of inferiority and of helplessness. She put her hand up to her throat and felt for his pearls; they seemed like friends; they seemed to assure her of his affection and of the future. People thought she was proud of them because they were so large, so perfect in colour and shape, so royal in their value; she would have been as pleased with them if they had been strings of berries out of the woods, and he had sent them with the same message and meaning.
She watched Nadine Napraxine with fascinated eyes; wondering where was the secret of that supreme seduction which even she, in her convent-bred simplicity, could feel was in her. In the few words which had been addressed to her she was dimly conscious that the other disdained her as a child, and derided Othmar as a fool.
Madame de Vannes roused her from her preoccupation with a tap of her fan.
‘How grave you look, fillette,’ she said with some impatience. ‘You must never look like that now you are in the world. Everyone detests grave people. If you cannot always smile, stay in your convent.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ murmured Yseulte, waking from her meditation with a little shock. ‘I did not know — I was thinking — —’
‘That is just what you must not do when you are in society. What were you thinking of? You looked very sombre.’
The girl coloured and hesitated, then she said very low:
‘The other day — the day of the casket — you said he loved her — was it true?’
She glanced across the room at Nadine Napraxine as she spoke.
‘Did I say so?’ answered the Duchesse, with annoyance at herself. ‘Then I talked great nonsense. But how was I to know then that he was thinking of you? Listen to me, fillette,’ she continued, with more real kindness in her tone than the girl had ever heard there. ‘ You will hear all kinds of scandals, insinuations, stories of all sorts in the world that you will live in; never listen to them, or you will be perpetually irritated and unhappy. People say all sorts of untruths out of sheer idleness; they must talk. M. Othmar must certainly have some very especial esteem for you, or why should he choose you out of all womankind for his wife? That is all you have to think of; do not perplex yourself as to whom he may, or may not, have loved beforehand. All your care must be that he shall love no one else afterwards. You are tired, I think; go to bed, if you like: you can slip away unnoticed. You are only a child yet.’
Yseulte went at once, thankful for the permission, yet looking wistfully still at the delicate head of Nadine Napraxine, as it rose up from a collar of emeralds. Madame de Vannes passed to the music room, where a little operetta was being given, with a vague compassion stirring in her.
‘I am sure the old Marquise could not have given her more moral advice than I,’ she thought, ‘but I am afraid the silly child will have trouble, she is so old-fashioned. Why cannot she marry the man, and enjoy all he will give her, without perplexing herself as to what fancies he may have had for other people? What does it matter? She will have to get used to that sort of thing. If it be not Nadine who makes her jealous, it will be someone else; but one could not tell her that. How right I was not to send Blanchette and Toinon to a convent! The holy women make them so romantic, so emotional, so pleurnicheuses!’
At the same moment Nadine Napraxine said, when she had left her and was speaking to Melville of her:
‘She is very interesting. She will have plenty of character; he thinks that he is marrying a child; he forgets that she will grow up, and that very rapidly. Marriage is a hothouse for women who are young. I was married at her age; in three months’ time I felt as old — as old — as old as I do now. Nobody can feel older! You are sixty-five, you say, and you are so young. That is because you are not married and can believe in Paradise.’
‘You mean that I hope for compensation?’ said Melville, with his pleasant laugh.
‘Or that you keep your illusions. There is so much in that. People who do are always young. I do not think I ever had any to lose!’
‘It is great emotions which make happy illusions, and I believe you have never permitted those to approach you?’
‘I have viewed them from afar off, as Lucretius says one ought to see a storm.’
‘I do not doubt you have seen them very often, Princess,’ said Melville, with significance. ‘But as you have not shared them, they have passed by you like great waves which leave no mark upon the smoothness of the sand on which they break.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said, while her mind reverted to the scene of which her boudoir had been the theatre three days before; then she added a little abruptly: ‘You know Mlle. de Valogne well — you are interested in her? What do you think of her marriage?’
‘I have known her from the time she was four years old,’ replied Melville. ‘I have seen her at intervals at the convent of Faïel. I am convinced she has no common character; she is very unlike the young girls one sees in the world, who have had their course of Deauville, Aix, and Biarritz. She is of the antique French patrician type; perhaps the highest human type that the world has ever seen, and the most capable of self-restraint, of heroism, of true distinction, and of loyalty. I fancy Elizabeth de France must have been just such a girl as is Yseulte de Valogne.’
‘What eulogy!’ returned his companion, with a little incredulous accent. ‘I have always wondered that your Church did not canonize the Princess Elizabeth. But you do not tell me what you think of the marriage.’
Melville smiled.
‘I might venture to prophecy if the success of a marriage depended on two persons, but it depends on so many others.’
‘You are very mysterious; I do not see what others have to do with it.’
‘And yet,’ thought Melville, ‘how often you have stretched out your delicate fingers and pushed down the most finely-wrought web of human happiness — just for pastime!’
Aloud he said: ‘If she and he were about to live their lives on a desert island, I am convinced they would be entirely suited to each other. But as they will live in the world, and perforce in what they call the great world, who shall presume to say what their marriage will become? It may pass into that indifferent and amiable friendship which is the most usual issue of such marriages, or it may grow into that direct antagonism which is perhaps its still commoner result; on the other hand, it may become that perfect flower of human sympathy which, like the aloe, blossoms once in a century; but, if that miracle happen, such flowers are not immortal; an unkind grasp will suffice to break them off at the root. On the whole, I am not especially hopeful; she is too young, and he — —’
‘And he?’ said Nadine Napraxine, with a gleam of curiosity in her glance.
‘I am not his confessor; I doubt if he ever confess — to his own sex,’ replied Melville; ‘but if I had been, I should have said to him
: “My son, one does not cure strong fevers with meadow-daisies; wait till your soul is cleansed before you offer it to a child whom you take from God.” That is what I should have said in the confessional; but I only know Othmar on the neutral ground of society. I cannot presume to say it there.’
‘You are too serious, Monsignore,’ said Nadine, with her enigmatical smile. ‘Marriage is not such a very serious thing, I assure you. Ask Platon.’
‘Prince Napraxine is exceptionally happy,’ said Melville, so gravely that she laughed gaily in his face.
Meanwhile Yseulte dismissed the maid, undressed herself slowly, kissed the pearls when she had unclasped them; and, kneeling down under her crucifix, said many prayers for Othmar.
She was soon asleep, like a tired child, and she had his note under her pillow; nevertheless, she dreamed of Nadine Napraxine, and her sleep was not the pure unbroken rest that she had always had before. Once she awoke in a great terror, her heart beating, her limbs trembling.
‘If he did not love me!’ she cried aloud; then the light of the lamp fell on the open casket, on the necklace of pearls. They seemed to say to her, ‘What should he want with you, unless he loved you?’
She fell asleep again, and with a smile on her face.
CHAPTER XXII.
The fortnight passed away rapidly and dizzily for her. They took her at once to Paris, and gave her no time for thought. She lived in a perpetual movement, which dazzled her as a blaze of fireworks would dazzle a forest doe. All the preparations of a great marriage were perpetually around her, and she began to realise that the world thought her lot most enviable and rare. Often her head ached and her ears were tired with the perpetual stream of compliment and felicitation, the continual demands made on her time, on her patience, on her gratitude. What would have been ecstasy to Blanchette was to her very nearly pain. There were moments when she almost longed for the great, still, walled gardens of the Dames de Ste. Anne, for her little whitewashed room, her rush chair in the chapel, her poor grey frock.
Then she thought of Othmar, and the colour came into her face and she was happy, though always unquiet and a little alarmed, as a dove is when its owner’s hand is stretched out to it.
To Yseulte he was a hero, a saint, an ideal. He had come so suddenly into her life, he had transformed it so completely, that he had something of a magical fascination and glory for her. She knew nothing of the House of Othmar, or of their position in finance; if she had understood it, she would have disliked it with the instinctive pride of a daughter of ‘les preux;’ she had a vague, confused idea of him as the possessor of great power and wealth, but that taint of commerce, which in Othmar’s eyes soiled every napoleon he touched, had not dimmed his majesty for her.
She was never allowed to see him alone; her cousin insisted on the strictest observance of ‘les convenances,’ and though a Romeo would have found means to circumvent these rules, her lover did not. He was glad of the stiff laws of etiquette which forbade him unwitnessed interviews. He felt that if she asked him straightway, with her clear eyes on his, what love he had for her, a lie would not come easily to his lips. He was lavish of all offerings to her, as though to atone materially for the feeling that was wanting in him. The Duchesse was herself astonished at the magnificence and frequency of his gifts. Unasked, he settled S. Pharamond and an estate in Seine et Oise upon her in absolute possession, while a commensurate income was secured to her to render her wholly independent in the future of any whim or will of his own.
‘He is really very generous,’ said the Duchesse to herself. ‘But what perplexes me is, he is not in love; not the very least in love! If he were, one would understand it all. But he is not in the very slightest degree amouraché; not half as much as Alain is.’
But she was heedful that no suggestion of this fact, which her observation made clear to her, should escape her before Yseulte or anyone else. If he were not in love, yet still wished to marry, it was his own affair; and she was not his keeper.
To Yseulte, it was absolute shame to find that she was regarded by all who approached her as having done something clever, won something enviable in the lottery of life. A vague distress weighed on her before the motives which she felt were attributed to her.
When her cousin said to her, ‘Fillette, you were really very audacious when you went to gather those flowers at S. Pharamond. But audacity succeeds — Voltaire and Napoléon were right,’ she could have wept with humiliation and indignation.
‘Perhaps he thinks as badly of me, too!’ she thought, in that perplexity which had never ceased, since his gift of the ivory casket, to torment her.
‘There is storm in the air,’ said the Duc once to his wife; ‘Othmar will be like one of those magicians who used to raise a force that they could neither guide nor quell. He is making a child worship him, and forgetting that he will make her a woman, and that then she will not be satisfied with being hung about with trinkets, and set ankle-deep in gold like an Indian goddess. I am quite sure that this marriage, which pleases you all so much, will be a very unhappy one — some day.’
‘You think what you wish — all men do,’ said his wife. ‘I have not a doubt that it will be perfectly happy — as happy as any marriage is, that is to say. She will adore him; men like to be adored. You can only get that from somebody very young. He will never say an unkind word to her, and he will never object, however much she may spend. If she cannot be content with that — —’
The Duc laughed derisively.
‘Gold! gold! gold! That is the joy of the cabotine, not of Yseulte de Valogne. What she will want will be love, and he will not give it her. With all deference to you, I see the materials for a very sombre poem in your épopée.’
‘I repeat, your wish is father to your thought. On the theatres women do rebel, and stab themselves, or other people, but in real life they are very much more pliable. In a year’s time she will not care in the least about Othmar himself, but she will have grown to like the world and the life that she leads in it. She will have learnt to amuse herself; she will not fret if he pass his time elsewhere — —’
‘You are entirely wrong,’ said de Vannes, with irritation. ‘She is a child now, but in a few weeks she will be a woman. Then he will find that you cannot light a fire on grass and leave the earth unscorched. She has the blood of Gui de Valogne. She will not be a saint always. If she find herself neglected, she will not forgive it when she shall understand what it means. If he be her lover after marriage, all may be well; I do not say the contrary. But if he neglect her then, as he neglects her now — —’
‘Pray, do not put such follies into her head. Neglected! When not a day passes that he does not send her the most marvellous presents, does not empty on her half the jewellers’ cases out of Europe and Asia.’
‘He makes up in jewels what he wants in warmth,’ said Alain de Vannes. ‘At present she is a baby, a little saint, an innocent; as ignorant as her ivory Madonna; but in six months’ time she will be very different. She will know that she belongs to a man who does not care for her; she will want all that he does not give her; she will be like a rich red rose opening where all is ice — —’
‘You go to the theatres till you get melodramatic,’ said his wife, with contempt. ‘I do not believe she will ever have any passions at all; she will always be the ivory saint.’
Alain de Vannes laughed grimly.
‘Women who are beautiful and have good health are never saints,’ he said, ‘and saints are not married at sixteen.’
‘Françoise Romaine was,’ said his wife, who always had the last word in any discussion.
Othmar was more restless than he had ever been in his life, more dissatisfied, and more impatient of fate. Yet he was not sure that he would have undone what he had done, even if honour would have allowed him.
The tenderness which Yseulte had awakened in him, though it could not compete with the passion another had aroused in him, made him feel a charm in her presence, a solace in her youth
fulness. The restrictions imposed on their intercourse sustained the mystic spiritual grace which the young girl had in his eyes, and it prevented any possible chance of disillusion or of fatigue on his part. Hers was really the virginal purity, as of a white rosebud which has blossomed in the shade. He was not insensible to its beauty, even whilst a beauty of another kind had fuller empire upon him. He had done an unwise thing, but he said to himself continually, ‘At least I have made one innocent creature happy, and surely I shall be able to continue to do so; she can hardly be more difficult to content than a dove or a fawn.’
He forgot, as so many men do forget, that in this life, which seemed to him like the dove’s, like the fawn’s, there would be all the latent ardours of womanhood; that in the folded rosebud there was the rose-tinted heart, in which the bee would sting. They met at ceremonies, banquets, great family réunions, solemn festivities, in which all the Faubourg took part. She was intensely, exquisitely, happy when she was conscious that he was near her, but she was as silent as a statue and as timid as a bird when he looked at her or addressed her. Every day, every hour, was increasing what was to become the one absorbing passion of her life, but he was too indifferent, or too engrossed by other thoughts, to note the growth of this innocent love. Alain de Vannes saw much more of it than he.
She had the spiritual loveliness for him which S. Cecilia had in the eyes of the Roman centurion who wedded with her; a more delicate and more ethereal charm than that which only springs from the provocation of the senses. A caress to her seemed almost a profanity: to disturb her innocent soul with the grossness of earthly love seemed like a sort of sacrilege.
The whole of this time was a period of restless doubt with him, and the sense that he had not been honest with her rebuked him whenever he met the timid worship of her wistful eyes. He thought, ‘She would not give herself to me, if she knew!’
He was impatient to have all the tumult and folly which precede a great marriage over and done with. Every detail annoyed him; every formula irritated him.