by Ouida
‘All I entreat is, that there may be no delay,’ he said so often to her cousin, that Madame de Vannes ended in believing that he must be much more enamoured than his manner had betokened, and said with amusement to her husband:
‘It has often been disputed whether a man can be in love with two persons at one time: Othmar is so, unquestionably. It is like the bud and the fruit on the same bough of camellia.’
‘It is to be hoped that when the bud is a flower the fruit will fall,’ said de Vannes, with a grim smile.
‘You are not sincere when you say that,’ said the Duchesse, ‘and you know that both always fall — after a time.’
‘A law of nature,’ said her husband. ‘And it is a law of nature also that others come in their place.’
‘My dear friend,’ said Aurore de Vannes, with good-natured contempt, ‘when Yseulte shall have followed the laws of nature in that way, believe me, it is not you who will profit by them. You were good-looking ten years ago — or more — but absinthe and bacarat does not improve the looks after five-and-twenty, and you have crow’s-feet already, and will soon have to dye your hair if you wish still to look young. Yseulte will never think of you except as a vieux cousin who was kind enough to give her a locket — if she will even do that when she has got all the diamonds that she will get as Countess Othmar.’
Meantime, Othmar himself was constantly saying to the Duchesse:
‘I put myself completely in your hands; only, all I beseech of you, Madame, is not to delay my marriage longer than you are absolutely obliged.’
‘He does not say his happiness,’ thought Madame de Vannes, as she said aloud, ‘Well, what will seem terrible to you? I think I ought to exact a delay of at least six months. She is so very young.’
‘It is her youth that is delightful to me,’ he replied abruptly. ‘I am old enough to need its charm. I should be glad if you would consent to our nuptials very soon — say within a fortnight. I have already instructed my solicitors to meet you and to make whatever settlements you and the Duc de Vannes may desire upon Mademoiselle de Valogne.’
‘What! carte blanche?’ thought Cri-Cri, with a wonder which she took care to conceal, whilst she objected that such speed as he desired was impossible, was quite unheard of, would be indecorous: there were so many things to be done; but in the end she relented, consented to name that day month, and reflected that he should pay for his haste in the marriage contract. It would make no difference to herself whether he settled ten millions or ten pence on her young cousin, but it seemed to her that she was not doing her duty unless, in condescending to ally herself with la Finance, she did not shear its golden fleeces unscrupulously.
In her own mind she reflected that it was as well the marriage should take place speedily, for she perceived that his heart was not much in it. She divined that some alien motive actuated him in his desire for it, and she would have regretted if any breach had occurred to prevent it; for, although she professed to her intimate friends that she disliked the alliance excessively, she was nevertheless very gratified at her own relative having borne off such a great prize as Othmar. One never knew either how useful such a connection as his might not become.
‘I would never have let her marry into the Juiverie,’ she said to her husband. ‘But Othmar is quite different; his mother was an English duke’s daughter, his grandmother was a de Soissons-Valette, he has really good blood.’
‘And besides that,’ said de Vannes savagely, ‘he is a man whom all Europe has sighed to marry ever since he came of age. Why do you talk such nonsense to me? It is waste of good acting!’
‘As you wasted your medallion,’ said his wife, with a malicious enjoyment. ‘If she had taken the veil, you would have been quite capable of eloping with her, the very infamy of the action would have delighted you. But Othmar will certainly not let you make love to his wife; he is just the sort of man to be jealous.’
‘Of Nadine Napraxine, not of his own wife!’ said de Vannes, with an angry laugh. ‘Marry them quickly, while he is in the mind, and before Madame Napraxine can spoil the thing. In six months’ time he will return to her, but that will not matter; our little cousin will be Countess Othmar, and will probably learn to console herself.’
‘You are not hopeless?’ said his wife, much amused. ‘Well, I do not think with you. I believe that Nadine Napraxine has never been anything to Othmar; that the child, on the contrary, is passionately in love with him; and that the marriage will be a very happy one.’
Alain de Vannes shrugged his shoulders. He was very angry that the matter had turned out as it had done; the more angry that it was wholly impossible for him to display or to express his discomfiture, and that he was compelled to be amiable to Othmar and to all the world in relation to it, and bear himself before everyone as the friend and guardian of his wife’s cousin. His fancy for her had been a caprice rather than anything stronger, but it was resentful in its disappointment and impotence, and might even be capable of some vengeance.
Faïel had left sweet, solemn memories with the girl: the green gloom of the fern-brakes and the wooded lanes, the soft grey summers, and the evenings with their mysterious silvery shadows; the silent corridors, the tolling bells, the altars with their white lilies, the pathetic monotonous voices of the nuns — all were blent together in her recollection into a picture full of holiness and calm. Now that she knew what the gipsy woman had meant, she wished to be there for a little while to muse upon her vast happiness, her wondrous future, and consecrate them both.
She asked for, and obtained, permission to go to her old convent in retreat for the two weeks before her marriage. Madame de Vannes was inclined to refuse what she regarded as excessive and eccentric, but Othmar obtained her consent.
It pleased him that she should pass her time before her marriage with the holy women who had trained her childhood; it was not so that Nadine Napraxine had spent the weeks preceding her soulless union.
‘You wish not to see her for two whole weeks?’ said the Duchesse, suspiciously.
‘I wish her to do always what she wishes,’ he answered.
‘She will be a very happy woman then,’ said Cri-Cri, drily.
He added, with a little hesitation: ‘It is her unlikeness to the world, her spirituality, which has charmed me; I wish her to retain them.’
‘It will be difficult,’ said the Duchesse, with a laugh. ‘Fillette,’ she said with amusement to her young cousin, ‘I do not know why you are so very solemn about it all; I assure you the soul has very little to do with marriage, as you will find out soon enough. Why should you go in retreat as if you were about to enter religion?’
Yseulte coloured; she answered timidly: ‘I am forgetting God; it is ungrateful; I am too happy; I mean — I grow selfish, I want to be quiet a little while to remember — —’
The Duchesse laughed, much amused: ‘ You ought decidedly to have taken the veil; you will be a religieuse manquée! At your age I thought of nothing but of my balls and my bouquets, and of the costumes they gave me, and of the officers of the Guides — Alain was in the Guides, he was very good-looking at that time. I must say Othmar and you are like no lovers in the world that I have ever known.’
However, she gave her permission, and Yseulte went to the ancient stonebuilt fortress-like house of Faïel, where the quiet corridors were filled with the smell of dried herbs from the nuns’ distillery and the little grey figures of the children played noiselessly under the leafless chestnut avenues of the tranquil gardens.
It was all so welcome to her after the babble of Blanchette, the tumult of congratulation, the succession of compliments, the perpetual sense of being exhibited and examined, discussed and depreciated; but it did not change her thoughts very much, for even in her prayers her wondrous change of fate always seemed with her, and she found that even amongst her pious and unworldly Dames de Ste. Anne the betrothed of Count Othmar was received as a very different being to the dowerless Yseulte de Valogne; and something of that b
itterness which so often came to her lover reached her through all her guilelessness. Even Nicole, also, embracing her with ardour and tenderness, with the tears running down her brown cheeks, and pleading for the right to send her pétiote the orange-blossoms and the lilies-of-the-valley for her bridal-dress, yet amidst her joyful tears and tearful joy had not forgotten to whisper: ‘And, dis donc, ma mignonne, you will say a word now to the Count Othmar to get my husband the municipal concession to put up the steam mill? It will make our fortune, my angel, and I know what a happiness that will be to you!’
‘A fortune! Money, money! It seems all they think of in the world!’ the child reflected sadly. ‘What can Nicole and Sandroz want with more money? They are very well off, and they have no children, no relations even; and yet all they think about is laying by one napoleon on the top of another! It is horrible! Even the Mother Superior has never said to me how good he is, how kind, how generous; she only says that I am fortunate because he is so rich! They make me feel quite wicked. I want to tell them how mean they are! Why am I so much better and greater in their sight because I am going to become rich too? I thought they cared for none of those things. But our Reverend Mother asks me for a new altar service as Blanchette asked me for a turquoise necklace! I understand why he is always a little sad. He thinks no one cares for him, for himself.’
And, after many days and nights of most anxious thought and most entreating prayer, she gathered up all her courage and wrote a little letter to Othmar, the only one which she had ever addressed to him; she was afraid it was a strange thing to do, and one perhaps unmaidenly, but she could not resist her longing to say that one thing to him, and so she wrote:
‘Monsieur, — I do not know whether I ought to say it, and I hope you will forgive me if it be wrong to say so, but I have thought often since I hear and see so much of your great wealth that perhaps — perhaps — you may imagine it is that which I care for; but indeed I do not; if you were quite poor, very poor to-morrow, it would be just the same to me, and I should be just as happy. I do pray you to believe this.
‘Yours, in affection and reverence,
‘Yseulte.’
She had hesitated very long before she ventured to sign herself so, but in the end it seemed to her that it could not be very wrong as it stood: she owed him both affection and reverence — even the Mother Superior herself would say so.
She enclosed the little note in a letter to her cousin the Duchesse, knowing that otherwise it would not be allowed to pass the convent walls. When Madame de Vannes received it she looked at it with suspicion.
‘If it should be any nonsense about Nadine Napraxine?’ she thought with alarm; ‘if it should be any folly that would break the marriage?’
She decided that it would be unwise to send it to Othmar without knowing what it said, so she broke the little seal very carefully and read it. Something in it touched her as she perused the simple words, written so evidently with a hand which trembled and a heart that was full. She sealed it again and despatched it to its destination. ‘Poor little simpleton,’ she thought, ‘why did she take the trouble to say that? She will not make him believe it!’
But he did believe it.
It was because she made the belief possible to him that the child had seemed to him like a young angel who brought healing on her wings; and the love which did not venture to avow itself, but yet was visible in every one of these timid sentences, went to his heart with sweetness and unconscious reproach. He wrote back to her:
‘I believe you, and I thank you. You give me what the world cannot give nor command.’
And he added words of tenderness which, if they would have seemed cold to an older or a less innocent recipient, wholly contented her, and seemed to her like a breath from heaven.
The fortnight soon passed, and after its quiet days at Faïel, filled with the sounds so familiar to her of the drowsy bells, the rolling organ swell, the plaintive monotonous chaunts and prayers, the pacing of slow steps up and down long stone passages, the grinding of the winch of the great well in the square court, she felt calmed and strengthened, and not afraid when the Mother Superior spoke of all the responsibilities of her future.
To her, marriage was a mystic, spiritual union; all she knew of it was gathered from the expressions borrowed from it to symbolise the union of Christ and His saints. She went to it with as religious and innocent a faith as she would have taken with her to the cloister had they sent her there. If any human creature can be as pure as snow, a very young girl who has been reared by simple and pious women is so. Even the Duchesse de Vannes felt a vague emotion before that absolute ignorance of the senses and of the passions of life.
‘It is stupid,’ she said to herself. ‘But it is lovely in its way. I can fancy a man likes to destroy it — slowly, cruelly — just as a boy pulls off butterflies’ wings.’
CHAPTER XXIII.
The first days of February came all too soon for the vague fears of Yseulte, which throbbed in her as the heart beats in a bird which feels a captor’s hand approaching. All the ridicule of Blanchette and Toinon, all the good-natured banter of their mother, and all the endless congratulations of society which rained on her like the almond blossoms which were falling in showers in the wind, could not make her otherwise than bewildered and alarmed, and as the time of her marriage drew closer and closer her terror almost obscured her happiness. No one would have believed in it; everyone, had they known the secrets of her shy and silent mind, would have laughed at it as hypocrisy; but with her it was most real.
Away from Othmar, she adored him; but near him, she dreaded him as a stranger who was about to lead her into the strangest and most terrible mysteries of life. But time stays not for the sinking or the fluttering of any poor human heart, and they brought her from the dim, cold, misty Breton country back into the gay and crowded world of Paris; and the great rooms of her cousin’s house, filled by brilliant throngs for the signing of the contract, brought home to her the inexorable fact that her marriage would itself take place in another forty-eight hours.
‘You are so pale, fillette!’ said the Duchesse in some impatience. ‘One would think that we were forcing your inclinations!’
Yseulte said nothing; she could not have explained the tumult of agitation which was in her. She was marvellously happy; and yet ——
A lover who had loved her would have divined and penetrated all those mingled emotions, which were unintelligible to herself; but Othmar was too distrait and too absorbed in thought, wherein she had no share, to do so. Though she was the centre of the world around her for the moment, the child remained in an absolute solitude.
Friederich Othmar, studying her with his exquisite power of penetration, alone perceived her trouble, and thought with pleasure: ‘The poets are not quite the fools I deemed them; there is such a thing as a virginal soul in which the senses do not speak, and to which the gewgaws of the world say nothing either. I should never have believed that, but I see it. He has found a pearl, but he will not care for it. He will absorb it into the acid of his own disappointed passions, and then will be surprised if it disappear.’
If he had been told a month earlier that he would have had such sentimental regrets, he would have been wholly incredulous, but something in the sight of the young girl, in her innocent gravity, with her wistful, changeful eyes, touched him, as she stood by the table where the marriage contract was signed. She seemed to him too good to be wedded with indifference, taught the fever of passion, the suffering of maternity, and then be forsaken — as she would be.
‘I am glad that I did not meet her, or one like her, thirty years ago; she would have unnerved me,’ he thought, as he stooped and wrote his own name.
Amongst the nuptial gifts had been one of great value from the Princess Napraxine. It was a gold statuette of Love, modelled by Mercié and standing on a base of jade and agate. It had all the cruelty and irony of the modern Italian school in it, for the poor Amorino was trying to drink out of a gourd w
hich was empty, and the expression of his disappointed, distressed, pathetic features was rendered with admirable mockery and skill. He turned his sad eyes ruefully on those who looked at him; some withered passion-flowers and a little asp were near his feet. When Othmar saw it, his face darkened; he thought it a jest at himself, nor had the giver selected it without intention. Behind the gold Amorino he seemed to see her smiling, serene, jewel-like eyes, her delicate, contemptuous mouth, which said: ‘Va donc! C’est le vieux jeu!’
‘The only woman that I shall ever love!’ he thought with a thrill of remorse, of shame, and of anger, all in one.
What right had he, while his veins were hot with those unholy fires, to simulate love for an innocent and virgin life?
The morning came for which Blanchette and Toinon had been longing for a month; and clothed in palest blue velvet, carrying white bouquets as large as themselves, they wore at their throats the new diamond lockets of their ambition, with the miniature of their cousin within each, for which they cared nothing at all. But the diamonds were as large and as numerous as ever their hearts could desire. ‘Vrai! Il est bon prince!’ they cried in chorus, as they skipped round each other, and made the sun sparkle in the jewels, and sang the song of Judic.
Then they went to the church of S. Philippe du Roule, and made their little naughty faces as grave as mice that see a cat, while the incense rose and the organ pealed, and the Latin words rolled out sonorously, and the pale wintry sunshine shone over the brilliant crowd assembled there for the marriage.
Yseulte herself looked like a slender white lily.
The deep peace and serenity of her convent days had come there with her; certain instincts of her race kept her still and composed with the eyes of so many strangers upon her; a dignity that was exquisitely graceful blended with her childish air; she looked like some young princess of the Valois time, such as poets and painters still see in their dreams.