by Ouida
One of those special trains which Blanchette thought the supreme privilege of marriage bore them without a pause through the wintry landscapes between Paris and Blois.
The day was fine and windless; there was a scent of spring which breathed through the leafless poplars and willows, and over the frosted fields and vineyards, with sweet, vague promise; here and there burst in to sight, out from a forest glade beside some château, some gaily-clad hunting party, the last of the season; ever and anon there was some little town, with its old ruined castle, or its monastic church, shut in, in leafless orchards. The broad river glistened in the light under the burden of its many islands, its breaking blocks of ice drifting on turbid green waters, its flood of mud and melted snow rolling heavily beneath the colliers and the merchant craft, which made their way slowly against the floes. In the drear blackened vineyards, peasants, like pictures by Millet, were at work; sometimes a woman with faggots on her bowed shoulders straightened herself to watch the swiftness of the train, or a bluefrocked herd-boy stopped his cattle at a crossing.
All these pictures passed before the eyes of Yseulte like the panorama of a dream: the early morning hours had been one long bewilderment to her; though she had carried herself so bravely, her heart had beaten all the while like a caught bird’s: even now the scent of the incense, the waves of sound from the organ, the sonorous voice of the great prelate in its admonitions, seemed to come with her into the still, brown, fresh country; the sense of some infinite and solemn obligation, accepted and irrevocable, was upon her.
They had left Paris immediately after the ceremony; and the evening sun was glowing in the west and lighting the pastoral country with its leafless woods and glancing rivers as they reached the château.
Amyôt was a place of great beauty and stateliness; it had been built for François Premier, and had the salamander and the crown carved on its stones and blazoned on its metal work; it was surrounded by water like Chenonceaux, and in the sunset-glow its pinnacles and towers and high steep roof gleamed as if made of gold; it stood on a hill amidst great woods, overlooking the fruitful valleys and fertile plains which lie between the Loire and Cher, and in its gardens all the art that modern horticulture can boast was united to the stately avenues, the close-shorn turf, the long grey stone terraces with the motto of the Valois and the fleur-de-lis of France carved upon their pilasters, which had in their day seen the mignons of Henri II., and felt the feet of Diane de Poitiers and of Mary Stuart.
Amyôt was a poem, epic and epopee in one; she had never seen it before; she gazed at it with entranced eyes, glad that her home would be in such a place; then she looked timidly at Othmar.
He was not looking at her.
She sighed, hardly knowing why, but with a vague sense of neglect and disappointment. She was in a trance of mingled joy and dread. She saw the dusky avenue of yews through which they passed, the long lines of majestic terraces, the sheets of glancing water, the masses of camellias and azaleas, brought from the hothouses to make the wintry gardens bloom for that momentous hour, the vast fantastic solemn pile towering up against the evening skies. She saw them all as in a dream; she was wondering wistfully in her ignorance whether it were possible that she had offended him, or possible that already he regretted what he had done. She shrank a little from him, and sat quite silent as their carriage rolled under the great stone gateway.
There had been enough in his caresses, in his words, as they had come thither, to startle her innocent ignorance into some sense of the meaning and the demands of love, but they had left her dimly alarmed and troubled, as before some great mystery, and he had soon grown abstracted, almost indifferent, and had abandoned himself to his own thoughts.
Amyôt even in its winter silence and sombreness, was a place where lovers could well forget the world; yews and bay trees made perpetual verdure around its lawns, and orangeries and palm-houses made ceaseless summer within its walls; in its halls and galleries old tapestries and Eastern hangings muffled every sound and excluded every draught; and in the warm air of its chambers, ceiled with cedar-wood, embossed with the salamander, and the ‘F.’ in solid gold, and having embayed windows, all looking straightway south over the Loire water, the winter’s landscape, seen through its painted casements, was but as a decorative scene set there for the strong charm of contrast.
They passed through the ranks of the bowing servants, and remained at last alone in the great suite of drawing-rooms, whose oriel windows all looked southward. They were rooms hung with pale satins, still ceiled with cedar, and keeping the Valois crown and arms upon their gilded carvings and lofty archways. They preserved the style and charm of the age which had begotten them. She was in harmony with them as she moved there, the dull red light which preceded evening falling through the painted panes on the dove-hued velvet and dusky furs of her travelling-gown, and touching the light gold of her fair hair coiled in a great knot above her throat.
He, when his servants had retired, kissed her hand with a ceremony which seemed, even to her innocence, very cold.
‘You are at home,’ he said gently. ‘Here it will be for you to command, for all to obey.’
She stood before him in one of the embrasures of the windows; the cream-hued velvet of her travelling-dress trimmed with sable, caught the rays of the setting sun.
‘You are châtelaine of Amyôt,’ he added, with a smile. ‘Here I shall be but the first of your servants.’
The words were gracious, and even tender, but they touched her with a sense of chillness; she felt, without knowing why she felt it, that it was not with this courteous ceremony that he would have welcomed her if he had loved her — much.
She said nothing, though she coloured a little as he kissed her hands.
She moved to one of the great windows and looked out a little wistfully towards the rolling waters, the deep, dark brown forests with their purple shadows. The dim afternoon light spread over the landscape without, and through the gorgeous and majestic chambers, which had once heard the love words of the Valois. She had laid her hat down on a table near, the lingering glow of the dying day fell on her white throat, on her cheek with its changing colour, on the knot of orange blossom fastened amongst the lace at her breast; she thrilled through all her nerves as she suddenly realised that she was altogether his, to be used as he chose, never to be apart from him unless by his wish.
She gazed at the scene around her, troubled, perplexed, wistfully, vaguely alarmed, afraid she knew not of what; whilst he watched her with a certain futile anger against himself that her loveliness did not excite him and content him more, a remorseful sense that he was not the lover she merited and should have won.
A sort of self-reproach moved him as he looked at her in her innocence, which seemed too holy a thing to be profaned by the grossness of sensual approach — on the morrow she would not look at him with those serene, childlike eyes.
It seemed to him almost cruel to rouse that perfect innocence from its unsuspicious repose.
Before he could speak again she had turned towards him; her lips trembled a little as she gathered her courage and said aloud what had been in her thoughts all the day through.
‘It will be for me to obey,’ she murmured, with the colour deepening in her cheeks. ‘And I will do it always, so gladly: but would you tell me one thing: did you — I mean — if you had not cared for me a little, surely you would never have wished —— ?’
She paused, overcome by the sense of her own hardihood, and her eyes filled with tears; she longed to say to him, ‘Instead of all your jewels, instead of all this luxury, give me one fond word,’ but her timidity and her modesty would not let her lips frame the supplication. He was still as a stranger to her — a man whom she had seen scarce a dozen times.
The question in its timid commencement had said enough: his conscience shrank from it; he had always dreaded the moment inevitable of the fatal —
‘If this be love, tell me how much.’
‘Would you tel
l me?’ she repeated very low, then paused with an overwhelming sense of her own hardihood and great immodesty.
She made a beautiful picture as she stood before him; the cream-hued satin falling about her, the warm cedar-wood panels behind her, the red light of the sunset shed like a glory upon her head and shining about her feet.
‘Who would not love you, dear?’ he murmured, with a hesitation of which her own confusion spared her from being conscious. ‘Never doubt my affection. I have not been as happy as the world thinks me, but if I be not happy beside you, fate will indeed find me thankless.’
Nor was it altogether untrue; she looked infinitely lovely to him in that moment, with the tears shining in her upraised eyes, and the blue veins of her throat swelling where the orange flowers touched them; and all this was his — his as wholly as the budding primrose in the woods is the child’s that finds it and may pluck and rifle it at will.
An emotion that was more nearly passion than he had hitherto felt for her moved him as he looked on her.
With a sudden impulse of the joy and mastery of possession, warmer and more eager than any she had roused in him before, he took her in his arms and kissed her throat where the orange flowers were fastened, and, with a tender touch, unloosed them.
CHAPTER XXIV.
‘Othmar filant le parfait amour while he gathers wet violets under his Valois woods, is a truly admirable idyl!’ said the Princess Napraxine, with her unkind little smile, a month later, while her eyes, from under an umbrella covered with old point duchesse, went indolently from the shining sea upon her right to the romantic gorge leading up to distant peaks of snow, which could be seen on her left through boughs of eucalyptus and mimosa. She was seated on the white terraces of a famous villa, crowning a promontory which carried luxuriant and fantastic gardens far out into the lazy blue water, across whose then smiling plains of azure light it looked straight southward to the cloud which was Corsica. It was the villa of another Russian magnate, Prince Ezarhédine, with whom there was at that time staying a mighty statesman at whose nod or frown Europe breathed lightly or held her breath; and under the guise of a breakfast there was an informal conference of diplomatists at his house that day.
Friederich Othmar was staying at S. Pharamond for two days to meet the great Russian, and conduct, over a cigarette and a glass of kümmel, one of those delicate and intricate negotiations in which finance and diplomacy had equal parts, and which were the delight of his soul, and made the special fame of the House of Othmar.
The great statesman was a charming person, Oriental in morals, Athenian in mind, and French in manners; and Nadine Napraxine, who so seldom could be persuaded to go anywhere, had deigned to come and breakfast with him there and allow him to recall her childhood.
‘You would never give me a smile,’ he said to her. ‘At five years old you were as cruel as you are now. I remember taking you what I thought an irresistible bribe; a gardener in Saxe driving a wheelbarrow of bonbons. But you just looked at it — smileless — and said cruelly, “Merci, Monsieur — mais j’en ai tant!” You were five years old then.’
‘“Tant” and “trop” are the spoilers of our existence,’ she replied. ‘I remember as a child I never cared for bonbons; I used to say that if they hung up where the church bells were, and one could not get them, one would care — —’
‘My intention was good,’ said the great man piteously; ‘you might have smiled on me for that.’
‘That would have been very commonplace, everybody is amiable in that kind of way; I am not amiable, they say, and yet I am never out of temper — which seems to me the first requisite for amiability.’
‘Serenity is unkind when it means indifference.’
‘But indifference is so comfortable to the indifferent!’ she had replied, and the reply admitted of no refutation.
Now, when the déjeuner, which had been the pretext and cover of the morning’s informal but pregnant discussion, was over, and she was about to go to her carriage, she had smiled with gentle condescension on the Baron, and asked him the tidings of Amyôt. Friederich Othmar, in his answers, had been incautiously and unusually enthusiastic in the hearing of a person who to all enthusiasm was merciless; the more merciless, because in a far-down and never-investigated corner of her own nature she was a little conscious that she also could have been enthusiastic — if it had been worth while.
She had laughed a little unkindly, and had made the remark about the wet violets; the Baron, slightly irritated and considerably in earnest, had replied, that to gather violets with your own wife was less exciting, but perhaps sweeter, and certainly wiser, than to purchase orchids for the wife of someone else.
‘A most moral opinion, turned with classic elegance, and quite indisputable,’ said Madame Napraxine, with much amusement. ‘And orchids are so short-lived! Do you think home-grown violets live longer? Dear Baron, I am so glad to see you so pleased, and so poetical; Napoleon’s desire for an heir made him quite brutal; your desire for your nephew’s heir makes you quite full of pretty sentiment. Pray go on, you interest me! it is as if one heard Bismarck playing a guitar!’
‘Like Napoleon, I dislike les amours stériles,’ replied Friederich Othmar, with a smile. ‘My nephew was in danger of letting his life drift away in a dream; I know no means of recalling a man to the practical happiness of existence so efficacious as a young girl’s beauty.’
‘You are very primitive in your ideas, dear Baron, for a person who has lived all his life in Paris,’ said the Princess Nadine, with her little air of fatigue and of irony. She knew very well what had been implied in his words, and she resented them.
‘Nature is primitive, Madame,’ said the Baron. ‘But after all, we do not improve on her, nor exclude her, do what we may.’
‘You think not?’ said Madame Napraxine, much amused. ‘Well, for my part, I have never been able to discover that Nature is very charming: if we attended to her, she would make us eat with our fingers, fight with our teeth, drink only water, and wear no clothes; she would certainly, also, give Otho Othmar a score of wives instead of one Sainte Mousseline. Do not take to admiring Nature, Baron; she will lead you astray. It is too late for you to begin; no one after twenty can eat green fruit with impunity.’
‘Sainte Mousseline!’ echoed the old man, with more temper than prudence. ‘Surely that epithet would not apply to Yseulte!’
‘Of course not now,’ said Nadine, serenely. ‘Sainte Mousseline has given way to the nuptial white satin. Only you spoke of Nature; — and if I were you I would not wish for Nature to prevail too much at Amyôt, for Nature has a sad trick of being soon satisfied, and dissatisfied, and disposed to change. You know it is only the poets who invented Constancy, at the same time that they created the Phœnix and the Hippogriff.’
‘If I thought he could be unfaithful to so much youth and so much innocence —— ,’ began the Baron, with some heat.
‘He will not be so yet, at all events,’ said Prince Ezarhédine. ‘Men are not quite so fickle as Madame Nadine thinks.’
‘Men are what women make them,’ she replied, with her most contemptuous tranquillity. ‘ As a rule, they are always faithless to women who love them. It is tiresome to be loved; “ça vous donne des nerfs.” You get out of temper and you go away; then silly people say you are inconstant.’
‘You will admit that at least it seems very like it,’ said Baron Fritz.
The great statesman, standing near, looked a little wistfully at her. He thought that he would not have found it tiresome to be loved by the wife of Napraxine.
‘The Countess Othmar will be too young to understand all that,’ continued Nadine. ‘ She will give too much of herself. She will not have the first essential: savoir se reprendre. Love is like all other fine arts — it should be treated scientifically. Do you remember Sergius Veriatine? He was devoted to the Princess Platoff — my cousin Sophie. All at once he broke with her. Some one asked him why he did so. He answered honestly: “Un jour, elle fais
ait la faute de me prier de rester quand je voulais m’en aller.” Serge Veriatine put the whole of male human nature into that sentence. Othmar’s wife will be always begging him to stay when he will want to go; she is so young. She is, of course, in love with him; very much in love with him; and she is so unhappily inexperienced that she will be sure to tell him so a hundred times a day. Now, however pretty a story is, still when you hear it very often it grows dull: you see she is beginning with an immense mistake: Amyôt in the winter!’
‘Amyôt is his choice as much as hers,’ said Friederich Othmar. ‘You know he always liked solitude. They will be in Paris in the first days of April — —’
‘Two months, or to speak precisely, seven weeks, of Amyôt in midwinter is precisely the mistake that a very young girl would be sure to make,’ continued his tormentor. ‘Amyôt is a delightful place in its way; it is like a page of Brantôme. I remember the admirable hunting parties he gave there for the Orleans princes. But all the same, seven whole weeks of Amyôt in the rain of February and March would damp any ardour that he might begin with — do you think he began with very much? What a pity there was no one to tell her that a man is bored so soon! And Othmar is like Chateaubriand; he is the grand ennuyé just because his ideals are so high that it is wholly impossible to find anything like them anywhere. I am quite sure that he has imagined in this poor child an angel and a goddess; a kind of Greek nymph and Christian virgin blent in one. When he finds that she is only a child, who has had the narrowest of all educations, and is not even a woman in her comprehension or her sympathies, he will be intolerably wearied. If they were in the world, the disillusion might be postponed; at Amyôt it must come in two days.’
‘You are very clever, Madame,’ said the Baron with some irritation, ‘but even you may perhaps for once be mistaken. She is very young, as you say; but for that very reason she will be like clay in his hands which he can mould as he will.’