Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  Nadine Napraxine, with that one comprehensive disdainful glance, passed across the marble floor, and entered through the open glass doors of the house. She said nothing more. The young Seliedoff, who had grown first very red, then very pale, followed her timidly like a chidden hound, and paused upon the threshold, hesitating; he scarcely ventured to enter also without some sign from her. But she gave him none. She passed on through the salons, and ascended the low broad staircase without bestowing on him a single glance. Then he knew that she was gone to her own apartments, where no man living dared follow her. Boris Seliedoff stole into a little salon humbly, and threw himself down on the first seat he saw. He covered his face with his hands; there were tears in his eyes, which fell slowly through his clasped fingers.

  He was a young dare-devil who had eaten fire and played with death, and had hewed down men and women and children without mercy by Skobeleff’s side; but he was a mere frightened, timid, wretched lad beneath the lash of her displeasure. He would have crawled for her pardon like her spaniel, even whilst he groped about in bewilderment and darkness to discover his own offence, and could not tell what it had been. An older man would have told him that it had only been the supreme fault of arriving at the wrong moment.

  How long he sat there he never knew; he waited in the vague hope of a gentler word, a more kind dismissal, at least for permission to return. He did not remember that he would only increase his offence, prolong his error. The bright day was shining without on all the gay array of shining marbles, many-coloured azaleas, dancing waves, white sails, blue skies; within, the shaded light fell subdued and roseate on the porcelains, the tapestries, the bronzes, the stands and bowls of flowers, all the fantastic details of modern luxury. He might have been in a peasant’s isba in the midst of a frozen plain for aught he knew. Two or three clocks chimed five, and the carillon in the stable-tower of La Jacquemerille answered them; for anything he could tell, he might have been there a whole day or only fifteen minutes.

  Whilst it was still quite daylight, servants came in and brought lamps with rose-coloured shades and set them down noiselessly and went away. Seliedoff raised his head, but he did not leave his place; he sat like a figure of stone. He heard a sound of voices and of laughter; through the parted curtains of the portières he saw the vista of the three drawing-rooms which opened out of the small one in which he was. People were coming in and standing about conversing with one another in the rose-hued light of the lamps, lit whilst the sun was still shining. He then remembered that it was Thursday, her day, on which, from five to seven, the dessus du panier could come there and idle and flirt and sip caravan tea, or syrups or liqueurs, and have the honour of a word from her, perhaps even of a word of welcome. As he looked and remembered, she herself entered the little room in which he sat, and which was the nearest to her own apartments. She cast a glance upon him, severe, astonished, then passed through to the larger salons. She wore a pale-mauve-coloured velvet gown, with a jabot of old point lace, and the same lace peeping here and there from the folds of its skirts; she had some natural yellow roses at her throat; she had her hair à l’empire; she had never looked lovelier, colder, more utterly beyond the imitation of other women or the solicitations of men. He watched her receive the little crowd of people already there, and those who came after them; he heard her sweet chill voice, now and then her laugh; he saw all the men whom he hated gathered about her; and the murmur of the voices, the whispers of the discreet mirth, the scent of the flower-laden air, the rosy gleams of the lamplight, the frou-frou of the dresses, the tinkle of the tea-cups, came to his ear as the sounds of the outer world come to a sick man in fever.

  Geraldine was not there. She had always prohibited his appearance more than once a month at her jour.

  ‘I will have no one seen in my rooms as regularly and certainly as Paul,’ she had always said to him. Paul was her groom of the chambers. ‘Whenever any man is seen perpetually anywhere, as immovably as though he were a clock or a bracket, he becomes ridiculous; and the woman who allows him to be there, still more so.’

  Geraldine had been forced to obey, with whatever reluctance; usually he had consoled himself, as well as he could, with the tripot. A man is not often jealous of a day in which he knows there exists for him, in his absence, that safety which lies in numbers.

  Boris Seliedoif sat on where he was with dogged persistence, his eyes riveted on those pretty salons in which the comedy of society was being acted, and where he perceived nothing save that one form, when it came within his sight, with the grace of movement, the charm of attitude, which were especial to Nadine Napraxine. He thought the coming and going of her many guests would never end; that the buzz of the many voices would never cease. Once or twice men and women whom he knew came into the little room, and sat down there for a few moments; then he was forced to rise and speak to them, to say he knew not what. But he took his seat again immediately, and resumed his silent vigil. Some of them looked at him in surprise, for his expression was strange, and his black Georgian eyes were misty yet fierce; but he was not conscious of the notice he excited, he was only conscious that she never glanced towards him, never summoned him, once.

  The two hours seemed to him endless. When seven had struck, the last carriage rolled away from before the windows, the last lingering visitor, the Duc de Prangins — he who had killed young d’Ivrea — made his profound bow over her hand, and took himself and his elegant witticisms and his admirable manners back to the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo. When the doors had closed on him, Nadine Napraxine stood a moment alone in the centre of her salon; then swiftly turned, and came towards Seliedoff. He rose, and awaited her sullenly.

  Her right hand was clenched as though it grasped the handle of a knout, and was about to use it; a terrible anger shone from the lustre of her eyes; her lips were pale with the force of her displeasure.

  ‘How dare you! how dare you!’ she said between her teeth.

  So might an empress have spoken to a moujik.

  To have waited unbidden in her room, seen by all the world, sulking there as though he were a lover once favoured, now dispossessed; making of himself a spectacle, a ridicule, a theme for the comment and chatter of society — it seemed to her such intolerable presumption, such infinite insolence, that she could have struck him with her clenched hand if her dignity had not forbade her. For all her world to see this love-sick boy half-hidden in an inner room, as though by her welcome and authority! She, who had dismissed kings as others dismiss lackeys when she had found them too presuming, could find no chastisement vast enough for such a sin against her authority and her repute.

  Seliedoff was but a spoilt child; he had had his own will and way unchecked all his short life, and all his companions and servants had existed only for his pleasure. A foolish and doting mother had never bridled his wishes or tamed his passions. Before Nadine Napraxine alone had the arrogant young noble become submissive, suppliant, and humble. Now, in his torture and his sense of wrong, the natural self-will and fury of a spoilt child crossed, of an adoring youth checked and repudiated, broke away from the bonds of fear in which she had always held them. He answered her with a torrent of words, unconsidered and unwise, beyond all pardon.

  ‘You have treated me like a dog!’ he said in conclusion, his voice choked in his throat, the veins of his forehead injected. ‘You have caressed me, called me, allowed me every liberty, been pleased with my every folly; and now you turn me out of your house as you would turn the dog if he misbehaved himself. But I am not a dog, I am a man, and that you shall know, by God — —’

  He came nearer to her, his eyes red and covetous, his boyish face inflamed with fiercest passion, his arms flung out to seize her.

  She looked at him, such a look as she would have given to a madman to control, and awe him; he paused, trembled, dared not draw nearer to her.

  She was deeply, implacably offended by what had passed. For him to permit himself such language and such actions, seemed to her as intol
erable an insult as if the African boy in her service had dared to disobey her. It was the first time that anyone had ever ventured to insult her; it irritated all her delicacy, infuriated all her pride. She never paused to think what provocation she had given; she would have struck him dead with a glance had she been able.

  ‘You are unwell, and delirious,’ she said in her serenest, chillest tones. ‘You know neither what you do or say. I have been kind to you, and you have presumed to misinterpret my kindness. Your cousin would treat you like a hound, if he knew. But you are ill, so there is excuse for you. Go home, and I will send you my physicians.’

  Then she rang; and when a servant entered from the antechamber she turned to him:

  ‘M. le Comte Seliedoff desires his carriage.’

  The boy looked at her with a terrible look in his eyes — pitiful, baffled, imploring, delirious.

  ‘Nadine, Nadine,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘will you send me away like that — to die?’

  But she had passed, with her slow soft grace, into the adjoining room. He heard her say to Melville, who had been asked there:

  ‘You are after my hours, Monsignore, but you are always welcome.’

  Seliedoff, with a mist like blood before his eyes, staggered out of the little salon into the mild primrose-scented evening air, hearing, as in a dream, the voices of the servants who told him that his horses waited.

  ‘She will never forgive; she will never forgive,’ he thought, with a sickening sense that this one moment of insanity had severed him for ever from the woman he worshipped. ‘She will never forgive; I shall never enter her house again!’

  All the lovely scene stretching before him in its peace and luxuriance, as the stars came out in the deep blue skies and the daylight still lingered upon shore and sea, was blotted out for him by a red haze as of blood and of tears.

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  Meanwhile Melville, who had come to take his leave before proceeding to Paris under orders from the Vatican, found his hostess evidently ennuyée; she was not in her usual serene humour.

  ‘What has irritated you, Princess?’ that very observant person presumed at last to ask. ‘Have you actually discovered that doubled rose-leaf of whose existence you have been always sure and I always sceptical?’

  ‘The doubled rose-leaf is that enormous nuisance, la bêtise humaine,’ she replied with ennui, breaking off some blossoms of an odontoglossum standing near her. ‘It is like the fog in London, it penetrates everywhere, you cannot escape it; there has been no rose-glass made which could shut it out. If Balzac had written for centuries, he would never have come to an end of it. Do you ever find any variety in your confessional? I never do in my drawing-rooms.’

  ‘And yet who should find it, if not Madame Napraxine?’ said Melville, who, when in his worldly moods, did not especially care to be reminded that he was a churchman.

  ‘I do not know who should, — I know that I never do,’ she replied. ‘I have made la chasse au caractère ever since I was old enough to know what character meant; and my only wonder is how, out of such a sameness of material, St.-Simon and La Bruyère and Ste.-Beuve, and all those people who write so well, ever were able to make such entertaining books. I suppose it is done by the same sort of science which enables mathematicians to make endless permutations out of four numbers. For myself, I should like other numbers than those we know by rote.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ thought Melville, ‘when men have died because she laughed! Is that so very commonplace? or, is it not tragic enough?’

  Aloud he said, in his courtliest manner:

  ‘Princess, I fear the sameness of human nature tries you so greatly because of the sameness of the emotions which you excite in it; I can imagine that too much adoration may cloy like too much sugar. Also, in your chasse au caractère you have, like all who hunt, left behind you a certain little bourgeois quality called pity; an absurd little quality, no doubt, still one which helps observation. I am sure you have read Tourguenieff’s little story of the quail?’

  ‘Yes; but one eats them still, you know, just the same as if he had never written it. Pity may be a microscope, I do not know; besides, you must admit that a quail is a much lovelier little life than a man’s, and so can excite it so much more easily. A quail is quite a charming little bird. Myself, I never eat birds at all; it is barbarous.’

  ‘What I meant to say was,’ suggested Melville, ‘that, in that tiny tale, Tourguenieff, like a poet, as he was, at heart, describes precisely what sympathy will do to open the intelligence to the closed lives of others, whether bird or man. Perhaps, madame, sympathy would even do something to smooth the creases out of your rose-leaf — if you tried it.’

  ‘I suppose I am not sympathetic,’ said Nadine Napraxine, stripping the petals of the odontoglossum; ‘they all say so. But I think it is their own fault; they are so uninteresting.’

  ‘The quail,’ said Melville, ‘to almost everybody is only a little juicy morsel to be wrapped in a vine-leaf and roasted; but Tourguenieff had the vision to see in it the courage of devotion, the heroism of maternity, the loveliness of its life, the infinite pathos of its death. Yet, the exceptional estimate of the student’s view of it was quite as true as the general view of the epicure.’

  ‘Am I an epicure?’ said Nadine Napraxine, amused.

  ‘Spiritually, intellectually, you are,’ replied Melville; ‘and so nothing escapes the fastidiousness of your taste; yet perhaps, madame, something may escape the incompleteness of your sympathies.’

  ‘That is very possible; but, as I observed to Lady Brancepeth when she made me a similar reproach, one is as one is made. One is Tourguenieff or one is Brillat-Savarin, all that is arranged beforehand for one — somewhere.’

  Melville had learned the ways of the world too well not to know how to glide easily, with closed eyes and averted ears, over such irreverences; but he ventured to say:

  ‘One cannot dispute the fact of natural idiosyncrasy and inclination, of course; but may not one’s self-culture be as much of the character as of the mind? Might it not become as interesting to strive and expand one’s moral as one’s intellectual horizon? It seems so to me, at the least.’

  She laughed, and rang a little silver bell for Mahmoud to bring them some fresh tea.

  ‘My dear Monsignore,’ she said, with amusement and admiration; ‘for enwrapping a kernel of religious advice in an envelope of agreeable social conversation, there is not your equal anywhere — you may well be beloved of the Propaganda! But, alas! it is all wasted on me.’

  Melville reddened a little with irritation:

  ‘I understand,’ he answered. ‘I fear, Princess, that you are like Virschow or Paul Bert, who are so absorbed in cutting, burning, and electrifying the nerves of dogs that the dog, as a sentient creature, a companion, and a friend, is wholly unknown to them. Humanity, poor Humanity, is your dog.’

  ‘Will you have some tea?’ she said, as Mahmoud brought in her service made by goldsmiths of the Deccan, who sat on mats under their banana trees, with the green parrots flying over the aloes and the euphorbia, and who produced work beside which all the best which Europe can do with her overgrown workshops is clumsy, inane, and vulgar.

  ‘What you suggested was very pretty,’ she continued, pouring out the clear golden stream on the slices of lemon; ‘and I had no right to laugh at you for wrapping up a sermon in nougat. Of course the character ought to be trained and developed just like the body and the mind, only nobody thinks so; no education is conducted on those lines. And so, though we overstrain the second, and pamper the third, we wholly neglect the first. I imagine that it never occurs to anyone out of the schoolroom to restrain a bad impulse or uproot a bad quality. Why should it? We are all too busy in trying to be amused, and failing. Do you not think it was always so in the world? Do you suppose La Bruyère, for instance, ever turned his microscope on himself? And do you think, if he had done, that any amount of self-scrutiny would have made La Bruyère Pascal or Vincent de Paul?�
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  ‘No; but it might have made him comprehend them, or their likenesses. I did not mean to moralise, madame; I merely meant that the issue of self-analysis is sympathy, whilst the issue of the anatomy of other organisations is cruelty even where it may be wisdom.’

  ‘That may be true in general, and I daresay is so; but the exception proves the rule, and I am the exception. Whenever I do think about myself I only arrive at two conclusions; the one, that I am not as well amused as I ought to be considering the means I have at my disposal, and the other is that, if I were quite sure that anything would amuse me very much, I should sacrifice everything else to enjoy it. Neither of those results is objective in its sympathies; and you would not, I suppose, call either of them moral.’

  ‘I certainly should not,’ said Melville, ‘except that there is always a certain amount of moral health in any kind of perfect frankness.’

  ‘I am always perfectly frank,’ said the Princess Nadine; ‘so is Bismarck. But the world has made up its mind that we are both of us always feigning.’

  ‘That is the world’s revenge for being ruled by each of you.’

  ‘Is it permitted in these serious days for churchmen to make pretty speeches? I prefer your scoldings, they are more uncommon.’

  ‘The kindness which permits them is uncommon,’ said Melville, as he took up his tea-cup.

  ‘Ah! I can be kind,’ said Nadine Napraxine. ‘ Ask Mahmoud and my little dog. But then Mahmoud is dumb, and the dog is — a dog. If humanity were my dog, too, as you say, I should make it aphone!’

  ‘Poor humanity!’ said Melville, with a sigh. ‘If it would not offend you, Princess, there are two lines of Mürger which always seem to me to exactly describe the attitude, or rather the altitude, from which you regard all our sorrows and follies.’

  ‘And they are?’

  ‘They are those in which he thinks he hears: