Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “Le fifre au son aigu railler le violoncelle,

  Qui pleure sous l’archet ses notes de crystal;”

  only we must substitute for aigu some prettier word, say perlé.’

  She laughed, thinking of Boris Seliedoff, with more perception of his absurdities than of his offences, as her first movement of wrath subsided into that ironical serenity which was most natural to her of all her varying moods.

  ‘The violoncello does not know itself why it weeps,’ she replied, ‘so why should the fife not laugh at it? Really, if I were not so impious a being, I would join your Church for the mere pleasure of confessing to you; you have such fine penetration, such delicate suggestion. But then, there is no living being who understands women as a Catholic priest does who is also a man of the world. Adieu! or rather, I hope, au revoir. You are going away for Lent? Ours will soon be here. I shock every Russian because I pay no heed to its sanctity. Did you ever find, even amongst your people, any creatures so superstitious in their religion as Russians? Platon is certainly the least moral man the sun shines on, but he would not violate a fast nor neglect a rite to save his life. It is too funny! Myself, I have fish from the Baltic and soups (very nasty ones) from Petersburg, and deem that quite concession enough to Carême. My dear Monsignore, why should there be salvation in salmon and sin in a salmis?’

  Melville was not at all willing to enter on that grave and large question with so incorrigible a mocker. He took his leave, and bowed himself out from her presence; whilst Nadine Napraxine went to her own rooms to dress for dinner and look at the domino which she would wear some hours later at a masked ball which was to take place that night in her own house in celebration of the last evening of the Catholic Carnival.

  ‘Le masque est si charmant que j’ai peur du visage,’

  she murmured inconsequently, as she glanced at the elegant disguise and the Venetian costume to be worn beneath it which had been provided for her. ‘That is the sort of feeling which one likes to inspire, and which one also prefers to feel. Always the mask, smiling, mysterious, unintelligible, seductive, suggestive of all kinds of unrealised, and therefore of unexhausted pleasures; never the face beneath it, the face which frowns and weeps and shows everything, is unlovely, only just because it is known and must in due time even grow wrinkled and yellow. How agreeable the world would be if no one ever took off their masks or their gloves!’

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  On the following day as she returned from her drive, she was met, to her great surprise, by Napraxine, who descended the steps of the house with a face unusually pale, and a manner unusually grave.

  ‘What can possibly be the matter, Platon?’ she said, with a vague sense of alarm, but with her inevitable mockery of him dominating her transient anxiety. ‘Have you had a culotte yonder? Has Athenais gone away with my jewel-safe? Or have our friends the Nihilists fired Zaraizoff?’

  Napraxine gave her his hand to help her to alight.

  ‘Do not jest,’ he said simply. ‘Boris has shot himself.’

  ‘Boris? — Boris Fédorovitch?’

  She spoke in astonishment and anger rather than sorrow: an impatient frown contracted her delicate brows, though she grew ashen pale. Why would men do these things?

  Napraxine was silent, but when they had entered the house he spoke very sadly, almost sternly.

  ‘This afternoon he had lost a hundred thousand francs; no doubt on purpose to have an excuse. The ruse can deceive nobody. A Count Seliedoff could lose as much all day for a year, and make no sign. He shot himself in the gardens, within a few yards of us all.’

  He paused and looked at his wife. A shadow passed over her face without changing its narcissus-like fairness; she shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly, her eyes had had for a moment an expression of awe and regret, but, beyond any other sentiment with her, were her impatience and irritation.

  ‘Why will men be so stupid?’ she thought. ‘As if it did any good! The foolish boy!’

  ‘Nadine,’ murmured her husband in a voice that was timid even in its expostulation and reproach. ‘I am sorry for Boris; for the other I have never cared, but for Boris; — you know that I promised his mother to take what care I could of him — and now — and now — and so young as he was! — and how shall I tell her? — My God!’

  She was silent; a genuine pain was on her face, though still mingled with the more personal emotion of impatience and annoyance.

  ‘It was no fault of yours!’ she said at last, as she saw two great tears roll down her husband’s cheeks.

  ‘Yes, it was,’ muttered Platon Napraxine. ‘I let him know you.’

  The direct accusation banished the softer pain which had for the minute moved her; she was at all times intolerant of censure or of what she resented as a too intimate interference; and here her own surprise at an unlooked-for tragedy, and her own self-consciousness of having been more or less the cause and creatress of it, stung her with an unwelcome and intolerable truth.

  ‘You are insolent,’ she said, with the regard which always daunted Napraxine, and made him feel himself an offender against her, even when he was entirely in the right.

  ‘You are insolent,’ she repeated. ‘Do you mean to insinuate that I am responsible for Seliedoff’s suicide? One would suppose you were a journalist seeking chantage!’

  The power which she at all times possessed over her husband making him unwilling to irritate, afraid to offend her, and without courage before her slightest sign of anger, rendered him timid now. He hesitated and grew pale, but the great sorrow and repentance which were at work in him gave him more resolution than usual; he was very pale, and the tears rolled down his cheeks unchecked.

  ‘Every one knows that Boris loved you,’ he said simply. ‘All the world knows that; he was a boy, he could not conceal it; I cannot tell what you did to him, but something which broke his heart. You know I never say anything; you give me no title. I am as much of a stranger to you as if we had met yesterday; and do not fancy I am ever — jealous — as men are sometimes. I know you would laugh at me, and besides, you care for none of them any more than you care for me. I should be a fool to wish for more than that; — if it be always like that, I shall never say anything. Only you might have spared this lad. He was so young and my cousin, and the only one left to his mother.’

  He paused, in stronger agitation than he cared to allow her to see. It was the first time for years that he had ventured to speak to her in any sort of earnestness or of upbraiding. She had allotted him his share in her life, a very distant one; and he had accepted it without dispute or lament, if not without inward revolt; it was for the first time for years that he presumed to show her he had observed her actions and had disapproved them, to hint that he was not the mere lay figure, the mere good-natured dolt, ‘bon comme du pain,’ and as commonplace, which she had always considered him.

  She looked at him a little curiously; there was a dangerous irritation in her glance, yet a touch of emotion was visible in her as she said with impatience, ‘You are growing theatrical. It does not become you. Boris was a boy, foolish as boys are; he had no mind; he was a mere spoilt child; he was grown up in inches, not in character; so many Russians are. If he have killed himself, who can help it? They should have kept him at home. Why do you play yourself? He is not the first.’

  ‘No, he is not the first,’ said Napraxine, with a curt bitterness. ‘He is not the first, and it was not play; he only played to have an excuse. He thought of your name, perhaps of mine; he did not wish the world to know he died because you laughed at him.’

  ‘Laughed! I used to laugh; why not? He was amusing before he grew tragical. I rebuked him yesterday, for he deserved it. Everyone scolds boys. It is good for them. No one supposes — —’ her tone was impatient and contemptuous, but her lips quivered a little; she was sorry that the boy was dead, though she would not say so. It hurt her, though it annoyed her more.

  ‘Did he — did he suffer?’ she asked, abruptly.


  Napraxine took out of the breast-pocket of his coat a sheet of note-paper, and gave it her.

  ‘He died instantly, if you mean that,’ he answered. ‘He knew enough to aim well. They brought me that note; he had written it last night, I think.’

  In the broad, rude handwriting of the young Seliedoff there was written: —

  ‘Pardonnez-moi, mon cousin: je l’adore, et elle se moque de moi; je ne peux pas vivre, mais j’aurai soin que le monde n’en sache rien. Soignez ma pauvre mère. Tout à vous de cœur

  ‘Boris Fédorovitch.’

  She read it with a mist before her eyes, and gave it back to him without a word.

  Napraxine looked at her wistfully; he wondered if he had killed himself whether she would have cared more than she cared now — no, he knew she would have cared as little, even less.

  ‘You say nothing?’ he murmured wistfully.

  ‘What is there to say?’ she answered. ‘It was a boy’s blunder. It was a grievous folly. But no one could foresee it.’

  ‘That is all the lament you give him?’

  ‘Would it please you better if I were weeping over his corpse? I regret his death profoundly; but I confess that I am also unspeakably annoyed at it. I detest melodramas. I detest tragedies. The world will say, as you have the good taste to say, that I have been at fault. I am not a coquette, and a reputation of being one gives me no satisfaction. As you justly observed, no one will believe that a Count Seliedoff destroyed his life because he lost money at play. Therefore, they will say, as you have been so good as to say, that the blame lies with me. And such accusations offend me.’

  She spoke very quietly, but with a tone which seemed chill as the winter winds of the White Sea, to Napraxine, whose soul was filled with remorse, dismay, and bewildered pain. Then she made him a slight gesture of farewell and left him. As usual, he was entirely right in the reproaches he had made, yet she had had the power to make himself feel at once foolish and at fault, at once coarse and theatrical.

  ‘Poor Boris!’ he muttered, as he drew his hand across his wet lashes.

  Had it been worth while to die at three-and-twenty years old, in full command of all which the world envies, only to have that cruel sacrifice called a boy’s blunder? His heart ached and his thoughts went, he knew not why, to his two young children away in the birch forests by the Baltic Sea. She would not care any more if she heard on the morrow that they were as dead in their infancy as Boris Seliedoff was in his youth, lying under the aloes and the palms of Monte Carlo in the southern sunshine.

  Platon Napraxine was a stupid man, a man not very sensitive or very tender of feeling, a man who could often console himself with coarse pleasures and purchasable charms for wounds given to his affections or his pride; but he was a man of quick compunction and warm emotions; he felt before the indifference of his wife as though he stretched out his hand to touch a wall of ice, when what he longed for was the sympathetic answering clasp of human fingers. He brushed the unusual moisture from his eyes, and went to fulfil all those innumerable small observances which so environ, embitter, and diminish the dignity of death to the friends of every dead creature.

  Meanwhile, Nadine passed on to her own rooms, and let her waiting-woman change her clothes.

  A momentary wish, wicked as a venomous snake, and swift as fire, had darted through her thoughts.

  ‘Why had not Othmar died like that? I would have loved his memory all my life!’ she thought, with inconsistency.

  Though she had almost refused to acknowledge it, the suicide of Seliedoff pained and saddened her. Foremost of all was her irritation that she who disliked tragedies, who abhorred publicity, who disbelieved in passion, should be thus subject to having her name in the mouths of men in connection with a melodrama which, terrible as it was, yet offended her by its vulgarity and its stupidity. The hour and the scene chosen were vulgar; the transparency of the pretext was stupid. It was altogether, as she had said, a boy’s blunder — a blunder, frightful, irreparable, with the horror of youth misspent and life self-destroyed upon it — still a blunder. She thought, with impatience, that what they called love was only a spoilt child’s whim and passionate outcry which, denied, ended in a child’s wild, foolish fit of rage, with no more wisdom in it than the child has.

  All Europe would say that, indirectly, she had been the cause of his death; every one had seen him, moping and miserable, in her rooms the previous day. She disliked a sensational triumph, which was fit for her husband’s mistresses, for Lia, for Aurélie, for la belle Fernande. Men were always doing these foolish things for her. She had been angry certainly: who would not have been so? He had been ridiculous, as youth and intense emotion and unreasonable suffering constantly are in the sight of others.

  There had been only one man who had not seemed to her absurd when passion had moved him, and that had only been because he had remained master of himself even in his greatest self-abandonment. If it had been Othmar who had been lying dead there with the bullet in his breast, she would have felt — she was not sure what she would have felt — some pleasure, some pain. Instead, he was at Amyôt finding what pleasures he might in a virginal love, like a spring snowdrop, timid and afraid. She, who always analysed her own soul without indulgence or self-delusion, was disgusted at the impulses which moved her now.

  ‘After all,’ she thought, ‘Goethe was right; we are always capable of crime, even the best of us; only one must be Goethe to be capable of acknowledging that.’

  She sat alone awhile, thoughtful and regretful; indisposed to accept the blame of others, yet not unwilling to censure herself if she saw cause. But she saw no cause here; it was no fault of hers if men loved her as she passed by them without seeing they were there. True, she had been annoyed with the youth; she had been irritated by him; she had treated him a little as some women treat a dog, — a smile one day, the whip the next; but she had thought so little about him all the time, except that his high spirits were infectious and his face was boyishly beautiful, and that it had diverted her to annoy Geraldine. But who could have supposed that it would end thus? And amidst her pain and her astonishment was foremost a great irritation at his want of thought for her.

  The journals, with their innuendoes, their initials, their transparent mysteries; the condolences and the curiosities of her own society; the reproaches of his family; the long ceremonious Russian mourning and Russian rites—’ Quelle corvée!’ she murmured impatiently, as at some pebble in her embroidered shoe, at some clove of garlic in her delicate dinner.

  After all, were the great sorrows of life one-half so unendurable in themselves as the tiresome annoyances with which the foolish habits of men have environed them?

  That our friend dies is pain enough, why must we have also the nuisance of following his funeral?

  ‘Men only think of themselves!’ she said irritably, in her own unconscious egotism. If Boris Seliedoff had considered her as he should have done, he would not have killed himself within three miles of her garden terrace, at a moment when all their own gossiping world was crowding on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean. A sense of the wrong done to herself divided the regret, tinged almost with remorse, which weighed on her.

  As she moved through her boudoir to write the inevitable and most difficult letter which must be penned to his mother far away in the province of the Ekaterinoslaf, a photograph, in a frame of blue plush, caught her eye as it stood amongst all the pretty costly nothings of her writing-table. It was a photograph of Seliedoff; it had been tinted with an artist’s skill, and the boyish handsome mouth smiled tenderly and gaily at her.

  For almost the first time in her life she felt the tears rise to her throat and eyes. She laid the picture face downward, and wept.

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  A few days later when the remains of Boris Seliedoff had been removed to Russia, there to find their last home in the sombre mausoleum of his family on their vast estates in Ekaterinoslaf, Geraldine, who was one of the few who were admitted to
La Jacquemerille in these days of mourning, coming thither one afternoon to find her in the garden alone and to entreat for permission to follow her in the various travels which she was about to undertake, since the Riviera had grown distasteful to her, was accosted by her abruptly, if in her delicate languor she could ever be termed abrupt:

  ‘My dear Ralph,’ she said briefly, ‘why do you not go home?’

  Geraldine drew his breath quickly, and stared at her.

  ‘Go home!’ he repeated stupidly.

  ‘Well, you have a home; you have several homes,’ she said, with her usual impatience at being questioned or misunderstood by wits slower than her own. ‘You are an Englishman; you must have a million and one duties. It is utterly wrong to live so much away from your properties. We do it, but I do not think it matters what we do. Whether we be here or there, it is always the stewards who rule everything, but in your country it is different. Your sister says you can do a great deal of good. I cannot imagine what good you should do, but no doubt she knows. I do not like England myself. Your châteaux are very fine, but the life in them is very tiresome. You all eat far too much and far too often, and you have lingering superstitions about Sunday; your women are always three months behind Paris, and never wear shoes like their gowns; your talk is always of games, and shooting, and flat-racing. You are not an amusing people; you never will be. You have too much of the Teuton, and the Hollander, and the Dane in you. Your stage makes one yawn, your books make one sleep, your country-houses make one do both. Your women clothe themselves in Newmarket coats, get red faces, and like to go over wet fields; your men are well built very often, but they move ill; they have no désinvolture, they have no charm. The whole thing is tiresome. I shall never willingly go to England; but you, as a great English noble, ought to go there, and stay there — —’

  ‘And marry there!’ said Geraldine, bitterly. ‘Is that the medicine you prescribe for all your friends?’