by Ouida
‘But some of the people love you,’ she insisted. ‘Did not the workmen of Paris give you that beautiful casket the other day? Was it not bought by a two-sous subscription?’
‘That was more a compliment to the Maison d’Othmar than to myself. We have always been popular in Paris; so was Louis Napoléon — once. We have much the same titles as he had; we have committed many crimes, and caused immeasurable misery.’
‘Not you,’ she said softly.
‘I inherit the results,’ said her husband.
‘But you have done great things,’ she said timidly. ‘The curé here was telling me yesterday of all you have done for the poor of Paris. He says that the hospitals you have founded, the charities you maintain — —’
‘The curé knows his way to your heart and your purse! My dear, the Emperor Napoléon Trois thought that he did a great thing for the poor of Paris when he pulled down their rookeries and built them fine and healthy cités ouvrières; there was only one thing the Emperor could not do: he could not make the poor live in them; and the Convalescent Home he erected at Vincennes did not save him from Sedan, or Paris from the Commune. We who are rich shall always have the Emperor’s fate; we shall build as much as we like, and spend as much as we like, but we shall never reach the hearts of the great multitudes, who all hate us. It is very natural they should. Never say a word about what they call my charities. They are blunders like the Emperor’s, many of which seem now to be very absurd ones. If I ever come to my Sedan, they will not be remembered for an hour. The one thing I can do, and will do, is, that I will prevent, as long as I live, the use of the great mill of gold which we grind being turned to immoral purposes — such purposes, for instance, as the oppression of peoples, as the barter of nationalities, as the supply of the sinews of unjust and unholy wars, as the many intolerable iniquities which, whilst professing Christianity, modern statesmen employ under spurious names to most intolerable ends. So much I can do; and, for doing it, I am thought a fool. All the rest is wholly indifferent to me. The machine swings on as it will; it is so admirably organised that it requires little guidance, and, that little, Baron Friederich gives, whilst I am free, my dear, to stay at Amyôt and gather you another rose, for I have spoilt this one.’
He had spoken more gaily, frankly, and fully than was his wont, and kissed her softly on the throat once more.
Yseulte’s thoughts were with his earlier words; her eyes were moist, and very serious. It was the first time that he had ever alluded before her to his family or his position; she had never at all understood what they had meant around her when they had spoken of la Finance; she had seen that he was très grand seigneur, and was treated, wherever he moved, with the greatest marks of deference. It seemed very strange to her that so much power and state should be possible without unblemished descent: it was outside of her creed and her comprehension. If she had loved him less, it would have shocked her.
‘I am sorry,’ she said softly, ‘it must have troubled you so much. I understand why you are sometimes sad. It must be like holding lightning in your hands; and then there is the fear of using it ill — —’
‘My greatest fault has been to be too careless of it,’ he answered. ‘To have used my power neither way, neither for good nor ill. I have comforted myself that I have done no harm; — a negative praise. Come, let us go and choose another rose for you; or shall we go into the woods? You like them better. Do not trouble your soul with the gold or the crimes of the Othmar. You are come to purify both; and you will make your children in your own likeness out of that consecrated ivory of which heaven has made you!’
‘She is the first woman of them all,’ he thought, as they descended the marble stairs towards the glades of the park, ‘the first who has had any sympathy with me. They have all thought me a fool for not turning round like the sluggard, and lying drugged in my golden nest. She understands very little because she does not understand the world; but she can imagine how all which the vulgar think so delightful drags me down like a wallet of stones.’
‘Yseulte,’ he said aloud, ‘do you know what all my millions cannot buy, and what I would give them all to be able to buy? Well, something like the mort sur le champ d’honneur, which was said for a hundred and fifty years when the name of Philippe de Valogne was called in the roll-call of the Grenadiers.’
The memory he recalled was one of the most glorious of her race; one of those traditions of pure honour which are common enough in the nobility of France. The Counts de Valogne had been behind none in high courage and lofty codes; and the local history of their province was studded with the exploits and the martial self-sacrifice whereby they had continually redeemed their extravagance and their idleness as courtiers and men of pleasure.
She turned to him with her brightest smile, and her hand touched his with a gesture caressing and timid.
‘He is mine; I will give him to you,’ she said, with a child’s abandonment and gaiety. ‘I am so glad that I have something to give!’
‘You will give his blood to my sons,’ said Othmar. ‘So you will give it to me.’
CHAPTER XXX.
Melville came one day to Amyôt.
‘You have followed my advice,’ he said to Othmar. ‘You have made yourself a home. It is the nearest likeness to heaven that men get on earth. Believe a homeless man when he tells you so.’
Othmar smiled.
‘It is odd that you, the purest priest I know, and my uncle, the worldliest of philosophers and money-makers, should coincide in your counsels. Perhaps to make a home is as difficult as to make a discovery in astronomy or mathematics, or to appreciate a sunrise or sunset.’
‘Do you mean to say? — —’
‘I mean to say nothing in especial; except that one’s life, as the world goes, does not fit one to be the hourly companion of a perfectly virginal mind. My dear Melville, she makes me ashamed; my society seems infinitely too coarse for her. I have never seemed to myself such a brute.’
‘That is, I fear, because you are not very much in love, and so are at liberty to analyse your own sensations: a lover would not feel those scruples,’ reflected Melville; but he merely said aloud: ‘If a woman have not a little of the angelic, she goes near to having something of the diabolic. Women are always in extremes.’
‘Her soul is like a crystal,’ said Othmar. ‘But in it I see my own soul, and it looks unworthy.’
He could not say even to Melville, tried physician of sick souls as he was, that there were moments when the perfect purity of the young girl wearied him, when her innocent tenderness fretted him, and failed to supply all the stimulant to his senses that women less lovely but more versed in amorous arts could have given, when he was, in a word — the most fatal word love ever hears — wearied.
CHAPTER XXXI.
‘Othmar cueillant les marguerites aux bois!’ said Nadine Napraxine, with her most unkind smile, when she heard that he remained under the Valois woods until autumn.
She herself was in Russia; forced also to gather daisies in her own manner, which always wearied her. It was necessary to be seen awhile at Tsarkoe Selo, or wherever the Imperial people were; and then to visit for a few months the immense estates of Prince Napraxine. They had gone thither earlier than usual through the suicide of Boris Seliedoff, which had cast many noble northern families into mourning, and had for a moment chilled the feeling of Europe in general towards herself.
‘It was so inconsiderate of him!’ she said more than once. ‘Everyone was sure to put it upon me!’
It seemed to her very unjust.
She had been kind to the boy, and then had rebuked him a little as anybody else would have done. Who could imagine that he would blow his brains out under the palms and aloes, like any décavé without a franc?
She was exceedingly angry that the world should venture to blame her. When her Imperial mistress, receiving her first visit, gave some expression to this general sentiment, and presumed to hazard some phrases which suggested a hint of r
eproof, Nadine Napraxine revolted with all the pride of her temper, and did not scruple to respond to her interlocutor that the Platoff and the Napraxine both were of more ancient lineage and greater traditions in Russia than those now seated on the throne.
To her alone would it have been possible to make such a reply and yet receive condonation of it, as she did. There was in her a force which no one resisted, a magnetism which no one escaped.
She was, however, extremely angered, both by the remarks made to her at Court, and about her in European society, and withdrew herself to the immense solitudes of the province of Kaluga in an irritation which was not without dignity. Men who adored her, of whom there were many, noticed that her self-exile to Zaraïzoff coincided with that of Othmar to Amyôt; but there was no one who would have dared to say so. Geraldine had gone to North America, which had amused her.
‘He will not shoot himself,’ she thought. ‘He will shoot a vast number of innocent beasts instead. Seliedoff was the manlier of the two.’
Zaraïzoff was a mighty place set amongst the endless woods and rolling plains of the north-eastern provinces; a huge rambling structure half fortress, half palace, with the village clustering near as in other days when the Tartars might sweep down on it like vultures. The wealth of the Napraxines had made it within almost oriental in its luxury; without, it had much of the barbaric wildness of the country, and it had been here in the first two intolerable years after her marriage that she had learned to love to be drawn by half-wild horses at lightning speed over the snow plains, with the bay of the wolves on the air, and the surety of fatal frost-bite if the furs were incautiously dropped a moment too soon.
At Zaraïzoff, when she established herself there for the summer, she brought usually a Parisian household with her, and inviting a succession of guests, filled with a great movement and gaiety of life the sombre courts, the silent galleries and chambers, the antique walls all covered with vivid paintings like a Byzantine church, the long low salons luxurious as a Persian harem. But this summer it saw her come almost alone. Her children came also from southern Russia, and Platon Napraxine at least was happy.
‘Is it possible to be uglier than that; not surely among the Kalmucks!’ she thought, looking in the good-tempered little Tartar-like faces of her two small sons.
They were absurdly like their father; but, as they promised to be also, like him, tall and well-built, would probably, as they grew up, find many women, as he had found many, to tell them they were handsome men; but that time was far off, and as yet they were but ugly children. Sachs and Mitz (Alexander and Demetrius) were respectively five and six years old, big, stout, ungainly little boys, with flat blunt features, in which the Tartar blood of the Napraxine was prominently visible. They had a retinue of tutors, governesses, bonnes, and attendants of all kinds, and had been early impressed with the opinion that a Napraxine had no superior on earth save the Gospodar.
‘Ils ont pris la peine de naître!’ quoted their mother with contempt as she beheld their arrogant little pomposities: she could never forgive them that they had done so. It was natural that when she looked in her mirror she could scarcely bring herself to believe that they had been the issue of her own life.
‘I suppose I ought to adore them, but I certainly do not,’ she said to Melville, who, having been sent on a mission to Petersburg by the Vatican in the vain hope of mitigating by the charm of his manner the hard fate of the Catholic Poles, had paused for a day at Zaraïzoff to obey the summons of its mistress, travelling some extra thousand versts to do so. It was to him that she had made the remark about the daisies.
Melville, though he was a priest whose vows were truly sacred obligations in his eyes, was also keenly alive to those enjoyments of the graces and luxuries of life which his frequent employment in diplomatic missions for the head of his Church made it not only permissible but desirable for him to indulge in at times. His brief visit to Zaraïzoff, and other similar diversions, were agreeable episodes in months of spiritual effort and very serious intellectual work, and he abandoned himself to the amusement of such occasional rewards with the youthful ardour which sixty years had not tamed in him.
Nadine Napraxine was not only charming to his eyes and taste, as to those of all men, but she interested him with the attraction which a complicated and not-easily-unravelled character possesses for all intellectual people. He had perceived in her those gifts mental and moral which, under suitable circumstance, make the noblest of temperaments, and he also perceived in her an indefinite potentiality for cruelty and for tyranny; the conflict between the two interested him as a psychological study. He could not but censure her intolerance of Napraxine; yet neither could he refuse to sympathise with it. The Prince was the last man on earth to have been able to attain any power over that variable, contemptuous, and subtle temperament and over an intelligence refined by culture to the utmost perfection of taste and hypercriticism of judgment. He adored her indeed, but c’est le pire défaut in such cases; and a hippopotamus in his muddy sedges might have done so, with as much hope as he, of exciting anything more than her impatience and contempt.
‘I certainly do not,’ she repeated, as she lay on a divan after dinner, in a grand hall imitated from the Alhambra, with a copy of the Lion fountain in white marble in the centre, and groves of palms in white marble vases lifting their green banners against the deep glow of the many-coloured fretwork and diapered gold of the walls. ‘They are two quite uninteresting children, stupid, obstinate, proud, already convinced that a Prince Napraxine has only to breathe a wish to see it accomplished. At present they are good tempered and are fond of each other, but that will not last long; they will soon feel their claws and use them. They are quite wonderfully ugly; — an ugliness flat, heavy, animal, altogether Tartar. I imagine I could have been fond of a child like any other woman, but then I think with any mother it must be always the child of a man she loves; it must be the symbol of sympathy and the issue of joy — —’
She spoke dreamily, almost regretfully, her delicate head lying back amongst the pillows of golden silk, while she sent a little cloud of smoke into the air.
Melville looked at her: he thought that there were persons who were like the Neva river; the Neva does not freeze of itself, but it has so many huge blocks of ice rolled down into it from above that it looks as if it did.
He hesitated a moment; he was too sagacious a man of the world to intrude his own beliefs where they would only have met with unbelief.
‘What can I say?’ he murmured. ‘Only that I suppose maternal love, after all, like all other love, does not come at command; human nature has always been under the illusion that it was a spontaneous and irresistible growth.’
‘Human nature has so many illusions,’ said Nadine Napraxine. ‘But I have never heard that much reason underlies any one of them.’
‘But does not our happiness?’ said Melville.
She laughed a little.
‘Do you believe much in happy people? I think there are passions, vanities, titillations, desires, successes — those one sees in full motion on the earth, like animalculæ in a drop of water; but happiness, I imagine, died with Paul et Virginie, with Chactas and Atala. To be happy, you must be capable of being unhappy. We never reach that point; we are only irritable, or grow anémique, according to the variety of our constitutions.’
‘I knew a perfectly happy woman once,’ said Melville; ‘happy all her life, and she lived long.’
‘Oh, you mean some nun,’ said Nadine Napraxine, with impatience. ‘That is not happiness; it is only a form of hysteria or hypogastria.’
‘Not a nun,’ replied Melville, making himself a cigarette, while the sun played on the red sash of his gown, the gown which Raffael designed for Leo. ‘Not a nun. The woman I mean was a servant in a little dirty village near Grenoble; she had been in the service of two cross, miserly people ever since she was fifteen. At the time I knew her first she was forty-seven. The old people had a small shop of general nece
ssaries; she attended to the shop, cooked, and cleaned, and washed, and spun, dug, too, in a vegetable garden, and took care of a donkey, and pigs, and fowls. When she was about thirty, the old man first, and then the old woman, became incapable, from paralysis. Rose — her name was Rose — worked on harder than ever. She had many offers of better service, even offers of marriage, for she was a famous housewife, but she refused them; she would not leave the old people. They were poor; they had never been good or grateful to her; they had even beaten her when she was a girl; but she would never leave them. She had been a foundling, and theirs had been the only form of human ties that she had ever known. She was perfectly happy all the day long, and she even found time to do many a good turn for neighbours worse off than herself. She had never had more than twenty francs a year in money, but then “you see, I live well, I want nothing,” she said to me once. And such living! Black cabbage and black bread! Well, she was perfectly happy, as I say. You do not seem to believe it?’
‘Oh, yes; so is a snail,’ said the Princess Nadine. ‘Besides, you know, if she had been a pretty woman — —’
Melville felt almost angry.
‘You are very cruel. Why will you divorce beauty and virtue?’
‘I do not divorce them, nature usually does,’ she answered, amused. ‘Perhaps they divorce themselves. Well, what became of this paragon?’