by Ouida
‘She was no paragon,’ said Melville, annoyed. ‘ She was a hard-working, good, honest woman, perfectly content with a horrible lot, and loyal unto death to two tyrannical old brutes who never thanked her. When they died they left all the little they had to a nephew in the Jura, who had taken no notice of them all their days — a rich tradesman. Poor Rose, at fifty-three years old, was sent adrift on the world. She cried her heart out to have to leave the house, and the ass, and the chickens. I got her the grant from the Prix Montyon, and she was set up in a tiny shop of her own in her own village, but she did not live long. “Quand on a été heureuse, après — c’est long,” she said in her dying hour. She was afraid to seem ungrateful, but “sans mes vieux,” as she said, apologetically, her life was done. It seems a terrible life to us, but I can solemnly declare that it was one of the few happy ones of which I have ever been witness. There is a sustaining, vivifying force in duty, like the heat of the sun, for those who accept it.’
‘For those who accept it, no doubt,’ said Nadine Napraxine, drily; ‘but then, you see, my dear and reverend Melville, it requires some organ in one’s brain — superstition, I think, or credulity — before one can do that. Every one is not blessed with that organ. Pray believe,’ she resumed, with her softer smile, perceiving a vexed shadow on his face, ‘I am not insensible to the quiet unconscious heroism of those lowly lives of devotion. They are always touching. Those revelations which the discours of the Prix Montyon give from time to time always make one envious of so much belief, of so much endurance, of so much unobtrusive and unselfish goodness. But, though I dare say you will be very angry, I cannot help reminding you that what makes the sparrow very happy would have no sort of effect on the swallow, except that he would feel restless and uncomfortable; and also that — pray forgive me, for you are a priest — to be contented with doing one’s duty one must believe in duty as a Divine ordinance. To do that one must have — well, just that bump of credulity of which I spoke — of easy, unquestioning, unintelligent, credulity. Now, that it is a happy quality I am certain, but is it, — is it, an intellectual one?’
She spoke very sweetly, but with a demure smile, which made Melville feel that there was a great deal more which she did not say out of respect for his sacred calling and his position as her guest.
‘Do not repeat over to me all the stock arguments,’ she said quickly, as he opened his lips; ‘I have heard them all ten thousand times. I have the greatest possible regard for your doctrines, which have satisfied Chateaubriand, Lacordaire, Montalembert, Manning, Newman, and yourself, but I have always failed to understand how they did satisfy any of you. But we will not discuss theology. Your poor Rose proves, if she prove anything, that Heaven is not in a hurry to reward its servitors. Perhaps, after all, she might have been wiser if she had married some Jeannot, all over flour or coal dust, and had half a dozen children and fifty grand children.’
‘There is common brute enjoyment all over the earth,’ said Melville, almost losing his temper. ‘It must be well that it should be leavened here and there with lives of sublime self-sacrifice; one heroic or unselfish act raises the whole of human nature with it.’
Nadine Napraxine took a cigarette.
‘There are ten thousand such acts in Russia every year, but they do not produce much effect. Juggernauth rolls on, — —’
Melville looked at her quickly.
‘You have a certain sympathy with the people, though you deride my poor Rose.’
‘I do not deride her; I admire her within certain limits. Only, I ascribe her actions more to ignorance and to superstition, whereas you ascribe them entirely to a clear-eyed devotion. Yes; I could have been a revolutionist, I think, only all the traditions of the Platoff and the Napraxine forbid it; and then, as I said to you once before, I do not like Pallida Mors carried about in a hat-box or a sardine-case. It is grotesque. Without jesting,’ she continued, ‘I think if I saw my way to do something truly great or of lasting benefit, I should be ready to sacrifice my life to it; but there is nothing. If a Princess Napraxine joined the Nihilists, she would only cause an intolerable scandal and set an example which would be very injurious to the country at large. Some day, Russia will be in revolt from one end to another, but the day is not yet, and I doubt much that any good will be done when it comes. The evil lies too deep, in the drunkenness, in the lying, in the bestiality — —’
She saw a look of surprise on Melville’s face, and continued quickly:
‘Do you suppose I never think? I believe I have read every socialistic writer from Rousseau to Bakounine. They do not convince me of anything except of the utter improbability that any real liberty will ever be obtainable from any congregation of men. Humanity is tyrannical and slavish at once; its governments are created in its own likeness, it makes little difference what they are called, they are human offspring, so they are narrow and arrogant.’
‘Poor humanity!’ said Melville. ‘It is only we priests who can lend it wings.’
‘Because you say to it, like Schiller, “Cheat yourself, and dream,”’ she replied. ‘But even there how narrow still! You say to each unit, “Save yourself!”’
‘Well,’ said the Englishman with good temper, ‘if every one sweep out his own little chamber, the whole city will be clean.’
‘The city will be for ever unclean. You know that as well as I do. Only, all Churchmen can hide their eyes ostrich-like in the sand of sonorous phrases. Your Christianity has been toiling for eighteen centuries, and, one may say, has accomplished nothing. It mouths a great deal, but practical result it has scarcely any. Its difficulty has always been that, being illogical in its essence and traditions, it must be restrained to words. Reduced to practice, all the modern world would fade away, riches would disappear, effort would be impossible, and the whole machinery of civilisation come to a standstill and entire disuse. You are as aware of that as I am, only you do not like to say so.’
She rose, amused at his discomfiture, and lighted another cigarette. She smoked as gracefully as a bird pecks at the dew in a rose.
‘She is the only woman who makes me irritable,’ the courtly Gervase Melville had once said of her, and he might have said also, ‘the only woman who reduces me to silence.’
‘Allow, Princess,’ he said irritably now, ‘ that whether we accredit Christianity with it or not, the life of poor Rose in her wooden shoes was much more useful than yours is in those pearl-embroidered mules.’
‘Ah,’ she answered with a smile. ‘You are indeed worsted in your logic if you must descend to personalities! Certainly I grant that; my life is of a most absolute inutility. It is, perhaps, now and then useful to my tailors, because I give them ideas they would not have without me. But to no one else. À qui la faute? I arrived in this world without any option. As Mr. Gladstone said when he was an Eton boy, responsibilities which are thrust upon us do not exact our obedience. It is the only sentiment of Mr. Gladstone with which I have ever been able to agree. Life is clearly thrust upon us. We none of us seek it, that is certain. If we are able to disport ourselves in it, like butterflies in a south wind, it says much in praise of the lightness of our hearts.’
‘Or of the levity of our consciences,’ said Melville, a little gloomily.
‘Conscience is only the unconscious cerebral action of transmitted influence, is it? Oh, I have read the Scientists as well as the Socialists. They are not much more convincing, if one goes to them with an unprejudiced mind — —’
‘Does your conscience never tell you that you have done any harm, Princess?’
‘Oh, very often — a great deal,’ she answered candidly. ‘But it does not tell me that I ought not to have done it. I suppose my chain of transmitted influences is not as strong as it should be. Seriously,’ she continued, ‘I do not think hereditary influences are nearly sufficiently allowed for at any time. Think what my people were for ages and ages; the most masterful of autocratic lords who had no single law save their own pleasure, and who, when the
y helped slay a Tzar, were washing out some blood-feud of their family; pleasure, vice, bloodshed, courage no doubt, rough justice perhaps, were all their lives knew; they lived in the saddle or beside the drinking-horn; they rode like madmen; they had huge castles set in almost eternal snows; they were the judge and the executioner of every wrong-doer in their family or their province; it was not until Letters came in with the great Catherine that the least touch of civilisation softened them, and even after Catherine they were amongst the slayers of Paul; for though they could read Bossuet and Marmontel, their culture was but the merest varnish still. Now, I come from these men and women, for the women were not better than the men. Do you suppose their leaven is not in me? Of course it is, though I am — perhaps as civilised as most people.’
Melville looked at her with a smile.
‘Yes, certainly civilisation has in you, Princess, reached its most exquisite and most supreme development; the hothouse can do no more. You are its most perfect flower. Are we really to credit that you have beneath all that the ferocity and the despotism of a thousand centuries of barbaric Boyars?’
‘I have no doubt something of it,’ said Nadine Napraxine, whilst the dark velvet of her eyes grew sombre and her delicate hand clenched on an imaginary knout. ‘I could use that sometimes,’ she said with significance: Melville understood what she meant.
‘You can hurt more than with the knout, Princess,’ he answered.
Nadine Napraxine smiled. The suggestion pleased her.
Then a certain regretfulness came upon her face.
‘I think I might have been tender-hearted,’ she said involuntarily and inconsistently, with a pathos of which she was unconscious. ‘I do not know — perhaps not — I am not compassionate.’
She forgot that Melville was seated on a divan near her in the great golden room of Moorish work, whose arches opened on to the marble court of the Lion. She thought of her spoilt, artificial, frivolous childhood, spent in great drawing-rooms listening to political rivalries and calumnious stories and wit that was always polished but not always decent; she thought how her keen eyes had unravelled all the threads of intrigue about her, and how her heart had scorned the duplicity of her mother; when she had been only eight years old, she had known by intuition her mother’s secrets and had shut them all up in her little silent soul with vague ideas of honour and dishonour, and never had said anything to her father — never, never — not even when he lay on his deathbed.
And then they had married her to Platon Napraxine as si bon garçon. ‘Oh, si bon garçon, no doubt!’ she had thought contemptuously then as she thought now — only he had outraged her, revolted her, disgusted her. Her marriage night still remained to her a memory of ineffaceable loathing.
She looked up to see the intelligent eyes of Melville fixed on her in some perplexity.
She laughed and walked out on to the marble pavement of the great court, above which shone the blue of a northern sky; beyond its colonnades were immense gardens, and beyond those stretched the plains like a green sea covered with forests of birch and willow.
‘I think I should have liked to be your Rose,’ she said, as she did so. ‘After all, she must have been content with herself when she died. A philosopher can be no more.’
‘A philosopher can rarely be as much,’ said Melville. ‘He may be resigned, but resignation and content are as different as a cold hand and a warm one. My poor Rose was certainly content whilst she lived, but not when she died, for she thought she had not done nearly enough in return for all the blessings which she had received throughout her life.’
‘Now you cannot get that kind of absurdly grateful feeling without pure ignorance,’ said Nadine Napraxine, a little triumphantly. ‘It would be impossible for an educated person to think that misery was comfort; so you see, after all, ignorance is at the bottom of all virtue. Now in your heart of hearts, you cannot deny that, because, though you are a priest, you are beyond anything a man of the world?’
Melville did not dislike to be called a man of the world, for he was one, and liked to prove, or think he proved, that worldly wisdom was not incompatible with the spiritual life.
At that moment Napraxine crossed the court. It was the first of the brief hours between sunset and sunrise; there was a full moon in the midsummer skies; he was smoking a cheroot, and talking with some young men, neighbouring gentlemen, who had dined there; he looked big and coarse, and his face was red; his wife gazed at him with an intolerant dislike; he could have a grand manner when he chose, but in the country he ‘let himself go;’ he did not remember that he was in the presence of the most inexorable of his critics, of the most implacable of his enemies, of the one person in the whole world whom it would have been most desirable, and was most impossible, for him to propitiate.
‘Sachs turned the knife round and round in the wolf’s throat; he did, on my honour, while it was alive; we blooded him at five years old, and the child never winked. When the blood splashed him he shouted!’ he was saying audibly, with much pride, to one of his guests, as he lounged across the marble court. Sachs was his eldest son. He was relating a hunting exploit, crowned by the presence of his heir.
Nadine glanced at Melville with an expression of sovereign contempt.
‘Butchers before they can spell!’ she said, with ineffable distaste.
‘Shall I venture to say anything?’ he murmured.
‘It would be of no use. Slaughter is the country gentleman’s god. Prince Napraxine is just now wholly fourré in his character of a country gentleman. It is perhaps as useful as that of a Monte Carlo gamester. Only here the beasts suffer — there, the fools. I prefer that the fools should do so.’
The young men gathered about her; Napraxine approached Melville.
‘How does the Othmar marriage succeed?’ he asked. ‘I suppose you have seen them?’
‘I have been once to Amyôt,’ returned Melville. ‘You know Amyôt? A magnificent place. They appeared very happy. She seems to have grown years in a month or two.’
‘That of course,’ said Napraxine, with his loud laugh. ‘She is very handsome. Why on earth do they stay on in the provinces?’
‘She is fond of Amyôt,’ replied Melville. ‘Probably he thinks that as she is so young, there is time and to spare for the world.’
‘Perhaps Nadine will believe now that it is a love marriage?’ insisted her husband, turning towards her.
‘Did I ever say it was not?’ she replied, with a little yawn.
‘I do not see, if it were not, why it should possibly have taken place,’ said Melville. ‘Othmar is lord of himself.’
‘With a slave for his master?’ she murmured, too low to be heard by the not quick ears of her husband.
Melville heard, and the doubt crossed him whether Othmar might not have been the lover of the Princess Napraxine, and the marriage arranged by her, as great ladies often arrange such matters to disarm suspicion; for Melville, despite the acumen on which he prided himself, did not by any means wholly understand the very complicated character of his hostess, in which a supreme courage was to the full as strong as were its disdain and its indifference.
She shook off the importunities of the young nobles, who seemed rustic and tiresome enough to a woman to whom the wittiest society of Europe had seemed dull and too tame, and strolled by herself through the half wild gardens, which reached and touched the virgin forests of the East. Her Kossack Hetman, who never lost her from sight when she was out of doors, paced at a respectful distance behind her, but he was no more to her than a big dog would be to others. The high seeding grass which grew in the unused paths screened him from sight.
As she looked back, the moonlit mass of the vast house gathered a dignity and austerity not its own by daylight, but to her it only resembled a prison. She hated it: she would have liked to raze it to the ground and make an end of it. There were so many prisons in Russia!
She laughed a little to herself, not mirthfully, as she strolled through the intense
light of the Northern night, her Kossack following like her shadow. A poor drudge like that servant woman in Jura had been content with her life, whilst she, the Princess Napraxine, in all the perfection of youth, beauty, and great rank, was often so dissatisfied with it that she could have drugged herself out of it with morphine from sheer ennui!
What was the use of the highest culture, if that was all it brought you? A whimsical fancy crossed her that she wished her Kossack would try and assassinate her; it would be something new, it might make her life seem worth the having, if somebody would try and take it away. She was only three-and-twenty years old, and her future seemed so immensely long that she felt tired at the very prospect of it, as one feels tired at the sight of a long dull road which one is bound to follow.
The eternal monotony of the great world would be for ever about her. She had too great rank, too great riches, for ambition to present any prizes to her. To attempt to thrust Platon Napraxine into high offices of the State would have been as absurd as to make a bear out of Finland a magistrate or a general. He was a very great noble, but he would never have wit enough even to play a decent hand at whist, much less to conduct a negotiation or sway a Council.
‘One might have had ambition for Othmar,’ she thought involuntarily, as his image rose unsummoned from the sea of silvery shadows around her; ‘he had none for himself, but he might have been spurred, stimulated, seduced, by a woman he had loved. There would have been many things possible to him; the financier is the king, the Merlin, of the modern world, and might become its Arthur also.’
She thought with impatience of that summer night, as it was shining on the towers and woods of Amyôt. She felt as if something of her own had been stolen from her, some allegiance due to her unlawfully transferred. He should have had patience, he should have waited on her will, he should have accepted her rebuffs, he should have followed her steps through life as the Kossack was following them through the dewy grass.