by Ouida
At noon he gave his card to a servant, and told the man to go and inquire at her hotel if the Princess Napraxine had suffered any inconvenience from the accident of that morning.
The servant brought him back one of the small pale-rose-tinted notes, folded in three, with the crown embossed in silver, which he knew so well. The few lines in it said only:
‘Merci bien. Vous êtes toujours preux chevalier. Je n’ai rien souffert du tout. Le Prince vous remerciera. — N. N.’
It was the merest trifle, a thing of no import, such as she wrote by scores every week to numbers of indifferent people; yet it had a sort of fascination for him. He could not destroy it; its faint subtle scent, like that of a tea-rose, recalled so vividly the charm of the woman who had written it; it seemed to him as if no one but Nadine Napraxine could have sent that little note, coloured like a sea-shell, delicate as a butterfly, with its miniature and mignonne writing. Ashamed of his own weakness, and angry with himself for his own concessions, he threw it into a drawer of his bureau and turned the key on it.
He had not seen her for a year, and her spell was unbroken; all he had done to escape from it was of no avail. One glance of her eyes from beneath the furs in that bleak, grey, misty daybreak, had sufficed to re-establish her dominion. He was conscious that life seemed no more the same to him since that chance encounter; it would be more troubled, more excited, more disturbed, but it would not be again the dull and even course which it had seemed to be when he had entered absent from her.
‘I will never see her, except in a crowd,’ he said to himself, whilst he remembered, with self-reproach, the tender caresses of Yseulte, which left him so calm, and even in his heart so cold!
Of course he had known that the Princess Napraxine, who was more Parisienne than the Parisiennes, would, sooner or later, return to her home there; would sooner or later reappear in the society which she had always preferred to all other. Russia had never held her long, and the seclusion which both her taste and her irritation had made her seek after the suicide of Seliedoff could not, in the nature of things, have lasted longer than one season. Yet the sense that she was there within a few streets of him, separated only by a few roods of house-roof from him, affected him with a force altogether unforeseen. He realised in it that there is no cure in simples for strong fevers, and that the will of a man is as naught against the dominion of passion. Even that slight letter, with its odour as of pale rose-buds, had a power over him which all the loveliness and innocence of Yseulte could not exercise. The irresistible force of his own emotions humiliated him in his own eyes.
He shrank a little, with almost a sense of guiltiness, as a little tap came on the panels of the library door, and from behind the tapestry the fair head of his young wife peeped cautiously.
‘May I come in?’ she asked, as a child might have done.
He rose with instinctive courtesy and opened the door to her.
It was noonday, and her few hours of sleep had sufficed to banish all her fatigue, and to make her as fresh, as radiant, and as clear-eyed, as she had been in the summer woods of Amyôt. She had none of the languor which late hours cause in later years; she had slept as soundly as a young fawn tired with its play, and had awakened as refreshed as a flower that uncloses at sunrise. She wore a long loose gown of palest blue, opening a little at the throat, with much old lace, of which the yellow tinge made whiter still the whiteness of her skin. The gown was of satin, and had gleams and shadows in it as she moved. Her eyes smiled; her cheeks were flushed from her bath; her entrance had a childish eagerness.
‘Do tell me again that I did well last night,’ she said, with a child’s longing for the recapitulation of its innocent triumphs.
He did not look at her as he drew her to him with a mechanical caress.
‘You did perfectly,’ he answered, absently. ‘A great ball is a woman’s Austerlitz, I suppose. Do not let it make you in love with the world.’
‘One cannot but like it,’ she said, with her habitual truthfulness, a little wistfully. ‘That is what I thought last night; perhaps it is wrong — when so many suffer — —’
‘They would not suffer a whit less if you did not give a ball.’
She hesitated, being still shy with him, and afraid of that which she had never seen, but which she always dreaded, his displeasure.
‘But,’ she said timidly, ‘when one is so very happy, one wants to do something to deserve it. You have made for me such a perfect life, I want to give others something out of it. I should like to be useful, to show that I am grateful; not only to give away money — —’
She paused, colouring a little at her own temerity. She did not express herself very well, because she was so much in earnest, and so uncertain as to whether it would seem discontented or vain in her to say so much. In an earlier moment the words would have touched his heart; he would have probably replied by admitting her into some association with the efforts of his own life, and some knowledge of his own desires and regrets for humanity at large. But in that instant he was only anxious to be alone. He answered a little absently:
‘My child, ask your confessor these questions; he will show you many ways; you think him a good man — I have too many doubts myself to be able to solve yours.’
He spoke with a certain impatience; the harsher note grated on her sensitive ear. She felt that her scruples, which were very honest and sincere, did not meet with the same sympathy from him that they had received a few hours earlier.
A shadow passed over her face and she was silent.
‘My dear,’ continued Othmar, a little penitently, a little inconsistently, ‘I have had such doubts as yours all my life, but no one has ever respected me for them; not even those in whose interest they tormented me. We cannot be wiser than all the world. If we stripped ourselves bare to found some community or some universal asylum, we should only be ridiculed as visionaries or as mischievous disturbers of the public peace and of the balance of fortune. Charity has oftener created a proletariat than it has increased prosperity. These questions have haunted me all my life. When I have found an answer to them, I will tell you. Until then, enjoy yourself. You are at the age when enjoyment is most possible and most natural. I wish your days to be happy.’
He spoke with a certain distraction; he was thinking little of what he said, much of the eyes which had looked at him from under the gloom of the fur in the mists of the dawn. He sighed unconsciously as he felt that this innocent young life beside him was no more to him — hardly more — than the flower which she wore at her throat. He recognised all its beauty, spiritual and physical, but only as he might have done that of a picture he looked at, of a poem he read.
‘Enjoy yourself, dear; why not?’ he added with kindness. ‘You were made to smile as a primrose is made to blossom, and it is now mid-April with you.’
He kissed her, and passed his hand carelessly over her hair, then he glanced at the clock on his writing-table.
‘I must leave you, for I have an appointment to keep. What are you going to do with your day?’
‘Blanchette is to come to me. I have not seen her yet. The children are only now up from Bois le Roy, and Toinon is ill.’
She answered him with a little sigh. She wanted him to understand, and she could not better explain, how her own intense thankfulness for the new joys of her life filled her sensitive conscience with a trembling longing to become more worthy of it all, and to let the light which was about her stream into all dark places, and illumine them with love and peace. But she felt chilled, and discouraged, and silenced; and she had been so accustomed to keep all rebellious thoughts mute, that she did not dream of pursuing a theme to which he appeared indifferent. He kissed her hand and left her. She sank down for a moment on the writing-chair he had occupied before the table, and leaned her forehead on her hands with the first vague sensation of loneliness which had ever touched her since her marriage day.
‘If my little child had been born alive,’ she thought, ‘the
n I should always have known what duty to do, what use to be — —’
It was an infinite trouble to her conscience that in these great palaces of the Othmars she was as useless in her own sight as any one of the green palm trees or the rose-hued parrots in the conservatories. She could give money away, indeed, — almost endlessly; but that did not seem enough to do; that counted to her as nothing, for it cost no effort. It hurt her to feel, as she did feel vaguely, that she was no more the companion of her husband than the marble statue of Athene which stood at one end of his great library. He was infinitely indulgent to her. He was perfectly courteous and kind, and generous even to excess; but he never opened his heart to her, he never made her those familiar confidences which are the sweetest homage that a man can render to a woman, even when they display his own weakness or unwisdom. She had too little experience to be able to measure all that this meant, all of which it argued the absence; but as much perception as she had of it mortified her. At Amyôt she had vaguely suffered from it, but here, in Paris, he seemed very far away from her in thought and feeling. She felt that she was but one of the ornaments of his house, as the azaleas and palms were in their great porcelain vases.
To be exquisitely dressed, to be the possessor of some of the finest jewels in the world, to be told to amuse herself as she chose, to have the world at her feet, and all Paris look after her as she drove over its asphalte, would have been enough to most women of her age to make up perfect happiness; but it was not enough for the girl whose thoughtful years had been passed under the sad and solemn skies of Morbihan, and who had the sense of duty and the instincts of honour inherited from great races who had perished on the scaffold and on the battle-field. There was a pensive seriousness in her nature which would not permit her to abandon herself wholly to the self-indulgences and gaieties of the life of the world. She was too grave and too spiritual to become one of the butterflies who flirt with folly from noonday till night. Her chastened childhood in the darkened rooms on the Ile St. Louis had left a gravity with her which could not easily assimilate itself to the levity and the licence of modern society, which offended her taste as it affronted her delicacy.
CHAPTER XXXV.
A few minutes after Othmar had left the house her groom of the chambers ushered into the library the Duc de Vannes and his elder daughter. Blanchette, muffled up to her dancing turquoise-coloured eyes in sealskin, and with her small, impatient feet cased in little velvet boots lined with fur, in which costume Carlos Durand was about to paint her portrait for the salon, with a background of snow and frosted boughs taken from the Bois, sprang across the long room with the speed of a little greyhound, and embraced her cousin as if she had never loved anyone so much in all the days of her life. They had not met for six months, for Blanchette had been in penitence with her governesses and the dowager Duchesse de Vannes, in the depths of the Jura; a chastisement which had only sent her back to Paris two centimètres taller, full of resolution to avenge herself, and more open-eyed and quick-eared than ever.
‘Ah, my dearest! How happy I am to see you again!’ she cried in ecstasy, lifting her pretty little pale face to be kissed, in a transport of affection.
‘Il faut la ménager: elle est si riche!’ she had said to Toinon that morning, who was in bed with a cold, and who had grumbled in answer, ‘Autrefois elle était si bête!’ to which Blanchette had judiciously replied, ‘On n’est jamais bête quand on est riche.’
De Vannes, when his little daughter’s ecstasies were somewhat spent, approached with a smile and kissed the hand of Yseulte with a reverential but cousinly familiarity.
‘Out so early!’ she said in surprise. ‘Surely you never used to see the outer air till two o’clock?’
‘I brought this feu-follet to enjoy your kindness,’ said the Duc, ‘that I might have the pleasure of seeing you before all the world does. I wished, too, to be the first to congratulate you, my cousin, on your brilliant success last night. You were perfect, marvellous, incredible! — —’
‘I think I was much like any one else,’ said Yseulte, to check the torrent of his adjectives; ‘and the success of the ball was due more to Julien than to us; he was so enchanted to have a ball to organise in this great house after so many years without any receptions.’
‘Julien is an admirable maître d’hôtel, no doubt,’ answered de Vannes, with a smile; ‘and he is happy in possessing a young mistress who appreciates his zeal and fidelity, but it is not of Julien that all Paris is talking and sighing this morning.’
‘They must be talking and sighing in their beds then,’ said Yseulte, a little impatiently. ‘I thought no one was up so early as this except myself. Is the Duchesse well? She was so kind last night; she gave so much entrain — —’
‘You know I never see her till dinner, if then, unless I chance to cross her in the Bois,’ answered the Duc, a little irritably.
He had risen three hours too early, and had bored himself to bring his little daughter here in his coupé; and he felt that so much self-sacrifice was not likely to avail him anything except that as he looked at Yseulte he could see for once in his life a woman who was still prettier in the morning than at night. He himself did not bear that trying light well; the lines about his eyes were deep and not to be hidden by any art, his eyes were dull and heavy, his cheeks hollow, and his moustache dyed. By night he was still one of the most elegant of la haute gomme, and his natural distinction could never altogether leave him; but his manner of life had aged him prematurely, and he felt old beside the freshness and the youth of Yseulte.
His vanity and his good sense alike counselled him to retire from a position which would avail him nothing; but a certain malice, which was a part of his character, and which his little daughter had inherited in increased degree, prompted him first to take reprisal for the indifference of his reception. Yseulte remained standing, holding the hand of Blanchette, evidently not desiring that he should be long there, and giving him no invitation to protract his visit until her breakfast hour. Blanchette’s mischievous eyes watched her father’s visible annoyance with keen appreciation of it; she had not forgotten the medallion given at Millo, and she had guessed very well why she had received the extraordinary honour of a seat in his brougham as he drove to the Jockey. She had been just about to leave the house with her maid when the Duc, passing her in the vestibule, had said carelessly: ‘Is it you, you little cat? Ah, you are going to your cousin. Well, jump in with me, and I will set you down as I pass; I am going to the Jockey.’ Now Blanchette knew as well as he did that the way from their house to the Jockey Club did not by any means lie past the Hôtel d’Othmar; but she had been too shrewd to say that, and too proud of driving beside her father, who smoked a big cheroot, and told her about the little theatres.
‘Can I see Othmar?’ he asked now, as he made his adieux to Yseulte.
‘I am sorry, but he is just gone out,’ she answered; ‘I think he is gone for some hours; I do not know where.’
‘You will soon learn not to say so,’ thought the Duc, diverted even in his discomfiture by her simplicity. He said aloud:
‘Do you think he may have gone to see the Napraxines? He was always a great friend of theirs, and they arrived last night; it is in all the papers, but then you do not read the papers. I only ask, because I should be so glad if I could meet him anywhere. The Prefect of Nice writes to me about the basin of Millo; now S. Pharamond has much more sea-front and much larger share of the harbour than we have, and if Othmar would use his influence, one word from him — —’
‘I will tell him; he will be sure to come to you or write to you,’ she said quickly. She had flinched a little at the name of the Napraxine, which no one had spoken to her since that silver statue of the Love with the empty gourd had been sent to her before her marriage.
‘Bien joué, petit papa,’ thought Blanchette, with understanding and appreciation, as her father bowed himself out of Othmar’s library.
‘Oh, how happy you are! — how I wish I
were you!’ she cried, five minutes later, as she skipped about her cousin’s boudoir, while the glow of the fire of olive-wood shone on the panels which Bougereau had painted there with groups of those charming nude children which he can set frolicking with almost the soft poetic grace of Correggio.
Yseulte smiled on the little impudent face of the child, who leaned her elbows on her knees as she spoke.
‘I am very happy,’ she said, with perfect truth. ‘But I hope you will be as much so one day, Blanchette.’
Blanchette nodded.
‘I shall marry into the finance too; the noblesse is finished; papa says so. He said yesterday, “Nous sommes de vieux bonzes — emballons-nous!”’
Blanchette tied her arms and legs in a knot as she had seen a clown do, and made a pantomimic show of being rolled away on a wheelbarrow; then she gathered herself up and came and stood before her cousin and hostess.
‘Te voilà, grande dame!’ she cried, looking at her with her own little pert flaxen head, with its innumerable little curls held on one side critically, as she surveyed Yseulte from head to foot with a frank astonishment and admiration. It was only such a little while ago that Yseulte had been her butt and victim at Millo; that she had ridiculed her for her grey convent dress, her thick shoes, her primitive, pious habits, brought from the Breton woods, and lo! — here she stood, ‘très grande dame!’ as Blanchette, a severe judge in such matters, acknowledged to herself. So tall, so elegant, so stately, with her beautiful slender hands covered with great rings, and her morning-gown a cascade of marvellous old lace. ‘She looks quite twenty years old!’ thought Blanchette. ‘How nice it must be to be married, if one get grown up all at once like that!’