by Ouida
‘Come in,’ she said impatiently.
The door opened behind the satin hangings, and Platon Napraxine entered.
‘How many times must I request you to pay me the common respect of sending to know if I be visible?’ she said, with that hauteur which he dreaded, as a prisoner in the fortress of Peter and Paul dreads the sight of the knout.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he murmured humbly. ‘It is not our day, but I thought you would allow me to take advantage of the French New Year to — to — to bring you a little gift. Do not be angry, Nadine — —’
He spoke very submissively and with a timidity which made his high-coloured cheeks grow paler. He had for many a year abandoned all hope of being any nearer to the woman who was his wife than the marble of the steps which she descended to her carriage; yet he could not help having, every now and then, a foolish impulse to approach her in affection, a wistful fancy that perhaps — perhaps — at last ——
He laid on her knee as he spoke a velvet case, with her crown and initials in gold upon it.
‘My dear Platon, what nonsense!’ she said, with some real annoyance, and she murmured to herself: ‘In half an hour he will take something similar to half a dozen cocottes!’
But she could do no less than open the case, which was filled by a necklace, earrings, and a small crown for the hair in pink pearls.
Platon Napraxine watched her wistfully as she looked at them with a listless indifference. If he could only please her once! If he could only once see that beautiful contemptuous mouth smile kindly on him.
‘There is not one of them worth her little finger,’ he thought, meaning the companions and consolers of his life.
‘I think you have no pink pearls; it is the only thing you have not,’ he said; as humble still as a chidden dog. ‘Will you not let me wish you bonne fête, Nadine? I — —’
He took her hand and carried it to his lips. She drew it away, not angrily, but with a profound indifference.
‘I cannot see why one day in the year is any more than another, that we should make speeches upon it,’ she said, shutting up the jewel case. ‘The pearls are quite charming. It is too good of you. Only, you know I do not in the least see why you should give me things; I really do not want them — —’
It was the ‘j’en ai tant’ of her five-year-old philosophy.
‘I know you do not want them,’ said her husband with a blank sense of foolish disappointment, foolish because his hope had been foolish. ‘But still most women never have jewels enough. I do not mean that I ever thought you would care for them, but still it is the custom — and — one never likes the day to go by, — if you would say a kind word — —’
‘My dear Platon,’ she said wearily, yet with a certain amusement at his stupidity, ‘why will you persist in that superstition that one day is any more than all the others? — and not even a Russian day either! You, who are such a Slavophil, should have ignored a French New Year’s day as quite pagan and indecent. The pearls are very pretty; I will put them on to-night, if that will please you. Only — only — you know I am not very fond of that sort of presents. Are you sure you have not another similar case in your pocket that you are going to take this morning to that very handsome new house in the Avenue Villiers? All the houses are new there, but that is newest — —’
Napraxine coloured dully with a dual sense of embarrassment and ridicule.
He was silent.
‘Are you sure?’ said his wife, with her head leaning back on her cushions and her demure smile gleaming beneath the lashes of her half-closed eyelids.
‘Nadine!’ stammered Napraxine, in mingled discomfiture and eagerness, which made him blunder more and more. ‘What can one do when you — you, — as God is above us, if you had not turned me adrift years ago as if I were a monster, I would never have looked at another woman. You do not believe it, but I would not. Even now, I would leave them all if you said a word, — if — if — —’
She rose and laid the case of pearls down on a table near her.
‘My dear Prince,’ she said in her iciest tones, though, in her own heart, she could very willingly have laughed aloud, ‘I see you have indeed mistaken your road to the Avenue de Villiers. Do you think you can purchase my — kindness — as you do that of your mistresses? Pray let this be the last of such blunders. You have not been guilty of them for many years. Do not begin now. They offend me. You will only ruffle, very disagreeably and uselessly, the amiable understanding on which we have agreed to live.’
‘When did I ever agree?’
His face was darkly flushed, his voice was husky and had a tremor in it, something savage and imperious began to wake in him and tell him that after all this delicate and disdainful woman was his; — but her languid lids opened wholly, and her calm, luminous eyes looked him full in the face with that look with which the keeper can daunt, by sheer power of will, the animal which could trample him into dust and tear him into atoms.
‘Pray, do not let us re-open a discussion which has been closed for six years,’ she said in her softest, coldest voice. ‘I am quite sure you meant well; I never bear malice; I will wear your pearls to-night. We have a dinner, I think; for d’Aumale, is it not? Bonne fête, mon ami. Think what a troubled life you would have if I cared about that new house, and be grateful. Please send Paul here. He must take away some of this lilac. So much of it will give me migraine.’
Napraxine stifled as best he could some oath which he dared not utter aloud, and went slowly and sullenly out of her presence, sensible of an ignominious dismissal. His glance as he went dwelt with suspicion on the baskets and bouquets which made the room and the adjoining rooms gardens of orchids and odontoglossum, of gardenias and of tea-roses.
‘Is there one among them,’ he thought, ‘for whom she cares?’
He was nothing to her: but he would be something to such an one if ever he could find his foe.
He was hurt, wounded, humiliated, infuriated, all in one; conscious of a defeat which made him grotesque in her sight, sensible of an act of unwisdom and of sentimentality which had only placed him lower than ever in the estimation of a woman whom he was furiously conscious that he still loved and still desired.
When the hangings of the door had closed behind him, his wife laughed with an amusement which her sense of courtesy had controlled before, and put a tea-rose in the bosom of her gown.
‘How stupid, how intensely stupid, to come to me as he goes to his cocottes,’ she thought, with that irritation and ennui which were the only emotions which he ever aroused in her. ‘And to renew that sort of argument as if we were two greengrocers living at Montmartre! Decidedly, when the bon Dieu made poor Platon, he left out of his composition every vestige of tact; and really tact is the only quality that it is absolutely necessary for everybody to have to prevent them from irritating others. Who could have imagined that after six years he would begin again like that! — he has always a little access of tenderness at the end of the year; last time he gave me a dreadful Chinese idol as big as himself with green eyes; some dealer had told him it was very precious: he did not know, he never knows; I wonder if there were anybody so stupid in all the world; I am only astonished that he did not send for Sachs and Mitz as an agreeable surprise for me!’
‘Yes, Paul,’ she said aloud, ‘take away most of those flowers, they make my head ache; and give that case to Jeanne to put up in the jewel-safe. Tell Fedor that I shall want the horses in an hour.’
‘How very stupid some women must be,’ she reflected often, ‘to let themselves be dictated to, and denied, and bullied, and worried by their husbands. Nothing is so easy to manage as a man, if you only begin in the right way with him. All depends on how you begin; it is just like a horse; if you do not make him feel that you are his superior at once, he will take advantage of you for ever. I remember my mother saying to me before my marriage: “Ménage ton mari, sois bien douce.” Now, if I had listened to her, I should have had Platon on my shoulders all my li
fe; I dare say, even, he would have expected me to please him, and to listen to him, and to accept all his absurdities. But I froze him from the first; he has always been intensely afraid of me. Of two people there is always one who is afraid, and I preferred that it should be he. It just shows what mind can do over matter.’
She looked listlessly at a pile of telegrams which her servant had brought in with him and laid on the little table near her.
‘They will all say the same thing,’ she thought indifferently, as she opened two or three which contained the usual greetings of the New Year from her innumerable relatives and friends in other countries and at other courts; no Russian, of course, amongst them.
‘If people must have it that a year begins, which is utterly absurd, why did they not take pretty pink and white April instead of this ugly, shivering, frost-bitten January?’ she said to her dog Dauphin, as she glanced through the tedious compliments of the telegrams. At last, amidst them, there was one which made her change colour as she read it. It was from Lady Brancepeth, away on her estates in the north of England. It was only a line; it said:
‘My brother has been killed on the ice in the Gulf of S. Lawrence.’
There were no details, only the bare fact, as it had been brought with the same crushing curtness by the electric cable from the western to the eastern shores of the Atlantic.
Nadine Napraxine read it three times without at the first realising or believing it. The news gave her a shock; not a great one, but still a kind of chilly pain and vague terror. A mist swam for a moment before her eyes; a sorrow, which was quite sincere, moved her as the sense of what she read gradually grew more and more distinct. A sudden remembrance smote her of Geraldine, as she had seen him first some three years earlier, standing on the beach at Biarritz, clad in his blue sea-clothes, with the sun shining full on his fair frank features and in his clear, happy, candid eyes. He had looked at her; his sister had beckoned to him, and had said carelessly: ‘Ralph, is it possible that you do not know Madame Napraxine?’ and he had come up to them over the rough red rocks, the sun and the wind playing in his bright hair. And then, life had never again been quite the same to him, and now it was over for ever. He was dead, just thirty years old!
‘Pauvre garçon!’ she said, with genuine regret, as she had said the same words when they had told her that the young Louis Napoléon had been killed at Isandula. It was not the regret for which the dead man, thinking of her as the frozen night had closed in on him and over the wastes of ice-bound waters, perchance had hoped. ‘Pauvre garçon!’ she murmured where she sat, amidst the profusion of the flowers. For the moment she felt cold in her room, which was as warm as a summer day, and through whose double windows of opalescent glass no breath of the outer air could penetrate.
‘I suppose they will say I did this too!’ she thought with impatience, her memory reverting to the death of young Seliedoff even whilst she said again very softly to herself, ‘Pauvre garçon!’
She was sincerely sorry; she felt nothing of that more passionate and personal pain which once Geraldine might not unnaturally have hoped that his death would excite in her, but a sincere regret mingled with a kind of annoyance that men who had loved her would always go and run some tragic risks, so that they perished miserably: — and then the world blamed her.
‘I, who detest tragedies!’ she said to the little dog. ‘When the majority of men, too, always live too long, live to have gout, and use spectacles, and grow tiresome!’
‘Pauvre garçon, pauvre garçon!’ she murmured once more, in the only threnody which occurred to her: how could he go and get drowned in the S. Lawrence, where the ice was surely as thick as in the Neva? She had always liked to play at being Providence to her world, a very capricious and unkind Providence indeed, but still one which decided their destinies without any reference to their desires as Providence is always permitted to do. She did not like these rude gusts of uncalled for accident which blew out the lives which she held in her hand as if they were so many tapers!
‘Pauvre garçon!’
He had grown very wearisome, he had been even disposed to become exacting, he had wearied her, and she had not known very well how to get rid of him; but still it was a pity. He had had a great position, he was an only son, his own people were very fond of him, he was better than most of the men of his age and rank; she had for once the sensation that one feels when one has broken a rare piece of china, — the sensation of having done a silly thing, an irreparable thing.
‘I never told him to go to Canada!’ she said to herself. No: she had only told him that he wearied her. So he had wearied her; he had never been too amusing at the best of times. It was not her fault that he had become tiresome; they all became so; they had no originality. Still it was a pity; she saw his fair frank face, with its eyes so blue and so wistful, looking at her as he had stood to hear his sentence that last day we saw La Jacquemerille.
‘I do not think I said anything unkind to him that day,’ she reflected; and then the little smile that was so often on her lips came on them a moment as she thought: ‘To be sure, I told him to marry somebody — anybody.’
Well, he was dead, and before he was thirty; with all his courage and gallantry and wealth, and the many people who loved him at home all powerless to save him from the black chasm of the yawning ice; and she was not so very sorry after all; she honestly wished she could feel more sorrow. She had never known real sorrow but once, when her father had been found dead in his writing-room in the Embassy at Vienna.
‘Platon will be more sorry,’ she thought, ‘he always likes his worst enemies so much!’
Then she rang again for Paul, and told him to take the telegram to the Prince if he was still in the house.
Napraxine, in five minutes’ time, not venturing to return in person, wrote to her on the back of the printed message:
‘I am grieved indeed. Would you desire to postpone the dinner of to-night?’
She wrote back to him:
‘That would be too infinitely ridiculous; though it is certainly a great pity, he was no relation of ours, only a bonne connaissance!’
‘A bonne connaissance!’ exclaimed Napraxine when he read the pencilled words. That was all the requiem given to the drowned man, whose battered and disfigured body was then on its way homeward, on the deck of a vessel which was ploughing a stormy way through dusky mountainous Atlantic waves!
She sat still a little while, looking through the remaining telegrams and casting them aside; all the rest were the mere congratulations of the season.
‘I wonder when people will invent anything new!’ she thought as she threw the last aside. ‘To think that the Romans five and twenty centuries ago were also running about and visiting and sending cakes and taking flowers, because what they called a new year had come! I suppose the world will never liberate itself from the camisole de force of idiotic customs.’
She wrote a telegram of sympathy to the sister of Geraldine as she had written a letter of condolence to the mother of Seliedoff; then she had herself wrapped in sealskin from head to foot and prepared for her drive in the Bois.
‘When I am gone, open the windows, Paul,’ she said to the servant, who was so astonished that he ventured to ask if he heard aright, knowing that his lady loved warm air as a palm does.
‘Open the windows and leave them open,’ she repeated. She looked at all the hot-house blossoms and thought, with that cruelty which was latent in her side by side with her higher qualities, ‘They will all be withered in an hour. Paul will tell all the valets, they will tell all their masters — —’
The fancy diverted her. She liked flowers, but she liked a little cruelty like this much better. It would be wholesome for all those men to know how she valued their New Year’s gifts.
‘Women nowadays make them so vain,’ she said to herself. ‘If it were not for me, they would never get a lesson at all.’
To some the lesson had been severe, severe as the severity of death; but th
at fact scarcely affected her conscience.
She did not stop her carriage to speak to any of her acquaintances, for she supposed that the news of Geraldine’s death would by this time be known in Paris, where he had so many friends, and knew that everyone would take pleasure in saying to her— ‘Mais comment donc? Est-ce bien vrai?—’ It would be so tiresome!
‘I cannot help it if they kill themselves!’ she said to herself as her horses sped along the frosty roads. ‘Society will blame me now, but I imagine they would have blamed me much more if I had gone away into his north-country mists with poor Geraldine as he would have liked me to do; he was so sensational, poor fellow, and so romantic under his English awkwardness. Englishmen are like that; they can seldom say anything they mean properly, but they are very romantic under it all; they are always ready to compromise themselves, despite their decorum, and they have just the dogged fidelity of their own bulldogs.’
He had been better than most of them certainly.
She felt a certain pain as she went through the chill sharp air and heavy mists, and remembered how many times she had seen Geraldine come riding through the trees, and how boyishly his face had flushed whenever he had seen her first! Poor foolish fellow! to leave all his possessions and interests and duties, and to go out to Ottawa, where he had no earthly business to be, as if going to Ottawa were likely to deliver him of her memory! That was so truly an Englishman’s idea, to change latitude and longitude and think you left behind you any inconvenient passion you might be haunted with by merely changing your climate and your food! ‘Poor Ralph! Poor Ralph! I think there was nothing on earth tragic, ridiculous, or abominable that he would not have done if I had ordered him to do it — except that he would never have killed Platon. I do not think even I could have made him kill Platon. That is the sort of scruple an Englishman always has, alone of all men in the world.’
‘I suppose she knows it, but she does not care,’ said many persons, looking after her as their wont was, as she flashed past them, nothing scarcely seen of her except her luminous eyes looking out from the brown lustre of the sealskins, whilst she made an almost imperceptible gesture of her head to the innumerable salutations that marked her course.