by Ouida
‘When we get rid of the camisole de force,’ she said to herself, ‘we shall get rid of bowing to each other; it is insane, when everyone meets everyone else morning, noon, and night, to be obliged to jerk one’s head fifty times every quarter of an hour when one is out of doors!’
She scarcely moved hers, indeed, but still it was a trouble; it was to avoid the trouble that she sometimes took those long solitary drives into the open country, of which the motive constantly perplexed her world. To any other woman they would have attributed assignations, but no one could ever do that to the Princess Napraxine; her absolute indifference was too notorious a fact, and the dullest who knew aught of her felt that if ever she awoke to any preference she would never stoop to mask it. She cared nothing for the opinion of any living being. She had no lover, only because she had no love.
Under her nonchalance and her occasional sentiments of sympathy with revolutionists, she was of an inexorably proud temperament; she would have liked to be an empress, — an empress such as was seen in earlier times, whose mere breath spoke the fiat of life and death. As it was, she could only vex the souls of men and kill orchids.
When she reached home, after driving until dusk, she passed through her boudoir to see if Paul had obeyed her. He had obeyed her implicitly: the windows were still wide open and the bitter biting air was streaming into the room, driving out before it all the heat from the calorifère; all the poor flowers were withered, as if a scorch from fire had passed over them, and the beautiful butterfly petals were mere shrivelled, shapeless leaves. It had been a pity, she thought, to have obeyed her so exactly; yet she knew very well that if he had not done so, Paul, despite his twenty-five years of service to the house of Napraxine, would have found himself outside her doors for evermore that night.
‘Shut them now,’ she said to him, as he waited for her commands, ‘and take away all those baskets and bouquets.’
Paul knew her too well to dare to remark what he had thought all the afternoon, that it had been a sad waste of some fifty thousand francs’ worth of blossoms. He closed the windows in silence. She passed on towards her dressing-chambers through the little library which divided the boudoir from them, the gayest and most coquettish of little libraries in appearance, with ivory bookcases ornamented by painted medallions of birds, a few white marble busts, and hangings of modern Gobelin tapestry; but a library by no means destitute of serious and philosophic works of some Latin authors, and of transactions of recent scientific research.
In the library, Paul, hesitating, ventured to approach her with a bouquet which was not harmed by the twilight frost.
‘This was left a few moments ago,’ he explained as he tendered it in some trepidation, uncertain whether he had done wrong to exclude it from the general massacre. She took it indifferently: it was very simple; — a bouquet of narcissus with a rim of white violets, nothing else. The name on the card with it was Othmar’s. She smiled and took it with her into her dressing-room. It was the bunch of ‘corn-cockles’ for which she had wished.
‘I did not do wrong,’ thought Paul, with a sigh of relief. Then he smiled too as he recalled the winter in which the sender had been many times alone with his mistress in that little room where the orchids had now withered in their gilded baskets. ‘It was he if it were ever anyone,’ he thought; ‘but I do not believe it has ever been anyone — yet.’
His knowledge of the world made him make the restriction, as he called one of his subordinates to sweep away all that rubbish, pointing to the poor murdered flowers, whose costly corbeilles would be one of his many perquisites.
She, meanwhile, was undressed, clothed in a loose gown of embroidered china silk, took a cup of tea, and slept peacefully in the perfumed warmth. She liked to come out of the frosty and foggy air, and lie still with the pleasant drowsiness caused by the contrast of the sharp evening wind and the atmosphere heated to 40° Réaumur. Physicians told her that so sudden a change was not wise or safe, but she laughed at them. ‘What is pleasant is always wholesome,’ she said, constructing new rules of hygiene, as she often did new rules of etiquette. She liked the warmth, the sense of repose, of languor, of voluptuousness, as a cat loves it, stretched on velvet, in still hot air. She slept now with perfect composure, dreamlessly, from the semi-stupor that driving against cold winds brings with it afterwards. Then, all at once, she dreamt of a lake half frozen, of dark tempestuous skies, of an open grave in the black water under the jagged drifting ice; and she awoke with a little unconscious cry to open her eyes on the mellow light, the satin hangings, the Saxe mirrors, the snowy bear-skins of her dressing-room, the little tray of silver and china, the bouquet of narcissus and violets near her.
‘What a wretched dream! I, who never dream,’ she said impatiently, as she stretched her limbs out on the white furs of her couch. Then she remembered Geraldine.
‘Will he haunt me every time I go to sleep?’ she thought, with a little shiver. It seemed to her altogether unreasonable and undeserved. She had never told him to go on the Gulf of S. Lawrence in the dangerous season before the ice was solid.
In an hour’s time she took the bouquet of narcissus in her hand, and descended to her drawing-rooms. She wore the pink pearls that night, the little crown holding up her hair, raised like that of the portraits of Madame Tallien: she never wore her hair twice together in the same fashion. ‘If you always wear your hair the same way, you have no imagination, and you are always suspected of a peruke,’ she was wont to say.
Platon Napraxine seeing his despised gift thus honoured, was almost contented. In the régime of starvation, on which he had been kept so long, the smallest crumbs of condescension were eagerly seized by him.
She herself was in a gentle and gracious mood; she was not quite so merciless in speech as usual, but she was quite as charming. The Duc d’Aumale sat on her right hand, the English Ambassador on her left. Her airy laughter rang ever and again like silver bells; and Napraxine, even in the midst of the surprised gratitude with which he saw his pink pearls honoured by being worn, thought with a sense of depression and wonder: ‘If I were to die to-morrow, would she care a whit more than she cares now for Ralph?’
CHAPTER XXXIX.
The telegram had merely said that Geraldine had been killed on the ice in the Gulf of S. Lawrence. There had been no details; but later on all the world learned that death had come to him in the freshness of his manhood by one of those trite accidents so common in North American waters in the beginning of winter, when the ice is still loose and detached, and is borne to and fro by the sullen waves which seem unwilling to endure its chains. He had been standing on an ice floe, off the Prince Edward Island, with Canadian hunters, seeking seals, when that portion of it which sustained them had suddenly broken away before they were aware of their danger, and, drifting with frightful rapidity, had borne them out to sea at the close of the short, bitter winter’s day. Many on the shore were witnesses of the certain death to which they were carried, but no help was possible before the darkness of night came down, — the night which froze all human life left without shelter in it.
Where the floe went none knew; when the dawn broke there was no trace of its passage to be made out amidst the many masses of ice rocking, meeting, parting, crashing one upon another as the frost strove to bind beneath its iron hold the free will and the wild anger of the sea. Whether those who had been upon it had been drowned, or frozen to death, or borne out to mid-Atlantic, none could know; but on the third day the body of Geraldine and of two of the Canadian fishermen had been washed ashore off the New Brunswick coast: his features had been recognised by his own crew, and the tidings of his cruel fate had been sent to his mother and his sisters. He had been the only son of a high and honourable House. There was the grief which sorrowed without hope in the old north country halls, where a widowed mother wept for him, and a loyal and loving tenantry followed his body to its grave by the fair Yore waters.
One Tuesday evening, some two weeks later, when Nadine Nap
raxine returned home from the opera to change her gown for a ball at Prince Orloff’s, there lay on her dressing-room table, amongst others, a letter of which the superscription was very familiar to her, and which moved her with a certain sense which was as nearly fear as it was possible for her temperament to know.
She herself had written to Geraldine’s people, but no one of them had answered her until now that Evelyn Brancepeth did so. She broke the envelope and read the letter, standing in the costume of Venetian red embroidered with silver flowers, in which, at the opera that night, she had held all the eyes of the house upon her as she sat, careless, indifferent, half hidden behind her great red fan, the diamond butterflies which served in the place of sleeves trembling upon her shoulders.
‘I know very well,’ wrote Lady Brancepeth, ‘that before the world you are wholly blameless. I know that my unhappy brother had no right to consider himself preferred by you. I know, were I speaking with you now, you would say with your chilliest manner that you had never honoured him with any encouragement to folly. But you will pardon me if I say that you are more blamable to me than you would be if you had loved him. I am a plain, stupid, unromantic Englishwoman, but even I can see that love excuses its own excesses: l’amour prime le droit. I could pardon a great passion if it even committed a great crime. But you have no passion, you have even no sentiment. You are sometimes amused, and you are sometimes — much more often — bored; and there the scale of your emotions rounds itself and ends. There may be someone who can, or who will, extend for you that narrow circle, though I very greatly doubt it; but it was entirely certain that poor Ralph had never any chance or any power to do so. He adored you, quite stupidly and hopelessly, but he never even knew how to say so in such a manner as could have touched you. He was very English, very terre à terre, and if he had never seen you he would have led a happy life enough; a commonplace one, no doubt, but one useful in his generation, and content with those simple joys which to a raffinée like you seem so absurd and so dull. But he did meet you; and ever afterwards life meant nothing to him unless it meant your presence, and your will. You had admitted him into the honour of a certain intimacy, which, in his blundering English way, he fancied meant all kinds of eventualities that it did not mean. No doubt his delusion was of his own creating, and of course he ought to have been prepared for his dismissal when he had become troublesome or tedious; but he was so unwise that he put all his heart into that which he should have understood was a mere jeu de salon; and you did not condescend to give him any warning. Why should you? you will say. Why, indeed, since his fate was as entirely indifferent to you as the bouquets that crowd your antechambers in Carnaval. It would have been so very easy for you, when first my brother ventured to show you what he felt, to banish him for ever with a decisive word; he would have been man enough to understand and to accept it; but you did not take that trouble, and the love of you grew — not perhaps precisely upon hope — but at least upon the tacit permission to exist. I scarcely know why I write all this to you, for you will not read it; only I have been your friend, so far as you allow any woman to call herself so, and I feel that whenever we meet in the world you will expect me to be so still, and I cannot. I must ask you to let us be strangers. No doubt, actually, you are innocent of my brother’s death, but indirectly — even in a manner directly — you were the cause of it. You made his country, his family, his home life, his duties of all kinds, become no more to him than if he had never known land or kindred. The pain with which you filled him made him wander in an aimless unrest from place to place in an alien world with which he had no sympathy, and made him only too willing to die, that he might so throw off the fever of your memory. My dear Nadine, you are a woman of perfect honour, of high repute, of sensitive and unbending pride, and on the ermine of your delicate dignity there is no stain as yet. But for me, there is blood upon your hand. I can never take it in my own again. Let us be strangers.’
The letter was signed, and nothing more was added to it.
Nadine Napraxine read the lines through, word by word, and when she had done so, folded it up and put it aside, without irritation, but not altogether without regret. The frank, sincere, and at times rough words of Geraldine’s sister had been welcome to her by their contrast with the false sweetness of the world’s phrases, and she knew that she would lose her friendship with reluctance, and miss her surly honesty, with its uncompromising truths. But the letter seemed to her exaggerated, not in the best taste, even if, under the circumstances which inspired it, natural enough. Geraldine had perished by such an accident as every year costs scores of fishers’ lives whenever the ice floes meet and sever in the half-frozen seas of the north. Why would they see her hand in it so clearly?
‘It is just as they always see the finger of God where a horse stumbles at a post and rails, or when a pointsman is sleepy and does not hang out the red light,’ she said to herself, with some impatient contempt. ‘I am sorry, quite sorry myself, that he is dead, but I certainly never told him to get upon a block of ice in midwinter on the St. Lawrence. And it was quite as much Platon’s doing as mine that ever he took the habit of coming about our house at all. Besides, if he had not been very stupid, as even his sister says, he would have understood à demi-mot; there is nothing on earth so tiresome as people who want things explained.’
Still, there were passages in the letter which touched her conscience, and reached that truthfulness in self-judgment which easily awoke in her.
‘I suppose I am unkind — sometimes,’ she thought, with a certain contrition. ‘When they irritate me I really do not care what becomes of them. As long as they know how to please me I am always amiable. It is not my fault that their knowledge comes to an end too soon. It is their own poverty of style, of thought, of invention. If I were writing a dictionary, and had to define Man, I should say he was a limited animal, exceedingly limited. There is infinitely more variety about dogs.’
The very recollection of the excessive monotony of the human species made her yawn. She wondered if that monotony were the fault of civilisation; probably not. In a savage state, no doubt, instincts had been all alike, just as manners were all alike now. People were all dull, and because she found them so they considered her heartless. Poor Geraldine had been dull; dull in comprehension, in intention, in discernment; and just because she had found him so his sister wrote to her as if she were a murderess.
‘Poor woman!’ she reflected. ‘She is always so disposed to see everything so terribly en noir. That is so English, too. They always have the fog in their eyes. I am not in the least like Lady Macbeth. I neither murder men, nor have my sleep murdered by them. It is natural that she should feel keenly the loss of her only brother, but it is absurd that she should lay the blame upon my shoulders, when she knows that if he had not wished to shoot seals — which is a barbarous pastime — he would most probably be alive now. As if a man could be wasting with despair, and yet care about seals! To be sure, it is very English. If an Englishman be hopelessly in love with any one, he generally goes a long way off and tries to kill a tiger or a moose. I do not see the connection of ideas between the sigh of passion and the steel of a gun barrel, but there must be some link of affinity for them, because they all do it. I prefer men like Othmar, who kill other men.’
Although she was all alone as these thoughts drifted through her mind while the letter of Lady Brancepeth lay amongst the litter of notes, cards, and invitations on her table, a momentary warmth came on her face as the name of Othmar recurred to her, and a certain bitterness of contempt came into her recollection as she remembered his marriage. If he had had patience, if he only had had patience, perhaps — perhaps — perhaps ——
She would not have gone away with him, because in her world they did not do those things, and she would have always been too keenly afraid of an after-time of regret and weariness, but she might have accepted the gift of his life, and given him something of her own.
In his haste and wrath he had set up a
barrier between them, but how frail it was! Only the timid, wistful youth of a girl! The imperial scorn of the Cleopatras of the earth rose in her before her meek, childlike rival.
What a coward he had been to shelter himself behind the frail rampart of a young girl’s affection; affection which he did not appreciate, did not reciprocate, did not value!
A woman with a tithe part of the discernment and the experience which she possessed could cast the horoscope of Yseulte without any recourse to the stars for knowledge of the future. All that fresh and tender love would count for nothing, would avail nothing, would awaken no response. She would bear his children, and live in his houses, and be the object of all his careful outward observance, and that would be all. He would grow unspeakably weary of seeing her, of hearing her, of remembering her tie to him, and he would conceal his weariness ill or well, and be every day more and more galled by the necessity for concealment.
When Nadine Napraxine, after the ball, went to her own rooms that night, she had herself undressed by her women and wrapped in a loose bed-room gown, made of her favourite white satin, and lined with eider-down. She dismissed her women, and lay before the warmth of her dressing-room fire in that dreamy state between waking and sleeping which is the very perfection of repose. The softly-lighted chambers opened one out of another in a vista of rich subdued colour, ending in the bath room, where a lamp hung above a beautiful reproduction of the Venus of Naples. The rooms were so many temples to her own perfections, she was the Grace, the Muse, and the Venus herself of this perfect sanctuary, which no footfall of man had ever dared invade. As she reclined before the fire that night and glanced through her half-closed lids down the succession of chambers, which in the clear but delicate light had the glow of jewels, she thought how dull and empty they would have seemed to most women of her years without a lover’s step coming silently and swiftly through the fragrant silence.