by Ouida
Naturally unselfish, Othmar had yet unconsciously dropped into the habit of one intense selfishness; he wrapped himself in his own thoughts as in a domino, and drew each day more and more closely about him that reserve which spared him all the trouble of reply, all the ennui of interrogation. The continual demands which his great position in the world made upon his time gave him continued excuse for being alike occupied and absorbed. Often the whole day passed without her receiving more from him than a few brief gentle phrases of greeting or adieu.
But he had provided her with every possible means of enjoyment and of self-indulgence, and it did not occur to him that amidst all her luxury the heart of the child remained empty and hungered.
‘He treats her as he would treat a mistress to whom he had grown utterly indifferent,’ thought Melville, often observing him with anger. ‘He surrounds her with every conceivable kind of luxury and distraction, and he leaves her alone amidst it. Does he think that a girl of her years wants nothing more than toilettes, horses, jewels, and bibelots? Does he suppose that at seventeen the heart is dead, and that the sentiments and the desires have said their last word? Does he believe that she will want nothing more of love than a chill embrace now and then, pro formâ? He leaves her at once so free and so starved, that were she any other woman in the world she would use her liberty in such wise that he would live to bitterly repent his neglect. But she is of the old time, the old school; she will keep silent and faithful; she will bear his children with the meekness and the resignation of the lambing sheep in spring-time; and she will rear them with courage, wisdom, and devotion. But she will not be happy, though probably the world will always envy her; and she will be less to him — less, less, less, — with every year which passes. In the end they will be total strangers, and she will accept that strange sort of widowhood — the saddest of all — as patiently as she accepted maternity and its pains. The cloister is out of date, perhaps, as they say, but the fact remains that there are natures for which, whether in or out of the cloister, life means crucifixion.’
Melville strove to do what he could to restore peace to her; but it is difficult to administer any efficacious medicine when no disease is admitted by the sufferer to exist. The extreme sensitiveness and the power of silent suffering in Yseulte baffled her well wishers, whilst it assisted those who did not wish her so well. When he, with his tact at suggestion, contrived to give her some hint that human love must always be accepted as a thing imperfect, that in every human life there must come disillusions, trials, and regrets, and that none of these need bring wretchedness with them if they be met with faith and patience, Yseulte listened to him with her usual courteous reverence, but felt bitterly that beneath his carefully chosen words, which were dropped with such elaborate assumption of hazard, as upon some general and impersonal subject, there were hidden both counsel to her and apprehension for her. She resented both with that hauteur which the blood of the de Valogne had given her; and he desisted from his efforts, afraid to do hurt where he washed to do good.
‘After all,’ he thought, ‘one’s fears for her may be wholly chimerical. Othmar is a man of honour, and Madame Napraxine is as chaste as snow, — according to report. It is true, her chastity has been as perilous and as cruel as the immoralities of others. But I think, even if to Othmar she should be not so cold, and be even more fatal than usual, his young wife may have charm enough to keep him faithful, or at least to win him back to fidelity.’
But though he tried thus to reassure himself, he did not succeed. He had learned much of the wisdom of society in his forty years of priesthood; he had been the favourite ecclesiastic of the great world, and he had seen much of its delicate and capricious women, of its unstable and unhealthy passions, of its irksome and disregarded ties; and he saw in the position of Yseulte many possibilities of error and unhappiness, little likelihood of a future of peace. Never within his memory, with its innumerable records of human destinies, had he ever seen simplicity, innocence, and devotion victorious over finesse, experience, and egotism; never within his memory had either the confessional or the drawing-rooms afforded him any precedent by which he could hope that the love which gave its all unreservedly and adoringly with both hands, would ever be conqueror over the seduction which provoked every desire and granted none, sacrificed nothing and expected all. Melville had always seen the egoist supreme in the conflict of life; his knowledge did not disturb his faith, it only made him the more convinced that there must be some future world in which all these wrongs would be set right; but it saddened him despite himself, and, despite his hope of ultimate compensation, he could not help whenever he could aiding the weak against the strong.
‘If everything is done by the will of God, why do you try and alter it?’ said Friederich Othmar to him once, with just sarcasm.
Melville was conscious that he was illogical, but he could not resist his own English love of fair play; it did not seem to him that as the world was made innocence and unselfishness ever obtained any chance of justice.
‘It must be granted,’ he thought mournfully once, also unable to resist his own clear-sightedness and its conclusions, ‘it must be granted that both innocence and unselfishness are too often inconceivably, irremediably, stupid, and throw their best cards on the table and follow will-o’-the-wisps, and break their limbs over every obstacle which a little skill and coolness would enable them to negotiate.’
The keen eyes of Aurore de Vannes saw what Othmar did not see; that since the arrival of the Princess Napraxine her young cousin had no longer the single-hearted and buoyant happiness of the early months of her marriage, that her face was often melancholy, her gaze wistful, her manner constrained.
But her reflections were precisely contrary to those of Melville.
‘She is fortunate beyond everything,’ said the Duchesse to her intimate friends. ‘He gives her all she can wish for, as if he were Haroun Alraschid, and he leaves her entirely to herself, because he is not in the least in love with her. Can anyone imagine a more enviable position? — to be seventeen years old and have all the Othmar millions at your back, and to enjoy such an absolute liberty that your husband never asks you even where you spend your days? Only she is such a baby still, so very full of all her convent fancies, so scrupulous, and proud, and old-fashioned, that I suppose she will never enjoy herself as she might do. She was ruined by those women at Faïel, and by the austerities and prejudices of the old Marquise. If she only knew it, her position might be the happiest in the world.’
‘Will it not be as I said?’ asked the Duc, her husband, triumphantly many a time. She always answered him irritably:
‘If a woman prefer to be miserable she always can be; men will always furnish her with the materials. But in this case you may be quite sure it is merely a girl’s romance and disappointment with marriage, which she expected, as they all do, to be a primrose path whilst it is only a common highway.’
‘The highway can be varied by étapes,’ murmured the Duc de Vannes.
He himself watched with unkind satisfaction the little cloud which had come in the serene heaven of Yseulte’s fate. It might betoken but an April shower, or it might bring in its wake a tempest. When he had seen Nadine Napraxine arrive in Paris he had said to himself, ‘Adieu les marguerites!’ The daisies were simple treasures of the spring; they would have no charm beside the hothouse flower. As his little daughter had said, he had bet heavily on the chances of Yseulte’s marriage, and he watched the unfolding of the leaves of fate with the impatience of the gambler added to the unacknowledged malice of a personal pique. In the frequent opportunities which both society and relationship afforded him he dropped the gall of many a vague insinuation, worded with tact and finesse, into the troubled peace of her thoughts. He had too much skill and too much good taste to permit himself to speak either Othmar’s or Nadine Napraxine’s name directly, but he had not been so long schooled in the cruelties of the world without having learned the art of suggestion in its most merciless
and its most subtle shapes. He never said so in any clear form of words, yet he contrived to convey to her his own conviction and the conviction of society that she counted for nothing in her husband’s existence. All his delicately-hinted compassion, all his vaguely-worded indignation, the mere light jests with which he strove to amuse her, all contained that drop of acid which burned its way into the pure gold of her affections, and remained with her long after he had left her presence.
She always summoned fortitude enough to repress any sign of the harm he did to her; but the effect of it was for that reason the more baneful. Sorrows and doubts, which pass away when a woman can weep for them at her mother’s knees, or in her sister’s arms, grow strong and cruel in solitary meditation and the nurture of thoughts unconfessed.
One night at a great fête the Duc de Vannes approached her and said to her with a smile:
‘How preoccupied you are, my cousin! I never should have thought that anyone so young would look so grave at a ball. Really, you make one fear that after all you were wrongly turned from your vocation, and would have been happiest in the cloister, much as the world would have lost.’
‘The world would have lost nothing,’ answered the girl, a little bitterly. ‘The world and I have no affinity.’
‘That is only an idea. In a few years you will habituate yourself to — —’ he paused and added with meaning, ‘to many things which seem to you harsh and cold. Penelope nowadays, if she spin at all to console herself for abandonment, only weaves the web of flirtages — —’
Yseulte coloured at the insinuation contained in the phrase. Her heart was too full for her to trust herself to answer. Did all these people know, as she knew, that her husband had never loved her?
‘You are trop taillée à l’antique,’ said de Vannes with a little impertinence. ‘Do you think you are ever thanked for all this exclusive devotion which does not permit you to smile at a ball? Do not be angered, Yseulte. I should be glad if I could persuade you that it would be much wiser to smile often — and smile on others. Men are ungrateful, my cousin. The spaniel love is not what moves them most.’
‘I do not know why you should say this to me,’ she murmured with embarrassment and offence. ‘You presume too far on our relationship — —’
‘Pardon me!’ said the Duc very humbly. ‘My indignation is apt to outrun my prudence. I do not like to see — any one — passively accept neglect. Neglect should be avenged. It is the only way in which it can be transformed into allegiance.’
Yseulte made a courageous effort to conceal her knowledge of the drift of his words.
‘I cannot tell what you allude to,’ she said coldly. ‘Nor do I see why you should feel any anger for which you are not asked.’
‘In the last century,’ continued de Vannes, as though he had not heard her, ‘there was a woman called Lescombat; she was very beautiful and had many lovers; she incited them to many crimes. One of them, Mongeôt, was condemned to be broken on the wheel for one of these crimes. He could have cleared himself if he had revealed her name; but he never did. He died on the wheel silent. She went to the Place de Grêve and smiled to see his tortures. ‘Il ne fallait pas moins que cela pour faire rougir Mongeôt!’ she cried so loud that he could hear her: he had always been very fair and pale. But he died mute, nevertheless. It is women like the Lescombat, my cousin, who are loved like that. Pauline de Beaumont, the very flower and perfection of womanhood, was only allowed as a reward for her devotion to follow her lover at a distance like a dog and die in Rome. It is always so.’
A chill passed over the girl as he spoke. She said wearily:
‘Madame de Beaumont was as nature and religion made her; she could not have rivalled your Lescombat if she had wished.’
Then she rose and went away from him.
When she returned home to her own rooms, where she was now too often left as solitary as though she had been in her nun’s cell at Faïel, she fell upon her knees before her crucifix and sobbed bitterly: she had seen that night how wistfully, and with what unconsciously revealed longing and regret, the eyes of Othmar had followed every movement of her rival.
To her ignorance, Nadine Napraxine was a woman as cruel, as evil, as terrible as the murderess Lescombat of whom the Duc de Vannes had spoken. All the innumerable intricacies of line, and the delicate half-tints of which such a character as hers was composed, made a study far beyond the girl’s power of analysis, even had any such power been left to her in the confusion and the fever of her thoughts. She only saw in her a sorceress, whose merciless will and irresistible seduction drew her husband from her as the Greek ships of old that passed to the world of the east were drawn out of their safe straight road by the loadstone rocks of the Gulf of Arabia. A sense of entire helplessness and of unending despair came upon her in those glad sunlit flower-filled Parisian days when all the pomp and pleasure which the great world could give were continually around her. If ever timidly and ashamed she ventured to reveal anything which she endured in the sanctity of the confessional, her confessor, an austere and fanatical recluse, always met her with the reply that, having turned as she had done from the paths of religion, she only met with her just retribution if the golden apples of terrestrial life, for which she had abandoned spiritual things, changed to ashes between her lips. She received no compassion from him and little consolation; she followed meekly the course of self-mortification he traced out for her; and, day by day, her cheek grew paler, her eye heavier, her step more slow and joyless.
She suffered as only a nature can suffer which is too sensitive to seek comfort in revealing itself, and too unused to the ways of the world to be able to find either distraction or compensation. No tortures would have wrung from her the confession of what she felt; she was ashamed of the passionate and piteous jealousy of which she was conscious; she thought it an offence against her husband and her God. But she could not resist its inroads into her peace; it grew and grew, and its insidious fires spread farther and farther in her simple soul, as a cancer spreads in healthy flesh.
She felt no sense of wrong; even in her own thoughts she uttered no reproach against him. In her own sight she was so utterly his debtor that she had no title to complain, even though he should wring her very heart with desertion. But a sickening despondency stole upon her little by little; each week brought with it some clearer sense of counting for nothing in his life, some sharper consciousness that she had no real place in his affections. Her perceptions, suddenly and cruelly aroused by the knowledge that he loved another woman than herself, became preternaturally keen in instinct and second-sight. She could tell in an instant, by the expression of his features, when he had seen her rival or when he had failed to meet her. Her mind, lately so ignorant of all the meanings of the world’s babble, grew fatally alive to all its insinuations, its hints, its allusions, whenever these in aught concerned Nadine Napraxine. Her ear brought to her the faintest and most distant whispers in which the dreaded name was spoken. She became aware of the meaning of Othmar’s glance, animated or absent, according as Nadine Napraxine was within his sight or not. She grew sensitive to all the different inflections of his voice, in which expectation, disappointment, pleasure, mortification, or impatience spoke. She was as susceptible to every change in him as the mercury to the frost and to the sun. Her whole existence was consumed in her study of him.
The self-restraint and the silence to which her early years had been trained, made her perfectly capable of repressing every outward sign of what she felt. Othmar saw no alteration in her; he saw that she went eagerly into the world, and imagined that she, like all women, had learned to enjoy its frivolities. She was always calm, docile, cheerful; she had at all times a graceful answer to those with whom she spoke, an admirable manner in whatever scene she was placed in. He never divined how, beneath the serious smile on her mouth which served to hide the aching, wistful doubts and fears of her still childlike heart, how, beneath the pretty stateliness and gravity which he had first admired at Millo
, and which never altered in her, there throbbed the poignant pain of a timid and impassioned affection — wasted.
If he had loved her, he might have seen something of it, little as men are able at any time to read the soul of a woman; but he was only kind to her, gentle to her, faithful — as yet — to her. He never loved her, and so all that wistful, lonely suffering went on and grew greater and greater unguessed by him. When he sat by her side in the opera-house, all he saw was Nadine Napraxine on the opposite side of the theatre; when he entered a ball-room, or a music-room, or a drawing-room before a dinner, all he looked for were the dark, languid, luminous eyes of the woman he adored, and when he met their glance, and saw across a crowded salon the irony of her slight and subtle smile, he only lived for her.
CHAPTER XLII.
This duel, if duel it could be called, since all the science and almost all the advantages were on one side, passed constantly in the presence and beneath the eyes of Othmar. But he was blind to it with the shortsightedness of a man; he was, even, more than once irritated by what he thought was an excess of kindness, an unusual interest, shown by the woman whom he loved to his wife. He hated to see them near each other. He scarcely disguised his restlessness when he noted any approach to intimacy between them. The remembrance of those two mornings at La Jacquemerille were for ever with him. He could not pardon Nadine Napraxine that she appeared so entirely to ignore their memory. True, he thought bitterly, it was she who had betrayed him, and it is always the betrayed who remembers, the betrayer who forgets. Had he said so much to her she would have answered: ‘My friend, I did not betray you; I only told you I would reflect. I did reflect; if the result of my reflections was adverse to you, it was your misfortune perhaps, but it was also your fault.’