by Ouida
Once or twice Melville endeavoured to induce Nadine Napraxine to speak of the young girl of whose destinies he considered her the arbitress, but he never succeeded.
‘She is very beautiful;’ she always answered with that talent in selecting what she could say truthfully, which was not the least of her wisdom. She added a few more words of eulogy, neither critical nor exaggerated; she did not permit him to have any glimpse of the consummate scorn joined to the sincere compassion with which she regarded the wife of Othmar, every one of whose emotions she read as though she read them in a book every time that the voice of Yseulte changed in greeting her or the girl’s tell-tale colour rose, or faded, whenever she herself entered a room or looked at her across a theatre.
No one of all her lovers had ever been so completely mesmerised by her power as was this girl who held the name, the home, the honour of Othmar, whilst she herself held all his memory, all his desires, all his mind and heart and life.
It was the fascination of the ophidian for the dove. It gratified her sense of dominion, and aroused all her more cruel instincts. The reluctant fascination which she exercised over Yseulte; the visible effort with which the girl strove to escape from it and failed; the magnetism with which her gaze was riveted and her ear strained to follow every movement, to catch every utterance of her foe; that helplessness, that unwilling, yet powerless, subjugation, excited all which was coldest, most contemptuous, most inexorable, in the soul of the woman in whose veins ran the blood of the assassins of Paul. That clairvoyance which is the gift of all rare intelligences, made her as conscious of all the bewildered thoughts which thronged the mind of Yseulte as though she saw them in the magic crystal of a sorcerer. She knew how, when she looked at the girl carelessly, smilingly, over the feathers of her fan or the flowers of her bouquet, across the sea of light of the opera-house, the whole soul of her innocent rival shrank and trembled within her, even whilst the natural courage, and resolution, and pride, of the de Valogne blood forced her to endeavour to resist, and enabled her to succeed in concealing, the fear and trouble which she felt.
‘She is brave,’ said Nadine Napraxine to herself with respect; but all the scorn which was in her made her add, without pity, ‘but what a child! — how foolish! — how transparent!’
In that continual flux and reflux of society which incessantly brings together those of the same world and allows them to see each other perpetually, even though they remain strangers, the occasions were frequent, almost daily, in which she could study this poor aching heart, which was laid as bare to her as though Yseulte had had a mirror in her breast, and, for no victory and no caprice of her life, had she ever been so interested de se faire belle as now, when she was conscious that her imperial charm, her nameless irresistible powers of seduction, had thrown their magic net over the life which had most cause of all on earth to fear her own.
If he had known that she had suffered thus, his compassion and his sense of honour would have been aroused and have taken alarm; but he was blind to it, as men dominated by an exclusive passion are blind to all outside it. His principles and his good taste would have made him his own most inexorable censor had he been in any act of his life faithless, in the gross meanings of the word, to the young life which he had united to his own. But he did not consider that a love which he pressed like a knife into the depths of his heart, and of which he believed he gave no outward sign whatever, did any wrong to Yseulte. She was still so young; she had all she desired; she would have children about her in other years; she was of that docile, feminine, unimpassioned nature which is easily content with the placid affections of the natural ties. He did not think that he betrayed her because, all unknown to her, he cherished in the depths of his own soul a bitter, cruel, hopeless, and yet most exquisite and most enduring passion. He had given her all which the world can give to any human creature; he did not realise that his lips were chill when he kissed her, his eyes indifferent when they glanced at her, his speech to her too often absent and conventional, his caresses too often forced, mechanical, and without any throb of warmth.
He knew well that if he were wise, even if he were faithful in intent to his wife, he would leave Paris whilst Nadine Napraxine was in it. His many possessions could have given him a hundred facile excuses for absence, and Yseulte would have gone willingly wherever he had chosen to take her. But he did not obey his conscience; he was swayed by his pride, which would not allow him to let the world say that he retreated before his sorceress, and he was held by that power which a great love exercises over the judgment and the volition. The mere glance of her eyes had fascination enough to destroy all his resolutions, and draw him into absolute oblivion of everything save herself. His passion for her was one of those which absence and denial intensify. He would make the arrangements of his whole day subordinate to one slight chance of meeting her for a moment in a crowd, of seeing her pass at a distance beneath the boughs of an avenue. He had received a mortal affront, a merciless insult, and yet he forgave them both; he was with her once more, he had no sense except of that one ecstasy. He was weak as a reed in her hands; he could have flung himself at her feet and kissed them. He knew that manliness, dignity, honour, duty, self-respect, all ought to have forbidden him to cross her threshold, but he was indifferent to them; they were mere names, without power, almost without meaning, for him. They had no more control over him than threads of silk upon the neck of a horse which has broken loose. She was before him, the one woman who was beautiful, beloved, and desired by him; and he realised that it had been of no use to try and cure a delirious fever with a simple draught of sweet herbs, as Melville had once said.
His own wife was nothing to him; the wife of Napraxine was all. He despised and hated himself for his inconstancy where his fealty bound him, for his fidelity where he had only received light mockery and cruel provocation. But he could not change his nature, and the education which life had given him had contained no lesson in the art of self-denial. The world had always been at his feet; his desires had always been gratified and his wishes forestalled; he had never been used to subjugate his own inclinations; and this, the first evil which had ever tempted him, began to assail him with increasing force with every day which brought him within sight of the one woman whom he adored. She knew his weakness as she knew that of every human being who ever approached her, and she had no compassion for it. A man who had done her the insult of presuming to seek elsewhere consolation for her own indifference, had no mercy from her in his failure; he had offended her in the only vulnerable portion of her character, her supreme love of exclusive dominion. She was not vain with any common vanity, but the instincts towards absolute mastery were strong in her; whoever thwarted those instincts, always repented his temerity in dust and ashes. Each step which Othmar made towards resumption of her yoke upon his passions, seemed to her only his due chastisement; every pang which she detected in him, every look of remorse, every imprudence of utterance or regard, pleased her as witness of his just degradation. In the many occasions which society gave her, she planted daggers in his breast with every cruelly chosen word she spoke, which was invariably veiled in easy irony or simulated friendliness, until his whole existence was consumed between the longing for, and the dread of, her approach. She had towards him a mingling of compassion, raillery, and kindness, which was of all means the one most certain to wound, excite, and enchain him. Whenever he was within hearing, she was in her wittiest moods, her most brilliant aspects; all the various charms of her acute intelligence and of her high culture seemed increased tenfold after the simple childlike speech and the convent-bred mind of his young wife. He felt like a man who, long chained to a narrow, colourless, peaceful shore, is suddenly set free amidst the flowering labyrinths and the voluptuous odours of a tropical savannah.
Never had Nadine Napraxine been so willing to please, so facile to be pleased, as in the course of this Paris winter, when he was constantly within sight of her coquetteries, within earshot of her speeches. He wa
tched her across a salon as a captive sunk in the depths of a prison may gaze at a summer sky beneath which he may never again stand a free man. The sense of his vicinity and of his suffering, supplied that stimulant to life which her languid emotions needed; she viewed the drama of his regret and revolt with an interest in it half bitter, half sweet. A man who could have wedded another whilst he loved herself, deserved, she told herself, to suffer; yet there were moments when, beneath her triumphs and her mockeries, there was in her own heart a thrill of answering pain; what might have been, glided also before her memory with pale reproach.
One night, entirely by chance, he and she were alone for a few minutes, that solitude in a crowd for which great entertainments give so much opportunity.
It was at a ball given by Prince Orloff; those hazards of society which it always amused her to subdue and turn to the service of her own intentions, had brought him to her side; some great palms made a little grove around them; the sound of the valse from Faust came dreamily from the distant ball-room.
‘Do you know, Othmar, that I am disappointed in you?’ she murmured, in her softest, cruellest, most malicious tones. ‘I imagined that you would be so very good to your wife; you were always sighing to be an homme d’intérieur, you were always coveting solitude, sentiment, and sympathy. I expected to see you give us the example of a perfectly ideal union; but I am afraid that, after all, you are not much better than other men.’
‘Madame — —’
‘Oh, you are angry, of course! Everyone is angry who is in the wrong. It is perfectly true, you are only a husband like ten thousand others. You were always a little like Chateaubriand: “Touriste, ambassadeur, ministre, ou amant, à peine arrivé, il s’ennuie.”’
‘It might be true of M. de Chateaubriand,’ said Othmar, with displeasure, ‘it is not so of me. I am most constant, — where I have never been welcome.’
The confession escaped him despite himself, and he regretted it passionately as soon as it was uttered.
‘That is why you are faithful,’ said Nadine Napraxine, smiling. ‘If you had been welcome, how poor and pale the whole country of your explorations would have seemed to you! There is only one way not to have shut on you those dreadful gates of disillusion; it is to be wise, and never to pass through them.’
‘Your philosophies are, no doubt, madame, as correct as your observations,’ said Othmar, with impatience.
‘I pass my life in observing,’ she replied. ‘It is the only pursuit in society which has really any interest in it. But tell me, do you not a little, just a little, neglect your wife? It is a pity, she is so young; in time, if you be not there, someone else will be.’
‘Never!’ he interrupted, with some heat. ‘I have many faults, no doubt, and I abandon them to your observation; but Yseulte has not a single defect that I have seen; she is loyalty, innocence, and honour incarnated.’
‘They are three charming qualities,’ replied Nadine Napraxine, ‘but they do not appear to have any result except that of making you dangerously confident that you may leave them wholly to themselves.’
Othmar coloured; he was sensible of the correctness of the accusation, and it irritated him excessively to hear the woman he loved rebuke him for his conduct to his wife.
‘If I be too indifferent where all my allegiance should be given,’ he said abruptly, ‘the Princess Napraxine should be the last on earth to accuse me of it. She knows the cause.’
‘The cause, I imagine, is in your temperament,’ she replied, ignoring his meaning, ‘as it was in Chateaubriand’s.’
‘Can we not leave Chateaubriand alone?’
‘And speak only of yourself? It is a curious thing, but a man is never contented unless he is speaking solely of himself. It is the only entity in which he takes any real interest.’
‘Perhaps it is the only one with which he is really conversant.’
‘Oh, you must be conversant with your wife’s. Her mind must be as clear as crystal. Do you know, Othmar, I think you ought to be more grateful than you are; to have so very pure a creature as that to be the mother of your children, is a privilege to you and to your race.’
She spoke gravely for the moment, abandoning the ironical mockery of her habitual tone.
He rose abruptly.
‘I cannot be grateful,’ he said very low, with a passionate vibration in his voice. ‘I was a fool, and I committed a great error. With all my life burnt up by one love, I imagined that I could slake the flames of it by contact with youth and innocence, as if the woodland brook could cool and arrest the boiling lava!’
Nadine Napraxine heard, with her languid lids drooped over her eyes, and the shadow of a smile upon her mouth.
‘If it were so, you should be too proud to confess it,’ she said, after a pause. ‘To be sure it is not a very confidential confession, for everyone sees that your — experiment — has not been quite so successful as you hoped, as Baron Fritz, at least, hoped. Well, we have talked long enough in this solitude; you may take me to the ball-room.’
When he went home, no sleep came to him that night; his conscience and his pride rebuked him for the admission he had made, and before his eyes there passed ceaselessly the vision of Nadine Napraxine, pale, ethereal, magically seductive, like those figures of Herculaneum which float noiselessly in the air, their bodies delicate as the gossamer-winged body of the Deilephila.
And she had said to him, ‘All the world sees that your experiment has not succeeded!’
The words added the one drop of mortification and of bitterness which was alone wanting in the cup which he had of his own weakness and of his own will filled for himself, and was forced by the justice of fate to drink.
She herself drove homeward alone through the chilly shadows of the dawn, which could not touch her, wrapped in her eider-down lined satins, and reclining amongst her yielding cushions. A beggar woman sitting on a doorstep with a sick child sleepless in her arms, saw the carriage pass, and thought, ‘What must it feel like to roll on like that, clad like that, warm and happy like that, with the price of a million loaves of bread in one single stone at your throat?’
Nadine Napraxine would have told her that food and warmth and jewels were no especial pleasure, when you had been always used to them; perhaps the absence of them might be painful — so much she would have granted.
She drove homeward, and went up to her white dressing-room with a vague sense of impatience and of regret stirring within her.
How he loved her, how he loved her, although he had been madman enough to give his life to another in an insane attempt to attain oblivion!
She did not lie down, but when her women had undressed her and wrapped her in her loose warm wrappers, she sat long looking dreamily into the fire burning on the open hearth, for the night of April was chilly within doors though without nightingales began to sing amidst the lilac buds. He would still, if she chose, go far away from all duty, all honour, all the ways of the world and the respect of men. Almost it tempted her, that which she had rejected two years before. There was another life to be hurt now! Friederich Othmar had perchance read her temperament aright when he had thought that the power to make misery would have greater force to attract her than the power to confer happiness.
‘I suppose I must be what the good dullards call wicked,’ she thought with a smile at herself, and a certain vague emotion of disgust at her own impulse.
Was she wicked? Was anybody so? Was there ever anything in human nature beyond impatience, ennui, inquisitiveness, natural love of dominion, and wholly instinctive egotism? Did not these, collectively or singly, suffice to account for all human actions?
CHAPTER XLIII.
A few days later Nadine Napraxine was surprised and annoyed at receiving in the forenoon a request from her husband that she would be so good as to receive him for a few moments.
‘Beg the Prince to excuse me,’ she said to her women. ‘I am tired and must go out in an hour.’
Never once in the year
s of their marriage had Napraxine ever ventured to insist after such a message, or to revolt against her decisions. She was astonished and exceedingly irritated when they brought her a pencilled note in which were written some blurred words: ‘Pray pardon me, but I have urgent reasons to desire to see you without delay; I must entreat of you to admit me, if only for a moment.’
‘Quelle corvée!’ she murmured as she reluctantly gave the order to let him enter. The companionship of her husband, at all times wearisome to her, had become in the last few weeks more than usually intolerable.
‘I must beg of you not to send me these autocratic demands,’ she said, with much impatience, as he entered. ‘You want my women sent away? Why should they be sent away? What can you possibly have to say that may not be heard from the housetops?’
Looking at him with irritation and undisguised dislike, she saw an expression upon his face which was new there; he motioned the maids away with authority; he was disturbed and excited; he had nevertheless a certain dignity and anger in his attitude.
‘Do you know, madame,’ he said abruptly when they were alone, being scarcely conscious of what he did say, ‘that here in Paris there are persons who venture to hint that — that — that Othmar has been for many years at your feet? That his marriage was only one of pique? That even now he neglects his wife because of you? Had you any idea of this? Can you tell me what possible foundation there is for it? Oh, do not think for a moment that I pay any heed to it, only I would like to know why — when — —’
Entangled in his words and in his ideas, he stammered, breathed heavily, came to a full pause; he dared not accuse her, did not even accuse her in his own thoughts; but the sudden knowledge that her name was spoken in union with Othmar’s had so galled and stunned him that he had lost his usual patience, his habitual timidity, before her.