by Ouida
His wife heard him with a contraction of her eyebrows, which was the only sign she ever gave of anger; her eyes were cold and haughty; her whole countenance was as unrevealing as the marble features of her bust by Dupré which stood on a table near. For the sole time in her life she was not prepared with a reply; the various memories which had united herself and Othmar had been always so carefully veiled from the knowledge of others that she had never imagined any outer light would be ever shed upon them. The world had certainly seen at one time that Othmar loved her, and had been ready to sacrifice his life at her word, but that had been long ago; she had not supposed that the emotions which her clairvoyance had discovered, the mesmerism which she still exercised, had had any spectators. But if for the moment surprised, she was never for a moment at fault. She looked steadily at her husband, with the delicate lines of her eyebrows drawn together in a frown, which lent a strange severity to her features.
‘My dear Prince,’ she said slowly and coldly; ‘you have known my character for nearly eight years. I cannot tell whether the opportunities you have had of understanding it have been employed to the utmost, or whether your powers of comprehension have been not altogether equal to the task. But one thing at least I should have supposed you would have learned in all that time — I should have thought you would have understood that I do not permit impertinent interrogation, or even interrogation at all. I never ask you questions; I expect never to be asked them.’
Napraxine stood before her like a chidden child; his long habit of deference to her will and fear of her superiority were still in the ascendant with him, but struggling against them were his own manliness, and a vague, new-born suspicion, strengthened by a certain evasiveness, which even his sluggish intelligence perceived, in her reply.
‘After all,’ he said, somewhat piteously and irrelevantly; ‘after all, Nadège, I am your husband.’
‘Unhappily!’
The single word so chill and so contemptuous was cast at him like a blow with crystals of ice. He shrank a little.
‘No doubt you think so, though I have done what I could,’ he said, humbly repressing the pang he felt. ‘But unhappily or not, the fact is a fact. You permit me very few conjugal rights, but there is one which you will not surely deny me — the right to know what truth or untruth there is in these stories of Othmar?’
‘You speak like a juge d’instruction!’ she said, with all her customary disdain. ‘You ought to let no one tell you those or any other stories. It is yourself whom they make ridiculous, not me.’
‘No one shall make me so long,’ he muttered. ‘If you will not answer me, I will go to him.’
She raised her head haughtily and looked him full in the face with that gaze wherewith she was accustomed to cow and to coerce men as the shepherd’s voice intimidates and rules the sheep.
‘That would be certainly original,’ she said, with a slight suggestion of laughter. ‘A husband going to an imaginary lover to beg him to reveal how high he stood in the favour of his wife! — it would be original if it would not be dignified. I wonder what Othmar would answer you! You will admit that it would be a great temptation to his vanity — and his invention!’
Napraxine paced a few steps to and fro the room in an agitation which every one of her languid and contemptuous words increased; a kind of hopelessness always came over him in the presence of his wife; it was so impossible to move, to touch, to hold, to comprehend her. The calm raillery, the chill imperious anger, which were all he ever could excite in her, left his heart so shrunken and wounded, his pride so humiliated and baffled.
He paused before her suddenly.
‘Nadège,’ he said, with a tremor in his voice: ‘You know that I have always liked Othmar. You asked me once why. It is not much of a narrative. This is it. One day, years and years ago, when he was quite a youth, we chanced to travel together in Russia. There was a movement of agrarian revolt at that time. As we passed a village in the province of Moscow we came upon a horrible conflagration; there were incendiary fires; great sheepfolds and cattle-pens were burning. I — Heaven forgive my selfishness! — would have driven on; I only wanted to get to Moscow itself in time for a masked ball at the Kremlin; but Othmar would not; he sprang out of the carriage and rallied a few men around him, and plunged right into the flames to save the sheep and the cattle, or such of them as he could; of course when he did that, I had no choice but to do the same. We worked all night; we saved thousands of the beasts, but we lost the ball at the Kremlin. I do not say it was anything very great to do. I dare say numbers of other young men would have done as much; but the remembrance of it has always made me like Othmar. If you had seen him scorched, and singed, and black with smoke, his hair burnt and his hands blistered, dragging the rams and the ewes, driving the bullocks and heifers, the flames curling up over the grass which was as dry as chips, for it was in the month of August; — I have always liked him ever since; he is not the mere ennuyé that they think him.’
He paused abruptly; his wife’s eyes had a conflicting expression in them; there was emotion and there was mockery.
‘Oh fool! — oh poor big innocent fool!’ she thought, ‘you to praise Otho Othmar to me!’
Yet something in what he had said softened her cynical intolerance of his questions and made her more merciful to him. The only qualities which were ever admirable to her in her husband were his courage and his sympathy with courage. They were not uncommon attributes, but they were those which always had affinity to hers. And the half-grotesque, half-pathetic ignorance which was visible as he spoke of Othmar moved her to a certain indulgence in all her scorn.
‘He is so stupid, but he is so honest,’ she thought, as she had thought so often before, with a feeling of compassion which might in any other woman have been a pang of conscience. However, the passing sentiment could not altogether exclude her more dominant instincts of raillery, her not easily appeased offence at interrogation and interference.
‘I do not really see, my dear Napraxine,’ she said languidly, ‘what possible connection singed sheep and burning heifers have to do with the rumours which — you say — society has been so good as to set on foot concerning me. It is unfortunate that your ideas are always so entangled that it is very difficult to follow them. But I imagine, so far as I can evolve anything from such a chaos, that what you intend me to understand by all this is, that because one summer night in Russia long ago you were witness of a courageous action on the part of — your friend — you would be sorry to suppose that he would commit one which would make him your enemy: is that so?’
Napraxine made a gesture of assent.
‘I cannot express myself well,’ he murmured. ‘But you are so clever you can always understand — —’
‘To sort the black and the white beans set to Psyche for a task were easier,’ quoted his wife, with her enigmatical smile. ‘Still, if I interpret your meaning aright, it is that. Pray, then, let your mind be at rest; the Countess Othmar is not neglected that I know of, and if she be, je n’y suis pour rien.’
Then she poured out her chocolate. Napraxine was reassured by her indifferent manner, and did not observe that the major part of his interrogations was still left unanswered.
‘I was sure of it,’ he said with warmth. ‘He is very much in love with her, is he not?’
She gave a slight, most eloquent gesture, indicative of absolute ignorance and of as absolute indifference.
‘Ah! that is another matter which I could not presume to decide,’ she answered with a little yawn. ‘He has been married fourteen months; men are not usually in love so long as that.’
‘I — —’ began Napraxine: then he stammered, paused, and coloured, afraid of her ridicule.
‘Yes; you were,’ said his wife, serenely. ‘But it is very unusual; it is very undesirable. I do not think it contributed to your comfort; it certainly did not to mine.’
Napraxine sighed.
‘I should have never changed,’ he said with ardo
ur, though with timidity, as though he were a lover of eighteen.
‘You have never changed,’ she said with that smile which she could render enchanting in sweetness and in graciousness. ‘You have always been much better to me than I have deserved, and you have always been the most generous and the most amiable of men. Now go; I have many things to do, and I want my women.’
Napraxine grew red with pleasure at her praise, and his pale eyes shone with eagerness, delight, and the admiration which she had hated so intensely in the early years of their marriage. He stooped towards her, breathless with his gratitude, and his hopes suddenly aroused after so many years of despair and of resignation.
‘Nadine,’ he murmured. ‘Even now — now — if you would? None of them have loved you as I do.’
She stretched out her hand so that his lips, which would fain have gone elsewhere, were forced to remain there.
‘Perhaps,’ she said vaguely, still with that enchanting smile which was to him like a glimpse into Paradise itself. ‘Do not ask for too much at first; au revoir.’
Then she rang for her maids, and he was forced to withdraw; but he went with all the forces of a re-awakened passion throbbing in his veins and beating at his heart, like a swarm of bees roused by a ray of warmth from winter torpor.
She, as soon as his step had ceased to echo along the distant corridors, and the sound of wheels and horses’ feet in the courtyard below told her that he was about to leave the house, dismissed her women, saying that she wished to sleep, and sat alone, with a sense of strong disgust and of vague anxiety upon her.
‘I could not allow him to provoke Othmar,’ she thought. ‘Anything but that! anything but that!’
She would have been capable of any self-sacrifice, of any concession to her husband, which could have prevented the hostile meeting of those men.
A sudden tide of strong emotion swept over her self-centred and languid life. In that one moment, in which she had become conscious of a possible danger to Othmar, she had become as conscious of the full force of her regard for him. Love, which had been her victim, her plaything, her instrument, her servitor, for so long, became at length the guest of her own heart, and was stronger than herself. She had driven that danger away from his path by the skill of her consummate finesse; but she was not wholly reassured, and if to save him from her husband’s suspicions she would be compelled to make herself the recipient of her husband’s re-awakened tenderness, she felt that the price would be more hateful than death.
Even the momentary constraint and feigning which she had put upon herself with her husband stung all her pride, offended all her dignity; she could take no delight in it as she did usually in the admirable issues of her most admirable skill in seduction and dissimulation. A certain impression, which was not profound enough to be shame but had its character, remained with her. She had been successful as usual, but success did not content her. She was exceedingly proud; her delicacy, which was as susceptible as any sensitive plant to any rude approach, shrank from the path into which she had entered. She could take an intellectual pleasure in adroit dissimulation, but she had no pleasure in deceiving an honest confidence. She had always despised with all the scorn of her nature the covered ways of intrigue, the hidden resorts of illicit desires; her taste as well as her pride had always preserved her from the pitfalls to which other women danced with light hearts and light steps. Some sense of approaching these perils touched her now and offended her, as with the presence of some vulgar thing. She saw clearly enough what Othmar perhaps did not or would not see, that their mutual love would soon or late take them on that same road which all lovers have taken since the days when the Book was read beneath the garden trees of Rimini. She was not alarmed or troubled in any moral sense, but her delicacy and her hauteur were disturbed. For the first time, she felt that it was possible for events and sentiments to have more control over her than she had over them; for the first time she had the sensation of being drawn on by fate in lieu of herself controlling it.
CHAPTER XLIV.
In the excitation of his new hopes and of his happy self-delusions her husband’s suspicions had all died away; he did not even notice how completely she had avoided all direct answer to the questions which had at the first so offended her. He had not the faintest conception of how completely he had been put off his guard, intoxicated by suggested concessions, and enwrapped in the blinding fumes of awakening affections.
He went, with his usual heavy and slow tread, but with a heart as light as a youth’s who has heard the first word of encouragement from lips he loved, out into the noon-day glare of the Paris streets. During these six years through which his wife had been no more to him than the tea-rose which she liked to wear at her throat, he had grown reconciled to the inevitable. He had consoled himself with the thousand and one consolations with which women are always ready to strew the path of a rich man; he had not, after the first shock of her dislike, greatly rebelled or greatly mourned; and he had been what his world called a viveur enragé. Yet at the depths of his soul there had been always — living, tenacious, indestructible, exceedingly humble, and infinitely forgiving — a great love for his wife. If she had cared, she could have done what she chose with him; he would have led the life of an anchorite to win her favour, and there would have been no heroism and no folly to which she could not have impelled him. She had never seen in him anything except a heavy, stupid, good-humoured man, who could have a very good manner when it was wanted, but had hardly more intelligence than one of his own moujiks. She never saw the possibilities of self-negation and of blind devotion which slumbered in his nature because she never felt interest enough in him to look for them. To see as little of him as was possible, whilst still remaining in accordance with the etiquette of the world, was all her study where Platon Napraxine was concerned.
That he loved her very much she was fully aware — loved her as only big dogs and unintellectual people have the instinct to do — but the higher qualities which were in him, and might have been called out had she chosen, she never knew or would have cared to know. The natural nobility of his character was entirely obscured to her beneath the slowness and dulness of his intelligence, as his corpulent body and his large appetite wholly concealed the heroism of poor Louis Seize from France and from the world.
Napraxine, when he left her now, walked straight to a private club which he often frequented; a club of great exclusiveness and distinction, where very high play could be indulged in every morning, afternoon, and evening. There he breakfasted, played a little himself to while away time, and waited the coming of the Duc de Prangins. He waited until four o’clock; at that hour, which was his usual one for entrance there, the elder de Prangins arrived for his customary afternoon baccarat.
Napraxine threw down the cards he held, rose, and approached him.
‘M. le Duc,’ he said curtly, ‘I have learned that you have ventured to jest about Madame la Princesse Napraxine. I am here to tell you that I do not allow such jests. If you apologise for them — well. If not — —’
‘I never apologise,’ said the Duc, as curtly.
Napraxine, without more words, struck him over the shoulders with a cane which he carried. Then he turned his back on him with supreme disdain, and sat down again to his écarté.
To such an insult there was only one answer possible. Within fifteen minutes a hostile meeting was arranged between him and M. de Prangins, which was to take place on the following morning at sunrise, in the gardens of a friend’s château situated on the road to Versailles.
The elder de Prangins, though a man of sixty-five years of age, was of great skill and address in all offensive and defensive science; it was he who had killed the young Piedmontese prince, d’Ivrea, some four years before. He was a slightly-made man, but very strong and agile, cold and sure in his attack, and very careful in his guard. He had the reputation of being a dangerous foe, and, secure in that reputation, had never condescended to bridle his tongue, which was at
once coarse and caustic. For Nadine Napraxine he had conceived, years earlier, one of those gross, yet chill, passions of which a man, advanced in years, is at once tenacious and impatient, proud and ashamed.
Platon Napraxine finished his game of écarté and won it. He was in no degree disturbed or depressed by the ordeal which lay before him. He was as happy as a boy to think that he was about to fight in her cause, and he pictured to himself how, when all was over, he would tell her, and perhaps — perhaps — she would smile on him for the recital. Like many big, strong, and kindly men, he had a great deal of the lad in him; he was unworn in heart, despite all the experiences of his life in Paris and in Petersburg; the adoration of his wife, which he had preserved throughout all the vulgar amours with which he had sought to console himself, had served, in a great measure, to keep his youth alive in him. With a youth’s hopefulness and short-sightedness he longed now for the moment in which he would say to her, ‘They dared to jest of you, but I was there; and they have bitten the dust.’
That night she dined at one house and he dined at another; she went later to more than one ball, at which she showed herself for a brief hour of the cotillon and then took herself away, knowing that after her presence there all other women would pale and pall, as the stars fade, or seem to fade, when a meteor passes. She and Othmar had met that night at more than one house, and she had kept him beside her more openly and for a longer time than she had ever done before. It was her manner of reply to her husband’s suspicions and to the conjectures of the world.
Platon Napraxine returned home earlier than usual, and waited in a little smoking-room which opened on to the head of the staircase that he might hear her arrival, and see her once, if only as she passed up the stairs. It was only midnight when he went home, and he waited one, two, three, four hours; then he heard the carriage roll into the inner court and the door of the private entrance open. He left the fumoir and walked a few steps downward to meet her as she ascended the staircase. His heart thrilled as he saw her in her cloak, made of soft blush-coloured feathers, with her delicate head emerging from it as from some rose-tinted cloud. She herself perceived him waiting there with that involuntary irresistible sense of annoyance which was always her first emotion whenever she saw him anywhere.