by Ouida
‘It is, no doubt, a great difference,’ said Yseulte, with more bitterness than she was aware of; the idle words struck at the hidden wound within her. The difference was vast indeed between herself and the woman whom her husband loved!
Blanchette watched her sharply, herself sitting on a stool at her feet.
‘Do you know,’ she said, pulling the ears of Yseulte’s great dog, ‘that she is coming — indeed, I think, is here? I heard them say so yesterday. It seems that the Prince bought that little villa and gave it to her — La Jacquemerille — when they were here two years ago. She is very rich, you know. Her husband has left her such immense properties, and then I think she had a great deal of money all of her own, before his death, from some distant relative, who left it to her because she did not want it; it is always like that.’
Yseulte rose abruptly. Blanchette could not see her face, but she saw her left hand, which trembled.
As far as the child liked anyone, she was attached to her cousin; since her marriage Yseulte had been extremely generous and kind to her, and the selfish little heart of Blanchette had been won, as far as ever it could be won, by its affections which were only another form of selfishness. She had been unable to resist the temptation of telling her news, and saying what was unkind; and yet in her way she was compassionate.
‘Why are you so very still and grave?’ she said now after a pause. ‘They say it is because the child died, but that cannot be it; it is nonsense; you would not care like that. Do you know now what I think? Do not be angry. I think that you are so unhappy because — because — now Prince Napraxine is dead, you fancy that she would have been his wife if you had not been here!’
‘Silence!’ said Yseulte, with imperative command. Her face grew scarlet under the inquisitive, searching gaze of the child. She suffered an intolerable humiliation beneath that impertinent and unerring examination which darted straight into her carefully-treasured secret, and dragged it out into the light of day.
‘Ah!’ said Blanchette, with what was, for her, almost regret and almost sympathy, ‘ah, I was sure of it! I have always been sorry that I said anything to you that day. But why do you care? If I were you, I should not care. What does it matter what he wishes? Men always wish for what they cannot get; I have heard that said a hundred and a thousand times. And you are his wife, and you have all the houses, and all the jewels, and all the horses; and all the millions; and as he is always thinking of her, so people say, he will not mind what you do. You may amuse yourself just as you like. If I were you, I should go and play at the tables.’
‘Silence! You are insolent; you hurt me; you offend me,’ said Yseulte, with greater passion than she had ever yielded to in all her life. All the coarse consolations which the world would have given her, repeated and exaggerated on the worldly-wise lips of Blanchette, seemed to her the most horrible parody of her own sacred and intolerable woe, so carefully buried, as she thought, from any human eye.
‘It is true,’ said the child, offended and sullen. ‘Everyone knew he never loved you; he always loved her. Even in Paris last year —— . But what does it matter? You have got everything you can want — —’
But Yseulte had left her standing alone in the golden-coloured drawing-room of S. Pharamond, with the irises and roses so gaily broidered on the panels of plush.
Blanchette shrugged her shoulders as she glanced round the room. ‘What idiots are these sensitives!’ she thought, with wondering contempt. ‘What can it matter? She has all the millions — —’
The mind of the little daughter of the latter half of the nineteenth century could go no farther than that.
She had all the millions!
She had meant, quite sincerely, to give sympathy and consolation, but she could not help fashioning both in her own likeness.
Yseulte, with a feverish instinct to reach solitude and the open air, left her tormentor within the house, and hastily covering herself, passed out into the gardens of S. Pharamond, and walked farther and faster than her physical strength, which had not been great since the birth of her child, was well fitted to bear. She longed thirstily for the grey skies and the moist air of Faïel, for the cold dusky seas of the north-west and the dim far-stretching lands. The light, the buoyancy, the glitter, the dry clear atmosphere of those southern shores, oppressed her and fevered her. If she had not altogether lost the habit of confidence in her husband, she would have said to him, ‘I sicken of all this drought and cloying sweetness. Let me go where the west wind blows; where the northern billows roll; where it is cold, and dusk, and green, and full of shadows; where it does not mock one’s pain with light and laughter!’
But she had lost that habit utterly: she never spoke of anything she felt or wished; she accepted all the days of her life as they came to her.
‘I have nothing of my own,’ she thought; ‘I have no right to wish for anything.’
He had made this place hers; he always spoke of it as hers; it was, indeed, her own inalienably; but she did not feel it to be so. It was only a part of his wide charity to her — the charity which she had thought was love.
She walked far, she scarcely knew herself where, taking her way mechanically through the grounds and into the fields and orange woods adjoining them, following the windings of the paths which wound upward between the great gnarled trunks of olives and beneath their hoary branches. As she ascended under the forest of olives, which was part of the lands of S. Pharamond, she could see below her a broad hunting road, cut in old times by the Maison de Savoie, neglected by the Commune, but kept in preservation by Othmar himself. She heard a sound of horses’ hoofs, and instinctively looked down; between the network of olive boughs she saw a low carriage, drawn by three black ponies abreast, and harnessed in the Russian manner, their abundant manes streaming on the wind as they dashed headlong down the steep incline. They were followed by two outriders in liveries of deep mourning.
The woman who drove them looked upward, and made a slight salutation with a smile.
It was Nadine Napraxine.
In another instant the turn of the road hid them from sight, and the beat of the galloping hoofs was lost in the sound of a little torrent which fell down through the red bare rocks above, and fed with its moisture the beds of violets beneath the olives.
CHAPTER LI.
That night there was a concert at Millo. It was the fifth week of Lent: nothing was possible but a musical party. There were famous musicians and equally famous singers; the gardens were illumined, and the whole arrangements had that charm and novelty which Madame de Vannes knew so well how to give to all she did. But the evening was chiefly noticeable for the first appearance in the world, since her husband’s death, of the Princess Napraxine. She came late, as she always came everywhere; she still wore black; there was no relief to it anywhere, except that given by the dazzling whiteness of her great pearls and of her beautiful skin. The contour of her throat and bosom, the exceeding beauty of her arms, had never been seen in such marked perfection as in that contrast with the sombre robe she wore, sleeveless, and fastened on each shoulder only with a clasp of pearls. One unanimous chorus of admiration ran from mouth to mouth as she entered.
The tragedy of her husband’s death had left no trace on her. Her smile had its old ironical insouciance, her lips their rich warm rose-colour, her eyes their lustrous languor; abstinence from all the fatigues of society, and the fresh air of the country life in which she had passed the tedious months of her seclusion, had given her all the vivifying forces of health without destroying that look of fragility and languor which were her most potent charms.
‘Poor Napraxine!’ thought Melville as he looked at her; but he was the only one there who remembered the dead man.
Neither Othmar nor his wife was present there that night.
Both feared, with a fear which lay mute at the heart of each, to see again for the first time before the eyes of the world the woman whose memory ruled his life.
CHAPTER LII.
‘So soon!’ she thought, with her little smile, which had always been so calm and so amused before the madnesses of men.
But when she had read it, it seemed like a living, burning, palpitating thing, so did its words throb and thrill with ardour, reproach, and pain. All the suffering and passion pent up in his soul for twelve long months had broken loose and were uttered in it.
He had written in the silence of the dawn, when all the world was quiet as the grave, and the loud beating of his heart was audible to his own ear as he realised that near him, beyond those few miles of feathery foliage and flower-scented fields, there lay sleeping the one woman he adored. The impulse to write so to her had been stronger than himself, and all wisdom, manhood, and pride spoke to him in vain. To her alone had he ever laid bare his heart; to her alone was he not ashamed to uncover all its weakness, all its rebellion, all its futile and feverish pain. Let her laugh if she would, he thought, but let her know all he suffered through her. For a year he had kept silent; chained down by the bonds of duty and of custom. For a year he had lived out his dreary days as best he might, bearing his burden mutely, and striving to do his best; but at the knowledge that she was near him, there in the pale, cool air of the daybreak, all his efforts at self-command were shattered as silk threads break in a nervous hand.
No one had ever written to her as he wrote now.
She read the letter, with the rosy light of the morning coming in through her half-closed shutters; and the words of it banished the sleep which hung like vapour about her languid eyes and her dreamy thoughts. The smile went away from her lips. The force of another human heart smote for once an echo from hers.
‘What madness!’ she murmured.
But it was a madness which seemed noble to her, beautiful in its folly, and even in its torture; she felt a strange emotion as she read and re-read the only message which he had sent to her in the whole months of a year. She sat lost in thought; hesitation was rare with her, but now she hesitated. With a word she could banish him for ever from her life. With a word she could call him for ever to her side. His face seemed to rise before her as she looked at the signature of his name; his voice seemed in her ear pleading, imperious, tender, as she had heard it a hundred times. A year had been lost; a year had passed and dropped in the past, and they had never looked upon each other’s faces. A certain emotion which she had never known stirred in her, — the weakness of a sudden yearning, of a sudden wistful desire.
‘Is this love too?’ she thought, with that ironical doubt of herself with which she had so often doubted others.
‘I have never cared,’ she thought, with scorn for the impulses which had moved her. But she cared now. The silence and the absence of those long months had been his friends. In her meditations she had confessed to herself that he had not been to her the mere poor slave and spaniel that other men had been; she had thought to herself more than once with a wonder at her own regret: ‘If he had only had patience! If he had only waited!’
She read the letter he had written twice again. Then she burned it. She did not need to keep it. Each word of it was written on her memory. When the day was warm with the light of the forenoon’s sunshine she went out into the air. She felt the need of movement, of space, of a fresh atmosphere. For the first time in her life a certain excitation had taken the place of her tranquil serenity. A certain restlessness had disturbed her indifference; she had the sense of having descended to some too great concession, of having let herself fall from her serene heights of power to some human feebleness and frailty.
‘If this be love?’ she mused again with doubt and disdain, casting on the awakening warmth of her own feelings that ice of scepticism with which she had so often frozen the hearts of others. ‘If I were only quite sure of what I feel,’ she thought, with that egoism which was so natural to her that it was part of her every impulse and of her every motive.
Life had a certain loveliness for her in her perfect liberty, though she still doubted whether its monotony would not mar even that. The sense of her entire freedom was still welcome to her, and the world awaited her as a courtier, hat in hand, awaits his queen. All its pleasures, — such as they were, she knew them all, and held them in slight esteem, — would be hers. She had youth, beauty, and wit, and, when the first two of these should have left her, would still have that power of great riches which, as a wise man has said, is the only one to which the modern world will bow. And yet a vague melancholy was upon her; that melancholy, like a light mist on a smiling landscape, which she had once said might have made her such a poet as Maikoff had she lived for ever in the solitude of the steppes.
She went out into the balmy air, clear as a crystal, and filled with the scent of blossoming orange-boughs. She stood awhile on the marble terrace and looked seaward. The memories of the dead men who so late had been living there beside her passed over her in the warmth and light of the morning with a chill, as the north wind will sweep through the sunshine and scatter the clusters of orange-buds. Of them all, it was of her husband that she thought with the nearest likeness to self-reproach which her nature made possible.
‘He was brave, he was as trustful as a dog, he was bon enfant,’ she mused, ‘and I do not think I ever said to him a single kind word before that last day — and then it was only said to deceive him!’
She remembered him as he had spoken to her on that day. He had had a certain dignity, the dignity of manliness, of simplicity, of truthfulness; and all that was left of him was lying, mere dry dust and bones, in his emblazoned coffin in the gilded gloom of the church at Zaraizoff.
‘Well — the dead are dead, and we shall soon be with them,’ she thought with a sigh, as she turned from the sea wall of the terrace and looked at the picturesque and irregular front of the house, covered with its gay garlands of creeping plants.
The place was hers, bought for her by Napraxine, as one may buy a bonbon-box for a child. It seemed that day to laugh with light and colour. Coming hither as she did from the endless night of a Russian winter, it seemed bathed in heat, and luminance, and flowers. She descended the steps to where her ponies waited, and went with them along the climbing roads into the hills above La Jacquemerille.
The day was still young. The bare mountain sides wore the hues of the jacinth and amethyst; the odours of sweet herbs and spring flowers were strong and sweet; far down below, unseen, the sea was sparkling, lending the sense of its presence and its freedom to all the gorges and hillsides above. Her swift-footed ponies bore her fleetly as the Hours bore Aurora through the roseate and golden radiance of the April morning.
With intention she guided them up the steep roads which led to the humble church of S. Pharamond, hidden beneath its great gnarled olive trees, and covered with its network of rose-boughs. She knew that Yseulte went there often in the forenoon, and the caprice moved her to see if she could meet, as if by chance, this poor child, whose fate lay in the hollow of her hand, like a bird taken from a trap to be strangled with a touch at pleasure of its keeper. The sense of such power was always sweet to her; although so familiar, its familiarity did not detract from its pleasure. It was the sole thing which did not by repetition grow monotonous. Her life had been short by years, but it had been full of such dominion. She had dealt with men and women as she chose, and to make or mar their destinies had always been the sole pastime of which she did not weary. Humanity was her box of puppets, as it is that of the Solitary of Varzin. To hold the strings of fate, to bind and loose the threads of circumstance, and weave the warp and woof of destiny, was the only science which had ever had charm over her changeful temperament and her sceptical intelligence. Beside it all other things were trivial and tame. She had never met anyone who had resisted her will; Othmar himself had done so for awhile, but he had lived to repent and to succumb.
The church of S. Pharamond was empty and
silent; there was no office said that day; it was grey and still and mournful, and no living thing was in it save a swallow perched upon the altar rail. She pursued the steep hillside road, overhung with olive and fig trees, the wayside carpeted with gladiolus and the blue fleur-de-luce. Below, through the light green foam of spring foliage and the sombre masses of pine and ilex woods, there rose the towers and pinnacles of the château, rising slim and fantastic, against the azure of the sky. Around her the silence was unbroken, except by a tethered goat cropping euphorbia and ivy from a ruined wall.
Looking through the boughs of the olives, she saw afar off the figure of Yseulte. Where she was standing was on the land of Nicole Sandroz, the furrows, thick with flowers, climbing the hill slope, the orchard of lemon and olive hiding the low white walls of the house. She alighted, and left her little horses standing by a stone well made in the old wall where the goat was tethered. She wished to see the wife of Othmar, and she moved straight towards her where she sat beneath one of the gigantic olives, whose foliage spread in a misty cloud silvery and sea-green above her. She had uncovered her head in the deep shadow around her; her attitude was listless, spiritless, dejected; in the shade thrown from the olive boughs her face looked very colourless, worn, and thin. All her look of childhood had passed away, and almost all her youth as well. As she recognised her rival she trembled violently and rose to her feet, losing for the moment all self-control and presence of mind. Her large brown eyes dilated with fear, like a deer’s when it is hard pressed in the chase. She had scarcely self-command to make the common gesture of salutation.