by Ouida
When Mahmoud had been very ill with the cruel north winds which blew so bitterly on his lungs, made only to breathe the torrid air of the Soudan, his lady had come to see him, had spoken sweet words to him in his own tongue, had touched his dusky paw with her soft snowy hand. Mahmoud would have died a hundred deaths for her if he had had the chance; but he was jealous, like a little black sulking dachshund, of the mistress who sheltered him. Whenever he walked behind her, bearing her shawls or her sunshade, he could have kissed her shadow as it fell, but he could have plunged his dagger into the throats of the great gentlemen who sauntered by her side. He was furiously, blindly jealous, with the jealousy of a child and of a little wild beast blent in one. To his naturally evil passions the life of Paris had united a monkeyish malice and a precocious comprehension of vice. As he went now under the red blossoms of the pepper trees and the yellow flowers of the mimosas which fringed the route, a devilish fancy came into his head.
If, instead of giving the letter which he bore to Othmar, he took it to Othmar’s wife? His faculties had been educated enough in all the scandals and jests of Paris to surmise that so he might bring about with impunity a complication not easy to unravel, a storm not easy to allay. If his mistake were ever brought against him, it would seem only a mistake; he would take refuge behind his stolid childish mask of affected stupidity, which had served him well more than once. He had the cunning of the African, and he knew that the first condition for his own safety in effecting such a treason would be that no one should observe him on his errand. He entered the grounds of the château cautiously. The gates usually stood open in the daytime, and the boy’s gaily-clad figure glided in amongst the shrubs unperceived.
It was about five o’clock in the afternoon. Yseulte was seated out of doors, in a part of the gardens which was not in sight of the house. There was a large Judas tree there covered with its crimson blossoms; beneath it were some rustic chairs. She was reading, or affecting to read; the book was open on her lap. The crimson flowers every now and then, shaken by a south wind, fell down upon the unturned page.
Mahmoud had crept noiselessly about amongst the trees and plants, until he saw her, with that feline skill and silence which were natural to him, and had been developed by his life in the households of the Napraxines. He knew her well by sight; he had seen her constantly in Paris. He knew nothing of her otherwise, but he was French enough by education to be sure that for her to receive and read a letter addressed to her husband would bring about some dire disturbance.
So he approached her, bowing low as he had been taught to do, and tendered the letter to her.
‘From Madame la Princesse Napraxine,’ he said, repeating his salaam.
Yseulte took the letter with a strange tumult at her heart: she did not look at the superscription; she broke open the envelope with agitation and haste. It might be only a conventional sentence or two, an invitation or a farewell, or it might be some message of greater meaning. It seemed strange to her that Nadine Napraxine should address even the most formal words to her. She sat down under the boughs of the roseate Judas tree and read what was written, read it all with that instantaneous comprehension which comes to the brain in moments of intense excitement.
There were but a few sentences in all in it, but those had been written to Othmar, not to herself:
‘I have read your letter. I believe all that is said in it. I doubt most things, but I have never doubted your love for me. If there be any consolation to you in knowing this, you may believe it to the full. I am certain that you would do all you say if I would accept the gift of your life. But I will not; for it is not yours to give, and I do not rob the innocent. My dear Othmar, I have seen your wife a few hours ago; I sought her, she did not seek me; and from my soul I pity her, though I am not too easily moved to pity. I pity her because she loves you so greatly, and yet in your life she counts for nothing. She would die for you, yet she will never be able to quicken a single beat of your pulse. The fault is not hers — you admitted that the last evening I spoke to you in Paris — but she only irritates when she would please you, she only wearies you when she should stimulate you. You will never care for her; she is a young angel, yet she will go unloved by you all her life. But if you cannot do more, you can spare her some pain, some dishonour; and I desire you to spare her that. Yours is the fault that she is now beside you; you were in haste and blind, and adventured a rash experiment; but it would be ungenerous in us both if we made her pay all the penalty of my indifference and your error. You have a strange madness for me because I am far removed from you; but I — who am not mad — I can see that honour says to you, and generosity says to me the same thing. I do not use the stale word duty, because neither you nor I believe much in it; but honour and generosity call upon us to protect a child who cannot protect herself, and perhaps even a little also to remember a dead man who cannot avenge himself. I do not speak to you as moralists would speak; I only mean that you must remember those obligations which, as they were taken up unasked, must be fulfilled out of sheer sense of common honour. You cannot force yourself to care for her, but you can force yourself to conceal from her that you do not. She is one of those women who easily and willingly believe. For myself, I would sooner hesitate to dishonour a dead man than a living one; so, I think, would you, if you only pause and think of it. If I listened to you now when I have repulsed you before, it would always seem to me as if I had not been brave enough whilst he was living, whilst he could have killed me or you, or done anything he chose. This is mere sentimental superstition, no doubt, but so it is with me. We will not meet again, not yet, at least. You will not be happy, of course, nor will you love your wife; neither happiness nor love is to be had at command. But you are just by nature; be just now; do not let all the weight of a mistake, which was wholly of your own seeking and making, lie upon a creature altogether innocent. She is not wise as we are wise, but she has a beautiful nature; she is purity itself; be grateful. I do not say forget me, for that you will not do; but live so that I may admire you and not esteem you a coward. We have both always lived for ourselves, let us endeavour for a change to live a little for others.’
The letter was signed in full ‘Nadège Fedorowna Princess Napraxine.’
Yseulte had read it once unconsciously, all its words seeming to smite her brain together like the blows of many hands upon an unresisting creature. She read it once again consciously, deliberately, word for word; then she rose and put it out towards the bearer of it.
‘It is not mine,’ she said, in a suffocated voice. ‘Take it to Count Othmar.’
But the African boy had disappeared. There was no sound near her except the sound of the sea breaking on the marble steps of the landing stairs far down below.
‘Take it, take it!’ she said, mechanically holding the letter out to the empty air. Then she staggered a little; her eyes grew blind; she groped with her hand to feel for the trunk of the tree, and crept to it and sank down on the bench beneath it, insensible.
How long she remained there she never knew. Gardeners were near, trimming the banksia roses of a covered arcade, and below, on the edge of the sea, there were boatmen and fishermen, and not fifty mètres away, in the house, in his library, Othmar was sitting, awaiting the reply to his letter. But no one knew what had befallen her. After awhile she was awakened by the touch of a sea breeze which rising rustled in the boughs and fanned her face.
When she was aroused and raised herself from her stupor, she saw the note lying before her on the ground.
CHAPTER LV.
She remembered all that it had said. She saw as though it were written in letters of fire the fact that her husband would leave her for ever if another would stoop to accept the gift of his life. She saw the terrible, inexorable humiliation of the truth that she would only owe his fidelity, his presence, and his endurance of her in the future, to the forbearance of Nadine Napraxine.
There was no place left in her mind for reason or hope to hide in; it was al
l a blank desolation.
The pride, which was the strongest instinct in her, and the gratitude which was the strongest motive, were all that were left alive in the dull stupor which had overspread her brain. The one told her that every hour which Othmar spent beside her would be but as an alms cast to her by her rival; the other told her that her existence was the sole barrier between the man to whom she owed obedience, love, and fealty, and the joys which he coveted, the fate which he desired. Not alone was she herself as nothing in his life; but she was his gaoler, his burden of burdens, his one unchangeable regret and calamity. He had sought her out of mercy, generosity, kindliness; and now she was for ever in his path of life like a black shadow which hid the sunshine from his house.
She had known this, or most of this, for many months, but its cruel indignity, its dreadful truth, had never looked to her all that it looked now as she realised that pity for her unloved loneliness which made her rival relinquish her hold on her husband’s life and refuse to accept the dishonoured allegiance which he offered. She saw in those few words, which had been written for Othmar’s eyes alone, the finer impulses of generosity, the higher instincts of compassion, which had impelled Nadine Napraxine to remember her and to spare her when her husband had been willing to sacrifice her as the forest doe was sacrificed of old upon the altars of love. She did not blame him or hate him; she loved him always with the same loyalty, the same grateful, mute, and timid devotion. But all her life revolted in her at the thought that she would owe his enforced constancy to the intercession of the woman he adored; that she herself was nothing more, would for ever be nothing more, than as the clog of wood upon the captive’s foot, keeping his steps for ever in one cheerless path. She did not reason; a stupor of horror had fallen upon her; she was only conscious of this one fact, that whilst she lived Othmar would suffer.
Inherent in her nature was the heroism of a race which had never feared death or danger, and the pride, sensitive as a nerve laid bare, which made pity intolerable, charity insult, life without self-respect unendurable. A delirium of shame was upon her. There was only alive in her one consciousness — that she would never consent to live to be a torture to him, never endure to be outstripped in generosity and in renunciation by the enemy of her life. She had loved him with all the tenderness and loyalty of her nature; she had done all she could to pay him back in gratitude and affection the immeasurable gifts she owed to him; but she had long known that she had failed, that she had no power to console or to beguile him. She was only a weariness to him, a chain upon his liberties, a companion undesired and irremovable, a thing useless and joyless, which, being lost, would be never missed and never regretted.
Nay, the gates of life closing for ever on herself would let the light of the future stream in, white and fair, across his path.
Her mind was dulled and her whole being strung to unnatural excitation; the many months in which she had shut her unuttered sorrow in silence in her own breast had in a manner disturbed the balance of her mind. That solitude in thought and absence of sustaining sympathy, which may be as bracing as the north wind to older or sterner lives, had to her youthfulness and timid susceptibility been fatal as the north wind is to the shyly-flowering spring. She had lost all hold on proportion in her lonely grief; she had become morbidly self-absorbed, and grew in her own sight a useless and undesired burden. All which remained distinct to her were her pride, which revolted from acceptation of her rival’s intercession in her favour, and the piteous sense that no devotion, no sacrifice, no effort on her part could ever make her more in her husband’s existence than a weight, a weariness, a thing undesired and unloved. The unselfishness and the loftiness of her instincts now served her worse than any fault or feebleness would have done. So long as she lived nothing, she knew, could serve him or release him. The patience and the piety which her confessor ceaselessly put before her as the eternal and unfailing panacea of woe could do nothing to give him happiness whilst she was there beside him; only her vacant place, her stiff dead limbs, her forgotten grave — these alone could be the precursors of any joy or liberty for him.
She did not reason thus, but she was moved by the knowledge of it, as one groping in the dark is guided by his touch. For the moment that sublime insanity of self-sacrifice was on her which has sent all the martyrs of the world to self-sought death.
By that which she believed divine law she knew that she was forbidden to loose the cord of life. To forestall the summons of God was to her implicit faith a guilt so dark that it would cast its shadow athwart all eternity. But as her people had flung themselves by choice upon the pikes of the revolutionists rather than outlive their king, so she was willing now to cast herself into the jaws of death rather than outlive the loss of hope, the loss of honour.
In her sight all his gifts, all his embraces, all the possessions with which he had dowered her, were but so much dishonour, being only the alms of pity and of charity, the forced atonement of a chill indifference. To live one other hour beneath his roof and by his side seemed to her, in all the dim, blind stupor of her thoughts, an indignity before which any death were blessed. She had the silent resolution and the endurance, meek yet dogged, of her Breton blood; these held her outwardly calm and restrained, while the delirium of self-sacrifice drove her headlong to her fate. She had never loved him more than she loved him at that moment. She had clearness of memory and strength of devotion enough to think, even in those terrible instants, of the only ways in which she could spare him pain. If he knew that her death was self-sought, remorse would be with him all his days.
‘He shall not know; he shall not know,’ she whispered to the sunny air and to the crimson blossoms.
She stooped and tore the letter of Nadine Napraxine into small pieces, and cast them down amongst the shrubs. Then with slow, unsteady steps she took the familiar paths which led through the gardens to the hills. There were no tears in her eyes; a flame-like force of self-destruction burned in her and scorched up all natural fear. Even the frightful guilt which her creed made her believe she was about to take upon her soul could not appal or arrest her. Even the human yearning in her which impelled her to turn back once and look upon his face and hear his voice, — if only from some distant place, as strangers might look and hear, — she had strength in her to resist and repel. Seeing him, she would betray herself; he would suspect; her death would be a burden to him as her life had been. She wished him to be happy, never to think of her save now and then with kindness.
Fortitude and self-denial were stronger in her than any other thing, and hushed down the natural revolt of aching passions.
‘I will give him my life, since it is all I have to give,’ she thought: she was his debtor for so much, but thus her debt would be paid.
She went slowly, but steadily, up the familiar way in the glad light of the afternoon hours. With the swift, unstudied instincts of a mind feverish and confused, but holding fast to one central and immovable idea, she had remembered at once the means by which she could reach her end and make her death seem the result of accident; she had remembered a crumbling tower on the flower-farm of her fostermother, where the owls built and the pigeons mated, and where again and again as a child she had been forbidden to risk life and limb on its rotten stairway and its ancient stones, but obstinately had sat for many an hour, seeming close to the blue sky, looking down on the olive and orange woods, and calling to the birds wheeling above her head.
One false step there — then silence. Who would ever know?
The sun was near its setting as she reached the hedge of aloes marking the boundary of S. Pharamond. She passed through them, and crossed a field or two where the red tulips were glowing beneath the tall wheat; then she reached the farm of Nicole Sandroz. No one was in sight: the man was away in the town of Villefranche, the women were at work in the rose fields. No one saw her save the old dog of the house, who gave her a mute welcome, creeping out with stiffened limbs from his niche in the wall. From the hill side on which t
he house stood, the turrets and terraces of Millo, the towers and woods of S. Pharamond, the green oasis of their gardens and the blue sea shining beyond, spread out before her gaze in all the glow and glory of the sunset hour. The golden light suffused all the visible world in its effulgence, and the mountains northward were violet as the cup of an anemone flower. She looked a moment: then closed her eyes and turned away, lest the fair sight of the earth at evening should weaken and unnerve her.
She entered the dwelling-place and ascended the stairway leading to the tower, relic of an ancient time when the low white-walled building had been fortified and armed against the pirates of the sea and the freelances of the land. She climbed the broken steps of stone, which her young feet had so often trodden with the careless light tread of the kid, and its heedlessness of danger. Every now and then a narrow slit in the masonry of the tower let in the golden light of the world without and let her see the smiling sunlit fields. A strong shudder shook her at such times from head to foot, but she did not pause until she had reached the platform of the tower. It was worn and broken, many fissures yawned in it, the unused nests of birds cumbered it, the battlements which had once protected it were almost levelled with its floor; the stones which remained were lose and uneven. She paused upon the summit, and the glory of the evening light was all about her and upon her; the deep blue heavens seemed very near. Though it was daylight still there were stars clear and large above her head. The world lay soundless and serene; no echo from it reached her through those depths of air.
Her eyes dwelt upon the place of her home.
The circling pigeons flew around her, the wind of their wings fanned her cheek. She kneeled down and made the sign of the cross.
‘God receive my soul!’ she murmured. ‘It is guilt — but there is no other way.’