by Ouida
Then she rose, and, with a step which never paused or faltered, she walked to the edge of the undefended roof. She looked once more southward to where the house of Othmar lay, once upward to the vault of azure air.
Then she stepped forward into the void below, threw her arms outward as a bird spreads its wings, and fell, as a stone falls through the empty air.
A little while later the women coming there, called by the howling of the old house-dog, found her lying quite dead upon the turf beneath. Death had been merciful and had not mutilated her, her face was calm and had not been bruised or wounded: her head had struck upon a stone, and she had died without any lingering pain or conscious death-throe.
The birds were flying startled and distressed above the summit of the tower. The sun had set.
Her last wish was fulfilled.
No one dreamed that her death had been sought by her own will. The loosened masonry told its tale, and no one doubted what it said. She had accomplished that supreme sacrifice which is content to be unguessed, unpitied, and, attaining to the martyr’s heroism, puts aside the martyr’s crown.
L’ENVOI.
In a year from that time Nadine Napraxine sat in her white boudoir in her house in Paris.
It was the eve of her marriage with Othmar. She was lying indolently amongst her white cushions; her eyes were thoughtful, her mouth was smiling.
‘If one could only feel all that rapture which he feels, how charming life would be!’ she mused, with her old sceptical wonder at the ardour and the follies of men.
Passion was for once acceptable to her, but it was still scarcely shared; she still surveyed and analysed its forces with a vague astonishment, a lingering derision. Love had reached her more nearly and enveloped her more warmly than she had ever believed that it would do; yet there remained beneath it the smile of her habitual raillery, the doubt of her habitual incredulity. Her life had obtained the fruition of all its desires, and the future was hers in perfect triumph, so far as any human knowledge can possess it. Yet, in the vague melancholy which floated like a little cloud at times upon her careless and amused mockery of herself, she thought more than once of the device emblazoned on the wall of Amyôt, Nutrio et extinguo — it is the motto of all human passions.
‘Yes, this is love, no doubt,’ she said to him this day; ‘it is even ecstasy — as yet. But shall we never know the recoil? Shall we never tire? Will there be no reaction, no fatigue, no level lengths of habit and of tedium? Who can keep always at this height?’
‘We shall — for ever!’ murmured her lover, with the intensity of his adoration for her trembling on his lips. ‘To doubt it is to doubt me!’
‘No,’ said Nadine Napraxine, with her fleeting mysterious smile. ‘No; I do not doubt you at all; I only doubt myself — and human nature!’
She sighed a little, even as she smiled. She, who had divined so much more of the truth than the blunter perceptions of a man had ever suspected, she, with that melancholy presage and superstitious sadness which were dormant in her blood, thought, with a passing chill of dread:
‘Our joy is like the basil plant of Isabella. It blossoms out of death!’
THE END
Othmar
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CHAPTER XLV.
CHAPTER XLVI.
CHAPTER XLVII.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
CHAPTER XLIX.
CHAPTER L.
CHAPTER LI.
CHAPTER LII.
CHAPTER LIII.
CHAPTER LIV.
CHAPTER I.
Under the forest-trees of a stately place there was held a Court of Love, in imitation and revival of those pretty pageantries and tournaments of tongues which were the chief social and royal diversion of the Italy of Lucrezia Borgia and the France of Marguerite de Valois.
It was a golden August afternoon, towards the close of a day which had been hot, fragrant, full of lovely lights and shadows. Throned on a hill a mighty castle rose, aerial, fantastic, stately, with its colonnades of stone rose-garlanded, and its stone staircases descending into bowers of foliage and foam of flowers. Its steep roofs were as sheets of silver in the sun, its many windows caught the red glow from the west, and its bastions shelved downward to meet smooth-shaven lawns and thickets of oleanders luxuriant with blossom, crimson, white, or blush-colour. In the woods around, the oaks and beeches were heavy with their densest leafage; the deer couched under high canopies of bracken and osmunda; and the wild boars, sunk deep in tangles of wild clematis and beds of meadow-sweet, were too drowsy in the mellow warmth to hear the sounds of human laughter which were wafted to them on the windless air. In the silent sunshiny vine-clad country which stretched around those forests, in ‘le pays de rire et de ne rien faire,’ from many a steep church-steeple and many a little white chapel on the edge of the great rivers or in the midst of the vast wheat-fields, the vesper-bell was sounding to small townships and tiny hamlets.
It was seven o’clock, and the Court of Love was still open; the chamber of council, or throne-room, being a grassy oval, with grassy seats raised around it, like the seats of an amphitheatre; an open space where the forest joined the gardens, with walls, first of clipped bay, and then of dense oak foliage, around it; the turf had been always kept shorn and rolled, and the evergreens always clipped, and a marble fountain in the centre of the grass, of fauns playing with naiads, bore an inscription testifying that, in the summer of the year of grace 1530, the Marguerite des Marguerites had held a Court of Love just there, using those same seats of turf, shadowed by those same oak-boughs.
‘Why should we not hold one also? If we have advanced in anything, since the Valois time, it is in the art of intellectual hair-splitting. We ought to be able to argue as many days together as they did. Only, I presume, their advantage was that they meant what they said, and we never or seldom do. They laughed or they sighed, and were sincere in both; but we do neither, we are gouailleurs always, which is not a happy temperament, nor an intellectually productive one.’
So had spoken the mistress of that stately place; and so, her word being law, had it been in the sunset hours before the nine o’clock dinner; and it was a pastime well suited to the luminous evenings of late summer in
The hush of old warm woods that lie
Low in the lap of evening, bright
And bathed in vast tranquillity.
She, herself, was seated on an ivory chair, carved with Hindoo steel, and shaped like a curule chair of old Rome. Two little pages, in costumes of the Valois time, stood behind her, holding large fans of peacock’s plumes.
‘They are anachronisms,’ she had said with a passing frown at the fans, ‘but they may remain, though quite certainly the Valois did not
know anything of them any more than they knew of blue china and yellow tea.’
But the gorgeous green and gold and purple-eyed plumes looked pretty, so she had let them stay.
‘We shall have so many jarring notes of “modernity” in our discussions,’ she had said, ‘that one note the more in decoration does not matter;’ and, backed by them, she sat now upon her ivory throne, an exquisite figure, poetic and delicate, with her cream-white skirts of the same hue as her throne, and her strings of great pearls at her throat. Next her was seated an ecclesiastic of high eminence, who had in vain protested that he was wholly out of place in such a diversion. ‘Was Cardinal Bembo out of place at Ferrara and Urbino?’ she had objected; and had so successfully, in the end, vanquished his scruples, that the late sunbeams, slanting through the oak-leaves and on to that gay assemblage, had found out in it his handsome head and his crimson sash, and his blue eyes full of their and keen witty observation, and his white hands folded together on his knee.
In a semicircle whose wings stretched right and left were ranged the gentlemen and ladies who formed momentarily the house party of the château; great people all; all the women young and all the men brilliant, no dull person amongst them, dulness being the one vice condemned there without any chance of pardon. They were charming people, distinguished people, handsome people also, and they made a gay and gracious picture, reclining or sitting in any attitudes they chose on these grassy slopes, which had seen the court of Francis and of both Marguerites:
Above their heads floated a silken banner, on which, in letters of gold, were embroidered the wise words, ‘Qu’on m’aime, mais avec de l’esprit!’
‘To return to our original demand — what is the definition of Love?’ asked their queen and president, turning her lovely eyes on to the great ecclesiastic, who replied with becoming gravity:
‘Madame, what can a humble priest possibly know of the theme?’
She smiled a little. ‘You know as much as Bembo knew,’ she made answer.
‘Ah no, Madame! The times are changed.’
‘The times, perhaps; not human nature. However, this is the question which must be first decided by the Court at large: How is the nature of Love to be defined?’
A gentleman on her left murmured:
‘No one can tell us so as well you, Madame, who have torn the poor butterfly in pieces so often sans merci.’
‘You have broken the first rule of all,’ said the sovereign, with severity. ‘The discussion is to be kept wholly free from all personalities.’
‘A wise rule, or the Court would probably end, like an Italian village festa, in a free use of the knife all round.’
‘If you be not quiet you will be exiled for contempt of court, and shut up in the library to write out Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria.” Once more, I inquire, how are we to define Love?’
‘It was never intended to be defined, but to be enjoyed.’
‘That is merely begging the question,’ said their Queen. ‘One enjoys music, flowers, a delicate wine, a fine sunset, a noble sonnet; but all these things are nevertheless capable of analysis and of reduction to known laws. So is Love. I ask once more: How is it to be defined? Does no one seem to know? What curious ignorance!’
‘In woman, Love may be defined to be the desire of annexation; and to consist chiefly in a passionate clinging to a sense of personal property in the creature loved.’
‘That is cynical, and may be true. But it is not general enough. You must not separate the love of man and the love of woman. We speak of Love general, human, concrete.’
‘With all deference I would observe that, if we did not separate the two, we should never arrive at any real definition at all, for Love differs according to sex as much as the physiognomy or the costume.’
‘Real Love is devotion!’ said a beautiful blonde with blue eyes that gazed from under black lashes with pathetic tenderness.
‘Euh! euh!’ murmured one impertinent.
‘Oh, oh!’ murmured another.
‘Ouiche!’ said a third under his breath.
The sovereign smiled ironically:
‘Ah, my dear Duchesse! all that died out with the poets of 1830. It belongs to the time when women wore muslin gowns, looked at the moon, and played the harp.’
‘If I might venture on a definition in the langue verte,’ suggested a handsome man, seated at the feet of the queen, ‘though I fear I should be turned out of Court as Rabelais and Scarron are turned out of the drawing-room — —’
‘We can imagine what it would be, and will not give you the trouble to say any more. If the definition of Love be, on the contrary, left to me, I shall include it all in one word — Illusion.’
‘That is a cruel statement!’
‘It is a fact. We have our own ideal, which we temporarily place in the person, and clothe with the likeness, of whoever is fortunate enough to resemble it superficially enough to delude us, unconsciously, into doing so. You remember the hackneyed saying of the philosopher about the real John — the John as he thinks himself to be, and the John as others imagine him: it is never the real John that is loved; always an imaginary one built up out of the fancies of those in love with him.’
‘That is fancy, your Majesty; it is not love.’
‘And what is love but fancy? — the fancy of attraction, the fancy of selection; the same sort of fancy as allures the bird to the brightest plumaged mate?’
‘I do not think any love is likely to last which is not based on intellectual sympathy. When the mind is interested and contented, it does not tire half so fast as the eyes or the passions. In any very great love there is at the commencement a delighted sense of meeting something long sought, some supplement of ourselves long desired in vain. When this pleasure is based on the charm of some mind wholly akin to our own, and filled for us with ever-renewing well-springs of the intellect, there is really hardly any reason why this mutual delight should ever change, especially if circumstances conspire to free it from those more oppressive and irritating forms of contact which the prose of life entails.’
‘You mean marriage, only you put it with a great deal of unnecessary euphuism. Tastes differ. Giovanni Dupré’s ideal of bliss was to see his wife ironing linen, while his mother-in-law looked on.’
‘Dupré was a simple soul, and a true artist, but intellect was not his strong point. If he had chanced to be educated, the good creature with her irons would have become very tiresome to him.’
‘What an argument in favour of ignorance!’
‘Is it? The savage is content with roots and an earth-baked bird; but it does not follow, therefore, that delicate food does not merit the preference we give to it. I grant, however, that a high culture of taste and intelligence does not result in the adoration of the primitive virtues any more than of the earth-baked bird.’
‘Is this a discussion on Love?’
‘It is a discussion which grows out of it, like the mistletoe out of the oak. The ideal of Dupré was that of a simple, uneducated, emotional and unimpassioned creature; it was what we call essentially a bourgeois ideal. It would have been suffocation and starvation, torture and death, to Raffaelle, to Phidias, to Shelley, to Goethe. There are men, born peasants, who soar into angels; who hate, loathe, and spurn the bourgeois ideal from their earliest times of wretchedness; but there are others who always remain peasants. Millet did, Dupré did, Wordsworth did.’
The queen tinkled her golden handbell and raised her ivory sceptre.
‘These digressions are admirable in their way, but I must recall the Court to the subject before them. Someone is bringing in allusions to cookery, flat-irons, and the bourgeois ideal which I have always understood was M. Thiers. They are certainly, however interesting, wholly irrelevant to the theme which we are met here to discuss. Let us pass on to the question next upon the list. If no one can define Love except as devotion, that definition suits so few cases that we must accept its existence without definition, and proceed to inquire what are i
ts characteristics and its results.’
‘The first is exigence and the second is ennui.’
‘No, the first is sympathy and the second is happiness.’
‘That is very commonplace. Its chief characteristic appears to me to be an extremely rapid transition from a state of imbecile adoration to a state of irritable fatigue. I speak from the masculine point of view.’
‘And I, from the feminine, classify it rather as a transition (regretted but inevitable) from amiable illusions and generous concessions to a wounded sense of offence at ingratitude.’
‘We are coming to the Italian coltellate! You both only mean that in love, as in everything else which is human, people who expect too much are disappointed; disappointment is always irritation; it may even become malignity if it take a very severe form.’
‘You seem all of you to have glided into an apology for inconstancy. Is that inevitable to love?’
‘It looks as if it were; or, at all events, its forerunner, fatigue, is so.’
‘You treat love as you would treat a man who asked you to paint his portrait, whilst you persisted in painting that of his shadow instead. The shadow which dogs his footsteps is not himself.’
‘It is cast by himself, so it is a part of him.’
‘No, it is an accompanying ghost sent by Nature which he cannot escape or dismiss.’
‘My good people,’ said their sovereign impatiently, ‘you wander too far afield. You are like the group of physicians who let the patient die while they disputed over the Greek root from which the name of his malady was derived. Love, like all other great monarchs, is ill sometimes; but let us consider him in health, not sickness.’
‘For Love in a state of health there is no better definition than one given just now — sympathy.’
‘The highest kind of love springs from the highest kind of sympathy. Of that there is no doubt. But then that is only to be found in the highest natures. They are not numerous.’
‘No; and even they require to possess a great reserve-fund of interest, and a bottomless deposit of inexhaustible comprehension. Such reserve-funds are rare in human nature, which is usually a mere fretful and foolish chatterbox, tout en dehors, and self-absorbed.’