by Ouida
She laughed also.
‘Well, be wise,’ she said as she rose; ‘you are warned in time. Oh, my dear Otho, you grant yourself that every passion is finite. I think it is; but I think also that the wise people, when it fades, make it leave friendship and sympathy behind it, as the beautiful blowing yellow corn when it is cut leaves the wheat. The foolish people let it leave all kinds of rancour, envy, and uncharitableness, as the brambles and weeds when they are burnt only leave behind them a foul smoke. But it is so easy to be philosophic in theory!’
‘Your philosophy far exceeds mine,’ said Othmar with a little impatience. ‘I have not yet reached the period at which I can calmly contemplate my green April fields laid sear to give corn to the millstones; they are all in flower with the poppy and the campion.’
‘Very prettily said,’ replied his wife. ‘You really are a poet at heart.’
Othmar went out from her presence that day with a vague sense of depression and of apprehension.
He had never wavered in his great love for her; the great passion with which she had inspired him still remained with him ardent and profound in much; the charm she had for his intelligence sustained the seduction for his senses; he loved her, only her, as much and as exclusively as in the early days of his acquaintance with her; she still remained the one woman upon earth for him. He could not hear her calmly speak of any future in which she would be less than then to him without a sense of irritation and offence. It seemed to him that such deliberate and unsparing analysis as hers could not exist side by side with any very intense feeling. Certainly he was used to it in her; he was accustomed to her delicate and critical dissection of every human motive and impulse, his, her own, or those of others; but it touched him now with a sense of pain, as though the scalpel had penetrated to some open nerve. His consciousness of his own devotion to her made him indignantly repulse the suggestion that he could ever change; yet his own knowledge of the nature of humanity and of the work of time told him that she had had truth on her side when she had said that such a change might come, would come; and he thrust the consciousness of that truth away as an insult and affront. Was there nothing which would endure and resist the cruel slow sapping of the waves of time? Was there no union, passion, or fidelity, strong enough to stand the dull fallings of the years like drops of grey rain which beat down the drooping rose and change it from a flower of paradise to a poor, pale, scentless wreck of itself?
CHAPTER VI.
On this the unwelcome anniversary of her birth, she was at St. Pharamond, which had been connected with the grounds of La Jacquemerille by the purchase, at great cost, of all the intervening flower-fields and olive-woods. It had been her whim to do so, and Othmar had not opposed it, though he would have preferred never again to see those shores; but, although she never spoke to him on that subject, she herself chose to go there with most winters, for the very reason that the world would sooner have expected her to shun the scenes of Yseulte’s early and tragic death. She invariably did whatever her society expected her not to do, and the vague sense of self-blame with which her conscience was moved, whenever she remembered the dead girl, was sting enough to make her display an absolute oblivion and indifference which, for once, she did not feel.
She never remained long upon the Riviera; she seldom stayed long anywhere, except it were at Amyôt; but she went thither always when the violets were thick in the valleys, and the yellow blossoms of the butterwort were flung like so many golden guineas over the brown furrows of the fields. The children spent the whole winter there. This day, when they had wished her bonne fête, and brought her their great baskets of white lilac and gardenias, she was indulgent to them, and took them with her in her carriage for a drive after her noonday breakfast. She was not a woman to whom the babble and play of children could ever be very long interesting; her mind was too speculative, too highly cultured, too exacting to give much response to the simplicity, the ignorance, and the imperfect thoughts of childhood. But in her own way she loved them. In her own way she took great care of their education, physical and mental. She wished her son to become a man whom the world would honour; and she wished her daughter to be wholly unlike herself.
As yet they were hardly more than babies; lovely, happy, gay, and gentle. ‘Let them be young as long as they can,’ she said to those entrusted with their training. ‘I was never young. It is a great loss. One never wholly recovers it in any after years.’
It was a fine day, mild, sunny, with light winds shaking the odour from the orange buds; such a day as that on which Platon Napraxine had died. She did not think of him.
Several years had gone away since then; the whole world seemed changed; the dead past had buried its dead; there were the two golden-haired laughing children in symbol and witness of the present.
‘Decidedly, however philosophic we may be, we are all governed at heart by sentiment,’ she thought, as the carriage rolled through the delicate green of the blossoming woods. ‘And by beauty,’ she added, as her eyes dwelt on the faces of Otho and Xenia, who were the very flower and perfection of childish loveliness; ideal children also, who were always happy, always caressing, always devoted to each other, and whose little lives were as pretty as those of two harebells in a sunny wood. Why were they dear to her, and sweet and charming? Why had the physical pain of their birth been forgotten in the mental joys of their possession? Why did her eyes delight to follow their movements, and her ear delight to listen to their laughter?
The other children had been as much hers, and she had always disliked them; she disliked them still, such time as she went to their Russian home to receive their annual homage, and that of all her dependents.
Othmar was devoted to the interests of Napraxine’s two little sons; an uneasy consciousness, often recurrent to him, that he had not merited the frank and steady friendship of the dead man, perpetually impelled him to the greatest care of their fortunes and education. They were kindly, stupid, vigorous little lads, likely to grow into the image of their dead father; but all that could be done for them in mind and body, for their present and their future, he took heed should be done; and placing them under wise and gentle teachers, endeavoured to counteract the fatal instincts to vanity and overbearing self-esteem which the adulation and submission they received everywhere on their estates had implanted in them long before they could spell. He never saw them come into his presence without painful memories and involuntary repugnance; but he repressed all signs of either, and the children, if they feared him, liked him. Of their mother they saw but very little: a lovely delicate vision, in an atmosphere scented like a tea rose, with a little sound in her voice which made them feel they must tread softly and speak low, looked at them with an expression which they did not understand, and touched them with cool fragrant lips lightly and distantly, and they knew she was their mother because they had always heard so: but Othmar seemed nearer to them than she did, and when they wished for anything, it was to him that they addressed their little rude scrawled notes. For the rest, they were always in Russia: it was the only stipulation with which their father had hampered their mother’s guardianship of them.
‘Let them be Russians always,’ he had said in his last letter to her. ‘Let them love no soil but Russia. The curse of Russians is the foreign life, the foreign tongue, the foreign ways, which draw them away from their people, make their lands unknown and indifferent to them, and lead them to squander on foreign cities and on foreign wantons the roubles wrung by their stewards in their absence from their dependents. Paris is the succursale of Petersburg, and it is also its hell. When the Russian nobles shall live in their own homes, the Nihilist will have little justification, and the Jew will be unable to drain the peasantry as a cancer drains the blood. I preach what I have not practised. But if I could live my life again, I would spend my strength, and my gold, and my years amongst my own people.’
‘Poor Platon!’ she had thought, more than once remembering those words. ‘He thinks he would have d
one so, but he would not. The first drôlesse who should have crossed the frontier would have taken him back with her in triumph. It is quite true what he says; an absent nobility leaves an open door behind them, through which Sedition creeps in to jump upon their vacant chairs. But so long as ever they have the power, men will go where they are amused, and the Russian tchin will not stay in the provinces, in the snow, with the wolves, and the Jews, and the drunken villagers all around his house, when he can live in the Avenue Joséphine, and never hear or see anything but what pleases him. Absenteeism ruined Ireland, and will ruin Russia; but, tant que le monde est monde, the man who has only one little short life of his own will like to enjoy it.’
Nevertheless, she and Othmar both respected his wishes, and his boys were brought up in the midst of the vast lands of their heritage, with everything done that could be done by tuition to amend their naturally slow intelligence and outweigh the stubbornness and arrogance begotten by centuries of absolute dominion in the race they sprang from. She herself only saw them very rarely, when, in midsummer weather, the flowering seas of grass and the scent of the violets in the larch woods brought life and warmth even to North-eastern Russia. They were unpleasant to her: always unpleasant. They were the living and intrusive records of years she would willingly have effaced. They were involuntary but irresistible reproaches spoken, as it were, by lips long dumb in death.
Living, their father had never had power to do otherwise than offend, irritate, and disgust her: the least active sentiment against himself that he had ever roused in her had been a contemptuous pity. But dead, there were moments when Platon Napraxine acquired both dignity and strength in her eyes: the silence of his death and its cause had commanded her respect: he had been wearisome, stupid, absurd, troublesome, in all his life; but in his death he had gained a certain grandeur, as features quite coarse and commonplace will look solemn and white on their bier.
He had died to defend her name, and she could not remember ever once having given him one kind word! There had been a greatness in his loyalty and in his sacrifice to its demands which outweighed the clumsiness of his passion and the grotesqueness of his ignorance. ‘If he were living again, I should be as intolerant of him as I ever was,’ she thought at times; ‘he would annoy me as much as ever, he would be as ridiculous, he would be as odious; and yet I should like for once to be able to say to him “Pauvre ours! vous êtes mal léché, mais vous avez bon cœur!”’
It was a vague remorse, but a sincere one; yet in her nature it irritated and did not alter her. It was an intrusive thought, and unwelcome as had been his presence. She thrust it away as she had used to bid her women lock the doors of her chamber; and the poor ghost went away obediently, timid, wistful, not daring to insist, as the living man had used to do from the street door.
Remorse is a vast persistent shadow in the poet’s metrical romance and the dramatist’s tragic story; but in the great world, in the pleasant world, in the world of movement, of distraction, of society, it is but a very faint mist, which at very distant intervals clouds some tiny space in a luminous sky, and hurries away before a breath of fashion, a whisper of news, a puff of novelty, as though conscious of its own incongruity and want of tact.
When their drive was over this day she dismissed the young Otho and his sister to their nurses and teachers, and remained on the sea-terrace of St. Pharamond with some friends about her. It was the last day in February, a day of warm winds and full sunshine and fragrant warmth. The air was penetrated with the sweet breath of primroses and the scented narcissus which were blossoming by millions under the woods of St. Pharamond. The place had been beautiful before, and under her directions had become as perfect a sea palace as the south coast of Europe could show anywhere. She had had a terrace made; a long line of rose-coloured marble overhanging the sea, backed by palms and araucarias, with sheltered seats that no angry breeze could find out, and wide staircases descending to the smooth sands below. Here, lying on the cushions and white bearskins, and leaning one elbow on the balustrade, she could watch all the width of the waters as they stretched eastward and westward, and see the manœuvres in the cupraces of her friends’ vessels without moving from her own garden. To the sea-terrace, when it was known that she would receive them, came, on such sunny afternoons as this, all those whom she deigned to encourage of the pleasure-seekers on the coast.
To see the sun set from that rose-marble terrace, and to take a Russian cigarette or a cup of caravan tea beneath those araucaria branches, was the most coveted distinction and one of the surest brevets of fashion in the world. She refused so many; she received so few; she was so inexorable in her social laws; mere rank alone had no weight with her; ambassadors could pass people to courts, but not up those rose-coloured stairs; princes and princesses, if they were dull, had no chance to be made welcome; and, in fine, to become an habitué there required so many perfections that the majority of the great world never passed the gates at all.
‘The first qualification for admittance is that they must find something new to say every day,’ she said to the Duc de Béthune, who was in an informal way her first chamberlain. ‘The second is, that they must always amuse me.’
‘The first clause a few might perhaps fulfil; but who shall attain to fulfilment of the second?’
‘That will remain to be seen,’ she said with a little yawn, while she reclined on the white furs and the Eastern tissues, her feet on a silver globe of hot water and her hands clasped idly on a tortoiseshell field-glass. It was five o’clock; the western sky was a burning vault of rose and gold; the zenith had the deep divine blue that is like nothing else in all creation; the sea was radiant, purple here, azure there, opal elsewhere, as the light fell on it; delicate winds blew across it violet-scented from the land; the afternoon sun was warm, and as its light deepened made the pale rose of the marbles glow like the flowers of a pomegranate tree. She forgot her companions; she leaned her head against her cushions and dreamily thought of many things; of the day she had first come thither most of all. It had been nine years before.
Nine years! — what an eternity! She remembered the bouquet which Othmar had given her on the head of the sea-stairs. What a lover he had been! — a lover out of a romance — Lelio, Ruy Blas, Romeo — anything you would. What a pity to have married him! It had been commonplace, banal, stupid — anybody would have done it. There had been a complete absence of originality in such a conclusion to their story.
If Laura had married Petrarca, who would have cared for the sonnets?
She laughed a little as she thought so. Her companions hoped they had succeeded in amusing her. She had not heard a word they were saying. She gazed dreamily at the sea through her eyelids, which looked shut, and pursued her own reflections.
Her companions of the moment were all men; the most notable of them were Melville, the Duc de Béthune, and a Russian, Loris Loswa.
Melville, on the wing between Rome and Paris, loitered a week or two in Nice, doing his best to shake alms for good works out of the sinners there, and lifting up the silver clarion of his voice against the curse of the tripot with unsparing denunciation.
The Duc de Béthune was there because for twelve years of his still young life he had been uneasy whenever many miles were between him and the face of his lady, whom he adored with the hopeless and chivalrous passion of which he had sustained the defence at the Court of Love at Amyôt. He would have carried her muff or her ribbon to the scaffold, like d’Aubiac and Montmorin, whom he had cited there. He had been almost the only one of her lovers whom she had deigned to take the trouble to preserve as a friend. He had been inspired at first sight with an intense passion for her, which had coloured and embittered some of the best years of his life. On the death of Napraxine he had been amongst the first to lay the offer of his life at her feet. She had rejected him, but without her customary mockery, even with a certain regret; and she had employed all the infinite power of her charms and tact of her intelligence to retain him as a compan
ion whilst rejecting him as a suitor. Such a position had seemed at first impossible to him, and had been long painful; but at last he chose rather to see her on those distant terms than never, and gradually, as time passed on, he grew familiarised to the sight of her as the wife of Othmar, and the love he bore to her softened into regard, and lost its sting and its torment.
In person he was handsome and distinguished-looking to a great degree; he resembled the portrait of Henri Quatre, and bore himself like the fine soldier he was; he had a grave temperament and a romantic fancy; the cradle of his race was a vast dark fortress overhanging the iron-bound rocks of Finisterre, and his early manhood had been ushered in by the terrible tragedies of the année terrible. As volunteer with the Army of the North, Gui de Béthune had seen the darkest side of war and life; he had been but a mere youth then, but the misfortunes of his country had added to the natural seriousness of his northern temper. The most elegant of gentlemen in the great world of Paris, he yet had never abandoned himself as utterly as most men of his age and rank to the empire of pleasure; there was a certain reserve and dignity in him which became the cast of his features and the gravity and sweetness of his voice.
But he never loved any other woman. And unconsciously to herself she was so used to consider that implicit and exclusive devotion to her as one of her rights, that she would have been astonished, even perhaps annoyed, had she seen that he took his worship elsewhere. Her remembrance had spoiled twelve years of the promise of his manhood, but if anyone had reproached her with that, she would have said sincerely enough, ‘I cannot help his adoring me.’ She would have even taken credit to herself for the unusual kindliness with which she had endeavoured to turn the sirocco of love into the mild and harmless breeze of friendly sympathy.