by Ouida
‘I should have thought you were happy,’ she said regretfully; that splendid pageantry of life of which she had seen a glimpse seemed to her magical, marvellous, inexhaustible.
‘I did not think she was,’ she added, with that directness and candour which made her great unlikeness to all of her sex whom he had ever known.
‘Why?’ he asked abruptly; the supposition annoyed him.
‘She looked tired, and as if she were looking for something she did not find.’
The accuracy and divination in the words surprised him. How had this child, who had never before seen any woman of the world, guessed so accurately the perpetual vague desire and as vague dissatisfaction which had always gone with the soul of his wife as a shadow goes through brilliant light?
All her life long Nadège had found the old saw true, familiarity had bred contempt in her; custom had made wisdom seem foolishness, wit seem prose, amusement become tedium, and interest change to apathy. Intimate knowledge of anything, of anyone, had always altered each for her, as the fairy gold changed in mortal hands to withered leaves.
It was no fault of hers; it was not even mere inconstancy of temper; it was rather due to the infinitude of her inexhaustible expectations and the microscopic penetration of her intelligence. The world was small to her as to Alexander.
He knew that neither to her nor to himself had their life together been that poem, that passion, that harmony which they — or he at least — had imagined that it would be. But was not this due only to that doom of human nature which they shared in common with all the rest of mankind? Was it not merely the effect of that lassitude and vague disappointment which must follow on the indulgence of every great passion, simply because in its supreme hours it reaches heights of rapture at which nothing human can remain?
Yet, however his philosophy may explain it, to have any other imagine that he does not render a woman who belongs to him perfectly contented with him always irritates and offends every man. It is a suspicion cast on his powers, his loyalty, and his good sense: it indirectly accuses him of deficiency in attraction or of feebleness of character. Othmar had but little vanity; no more than human nature naturally possesses in its unconscious forms of self-love; but the little he had was mortified by this child’s observation. She, ignorant of all the fine intricacies of emotion which are the traits of such highly-cultured and over-refined temperaments as were theirs, could only say, in her simple and inadequate language, that they seemed to her ‘not happy.’ It was not the phrase which expressed what they lacked; it was too homely, too crude, too direct, to describe the complicated world-weariness of which they both suffered the penalties, the innumerable and conflicting sentiments and desires which made of their lives a continual vague expectation and as vague and continual a regret. But her young eyes, unused as they were to read anything less clear than the open language of sea and sky, and ignorant of the whole meaning of psychological analysis, had yet been able to perceive the shadow of this which she had had no power of understanding.
He was surprised at her penetration, whilst he wondered uneasily if the world in general, so much keener of sight and more bitter of tongue than she, saw as much as she saw. The idea that it might be so was unwelcome to him. The supposition was horrible to him that the great passion of his life had gone the way of most great passions which are exposed to that most cruel of all slow destroyers — familiarity; familiarity which is as the mildew to the wheat, as the sirdax to the fir-tree, as the calandra to the sugar-cane. He loathed to realise the fact, or think of it in any way; and when it was placed before him by another’s observation, he saw his own soul, as it were in a mirror, and detested what he saw.
He answered with some constraint: ‘I have told you, my dear, that happiness is the fruit of illusions; it cannot exist without them any more than we could have that beautiful haze yonder without water in the atmosphere. Besides, in the world, people are only content so long as they are of completely frivolous characters. My wife has cultivated her intelligence and her wit too exquisitely to be capable of that sort of coarse and common satisfaction with things as they are which is so easy to mediocre minds.’
‘Yet you advise me to be content?’
‘My dear child, you are young, you are accustomed to an out-of-door life, you have the felicity of belonging to country things and country thoughts which give you a storehouse full of sunny memories. My wife is a mondaine (if you have ever heard that word) who is also a pessimist and a metaphysician. Life presents many intricate problems to her mind which will, I hope, never trouble your joyous acceptance of it as it is. Fénelon, I assure you, was a happier man than Lamennais.’
‘Because he was a stupider one.’
‘Stupid? No, but simpler, cast in a different mould, naturally inclined to faith, averse to speculation, taking things as he found them without question. That is the cast of mind of all men and women who are made to be happy.’
She was silent; wishfully thinking of those immense fields of knowledge shut out from her own eyes like the aerial spheres of unseen suns and planets which the unassisted sight can never behold. She felt childish, ignorant, made of dull and common clay.
The bells of a little distant spire sounded for Vespers. The sun was sinking beyond the edge of the wide green plain. A deeper stillness was stealing over the meadow and the low coppices which made its boundaries. Birds, looking grey in the shadows, flew low, to and fro, restlessly, in that uncertain flight with which, near nightfall, they always seek a resting-place for the dark hours.
Othmar looked at his watch. ‘I must leave you or I shall miss the train to Paris, and I go to-night to Russia.’
She changed colour.
‘To Russia! That is very far away!’
‘It does not seem so in these days. One sleeps and wakes and sleeps again, and one is there. If you want me in any way, write to me at the Paris house and they will forward your letter. Rosselin will come to see you to-morrow. He will tell you, as no one else can, all you will have to prepare for and encounter if you choose the life of an artist. Do not decide too hastily. There is no hurry. I like best to think of you in these safe pastures.’
‘But the winter will come to them and — some time — to me?’
‘It is far enough off you, at least, to be forgotten. Well, listen to Rosselin and be guided by your own impulses; they are the only safe guides in such a choice as this. I dare say the world will win you; the world always does. It is only in fable that Herakles goes with Pallas. Adieu.’
She grew very pale, and the light had gone out of her face as it had now gone off the landscape.
‘You will come back soon?’ she asked.
Othmar resisted a wave of tenderness and pity which passed over him.
‘Not very soon,’ he answered. ‘You know I have many occupations, and the world I warn you against is always with me, alas! I shall never be able to see you often, my dear, for — for — very many reasons; but whenever you really need me, write to me without hesitation, and always depend upon the sincerity of my regard.’
She did not reply. She stood motionless. With the coming of the evening shadows there had came a great chillness, a sense of loss upon her, as if she had been suddenly brought from the warm green meadows of the vale of Chevreuse into the awful silence and whiteness and frozen solitude of a winter’s night in Siberia.
‘Write to me,’ said Othmar again. With a gentle movement he stooped and kissed her on the soft thick waves of hair which fell over her forehead.
Then he left her.
She remained standing in the same place and the same attitude, her feet in the mown grass growing wet with dew, her head bent like a statue of meditation. The caress had been gentle, slight, passionless, like a kiss to a child; but her face and bosom had grown hot with blushes which the evening shadows veiled, and a strange vague joy and pain strove together in her.
CHAPTER XXX.
It was eight o’clock in the evening on the plains of Russia, and war
m with that Asiatic heat which comes with the reign of the dog-star even to the provinces that lie between the Baltic waters and the Ural snows. In the vast gardens and white wide courts of the house at Zaraïla the evening was sultry, and Nadège, spending a few dull days in her annual visit to her elder children and their estates, was lying half asleep upon a couch, listening to the monotonous drip of the lion-fountain in the central court, and thinking of nothing in especial. This visit had always represented to her supreme and unmitigated tedium. It was a duty to come there no doubt; her duties were docile courtiers as a rule and seldom troubled her; but it was tiresome, infinitely tiresome, it was so much time lost out of the sum of her life. Why is duty never agreeable?
The Napraxine children were in their own apartments; the clear sunny evening, whose light would stretch almost to dawn, illumined the gardens and terraces. She reclined motionless upon her broad low couch, with a little cigarette between her lips, now and then sending into the air around her delicate rings of rose-scented smoke. The mother of Platon Napraxine, a woman old and austere, with the terrible austerity of women who have loved pleasure and passion, and only turned to devotion when both have deserted them, sat near and watched her with dark, brooding, sunken eyes, full of a hate which the object of it was too indifferent and too careless to care for or to measure.
The Princess Lobow Gregorievna, born a Princess Miliutine, was a woman who had been handsome, but had now lost nearly all trace of past beauty. She was spare, colourless, and attenuated, and her severe, straight profile, and her expression of ascetic rigidity, gave her a curious likeness to those Byzantine portraits of St. Anne and of St. Elizabeth which were surrounded with jewels and relics on the altars of her private chapel. Her piety in old age was as complete and absorbing as her licentious amours had been in her earlier womanhood. Superstition had taken the same empire over her in age which her passions had possessed previously; and she was as extravagant in her donations to church and convent as she had once been to the impecunious officers of the guard and princely gamblers, who had been in turn favoured with her fantastic and short-lived preference. Her religious and most orthodox fervour was neither a mask nor an hypocrisy. It was the most genuine of all religions — that which is founded on personal fear. But it intensified the hardness of her temper, and never whispered to her that mercy might be holier than long prayers.
In all Europe Othmar and his wife had no enemy colder, harder, more implacable than this holy woman, whose name meant Love, and whose good works were seen in endowed convents, jewelled reliques, mighty treasures bestowed all over her province, and ceremonials, fasts, and penances of the orthodox most rigidly observed in her person. Nadège never tried to conciliate or propitiate her grim foe; she was at once too careless and too courageous. With her delicate and unsparing raillery she had stung this enmity with many a barbed word, subtle and negligent and penetrating, accentuated with the cruel sweet music of her laughter, until the hatred with which the Princess Lobow hated her was deep as the Volga, though hidden like the Volga’s bottomless holes so long as Platon Napraxine had lived. His death had given it justification, and intensified it a thousandfold.
‘If she were a good woman she would be compelled to hate me,’ thought the object of her hate. ‘And being what she is, if she could poison me secretly she would do it, even in the blessed bread itself.’
When they had first met after her marriage with Othmar, there had been said between them such words as are ineffaceable on the memory like vitriol flung on the face.
‘For the first time in my life I have allowed myself to be in a rage; je me suis encanaillée!’ she had said to herself, penitent not for the anger into which she had been driven, but for the force with which she had uttered it, which was an offence against her canons of good taste.
The earlier years of the Princess Lobow had been dedicated to all those refined ingenuities of depravity in which the nineteenth century can rival the Rome of Vitellius and the Constantinople of the Byzantine emperors. There were terrible facts in her past, ready, like so many knives, to the use of her opponent, allusions which could pierce like steel, and could scar like flame. Nadège had spared none of them. With all the pitiless disdain of a woman in whom the senses have but very faint power, she had poured out her scorn on the other, whose senses had been her tyrants until, virtuous perforce through the chills of age, she had taken her worthless withered soul to God.
Since that time the bitterest enmity had been open and avowed between them. Concession to the world, and regard to the dead man’s memory, caused them to still keep up a show and aspect of conventional politeness before others. But the polished surface covered the most bitter feud. They were studiously ceremonious and courteous one to the other; but beneath the few phrases they exchanged, often trivial and apparently amiable as these might be, there were a hint, a tone, a meaning which told to each of the other’s undying animosity. To the younger woman it was a matter of pure indifference, of careless amusement; her nature was too capricious and too disdainful to cherish deep enmities; she despised rather than she disliked; but to the elder this hatred she cherished was the last flickering flame of the many hot passions which had governed her in earlier years. For her only son she had had a concentrated intensity of affection, into which all the ambition, cupidity, and love of dominion in her character had been united. His marriage had been hateful to her, and when Nadine, in her sixteenth year, as fragile as an orchid and as impertinent as Cherubino, petulantly detesting the husband they had given her, and in the bitterness of her disillusions at war with all the world, was brought in the first months of her marriage to the great house of Zaraïla, the Princess Lobow had seen in her not only the despoiler of her own power, but the ruin of her son.
Many and violent had been the scenes between Platon Napraxine and herself, of which his wife was the object and the cause.
‘She is a crystal of ice, you say,’ she told him a hundred times. ‘Well, she will so chill your heart one day that it will be numb for ever. Remember that; I warn you.’
He did remember when he went out to his death in the dawn of the April morning at Versailles.
Whilst he lived his mother’s hatred for his wife was impotent and perforce mute; but all the many slights, the constant indifference, the frequent ridicule of which he was the object, though unperceived or forgiven by him, were written on his mother’s memory indelibly as on tablets of stone. All the coquetries and scandals which were associated with his wife’s name, all the tragedies for which the breath of her world made her responsible, all the cruel words and strange caprices which were attributed to her, were gathered up and treasured by the Princess Lobow. Seldom leaving her solitudes in the provinces, and seldom seen even in Petersburg, she yet was as accurately informed of all the gossip of Europe concerning her daughter-in-law as though she had lived perpetually beside her. None of the minutiæ of the vaguest rumours about her escaped the vigilance of her enemy. Saint though she was, she prayed passionately that some imprudence greater than usual, some coquetry which would pass beyond the patience of her husband and her world, would deliver Nadège Federowna into her hands, but she waited in vain. The indulgence of both the world and the husband was inexhaustible for one to whom they were both of the most absolute insignificance.
Then one day, as falls a bolt from a clear sky, a single line by the electric wires told her that her son was dead.
In her eyes he was murdered by his wife, as surely as though she had touched his lips with poison.
Her grief and her rage were terrible: the more terrible because the hatred which might have assuaged it had no outlet in action, could scarce have any in speech.
For Platon Napraxine had left his young sons wholly in the hands of their mother, and she could take them whither she would, and do with them whatever she chose; and the elder woman, who had transferred to them all that jealous and violent attachment which she had given their father, concealed all she felt that she might retain them near her,
whilst the secretiveness and ruses of the Slav temperament made it possible for her to continue in apparent friendship before the world with one whom she looked on as his destroyer.
She sat now erect on an antique chair of gilded and painted leather, and through her dropped eyelids watched the indolent attitude, the profound idleness, the outstretched limbs, like those of a reposing Diana, of the woman she loathed. In all the attitude, from the sans gêne and complete ease of it to the little rose-scented puffs of smoke which ever and again came from her parted lips, there was that ‘note of modernity’ which beyond all other things the Princess Lobow detested. The women of her time had been as licentious as the great Catharine herself, but they had been different to the cocodettes in manner, in mind, in opinion, in everything. They had been like fierce Oriental empresses, often barbarous, uncleanly, gross, but they had had a stateliness which all their excesses could not impair. The modern woman of the world, with her careless attitudes, her mockery of all ceremonial, her disrespect for tradition and etiquette, her airy scepticism, and her vague dissatisfaction, was, wherever she was met with, an enigma and an affront to the elder woman, whose own life had been divided between strong vices and strong faiths, and whose bigotry and whose sensuality had been of equal force. They had neither senses nor souls, these poor modern anémiques, thought this woman of seventy years, who had been a Messalina and who had become a St. Katherine.
‘Ah, you despise us, madame; how right you are!’ Nadège had said to her once. ‘We never know what we wish, and when we get what we ask for, we are as irritated as when it is denied to us. It is the fault of all culture — it creates discontent and fastidiousness as surely as civilisation brings all kinds of new diseases. I only wish that we could be like our granddames and godmothers, who had no earthly ideals beyond a constant succession of big officers of cuirassiers, and no mental doubt whatever as to the existence of a “bon Dieu.” It must have simplified life so much to have been able to balance the little weakness for the succession of cuirassiers with such a perfect confidence in Heaven!’