by Ouida
At this moment in the summer evening at Zaraïla neither of them were speaking. They had exchanged many cruel, courteous innuendoes in the course of the day, but with the evening there had come a tacit truce. The little boys were wholly under the power of their mother as their guardian, and their grandmother feared that if she were too much irritated she might remove them from Zaraïla or request her to leave it. Nadine, on her side, had thought, with a sense of compassion and that disdainful but candid justice which was seldom wanting in her: ‘After all, as she loved that poor, big, clumsy fellow so well, and he was her only son — the only thing she had — it is pardonable, it is natural, that she should hate me for ever.’
It grew late, but it was still light with the long and radiant evening of the north in summer. She, in the drowsy heat of the eventide, looked with still dreamy eyes out on to the sultry gardens beneath, where golden evening light was poured on endless aisles and fields of roses, and groves of feathery bananas and plumed palms; the vegetation of the vales of Kashmere made by art to blossom there for the brief season of a Russian summer.
‘How very foolish women are to fear absence,’ she thought. ‘Absence is the only possible avenue which can lead us to find the fontaine de jouvence of renewed interest. Familiarity is so fatal — so fatal! Helen’s self would be unable to hold her own against it. Those silly women who let the man they love enter their chamber as easily as he can go into his racing stables, set a great grey ghost of indifference at the threshold. Most women are afraid of not being near what they love. If they only knew how distance helps them; how constant proximity hurts them! If Love cannot keep a few surprises in his pocket, he is as tiresome as a newspaper a week old.’
She laughed a little, watching the leaves of a full-blown rose fall under the touch of an alighting bird.
‘When it has once been full-blown,’ she thought, ‘any touch — even a bird’s, even a butterfly’s — will serve to finish it for ever.’
Love was so like that great crimson rose, which a moment before had been a cup of ruby-coloured fragrance, and now was a mere litter of dropped leaves upon the grass. Love lives by its emotions, its desires, its illusions: so long as these can be excited and sustained it is Love; when they cannot be so, it is as the Spanish poet said centuries ago, habit, friendship, what you will, but not Love any more.
She had studied the natures of men too profoundly not to know this.
There was the sound of wheels in the central court, and various doors opened and shut in the apartments leading to the grand salon where they were. Then the groom of the chambers, in his black uniform, only relieved by his silver chain of office and the key embroidered on his collar, preceded and announced Othmar.
Nadine half rose, leaning on one arm on the cushion.
‘My dear Otho, this is charming of you! I did not expect you until to-morrow,’ she said, with a smile of welcome, as she put out her left hand to him. Othmar kissed her fingers with warmth and deference, then saluted with ceremony the Princess Lobow.
‘I came from Moscow more quickly than I could have hoped to do,’ he said, as he seated himself beside his wife. ‘An Imperial train was leaving for the north, and the Grand Duke Alexis offered me a place in it. Are you well? It is three months and more since we met.’
‘I am as well as it is ever permitted one to be in a century in which the nerves play the most prominent rôle. And the children?’
‘Perfectly well, and perfectly happy. They are not yet at the age of nerves. But I have telegraphed all news to you; there is nothing left to say, except that absence — —’
‘Oh, do not make me compliments like a berger d’éventail! We will take all that for granted.’
The reproof to him was the same sort of mockery with which she had been always wont to repress the attempts at tenderness of Napraxine; but his mother, listening, heard the difference in the accent, and watching, saw the difference in the smile with which they were spoken.
‘The wanton!’ she thought bitterly; ‘she expected him to-night, though she said not till to-morrow. It was for him, that attitude like a Diane endormie, that coquette’s disarray, that studied disorder of laces and gauzes, that little bouquet of heliotrope fastened just above the left breast! Oh, the beast, the beast! All that belonged to my son — every atom of it, from her little ear to her slender foot, and should have been burnt with him, like the Indian women, if I could have had my way — should have been buried with him, like his stars and his crosses. Oh, the beast, the beast! if I could only wring her neck!’
Then she rose, and murmuring some words inaudible and indifferent to her companions, she left the apartment. Othmar, alone beside his wife in the aromatic warmth of the summer evening, bent over her couch and kissed her little bouquet of heliotrope.
‘Allons, berger!’ she cried, with a little resistance which was not displeasure.
It pleased her that she had the power to make her husband her lover; that she could still see him moved to the folies des bergers. It was a point of vanity with her, as well as an impulse of the heart, to retain something of that empire over him which had once been so absolute. When she should wholly cease to be able to do so, it seemed to her that she would be grown old indeed. She had never put more coquetry, more sorcery, more art concealed by art into her efforts to blind and enslave her lovers, than she had done that evening when she was awaiting Othmar after three months’ absence. It might not be the highest form of love, but it was the ablest. It was of a piece with that magic by which Cleopatra defied time, and changed the ravages of habit into philtres of fresh charm.
CHAPTER XXXI.
Othmar did not tell her that night of Damaris.
With daylight he remembered uneasily that it was a story which should be told. A certain nervousness came over him whenever he thought of her possible, her probable, laughter, the incredulity as to his motives which she would be sure, out of mirth, to affect if she were too unlike other women to in seriousness entertain it. He recalled the tone with which she had spoken of his escort of the girl to her island, and he shrank from hearing the same tone again. He felt that, if heard, it would anger him unreasonably, perhaps move him to the utterance of that kind of words which are most fatal to friendship, harmony, or love.
The lovely Diane endormie, who had received him with so sweet a smile, could, when aroused, select and speed arrows from her quiver which could pierce deep and rankle long.
It seemed to him impossible to tell her that for weeks his house had been the home of Damaris Bérarde without awaking all those ironies and all that disdain which were always so very near the surface in her nature that they were displayed upon the slightest provocation. He would certainly seem to her to have behaved with needless exaggeration, with uncalled-for chivalry. Paris was wide enough to furnish other asylums than his own house; his means were large enough and powerful enough to have obtained friends for a desolate girl without becoming her chief friend himself. Away from the pathos and charm of Damaris’s fate, of her perfect trust in himself, and of her childish courage and candour of character, what he had done seemed even to him, himself, unnecessarily personal in its care of her. He did not regret it; he would not have done less if he had had to do it again; yet he was conscious that to induce his wife to see his actions in the light in which he honestly saw them would be difficult, probably impossible.
This day drifted by, and another, and another; and the name of Damaris did not pass his lips.
She had for him the sanctity of innocence, of youth, and of supreme misfortune; he felt that he could not trust himself to have her made the target for the silver arrows of his wife’s wit. True, there might be moments in which she would be so compassionate and generous, that the calamities of the child whom she had tempted from her safe solitudes would find in her a frank and generous friend. But Othmar knew women too well not to know that she would only have been so had he himself had nothing to do with the fate of this waif and stray; if she, and not himself, had foun
d her adrift in the streets of Paris.
‘She would doubt my motives and ridicule my endeavours,’ he thought, and the fear of her slight, chill laughter was strong upon him. He knew that she would be unsparing in her sarcasms upon himself, even if she should chance to feel any remnant of her momentary interest in the future Desclée of her prophecies.
He could not forget the coldness and scorn with which she had treated his regret and remorse at Amyôt; he could not forget the aching sense of loneliness and loss with which she had allowed him to leave her presence on the night when he had told her of the little verses which he had found in the closed chambers of Yseulte. He almost resented with a sense of weakness and unworthiness in himself, the empire which she possessed over his senses, the self-oblivion into which she had the power to draw him when she chose.
He was sensible that he lost all dignity in her eyes, because he was so willing to forgive, so easy to be recalled, so spaniel-like in his too meek acceptance of her slights, and too eager gratitude for her capricious tenderness.
The first hours passed of that dominion which she could always exercise over him at will, the sense of his own weakness returned to him with humiliation. He was conscious that he must appear unmanly and feeble to her, since he allowed her to play with him thus at her whim and pleasure. At Amyôt she had been unkind, disdainful, contemptuous; if he condoned her cruelty, and accepted her commands, did he not seem to her no higher than the Siberian greyhound which it was her fancy one moment to adorn and caress, and which the next was abandoned and forgotten?
He knew that a lover may obey the varying shades of his mistress’s temper without unmanliness, but that in marriage such humility and obedience on the man’s side are fatal to his peace and self-respect. If he had had the strength of character from the first to resist her influence, and enforce his own, he might have had empire over her; now he felt that he would never gain it, that on her side alone was all that immense power of command, and of superiority, which in human love always remains with the one who loves least. He had too long allowed her to treat him as she treated her hawk in the falconry-parties at Amyôt, whistling the bird to her wrist and casting it off down the wind with wanton unstable fancies, for him now to take that place in her esteem, and that dignity in her sight, which he had lost through his too fond and too submissive idolatry of her. He had only of late grown conscious of this, and the sudden perception of his own error was full of bitterness and useless regret.
‘He resents the power I have over him,’ she thought, ‘and he is thinking of something which he does not say.’
She had never expected him to vary with her varying moods. When she was cold, she had always seen him unhappy; when she had chided his warmth, he had always remained her adorer. That any shadow from her own indifference which had fallen like night across the paths of others should ever touch herself, seemed to her impossible, intolerable, almost grotesque; that she could ever cease to be his sun and moon, his planet, and his fixed star, seemed to her as improbable as that the earth would cease to revolve.
Her philosophic wit had indeed predicted the time when the fate which overtakes all passion would overtake his, and end it, but in her inmost soul that time had seemed to her remote as death itself. From the time when his eyes had first met hers, she had had complete and undisputed mastery over his life; she had dominated his fancy, filled his imagination, ruled over his destiny, and held empire over his senses. More than once she had told herself, as she had told him, that in the common course of human life and human nature this would change and cease some day, but in her own heart she had never realised what her lips had said.
Men had seldom changed to her. They had met tragic ends for her sake or through her name, or they had given up their lives to celibate indifference to all other women, as Gui de Béthune had done; but they had seldom or never, having once loved her, loved others; seldom or never learned to meet her tranquilly in the world as one who had become naught to them. The philtre poured out by her cool white hand had been of that rare flavour which makes all other beverages tasteless. Even Platon Napraxine, although her husband, had yet retained for her such utter devotion in his slow, rude, mute nature, that he had hungered for a rose from her bosom the night before he had gone out to be shot like a dog for her sake.
Of the mortification of waning ardour, of the slow sad change from fervour to apathy, of the great débâcle of all passion which so many women watch with hopeless and sinking hearts, as poor peasants of Alpine valleys watch the melting snow and stealing floods sweep away their homesteads — of these she had known nothing; known no more than the reigning and honoured sovereign knows of exile and dethronement. Now she was conscious of it, of the first slight imperceptible chillness of feeling, even as she had been conscious of what no other eyes than hers saw; the first faint change in her own beauty like the film of breath on a mirror. It was very slight, rather negative than positive, rather told by what was lacking than by what was present; a shadow of fatigue, an absence of eagerness, a forced attention, an accent of constraint, slender, vague, intangible things all; yet apparent and eloquent to her quick intelligence, to her supreme knowledge of human nature.
They affected her with a strange sense of offence, of astonishment, of irritation. She had a sudden impression of loss, as of one who, having carelessly swung in his hand, without remembering it, a jewel of value, discovers with a shock of surprise that his hand is empty, and his treasure dropped in some crowded street, its fall unheard, its loss only told by its absence.
Always, hitherto, after any separation he had returned to her with the impassioned enthusiasm of a lover; the hours had been long to him without her near presence, and all the warmth of early passion had accompanied his return to or his welcome of her. She had often chilled him, checked him, laughed at him, left him vexed, dissatisfied, and chafing, but the ardour on his side had never been less. Men had called him uxorious, and he had been careless of their ridicule; he had only lived for her. Now, for the first time, a chill had come, as sometimes in a summer night, in those still grass plains of Russia, there would steal through the hot, fragrant air a breath of ice-cold wind, and then those skilled to read the forecast of the weather would say to one another: ‘Lo! the frost is near.’
She was as skilled in the weather of the human heart as the peasants were in that of the earth and skies; and she failed not to read its presage aright. With all her arrogance she had always had that kind of humility which comes from great intelligence and self-comprehension; part of her contempt for her many lovers had arisen from her candid estimate of herself, as not worth so much covetousness, despair, and dispute. All the flatteries she had been saturated with all her life had left her brain cool, and had never warped her estimate of herself. She would see coldness take the place of idolatry with the same philosophic consciousness of its inevitability with which she contemplated the certainty of age overtaking her upon the road of life if she continued to live. Long before their approach she had reasoned out the surety of the arrival of both, sure as the surety of winter to the Russian plains. But still, nature shrinks and withers before winter. Who can welcome it as they welcome summer?
With the inherent instinct of contradiction common to all human nature she, who had nine times out of ten evaded his caresses and repulsed his affections, was angered and felt defrauded of her own because for once her power over him in a measure failed in the exercise of its magnetism. To find thoughts which occupied his mind to her exclusion was something so strange, so new, that it disturbed all her philosophic serenity, and with that quick divination of the motives of men with which her experience and her penetration supplied her, she wondered if it were in truth only the memory of that poor dead woman which had changed his manner and chilled his caresses, or if it were some fresh and living influence?
A certain cold contempt succeeded her anger as this possibility suggested itself.
If he were like other men, after all? Well — why not? Would she care
greatly? She did not know. All she was conscious of at the moment was that sense of astonishment, of affront, of loss, with which a woman feels for the first time that her power over any man has had its fullest sway, and has begun to decline and waste.
It was a sensation she had never experienced before, and it displeased her that she should be capable of feeling it.
‘As if I were Jeannette and he were Jeanôt!’ she thought with disdain for so bourgeois an emotion.
But it recalled to her sharply, painfully, what the world never had recalled to her hitherto; that the time must come to her, no less than to others, when her empire over all men would cease, when its sceptre would pass to other hands. It is a knowledge which hurts with the humiliation of dethronement every woman who has ever reigned.
There was nothing said by either which had the least actual coldness or offence in it: yet the sense of offence and coldness was between them, and many times he smarted under some such touch of ridicule or of reproof from her as had used to make Platon Napraxine stand like a chidden schoolboy before her. He was neither so blunt of nerve nor so dull of comprehension as Napraxine had been; and he had an impatient revolt of compromised dignity when he became the target for his wife’s delicate and cruel ironies. True, he knew they were a part of her temper; as natural to her as its talon to the falcon, as its pungent odour to the calycanthus. He did not attribute too serious a meaning to them, knowing that her lips were often merciless when her heart was kind. Yet they irritated and estranged him. No man likes to feel that his character is lessened or his opinions regarded with indifference by the woman before whom he most desires to stand in a fair if not an heroic light.