by Ouida
‘Tell me what you wish,’ she said in a low tone. ‘If I can I will do it.’
The voice of Rosselin shook a little as he answered, ‘My child I want you to do what she cannot. These people have all things; they have ease and mirth, and soft beds, and minds without care, and great riches, and great palaces, and great powers, but there are two things which often escape them, and ofttimes the poor have the one and now and then they are born to the other. I mean that great consoler of the humble, content, and that great redresser of injustice, genius. You have the latter. In your sea-gull’s nest the Muses found you. Oh, child, be grateful! You are richer than the kings who ruled here in Paris — if only you knew your riches!’
She looked up at him suddenly, pushing her troubled curls out of her eyes.
‘If I spoke before her my throat would dry up — my voice would be strangled in it. If I were to do well, she would never care. If I were to fail, she would smile. I should see her smile in my grave. He loves her you know, he loves her so much, but she has made his heart numb in him with her indifference and her scorn.’
He was awed and amazed at such intensity of dread in a nature which had always seemed to him bold as the winds, and resolute and headstrong.
‘Yes,’ he said, almost brutally. ‘If you fail she will smile, she will laugh; she knows nothing of failure. But you will not fail. Only the weak fail. You are strong. You will not let that woman think that you threw away your genius for love of her lord!’
They were words which were hard and rough and brutal; but they seemed to him the wisest words that he could speak. She was a child with a passionate heart half broken; unless that heart were torn out and trodden under her foot, he thought that she would never walk straight to where the laurels, the bitter laurels, grew.
He meant to do well; he spoke according to his light; but he was only a man and childless, and forgot a little what easily bruised things the hearts of some women are when they are very young, and have hot blood in their veins, and are all alone in a world which feels to them as the stony road of the moorland feels to the shot doe when there is many a long mile to be covered between her and the herd.
She turned her head from him quickly, and he saw the dark red flush which stained her throat.
She did not answer. The words brought no solace to her. Her heart was empty. He saw the great tears roll slowly down her cheeks. He realised that the hilt of this two-edged sword which he held out to her was too cold a pillow for so young a breast.
CHAPTER XLIII.
The weeks passed on, and Othmar returned no more to the fields of Chevreuse. The great interests and the vast operations of his house occupied his time, and the days of this man whom Nature had created a dreamer and a student, went away in the consideration of financial enterprises, in the audience of innumerable supplicants, in the emission of national loans, and in the study of political situations. He thought oftentimes of her, but he went to her no more. To let her alone he knew was, as Rosselin said, all that he could do for her.
His wife he scarcely saw at this season.
Now and then when it was unavoidable he went with her to some great dinner or reception; oftener they received at home themselves, and on such evenings he saw her in all the grace and elegance which the highest culture and the utmost fashion can lend to a woman already patrician in every fibre of her being. Sometimes she addressed a few words to him concerning the children, or the horses, or some matter of mutual interest; and he saw her carriage passing in and out, her friends and acquaintances coming and going on the stairs, her attendants carrying her chocolate, or her bouquets, or the offerings made her by her courtiers: that was all. In no year had she been more absorbingly mondaine; in no year had she been so conspicuous as the greatest lady in Paris; in no year had her balls, her fêtes, her banquets, her concerts, been more wonderful in their novelty and more exclusive in their invitations.
‘Dame! elle a un chic incroyable!’ thought Blanchette, angrily, watching her and conscious that her day was not done as she had hoped.
Meantime, in the brilliant movement of which his house was the centre, Othmar felt that he was becoming rapidly a mere cypher amidst it all, as Platon Napraxine had been, and he perceived no way by which he could recover his influence without her ridicule and the world’s comment. That had come to him which he had said should never come: he was nothing in her life, not so much as one of her mere acquaintances.
Such a position had always seemed to him the deepest humiliation that any man could accept; he had always thought that any man might save his dignity if he could not secure his own happiness; but now, he saw how easy it is to theorise, how difficult it is to resist the slow insidious influence of circumstances. We drift into positions which we hate without being conscious of our descent, and the effect of others upon our nature and our actions is as subtle and as unperceived as those of climate or of time.
He could not have said when the first coldness had come between himself and her, when the first irritation had crept into their intercourse, when the first frost of indifference had passed from her manner over the warmth of his own emotions. It had been unperceived, uncounted, but its results had grown and strengthened, until now they were like ten thousand other men and women in the world, living under the same roof, but wholly strangers to each other, only united by one slender thread, their mutual interests. It was a position which wounded him, humiliated him, oppressed him with a constant sense of weakness and of failure: he had not the slightest power over her, though she retained much over him; strong men, he thought, either left their wives or forced them to keep their marriage vows; and he did neither.
Of late she had become almost insolent in her tone to him; she seemed to take pleasure in passing the most marked slights upon him; she purposely withheld from him the slightest acquaintance with her movements or intentions, and at times her eyes looked at him with a cynical disdain.
It was absurd, he felt, and exaggerated, and probably wholly ungrounded in every way, but there were moments when he imagined that she wished to remind him of his social inferiority to herself, moments when the recollection of the origin of the Othmar fortunes spoilt for a passing hour her pleasure in the existence of her children. Though he did not harbour the suspicion, but threw it away from him as unworthy of both himself and her, it yet existed and made him over-sensitive to any slight upon her part, quick to perceive the faintest tinge of contempt in her tone to him. He knew that she could count her great ancestries far beyond the dim days of Rurick; whilst there were courts of Europe where feudal etiquette still prevailed strongly enough to make his presence in their throne-rooms impossible. These were mere nominal differences, no doubt, and he might perchance have saved from bankruptcy the very state in which he would have been forbidden to pass the palace gates if he had sought to accompany her through them; but still there were moments when the voice and the glance of his wife recalled these conventional things to him out of the limbo of absolute nullity in which, but for those, he let them lie. Never by any spoken word or hint had she ever reminded him of them, yet now and then in her colder moments he thought: ‘Perhaps she remembers that two hundred years ago if her forefathers rode over the plains of Croatia they could ride down mine before them, and drive them with their whips like so many acorn-eating swine!’
He began to believe that she was in truth as cruel as the world had always called her; and a feeling which was almost hatred at times awoke in him and blent with the suffering she caused him.
It seemed to him that no man on earth ever gave a woman such passion and such worship as he had given her; these might at least, he thought, have secured respect from her, even if they had failed to hold her sympathy.
He said nothing to her. Remonstrance would have been useless, supplication unmanly. He let time drift them where it would: and in the ever-exercising burden of his pain Damaris became almost forgotten.
Some weeks after the performance of Lemberg’s cantata, Blanche de Laon, cal
ling on the woman whom she hated on her ‘jour,’ came late, stayed until the rooms were nearly emptied of their crowd, and then sank down beside her hostess on a low couch in a corner palm-shadowed, where banks of lilies of the valley gave out their fragrance under rose-shaded lamps, and great Japanese vases were filled with the rosy flowers of the gesneria and the philesia. She always paid great outward deference to Nadège, was coaxing and câline, and for her alone subdued the rudeness and the shrillness of her voice and manner. She leaned now beside her on the broad low seat of the cushioned corner, whilst the few people who remained in the rooms conversed in little groups, and the flowers, the porcelains, the stuffs, the pictures, the embroidered satins of the walls, the long vista of salons opening one out of another, made up one of those pictures of harmonised colour and of artistically arranged luxuries of which the modern world is so full. Blanchette had all manner of confidential things to disclose, secrets of this toilette and that, of this scandal and the other, of the true reason of a dear friend’s sudden indisposition, and the actual cause of a coming duel; all these secrets de Polichinelle, which society loves to carry about and distribute, things which are mysteries of life and death yet whispered at every ‘petit quart d’heure’ in every house known to fashion.
Nadine listened, leaning back amongst her cushions indifferent, scarcely affecting attention, thinking of her own costume at a coming ball she was about to give, in which the règne animal of Cuvier was to furnish the dresses. She had chosen a panther. All the yellow and black would make her delicate colourless skin look so well, and she would wear all her diamonds, and —— . She was aroused from her meditation by the question which Blanche de Laon put suddenly to her.
‘Do tell me,’ she said, leaning down amongst her cushions: ‘You know I like to be the first to hear things — when will the new genius make her début with you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, you know what I mean; this young artist whom Rosselin is training, in whom your husband is interested, and who is to make her first appearance here? Who is she? Do tell me about her. I should like to have her appear at my house if you have no proprietary rights to her exclusive production.’
‘I have no idea of what person you speak of; I am not fond of untried artists,’ she answered, with perfect indifference, but Blanchette saw a shade of surprise and a coldness of displeasure on her face.
‘Oh, surely you like a débutante?’ she said carelessly. ‘It always amuses people so much, something quite new, and I believe this girl is beautiful; does not Othmar say so?’
But by this time her hostess was on her guard, and her expression wholly under control.
‘I think I know whom you mean now,’ she replied indifferently. ‘But as to a début here — that is quite in the future. I am not fond of untried artists as I say: one does not take out unbroken horses to drive in a crowd. Genius is admirable, but I think like wine it wants time and a seal set upon it before one offers it at one’s table.’
Blanche de Laon was perplexed.
‘Does she know all about her, or nothing about her?’ she wondered. ‘I want to know more myself before I go on with it.’
Some other people approached them at that moment; the conversation turned on the règne animal ball; Blanchette, disappointed, rose and went and drank deux doigts de liqueur, and ate a caviare biscuit, in another room, where Loris Loswa was drawing some caricatures of mutual acquaintances, as the beasts of Cuvier, on his visiting cards, and distributing them amongst some ladies of fashion.
‘Meet me on Saturday at eleven at the Rond point,’ she murmured to him as she took from him a sketch of her brother-in-law the Duc d’Yprès as a wild boar in top boots, over which she condescended to shriek her shrillest laughter and approval.
When her rooms were all quite emptied, and she was left alone in them, Nadine remained leaning back amongst the cushions motionless and with a cold contemptuous anger on her face.
‘To think that I should accept such a part as that!’ she thought. ‘He must be mad and the whole world with him!’
Weak women, indulgent women, women who were afraid and wanted pardon for their own secrets, these women did these things, aided their husbands’ amours, received their husbands’ favourites, helped their husbands to conventional disguises of equivocal situations, but that rôle, was not hers.
‘And he came from this girl to me in Russia;’ she thought with that physical disgust which is so strong in some women, and which men never understand.
One forenoon on entering his study, Othmar missed from the wall the sketch made by Loswa. There was only a blank space between the places of the Corot and the Aivanoffsky. He rang for the major-domo.
‘Who has taken the portrait from that place?’ he asked; he feared the entrance of some thief from the gardens.
The major-domo, astonished and alarmed, replied that he had taken it down that morning by command of his mistress, and had sent it whither she had directed him to do; to a certain gallery recently built on the Trocadéro.
‘You were quite right to do so if Madame desired you,’ said Othmar; and dismissed the official without more comment.
As soon as he could be admitted to his wife’s presence, he went to her and opened the subject with scanty preface.
‘Philippe says that you ordered him to send the sketch by Loswa out of my study to the new gallery on the Trocadéro,’ he said, when he had made her his usual greeting. ‘Is that true?’
‘Very true. One would think I had ordered him to blow up the Louvre or the Luxembourg!’
‘May I venture to inquire your reasons?’
‘Certainly. There is an exhibition of Loswa’s works about to be opened there. You are aware that these exhibitions of a single master are very popular now. That head is one of the best things he has done. It will come back to you in three months. Cannot you live without it till then?’
Othmar felt that he coloured like a boy.
‘I would, of course, have lent it,’ he said with a little hesitation.
‘I have sent all his portraits of myself and of the children,’ she said with a cold glance at him. ‘You do not appear to have missed those.’
‘I have probably not entered the rooms in which they hung. If you will pardon my saying so, I do not care to know less of what you wish to do than my servants know — and to know it first through them.’
‘If I had told you, you would have objected. When I know that people will object, I never ask them what they wish.’
‘The method has the merit of simplicity.’
He felt exceedingly angered; in the first place he did not care to have the portrait seen by all Paris at a moment when the original was living so near Paris with no friend but himself, and in the second place he indignantly resented being treated like a cypher in his own houses; he never permitted himself to intrude on her personal arrangements — could she not respect his?
Now and then, and above all of late, there had been something high-handed and even insolent in her occasional treatment of things which concerned him, and on which she did not consult him; something which made him fancy that in the deepest depth of the thoughts and feelings there was occasionally the remembrance that the great race of princes from whom she herself descended would have deemed her alliance with one of the princes of finance a gross mésalliance.
This was a trifle, no doubt, and he was not a man who ever disputed small matters. But the tone with which she had spoken had given it something of personal offence, and he could not shake from him the impression that she had purposely sent away the portrait. The exhibition was about to take place, no doubt, at the new gallery on the Trocadéro; Loswa having quarrelled violently with the committee of the Salon, had chosen to prove that the collection of his works would be more attractive to the public than anything which the Salon could offer without his assistance; but the manner in which this sketch had been removed from his study, conveyed to Othmar the impression of some personal motive, some per
sonal meaning in the act.
Capricious as his wife always was, she yet was usually courteous. This insolence of the removal of his picture was unlike her.
She always held the very true creed that mutual politeness is the first of obligations to render the intimacy of daily life endurable.
He left her presence quickly, afraid of what his anger might bring him into saying. He had never as yet wholly lost his temper with her, though there were times when it was sorely tried.
Her cold, nonchalant, slighting tone was that which always tried it the most. Of all things which he most hated it was to be spoken to as Platon Napraxine had been; like the last of her lacqueys! as he thought bitterly now. She looked after him with some scorn.
‘Is he gone to the Trocadéro to seize back his lost treasure?’
She had sent the sketch thither on purpose to see what he would do or say.
With an impulse which was as swift as thought itself and which he did not pause to consider, he turned back as he reached the threshold of her boudoir, and stood before her.
‘Nadège,’ he began with an impetuosity which yet had a certain timidity in it. ‘There is something which I wished to tell you the other day. There is a reason which makes me especially regret that you should have sent that portrait for exhibition without referring the matter to me. Are you inclined to be patient enough to hear a little tale which might interest you perhaps if it were a sketch by Ludovic Halévy, but I fear will not do so told in my poor words?’
He did not observe the expression of her eyes, which surveyed him with a cynical coldness, as she asked:
‘Do you mean that you have written a romance? — or played one?’
There was the mockery in the words which he had dreaded so much that he had put off this moment day after day, week after week, month after month.