by Ouida
‘You are melodramatic,’ she said, with her serene contempt. ‘Perhaps you will appear on the stage, too! I shall be glad if you will spare me more words on such a subject. I shall not resent it publicly. All I request of you is to avoid publicity in it as far as possible. That is a mere matter of good taste.’
‘Good God!’ he cried, beside himself. ‘Do you credit that I should stand here and lie to you? Do you believe that I should stoop so low? — do you think that I come here like a comedian to repeat a monologue of my own invention? You may think what else of me that you will, but this you shall not think. I am not the lover of Damaris Bérarde; I have never been so — I shall never be so.’
‘If you swore it on the lives of your own children, I would not believe you?’
Some reflex and heat of the flame of his rage caught her soul also for one sudden instant, and drew it out for that one instant from its serenity and reticence.
There was the vibration of intensest passion in her voice; she half rose from her seat; her bosom heaved; the rose fell in a shower of leaves to the floor; for the moment he thought that she would strike him.
‘You shall believe me,’ he said in answer, ‘or I will not live under the same roof with you!’
Then he looked at her with one last look, and left her presence.
CHAPTER XLIV.
Othmar went into his great library, and shut the door upon himself. For more than an hour he paced to and fro the length of the room, overcome with an agitation which he could not master. He had a sense that his life was over. He felt as though his very heart-strings had snapped and parted for ever. A great love cannot perish without some such throb as a strong animal life suffers when it is forcibly torn asunder. A kind of horror seized him at the idea of the years which were to come; the long, long years through which he would dwell in apparent amity beside her in the sight of the world.
His first impulse was to go out of the house, out of the city, out of the world, to leave her everything he possessed, but never to see her face again.
But a brief reflection made him feel how impossible such a course as that would be to him. Obscure people can do these things, they are happy; they are not set in the fierce light of publicity and society, and no one heeds it if they creep away to lay their aching heads under some lowly roof in solitude. But to a man well known and conspicuous in the life of the world, any such retreat into obscurity is impossible. He is bound hand and foot by a million threads, each strong as cables to hold him to his place. He cannot forsake his place without forsaking a mass of interests confided to his honour. Solitude is for ever forbidden to him, and liberty he can never more recover. Life never gives two opposite sets of gifts to the same recipient; it never bestows both the king’s dominion and the peasant’s peace. The sigh of Henry IV. upon his sleepless couch is the sigh of all eminence whatever be its throne.
Othmar’s momentary longing to go far away from everything and everyone he had ever known, and never again behold the woman whom he had adored, and who had insulted him as though she had struck him with a knout, was the natural thirst for loneliness of all wounded creatures. But he knew that this desire, like so many others, was hopeless; he could never leave her or the world he lived in; there were his children, who must not be sacrificed, and the fortunes of others which must not be imperilled. He knew that he could no more undo the bands fastened — many by his own hand — around him, than he could sweep ten years off the sum of his past life. Such as his existence was now, so he had to continue it.
He walked to and fro the vast length of the chamber in the quiet of the noonday. He felt as if her hand had struck him.
It had not been even an insult of unpremeditated passion, of hot anger, of inconsiderate haste — as such as he might have pardoned it — but, serene and deliberate and measured, spoken in cold blood, and matured on long consideration, it had been such an outrage as severs the closest ties, and destroys the most profound affections, cuts at the deepest roots of self-respect, and burns up all delicate fibres of sympathy. He would much sooner have forgiven a dagger’s thrust.
He had been insulted by the one person for whom he had given up all his life, all his loyalty, all his devotion, all his faith, and all his years to come. The outrage of her insolence, of her disbelief, burned in his heart as the shame of a blow burns on a brave man’s forehead. Never could he make her believe, though he were to swear the truth to her as he lay dying!
That perfect silence with which she had listened and led him on to speak, that perfect consciousness of all his actions which had existed beneath her apparent ignorance, that feline attitude of cold expectation and of watchful, motionless observation with which she had waited for the telling of a tale of which she already knew every smallest detail: all these seemed to him horrible, hateful, unnatural in a woman so near to him, so dear to him, to whom he had given up his life, and whom he had never wronged, or slighted, or betrayed. And then the espionage! — all his soul revolted at it.
‘One might have known that the weapon of a Russian woman is always a spy!’ he thought, with passionate indignation at what seemed to him this last and lowest of affronts.
If he had found in her any of the warm and fond, though unwise, angers of that jealousy which loves whilst it hates, he would have forgiven and comprehended it. But he could not hope that there was any single pulse of it in her breast. She had viewed and measured his actions with the accuracy and coldness of a judge of court overwhelming any prisoner with his logic, and had treated his own asseverations with utter and contemptuous disbelief, not deigning even to weigh as remotely possible the chance that he might tell the truth. He himself would have taken her word against that of the whole world, against all evidence of his own senses, all adverse witness of circumstance.
‘I was mad to suppose she ever cared for me,’ he thought bitterly, whilst the tears rose hotly in his eyes. ‘For my children she cares, perhaps, but for me nothing: I have never been wise enough, great enough, strong enough to compel even her respect. She looks on me as a mere dreamer, a mere fool. All she is anxious for now is that the world may not have a story to laugh at, because it would lessen her dignity and offend her pride!’
And yet he loved her still as he remembered her there sitting so still, so fair, with the cold challenge in her eyes, and the pale roses at her breast; and she was all his, and yet as far off him as though she were queen in another world beyond the sun; and he loved her still, and was filled with guilty shame at his own weakness, as men are when they still adore the women who have defiled their name.
CHAPTER XLV.
For the first time in her whole existence his wife had known the mastery of a strong and uncontrollable impulse of emotion; for the first time since her dreamy eyes had smiled at the pains and follies of men a wave of fierce and simple passion had passed through her as the seismic wave moves the still earth.
She was touched with the common infirmity of common lives.
The women in her laundry rooms, the groom’s wife who lived above her horses’ stables, might feel as she felt now. Jealousy! It could not be jealousy. Would Cleopatra have been jealous of that slave from the market-place, that Nubian seller of green figs, or Persian dancing girl?
For jealousy it seemed to her there must first of all, be equality. No — no: she was not jealous; she was only angered, bitterly angered, because he had stooped to subterfuge and to untruth: earths in which the fox of cowardice always hides. It was all ignoble, mean, unworthy, there was no manliness in it and no honesty. Any common knave could have woven such a net of falsehood and stupidity as this.
He had thought to deceive her! She could almost have laughed aloud at the idea! — was there any brain subtle enough, clear enough, wise enough in all Europe to invent a lie which would have power to blind her? Surely not; and he knew it; and yet he had thought such vulgar ordinary devices as have served in half the vaudevilles of half the theatres of France would serve to hoodwink and to satisfy her!
&nb
sp; There was a vulgarity in such miserable intrigue, which offended her taste whilst it outraged her dignity. In all the innumerable women of their own world could he not have found some rival in some measure her equal?
It might have hurt her more, but at least it would have insulted her less.
She remained alone and motionless, except for such feverish mechanical action as that with which her right hand plucked the roses from the bowl one by one and tore their hearts asunder.
She did not know she did it. She shed the sweet, faint-smelling petals on the floor, and her fingers had the movement of a great nervousness as they played with the loosened leaves. No one came there to disturb her; no one would dare to do so until she rang; the slow morning hours crept on, the very footfall of time was muffled, and did not dare obtrude in these still fragrant chambers where the air was heavy with hothouse heat, and was sweet with a somnolent lily-like odour.
She took the little written sheets from between the blotting-paper and read what was written on them again. There was more than she had read aloud to him. All the details of his intercourse with Damaris Bérarde were described there with searching minuteness. She studied them again and again. Their bare records were full of suggestion to her; they seemed to tell so much which was not said in words, to be pregnant with meaning and with cynical emphasis.
She sat still as any statue of a queen dethroned; the pale rose folds of the satin flowing about her feet, the ruin of pale rose leaves on the floor before her.
All her life she had laughed at the love of men and derided it, and starved it on graceful philosophies and ethereal conceits, and dismissed it with airy banter and disbelieved its truest words and its hardest pains: and now a love which she had lost escaped her, and she found no comfort either in her wit or in her scorn.
Certain of the words which he had said to her remained in persistent echo on her ear. Some sense that she had been cold to him and too capricious, and too negligent of what he felt, came to her. It might even be that he had sought the warmth of other affections because she had left his heart empty herself. He had always been a sentimentalist! Had she not called him Werther, Obermann, René, Rolla? He had wanted the impossible, the immutable, the eternal.
He had asked of love and of life what neither can give.
He had expected a moment of divinest rapture to be prolonged through a lifetime.
He had expected the song of the nightingale to thrill through the year. Senseless dreams and hopeless! — but had she been too cruel to them?
For a moment her conscience spoke, and her heart relented towards him. She remembered the many times when she had treated the warmth of his passion as an absurd delirium or an exaggerated sentiment, when she had again and again and again bidden him take his erratic rhapsodies elsewhere than to her.
If he had done so, was he so much to blame?
Almost she could have pardoned him. If only he had not lied to her she would have pardoned him.
‘Good God, why could he not be honest?’ she thought, with indignant scorn. ‘Why could he not kneel at her feet, and lay his head upon her knee and own his folly? Men were weak always, and so easily misled whenever their senses ruled them, and such mere animals after all, even those in whom the mind was strongest!’
CHAPTER XLVI.
‘Send the children to me,’ she said when at last she rang for her women, and the children came. They had come in from their morning’s ride on their small ponies in the Bois. They were very pretty in their velvet riding dresses, with their golden hair flowing over their shoulders; they were very gentle and had admirable manners; the little boy with his cap in his hand kissed his mother’s fingers with an old-world grace. She drew them both towards her.
‘Mes mignons,’ she said, looking alternately at each of them, ‘I want you to tell me something quite honestly; are you afraid of me, either of you?’
The young Otho, a very sensitive and chivalrous child, coloured to his hair and was silent; his sister Xenia, less timid and more communicative, answered for him and for herself: ‘We are both of us — a little.’
The brows of Nadine contracted with a sudden sense of pain.
‘Why?’ she said imperiously.
The children did not reply; their small faces grew serious; they were not prepared to analyse what they felt.
‘Do you mean,’ she continued, ‘that if you wished for anything you would sooner ask your father for it than you would ask me?’
The children nodded their heads silently. They had lost their colour. She saw that the interrogation alarmed them.
‘Why?’ she repeated, in a softer tone.
They were still silent; they could not really tell; they only knew that a certain sense of timidity and awe was always upon them in their mother’s presence, that they never dared to laugh too loudly or ask a question twice before her. They loved her, and had the passionate admiration of childhood for that which is above it and incomprehensible to it, and she seemed to them more wonderful and beautiful than any other living creature, but there was a tinge of fear in their sense of her presence.
She read their unformed confused thoughts, and she felt a sharp reproach in their tacit confession.
Had she been so engrossed in the ice of her egotism, that she had never taken the trouble even to stoop and draw to her these young hesitating half-opened souls?
Had she been cold and careless even to them?
Enfants d’amour, nés d’une étreinte!
she murmured as she kissed them with lips which trembled; had she been so little kind to them that even they feared her?
‘Maman était prête à pleurer,’ murmured Xenia to her brother in amazed awe, as with their arms wound about each other they passed down the corridor to their own apartments.
Otho drew a long breath.
‘Elle nous a embrassés, vois-tu,’ he murmured, ‘comme on embrasse les petits pauvres!’
‘Les petits pauvres,’ whom he had seen in the Tuileries or the Luxembourg gardens, kissed by their ragged mothers with eager tenderness on cold winter mornings, when perhaps the mothers had no food to give them except such fond caresses. Watching those happy hungry children, he had said more than once to his sister enviously, ‘Si maman nous embrassait comme ça!’
And then they had always kissed each other to make up for the caresses which they did not obtain.
And now she too had kissed them ‘comme ça!’ They were not sure whether they had done something very wrong or something very good to move her so; one or the other they were sure it must have been.
As the children went from her presence a note was brought her which briefly announced that the Princess Lobow Gregorievna had arrived in Paris from Russia to consult some famous physician.
‘As the vulture comes when there is death in the air,’ she murmured with passion, as she tore the note in two. Must this mummied saint even change all the habits of her life and quit her country to be present here, when for the first time a rupture open and irrevocable had come between herself and Othmar, when in a few days’ time, if it were not doing so already, all Paris would be speaking of the cause of their disunion!
All the vague dormant superstition which slumbered beneath her sceptical intelligence, made her see a fatal omen in this unlooked-for arrival of her bitterest enemy. More than once she had said in her heart, ‘If ever I have misfortune, Lobow Gregorievna will be there to triumph in it.’ And now she was there, within a few streets, residing in a religious house of Muscovite nuns, a dark still austere spectre, which seemed to her like the carrion bird which waits for those who die.
‘Do I grow nervous and hysterical?’ she asked herself in scorn.
She who had meted out destiny to so many, who had thought that it was only the timid and foolish who let life go ill with them, who had regarded the sorrows of sentiment and emotion with an indulgent contempt, felt with anger against herself that such a trivial thing as the advent of a woman who hated her could affect her nerves and appear t
o her a presage of ill. With her delicate scorn and her consummate indifference she had turned aside all the efforts of others to move her or influence her; she had never known either apprehension or regret; it had always seemed to her that life was a comedy to be played ill or well according as you were wise or stupid. Suddenly, for the first time, emotions which were beyond her own control affected her, and a sense that circumstance escaped her guidance filled her with the sharp pain of irritated impotence.
She knew the world too well not to know that all the women who had vainly envied her, and many of the men who had vainly wooed her, would take pleasure and find solace in every whisper which should tell them of the offence to her pride; and she knew the world too well not to know also that there is no such thing as privacy in it, that all which she had learned through Michel Obrenowitch society would find out and gossip exaggerate; and that the whole of the society throughout Europe which she had dominated and influenced and been feared by for so long, would know that she — she — Nadège Feodorowna — was deserted for a peasant girl taken from the streets.
All the imperious blood which was in her changed to fire as she thought of the certain comments of the courts and drawing-rooms in which she had been so long so arrogant a leader, so dreaded a wit; she knew that eagerly as hounds at the curée would all her flatterers, friends, and lovers join her foes in exultantly rejoicing over her insulted dignity.
How many and many a time she had heard society laugh over just such a story as this! How well she knew all the cruel derision, all the gay contempt, all the equivocal jests, all the affected pity! How well she knew that precisely in measure to the homage which they yield us is the pleasure of others in our pain!