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Princess Napraxine, Volume 2 (of 3)

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Title: Princess Napraxine, Volume 2 (of 3)

Author: Ouida


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRINCESS NAPRAXINE, VOLUME 2 (OF 3) ***

 PRINCESS NAPRAXINE

       II.




 New Three-volume Novels at all Libraries.


  DOROTHY FORSTER. By WALTER BESANT.

  THE NEW ABELARD. By ROBERT BUCHANAN.

  A REAL QUEEN. By R. E. FRANCILLON.

  THE WAY OF THE WORLD. By DAVID CHRISTIE
  MURRAY.

   CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly, W.




   Table of Contents
  Chapter 14    1
  Chapter 15    9
  Chapter 16    41
  Chapter 17    63
  Chapter 18    77
  Chapter 19    80
  Chapter 20    98
  Chapter 21    117
  Chapter 22    136
  Chapter 23    157
  Chapter 24    171
  Chapter 25    192
  Chapter 26    207
  Chapter 27    218
  Chapter 28    232
  Chapter 29    254
  Chapter 30    276
  Chapter 31    278
  Chapter 32    321
  Chapter 33    340
Chatto & Windus's List of Books




     PRINCESS NAPRAXINE

             BY

            OUIDA

       [Illustration]

      IN THREE VOLUMES

          VOL. II.

           London
 CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
            1884

   [_All rights reserved_]




PRINCESS NAPRAXINE.




CHAPTER XIV.


When her husband and her guests came downstairs at one o'clock, they
found the Princess Nadine looking her loveliest.

'Oh, you lazy people!' she cried to them. 'Are you any the better for
sleeping like that? Look at me. I have been swimming half an hour; I
have dictated twenty letters; I have scolded the gardeners, and I have
seen three boxes from Worth unpacked; it is only one o'clock, and I can
already feel as good a conscience as Titus. I have already saved my
day.'

'I daresay you have only been doing mischief,' said Lady Brancepeth. 'I
should like to see the letters before I judge of the excellence of your
actions.'

'Anyone might see the letters; they are all orders, or invitations, or
refusals of invitations; quite stupid, but very useful; epistolary
omnibus horses driven by the secretary. When I had done with them,
I had my half hour's swim. What nonsense the doctors talk about not
swimming in winter: the chill of the water is delicious. In summer one
always fancies the sea has been boiled. Platon, if you had not gone to
bed, you would have seen your friend Othmar. He was here for half an
hour.'

'Othmar!' exclaimed the Prince. 'Here at that time of the morning?'

'He does not want to go to sleep,' she retorted. 'He had his chocolate
with me, and then rowed himself back to S. Pharamond and Baron Fritz.'

Lady Brancepeth glanced at her.

'You have certainly done a great deal, Nadine, while we have been only
dozing,' she said drily. The Princess looked at her good-humouredly,
with her little dubious smile.

'There is always something to do if one only look for it. You feel
so satisfied with yourself too when you have been useful before one
o'clock.'

'Othmar!' repeated the Prince. 'If I had known, I would have come
downstairs.'

'My dear Platon, you would have done nothing of the kind; you would
have sworn at your man for disturbing you, and would have turned round
and gone to sleep again. Besides, what do you want with Othmar? You do
not care about "getting on a good thing," nor even about suggesting a
loan for Odessa.'

'I like Othmar,' said Napraxine with perfect sincerity. His wife looked
at him, with her little dubious smile. 'It is always so with them,' she
thought. 'They always like just the one man of all others----!'

'I suppose, if I had done quite what I ought, I should have asked
Othmar to "put me on" something,' she said aloud. 'It is not every day
that one has one of the masters of the world all alone at eight o'clock
in the morning.'

'The masters of the world always find their Cleopatras,' said Lady
Brancepeth. 'At La Jacquemerille, perhaps, as well as in Egypt.'

'Cleopatra must have been a very stupid woman,' said Nadine Napraxine,
'to be able to think of nothing but that asp!'

'I do not know that it was so very stupid; it was a good _réclame_. It
has sent her name down to us.'

'Anthony alone would have done that. A woman lives by her lovers. Who
would have heard of Héloïse, of Beatrice, of Leonora d'Este?----'

'You are very modest for us. Perhaps without the women the men might
never have been immortal.'

'I cannot think why you sent Othmar away,' repeated Prince Napraxine.
'I wanted especially to know if they take up the Russian loan----'

'I did not send him away, he went,' replied his wife, with a little
smile; 'and you know he will never allow anyone to talk finance to him.'

'That is very absurd. He cannot deny that his House lives by finance.'

'He would certainly never deny it, but he dislikes the fact; you cannot
force it on him, my dear Platon, in the course of breakfast chit-chat.
I am sure your manners are better than that. Besides, if you did commit
such a rudeness, you would get nothing by it. I believe he never tells
a falsehood, but he will never tell the truth unless he chooses. And I
suppose, too, that financiers are like cabinet ministers--they have a
right to lie if they like.'

'I am sure Othmar does not lie,' said Napraxine.

'I dare say he is as truthful as most men of the world. Truth is not
a social virtue; tact is a much more amiable quality. Truth says to
one, 'You have not a good feature in your face;' tact says to one, 'You
have an exquisite expression.' Perhaps both facts are equally true;
but the one only sees what is unpleasant, the other only sees what is
agreeable. There can be no question which is the pleasanter companion.'

'Othmar has admirable tact----'

'How your mind runs upon Othmar! Kings generally acquire a great deal
of tact from the obligation to say something agreeable to so many
strangers all their lives. He is a kind of king in his way. He has
learnt the kings' art of saying a few phrases charmingly with all his
thoughts elsewhere. It is creditable to him, for he has no need to be
popular, he is so rich.'

'Ask him to dinner to-morrow or Sunday.'

'If you wish. But he will not come; he dislikes dinners as much as I
do. It is the most barbarous method of seeing one's friends.'

'There is no other so genial.'

She rose with a little shrug of her shoulders. She seldom honoured
Napraxine by conversing so long with him.

'Order the horses, Ralph,' she said to Lord Geraldine; 'I want a long
gallop.'

'She has had some decisive scene with Othmar,' thought Lady Brancepeth,
'and she is out of humour; she always rides like a Don Kossack when she
is irritated.'

'There is no real riding here,' said the Princess, as she went to put
on her habit. 'One almost loves Russia when one thinks of the way one
can ride there; of those green eternal steppes, those illimitable
plains, with no limit but the dim grey horizon, your black Ukrane
horse, bounding like a deer, flying like a zephyr; it is worth while to
remain in Russia to gallop so, on a midsummer night, with not a wall or
a fence all the way between you and the Caspian Sea. I think if I were
always in Russia I should become such a poet as Maïkoff: those immense
distances are inspiration.'

She rode with exquisite grace and spirit; an old Kossack had taught
her, as a child, the joys of the saddle, on those lonely and dreamful
plains, which had always held since a certain place in her heart. That
latent energy and daring, which found no scope in the life of the
world, made her find pleasure in the strong stride of the horse beneath
her, in the cleaving of the air at topmost speed. The most indolent
of _mondaines_ at all other times, when she sprang into the saddle as
lightly as a bird on a bough, she was transformed; her slender hands
had a grip of steel, her delicate face flushed with pleasure, the fiery
soul of her fathers woke in her--of the men who had ridden out with
their troopers to hunt down the Persian and the Circassian; who had
swept like storm-clouds over those shadowy steppes which she loved;
who had had their part or share in all the tragic annals of Russia;
who had slain their foes at the steps of the throne, in the holiness
of the cloister; who had been amongst those whose swords had found the
heart of Cathrine's son, and whose voices had cried to the people in
the winter's morning, 'Paul, the son of Peter, is dead; pray for his
soul!' If she were cruel--now and then--was it not in her blood?

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile Yseulte was helping her foster-mother to pack tea-roses, to
go to England for a great ball, in their little hermetically-sealed
boxes. The roses were not wholly opened before they were thus shut
away from light and air into darkness. They would not wither in
their airless cells, but they would pale a little in that dull sad
voyage from the sunshine to the frost and fog. As she laid the
rosebuds,--pink, white, and pale yellow,--one by one on their beds of
moss, she thought for the first time wistfully that her fate was very
like theirs; only the rosebuds, perhaps, when they should be taken out
of their prisons at their journey's end, though they would have but
a very few hours of life before them, yet would bloom a little, if
mournfully, in the northern land, and see the light again, if only for
a day. But her life would be shut into silence and darkness for ever;
she would not even live the rose's life '_l'espace d'un matin_.'




CHAPTER XV.


When Othmar went out from her presence, he was more near to happiness
than he had been in his whole thirty years of life. He was filled
with vivid, palpitating, intoxicated hope. He was passionately in
love, and almost he believed himself beloved in return. As much as
she had allowed to him she had certainly allowed to no living man.
The very force of his passion, which had driven him to scorn the
conventional court which he might have paid her in common with so many
others--the spaniel's place of Geraldine, the slave's place of Boris
Seliedoff--rendered him as willing to set no limits to the sacrifices
which she should be free to exact from him, and he be proud to make.
Only he would never share her, even in nominal union with her lawful
lord. He would be all to her, or nothing.

He loathed the conventional adulteries of his time and of his society;
he sighed, impatiently for the means to prove that the old fearless,
high-handed, single-hearted passion which sees in the whole teeming
world only one life, was not dead, but lived in him for her.

He foresaw all the loss of freedom and of fair repute which would be
entailed on him by the surrender of his life to her; he knew well
that she was a woman who would be no docile companion or unexacting
mistress; he knew that there were in her the habits of dominance, the
instincts of egotism, and that _esprit gouailleur_ which compelled
her, almost despite herself, to jest at what she admired, to ridicule
her better emotions, to make a mockery of the very things which were
the dearest to her. He did not because he loved her become blind to
all that was cold, merciless, and capricious in her nature; he was
conscious that she would never lose her own identity in any passion,
never surrender her mind, even if she gave her person, to any lover; he
knew that she would always remain outside those tropic tempests of love
which she aroused and controlled, and which offended her or flattered
her, according to the mood in which they found her.

He knew all these things, and was aware that his future would not be
one of peace. But he loved her, and agitation, jealousy, suffering
beside her would, he felt, be sweeter to him than any repose beside
another. Even these defects, these dangers, which he clearly perceived,
added to her sorcery for him. It is the mistress who is indifferent
who excites the most vehement desires; and, by reason of his great
fortunes, women had been always to him so facile, so eager, and so
easily won, that the coldness of Nadine Napraxine, which he knew was a
thing of temperament, not of affectation, had but the more irresistible
power over him. The very sense with which she impressed everyone,
himself as well as others, of being no more to be held or relied upon
than the snowflake, to which her world likened her, attracted a man who
had, from his boyhood, been wearied by the adulation, insistence, and
sycophancy of almost all who approached him.

The few days of his probation passed slowly over his head, seeming as
though they would never end. He was restless, feverish, and absent
of mind; Friederich Othmar, who, contrary to all his usual habits,
remained at S. Pharamond, tranquilly ignoring the visible impatience
of his host at his unasked presence, was sorely troubled by the
alternate exhilaration and anxiety of spirit which all the reserve
and self-possession of Othmar himself could not wholly conceal from
the penetration of a person accustomed to divine and dive into the
innermost recesses of the minds of men.

'What, in God's name, is he meditating?' thought his uncle. 'Some
insanity probably. I should believe he was about to disappear from
the world with Madame Napraxine if I were not so persuaded that her
pride and her selfishness will never permit her to commit a folly for
anyone. Morality is nothing to her, but her position is a great deal;
her delight in being insolent will never allow her to lose the power of
being so.'

So accurately did this man of the world read a character which baffled
most persons by its intricacy and its anomalies.

To Friederich Othmar human nature presented many absurdities but few
secrets.

He remained at S. Pharamond, despite his own abhorrence of any place
which was not a capital. He passed his mornings in the consideration
of his correspondence and his telegraphic despatches, but in the later
hours of the day and in the evenings he was that agreeable member of
society whom society had known and courted for so many years; and
beneath his pleasant subacid wit and his admirable manner his acute
penetration was for ever _en vedette_ to penetrate his nephew's purpose
and preoccupation. But a lover, on his guard, will baffle an observer
whom the keenest of statesmen would, in vain, seek to deceive or
mislead, and the Baron learned nothing of Othmar's inmost thoughts.
Although Othmar and Nadine Napraxine met twice or thrice in his
presence at other people's houses, and once at S. Pharamond itself,
where some more choice music was given one evening, the acute blue eyes
of the elder man failed to read the understanding which existed between
them. All he saw was that she appeared to treat Othmar, before others,
with more raillery and more nonchalance than usual. He remarked that
Othmar did not seem either hurt or surprised at this.

'Since he is as much in love with her as ever, he must be aware of some
intimacy between them which renders him comparatively insensible to
her treatment of him in society,' thought the sagacity of his uncle,
who was alarmed and disquieted by a fact which would have reassured
less fine observers--the fact that the master of S. Pharamond did
not once, during fifteen days, cross the mile or two of olive-wood,
orange orchard, and hanging field which alone separated him from La
Jacquemerille.

'No love is so patient but on some promise,' he reflected. He knew
the romantic turn of Othmar's character, and he feared its results as
others would fear the issue of some mortal or hereditary disease. A
week or two previous the ministers then presiding over the fortunes
of France had met, at his little house in the Rue du Traktir, the
representatives of two great Powers, and in the newspapers of the
hour that informal meeting, which had led to many important results,
had been called the Unwritten Treaty of Baron Fritz; and yet, at such
a moment, instead of being entranced with such influence as such a
nickname implied to his House, instead of being occupied with the
power, the might, and the mission of the Othmars, which that gathering
around the library-table in the Rue du Traktir displayed for the
ten thousandth time to the dazzled eyes of suppliant and trembling
Europe, Otho himself could only think of a woman with larger eyes and
smaller hands than usual, but a woman absolutely useless to him in any
ambitions--likely, rather, to be his ruin in all ways!

'I could understand it were she one of the great political forces
of the world. Some women are that, and might so, to us, be of very
high value,' thought Friederich Othmar, 'but Madame Napraxine is as
indifferent to all political movement as if she were made of the ivory
and mother-of-pearl which her skin resembles. If she be anything, she
is that horrible thing a Nihilist, only because Nihilism embodies an
endless and irreconcilable discontent, which finds in her some secret
corner of vague sympathy. But for politics in our meaning of the word
she has the most complete contempt. What did she say to me the other
day? "I am a diplomatist's daughter. I have seen the strings of all
your puppets. I cannot accept a Polichinelle for a Richelieu, as you
all do." And she declared that if there were no statesmen at all, and
no journalists, life would go smoothly; everybody would attend to their
own affairs, the world would be quiet, and there would be no wars. What
but disaster can such a woman with such views bring into the life of
Otho, already paralysed as it is by poco-curantism?'

He asked the question of himself in his own meditations, and could give
himself no answer save one which grieved and alarmed him.

Othmar himself bestowed on his guest but little thought except a
passing impatience that his uncle should have taken that moment, of all
others, to instal himself at S. Pharamond.

He had not the cynicism nor the _insouciance_ of the woman he adored.
He did not attempt any sophisms with his own conscience. He knew that
to do a man dishonour was to do him a violence unkinder, and perhaps
even in a way baser, than to take his life. But he was ready to pledge
himself to that which, unlike her, he still considered was a sin.
He was entirely mastered by a force of passion which she could have
understood by the subtlety of her intelligence, but was not likely ever
to share by any fibre of her nature. He was lost in that whirlpool of
emotion, anticipation, and fear which carried his inner life away on
it, although his outer life remained in appearance calm enough for no
eyes save those of the Baron to penetrate the disguise of his serenity.

Yseulte he had forgotten.

The simple and innocent tenderness which she had momentarily aroused
in him could not hold its place beside the overwhelming passion which
governed him, more than a slender soft-eyed dove can dispute possession
with the fierce, strong-pinioned falcon. Once or twice he saw her and
spoke to her with kindness, but his thoughts were far away from her,
and he did not linger beside her, although each time he chanced to meet
her on the way to her foster-mother's, in lonely lovely country paths,
which might well have tempted him to tarry.

On the thirteenth day of his probation, the priest's gown which, to
please her, he had ordered for the church of S. Pharamond, arrived at
the château, and, his attention being drawn to it by his servants,
he remembered his promise to her. It was the last day of the year. A
passing remembrance of pity came over him as he thought of her; she
was so entirely alone, and she would go to the life of the cloister;
a fancy came to him to do some little thing to give her pleasure; a
mere evanescent breath of innocent impulse, which passed like the cool
breeze of an April day, sweet with scent of field flowers, across the
heated atmosphere of desire and expectation in which his soul was then
living. Conventional etiquette had seldom troubled him greatly; he
had always enjoyed something of that sense which princes have, that
whatever he did the world would condone. A man of the exceptional power
which he possessed can always exercise on his contemporaries more or
less of his own will. Whatever he might have done no one would have
said of him anything more severe than that he was singular.

When he went into Nice that day he chanced to see a very pretty thing,
modern, but admirable in taste and execution, a casket of ivory mounted
on silver, with a little angel in silver on the summit. On its sides
were painted in delicate miniatures reproductions of Fra Angelico
and Botticelli. It was signed by a famous miniaturist, and cost ten
thousand francs. Othmar, to whom the price seemed no more than ten
centimes, bought it at once.

'It will please her,' he thought. 'It shall go to her with the
soutane;' and he sent it with the vestment to Millo, addressed to
Mademoiselle de Valogne. His knowledge of etiquette told him that he
ought to send it, if he sent it at all, through the Duchesse; but he
did not choose to obey etiquette; he had discarded social rules, more
or less, all his life, according to his inclination, and people had not
resented his rebellion simply because he was who he was. He utterly
disobeyed etiquette now, and sent his present direct to Yseulte very
early on the morning of the New Year.

It did not occur to him that he might only run the risk of cruelly
compromising the poor child. He gave hardly more thought to the action
than he would have given to a rose which he might have broken off
its stalk to offer to her. All his heart had gone with the basket of
flowers which he had sent at sunrise to Nadine Napraxine, who allowed
no other offering.

The chances were a million to one that his casket would never
reach its destination without being seen, if not intercepted, by
the governesses; but as it happened, his messenger gave it to the
gatekeeper, and the gatekeeper gave it in turn to the woman who served
her as maid during her stay at Millo, and who was passing through the
gates, on her way home from matins. The woman was attached to her;
indeed, being a religious person herself, considered that Yseulte was
the only creature whose presence saved Millo from the fate of Sodom and
Gomorrah; therefore, pleased that the girl should have pleasure, she
carried the packet straight to her as she rose from her bed; and in the
cold, misty morning of the New Year the first thing that greeted the
astonished eyes of Yseulte was the Coronation of the Virgin, glowing
like a jewel on the side of the ivory casket.

The whole day passed to her in an enchanted rapture.

In the large, idle, careless household there was a general exchange
of congratulations and _étrennes_, and a pleasant tumult of good
wishes and merriment. Blanchette and Toinon danced about before a
pyramid of bonbons and costly playthings, and the Duchesse, descending
at her usual hour, two o'clock, gave and received a multitude of
felicitations, gifts, and visits. 'The most tedious day of the whole
three hundred and sixty-five,' she said pettishly, giving her cheek to
the touch of her children's pale little lips.

In the many occupations and ennuis of the day no one heard or knew
anything of Othmar's present. At noon some bouquets of roses and some
orchids, laid on a plate of old _cloisonné_ enamel, were brought in
his name to Madame de Vannes, but she knew nothing of her cousin's
casket. Meanwhile nothing could hurt Yseulte. The contempt with which
her little cousins received the gifts she had made for them in the
convent, the oblivion to which she was consigned by every one, the
carelessness with which the Duchesse received her timidly-offered good
wishes, the severity with which the governesses forbade her to go out
in such weather to see Nicole or attend Mass in the little church, the
unconcealed ill-temper with which Alain de Vannes flung her a word of
greeting--none of these things had any power to wound her; she scarcely
perceived them; she was lifted up into a world all her own. Unnoticed
in the general _branle-bas_ of the day, she passed the hours, when she
was not at Mass in the chapel, locked safely in her own room, before
her treasure, in a rapt happiness, in a wonder of ecstasy, which were
so intense that she feared they were cardinal sins.

The weather was cold, some snow had even fallen, and the north winds
blew, making all the chilly foreigners gathered on those shores shiver
and grumble like creatures defrauded of their rights; but all the
grey, cheerless, misty landscape, and the fog upon the sea, appeared
more beautiful to her than they had ever done before in its sunshine.
From her window she looked at the towers of S. Pharamond, and on her
table--all her own--was the ivory casket.

The Duchesse de Vannes, waking in the forenoon after the Jour de l'An,
cross, peevish, sleepy, and yet sleepless, which is, in itself, the
most irritating and dispiriting of all human conditions, and morbidly
conscious that, as her little daughter had said, she was beginning
to _baisser un peu_, was in a mood of natural resentment against all
creation in general and the human race in particular, and quite ready
to vent her ill-humour on the first object which offered itself.
That first object was one of the little prim notes by which her
children's instructresses were wont to communicate any terrible event
in the schoolroom, or any entreaty for guidance when Mademoiselle
Blanchette had insisted on riding the wooden horses at a village fair,
or Mademoiselle Toinon had dressed herself up in the smallest groom's
clothes. 'Ne m'ennuyez pas; vous savez vos devoirs' was the only reply
they ever received; but the good women continued to write the notes
as a relief to their consciences. They wrote one now, signed in their
joint names, humbly entreating to be informed if it were the pleasure
of Madame la Duchesse that Mdlle. de Valogne should receive presents
of which the donor was unknown. Mdlle. de Valogne was in possession of
a new and very valuable locket; they believed also that she was in the
habit of going to the gardens of S. Pharamond; they had deemed it their
duty to acquaint Madame la Duchesse, &c., &c.

Blanchette, with the most innocent face in the world, had said to them,
'I have seen the big pearl locket of Yseulte! _Oh, vrai!_ When I am
as old, I will not hide my handsome things as she does. Who gave it
her? Who do you think could give it to her? She is friends with that
gentleman at S. Pharamond--the one that is as rich as M. de Rothschild.
I think he gave it her! Do you tell mamma.'

Blanchette guessed very shrewdly that her father had given the locket;
but she was too wary to offend him. Blanchette was like the little cats
who steal round and round to their mouse by devious paths unseen. She
had alarmed the governesses, and the prim note was the consequence.

When the Duchesse read it, she flung it away in a corner. '_Tas
d'imbéciles_,' she said, contemptuously; then said to one of her maids,
'Request Mdlle. de Valogne to come hither.'

Yseulte was presented in a fortuitous moment as the whipping-boy on
whom could be spent all that useless irritation which she could not
spend on the real offenders, her ineffective chloral, her increasing
wrinkles, and the indifference of Raymond de Prangins.

'Mamma is always cross,' the wise little Blanchette had reflected.
'She is always angry, even for nothing. That great baby will get a
lecture, and she will be sure to say it was papa; she always tells the
truth--such a simpleton!--and papa will hate her for ever and for ever!'

Then Blanchette made a _pied de nez_ all by herself in her little
bedroom: when you were a child you could not have many things your
own way, but you could spoil other people's things very neatly with a
little pat here, a little poke there, if you looked all the while like
your picture by Baudry, an innocent cherub with sweet smiling eyes, who
could not have made a _pied de nez_ to save your life. Blanchette had
already acquired the knowledge that this was how the world was most
easily managed.

When Yseulte was summoned to her cousin's presence, the girl was
startled to see how old she looked, for it was scarcely noon, and the
handsome face which 'Cri-Cri' was wont to present to her own world had
scarcely received its finishing touches from the various embellishing
_petits secrets_ shut up in their silver boxes and their china pots,
which were strewn about under the great Dresden-framed mirror in front
of her.

'Good-day,' she said, with irritation already in her voice, as Yseulte
timidly kissed her hand. 'Is this true what they tell me, that you
receive presents without my knowledge and consent? Do you not know that
it is perfectly _inconvenable_? Are you not taught enough of the world
in your convent to be aware that a young girl cannot do such things
without being disgraced eternally? What is it you have accepted? Is it
a jewel? Can you realise the enormity of your action?----' she paused,
in some irritation and uncertainty. 'Well, why do you not speak? Can
you excuse yourself? What is it you have taken? From whom have you
taken it? My people have told me you have a new and valuable jewel and
refuse to say who gave it.'

'My cousin, M. le Duc, gave it me,' said Yseulte. 'He said that I was
to tell you if you asked me, but not anyone else.'

She spoke frankly, without any hesitation. The Duchesse stared at her,
half rose in her amazement; her face was dark with anger for a moment,
then cleared into a sudden laughter.

'My husband!' she echoed. 'A _fillette_ like you! And they say there
are no miracles now! Do you absolutely mean to say that Alain gave you
a jewel?----'

'He was so good as to give me a locket--yes,' murmured Yseulte,
conscious that her cousin was angry, insolent, and derisive, and afraid
that the Duc would be irritated at the issue of his kindness to her.

'Pray, has he given you anything else?' echoed Madame de Vannes. 'Has
he given you the diamonds he had bought for Mdlle. Rubis, or the
_coupé_ from Bender's which he meant for _la grande_ Laure?'

'He has not given me anything else,' answered Yseulte, to whom these
terrible names conveyed no meaning.

'Where is this locket? Show it me.'

'It is in my room. Shall I fetch it?'

'No, no. It does not matter. You can send it me. I will send Agnès for
it. The idea of Alain having even looked at you!--it makes one laugh;
it is too absurd.'

She continued to laugh, but the laughter did not convey to the ear of
Yseulte any impression either that she was pardoned or that her cousin
was amused. It was a laugh expressive of irony, irritation, wonder,
contempt, rancour, all in one.

'You should not have taken it. You should have told me,' continued
the Duchesse. 'To be sure, he is your cousin. But it is not proper to
take a man's gifts. It is not becoming. It is too forward. It is even
immodest. Is that the sort of thing the Dames de Ste. Anne have taught
you? Surely you might have known better.'

These phrases she uttered in a staccato rapid succession, as if she
thought little of what she said; she was indeed thinking as the girl
stood before her:

'What a skin! What shoulders! What a throat! What a thing it is to be
sixteen! Why did not _le bon Dieu_ make all that last longer with us?
It goes too soon; so horribly soon; after one is five-and-twenty it
is all one can do to make up decently. If it were only the complexion
which went it would not matter; that one can easily arrange; but it
is the features that change; they grow out or they grow in; the mouth
gets thin or the cheeks get broad; the very lines alter somehow, and we
cannot alter that; and then to make oneself up is as much trouble as
to build a house, and the house has to be built anew every day!--it is
horribly hard--and yet one has compensations, revenges; it is not those
children whom men care to look at though they are fresh as roses; at
least not usually. Alain, I suppose, does--what can he mean by giving
her a medallion?'

While these thoughts ran through her mind, she was staring hard at
Yseulte through her eyeglass, as though they had never met before then.
The girl had coloured scarlet at the epithet 'immodest,' but it had
made her a little angry, with the righteous indignation of innocence.
Respect kept her mute, but her face spoke for her.

'Alain was right; she is really handsome,' reflected the Duchesse.

She was herself only eight-and-twenty, but in the world as on the
racecourse it is the pace that kills; and before she had passed through
all those arduous processes which she had rightly compared to building
a house anew every day, she knew very well that she looked cruelly old,
though after two o'clock in the day she was still one of the great
beauties of France.

She had been immersed in pleasures, pastimes, and excitements from
the day of her marriage; she had lived in a crowd, she had gambled
not a little, and she had had certain intrigues, of whose dangers
she had at times a vivid and anxious consciousness, for the Duc was
indifferent but not base, and might any day be roused if he came to be
aware that men laughed at him more than he liked. As a rule, she and
he understood each other very well, and tacitly condoned each other's
indiscretions; but there might come a time when he would break that
convenient compact, as she felt disposed now to resent his admiration
of her young cousin. On the whole, perhaps, she mused, she had been
wrong to do so; she would let the girl keep his present; he might, if
she provoked him, insist that Raymond de Prangins should leave Millo.
All these reflections occurred to her during that one minute in which
her eyeglass watched the indignation rise in Yseulte's face.

'Have you seen M. de Vannes alone?' she resumed, with a sharpness in
her voice, due rather to her own sense of the girl's beauty than to her
knowledge of her husband's admiration for it.

'Now and then,' said Yseulte without hesitation. 'He has come into the
schoolroom----'

'For a lesson in A B C, I suppose?--or a cup of Brown's green tea?'
said the Duchesse contemptuously. 'Well, he may _conter ses fleurettes
ailleurs_. I should have thought he had had better taste than to begin
in his own house: however,' she continued, interrupting herself, as she
remembered that she was suggesting, 'I do not suppose it is you who
are to blame. But another time, ask my permission before you accept
anything from anybody. I will not deprive you of the Duc's gift. He is
in a manner your cousin--your guardian--of course he meant very kindly,
but another time remember to come to me. You will tell the Duc that I
said so.'

'Good heavens!' she was thinking, 'who would have supposed that Alain
had a taste for a creature like that, half a saint and half a baby? To
be sure, her eyes are superb, and the throat and bosom--what beautiful
lines they have; why did they send her here? She shall go back next
week. The wickedness of the thing would charm him; the nearer it was
to a crime, the more of a _clou_ it would be. To play Faust under the
respectable shade of Brown's teapot and the big dictionaries would be
sure to enthral him, out of its very drollery--men are made like that.'

Then a remembrance of S. Pharamond passed over her, and she said aloud,
with an unkind sarcasm in her voice:

'Perhaps you have other friends beside M. de Vannes? Pray tell me if
you have. I fully appreciate the effects of the education which the
Dames de Ste. Anne have given you.'

Yseulte coloured scarlet, and the Duchesse's eyes scanned her face as
Blanchette's had done, without mercy.

'Pray tell me,' she continued, with a chill dignity, which was in sharp
contrast with the sarcasm and railing of her previous manner. 'You will
be so good as to remember that I stand in the place of your mother;
your indiscretions are not alone painful to me, but compromising to me.
Is it true that you are intimate with Otho Othmar?'

'He has been kind to me,' murmured Yseulte, an agony at her heart and
the hot tears standing in her eyes. She did not understand enough of
the world to justify herself by the fact that the offender had been
presented to her by her cousin herself; nor, if she had done so, would
the position she stood in towards Madame de Vannes have allowed her to
use such a justification without apparent impertinence. For eight years
she had owed everything to the Duchesse.

'Kind to you!' echoed her cousin, 'a most fortuitous phrase, but not
one that young girls can employ except to their own ridicule and
injury. Pray how has he been kind to you? has _he_ given you a locket?'

Yseulte might easily have told a lie; no one knew of the casket, no one
could tell of it; she loved it more dearly than anything she had ever
possessed. But she had been taught in her childhood that falsehood was
cowardice, and the courage of the de Valogne was in her; therefore she
answered, with an unsteady voice indeed, but with entire truthfulness,
'He has given me a very beautiful box, it is made of ivory and painted,
it came yesterday----'

Madame de Vannes burst into another laugh, which jarred on the child's
ear:

'Really,' she cried, relapsing into the manner most natural to her,
'you begin well! Othmar and my husband! and you are not quite sixteen
yet, and we all thought you such a little demure saint in your grey
clothes! Send the casket to me. You cannot receive presents in that
way. From your cousin, _passe encore_, but from a man like Othmar--you
might as well go and sup with him at Bignon's. Good heavens! What are
Schemmitz and Brown about that they have let you meet him? Where have
you seen him? how have you become intimate with him?'

Yseulte had become very pale. She had done her duty; done what honour,
truth, obedience, and gratitude all required; but it had cost her a
great effort, and she would lose the casket.

'I have only seen him three times,' she said, with her colour changing;
and she went on to tell the story of her visit to his gardens, of his
conversation with her on the seashore, of the priest's soutane, and of
their meeting at the house of Nicole. It was a very simple inoffensive
little story, but it hurt her greatly to tell it; cost her quite as
much as it would have done Madame de Vannes to unfold all her manifold
indiscretions in full confession before a _conseil de famille_.

'He has been very kind to me,' she said timidly, as she finished her
little tale, 'and if--if--if you would only let me keep the casket and
take it to Faïel?'

The Duchesse laughed once more:

'You do not care to keep the Duc's locket--how flattering to him!
Really, _fillette_, you are sagacious betimes; I would never have
believed you such a cunning little cat! Did you learn all that at
the convent? you convent-girls are more _rusées_ than so many rats!
Othmar, of all men of the world! My dear, you might as well wish for
an emperor. There is not a marriageable woman in Europe who does not
sigh for Othmar! He is so enormously rich! There is no one else rich
like that; all the other financiers have a tribe of people belonging to
them. "The family" is everywhere, at Paris, at Vienna, at Berlin, at
London, and have as many branches as the oak; but Othmar is absolutely
alone--for old Baron Fritz does not count--he is absolutely alone,
that is what is unique in him. Whoever marries him will be the most
fortunate woman in Europe. Yes, I say it advisedly, it is fortune that
is power nowadays; our day is over; we do not even lead society any
longer.'

The colour had rushed back into Yseulte's face; the Duchesse's words
tortured her as only a very young and sensitive creature can be
tortured by an indelicate and cruel suspicion. 'I never thought, I
never meant,' she murmured. 'You know, my cousin, I am dedicated to the
religious life; you cannot suppose that I--I----' The words choked her.

'_Ne pleurnichez pas, de grâce!_' said the Duchesse impatiently. 'I
have no doubt you have taken all kinds of impossibilities into your
head, girls are always so foolish; but you may be sure that the gift of
the casket means nothing--nothing. Othmar is always giving away, right
and left; most very rich men are mean, but he is not. It was a wrong
thing, an impertinent thing, for him to do, and it must be returned to
him instantly; but if you imagine you have made any impression upon
him, I can assure you you are very mistaken, he only thinks of Nadine
Napraxine.'

Yseulte remained very pale; her eyes were cast down, her lips were
pressed together. She had done her duty and told the truth, but she
was not recompensed.

The Duchesse rang for her maids. To the one who answered the summons,
she said: 'Accompany Mdlle. de Valogne to her room, and bring me a
casket she will give you, which is to be sold for the Little Sisters of
the Poor. _Va-t'-en, Yseulte._'

She put out her hand carelessly, and the girl bent over her.

'My cousin! I have never seen him but three times,' she murmured
again. Her face was very pale; she had been wounded profoundly by the
Duchesse's words, even though their full meaning was not known to her.

Madame de Vannes laughed again; then, with an assumption of dignity,
which she could take on at will, said coldly:

'Once was too much. Never accuse accident; no one believes in it.
Remember also, that as one vowed to the service of Heaven, it is
already sin in you if you harbour one earthly thought. Go, and send me
the casket.'

Without another word Yseulte curtsied and withdrew from her presence.

When the maid returned, she brought her mistress the ivory casket; but
inside it was the Duc's medallion. Madame de Vannes laughed yet again
as she saw.

'The little obstinate!' she murmured. 'It is not often that Alain
throws pearls, or anything else away. And what a casket! Heavens! it is
fit for a wedding gift to a queen. Is it possible that Othmar---- No,
it is not possible; he would never think of a child like that. Perhaps
he did it to rouse Nadine. What a cunning little pole-cat these nuns
have sent me!'

But a kind of respect awakened in her towards her young cousin. A girl
who could charm Alain de Vannes and Othmar was not to be dismissed
scornfully as a novice and a baby. The Duchesse drew some note-paper to
her, and wrote a little letter to her neighbour, in which she expressed
herself very admirably, with dignity and grace, as the guardian of
a motherless child who was dedicated to the service of Heaven. She
suggested, without actually saying so, that he had failed in reverence
towards Heaven, and towards the Maison de Vannes and the Maison de
Creusac, in permitting himself to offer gifts to Mdlle. de Valogne;
she recalled to him, without any positive expression of the sort, that
a young girl of noble descent could not be approached with gifts as a
young actress might be, and that if any had been offered they should
have, at least, been offered through herself.

She was honestly irritated with Othmar for having thus been wanting,
as she considered, in full respect for those great families from which
Yseulte de Valogne had sprung. She was excessively angry with her
children's governesses, whose negligence had rendered it possible for
the girl to wander about alone, and she gave them a short but very
terrible audience in her dressing-room; yet, on the whole, the affair
amused her a little, and the high-breeding in her made her do justice
to the honour which had forced her young cousin to tell unasked all the
truth.

Later on she had a little scene with her husband, half comic, half
tragic, in which they flung the _tu quoque_ liberally one at the other,
apropos of many vagaries less innocent than his fancy for Yseulte
de Valogne; but she did not tell him about Othmar's casket, for she
reasoned, with admirable knowledge of men's natures, that they cared
so much more if they thought any one else cared too.

Meanwhile Yseulte, having given the casket into the hands of the maid
without a word or a sign of regret, locked herself in, threw herself on
her bed, and sobbed as piteously as though the magic box had been that
of Pandora, and bore all hope away within it.




CHAPTER XVI.


Nadine Napraxine kept her promise to Othmar. She did for him what she
had done for no other human being; she meditated on his entreaties as a
thing which might possibly be granted by her. She looked for a little
while through the play and the glow of his impassioned words as through
some painted window into some agreeable land whither, perchance, she
might travel.

The very sternness and daring of his manner of demand had its
attraction for her. None of her courtiers had wooed her quite in
that way: some had been too timid, some too submissive, some too
worldly-wise. The insane desire to fly with her from the world to some
far-away, semi-barbaric, mysterious Eden of his own making had never
been so boldly and uncompromisingly set forth to her by any lover as
now by Othmar. It had a certain fascination for her even while the
philosophy and irony in her ridiculed the idea. It responded to the
vague but very real dissatisfaction with which life, as it was, filled
her. She was tired of the routine of it. Everyone said the same thing.
Its very triumphs were so monotonous that they might just as well have
been failures. Half her provocation and cruelty to men arose from a
wish which she could not resist, to find something vivid and new to
interest her. She succeeded in causing tragedies, but she did not
succeed in being interested in them herself.

Othmar did interest her--in a measure.

He had done so from the first moment that she saw him coming in--tall,
slight, grave, with great repose and more dignity than most men of his
day--through the vague light, _entre chien et loup_, into the hall of
a country house in the green heart of the Ardennes, where she and her
hosts and a great party, wearing the russet and gold and pale blue of
their hunting clothes, were waiting for the signal of the _curée_ from
the terraces without.

He had interested her then and always in a degree; but only in a degree.

'It certainly cannot be love that _I_ feel,' she said to herself,
with regret. 'I am glad when he comes because he--almost--excites
me, but I am glad when he is gone because he--almost--disturbs me. I
can imagine certain follies being possible to me when he is here, but
they never quite become possible. If I were sure they would become
so, and in becoming so be agreeable to me, I would go away with him.
But--but--but----.'

The objections seemed many to her, in a way insuperable; they lay in
herself, not in him, and so appeared never to be removed.

She respected him because he would have scorned one of those intrigues
screened under conventional observances, of which the world is so
full. If she could have entirely persuaded herself that his life was
absolutely necessary to hers, she would not have hesitated to let
society become aware of the truth. She had no grain in her of the
hypocrite or of the coward.

But she was not sure: and to break up your life irrevocably, to throw
it into a furnace and fuse it into a wholly new shape, to fling your
name to all the hounds who fed on the offal of calumny, and then
to find, after all this _Sturm und Drang_, that you had only made
a mistake, and were only a little more bored than before!--this
possibility seemed to be at once so dreary and so ridiculous that she
did not dare to put it to the proof. Her own potential weariness in the
future to which he wooed her, rose before her in a ghastly shape and
barred the way.

She pondered on the matter fully and sincerely for some days: days
in which nothing pleased her: days in which her riding-horse felt
her spurs, and her friends her sarcasms: days in which her toilettes
had little power to interest her; Worth himself seemed worn out; her
admirable tire-woman did nothing well; and her husband seemed to her
to have grown heavier, stouter, stupider, more Kalmuck, and more
intolerable than ever during the hours of breakfast and dinner, which
were the only hours weighted by his presence. In those few hours she
felt almost persuaded to take her lover at his word. Platon Napraxine
was so densely, so idiotically, so provocatively unalarmed and secure!
He would have tempted almost any woman to make him suddenly awake to
find himself ridiculous.

'He would howl like a wounded bear!' she thought contemptuously, 'and
then somebody would bring him brandy, and somebody would mention the
tables, and somebody would talk about Mdlle. Chose, and he would be all
right again. He is too stupid to feel. There are prairie dogs, they
say, which hardly know when they are shot or beaten; he has got the
soul of one of them. Because I have married him he is convinced that I
shall never leave him;--_la belle raison_! There are so many men like
that. They marry just as they buy a cane; they put the cane in the
stand; it is bought and it cannot move; they are sure it will always be
there. One fine day some one comes and takes it; then they stare and
they swear because they have been robbed.'

This time of uncertainty and doubt, which was to Othmar fraught with
such wild alternations of hope and of fear, which now swung him in his
fancy high as heaven and now sunk him deep in the darkness of despair,
was to her a period rather of the most minute analysis and of the
most subtle self-examination. In the _naïveté_ of her profound and
unconscious egotism she never once considered his loss or gain: she was
entirely occupied with the consideration of her own wishes. Everything
bored her; would she, if she took this step, which to most women would
have looked so big with fate, be less bored--or more? This seemed to
her the one momentous issue which trembled uncertain at the gate of
choice.

She considered it thoughtfully and dispassionately. She was not
troubled by any moral doubts, or any such reasons for hesitation as
would have beset many women of more prejudices and of less intelligence
than herself. All these things were _le vieux jeu_. She was far too
clear-sighted and too highly-cultured to be scared by such bogies as
frighten narrow minds. She saw no sanctity whatever in the marriage
ties which bound her to Platon Napraxine. You might as well talk of
a contract for eggs and butter, or an operation on the Bourse being
sacred! No human ordinances can very well be sacred, and we cannot
be sure there are any divine ones, logically, all the probabilities
are that there are none; so she certainly would have said had anyone
challenged her views on such a subject.

In a manner, this crisis of her life amused her like a comedy. The
unconsciousness of her husband whilst the unseen cords of destiny were
tightening about him; the revolt and impatience of Othmar, conveyed to
her by many a restless glance and half-uttered word as they passed each
other in his drawing-rooms or in those of others; the ignorance of her
lovers and her friends; and her own meditations as to the many comments
that the world would make if ever it knew: all these diverted her.

What alone troubled her was her own pride. Would she ever be able to
endure any loss of that? '_Je serai honnête femme_,' she had said to
her father in her childhood, and when she had repeated the words in her
womanhood her mind had been made up not so much by coldness, chastity,
or delicacy as by hauteur. She could not have endured to feel that
there were any doors in Europe which could be shut in her face, or that
she could not shut her own whensoever and against whomsoever she might
choose.

His term of probation came to an end one morning when the day had
nothing of winter save its date; a morning rosy and golden, with
distant mists transparent as a veil, and the mild air soundless and
windless amongst the mimosa and eucalyptus groves of the grounds of La
Jacquemerille. For once Nadine Napraxine condescended to be true to an
appointment; whilst the day was still young and all the lazy world of
the modern Baiæ still dozed or, at the utmost, yawned itself awake, she
moved, with that lovely languor which was as much a portion of her as
the breath she drew, along the sea-terrace of her house, and smiled to
see Othmar already standing at the foot of the sea-steps.

'What children men are!' she thought, with that ridicule which the
ardour of her lovers was always most apt to awake in her, as he bent
over her hand and pressed on it lips which trembled.

'It must be really delightful,' she continued in her own reflections,
'to be able to be so very eager and so very much in earnest about
anything. Instead of abusing us, men ought to be infinitely thankful
to us for giving them emotions which do, for the time at least eclipse
those of baccarat and of pigeon-shooting. In a moment or two he will be
inclined to hate me, but he will be very wrong. He will always be my
debtor for fifteen days of the most exquisite agitation of his life.
Twenty years hence he will look back to this time, and say, "_Oh, le
beau temps quand j'étais si malheureux!_"'

Whilst she so mused she was saying little careless, easy phrases to
him, pacing her terrace slowly, with her great mantle of iris-coloured
plush, lined with silver-fox fur drawn close about her, and its
hood about her face, like its spathe around the narcissus. She was
serene, affable, nonchalante; he was silent, and deeply agitated; so
passionately eager for his fate to be spoken, that he could find no
light sentences with which to answer hers.

'He looks very well in that kind of excitement,' she thought, as she
glanced sideways at him. 'He is poetic in it, instead of being only
awkward, like poor Ralph. Really, if one could only be sure of one's
self----'

She amused herself awhile by keeping him upon the terrace, on which all
the windows of the house looked, and where regard for her must perforce
restrain him from any betrayal of his own emotions. She felt as if she
held in leash some panting, striving, desert animal which she forced to
preserve the measured pace and decorous stillness of tamed creatures.

At length, compassion or prudence made her relent, and enter the
little oriental room where his eloquent avowals had been made a
fortnight before. She closed the glass doors, threw off her furs, and
stood in the subdued light and the heated air of the room, cool, pale,
delicate as the April flower which she resembled, long trailing folds
of the primrose-coloured satin which formed her morning _négligé_
falling from her throat to her feet in the long lines that painters
love; one great pearl fastened a few sprays of stephanotis at her
throat. She sank into a chair which stood against a tree of scarlet
azalea set in an antique vase of brass. She was one of those women
who naturally make pictures of themselves for every act and in every
attitude.

The moment they were secure from observation Othmar knelt at her feet
and kissed her hands again; his eyes, uplifted, told their tale of
rapture, hope, fear, and imploring prayer more passionately than any
words. He would have cut his heart out of his breast if she had bidden
him.

She glanced down on the agitation which his features could not conceal
with a sense of that wonder which never failed to come to her before
the intensity of feeling with which she inspired others.

'When I really do nothing to make them like that!' she reflected for
the hundredth time before the tempest which she raised almost without
endeavour.

Othmar had recovered his presence of mind, though none of his
tranquillity; his words, impetuous, persuasive, at times broken by the
force of his emotion, at times eloquent with the eloquence natural
to passion, fell on her ear uninterrupted by her. She listened, much
as she might have listened to the sonorous swell of the _Marche au
Supplice_ of Berlioz, or any other harmony which should have pleased
her taste if only by contrast of its own vehemence and strength with
the serenity of her own nature. She listened, without any sign of
any sort, save of so much acquiescence as might be indicated by the
gentleness of her expression and the passiveness with which she left
her hand in his. He believed her silence to be assent.

'This is what I have always fancied might conquer me,' she thought,
whilst his ardent protestations and entreaties held her for the moment
pleased and fascinated. 'And yet, I do not know. To leave the world, to
be always together, to go, heaven knows where, into a sort of Mahometan
paradise--would it suit me? I am afraid not. The idea pleases one in
a way, but not quite enough for that. Always together, and alone--one
would tire of an angel!'

So still she was, as these thoughts drifted through her mind, so
unresistingly she let his forehead, and then his lips, lie on her hand,
that he believed himself successful in his prayer. He lifted his eyes
and looked at her with a gaze full of rapturous light, of adoration and
of gratitude.

'Oh, my love! my love!' he murmured. 'Never shall you regret an hour
your mercy to me!'

His lips would have sought hers as his words ended in a sigh, the
lover's sigh of happiness, but she moved and disengaged herself
quickly, and motioned to him to rise. On her mouth there was the slight
smile he knew so well--the smile that was the enemy of men.

'My dear friend,' she said, in her melodious voice, sweet as the
south wind, and never sweeter than when it uttered cruel truths to
ears that were wounded by them, 'I will do you the justice to grant
that I quite believe you care very much for me' (he made an indignant
gesture); 'well, that you love me _un peu, beaucoup, passionnément_, as
the convent girls say to the daisies. But I am equally convinced that
you do not understand me in the least. I understand myself thoroughly.
We are all enigmas to others, but we ought to be able to read our own
riddle ourselves. I can read mine; many people never can read theirs
all their lives long, and that is why they make so many mistakes.
Now, I do know myself so very well. I know that no kind of sin, if
there really be such a thing as sin, would frighten me much. I think
my nerves would stand even a crime without wincing, if it were a bold
one. If the world threw stones at me, it would amuse me. I cannot
fancy anybody being unhappy about it. Therefore you will comprehend me
when I say that it is not any kind of commonplace nonsense about doing
anything wrong which moves me for a moment, but,--I have thought of it
all very much and very seriously, and really with a wish to try that
other kind of life you speak of, but--I cannot go with you!'

She said it as quietly and as lightly as if she were saying that she
could not drive with him to the Col di Guardia that morning. She was
smiling her pretty, slight, mysterious smile, which might have meant
anything, from pity to derision. She had a sprig or two of the leafless
calycanthus in her fingers, which she played with as she spoke. He
hated the fragrance of that winter blossom ever afterwards.

'You cannot? You cannot?' he murmured almost unconsciously. 'And why?'

He did not well know what he said, the paralysis of a sudden and
intense disappointment was upon him; he forgot that he had no right to
interrogate her, that no faintest breath of promise from her had ever
given him title to upbraid her; the noise as of a million waves of
stormy seas was surging in his ears.

'Why?' she repeated, with the same serenity, and with a kind of
indulgence as to a wayward, imperious child. 'Oh, for so many
reasons!--not at all, believe me, from any kind of hesitation about
Platon; he would do very well without me, though he would try to kill
you, I suppose, because men have such odd ideas; besides they are
always fretting about what the world thinks, just as when they play
billiards they think about the opinion of the _galerie_; no, not for
that, believe me; that is not my kind of feeling at all; but I have
thought over it all very much, and I have decided that it would not
do--for me. I should be irritable and unhappy in a false position,
because I should have lost the power to shut my doors, other people
would shut theirs instead; I should be quite miserable if I could not
be disagreeable to persons whom I did not care to know, and no one
in a false position ever dares be that; they smile, poor creatures,
perpetually, like so many wax dolls from Giroux's. Of course the moral
people say it is the loss of self-respect which makes them so anxious
to please, but it is not that: it is really the sense that it is of no
use for them to be rude any more, because their rudeness cannot vex
anybody. I quite understand Marie Antoinette; I should not mind the
scaffold in the least, but I should dislike going in the cart. "_Le roi
avait une charrette_," you remember.'

Othmar had risen; as she glanced up at him, even over her calm and
courageous temperament, a little chill passed that was almost one of
alarm. Yet her sense of pleasure was keener than her fear: men's souls
were the chosen instrument on which she chose to play; if here she
struck some deeper chords than usual, the melody gained for her ear.
Profound emotions and eager passions were unknown to her in her own
person, but they constituted a spectacle which diverted her if it did
not weary her--the chances depended upon her mood. At this moment they
pleased her; pleased her the more for that thrill of alarm, which was
so new to her nerves.

Othmar did not speak: all the strength which was in him was taxed to
its breaking point in the effort to restrain the passionate reproaches
and entreaties which sprang to his lips, the burning tears of bitter
disillusion and cruel disappointment which rushed to his sight and
oppressed his breath. What a fool, what a madman, he had been again to
throw down his heart like a naked, trembling, panting thing at her feet
to be played with by her.

'How well he looks like that!' she thought. 'Most men grow red when
they are so angry, but he grows like marble, and his eyes burn--there
are great tears in them--he looks like Mounet-Sully as Hippolytus.'

Once more the momentary inclination came over her to trust herself to
that stormy force of love which might lead to shipwreck and might lead
to paradise; there were a beauty, a force, a fascination for her about
him as he stood there in his silent rage, his eyes pouring down on her
the lightnings of his reproach; but the impulse was not strong enough
to conquer her; the world she would have given up with contemptuous
indifference, but she would not surrender her own power to dictate to
the world.

Her soft tranquil voice went on, as a waterfall may gently murmur its
silvery song while a tempest shakes the skies.

'I know you think that love is enough, but I assure you I should doubt
it, even if I did--love you. Rousseau has said long before us that
love lacks two things,--permanence and immutability; they seem to me
synonymous, and I do not think that their absence is a defect; I think
it even a merit. Yet, as they _are_ absent, it cannot be worth while to
pay so very much for so very defective a thing.'

'God forgive you!' cried her lover in passionate pain. 'You betray me
with the cruelest jest that woman ever played off on man, and you think
that I can stand still to hearken to the pretty tinkling bells of a
drawing-room philosophy!'

'You do not stand still,' she answered languidly, 'you walk to and fro
like a wounded panther in a cage. I have in no way betrayed you, and I
am not jesting at all. I am saying the very simplest truth. You have
asked me to do a momentous and irrevocable thing; and I have answered
you truthfully that I should not shrink from it if I were convinced
that I should never regret it. But I am not convinced----'

'If you loved me you would be so!' he said in a voice which was choked
and almost inaudible.

'Ah!--if!' said Nadine Napraxine with a smile and a little sigh. 'The
whole secret lies in that one conjunction!'

His teeth clenched as he heard her as if in the intolerable pain of
some mortal wound.

'Besides, besides,' she murmured, half to herself and half to him, 'my
dear Othmar, you are charming. You are like no one else; you please
me; I confess that you please me, but you could not ensure me against
my own unfortunate capacity for very soon tiring of everybody, and,--I
have a conviction that in three months' time _I should be tired of
you_!'

A strong shudder passed over him from head to foot, as the words struck
him with a greater shock than the blow of a dagger in his side would
have given. He realised the bottomless gulf which separated him from
the woman he adored,--the chasm of her own absolute indifference.

He, in his exaltation, was ready to give up all his future and fling
away all his honour for her sake, and would have asked nothing more of
earth and heaven than to have passed life and eternity at her feet; and
she, swayed momentarily towards him by a faint impulse of the senses
and the sensibilities, yet could draw back and calmly look outward into
that vision of the possible future, which dazzled him as the mirage
blinds and mocks the desert-pilgrim dying of thirst; she, with chill
prescience could foresee the time when his presence would become to
her a weariness, a chain, a yoke-fellow tiresome and dull!

She looked at him with a momentary compassion.

'Dear Othmar, I am quite sure you have meant all you said,' she
murmured softly. 'But, believe me, it would not do; it would not do for
you and me, if it might for some people. I am not in the least shocked.
I think your idea quite beautiful, like a poem; but I am certain it
would never suit myself. I tire of everything so quickly, and then you
know I am not in love with _you_. One wants to be so much in love to
do that sort of thing, we should bore one another so infinitely after
the first week. Yes, I am sure we should, though I know you are quite
sincere in saying you would like it.'

Then, still with that demure, satisfied, amused smile, she turned
away and lifted up the Moorish chocolate pot and poured out a little
chocolate into her cup.

'It has grown cold,' she said, and tinkled a hand-bell which was on the
tray to summon Mahmoud.

Othmar, who had sprung to his feet and stood erect, seized her wrist
in his fingers and threw the bell aside.

'There is no need to dismiss me,' he said in a low tone. 'Adieu! You
can tell the story to Lord Geraldine.'

His face was quite colourless, except that around his forehead there
was a dusky red mark where the blood had surged and settled as though
he had been struck there with a whip.

He bowed low, and left her.

She stood before the Moorish tray and its contents with a sense of cold
at her heart, but her little self-satisfied smile was still on her
mouth.

'He will come back,' she thought. 'He came back before; they always
come back.'

She did not intend to go with him to Asia, but she did not, either,
intend to lose him altogether.

'He was superb in his fury and his grief,' she thought, 'and he meant
every word of it, and he would do all that he said, more than he said.
Perhaps it hurt him too much, perhaps I laughed a little too soon.'

She was like the child who had found its living bird the best of all
playthings, but had forgotten that its plaything, being alive, could
also die, and so had nipped the new toy too cruelly in careless little
fingers, and had killed it.




CHAPTER XVII.


Othmar, as he left La Jacquemerille, forgot the boat in which he had
come thither. He walked mechanically through the house, and out by the
first gate which he saw before him. He was in that state of febrile
excitation in which the limbs move without the will in an instinctive
effort to find outlet to mental pain in bodily exertion. The gate he
had passed through opened into a little wood of pines, whence a narrow
path led upward into the hills above. With little consciousness of
what he did, he ascended the mule-road which rose before him, and the
chill of the morning air, as it blew through the tops of the swaying
pines, was welcome to him. He had that cruel wound within him which a
proud man suffers from when he has disclosed the innermost secrets of
his heart in a rare moment of impulse, and has seen them lightly and
contemptuously played with for a jest.

He had gone through life receiving much adulation but little sympathy,
and giving as little confidence; in a moral isolation due to the
delicacy of his own nature and to the flattery he received, which had
early made him withhold himself from intimate friendships, fearing to
trust where he would be only duped.

To her, in an unguarded hour, he had shown the loneliness and the
longing which he felt, he had disclosed the empty place which no powers
or vanities of the world could fill; he had staked the whole of his
peace on the caprice of one woman, and he knew that, in the rough
phrase which men would have used to him, he had been made a fool of
in return; he had betrayed himself, and had nothing in return but the
memory of a little low laughter, of a tranquil voice, saying: '_Tout
cela c'est le vieux jeu!_'

He never knew very well how that day of the 2nd of January passed
with him. He was sensible of walking long, of climbing steep paths
going towards the higher mountains, of drinking thirstily at a little
woodland fountain, of sitting for hours quite motionless, looking down
on the shore far below, where the blue sea spread in the sunlight,
and the towers of S. Pharamond were mere grey points amidst a crowd of
evergreen and of silvery-leafed trees.

There was an irony in the sense that he could have purchased the
whole province which lay beneath his feet, could have bought out the
princeling who reigned in that little kingdom under old Turbia, as
easily as he could have bought a bouquet for a woman, could have set
emperors to war with one another by merely casting his gold into the
scales of peace, could have created a city in a barren plain with as
little effort as a child builds up a toy village on a table, and yet
was powerless to command, or to arouse, the only thing on earth which
he desired, one whit of feeling in the woman he loved!

It was late in the afternoon when he took his way homeward, having
eaten nothing, only drunk thirstily of water wherever a little brook
had made a well amongst the tufts of hepatica in the pine woods. He was
a man capable of a spiritual love; if she had remained aloof from him
for honour's sake, but had cared for him, he would not have demurred
to her choice, but would have accepted his fate at her hands and would
have served her loyally with the devotion of a chivalrous nature.

All the passion, the pain, as of a boy's first love, blent in him
with the bitter revolts of mature manhood. He believed that Nadine
Napraxine had never intended more than to amuse herself with his
rejection; he believed that for the second time he had been the toy of
an unscrupulous coquette. Whatever fault there might be in his love for
her, it was love--absolute, strong, faithful, and capable of an eternal
loyalty; he had laid his heart bare before her, and had meant in their
utmost meaning all the words which he had uttered, all the offers which
he had made. Despite his knowledge of her, he had allowed himself to
be beguiled into a second confession of the empire she possessed over
him, and for the second time he had been not alone rejected, but gently
ridiculed with that quiet amused irony which had been to the force
and heat of his passion like a fine spray of ice-cold water falling
on iron at a white-heat. She had not alone wounded and stung him: she
had humiliated him profoundly. If she had rejected him from honour,
duty, or love for any other, he would have borne what men have borne
a thousand times in silence, and with no sense of shame; but he was
conscious that in her absolute indifference she had drawn him on to the
fullest revelation of all he felt for her, only that her ready satire
might find food in his folly, and her fine wit play with his suffering,
as the angler plays the trout. She seemed to him to have betrayed
him in the basest manner that a woman could betray a man who had no
positive right to her loyalty. She had known so well how he loved her.
He had told her so many times; unless she had been willing to hear the
tale again, why had she bidden him come there in that charmed solitude
in the hush and freshness of the early morning? When women desire not
love, do they seat their lover beside them when all the world sleeps?
He had been cheated, laughed at, summoned, and then dismissed; his
whole frame thrilled with humiliation when he recalled the smiling
subdued mockery of her voice as she had dismissed him.

He had been willing to give her his life, his good repute, his peace,
his honour, his very soul; and she had sent him away with the calm,
cool, little phrases with which she would have rejected a clumsy valser
for a cotillon!

He had little vanity, but he knew himself to be one of those to whom
the world cringes; one of those of whom modern life has made its
Cæsars; he knew that what he had been willing to surrender to her had
been no little thing; that he would have said farewell to the whole
of mankind for her sake, and would have loved her with the romantic
devoted force and fealty of a franker and fiercer time than his own;
and she had drawn him on to again confess this, again offer this, and
all it had seemed to her was _vieux jeu_, an archaic thing to laugh at,
to yawn at, to be indulgent to, and tired by, in a breath!

He was a very proud man, and a man who had seldom or never shown what
he either desired or suffered, yet he had laid his whole heart bare to
her; and she, the only living being who had either power over him, or
real knowledge of him, had looked at him with her little cool smile,
and said, 'In three months I should be tired of you.'

If, when the knight had killed his falcon for his lady, she had scoffed
at it and thrown it out to feed the rats and sparrows he would have
suffered as Othmar suffered now. He had killed his honour and his pride
for her sake, and she had held them in her hands for a moment, and then
had laughed a little and had thrown them away.

Where he sat all alone he felt his cheeks burn with the sense of an
unendurable mortification. At this moment, for aught he knew, she, with
her admirable mimicry and her merciless sarcasm, might be reacting the
scene for the diversion of her companions! Passion was but _vieux jeu_;
it could expect no higher distinction than to be ridiculed as comedy by
a witty woman. Did not the universe only exist to amuse the languor of
Nadine Napraxine?

The world, had it heard the story, would have blamed him for an unholy
love, and praised her for her dismissal of it; but he knew that he had
been as utterly betrayed as though he had been sold by her into the
hands of assassins. She had drawn him on, and on, and on, until all his
life had been laid at her feet, and then she had looked at it a little,
carelessly, idly, and had said she had no use for it, as she might
have said so of any sea-waste washed up on the sea-steps of her terrace
with that noon.

Of course the world would have praised her; no doubt the world would
have blamed him; but he knew that women who slay their lovers after
loving them do a coarser but a kinder thing.

It was almost dark as he descended the road to S. Pharamond, intending
when he reached home to make some excuse to his uncle and leave
for Paris by the night express or by a special train. The path he
took led through the orange-wood of Sandroz, which fitted, in a
triangular-shaped piece of ground, between the boundaries of his own
land and that of Millo. Absorbed as he was in his own thoughts, he
recognised with surprise the figure of Yseulte as he pushed his way
under the low boughs of the orange trees, and saw her within a yard of
him. She was with the woman Nicole.

She did not see him until he was close to her, where she sat on a low
stone wall, the woman standing in front of her. When she did so, her
face spoke for her; it said what Nadine Napraxine's had never said.
The emotion of joy and timidity mingled touched him keenly in that
moment, when he, with his millions of gold and of friends, had so
strongly realised his own loneliness.

'_She_ loves me as much as she dare--as much as she can, without being
conscious of it,' he thought, as he paused beside her. She did not
speak, she did not move; but her colour changed and her breath came
quickly. She had slipped off the wall and stood irresolute, as though
inclined to run away, the glossy leaves and the starry blossoms of the
trees consecrated to virginity were all above her and around her. She
glanced at him with an indefinite fear; she fancied he was angered by
the return of the casket; he looked paler and sterner than she had ever
seen him look.

He paused a moment and said some commonplace word.

Then he saw that her eyes were wet with tears, and that she had been
crying.

'What is the matter?' he said, gently. 'Has anything vexed you?'

'They are sending her away,' said Nicole Sandroz, with indignant tears
in her own eyes, finding that she did not reply for herself. 'They are
sending her to the Vosges, where, as Monsieur knows very well, I make
no doubt, the very hares and wolves are frozen in the woods at this
month of the year.'

'Are you indeed going away?' he asked of Yseulte herself.

She did not speak: she made a little affirmative gesture.

'Why is that? Bois le Roy, in this season, will be a cruel prison for
you.'

'My cousin wishes it,' said the girl; she spoke with effort; she did
not wish to cry before him; the memory of all that her cousin had said
that morning was with her in merciless distinctness.

Nicole broke out in a torrent of speech, accusing the tyrants of Millo
in impassioned and immoderate language, and devoting them and theirs to
untold miseries in retribution.

Yseulte stopped her with authority; 'You are wrong, Nicole; do not
speak in such a manner, it is insolent. You forget that, whether I am
in the Vosges or here, I equally owe my cousin everything.'

She paused; she was no more than a child. Her departure was very cruel
to her; she had been humiliated and chastised that day beyond her power
of patience; she had said nothing, done nothing, but in her heart she
had rebelled passionately when they had taken away her ivory casket.
They had left her the heart of a woman in its stead.

Othmar was ignorant that his casket, fateful as Pandora's, had been
returned, but he divined that his gift had displeased those who
disposed of her destiny, and had brought about directly or indirectly
her exile from Millo.

'When do you go?' he asked abruptly.

'To-morrow.'

As she answered him the tears she could not altogether restrain rolled
off her lashes. She turned away.

'Let us go in, Nicole,' she murmured. 'You know Henriette is waiting
for me.'

'Let her wait, the cockered-up Parisienne, who shrieks if she see a pig
and has hysterics if she get a spot of mud on her stockings!' grumbled
Nicole, who was the sworn foe of the whole Paris-born and Paris-bred
household of Millo. But Yseulte had already moved towards the house.
When she had gone a few yards away, however, she paused, returned, and
approached Othmar. She looked on the ground, and her voice trembled as
she spoke: 'I ought to thank you, M. Othmar--I do thank you. It was
very beautiful. I would have kept it all my life.'

'Ah!' said Othmar.

He understood; he was moved to a sudden anger, which penetrated even
his intense preoccupation. He had meant to do this poor child a
kindness, and he had only done her great harm.

Yseulte had turned away, and had gone rapidly through the orange-trees
towards the house.

'She is not happy?' said Othmar to her foster-mother, whose tongue,
once loosed, told him with the eloquence of indignation of all the
sorrows suffered by her nursling. 'And they will make her a nun,
Monsieur!' she cried; 'a nun! That child, who is like a June lily. For
me, I say nothing against the black and grey women, though Sandroz
calls them bad names. There are good women amongst them, and when one
lies sick in hospital one is glad of them; but there are women enough
in this world who have sins and shame to repent them of to fill all
the convents from here to Jerusalem. There are all the ugly ones too,
and the sickly ones and the deformed ones, and the heart-broken; for
them it is all very well; the cloister is home, the veil is peace,
they must think of heaven, or go mad; it is best they should think of
it. But this child to be a nun!--when she should be running with her
own children through the daisies--when she should be playing in the
sunshine like the lambs, like the kids, like the pigeons!'----

Othmar heard her to the end; then without answer he bade her good-day,
and descended the sloping grass towards his house.

'They say he has a million a year,' said Nicole to herself, as she
looked after him. 'Well, he does not seem to be happy upon it. The lads
that bring up the rags on their heads from the ships look gayer than
he, all in the stench and the muck as they are, and never knowing that
they will earn their bread and wine from one day to another.'

She kicked a stone from her path, and hurried after her nursling.

Othmar went quickly on to his own woods. 'They could not even let
her have that toy,' he thought with an emotion, vague but sincere,
outside the conflict of passion, wrath, and mortification which Nadine
Napraxine had aroused in him. He saw the sudden happiness, so soon
veiled beneath reserve and timidity, which had shone on the girl's face
as she had first seen him under the orange boughs. He saw her beautiful
golden eyes misty with the tears she had had too much courage to
shed; he saw her slender throat swell with subdued emotion as she had
approached him and said shyly, 'I would have kept it all my life.'

All her life,--in the stone cell of some house of the Daughters of
Christ or the Sisters of St. Marie!

 'To love is more, yet to be loved is something,'

he thought. 'What treasures for one's heart and senses are in her--if
one could only care!'




CHAPTER XVIII.


When he reached home that evening he found on his writing-table the
ivory casket and the letter of Madame de Vannes. In the pain and
the passion which wrestled together against his manhood in him, he
scarcely heeded either, yet they brought before his memory the face of
Yseulte, and the sound of her soft grave voice with that sweet thrill
of youth in it which is like the thrill of the thrush's in the woods at
spring-time. She had youth, but she would have no spring-time.

And in the strong and impotent rage which consumed him, in the pain of
bruised and aching nerves, and the sickening void which the certain
loss of what alone is loved brings with it, Othmar, seeing the ivory
casket, and glancing at the letter which he had had no patience to
read through, thought to himself, 'The child loves me; she will have
a wretched life; what if I try to forget? They threw virgins to the
Minotaur. Shall I try to appease with one this cruel fire of love,
which leaves me no peace or wisdom?'

It was the act of a madman to attempt to make one woman take the place
of another to the senses or to the heart, but in that moment he was
not master of himself. He was only sensible of a cruel insult which he
had received from the hand he loved best on earth; of a cruel betrayal
which was but the more merciless because wrought with so sweet a smile,
so apparent an unconsciousness, so seemingly innocent a malice.

He passed the night and the next morning locked in his own room; when
he left it, and met the Baron Friederich, he said to him:

'I have thought over all you said the other day. You are right, no
doubt. Will you go across to our neighbours at Millo and ask of them
the honour of the hand of their cousin, of Mademoiselle de Valogne?'

The Baron stared at him with a little cry of amaze.

'For you?' he stammered.

'For me,' said Othmar. 'What have you said yourself? I do not want
wealth; I want good blood, beauty, and innocence; they are all
possessed by Mademoiselle de Valogne. Go; your errand will please them.
They will pardon some breach of etiquette. It will be a mission which
you will like.'

As the Baron, a little later, rolled through the gates of Millo in full
state, his shrewd knowledge of men and their madnesses made him think:

'So the Princess Napraxine evidently will have nothing to say to him!
_A la bonne heure!_ There are some honest women left then amongst the
great ladies. She could so easily have ruined him! He takes a droll
way to cure himself, but it is not a bad one. The worst is, that this
sort of cure never lasts long, and when she can make the unhappiness of
two persons, instead of only the happiness of one, perhaps Madame la
Princesse will be tempted to make it!'




CHAPTER XIX.


On the following day Platon Napraxine drove home from Monte Carlo at
sunset with a piece of news to carry there which amused and unusually
animated him.

He went up the stone stairs of the terrace of La Jacquemerille with the
quick step of one who is eager to deliver himself of his tidings, and
approached, with a rapidity unfrequent with him, the spot where his
wife sat with her guests under the rose and white awning beside the
marble balustrade and the variegated aloes.

The Princess Nadine was also full of unwonted animation; her cheek
had its sea-shell flush, her eyes a vague and pleased expectancy; she
was laughing a little and listening a good deal; besides her usual
companions, she had there a group of Austrian and Russian diplomatists
and some Parisian boulevardiers. They were just taking their leave as
she was taking her tea, but it was not very greatly of them that she
was thinking: she was thinking as she heard the roll of her husband's
carriage wheels beneath the carouba trees;----'Ten to one Othmar will
return with him.'

She lost her gay expression as she saw that he was alone.

All the day she had expected the man whom she had banished to return.
She was accustomed to spaniels who crawled humbly up after a beating to
solicit another beating rather than remain unnoticed. She had dismissed
a certain apprehension which had told her that she had gone too far
with the reflection that a man who loved her once did so for ever, and
that, as he had returned from Asia, so he would return this morning,
however great his offence or his humiliation might have been.

'He is more romantic than most,' she had thought, 'but after all, he
must be made of the same stuff.'

Napraxine approached her hurriedly, and scarcely giving himself time to
formally greet the gentlemen there, cried to her aloud:

'_Ecoutez donc, Madame!_ You will never guess what has happened.'

'It is of no use for us to try then,' said his wife. 'You are evidently
_gonflé_ with some tremendous intelligence. Pray unburden yourself.
Perhaps the societies for the protection of animals have had Strasburg
_pâtés_ made illegal?'

'I have seen the Duchesse, I have seen Baron Fritz, I have seen
Melville,' answered her husband impetuously and triumphantly, 'and
they all say the same thing, so that there cannot be a doubt that it
is true. Othmar marries that little cousin of Cri-Cri: the one of whom
they meant to make a nun. What luck for her! But they say she is very
beautiful, and only sixteen.'

The people assembled round her table raised a chorus of exclamation
and of comment. Napraxine stood amidst them, delighted; his little
social bomb had burst with the brilliancy and the noise that he had
anticipated.

Nadine Napraxine turned her head with an involuntary movement of
surprise.

'Othmar!' she repeated; her large black eyes opened fully with a
perplexed expression.

'It must be the girl who was in the boat,' said Lady Brancepeth. 'She
was very handsome.'

Geraldine looked at Madame Napraxine with curiosity, eagerness, and
gratification.

'Who told you, Platon?' she asked, with a certain impatience in her
voice.

'Three of them told me; Melville first, then Cri-Cri herself, in the
Salle de Jeu. She did not seem to know whether to be affronted or
pleased. She said the whole thing was a great surprise, but that she
could not refuse Othmar; she declared that her projects were all upset,
that her young cousin had been always destined to the religious life;
that she regretted to have her turned from her vocation; in short, she
talked a great deal of nonsense, but the upshot of it all was that
Baron Fritz had made formal proposals, and that she had accepted them.
In the gardens, coming away, I met the Baron himself; he was in a state
of ecstasy; all he cares for is the perpetuation of the name of Othmar;
but he declares that Mademoiselle de Valogne is everything he could
desire, that she was excessively timid, and scarcely spoke a word when
they allowed him to see her for five minutes, but that it was a very
graceful timidity, and full of feeling.'

'Baron Fritz in the operatic _rôle_ of Padrone d'Amore is infinitely
droll,' said Nadine, with a little cold laugh.

'Of course Othmar was obliged to marry some time,' continued Napraxine,
who did not easily abandon a subject when one pleased him. 'And he
is--how old is he?--I saw the Baron as I left; he is delighted. He says
the poor child fainted when they told her she was to be saved from a
religious life.'

'My dear Platon,' said his wife impatiently, 'we can read Daudet or
Henri Greville when we want this sort of thing. Pray, spare us. I hope
Baron Fritz explained to her that all she is wanted for is to continue
a race of Croatian money-lenders which he considers the pivot of the
world. If she fail in doing that he will counsel a divorce, _à la_
Bonaparte.'

'He might marry an archduchess,' said one of the diplomatists. 'Surely,
it is throwing himself away.'

'It must be for love,' said Geraldine, with an ironical smile.

'The de Valogne was a great race, but impoverished long ago,' said a
Russian minister. 'I think, if he had married at all, he should have
made an alliance which would have brought him that unassailably great
rank which is usually the ambition of all financiers. For a man of
his position to make a mere romantic _mariage d'amour_ is absurd--out
of place;--and who knows if it be even that?' he pursued, with an
involuntary glance at the Princess Napraxine.

'Why on earth should we doubt it?' said her husband. 'It cannot be
anything else, and they say the girl is quite beautiful. Surely, if
anyone can afford to marry to please himself, that one is Othmar.'

'At any rate, it is his own affair,' said Nadine, in a voice which was
clear and sweet, but cold as steel. 'I cannot see why we should occupy
ourselves about it, or why you should have announced it as if it were
the dissolution of the world.'

'Mademoiselle de Valogne is very beautiful,' said Geraldine, 'I have
seen her once at Millo. Why should they pretend to hesitate?'

'They hesitated because she is _vouée à Marie_,' replied Napraxine,
'and also the de Vannes and the de Creusac scarcely recognise the
princes of finance as their equals. Still the marriage is magnificent;
they felt they had no right to regret it since it fell to them from
heaven.'

'Do you still believe, Platon, that heaven has anything to do with
marriage?' said his wife, with her little significant smile; a slight
colour had come upon her cheeks, tinging them as blush-roses are tinged
with the faintest flush; her eyes retained their astonished and annoyed
expression, of which her husband saw nothing.

'Heaven made mine at least,' he said, with his unfailing good-humour,
and a bow in which there was some grace.

'Louis Quatorze could not have answered better,' said Nadine. 'I cannot
say I see the hand of heaven myself in it, but if you do, so much the
better. "Les illusions sont des zéros, mais c'est avec les zéros qu'on
fait les beaux chiffres."'

'I do not know whether Mademoiselle de Valogne has illusions, but
her settlements will certainly have _de beaux chiffres_,' continued
Napraxine, who was still full of the tidings he had brought. 'Did
Othmar say nothing to you the other morning of what he intended to do?'

'Nothing; why should he? I am no relation of his or of Mademoiselle de
Valogne.'

'He might have done so; he was a long time alone with you. Perhaps he
did not know it himself.'

'Perhaps not.'

'It seems a _coup de tête_. Madame de Vannes told me that he had only
seen her cousin four times.'

'That is three times more than is necessary.'

'They say the girl is very much in love with him, and burst into tears
when they told her of his proposals.'

'Oh, my dear Platon! That the girl marries Othmar one understands; she
would be an imbecile, a lunatic, to refuse; but that she weeps because
she will enjoy one of the hugest fortunes in Europe--do not make such
demands on our credulity!'

'They say their acquaintance has been an idyl; quite _hors d'usage_;
they both met in his gardens by chance, and he----'

'Chance? I thought it was heaven? You may be quite sure neither had
anything to do with it. Aurore is a very clever woman; she knew very
well what she did when she brought her cousin down to Millo this
winter; if the girl had been honestly _vouée à Marie_, would they have
had her in the drawing-room after their dinner-parties? Ralph says he
has seen her there.'

'Well, if it were a conspiracy, it has succeeded.'

'Of course it has succeeded. When women condescend to conspire, men
always fall. Our Russian history will show you that.'

Being, however, an obstinate man, who always adhered to his own
opinion, even in trifles which in no way concerned him, Napraxine
reiterated that Baron Fritz had expressed himself satisfied that the
girl was in love with his nephew.

'And why not?' he said stoutly, with more courage than he usually
showed. 'Most women would soon care for Othmar if he wished them to do
so.'

'Oh, _grand dada_!' murmured Nadine, in supreme disdain, whilst her
eyes glanced over him for a moment with an expression which, had he
been wise enough to read it, would have made him less eager to extol
the absent.

'After all,' she said aloud, 'what is his marriage to us, that we
should talk about it? I suppose it is the sole act of his life which
would have no effect on the Bourses. We get into very base habits of
discussing our neighbours' affairs. Let us say, once for all, that he
has done a very charitable action, and that we hope it will have a
happy result: _e basta!_ We will call at Millo to-morrow. I am curious
to see the future Countess Othmar.'

'They say she is very shy.'

'Oh, we all know Ste. Mousseline,' said Nadine Napraxine, with scorn.
'Besides, convent-reared girls are all of the same type. I only hope
Cri-Cri will not assume any hypocritical airs of regret before me; the
only regret she can really have is that Blanchette was not old enough
to have won this matrimonial Derby.'

'You always speak so slightingly of Othmar,' said Napraxine, with some
reproach.

'I really thought I paid him a high compliment,' said his wife.

'Why has he done it?' said one of the Russian diplomatists to another,
when they had taken leave of the Princess and her party.

'I imagine that Madame Napraxine piqued him,' said another. 'You know
he has been madly in love with her for two years.'

'She does not seem to like his marriage.'

'They never like it,' returned the Russian minister. 'They may not look
at you themselves, but they never like you to look at any one else.'

'If he marry her because he is in love elsewhere, and if she have the
Princess Nadine for an enemy at the onset, this poor child's path will
not be of roses.'

'She will be almost the richest woman in Europe; that must suffice.'

'That will depend on her character.'

'It will depend a little on whether she will be in love with her
husband. If she be not, all may go smoothly.'

'Do you know what I thought as I looked at Madame Napraxine just
now?' said the younger man. 'I thought of that Persian or Indian tale
where the woman, leaning over the magic cup, dropped a pearl from her
necklace into it, and spoilt the whole charm for all eternity. I dare
say it will be only a pearl which she will drop into Othmar's future
life, but it will spoil the whole charm of it for ever and ever.'

'You never liked her,' said the elder man. 'She is a woman capable of
an infinitude of things, good and bad. She has the misfortune to have a
very excellent and very stupid husband. There is nothing so injurious
for a clever woman. A bad man who had ill-treated her would not have
done her half as much harm. She would have had courage and energy to
meet an unhappy fate superbly. But a perfectly amiable fool whom she
disdains from all the height of her own admirable wit, coupled with the
habits of our idiotic world, which is like a mountain of wool steeped
in opium, into which the strongest sinks indolent and enfeebled, have
all tended to confirm her in her egotism and her disdain, and to send
to sleep all her more noble impulses. Whatever men may be, women can
only be "saved by faith," and what faith has Nadine Napraxine except
her perfect faith in her own irresistible and incomparable power over
her innumerable lovers?'

'Well,' said the younger man, 'if she chose to drop that pearl in, as I
said, I would not give much for the chances of Othmar's wife against
her. I have seen the girl. She is very lovely, serious, simple; no
match at all against such a woman as Princess Napraxine.'

'She will have the advantage of youth, and also--which, perhaps, will
count for something with such a man as Othmar, though it would not with
most men--she will be his wife.'

'Perhaps. He has been always eccentric,' rejoined the other.

Watching her with all the keen anxiety of jealousy Geraldine had been
unable to discover that the intelligence of Othmar's marriage caused
her any more surprise or interest than any other of the hundred and one
items of news which make up the daily pabulum of society. But then he
knew very well that she was of such a character that though she might
have suffered intolerably she would have shown no sign of it any more
than she would have shown any fear had a dozen naked sabres been at her
breast.

Left alone beside his sister for a moment, he said to her, with
doubting impatience: 'Does she care, do you think?'

'What affair is it of yours if she does?' returned Lady Brancepeth.
'Does she ever care for anything? And why should she care here? Othmar
has been known to be violently in love with her--as you are--but no one
has ever had the slightest reason to suppose that she had any feeling
in return for him. He does a foolish thing in marrying one woman while
he loves another. Some men have faith in that cure. Myself I should
have none. But whatever his reasons for this sudden choice of Mdlle.
de Valogne, I imagine that his marriage is a matter of as perfect
indifference to Nadine as your own would be.'

Geraldine grew red, and his mortification kept him silent. But the
insight of a man in love told him that his keen-eyed sister was for
once in error.

Nadine Napraxine herself had gone to her own rooms to change her gown
for dinner, but she dismissed her maids for twenty minutes and threw
herself on a couch in her bedroom. She was herself uncertain what she
felt, and angered that she should feel anything. She was conscious of
a sense of offence, irritation, amazement, almost chagrin, which hurt
her pride and alarmed her dignity. If a month before she had been told
that Othmar was dead, she would have felt no more than a momentary
regret. But the strength of his passion in the morning interviews with
her had touched some fibre, some nerve in her, which had been dumb and
numb before. Again and again she had recalled the accents of his voice,
the sombre fire and pathetic entreaty of his eyes; they had not moved
her at the time to anything more than the vague artistic pleasure which
she would have taken in any emotion admirably rendered in art or on the
stage, but in remembrance they had haunted her and thrilled through
her with something more nearly resembling response than had ever been
aroused in her.

The expectation of his return had been as strong as certainty; the
sense that she had gone too far with him had heightened the interest
with which she had awaited her next meeting with him. One of the
greatest triumphs of her fascination had been the power she had
exercised over him. She was the only living person who could say to
this man, who could have purchased souls and bodies as he could have
purchased strings of unpierced pearls if he had chosen: 'You desire
something of which you will never be master.'

That she had had influence enough on such a career as his to drive him
out from the world where all his interests, pursuits, and friendships
lay, had pleased her with more keenness in her pleasure than similar
victories often gave her. She had seen his return to Europe with
amusement, even with derision; she had seen at a glance that he had
fled in vain from her; she had been diverted, but she had remained
indifferent.

In those morning hours when he had addressed her with an almost brutal
candour, he had taken a hold upon her admiration which he had never
gained before. His accents had lingered on her ear; his regard had
burned itself into her remembrance; she had begun to look forward to
his next approach, after her rejection, with something more than the
merely intellectual curiosity with which before she had studied the
results of her influence upon him. The news of his intended marriage
came to her with a sense of surprise and of affront which was more
nearly regret than any sentiment she had ever experienced. It seemed
to her supremely ridiculous that a man who adored _her_ should seek
or hope to find any oblivion elsewhere; she even understood that it
was no such hope which had actuated him, but rather his wounded pride
which had rebelled against herself and been unwilling to allow the
world to consider him her slave. Of the more delicate and more tender
motives which had led him towards Yseulte de Valogne she could know
nothing; but of those more selfish and embittered ones she comprehended
accurately all the sources and all the extent.

'He does it to escape me,' she thought as she sat in solitude, while
the last faint crimson of the winter's sunset tinged the light clouds
before her windows; a smile came slowly on her beautiful mouth,--a
smile, proud, unkind, a little bitter. There was resentment in her,
and there was also pain, two emotions hitherto strangers to her
heart; but beyond these, and deeper than these, there was a caustic
contempt for the man's cowardice in seeking asylum in an unreal love,
in endeavouring to cheat himself and another into belief in a feigned
passion.

'I thought him more brave!' she said bitterly to herself. 'He is like
a beaten warrior who makes a rampart of a virgin's body!'

And yet, in that moment she was nearer love for him than she had ever
been before.




CHAPTER XX.


Blanchette was dancing round her cousin in the twilight of the January
day, making her _pied de nez_ triumphantly, but pausing every now and
then to look up in her face with her habitual inquisitiveness, yet with
a respect quite new to her.

'_Tiens, tiens, tiens!_' she was crying in her little shrill voice,
like the tiniest of silver trumpets. 'To think you are going to be
married after all! You will be ever so much richer than mamma, they
say; you will be as rich as all the _Juiverie_ put together, and you
will be as great a lady as all the _grandes dames_. You will have as
many jewels as Madame de Talleyrand; you will have as many horses and
houses as Madame de Sagan; you will have two new gowns every day if you
like. Have you seen the Hôtel Othmar? I have seen it; it is as big as
the Louvre. What will you ask him for first? If I were you, I should
ask him for a rope of pearls, all as big as pigeons' eggs. What are
the Othmar liveries? I never saw them; the state liveries, I mean. I
like canary-colour best, and Louis Treize _tricornes_. What will he
settle on you? He will give you what you wish; I heard mamma say so.
Make him give you S. Pharamond for your very own. I am sure you will
not get half you might, you are such a silly little snipe; you are as
tall as a Venetian mast on a feast day, but you are a simpleton. You
cried when mamma told you he would marry you. The idea! You should have
danced for joy. It would be delicious to marry him if he were as old as
the hills and as ugly as Punch, but he is not old and he is handsome:
all that _par-dessus le panier_, and thirty thousand francs a day,
Julie says; and Brown and Schemmitz wanted to kiss your hand! What fun
you would make of them if you were me. You should skip and shout all
day;--I should. To be sure, he is _dans la finance_, but they are the
only royalties nowadays; I have heard mamma say so. Whatever can he
see in you? You are pretty and tall, but you don't know it; you stand
and stare like an owl with your big eyes. What can he want with you?
He will give you everything, he must be a simpleton, too! he might
marry somebody quite great; none of them can imagine what he wants you
for----'

'Oh, Blanchette!' said Yseulte de Valogne, with a look of pain, as she
tried to silence her little tormentor, whose words she only vaguely
heard as she stood lost in the golden mists of an incomparable dream.

'_Vrai!_' said the cruel little child. 'Nobody can think what he can
see in you. It is Madame Napraxine whom he loves.'

Yseulte coloured with sudden anger, and a look of severity and
sternness came on her youthful face, while its happy wistful eyes lost
their light and grew cold:

'You must not say these things, Blanchette,' she said sternly; 'you may
laugh at me as you like, but you must respect M. Othmar.'

The red deepened in her cheeks as she spoke, and realised that she
had the right to defend his name thus. She was thinking in herself as
she did so: 'If it were true, if I thought it were true, I would bury
myself in the convent for ever.'

The quick little mind of Blanchette divined the direction of her
thoughts, and dearly as the child loved to do mischief and to torment,
she loved her own pleasure and gain better. She had no wish for this
_beau mariage_ to be broken off, as she foresaw from it endless
diversion, gifts, and bonbons for herself.

'Othmar will give us each at least a medallion with diamonds on the
back,' she reflected; and she was conscious, too, that if the marriage
fell through by any doing of hers, her mother would be unsparing in
her punishment, of which not the least portion would be banishment to
Bois de Roy; for Blanchette adored her spring-time in Paris, her summer
months at Deauville and Homburg and Biarritz, her wagers on the _petits
chevaux_, her exploits in the water, and the many whispers of scandals
and naughty witticisms which she caught, when apparently engrossed
with her toy balloon or her ball, behind the chairs of her mother and
other great ladies on the sand by the sea or under the trees of the
fashionable inland baths.

With a rapid remembrance of all that she herself would lose if there
were no grand wedding at which she would assist at the Madeleine or S.
Philippe du Roule, she threw her arms about her cousin with her most
coaxing _câlinerie_: 'It was only my fun,' she whispered; 'pray don't
tell any one, _chérie_. It was years and years ago that they laughed
about Madame Napraxine; of course, it is you he loves now. Why should
he marry you if he did not? He could marry anywhere, anybody,--mamma
says so. And you _are_ handsome, if you would only think it! Mamma says
when you shall have been married a week, and have all your jewels you
will be superb.'

Her cousin's face flushed more warmly till it was the hue of those
Charles Raybaud roses which she had used to pack for Nicole. Her heart
beat in that tumult of emotion, of joy, and of vague, most sweet, fear,
in which she had lived for the last twenty-four hours. She thought:
'Why, if he did not care for me, why, indeed, should he seek me?'

It seemed marvellous to her that it should be so, but she could not
doubt it.

She had only seen him for ten minutes that morning, in the presence of
the Duchesse de Vannes, but though her confusion had been too great to
let her eyes meet his, the few soft grave words he had spoken, and the
touch of his lips on her hand, had left with her an ineffable sense of
protection and affection received. If it were not for love, why should
he have paused on his way to thrust back the gates of the convent and
take her to himself?

As for herself, the timid, pure, half-unconscious feeling which he had
awakened in her was growing in strength with every hour now that it had
recognised its own existence and been permitted its expansion without
shame. It remained as shy and fearful as a freshly captured wood-dove,
but it had in it all the elements of an intense and devoted passion.

She did not hear the child's chatter, which rippled on like a little
brook, asking her a thousand questions of what she would do, of what
she would wear, of what she would give away. Blanchette was herself
half sympathetic, half envious; disposed to resent her cousin's sudden
and splendid change of destiny, yet inclined to rejoice in it, as it
would secure to herself a spectacle, a new costume, and a costly gift.
She kept looking at the girl critically, with her head on one side, and
affecting to help her only hindered her, as she dressed for the first
ceremonious dinner at which she had ever assisted.

'To think you can dress yourself; how queer!' cried the little censor.
'I cannot put on a stocking, nor Toinon either. I never mean to do it.
Mamma could not to save her life. How many women will you have? Two?
three? Never let your maids carry your jewel-box; have it always put in
the train by your major-domo, between two footmen. Mamma says all the
robberies are done by the maids. What are you going to put on? You have
only white frocks. Don't you long to wear satin and velvet? Oh, you are
so stupid; you ought to marry a shepherd, and wear lambs'-wool that you
spun yourself. You must not be so simple. A Countess Othmar ought to be
very magnificent. The finance is nothing if it do not look gorgeous.
Oh, what are you doing? You must not put a black sash on; you are a
_fiancée_. Have you got nothing but black? Wait a minute; I will run
and get one of mine.'

'I have always worn something black or grey since my grandmother died,'
said Yseulte, a little sadly.

But Blanchette made a _pirouette_.

'Henri IV. est sur le Pont-Neuf!' she cried. 'Oh, you silly! You were
Cendrillon yesterday; now you are the prince's betrothed. Yesterday you
were a little brown grub; now you are a butterfly. I will go and get my
sash.'

The child flew out of the room and left Yseulte standing before the
mirror, looking shyly at her own reflection as though she saw a
stranger. She felt, indeed, a stranger to herself; so long she had been
resigned to the religious life, so long she had been accustomed to
regard obscurity, neglect, sadness, loneliness, as her natural lot; so
long she had been trained to submission, lectured to the shade and the
silence of resignation, that to be thus suddenly called out into the
light, and lifted on to a pedestal, dazzled and almost paralysed her.

It seemed to her as though it could never be herself, Yseulte de
Valogne, to whom her cousin had said, with an admiration that was
almost reverence: 'You will be the most enviable woman in Europe. Do
you understand all you have done for yourself?'

She did not understand it; she only understood that he had rescued her
from the conventual life, and that he loved her--surely he loved her,
or he would not wish?----

Blanchette flew back into the room, accompanied by the maid Françoise.

'Yseulte! Yseulte!' she shrieked, waving a blue sash in one hand and
with the other clasping to her a square parcel tied with silver cord.
'Here is something he sends you: Françoise was bringing it. Open it
quick, quick. Oh, what a happy creature you are, and you only stand and
stare like the statues in the Luxembourg! Open it quick! It is sure to
be something worth thousands and thousands of francs.'

'Hush, Blanchette!' said the girl, with a look of pain, as she took the
packet and undid its covering. Within was the ivory casket; and within
the casket was a necklace of great pearls.

A little note lay on them, which said merely:--

'_No one can dispossess you of the casket now. Receive what is within
as a symbol of your own innocence and of my reverence for it.--Yours,
with devotion_, OTHMAR.'

On the other side of the paper was written more hastily:--'_Pardon me
that I must leave immediately after dinner for Paris and shall not see
you for a few days. I have explained to the Duchesse._'

Yseulte grew very pale. If the eyes of her little tormentor and of the
woman Françoise had not been on her, she would have kissed his note and
fallen on her knees and wept. As it was, she stood still in silence,
reading the lines again and again, with sweet, warm tears in her eyes.
It was Blanchette who took out the pearls and held them up in the
lamplight, and appraised their value with the keenness of a jeweller
and screamed in rapture over their size and colour.

'They _are_ the pigeon's eggs!' she cried, 'and four ropes of them;
they must be worth an empire. They are as fine as mamma's, and she
has only three rows. I will marry into the finance myself. Oh, what a
happy creature you are! Brown says it all came out of your going to
gather flowers in his garden. Is that true? How clever it was of you!
Who would ever have believed you were so clever, with your silent ways
and your countryfied scruples. Let me see his note? You will not? What
nonsense! You must put the pearls on. Let me fasten them. Four ropes!
They are fit for a Court ball. What a _corbeille_ he will send you!'

As she chattered she clasped it round the throat of her cousin, who
grew red, then white, as the pearls touched her skin. They made her
realise the immense change which one short day had made in her lot.
They made her realise that Othmar henceforth was her lover.

While Blanchette chirped and skipped around her, directing her toilette
with the accurate instinct in decoration of a little Parisienne, the
eyes of the girl were suffused with unshed tears of gratitude and
tremulous joy.

 'What can I render thee, O princely giver?'

she was saying in her heart, although she had never read the Portuguese
sonnets; while her little cousin babbled on of jewels and ball-dresses,
and horses and establishments, and dowries and settlements, and the
_régime dotal_, and all the many matters which meant marriage to the
precocious comprehension of Blanchette.

'You will have your box at all the theatres, will you not? You have
never been to a theatre, but I have. Mind that you go the evening after
your marriage. When will your marriage be? I heard mamma say that he
wished it to be very soon: but then there is all your _lingerie_,
and all your gowns to be made. I suppose mamma will give you your
trousseau; she must. Oh, how happy you ought to be, and you look
just as grave as an owl! Nobody would guess you were going to be the
Countess Othmar. Do you know that he could be made a prince if he
liked? You have never learned to ride, Yseulte. What a pity! It is so
_chic_ to ride early in the Bois. Well, you will have a _coupé_ for
the early morning, and then you will have a Daumont for the afternoon,
of course. There is nothing so pretty as postillions in velvet jackets
and caps--if you only knew what colour his liveries are? Won't you
have out-riders? I do not know, though, whether you can; I think
it is only ambassadresses and princesses of the blood who may have
out-riders----You might have a special train every day,' continued
Blanchette, exciting herself with her own visions. 'There is nothing
such fun as a special train; we had one when grandmère was dying at
Bois le Roy all in a moment and wanted to see us; it is so diverting
to go on, on, on, through all the stations, past all the other trains,
never stopping--pr-r-r-rut!'

'Oh, hush, Blanchette! What do I care about those things?' murmured
Yseulte, as she put his note into the casket, locked it, and slipped
the little silver key in her bosom, blushing very much as she did so.

It seemed so very wonderful to her that such lines should have been
written to her. She wanted to be all alone to muse upon the marvel
of it. She remembered a little nook in the convent garden where a
bench was fixed against the high stone wall, under the branches of an
old medlar tree; a place that she had gone to with her sorrows, her
fancies, her visions, her tears, very often; she would have liked to
have gone now to some such quiet and solitary nook, to realise in peace
this miracle which had been wrought for her. But that was impossible;
they had ordered her to dine with them at eight--her first great
dinner. She must submit to be gazed at, commented on, complimented,
felicitated.

The sensitive, delicate nature of the child shrank from the publicity
of her triumph; but she understood that it was her duty, that
henceforth these things would be a prominent portion of her duties; the
wife of Othmar could not live shut away from the world.

Blanchette tossed her golden head with immeasurable contempt.

'It is all "those things" that make a _grand mariage_. If you think you
do not care now, you will care in a year's time. Mamma said so. Mamma
said you will be just like anybody else when you shall have been in the
world six months.'

Yseulte shook her head with a smile, but she sighed a little also; it
pained her that the world, and all it gave, was so intermingled with
this beautiful, incredible, dream-like joy which had come to her like
some vision brought by angels. In the singleness and sincerity of her
young heart she thought: 'Ah! if only he were poor!--how I wish he were
poor!--then they would know and he!----'

But he was not poor, and he had sent her pearls worthy of an empress,
and Blanchette was dancing before her in envy, longing to be sixteen
years old too and betrothed to an archi-millionaire.

She cast one last timid glance at herself and at the great pearls
lying beneath the slender ivory column of her throat, then she drew
on her long gloves, and went, with a quickly-beating heart, down the
staircase, Blanchette shouting after her Judic's song,--

    On ne peut pas savoir ce que c'est,
        Ce que c'est,
    Si on n'a pas passé par là!

which the child had caught up from the echoes of the boulevards, and
sang with as much by-play and meaning as Judic herself could have put
into it.

There were some twenty people assembled in the oval drawing-room when
Yseulte entered it. It was not of them she was afraid: it was of seeing
Othmar before them. There was a murmur of admiration as she appeared in
her childish white dress, with the superb necklace on, which a queen
might have worn at a Court ball. Her shyness did not impair her grace;
the stateliness and pride which were in her blood gave her composure
even in her timidity; her eyes were dark and soft with conflicting
feelings, her colour came and went. She never spoke audibly once in
answer to all the compliment and felicitation she received, but she
looked so lovely and so young that no one quarrelled with her silence.
When Othmar gave her his arm she trembled from head to foot, but no one
noticed it save Othmar himself.

'Do not be afraid of me, my child,' he murmured, and for the first
time she took courage and looked at him with a rapid glance that was
like a beam of sunlight. The look said to him, 'I am not afraid, I am
grateful; I love you, only I dare not say so, and I hardly understand
what has happened.'

The dinner seemed both to her and to him interminable; she was quite
silent through it, and ate nothing. She was conscious of a sullen gaze
which her cousin, de Vannes, fastened on her, and which made her feel
that, by him, she was unforgiven. She was confused by the florid speech
made to her by the Baron Friederich, who was so enchanted by her that
he put no measure to his audible admiration. Othmar, seated beside her,
said very little. The party was gay, and the conversation animated.
The silence of each of them passed unnoticed. The Duchesse, who alone
remarked it, said to Raymond de Prangins:

'It is their way of being in love; it is the old way, which they have
copied out of Lamartine and Bernardin de St. Pierre. It is infinitely
droll that Othmar should play the sentimental lover, but he does. I
want Nadine Napraxine to see him like that. I asked her to dinner, but
they had a dinner party at home. She sent me a little line just now,
promising, if her people were gone, to come for an hour in the evening.
The child looks well, does she not? What jewels he has given her! They
are bigger than mine. It is the least he can do; the Finance is bound
to buy big jewels. Who would ever have supposed he would have seen
anything in that baby, that convent mouse? To be sure, she is handsome.
Such a marriage for that little mouse to make! a mere baby like that,
a child proud of being the _médaillon_ of her convent yesterday! After
all, nothing takes some men like that air of innocence, which bores
them to death as soon as they have put an end to it. It is like dew; it
is like drinking milk in the meadow in the morning; we don't care for
the milk, but the doctors say it is good for us, and so----I wonder
what she is thinking about. About her gowns, I dare say, or about her
jewels. She is just like a vignette out of "Paul et Virginie." She need
not pretend to be in love with him; no one will believe in it; he will
not believe in it himself; he is too rich. What can he have seen in her
more than in five thousand other _fillettes_ he might have married? To
be sure she is handsome. She will be handsomer----'

She put up her eyeglass and looked down the table at her young cousin
with amusement and envy, mingled as they mingled in little Blanchette.
The amusement was at the girl's evident embarrassment, the envy was of
her youth, of her complexion, of her form, of all which told her own
unerring instincts that Yseulte in a few years, even in a few months,
would be one of the most beautiful women of her world.

And she said angrily to de Prangins, 'Some men like children; it is as
boys like green apples.'

'At least the green apples are not painted,' thought the young man as
he murmured aloud a vague compliment. Raymond de Prangins, like most
men of his age, had never looked twice at a _fillette_; he had been
three weeks in the same house with this child and had never addressed
a word to her or noticed whether her eyes were black or brown; but now
that she had become the betrothed wife of Othmar, the charm of the
forbidden fruit had come to her; she had suddenly become an object of
interest in his sight; he was never tired of finding out her beauties,
he was absorbed in studying the shape of her throat, the colour of her
hair, the whiteness of her shoulders, which came so timidly and with a
little shiver, like shorn lambs, out of the first low bodice that she
had ever worn. To know that she was about to belong to another man,
gave her all at once importance, enchantment, and desirability in his
sight.




CHAPTER XXI.


Immediately that the dinner was over Othmar made his excuses and left
Millo to take the night express to Paris. When once she knew that he
was absent, she lost all fear.

Her innocent love was at that stage when the presence of a lover
is full of trouble and alarm, and the happiest hours are those in
which his absence permits its dreams to wander about her memory
undisturbed. When he was there he was still, to her, a stranger whose
gaze embarrassed her, whose touch confused her, whose association
with herself was unfamiliar and unreal; but, away from him, there was
nothing to check or dismay those spiritual and poetic fancies which had
lodged their ideal in him. No one of those around her would ever have
imagined that she had these fancies, or would have understood them in
the slightest degree; they only thought that she was very naturally
enraptured to be chosen by a very rich man, and did not doubt that in
her mind she was musing, as Blanchette had suggested, on the colour of
her liveries, the number of her horses, the places of her residence,
and the prospect of her jewels.

Baron Fritz, who made her blush with the fervour of his compliments,
and was so delighted with her that he could not cease from gazing at
her as though she were a water-colour of Copley Fielding's, was alone
sufficiently sympathetic, despite all his seventy years of cynicism,
to perceive that the things of this world had little place in her
thoughts, and he thought to himself as he looked at her:

'Will Otho be wise enough to appreciate all that? He will have the
carnation in its bud, the peach in its flower; he will make just
what he pleases of them; the worse will be if he should leave them
altogether alone: then the carnation will unfold, the peach will ripen
and come out into fruit unnoticed, and if he be an ingrate, they will
both come to their perfection for someone else--which will be a pity.
The child is in love with him--_parbleu!_--he does not deserve it; he
only cares for his Russian woman, his hothouse narcissus; he only
wants to cure himself of Nadine Napraxine; as if one blush of this
child's cheek were not worth a century of Madame Napraxine's languor!'

And he felt a passing regret that he was not forty years younger and in
the place of his nephew.

After dinner he seated himself beside Yseulte, and talked to her of
Othmar, of his boyhood, of his talents, of his opportunities, and of
his destinies, with so much tact and so much skill that she was moved
to an affectionate gratitude towards the speaker and to a sense of
infinite awe before all the ambitions and responsibilities with which
he filled her future.

'She is a baby, but she is not a fool,' thought the wise old man. 'When
the love fever has passed, we shall make of her just what we want,
provided only that she has influence over Otho. But will she have
any? In marriage there is always one who rules the other: "_un qui se
baisse, et l'autre qui tend la joue_": and it is always the one who
_cares_ who goes under.'

Even as he had eaten his truffles and drunk the fine wines grown on
the de Vannes' estates in Gironde, he had been more troubled by an
impersonal anxiety than he had ever allowed himself to be in the whole
course of his existence. The child had sat opposite to him, looking
so youthful beside the faces, more or less _maquillées_, of the women
around her, with her soft surprised eyes, happy as those of a child
that wakes from sleep, and her colour coming and going, delicate and
warm: 'And he will not stay here to see, just because the desire for
another woman is in him like a fly in the ear of a horse!' had thought
the Baron impatiently. He guessed very accurately that the departure of
Othmar was due to a restless unwillingness to face the fate which he
had voluntarily made for himself.

He himself had had no heed of Othmar's marriage except as a means of
legally continuing his race; his only notion of a woman was Napoleon's,
that she should bear many children; but as he looked at Yseulte de
Valogne, something kinder and more pitiful stirred in his selfish old
heart; she seemed to him too good to be sacrificed so; he understood
that there would be other things than money and children which this
sensitive plant would want; and worldly, unemotional, and unprincipled
as he was, Baron Fritz was the only person present who divined
something of the dreams which she was dreaming and felt a compassionate
regret for them, as for flowers which opened at dawn to die perforce at
noonday.

About eleven o'clock in the evening, when Yseulte was beginning to
feel her eyelids grow heavy, and was thinking wistfully of her little
white bed amidst the murmur of conversation unintelligible to her and
the stare of inquisitive eyes, she heard with a little thrill of an
emotion quite new to her the voice of the groom of the chambers, which
announced Madame la Princesse Napraxine.

Jealousy she was too young, too simple, and too innocent to know; but a
strange eagerness and an unanalysed pain moved her as she saw the woman
whom they said that Othmar loved.

'Is that really Madame Napraxine?' she said in a low voice to the
Baron, who was beside her.

'Who has told you of Madame Napraxine?' he thought, as he answered her:
'Yes! that is the name of the lady coming in now; she is a famous
European beauty, though to my taste she is too slender and too pale.'

The girl did not reply; her eyes followed the trail of Princess
Nadine's pale primrose-coloured skirts laden with lace, and fastened
here and there with large lilies and lilac. Before that inimitable
grace, that exquisite languor and ease, that indescribable air of
indifference and of empire and of disdain which made the peculiar power
of Nadine Napraxine, the poor child felt her own insignificance, her
own childishness, her own powerlessness; she fancied she must look
rustic, awkward, stupid: she grew very pale, and her throat swelled
with pain under her lover's pearls.

'It is too early for you to have that adder in your breast,' thought
Friederich Othmar, as he watched her. 'What a coward he was to go away,
instead of standing his ground beside you! After all, why is everyone
so afraid of this Russian woman?'

Aloud, he only said: 'The Princess is coming to you; courage, _mon
enfant_. A woman of the world is certainly an alarming animal, but you
will have to meet many such, and you will be one yourself before very
long.'

'_Fillette_, come and be presented to Mme. Napraxine; she wishes it,'
said her cousin at that moment in her ear. The girl shrank back a
little, and the colour came into her face; she rose, nevertheless,
obediently.

Nadine Napraxine came half-way to meet her, with an indulgent little
smile, of which the compassion and disdain penetrated the inmost soul
of Yseulte with a cruel sense of inferiority. Yet had she not been so
humble and so embarrassed she might have seen a look of surprise in the
eyes of her rival. Nadine saw at a glance that in this child there was
no 'Sainte Mousseline' to be easily derided and contemned.

'How beautiful a woman she will be in a year or two!' she thought, with
that candour which was never lacking in her in her judgments of her
greatest foes. 'He is going to possess all that, and he only sighs in
his soul for me!--what fools men are!'

While she so thought, she was still smiling as she came to meet Yseulte
with that slow, soft, indescribable grace of which she had the secret.

'I am an old friend of Count Othmar's; you must let me be yours in the
future,' she said with gracious kindliness. 'Shall I offend you if I
venture to say that I am sure he is a very happy and fortunate person?
I dare say I shall please you better if I say that he deserves to be
so.'

The girl could not have found words to answer to save her life.
Instinctively she made her grand eighteenth-century curtsy in
acknowledgment. She was very pale; her heart seemed to sink within her
as she realised all the charm of this her rival.

Mme. de Vannes murmured a few amiable words, and left them opposite
to one another; the girl trembled despite herself, as those indolent
lustrous eyes scanned her with merciless investigation and smiled at
her embarrassment.

It was her first experience of that obligation, so constant in the
world, to meet what is dreaded and disliked with suavity and compliment.

'I am a great friend of your cousin, too,' continued Nadine Napraxine,
with all the amiable condescension of a woman of the world to a child.
'We shall be sure to meet constantly in the years to come, which will
leave you so young and make us so old! Where have you lived? In an old
Breton convent? I wish I had lived in a Breton convent too! Come and
sit by me and talk to me a little. Do you know that I am here to-night
on purpose to see you. I had a tiresome dinner, all of Russian people,
or I should have come here earlier.'

She drew the girl down beside her on a sofa with that pretty
imperiousness of which women as well as men often felt the charm and
the command. She was most kindly, most gentle, most flattering, yet
Yseulte suffered under all her gracious compliments as under the most
poignant irony. She answered in monosyllables and at random; she was
ill at ease and confused, she looked down with the fascination of a
bird gazing at a snake on the hand which held hers, such a slender hand
in its tan-coloured glove and with its circles of _porte-bonheurs_
above the wrist, and its heavy bracelets crowding one another almost to
the elbow.

She would not have spoken more than Yes or No to save her life, and she
said even these in the wrong places; but Nadine Napraxine did not make
the mistake of thinking her stupid, as less intelligent women would
have done.

She studied her curiously whilst she continued to speak those amiable
and careless nothings which are the armoury of social life; toy weapons
of which the young know neither the use nor the infinite value. She had
all the kindly condescension, the good-humoured, amused indulgence,
of a grown woman of the world for a schoolgirl; by dates she was only
seven years older than Yseulte de Valogne, but in experience and
knowledge she was fifty years her senior.

'_Elle est vraiment très bien_,' she said, as she turned away from the
girl and took the arm of Friederich Othmar. 'At present she is like a
statue in the clay, like a sketch, like a magnolia flower folded up;
but Othmar will change all that. You must be so glad; his marriage must
have been such an anxiety to you. Suppose he had married a Mongol! What
would you have done?'

'It was not precisely of the Mongol that I was most afraid, Madame,'
replied the Baron. 'Do you think too that a marriage is a termination
to anyone's anxieties? Surely, the dangerous romance begins afterwards
in life as in novels.'

'It would be very dull reading in either if it did not,' said Madame
Napraxine. 'But we will hope that Mademoiselle and your nephew will
read theirs together, and eschew the dangers; that is possible
sometimes; and she will have one great advantage for the next five
years; she will be handsomer every year.'

'It will be a great advantage if he find her so, but perhaps only
others will find her so; marriage does not lend rose-coloured
spectacles to its disciples,' thought the Baron, as he answered aloud,
'There can be no one's opinion that he could value as much as he is
sure to do that of Madame Napraxine.'

'I imagine my opinion matters nothing at all to him,' she answered,
with her enigmatical smile. 'But when I see him I shall certainly be
able to congratulate him with much more truth than one can usually
put into those conventionalities. Mademoiselle de Valogne is very
beautiful.'

The Baron sadly recalled the saying of that wise man who was of opinion
that it makes little difference after three months whether your wife
be a Venus or a Hottentot; but he did not utter this blasphemy to a
lovely woman.

The girl remained on her sofa gazing wistfully after this _élégante_
who had all the knowledge which she lacked, and who impressed her so
sadly with an indefinite dull sense of inferiority and of helplessness.
She put her hand up to her throat and felt for his pearls; they seemed
like friends; they seemed to assure her of his affection and of the
future. People thought she was proud of them because they were so
large, so perfect in colour and shape, so royal in their value; she
would have been as pleased with them if they had been strings of
berries out of the woods, and he had sent them with the same message
and meaning.

She watched Nadine Napraxine with fascinated eyes; wondering where
was the secret of that supreme seduction which even she, in her
convent-bred simplicity, could feel was in her. In the few words which
had been addressed to her she was dimly conscious that the other
disdained her as a child, and derided Othmar as a fool.

Madame de Vannes roused her from her preoccupation with a tap of her
fan.

'How grave you look, _fillette_,' she said with some impatience. 'You
must never look like that now you are in the world. Everyone detests
grave people. If you cannot always smile, stay in your convent.'

'I beg your pardon,' murmured Yseulte, waking from her meditation with
a little shock. 'I did not know--I was thinking----'

'That is just what you must not do when you are in society. What were
you thinking of? You looked very sombre.'

The girl coloured and hesitated, then she said very low:

'The other day--the day of the casket--you said he loved her--was it
true?'

She glanced across the room at Nadine Napraxine as she spoke.

'Did I say so?' answered the Duchesse, with annoyance at herself.
'Then I talked great nonsense. But how was I to know then that he was
thinking of you? Listen to me, _fillette_,' she continued, with more
real kindness in her tone than the girl had ever heard there. 'You
will hear all kinds of scandals, insinuations, stories of all sorts in
the world that you will live in; never listen to them, or you will be
perpetually irritated and unhappy. People say all sorts of untruths
out of sheer idleness; they must talk. M. Othmar must certainly have
some very especial esteem for you, or why should he choose you out of
all womankind for his wife? That is all you have to think of; do not
perplex yourself as to whom he may, or may not, have loved beforehand.
All your care must be that he shall love no one else afterwards.
You are tired, I think; go to bed, if you like: you can slip away
unnoticed. You are only a child yet.'

Yseulte went at once, thankful for the permission, yet looking
wistfully still at the delicate head of Nadine Napraxine, as it rose
up from a collar of emeralds. Madame de Vannes passed to the music
room, where a little operetta was being given, with a vague compassion
stirring in her.

'I am sure the old Marquise could not have given her more moral
advice than I,' she thought, 'but I am afraid the silly child will
have trouble, she is so old-fashioned. Why cannot she marry the man,
and enjoy all he will give her, without perplexing herself as to
what fancies he may have had for other people? What does it matter?
She will have to get used to that sort of thing. If it be not Nadine
who makes her jealous, it will be someone else; but one could not
tell her that. How right I was not to send Blanchette and Toinon to
a convent! The holy women make them so romantic, so emotional, so
_pleurnicheuses_!'

At the same moment Nadine Napraxine said, when she had left her and was
speaking to Melville of her:

'She is very interesting. She will have plenty of character; he thinks
that he is marrying a child; he forgets that she will grow up, and that
very rapidly. Marriage is a hothouse for women who are young. I was
married at her age; in three months' time I felt as old--as old--as old
as I do now. Nobody can feel older! You are sixty-five, you say, and
you are so young. That is because you are not married and can believe
in Paradise.'

'You mean that I hope for compensation?' said Melville, with his
pleasant laugh.

'Or that you keep your illusions. There is so much in that. People who
do are always young. I do not think I ever had any to lose!'

'It is great emotions which make happy illusions, and I believe you
have never permitted those to approach you?'

'I have viewed them from afar off, as Lucretius says one ought to see a
storm.'

'I do not doubt you have seen them very often, Princess,' said
Melville, with significance. 'But as you have not shared them, they
have passed by you like great waves which leave no mark upon the
smoothness of the sand on which they break.'

'Perhaps,' she said, while her mind reverted to the scene of which her
boudoir had been the theatre three days before; then she added a little
abruptly: 'You know Mlle. de Valogne well--you are interested in her?
What do you think of her marriage?'

'I have known her from the time she was four years old,' replied
Melville. 'I have seen her at intervals at the convent of Faïel. I am
convinced she has no common character; she is very unlike the young
girls one sees in the world, who have had their course of Deauville,
Aix, and Biarritz. She is of the antique French patrician type; perhaps
the highest human type that the world has ever seen, and the most
capable of self-restraint, of heroism, of true distinction, and of
loyalty. I fancy Elizabeth de France must have been just such a girl as
is Yseulte de Valogne.'

'What eulogy!' returned his companion, with a little incredulous
accent. 'I have always wondered that your Church did not canonize
the Princess Elizabeth. But you do not tell me what you think of the
marriage.'

Melville smiled.

'I might venture to prophecy if the success of a marriage depended on
two persons, but it depends on so many others.'

'You are very mysterious; I do not see what others have to do with it.'

'And yet,' thought Melville, 'how often you have stretched out your
delicate fingers and pushed down the most finely-wrought web of human
happiness--just for pastime!'

Aloud he said: 'If she and he were about to live their lives on a
desert island, I am convinced they would be entirely suited to each
other. But as they will live in the world, and perforce in what they
call the great world, who shall presume to say what their marriage
will become? It may pass into that indifferent and amiable friendship
which is the most usual issue of such marriages, or it may grow into
that direct antagonism which is perhaps its still commoner result; on
the other hand, it may become that perfect flower of human sympathy
which, like the aloe, blossoms once in a century; but, if that miracle
happen, such flowers are not immortal; an unkind grasp will suffice to
break them off at the root. On the whole, I am not especially hopeful;
she is too young, and he----'

'And he?' said Nadine Napraxine, with a gleam of curiosity in her
glance.

'I am not his confessor; I doubt if he ever confess--to his own sex,'
replied Melville; 'but if I had been, I should have said to him: "My
son, one does not cure strong fevers with meadow-daisies; wait till
your soul is cleansed before you offer it to a child whom you take from
God." That is what I should have said in the confessional; but I only
know Othmar on the neutral ground of society. I cannot presume to say
it there.'

'You are too serious, Monsignore,' said Nadine, with her enigmatical
smile. 'Marriage is not such a very serious thing, I assure you. Ask
Platon.'

'Prince Napraxine is exceptionally happy,' said Melville, so gravely
that she laughed gaily in his face.

Meanwhile Yseulte dismissed the maid, undressed herself slowly, kissed
the pearls when she had unclasped them; and, kneeling down under her
crucifix, said many prayers for Othmar.

She was soon asleep, like a tired child, and she had his note under her
pillow; nevertheless, she dreamed of Nadine Napraxine, and her sleep
was not the pure unbroken rest that she had always had before. Once she
awoke in a great terror, her heart beating, her limbs trembling.

'If he did not love me!' she cried aloud; then the light of the lamp
fell on the open casket, on the necklace of pearls. They seemed to say
to her, 'What should he want with you, unless he loved you?'

She fell asleep again, and with a smile on her face.




CHAPTER XXII.


The fortnight passed away rapidly and dizzily for her. They took her
at once to Paris, and gave her no time for thought. She lived in a
perpetual movement, which dazzled her as a blaze of fireworks would
dazzle a forest doe. All the preparations of a great marriage were
perpetually around her, and she began to realise that the world thought
her lot most enviable and rare. Often her head ached and her ears were
tired with the perpetual stream of compliment and felicitation, the
continual demands made on her time, on her patience, on her gratitude.
What would have been ecstasy to Blanchette was to her very nearly pain.
There were moments when she almost longed for the great, still, walled
gardens of the Dames de Ste. Anne, for her little whitewashed room, her
rush chair in the chapel, her poor grey frock.

Then she thought of Othmar, and the colour came into her face and she
was happy, though always unquiet and a little alarmed, as a dove is
when its owner's hand is stretched out to it.

To Yseulte he was a hero, a saint, an ideal. He had come so suddenly
into her life, he had transformed it so completely, that he had
something of a magical fascination and glory for her. She knew nothing
of the House of Othmar, or of their position in finance; if she had
understood it, she would have disliked it with the instinctive pride of
a daughter of '_les preux_;' she had a vague, confused idea of him as
the possessor of great power and wealth, but that taint of commerce,
which in Othmar's eyes soiled every napoleon he touched, had not dimmed
his majesty for her.

She was never allowed to see him alone; her cousin insisted on the
strictest observance of '_les convenances_,' and though a Romeo would
have found means to circumvent these rules, her lover did not. He was
glad of the stiff laws of etiquette which forbade him unwitnessed
interviews. He felt that if she asked him straightway, with her clear
eyes on his, what love he had for her, a lie would not come easily to
his lips. He was lavish of all offerings to her, as though to atone
materially for the feeling that was wanting in him. The Duchesse was
herself astonished at the magnificence and frequency of his gifts.
Unasked, he settled S. Pharamond and an estate in Seine et Oise upon
her in absolute possession, while a commensurate income was secured to
her to render her wholly independent in the future of any whim or will
of his own.

'He is really very generous,' said the Duchesse to herself. 'But what
perplexes me is, he is not in love; not the very least in love! If he
were, one would understand it all. But he is not in the very slightest
degree _amouraché_; not half as much as Alain is.'

But she was heedful that no suggestion of this fact, which her
observation made clear to her, should escape her before Yseulte or
anyone else. If he were not in love, yet still wished to marry, it was
his own affair; and she was not his keeper.

To Yseulte, it was absolute shame to find that she was regarded by
all who approached her as having done something clever, won something
enviable in the lottery of life. A vague distress weighed on her
before the motives which she felt were attributed to her.

When her cousin said to her, '_Fillette_, you were really very
audacious when you went to gather those flowers at S. Pharamond. But
audacity succeeds--Voltaire and Napoléon were right,' she could have
wept with humiliation and indignation.

'Perhaps he thinks as badly of me, too!' she thought, in that
perplexity which had never ceased, since his gift of the ivory casket,
to torment her.

'There is storm in the air,' said the Duc once to his wife; 'Othmar
will be like one of those magicians who used to raise a force that they
could neither guide nor quell. He is making a child worship him, and
forgetting that he will make her a woman, and that then she will not be
satisfied with being hung about with trinkets, and set ankle-deep in
gold like an Indian goddess. I am quite sure that this marriage, which
pleases you all so much, will be a very unhappy one--some day.'

'You think what you wish--all men do,' said his wife. 'I have not a
doubt that it will be perfectly happy--as happy as any marriage is,
that is to say. She will adore him; men like to be adored. You can only
get that from somebody very young. He will never say an unkind word
to her, and he will never object, however much she may spend. If she
cannot be content with that----'

The Duc laughed derisively.

'Gold! gold! gold! That is the joy of the _cabotine_, not of Yseulte de
Valogne. What she will want will be love, and he will not give it her.
With all deference to you, I see the materials for a very sombre poem
in your _épopée_.'

'I repeat, your wish is father to your thought. On the theatres women
do rebel, and stab themselves, or other people, but in real life they
are very much more pliable. In a year's time she will not care in
the least about Othmar himself, but she will have grown to like the
world and the life that she leads in it. She will have learnt to amuse
herself; she will not fret if he pass his time elsewhere----'

'You are entirely wrong,' said de Vannes, with irritation. 'She is a
child now, but in a few weeks she will be a woman. Then he will find
that you cannot light a fire on grass and leave the earth unscorched.
She has the blood of Gui de Valogne. She will not be a saint always.
If she find herself neglected, she will not forgive it when she shall
understand what it means. If he be her lover after marriage, all may
be well; I do not say the contrary. But if he neglect her then, as he
neglects her now----'

'Pray, do not put such follies into her head. Neglected! When not a day
passes that he does not send her the most marvellous presents, does not
empty on her half the jewellers' cases out of Europe and Asia.'

'He makes up in jewels what he wants in warmth,' said Alain de Vannes.
'At present she is a baby, a little saint, an innocent; as ignorant as
her ivory Madonna; but in six months' time she will be very different.
She will know that she belongs to a man who does not care for her; she
will want all that he does not give her; she will be like a rich red
rose opening where all is ice----'

'You go to the theatres till you get melodramatic,' said his wife, with
contempt. 'I do not believe she will ever have any passions at all; she
will always be the ivory saint.'

Alain de Vannes laughed grimly.

'Women who are beautiful and have good health are never saints,' he
said, 'and saints are not married at sixteen.'

'Françoise Romaine was,' said his wife, who always had the last word in
any discussion.

Othmar was more restless than he had ever been in his life, more
dissatisfied, and more impatient of fate. Yet he was not sure that he
would have undone what he had done, even if honour would have allowed
him.

The tenderness which Yseulte had awakened in him, though it could not
compete with the passion another had aroused in him, made him feel a
charm in her presence, a solace in her youthfulness. The restrictions
imposed on their intercourse sustained the mystic spiritual grace which
the young girl had in his eyes, and it prevented any possible chance
of disillusion or of fatigue on his part. Hers was really the virginal
purity, as of a white rosebud which has blossomed in the shade. He was
not insensible to its beauty, even whilst a beauty of another kind
had fuller empire upon him. He had done an unwise thing, but he said
to himself continually, 'At least I have made one innocent creature
happy, and surely I shall be able to continue to do so; she can hardly
be more difficult to content than a dove or a fawn.'

He forgot, as so many men do forget, that in this life, which seemed
to him like the dove's, like the fawn's, there would be all the
latent ardours of womanhood; that in the folded rosebud there was
the rose-tinted heart, in which the bee would sting. They met at
ceremonies, banquets, great family réunions, solemn festivities, in
which all the Faubourg took part. She was intensely, exquisitely, happy
when she was conscious that he was near her, but she was as silent as
a statue and as timid as a bird when he looked at her or addressed
her. Every day, every hour, was increasing what was to become the one
absorbing passion of her life, but he was too indifferent, or too
engrossed by other thoughts, to note the growth of this innocent love.
Alain de Vannes saw much more of it than he.

She had the spiritual loveliness for him which S. Cecilia had in the
eyes of the Roman centurion who wedded with her; a more delicate and
more ethereal charm than that which only springs from the provocation
of the senses. A caress to her seemed almost a profanity: to disturb
her innocent soul with the grossness of earthly love seemed like a sort
of sacrilege.

The whole of this time was a period of restless doubt with him, and the
sense that he had not been honest with her rebuked him whenever he met
the timid worship of her wistful eyes. He thought, 'She would not give
herself to me, if she knew!'

He was impatient to have all the tumult and folly which precede a great
marriage over and done with. Every detail annoyed him; every formula
irritated him.

'All I entreat is, that there may be no delay,' he said so often to her
cousin, that Madame de Vannes ended in believing that he must be much
more enamoured than his manner had betokened, and said with amusement
to her husband:

'It has often been disputed whether a man can be in love with two
persons at one time: Othmar is so, unquestionably. It is like the bud
and the fruit on the same bough of camellia.'

'It is to be hoped that when the bud is a flower the fruit will fall,'
said de Vannes, with a grim smile.

'You are not sincere when you say that,' said the Duchesse, 'and you
know that both always fall--after a time.'

'A law of nature,' said her husband. 'And it is a law of nature also
that others come in their place.'

'My dear friend,' said Aurore de Vannes, with good-natured contempt,
'when Yseulte shall have followed the laws of nature in that
way, believe me, it is not you who will profit by them. You were
good-looking ten years ago--or more--but absinthe and bacarat does
not improve the looks after five-and-twenty, and you have crow's-feet
already, and will soon have to dye your hair if you wish still to look
young. Yseulte will never think of you except as a _vieux cousin_ who
was kind enough to give her a locket--if she will even do that when she
has got all the diamonds that she will get as Countess Othmar.'

Meantime, Othmar himself was constantly saying to the Duchesse:

'I put myself completely in your hands; only, all I beseech of you,
Madame, is not to delay my marriage longer than you are absolutely
obliged.'

'He does not say his happiness,' thought Madame de Vannes, as she said
aloud, 'Well, what will seem terrible to you? I think I ought to exact
a delay of at least six months. She is so very young.'

'It is her youth that is delightful to me,' he replied abruptly. 'I am
old enough to need its charm. I should be glad if you would consent
to our nuptials very soon--say within a fortnight. I have already
instructed my solicitors to meet you and to make whatever settlements
you and the Duc de Vannes may desire upon Mademoiselle de Valogne.'

'What! carte blanche?' thought Cri-Cri, with a wonder which she took
care to conceal, whilst she objected that such speed as he desired was
impossible, was quite unheard of, would be indecorous: there were so
many things to be done; but in the end she relented, consented to name
that day month, and reflected that he should pay for his haste in the
marriage contract. It would make no difference to herself whether he
settled ten millions or ten pence on her young cousin, but it seemed
to her that she was not doing her duty unless, in condescending to
ally herself with la Finance, she did not shear its golden fleeces
unscrupulously.

In her own mind she reflected that it was as well the marriage should
take place speedily, for she perceived that his heart was not much in
it. She divined that some alien motive actuated him in his desire for
it, and she would have regretted if any breach had occurred to prevent
it; for, although she professed to her intimate friends that she
disliked the alliance excessively, she was nevertheless very gratified
at her own relative having borne off such a great prize as Othmar. One
never knew either how useful such a connection as his might not become.

'I would never have let her marry into the _Juiverie_,' she said to
her husband. 'But Othmar is quite different; his mother was an English
duke's daughter, his grandmother was a de Soissons-Valette, he has
really good blood.'

'And besides that,' said de Vannes savagely, 'he is a man whom all
Europe has sighed to marry ever since he came of age. Why do you talk
such nonsense to me? It is waste of good acting!'

'As you wasted your medallion,' said his wife, with a malicious
enjoyment. 'If she had taken the veil, you would have been quite
capable of eloping with her, the very infamy of the action would have
delighted you. But Othmar will certainly not let you make love to his
wife; he is just the sort of man to be jealous.'

'Of Nadine Napraxine, not of his own wife!' said de Vannes, with an
angry laugh. 'Marry them quickly, while he is in the mind, and before
Madame Napraxine can spoil the thing. In six months' time he will
return to her, but that will not matter; our little cousin will be
Countess Othmar, and will probably learn to console herself.'

'You are not hopeless?' said his wife, much amused. 'Well, I do not
think with you. I believe that Nadine Napraxine has never been anything
to Othmar; that the child, on the contrary, is passionately in love
with him; and that the marriage will be a very happy one.'

Alain de Vannes shrugged his shoulders. He was very angry that the
matter had turned out as it had done; the more angry that it was
wholly impossible for him to display or to express his discomfiture,
and that he was compelled to be amiable to Othmar and to all the
world in relation to it, and bear himself before everyone as the
friend and guardian of his wife's cousin. His fancy for her had been
a caprice rather than anything stronger, but it was resentful in
its disappointment and impotence, and might even be capable of some
vengeance.

Faïel had left sweet, solemn memories with the girl: the green gloom
of the fern-brakes and the wooded lanes, the soft grey summers,
and the evenings with their mysterious silvery shadows; the silent
corridors, the tolling bells, the altars with their white lilies, the
pathetic monotonous voices of the nuns--all were blent together in
her recollection into a picture full of holiness and calm. Now that
she knew what the gipsy woman had meant, she wished to be there for a
little while to muse upon her vast happiness, her wondrous future, and
consecrate them both.

She asked for, and obtained, permission to go to her old convent in
retreat for the two weeks before her marriage. Madame de Vannes was
inclined to refuse what she regarded as excessive and eccentric, but
Othmar obtained her consent.

It pleased him that she should pass her time before her marriage with
the holy women who had trained her childhood; it was not so that Nadine
Napraxine had spent the weeks preceding her soulless union.

'You wish not to see her for two whole weeks?' said the Duchesse,
suspiciously.

'I wish her to do always what she wishes,' he answered.

'She will be a very happy woman then,' said Cri-Cri, drily.

He added, with a little hesitation: 'It is her unlikeness to the world,
her spirituality, which has charmed me; I wish her to retain them.'

'It will be difficult,' said the Duchesse, with a laugh. '_Fillette_,'
she said with amusement to her young cousin, 'I do not know why you are
so very solemn about it all; I assure you the soul has very little to
do with marriage, as you will find out soon enough. Why should you go
in retreat as if you were about to enter religion?'

Yseulte coloured; she answered timidly: 'I am forgetting God; it is
ungrateful; I am too happy; I mean--I grow selfish, I want to be quiet
a little while to remember----'

The Duchesse laughed, much amused: 'You ought decidedly to have taken
the veil; you will be a _religieuse manquée_! At your age I thought of
nothing but of my balls and my bouquets, and of the costumes they gave
me, and of the officers of the Guides--Alain was in the Guides, he was
very good-looking at that time. I must say Othmar and you are like no
lovers in the world that I have ever known.'

However, she gave her permission, and Yseulte went to the ancient
stonebuilt fortress-like house of Faïel, where the quiet corridors were
filled with the smell of dried herbs from the nuns' distillery and
the little grey figures of the children played noiselessly under the
leafless chestnut avenues of the tranquil gardens.

It was all so welcome to her after the babble of Blanchette, the tumult
of congratulation, the succession of compliments, the perpetual sense
of being exhibited and examined, discussed and depreciated; but it
did not change her thoughts very much, for even in her prayers her
wondrous change of fate always seemed with her, and she found that even
amongst her pious and unworldly Dames de Ste. Anne the betrothed of
Count Othmar was received as a very different being to the dowerless
Yseulte de Valogne; and something of that bitterness which so often
came to her lover reached her through all her guilelessness. Even
Nicole, also, embracing her with ardour and tenderness, with the tears
running down her brown cheeks, and pleading for the right to send her
_pétiote_ the orange-blossoms and the lilies-of-the-valley for her
bridal-dress, yet amidst her joyful tears and tearful joy had not
forgotten to whisper: 'And, _dis donc, ma mignonne_, you will say a
word now to the Count Othmar to get my husband the municipal concession
to put up the steam mill? It will make our fortune, my angel, and I
know what a happiness that will be to you!'

'A fortune! Money, money! It seems all they think of in the world!'
the child reflected sadly. 'What can Nicole and Sandroz want with more
money? They are very well off, and they have no children, no relations
even; and yet all they think about is laying by one napoleon on the
top of another! It is horrible! Even the Mother Superior has never said
to me how good he is, how kind, how generous; she only says that I am
fortunate because he is so rich! They make me feel quite wicked. I want
to tell them how mean they are! Why am I so much better and greater
in their sight because I am going to become rich too? I thought they
cared for none of those things. But our Reverend Mother asks me for a
new altar service as Blanchette asked me for a turquoise necklace! I
understand why he is always a little sad. He thinks no one cares for
him, for himself.'

And, after many days and nights of most anxious thought and most
entreating prayer, she gathered up all her courage and wrote a little
letter to Othmar, the only one which she had ever addressed to him; she
was afraid it was a strange thing to do, and one perhaps unmaidenly,
but she could not resist her longing to say that one thing to him, and
so she wrote:

'Monsieur,--I do not know whether I ought to say it, and I hope
you will forgive me if it be wrong to say so, but I have thought
often since I hear and see so much of your great wealth that
perhaps--perhaps--you may imagine it is that which I care for; but
indeed I do not; if you were quite poor, very poor to-morrow, it would
be just the same to me, and I should be just as happy. I do pray you to
believe this.

  'Yours, in affection and reverence,
  'YSEULTE.'

She had hesitated very long before she ventured to sign herself so,
but in the end it seemed to her that it could not be very wrong as
it stood: she owed him both affection and reverence--even the Mother
Superior herself would say so.

She enclosed the little note in a letter to her cousin the Duchesse,
knowing that otherwise it would not be allowed to pass the convent
walls. When Madame de Vannes received it she looked at it with
suspicion.

'If it should be any nonsense about Nadine Napraxine?' she thought with
alarm; 'if it should be any folly that would break the marriage?'

She decided that it would be unwise to send it to Othmar without
knowing what it said, so she broke the little seal very carefully and
read it. Something in it touched her as she perused the simple words,
written so evidently with a hand which trembled and a heart that was
full. She sealed it again and despatched it to its destination. 'Poor
little simpleton,' she thought, 'why did she take the trouble to say
that? She will not make him believe it!'

But he did believe it.

It was because she made the belief possible to him that the child had
seemed to him like a young angel who brought healing on her wings; and
the love which did not venture to avow itself, but yet was visible in
every one of these timid sentences, went to his heart with sweetness
and unconscious reproach. He wrote back to her:

'I believe you, and I thank you. You give me what the world cannot give
nor command.'

And he added words of tenderness which, if they would have seemed cold
to an older or a less innocent recipient, wholly contented her, and
seemed to her like a breath from heaven.

The fortnight soon passed, and after its quiet days at Faïel, filled
with the sounds so familiar to her of the drowsy bells, the rolling
organ swell, the plaintive monotonous chaunts and prayers, the pacing
of slow steps up and down long stone passages, the grinding of the
winch of the great well in the square court, she felt calmed and
strengthened, and not afraid when the Mother Superior spoke of all the
responsibilities of her future.

To her, marriage was a mystic, spiritual union; all she knew of it was
gathered from the expressions borrowed from it to symbolise the union
of Christ and His saints. She went to it with as religious and innocent
a faith as she would have taken with her to the cloister had they sent
her there. If any human creature can be as pure as snow, a very young
girl who has been reared by simple and pious women is so. Even the
Duchesse de Vannes felt a vague emotion before that absolute ignorance
of the senses and of the passions of life.

'It is stupid,' she said to herself. 'But it is lovely in its way. I
can fancy a man likes to destroy it--slowly, cruelly--just as a boy
pulls off butterflies' wings.'




CHAPTER XXIII.


The first days of February came all too soon for the vague fears of
Yseulte, which throbbed in her as the heart beats in a bird which
feels a captor's hand approaching. All the ridicule of Blanchette
and Toinon, all the good-natured banter of their mother, and all the
endless congratulations of society which rained on her like the almond
blossoms which were falling in showers in the wind, could not make her
otherwise than bewildered and alarmed, and as the time of her marriage
drew closer and closer her terror almost obscured her happiness. No one
would have believed in it; everyone, had they known the secrets of her
shy and silent mind, would have laughed at it as hypocrisy; but with
her it was most real.

Away from Othmar, she adored him; but near him, she dreaded him as
a stranger who was about to lead her into the strangest and most
terrible mysteries of life. But time stays not for the sinking or
the fluttering of any poor human heart, and they brought her from the
dim, cold, misty Breton country back into the gay and crowded world of
Paris; and the great rooms of her cousin's house, filled by brilliant
throngs for the signing of the contract, brought home to her the
inexorable fact that her marriage would itself take place in another
forty-eight hours.

'You are so pale, _fillette_!' said the Duchesse in some impatience.
'One would think that we were forcing your inclinations!'

Yseulte said nothing; she could not have explained the tumult of
agitation which was in her. She was marvellously happy; and yet----

A lover who had loved her would have divined and penetrated all those
mingled emotions, which were unintelligible to herself; but Othmar was
too _distrait_ and too absorbed in thought, wherein she had no share,
to do so. Though she was the centre of the world around her for the
moment, the child remained in an absolute solitude.

Friederich Othmar, studying her with his exquisite power of
penetration, alone perceived her trouble, and thought with pleasure:
'The poets are not quite the fools I deemed them; there _is_ such a
thing as a virginal soul in which the senses do not speak, and to
which the gewgaws of the world say nothing either. I should never have
believed that, but I see it. He has found a pearl, but he will not
care for it. He will absorb it into the acid of his own disappointed
passions, and then will be surprised if it disappear.'

If he had been told a month earlier that he would have had such
sentimental regrets, he would have been wholly incredulous, but
something in the sight of the young girl, in her innocent gravity, with
her wistful, changeful eyes, touched him, as she stood by the table
where the marriage contract was signed. She seemed to him too good to
be wedded with indifference, taught the fever of passion, the suffering
of maternity, and then be forsaken--as she would be.

'I am glad that I did not meet her, or one like her, thirty years ago;
she would have unnerved me,' he thought, as he stooped and wrote his
own name.

Amongst the nuptial gifts had been one of great value from the
Princess Napraxine. It was a gold statuette of Love, modelled by Mercié
and standing on a base of jade and agate. It had all the cruelty and
irony of the modern Italian school in it, for the poor Amorino was
trying to drink out of a gourd which was empty, and the expression
of his disappointed, distressed, pathetic features was rendered with
admirable mockery and skill. He turned his sad eyes ruefully on those
who looked at him; some withered passion-flowers and a little asp were
near his feet. When Othmar saw it, his face darkened; he thought it
a jest at himself, nor had the giver selected it without intention.
Behind the gold Amorino he seemed to see her smiling, serene,
jewel-like eyes, her delicate, contemptuous mouth, which said: '_Va
donc! C'est le vieux jeu!_'

'The only woman that I shall ever love!' he thought with a thrill of
remorse, of shame, and of anger, all in one.

What right had he, while his veins were hot with those unholy fires, to
simulate love for an innocent and virgin life?

The morning came for which Blanchette and Toinon had been longing for a
month; and clothed in palest blue velvet, carrying white bouquets as
large as themselves, they wore at their throats the new diamond lockets
of their ambition, with the miniature of their cousin within each,
for which they cared nothing at all. But the diamonds were as large
and as numerous as ever their hearts could desire. '_Vrai! Il est bon
prince!_' they cried in chorus, as they skipped round each other, and
made the sun sparkle in the jewels, and sang the song of Judic.

Then they went to the church of S. Philippe du Roule, and made their
little naughty faces as grave as mice that see a cat, while the incense
rose and the organ pealed, and the Latin words rolled out sonorously,
and the pale wintry sunshine shone over the brilliant crowd assembled
there for the marriage.

Yseulte herself looked like a slender white lily.

The deep peace and serenity of her convent days had come there with
her; certain instincts of her race kept her still and composed with
the eyes of so many strangers upon her; a dignity that was exquisitely
graceful blended with her childish air; she looked like some young
princess of the Valois time, such as poets and painters still see in
their dreams.

One of those special trains which Blanchette thought the supreme
privilege of marriage bore them without a pause through the wintry
landscapes between Paris and Blois.

The day was fine and windless; there was a scent of spring which
breathed through the leafless poplars and willows, and over the frosted
fields and vineyards, with sweet, vague promise; here and there
burst in to sight, out from a forest glade beside some château, some
gaily-clad hunting party, the last of the season; ever and anon there
was some little town, with its old ruined castle, or its monastic
church, shut in, in leafless orchards. The broad river glistened in
the light under the burden of its many islands, its breaking blocks of
ice drifting on turbid green waters, its flood of mud and melted snow
rolling heavily beneath the colliers and the merchant craft, which made
their way slowly against the floes. In the drear blackened vineyards,
peasants, like pictures by Millet, were at work; sometimes a woman
with faggots on her bowed shoulders straightened herself to watch the
swiftness of the train, or a bluefrocked herd-boy stopped his cattle
at a crossing.

All these pictures passed before the eyes of Yseulte like the panorama
of a dream: the early morning hours had been one long bewilderment to
her; though she had carried herself so bravely, her heart had beaten
all the while like a caught bird's: even now the scent of the incense,
the waves of sound from the organ, the sonorous voice of the great
prelate in its admonitions, seemed to come with her into the still,
brown, fresh country; the sense of some infinite and solemn obligation,
accepted and irrevocable, was upon her.

They had left Paris immediately after the ceremony; and the evening
sun was glowing in the west and lighting the pastoral country with its
leafless woods and glancing rivers as they reached the château.

Amyôt was a place of great beauty and stateliness; it had been built
for François Premier, and had the salamander and the crown carved on
its stones and blazoned on its metal work; it was surrounded by water
like Chenonceaux, and in the sunset-glow its pinnacles and towers and
high steep roof gleamed as if made of gold; it stood on a hill amidst
great woods, overlooking the fruitful valleys and fertile plains which
lie between the Loire and Cher, and in its gardens all the art that
modern horticulture can boast was united to the stately avenues, the
close-shorn turf, the long grey stone terraces with the motto of the
Valois and the fleur-de-lis of France carved upon their pilasters,
which had in their day seen the _mignons_ of Henri II., and felt the
feet of Diane de Poitiers and of Mary Stuart.

Amyôt was a poem, epic and epopee in one; she had never seen it before;
she gazed at it with entranced eyes, glad that her home would be in
such a place; then she looked timidly at Othmar.

He was not looking at her.

She sighed, hardly knowing why, but with a vague sense of neglect and
disappointment. She was in a trance of mingled joy and dread. She saw
the dusky avenue of yews through which they passed, the long lines
of majestic terraces, the sheets of glancing water, the masses of
camellias and azaleas, brought from the hothouses to make the wintry
gardens bloom for that momentous hour, the vast fantastic solemn pile
towering up against the evening skies. She saw them all as in a dream;
she was wondering wistfully in her ignorance whether it were possible
that she had offended him, or possible that already he regretted what
he had done. She shrank a little from him, and sat quite silent as
their carriage rolled under the great stone gateway.

There had been enough in his caresses, in his words, as they had come
thither, to startle her innocent ignorance into some sense of the
meaning and the demands of love, but they had left her dimly alarmed
and troubled, as before some great mystery, and he had soon grown
abstracted, almost indifferent, and had abandoned himself to his own
thoughts.

Amyôt even in its winter silence and sombreness, was a place where
lovers could well forget the world; yews and bay trees made perpetual
verdure around its lawns, and orangeries and palm-houses made ceaseless
summer within its walls; in its halls and galleries old tapestries and
Eastern hangings muffled every sound and excluded every draught; and in
the warm air of its chambers, ceiled with cedar-wood, embossed with the
salamander, and the 'F.' in solid gold, and having embayed windows,
all looking straightway south over the Loire water, the winter's
landscape, seen through its painted casements, was but as a decorative
scene set there for the strong charm of contrast.

They passed through the ranks of the bowing servants, and remained at
last alone in the great suite of drawing-rooms, whose oriel windows
all looked southward. They were rooms hung with pale satins, still
ceiled with cedar, and keeping the Valois crown and arms upon their
gilded carvings and lofty archways. They preserved the style and charm
of the age which had begotten them. She was in harmony with them as
she moved there, the dull red light which preceded evening falling
through the painted panes on the dove-hued velvet and dusky furs of her
travelling-gown, and touching the light gold of her fair hair coiled in
a great knot above her throat.

He, when his servants had retired, kissed her hand with a ceremony
which seemed, even to her innocence, very cold.

'You are at home,' he said gently. 'Here it will be for you to command,
for all to obey.'

She stood before him in one of the embrasures of the windows; the
cream-hued velvet of her travelling-dress trimmed with sable, caught
the rays of the setting sun.

'You are châtelaine of Amyôt,' he added, with a smile. 'Here I shall be
but the first of your servants.'

The words were gracious, and even tender, but they touched her with a
sense of chillness; she felt, without knowing why she felt it, that it
was not with this courteous ceremony that he would have welcomed her if
he had loved her--much.

She said nothing, though she coloured a little as he kissed her hands.

She moved to one of the great windows and looked out a little wistfully
towards the rolling waters, the deep, dark brown forests with their
purple shadows. The dim afternoon light spread over the landscape
without, and through the gorgeous and majestic chambers, which had
once heard the love words of the Valois. She had laid her hat down on
a table near, the lingering glow of the dying day fell on her white
throat, on her cheek with its changing colour, on the knot of orange
blossom fastened amongst the lace at her breast; she thrilled through
all her nerves as she suddenly realised that she was altogether his, to
be used as he chose, never to be apart from him unless by his wish.

She gazed at the scene around her, troubled, perplexed, wistfully,
vaguely alarmed, afraid she knew not of what; whilst he watched her
with a certain futile anger against himself that her loveliness did not
excite him and content him more, a remorseful sense that he was not the
lover she merited and should have won.

A sort of self-reproach moved him as he looked at her in her innocence,
which seemed too holy a thing to be profaned by the grossness of
sensual approach--on the morrow she would not look at him with those
serene, childlike eyes.

It seemed to him almost cruel to rouse that perfect innocence from its
unsuspicious repose.

Before he could speak again she had turned towards him; her lips
trembled a little as she gathered her courage and said aloud what had
been in her thoughts all the day through.

'It will be for me to obey,' she murmured, with the colour deepening in
her cheeks. 'And I will do it always, so gladly: but would you tell
me one thing: did you--I mean--if you had not cared for me a little,
surely you would never have wished----?'

She paused, overcome by the sense of her own hardihood, and her eyes
filled with tears; she longed to say to him, 'Instead of all your
jewels, instead of all this luxury, give me one fond word,' but her
timidity and her modesty would not let her lips frame the supplication.
He was still as a stranger to her--a man whom she had seen scarce a
dozen times.

The question in its timid commencement had said enough: his conscience
shrank from it; he had always dreaded the moment inevitable of the
fatal--

 'If this be love, tell me how much.'

'Would you tell me?' she repeated very low, then paused with an
overwhelming sense of her own hardihood and great immodesty.

She made a beautiful picture as she stood before him; the cream-hued
satin falling about her, the warm cedar-wood panels behind her, the red
light of the sunset shed like a glory upon her head and shining about
her feet.

'Who would not love you, dear?' he murmured, with a hesitation of
which her own confusion spared her from being conscious. 'Never doubt
my affection. I have not been as happy as the world thinks me, but if I
be not happy beside you, fate will indeed find me thankless.'

Nor was it altogether untrue; she looked infinitely lovely to him in
that moment, with the tears shining in her upraised eyes, and the blue
veins of her throat swelling where the orange flowers touched them; and
all this was his--his as wholly as the budding primrose in the woods is
the child's that finds it and may pluck and rifle it at will.

An emotion that was more nearly passion than he had hitherto felt for
her moved him as he looked on her.

With a sudden impulse of the joy and mastery of possession, warmer and
more eager than any she had roused in him before, he took her in his
arms and kissed her throat where the orange flowers were fastened, and,
with a tender touch, unloosed them.




CHAPTER XXIV.


'Othmar _filant le parfait amour_ while he gathers wet violets under
his Valois woods, is a truly admirable idyl!' said the Princess
Napraxine, with her unkind little smile, a month later, while her eyes,
from under an umbrella covered with old point duchesse, went indolently
from the shining sea upon her right to the romantic gorge leading up
to distant peaks of snow, which could be seen on her left through
boughs of eucalyptus and mimosa. She was seated on the white terraces
of a famous villa, crowning a promontory which carried luxuriant and
fantastic gardens far out into the lazy blue water, across whose then
smiling plains of azure light it looked straight southward to the cloud
which was Corsica. It was the villa of another Russian magnate, Prince
Ezarhédine, with whom there was at that time staying a mighty statesman
at whose nod or frown Europe breathed lightly or held her breath; and
under the guise of a breakfast there was an informal conference of
diplomatists at his house that day.

Friederich Othmar was staying at S. Pharamond for two days to meet the
great Russian, and conduct, over a cigarette and a glass of kümmel,
one of those delicate and intricate negotiations in which finance and
diplomacy had equal parts, and which were the delight of his soul, and
made the special fame of the House of Othmar.

The great statesman was a charming person, Oriental in morals, Athenian
in mind, and French in manners; and Nadine Napraxine, who so seldom
could be persuaded to go anywhere, had deigned to come and breakfast
with him there and allow him to recall her childhood.

'You would never give me a smile,' he said to her. 'At five years
old you were as cruel as you are now. I remember taking you what I
thought an irresistible bribe; a gardener in Saxe driving a wheelbarrow
of bonbons. But you just looked at it--smileless--and said cruelly,
"_Merci, Monsieur--mais j'en ai tant!_" You were five years old then.'

'"_Tant_" and "_trop_" are the spoilers of our existence,' she replied.
'I remember as a child I never cared for bonbons; I used to say that if
they hung up where the church bells were, and one could not get them,
one would care----'

'My intention was good,' said the great man piteously; 'you might have
smiled on me for that.'

'That would have been very commonplace, everybody is amiable in that
kind of way; I am not amiable, they say, and yet I am never out of
temper--which seems to me the first requisite for amiability.'

'Serenity is unkind when it means indifference.'

'But indifference is so comfortable to the indifferent!' she had
replied, and the reply admitted of no refutation.

Now, when the _déjeuner_, which had been the pretext and cover of the
morning's informal but pregnant discussion, was over, and she was
about to go to her carriage, she had smiled with gentle condescension
on the Baron, and asked him the tidings of Amyôt. Friederich Othmar,
in his answers, had been incautiously and unusually enthusiastic in
the hearing of a person who to all enthusiasm was merciless; the more
merciless, because in a far-down and never-investigated corner of her
own nature she was a little conscious that she also could have been
enthusiastic--if it had been worth while.

She had laughed a little unkindly, and had made the remark about the
wet violets; the Baron, slightly irritated and considerably in earnest,
had replied, that to gather violets with your own wife was less
exciting, but perhaps sweeter, and certainly wiser, than to purchase
orchids for the wife of someone else.

'A most moral opinion, turned with classic elegance, and quite
indisputable,' said Madame Napraxine, with much amusement. 'And orchids
are so short-lived! Do you think home-grown violets live longer? Dear
Baron, I am so glad to see you so pleased, and so poetical; Napoleon's
desire for an heir made him quite brutal; your desire for your nephew's
heir makes you quite full of pretty sentiment. Pray go on, you interest
me! it is as if one heard Bismarck playing a guitar!'

'Like Napoleon, I dislike _les amours stériles_,' replied Friederich
Othmar, with a smile. 'My nephew was in danger of letting his life
drift away in a dream; I know no means of recalling a man to the
practical happiness of existence so efficacious as a young girl's
beauty.'

'You are very primitive in your ideas, dear Baron, for a person who has
lived all his life in Paris,' said the Princess Nadine, with her little
air of fatigue and of irony. She knew very well what had been implied
in his words, and she resented them.

'Nature is primitive, Madame,' said the Baron. 'But after all, we do
not improve on her, nor exclude her, do what we may.'

'You think not?' said Madame Napraxine, much amused. 'Well, for my
part, I have never been able to discover that Nature is very charming:
if we attended to her, she would make us eat with our fingers, fight
with our teeth, drink only water, and wear no clothes; she would
certainly, also, give Otho Othmar a score of wives instead of one
Sainte Mousseline. Do not take to admiring Nature, Baron; she will lead
you astray. It is too late for you to begin; no one after twenty can
eat green fruit with impunity.'

'Sainte Mousseline!' echoed the old man, with more temper than
prudence. 'Surely that epithet would not apply to Yseulte!'

'Of course not now,' said Nadine, serenely. 'Sainte Mousseline has
given way to the nuptial white satin. Only you spoke of Nature;--and if
I were you I would not wish for Nature to prevail too much at Amyôt,
for Nature has a sad trick of being soon satisfied, and dissatisfied,
and disposed to change. You know it is only the poets who invented
Constancy, at the same time that they created the Phoenix and the
Hippogriff.'

'If I thought he could be unfaithful to so much youth and so much
innocence----,' began the Baron, with some heat.

'He will not be so yet, at all events,' said Prince Ezarhédine. 'Men
are not quite so fickle as Madame Nadine thinks.'

'Men are what women make them,' she replied, with her most contemptuous
tranquillity. 'As a rule, they are always faithless to women who
love them. It is tiresome to be loved; "_ça vous donne des nerfs_."
You get out of temper and you go away; then silly people say you are
inconstant.'

'You will admit that at least it seems very like it,' said Baron Fritz.

The great statesman, standing near, looked a little wistfully at her.
He thought that he would not have found it tiresome to be loved by the
wife of Napraxine.

'The Countess Othmar will be too young to understand all that,'
continued Nadine. 'She will give too much of herself. She will not
have the first essential: _savoir se reprendre_. Love is like all
other fine arts--it should be treated scientifically. Do you remember
Sergius Veriatine? He was devoted to the Princess Platoff--my cousin
Sophie. All at once he broke with her. Some one asked him why he did
so. He answered honestly: "Un jour, elle faisait la faute de me prier
de rester quand je voulais m'en aller." Serge Veriatine put the whole
of male human nature into that sentence. Othmar's wife will be always
begging him to stay when he will want to go; she is so young. She is,
of course, in love with him; very much in love with him; and she is so
unhappily inexperienced that she will be sure to tell him so a hundred
times a day. Now, however pretty a story is, still when you hear it
very often it grows dull: you see she is beginning with an immense
mistake: Amyôt in the winter!'

'Amyôt is his choice as much as hers,' said Friederich Othmar. 'You
know he always liked solitude. They will be in Paris in the first days
of April----'

'Two months, or to speak precisely, seven weeks, of Amyôt in midwinter
is precisely the mistake that a very young girl would be sure to make,'
continued his tormentor. 'Amyôt is a delightful place in its way; it
is like a page of Brantôme. I remember the admirable hunting parties
he gave there for the Orleans princes. But all the same, seven whole
weeks of Amyôt in the rain of February and March would damp any ardour
that he might begin with--do you think he began with very much? What
a pity there was no one to tell her that a man is bored so soon! And
Othmar is like Chateaubriand; he is the _grand ennuyé_ just because
his ideals are so high that it is wholly impossible to find anything
like them anywhere. I am quite sure that he has imagined in this poor
child an angel and a goddess; a kind of Greek nymph and Christian
virgin blent in one. When he finds that she is only a child, who has
had the narrowest of all educations, and is not even a woman in her
comprehension or her sympathies, he will be intolerably wearied. If
they were in the world, the disillusion might be postponed; at Amyôt it
must come in two days.'

'You are very clever, Madame,' said the Baron with some irritation,
'but even you may perhaps for once be mistaken. She is very young, as
you say; but for that very reason she will be like clay in his hands
which he can mould as he will.'

'If he take the trouble to model it at all,' said Nadine Napraxine.
'If the sculptor do not touch the clay, it lies in a lump neglected
till somebody else comes. She will not know, I fear, how to tempt him
to make anything of her. Do you suppose they have taught her the art
of provocation in her Breton convent? She will only sob aloud if he go
away for an hour, and be plunged into despair if his kisses be one less
in number. My dear Baron, you lost all your wisdom when you failed to
persuade them to leave Amyôt. They say there is no living woman who can
be seen at sunrise after a ball and keep her lover; I am sure there is
not one who can be shut up with a man for two months in the country, in
winter, and retain his belief in her.'

'You are very learned in these matters,' said the Baron, more and more
irritated, 'and yet everyone knows that the Princess Napraxine has
always herself despised all human affections!'

'It is not necessary to have sat in the midst of a maelstrom to have
studied the laws of whirlpools,' said his tormentor. 'And what have
human affections to do with it? You know as well as I do that humanity
has only caprices and passions, with their natural issue, disillusions.'

Friederich Othmar thought of the terrace at Amyôt and the face of
Yseulte.

Walking with her a moment, alone, in the afternoon sunshine, he had
ventured on a word of counsel.

'My dear child, you are very young. Let an old man tell you something.
Otho has one serious malady; nay, do not look so alarmed, it is only
the malady of his generation--caprice and ennui. He has not an idea
that he is capricious, but he is so. Do not let his caprices pain you;
but, as far as you can, vary with his varying moods; I think that is
the secret of sympathy. Just now it is high noon with you; so there are
no shadows; but shadows will fall. I want you to understand that. Otho
is not perfect; in a way, he is very weak, though he has more intellect
than most men. Do not make a god of him. You will only spoil him and
blind yourself.'

And then she had looked at him with that look which he recalled now as
he sat by Nadine Napraxine, and had said with a dignity of reproach
which had sat very prettily on her youthfulness: 'If he have faults, I
shall never see them--you maybe sure of that; and if you will tell me
how to please him, I will never think of myself.'

Remembering this, the Baron, who had never in his life cared greatly
for any woman or believed much in one, felt a restless anger against
the prophetess of woe.

'When they predict fire they have already laid the powder,' he thought,
impatiently.

Friederich Othmar was surprised himself at the feeling of affection and
of anxiety which Yseulte had aroused in him. He had wished Othmar to
marry that the race might be continued, but he had never supposed that
any young girl would fill him with the solicitude for her own welfare
which she made him feel for hers.

Women had always been _la femelle de l'homme_ with him; no more; he was
astonished at himself for being moved by a genuine desire to secure for
her those more subtle joys of the soul which he had always derided.
Before her he felt ashamed of his own grosser convictions (which a
month before would have been so confident) that she could want nothing
more than the riches her marriage conferred on her. Though he had been
a man of little feeling he was not altogether without kindliness,
and his keen penetration told him that hers was a nature which the
glories and gewgaws of the world would do very little to console if its
affections were starved or its higher instincts humiliated, and the
prophecies of Nadine Napraxine but irritated him more because he knew
that her merciless intelligence was as a seismographic pendulum which
foretold truly the convulsions of the future.

'Surely,' she continued, 'S. Pharamond would have been a more natural
place to select at this season. Amyôt is superb, but it must be sunk
fathoms deep in snow.'

'There is no snow; it was open weather, and even mild,' replied the
Baron, who was ready to declare that roses were blossoming in the
ditches of the Orleannais.

'But why did he not come to S. Pharamond? It is a paradise of azaleas
and tulips at the present moment.'

'It is a pretty place,' he answered; 'but perhaps more suggestive of
Apates and Philotes than of the true Eros.'

'The vicinity of the _tripots_ hardly accords with the solemnity
of Hymen? Do you mean that?' she said, with her enigmatical little
smile. 'Who would ever have thought to live to hear Baron Friederich
mention Eros! Well, we will hope that the god for once will be like
the Salamander which is emblazoned, and carved so liberally, all over
Amyôt. We will hope the fire that feeds him may not go out; but I am
afraid the motto really means that what nourishes extinguishes.'

With that she rose and took herself and her sunshade, with its point
duchesse, and her marvellous gown with its cascades of lace and soft
pale hues, like tea roses, her provocative languor, and her admirable
grace, from the terraces of the Prince Ezarhédine. She was followed
by longing eyes and a silence which was the truest of compliments. To
more than one there, the sun had set whenever she had passed from their
sight.

'What makes the world of men so fanatic about that woman?' asked
Friederich Othmar, exhaling all the unspoken grievances of his own soul
in a rude grumble, as the sound of the whirling wheels of her carriage
died away. 'Why? Why? There are numbers more beautiful; few, perhaps,
with so perfect a form, yet there are some who equal her even in that.
She is as cruel as death, as cold as frost; no one ever saw a flush on
her cheek or a tear in her eyes, and when she smiles it is like the
sirocco and the north wind blent together; and yet there is no woman so
blindly loved.'

'Yet!' echoed Prince Ezarhédine. 'Surely, you should say "therefore."
The sirocco and the north wind blent together are electric shocks to
the most sated senses.'

'Yes,' added the great statesman who was his guest, 'and if it will
not sound too pedantic, I will add also why it is. She is to her lovers
very much what the worship of Isis became to the Latins. She blends an
infinite subtlety of sentiment with an infinite potentiality of sensual
delight.'

'Sensual! She is as cold as snow----'

'I know; she has that sobriquet. But every one feels what a paradise
would lie within if the snow were melted. Every one hopes--more or less
conscious or unconscious of his hope--to pass that frosty barrier. I
think if Madame Napraxine ever loved any man, she would make such a
heaven for him that he would be the most enviable of all human beings.
But it would only last a month; perhaps six weeks. Although,' he added,
with a faint sigh, 'it would be worth losing all the rest of life to be
the companion of those six weeks.'

'If I may differ with you, Prince, I would say that, on the contrary,
if ever Madame Nadine can be touched to love she will be most tenacious
and most constant,' said Ezarhédine.

'Perhaps too much so for the felicity of the person whom she might
honour,' added the Baron with a smile that was a little impertinent.
He had always disliked and dreaded her; she had wasted two years of
his nephew's life, and he shrewdly suspected that she was the cause of
Othmar's too slight ardour towards his young wife.

Meanwhile, the subject of their meditations and desires was borne by
her fleet horses over the sea-road homeward to La Jacquemerille. She
felt astonished, irritated, offended at the idyl of Amyôt. To have
loved herself, and then to be content shut up within the stone walls of
a country-house with a girl taken from a convent!

'He is like Gilles de Retz,' she thought, with bitter disdain. 'He
takes the white flesh of a child to try and cure his malady.'

It seemed to her cowardly, sensual, contemptible.

She drove homeward through the olives and the lemon-yards and the green
fields that were full of anemones and narcissus and of the bright gold
and sea-shell hues of the crocus. The grey towers of S. Pharamond were
on her left as she went, and beyond them the fantastic pinnacles and
gilded crockets of Millo. She looked at them with an anger foreign to
her character.

'Who could have dreamed he would have done so absurd a thing?' she
thought, irritated against him and against herself. Never before in
her life had the actions of any other person had the slightest effect
upon her own feelings. She had not lived very long, it is true, but
to herself she seemed to have an illimitable experience; and within
her memory there was no record of any time in which she

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