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Princess Napraxine, Volume 3 (of 3)

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Title: Princess Napraxine, Volume 3 (of 3)

Author: Ouida


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

PRINCESS NAPRAXINE

III.




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




PRINCESS NAPRAXINE


BY

OUIDA

[Illustration]

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. III.

  London
  CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
  1884

  [_All rights reserved_]




  TABLE OF CONTENTS
  Chapter 34      1
  Chapter 35     62
  Chapter 36     92
  Chapter 37    115
  Chapter 38    136
  Chapter 39    163
  Chapter 40    179
  Chapter 41    197
  Chapter 42    226
  Chapter 43    243
  Chapter 44    257
  Chapter 45    267
  Chapter 46    270
  Chapter 47    276
  Chapter 48    284
  Chapter 49    292
  Chapter 50    315
  Chapter 51    325
  Chapter 52    327
  Chapter 53    342
  Chapter 54    354
  Chapter 55    363
  L'Envoi       375




PRINCESS NAPRAXINE.




CHAPTER XXXIV.


When Yseulte had recovered enough to travel, he took her to the Italian
lakes for awhile, to restore her to her usual health and strength,
and distract her thoughts from what had befallen her at Amyôt. With
the beginning of winter they returned, and made their home for awhile
in the great hotel of the Boulevard St. Germain, which he hated, and
where he intended to remain for the briefest time that could suffice
for the fulfilment of those social duties of which Friederich Othmar
never ceased to remind him. There his mother's apartments had been
prepared for his wife, and every grace and attraction that the art and
the taste of the day could add to them had been added, as though the
most solicitous affection had presided over the preparation of them.
All the preferences she had shown in the country had been remembered
and gratified; whatever she had liked best in colour, in treatment, in
art, in flowers, in marble, had been consulted or reproduced in Paris;
and even a large dog to which she had taken a fancy at Amyôt had been
brought thence from the kennels, and was lying before the fire when she
entered.

A much older and far wiser woman would have been persuaded to believe,
as she believed, that in all this delicate _prévenance_ for her
pleasures and her preferences the tenderest love had spoken. She could
not divine the self-reproach of her husband's conscience, which made
him sensible that he perforce denied her so much that was her due,
and made him proportionately eager to atone for that denial by every
material enjoyment and outward mark of affection and of homage. All
those who surrounded him, all his acquaintances, his household, and his
dependents, imagined that he loved his young wife. The person who was
in nowise deceived was Friederich Othmar.

'He is like a Sultan,' thought the old man angrily, 'a Sultan who loads
the women of his zenana with ropes of pearls and emeralds as big as
pigeon's eggs, that they may not perceive that he only visits them
twice a year!'

By the law of the attraction of contrasts, there had arisen a mutual
attachment between her and Baron Fritz: the unscrupulous old man, for
whom as for Turcaret the whole world was composed of shareholders, felt
more reverence and tenderness for Yseulte than he ever felt in his life
for anyone; and she, who only saw his devotion to Othmar, his admirable
manners, his shrewd wit, and his paternal kindness to herself, grew
fond of, and grateful to, him, and was wholly ignorant of that
mercilessness and selfishness which would have immolated all mankind
to the service of his personal ambitions, and to which all morality or
humanity appeared as absurd as they did to Fouquet or to Talleyrand.

Friederich Othmar incessantly strove to inspire her with his own
passion for the House he adored, and though he failed because she
was too thoroughly patrician in all her instincts to easily welcome
such impressions, and was more apt to share her husband's disdain for
all such ambitions, he did succeed in persuading her that the future
content of Othmar himself would depend on the measure of the interest
which he would take in those great fortunes of which he held the key.

'Understand this, my child,' he would say, 'a man in old age never
forgives himself for the occasions which he has let slip in youth;
and every man who in youth is _désœuvré_, pays for it heavily when
age has come. Otho is a clever man, but he has the sickness of his
century; he is indifferent to everything' ('even to you!' he thought
impatiently). 'We call it the malady of the time; I do not know that we
are right. It existed in Petronius Arbiter's, but it had no existence
in our immediate forefathers'. However, you do not care for abstract
discussions; you care for Otho. Well, let us confine ourselves to Otho.
Nowadays, he is still a young man; he thinks he can afford to despise
all things because he has strength, and health, and every form of
enjoyment accessible to him--and he is certainly rich enough to play at
cynicism all day if it amuse him most.'

'He is no cynic,' said Yseulte, quickly.

Baron Fritz smiled.

'A little of Alceste, surely? You read "Le Misanthrope," even at your
convent, I imagine? My dear child, people always desire the fate they
have not. Alfred de Vigny, with his sixteen quarterings, was always
in rebellion against the fate of the poor gentleman; Otho, one of the
richest men in Europe, is always rebelling against his riches as a
chain and a species of dishonour. Now, it is for you to reconcile him
to them; it is for you to persuade him that in the interests of his
House lie those occupations and obligations which will not pall upon
him as he grows older. I have known men weary of love and pleasure,
but I have never known them weary of ambition. Otho scorns vulgar
ambitions, but there are those which are not vulgar. In finance, as
in life, there is no standing still. In his present mood he would be
delighted if ruin were possible to us; it is not possible. Short of a
European war that should last thirty years, nothing can harm us much.
Still, no great house can long stand without a chief who cares for
its welfare and honour. Like Catherine II., "je lis l'avenir dans le
passé." A wise statesman has always the past of the world spread out
before him like an ordnance map for his guidance. So may we also, in
the past history of such houses as our own, see what has led to their
ruin, and so guide ourselves to avoid those evils in our own case.
Now, nothing has been so commonly the cause of _krach_ in financial
establishments as their being afflicted with imprudent or indifferent
members. Otho is not very often imprudent, but he is entirely
indifferent. Certainly,' continued the Baron, with pardonable pride,
'the Maison d'Othmar is too solidly established, too greatly important
to the public life of Europe, to be easily imperilled by a young man's
foibles. Still, I cannot disguise from myself the fact that when I am
no more there will be no check on his eccentricities, no stimulus to
his apathy. He will be ill served because he will at once expect too
much virtue from men, and observe them with too little suspicion. The
ship is sound and safe, and sure to have fair winds, but if the man at
her helm be reading his Horace or his La Bruyère instead of steering
by his chart, the ship may founder in clear weather and calm seas. You
understand me?'

Metaphor was very unusual to him; he only condescended to use it for
sake of making his meaning clearer to the feebleness of a feminine
mind.

'Yes, I understand quite well,' she replied, with a little sigh. 'But I
have no influence; he would think me impertinent; and I am sure no one
will care for the honour of the House more truly than he.'

'Commercially speaking, there are two kinds of honour,' said Friederich
Othmar. 'The fantastic and visionary one he will always maintain,
but the practical one, which lies in doing your utmost for all the
interests centred in yours, he will neglect. If I were to tell him that
we must collapse to-morrow, he would give up everything, down to his
pet edition of Marcus Aurelius, to satisfy our debts; but if I were to
tell him also how many financial schemes and companies would fall with
us, he would only reply that the world would be exceedingly well rid
of so many scoundrels. The honour is safe with him, doubtless, but the
welfare is not. I shall not live for ever; I shall probably only live
a very few years more. You must persuade your husband that his true
duties and pleasures will lie in those ambitions which his fathers
have bequeathed to him. I know that he and you would like to extinguish
the House of Othmar financially, and dwell at Amyôt with no remembrance
of the world. That is a lover's dream. My dear, simplicity and solitude
are impossible in our society; a shepherd's peace is not attainable by
a man whom the world claims. If I were to die to-morrow, and Otho to
remain as indifferent to his own interests as he is now, all that I
have done, all that his predecessors have done, would crumble away in
ten or twenty years like so much soft sandstone in a succession of wet
winters. He would not resent it now, but when he should be fifty years
old he would resent it bitterly; he would never pardon himself. It is
from this possibility that your influence must protect him.'

She hesitated, with a blush upon her face.

'I have no influence,' she said timidly. 'He knows so much better, so
much more than I----'

'Obtain influence over him,' said the old man curtly; 'for if you do
not, someone else will. Nay, my dear, pardon me; do not be hurt by
my plain speaking. Such men as Otho are always influenced by women;
he should be so now by you; he will be so if you will leave off
worshipping him timidly, making him your law and your religion, and
realise that you are an exquisitely lovely woman, with mind enough not
to be the mere toy of any man. You are very young, it is true, but you
have grown ten years in a few months. You must remember that to be in
love is very agreeable, no doubt, but you are not his mistress; you are
his wife. You must not think only of the immediate moment, but of the
far future when he will not be in love with you, _ma belle_, nor you
with him, but when you may still influence him nobly and wisely, and he
may find in you his safest friend.'

Yseulte listened, with a little sigh.

It seemed to her as if all her happy illusions were taking wing,
like the group of amorini which flew away from a weeping nymph on
the ceiling of her room, which had been painted by Bourgereau. They
were seated in one of her own apartments, a very bower of primroses
and white lilac, panelled in the Louis Seize style, with Bourgereau's
charming children in groups within each panel above the satin couches.
Between the curtains, there were glimpses through the windows of the
cedars and wellingtonias of the gardens. Without, it was a chilly
winter's day, but within, it was warm as summer, mellow with soft
colour, fragrant with innumerable flowers; even to this great hotel
of the Boulevard S. Germain, which had always seemed to Othmar the
most oppressive and detestable of all his many mansions, the advent of
Yseulte had brought a grace and light and sweetness as of young and
innocent life, a charm of home to these splendid and desolate suites of
rooms. Her dogs lay on the hearth, her voice called the peacocks in the
lonely gardens, her scores of Beethoven and Schubert and Berlioz lay
open on the grand pianos. Even the look of the great bouquets in the
Japanese bowls and the jars of Saxe and Sèvres was different: her hand
had added a rose there, a fern here; they were flowers which were there
because she loved them, not only because they served for decorations
grouped by skilful servants as mere masses of colour. The great house,
sombre in its Bourbon stateliness, magnificent in its architecture,
but oppressive in its too continual display of wealth, was no longer
'une maison sans musique, une ruche sans abeilles;' it had gained a
charm which was none the less perceptible because undefinable and
impalpable, as the scent of the tea-roses in the tall Sèvres jars. But
Friederich Othmar was more sensible of this than was the possessor of
the house and of her. Friederich Othmar, who had lived for fifty years
and more without perceiving that he had never had, or wished to have,
a home, perceived that his nephew had one and scarcely appreciated it.
Friederich Othmar himself became suddenly alive to the pleasure of
finding something home-like in that corner of her boudoir where she
drew a Japanese screen between him and the draught from the windows,
brought him his cup of green tea, and listened with an interest fresh
and unfeigned to his anecdotes, his reminiscences, and his counsels:
but he found Othmar there less often than he would have wished.

'He will be glad of that _coin du feu_ some day,' he thought angrily;
annoyed by a neglect which Yseulte herself did not perceive. She
had been used to solitude; she was neither vain nor exacting; she
understood that everything could not be in Paris altogether as it had
been at Amyôt; and if she gave a sigh to that necessity, she bravely
and tranquilly accepted it. The great world was about her with its
demands, its solicitations, its tyrannies over time and thought; she
had little leisure for meditation; the Countess Othmar could not escape
the social obligations of her position or avoid its ceremonies and its
courtesies.

She remained much graver and simpler than her contemporaries were; she
cared for none of the noisy amusements of modern fashion; the world
of pleasure seemed to her, on the whole, a little vulgar, a little
tiresome, astonishingly monotonous, even in its feverish search for the
untried and the startling. But at the same time she could not escape
from its demands, and their effects upon her, and the counsels of
Friederich Othmar incessantly reminded her that she could best serve
the honour of the name she bore by making Europe admire and praise her.
It was a counsel which contained the seeds of danger; but he read her
character aright.

'Voilà une qui ne _cascadera_ jamais,' said the Baron to himself in his
tongue of the Boulevards. He was infinitely proud of, and delighted
with her; he gave her the most magnificent presents, bought her the
rarest of jewels. He accompanied her constantly in her drives and to
the opera, and even in the visits which she paid.

'It is Baron Fritz whom Othmar's marriage has reformed!' said a pretty
woman, who had long considered the silver-haired financier as her own
especial prey. He took a paternal pleasure in the admiration which the
rare patrician graces of the girl awoke in that _tout Paris_ which he
had long considered the lawgiver of the universe.

'If you had been Marie Antoinette, there might have been no
revolution,' he said jestingly to her. 'You would never have flirted
with Ferson, nor would you have played at shepherdessing, or worn a
mask in the Palais Royal.'

'I think I should only have thought of France,' she answered.

'Which would not have prevented you from going to the guillotine, I
dare say,' said the Baron. 'Nations are the concentrated distillation
of the ingratitude of men. There is only one thing which one can
always count on with absolute certainty, and that is, the general and
individual thanklessness.'

Nothing was further from his thoughts than to cloud over the trust,
confidence, and faith of her innocent optimism. He spoke as he thought
and felt, and as a long experience of mankind had taught him to do,
without reflecting that he dropped the bitterness of gall into a fair
and limpid spring, which had seen nothing above its waters save the
white lily-cups and the blue heavens.

'She will be robbed right and left endlessly if she be not taught a
little mistrust,' he said to Othmar himself, who replied:

'Let her be robbed of everything rather than of her illusions. This is
the only loss from which we never recover.'

'What an absurd idea!' thought the Baron, who had never cherished any
illusions at all, and had found life exceedingly entertaining and
enjoyable without them.

The practical mind can no more understand the regrets of the meditative
one than a manufacturer, spending his days by choice amidst the roar of
steam wheels and the ledgers of a counting-house, can understand the
artist's anguish when he is shut up in a city garret whence he cannot
see a sunset or a sunrise.

'The woes of the body, I grant, may be too much for one's philosophy,'
the Baron was wont to say. 'With the gout, or neuralgia, or sciatica,
Seneca's self might fail to retain serenity. But the sorrows of
the emotions or of the imagination are so entirely fictitious that
anyone, by the exercise of a little self-control, may put them aside
completely.'

'What! Even the losses of death?' objected some one once.

The Baron smiled:

'Death cannot affect you very greatly unless you have already committed
an act of unwisdom--that is, have already attached yourself to some
other life than your own.'

'Then where is love?' said his interlocutor.

'Where it has always been,' said Friederich Othmar, 'chiefly in the
senses partially in the imagination. When we have both the senses
and the imagination under the control of our temperate judgment, it
cannot disturb us seriously. In my youth, and even in my maturity,' he
continued, with complacence, 'I have dallied with love as well as other
men, but the moment that I felt that any one passion was likely to
exercise undue influence upon me, I withdrew myself from it. To break a
chain is difficult, but never to let it be forged is easy.'

He thought it his duty to put his young favourite on her guard against
all the deceptions and delusions which the world prepares for its
novices; he told her much more than her husband would have done of all
the intricacies and meanings of the varied life which was about her,
gave her the key to many of its secrets, and the hidden biographies of
many of its personages.

'You are in the world, you must understand the world,' he said to her;
'if not, it will be a mere labyrinth to you, and you will be lost in
it. You need not become a _mondaine_ with your heart, but you must
become one with your head, or the _mondaines_ will devour you. It
is not necessary that you should gamble or swear or get into debts
for your petticoats, as they do; but it is necessary that you should
understand the society of your time. At Amyôt you may be a young saint,
as heaven meant you to be, but in Paris you must be able to hold your
own against those who are the reverse of saints. Otho ought to teach
you all this himself, but he will not, so you must listen to me. I have
not been so engrossed in the gold market all my days that I do not
know _la haute gomme_ down to the ground. In my leisure I have always
gone into the world: the boudoir of a pretty woman is always much more
amusing than a card-table or a pistol-gallery. _L'Ecole des Femmes_ is
the one to which every wise man goes.'

He paused, with a consciousness that he had better not pursue that
theme.

'My child,' he resumed, as the carriage rolled down the Bois, 'you
are not seventeen; you are in love with your husband; you sweep your
conscience every morning with a palm-leaf to make sure there is no
little film of a cobweb left in it; you think life is such a simple
and beautiful thing that you have only to get up and go to bed as the
sun does. You hear quantities of compliments, but you pay no attention
to them; you are altogether as innocent as a flower, and you are quite
exquisite like that--it suits you; but, all the same, you cannot go on
like that for ever. Men might let you, for we are not as black as we
are painted, but women will not. It is from women that your sorrows
will come, that your perception of evil will come, that your enemies
will come. Satan, pardon me the word, would take off his hat to you and
pass by on the other side, for he, too, is not as black as he has been
painted. But women will not feel what Satan would feel; they are much
more hard to touch. It is women whom you must try to understand; you
can analyse without imbibing, as chemists do poisons.'

'Must one analyse at all?' said Yseulte, a little wistfully.

Such abrupt and familiar allusions to Satan disturbed the awe in
which she had been reared at Faïel; but she was growing used to the
perception that all the things which she held most sacred were mere
Mother Goose's tales to the world in general, and to understand why
her cousin Clothilde, who had her emblazoned chair at S. Philippe du
Roule and occupied it so regularly, and was so heedful all Lent to
wear the strictest mourning costume without a shred of lace, had yet
not a grain of real religion in her. She began to comprehend what
Blanchette had meant by all her rapturous felicitations, and sometimes
the proud and austere young soul of her was humiliated to think that
these mere material pleasures should have any attraction for her: she
felt that her grandmother's ascetic and haughty teachings would have
condemned such joys as mundane and vulgar. But the pleasure of them
was there, nevertheless, and she was too honest in her self-analysis
to dissimulate before her conscience. Unworldly as temperament and
education alike made her, Yseulte was feminine enough and accessible
enough to such vanities for all the possessions into which she entered
to amuse and please her with their novelty and the sense of power which
they gave. She was but a child in years, and the large households
deferential to her slightest word, the grand equipages ready for her
whim and fancy, the beautiful horses which bore her with the fleetness
of the wind, the vast houses through which she could wander, conscious
that she was the mistress of them all, the innumerable beauties of
art which they contained, the caskets and coffers full of jewels and
baubles, all these things beguiled her time and gratified that pride
which a very young girl always feels in the sudden assumption of
womanhood. She began to understand why all her companions at Faïel
had thought her so fortunate. Her serious and spiritual nature made
her feel a little ashamed at finding so much interest in such earthly
treasures; in her self-examination she reproved herself, and almost
contemned herself. But she was too young not to take such irresistible
delight in all these things as a child takes in butterflies or poppies;
it was delightful to say 'I wish,' and see her wishes accomplished as
by magic; it was charming to give away right and left, as out of a
bottomless purse; it was amusing to command, to confer, to be regarded
as the source of all favours and all fortune, as the people of Amyôt
and the household of Paris regarded her. In time, the delicacy of
her taste, the seriousness of her intelligence, might probably make
these possessions and privileges pall on her; in time she would see
sycophancy where she now saw only devotion, and grow weary of a loyalty
only rooted in self-interest; but, at the onset, life was to her like a
fairy story, her empire was one on which the sun never set and in which
the spring-time never waned.

Othmar never said one word which could have served to disenchant
her. Conscious that he could not give her all the singleness of love
which was her due, he strove to atone for any wrong he did her so by
multiplying around her every physical gratification, and giving her an
unlimited power of self-indulgence.

In this new life she was like a child who stands amidst the
bewilderment of its crowd of New Year presents; sometimes she thought
of herself as she had been six months before, sitting in the shadow of
the stone cloisters at Faïel, in her dust-coloured convent frock, with
the blue ribbon of merit crossing her breast and some holy book open on
her hands, with a kind of wondering pity and strangeness, and a sense
of being herself far, very far, away from any kinship with that sad
grey figure.

That so little of egotism was aroused in her in this hot-house
existence which she led, was due to the generosity and simplicity
of her instincts, on which the contagion of worldly influences had
little power. To send a silver crucifix to Faïel, or a piece of fine
lace to Nicole, still gave her greater pleasure than to wear her own
great diamonds or see the crowds in the Champs Elysées look after her
carriage with its liveries of black velvet and white satin.

Meanwhile she had the natural feeling of every unselfish and generous
nature, that her life was not full enough of thought for others. It was
difficult for her at her age to know what to do, so as to carry out
those theories of self-sacrifice which training and temperament alike
made a religion to her.

Friederich Othmar, when he discovered this, told her, with some
impatience, that the House of Othmar always did what was expected of it
in this respect, and that its women had no occasion to trouble their
heads with such matters.

'Wherever we have been located we have always been good citizens,'
he said, with truth. 'We have always borne our due share of public
expenditure or public almsgiving; perhaps more than our due share.
Myself, I believe that all that sort of charity is a vast mistake. It
is intended as a sop to the wolves, but you cannot feed wolves on sops.
They will always want your blood, however they may lick up your mess.'

Yseulte remembered that S. Francis had proved that even wolves may be
tamed into affection and usefulness; but though she believed firmly in
that legend, she hesitated to put it forward, even as an allegory, as
evidence against the arguments of the Baron. She did not lack courage,
nor even that truest courage, the courage of opinion, but she had been
reared in the old traditions of high breeding, which make contradiction
a vulgarity, and, from the young to the old, an offence.

'I hope you will not make yourself into a sort of Judith Montefiore,'
continued the Baron irritably. 'We are not Jews. Jews must do that
kind of thing to get themselves tolerated. We could forgive them the
Crucifixion, but we cannot forgive them their percentage. Though we are
not Jews, Otho has already done some Quixotic things in the Montefiore
fashion. I hope you will not encourage him to continue them.'

'Tell me what they were,' she said, with the light in her eyes and the
colour in her face.

'Not I,' said the Baron; 'I much prefer to see him smoking à Londrès at
the Jockey.'

'Had he ever any very great sorrow?' she ventured to ask.

'None, my dear, but what he chose to make for himself,' replied
Friederich Othmar, with contempt. 'Do you remember Joubert's regret
that he could not write his thoughts on the bark of trees by merely
looking at them?--well, Otho's griefs are much as baseless. As if,' he
added, 'as if there were any real grief in the world,--except the gout!'

'He is like Obermann, like Amiel,' she said timidly. She had read
passages in the volumes of those dreamy and isolated thinkers in the
library of Amyôt. Friederich Othmar shrugged his shoulders; those names
signified to him the very lowest deeps of human ineptitude and folly.

'Men who were so afraid of disappointment and disillusion that they
would allow themselves to enjoy nothing! It would be as reasonable to
let oneself die of starvation as a preventive of dyspepsia! Such men
do not think; they only moon. The cattle that lie and graze under the
trees have meditations quite as useful. My child,' he added, 'would
you be wise or foolish if you threw all your diamonds into the river
in anger because they were not stars? That is what your husband does
with his life. You must learn to persuade him that the stars are
unattainable, and that the diamonds represent a very fair and fruitful
kingdom if not the powers of the air.'

Yseulte sighed wistfully. She vaguely felt that it was not within her
means to reconcile him with the world and fate; she had not the magic
wand.

'I am always in dread,' continued the Baron, 'that you, with your
religious ideas, and he, with his impatience of his position, will do
something extraordinary and Quixotic; will turn S. Pharamond into a
_maison de santé_, or this hotel into a lazar-house for cancer. I shall
never be surprised at any madness of that sort.'

Yseulte sighed a little.

'But, there is the misery of the world all around us,' she ventured to
say; 'if we could alleviate it, would it not be worth any sacrifice?'

'My dear,' said Baron Fritz, 'when Napoléon gave the opium at Jaffa, he
did more to alleviate suffering than all the philanthropists have ever
done. Yet it has been always brought against him as his worst action. I
went once, out of curiosity, to see the Incurables at the hospital of
la Salpêtrière. Well, if false sentiment did not prevent the treatment
à la Jaffa taking place there, an infinitude of hideous suffering and
of hideous deformity would be mercifully nded. But the world is so
sentimental that it will send several hundred thousand of young and
healthy men to endure all kinds of tortures in war for a question of
frontier, or a matter of national etiquette, but it esteems it unlawful
to kill idiots or drug to death incurables cursed with elephantiasis or
leprosy.'

Yseulte's clear eyes grew troubled; these views of life were perplexing
to her. At Faïel all such contradictions had been simply accepted as
ordained under one unquestioned and divine law; the conversation of
Friederich Othmar depressed and bewildered her, but she could perceive
its reason. It made her reflect; it made her more of a woman, less of
a child. He thought that was for the best. If she were not educated in
some worldly knowledge, the world would make an easy prey of her.

'Otho treats her as if she were an ivory madonnina who would remain
aloof on an altar all her days,' he said to a woman he knew. 'On the
contrary, she is a beautiful creature, about whom all the world will
buzz and sting like bees about a lily. She must be taught not to throw
away her honey. She is just now in the clouds; she is very much in
love with a man who is not in love with her; she is full of ideals and
impossible sentiments. She is half a child, half an angel; but to hold
her own in the world she must be something else--not so angelic and
not so childish,--and she must learn to esteem people at their value,
which is for the most part very small. It would be even well if she
could see Otho as he is; she would take life more easily. She would
not be so likely to fall headlong from a heaven of adoration into a
stone well of disillusion. Truths live at the bottom of these wells, no
doubt, but they are not agreeable, and they give a shock to sensitive
people. A woman is prettier when she is sensitive. It is like piety
or charity--it is an essentially feminine ornament, but it is not a
quality which wears well.'

His friend laughed.

'Do you think Othmar will thank you for so educating his wife?'

'He has never thanked me for anything that I have done,' he replied.
'But that does not prevent me from doing what I consider is my duty, or
is most wise.'

'Say wisdom,' returned the lady. 'That suits you better than duty. Duty
is ridiculous if you do not let _le bon Dieu_ pose behind it.'

'I know people say so,' answered the Baron; 'but it is only an idea. In
practical life agnostics and disbelievers of every sort make just as
good citizens as the pietists.'

With the second week of December there was a great social event in
Paris. The Hôtel Othmar was opened to the world. 'The gates of Janus
unclose,' said one who deemed himself a wit in allusion to a war, then
in embryo, into whose conception and gestation the gold of the Othmar
was considered to enter largely.

The Boulevard S. Germain and all its approaches were like rivers of
light, and the sound of carriage wheels was like the roll of artillery.
'Tout Paris' flocked there, and even the Faubourg disdained not to pass
through those immense gates of gilded bronze, which were nicknamed
of Janus, since the mistress of the salons within was by birth
incontestibly a Comtesse de Valogne.

'Tiens, tiens, tiens!' murmured Aurore de Vannes. 'Is it possible
for twelve months to have so changed a _fillette_ into a goddess!
Really, we were all wrong, and Othmar was right. We all thought her a
_pauvrette_, to be put away in a holy house; he had the sense to see
that she would become superb, and would set him right with all the
Faubourg. The Faubourg was always well inclined to him, because his
grandmother was a de Soissons-Valette, but his marriage has made him
one of them: he is definitely placed for ever. Really, I never gave him
credit for so much foresight when he sent that ivory casket. I thought
it was only a caprice.'

'Othmar cares not a straw for the Faubourg,' said her husband, out of
the pure spirit of contradiction. 'He will never give his millions to
carry on a Holy War or restore the throne. He is more likely to dream
of a great Western empire with its capital at the Golden Horn. He is a
Slavophile.'

'He is wholly indifferent to politics; it is Baron Fritz who is the
political conspirator,' returned the Duchesse. 'Otho is a mere dreamer,
and he used to be a discontented one. Perhaps he is not so now.'

'He does not look especially happy; she does. I confess I should be
sorry for him to become contented; the contemplation of his discontent
has always reconciled me with having nothing myself,' said a great
diplomatist, whose debts were as considerable as his talents.

'If he be not contented----' began the Duc, and paused, conscious that
for him to say anything except a jest of any marriage under the sun
would appear supremely ridiculous to his companions. Yet his admiration
for Yseulte was not dormant, and took a still warmer character as he
saw her in the _grande tenue_ of a woman of the world, with the Othmar
diamonds, long famous and long unseen, on her fair hair and her white
breast.

'She has too many jewels for such a child,' he said irritably. 'She is
covered with them like an Indian idol. That is so like a financier's
love of display!'

'I dare say he has given them to her as you give toys to a child,'
replied the diplomatist. 'Othmar has no faults of display. What has
been almost ridiculous in him has been a simplicity of taste not in
accord with his millions. But his wife is so very handsome that she may
well betray him into some vanities.'

Twelve months had truly made in her that almost magical transformation
which passion can cause in a very young and innocent girl who, from
entire seclusion and absolute ignorance, is suddenly thrown into the
arms of a man whom she has scarcely seen, yet timidly adores. She had
lost her extreme spirituality of expression, but she had gained a
thousand-fold in other ways. Her form had developed, her whole person
had become that of a woman instead of a child; she was many years older
than she had been one short year before, when, in her little quiet
chamber under the woods of Faïel, she had only thought of love as a
mystical religious emotion, and of herself as the betrothed of Christ.

She filled her place, and did the honours of her house with a calm
grace which had nothing of the hesitation or the awkwardness of youth.
He had told her what to do, and she did it with perfect ease, and that
dignity which had so become her when she had curtsied to Melville as a
little child in the old, dusky house in the Ile Saint-Louis. In manner
she might have been a Queen of France for five-and-twenty years. It
was only in the unworn transparency of the fair skin, beneath which
the blood came and went so warmly, the slenderness of the lines of
her form, the childlike naïveté of her smile, that her exceeding
youthfulness was still revealed.

She made no single error; she said little, but she said always what
was needful and becoming; she received each one of her guests with the
phrase that pleased them, with the observances that were due to them;
there was no hesitation or awkwardness in her. Even women who watched
her, as her cousin did, with a malicious wish to find her at fault
somewhere, were forced to confess to themselves that she bore herself
admirably. If she had a defect, it was that she appeared a little cold.
She was always exquisitely courteous; she was never familiar.

'She has the manner of the last century,' said Madame de Vannes, 'of
the last century, before the women of Marie Antoinette rode donkeys and
milked cows.'

To see that baby who six months ago had never spoken to any man except
her confessor, and never worn any ornament except her convent medal,
receiving sovereigns and princes and ambassadors, _de puissance à
puissance_, and wearing diamonds which were ten times bigger, finer,
and in greater profusion than her own, made her very angry, and yet
made her laugh. She had seen many transformations of _fillettes_ into
great ladies, but none quite so rapid, so striking, or so complete as
that of her young cousin into the mistress of the Hôtel Othmar.

'I wish Nadine Napraxine were here this evening,' she thought with that
good-humoured malice which enjoys a friend's annoyance without meaning
any real unkindness.

'All Paris will talk of your ball and much more of you to-morrow,' said
de Vannes during the evening to his wife's cousin. 'Does that please
you as much as it pleases most of them?'

'I shall not think about it,' replied Yseulte, simply.

'But I imagine you read the journals?'

'No, never.'

'Never!' he echoed, incredulously. 'Why is that?'

She hesitated, then answered with a little blush: 'He has told me not;
he thinks they are foolish.'

'Othmar?' asked the Duc, with a laugh. 'Do you obey him as you did the
Mother Superior?'

'Why not?' said Yseulte gently, but coldly.

'Why not!' he said irritably. 'Well, because you should begin as you
wish to go on; you will not care for that state of servitude long; it
would be better never to accustom him to it.'

'Excuse me, my cousin, I see Madame de Tavernes is looking for me,'
said Yseulte, as she went to speak with a Duchesse whose genealogical
tree mounted to the remote ages before the long-haired kings; a stately
and powdered person who had issued from the retirement in which she
usually lived to honour the first great entertainment of the daughter
of Gui de Valogne.

The Duc was rebuffed and annoyed.

'She has learned her _riposte_ already,' he thought, 'and she has
not forgotten the locket. I wonder if he care? If he want to be free
himself, he had better put her on a course of _petits journaux_ at
once. There is no recipe like that for corrupting the mind and debasing
the taste. How handsome she is! What a lovely face--what a lovely
form!--and only seventeen even now! She will be in perfect beauty for
the next ten years. If he be not a very ardent or a very assiduous
husband, he will not be able to keep all that to himself; he will have
many rivals, and he will be sure to be unfaithful himself:--then she
will read the journals and learn how women console themselves.'

At five o'clock that morning her rooms were empty, her guests were
gone, and her woman had undressed her, and put on her a _négligée_
of white silk; her hair was unloosened and fell behind her like a
cascade of gold; all the great jewels were strewn on the table near;
she was looking at her own reflection in the large oval silver-framed
mirror before her; she smiled a little as she did so; her eyes were
luminous, her cheeks were flushed; she was sensible of no fatigue, she
was only elated with her own triumphs. She had had a girlish pleasure
in receiving her cousins in that magnificent house; she had had an
innocent triumph in showing how well she could fill the part of a woman
of the world; she felt like a child who has played a queen's part in
some pageant, and played it well; something of the insidious charm of
the world had begun to steal on her; something of its vanity and of its
rivalry had begun to attract her;--very little, for her nature was too
proud, too pure, and too serious to yield easily to these temptations,
but something nevertheless. Only as yet her one dominant thought was of
him in it all. Had he also been content; had there been nothing that he
could have desired otherwise?

She turned with a smile, half timid still, as he knocked at the door
and entered her chamber. Her attendants withdrew at a sign from him; he
took her in his arms and kissed her.

'I thank you for all your triumphs, dear,' he said kindly. 'They are
mine.'

'Did I really do well?' she said doubtfully, but joyfully.

'Perfectly, perhaps almost too well; Paris will talk too much of you.'

'I forgot nothing?' she asked, still anxiously.

'You forgot nothing, and you looked--much too beautiful for men quickly
to forgive me! No, dear, I do not flatter you; flattery would be absurd
from me to you; I tell you the simple truth.'

'I am glad,' she said simply, 'for I have nothing else to reward you
with for all you have given to me.'

She spoke shyly, for she was always in awe of him a little. Her arm,
uncovered to the shoulder as the loose folds of the sleeve fell away
from it, stole timidly about his throat; in all her caresses there was
the hesitation of a proud and delicate nature blent with the longing
of an ardent love. Habit had not familiarised her with the relation in
which he stood to her; the brutalising intimacy of marriage had not
dwarfed or dulled her ideal and adoration of him. He was still much
less her lover than her lord.

Othmar took the bright gold of her heavy hair in his hand, and drew it
through his fingers.

'On chasse de race,' he said, with a smile. 'You receive a great crowd
as if you had been reared in a court from your babyhood.'

'You told me what to do,' she answered simply. 'It seems very easy;
besides, every one was so extremely kind.'

'The kindness of society,' thought Othmar, 'the kiss of Judas!'

But he did not say so. Let her learn for herself what it was worth, he
thought; the knowledge would come soon enough of itself.

Yseulte's face grew grave as she sat lost in thought.

'I do not think it is right to care for this sort of thing,' she said,
with hesitation. 'It is only a sort of vanity. And then all these
diamonds and these great pearls--they say they are worth millions--I do
not like to wear them whilst there are so many without clothes or food
of any kind; one knows that there is so much misery all about us here
in Paris. Is it right, do you think, to enjoy oneself in this kind of
way? I seem to remember nothing but myself all the day long----'

Othmar smiled and sighed.

'Enjoy, my child, while you can; leave all those grave thoughts for
your older years. If you like to sell your jewels, and give them all to
the poor, you can do it, but wait a few years first; wait to see more
of the world. There is a cruel science, called political economy, which
they certainly did not teach you at Faïel; you must learn something
of that before you try to decide these questions, which have vainly
perplexed every thoughtful man since rich and poor were together on
earth. And now, shut your pretty eyes, and sleep and dream of your
triumphs; they have been very innocent ones, you need not repent them.'

He kissed her again, and left her to her daybreak slumber in the warm
orange-flower-scented air of her bed-chamber; and himself went out into
the chill half-frozen streets of Paris on one of those errands of mercy
of which he never spoke to any human being, and which were the result
of his pity for men rather than of any belief or faith or sympathy that
he had with them. He was one of the few men whom the lawless classes of
Paris have ever respected.

Othmar himself could go unharmed where the police would not have
ventured to go save in force; and in the days of the Commune the worst
leaders of it had put a white cross on the great houses of which he was
master, and spared them from torch and shell for sake of the young man
who was wont to pass through the vilest quarters of Paris, with his
hand ever open and his compassion never denied. They knew that if their
_couches sociales_ could have been an accomplished fact, Othmar himself
would never have wished the old state of things maintained, but would
have accepted the new with indifference and perfect courage, himself
glad to be rid of a burden.

They forgave him his riches for sake of his own contempt for them; his
courage, even his coldness, attracted them. He had no _blague_; he was
entirely sincere; he never attempted to convert them to anything; he
aided them without putting any price on his aid, either of gratitude or
doctrine. They knew that he had neither fear of them nor love for them,
but that he had a profound sense of a common humanity with them, which
was in his eyes as in theirs another name for a common misfortune.

The times were out of joint for him. If he had been created with the
capacity of religious faith, he would have been willingly what François
Xavier or Père Lacordaire were. But he had the clear and critical
intelligence of a man of the world; the fables of faith could not give
him any mental pabulum. He took refuge in pity; it seemed to him that
men were bound to do for one another at least as much as buffaloes do,
which in trouble gather around the wounded ones of the herd.

Melville alone had found out something of what he did; Melville,
who although the sweetest-voiced, softest-handed, of churchmen and
courtiers in salon and boudoir, never feared or failed to descend into
the haunts of iniquity, to grapple with disease and crime. In such
places he and Othmar had met by chance more than once, and on one
occasion Melville had said to him: 'You have more influence than I,
because they do not suspect you; a priest is always suspected of trying
to save souls only to serve his own.'

'If I have more influence than you, they are thankless,' rejoined
Othmar; 'for you certainly love them, and I care nothing for them,
absolutely nothing.'

'Why do you serve them, then?' asked Melville, in surprise.

Othmar sighed impatiently. 'It seems to me that one is bound in honour
when fate has placed oneself beyond temptation;--besides, these reeking
breeding-pens of crime in the midst of our own luxury are horrible;
they are cancers in the very womb of human nature. Your Christianity
has endeavoured to cure them for eighteen centuries, and has always
failed miserably. The cancer grows and grows.'

Few persons save those of the police, who were perforce acquainted with
his movements, were aware of the intimacy and influence he had acquired
with the most wretched and the most dangerous classes of Paris;
the food of _maisons centrales_ and the emigrants of Nouméa. Often
Friederich Othmar wondered within himself whither went the large sums
which his nephew drew and spent without explanation; what he spent on
art and on pleasure was known, but there were often great quantities of
money taken by Othmar, in the exercise of his unquestionable right, for
the use of which all the Baron's ingenuity failed to find an account.
Numberless families redeemed from misery, many youths saved from crime
and the galleys, many grown men aided to begin new lives in other
climes, and many a foul place purged to moral and physical cleanliness,
swallowed up these millions of francs, of which the employment remained
a secret to the argus-eyes of Baron Fritz. There was a nobility about
the indifference of this very rich man to his riches which conquered
the hatred of the poor even amongst the Socialistic arrondissements,
where such hatred was the sole religion recognised. They knew that
Othmar himself was as disdainful of existent society as they were
themselves, and that although fortune had so favoured him, he was
no more content with the arrangement of the world than they were
themselves. They were continually, brutally, ungrateful, but underneath
their gratitude they liked him, and would never have harmed him.

As he walked out now into the misty air of dawn, he recalled the
lovely face, with its sleepy eyelids, of his young wife with a sharp
pang of conscience. Why could he not be content with that innocent and
undivided love?

He recalled with a sense of some great fault in himself how entirely
she was outside his life, how little hold she had upon his passions
or his emotions. She was exquisite, she was purity itself in body
and soul; he realised his own absolute possession of her as he had
never done that of any other woman. He had been, that night, proud of
her grace before the world, charmed by her manner, conscious of her
incomparable distinction; and she was his as entirely as any flower
that he might gather in a field. For him had been her first flush, her
first kiss, her first consciousness of love; and yet, as he walked
through the streets of Paris, leaving her to sink to sleep like a happy
and tired child, he was conscious that his heart was indifferent to
her; that, the mere early inclinations of the senses pacified, she had
no power to rouse in him more than the kindly and indulgent affection
which a child might have called forth by its helplessness and beauty.

He desired earnestly to make her as happy as any creature could be on
earth, and would have denied her nothing which could have helped to
make her so; but he could not command his own passions, and he could
not make her the supreme mistress of them. She was a most lovely and
most innocent creature, who was welcome to enjoy all the greatness
and the grace of life with which he could dower her; she was a young
saint who would bear his children in her breast as innocently as
the peach-blossom bears the fruit; she was at all times both dear
to him and sacred to him; but love for her was not there. He sighed
impatiently as he felt that in all his words and his caresses he acted
a part with her, that perhaps sooner or later, when the world had
taught her better what men were, she would know that, and would be no
longer so easily deceived.

As he had watched her that evening in her serenity, her gracefulness,
her dignity, he had all at once remembered that in the great world
youth grows rapidly, as a flower in a hothouse, that she would be
surrounded by many who would ask no happier task than to enlighten
her ignorance and embitter her confidence, and that if she ever came
to learn and realise that she had owed her marriage partially to his
compassion, and more still to his passion for another woman, her heart
might break under the burden of that bitter knowledge, but her pride
would never pardon the offence.

He began to feel as if he wronged her, though neither by act nor word
had he been untrue to her since her marriage. She was so charming
in every way, so delicate of thought, so graceful in expression, so
intelligent even in her ignorance, so wholly worthy to inspire and
retain the greatest love of a man's life, that he felt guilty before
her, knowing that his pulses beat no quicker when he joined her after
absence, that when her young lips, fresh as roses, touched his own, he
met them without ardour or emotion. He had wished society to attract
her; it seemed to him the quickest and the easiest compensation
that he could offer her. At the root of the willingness with which
he entertained the world, he to whom it was as indifferent as it
was commonplace, was the unacknowledged sentiment that if Yseulte
placed her happiness, as her temperament would lead her to do, in
the inner life, in the affections and in the sympathies, she would
be inevitably most miserable soon or late, since soon or late she
would discover the poverty of his own heart; and his heart was richly
endowed enough by nature to make him ashamed to think that it might
ever be so. Friederich Othmar judged him harshly but justly; his
indulgence and tenderness to her were not those of a lover, but were
the accumulated gifts with which he strove to make her blind to his own
coldness. The more he lived with her, the more he felt as though it
were an unpardonable sin to have no love to give her, and the farther
the possibility of such love receded from him. Esteem, admiration,
tenderness, even affection, may all exist only to make the absence of
love itself the more conspicuous.

As he went through the quiet streets, almost wholly deserted in
the early hour of the morning, and swept by a keen wind, a waggon
thundering along at too rapid a pace for so clumsy a vehicle caught the
wheel of a carriage, which was coming in the opposite direction. The
shock flung the carriage on the kerbstone; one of its two horses fell,
the other struggled like a demoniac; the coachman and servant were
thrown to the ground. Othmar naturally hastened to the spot. He was the
only person in sight. The carriage itself had oscillated violently, but
was not upset; its occupant had opened the door of it before he could
arrive at the spot, and had leaped lightly out, though wrapped in
sable furs from head to foot. When he reached the place, the fur-clad
figure was standing in calm contemplation of the harm which had been
done, and of the struggling horses which the coachman, who had sprung
to his feet, was endeavouring to pacify.

'Othmar, is it you?' said a voice whose clear and sweet vibration sent
the blood to his temples; and the eyes of Nadine Napraxine looked at
him from under the sable lining of her velvet hood.

The waggon had blundered on out of sight, its driver in terror of the
distant figure of a sergeant-de-ville who had now approached the scene.
The fallen men had both found their feet, and the horses were still
throwing themselves from side to side with broken traces and slippery
pavement adding to the difficulty increased by their terror.

Othmar's own _coupé_, which followed him at a distance, had now come
up, and his servants assisted hers. He opened the door of his own
carriage.

'Pray accept it,' he said hurriedly. 'They will drive you where you
wish; I will stay and help your people.'

'My people are idiots,' she said, as she gave them a disdainful glance.
'The waggon was large enough to be seen. I was coming from the Gare du
Nord; my women and the _fourgons_ are behind me. What are you about at
this hour? Does the Countess Othmar allow you to be out so early--or so
late?'

There was a grain of malice in the accent of the words; Othmar coloured
despite himself, yet knew not why. He felt his whole being thrill at
the mere sound of the sweet, cruel, well-remembered tones, and hated
her.

She looked at him as they stood together on the kerbstone of the
deserted and foggy street. She was enveloped in her long fur mantle,
and none of the lines of her figure were traceable: she had no more
contour than an Esquimaux. Yet, nevertheless, that incomparable grace
which belonged to her--as its movement to a bird, as its fragrance to
a flower--seemed to detach itself, and escape, even from the heavy
shapeless covering of the travelling-cloak in which she had been
wrapped throughout her long express journey from Russia hither by way
of Berlin and Strasburg. There was nothing visible of her except her
starry eyes, and yet all the irresistible power which she possessed
made his pulses fast and his thought confused; he strove against his
own weakness, and pressed his offer on her with a cold courtesy.

'Well, I will take it since you wish it,' she said, as she entered his
_coupé_. 'You will say who I am to this sergeant-de-ville, and whatever
else may be necessary, though it is no case for the police since the
waggoner has made good his escape; and if he had not, I certainly
should let him alone. Tell your men my address--you remember it? _Au
revoir!_ I shall come and witness your happiness. Many things from me
to your wife.'

They were only the usual words of commonplace politeness, yet to the
ear of Othmar they were fraught with a thousand meanings. 'C'est le ton
qui fait la musique,' and the tone of these perfectly simple sentences
had for him irony, mockery, menace, and ridicule. Remember her address!
Remember the Hôtel Napraxine! As if to his dying day he would ever
forget the slightest trifle which had ever been associated with her!

His horses started off at a swift trot, and he lost her from sight.
The questions of the police as to the cause of the accident started
him as though someone had spoken to him in his sleep. When the matter
was over, and the disabled carriage had been dragged away by hand, and
the frightened horses led homewards by their coachman, it was too late
to go where he had intended. He returned to his own house, bathed,
dressed, and went to his library; but he could not give his attention
to what he read. Nor when, with the early hours of the forenoon,
various persons came to see him by appointment, could he confine his
thoughts to the subjects under consideration.

At noon he gave his card to a servant, and told the man to go and
inquire at her hotel if the Princess Napraxine had suffered any
inconvenience from the accident of that morning.

The servant brought him back one of the small pale-rose-tinted notes,
folded in three, with the crown embossed in silver, which he knew so
well. The few lines in it said only:

'Merci bien. Vous êtes toujours preux chevalier. Je n'ai rien souffert
du tout. Le Prince vous remerciera.--N. N.'

It was the merest trifle, a thing of no import, such as she wrote by
scores every week to numbers of indifferent people; yet it had a sort
of fascination for him. He could not destroy it; its faint subtle
scent, like that of a tea-rose, recalled so vividly the charm of the
woman who had written it; it seemed to him as if no one but Nadine
Napraxine could have sent that little note, coloured like a sea-shell,
delicate as a butterfly, with its miniature and _mignonne_ writing.
Ashamed of his own weakness, and angry with himself for his own
concessions, he threw it into a drawer of his bureau and turned the key
on it.

He had not seen her for a year, and her spell was unbroken; all he had
done to escape from it was of no avail. One glance of her eyes from
beneath the furs in that bleak, grey, misty daybreak, had sufficed to
re-establish her dominion. He was conscious that life seemed no more
the same to him since that chance encounter; it would be more troubled,
more excited, more disturbed, but it would not be again the dull and
even course which it had seemed to be when he had entered absent from
her.

'I will never see her, except in a crowd,' he said to himself, whilst
he remembered, with self-reproach, the tender caresses of Yseulte,
which left him so calm, and even in his heart so cold!

Of course he had known that the Princess Napraxine, who was more
Parisienne than the Parisiennes, would, sooner or later, return to her
home there; would sooner or later reappear in the society which she had
always preferred to all other. Russia had never held her long, and the
seclusion which both her taste and her irritation had made her seek
after the suicide of Seliedoff could not, in the nature of things, have
lasted longer than one season. Yet the sense that she was there within
a few streets of him, separated only by a few roods of house-roof from
him, affected him with a force altogether unforeseen. He realised in it
that there is no cure in simples for strong fevers, and that the will
of a man is as naught against the dominion of passion. Even that slight
letter, with its odour as of pale rose-buds, had a power over him which
all the loveliness and innocence of Yseulte could not exercise. The
irresistible force of his own emotions humiliated him in his own eyes.

He shrank a little, with almost a sense of guiltiness, as a little tap
came on the panels of the library door, and from behind the tapestry
the fair head of his young wife peeped cautiously.

'May I come in?' she asked, as a child might have done.

He rose with instinctive courtesy and opened the door to her.

It was noonday, and her few hours of sleep had sufficed to banish all
her fatigue, and to make her as fresh, as radiant, and as clear-eyed,
as she had been in the summer woods of Amyôt. She had none of the
languor which late hours cause in later years; she had slept as soundly
as a young fawn tired with its play, and had awakened as refreshed
as a flower that uncloses at sunrise. She wore a long loose gown of
palest blue, opening a little at the throat, with much old lace, of
which the yellow tinge made whiter still the whiteness of her skin. The
gown was of satin, and had gleams and shadows in it as she moved. Her
eyes smiled; her cheeks were flushed from her bath; her entrance had a
childish eagerness.

'Do tell me again that I did well last night,' she said, with a
child's longing for the recapitulation of its innocent triumphs.

He did not look at her as he drew her to him with a mechanical caress.

'You did perfectly,' he answered, absently. 'A great ball is a woman's
Austerlitz, I suppose. Do not let it make you in love with the world.'

'One cannot but like it,' she said, with her habitual truthfulness, a
little wistfully. 'That is what I thought last night; perhaps it is
wrong--when so many suffer----'

'They would not suffer a whit less if you did not give a ball.'

She hesitated, being still shy with him, and afraid of that which she
had never seen, but which she always dreaded, his displeasure.

'But,' she said timidly, 'when one _is_ so very happy, one wants to do
something to deserve it. You have made for me such a perfect life, I
want to give others something out of it. I should like to be useful, to
show that I am grateful; not only to give away money----'

She paused, colouring a little at her own temerity. She did not
express herself very well, because she was so much in earnest, and
so uncertain as to whether it would seem discontented or vain in her
to say so much. In an earlier moment the words would have touched
his heart; he would have probably replied by admitting her into some
association with the efforts of his own life, and some knowledge of his
own desires and regrets for humanity at large. But in that instant he
was only anxious to be alone. He answered a little absently:

'My child, ask your confessor these questions; he will show you many
ways; you think him a good man--I have too many doubts myself to be
able to solve yours.'

He spoke with a certain impatience; the harsher note grated on her
sensitive ear. She felt that her scruples, which were very honest and
sincere, did not meet with the same sympathy from him that they had
received a few hours earlier.

A shadow passed over her face and she was silent.

'My dear,' continued Othmar, a little penitently, a little
inconsistently, 'I have had such doubts as yours all my life, but no
one has ever respected me for them; not even those in whose interest
they tormented me. We cannot be wiser than all the world. If we
stripped ourselves bare to found some community or some universal
asylum, we should only be ridiculed as visionaries or as mischievous
disturbers of the public peace and of the balance of fortune. Charity
has oftener created a proletariat than it has increased prosperity.
These questions have haunted me all my life. When I have found an
answer to them, I will tell you. Until then, enjoy yourself. You are at
the age when enjoyment is most possible and most natural. I wish your
days to be happy.'

He spoke with a certain distraction; he was thinking little of what he
said, much of the eyes which had looked at him from under the gloom of
the fur in the mists of the dawn. He sighed unconsciously as he felt
that this innocent young life beside him was no more to him--hardly
more--than the flower which she wore at her throat. He recognised all
its beauty, spiritual and physical, but only as he might have done that
of a picture he looked at, of a poem he read.

'Enjoy yourself, dear; why not?' he added with kindness. 'You were
made to smile as a primrose is made to blossom, and it is now mid-April
with you.'

He kissed her, and passed his hand carelessly over her hair, then he
glanced at the clock on his writing-table.

'I must leave you, for I have an appointment to keep. What are you
going to do with your day?'

'Blanchette is to come to me. I have not seen her yet. The children are
only now up from Bois le Roy, and Toinon is ill.'

She answered him with a little sigh. She wanted him to understand, and
she could not better explain, how her own intense thankfulness for the
new joys of her life filled her sensitive conscience with a trembling
longing to become more worthy of it all, and to let the light which was
about her stream into all dark places, and illumine them with love and
peace. But she felt chilled, and discouraged, and silenced; and she
had been so accustomed to keep all rebellious thoughts mute, that she
did not dream of pursuing a theme to which he appeared indifferent.
He kissed her hand and left her. She sank down for a moment on the
writing-chair he had occupied before the table, and leaned her forehead
on her hands with the first vague sensation of loneliness which had
ever touched her since her marriage day.

'If my little child had been born alive,' she thought, 'then I should
always have known what duty to do, what use to be----'

It was an infinite trouble to her conscience that in these great
palaces of the Othmars she was as useless in her own sight as any one
of the green palm trees or the rose-hued parrots in the conservatories.
She could give money away, indeed,--almost endlessly; but that did
not seem enough to do; that counted to her as nothing, for it cost
no effort. It hurt her to feel, as she did feel vaguely, that she
was no more the companion of her husband than the marble statue of
Athene which stood at one end of his great library. He was infinitely
indulgent to her. He was perfectly courteous and kind, and generous
even to excess; but he never opened his heart to her, he never made
her those familiar confidences which are the sweetest homage that a
man can render to a woman, even when they display his own weakness or
unwisdom. She had too little experience to be able to measure all that
this meant, all of which it argued the absence; but as much perception
as she had of it mortified her. At Amyôt she had vaguely suffered from
it, but here, in Paris, he seemed very far away from her in thought and
feeling. She felt that she was but one of the ornaments of his house,
as the azaleas and palms were in their great porcelain vases.

To be exquisitely dressed, to be the possessor of some of the finest
jewels in the world, to be told to amuse herself as she chose, to
have the world at her feet, and all Paris look after her as she drove
over its asphalte, would have been enough to most women of her age to
make up perfect happiness; but it was not enough for the girl whose
thoughtful years had been passed under the sad and solemn skies of
Morbihan, and who had the sense of duty and the instincts of honour
inherited from great races who had perished on the scaffold and on the
battle-field. There was a pensive seriousness in her nature which would
not permit her to abandon herself wholly to the self-indulgences and
gaieties of the life of the world. She was too grave and too spiritual
to become one of the butterflies who flirt with folly from noonday till
night. Her chastened childhood in the darkened rooms on the Ile St.
Louis had left a gravity with her which could not easily assimilate
itself to the levity and the licence of modern society, which offended
her taste as it affronted her delicacy.




CHAPTER XXXV.


A few minutes after Othmar had left the house her groom of the chambers
ushered into the library the Duc de Vannes and his elder daughter.
Blanchette, muffled up to her dancing turquoise-coloured eyes in
sealskin, and with her small, impatient feet cased in little velvet
boots lined with fur, in which costume Carlos Durand was about to paint
her portrait for the salon, with a background of snow and frosted
boughs taken from the Bois, sprang across the long room with the speed
of a little greyhound, and embraced her cousin as if she had never
loved anyone so much in all the days of her life. They had not met for
six months, for Blanchette had been in penitence with her governesses
and the dowager Duchesse de Vannes, in the depths of the Jura; a
chastisement which had only sent her back to Paris two centimètres
taller, full of resolution to avenge herself, and more open-eyed and
quick-eared than ever.

'Ah, my dearest! How happy I am to see you again!' she cried in
ecstasy, lifting her pretty little pale face to be kissed, in a
transport of affection.

'Il faut la ménager: elle est si riche!' she had said to Toinon that
morning, who was in bed with a cold, and who had grumbled in answer,
'Autrefois elle était si bête!' to which Blanchette had judiciously
replied, 'On n'est jamais bête quand on est riche.'

De Vannes, when his little daughter's ecstasies were somewhat spent,
approached with a smile and kissed the hand of Yseulte with a
reverential but cousinly familiarity.

'Out so early!' she said in surprise. 'Surely you never used to see the
outer air till two o'clock?'

'I brought this _feu-follet_ to enjoy your kindness,' said the Duc,
'that I might have the pleasure of seeing you before all the world
does. I wished, too, to be the first to congratulate you, my cousin,
on your brilliant success last night. You were perfect, marvellous,
incredible!----'

'I think I was much like any one else,' said Yseulte, to check the
torrent of his adjectives; 'and the success of the ball was due more to
Julien than to us; he was so enchanted to have a ball to organise in
this great house after so many years without any receptions.'

'Julien is an admirable maître d'hôtel, no doubt,' answered de Vannes,
with a smile; 'and he is happy in possessing a young mistress who
appreciates his zeal and fidelity, but it is not of Julien that all
Paris is talking and sighing this morning.'

'They must be talking and sighing in their beds then,' said Yseulte, a
little impatiently. 'I thought no one was up so early as this except
myself. Is the Duchesse well? She was so kind last night; she gave so
much _entrain_----'

'You know I never see her till dinner, if then, unless I chance to
cross her in the Bois,' answered the Duc, a little irritably.

He had risen three hours too early, and had bored himself to bring
his little daughter here in his _coupé_; and he felt that so much
self-sacrifice was not likely to avail him anything except that as he
looked at Yseulte he could see for once in his life a woman who was
still prettier in the morning than at night. He himself did not bear
that trying light well; the lines about his eyes were deep and not to
be hidden by any art, his eyes were dull and heavy, his cheeks hollow,
and his moustache dyed. By night he was still one of the most elegant
of _la haute gomme_, and his natural distinction could never altogether
leave him; but his manner of life had aged him prematurely, and he felt
old beside the freshness and the youth of Yseulte.

His vanity and his good sense alike counselled him to retire from a
position which would avail him nothing; but a certain malice, which was
a part of his character, and which his little daughter had inherited
in increased degree, prompted him first to take reprisal for the
indifference of his reception. Yseulte remained standing, holding the
hand of Blanchette, evidently not desiring that he should be long
there, and giving him no invitation to protract his visit until her
breakfast hour. Blanchette's mischievous eyes watched her father's
visible annoyance with keen appreciation of it; she had not forgotten
the medallion given at Millo, and she had guessed very well why she
had received the extraordinary honour of a seat in his brougham as
he drove to the Jockey. She had been just about to leave the house
with her maid when the Duc, passing her in the vestibule, had said
carelessly: 'Is it you, you little cat? Ah, you are going to your
cousin. Well, jump in with me, and I will set you down as I pass; I am
going to the Jockey.' Now Blanchette knew as well as he did that the
way from their house to the Jockey Club did not by any means lie past
the Hôtel d'Othmar; but she had been too shrewd to say that, and too
proud of driving beside her father, who smoked a big cheroot, and told
her about the little theatres.

'Can I see Othmar?' he asked now, as he made his adieux to Yseulte.

'I am sorry, but he is just gone out,' she answered; 'I think he is
gone for some hours; I do not know where.'

'You will soon learn not to say so,' thought the Duc, diverted even in
his discomfiture by her simplicity. He said aloud:

'Do you think he may have gone to see the Napraxines? He was always
a great friend of theirs, and they arrived last night; it is in all
the papers, but then you do not read the papers. I only ask, because
I should be so glad if I could meet him anywhere. The Prefect of Nice
writes to me about the basin of Millo; now S. Pharamond has much more
sea-front and much larger share of the harbour than we have, and if
Othmar would use his influence, one word from him----'

'I will tell him; he will be sure to come to you or write to you,' she
said quickly. She had flinched a little at the name of the Napraxine,
which no one had spoken to her since that silver statue of the Love
with the empty gourd had been sent to her before her marriage.

'Bien joué, petit papa,' thought Blanchette, with understanding and
appreciation, as her father bowed himself out of Othmar's library.

'Oh, how happy you are!--how I wish I were you!' she cried, five
minutes later, as she skipped about her cousin's boudoir, while the
glow of the fire of olive-wood shone on the panels which Bougereau had
painted there with groups of those charming nude children which he can
set frolicking with almost the soft poetic grace of Correggio.

Yseulte smiled on the little impudent face of the child, who leaned her
elbows on her knees as she spoke.

'I am very happy,' she said, with perfect truth. 'But I hope you will
be as much so one day, Blanchette.'

Blanchette nodded.

'I shall marry into the finance too; the noblesse is finished;
papa says so. He said yesterday, "Nous sommes de vieux
bonzes--emballons-nous!"'

Blanchette tied her arms and legs in a knot as she had seen a clown
do, and made a pantomimic show of being rolled away on a wheelbarrow;
then she gathered herself up and came and stood before her cousin and
hostess.

'Te voilà, grande dame!' she cried, looking at her with her own little
pert flaxen head, with its innumerable little curls held on one side
critically, as she surveyed Yseulte from head to foot with a frank
astonishment and admiration. It was only such a little while ago that
Yseulte had been her butt and victim at Millo; that she had ridiculed
her for her grey convent dress, her thick shoes, her primitive, pious
habits, brought from the Breton woods, and lo!--here she stood,
'très grande dame!' as Blanchette, a severe judge in such matters,
acknowledged to herself. So tall, so elegant, so stately, with her
beautiful slender hands covered with great rings, and her morning-gown
a cascade of marvellous old lace. 'She looks quite twenty years old!'
thought Blanchette. 'How nice it must be to be married, if one get
grown up all at once like that!'

She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she was unusually quiet for
a little time, during which her terrible eyes scanned every detail of
Yseulte's appearance, from the pearl solitaire at her throat to the
gold buckles in her shoes. Then, with a shriek of laughter, she cried
aloud:

'Do you remember when you came first to us you had leather
shoes--leather!--and no heels, and mamma sent you at once to have some
proper shoes; and how you could not walk a step in them, and cried?'

'I remember,' said Yseulte good-humouredly, 'but I wonder you do--you
were so little.'

'Oh, I never forget anything,' replied Blanchette, sagely. 'What
beautiful feet you have now, and you are so grown, so grown! And I want
to see all your jewels. Mamma says they are wonderful. I love jewels.'

'You shall see them, if you like, by-and-bye. But you did see many
before my marriage.'

'But mamma says he has given you ever so many more since--that you were
covered with them at your ball.'

'He is always generous.'

Yseulte smiled as she spoke--the dreamy introspective smile of one who
recalls happy hours.

'_Tope-là_, while it lasts,' said the small cynic before her.

'Hush,' said Yseulte, with some disgust.

'Papa never gives mamma anything,' pursued Blanchette. 'Papa gives
heaps of things to Mdlle. Fraise; the one they call Rose Fraise. She
plays; she has eyes like saucers; she is at the Variétés; she rides a
roan horse in the Bois of a morning. Don't you go to the theatre every
night? When I marry I shall have a box at every house. I have gone to
Hengler's. Now show me the jewels, will you?'

To humour the child, Yseulte took her to her dressing-room, where
the tortoiseshell and silver box, which was the outer shell of the
iron fire-proof jewel case, was kept, and told her women to open it.
Blanchette remained in an almost religious ecstasy before the treasures
exposed to her adoring eyes. Nothing could awe this true child of
her century except such a display as she now saw of ropes of pearls,
streams of sapphires, emeralds green as the deep sea, diamonds in
all possible settings, rare Italian jewels of the Renaissance, and
Byzantine and Persian work of the rarest quality. She was, after an
hour's worship, with difficulty persuaded to leave the spot where such
divine objects were shut within their silver shrine defended by Chubb's
locks.

'You _are_ happy!' she said, with a sigh.

Yseulte glanced at a miniature of Othmar which stood near.

'That is worth them all!' she said, and then coloured, vexed that she
had betrayed herself to the artificial, satirical mockery of the child.

But Blanchette did not hear; she was thinking of the great diamonds
lying like planets and comets fallen out of the sky into their velvet
beds.

'_Dis donc_,' she said abruptly, 'what is your budget for your
toilettes? You would not tell me when you married; tell me now.'

'I do not think it concerns you, my dear, and your mamma knows,'
replied Yseulte.

'Oh, it made mamma very angry; she said he gave you three times as
much as she has; that is why I want to know what it is, because then
I should know what hers is. And I know she is in debt so deep!' and
Blanchette held her little hand high above her head. 'What is the
first thing you ordered, Yseulte? Me, I should order a petticoat with
valenciennes quite up to the top; like that they are three thousand
francs each. Yours are like that? You have got them in all colours, and
ever so many white satin ones too? If I were you, I should be all day
long with the _lingères_ and _costumiers_. Are you not with them all
day long?'

'No, I have ordered nothing; I want nothing; I have such quantities of
clothes;--if I live to be a hundred I shall never wear them out!----'

'Wear them out!' cried Blanchette, with a scream which was as
inimitable as a shriek of Judic's or Jeanne Granier's. 'What an
expression! One would think you were a doctor's wife in the provinces.
You know you can never wear anything more than three times, and a
_toilette du soir_ never but once. Your maids surely tell you that?----'

'I wear what they put out,' said Yseulte, a little amused. 'But I doubt
very much whether I shall ever care about _chiffons_; not in your sense
of caring, Blanchette. Of course I like pretty things, but there are so
many other ways of spending money.'

'What ways?' said the child sharply. 'Play? Horses? The Bourse? Or do
you buy big jewels? It is very safe to buy big jewels; you can run away
with them in revolution, sown in your stays----'

'There is so much to do for the poor,' said Yseulte, with a little
hesitation; she feared to seem to boast of her own charity, yet she
thought it wrong to let the child think that she spent all she had
selfishly and frivolously.

Blanchette's little rosy mouth grinned.

'For the poor? One can _quêter_; that is always amusing. I stood at
the door of S. Philippe after Mass last month, and I got such a bagful
of napoleons, and I wore a frock, _couleur de feu_, and a Henri-Trois
hat, and Monseigneur himself kissed me--it was great fun--there was a
crowd in the street, and one of them said, "'Est crâne, la pétiote!" It
was a baker's boy said it; I threw him a napoleon out of the bag.'

'Oh, Blanchette!--out of the alms money!'

'Why not? I put a dragée in instead, and I dare say the boy was poor,
or he wouldn't have had a basket on his head. Monseigneur said to mamma
that I was one of the children of heaven!'

And Blanchette made her _pied de nez_, and waltzed round on one foot.

'You could buy the whole of Siraudin's and not feel it,' she resumed
enviously. 'You could buy half Paris they say; why don't you?'

'I have all I want,' said Yseulte; 'very much more than I want.'

'That is nonsense; one need never stop wishing----'

'One must be very ungrateful then,' said Yseulte. 'But you can wish
as much as you like this morning; you shall have your wishes. Only I
should like to hear you wish that Toinon were with you. Poor Toinon, at
home with her sore throat!'

'I don't wish that at all,' said Blanchette sturdily. 'She pinches, she
gobbles, and _she_ is vulgar, if you like; she swears like the grooms.
You know our rooms overlook the stables; we can hear all the men say
when they are cleaning the horses. Toinon makes signals to the English
tiger Bob, and he to her. Toinon will only marry someone who keeps a
fine _meute_ and good colours for a hunting-dress. She only lives for
the Cours Hippique. She got her sore throat because she would go on M.
de Rochmont's break when it was raining.'

'Poor Toinon! You ought to be so fond of each other. If I had had a
sister----'

'Ab-bah!' said Blanchette; 'you would have hated her! I can never have
a scrap of pleasure in a new frock because Toinon always has one too; I
know I do not make half the effect I should do if I were all alone!'

'Hush! If Toinon died, only think how sorry you would be!'

Blanchette laughed in silence; she did not dare to say so, but she
thought that if Toinon did die it would be a bore in one way, because
death always dressed one in black, and shut one up in the house; but
otherwise--there were quantities of Toinon's things which she would
like to possess herself, and in especial a set of pink coral, which
Toinon's godmother, the Queen of Naples, had given her, which was
delicious. Blanchette's own godmother was but little use to her, being
a most religious and most rigid Marquise, who dwelt on her estates in a
lonely part of La Vendée, and only made her presents of holy books and
crucifixes and relics in little antique boxes.

'Do you know, Yseulte,' she continued, with her persistent prattle, as
she hopped round the room, examining and appraising as accurately as a
dealer at the Drouot the treasures which it contained, 'they make bets
about you at the clubs? How nice that is! Nobody is anything in Paris
till the clubs do that. Papa and the Marquis have a hundred thousand
francs on it, and mamma laughs;--they think I don't hear these things,
but I do.'

'Bets on me?' repeated Yseulte in wonder. 'Why should they bet about
me?'

'Oh, they bet as to whether you will be the first to _flanquer_ Count
Othmar, or he you. They often make that sort of bet when people marry.
Papa is all for you; he says you will be _flanquée_, and bear it like
an angel,--"like a two-sous print of S. Marie!" said mamma.'

Yseulte coloured with natural indignation.

'You have no right to repeat such things if you hear them, Blanchette,'
she said, with only a vague idea of the child's meaning. 'You might
make great mischief. If Count Othmar were to know----'

'Bah!' said Blanchette. 'You will not tell him. You are in love with
him; they all say so; it is what they laugh at: it is what they bet
about--how long it will last, who will get him away first, what you
will do, whether you will take some one else. Papa says you will not;
mamma says you will: they quarrel ever so often about it. You see,'
continued Blanchette, with her mixture of _blasé_ cynicism and childish
naïveté, which made her say the most horrible things with only a half
perception of their meaning, 'they all only marry for that, to be able
to take some one else; that is why it does not matter if one's husband
is as old as the Pont Neuf and as ugly as Punch. You happen to be in
love with your's, and he is handsome; but it only makes them laugh, and
he was never in love with you--mamma says so; he married you because he
was angry with Madame Napraxine, and he wanted to do something to vex
her.'

Blanchette, who was given to such ruthless analysis of other people,
did not dissect her own emotions, so that she was ignorant of the
malice which actuated her speech, of the unconscious longing which
moved her to put a thorn in the rose. She wanted all those jewels for
herself! She knew very well she could not have them, that she would
be laughed at by Toinon and everybody if it were known she wished for
them; still, the longing for them made it pleasant to her to plant
her little poisoned dagger in the happy breast of her cousin. But she
paused, for once frightened at the sudden paleness of her cousin's face.

Yseulte gave a little low cry, like a wounded animal; she felt the air
grow grey, the room go round her, for a moment, with the intensity
of her surprise, the shock of her pain. But in another moment she
recovered herself; she repulsed, almost without pausing to examine it,
a suspicion which was an offence to himself and her. She laid her hand
on the little gay figure of the cruel child, and stopped her in her
airy circuit of the room, with a gesture so grave, a rebuke so calm,
that even Blanchette was awed.

'My little cousin,' she said, with an authority and a serenity which
seemed all at once to add a score of years to her age, 'you can jest
with me, and at me, as much as ever you like, I shall forgive it and I
shall never forget all I owed once to your mother; but if you venture
to speak again of my husband without respect, I shall not forgive it.
I shall close his house to you, and I shall tell your parents why I do
so.'

Blanchette looked furtively up in her face, and understood that she was
not to be trifled with. She began to whimper, and then to laugh, and
then to murmur in the coaxing way she had when she had been most in
fault.

'How grand you have grown, and how old in twelve months! You know I
only talked nonsense; I never heard them say a word; I only wanted to
teaze you; it is so silly, you see, Yseulte, to be so in love with M.
Othmar, it is so bourgeoise and so stupid, and they all say that it
is not the way to keep him. Me, when I marry, I will always make my
husband call me Madame, and I will never let him touch but the tip of
my little finger, and I will eat oysters every day, and drive the horse
that wins the Grand Prix in my basket in the Bois. _Dis, donc!_ you
will not tell mamma I said anything naughty?'

'I shall not tell her,' said Yseulte, who could not so quickly smile.
She felt as if some one had run a needle straight through her heart.

Blanchette laid her curly head against her cousin's breast:

'I do love you, Yseulte,' she murmured. 'You are always true, and you
are always kind, and you are so handsome, so handsome! Mercié, and all
the sculptors say so; and all the painters too. The Salon will be full
of your busts and your portraits; Madame Napraxine is only a pale woman
with great black eyes like coals in a figure of snow----'

'I desire you not to speak of Madame Napraxine!' said Yseulte, with a
violence which startled herself and momentarily shook her self-control.

The child, who had ignorantly meant to atone and to console for her
previous offence, was genuinely alarmed at her failure.

'I only meant that you are much prettier, much handsomer, than she is,'
she stammered.

'Madame Napraxine's beauty is celebrated,' said Yseulte, with enforced
calmness. 'Leave off your habit of indulging in personalities,
Blanchette; it is a very vulgar fault, and it makes you malicious for
the pleasure of fancying yourself witty. Come and feed my peacocks;
they are birds who will recommend themselves to your esteem, for they
are intensely vain, artificial, and egotistic; they believe flowers
only grow that they may pull them to pieces.'

'I don't care for the peacocks,' said Blanchette. 'Drive me in the
Bois in the _Daumont_ with the four white horses, and you can buy me
something at Siraudin's as we go.'

'As you like,' said Yseulte.

Yseulte humoured the child's caprices, and drove her out into the
cold sparkling air with the four white horses, with their postilions
in black velvet caps and jackets, which Blanchette condescended to
praise as the most _chic_ thing in all Paris. It was on the tip of her
tongue to say that they were even more _chic_ than the Napraxine black
horses and Russian coachman, but she restrained herself, unwilling to
offend her cousin before they stopped on their return from the Bois
at Giroux's, at Siraudin's, and at Fontane's, for Blanchette was too
sensible to be satisfied with toys and bonbons, and set her affections
on three monkeys in silver-gilt, playing at see-saw on a tree trunk of
jade, with little caps made of turquoises on their heads.

When she had chattered herself tired, and the day was declining, she
consented to allow herself to be driven home, and Yseulte returned
alone to the Boulevard S. Germain. For the first time since her
marriage her heart was heavy. The selfishness and greed of her little
companion were nothing new to her, but they had been made painfully
evident in that drive through Paris; and the wound which the child had
given her still smarted, as the bee-sting throbs after the insect has
flown away. It was not that she believed what was said; she was too
loyal and too innocently sure of her husband's affection to dishonour
him by such suspicion. Yet the mere knowledge that such things were
said of him and herself hurt her delicacy and her pride cruelly, and
she knew well that, if the Duchesse de Vannes said so, then the world
said so too. And her heart contracted as she thought involuntarily,
'Why should they speak of Madame Napraxine at all in connection with
me, unless--unless he had loved her?'

Yseulte was too young to think with composure of the women who had
preceded herself in the affections of her husband; she could not
console herself, as older or colder women would have done, with the
reflection that every man has many passions, and that the past should
be a matter of indifference to one who was indissolubly united with his
present and his future. To her it seemed that if he had ever loved any
one else he could not care for her; all the ignorance and exaggeration
of youth made this seem a certainty to her.

She was no longer the calm and innocent child that she had been at
Millo; the passions of humanity had become to stir in her; love, the
great creator and the great destroyer, had taken possession of her, and
had roused in her impulses, jealousies, desires, of whose existence
she had never dreamed; her temperament, naturally sweet and spiritual,
had beneath it unknown springs of ardour and of passions: _le vin
mousseux_, which her cousin Alain had said was latent in her blood from
the impetuous and voluptuous race of her fathers. She could not wholly
recover from the shock which she had received, as from a bolt that fell
from sunny skies. It had been only a child's frothy foolish chatter,
no doubt; yet the mere suggestion made in it clung to her memory with
a cruel and terrible persistency. She did not doubt that the child had
only repeated what she had heard; she knew that Blanchette's memory was
as retentive as a telephone; and if the Duchesse de Vannes had said
it, then the world had thought it. She had not allowed Blanchette to
perceive the pain that she had caused; but as her horses had flashed
through the chill bright frosty air of Paris, and the child's gay
shrill voice had chattered incessantly beside her, she had suffered
the first moments of anguish that she had known since her marriage.
As she drove now through the streets of Paris, in which the lamps were
beginning to sparkle through the red of the winter sunset, she felt a
strange sense of solitude amidst those gay and hurrying crowds through
which her postboys forced their fretting horses.

At Amyôt, on the days when Othmar had left her, she had never felt
alone; she had amused herself with the dogs, the birds, the horses, the
woods; she had dreamed over her classic music, or read some book which
he had recommended, and spent hours looking from the balustrade of the
great terrace, or from the embrasure of a window to watch for the first
appearance in the avenue of the horses which should bring him from the
station of Beaugency. She had never felt alone at Amyôt, but here in
the city which she loved from the associations of childhood, and as the
scene of her marriage, in this city which regarded her as one of the
most fortunate of its favourites of fortune, she felt a sense of utter
loneliness as the carriage rolled through the gates.

The _suisse_ told her that Othmar had not come home.

She went upstairs to her boudoir and threw off her close-fitting-coat
of sables and her sable hat, and sat down beside the olive-wood fire,
drawing off her long gloves. The room was softly lighted with a
rose-tinted light which shone on the gay children painted by Bougereau,
the flowered satin of the curtains and couches, the Dresden frames of
the mirrors, the marqueterie of the tables and consoles, the bouquets
of roses of all growths and colours. She looked round it with a little
sigh; with the same sense of chillness and sadness. Everything in it
seemed to echo the cruel words: 'He only married you to anger her!'

In the morning the whole chamber had seemed to smile at her from all
the thousand trifles, which spoke in it of his tender thoughtfulness
for herself; now, the roses in their bowls, the children on their
panels, the amorini holding up the mirrors, the green parrots swinging
in their rings, all seemed to say with one voice, 'What if he never
loved you?'

Her arms rested on her knees and her face on her hands, as she sat in
a low chair before the fire which burned under white marble friezes of
the Daphnephoria, carved by the hand of Clésinger. She could never
ask him, she could never ask any one, of this cruel doubt, which had
come into her perfect peace as a worm comes into a rose. All her pride
shrank from the thought of laying bare such a wound. Not even in the
confessional could she have brought herself to breathe a whisper of
it. She was not yet seventeen years old, and she had already a doubt
which, like the pains of maternity, she must shut in her heart and bear
as best she might alone. She had both courage and resignation in her
nature, and she needed both.

'It is impossible!' she murmured unconsciously, half aloud, as the
memory of a thousand caresses and gestures, which seemed to her to be
proof of the most absolute love, came to her thoughts with irresistible
persuasion, and made her face grow warm with blushes even in her
solitude. It was impossible that he did not love her--he who had been
free to choose from the whole world.

'It is impossible!' she murmured, with her head lifted as though in
some instinct of combat against some unseen foe.

'What is impossible?' said Othmar, as he entered the room and
approached behind her, unseen until he had drawn her head backward and
kissed her on the eyes. 'What is impossible, my child?' he repeated.
'No wish of yours if you tell it to me.'

She coloured very much, and rose, and remained silent. Her heart was
beating fast; she did not know what to reply. By the light of the fire
he did not see how red she grew and then how pale. He seated himself in
a low chair and took her by the hand.

'What is so impossible,' he said carelessly, 'that you dream of it in
my absence in the dark?'

'Nothing,--at least,--I would rather not say,' she murmured.

'As you like,' said Othmar. 'You know I am not Blue Beard, my dear.'

A great longing rushed through her to tell him what the Duchesse de
Vannes had said, and ask him if it were true or false--he who alone
could know the secrets of his own heart,--but sensitiveness, timidity,
delicacy, pride, all made her mute. What use would it be to ask him? He
would never wound her with the truth if the truth were what her cousin
had said.

Othmar smiled kindly as he looked at her; she did not know that if
he had loved her more he would have been more curious before this,
her first secret, less willingly resigned to be shut out from her
confidence.

'Who has been with you to-day?' he asked. 'Oh, I remember, you have had
little Blanchette. What a terrible child; she is an Elzevir compendium
of the century. Has she said anything to vex you? She is as malicious
as Mascarille----'

Yseulte touched his hand timidly. There was a grain of fear in her
adoration of him, that fear which enters into all great love, though
Nadine Napraxine and Madame de Vannes would have ridiculed it as
'jeu de lac et de nacelle,' the 'vieux jeu' of the romanticists and
sentimentalists.

'You do love me?' she said, very low, with much hesitation, while her
colour deepened.

Othmar looked up quickly with a certain irritation.

'Has that pert baby told you to doubt it? Can that be a question
between you and me? My dear child, would you be by me now if I did not
do so?'

And he soothed her agitation by those caresses with which a man can so
easily and with pleasure to himself counterfeit warmth and tenderness
to a woman who has youth and grace and cheeks as soft as the wing of a
bird.

'Yseulte,' he said gravely a few moments later, 'do not listen to
what other women say to you; if you do, you will lose your beautiful
serenity and fret yourself vainly by doubts and fancies. There is
nothing on earth so cruel to a woman as women. They envy you--not for
me--but for what you possess through me and for the face and form with
which nature has dowered you. Do not let them poison your peace. I am
not afraid that they will corrupt your heart, but I am afraid that
they may distress and disturb you. We cannot live all our lives in
seclusion at Amyôt, and the world must come about you soon or late.
To be in the world means to be surrounded with jealousies, cruelties,
enmities, ingratitude, and malice; if we once lend our ear to what
these will tell us, we shall have no more happiness. You have been like
your favourite, S. Ignace; by reason of your own purity you have been
allowed to hear the angels sing. Do not let the world's clamour drown
that divine song, for once lost no one ever hears it again! Do you
understand what I mean, my dear?'

She said nothing, but she hid her face on his breast and burst into
tears, the first that he had ever seen from her eyes.

'Can they not let her alone,' he thought with anger, and a sense of
weariness and apprehension; if the world taught her what men's love
could be, would she not discover what was missing in his?




CHAPTER XXXVI.


When the three black horses of the Princess Napraxine, with their manes
flying in the wind, their eyes flashing, and their nostrils breathing
fire, dashed down the Champs Elysées to make the tour du Bois, all
Paris looked after her, and multitudes who only knew her by repute took
off their hats to her as they had used to do in a bygone time to the
golden-haired empress.

'Ah, if I had been in that woman's place in 'seventy-one,' she thought
once, 'I would not have run away in a cab with Evans the dentist; I
would have put on a white gown and all my diamonds, and gone out before
them on to the terrace of the Tuileries--they would have forgotten
Sedan, and would have worshipped me! I cannot forgive people who have
the happiness of great opportunities for not rising to be equal to
them. One can but die once, and it must be essentially delightful to
die amidst a roll of drums, a blaze of sunset, a storm of welcome. The
death of Desaix at Marengo is the ideal death.'

There was at the bottom of her soul, despite her languor, ennui,
and pessimism, a certain heroic element; life seemed to her so poor
a thing, so stupid, so illogical, that if it went out in fire it
vindicated itself in a measure.

'Sometimes, do you know,' she said once to a sympathetic companion,
'I think I might have been something great if I had been born in the
time for it; all depends upon that. Mdlle. de Sombreuil would have
lived and died like ten thousand other Frenchwomen, in the monotony
of the _vie de château_, if she had not happened to be alive under
the Terror. What possibility of any greatness is there for a woman
who lives nowadays in what calls itself the great world? The very
men who have any genius in it are dwarfed by it. Modern life is so
trivial, yet so absorbing; it is such a bed of down and such a bed of
prickles; it is such a sleeping-potion and such a whip of nettles,
that we have no time to think about anything but itself. You must live
"à l'abri des hommes," if you want to be of higher stature than they
are. Bismarck is a colossus, because he shuts himself up in Varzin
so constantly. It is very hard even for men to resist the presence
of the world; even Tennyson leaves Farringford in the primrose month
to court a vulgar apotheosis in the London drawing-rooms; and for a
woman who finds herself from birth upward in that _milieu_ there is no
resistance possible. We are born to dress, to drive, to dine, to dance,
to set the fashion in all kinds of things,--and that is all. If we are
clever, we do mischief in meddling with the hidden cards of diplomacy
or statecraft, and if we are light-minded we do a different manner of
mischief in making all sorts of vices look pretty and distinguished
to those below us, who are always endeavouring to imitate us; but
more than that we cannot do. The morphine has been injected into our
veins; we cannot resist its influence; there is a kind of excitement
and somnolence, both at once, in the routine of our world which none
of us can resist. If we have any brains, perhaps we make resolutions
to resist, but we do not keep them; the world we live in is idiotic
but it is irresistible. When we wake, we see the heap of invitation
cards on our table; we yawn, but we yield, and we fill up our book
of engagements; the day is crowded, so is the year; and so life slips
away hurried, tired, thinking itself amused. Sometimes I think I should
like to live amongst the corn-fields and the larchwoods, and do good,
and I dare say I shall when I am old, or, what is still worse than old,
middle-aged. But you know one does not do good in that way; one always
gets imposed on, and the Jew money-lender in the centre of the village
would be really the person who would profit by one's charities. It is
quite easy for stupid people to be happy; they believe in fables and
they trot on in a beaten track like a horse on a tramway. But when you
have some intelligence, and have read something besides your breviary,
and have studied the philosophy of life a little, it is much more
difficult to content yourself. My friends who are putting on blisters
and bandages at the hospitals, fancy they are on the way to eternal
salvation, but a political economist would tell them that they were
only doing a vast deal of mischief, upsetting the nicely-balanced
arrangements of Nature. Myself, I think, Nature has very little to
do with the world as it is in the nineteenth century in Europe. I do
not think Nature, left to herself, would create either cripples or
cancers, any more than she would yoke bullocks or cut terriers' tails.'

She had accompanied her friends the Dames du Calvaire more than once to
those hospitals, where patrician hands touched the leper's sores and
the idiot's ulcers; but her delicate taste had been revolted, and her
intelligence, nurtured on shrewd and satiric philosophies, had rejected
the idea that any good was done by great ladies transforming themselves
into sick nurses of disease. She thought it must be infinitely
delightful to be able to delude yourself in that kind of way, to think
that you pleased Deity by putting on a poultice and averted a social
cataclysm by washing a cretin, but she did not believe in that kind of
thing herself. She did not see how any one could do so who had thought
about life, and the rest of it.

'I dare say I am quite useless,' she would reply to those who tried
to convince her, 'but then so many things are. Who has ever found
out the use of butterflies, or of daisies, or of a nautilus, or of
a nightingale, or of those charming rosy clouds which drift about
at sunset? I do not see the utility of prolonging the horrible and
miserable lives of lepers and of idiots in hospitals and asylums.
Humanity is not in the least served; it is much more often profoundly
noxious and disgusting. Even the people who talk about its sanctity,
do not believe in what they say, or war would become an impossibility,
and so would all the factories which, as Victor Hugo has said, take the
soul out of man to put it into machinery.'

When she spoke in this way she was very much in earnest, and her
arguments were very hard to refute; and even Melville went out of her
presence with an uncomfortable, though unacknowledged, sense that his
whole life had been a mistake based on a bubble which had all the hues
of the rainbow, indeed, but no more than a bubble's solidity. When
the men of science, with whom she sometimes amused herself by playing
the part of the great Catherine to the Encyclopædists, came into her
presence, they fared no better than the priests, and she did not
believe in them a whit the more.

'Five hundred years hence, your ideas and your discoveries will all
be refuted and ridiculed,' she said to them, 'as you now refute and
ridicule the physiology of the Greeks and Latins; you will not find the
key to the mystery of creation by torturing dogs or chaining horses on
a bed of agony.'

And she listened to them, but she laughed at them. To the satirical
clearness of her highly-trained intelligence the delirium of science
was quite as much a malady of the mind as were the rhapsodies of
religion.

'La science est la grande névrose du moment; ça passera,' she said once
to Claude Bernard.

In Paris, Nadine Napraxine was what the world had made her; she was
the _élégante_ of her period, a hothouse flower of fragile beauty,
of absolute indolence, of hypercritical taste, of utter and entire
uselessness. In her carriage or her sleigh, under her pile of silver
fox skins; on a Tuesday at the Français, and on a Saturday at the
Grand Opéra; on her Thursdays at her 'cinq heures,' when the most
exclusive of crowds gathered in her drawing-rooms; in the few great
assemblies and balls to which she deigned to carry her listless grace
and her marvellous jewels; throughout her self-absorbed day, which
began at noon and ended at dawn, she was a _cocodette_ of the most
exquisite grace and of the most incredible extravagance, such as Paris
had known her to be from the second year of her marriage. Her caprices
were unending, her changefulness was incalculable, her expenditure
was enormous; the most exaggerated tales were told of her hauteur and
of her exclusiveness, yet were not much beyond the truth; and men
worshipped her, and women intrigued for her notice, just because she
was so unapproachable and could be insolent. Fragile and white as the
narcissus flower, which she always took as her emblem, with a voice
ever sweet and low, and the most perfect manner in the world, she could
be as cruel in all the cruelties of society as ever her ancestors had
been with knout and steel in their frosty fastnesses. It amused her to
see the timid recoil, the presumptuous shrink, the confident wither
into humiliation, before the chillness of her smile, the terror of her
few cold softly-spoken words.

'I am the only scavenger that Europe has left,' she said once. 'All
the others have been frightened by the democracy, but I frighten the
democracy, or, at least, I keep it out of my drawing-rooms. It may get
into the "Almanac de Gotha," but it will not get past my _suisse_ and
up my staircase.'

Now and then she had been known to do exceedingly kind things, just
as in the midst of her worldly life she would go now and then to a
discourse at the Academy or to a séance at the Sorbonne. But they had
been always done to persons quite simple and frank, who never affronted
her with presumption or disgusted her with pretension. To a lie of any
sort she was inexorable.

The Hôtel Napraxine was one of the most delightful houses in Europe.
It stood near the entrance of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and was
withdrawn from every inquisitive glance which might be cast on it
from the road, within gardens large enough to contain groves of lime
trees and plane trees, fountains, lawns, pavilions, and terraces of
rose-coloured marbles. No disturbing echo of the traffic of Paris could
reach the sensitive ear of its sovereign lady when she sank to sleep
under the white satin of her shell-shaped ivory bed.

All the finest French artists living had been summoned to its adornment
within.

'All modern rooms are only like so many bonbon-boxes,' she had said.
'At least my bonbon-boxes shall be well-painted.'

And Meissonier, Duran, Baudry, Cabanel, Henner, Legros, had all signed
some panel, some ceiling, some staircase, chimney-piece, or salon-wall
in this most exquisite of houses.

'It is really charming,' she said to herself, when she reached it on
that first grey, chill, misty morning of her arrival, and its delicious
colour and warm air and flower-filled twilight welcomed her after the
long dull journey across Europe. It was especially perfect to her
this day because for some fifty hours at least her husband would not
come thither. There was only one thing ever discordant in its perfect
harmonies. When Platon Napraxine came up the staircase--with its
black-and-white marbles, its pale-blue velvet carpets, its sculptures
by Clésinger, and its wall-paintings by Baudry,--when he came up under
the leaves of the bananas and the palms, and entered her own sanctuary,
his broad tall form, his heavy step, his Kalmuck face were dissonant
and absurd in it all, and irritated her sense of fitness, and annoyed
her like a false note in the middle of a classic symphony.

'Poor Platon!' she thought more than once; 'I have certainly been the
most expensive whim that he has ever had; and he has never got the
slightest entertainment out of me. I am very disagreeable to him; I
have always been disagreeable to him. I was so at first because I could
not help it, and I am so now because I like to be so. But I grant
that it has never been quite fair to him. He might just as well have
been all alone to amuse himself with his dancers, and comic singers,
and people; I have been a white elephant to him. Certainly he has a
kind of triumph in possessing the white elephant; he likes to feel I
am here; when they all look after me in the Bois, or at the Opéra, he
likes to think I belong to him. As somebody said, when people admire
what is ours, it is as if they admired us. I am very much to him what
the _bleu ciel_ Sèvres for which he gave ten thousand pounds must be
to Lord Dudley. The Sèvres is of no earthly use to him, and he would
scarcely dare to touch it, and he would certainly never eat his cutlet
or have his venison served on it; but it is something that everybody
envies him, that nobody else has. When Platon gives great dinners to
sovereigns and all kinds of _gros bonnets_, and I am opposite to him,
I am sure he has the sort of feeling that Lord Dudley has about that
_bleu ciel_ service. After all, that is something; though, as the
service was incomplete in quantity, so I am incomplete in sentiment.
And then, when I meet him driving Mdlle. Chose in the Champs Elysées, I
seem as if I did not see him; and I never say a syllable of objection
if there are a hundred paragraphs in the _petits journaux_ about
himself and any number of Mdlles. Chose. If I had ever liked him, I
should be angry and make a fuss. After all, he ought to know that, if
indifference be not flattery, it is peace.'

So she soothed her conscience, but not always successfully; she had
occasionally a passing touch of self-reproach, when she remembered how
very little she had given her husband in return for the magnificent
fortune, the boundless admiration, and the perfect independence,
which she owed to him. She had at the bottom of her heart, though
stifled and indistinct, a more sensitive and a higher-toned honour
than most women; that instinct of honour told her that she had been,
at all times, unjust and ungrateful to a man whose good qualities she
refused to see, and even did her best to destroy, because his relation
to her irritated her taste and temper, and his ugliness and want of
intelligence filled her with disdain.

'If I had a daughter,' she thought, in those moments of candour and
compunction, 'I think I should say to her, "Commit any sin and incur
any sorrow you like rather than make a marriage without sympathy; it is
the one crime which society has agreed to applaud as an act of wisdom
and of virtue; but it is a crime nevertheless. One is so young, one
does not know; one listens to people who urge all the advantages of it,
and when one does know it is too late." However,' she added in her own
musings, 'I dare say, if I had daughters, when they were old enough, I
should do just the same as everybody else does; I should want them to
make a _beau mariage_, and I should tell them to do it. It is the world
which makes one like that. At the fair of Novgorod I once saw a little
Simbirsh peasant arrested for stealing a necklace of blue and yellow
beads; she burst out sobbing, and said she would not have taken it, but
all the girls of her village had all their big beads, and she had none!
In the big world we do the same. We want the big beads because other
people have theirs. It is paltry; but then society is paltry at its
best. They say, when you have entered an opium house, you may have made
all the resolutions you will against smoking, you cannot keep them, the
atmosphere gains on you, you yield, and smoke, and sink, like all the
rest. The world is an opium house.'

Nature had designed her for something better than the opium house.
Her intellect, her courage, and her chastity were all of great and
fine quality, like the burnished blade of a sword, that is at once
delicate and strong. But the world had absorbed her, and left little
scope to those higher and nobler instincts. She was in her habits and
her tastes a mere _élégante_, indolent, hard to please, hypercritical,
of languid constitution, of infinite egotism. Given the impetus, this
languor could alter, as by magic, into ardour, force, and energy; but
the motive power could rarely be found which could rouse her, and she
remained for the most part of her time a mere _mondaine_, of exquisite
taste, of irresistible seduction, but useless, idle, contemptuous,
cynical, vaguely disappointed, though all were at her feet, wanting,
petulantly, like Alexander, more worlds to conquer. Sometimes in the
ennui of the whole thing, and her dissatisfaction in it, she was only
restrained from absolute evil by the consciousness of its vulgarity,
and her own aversion to those indulgences in which most find their
strongest temptation, but in which she only saw a humiliating and a
grotesque affinity to the brutes.

As at four years old she had shrugged her small shoulders, with a
sigh, before the bonbon boxes--'J'en ai tant!'--so at four-and-twenty
years old she was supercilious to the whole world because it had
given her so much, and yet had nothing better than that to give. And
incredulous that there was anywhere anything better, she lived in her
calorifère-heated rooms, like an orchid in a hothouse, and amused
herself as with a game by the desires, the pains, the reproaches, the
solicitations, the jealousies, which fretted and fumed themselves in
that arena of her salon, whilst she remained as tranquil, as pitiless,
and as indifferent as fate.

No woman had the world more completely beneath her feet, yet she,
like Othmar, was consumed by that eternal ennui which is the penalty
of those who possess too much, have seen and heard too much too
early, and have been from childhood the objects of adulation and of
speculation;--of all those, indeed, who have mind and heart enough not
to find all their interests in society, and yet have not that poetic
temper which would give them a sure consolation and a safe refuge in
the uncloying loveliness of nature.

Ennui is unjustly looked upon as the characteristic of the frivolous
type of humanity; on the contrary, the frivolous character is perfectly
content with frivolity, and never tires of it. Ennui is rather the mark
of those whose taste is too fine and whose instincts are too high to
let them be satisfied with the excitement of, and the victories of,
society, and yet who have too little of that simplicity, or of that
impersonality, which makes the artistic temperament capable of entirely
withdrawing from the world and living its own life, self-sustained.

This delicate patrician had the seed in her of great _roués_, of
dauntless conspirators, of haughty territorial tyrants, of men and
of women who had emptied thrones and filled them, and given law for
life and death to multitudes of vassals; she could not be altogether
content with the rosewater politics of modern drawing-rooms, with the
harmless rivalry of toilettes and equipages, with the trivial pastimes
and as trivial passions of society. She was a woman of the world to the
tips of her fingers, yet she could not be altogether content with an
existence of Courts, _chiffons_, flirtations, endless entertainments,
and unlimited expenditure.

'They find us eccentric, capricious, autocratic, us Russians,' she said
one day. 'I dare say we are so; they forget that, not a century ago,
our great-grandparents were slaying Paul and Peter in their palaces,
and could knout to death whole villages of men, women, and children, at
their mere freak and fancy. I think it is very creditable to us not to
be a thousand times worse than we are; our blood is made up of arack
and of ice; we are the rude pines of the north French-polished!'

It was three o'clock in the day; she had given orders to be
undisturbed. She had slept admirably for eight hours without any
morphine. She had bathed twice, on her arrival and on her awaking,
in warm water, opaque with otto of rose; she had breakfasted off her
usual cup of cream and rolls made of milk. She was in a dreamy, drowsy,
amused state of thought; and, as she lay on her couch in the boudoir,
which was placed between her library and her dressing-chamber, her
thoughts drifted persistently to the meeting of the dawn.

She felt very like Fate now, as she thought how odd it was that the
first person she had met in Paris had been Othmar.

'He is very much changed for so short a time. He is not a whit more
content,' she reflected, with pleasure.

The little room was the prettiest thing in all Paris. 'It is a casket
for a pearl,' one of her adorers had said, and it seemed really a pity
that for eight months out of the year the casket should be closed, and
no ray of light ever enter it. Its furniture was of ivory, like that of
the adjoining library, bed-room, and bathroom, and its hangings were of
silvery satin embroidered with pale roses and apple-blossoms; Baudry
had painted the ceiling with the story of Ædon and Procris: the glass
in the windows was milk white, and the floor was covered with white
bearskins: the atmosphere was like that of a hothouse, and as odorous;
there were always a perfect seclusion and silence in it; the only sound
which ever came there was the splash of a fountain in the garden below;
it might have been set in the heart of the island of Alcina rather than
in one of the great avenues of Paris. Here, lying back on one of her
low couches with the air around her tropical, vaporous, dreamy, she
mused within herself as to how she would deal with Othmar, a smile in
her eyes and a doubt in her mind.

'Let him alone,' said her conscience.

'No,' said her vanity, and perhaps some other emotion also.

'He never harmed you; he only loved you, and obeyed you, and went
away,' her conscience urged on her. But her vanity replied: 'That
was the worst offence. There are commands which are most honoured
by disobedience. There are wounds which ought to be cherished, not
healed.'

Unless she chose that it should be otherwise, Othmar, she knew, would
be a stranger to her all his life. They would meet, perhaps, in the
world very often, but they would exchange commonplace courtesy, and
remain as far asunder as two ships that pass each other on the same
ocean course, unless she chose. Her better self said to her, 'Let him
alone; he has tried to make another life for himself; he has failed, no
doubt, but he has probably found a sort of peace, a kind of affection;
if it can console him, do not disturb it.' But the habits of supremacy
and of intrigue, the love of dominion, the intolerance of opposition,
which were instinctive in her, and which all her many triumphs and her
permitted egotism had fostered and confirmed, forbade her to resign
herself to such passivity, and urged her to take up her empire over his
life.

And she had a vague wish to see him there again beside her, a wish not
very strong, but strong enough to move her. It was here, in this room,
that he had first of all told her that he loved her, with words more
daring and more imperious than any other had ventured to use in her
presence; he was never like other people; he was probably no better,
certainly no worse, than other men, but he was different: he pleased
her imagination, he touched her sympathy; he was the only man with
whom it had ever seemed to her that her life might have been lived
harmoniously, with whom she might have understood something of that
mystery of love in which she had never believed. To her temper it was
the intrigue and intricacy of life which alone made it endurable, the
unrolling of the ribbon of fate, the watching and controlling of the
comedy of circumstances, which alone made it worth while to rise in the
morning to the tedium of its routine.

'Is life worth living?' she said once, hearing of the title of a book
of drawing-room philosophy. 'Yes, I think it is, if you are the cat,
if you are the spider, if you are the eagle, if you are the dog; not
if you are the mouse, or the fly, or the lamb, or the hare. Life
is certainly worth living, too, if you regard it as what it is, a
dramatic entertainment, diversion. This is the true use of riches,
that it enables you to give yourself up to watching and controlling
circumstances as if men and women were marionettes; it enables you
to sit in your fauteuil and look on without moving unless you wish.
I think that life must be always rather tiresome to anybody over ten
years old, but the only possible way to endure it is to regard it as
a spectacle, as a comedy, or, as Manteuffel has said, that a general
sitting in his saddle regards the battlefield he governs.'

This was what she said and felt in her cynical moods, and she was
cynical now on her return to Paris; she had left her better self behind
her in the snow-drifts of her own country. The woman who had spoken so
tenderly of Boganof scarcely existed in her; she lived in an atmosphere
of adulation, excitation, ennui, and frivolous occupations. The heroic
protectress of the Siberian exile had scarcely a trait in common with
her; she spent half the day in the discussion of new costumes with her
tailors, and the other half surrounded by flatterers and courtiers in
the pursuit of new distractions.

Analysis was so natural to her that it seemed to her in no situation
or even crisis of her life would she have abandoned it. There is a
well-known physiologist, now head of a famous laboratory, who, when
his son died, a boy of twelve, scarcely waited for the child's last
breath to plunge his scalpel into the still warm body in hopes of some
discovery of the law of life.[1] If she had had any emotions she would
have done a similar thing; she would have dissected them even if they
had sprung from her own life blood.

[1] A fact.




CHAPTER XXXVII.


'Is Madame Napraxine a good woman?' said Yseulte timidly one day in her
own drawing-room to Melville, whilst she coloured to the eyes as she
pronounced the name.

'Good, my dear!' echoed Friederich Othmar, who overheard and replied to
the question. 'The epithet is comically incongruous. She would be as
horrified if she heard you as if you called her _ma bourgeoise_.'

Melville laughed a little despite himself, and hesitated before giving
his own reply: he was embarrassed. How could he as a priest say to this
innocent creature what he as a man of the world knew to be the truth;
that the simple classifications of good and bad can no more suffice
to describe the varieties of human character than the shepherd's
simple names for herb and flower can suffice for the botanist's floral
nomenclature and complicated subdivisions.

'She has very noble qualities,' he said at length. 'Perhaps they are
somewhat obscured by the habits of the world. She is of an exceedingly
complicated character. I fear I scarcely know her well enough to
describe her with perfect correctness. But I know some noble acts of
her life; one I may tell you.'

And he related to her the episode of Boganof.

Yseulte listened with wonder: to her youthful imagination her one
enemy appeared in all the dark hues with which youth ever paints what
it dislikes and dreads, exaggerated like the rainbow light with which
it decks what it loves. All the highest instincts of her nature were
touched to sympathy by what she now heard, but a pain of which Melville
knew nothing contracted her heart as she thought that if her husband
had indeed loved such a woman as this, it was natural that she would
for ever retain her power on him.

'And she is so beautiful!' she added, with a little sigh. Melville
looked at her in surprise.

'Who has been talking to her?' he wondered as he said aloud:

'There are women more beautiful. You have but to look in your mirror,
my child. But she has a surpassing grace, an incomparable fascination,
some of which springs, perhaps, from her very defects. She is a woman
essentially of the modern type, all nerves and scepticism intermingled;
ironical, incredulous, indifferent, yet capable of heroic _coups de
tête_; dissatisfied with the worldly life and yet incapable of living
any other; the Réné of Chateaubriand, made female and left without a
God.'

'Except her tailor!' said Friederich Othmar, who approached the little
nook in which Melville was seated in the boudoir.

'Pardon me,' said Melville, with a smile. 'Madame Napraxine's tailor
is but her slave, like every one else whom she employs or encounters.
The king of _couturiers_ trembles before her, he is so afraid of her
displeasure; if she blame his creations they are ruined. She makes _la
pluie et le beau temps_ in the world of fashion.'

'And yet she could do what you say for that unhappy man in Siberia?'
murmured Yseulte, who had listened with seriousness and some
perplexity to all that had been said of one in whom her instinct felt
was the enemy of her life.

'You should understand a character which is made up of contradictions,
my dear,' interrupted the Baron; 'for you have one beside you every
day in Otho's. Your own is formed with just a few broad, simple, fair
lines, ruled very straight on the old pattern, which was in use before
the Revolution, or even farther back than that, in the days of Anne of
Bretagne and of Blanche of Castille. But your husband's--and some other
people's--is a tangled mass of unformed desires and of widely-opposed
qualities which are for ever in conflict, and are as unsatisfactory and
as indefinite as any _impressionniste's_ picture.'

Yseulte did not hear; she was absorbed in her own reflections; her face
was very grave.

'M. le Baron, you cannot have everything,' said Melville, gaily. 'Your
age has destroyed the _femme croyante_. Nature, which always avenges
herself, gives you the _femme du monde_, which, in its lowest stages,
becomes the _cabotine_, and in its highest just such an ethereal,
capricious, tantalising combination of the finest culture and the most
languid scepticism, as captivates and tortures her world in the person
of the Princess Napraxine.'

'Excuse me in my turn if I say that you are quite mistaken,' said
Friederich Othmar. 'The two species of womankind have existed since the
days of Athens and of Rome, and modern theology and modern scepticism
have nothing to do with either of them. Penelope and Circe are as old
as the islands and the seas. If you will not find me impertinent, I
cannot help saying that ecclesiastics always remind me of the old
story (I think it is in Moore's Diary) of the grazier's son who went
to Switzerland, and was only impressed by one fact--that bullocks were
very cheap there. Christianity is a purely modern thing. What are
eighteen centuries in the history of the world? Yet every churchman
refers every virtue and every vice of human nature to the influence or
the absence of this purely modern creed, which has, after all, not one
tenth of the magnetic power of absorption of Buddhism and nothing like
the grasp on the mind of a multitude which Islamism has possessed.'

Friederich Othmar had always an especial pleasure in teazing Melville,
and in contemplating the address with which the trained talent of the
theologian vaulted over the difficulties which his reason was forced to
acknowledge.

As Melville was about to reply, the groom of the chambers entered and
announced 'Madame la Princesse Napraxine.'

Yseulte rose with a startled look upon her young face, which was not
yet trained to conceal what she felt beneath that mask of serenity and
smiling indifference which makes the most impenetrable of all masks.
Her cheeks flushed, her eyes had a momentary look of bewilderment. She
did not hear the words of graceful greeting with which her visitor
answered the courtesy she mechanically made.

Melville, who himself felt a little guilty, hastened to her rescue,
and the Baron, as he rolled a low chair for the newcomer, thought to
himself, 'What a pity Otho is not here; it is always better to have
those situations gone through, and over. The poor child!--so happy
as she has been! It will be a pity if Circe come. But Circe always
comes. How can Melville pretend that Circe is anything new, or has
only sprung into existence because women do not go to church! Madame
Napraxine is precisely the same kind of _charmeresse_ that Propertius
used to write odes to on his tablets; the type was more consistent
then, because in our days costume is incongruous, and life is more
complicated, and people are more tired, but it remains integrally the
same.'

Nadine Napraxine meanwhile was saying:

'Your people were unwilling to let me in because it was not your day;
but I insisted. When one desires a thing very much one always insists
till one gets it. I find Paris talking of nothing but the Countess
Othmar; I was eager to claim from her the privilege of an old friend.'

It was said with sweetness, apparent frankness, and all her own
inimitable grace. She lightly touched, with the softest, slightest
kiss, the cheeks of Yseulte, which grew warm and then cold. Not
appearing to notice her embarrassment, Nadine Napraxine continued to
string her pretty, careless, courteous phrases together with that tact
which is the most useful and the most graceful of all the talents.
Yseulte had all a girl's embarrassment before her, and that dignity
which was an instinct in her became, by contrast, almost stiffness.

'Someone has told her of me,' thought Nadine, with amusement and
irritation combined. It at once offended her and pleased her that
she should be a source of pain to this girl--to how many women had
she been so, and without mercy! Well, why would they not learn to
keep to themselves the wandering thoughts of their lovers and their
lords? 'This child is beautiful,' she said to herself with candour;
'how can she fail with him. No doubt she loves him herself; men are
not thankful. _Tenez la dragée haute_ is the only motto for their
subjection.'

She studied Yseulte with attention and interest, and without malice.
She frankly admired this beauty so different to her own; this union
of high-bred stateliness and childish naïveté which seemed to her
just such a manner as some young châtelaine of some old Breton or
Norman tower would have had in the days of the Reine Isabeau; she did
full justice to it. The irritation she had felt when she had walked
in the moonlight through the grass lands at Zaraïzoff, and thought
of the château of Amyôt, had ceased the moment that she had entered
the atmosphere of Paris. Othmar had believed that he had been cold as
marble in that momentary meeting, but she had seen in it that her power
over him was undiminished. She knew very well that soon or late he
who had defied her would be once more as a reed in her hands. She was
in no haste to try her force; she could rely on it in the calmness of
certainty. She was very amiable to his wife; but she had a little touch
of good-natured condescension in her amiability which made the pride of
the girl shrink as under an affront which could not be resented; the
very young always suffer under a kindness which tacitly reminds them,
by its unspoken superiority, of their own inexperience and their own
defects. The ironical smile, the slight suggestive phrases, the very
indulgence, as to a child, of Nadine Napraxine were as so many thorns
in the heart of Yseulte, who had none of that vanity which might have
rendered her indifferent to them.

It was not so much an emotion, but a certain sentiment--half interest,
half irritation--which brought her to the great house of which, in a
moment of impulse, he had made this child mistress. 'They try to give
it a false air of home,' she thought, with her merciless accuracy of
penetration, 'but they do not succeed. It is always a barn--a barn
gilded and painted like Versailles: but a barn. Perhaps they succeed
better at Amyôt, and perhaps they do not. He always hated this huge
house, and he was very right in his taste. It is made to entertain
in, not to be happy in. If he were happy he would go far away to that
castle by the blue Adrian Sea that I saw within a few leagues of
Miramar.'

With that thought she had gone through the succession of great rooms,
grand and uninteresting as the rooms of the Escurial, until she had
reached one of the drawing-rooms, with its painted panels of children
romping in orchards and gardens, and there had found Yseulte sitting
at her tapestry like some young dame of the time of Bayard or the
Béarnais, a large hound at her feet, the two old men beside her.

'What colouring! She is like a pastel of Emile Lévy's!' she had
thought, with an appreciation which was entirely sincere, as she kissed
the girl's reluctant, roseleaf-like cheek: she really felt not the
slightest ill-will towards her; on the contrary, she was moved to a
compassion, none the less genuine that it was based on something very
like disdain; the disdain of the wise for the simple, of the certainly
victorious for the predestined vanquished, of the snake-charmer for
those who let the snake kill them.

With her most charming grace, with that seduction which made it
impossible for anyone in her presence to be her enemy, she renewed
her acquaintance with the wife of Othmar, speaking pretty and
gracious words of recognition and of admiration. Yseulte preserved a
self-control admirable for one so young, to whom the necessities for
such reserve were a new and painful lesson; but she was unable to keep
the change of colour in her cheeks, and the expression in her candid
eyes betrayed her to the quick perception of her guest.

'You have come to honour Paris, Princess?' said the Baron, to cover the
embarrassment and the constraint of Yseulte.

'One always comes to Paris, Baron,' answered Nadine Napraxine, raising
her eyeglass and gazing at the girl through it, with all the cruel,
careless scrutiny of a woman of the world; her luminous eyes wanted
no assistance of the sort, but it was a weapon--unkind as a dagger
on occasion. 'One always comes to Paris. It is the toy-shop where
we dolls of the world get mended when we are battered and bruised.
We come for our hair, for our teeth, for our complexions; at any
rate, for our gowns; and then when we arrive we remain. The Republic
may push its iron roller, as Berlioz says it does, over the world;
it rolls on wheels of lead; but it cannot prevent Paris from being
always an empire, and always the _urbs_ for us. I do not love Paris as
passionately as most Russians do, yet even I admit that there is no
other city where one finds so little monotony. Even in Paris, alas!
as Marivaux said long ago, everybody has two eyes, one nose, and one
mouth, and one sighs in vain for a little variety of outline.'

'If I remember,' said the Baron, 'Marivaux was more merciful to
humanity than is Madame Napraxine; he admitted that even with such
homely materials as two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, one could obtain
infinite variety in expression; no two physiognomies are alike.'

'Perhaps in Marivaux's time men did not imitate the _chic anglais_!'
said Nadine Napraxine. 'I see very little variety myself. Everybody is
terribly like everyone else, except the Comtesse Othmar,' she added,
with her charming smile, 'who is only like Hope nursing Love, or some
other picture of a fairer day than ours.'

Yseulte, pained at herself for her want of self-command, coloured
hotly under the compliment, in which her alarmed sensitiveness fancied
there was hidden a sarcasm. She did not know of what picture Nadine
Napraxine spoke, and she thought--'Does she mean that Hope was barren
and foolish, that Love did not care?' She remembered the silver amorino
and the empty gourd.

Directly appealed to, a moment later, she murmured something at random;
she did not well know what; she grew first pale, then red; she seemed
constrained and stupid, void of ideas, and stiff in manner. Friederich
Othmar could have broken his cane about her shoulders in his vexation.

'Heavens and earth!' he thought, 'if you let yourself be magnetised
at the first sight of an imagined rival, what will you do before the
reality when you meet it? My poor little girl! It is not the women who
adore a man, and are struck dumb because they see another woman whom
he has once loved, who obtain any influence over him, or possess any
charm whatever for him. Who is to tell you that? who is to open your
eyes and harden your heart? who is to make you understand that you are
as lovely as the morning, but that if you do not acquire self-control,
wit, indifference, all the armoury of the world's weapons, she will
pass over you as artillery sweeps over the daisy in the grass.'

But he could not say his impatient thoughts aloud; he could not even,
by his own readiness of language and easy persiflage, contrive wholly
to hide the uneasiness and restraint which the presence of her guest
brought upon Yseulte, and which she herself was at once too young and
too frank to dissemble. They amused the Princess Napraxine, and they
gratified her infinitely. She had not the slightest pity for them; she
had never suffered from any such awkwardness herself.

'You are cruel, Princess,' Melville ventured to murmur as he rose and
bade her adieu.

'Have you only now discovered that?' said Nadine. 'And I do not know
why you should discover it especially now, or why, even if it were
truth, you should be in any way astonished. Thirty years of the
confessional should have taught you that women are always cruel. Are
you never cruel?' she said aloud, turning to Yseulte. 'Ah, then,
your dog will disobey you and your horse run away with you, my dear
Countess!'

'Is there no power in affection?' said Yseulte bravely, feeling her
colour come and go, and conscious that she had made an absurd reply.

Madame Napraxine smiled with a little look of indulgent amusement,
which made the girl thrill to the tips of her fingers.

'You are still in the age of illusions, my love. I dare say you even
write poetry. Do you not write poetry? I am sure you must have a little
velvet book and a silver pencil somewhere. It is so delightful to see
anyone so young,' she added, with seriousness, to Friederich Othmar.
'The children are not young now, are never young. I do not think I ever
was; I have no recollection of it. If I had daughters, I would send
them to those Dames de Sainte Anne--away in Brittany, is it not?--if
it be they who have made your nephew's wife what she is. I did not
believe there was any place left, simple enough and sweet and solemn
enough to make a girlhood like a garden lily. Othmar has been very
happy to have gathered the lily.'

There were both reality and admiration in many of her words, but the
last phrase was not so sincere. Yseulte, overhearing, thought, with a
pang, 'She knows that he is not happy!' Her heart swelled. She felt
that this exquisite woman, so little her senior in actual years, so
immeasurably her superior in knowledge, tact, and power, laughed at
her even as she praised her. 'How could she know that I wrote poetry?'
thought the child, conscious of many a poor little verse, the unseen,
carefully-hidden, timid offspring of a heart too full, written with a
pencil in the leafy recesses of the woods of Amyôt, in that instinctive
longing for adequate expression which is born of a great love. The
chance phrase gave Nadine Napraxine in her sight all the irresistible
fascination of a magician. She felt as if those languid, luminous
eyes could read all the secrets of her soul--secrets so innocent, all
pregnant with the memory of Othmar--secrets pure, wholesome, and
harmless as the violets that the mosses hid in the Valois woods of
Amyôt.

'Well, what do you think of her?' asked Friederich Othmar when she had
left the house. Yseulte hesitated.

'I can believe that she has a great charm,' she answered with some
effort. 'She has a fascination that one feels whether one will or
no----'

She paused and unconsciously sighed.

'She is the greatest _charmeresse_ in Europe,' replied Friederich
Othmar. 'No other words describe her. She is not a Cleopatra or a Mary
Stuart. She would never have had an Actium or a Kirk's Field. She would
never have so blundered. She has no passions; she would be a better
woman if she had. She is entirely chaste only because she is absolutely
indifferent. It creates her immense power over men. She remains ice
while she casts them into hell.' He stopped abruptly, remembering to
whom he spoke, and added, 'Her visit was a most rare honour to you, my
dear; she seldom deigns to go in person anywhere; her servants leave
her cards, and the fortunate great ladies who are the recipients of
them may go and see her on her day, and take their chance of receiving
a few words from her. She is one of those exceptional women who have no
intimate friends of their own sex, or hardly any; men----'

He paused, asked leave to light a cigarette, and walked with it awhile
about the room. Yseulte did not take up his unfinished phrase by an
interrogation.

'Have you no inquisitiveness?' thought Friederich Othmar. She was,
indeed, full of restless and painful curiosity concerning the woman who
had just left her presence, but she would not allow herself to utter a
word of it. She thought it would be disloyalty to her husband.

Some fifteen minutes later Othmar himself entered.

'Madame Napraxine has just honoured us _in propriâ personâ_,' said the
Baron, looking at him with intention.

'Indeed!' said Othmar. 'It was most amiable of her,' he added, after
a moment's pause; but to the penetration or to the imagination of
his uncle it seemed that he spoke with embarrassment and annoyance.
Yseulte had resumed her work at her tapestry. The cruel sense that she
was not wanted there, that she had been brought there only out of pity,
as a kind hand gives a stray animal a home, weighed on her more and
more. She did not see all that others saw in her; all the attraction
of her youth, and her innocence and her beauty. She had too sincere a
humility for any idea of her own charms to console her. She was wise
enough to perceive that the world flattered her because she was a rich
man's wife, but in her own eyes she remained the same that she had been
under the grey shadows of Faïel.

'If I were only myself again to-morrow, they would never think of
me,' she said to herself, with a wisdom born out of the poverty
and obscurity in which her childish years had been spent. She was
passionately grateful to Othmar, as well as devoted to him; but the
suggestion that she was in no way necessary to his happiness, was even
a burden and a constraint to him, had been harshly set before her by
the words of Blanchette, and it was corroborated by a thousand trifles
of look, and speech, and accident. His very entrance into her room had
nothing of the warmth of a man who returns to what he loves; he came
there so evidently because he felt that courtesy and custom required it
of him.

The Baron understood what was passing in her thoughts as she bent her
fair head over her tapestry-frame, the severity of her black velvet
gown serving to enhance, by its contrast, the whiteness of her throat,
the youthfulness of her features, the suppleness and vigour of her
form. He longed to say to her, 'My child, do not fret because he is
no longer your lover--is even, perhaps, that of some one else; it is
always so in marriage, even in love. There is always one who cares
long, and one who cares little. It will not matter to you in the end;
you will learn to lead your own life; you will have your children. I do
not think you will have your lovers, as most of them do, but you will
get reconciled to accepting life on a lower plane than your youthful
imagination placed it on at first.'

He would have liked to say that, and much more, to her, but he did
not venture. She made no confidence, no appeal for sympathy; and
after all, for aught he knew, she might be entirely content with her
husband's ardour, or his lack of it. She was but a child still, and had
little knowledge of the passions of men.

Othmar did not say that he had met his wife's guest as she left his
house.

She had given him her prettiest smile.

'The Countess Othmar is quite lovely; and what a perfect manner!'
she had said. 'What does she say to all your pessimism, to all your
_boutades_? Does she understand them? You must send her to hear a
course of Caro. Her mind can hardly be metaphysical yet. She is at the
age to eat bonbons and expect caresses.'

Then she had made him a little careless sign of farewell, and her black
horses had borne her through the great gates of gilded bronze of the
house which always seemed to him oppressive as a gaol. The words were
harmless, playful, amiable; yet they had annoyed him. He understood
that she ridiculed his marriage, and that she divined that it had but
little place in his affections, and as little hold upon his thoughts.

'Poor child!' he had said involuntarily, as he mounted his staircase to
enter the presence of Yseulte.




CHAPTER XXXVIII.


When Nadine Napraxine came into her boudoir on New Year's day, she
smiled a little to see it blocked with flowers. She had always
discountenanced any other gifts than flowers. Whoever had presumed to
offer her anything else would have run the risk of having his name
struck off her list of acquaintances.

'All those _gros cadeaux_ are so vulgar,' she was wont to say. 'A
branch of lilac--a tea-rose--nothing else. No; you must not send the
lilac in a _cloisonné_ Limoges vase, or the roses in a _repoussé_
silver bowl; I should send you your vase or your bowl back to you; you
have no kind of right to suppose that I want vases or bowls; but just
the branch, just the rose, you may send if you like.'

They trembled, and dared not disobey; the lilacs or the roses came by
the scores, with the greatest names of Europe attached to them; and
her courtiers managed ingeniously to spend many thousands of francs
by means of the rarest of the orchids, fulfilling her commands in the
letter, though breaking them in the spirit.

She smiled now as she came into her favourite room this morning, when
fog and frost together reigned without. All the orchid world was there
to welcome her, brilliant and ethereal as the hues of sunrise.

'They love to be extravagant,' she thought, with a little contempt.
'If one limit them to flowers they manage to spend as much as if they
bought jewels. It is very vulgar, all that sort of thing. If I cared
for any one of them, I think I should like him to bring me a little
bunch of corn-cockles--just by way of change.'

She glanced here and there at a name, but, for the most part, did not
even trouble herself to look who was the sender of this or of that.

'_C'est toute la bande!_' she murmured, with an impatient amusement,
knowing that every man in Paris, with rank sufficient to be able to
dare to do so, had sent his floral tribute there.

She rang for her favourite servant Paul; when he appeared she said to
him, 'Take all those cards off those baskets and bouquets; they look
as if they were ticketed for a horticultural show.' So Paul, obedient,
swept away the visiting cards with his swift and silent touch, and
the senders of them were not even honoured by her caring to know
their names; their gifts were all blended in one mass of blossom as
indifferent to her as themselves.

Paul, as he retired with the cards crushed in his hand, thought to
himself with grim amusement, 'If only those _beaux messieurs_ would
understand that Nadège Fedorowna cares no more for any one of them
than she will care for those flowers when they are yellow and withered
to-morrow.'

'If somebody would bring me the corn-cockles!' she herself thought,
with a little laugh.

At that moment there came a timid tap on the door which separated
her boudoir from the great salons. She recognised it with a little
shiver, such as a nervous woman will give when she sees an unpleasant
or uncouth animal; only she was not nervous herself; she was merely
impressionable and irritated.

'Come in,' she said impatiently.

The door opened behind the satin hangings, and Platon Napraxine entered.

'How many times must I request you to pay me the common respect of
sending to know if I be visible?' she said, with that hauteur which he
dreaded, as a prisoner in the fortress of Peter and Paul dreads the
sight of the knout.

'I beg your pardon,' he murmured humbly. 'It is not our day, but I
thought you would allow me to take advantage of the French New Year
to--to--to bring you a little gift. Do not be angry, Nadine----'

He spoke very submissively and with a timidity which made his
high-coloured cheeks grow paler. He had for many a year abandoned all
hope of being any nearer to the woman who was his wife than the marble
of the steps which she descended to her carriage; yet he could not
help having, every now and then, a foolish impulse to approach her in
affection, a wistful fancy that perhaps--perhaps--at last----

He laid on her knee as he spoke a velvet case, with her crown and
initials in gold upon it.

'My dear Platon, what nonsense!' she said, with some real annoyance,
and she murmured to herself: 'In half an hour he will take something
similar to half a dozen _cocottes_!'

But she could do no less than open the case, which was filled by a
necklace, earrings, and a small crown for the hair in pink pearls.

Platon Napraxine watched her wistfully as she looked at them with a
listless indifference. If he could only please her once! If he could
only once see that beautiful contemptuous mouth smile kindly on him.

'There is not one of them worth her little finger,' he thought, meaning
the companions and consolers of his life.

'I think you have no pink pearls; it is the only thing you have not,'
he said; as humble still as a chidden dog. 'Will you not let me wish
you _bonne fête_, Nadine? I----'

He took her hand and carried it to his lips. She drew it away, not
angrily, but with a profound indifference.

'I cannot see why one day in the year is any more than another, that we
should make speeches upon it,' she said, shutting up the jewel case.
'The pearls are quite charming. It is too good of you. Only, you know
I do not in the least see why you should give me things; I really do
not want them----'

It was the '_j'en ai tant_' of her five-year-old philosophy.

'I know you do not want them,' said her husband with a blank sense of
foolish disappointment, foolish because his hope had been foolish. 'But
still most women never have jewels enough. I do not mean that I ever
thought you would care for them, but still it is the custom--and--one
never likes the day to go by,--if you would say a kind word----'

'My dear Platon,' she said wearily, yet with a certain amusement at
his stupidity, 'why will you persist in that superstition that one day
is any more than all the others?--and not even a Russian day either!
You, who are such a Slavophil, should have ignored a French New Year's
day as quite pagan and indecent. The pearls are very pretty; I will
put them on to-night, if that will please you. Only--only--you know I
am not very fond of that sort of presents. Are you sure you have not
another similar case in your pocket that you are going to take this
morning to that very handsome new house in the Avenue Villiers? All
the houses are new there, but that is newest----'

Napraxine coloured dully with a dual sense of embarrassment and
ridicule.

He was silent.

'Are you sure?' said his wife, with her head leaning back on her
cushions and her demure smile gleaming beneath the lashes of her
half-closed eyelids.

'Nadine!' stammered Napraxine, in mingled discomfiture and eagerness,
which made him blunder more and more. 'What can one do when
you--you,--as God is above us, if you had not turned me adrift years
ago as if I were a monster, I would never have looked at another woman.
You do not believe it, but I would not. Even now, I would leave them
all if you said a word,--if--if----'

She rose and laid the case of pearls down on a table near her.

'My dear Prince,' she said in her iciest tones, though, in her own
heart, she could very willingly have laughed aloud, 'I see you have
indeed mistaken your road to the Avenue de Villiers. Do you think you
can purchase my--kindness--as you do that of your mistresses? Pray let
this be the last of such blunders. You have not been guilty of them for
many years. Do not begin now. They offend me. You will only ruffle,
very disagreeably and uselessly, the amiable understanding on which we
have agreed to live.'

'When did I ever agree?'

His face was darkly flushed, his voice was husky and had a tremor in
it, something savage and imperious began to wake in him and tell him
that after all this delicate and disdainful woman was his;--but her
languid lids opened wholly, and her calm, luminous eyes looked him full
in the face with that look with which the keeper can daunt, by sheer
power of will, the animal which could trample him into dust and tear
him into atoms.

'Pray, do not let us re-open a discussion which has been closed for six
years,' she said in her softest, coldest voice. 'I am quite sure you
meant well; I never bear malice; I will wear your pearls to-night. We
have a dinner, I think; for d'Aumale, is it not? _Bonne fête, mon ami._
Think what a troubled life you would have if I cared about that new
house, and be grateful. Please send Paul here. He must take away some
of this lilac. So much of it will give me _migraine_.'

Napraxine stifled as best he could some oath which he dared not utter
aloud, and went slowly and sullenly out of her presence, sensible of an
ignominious dismissal. His glance as he went dwelt with suspicion on
the baskets and bouquets which made the room and the adjoining rooms
gardens of orchids and odontoglossum, of gardenias and of tea-roses.

'Is there one among them,' he thought, 'for whom she cares?'

He was nothing to her: but he would be something to such an one if ever
he could find his foe.

He was hurt, wounded, humiliated, infuriated, all in one; conscious of
a defeat which made him grotesque in her sight, sensible of an act of
unwisdom and of sentimentality which had only placed him lower than
ever in the estimation of a woman whom he was furiously conscious that
he still loved and still desired.

When the hangings of the door had closed behind him, his wife laughed
with an amusement which her sense of courtesy had controlled before,
and put a tea-rose in the bosom of her gown.

'How stupid, how intensely stupid, to come to me as he goes to his
_cocottes_,' she thought, with that irritation and ennui which were
the only emotions which he ever aroused in her. 'And to renew that
sort of argument as if we were two greengrocers living at Montmartre!
Decidedly, when the _bon Dieu_ made poor Platon, he left out of his
composition every vestige of tact; and really tact is the only quality
that it is absolutely necessary for everybody to have to prevent them
from irritating others. Who could have imagined that after six years
he would begin again like that!--he has always a little access of
tenderness at the end of the year; last time he gave me a dreadful
Chinese idol as big as himself with green eyes; some dealer had told
him it was very precious: he did not know, he never knows; I wonder if
there were anybody so stupid in all the world; I am only astonished
that he did not send for Sachs and Mitz as an agreeable surprise for
me!'

'Yes, Paul,' she said aloud, 'take away most of those flowers, they
make my head ache; and give that case to Jeanne to put up in the
jewel-safe. Tell Fedor that I shall want the horses in an hour.'

'How very stupid some women must be,' she reflected often, 'to let
themselves be dictated to, and denied, and bullied, and worried by
their husbands. Nothing is so easy to manage as a man, if you only
begin in the right way with him. All depends on how you begin; it
is just like a horse; if you do not make him feel that you are his
superior at once, he will take advantage of you for ever. I remember
my mother saying to me before my marriage: "Ménage ton mari, sois bien
douce." Now, if I had listened to her, I should have had Platon on my
shoulders all my life; I dare say, even, he would have expected me to
please him, and to listen to him, and to accept all his absurdities.
But I froze him from the first; he has always been intensely afraid of
me. Of two people there is always one who is afraid, and I preferred
that it should be he. It just shows what mind can do over matter.'

She looked listlessly at a pile of telegrams which her servant had
brought in with him and laid on the little table near her.

'They will all say the same thing,' she thought indifferently, as she
opened two or three which contained the usual greetings of the New Year
from her innumerable relatives and friends in other countries and at
other courts; no Russian, of course, amongst them.

'If people must have it that a year begins, which is utterly absurd,
why did they not take pretty pink and white April instead of this ugly,
shivering, frost-bitten January?' she said to her dog Dauphin, as she
glanced through the tedious compliments of the telegrams. At last,
amidst them, there was one which made her change colour as she read
it. It was from Lady Brancepeth, away on her estates in the north of
England. It was only a line; it said:

'My brother has been killed on the ice in the Gulf of S. Lawrence.'

There were no details, only the bare fact, as it had been brought with
the same crushing curtness by the electric cable from the western to
the eastern shores of the Atlantic.

Nadine Napraxine read it three times without at the first realising
or believing it. The news gave her a shock; not a great one, but
still a kind of chilly pain and vague terror. A mist swam for a moment
before her eyes; a sorrow, which was quite sincere, moved her as the
sense of what she read gradually grew more and more distinct. A sudden
remembrance smote her of Geraldine, as she had seen him first some
three years earlier, standing on the beach at Biarritz, clad in his
blue sea-clothes, with the sun shining full on his fair frank features
and in his clear, happy, candid eyes. He had looked at her; his sister
had beckoned to him, and had said carelessly: 'Ralph, is it possible
that you do not know Madame Napraxine?' and he had come up to them over
the rough red rocks, the sun and the wind playing in his bright hair.
And then, life had never again been quite the same to him, and now it
was over for ever. He was dead, just thirty years old!

'Pauvre garçon!' she said, with genuine regret, as she had said the
same words when they had told her that the young Louis Napoléon had
been killed at Isandula. It was not the regret for which the dead man,
thinking of her as the frozen night had closed in on him and over the
wastes of ice-bound waters, perchance had hoped. 'Pauvre garçon!' she
murmured where she sat, amidst the profusion of the flowers. For the
moment she felt cold in her room, which was as warm as a summer day,
and through whose double windows of opalescent glass no breath of the
outer air could penetrate.

'I suppose they will say I did this too!' she thought with impatience,
her memory reverting to the death of young Seliedoff even whilst she
said again very softly to herself, 'Pauvre garçon!'

She was sincerely sorry; she felt nothing of that more passionate and
personal pain which once Geraldine might not unnaturally have hoped
that his death would excite in her, but a sincere regret mingled with
a kind of annoyance that men who had loved her would always go and run
some tragic risks, so that they perished miserably:--and then the world
blamed her.

'I, who detest tragedies!' she said to the little dog. 'When the
majority of men, too, always live too long, live to have gout, and use
spectacles, and grow tiresome!'

'Pauvre garçon, pauvre garçon!' she murmured once more, in the only
threnody which occurred to her: how could he go and get drowned in
the S. Lawrence, where the ice was surely as thick as in the Neva?
She had always liked to play at being Providence to her world, a very
capricious and unkind Providence indeed, but still one which decided
their destinies without any reference to their desires as Providence is
always permitted to do. She did not like these rude gusts of uncalled
for accident which blew out the lives which she held in her hand as if
they were so many tapers!

'Pauvre garçon!'

He had grown very wearisome, he had been even disposed to become
exacting, he had wearied her, and she had not known very well how to
get rid of him; but still it was a pity. He had had a great position,
he was an only son, his own people were very fond of him, he was
better than most of the men of his age and rank; she had for once
the sensation that one feels when one has broken a rare piece of
china,--the sensation of having done a silly thing, an irreparable
thing.

'I never told him to go to Canada!' she said to herself. No: she had
only told him that he wearied her. So he had wearied her; he had never
been too amusing at the best of times. It was not her fault that he had
become tiresome; they all became so; they had no originality. Still it
was a pity; she saw his fair frank face, with its eyes so blue and so
wistful, looking at her as he had stood to hear his sentence that last
day we saw La Jacquemerille.

'I do not think I said anything unkind to him that day,' she reflected;
and then the little smile that was so often on her lips came on
them a moment as she thought: 'To be sure, I told him to marry
somebody--anybody.'

Well, he was dead, and before he was thirty; with all his courage and
gallantry and wealth, and the many people who loved him at home all
powerless to save him from the black chasm of the yawning ice; and she
was not so very sorry after all; she honestly wished she could feel
more sorrow. She had never known real sorrow but once, when her father
had been found dead in his writing-room in the Embassy at Vienna.

'Platon will be more sorry,' she thought, 'he always likes his worst
enemies so much!'

Then she rang again for Paul, and told him to take the telegram to the
Prince if he was still in the house.

Napraxine, in five minutes' time, not venturing to return in person,
wrote to her on the back of the printed message:

'I am grieved indeed. Would you desire to postpone the dinner of
to-night?'

She wrote back to him:

'That would be too infinitely ridiculous; though it is certainly a
great pity, he was no relation of ours, only a _bonne connaissance_!'

'A _bonne connaissance_!' exclaimed Napraxine when he read the
pencilled words. That was all the requiem given to the drowned man,
whose battered and disfigured body was then on its way homeward, on
the deck of a vessel which was ploughing a stormy way through dusky
mountainous Atlantic waves!

She sat still a little while, looking through the remaining telegrams
and casting them aside; all the rest were the mere congratulations of
the season.

'I wonder when people will invent anything new!' she thought as she
threw the last aside. 'To think that the Romans five and twenty
centuries ago were also running about and visiting and sending cakes
and taking flowers, because what they called a new year had come! I
suppose the world will never liberate itself from the _camisole de
force_ of idiotic customs.'

She wrote a telegram of sympathy to the sister of Geraldine as she had
written a letter of condolence to the mother of Seliedoff; then she
had herself wrapped in sealskin from head to foot and prepared for her
drive in the Bois.

'When I am gone, open the windows, Paul,' she said to the servant, who
was so astonished that he ventured to ask if he heard aright, knowing
that his lady loved warm air as a palm does.

'Open the windows and leave them open,' she repeated. She looked at
all the hot-house blossoms and thought, with that cruelty which was
latent in her side by side with her higher qualities, 'They will all be
withered in an hour. Paul will tell all the valets, they will tell all
their masters----'

The fancy diverted her. She liked flowers, but she liked a little
cruelty like this much better. It would be wholesome for all those men
to know how she valued their New Year's gifts.

'Women nowadays make them so vain,' she said to herself. 'If it were
not for me, they would never get a lesson at all.'

To some the lesson had been severe, severe as the severity of death;
but that fact scarcely affected her conscience.

She did not stop her carriage to speak to any of her acquaintances, for
she supposed that the news of Geraldine's death would by this time be
known in Paris, where he had so many friends, and knew that everyone
would take pleasure in saying to her--'Mais comment donc? Est-ce bien
vrai?--' It would be so tiresome!

'I cannot help it if they kill themselves!' she said to herself as her
horses sped along the frosty roads. 'Society will blame me now, but I
imagine they would have blamed me much more if I had gone away into
his north-country mists with poor Geraldine as he would have liked me
to do; he was so sensational, poor fellow, and so romantic under his
English awkwardness. Englishmen are like that; they can seldom say
anything they mean properly, but they are very romantic under it all;
they are always ready to compromise themselves, despite their decorum,
and they have just the dogged fidelity of their own bulldogs.'

He had been better than most of them certainly.

She felt a certain pain as she went through the chill sharp air and
heavy mists, and remembered how many times she had seen Geraldine
come riding through the trees, and how boyishly his face had flushed
whenever he had seen her first! Poor foolish fellow! to leave all his
possessions and interests and duties, and to go out to Ottawa, where
he had no earthly business to be, as if going to Ottawa were likely
to deliver him of her memory! That was so truly an Englishman's idea,
to change latitude and longitude and think you left behind you any
inconvenient passion you might be haunted with by merely changing your
climate and your food! 'Poor Ralph! Poor Ralph! I think there was
nothing on earth tragic, ridiculous, or abominable that he would not
have done if I had ordered him to do it--except that he would never
have killed Platon. I do not think even I could have made him kill
Platon. That is the sort of scruple an Englishman always has, alone of
all men in the world.'

'I suppose she knows it, but she does not care,' said many persons,
looking after her as their wont was, as she flashed past them, nothing
scarcely seen of her except her luminous eyes looking out from the
brown lustre of the sealskins, whilst she made an almost imperceptible
gesture of her head to the innumerable salutations that marked her
course.

'When we get rid of the _camisole de force_,' she said to herself, 'we
shall get rid of bowing to each other; it is insane, when everyone
meets everyone else morning, noon, and night, to be obliged to jerk
one's head fifty times every quarter of an hour when one is out of
doors!'

She scarcely moved hers, indeed, but still it was a trouble; it was to
avoid the trouble that she sometimes took those long solitary drives
into the open country, of which the motive constantly perplexed her
world. To any other woman they would have attributed assignations,
but no one could ever do that to the Princess Napraxine; her absolute
indifference was too notorious a fact, and the dullest who knew aught
of her felt that if ever she awoke to any preference she would never
stoop to mask it. She cared nothing for the opinion of any living
being. She had no lover, only because she had no love.

Under her nonchalance and her occasional sentiments of sympathy with
revolutionists, she was of an inexorably proud temperament; she would
have liked to be an empress,--an empress such as was seen in earlier
times, whose mere breath spoke the _fiat_ of life and death. As it was,
she could only vex the souls of men and kill orchids.

When she reached home, after driving until dusk, she passed through her
boudoir to see if Paul had obeyed her. He had obeyed her implicitly:
the windows were still wide open and the bitter biting air was
streaming into the room, driving out before it all the heat from the
calorifère; all the poor flowers were withered, as if a scorch from
fire had passed over them, and the beautiful butterfly petals were mere
shrivelled, shapeless leaves. It had been a pity, she thought, to have
obeyed her so exactly; yet she knew very well that if he had not done
so, Paul, despite his twenty-five years of service to the house of
Napraxine, would have found himself outside her doors for evermore that
night.

'Shut them now,' she said to him, as he waited for her commands, 'and
take away all those baskets and bouquets.'

Paul knew her too well to dare to remark what he had thought all the
afternoon, that it had been a sad waste of some fifty thousand francs'
worth of blossoms. He closed the windows in silence. She passed on
towards her dressing-chambers through the little library which divided
the boudoir from them, the gayest and most coquettish of little
libraries in appearance, with ivory bookcases ornamented by painted
medallions of birds, a few white marble busts, and hangings of modern
Gobelin tapestry; but a library by no means destitute of serious and
philosophic works of some Latin authors, and of transactions of recent
scientific research.

In the library, Paul, hesitating, ventured to approach her with a
bouquet which was not harmed by the twilight frost.

'This was left a few moments ago,' he explained as he tendered it
in some trepidation, uncertain whether he had done wrong to exclude
it from the general massacre. She took it indifferently: it was very
simple;--a bouquet of narcissus with a rim of white violets, nothing
else. The name on the card with it was Othmar's. She smiled and took it
with her into her dressing-room. It was the bunch of 'corn-cockles' for
which she had wished.

'I did not do wrong,' thought Paul, with a sigh of relief. Then he
smiled too as he recalled the winter in which the sender had been
many times alone with his mistress in that little room where the
orchids had now withered in their gilded baskets. 'It was he if it
were ever anyone,' he thought; 'but I do not believe it has ever been
anyone--yet.'

His knowledge of the world made him make the restriction, as he called
one of his subordinates to sweep away all that rubbish, pointing to the
poor murdered flowers, whose costly _corbeilles_ would be one of his
many perquisites.

She, meanwhile, was undressed, clothed in a loose gown of embroidered
china silk, took a cup of tea, and slept peacefully in the perfumed
warmth. She liked to come out of the frosty and foggy air, and lie
still with the pleasant drowsiness caused by the contrast of the sharp
evening wind and the atmosphere heated to 40° Réaumur. Physicians told
her that so sudden a change was not wise or safe, but she laughed at
them. 'What is pleasant is always wholesome,' she said, constructing
new rules of hygiene, as she often did new rules of etiquette. She
liked the warmth, the sense of repose, of languor, of voluptuousness,
as a cat loves it, stretched on velvet, in still hot air. She slept
now with perfect composure, dreamlessly, from the semi-stupor that
driving against cold winds brings with it afterwards. Then, all at
once, she dreamt of a lake half frozen, of dark tempestuous skies, of
an open grave in the black water under the jagged drifting ice; and
she awoke with a little unconscious cry to open her eyes on the mellow
light, the satin hangings, the Saxe mirrors, the snowy bear-skins of
her dressing-room, the little tray of silver and china, the bouquet of
narcissus and violets near her.

'What a wretched dream! I, who never dream,' she said impatiently, as
she stretched her limbs out on the white furs of her couch. Then she
remembered Geraldine.

'Will he haunt me every time I go to sleep?' she thought, with a little
shiver. It seemed to her altogether unreasonable and undeserved. She
had never told him to go on the Gulf of S. Lawrence in the dangerous
season before the ice was solid.

In an hour's time she took the bouquet of narcissus in her hand, and
descended to her drawing-rooms. She wore the pink pearls that night,
the little crown holding up her hair, raised like that of the portraits
of Madame Tallien: she never wore her hair twice together in the same
fashion. 'If you always wear your hair the same way, you have no
imagination, and you are always suspected of a peruke,' she was wont to
say.

Platon Napraxine seeing his despised gift thus honoured, was almost
contented. In the _régime_ of starvation, on which he had been kept so
long, the smallest crumbs of condescension were eagerly seized by him.

She herself was in a gentle and gracious mood; she was not quite so
merciless in speech as usual, but she was quite as charming. The Duc
d'Aumale sat on her right hand, the English Ambassador on her left. Her
airy laughter rang ever and again like silver bells; and Napraxine,
even in the midst of the surprised gratitude with which he saw his pink
pearls honoured by being worn, thought with a sense of depression and
wonder: 'If I were to die to-morrow, would she care a whit more than
she cares now for Ralph?'




CHAPTER XXXIX.


The telegram had merely said that Geraldine had been killed on the
ice in the Gulf of S. Lawrence. There had been no details; but later
on all the world learned that death had come to him in the freshness
of his manhood by one of those trite accidents so common in North
American waters in the beginning of winter, when the ice is still loose
and detached, and is borne to and fro by the sullen waves which seem
unwilling to endure its chains. He had been standing on an ice floe,
off the Prince Edward Island, with Canadian hunters, seeking seals,
when that portion of it which sustained them had suddenly broken away
before they were aware of their danger, and, drifting with frightful
rapidity, had borne them out to sea at the close of the short, bitter
winter's day. Many on the shore were witnesses of the certain death to
which they were carried, but no help was possible before the darkness
of night came down,--the night which froze all human life left without
shelter in it.

Where the floe went none knew; when the dawn broke there was no trace
of its passage to be made out amidst the many masses of ice rocking,
meeting, parting, crashing one upon another as the frost strove to
bind beneath its iron hold the free will and the wild anger of the
sea. Whether those who had been upon it had been drowned, or frozen to
death, or borne out to mid-Atlantic, none could know; but on the third
day the body of Geraldine and of two of the Canadian fishermen had
been washed ashore off the New Brunswick coast: his features had been
recognised by his own crew, and the tidings of his cruel fate had been
sent to his mother and his sisters. He had been the only son of a high
and honourable House. There was the grief which sorrowed without hope
in the old north country halls, where a widowed mother wept for him,
and a loyal and loving tenantry followed his body to its grave by the
fair Yore waters.

One Tuesday evening, some two weeks later, when Nadine Napraxine
returned home from the opera to change her gown for a ball at Prince
Orloff's, there lay on her dressing-room table, amongst others, a
letter of which the superscription was very familiar to her, and which
moved her with a certain sense which was as nearly fear as it was
possible for her temperament to know.

She herself had written to Geraldine's people, but no one of them had
answered her until now that Evelyn Brancepeth did so. She broke the
envelope and read the letter, standing in the costume of Venetian red
embroidered with silver flowers, in which, at the opera that night,
she had held all the eyes of the house upon her as she sat, careless,
indifferent, half hidden behind her great red fan, the diamond
butterflies which served in the place of sleeves trembling upon her
shoulders.

'I know very well,' wrote Lady Brancepeth, 'that before the world you
are wholly blameless. I know that my unhappy brother had no right
to consider himself preferred by you. I know, were I speaking with
you now, you would say with your chilliest manner that you had never
honoured him with any encouragement to folly. But you will pardon me
if I say that you are more blamable to me than you would be if you
had loved him. I am a plain, stupid, unromantic Englishwoman, but
even I can see that love excuses its own excesses: _l'amour prime le
droit_. I could pardon a great passion if it even committed a great
crime. But you have no passion, you have even no sentiment. You are
sometimes amused, and you are sometimes--much more often--bored; and
there the scale of your emotions rounds itself and ends. There may
be someone who can, or who will, extend for you that narrow circle,
though I very greatly doubt it; but it was entirely certain that poor
Ralph had never any chance or any power to do so. He adored you, quite
stupidly and hopelessly, but he never even knew how to say so in such
a manner as could have touched you. He was very English, very _terre
à terre_, and if he had never seen you he would have led a happy life
enough; a commonplace one, no doubt, but one useful in his generation,
and content with those simple joys which to a _raffinée_ like you seem
so absurd and so dull. But he did meet you; and ever afterwards life
meant nothing to him unless it meant your presence, and your will. You
had admitted him into the honour of a certain intimacy, which, in his
blundering English way, he fancied meant all kinds of eventualities
that it did not mean. No doubt his delusion was of his own creating,
and of course he ought to have been prepared for his dismissal when he
had become troublesome or tedious; but he was so unwise that he put all
his heart into that which he should have understood was a mere _jeu
de salon_; and you did not condescend to give him any warning. Why
should you? you will say. Why, indeed, since his fate was as entirely
indifferent to you as the bouquets that crowd your antechambers in
Carnaval. It would have been so very easy for you, when first my
brother ventured to show you what he felt, to banish him for ever
with a decisive word; he would have been man enough to understand and
to accept it; but you did not take that trouble, and the love of you
grew--not perhaps precisely upon hope--but at least upon the tacit
permission to exist. I scarcely know why I write all this to you, for
you will not read it; only I have been your friend, so far as you allow
any woman to call herself so, and I feel that whenever we meet in the
world you will expect me to be so still, and I cannot. I must ask you
to let us be strangers. No doubt, actually, you are innocent of my
brother's death, but indirectly--even in a manner directly--you were
the cause of it. You made his country, his family, his home life, his
duties of all kinds, become no more to him than if he had never known
land or kindred. The pain with which you filled him made him wander in
an aimless unrest from place to place in an alien world with which he
had no sympathy, and made him only too willing to die, that he might so
throw off the fever of your memory. My dear Nadine, you are a woman of
perfect honour, of high repute, of sensitive and unbending pride, and
on the ermine of your delicate dignity there is no stain as yet. But
for me, there is blood upon your hand. I can never take it in my own
again. Let us be strangers.'

The letter was signed, and nothing more was added to it.

Nadine Napraxine read the lines through, word by word, and when she
had done so, folded it up and put it aside, without irritation, but
not altogether without regret. The frank, sincere, and at times rough
words of Geraldine's sister had been welcome to her by their contrast
with the false sweetness of the world's phrases, and she knew that
she would lose her friendship with reluctance, and miss her surly
honesty, with its uncompromising truths. But the letter seemed to her
exaggerated, not in the best taste, even if, under the circumstances
which inspired it, natural enough. Geraldine had perished by such an
accident as every year costs scores of fishers' lives whenever the ice
floes meet and sever in the half-frozen seas of the north. Why would
they see her hand in it so clearly?

'It is just as they always see the finger of God where a horse stumbles
at a post and rails, or when a pointsman is sleepy and does not hang
out the red light,' she said to herself, with some impatient contempt.
'I am sorry, quite sorry myself, that he is dead, but I certainly never
told him to get upon a block of ice in midwinter on the St. Lawrence.
And it was quite as much Platon's doing as mine that ever he took the
habit of coming about our house at all. Besides, if he had not been
very stupid, as even his sister says, he would have understood _à
demi-mot_; there is nothing on earth so tiresome as people who want
things explained.'

Still, there were passages in the letter which touched her conscience,
and reached that truthfulness in self-judgment which easily awoke in
her.

'I suppose I am unkind--sometimes,' she thought, with a certain
contrition. 'When they irritate me I really do not care what becomes
of them. As long as they know how to please me I am always amiable. It
is not my fault that their knowledge comes to an end too soon. It is
their own poverty of style, of thought, of invention. If I were writing
a dictionary, and had to define Man, I should say he was a limited
animal, exceedingly limited. There is infinitely more variety about
dogs.'

The very recollection of the excessive monotony of the human species
made her yawn. She wondered if that monotony were the fault of
civilisation; probably not. In a savage state, no doubt, instincts had
been all alike, just as manners were all alike now. People were all
dull, and because she found them so they considered her heartless.
Poor Geraldine had been dull; dull in comprehension, in intention, in
discernment; and just because she had found him so his sister wrote to
her as if she were a murderess.

'Poor woman!' she reflected. 'She is always so disposed to see
everything so terribly _en noir_. That is so English, too. They always
have the fog in their eyes. I am not in the least like Lady Macbeth. I
neither murder men, nor have my sleep murdered by them. It is natural
that she should feel keenly the loss of her only brother, but it is
absurd that she should lay the blame upon my shoulders, when she
knows that if he had not wished to shoot seals--which is a barbarous
pastime--he would most probably be alive now. As if a man could be
wasting with despair, and yet care about seals! To be sure, it is
very English. If an Englishman be hopelessly in love with any one, he
generally goes a long way off and tries to kill a tiger or a moose.
I do not see the connection of ideas between the sigh of passion and
the steel of a gun barrel, but there must be some link of affinity for
them, because they all do it. I prefer men like Othmar, who kill other
men.'

Although she was all alone as these thoughts drifted through her
mind while the letter of Lady Brancepeth lay amongst the litter of
notes, cards, and invitations on her table, a momentary warmth came
on her face as the name of Othmar recurred to her, and a certain
bitterness of contempt came into her recollection as she remembered
his marriage. If he had had patience, if he only had had patience,
perhaps--perhaps--perhaps----

She would not have gone away with him, because in her world they did
not do those things, and she would have always been too keenly afraid
of an after-time of regret and weariness, but she might have accepted
the gift of his life, and given him something of her own.

In his haste and wrath he had set up a barrier between them, but how
frail it was! Only the timid, wistful youth of a girl! The imperial
scorn of the Cleopatras of the earth rose in her before her meek,
childlike rival.

What a coward he had been to shelter himself behind the frail rampart
of a young girl's affection; affection which he did not appreciate, did
not reciprocate, did not value!

A woman with a tithe part of the discernment and the experience which
she possessed could cast the horoscope of Yseulte without any recourse
to the stars for knowledge of the future. All that fresh and tender
love would count for nothing, would avail nothing, would awaken no
response. She would bear his children, and live in his houses, and be
the object of all his careful outward observance, and that would be
all. He would grow unspeakably weary of seeing her, of hearing her,
of remembering her tie to him, and he would conceal his weariness ill
or well, and be every day more and more galled by the necessity for
concealment.

When Nadine Napraxine, after the ball, went to her own rooms that
night, she had herself undressed by her women and wrapped in a loose
bed-room gown, made of her favourite white satin, and lined with
eider-down. She dismissed her women, and lay before the warmth of her
dressing-room fire in that dreamy state between waking and sleeping
which is the very perfection of repose. The softly-lighted chambers
opened one out of another in a vista of rich subdued colour, ending in
the bath room, where a lamp hung above a beautiful reproduction of the
Venus of Naples. The rooms were so many temples to her own perfections,
she was the Grace, the Muse, and the Venus herself of this perfect
sanctuary, which no footfall of man had ever dared invade. As she
reclined before the fire that night and glanced through her half-closed
lids down the succession of chambers, which in the clear but delicate
light had the glow of jewels, she thought how dull and empty they would
have seemed to most women of her years without a lover's step coming
silently and swiftly through the fragrant silence.

'Decidedly,' she mused, 'the _voix de la nature_ says nothing at all
to me. Is it because I have no heart, as they say? I do not think the
heart has much to do with that kind of thing. I suppose I am cold, as
they all cry out against me. Of all of them, there is no one I should
care to see coming through those shadows; he would disturb me. The
passions are coarse things. It is disgusting that there should not
be two ways of love, one for Dona Sol and one for Manon Lescaut--for
one's self and one's maid. But there are not. _On se rend, ou on ne se
rend pas_; but when the submission is made Nature makes no difference
between Cleopatra and a camp-follower.'

She sighed a little, inconsistently. She disdained alike the
solicitations of the senses and the pleasures of the affections, and
yet she was conscious of a certain coldness and emptiness in her life;
she was not prepared to confess that what she needed was love, but a
vague impression of solitude came upon her. She remembered the lips
of Othmar pressed upon her wrist, how they had burned, how they had
trembled!

Was it possible that the keenest joys of life lay, after all, in those
follies which her temperament and her philosophies had classed with
contempt amongst the excesses of wantons and the exaggerations of poets?

The purest maiden in her cloister could not have been colder than
was Nadine Napraxine; to her the indulgence of the senses only meant
an intolerable humiliation, an ignominious outrage; maternity itself
had only been to her a long and hated and revolting burden, a sign
of unendurable degradation, which offended all her pride and all her
delicacy. The satyr had always seemed to her a much juster emblem of
such instincts than any winged amorino.

    'D'un être inconnu le contact passager'

could not rouse any desire or any sentiment in her.

And yet there were occasionally moments, fleeting ones it is true, when
in the sublimated egoism of her indolent, ironical, artificial life,
she had a vague impression of some possible passion which yet might
arouse her to acknowledge its force; a tempestuous fancy swept over
her, as a storm-wind may sweep over a parterre of tulips and azaleas,
for stronger emotions, hotter enmities, dearer attachments, keener
strife, than those which the polished inanities of her own sphere could
yield to her. The emotion lasted with her very little time, but whilst
it was there the eyes of Othmar always looked in memory into hers.

She who at will forgot everything had never forgotten the sound of his
voice as he had pleaded with her. It had ever since haunted her with a
vague imperfect sense of something missed, something lost, something in
her own life incomplete and unattainable. She had not a doubt but that
in time they would have wearied each other--fatigue was the inevitable
shadow of all love--yet she had a pathetic regretfulness as for life
incomplete, undeveloped, unshared, whenever she remembered that hers
and his might have been passed together.

It had been only a sentiment; it never had risen to the form of desire,
or ached with the pain of passion; but it had been a sentiment, vague,
almost poetic; a wild flower of feeling which seemed of strange growth
in the hot-house culture of her intelligence, and the rarified chill
air of her many philosophies.

She had sometimes said to herself, 'I could have loved him.' In
self-communion the conditional mood is never parted by more than a
hair's breadth from the present. There were moments in the ironical,
indolent, artificial life which usurped her time and thoughts in which
she almost regretted that decision which had banished Othmar from her
side and given him to another. The regret was as nearly a movement
of the heart as she was capable of; but it was much besides that; it
was the inquisitiveness of a _désœuvrée_ incredulous that life could
hold any great emotions for her; it was the impulse of a contemptuous
courage to break through social laws which it despised; it was the
desire of a woman lonely amidst her triumphs to find that key to the
enjoyment of existence which, in some way or another, had slipped
through her hands, and had never been discovered in its hiding-place.

'If I had been quite sure that he would have contented me!' she thought
more than once.

If she had been quite sure, she would have surrendered everything,
paused at nothing; it was neither daring nor generosity which were
wanting in her; but she had not been sure, since she was never sure of
herself!




CHAPTER XL.


A fortnight afterwards, the Prince and Princess Napraxine issued cards
for a dinner, to meet the Emperor of all the Russias. The invitation
came to the Hôtel Othmar at noon, as Yseulte sat at breakfast; she
coloured a little as she saw it, and passed it across the table to her
husband with a dozen other invitations. He glanced at them, put them
aside, and spoke of something else. She hesitated a few minutes, then
said timidly:

'Am I to accept it?'

'Accept which of them?'

'The Princess Napraxine's.'

He looked up with some displeasure at her tone; he answered quickly:

'Assuredly. Why not? You cannot leave it open as you do for a ball or a
reception.'

She did not venture to say why. She coloured more and more, and
remained silent.

'You have no plea for refusing invitations since you are not ill and
are seen everywhere,' he said coldly. 'Besides, I thought you were
acquiring the tastes of the world.'

She did not speak. She could not say to him: 'I cannot bear to be the
guest of Madame Napraxine, because they tell me you have loved her as
you never have loved me.'

Othmar glanced at her, and imagined what was in her thoughts. 'Perhaps
that meddlesome Melville has talked to her,' he thought, with the ready
suspicion of a man of the world of an ecclesiastic. He said, a little
impatiently:

'My dear child, do not conceive animosities against people, or you will
spoil your own sweetness of temper and make yourself disliked by your
own sex. And do not fret yourself with imaginary antagonisms, which
are altogether unworthy of you. When we are living in the world, we
must abide by its rules of courtesy. I am wholly at a loss to imagine
why you should be unwilling to accept this invitation; but as you are
seen everywhere in this your first Paris winter, you cannot without
rudeness refuse it. This is the only good that I have ever seen come
out of society, that it compels us to subordinate our own inclinations
to certain definite laws of good breeding. Pray do not grow fretful; it
was your beautiful serenity that I first admired, and loved.'

He hesitated a moment before the last word.

'I will remember,' she said gently; but without much effort she would
have burst into tears.

He saw the effort, and it irritated him. He knew that he ought to have
said to her, 'Follow your inclination and refuse, if you like.' But
her wish to refuse it had annoyed him, and hurried him into a command
to accept it from which he could not recede. And the charm of Nadine
Napraxine was upon him, and had broken down all his wiser resolutions.

He looked across the table at Yseulte. She was as fair as the dawn,
certainly; but she had no power over him; she did not beguile his time,
or stimulate his wit, or stir his intellect; she did not, even after
twelve months of possession, move his senses. She was a lovely child,
most obedient, tender, and spiritual; but--she was not the mistress of
his thoughts. She never had been, she never would be so.

'How stupid men are!' thought Nadine Napraxine that night. 'She is
worth very much more than I am; she is both handsome and lovely; she is
as harmless and guileless as a dove, and she adores him, a great deal
too much; yet, perhaps one ought to say therefore, he cares nothing
on earth for her; he will love me as long as his life lasts; he would
do so even if I had the tremendous penalty-weight, as the racing-men
say, of being his wife. I really do not know why it is that the noblest
sort of women do not excite love. I wonder why it is? I asked my father
once; he said, "Because the devil dowers his own daughters." But that
explains nothing; we all know there is no devil; there are women--and
women. That is all.'

As those thoughts drifted dreamily through her mind she was conversing
all the while about classic music with a potentate who was no mean
dilettante in melody, and she was looking down her table at the young
face of Yseulte with a vague sort of pity which she could scarcely
have explained,--such pity as in the gladiatorial arena some trained
and irresistible _retiarius_ might have felt at seeing some fair brave
youth enter with the shield that was to be so useless and the sword
that was so soon to fail; a pity which might be quite sincere, though
it might never go so far as mercy. The faint jealousy which she had
felt when, walking amongst the moonlit fields of Zaraïzoff, she had
thought of Amyôt, had faded altogether the moment that she had met
Othmar again. She knew, as women always know such things, that her
power over him was unaltered and unalterable by any will of his own.

'When I choose,' she thought, 'he will leave her and she will break her
heart. She will know nothing about such reprisal as a Parisienne should
take; she will never be a Parisienne; she will always be a patrician of
the _vieille souche_, which is quite another thing; she will always be
an innocent woman, with a soul like a lily. She is afraid of me, and
she dislikes me; she tries to hide it all she can, but she does not
know how. Platon admires her; that is what he ought to have married; I
dare say she would never have found him ugly or clumsy; he would have
been her husband--that would have been enough to make him sacred;
there are wome

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