Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 542
‘I am flattered, Madame, that you deign to draw my portrait, since it shows that you have not wholly forgotten my features,’ said Othmar, with some bitterness. ‘At present I have not discovered the hen, the cabbages, or the keys that will make life worth living to me. No doubt the fault lies with myself.’
‘I think you have not the dramatic instinct which alone makes life interesting,’ replied Nadine Napraxine. ‘You do not divert yourself with the faults, the follies, and the meannesses of men; you sigh over them, and your regret is so poignant that it prevents your seeing how infinitely droll their blunders are in reality.’
‘I think,’ she continued, ‘that there are only two ways of looking on life which make it interesting, or even endurable. The one is the way of Corot, which adores Nature, and can find an absolute ecstasy in the sound of the wind and the play of the sunshine, and asks nothing more of fate than a mill-stream and a handful of green leaves. The other is the way of Rochefoucauld and of St. Simon, which finds infinite and unending diversion in watching the feebleness and the mistakes of human nature, which regards the world with what I call the dramatic instinct, and amuses itself endlessly with the attitudes and genuflections of its courtiers, the false phrases and the balked calculations. Now, though you are a very clever man, my dear Othmar, you cannot be put in either of these categories. You know too much of the world for the first, and you have too much softness of heart for the second. Now, were you like Baron Fritz — —’
‘My uncle is the one perfectly happy man that I have ever known,’ replied Othmar. ‘It is because he is the most perfect of egotists. According to him the sun shines only for the Othmar, as Joshua fancied it only shone for the Israelites.’
‘It is not only that,’ she said, ‘it is because he has the dramatic instinct. He sees the dramatic side to all that he does; suppliant monarchs, bankrupt statesmen, intriguing diplomatists; men who carry him schemes to tunnel the earth from pole to pole, and great ladies who want him to lend them money on their family diamonds; they are all so many comedians in the eyes of Baron Fritz. He pulls their strings and makes them dance at his pleasure. I quite understand how the whole comedy amuses him so greatly that he can never be conscious of a moment of ennui. It is a great pity that you are not like that. You would leave such witty memoirs! — for you can be witty, — or you would be if you were not always so melancholy.’
‘I regret, Madame,’ said Othmar, ‘that I cannot alter the manner of my life even to have the honour of amusing you after my death!’
Across the bows of the ‘Zostera’ at that moment there passed, perilously near, one of the lateen-sailed boats so common on the coast, with their freights of fruits, of fish, of olives, or of market produce. The boat was full of lemons and of oranges, which gleamed like virgin gold in the bright sunshine of the tranquil afternoon. A peasant woman was managing the sail, a young girl was steering.
‘What a beautiful face!’ said Nadine Napraxine, who had a great love of beauty, and the frank acknowledgment of it of a woman high above all possibilities of envy.
Othmar looked where she pointed.
‘A very lovely face,’ he said indifferently.
‘She does not look like a peasant,’ continued Mme. Napraxine; ‘that little grey gown speaks of some convent. She steers well, for they were terribly near. Who is that very pretty child, Monsignore? I suppose you know all the flock of which you are given the winter shepherding.’
‘Pray do not make me responsible for all the black sheep of these shores,’ said Melville, drawing near and looking at the boat, which was going slowly and heavily against the wind, and labouring under a weighty load. He said as he did so, with a little surprise:
‘Why, that is Yseulte de Valogne!’
‘Yseulte de Valogne! What a name of the Romaunt de la Rose and black-letter Chronicles! Pray who may she be, may I ask?’
‘They call her here Cendrillon,’ said Melville, a little sadly. ‘As for her name, the de Valogne belong to French history; surely you remember to have heard of some of them? Aymar, who fell at the combat of the Thirty; and Adhémar, who was Constable of France under Louis XII.; and Maximin, who was a general under Condé; and Gui, who was ruined by his display at Versailles, a Colonel of the Guard and a great officer of State. The family is as historic as the Louvre itself, but the poor child is literally sans le sou.’
‘So that she is reduced to sell oranges?’ said Nadine. ‘How very touching! Othmar will purchase immediately several bales.’
‘No, she does not sell oranges,’ said Melville, ‘but perhaps she is more to be pitied than those who do. A great name and no dower — it is to have silver bells to your shoes but no stockings inside them.’
‘Surely she must have stockings, I mean relations?’
‘Only very distant ones. She is a far-off cousin of your friend and neighbour the Duchesse de Vannes, who brings her up; that is, sends her to her convent, pays for her frocks, and allows her to pass her holidays at one of de Vannes’ country-houses. I do not know that we could reasonably expect the Duchesse to do more, only there are two ways of doing a thing, and she does not do this in the best possible manner.’
‘Cri-Cri cannot love a very pretty girl of sixteen, it would not be in nature, certainly not in her nature,’ said the Princess, with one of her moments of frankness. ‘I imagine they will make her embrace the religious life; what else can they do with her?’
‘It is what they will probably end with,’ said Melville, with a tinge of sadness. ‘It is hard for a girl of noble blood and no dower to end otherwise in France. The men who ought to marry her, her equals, will marry instead some Americans with dollars, whose fathers were stokers or pork-butchers.’
‘But are there no other de Valogne?’
‘None; she is the last of a family which was as extravagant as it was distinguished. Othmar may have heard of her father, the last Comte de Valogne; he was a viveur enragé, and finished the little that had been left by Count Gui, the hero of Versailles, and the fortune of his wife as well, who was a De Creusac. She died in childbed. Her mother had the care of the child, and he went on with his life of pleasure until he broke his neck riding at La Marche. The old Marquise de Creusac, when she also died, could not leave her granddaughter a farthing. The de Creusac had been ruined in the Revolution, and the sons of the Marquise, who would never have anything to do with their brother-in-law, were both killed in the war of ‘70. There was no one left but the Duchesse de Vannes, who was a third cousin of de Valogne, to do anything. She took the child in her charge, as I have said, and has behaved admirably, in the letter of charity, if something has been lacking of the spirit. So long as the girl is being educated the thing is easy; but when the time comes when she must leave her convent, as she will have to do in two years’ time, the problem will not be so easy of solution; they will have to decide on her future; at present her fate has been easily settled, but soon the terrible question will arise, — who will marry her without a dower? I believe they mean to make her enter the religious life, as you said; for the men who probably would marry her for sake of alliance with the de Vannes, will be those with whom the de Vannes would utterly refuse to ally themselves.’
‘A convent! Good heavens, for a child like a Greuze picture!’ exclaimed Othmar.
Melville added sadly:
‘It is a refuge; but myself, I would never have the religious life embraced only for its safety. I never approve of looking at Deity as a superior sort of chaperon. If all the soul be not aspirant of its own accord to a spiritual sacrifice the vows are a mere shibboleth.’
‘What soul shrined in a healthy body would aspire to the cloister at sixteen?’ thought Othmar, as the Princess said, ‘All this is very interesting, Monsignore, but it does not explain how a protégée of my neighbours, the high and mighty de Vannes, comes to be rowing in a boat full of oranges.’
‘Ah, that I cannot tell you,’ said Melville, ‘but I believe her foster-mother has a bastide near Nice; it may be she is with her foster-mother now. I knew her well when she was a little child, living with the old Marquise de Creusac in that extreme but refined and reserved poverty of which only the old noblesse has the secret. The Marquise was one of the sweetest and most pious women I have ever had the honour to know; but she could, if necessary, have withered a king into the earth with a glance. The child promised to be like her, but had something bouillante and impetuous, which had come to her from her father, and which, beneath her high-bred manner and her chastened tone, made her, as a baby, intensely interesting.’
‘Dear Monsignore,’ said the Princess, with a little impatience, ‘surely you have mistaken your vocation, and should have been a writer of novels; you draw portraits with the skill of Octave Feuillet.’
‘I have only said what I have seen,’ said Melville, good-humouredly. ‘Probably Feuillet only does the same.’
The boat with the oranges had passed ahead towards the shore, its Venetian red side was dipping in the trough of the waves, its old striped sail was swaying in the wind; there was a speck of gold in the sun where the oranges were.
‘You had better rescue this distressed damsel and marry her, Othmar!’ said the Princess Napraxine, with an unkind little laugh. ‘She seems made on purpose for you. She has the unsullied descent which you are always sighing for, and you certainly can dispense with a dot.’
For answer he only looked at her; but she understood his answer.
Melville vaguely understood also that in his innocent praises of his Cinderella he had unwittingly struck a false chord, and he was too much a man of the world not to be grieved at his involuntary failure in tact. The boat meanwhile was fast growing to a mere speck of red and yellow colour, soon to be wholly lost in the blue radiance of sea and sky.
‘You have at times bought some Greuzes, if I remember,’ continued the Princess. ‘They are pretty, soft, conventional, but I do not know that your gallery is much the richer for them.’
‘They belong to another time than ours,’ said Othmar. ‘I imagine Talleyrand was right when he said that no one born since ‘89 can know how sweet human life can become.’
‘And how elegant human manners can be,’ added Melville. ‘Cendrillon has something of that old grace; when she was two years old she curtseyed as though she were Sevigné’s self.’
‘What a paragon!’ said Madame Napraxine. ‘Poverty and all the Graces! An irresistible combination. The time I should have liked to live in would have been Louis Treize’s; what perfect costume, what picturesque wars, what admirable architecture! Is this child at Sacré Cœur, did you say, Monsignore?’
‘That would be too extravagant for her place as Cendrillon,’ replied Melville. ‘No; I think they were wise not to put her amidst all those great ladies in embryo; she has been educated by the Dames de Ste. Anne, at a remote village called Faiël in the Morbihan. She has had a pale girlhood there, like the arum-lily that blossoms under the moss-grown oaks.’
‘How poetic you are!’ said the Princess Napraxine, with a smile which brought a flush of embarrassment even to the world-bronzed cheek of Melville. ‘Men are so much more romantic than women. Here are Clotilde de Vannes and I, who only see that, as this young girl has no dower, the very best place for her in the world is a convent, melancholy but inevitable; whereas you and Othmar, merely because she has pretty hair which the sun shines on as she goes past amongst her oranges, are already thinking that some one ought to rise out of the sea to marry her, with a duke’s couronne in one hand and a veil of old d’Alençon lace in the other! Certainly those things do happen. If she were an impudent écuyère at Hengler’s, or a Californian who never had a grandfather, the duke’s couronne would no doubt appear on her horizon. By the way, pending her eternal retreat, does Cri-Cri allow her to be seen at all?’
‘You will probably see her at Millo. I saw her there last week, and made her cry by reminding her of her babyhood on the isle; and of her grandmother, whom she adored. She is with the Duchesse now, because there is typhus fever at the convent, and the pupils are all dispersed; but Millo is scarcely a congenial air for a poor relation, who is also a proud one.’
‘Ah! she is a good advertisement of Cri-Cri’s virtues, elle en a besoin,’ said the Princess Napraxine, with her merciless little laugh. ‘And de Vannes, what does he say to so pretty a relative?’
‘A man like de Vannes never sees that a young girl of that type exists.’
‘Hum — m — mph!’ she murmured dubiously. ‘That depends on a great many circumstances. Propinquity and ennui will make Ste. Scholastique herself sought like the Krauss or Jeanne Granier. Millo is certainly a very odd kind of home for your woodland arum-lily. If she have any intelligence at all, and relate what she sees when she gets back to Faiël, the good Dames de Ste. Anne will have the monastic enjoyment of scandal gratified to the uttermost.’
‘I believe she lives entirely in the schoolroom whilst at Millo,’ said Melville, a little impatiently. He wished he had never spoken the name of Yseulte de Valogne, the name which seemed to belong to le temps quand la Reine Berthe fila. He had one of those instincts of having spoken unwisely, one of those presentiments of impending disaster, which come to finely organised and much-experienced minds, and are called by blunter and slower brains mere nervous nonsense.
When the other day the tall factory chimney fell at Bradford, the birds which built in it had flown away before the workmen — stupidly eating their breakfasts till the bricks tumbled about their ears — had looked up and seen any danger.
CHAPTER V.
As Othmar leaned against the side of the yacht and let his eyes dwell on her face, unseen by him so long, his regard let something of the emotion which he felt escape him, and betrayed that the chill indifference with which he had met her again had been but the mere mask of pride, though it might be a mask which he would be strong enough always to wear in her presence.
‘Yonder is S. Pharamond,’ he said, conscious of his momentary loss of self-control, as he pointed to some round towers which rose above woods of ilex trees and magnolias. ‘If you would allow them to land me there instead of at Nice I should be grateful, and perhaps you would honour me with landing too: the house is somewhat neglected, as I have been away so long; but they will be at least able to give you a cup of tea.’
‘With pleasure, if Wilkes likes it,’ said the Princess, as she joined her friend. ‘I never knew you had a place upon this coast; surely you never named it when — when I knew you first?’
‘Most likely not,’ said Othmar, ‘I have been seldom there. It was a favourite house of my father’s in his rare moments of leisure, but I have never cared for the air or for the world of Nice. I have lent it sometimes to my friends.’
‘What do you not lend to your friends? In that respect you have made yourself honey, and the flies have eaten you without hesitation.’
‘If the honey be not in the hive it ought to be eaten. There is a landing-place in my grounds, and the house is not more than a quarter of a mile distant, if such a distance do not alarm you. I know that you are no great pedestrian, Princess.’
‘Why should one be when there are so many more agreeable modes of progression? On ne doit jamais se punir pour rien.’
‘I have walked twenty miles for my own pleasure very often,’ said Lady Brancepeth, who approached them.
‘Oh, but you are English; we were just saying that all English people are like beavers, you must be sawing and drilling and building and dragging something or other all through the length of your days. I could walk, I think I could walk right across Russia, if there were any wise object to be obtained by it, but simply to walk, as a mad dog runs, from a sort of blind impulsion! — no, that is beyond me.’
‘You are such a curious union, Nadine, of languor and energy, of indifference and of potentialities,’ began her friend.
‘My energy is latent,’ she said, interrupting her. ‘I do not waste it on every-day trifles, as you waste yours. You always use forty-horse power to boil an egg or make a box of wax matches. That is an English idea of energy.’
‘Your grandmother, the Princesse d’Yssingeaux, was English by birth.’
‘So was Othmar’s mother. That is why he and I have something of the beaver in us, but calmed, controlled, kept in reserve; we do not waste our time and timber damming up threads of water, but we shall be ready if an inundation occur.’
‘Othmar, perhaps,’ said Lady Brancepeth.
‘I have a great deal more energy than he,’ said Nadine Napraxine, with a smile, as she leaned back in the wicker lounging-chair, looking as indolent as a Turkish woman, and as delicate and useless as a painted butterfly.
The schooner in twenty minutes’ time landed them at a creek, with a little marble quay, shadowed by great pines and eucalyptus trees; there was a pavilion on the small pier, a pretty kiosque all white and blue and gold, with twisted pillars and Moorish arabesques.
‘Remember, nothing here is of my taste or choice,’ said Othmar; ‘I have not been at the place for ten years. Would you like to rest? They can bring your tea to you; or would you come up to the house at once?’
‘Va pour le château,’ said Nadine Napraxine; ‘I never care for the preface of a story.’
