Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 567
‘If he take the trouble to model it at all,’ said Nadine Napraxine. ‘If the sculptor do not touch the clay, it lies in a lump neglected till somebody else comes. She will not know, I fear, how to tempt him to make anything of her. Do you suppose they have taught her the art of provocation in her Breton convent? She will only sob aloud if he go away for an hour, and be plunged into despair if his kisses be one less in number. My dear Baron, you lost all your wisdom when you failed to persuade them to leave Amyôt. They say there is no living woman who can be seen at sunrise after a ball and keep her lover; I am sure there is not one who can be shut up with a man for two months in the country, in winter, and retain his belief in her.’
‘You are very learned in these matters,’ said the Baron, more and more irritated, ‘and yet everyone knows that the Princess Napraxine has always herself despised all human affections!’
‘It is not necessary to have sat in the midst of a maelstrom to have studied the laws of whirlpools,’ said his tormentor. ‘And what have human affections to do with it? You know as well as I do that humanity has only caprices and passions, with their natural issue, disillusions.’
Friederich Othmar thought of the terrace at Amyôt and the face of Yseulte.
Walking with her a moment, alone, in the afternoon sunshine, he had ventured on a word of counsel.
‘My dear child, you are very young. Let an old man tell you something. Otho has one serious malady; nay, do not look so alarmed, it is only the malady of his generation — caprice and ennui. He has not an idea that he is capricious, but he is so. Do not let his caprices pain you; but, as far as you can, vary with his varying moods; I think that is the secret of sympathy. Just now it is high noon with you; so there are no shadows; but shadows will fall. I want you to understand that. Otho is not perfect; in a way, he is very weak, though he has more intellect than most men. Do not make a god of him. You will only spoil him and blind yourself.’
And then she had looked at him with that look which he recalled now as he sat by Nadine Napraxine, and had said with a dignity of reproach which had sat very prettily on her youthfulness: ‘If he have faults, I shall never see them — you maybe sure of that; and if you will tell me how to please him, I will never think of myself.’
Remembering this, the Baron, who had never in his life cared greatly for any woman or believed much in one, felt a restless anger against the prophetess of woe.
‘When they predict fire they have already laid the powder,’ he thought, impatiently.
Friederich Othmar was surprised himself at the feeling of affection and of anxiety which Yseulte had aroused in him. He had wished Othmar to marry that the race might be continued, but he had never supposed that any young girl would fill him with the solicitude for her own welfare which she made him feel for hers.
Women had always been la femelle de l’homme with him; no more; he was astonished at himself for being moved by a genuine desire to secure for her those more subtle joys of the soul which he had always derided. Before her he felt ashamed of his own grosser convictions (which a month before would have been so confident) that she could want nothing more than the riches her marriage conferred on her. Though he had been a man of little feeling he was not altogether without kindliness, and his keen penetration told him that hers was a nature which the glories and gewgaws of the world would do very little to console if its affections were starved or its higher instincts humiliated, and the prophecies of Nadine Napraxine but irritated him more because he knew that her merciless intelligence was as a seismographic pendulum which foretold truly the convulsions of the future.
‘Surely,’ she continued, ‘S. Pharamond would have been a more natural place to select at this season. Amyôt is superb, but it must be sunk fathoms deep in snow.’
‘There is no snow; it was open weather, and even mild,’ replied the Baron, who was ready to declare that roses were blossoming in the ditches of the Orleannais.
‘But why did he not come to S. Pharamond? It is a paradise of azaleas and tulips at the present moment.’
‘It is a pretty place,’ he answered; ‘but perhaps more suggestive of Apates and Philotes than of the true Eros.’
‘The vicinity of the tripots hardly accords with the solemnity of Hymen? Do you mean that?’ she said, with her enigmatical little smile. ‘Who would ever have thought to live to hear Baron Friederich mention Eros! Well, we will hope that the god for once will be like the Salamander which is emblazoned, and carved so liberally, all over Amyôt. We will hope the fire that feeds him may not go out; but I am afraid the motto really means that what nourishes extinguishes.’
With that she rose and took herself and her sunshade, with its point duchesse, and her marvellous gown with its cascades of lace and soft pale hues, like tea roses, her provocative languor, and her admirable grace, from the terraces of the Prince Ezarhédine. She was followed by longing eyes and a silence which was the truest of compliments. To more than one there, the sun had set whenever she had passed from their sight.
‘What makes the world of men so fanatic about that woman?’ asked Friederich Othmar, exhaling all the unspoken grievances of his own soul in a rude grumble, as the sound of the whirling wheels of her carriage died away. ‘Why? Why? There are numbers more beautiful; few, perhaps, with so perfect a form, yet there are some who equal her even in that. She is as cruel as death, as cold as frost; no one ever saw a flush on her cheek or a tear in her eyes, and when she smiles it is like the sirocco and the north wind blent together; and yet there is no woman so blindly loved.’
‘Yet!’ echoed Prince Ezarhédine. ‘Surely, you should say “therefore.” The sirocco and the north wind blent together are electric shocks to the most sated senses.’
‘Yes,’ added the great statesman who was his guest, ‘and if it will not sound too pedantic, I will add also why it is. She is to her lovers very much what the worship of Isis became to the Latins. She blends an infinite subtlety of sentiment with an infinite potentiality of sensual delight.’
‘Sensual! She is as cold as snow — —’
‘I know; she has that sobriquet. But every one feels what a paradise would lie within if the snow were melted. Every one hopes — more or less conscious or unconscious of his hope — to pass that frosty barrier. I think if Madame Napraxine ever loved any man, she would make such a heaven for him that he would be the most enviable of all human beings. But it would only last a month; perhaps six weeks. Although,’ he added, with a faint sigh, ‘it would be worth losing all the rest of life to be the companion of those six weeks.’
‘If I may differ with you, Prince, I would say that, on the contrary, if ever Madame Nadine can be touched to love she will be most tenacious and most constant,’ said Ezarhédine.
‘Perhaps too much so for the felicity of the person whom she might honour,’ added the Baron with a smile that was a little impertinent. He had always disliked and dreaded her; she had wasted two years of his nephew’s life, and he shrewdly suspected that she was the cause of Othmar’s too slight ardour towards his young wife.
Meanwhile, the subject of their meditations and desires was borne by her fleet horses over the sea-road homeward to La Jacquemerille. She felt astonished, irritated, offended at the idyl of Amyôt. To have loved herself, and then to be content shut up within the stone walls of a country-house with a girl taken from a convent!
‘He is like Gilles de Retz,’ she thought, with bitter disdain. ‘He takes the white flesh of a child to try and cure his malady.’
It seemed to her cowardly, sensual, contemptible.
She drove homeward through the olives and the lemon-yards and the green fields that were full of anemones and narcissus and of the bright gold and sea-shell hues of the crocus. The grey towers of S. Pharamond were on her left as she went, and beyond them the fantastic pinnacles and gilded crockets of Millo. She looked at them with an anger foreign to her character.
‘Who could have dreamed he would have done so absurd a thing?’ she thought, irritated against him and against herself. Never before in her life had the actions of any other person had the slightest effect upon her own feelings. She had not lived very long, it is true, but to herself she seemed to have an illimitable experience; and within her memory there was no record of any time in which she had cared one straw what another did. That she should care now, ever so slightly, irritated her pride and wounded her delicacy. She was a woman at all times truthful with herself, however it might be her amusement to mislead others. She was quite as cruel to herself as to anyone else in her unrelenting and inquisitive mental dissection. She pursued her self-analysis with a mercilessness which, had she been less witty and less worldly, might have been morbid; and she did not disguise from herself now that the tidings of Amyôt were an irritation if not a pain to her. She did full justice to the loveliness with which Othmar had sought to find oblivion of her own; and she knew that it might very well be that, as the Baron had said, he had become the girl’s lover as well as her husband.
‘Men are such poor creatures,’ she thought with scorn. ‘They are all the slaves of their senses; they have no character; they are only animals. They talk of their souls, but they have got none; and of their constancy, but they are only constant to their own self-indulgence.’
The contempt of a woman, in whom the senses have never awakened, and for whom all the grosser appetites have no attraction, for those easy consolations which men can find in the mere gratification of those appetites, is very real and very unforgiving.
Her scorn for Othmar, seeking forgetfulness of herself in the fresh and budding life of a child of sixteen, was equal to that which she felt for Napraxine finding solace for her own indifference in the purchasable charms of the belles petites; the one seemed as trivial to her as the other. When men spoke of their devotion, they only meant their own passions; if these were denied, they sought refuge in mere physical pleasures, which at all events partially consoled them. She thought of him with increasing intolerance. She answered only by monosyllables to the remarks of her companions, and her mind wandered away to that stately place where life might well seem a love-lay of the Renaissance.
‘He will soon be tired,’ she mused, with cruel wisdom. ‘In a week the child will have become a romance read through; a peach with its bloom rubbed off; a poor little bird which has only one note, and has sung that one till its master is ready to wring its throat. It is always so. I never see a baby run through the fields gathering daisies and throwing them down but what I think of men with their loves. The only passion that lasts with them is one which is denied, and even that is a poor affair. To be sure, sometimes they kill themselves, but that is rather out of rage than out of any higher despair. And for one who kills himself for us there are a hundred who kill themselves for their debts. Othmar never can have any debts, so he invents woes for himself, and captivity for himself, and he will die of neither.’
Yet, contemptuous of him for what seemed to her his weakness and his unreason as she was, her thoughts attached themselves persistently to him. He was the only living being who had never wearied her, who had always perforce interested her, who had seemed to her unlike the rest of the world, and capable of a master-passion, which might have risen beyond mediocrity. How would it have been with them if he had stood in the stead of Napraxine, whilst she was vaguely open to dim and noble ideals, to spiritual emotions, to human affections?
‘Pooh!’ she thought. ‘It would have been just the same thing. Love is gross and absurd in its intimacies; it is like the hero to his valet. Maternity is first a malady, and then an ennui; that biche blanche at Amyôt will learn that as I learned it. He would have been much more poetic than Platon, and much more agreeable; but I dare say he would have been much more exacting, and much more jealous.’
Yet the remembrance of Amyôt pursued her, and made her restless; with her lips she had ridiculed the idea of nuptial joys enshrouded in the wet woods and falling mists of the Orleannais; but in her heart she did not laugh; almost — almost — she envied that child, with the innocent, serious eyes, whom she called contemptuously la biche blanche, who was learning the language of love in the earliest dawn of womanhood.
‘Only he does not love her!’ she reflected, with pity, disdain, and satisfaction, all commingled. No! He loved herself. She believed in few things, and in few emotions; but she believed that so long as Othmar lived he would love her alone.
‘Quand on tient la dragée haute!’ she thought, with her unkindest smile at the fractiousness and ingratitude of men, as she descended at the doors of La Jacquemerille, and with displeasure heard her servants say, ‘M. le Comte Seliedoff awaits Madame la Princesse.’
CHAPTER XXV.
Boris Fedorovich Seliedoff was a young cousin of Napraxine’s; he was twenty-two years old, tall and well made, with a beautiful face on his broad shoulders, a face given him by a Georgian mother. He had been an imperial page, and was now a lieutenant in the Imperial Guard. He was an only son, and his father was dead; he had a great position, and was much indulged by all his world, and was as headstrong and as affectionate as a child. Nadine Napraxine alone did not indulge him, and he adored her with all the blind ecstasies of a first love; he had obtained his leave of absence only that he might follow her southward. He was extremely timid in his devotion, but he was impassioned also; the moral question of his love for his cousin’s wife weighed no more with him than it weighed with Othmar. His world was not given to consideration of such scruples. As far as she could be entertained by such stale things, she was amused by the worship of this boy. In Russia he had done the maddest follies at her whim and word; once he had come from Petersburg to the Krimea only to be able to dance one valse with her at a ball at her villa on the Black Sea; he had ridden his horse up the staircase of her house in Petersburg, and taken an incredible leap over a river in Orel, because she wished for a stalk of foxglove growing on the other bank; he had risked life and limb, position and honour, again and again, to attract her attention or to go where she was, and she had smiled on him the more kindly the more headstrong were his acts and the more perilous his follies.
Once Napraxine had dared to say to her:
‘Could you not spare Boris? He is only a lad, and his mother trusts to me to keep him out of harm.’
She had answered in her chilliest tones:
‘Pray keep him so. I do not think, however, that you give him the best of examples. Your clubs, your play, your various distractions, are not all of them virtuous?’
And he had been dumb, afraid to offend her more, though he was vaguely uneasy for his young cousin. The lad was terribly in earnest, and she only saw in him a young lion-whelp whose juvenile ardours and furies were half grotesque, half amusing. Napraxine knew that if the lion-whelp went too far, or if she tired of his rage and fret, she would strike him with a whip like any other cur. But he dared not remonstrate more; and Boris Seliedoff, on a brief term of leave, had followed them to the sea-shores of the south-west, and was fretting his soul in futile rage before the indifference of his idol and the presence of her other lovers. It would have been very easy at the onset to have checked the growth of this boyish passion, but she had diverted herself with it, permitted its exaggerations, smiled at its escapades, fanned its fires as she so well knew how to do, and it had sprung to a giant growth in giant strength. This day, when she drove homeward from the breakfast at Ezarhédine’s, he was waiting for her at La Jacquemerille. For anyone to wait for her was a thing she detested; it was a disobedience to all those unspoken laws which she required her courtiers implicitly to obey. She expected everyone, of whichever sex, of whatever rank, in however high a degree of favour, to be the humble suer of her commands, the meek attendant of her pleasure. To be waited for without her desires being previously ascertained, made her instantly in a chill and irritable mood; it was a presumption. This morning she was especially ready to be irritated. When she saw the tall figure of the young soldier pacing to and fro, with feverish steps, the marble perron of her villa, she grew suddenly and disproportionately angry.
‘The boy becomes audacious, — intolerable, — impertinent,’ she thought. ‘I should have taken him to Ezarhédine’s if I had wanted him. He has had too much sugar, he needs the whip.’
All that was most cruel, most intolerant, most tyrannical in her, came with a cold hard look upon her delicate features; the temper of those of her people who had thrust their swords into the body of Paul began to awake in her. She was in the humour to hurt something, the first thing she saw; her eyes were full of scorn and of command as they looked haughtily at Seliedoff, and arrested him by a glance as he sprang towards her.
‘Who told you that I sent for you?’ she said, with that chill contemptuous gaze which froze the boy and magnetised him in the same moment.
‘No one,’ he said piteously; ‘I thought, — I imagined — —’
‘You imagined you were always welcome!’ she replied. ‘A very erroneous imagination. You may be so to Prince Napraxine, you are his cousin; but as the house is mine, I shall prefer that you shall await my invitation.’
She spoke slightingly, and with a coldness like the New Year ice of Russia.
Boris Seliedoff stood and gazed at her helplessly, fascinated by the anger of the gaze which swept over him in such supreme contempt. He had before offended, before had seen what her caprices and her unkindness could become when she was displeased; but all those previous moments had been as summer showers compared with this glacial censure which froze all his hot young blood. So often she had been content to see him; so often she had laughed at him with indulgence and benignity; so often she had called him ‘ beau cousin,’ ‘cher enfant,’ and smiled at his haste and eagerness when he had done much more than this. Might not any stranger have waited to see her pass, to hear her speak?
