Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 614
‘I would lead any life you suggested — out of the world if you pleased.’
‘Ah, but I do not please,’ she said, with a little sigh. ‘That is just the mischief. You remember when we went to your Dalmatian castle the first year; the solitude was enchanting, the loneliness of the sea and the shore was exquisite, the mountains seemed drawn behind us like a curtain, shutting out all noise and commonness and only enclosing our own dreams; but after a little time you looked at me, I looked at you, and we both tried to hide from each other that we yawned. One morning when there was a rough wind on the sea and the first snow on the hills, I said to you, “What if we go to Paris?” and you were relieved beyond expression, only you would not say so. Now, if we had been poets — really poets, you and I — we should never have quitted Zama for Paris. We should have let the whole world go.’
Othmar did not well know what to reply, because he was conscious of a certain truth in her words.
‘I am not a poet, you have often told me so,’ he said with some bitterness. ‘The atmosphere I was born in was too thick and yellow with gold for the Parnassian bees to fly to my cradle. The supreme privilege of the poet is an imperishable youth, and I do not think that I was ever young; they did not let me be so.’
‘You were so for a little while when you first loved me,’ she said with a smile; ‘that is why I wonder we had not more imagination at that time. Anybody could live the life we live now. It shows what a stifling, cramping thing the world is; we who used to meditate on every possible idealic and idyllic kind of existence have found that there is nothing for us to do but to open our houses, surround ourselves with a crowd, spend quantities of money in all commonplace fashions, and be hated by envy and envied by stupidity. Do you remember our sunlit kingdom in Persia that we were to have gone to together? Well, we are as far off it as though we were not together.’
‘Do you mean then,’ said Othmar impatiently, ‘that you think our life together a mistake?’
‘No, not quite that; because we are more intelligent than most people, only we have been unable to rise above the commonplace; unable to keep our iron at a white heat. Our existence looks very brilliant, no doubt, to those outside it, but in real truth there is a poverty of invention about it which makes me feel ashamed of my own want of originality.’
She laughed a little; her old laugh, which always chilled the hearts of men.
She had always foreseen the termination of their pilgrimage of joy in that mortuary chapel of lifeless bones and motionless dust to which the lovers’ path through the roses and raptures was so sure to lead. But he, man like, had been so certain that the roses would never fade, that the raptures would never diminish!
Othmar was sensible that he had in some manner failed to fulfil her expectations, and the sense of such a fact stings the self-love of the least vain and least selfish of men. Her life possessed all that any woman could in her uttermost exactness require. All the perfect self-indulgence and continual pageantry of life which an immense fortune can command were always hers; her children by him were beautiful and of great promise, physical and mental; her world still obeyed her slightest sign, and her slightest whim was gratified; men still found the most fatal sorcery in her careless glance, and society offered to her all that it possessed. If this sense of disappointment, of disillusion, of dissatisfaction were really with her, it could only be so because he himself, as the companion of her life, failed to realise what she had expected in him — was unhappy enough to weary her, as all others before him had done.
A vainer man would have laid the blame on her, and have arrived, through vanity, at the perception that it was her temperament and not his character which was at fault. But all the flattery which every rich and powerful man daily receives had failed to make Othmar vain. His self-esteem was very modest in its proportions, and he attributed the fact of his wife’s apparent indifference to him humbly enough to his own demerits.
‘I have not the talent of amusing her,’ he thought. ‘I have been always too grave — have taken life too sadly to be the companion of a woman of her wit. I have never done anything of which she can be very proud with that sort of pride which would be the sweetest flattery to her; the years slip away with me and bring me no occasion, at least no capability, of the kind of distinction which she would appreciate. I cannot be a Skobeleff or a Gortschakoff; I cannot make that renown which might arrest her fancy and please her amour propre; she has loved me possibly as much as she can love, but as she finds that I am made of the common clay of ordinary humanity, I become not much more to her than all those dead men whom she has tired of and forgotten.’
But whilst his reason told him this, his heart yearned to disbelieve it, and his pride refused a meek submission to it. There was something in her fugitive, delicately disdainful, capriciously insecure, which was certain to sustain the passion of man, because it constantly stimulated it; her concessions were made to his desires not her own; she never shared his weakness even whilst she was indulgent to it.
‘I have absolutely never known yet whether you have ever loved me!’ he said to her once, and she replied, with her little indulgent, mysterious smile:
‘How should you know what I do not know myself?’
It was a part, and no small part, of the ascendency she had over him; it stimulated his affections, because it perpetually stinted them; it made satiety impossible with her.
Yet all which excited his passions and secured the continuance of her influence over him, left him more and more conscious of a void at his heart which she would never fill, because a nature cannot bestow more than it possesses. All the intellectual charm she had for him had a certain coldness in it; her incorrigible irony, her inveterate analysis, her natural attitude of observation and of mockery before the foibles and follies and affections of mankind, enchanting as they were, were without warmth as they were without pity. It was the brilliant play of electric light on polished steel. Sometimes, with the wayward inconsistency of human wishes, he would have preferred the glow from some simple fire of the hearth.
There were times when the feeling which met his own left his heart cold. He had never wholly ceased to feel that he was always in a measure outside her life. He would have been ashamed to confess to her many youthful weaknesses, many romantic impulses which often moved him; there were many lover-like follies which would have been natural and sweet to him, which he had early learned to control and dismiss, unyielded to because he was afraid of that slight ironical smile, and that contemptuous little word with which she had the power to arrest the quick tide of any impetuous emotion.
The excesses of passion and the force of emotion always seemed to her slightly absurd; she had yielded to both for his sake more than she had ever thought to do; but her intelligence always held reign over her with much greater dominance than her feelings ever obtained. There were moments when he felt as if he asked her for bread, and she gave him a stone; a most polished stone of magical charm, of exquisite transparency, of occult power, but still a stone, when he merely wished for the plain sweet bread of simple sympathy.
Once, in riding alone through the forests of Amyôt, his horse put its foot in a rabbit’s hole and threw him. He was unhurt, and rose and remounted. But he thought as he rode onward: ‘If I had been disfigured, crippled, made an invalid for life, how would she have regarded me?’
With pity, no doubt, but probably with aversion; certainly with indifference. She would have brought her exquisite grace, her cool nonchalant smile, her delicate fragrant presence to his bedside, and would have come there every day, no doubt, and have been careful that he should want for nothing; but would there have been the blinding tears of a passionate sorrow in her eyes, would her cheek have grown hollow and her hair white with long vigil, would her whole world have been found within the four walls of his sick room?
He thought not.
He sighed as he rode through the green glades of the great woods where she had held her Court of Love.
Of love no one could speak with such science and surety as she. She had known it in all its phases, studied it in all its madness, accepted it in all its sacrifices; on no theme would her silver speech be more eloquent; and love had been given to her as the widest of all her kingdoms. But had she really known it ever? Had not that which her own breast had harboured always been the mere impulse of curiosity, the mere exercise of power, the mere chillness of analysis such as that with which the physiologist gazes on the bared nerves of the living organism? After all, why had men cared so much for her? Only because she had been as unmoved as the moon. Men are children; they long for what they cannot clasp. He himself had only loved her so long, despite the chilling and dulling effect of marriage, because he had always felt that he possessed so little real hold upon her that any day she might take it into her fancy to leave him, not out of unkindness but out of ennui.
Sometimes he thought with a curious compassion of Napraxine. He thought of him now, and for a moment his own heart grew hard against her as he rode through the beautiful summer world of his woods; hard as had grown the hearts of men who, dying for her sake, had felt that they had given their life for a smile, for a jest, for a chimera, for a caprice — given it away unthanked.
But then, when he entered his house again and saw her, he forgave her and loved her; he cared more still for one touch of her cool white hand, the favour of one careless smile cast to him, than he cared for the whole world of women — women who would willingly have seen him forget his allegiance to her, and have consoled him for all her defects.
‘Otho is uxorious, like Belisarius, like Bismarck,’ said Friedrich Othmar, with an unpleasant smile. ‘And alas! he is neither a great soldier nor a great statesman, to make the weakness respected either by the world or by his wife.’
Othmar had overheard the speech, and it had made him irritated, and afraid lest he ever looked absurd.
‘Yet,’ he thought bitterly, ‘if she were still the wife of Napraxine, no one would ever see anything singular in any weakness or madness that I might commit for her!’
Between his uncle and himself few intimate words ever passed. After the death of Yseulte a tacit understanding had been come to between them that neither should ever name those causes, whether great or small, which she had had for pain and jealous sorrow in her brief life’s space. It was a subject on which they could never have touched without a breach irrevocable and eternal in their friendship.
Friedrich Othmar visited at their houses, caressed their children, preserved all outward amity with both of them, and devoted all the energies of his last years and of his immense experience to the interests of the house which he had honoured, served, and loved so long, but with neither his nephew nor his nephew’s wife did he ever pass the limits of a conventional and courteous intercourse, which had neither affection in it nor any exchange of confidence.
Once or twice the worldly-wise and harsh old man did a thing which a few years before, in anyone else, he would have regarded as the most flimsy and foolish of sentimentalities. He took the little Xenia with him into the gardens of St. Pharamond, and made her gather with her own small hands a quantity of violets; then he led her to the tomb of Yseulte, and bade her lay them on it. She had been buried there, though a sepulchre sculptured by Mercier had been raised to her memory at Amyôt.
‘Why are you not her child?’ he said to her. ‘Why are you not? She would have loved you better than your own mother can.’
The child scattered her violets, then came and leaned her arms upon his knee and looked up at him with serious eyes.
‘You are crying!’ she said, touching softly two great tears which had fallen on his cheeks. Then she added gravely: ‘I thought you were too old!’
‘I too should have thought so,’ said Friedrich Othmar bitterly. ‘It is a sign that my end is near.’
And he envied those credulous, unintellectual, happy imbeciles who could believe that that ‘end’ was only the opening of the portals of a wider, fairer, greater life; he whose reason told him that for his own strong keen brain and multiform knowledge and accumulated wisdom and fierce love of life, as for the youthful limbs and the fair soul and the pure body of the dead girl there, that end was only the ‘end’ of all things: cruel corruption, hideous putridity, blank nothingness, eternal silence.
‘What is the use of it all? What is the use?’ he said to the startled child, as he took her hand and led her from the tomb. What was the use of any life or any death? What had been the use of Yseulte’s?
One day he found before her mausoleum at Amyôt the most mondaine of women: Blanche Princesse de Laon, who, in her childish days, had been Blanchette de Vannes.
‘You, too, remember her?’ he said in surprise.
Blanche de Laon replied roughly:
‘I loved her; — tout le monde est bête une fois!’
She stood before the marble sepulchre where Mercier had made the angels of Pity and of Youth weeping. She was not twenty years of age, but she knew the world like her glove. She was cruel, cold, avaricious, sensual, steeped in frivolity and intrigue as in a bath of wine, but underneath all that there was one little spot of memory, of regret, of tenderness in her nature; as far as she had been capable of affection she had loved Yseulte.
‘Tiens!’ she said, as she stood beside the sepulchre. ‘Do you think it has succeeded — your nephew’s last marriage?’
‘I believe so,’ replied Friedrich Othmar with surprise. ‘Yes, certainly, I should say so; they seem quite in accord; he is devoted to her still.’
‘Tiens!’ she said again, and she struck the marble of the tomb sharply with the long ivory stick of her sun umbrella. ‘I watch them like a cat a mouse. I will be even with her still; the first time there is a little crack in what you call their happiness, I shall be there — and I will widen it. Have you seen the drivers of Monte Carlo make an open wound in their horses’ flank on purpose? Well, this is how they do it. A fly settles and leaves a little piece of braised skin, the men rub that little place with sand, it widens and widens, they rub in more sand, the sun and the flies do the rest.’
Then she struck her ivory stick once more on the marble parapet of the great tomb.
‘She died for them! She was so foolish always. But there was something great in it. We are not great like that. If he only remembered, I would forgive him for her sake. But he never remembers. He does not care. A dog might be buried instead of her.’
‘You cannot be sure of that.’
‘Bah! I am perfectly sure. He has never even understood that she did die for him. He thought it was an accident!’
‘Hush!’ said Friedrich Othmar harshly, but with great emotion. ‘She wished that he should think it so; what right have you or have I or has anyone in the wide world to betray her last secret if we guess it? It has gone to the grave with her, like her dead children.’
‘I betray it no more than you!’ she replied with asperity. ‘I have given no hint of it to any living soul; when Toinon said it was a suicide I struck her, I made her hold her peace. I was a child then, and all these years since I have never said a word; but you, you know; you know as well as I.’
‘It was not a suicide, it was a heroism. If there were a God, a great God, He would have honoured it.’
‘But there are only priests!’ said Blanchette, with her bitterest smile.
They turned away together from the mausoleum, where the marble figure of Yseulte seemed to lie in the peace of a dreamless sleep beneath the shadowing wings of the two angels. Gates of metal scroll-work let in the sunlight to this house of death; there was no darkness in it, no terror, no melancholy; white doves flew around its roof, and white roses blossomed at its portals.
‘Madame la Princesse de Laon,’ said Friedrich Othmar gravely, as they passed across the turf, ‘whenever the fly begins that little wound in the skin that you talked of, forbear to widen it for the sake of your cousin who sleeps there; do not make her sacrifice wholly useless. What is done is done. We cannot bring her back to life, and if we could she would not be happy in it. There are souls too delicate and too spiritual for earth. Hers was so.’
Blanche de Laon gave him no promise. She walked on over the smooth sward through the labyrinths of blossom, and crossed the gardens where her courtiers met her, with outcries of welcome and of homage.
She was at the supreme height of coquetry and triumph and fashion. She was not beautiful in feature, but she was dazzling fair, had a marvellously perfect figure, une crânerie inouie, and the advantage and fascination conferred by an absolute indifference to all laws, hesitations and principles. She was hard as her own diamonds, plundered her lovers with a greed and ruthlessness which rivalled any cocotte’s, kept her splendid position by sheer force of audacity as high above the world as though she were the most pure of women, and before she had completed her twenty-first year knew all that was to be known of the refinements of vice, the exaggerations of self-indulgence, and the eccentricities of unbridled levity. She had supreme scorn for her sister Toinon, who had espoused the Duc de Yprès, a hunting-noble of the Ardennes, and who spent most of her time in the provinces chasing wolves, bears, and wild deer, and could give the death-blow with her knife to an old tusked monarch of the woods or a king-stag of eleven points, as surely as any huntsman in French Flanders or the Luxembourg.
The Princesse de Laon came as a guest to Amyôt with most summers or autumns. She knew that her host disliked her, and would willingly, had it been possible, never have seen her face; she knew that his wife disliked her scarcely less, but that knowledge increased her whim to be often at their houses, and she never gave them any possible pretext to break with or to slight her. Her name was included, as a matter of course, in their first series of guests every season, and usually she was accompanied by Laon himself; a man of small brains and admirable manners, who adored her, and would no more have dared resent the liberties she took with his honour than he would have dared to enter her presence uninvited.
