Princess Napraxine
I.

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CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly, W.

Princess Napraxine

BY

OUIDA

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. I.

London

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1884

[All rights reserved]

TO

TWO PERFECTLY WISE AND HAPPY PEOPLE

MY DEAR FRIENDS

PIERRE AND EMILIE DE TCHIHATCHEFF

This Story

OF PEOPLE NEITHER HAPPY NOR WISE

IS

Affectionately Dedicated

PRINCESS NAPRAXINE.

CHAPTER I.

A blue sea, some palms with their heads bound up, some hedges of cactus and aloes; some thickets of high rose-laurel, a long marble terrace shining in the sun, huge groups of geraniums not yet frost-bitten, a low white house with green shutters and wooden balconies, a châlet roof and a classical colonnade, these all—together with some entangled shrubberies, an orange orchard, and an olive wood—made up a place which was known on the French Riviera as La Jacquemerille.

What the name had meant originally nobody knew or everybody had forgotten. What La Jacquemerille had been in the beginning of time—whether a woman, a plant, a saint, a ship, a game, a shrine, or only a caprice—was not known even to tradition; but La Jacquemerille the villa was called, as, before it, had been the old windmill which had occupied the site, ere steam and fashion, revolutionising the seashores of Savoy, had caused the present pretty nonsensical, half-rustic, half-classical house to be erected on the tongue of land which ran sharply out into the midst of the blue waves, and commanded a sea view, west and east, as far as the Cape of Antibes on the one side and the Tête du Chien on the other.

It was one of the most coveted spots on the whole seaboard of our modern Capua, and brought a little fortune annually to its happy possessor, a respectable vendor of hams, cheese, and butter in the Cannebière at Marseilles, who for the coming season had pocketed now, from Prince Napraxine, the round little sum of two thousand napoleons.

And the Princess Nadège Napraxine, who had set her heart, or rather her fancy, upon it, was sitting in a bamboo rocking-chair and looking over the house front, and thinking that decidedly she did not like it. It had been an idiotcy to take it, just the sort of folly which her delegate in the affair always committed. They would have been a thousand times better off at the hotels in Nice; you had no kind of trouble at an hotel, and you could always have your own cooks if you insisted.

For three months it had been the reigning desire of her life to have La Jacquemerille for the winter; it had been let to an American millionnaire, and the apparent impossibility of getting it had naturally increased her anxiety. The American millionnaire had suddenly decided to go home; Jay Gould or Mr. Vanderbilt had done something that had disturbed his digestion, and La Jacquemerille, which she had never seen, but had fallen in love with from photographs, was granted to her wishes for the modest sum of forty thousand francs. She had travelled straight from the Krimea to it without stopping, had arrived by night, and now was looking at it for the first time in broad daylight with a sentiment very near akin to disgust. She did not find it the least like the photographs.

‘It is so horridly low!’ she exclaimed, after a long and thoughtful examination of the frontage, where an Ionic colonnade sheltered itself under a châlet roof from the Bernese Oberland. ‘I am sure it will be most dreadfully cold. And just look at the architecture—every style under heaven! Was there ever such an extraordinary jumble?’

‘If it be a jumble, my dear, it is very suitable to our generation; and you are very lucky if, when you buy a pig in a poke, you get nothing worse than a jumble,’ said another lady who was sitting opposite to her, with a book held upside down and a litter of newspapers, and who was known in society as Lady Brancepeth.

‘Pig in a poke! what is he?’ said the Princess Napraxine in her pretty English, which she spoke with scarcely any foreign accent. ‘The house is shocking! It is the Parthenon mixed up with a Gasthof. It is a nightmare;—and so small! I don’t believe there is room for one quarter of the servants. And just look at these palms with their heads tied up as if they had neuralgia; and I am sure they may well have it, standing still in that bise, day and night. I think the whole place utterly odious. I will tell the women to unpack nothing; I am sure I shall not stay a night; an Italian villino with a shingle roof and Grindenwald balconies! Can anything be so absurd?’

‘I suppose you will wait till the Prince comes downstairs?’ said Lady Brancepeth with a little yawn.

‘Oh, I don’t know; why? He can stay if he likes. Oh, dear! there is a Cairene lattice at that end and these other windows have been copied from the Ca d’Oro, and the roof is as Swiss as if it were a cuckoo clock or a St. Bernard dog. What is one to do?’

‘Stay,’ suggested Lady Brancepeth. ‘People do not die of a Swiss roof unless it tumbles in. The house is all wrong, no doubt, but it is picturesque; a horrible word, you will say, but it describes the place. It is picturesque.’

‘Wrong things usually are,’ said the Princess Napraxine with a sigh, as she surveyed the Greek peristyle, the Swiss shingles, and the slender Ionic colonnade. ‘Are all these oranges good for one’s complexion, I wonder? It is like sitting in a bright yellow room. I don’t like bright yellow rooms. Who said that granted wishes are self-sown curses? Whoever did must have wished to hire La Jacquemerille, and done it. Why do they tie up those palms?’

‘To blanch the leaves for Holy Week. Every blade of grass is turned into money on this poetic shore. If the gardens have been included in your agreement you can untie them; if not, you cannot.’

‘They will certainly be untied; as for agreement—your brother took the place for us, I daresay he blundered.’

‘What were your instructions to him, may I ask?’

‘Oh, instructions? I do not remember. I sent him the photographs, and wrote under them: “Take me the house at any price.”’

‘Curt as Cæsar!’

With a little yawn the Princess Napraxine looked down the long shining sea-wall of white marble, studded at intervals with vases of white marble filled with aloes; beyond the marble wall was the sea—blue, bright, quivering, and full of shifting lights as diamonds are. Then her gaze came inward, and returned to the outline of the house which was so daring and contradictory a jumble. The creepers which covered it glowed red in the December noon; its blue and white awnings were gay and fresh; its vanes were gilded, and pointed merrily to the south; a late rose was garlanding the Cairene lattice; some woodlarks were singing their pretty little roundelay on the boughs of a carob tree; it was all bright, lively, full of colour and of gaiety. Nevertheless, she hardened her heart to it and condemned it utterly, out of mere waywardness.

‘I shall go away after breakfast,’ she said, as she looked. ‘Platon can do as he likes. I shall dine at Nice, and you will come with me.’

‘I was sure that was what you would do,’ said her friend; ‘so was Ralph.’

‘Then I shall not do it,’ said Princess Napraxine.

She rocked herself soothingly in her chair.

‘What a dear little bird that is singing; it cannot be a nightingale in December. The sea looks very much like our Krimean one; and what a lovely air it is. Like an English June without the rain-clouds.’

‘Wait till Madame la Bise comes round.’

‘Oh, Madame la Bise comes round the corner everywhere. She is like ennui—ubiquitous. You have her in England, only you pretend she is good for your health, and your Kingsley wrote an ode to her; the rest of the world is not such a hypocrite.’

‘Kingsley? He was Tom Brown, was he not?’

‘You are Tom Brown! Really, Wilkes, you know nothing of your own literature.’

‘Well, I was never educated as you clever Russians are,’ said Lady Brancepeth, good-humouredly; she was sometimes called Socrates, and generally Wilkes by her intimates. She was the ugly member of a singularly handsome family, and the nickname had been given to her in the schoolroom. But her ugliness was a belle laideur; her face was charming in its own way; her eyes were brilliant, and her figure was matchless. She was an earl’s daughter and an earl’s wife, and when she put on the Brancepeth diamonds and showed herself at a State ball, if ugly she was magnificent, even as, if intellectually ignorant, she was a marvel of tact, humour, and discernment.

Her friend and hostess was as entirely unlike her as an orchid is unlike an aloe. She was exquisitely lovely, alike in face and form, and as cultured as a hothouse flower. She was just three-and-twenty years old, and was a woman of the world to her finger tips. She was very cosmopolitan, for though a Russian by birth and marriage her mother had been French, one of her grandmothers English, the other German, and she had been educated by a crowd of governesses of many different nationalities. All her people, whether Russian, English, French, or German, had been very great people, with innumerable and unimpeachable quarterings, for many generations, and to that fact she owed her slender feet, her tiny ears, and her general look of perfect distinction. She had a transparent, colourless skin, like the petals of a narcissus in its perfect mat whiteness; she had oriental eyes of a blue-black, which looked immensely large in her delicate face, and which could have great inquisitiveness, penetration, and sarcasm in them, but were usually only lustrous and languid; her mouth was most admirably shaped, and her teeth deserved the trite compliment of the old madrigals, for they were like pearls; she had a very ethereal and delicate appearance, but that delicacy of mould sheathed nerves of steel as a silken scabbard sheathes a damascene blade. She had an infinite grace and an intricate alternation of vivacity and languor which were irresistible. Men were madly in love with her, which sometimes diverted and sometimes bored her; many people were rather afraid of her, and this pleased her much more than anything. She had a capacity for malice.

She now held a sunshade above her head and surveyed the house, and tried to persuade herself it was charming, as her friend had been so sure she would find it detestable. She had wished for the place with an intensity that had almost disturbed her sleep for some weeks, and now she had got it and she hated it. But as they had expected her to do so she was determined to conquer her hatred and to find it much better than its photographs. The task was not difficult, for La Jacquemerille, if full of absurdities and incongruities, was decidedly pretty.

As she swung herself on her rocking-chair and began to see with the eyes of her mind a hundred improvements which she would instantly have effected whether the terms of the contract allowed of it or not, she saw coming within the range of her unassisted eyesight a large and stately schooner, with canvas white as snow bellying in the breeze. She drew on her long loose tan-coloured glove cheerfully, and said aloud:

‘After all, it is better than an hotel. There is no noise, and nobody to stare at one. I daresay we shall get through three months without cutting each other’s throats.’

Lady Brancepeth turned and looked out to sea, and saw the schooner, and smiled discreetly; she said as discreetly:

‘I am so glad, dear, you won’t fret yourself too much about the place; after all, you are not going to live in it for a lifetime; and though, no doubt, it is utterly wrong, and would give Oscar Wilde a sick headache, yet one must confess it is pretty and suits the sunshine.’

The trees had been cut, so that openings in their boughs allowed the sea to be seen from any point of the terrace. Princess Nadine from under her sunshade watched the stately yacht draw nearer and nearer over the shining path of the waters, and drop anchor some half mile off the shore; then she saw a gig lowered, with red-capped white-shirted sailors to man it, and a figure which she recognised descended over the schooner’s side into the stern of the boat, which thereupon left the vessel, and was pulled straight towards La Jacquemerille. Neither she nor Lady Brancepeth appeared to notice it; they talked chiffons, and read their newspapers; but the long boat came nearer and nearer, until the beat of the oars sounded directly under the walls of La Jacquemerille, and the rowers were too close at hand to be seen. But the Princess Nadine heard the rattle of the oars in the rowlocks, the shock of its keel against the sea stairs below, which she could not see for the tangle of pyracanthus and mahonia and many another evergreen shrub, covering the space between the terrace and the shore; she heard a step that she knew very well, the sound of which moved her to a slight sense of anticipated amusement, and a stronger sense of approaching weariness, and she turned her head a little, with a gracious if indifferent welcome in her eyes, as a man ran up the stairs at the end of the terrace, and came along the marble floor in the sunshine—a young man, tall, fair, athletic, with a high-bred look and handsome aquiline features.

‘You have had a very quick run, surely?’ said the Princess Napraxine, stretching out her tan glove.

‘Well, we did all we knew, and crammed on every stitch we had,’ the new comer answered, as he kissed the tips of the glove, and murmured in a lower tone, ‘Were you not here?’

Then he crossed over to where Lady Brancepeth sat, and kissed her cheek with a brother’s indifference.

‘Dear Wilkes, are you all right?’ he said as he took up a majolica stool and seated himself between them.

‘Take that bamboo chair, Geraldine,’ asked the Princess. ‘That china stool does not suit your long legs at all. How many hours really have you been coming from Genoa? I am fearfully angry with you, by the way; how could you take this place?’

‘Because you told me,’ answered Lord Geraldine, staring hard. ‘What was the command? Take it, coûte que coûte. Not an “if”; not a “perhaps”; not a “but.” Wilkes, do you not call that too cruel?’

‘My dear Ralph,’ said Lady Brancepeth, ‘any woman’s instructions should always be construed so liberally that a margin is left for her at the eleventh hour to change her mind. But do not distress yourself. I do not think Mme. Napraxine really dislikes the place. It is only her way. When she has bought a thing she always finds a flaw in it. It is her habit to condemn everything. She is a pessimist from sheer want of ever having had real disappointment.’

‘Look at the house. It speaks for itself,’ said the Princess, contemptuously. ‘Why did you not telegraph and say that it was a patchwork of every known order of architecture? I would have told you to break off negotiations.’

‘But you had seen the photographs.’

‘Photographs! Would you know your own mother from a photograph if you had not been told beforehand whose it was?’

‘I am so sorry,’ murmured Geraldine, as he turned round and gazed at the offending building. ‘It is a pretty place, surely? not classical or severe, certainly; but cheery and picturesque. I looked all over it conscientiously, I give you my word, and it is really in very good taste inside; much better than one could have hoped for in a maison meublée.’

‘Oh, it is Wilkes, not I, who finds it so irretrievably bad,’ said the Princess Napraxine, with tranquil mendacity; ‘but if it be too bad one can always go to an hotel, only in an hotel one can never sleep at night for the omnibuses, and the banging of other people’s luggage, and if I do not sleep I can do nothing. Here I should fancy it is perfectly quiet?’

‘Quiet as the grave, unless the sea is howling. But Monte Carlo is just behind that cliff there; with fast horses you can drive over in twenty-six minutes—I timed it by my watch. You can have a score of people to dinner every evening if you like.’

The Princess raised her eyebrows with a gesture signifying that this prospect was not one of unmitigated happiness; and Lady Brancepeth, alleging that the sun was rather too warm for her north-country bones, went away into the house, being of opinion that three was no company; her brother drew his bamboo-chair nearer his hostess, and took the tan glove with the wrist it inclosed in a tender grasp.

‘So you do not like the poor place? I am truly grieved!’

She drew her hand away so dexterously that she left the loose empty glove in his fingers, and he looked foolish.

‘No; I thought of going away to-morrow,’ she continued, without any regard to his dejection; ‘I do not like palms that have the toothache, and marble pillars that have married wooden balconies. But your sister, who always opposes me, is so certain I shall go that it is very probable I shall stop.’

‘Admirable feminine logic! No doubt the poor house is utterly wrong, though it has been the desire of everybody on the Riviera ever since it was built. I felt sure you would have been more comfortable in a good hotel at Nice, and if I had ventured to volunteer an opinion, I should have said so. Wilkes is quite right; you will be bored to death here.’

‘She is quite wrong; she does not like the place herself,’ said Princess Napraxine, with decision, while she took back her glove peremptorily. ‘I do—at least in a way. The oranges look jaundiced, and the palms rheumatic, but those are trifles. They do say it hailed yesterday, and the water in the washing-basin in the coupé lit was frozen last night as we came into Ventimiglia; but I saw a scorpion on the wall this morning, and heard a mosquito, so I am convinced it is the south of the poets, and am prepared for any quantity of proper impressions, only they are slow in coming to me; it is so excessively like the Krimea, terrace and all. Should not you go in and see if Platon be awake?’

‘I am convinced he is asleep. It is not quite one o’clock, and you arrived in the night, didn’t you?’

‘Yes; but he will get up, because he will want to be off to Monte Carlo. He will spend his life there and send over expresses every hour for fresh rouleaux. When he is near a gaming-table he is so happy.’

‘Enviable faculty!’

‘It is my faculty too. But I try against it; he doesn’t. Men never try to resist anything.’

Geraldine murmured words to the effect that his life was one long compulsory resistance, and his eyes completed the uncomplete sentences.

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said his hostess. ‘You know I do not like madrigaux; and an Englishman always looks so clumsy when he is making them. Make me a cigarette instead.’

‘Always cruel!’ murmured her companion, obediently rolling up Turkish tobacco.

‘Always kind,’ said the Princess. ‘People who are kind to men and children never spoil them. Where will your schooner stay? There is no dock, or quay, or whatever you call it, here. These places always ought to have one of their own.’

‘How can they when the rocks go sheer down into deep water? No, I must keep her off Villefranche or Monaco. She can be round in half an hour—at your disposition, of course, like her owner.’

‘If she be not more manageable than her owner——’

‘Oh, Nadine! When I only live to obey your orders, and never even receive a smile in return!’

‘Ah, if you want reward there is no longer any merit! And do not call me by my name in that manner; you will do it some day before Platon.’

‘He doesn’t mind.’

‘No, of course he does not mind; but I do, which is more to the purpose.’

‘You are very unkind to-day, princess. This unhappy Jacquemerille! it is grievous that you don’t like it; the gardens are really pretty, and the view is superb.’

‘You talk like an auctioneer; go and find the gardener and tell him to untie those palms.’

‘Pray don’t send me away yet.’

‘Is that what you call your docility?’

His hand stole towards hers again.

‘Do tell me, princess,’ he murmured timidly. ‘You will stay now that you are here, will you not?’

‘How can I answer for the duration of my fancies? Perhaps I may, if you amuse me well enough.’

‘I would rather interest you.’

‘Ah, my friend, that is quite impossible. Even to be amused is hard enough, when one is not in the humour. When one is in the humour, it is even fun to go out fishing; when one is not, one is dull even at a masked ball at Petersburg. We are like the cuttle-fish, we make our sphere muddy with our own dulness. How would you suggest that I should find any interest here? There will be no society except some gouty statesmen and some sickly women, a few yachtsmen, a pigeon-shooter or two, and quantities of people one cannot know.’

‘There will be heaps of people who know you,’ said Geraldine, almost with a groan; ‘at least, if you deign to allow them the entrée of La Jacquemerille. If I might presume to advise, the place is all to itself, they cannot come if you do not invite them. It is as nearly simple nature here as a mondaine and an élégante like you can ever bring herself to go. You have the sea at your feet and the mountains at your back; you can have absolute repose and leisure unless you wilfully bring a horde of men and women from Nice and Monaco. You are so clever; you might make endless sketches. If I were you, I should make it the occasion to get away from the world a little; if the world you must have, I should take it in the Avenue Josephine instead of at La Jacquemerille.’

The Princess laughed languidly, and looked at her cigarette.

‘You want a solitude à deux, I daresay! But you see there are Platon and Wilkes against that, not to mention my own inclinations.’

‘Pray, be serious.’

‘Why? When one is in the mood to be serious, one does not take a nondescript toy within five miles of Nice. I daresay you are right; a quiet life for a little while would be very wholesome, it would certainly be a novelty, but it would be beyond me. I am not a stupid woman, I am not a silly woman certainly; no, I am quite convinced I have a brain, though as for a soul, I don’t know, and I am afraid I don’t very much care. A brain, however, I have; Wilkes is even unkind enough to call me learned. But still, my dear Ralph, I am, as you observed, that much-abused animal, a mondaine. When once we belong to the world can we ever get rid of the world? Jamais! au grand jamais! If we try to drink spring water, we put it somehow or other in a liqueur glass. If we smell at a hedge-rose, somehow or other Piver has got in it before us, and given it the scent of a sachet.’

‘You are very witty, but——’

‘I don’t care in the least for “buts,” and I have no pretensions to wit; I leave wit and whist to the dowagers. No; when we are once of the world worldly, we never get rid of the world again. It is our old man of the sea pickaback with us for ever? Who can lead a meditative life that dines twice a day, as we all practically do, and eats of twenty services? When we prattle about nature, and quote Matthew Arnold, we are as artificial as the ribboned shepherdesses of Trianon; and what we call our high art is only just another sort of jargon. Suppose I followed your recipe and tried living quietly here, which means asking nobody to dinner, what would happen? Wilkes would go away, Platon would sulk or do worse, and you and I should yawn in each other’s faces. It is not that I have no brain, I have even a soul—if anybody has—but I began the other way, you know. It is like taking chloral; if once you do it you cannot leave off. Society is entirely like chloral; it gives you pleasant titillations at first and just the same morne depression afterwards, and yet you cannot do without it.’

‘I hope you do without chloral; wait another twenty years at any rate before you poison yourself.’

‘Twenty years! I wonder what we shall be like by then? I daresay I shall be an incurable hypochondriac, and you will have several tall boys at Eton. Perhaps your son will be falling in love with my daughter, and you and I shall be quarrelling about the settlements.’

‘Nadine!’

He drew his chair very near indeed, and looked straight into her eyes. The Princess looked up at the blue sky, serenely indifferent.

‘That is all nonsense, you know,’ she said, with a little affected asperity, but she smiled even if she felt more inclined to yawn. At that moment there issued from one of the many glass doors of the nondescript house her husband, Platon Nicholaivitch Napraxine.

‘My dear Ralph, I am very glad to see you,’ he said cordially, in the tongue of the boulevards, which every gently born Russian has taken as his own. ‘You came round in your “tub,” as you call her? You have found the Princess dissatisfied with the house? She is always dissatisfied with everything, alas! The house is well enough; the bathrooms are small, and there is no billiard-room; but otherwise I see no defect. Breakfast is waiting and Lady Brancepeth also. Will you come?’

His wife rose languidly, and taking the arm of Lord Geraldine, drew her skirts of India muslin, Flemish lace, and primrose satin, over the marble pavement of the terrace to the house. Prince Napraxine stood a moment with his cigar in his mouth, looking south and east over the sparkling sea, then, with his hands in his pockets, sauntered also towards the house.

He was a tall, loosely-built man, with an ugly and frankly Kalmuck face, redeemed by an expression of extreme good humour; he was about thirty years of age, and had the air of a person who had always done what he chose, and had always been obeyed when he spoke; but this air changed curiously whenever he looked at his wife; he had then the timid and almost supplicating expression of a big dog, anxious to please, but afraid to offend.

‘Let us go and eat Milo’s red mullets,’ she said now.

‘Milo? Is that the cook? Can he do a bouillabaisse, I wonder?’ he replied.

Their chef had been taken ill, as the train had touched Bordighera, and their agent had hastily supplied his place so far as it is ever possible to supply that of a great and almost perfect creature experienced in all the peculiarities and caprices in taste of those to whom his art is consecrated.

The Princess took no notice of her lord’s blunder; indeed, she seldom answered his remarks at any time; she drew her primrose satin and soft muslin over the sill of the French window, and seated herself at an oval table, gay with fine china, with flowers and fruit, and with a Venice point lace border to its table cloth, which was strewn with Parma violets and the petals of orange-blossoms. She had Geraldine on her right hand and her back to the light. She had an ermine bag holding a silver globe of warm water for her feet, and a chair that was the perfection of ease. The dining-room was small, but very pretty, with game and autumn flowers painted on its panels, and shutters, with hangings of olive velvet and cornices of dead gold, and on the ceiling a hunting scene of Fontainebleau à la Henri IV.

She began to think seriously that after all La Jacquemerille would do very well for the winter. It was utterly absurd, to be sure, outside, but it was comfortable within; and, indeed, had considerable taste displayed in it, the American having wisely mistrusted his own tendencies and left the whole arrangement to French artists, who had robbed him ruthlessly, but who had made each of his apartments as perfect in its way as a Karl Theodor plate.

‘I think I shall buy it,’ said the Princess to her companions; indifferent to her own inconsistencies.

‘Wait a little,’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘Don’t rush from hatred to adoration. There may be all sorts of things the matter with the drains. The calorifères may be wrong. The cellars may be damp. The windows may rattle. The kitchens may be too far or too near. At the end of the winter you will know all its defects and all its virtues. Houses are like friendships, there is hardly one in a thousand worth a long lease.’

‘Wilkes is always cynical,’ said her brother.

‘And nobody is a stauncher friend,’ said the Princess. ‘Why will she make herself out a cynic?’

‘A cynic? Because I am prudent?’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘If you sigh all the winter because the house is not yours you will enjoy it. If you buy it you will discover that it is uninhabitable at once.’

‘Nadine is never long pleased,’ said her husband.

‘What does Matthew Arnold say?’ answered the Princess, ‘that the poet is never happy, because in nature he wants the world, and in the world he longs for nature. Now, I am not a poet, but still I am a little like that. What you are pleased to call my discontent is a certain restless sensation that our life—which we think the only life—is a very ridiculous one; and yet I am quite incapable of leading any other—for more than a week. I remember, Geraldine, that you remarked once that it was this fool of a world which makes fools of us all. There was a profound truth in the not very elegant speech.’

‘I don’t remember saying it; but it is certainly true. We grow up in the world as a Chinese child grows up in the jar which is to make a dwarf of him. The jar checks our development malgré nous. We cannot be giants, if we would.’

‘I am sure it would not suit you to be a giant, Ralph,’ said his sister. ‘You would never like to release distressed damsels and slay disagreeable dragons. The uttermost you would ever do to the very biggest dragon would be to turn an epigram on his odd appearance. Giants are always very busy people, and you are so lazy——’

‘That is the fault of the jar,’ said Geraldine.

‘Some people break the jar and get out of it,’ said his sister.

‘No, nobody does,’ said the Princess Napraxine. ‘You mistake there, Wilkes. The world is with us always, and we cannot get rid of it.’

The frank eyes of Geraldine conveyed to her eloquently his conviction that the discontent she spoke of was solely due to her determined banishment of one sentiment out of her life. She gave him an enigmatical little smile of comprehension and disbelief combined, and continued to unroll her philosophies—or what did duty as such.

‘Do you not know the kind of feeling I mean? When we are among the orchids in the conservatories we want to go and gather damp primroses. Do you not remember that queen who, when she heard the gipsies singing under her windows, all in a moment longed to go with them? There is something of the gipsy in everybody—in everybody who has a soul. The time comes when one is tired of the trumpery and folly of it all—the wicked expenditure, the dense selfishness and indifference, the people that call themselves leaders of good taste, and yet like foie gras and the Concours hippique and Kümmel and Londrès, and the atmosphere of Paris theatres.’

‘Interesting, but discursive,’ murmured Lady Brancepeth. ‘Primroses—gipsies—a soul—I do not see the connection.’

‘You know what I mean,’ said her hostess, who always expected to be understood. ‘Our life is silly, it is tiresome, it is entirely selfish, it is even, in a way, monstrous; and yet we cannot live any other. We are dominated by the Frankenstein of pleasure which we have been pleased to create. When we wish to get away we cannot; we are like the queen at the palace windows—we would fain go to the greenwood, and the brook, and the fresh winds, but we cannot, because we are fastened in our gilded chair; there is always our household to shut the window and send the gipsies away. Do we ever get rid of the household, of the galerie, of the routine, of the infinite ennui? I am only twenty-three years old, as you all know, and I feel as if I had lived fifty years. Why? Because it is all over-full, tiresome, high-pressure; and the worst of it is that I could lead no other life if I tried!’

‘I am not sure of that,’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘Marie Antoinette would never have believed that she could mend clothes and darn stockings had not the days of darkness come. In those days it was just the dainty perfumed mignonnes like you, my dear, who were the bravest and handiest in bearing their troubles and earning their bread.’

‘One never knows till one is tried,’ said Princess Nadine. ‘If they would begin to guillotine us I daresay we should know how to behave; dynamite doesn’t do much for us. When one goes into the air without warning in little bits, in company with the plaster of the ceiling, or the skin of the carriage horses, or the stuffing of the railway carriage, there is not much room for heroism.’

‘I am not sure there is no heroism,’ said Geraldine. ‘The certainty of the guillotine must have been much easier to bear than the uncertainty in which you all dwell in Russia—the perpetual spectre always behind your chairs, beside your pillows, under the roses in your gardens——’

‘Oh, my dear Geraldine, is not death with us always everywhere? May we not kill ourselves every moment we walk downstairs, or eat a mullet like this, or start on a journey, or read a book by a night-lamp? You all wonder how Russians can exist with assassination always keeping step with them, but in reality is it so much worse than the way in which all humanity loves and laughs, and toils and moils, and makes leases for ninety-nine years, and contracts foreign loans for payment in a century, with death hanging over the whole thing ready to swoop down at any minute? If the world realised it of course it would go mad en masse, but it doesn’t realise it though hundreds of people die every second.’

‘Did Nadine ever tell you what she did last year?’ said Prince Napraxine. ‘She saw by chance a queer-looking can which had been placed by some of those miscreants in a niche of the garden wall of our house in Petersburg; the thing looked suspicious to her, and it had a coil of tubing attached to it. She took the whole affair up and dropped it into the fountain. She forgot to mention it till the next morning. Then when we fished it out, and the chemists reported on it, it appeared that the can was really full of nitro-glycerine as she had fancied. I think that was quite as courageous as going to the guillotine.’

‘Oh, no, my dear Platon!’ said his wife, with some annoyance. ‘Nothing you have no time to think about is really courageous. The can was suspicious and the children were playing near it, so I thought the fountain was the safest place; it might have been only milk, you know. Pray do not let us attempt to compete with those people of ‘89. We shall fail dismally.’

Geraldine looked up with a startled apprehension in his eyes.

‘Good heavens, do you mean it? Has she actually been—been—in such awful danger as that, and never told me?’

‘We were all in the same danger,’ said Prince Napraxine, a little drily; ‘but the Princess alone had the beau rôle out of it.’

‘Who put the can there?’

‘Oh, how should I know. The police never traced it. I do not suppose it was any special design against us as individuals; only as items of a detested whole. And two of the Grand Dukes were coming to breakfast with us that day.’

‘What a fuss about an ugly little tin can!’ said his wife. ‘The really courageous person must have been the person who brought it there; misguided, perhaps, but certainly courageous. To drive through a city in a droschky embracing certain annihilation, in the form of a little tin pot held on your knee, is a combination of absolute awfulness and grotesque bathos, which must try all one’s nerves without any compensating sense of grandeur in it. A jolt of the wheel over a stone and away you fly into the air, a blurred nothing in a stream of blood and dust! No; I respect the Nihilists when I think of all they risk for a purely abstract idea without any sort of personal hope or triumph.’

‘They have hatred,’ said Lady Brancepeth; ‘I think you forget what an invigorating, self-sustaining, all-compensating sentiment that is. Its ecstasy is its own reward. You underrate, too, the immense fascination of the power to destroy; on se grise with that sense of holding the annihilation of a whole community in their hands. What made the Roman Emperors mad,—the unlimited power of destruction,—now intoxicates the mechanic or the clerk who has the task of planting a can of nitro-glycerine. When statesmen, and even philosophers, theorise about human nature and all its disorders, they never give weight enough to the tremendous attraction which pure destruction alone exercises over so many minds.’

‘But they have love, too; love of the poor and of a lofty ideal,’ said the Princess. ‘Myself, I forgive their little tin cans, though they are extremely unpleasant, when I think of their impersonal devotion. All I wish is, that their warfare was not conducted by tin cans; the thing has a ludicrous, comical, vulgar side; death dropped in a little box labelled "glass, with care"! There is no dignity in it, no grace. Pallida Mors should not crouch under a cab-cushion!’

‘How can you make a jest——’ began Prince Napraxine. She interrupted him:

‘I am not in the least jesting, I am entirely in earnest. I do not like being made war on by chemists; I do not like annihilation left in a paper parcel; it makes one feel absurd, fate seems trifling with one. A Jacquerie hewing at one with their scythes one would know what to do with, but who can extract any Sophoclean tragedy from a Thanatus that looks exactly like a box of sardines or a pot of foie gras? It is not the war that I object to, it is the form it takes; and our great, grim, ghostly Russia should evolve out of her soul of ice something much more in consonance with her. Beside the burning of Moscow, the little tin cans and the burrowing like moles underground are commonplace and a little vulgar. Russia is so awful in herself. One thinks of the frozen world of the Inferno, and Dante and Virgil walking in the spectral silence; and then, after all, in hard fact there is nothing but the police, and the drunken moujik, and the man who carries his nitro-glycerine as a baker’s boy carries his rolls of bread! It is bathos.’

‘One never knows what you mean, Nadine,’ murmured her husband. ‘If you talk so at Petersburg they will think you are a Nihilist at heart.’

‘I imagine half the noblesse are,’ said the Princess. ‘The noblesse have always dug their own graves before all revolutions everywhere. They call it “going with the times.” They did it in France, they are now doing it in England, they are doing it (more secretly) in Russia. No one should forsake their order; it is a kind of desertion, like that of a soldier who runs away before the enemy. That is why I like the party obedience of your country, Wilkes; it is entirely unintelligent and profoundly immoral; to a generally intellectual nation it would be impossible, but it is loyal. I think when one has to choose between a crime and a disloyalty one must take the crime as the lesser evil of the two.’

‘Voting for party is a crime very often,’ said Geraldine. ‘It is one of the many things as to which I have never made up my mind. Ought one to sacrifice the country to what one believes a bad measure for the sheer sake of keeping one’s party in office? Surely not.’

‘You solve your doubts by having no party, and never going into the Lords.’

‘At least, I can do no mischief.’

‘Are you certain of that?’ said his sister. ‘I think you place voting for party on too low a plane. If we believe, generally, that one party—say it is Conservative, say it is Liberal—is necessary to the preservation or the progress of the nation, then I think we are bound to do our best to keep it at the helm of the vessel of the nation, even if in certain minor matters we are not always in accord with the course it takes.’

‘Admirably reasoned; but are not politicians always as great sophists as priests?’

‘Sophists! always that cruel charge,’ said a mellow and manly voice, as there entered the dining-room a person of handsome and stately presence, in a picturesque costume, with knee breeches and buckled shoes, whom the servant announced as Monsignore Melville. He was welcomed by all with cordiality and delight, and the Princess bade him draw his chair beside her, though he alleged that he had breakfasted.

‘I came to see if you had arrived,’ he said, as he seated himself. ‘Princess, I hope La Jacquemerille is fortunate enough to please you?’

‘I have been abusing it; it is a very ridiculous house, but it grows upon one; and if you will come often enough, Monsignore—— No, I never make compliments. You know you are a delightful companion, and of how many people can one say that?’

Monsignore Melville bowed low.

‘You are too enchantingly kind. But all are not so kind. Lord Geraldine was accusing priests of sophism. What was he saying?’

‘He was saying that politicians are the sophists, and Wilkes the head of them.’

‘Because I defended "voting straight,"’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘Is it not the very root and essence of English constitutional life? Monsignore Melville, who is an Englishman, will, I am sure, say so.’

‘To serve the Church is only a superior kind of voting with party,’ said Geraldine.

‘Do not be profane, Ralph,’ said his sister. ‘It does not suit you. You were created with a reverential nature, and you have endeavoured to ruin it, as most men always do try to destroy what is best in them. Monsignore, answer me, is it not the highest morality to vote straight?’

‘That is a very unlimited laudation, Lady Brancepeth,’ returned Melville, with a charming smile. ‘I should be scarcely prepared to go so far, though I am aware that there is no salvation outside such morality in the political creed of our country.’

‘Ecclesiastics have no country, my dear Monsignore,’ said the Princess Napraxine, ‘except a heavenly one. What a comfort that must be! Platon is always being worried to return to the mater patria, and his conscience is so peculiarly constituted that it will never allow him to admit how intensely he hates it. As if life were not tiresome enough in itself, without everyone being burdened with the obligation to like, or pretend that they like, their country, their relatives, their children, and their church!——.’

Napraxine looked distressed:

‘You have liked Russia, too, sometimes,’ he said wistfully; ‘and poor little Sachs and Mitz!’

His wife cast upon him a glance of sovereign disdain: ‘There are only two things I like in Russia, they are the steppes and the wolves: that limitless expanse, stretching away to the dim grey sky on every side, and the sight of a pack of the gaunt grey beasts on the snow as one’s sledge flies by; those two things give one a sensation which one does not get elsewhere. But it is monotonous, it soon ceases to move one; the wolves never attack, and the great, awful, white plain never leads to anything better than the posting-house, the samavàr, and the vodki, and the group of drunken coachmen.’

‘The human interest, in a word,’ suggested Melville.

Madame Napraxine smiled:

‘Ah! my dear Monsignore, the human interest is quite as dull as the steppe and quite as ravenous as the wolf! How delightful it must be to be a priest to see all that raw material through rose-glasses!’

‘May not the interest be in subduing the wolf?’ murmured Melville. ‘And even the steppe, under the fostering touch of May dews and June sunlight, will put forth blossoms. Is there no allegory there that Madame Napraxine will deign to accept?’

‘You always say pretty things, in the pulpit or out of it,’ she replied; ‘but you cannot lend me your rose-glasses to see them through, so I fear they do not convince me. The astronomers who are now busy seeing canals in the planet Mars, would see nothing if they had not their glasses; no more would you. You see a soul in a drunken dvornik; that is quite as astonishing, and probably quite as imaginary, as the network of canals in Mars. Will you really eat nothing, Monsignore? Let us go out and sit under that awning there; a bath of sunshine always does one good, and you need not grudge yourself a half hour of leisure. I have no doubt you have been passing the forenoon somewhere with cholera or typhus or some other plague of this sanitary century. You know, Geraldine, that is Monsignore’s way. He is S. Francis Xavier all the morning, and then turns himself inside out and becomes an Abbé galant for society.’

‘I have not been to anything typhoid or choleraic this morning, or I should not be here to endanger your loveliness, Princess,’ answered Melville. ‘I have been where Poverty is—alas! where is she not?—and in our day those who wed with her regard it as a forced marriage, wholly joyless; and we cannot persuade them that there may be graciousness where she dwells if only cleanliness and content will sit down with her.’

‘Oh, Monsignore, it is not only poverty that scares content, I can assure you,’ said Madame Napraxine.

‘If you be not content, who should be?’ murmured Melville. ‘With every possible gift of nature, culture, fate, and fortune showered upon you, why will you always persuade yourself, Princess, that your doubled rose-leaf mars everything? I do not believe the rose-leaf even exists!’

‘I am not sure that it does, either,’ replied Madame Napraxine; ‘but I never remember to have felt contented in my life. Is content an intellectual quality? I doubt it. Perhaps it is a virtue; I dislike virtues.’

Melville was a sincerely pious Churchman, but even he did not dare to take up the cudgels in honour of poor virtue before this merciless speaker. He was satisfied with replying that content was not a quality which the tendencies of the waning nineteenth century were likely to foster.

‘No!’ said the Princess Napraxine. ‘The note of our time is restlessness, and its chief attainment the increase of insanity.’

‘If it did not sound too much like moralising, I should say that there was never any time in which there was so much self-indulgence and so little real rest,’ said Melville, who had the sensitive fear of a man of the world of appearing to obtrude his own convictions, and to preach out of season and out of church.

‘People require to have their brains and their consciences very clear and very calm to enjoy rest. It is the reward which nature reserves for her good children,’ said Lady Brancepeth.

‘I must be very good, then,’ said Madame Napraxine with her little mysterious smile, ‘for I rest absolutely. To know how to do nothing is a great secret of health and of comfort; but you must not wait till you are fatigued to do nothing, or you cannot enjoy it.’

‘And I suppose you must occasionally be deaf to duty knocking at the door?’

‘Duty! She should have her proper moments of audience, like the steward, the piqueur, the secretary, and other necessary and disagreeable people; that is to say, if she really exist. Monsignore Melville evidently is in the habit of listening to her.’

‘I may say with Josef II., "C’est mon métier à moi,"’ said Melville, with good humour. ‘But believe me, Princess, it is not duty which prevents repose; it is far more often worry, the hateful familiar of all modern life. Worry takes a million forms; very often it is dressed up as pleasure, and perhaps in that shape is more distressing than in any other.’

‘Yes, the age has invented nothing that does not result in worry. Only look at the torture to diplomatists from the telegrams,’ replied Madame Napraxine, while she tendered him a cigar. ‘In other years an ambassador had some pleasure in disentangling a delicate and intricate embroglio, some chance of making a great name by his skill in negotiation. An able man was let alone to mingle his suaviter and his fortiter, his honey and his aloes, as he thought fit; his knowledge of the country to which he was accredited was trusted to and appreciated; nowadays, telegrams rain in on him with every hour; he is allowed no initiative, no independent action; he is dictated to and interfered with by his home government, and cypher messages torture him at every step. What is the consequence? That there is scarcely a diplomatist left in Europe—they are only delegates. Where there is one, he is incessantly controlled, hindered, and annoyed, and all his counsels are disregarded. Meanwhile the world’s only kind of peace is a permanent armed truce. But let us go into the garden.’

CHAPTER II.

When Nadège Fedorevna, Countess Platoff, known to all her friends by the petit nom of Nadine, had reached her sixteenth year she had the look of a hothouse gardenia, so white was her skin and so spiritual her aspect, whilst her slender form had all the grace of a flower balancing itself on a fragile stalk in a south wind. That ethereality, that exquisite delicacy, as of something far too fair and evanescent for man’s rude touch, fascinated into a timid and adoring passion a heavily-built and clumsy cuirassier of the Imperial Guard, who was also one of the greatest nobles written in the Velvet Book of Russia—Platon Nicholaivitch, head of the mighty family of Napraxine. He was eight-and-twenty years old, immeasurably rich, popular with his sovereign, a good soldier, and an exceedingly amiable man. He laid his heart and everything he possessed at the feet of this exquisite and disdainful child when he saw her at her father’s embassy in Vienna one fateful April day.

She refused him without a moment of doubt; but he was persevering, greatly enamoured, and had both her parents upon his side. She was neither weak, nor very obedient; yet in time she allowed herself to be persuaded that not to accept such an alliance would be to do something supremely ridiculous. She resisted stubbornly for a while; but she was inquisitive, independent, and a little heartless.

Her mother, a woman of the world, full of tact and of wisdom, answered her objection that the Prince Napraxine was stupid, had a Kalmuck face, and was inclined to be corpulent—in a word, displeased her taste in every way—by frankly admitting these objections to be incontestable facts, but added, with persuasive equanimity, ‘All you say is quite true, my child, but that sort of details does not matter, I assure you, in a question of the kind we are discussing. It would matter terribly to him if you were stupid or ugly, or inclined to be fat; but in a man—in a husband—in three months’ time you will not even observe it. Indeed, in a fortnight you will be so used to him that you will not think whether he is handsome or ugly. Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty, but kind to ugliness. As for being inclined to corpulence, he is very tall, he will carry it off very well; and as to gambling, he will never get to the bottom of his salt mines and ruby mines: that is the chief question. And after all, my dear Nadine, a man who will never interfere with you and never quarrel with you is a pearl seldom found amongst the husks; and when the pearl is set in gold—— I would not for worlds persuade you, my dear, to marry merely for certain worldly considerations, such as the great place and the great wealth of Platon Nicholaivitch; but I would earnestly advise you to marry early and to marry for peace, and when peace and a colossal fortune are to be found united, it seems to me a great mistake to throw them both away. Somebody else will take them. I suppose you dream of love as all young girls do; but——’

‘Not at all; I know this is only a question of marriage,’ said Nadine, with that terrible sarcasm on her lovely young lips with which many things she had seen in her mother’s house had armed her for the battle of life whilst she was still but a child.

She did not think about love at all; she was not romantic; she already thought it vieux jeu; but she had a brain above the average, and she fancied that she should like the man to whom she was given to be something great in intellectual power, not merely in the sense of millions and of rank. But a girl of sixteen, born and bred in an embassy, reared in the most brilliant cities of the world, having seen the great panorama of society pass before her eyes from her babyhood, is, however innocent in other ways, not unsophisticated enough to ignore the vast advantages of such a position and such wealth as the Prince Napraxine offered to her. Besides, her father wished passionately for the acceptance of Napraxine; he himself was deeply in debt, and knew that his constitution had the germs of a mortal disease.

‘V’là, ma petite,’ he said to her gravely one morning, ‘je suis criblé de dettes: je peux mourir demain. C’est mieux que tu le prennes—— enfin, c’est un assez bon garçon.’

It was not an enthusiastic eulogy of his desired son-in-law, but he never spoke enthusiastically, and his child knew very well that under the negligent slight phrases there ran a keen and vivid desire, perhaps even a carking and unacknowledged care. By the end of that evening she had allowed herself to be persuaded, and in three months’ time was married to Prince Napraxine, not knowing in the least what marriage was, but only regarding it as an entry into the world with unlimited jewels and the power of going to any theatres she chose. When she did know what it was, it filled her with an inexpressible disgust and melancholy. She was very young, and her temperament was composed of that mingled hauteur and spirituality in which the senses sleep silent long, sometimes for ever.

She bore two sons in the first two years of her marriage, and then considered herself free from further obligations to provide heirs for the vast Napraxine properties. Her husband had been ardently but timidly in love; when she intimated to him that their union should be restricted to going to Courts together and being seen in the same houses at discreet intervals, he suffered in his affections as well as in his pride, but he did not dare to rebel.

This lovely young woman, who was like a gardenia or a narcissus, who was not nineteen, and declared that all the caresses and obligations of love were odious to her, could strike terror and submission into the soul of the big Platon Napraxine, who stood six feet three inches, and had been no unheroic soldier in the frosty Caucasus and on the banks of Euphrates and Indus. She was unusually clever, clever by nature and culture, by intellect and insight, keenly, delicately clever, with both aptitude and appetite for learning and scholarship; and within the first twenty-four hours of her marriage, she had taken his measurement, moral and mental, with merciless accuracy, and had decided to herself that she would never do but what she chose. He was a big dog, a bon enfant, a good-natured, good-tempered cipher, but he was a great bore. And she put him aside out of her life altogether, except inasmuch as it was absolutely necessary to sit sometimes at the same table with him, and have his orders blaze beside her diamonds at State balls; and the friends of the Prince Napraxine envied her, of all her valuable possessions, none so much as that of her husband, whose revenues were inexhaustible, and whose good-nature and patience were equally endless.

Looking back to her seventeenth year she always admitted that her mother had judged rightly.

‘Poor Platon!’ she would say to herself sometimes when she thought so, with a little passing flicker of something like compunction. What had she given him in return for his great name, his enormous wealth, his magnificent gifts of all kinds, his honest devotion, and his infinite docility? Being very honest, when in self-communion of this sort, she was obliged to confess to herself—nothing. Her own money was all settled on herself; their rank had been quite equal; there were hundreds as pretty as herself, and she could not now recollect that in six years of marriage she had given him one affectionate word.

‘The fault is not ours;’ she would say, ‘it is the institution that is so stupid. People do not know how else to manage about property, and so they invented the marriage state. But it is an altogether illogical idea, binding down two strangers side by side for ever, and it cannot be said to work well. It keeps property together, that is all; so I suppose it is good for the world; but certainly individuals suffer for it more than perhaps property is worth.’

Her two little boys were always left in the Krimea with the mother of Napraxine; they were much better there, she thought, growing up robust and healthy like two young bear cubs (which, to her eyes, they much resembled) in the pure breezes from the Black Sea. When she did see them she was always amiable to them, even thought she felt fond of them, as she did of the steppes and the wolves; but like the steppes and the wolves they were certainly most interesting in theory and at a good long distance. They were too like their father to be welcome to her. ‘They have the Tartar face, and they will be just as big and just as stupid,’ she thought, whenever she saw them.

When Melville, who had been long intimate with her family, told her, as he very often did, that it was her duty to have the children near her, and to interest herself in their education, she always replied: ‘They are exactly like Platon; nothing I could do would make them different. They are perfectly well cared for by his mother, and brought up much better than I could do it. I was expected to give him an heir: I have given him two heirs. I do not see that anything more is required of me.’

And when Melville would fain have insisted on the usual arguments as to the obligations of maternity and education, she invariably interrupted him, and once said at full length, ‘If the children were mine only and not Platon’s, I could make something of them. But they are formed in his image; exceedingly good, entirely uninteresting. They will be Princes Napraxine, and so the world will adore them, though they be as stupid as mules and as ugly as hedgehogs. They do not interest me. Oh, you are shocked! Even you, the most original of Churchmen, cannot get over your prejudices. Believe me, la voix de la Nature does not speak to everybody. It does not say anything at all to me.’

‘I will be an honest woman; it is much more chic,’ she had said to herself in the first year of her marriage in the height of a Paris winter, as she had looked around her on society, with her brilliant indolent eyes, which saw so clearly and so far, and surveyed and appraised her contemporaries.

It would be eccentric, but distinguished. To her delicate, satirical, fastidious taste, there was a sort of vulgarity in being compromised. She did not go farther than that, or higher than that. The thing was common, was low; that was quite enough against it. Something that was half spirituality, half hauteur, made the decision easy to her. A certain chillness of temper aiding, her resolve had been kept. She had been as loyal a wife to Prince Napraxine as though she had loved him. Men did not obtain any hold on her. She flirted desperately sometimes, amused herself always, but that was all. When they tried to pass from courtiers into lovers, they found a barrier, impalpable but impassable, compounded of her indifference and her raillery, ever set between her and them. She fancied that it would be quite intolerable to her for any living being to believe himself necessary to her happiness; besides, she did not much believe in happiness. The world was pleasant enough; like a well-cushioned saloon carriage on a well-ordered line of rail; nothing more. You travelled onward, malgré vous, and you slept comfortably, and your ultimate destination you could not avoid; but if you escaped any great disaster by the way, and if nobody woke you with a shock, it was all you wanted. She did not believe in the possibility of any great beatitude coming to you on that very monotonous route.

She had that admirable tact coupled with that refined but unsparing insolence which daunts the world in general to silence and respect. The greatest blagueur on the Boulevards never dared to hint at a weakness or a concession on the part of the Princess Napraxine. And women, though they envied her bitterly, reviled her unsparingly, and shivered under the sting of her delicate impertinence or her pregnant epigram, yet were perfectly conscious that she had never shared their follies. Passion had as yet no place in her complex and delicate organism. She could not, or would not, understand why passion should not be content to amuse and worship her, just as a furnace fire may only bake a porcelain cup or call to life a gardenia blossom.

Now and then this refusal of hers to comprehend what she inspired ended in dire tragedy. Now and then some one killed himself because she had laughed. Now and then two people were silly enough to fight a duel about a glove she had dropped, or the right to take her down the stairs at the opera. But this was always lamentable and foolish in her sight; only its consequences, though she regretted them, did not alter her. If she had loved her husband her victims would have been less mortified; but they all knew very well that Platon Napraxine was no more to her than one of the chairs in her drawing-room. If she had even loved the world she lived in, her coldness would have been more intelligible; but she did not. Her magnificent jewels, her marvellous toilettes, her many beautiful houses, her power of gratifying any whim as it formed itself, the way people looked after her postillions in their blue velvet jackets, the perpetual fête of which society was made up for her, all diverted her but moderately. She was mondaine to the tips of her fingers, but not enthusiastically so, only so from habit—as she wore silk stockings or had rose-water in her bath.

‘I have seen the whole thing since I was sixteen; how can it entertain me much?’ she said to those who marvelled at her indifference. When it was objected to her that there were many who had seen it from sixteen to sixty, and yet thought nothing else worth seeing, she shrugged her shoulders. On the whole she understood the sect of the Skoptzi better; they had an ideal. What ideal had her world?

She kept her exquisite tint and her lovely eyes unspoiled by the endless late hours and the incessant excitations in which women of the monde où l’on s’amuse lose their youth in a year or two. She ate very simply, drank little but water, rode or drove no matter what weather, refused forty-nine out of fifty of all the invitations she received, seldom or never made any house visits, and spent many hours in perfect repose.

‘Why should you go and stay in other people’s houses?’ she always said to her English friends, in whom this mania is more rampant than amongst any other nationality. ‘Another person’s house is hardly better than an hotel; indeed, very often it is worse. If you don’t like the dinner-hour, you cannot change it; if you are given slow horses, you cannot complain; if you dislike your rooms, you cannot alter them; if you think the chef a bad one, you cannot say so; if you find all the house party bore you, you cannot get rid of them. You must pretend to eat all day long; you must pretend to feel amiable from noon to midnight; you must have all kinds of plans made for you, and submit to them; you can never read but in your own room, and, generally speaking, there is nothing in the library—if it be an English library—except Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Mr. Darwin. I cannot imagine how any reasonable being subjects herself to such a martyrdom only because somebody else finds their country place dull without people.’

She had also ingeniously established a reputation for very delicate health, which she found beyond anything useful to spare her from being bored, and to excuse her absence from any gathering which did not specially attract her.

‘I have a santé de fer,’ she said once to a friend, ‘but happily I look very fragile, and physicians, if they think you wish it, will always promise you angina pectoris or tubercles on your lungs. I have an enchanting doctor in Paris—you know him, de Thiviers—he is very famous; he will shake his head over me as if I were doomed to die in ten minutes, and he frightens Platon out of his wits—he gets a great many rouleaux at the end of the season—and he and I look as grave as the two augurs, though, like the augurs, we are both longing to laugh. It is so useful to be thought very delicate, you have an excuse for everything. If at the last moment you don’t wish to go anywhere, nobody can say anything if it be your health that gives way. They would never forgive me my continual absence from the Court at Petersburg, and I certainly should not receive my perpetual passport, if they did not sincerely believe in the tubercles which de Thiviers has so obligingly found for me. Do go to de Thiviers if you are quite well and want to be ill; he understands all that sort of thing so well, and he never betrays you. He has convinced Platon that I am poitrinaire.’

And between her reputation for a dangerous disease in her system, and her really intelligent care of her health, she had the paths of life made very smooth to her, and was infinitely freer from any genuine indisposition than might have been expected from the fragility of her aspect, and her Russian love of hot rooms and yellow tea. Still, as a great comedian will so identify himself with his part that he at times believes himself the thing which he represents, she did at times almost persuade herself, as she completely persuaded others, that she had some great constitutional delicacy to contend with, and she would play at medicine with little needles for morphia, or a few glasses of water at Baden-Baden or Ems, as she would play now and then at baccarat or roulette in her drawing-rooms.

‘Nothing is so useful,’ she would say in moments of confidence. ‘Look at the quantity of weariness that there is in the world from which no other possible plan will set you free. Palace dinners, diplomatic banquets, great marriages, country house visits, self-invited princes, imperial coronations, royal baptisms,—you cannot refuse them; the laws of society forbid; but if you are known to be in delicate health, no one can be offended if, at the last moment, quite unexpectedly, you get a chill and must not stir out of your own room. When there is some unutterable social tedium looming on the horizon, I always telegraph for de Thiviers, and he is always equal to the occasion.’

In this, as in other matters, she arranged her life to her own satisfaction, without any kind of misgiving that this self-absorption was egotistical. Everything had combined to make her an egotist. An only child, adored by her father, admired and a little feared by her mother, whose most intimate secrets she had divined with all the keen intuition of her natural intelligence; surrounded from her earliest years by a court of dependents and servants who seemed only to live to minister to her caprices, flattered from her babyhood by all her father’s friends, secretaries, and attachés, she had imbibed selfishness as inevitably as a young willow sucks in the moisture from the stream by which it grows. There was nothing in a loveless marriage and in the clumsy and irritating devotion of a man who was ardently in love with her, whilst she only viewed him with contempt and dislike, to counteract the influences of her earlier years. The whole world conspired to induce the Princess Napraxine to live only for herself.

That she occasionally had moments of supreme generosity, and a capacity seldom or never called out for heroic courage, did not alter the main fact that her life was essentially selfish. She never did anything that she did not wish to do; the great want in her existence, to herself, was that she so very seldom felt any wish for anything. When she did, she gratified it without any scruple or hesitation.

Her mind was too clear and logical for any creed to obtain any hold upon her; nominally, of course, she was of the Greek Church, and had too much good taste to create any scandal by openly separating herself from it; but her intelligence, as critical and as subtle as Voltaire’s or Bolingbroke’s, would no more have submitted to the bondage of religious superstition and tradition than she would have clothed her graceful person in one of the ‘Décrochez-moi-ça’ that hung in the windows of Paris clothes-shops. In morality, also, she did not much believe; she read Stuart Mill’s plea for the utility of virtue once, and smiled as she closed the book with a mental verdict of ‘non-proven.’

Pride (that pride which has been happily defined by a French writer as pas d’orgueil, mais de la fierté), and the delicacy of her taste, with her profound indifference, supplied the place in her of moral laws, and probably acted on her much more effectively than they would have done. Principle is but a palisade; temperament is a stone bastion.

‘Les honnêtes gens m’ennuient et les mauvaises gens me déplaisent,’ she was wont to say, with a frank confession of what many others have felt, and have not had the courage to say. She had no more rigidity of principle than any other person who has been reared in the midst of a witty, elegant, and corrupt society; but her perfect taste supplied the place of moral convictions, the grossness of vice offended her like a bad odour, or a staring colour; and everything loose or coarse seemed to her an affront to intelligence and to refinement.

Sometimes she almost envied the women who could plunge themselves into the hot springs of a passion, only it seemed to her vulgar; the same sort of vulgarity as swimming in public in a rose-coloured maillot. She could swim like an otter, but she never swam in public. The noisy and ungrateful pleasures which delight modern society seemed to her sheer imbecilities, whilst she would as soon have descended to an intrigue with her cook or her coachman as have made an amorous appointment in a private room at a café, or have mounted the stairs of a hired house to meet a Lovelace of the clubs. ‘Peut-on être plus bête!’ she would say, with supreme disdain, whenever she heard of the vulgarities which usually accompany Apate and Philotes in these the waning years of the nineteenth century. She quite understood the Parisienne in ‘Frou-frou’ who, tempted to make an assignation, awakes to a sense of its coarseness and commonness when she finds that the temple of love is upon the third floor in the Rue du Petit Hurleur, and that the wall-paper has five-and-twenty Poniatowskys jumping into the Elster repeated on every length of it.

‘In that sort of affair,’ she said once, ‘you must have either secrecy or a scandal; both to me seem in bad taste. And then, with the one you are at the mercy of your maid, and with the other you are at the mercy of the newspapers. To be sure,’ she added, ‘I cannot, perhaps, measure the force of the temptation, for I have never in my life seen any human being to meet whom I should have ever thought it worth while even to order out my coupé.’

Innumerable lives had done their uttermost to entwine themselves in hers and had only broken themselves helplessly on the rock of her supreme indifference, like so many ships upon icebergs. She was a charmeresse in the uttermost sense of that expressive word, but she was scarcely a coquette, though the most merciless coquetry might have done much less harm than she did. A coquette desires and strives to please; Nadine Napraxine fascinated other lives to hers without effort if without pity. She had one supreme end—to endeavour to amuse herself; and she had one unending appetite—that of the study of character. She so seldom succeeded in amusing herself that she came naturally to the conclusion that most characters contained no amusing elements.

‘Vous m’ennuyez!’ was her single word of explication to those whose homage she had permitted for a while only to send them adrift without a sign of compassion or contrition. To her the three words seemed entirely comprehensive. When some one more daring than the others had once ventured to remind her that he had not been quite so hateful to her only a brief while before, she had said, with some impatience, ‘Can one know that a book is dull unless one looks at a few pages? It is not one’s fault if it be ill-written. I cannot say why you all weary me, but if you do, it is not my fault either.’

When once they wearied her it was of no use for them by any ingenuity, subserviency, or despair, to attempt to regain her favour. Her path, like that of all great victors, was strewn with unregarded victims. Now and then her composure had been ruffled, when the fate of someone of these had roused the adverse comments of the world, and the issue of some duel or the fact of some suicide had had her name, by common consent, coupled with it. She disliked that kind of notoriety; sincerely disliked it with all the hauteur and disgust of a very proud and sensitive refinement; but it never made her change the tenor of her ways.

‘If you do not like du potin, would it not be better—to—to—not to give rise to it?’ Napraxine himself had once humbly ventured to suggest when she was excessively angered because the journals of the hour had ventured to introduce her name into their narratives of a duel ending in the death of the young Principe d’Ivrea, who had been very popular and beloved in French and Italian society.

‘Du potin!’ she had echoed. ‘Why cannot you say scandal? What sense is there in slang? Give rise to it? Ivrea was a nice boy, but irascible like all Italians, and intensely vain; the least word irritated him. He chose to provoke de Prangins because de Prangins teased him, and the old man has been too strong for the young one. It is a great pity! he had a pretty face and a pretty manner, but I have no more to do with his death than the gilt arrow on the top of the house. Myself, I would much rather he had killed de Prangins.’

Napraxine had preserved a reverential silence; he knew that there was another side to the story, but he did not venture to say so.

When the jealousies, feuds, and quarrels which it amused her to excite and foment arrived at any such tragical conclusion as this with which the Duc de Prangins had disembarrassed her salons of a youth who of late had grown too presuming, she was always entirely innocent of being the cause of it. ‘I always tell them to like each other,’ she would say placidly; but therein they did not obey her.

She valued her power of destruction as the only possible means of her own amusement. It reconciled her to herself when she was most disposed to be discontented. Her delicate lips smiled with ineffable disdain when she saw other women se tordant comme des folles, as she expressed it, in their effort to secure the admiration or retain the passions of men, while she, merely lifting the cloud of her black lashes in the sunshine by the lake, or sitting still as marble in the shadow of her box at the ‘Français,’ could anchor down by her for ever the thoughts, the desires, the regrets, the destinies of young and old, of friend and enemy, of stranger and familiar, merely by the passive magnetism of that charm which Nature had given her.

‘Marie Stuart,’ she said once when she closed Chastelard, ‘a sorceress! Pooh! They make much too much of her. She had a charm, I suppose, but she could not have known how to use it, or she would never have married either Darnley or Bothwell, and she would never have allowed herself to be beaten by Elizabeth—a grey-haired virgin and a maîtresse femme!’

All women seemed to her to have been very weak: Josephine humiliated at Malmaison; Marie Antoinette, on the tumbril of death; Heloise, in her cell of Paraclete; Lady Hamilton, dying of want in Calais; Lady Blessington, poor and miserable in Paris:—what was the use of ‘charm’ if it ended like that?

‘I shall reign as long as I live,’ she said to herself. ‘And if I live to eighty men will be still eager to hear me talk.’

CHAPTER III.

‘This room is stifling, it is so small; and yet there are horrible draughts in it. I dare say the ridiculous walls are not an inch thick,’ said the Princess Napraxine now, as she rose from the breakfast-table, and drew her delicate skirts, with their undulating waves and foam of lace, out through the glass doors and over the marble of the terrace to the sheltered nook in which she had been sitting before breakfast, where a square Smyrna carpet was placed under several cushioned lounging-chairs. It was only two o’clock, and the air was warm and full of brilliant sunshine.

‘It is all in dreadful taste,’ she said for the hundredth time. ‘This sort of mock-Syrian scenery, mixed up with châlets, villas, and hotels, has such a look of the stage. It seems made on purpose for maquillées beauties, dyed and pampered gamblers, and great ladies who are received nowhere else. Places have all a physiognomy, moral as well as physical. The Riviera must have been enchanting when there was only a mule-track as wide as a ribbon between the hills and the sea from Marseilles to Genoa, but now that the moral emanations of Monte Carlo and of the cinq heures at all the nondescript houses, and of the baccarat groups in the clubs which are not as exclusive as they might be, have spread all along the coast like miasma, the whole thing is only a décor de scène, the very gardens are masquerading as Egypt, as Damascus, as Palermo. It is all postiche.’

‘You are very cruel, madame,’ murmured Melville.

‘That is the only thing you can any of you find to reply when I say anything that is true!’ said the Princess, with triumph.

‘The de Vannes are your nearest neighbours,’ suggested her husband.

‘Did you mean that Cri-Cri is bien nature?’ she said, with her little low laugh. ‘I fear neither of them will contribute anything to redeem the character of the place for either maquillage or gambling——’

‘Why would you come to it?’ he asked, with all a man’s stupidity.

‘Why do people ever ask one why one does things?’ she interrupted, irritably. ‘One imagines one will like a thing; one gets it; and directly, of course, one does not like it. That is a kind of general law. Monsignore Melville will tell us, I suppose, that it is to prevent us attaching ourselves to the pleasures of this world; but as it also operates in preventing one’s attaching oneself to anybody, as well as anything, I do not know that the result is as admirable as he would imagine.’

‘I never said——’ began Melville.

‘Oh, no, but you would say if you were in the pulpit,’ she replied, before he could finish his sentence. ‘You would say that even ennui and satiety and depression have their uses if they lead the soul to heaven; but that is just what they do not do; they only lead to morphia, chloral, dyspepsia, and Karlsbad. It is quite impossible—it must be quite impossible, even for you, Monsignore—to consider Karlsbad as an antechamber to heaven!’

Melville tried to look shocked, but did not succeed well, as he was a little Rabelaisian and Montaignist at heart, and not intended by nature for a Churchman.

‘What are we going to do?’ said the Prince, as he stretched himself in his chair, and lighted another cigarette.

‘Stay where we are,’ suggested Geraldine, who desired nothing better, as a tête-à-tête was a favour never accorded to him twice in twenty-four hours.

‘Oh, not I, indeed!’ cried Napraxine, with as much alacrity as was possible beneath his heavy ‘envelope of flesh.’ ‘I shall go to Monte Carlo. I have told them to harness. If you like to come——’

At that moment a servant brought him a card. He read what was written in pencilled lines upon it; then raised his head with a pleased exclamation.

‘Je vous le donne en mille!’ he cried. ‘Nadine, who do you think is here?’

‘A goose with a diseased liver, or a hundred green oysters?’ said his wife, contemptuously. ‘I can imagine no lesser source for so much radiance.’

The Prince, regardless of sarcasm, or tempered to endurance of it by long habit, answered placidly:

‘No; it is Othmar.’

The face of Nadine Napraxine changed considerably; the most astute observer could not have decided whether annoyance or gratification was the most visible expression; her eyes lighted with a look different to the mild amusement with which she had greeted Geraldine.

‘Where can he have come from?’ continued her husband. ‘He was in Asia a little while ago. One is always so glad to see him. He is so unlike other people. It is only you, Nadine, who do not appreciate him.’

‘He is poseur,’ said she with languor. ‘But I do not know whether that is reason enough to keep him waiting at the gate?’

‘I forgot,’ said Napraxine. ‘There is no one less poseur, I assure you. Clever as you are, you sometimes mistake. Grégor, beg Count Othmar to join us here.’

The servant withdrew. Princess Nadine put a large peacock fan between her and the sun; she yawned a little.

‘Seven minutes for Grégor to send down to the gate, seven minutes for Othmar to come up from the gate, a minute and a half more for him to traverse the house; we have fifteen minutes and a half in which to vilify our coming friend, as modern hospitality binds us to do. Let us begin. We must be stupid indeed if we cannot kill anybody’s character in a quarter of an hour.’

‘There is no character to kill,’ began her husband.

‘Pardon me! No one can say he is characterless. He is a very marked character.’

‘That was not what I meant,’ said Napraxine. ‘I meant that no one could say otherwise than good of him. And if there were such a one, he should not say it before me.’

Nadine Napraxine let her eye rest on her husband with a peculiar expression, half pity, half derision, which might have given him plentiful food for reflection, had he been a man who ever reflected.

‘Poor Platon! He has all the antique virtues!’ she said softly. ‘He even thinks it necessary to defend his acquaintances behind their backs. Quel type admirable!’

‘Why do you like Othmar, Prince?’ said Geraldine, abruptly. ‘I detest him.’

‘Indeed?’ said Napraxine, in surprise. ‘You must be almost alone, then. What do you see to dislike?’

Geraldine glanced at his hostess, but she refused to accept the challenge of his regard. She was looking out to sea with a little dreamy amused smile.

‘I hate all financiers,’ said Geraldine, moodily and lamely. ‘La grande Juiverie is one gigantic nest of brigands; those men get everything, whilst we lose even our old acres.’

‘Perhaps that is your fault,’ said Prince Platon; ‘and Othmar, believe me, has nothing to do with the Juiverie; the Othmar are pure Croats; Croats loathe Hebrews.’

‘He is very fortunate, Prince, to have your admiration and your confidence,’ said Geraldine, with a sarcasm, lost on the pachydermatous placidity of his host.