Princess Napraxine
II.

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Princess Napraxine

BY

OUIDA

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. II.

London

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1884

[All rights reserved]

PRINCESS NAPRAXINE.

CHAPTER XIV.

When her husband and her guests came downstairs at one o’clock, they found the Princess Nadine looking her loveliest.

‘Oh, you lazy people!’ she cried to them. ‘Are you any the better for sleeping like that? Look at me. I have been swimming half an hour; I have dictated twenty letters; I have scolded the gardeners, and I have seen three boxes from Worth unpacked; it is only one o’clock, and I can already feel as good a conscience as Titus. I have already saved my day.’

‘I daresay you have only been doing mischief,’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘I should like to see the letters before I judge of the excellence of your actions.’

‘Anyone might see the letters; they are all orders, or invitations, or refusals of invitations; quite stupid, but very useful; epistolary omnibus horses driven by the secretary. When I had done with them, I had my half hour’s swim. What nonsense the doctors talk about not swimming in winter: the chill of the water is delicious. In summer one always fancies the sea has been boiled. Platon, if you had not gone to bed, you would have seen your friend Othmar. He was here for half an hour.’

‘Othmar!’ exclaimed the Prince. ‘Here at that time of the morning?’

‘He does not want to go to sleep,’ she retorted. ‘He had his chocolate with me, and then rowed himself back to S. Pharamond and Baron Fritz.’

Lady Brancepeth glanced at her.

‘You have certainly done a great deal, Nadine, while we have been only dozing,’ she said drily. The Princess looked at her good-humouredly, with her little dubious smile.

‘There is always something to do if one only look for it. You feel so satisfied with yourself too when you have been useful before one o’clock.’

‘Othmar!’ repeated the Prince. ‘If I had known, I would have come downstairs.’

‘My dear Platon, you would have done nothing of the kind; you would have sworn at your man for disturbing you, and would have turned round and gone to sleep again. Besides, what do you want with Othmar? You do not care about “getting on a good thing,” nor even about suggesting a loan for Odessa.’

‘I like Othmar,’ said Napraxine with perfect sincerity. His wife looked at him, with her little dubious smile. ‘It is always so with them,’ she thought. ‘They always like just the one man of all others——!’

‘I suppose, if I had done quite what I ought, I should have asked Othmar to “put me on” something,’ she said aloud. ‘It is not every day that one has one of the masters of the world all alone at eight o’clock in the morning.’

‘The masters of the world always find their Cleopatras,’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘At La Jacquemerille, perhaps, as well as in Egypt.’

‘Cleopatra must have been a very stupid woman,’ said Nadine Napraxine, ‘to be able to think of nothing but that asp!’

‘I do not know that it was so very stupid; it was a good réclame. It has sent her name down to us.’

‘Anthony alone would have done that. A woman lives by her lovers. Who would have heard of Héloïse, of Beatrice, of Leonora d’Este?——’

‘You are very modest for us. Perhaps without the women the men might never have been immortal.’

‘I cannot think why you sent Othmar away,’ repeated Prince Napraxine. ‘I wanted especially to know if they take up the Russian loan——’

‘I did not send him away, he went,’ replied his wife, with a little smile; ‘and you know he will never allow anyone to talk finance to him.’

‘That is very absurd. He cannot deny that his House lives by finance.’

‘He would certainly never deny it, but he dislikes the fact; you cannot force it on him, my dear Platon, in the course of breakfast chit-chat. I am sure your manners are better than that. Besides, if you did commit such a rudeness, you would get nothing by it. I believe he never tells a falsehood, but he will never tell the truth unless he chooses. And I suppose, too, that financiers are like cabinet ministers—they have a right to lie if they like.’

‘I am sure Othmar does not lie,’ said Napraxine.

‘I dare say he is as truthful as most men of the world. Truth is not a social virtue; tact is a much more amiable quality. Truth says to one, ‘You have not a good feature in your face;’ tact says to one, ‘You have an exquisite expression.’ Perhaps both facts are equally true; but the one only sees what is unpleasant, the other only sees what is agreeable. There can be no question which is the pleasanter companion.’

‘Othmar has admirable tact——’

‘How your mind runs upon Othmar! Kings generally acquire a great deal of tact from the obligation to say something agreeable to so many strangers all their lives. He is a kind of king in his way. He has learnt the kings’ art of saying a few phrases charmingly with all his thoughts elsewhere. It is creditable to him, for he has no need to be popular, he is so rich.’

‘Ask him to dinner to-morrow or Sunday.’

‘If you wish. But he will not come; he dislikes dinners as much as I do. It is the most barbarous method of seeing one’s friends.’

‘There is no other so genial.’

She rose with a little shrug of her shoulders. She seldom honoured Napraxine by conversing so long with him.

‘Order the horses, Ralph,’ she said to Lord Geraldine; ‘I want a long gallop.’

‘She has had some decisive scene with Othmar,’ thought Lady Brancepeth, ‘and she is out of humour; she always rides like a Don Kossack when she is irritated.’

‘There is no real riding here,’ said the Princess, as she went to put on her habit. ‘One almost loves Russia when one thinks of the way one can ride there; of those green eternal steppes, those illimitable plains, with no limit but the dim grey horizon, your black Ukrane horse, bounding like a deer, flying like a zephyr; it is worth while to remain in Russia to gallop so, on a midsummer night, with not a wall or a fence all the way between you and the Caspian Sea. I think if I were always in Russia I should become such a poet as Maïkoff: those immense distances are inspiration.’

She rode with exquisite grace and spirit; an old Kossack had taught her, as a child, the joys of the saddle, on those lonely and dreamful plains, which had always held since a certain place in her heart. That latent energy and daring, which found no scope in the life of the world, made her find pleasure in the strong stride of the horse beneath her, in the cleaving of the air at topmost speed. The most indolent of mondaines at all other times, when she sprang into the saddle as lightly as a bird on a bough, she was transformed; her slender hands had a grip of steel, her delicate face flushed with pleasure, the fiery soul of her fathers woke in her—of the men who had ridden out with their troopers to hunt down the Persian and the Circassian; who had swept like storm-clouds over those shadowy steppes which she loved; who had had their part or share in all the tragic annals of Russia; who had slain their foes at the steps of the throne, in the holiness of the cloister; who had been amongst those whose swords had found the heart of Cathrine’s son, and whose voices had cried to the people in the winter’s morning, ‘Paul, the son of Peter, is dead; pray for his soul!’ If she were cruel—now and then—was it not in her blood?

Meanwhile Yseulte was helping her foster-mother to pack tea-roses, to go to England for a great ball, in their little hermetically-sealed boxes. The roses were not wholly opened before they were thus shut away from light and air into darkness. They would not wither in their airless cells, but they would pale a little in that dull sad voyage from the sunshine to the frost and fog. As she laid the rosebuds,—pink, white, and pale yellow,—one by one on their beds of moss, she thought for the first time wistfully that her fate was very like theirs; only the rosebuds, perhaps, when they should be taken out of their prisons at their journey’s end, though they would have but a very few hours of life before them, yet would bloom a little, if mournfully, in the northern land, and see the light again, if only for a day. But her life would be shut into silence and darkness for ever; she would not even live the rose’s life ‘l’espace d’un matin.’

CHAPTER XV.

When Othmar went out from her presence, he was more near to happiness than he had been in his whole thirty years of life. He was filled with vivid, palpitating, intoxicated hope. He was passionately in love, and almost he believed himself beloved in return. As much as she had allowed to him she had certainly allowed to no living man. The very force of his passion, which had driven him to scorn the conventional court which he might have paid her in common with so many others—the spaniel’s place of Geraldine, the slave’s place of Boris Seliedoff—rendered him as willing to set no limits to the sacrifices which she should be free to exact from him, and he be proud to make. Only he would never share her, even in nominal union with her lawful lord. He would be all to her, or nothing.

He loathed the conventional adulteries of his time and of his society; he sighed, impatiently for the means to prove that the old fearless, high-handed, single-hearted passion which sees in the whole teeming world only one life, was not dead, but lived in him for her.

He foresaw all the loss of freedom and of fair repute which would be entailed on him by the surrender of his life to her; he knew well that she was a woman who would be no docile companion or unexacting mistress; he knew that there were in her the habits of dominance, the instincts of egotism, and that esprit gouailleur which compelled her, almost despite herself, to jest at what she admired, to ridicule her better emotions, to make a mockery of the very things which were the dearest to her. He did not because he loved her become blind to all that was cold, merciless, and capricious in her nature; he was conscious that she would never lose her own identity in any passion, never surrender her mind, even if she gave her person, to any lover; he knew that she would always remain outside those tropic tempests of love which she aroused and controlled, and which offended her or flattered her, according to the mood in which they found her.

He knew all these things, and was aware that his future would not be one of peace. But he loved her, and agitation, jealousy, suffering beside her would, he felt, be sweeter to him than any repose beside another. Even these defects, these dangers, which he clearly perceived, added to her sorcery for him. It is the mistress who is indifferent who excites the most vehement desires; and, by reason of his great fortunes, women had been always to him so facile, so eager, and so easily won, that the coldness of Nadine Napraxine, which he knew was a thing of temperament, not of affectation, had but the more irresistible power over him. The very sense with which she impressed everyone, himself as well as others, of being no more to be held or relied upon than the snowflake, to which her world likened her, attracted a man who had, from his boyhood, been wearied by the adulation, insistence, and sycophancy of almost all who approached him.

The few days of his probation passed slowly over his head, seeming as though they would never end. He was restless, feverish, and absent of mind; Friederich Othmar, who, contrary to all his usual habits, remained at S. Pharamond, tranquilly ignoring the visible impatience of his host at his unasked presence, was sorely troubled by the alternate exhilaration and anxiety of spirit which all the reserve and self-possession of Othmar himself could not wholly conceal from the penetration of a person accustomed to divine and dive into the innermost recesses of the minds of men.

‘What, in God’s name, is he meditating?’ thought his uncle. ‘Some insanity probably. I should believe he was about to disappear from the world with Madame Napraxine if I were not so persuaded that her pride and her selfishness will never permit her to commit a folly for anyone. Morality is nothing to her, but her position is a great deal; her delight in being insolent will never allow her to lose the power of being so.’

So accurately did this man of the world read a character which baffled most persons by its intricacy and its anomalies.

To Friederich Othmar human nature presented many absurdities but few secrets.

He remained at S. Pharamond, despite his own abhorrence of any place which was not a capital. He passed his mornings in the consideration of his correspondence and his telegraphic despatches, but in the later hours of the day and in the evenings he was that agreeable member of society whom society had known and courted for so many years; and beneath his pleasant subacid wit and his admirable manner his acute penetration was for ever en vedette to penetrate his nephew’s purpose and preoccupation. But a lover, on his guard, will baffle an observer whom the keenest of statesmen would, in vain, seek to deceive or mislead, and the Baron learned nothing of Othmar’s inmost thoughts. Although Othmar and Nadine Napraxine met twice or thrice in his presence at other people’s houses, and once at S. Pharamond itself, where some more choice music was given one evening, the acute blue eyes of the elder man failed to read the understanding which existed between them. All he saw was that she appeared to treat Othmar, before others, with more raillery and more nonchalance than usual. He remarked that Othmar did not seem either hurt or surprised at this.

‘Since he is as much in love with her as ever, he must be aware of some intimacy between them which renders him comparatively insensible to her treatment of him in society,’ thought the sagacity of his uncle, who was alarmed and disquieted by a fact which would have reassured less fine observers—the fact that the master of S. Pharamond did not once, during fifteen days, cross the mile or two of olive-wood, orange orchard, and hanging field which alone separated him from La Jacquemerille.

‘No love is so patient but on some promise,’ he reflected. He knew the romantic turn of Othmar’s character, and he feared its results as others would fear the issue of some mortal or hereditary disease. A week or two previous the ministers then presiding over the fortunes of France had met, at his little house in the Rue du Traktir, the representatives of two great Powers, and in the newspapers of the hour that informal meeting, which had led to many important results, had been called the Unwritten Treaty of Baron Fritz; and yet, at such a moment, instead of being entranced with such influence as such a nickname implied to his House, instead of being occupied with the power, the might, and the mission of the Othmars, which that gathering around the library-table in the Rue du Traktir displayed for the ten thousandth time to the dazzled eyes of suppliant and trembling Europe, Otho himself could only think of a woman with larger eyes and smaller hands than usual, but a woman absolutely useless to him in any ambitions—likely, rather, to be his ruin in all ways!

‘I could understand it were she one of the great political forces of the world. Some women are that, and might so, to us, be of very high value,’ thought Friederich Othmar, ‘but Madame Napraxine is as indifferent to all political movement as if she were made of the ivory and mother-of-pearl which her skin resembles. If she be anything, she is that horrible thing a Nihilist, only because Nihilism embodies an endless and irreconcilable discontent, which finds in her some secret corner of vague sympathy. But for politics in our meaning of the word she has the most complete contempt. What did she say to me the other day? “I am a diplomatist’s daughter. I have seen the strings of all your puppets. I cannot accept a Polichinelle for a Richelieu, as you all do.” And she declared that if there were no statesmen at all, and no journalists, life would go smoothly; everybody would attend to their own affairs, the world would be quiet, and there would be no wars. What but disaster can such a woman with such views bring into the life of Otho, already paralysed as it is by poco-curantism?’

He asked the question of himself in his own meditations, and could give himself no answer save one which grieved and alarmed him.

Othmar himself bestowed on his guest but little thought except a passing impatience that his uncle should have taken that moment, of all others, to instal himself at S. Pharamond.

He had not the cynicism nor the insouciance of the woman he adored. He did not attempt any sophisms with his own conscience. He knew that to do a man dishonour was to do him a violence unkinder, and perhaps even in a way baser, than to take his life. But he was ready to pledge himself to that which, unlike her, he still considered was a sin. He was entirely mastered by a force of passion which she could have understood by the subtlety of her intelligence, but was not likely ever to share by any fibre of her nature. He was lost in that whirlpool of emotion, anticipation, and fear which carried his inner life away on it, although his outer life remained in appearance calm enough for no eyes save those of the Baron to penetrate the disguise of his serenity.

Yseulte he had forgotten.

The simple and innocent tenderness which she had momentarily aroused in him could not hold its place beside the overwhelming passion which governed him, more than a slender soft-eyed dove can dispute possession with the fierce, strong-pinioned falcon. Once or twice he saw her and spoke to her with kindness, but his thoughts were far away from her, and he did not linger beside her, although each time he chanced to meet her on the way to her foster-mother’s, in lonely lovely country paths, which might well have tempted him to tarry.

On the thirteenth day of his probation, the priest’s gown which, to please her, he had ordered for the church of S. Pharamond, arrived at the château, and, his attention being drawn to it by his servants, he remembered his promise to her. It was the last day of the year. A passing remembrance of pity came over him as he thought of her; she was so entirely alone, and she would go to the life of the cloister; a fancy came to him to do some little thing to give her pleasure; a mere evanescent breath of innocent impulse, which passed like the cool breeze of an April day, sweet with scent of field flowers, across the heated atmosphere of desire and expectation in which his soul was then living. Conventional etiquette had seldom troubled him greatly; he had always enjoyed something of that sense which princes have, that whatever he did the world would condone. A man of the exceptional power which he possessed can always exercise on his contemporaries more or less of his own will. Whatever he might have done no one would have said of him anything more severe than that he was singular.

When he went into Nice that day he chanced to see a very pretty thing, modern, but admirable in taste and execution, a casket of ivory mounted on silver, with a little angel in silver on the summit. On its sides were painted in delicate miniatures reproductions of Fra Angelico and Botticelli. It was signed by a famous miniaturist, and cost ten thousand francs. Othmar, to whom the price seemed no more than ten centimes, bought it at once.

‘It will please her,’ he thought. ‘It shall go to her with the soutane;’ and he sent it with the vestment to Millo, addressed to Mademoiselle de Valogne. His knowledge of etiquette told him that he ought to send it, if he sent it at all, through the Duchesse; but he did not choose to obey etiquette; he had discarded social rules, more or less, all his life, according to his inclination, and people had not resented his rebellion simply because he was who he was. He utterly disobeyed etiquette now, and sent his present direct to Yseulte very early on the morning of the New Year.

It did not occur to him that he might only run the risk of cruelly compromising the poor child. He gave hardly more thought to the action than he would have given to a rose which he might have broken off its stalk to offer to her. All his heart had gone with the basket of flowers which he had sent at sunrise to Nadine Napraxine, who allowed no other offering.

The chances were a million to one that his casket would never reach its destination without being seen, if not intercepted, by the governesses; but as it happened, his messenger gave it to the gatekeeper, and the gatekeeper gave it in turn to the woman who served her as maid during her stay at Millo, and who was passing through the gates, on her way home from matins. The woman was attached to her; indeed, being a religious person herself, considered that Yseulte was the only creature whose presence saved Millo from the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah; therefore, pleased that the girl should have pleasure, she carried the packet straight to her as she rose from her bed; and in the cold, misty morning of the New Year the first thing that greeted the astonished eyes of Yseulte was the Coronation of the Virgin, glowing like a jewel on the side of the ivory casket.

The whole day passed to her in an enchanted rapture.

In the large, idle, careless household there was a general exchange of congratulations and étrennes, and a pleasant tumult of good wishes and merriment. Blanchette and Toinon danced about before a pyramid of bonbons and costly playthings, and the Duchesse, descending at her usual hour, two o’clock, gave and received a multitude of felicitations, gifts, and visits. ‘The most tedious day of the whole three hundred and sixty-five,’ she said pettishly, giving her cheek to the touch of her children’s pale little lips.

In the many occupations and ennuis of the day no one heard or knew anything of Othmar’s present. At noon some bouquets of roses and some orchids, laid on a plate of old cloisonné enamel, were brought in his name to Madame de Vannes, but she knew nothing of her cousin’s casket. Meanwhile nothing could hurt Yseulte. The contempt with which her little cousins received the gifts she had made for them in the convent, the oblivion to which she was consigned by every one, the carelessness with which the Duchesse received her timidly-offered good wishes, the severity with which the governesses forbade her to go out in such weather to see Nicole or attend Mass in the little church, the unconcealed ill-temper with which Alain de Vannes flung her a word of greeting—none of these things had any power to wound her; she scarcely perceived them; she was lifted up into a world all her own. Unnoticed in the general branle-bas of the day, she passed the hours, when she was not at Mass in the chapel, locked safely in her own room, before her treasure, in a rapt happiness, in a wonder of ecstasy, which were so intense that she feared they were cardinal sins.

The weather was cold, some snow had even fallen, and the north winds blew, making all the chilly foreigners gathered on those shores shiver and grumble like creatures defrauded of their rights; but all the grey, cheerless, misty landscape, and the fog upon the sea, appeared more beautiful to her than they had ever done before in its sunshine. From her window she looked at the towers of S. Pharamond, and on her table—all her own—was the ivory casket.

The Duchesse de Vannes, waking in the forenoon after the Jour de l’An, cross, peevish, sleepy, and yet sleepless, which is, in itself, the most irritating and dispiriting of all human conditions, and morbidly conscious that, as her little daughter had said, she was beginning to baisser un peu, was in a mood of natural resentment against all creation in general and the human race in particular, and quite ready to vent her ill-humour on the first object which offered itself. That first object was one of the little prim notes by which her children’s instructresses were wont to communicate any terrible event in the schoolroom, or any entreaty for guidance when Mademoiselle Blanchette had insisted on riding the wooden horses at a village fair, or Mademoiselle Toinon had dressed herself up in the smallest groom’s clothes. ‘Ne m’ennuyez pas; vous savez vos devoirs’ was the only reply they ever received; but the good women continued to write the notes as a relief to their consciences. They wrote one now, signed in their joint names, humbly entreating to be informed if it were the pleasure of Madame la Duchesse that Mdlle. de Valogne should receive presents of which the donor was unknown. Mdlle. de Valogne was in possession of a new and very valuable locket; they believed also that she was in the habit of going to the gardens of S. Pharamond; they had deemed it their duty to acquaint Madame la Duchesse, &c., &c.

Blanchette, with the most innocent face in the world, had said to them, ‘I have seen the big pearl locket of Yseulte! Oh, vrai! When I am as old, I will not hide my handsome things as she does. Who gave it her? Who do you think could give it to her? She is friends with that gentleman at S. Pharamond—the one that is as rich as M. de Rothschild. I think he gave it her! Do you tell mamma.‘

Blanchette guessed very shrewdly that her father had given the locket; but she was too wary to offend him. Blanchette was like the little cats who steal round and round to their mouse by devious paths unseen. She had alarmed the governesses, and the prim note was the consequence.

When the Duchesse read it, she flung it away in a corner. ‘Tas d’imbéciles,’ she said, contemptuously; then said to one of her maids, ‘Request Mdlle. de Valogne to come hither.’

Yseulte was presented in a fortuitous moment as the whipping-boy on whom could be spent all that useless irritation which she could not spend on the real offenders, her ineffective chloral, her increasing wrinkles, and the indifference of Raymond de Prangins.

‘Mamma is always cross,’ the wise little Blanchette had reflected. ‘She is always angry, even for nothing. That great baby will get a lecture, and she will be sure to say it was papa; she always tells the truth—such a simpleton!—and papa will hate her for ever and for ever!’

Then Blanchette made a pied de nez all by herself in her little bedroom: when you were a child you could not have many things your own way, but you could spoil other people’s things very neatly with a little pat here, a little poke there, if you looked all the while like your picture by Baudry, an innocent cherub with sweet smiling eyes, who could not have made a pied de nez to save your life. Blanchette had already acquired the knowledge that this was how the world was most easily managed.

When Yseulte was summoned to her cousin’s presence, the girl was startled to see how old she looked, for it was scarcely noon, and the handsome face which ‘Cri-Cri’ was wont to present to her own world had scarcely received its finishing touches from the various embellishing petits secrets shut up in their silver boxes and their china pots, which were strewn about under the great Dresden-framed mirror in front of her.

‘Good-day,’ she said, with irritation already in her voice, as Yseulte timidly kissed her hand. ‘Is this true what they tell me, that you receive presents without my knowledge and consent? Do you not know that it is perfectly inconvenable? Are you not taught enough of the world in your convent to be aware that a young girl cannot do such things without being disgraced eternally? What is it you have accepted? Is it a jewel? Can you realise the enormity of your action?——’ she paused, in some irritation and uncertainty. ‘Well, why do you not speak? Can you excuse yourself? What is it you have taken? From whom have you taken it? My people have told me you have a new and valuable jewel and refuse to say who gave it.’

‘My cousin, M. le Duc, gave it me,’ said Yseulte. ‘He said that I was to tell you if you asked me, but not anyone else.’

She spoke frankly, without any hesitation. The Duchesse stared at her, half rose in her amazement; her face was dark with anger for a moment, then cleared into a sudden laughter.

‘My husband!’ she echoed. ‘A fillette like you! And they say there are no miracles now! Do you absolutely mean to say that Alain gave you a jewel?——’

‘He was so good as to give me a locket—yes,’ murmured Yseulte, conscious that her cousin was angry, insolent, and derisive, and afraid that the Duc would be irritated at the issue of his kindness to her.

‘Pray, has he given you anything else?’ echoed Madame de Vannes. ‘Has he given you the diamonds he had bought for Mdlle. Rubis, or the coupé from Bender’s which he meant for la grande Laure?’

‘He has not given me anything else,’ answered Yseulte, to whom these terrible names conveyed no meaning.

‘Where is this locket? Show it me.’

‘It is in my room. Shall I fetch it?’

‘No, no. It does not matter. You can send it me. I will send Agnès for it. The idea of Alain having even looked at you!—it makes one laugh; it is too absurd.’

She continued to laugh, but the laughter did not convey to the ear of Yseulte any impression either that she was pardoned or that her cousin was amused. It was a laugh expressive of irony, irritation, wonder, contempt, rancour, all in one.

‘You should not have taken it. You should have told me,’ continued the Duchesse. ‘To be sure, he is your cousin. But it is not proper to take a man’s gifts. It is not becoming. It is too forward. It is even immodest. Is that the sort of thing the Dames de Ste. Anne have taught you? Surely you might have known better.’

These phrases she uttered in a staccato rapid succession, as if she thought little of what she said; she was indeed thinking as the girl stood before her:

‘What a skin! What shoulders! What a throat! What a thing it is to be sixteen! Why did not le bon Dieu make all that last longer with us? It goes too soon; so horribly soon; after one is five-and-twenty it is all one can do to make up decently. If it were only the complexion which went it would not matter; that one can easily arrange; but it is the features that change; they grow out or they grow in; the mouth gets thin or the cheeks get broad; the very lines alter somehow, and we cannot alter that; and then to make oneself up is as much trouble as to build a house, and the house has to be built anew every day!—it is horribly hard—and yet one has compensations, revenges; it is not those children whom men care to look at though they are fresh as roses; at least not usually. Alain, I suppose, does—what can he mean by giving her a medallion?’

While these thoughts ran through her mind, she was staring hard at Yseulte through her eyeglass, as though they had never met before then. The girl had coloured scarlet at the epithet ‘immodest,’ but it had made her a little angry, with the righteous indignation of innocence. Respect kept her mute, but her face spoke for her.

‘Alain was right; she is really handsome,’ reflected the Duchesse.

She was herself only eight-and-twenty, but in the world as on the racecourse it is the pace that kills; and before she had passed through all those arduous processes which she had rightly compared to building a house anew every day, she knew very well that she looked cruelly old, though after two o’clock in the day she was still one of the great beauties of France.

She had been immersed in pleasures, pastimes, and excitements from the day of her marriage; she had lived in a crowd, she had gambled not a little, and she had had certain intrigues, of whose dangers she had at times a vivid and anxious consciousness, for the Duc was indifferent but not base, and might any day be roused if he came to be aware that men laughed at him more than he liked. As a rule, she and he understood each other very well, and tacitly condoned each other’s indiscretions; but there might come a time when he would break that convenient compact, as she felt disposed now to resent his admiration of her young cousin. On the whole, perhaps, she mused, she had been wrong to do so; she would let the girl keep his present; he might, if she provoked him, insist that Raymond de Prangins should leave Millo. All these reflections occurred to her during that one minute in which her eyeglass watched the indignation rise in Yseulte’s face.

‘Have you seen M. de Vannes alone?’ she resumed, with a sharpness in her voice, due rather to her own sense of the girl’s beauty than to her knowledge of her husband’s admiration for it.

‘Now and then,’ said Yseulte without hesitation. ‘He has come into the schoolroom——’

‘For a lesson in A B C, I suppose?—or a cup of Brown’s green tea?’ said the Duchesse contemptuously. ‘Well, he may conter ses fleurettes ailleurs. I should have thought he had had better taste than to begin in his own house: however,’ she continued, interrupting herself, as she remembered that she was suggesting, ‘I do not suppose it is you who are to blame. But another time, ask my permission before you accept anything from anybody. I will not deprive you of the Duc’s gift. He is in a manner your cousin—your guardian—of course he meant very kindly, but another time remember to come to me. You will tell the Duc that I said so.’

‘Good heavens!’ she was thinking, ‘who would have supposed that Alain had a taste for a creature like that, half a saint and half a baby? To be sure, her eyes are superb, and the throat and bosom—what beautiful lines they have; why did they send her here? She shall go back next week. The wickedness of the thing would charm him; the nearer it was to a crime, the more of a clou it would be. To play Faust under the respectable shade of Brown’s teapot and the big dictionaries would be sure to enthral him, out of its very drollery—men are made like that.’

Then a remembrance of S. Pharamond passed over her, and she said aloud, with an unkind sarcasm in her voice:

‘Perhaps you have other friends beside M. de Vannes? Pray tell me if you have. I fully appreciate the effects of the education which the Dames de Ste. Anne have given you.’

Yseulte coloured scarlet, and the Duchesse’s eyes scanned her face as Blanchette’s had done, without mercy.

‘Pray tell me,’ she continued, with a chill dignity, which was in sharp contrast with the sarcasm and railing of her previous manner. ‘You will be so good as to remember that I stand in the place of your mother; your indiscretions are not alone painful to me, but compromising to me. Is it true that you are intimate with Otho Othmar?’

‘He has been kind to me,’ murmured Yseulte, an agony at her heart and the hot tears standing in her eyes. She did not understand enough of the world to justify herself by the fact that the offender had been presented to her by her cousin herself; nor, if she had done so, would the position she stood in towards Madame de Vannes have allowed her to use such a justification without apparent impertinence. For eight years she had owed everything to the Duchesse.

‘Kind to you!’ echoed her cousin, ‘a most fortuitous phrase, but not one that young girls can employ except to their own ridicule and injury. Pray how has he been kind to you? has he given you a locket?’

Yseulte might easily have told a lie; no one knew of the casket, no one could tell of it; she loved it more dearly than anything she had ever possessed. But she had been taught in her childhood that falsehood was cowardice, and the courage of the de Valogne was in her; therefore she answered, with an unsteady voice indeed, but with entire truthfulness, ‘He has given me a very beautiful box, it is made of ivory and painted, it came yesterday——’

Madame de Vannes burst into another laugh, which jarred on the child’s ear:

‘Really,’ she cried, relapsing into the manner most natural to her, ‘you begin well! Othmar and my husband! and you are not quite sixteen yet, and we all thought you such a little demure saint in your grey clothes! Send the casket to me. You cannot receive presents in that way. From your cousin, passe encore, but from a man like Othmar—you might as well go and sup with him at Bignon’s. Good heavens! What are Schemmitz and Brown about that they have let you meet him? Where have you seen him? how have you become intimate with him?’

Yseulte had become very pale. She had done her duty; done what honour, truth, obedience, and gratitude all required; but it had cost her a great effort, and she would lose the casket.

‘I have only seen him three times,’ she said, with her colour changing; and she went on to tell the story of her visit to his gardens, of his conversation with her on the seashore, of the priest’s soutane, and of their meeting at the house of Nicole. It was a very simple inoffensive little story, but it hurt her greatly to tell it; cost her quite as much as it would have done Madame de Vannes to unfold all her manifold indiscretions in full confession before a conseil de famille.

‘He has been very kind to me,’ she said timidly, as she finished her little tale, ‘and if—if—if you would only let me keep the casket and take it to Faïel?’

The Duchesse laughed once more:

‘You do not care to keep the Duc’s locket—how flattering to him! Really, fillette, you are sagacious betimes; I would never have believed you such a cunning little cat! Did you learn all that at the convent? you convent-girls are more rusées than so many rats! Othmar, of all men of the world! My dear, you might as well wish for an emperor. There is not a marriageable woman in Europe who does not sigh for Othmar! He is so enormously rich! There is no one else rich like that; all the other financiers have a tribe of people belonging to them. “The family” is everywhere, at Paris, at Vienna, at Berlin, at London, and have as many branches as the oak; but Othmar is absolutely alone—for old Baron Fritz does not count—he is absolutely alone, that is what is unique in him. Whoever marries him will be the most fortunate woman in Europe. Yes, I say it advisedly, it is fortune that is power nowadays; our day is over; we do not even lead society any longer.’

The colour had rushed back into Yseulte’s face; the Duchesse’s words tortured her as only a very young and sensitive creature can be tortured by an indelicate and cruel suspicion. ‘I never thought, I never meant,’ she murmured. ‘You know, my cousin, I am dedicated to the religious life; you cannot suppose that I—I——’ The words choked her.

‘Ne pleurnichez pas, de grâce!’ said the Duchesse impatiently. ‘I have no doubt you have taken all kinds of impossibilities into your head, girls are always so foolish; but you may be sure that the gift of the casket means nothing—nothing. Othmar is always giving away, right and left; most very rich men are mean, but he is not. It was a wrong thing, an impertinent thing, for him to do, and it must be returned to him instantly; but if you imagine you have made any impression upon him, I can assure you you are very mistaken, he only thinks of Nadine Napraxine.’

Yseulte remained very pale; her eyes were cast down, her lips were pressed together. She had done her duty and told the truth, but she was not recompensed.

The Duchesse rang for her maids. To the one who answered the summons, she said: ‘ Accompany Mdlle. de Valogne to her room, and bring me a casket she will give you, which is to be sold for the Little Sisters of the Poor. Va-t’ -en, Yseulte.’

She put out her hand carelessly, and the girl bent over her.

‘My cousin! I have never seen him but three times,’ she murmured again. Her face was very pale; she had been wounded profoundly by the Duchesse’s words, even though their full meaning was not known to her.

Madame de Vannes laughed again; then, with an assumption of dignity, which she could take on at will, said coldly:

‘Once was too much. Never accuse accident; no one believes in it. Remember also, that as one vowed to the service of Heaven, it is already sin in you if you harbour one earthly thought. Go, and send me the casket.’

Without another word Yseulte curtsied and withdrew from her presence.

When the maid returned, she brought her mistress the ivory casket; but inside it was the Duc’s medallion. Madame de Vannes laughed yet again as she saw.

‘The little obstinate!’ she murmured. ‘It is not often that Alain throws pearls, or anything else away. And what a casket! Heavens! it is fit for a wedding gift to a queen. Is it possible that Othmar—— No, it is not possible; he would never think of a child like that. Perhaps he did it to rouse Nadine. What a cunning little pole-cat these nuns have sent me!’

But a kind of respect awakened in her towards her young cousin. A girl who could charm Alain de Vannes and Othmar was not to be dismissed scornfully as a novice and a baby. The Duchesse drew some note-paper to her, and wrote a little letter to her neighbour, in which she expressed herself very admirably, with dignity and grace, as the guardian of a motherless child who was dedicated to the service of Heaven. She suggested, without actually saying so, that he had failed in reverence towards Heaven, and towards the Maison de Vannes and the Maison de Creusac, in permitting himself to offer gifts to Mdlle. de Valogne; she recalled to him, without any positive expression of the sort, that a young girl of noble descent could not be approached with gifts as a young actress might be, and that if any had been offered they should have, at least, been offered through herself.

She was honestly irritated with Othmar for having thus been wanting, as she considered, in full respect for those great families from which Yseulte de Valogne had sprung. She was excessively angry with her children’s governesses, whose negligence had rendered it possible for the girl to wander about alone, and she gave them a short but very terrible audience in her dressing-room; yet, on the whole, the affair amused her a little, and the high-breeding in her made her do justice to the honour which had forced her young cousin to tell unasked all the truth.

Later on she had a little scene with her husband, half comic, half tragic, in which they flung the tu quoque liberally one at the other, apropos of many vagaries less innocent than his fancy for Yseulte de Valogne; but she did not tell him about Othmar’s casket, for she reasoned, with admirable knowledge of men’s natures, that they cared so much more if they thought any one else cared too.

Meanwhile Yseulte, having given the casket into the hands of the maid without a word or a sign of regret, locked herself in, threw herself on her bed, and sobbed as piteously as though the magic box had been that of Pandora, and bore all hope away within it.

CHAPTER XVI.

Nadine Napraxine kept her promise to Othmar. She did for him what she had done for no other human being; she meditated on his entreaties as a thing which might possibly be granted by her. She looked for a little while through the play and the glow of his impassioned words as through some painted window into some agreeable land whither, perchance, she might travel.

The very sternness and daring of his manner of demand had its attraction for her. None of her courtiers had wooed her quite in that way: some had been too timid, some too submissive, some too worldly-wise. The insane desire to fly with her from the world to some far-away, semi-barbaric, mysterious Eden of his own making had never been so boldly and uncompromisingly set forth to her by any lover as now by Othmar. It had a certain fascination for her even while the philosophy and irony in her ridiculed the idea. It responded to the vague but very real dissatisfaction with which life, as it was, filled her. She was tired of the routine of it. Everyone said the same thing. Its very triumphs were so monotonous that they might just as well have been failures. Half her provocation and cruelty to men arose from a wish which she could not resist, to find something vivid and new to interest her. She succeeded in causing tragedies, but she did not succeed in being interested in them herself.

Othmar did interest her—in a measure.

He had done so from the first moment that she saw him coming in—tall, slight, grave, with great repose and more dignity than most men of his day—through the vague light, entre chien et loup, into the hall of a country house in the green heart of the Ardennes, where she and her hosts and a great party, wearing the russet and gold and pale blue of their hunting clothes, were waiting for the signal of the curée from the terraces without.

He had interested her then and always in a degree; but only in a degree.

‘It certainly cannot be love that I feel,’ she said to herself, with regret. ‘I am glad when he comes because he—almost—excites me, but I am glad when he is gone because he—almost—disturbs me. I can imagine certain follies being possible to me when he is here, but they never quite become possible. If I were sure they would become so, and in becoming so be agreeable to me, I would go away with him. But—but—but——.’

The objections seemed many to her, in a way insuperable; they lay in herself, not in him, and so appeared never to be removed.

She respected him because he would have scorned one of those intrigues screened under conventional observances, of which the world is so full. If she could have entirely persuaded herself that his life was absolutely necessary to hers, she would not have hesitated to let society become aware of the truth. She had no grain in her of the hypocrite or of the coward.

But she was not sure: and to break up your life irrevocably, to throw it into a furnace and fuse it into a wholly new shape, to fling your name to all the hounds who fed on the offal of calumny, and then to find, after all this Sturm und Drang, that you had only made a mistake, and were only a little more bored than before!—this possibility seemed to be at once so dreary and so ridiculous that she did not dare to put it to the proof. Her own potential weariness in the future to which he wooed her, rose before her in a ghastly shape and barred the way.

She pondered on the matter fully and sincerely for some days: days in which nothing pleased her: days in which her riding-horse felt her spurs, and her friends her sarcasms: days in which her toilettes had little power to interest her; Worth himself seemed worn out; her admirable tire-woman did nothing well; and her husband seemed to her to have grown heavier, stouter, stupider, more Kalmuck, and more intolerable than ever during the hours of breakfast and dinner, which were the only hours weighted by his presence. In those few hours she felt almost persuaded to take her lover at his word. Platon Napraxine was so densely, so idiotically, so provocatively unalarmed and secure! He would have tempted almost any woman to make him suddenly awake to find himself ridiculous.

‘He would howl like a wounded bear!’ she thought contemptuously, ‘and then somebody would bring him brandy, and somebody would mention the tables, and somebody would talk about Mdlle. Chose, and he would be all right again. He is too stupid to feel. There are prairie dogs, they say, which hardly know when they are shot or beaten; he has got the soul of one of them. Because I have married him he is convinced that I shall never leave him;—la belle raison! There are so many men like that. They marry just as they buy a cane; they put the cane in the stand; it is bought and it cannot move; they are sure it will always be there. One fine day some one comes and takes it; then they stare and they swear because they have been robbed.’

This time of uncertainty and doubt, which was to Othmar fraught with such wild alternations of hope and of fear, which now swung him in his fancy high as heaven and now sunk him deep in the darkness of despair, was to her a period rather of the most minute analysis and of the most subtle self-examination. In the naïveté of her profound and unconscious egotism she never once considered his loss or gain: she was entirely occupied with the consideration of her own wishes. Everything bored her; would she, if she took this step, which to most women would have looked so big with fate, be less bored—or more? This seemed to her the one momentous issue which trembled uncertain at the gate of choice.

She considered it thoughtfully and dispassionately. She was not troubled by any moral doubts, or any such reasons for hesitation as would have beset many women of more prejudices and of less intelligence than herself. All these things were le vieux jeu. She was far too clear-sighted and too highly-cultured to be scared by such bogies as frighten narrow minds. She saw no sanctity whatever in the marriage ties which bound her to Platon Napraxine. You might as well talk of a contract for eggs and butter, or an operation on the Bourse being sacred! No human ordinances can very well be sacred, and we cannot be sure there are any divine ones, logically, all the probabilities are that there are none; so she certainly would have said had anyone challenged her views on such a subject.

In a manner, this crisis of her life amused her like a comedy. The unconsciousness of her husband whilst the unseen cords of destiny were tightening about him; the revolt and impatience of Othmar, conveyed to her by many a restless glance and half-uttered word as they passed each other in his drawing-rooms or in those of others; the ignorance of her lovers and her friends; and her own meditations as to the many comments that the world would make if ever it knew: all these diverted her.

What alone troubled her was her own pride. Would she ever be able to endure any loss of that? ‘Je serai honnête femme,’ she had said to her father in her childhood, and when she had repeated the words in her womanhood her mind had been made up not so much by coldness, chastity, or delicacy as by hauteur. She could not have endured to feel that there were any doors in Europe which could be shut in her face, or that she could not shut her own whensoever and against whomsoever she might choose.

His term of probation came to an end one morning when the day had nothing of winter save its date; a morning rosy and golden, with distant mists transparent as a veil, and the mild air soundless and windless amongst the mimosa and eucalyptus groves of the grounds of La Jacquemerille. For once Nadine Napraxine condescended to be true to an appointment; whilst the day was still young and all the lazy world of the modern Baiæ still dozed or, at the utmost, yawned itself awake, she moved, with that lovely languor which was as much a portion of her as the breath she drew, along the sea-terrace of her house, and smiled to see Othmar already standing at the foot of the sea-steps.

‘What children men are!’ she thought, with that ridicule which the ardour of her lovers was always most apt to awake in her, as he bent over her hand and pressed on it lips which trembled.

‘It must be really delightful,’ she continued in her own reflections, ‘to be able to be so very eager and so very much in earnest about anything. Instead of abusing us, men ought to be infinitely thankful to us for giving them emotions which do, for the time at least eclipse those of baccarat and of pigeon-shooting. In a moment or two he will be inclined to hate me, but he will be very wrong. He will always be my debtor for fifteen days of the most exquisite agitation of his life. Twenty years hence he will look back to this time, and say, “Oh, le beau temps quand j’étais si malheureux!”’

Whilst she so mused she was saying little careless, easy phrases to him, pacing her terrace slowly, with her great mantle of iris-coloured plush, lined with silver-fox fur drawn close about her, and its hood about her face, like its spathe around the narcissus. She was serene, affable, nonchalante; he was silent, and deeply agitated; so passionately eager for his fate to be spoken, that he could find no light sentences with which to answer hers.

‘He looks very well in that kind of excitement,’ she thought, as she glanced sideways at him. ‘He is poetic in it, instead of being only awkward, like poor Ralph. Really, if one could only be sure of one’s self——’

She amused herself awhile by keeping him upon the terrace, on which all the windows of the house looked, and where regard for her must perforce restrain him from any betrayal of his own emotions. She felt as if she held in leash some panting, striving, desert animal which she forced to preserve the measured pace and decorous stillness of tamed creatures.

At length, compassion or prudence made her relent, and enter the little oriental room where his eloquent avowals had been made a fortnight before. She closed the glass doors, threw off her furs, and stood in the subdued light and the heated air of the room, cool, pale, delicate as the April flower which she resembled, long trailing folds of the primrose-coloured satin which formed her morning négligé falling from her throat to her feet in the long lines that painters love; one great pearl fastened a few sprays of stephanotis at her throat. She sank into a chair which stood against a tree of scarlet azalea set in an antique vase of brass. She was one of those women who naturally make pictures of themselves for every act and in every attitude.

The moment they were secure from observation Othmar knelt at her feet and kissed her hands again; his eyes, uplifted, told their tale of rapture, hope, fear, and imploring prayer more passionately than any words. He would have cut his heart out of his breast if she had bidden him.

She glanced down on the agitation which his features could not conceal with a sense of that wonder which never failed to come to her before the intensity of feeling with which she inspired others.

‘When I really do nothing to make them like that!’ she reflected for the hundredth time before the tempest which she raised almost without endeavour.

Othmar had recovered his presence of mind, though none of his tranquillity; his words, impetuous, persuasive, at times broken by the force of his emotion, at times eloquent with the eloquence natural to passion, fell on her ear uninterrupted by her. She listened, much as she might have listened to the sonorous swell of the Marche au Supplice of Berlioz, or any other harmony which should have pleased her taste if only by contrast of its own vehemence and strength with the serenity of her own nature. She listened, without any sign of any sort, save of so much acquiescence as might be indicated by the gentleness of her expression and the passiveness with which she left her hand in his. He believed her silence to be assent.

‘This is what I have always fancied might conquer me,’ she thought, whilst his ardent protestations and entreaties held her for the moment pleased and fascinated. ‘And yet, I do not know. To leave the world, to be always together, to go, heaven knows where, into a sort of Mahometan paradise—would it suit me? I am afraid not. The idea pleases one in a way, but not quite enough for that. Always together, and alone—one would tire of an angel!’

So still she was, as these thoughts drifted through her mind, so unresistingly she let his forehead, and then his lips, lie on her hand, that he believed himself successful in his prayer. He lifted his eyes and looked at her with a gaze full of rapturous light, of adoration and of gratitude.

‘Oh, my love! my love!’ he murmured. ‘Never shall you regret an hour your mercy to me!’

His lips would have sought hers as his words ended in a sigh, the lover’s sigh of happiness, but she moved and disengaged herself quickly, and motioned to him to rise. On her mouth there was the slight smile he knew so well—the smile that was the enemy of men.

‘My dear friend,’ she said, in her melodious voice, sweet as the south wind, and never sweeter than when it uttered cruel truths to ears that were wounded by them, ‘I will do you the justice to grant that I quite believe you care very much for me’ (he made an indignant gesture); ‘well, that you love me un peu, beaucoup, passionnément, as the convent girls say to the daisies. But I am equally convinced that you do not understand me in the least. I understand myself thoroughly. We are all enigmas to others, but we ought to be able to read our own riddle ourselves. I can read mine; many people never can read theirs all their lives long, and that is why they make so many mistakes. Now, I do know myself so very well. I know that no kind of sin, if there really be such a thing as sin, would frighten me much. I think my nerves would stand even a crime without wincing, if it were a bold one. If the world threw stones at me, it would amuse me. I cannot fancy anybody being unhappy about it. Therefore you will comprehend me when I say that it is not any kind of commonplace nonsense about doing anything wrong which moves me for a moment, but,—I have thought of it all very much and very seriously, and really with a wish to try that other kind of life you speak of, but—I cannot go with you!’

She said it as quietly and as lightly as if she were saying that she could not drive with him to the Col di Guardia that morning. She was smiling her pretty, slight, mysterious smile, which might have meant anything, from pity to derision. She had a sprig or two of the leafless calycanthus in her fingers, which she played with as she spoke. He hated the fragrance of that winter blossom ever afterwards.

‘You cannot? You cannot?’ he murmured almost unconsciously. ‘And why?’

He did not well know what he said, the paralysis of a sudden and intense disappointment was upon him; he forgot that he had no right to interrogate her, that no faintest breath of promise from her had ever given him title to upbraid her; the noise as of a million waves of stormy seas was surging in his ears.

‘Why?’ she repeated, with the same serenity, and with a kind of indulgence as to a wayward, imperious child. ‘Oh, for so many reasons!—not at all, believe me, from any kind of hesitation about Platon; he would do very well without me, though he would try to kill you, I suppose, because men have such odd ideas; besides they are always fretting about what the world thinks, just as when they play billiards they think about the opinion of the galerie; no, not for that, believe me; that is not my kind of feeling at all; but I have thought over it all very much, and I have decided that it would not do—for me. I should be irritable and unhappy in a false position, because I should have lost the power to shut my doors, other people would shut theirs instead; I should be quite miserable if I could not be disagreeable to persons whom I did not care to know, and no one in a false position ever dares be that; they smile, poor creatures, perpetually, like so many wax dolls from Giroux’s. Of course the moral people say it is the loss of self-respect which makes them so anxious to please, but it is not that: it is really the sense that it is of no use for them to be rude any more, because their rudeness cannot vex anybody. I quite understand Marie Antoinette; I should not mind the scaffold in the least, but I should dislike going in the cart. “Le roi avait une charrette,” you remember.’

Othmar had risen; as she glanced up at him, even over her calm and courageous temperament, a little chill passed that was almost one of alarm. Yet her sense of pleasure was keener than her fear: men’s souls were the chosen instrument on which she chose to play; if here she struck some deeper chords than usual, the melody gained for her ear. Profound emotions and eager passions were unknown to her in her own person, but they constituted a spectacle which diverted her if it did not weary her—the chances depended upon her mood. At this moment they pleased her; pleased her the more for that thrill of alarm, which was so new to her nerves.

Othmar did not speak: all the strength which was in him was taxed to its breaking point in the effort to restrain the passionate reproaches and entreaties which sprang to his lips, the burning tears of bitter disillusion and cruel disappointment which rushed to his sight and oppressed his breath. What a fool, what a madman, he had been again to throw down his heart like a naked, trembling, panting thing at her feet to be played with by her.

‘How well he looks like that!’ she thought. ‘ Most men grow red when they are so angry, but he grows like marble, and his eyes burn—there are great tears in them—he looks like Mounet-Sully as Hippolytus.’

Once more the momentary inclination came over her to trust herself to that stormy force of love which might lead to shipwreck and might lead to paradise; there were a beauty, a force, a fascination for her about him as he stood there in his silent rage, his eyes pouring down on her the lightnings of his reproach; but the impulse was not strong enough to conquer her; the world she would have given up with contemptuous indifference, but she would not surrender her own power to dictate to the world.

Her soft tranquil voice went on, as a waterfall may gently murmur its silvery song while a tempest shakes the skies.

‘I know you think that love is enough, but I assure you I should doubt it, even if I did—love you. Rousseau has said long before us that love lacks two things,—permanence and immutability; they seem to me synonymous, and I do not think that their absence is a defect; I think it even a merit. Yet, as they are absent, it cannot be worth while to pay so very much for so very defective a thing.’

‘God forgive you!’ cried her lover in passionate pain. ‘You betray me with the cruelest jest that woman ever played off on man, and you think that I can stand still to hearken to the pretty tinkling bells of a drawing-room philosophy!’

‘You do not stand still,’ she answered languidly, ‘you walk to and fro like a wounded panther in a cage. I have in no way betrayed you, and I am not jesting at all. I am saying the very simplest truth. You have asked me to do a momentous and irrevocable thing; and I have answered you truthfully that I should not shrink from it if I were convinced that I should never regret it. But I am not convinced——’

‘If you loved me you would be so!’ he said in a voice which was choked and almost inaudible.

‘Ah!—if!’ said Nadine Napraxine with a smile and a little sigh. ‘The whole secret lies in that one conjunction!’

His teeth clenched as he heard her as if in the intolerable pain of some mortal wound.

‘Besides, besides,’ she murmured, half to herself and half to him, ‘my dear Othmar, you are charming. You are like no one else; you please me; I confess that you please me, but you could not ensure me against my own unfortunate capacity for very soon tiring of everybody, and,—I have a conviction that in three months’ time I should be tired of you!’

A strong shudder passed over him from head to foot, as the words struck him with a greater shock than the blow of a dagger in his side would have given. He realised the bottomless gulf which separated him from the woman he adored,—the chasm of her own absolute indifference.

He, in his exaltation, was ready to give up all his future and fling away all his honour for her sake, and would have asked nothing more of earth and heaven than to have passed life and eternity at her feet; and she, swayed momentarily towards him by a faint impulse of the senses and the sensibilities, yet could draw back and calmly look outward into that vision of the possible future, which dazzled him as the mirage blinds and mocks the desert-pilgrim dying of thirst; she, with chill prescience could foresee the time when his presence would become to her a weariness, a chain, a yoke-fellow tiresome and dull!

She looked at him with a momentary compassion.

‘Dear Othmar, I am quite sure you have meant all you said,’ she murmured softly. ‘But, believe me, it would not do; it would not do for you and me, if it might for some people. I am not in the least shocked. I think your idea quite beautiful, like a poem; but I am certain it would never suit myself. I tire of everything so quickly, and then you know I am not in love with you. One wants to be so much in love to do that sort of thing, we should bore one another so infinitely after the first week. Yes, I am sure we should, though I know you are quite sincere in saying you would like it.’

Then, still with that demure, satisfied, amused smile, she turned away and lifted up the Moorish chocolate pot and poured out a little chocolate into her cup.

‘It has grown cold,’ she said, and tinkled a hand-bell which was on the tray to summon Mahmoud.

Othmar, who had sprung to his feet and stood erect, seized her wrist in his fingers and threw the bell aside.

‘There is no need to dismiss me,’ he said in a low tone. ‘Adieu! You can tell the story to Lord Geraldine.’

His face was quite colourless, except that around his forehead there was a dusky red mark where the blood had surged and settled as though he had been struck there with a whip.

He bowed low, and left her.

She stood before the Moorish tray and its contents with a sense of cold at her heart, but her little self-satisfied smile was still on her mouth.

‘He will come back,’ she thought. ‘He came back before; they always come back.’

She did not intend to go with him to Asia, but she did not, either, intend to lose him altogether.

‘He was superb in his fury and his grief,’ she thought, ‘and he meant every word of it, and he would do all that he said, more than he said. Perhaps it hurt him too much, perhaps I laughed a little too soon.’

She was like the child who had found its living bird the best of all playthings, but had forgotten that its plaything, being alive, could also die, and so had nipped the new toy too cruelly in careless little fingers, and had killed it.

CHAPTER XVII.

Othmar, as he left La Jacquemerille, forgot the boat in which he had come thither. He walked mechanically through the house, and out by the first gate which he saw before him. He was in that state of febrile excitation in which the limbs move without the will in an instinctive effort to find outlet to mental pain in bodily exertion. The gate he had passed through opened into a little wood of pines, whence a narrow path led upward into the hills above. With little consciousness of what he did, he ascended the mule-road which rose before him, and the chill of the morning air, as it blew through the tops of the swaying pines, was welcome to him. He had that cruel wound within him which a proud man suffers from when he has disclosed the innermost secrets of his heart in a rare moment of impulse, and has seen them lightly and contemptuously played with for a jest.

He had gone through life receiving much adulation but little sympathy, and giving as little confidence; in a moral isolation due to the delicacy of his own nature and to the flattery he received, which had early made him withhold himself from intimate friendships, fearing to trust where he would be only duped.

To her, in an unguarded hour, he had shown the loneliness and the longing which he felt, he had disclosed the empty place which no powers or vanities of the world could fill; he had staked the whole of his peace on the caprice of one woman, and he knew that, in the rough phrase which men would have used to him, he had been made a fool of in return; he had betrayed himself, and had nothing in return but the memory of a little low laughter, of a tranquil voice, saying: ‘Tout cela c’est le vieux jeu!’

He never knew very well how that day of the 2nd of January passed with him. He was sensible of walking long, of climbing steep paths going towards the higher mountains, of drinking thirstily at a little woodland fountain, of sitting for hours quite motionless, looking down on the shore far below, where the blue sea spread in the sunlight, and the towers of S. Pharamond were mere grey points amidst a crowd of evergreen and of silvery-leafed trees.

There was an irony in the sense that he could have purchased the whole province which lay beneath his feet, could have bought out the princeling who reigned in that little kingdom under old Turbia, as easily as he could have bought a bouquet for a woman, could have set emperors to war with one another by merely casting his gold into the scales of peace, could have created a city in a barren plain with as little effort as a child builds up a toy village on a table, and yet was powerless to command, or to arouse, the only thing on earth which he desired, one whit of feeling in the woman he loved!

It was late in the afternoon when he took his way homeward, having eaten nothing, only drunk thirstily of water wherever a little brook had made a well amongst the tufts of hepatica in the pine woods. He was a man capable of a spiritual love; if she had remained aloof from him for honour’s sake, but had cared for him, he would not have demurred to her choice, but would have accepted his fate at her hands and would have served her loyally with the devotion of a chivalrous nature.

All the passion, the pain, as of a boy’s first love, blent in him with the bitter revolts of mature manhood. He believed that Nadine Napraxine had never intended more than to amuse herself with his rejection; he believed that for the second time he had been the toy of an unscrupulous coquette. Whatever fault there might be in his love for her, it was love—absolute, strong, faithful, and capable of an eternal loyalty; he had laid his heart bare before her, and had meant in their utmost meaning all the words which he had uttered, all the offers which he had made. Despite his knowledge of her, he had allowed himself to be beguiled into a second confession of the empire she possessed over him, and for the second time he had been not alone rejected, but gently ridiculed with that quiet amused irony which had been to the force and heat of his passion like a fine spray of ice-cold water falling on iron at a white-heat. She had not alone wounded and stung him: she had humiliated him profoundly. If she had rejected him from honour, duty, or love for any other, he would have borne what men have borne a thousand times in silence, and with no sense of shame; but he was conscious that in her absolute indifference she had drawn him on to the fullest revelation of all he felt for her, only that her ready satire might find food in his folly, and her fine wit play with his suffering, as the angler plays the trout. She seemed to him to have betrayed him in the basest manner that a woman could betray a man who had no positive right to her loyalty. She had known so well how he loved her. He had told her so many times; unless she had been willing to hear the tale again, why had she bidden him come there in that charmed solitude in the hush and freshness of the early morning? When women desire not love, do they seat their lover beside them when all the world sleeps? He had been cheated, laughed at, summoned, and then dismissed; his whole frame thrilled with humiliation when he recalled the smiling subdued mockery of her voice as she had dismissed him.

He had been willing to give her his life, his good repute, his peace, his honour, his very soul; and she had sent him away with the calm, cool, little phrases with which she would have rejected a clumsy valser for a cotillon!

He had little vanity, but he knew himself to be one of those to whom the world cringes; one of those of whom modern life has made its Cæsars; he knew that what he had been willing to surrender to her had been no little thing; that he would have said farewell to the whole of mankind for her sake, and would have loved her with the romantic devoted force and fealty of a franker and fiercer time than his own; and she had drawn him on to again confess this, again offer this, and all it had seemed to her was vieux jeu, an archaic thing to laugh at, to yawn at, to be indulgent to, and tired by, in a breath!

He was a very proud man, and a man who had seldom or never shown what he either desired or suffered, yet he had laid his whole heart bare to her; and she, the only living being who had either power over him, or real knowledge of him, had looked at him with her little cool smile, and said, ‘In three months I should be tired of you.’

If, when the knight had killed his falcon for his lady, she had scoffed at it and thrown it out to feed the rats and sparrows he would have suffered as Othmar suffered now. He had killed his honour and his pride for her sake, and she had held them in her hands for a moment, and then had laughed a little and had thrown them away.

Where he sat all alone he felt his cheeks burn with the sense of an unendurable mortification. At this moment, for aught he knew, she, with her admirable mimicry and her merciless sarcasm, might be reacting the scene for the diversion of her companions! Passion was but vieux jeu; it could expect no higher distinction than to be ridiculed as comedy by a witty woman. Did not the universe only exist to amuse the languor of Nadine Napraxine?

The world, had it heard the story, would have blamed him for an unholy love, and praised her for her dismissal of it; but he knew that he had been as utterly betrayed as though he had been sold by her into the hands of assassins. She had drawn him on, and on, and on, until all his life had been laid at her feet, and then she had looked at it a little, carelessly, idly, and had said she had no use for it, as she might have said so of any sea-waste washed up on the sea-steps of her terrace with that noon.

Of course the world would have praised her; no doubt the world would have blamed him; but he knew that women who slay their lovers after loving them do a coarser but a kinder thing.

It was almost dark as he descended the road to S. Pharamond, intending when he reached home to make some excuse to his uncle and leave for Paris by the night express or by a special train. The path he took led through the orange-wood of Sandroz, which fitted, in a triangular-shaped piece of ground, between the boundaries of his own land and that of Millo. Absorbed as he was in his own thoughts, he recognised with surprise the figure of Yseulte as he pushed his way under the low boughs of the orange trees, and saw her within a yard of him. She was with the woman Nicole.

She did not see him until he was close to her, where she sat on a low stone wall, the woman standing in front of her. When she did so, her face spoke for her; it said what Nadine Napraxine’s had never said. The emotion of joy and timidity mingled touched him keenly in that moment, when he, with his millions of gold and of friends, had so strongly realised his own loneliness.

‘She loves me as much as she dare—as much as she can, without being conscious of it,’ he thought, as he paused beside her. She did not speak, she did not move; but her colour changed and her breath came quickly. She had slipped off the wall and stood irresolute, as though inclined to run away, the glossy leaves and the starry blossoms of the trees consecrated to virginity were all above her and around her. She glanced at him with an indefinite fear; she fancied he was angered by the return of the casket; he looked paler and sterner than she had ever seen him look.

He paused a moment and said some commonplace word.

Then he saw that her eyes were wet with tears, and that she had been crying.

‘What is the matter?’ he said, gently. ‘Has anything vexed you?’

‘They are sending her away,’ said Nicole Sandroz, with indignant tears in her own eyes, finding that she did not reply for herself. ‘They are sending her to the Vosges, where, as Monsieur knows very well, I make no doubt, the very hares and wolves are frozen in the woods at this month of the year.’

‘Are you indeed going away?’ he asked of Yseulte herself.

She did not speak: she made a little affirmative gesture.

‘Why is that? Bois le Roy, in this season, will be a cruel prison for you.’

‘My cousin wishes it,’ said the girl; she spoke with effort; she did not wish to cry before him; the memory of all that her cousin had said that morning was with her in merciless distinctness.

Nicole broke out in a torrent of speech, accusing the tyrants of Millo in impassioned and immoderate language, and devoting them and theirs to untold miseries in retribution.

Yseulte stopped her with authority; ‘You are wrong, Nicole; do not speak in such a manner, it is insolent. You forget that, whether I am in the Vosges or here, I equally owe my cousin everything.’

She paused; she was no more than a child. Her departure was very cruel to her; she had been humiliated and chastised that day beyond her power of patience; she had said nothing, done nothing, but in her heart she had rebelled passionately when they had taken away her ivory casket. They had left her the heart of a woman in its stead.

Othmar was ignorant that his casket, fateful as Pandora’s, had been returned, but he divined that his gift had displeased those who disposed of her destiny, and had brought about directly or indirectly her exile from Millo.

‘When do you go?’ he asked abruptly.

‘To-morrow.’

As she answered him the tears she could not altogether restrain rolled off her lashes. She turned away.

‘Let us go in, Nicole,’ she murmured. ‘You know Henriette is waiting for me.’

‘Let her wait, the cockered-up Parisienne, who shrieks if she see a pig and has hysterics if she get a spot of mud on her stockings!’ grumbled Nicole, who was the sworn foe of the whole Paris-born and Paris-bred household of Millo. But Yseulte had already moved towards the house. When she had gone a few yards away, however, she paused, returned, and approached Othmar. She looked on the ground, and her voice trembled as she spoke: ‘I ought to thank you, M. Othmar—I do thank you. It was very beautiful. I would have kept it all my life.’

‘Ah!’ said Othmar.

He understood; he was moved to a sudden anger, which penetrated even his intense preoccupation. He had meant to do this poor child a kindness, and he had only done her great harm.

Yseulte had turned away, and had gone rapidly through the orange-trees towards the house.

‘She is not happy?’ said Othmar to her foster-mother, whose tongue, once loosed, told him with the eloquence of indignation of all the sorrows suffered by her nursling. ‘And they will make her a nun, Monsieur!’ she cried; ‘a nun! That child, who is like a June lily. For me, I say nothing against the black and grey women, though Sandroz calls them bad names. There are good women amongst them, and when one lies sick in hospital one is glad of them; but there are women enough in this world who have sins and shame to repent them of to fill all the convents from here to Jerusalem. There are all the ugly ones too, and the sickly ones and the deformed ones, and the heart-broken; for them it is all very well; the cloister is home, the veil is peace, they must think of heaven, or go mad; it is best they should think of it. But this child to be a nun!—when she should be running with her own children through the daisies—when she should be playing in the sunshine like the lambs, like the kids, like the pigeons!’ ——

Othmar heard her to the end; then without answer he bade her good-day, and descended the sloping grass towards his house.

‘They say he has a million a year,’ said Nicole to herself, as she looked after him. ‘Well, he does not seem to be happy upon it. The lads that bring up the rags on their heads from the ships look gayer than he, all in the stench and the muck as they are, and never knowing that they will earn their bread and wine from one day to another.’

She kicked a stone from her path, and hurried after her nursling.

Othmar went quickly on to his own woods. ‘They could not even let her have that toy,’ he thought with an emotion, vague but sincere, outside the conflict of passion, wrath, and mortification which Nadine Napraxine had aroused in him. He saw the sudden happiness, so soon veiled beneath reserve and timidity, which had shone on the girl’s face as she had first seen him under the orange boughs. He saw her beautiful golden eyes misty with the tears she had had too much courage to shed; he saw her slender throat swell with subdued emotion as she had approached him and said shyly, ‘I would have kept it all my life.’

All her life,—in the stone cell of some house of the Daughters of Christ or the Sisters of St. Marie!

‘To love is more, yet to be loved is something,’

he thought. ‘What treasures for one’s heart and senses are in her—if one could only care!’

CHAPTER XVIII.

When he reached home that evening he found on his writing-table the ivory casket and the letter of Madame de Vannes. In the pain and the passion which wrestled together against his manhood in him, he scarcely heeded either, yet they brought before his memory the face of Yseulte, and the sound of her soft grave voice with that sweet thrill of youth in it which is like the thrill of the thrush’s in the woods at spring-time. She had youth, but she would have no spring-time.

And in the strong and impotent rage which consumed him, in the pain of bruised and aching nerves, and the sickening void which the certain loss of what alone is loved brings with it, Othmar, seeing the ivory casket, and glancing at the letter which he had had no patience to read through, thought to himself, ‘The child loves me; she will have a wretched life; what if I try to forget? They threw virgins to the Minotaur. Shall I try to appease with one this cruel fire of love, which leaves me no peace or wisdom?’

It was the act of a madman to attempt to make one woman take the place of another to the senses or to the heart, but in that moment he was not master of himself. He was only sensible of a cruel insult which he had received from the hand he loved best on earth; of a cruel betrayal which was but the more merciless because wrought with so sweet a smile, so apparent an unconsciousness, so seemingly innocent a malice.

He passed the night and the next morning locked in his own room; when he left it, and met the Baron Friederich, he said to him:

‘I have thought over all you said the other day. You are right, no doubt. Will you go across to our neighbours at Millo and ask of them the honour of the hand of their cousin, of Mademoiselle de Valogne?’

The Baron stared at him with a little cry of amaze.

‘For you?’ he stammered.

‘For me,’ said Othmar. ‘What have you said yourself? I do not want wealth; I want good blood, beauty, and innocence; they are all possessed by Mademoiselle de Valogne. Go; your errand will please them. They will pardon some breach of etiquette. It will be a mission which you will like.’

As the Baron, a little later, rolled through the gates of Millo in full state, his shrewd knowledge of men and their madnesses made him think:

‘So the Princess Napraxine evidently will have nothing to say to him! A la bonne heure! There are some honest women left then amongst the great ladies. She could so easily have ruined him! He takes a droll way to cure himself, but it is not a bad one. The worst is, that this sort of cure never lasts long, and when she can make the unhappiness of two persons, instead of only the happiness of one, perhaps Madame la Princesse will be tempted to make it!’

CHAPTER XIX.

On the following day Platon Napraxine drove home from Monte Carlo at sunset with a piece of news to carry there which amused and unusually animated him.

He went up the stone stairs of the terrace of La Jacquemerille with the quick step of one who is eager to deliver himself of his tidings, and approached, with a rapidity unfrequent with him, the spot where his wife sat with her guests under the rose and white awning beside the marble balustrade and the variegated aloes.

The Princess Nadine was also full of unwonted animation; her cheek had its sea-shell flush, her eyes a vague and pleased expectancy; she was laughing a little and listening a good deal; besides her usual companions, she had there a group of Austrian and Russian diplomatists and some Parisian boulevardiers. They were just taking their leave as she was taking her tea, but it was not very greatly of them that she was thinking: she was thinking as she heard the roll of her husband’s carriage wheels beneath the carouba trees;——‘Ten to one Othmar will return with him.’

She lost her gay expression as she saw that he was alone.

All the day she had expected the man whom she had banished to return. She was accustomed to spaniels who crawled humbly up after a beating to solicit another beating rather than remain unnoticed. She had dismissed a certain apprehension which had told her that she had gone too far with the reflection that a man who loved her once did so for ever, and that, as he had returned from Asia, so he would return this morning, however great his offence or his humiliation might have been.

‘He is more romantic than most,’ she had thought, ‘but after all, he must be made of the same stuff.’

Napraxine approached her hurriedly, and scarcely giving himself time to formally greet the gentlemen there, cried to her aloud:

‘Ecoutez donc, Madame! You will never guess what has happened.’

‘It is of no use for us to try then,’ said his wife. ‘You are evidently gonflé with some tremendous intelligence. Pray unburden yourself. Perhaps the societies for the protection of animals have had Strasburg pâtés made illegal?’

‘I have seen the Duchesse, I have seen Baron Fritz, I have seen Melville,’ answered her husband impetuously and triumphantly, ‘and they all say the same thing, so that there cannot be a doubt that it is true. Othmar marries that little cousin of Cri-Cri: the one of whom they meant to make a nun. What luck for her! But they say she is very beautiful, and only sixteen.’

The people assembled round her table raised a chorus of exclamation and of comment. Napraxine stood amidst them, delighted; his little social bomb had burst with the brilliancy and the noise that he had anticipated.

Nadine Napraxine turned her head with an involuntary movement of surprise.

‘Othmar!’ she repeated; her large black eyes opened fully with a perplexed expression.