PRINCESS NAPRAXINE
I.
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DOROTHY FORSTER. By WALTER BESANT.
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A REAL QUEEN. By R. E. FRANCILLON.
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CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly, W.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1 1
Chapter 2 46
Chapter 3 71
Chapter 4 96
Chapter 5 130
Chapter 6 155
Chapter 7 177
Chapter 8 200
Chapter 9 234
Chapter 10 269
Chapter 11 296
Chapter 12 319
Chapter 13 336
PRINCESS NAPRAXINE
BY
OUIDA
[Illustration]
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.'