'The "Zostera" looks tempting in the sunshine,' said Nadine Napraxine,
as she rose and leaned on the marble balustrade to gaze over the sea,
where the stately sailing yacht of Geraldine was at anchor outside the
little bay of La Jacquemerille, which was too shallow to be entered.
'I will go out in her in ten minutes' time. I prefer to watch the
sunset from the sea, and the sunset will be very fine to-day, for
there are a few clouds above; the sky is usually so terribly
monotonous here, it is like an eulogy of your predecessor at the
Academy: _il y a trop de bleu_. Monsignore, I will take you back to
Nice by the coast. I dislike coasting usually, but along this shore it
is pretty, and besides, it is too late to go far out to sea. Lord
Geraldine, go and give your men the order. I will go and change my
clothes.--Wilkes, you will come?'
Geraldine sullenly obeyed, and went down the steps to where his long
boat was still in waiting. In a very few moments the Princess
Napraxine returned, not clothed in any maritime fashion, for she
thought that sort of thing theatrical, foolish, and staring; but
wearing a dark serge gown, fitting with marvellous precision to the
perfect contour and lines of her form, and carrying a scarlet parasol
large enough to shelter the dignity of any Chinese mandarin. She wore
yachting shoes and scarlet stockings; her feet, like her hands, were
such as sculptors dream of but seldom see.
'Tell them to put in my furs,' she said to Geraldine. 'Are you ready?
It is always so cold here when the sun has gone down. We will take
Count Othmar and Monsignore Melville to Nice. It is a beautiful day
for a sail, just wind enough and not too much. Platon goes to his
adored _tripot_; I wonder he stayed to eat his breakfast.'
'The "Zostera," of course, is at your commands,' murmured Geraldine,
with ill-disguised ill-humour. 'For myself, if you will excuse me, I
will accompany the Prince.'
She smiled, understanding his ill-humour well enough.
'How immoral they are!' she said to Melville. 'The _salle de jeu_ by
daylight is monstrous; but since it is their form of happiness----'
'Happiness!' muttered Geraldine between his teeth.
'All your preaching and mine will not alter them,' she continued. 'It
is an extraordinary thing; neither Platon nor Lord Geraldine cares a
straw for money; neither of them would awake a whit merrier if their
fortunes were quadrupled to-morrow; and yet they find absolute
intoxication in playing for money! What an inexplicable anomaly!
Othmar is far more consistent. He despises his own fortune and the
table of M. Blanc with equal sincerity.'
'I do not despise wealth, I dislike it,' said Othmar.
'Why should you do either?' said Melville. 'Look at the immense
potentialities of great riches.'
'That is what I said this morning,' continued Princess Nadine.
'Surely great riches help one very nearly to happiness,' continued
Melville. 'I do not mean from the _bourgeois_ point of view, but
simply because they remove so many material obstacles in the way of
happiness. There can be hardly any great difficulties for a very rich
man. He goes where he chooses, he can purchase whatever he desires;
there are swept aside from his path for ever all the thousand and one
annoyances and hindrances which beset the man who is not rich. Only
imagine a person who cannot reach his dying child because he has not
money enough for the journey; imagine another who has his homestead
made intolerable to him by the erection of a steam-mill, and yet is
obliged to end his days in it because he cannot afford to move;
imagine yet another with weak lungs, who would recover his strength if
he could take a house in the country, in the south, and yet cannot
leave his business, which chains him to a city in the north. Those are
the sort of sorrows from which wealth sets free a man or a woman. One
may say roughly, I think, that if his health be good, a very rich
person is exempt from all other misfortunes than those which come to
him from his affections or his friendships; his troubles are, in a
word, entirely those of sentiment.'
'Precisely,' said Nadine Napraxine.
'Un seul être est mort et tout est dépeuplé!'
murmured Othmar; 'you will not allow, or cannot comprehend that,
Princess?'
'I can imagine that a man might fancy so for twenty-four hours; but
even if the fancy endure, a rich man can enjoy his desolation while a
poor man cannot. Part of the advantages of the rich man consists in
his having the leisure and the luxury to muse upon his own
unhappiness. I think you forget what a great happiness that is!'
'You believe neither in love nor in sorrow,' said Othmar, abruptly.
'I am aware they exist, if you mean that,' she replied; 'but their
existence chiefly depends upon the imagination.'
Othmar gave an impatient gesture.
'And, like all pleasures of the imagination,' she added, 'require
leisure for their development. The rich man or woman enjoys that
leisure, and if he or she like to raise a gigantic mushroom under
glass, in the way of exaggerated affections or sentimental regrets,
they are at liberty to do so. Besides, surely, no one can deny that
there is a captivating sense of power in vast riches; the fancy can
take endless flights in that golden sphere; we do not know that
delight, because, though people think us rich, in reality we are no
such thing, in reality our expenses keep for ever ahead of our income,
as I think they do with most people; but Othmar, who is actually,
positively, fabulously rich, who is all alone, who spends nothing on
himself--at least, he used to spend nothing--why, he could build you a
cathedral, Monsignore Melville, in every city of the world of jasper
and chalcedony, whatever they are, and never be a sou the poorer for
doing it.'
'Are you inclined, Count Othmar?' said Melville.
'If it would make all men like you I should be so,' said Othmar. 'But
I regret to see that the Princess Napraxine has apparently retained
only one recollection of me, and that one is of my "wall of ingots,"
as she termed it, which appears to separate me from her sympathies.'
'Did you hear that?' she said, not very well pleased, though it was
not in human power to confuse her. 'We will let those people go to
Monte Carlo, and we will have a run before the wind and leave you and
Monsignore at Nice.'
'But it is not my own yacht.'
'But it is mine when I am in it, and I invite you both. Come.'
Othmar hesitated till she gave him a little look, one brief fleeting
look. Two years seemed to have fled away; he was again on the
staircase of the Grand Opéra, she gave him her fan to carry, she had
on a cloak of soft white feathers, a gardenia dropped out of her
bouquet, he picked it up; in the whole glittering mass of Paris he
only saw that one delicate face, pale as a narcissus, with two
wonderful liquid eyes like night; and, with a sort of shock, he
recollected himself, and realised that he was standing on the terrace
of La Jacquemerille beside a woman whom he had vowed to put out of his
life for ever and aye.
'Come!' said Princess Nadine, and he did not resist her.
He followed in her shadow down the flight of marble steps leading to
the sea; while Geraldine, with a tempestuous rage stifled in his
heart, drove Napraxine (who never drove himself), as furiously as
Russian horses can be driven, along the sunny road, shaded with olives
and caruba trees, which led from La Jacquemerille to the gambler's
paradise a few miles westward on the shore.
'When boys sulk, they should always be punished,' thought the Princess
Nadine with silent diversion, as she heard the plunge and rush of the
horses on the other side of the gardens, and divined that their driver
was already repenting of the moment of petulance and of jealousy in
which he had exiled himself from her presence, and condemned himself
to the society of her lord.
'Poor Platon is the dullest of companions, and Geraldine thinks it
_dans son rôle_ to detest him; and yet he goes with him by way of
showing his pique against Othmar. How stupid, how intensely stupid!'
she thought, with exceeding amusement to herself, as she descended the
water-stairs and stepped into Geraldine's boat.
It was droll to her that anybody should either detest or envy her
husband, he was so infinitesimally little in her own life. She readily
did justice to his good humour, his loyalty, his courage, and his
honesty; but those qualities were all obscured by his dulness and
heaviness, and also by the simple fact that he was her husband, as the
good points in a landscape are blotted out by a fog. 'Dogs' virtues!
all of them,' she called them, with a mixture of esteem and
impatience, of appreciation and contempt.
The boat glided through a quarter of a mile of blue water, and brought
them to the side of Geraldine's yacht, a beautiful racer-like schooner
with canvas white as foam, and flying the pennon of Cowes.
'My poor "Berenice" was once as elegant and spotless as this,' said
Othmar, 'but she has been through sore stress of weather. Her sails
are rags, her sides are battered, her rudder is gone. She made a sorry
spectacle when we hove to last night, but I am attached to her. I
shall not buy another yacht.'
'You always take things so seriously,' said Princess Nadine. 'A yacht
is a toy like any other; when one is broken get another. Why should
you be attached to a thing of teak and copper?'
'She has served me well,' he said simply. 'You do not understand
attachment of any kind, Princess.'
'It is only an amiable form of prejudice. Certainly I do not
understand why you should be attached to a thing made of wood and
metal.'
'Or to a thing made of flesh and blood! I believe that is equally
ridiculous in the eyes of Madame Napraxine,' said Othmar, with some
bitterness. 'May I ask, how are your children?' he added after a
pause.
'My two ugly little boys? Oh, quite well; they are never anything
else. They are as strong as ponies. They are _very_ ugly; they have
the Tartar face, which is the ugliest in Europe; they are so like
Platon that it is quite absurd.'
Othmar was silent; the words did not seem to him in her usual
perfectly good taste. They did not accord with the delicate
narcissus-like face of their speaker.
'I remember that you never cared for your children,' he said, and
added, after a pause, 'Nor for anything that had the misfortune to
love you.'
'I do not think the children love me at all,' she said, with a smile.
'Why should they? Their father they adore because he adores them. It
is always _quid pro quo_ in any love.'
'Not always,' said Othmar, curtly.
'Ah, you love me still,' thought Princess Nadine, without
astonishment.
Aloud she said, 'It must be, or the thing is absurd, it dies a natural
death, or rather, is starved to death; nothing one-sided has any
strength.'
'I think you have seen many living proofs to the contrary,' he
answered. 'But pride may strangle a love which is not shared; it is a
violent death, but a sure one.'
'Why will men always talk of love?' she said, with some impatience.
'After all, how little place it takes up in real life! ambition,
society, amusement, politics, money-making, a hundred things, take up
a hundredfold more space.'
'It is not to every one the unnecessary molecule that it is to Madame
Napraxine,' said Othmar. 'You have seen a glass of water touched by a
single drop of quinine? It is only a drop, but it embitters the whole
glassful. So do the attachments of life embitter it.'
'If you put the drop in, no doubt,' said Princess Napraxine, drily.
'Or if some one else put it in,' muttered Othmar, 'before one knows
what one drinks.'
'Oh! one must never let others meddle with one, even in drinking a
glass of water,' replied his tormentor. She knew very well that he
meant to reproach her, but she bore the reproach lightly. If the
remembrance of her embittered any man's existence it was not her
fault; it was the fault of those who would not be content with adoring
her as the poor people of this sea-shore adored their Madonna shut
away behind a glass case.
'By the way, Othmar, have you not a villa here?' she said, suddenly
remembering the fact. 'I believe you have five hundred and fifty-five
houses altogether, have you not? Is there not some place near Nice
that belongs to you?'
'S. Pharamond? Yes. It is where I slept last night. My father bought
some olive and pine wood and built the house in the midst of them. It
has a fine view seaward.'
'Then we shall be neighbours?'
'If I do not go to Paris.'
'Of course you will go to Paris, but you will go one day and come back
another, like everybody else at this season; though, to be sure, I
dare say you are longing for the smell of the asphalte after a cycle
of Cathay?'
'No; the asphalte is not necessary to me. It is more monotonous, on
the whole, than the desert.'
'Ah! you were never a Parisien _parisiennant_; you were always in
revolt against something or another, though one never could understand
very well what. When you condescended to our amusements, it was with
the air of a man who, to please a child, plays with tin soldiers; that
sort of air of contemptuous condescension has made you many enemies.
There is nothing makes the world so angry as indifference to what it
thinks delightful.'
'You have offended it in that way yourself, Princess.'
'Often; but not quite with your insolence. A man who prefers his
library to the clubs is beyond all pardon; and, besides, I am seen
everywhere where it is worth while to be seen; you are--or
were--generally conspicuous by your absence.'
'I imagine the world has grown as indifferent to me as I am to it, and
having forgotten has so forgiven me. I have been away eighteen
months.'
'The world never forgets its rich men, my dear Othmar. It may forget
its great ones. Will forget them, indeed, unless they have a drum
beaten very loudly before them. You might be great, I think, if you
liked; you have so many talents, so much power.'
'I might buy a kingdom the size of Morocco or Montenegro? Very likely:
such sovereignty does not attract me.'
'Of course I do not mean that: you do not want to be a Prince
Floristan; you do not love the race of princes well enough. But were I
you I should set some great ambition before me.'
'Pardon me; you would do no such thing if you were in my position. You
would feel, as I feel, the numbing influence of what you called just
now the "blank wall of ingots." When you can buy men you do not
estimate them highly enough either to serve or rule them. I have all
I can possibly want--materially. I have no reason to seek anything.'
'Why do English nobles enter public life? They want nothing,
materially, either. Some of them are of rank, also, so high in place
that nothing can be added to their position.'
'God knows why they do,' said Othmar, 'except that I think the
Englishman is an animal like the beaver, not happy without work.
Besides, I think they imagine that they serve their country, a
delusion, but an honourable one, which must make them very happy. As I
have no country I cannot be attached to it.'
'You could choose one; you are allied to several.'
'That would not be the same thing. To adore the motherland one must
have known no arms, no hearts but hers; no country is more than a
stepmother to me.'
'You are a very much envied man, Othmar, but you are not a happy man.'
He looked her straight in the eyes.
'I have been unhappy, but I have conquered my folly. It is ingratitude
to fate to be wretched while one has health and strength and no
material cares to contend with.'
'All the same, you are not happy now,' she thought, but she said, with
her sweetest smile, 'You admit that you have all you want materially;
all the rest is a dream, not worth keeping awake about for one hour.
By the way, as you speak of countries--you are French now by law, I
think?'
'My grandfather was naturalised for his own interests, as you know;
but our people were Croat peasants.'
'I know I have heard you always say so; but I believe it is a fable.
_You_ do not come from any peasantry; besides, surely Sclavonia is old
enough and dim enough to give you any mystical heroic ancestry you may
prefer.'
'They might be robbers,' said Othmar, 'I do not know. There is not
much to choose.'
'Everybody who is noble comes from robbers of some sort,' said
Princess Napraxine; 'what were the Hohenstauffen, the Hohenzollern,
the Habsburg, the Grimaldi, the Montefeltro, the Colonna? Robbers all,
sitting on high in their fortresses, and swooping down like hawks on
the fords, on the highways, on the moorlands, on the forests, on the
little towns below them. You may be quite sure that is what your
people did in Croatia.'
'You are very kind to try and console me,' said Othmar. 'Nobility, I
think, consists in being able to trace the past of your forefathers
and to have your charters; the past of mine is lost in darkness, and
my charters are lost with them. Truthfully we can only date from 1767,
when Marc Othmar, who dealt in horses, began to lend money in Agram.
It is not a lofty beginning; it is not even a creditable one. But I do
not think that to pretend that Marc Othmar, the horse dealer or horse
stealer, was a hero and saint would mend matters. I accept him as what
he was, but I cannot be proud of him; even sometimes I am on the eve
of cursing him; at all events, of wishing he had never existed.'
'My dear Othmar, you are very strange sometimes----'
'Am I? One is never content with what one has. There is nothing
strange in that. If you will deign to remember me at all, you will
remember that I was never pleased with being the head of the house of
Othmar; I would give all its millions for an unblemished descent.'
'Then you are ungrateful to your fortunes, and do not understand your
own times.'
'Perhaps I understand them too well, and that is why I despise what
they over-estimate.'
'And over-estimate yourself what they have found worth but little.
Look at most of our contemporaries and associates. Have their
unblemished names served them in much? How many have remembered that
_noblesse oblige_? How many of them ally themselves with the mud of
the earth for the sake of large dowries? how many mortgage their old
lands till they have not a sod left which they can call their own? how
many waste all their energies and all their health in a routine of
miserable and stupid follies which are hardly even to be dignified as
vice?'
She spoke with animation; her cheeks had a faint flush, delicate as
that of the waxen bells of the begonia flowers, her eyes were full of
light. Othmar looked at her with a passion of regret. If only she had
loved him, he thought he could have conquered the world, have renewed
the impossibilities of Alexander, have done all that visionary boys
dream of doing as they read their Euripides or their Æschylus in a
summer noon under blossoming lime trees.
'You will take from Rome what you yourself have carried there,' says a
German writer, and it is with love the same thing; you take from it
what you carry to it, you get out of it so much spirituality, and no
more, than you bear thereto. To others Nadine Napraxine was a
coquette, a _mondaine_, a mere _élégante_ of the elegant world; but to
him she was the one woman of the earth; she could have inspired him
with any heroism, she could have moved him to any sacrifice, she could
have compensated him for any loss; he saw in her a million
possibilities which no one ever saw, which might be only the fruits of
his imagination, but yet were wholly real to him, unspeakably lovely
and attractive. She had offended him, alienated him, treated his
ardour and his earnestness as a baby treats its toys, and his reason
condemned her inexorably and often; yet she was the one woman on earth
for him, and he had tried to hate her, to drive her out of his memory,
and had thought that he succeeded, and had only failed.
'If you were like other men of your generation,' she pursued, 'you
would be much more content. You do not care for any of the things
which fill up their time. You have magnificent horses, but you never
race with them, you never even hunt. You care nothing for cards, or
for any games of hazard. You do not shoot except, as you justly
observed, a fellow-creature now and then when he provokes you. You do
not care to have yourself talked about, which is the supreme felicity
of the age you live in; your solitary extravagance is to have operas
and concerts given in your own houses with closed doors, like Ludwig
of Bavaria, and that seems rather an eccentricity than an extravagance
to the world at large. You are a great student, but you care about the
contents of your books, not about the binding or the date of their
edition, so that you never commit the follies of a bibliophile. You do
not care about any of your fine places; you have an idea that you
would like a cottage just because you are tired of palaces. You vex
women by your indifference to their attractions, and men by your
indifference to their pursuits. Because circumstance has made you a
conspicuous person with an electric light always upon you, you sigh
to be an _homme d'intérieur_, with no light on you at all except that
of your own hearth. It is Louis Seize and the locksmith, Domitian and
the cabbage-garden, Honorius and the hens, over again. History always
repeats itself, and how one wishes that it did not!'
'I am flattered, Madame, that you deign to draw my portrait, since it
shows that you have not wholly forgotten my features,' said Othmar,
with some bitterness. 'At present I have not discovered the hen, the
cabbages, or the keys that will make life worth living to me. No doubt
the fault lies with myself.'
'I think you have not the dramatic instinct which alone makes life
interesting,' replied Nadine Napraxine. 'You do not divert yourself
with the faults, the follies, and the meannesses of men; you sigh over
them, and your regret is so poignant that it prevents your seeing how
infinitely droll their blunders are in reality.'
'I think,' she continued, 'that there are only two ways of looking on
life which make it interesting, or even endurable. The one is the way
of Corot, which adores Nature, and can find an absolute ecstasy in
the sound of the wind and the play of the sunshine, and asks nothing
more of fate than a mill-stream and a handful of green leaves. The
other is the way of Rochefoucauld and of St. Simon, which finds
infinite and unending diversion in watching the feebleness and the
mistakes of human nature, which regards the world with what I call the
dramatic instinct, and amuses itself endlessly with the attitudes and
genuflections of its courtiers, the false phrases and the balked
calculations. Now, though you are a very clever man, my dear Othmar,
you cannot be put in either of these categories. You know too much of
the world for the first, and you have too much softness of heart for
the second. Now, were you like Baron Fritz----'
'My uncle is the one perfectly happy man that I have ever known,'
replied Othmar. 'It is because he is the most perfect of egotists.
According to him the sun shines only for the Othmar, as Joshua fancied
it only shone for the Israelites.'
'It is not only that,' she said, 'it is because he has the dramatic
instinct. He sees the dramatic side to all that he does; suppliant
monarchs, bankrupt statesmen, intriguing diplomatists; men who carry
him schemes to tunnel the earth from pole to pole, and great ladies
who want him to lend them money on their family diamonds; they are all
so many comedians in the eyes of Baron Fritz. He pulls their strings
and makes them dance at his pleasure. I quite understand how the whole
comedy amuses him so greatly that he can never be conscious of a
moment of _ennui_. It is a great pity that you are not like that. You
would leave such witty memoirs!--for you can be witty,--or you would
be if you were not always so melancholy.'
'I regret, Madame,' said Othmar, 'that I cannot alter the manner of my
life even to have the honour of amusing you after my death!'
Across the bows of the 'Zostera' at that moment there passed,
perilously near, one of the lateen-sailed boats so common on the
coast, with their freights of fruits, of fish, of olives, or of market
produce. The boat was full of lemons and of oranges, which gleamed
like virgin gold in the bright sunshine of the tranquil afternoon. A
peasant woman was managing the sail, a young girl was steering.
'What a beautiful face!' said Nadine Napraxine, who had a great love
of beauty, and the frank acknowledgment of it of a woman high above
all possibilities of envy.
Othmar looked where she pointed.
'A very lovely face,' he said indifferently.
'She does not look like a peasant,' continued Mme. Napraxine; 'that
little grey gown speaks of some convent. She steers well, for they
were terribly near. Who is that very pretty child, Monsignore? I
suppose you know all the flock of which you are given the winter
shepherding.'
'Pray do not make me responsible for all the black sheep of these
shores,' said Melville, drawing near and looking at the boat, which
was going slowly and heavily against the wind, and labouring under a
weighty load. He said as he did so, with a little surprise:
'Why, that is Yseulte de Valogne!'
'Yseulte de Valogne! What a name of the Romaunt de la Rose and
black-letter Chronicles! Pray who may she be, may I ask?'
'They call her here Cendrillon,' said Melville, a little sadly. 'As
for her name, the de Valogne belong to French history; surely you
remember to have heard of some of them? Aymar, who fell at the combat
of the Thirty; and Adhémar, who was Constable of France under Louis
XII.; and Maximin, who was a general under Condé; and Gui, who was
ruined by his display at Versailles, a Colonel of the Guard and a
great officer of State. The family is as historic as the Louvre
itself, but the poor child is literally _sans le sou_.'
'So that she is reduced to sell oranges?' said Nadine. 'How very
touching! Othmar will purchase immediately several bales.'
'No, she does not sell oranges,' said Melville, 'but perhaps she is
more to be pitied than those who do. A great name and no dower--it is
to have silver bells to your shoes but no stockings inside them.'
'Surely she must have stockings, I mean relations?'
'Only very distant ones. She is a far-off cousin of your friend and
neighbour the Duchesse de Vannes, who brings her up; that is, sends
her to her convent, pays for her frocks, and allows her to pass her
holidays at one of de Vannes' country-houses. I do not know that we
could reasonably expect the Duchesse to do more, only there are two
ways of doing a thing, and she does not do this in the best possible
manner.'
'Cri-Cri cannot love a very pretty girl of sixteen, it would not be in
nature, certainly not in her nature,' said the Princess, with one of
her moments of frankness. 'I imagine they will make her embrace the
religious life; what else can they do with her?'
'It is what they will probably end with,' said Melville, with a tinge
of sadness. 'It is hard for a girl of noble blood and no dower to end
otherwise in France. The men who ought to marry her, her equals, will
marry instead some Americans with dollars, whose fathers were stokers
or pork-butchers.'
'But are there no other de Valogne?'
'None; she is the last of a family which was as extravagant as it was
distinguished. Othmar may have heard of her father, the last Comte de
Valogne; he was a _viveur enragé_, and finished the little that had
been left by Count Gui, the hero of Versailles, and the fortune of his
wife as well, who was a De Creusac. She died in childbed. Her mother
had the care of the child, and he went on with his life of pleasure
until he broke his neck riding at La Marche. The old Marquise de
Creusac, when she also died, could not leave her granddaughter a
farthing. The de Creusac had been ruined in the Revolution, and the
sons of the Marquise, who would never have anything to do with their
brother-in-law, were both killed in the war of '70. There was no one
left but the Duchesse de Vannes, who was a third cousin of de Valogne,
to do anything. She took the child in her charge, as I have said, and
has behaved admirably, in the letter of charity, if something has been
lacking of the spirit. So long as the girl is being educated the thing
is easy; but when the time comes when she must leave her convent, as
she will have to do in two years' time, the problem will not be so
easy of solution; they will have to decide on her future; at present
her fate has been easily settled, but soon the terrible question will
arise,--who will marry her without a dower? I believe they mean to
make her enter the religious life, as you said; for the men who
probably would marry her for sake of alliance with the de Vannes, will
be those with whom the de Vannes would utterly refuse to ally
themselves.'
'A convent! Good heavens, for a child like a Greuze picture!'
exclaimed Othmar.
Melville added sadly:
'It is a refuge; but myself, I would never have the religious life
embraced only for its safety. I never approve of looking at Deity as a
superior sort of chaperon. If all the soul be not aspirant of its own
accord to a spiritual sacrifice the vows are a mere shibboleth.'
'What soul shrined in a healthy body would aspire to the cloister at
sixteen?' thought Othmar, as the Princess said, 'All this is very
interesting, Monsignore, but it does not explain how a _protégée_ of
my neighbours, the high and mighty de Vannes, comes to be rowing in a
boat full of oranges.'
'Ah, that I cannot tell you,' said Melville, 'but I believe her
foster-mother has a _bastide_ near Nice; it may be she is with her
foster-mother now. I knew her well when she was a little child, living
with the old Marquise de Creusac in that extreme but refined and
reserved poverty of which only the old noblesse has the secret. The
Marquise was one of the sweetest and most pious women I have ever had
the honour to know; but she could, if necessary, have withered a king
into the earth with a glance. The child promised to be like her, but
had something _bouillante_ and impetuous, which had come to her from
her father, and which, beneath her high-bred manner and her chastened
tone, made her, as a baby, intensely interesting.'
'Dear Monsignore,' said the Princess, with a little impatience,
'surely you have mistaken your vocation, and should have been a writer
of novels; you draw portraits with the skill of Octave Feuillet.'
'I have only said what I have seen,' said Melville, good-humouredly.
'Probably Feuillet only does the same.'
The boat with the oranges had passed ahead towards the shore, its
Venetian red side was dipping in the trough of the waves, its old
striped sail was swaying in the wind; there was a speck of gold in the
sun where the oranges were.
'You had better rescue this distressed damsel and marry her, Othmar!'
said the Princess Napraxine, with an unkind little laugh. 'She seems
made on purpose for you. She has the unsullied descent which you are
always sighing for, and you certainly can dispense with a _dot_.'
For answer he only looked at her; but she understood his answer.
Melville vaguely understood also that in his innocent praises of his
Cinderella he had unwittingly struck a false chord, and he was too
much a man of the world not to be grieved at his involuntary failure
in tact. The boat meanwhile was fast growing to a mere speck of red
and yellow colour, soon to be wholly lost in the blue radiance of sea
and sky.
'You have at times bought some Greuzes, if I remember,' continued the
Princess. 'They are pretty, soft, conventional, but I do not know that
your gallery is much the richer for them.'
'They belong to another time than ours,' said Othmar. 'I imagine
Talleyrand was right when he said that no one born since '89 can know
how sweet human life can become.'
'And how elegant human manners can be,' added Melville. 'Cendrillon
has something of that old grace; when she was two years old she
curtseyed as though she were Sevigné's self.'
'What a paragon!' said Madame Napraxine. 'Poverty and all the Graces!
An irresistible combination. The time I should have liked to live in
would have been Louis Treize's; what perfect costume, what picturesque
wars, what admirable architecture! Is this child at Sacré Coeur, did
you say, Monsignore?'
'That would be too extravagant for her place as Cendrillon,' replied
Melville. 'No; I think they were wise not to put her amidst all those
great ladies in embryo; she has been educated by the Dames de Ste.
Anne, at a remote village called Faiël in the Morbihan. She has had a
pale girlhood there, like the arum-lily that blossoms under the
moss-grown oaks.'
'How poetic you are!' said the Princess Napraxine, with a smile which
brought a flush of embarrassment even to the world-bronzed cheek of
Melville. 'Men are so much more romantic than women. Here are Clotilde
de Vannes and I, who only see that, as this young girl has no dower,
the very best place for her in the world is a convent, melancholy but
inevitable; whereas you and Othmar, merely because she has pretty hair
which the sun shines on as she goes past amongst her oranges, are
already thinking that some one ought to rise out of the sea to marry
her, with a duke's _couronne_ in one hand and a veil of old d'Alençon
lace in the other! Certainly those things do happen. If she were an
impudent _écuyère_ at Hengler's, or a Californian who never had a
grandfather, the duke's _couronne_ would no doubt appear on her
horizon. By the way, pending her eternal retreat, does Cri-Cri allow
her to be seen at all?'
'You will probably see her at Millo. I saw her there last week, and
made her cry by reminding her of her babyhood on the isle; and of her
grandmother, whom she adored. She is with the Duchesse now, because
there is typhus fever at the convent, and the pupils are all
dispersed; but Millo is scarcely a congenial air for a poor relation,
who is also a proud one.'
'Ah! she is a good advertisement of Cri-Cri's virtues, _elle en a
besoin_,' said the Princess Napraxine, with her merciless little
laugh. 'And de Vannes, what does he say to so pretty a relative?'
'A man like de Vannes never sees that a young girl of that type
exists.'
'Hum--m--mph!' she murmured dubiously. 'That depends on a great many
circumstances. Propinquity and _ennui_ will make Ste. Scholastique
herself sought like the Krauss or Jeanne Granier. Millo is certainly a
very odd kind of home for your woodland arum-lily. If she have any
intelligence at all, and relate what she sees when she gets back to
Faiël, the good Dames de Ste. Anne will have the monastic enjoyment of
scandal gratified to the uttermost.'
'I believe she lives entirely in the schoolroom whilst at Millo,' said
Melville, a little impatiently. He wished he had never spoken the name
of Yseulte de Valogne, the name which seemed to belong to _le temps
quand la Reine Berthe fila_. He had one of those instincts of having
spoken unwisely, one of those presentiments of impending disaster,
which come to finely organised and much-experienced minds, and are
called by blunter and slower brains mere nervous nonsense.
When the other day the tall factory chimney fell at Bradford, the
birds which built in it had flown away before the workmen--stupidly
eating their breakfasts till the bricks tumbled about their ears--had
looked up and seen any danger.