At eight o'clock on the following night Othmar walked across his
gardens, under a starlit sky, towards the adjacent grounds of Millo. A
few roods of plantation parted his from theirs; in the boundary fence
there was a small gate, of which his major-domo had reminded him that
a key existed. The night was young, but the stars already were many,
and a slender moon had risen in the deep serene blue of the heavens.
Though it was midwinter the air was sweet with the smell of orange
orchards in flower and of the aromatic pine-woods of his own
enclosures.
'Will she be there?' he thought a hundred times.
He had kept away from her all the day, had busied himself with his
sailors, with his steward, with the condition of the place; but he
longed to see that smile which even in its malice was sweeter to him
than all the kindness of others, to hear again that voice which was
music to his ear, even in its chill, indifferent mockeries.
He had an intuitive belief, which had been shaken but not destroyed by
his own failure, that in her nature there were depths to be reached,
passions to be awakened, though a bland and cruel indifference at
present veiled them. He had been ruthlessly betrayed by her coquetry,
profoundly wounded by her coldness, but he believed in her still--even
still believed in himself as the man whom ultimately she would love.
He had returned to Europe with the resolution never to be in her
presence except when the hazards of society should bring them perforce
in the same atmosphere, but at the first charm of her regard he had
forgotten all his resolves, lost all his wisdom. Life only seemed
worth living if he could hear that one voice, so sweet in its
modulations, so chilly in its perfect harmony. It was, perhaps,
because he was one of the few men who could gratify all wishes,
caprices, and ambitions as fast as such arose, that this one thing
wholly denied to him, wholly inaccessible, had such force of
attraction for him. Yet he was bitterly angered against himself for
his own submission. She was but a supreme coquette, a woman _pétrie
du monde_, despite all her charm; but she could make her careless
little nod, or a half-ironical smile, more prized from her than the
utmost tenderness of other women ever was. There was about her that
air as of one so wholly indifferent to all the vulgarities which
others esteem triumphs that, when she ever deigned to notice that a
man existed, he was more flattered than by the fondest concessions of
his most ardent adorers. She had been assailed by all the powers and
vanities of passion, but she had always given it at most that cool
little smile--sometimes the smile had been compassionate, more often
it had been cruel. Women had succumbed to him as full-blown roses fall
before the touch of a careless hand; for this reason the chillness of
Nadine Napraxine, which seemed chastity, had had so strong an
attraction for him that for awhile it had seemed to him sweeter to
wait upon its caprices than to obtain fuller response from them. But
no man tarries long at this stage of his affections, and the time had
come when he had grown impatient of a pursuit without end, of an
allegiance without recompense. It was like an empty cup of exquisite
form and transparent beauty, for ever without wine in it; to the
connoisseur the gem is perfect thus, but to those athirst it brings
little delight.
The unshuttered windows of Millo were glistening with light, which
shone through the thickets of rose-laurel and bay as he approached the
house, and a flood of light was poured out shining on the stone
_perron_, carpeted and screened closely by rose-coloured awnings from
the air of night. After a year and a half spent on tropic seas and in
desert lands, the return to society has always a half-sweet,
half-bitter, flavour. Was it worth while, he thought, to leave all the
routine and tedium and emptiness of the world only to drift back again
into its formalities and follies?
He had, however, no choice left in the matter, for the servants in the
antechamber were bowing low to him and taking his furred coat from
him, and in another moment the Duchesse de Vannes was welcoming him
with all the genuine pleasure which a hostess feels in having the
first visit from a person long absent, and high enough in the world's
favour to make his return to the world an event of social interest
and of public importance.
Aurore de Vannes, called Cri-Cri by her friends, was a very pretty
woman, as much and as delicately painted as the fan she carried; she
wore a marvellous costume of cream-coloured velvet blent with
japonica-coloured satin, and had japonicas in her hair and at her
bosom; she wore also some very fine rubies.
When he entered the drawing-rooms of Millo there were a dozen persons
assembled there, most of whom he knew, but amongst them was not the
Princess Napraxine. There was lamentation for her absence, but no
surprise at it, because her caprices were so well known.
As he entered a little note had entered behind him; when Mme. de
Vannes had said all her pretty greetings to him she glanced at it.
'"Désolée--migraine--temps détestable,"' she murmured, as she ran her
eyes over it. 'Of course!' she said, aloud, 'that is always Nadine's
way--she does it on purpose. She loves to disappoint people. She was
out riding this afternoon; I saw her in the distance with Boris
Seliedoff. She treated the Empress in that fashion last winter at
Petersburg, and when the Dames du Palais told her that the Tsarina was
so displeased that she would exclude her from Court, Nadine said to
them quite simply: "Trop de bonté! Je m'habitue si mal à ces
corvées-là."'
'And has she been excluded?' asked one of the guests.
'Ouf!' cried the Duchesse de Vannes, 'I see you do not know her. No
empress in the world would dare to exclude her. Imagine how she would
avenge herself! Courts cannot afford to be brave nowadays.'
Othmar heard every syllable she said as he conversed with De Vannes, a
tall man of some eight-and-thirty years old, with a look of extreme
distinction and of as supreme fatigue. 'Who is Boris Seliedoff?' he
thought, with the restless jealousy of an unsatisfied passion. He
regretted his tent in Tartary: the elegant rooms, the perfumed air,
the pretty women, the low buzz of conversation, the little breaks of
laughter, the artificiality, the monotony of the whole thing, wearied
him already.
The dinner was gay and even brilliant; to him alone it seemed tedious.
Why had she not come? he thought, and that disappointment alone
occupied him. He was angered that she should have so much power to
make _la pluie et le beau temps_ of his time and of his moods.
'Is Othmar cured by Central Asia?' said one of the guests to the
Duchesse de Vannes who looked across the table at him, and answered,
'I should say not. He would hardly be within five leagues of La
Jacquemerille if he were so. Besides, Nadine has a power of making
herself remembered which I have seen in no one else. It is because she
remembers nothing herself. The law of contrasts is the law of
affinity.'
'Madame Napraxine is the only woman in whom virtue does not look
ridiculous,' said an old gentleman to his neighbour, overhearing her
name. 'But then, true, this is because it is not virtue at all, but
something much more disdainful and unapproachable. Have you seen a
peacock ravage a flower-garden? He does not care for any one of the
flowers, but all the same the carnations and roses and geraniums fall
in showers as he goes, strewing them right and left, and drawing his
plumes carelessly over the waste he has made behind him. Her lovers
are no more to Madame Napraxine than the flowers to the peacock; but
the result is the same.'
'Is that a quality you would rank very highly?' asked the person next
him.
'That depends on your standard,' he answered. 'It is a power which is
to her just what plumage is to the peacock--something quite beyond
imitation, and royal in its disdainful beauty. I did not think men
were ever hopelessly in love in this century, but with her I perceive
that they are so.'
'Othmar'---- began the other.
'Othmar?' repeated the old diplomat, 'Othmar reminds me of a man I
once knew, who was a collector of miniatures; the collection has been
dispersed now by unworthy heirs, but some twenty years ago it was a
marvel of completeness. Every admirable miniaturist whom the world has
possessed was represented in it by his finest examples. It had taken
him thirty-five years and more millions to make it what it was. Any
one else would have thought it perfect. He did not, because he had not
an example amongst it of Karl Huth. You may never have heard of Karl
Huth; I never had. He was a German miniaturist of the sixteenth
century; he dwelt at Daunenberg, a small place on the Elbe. There is
nothing of him in any museum, and there was supposed to be nothing of
him anywhere but his tradition. For thirty-five years my friend hunted
North and South Germany for a Karl Huth. At length, such was his
perseverance that he did find an undeniable Karl Huth, in the family
of a tradesman at Grieffenhagen, in a little portrait of a woman, on
ivory, the size of a walnut, and signed and dated. His joy was
immense; but, alas! it was of short duration. The burgomaster who
owned it would not part with it. My friend offered sums untold for
this three inches of ivory, would have sold his estates to purchase
it, stopped at nothing in his frantic offers; but the burgomaster was
rich, too, and inflexible; he would not sell the Karl Huth. There was
some fable in his family about it. Two obstinacies met with a shock
like the foreheads of two elephants in combat; of course the Teuton
obstinacy beat the Gaul's. The Karl Huth remained in the burgomaster's
possession, and my friend had such an excess of rage and despair that
it brought on gout and killed him in an inn in that obscure Pomeranian
town--all because with three thousand five hundred famous miniatures
he failed to acquire one obscure example. Now Madame Napraxine is
certainly not obscure, nevertheless she is the Karl Huth of Othmar. He
is one of those men who can command and enjoy everything; therefore,
of course, he has set his heart on the only woman, probably, in Europe
who will not smile on him. All his grand collection became worthless
to my poor friend when once he failed to include in it that single
Karl Huth.'
Othmar, meanwhile, unconscious that they talked of him, even
unconscious that his passion for his friend's wife had been ever
suspected by his world, found the dinner tedious, and was not
distracted by his neighbours, both of whom were lovely women.
When they returned to the salons at the further end of the great
central drawing-room, which was all white and silver, with satin
panels embroidered with silver thread, and doors made of mirrors
painted with groups of flowers, there was seated all alone at one of
the little tables a very young girl, who wore a plain white gown,
with a plain black sash tied around her waist, _à l'enfant_, and a
black ribbon holding up the thick masses of her fair hair.
'That is Cendrillon,' thought Othmar, moved to a vague interest as he
recalled the story which Melville had told; and he looked on her more
attentively.
As she rose at the entrance of the Duchess he saw that she was very
tall for her age; the slim, straight, unornamented frock became her:
she had neither awkwardness nor self-consciousness, neither much
timidity nor any self-assertion. There was a look about her of
spirited but restrained life which was pathetic, the look of any
high-couraged young animal which is too early and too rudely tamed.
'Poor child!' thought Othmar in an involuntary pity, as he saw the
Duchess go up to her, tap her carelessly on the shoulder with a fan,
present her to another lady and with that other lady turn away
indifferently after a few words. The girl curtsied low with perfect
grace, and resumed her seat; she appeared used to be forgotten. She
sat quite still, neither embarrassed by neglect or solicitous of
attention. She might have been a statue but for her half-veiled eyes,
of a luminous golden brown shaded by long black lashes, and her mouth
like a rose, which had made him call her a Greuze picture as she had
passed him in the boat. She had looked much happier in the boat than
she looked now in the drawing-room.
Othmar watched her a little while. No one approached her: the men
present did not care for _ingénues_; the women, it is needless to say,
cared still less. The Duchesse did not think it necessary to trouble
herself about a child who was still in a convent and would soon be in
one for the rest of her days. She was not averse to such an evidence
of her own charity as her young cousin presented sitting there,
carefully dressed, admirably educated, in living testimony of the
benevolence of Aurore de Vannes; but there was no need for more than
the tap with the fan and the good-natured indifferent _Comment va-t-on
ce soir, petite?_
Othmar waited some ten or twelve minutes, then approached his hostess.
'Duchesse, will you do me the honour to present me to Mdlle. de
Valogne?'
She stared at him in astonishment.
'Certainly--yes; why not?--But how did you know her name? And she is
only a child at Sacré Coeur.'
'Melville told me her sad little story and of all your amiability
towards her. Surely she will soon be a very beautiful woman?'
'_Elle n'est pas mal_,' said the Duchess, somewhat irritably.
'Melville is always romancing, you know; there is nothing to be
romantic about; she is destined to the religious life; it was her
grandmother's wish, and is her own. As for presenting you to her, she
is only a child; it would not be well to make her think herself in the
world. If you would excuse me----'
'Pray present me, Duchesse,' he persisted. 'I assure you I do not eat
children; and if she be doomed to take the veil so soon, the world
will lose her anyhow. But will you have the heart to cut off all that
hair?'
'You will always have your own way,' said Madame de Vannes, who knew
very well that he did not have it where most he cared; then she took
him across to where her young cousin sat, and said, 'Yseulte, Count
Othmar wishes to know you; he is a friend of Monsignor Melville's.'
The girl made him the same grand curtsy, which she had made before,
only a little less low than she had given to the lady. Then she seated
herself once more, and waited for him to speak first, as we wait for a
royal person to do so.
He spoke to her of Melville, divining that the way to her confidence
would be through his regard for the early period of her childhood. She
listened with pleasure to his praises of her grandmother's friend, and
answered him in few syllables; but the restraint seemed to him the
result neither of timidity nor of want of intelligence, but of the
reserve which had been imposed upon her alike at her convent and here
at Millo, where no one heeded her unless the Duc threw her a
good-natured glance, or the Duchesse a petulant word of censure. It
was easy to see that on a nature formed for light and laughter, the
sense of being unneeded and undesired in the home of others had early
cast shadows too deep for childhood.
'How very handsome she is!' he thought, as he spoke of Melville and
his many noble works. Close to her he could see the exceeding
regularity of her features, the splendour of her eyes, the purity of
her complexion, which was not the narcissus whiteness of Nadine
Napraxine, but that childlike fairness under which the colour mantles
at any passing thought, or any effort or exercise. Her form, too, had
all the slenderness and indecision of youth, but it had also the
certainty of a magnificent womanhood. Her low dress showed her white
shoulders, her quickly-breathing childlike breast, her beautiful
throat.
'All that to be wasted in a cloister!' he thought, with repugnance. It
seemed a sin against nature's finest work, youth's most gracious
grace. To be sixteen years old, and to have a face as fair as a
flower, and to be the last of a great race, and yet to be doomed to be
joyless, loverless, childless, from birth unto death, because a little
gold and silver were lacking to her! To the master of millions it
seemed the cruelest irony of fate that he had ever encountered. Why
should the absurd codes and prejudices of the world make him powerless
to give this unhappy child out of his abundance the little which she
would need to take her place amidst those common human joys which the
poorest can attain, but which the selfishness of man and the customs
of society forbade to her, merely because she had been nobly born? He
was thinking of her fate all the while that he talked to her of
Melville; he was thinking of that supple slender form disguised under
the nun's heavy garb, of that abundant hair shorn and falling to the
stone floor. Could those gay, good-natured, idle, spendthrift people
who condemned her so lightly to such a sacrifice, not surrender one of
their luxuries, one of their follies, to save her?
Then he pictured to himself, with a smile at his own whimsical
conceit, the tailors' bills of Madame de Vannes curtailed, her
caprices sacrificed, her equipages diminished, her _parties de chasse_
discontinued, her superfluous jewels sold, to furnish with the result
attained a dower to her portionless cousin! These good people called
themselves Christians; nevertheless, such generosity would have seemed
to them as impossible as to go out on to the boulevards in the
goatskin of John the Baptist. Would there ever be a religion that
should influence the lives of its professors? Christianity had had
its own way for nigh two thousand years, and had scarcely left a mark
on the world so far as practical renunciation went.
While he mused thus, he talked lightly and kindly to the girl, but he
met with little response. The convent education had taught her
silence, and she thought that he had only come to her side because he
had pitied her solitude; that thought made her shy and proud. With all
his good will, he failed to make much way into her friendship, or to
elicit much more than monosyllabic replies, and he would have felt his
benevolence wearisome had it not been that there was so much true
loveliness in her features and in her form that he was not glad of his
release when she was called by the Duchesse to the piano.
'Could you make anything of Yseulte?' said the Duc de Vannes to him.
'She is the true _ingénue_ of the novelist and dramatist; she knows
nothing beyond the four walls of the convent. It is a type fast
disappearing, even with us, under the influence of American women and
English romances. I am not sure that it is not to be regretted; it is
something, at least, to have a girlhood like a white rose.'
'But you are going to set the rose to wither before the sanctuary of
Marie?' said Othmar, still moved by his one idea.
The Duc shrugged his shoulders.
'Oh, that is my wife's affair. Myself, I think it is a pity. The child
will be a magnificent woman; but then, you see, she has no dower.
Where can she go except to the cloisters? Listen! she sings well.'
She was singing then, and her voice rose with singular richness, like
the notes of a nightingale smiting the silence of a golden southern
noon. The quality of her voice was pure and strong, with a sound in it
as of unshed tears, of restrained, and perhaps unconscious, emotion.
'And she will only sing the _Laus Deo_ and the _Kyrie Eleison_,'
thought Othmar, 'and no one will hear her except a few scores of
sad-hearted, stupid women, who will succeed in making her as
sad-hearted and as stupid as themselves!'
What she rendered was the sweetest of all the simple Noëls written by
Roumanille, the song of the blind child who begs her mother to take
her to see the Enfant Jésus in the church, and to whom the mother long
replies, in chiding and hardness of heart: 'What use, since thou canst
not see?' Saint-Saëns had set the naive and pathetic words to music
which was penetrated with that _esprit provençal_ which has in it 'les
pleurs du peuple et les fleurs du printemps;' and the voice of the
girl was pure, tender, and solemn, in unison with what she treated.
'Je sais qu'au tombeau seul finit ma voie obscure;
Je sais encor
Que je ne verrai pas, divine créature,
Ta face d'or.
'Mais qu'est-il besoin d'yeux pour adorer et croire?
Si mes yeux sont
A te voir impuissants, mes mains, ô Dieu de gloire,
Te toucheront!'
L'aveugle à ses genoux pleure si fort, et prie
Sur un tel ton,
D'un air si déchirant, que la mère attendrie
N'a plus dit non.
Oh! comme la pauvrette, en entrant dans la grotte,
En tressaillait!
De Jésus sur son coeur elle mit la menotte:
Elle voyait!
Of all those who listened to her, the old minister, who had spoken of
Karl Huth, and Othmar himself, were the only persons touched by the
likeness of the words of the Noël to the destiny which awaited the
singer of it.
'Je sais qu'au tombeau seul finit ma voie obscure,'
Othmar repeated to himself. 'Poor child! there will be no miracle
wrought for her.'
It seemed to him pathetic, and even cruel.
She had sung with science and accuracy which were in contrast with the
very youthful cadence of her voice, and when she ceased there was a
murmur of applause. She blushed a little, and with a composure that
was almost dignity accepted the compliments paid her, and went back,
without a word, to her seat.
'She would make a name for herself as an artist if she were not the
last Comtesse de Valogne,' thought Othmar. 'Poor child! it is hard to
bear all the harness and curb of rank and have none of its gilded oats
to eat.'
A pretty _élégante_ was now singing a song of Judic's with even more
suggestion by gesture and of glance than the original version of it
gave; the air of the drawing-room rippled with her silvery notes and
their response of subdued laughter; everyone forgot Mdlle. de Valogne
and the Provençal Noël. When Othmar looked again for her, she was
gone: the salon saw her no more that night.
'You were soon tired, Othmar,' said the Duchesse. 'Naturally: what
should you find to say to a child from a convent? She has not two
ideas.'
'She speaks little, certainly,' he answered; 'but I am not sure that
it is from want of ideas; and even if she have no ideas, what does a
beautiful woman want with them?--and she is beautiful.'
'I thought you liked clever women.'
'Clever! Oh, what a comprehensive word. It is like that balloon they
advertise, which you can either fold up in your pocket or float as
high as the moon. As for Mdlle. de Valogne, I should think she was
very intelligent, to judge by her brow and her eyes. But convents do
not nourish their pupils on Rénan and Huxley.'
'Rénan?' said the Duchess, with a charming affectation of ignorance.
'Oh, that is the man who writes so many volumes about himself to
explain why he cannot bring himself to believe some story about an
almond bough that swallowed snakes! When Voltaire began that sort of
thing, it seemed shocking, but it was new; nowadays it is not new and
nobody is shocked; it is only tiresome.'
'But you, Madame, who laugh, yet respect the Church enough to
sacrifice a virgin to it as the Greek to the Minotaur?'
'There is no other retreat possible for girls of good family who are
portionless,' said the Duchess very positively.
'But there are many men who do not marry for a dower.'
'Perhaps, but not with us; it would be quite impossible, an unheard of
thing,' said the Duchesse, scandalised at such a suggestive violation
of all etiquette and family dignity.
From time immemorial the younger sons or the unmarriageable daughters
of the Valogne, of the Creusac, of the d'Authemont, of all the great
races whose blood met in this child, had hidden their narrowed fates
with decorum and stateliness in the refuge of the cloisters; why
should she, because she had been born in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, rebel against so just a disposal? And she did not
rebel at all, would not, unless some man made love to her and put
rebellion in her head. That man would not be Othmar; he had only one
thought--Nadine Napraxine. If she had not been sure of that, she would
not even have presented him to her young cousin, for she was a very
proud woman despite her frivolity, and to seek a rich alliance for a
poor relative would have seemed to her the last of degradations. Her
own people, and her husband's, had always married as sovereigns do,
accepting and conferring equal advantages.
'Poverty has the right to be as proud as it chooses so long as it
accepts nothing; when once it has accepted anything, it has become
mendicity,' had said often the old Marquise de Creusac to her
granddaughter, and Yseulte would not do dishonour to that lesson.
'One can trust her implicitly,' said Madame de Vannes once to her
husband, who had answered:
'Oh, yes, my dear; that is the result of an old-fashioned education.
When your Blanchette and Toinon are at her age, they will know
everything objectionable under the sun, but they will not let you know
that they know it. You are bringing them up _more britannico_!'