'Is Madame Napraxine a good woman?' said Yseulte timidly one day in her
own drawing-room to Melville, whilst she coloured to the eyes as she
pronounced the name.
'Good, my dear!' echoed Friederich Othmar, who overheard and replied to
the question. 'The epithet is comically incongruous. She would be as
horrified if she heard you as if you called her _ma bourgeoise_.'
Melville laughed a little despite himself, and hesitated before giving
his own reply: he was embarrassed. How could he as a priest say to this
innocent creature what he as a man of the world knew to be the truth;
that the simple classifications of good and bad can no more suffice
to describe the varieties of human character than the shepherd's
simple names for herb and flower can suffice for the botanist's floral
nomenclature and complicated subdivisions.
'She has very noble qualities,' he said at length. 'Perhaps they are
somewhat obscured by the habits of the world. She is of an exceedingly
complicated character. I fear I scarcely know her well enough to
describe her with perfect correctness. But I know some noble acts of
her life; one I may tell you.'
And he related to her the episode of Boganof.
Yseulte listened with wonder: to her youthful imagination her one
enemy appeared in all the dark hues with which youth ever paints what
it dislikes and dreads, exaggerated like the rainbow light with which
it decks what it loves. All the highest instincts of her nature were
touched to sympathy by what she now heard, but a pain of which Melville
knew nothing contracted her heart as she thought that if her husband
had indeed loved such a woman as this, it was natural that she would
for ever retain her power on him.
'And she is so beautiful!' she added, with a little sigh. Melville
looked at her in surprise.
'Who has been talking to her?' he wondered as he said aloud:
'There are women more beautiful. You have but to look in your mirror,
my child. But she has a surpassing grace, an incomparable fascination,
some of which springs, perhaps, from her very defects. She is a woman
essentially of the modern type, all nerves and scepticism intermingled;
ironical, incredulous, indifferent, yet capable of heroic _coups de
tête_; dissatisfied with the worldly life and yet incapable of living
any other; the Réné of Chateaubriand, made female and left without a
God.'
'Except her tailor!' said Friederich Othmar, who approached the little
nook in which Melville was seated in the boudoir.
'Pardon me,' said Melville, with a smile. 'Madame Napraxine's tailor
is but her slave, like every one else whom she employs or encounters.
The king of _couturiers_ trembles before her, he is so afraid of her
displeasure; if she blame his creations they are ruined. She makes _la
pluie et le beau temps_ in the world of fashion.'
'And yet she could do what you say for that unhappy man in Siberia?'
murmured Yseulte, who had listened with seriousness and some
perplexity to all that had been said of one in whom her instinct felt
was the enemy of her life.
'You should understand a character which is made up of contradictions,
my dear,' interrupted the Baron; 'for you have one beside you every
day in Otho's. Your own is formed with just a few broad, simple, fair
lines, ruled very straight on the old pattern, which was in use before
the Revolution, or even farther back than that, in the days of Anne of
Bretagne and of Blanche of Castille. But your husband's--and some other
people's--is a tangled mass of unformed desires and of widely-opposed
qualities which are for ever in conflict, and are as unsatisfactory and
as indefinite as any _impressionniste's_ picture.'
Yseulte did not hear; she was absorbed in her own reflections; her face
was very grave.
'M. le Baron, you cannot have everything,' said Melville, gaily. 'Your
age has destroyed the _femme croyante_. Nature, which always avenges
herself, gives you the _femme du monde_, which, in its lowest stages,
becomes the _cabotine_, and in its highest just such an ethereal,
capricious, tantalising combination of the finest culture and the most
languid scepticism, as captivates and tortures her world in the person
of the Princess Napraxine.'
'Excuse me in my turn if I say that you are quite mistaken,' said
Friederich Othmar. 'The two species of womankind have existed since the
days of Athens and of Rome, and modern theology and modern scepticism
have nothing to do with either of them. Penelope and Circe are as old
as the islands and the seas. If you will not find me impertinent, I
cannot help saying that ecclesiastics always remind me of the old
story (I think it is in Moore's Diary) of the grazier's son who went
to Switzerland, and was only impressed by one fact--that bullocks were
very cheap there. Christianity is a purely modern thing. What are
eighteen centuries in the history of the world? Yet every churchman
refers every virtue and every vice of human nature to the influence or
the absence of this purely modern creed, which has, after all, not one
tenth of the magnetic power of absorption of Buddhism and nothing like
the grasp on the mind of a multitude which Islamism has possessed.'
Friederich Othmar had always an especial pleasure in teazing Melville,
and in contemplating the address with which the trained talent of the
theologian vaulted over the difficulties which his reason was forced to
acknowledge.
As Melville was about to reply, the groom of the chambers entered and
announced 'Madame la Princesse Napraxine.'
Yseulte rose with a startled look upon her young face, which was not
yet trained to conceal what she felt beneath that mask of serenity and
smiling indifference which makes the most impenetrable of all masks.
Her cheeks flushed, her eyes had a momentary look of bewilderment. She
did not hear the words of graceful greeting with which her visitor
answered the courtesy she mechanically made.
Melville, who himself felt a little guilty, hastened to her rescue,
and the Baron, as he rolled a low chair for the newcomer, thought to
himself, 'What a pity Otho is not here; it is always better to have
those situations gone through, and over. The poor child!--so happy
as she has been! It will be a pity if Circe come. But Circe always
comes. How can Melville pretend that Circe is anything new, or has
only sprung into existence because women do not go to church! Madame
Napraxine is precisely the same kind of _charmeresse_ that Propertius
used to write odes to on his tablets; the type was more consistent
then, because in our days costume is incongruous, and life is more
complicated, and people are more tired, but it remains integrally the
same.'
Nadine Napraxine meanwhile was saying:
'Your people were unwilling to let me in because it was not your day;
but I insisted. When one desires a thing very much one always insists
till one gets it. I find Paris talking of nothing but the Countess
Othmar; I was eager to claim from her the privilege of an old friend.'
It was said with sweetness, apparent frankness, and all her own
inimitable grace. She lightly touched, with the softest, slightest
kiss, the cheeks of Yseulte, which grew warm and then cold. Not
appearing to notice her embarrassment, Nadine Napraxine continued to
string her pretty, careless, courteous phrases together with that tact
which is the most useful and the most graceful of all the talents.
Yseulte had all a girl's embarrassment before her, and that dignity
which was an instinct in her became, by contrast, almost stiffness.
'Someone has told her of me,' thought Nadine, with amusement and
irritation combined. It at once offended her and pleased her that
she should be a source of pain to this girl--to how many women had
she been so, and without mercy! Well, why would they not learn to
keep to themselves the wandering thoughts of their lovers and their
lords? 'This child is beautiful,' she said to herself with candour;
'how can she fail with him. No doubt she loves him herself; men are
not thankful. _Tenez la dragée haute_ is the only motto for their
subjection.'
She studied Yseulte with attention and interest, and without malice.
She frankly admired this beauty so different to her own; this union
of high-bred stateliness and childish naïveté which seemed to her
just such a manner as some young châtelaine of some old Breton or
Norman tower would have had in the days of the Reine Isabeau; she did
full justice to it. The irritation she had felt when she had walked
in the moonlight through the grass lands at Zaraïzoff, and thought
of the château of Amyôt, had ceased the moment that she had entered
the atmosphere of Paris. Othmar had believed that he had been cold as
marble in that momentary meeting, but she had seen in it that her power
over him was undiminished. She knew very well that soon or late he
who had defied her would be once more as a reed in her hands. She was
in no haste to try her force; she could rely on it in the calmness of
certainty. She was very amiable to his wife; but she had a little touch
of good-natured condescension in her amiability which made the pride of
the girl shrink as under an affront which could not be resented; the
very young always suffer under a kindness which tacitly reminds them,
by its unspoken superiority, of their own inexperience and their own
defects. The ironical smile, the slight suggestive phrases, the very
indulgence, as to a child, of Nadine Napraxine were as so many thorns
in the heart of Yseulte, who had none of that vanity which might have
rendered her indifferent to them.
It was not so much an emotion, but a certain sentiment--half interest,
half irritation--which brought her to the great house of which, in a
moment of impulse, he had made this child mistress. 'They try to give
it a false air of home,' she thought, with her merciless accuracy of
penetration, 'but they do not succeed. It is always a barn--a barn
gilded and painted like Versailles: but a barn. Perhaps they succeed
better at Amyôt, and perhaps they do not. He always hated this huge
house, and he was very right in his taste. It is made to entertain
in, not to be happy in. If he were happy he would go far away to that
castle by the blue Adrian Sea that I saw within a few leagues of
Miramar.'
With that thought she had gone through the succession of great rooms,
grand and uninteresting as the rooms of the Escurial, until she had
reached one of the drawing-rooms, with its painted panels of children
romping in orchards and gardens, and there had found Yseulte sitting
at her tapestry like some young dame of the time of Bayard or the
Béarnais, a large hound at her feet, the two old men beside her.
'What colouring! She is like a pastel of Emile Lévy's!' she had
thought, with an appreciation which was entirely sincere, as she kissed
the girl's reluctant, roseleaf-like cheek: she really felt not the
slightest ill-will towards her; on the contrary, she was moved to a
compassion, none the less genuine that it was based on something very
like disdain; the disdain of the wise for the simple, of the certainly
victorious for the predestined vanquished, of the snake-charmer for
those who let the snake kill them.
With her most charming grace, with that seduction which made it
impossible for anyone in her presence to be her enemy, she renewed
her acquaintance with the wife of Othmar, speaking pretty and
gracious words of recognition and of admiration. Yseulte preserved a
self-control admirable for one so young, to whom the necessities for
such reserve were a new and painful lesson; but she was unable to keep
the change of colour in her cheeks, and the expression in her candid
eyes betrayed her to the quick perception of her guest.
'You have come to honour Paris, Princess?' said the Baron, to cover the
embarrassment and the constraint of Yseulte.
'One always comes to Paris, Baron,' answered Nadine Napraxine, raising
her eyeglass and gazing at the girl through it, with all the cruel,
careless scrutiny of a woman of the world; her luminous eyes wanted
no assistance of the sort, but it was a weapon--unkind as a dagger
on occasion. 'One always comes to Paris. It is the toy-shop where
we dolls of the world get mended when we are battered and bruised.
We come for our hair, for our teeth, for our complexions; at any
rate, for our gowns; and then when we arrive we remain. The Republic
may push its iron roller, as Berlioz says it does, over the world;
it rolls on wheels of lead; but it cannot prevent Paris from being
always an empire, and always the _urbs_ for us. I do not love Paris as
passionately as most Russians do, yet even I admit that there is no
other city where one finds so little monotony. Even in Paris, alas!
as Marivaux said long ago, everybody has two eyes, one nose, and one
mouth, and one sighs in vain for a little variety of outline.'
'If I remember,' said the Baron, 'Marivaux was more merciful to
humanity than is Madame Napraxine; he admitted that even with such
homely materials as two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, one could obtain
infinite variety in expression; no two physiognomies are alike.'
'Perhaps in Marivaux's time men did not imitate the _chic anglais_!'
said Nadine Napraxine. 'I see very little variety myself. Everybody is
terribly like everyone else, except the Comtesse Othmar,' she added,
with her charming smile, 'who is only like Hope nursing Love, or some
other picture of a fairer day than ours.'
Yseulte, pained at herself for her want of self-command, coloured
hotly under the compliment, in which her alarmed sensitiveness fancied
there was hidden a sarcasm. She did not know of what picture Nadine
Napraxine spoke, and she thought--'Does she mean that Hope was barren
and foolish, that Love did not care?' She remembered the silver amorino
and the empty gourd.
Directly appealed to, a moment later, she murmured something at random;
she did not well know what; she grew first pale, then red; she seemed
constrained and stupid, void of ideas, and stiff in manner. Friederich
Othmar could have broken his cane about her shoulders in his vexation.
'Heavens and earth!' he thought, 'if you let yourself be magnetised
at the first sight of an imagined rival, what will you do before the
reality when you meet it? My poor little girl! It is not the women who
adore a man, and are struck dumb because they see another woman whom
he has once loved, who obtain any influence over him, or possess any
charm whatever for him. Who is to tell you that? who is to open your
eyes and harden your heart? who is to make you understand that you are
as lovely as the morning, but that if you do not acquire self-control,
wit, indifference, all the armoury of the world's weapons, she will
pass over you as artillery sweeps over the daisy in the grass.'
But he could not say his impatient thoughts aloud; he could not even,
by his own readiness of language and easy persiflage, contrive wholly
to hide the uneasiness and restraint which the presence of her guest
brought upon Yseulte, and which she herself was at once too young and
too frank to dissemble. They amused the Princess Napraxine, and they
gratified her infinitely. She had not the slightest pity for them; she
had never suffered from any such awkwardness herself.
'You are cruel, Princess,' Melville ventured to murmur as he rose and
bade her adieu.
'Have you only now discovered that?' said Nadine. 'And I do not know
why you should discover it especially now, or why, even if it were
truth, you should be in any way astonished. Thirty years of the
confessional should have taught you that women are always cruel. Are
you never cruel?' she said aloud, turning to Yseulte. 'Ah, then,
your dog will disobey you and your horse run away with you, my dear
Countess!'
'Is there no power in affection?' said Yseulte bravely, feeling her
colour come and go, and conscious that she had made an absurd reply.
Madame Napraxine smiled with a little look of indulgent amusement,
which made the girl thrill to the tips of her fingers.
'You are still in the age of illusions, my love. I dare say you even
write poetry. Do you not write poetry? I am sure you must have a little
velvet book and a silver pencil somewhere. It is so delightful to see
anyone so young,' she added, with seriousness, to Friederich Othmar.
'The children are not young now, are never young. I do not think I ever
was; I have no recollection of it. If I had daughters, I would send
them to those Dames de Sainte Anne--away in Brittany, is it not?--if
it be they who have made your nephew's wife what she is. I did not
believe there was any place left, simple enough and sweet and solemn
enough to make a girlhood like a garden lily. Othmar has been very
happy to have gathered the lily.'
There were both reality and admiration in many of her words, but the
last phrase was not so sincere. Yseulte, overhearing, thought, with a
pang, 'She knows that he is not happy!' Her heart swelled. She felt
that this exquisite woman, so little her senior in actual years, so
immeasurably her superior in knowledge, tact, and power, laughed at
her even as she praised her. 'How could she know that I wrote poetry?'
thought the child, conscious of many a poor little verse, the unseen,
carefully-hidden, timid offspring of a heart too full, written with a
pencil in the leafy recesses of the woods of Amyôt, in that instinctive
longing for adequate expression which is born of a great love. The
chance phrase gave Nadine Napraxine in her sight all the irresistible
fascination of a magician. She felt as if those languid, luminous
eyes could read all the secrets of her soul--secrets so innocent, all
pregnant with the memory of Othmar--secrets pure, wholesome, and
harmless as the violets that the mosses hid in the Valois woods of
Amyôt.
'Well, what do you think of her?' asked Friederich Othmar when she had
left the house. Yseulte hesitated.
'I can believe that she has a great charm,' she answered with some
effort. 'She has a fascination that one feels whether one will or
no----'
She paused and unconsciously sighed.
'She is the greatest _charmeresse_ in Europe,' replied Friederich
Othmar. 'No other words describe her. She is not a Cleopatra or a Mary
Stuart. She would never have had an Actium or a Kirk's Field. She would
never have so blundered. She has no passions; she would be a better
woman if she had. She is entirely chaste only because she is absolutely
indifferent. It creates her immense power over men. She remains ice
while she casts them into hell.' He stopped abruptly, remembering to
whom he spoke, and added, 'Her visit was a most rare honour to you, my
dear; she seldom deigns to go in person anywhere; her servants leave
her cards, and the fortunate great ladies who are the recipients of
them may go and see her on her day, and take their chance of receiving
a few words from her. She is one of those exceptional women who have no
intimate friends of their own sex, or hardly any; men----'
He paused, asked leave to light a cigarette, and walked with it awhile
about the room. Yseulte did not take up his unfinished phrase by an
interrogation.
'Have you no inquisitiveness?' thought Friederich Othmar. She was,
indeed, full of restless and painful curiosity concerning the woman who
had just left her presence, but she would not allow herself to utter a
word of it. She thought it would be disloyalty to her husband.
Some fifteen minutes later Othmar himself entered.
'Madame Napraxine has just honoured us _in propriâ personâ_,' said the
Baron, looking at him with intention.
'Indeed!' said Othmar. 'It was most amiable of her,' he added, after
a moment's pause; but to the penetration or to the imagination of
his uncle it seemed that he spoke with embarrassment and annoyance.
Yseulte had resumed her work at her tapestry. The cruel sense that she
was not wanted there, that she had been brought there only out of pity,
as a kind hand gives a stray animal a home, weighed on her more and
more. She did not see all that others saw in her; all the attraction
of her youth, and her innocence and her beauty. She had too sincere a
humility for any idea of her own charms to console her. She was wise
enough to perceive that the world flattered her because she was a rich
man's wife, but in her own eyes she remained the same that she had been
under the grey shadows of Faïel.
'If I were only myself again to-morrow, they would never think of
me,' she said to herself, with a wisdom born out of the poverty
and obscurity in which her childish years had been spent. She was
passionately grateful to Othmar, as well as devoted to him; but the
suggestion that she was in no way necessary to his happiness, was even
a burden and a constraint to him, had been harshly set before her by
the words of Blanchette, and it was corroborated by a thousand trifles
of look, and speech, and accident. His very entrance into her room had
nothing of the warmth of a man who returns to what he loves; he came
there so evidently because he felt that courtesy and custom required it
of him.
The Baron understood what was passing in her thoughts as she bent her
fair head over her tapestry-frame, the severity of her black velvet
gown serving to enhance, by its contrast, the whiteness of her throat,
the youthfulness of her features, the suppleness and vigour of her
form. He longed to say to her, 'My child, do not fret because he is
no longer your lover--is even, perhaps, that of some one else; it is
always so in marriage, even in love. There is always one who cares
long, and one who cares little. It will not matter to you in the end;
you will learn to lead your own life; you will have your children. I do
not think you will have your lovers, as most of them do, but you will
get reconciled to accepting life on a lower plane than your youthful
imagination placed it on at first.'
He would have liked to say that, and much more, to her, but he did
not venture. She made no confidence, no appeal for sympathy; and
after all, for aught he knew, she might be entirely content with her
husband's ardour, or his lack of it. She was but a child still, and had
little knowledge of the passions of men.
Othmar did not say that he had met his wife's guest as she left his
house.
She had given him her prettiest smile.
'The Countess Othmar is quite lovely; and what a perfect manner!'
she had said. 'What does she say to all your pessimism, to all your
_boutades_? Does she understand them? You must send her to hear a
course of Caro. Her mind can hardly be metaphysical yet. She is at the
age to eat bonbons and expect caresses.'
Then she had made him a little careless sign of farewell, and her black
horses had borne her through the great gates of gilded bronze of the
house which always seemed to him oppressive as a gaol. The words were
harmless, playful, amiable; yet they had annoyed him. He understood
that she ridiculed his marriage, and that she divined that it had but
little place in his affections, and as little hold upon his thoughts.
'Poor child!' he had said involuntarily, as he mounted his staircase to
enter the presence of Yseulte.