When Nadine Napraxine came into her boudoir on New Year's day, she
smiled a little to see it blocked with flowers. She had always
discountenanced any other gifts than flowers. Whoever had presumed to
offer her anything else would have run the risk of having his name
struck off her list of acquaintances.
'All those _gros cadeaux_ are so vulgar,' she was wont to say. 'A
branch of lilac--a tea-rose--nothing else. No; you must not send the
lilac in a _cloisonné_ Limoges vase, or the roses in a _repoussé_
silver bowl; I should send you your vase or your bowl back to you; you
have no kind of right to suppose that I want vases or bowls; but just
the branch, just the rose, you may send if you like.'
They trembled, and dared not disobey; the lilacs or the roses came by
the scores, with the greatest names of Europe attached to them; and
her courtiers managed ingeniously to spend many thousands of francs
by means of the rarest of the orchids, fulfilling her commands in the
letter, though breaking them in the spirit.
She smiled now as she came into her favourite room this morning, when
fog and frost together reigned without. All the orchid world was there
to welcome her, brilliant and ethereal as the hues of sunrise.
'They love to be extravagant,' she thought, with a little contempt.
'If one limit them to flowers they manage to spend as much as if they
bought jewels. It is very vulgar, all that sort of thing. If I cared
for any one of them, I think I should like him to bring me a little
bunch of corn-cockles--just by way of change.'
She glanced here and there at a name, but, for the most part, did not
even trouble herself to look who was the sender of this or of that.
'_C'est toute la bande!_' she murmured, with an impatient amusement,
knowing that every man in Paris, with rank sufficient to be able to
dare to do so, had sent his floral tribute there.
She rang for her favourite servant Paul; when he appeared she said to
him, 'Take all those cards off those baskets and bouquets; they look
as if they were ticketed for a horticultural show.' So Paul, obedient,
swept away the visiting cards with his swift and silent touch, and
the senders of them were not even honoured by her caring to know
their names; their gifts were all blended in one mass of blossom as
indifferent to her as themselves.
Paul, as he retired with the cards crushed in his hand, thought to
himself with grim amusement, 'If only those _beaux messieurs_ would
understand that Nadège Fedorowna cares no more for any one of them
than she will care for those flowers when they are yellow and withered
to-morrow.'
'If somebody would bring me the corn-cockles!' she herself thought,
with a little laugh.
At that moment there came a timid tap on the door which separated
her boudoir from the great salons. She recognised it with a little
shiver, such as a nervous woman will give when she sees an unpleasant
or uncouth animal; only she was not nervous herself; she was merely
impressionable and irritated.
'Come in,' she said impatiently.
The door opened behind the satin hangings, and Platon Napraxine entered.
'How many times must I request you to pay me the common respect of
sending to know if I be visible?' she said, with that hauteur which he
dreaded, as a prisoner in the fortress of Peter and Paul dreads the
sight of the knout.
'I beg your pardon,' he murmured humbly. 'It is not our day, but I
thought you would allow me to take advantage of the French New Year
to--to--to bring you a little gift. Do not be angry, Nadine----'
He spoke very submissively and with a timidity which made his
high-coloured cheeks grow paler. He had for many a year abandoned all
hope of being any nearer to the woman who was his wife than the marble
of the steps which she descended to her carriage; yet he could not
help having, every now and then, a foolish impulse to approach her in
affection, a wistful fancy that perhaps--perhaps--at last----
He laid on her knee as he spoke a velvet case, with her crown and
initials in gold upon it.
'My dear Platon, what nonsense!' she said, with some real annoyance,
and she murmured to herself: 'In half an hour he will take something
similar to half a dozen _cocottes_!'
But she could do no less than open the case, which was filled by a
necklace, earrings, and a small crown for the hair in pink pearls.
Platon Napraxine watched her wistfully as she looked at them with a
listless indifference. If he could only please her once! If he could
only once see that beautiful contemptuous mouth smile kindly on him.
'There is not one of them worth her little finger,' he thought, meaning
the companions and consolers of his life.
'I think you have no pink pearls; it is the only thing you have not,'
he said; as humble still as a chidden dog. 'Will you not let me wish
you _bonne fête_, Nadine? I----'
He took her hand and carried it to his lips. She drew it away, not
angrily, but with a profound indifference.
'I cannot see why one day in the year is any more than another, that we
should make speeches upon it,' she said, shutting up the jewel case.
'The pearls are quite charming. It is too good of you. Only, you know
I do not in the least see why you should give me things; I really do
not want them----'
It was the '_j'en ai tant_' of her five-year-old philosophy.
'I know you do not want them,' said her husband with a blank sense of
foolish disappointment, foolish because his hope had been foolish. 'But
still most women never have jewels enough. I do not mean that I ever
thought you would care for them, but still it is the custom--and--one
never likes the day to go by,--if you would say a kind word----'
'My dear Platon,' she said wearily, yet with a certain amusement at
his stupidity, 'why will you persist in that superstition that one day
is any more than all the others?--and not even a Russian day either!
You, who are such a Slavophil, should have ignored a French New Year's
day as quite pagan and indecent. The pearls are very pretty; I will
put them on to-night, if that will please you. Only--only--you know I
am not very fond of that sort of presents. Are you sure you have not
another similar case in your pocket that you are going to take this
morning to that very handsome new house in the Avenue Villiers? All
the houses are new there, but that is newest----'
Napraxine coloured dully with a dual sense of embarrassment and
ridicule.
He was silent.
'Are you sure?' said his wife, with her head leaning back on her
cushions and her demure smile gleaming beneath the lashes of her
half-closed eyelids.
'Nadine!' stammered Napraxine, in mingled discomfiture and eagerness,
which made him blunder more and more. 'What can one do when
you--you,--as God is above us, if you had not turned me adrift years
ago as if I were a monster, I would never have looked at another woman.
You do not believe it, but I would not. Even now, I would leave them
all if you said a word,--if--if----'
She rose and laid the case of pearls down on a table near her.
'My dear Prince,' she said in her iciest tones, though, in her own
heart, she could very willingly have laughed aloud, 'I see you have
indeed mistaken your road to the Avenue de Villiers. Do you think you
can purchase my--kindness--as you do that of your mistresses? Pray let
this be the last of such blunders. You have not been guilty of them for
many years. Do not begin now. They offend me. You will only ruffle,
very disagreeably and uselessly, the amiable understanding on which we
have agreed to live.'
'When did I ever agree?'
His face was darkly flushed, his voice was husky and had a tremor in
it, something savage and imperious began to wake in him and tell him
that after all this delicate and disdainful woman was his;--but her
languid lids opened wholly, and her calm, luminous eyes looked him full
in the face with that look with which the keeper can daunt, by sheer
power of will, the animal which could trample him into dust and tear
him into atoms.
'Pray, do not let us re-open a discussion which has been closed for six
years,' she said in her softest, coldest voice. 'I am quite sure you
meant well; I never bear malice; I will wear your pearls to-night. We
have a dinner, I think; for d'Aumale, is it not? _Bonne fête, mon ami._
Think what a troubled life you would have if I cared about that new
house, and be grateful. Please send Paul here. He must take away some
of this lilac. So much of it will give me _migraine_.'
Napraxine stifled as best he could some oath which he dared not utter
aloud, and went slowly and sullenly out of her presence, sensible of an
ignominious dismissal. His glance as he went dwelt with suspicion on
the baskets and bouquets which made the room and the adjoining rooms
gardens of orchids and odontoglossum, of gardenias and of tea-roses.
'Is there one among them,' he thought, 'for whom she cares?'
He was nothing to her: but he would be something to such an one if ever
he could find his foe.
He was hurt, wounded, humiliated, infuriated, all in one; conscious of
a defeat which made him grotesque in her sight, sensible of an act of
unwisdom and of sentimentality which had only placed him lower than
ever in the estimation of a woman whom he was furiously conscious that
he still loved and still desired.
When the hangings of the door had closed behind him, his wife laughed
with an amusement which her sense of courtesy had controlled before,
and put a tea-rose in the bosom of her gown.
'How stupid, how intensely stupid, to come to me as he goes to his
_cocottes_,' she thought, with that irritation and ennui which were
the only emotions which he ever aroused in her. 'And to renew that
sort of argument as if we were two greengrocers living at Montmartre!
Decidedly, when the _bon Dieu_ made poor Platon, he left out of his
composition every vestige of tact; and really tact is the only quality
that it is absolutely necessary for everybody to have to prevent them
from irritating others. Who could have imagined that after six years
he would begin again like that!--he has always a little access of
tenderness at the end of the year; last time he gave me a dreadful
Chinese idol as big as himself with green eyes; some dealer had told
him it was very precious: he did not know, he never knows; I wonder if
there were anybody so stupid in all the world; I am only astonished
that he did not send for Sachs and Mitz as an agreeable surprise for
me!'
'Yes, Paul,' she said aloud, 'take away most of those flowers, they
make my head ache; and give that case to Jeanne to put up in the
jewel-safe. Tell Fedor that I shall want the horses in an hour.'
'How very stupid some women must be,' she reflected often, 'to let
themselves be dictated to, and denied, and bullied, and worried by
their husbands. Nothing is so easy to manage as a man, if you only
begin in the right way with him. All depends on how you begin; it
is just like a horse; if you do not make him feel that you are his
superior at once, he will take advantage of you for ever. I remember
my mother saying to me before my marriage: "Ménage ton mari, sois bien
douce." Now, if I had listened to her, I should have had Platon on my
shoulders all my life; I dare say, even, he would have expected me to
please him, and to listen to him, and to accept all his absurdities.
But I froze him from the first; he has always been intensely afraid of
me. Of two people there is always one who is afraid, and I preferred
that it should be he. It just shows what mind can do over matter.'
She looked listlessly at a pile of telegrams which her servant had
brought in with him and laid on the little table near her.
'They will all say the same thing,' she thought indifferently, as she
opened two or three which contained the usual greetings of the New Year
from her innumerable relatives and friends in other countries and at
other courts; no Russian, of course, amongst them.
'If people must have it that a year begins, which is utterly absurd,
why did they not take pretty pink and white April instead of this ugly,
shivering, frost-bitten January?' she said to her dog Dauphin, as she
glanced through the tedious compliments of the telegrams. At last,
amidst them, there was one which made her change colour as she read
it. It was from Lady Brancepeth, away on her estates in the north of
England. It was only a line; it said:
'My brother has been killed on the ice in the Gulf of S. Lawrence.'
There were no details, only the bare fact, as it had been brought with
the same crushing curtness by the electric cable from the western to
the eastern shores of the Atlantic.
Nadine Napraxine read it three times without at the first realising
or believing it. The news gave her a shock; not a great one, but
still a kind of chilly pain and vague terror. A mist swam for a moment
before her eyes; a sorrow, which was quite sincere, moved her as the
sense of what she read gradually grew more and more distinct. A sudden
remembrance smote her of Geraldine, as she had seen him first some
three years earlier, standing on the beach at Biarritz, clad in his
blue sea-clothes, with the sun shining full on his fair frank features
and in his clear, happy, candid eyes. He had looked at her; his sister
had beckoned to him, and had said carelessly: 'Ralph, is it possible
that you do not know Madame Napraxine?' and he had come up to them over
the rough red rocks, the sun and the wind playing in his bright hair.
And then, life had never again been quite the same to him, and now it
was over for ever. He was dead, just thirty years old!
'Pauvre garçon!' she said, with genuine regret, as she had said the
same words when they had told her that the young Louis Napoléon had
been killed at Isandula. It was not the regret for which the dead man,
thinking of her as the frozen night had closed in on him and over the
wastes of ice-bound waters, perchance had hoped. 'Pauvre garçon!' she
murmured where she sat, amidst the profusion of the flowers. For the
moment she felt cold in her room, which was as warm as a summer day,
and through whose double windows of opalescent glass no breath of the
outer air could penetrate.
'I suppose they will say I did this too!' she thought with impatience,
her memory reverting to the death of young Seliedoff even whilst she
said again very softly to herself, 'Pauvre garçon!'
She was sincerely sorry; she felt nothing of that more passionate and
personal pain which once Geraldine might not unnaturally have hoped
that his death would excite in her, but a sincere regret mingled with
a kind of annoyance that men who had loved her would always go and run
some tragic risks, so that they perished miserably:--and then the world
blamed her.
'I, who detest tragedies!' she said to the little dog. 'When the
majority of men, too, always live too long, live to have gout, and use
spectacles, and grow tiresome!'
'Pauvre garçon, pauvre garçon!' she murmured once more, in the only
threnody which occurred to her: how could he go and get drowned in
the S. Lawrence, where the ice was surely as thick as in the Neva?
She had always liked to play at being Providence to her world, a very
capricious and unkind Providence indeed, but still one which decided
their destinies without any reference to their desires as Providence is
always permitted to do. She did not like these rude gusts of uncalled
for accident which blew out the lives which she held in her hand as if
they were so many tapers!
'Pauvre garçon!'
He had grown very wearisome, he had been even disposed to become
exacting, he had wearied her, and she had not known very well how to
get rid of him; but still it was a pity. He had had a great position,
he was an only son, his own people were very fond of him, he was
better than most of the men of his age and rank; she had for once
the sensation that one feels when one has broken a rare piece of
china,--the sensation of having done a silly thing, an irreparable
thing.
'I never told him to go to Canada!' she said to herself. No: she had
only told him that he wearied her. So he had wearied her; he had never
been too amusing at the best of times. It was not her fault that he had
become tiresome; they all became so; they had no originality. Still it
was a pity; she saw his fair frank face, with its eyes so blue and so
wistful, looking at her as he had stood to hear his sentence that last
day we saw La Jacquemerille.
'I do not think I said anything unkind to him that day,' she reflected;
and then the little smile that was so often on her lips came on
them a moment as she thought: 'To be sure, I told him to marry
somebody--anybody.'
Well, he was dead, and before he was thirty; with all his courage and
gallantry and wealth, and the many people who loved him at home all
powerless to save him from the black chasm of the yawning ice; and she
was not so very sorry after all; she honestly wished she could feel
more sorrow. She had never known real sorrow but once, when her father
had been found dead in his writing-room in the Embassy at Vienna.
'Platon will be more sorry,' she thought, 'he always likes his worst
enemies so much!'
Then she rang again for Paul, and told him to take the telegram to the
Prince if he was still in the house.
Napraxine, in five minutes' time, not venturing to return in person,
wrote to her on the back of the printed message:
'I am grieved indeed. Would you desire to postpone the dinner of
to-night?'
She wrote back to him:
'That would be too infinitely ridiculous; though it is certainly a
great pity, he was no relation of ours, only a _bonne connaissance_!'
'A _bonne connaissance_!' exclaimed Napraxine when he read the
pencilled words. That was all the requiem given to the drowned man,
whose battered and disfigured body was then on its way homeward, on
the deck of a vessel which was ploughing a stormy way through dusky
mountainous Atlantic waves!
She sat still a little while, looking through the remaining telegrams
and casting them aside; all the rest were the mere congratulations of
the season.
'I wonder when people will invent anything new!' she thought as she
threw the last aside. 'To think that the Romans five and twenty
centuries ago were also running about and visiting and sending cakes
and taking flowers, because what they called a new year had come! I
suppose the world will never liberate itself from the _camisole de
force_ of idiotic customs.'
She wrote a telegram of sympathy to the sister of Geraldine as she had
written a letter of condolence to the mother of Seliedoff; then she
had herself wrapped in sealskin from head to foot and prepared for her
drive in the Bois.
'When I am gone, open the windows, Paul,' she said to the servant, who
was so astonished that he ventured to ask if he heard aright, knowing
that his lady loved warm air as a palm does.
'Open the windows and leave them open,' she repeated. She looked at
all the hot-house blossoms and thought, with that cruelty which was
latent in her side by side with her higher qualities, 'They will all be
withered in an hour. Paul will tell all the valets, they will tell all
their masters----'
The fancy diverted her. She liked flowers, but she liked a little
cruelty like this much better. It would be wholesome for all those men
to know how she valued their New Year's gifts.
'Women nowadays make them so vain,' she said to herself. 'If it were
not for me, they would never get a lesson at all.'
To some the lesson had been severe, severe as the severity of death;
but that fact scarcely affected her conscience.
She did not stop her carriage to speak to any of her acquaintances, for
she supposed that the news of Geraldine's death would by this time be
known in Paris, where he had so many friends, and knew that everyone
would take pleasure in saying to her--'Mais comment donc? Est-ce bien
vrai?--' It would be so tiresome!
'I cannot help it if they kill themselves!' she said to herself as her
horses sped along the frosty roads. 'Society will blame me now, but I
imagine they would have blamed me much more if I had gone away into
his north-country mists with poor Geraldine as he would have liked me
to do; he was so sensational, poor fellow, and so romantic under his
English awkwardness. Englishmen are like that; they can seldom say
anything they mean properly, but they are very romantic under it all;
they are always ready to compromise themselves, despite their decorum,
and they have just the dogged fidelity of their own bulldogs.'
He had been better than most of them certainly.
She felt a certain pain as she went through the chill sharp air and
heavy mists, and remembered how many times she had seen Geraldine
come riding through the trees, and how boyishly his face had flushed
whenever he had seen her first! Poor foolish fellow! to leave all his
possessions and interests and duties, and to go out to Ottawa, where
he had no earthly business to be, as if going to Ottawa were likely
to deliver him of her memory! That was so truly an Englishman's idea,
to change latitude and longitude and think you left behind you any
inconvenient passion you might be haunted with by merely changing your
climate and your food! 'Poor Ralph! Poor Ralph! I think there was
nothing on earth tragic, ridiculous, or abominable that he would not
have done if I had ordered him to do it--except that he would never
have killed Platon. I do not think even I could have made him kill
Platon. That is the sort of scruple an Englishman always has, alone of
all men in the world.'
'I suppose she knows it, but she does not care,' said many persons,
looking after her as their wont was, as she flashed past them, nothing
scarcely seen of her except her luminous eyes looking out from the
brown lustre of the sealskins, whilst she made an almost imperceptible
gesture of her head to the innumerable salutations that marked her
course.
'When we get rid of the _camisole de force_,' she said to herself, 'we
shall get rid of bowing to each other; it is insane, when everyone
meets everyone else morning, noon, and night, to be obliged to jerk
one's head fifty times every quarter of an hour when one is out of
doors!'
She scarcely moved hers, indeed, but still it was a trouble; it was to
avoid the trouble that she sometimes took those long solitary drives
into the open country, of which the motive constantly perplexed her
world. To any other woman they would have attributed assignations,
but no one could ever do that to the Princess Napraxine; her absolute
indifference was too notorious a fact, and the dullest who knew aught
of her felt that if ever she awoke to any preference she would never
stoop to mask it. She cared nothing for the opinion of any living
being. She had no lover, only because she had no love.
Under her nonchalance and her occasional sentiments of sympathy with
revolutionists, she was of an inexorably proud temperament; she would
have liked to be an empress,--an empress such as was seen in earlier
times, whose mere breath spoke the _fiat_ of life and death. As it was,
she could only vex the souls of men and kill orchids.
When she reached home, after driving until dusk, she passed through her
boudoir to see if Paul had obeyed her. He had obeyed her implicitly:
the windows were still wide open and the bitter biting air was
streaming into the room, driving out before it all the heat from the
calorifère; all the poor flowers were withered, as if a scorch from
fire had passed over them, and the beautiful butterfly petals were mere
shrivelled, shapeless leaves. It had been a pity, she thought, to have
obeyed her so exactly; yet she knew very well that if he had not done
so, Paul, despite his twenty-five years of service to the house of
Napraxine, would have found himself outside her doors for evermore that
night.
'Shut them now,' she said to him, as he waited for her commands, 'and
take away all those baskets and bouquets.'
Paul knew her too well to dare to remark what he had thought all the
afternoon, that it had been a sad waste of some fifty thousand francs'
worth of blossoms. He closed the windows in silence. She passed on
towards her dressing-chambers through the little library which divided
the boudoir from them, the gayest and most coquettish of little
libraries in appearance, with ivory bookcases ornamented by painted
medallions of birds, a few white marble busts, and hangings of modern
Gobelin tapestry; but a library by no means destitute of serious and
philosophic works of some Latin authors, and of transactions of recent
scientific research.
In the library, Paul, hesitating, ventured to approach her with a
bouquet which was not harmed by the twilight frost.
'This was left a few moments ago,' he explained as he tendered it
in some trepidation, uncertain whether he had done wrong to exclude
it from the general massacre. She took it indifferently: it was very
simple;--a bouquet of narcissus with a rim of white violets, nothing
else. The name on the card with it was Othmar's. She smiled and took it
with her into her dressing-room. It was the bunch of 'corn-cockles' for
which she had wished.
'I did not do wrong,' thought Paul, with a sigh of relief. Then he
smiled too as he recalled the winter in which the sender had been
many times alone with his mistress in that little room where the
orchids had now withered in their gilded baskets. 'It was he if it
were ever anyone,' he thought; 'but I do not believe it has ever been
anyone--yet.'
His knowledge of the world made him make the restriction, as he called
one of his subordinates to sweep away all that rubbish, pointing to the
poor murdered flowers, whose costly _corbeilles_ would be one of his
many perquisites.
She, meanwhile, was undressed, clothed in a loose gown of embroidered
china silk, took a cup of tea, and slept peacefully in the perfumed
warmth. She liked to come out of the frosty and foggy air, and lie
still with the pleasant drowsiness caused by the contrast of the sharp
evening wind and the atmosphere heated to 40° Réaumur. Physicians told
her that so sudden a change was not wise or safe, but she laughed at
them. 'What is pleasant is always wholesome,' she said, constructing
new rules of hygiene, as she often did new rules of etiquette. She
liked the warmth, the sense of repose, of languor, of voluptuousness,
as a cat loves it, stretched on velvet, in still hot air. She slept
now with perfect composure, dreamlessly, from the semi-stupor that
driving against cold winds brings with it afterwards. Then, all at
once, she dreamt of a lake half frozen, of dark tempestuous skies, of
an open grave in the black water under the jagged drifting ice; and
she awoke with a little unconscious cry to open her eyes on the mellow
light, the satin hangings, the Saxe mirrors, the snowy bear-skins of
her dressing-room, the little tray of silver and china, the bouquet of
narcissus and violets near her.
'What a wretched dream! I, who never dream,' she said impatiently, as
she stretched her limbs out on the white furs of her couch. Then she
remembered Geraldine.
'Will he haunt me every time I go to sleep?' she thought, with a little
shiver. It seemed to her altogether unreasonable and undeserved. She
had never told him to go on the Gulf of S. Lawrence in the dangerous
season before the ice was solid.
In an hour's time she took the bouquet of narcissus in her hand, and
descended to her drawing-rooms. She wore the pink pearls that night,
the little crown holding up her hair, raised like that of the portraits
of Madame Tallien: she never wore her hair twice together in the same
fashion. 'If you always wear your hair the same way, you have no
imagination, and you are always suspected of a peruke,' she was wont to
say.
Platon Napraxine seeing his despised gift thus honoured, was almost
contented. In the _régime_ of starvation, on which he had been kept so
long, the smallest crumbs of condescension were eagerly seized by him.
She herself was in a gentle and gracious mood; she was not quite so
merciless in speech as usual, but she was quite as charming. The Duc
d'Aumale sat on her right hand, the English Ambassador on her left. Her
airy laughter rang ever and again like silver bells; and Napraxine,
even in the midst of the surprised gratitude with which he saw his pink
pearls honoured by being worn, thought with a sense of depression and
wonder: 'If I were to die to-morrow, would she care a whit more than
she cares now for Ralph?'