The telegram had merely said that Geraldine had been killed on the
ice in the Gulf of S. Lawrence. There had been no details; but later
on all the world learned that death had come to him in the freshness
of his manhood by one of those trite accidents so common in North
American waters in the beginning of winter, when the ice is still loose
and detached, and is borne to and fro by the sullen waves which seem
unwilling to endure its chains. He had been standing on an ice floe,
off the Prince Edward Island, with Canadian hunters, seeking seals,
when that portion of it which sustained them had suddenly broken away
before they were aware of their danger, and, drifting with frightful
rapidity, had borne them out to sea at the close of the short, bitter
winter's day. Many on the shore were witnesses of the certain death to
which they were carried, but no help was possible before the darkness
of night came down,--the night which froze all human life left without
shelter in it.
Where the floe went none knew; when the dawn broke there was no trace
of its passage to be made out amidst the many masses of ice rocking,
meeting, parting, crashing one upon another as the frost strove to
bind beneath its iron hold the free will and the wild anger of the
sea. Whether those who had been upon it had been drowned, or frozen to
death, or borne out to mid-Atlantic, none could know; but on the third
day the body of Geraldine and of two of the Canadian fishermen had
been washed ashore off the New Brunswick coast: his features had been
recognised by his own crew, and the tidings of his cruel fate had been
sent to his mother and his sisters. He had been the only son of a high
and honourable House. There was the grief which sorrowed without hope
in the old north country halls, where a widowed mother wept for him,
and a loyal and loving tenantry followed his body to its grave by the
fair Yore waters.
One Tuesday evening, some two weeks later, when Nadine Napraxine
returned home from the opera to change her gown for a ball at Prince
Orloff's, there lay on her dressing-room table, amongst others, a
letter of which the superscription was very familiar to her, and which
moved her with a certain sense which was as nearly fear as it was
possible for her temperament to know.
She herself had written to Geraldine's people, but no one of them had
answered her until now that Evelyn Brancepeth did so. She broke the
envelope and read the letter, standing in the costume of Venetian red
embroidered with silver flowers, in which, at the opera that night,
she had held all the eyes of the house upon her as she sat, careless,
indifferent, half hidden behind her great red fan, the diamond
butterflies which served in the place of sleeves trembling upon her
shoulders.
'I know very well,' wrote Lady Brancepeth, 'that before the world you
are wholly blameless. I know that my unhappy brother had no right
to consider himself preferred by you. I know, were I speaking with
you now, you would say with your chilliest manner that you had never
honoured him with any encouragement to folly. But you will pardon me
if I say that you are more blamable to me than you would be if you
had loved him. I am a plain, stupid, unromantic Englishwoman, but
even I can see that love excuses its own excesses: _l'amour prime le
droit_. I could pardon a great passion if it even committed a great
crime. But you have no passion, you have even no sentiment. You are
sometimes amused, and you are sometimes--much more often--bored; and
there the scale of your emotions rounds itself and ends. There may
be someone who can, or who will, extend for you that narrow circle,
though I very greatly doubt it; but it was entirely certain that poor
Ralph had never any chance or any power to do so. He adored you, quite
stupidly and hopelessly, but he never even knew how to say so in such
a manner as could have touched you. He was very English, very _terre
à terre_, and if he had never seen you he would have led a happy life
enough; a commonplace one, no doubt, but one useful in his generation,
and content with those simple joys which to a _raffinée_ like you seem
so absurd and so dull. But he did meet you; and ever afterwards life
meant nothing to him unless it meant your presence, and your will. You
had admitted him into the honour of a certain intimacy, which, in his
blundering English way, he fancied meant all kinds of eventualities
that it did not mean. No doubt his delusion was of his own creating,
and of course he ought to have been prepared for his dismissal when he
had become troublesome or tedious; but he was so unwise that he put all
his heart into that which he should have understood was a mere _jeu
de salon_; and you did not condescend to give him any warning. Why
should you? you will say. Why, indeed, since his fate was as entirely
indifferent to you as the bouquets that crowd your antechambers in
Carnaval. It would have been so very easy for you, when first my
brother ventured to show you what he felt, to banish him for ever
with a decisive word; he would have been man enough to understand and
to accept it; but you did not take that trouble, and the love of you
grew--not perhaps precisely upon hope--but at least upon the tacit
permission to exist. I scarcely know why I write all this to you, for
you will not read it; only I have been your friend, so far as you allow
any woman to call herself so, and I feel that whenever we meet in the
world you will expect me to be so still, and I cannot. I must ask you
to let us be strangers. No doubt, actually, you are innocent of my
brother's death, but indirectly--even in a manner directly--you were
the cause of it. You made his country, his family, his home life, his
duties of all kinds, become no more to him than if he had never known
land or kindred. The pain with which you filled him made him wander in
an aimless unrest from place to place in an alien world with which he
had no sympathy, and made him only too willing to die, that he might so
throw off the fever of your memory. My dear Nadine, you are a woman of
perfect honour, of high repute, of sensitive and unbending pride, and
on the ermine of your delicate dignity there is no stain as yet. But
for me, there is blood upon your hand. I can never take it in my own
again. Let us be strangers.'
The letter was signed, and nothing more was added to it.
Nadine Napraxine read the lines through, word by word, and when she
had done so, folded it up and put it aside, without irritation, but
not altogether without regret. The frank, sincere, and at times rough
words of Geraldine's sister had been welcome to her by their contrast
with the false sweetness of the world's phrases, and she knew that
she would lose her friendship with reluctance, and miss her surly
honesty, with its uncompromising truths. But the letter seemed to her
exaggerated, not in the best taste, even if, under the circumstances
which inspired it, natural enough. Geraldine had perished by such an
accident as every year costs scores of fishers' lives whenever the ice
floes meet and sever in the half-frozen seas of the north. Why would
they see her hand in it so clearly?
'It is just as they always see the finger of God where a horse stumbles
at a post and rails, or when a pointsman is sleepy and does not hang
out the red light,' she said to herself, with some impatient contempt.
'I am sorry, quite sorry myself, that he is dead, but I certainly never
told him to get upon a block of ice in midwinter on the St. Lawrence.
And it was quite as much Platon's doing as mine that ever he took the
habit of coming about our house at all. Besides, if he had not been
very stupid, as even his sister says, he would have understood _à
demi-mot_; there is nothing on earth so tiresome as people who want
things explained.'
Still, there were passages in the letter which touched her conscience,
and reached that truthfulness in self-judgment which easily awoke in
her.
'I suppose I am unkind--sometimes,' she thought, with a certain
contrition. 'When they irritate me I really do not care what becomes
of them. As long as they know how to please me I am always amiable. It
is not my fault that their knowledge comes to an end too soon. It is
their own poverty of style, of thought, of invention. If I were writing
a dictionary, and had to define Man, I should say he was a limited
animal, exceedingly limited. There is infinitely more variety about
dogs.'
The very recollection of the excessive monotony of the human species
made her yawn. She wondered if that monotony were the fault of
civilisation; probably not. In a savage state, no doubt, instincts had
been all alike, just as manners were all alike now. People were all
dull, and because she found them so they considered her heartless.
Poor Geraldine had been dull; dull in comprehension, in intention, in
discernment; and just because she had found him so his sister wrote to
her as if she were a murderess.
'Poor woman!' she reflected. 'She is always so disposed to see
everything so terribly _en noir_. That is so English, too. They always
have the fog in their eyes. I am not in the least like Lady Macbeth. I
neither murder men, nor have my sleep murdered by them. It is natural
that she should feel keenly the loss of her only brother, but it is
absurd that she should lay the blame upon my shoulders, when she
knows that if he had not wished to shoot seals--which is a barbarous
pastime--he would most probably be alive now. As if a man could be
wasting with despair, and yet care about seals! To be sure, it is
very English. If an Englishman be hopelessly in love with any one, he
generally goes a long way off and tries to kill a tiger or a moose.
I do not see the connection of ideas between the sigh of passion and
the steel of a gun barrel, but there must be some link of affinity for
them, because they all do it. I prefer men like Othmar, who kill other
men.'
Although she was all alone as these thoughts drifted through her
mind while the letter of Lady Brancepeth lay amongst the litter of
notes, cards, and invitations on her table, a momentary warmth came
on her face as the name of Othmar recurred to her, and a certain
bitterness of contempt came into her recollection as she remembered
his marriage. If he had had patience, if he only had had patience,
perhaps--perhaps--perhaps----
She would not have gone away with him, because in her world they did
not do those things, and she would have always been too keenly afraid
of an after-time of regret and weariness, but she might have accepted
the gift of his life, and given him something of her own.
In his haste and wrath he had set up a barrier between them, but how
frail it was! Only the timid, wistful youth of a girl! The imperial
scorn of the Cleopatras of the earth rose in her before her meek,
childlike rival.
What a coward he had been to shelter himself behind the frail rampart
of a young girl's affection; affection which he did not appreciate, did
not reciprocate, did not value!
A woman with a tithe part of the discernment and the experience which
she possessed could cast the horoscope of Yseulte without any recourse
to the stars for knowledge of the future. All that fresh and tender
love would count for nothing, would avail nothing, would awaken no
response. She would bear his children, and live in his houses, and be
the object of all his careful outward observance, and that would be
all. He would grow unspeakably weary of seeing her, of hearing her,
of remembering her tie to him, and he would conceal his weariness ill
or well, and be every day more and more galled by the necessity for
concealment.
When Nadine Napraxine, after the ball, went to her own rooms that
night, she had herself undressed by her women and wrapped in a loose
bed-room gown, made of her favourite white satin, and lined with
eider-down. She dismissed her women, and lay before the warmth of her
dressing-room fire in that dreamy state between waking and sleeping
which is the very perfection of repose. The softly-lighted chambers
opened one out of another in a vista of rich subdued colour, ending in
the bath room, where a lamp hung above a beautiful reproduction of the
Venus of Naples. The rooms were so many temples to her own perfections,
she was the Grace, the Muse, and the Venus herself of this perfect
sanctuary, which no footfall of man had ever dared invade. As she
reclined before the fire that night and glanced through her half-closed
lids down the succession of chambers, which in the clear but delicate
light had the glow of jewels, she thought how dull and empty they would
have seemed to most women of her years without a lover's step coming
silently and swiftly through the fragrant silence.
'Decidedly,' she mused, 'the _voix de la nature_ says nothing at all
to me. Is it because I have no heart, as they say? I do not think the
heart has much to do with that kind of thing. I suppose I am cold, as
they all cry out against me. Of all of them, there is no one I should
care to see coming through those shadows; he would disturb me. The
passions are coarse things. It is disgusting that there should not
be two ways of love, one for Dona Sol and one for Manon Lescaut--for
one's self and one's maid. But there are not. _On se rend, ou on ne se
rend pas_; but when the submission is made Nature makes no difference
between Cleopatra and a camp-follower.'
She sighed a little, inconsistently. She disdained alike the
solicitations of the senses and the pleasures of the affections, and
yet she was conscious of a certain coldness and emptiness in her life;
she was not prepared to confess that what she needed was love, but a
vague impression of solitude came upon her. She remembered the lips
of Othmar pressed upon her wrist, how they had burned, how they had
trembled!
Was it possible that the keenest joys of life lay, after all, in those
follies which her temperament and her philosophies had classed with
contempt amongst the excesses of wantons and the exaggerations of poets?
The purest maiden in her cloister could not have been colder than
was Nadine Napraxine; to her the indulgence of the senses only meant
an intolerable humiliation, an ignominious outrage; maternity itself
had only been to her a long and hated and revolting burden, a sign
of unendurable degradation, which offended all her pride and all her
delicacy. The satyr had always seemed to her a much juster emblem of
such instincts than any winged amorino.
'D'un être inconnu le contact passager'
could not rouse any desire or any sentiment in her.
And yet there were occasionally moments, fleeting ones it is true, when
in the sublimated egoism of her indolent, ironical, artificial life,
she had a vague impression of some possible passion which yet might
arouse her to acknowledge its force; a tempestuous fancy swept over
her, as a storm-wind may sweep over a parterre of tulips and azaleas,
for stronger emotions, hotter enmities, dearer attachments, keener
strife, than those which the polished inanities of her own sphere could
yield to her. The emotion lasted with her very little time, but whilst
it was there the eyes of Othmar always looked in memory into hers.
She who at will forgot everything had never forgotten the sound of his
voice as he had pleaded with her. It had ever since haunted her with a
vague imperfect sense of something missed, something lost, something in
her own life incomplete and unattainable. She had not a doubt but that
in time they would have wearied each other--fatigue was the inevitable
shadow of all love--yet she had a pathetic regretfulness as for life
incomplete, undeveloped, unshared, whenever she remembered that hers
and his might have been passed together.
It had been only a sentiment; it never had risen to the form of desire,
or ached with the pain of passion; but it had been a sentiment, vague,
almost poetic; a wild flower of feeling which seemed of strange growth
in the hot-house culture of her intelligence, and the rarified chill
air of her many philosophies.
She had sometimes said to herself, 'I could have loved him.' In
self-communion the conditional mood is never parted by more than a
hair's breadth from the present. There were moments in the ironical,
indolent, artificial life which usurped her time and thoughts in which
she almost regretted that decision which had banished Othmar from her
side and given him to another. The regret was as nearly a movement
of the heart as she was capable of; but it was much besides that; it
was the inquisitiveness of a _désœuvrée_ incredulous that life could
hold any great emotions for her; it was the impulse of a contemptuous
courage to break through social laws which it despised; it was the
desire of a woman lonely amidst her triumphs to find that key to the
enjoyment of existence which, in some way or another, had slipped
through her hands, and had never been discovered in its hiding-place.
'If I had been quite sure that he would have contented me!' she thought
more than once.
If she had been quite sure, she would have surrendered everything,
paused at nothing; it was neither daring nor generosity which were
wanting in her; but she had not been sure, since she was never sure of
herself!