A fortnight afterwards, the Prince and Princess Napraxine issued cards
for a dinner, to meet the Emperor of all the Russias. The invitation
came to the Hôtel Othmar at noon, as Yseulte sat at breakfast; she
coloured a little as she saw it, and passed it across the table to her
husband with a dozen other invitations. He glanced at them, put them
aside, and spoke of something else. She hesitated a few minutes, then
said timidly:
'Am I to accept it?'
'Accept which of them?'
'The Princess Napraxine's.'
He looked up with some displeasure at her tone; he answered quickly:
'Assuredly. Why not? You cannot leave it open as you do for a ball or a
reception.'
She did not venture to say why. She coloured more and more, and
remained silent.
'You have no plea for refusing invitations since you are not ill and
are seen everywhere,' he said coldly. 'Besides, I thought you were
acquiring the tastes of the world.'
She did not speak. She could not say to him: 'I cannot bear to be the
guest of Madame Napraxine, because they tell me you have loved her as
you never have loved me.'
Othmar glanced at her, and imagined what was in her thoughts. 'Perhaps
that meddlesome Melville has talked to her,' he thought, with the ready
suspicion of a man of the world of an ecclesiastic. He said, a little
impatiently:
'My dear child, do not conceive animosities against people, or you will
spoil your own sweetness of temper and make yourself disliked by your
own sex. And do not fret yourself with imaginary antagonisms, which
are altogether unworthy of you. When we are living in the world, we
must abide by its rules of courtesy. I am wholly at a loss to imagine
why you should be unwilling to accept this invitation; but as you are
seen everywhere in this your first Paris winter, you cannot without
rudeness refuse it. This is the only good that I have ever seen come
out of society, that it compels us to subordinate our own inclinations
to certain definite laws of good breeding. Pray do not grow fretful; it
was your beautiful serenity that I first admired, and loved.'
He hesitated a moment before the last word.
'I will remember,' she said gently; but without much effort she would
have burst into tears.
He saw the effort, and it irritated him. He knew that he ought to have
said to her, 'Follow your inclination and refuse, if you like.' But
her wish to refuse it had annoyed him, and hurried him into a command
to accept it from which he could not recede. And the charm of Nadine
Napraxine was upon him, and had broken down all his wiser resolutions.
He looked across the table at Yseulte. She was as fair as the dawn,
certainly; but she had no power over him; she did not beguile his time,
or stimulate his wit, or stir his intellect; she did not, even after
twelve months of possession, move his senses. She was a lovely child,
most obedient, tender, and spiritual; but--she was not the mistress of
his thoughts. She never had been, she never would be so.
'How stupid men are!' thought Nadine Napraxine that night. 'She is
worth very much more than I am; she is both handsome and lovely; she is
as harmless and guileless as a dove, and she adores him, a great deal
too much; yet, perhaps one ought to say therefore, he cares nothing
on earth for her; he will love me as long as his life lasts; he would
do so even if I had the tremendous penalty-weight, as the racing-men
say, of being his wife. I really do not know why it is that the noblest
sort of women do not excite love. I wonder why it is? I asked my father
once; he said, "Because the devil dowers his own daughters." But that
explains nothing; we all know there is no devil; there are women--and
women. That is all.'
As those thoughts drifted dreamily through her mind she was conversing
all the while about classic music with a potentate who was no mean
dilettante in melody, and she was looking down her table at the young
face of Yseulte with a vague sort of pity which she could scarcely
have explained,--such pity as in the gladiatorial arena some trained
and irresistible _retiarius_ might have felt at seeing some fair brave
youth enter with the shield that was to be so useless and the sword
that was so soon to fail; a pity which might be quite sincere, though
it might never go so far as mercy. The faint jealousy which she had
felt when, walking amongst the moonlit fields of Zaraïzoff, she had
thought of Amyôt, had faded altogether the moment that she had met
Othmar again. She knew, as women always know such things, that her
power over him was unaltered and unalterable by any will of his own.
'When I choose,' she thought, 'he will leave her and she will break her
heart. She will know nothing about such reprisal as a Parisienne should
take; she will never be a Parisienne; she will always be a patrician of
the _vieille souche_, which is quite another thing; she will always be
an innocent woman, with a soul like a lily. She is afraid of me, and
she dislikes me; she tries to hide it all she can, but she does not
know how. Platon admires her; that is what he ought to have married; I
dare say she would never have found him ugly or clumsy; he would have
been her husband--that would have been enough to make him sacred;
there are women like that. She adores Othmar, but she knows nothing
about him; he is a little like Hamlet, and she is as much puzzled as
Ophelia. Of course she would have worshipped any man who had prevented
her being buried in a convent; she is as full of life as a lime-tree
in flower. She is longing to look at me always, but she does not dare.
She is quite beautiful, quite, but all that is no use to her. He knows
it, but he does not care for it. He will keep her in his house and have
children by her, but he will care no more for her than for Mercié's
Andromache, that stands in his vestibule. Whether you are Venus or a
Hottentot matters so little if a man do not love you; if you do not
know how to make him love you. They always say a modest woman never
does know how; but I do not think I am especially immodest, yet I
know----'
The disjointed thoughts drifted through her mind without interfering
with the current of her conversation. Metaphysicians may dispute the
existence of two simultaneous trains of thought, but women know their
possibility.
Her enigmatical victorious smile came on her lips as that consciousness
soothed and stimulated her.
She had too much honour to make any deliberate project to seduce him
from his allegiance. Her coquetries might be less merciful than many
more guilty, but they had never ceased to be innocent in the world's
conception of the term. The coldness with which Othmar had reproached
her was still one of the most definite of her qualities. It was
the amulet of her magic, the secret of her power. She was as yet a
perfectly passionless woman, and as such ruled the passions of men.
'So, Othmar, like every one else, you find that marriage leads to
the world, not to the hidden doves' nest of the poets?' said Nadine
Napraxine after dinner, when her rooms had filled an hour before
midnight, and her imperial guest had gone and left her free.
'I am afraid it is impossible to avoid following the mould of the
society we live in,' replied Othmar. 'The hope of being original is one
of the many illusions which we leave behind us with time.'
'I confess that I am a little disappointed in you,' she continued,
with the smile of malice which he knew so well. 'I should have thought
you would have had courage to live your own life, to avoid beaten
paths, and to keep your lovely arum lily from the Breton woods out of
our forcing-house. Allow me to say it in all simplicity and sincerity,
she is most lovely. All Paris envies you.'
Othmar's face flushed as he bowed in acknowledgment. He did not reply.
Though the habits of the world had taught him many such lessons, he
found it hard to appear unmoved beside the woman he loved, and discuss
with her that other whom he had wedded. She understood quite well the
unwillingness and the embarrassment which he felt, and they made her
but the more tenacious in pursuit of the subject she had selected.
'Heavens!' she thought, 'what children of Nature men always remain!
They are unmanned if they meet a woman who recalls a love scene ten
years old, whilst a woman would not move an eyelash if she encountered
a score of lovers she had forsaken--no!--not if she had hired bravoes
to kill them, and they knew it!'
Aloud she said, in her sweetest voice: 'I remember you were always
so haunted with ideals. You must certainly have realised the most
spiritual and the purest of them now. When I heard people say that you
were going to shut yourself up in your country house in the Orléannais,
it seemed to me perfectly natural, perfectly fitting; you never cared
for society. Why should you contaminate your young wife with it? I
thought you were going to show us that an idyllic life was still
possible. We are all sad sceptics, but we should have believed _you_.
Why did you lose so good an opportunity? To live in Paris, to receive
and be received; any one can do that; _toute la gomme_ does it; Amyôt
ought to have given you something better.'
'To live in the country needs a clear conscience,' replied Othmar
impatiently, not very well knowing what he said.
'I hope you have murdered nobody,' said his tormentor. 'Really, without
compliment, I should have thought you were one of the few men who
could have lived in the country without ennui. You love books, you
like your own company, and you are not enamoured of that of others.
Besides, it is really a pity to bring that young angel,--that
clear-eyed saint,--into our feverish world. She will only lose that
lovely complexion, and perhaps her health as well, learn a great deal
of folly, and feel thirty years old before she is twenty. Why do you do
it? It is heartless of you. Amyôt is her world.'
He did not attempt to reply.
She had spoken with sincerity, though her motive in speaking was not so
sincere as her sentiment. Nadine Napraxine, who herself often regretted
the premature womanhood which the manner of her childhood had brought
so early to her, who often sighed restlessly, if disdainfully, for
that innocence of mind, that freshness of heart which she had never
enjoyed--the blue cornflower of Louise of Prussia, the green fields
of Eugénie de Guerin,--felt at that moment the impulse of compassion
which she expressed. It seemed to her, momentarily at least, cruel to
have brought any creature so youthful and so easily contented by simple
things, as Yseulte was, into the furnace of the world, where all simple
tastes and fancies perish like a handful of meadow daisies cast into a
brazier.
'And to have brought her near _me_!' she thought, with the singular
union of disdain and of compassion with which she had looked for the
first time at the face of the child in the salons of Millo. Whilst
he remained silent she looked at him a little curiously, a little
contemptuously; with no pity whatever for him.
'One day, when I was ten years old, I was in my father's study,' she
continued with apparent irrelevance. 'I was very tiresome; he was
dictating to three secretaries alternately, and I tormented him with
questions. He was so good to me that he could never bear to turn me
out; but he threw me an illustrated copy of "Gil Blas." I became as
quiet as a mouse. I was entranced, delighted; I never spoke for two
hours--but I do not know that I was the better for it afterwards. "Gil
Blas" is not amongst the moral tales of children. I suppose he did not
think of that; he only wanted to get rid of me.'
Othmar coloured with anger and self-consciousness. He knew very well
that she meant to imply that he sent his wife into the world as Count
Platoff had given his daughter 'Gil Blas.' Conscience would not allow
him a disclaimer, even if a sense of ridicule in her reminiscences,
apparently so ill-timed, had permitted him to make one.
'I do not know that I was any the better,' continued Nadine Napraxine
in the same even, dreamy tones. 'But I do not know that I was any the
worse. Everything depends on temperament. Oh yes, much more than on
circumstance, let them say what they will. Temperament is like climate,
a thing unalterable. All the forces of men will not make the Nile
desert cold, or the Baltic shores tropical. It is so delightful to
think that something escapes the carpentering of man! Do you know, when
an earthquake asserts itself or a mountain kills people, I can never
help saying to myself with pleasure--"Ah-ha! there is _something_ left,
then, that they cannot explain away, or regulate, or measure with their
pocket-rule, and what a comfort that is!"'
She laughed a little, leaning back in her chair, slowly moving a fan
which Watteau had painted for Larghillière.
'Madame Napraxine,' answered Othmar bitterly, 'has always occupied in
life the position which Juvenal thought so enviable; she has always
watched the tempest and the shipwreck from her own safe couch behind
her casement.'
'Yes, I have,' she murmured, with a little sigh of self-satisfaction.
'It is so easy not to go out in bad weather.'
'May one not be overtaken by it?'
'Not if one have a good aneroid.'
'Let us leave metaphor,' she continued, after a pause; 'I know you
believe in something like the Greek Erinnys; but you may believe me
that there is nothing of the kind. We all make our own fates, or our
temperaments make them for us. Destiny does not stalk about amongst us
unseen, but irresistible, as I know you think it does. I believe there
is nothing which befalls us, from a catarrh to a catastrophe, which,
if we choose to be honest with ourselves, we may not trace to our own
imprudence.'
'You cannot judge; you have never----'
'Never had a cold? Oh, indeed I have. If you were to listen to de
Thiviers, I am a person on whom the most southerly wind should never be
allowed to blow, for fear of its blowing through me and annihilating
me; as for catastrophe----'
She paused a moment; across even her profound indifference there passed
the memories of some dead men.
'Catastrophes,' added Othmar; 'catastrophes have not been lacking in
the pageant of your life, madame; but I believe they have only been the
shipwrecks seen through the windows of rose-glass.'
She was silent. Then she said slowly and in a low voice:
'You mistake if you think that I did not feel pain for the death of
Seliedoff.'
Othmar bent his head. She saw that he did not believe her. The sense of
being misjudged banished her momentarily chastened mood.
'But I was at the same time very much annoyed,' she continued. 'Tragedy
always annoys me. It sets the asses of the world braying. No one
ever pleases me by irrational or exaggerated actions. I am sorry, of
course, but I cannot forgive the uproar which all conduct of--of that
sort causes me. It always irritates me like the conflagration in the
cantata of the 'Dernière Nuit de Sardanapale,' where the _grosse
caisse_ always roars and rolls so loud that all the music is lost, and
one does not feel to care in the very least who may die or who may
live.'
Then she rose and gave him a little smile.
'I assure you the _grosse caisse_ is a mistake in a cantata!' she said
as she passed him and left him, the subtle, voluptuous odour of the
gardenias of her bouquet floating by him like the dewy odours of a
midsummer eve.
He thought bitterly that he could comprehend how such a man as Joubert
loved the scent of tube-roses till his death, because a woman once had
taken a cluster of them from his hand twenty years before in a garden
alley of the Tuileries.
It irritated him extremely that she should so exactly have suspected
and penetrated the motive which had led him to desire that the life of
the world should distract and occupy the young companion of his life.
It was a motive of which he was acutely ashamed, which he could not
endure to confess to himself, much less could bear to feel was subject
to the observation of her unsparing raillery. Of all wounds which she
could have reopened, none would have ached more keenly in him than his
humiliating sense of how she, at the least, must know that the young
girl who bore his name had no place in his heart; that she, at the
least, must remember, as he remembered, those interviews with her at La
Jacquemerille which had been so closely followed by his marriage. He
might deceive all the world into the belief that he loved his wife--he
could not so deceive her. His veins thrilled, his blood burned, as he
recalled those two days in which his passion had been spoken to her
in words whose utterance he himself could never forget. What had they
sounded to her ear? Only, no doubt, like the _grosse caisse_ which,
symbolising death, agony, destruction, woe untellable, yet only seemed
to her grotesquely forcible, jarring unpleasantly on the harmonious
serenity of the symphony!
He forced himself not to follow her with his eyes as she moved away
with that exquisite harmony of step and carriage which were due to the
perfect proportions of her form, and he turned and sought out Yseulte
herself.
She was in the music-room, listening absently to an andante of
Beethoven's, surrounded by a little court of men no longer young, who
cared nothing for Beethoven, but much for her youth and her unconscious
charm of manner.
'Are you willing to come away?' he murmured to her when the andante was
ended.
She rose with eagerness; to be in the Hôtel Napraxine was oppressive
and painful to her.
He took her away unobserved, and drove homeward beside her in silence.
He looked at her profile, fair and clear against the light thrown from
without on the glass of the carriage window, and at the whiteness
of her slender throat, with its collar of pearls, and hated himself
because he could only think, with a shudder, 'All my life must I sit
beside her, a living lie to her!'
'Yseulte,' he murmured suddenly; then paused: he felt a momentary
impulse to tell her the truth, to say to her, 'I do not love you--God
forgive me!--I love another woman; help me, my dear, and pity me; do
not reproach me; I will do the best that I can by your life; love me
always yourself if you can; I need it sorely. We may never be happy;
but at least there will be no falsehood or secrecy between us. That
will be much.'
The impulse was momentarily strong upon him; he took her hand in his
and said once more with hesitation: 'Yseulte----'
Then he paused; long habit of reserve, a sensitive fear of wounding and
of being wounded, the tenderness of pity for a blameless creature who
adored him and who, if he spoke his thoughts aloud, would never lie in
peace upon his heart again, all checked the words which had risen to
his lips.
He sighed, kissed her hand, and murmured some vague caressing phrase.
The moment passed; the impulse of confidence and candour lost strength
and courage. 'It would be cruel,' he thought. 'Since I have made my
burden, let me at least have courage to bear it alone.'
It seemed to him unmanly and ungenerous to lay any share or shadow of
it on this young life, which owed all its peace and light to ignorance
of the truth. She was deluded, but she was happy: he let her be. He
shrank from arousing her; he shrank from hurting her; she was like a
child, doomed to starve on her awaking, but whilst she slept, dreaming,
with a smile, that she was fed by bread from heaven.