This duel, if duel it could be called, since all the science and
almost all the advantages were on one side, passed constantly in the
presence and beneath the eyes of Othmar. But he was blind to it with
the shortsightedness of a man; he was, even, more than once irritated
by what he thought was an excess of kindness, an unusual interest,
shown by the woman whom he loved to his wife. He hated to see them
near each other. He scarcely disguised his restlessness when he noted
any approach to intimacy between them. The remembrance of those two
mornings at La Jacquemerille were for ever with him. He could not
pardon Nadine Napraxine that she appeared so entirely to ignore their
memory. True, he thought bitterly, it was she who had betrayed him,
and it is always the betrayed who remembers, the betrayer who forgets.
Had he said so much to her she would have answered: 'My friend, I did
not betray you; I only told you I would reflect. I did reflect; if the
result of my reflections was adverse to you, it was your misfortune
perhaps, but it was also your fault.'
Once or twice Melville endeavoured to induce Nadine Napraxine to speak
of the young girl of whose destinies he considered her the arbitress,
but he never succeeded.
'She is very beautiful;' she always answered with that talent in
selecting what she could say truthfully, which was not the least of
her wisdom. She added a few more words of eulogy, neither critical
nor exaggerated; she did not permit him to have any glimpse of the
consummate scorn joined to the sincere compassion with which she
regarded the wife of Othmar, every one of whose emotions she read as
though she read them in a book every time that the voice of Yseulte
changed in greeting her or the girl's tell-tale colour rose, or faded,
whenever she herself entered a room or looked at her across a theatre.
No one of all her lovers had ever been so completely mesmerised by
her power as was this girl who held the name, the home, the honour of
Othmar, whilst she herself held all his memory, all his desires, all
his mind and heart and life.
It was the fascination of the ophidian for the dove. It gratified
her sense of dominion, and aroused all her more cruel instincts. The
reluctant fascination which she exercised over Yseulte; the visible
effort with which the girl strove to escape from it and failed; the
magnetism with which her gaze was riveted and her ear strained to
follow every movement, to catch every utterance of her foe; that
helplessness, that unwilling, yet powerless, subjugation, excited all
which was coldest, most contemptuous, most inexorable, in the soul of
the woman in whose veins ran the blood of the assassins of Paul. That
clairvoyance which is the gift of all rare intelligences, made her as
conscious of all the bewildered thoughts which thronged the mind of
Yseulte as though she saw them in the magic crystal of a sorcerer.
She knew how, when she looked at the girl carelessly, smilingly, over
the feathers of her fan or the flowers of her bouquet, across the sea
of light of the opera-house, the whole soul of her innocent rival
shrank and trembled within her, even whilst the natural courage, and
resolution, and pride, of the de Valogne blood forced her to endeavour
to resist, and enabled her to succeed in concealing, the fear and
trouble which she felt.
'She is brave,' said Nadine Napraxine to herself with respect; but all
the scorn which was in her made her add, without pity, 'but what a
child!--how foolish!--how transparent!'
In that continual flux and reflux of society which incessantly brings
together those of the same world and allows them to see each other
perpetually, even though they remain strangers, the occasions were
frequent, almost daily, in which she could study this poor aching
heart, which was laid as bare to her as though Yseulte had had a mirror
in her breast, and, for no victory and no caprice of her life, had
she ever been so interested _de se faire belle_ as now, when she was
conscious that her imperial charm, her nameless irresistible powers
of seduction, had thrown their magic net over the life which had most
cause of all on earth to fear her own.
If he had known that she had suffered thus, his compassion and his
sense of honour would have been aroused and have taken alarm; but he
was blind to it, as men dominated by an exclusive passion are blind
to all outside it. His principles and his good taste would have made
him his own most inexorable censor had he been in any act of his life
faithless, in the gross meanings of the word, to the young life which
he had united to his own. But he did not consider that a love which
he pressed like a knife into the depths of his heart, and of which he
believed he gave no outward sign whatever, did any wrong to Yseulte.
She was still so young; she had all she desired; she would have
children about her in other years; she was of that docile, feminine,
unimpassioned nature which is easily content with the placid affections
of the natural ties. He did not think that he betrayed her because, all
unknown to her, he cherished in the depths of his own soul a bitter,
cruel, hopeless, and yet most exquisite and most enduring passion.
He had given her all which the world can give to any human creature;
he did not realise that his lips were chill when he kissed her, his
eyes indifferent when they glanced at her, his speech to her too often
absent and conventional, his caresses too often forced, mechanical, and
without any throb of warmth.
He knew well that if he were wise, even if he were faithful in intent
to his wife, he would leave Paris whilst Nadine Napraxine was in it.
His many possessions could have given him a hundred facile excuses for
absence, and Yseulte would have gone willingly wherever he had chosen
to take her. But he did not obey his conscience; he was swayed by his
pride, which would not allow him to let the world say that he retreated
before his sorceress, and he was held by that power which a great love
exercises over the judgment and the volition. The mere glance of her
eyes had fascination enough to destroy all his resolutions, and draw
him into absolute oblivion of everything save herself. His passion for
her was one of those which absence and denial intensify. He would make
the arrangements of his whole day subordinate to one slight chance of
meeting her for a moment in a crowd, of seeing her pass at a distance
beneath the boughs of an avenue. He had received a mortal affront, a
merciless insult, and yet he forgave them both; he was with her once
more, he had no sense except of that one ecstasy. He was weak as a reed
in her hands; he could have flung himself at her feet and kissed them.
He knew that manliness, dignity, honour, duty, self-respect, all ought
to have forbidden him to cross her threshold, but he was indifferent
to them; they were mere names, without power, almost without meaning,
for him. They had no more control over him than threads of silk upon
the neck of a horse which has broken loose. She was before him, the one
woman who was beautiful, beloved, and desired by him; and he realised
that it had been of no use to try and cure a delirious fever with a
simple draught of sweet herbs, as Melville had once said.
His own wife was nothing to him; the wife of Napraxine was all. He
despised and hated himself for his inconstancy where his fealty
bound him, for his fidelity where he had only received light mockery
and cruel provocation. But he could not change his nature, and the
education which life had given him had contained no lesson in the art
of self-denial. The world had always been at his feet; his desires
had always been gratified and his wishes forestalled; he had never
been used to subjugate his own inclinations; and this, the first evil
which had ever tempted him, began to assail him with increasing force
with every day which brought him within sight of the one woman whom he
adored. She knew his weakness as she knew that of every human being who
ever approached her, and she had no compassion for it. A man who had
done her the insult of presuming to seek elsewhere consolation for her
own indifference, had no mercy from her in his failure; he had offended
her in the only vulnerable portion of her character, her supreme love
of exclusive dominion. She was not vain with any common vanity, but the
instincts towards absolute mastery were strong in her; whoever thwarted
those instincts, always repented his temerity in dust and ashes.
Each step which Othmar made towards resumption of her yoke upon his
passions, seemed to her only his due chastisement; every pang which she
detected in him, every look of remorse, every imprudence of utterance
or regard, pleased her as witness of his just degradation. In the many
occasions which society gave her, she planted daggers in his breast
with every cruelly chosen word she spoke, which was invariably veiled
in easy irony or simulated friendliness, until his whole existence
was consumed between the longing for, and the dread of, her approach.
She had towards him a mingling of compassion, raillery, and kindness,
which was of all means the one most certain to wound, excite, and
enchain him. Whenever he was within hearing, she was in her wittiest
moods, her most brilliant aspects; all the various charms of her acute
intelligence and of her high culture seemed increased tenfold after the
simple childlike speech and the convent-bred mind of his young wife.
He felt like a man who, long chained to a narrow, colourless, peaceful
shore, is suddenly set free amidst the flowering labyrinths and the
voluptuous odours of a tropical savannah.
Never had Nadine Napraxine been so willing to please, so facile to be
pleased, as in the course of this Paris winter, when he was constantly
within sight of her coquetteries, within earshot of her speeches. He
watched her across a salon as a captive sunk in the depths of a prison
may gaze at a summer sky beneath which he may never again stand a free
man. The sense of his vicinity and of his suffering, supplied that
stimulant to life which her languid emotions needed; she viewed the
drama of his regret and revolt with an interest in it half bitter, half
sweet. A man who could have wedded another whilst he loved herself,
deserved, she told herself, to suffer; yet there were moments when,
beneath her triumphs and her mockeries, there was in her own heart a
thrill of answering pain; what might have been, glided also before her
memory with pale reproach.
One night, entirely by chance, he and she were alone for a few minutes,
that solitude in a crowd for which great entertainments give so much
opportunity.
It was at a ball given by Prince Orloff; those hazards of society which
it always amused her to subdue and turn to the service of her own
intentions, had brought him to her side; some great palms made a little
grove around them; the sound of the valse from Faust came dreamily from
the distant ball-room.
'Do you know, Othmar, that I am disappointed in you?' she murmured,
in her softest, cruellest, most malicious tones. 'I imagined that you
would be so very good to your wife; you were always sighing to be an
_homme d'intérieur_, you were always coveting solitude, sentiment, and
sympathy. I expected to see you give us the example of a perfectly
ideal union; but I am afraid that, after all, you are not much better
than other men.'
'Madame----'
'Oh, you are angry, of course! Everyone is angry who is in the wrong.
It is perfectly true, you are only a husband like ten thousand others.
You were always a little like Chateaubriand: "Touriste, ambassadeur,
ministre, ou amant, à peine arrivé, il s'ennuie."'
'It might be true of M. de Chateaubriand,' said Othmar, with
displeasure, 'it is not so of me. I am most constant,--where I have
never been welcome.'
The confession escaped him despite himself, and he regretted it
passionately as soon as it was uttered.
'That is why you are faithful,' said Nadine Napraxine, smiling. 'If
you had been welcome, how poor and pale the whole country of your
explorations would have seemed to you! There is only one way not to
have shut on you those dreadful gates of disillusion; it is to be wise,
and never to pass through them.'
'Your philosophies are, no doubt, madame, as correct as your
observations,' said Othmar, with impatience.
'I pass my life in observing,' she replied. 'It is the only pursuit in
society which has really any interest in it. But tell me, do you not
a little, just a little, neglect your wife? It is a pity, she is so
young; in time, if you be not there, someone else will be.'
'Never!' he interrupted, with some heat. 'I have many faults, no
doubt, and I abandon them to your observation; but Yseulte has not a
single defect that I have seen; she is loyalty, innocence, and honour
incarnated.'
'They are three charming qualities,' replied Nadine Napraxine, 'but
they do not appear to have any result except that of making you
dangerously confident that you may leave them wholly to themselves.'
Othmar coloured; he was sensible of the correctness of the accusation,
and it irritated him excessively to hear the woman he loved rebuke him
for his conduct to his wife.
'If I be too indifferent where all my allegiance should be given,' he
said abruptly, 'the Princess Napraxine should be the last on earth to
accuse me of it. She knows the cause.'
'The cause, I imagine, is in your temperament,' she replied, ignoring
his meaning, 'as it was in Chateaubriand's.'
'Can we not leave Chateaubriand alone?'
'And speak only of yourself? It is a curious thing, but a man is never
contented unless he is speaking solely of himself. It is the only
entity in which he takes any real interest.'
'Perhaps it is the only one with which he is really conversant.'
'Oh, you must be conversant with your wife's. Her mind must be as clear
as crystal. Do you know, Othmar, I think you ought to be more grateful
than you are; to have so very pure a creature as that to be the mother
of your children, is a privilege to you and to your race.'
She spoke gravely for the moment, abandoning the ironical mockery of
her habitual tone.
He rose abruptly.
'I cannot be grateful,' he said very low, with a passionate vibration
in his voice. 'I was a fool, and I committed a great error. With all
my life burnt up by one love, I imagined that I could slake the flames
of it by contact with youth and innocence, as if the woodland brook
could cool and arrest the boiling lava!'
Nadine Napraxine heard, with her languid lids drooped over her eyes,
and the shadow of a smile upon her mouth.
'If it were so, you should be too proud to confess it,' she said, after
a pause. 'To be sure it is not a very confidential confession, for
everyone sees that your--experiment--has not been quite so successful
as you hoped, as Baron Fritz, at least, hoped. Well, we have talked
long enough in this solitude; you may take me to the ball-room.'
When he went home, no sleep came to him that night; his conscience
and his pride rebuked him for the admission he had made, and before
his eyes there passed ceaselessly the vision of Nadine Napraxine,
pale, ethereal, magically seductive, like those figures of Herculaneum
which float noiselessly in the air, their bodies delicate as the
gossamer-winged body of the Deilephila.
And she had said to him, 'All the world sees that your experiment has
not succeeded!'
The words added the one drop of mortification and of bitterness which
was alone wanting in the cup which he had of his own weakness and of
his own will filled for himself, and was forced by the justice of fate
to drink.
She herself drove homeward alone through the chilly shadows of the
dawn, which could not touch her, wrapped in her eider-down lined
satins, and reclining amongst her yielding cushions. A beggar woman
sitting on a doorstep with a sick child sleepless in her arms, saw the
carriage pass, and thought, 'What must it feel like to roll on like
that, clad like that, warm and happy like that, with the price of a
million loaves of bread in one single stone at your throat?'
Nadine Napraxine would have told her that food and warmth and jewels
were no especial pleasure, when you had been always used to them;
perhaps the absence of them might be painful--so much she would have
granted.
She drove homeward, and went up to her white dressing-room with a vague
sense of impatience and of regret stirring within her.
How he loved her, how he loved her, although he had been madman enough
to give his life to another in an insane attempt to attain oblivion!
She did not lie down, but when her women had undressed her and wrapped
her in her loose warm wrappers, she sat long looking dreamily into the
fire burning on the open hearth, for the night of April was chilly
within doors though without nightingales began to sing amidst the
lilac buds. He would still, if she chose, go far away from all duty,
all honour, all the ways of the world and the respect of men. Almost
it tempted her, that which she had rejected two years before. There
was another life to be hurt now! Friederich Othmar had perchance read
her temperament aright when he had thought that the power to make
misery would have greater force to attract her than the power to confer
happiness.
'I suppose I must be what the good dullards call wicked,' she thought
with a smile at herself, and a certain vague emotion of disgust at her
own impulse.
Was she wicked? Was anybody so? Was there ever anything in human
nature beyond impatience, ennui, inquisitiveness, natural love of
dominion, and wholly instinctive egotism? Did not these, collectively
or singly, suffice to account for all human actions?