A few days later Nadine Napraxine was surprised and annoyed at
receiving in the forenoon a request from her husband that she would be
so good as to receive him for a few moments.
'Beg the Prince to excuse me,' she said to her women. 'I am tired and
must go out in an hour.'
Never once in the years of their marriage had Napraxine ever ventured
to insist after such a message, or to revolt against her decisions.
She was astonished and exceedingly irritated when they brought her a
pencilled note in which were written some blurred words: 'Pray pardon
me, but I have urgent reasons to desire to see you without delay; I
must entreat of you to admit me, if only for a moment.'
'_Quelle corvée!_' she murmured as she reluctantly gave the order to
let him enter. The companionship of her husband, at all times wearisome
to her, had become in the last few weeks more than usually intolerable.
'I must beg of you not to send me these autocratic demands,' she said,
with much impatience, as he entered. 'You want my women sent away? Why
should they be sent away? What can you possibly have to say that may
not be heard from the housetops?'
Looking at him with irritation and undisguised dislike, she saw an
expression upon his face which was new there; he motioned the maids
away with authority; he was disturbed and excited; he had nevertheless
a certain dignity and anger in his attitude.
'Do you know, madame,' he said abruptly when they were alone, being
scarcely conscious of what he did say, 'that here in Paris there are
persons who venture to hint that--that--that Othmar has been for many
years at your feet? That his marriage was only one of pique? That even
now he neglects his wife because of you? Had you any idea of this? Can
you tell me what possible foundation there is for it? Oh, do not think
for a moment that I pay any heed to it, only I would like to know
why--when----'
Entangled in his words and in his ideas, he stammered, breathed
heavily, came to a full pause; he dared not accuse her, did not even
accuse her in his own thoughts; but the sudden knowledge that her name
was spoken in union with Othmar's had so galled and stunned him that he
had lost his usual patience, his habitual timidity, before her.
His wife heard him with a contraction of her eyebrows, which was the
only sign she ever gave of anger; her eyes were cold and haughty; her
whole countenance was as unrevealing as the marble features of her
bust by Dupré which stood on a table near. For the sole time in her
life she was not prepared with a reply; the various memories which had
united herself and Othmar had been always so carefully veiled from the
knowledge of others that she had never imagined any outer light would
be ever shed upon them. The world had certainly seen at one time that
Othmar loved her, and had been ready to sacrifice his life at her word,
but that had been long ago; she had not supposed that the emotions
which her clairvoyance had discovered, the mesmerism which she still
exercised, had had any spectators. But if for the moment surprised, she
was never for a moment at fault. She looked steadily at her husband,
with the delicate lines of her eyebrows drawn together in a frown,
which lent a strange severity to her features.
'My dear Prince,' she said slowly and coldly; 'you have known
my character for nearly eight years. I cannot tell whether the
opportunities you have had of understanding it have been employed
to the utmost, or whether your powers of comprehension have been
not altogether equal to the task. But one thing at least I should
have supposed you would have learned in all that time--I should have
thought you would have understood that I do not permit impertinent
interrogation, or even interrogation at all. I never ask you questions;
I expect never to be asked them.'
Napraxine stood before her like a chidden child; his long habit of
deference to her will and fear of her superiority were still in
the ascendant with him, but struggling against them were his own
manliness, and a vague, new-born suspicion, strengthened by a certain
evasiveness, which even his sluggish intelligence perceived, in her
reply.
'After all,' he said, somewhat piteously and irrelevantly; 'after all,
Nadège, I am your husband.'
'Unhappily!'
The single word so chill and so contemptuous was cast at him like a
blow with crystals of ice. He shrank a little.
'No doubt you think so, though I have done what I could,' he said,
humbly repressing the pang he felt. 'But unhappily or not, the fact is
a fact. You permit me very few conjugal rights, but there is one which
you will not surely deny me--the right to know what truth or untruth
there is in these stories of Othmar?'
'You speak like a _juge d'instruction_!' she said, with all her
customary disdain. 'You ought to let no one tell you those or any other
stories. It is yourself whom they make ridiculous, not me.'
'No one shall make me so long,' he muttered. 'If you will not answer
me, I will go to him.'
She raised her head haughtily and looked him full in the face with
that gaze wherewith she was accustomed to cow and to coerce men as the
shepherd's voice intimidates and rules the sheep.
'That would be certainly original,' she said, with a slight suggestion
of laughter. 'A husband going to an imaginary lover to beg him to
reveal how high he stood in the favour of his wife!--it would be
original if it would not be dignified. I wonder what Othmar would
answer you! You will admit that it would be a great temptation to his
vanity--and his invention!'
Napraxine paced a few steps to and fro the room in an agitation which
every one of her languid and contemptuous words increased; a kind of
hopelessness always came over him in the presence of his wife; it was
so impossible to move, to touch, to hold, to comprehend her. The calm
raillery, the chill imperious anger, which were all he ever could
excite in her, left his heart so shrunken and wounded, his pride so
humiliated and baffled.
He paused before her suddenly.
'Nadège,' he said, with a tremor in his voice: 'You know that I have
always liked Othmar. You asked me once why. It is not much of a
narrative. This is it. One day, years and years ago, when he was quite
a youth, we chanced to travel together in Russia. There was a movement
of agrarian revolt at that time. As we passed a village in the province
of Moscow we came upon a horrible conflagration; there were incendiary
fires; great sheepfolds and cattle-pens were burning. I--Heaven forgive
my selfishness!--would have driven on; I only wanted to get to Moscow
itself in time for a masked ball at the Kremlin; but Othmar would not;
he sprang out of the carriage and rallied a few men around him, and
plunged right into the flames to save the sheep and the cattle, or such
of them as he could; of course when he did that, I had no choice but
to do the same. We worked all night; we saved thousands of the beasts,
but we lost the ball at the Kremlin. I do not say it was anything very
great to do. I dare say numbers of other young men would have done as
much; but the remembrance of it has always made me like Othmar. If you
had seen him scorched, and singed, and black with smoke, his hair burnt
and his hands blistered, dragging the rams and the ewes, driving the
bullocks and heifers, the flames curling up over the grass which was as
dry as chips, for it was in the month of August;--I have always liked
him ever since; he is not the mere ennuyé that they think him.'
He paused abruptly; his wife's eyes had a conflicting expression in
them; there was emotion and there was mockery.
'Oh fool!--oh poor big innocent fool!' she thought, '_you_ to praise
Otho Othmar to me!'
Yet something in what he had said softened her cynical intolerance of
his questions and made her more merciful to him. The only qualities
which were ever admirable to her in her husband were his courage and
his sympathy with courage. They were not uncommon attributes, but they
were those which always had affinity to hers. And the half-grotesque,
half-pathetic ignorance which was visible as he spoke of Othmar moved
her to a certain indulgence in all her scorn.
'He is so stupid, but he is so honest,' she thought, as she had thought
so often before, with a feeling of compassion which might in any other
woman have been a pang of conscience. However, the passing sentiment
could not altogether exclude her more dominant instincts of raillery,
her not easily appeased offence at interrogation and interference.
'I do not really see, my dear Napraxine,' she said languidly, 'what
possible connection singed sheep and burning heifers have to do with
the rumours which--you say--society has been so good as to set on
foot concerning me. It is unfortunate that your ideas are always so
entangled that it is very difficult to follow them. But I imagine, so
far as I can evolve anything from such a chaos, that what you intend me
to understand by all this is, that because one summer night in Russia
long ago you were witness of a courageous action on the part of--your
friend--you would be sorry to suppose that he would commit one which
would make him your enemy: is that so?'
Napraxine made a gesture of assent.
'I cannot express myself well,' he murmured. 'But you are so clever you
can always understand----'
'To sort the black and the white beans set to Psyche for a task were
easier,' quoted his wife, with her enigmatical smile. 'Still, if I
interpret your meaning aright, it is that. Pray, then, let your mind be
at rest; the Countess Othmar is not neglected that I know of, and if
she be, _je n'y suis pour rien_.'
Then she poured out her chocolate. Napraxine was reassured by her
indifferent manner, and did not observe that the major part of his
interrogations was still left unanswered.
'I was sure of it,' he said with warmth. 'He is very much in love with
her, is he not?'
She gave a slight, most eloquent gesture, indicative of absolute
ignorance and of as absolute indifference.
'Ah! that is another matter which I could not presume to decide,' she
answered with a little yawn. 'He has been married fourteen months; men
are not usually in love so long as that.'
'I----' began Napraxine: then he stammered, paused, and coloured,
afraid of her ridicule.
'Yes; you were,' said his wife, serenely. 'But it is very unusual; it
is very undesirable. I do not think it contributed to your comfort; it
certainly did not to mine.'
Napraxine sighed.
'I should have never changed,' he said with ardour, though with
timidity, as though he were a lover of eighteen.
'You have never changed,' she said with that smile which she could
render enchanting in sweetness and in graciousness. 'You have always
been much better to me than I have deserved, and you have always been
the most generous and the most amiable of men. Now go; I have many
things to do, and I want my women.'
Napraxine grew red with pleasure at her praise, and his pale eyes shone
with eagerness, delight, and the admiration which she had hated so
intensely in the early years of their marriage. He stooped towards her,
breathless with his gratitude, and his hopes suddenly aroused after so
many years of despair and of resignation.
'Nadine,' he murmured. 'Even now--now--if you would? None of them have
loved you as I do.'
She stretched out her hand so that his lips, which would fain have gone
elsewhere, were forced to remain there.
'Perhaps,' she said vaguely, still with that enchanting smile which was
to him like a glimpse into Paradise itself. 'Do not ask for too much at
first; _au revoir_.'
Then she rang for her maids, and he was forced to withdraw; but he went
with all the forces of a re-awakened passion throbbing in his veins and
beating at his heart, like a swarm of bees roused by a ray of warmth
from winter torpor.
She, as soon as his step had ceased to echo along the distant
corridors, and the sound of wheels and horses' feet in the courtyard
below told her that he was about to leave the house, dismissed her
women, saying that she wished to sleep, and sat alone, with a sense of
strong disgust and of vague anxiety upon her.
'I could not allow him to provoke Othmar,' she thought. 'Anything but
that! anything but that!'
She would have been capable of any self-sacrifice, of any concession to
her husband, which could have prevented the hostile meeting of those
men.
A sudden tide of strong emotion swept over her self-centred and languid
life. In that one moment, in which she had become conscious of a
possible danger to Othmar, she had become as conscious of the full
force of her regard for him. Love, which had been her victim, her
plaything, her instrument, her servitor, for so long, became at length
the guest of her own heart, and was stronger than herself. She had
driven that danger away from his path by the skill of her consummate
finesse; but she was not wholly reassured, and if to save him from
her husband's suspicions she would be compelled to make herself the
recipient of her husband's re-awakened tenderness, she felt that the
price would be more hateful than death.
Even the momentary constraint and feigning which she had put upon
herself with her husband stung all her pride, offended all her dignity;
she could take no delight in it as she did usually in the admirable
issues of her most admirable skill in seduction and dissimulation. A
certain impression, which was not profound enough to be shame but had
its character, remained with her. She had been successful as usual, but
success did not content her. She was exceedingly proud; her delicacy,
which was as susceptible as any sensitive plant to any rude approach,
shrank from the path into which she had entered. She could take an
intellectual pleasure in adroit dissimulation, but she had no pleasure
in deceiving an honest confidence. She had always despised with all the
scorn of her nature the covered ways of intrigue, the hidden resorts of
illicit desires; her taste as well as her pride had always preserved
her from the pitfalls to which other women danced with light hearts
and light steps. Some sense of approaching these perils touched her
now and offended her, as with the presence of some vulgar thing. She
saw clearly enough what Othmar perhaps did not or would not see, that
their mutual love would soon or late take them on that same road which
all lovers have taken since the days when the Book was read beneath
the garden trees of Rimini. She was not alarmed or troubled in any
moral sense, but her delicacy and her hauteur were disturbed. For the
first time, she felt that it was possible for events and sentiments to
have more control over her than she had over them; for the first time
she had the sensation of being drawn on by fate in lieu of herself
controlling it.