When Nadine Napraxine returned home that night she found a letter lying
on the table, of whose superscription she recognised the writing.
'So soon!' she thought, with her little smile, which had always been so
calm and so amused before the madnesses of men.
But when she had read it, it seemed like a living, burning, palpitating
thing, so did its words throb and thrill with ardour, reproach, and
pain. All the suffering and passion pent up in his soul for twelve long
months had broken loose and were uttered in it.
He had written in the silence of the dawn, when all the world was
quiet as the grave, and the loud beating of his heart was audible to
his own ear as he realised that near him, beyond those few miles of
feathery foliage and flower-scented fields, there lay sleeping the one
woman he adored. The impulse to write so to her had been stronger than
himself, and all wisdom, manhood, and pride spoke to him in vain. To
her alone had he ever laid bare his heart; to her alone was he not
ashamed to uncover all its weakness, all its rebellion, all its futile
and feverish pain. Let her laugh if she would, he thought, but let
her know all he suffered through her. For a year he had kept silent;
chained down by the bonds of duty and of custom. For a year he had
lived out his dreary days as best he might, bearing his burden mutely,
and striving to do his best; but at the knowledge that she was near
him, there in the pale, cool air of the daybreak, all his efforts at
self-command were shattered as silk threads break in a nervous hand.
No one had ever written to her as he wrote now.
She read the letter, with the rosy light of the morning coming in
through her half-closed shutters; and the words of it banished the
sleep which hung like vapour about her languid eyes and her dreamy
thoughts. The smile went away from her lips. The force of another human
heart smote for once an echo from hers.
'What madness!' she murmured.
But it was a madness which seemed noble to her, beautiful in its folly,
and even in its torture; she felt a strange emotion as she read and
re-read the only message which he had sent to her in the whole months
of a year. She sat lost in thought; hesitation was rare with her, but
now she hesitated. With a word she could banish him for ever from her
life. With a word she could call him for ever to her side. His face
seemed to rise before her as she looked at the signature of his name;
his voice seemed in her ear pleading, imperious, tender, as she had
heard it a hundred times. A year had been lost; a year had passed
and dropped in the past, and they had never looked upon each other's
faces. A certain emotion which she had never known stirred in her,--the
weakness of a sudden yearning, of a sudden wistful desire.
'Is this love too?' she thought, with that ironical doubt of herself
with which she had so often doubted others.
'I have never cared,' she thought, with scorn for the impulses which
had moved her. But she cared now. The silence and the absence of those
long months had been his friends. In her meditations she had confessed
to herself that he had not been to her the mere poor slave and spaniel
that other men had been; she had thought to herself more than once with
a wonder at her own regret: 'If he had only had patience! If he had
only waited!'
She read the letter he had written twice again. Then she burned it. She
did not need to keep it. Each word of it was written on her memory.
When the day was warm with the light of the forenoon's sunshine she
went out into the air. She felt the need of movement, of space, of a
fresh atmosphere. For the first time in her life a certain excitation
had taken the place of her tranquil serenity. A certain restlessness
had disturbed her indifference; she had the sense of having descended
to some too great concession, of having let herself fall from her
serene heights of power to some human feebleness and frailty.
'If this be love?' she mused again with doubt and disdain, casting on
the awakening warmth of her own feelings that ice of scepticism with
which she had so often frozen the hearts of others. 'If I were only
quite sure of what I feel,' she thought, with that egoism which was so
natural to her that it was part of her every impulse and of her every
motive.
Life had a certain loveliness for her in her perfect liberty, though
she still doubted whether its monotony would not mar even that. The
sense of her entire freedom was still welcome to her, and the world
awaited her as a courtier, hat in hand, awaits his queen. All its
pleasures,--such as they were, she knew them all, and held them in
slight esteem,--would be hers. She had youth, beauty, and wit, and,
when the first two of these should have left her, would still have that
power of great riches which, as a wise man has said, is the only one to
which the modern world will bow. And yet a vague melancholy was upon
her; that melancholy, like a light mist on a smiling landscape, which
she had once said might have made her such a poet as Maikoff had she
lived for ever in the solitude of the steppes.
She went out into the balmy air, clear as a crystal, and filled with
the scent of blossoming orange-boughs. She stood awhile on the marble
terrace and looked seaward. The memories of the dead men who so late
had been living there beside her passed over her in the warmth and
light of the morning with a chill, as the north wind will sweep through
the sunshine and scatter the clusters of orange-buds. Of them all,
it was of her husband that she thought with the nearest likeness to
self-reproach which her nature made possible.
'He was brave, he was as trustful as a dog, he was _bon enfant_,' she
mused, 'and I do not think I ever said to him a single kind word before
that last day--and then it was only said to deceive him!'
She remembered him as he had spoken to her on that day. He had had
a certain dignity, the dignity of manliness, of simplicity, of
truthfulness; and all that was left of him was lying, mere dry dust and
bones, in his emblazoned coffin in the gilded gloom of the church at
Zaraizoff.
'Well--the dead are dead, and we shall soon be with them,' she thought
with a sigh, as she turned from the sea wall of the terrace and looked
at the picturesque and irregular front of the house, covered with its
gay garlands of creeping plants.
The place was hers, bought for her by Napraxine, as one may buy a
bonbon-box for a child. It seemed that day to laugh with light and
colour. Coming hither as she did from the endless night of a Russian
winter, it seemed bathed in heat, and luminance, and flowers. She
descended the steps to where her ponies waited, and went with them
along the climbing roads into the hills above La Jacquemerille.
The day was still young. The bare mountain sides wore the hues of the
jacinth and amethyst; the odours of sweet herbs and spring flowers
were strong and sweet; far down below, unseen, the sea was sparkling,
lending the sense of its presence and its freedom to all the gorges
and hillsides above. Her swift-footed ponies bore her fleetly as the
Hours bore Aurora through the roseate and golden radiance of the April
morning.
With intention she guided them up the steep roads which led to the
humble church of S. Pharamond, hidden beneath its great gnarled olive
trees, and covered with its network of rose-boughs. She knew that
Yseulte went there often in the forenoon, and the caprice moved her to
see if she could meet, as if by chance, this poor child, whose fate
lay in the hollow of her hand, like a bird taken from a trap to be
strangled with a touch at pleasure of its keeper. The sense of such
power was always sweet to her; although so familiar, its familiarity
did not detract from its pleasure. It was the sole thing which did not
by repetition grow monotonous. Her life had been short by years, but
it had been full of such dominion. She had dealt with men and women as
she chose, and to make or mar their destinies had always been the sole
pastime of which she did not weary. Humanity was her box of puppets,
as it is that of the Solitary of Varzin. To hold the strings of fate,
to bind and loose the threads of circumstance, and weave the warp and
woof of destiny, was the only science which had ever had charm over her
changeful temperament and her sceptical intelligence. Beside it all
other things were trivial and tame. She had never met anyone who had
resisted her will; Othmar himself had done so for awhile, but he had
lived to repent and to succumb.
The church of S. Pharamond was empty and silent; there was no office
said that day; it was grey and still and mournful, and no living thing
was in it save a swallow perched upon the altar rail. She pursued the
steep hillside road, overhung with olive and fig trees, the wayside
carpeted with gladiolus and the blue fleur-de-luce. Below, through
the light green foam of spring foliage and the sombre masses of pine
and ilex woods, there rose the towers and pinnacles of the château,
rising slim and fantastic, against the azure of the sky. Around her the
silence was unbroken, except by a tethered goat cropping euphorbia and
ivy from a ruined wall.
Looking through the boughs of the olives, she saw afar off the figure
of Yseulte. Where she was standing was on the land of Nicole Sandroz,
the furrows, thick with flowers, climbing the hill slope, the orchard
of lemon and olive hiding the low white walls of the house. She
alighted, and left her little horses standing by a stone well made in
the old wall where the goat was tethered. She wished to see the wife of
Othmar, and she moved straight towards her where she sat beneath one
of the gigantic olives, whose foliage spread in a misty cloud silvery
and sea-green above her. She had uncovered her head in the deep shadow
around her; her attitude was listless, spiritless, dejected; in the
shade thrown from the olive boughs her face looked very colourless,
worn, and thin. All her look of childhood had passed away, and almost
all her youth as well. As she recognised her rival she trembled
violently and rose to her feet, losing for the moment all self-control
and presence of mind. Her large brown eyes dilated with fear, like
a deer's when it is hard pressed in the chase. She had scarcely
self-command to make the common gesture of salutation.
Nadine Napraxine, smiling, approached her and looked at her with that
critical and penetrating glance which, through its languor, could
read all the secrets of the soul. She spoke the bland commonplaces of
compliment and courtesy with her sweetest manner, her most gracious
grace; and the girl, paralysed once again, as a hundred times before,
murmured a stupid sentence or so, coloured, grew pale, hesitated, felt
herself awkward, foolish, and constrained, and could not keep down the
tremor which shook her from head to foot, thus suddenly confronted with
the woman whom her husband loved. All the terror which she had felt
in Paris returned to her with tenfold more suffering, tenfold more
intensity. In the morning light, standing amongst the simple wild herbs
and flowers, her foe had the same magical power of magnetism over her
as she had had in the lighted drawing-rooms and theatres of Paris. She
understood why she herself was nothing in her husband's life, and this
other was all.
With simple gracious words, as she might have spoken to a timid child,
her enemy continued to address her, passing over her constraint and
silence as though she perceived them not, and all the while that the
smooth, careless phrases rose so easily on her lips she studied the
changing colour and the frightened eyes of Yseulte with that amused and
merciless analysis which was so common to her. She understood how all
the whole being of her victim shrank from her as a bird shrinks from
the gaze of a snake, yet how her courage and her pride strove with her
emotion and vainly tried to hide her fear.
'Oh, foolish, foolish child!' she thought, from the height of her
own assured strength, her own irresistible power. 'If you mistrust
yourself, you lie at the mercy of all your foes. Do you not know that
the first necessity for all success is to believe in our own power to
attain it? Nature has given you personal loveliness, but the gift is of
no more use to you than a score of music in the hands of an ignorant
who cannot read it, than a sculptor's chisel in the fingers of a child.
You love Othmar, and you weep for him; and you know how to do nothing
more. Do you suppose that women govern men with tears? Do you suppose
that their desires wake because a woman prays?'
There was derision, but there was a not unkind pity in her, as her eyes
studied the face in which, despite its youth and delicacy and charm,
Othmar could see no beauty.
'Your child died?' she said suddenly, as she sat there beside her
unwilling and trembling captive. Yseulte bent her head; she could not
trust her voice to answer.
'Did you care so much?' said Nadine Napraxine in wonder.
'I wished that it had been myself.'
The words escaped her almost unawares. When they had been uttered she
longed to recall them. They would sound, she knew, like a confession
of sorrow to the ear of one to whom all the sorrow of her life was due.
'Are you not happy, then, my dear?' said Nadine Napraxine: her tone was
grave and soft, and had for once no mockery or innuendo in it.
Yseulte grew paler even than she had been before; a frown of anger
knitted her fair brow; her expression grew cold and hard.
'I think you have no right to ask me that,' she said, gathering with
effort courage enough to oppose her dreaded foe. 'I think you have no
right. You are my husband's friend, not mine.'
Nadine Napraxine smiled.
'The frightened doe has its own bravery when roused,' she mused; and
aloud she only said, with all the sweet suave courtesy of her very
gentlest manner:
'His friend and yours. Surely that is the same thing? Or if it be not,
you should be wise and make it so.'
She paused a moment, then added softly still:
'Happiness only comes to the wise, my dear; it does not come to those
who stake their all upon one cast like the mad gamblers in the _salle
de jeu_ behind those hills. But you are too young to understand; and if
I spoke to you all day I should not teach you my philosophies.'
'I do not wish to learn them.'
She spoke almost sullenly, almost rudely, as the natural courage of her
temper asserted itself and strove to struggle against the paralysis of
mesmerised fear in which the presence of her rival held her.
'They have been useful,' said Nadine Napraxine with a chillier
intonation. 'And for want of them, what have women--who can only
love--made of their lives, and of their lovers? But since you will not
allow that I am your friend, I will leave you to your sylvan solitudes.
Adieu, my dear. It is not in the woods and hills that you will learn to
recover that _secret de bonheur_ which you have lost so early.'
She lingered a moment, looking at Yseulte with her meditative, languid,
unrevealing gaze. The girl's lips trembled, her throat swelled, her
eyes filled with scorching tears; she turned abruptly away lest her
self-control should altogether fail her. She knew that she had betrayed
herself as utterly to her enemy's eyes as though she had poured out in
words all the piteous secrets of her aching heart. Nadine Napraxine
passed slowly beneath the olive branches, brushing the humble flowers
with her careless sovereign's step.
'She is foolish, she is simple, she is awkward, and she is most
unwise,' she thought. 'But she is brave----'
It was the quality which she always honoured.