When she returned home, she shut herself in her own rooms, and was not
seen, even by her women, for three hours. She lay almost immovable upon
a couch, whilst the sunshine came tempered and rose-hued through the
lowered awnings of her windows, and the air around her was filled with
the scent of hundreds of cut roses placed in all the jars and bowls and
vases in her sight. For the first time in her life a doubt which came
from pity, and a hesitation which came from conscience, were at war
with all her habits, instincts, and vanities. Underneath her egoism,
and her cruelty, and her many ironies, there had always been latent
a disdainful honour. Once having given it, she would have kept her
word to the meanest creature; she would have taken no advantage of the
weakest enemy, if to do so had been an injustice. She was capricious
in every act of her life, but her caprices had no meanness in them;
she was supremely merciless, because she was supremely indifferent,
but she was capable of perfect loyalty in her own fashion. Far down in
the depths of her complex nature there was, beneath all the coldness,
malice and selfishness of disposition and of custom, a vague instinct
of chivalrous generosity. If ever that chord in her were touched it
always responded. When she had been a child, reading the old chronicles
in her father's library, her favourite of history had always been
John of France, for sake of that voluntary return to his captivity in
England.
She comprehended the delirious impulse on which Othmar, hearing that
she was near him after twelve months of absence, had been unable
to control the emotion which mastered him, and had, in an hour of
irresponsible passion, laid his soul bare before her, in all its
weakness, and offered to load it with any weight she chose, so that
only he could be once more admitted to her presence. And she knew,
even more surely than he did, because she was calmer than he was, all
which hung upon her own decision. She knew that, once entering there,
he would be then and for ever hers; never more his wife's. She was too
clear of sight to cheat herself with self-delusions. Othmar would be
faithful to her, and false to all else all his life through, if once
she wrote to him the simple word he asked for: 'Come.' She knew that he
had played with fire unharmed, only because she herself had been cold
as ice; but now her coldness seemed suddenly to melt within her, and
her heart to go out to him in sweet and sudden yearning.
If he came there he would come as her lover.
To all her newly awakening tenderness, and to all her habitual
instincts of supremacy, the temptation was strong. For once in her life
she realised something of the force of that irresistible and enervating
impulse which heretofore had always seemed to her a mere frenzy of
ungoverned senses, of disordered dreams. For once her life seemed
incomplete if lived on without his.
Her irony and raillery could not aid her against herself; she was
absorbed in, and invaded by a tide of new and warm emotion; the words
which he had written to her seemed burned into her mind--seemed to fill
the rose-scented air, and become audible, as though his voice were
pleading to her.
'If this be love?' she thought again, with astonished impatience, with
a sense of servitude and weakness.
Twice she rose to write the one word he asked; and twice she put the
pen aside with it unwritten.
Such vacillation was new to her, and hateful as a sign of feebleness.
Her caprices had been as changeful as the winds of April, but beneath
them her will had been always firm as a rod of steel, centred ever on
her own whim and pleasure. Now she was irresolute, and scarce knew what
she wished, or what she chose.
She who had the blood in her of lascivious empresses, and of fierce
murderers of men, was swayed by two unfamiliar and divided things--by
conscience, and compassion. The tide of freshly-roused emotions, which
would have swept her onward to the gratification of them without
thought or pause, was checked by a sentiment as rare--the sentiment
of mercy. Once, one of her people, in the dark days of Natalia
Narischkine's rule, being of those who slew in the name of the idiot,
Ivan, had slaughtered the Narischkine right and left, not pausing for
age or youth, or sex, but, coming to the place where a young child of
the hated race lay sleeping, had dropped his blood-red sword in shame,
as before some holy image, faltered, and turned away; the child had
slept on unharmed. Such hesitation as that was with her now, born out
of the very faults of her nature, out of her disdain, of her hauteur,
of her superb self-love.
She was conscious of a desire to be in the presence of Othmar, to hear
his voice, to see his face again; a desire enervating, vague, full of
a dangerous languor, and a dangerous warmth; beyond that, stimulating
and sustaining it, were the instincts of empire, of dominion, of a
capricious and ever-victorious volition. Never in all her life had she
resisted an impulse of self-indulgence, had she hesitated before any
sacrifice of others. Absence had increased the shadowy attraction which
had always drawn her towards this one amongst her many lovers; in the
long silent months of her solitude his memory had grown dearer and more
welcome with each day. And he was hers, if she chose.
At her command all honour, duty and allegiance would be mere empty
words on his ear, without power to hold him, or meaning to move him.
Dignity, self-respect, and loyalty to his self-chosen vows would become
no more to him than threads of silk upon the neck of a courser broke
loose. She had only to let him enter there, and the world would hold
nothing for him but herself.
And for once she might perchance be able to share that oblivion, to
comprehend that ecstasy; and yet she hesitated, because a new faint
sense of pity and of compassion had come upon her.
'After all,' she thought, 'I should probably care such a little while,
and she, poor child,--it is all her life!'
A disdainful compassion forbade her to strike down so weak a foe.
Opposition or conflict would have intensified all her imperious
resolve, and heightened the zest of her power of destruction; but the
helplessness, the feebleness of her rival disarmed her. It would be
like striking a nesting-bird, a wounded kid.
Nadine Napraxine thought of her with a sensation of pity and the
stronger sensation of disdain which was inevitable to her character.
A creature who could not conquer, could not resist, could not keep
hold upon her own, seemed a thing so foolish and so feeble to her!
Even in her solitude, her imperial supremacy made her lips smile
contemptuously, her eyes gleam with scorn, as she rose and paced her
chamber for a few moments, her head erect and her bosom risen high with
her proud thoughts.
All the superb courage and scorn which were much stronger in her than
any other emotion, rejected so easy a victory, so sure a triumph.
'She is so impotent, poor little fool!' she murmured. 'She will break
her heart for ever in vain; she will never touch his.'
Her rooms were filled with the sweet faint smell of the roses, and
heated to the heat of a midsummer noon. She sat still in the dreamy
warmth, and all her vague regrets oppressed her with a faint, heavy
sense of inclinations suppressed, and impulses awaking after long
torpor.
'I should not hesitate at a crime,' she thought, 'but this would be
almost a baseness.'
And her memory went once more back to the hour in which the dead body
of Napraxine had been before her sight, the tea-rose held close in his
stiffened hand, and darkly red with the blood of his lungs.
'If he were living'--she thought.
If he had been living, he could have avenged Yseulte and himself.
But he was dead, a thing of bones and ashes--powerless, senseless,
defenceless. Something in that dishonour which would be done to a dead
man and to a helpless child seemed to her courage cowardice, to her
generosity meanness, to her dignity unworthiness.
'Neither could ever hurt us,' she thought, 'neither could ever avenge
it on us.'
Her sense of the utter impotency of those two, when she remembered
it, disarmed her where opposition or the struggle of forces equal
to her own would have made her obstinate and pitiless. They were so
helpless! the girl, in her pathetic, ignorant, unloved humiliation and
ineptitude; the man, dead in his strength, who had left only a memory
behind him. It would be as easy to sweep the one out of her path as
to forget and deride the other; so easy that it seemed not worth the
while; so easy that it seemed almost base.
She would have used her blade of steel without mercy to cleave through
bone and flesh of any who should have ventured to oppose her; but to
cut down a garden lily already dying of drought, to strike a pale
shadow from the tomb--it seemed poor, unworthy.
Othmar was hers if she would.
Had there been any doubt of it, her nature would have urged her on in
unsparing resolution until he should have yielded. But he was hers
when she chose, body and soul, peace and honour, present and future.
Her perfect sense of empire and security of dominion left her serene
and gentle; she could listen to the voice of pity, the impulse of what
men, in their stupidity, called conscience. It was with the disdainful
generosity with which the Great Katherine might have loosed one of
her lovers from the chains which bound him to her throne, that she
renounced her power to take him from his wife.
'If it were only a crime,' she thought, in the mystical complex
subtleties and intricacies of her brain, 'if it were only a crime,
the darkness would heighten the dawn, the danger would sweeten the
pleasure, the courage of it would strengthen the self-indulgence; but
when it is mean, when one is sure that there is no one living who can
avenge it, only a poor meek fool who will weep----!'
The laws of so-called duty said nothing to her.
The morality of the world was in her sight a mere mass of affectation,
hypocrisies, and timorous shifts.
To her sated and ever-curious intelligence a crime might have had
some potent charm, because it would have possessed some novelty and
proffered some strange experience.
But a meanness revolted her with the same sense of disgust as would
have moved her before squalor or disease. The same impulse which moves
the white-plumaged bird to keep aloof from dust or mud, moved her to
recoil from what was base or was ungenerous.
She rose and approached one of the windows, and pushed the
rose-coloured blind aside, and looked out over the wide white marble
terrace and the blue silent sea beyond.
It was three in the afternoon.
He had waited ten hours for her answer.
She left the casement and sat down and wrote. She wrote rapidly, as
her wont was; and when she had written, folded and sealed her letter
rapidly, giving it no second glance or afterthought. Then she rang, and
bade her women send her the African boy Mahmoud. When he obeyed her
summons, she gave him a letter.
'Take that to the château of S. Pharamond,' she said to him. 'You know
Count Othmar. Wait until you can see him alone, and give it, when he is
alone, into his own hands. You understand me.'
Mahmoud prostrated himself, put the letter in his vest, stretched
himself again on the ground in obeisance, then silently left her
presence.
She had always found the child obedient and intelligent, the only
person in all her household who would obey implicitly and in silence,
without feeling any curiosity as to the purport of his errands or ever
babbling of them in the servants' hall.
When he had left her she remained long motionless, lost in thought,
sitting alone amidst the dying roses, and the sunbeams broken and
dimmed by the deep shadows from the veiled windows. She had a strange
desolate sense of having given up the only thing which could have made
life worth the living.
'But I think in what I wrote there was no suggestion of regret,' she
mused, recalling all her written words. 'I think not; I hope not. If he
believed that there were any regret on my side, it would be of no avail
to have written it. He would be here in an hour, and he would follow me
all the world over.'
Then she summoned her women again:
'I go back to Russia to-night to Zaraizoff,' she said to them. 'Tell
Paul to have everything done that is necessary.'