On the following day as she returned from her drive, she was met, to
her great surprise, by Napraxine, who descended the steps of the house
with a face unusually pale, and a manner unusually grave.
'What can possibly be the matter, Platon?' she said, with a vague
sense of alarm, but with her inevitable mockery of him dominating her
transient anxiety. 'Have you had a _culotte_ yonder? Has Athenais
gone away with my jewel-safe? Or have our friends the Nihilists fired
Zaraizoff?'
Napraxine gave her his hand to help her to alight.
'Do not jest,' he said simply. 'Boris has shot himself.'
'Boris?--Boris Fédorovitch?'
She spoke in astonishment and anger rather than sorrow: an impatient
frown contracted her delicate brows, though she grew ashen pale. Why
would men do these things?
Napraxine was silent, but when they had entered the house he spoke very
sadly, almost sternly.
'This afternoon he had lost a hundred thousand francs; no doubt on
purpose to have an excuse. The ruse can deceive nobody. A Count
Seliedoff could lose as much all day for a year, and make no sign. He
shot himself in the gardens, within a few yards of us all.'
He paused and looked at his wife. A shadow passed over her face without
changing its narcissus-like fairness; she shrugged her shoulders ever
so slightly, her eyes had had for a moment an expression of awe and
regret, but, beyond any other sentiment with her, were her impatience
and irritation.
'Why will men be so stupid?' she thought. 'As if it did any good! The
foolish boy!'
'Nadine,' murmured her husband in a voice that was timid even in its
expostulation and reproach. 'I am sorry for Boris; for the other I have
never cared, but for Boris;--you know that I promised his mother to
take what care I could of him--and now--and now--and so young as he
was!--and how shall I tell her?--My God!'
She was silent; a genuine pain was on her face, though still mingled
with the more personal emotion of impatience and annoyance.
'It was no fault of yours!' she said at last, as she saw two great
tears roll down her husband's cheeks.
'Yes, it was,' muttered Platon Napraxine. 'I let him know you.'
The direct accusation banished the softer pain which had for the minute
moved her; she was at all times intolerant of censure or of what she
resented as a too intimate interference; and here her own surprise at
an unlooked-for tragedy, and her own self-consciousness of having been
more or less the cause and creatress of it, stung her with an unwelcome
and intolerable truth.
'You are insolent,' she said, with the regard which always daunted
Napraxine, and made him feel himself an offender against her, even when
he was entirely in the right.
'You are insolent,' she repeated. 'Do you mean to insinuate that I
am responsible for Seliedoff's suicide? One would suppose you were a
journalist seeking _chantage_!'
The power which she at all times possessed over her husband making him
unwilling to irritate, afraid to offend her, and without courage before
her slightest sign of anger, rendered him timid now. He hesitated and
grew pale, but the great sorrow and repentance which were at work in
him gave him more resolution than usual; he was very pale, and the
tears rolled down his cheeks unchecked.
'Every one knows that Boris loved you,' he said simply. 'All the world
knows that; he was a boy, he could not conceal it; I cannot tell what
you did to him, but something which broke his heart. You know I never
say anything; you give me no title. I am as much of a stranger to you
as if we had met yesterday; and do not fancy I am ever--jealous--as
men are sometimes. I know you would laugh at me, and besides, you care
for none of them any more than you care for me. I should be a fool to
wish for more than that;--if it be always like that, I shall never say
anything. Only you might have spared this lad. He was so young and my
cousin, and the only one left to his mother.'
He paused, in stronger agitation than he cared to allow her to see.
It was the first time for years that he had ventured to speak to her
in any sort of earnestness or of upbraiding. She had allotted him his
share in her life, a very distant one; and he had accepted it without
dispute or lament, if not without inward revolt; it was for the first
time for years that he presumed to show her he had observed her actions
and had disapproved them, to hint that he was not the mere lay figure,
the mere good-natured dolt, '_bon comme du pain_,' and as commonplace,
which she had always considered him.
She looked at him a little curiously; there was a dangerous irritation
in her glance, yet a touch of emotion was visible in her as she said
with impatience, 'You are growing theatrical. It does not become you.
Boris was a boy, foolish as boys are; he had no mind; he was a mere
spoilt child; he was grown up in inches, not in character; so many
Russians are. If he have killed himself, who can help it? They should
have kept him at home. Why do you play yourself? He is not the first.'
'No, he is not the first,' said Napraxine, with a curt bitterness.
'He is not the first, and it was not play; he only played to have an
excuse. He thought of your name, perhaps of mine; he did not wish the
world to know he died because you laughed at him.'
'Laughed! I used to laugh; why not? He was amusing before he grew
tragical. I rebuked him yesterday, for he deserved it. Everyone scolds
boys. It is good for them. No one supposes----' her tone was impatient
and contemptuous, but her lips quivered a little; she was sorry that
the boy was dead, though she would not say so. It hurt her, though it
annoyed her more.
'Did he--did he suffer?' she asked, abruptly.
Napraxine took out of the breast-pocket of his coat a sheet of
note-paper, and gave it her.
'He died instantly, if you mean that,' he answered. 'He knew enough to
aim well. They brought me that note; he had written it last night, I
think.'
In the broad, rude handwriting of the young Seliedoff there was
written:--
'Pardonnez-moi, mon cousin: je l'adore, et elle se moque de moi; je ne
peux pas vivre, mais j'aurai soin que le monde n'en sache rien. Soignez
ma pauvre mère. Tout à vous de coeur
'BORIS FÉDOROVITCH.'
She read it with a mist before her eyes, and gave it back to him
without a word.
Napraxine looked at her wistfully; he wondered if he had killed himself
whether she would have cared more than she cared now--no, he knew she
would have cared as little, even less.
'You say nothing?' he murmured wistfully.
'What is there to say?' she answered. 'It was a boy's blunder. It was a
grievous folly. But no one could foresee it.'
'That is all the lament you give him?'
'Would it please you better if I were weeping over his corpse? I regret
his death profoundly; but I confess that I am also unspeakably annoyed
at it. I detest melodramas. I detest tragedies. The world will say, as
you have the good taste to say, that I have been at fault. I am not
a coquette, and a reputation of being one gives me no satisfaction.
As you justly observed, no one will believe that a Count Seliedoff
destroyed his life because he lost money at play. Therefore, they will
say, as you have been so good as to say, that the blame lies with me.
And such accusations offend me.'
She spoke very quietly, but with a tone which seemed chill as the
winter winds of the White Sea, to Napraxine, whose soul was filled
with remorse, dismay, and bewildered pain. Then she made him a slight
gesture of farewell and left him. As usual, he was entirely right in
the reproaches he had made, yet she had had the power to make himself
feel at once foolish and at fault, at once coarse and theatrical.
'Poor Boris!' he muttered, as he drew his hand across his wet lashes.
Had it been worth while to die at three-and-twenty years old, in
full command of all which the world envies, only to have that cruel
sacrifice called a boy's blunder? His heart ached and his thoughts
went, he knew not why, to his two young children away in the birch
forests by the Baltic Sea. She would not care any more if she heard on
the morrow that they were as dead in their infancy as Boris Seliedoff
was in his youth, lying under the aloes and the palms of Monte Carlo in
the southern sunshine.
Platon Napraxine was a stupid man, a man not very sensitive or very
tender of feeling, a man who could often console himself with coarse
pleasures and purchasable charms for wounds given to his affections or
his pride; but he was a man of quick compunction and warm emotions;
he felt before the indifference of his wife as though he stretched
out his hand to touch a wall of ice, when what he longed for was the
sympathetic answering clasp of human fingers. He brushed the unusual
moisture from his eyes, and went to fulfil all those innumerable small
observances which so environ, embitter, and diminish the dignity of
death to the friends of every dead creature.
Meanwhile, Nadine passed on to her own rooms, and let her waiting-woman
change her clothes.
A momentary wish, wicked as a venomous snake, and swift as fire, had
darted through her thoughts.
'Why had not Othmar died like that? I would have loved his memory all
my life!' she thought, with inconsistency.
Though she had almost refused to acknowledge it, the suicide of
Seliedoff pained and saddened her. Foremost of all was her irritation
that she who disliked tragedies, who abhorred publicity, who
disbelieved in passion, should be thus subject to having her name in
the mouths of men in connection with a melodrama which, terrible as
it was, yet offended her by its vulgarity and its stupidity. The hour
and the scene chosen were vulgar; the transparency of the pretext
was stupid. It was altogether, as she had said, a boy's blunder--a
blunder, frightful, irreparable, with the horror of youth misspent
and life self-destroyed upon it--still a blunder. She thought, with
impatience, that what they called love was only a spoilt child's whim
and passionate outcry which, denied, ended in a child's wild, foolish
fit of rage, with no more wisdom in it than the child has.
All Europe would say that, indirectly, she had been the cause of his
death; every one had seen him, moping and miserable, in her rooms the
previous day. She disliked a sensational triumph, which was fit for
her husband's mistresses, for Lia, for Aurélie, for la belle Fernande.
Men were always doing these foolish things for her. She had been angry
certainly: who would not have been so? He had been ridiculous, as youth
and intense emotion and unreasonable suffering constantly are in the
sight of others.
There had been only one man who had not seemed to her absurd when
passion had moved him, and that had only been because he had remained
master of himself even in his greatest self-abandonment. If it had
been Othmar who had been lying dead there with the bullet in his
breast, she would have felt--she was not sure what she would have
felt--some pleasure, some pain. Instead, he was at Amyôt finding what
pleasures he might in a virginal love, like a spring snowdrop, timid
and afraid. She, who always analysed her own soul without indulgence or
self-delusion, was disgusted at the impulses which moved her now.
'After all,' she thought, 'Goethe was right; we are always capable of
crime, even the best of us; only one must be Goethe to be capable of
acknowledging that.'
She sat alone awhile, thoughtful and regretful; indisposed to accept
the blame of others, yet not unwilling to censure herself if she saw
cause. But she saw no cause here; it was no fault of hers if men loved
her as she passed by them without seeing they were there. True, she had
been annoyed with the youth; she had been irritated by him; she had
treated him a little as some women treat a dog,--a smile one day, the
whip the next; but she had thought so little about him all the time,
except that his high spirits were infectious and his face was boyishly
beautiful, and that it had diverted her to annoy Geraldine. But who
could have supposed that it would end thus? And amidst her pain and her
astonishment was foremost a great irritation at his want of thought for
her.
The journals, with their innuendoes, their initials, their transparent
mysteries; the condolences and the curiosities of her own society; the
reproaches of his family; the long ceremonious Russian mourning and
Russian rites--'_Quelle corvée!_' she murmured impatiently, as at some
pebble in her embroidered shoe, at some clove of garlic in her delicate
dinner.
After all, were the great sorrows of life one-half so unendurable in
themselves as the tiresome annoyances with which the foolish habits of
men have environed them?
That our friend dies is pain enough, why must we have also the nuisance
of following his funeral?
'Men only think of themselves!' she said irritably, in her own
unconscious egotism. If Boris Seliedoff had considered her as he should
have done, he would not have killed himself within three miles of her
garden terrace, at a moment when all their own gossiping world was
crowding on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean. A sense of the wrong
done to herself divided the regret, tinged almost with remorse, which
weighed on her.
As she moved through her boudoir to write the inevitable and most
difficult letter which must be penned to his mother far away in the
province of the Ekaterinoslaf, a photograph, in a frame of blue plush,
caught her eye as it stood amongst all the pretty costly nothings of
her writing-table. It was a photograph of Seliedoff; it had been tinted
with an artist's skill, and the boyish handsome mouth smiled tenderly
and gaily at her.
For almost the first time in her life she felt the tears rise to her
throat and eyes. She laid the picture face downward, and wept.