A few days later when the remains of Boris Seliedoff had been removed
to Russia, there to find their last home in the sombre mausoleum of
his family on their vast estates in Ekaterinoslaf, Geraldine, who was
one of the few who were admitted to La Jacquemerille in these days
of mourning, coming thither one afternoon to find her in the garden
alone and to entreat for permission to follow her in the various
travels which she was about to undertake, since the Riviera had grown
distasteful to her, was accosted by her abruptly, if in her delicate
languor she could ever be termed abrupt:
'My dear Ralph,' she said briefly, 'why do you not go home?'
Geraldine drew his breath quickly, and stared at her.
'Go home!' he repeated stupidly.
'Well, you have a home; you have several homes,' she said, with her
usual impatience at being questioned or misunderstood by wits slower
than her own. 'You are an Englishman; you must have a million and one
duties. It is utterly wrong to live so much away from your properties.
We do it, but I do not think it matters what we do. Whether we be here
or there, it is always the stewards who rule everything, but in your
country it is different. Your sister says you can do a great deal of
good. I cannot imagine what good you should do, but no doubt she knows.
I do not like England myself. Your châteaux are very fine, but the
life in them is very tiresome. You all eat far too much and far too
often, and you have lingering superstitions about Sunday; your women
are always three months behind Paris, and never wear shoes like their
gowns; your talk is always of games, and shooting, and flat-racing.
You are not an amusing people; you never will be. You have too much of
the Teuton, and the Hollander, and the Dane in you. Your stage makes
one yawn, your books make one sleep, your country-houses make one do
both. Your women clothe themselves in Newmarket coats, get red faces,
and like to go over wet fields; your men are well built very often,
but they move ill; they have no _désinvolture_, they have no charm. The
whole thing is tiresome. I shall never willingly go to England; but
you, as a great English noble, ought to go there, and stay there----'
'And marry there!' said Geraldine, bitterly. 'Is that the medicine you
prescribe for all your friends?'
'Of course you will marry some time,' she said indifferently. 'Men of
your position always do; they think they owe it to their country. But
whether you marry or not, go home and be useful. You have idled quite
too much time away in following our changes of residence.'
He turned pale, and his eyes grew dark with subdued anger.
'You want to be rid of me!'
'Ah, that is just the kind of rough, rude thing which an Englishman
always says. It is the reason why Englishmen do not please women much.
No Italian or Frenchman or Russian would make such a stupid, almost
brutal, remark as that; he would respect his own dignity and the
courtesy of words too greatly.'
'We are unpolished, even at our best; you have told me so fifty
times,' he said sullenly. 'Well, let me be a savage, then, and ask for
a savage mercy; a plain answer. You want me away?'
Nadine's eyes grew very cold.
'I never say uncivil things,' she answered, with an accent that was
chill as the mistral. 'But since for once you divine one's meaning, I
will not deny the accuracy of your divination.'
She blew a little cloud from a tiny cigarette as she paused. She
expressed, as clearly as though she had spoken, the fact that her
companion was as little to her as that puff of smoke.
'Does sincerity count for nothing?' he muttered stupidly.
'Sincerity!' she echoed. 'Ah! English people always speak as if they
had a monopoly of sincerity, like a monopoly of salt or a monopoly of
coal! My dear Lord Geraldine, I am not doubting your sincerity in the
very least; it is not _that_ which is wanting in you----'
'What is?' he asked in desperation.
'So much!' said the Princess Napraxine with a little comprehensive
smile and sigh.
'If you would deign to speak definitely--' he murmured in bitter pain,
which he strove clumsily to make into the likeness of serenity and
irony.
'Oh, if you wish for details!--It is just that kind of wish for details
which shows what you fail in so very much; tact, finesse, observation,
flexibility. My dear friend, you are thoroughly insular! Everything is
comprised in that!'
He was silent.
'I have not the least wish to vex you,' she continued. 'I am quite
sorry to vex you, but if you will press me----A painter teased me the
other day to go to his studio and see what he had done for the salon.
I made him polite excuses, the weather, my health, my engagements, the
usual phrases, but he would not be satisfied with them, he continued to
insist, so at last he had the truth. I told him that I detested almost
all modern art, and that I did not know why anyone encouraged it at all
when it was within everyone's power to have at least line-engravings of
the old masters. He was not pleased--take warning. Do not be as stupid
as he.'
Geraldine understood, and his tanned cheek grew white with pain. He
was a proud man, and had been made vain by his world. He was bitterly
and cruelly humbled, but the love he had for her made him almost
unconscious of the offence to him, so overwhelming in its cruelty was
the sentence of exile which he received.
He did not speak at once, for he could not be sure to command his
voice, and he shrank from betraying what he felt. She rose, and threw
the cigarette over the balustrade into the sea, and turned to go
indoors. She had said what her wishes were, and she expected to have
them obeyed without more discussion. But the young man rose too, and
barred her way.
He had only one consciousness, that he was on the point of banishment
from the only woman whom he had cared for through two whole years. It
had become so integral a part of his life that he should follow Nadine
Napraxine as the moon follows the earth, that exile from her presence
seemed to him the most terrible of disasters, the most unendurable of
chastisements.
'After all this time, do you only tell me to go away?' he muttered,
conscious of the lameness and impotency of his own words, which might
well only move her laughter. But a certain anger rather than amusement
was what they stirred in her; there was in them an implied right, an
implied reproach, which were both what she was utterly indisposed to
admit his title to use.
'All this time!' she echoed; 'all what time? You are leading a very
idle life, and all your excellent friends say that you leave many
duties neglected; I advise you to return to them.'
'Is it the end of all?' he said, while his lips trembled in his own
despite.
'All? All what? The end? No; it is the end to nothing that I know of;
I should rather suppose that you would make it the beginning--of a
perfectly proper life at home. Evelyn Brancepeth says you ought to
reduce all your farmers' rents; go and do it; it will make you popular
in your own county. I know you good English always fancy that you can
quench revolutions with a little weak tea of that sort. As if people
who hate you will not hate you just the same whether they pay you half
a guinea, or half a crown, for every sod of ground! Our Tsar Alexander
thought the same sort of thing _en grand_, and did it; but it has not
answered with him. To be sure, he was even sillier--he expected slaves
to be grateful!'
'You really mean that you are tired of my presence?' he said, with no
sense of anything except the immense desolation which seemed suddenly
to cover all his life.
'You _will_ put the dots on all your i's!' she said impatiently. 'That
kind of love of explanation is so English; all your political men's
time is wasted in it. Nobody in England understands _à demi-mot_, or
appreciates the prettiness of a hint.'
'I understand well enough--too well,' he muttered, with a sigh that
was choked in its birth. 'But--but--I suppose I am a fool; I did not
think you really cared much--yet I always fancied--I suppose I had no
right--but surely we have been friends at the least?'
His knowledge of the world and of women ought to have stopped the
question unuttered; but a great pain, an intense disappointment, had
mastered him, and left him with no more tact or wisdom than if he
had been a mere lad fresh from college. It cost him much to make his
reproach so measured, his words so inoffensive. He began to understand
why men had said that Nadine Napraxine was more perilous in her
chastity and her spiritual cruelty than the most impassioned Alcina.
She looked at him with a little astonishment mingled with a greater
offence.
'Friends? certainly; why not?' she said, with entire indifference. 'Who
is talking of enmity? In plain words, since you like them so much, you
do--bore me just a little; you are too often here; you have a certain
manner in society which might make gossips remark it. You do not seem
to comprehend that one may see too much of the most agreeable person
under the sun. It is, perhaps, a mistake ever to see much of anyone;
at least, I think so. Briefly, I do not wish to have any more stories
for Nice and its neighbourhood; this one of Boris Seliedoff is quite
enough! They are beginning to give me a kind of reputation of being
a _tueuse d'hommes_. It is so vulgar, that kind of thing. They are
beginning to call me Marie Stuart; it is absurd, but I do not like
that sort of absurdities. I had nothing to do with the folly of poor
Boris, but no one will ever believe it; he will always be considered
my victim. It is true you are certain not to kill yourself; Englishmen
always kill a tiger or a pig if they are unhappy, never themselves. I
am not afraid of your doing any kind of harm; you will only go home
and see your farmers and please your family; and you will give big
breakfasts in uncomfortable tents, and be toasted, and your county
newspapers will have all sorts of amiable paragraphs about you, and
sometime or other you will marry--why not? Please stand back a little
and let me pass; we shall meet in Paris next year when you take a
holiday on your reduced rents.'
She laughed a little, for the first time since Seliedoff's suicide; her
own words amused her. Those poor English gentlemen, who fancied they
would stem the great salt tide of class hatred, the ever-heaving ocean
of plebeian envy, by the little paper fence of a reduced rental! Poor
Abels, deluding themselves with the idea that they could disarm the
jealousy of their Cains with a silver penny!
But the thoughts of Geraldine were far away from any political ironies
with which she might entertain her own discursive mind.
'Nadine, Nadine,' he said stupidly, 'you cannot be so cruel. I have
always obeyed you; I have never murmured; I have been like your dog;
I have been content on so little. Other men would have rebelled, but
I--I----'
Her languid eyes opened widely upon him in haughty surprise and rebuke.
'Now you talk like a _jeune premier_ of the Gymnase!' she said,
contemptuously. 'Rebelled? Content? What words are those? You have been
a pleasant acquaintance--amongst many. You cannot say you have been
ever more. If you have begun to misunderstand that, go where you can
recover your good sense. I have liked you; so has Prince Napraxine. Do
not force us to consider our esteem misplaced.'
She spoke coldly, almost severely; then, with an enchanting smile, she
held out her hand.
'Come, we will part friends, though you are disposed to _bouder_ like
a boy. You know something of the world; learn to look as if you had
learned at least its first lesson--good temper. Affect it if you have
it not! And--never outstay a welcome!'
He looked at her and his chest heaved with a heavy sigh that was
almost a sob. Passionate upbraiding rose to his lips, a thousand
reproaches for delusive affabilities, for patiently-endured caprices,
for wasted hours and wasted hopes, and wasted energies, all rose to
his mouth in hot hard words of senseless, irrepressible pain; but they
remained unuttered. He dared not offend her beyond pardon, he dared not
exile himself beyond recall. He was conscious of the futility of any
reproach which he could bring, of the absence of any title which he
could allege. For two years he had been her bondsman, her spaniel, her
submissive servant in the full sight of the world, yet looking backward
he could not recall any sign or word or glance which could have
justified him in the right to call himself her lover. She had accepted
his services, permitted his presence--no more; and yet, he felt himself
as bitterly wronged, as cruelly deluded, as ever man could have been by
woman.
There is a little song which has been given world-wide fame by the
sweetest singer of our time: the little song which is called, '_Si
vous n'avez rien à me dire_.' Just so vague, and so intense, as is the
reproach of the song, was the cry of his heart against her now.
If she had never cared, had never meant, why then----?
But he dared not formulate his injury in words; he knew that it would
condemn him never to see her face again except in crowds as strangers
saw it. He had never really believed that she would care for him as
he cared for her, but it had always seemed to him that habit would in
the end become affection, that the continual and familiar intercourse
which he had obtained with her would become in time necessary to her,
an association, a custom, a friendship not lightly to be discarded.
He had believed that patience would do more for him than passion; he
had endured all her caprices, followed all her movements, incurred the
ridicule of men, and, what was worse, his own self-contempt, in the
belief that, with her, _Festina lente_ was the sole possible rule of
victory. And now she cast him aside, with no more thought than she
left to her maids a fan of an old fashion, a glove that had been worn
once!
She gave him no time to recover the shock with which he had heard his
sentence of exile, but, with a little kindly indifferent gesture,
passed him and went into the house.
He had not the courage of Othmar; he had never had as much title as
Othmar to deem himself preferred to the multitude; looking back on the
two years which he had consecrated to her memory and her service, he
could not honestly recall a single word or glance or sign which could
have justified him in believing himself betrayed.
She had accepted his homage as she accepted the bouquets which men sent
her, to die in masses in her ante-chambers.
His pain was intolerable, his disappointment was altogether out of
proportion to the frail, vague hopes which he had cherished; but he
felt also that his position was absurd, untenable; he had never been
her lover, he had none of the rights of a lover; he was only one of
many who had failed to please her, who had unconsciously blundered, who
had committed the one unpardonable sin of wearying her.
Resistance could only make him ridiculous in her eyes. She had plainly
intimated that she was tired of his acquaintance and companionship.
It was an intense suffering to him, but it was not one which he could
show to the world, or in which he could seek the world's sympathy. If
he had failed to please her--failed, despite all his opportunities, to
obtain any hold upon her sympathies--it was such a failure as is only
grotesque in the esteem of men, and contemptible in the sight of women.
'_A qui la faute?_' she would have said herself, with a pitiless
amusement, which the world would only have echoed.
It was late in February, but already spring in the Riviera; a brilliant
sun was dancing on all the million and one pretty things in her
boudoir, for she liked light, and could afford, with her exquisite
complexion and her flower-like mouth, to laugh at the many less
fortunate of her sex, who dared not be seen without all the devices of
red glass and rose-coloured transparencies and muffled sunbeams. She
caressed her little dog, and bade the negro boy bring her some tea, and
stretched herself out on a long low chair with a pleasant sense of
freedom from a disagreeable duty done and over.
'I will never be intimate with an Englishman again,' she thought.
'They cannot understand; they think they must be either your Cæsar or
_nullus_: it is so stupid; and then, when you are tired, they grumble.
Other men say nothing to you, but they fight somebody else,--which is
so much better. It is only the Englishman who grumbles, and abuses you
as if you were the weather!'
The idea amused her.
Through her open windows she could see the sea. She saw the boat
of Geraldine, with its red-capped crew pulling straightway to the
westward; he was going to his yacht; the affair was over peaceably; he
would not kill himself like Seliedoff. Her husband would miss him for
a little time, but he was used to men who made themselves his ardent
and assiduous friends for a few months or more, and then were no more
seen about his house, being banished by her; he was wont to call such
victims the Zephyrs after that squadron of the mutinous in the Algerian
army, which receives all those condemned and rejected by their chiefs.
He would ask no questions; he would understand that his old companion
had joined the rest; he had never cared for the fate of any save for
that of young Seliedoff. There were always men by the score ready to
amuse, distract, and feast with Prince Napraxine.
She drank her yellow tea with its slice of lemon, and enjoyed the
unwonted repose of half an hour's solitude. She was conscious at once
of a certain relief in the definite exile of her late companion, yet
of a certain magnanimity, inasmuch as she would enable other women to
presume that he had grown tired of his allegiance.
But the latter consideration weighed little with her; she had been
too satiated with triumph not to be indifferent to it, and she was at
all times careless of the opinions of others. She would miss him a
little, as one misses a well-trained servant, but there would be so
many others ready to fill his place. Whenever her groom-of-the-chambers
told her hall-porter to say 'Madame reçoit,' her rooms were filled with
young men ready to obey her slightest sign or wildest whim as poodles
or spaniels those of their masters. There were not a few who, like
Geraldine, regulated their seasons and their sojourns by the capricious
movements of the Princess Napraxine, as poor benighted shepherds follow
the gyrations of an ignis-fatuus. Whether north, south, east, or west,
wherever she was momentarily resident, there was always seen her _corps
de garde_.
As she sat alone now for the brief half-hour before her usual drive,
her past drifted before her recollection in clear colours, as though
she were quite old. She remembered her childhood, spent at the
embassies of great cities, where her father was the idol of all that
was distinguished and of much that was dissolute; the most courtly, the
most witty, the most elegant, of great diplomatists. She remembered
how, sitting in her mother's barouche in the Bois or the Prater,
or petted and caressed by sovereigns and statesmen in her mother's
drawing-rooms, she had seen so much with her opal-like eyes, heard so
much with her sea-shell-like ears, and had, at ten years old, said to
Count Platoff, '_Je serai honnête femme; ce sera plus chic_;' and
how his peal of laughter had disconcerted her own serious mood and
solemnity of resolve. Then she remembered how, when she was seventeen
years old, her mother had advised her to marry her cousin; and how her
father, when she had been tempted to ask his support of her own adverse
wishes, had twisted his silken white moustaches with a little shrug of
his shoulders, and had said: 'Mais, mon enfant, je ne sais--nous sommes
presque ruinés; ça me plaira--et un mari, c'est si peu de chose!'
'_Si peu de chose!_' she thought, now; and yet a bullet that you drag
after you, a note of discord always in your music, a stone in your ball
slipper, dance you ever so lightly--an inevitable ennui always awaiting
you!
'If they had not been in such haste, I should have met Othmar and have
married him!' she mused, with that frankness which was never missing
from her self-communion. 'Life would have looked differently;----I
would have made him the foremost man in Europe; he has the powers
needful, but he has no ambitions; his millions have stifled them.'
She thought, with something that was almost envy, of the fate of
Yseulte, and with a remembrance, which was almost disgust, of the early
hours of her own marriage, when all the delicacy and purity of her own
girlhood had revolted against the brutality of obligations which she
had in her ignorance submitted to accept.
How could she care for the children born of that intolerable
degradation to which no habit or time had had power to reconcile her?
In her own eyes she had been as much violated as any slave bought in
the market.
'If I had daughters, they should at least know to what they surrendered
themselves before they were given away in marriage,' she had often
reflected, with a bitter remembrance of the absolute innocence in which
she herself had repeated the vows, and broken the glass, which had
indissolubly united her to her cousin Platon.
Then, with the irony even of herself, and the doubt even of herself,
which were stronger than any other instincts in her, she laughed at her
own momentary sentiment.
'I dare say I should have been tired of him in six months,' she
thought, 'and very likely we should have hated one another in another
six. He would not have been as easy as Platon; he would have had his
prejudices----'
Before her mind there rose the vision of a place she had once seen as
she had sailed in a yacht down the Adriatic one cool autumnal month;
a place not far from Ragusa, somewhat farther to the southward; a
fantastic pile, half Greek, half Turkish, with an old Gothic keep built
by Quattrocentisto Venetians rising in its midst; gardens of palms and
woods of ilex sloping from it to meet the lapis-lazuli-hued sea, cliffs
of all the colours of precious stones towering up behind it into the
white clouds and the dazzling sunshine. Fascinated by the aspect of the
place, she had asked its name and owner, and the Austrians with her had
answered her, 'It is called Zama, and it belongs to the Othmars.'
She had often remembered the Herzegovinian castle, lonely as Miramar
after the tragedy of Quetaro.
'I would not have lived at Amyôt, but at Zama,' she thought now; then,
angry and impatient of herself, she dismissed her fancies as you banish
with a light clap of your hands a flock of importunate birds, which fly
away as fast as they have come.