'_Othmar cueillant les marguerites aux bois!_' said Nadine Napraxine,
with her most unkind smile, when she heard that he remained under the
Valois woods until autumn.
She herself was in Russia; forced also to gather daisies in her own
manner, which always wearied her. It was necessary to be seen awhile at
Tsarkoe Selo, or wherever the Imperial people were; and then to visit
for a few months the immense estates of Prince Napraxine. They had gone
thither earlier than usual through the suicide of Boris Seliedoff,
which had cast many noble northern families into mourning, and had for
a moment chilled the feeling of Europe in general towards herself.
'It was so inconsiderate of him!' she said more than once. 'Everyone
was sure to put it upon me!'
It seemed to her very unjust.
She had been kind to the boy, and then had rebuked him a little as
anybody else would have done. Who could imagine that he would blow his
brains out under the palms and aloes, like any _décavé_ without a franc?
She was exceedingly angry that the world should venture to blame her.
When her Imperial mistress, receiving her first visit, gave some
expression to this general sentiment, and presumed to hazard some
phrases which suggested a hint of reproof, Nadine Napraxine revolted
with all the pride of her temper, and did not scruple to respond to
her interlocutor that the Platoff and the Napraxine both were of more
ancient lineage and greater traditions in Russia than those now seated
on the throne.
To her alone would it have been possible to make such a reply and yet
receive condonation of it, as she did. There was in her a force which
no one resisted, a magnetism which no one escaped.
She was, however, extremely angered, both by the remarks made to her
at Court, and about her in European society, and withdrew herself
to the immense solitudes of the province of Kaluga in an irritation
which was not without dignity. Men who adored her, of whom there were
many, noticed that her self-exile to Zaraïzoff coincided with that of
Othmar to Amyôt; but there was no one who would have dared to say so.
Geraldine had gone to North America, which had amused her.
'_He_ will not shoot himself,' she thought. 'He will shoot a vast
number of innocent beasts instead. Seliedoff was the manlier of the
two.'
Zaraïzoff was a mighty place set amongst the endless woods and rolling
plains of the north-eastern provinces; a huge rambling structure half
fortress, half palace, with the village clustering near as in other
days when the Tartars might sweep down on it like vultures. The wealth
of the Napraxines had made it within almost oriental in its luxury;
without, it had much of the barbaric wildness of the country, and it
had been here in the first two intolerable years after her marriage
that she had learned to love to be drawn by half-wild horses at
lightning speed over the snow plains, with the bay of the wolves on the
air, and the surety of fatal frost-bite if the furs were incautiously
dropped a moment too soon.
At Zaraïzoff, when she established herself there for the summer,
she brought usually a Parisian household with her, and inviting a
succession of guests, filled with a great movement and gaiety of life
the sombre courts, the silent galleries and chambers, the antique walls
all covered with vivid paintings like a Byzantine church, the long low
salons luxurious as a Persian harem. But this summer it saw her come
almost alone. Her children came also from southern Russia, and Platon
Napraxine at least was happy.
'Is it possible to be uglier than that; not surely among the Kalmucks!'
she thought, looking in the good-tempered little Tartar-like faces of
her two small sons.
They were absurdly like their father; but, as they promised to be also,
like him, tall and well-built, would probably, as they grew up, find
many women, as he had found many, to tell them they were handsome men;
but that time was far off, and as yet they were but ugly children.
Sachs and Mitz (Alexander and Demetrius) were respectively five and six
years old, big, stout, ungainly little boys, with flat blunt features,
in which the Tartar blood of the Napraxine was prominently visible.
They had a retinue of tutors, governesses, bonnes, and attendants
of all kinds, and had been early impressed with the opinion that a
Napraxine had no superior on earth save the Gospodar.
'_Ils ont pris la peine de naître!_' quoted their mother with contempt
as she beheld their arrogant little pomposities: she could never
forgive them that they had done so. It was natural that when she looked
in her mirror she could scarcely bring herself to believe that they had
been the issue of her own life.
'I suppose I ought to adore them, but I certainly do not,' she said
to Melville, who, having been sent on a mission to Petersburg by the
Vatican in the vain hope of mitigating by the charm of his manner the
hard fate of the Catholic Poles, had paused for a day at Zaraïzoff to
obey the summons of its mistress, travelling some extra thousand versts
to do so. It was to him that she had made the remark about the daisies.
Melville, though he was a priest whose vows were truly sacred
obligations in his eyes, was also keenly alive to those enjoyments
of the graces and luxuries of life which his frequent employment
in diplomatic missions for the head of his Church made it not only
permissible but desirable for him to indulge in at times. His brief
visit to Zaraïzoff, and other similar diversions, were agreeable
episodes in months of spiritual effort and very serious intellectual
work, and he abandoned himself to the amusement of such occasional
rewards with the youthful ardour which sixty years had not tamed in him.
Nadine Napraxine was not only charming to his eyes and taste, as to
those of all men, but she interested him with the attraction which
a complicated and not-easily-unravelled character possesses for all
intellectual people. He had perceived in her those gifts mental
and moral which, under suitable circumstance, make the noblest of
temperaments, and he also perceived in her an indefinite potentiality
for cruelty and for tyranny; the conflict between the two interested
him as a psychological study. He could not but censure her intolerance
of Napraxine; yet neither could he refuse to sympathise with it. The
Prince was the last man on earth to have been able to attain any power
over that variable, contemptuous, and subtle temperament and over an
intelligence refined by culture to the utmost perfection of taste and
hypercriticism of judgment. He adored her indeed, but _c'est le pire
défaut_ in such cases; and a hippopotamus in his muddy sedges might
have done so, with as much hope as he, of exciting anything more than
her impatience and contempt.
'I certainly do not,' she repeated, as she lay on a divan after dinner,
in a grand hall imitated from the Alhambra, with a copy of the Lion
fountain in white marble in the centre, and groves of palms in white
marble vases lifting their green banners against the deep glow of
the many-coloured fretwork and diapered gold of the walls. 'They are
two quite uninteresting children, stupid, obstinate, proud, already
convinced that a Prince Napraxine has only to breathe a wish to see it
accomplished. At present they are good tempered and are fond of each
other, but that will not last long; they will soon feel their claws and
use them. They are quite wonderfully ugly;--an ugliness flat, heavy,
animal, altogether Tartar. I imagine I could have been fond of a child
like any other woman, but then I think with any mother it must be
always the child of a man she loves; it must be the symbol of sympathy
and the issue of joy----'
She spoke dreamily, almost regretfully, her delicate head lying back
amongst the pillows of golden silk, while she sent a little cloud of
smoke into the air.
Melville looked at her: he thought that there were persons who were
like the Neva river; the Neva does not freeze of itself, but it has so
many huge blocks of ice rolled down into it from above that it looks as
if it did.
He hesitated a moment; he was too sagacious a man of the world to
intrude his own beliefs where they would only have met with unbelief.
'What can I say?' he murmured. 'Only that I suppose maternal love,
after all, like all other love, does not come at command; human nature
has always been under the illusion that it was a spontaneous and
irresistible growth.'
'Human nature has so many illusions,' said Nadine Napraxine. 'But I
have never heard that much reason underlies any one of them.'
'But does not our happiness?' said Melville.
She laughed a little.
'Do you believe much in happy people? I think there are passions,
vanities, titillations, desires, successes--those one sees in full
motion on the earth, like animalculæ in a drop of water; but happiness,
I imagine, died with Paul et Virginie, with Chactas and Atala. To be
happy, you must be capable of being unhappy. We never reach that point;
we are only irritable, or grow _anémique_, according to the variety of
our constitutions.'
'I knew a perfectly happy woman once,' said Melville; 'happy all her
life, and she lived long.'
'Oh, you mean some nun,' said Nadine Napraxine, with impatience. 'That
is not happiness; it is only a form of hysteria or hypogastria.'
'Not a nun,' replied Melville, making himself a cigarette, while the
sun played on the red sash of his gown, the gown which Raffael designed
for Leo. 'Not a nun. The woman I mean was a servant in a little dirty
village near Grenoble; she had been in the service of two cross,
miserly people ever since she was fifteen. At the time I knew her
first she was forty-seven. The old people had a small shop of general
necessaries; she attended to the shop, cooked, and cleaned, and washed,
and spun, dug, too, in a vegetable garden, and took care of a donkey,
and pigs, and fowls. When she was about thirty, the old man first, and
then the old woman, became incapable, from paralysis. Rose--her name
was Rose--worked on harder than ever. She had many offers of better
service, even offers of marriage, for she was a famous housewife, but
she refused them; she would not leave the old people. They were poor;
they had never been good or grateful to her; they had even beaten her
when she was a girl; but she would never leave them. She had been a
foundling, and theirs had been the only form of human ties that she
had ever known. She was perfectly happy all the day long, and she
even found time to do many a good turn for neighbours worse off than
herself. She had never had more than twenty francs a year in money, but
then "you see, I live well, I want nothing," she said to me once. And
such living! Black cabbage and black bread! Well, she was perfectly
happy, as I say. You do not seem to believe it?'
'Oh, yes; so is a snail,' said the Princess Nadine. 'Besides, you
know, if she had been a pretty woman----'
Melville felt almost angry.
'You are very cruel. Why will you divorce beauty and virtue?'
'I do not divorce them, nature usually does,' she answered, amused.
'Perhaps they divorce themselves. Well, what became of this paragon?'
'She was no paragon,' said Melville, annoyed. 'She was a hard-working,
good, honest woman, perfectly content with a horrible lot, and loyal
unto death to two tyrannical old brutes who never thanked her. When
they died they left all the little they had to a nephew in the Jura,
who had taken no notice of them all their days--a rich tradesman. Poor
Rose, at fifty-three years old, was sent adrift on the world. She
cried her heart out to have to leave the house, and the ass, and the
chickens. I got her the grant from the Prix Montyon, and she was set
up in a tiny shop of her own in her own village, but she did not live
long. "_Quand on a été heureuse, après--c'est long_," she said in her
dying hour. She was afraid to seem ungrateful, but "_sans mes vieux_,"
as she said, apologetically, her life was done. It seems a terrible
life to us, but I can solemnly declare that it was one of the few
happy ones of which I have ever been witness. There is a sustaining,
vivifying force in duty, like the heat of the sun, for those who accept
it.'
'For those who accept it, no doubt,' said Nadine Napraxine, drily;
'but then, you see, my dear and reverend Melville, it requires some
organ in one's brain--superstition, I think, or credulity--before one
can do that. Every one is not blessed with that organ. Pray believe,'
she resumed, with her softer smile, perceiving a vexed shadow on his
face, 'I am not insensible to the quiet unconscious heroism of those
lowly lives of devotion. They are always touching. Those revelations
which the _discours_ of the Prix Montyon give from time to time always
make one envious of so much belief, of so much endurance, of so much
unobtrusive and unselfish goodness. But, though I dare say you will be
very angry, I cannot help reminding you that what makes the sparrow
very happy would have no sort of effect on the swallow, except that he
would feel restless and uncomfortable; and also that--pray forgive me,
for you are a priest--to be contented with doing one's duty one must
believe in duty as a Divine ordinance. To do that one must have--well,
just that bump of credulity of which I spoke--of easy, unquestioning,
unintelligent, credulity. Now, that it is a happy quality I am certain,
but is it,--is it, an intellectual one?'
She spoke very sweetly, but with a demure smile, which made Melville
feel that there was a great deal more which she did not say out of
respect for his sacred calling and his position as her guest.
'Do not repeat over to me all the stock arguments,' she said quickly,
as he opened his lips; 'I have heard them all ten thousand times.
I have the greatest possible regard for your doctrines, which have
satisfied Chateaubriand, Lacordaire, Montalembert, Manning, Newman, and
yourself, but I have always failed to understand how they did satisfy
any of you. But we will not discuss theology. Your poor Rose proves,
if she prove anything, that Heaven is not in a hurry to reward its
servitors. Perhaps, after all, she might have been wiser if she had
married some Jeannot, all over flour or coal dust, and had half a dozen
children and fifty grand children.'
'There is common brute enjoyment all over the earth,' said Melville,
almost losing his temper. 'It must be well that it should be leavened
here and there with lives of sublime self-sacrifice; one heroic or
unselfish act raises the whole of human nature with it.'
Nadine Napraxine took a cigarette.
'There are ten thousand such acts in Russia every year, but they do not
produce much effect. Juggernauth rolls on,----'
Melville looked at her quickly.
'You have a certain sympathy with the people, though you deride my poor
Rose.'
'I do not deride her; I admire her within certain limits. Only, I
ascribe her actions more to ignorance and to superstition, whereas you
ascribe them entirely to a clear-eyed devotion. Yes; I could have been
a revolutionist, I think, only all the traditions of the Platoff and
the Napraxine forbid it; and then, as I said to you once before, I do
not like _Pallida Mors_ carried about in a hat-box or a sardine-case.
It is grotesque. Without jesting,' she continued, 'I think if I saw
my way to do something truly great or of lasting benefit, I should be
ready to sacrifice my life to it; but there is nothing. If a Princess
Napraxine joined the Nihilists, she would only cause an intolerable
scandal and set an example which would be very injurious to the country
at large. Some day, Russia will be in revolt from one end to another,
but the day is not yet, and I doubt much that any good will be done
when it comes. The evil lies too deep, in the drunkenness, in the
lying, in the bestiality----'
She saw a look of surprise on Melville's face, and continued quickly:
'Do you suppose I never think? I believe I have read every socialistic
writer from Rousseau to Bakounine. They do not convince me of anything
except of the utter improbability that any real liberty will ever be
obtainable from any congregation of men. Humanity is tyrannical and
slavish at once; its governments are created in its own likeness, it
makes little difference what they are called, they are human offspring,
so they are narrow and arrogant.'
'Poor humanity!' said Melville. 'It is only we priests who can lend it
wings.'
'Because you say to it, like Schiller, "Cheat yourself, and dream,"'
she replied. 'But even there how narrow still! You say to each unit,
"Save yourself!"'
'Well,' said the Englishman with good temper, 'if every one sweep out
his own little chamber, the whole city will be clean.'
'The city will be for ever unclean. You know that as well as I do.
Only, all Churchmen can hide their eyes ostrich-like in the sand of
sonorous phrases. Your Christianity has been toiling for eighteen
centuries, and, one may say, has accomplished nothing. It mouths a
great deal, but practical result it has scarcely any. Its difficulty
has always been that, being illogical in its essence and traditions, it
must be restrained to words. Reduced to practice, all the modern world
would fade away, riches would disappear, effort would be impossible,
and the whole machinery of civilisation come to a standstill and entire
disuse. You are as aware of that as I am, only you do not like to say
so.'
She rose, amused at his discomfiture, and lighted another cigarette.
She smoked as gracefully as a bird pecks at the dew in a rose.
'She is the only woman who makes me irritable,' the courtly Gervase
Melville had once said of her, and he might have said also, 'the only
woman who reduces me to silence.'
'Allow, Princess,' he said irritably now, 'that whether we accredit
Christianity with it or not, the life of poor Rose in her wooden shoes
was much more useful than yours is in those pearl-embroidered _mules_.'
'Ah,' she answered with a smile. 'You are indeed worsted in your logic
if you must descend to personalities! Certainly I grant that; my life
is of a most absolute inutility. It is, perhaps, now and then useful
to my tailors, because I give them ideas they would not have without
me. But to no one else. _À qui la faute?_ I arrived in this world
without any option. As Mr. Gladstone said when he was an Eton boy,
responsibilities which are thrust upon us do not exact our obedience.
It is the only sentiment of Mr. Gladstone with which I have ever been
able to agree. Life is clearly thrust upon us. We none of us seek
it, that is certain. If we are able to disport ourselves in it, like
butterflies in a south wind, it says much in praise of the lightness of
our hearts.'
'Or of the levity of our consciences,' said Melville, a little
gloomily.
'Conscience is only the unconscious cerebral action of transmitted
influence, is it? Oh, I have read the Scientists as well as the
Socialists. They are not much more convincing, if one goes to them with
an unprejudiced mind----'
'Does your conscience never tell you that you have done any harm,
Princess?'
'Oh, very often--a great deal,' she answered candidly. 'But it does
not tell me that I ought not to have done it. I suppose my chain of
transmitted influences is not as strong as it should be. Seriously,'
she continued, 'I do not think hereditary influences are nearly
sufficiently allowed for at any time. Think what my people were for
ages and ages; the most masterful of autocratic lords who had no single
law save their own pleasure, and who, when they helped slay a Tzar,
were washing out some blood-feud of their family; pleasure, vice,
bloodshed, courage no doubt, rough justice perhaps, were all their
lives knew; they lived in the saddle or beside the drinking-horn; they
rode like madmen; they had huge castles set in almost eternal snows;
they were the judge and the executioner of every wrong-doer in their
family or their province; it was not until Letters came in with the
great Catherine that the least touch of civilisation softened them, and
even after Catherine they were amongst the slayers of Paul; for though
they could read Bossuet and Marmontel, their culture was but the merest
varnish still. Now, I come from these men and women, for the women were
not better than the men. Do you suppose their leaven is not in me? Of
course it is, though I am--perhaps as civilised as most people.'
Melville looked at her with a smile.
'Yes, certainly civilisation has in you, Princess, reached its most
exquisite and most supreme development; the hothouse can do no more.
You are its most perfect flower. Are we really to credit that you have
beneath all that the ferocity and the despotism of a thousand centuries
of barbaric Boyars?'
'I have no doubt something of it,' said Nadine Napraxine, whilst the
dark velvet of her eyes grew sombre and her delicate hand clenched
on an imaginary knout. 'I could use _that_ sometimes,' she said with
significance: Melville understood what she meant.
'You can hurt more than with the knout, Princess,' he answered.
Nadine Napraxine smiled. The suggestion pleased her.
Then a certain regretfulness came upon her face.
'I think I might have been tender-hearted,' she said involuntarily and
inconsistently, with a pathos of which she was unconscious. 'I do not
know--perhaps not--I am not compassionate.'
She forgot that Melville was seated on a divan near her in the great
golden room of Moorish work, whose arches opened on to the marble
court of the Lion. She thought of her spoilt, artificial, frivolous
childhood, spent in great drawing-rooms listening to political
rivalries and calumnious stories and wit that was always polished but
not always decent; she thought how her keen eyes had unravelled all
the threads of intrigue about her, and how her heart had scorned the
duplicity of her mother; when she had been only eight years old, she
had known by intuition her mother's secrets and had shut them all up in
her little silent soul with vague ideas of honour and dishonour, and
never had said anything to her father--never, never--not even when he
lay on his deathbed.
And then they had married her to Platon Napraxine as _si bon garçon_.
'Oh, _si bon garçon_, no doubt!' she had thought contemptuously then
as she thought now--only he had outraged her, revolted her, disgusted
her. Her marriage night still remained to her a memory of ineffaceable
loathing.
She looked up to see the intelligent eyes of Melville fixed on her in
some perplexity.
She laughed and walked out on to the marble pavement of the great
court, above which shone the blue of a northern sky; beyond its
colonnades were immense gardens, and beyond those stretched the plains
like a green sea covered with forests of birch and willow.
'I think I should have liked to be your Rose,' she said, as she did so.
'After all, she must have been content with herself when she died. A
philosopher can be no more.'
'A philosopher can rarely be as much,' said Melville. 'He may be
resigned, but resignation and content are as different as a cold hand
and a warm one. My poor Rose was certainly content whilst she lived,
but not when she died, for she thought she had not done nearly enough
in return for all the blessings which she had received throughout her
life.'
'Now you cannot get that kind of absurdly grateful feeling without pure
ignorance,' said Nadine Napraxine, a little triumphantly. 'It would be
impossible for an educated person to think that misery was comfort; so
you see, after all, ignorance is at the bottom of all virtue. Now in
your heart of hearts, you cannot deny that, because, though you are a
priest, you are beyond anything a man of the world?'
Melville did not dislike to be called a man of the world, for he was
one, and liked to prove, or think he proved, that worldly wisdom was
not incompatible with the spiritual life.
At that moment Napraxine crossed the court. It was the first of the
brief hours between sunset and sunrise; there was a full moon in the
midsummer skies; he was smoking a cheroot, and talking with some young
men, neighbouring gentlemen, who had dined there; he looked big and
coarse, and his face was red; his wife gazed at him with an intolerant
dislike; he could have a grand manner when he chose, but in the country
he 'let himself go;' he did not remember that he was in the presence
of the most inexorable of his critics, of the most implacable of his
enemies, of the one person in the whole world whom it would have been
most desirable, and was most impossible, for him to propitiate.
'Sachs turned the knife round and round in the wolf's throat; he did,
on my honour, while it was alive; we blooded him at five years old, and
the child never winked. When the blood splashed him he shouted!' he was
saying audibly, with much pride, to one of his guests, as he lounged
across the marble court. Sachs was his eldest son. He was relating a
hunting exploit, crowned by the presence of his heir.
Nadine glanced at Melville with an expression of sovereign contempt.
'Butchers before they can spell!' she said, with ineffable distaste.
'Shall I venture to say anything?' he murmured.
'It would be of no use. Slaughter is the country gentleman's god.
Prince Napraxine is just now wholly _fourré_ in his character of a
country gentleman. It is perhaps as useful as that of a Monte Carlo
gamester. Only here the beasts suffer--there, the fools. I prefer that
the fools should do so.'
The young men gathered about her; Napraxine approached Melville.
'How does the Othmar marriage succeed?' he asked. 'I suppose you have
seen them?'
'I have been once to Amyôt,' returned Melville. 'You know Amyôt? A
magnificent place. They appeared very happy. She seems to have grown
years in a month or two.'
'That of course,' said Napraxine, with his loud laugh. 'She is very
handsome. Why on earth do they stay on in the provinces?'
'She is fond of Amyôt,' replied Melville. 'Probably he thinks that as
she is so young, there is time and to spare for the world.'
'Perhaps Nadine will believe now that it is a love marriage?' insisted
her husband, turning towards her.
'Did I ever say it was not?' she replied, with a little yawn.
'I do not see, if it were not, why it should possibly have taken
place,' said Melville. 'Othmar is lord of himself.'
'With a slave for his master?' she murmured, too low to be heard by
the not quick ears of her husband.
Melville heard, and the doubt crossed him whether Othmar might not have
been the lover of the Princess Napraxine, and the marriage arranged by
her, as great ladies often arrange such matters to disarm suspicion;
for Melville, despite the acumen on which he prided himself, did not
by any means wholly understand the very complicated character of his
hostess, in which a supreme courage was to the full as strong as were
its disdain and its indifference.
She shook off the importunities of the young nobles, who seemed rustic
and tiresome enough to a woman to whom the wittiest society of Europe
had seemed dull and too tame, and strolled by herself through the half
wild gardens, which reached and touched the virgin forests of the East.
Her Kossack Hetman, who never lost her from sight when she was out of
doors, paced at a respectful distance behind her, but he was no more
to her than a big dog would be to others. The high seeding grass which
grew in the unused paths screened him from sight.
As she looked back, the moonlit mass of the vast house gathered a
dignity and austerity not its own by daylight, but to her it only
resembled a prison. She hated it: she would have liked to raze it to
the ground and make an end of it. There were so many prisons in Russia!
She laughed a little to herself, not mirthfully, as she strolled
through the intense light of the Northern night, her Kossack following
like her shadow. A poor drudge like that servant woman in Jura had been
content with her life, whilst she, the Princess Napraxine, in all the
perfection of youth, beauty, and great rank, was often so dissatisfied
with it that she could have drugged herself out of it with morphine
from sheer ennui!
What was the use of the highest culture, if that was all it brought
you? A whimsical fancy crossed her that she wished her Kossack would
try and assassinate her; it would be something new, it might make her
life seem worth the having, if somebody would try and take it away. She
was only three-and-twenty years old, and her future seemed so immensely
long that she felt tired at the very prospect of it, as one feels
tired at the sight of a long dull road which one is bound to follow.
The eternal monotony of the great world would be for ever about her.
She had too great rank, too great riches, for ambition to present any
prizes to her. To attempt to thrust Platon Napraxine into high offices
of the State would have been as absurd as to make a bear out of Finland
a magistrate or a general. He was a very great noble, but he would
never have wit enough even to play a decent hand at whist, much less to
conduct a negotiation or sway a Council.
'One might have had ambition for Othmar,' she thought involuntarily, as
his image rose unsummoned from the sea of silvery shadows around her;
'he had none for himself, but he might have been spurred, stimulated,
seduced, by a woman he had loved. There would have been many things
possible to him; the financier is the king, the Merlin, of the modern
world, and might become its Arthur also.'
She thought with impatience of that summer night, as it was shining
on the towers and woods of Amyôt. She felt as if something of her
own had been stolen from her, some allegiance due to her unlawfully
transferred. He should have had patience, he should have waited on her
will, he should have accepted her rebuffs, he should have followed her
steps through life as the Kossack was following them through the dewy
grass.
Poor stupid Geraldine would have been grateful to do so much, or
Seliedoff, or so many others. Othmar alone had dared to say to her, 'I
will be nothing or all.'
Therefore his memory abided with her and moved her, and had power
over her, and at times an irritable gnawing sense of something which
might have been stole upon her. What could that child give him at
Amyôt?--white limbs, clear eyes, a rose-bloom of blushes; but besides?
what sympathy, comprehension, inspiration? what of the higher delights
of the passions?
The thought of him irritated her. There was a defiance, an insolence,
in his assumption of being able to command his destiny in independence
of herself, which offended her; it was unlike what others did. She was
aware that it was done out of bravado, or so she believed; but it was
not thus that the fates on which she had deigned to lay her finger had
usually been closed. Something even of contempt for him at seeking such
a refuge from herself mingled with her irritation. It seemed to her
weak and commonplace.
'Madame,' said the voice of Melville through the shadows, 'is it quite
safe to ramble so late, despite the trusty Kossack and his lance?'
She turned; her head enwrapped in gossamer, till he saw nothing but the
cloud of lace and the two dusky, jewel-like eyes.
'I was just wishing, almost wishing,' she answered, 'that the trusty
Kossack were of the new doctrines, and would take advantage of the
opportunity to make away with his _barina_. I am not sure that I would
have called out; it would have saved one a great deal of sameness.
When my chocolate comes to my bedside I always think of Pierre Loti's
childish protest, "Toujours se lever, toujours se coucher, et toujours
manger de la soupe qui n'est pas bonne!" Our soup is good, perhaps. It
is rather the appetite which is lacking.'
'Your generation is born tired,' said Melville. 'Mine was happier; it
believed in the possibility of enjoyment--an illusion, no doubt, but
one which cheers life considerably. Princess, I wish you would pardon
me an indiscretion; you are always so merciful to me, you make me
over-bold; but I have always so much wanted to know whether a story
that I heard, of a winter's journey of yours across Russia, was true.
It was in the newspapers, but one never knows what is true there, and I
was in India at the time.'
She smiled. 'Oh! I know what you mean. Yes, it was true enough. That
was nothing; nothing at all. I had all kinds of people to help me.
There was no difficulty of any sort. It was amusing----'
'It was a very heroic thing to do,' said Melville gravely.
'Not at all,' she interrupted quickly. 'There was no heroism about it.
The Tzar was always very kind to me. I had every assistance, every
comfort on my journey. You, imaginative being, have a picture instantly
in your mind of me as enduring all the dangers of poor Elizabeth in the
French classic; on the contrary, I slept nearly all the way, and read a
novel the rest.'
'All the same,' said Melville, 'no one but yourself will deny that it
was a very noble thing to travel in November, the most hideous part
of the year, through mud and snow, right across Russia, to have a few
facts reach the Emperor in their true aspect, and then post to Tobolsk
with his pardon, that a dying mother might know her son was free before
she died----'
Nadine Napraxine shrugged her shoulders slightly, with a gesture of
indifference.
'It amused me. I had a fancy to see Siberia in winter. The pity
was that Fedor Alexowitch Boganof was an ugly and uninteresting
fellow--with plenty of brains, indeed, which brought his ruin, but
quite ugly, rather misshapen, and blessed with five children. If the
hero of my journey had only been a fine officer of cuirassiers, or a
romantic-looking revolutionist, the story would have been delightful,
but poor Boganof no one could turn into a _jeune premier_; not even
the gossips of Petersburg. He was only a clever writer, with a mother
and a wife who idolised him. The truth is, I had read his novel and
liked it; that is why, when his people came to me, I did what I could.
Anybody who knew the Tzar as well as I could have done as much. As
for going to Siberia--well, I went myself because I have a profound
distrust of Russian officials. Even an Imperial pardon has a knack of
arriving too late when it is desirable that it should do so. It was
certainly a disagreeable season of the year, but behind strong horses
one does not mind that. Very soon Siberia will have lost its terrors
and its romance; there will be a railway across the Urals, and all
chance of the little excitements attendant on such a journey as mine
will be over. When the Governor saw me actually in Tobolsk, he could
not believe his eyes. If his beard had not been dyed, it would have
turned white with the extremity of his amazement. I think he could have
understood my taking the trouble if it had been for a Tchin; but for
a mere scribbler of books, a mere teller of stories! I told him that
Homer, and Ariosto, and Goethe, and ever so many others had been only
tellers of stories too, but that produced no impression on him. He was
compelled to let Boganof go, because the Tzar ordered him, but he could
not see any valid reason why Boganof should not be left to rot away,
brain downwards, under the ice.'
She laughed a little at the recollection of it all; it had been called
an eccentric hair-brained thing at the time by all her world, but she
had taken Boganof back with her in triumph, and had not left him until
she had seen him seated by the stove of his own humble house in Odessa.
It had been one of the best moments of her life--yes, certainly--but it
did not seem to her that she had done anything remarkable. It had been
so absurd to send a man to dwell amidst eternal snows and semi-eternal
darkness because he had written a clever novel in which the wiseacres
of the third section had seen fit to discover revolutionary doctrines,
that when the wife and mother of Boganof, knowing her influence at
Court, and having chance of access to her through her steward, threw
themselves at her feet one day, and besought her compassion and
assistance, she had been surprised into promising her aid, from that
generosity and sympathy with courage which always lived beneath the
artificiality and indifference of her habits and temper. No doubt they
had succeeded because they had come upon her in a _bon moment_; no
doubt they might have found her in moods in which they might as well
have appealed to the Japanese bronzes in her vestibule; but, having
been touched and surprised into a promise, she had kept it through much
difficulty and with an energy which bore down all opposition.
'She looks as frail as a reed, but she has the force of a lance,' the
autocrat to whom she appealed, and who was at the onset utterly opposed
to her petition, had thought as he had answered her coldly that Boganof
was a dangerous writer.
'So were all the Encyclopædists; but the great Catherine was not afraid
of them; will you, the Father of your people, refuse to one of those
the protection which she was proud to grant to Frenchmen?' she had said
to the Emperor, with many another persuasive and audacious argument,
to which he had listened with a smile because the lovely mouth of the
Princess Napraxine had spoken them.
'It was a very noble thing to do,' repeated Melville.
'Oh, no,' she also repeated; 'it amused me. It frightened everybody
else. The Tzar was at Livadia unusually late; there was first to go
to him from here; when I reached Livadia, he was everything that was
kind to me personally, but I found him terribly angered against the
poor novelist, and all his courtiers were of course ready to swear
that Boganof was Satan; poor innocent Boganof, with his tender heart
always aching over the sorrows of the poor, and the mysteries of animal
suffering! I told the Emperor that Boganof was, on the contrary, a
type of all that was best in the Russian people; of that obedience,
of that faith, of that fortitude, which the Russian possesses in a
stronger degree than any other of the races of man. Where will you find
as you find in Russia the heroic silence under torture, the unwavering
adherence to a lost cause, the power of dying mute for sake of an idea,
the uncomplaining surrender of youth, of beauty, of all enjoyment,
often of rank and riches, to a mere impersonal duty? They are all
sacrificed to dreams, it is true; but they are heroic dreams which have
a greatness that looks fine in them, beside the vulgar greeds, and the
vulgar content of ordinary life. I said something to that effect to
the Tzar. "You fill your mines and prisons, sir, with these people,"
I said to him. "Greece would have raised altars to them. They are the
brothers of Harmodius; they are the sisters of Læna." I suppose it is
wonderful that he did not send me to the prisons; I dare say, if I had
been an ugly woman he would have done; he was, on the contrary, very
indulgent, and, though he was hard to move at first, he ended with the
utmost leniency.
'I was really quite in earnest at the time,' she continued, now, with
a little wondering astonishment at such remembrances of herself. 'I
urged on the Tzar the truth that, when the intellect of a nation
is suppressed and persecuted, the nation "dies from the top," like
Swift. I think I convinced him for the moment, but then there were so
many other people always at his ear to persuade him that universal
convulsion was only to be avoided by corking all the inkbottles, and
putting all the writers and readers down the mines. Prince Napraxine,
by the way, was in a terrible state when he heard of it all. He
was away in Paris at the time, and you may imagine that I did not
telegraph to ask his consent. Indeed, he first learnt what I had done
from the Russian correspondent of _Figaro_, and took the whole story
for one of _Figaro's_ impudent fictions. He went to the bureau in a
towering rage, and, I think, broke a Malacca cane over a sub-editor.
Then he telegraphed to me, and found it was all true enough; he might
more wisely have telegraphed first, for the sub-editor brought an
action for assault against him, and he had a vast deal of money to
pay. He abhors the very name of Boganof. Last New Year's day I had all
Boganof's novels in the Russian text, bound in vellum, as a present
from him; I thought he would have had an apoplectic fit.'
Her pretty, chill laughter completed the sentence.
'My honesty, however, compels me to confess,' she continued, 'that for
an unheroic _boulevardier_ and a strongly conservative _tchin_ like my
husband, the position was a trying one. He abhors literature, liberal
doctrines, and newspaper publicity; and the story of my journey for
and with Boganof met him in every journal, in every club, in every
city of Europe. The publicity annoyed me myself very much. I think
the way in which journalists seize on everything and exaggerate it to
their own purposes will, in time, prevent any action, a little out of
the common, ever taking place at all. People will shut themselves up
in their own shells like oysters. I should have left Boganof to the
governor of Tobolsk, who was so anxious to keep him, if I had ever
foreseen the annoyance which the Press was destined to cause me about
him. When I met the Tzar afterwards he said, "Well, Princess, are you
still convinced now that the ink-bottle contains the most harmless and
holy of fluids?" and I answered him that I granted it might contain a
good deal of gas and a good deal of gall, yet still I thought it wiser
not to cork it.'
'Princess,' said Melville, with a little hesitation, 'one cannot
but regret that a person capable of such fine sympathy and such
noble effort as yourself should pass nearly the whole of her time in
sedulously endeavouring to persuade the world that she has no heart and
herself that she has no soul. Why do you do it?'
She gave a little contemptuous gesture. 'I do not believe I have
either,' she said. 'When I was a tiny child, my father said to me,
"Douchka, you will have no dower, but you will have plenty of wit,
two big eyes, and a white skin." The possession of these three things
has always been the only fact I have ever been sure of, really! Do
not begin to talk theologically; you are delightful as a man of the
world, but as a priest you would bore me infinitely. One thinks out all
that sort of thing for oneself: ostensibly, I am of the Greek Church;
actually, I am of Victor Hugo's creed, which has never been able to
find a key to the mystery of the universe, "_Quelle loi a donné la bête
effarée à l'homme cruel?_" The horse strains and shivers under the
whip, the brutal drunkard kicks him in his empty stomach: God looks
on, if He exist at all, in entire indifference throughout tens of
thousands of ages. You say the patient animal has no soul, and that the
sodden drunkard has one. I do not admire your religion, which enables
you placidly to accept such an absurdity, and such an injustice, as a
Divine creation. Do not say that poets do no good; they do more than
priests, my dear friend. I had been reading that poem of Hugo's, the
_Melancholia_, at the moment when Boganof's wife and mother brought
their petition to me. It had made me in a mood for pity. You know that
is the utmost a woman ever has of any goodness--a mere mood. It is why
we are so dangerous in revolutions: we slay one minute, and weep the
next, and dance the next, and are sincere enough in it all. If they had
come to me when I had been annoyed about anything, or when I had had a
toilette I disliked, or a visit that had wearied me, I should have said
"No," and left Boganof in Siberia. It was the merest chance, the merest
whim--all due to the _Melancholia_.'
'Whim, or will, I am sure Boganof was grateful?' asked Melville.
Her voice softened: 'Oh yes, poor soul! But he died six months
afterwards of tubercular consumption, brought on by exposure and bad
food in Siberia. You see, imperial pardons may arrive too late, even if
one carry them oneself!'
'But he died at home,' said Melville; 'think how much that is!'
'For the sentimentalists,' she added, with her cruel little smile, but
her eyes were dim as she glanced upward at the stars in the north.
'Poor Boganof!' she said, after a pause, with a vibration of unresisted
emotion in her voice. 'There is another problem to set beside your
Rose. The world is full of them. Your Christianity does not explain
them. He was the son of a country proprietor, a poor one, but he had a
little estate, enough for his wants. He was a man of most simple tastes
and innocent desires: he might have lived, as Tourguenieff might have
lived, happy all his humble days on his own lands; but he had genius,
or something near it. He believed in his country and in mankind; he
had passionate hopes and passionate faiths; he knew he would lose all
for saying the truth as he saw it, but he could not help it; the truth
in him was stronger than he, he could not restrain the fire that was
in him--a holy fire, pure of all personal greed. Well, he has died for
being so simple, being so loyal, being so impersonal and so unselfish.
If he had been an egotist, a time-server, a sycophant, he would have
lived in peace and riches. Your Christianity has no explanation of
that! Musset's "_être immobile qui regarde mourir_" is all we see
behind the eternal spectacle of useless suffering and unavailing loss.'
She turned and drew her laces closer about her head, and passed quickly
through the shadows to the house.
Melville in answer sighed.
That night, when Melville stood at his windows looking over the immense
flat landscape, green with waving corn and rolling grass lands and low
birch woods which stretched before him silvered by the effulgence of a
broad white moon, he thought of Nadine Napraxine curiously, wistfully,
wonderingly, as a man who plays chess well puzzles over some chess
problem that is too intricate for him. The explanation we give of
ourselves is rarely accepted by others, and he did not accept hers of
herself; that she was the creature of the impression of the moment.
It seemed to him rather that hers was a nature with noble and heroic
impulses crusted over by the habits of the world and veiled by the
assumption rather than the actuality of egotism. She, too, could have
been a sister of Læna, he thought.
What waste was here of a fine nature, sedulously forcing itself and
others to believe that it was worthless, wearied by the pleasures which
yet made its only kingdom, cynical, lonely, incredulous, whilst at the
height of youth and of all possession!