On this the unwelcome anniversary of her birth, she was at St.
Pharamond, which had been connected with the grounds of La
Jacquemerille by the purchase, at great cost, of all the intervening
flower-fields and olive-woods. It had been her whim to do so, and
Othmar had not opposed it, though he would have preferred never again
to see those shores; but, although she never spoke to him on that
subject, she herself chose to go there with most winters, for the
very reason that the world would sooner have expected her to shun the
scenes of Yseulte's early and tragic death. She invariably did whatever
her society expected her not to do, and the vague sense of self-blame
with which her conscience was moved, whenever she remembered the dead
girl, was sting enough to make her display an absolute oblivion and
indifference which, for once, she did not feel.
She never remained long upon the Riviera; she seldom stayed long
anywhere, except it were at Amyôt; but she went thither always when
the violets were thick in the valleys, and the yellow blossoms of
the butterwort were flung like so many golden guineas over the brown
furrows of the fields. The children spent the whole winter there. This
day, when they had wished her _bonne fête_, and brought her their
great baskets of white lilac and gardenias, she was indulgent to them,
and took them with her in her carriage for a drive after her noonday
breakfast. She was not a woman to whom the babble and play of children
could ever be very long interesting; her mind was too speculative, too
highly cultured, too exacting to give much response to the simplicity,
the ignorance, and the imperfect thoughts of childhood. But in her
own way she loved them. In her own way she took great care of their
education, physical and mental. She wished her son to become a man whom
the world would honour; and she wished her daughter to be wholly unlike
herself.
As yet they were hardly more than babies; lovely, happy, gay, and
gentle. 'Let them be young as long as they can,' she said to those
entrusted with their training. 'I was never young. It is a great loss.
One never wholly recovers it in any after years.'
It was a fine day, mild, sunny, with light winds shaking the odour from
the orange buds; such a day as that on which Platon Napraxine had died.
She did not think of him.
Several years had gone away since then; the whole world seemed changed;
the dead past had buried its dead; there were the two golden-haired
laughing children in symbol and witness of the present.
'Decidedly, however philosophic we may be, we are all governed at
heart by sentiment,' she thought, as the carriage rolled through the
delicate green of the blossoming woods. 'And by beauty,' she added,
as her eyes dwelt on the faces of Otho and Xenia, who were the very
flower and perfection of childish loveliness; ideal children also, who
were always happy, always caressing, always devoted to each other, and
whose little lives were as pretty as those of two harebells in a sunny
wood. Why were they dear to her, and sweet and charming? Why had the
physical pain of their birth been forgotten in the mental joys of their
possession? Why did her eyes delight to follow their movements, and her
ear delight to listen to their laughter?
The other children had been as much hers, and she had always disliked
them; she disliked them still, such time as she went to their Russian
home to receive their annual homage, and that of all her dependents.
Othmar was devoted to the interests of Napraxine's two little sons; an
uneasy consciousness, often recurrent to him, that he had not merited
the frank and steady friendship of the dead man, perpetually impelled
him to the greatest care of their fortunes and education. They were
kindly, stupid, vigorous little lads, likely to grow into the image
of their dead father; but all that could be done for them in mind
and body, for their present and their future, he took heed should be
done; and placing them under wise and gentle teachers, endeavoured to
counteract the fatal instincts to vanity and overbearing self-esteem
which the adulation and submission they received everywhere on their
estates had implanted in them long before they could spell. He
never saw them come into his presence without painful memories and
involuntary repugnance; but he repressed all signs of either, and the
children, if they feared him, liked him. Of their mother they saw but
very little: a lovely delicate vision, in an atmosphere scented like a
tea rose, with a little sound in her voice which made them feel they
must tread softly and speak low, looked at them with an expression
which they did not understand, and touched them with cool fragrant lips
lightly and distantly, and they knew she was their mother because they
had always heard so: but Othmar seemed nearer to them than she did,
and when they wished for anything, it was to him that they addressed
their little rude scrawled notes. For the rest, they were always
in Russia: it was the only stipulation with which their father had
hampered their mother's guardianship of them.
'Let them be Russians always,' he had said in his last letter to
her. 'Let them love no soil but Russia. The curse of Russians is the
foreign life, the foreign tongue, the foreign ways, which draw them
away from their people, make their lands unknown and indifferent to
them, and lead them to squander on foreign cities and on foreign
wantons the roubles wrung by their stewards in their absence from their
dependents. Paris is the _succursale_ of Petersburg, and it is also
its hell. When the Russian nobles shall live in their own homes, the
Nihilist will have little justification, and the Jew will be unable
to drain the peasantry as a cancer drains the blood. I preach what I
have not practised. But if I could live my life again, I would spend my
strength, and my gold, and my years amongst my own people.'
'Poor Platon!' she had thought, more than once remembering those
words. 'He thinks he would have done so, but he would not. The first
_drôlesse_ who should have crossed the frontier would have taken him
back with her in triumph. It is quite true what he says; an absent
nobility leaves an open door behind them, through which Sedition creeps
in to jump upon their vacant chairs. But so long as ever they have the
power, men will go where they are amused, and the Russian _tchin_ will
not stay in the provinces, in the snow, with the wolves, and the Jews,
and the drunken villagers all around his house, when he can live in the
Avenue Joséphine, and never hear or see anything but what pleases him.
Absenteeism ruined Ireland, and will ruin Russia; but, _tant que le
monde est monde_, the man who has only one little short life of his own
will like to enjoy it.'
Nevertheless, she and Othmar both respected his wishes, and his boys
were brought up in the midst of the vast lands of their heritage, with
everything done that could be done by tuition to amend their naturally
slow intelligence and outweigh the stubbornness and arrogance begotten
by centuries of absolute dominion in the race they sprang from. She
herself only saw them very rarely, when, in midsummer weather, the
flowering seas of grass and the scent of the violets in the larch
woods brought life and warmth even to North-eastern Russia. They
were unpleasant to her: always unpleasant. They were the living and
intrusive records of years she would willingly have effaced. They were
involuntary but irresistible reproaches spoken, as it were, by lips
long dumb in death.
Living, their father had never had power to do otherwise than offend,
irritate, and disgust her: the least active sentiment against himself
that he had ever roused in her had been a contemptuous pity. But
dead, there were moments when Platon Napraxine acquired both dignity
and strength in her eyes: the silence of his death and its cause
had commanded her respect: he had been wearisome, stupid, absurd,
troublesome, in all his life; but in his death he had gained a certain
grandeur, as features quite coarse and commonplace will look solemn and
white on their bier.
He had died to defend her name, and she could not remember ever once
having given him one kind word! There had been a greatness in his
loyalty and in his sacrifice to its demands which outweighed the
clumsiness of his passion and the grotesqueness of his ignorance. 'If
he were living again, I should be as intolerant of him as I ever was,'
she thought at times; 'he would annoy me as much as ever, he would be
as ridiculous, he would be as odious; and yet I should like for once
to be able to say to him "_Pauvre ours! vous êtes mal léché, mais vous
avez bon c[oe]ur!_"'
It was a vague remorse, but a sincere one; yet in her nature it
irritated and did not alter her. It was an intrusive thought, and
unwelcome as had been his presence. She thrust it away as she had used
to bid her women lock the doors of her chamber; and the poor ghost went
away obediently, timid, wistful, not daring to insist, as the living
man had used to do from the street door.
Remorse is a vast persistent shadow in the poet's metrical romance and
the dramatist's tragic story; but in the great world, in the pleasant
world, in the world of movement, of distraction, of society, it is but
a very faint mist, which at very distant intervals clouds some tiny
space in a luminous sky, and hurries away before a breath of fashion,
a whisper of news, a puff of novelty, as though conscious of its own
incongruity and want of tact.
When their drive was over this day she dismissed the young Otho and his
sister to their nurses and teachers, and remained on the sea-terrace
of St. Pharamond with some friends about her. It was the last day in
February, a day of warm winds and full sunshine and fragrant warmth.
The air was penetrated with the sweet breath of primroses and the
scented narcissus which were blossoming by millions under the woods
of St. Pharamond. The place had been beautiful before, and under her
directions had become as perfect a sea palace as the south coast of
Europe could show anywhere. She had had a terrace made; a long line
of rose-coloured marble overhanging the sea, backed by palms and
araucarias, with sheltered seats that no angry breeze could find
out, and wide staircases descending to the smooth sands below. Here,
lying on the cushions and white bearskins, and leaning one elbow on
the balustrade, she could watch all the width of the waters as they
stretched eastward and westward, and see the man[oe]uvres in the
cupraces of her friends' vessels without moving from her own garden.
To the sea-terrace, when it was known that she would receive them,
came, on such sunny afternoons as this, all those whom she deigned to
encourage of the pleasure-seekers on the coast.
To see the sun set from that rose-marble terrace, and to take a Russian
cigarette or a cup of caravan tea beneath those araucaria branches, was
the most coveted distinction and one of the surest brevets of fashion
in the world. She refused so many; she received so few; she was so
inexorable in her social laws; mere rank alone had no weight with her;
ambassadors could pass people to courts, but not up those rose-coloured
stairs; princes and princesses, if they were dull, had no chance to be
made welcome; and, in fine, to become an _habitué_ there required so
many perfections that the majority of the great world never passed the
gates at all.
'The first qualification for admittance is that they must find
something new to say every day,' she said to the Duc de Béthune, who
was in an informal way her first chamberlain. 'The second is, that they
must always amuse me.'
'The first clause a few might perhaps fulfil; but who shall attain to
fulfilment of the second?'
'That will remain to be seen,' she said with a little yawn, while she
reclined on the white furs and the Eastern tissues, her feet on a
silver globe of hot water and her hands clasped idly on a tortoiseshell
field-glass. It was five o'clock; the western sky was a burning vault
of rose and gold; the zenith had the deep divine blue that is like
nothing else in all creation; the sea was radiant, purple here, azure
there, opal elsewhere, as the light fell on it; delicate winds blew
across it violet-scented from the land; the afternoon sun was warm, and
as its light deepened made the pale rose of the marbles glow like the
flowers of a pomegranate tree. She forgot her companions; she leaned
her head against her cushions and dreamily thought of many things; of
the day she had first come thither most of all. It had been nine years
before.
Nine years!--what an eternity! She remembered the bouquet which
Othmar had given her on the head of the sea-stairs. What a lover he
had been!--a lover out of a romance--Lelio, Ruy Blas, Romeo--anything
you would. What a pity to have married him! It had been commonplace,
_banal_, stupid--anybody would have done it. There had been a complete
absence of originality in such a conclusion to their story.
If Laura had married Petrarca, who would have cared for the sonnets?
She laughed a little as she thought so. Her companions hoped they had
succeeded in amusing her. She had not heard a word they were saying.
She gazed dreamily at the sea through her eyelids, which looked shut,
and pursued her own reflections.
Her companions of the moment were all men; the most notable of them
were Melville, the Duc de Béthune, and a Russian, Loris Loswa.
Melville, on the wing between Rome and Paris, loitered a week or two in
Nice, doing his best to shake alms for good works out of the sinners
there, and lifting up the silver clarion of his voice against the curse
of the _tripot_ with unsparing denunciation.
The Duc de Béthune was there because for twelve years of his still
young life he had been uneasy whenever many miles were between him and
the face of his lady, whom he adored with the hopeless and chivalrous
passion of which he had sustained the defence at the Court of Love at
Amyôt. He would have carried her muff or her ribbon to the scaffold,
like d'Aubiac and Montmorin, whom he had cited there. He had been
almost the only one of her lovers whom she had deigned to take the
trouble to preserve as a friend. He had been inspired at first sight
with an intense passion for her, which had coloured and embittered some
of the best years of his life. On the death of Napraxine he had been
amongst the first to lay the offer of his life at her feet. She had
rejected him, but without her customary mockery, even with a certain
regret; and she had employed all the infinite power of her charms and
tact of her intelligence to retain him as a companion whilst rejecting
him as a suitor. Such a position had seemed at first impossible to him,
and had been long painful; but at last he chose rather to see her on
those distant terms than never, and gradually, as time passed on, he
grew familiarised to the sight of her as the wife of Othmar, and the
love he bore to her softened into regard, and lost its sting and its
torment.
In person he was handsome and distinguished-looking to a great degree;
he resembled the portrait of Henri Quatre, and bore himself like
the fine soldier he was; he had a grave temperament and a romantic
fancy; the cradle of his race was a vast dark fortress overhanging the
iron-bound rocks of Finisterre, and his early manhood had been ushered
in by the terrible tragedies of the _année terrible_. As volunteer with
the Army of the North, Gui de Béthune had seen the darkest side of war
and life; he had been but a mere youth then, but the misfortunes of his
country had added to the natural seriousness of his northern temper.
The most elegant of gentlemen in the great world of Paris, he yet had
never abandoned himself as utterly as most men of his age and rank to
the empire of pleasure; there was a certain reserve and dignity in him
which became the cast of his features and the gravity and sweetness of
his voice.
But he never loved any other woman. And unconsciously to herself
she was so used to consider that implicit and exclusive devotion to
her as one of her rights, that she would have been astonished, even
perhaps annoyed, had she seen that he took his worship elsewhere. Her
remembrance had spoiled twelve years of the promise of his manhood,
but if anyone had reproached her with that, she would have said
sincerely enough, 'I cannot help his adoring me.' She would have even
taken credit to herself for the unusual kindliness with which she had
endeavoured to turn the sirocco of love into the mild and harmless
breeze of friendly sympathy.
The Duc de Béthune was one of those conquests which flattered even
her sated and fastidious vanity; and she had been touched to unwonted
feeling by the delicate, chivalrous, and lofty character of the loyalty
he gave her so long.
She jested at him often, but she respected him always; occasionally she
irritated Othmar by saying to him, half in joke and half in earnest:
'Sometimes I almost wish that I had married Béthune!'
That he remained unmarried for her sake was always agreeable to her.
Loris Loswa was, on the contrary, one of the gayest of her many
servitors. By birth noble and poor, he had been early compromised in
a students' revolt at Kieff, and through family influence had been
allowed self-exile instead of deportation to Tobolsk. He had turned his
steps to Paris, and, possessing great facility for art, had pursued the
study seriously and so successfully, that before he was thirty he had
become one of the most noted artists in France.
He had a wonderful talent for the portraiture of women. No one rendered
with so much grace, so much charm, so much delicate flattery, running
deftly in the lines of truth, the peculiar beauties of the _mondaine_,
in which, however much nude nature may have done, art always does
still more. All that subtle, indescribable loveliness of the woman of
society, which is made up of so many details of tint and costume, and
manner and style, and a thousand other subtle indescribable things,
was caught and fixed by the brush or by the crayon of Loris Loswa with
a power all his own, and a fidelity which became the most charming of
compliments. Ruder artists, truer perhaps to art than he, grumbled
at his method and despised his renown. '_Faiseur de chiffons_' some
students wrote once upon his door; and there were many of his brethren
who pretended that his creations were nothing more than audacious, and
unreally brilliant, trickeries.
But detraction did not lock the wheels of his triumphal chariot; it
glided along with inconceivable rapidity through the pleasant avenues
of popular admiration. And his art pleased too many connoisseurs
of elegant taste and cultured sight not to have in it some higher
and finer qualities than his enemies allowed to it. He had magical
colouring, and as magical a touch; a woman's portrait, under his
treatment, became gorgeous as a sunbird, delicate as an orchid,
ethereal as a butterfly floating down a sunbeam. Then he was at times
arrogant in his pretensions, fastidious in his selections of sitters;
he was given to call himself an amateur, which at once disarmed his
critics and increased his vogue; he was an aristocrat, and very
good-looking, which did not diminish his popularity with any class of
women; and what increased it still more was, that he refused many more
sitters than he accepted. Not to have been painted in water colours,
or drawn in pastel by Count Loris Loswa, was to any _élégante_ to be a
step behindhand in fashion; to have a pearl missing from her crown of
distinction.
'If anyone could paint dew on a cobweb it would be Loswa,' a great
critic had said one day. 'Have you never seen dew on a cobweb? It
is the most beautiful thing in the world, especially when a sunbeam
trembles through it.'
His present hostess had a high opinion of his powers, mingled with
a certain depreciation of them. 'Perhaps it is only a trick,' she
admitted; 'but it is a divine trick--a trick of Hermes.'
He leaned now over the balustrade of the terrace of St. Pharamond,
the warmth of the western sun shining on his fair curls and straight
profile.
'A coxcomb can never be a genius,' murmured the Duc de Béthune,
glancing towards him with sovereign contempt and dislike.
'You are always very _porté_ against poor Loris,' returned his hostess
with a smile. 'Yes, he has genius in a way, the same sort of genius
that Watteau had, and Coustou and Boucher; he should have been born
under Louis Quinze; that is his only mistake.'
'He is a coxcomb,' repeated Béthune.
'He seems so to you, because all your life has been filled with grave
thoughts and strong actions. All artists are apt to seem mere triflers
to all soldiers. Who is that girl he is looking at?--what a handsome
face!'
She raised herself a little on her elbow, and looked down over the
balustrade; a small boat with a single red sail and two women under it
were passing under the terrace; one of them was old, brown and ugly,
the other was young, fair, and with golden-brown hair curling under a
red woollen fisher's cap. The water was shallow under the marble walls
of St. Pharamond; the boat was drifting very slowly; there was a pile
of oranges and lemons in it as its cargo; the elder woman, with one
oar in the water, was with her other hand counting copper coins into a
leathern bag in her lap; the younger, who steered with a string tied
to her foot, was managing the sail with a practised skill which showed
that all maritime exercises were familiar to her. When she sat down
again she looked up at the terrace above her.
She had a beautiful and uncommon countenance, full of light; the light
of youth, of health, of enjoyment; she wore a gown of rough dark-blue
sea-stuff much stained with salt water, and the sleeves of it were
rolled up high, showing the whole of her bare and admirably moulded
arms. The memories of Melville and of his hostess both went back to the
day when they had seen another boat upon those waters with the happy
loveliness of youth within it.
Loris Loswa, full of outspoken admiration, exhausted all his epithets
of praise as he watched the little vessel drift by them, slowly, very
slowly, for there was no wind to aid it, and the oar was motionless in
the water.
'Stay, oh stay!' he cried to the boat, and began to murmur the 'Enfant,
si j'étais roi----'
'If you were a king you could hardly do better than what, I am quite
sure, you will do as it is,' said Nadine. 'Find out where she lives,
and make her portrait for next year's Salon. She is very handsome, and
that old scarlet cap is charming. Let us recompense her for passing,
and astonish her.'
As she spoke she drew a massive gold bracelet off her own arm, and
leaning farther down over the marble parapet, threw it towards the
girl. Her aim was good; the boat was almost motionless, the bracelet
was very weighty; it fell with admirable precision where it was
intended to fall--on the knees of the girl as she sat in the prow
behind the pile of golden fruit.
'How astonished and pleased she will be!' said Loswa. 'It is only you,
Madame, who have such apropos inspirations.'
Even as he spoke the maiden in the boat had taken up the bracelet,
looked at it a moment with a frown upon her face, then without a
second's pause had sprung to her feet to obtain a better attitude for
her effort, and with a magnificent sweep of her bare arm upward and
backward cast the thing back again on high on to the balustrade, where
it rolled to the feet of its mistress.
Without waiting an instant, she plucked the oars up, one from the
hand of the old woman the other from the bottom of the boat, and with
vigorous strokes drove her sluggish old vessel past the terrace wall,
never once looking up, and not heeding the cries of her companion. In
a few moments, under her fierce swift movements, the boat was several
yards away, leaving the shallow water for the deeper, and hidden
altogether from the gaze of her admirers by the red sail flaked with
amber and bistre stains, where wind, and sun, and storm had marked it
for their own.
'What has happened?' said Melville, who had not understood the episode
of the bracelet, rising and coming towards them.
'We are in Arcadia, Monsignor!' cried Nadine. 'A peasant girl rejects a
jewel!'
'Is she a peasant? I should doubt it,' said Béthune.
Melville looked through one of the spy-glasses.
'No, no! It is Damaris Bérarde,' he said as he laid it aside. 'She is
by no means a peasant. She is a great heiress in her own little way,
and as proud as if she were dauphine of France.'
'Damaris! What a pretty name!' said Loswa. 'It makes one think of
damask roses, and she is rather like one. Where does she live,
Monsignor?'
'She lives with her grandfather on a little island which belongs to
him. He is a very well-to-do man, but a great brute in many ways; he
is not cruel to the girl, but were she to cross his will I imagine he
would be. Krapotkine is his hero and Karl Marx his prophet; he is the
most ferocious anarchist. You know the sort of man. It is a sort very
common in France, and especially so in the South. Did you give her a
jewel, Madame Nadège? Ah, that was a very great offence! She must have
been mortally offended. When that child is en fête she has a row of
pearls as big as any in your jewel-cases.'
'She looked a poor girl, and I thought I should please her,' said
Nadine, with impatience. 'Who was to tell that the owner of pearls
as big as sparrows' eggs was rowing in a fruit-boat, bare-armed and
bare-headed?'
'Where did you say that she lived?' asked Loswa, curious and interested.
'Oh, on an island a long way off from here,' said Melville, regretting
that he had spoken of this source of dissension.
'Take me to that island, Monsignor,' murmured Loris Loswa in his ear.
'Oh, indeed no,' said the priest hastily. 'You are a "cursed
aristocrat;" the old man would receive you with a thrust of a pike.'
'I would take my chance of the pike,' said Loswa, 'and I would assure
him that the future lies with the Anarchists, for I believe it, and
I would not add that I also think that their millennium will be most
highly uncomfortable.'
'Will you take _me_ to that island, Monsignor?' said Nadine. 'It will
not be favourable to fashionable impressionists like Loris.'
Loswa coloured a little with irritation; he had not thought she would
overhear his request. He was, besides, despite his vanity, always
vaguely sensible that her admiration of his powers was tinged with
contempt.
'You, Madame!' cried Melville, cordially wishing that the island of
Damaris Bérarde was far away in the Pacific in lieu of a score of
leagues off the shores of Savoy. 'Would I take the world incarnate, the
most seductive and irresistible of all its votaries, into a convent of
Oblates to torture all the good Sisters condemned to eternal seclusion?
That poor little girl is a little recluse, a little barbarian, but she
is happy in her solitude, in her _sauvagerie_. Were she once to see the
Countess Othmar she would know peace no more.'
'She must see many very like me if she live a mile or so off these
shores,' said Nadine, dismissing the subject with indifference. 'I am
sure it is she who is to be envied if she can find any entertainment
in rowing about in a boat full of oranges. I would do it this moment
if it would amuse me, but it would not. That is the penalty of having
sophisticated and corrupted tastes. How old is your paragon?'
'Did I say she was a paragon? She is a good little girl. Her age? I
should think fifteen, sixteen; certainly not more. Her birth is rather
curious. Her mother was an actress, and her father the master of a
fruit-carrying brig; dissimilar enough progenitors. Her father was
drowned, and her mother died of nostalgia for the stage; and Damaris
was left to the care of her grandfather, the fierce old Communist I
have described to you. However, he is not so terrible a bigot after
all, for he allowed her to be taught by the Sisters at the Villefranche
Convent, as a concession to me when I knew him first, in return for a
little service I had done him. He thinks it does not much matter what
women do; to him they are only beasts of burden; he likes to see his
hung with pearls only as he puts tassels and ribbons on his cows when
they are taken to market.'
'And what service did you render him?'
'Oh, nothing worth mentioning; a trifle,' said Melville, who never
spoke of his own deeds of heroism, which were many. The old man's
younger and only remaining son had lain dying of Asiatic cholera,
brought to the coast in some infected load of Eastern rags, with which
they had manured the olives one hot August day. Not a soul had dared to
approach the plague-stricken bed, except the courtly churchman whose
smile was so sought by great ladies and whose wit was so prized at
dinner-parties. He had not abandoned it until all was over, and with
his own hands had aided Jean Bérarde to lay the body of his boy in
mother-earth. When the grave was filled up, the old socialist, to whom
priests had been as loathliest vermin, gave his knotted work-worn hand
to the slender white hand of Melville:
'The only one that had the courage!' he muttered. 'Do not try to do
anything with me, it would be no use; but do what you like about the
child. I will say nothing. You alone stayed by me to see her uncle die.'
So the girl Damaris had been allowed to go in her boat to learn of the
Sisters on the mainland, and had been allowed to go also to Mass on
high days and holy days. But Melville saw no necessity to say all this
to his worldly friends upon the sea-terrace of St. Pharamond. Nay, he
even reproached himself that, in a momentary unconsidered impulse,
he had given the name of the girl to Loswa. Loswa was not perhaps a
man to go in cold blood on a seducer's errand, but he was conceited,
sensual, egotistic, and accustomed to take his own way without much
consideration for its consequences, whether to himself or to others.
And the worldly wisdom of Melville told him he had committed an
imprudence.
'Jean Bérarde,' he continued, 'of course, abhors priests, and would
have a general massacre of the Church. But I chanced to do him a
service, as I said, some time ago, and so he allows me now and then
to go and sit under his big olives and talk to the child, and even,
grudgingly, lets her go to Mass now and then. His past is written
clearly enough in the history of Savoy, but he either does not know
or does not care anything about his descent. All he does care about
are his profits from olives and oranges, and also, I suspect, from
smuggling. What is infinitely droll is, that the principles which slew
his forefathers and destroyed the cradle of his race have become his
own. Perhaps the fury of the _Ça ira_ got into him, being begotten, as
he was, in that time of blood and flame through which his progenitors
passed. Anyhow he is the fiercest of socialists now.
'The Counts de la Bérarde were very mighty people; almost as great as
their suzerains and neighbours, the Counts of Dauphiné. The cradle
of their race, of which you may see one tower standing now, was set
amongst the glaciers and gorges of the Val St. Christophe; it stood
above the Romanche on a great slope of gneiss, with the snow mountains
at its back. Up to the time of Richelieu the Bérardes were omnipotent,
and they had sway as far down as the sea coast, and it is said that sea
piracy, as well as stoppage of land travellers going on their horses
and sumpter mules through the passes, swelled their wealth and their
power not a little. All these mountain lords were robbers in those
days. If you have never been up as far as the St. Christophe valley,
you should go as soon as the weather opens and the roads are passable;
all the _cols_ and the _combes_ are fine, well worth a little Alpine
climbing; and the Pointe des Écrins may hold its own with the peaks of
the Engadine.
'Well, to revert to the Counts de Bérarde: Richelieu broke the back
of their power--it is odd that a Churchman, doing all he could to
strengthen the hands of a king, did in truth lay the first stone of
what became centuries after the Revolution!--their chiefs were beheaded
on the ramparts of Briançon, their castle in the Alps was razed,
and only two or three of their younger scions survived the general
destruction of the race. From one of these distant branches, Jean de
la Bérarde, who had a small stronghold on the sea, and who became, by
all these executions, the head of the family, this old man who owns
Bonaventure, and is the rudest and roughest of cruisers and farmers,
is lineally descended. I have been at pains to make out his genealogy.
These matters always have interest for me, and it is curious to trace
how the old patrician strain comes out in the girl, his grand-daughter,
though he himself is nothing more than a boor. The Bérardes never
recovered the massacres and confiscations of the reign of Louis XIII.,
though they were small suzerains on the sea-coast up to the days of
Louis XV. They then fell into poverty, and lost their hold over their
neighbours; the Terror extinguished them entirely; they were swallowed
up in the night of anarchy. But Jean Bérarde of Bonaventure is legally
heir of the Count Alain de la Bérarde, who was taken to Toulon, and
shot there by the Maratists of Freron and Barras. His only son, being a
lad at the time, was saved by disguising himself as a fisherman, and,
being utterly beggared by the Jacobins, took to the coasting trade,
and in time saved money, married a peasant, and bought the island: my
socialist friend was _his_ son.
'That is the story of these people, who in two generations have dropped
the very memory of the fierce nobles they sprang from so entirely that
the old man on Bonaventure is as rabid a Communist as any man can be
who has property and clings to it. There--I have been terribly prosy,
and Madame will say that all this genealogy is of no earthly interest
to her; and, indeed, it cannot be to any of you, only that to a student
of human nature it is always, in a measure, interesting to see how old
races look under new hoods.'
'In this instance,' said Nadine smiling, 'the old race looks very
pretty under the Phrygian cap. The girl is unusually handsome. You
would be wild to paint her, Loswa, if only she were a duchess!'
'I would ask no better fate as it is,' he replied. 'But perhaps it
might not be so easy. The grandfather Bérarde is sure to be a Cerberus.'
'You must air your destructive doctrines before him; he will be
fascinated; he will not know that you live with the duchesses, and
would not trouble yourself actually to walk the length of a boulevard
to save All The Russias.'
'I am not a political hypocrite, Madame, though you are pleased to
ridicule me as an artistic impostor,' said Loswa, with an angry flush
on his face.
She cast the end of her cigarette into the sea.
'Oh no; you are not a hypocrite; you would very much like to see the
destruction of the whole world, provided only that your own armchair
should withstand the shock. There are so many anarchists of that type;
and, indeed, why should you die for politics or creed when you can
live and paint such charming pictures? For your pictures are very
charming, though they are all pearl-powder and point-lace, all satins
and brocades, and we are all going to Court in every one of them.'
'Vandyke did not paint beggars,' said Loswa, who would have lost his
temper had he dared.
She looked at him with amusement.
'But you are not Vandyke, my dear Loris; you are, at most, Lely or
Boucher, and the pearl-powder has got into your brushes a little more
than it should have done. You have only one defect as an artist, but
it is a capital offence, and you will not outgrow it--you are _never
natural_!'
He was silent from vexation.
He had an exaggerated opinion of his own genius, and saw in himself a
mingling of Clouet and Boucher, Leonardo and Largillière, and was often
restless and nervous under his sense of her depreciative criticism; but
he was very proud of the intimacy he was allowed to enjoy with her, and
usually bore her chastisement with a spaniel's humility; a quality rare
in him, spoilt and courted darling of high dames as he was.
'If you do take a portrait of that child,' she pursued, pointing to
the distant boat, 'you will be utterly unable to portray her as she
is; you will never give the sea-stains on her gown, the sea-tan on her
face, the rough dull red of that old worn sea-cap. You will idealise
her, which with you means that you will make her utterly artificial.
She will become a goddess of liberty, and she will look like a maid of
honour frisking under a republican disguise to amuse a frisky Court.
The simple sea-born creature yonder, rowing through blue water, and
thinking of the sale of her oranges or the capture of her fish, will
be altogether and forever beyond you. It is always beyond the Lelys
and the Bouchers, though it would not have been beyond Vandyke. Do you
think you could paint a forest-tree or a field-flower? Not you; your
daisy would become a gardenia, and your larch would be a lime on the
boulevards.'
'Am I to understand, Madame, that you have suddenly become a patroness
of nature? Then surely even I, poor creature of the boulevards though I
be, need not despair of becoming _natürlich_?'
'You mistake,' said Nadine with a little sadness. 'I have lived in a
hothouse, but I have always envied those who lived in the open air.
Besides, I am not an artist; I am a mere _mondaine_. I was born in the
world as an oyster is in its shallows. But an artist, if he be worthy
the name, should abhor the world. He should live and work and think and
dream in the open air, and in full contact with nature. Do you suppose
Millet could have breathed an hour in your studio with its velvets
and tapestries and lacquer work, with its draperies and screens and
rugs, and carefully shaded windows? He would have been stifled. Why is
nearly all modern work so valueless? Because it is nearly all of it
studio-work; work done at high pressure and in an artificial light. Do
you think that Michel Angelo could have endured to dwell in Cromwell
Road? Or do you think that Murillo or Domenichino would have built
themselves an hotel in the Avenue Villiers? Why is Basil Vereschaguin,
with all his faults and deformities, original and in a way sublime?
Because he works in the open air; in no light tempered otherwise than
by the clouds as they pass, or by the leaves as they move.'
'For heaven's sake!' cried Loswa with a gesture of appeal.
She laughed a little.
'Ah, my poor Court poodle, with your pretty tricks and graces!--of
course, the very name of our wolf of the forests is terrible to you.
But I suppose the Court has made the poodle what he is; I suppose it is
as much your duchesses' fault as your own.'
Then she turned away and left this favourite of fortune and great
ladies to his own reflections. They were irritated and mortified;
bitter with that bitterest of all earthly things, wounded vanity.
Good heavens! he thought, with a sharp stinging sense of a woman's
base ingratitude, was it for this that he had painted her portrait
in such wise that season after season each succeeding one had been
the centre of all eyes in the Paris Salon? Was it for this that he
had immortalised her face looking out from a cloud of shadow like
a narcissus in the mists of March?--that he had drawn her in every
attitude and every costume, from the loose white draperies of her hours
of langour to the golden tissues and crowding jewels of her court-dress
at imperial palaces? Was it for this that he had composed that divinest
portrait of them all, in which, with a knot of stephanotis at her
breast and a collar of pearls at her throat, she seemed to smile at
all who looked on her that slight, amused, disdainful smile which had
killed men as surely as any silver-hilted dagger lying in an ivory
case, which once was steeped in _aqua Tofana_ for Lucrezia or Bianca?
Was it for this!--to be called opprobrious, derisive names, and have
Basil Vereschaguin, the painter of death, of carnage, of horror, of
brown Hindoos and hideous Tartars, vaunted before him as his master!
He hated Vereschaguin as a Sèvres vase, had it a mind and soul to hate,
might hate the bronze statue of a gladiator; and his tormentor, in a
moment of mercilessness and candour, had wounded him with a weapon
whose use he never forgave.
'He is a coxcomb! Béthune is quite right,' she said of him when
Melville hinted that she had been too cruel. 'He has marvellous talent
and _technique_, but he dares to think that these two are genius. If he
had not likened himself to Vandyke I might perhaps never have told him
what I think of his place in art. He is a pretty painter, a very pretty
painter, and his portraits of me are charming; but if they be looked at
at all in the twentieth century they will hardly rank higher than we
rank now the pastels of Rosalba; certainly not higher than we rank the
portraits of Greuze.'
'If I were a painter I would be content to be Greuze,' said Melville
with a smile.
'No you would not,' said Nadine; 'you would not be content to be a
d'Estrées in your own profession, nor any other mere Court cardinal.'