It was eight o'clock in the evening on the plains of Russia, and warm
with that Asiatic heat which comes with the reign of the dog-star even
to the provinces that lie between the Baltic waters and the Ural snows.
In the vast gardens and white wide courts of the house at Zaraïla the
evening was sultry, and Nadège, spending a few dull days in her annual
visit to her elder children and their estates, was lying half asleep
upon a couch, listening to the monotonous drip of the lion-fountain
in the central court, and thinking of nothing in especial. This visit
had always represented to her supreme and unmitigated tedium. It was
a duty to come there no doubt; her duties were docile courtiers as a
rule and seldom troubled her; but it was tiresome, infinitely tiresome,
it was so much time lost out of the sum of her life. Why is duty never
agreeable?
The Napraxine children were in their own apartments; the clear sunny
evening, whose light would stretch almost to dawn, illumined the
gardens and terraces. She reclined motionless upon her broad low couch,
with a little cigarette between her lips, now and then sending into
the air around her delicate rings of rose-scented smoke. The mother of
Platon Napraxine, a woman old and austere, with the terrible austerity
of women who have loved pleasure and passion, and only turned to
devotion when both have deserted them, sat near and watched her with
dark, brooding, sunken eyes, full of a hate which the object of it was
too indifferent and too careless to care for or to measure.
The Princess Lobow Gregorievna, born a Princess Miliutine, was a woman
who had been handsome, but had now lost nearly all trace of past
beauty. She was spare, colourless, and attenuated, and her severe,
straight profile, and her expression of ascetic rigidity, gave her
a curious likeness to those Byzantine portraits of St. Anne and of
St. Elizabeth which were surrounded with jewels and relics on the
altars of her private chapel. Her piety in old age was as complete and
absorbing as her licentious amours had been in her earlier womanhood.
Superstition had taken the same empire over her in age which her
passions had possessed previously; and she was as extravagant in her
donations to church and convent as she had once been to the impecunious
officers of the guard and princely gamblers, who had been in turn
favoured with her fantastic and short-lived preference. Her religious
and most orthodox fervour was neither a mask nor an hypocrisy. It was
the most genuine of all religions--that which is founded on personal
fear. But it intensified the hardness of her temper, and never
whispered to her that mercy might be holier than long prayers.
In all Europe Othmar and his wife had no enemy colder, harder, more
implacable than this holy woman, whose name meant Love, and whose
good works were seen in endowed convents, jewelled reliques, mighty
treasures bestowed all over her province, and ceremonials, fasts, and
penances of the orthodox most rigidly observed in her person. Nadège
never tried to conciliate or propitiate her grim foe; she was at once
too careless and too courageous. With her delicate and unsparing
raillery she had stung this enmity with many a barbed word, subtle
and negligent and penetrating, accentuated with the cruel sweet music
of her laughter, until the hatred with which the Princess Lobow hated
her was deep as the Volga, though hidden like the Volga's bottomless
holes so long as Platon Napraxine had lived. His death had given it
justification, and intensified it a thousandfold.
'If she were a good woman she would be compelled to hate me,' thought
the object of her hate. 'And being what she is, if she could poison me
secretly she would do it, even in the blessed bread itself.'
When they had first met after her marriage with Othmar, there had been
said between them such words as are ineffaceable on the memory like
vitriol flung on the face.
'For the first time in my life I have allowed myself to be in a rage;
_je me suis encanaillée!_' she had said to herself, penitent not for
the anger into which she had been driven, but for the force with which
she had uttered it, which was an offence against her canons of good
taste.
The earlier years of the Princess Lobow had been dedicated to all those
refined ingenuities of depravity in which the nineteenth century can
rival the Rome of Vitellius and the Constantinople of the Byzantine
emperors. There were terrible facts in her past, ready, like so many
knives, to the use of her opponent, allusions which could pierce like
steel, and could scar like flame. Nadège had spared none of them. With
all the pitiless disdain of a woman in whom the senses have but very
faint power, she had poured out her scorn on the other, whose senses
had been her tyrants until, virtuous perforce through the chills of
age, she had taken her worthless withered soul to God.
Since that time the bitterest enmity had been open and avowed between
them. Concession to the world, and regard to the dead man's memory,
caused them to still keep up a show and aspect of conventional
politeness before others. But the polished surface covered the most
bitter feud. They were studiously ceremonious and courteous one to
the other; but beneath the few phrases they exchanged, often trivial
and apparently amiable as these might be, there were a hint, a tone,
a meaning which told to each of the other's undying animosity. To
the younger woman it was a matter of pure indifference, of careless
amusement; her nature was too capricious and too disdainful to cherish
deep enmities; she despised rather than she disliked; but to the elder
this hatred she cherished was the last flickering flame of the many
hot passions which had governed her in earlier years. For her only
son she had had a concentrated intensity of affection, into which all
the ambition, cupidity, and love of dominion in her character had
been united. His marriage had been hateful to her, and when Nadine,
in her sixteenth year, as fragile as an orchid and as impertinent
as Cherubino, petulantly detesting the husband they had given her,
and in the bitterness of her disillusions at war with all the world,
was brought in the first months of her marriage to the great house of
Zaraïla, the Princess Lobow had seen in her not only the despoiler of
her own power, but the ruin of her son.
Many and violent had been the scenes between Platon Napraxine and
herself, of which his wife was the object and the cause.
'She is a crystal of ice, you say,' she told him a hundred times.
'Well, she will so chill your heart one day that it will be numb for
ever. Remember that; I warn you.'
He did remember when he went out to his death in the dawn of the April
morning at Versailles.
Whilst he lived his mother's hatred for his wife was impotent and
perforce mute; but all the many slights, the constant indifference, the
frequent ridicule of which he was the object, though unperceived or
forgiven by him, were written on his mother's memory indelibly as on
tablets of stone. All the coquetries and scandals which were associated
with his wife's name, all the tragedies for which the breath of her
world made her responsible, all the cruel words and strange caprices
which were attributed to her, were gathered up and treasured by the
Princess Lobow. Seldom leaving her solitudes in the provinces, and
seldom seen even in Petersburg, she yet was as accurately informed of
all the gossip of Europe concerning her daughter-in-law as though she
had lived perpetually beside her. None of the minutiæ of the vaguest
rumours about her escaped the vigilance of her enemy. Saint though she
was, she prayed passionately that some imprudence greater than usual,
some coquetry which would pass beyond the patience of her husband and
her world, would deliver Nadège Federowna into her hands, but she
waited in vain. The indulgence of both the world and the husband was
inexhaustible for one to whom they were both of the most absolute
insignificance.
Then one day, as falls a bolt from a clear sky, a single line by the
electric wires told her that her son was dead.
In her eyes he was murdered by his wife, as surely as though she had
touched his lips with poison.
Her grief and her rage were terrible: the more terrible because the
hatred which might have assuaged it had no outlet in action, could
scarce have any in speech.
For Platon Napraxine had left his young sons wholly in the hands of
their mother, and she could take them whither she would, and do with
them whatever she chose; and the elder woman, who had transferred to
them all that jealous and violent attachment which she had given their
father, concealed all she felt that she might retain them near her,
whilst the secretiveness and ruses of the Slav temperament made it
possible for her to continue in apparent friendship before the world
with one whom she looked on as his destroyer.
She sat now erect on an antique chair of gilded and painted leather,
and through her dropped eyelids watched the indolent attitude, the
profound idleness, the outstretched limbs, like those of a reposing
Diana, of the woman she loathed. In all the attitude, from the _sans
gêne_ and complete ease of it to the little rose-scented puffs of
smoke which ever and again came from her parted lips, there was that
'note of modernity' which beyond all other things the Princess Lobow
detested. The women of her time had been as licentious as the great
Catharine herself, but they had been different to the _cocodettes_
in manner, in mind, in opinion, in everything. They had been like
fierce Oriental empresses, often barbarous, uncleanly, gross, but they
had had a stateliness which all their excesses could not impair. The
modern woman of the world, with her careless attitudes, her mockery of
all ceremonial, her disrespect for tradition and etiquette, her airy
scepticism, and her vague dissatisfaction, was, wherever she was met
with, an enigma and an affront to the elder woman, whose own life had
been divided between strong vices and strong faiths, and whose bigotry
and whose sensuality had been of equal force. They had neither senses
nor souls, these poor modern _anémiques_, thought this woman of seventy
years, who had been a Messalina and who had become a St. Katherine.
'Ah, you despise us, madame; how right you are!' Nadège had said to
her once. 'We never know what we wish, and when we get what we ask
for, we are as irritated as when it is denied to us. It is the fault
of all culture--it creates discontent and fastidiousness as surely
as civilisation brings all kinds of new diseases. I only wish that
we could be like our granddames and godmothers, who had no earthly
ideals beyond a constant succession of big officers of cuirassiers,
and no mental doubt whatever as to the existence of a "bon Dieu." It
must have simplified life so much to have been able to balance the
little weakness for the succession of cuirassiers with such a perfect
confidence in Heaven!'
At this moment in the summer evening at Zaraïla neither of them were
speaking. They had exchanged many cruel, courteous innuendoes in the
course of the day, but with the evening there had come a tacit truce.
The little boys were wholly under the power of their mother as their
guardian, and their grandmother feared that if she were too much
irritated she might remove them from Zaraïla or request her to leave
it. Nadine, on her side, had thought, with a sense of compassion and
that disdainful but candid justice which was seldom wanting in her:
'After all, as she loved that poor, big, clumsy fellow so well, and
he was her only son--the only thing she had--it is pardonable, it is
natural, that she should hate me for ever.'
It grew late, but it was still light with the long and radiant evening
of the north in summer. She, in the drowsy heat of the eventide, looked
with still dreamy eyes out on to the sultry gardens beneath, where
golden evening light was poured on endless aisles and fields of roses,
and groves of feathery bananas and plumed palms; the vegetation of the
vales of Kashmere made by art to blossom there for the brief season of
a Russian summer.
'How very foolish women are to fear absence,' she thought. 'Absence
is the only possible avenue which can lead us to find the _fontaine
de jouvence_ of renewed interest. Familiarity is so fatal--so fatal!
Helen's self would be unable to hold her own against it. Those silly
women who let the man they love enter their chamber as easily as he
can go into his racing stables, set a great grey ghost of indifference
at the threshold. Most women are afraid of not being near what they
love. If they only knew how distance helps them; how constant proximity
hurts them! If Love cannot keep a few surprises in his pocket, he is as
tiresome as a newspaper a week old.'
She laughed a little, watching the leaves of a full-blown rose fall
under the touch of an alighting bird.
'When it has once been full-blown,' she thought, 'any touch--even a
bird's, even a butterfly's--will serve to finish it for ever.'
Love was so like that great crimson rose, which a moment before had
been a cup of ruby-coloured fragrance, and now was a mere litter of
dropped leaves upon the grass. Love lives by its emotions, its desires,
its illusions: so long as these can be excited and sustained it is
Love; when they cannot be so, it is as the Spanish poet said centuries
ago, habit, friendship, what you will, but not Love any more.
She had studied the natures of men too profoundly not to know this.
There was the sound of wheels in the central court, and various doors
opened and shut in the apartments leading to the grand salon where
they were. Then the groom of the chambers, in his black uniform, only
relieved by his silver chain of office and the key embroidered on his
collar, preceded and announced Othmar.
Nadine half rose, leaning on one arm on the cushion.
'My dear Otho, this is charming of you! I did not expect you until
to-morrow,' she said, with a smile of welcome, as she put out her left
hand to him. Othmar kissed her fingers with warmth and deference, then
saluted with ceremony the Princess Lobow.
'I came from Moscow more quickly than I could have hoped to do,' he
said, as he seated himself beside his wife. 'An Imperial train was
leaving for the north, and the Grand Duke Alexis offered me a place in
it. Are you well? It is three months and more since we met.'
'I am as well as it is ever permitted one to be in a century in which
the nerves play the most prominent rôle. And the children?'
'Perfectly well, and perfectly happy. They are not yet at the age of
nerves. But I have telegraphed all news to you; there is nothing left
to say, except that absence----'
'Oh, do not make me compliments like a _berger d'éventail_! We will
take all that for granted.'
The reproof to him was the same sort of mockery with which she had been
always wont to repress the attempts at tenderness of Napraxine; but his
mother, listening, heard the difference in the accent, and watching,
saw the difference in the smile with which they were spoken.
'The wanton!' she thought bitterly; 'she expected him to-night, though
she said not till to-morrow. It was for him, that attitude like a
_Diane endormie_, that coquette's disarray, that studied disorder of
laces and gauzes, that little bouquet of heliotrope fastened just above
the left breast! Oh, the beast, the beast! All that belonged to my
son--every atom of it, from her little ear to her slender foot, and
should have been burnt with him, like the Indian women, if I could have
had my way--should have been buried with him, like his stars and his
crosses. Oh, the beast, the beast! if I could only wring her neck!'
Then she rose, and murmuring some words inaudible and indifferent to
her companions, she left the apartment. Othmar, alone beside his wife
in the aromatic warmth of the summer evening, bent over her couch and
kissed her little bouquet of heliotrope.
'_Allons, berger!_' she cried, with a little resistance which was not
displeasure.
It pleased her that she had the power to make her husband her lover;
that she could still see him moved to the _folies des bergers_. It
was a point of vanity with her, as well as an impulse of the heart,
to retain something of that empire over him which had once been so
absolute. When she should wholly cease to be able to do so, it seemed
to her that she would be grown old indeed. She had never put more
coquetry, more sorcery, more art concealed by art into her efforts to
blind and enslave her lovers, than she had done that evening when she
was awaiting Othmar after three months' absence. It might not be the
highest form of love, but it was the ablest. It was of a piece with
that magic by which Cleopatra defied time, and changed the ravages of
habit into philtres of fresh charm.