Othmar did not tell her that night of Damaris.
With daylight he remembered uneasily that it was a story which should
be told. A certain nervousness came over him whenever he thought of her
possible, her probable, laughter, the incredulity as to his motives
which she would be sure, out of mirth, to affect if she were too unlike
other women to in seriousness entertain it. He recalled the tone with
which she had spoken of his escort of the girl to her island, and he
shrank from hearing the same tone again. He felt that, if heard, it
would anger him unreasonably, perhaps move him to the utterance of that
kind of words which are most fatal to friendship, harmony, or love.
The lovely _Diane endormie_, who had received him with so sweet a
smile, could, when aroused, select and speed arrows from her quiver
which could pierce deep and rankle long.
It seemed to him impossible to tell her that for weeks his house had
been the home of Damaris Bérarde without awaking all those ironies and
all that disdain which were always so very near the surface in her
nature that they were displayed upon the slightest provocation. He
would certainly seem to her to have behaved with needless exaggeration,
with uncalled-for chivalry. Paris was wide enough to furnish other
asylums than his own house; his means were large enough and powerful
enough to have obtained friends for a desolate girl without becoming
her chief friend himself. Away from the pathos and charm of Damaris's
fate, of her perfect trust in himself, and of her childish courage and
candour of character, what he had done seemed even to him, himself,
unnecessarily personal in its care of her. He did not regret it; he
would not have done less if he had had to do it again; yet he was
conscious that to induce his wife to see his actions in the light in
which he honestly saw them would be difficult, probably impossible.
This day drifted by, and another, and another; and the name of Damaris
did not pass his lips.
She had for him the sanctity of innocence, of youth, and of supreme
misfortune; he felt that he could not trust himself to have her made
the target for the silver arrows of his wife's wit. True, there might
be moments in which she would be so compassionate and generous,
that the calamities of the child whom she had tempted from her safe
solitudes would find in her a frank and generous friend. But Othmar
knew women too well not to know that she would only have been so had he
himself had nothing to do with the fate of this waif and stray; if she,
and not himself, had found her adrift in the streets of Paris.
'She would doubt my motives and ridicule my endeavours,' he thought,
and the fear of her slight, chill laughter was strong upon him. He
knew that she would be unsparing in her sarcasms upon himself, even if
she should chance to feel any remnant of her momentary interest in the
future Desclée of her prophecies.
He could not forget the coldness and scorn with which she had treated
his regret and remorse at Amyôt; he could not forget the aching sense
of loneliness and loss with which she had allowed him to leave her
presence on the night when he had told her of the little verses which
he had found in the closed chambers of Yseulte. He almost resented with
a sense of weakness and unworthiness in himself, the empire which she
possessed over his senses, the self-oblivion into which she had the
power to draw him when she chose.
He was sensible that he lost all dignity in her eyes, because he was
so willing to forgive, so easy to be recalled, so spaniel-like in his
too meek acceptance of her slights, and too eager gratitude for her
capricious tenderness.
The first hours passed of that dominion which she could always exercise
over him at will, the sense of his own weakness returned to him with
humiliation. He was conscious that he must appear unmanly and feeble
to her, since he allowed her to play with him thus at her whim and
pleasure. At Amyôt she had been unkind, disdainful, contemptuous; if he
condoned her cruelty, and accepted her commands, did he not seem to her
no higher than the Siberian greyhound which it was her fancy one moment
to adorn and caress, and which the next was abandoned and forgotten?
He knew that a lover may obey the varying shades of his mistress's
temper without unmanliness, but that in marriage such humility and
obedience on the man's side are fatal to his peace and self-respect.
If he had had the strength of character from the first to resist her
influence, and enforce his own, he might have had empire over her; now
he felt that he would never gain it, that on her side alone was all
that immense power of command, and of superiority, which in human love
always remains with the one who loves least. He had too long allowed
her to treat him as she treated her hawk in the falconry-parties at
Amyôt, whistling the bird to her wrist and casting it off down the wind
with wanton unstable fancies, for him now to take that place in her
esteem, and that dignity in her sight, which he had lost through his
too fond and too submissive idolatry of her. He had only of late grown
conscious of this, and the sudden perception of his own error was full
of bitterness and useless regret.
'He resents the power I have over him,' she thought, 'and he is
thinking of something which he does not say.'
She had never expected him to vary with her varying moods. When she
was cold, she had always seen him unhappy; when she had chided his
warmth, he had always remained her adorer. That any shadow from her own
indifference which had fallen like night across the paths of others
should ever touch herself, seemed to her impossible, intolerable,
almost grotesque; that she could ever cease to be his sun and moon, his
planet, and his fixed star, seemed to her as improbable as that the
earth would cease to revolve.
Her philosophic wit had indeed predicted the time when the fate which
overtakes all passion would overtake his, and end it, but in her
inmost soul that time had seemed to her remote as death itself. From
the time when his eyes had first met hers, she had had complete and
undisputed mastery over his life; she had dominated his fancy, filled
his imagination, ruled over his destiny, and held empire over his
senses. More than once she had told herself, as she had told him, that
in the common course of human life and human nature this would change
and cease some day, but in her own heart she had never realised what
her lips had said.
Men had seldom changed to her. They had met tragic ends for her sake
or through her name, or they had given up their lives to celibate
indifference to all other women, as Gui de Béthune had done; but they
had seldom or never, having once loved her, loved others; seldom or
never learned to meet her tranquilly in the world as one who had become
naught to them. The philtre poured out by her cool white hand had been
of that rare flavour which makes all other beverages tasteless. Even
Platon Napraxine, although her husband, had yet retained for her such
utter devotion in his slow, rude, mute nature, that he had hungered for
a rose from her bosom the night before he had gone out to be shot like
a dog for her sake.
Of the mortification of waning ardour, of the slow sad change from
fervour to apathy, of the great _débâcle_ of all passion which so many
women watch with hopeless and sinking hearts, as poor peasants of
Alpine valleys watch the melting snow and stealing floods sweep away
their homesteads--of these she had known nothing; known no more than
the reigning and honoured sovereign knows of exile and dethronement.
Now she was conscious of it, of the first slight imperceptible
chillness of feeling, even as she had been conscious of what no other
eyes than hers saw; the first faint change in her own beauty like the
film of breath on a mirror. It was very slight, rather negative than
positive, rather told by what was lacking than by what was present;
a shadow of fatigue, an absence of eagerness, a forced attention,
an accent of constraint, slender, vague, intangible things all; yet
apparent and eloquent to her quick intelligence, to her supreme
knowledge of human nature.
They affected her with a strange sense of offence, of astonishment, of
irritation. She had a sudden impression of loss, as of one who, having
carelessly swung in his hand, without remembering it, a jewel of value,
discovers with a shock of surprise that his hand is empty, and his
treasure dropped in some crowded street, its fall unheard, its loss
only told by its absence.
Always, hitherto, after any separation he had returned to her with
the impassioned enthusiasm of a lover; the hours had been long to him
without her near presence, and all the warmth of early passion had
accompanied his return to or his welcome of her. She had often chilled
him, checked him, laughed at him, left him vexed, dissatisfied, and
chafing, but the ardour on his side had never been less. Men had called
him uxorious, and he had been careless of their ridicule; he had only
lived for her. Now, for the first time, a chill had come, as sometimes
in a summer night, in those still grass plains of Russia, there would
steal through the hot, fragrant air a breath of ice-cold wind, and then
those skilled to read the forecast of the weather would say to one
another: 'Lo! the frost is near.'
She was as skilled in the weather of the human heart as the peasants
were in that of the earth and skies; and she failed not to read its
presage aright. With all her arrogance she had always had that kind of
humility which comes from great intelligence and self-comprehension;
part of her contempt for her many lovers had arisen from her candid
estimate of herself, as not worth so much covetousness, despair,
and dispute. All the flatteries she had been saturated with all her
life had left her brain cool, and had never warped her estimate of
herself. She would see coldness take the place of idolatry with the
same philosophic consciousness of its inevitability with which she
contemplated the certainty of age overtaking her upon the road of life
if she continued to live. Long before their approach she had reasoned
out the surety of the arrival of both, sure as the surety of winter
to the Russian plains. But still, nature shrinks and withers before
winter. Who can welcome it as they welcome summer?
With the inherent instinct of contradiction common to all human nature
she, who had nine times out of ten evaded his caresses and repulsed
his affections, was angered and felt defrauded of her own because for
once her power over him in a measure failed in the exercise of its
magnetism. To find thoughts which occupied his mind to her exclusion
was something so strange, so new, that it disturbed all her philosophic
serenity, and with that quick divination of the motives of men with
which her experience and her penetration supplied her, she wondered
if it were in truth only the memory of that poor dead woman which had
changed his manner and chilled his caresses, or if it were some fresh
and living influence?
A certain cold contempt succeeded her anger as this possibility
suggested itself.
If he were like other men, after all? Well--why not? Would she care
greatly? She did not know. All she was conscious of at the moment was
that sense of astonishment, of affront, of loss, with which a woman
feels for the first time that her power over any man has had its
fullest sway, and has begun to decline and waste.
It was a sensation she had never experienced before, and it displeased
her that she should be capable of feeling it.
'As if I were Jeannette and he were Jeanôt!' she thought with disdain
for so _bourgeois_ an emotion.
But it recalled to her sharply, painfully, what the world never had
recalled to her hitherto; that the time must come to her, no less than
to others, when her empire over all men would cease, when its sceptre
would pass to other hands. It is a knowledge which hurts with the
humiliation of dethronement every woman who has ever reigned.
There was nothing said by either which had the least actual coldness
or offence in it: yet the sense of offence and coldness was between
them, and many times he smarted under some such touch of ridicule or
of reproof from her as had used to make Platon Napraxine stand like a
chidden schoolboy before her. He was neither so blunt of nerve nor so
dull of comprehension as Napraxine had been; and he had an impatient
revolt of compromised dignity when he became the target for his wife's
delicate and cruel ironies. True, he knew they were a part of her
temper; as natural to her as its talon to the falcon, as its pungent
odour to the calycanthus. He did not attribute too serious a meaning
to them, knowing that her lips were often merciless when her heart was
kind. Yet they irritated and estranged him. No man likes to feel that
his character is lessened or his opinions regarded with indifference
by the woman before whom he most desires to stand in a fair if not an
heroic light.
'My dear Otho,' she said a little irritably one day when he had
answered her with wandering attention, 'you are very pensive and
_distrait_ since you came to Russia. What have you been doing in the
solitudes of a Parisian summer? You look as if you had been writing an
epic and had failed in it.'
'Death is never gay or agreeable,' said Othmar; 'and I have been in its
company.'
'My dear, when death does not come until our friends are over eighty,
surely we can see his approach without surprise or any very great
regret. Besides, I never knew that Baron Friederich was remarkably
sympathetic to you. You used to quarrel with him about most things. But
you have such a curious waywardness in always regretting, when they are
dead, the absence of the very persons you most wished away from you
when they were living.'
Othmar shrank a little from the words, as though they hurt him
physically. They were true enough to be painful.
'Perhaps one knows their value too late,' he said, controlling with
effort a strong impatience of her want of sympathy and her unkind and
careless amusement at his expense.
'Or perhaps we imagine a value in them they never possessed,' she
replied. 'That is far more probable. Distance lends enchantment to the
view of them--at least it does with such temperaments as yours, which
are always self-tormenting and given to idealising both things and
people. When the persons are living, to ruffle and weary and contradict
you, you only think what bores they are; but when they are dead you
begin to idealise them, and sacrifice yourself to their manes in all
kinds of self-censure. It is a very morbid way of taking life. I hope
your son will not resemble you in that particular.'
'It is to be hoped, for his comfort, that he will rather resemble his
mother in the art of immediate and complete oblivion of both the dead
and the living,' said Othmar, with an irritation which was almost
ill-temper, and a retort which passed the limits of courtesy.
He had never felt so strong an annoyance as he felt now at her ironical
and slighting treatment of his thoughts and feelings; so great an
impatience of that tranquil and contemptuous method of regarding life
which never varied in her, and which would never vary, it seemed to
him, even before his own dead body. Before it he felt that fatigue
which human eyes feel when long in the radiance of electric light. He
longed for simple sympathy, simple consolation, simple affection, as
the tired eyes long for rest in cool shadows of dusky dewy eves in
summer woods, and he was ill at ease with himself for what he concealed
from her.
Yet, he thought, of what use would it be to tell her of that poor
child at Les Hameaux? She would have no pity certainly, probably no
patience, with what would seem to her the most absurdly romantic course
of adventures. She would ridicule him as she ridiculed him now--if she
believed him; and very likely she would not even do that.
She looked at him under the languid lids of her dreamy eyes: eyes so
calm, so indifferent, so mysterious, so satirical in their survey of
him as of all mankind.
'My dear friend,' she said, with a little contempt and a little rebuke
in her tone, 'it seems to me that we are very nearly--quarrelling!
Nothing is so vulgar as to quarrel. I have never done it in my life. It
is a great waste of time; and nothing can be more _bourgeois_. I have
never understood why people should quarrel; it is so very easy to walk
away!'
Therewith she rose and walked towards the open doors, with that
undulating movement of the hips and beautiful ease and grace of
step for which she was renowned through Europe; no woman's walk was
comparable to hers.
Othmar remained standing where he was, and looked after her with
a sombre and regretful glance, in which some of the old worship
and passion lingered, united to a new-born anger and offence. The
mortification which lies for any man of intelligence and feeling in the
sense that he has never really touched and held the soul of the woman
of whose physical possession he has been master, was upon him in a
strong and cruel sense of moral failure and of intellectual impotence.
Was it his fault or hers? Was it true, as he had said once to her, that
you cannot obtain more from any nature than it possesses, and that all
the forces of created life cannot draw fire from the smooth marble or
make the pale pearl blush like the opal? Was it that she had it not in
her to give any man more than that mingling of momentary aphrodisiacal
indulgence and of eternal immutable derision; and that whilst her power
to create a heaven of physical passion was so great, her power of
satisfying the exactions of the heart and soul was slight?
Or was it, as the self-depreciation of his temperament led him to
think, that he himself had not moral and mental force or intellectual
greatness strong enough to obtain empire over her mind--a mind so
cultured, so refined, so exacting, so satiated, that hardly any human
companionship could succeed in awaking in it any lasting interest?
He had humility enough to believe the last.
The Princess Lobow Gregorievna, sitting mute and chill as a statue of
Nemesis, heard and watched, and in the depths of her narrow darksome
soul, filled with harsh creeds and as harsh hatreds, said to herself
that perchance, after all, her dead son might yet be avenged by the
mere results of time--that foe of love, that friend of all disunion.
Their marriage had been abhorrent to her. It had seemed to her eyes
like a blow on the cheek given to her son's corpse. Any laugh or smile
of either of them seemed an affront to him. Every glance of sympathy
exchanged between them seemed a mockery of his death, suffered for
their sakes. She who had never doubted that Othmar had betrayed her son
in his lifetime, only cherished one hope in her chill breast--to see
him suffer the same fate. She had always felt that she would kiss on
both cheeks any lover of Nadine's who should make Othmar feel the shame
of a dishonoured name, the pangs of a betrayed trust. But for that
lover she had looked in vain. She had always said to the hungry hate in
her heart: 'Patience; time will bring all things; and the serpent may
cast its skin but keeps its nature.'
But of late years she had feared that nothing would ever divide them.
Their lives seemed to her to pass on like a smooth full river, without
shoal or rapid, or any spate from storm. There was many an hour when
she lay stretched in semblance of devoutest prayer before the holy
eikon of the chamber altar, when all that her soul uttered and her lips
murmured were curses low and long upon them both.
Year after year went on and brought her no gratification of her desires
and her hate. All things went well with them. They had health and
pleasure; happiness too, so far as happiness comes to mortals. Their
offspring throve in loveliness and grace, and the world honoured and
caressed them both. Sometimes, in the stern yet frantic hatred which
she cherished, she would pray that disease or pestilence might at least
take the woman's beauty from her; but her prayer passed ungranted.
Nadine had ever that serene immunity from all serious maladies of the
flesh which so often accompanies the fragile appearance and sensitive
nerves of women who, like her, declare themselves made unwell by a
discordant noise, an unpleasant odour, a wearisome day, or any other
trifle which displeases them. Even the pains and perils of maternity
her good fortune had made unusually light to her, and except from that
cause she had hardly had a day's real suffering in her whole existence.
To the sullen eyes of Napraxine's mother she always seemed to bear a
charmed life.
Therefore with fierce dumb joy Lobow Gregorievna, with her vigilant ear
and eye, saw the one little rift within the lute, heard the one jarring
chord on the music. It was so slight that no anxiety less keen than her
own would have detected it; but it was there.
He remained in Russia a fortnight, but during that time he did not find
any occasion which seemed to him propitious enough for him to speak
of Damaris, with any chance of obtaining sympathy for her position or
understanding of his own actions. With that ignorance of what most
concerns us, which is one of the saddest things of life, he never
dreamed that any change in himself had made his wife as he found her to
be, in one of her most captious, most capricious, most unsympathetic
moods. He was not unused to these; he attributed them now to the
weariness she felt at existence in the plains of Ural and impatience at
the companionship of the Princess Napraxine which he knew was at all
times irksome to her. He was not aware that he was himself more absent
of mind, less tender in manner, less frankly and fully confidential in
speech; he was not aware that this one thing untold, this one thought
unrevealed, had caused an alteration in him, slight and vague indeed,
yet plainly perceptible to her, skilled reader of manner and of mind as
she was.
A delicate nature shrinks from the imputation of unworthy motives, and
a fastidious temper shrinks from any possibility of ridicule; it was
the dread of both which kept him silent as to the friendship he had
shown to the child from Bonaventure. The apprehension of his wife's
scepticism and ironies hung like a grey mist over the generous impulses
of his manhood, as in his earliest youth the certainty of his father's
brutal cynicism had lain like a stone on the poetic aspirations of his
boyhood.
Even in those rare instants when she was moved to sympathy with any
unselfishness or any unworldliness, there was always in her eyes some
faint gleam of derision, there was always in her voice some lingering
accent of doubt and of raillery. She would have been capable of many
great things in great emergencies herself, but she would have been
wholly incapable of refraining from making a jest of them afterwards.
It is the temper of all wit; it is the temper of much philosophy; but
it is not the temper which invites the confidence or soothes the doubts
of another.
Confidence, like a swallow coming over seas in the storm and sunshine
of spring weather, will only nest where it is sure of a safe shelter.
The higher, better, subtler emotions of the human heart will not
venture to come forth into the wintry air of mockery or scorn; they are
shy blossoms which want the warm wind of a sure sympathy to enable them
to expand.
'If I told her, she would only think me either an imbecile or a
libertine,' he thought, and the tale went untold.