'Send the children to me,' she said when at last she rang for her
women, and the children came. They had come in from their morning's
ride on their small ponies in the Bois. They were very pretty in their
velvet riding dresses, with their golden hair flowing over their
shoulders; they were very gentle and had admirable manners; the little
boy with his cap in his hand kissed his mother's fingers with an
old-world grace. She drew them both towards her.
'_Mes mignons_,' she said, looking alternately at each of them, 'I want
you to tell me something quite honestly; are you afraid of me, either
of you?'
The young Otho, a very sensitive and chivalrous child, coloured
to his hair and was silent; his sister Xenia, less timid and more
communicative, answered for him and for herself: 'We are both of us--a
little.'
The brows of Nadine contracted with a sudden sense of pain.
'Why?' she said imperiously.
The children did not reply; their small faces grew serious; they were
not prepared to analyse what they felt.
'Do you mean,' she continued, 'that if you wished for anything you
would sooner ask your father for it than you would ask me?'
The children nodded their heads silently. They had lost their colour.
She saw that the interrogation alarmed them.
'Why?' she repeated, in a softer tone.
They were still silent; they could not really tell; they only knew
that a certain sense of timidity and awe was always upon them in their
mother's presence, that they never dared to laugh too loudly or ask
a question twice before her. They loved her, and had the passionate
admiration of childhood for that which is above it and incomprehensible
to it, and she seemed to them more wonderful and beautiful than any
other living creature, but there was a tinge of fear in their sense of
her presence.
She read their unformed confused thoughts, and she felt a sharp
reproach in their tacit confession.
Had she been so engrossed in the ice of her egotism, that she had never
taken the trouble even to stoop and draw to her these young hesitating
half-opened souls?
Had she been cold and careless even to them?
Enfants d'amour, nés d'une étreinte!
she murmured as she kissed them with lips which trembled; had she been
so little kind to them that even they feared her?
'_Maman était prête à pleurer_,' murmured Xenia to her brother in
amazed awe, as with their arms wound about each other they passed down
the corridor to their own apartments.
Otho drew a long breath.
'_Elle nous a embrassés, vois-tu_,' he murmured, '_comme on embrasse
les petits pauvres_!'
'_Les petits pauvres_,' whom he had seen in the Tuileries or the
Luxembourg gardens, kissed by their ragged mothers with eager
tenderness on cold winter mornings, when perhaps the mothers had no
food to give them except such fond caresses. Watching those happy
hungry children, he had said more than once to his sister enviously,
'_Si maman nous embrassait comme ça!_'
And then they had always kissed each other to make up for the caresses
which they did not obtain.
And now she too had kissed them '_comme ça_!' They were not sure
whether they had done something very wrong or something very good to
move her so; one or the other they were sure it must have been.
As the children went from her presence a note was brought her which
briefly announced that the Princess Lobow Gregorievna had arrived in
Paris from Russia to consult some famous physician.
'As the vulture comes when there is death in the air,' she murmured
with passion, as she tore the note in two. Must this mummied saint even
change all the habits of her life and quit her country to be present
here, when for the first time a rupture open and irrevocable had come
between herself and Othmar, when in a few days' time, if it were not
doing so already, all Paris would be speaking of the cause of their
disunion!
All the vague dormant superstition which slumbered beneath her
sceptical intelligence, made her see a fatal omen in this unlooked-for
arrival of her bitterest enemy. More than once she had said in her
heart, 'If ever I have misfortune, Lobow Gregorievna will be there to
triumph in it.' And now she was there, within a few streets, residing
in a religious house of Muscovite nuns, a dark still austere spectre,
which seemed to her like the carrion bird which waits for those who die.
'Do I grow nervous and hysterical?' she asked herself in scorn.
She who had meted out destiny to so many, who had thought that it
was only the timid and foolish who let life go ill with them, who
had regarded the sorrows of sentiment and emotion with an indulgent
contempt, felt with anger against herself that such a trivial thing as
the advent of a woman who hated her could affect her nerves and appear
to her a presage of ill. With her delicate scorn and her consummate
indifference she had turned aside all the efforts of others to move her
or influence her; she had never known either apprehension or regret;
it had always seemed to her that life was a comedy to be played ill
or well according as you were wise or stupid. Suddenly, for the first
time, emotions which were beyond her own control affected her, and a
sense that circumstance escaped her guidance filled her with the sharp
pain of irritated impotence.
She knew the world too well not to know that all the women who had
vainly envied her, and many of the men who had vainly wooed her, would
take pleasure and find solace in every whisper which should tell them
of the offence to her pride; and she knew the world too well not to
know also that there is no such thing as privacy in it, that all which
she had learned through Michel Obrenowitch society would find out and
gossip exaggerate; and that the whole of the society throughout Europe
which she had dominated and influenced and been feared by for so long,
would know that she--she--Nadège Feodorowna--was deserted for a peasant
girl taken from the streets.
All the imperious blood which was in her changed to fire as she thought
of the certain comments of the courts and drawing-rooms in which she
had been so long so arrogant a leader, so dreaded a wit; she knew that
eagerly as hounds at the _curée_ would all her flatterers, friends, and
lovers join her foes in exultantly rejoicing over her insulted dignity.
How many and many a time she had heard society laugh over just such a
story as this! How well she knew all the cruel derision, all the gay
contempt, all the equivocal jests, all the affected pity! How well she
knew that precisely in measure to the homage which they yield us is the
pleasure of others in our pain!