Delphi collected works o.., p.625
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 625
Geraldine understood, and his tanned cheek grew white with pain. He was a proud man, and had been made vain by his world. He was bitterly and cruelly humbled, but the love he had for her made him almost unconscious of the offence to him, so overwhelming in its cruelty was the sentence of exile which he received.
He did not speak at once, for he could not be sure to command his voice, and he shrank from betraying what he felt. She rose, and threw the cigarette over the balustrade into the sea, and turned to go indoors. She had said what her wishes were, and she expected to have them obeyed without more discussion. But the young man rose too, and barred her way.
He had only one consciousness, that he was on the point of banishment from the only woman whom he had cared for through two whole years. It had become so integral a part of his life that he should follow Nadine Napraxine as the moon follows the earth, that exile from her presence seemed to him the most terrible of disasters, the most unendurable of chastisements.
‘After all this time, do you only tell me to go away?’ he muttered, conscious of the lameness and impotency of his own words, which might well only move her laughter. But a certain anger rather than amusement was what they stirred in her; there was in them an implied right, an implied reproach, which were both what she was utterly indisposed to admit his title to use.
‘All this time!’ she echoed; ‘all what time? You are leading a very idle life, and all your excellent friends say that you leave many duties neglected; I advise you to return to them.’
‘Is it the end of all?’ he said, while his lips trembled in his own despite.
‘All? All what? The end? No; it is the end to nothing that I know of; I should rather suppose that you would make it the beginning — of a perfectly proper life at home. Evelyn Brancepeth says you ought to reduce all your farmers’ rents; go and do it; it will make you popular in your own county. I know you good English always fancy that you can quench revolutions with a little weak tea of that sort. As if people who hate you will not hate you just the same whether they pay you half a guinea, or half a crown, for every sod of ground! Our Tsar Alexander thought the same sort of thing en grand, and did it; but it has not answered with him. To be sure, he was even sillier — he expected slaves to be grateful!’
‘You really mean that you are tired of my presence?’ he said, with no sense of anything except the immense desolation which seemed suddenly to cover all his life.
‘You will put the dots on all your i’s!’ she said impatiently. ‘That kind of love of explanation is so English; all your political men’s time is wasted in it. Nobody in England understands à demi-mot, or appreciates the prettiness of a hint.’
‘I understand well enough — too well,’ he muttered, with a sigh that was choked in its birth. ‘But — but — I suppose I am a fool; I did not think you really cared much — yet I always fancied — I suppose I had no right — but surely we have been friends at the least?’
His knowledge of the world and of women ought to have stopped the question unuttered; but a great pain, an intense disappointment, had mastered him, and left him with no more tact or wisdom than if he had been a mere lad fresh from college. It cost him much to make his reproach so measured, his words so inoffensive. He began to understand why men had said that Nadine Napraxine was more perilous in her chastity and her spiritual cruelty than the most impassioned Alcina.
She looked at him with a little astonishment mingled with a greater offence.
‘Friends? certainly; why not?’ she said, with entire indifference. ‘Who is talking of enmity? In plain words, since you like them so much, you do — bore me just a little; you are too often here; you have a certain manner in society which might make gossips remark it. You do not seem to comprehend that one may see too much of the most agreeable person under the sun. It is, perhaps, a mistake ever to see much of anyone; at least, I think so. Briefly, I do not wish to have any more stories for Nice and its neighbourhood; this one of Boris Seliedoff is quite enough! They are beginning to give me a kind of reputation of being a tueuse d’hommes. It is so vulgar, that kind of thing. They are beginning to call me Marie Stuart; it is absurd, but I do not like that sort of absurdities. I had nothing to do with the folly of poor Boris, but no one will ever believe it; he will always be considered my victim. It is true you are certain not to kill yourself; Englishmen always kill a tiger or a pig if they are unhappy, never themselves. I am not afraid of your doing any kind of harm; you will only go home and see your farmers and please your family; and you will give big breakfasts in uncomfortable tents, and be toasted, and your county newspapers will have all sorts of amiable paragraphs about you, and sometime or other you will marry — why not? Please stand back a little and let me pass; we shall meet in Paris next year when you take a holiday on your reduced rents.’
She laughed a little, for the first time since Seliedoff’s suicide; her own words amused her. Those poor English gentlemen, who fancied they would stem the great salt tide of class hatred, the ever-heaving ocean of plebeian envy, by the little paper fence of a reduced rental! Poor Abels, deluding themselves with the idea that they could disarm the jealousy of their Cains with a silver penny!
But the thoughts of Geraldine were far away from any political ironies with which she might entertain her own discursive mind.
‘Nadine, Nadine,’ he said stupidly, ‘you cannot be so cruel. I have always obeyed you; I have never murmured; I have been like your dog; I have been content on so little. Other men would have rebelled, but I — I — —’
Her languid eyes opened widely upon him in haughty surprise and rebuke.
‘Now you talk like a jeune premier of the Gymnase!’ she said, contemptuously. ‘Rebelled? Content? What words are those? You have been a pleasant acquaintance — amongst many. You cannot say you have been ever more. If you have begun to misunderstand that, go where you can recover your good sense. I have liked you; so has Prince Napraxine. Do not force us to consider our esteem misplaced.’
She spoke coldly, almost severely; then, with an enchanting smile, she held out her hand.
‘Come, we will part friends, though you are disposed to bouder like a boy. You know something of the world; learn to look as if you had learned at least its first lesson — good temper. Affect it if you have it not! And — never outstay a welcome!’
He looked at her and his chest heaved with a heavy sigh that was almost a sob. Passionate upbraiding rose to his lips, a thousand reproaches for delusive affabilities, for patiently-endured caprices, for wasted hours and wasted hopes, and wasted energies, all rose to his mouth in hot hard words of senseless, irrepressible pain; but they remained unuttered. He dared not offend her beyond pardon, he dared not exile himself beyond recall. He was conscious of the futility of any reproach which he could bring, of the absence of any title which he could allege. For two years he had been her bondsman, her spaniel, her submissive servant in the full sight of the world, yet looking backward he could not recall any sign or word or glance which could have justified him in the right to call himself her lover. She had accepted his services, permitted his presence — no more; and yet, he felt himself as bitterly wronged, as cruelly deluded, as ever man could have been by woman.
There is a little song which has been given world-wide fame by the sweetest singer of our time: the little song which is called, ‘Si vous n’avez rien à me dire.’ Just so vague, and so intense, as is the reproach of the song, was the cry of his heart against her now.
If she had never cared, had never meant, why then —— ?
But he dared not formulate his injury in words; he knew that it would condemn him never to see her face again except in crowds as strangers saw it. He had never really believed that she would care for him as he cared for her, but it had always seemed to him that habit would in the end become affection, that the continual and familiar intercourse which he had obtained with her would become in time necessary to her, an association, a custom, a friendship not lightly to be discarded. He had believed that patience would do more for him than passion; he had endured all her caprices, followed all her movements, incurred the ridicule of men, and, what was worse, his own self-contempt, in the belief that, with her, Festina lente was the sole possible rule of victory. And now she cast him aside, with no more thought than she left to her maids a fan of an old fashion, a glove that had been worn once!
She gave him no time to recover the shock with which he had heard his sentence of exile, but, with a little kindly indifferent gesture, passed him and went into the house.
He had not the courage of Othmar; he had never had as much title as Othmar to deem himself preferred to the multitude; looking back on the two years which he had consecrated to her memory and her service, he could not honestly recall a single word or glance or sign which could have justified him in believing himself betrayed.
She had accepted his homage as she accepted the bouquets which men sent her, to die in masses in her ante-chambers.
His pain was intolerable, his disappointment was altogether out of proportion to the frail, vague hopes which he had cherished; but he felt also that his position was absurd, untenable; he had never been her lover, he had none of the rights of a lover; he was only one of many who had failed to please her, who had unconsciously blundered, who had committed the one unpardonable sin of wearying her.
Resistance could only make him ridiculous in her eyes. She had plainly intimated that she was tired of his acquaintance and companionship. It was an intense suffering to him, but it was not one which he could show to the world, or in which he could seek the world’s sympathy. If he had failed to please her — failed, despite all his opportunities, to obtain any hold upon her sympathies — it was such a failure as is only grotesque in the esteem of men, and contemptible in the sight of women.
‘A qui la faute?’ she would have said herself, with a pitiless amusement, which the world would only have echoed.
It was late in February, but already spring in the Riviera; a brilliant sun was dancing on all the million and one pretty things in her boudoir, for she liked light, and could afford, with her exquisite complexion and her flower-like mouth, to laugh at the many less fortunate of her sex, who dared not be seen without all the devices of red glass and rose-coloured transparencies and muffled sunbeams. She caressed her little dog, and bade the negro boy bring her some tea, and stretched herself out on a long low chair with a pleasant sense of freedom from a disagreeable duty done and over.
‘I will never be intimate with an Englishman again,’ she thought. ‘They cannot understand; they think they must be either your Cæsar or nullus: it is so stupid; and then, when you are tired, they grumble. Other men say nothing to you, but they fight somebody else, — which is so much better. It is only the Englishman who grumbles, and abuses you as if you were the weather!’
The idea amused her.
Through her open windows she could see the sea. She saw the boat of Geraldine, with its red-capped crew pulling straightway to the westward; he was going to his yacht; the affair was over peaceably; he would not kill himself like Seliedoff. Her husband would miss him for a little time, but he was used to men who made themselves his ardent and assiduous friends for a few months or more, and then were no more seen about his house, being banished by her; he was wont to call such victims the Zephyrs after that squadron of the mutinous in the Algerian army, which receives all those condemned and rejected by their chiefs. He would ask no questions; he would understand that his old companion had joined the rest; he had never cared for the fate of any save for that of young Seliedoff. There were always men by the score ready to amuse, distract, and feast with Prince Napraxine.
She drank her yellow tea with its slice of lemon, and enjoyed the unwonted repose of half an hour’s solitude. She was conscious at once of a certain relief in the definite exile of her late companion, yet of a certain magnanimity, inasmuch as she would enable other women to presume that he had grown tired of his allegiance.
But the latter consideration weighed little with her; she had been too satiated with triumph not to be indifferent to it, and she was at all times careless of the opinions of others. She would miss him a little, as one misses a well-trained servant, but there would be so many others ready to fill his place. Whenever her groom-of-the-chambers told her hall-porter to say ‘Madame reçoit,’ her rooms were filled with young men ready to obey her slightest sign or wildest whim as poodles or spaniels those of their masters. There were not a few who, like Geraldine, regulated their seasons and their sojourns by the capricious movements of the Princess Napraxine, as poor benighted shepherds follow the gyrations of an ignis-fatuus. Whether north, south, east, or west, wherever she was momentarily resident, there was always seen her corps de garde.
As she sat alone now for the brief half-hour before her usual drive, her past drifted before her recollection in clear colours, as though she were quite old. She remembered her childhood, spent at the embassies of great cities, where her father was the idol of all that was distinguished and of much that was dissolute; the most courtly, the most witty, the most elegant, of great diplomatists. She remembered how, sitting in her mother’s barouche in the Bois or the Prater, or petted and caressed by sovereigns and statesmen in her mother’s drawing-rooms, she had seen so much with her opal-like eyes, heard so much with her sea-shell-like ears, and had, at ten years old, said to Count Platoff, ‘Je serai honnête femme; ce sera plus chic;’ and how his peal of laughter had disconcerted her own serious mood and solemnity of resolve. Then she remembered how, when she was seventeen years old, her mother had advised her to marry her cousin; and how her father, when she had been tempted to ask his support of her own adverse wishes, had twisted his silken white moustaches with a little shrug of his shoulders, and had said: ‘Mais, mon enfant, je ne sais — nous sommes presque ruinés; ça me plaira — et un mari, c’est si peu de chose!’
‘Si peu de chose!’ she thought, now; and yet a bullet that you drag after you, a note of discord always in your music, a stone in your ball slipper, dance you ever so lightly — an inevitable ennui always awaiting you!
‘If they had not been in such haste, I should have met Othmar and have married him!’ she mused, with that frankness which was never missing from her self-communion. ‘Life would have looked differently; —— I would have made him the foremost man in Europe; he has the powers needful, but he has no ambitions; his millions have stifled them.’
She thought, with something that was almost envy, of the fate of Yseulte, and with a remembrance, which was almost disgust, of the early hours of her own marriage, when all the delicacy and purity of her own girlhood had revolted against the brutality of obligations which she had in her ignorance submitted to accept.
How could she care for the children born of that intolerable degradation to which no habit or time had had power to reconcile her?
In her own eyes she had been as much violated as any slave bought in the market.
‘If I had daughters, they should at least know to what they surrendered themselves before they were given away in marriage,’ she had often reflected, with a bitter remembrance of the absolute innocence in which she herself had repeated the vows, and broken the glass, which had indissolubly united her to her cousin Platon.
Then, with the irony even of herself, and the doubt even of herself, which were stronger than any other instincts in her, she laughed at her own momentary sentiment.
‘I dare say I should have been tired of him in six months,’ she thought, ‘and very likely we should have hated one another in another six. He would not have been as easy as Platon; he would have had his prejudices — —’
Before her mind there rose the vision of a place she had once seen as she had sailed in a yacht down the Adriatic one cool autumnal month; a place not far from Ragusa, somewhat farther to the southward; a fantastic pile, half Greek, half Turkish, with an old Gothic keep built by Quattrocentisto Venetians rising in its midst; gardens of palms and woods of ilex sloping from it to meet the lapis-lazuli-hued sea, cliffs of all the colours of precious stones towering up behind it into the white clouds and the dazzling sunshine. Fascinated by the aspect of the place, she had asked its name and owner, and the Austrians with her had answered her, ‘It is called Zama, and it belongs to the Othmars.’
She had often remembered the Herzegovinian castle, lonely as Miramar after the tragedy of Quetaro.
‘I would not have lived at Amyôt, but at Zama,’ she thought now; then, angry and impatient of herself, she dismissed her fancies as you banish with a light clap of your hands a flock of importunate birds, which fly away as fast as they have come.
CHAPTER XXIX.
‘ARE YOU VERY happy?’ said Baron Fritz to Yseulte in his occasional visits to Amyôt. And she answered without words, with a blush and a smile which were much warmer than words. He saw that she was perfectly happy, as yet; that whatever thorns might be beneath the nuptial couch, they had not touched her.
He did not venture to put the same question to Othmar. There were times when he would no more have interrogated his nephew than he would have put fire to a pile of powder; he had at once the vague fear and the abundant contempt which a thoroughly practical, artificial, and worldly man has for one whose dreams and desires are wholly unintelligible to him.
‘Otho,’ he said once to her, ’is like an Eastern sorcerer who holds the magic ring with which he can wish for anything under heaven; but, as he cannot command immortality, all his life slips through his fingers before he has decided on what is most worth wishing for. Do you understand?’
