Delphi collected works o.., p.686
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 686
Then she laughed again, and rose and took her elegant person, her shrill, cruel, little laugh, her pale, keen, penetrating eyes into an adjoining room, where she gathered her adorers about her to play at chemin de fer, and win or lose, in breathless alternations, gold enough to dower fifty dowerless maidens, or stock a score of farms, whilst without the still, cool, dewy night lay soft as a blessing on the gardens and the woods and the great distant river, with the shadowy vessels gliding to and fro, and the little villages, dusky and noiseless, hidden away under the vineyards and the pear trees.
She cared in nothing what he did; he was profoundly indifferent to her when she did not remember her dead cousin, and then she hated him. She had not seen the features of his companion in the fields of Les Hameaux, nor would she have recognised them had she done so. The evening at St. Pharamond was blotted and blurred into oblivion under the heaps of forgotten things of a past year which could have no place in a mind engrossed in its own vanities and excitations, and living wholly in the present. But she had recognised Othmar himself as her carriage had passed yards off, and she had put up her field-glass at the towers of the château of Dampierre; and it had amused her to find that he was just like other men, though he affected such absurd, undivided devotion to one.
No doubt it was only an amourette; but it pleased her to have something with which she could tease him when she felt so disposed; and it pleased her more strongly still to reflect that his wife was losing her power over him, which she probably was, she reasoned, if another woman were gaining any. Pure malice was an integral part of her nature; to irritate, torment, and dominate people through their various little secrets seemed to her the best part of the comedy of life. She had nothing of the supreme indolent disdain of the woman she hated, or of her absolute indifference. She loved to fourrer son nez in all holes and corners. Her theory was that all knowledge was useful, especially when it was knowledge to your friends’ detriment; and a lively and insatiable curiosity was her strongest guarantee against ennui.
She thought complacently of the trouble she had cast into his mind as she sat and played her game of hazard, the light flashing on her rings and the gold she handled. No doubt the thing was only an amour en village, an absurdity, a caprice, some rosy-limbed, coarsely-built nymph of La Beauce, who pleased him for the hour because of her utter unlikeness to the great ladies he lived amongst.
‘Je les connais!’ thought Blanchette, with something of Nadine’s contempt for the sex. ‘When they can drink out of a hundred silver goblets they are always crazy for a brown cottage pipkin. They are always like that.’
She attached no importance to the discovery that he walked not unaccompanied in the fields of the vale of Chevreuse; but the knowledge that he did so had embarrassed him; that was enough to make it delightful to her.
It amused her to be at Amyôt when its mistress was absent. ‘Nous sommes très bien installés,’ she said carelessly to Othmar, not even going through the form of inquiring as to his wishes, and she and her party stayed on for the rest of the week. He was displeased, but he could not tell them to go. His wife could do that sort of thing; he could not. It seemed to him impossible to make even self-invited guests realise that they were not welcome. Blanche de Laon thought his compliance argued fear of her, and was more diverted than before.
‘Perhaps he is dying to get back to Chevreuse!’ she thought with much amusement. ‘But he is too courteous to turn us out; he belongs to the last century.’
She was not grateful for his courtesy; she, rather, despised him for it.
One morning she took a fancy to wander over the house by herself; it was an immense building, and to visit it thoroughly would have taken more hours than she gave it minutes; but even in her rapid and cursory fashion, she covered a good deal of ground.
‘It is really a royal place,’ she thought. ‘We have nothing like it. La Finance gets everything.’
She disliked Othmar; he was everything that she detested in man: he was reserved, punctilious, prejudiced; he had a distant manner of cold courtesy, which was not at all of her own generation; he was grave, often preoccupied, and always blind to her own attractions: yet as she went over she wished that she had married him.
‘Quel diable de vie je lui aurais donné!’ she thought with complacency, and how amusing it would have been!
Bertrand de Laon was not rich; at least not rich enough for the enormous expenditure at which they lived; and then he was so stupid, so amiable, so devoted, that there was no kind of pleasure in doing him every sort of wrong that a woman can do a man! He never knew anything about it, or, if he did know, never resented anything. She grew tired of kicking this poor spaniel, who, beat him as she would, always came humbly and caressingly to her feet.
As she wandered about the house she came on the doors which led to the apartments of Yseulte. They were locked. She sent one of her companions to fetch the major-domo.
‘Open these doors,’ she said imperiously to the official, who timidly answered that he dared not; except by his master’s orders they could never be unlocked. ‘I have his orders, open them,’ said Blanchette, with such authority in her tone that the man never dreamed she was not speaking the truth; besides it seemed to him to be natural enough; she had been, he knew, the cousin german of the dead Countess Othmar. He fetched the duplicate keys he possessed, and opened the doors: great doors of cedar-wood like all those at Amyôt, with intricate locks of old Florentine work of steel and silver. Then he went in and opened also some of the shutters of the apartments, letting in the warm summer light from without on some portions of the rooms, whilst other parts of them were left in darkness.
Blanchette shut out her companions with her usual unceremonious manner.
‘It is not for you,’ she said curtly, and banged the doors in their faces with that insolence which was considered by others as by herself d’un chic suprême.
She had never been able to come there before, for she had never before been at Amyôt in the absence of its mistress. She was not sure why she came now; partly because she thought it would annoy Othmar, partly from a movement of that remembered affection for the companion of her childhood, which was the only thing of any tenderness which had ever sprung up in the breast of Blanchette: one tiny flower of sentiment blossoming on a granite soil. The sentiment had been rooted in selfishness; ‘she used to give me so many things!’ she thought always, whenever she remembered her.
The little volume of manuscript poems was in its place; Othmar had hesitated to remove it; everything was in the rooms as when Yseulte had lived, and no eyes but his own had ever beheld them. He had returned more than once to read again those poor fragments, so simple in language, so immeasurable in devotion: read them with a mist before his sight and the sense of some base ingratitude in himself which had come to him on his first discovery of them. He had always replaced them with a lingering and reverent touch in the drawer, whence he had first taken them, where they lay now with a crumpled glove, two or three faded roses, and some notepaper with her initials in silver on it. The restless penetrating agile glance and fingers of Blanchette, touching, seeing, alighting on all things, and skimming over each with the lightness of swallows, brought her to that drawer amongst other places, and showed her the little volume lying with the dead roses. She took it up, and turned over the pages rapidly; looking on it here, there, everywhere; scanning a hundred lines in the space of time that would have served to others to see only half a score. The familiar handwriting, the pathetic words, the mixture of ignorance and of intensity, the force of strong emotions striving to express themselves in an unwonted manner, and half observed, half revealed by the unaccustomed livery of language, had a certain effect upon her as she stood in the empty rooms before one of the great casements, and turned over the leaves of the little book, half contemptuous, half reverential.
If she had read such lines in a printed volume, she would have tossed it away with her most terrible sneer. ‘Pleurnicheuse!’ she would have said, with a grin of her white small teeth; but read in the handwriting of her dead cousin, they affected her differently; they did not seem ridiculous; they brought home to her the fact that this world, which was but a masked ball, a mad fête, a continual comedy to herself, might be to others, who yet were not wholly fools, a place of martyrdom, endured in silence. Her shrewd and quick intelligence supplying the place of sympathy, could read between the lines; could make her understand as Othmar had understood, all that was unuttered, or only half uttered, in those halting, timid, tender, wistful verses.
‘Dame! Comme c’est drôle!’ she murmured to herself: it was droll that anyone with youth, with fortune, with beauty, with all the pleasures, and pastime, and pomps of existence at her call, should have wasted her time and her tears in useless lament, because the heart of one man was cold to her. It was droll; it was absurd; it was contemptible; and yet she closed the little velvet book, and laid it down by the worn glove, and the dead roses with a vague admiration, with a certain respect.
But her heart grew harder than before against the man who had been thus loved, and had given no throb of love in answer.
She remembered the words of Friederich Othmar at the mausoleum in the grounds yonder: ‘She would wish you to spare him.’ Yes, no doubt, poor, generous, heroic, saintly, foolish soul! — if she could know, if she could speak, if she could interpose, she would always come from her grave to save or to serve the husband who had never had one impulse of love for her. But the dead know nothing; the dead never stir; ‘quand on est mort c’est pour longtemps,’ thought Blanchette, with grim realism, as she closed the drawer which held the little poem: and meanwhile, if ever she herself had the chance, she would do as she had said: she would rub the sand into the gall, she would widen any wound that she saw.
She thought to herself, ‘If she had lived, perhaps — —’ perhaps she would have kept alive some little green place in her own soul; perhaps she would have kept her own steps aloof from some vices which were not all sweetness; perhaps she would have had something in her own life besides insolent audacity, merciless intrigue, and insatiable curiosity of unattainable excitations: it was a consciousness of her own loss, in the loss of the one purer influence which her life had ever known, which made the arid and frivolous nature of Blanche de Laon cherish her hatred for those who seemed to her as the murderers of Yseulte with a ferocity and tenacity of remembrance which was the only impersonal emotion she had ever known.
Avarice, expenditure, vanity, corruption, every ingenuity of self-indulgence and of physical licence, filled up her own days, and left no space for any memory which was not selfish, any desire which was not base; she had copied and exaggerated the egotism of Nadine Napraxine until it had become a monstrosity, and she had replaced the physical indifference of her model by appetites and curiosities which were both morbid and insatiable. Yet her life at times failed to satisfy her, and at such time the recollection of Yseulte came to her as a cool breeze will touch the hot forehead of a drunkard. Things which had been odious and ridiculous to her in all others, had looked worth something when mirrored to her in the clear soul of her childhood’s companion; when Yseulte had passed out of her life she, little greedy, callous cynic of a child though she had been, had vaguely felt that something had gone away from her which would never be replaced.
‘Poor little saint! Poor little fool!’ she thought now, with as near an approach to tenderness and reverence as her temperament could approach, as she cast a lingering glance over the lonely rooms, with the dead flowers in the vases, the dust of years on the walls, the stray sunbeams slanting on to the empty bed, the scent of late roses and autumn fruits coming in through the dusky shadows and close odours within.
‘Poor little saint! Poor little fool!’
As she stood thus, Othmar, passing through the gardens, saw the windows open which were by his command always closed. He was immediately beneath them, and he called aloud in tones of exceeding anger: ‘Who has ventured to enter there?’
Blanche de Laon heard, and her insolent, fair, small face looked out from one of the open places in the old painted casements, guarded with their scrolls of iron.
‘It is I,’ she said, with the usual impertinence of her accent hushed into quietude, almost into sadness. Then she leaned her elbows on the stonework of the sill, and put her face close to his. He was almost on a level with her, for those rooms were raised but a mètre or two from the ground.
He grew pale with indignation.
‘Madame de Laon,’ he said in a low tone, through which all his anger thrilled, ‘when I put all my house at your disposition there were some things in it which I did not suppose it necessary to enjoin you to respect.’
‘Pooh!’ said Blanchette, resting her elbows on the stone and her chin on her hands. ‘I have more title in her rooms than you; I have not forgotten her.’
His face flushed; he hesitated a moment.
‘What means did you take to induce my servants to disobey me?’ he asked, avoiding her later words.
‘I told them I had your authority,’ said Blanchette carelessly. ‘What can it matter to you? You never come here. You never go to her grave. Your uncle did. Even I do. But you — never.’
Othmar was silent. He hated this woman with her impudent pale face, her high satirical tones, her overbearing effrontery, and he hated to see her there in the rooms which had been the bridal chambers of Yseulte in the one brief summer of happiness which she had known.
Blanchette looked down at him with hard cold eyes; she, on her side, hated him no less at that moment. There was no one within hearing; the western garden on which these rooms looked was the loneliest though the loveliest place in Amyôt; and since the death of Yseulte it had been so unfrequented, that hares would come and nibble at the moss-roses under the windows, and once a stag from the herds of red deer cast loose in the park had dared to enter and drink his fill at the fountain.
‘Tiens!’ said Blanchette, leaning from the window, her artificial pale blonde beauty looking akin there. ‘She broke her heart for you: one laughs at those things in the world; they are good for the “Traviata,” not out of it; it was absurd — grotesquely absurd; and yet in her one knows it was true. When I was a child, and she married you, I wanted her to think of the fine clothes, the fine jewels, the fine houses, all the rest of it — all the things we give ourselves for — but she never cared. She said once, “If he were a beggar I should be happier, because then he would be sure that it is for himself that I care.” Oh yes, she would have gone barefoot in the dust after you if you had held out your hand. And you — you did not see it or know it, or thank her for it; all you cared for was Nadine Napraxine. It is always so. It is always the other — the other that we cannot have. And now “the other” is your wife; and so you go to the meadows in Chevreuse. How like a man! And to think that such a woman as Yseulte should have died for you! Pouah! If she had known you as I know men she would not have wasted a hair of her head on you. Pouah —— !’
Then she banged the casement close, and left him standing there. He might rage in his heart as he chose, what did she care for his wrath or for his amours or for his whole existence? What she had cared for was the dead girl who had died for him. That she had insulted him in return for his hospitality and his courtesy was delightful to her. In that moment she would have liked to insult him before the whole world.
Othmar paused a moment, looking blankly up at this window of his own house thus shut in his face; then, with slow step, and with his head down, he pursued his way through the western garden. His guest had insulted him, but the worst sting of the insult lay in its truth. It was true, most true; he owned to himself that he had been wholly unworthy the sacrifice of such a life as Yseulte’s.
Yet, he thought, in the words which had been quoted under the oaks of Amyôt in the Court of Love, ‘How is it under our control to love or not to love?’
Love is not to be commanded, and naught less than a great and undivided love could ever have given happiness and faith in itself to so delicate, to so sensitive, to so perfectly and sincerely humble a nature as that of the dead girl whose bridal hours had been passed in those closed chambers, around whose casements the ivy climbed and the swallows nested undisturbed as the seasons passed. The rough, sharp, upbraiding words of Blanche de Laon smarted in his memory, as the cut of a knife smarts in the flesh. They only repeated in coarse emphasis what his own conscience had said to him ever since he had found the little manuscript poems in the drawer with the faded roses. Before then, with the blindness of a man whose whole soul is centred on another passion than the one which claims his sympathy, he had never once dreamed that the death of Yseulte had been self sought.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
DAMARIS, MEANWHILE, WAS altogether at ease as to her own circumstances. No doubt ever entered her mind as to the legacy bequeathed by her grandfather; it was more than enough for all her wants, and she understood that she could live at Les Hameaux easily, all her lifetime, if she chose. But without any apprehension for her future, she was not without that unrest which is the inseparable companion of all ambition. The remembrance of the wife of Othmar was like a thorn in her side: she had an eager, passionate, thirsty desire to justify herself in the sight of that great lady, to become something which could not be derided or denied or set aside with contempt. The memory of that day under the roof of St. Pharamond was continually with her, in all its humiliation and its disappointment, and its sharp cruel sense of being a barbarian amongst the highest grace and culture that were possible to human life and manners. It had been a glimpse into an unknown land never to be forgotten; the gates to it had been shut in her face, almost as soon as opened; but the dreams which had come to her through them remained with her, and pursued her sleeping and waking.
