When Yseulte had recovered enough to travel,
he took her to the Italian lakes for awhile, to
restore her to her usual health and strength,
and distract her thoughts from what had befallen
her at Amyôt. With the beginning of winter they
returned, and made their home for awhile in
the great hotel of the Boulevard St. Germain,
which he hated, and where he intended to
remain for the briefest time that could suffice
for the fulfilment of those social duties of which
Friederich Othmar never ceased to remind him.
There his mother’s apartments had been prepared
for his wife, and every grace and attraction
that the art and the taste of the day could
add to them had been added, as though the
most solicitous affection had presided over the
preparation of them. All the preferences she
had shown in the country had been remembered
and gratified; whatever she had liked best in
colour, in treatment, in art, in flowers, in
marble, had been consulted or reproduced in
Paris; and even a large dog to which she had
taken a fancy at Amyôt had been brought
thence from the kennels, and was lying before
the fire when she entered.
A much older and far wiser woman would
have been persuaded to believe, as she believed,
that in all this delicate prévenance for her
pleasures and her preferences the tenderest love
had spoken. She could not divine the self-reproach
of her husband’s conscience, which
made him sensible that he perforce denied her
so much that was her due, and made him proportionately
eager to atone for that denial by
every material enjoyment and outward mark
of affection and of homage. All those who
surrounded him, all his acquaintances, his
household, and his dependents, imagined that
he loved his young wife. The person who was
in nowise deceived was Friederich Othmar.
‘He is like a Sultan,’ thought the old man
angrily, ‘a Sultan who loads the women of his
zenana with ropes of pearls and emeralds as big
as pigeon’s eggs, that they may not perceive
that he only visits them twice a year!’
By the law of the attraction of contrasts,
there had arisen a mutual attachment between
her and Baron Fritz: the unscrupulous old
man, for whom as for Turcaret the whole
world was composed of shareholders, felt more
reverence and tenderness for Yseulte than he
ever felt in his life for anyone; and she, who
only saw his devotion to Othmar, his admirable
manners, his shrewd wit, and his paternal kindness
to herself, grew fond of, and grateful to,
him, and was wholly ignorant of that mercilessness
and selfishness which would have
immolated all mankind to the service of his personal
ambitions, and to which all morality or
humanity appeared as absurd as they did to
Fouquet or to Talleyrand.
Friederich Othmar incessantly strove to
inspire her with his own passion for the House
he adored, and though he failed because she
was too thoroughly patrician in all her instincts
to easily welcome such impressions, and was
more apt to share her husband’s disdain for all
such ambitions, he did succeed in persuading
her that the future content of Othmar himself
would depend on the measure of the interest
which he would take in those great fortunes
of which he held the key.
‘Understand this, my child,’ he would say,
‘a man in old age never forgives himself for
the occasions which he has let slip in youth;
and every man who in youth is désœuvré, pays
for it heavily when age has come. Otho is a
clever man, but he has the sickness of his century;
he is indifferent to everything’ (‘even
to you!’ he thought impatiently). ‘We call it
the malady of the time; I do not know that
we are right. It existed in Petronius Arbiter’s,
but it had no existence in our immediate forefathers’.
However, you do not care for abstract
discussions; you care for Otho. Well, let us
confine ourselves to Otho. Nowadays, he is still
a young man; he thinks he can afford to despise
all things because he has strength, and health,
and every form of enjoyment accessible to him—and
he is certainly rich enough to play at
cynicism all day if it amuse him most.’
‘He is no cynic,’ said Yseulte, quickly.
Baron Fritz smiled.
‘A little of Alceste, surely? You read
“Le Misanthrope,” even at your convent, I imagine?
My dear child, people always desire
the fate they have not. Alfred de Vigny, with
his sixteen quarterings, was always in rebellion
against the fate of the poor gentleman; Otho,
one of the richest men in Europe, is always
rebelling against his riches as a chain and a
species of dishonour. Now, it is for you to
reconcile him to them; it is for you to persuade
him that in the interests of his House
lie those occupations and obligations which will
not pall upon him as he grows older. I have
known men weary of love and pleasure, but I
have never known them weary of ambition.
Otho scorns vulgar ambitions, but there are
those which are not vulgar. In finance, as in
life, there is no standing still. In his present
mood he would be delighted if ruin were possible
to us; it is not possible. Short of a
European war that should last thirty years,
nothing can harm us much. Still, no great
house can long stand without a chief who
cares for its welfare and honour. Like
Catherine II., “je lis l’avenir dans le passé.”
A wise statesman has always the past of
the world spread out before him like an
ordnance map for his guidance. So may we
also, in the past history of such houses as our
own, see what has led to their ruin, and so
guide ourselves to avoid those evils in our own
case. Now, nothing has been so commonly
the cause of krach in financial establishments
as their being afflicted with imprudent or indifferent
members. Otho is not very often
imprudent, but he is entirely indifferent. Certainly,’
continued the Baron, with pardonable
pride, ‘the Maison d’Othmar is too solidly
established, too greatly important to the public
life of Europe, to be easily imperilled by a
young man’s foibles. Still, I cannot disguise
from myself the fact that when I am no more
there will be no check on his eccentricities, no
stimulus to his apathy. He will be ill served
because he will at once expect too much virtue
from men, and observe them with too little suspicion.
The ship is sound and safe, and sure to
have fair winds, but if the man at her helm be
reading his Horace or his La Bruyère instead of
steering by his chart, the ship may founder in
clear weather and calm seas. You understand
me?’
Metaphor was very unusual to him; he only
condescended to use it for sake of making his
meaning clearer to the feebleness of a feminine
mind.
‘Yes, I understand quite well,’ she replied,
with a little sigh. ‘But I have no influence;
he would think me impertinent; and I am
sure no one will care for the honour of the
House more truly than he.’
‘Commercially speaking, there are two kinds
of honour,’ said Friederich Othmar. ‘The
fantastic and visionary one he will always
maintain, but the practical one, which lies in
doing your utmost for all the interests centred
in yours, he will neglect. If I were to tell him
that we must collapse to-morrow, he would
give up everything, down to his pet edition of
Marcus Aurelius, to satisfy our debts; but if I
were to tell him also how many financial
schemes and companies would fall with us, he
would only reply that the world would be
exceedingly well rid of so many scoundrels.
The honour is safe with him, doubtless, but
the welfare is not. I shall not live for
ever; I shall probably only live a very
few years more. You must persuade your
husband that his true duties and pleasures
will lie in those ambitions which his fathers
have bequeathed to him. I know that he
and you would like to extinguish the House
of Othmar financially, and dwell at Amyôt
with no remembrance of the world. That is a
lover’s dream. My dear, simplicity and solitude
are impossible in our society; a shepherd’s
peace is not attainable by a man whom the
world claims. If I were to die to-morrow,
and Otho to remain as indifferent to his own
interests as he is now, all that I have done, all
that his predecessors have done, would crumble
away in ten or twenty years like so much soft
sandstone in a succession of wet winters. He
would not resent it now, but when he should
be fifty years old he would resent it bitterly;
he would never pardon himself. It is from
this possibility that your influence must protect
him.’
She hesitated, with a blush upon her face.
‘I have no influence,’ she said timidly.
‘He knows so much better, so much more
than I——’
‘Obtain influence over him,’ said the old
man curtly; ‘for if you do not, someone else
will. Nay, my dear, pardon me; do not be
hurt by my plain speaking. Such men as
Otho are always influenced by women; he
should be so now by you; he will be so if
you will leave off worshipping him timidly,
making him your law and your religion, and
realise that you are an exquisitely lovely
woman, with mind enough not to be the mere
toy of any man. You are very young, it is
true, but you have grown ten years in a few
months. You must remember that to be in
love is very agreeable, no doubt, but you are
not his mistress; you are his wife. You must
not think only of the immediate moment, but
of the far future when he will not be in love
with you, ma belle, nor you with him, but when
you may still influence him nobly and wisely,
and he may find in you his safest friend.’
Yseulte listened, with a little sigh.
It seemed to her as if all her happy illusions
were taking wing, like the group of amorini
which flew away from a weeping nymph on
the ceiling of her room, which had been painted
by Bourgereau. They were seated in one of
her own apartments, a very bower of primroses
and white lilac, panelled in the Louis Seize
style, with Bourgereau’s charming children in
groups within each panel above the satin
couches. Between the curtains, there were
glimpses through the windows of the cedars
and wellingtonias of the gardens. Without, it
was a chilly winter’s day, but within, it was warm
as summer, mellow with soft colour, fragrant
with innumerable flowers; even to this great
hotel of the Boulevard S. Germain, which had
always seemed to Othmar the most oppressive
and detestable of all his many mansions, the
advent of Yseulte had brought a grace and
light and sweetness as of young and innocent
life, a charm of home to these splendid and
desolate suites of rooms. Her dogs lay on the
hearth, her voice called the peacocks in the
lonely gardens, her scores of Beethoven and
Schubert and Berlioz lay open on the grand
pianos. Even the look of the great bouquets
in the Japanese bowls and the jars of Saxe
and Sèvres was different: her hand had added
a rose there, a fern here; they were flowers
which were there because she loved them, not
only because they served for decorations
grouped by skilful servants as mere masses of
colour. The great house, sombre in its Bourbon
stateliness, magnificent in its architecture, but
oppressive in its too continual display of wealth,
was no longer ‘une maison sans musique, une
ruche sans abeilles;’ it had gained a charm
which was none the less perceptible because
undefinable and impalpable, as the scent of
the tea-roses in the tall Sèvres jars. But
Friederich Othmar was more sensible of this
than was the possessor of the house and of her.
Friederich Othmar, who had lived for fifty
years and more without perceiving that he had
never had, or wished to have, a home, perceived
that his nephew had one and scarcely appreciated
it. Friederich Othmar himself became suddenly
alive to the pleasure of finding something home-like
in that corner of her boudoir where she drew
a Japanese screen between him and the draught
from the windows, brought him his cup of
green tea, and listened with an interest fresh
and unfeigned to his anecdotes, his reminiscences,
and his counsels: but he found Othmar
there less often than he would have wished.
‘He will be glad of that coin du feu some
day,’ he thought angrily; annoyed by a neglect
which Yseulte herself did not perceive. She
had been used to solitude; she was neither
vain nor exacting; she understood that everything
could not be in Paris altogether as it had
been at Amyôt; and if she gave a sigh to that
necessity, she bravely and tranquilly accepted
it. The great world was about her with its
demands, its solicitations, its tyrannies over
time and thought; she had little leisure for
meditation; the Countess Othmar could not
escape the social obligations of her position or
avoid its ceremonies and its courtesies.
She remained much graver and simpler than
her contemporaries were; she cared for none
of the noisy amusements of modern fashion;
the world of pleasure seemed to her, on the
whole, a little vulgar, a little tiresome, astonishingly
monotonous, even in its feverish search
for the untried and the startling. But at the
same time she could not escape from its demands,
and their effects upon her, and the counsels
of Friederich Othmar incessantly reminded
her that she could best serve the honour of the
name she bore by making Europe admire and
praise her. It was a counsel which contained
the seeds of danger; but he read her character
aright.
‘Voilà une qui ne cascadera jamais,’ said
the Baron to himself in his tongue of the
Boulevards. He was infinitely proud of, and
delighted with her; he gave her the most
magnificent presents, bought her the rarest of
jewels. He accompanied her constantly in her
drives and to the opera, and even in the visits
which she paid.
‘It is Baron Fritz whom Othmar’s marriage
has reformed!’ said a pretty woman, who had
long considered the silver-haired financier as her
own especial prey. He took a paternal pleasure in
the admiration which the rare patrician graces
of the girl awoke in that tout Paris which he
had long considered the lawgiver of the universe.
‘If you had been Marie Antoinette, there
might have been no revolution,’ he said
jestingly to her. ‘You would never have
flirted with Ferson, nor would you have played
at shepherdessing, or worn a mask in the
Palais Royal.’
‘I think I should only have thought of
France,’ she answered.
‘Which would not have prevented you
from going to the guillotine, I dare say,’ said
the Baron. ‘Nations are the concentrated
distillation of the ingratitude of men. There
is only one thing which one can always count
on with absolute certainty, and that is, the
general and individual thanklessness.’
Nothing was further from his thoughts than
to cloud over the trust, confidence, and faith
of her innocent optimism. He spoke as he
thought and felt, and as a long experience of
mankind had taught him to do, without reflecting
that he dropped the bitterness of gall
into a fair and limpid spring, which had seen
nothing above its waters save the white lily-cups
and the blue heavens.
‘She will be robbed right and left endlessly
if she be not taught a little mistrust,’ he said
to Othmar himself, who replied:
‘Let her be robbed of everything rather
than of her illusions. This is the only loss
from which we never recover.’
‘What an absurd idea!’ thought the Baron,
who had never cherished any illusions at all,
and had found life exceedingly entertaining
and enjoyable without them.
The practical mind can no more understand
the regrets of the meditative one than a manufacturer,
spending his days by choice amidst the
roar of steam wheels and the ledgers of a
counting-house, can understand the artist’s
anguish when he is shut up in a city garret
whence he cannot see a sunset or a sunrise.
‘The woes of the body, I grant, may be
too much for one’s philosophy,’ the Baron was
wont to say. ‘With the gout, or neuralgia, or
sciatica, Seneca’s self might fail to retain
serenity. But the sorrows of the emotions or of
the imagination are so entirely fictitious that
anyone, by the exercise of a little self-control,
may put them aside completely.’
‘What! Even the losses of death?’
objected some one once.
The Baron smiled:
‘Death cannot affect you very greatly
unless you have already committed an act of
unwisdom—that is, have already attached
yourself to some other life than your own.’
‘Then where is love?’ said his interlocutor.
‘Where it has always been,’ said Friederich
Othmar, ‘chiefly in the senses partially in the
imagination. When we have both the senses
and the imagination under the control of our
temperate judgment, it cannot disturb us seriously.
In my youth, and even in my maturity,’
he continued, with complacence, ‘I have dallied
with love as well as other men, but the moment
that I felt that any one passion was likely to
exercise undue influence upon me, I withdrew
myself from it. To break a chain is difficult,
but never to let it be forged is easy.’
He thought it his duty to put his young
favourite on her guard against all the deceptions
and delusions which the world prepares
for its novices; he told her much more than
her husband would have done of all the intricacies
and meanings of the varied life which
was about her, gave her the key to many of
its secrets, and the hidden biographies of many
of its personages.
‘You are in the world, you must understand
the world,’ he said to her; ‘if not, it
will be a mere labyrinth to you, and you will
be lost in it. You need not become a mondaine
with your heart, but you must become
one with your head, or the mondaines will
devour you. It is not necessary that you should
gamble or swear or get into debts for your
petticoats, as they do; but it is necessary that
you should understand the society of your time.
At Amyôt you may be a young saint, as heaven
meant you to be, but in Paris you must be
able to hold your own against those who are
the reverse of saints. Otho ought to teach you
all this himself, but he will not, so you must
listen to me. I have not been so engrossed in
the gold market all my days that I do not
know la haute gomme down to the ground.
In my leisure I have always gone into the
world: the boudoir of a pretty woman is
always much more amusing than a card-table
or a pistol-gallery. L’Ecole des Femmes is the
one to which every wise man goes.’
He paused, with a consciousness that he
had better not pursue that theme.
‘My child,’ he resumed, as the carriage
rolled down the Bois, ‘you are not seventeen;
you are in love with your husband; you sweep
your conscience every morning with a palm-leaf
to make sure there is no little film of a
cobweb left in it; you think life is such a
simple and beautiful thing that you have only
to get up and go to bed as the sun does. You
hear quantities of compliments, but you pay no
attention to them; you are altogether as innocent
as a flower, and you are quite exquisite
like that—it suits you; but, all the same, you
cannot go on like that for ever. Men might
let you, for we are not as black as we are
painted, but women will not. It is from women
that your sorrows will come, that your perception
of evil will come, that your enemies will
come. Satan, pardon me the word, would
take off his hat to you and pass by on the
other side, for he, too, is not as black as he
has been painted. But women will not feel
what Satan would feel; they are much more
hard to touch. It is women whom you must
try to understand; you can analyse without
imbibing, as chemists do poisons.’
‘Must one analyse at all?’ said Yseulte, a
little wistfully.
Such abrupt and familiar allusions to Satan
disturbed the awe in which she had been reared
at Faïel; but she was growing used to the
perception that all the things which she held
most sacred were mere Mother Goose’s tales
to the world in general, and to understand
why her cousin Clothilde, who had her emblazoned
chair at S. Philippe du Roule and
occupied it so regularly, and was so heedful
all Lent to wear the strictest mourning costume
without a shred of lace, had yet not a grain
of real religion in her. She began to comprehend
what Blanchette had meant by all her
rapturous felicitations, and sometimes the proud
and austere young soul of her was humiliated
to think that these mere material pleasures
should have any attraction for her: she felt
that her grandmother’s ascetic and haughty
teachings would have condemned such joys as
mundane and vulgar. But the pleasure of them
was there, nevertheless, and she was too honest
in her self-analysis to dissimulate before her
conscience. Unworldly as temperament and
education alike made her, Yseulte was feminine
enough and accessible enough to such vanities
for all the possessions into which she entered
to amuse and please her with their novelty and
the sense of power which they gave. She was
but a child in years, and the large households
deferential to her slightest word, the grand
equipages ready for her whim and fancy, the
beautiful horses which bore her with the fleetness
of the wind, the vast houses through which
she could wander, conscious that she was the
mistress of them all, the innumerable beauties
of art which they contained, the caskets and
coffers full of jewels and baubles, all these
things beguiled her time and gratified that
pride which a very young girl always feels in
the sudden assumption of womanhood. She
began to understand why all her companions at
Faïel had thought her so fortunate. Her serious
and spiritual nature made her feel a little
ashamed at finding so much interest in such
earthly treasures; in her self-examination she
reproved herself, and almost contemned herself.
But she was too young not to take such
irresistible delight in all these things as a
child takes in butterflies or poppies; it was
delightful to say ‘I wish,’ and see her wishes
accomplished as by magic; it was charming to
give away right and left, as out of a bottomless
purse; it was amusing to command, to
confer, to be regarded as the source of all
favours and all fortune, as the people of Amyôt
and the household of Paris regarded her. In
time, the delicacy of her taste, the seriousness
of her intelligence, might probably make these
possessions and privileges pall on her; in time
she would see sycophancy where she now saw
only devotion, and grow weary of a loyalty
only rooted in self-interest; but, at the onset,
life was to her like a fairy story, her empire
was one on which the sun never set and in
which the spring-time never waned.
Othmar never said one word which could
have served to disenchant her. Conscious that
he could not give her all the singleness of love
which was her due, he strove to atone for any
wrong he did her so by multiplying around her
every physical gratification, and giving her an
unlimited power of self-indulgence.
In this new life she was like a child who
stands amidst the bewilderment of its crowd of
New Year presents; sometimes she thought of
herself as she had been six months before, sitting
in the shadow of the stone cloisters at
Faïel, in her dust-coloured convent frock, with
the blue ribbon of merit crossing her breast
and some holy book open on her hands, with
a kind of wondering pity and strangeness, and
a sense of being herself far, very far, away from
any kinship with that sad grey figure.
That so little of egotism was aroused in her
in this hot-house existence which she led, was
due to the generosity and simplicity of her
instincts, on which the contagion of worldly
influences had little power. To send a silver
crucifix to Faïel, or a piece of fine lace to
Nicole, still gave her greater pleasure than to
wear her own great diamonds or see the
crowds in the Champs Elysées look after her
carriage with its liveries of black velvet and
white satin.
Meanwhile she had the natural feeling of
every unselfish and generous nature, that her
life was not full enough of thought for others.
It was difficult for her at her age to know what
to do, so as to carry out those theories of self-sacrifice
which training and temperament alike
made a religion to her.
Friederich Othmar, when he discovered
this, told her, with some impatience, that the
House of Othmar always did what was expected
of it in this respect, and that its women
had no occasion to trouble their heads with
such matters.
‘Wherever we have been located we have
always been good citizens,’ he said, with truth.
‘We have always borne our due share of public
expenditure or public almsgiving; perhaps
more than our due share. Myself, I believe
that all that sort of charity is a vast mistake.
It is intended as a sop to the wolves, but you
cannot feed wolves on sops. They will always
want your blood, however they may lick up
your mess.’
Yseulte remembered that S. Francis had
proved that even wolves may be tamed into
affection and usefulness; but though she believed
firmly in that legend, she hesitated to
put it forward, even as an allegory, as evidence
against the arguments of the Baron. She did
not lack courage, nor even that truest courage,
the courage of opinion, but she had been reared
in the old traditions of high breeding, which
make contradiction a vulgarity, and, from the
young to the old, an offence.
‘I hope you will not make yourself into a
sort of Judith Montefiore,’ continued the Baron
irritably. ‘We are not Jews. Jews must do
that kind of thing to get themselves tolerated.
We could forgive them the Crucifixion, but we
cannot forgive them their percentage. Though
we are not Jews, Otho has already done some
Quixotic things in the Montefiore fashion. I
hope you will not encourage him to continue
them.’
‘Tell me what they were,’ she said, with
the light in her eyes and the colour in her
face.
‘Not I,’ said the Baron; ‘I much prefer to
see him smoking à Londrès at the Jockey.’
‘Had he ever any very great sorrow?’ she
ventured to ask.
‘None, my dear, but what he chose to
make for himself,’ replied Friederich Othmar,
with contempt. ‘Do you remember Joubert’s
regret that he could not write his thoughts on
the bark of trees by merely looking at them?—well,
Otho’s griefs are much as baseless.
As if,’ he added, ‘as if there were any real
grief in the world,—except the gout!’
‘He is like Obermann, like Amiel,’ she
said timidly. She had read passages in the
volumes of those dreamy and isolated thinkers
in the library of Amyôt. Friederich Othmar
shrugged his shoulders; those names signified
to him the very lowest deeps of human ineptitude
and folly.
‘Men who were so afraid of disappointment
and disillusion that they would allow themselves
to enjoy nothing! It would be as
reasonable to let oneself die of starvation as a
preventive of dyspepsia! Such men do not
think; they only moon. The cattle that lie
and graze under the trees have meditations
quite as useful. My child,’ he added, ‘would
you be wise or foolish if you threw all your
diamonds into the river in anger because they
were not stars? That is what your husband
does with his life. You must learn to persuade
him that the stars are unattainable, and that
the diamonds represent a very fair and fruitful
kingdom if not the powers of the air.’
Yseulte sighed wistfully. She vaguely felt
that it was not within her means to reconcile
him with the world and fate; she had not the
magic wand.
‘I am always in dread,’ continued the
Baron, ‘that you, with your religious ideas,
and he, with his impatience of his position, will
do something extraordinary and Quixotic; will
turn S. Pharamond into a maison de santé,
or this hotel into a lazar-house for cancer. I
shall never be surprised at any madness of that
sort.’
Yseulte sighed a little.
‘But, there is the misery of the world all
around us,’ she ventured to say; ‘if we could
alleviate it, would it not be worth any sacrifice?’
‘My dear,’ said Baron Fritz, ‘when
Napoléon gave the opium at Jaffa, he did more
to alleviate suffering than all the philanthropists
have ever done. Yet it has been always
brought against him as his worst action. I
went once, out of curiosity, to see the Incurables
at the hospital of la Salpêtrière. Well, if false
sentiment did not prevent the treatment à la
Jaffa taking place there, an infinitude of hideous
suffering and of hideous deformity would be
mercifully nded. But the world is so sentimental
that it will send several hundred thousand
of young and healthy men to endure all
kinds of tortures in war for a question of frontier,
or a matter of national etiquette, but it
esteems it unlawful to kill idiots or drug to
death incurables cursed with elephantiasis or
leprosy.’
Yseulte’s clear eyes grew troubled; these
views of life were perplexing to her. At Faïel
all such contradictions had been simply accepted
as ordained under one unquestioned and divine
law; the conversation of Friederich Othmar
depressed and bewildered her, but she could
perceive its reason. It made her reflect; it
made her more of a woman, less of a child.
He thought that was for the best. If she were
not educated in some worldly knowledge, the
world would make an easy prey of her.
‘Otho treats her as if she were an ivory
madonnina who would remain aloof on an altar
all her days,’ he said to a woman he knew.
‘On the contrary, she is a beautiful creature,
about whom all the world will buzz and sting
like bees about a lily. She must be taught not
to throw away her honey. She is just now
in the clouds; she is very much in love with a
man who is not in love with her; she is full of
ideals and impossible sentiments. She is half a
child, half an angel; but to hold her own in
the world she must be something else—not so
angelic and not so childish,—and she must
learn to esteem people at their value, which is
for the most part very small. It would be
even well if she could see Otho as he is;
she would take life more easily. She would
not be so likely to fall headlong from a
heaven of adoration into a stone well of disillusion.
Truths live at the bottom of these
wells, no doubt, but they are not agreeable, and
they give a shock to sensitive people. A woman
is prettier when she is sensitive. It is like piety
or charity—it is an essentially feminine ornament,
but it is not a quality which wears well.’
His friend laughed.
‘Do you think Othmar will thank you for
so educating his wife?’
‘He has never thanked me for anything
that I have done,’ he replied. ‘But that does
not prevent me from doing what I consider is
my duty, or is most wise.’
‘Say wisdom,’ returned the lady. ‘That
suits you better than duty. Duty is ridiculous
if you do not let le bon Dieu pose behind it.’
‘I know people say so,’ answered the Baron;
‘but it is only an idea. In practical life
agnostics and disbelievers of every sort make
just as good citizens as the pietists.’
With the second week of December there
was a great social event in Paris. The Hôtel
Othmar was opened to the world. ‘The gates
of Janus unclose,’ said one who deemed himself
a wit in allusion to a war, then in embryo, into
whose conception and gestation the gold of the
Othmar was considered to enter largely.
The Boulevard S. Germain and all its
approaches were like rivers of light, and the
sound of carriage wheels was like the roll of
artillery. ‘Tout Paris’ flocked there, and
even the Faubourg disdained not to pass
through those immense gates of gilded bronze,
which were nicknamed of Janus, since the
mistress of the salons within was by birth incontestibly
a Comtesse de Valogne.
‘Tiens, tiens, tiens!’ murmured Aurore
de Vannes. ‘Is it possible for twelve months
to have so changed a fillette into a goddess!
Really, we were all wrong, and Othmar was
right. We all thought her a pauvrette, to be
put away in a holy house; he had the sense to
see that she would become superb, and would
set him right with all the Faubourg. The
Faubourg was always well inclined to him, because
his grandmother was a de Soissons-Valette,
but his marriage has made him one of them: he
is definitely placed for ever. Really, I never
gave him credit for so much foresight when he
sent that ivory casket. I thought it was only
a caprice.’
‘Othmar cares not a straw for the Faubourg,’
said her husband, out of the pure spirit
of contradiction. ‘He will never give his
millions to carry on a Holy War or restore the
throne. He is more likely to dream of a great
Western empire with its capital at the Golden
Horn. He is a Slavophile.’
‘He is wholly indifferent to politics; it is
Baron Fritz who is the political conspirator,’
returned the Duchesse. ‘Otho is a mere
dreamer, and he used to be a discontented
one. Perhaps he is not so now.’
‘He does not look especially happy; she
does. I confess I should be sorry for him to
become contented; the contemplation of his
discontent has always reconciled me with
having nothing myself,’ said a great diplomatist,
whose debts were as considerable as his
talents.
‘If he be not contented——’ began the
Duc, and paused, conscious that for him to say
anything except a jest of any marriage under
the sun would appear supremely ridiculous to
his companions. Yet his admiration for Yseulte
was not dormant, and took a still warmer
character as he saw her in the grande tenue
of a woman of the world, with the Othmar
diamonds, long famous and long unseen, on
her fair hair and her white breast.
‘She has too many jewels for such a child,’
he said irritably. ‘She is covered with them
like an Indian idol. That is so like a financier’s
love of display!’
‘I dare say he has given them to her as
you give toys to a child,’ replied the diplomatist.
‘Othmar has no faults of display.
What has been almost ridiculous in him has
been a simplicity of taste not in accord with
his millions. But his wife is so very handsome
that she may well betray him into some
vanities.’
Twelve months had truly made in her that
almost magical transformation which passion
can cause in a very young and innocent girl
who, from entire seclusion and absolute ignorance,
is suddenly thrown into the arms of a
man whom she has scarcely seen, yet timidly
adores. She had lost her extreme spirituality
of expression, but she had gained a thousand-fold
in other ways. Her form had developed,
her whole person had become that of a woman
instead of a child; she was many years older
than she had been one short year before, when,
in her little quiet chamber under the woods of
Faïel, she had only thought of love as a mystical
religious emotion, and of herself as the betrothed
of Christ.
She filled her place, and did the honours
of her house with a calm grace which had
nothing of the hesitation or the awkwardness
of youth. He had told her what to do, and
she did it with perfect ease, and that dignity
which had so become her when she had curtsied
to Melville as a little child in the old,
dusky house in the Ile Saint-Louis. In
manner she might have been a Queen of
France for five-and-twenty years. It was only
in the unworn transparency of the fair skin,
beneath which the blood came and went so
warmly, the slenderness of the lines of her
form, the childlike naïveté of her smile, that
her exceeding youthfulness was still revealed.
She made no single error; she said little,
but she said always what was needful and
becoming; she received each one of her guests
with the phrase that pleased them, with the
observances that were due to them; there was
no hesitation or awkwardness in her. Even
women who watched her, as her cousin did,
with a malicious wish to find her at fault somewhere,
were forced to confess to themselves that
she bore herself admirably. If she had a defect,
it was that she appeared a little cold. She
was always exquisitely courteous; she was
never familiar.
‘She has the manner of the last century,’
said Madame de Vannes, ‘of the last century,
before the women of Marie Antoinette rode
donkeys and milked cows.’
To see that baby who six months ago had
never spoken to any man except her confessor,
and never worn any ornament except her convent
medal, receiving sovereigns and princes
and ambassadors, de puissance à puissance, and
wearing diamonds which were ten times bigger,
finer, and in greater profusion than her own,
made her very angry, and yet made her laugh.
She had seen many transformations of fillettes
into great ladies, but none quite so rapid, so
striking, or so complete as that of her young
cousin into the mistress of the Hôtel Othmar.
‘I wish Nadine Napraxine were here this
evening,’ she thought with that good-humoured
malice which enjoys a friend’s annoyance without
meaning any real unkindness.
‘All Paris will talk of your ball and much
more of you to-morrow,’ said de Vannes
during the evening to his wife’s cousin. ‘Does
that please you as much as it pleases most of
them?’
‘I shall not think about it,’ replied Yseulte,
simply.
‘But I imagine you read the journals?’
‘No, never.’
‘Never!’ he echoed, incredulously. ‘Why
is that?’
She hesitated, then answered with a little
blush: ‘He has told me not; he thinks they
are foolish.’
‘Othmar?’ asked the Duc, with a laugh.
‘Do you obey him as you did the Mother
Superior?’
‘Why not?’ said Yseulte gently, but coldly.
‘Why not!’ he said irritably. ‘Well,
because you should begin as you wish to go on;
you will not care for that state of servitude
long; it would be better never to accustom
him to it.’
‘Excuse me, my cousin, I see Madame de
Tavernes is looking for me,’ said Yseulte, as
she went to speak with a Duchesse whose
genealogical tree mounted to the remote ages
before the long-haired kings; a stately and
powdered person who had issued from the retirement
in which she usually lived to honour
the first great entertainment of the daughter of
Gui de Valogne.
The Duc was rebuffed and annoyed.
‘She has learned her riposte already,’ he
thought, ‘and she has not forgotten the locket.
I wonder if he care? If he want to be free
himself, he had better put her on a course of
petits journaux at once. There is no recipe
like that for corrupting the mind and debasing
the taste. How handsome she is! What a
lovely face—what a lovely form!—and only
seventeen even now! She will be in perfect
beauty for the next ten years. If he be not
a very ardent or a very assiduous husband, he
will not be able to keep all that to himself; he
will have many rivals, and he will be sure to
be unfaithful himself:—then she will read the
journals and learn how women console themselves.’
At five o’clock that morning her rooms
were empty, her guests were gone, and her
woman had undressed her, and put on her
a négligée of white silk; her hair was unloosened
and fell behind her like a cascade
of gold; all the great jewels were strewn on
the table near; she was looking at her own
reflection in the large oval silver-framed mirror
before her; she smiled a little as she did so;
her eyes were luminous, her cheeks were
flushed; she was sensible of no fatigue, she
was only elated with her own triumphs. She
had had a girlish pleasure in receiving her
cousins in that magnificent house; she had
had an innocent triumph in showing how well
she could fill the part of a woman of the
world; she felt like a child who has played a
queen’s part in some pageant, and played it
well; something of the insidious charm of the
world had begun to steal on her; something of
its vanity and of its rivalry had begun to attract
her;—very little, for her nature was too proud,
too pure, and too serious to yield easily to these
temptations, but something nevertheless. Only
as yet her one dominant thought was of him in
it all. Had he also been content; had there
been nothing that he could have desired otherwise?
She turned with a smile, half timid still, as
he knocked at the door and entered her chamber.
Her attendants withdrew at a sign from
him; he took her in his arms and kissed her.
‘I thank you for all your triumphs, dear,’
he said kindly. ‘They are mine.’
‘Did I really do well?’ she said doubtfully,
but joyfully.
‘Perfectly, perhaps almost too well; Paris
will talk too much of you.’
‘I forgot nothing?’ she asked, still
anxiously.
‘You forgot nothing, and you looked—much
too beautiful for men quickly to forgive
me! No, dear, I do not flatter you; flattery
would be absurd from me to you; I tell you
the simple truth.’
‘I am glad,’ she said simply, ‘for I have
nothing else to reward you with for all you
have given to me.’
She spoke shyly, for she was always in awe
of him a little. Her arm, uncovered to the
shoulder as the loose folds of the sleeve fell
away from it, stole timidly about his throat;
in all her caresses there was the hesitation of a
proud and delicate nature blent with the longing
of an ardent love. Habit had not familiarised
her with the relation in which he stood to
her; the brutalising intimacy of marriage had
not dwarfed or dulled her ideal and adoration
of him. He was still much less her lover than
her lord.
Othmar took the bright gold of her heavy
hair in his hand, and drew it through his fingers.
‘On chasse de race,’ he said, with a smile.
‘You receive a great crowd as if you had been
reared in a court from your babyhood.’
‘You told me what to do,’ she answered
simply. ‘It seems very easy; besides, every
one was so extremely kind.’
‘The kindness of society,’ thought Othmar,
‘the kiss of Judas!’
But he did not say so. Let her learn for
herself what it was worth, he thought; the
knowledge would come soon enough of itself.
Yseulte’s face grew grave as she sat lost in
thought.
‘I do not think it is right to care for this
sort of thing,’ she said, with hesitation. ‘It is
only a sort of vanity. And then all these
diamonds and these great pearls—they say they
are worth millions—I do not like to wear
them whilst there are so many without clothes
or food of any kind; one knows that there is
so much misery all about us here in Paris. Is
it right, do you think, to enjoy oneself in this
kind of way? I seem to remember nothing
but myself all the day long——’
Othmar smiled and sighed.
‘Enjoy, my child, while you can; leave all
those grave thoughts for your older years. If
you like to sell your jewels, and give them all
to the poor, you can do it, but wait a few years
first; wait to see more of the world. There is
a cruel science, called political economy, which
they certainly did not teach you at Faïel; you
must learn something of that before you try to
decide these questions, which have vainly perplexed
every thoughtful man since rich and
poor were together on earth. And now, shut
your pretty eyes, and sleep and dream of your
triumphs; they have been very innocent ones,
you need not repent them.’
He kissed her again, and left her to her
daybreak slumber in the warm orange-flower-scented
air of her bed-chamber; and himself
went out into the chill half-frozen streets of
Paris on one of those errands of mercy of
which he never spoke to any human being,
and which were the result of his pity for men
rather than of any belief or faith or sympathy
that he had with them. He was one of the
few men whom the lawless classes of Paris
have ever respected.
Othmar himself could go unharmed where
the police would not have ventured to go save
in force; and in the days of the Commune the
worst leaders of it had put a white cross on
the great houses of which he was master, and
spared them from torch and shell for sake of
the young man who was wont to pass through
the vilest quarters of Paris, with his hand ever
open and his compassion never denied. They
knew that if their couches sociales could have
been an accomplished fact, Othmar himself
would never have wished the old state of things
maintained, but would have accepted the new
with indifference and perfect courage, himself
glad to be rid of a burden.
They forgave him his riches for sake of
his own contempt for them; his courage, even
his coldness, attracted them. He had no blague;
he was entirely sincere; he never attempted
to convert them to anything; he aided them
without putting any price on his aid, either of
gratitude or doctrine. They knew that he
had neither fear of them nor love for them,
but that he had a profound sense of a common
humanity with them, which was in his eyes
as in theirs another name for a common misfortune.
The times were out of joint for him. If
he had been created with the capacity of
religious faith, he would have been willingly
what François Xavier or Père Lacordaire were.
But he had the clear and critical intelligence of
a man of the world; the fables of faith could
not give him any mental pabulum. He took
refuge in pity; it seemed to him that men
were bound to do for one another at least as
much as buffaloes do, which in trouble gather
around the wounded ones of the herd.
Melville alone had found out something of
what he did; Melville, who although the
sweetest-voiced, softest-handed, of churchmen
and courtiers in salon and boudoir, never feared
or failed to descend into the haunts of iniquity,
to grapple with disease and crime. In such
places he and Othmar had met by chance more
than once, and on one occasion Melville had
said to him: ‘You have more influence than
I, because they do not suspect you; a priest is
always suspected of trying to save souls only
to serve his own.’
‘If I have more influence than you, they
are thankless,’ rejoined Othmar; ‘for you
certainly love them, and I care nothing for
them, absolutely nothing.’
‘Why do you serve them, then?’ asked Melville,
in surprise.
Othmar sighed impatiently. ‘It seems to
me that one is bound in honour when fate has
placed oneself beyond temptation;—besides,
these reeking breeding-pens of crime in the
midst of our own luxury are horrible; they
are cancers in the very womb of human nature.
Your Christianity has endeavoured to cure
them for eighteen centuries, and has always
failed miserably. The cancer grows and grows.’
Few persons save those of the police, who
were perforce acquainted with his movements,
were aware of the intimacy and influence he
had acquired with the most wretched and the
most dangerous classes of Paris; the food of
maisons centrales and the emigrants of Nouméa.
Often Friederich Othmar wondered within himself
whither went the large sums which his
nephew drew and spent without explanation;
what he spent on art and on pleasure was
known, but there were often great quantities
of money taken by Othmar, in the exercise
of his unquestionable right, for the use of
which all the Baron’s ingenuity failed to find
an account. Numberless families redeemed
from misery, many youths saved from crime
and the galleys, many grown men aided to
begin new lives in other climes, and many a
foul place purged to moral and physical cleanliness,
swallowed up these millions of francs,
of which the employment remained a secret
to the argus-eyes of Baron Fritz. There was
a nobility about the indifference of this very
rich man to his riches which conquered the
hatred of the poor even amongst the Socialistic
arrondissements, where such hatred was the
sole religion recognised. They knew that
Othmar himself was as disdainful of existent
society as they were themselves, and that
although fortune had so favoured him, he was
no more content with the arrangement of the
world than they were themselves. They were
continually, brutally, ungrateful, but underneath
their gratitude they liked him, and would
never have harmed him.
As he walked out now into the misty air of
dawn, he recalled the lovely face, with its sleepy
eyelids, of his young wife with a sharp pang
of conscience. Why could he not be content
with that innocent and undivided love?
He recalled with a sense of some great fault
in himself how entirely she was outside his life,
how little hold she had upon his passions or
his emotions. She was exquisite, she was purity
itself in body and soul; he realised his own
absolute possession of her as he had never
done that of any other woman. He had been,
that night, proud of her grace before the world,
charmed by her manner, conscious of her incomparable
distinction; and she was his as
entirely as any flower that he might gather
in a field. For him had been her first flush, her
first kiss, her first consciousness of love; and
yet, as he walked through the streets of Paris,
leaving her to sink to sleep like a happy and
tired child, he was conscious that his heart was
indifferent to her; that, the mere early inclinations
of the senses pacified, she had no power
to rouse in him more than the kindly and indulgent
affection which a child might have
called forth by its helplessness and beauty.
He desired earnestly to make her as happy
as any creature could be on earth, and would
have denied her nothing which could have
helped to make her so; but he could not command
his own passions, and he could not make
her the supreme mistress of them. She was
a most lovely and most innocent creature, who
was welcome to enjoy all the greatness and the
grace of life with which he could dower her;
she was a young saint who would bear his
children in her breast as innocently as the
peach-blossom bears the fruit; she was at all
times both dear to him and sacred to him; but
love for her was not there. He sighed impatiently
as he felt that in all his words and
his caresses he acted a part with her, that perhaps
sooner or later, when the world had taught
her better what men were, she would know
that, and would be no longer so easily deceived.
As he had watched her that evening in her
serenity, her gracefulness, her dignity, he had
all at once remembered that in the great world
youth grows rapidly, as a flower in a hothouse,
that she would be surrounded by many who
would ask no happier task than to enlighten
her ignorance and embitter her confidence, and
that if she ever came to learn and realise that
she had owed her marriage partially to his
compassion, and more still to his passion for
another woman, her heart might break under
the burden of that bitter knowledge, but her
pride would never pardon the offence.
He began to feel as if he wronged her,
though neither by act nor word had he been
untrue to her since her marriage. She was so
charming in every way, so delicate of thought,
so graceful in expression, so intelligent even in
her ignorance, so wholly worthy to inspire and
retain the greatest love of a man’s life, that he
felt guilty before her, knowing that his pulses
beat no quicker when he joined her after
absence, that when her young lips, fresh as
roses, touched his own, he met them without
ardour or emotion. He had wished society to
attract her; it seemed to him the quickest and
the easiest compensation that he could offer
her. At the root of the willingness with which
he entertained the world, he to whom it was as
indifferent as it was commonplace, was the unacknowledged
sentiment that if Yseulte placed
her happiness, as her temperament would lead
her to do, in the inner life, in the affections
and in the sympathies, she would be inevitably
most miserable soon or late, since soon or late
she would discover the poverty of his own
heart; and his heart was richly endowed
enough by nature to make him ashamed to
think that it might ever be so. Friederich
Othmar judged him harshly but justly; his
indulgence and tenderness to her were not
those of a lover, but were the accumulated
gifts with which he strove to make her blind
to his own coldness. The more he lived with
her, the more he felt as though it were an
unpardonable sin to have no love to give her,
and the farther the possibility of such love receded
from him. Esteem, admiration, tenderness,
even affection, may all exist only to make
the absence of love itself the more conspicuous.
As he went through the quiet streets, almost
wholly deserted in the early hour of the morning,
and swept by a keen wind, a waggon
thundering along at too rapid a pace for so
clumsy a vehicle caught the wheel of a carriage,
which was coming in the opposite
direction. The shock flung the carriage on the
kerbstone; one of its two horses fell, the other
struggled like a demoniac; the coachman and
servant were thrown to the ground. Othmar
naturally hastened to the spot. He was the
only person in sight. The carriage itself had
oscillated violently, but was not upset; its
occupant had opened the door of it before he
could arrive at the spot, and had leaped lightly
out, though wrapped in sable furs from head to
foot. When he reached the place, the fur-clad
figure was standing in calm contemplation of
the harm which had been done, and of the
struggling horses which the coachman, who had
sprung to his feet, was endeavouring to pacify.
‘Othmar, is it you?’ said a voice whose
clear and sweet vibration sent the blood to his
temples; and the eyes of Nadine Napraxine
looked at him from under the sable lining of
her velvet hood.
The waggon had blundered on out of sight,
its driver in terror of the distant figure of a
sergeant-de-ville who had now approached the
scene. The fallen men had both found their
feet, and the horses were still throwing themselves
from side to side with broken traces and
slippery pavement adding to the difficulty increased
by their terror.
Othmar’s own coupé, which followed him
at a distance, had now come up, and his servants
assisted hers. He opened the door of
his own carriage.
‘Pray accept it,’ he said hurriedly. ‘They
will drive you where you wish; I will stay
and help your people.’
‘My people are idiots,’ she said, as she
gave them a disdainful glance. ‘The waggon
was large enough to be seen. I was coming
from the Gare du Nord; my women and the
fourgons are behind me. What are you about
at this hour? Does the Countess Othmar allow
you to be out so early—or so late?’
There was a grain of malice in the accent
of the words; Othmar coloured despite himself,
yet knew not why. He felt his whole
being thrill at the mere sound of the sweet,
cruel, well-remembered tones, and hated her.
She looked at him as they stood together
on the kerbstone of the deserted and foggy
street. She was enveloped in her long fur
mantle, and none of the lines of her figure
were traceable: she had no more contour
than an Esquimaux. Yet, nevertheless, that
incomparable grace which belonged to her—as
its movement to a bird, as its fragrance to a
flower—seemed to detach itself, and escape,
even from the heavy shapeless covering of the
travelling-cloak in which she had been wrapped
throughout her long express journey from
Russia hither by way of Berlin and Strasburg.
There was nothing visible of her except her
starry eyes, and yet all the irresistible power
which she possessed made his pulses fast and
his thought confused; he strove against his
own weakness, and pressed his offer on her
with a cold courtesy.
‘Well, I will take it since you wish it,’ she
said, as she entered his coupé. ‘You will say
who I am to this sergeant-de-ville, and whatever
else may be necessary, though it is no
case for the police since the waggoner has
made good his escape; and if he had not, I
certainly should let him alone. Tell your men
my address—you remember it? Au revoir! I
shall come and witness your happiness. Many
things from me to your wife.’
They were only the usual words of commonplace
politeness, yet to the ear of Othmar they
were fraught with a thousand meanings.
‘C’est le ton qui fait la musique,’ and the
tone of these perfectly simple sentences had
for him irony, mockery, menace, and ridicule.
Remember her address! Remember the Hôtel
Napraxine! As if to his dying day he would
ever forget the slightest trifle which had ever
been associated with her!
His horses started off at a swift trot,
and he lost her from sight. The questions of
the police as to the cause of the accident
started him as though someone had spoken to
him in his sleep. When the matter was over,
and the disabled carriage had been dragged
away by hand, and the frightened horses led
homewards by their coachman, it was too late
to go where he had intended. He returned
to his own house, bathed, dressed, and went to
his library; but he could not give his attention
to what he read. Nor when, with the early
hours of the forenoon, various persons came
to see him by appointment, could he confine his
thoughts to the subjects under consideration.
At noon he gave his card to a servant,
and told the man to go and inquire at her
hotel if the Princess Napraxine had suffered
any inconvenience from the accident of that
morning.
The servant brought him back one of the
small pale-rose-tinted notes, folded in three,
with the crown embossed in silver, which he
knew so well. The few lines in it said only:
‘Merci bien. Vous êtes toujours preux
chevalier. Je n’ai rien souffert du tout. Le
Prince vous remerciera.—N. N.’
It was the merest trifle, a thing of no import,
such as she wrote by scores every week
to numbers of indifferent people; yet it had a
sort of fascination for him. He could not destroy
it; its faint subtle scent, like that of a
tea-rose, recalled so vividly the charm of the
woman who had written it; it seemed to him
as if no one but Nadine Napraxine could have
sent that little note, coloured like a sea-shell,
delicate as a butterfly, with its miniature and
mignonne writing. Ashamed of his own weakness,
and angry with himself for his own concessions,
he threw it into a drawer of his
bureau and turned the key on it.
He had not seen her for a year, and her
spell was unbroken; all he had done to escape
from it was of no avail. One glance of her
eyes from beneath the furs in that bleak, grey,
misty daybreak, had sufficed to re-establish her
dominion. He was conscious that life seemed
no more the same to him since that chance encounter;
it would be more troubled, more excited,
more disturbed, but it would not be again
the dull and even course which it had seemed
to be when he had entered absent from her.
‘I will never see her, except in a crowd,’
he said to himself, whilst he remembered, with
self-reproach, the tender caresses of Yseulte,
which left him so calm, and even in his heart
so cold!
Of course he had known that the Princess
Napraxine, who was more Parisienne than
the Parisiennes, would, sooner or later, return
to her home there; would sooner or later
reappear in the society which she had always
preferred to all other. Russia had never held
her long, and the seclusion which both her
taste and her irritation had made her seek
after the suicide of Seliedoff could not, in
the nature of things, have lasted longer than
one season. Yet the sense that she was there
within a few streets of him, separated only by a
few roods of house-roof from him, affected him
with a force altogether unforeseen. He realised
in it that there is no cure in simples for strong
fevers, and that the will of a man is as naught
against the dominion of passion. Even that
slight letter, with its odour as of pale rose-buds,
had a power over him which all the loveliness
and innocence of Yseulte could not exercise.
The irresistible force of his own emotions
humiliated him in his own eyes.
He shrank a little, with almost a sense of
guiltiness, as a little tap came on the panels of
the library door, and from behind the tapestry
the fair head of his young wife peeped
cautiously.
‘May I come in?’ she asked, as a child
might have done.
He rose with instinctive courtesy and opened
the door to her.
It was noonday, and her few hours of sleep
had sufficed to banish all her fatigue, and to
make her as fresh, as radiant, and as clear-eyed,
as she had been in the summer woods
of Amyôt. She had none of the languor which
late hours cause in later years; she had slept
as soundly as a young fawn tired with its play,
and had awakened as refreshed as a flower
that uncloses at sunrise. She wore a long
loose gown of palest blue, opening a little at
the throat, with much old lace, of which the
yellow tinge made whiter still the whiteness of
her skin. The gown was of satin, and had
gleams and shadows in it as she moved. Her
eyes smiled; her cheeks were flushed from her
bath; her entrance had a childish eagerness.
‘Do tell me again that I did well last night,’
she said, with a child’s longing for the recapitulation
of its innocent triumphs.
He did not look at her as he drew her to
him with a mechanical caress.
‘You did perfectly,’ he answered, absently.
‘A great ball is a woman’s Austerlitz, I
suppose. Do not let it make you in love with
the world.’
‘One cannot but like it,’ she said, with her
habitual truthfulness, a little wistfully. ‘That
is what I thought last night; perhaps it is
wrong—when so many suffer——’
‘They would not suffer a whit less if you
did not give a ball.’
She hesitated, being still shy with him, and
afraid of that which she had never seen, but
which she always dreaded, his displeasure.
‘But,’ she said timidly, ‘when one is so
very happy, one wants to do something to
deserve it. You have made for me such a
perfect life, I want to give others something
out of it. I should like to be useful, to show
that I am grateful; not only to give away
money——’
She paused, colouring a little at her own
temerity. She did not express herself very
well, because she was so much in earnest, and
so uncertain as to whether it would seem discontented
or vain in her to say so much. In an
earlier moment the words would have touched
his heart; he would have probably replied
by admitting her into some association with
the efforts of his own life, and some knowledge
of his own desires and regrets for humanity at
large. But in that instant he was only anxious
to be alone. He answered a little absently:
‘My child, ask your confessor these questions;
he will show you many ways; you
think him a good man—I have too many
doubts myself to be able to solve yours.’
He spoke with a certain impatience; the
harsher note grated on her sensitive ear. She
felt that her scruples, which were very honest
and sincere, did not meet with the same
sympathy from him that they had received a
few hours earlier.
A shadow passed over her face and she was
silent.
‘My dear,’ continued Othmar, a little
penitently, a little inconsistently, ‘I have had
such doubts as yours all my life, but no one
has ever respected me for them; not even
those in whose interest they tormented me.
We cannot be wiser than all the world. If we
stripped ourselves bare to found some community
or some universal asylum, we should
only be ridiculed as visionaries or as mischievous
disturbers of the public peace and of
the balance of fortune. Charity has oftener
created a proletariat than it has increased
prosperity. These questions have haunted
me all my life. When I have found an answer
to them, I will tell you. Until then, enjoy yourself.
You are at the age when enjoyment is
most possible and most natural. I wish your
days to be happy.’
He spoke with a certain distraction; he was
thinking little of what he said, much of the
eyes which had looked at him from under the
gloom of the fur in the mists of the dawn.
He sighed unconsciously as he felt that this
innocent young life beside him was no more
to him—hardly more—than the flower which
she wore at her throat. He recognised all its
beauty, spiritual and physical, but only as he
might have done that of a picture he looked
at, of a poem he read.
‘Enjoy yourself, dear; why not?’ he added
with kindness. ‘You were made to smile as
a primrose is made to blossom, and it is now
mid-April with you.’
He kissed her, and passed his hand carelessly
over her hair, then he glanced at the
clock on his writing-table.
‘I must leave you, for I have an appointment
to keep. What are you going to do
with your day?’
‘Blanchette is to come to me. I have not
seen her yet. The children are only now up
from Bois le Roy, and Toinon is ill.’
She answered him with a little sigh. She
wanted him to understand, and she could not
better explain, how her own intense thankfulness
for the new joys of her life filled her
sensitive conscience with a trembling longing
to become more worthy of it all, and to let the
light which was about her stream into all dark
places, and illumine them with love and peace.
But she felt chilled, and discouraged, and
silenced; and she had been so accustomed to
keep all rebellious thoughts mute, that she did
not dream of pursuing a theme to which he
appeared indifferent. He kissed her hand and
left her. She sank down for a moment on the
writing-chair he had occupied before the table,
and leaned her forehead on her hands with
the first vague sensation of loneliness which
had ever touched her since her marriage day.
‘If my little child had been born alive,’
she thought, ‘then I should always have known
what duty to do, what use to be——’
It was an infinite trouble to her conscience
that in these great palaces of the Othmars she
was as useless in her own sight as any one of
the green palm trees or the rose-hued parrots
in the conservatories. She could give money
away, indeed,—almost endlessly; but that did
not seem enough to do; that counted to her as
nothing, for it cost no effort. It hurt her to feel,
as she did feel vaguely, that she was no more
the companion of her husband than the marble
statue of Athene which stood at one end of his
great library. He was infinitely indulgent to
her. He was perfectly courteous and kind,
and generous even to excess; but he never
opened his heart to her, he never made her
those familiar confidences which are the
sweetest homage that a man can render to a
woman, even when they display his own weakness
or unwisdom. She had too little experience
to be able to measure all that this
meant, all of which it argued the absence;
but as much perception as she had of it
mortified her. At Amyôt she had vaguely
suffered from it, but here, in Paris, he seemed
very far away from her in thought and feeling.
She felt that she was but one of the ornaments
of his house, as the azaleas and palms were in
their great porcelain vases.
To be exquisitely dressed, to be the possessor
of some of the finest jewels in the world,
to be told to amuse herself as she chose, to
have the world at her feet, and all Paris
look after her as she drove over its asphalte,
would have been enough to most women of
her age to make up perfect happiness; but it
was not enough for the girl whose thoughtful
years had been passed under the sad and
solemn skies of Morbihan, and who had the
sense of duty and the instincts of honour inherited
from great races who had perished on
the scaffold and on the battle-field. There
was a pensive seriousness in her nature which
would not permit her to abandon herself
wholly to the self-indulgences and gaieties of
the life of the world. She was too grave and
too spiritual to become one of the butterflies
who flirt with folly from noonday till night.
Her chastened childhood in the darkened
rooms on the Ile St. Louis had left a gravity
with her which could not easily assimilate
itself to the levity and the licence of modern
society, which offended her taste as it affronted
her delicacy.
