'Write to me,' said Othmar again. With a gentle movement he stooped and kissed her on the soft thick waves of hair which fell over her forehead.
Then he left her.
She remained standing in the same place and the same attitude, her feet in the mown grass growing wet with dew, her head bent like a statue of meditation. The caress had been gentle, slight, passionless, like a kiss to a child; but her face and bosom had grown hot with blushes which the evening shadows veiled, and a strange vague joy and pain strove together in her.
CHAPTER XXX.
It was eight o'clock in the evening on the plains of Russia, and warm with that Asiatic heat which comes with the reign of the dog-star even to the provinces that lie between the Baltic waters and the Ural snows. In the vast gardens and white wide courts of the house at Zaraïla the evening was sultry, and Nadège, spending a few dull days in her annual visit to her elder children and their estates, was lying half asleep upon a couch, listening to the monotonous drip of the lion-fountain in the central court, and thinking of nothing in especial. This visit had always represented to her supreme and unmitigated tedium. It was a duty to come there no doubt; her duties were docile courtiers as a rule and seldom troubled her; but it was tiresome, infinitely tiresome, it was so much time lost out of the sum of her life. Why is duty never agreeable?
The Napraxine children were in their own apartments; the clear sunny evening, whose light would stretch almost to dawn, illumined the gardens and terraces. She reclined motionless upon her broad low couch, with a little cigarette between her lips, now and then sending into the air around her delicate rings of rose-scented smoke. The mother of Platon Napraxine, a woman old and austere, with the terrible austerity of women who have loved pleasure and passion, and only turned to devotion when both have deserted them, sat near and watched her with dark, brooding, sunken eyes, full of a hate which the object of it was too indifferent and too careless to care for or to measure.
The Princess Lobow Gregorievna, born a Princess Miliutine, was a woman who had been handsome, but had now lost nearly all trace of past beauty. She was spare, colourless, and attenuated, and her severe, straight profile, and her expression of ascetic rigidity, gave her a curious likeness to those Byzantine portraits of St. Anne and of St. Elizabeth which were surrounded with jewels and relics on the altars of her private chapel. Her piety in old age was as complete and absorbing as her licentious amours had been in her earlier womanhood. Superstition had taken the same empire over her in age which her passions had possessed previously; and she was as extravagant in her donations to church and convent as she had once been to the impecunious officers of the guard and princely gamblers, who had been in turn favoured with her fantastic and short-lived preference. Her religious and most orthodox fervour was neither a mask nor an hypocrisy. It was the most genuine of all religions—that which is founded on personal fear. But it intensified the hardness of her temper, and never whispered to her that mercy might be holier than long prayers.
In all Europe Othmar and his wife had no enemy colder, harder, more implacable than this holy woman, whose name meant Love, and whose good works were seen in endowed convents, jewelled reliques, mighty treasures bestowed all over her province, and ceremonials, fasts, and penances of the orthodox most rigidly observed in her person. Nadège never tried to conciliate or propitiate her grim foe; she was at once too careless and too courageous. With her delicate and unsparing raillery she had stung this enmity with many a barbed word, subtle and negligent and penetrating, accentuated with the cruel sweet music of her laughter, until the hatred with which the Princess Lobow hated her was deep as the Volga, though hidden like the Volga's bottomless holes so long as Platon Napraxine had lived. His death had given it justification, and intensified it a thousandfold.
'If she were a good woman she would be compelled to hate me,' thought the object of her hate. 'And being what she is, if she could poison me secretly she would do it, even in the blessed bread itself.'