Othmar

by Ouida

Her grief and her rage were terrible: the more terrible because the hatred which might have assuaged it had no outlet in action, could scarce have any in speech.

For Platon Napraxine had left his young sons wholly in the hands of their mother, and she could take them whither she would, and do with them whatever she chose; and the elder woman, who had transferred to them all that jealous and violent attachment which she had given their father, concealed all she felt that she might retain them near her, whilst the secretiveness and ruses of the Slav temperament made it possible for her to continue in apparent friendship before the world with one whom she looked on as his destroyer.

She sat now erect on an antique chair of gilded and painted leather, and through her dropped eyelids watched the indolent attitude, the profound idleness, the outstretched limbs, like those of a reposing Diana, of the woman she loathed. In all the attitude, from the sans gêne and complete ease of it to the little rose-scented puffs of smoke which ever and again came from her parted lips, there was that 'note of modernity' which beyond all other things the Princess Lobow detested. The women of her time had been as licentious as the great Catharine herself, but they had been different to the cocodettes in manner, in mind, in opinion, in everything. They had been like fierce Oriental empresses, often barbarous, uncleanly, gross, but they had had a stateliness which all their excesses could not impair. The modern woman of the world, with her careless attitudes, her mockery of all ceremonial, her disrespect for tradition and etiquette, her airy scepticism, and her vague dissatisfaction, was, wherever she was met with, an enigma and an affront to the elder woman, whose own life had been divided between strong vices and strong faiths, and whose bigotry and whose sensuality had been of equal force. They had neither senses nor souls, these poor modern anémiques, thought this woman of seventy years, who had been a Messalina and who had become a St. Katherine.

'Ah, you despise us, madame; how right you are!' Nadège had said to her once. 'We never know what we wish, and when we get what we ask for, we are as irritated as when it is denied to us. It is the fault of all culture—it creates discontent and fastidiousness as surely as civilisation brings all kinds of new diseases. I only wish that we could be like our granddames and godmothers, who had no earthly ideals beyond a constant succession of big officers of cuirassiers, and no mental doubt whatever as to the existence of a "bon Dieu." It must have simplified life so much to have been able to balance the little weakness for the succession of cuirassiers with such a perfect confidence in Heaven!'

At this moment in the summer evening at Zaraïla neither of them were speaking. They had exchanged many cruel, courteous innuendoes in the course of the day, but with the evening there had come a tacit truce. The little boys were wholly under the power of their mother as their guardian, and their grandmother feared that if she were too much irritated she might remove them from Zaraïla or request her to leave it. Nadine, on her side, had thought, with a sense of compassion and that disdainful but candid justice which was seldom wanting in her: 'After all, as she loved that poor, big, clumsy fellow so well, and he was her only son—the only thing she had—it is pardonable, it is natural, that she should hate me for ever.'

It grew late, but it was still light with the long and radiant evening of the north in summer. She, in the drowsy heat of the eventide, looked with still dreamy eyes out on to the sultry gardens beneath, where golden evening light was poured on endless aisles and fields of roses, and groves of feathery bananas and plumed palms; the vegetation of the vales of Kashmere made by art to blossom there for the brief season of a Russian summer.

'How very foolish women are to fear absence,' she thought. 'Absence is the only possible avenue which can lead us to find the fontaine de jouvence of renewed interest. Familiarity is so fatal—so fatal! Helen's self would be unable to hold her own against it. Those silly women who let the man they love enter their chamber as easily as he can go into his racing stables, set a great grey ghost of indifference at the threshold. Most women are afraid of not being near what they love. If they only knew how distance helps them; how constant proximity hurts them! If Love cannot keep a few surprises in his pocket, he is as tiresome as a newspaper a week old.'

She laughed a little, watching the leaves of a full-blown rose fall under the touch of an alighting bird.

'When it has once been full-blown,' she thought, 'any touch—even a bird's, even a butterfly's—will serve to finish it for ever.'

Love was so like that great crimson rose, which a moment before had been a cup of ruby-coloured fragrance, and now was a mere litter of dropped leaves upon the grass. Love lives by its emotions, its desires, its illusions: so long as these can be excited and sustained it is Love; when they cannot be so, it is as the Spanish poet said centuries ago, habit, friendship, what you will, but not Love any more.