CHAPTER XXXI.
‘Othmar cueillant les marguerites aux bois!’ said Nadine Napraxine, with her most unkind smile, when she heard that he remained under the Valois woods until autumn.
She herself was in Russia; forced also to gather daisies in her own manner, which always wearied her. It was necessary to be seen awhile at Tsarkoe Selo, or wherever the Imperial people were; and then to visit for a few months the immense estates of Prince Napraxine. They had gone thither earlier than usual through the suicide of Boris Seliedoff, which had cast many noble northern families into mourning, and had for a moment chilled the feeling of Europe in general towards herself.
‘It was so inconsiderate of him!’ she said more than once. ‘Everyone was sure to put it upon me!’
It seemed to her very unjust.
She had been kind to the boy, and then had rebuked him a little as anybody else would have done. Who could imagine that he would blow his brains out under the palms and aloes, like any décavé without a franc?
She was exceedingly angry that the world should venture to blame her. When her Imperial mistress, receiving her first visit, gave some expression to this general sentiment, and presumed to hazard some phrases which suggested a hint of reproof, Nadine Napraxine revolted with all the pride of her temper, and did not scruple to respond to her interlocutor that the Platoff and the Napraxine both were of more ancient lineage and greater traditions in Russia than those now seated on the throne.
To her alone would it have been possible to make such a reply and yet receive condonation of it, as she did. There was in her a force which no one resisted, a magnetism which no one escaped.