She was, however, extremely angered, both by the remarks made to her at Court, and about her in European society, and withdrew herself to the immense solitudes of the province of Kaluga in an irritation which was not without dignity. Men who adored her, of whom there were many, noticed that her self-exile to Zaraïzoff coincided with that of Othmar to Amyôt; but there was no one who would have dared to say so. Geraldine had gone to North America, which had amused her.
‘He will not shoot himself,’ she thought. ‘He will shoot a vast number of innocent beasts instead. Seliedoff was the manlier of the two.’
Zaraïzoff was a mighty place set amongst the endless woods and rolling plains of the north-eastern provinces; a huge rambling structure half fortress, half palace, with the village clustering near as in other days when the Tartars might sweep down on it like vultures. The wealth of the Napraxines had made it within almost oriental in its luxury; without, it had much of the barbaric wildness of the country, and it had been here in the first two intolerable years after her marriage that she had learned to love to be drawn by half-wild horses at lightning speed over the snow plains, with the bay of the wolves on the air, and the surety of fatal frost-bite if the furs were incautiously dropped a moment too soon.
At Zaraïzoff, when she established herself there for the summer, she brought usually a Parisian household with her, and inviting a succession of guests, filled with a great movement and gaiety of life the sombre courts, the silent galleries and chambers, the antique walls all covered with vivid paintings like a Byzantine church, the long low salons luxurious as a Persian harem. But this summer it saw her come almost alone. Her children came also from southern Russia, and Platon Napraxine at least was happy.
‘Is it possible to be uglier than that; not surely among the Kalmucks!’ she thought, looking in the good-tempered little Tartar-like faces of her two small sons.
They were absurdly like their father; but, as they promised to be also, like him, tall and well-built, would probably, as they grew up, find many women, as he had found many, to tell them they were handsome men; but that time was far off, and as yet they were but ugly children. Sachs and Mitz (Alexander and Demetrius) were respectively five and six years old, big, stout, ungainly little boys, with flat blunt features, in which the Tartar blood of the Napraxine was prominently visible. They had a retinue of tutors, governesses, bonnes, and attendants of all kinds, and had been early impressed with the opinion that a Napraxine had no superior on earth save the Gospodar.
‘Ils ont pris la peine de naître!’ quoted their mother with contempt as she beheld their arrogant little pomposities: she could never forgive them that they had done so. It was natural that when she looked in her mirror she could scarcely bring herself to believe that they had been the issue of her own life.
‘I suppose I ought to adore them, but I certainly do not,’ she said to Melville, who, having been sent on a mission to Petersburg by the Vatican in the vain hope of mitigating by the charm of his manner the hard fate of the Catholic Poles, had paused for a day at Zaraïzoff to obey the summons of its mistress, travelling some extra thousand versts to do so. It was to him that she had made the remark about the daisies.
Melville, though he was a priest whose vows were truly sacred obligations in his eyes, was also keenly alive to those enjoyments of the graces and luxuries of life which his frequent employment in diplomatic missions for the head of his Church made it not only permissible but desirable for him to indulge in at times. His brief visit to Zaraïzoff, and other similar diversions, were agreeable episodes in months of spiritual effort and very serious intellectual work, and he abandoned himself to the amusement of such occasional rewards with the youthful ardour which sixty years had not tamed in him.