Nadine Napraxine was not only charming to his eyes and taste, as to those of all men, but she interested him with the attraction which a complicated and not-easily-unravelled character possesses for all intellectual people. He had perceived in her those gifts mental and moral which, under suitable circumstance, make the noblest of temperaments, and he also perceived in her an indefinite potentiality for cruelty and for tyranny; the conflict between the two interested him as a psychological study. He could not but censure her intolerance of Napraxine; yet neither could he refuse to sympathise with it. The Prince was the last man on earth to have been able to attain any power over that variable, contemptuous, and subtle temperament and over an intelligence refined by culture to the utmost perfection of taste and hypercriticism of judgment. He adored her indeed, but c’est le pire défaut in such cases; and a hippopotamus in his muddy sedges might have done so, with as much hope as he, of exciting anything more than her impatience and contempt.
‘I certainly do not,’ she repeated, as she lay on a divan after dinner, in a grand hall imitated from the Alhambra, with a copy of the Lion fountain in white marble in the centre, and groves of palms in white marble vases lifting their green banners against the deep glow of the many-coloured fretwork and diapered gold of the walls. ‘They are two quite uninteresting children, stupid, obstinate, proud, already convinced that a Prince Napraxine has only to breathe a wish to see it accomplished. At present they are good tempered and are fond of each other, but that will not last long; they will soon feel their claws and use them. They are quite wonderfully ugly;—an ugliness flat, heavy, animal, altogether Tartar. I imagine I could have been fond of a child like any other woman, but then I think with any mother it must be always the child of a man she loves; it must be the symbol of sympathy and the issue of joy——’
She spoke dreamily, almost regretfully, her delicate head lying back amongst the pillows of golden silk, while she sent a little cloud of smoke into the air.
Melville looked at her: he thought that there were persons who were like the Neva river; the Neva does not freeze of itself, but it has so many huge blocks of ice rolled down into it from above that it looks as if it did.
He hesitated a moment; he was too sagacious a man of the world to intrude his own beliefs where they would only have met with unbelief.
‘What can I say?’ he murmured. ‘Only that I suppose maternal love, after all, like all other love, does not come at command; human nature has always been under the illusion that it was a spontaneous and irresistible growth.’
‘Human nature has so many illusions,’ said Nadine Napraxine. ‘But I have never heard that much reason underlies any one of them.’
‘But does not our happiness?’ said Melville.
She laughed a little.