Princess Napraxine, Volume 3 (of 3)

by Ouida

She remembered all that it had said. She saw as though it were written in letters of fire the fact that her husband would leave her for ever if another would stoop to accept the gift of his life. She saw the terrible, inexorable humiliation of the truth that she would only owe his fidelity, his presence, and his endurance of her in the future, to the forbearance of Nadine Napraxine.

There was no place left in her mind for reason or hope to hide in; it was all a blank desolation.

The pride, which was the strongest instinct in her, and the gratitude which was the strongest motive, were all that were left alive in the dull stupor which had overspread her brain. The one told her that every hour which Othmar spent beside her would be but as an alms cast to her by her rival; the other told her that her existence was the sole barrier between the man to whom she owed obedience, love, and fealty, and the joys which he coveted, the fate which he desired. Not alone was she herself as nothing in his life; but she was his gaoler, his burden of burdens, his one unchangeable regret and calamity. He had sought her out of mercy, generosity, kindliness; and now she was for ever in his path of life like a black shadow which hid the sunshine from his house.

She had known this, or most of this, for many months, but its cruel indignity, its dreadful truth, had never looked to her all that it looked now as she realised that pity for her unloved loneliness which made her rival relinquish her hold on her husband’s life and refuse to accept the dishonoured allegiance which he offered. She saw in those few words, which had been written for Othmar’s eyes alone, the finer impulses of generosity, the higher instincts of compassion, which had impelled Nadine Napraxine to remember her and to spare her when her husband had been willing to sacrifice her as the forest doe was sacrificed of old upon the altars of love. She did not blame him or hate him; she loved him always with the same loyalty, the same grateful, mute, and timid devotion. But all her life revolted in her at the thought that she would owe his enforced constancy to the intercession of the woman he adored; that she herself was nothing more, would for ever be nothing more, than as the clog of wood upon the captive’s foot, keeping his steps for ever in one cheerless path. She did not reason; a stupor of horror had fallen upon her; she was only conscious of this one fact, that whilst she lived Othmar would suffer.

Inherent in her nature was the heroism of a race which had never feared death or danger, and the pride, sensitive as a nerve laid bare, which made pity intolerable, charity insult, life without self-respect unendurable. A delirium of shame was upon her. There was only alive in her one consciousness—that she would never consent to live to be a torture to him, never endure to be outstripped in generosity and in renunciation by the enemy of her life. She had loved him with all the tenderness and loyalty of her nature; she had done all she could to pay him back in gratitude and affection the immeasurable gifts she owed to him; but she had long known that she had failed, that she had no power to console or to beguile him. She was only a weariness to him, a chain upon his liberties, a companion undesired and irremovable, a thing useless and joyless, which, being lost, would be never missed and never regretted.

Nay, the gates of life closing for ever on herself would let the light of the future stream in, white and fair, across his path.

Her mind was dulled and her whole being strung to unnatural excitation; the many months in which she had shut her unuttered sorrow in silence in her own breast had in a manner disturbed the balance of her mind. That solitude in thought and absence of sustaining sympathy, which may be as bracing as the north wind to older or sterner lives, had to her youthfulness and timid susceptibility been fatal as the north wind is to the shyly-flowering spring. She had lost all hold on proportion in her lonely grief; she had become morbidly self-absorbed, and grew in her own sight a useless and undesired burden. All which remained distinct to her were her pride, which revolted from acceptation of her rival’s intercession in her favour, and the piteous sense that no devotion, no sacrifice, no effort on her part could ever make her more in her husband’s existence than a weight, a weariness, a thing undesired and unloved. The unselfishness and the loftiness of her instincts now served her worse than any fault or feebleness would have done. So long as she lived nothing, she knew, could serve him or release him. The patience and the piety which her confessor ceaselessly put before her as the eternal and unfailing panacea of woe could do nothing to give him happiness whilst she was there beside him; only her vacant place, her stiff dead limbs, her forgotten grave—these alone could be the precursors of any joy or liberty for him.

She did not reason thus, but she was moved by the knowledge of it, as one groping in the dark is guided by his touch. For the moment that sublime insanity of self-sacrifice was on her which has sent all the martyrs of the world to self-sought death.

By that which she believed divine law she knew that she was forbidden to loose the cord of life. To forestall the summons of God was to her implicit faith a guilt so dark that it would cast its shadow athwart all eternity. But as her people had flung themselves by choice upon the pikes of the revolutionists rather than outlive their king, so she was willing now to cast herself into the jaws of death rather than outlive the loss of hope, the loss of honour.

In her sight all his gifts, all his embraces, all the possessions with which he had dowered her, were but so much dishonour, being only the alms of pity and of charity, the forced atonement of a chill indifference. To live one other hour beneath his roof and by his side seemed to her, in all the dim, blind stupor of her thoughts, an indignity before which any death were blessed. She had the silent resolution and the endurance, meek yet dogged, of her Breton blood; these held her outwardly calm and restrained, while the delirium of self-sacrifice drove her headlong to her fate. She had never loved him more than she loved him at that moment. She had clearness of memory and strength of devotion enough to think, even in those terrible instants, of the only ways in which she could spare him pain. If he knew that her death was self-sought, remorse would be with him all his days.