‘My brother has been killed on the ice in the Gulf of S. Lawrence.’
There were no details, only the bare fact, as it had been brought with the same crushing curtness by the electric cable from the western to the eastern shores of the Atlantic.
Nadine Napraxine read it three times without at the first realising or believing it. The news gave her a shock; not a great one, but still a kind of chilly pain and vague terror. A mist swam for a moment before her eyes; a sorrow, which was quite sincere, moved her as the sense of what she read gradually grew more and more distinct. A sudden remembrance smote her of Geraldine, as she had seen him first some three years earlier, standing on the beach at Biarritz, clad in his blue sea-clothes, with the sun shining full on his fair frank features and in his clear, happy, candid eyes. He had looked at her; his sister had beckoned to him, and had said carelessly: ‘Ralph, is it possible that you do not know Madame Napraxine?’ and he had come up to them over the rough red rocks, the sun and the wind playing in his bright hair. And then, life had never again been quite the same to him, and now it was over for ever. He was dead, just thirty years old!
‘Pauvre garçon!’ she said, with genuine regret, as she had said the same words when they had told her that the young Louis Napoléon had been killed at Isandula. It was not the regret for which the dead man, thinking of her as the frozen night had closed in on him and over the wastes of ice-bound waters, perchance had hoped. ‘Pauvre garçon!’ she murmured where she sat, amidst the profusion of the flowers. For the moment she felt cold in her room, which was as warm as a summer day, and through whose double windows of opalescent glass no breath of the outer air could penetrate.
‘I suppose they will say I did this too!’ she thought with impatience, her memory reverting to the death of young Seliedoff even whilst she said again very softly to herself, ‘Pauvre garçon!’
She was sincerely sorry; she felt nothing of that more passionate and personal pain which once Geraldine might not unnaturally have hoped that his death would excite in her, but a sincere regret mingled with a kind of annoyance that men who had loved her would always go and run some tragic risks, so that they perished miserably:—and then the world blamed her.
‘I, who detest tragedies!’ she said to the little dog. ‘When the majority of men, too, always live too long, live to have gout, and use spectacles, and grow tiresome!’
‘Pauvre garçon, pauvre garçon!’ she murmured once more, in the only threnody which occurred to her: how could he go and get drowned in the S. Lawrence, where the ice was surely as thick as in the Neva? She had always liked to play at being Providence to her world, a very capricious and unkind Providence indeed, but still one which decided their destinies without any reference to their desires as Providence is always permitted to do. She did not like these rude gusts of uncalled for accident which blew out the lives which she held in her hand as if they were so many tapers!
‘Pauvre garçon!’