She did not stop her carriage to speak to any of her acquaintances, for she supposed that the news of Geraldine’s death would by this time be known in Paris, where he had so many friends, and knew that everyone would take pleasure in saying to her—‘Mais comment donc? Est-ce bien vrai?—’ It would be so tiresome!
‘I cannot help it if they kill themselves!’ she said to herself as her horses sped along the frosty roads. ‘Society will blame me now, but I imagine they would have blamed me much more if I had gone away into his north-country mists with poor Geraldine as he would have liked me to do; he was so sensational, poor fellow, and so romantic under his English awkwardness. Englishmen are like that; they can seldom say anything they mean properly, but they are very romantic under it all; they are always ready to compromise themselves, despite their decorum, and they have just the dogged fidelity of their own bulldogs.’
He had been better than most of them certainly.
She felt a certain pain as she went through the chill sharp air and heavy mists, and remembered how many times she had seen Geraldine come riding through the trees, and how boyishly his face had flushed whenever he had seen her first! Poor foolish fellow! to leave all his possessions and interests and duties, and to go out to Ottawa, where he had no earthly business to be, as if going to Ottawa were likely to deliver him of her memory! That was so truly an Englishman’s idea, to change latitude and longitude and think you left behind you any inconvenient passion you might be haunted with by merely changing your climate and your food! ‘Poor Ralph! Poor Ralph! I think there was nothing on earth tragic, ridiculous, or abominable that he would not have done if I had ordered him to do it—except that he would never have killed Platon. I do not think even I could have made him kill Platon. That is the sort of scruple an Englishman always has, alone of all men in the world.’
‘I suppose she knows it, but she does not care,’ said many persons, looking after her as their wont was, as she flashed past them, nothing scarcely seen of her except her luminous eyes looking out from the brown lustre of the sealskins, whilst she made an almost imperceptible gesture of her head to the innumerable salutations that marked her course.
‘When we get rid of the camisole de force,’ she said to herself, ‘we shall get rid of bowing to each other; it is insane, when everyone meets everyone else morning, noon, and night, to be obliged to jerk one’s head fifty times every quarter of an hour when one is out of doors!’
She scarcely moved hers, indeed, but still it was a trouble; it was to avoid the trouble that she sometimes took those long solitary drives into the open country, of which the motive constantly perplexed her world. To any other woman they would have attributed assignations, but no one could ever do that to the Princess Napraxine; her absolute indifference was too notorious a fact, and the dullest who knew aught of her felt that if ever she awoke to any preference she would never stoop to mask it. She cared nothing for the opinion of any living being. She had no lover, only because she had no love.
Under her nonchalance and her occasional sentiments of sympathy with revolutionists, she was of an inexorably proud temperament; she would have liked to be an empress,—an empress such as was seen in earlier times, whose mere breath spoke the fiat of life and death. As it was, she could only vex the souls of men and kill orchids.
When she reached home, after driving until dusk, she passed through her boudoir to see if Paul had obeyed her. He had obeyed her implicitly: the windows were still wide open and the bitter biting air was streaming into the room, driving out before it all the heat from the calorifère; all the poor flowers were withered, as if a scorch from fire had passed over them, and the beautiful butterfly petals were mere shrivelled, shapeless leaves. It had been a pity, she thought, to have obeyed her so exactly; yet she knew very well that if he had not done so, Paul, despite his twenty-five years of service to the house of Napraxine, would have found himself outside her doors for evermore that night.
‘Shut them now,’ she said to him, as he waited for her commands, ‘and take away all those baskets and bouquets.’