She herself was in a gentle and gracious mood; she was not quite so merciless in speech as usual, but she was quite as charming. The Duc d’Aumale sat on her right hand, the English Ambassador on her left. Her airy laughter rang ever and again like silver bells; and Napraxine, even in the midst of the surprised gratitude with which he saw his pink pearls honoured by being worn, thought with a sense of depression and wonder: ‘If I were to die to-morrow, would she care a whit more than she cares now for Ralph?’
CHAPTER XXXIX.
The telegram had merely said that Geraldine had been killed on the ice in the Gulf of S. Lawrence. There had been no details; but later on all the world learned that death had come to him in the freshness of his manhood by one of those trite accidents so common in North American waters in the beginning of winter, when the ice is still loose and detached, and is borne to and fro by the sullen waves which seem unwilling to endure its chains. He had been standing on an ice floe, off the Prince Edward Island, with Canadian hunters, seeking seals, when that portion of it which sustained them had suddenly broken away before they were aware of their danger, and, drifting with frightful rapidity, had borne them out to sea at the close of the short, bitter winter’s day. Many on the shore were witnesses of the certain death to which they were carried, but no help was possible before the darkness of night came down,—the night which froze all human life left without shelter in it.
Where the floe went none knew; when the dawn broke there was no trace of its passage to be made out amidst the many masses of ice rocking, meeting, parting, crashing one upon another as the frost strove to bind beneath its iron hold the free will and the wild anger of the sea. Whether those who had been upon it had been drowned, or frozen to death, or borne out to mid-Atlantic, none could know; but on the third day the body of Geraldine and of two of the Canadian fishermen had been washed ashore off the New Brunswick coast: his features had been recognised by his own crew, and the tidings of his cruel fate had been sent to his mother and his sisters. He had been the only son of a high and honourable House. There was the grief which sorrowed without hope in the old north country halls, where a widowed mother wept for him, and a loyal and loving tenantry followed his body to its grave by the fair Yore waters.
One Tuesday evening, some two weeks later, when Nadine Napraxine returned home from the opera to change her gown for a ball at Prince Orloff’s, there lay on her dressing-room table, amongst others, a letter of which the superscription was very familiar to her, and which moved her with a certain sense which was as nearly fear as it was possible for her temperament to know.
She herself had written to Geraldine’s people, but no one of them had answered her until now that Evelyn Brancepeth did so. She broke the envelope and read the letter, standing in the costume of Venetian red embroidered with silver flowers, in which, at the opera that night, she had held all the eyes of the house upon her as she sat, careless, indifferent, half hidden behind her great red fan, the diamond butterflies which served in the place of sleeves trembling upon her shoulders.
‘I know very well,’ wrote Lady Brancepeth, ‘that before the world you are wholly blameless. I know that my unhappy brother had no right to consider himself preferred by you. I know, were I speaking with you now, you would say with your chilliest manner that you had never honoured him with any encouragement to folly. But you will pardon me if I say that you are more blamable to me than you would be if you had loved him. I am a plain, stupid, unromantic Englishwoman, but even I can see that love excuses its own excesses: l’amour prime le droit. I could pardon a great passion if it even committed a great crime. But you have no passion, you have even no sentiment. You are sometimes amused, and you are sometimes—much more often—bored; and there the scale of your emotions rounds itself and ends. There may be someone who can, or who will, extend for you that narrow circle, though I very greatly doubt it; but it was entirely certain that poor Ralph had never any chance or any power to do so. He adored you, quite stupidly and hopelessly, but he never even knew how to say so in such a manner as could have touched you. He was very English, very terre à terre, and if he had never seen you he would have led a happy life enough; a commonplace one, no doubt, but one useful in his generation, and content with those simple joys which to a raffinée like you seem so absurd and so dull. But he did meet you; and ever afterwards life meant nothing to him unless it meant your presence, and your will. You had admitted him into the honour of a certain intimacy, which, in his blundering English way, he fancied meant all kinds of eventualities that it did not mean. No doubt his delusion was of his own creating, and of course he ought to have been prepared for his dismissal when he had become troublesome or tedious; but he was so unwise that he put all his heart into that which he should have understood was a mere jeu de salon; and you did not condescend to give him any warning. Why should you? you will say. Why, indeed, since his fate was as entirely indifferent to you as the bouquets that crowd your antechambers in Carnaval. It would have been so very easy for you, when first my brother ventured to show you what he felt, to banish him for ever with a decisive word; he would have been man enough to understand and to accept it; but you did not take that trouble, and the love of you grew—not perhaps precisely upon hope—but at least upon the tacit permission to exist. I scarcely know why I write all this to you, for you will not read it; only I have been your friend, so far as you allow any woman to call herself so, and I feel that whenever we meet in the world you will expect me to be so still, and I cannot. I must ask you to let us be strangers. No doubt, actually, you are innocent of my brother’s death, but indirectly—even in a manner directly—you were the cause of it. You made his country, his family, his home life, his duties of all kinds, become no more to him than if he had never known land or kindred. The pain with which you filled him made him wander in an aimless unrest from place to place in an alien world with which he had no sympathy, and made him only too willing to die, that he might so throw off the fever of your memory. My dear Nadine, you are a woman of perfect honour, of high repute, of sensitive and unbending pride, and on the ermine of your delicate dignity there is no stain as yet. But for me, there is blood upon your hand. I can never take it in my own again. Let us be strangers.’
The letter was signed, and nothing more was added to it.