What a coward he had been to shelter himself behind the frail rampart of a young girl’s affection; affection which he did not appreciate, did not reciprocate, did not value!
A woman with a tithe part of the discernment and the experience which she possessed could cast the horoscope of Yseulte without any recourse to the stars for knowledge of the future. All that fresh and tender love would count for nothing, would avail nothing, would awaken no response. She would bear his children, and live in his houses, and be the object of all his careful outward observance, and that would be all. He would grow unspeakably weary of seeing her, of hearing her, of remembering her tie to him, and he would conceal his weariness ill or well, and be every day more and more galled by the necessity for concealment.
When Nadine Napraxine, after the ball, went to her own rooms that night, she had herself undressed by her women and wrapped in a loose bed-room gown, made of her favourite white satin, and lined with eider-down. She dismissed her women, and lay before the warmth of her dressing-room fire in that dreamy state between waking and sleeping which is the very perfection of repose. The softly-lighted chambers opened one out of another in a vista of rich subdued colour, ending in the bath room, where a lamp hung above a beautiful reproduction of the Venus of Naples. The rooms were so many temples to her own perfections, she was the Grace, the Muse, and the Venus herself of this perfect sanctuary, which no footfall of man had ever dared invade. As she reclined before the fire that night and glanced through her half-closed lids down the succession of chambers, which in the clear but delicate light had the glow of jewels, she thought how dull and empty they would have seemed to most women of her years without a lover’s step coming silently and swiftly through the fragrant silence.
‘Decidedly,’ she mused, ‘the voix de la nature says nothing at all to me. Is it because I have no heart, as they say? I do not think the heart has much to do with that kind of thing. I suppose I am cold, as they all cry out against me. Of all of them, there is no one I should care to see coming through those shadows; he would disturb me. The passions are coarse things. It is disgusting that there should not be two ways of love, one for Dona Sol and one for Manon Lescaut—for one’s self and one’s maid. But there are not. On se rend, ou on ne se rend pas; but when the submission is made Nature makes no difference between Cleopatra and a camp-follower.’
She sighed a little, inconsistently. She disdained alike the solicitations of the senses and the pleasures of the affections, and yet she was conscious of a certain coldness and emptiness in her life; she was not prepared to confess that what she needed was love, but a vague impression of solitude came upon her. She remembered the lips of Othmar pressed upon her wrist, how they had burned, how they had trembled!
Was it possible that the keenest joys of life lay, after all, in those follies which her temperament and her philosophies had classed with contempt amongst the excesses of wantons and the exaggerations of poets?
The purest maiden in her cloister could not have been colder than was Nadine Napraxine; to her the indulgence of the senses only meant an intolerable humiliation, an ignominious outrage; maternity itself had only been to her a long and hated and revolting burden, a sign of unendurable degradation, which offended all her pride and all her delicacy. The satyr had always seemed to her a much juster emblem of such instincts than any winged amorino.
‘D’un être inconnu le contact passager’
could not rouse any desire or any sentiment in her.
And yet there were occasionally moments, fleeting ones it is true, when in the sublimated egoism of her indolent, ironical, artificial life, she had a vague impression of some possible passion which yet might arouse her to acknowledge its force; a tempestuous fancy swept over her, as a storm-wind may sweep over a parterre of tulips and azaleas, for stronger emotions, hotter enmities, dearer attachments, keener strife, than those which the polished inanities of her own sphere could yield to her. The emotion lasted with her very little time, but whilst it was there the eyes of Othmar always looked in memory into hers.