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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
'Opportunity.'
'Destiny.'
'Predestination.'
'Circumstance.'
'Affinity.'
'Affinity can only hold them on that millionth occasion when a perfect
love is the result.'
'Usually Chance and Circumstance fill the scales, and they are two
roguish boys who like to make mischief. Affinity is the angel;
perhaps the only angel by which poor humanity is ever led into an
earthly paradise.'
'That is worthy of Philip Sydney.'
'Or of the Earl of Lytton.'
'And is so charming that we will not risk having anything coarse or
commonplace said after it. Let us adjourn the debate till to-morrow.'
'Nay, Majesté; let us pass to another question: What is the greatest
dilemma of Love?'
'To have to galvanise itself into an imitation of life when it is dead.'
'Is it worse to be the last to love, or the first to grow tired?'
'In the former case one's self-esteem is hurt; in the latter one's
conscience.'
'The wounds of conscience are sooner cured than those of vanity.'
'Whoever loves most loves longest.'
'No, whoever is least loved loves longest.'
'How is that to be explained?'
'The contradictions of human nature will usually suffice to explain
everything.'
'But there may be another explanation also; the one who is least
loved is the least cloyed, and the most apprehensive of alteration.'
'Love is best worked with egotism, as gold is worked with alloy.'
'Surely the essential loveliness of love is self-sacrifice?'
'That is a theory. In fact, the only satisfactory love is one which gives
and receives mutual pleasure. When there is self-sacrifice on one
side the pleasure also is one-sided.'
'Then the revellers of the Decamerone knew more of love than
Dante?'
'That is approaching a theme too full of dangers to be discussed—
the difference between physical and spiritual love. I do not consider
that you have satisfactorily answered the previous question: What is
the greatest dilemma of Love?'
'When, in the open doorway of its house of life, one passion, grown
old and grey, passes out limping, and meets another passion newly
come thither, and laughing, with the blossoms of April in its sunny
hair.'
'What a sonnet in a sentence! What is Love to do in such a case?
Shall he detain the grey-haired crippled guest?'
'He cannot. For the more he shall endeavour to retain him the
thinner and paler and more impalpable will the withered and lame
passion grow.'
'And the newly-come one?'
'Oh, he will enter, smiling and strong, and will fill the house with the
music of his pipe and the odour of his hyacinths for awhile, until he
too shall in turn pass outwards, when his music is silent and his
flowers are dead.'
'Is Love then always to be mourned like Lycidas?'
'He is in no sense like Lycidas; Lycidas died, a perfect youth. Love,
with time, grows pale and wan and feeble, and a very shadow of
itself, before it dies.'
'There are some who say, if he have not immortality he is not Love
at all; but only Caprice, Vanity, Wantonness, or faithless Fancy,
masquerading in his dress.'
'How can that be immortal which has no existence without mortal
forms?'
'Here is one of the notes of modernity! The sad note of self-
consciousness; the consciousness of mortality and of insignificance;
the memento mori which is always with us. And yet we do not
respect death, we only hate it and fear it; because it will make of us
a dreary, ugly, putrid thing. That is all we know. And the knowledge
dulls even our diversions. We can be gouailleur, but we cannot be
gay if we would.'
'There is too great a tendency here to use gros mots—devotion,
death, immortality, &c. They are a mistake in a disquisition which
wishes to be witty. They are like the use of cannon in an opera. But I
think, even in France, the secret of lightness of wit is lost. We have
all read too much German philosophy.'
'We will endeavour to be gayer to-morrow. We will wake all the
shades of Brantôme.'
'Well,' their sovereign declared, as she rose, 'we have held our Court
to little avail; some pretty things have been said, and some stupid
ones, but we have arrived at no definite conclusion, unless it be this:
that love is only respectable when it is unhappy, and ceases to exist
the moment it is contented.'
'A cruel sentence, Madame!'
'Human nature is cruel; so is Time.'
When the sun had wholly set, and only a warm yellow glow through
all the west told that its glory had passed, the Court broke up for
that day, and strolled in picturesque groups towards the house as
the chimes of the clock tower told the hour of dinner.
'How very characteristic of our time and of our world,' said the
queen, as she drew her ivory-hued, violet-laden skirts over the
smooth turf. 'We have talked for three whole hours of Love, and
nobody has ever thought of mentioning Marriage as his kinsman!'
'He who has had the honour to marry you might well have done so,
had he been here to-day,' murmured a courtier on her right.
She laughed, looking up into the deep-blue evening sky through the
network of green leaves:
'But he was not here, so he was saved the difficulty of choice
between an insincerity and a rudeness, always a very serious
dilemma to him. Marriage is the grave of love, my dear friend, even
if he be buried with roses for his pillow and lilies for his shroud.'
'But Love may be stronger than Death. Solomon has said so.'
'What is stronger than Death? Death is stronger than all of us. Tout
cela pourrira. It is the despair of the lover and the poet, and the
consolation of the beggar when the rich and the beautiful go past
him.'
She spoke with a certain melancholy, and absently struck the tall
heads of seeding grasses with her ivory sceptre.
'We have only wearied you, I fear,' said her companion, with
contrition and mortification.
'That is the fault of Love,' she answered, with a smile.
As they left the shadow of the trees, crossing the grassland was a
herd of cows and calves already passing away in the distance, going
to their byres; far behind them, lingering willingly, were the
herdsman and his love; he a comely lad in a blue blouse and a
peaked cap, she a smiling buxom maiden with dusky tresses under a
linen coif, and cheeks glowing like a 'Catherine pear, the side that's
next the sun.'
'Lubin and Lisette,' said Béthune with a smile, 'practically illustrating
what we have been spoiling with the too fine wire-drawing of
analysis. I am sure that they come much nearer than we to the
story-tellers of the Heptameron.'
The châtelaine of Amyôt looked at the two rustic lovers with a little
wistfulness and a good-natured contempt.
They had passed out of the shade of the woods, and the rose-glow
of evening illumined their interlaced figures as they followed their
cows.
'"To know is much, yet to enjoy is more,"' she quoted. 'I suppose
that is what you mean. Yet I rather incline to think that love as a
sentiment is the product of education. The cows know almost as
much of it as your Lubin and Lisette.'
'Brandès says,' observed one of her party, 'that love as a sentiment
was always unknown in a state of nature, and was only created with
the first petticoat. Petticoats have invariably been responsible for a
great deal. They ruined France, according to the Great Frederic; but
if they have raised us from the level of the cattle they have
redeemed their repute.'
'Poor cattle! They have as much poetry in their eyes as there is in
the Penseroso. Lubin and Lisette are Naturkinder; but when both a
cow and Lisette become the property of Lubin, he will assign the
higher place to the first, both in life and in death.'
'Well, he shall have both of them, for having met us at so apropos
an instant,' she answered with, a little smile. 'Perhaps the only word
of truth that has been said in the whole discussion was the
quotation: "Il n'y a que les commencements qui sont charmants!"'
The great woodland which they traversed as she spoke opened into
an avenue of beeches, long and straight, the branches meeting and
interlacing overhead until the opening at the farther end looked like
an arched doorway closing a cathedral aisle. The archway was filled
with dim golden suffused light, and within that archway of twilight
and golden haze there rose the snowy column of a high-reaching
fountain; it was the first of the grandes eaux of the garden of
Amyôt. And the sovereign of the Court of Love was she who had
once been the Princess Napraxine.
 CHAPTER II.
As they entered on the smoother sward of the stately gardens a
figure came out of the deep shadow of clipped walls of bay and
approached them.
'Is the Court over? At what decision has it arrived?' said the master
of Amyôt as he saluted the party and kissed the hand of his wife
with a graceful formality of greeting.
'It will have to sit for half a century if it be compelled to come to
any,' returned the châtelaine. 'We have said many pretty things
about love, Béthune in especial; but we met Lubin with Lisette
loitering behind their cows, and I fear the living commentary was
truer to nature than all our doctrines.'
'The only issue of its resolutions is that you are to give away a cow
and a maiden to the admirable lover,' said M. de Béthune. 'He
crossed our path just in time to point a moral for us: we were all
sadly in want of one.'
'Could you not agree then? Surely you chose a very simple subject?'
'It might be simple in the days of Philemon and Baucis. It is
sufficiently complicated now. Is the sentiment which sent d'Aubiac to
the scaffold, pressing a little blue velvet muff to his lips, the same
thing as the unpoetic impulse which makes the femelle de l'homme
sought by Tom, Dick, and Harry? You will admit that a vast field of
the most various emotions separates the two kinds of passion?'
'Certainly: there is a great difference between Montrose's Farewell
and Sir John Suckling's verses.'
'Precisely: so we came to no decision. We have all too much of the
terrible modern tendency to hesitation and melancholy. I do not
know why; unless it come from the conviction of all of us that love is
always melancholy when it is not absurd.'
'What a cruel sentiment!'
'A perfectly true assertion. The only loves respectable in tradition are
those which have ended wretchedly. Suppose Romeo had been
happy; or Stradella; what do you think the poets could have made of
them? Love must end somehow: if it end in tragedy its dignity is
saved like Cæsar's.'
'But why need it end? You, at least, have seen that through all
disappointments it can endure,' murmured he who had cited the love
of d'Aubiac for Marguerite.
She looked at him and shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.
'Love is, so unhappily, like a comet. It mounts to its perihelion,
increasing in splendour as it goes, and then slowly, little by little, the
glory departs, the sovereign of the skies grows less and less, until at
last there is no more sign of it anywhere, and all is darkness. But the
comet is not really gone; it has only gone—elsewhere.'
Her slight delicate laugh robbed the speech of the melancholy which
it would otherwise have possessed.
'My wife believes in no constancy,' said Othmar.
She looked at him with her mysterious smile:
'I believe in Romeo's, I believe in Stradella's, because the kindness
of death saved them from the ridicule of forswearing themselves.
What a pity you did not come home a little sooner. You would have
been an invaluable ally to the sentimentalists headed by Béthune.
He was eloquent, but his cause was weak.'
'My cause was strong,' said the Duc de Béthune; 'it was my tongue
which lacked persuasiveness.'
'No, you were very poetical; you were only not convincing. My dear
friend, we are too scientific in these days for sentiment to have any
abiding place in us; we are pessimists, it is true, but we mourn for
ourselves, not for others. We are neither gay enough nor sad
enough to do justice to such discussions as this which we have tried
to revive; we are only bored. We do not take our fooling joyously or
our sorrows deeply. We are uneasily conscious that we are childish
and unreal in both. Then there is the incurable modern tendency to
end everything with a laugh en gouailleur, yet with tears in our eyes.
We are always ridiculing ourselves, yet we are always vexed that,
ridiculous as we are, we must still die.'
'At the present moment we must still eat,' said Othmar, as the boom
of a silver-toned gong came over the gardens in deep waves of
sound.
It was nine o'clock, and that repast which had been used to be
called in the Valois Amyôt arrière-grand-souper, and was now called
'dinner,' awaited them.
There were some twenty-five guests then staying there; she did not
approve of immense house parties, and she restricted her house list
to the very choicest of her favourites and associates; she always
asked double the number of men to that of women, but she was
proportionately careful that the latter should be those whom men
most liked and admired; she was wholly above the petty envies and
jealousies of her sex. Her vanity rather consisted in having it said
that she feared no rivals.
As the deep boom of the gong sounded from the house, she and her
guests passed onward, and in their Valois dresses were soon seated
in the summer banqueting-room: a modern addition to the château,
an open loggia in the Italian style, with marble floor and marble
columns, one side open to the air, the other sides rich in white
marble bas-reliefs by French sculptors; the ceiling had been painted
by Puvis de Chavannes with the story of Europa. In each corner
there were tall palms in large square cases of white porcelain; the
white columns were garlanded by passion-flowers, which grew
without; at either end there was a fountain, their basins filled with
gold fish and water-lilies; through the columns the whole enchanting
view of the west gardens was seen stretching far away to where the
Loire waters spread wide as a lake and mirroring the newly-risen
moon.
'I had it built,' she said, in answer to some one who complimented
her upon it. 'There is a great dining-hall and a small dining-room
indoors, but neither are fitted for summer evenings. It is a barbarism
to be shut up within four walls just as the moon rises and the
nightingales sing. The matter of food is always a distressingly coarse
question; nothing can really spiritualise or redeem it, but at least it
may be divested of some of its brute aspects. A delicate cuisine does
that for us in some measure, and the scene we have around us may
do more. The London and Paris habit of sitting in mere boxes, more
or less well decorated, is horrible. Perfect ease, vast space, and soft
shadowy distances are absolutely necessary to preserve illusions as
we dine.'
And to that end she had caused to be built the loggia of Amyôt, with
as much celerity and breathless obedience to her commands as the
architects of the East showed a sultan of Bagdad or Benares when
he bade a palace of marble uprise from the sand. Her fine taste
would not have allowed her to hurt the architecture of Amyôt with
any incongruity, however much her caprices might have desired it;
but the marble loggia accorded in exterior with the Renaissance
outline of the château, and the tone of Primaticcio and the epoch of
Jean Goujon had been faithfully followed in its internal decoration.
'What a perfect place it is!' said one of her guests to her after dinner.
She smiled.
'In August, yes. When the terraces are hung with ice, and the forests
black with winter storm, it is not so perfect. All places have their
season, like all lives.'
'There are some places, like some lives, which can never lose their
beauty.'
'Do you think so? I have never found them. When one knows every
leaf, every stone, every fence, the beauty of the place fades for us
as it does when one knows every impulse, every prejudice, every
fault, and every virtue of the life.'
'A melancholy truth—if it be a truth. Perhaps it is only half a one.
There are people who love their homes.'
'There are prisoners who have loved their cells! Amyôt is delightful in
many ways, but I have no more sense of home in it than a swallow
has in the eaves it builds under for one summer. You must go to the
vinedresser's wife in the cliff cabin on the river for that.'
'Then the vinedresser's wife has a jewel which the great châtelaine's
crown is without?'
'A jewel? Are you sure it is a jewel? I think there is much to be said
in favour of the restlessness of our world, it saves us from rust and
reflection; it makes us unprejudiced and cosmopolitan; it annihilates
nationalities and antipathies. I imagine, if Horace had lived now, he
would never have been still; he would have seen the farm in its
pleasantest season, and that only. He would have carried with him
the undying lamp of his enchanting temperament, and he would
have been happy anywhere.'
'But is it really incomprehensible to you, the love of home?'
'I think so. I have lived in too many places. We are a few months
here, a few months in Paris, a few weeks in the Riviera, a few weeks
in Russia, or Vienna, or London. It is impossible to carry about the
sense of home peripatetically with you as the snail carries his shell.
The sparrow feels it, the swallow does not. I have always had a
number of houses in which I spend a number of months, of weeks,
of days. I like each of them to be perfect in its own way, and I like
each to have copies of my favourite books in it: the sight of Goethe,
of Molière, of Horace makes one feel chez soi. That is as near
"home" as I approach. I imagine all happiness is much more a
matter of temperament than of place or of circumstance.'
'I do not believe you are happy even now!'
It was a personal speech, and too bold a one to be justified even by
intimate and privileged friendship. But she was moved to it by that
ever ready and pitiless self-analysis which made her as severe a
critic of herself as of others.
'Happy? Oh, I must be,' she said with a smile. 'Who on earth should
be happy if I am not? I have all the vulgar attributes of happiness in
profusion and all the more delicate ones too. If I am not so, it can
only be because my temperament is the very opposite of a porte-
bonheur like Horace's. I have always expected too much of
everything and of everybody, and yet I am not at all what you would
call an imaginative person. I ought to be prosaically contented with
the world as it is. But I am not.'
It was a sultry and lovely August night. The sky was radiant and the
white lustre of the full moon shone over all the scene, making the
gardens, the terraces, the fountains, the parterres of flowers light as
day, and leaving the masses of the great forest which surrounded
them in deepest shadow. It was haunted ground, this stately and
royal place where both Marguerites had passed in turn summers
dead three centuries ago; where the one, witty, wise and faithful,
had read the tales of her Heptameron beneath its spreading oaks;
and the other, lovely, perilous and faithless, had gathered its roses
and ruffled them, murmuring the 'un peu—beaucoup—
passionnément,' as one passion hotly chased another from her fickle
breast, each scarce living the life of the gathered rose.
The present châtelaine of Amyôt, leaning against one of the marble
columns of her summer dining-hall, and listening to the words of a
friend who dared tell her truths, looked out into the wide white
moonlight, on to the trellised rose walks, the turf smooth as velvet,
bordered with ground ivy; the marble statues standing against the
high walls of close-clipped evergreens; the deep and sombre forests
which held the heart of so many secrets, the story of so many lives
and of so many deaths, safe shut away for ever, dumb and dead in
the eternal mystery of its vernal solitudes. If she were not happy
who should be?
But happiness—what an immense word!—or what a little one! A
poet's dream of paradise, or the peasant's contentment in the
chimney-corner and the pot of soup! Which you will—but never both
at once.
She was as happy as a very analytical and fastidious nature can
possibly be, but at times her old enemy dissatisfaction looked in over
the flowers and through the golden air. She was pursued by her old
consciousness that the human race was after all exceedingly limited
in its capabilities, and the lives of men on the whole very wearisome.
There was with her that vague disappointment and dissatisfaction
which come to most of us when we have done what we wished to
do. There is a monotony even in what is most agreeable, which
makes all happiness dull after awhile. Priests tells us that this
unpleasant weariness is intended to detach us from the joys of
earth, and philosophers are content to find its solution in the
physiology of the senses. But whether explained sentimentally or
scientifically, the result is the same: that expectation makes up so
large a component part of pleasure that, when there is nothing new
to expect, pleasure becomes so attenuated as to be scarcely visible.
All loves which have been constant and become famous have been
those to which immense difficulties arose, where perils supplied the
element of an unending interest. It is when they can only behold
each other in the stolen hours of the moonlight, that Romeo and
Giulietta are to each other divinely fair. Were they condemned to
face each other at dinner every night for ten years, what divinity
would be left for either in the eyes of the other?
Habit and love cannot dwell together. As well ask the rose to flower
beneath a slab of stone.
'Happiness is not of this world,' she said, with a little dreamy
lingering smile. 'Is not that what your brethren are always telling
us?'
Melville answered with a sigh:
'May this not prove that we may at least hope for it in some other?'
'Yes, I think,' she replied, rather to herself than to him, 'I think with
you; the strongest argument (if any are strong) in favour of the
future development of the soul, is the absolute impossibility for
anybody with any average mind to be content with what he or she
finds in human existence. Life is a pretty enough picture for people
like ourselves; it is sometimes a pageant, it is sometimes even a
poem, but it is all wonderfully unproductive and circumscribed.
Except in a few hours of passion or exultation, we are sensible of the
flatness and insufficiency of it all. We have ideals which may be only
remembrance, but if not must surely be prevision; ideals which, at
any rate, are larger and of another atmosphere than anything which
belongs to earth.'
Her voice grew soft and dreamy, and had a tone in it of wistful
regret. It was not the mere dissatisfaction of the ennuyée which
moved her. She had had her own way in life, and the success of it
had become monotonous.
'Yes,' she repeated with a little laugh, which was not very gay; 'I
suppose it must be the soul in us; that odd, unquiet, dissatisfied,
nameless thing inside us, which is always crying, "Give, give, give!"
and never gets what it wants. Our discontent must be the proof of
something in us meant for better things, just as the eternal
revolutions of Paris are the proof of its people's genius. What a night
it is! It wants Lorenzo and Jessica, but they are not here. There are
flirtations and intrigues enough indoors, but Lorenzo and Jessica are
not of our world. It is a pity. The moon seems to look for them.'
Then she left the marble loggia and went amongst her guests, who
were gathering together in the silver drawing-room, as the sounds of
music, in the ever-youthful 'Invitation à la Valse,' called them, with
midnight, to the ball-room. Gervase Melville strayed away by himself
through the moonlit aisles of roses.
'Always the pebble of ennui in the golden slipper of pleasure,' he
thought. 'Perhaps life is, after all, more evenly balanced than the
wooden shoe and the ragged stocking will ever believe. Perhaps in
life, as they said to-day that it is in love, hunger is a happier state
than satiety. Perhaps, if Lorenzo had never married Jessica, he
would have written sonnets to her all his life, as Petrarca wrote them
to Laura! The Lady of Amyôt is the most interesting woman I have
ever known, but she is the one person on earth capable of making
me doubt the faith that I have lived and hope to die for; when I am
amongst the green savages of Formosa or the drunken Indians of
Ottawa, I can still believe in the human soul; but when I am with
her I doubt—I doubt—I doubt! She is as exquisitely organised as this
gloxinia which is full of dew and of moonbeams; but she believes
that she will have only her one brief passage on earth like the
gloxinia—the glory of a day—and alas! who shall prove that she is
wrong? When she holds my creed in the hollow of her white hand
and smiles, it grows small and shrunken as a daisy that is dead!'
 CHAPTER III.
'Bulwer has said that none preserve imagination after forty; does
anyone preserve illusions after thirty?' said a very pretty woman on
her thirty-second birthday.
Her husband chivalrously replied, 'Any one who lives beside you will
preserve them until he is a hundred.'
She looked at him dubiously, curiously, with a slight smile which was
a little cynical and a little pensive.
'I was never famous for the culture of them,' she said, a little
regretfully. 'I do not know why you should have found me so
favourable to yours—if you have found me favourable,' she added,
after a pause.
As the most eloquent and comprehensive answer he could give, he
kissed her hands.
She glanced at her face in the mirror; she was certainly thirty-two
years old on this last day of February. She did not like it; no woman
likes it. The way is not actually longer because the traveller reads on
a milestone the cipher which tells him how many thousands of yards
he has traversed and has still to traverse, but the milestone suddenly
and distastefully testifies to distance, and increases the sense of
fatigue which the road has given.
'If women had all a happy Euthanasia,' she said dreamily, 'when they
reach the age I am now, what a good thing it would be for the
world. On her thirtieth birthday every woman ought to be put to
death; mercifully, poetically, as the girl dies in the "Faute de l'Abbé
Mouret," stifled in flowers, but securely put to death.'
'The world,' said Othmar, smiling, 'would certainly be rid of its most
perilous enchantresses if your proposal became law.'
'And how much prettier our drawing-rooms would look, and how
much effort and heartburning would be spared, if every woman died
before she began to "make up!" Do you know last night, in the
mirror figure of the cotillion, as the men looked over my shoulder
one by one, I forgot all about them. I only looked at my own face; it
seemed to me that there was a sort of dimness in it, as there is on a
photograph which has been some years done; not age exactly, but
the shadow of age which was coming up behind me as the men
were coming, and was looking over my shoulder as they looked.
Why do you laugh? It was not agreeable to me. I was startled when
the voice of Hugo de Rochefort came behind my ear, "Ah, Madame,
is it possible? Do you reject us all?" I had quite forgotten where I
was, and why they were all waiting. Perhaps Age only meant to say
to me, "Do not stay for the cotillions any more!"'
'If Age did, it certainly found no man living to agree with it,' said her
companion. 'If you will allow me to say so, I do not recognise you in
this unusual phase of self-depreciation. What bee has stung you to-
day?'
'Self-knowledge, I suppose. Whatever philosophers may declare to
the contrary, it is a very uncomfortable companion.'
'Surely that depends on one's mood?'
'Everything in life depends on one's mood. When I am in another
mood I shall say to myself that I have ten years left in which I shall
be agreeable to myself and other people; that the young girls do not
understand men and do not influence them; that a woman is always
young so long as she retains her power to please and to be pleased.
There are five hundred sophisms with which I can console myself,
but just now I am not in a humour to be consoled by them. I am
only sensible of what is very frightful to think of—that a woman is
allotted threescore and ten years as well as a man, but that he may
enjoy himself to the end of them, if only he keep his health; she
comes to the close of her pleasures before her life is half lived. With
her, the preface is exquisite, the poem is delightful, but the colophon
is of such preposterous and odious length and dulness, that it is out
of all proportion to the brevity of the romance.'
He smiled. 'I know that it is always hopeless to convince you when
you are in a pessimistic humour.'
'Oh yes; into one's character, as into the characters of others, one
gets little flashes of real light here and there, now and then; the
moments are not agreeable; they are the flashes of a policeman's
lanthorn; while they are shining disguise is not possible.'
'What do you see when they flash upon me?'
'Not very much that I would have changed except your
sentimentalities.'
'I am grateful.'
She looked at him curiously. 'Did you doubt it?'
He answered, 'Well, no; not precisely. But with such a character as
yours one never knows.'
'Is not that the charm of my character?'
'I think it is the secret of your ascendancy. No one can be wholly,
absolutely sure of what you are thinking far down in the recesses of
your immense thoughts.'
'That was what people use to say of Louis Napoleon, and there
never was a shallower creature. I think I have more profundity than
he; but I have not so much as I had. Happiness is not intellectual; it
tends to make one content, and content is stupidity; that is why Age
looked into the cotillion mirror to-night to remind me that I was
getting stupid. No, you are not to pay me any compliments, my
dear; after ten years of them they have a certain fadeur, though I
am sure you are sincere when you make them.'
She smiled and rose.
This was her thirty-second birthday. That unpleasant and unpoetic
fact shadowed life to her for the moment. She was still young
enough, and had potent charm enough, of which she was fully
conscious, to own it frankly. The world was still at her feet. She
could afford to confess that she foresaw the time when it would not
be so. True, in a way she would have a certain empire always. She
would never altogether lose her power over the minds of men when
she should lose it over their passions. But it would be a pale-grey
kingdom, a sad shore, with sea-lavender blowing above silvery sand
instead of her own Ogygia, with its world of roses and its smiling
suns.
Face it with what courage and charm she may, the thought of age
must always appal a woman. It takes so much; it offers nothing.
True, some of the greatest passions the world has seen have been
born after youth had long passed, and have burned on till death with
deeper fires of sunset than ever dawn has seen. But a woman is not
consoled by that possibility as morning slides past her and the
shadows grow long.
Othmar, without other reply, opened the door of her dressing-room,
and there entered two small children, a boy and a girl with faces like
flowers, and sweet rosy mouths, carrying a large gilded basket
between them, filled with white lilac and gardenia. They came up to
her hand in hand, not very certain upon their feet or in their speech,
and bowed their little golden heads with pretty reverence, and
stammered together with birdlike voices, 'Bonne fête, maman.'
'Here are your eternal courtiers,' said their father. 'Time will make no
difference in their worship of you.'
She smiled again, and took them together on her lap, and kissed
them with tenderness, her hand playing with their soft, light curls.
But she said perversely, and a little sadly: 'My dear, how can one
tell? That is only a phrase also. One never knows what children may
become. In fifteen or twenty years' time Otho may send me a
sommation respectueuse, because he wants to marry a circus-rider,
and Xenia may hate me because I make her accept a grand-duke
whilst she is in love with an attaché. One never can tell. They are
fond of me now, certainly.'
'They will as certainly love you always.'
'What an optimist you have grown! It is flattering to me,' she
answered, as she caressed the children and gave them some crystals
of sugar. 'I cannot help seeing things as they are; you know I never
could help it; and the relations of parents with their children, which
are pretty and idyllic to begin with, are often apt to alter to very
grim prose as time goes on, and separate interests arise to part
them. Why does no sovereign who ever lived like his or her
immediate heir? Why is the crown prince always arrayed against the
crown?'
'I am very fond of my crown prince,' said Othmar, as he drew his
young son to him.
'He is not a crown prince yet; he is a baby. Wait until he does want
to marry that circus-rider, or until you see him take an opposite side
in European politics to yourself. It is when the distinct Ego asserts
itself in your child, in opposition to your own entity, that the
separation begins and the antagonism rises.'
'You will always analyse so mercilessly!'
'I can never be content with the world's commonplaces and
sophisms, if you mean that. And on this day, when I am thirty-two
years old, no persuasion on earth would convince me that, when the
time should come which will make me twice that age, I shall be
anything but an unhappy woman. It will not console me in the least
that my grandchildren may wish me bonne fête.'
'I wonder if you are serious?'
'I was never more so, I assure you. Life is a series of losses; but a
woman's losses outweigh a man's by a million. From the first little
line she sees between her eyebrows or about her mouth, existence
is nothing but a dégringolade for her. To say that she is
compensated for the loss of her empire by becoming a grandmother
is wholly absurd.'
'You always allot such a small space to the affections!'
'Madame de Sévigné allotted the largest that any clever woman ever
did or could. Do you think the chill philosophies of Madame de
Grignan rewarded her? Myself, je n'ai pas cette bosse là. You know it
very well. I am fond of these children, because they are yours; but I
do not think them in the least a compensation for growing old!'
'As if years mattered to a woman of your wit!'
She smiled.
'That is so like a man's clumsy idea of consolation. True, wit, in
theory, is very much admired, but, practically, nobody cares much
about it, unless it comes out of a handsome mouth. Men prefer
white shoulders. And——'
'And your shoulders?' said Othmar, with a smile. 'Are they not of
snow, and fit for Venus' self?'
'Oh, they are white as yet,' she cried indifferently.
'For myself,' he added, 'I shall be delighted when the faces of no
aspirants are reflected in your cotillion mirror. I detest all those men
——'
'Oh no, you do not,' she said tranquilly. 'If there were none of them
you would say to yourself, "Really, she is very much aged." A man's
love is always so made up of pride and prejudice that if no one envy
him what he has he soon ceases to value it. On the whole, men go
much more by the opinion of the world than women do. A woman, if
she take a fancy to a cripple, or a hunchback, or a crétin, makes
herself ridiculous over him, without any regard to how she may be
laughed at; but a man is always thinking of what they say at the
clubs. In his most headlong follies he is always nervous about the
opinion of the galerie.'
'You always think us such fools,' said Othmar, with some ill humour.
'Oh, no,' she said again with a smile, 'only I think you are, in a way,
more conscientious than we are, and in another way more nervous.
A woman, when she has a fancy for a thing, would burn down half
the world to get at it; a man would hesitate to sacrifice so many
cities and people, and would also be preoccupied with the idea that
he would be badly placed in history for his exploit.'
'Then he is no true lover.'
'Are there any true lovers?'
'I think you should be the last woman who could doubt it.'
'You want a compliment, but I shall not give it you. Or if you mean
the others—well, perhaps they have been, or they are, true enough;
but then that is only because a passion for me has always been
thought d'un chic incroyable. I should believe in the love of a man if
I were a milkmaid, but when to be in love with one is a mere fashion
like the height of your wheels or the shape of your mail, one may
question its single-mindedness. I have never, either, observed that
the most devoted of them eat their dinner less regularly, or smoke
less often when they were unhappy. Even you, yourself, when you
were wasting with despair, did not refuse to dine or smoke.'
'Do not speak of that time,' said Othmar, with a look of distress. 'As
for your complaint against us, we are mere machines in a great deal;
the machine goes on mechanically in its daily exercise for its daily
necessities; that movement of mechanism has nothing to do with
the suffering of the soul. Nothing can be more unjust than to
confuse the one with the other. You say a man cannot be a poet or a
lover because he eats a truffled beefsteak. I say it is the mechanical
part of him which eats the beefsteak, and eating it impairs neither
his sensitive nerves nor his passions. As for smoking, it is a
consolation because it is a sedative.'
'Admirably reasoned,' said Nadine, 'but you do not convince me. I
am certain that the conventionalities and habits of modern life do
diminish the forces of passion. When Tityæus was forsaken by
Musidora, and had only the primæval woods, the fons sylvæ, the
mountain solitudes, and the silent sheep, his grief could reign over
him undivided; but nowadays, when he dines out every evening, is
made to laugh whether he will or no, finds a hundred engagements
waiting for every hour, and has the babble of the world eternally in
his ear, his remembrance is of a very attenuated sort. I do not say
that he suffers nothing, but I do say that he often forgets that he
suffers.'
'I am not at all sure of that,' said Othmar, 'and what is more, I am
almost disposed to think that the effort to affect indifference which
Society compels, is much more suffering than the delightful
permission which Nature gave your shepherd to be as miserable as
he pleased, unchecked and unremarked. The world may cause the
most excruciating torture to a man who is compelled to be in it and
of it, while some great preoccupation makes every thought except
one alien and hateful.'
'If the man have a great nature, perhaps. But how many have?'
'As many, or as few, as in the days of the shepherds. The ordinary
Tityæus, I imagine, did not weep long for the ordinary Musidora, but
soon tuned his pipe afresh and put new ribbons on his crook.'
'I do not quite think that; I think all feelings were stronger, warmer,
deeper, more concentrated in the earlier ages of the world.
Nowadays we contrive to make everything absurd—our heroes, our
poets, our sorrows, our loves, all are dwarfed by our treatment of
them. Even death itself we have managed to make ridiculous, and
strip of all its majesty. Ulysses' self would have looked grotesque if
buried with the civil rites which attended Gambetta to his tomb, or
the religious rites which mocked the prince of mockers, Disraeli.
Whenever I die, I hope you will let me be carried by young children
clad in white to some green grave in your own woods, where only a
stag will come or a pretty hare. Will you be unconventional enough
for that? Or will you be afraid of the French municipalities and the
Russian popes? I should have courage to execute your last wishes
so, but whether you will have the courage to execute mine——Men
are so much more timid than women!'
'Do not talk of death!' said Othmar, with a passing shudder.
'Did I not say that men are cowards?'
'Not for ourselves; for those we love we are.'
She smiled a little contemptuously, a little sadly.
'Ah, my dear! who knows! Death would not be so dreadful to me as
if I lived to incur Horace's reproach to Lyce. What is it? "Fis anus, et
tamen," &c., &c., though that reproach perhaps belongs to a more
unsophisticated age than our own. Nowadays the perruquiers let
nobody get grey, and there are a great many grandmothers, even
great-grandmothers, who are entirely charming—more charming
than the girls who are just out.'
'I do not think you will ever go to the perruquiers, but you will
always be charming, and you will never be old.'
'One would think you were my lover!'
'Why will you never believe that I am still so?'
'Because I do not believe in any miracles; I go to no Loretto. Love is
a volatile precipitate, and marriage a solvent in which it disappears.
If we are exceptions to that rule of chemistry and life, we are so
extraordinarily exceptional that fate must have some dreadful
punishment in store for us.'
'Or some exceptional reward.'
'Is not virtue always punished!' she said, with her enigmatical smile.
'You are a very handsome man, and have been the most poetic of
lovers. But in the nature of things I grow used to your good looks,
and in the nature of things you do not make love to me any longer.
Love may be the most delightful thing in the world, but it cannot
resist the pressure of daily intercourse. It is doomed when it has to
look over a common visiting list, and scold the same house-steward
about the weekly expenditure. "Ah—ouiche, Madame!" said one of
the peasants at Amyôt to me once, "where is love when you dip two
spoons in one soup-pot?—you only quarrel about the onions." That
is always the fault of marriage. It is always putting two spoons in
one pot. Whether it is an earthen pitcher or a Cellini vase does not
make the least difference. Poor love runs away from the clash of the
spoons.'
Othmar laughed, but he was irritated. 'I should be miserable if I
believed you were in earnest,' he said impatiently. 'But I know you
would sacrifice your own life to an epigram.'
'I am entirely in earnest,' she replied. 'But if you do not believe me
that shows that you are a less changeable man than most, or I a
wiser woman. Ah, my dear,' she added, with a smile and a sigh,
'when men do not admire me any longer then you will not admire
me either, I imagine; I wonder you do as it is—you see so much of
me!'
'I shall adore you all my life,' said Othmar, with almost as much
fervour as when he had been the most impassioned and the most
hopeless of her lovers.
'You fancy so; and that is very pretty in you, after so many years;
but it does not follow that you will think so still in twelve months'
time,' said his wife, with the smile of her incurable scepticism upon
her lips. 'And do not insist on it too much. Things which are insisted
on too much have a knack of making themselves tiresome, and you
know of old that repetition has no great charm for me, and say what
you will you cannot prevent me from feeling that very soon I shall
grow old!'
She rose and looked over her shoulder at the silver-framed mirror
with its three glasses, showing her profile to her as she turned.
'I could not brave the sunrise after a ball now,' she thought, with a
little pang.
'Has not a poet said,' she added aloud:
I fear
Life's many changes; not Death's changelessness?'
There was a touch of graver sadness in the tone with which she
quoted the line of verse, which forbade reply either by persiflage or
compliment.
Othmar kissed her hand with almost the same emotion as when he
had declared to her a passion hopeless, and therefore for the time
changeless; and he remained mute.
'The same poet says:
Love's words are weak, but not Love's silences,'
she added, with a smile. 'Well, I will believe you——as yet.'
She had in nowise resigned the power of, and the diversion afforded
her by, what in a lesser person would have been called endless
flirtation. She amused herself constantly with the follies of men and
their subjugation.
'If you do not make yourself attractive to others, the man to whom
you care to be attractive will soon not find you so,' she was wont to
say. 'Those women who make themselves a statue of fidelity, like the
Queen in the "Winter's Tale," will soon be left alone on their
pedestals. Be as faithful as you please, but show him that you have
every temptation and opportunity to be unfaithful if you did please.'
It was on those lines that she had traced her conduct, and whilst her
world knew that she was unaltered in coquetry, if coquetry her
languid charm and domination could be called, it also saw that she
was equally unaltered in profound and universal indifference to all
those whom she subjugated. Othmar, as he said, would have
preferred that she should subjugate none. But she frankly told him
that it was of no use to wish for subversion of the laws of nature. 'I
am as nature made me,' she said once to him. 'If you did not like the
way I was made, why did you not leave me alone? You had plenty of
time to study me. I am like Disraeli, I like power. Now the only
power possible to a woman is that which she possesses over men. If
men were more interesting, the power would be more interesting
too. But then it is not our fault. It is perhaps the fault of the millions
of stupid women who swallow up the occasional originality of men
as sand swallows up the bits of agate and cornelian on the shore. It
is the fashion to say that it is the wicked, clever women who hurt
men. That is not the case; it is the good silly ones who make of life
the sahara of commonplaces and of blunders which it is. Talent will
at least always understand; blameless stupidity understands
nothing.'
She was somewhat more, rather than less, of a charmeuse than she
had been. It was so natural to her to charm the lives of men that
she could have as soon ceased to breathe as to cease to use her
power over them. There were times when Othmar grew irritated and
jealous, but she was unmoved by his anger.
'It is a much greater compliment to you that men should admire me,'
she said to him, 'and it would look supremely absurd if I lapsed into
a bonne bourgeoise, and always went everywhere arm-in-arm with
you. I should not know myself. You would not know me. Be content.
You are aware that I think very little about any one of them; they
are none of them so interesting as you used to be. But I must have
them about me. They are like my fans; I never scarcely use a fan or
look at one, but still a fan is indispensable; it is a part of one's
toilette.'
Othmar, who retained for her much of the imperious and perfervid
passion which he had had as a lover, resigned himself with a bad
grace to her arguments. Something of the old tyrannical feeling with
which he would once have liked to bear her out of sight and hearing
of the world for ever still moved in him at times, though he had
grown diffident of displaying it, having grown afraid of her delicate
ironies.
'It is so good for him,' she said to herself; 'that sort of irritation and
jealousy keeps his affections and his admirations alive: they are not
allowed to go to sleep, as both have a knack of going to sleep in
marriage. Anything is less dangerous than stagnant water. If a man
be not made jealous he must drift imperceptibly into indifference.
Monotony is like a calm at sea; everyone yawns, and in time even a
shark would be welcomed as a delightful interruption. To avoid
sameness is the first requisite for the endurance of love. If he love
me as much as he did nine years ago—and I think he does—it is
only because at the bottom of his heart he never feels absolutely
sure of me. He has always a faint unacknowledged sense that I may
any day do something entirely unexpected by him; may even fly
away, as a bird does, off a bough which it has tired of. I am like a
book of alchemy to him, of which he has mastered all the secrets
save just one or two lines, but in which those lines always remain in
unintelligible abracadabra to perplex and interest him. He will never
tire of the book till he thinks he can decipher those lines. It is a
mistake to suppose that men are only allured by their senses; there
is an intellectual mystery which fascinates them, and which is not so
easily exhausted. All men are amused by me, all men are more or
less attracted by me. I should not wish my husband, alone of all
men, to become tired of me. Of course it is very difficult to prevent it
when he is so used to me, but I think it is possible.'
A feeble woman, a dull woman, a woman of that kind of self-
complacency which goes with stupidity, would not have allowed so
much even in her own thoughts; but she, who was deemed the
vainest of her kind, had no such vanity wherewith to deceive herself.
Her high intelligence and her unerring penetration were glasses
forever turned upon herself no less than upon others. Othmar was at
times surprised and almost irritated that she left him so often to go
on her own visits or travels, or sent him alone upon his. But she
knew very well what she did.
'Frequent absences are like those pauses in the music which in
French we call silences, and in German Pausen,' she said to herself.
'They make us care for the music more than we should do if it were
always on our ear. Monotony is the most terrible enemy that
affection or enjoyment ever has. Unfortunately, most women are so
eternally monotonous that they can never understand why men are
not as pleased with the defect as they are themselves. Lord
Beaconsfield was not an apostle of love, but he was a shrewd
observer of mankind, and I always think that he suggested the most
admirable phase of modern love possible, when he depicted two
people who were fond of one another as going their different ways
every evening to different houses, and meeting again to talk it all
over with champagne and chicken at dawn. If people are always
together in the same places, what have they left to tell one another
in their own house? Myself, I don't like either champagne or chicken,
but that is a mere matter of detail. You can say, Rhine wine and
green oysters, or yellow tea and Russian cigarettes. It is, no doubt,
only another form of vanity; but I wish our lives not to break down
and drift away in little bits of wreck wood, as most peoples' lives do.
It is not goodness in me; it is only amour propre.'
She had more sympathy for him than she would in other years have
supposed herself capable of feeling, but with her regard for him
there was mingled that habit of analysis which was so inveterate in
her, and that indulgence to his weaknesses which arose from her
condescending comprehension of them. She, as yet, made the
preservation of his admiration her study, but in her study there was
blended the sense of amusement and disdain, which always came to
her before the inconsistencies and the unwisdom of men. She loved
him perhaps; but she never failed to weigh him accurately. To
Yseulte, he had been as a lord and a god; to her he was dearer than
other men, but not more imposing. Even when the first winelike
fumes of awakened passion had touched her, she had been clear of
judgment and unerring in vision. She had said to herself: 'He looked
larger than others once, through the mists of my preference, but he
is not so really.'
 CHAPTER IV.
When he saw the beauty of her children, Friedrich Othmar relented
in that unsparing bitterness which he felt against her. As a woman
he still hated her intensely, unspeakably, unchangeably, but as their
mother he had respect for her, and almost pardon.
'He will be childless all his days,' he had said with certainty and
scorn. 'That bloodless mondaine, that ethereal coquette will leave
the name barren; she is all brain and nerve; she will never give birth
to anything save an epigram.'
When his words had been disproved, he had rendered her a sullen
honour. He would take no joy in the children as he would have taken
joy in Yseulte's; but they were there to bear the name he thought so
precious, and he was forced to confess that no lovelier or stronger or
healthier creatures than the young Otho and his sister Xenia ever
could have played beneath the oak-boughs of Amyôt.
But the old man was faithful to the one innocent affection which had
ever lived in his selfish breast; with an aching heart he would often
turn from watching these children tumble amongst the daisies in the
sunshine, and find his way to a solitary tomb made in white marble
in the mausoleum of Amyôt, in memory of her whose slender
crushed body lay buried amongst the violets by the sea of the
southern shore.
'All that weight of marble!' he thought, 'and not one little sigh of
regret!'
Not one; unless he gave it.
'I hate this Russian woman, but I am bound to say that the children
are beautiful,' he said once to Melville. 'I am bound to say, too, that
she has made a change for the better in Otho. Since he has
discovered (doubtless) that every grande passion has its perihelion
and its decline, he has become more like other men. He has
interested himself in the welfare of the House. He has condescended
to be conscious that Europe exists. He has lived the natural life of
the world, and has, I think, ceased to wish himself a wandering
Wilhelm Meister, a François Villon without a rag to his back. My poor
dead child only loved him, and could do nothing to attach him to life
or to detach him from his fantastic preoccupations and morbid
demands for the impossible. This woman has made him so in love
with the actual, with the real, that he has ceased to dream of the
ideal. He has even grown aware that his own fate is an enviable one,
which for thirty years of his life he obstinately denied.'
'It is a questionable benefit to make a man abandon the ideal,' said
Melville. 'I think, however, that Othmar's feeling was always rather
impatience of existing facts than thirst of any impalpable perfection.
You believe that a discontented man is necessarily an imaginative
man. It does not follow. Imagination may perhaps create discontent;
but then, on the other hand, it may console it. If he had had
imagination enough, he would have found out a thousand idealised
ways of using his great wealth.'
'Thank heaven, then, that he has so little,' said Friedrich Othmar.
'Myself, I always considered that he had a great deal too much. I do
not underrate imagination in its proper place. None of the great
events of the world would have taken place without it: every great
revolutionist, every great conqueror, every great statesman, even,
must possess it; but it is a perilous quality, singularly similar to nitro-
glycerine; you can never be certain of the hour and the sphere of its
action; it may pierce a new road for humanity to use after it, or it
may wreck nations and send humanity backward by a thousand
years.'
'I should not mind going back a thousand years,' murmured Melville.
'Basil was living, and Augustine.'
Since the death of Yseulte these two men, so dissimilar, even so
inharmonious, had become in a manner friends. Their mutual pain
had drawn them together. The thought which was the same in the
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