Princess Napraxine

BY

OUIDA

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. I.

London

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1884

[All rights reserved]

TO

TWO PERFECTLY WISE AND HAPPY PEOPLE

MY DEAR FRIENDS

PIERRE AND EMILIE DE TCHIHATCHEFF

This Story

OF PEOPLE NEITHER HAPPY NOR WISE

IS

Affectionately Dedicated

PRINCESS NAPRAXINE.

CHAPTER I.

A blue sea, some palms with their heads bound up, some hedges of cactus and aloes; some thickets of high rose-laurel, a long marble terrace shining in the sun, huge groups of geraniums not yet frost-bitten, a low white house with green shutters and wooden balconies, a châlet roof and a classical colonnade, these all—together with some entangled shrubberies, an orange orchard, and an olive wood—made up a place which was known on the French Riviera as La Jacquemerille.

What the name had meant originally nobody knew or everybody had forgotten. What La Jacquemerille had been in the beginning of time—whether a woman, a plant, a saint, a ship, a game, a shrine, or only a caprice—was not known even to tradition; but La Jacque[2]merille the villa was called, as, before it, had been the old windmill which had occupied the site, ere steam and fashion, revolutionising the seashores of Savoy, had caused the present pretty nonsensical, half-rustic, half-classical house to be erected on the tongue of land which ran sharply out into the midst of the blue waves, and commanded a sea view, west and east, as far as the Cape of Antibes on the one side and the Tête du Chien on the other.

It was one of the most coveted spots on the whole seaboard of our modern Capua, and brought a little fortune annually to its happy possessor, a respectable vendor of hams, cheese, and butter in the Cannebière at Marseilles, who for the coming season had pocketed now, from Prince Napraxine, the round little sum of two thousand napoleons.

And the Princess Nadège Napraxine, who had set her heart, or rather her fancy, upon it, was sitting in a bamboo rocking-chair and looking over the house front, and thinking that decidedly she did not like it. It had been an idiotcy to take it, just the sort of folly which her delegate in the affair always committed. They would have been a thousand times better[3] off at the hotels in Nice; you had no kind of trouble at an hotel, and you could always have your own cooks if you insisted.

For three months it had been the reigning desire of her life to have La Jacquemerille for the winter; it had been let to an American millionnaire, and the apparent impossibility of getting it had naturally increased her anxiety. The American millionnaire had suddenly decided to go home; Jay Gould or Mr. Vanderbilt had done something that had disturbed his digestion, and La Jacquemerille, which she had never seen, but had fallen in love with from photographs, was granted to her wishes for the modest sum of forty thousand francs. She had travelled straight from the Krimea to it without stopping, had arrived by night, and now was looking at it for the first time in broad daylight with a sentiment very near akin to disgust. She did not find it the least like the photographs.

‘It is so horridly low!’ she exclaimed, after a long and thoughtful examination of the frontage, where an Ionic colonnade sheltered itself under a châlet roof from the Bernese Oberland. ‘I am sure it will be most dread[4]fully cold. And just look at the architecture—every style under heaven! Was there ever such an extraordinary jumble?’

‘If it be a jumble, my dear, it is very suitable to our generation; and you are very lucky if, when you buy a pig in a poke, you get nothing worse than a jumble,’ said another lady who was sitting opposite to her, with a book held upside down and a litter of newspapers, and who was known in society as Lady Brancepeth.

‘Pig in a poke! what is he?’ said the Princess Napraxine in her pretty English, which she spoke with scarcely any foreign accent. ‘The house is shocking! It is the Parthenon mixed up with a Gasthof. It is a nightmare;—and so small! I don’t believe there is room for one quarter of the servants. And just look at these palms with their heads tied up as if they had neuralgia; and I am sure they may well have it, standing still in that bise, day and night. I think the whole place utterly odious. I will tell the women to unpack nothing; I am sure I shall not stay a night; an Italian villino with a shingle roof and Grindenwald balconies! Can anything be so absurd?’

[5]

‘I suppose you will wait till the Prince comes downstairs?’ said Lady Brancepeth with a little yawn.

‘Oh, I don’t know; why? He can stay if he likes. Oh, dear! there is a Cairene lattice at that end and these other windows have been copied from the Ca d’Oro, and the roof is as Swiss as if it were a cuckoo clock or a St. Bernard dog. What is one to do?’

‘Stay,’ suggested Lady Brancepeth. ‘People do not die of a Swiss roof unless it tumbles in. The house is all wrong, no doubt, but it is picturesque; a horrible word, you will say, but it describes the place. It is picturesque.’

‘Wrong things usually are,’ said the Princess Napraxine with a sigh, as she surveyed the Greek peristyle, the Swiss shingles, and the slender Ionic colonnade. ‘Are all these oranges good for one’s complexion, I wonder? It is like sitting in a bright yellow room. I don’t like bright yellow rooms. Who said that granted wishes are self-sown curses? Whoever did must have wished to hire La Jacquemerille, and done it. Why do they tie up those palms?’

‘To blanch the leaves for Holy Week. Every blade of grass is turned into money on[6] this poetic shore. If the gardens have been included in your agreement you can untie them; if not, you cannot.’

‘They will certainly be untied; as for agreement—your brother took the place for us, I daresay he blundered.’

‘What were your instructions to him, may I ask?’

‘Oh, instructions? I do not remember. I sent him the photographs, and wrote under them: “Take me the house at any price.”’

‘Curt as Cæsar!’

With a little yawn the Princess Napraxine looked down the long shining sea-wall of white marble, studded at intervals with vases of white marble filled with aloes; beyond the marble wall was the sea—blue, bright, quivering, and full of shifting lights as diamonds are. Then her gaze came inward, and returned to the outline of the house which was so daring and contradictory a jumble. The creepers which covered it glowed red in the December noon; its blue and white awnings were gay and fresh; its vanes were gilded, and pointed merrily to the south; a late rose was garlanding the Cairene lattice; some woodlarks were[7] singing their pretty little roundelay on the boughs of a carob tree; it was all bright, lively, full of colour and of gaiety. Nevertheless, she hardened her heart to it and condemned it utterly, out of mere waywardness.

‘I shall go away after breakfast,’ she said, as she looked. ‘Platon can do as he likes. I shall dine at Nice, and you will come with me.’

‘I was sure that was what you would do,’ said her friend; ‘so was Ralph.’

‘Then I shall not do it,’ said Princess Napraxine.

She rocked herself soothingly in her chair.

‘What a dear little bird that is singing; it cannot be a nightingale in December. The sea looks very much like our Krimean one; and what a lovely air it is. Like an English June without the rain-clouds.’

‘Wait till Madame la Bise comes round.’

‘Oh, Madame la Bise comes round the corner everywhere. She is like ennui—ubiquitous. You have her in England, only you pretend she is good for your health, and your Kingsley wrote an ode to her; the rest of the world is not such a hypocrite.’

[8]

‘Kingsley? He was Tom Brown, was he not?’

‘You are Tom Brown! Really, Wilkes, you know nothing of your own literature.’

‘Well, I was never educated as you clever Russians are,’ said Lady Brancepeth, good-humouredly; she was sometimes called Socrates, and generally Wilkes by her intimates. She was the ugly member of a singularly handsome family, and the nickname had been given to her in the schoolroom. But her ugliness was a belle laideur; her face was charming in its own way; her eyes were brilliant, and her figure was matchless. She was an earl’s daughter and an earl’s wife, and when she put on the Brancepeth diamonds and showed herself at a State ball, if ugly she was magnificent, even as, if intellectually ignorant, she was a marvel of tact, humour, and discernment.

Her friend and hostess was as entirely unlike her as an orchid is unlike an aloe. She was exquisitely lovely, alike in face and form, and as cultured as a hothouse flower. She was just three-and-twenty years old, and was a woman of the world to her finger tips. She was very cosmopolitan, for though a Russian by birth and[9] marriage her mother had been French, one of her grandmothers English, the other German, and she had been educated by a crowd of governesses of many different nationalities. All her people, whether Russian, English, French, or German, had been very great people, with innumerable and unimpeachable quarterings, for many generations, and to that fact she owed her slender feet, her tiny ears, and her general look of perfect distinction. She had a transparent, colourless skin, like the petals of a narcissus in its perfect mat whiteness; she had oriental eyes of a blue-black, which looked immensely large in her delicate face, and which could have great inquisitiveness, penetration, and sarcasm in them, but were usually only lustrous and

languid; her mouth was most admirably shaped, and her teeth deserved the trite compliment of the old madrigals, for they were like pearls; she had a very ethereal and delicate appearance, but that delicacy of mould sheathed nerves of steel as a silken scabbard sheathes a damascene blade. She had an infinite grace and an intricate alternation of vivacity and languor which were irresistible. Men were[10] madly in love with her, which sometimes diverted and sometimes bored her; many people were rather afraid of her, and this pleased her much more than anything. She had a capacity for malice.

She now held a sunshade above her head and surveyed the house, and tried to persuade herself it was charming, as her friend had been so sure she would find it detestable. She had wished for the place with an intensity that had almost disturbed her sleep for some weeks, and now she had got it and she hated it. But as they had expected her to do so she was determined to conquer her hatred and to find it much better than its photographs. The task was not difficult, for La Jacquemerille, if full of absurdities and incongruities, was decidedly pretty.

As she swung herself on her rocking-chair and began to see with the eyes of her mind a hundred improvements which she would instantly have effected whether the terms of the contract allowed of it or not, she saw coming within the range of her unassisted eyesight a large and stately schooner, with canvas white as snow bellying in the breeze. She drew on[11] her long loose tan-coloured glove cheerfully, and said aloud:

‘After all, it is better than an hotel. There is no noise, and nobody to stare at one. I daresay we shall get through three months without cutting each other’s throats.’

Lady Brancepeth turned and looked out to sea, and saw the schooner, and smiled discreetly; she said as discreetly:

‘I am so glad, dear, you won’t fret yourself too much about the place; after all, you are not going to live in it for a lifetime; and though, no doubt, it is utterly wrong, and would give Oscar Wilde a sick headache, yet one must confess it is pretty and suits the sunshine.’

The trees had been cut, so that openings in their boughs allowed the sea to be seen from any point of the terrace. Princess Nadine from under her sunshade watched the stately yacht draw nearer and nearer over the shining path of the waters, and drop anchor some half mile off the shore; then she saw a gig lowered, with red-capped white-shirted sailors to man it, and a figure which she recognised descended over the schooner’s side into the stern of the[12] boat, which thereupon left the vessel, and was pulled straight towards La Jacquemerille. Neither she nor Lady Brancepeth appeared to notice it; they talked chiffons, and read their newspapers; but the long boat came nearer and nearer, until the beat of the oars sounded directly under the walls of La Jacquemerille, and the rowers were too close at hand to be seen. But the Princess Nadine heard the rattle of the oars in the rowlocks, the shock of its keel against the sea stairs below, which she could not see for the tangle of pyracanthus and mahonia and many another evergreen shrub, covering the space between the terrace and the

shore; she heard a step that she knew very well, the sound of which moved her to a slight sense of anticipated amusement, and a stronger sense of approaching weariness, and she turned her head a little, with a gracious if indifferent welcome in her eyes, as a man ran up the stairs at the end of the terrace, and came along the marble floor in the sunshine—a young man, tall, fair, athletic, with a high-bred look and handsome aquiline features.

‘You have had a very quick run, surely?’[13] said the Princess Napraxine, stretching out her tan glove.

‘Well, we did all we knew, and crammed on every stitch we had,’ the new comer answered, as he kissed the tips of the glove, and murmured in a lower tone, ‘Were you not here?’

Then he crossed over to where Lady Brancepeth sat, and kissed her cheek with a brother’s indifference.

‘Dear Wilkes, are you all right?’ he said as he took up a majolica stool and seated himself between them.

‘Take that bamboo chair, Geraldine,’ asked the Princess. ‘That china stool does not suit your long legs at all. How many hours really have you been coming from Genoa? I am fearfully angry with you, by the way; how could you take this place?’

‘Because you told me,’ answered Lord Geraldine, staring hard. ‘What was the command? Take it, coûte que coûte. Not an “if”; not a “perhaps”; not a “but.” Wilkes, do you not call that too cruel?’

‘My dear Ralph,’ said Lady Brancepeth, ‘any woman’s instructions should always be[14] construed so liberally that a margin is left for her at the eleventh hour to change her mind. But do not distress yourself. I do not think Mme. Napraxine really dislikes the place. It is only her way. When she has bought a thing she always finds a flaw in it. It is her habit to condemn everything. She is a pessimist from sheer want of ever having had real disappointment.’

‘Look at the house. It speaks for itself,’ said the Princess, contemptuously. ‘Why did you not telegraph and say that it was a patchwork of every known order of architecture? I would have told you to break off negotiations.’

‘But you had seen the photographs.’

‘Photographs! Would you know your own mother from a photograph if you had not been told beforehand whose it was?’

‘I am so sorry,’ murmured Geraldine, as he turned round and gazed at the offending building. ‘It is a pretty place, surely? not classical or severe, certainly; but cheery and picturesque. I looked all over it conscientiously, I give you my word, and it is really[15] in very good taste inside; much better than one could have hoped for in a maison meublée.’

‘Oh, it is Wilkes, not I, who finds it so irretrievably bad,’ said the Princess Napraxine, with tranquil mendacity; ‘but if it be too bad one can always go to an hotel, only in an hotel one can never sleep at night for the omnibuses, and the banging of other people’s luggage, and if I do not sleep I can do nothing. Here I should fancy it is perfectly quiet?’

‘Quiet as the grave, unless the sea is howling. But Monte Carlo is just behind that cliff there; with fast horses you can drive over in twenty-six minutes—I timed it by my watch. You can have a score of people to dinner every evening if you like.’

The Princess raised her eyebrows with a gesture signifying that this prospect was not one of unmitigated happiness; and Lady Brancepeth, alleging that the sun was rather too warm for her north-country bones, went away into the house, being of opinion that three was no company; her brother drew his bamboo-chair nearer his hostess, and took the tan glove with the wrist it inclosed in a tender grasp.

[16]

‘So you do not like the poor place? I am truly grieved!’

She drew her hand away so dexterously that she left the loose empty glove in his fingers, and he looked foolish.

‘No; I thought of going away to-morrow,’ she continued, without any regard to his dejection; ‘I do not like palms that have the toothache, and marble pillars that have married wooden balconies. But your sister, who always opposes me, is so certain I shall go that it is very probable I shall stop.’

‘Admirable feminine logic! No doubt the poor house is utterly wrong, though it has been the desire of everybody on the Riviera ever since it was built. I felt sure you would have been more comfortable in a good hotel at Nice, and if I had ventured to volunteer an opinion, I should have said so. Wilkes is quite right; you will be bored to death here.’

‘She is quite wrong; she does not like the place herself,’ said Princess Napraxine, with decision, while she took back her glove peremptorily. ‘I do—at least in a way. The oranges look jaundiced, and the palms rheumatic, but those are trifles. They do say it hailed yes[17]terday, and the water in the washing-basin in the coupé lit was frozen last night as we came into Ventimiglia; but I saw a scorpion on the wall this morning, and heard a mosquito, so I am convinced it is the south of the poets, and am prepared for any quantity of proper impressions, only they are slow in coming to me; it is so excessively like the Krimea, terrace and all. Should not you go in and see if Platon be awake?’

‘I am convinced he is asleep. It is not quite one o’clock, and you arrived in the night, didn’t you?’

‘Yes; but he will get up, because he will want to be off to Monte Carlo. He will spend his life there and send over expresses every hour for fresh rouleaux. When he is near a gaming-table he is so happy.’

‘Enviable faculty!’

‘It is my faculty too. But I try against it; he doesn’t. Men never try to resist anything.’

Geraldine murmured words to the effect that his life was one long compulsory resistance, and his eyes completed the uncomplete sentences.

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said his hostess.[18] ‘You know I do not like madrigaux; and an Englishman always looks so clumsy when he is making them. Make me a cigarette instead.’

‘Always cruel!’ murmured her companion, obediently rolling up Turkish tobacco.

‘Always kind,’ said the Princess. ‘People who are kind to men and children never spoil them. Where will your schooner stay? There is no dock, or quay, or whatever you call it, here. These places always ought to have one of their own.’

‘How can they when the rocks go sheer down into deep water? No, I must keep her off Villefranche or Monaco. She can be round in half an hour—at your disposition, of course, like her owner.’

‘If she be not more manageable than her owner——’

‘Oh, Nadine! When I only live to obey your orders, and never even receive a smile in return!’

‘Ah, if you want reward there is no longer any merit! And do not call me by my name in that manner; you will do it some day before Platon.’

‘He doesn’t mind.’

[19]

‘No, of course he does not mind; but I do, which is more to the purpose.’

‘You are very unkind to-day, princess. This unhappy Jacquemerille! it is grievous that you don’t like it; the gardens are really pretty, and the view is superb.’

‘You talk like an auctioneer; go and find the gardener and tell him to untie those palms.’

‘Pray don’t send me away yet.’