and brought her their great baskets of white lilac and gardenias, she was indulgent to them, and took them with her in her carriage for a drive after her noonday breakfast. She was not a woman to whom the babble and play of children could ever be very long interesting; her mind was too speculative, too highly cultured, too exacting to give much response to the simplicity, the ignorance, and the imperfect thoughts of childhood. But in her own way she loved them. In her own way she took great care of their education, physical and mental. She wished her son to become a man whom the world would honour; and she wished her daughter to be wholly unlike herself.
As yet they were hardly more than babies; lovely, happy, gay, and gentle. 'Let them be young as long as they can,' she said to those entrusted with their training. 'I was never young. It is a great loss. One never wholly recovers it in any after years.'
It was a fine day, mild, sunny, with light winds shaking the odour from the orange buds; such a day as that on which Platon Napraxine had died. She did not think of him.
Several years had gone away since then; the whole world seemed changed; the dead past had buried its dead; there were the two golden-haired laughing children in symbol and witness of the present.
'Decidedly, however philosophic we may be, we are all governed at heart by sentiment,' she thought, as the carriage rolled through the delicate green of the blossoming woods. 'And by beauty,' she added, as her eyes dwelt on the faces of Otho and Xenia, who were the very flower and perfection of childish loveliness; ideal children also, who were always happy, always caressing, always devoted to each other, and whose little lives were as pretty as those of two harebells in a sunny wood. Why were they dear to her, and sweet and charming? Why had the physical pain of their birth been forgotten in the mental joys of their possession? Why did her eyes delight to follow their movements, and her ear delight to listen to their laughter?
The other children had been as much hers, and she had always disliked them; she disliked them still, such time as she went to their Russian home to receive their annual homage, and that of all her dependents.
Othmar was devoted to the interests of Napraxine's two little sons; an uneasy consciousness, often recurrent to him, that he had not merited the frank and steady friendship of the dead man, perpetually impelled him to the greatest care of their fortunes and education. They were kindly, stupid, vigorous little lads, likely to grow into the image of their dead father; but all that could be done for them in mind and body, for their present and their future, he took heed should be done; and placing them under wise and gentle teachers, endeavoured to counteract the fatal instincts to vanity and overbearing self-esteem which the adulation and submission they received everywhere on their estates had implanted in them long before they could spell. He never saw them come into his presence without painful memories and involuntary repugnance; but he repressed all signs of either, and the children, if they feared him, liked him. Of their mother they saw but very little: a lovely delicate vision, in an atmosphere scented like a tea rose, with a little sound in her voice which made them feel they must tread softly and speak low, looked at them with an expression which they did not understand, and touched them with cool fragrant lips lightly and distantly, and they knew she was their mother because they had always heard so: but Othmar seemed nearer to them than she did, and when they wished for anything, it was to him that they addressed their little rude scrawled notes. For the rest, they were always in Russia: it was the only stipulation with which their father had hampered their mother's guardianship of them.
'Let them be Russians always,' he had said in his last letter to her. 'Let them love no soil but Russia. The curse of Russians is the foreign life, the foreign tongue, the foreign ways, which draw them away from their people, make their lands unknown and indifferent to them, and lead them to squander on foreign cities and on foreign wantons the roubles wrung by their stewards in their absence from their dependents. Paris is the succursale of Petersburg, and it is also its hell. When the Russian nobles shall live in their own homes, the Nihilist will have little justification, and the Jew will be unable to drain the peasantry as a cancer drains the blood. I preach what I have not practised. But if I could live my life again, I would spend my strength, and my gold, and my years amongst my own people.'
'Poor Platon!' she had thought, more than once remembering those words. 'He thinks he would have done so, but he would not. The first drôlesse who should have crossed the frontier would have taken him back with her in triumph. It is quite true what he says; an absent nobility leaves an open door behind them, through which Sedition creeps in to jump upon their vacant chairs. But so long as ever they have the power, men will go where they are amused, and the Russian tchin will not stay in the provinces, in the snow, with the wolves, and the Jews, and the drunken villagers all around his house, when he can live in the Avenue Joséphine, and never hear or see anything but what pleases him. Absenteeism ruined Ireland, and will ruin Russia; but, tant que le monde est monde, the man who has only one little short life of his own will like to enjoy it.'
Nevertheless, she and Othmar both respected his wishes, and his boys were brought up in the midst of the vast lands of their heritage, with everything done that could be done by tuition to amend their naturally slow intelligence and outweigh the stubbornness and arrogance begotten by centuries of absolute dominion in the race they sprang from. She herself only saw them very rarely, when, in midsummer weather, the flowering seas of grass and the scent of the violets in the larch woods brought life and warmth even to North-eastern Russia. They were unpleasant to her: always unpleasant. They were the living and intrusive records of years she would willingly have effaced. They were involuntary but irresistible reproaches spoken, as it were, by lips long dumb in death.
Living, their father had never had power to do otherwise than offend, irritate, and disgust her: the least active sentiment against himself that he had ever roused in her had been a contemptuous pity. But dead, there were moments when Platon Napraxine acquired both dignity and strength in her eyes: the silence of his death and its cause had commanded her respect: he had been wearisome, stupid, absurd, troublesome, in all his life; but in his death he had gained a certain grandeur, as features quite coarse and commonplace will look solemn and white on their bier.
He had died to defend her name, and she could not remember ever once having given him one kind word! There had been a greatness in his loyalty and in his sacrifice to its demands which outweighed the clumsiness of his passion and the grotesqueness of his ignorance. 'If he were living again, I should be as intolerant of him as I ever was,' she thought at times; 'he would annoy me as much as ever, he would be as ridiculous, he would be as odious; and yet I should like for once to be able to say to him "Pauvre ours! vous êtes mal léché, mais vous avez bon cœur!"'
It was a vague remorse, but a sincere one; yet in her nature it irritated and did not alter her. It was an intrusive thought, and unwelcome as had been his presence. She thrust it away as she had used to bid her women lock the doors of her chamber; and the poor ghost went away obediently, timid, wistful, not daring to insist, as the living man had used to do from the street door.
Remorse is a vast persistent shadow in the poet's metrical romance and the dramatist's tragic story; but in the great world, in the pleasant world, in the world of movement, of distraction, of society, it is but a very faint mist, which at very distant intervals clouds some tiny space in a luminous sky, and hurries away before a breath of fashion, a whisper of news, a puff of novelty, as though conscious of its own incongruity and want of tact.
When their drive was over this day she dismissed the young Otho and his sister to their nurses and teachers, and remained on the sea-terrace of St. Pharamond with some friends about her. It was the last day in February, a day of warm winds and full sunshine and fragrant warmth. The air was penetrated with the sweet breath of primroses and the scented narcissus which were blossoming by millions under the woods of St. Pharamond. The place had been beautiful before, and under her directions had become as perfect a sea palace as the south coast of Europe could show anywhere. She had had a terrace made; a long line of rose-coloured marble overhanging the sea, backed by palms and araucarias, with sheltered seats that no angry breeze could find out, and wide staircases descending to the smooth sands below. Here, lying on the cushions and white bearskins, and leaning one elbow on the balustrade, she could watch all the width of the waters as they stretched eastward and westward, and see the manœuvres in the cupraces of