It was eight o'clock in the evening on the plains of Russia, and warm with that Asiatic heat which comes with the reign of the dog-star even to the provinces that lie between the Baltic waters and the Ural snows. In the vast gardens and white wide courts of the house at ZaraÏla the evening was sultry, and NadÈge, spending a few dull days in her annual visit to her elder children and their estates, was lying half asleep upon a couch, listening to the monotonous drip of the lion-fountain in the central court, and thinking of nothing in especial. This visit had always represented to her supreme and unmitigated tedium. It was a duty to come there no doubt; her duties were docile courtiers as a rule and seldom troubled her; but it was tiresome, infinitely tiresome, it was so much time lost out of the sum of her life. Why is duty never agreeable?

The Napraxine children were in their own apartments; the clear sunny evening, whose light would stretch almost to dawn, illumined the gardens and terraces. She reclined motionless upon her broad low couch, with a little cigarette between her lips, now and then sending into the air around her delicate rings of rose-scented smoke. The mother of Platon Napraxine, a woman old and austere, with the terrible austerity of women who have loved pleasure and passion, and only turned to devotion when both have deserted them, sat near and watched her with dark, brooding, sunken eyes, full of a hate which the object of it was too indifferent and too careless to care for or to measure.

The Princess Lobow Gregorievna, born a Princess Miliutine, was a woman who had been handsome, but had now lost nearly all trace of past beauty. She was spare, colourless, and attenuated, and her severe, straight profile, and her expression of ascetic rigidity, gave her a curious likeness to those Byzantine portraits of St. Anne and of St. Elizabeth which were surrounded with jewels and relics on the altars of her private chapel. Her piety in old age was as complete and absorbing as her licentious amours had been in her earlier womanhood. Superstition had taken the same empire over her in age which her passions had possessed previously; and she was as extravagant in her donations to church and convent as she had once been to the impecunious officers of the guard and princely gamblers, who had been in turn favoured with her fantastic and short-lived preference. Her religious and most orthodox fervour was neither a mask nor an hypocrisy. It was the most genuine of all religions—that which is founded on personal fear. But it intensified the hardness of her temper, and never whispered to her that mercy might be holier than long prayers.

In all Europe Othmar and his wife had no enemy colder, harder, more implacable than this holy woman, whose name meant Love, and whose good works were seen in endowed convents, jewelled reliques, mighty treasures bestowed all over her province, and ceremonials, fasts, and penances of the orthodox most rigidly observed in her person. NadÈge never tried to conciliate or propitiate her grim foe; she was at once too careless and too courageous. With her delicate and unsparing raillery she had stung this enmity with many a barbed word, subtle and negligent and penetrating, accentuated with the cruel sweet music of her laughter, until the hatred with which the Princess Lobow hated her was deep as the Volga, though hidden like the Volga's bottomless holes so long as Platon Napraxine had lived. His death had given it justification, and intensified it a thousandfold.

'If she were a good woman she would be compelled to hate me,' thought the object of her hate. 'And being what she is, if she could poison me secretly she would do it, even in the blessed bread itself.'

When they had first met after her marriage with Othmar, there had been said between them such words as are ineffaceable on the memory like vitriol flung on the face.

'For the first time in my life I have allowed myself to be in a rage; je me suis encanaillÉe!' she had said to herself, penitent not for the anger into which she had been driven, but for the force with which she had uttered it, which was an offence against her canons of good taste.

The earlier years of the Princess Lobow had been dedicated to all those refined ingenuities of depravity in which the nineteenth century can rival the Rome of Vitellius and the Constantinople of the Byzantine emperors. There were terrible facts in her past, ready, like so many knives, to the use of her opponent, allusions which could pierce like steel, and could scar like flame. NadÈge had spared none of them. With all the pitiless disdain of a woman in whom the senses have but very faint power, she had poured out her scorn on the other, whose senses had been her tyrants until, virtuous perforce through the chills of age, she had taken her worthless withered soul to God.

Since that time the bitterest enmity had been open and avowed between them. Concession to the world, and regard to the dead man's memory, caused them to still keep up a show and aspect of conventional politeness before others. But the polished surface covered the most bitter feud. They were studiously ceremonious and courteous one to the other; but beneath the few phrases they exchanged, often trivial and apparently amiable as these might be, there were a hint, a tone, a meaning which told to each of the other's undying animosity. To the younger woman it was a matter of pure indifference, of careless amusement; her nature was too capricious and too disdainful to cherish deep enmities; she despised rather than she disliked; but to the elder this hatred she cherished was the last flickering flame of the many hot passions which had governed her in earlier years. For her only son she had had a concentrated intensity of affection, into which all the ambition, cupidity, and love of dominion in her character had been united. His marriage had been hateful to her, and when Nadine, in her sixteenth year, as fragile as an orchid and as impertinent as Cherubino, petulantly detesting the husband they had given her, and in the bitterness of her disillusions at war with all the world, was brought in the first months of her marriage to the great house of ZaraÏla, the Princess Lobow had seen in her not only the despoiler of her own power, but the ruin of her son.

Many and violent had been the scenes between Platon Napraxine and herself, of which his wife was the object and the cause.

'She is a crystal of ice, you say,' she told him a hundred times. 'Well, she will so chill your heart one day that it will be numb for ever. Remember that; I warn you.'

He did remember when he went out to his death in the dawn of the April morning at Versailles.

Whilst he lived his mother's hatred for his wife was impotent and perforce mute; but all the many slights, the constant indifference, the frequent ridicule of which he was the object, though unperceived or forgiven by him, were written on his mother's memory indelibly as on tablets of stone. All the coquetries and scandals which were associated with his wife's name, all the tragedies for which the breath of her world made her responsible, all the cruel words and strange caprices which were attributed to her, were gathered up and treasured by the Princess Lobow. Seldom leaving her solitudes in the provinces, and seldom seen even in Petersburg, she yet was as accurately informed of all the gossip of Europe concerning her daughter-in-law as though she had lived perpetually beside her. None of the minutiÆ of the vaguest rumours about her escaped the vigilance of her enemy. Saint though she was, she prayed passionately that some imprudence greater than usual, some coquetry which would pass beyond the patience of her husband and her world, would deliver NadÈge Federowna into her hands, but she waited in vain. The indulgence of both the world and the husband was inexhaustible for one to whom they were both of the most absolute insignificance.

Then one day, as falls a bolt from a clear sky, a single line by the electric wires told her that her son was dead.

In her eyes he was murdered by his wife, as surely as though she had touched his lips with poison.

Her grief and her rage were terrible: the more terrible because the hatred which might have assuaged it had no outlet in action, could scarce have any in speech.

For Platon Napraxine had left his young sons wholly in the hands of their mother, and she could take them whither she would, and do with them whatever she chose; and the elder woman, who had transferred to them all that jealous and violent attachment which she had given their father, concealed all she felt that she might retain them near her, whilst the secretiveness and ruses of the Slav temperament made it possible for her to continue in apparent friendship before the world with one whom she looked on as his destroyer.

She sat now erect on an antique chair of gilded and painted leather, and through her dropped eyelids watched the indolent attitude, the profound idleness, the outstretched limbs, like those of a reposing Diana, of the woman she loathed. In all the attitude, from the sans gÊne and complete ease of it to the little rose-scented puffs of smoke which ever and again came from her parted lips, there was that 'note of modernity' which beyond all other things the Princess Lobow detested. The women of her time had been as licentious as the great Catharine herself, but they had been different to the cocodettes in manner, in mind, in opinion, in everything. They had been like fierce Oriental empresses, often barbarous, uncleanly, gross, but they had had a stateliness which all their excesses could not impair. The modern woman of the world, with her careless attitudes, her mockery of all ceremonial, her disrespect for tradition and etiquette, her airy scepticism, and her vague dissatisfaction, was, wherever she was met with, an enigma and an affront to the elder woman, whose own life had been divided between strong vices and strong faiths, and whose bigotry and whose sensuality had been of equal force. They had neither senses nor souls, these poor modern anÉmiques, thought this woman of seventy years, who had been a Messalina and who had become a St. Katherine.

'Ah, you despise us, madame; how right you are!' NadÈge had said to her once. 'We never know what we wish, and when we get what we ask for, we are as irritated as when it is denied to us. It is the fault of all culture—it creates discontent and fastidiousness as surely as civilisation brings all kinds of new diseases. I only wish that we could be like our granddames and godmothers, who had no earthly ideals beyond a constant succession of big officers of cuirassiers, and no mental doubt whatever as to the existence of a "bon Dieu." It must have simplified life so much to have been able to balance the little weakness for the succession of cuirassiers with such a perfect confidence in Heaven!'

At this moment in the summer evening at ZaraÏla neither of them were speaking. They had exchanged many cruel, courteous innuendoes in the course of the day, but with the evening there had come a tacit truce. The little boys were wholly under the power of their mother as their guardian, and their grandmother feared that if she were too much irritated she might remove them from ZaraÏla or request her to leave it. Nadine, on her side, had thought, with a sense of compassion and that disdainful but candid justice which was seldom wanting in her: 'After all, as she loved that poor, big, clumsy fellow so well, and he was her only son—the only thing she had—it is pardonable, it is natural, that she should hate me for ever.'

It grew late, but it was still light with the long and radiant evening of the north in summer. She, in the drowsy heat of the eventide, looked with still dreamy eyes out on to the sultry gardens beneath, where golden evening light was poured on endless aisles and fields of roses, and groves of feathery bananas and plumed palms; the vegetation of the vales of Kashmere made by art to blossom there for the brief season of a Russian summer.

'How very foolish women are to fear absence,' she thought. 'Absence is the only possible avenue which can lead us to find the fontaine de jouvence of renewed interest. Familiarity is so fatal—so fatal! Helen's self would be unable to hold her own against it. Those silly women who let the man they love enter their chamber as easily as he can go into his racing stables, set a great grey ghost of indifference at the threshold. Most women are afraid of not being near what they love. If they only knew how distance helps them; how constant proximity hurts them! If Love cannot keep a few surprises in his pocket, he is as tiresome as a newspaper a week old.'

She laughed a little, watching the leaves of a full-blown rose fall under the touch of an alighting bird.

'When it has once been full-blown,' she thought, 'any touch—even a bird's, even a butterfly's—will serve to finish it for ever.'

Love was so like that great crimson rose, which a moment before had been a cup of ruby-coloured fragrance, and now was a mere litter of dropped leaves upon the grass. Love lives by its emotions, its desires, its illusions: so long as these can be excited and sustained it is Love; when they cannot be so, it is as the Spanish poet said centuries ago, habit, friendship, what you will, but not Love any more.

She had studied the natures of men too profoundly not to know this.

There was the sound of wheels in the central court, and various doors opened and shut in the apartments leading to the grand salon where they were. Then the groom of the chambers, in his black uniform, only relieved by his silver chain of office and the key embroidered on his collar, preceded and announced Othmar.

Nadine half rose, leaning on one arm on the cushion.

'My dear Otho, this is charming of you! I did not expect you until to-morrow,' she said, with a smile of welcome, as she put out her left hand to him. Othmar kissed her fingers with warmth and deference, then saluted with ceremony the Princess Lobow.

'I came from Moscow more quickly than I could have hoped to do,' he said, as he seated himself beside his wife. 'An Imperial train was leaving for the north, and the Grand Duke Alexis offered me a place in it. Are you well? It is three months and more since we met.'

'I am as well as it is ever permitted one to be in a century in which the nerves play the most prominent rÔle. And the children?'

'Perfectly well, and perfectly happy. They are not yet at the age of nerves. But I have telegraphed all news to you; there is nothing left to say, except that absence——'

'Oh, do not make me compliments like a berger d'Éventail! We will take all that for granted.'

The reproof to him was the same sort of mockery with which she had been always wont to repress the attempts at tenderness of Napraxine; but his mother, listening, heard the difference in the accent, and watching, saw the difference in the smile with which they were spoken.

'The wanton!' she thought bitterly; 'she expected him to-night, though she said not till to-morrow. It was for him, that attitude like a Diane endormie, that coquette's disarray, that studied disorder of laces and gauzes, that little bouquet of heliotrope fastened just above the left breast! Oh, the beast, the beast! All that belonged to my son—every atom of it, from her little ear to her slender foot, and should have been burnt with him, like the Indian women, if I could have had my way—should have been buried with him, like his stars and his crosses. Oh, the beast, the beast! if I could only wring her neck!'

Then she rose, and murmuring some words inaudible and indifferent to her companions, she left the apartment. Othmar, alone beside his wife in the aromatic warmth of the summer evening, bent over her couch and kissed her little bouquet of heliotrope.

'Allons, berger!' she cried, with a little resistance which was not displeasure.

It pleased her that she had the power to make her husband her lover; that she could still see him moved to the folies des bergers. It was a point of vanity with her, as well as an impulse of the heart, to retain something of that empire over him which had once been so absolute. When she should wholly cease to be able to do so, it seemed to her that she would be grown old indeed. She had never put more coquetry, more sorcery, more art concealed by art into her efforts to blind and enslave her lovers, than she had done that evening when she was awaiting Othmar after three months' absence. It might not be the highest form of love, but it was the ablest. It was of a piece with that magic by which Cleopatra defied time, and changed the ravages of habit into philtres of fresh charm.