Boris Fedorovich Seliedoff was a young cousin of Napraxine’s; he was twenty-two years old, tall and well made, with a beautiful face on his broad shoulders, a face given him by a Georgian mother. He had been an imperial page, and was now a lieutenant in the Imperial Guard. He was an only son, and his father was dead; he had a great position, and was much indulged by all his world, and was as headstrong and as affectionate as a child. Nadine Napraxine alone did not indulge him, and he adored her with all the blind ecstasies of a first love; he had obtained his leave of absence only that he might follow her southward. He was extremely timid in his devotion, but he was impassioned also; the moral question of his love for his cousin’s wife weighed no more with him than it weighed with Othmar. His world was not given to consideration of such scruples. As far as she could be entertained by such stale things, she was amused by the worship of this boy. In Russia he had done the maddest follies at her whim and word; once he had come from Petersburg to the Krimea only to be able to dance one valse with her at a ball at her villa on the Black Sea; he had ridden his horse up the staircase of her house in Petersburg, and taken an incredible leap over a river in Orel, because she wished for a stalk of foxglove growing on the other bank; he had risked life and limb, position and honour, again and again, to attract her attention or to go where she was, and she had smiled on him the more kindly the more headstrong were his acts and the more perilous his follies.

Once Napraxine had dared to say to her:

‘Could you not spare Boris? He is only a lad, and his mother trusts to me to keep him out of harm.’

She had answered in her chilliest tones:

‘Pray keep him so. I do not think, however, that you give him the best of examples. Your clubs, your play, your various distractions, are not all of them virtuous?’

And he had been dumb, afraid to offend her more, though he was vaguely uneasy for his young cousin. The lad was terribly in earnest, and she only saw in him a young lion-whelp whose juvenile ardours and furies were half grotesque, half amusing. Napraxine knew that if the lion-whelp went too far, or if she tired of his rage and fret, she would strike him with a whip like any other cur. But he dared not remonstrate more; and Boris Seliedoff, on a brief term of leave, had followed them to the sea-shores of the south-west, and was fretting his soul in futile rage before the indifference of his idol and the presence of her other lovers. It would have been very easy at the onset to have checked the growth of this boyish passion, but she had diverted herself with it, permitted its exaggerations, smiled at its escapades, fanned its fires as she so well knew how to do, and it had sprung to a giant growth in giant strength. This day, when she drove homeward from the breakfast at EzarhÉdine’s, he was waiting for her at La Jacquemerille. For anyone to wait for her was a thing she detested; it was a disobedience to all those unspoken laws which she required her courtiers implicitly to obey. She expected everyone, of whichever sex, of whatever rank, in however high a degree of favour, to be the humble suer of her commands, the meek attendant of her pleasure. To be waited for without her desires being previously ascertained, made her instantly in a chill and irritable mood; it was a presumption. This morning she was especially ready to be irritated. When she saw the tall figure of the young soldier pacing to and fro, with feverish steps, the marble perron of her villa, she grew suddenly and disproportionately angry.

‘The boy becomes audacious,—intolerable,—impertinent,’ she thought. ‘I should have taken him to EzarhÉdine’s if I had wanted him. He has had too much sugar, he needs the whip.’

All that was most cruel, most intolerant, most tyrannical in her, came with a cold hard look upon her delicate features; the temper of those of her people who had thrust their swords into the body of Paul began to awake in her. She was in the humour to hurt something, the first thing she saw; her eyes were full of scorn and of command as they looked haughtily at Seliedoff, and arrested him by a glance as he sprang towards her.

‘Who told you that I sent for you?’ she said, with that chill contemptuous gaze which froze the boy and magnetised him in the same moment.

‘No one,’ he said piteously; ‘I thought,—I imagined——’

‘You imagined you were always welcome!’ she replied. ‘A very erroneous imagination. You may be so to Prince Napraxine, you are his cousin; but as the house is mine, I shall prefer that you shall await my invitation.’

She spoke slightingly, and with a coldness like the New Year ice of Russia.

Boris Seliedoff stood and gazed at her helplessly, fascinated by the anger of the gaze which swept over him in such supreme contempt. He had before offended, before had seen what her caprices and her unkindness could become when she was displeased; but all those previous moments had been as summer showers compared with this glacial censure which froze all his hot young blood. So often she had been content to see him; so often she had laughed at him with indulgence and benignity; so often she had called him ‘ beau cousin,‘ ’cher enfant,’ and smiled at his haste and eagerness when he had done much more than this. Might not any stranger have waited to see her pass, to hear her speak?

Nadine Napraxine, with that one comprehensive disdainful glance, passed across the marble floor, and entered through the open glass doors of the house. She said nothing more. The young Seliedoff, who had grown first very red, then very pale, followed her timidly like a chidden hound, and paused upon the threshold, hesitating; he scarcely ventured to enter also without some sign from her. But she gave him none. She passed on through the salons, and ascended the low broad staircase without bestowing on him a single glance. Then he knew that she was gone to her own apartments, where no man living dared follow her. Boris Seliedoff stole into a little salon humbly, and threw himself down on the first seat he saw. He covered his face with his hands; there were tears in his eyes, which fell slowly through his clasped fingers.

He was a young dare-devil who had eaten fire and played with death, and had hewed down men and women and children without mercy by Skobeleff’s side; but he was a mere frightened, timid, wretched lad beneath the lash of her displeasure. He would have crawled for her pardon like her spaniel, even whilst he groped about in bewilderment and darkness to discover his own offence, and could not tell what it had been. An older man would have told him that it had only been the supreme fault of arriving at the wrong moment.

How long he sat there he never knew; he waited in the vague hope of a gentler word, a more kind dismissal, at least for permission to return. He did not remember that he would only increase his offence, prolong his error. The bright day was shining without on all the gay array of shining marbles, many-coloured azaleas, dancing waves, white sails, blue skies; within, the shaded light fell subdued and roseate on the porcelains, the tapestries, the bronzes, the stands and bowls of flowers, all the fantastic details of modern luxury. He might have been in a peasant’s isba in the midst of a frozen plain for aught he knew. Two or three clocks chimed five, and the carillon in the stable-tower of La Jacquemerille answered them; for anything he could tell, he might have been there a whole day or only fifteen minutes.

Whilst it was still quite daylight, servants came in and brought lamps with rose-coloured shades and set them down noiselessly and went away. Seliedoff raised his head, but he did not leave his place; he sat like a figure of stone. He heard a sound of voices and of laughter; through the parted curtains of the portiÈres he saw the vista of the three drawing-rooms which opened out of the small one in which he was. People were coming in and standing about conversing with one another in the rose-hued light of the lamps, lit whilst the sun was still shining. He then remembered that it was Thursday, her day, on which, from five to seven, the dessus du panier could come there and idle and flirt and sip caravan tea, or syrups or liqueurs, and have the honour of a word from her, perhaps even of a word of welcome. As he looked and remembered, she herself entered the little room in which he sat, and which was the nearest to her own apartments. She cast a glance upon him, severe, astonished, then passed through to the larger salons. She wore a pale-mauve-coloured velvet gown, with a jabot of old point lace, and the same lace peeping here and there from the folds of its skirts; she had some natural yellow roses at her throat; she had her hair À l’empire; she had never looked lovelier, colder, more utterly beyond the imitation of other women or the solicitations of men. He watched her receive the little crowd of people already there, and those who came after them; he heard her sweet chill voice, now and then her laugh; he saw all the men whom he hated gathered about her; and the murmur of the voices, the whispers of the discreet mirth, the scent of the flower-laden air, the rosy gleams of the lamplight, the frou-frou of the dresses, the tinkle of the tea-cups, came to his ear as the sounds of the outer world come to a sick man in fever.

Geraldine was not there. She had always prohibited his appearance more than once a month at her jour.

‘I will have no one seen in my rooms as regularly and certainly as Paul,’ she had always said to him. Paul was her groom of the chambers. ‘Whenever any man is seen perpetually anywhere, as immovably as though he were a clock or a bracket, he becomes ridiculous; and the woman who allows him to be there, still more so.’

Geraldine had been forced to obey, with whatever reluctance; usually he had consoled himself, as well as he could, with the tripot. A man is not often jealous of a day in which he knows there exists for him, in his absence, that safety which lies in numbers.

Boris Seliedoif sat on where he was with dogged persistence, his eyes riveted on those pretty salons in which the comedy of society was being acted, and where he perceived nothing save that one form, when it came within his sight, with the grace of movement, the charm of attitude, which were especial to Nadine Napraxine. He thought the coming and going of her many guests would never end; that the buzz of the many voices would never cease. Once or twice men and women whom he knew came into the little room, and sat down there for a few moments; then he was forced to rise and speak to them, to say he knew not what. But he took his seat again immediately, and resumed his silent vigil. Some of them looked at him in surprise, for his expression was strange, and his black Georgian eyes were misty yet fierce; but he was not conscious of the notice he excited, he was only conscious that she never glanced towards him, never summoned him, once.

The two hours seemed to him endless. When seven had struck, the last carriage rolled away from before the windows, the last lingering visitor, the Duc de Prangins—he who had killed young d’Ivrea—made his profound bow over her hand, and took himself and his elegant witticisms and his admirable manners back to the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo. When the doors had closed on him, Nadine Napraxine stood a moment alone in the centre of her salon; then swiftly turned, and came towards Seliedoff. He rose, and awaited her sullenly.

Her right hand was clenched as though it grasped the handle of a knout, and was about to use it; a terrible anger shone from the lustre of her eyes; her lips were pale with the force of her displeasure.

‘How dare you! how dare you!’ she said between her teeth.

So might an empress have spoken to a moujik.

To have waited unbidden in her room, seen by all the world, sulking there as though he were a lover once favoured, now dispossessed; making of himself a spectacle, a ridicule, a theme for the comment and chatter of society—it seemed to her such intolerable presumption, such infinite insolence, that she could have struck him with her clenched hand if her dignity had not forbade her. For all her world to see this love-sick boy half-hidden in an inner room, as though by her welcome and authority! She, who had dismissed kings as others dismiss lackeys when she had found them too presuming, could find no chastisement vast enough for such a sin against her authority and her repute.

Seliedoff was but a spoilt child; he had had his own will and way unchecked all his short life, and all his companions and servants had existed only for his pleasure. A foolish and doting mother had never bridled his wishes or tamed his passions. Before Nadine Napraxine alone had the arrogant young noble become submissive, suppliant, and humble. Now, in his torture and his sense of wrong, the natural self-will and fury of a spoilt child crossed, of an adoring youth checked and repudiated, broke away from the bonds of fear in which she had always held them. He answered her with a torrent of words, unconsidered and unwise, beyond all pardon.

‘You have treated me like a dog!’ he said in conclusion, his voice choked in his throat, the veins of his forehead injected. ‘You have caressed me, called me, allowed me every liberty, been pleased with my every folly; and now you turn me out of your house as you would turn the dog if he misbehaved himself. But I am not a dog, I am a man, and that you shall know, by God——’

He came nearer to her, his eyes red and covetous, his boyish face inflamed with fiercest passion, his arms flung out to seize her.

She looked at him, such a look as she would have given to a madman to control, and awe him; he paused, trembled, dared not draw nearer to her.

She was deeply, implacably offended by what had passed. For him to permit himself such language and such actions, seemed to her as intolerable an insult as if the African boy in her service had dared to disobey her. It was the first time that anyone had ever ventured to insult her; it irritated all her delicacy, infuriated all her pride. She never paused to think what provocation she had given; she would have struck him dead with a glance had she been able.

‘You are unwell, and delirious,’ she said in her serenest, chillest tones. ‘You know neither what you do or say. I have been kind to you, and you have presumed to misinterpret my kindness. Your cousin would treat you like a hound, if he knew. But you are ill, so there is excuse for you. Go home, and I will send you my physicians.’

Then she rang; and when a servant entered from the antechamber she turned to him:

‘M. le Comte Seliedoff desires his carriage.’

The boy looked at her with a terrible look in his eyes—pitiful, baffled, imploring, delirious.

‘Nadine, Nadine,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘will you send me away like that—to die?’

But she had passed, with her slow soft grace, into the adjoining room. He heard her say to Melville, who had been asked there:

‘You are after my hours, Monsignore, but you are always welcome.’

Seliedoff, with a mist like blood before his eyes, staggered out of the little salon into the mild primrose-scented evening air, hearing, as in a dream, the voices of the servants who told him that his horses waited.

‘She will never forgive; she will never forgive,’ he thought, with a sickening sense that this one moment of insanity had severed him for ever from the woman he worshipped. ‘She will never forgive; I shall never enter her house again!’

All the lovely scene stretching before him in its peace and luxuriance, as the stars came out in the deep blue skies and the daylight still lingered upon shore and sea, was blotted out for him by a red haze as of blood and of tears.