The telegram had merely said that Geraldine had been killed on the ice in the Gulf of S. Lawrence. There had been no details; but later on all the world learned that death had come to him in the freshness of his manhood by one of those trite accidents so common in North American waters in the beginning of winter, when the ice is still loose and detached, and is borne to and fro by the sullen waves which seem unwilling to endure its chains. He had been standing on an ice floe, off the Prince Edward Island, with Canadian hunters, seeking seals, when that portion of it which sustained them had suddenly broken away before they were aware of their danger, and, drifting with frightful rapidity, had borne them out to sea at the close of the short, bitter winter’s day. Many on the shore were witnesses of the certain death to which they were carried, but no help was possible before the darkness of night came down,—the night which froze all human life left without shelter in it.

Where the floe went none knew; when the dawn broke there was no trace of its passage to be made out amidst the many masses of ice rocking, meeting, parting, crashing one upon another as the frost strove to bind beneath its iron hold the free will and the wild anger of the sea. Whether those who had been upon it had been drowned, or frozen to death, or borne out to mid-Atlantic, none could know; but on the third day the body of Geraldine and of two of the Canadian fishermen had been washed ashore off the New Brunswick coast: his features had been recognised by his own crew, and the tidings of his cruel fate had been sent to his mother and his sisters. He had been the only son of a high and honourable House. There was the grief which sorrowed without hope in the old north country halls, where a widowed mother wept for him, and a loyal and loving tenantry followed his body to its grave by the fair Yore waters.

One Tuesday evening, some two weeks later, when Nadine Napraxine returned home from the opera to change her gown for a ball at Prince Orloff’s, there lay on her dressing-room table, amongst others, a letter of which the superscription was very familiar to her, and which moved her with a certain sense which was as nearly fear as it was possible for her temperament to know.

She herself had written to Geraldine’s people, but no one of them had answered her until now that Evelyn Brancepeth did so. She broke the envelope and read the letter, standing in the costume of Venetian red embroidered with silver flowers, in which, at the opera that night, she had held all the eyes of the house upon her as she sat, careless, indifferent, half hidden behind her great red fan, the diamond butterflies which served in the place of sleeves trembling upon her shoulders.

‘I know very well,’ wrote Lady Brancepeth, ‘that before the world you are wholly blameless. I know that my unhappy brother had no right to consider himself preferred by you. I know, were I speaking with you now, you would say with your chilliest manner that you had never honoured him with any encouragement to folly. But you will pardon me if I say that you are more blamable to me than you would be if you had loved him. I am a plain, stupid, unromantic Englishwoman, but even I can see that love excuses its own excesses: l’amour prime le droit. I could pardon a great passion if it even committed a great crime. But you have no passion, you have even no sentiment. You are sometimes amused, and you are sometimes—much more often—bored; and there the scale of your emotions rounds itself and ends. There may be someone who can, or who will, extend for you that narrow circle, though I very greatly doubt it; but it was entirely certain that poor Ralph had never any chance or any power to do so. He adored you, quite stupidly and hopelessly, but he never even knew how to say so in such a manner as could have touched you. He was very English, very terre À terre, and if he had never seen you he would have led a happy life enough; a commonplace one, no doubt, but one useful in his generation, and content with those simple joys which to a raffinÉe like you seem so absurd and so dull. But he did meet you; and ever afterwards life meant nothing to him unless it meant your presence, and your will. You had admitted him into the honour of a certain intimacy, which, in his blundering English way, he fancied meant all kinds of eventualities that it did not mean. No doubt his delusion was of his own creating, and of course he ought to have been prepared for his dismissal when he had become troublesome or tedious; but he was so unwise that he put all his heart into that which he should have understood was a mere jeu de salon; and you did not condescend to give him any warning. Why should you? you will say. Why, indeed, since his fate was as entirely indifferent to you as the bouquets that crowd your antechambers in Carnaval. It would have been so very easy for you, when first my brother ventured to show you what he felt, to banish him for ever with a decisive word; he would have been man enough to understand and to accept it; but you did not take that trouble, and the love of you grew—not perhaps precisely upon hope—but at least upon the tacit permission to exist. I scarcely know why I write all this to you, for you will not read it; only I have been your friend, so far as you allow any woman to call herself so, and I feel that whenever we meet in the world you will expect me to be so still, and I cannot. I must ask you to let us be strangers. No doubt, actually, you are innocent of my brother’s death, but indirectly—even in a manner directly—you were the cause of it. You made his country, his family, his home life, his duties of all kinds, become no more to him than if he had never known land or kindred. The pain with which you filled him made him wander in an aimless unrest from place to place in an alien world with which he had no sympathy, and made him only too willing to die, that he might so throw off the fever of your memory. My dear Nadine, you are a woman of perfect honour, of high repute, of sensitive and unbending pride, and on the ermine of your delicate dignity there is no stain as yet. But for me, there is blood upon your hand. I can never take it in my own again. Let us be strangers.’

The letter was signed, and nothing more was added to it.

Nadine Napraxine read the lines through, word by word, and when she had done so, folded it up and put it aside, without irritation, but not altogether without regret. The frank, sincere, and at times rough words of Geraldine’s sister had been welcome to her by their contrast with the false sweetness of the world’s phrases, and she knew that she would lose her friendship with reluctance, and miss her surly honesty, with its uncompromising truths. But the letter seemed to her exaggerated, not in the best taste, even if, under the circumstances which inspired it, natural enough. Geraldine had perished by such an accident as every year costs scores of fishers’ lives whenever the ice floes meet and sever in the half-frozen seas of the north. Why would they see her hand in it so clearly?

‘It is just as they always see the finger of God where a horse stumbles at a post and rails, or when a pointsman is sleepy and does not hang out the red light,’ she said to herself, with some impatient contempt. ‘I am sorry, quite sorry myself, that he is dead, but I certainly never told him to get upon a block of ice in midwinter on the St. Lawrence. And it was quite as much Platon’s doing as mine that ever he took the habit of coming about our house at all. Besides, if he had not been very stupid, as even his sister says, he would have understood À demi-mot; there is nothing on earth so tiresome as people who want things explained.’

Still, there were passages in the letter which touched her conscience, and reached that truthfulness in self-judgment which easily awoke in her.

‘I suppose I am unkind—sometimes,’ she thought, with a certain contrition. ‘When they irritate me I really do not care what becomes of them. As long as they know how to please me I am always amiable. It is not my fault that their knowledge comes to an end too soon. It is their own poverty of style, of thought, of invention. If I were writing a dictionary, and had to define Man, I should say he was a limited animal, exceedingly limited. There is infinitely more variety about dogs.’

The very recollection of the excessive monotony of the human species made her yawn. She wondered if that monotony were the fault of civilisation; probably not. In a savage state, no doubt, instincts had been all alike, just as manners were all alike now. People were all dull, and because she found them so they considered her heartless. Poor Geraldine had been dull; dull in comprehension, in intention, in discernment; and just because she had found him so his sister wrote to her as if she were a murderess.

‘Poor woman!’ she reflected. ‘She is always so disposed to see everything so terribly en noir. That is so English, too. They always have the fog in their eyes. I am not in the least like Lady Macbeth. I neither murder men, nor have my sleep murdered by them. It is natural that she should feel keenly the loss of her only brother, but it is absurd that she should lay the blame upon my shoulders, when she knows that if he had not wished to shoot seals—which is a barbarous pastime—he would most probably be alive now. As if a man could be wasting with despair, and yet care about seals! To be sure, it is very English. If an Englishman be hopelessly in love with any one, he generally goes a long way off and tries to kill a tiger or a moose. I do not see the connection of ideas between the sigh of passion and the steel of a gun barrel, but there must be some link of affinity for them, because they all do it. I prefer men like Othmar, who kill other men.’

Although she was all alone as these thoughts drifted through her mind while the letter of Lady Brancepeth lay amongst the litter of notes, cards, and invitations on her table, a momentary warmth came on her face as the name of Othmar recurred to her, and a certain bitterness of contempt came into her recollection as she remembered his marriage. If he had had patience, if he only had had patience, perhaps—perhaps—perhaps——

She would not have gone away with him, because in her world they did not do those things, and she would have always been too keenly afraid of an after-time of regret and weariness, but she might have accepted the gift of his life, and given him something of her own.

In his haste and wrath he had set up a barrier between them, but how frail it was! Only the timid, wistful youth of a girl! The imperial scorn of the Cleopatras of the earth rose in her before her meek, childlike rival.

What a coward he had been to shelter himself behind the frail rampart of a young girl’s affection; affection which he did not appreciate, did not reciprocate, did not value!

A woman with a tithe part of the discernment and the experience which she possessed could cast the horoscope of Yseulte without any recourse to the stars for knowledge of the future. All that fresh and tender love would count for nothing, would avail nothing, would awaken no response. She would bear his children, and live in his houses, and be the object of all his careful outward observance, and that would be all. He would grow unspeakably weary of seeing her, of hearing her, of remembering her tie to him, and he would conceal his weariness ill or well, and be every day more and more galled by the necessity for concealment.

When Nadine Napraxine, after the ball, went to her own rooms that night, she had herself undressed by her women and wrapped in a loose bed-room gown, made of her favourite white satin, and lined with eider-down. She dismissed her women, and lay before the warmth of her dressing-room fire in that dreamy state between waking and sleeping which is the very perfection of repose. The softly-lighted chambers opened one out of another in a vista of rich subdued colour, ending in the bath room, where a lamp hung above a beautiful reproduction of the Venus of Naples. The rooms were so many temples to her own perfections, she was the Grace, the Muse, and the Venus herself of this perfect sanctuary, which no footfall of man had ever dared invade. As she reclined before the fire that night and glanced through her half-closed lids down the succession of chambers, which in the clear but delicate light had the glow of jewels, she thought how dull and empty they would have seemed to most women of her years without a lover’s step coming silently and swiftly through the fragrant silence.

‘Decidedly,’ she mused, ‘the voix de la nature says nothing at all to me. Is it because I have no heart, as they say? I do not think the heart has much to do with that kind of thing. I suppose I am cold, as they all cry out against me. Of all of them, there is no one I should care to see coming through those shadows; he would disturb me. The passions are coarse things. It is disgusting that there should not be two ways of love, one for Dona Sol and one for Manon Lescaut—for one’s self and one’s maid. But there are not. On se rend, ou on ne se rend pas; but when the submission is made Nature makes no difference between Cleopatra and a camp-follower.’

She sighed a little, inconsistently. She disdained alike the solicitations of the senses and the pleasures of the affections, and yet she was conscious of a certain coldness and emptiness in her life; she was not prepared to confess that what she needed was love, but a vague impression of solitude came upon her. She remembered the lips of Othmar pressed upon her wrist, how they had burned, how they had trembled!

Was it possible that the keenest joys of life lay, after all, in those follies which her temperament and her philosophies had classed with contempt amongst the excesses of wantons and the exaggerations of poets?

The purest maiden in her cloister could not have been colder than was Nadine Napraxine; to her the indulgence of the senses only meant an intolerable humiliation, an ignominious outrage; maternity itself had only been to her a long and hated and revolting burden, a sign of unendurable degradation, which offended all her pride and all her delicacy. The satyr had always seemed to her a much juster emblem of such instincts than any winged amorino.

could not rouse any desire or any sentiment in her.

And yet there were occasionally moments, fleeting ones it is true, when in the sublimated egoism of her indolent, ironical, artificial life, she had a vague impression of some possible passion which yet might arouse her to acknowledge its force; a tempestuous fancy swept over her, as a storm-wind may sweep over a parterre of tulips and azaleas, for stronger emotions, hotter enmities, dearer attachments, keener strife, than those which the polished inanities of her own sphere could yield to her. The emotion lasted with her very little time, but whilst it was there the eyes of Othmar always looked in memory into hers.

She who at will forgot everything had never forgotten the sound of his voice as he had pleaded with her. It had ever since haunted her with a vague imperfect sense of something missed, something lost, something in her own life incomplete and unattainable. She had not a doubt but that in time they would have wearied each other—fatigue was the inevitable shadow of all love—yet she had a pathetic regretfulness as for life incomplete, undeveloped, unshared, whenever she remembered that hers and his might have been passed together.

It had been only a sentiment; it never had risen to the form of desire, or ached with the pain of passion; but it had been a sentiment, vague, almost poetic; a wild flower of feeling which seemed of strange growth in the hot-house culture of her intelligence, and the rarified chill air of her many philosophies.

She had sometimes said to herself, ‘I could have loved him.’ In self-communion the conditional mood is never parted by more than a hair’s breadth from the present. There were moments in the ironical, indolent, artificial life which usurped her time and thoughts in which she almost regretted that decision which had banished Othmar from her side and given him to another. The regret was as nearly a movement of the heart as she was capable of; but it was much besides that; it was the inquisitiveness of a dÉsoeuvrÉe incredulous that life could hold any great emotions for her; it was the impulse of a contemptuous courage to break through social laws which it despised; it was the desire of a woman lonely amidst her triumphs to find that key to the enjoyment of existence which, in some way or another, had slipped through her hands, and had never been discovered in its hiding-place.

‘If I had been quite sure that he would have contented me!’ she thought more than once.

If she had been quite sure, she would have surrendered everything, paused at nothing; it was neither daring nor generosity which were wanting in her; but she had not been sure, since she was never sure of herself!