The weeks passed on, and Othmar returned no more to the fields of
Chevreuse. The great interests and the vast operations of his house
occupied his time, and the days of this man whom Nature had created
a dreamer and a student, went away in the consideration of financial
enterprises, in the audience of innumerable supplicants, in the
emission of national loans, and in the study of political situations.
He thought oftentimes of her, but he went to her no more. To let her
alone he knew was, as Rosselin said, all that he could do for her.
His wife he scarcely saw at this season.
Now and then when it was unavoidable he went with her to some great
dinner or reception; oftener they received at home themselves, and
on such evenings he saw her in all the grace and elegance which the
highest culture and the utmost fashion can lend to a woman already
patrician in every fibre of her being. Sometimes she addressed a few
words to him concerning the children, or the horses, or some matter
of mutual interest; and he saw her carriage passing in and out,
her friends and acquaintances coming and going on the stairs, her
attendants carrying her chocolate, or her bouquets, or the offerings
made her by her courtiers: that was all. In no year had she been more
absorbingly _mondaine_; in no year had she been so conspicuous as
the greatest lady in Paris; in no year had her balls, her fêtes, her
banquets, her concerts, been more wonderful in their novelty and more
exclusive in their invitations.
'_Dame! elle a un chic incroyable!_' thought Blanchette, angrily,
watching her and conscious that her day was not done as she had hoped.
Meantime, in the brilliant movement of which his house was the centre,
Othmar felt that he was becoming rapidly a mere cypher amidst it all,
as Platon Napraxine had been, and he perceived no way by which he could
recover his influence without her ridicule and the world's comment.
That had come to him which he had said should never come: he was
nothing in her life, not so much as one of her mere acquaintances.
Such a position had always seemed to him the deepest humiliation that
any man could accept; he had always thought that any man might save
his dignity if he could not secure his own happiness; but now, he saw
how easy it is to theorise, how difficult it is to resist the slow
insidious influence of circumstances. We drift into positions which we
hate without being conscious of our descent, and the effect of others
upon our nature and our actions is as subtle and as unperceived as
those of climate or of time.
He could not have said when the first coldness had come between himself
and her, when the first irritation had crept into their intercourse,
when the first frost of indifference had passed from her manner over
the warmth of his own emotions. It had been unperceived, uncounted, but
its results had grown and strengthened, until now they were like ten
thousand other men and women in the world, living under the same roof,
but wholly strangers to each other, only united by one slender thread,
their mutual interests. It was a position which wounded him, humiliated
him, oppressed him with a constant sense of weakness and of failure:
he had not the slightest power over her, though she retained much over
him; strong men, he thought, either left their wives or forced them to
keep their marriage vows; and he did neither.
Of late she had become almost insolent in her tone to him; she seemed
to take pleasure in passing the most marked slights upon him; she
purposely withheld from him the slightest acquaintance with her
movements or intentions, and at times her eyes looked at him with a
cynical disdain.
It was absurd, he felt, and exaggerated, and probably wholly ungrounded
in every way, but there were moments when he imagined that she wished
to remind him of his social inferiority to herself, moments when the
recollection of the origin of the Othmar fortunes spoilt for a passing
hour her pleasure in the existence of her children. Though he did
not harbour the suspicion, but threw it away from him as unworthy of
both himself and her, it yet existed and made him over-sensitive to
any slight upon her part, quick to perceive the faintest tinge of
contempt in her tone to him. He knew that she could count her great
ancestries far beyond the dim days of Rurick; whilst there were courts
of Europe where feudal etiquette still prevailed strongly enough to
make his presence in their throne-rooms impossible. These were mere
nominal differences, no doubt, and he might perchance have saved from
bankruptcy the very state in which he would have been forbidden to
pass the palace gates if he had sought to accompany her through them;
but still there were moments when the voice and the glance of his wife
recalled these conventional things to him out of the limbo of absolute
nullity in which, but for those, he let them lie. Never by any spoken
word or hint had she ever reminded him of them, yet now and then in
her colder moments he thought: 'Perhaps she remembers that two hundred
years ago if her forefathers rode over the plains of Croatia they could
ride down mine before them, and drive them with their whips like so
many acorn-eating swine!'
He began to believe that she was in truth as cruel as the world had
always called her; and a feeling which was almost hatred at times awoke
in him and blent with the suffering she caused him.
It seemed to him that no man on earth ever gave a woman such passion
and such worship as he had given her; these might at least, he thought,
have secured respect from her, even if they had failed to hold her
sympathy.
He said nothing to her. Remonstrance would have been useless,
supplication unmanly. He let time drift them where it would: and in the
ever-exercising burden of his pain Damaris became almost forgotten.
Some weeks after the performance of Lemberg's cantata, Blanche de
Laon, calling on the woman whom she hated on her 'jour,' came late,
stayed until the rooms were nearly emptied of their crowd, and then
sank down beside her hostess on a low couch in a corner palm-shadowed,
where banks of lilies of the valley gave out their fragrance under
rose-shaded lamps, and great Japanese vases were filled with the rosy
flowers of the gesneria and the philesia. She always paid great outward
deference to Nadège, was coaxing and _câline_, and for her alone
subdued the rudeness and the shrillness of her voice and manner. She
leaned now beside her on the broad low seat of the cushioned corner,
whilst the few people who remained in the rooms conversed in little
groups, and the flowers, the porcelains, the stuffs, the pictures, the
embroidered satins of the walls, the long vista of salons opening one
out of another, made up one of those pictures of harmonised colour and
of artistically arranged luxuries of which the modern world is so full.
Blanchette had all manner of confidential things to disclose, secrets
of this toilette and that, of this scandal and the other, of the true
reason of a dear friend's sudden indisposition, and the actual cause
of a coming duel; all these _secrets de Polichinelle_, which society
loves to carry about and distribute, things which are mysteries of life
and death yet whispered at every '_petit quart d'heure_' in every house
known to fashion.
Nadine listened, leaning back amongst her cushions indifferent,
scarcely affecting attention, thinking of her own costume at a coming
ball she was about to give, in which the _règne animal_ of Cuvier
was to furnish the dresses. She had chosen a panther. All the yellow
and black would make her delicate colourless skin look so well, and
she would wear all her diamonds, and ----. She was aroused from her
meditation by the question which Blanche de Laon put suddenly to her.
'Do tell me,' she said, leaning down amongst her cushions: 'You know I
like to be the first to hear things--when will the new genius make her
_début_ with you?'
'What do you mean?'
'Oh, you know what I mean; this young artist whom Rosselin is training,
in whom your husband is interested, and who is to make her first
appearance here? Who is she? Do tell me about her. I should like to
have her appear at my house if you have no proprietary rights to her
exclusive production.'
'I have no idea of what person you speak of; I am not fond of untried
artists,' she answered, with perfect indifference, but Blanchette saw a
shade of surprise and a coldness of displeasure on her face.
'Oh, surely you like a _débutante_?' she said carelessly. 'It always
amuses people so much, something quite new, and I believe this girl is
beautiful; does not Othmar say so?'
But by this time her hostess was on her guard, and her expression
wholly under control.
'I think I know whom you mean now,' she replied indifferently. 'But
as to a _début_ here--that is quite in the future. I am not fond of
untried artists as I say: one does not take out unbroken horses to
drive in a crowd. Genius is admirable, but I think like wine it wants
time and a seal set upon it before one offers it at one's table.'
Blanche de Laon was perplexed.
'Does she know all about her, or nothing about her?' she wondered. 'I
want to know more myself before I go on with it.'
Some other people approached them at that moment; the conversation
turned on the _règne animal_ ball; Blanchette, disappointed, rose and
went and drank _deux doigts de liqueur_, and ate a caviare biscuit, in
another room, where Loris Loswa was drawing some caricatures of mutual
acquaintances, as the beasts of Cuvier, on his visiting cards, and
distributing them amongst some ladies of fashion.
'Meet me on Saturday at eleven at the Rond point,' she murmured to him
as she took from him a sketch of her brother-in-law the Duc d'Yprès as
a wild boar in top boots, over which she condescended to shriek her
shrillest laughter and approval.
When her rooms were all quite emptied, and she was left alone in them,
Nadine remained leaning back amongst the cushions motionless and with a
cold contemptuous anger on her face.
'To think that I should accept such a part as that!' she thought. 'He
must be mad and the whole world with him!'
Weak women, indulgent women, women who were afraid and wanted pardon
for their own secrets, these women did these things, aided their
husbands' amours, received their husbands' favourites, helped their
husbands to conventional disguises of equivocal situations, but that
_rôle_, was not hers.
'And he came from this girl to me in Russia;' she thought with that
physical disgust which is so strong in some women, and which men never
understand.
One forenoon on entering his study, Othmar missed from the wall the
sketch made by Loswa. There was only a blank space between the places
of the Corot and the Aivanoffsky. He rang for the major-domo.
'Who has taken the portrait from that place?' he asked; he feared the
entrance of some thief from the gardens.
The major-domo, astonished and alarmed, replied that he had taken it
down that morning by command of his mistress, and had sent it whither
she had directed him to do; to a certain gallery recently built on the
Trocadéro.
'You were quite right to do so if Madame desired you,' said Othmar; and
dismissed the official without more comment.
As soon as he could be admitted to his wife's presence, he went to her
and opened the subject with scanty preface.
'Philippe says that you ordered him to send the sketch by Loswa out of
my study to the new gallery on the Trocadéro,' he said, when he had
made her his usual greeting. 'Is that true?'
'Very true. One would think I had ordered him to blow up the Louvre or
the Luxembourg!'
'May I venture to inquire your reasons?'
'Certainly. There is an exhibition of Loswa's works about to be opened
there. You are aware that these exhibitions of a single master are very
popular now. That head is one of the best things he has done. It will
come back to you in three months. Cannot you live without it till then?'
Othmar felt that he coloured like a boy.
'I would, of course, have lent it,' he said with a little hesitation.
'I have sent all his portraits of myself and of the children,' she said
with a cold glance at him. 'You do not appear to have missed those.'
'I have probably not entered the rooms in which they hung. If you will
pardon my saying so, I do not care to know less of what you wish to do
than my servants know--and to know it first through them.'
'If I had told you, you would have objected. When I know that people
will object, I never ask them what they wish.'
'The method has the merit of simplicity.'
He felt exceedingly angered; in the first place he did not care to have
the portrait seen by all Paris at a moment when the original was living
so near Paris with no friend but himself, and in the second place he
indignantly resented being treated like a cypher in his own houses; he
never permitted himself to intrude on her personal arrangements--could
she not respect his?
Now and then, and above all of late, there had been something
high-handed and even insolent in her occasional treatment of things
which concerned him, and on which she did not consult him; something
which made him fancy that in the deepest depth of the thoughts and
feelings there was occasionally the remembrance that the great race of
princes from whom she herself descended would have deemed her alliance
with one of the princes of finance a gross mésalliance.
This was a trifle, no doubt, and he was not a man who ever disputed
small matters. But the tone with which she had spoken had given
it something of personal offence, and he could not shake from him
the impression that she had purposely sent away the portrait. The
exhibition was about to take place, no doubt, at the new gallery on
the Trocadéro; Loswa having quarrelled violently with the committee of
the Salon, had chosen to prove that the collection of his works would
be more attractive to the public than anything which the Salon could
offer without his assistance; but the manner in which this sketch had
been removed from his study, conveyed to Othmar the impression of some
personal motive, some personal meaning in the act.
Capricious as his wife always was, she yet was usually courteous. This
insolence of the removal of his picture was unlike her.
She always held the very true creed that mutual politeness is the first
of obligations to render the intimacy of daily life endurable.
He left her presence quickly, afraid of what his anger might bring
him into saying. He had never as yet wholly lost his temper with her,
though there were times when it was sorely tried.
Her cold, nonchalant, slighting tone was that which always tried it
the most. Of all things which he most hated it was to be spoken to as
Platon Napraxine had been; like the last of her lacqueys! as he thought
bitterly now. She looked after him with some scorn.
'Is he gone to the Trocadéro to seize back his lost treasure?'
She had sent the sketch thither on purpose to see what he would do or
say.
With an impulse which was as swift as thought itself and which he did
not pause to consider, he turned back as he reached the threshold of
her boudoir, and stood before her.
'Nadège,' he began with an impetuosity which yet had a certain timidity
in it. 'There is something which I wished to tell you the other day.
There is a reason which makes me especially regret that you should have
sent that portrait for exhibition without referring the matter to me.
Are you inclined to be patient enough to hear a little tale which might
interest you perhaps if it were a sketch by Ludovic Halévy, but I fear
will not do so told in my poor words?'
He did not observe the expression of her eyes, which surveyed him with
a cynical coldness, as she asked:
'Do you mean that you have written a romance?--or played one?'
There was the mockery in the words which he had dreaded so much that
he had put off this moment day after day, week after week, month after
month.
'Neither,' he answered, curtly. 'I have not talent for the one, nor
time and inclination for the other. You may believe me,' he added a
little bitterly, 'if I had been foolish enough to tempt fate with
either, your indulgence is the last mercy for which I should hope.'
Her eyes still looked at him coldly, steadfastly; with no revelation
in her gaze of whether she were surprised, interested, indifferent, or
already wearied.
She was leaning back in her long low chair; there was a great deal of
lace ruffled at her bosom and on her arms; she wore a long loose satin
gown of palest _rose effeuillée_ of which the lights and shadows were
very beautiful: her hands were tightly clasped upon her lap; her great
pearls gleamed behind the lace; she looked like a woman of the time
of the Stuarts or of the Valois. At her elbow stood an immense bowl
of Louise de Savoy roses; as she looked at him she drew out one and
put it in her bosom. She did not speak or attempt to aid him in any
way to continue the conversation which he had begun. She only waited,
and as he saw her in that impassible attitude, his task grew harder to
him; that sudden sense of her cruelty, of her want of sympathy, of her
immovable indifference, which had come to him so sharply on the night
of her return from Russia, struck him once more and hardened in him
almost to dislike.
Why should he tell her anything? She cared nothing for what he did or
what he felt. She dwelt in that serene rarefied atmosphere of her own
in which no passions or pains of his could disturb her. If she had once
seemed to him to lean from it for a little while to share his emotions,
that time was passed, long passed, never to return again.
She was silent many minutes, but she asked no question, threw out no
conjecture, did not even by a glance assist him to begin his offered
narrative. If she would only have said something--anything--it would
have broken the ice at least. But the marble bust of herself which
stood near her, carved by Hildebrand, was not more mute than she; and
she was quite motionless, her hands clasped on another rose with which
she toyed.
He was angered with himself to feel that his cheeks grew warm, and that
his voice was nervous as he said at last:
'I regret that the portrait is gone to the Trocadéro, because the
original of it is living near Paris, and it may lead to comment and
conjecture which may be injurious to her; she is scarcely more than a
child, and she will be an artist; she is better without the attention
of the public until she challenges it directly.'
He did not notice a gleam like that of such which flashed over him one
instant from the unrevealing eyes of his wife; the next moment the eyes
of the bust were not colder and more impenetrable than hers.
'I have long meant to tell you,' he continued with rapidity, his words
now coming with eagerness and eloquence from his lips. 'But I have been
afraid of your ridicule. Long ago, in the midsummer of last year, I
found the child of Bonaventure dying in the streets. It was at the time
my uncle was on his death-bed. I did all I could for her, of course.
She was long ill; when she recovered I placed her in the country with
good simple people whom I knew. She is there now. Rosselin, the great
actor whose name you will remember, though his career was over before
your time or mine, has trained her these many months past; he believes
she has great talents; that she has a future; that when you predicted
the career of Desclée for her you showed your usual insight. She has
had little but sorrow since that day you tempted her from her island;
it has always seemed to me that we owed her a great debt, that we had
done her a great brutality; but for us her life would have gone on in
peace and prosperity, she would never have left her little kingdom; if
you realised what you did that day you would regret your caprice. There
are many more details I could tell you if you cared to hear them, but I
know your intolerance of any demand upon your patience.'
She smiled slightly; the smile was very chill; it checked the expansion
and the confidence of his words.
'You are pleased to ridicule my knight-errantry, no doubt,' he said,
with heightened colour in his face. 'But no man living would have done
less than I did, I think, being conscious as I was that the invitation
which you gave her without thought was the origin of all her unmerited
misfortune. I believe you were right that she has genius or something
very nearly approaching genius, in her; and it may be that the world
will in time compensate to her for all she has lost. But meantime----'
'You do so!'
The words were very calm and cold, but they struck Othmar like the cut
of a whip. They cast on his words the dishonour of disbelief.
He strove to command his temper as he replied: 'I do not; no one can;
she lost what no one ever can give back to her, when you showed her
what the world was like, and taught her discontent. But for you, and
that one evening in your house, she would have lived, and married, and
spent all the even tenour of her days in her native air, on her native
soil, as ignorant of ambition as any of the sea-birds on her coast.'
She looked at him with an expression of fatigue, and of exhausted
patience; he saw that she was perfectly incredulous, that his words
might as well have remained unspoken for any impression of their
truthfulness which they conveyed to her.
'Is this all your story?' she asked.
'It is the outline of it all,' he answered. 'If you care to know more
of the causes which drove her from her home----'
'They do not interest me in the least.'
Her voice was as chill as frost.
'Then allow me to apologise for having intruded even so much as this on
your attention.'
He bowed before her, and was about to leave the room; but she, without
rising a hair's breadth from the languid attitude in which she
reclined, said, 'Wait.'
He waited, in sanguine expectation of an impulse of sympathy in which
those more generous instincts, those kinder emotions which sometimes
swayed her, would be aroused on behalf of a life she had thoughtlessly
injured.
Still without rising she stretched out her arm, and took up a
blotting-book from her writing-cabinet, which stood near. In the
blotting-case was a tiny note-book of ivory and silver; she opened it,
and read from it in a serene voice certain dates.
'Before you give your idyl to Halévy--or to the journalists in
general--let me renew your memory with these memoranda,' she said in
the same soft cold voice. 'Your narrative, as you tell it, is bald
and wanting, as you admit, in detail. I will supply some of those
details. On June 10 you brought Damaris Bérarde to this house, where
she remained ill for many days, even weeks. On July 20 you went
yourself to visit her cousin, the present proprietor of the island of
Bonaventure, and endeavoured to negotiate through bankers of Aix the
purchase of the island, which, however, the owner refused to sell. On
August 2 you had her taken, accompanied by her _gardes-malades_, to
the farm of the Croix Blanche, which lies between the villages of Les
Hameaux and Magny. On August 15 you visited Les Hameaux. In the last
week of July, many objects of artistic interest and value had been
already sent by you to the farmhouse. In the same week, rentes to the
amount of a hundred thousand francs, were purchased on the Bourse in
the name of Damaris Bérarde. There are many more dates than these in
my note-book, but those are enough to supply the lacunæ in your story.
_On peut broder dessus_ without any great imagination. A knowledge of
human nature will suffice. You will do me the favour never to re-open
the subject; and as a matter of good taste, to endeavour that your idyl
shall not be too largely talked about for the amusement of the world in
general.'
Then she slid the little note-book within the leaves of blotting-paper,
and fastened the rose in the lace at her breast.
It was impossible for him to misunderstand her meaning.
A violent anger eclipsed for the moment all sense of astonishment at
her knowledge, or of wonder as to how she had acquired it. All he was
conscious of was the indignity, the insult, put upon him by her utter
disbelief.
He felt it a task almost beyond his strength to forbear from some such
words as men must never say to women, and in the bewilderment of his
emotions he was silent.
'You have engaged an actor, once great, to give her lessons in
elocution,' she continued, in the same unmoved harmonious tones. 'It
is the fashion of the day to have a mistress on the stage. I suppose I
cannot blame you for that. As it was I who first suggested the future
possibility of a dramatic success for your _protégée_, it is, perhaps,
natural that you should have remembered my suggestions, when you sought
the cover of some artistic career for her. Someone has told me that
you reserve for me the part of Mæcena to her Roscia (can one feminise
the names?), that you intend to have her talents first essayed and
pronounced on under my roof; that the world is to be invited to smile
at my credulity, or at my good nature, with whichever it may most
prefer to accredit me. Women often do such things as this, I know,
because they are weak, or because they need indulgence in return. But
it is not a _rôle_ which will suit either my temper or my taste. I
see the convenience to yourself of your project, but you must pardon
me if I do not accept the part you would assign me in it. The world
and Mlle. Bérarde will have opportunities for mutual acquaintance and
admiration without their first meeting each other in my drawing-rooms.
I should not have mentioned the matter unless you had done so first,
but I should have prevented the execution of your and of M. Rosselin's
intentions!'
She looked at him from under her drooped eyelids, with that critical
observation which never deserted her in the most trying hour, or before
the deepest emotion. She did not hurry him or dismiss him, only he knew
by the look upon her face, that the discussion was, in her view of it,
closed irrevocably. But for the sake of the other who was involved in
her judgment, he put aside his pride, his offence, and his dignity, and
stooped to an appeal.
'I do not know,' he said, and he was sensible that his voice vibrated
with fury, as well as with emotion, 'I do not know what steps you may
have taken to enable you to tabulate my actions so exactly. I keep no
diary, but I have no doubt your facts are correct. But as you put the
data which have been given you by some creature you have stooped to
employ, they would certainly seem to point to some selfish intrigue on
my part, some vulgar use for my own ends of this young girl's illness
and misfortunes. It may be even quite natural that you should take such
a view of it as this, though it shows that you do not, after all, much
understand my character. But I will admit that your suspicions may seem
to you just. I will admit that my own reticence has been blameable and
unwise, and I do not suppose you will believe how much your own habit
of ridicule, of irony, and of cruel scorn, has made me shrink from
provoking your malicious comments by any confidences which would seem
to you sentimental and melodramatic.'
He paused, hoping for some word from her. But she spoke none. She
continued to listen and to wait, in unbroken silence and serenity, her
fingers touching the rose at her breast. A momentary sense of rage
passed quivering over him. He understood how men may in some moments
kill the woman they have loved best.
He restrained his passion with great effort, and tried to keep his
words within the compass of ordinary courtesy.
'You do not know, and if you knew you would not care for it, how many
a time this story, like many another thought and memory of mine, has
been upon my lips, and speech has been stopped in me, merely because I
was conscious you would laugh. I am a fool in your eyes, worthy to die
with Rolla, to fall with Desgrieux, or any other absurd sentimentalist.
I dare say you will even despise me the more if you be compelled to
believe that, though I might be the lover of Damaris Bérarde, I am not
so, whatever your spies may have told you.'
Her face flushed haughtily.
'Spies! I set no watcher on your actions until you deceived me. When
I know that I am deceived I have no mercy. Those who deceive me are
outside my pale. I hunt them down. Foolish women can bear to be
blinded. I am not foolish, and I do not consent to be so.'
'I have never deceived you.'
She gave a gesture of deprecation, slight but full of unuttered disdain.
'Long ago I told you that if you had strength enough in you to tell
me when you were weak, I should not be like other women; I should
understand: to understand is always to forgive; a greater woman than
I am has said it. If you had come to me frankly, with no subterfuge,
no pretext, no empty phrases of untrue sentiments, but had said
honestly that you were no better than other men, I should have told you
that follies of that sort need never disturb our friendship nor our
confidence, but----'
'But, my God, what had I to confess?' cried Othmar, with that
passionate protest of the tortured man who calls in vain that he is
innocent.
Infinite contempt swept over her face. What a fool he seemed to her!
What a poor, weak coward and fool!
'If there were any lover whom I loved, how I should hurl the truth of
it in his face!' she thought. 'Men are such cowards--so half-hearted
and so tame, and never hardly even knowing what they do love! If he
would only be truthful even now, what should I care!--a wretched child
off the streets, a creature who owes her very bread to him--what rival
could she be to me!'
She felt for him all the superb disdain that Cleopatra might have felt
had she known that Anthony toyed with a slave from the market-place,
and dared not plead guilty to his paltry sin.
He heard her with indignant and bewildered amaze. There is a great
simplicity in every honest man, and he, despite his knowledge of the
world, was single-minded as a boy. That she should refuse to believe
him when he told the truth seemed to him incredible.
'Can you insinuate that I would speak such a lie--_I_?' he cried to her
in violent emotion.
She answered coldly:
'Oh, yes: those untruths are always counted as men's honour.'
'They are not mine; nor my dishonour either. I never willingly spoke
an untruth yet to man or woman. If this child were my mistress I would
tell you so. You may remember that many a time you have bade me take
my liberty. You would care nothing if I did so. Why should I have
concealed what you would not have done me the honour to resent?'
He paused, expecting her to say some word of assent or dissent, but she
remained silent.
'Certainly,' he said, bitterly, 'had I considered myself free in
all ways I should have been justified in doing so. Few men of your
world see less of you than I. Your very lacqueys know more of your
engagements and your intentions than I do. You lend great brilliancy to
my name, you give great distinction to my houses, you allow my children
to sit by you in your carriage, and you permit me to receive kings for
you in your antechambers. But more than that you deny me. If I sought
elsewhere the tenderness I seek in vain from you, could you complain of
my infidelity?'
'I do not complain of the infidelity; it is immaterial; I complain
of the long series of elaborate deceptions with which you have
endeavoured, with which you still endeavour, to surround it.'
'I repeat, there has been no deception.'
She laughed, laughed slightly that cruel laugh of a woman, which can
tell a man with impunity what a man could never dare to tell him--that
he has lied.
'You dare to doubt me still!' he exclaimed, with that blindness and
good faith with which a man, candid and honest himself, expects
credence from others; he had never in his heart really doubted that
when he should tell the truth to her she would believe it.
Conscious rectitude has a curious pathetic ignorance of its own
impotence to move others; it imagines that it has but to speak and
mountains will fall before it.
Because this thing was clear as daylight to his own knowledge, to his
own conscience, he stupidly thought that it must stand out plain as the
noonday to her likewise. Those who tell the truth always fancy that the
truth must be like those trumpets before which the walls of Jericho
fell.
'You dare to doubt my word!' he cried again passionately; she looked
him full in the face coldly and calmly.
'Told earlier,' she said in her serenest voice, 'your comedy might have
deceived even me. Told now, I do not think it would deceive the most
credulous woman living--and I am not credulous. I am like Montaigne; I
do not accept miracles out of church.'
His face grew white and grey with wounded pride and breathless passion
as he heard her. The same sense of hopelessness which had come over
so many of her lovers when driven to appeal to a mercy which had no
existence in her, came over him now. He felt that one might throw one's
self for ever against the smooth white marble of her soul, and never
gain from it either pity or belief.
His patience was at an end, and his bitter sense of wrong, done to
himself and to one absent, broke down all his self-control.
'But as God lives you shall believe!' he cried to her. 'You shall
believe it for her sake, not for mine nor yours. You can cover the
whole world with the fine scorn of your scepticism if you will, but you
shall believe this. I may have done unwisely what I have done for her.
I may have acted with that mule-like stupidity which you consider the
characteristic of men. I may even, God forgive me, have not done what
was best for the child herself; but in all that I have done, I have
been honest in it, and not a mere lecherous egotist. You have never
deigned to try and measure the feeling with which I have regarded you,
but you ought, I think, to understand enough of the common honour which
I share with all men who are not scoundrels, to believe in my word when
I give it you. The woman with whom she lives at Les Hameaux is of good
repute and blameless conduct. Rosselin, who has become her teacher,
is a man too upright to accord his assistance in any common intrigue.
The money I placed to her credit she imagines to be a legacy of her
grandfather, whose heiress she would have been if you in a moment of
unaccountable and unconsidered caprice had not tempted her to incur
the old man's anger. All these things are capable of the simplest
explanations. Still, I will concede that, without explanation, they
may have appeared singular and suspicious to you. But, however much
they may do so, I expect from you that acceptance of my bare word, that
belief in my common honour, which the merest stranger to me on earth
would not dare to refuse.'
She preserved her perfect composure, the rose in her breast was not
ruffled by one uneven breath; she looked at him with cold, calm, unkind
eyes, which never wavered in their rejection of him.
'You are melodramatic,' she said, with her serene contempt. 'Perhaps
_you_ will appear on the stage, too! I shall be glad if you will spare
me more words on such a subject. I shall not resent it publicly. All I
request of you is to avoid publicity in it as far as possible. That is
a mere matter of good taste.'
'Good God!' he cried, beside himself. 'Do you credit that I should
stand here and lie to you? Do you believe that I should stoop so
low?--do you think that I come here like a comedian to repeat a
monologue of my own invention? You may think what else of me that you
will, but this you shall not think. I am not the lover of Damaris
Bérarde; I have never been so--I shall never be so.'
'If you swore it on the lives of your own children, I would not believe
you?'
Some reflex and heat of the flame of his rage caught her soul also
for one sudden instant, and drew it out for that one instant from its
serenity and reticence.
There was the vibration of intensest passion in her voice; she half
rose from her seat; her bosom heaved; the rose fell in a shower of
leaves to the floor; for the moment he thought that she would strike
him.
'You shall believe me,' he said in answer, 'or I will not live under
the same roof with you!'
Then he looked at her with one last look, and left her presence.