For the first time in her whole existence his wife had known the
mastery of a strong and uncontrollable impulse of emotion; for the
first time since her dreamy eyes had smiled at the pains and follies of
men a wave of fierce and simple passion had passed through her as the
seismic wave moves the still earth.
She was touched with the common infirmity of common lives.
The women in her laundry rooms, the groom's wife who lived above her
horses' stables, might feel as she felt now. Jealousy! It could not
be jealousy. Would Cleopatra have been jealous of that slave from the
market-place, that Nubian seller of green figs, or Persian dancing girl?
For jealousy it seemed to her there must first of all, be equality.
No--no: she was not jealous; she was only angered, bitterly angered,
because he had stooped to subterfuge and to untruth: earths in which
the fox of cowardice always hides. It was all ignoble, mean, unworthy,
there was no manliness in it and no honesty. Any common knave could
have woven such a net of falsehood and stupidity as this.
He had thought to deceive her! She could almost have laughed aloud at
the idea!--was there any brain subtle enough, clear enough, wise enough
in all Europe to invent a lie which would have power to blind her?
Surely not; and he knew it; and yet he had thought such vulgar ordinary
devices as have served in half the vaudevilles of half the theatres of
France would serve to hoodwink and to satisfy her!
There was a vulgarity in such miserable intrigue, which offended her
taste whilst it outraged her dignity. In all the innumerable women of
their own world could he not have found some rival in some measure her
equal?
It might have hurt her more, but at least it would have insulted her
less.
She remained alone and motionless, except for such feverish mechanical
action as that with which her right hand plucked the roses from the
bowl one by one and tore their hearts asunder.
She did not know she did it. She shed the sweet, faint-smelling petals
on the floor, and her fingers had the movement of a great nervousness
as they played with the loosened leaves. No one came there to disturb
her; no one would dare to do so until she rang; the slow morning hours
crept on, the very footfall of time was muffled, and did not dare
obtrude in these still fragrant chambers where the air was heavy with
hothouse heat, and was sweet with a somnolent lily-like odour.
She took the little written sheets from between the blotting-paper and
read what was written on them again. There was more than she had read
aloud to him. All the details of his intercourse with Damaris Bérarde
were described there with searching minuteness. She studied them again
and again. Their bare records were full of suggestion to her; they
seemed to tell so much which was not said in words, to be pregnant with
meaning and with cynical emphasis.
She sat still as any statue of a queen dethroned; the pale rose folds
of the satin flowing about her feet, the ruin of pale rose leaves on
the floor before her.
All her life she had laughed at the love of men and derided it,
and starved it on graceful philosophies and ethereal conceits, and
dismissed it with airy banter and disbelieved its truest words and its
hardest pains: and now a love which she had lost escaped her, and she
found no comfort either in her wit or in her scorn.
Certain of the words which he had said to her remained in persistent
echo on her ear. Some sense that she had been cold to him and too
capricious, and too negligent of what he felt, came to her. It might
even be that he had sought the warmth of other affections because she
had left his heart empty herself. He had always been a sentimentalist!
Had she not called him Werther, Obermann, René, Rolla? He had wanted
the impossible, the immutable, the eternal.
He had asked of love and of life what neither can give.
He had expected a moment of divinest rapture to be prolonged through a
lifetime.
He had expected the song of the nightingale to thrill through the year.
Senseless dreams and hopeless!--but had she been too cruel to them?
For a moment her conscience spoke, and her heart relented towards him.
She remembered the many times when she had treated the warmth of his
passion as an absurd delirium or an exaggerated sentiment, when she
had again and again and again bidden him take his erratic rhapsodies
elsewhere than to her.
If he had done so, was he so much to blame?
Almost she could have pardoned him. If only he had not lied to her she
would have pardoned him.
'Good God, why could he not be honest?' she thought, with indignant
scorn. 'Why could he not kneel at her feet, and lay his head upon her
knee and own his folly? Men were weak always, and so easily misled
whenever their senses ruled them, and such mere animals after all, even
those in whom the mind was strongest!'