THE REVOLT OF A SLAVE
The day after that on which Berselius had seen Leopold, Madame Berselius,
moved by one of those fits of caprice common to women of her type, came
back suddenly from Trouville.
She knew of her husband's return, but she knew nothing of the injury or of
the alteration that had come in him until Maxine, who met her at the
station, hinted at the fact. Berselius was standing at the window of his
private sitting room when Madame Berselius was announced.
He turned to greet her; even as he turned she perceived the change. This
was not the man who had left her a few months ago, strong, confident,
impassive; the man who had been her master and before whom she had shrunk
like a slave. Intuition told her that the change was not the change
wrought by sickness--Berselius was not ill, he was gone, leaving another
man in his place. They conversed for some time on indifferent matters, and
then Madame Berselius took her departure for her own apartments.
But she left the room of Berselius a changed woman, just as he had
returned to it a changed man.
The slave in her had found her freedom. Utterly without the capacity for
love and without honour, without conscience and with a vague superstition
to serve for religion, Madame Berselius had, up to this, been held in her
place by the fear of her husband. His will up to this had been her law;
she had moved in the major affairs of life under his direction, and even
in the minor affairs of life everything had to be surrendered at his
word.
And now she hated him.
She had never hated him before, she had admired him; indeed, as far as her
power of admiration went, his strength had appealed to her as only
strength can appeal to a woman of her type; but now that his strength was
gone hatred of him rose up in her heart, petty yet powerful, a dwarf
passion that had been slumbering for years.
When the engine seizes the engineer in its wheels, when the slave gets
power over his master, cruel things happen, and they were to happen in the
case of Berselius.
Madame's rooms were so far away from the rooms of her husband that they
might have been living in different houses. There was none of the intimacy
of married life between this couple; they met formally at meal times, and
it was at _déjeuner_ on the morning after her return that she showed
openly before Adams, Maxine, and the servants her contempt for the man who
had once held her in subjection. Without a rude word, simply by her
manner, her tone, and her indifference to him, she humbled to the dust the
stricken man and proclaimed the full measure of his disaster.
As day followed day the dominance of the woman and the subjection of the
man became more marked. Madame would, if the spirit took her, countermand
her husband's orders; once, with absolute rudeness, she, at table and
before the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was a guest, turned to
ridicule a remark which Berselius had let escape. The flush that came to
his cheek told Maxine that her father's sensibilities were not dead--he
was dominated.
Nothing could be stranger than this reduction of a man from greatness to
insignificance. The old Berselius dying, bound in chains, would have
mastered this woman with one glance of his eye. The new Berselius, free,
wealthy, and with all his material powers at command, was yet her
creature, an object of pity to his daughter and of derision to his
servants.
Eight days after her return Madame Berselius, now free and her own
mistress, left Paris for Vaux on a short visit to some friends, little
dreaming of the momentous event that was to cause her return.