He spoke confidently at first; indeed, almost with firmness. But as he looked at her, sitting like some exquisite waxen figure in the old leathern chair, a delicacy and royal daintiness about her, even to every fold of her glistening evening gown, her eyes fixed upon him with an expression of sad reproach, faintly tinged with disdain, he felt a wild impulse to throw himself at her feet and tell her he was hers—her slave, to be hers till death. Astonished at his own feelings—alarmed,—he violently repressed them; but his voice first faltered, then lost its resonance; he stammered, forgot what he wanted to say; in fact, failed miserably in his attempt to assert himself. He was thankful to her when she spoke, although she reproached him.
“You were not only my docteur,” she said, and her sweet, reproachful voice seemed dearer, more familiar, than before. “You said—you promised to be my friend.”
“Friendship cannot be all on one side,” said Hugh bitterly, relinquishing the pretence of doctor speaking to patient. “You told me you did not want me. You wrote as cruelly as ever woman wrote to man. I could not believe in your wish for my friendship after that.”
She looked at him, surprised.
“Think,” she said; “remember, remember! How did you be to me that night—that night at Lady Boisville’s? The good count he did come afterwards to console me. He said to me, ‘Excuse him, because he is so clever a man, and he understands les nerfs as no other man does understand them.’ Then he tells me more——”
“The count is extremely kind,” said Hugh. “He appears to know me very well. And pray what more did the count tell you about me?”
“He tells me” (she closed her eyes and spoke with hesitation and in a stifled voice) “how beautiful was your young wife, and how your poor heart is buried in her grave.”
There was silence in the big, shabby old room, where the Princess Andriocchi, seated in the lamplight, was the spot of light among the shadows. The princess had not spoken mockingly; she spoke like a true woman, sympathetically, although a cool listener would have gathered from her tone and manner how deeply she loved the man to whom she addressed those words.
But Hugh was no cool listener; he was excited to the utmost pitch, beyond the point where he could recognise that he was not himself.
“That is true in a way,” he said, roughly, with a half laugh. “It is true as far as this: if I had a heart, it might be buried in a grave. But I have none, princess. All women and men are alike to me. If they are ill and want me, then, of course, they are my patients, and I am interested in them as such. Otherwise—well, I wish good to everyone; but I am content to live alone—aye, and to die alone.”