Meanwhile there are neighbours, hunting friends who come to the castle, and among them is a young Frenchman. She told me simply, quietly, as if she were telling me the story of some one else, how this man had gradually attracted her, how delicately and perseveringly he had made love to her, and how his presence rendered the tedium of her life less insupportable. She loved him, she believed that he loved her, and a new happiness came into her life. One day the husband, who had appeared to suspect nothing, came back unexpectedly. She had been playing the piano, her lover was seated just behind her, and as she rose from the piano and flung herself passionately into his arms, she saw, over his shoulder, the reflection of her husband's face in the mirror. He had opened the door while she was playing, and stood motionless, holding the door half open, with his eyes fixed upon them. Before she could make a movement the door had closed silently. It did not open again. The lover left the castle hastily, meeting no one on the way. Hours passed, and she sat watching the door, quiet with terror. At last she could bear it no longer, and she went straight to her husband's apartments. The painters had been at work, and their tools, paints, brushes, and bottles were still lying about. Her husband was seated at his writing-table. As she entered the room he put down the pen, turned to her calmly and said: 'I am writing to ask Xavier to dinner, but you will have to fix the date. I have a little surprise for him.' He rose, took three steps towards her, with a look of inexpressibly sarcastic malignity, and, stooping rapidly, picked up a bottle from the floor, and flung the contents in her face. She shrieked in agony as the vitriol burnt into her like liquid fire, and she rolled over at his feet, shrieking.
When, after months of suffering, the bandages were at last taken off, and she could resume her place at the table, she found, on coming downstairs to dinner, one guest awaiting her with her husband. It was her lover. She had not seen him, no word from him had reached her, since the accident. During dinner the Baron was cheerful, almost gay; he related amusing stories, turning from one to the other with an air of cordiality, and affecting not to notice that neither spoke more than a few words. Soon after dinner, the guest excused himself. A few days afterwards it was reported that he had left the neighbourhood.
August 21.—I lay awake last night for several hours, unable to get this horrible story out of my head. I thought these were things that no longer happened, or only in Russia, perhaps; I thought we were at least so far civilised. It is the meanness of the revenge that horrifies me most in its atrocity. And that these two people, after that moment's revelation of the one to the other, should have gone on living together, under the same roof: it is incredible. There, I suppose, is civilisation, the hypocrisy of our conventions, which, if they cannot suppress the brute in the human animal, are prompt to cloak the thing once done, to pretend that it never was done, never could have been done.
Now, when I sit at table between that man and woman, I scarcely know whether I am judge, witness, or accuser. What had been instinctive in my distrust of the man has become a mental revulsion not less intense than the physical revulsion which I must always feel towards the woman. Only, towards her, I have a new feeling, a kind of sympathetic confidence, mingled with pity; and it pleases me that she has confidence in me. It would give me pleasure if I could aid her, in some way that I cannot even conjecture, to avenge herself on that diabolical tyrant, her husband.
September 25.—As I look back over these pages it seems to me that I have lost the habit of writing down my thoughts about general questions, which my once wholly personal preoccupations brought constantly before me. How a journal changes with one's life, if it is really, as mine is, the confidant of one's moods, the secret witness of one's growth or decay! I suppose it is that, as I accustom myself to look for my interest outside the circle of my own brain, I become less personal, less sick with myself. My old terrors, my old preoccupations, have loosened their hold on me, I think; my brain is getting more quiescent, more conventional. If only the nerves do not break out again, as I find it so easy to realise their doing; if I can avoid excitement, that is, keep myself as I am now, an interested spectator of other people's lives, with no too eager interests of my own: that will at last set me wholly to rights. And, certainly, this divine Cornish air, half salt, half honey, will have done something for me, in helping to cure me of a too narrow, London philosophy.
August 3.—It is almost exactly a year since I have written anything in my journal, which I find where I left it, forgotten in the corner of a drawer in the Cornish manor-house, to which we have gone back again this summer. I am glad to be here again, but, all the same, it is not quite as it was last year. The Baroness and I are better friends than ever. I am more accustomed to her, she is kindness itself. Ah yes, that is it. Her kindness begins to become fatiguing; I would prefer a little liberty. Why is it that good people forge chains with their kindness, adding link to link with the best intentions in the world, until one is tripped up and weighed down and held by the fetters of innumerable favours? To break so much as a link is held to be ingratitude. But one's liberty, then, is there anything comparable in the price one pays, and in the utmost one can receive in place of it?
Is it that a woman is unable to conceive of the fatigue of kindness? How incomprehensible to them must be that marvellous sentence in 'Adolphe': 'Je me reposais, pour ainsi dire, dans l'indifférence des autres, de la fatigue de son amour.' And, even if it is not love, the heaviest of all burdens when it comes unasked, there is still a fatiguing weight in that affectionate vigilance which is one long appeal for gratitude, in that sleepless solicitude which 'prevents,' in both senses of the word, all one's goings. I am beginning to find this with the Baroness, who would replace Providence for me, but with a more continual intervention.