Afterwards, as they went out, they passed the Boleskis close, and the two rose and spoke to Verisschenzko, with empressement. He introduced Captain Ardayre and they talked for a few minutes, Harietta Boleski all smiles and flattering cajoleries now—and then they said good-night and went out.
But as Stépan passed, a man half hidden behind a pillar leaned forward and looked at him, and in his light blue eyes there burned a jealous hate.
"Ah, Gott in Himmel!" he growled to himself. "It is he whom she loves—not the pig-fool who we gave her to—one day I shall kill him—" and he raised his glass of Rhine wine and murmured "Der Tag!"
That evening Sir John Ardayre had taken his bride to dine in the Bois, and they were sitting listening to the Tziganes at Arménonville. Amaryllis was conscious that the evening lacked something. The circumstances were interesting—a bride of ten days, and the environment so illuminating—and yet there was John smoking an expensive cigar and not saying anything! She did not like people who chattered—and she could even imagine a delicious silence wrought with meaning. But a stolid respectable silence with Tziganes playing moving airs and the romantic background of this Paris out-of-door joyous night life, surely demanded some show of emotion!
John loved her she supposed—of course he did—or he never would have asked her to marry him, rich as he was and poor as she had been. She could not help going over all their acquaintance; the date of its beginning was only three months back!
They had met at a country house and had played golf together, and then they had met again a month later at another house, in March, but she could not remember any love-making—she could not remember any of those warm looks and those surreptitious hand-clasps when occasion was propitious, which Elsie Goldmore had told her men were so prodigal of in demonstrating when they fell in love. Indeed, she had seen emotion upon the faces of quite two or three young men, for all her secluded life and restricted means, since she had left the school in Dresden, where a worldly maiden aunt had pinched to send her, German officers had looked at her there with interest in the street, and the clergyman's three sons and the Squire's two, when she returned home. Indeed, Tom Clarke had gone further than this! He had kissed her cheek coming out of the door in the dark one evening, and had received a severe rebuff for his pains.
She had read quantities of novels, ancient and modern. She knew that love was a wonderful thing; she knew also that modern life and its exigencies had created a new and far more matter-of-fact point of view about it than that which was obtained in most books. She did not expect much, and had indulged in none of those visions of romantic bliss which girls were once supposed to spend their time in constructing. But she did expect something, and here was nothing—just nothing!
The day John had asked her to marry him he had not been much moved. He had put the question to her simply and calmly, and she had not dreamed of refusing him. It was obviously her duty, and it had always been her intention to marry well, if the chance came her way, and so leave a not too congenial home.
She had been to a few London balls with the maiden aunt, a personage of some prestige and character. But invitations do not flow to a penniless young woman from the country, nor do partners flock to be presented to strangers in those days, and Amaryllis had spent many humiliating hours as a wall-flower and had grown to hate balls. She was not expansive in herself and did not make friends easily, and pretty as she was, as a girl, luck did not come her way.
When she had said "Yes" in as matter-of-fact a voice as the proposal of marriage had been made to her, Sir John had replied: "You are a dear," and that had seemed to her a most ordinary remark. He had leaned over—they were climbing a steep pitch in search of a fugitive golf ball—and had taken her hand respectfully, and then he had kissed her forehead—or her ear—she forgot which—nothing which mattered much, or gave her any thrill!