“Are you imagining, Nevil, that there is a possibility of my returning to him?”
“To your place in the world! You have not had to endure tyranny?”
“I should have had a certain respect for a tyrant, Nevil. At least I should have had an occupation in mocking him and conspiring against him. Tyranny! There would have been some amusement to me in that.”
“It was neglect.”
“If I could still charge it on neglect, Nevil! Neglect is very endurable. He rewards me for nursing him... he rewards me with a little persecution: wives should be flattered by it: it comes late.”
“What?” cried Beauchamp, oppressed and impatient.
Renée sank her voice.
Something in the run of the unaccented French: “Son amour, mon ami”: drove the significance of the bitterness of the life she had left behind her burningly through him. This was to have fled from a dragon! was the lover’s thought: he perceived the motive of her flight: and it was a vindication of it that appealed to him irresistibly. The proposal for her return grew hideous: and this ever multiplying horror and sting of the love of a married woman came on him with a fresh throbbing shock, more venom.
He felt for himself now, and now he was full of feeling for her. Impossible that she should return! Tourdestelle shone to him like a gaping chasm of fire. And becoming entirely selfish he impressed his total abnegation of self upon Renée so that she could have worshipped him. A lover that was like a starry frost, froze her veins, bewildered her intelligence. She yearned for meridian warmth, for repose in a directing hand; and let it be hard as one that grasps a sword: what matter? unhesitatingness was the warrior virtue of her desire. And for herself the worst might happen if only she were borne along. Let her life be torn and streaming like the flag of battle, it must be forward to the end.
That was a quality of godless young heroism not unexhausted in Beauchamp’s blood. Reanimated by him, she awakened his imagination of the vagrant splendours of existence and the rebel delights which have their own laws and “nature” for an applauding mother. Radiant Alps rose in his eyes, and the morning born in the night suns that from mountain and valley, over sea and desert, called on all earth to witness their death. The magnificence of the contempt of humanity posed before him superbly satanesque, grand as thunder among the crags and it was not a sensual cry that summoned him from his pedlar labours, pack on back along the level road, to live and breathe deep, gloriously mated: Renée kindled his romantic spirit, and could strike the feeling into him that to be proud of his possession of her was to conquer the fretful vanity to possess. She was not a woman of wiles and lures.