In the midst of all her superficiality and moral recklessness, she had always been characterized by a certain frankness, which at times had passed the bounds of decorum; now she writhed under a burden of hypocrisy which weighed most heavily upon her.
And why was this so?
It had all been the gradual result of the tedium of the life she led. A man more coarse and rough than any of her other admirers had paid court to her in a way that flattered her vanity; he amused her, he brought some variety into her life; his lavishness was astounding. Once when he had lost a wager to her he brought her a diamond necklace in an Easter egg.
She knew that this was wrong, but she had been wont as a girl to accept presents from men, and then she had an almost morbid delight in diamonds. And what stones these were!--a chain of dew-drops glittering in the morning sun! And he had so careless a way of throwing the costly gift into her lap, as if it had been the merest trifle.
She could not resist wearing the necklace once at the next court ball,--explaining to her husband, who understood nothing of such things, that she had purchased it for a mere song at a sale of old jewelry.
She intended to return it; but she did not return it. From that moment he had her in his power. He lured her on as a serpent lures a bird, extorting from her one innocent concession after another, until one day---- Good God! if she could but obliterate the memory of that day!
To call the torment which she suffered from that time stings of conscience would be to invest it with ideality. No, she felt no stings of conscience; her moral sense was entirely blunted; but she was enraged with herself for having fallen into the snare; her pride was humbled in the dust, and she was in mortal dread of discovery. She was a coward to the core. What would she not have given to be free? She would have broken with her lover ten times, but that she feared him more than she did her husband.
He was a Russian, fabulously wealthy, and notorious in the Parisian demi-monde which he habitually frequented. Orbanoff was his name, and outside of his own country he was credited with princely rank to which he had no title,--a man with no moral sense, brutal on occasion, with no idea of the laws of honour prevailing in Western Europe, but of an undoubted physical courage, which helped him to maintain his present position.
Princess Dorothea was convinced that should she break with him he would commit some reckless, impossible crime.
Oh, if he would only release her! She began to build castles in the air. Never, never again would she be concerned in such an adventure. All the romances that she had read were lies: there was nothing in the world more hateful than just this. Only once in her life had she been conscious of any real preference for a man, and that had been for her cousin Helmy; now of all men her own clumsy, thoroughly honourable and intensely good-natured husband was the dearest. He was at present on his estate in Silesia, where he was much happier than in the society of the capital. Dorothea had made him so uncomfortable in Berlin that he always stayed as long as possible in Silesia.