"I do not understand what any one could have against Chuchu!" said the young husband, enthusiastically. "What a woman she is! She has diamonds from the Emperor of ---- and a gold coat of mail from the Duke of ----, and with all that, she is nevertheless all domesticity and love! She calls me Tony, and darns my socks from pure love."
XXI.
At this time life was for poor Felix only a heavy, oppressing burden.
He knew that Juanita was staying in Marienbad; knew that she had married his father-in-law. He felt neither horror nor astonishment at this step; nothing which she did would have astonished him, but he felt oppressed by the sense of her nearness; a true superstitious fear of the magic charm which her beauty had for him weighed upon him. His recollections, his imagination, had been busy with the picture of her which he still possessed--had invested it with the most refined charms. For Felix, the only excuse for his inexcusable conduct, by which he had ruined his life, lay in the demoniac fascination of the dancer.
Linda had written her father, before his marriage, an annihilating letter, to which she had received no answer. She believed her father angry, and therefore expected nothing less than a visit from him. Felix, who thought her opinion sensible, nevertheless showed from time to time a certain fear, and thereby excited the spirit of contradiction in Linda.
"One can be glad that papa has done nothing worse," she remarked once, indifferently. "It is not to be supposed that they will have children--et pour le reste, such a marriage with a dancer has a certain cachet. I shall make no advances to her, but if she comes I must receive her!"
Felix shuddered and was silent.
Bitterly ashamed of himself, for a time he had tried to restrain his thirst for liquor. But he could control himself no longer. When the old remembrance began to burn in his heart like eating poison, he at first tried hard to occupy himself. He read, but, unaccustomed to all mental activity, a book scarcely chained his attention. He took long walks, he was too uneasy to become tired; he rode, he was too good a horseman to have any trouble with his horse.
His heart grew more and more heavy, and he drank--drank privately in his room so as not to be surprised in an unreliable condition. He was always temperate at table. No one saw him now with flabby lips and tottering knees, and his friends did not notice that he was really never quite sober now. His hands shook perpetually, there was a watery look in his staring, hollow eyes. A slight bluish flush colored his nostrils, and his voice was quavering.
Meanwhile Linda, careless and indifferent, fluttered around him, bitterness in her heart, on her lips a charming smile and malicious jests. A butterfly with a wasp's sting, Scirocco had called her, and Pistasch repeated it to her. It had greatly pleased her.