"She must have been very young then?" she says, beating impatiently on her blotting-book with her gold pen.
"Very young; but such a husband as Paul Sabaroff made is—well, a more than liberal education to any woman, however young. She was sixteen, I think, and very lovely; though she is perhaps handsomer now. I had the honor of her confidence: she was unhappy and incomprise; her father had given her hand in discharge of a debt at cards; Sabaroff was a gambler and a brute; at the end of the second winter season he had a violent fit of jealousy, and sent her to his estate on the White Sea——"
"Jealousy of you?"
Gervase bowed.
"Where she was kept in a state of surveillance scarcely better than absolute imprisonment. I did all manner of crazy and romantic things to endeavor to see her; and once or twice I succeeded; but he had discovered letters of mine, and made her captivity more rigorous than ever. I myself was ordered on the special mission to Spain,—you remember,—and I left Russia with a broken heart. From that time to this I have never seen her."
"But your broken heart has continued to do its daily work?"
"It is a figure of speech. I adored her, and the husband was a brute. When Lustoff shot him he only rid the world of a brute. You have seen that broad bracelet she wears above the right elbow? People always talk so about it. She wears it to hide where Sabaroff broke her arm one night in his violence: the marks of it are there forever."
Lady Usk is silent: she is divided between her natural compassion and sympathy, which are very easily roused, and her irritation at discovering that her new favorite is what Usk would call "just like all the rest of them."
"You perceive," he added, "that, as the princess chooses wholly to ignore the past, it is not for me to recall it. I am obliged to accept her decision, however much I must suffer from it."
"Suffer!" echoes his cousin. "After her husband's death you never took the trouble to cross Europe to see her."