He remained in Russia a fortnight, but during that time he did not find any occasion which seemed to him propitious enough for him to speak of Damaris, with any chance of obtaining sympathy for her position or understanding of his own actions. With that ignorance of what most concerns us, which is one of the saddest things of life, he never dreamed that any change in himself had made his wife as he found her to be, in one of her most captious, most capricious, most unsympathetic moods. He was not unused to these; he attributed them now to the weariness she felt at existence in the plains of Ural and impatience at the companionship of the Princess Napraxine which he knew was at all times irksome to her. He was not aware that he was himself more absent of mind, less tender in manner, less frankly and fully confidential in speech; he was not aware that this one thing untold, this one thought unrevealed, had caused an alteration in him, slight and vague indeed, yet plainly perceptible to her, skilled reader of manner and of mind as she was.
A delicate nature shrinks from the imputation of unworthy motives, and a fastidious temper shrinks from any possibility of ridicule; it was the dread of both which kept him silent as to the friendship he had shown to the child from Bonaventure. The apprehension of his wife's scepticism and ironies hung like a grey mist over the generous impulses of his manhood, as in his earliest youth the certainty of his father's brutal cynicism had lain like a stone on the poetic aspirations of his boyhood.
Even in those rare instants when she was moved to sympathy with any unselfishness or any unworldliness, there was always in her eyes some faint gleam of derision, there was always in her voice some lingering accent of doubt and of raillery. She would have been capable of many great things in great emergencies herself, but she would have been wholly incapable of refraining from making a jest of them afterwards. It is the temper of all wit; it is the temper of much philosophy; but it is not the temper which invites the confidence or soothes the doubts of another.
Confidence, like a swallow coming over seas in the storm and sunshine of spring weather, will only nest where it is sure of a safe shelter.
The higher, better, subtler emotions of the human heart will not venture to come forth into the wintry air of mockery or scorn; they are shy blossoms which want the warm wind of a sure sympathy to enable them to expand.
'If I told her, she would only think me either an imbecile or a libertine,' he thought, and the tale went untold.
CHAPTER XXXII.
Amyôt was still quite solitary when he returned from Russia. The children were on the north coast by the sea; its châtelaine was still taking her desired presence with rare condescension and alternative moods of ennui and irony to those royal hunting castles and imperial pleasure places she deigned to honour; the wide avenues, the great terraces, the blossoming gardens, the sunlit colonnades of the modern summer dining-hall were only tenanted by the last lingering butterflies which skimmed the air with white wings, blue wings, scarlet wings, and the balmy aromatic scent of the millions of roses which seemed to wander through the empty places like a visible presence.