To his fancy, life together was poor and meaningless, unless it implied mutual sympathy and communion of feeling. He was a romanticist, as she had always told him. To his views it was not in any way an ideal of either love or happiness to be for ever surrounded by the fever of the great world, to be for ever separated by its demands and its excitements, to meet only on the common ground of mutual interests, to dwell under the same roof with little more intimacy than two strangers met there at a house-party. It appeared that this was what she now expected, what she now preferred. His pride prevented him from struggling against her decrees; but he felt, and loathed to feel, that he was insensibly approaching a position towards her scarcely higher than that which Napraxine had occupied. True, she still had moments of exquisite charm, of irresistible sorcery, in which she occasionally deigned to remember that he had been the lover of her choice; and in these she bent his will and turned his brain almost as much as in the earlier years of his idolatry. But these moments were rare, and when they came appealed to the senses in him, and not to the heart; they left him unnerved, they did not satisfy his affections.
The world had so many claims upon her: his were forgotten or ignored. Where were the visions he had had of a life out of the world, poetic, unworldly, tuned to another key than the brazen clangour of society? They were gone for ever like last year's roses.
The so-called pleasures of life had never had attraction for him; they were a mere routine; he was tired of crowds, of flattery, of splendour, of movement; he was tired of the women who tried to beguile, and the men who endeavoured to use, him; the whole thing seemed to him witless, tedious, tame. She, who had always declared that it was so, yet could find her diversion in dazzling it and stimulating its envy; though most things failed to please her, yet, like all women, her own power pleased her always; but he had no such resource, for the power which he had (that of wealth) he despised.
A sense of failure came wearily upon him during this evening which followed on her return. If this were all the issue of great passion and great love, what use were either?
The world was a pageant to her, and he might stand by and see her pass in it. The rôle did not please him. He fancied—no doubt he told himself it was but fancy—that the world ridiculed him in that subordinate place, that half-effaced position, that too indulgent acceptance of her continual caprices, tyrannies, and slights.
He did not remember, did not know, that he himself in Russia had seemed cold to her. He was only sensible of the barrier which had grown up between them, of the indifference with which his presence or his absence was regarded by her. Gradually, as the fine mist of approaching rain steals over a sunny country, dimming the colours and effacing the lines of it little by little, until nothing is seen but the colourless blur of the wide white rain itself, so the sensation of dissatisfaction, of disappointment, of disunion had come over the tenor of their lives together. The consciousness of it brought to him a profound and passionate sense of irreparable loss. A word from her would have dispelled it, an hour of full belief that she had ever loved him as he had once loved her would have sufficed to sweep it away; but the word was never spoken, the hour never came. Time only strengthened his conviction that, were he dead before her, she would not greatly care.
The sense of the incompleteness of his own life came upon him with a strong consciousness as he stood in his brilliant rooms with the laughter of his wife and her guests borne to his ear, and the sounds of some gay music coming to him from another salon. He might have ten, twenty, thirty, forty years more of this existence, and its years, its days, its hours would always be precisely like this year, this day, this hour. The future seemed to rise up like a phantom and say to him, 'The past gave you the fulfilment of your greatest desire. I shall give you nothing but the fruit of that fulfilment. If that fruit do not content you, whose fault is that?'
Men whose wishes are thwarted can throw the blame on fate if their lives prove barren; but he had passionately wished for one thing, and all the forces of life and of death had joined together to give it him. He had no one to reproach, no unkind destiny to upbraid, if the gift left his heart cold, his soul cheerless; if he felt at times a mortal loneliness, and at times a weariness of vague regret.
The cruelty of all great passions is that, after their fruition, there must come this inevitable regret. They are altogether beyond the pale of daily life; they can never fraternise with the demands of social existence. She had once said truly that death is the kindest friend to love, because it saves it from being made ridiculous by daily habit and worn away by daily friction.
The world is wrong when it pities Romeo, when it weeps for Stradella.