'Is it she who does not care, then?' she asked. Her voice was hurried and had a tremor in it.
'God knows!' said Othmar. 'No; I think she does not.'
He sighed wearily; his reserve once broken through, it was a kind of solace to him to speak out aloud the disappointment mute for so long, for so long unconfessed even to himself.
'It is not her fault,' he continued; 'nature made her so. We all seem to her weak and sensual fools. Her own mind is so cultured and so hypercritical that men far greater than I am would seem to her poor creatures. She needed a Cæsar to share his empire with her, and she would have laughed even at him because his laurels could not have covered his scanty locks! She would have always seen his baldness, never his greatness. She is made like that. She does not care; why should she? We care for her. But that is no reason. Perhaps she would regret it if the children she has had by me died, but if I died to-morrow I doubt if the world would look dark to her. It certainly would not look empty!'
He spoke bitterly, with truth and irony so intermingled in his unconsidered words, that it was far beyond the powers of his inexperienced hearer to distinguish between them; all she felt was that he was unhappy, yet that his soul was set irrevocably upon this woman who had wedded him only to torment, to elude, to disappoint, to humiliate him.
She did not know enough of men and women and their passions to understand all that he meant in all its fulness of mortification, but she could understand that he suffered with a kind of suffering for which it was impossible for anyone to console him, and which severed him from herself by a vast and cruel distance of which she became suddenly sensible as she had never been before. His presence was sweet to her with a sweetness which was akin to anguish; the sound of his voice thrilled through all her being, the touch of his hand was a magnetism over her, charming her to a sense of ecstasy in which she lost all power of will: but she was powerless to banish for an hour the remembrance of this other woman, she had no sorcery which could undo and replace the magic of the past; she did not think this or feel this because her thoughts and her feelings were all confused and inarticulate, but it was so, and an immense consciousness of loneliness and impotency weighed like lead upon the warmth and the buoyancy of her soul.
She was nothing to him.
They were alike silent, standing in the dusky windows with the cold dark country in its wintry silences stretched without.
'It is best she should know!' he thought with a sense of cruelty and ingratitude. It seemed to him terrible that she should waste all the treasures of her lovely youth, of her fresh emotions, of her original thoughts, of her awaking passions, upon one who could not give her even one single heart's beat of love in answer. He stooped and kissed her on her shining curls.
'Good-night, my child,' he said with pitying tenderness. 'Good-night. Think of me as your friend, always your friend, and if you see me seldom believe that it is not due to want of sympathy, but only because—because——'