He walked to and fro the vast length of the chamber in the quiet of the noonday. He felt as if her hand had struck him.
It had not been even an insult of unpremeditated passion, of hot anger, of inconsiderate haste—as such as he might have pardoned it—but, serene and deliberate and measured, spoken in cold blood, and matured on long consideration, it had been such an outrage as severs the closest ties, and destroys the most profound affections, cuts at the deepest roots of self-respect, and burns up all delicate fibres of sympathy. He would much sooner have forgiven a dagger's thrust.
He had been insulted by the one person for whom he had given up all his life, all his loyalty, all his devotion, all his faith, and all his years to come. The outrage of her insolence, of her disbelief, burned in his heart as the shame of a blow burns on a brave man's forehead. Never could he make her believe, though he were to swear the truth to her as he lay dying!
That perfect silence with which she had listened and led him on to speak, that perfect consciousness of all his actions which had existed beneath her apparent ignorance, that feline attitude of cold expectation and of watchful, motionless observation with which she had waited for the telling of a tale of which she already knew every smallest detail: all these seemed to him horrible, hateful, unnatural in a woman so near to him, so dear to him, to whom he had given up his life, and whom he had never wronged, or slighted, or betrayed. And then the espionage!—all his soul revolted at it.
'One might have known that the weapon of a Russian woman is always a spy!' he thought, with passionate indignation at what seemed to him this last and lowest of affronts.
If he had found in her any of the warm and fond, though unwise, angers of that jealousy which loves whilst it hates, he would have forgiven and comprehended it. But he could not hope that there was any single pulse of it in her breast. She had viewed and measured his actions with the accuracy and coldness of a judge of court overwhelming any prisoner with his logic, and had treated his own asseverations with utter and contemptuous disbelief, not deigning even to weigh as remotely possible the chance that he might tell the truth. He himself would have taken her word against that of the whole world, against all evidence of his own senses, all adverse witness of circumstance.
'I was mad to suppose she ever cared for me,' he thought bitterly, whilst the tears rose hotly in his eyes. 'For my children she cares, perhaps, but for me nothing: I have never been wise enough, great enough, strong enough to compel even her respect. She looks on me as a mere dreamer, a mere fool. All she is anxious for now is that the world may not have a story to laugh at, because it would lessen her dignity and offend her pride!'
And yet he loved her still as he remembered her there sitting so still, so fair, with the cold challenge in her eyes, and the pale roses at her breast; and she was all his, and yet as far off him as though she were queen in another world beyond the sun; and he loved her still, and was filled with guilty shame at his own weakness, as men are when they still adore the women who have defiled their name.