Nadège looked at her with her cruellest irony.
'Why do you come to tell me this? Be great if you like—if you can! You say quite truly: my husband can easily build you a golden bridge to the temple of fame. But you can scarcely expect me, I think, to come and crown you upon it!'
The chill, sarcastic scorn cut the soul of Damaris to the quick.
'Oh, my God, can you believe it too!' she cried, in an agony of despair. 'Only because he took me in when I was half-dead with hunger, as he would have taken home a starved dog! He has been good to me with the goodness of angels. There is a tale of a beggar whom a king befriended, and the beggar cut the gold fringe from the king's robes in return; do you think me as vile as that beggar? I know that my debt is great to him, so great that I cannot pay it with my life; but if you can believe that I dream of taking of his gold—that I would use him, or rob him, or ask his help for my own ambition——'
Nadège looked at her with cold, impenetrable, unmerciful eyes of unrelenting contempt and pitiless examination.
'I am still at a loss to know why you come to me. I am not interested in the terms that you may have made with him. Whether he give you a cottage at Chevreuse or an hotel in the Champs Elysées, what does it matter to me? Do you wish for my advice upon the architecture of either?'
She spoke with her usual languor and irony unaltered, she sat erect with the roses at her breast, and the pale rose of the satin gown flowing to her feet: her eyes were cold and hard as jewels, the only trace of any anger, or of any feeling repressed was in her lips, from which all colour had gone.
Why did she let an interview so hateful be prolonged? Why did she not summon her people, and have this stranger thrust in ignominy from her chamber? Why did she not send for her husband and confront him with the truth he had denied? She did not know why she did none of these things, unless it were that all exposure and publicity were hateful to her, and also because the psychological interest of the instant was strong enough to hold in suspense both her offended dignity and her aroused passions. What brought this girl to her? Until she knew that, she would not send her from her presence.
The simplicity and strength of the nature of Damaris, in which single motives and undivided instincts reigned, meanwhile made the complexity and the variety of sentiments in this cultured and satirical intelligence wholly incomprehensible to her. That any woman could see matter for jest, for derision, for amusement, in passions which bitterly offended and mortally alienated her, was a contradiction which was utterly beyond her comprehension. That the wife of Othmar, believing what she evidently believed, might have struck her some mortal blow, or bidden her servants scourge her from the house, she could have understood; but this complex mind, which could play with its own pain, and dally with its own injuries, she could not follow. She only felt that such a mind scorned her herself as something too low to be believed, too poor to be quarrelled with, too far beneath contempt to be even accepted as a foe.
'You think—you think—I do not know what it is you think,' she said in a voice broken by great emotion. 'I have done whatever he told me, he has told me nothing but good; he does not care for me—in—in in that way which you believe. I am nothing to him. He loves you——'