Man-like, the very indignity he had suffered, the very sense he had of her cruelty, her insolence, her injustice, seemed only to re-awaken in him that passion for her which had so deeply coloured and absorbed his nature. The very knowledge that legally and in name he was her master, her possessor, whilst in fact he could not touch a hair of her head or move a chord of her heart, sufficed to re-arouse in him all those desires which die of facility and familiarity, and acquire the strength of giants on denial.
He had almost forgotten Damaris. The gentle and compassionate tenderness he felt for her could have no place beside the bitter-sweet passion which filled his memory and his soul for his wife.
In these days, when he was constantly in her presence, constantly within the sound of her voice, and compelled by the conventionalities of society to address conventional phrases to her, whilst yet severed by the world from her as much as if a river of fire were between them, something of that delirious love which he had felt for her in the lifetime of Napraxine returned to him, united to a passion of regret and a poignancy of wrath which was almost hatred. He was her husband—her lord by all the fictions of men's laws—and he would not be permitted to touch one of the pearls about her throat or obtain five minutes' audience of her! She was the mother of his children, and yet she was as far aloof from him as though she were some Phidian statue with jewelled eyes and breasts of ivory!
Whilst he went amongst his guests outwardly calm and coldly courteous, fulfilling all the duties of a host, his heart was in a tumult of indignation and despair. The failure of his whole life was before him. Without her the whole of the world was valueless to him.
Yet of one thing he was resolved. He would not live under the same roof with a woman who believed him guilty of a lie to her, who insulted him as he would not have insulted the commonest of his servants. He would sever his existence from hers, let it cost him what it would. The cost would be great: to bring the world as a witness of their disunion; to admit to society that his marriage had been a failure, like so many others; to let his children, as they grew older, know that their parents were strangers and enemies: all this would be more bitter than death itself to him. All the reserve and the delicacy of his temper made the idea of the world's comments on his quarrel with his wife intolerable to him, and the rupture of his ties to her unendurably painful in its inevitable publicity. He was lover enough still to shrink from the thought of any future in which he would cease to hear her voice, to see her face. True, of late their union had been but nominal. She had passed her life in separate interests and separate pleasures. She had allowed him to see no more of her than her merest acquaintances saw, and to meet her only in the crowds of that great world which separates what it unites. Yet absolute severance from her—such severance as would be inevitable if once their existences were led apart—was a thing without hope, would make him more powerless to touch her hand, to approach her presence, than any stranger who had access to her house. Once separated, her pride and his would keep them asunder till the grave. He knew that, and all the remembered passion which had been at once the strongest and the weakest thing in him shrank from the vision of his lonely future.
Yet all the manhood in him told him that to continue to live under the same roof with a woman whose every word was insult to him, would degrade him utterly and for ever in his eyes and in her own. And he had loved her too passionately for it to be possible for him to continue to dwell in that passive enmity, that alienation covered with ostensible cordiality and external courtesy, with which so many men and women deceive society to the end of their lives, and sustain a hollow truce, of which the hatefulness and the untruth are only visible to themselves and to their children. Such insincerity, such hypocrisy, as this, were to him altogether impossible. Sooner than lead such a life, he felt that he would end his days with his own hand, and leave mankind to blame him as they would: they would not blame her.
On her part, unknown to him, she watched him with a new interest, bitter, painful, and more absorbing than any which had ever had power upon her; a feeling of disdain, of scorn, of impatience, of regret, of forgiveness, of tenderness, all inextricably mingled in an emotion stronger than any she had known. When she thought of him as in any way with however much indifference as the lover of Damaris, she was conscious of an intense disgust, of a wondering scorn, which were not wise or cold, or temperate with the judicial severity of her usual judgments, but were merely and strongly human, and born of human emotions. They humiliated her with the consciousness of their own humanity, and the uncontrollable bitterness of the sentiments which they aroused in her. Jealousy it could have scarce been called. For jealousy implies a recognition of equality, a fear of usurpation, and these to her haughty soul were impossible in face of a peasant girl, a déclassée, a waif and stray, with no place in the world save such as Othmar might choose to give her. Jealousy in this sense, jealousy intellectual and moral it was not; but jealousy physical it was. She thought and hated to think of the personal beauty of Damaris; she thought and hated to think of all those summer hours in her own house in which that beauty had been helpless and dependent before him. Like all women who know much of the natures of men, she knew that the senses were often beyond control, when the heart in no way went with them. She had always thought that it would never matter to her whither such undisciplined vagaries might lead him. She had always felt with the disdain of a nature over which physical desires have little power, that wherever his caprice took him there he might go for aught that she would say to restrain him.
She was startled to find that it did pain her, that it did revolt her, to believe that this disloyalty had been done her, that this child had had from him even the slightest, most soulless kind of love.
Her world had never seen her more full of wit, and grace, and brilliancy, than in those days when in her inmost soul she suffered more mental pain and doubt than she had ever known. Life had become touched with humiliation, indignation, emotion of a complex kind, contemptuous anger, and a vague remorse; but it had thereby become to her once more a thing of interest and of vitality, her languor had been startled, her self-love shocked, her whole nature stirred. She gave no sign of it that any one, either foe or friend, could read, but she was conscious that these emotions which she had ridiculed in others could become the dominant forces and tyrannical preoccupation even of her own thoughts and life.
A sensation of failure, of loss, of humiliation, was always with her; not so much for this fact of what she believed to be his infidelity, as for her own consciousness that she herself had been untrue to all the theories and philosophies of her existence, that she had failed to guide their lives into that calm haven of friendship and mutual comprehension which had always seemed to her the only possibly decent grave for a dead passion; and had failed also in this crisis of their fates to preserve that wisdom, patience, and composure, which can alone lend dignity to the woman who sees her power passed away.