Then a certain regretfulness came upon her face.
‘I think I might have been tender-hearted,’ she said involuntarily and inconsistently, with a pathos of which she was unconscious. ‘I do not know—perhaps not—I am not compassionate.’
She forgot that Melville was seated on a divan near her in the great golden room of Moorish work, whose arches opened on to the marble court of the Lion. She thought of her spoilt, artificial, frivolous childhood, spent in great drawing-rooms listening to political rivalries and calumnious stories and wit that was always polished but not always decent; she thought how her keen eyes had unravelled all the threads of intrigue about her, and how her heart had scorned the duplicity of her mother; when she had been only eight years old, she had known by intuition her mother’s secrets and had shut them all up in her little silent soul with vague ideas of honour and dishonour, and never had said anything to her father—never, never—not even when he lay on his deathbed.
And then they had married her to Platon Napraxine as si bon garçon. ‘Oh, si bon garçon, no doubt!’ she had thought contemptuously then as she thought now—only he had outraged her, revolted her, disgusted her. Her marriage night still remained to her a memory of ineffaceable loathing.
She looked up to see the intelligent eyes of Melville fixed on her in some perplexity.
She laughed and walked out on to the marble pavement of the great court, above which shone the blue of a northern sky; beyond its colonnades were immense gardens, and beyond those stretched the plains like a green sea covered with forests of birch and willow.
‘I think I should have liked to be your Rose,’ she said, as she did so. ‘After all, she must have been content with herself when she died. A philosopher can be no more.’
‘A philosopher can rarely be as much,’ said Melville. ‘He may be resigned, but resignation and content are as different as a cold hand and a warm one. My poor Rose was certainly content whilst she lived, but not when she died, for she thought she had not done nearly enough in return for all the blessings which she had received throughout her life.’
‘Now you cannot get that kind of absurdly grateful feeling without pure ignorance,’ said Nadine Napraxine, a little triumphantly. ‘It would be impossible for an educated person to think that misery was comfort; so you see, after all, ignorance is at the bottom of all virtue. Now in your heart of hearts, you cannot deny that, because, though you are a priest, you are beyond anything a man of the world?’