‘That of course,’ said Napraxine, with his loud laugh. ‘She is very handsome. Why on earth do they stay on in the provinces?’
‘She is fond of Amyôt,’ replied Melville. ‘Probably he thinks that as she is so young, there is time and to spare for the world.’
‘Perhaps Nadine will believe now that it is a love marriage?’ insisted her husband, turning towards her.
‘Did I ever say it was not?’ she replied, with a little yawn.
‘I do not see, if it were not, why it should possibly have taken place,’ said Melville. ‘Othmar is lord of himself.’
‘With a slave for his master?’ she murmured, too low to be heard by the not quick ears of her husband.
Melville heard, and the doubt crossed him whether Othmar might not have been the lover of the Princess Napraxine, and the marriage arranged by her, as great ladies often arrange such matters to disarm suspicion; for Melville, despite the acumen on which he prided himself, did not by any means wholly understand the very complicated character of his hostess, in which a supreme courage was to the full as strong as were its disdain and its indifference.
She shook off the importunities of the young nobles, who seemed rustic and tiresome enough to a woman to whom the wittiest society of Europe had seemed dull and too tame, and strolled by herself through the half wild gardens, which reached and touched the virgin forests of the East. Her Kossack Hetman, who never lost her from sight when she was out of doors, paced at a respectful distance behind her, but he was no more to her than a big dog would be to others. The high seeding grass which grew in the unused paths screened him from sight.
As she looked back, the moonlit mass of the vast house gathered a dignity and austerity not its own by daylight, but to her it only resembled a prison. She hated it: she would have liked to raze it to the ground and make an end of it. There were so many prisons in Russia!