‘You never liked her,’ said the elder man. ‘She is a woman capable of an infinitude of things, good and bad. She has the misfortune to have a very excellent and very stupid husband. There is nothing so injurious for a clever woman. A bad man who had ill-treated her would not have done her half as much harm. She would have had courage and energy to meet an unhappy fate superbly. But a perfectly amiable fool whom she disdains from all the height of her own admirable wit, coupled with the habits of our idiotic world, which is like a mountain of wool steeped in opium, into which the strongest sinks indolent and enfeebled, have all tended to confirm her in her egotism and her disdain, and to send to sleep all her more noble impulses. Whatever men may be, women can only be “saved by faith,” and what faith has Nadine Napraxine except her perfect faith in her own irresistible and incomparable power over her innumerable lovers?’
‘Well,’ said the younger man, ‘if she chose to drop that pearl in, as I said, I would not give much for the chances of Othmar’s wife against her. I have seen the girl. She is very lovely, serious, simple; no match at all against such a woman as Princess Napraxine.’
‘She will have the advantage of youth, and also—which, perhaps, will count for something with such a man as Othmar, though it would not with most men—she will be his wife.’
‘Perhaps. He has been always eccentric,’ rejoined the other.
Watching her with all the keen anxiety of jealousy Geraldine had been unable to discover that the intelligence of Othmar’s marriage caused her any more surprise or interest than any other of the hundred and one items of news which make up the daily pabulum of society. But then he knew very well that she was of such a character that though she might have suffered intolerably she would have shown no sign of it any more than she would have shown any fear had a dozen naked sabres been at her breast.
Left alone beside his sister for a moment, he said to her, with doubting impatience: ‘Does she care, do you think?’
‘What affair is it of yours if she does?’ returned Lady Brancepeth. ‘Does she ever care for anything? And why should she care here? Othmar has been known to be violently in love with her—as you are—but no one has ever had the slightest reason to suppose that she had any feeling in return for him. He does a foolish thing in marrying one woman while he loves another. Some men have faith in that cure. Myself I should have none. But whatever his reasons for this sudden choice of Mdlle. de Valogne, I imagine that his marriage is a matter of as perfect indifference to Nadine as your own would be.’
Geraldine grew red, and his mortification kept him silent. But the insight of a man in love told him that his keen-eyed sister was for once in error.
Nadine Napraxine herself had gone to her own rooms to change her gown for dinner, but she dismissed her maids for twenty minutes and threw herself on a couch in her bedroom. She was herself uncertain what she felt, and angered that she should feel anything. She was conscious of a sense of offence, irritation, amazement, almost chagrin, which hurt her pride and alarmed her dignity. If a month before she had been told that Othmar was dead, she would have felt no more than a momentary regret. But the strength of his passion in the morning interviews with her had touched some fibre, some nerve in her, which had been dumb and numb before. Again and again she had recalled the accents of his voice, the sombre fire and pathetic entreaty of his eyes; they had not moved her at the time to anything more than the vague artistic pleasure which she would have taken in any emotion admirably rendered in art or on the stage, but in remembrance they had haunted her and thrilled through her with something more nearly resembling response than had ever been aroused in her.
The expectation of his return had been as strong as certainty; the sense that she had gone too far with him had heightened the interest with which she had awaited her next meeting with him. One of the greatest triumphs of her fascination had been the power she had exercised over him. She was the only living person who could say to this man, who could have purchased souls and bodies as he could have purchased strings of unpierced pearls if he had chosen: ‘You desire something of which you will never be master.’