That she had had influence enough on such a career as his to drive him out from the world where all his interests, pursuits, and friendships lay, had pleased her with more keenness in her pleasure than similar victories often gave her. She had seen his return to Europe with amusement, even with derision; she had seen at a glance that he had fled in vain from her; she had been diverted, but she had remained indifferent.
In those morning hours when he had addressed her with an almost brutal candour, he had taken a hold upon her admiration which he had never gained before. His accents had lingered on her ear; his regard had burned itself into her remembrance; she had begun to look forward to his next approach, after her rejection, with something more than the merely intellectual curiosity with which before she had studied the results of her influence upon him. The news of his intended marriage came to her with a sense of surprise and of affront which was more nearly regret than any sentiment she had ever experienced. It seemed to her supremely ridiculous that a man who adored her should seek or hope to find any oblivion elsewhere; she even understood that it was no such hope which had actuated him, but rather his wounded pride which had rebelled against herself and been unwilling to allow the world to consider him her slave. Of the more delicate and more tender motives which had led him towards Yseulte de Valogne she could know nothing; but of those more selfish and embittered ones she comprehended accurately all the sources and all the extent.
‘He does it to escape me,’ she thought as she sat in solitude, while the last faint crimson of the winter’s sunset tinged the light clouds before her windows; a smile came slowly on her beautiful mouth,—a smile, proud, unkind, a little bitter. There was resentment in her, and there was also pain, two emotions hitherto strangers to her heart; but beyond these, and deeper than these, there was a caustic contempt for the man’s cowardice in seeking asylum in an unreal love, in endeavouring to cheat himself and another into belief in a feigned passion.
‘I thought him more brave!’ she said bitterly to herself. ‘He is like a beaten warrior who makes a rampart of a virgin’s body!’
And yet, in that moment she was nearer love for him than she had ever been before.
CHAPTER XX.
Blanchette was dancing round her cousin in the twilight of the January day, making her pied de nez triumphantly, but pausing every now and then to look up in her face with her habitual inquisitiveness, yet with a respect quite new to her.
‘Tiens, tiens, tiens!’ she was crying in her little shrill voice, like the tiniest of silver trumpets. ‘To think you are going to be married after all! You will be ever so much richer than mamma, they say; you will be as rich as all the Juiverie put together, and you will be as great a lady as all the grandes dames. You will have as many jewels as Madame de Talleyrand; you will have as many horses and houses as Madame de Sagan; you will have two new gowns every day if you like. Have you seen the Hôtel Othmar? I have seen it; it is as big as the Louvre. What will you ask him for first? If I were you, I should ask him for a rope of pearls, all as big as pigeons’ eggs. What are the Othmar liveries? I never saw them; the state liveries, I mean. I like canary-colour best, and Louis Treize tricornes. What will he settle on you? He will give you what you wish; I heard mamma say so. Make him give you S. Pharamond for your very own. I am sure you will not get half you might, you are such a silly little snipe; you are as tall as a Venetian mast on a feast day, but you are a simpleton. You cried when mamma told you he would marry you. The idea! You should have danced for joy. It would be delicious to marry him if he were as old as the hills and as ugly as Punch, but he is not old and he is handsome: all that par-dessus le panier, and thirty thousand francs a day, Julie says; and Brown and Schemmitz wanted to kiss your hand! What fun you would make of them if you were me. You should skip and shout all day;—I should. To be sure, he is dans la finance, but they are the only royalties nowadays; I have heard mamma say so. Whatever can he see in you? You are pretty and tall, but you don’t know it; you stand and stare like an owl with your big eyes. What can he want with you? He will give you everything, he must be a simpleton, too! he might marry somebody quite great; none of them can imagine what he wants you for——’