She drove homeward through the olives and the lemon-yards and the green fields that were full of anemones and narcissus and of the bright gold and sea-shell hues of the crocus. The grey towers of S. Pharamond were on her left as she went, and beyond them the fantastic pinnacles and gilded crockets of Millo. She looked at them with an anger foreign to her character.
‘Who could have dreamed he would have done so absurd a thing?’ she thought, irritated against him and against herself. Never before in her life had the actions of any other person had the slightest effect upon her own feelings. She had not lived very long, it is true, but to herself she seemed to have an illimitable experience; and within her memory there was no record of any time in which she had cared one straw what another did. That she should care now, ever so slightly, irritated her pride and wounded her delicacy. She was a woman at all times truthful with herself, however it might be her amusement to mislead others. She was quite as cruel to herself as to anyone else in her unrelenting and inquisitive mental dissection. She pursued her self-analysis with a mercilessness which, had she been less witty and less worldly, might have been morbid; and she did not disguise from herself now that the tidings of Amyôt were an irritation if not a pain to her. She did full justice to the loveliness with which Othmar had sought to find oblivion of her own; and she knew that it might very well be that, as the Baron had said, he had become the girl’s lover as well as her husband.
‘Men are such poor creatures,’ she thought with scorn. ‘They are all the slaves of their senses; they have no character; they are only animals. They talk of their souls, but they have got none; and of their constancy, but they are only constant to their own self-indulgence.’
The contempt of a woman, in whom the senses have never awakened, and for whom all the grosser appetites have no attraction, for those easy consolations which men can find in the mere gratification of those appetites, is very real and very unforgiving.
Her scorn for Othmar, seeking forgetfulness of herself in the fresh and budding life of a child of sixteen, was equal to that which she felt for Napraxine finding solace for her own indifference in the purchasable charms of the belles petites; the one seemed as trivial to her as the other. When men spoke of their devotion, they only meant their own passions; if these were denied, they sought refuge in mere physical pleasures, which at all events partially consoled them. She thought of him with increasing intolerance. She answered only by monosyllables to the remarks of her companions, and her mind wandered away to that stately place where life might well seem a love-lay of the Renaissance.
‘He will soon be tired,’ she mused, with cruel wisdom. ‘In a week the child will have become a romance read through; a peach with its bloom rubbed off; a poor little bird which has only one note, and has sung that one till its master is ready to wring its throat. It is always so. I never see a baby run through the fields gathering daisies and throwing them down but what I think of men with their loves. The only passion that lasts with them is one which is denied, and even that is a poor affair. To be sure, sometimes they kill themselves, but that is rather out of rage than out of any higher despair. And for one who kills himself for us there are a hundred who kill themselves for their debts. Othmar never can have any debts, so he invents woes for himself, and captivity for himself, and he will die of neither.’
Yet, contemptuous of him for what seemed to her his weakness and his unreason as she was, her thoughts attached themselves persistently to him. He was the only living being who had never wearied her, who had always perforce interested her, who had seemed to her unlike the rest of the world, and capable of a master-passion, which might have risen beyond mediocrity. How would it have been with them if he had stood in the stead of Napraxine, whilst she was vaguely open to dim and noble ideals, to spiritual emotions, to human affections?
‘Pooh!’ she thought. ‘It would have been just the same thing. Love is gross and absurd in its intimacies; it is like the hero to his valet. Maternity is first a malady, and then an ennui; that biche blanche at Amyôt will learn that as I learned it. He would have been much more poetic than Platon, and much more agreeable; but I dare say he would have been much more exacting, and much more jealous.’
Yet the remembrance of Amyôt pursued her, and made her restless; with her lips she had ridiculed the idea of nuptial joys enshrouded in the wet woods and falling mists of the Orleannais; but in her heart she did not laugh; almost—almost—she envied that child, with the innocent, serious eyes, whom she called contemptuously la biche blanche, who was learning the language of love in the earliest dawn of womanhood.
‘Only he does not love her!’ she reflected, with pity, disdain, and satisfaction, all commingled. No! He loved herself. She believed in few things, and in few emotions; but she believed that so long as Othmar lived he would love her alone.