She was silent; a genuine pain was on her face, though still mingled with the more personal emotion of impatience and annoyance.
‘It was no fault of yours!’ she said at last, as she saw two great tears roll down her husband’s cheeks.
‘Yes, it was,’ muttered Platon Napraxine. ‘I let him know you.’
The direct accusation banished the softer pain which had for the minute moved her; she was at all times intolerant of censure or of what she resented as a too intimate interference; and here her own surprise at an unlooked-for tragedy, and her own self-consciousness of having been more or less the cause and creatress of it, stung her with an unwelcome and intolerable truth.
‘You are insolent,’ she said, with the regard which always daunted Napraxine, and made him feel himself an offender against her, even when he was entirely in the right.
‘You are insolent,’ she repeated. ‘Do you mean to insinuate that I am responsible for Seliedoff’s suicide? One would suppose you were a journalist seeking chantage!’
The power which she at all times possessed over her husband making him unwilling to irritate, afraid to offend her, and without courage before her slightest sign of anger, rendered him timid now. He hesitated and grew pale, but the great sorrow and repentance which were at work in him gave him more resolution than usual; he was very pale, and the tears rolled down his cheeks unchecked.
‘Every one knows that Boris loved you,’ he said simply. ‘All the world knows that; he was a boy, he could not conceal it; I cannot tell what you did to him, but something which broke his heart. You know I never say anything; you give me no title. I am as much of a stranger to you as if we had met yesterday; and do not fancy I am ever—jealous—as men are sometimes. I know you would laugh at me, and besides, you care for none of them any more than you care for me. I should be a fool to wish for more than that;—if it be always like that, I shall never say anything. Only you might have spared this lad. He was so young and my cousin, and the only one left to his mother.‘
He paused, in stronger agitation than he cared to allow her to see. It was the first time for years that he had ventured to speak to her in any sort of earnestness or of upbraiding. She had allotted him his share in her life, a very distant one; and he had accepted it without dispute or lament, if not without inward revolt; it was for the first time for years that he presumed to show her he had observed her actions and had disapproved them, to hint that he was not the mere lay figure, the mere good-natured dolt, ‘bon comme du pain,’ and as commonplace, which she had always considered him.
She looked at him a little curiously; there was a dangerous irritation in her glance, yet a touch of emotion was visible in her as she said with impatience, ‘You are growing theatrical. It does not become you. Boris was a boy, foolish as boys are; he had no mind; he was a mere spoilt child; he was grown up in inches, not in character; so many Russians are. If he have killed himself, who can help it? They should have kept him at home. Why do you play yourself? He is not the first.’