Napraxine looked at her wistfully; he wondered if he had killed himself whether she would have cared more than she cared now—no, he knew she would have cared as little, even less.
‘You say nothing?’ he murmured wistfully.
‘What is there to say?’ she answered. ‘It was a boy’s blunder. It was a grievous folly. But no one could foresee it.’
‘That is all the lament you give him?’
‘Would it please you better if I were weeping over his corpse? I regret his death profoundly; but I confess that I am also unspeakably annoyed at it. I detest melodramas. I detest tragedies. The world will say, as you have the good taste to say, that I have been at fault. I am not a coquette, and a reputation of being one gives me no satisfaction. As you justly observed, no one will believe that a Count Seliedoff destroyed his life because he lost money at play. Therefore, they will say, as you have been so good as to say, that the blame lies with me. And such accusations offend me.’
She spoke very quietly, but with a tone which seemed chill as the winter winds of the White Sea, to Napraxine, whose soul was filled with remorse, dismay, and bewildered pain. Then she made him a slight gesture of farewell and left him. As usual, he was entirely right in the reproaches he had made, yet she had had the power to make himself feel at once foolish and at fault, at once coarse and theatrical.
‘Poor Boris!’ he muttered, as he drew his hand across his wet lashes.
Had it been worth while to die at three-and-twenty years old, in full command of all which the world envies, only to have that cruel sacrifice called a boy’s blunder? His heart ached and his thoughts went, he knew not why, to his two young children away in the birch forests by the Baltic Sea. She would not care any more if she heard on the morrow that they were as dead in their infancy as Boris Seliedoff was in his youth, lying under the aloes and the palms of Monte Carlo in the southern sunshine.
Platon Napraxine was a stupid man, a man not very sensitive or very tender of feeling, a man who could often console himself with coarse pleasures and purchasable charms for wounds given to his affections or his pride; but he was a man of quick compunction and warm emotions; he felt before the indifference of his wife as though he stretched out his hand to touch a wall of ice, when what he longed for was the sympathetic answering clasp of human fingers. He brushed the unusual moisture from his eyes, and went to fulfil all those innumerable small observances which so environ, embitter, and diminish the dignity of death to the friends of every dead creature.
Meanwhile, Nadine passed on to her own rooms, and let her waiting-woman change her clothes.