A momentary wish, wicked as a venomous snake, and swift as fire, had darted through her thoughts.
‘Why had not Othmar died like that? I would have loved his memory all my life!’ she thought, with inconsistency.
Though she had almost refused to acknowledge it, the suicide of Seliedoff pained and saddened her. Foremost of all was her irritation that she who disliked tragedies, who abhorred publicity, who disbelieved in passion, should be thus subject to having her name in the mouths of men in connection with a melodrama which, terrible as it was, yet offended her by its vulgarity and its stupidity. The hour and the scene chosen were vulgar; the transparency of the pretext was stupid. It was altogether, as she had said, a boy’s blunder—a blunder, frightful, irreparable, with the horror of youth misspent and life self-destroyed upon it—still a blunder. She thought, with impatience, that what they called love was only a spoilt child’s whim and passionate outcry which, denied, ended in a child’s wild, foolish fit of rage, with no more wisdom in it than the child has.
All Europe would say that, indirectly, she had been the cause of his death; every one had seen him, moping and miserable, in her rooms the previous day. She disliked a sensational triumph, which was fit for her husband’s mistresses, for Lia, for Aurélie, for la belle Fernande. Men were always doing these foolish things for her. She had been angry certainly: who would not have been so? He had been ridiculous, as youth and intense emotion and unreasonable suffering constantly are in the sight of others.
There had been only one man who had not seemed to her absurd when passion had moved him, and that had only been because he had remained master of himself even in his greatest self-abandonment. If it had been Othmar who had been lying dead there with the bullet in his breast, she would have felt—she was not sure what she would have felt—some pleasure, some pain. Instead, he was at Amyôt finding what pleasures he might in a virginal love, like a spring snowdrop, timid and afraid. She, who always analysed her own soul without indulgence or self-delusion, was disgusted at the impulses which moved her now.
‘After all,’ she thought, ‘Goethe was right; we are always capable of crime, even the best of us; only one must be Goethe to be capable of acknowledging that.’
She sat alone awhile, thoughtful and regretful; indisposed to accept the blame of others, yet not unwilling to censure herself if she saw cause. But she saw no cause here; it was no fault of hers if men loved her as she passed by them without seeing they were there. True, she had been annoyed with the youth; she had been irritated by him; she had treated him a little as some women treat a dog,—a smile one day, the whip the next; but she had thought so little about him all the time, except that his high spirits were infectious and his face was boyishly beautiful, and that it had diverted her to annoy Geraldine. But who could have supposed that it would end thus? And amidst her pain and her astonishment was foremost a great irritation at his want of thought for her.
The journals, with their innuendoes, their initials, their transparent mysteries; the condolences and the curiosities of her own society; the reproaches of his family; the long ceremonious Russian mourning and Russian rites—‘ Quelle corvée!’ she murmured impatiently, as at some pebble in her embroidered shoe, at some clove of garlic in her delicate dinner.