He was silent.
‘I have not the least wish to vex you,’ she continued. ‘I am quite sorry to vex you, but if you will press me——A painter teased me the other day to go to his studio and see what he had done for the salon. I made him polite excuses, the weather, my health, my engagements, the usual phrases, but he would not be satisfied with them, he continued to insist, so at last he had the truth. I told him that I detested almost all modern art, and that I did not know why anyone encouraged it at all when it was within everyone’s power to have at least line-engravings of the old masters. He was not pleased—take warning. Do not be as stupid as he.’
Geraldine understood, and his tanned cheek grew white with pain. He was a proud man, and had been made vain by his world. He was bitterly and cruelly humbled, but the love he had for her made him almost unconscious of the offence to him, so overwhelming in its cruelty was the sentence of exile which he received.
He did not speak at once, for he could not be sure to command his voice, and he shrank from betraying what he felt. She rose, and threw the cigarette over the balustrade into the sea, and turned to go indoors. She had said what her wishes were, and she expected to have them obeyed without more discussion. But the young man rose too, and barred her way.
He had only one consciousness, that he was on the point of banishment from the only woman whom he had cared for through two whole years. It had become so integral a part of his life that he should follow Nadine Napraxine as the moon follows the earth, that exile from her presence seemed to him the most terrible of disasters, the most unendurable of chastisements.
‘After all this time, do you only tell me to go away?’ he muttered, conscious of the lameness and impotency of his own words, which might well only move her laughter. But a certain anger rather than amusement was what they stirred in her; there was in them an implied right, an implied reproach, which were both what she was utterly indisposed to admit his title to use.
‘All this time!’ she echoed; ‘all what time? You are leading a very idle life, and all your excellent friends say that you leave many duties neglected; I advise you to return to them.’
‘Is it the end of all?’ he said, while his lips trembled in his own despite.
‘All? All what? The end? No; it is the end to nothing that I know of; I should rather suppose that you would make it the beginning—of a perfectly proper life at home. Evelyn Brancepeth says you ought to reduce all your farmers’ rents; go and do it; it will make you popular in your own county. I know you good English always fancy that you can quench revolutions with a little weak tea of that sort. As if people who hate you will not hate you just the same whether they pay you half a guinea, or half a crown, for every sod of ground! Our Tsar Alexander thought the same sort of thing en grand, and did it; but it has not answered with him. To be sure, he was even sillier—he expected slaves to be grateful!’