‘Now you talk like a jeune premier of the Gymnase!’ she said, contemptuously. ‘Rebelled? Content? What words are those? You have been a pleasant acquaintance—amongst many. You cannot say you have been ever more. If you have begun to misunderstand that, go where you can recover your good sense. I have liked you; so has Prince Napraxine. Do not force us to consider our esteem misplaced.’
She spoke coldly, almost severely; then, with an enchanting smile, she held out her hand.
‘Come, we will part friends, though you are disposed to bouder like a boy. You know something of the world; learn to look as if you had learned at least its first lesson—good temper. Affect it if you have it not! And—never outstay a welcome!’
He looked at her and his chest heaved with a heavy sigh that was almost a sob. Passionate upbraiding rose to his lips, a thousand reproaches for delusive affabilities, for patiently-endured caprices, for wasted hours and wasted hopes, and wasted energies, all rose to his mouth in hot hard words of senseless, irrepressible pain; but they remained unuttered. He dared not offend her beyond pardon, he dared not exile himself beyond recall. He was conscious of the futility of any reproach which he could bring, of the absence of any title which he could allege. For two years he had been her bondsman, her spaniel, her submissive servant in the full sight of the world, yet looking backward he could not recall any sign or word or glance which could have justified him in the right to call himself her lover. She had accepted his services, permitted his presence—no more; and yet, he felt himself as bitterly wronged, as cruelly deluded, as ever man could have been by woman.
There is a little song which has been given world-wide fame by the sweetest singer of our time: the little song which is called, ‘Si vous n’avez rien à me dire.’ Just so vague, and so intense, as is the reproach of the song, was the cry of his heart against her now.
If she had never cared, had never meant, why then——?
But he dared not formulate his injury in words; he knew that it would condemn him never to see her face again except in crowds as strangers saw it. He had never really believed that she would care for him as he cared for her, but it had always seemed to him that habit would in the end become affection, that the continual and familiar intercourse which he had obtained with her would become in time necessary to her, an association, a custom, a friendship not lightly to be discarded. He had believed that patience would do more for him than passion; he had endured all her caprices, followed all her movements, incurred the ridicule of men, and, what was worse, his own self-contempt, in the belief that, with her, Festina lente was the sole possible rule of victory. And now she cast him aside, with no more thought than she left to her maids a fan of an old fashion, a glove that had been worn once!
She gave him no time to recover the shock with which he had heard his sentence of exile, but, with a little kindly indifferent gesture, passed him and went into the house.
He had not the courage of Othmar; he had never had as much title as Othmar to deem himself preferred to the multitude; looking back on the two years which he had consecrated to her memory and her service, he could not honestly recall a single word or glance or sign which could have justified him in believing himself betrayed.