She comprehended the delirious impulse on which Othmar, hearing that she was near him after twelve months of absence, had been unable to control the emotion which mastered him, and had, in an hour of irresponsible passion, laid his soul bare before her, in all its weakness, and offered to load it with any weight she chose, so that only he could be once more admitted to her presence. And she knew, even more surely than he did, because she was calmer than he was, all which hung upon her own decision. She knew that, once entering there, he would be then and for ever hers; never more his wife’s. She was too clear of sight to cheat herself with self-delusions. Othmar would be faithful to her, and false to all else all his life through, if once she wrote to him the simple word he asked for: ‘Come.’ She knew that he had played with fire unharmed, only because she herself had been cold as ice; but now her coldness seemed suddenly to melt within her, and her heart to go out to him in sweet and sudden yearning.
If he came there he would come as her lover.
To all her newly awakening tenderness, and to all her habitual instincts of supremacy, the temptation was strong. For once in her life she realised something of the force of that irresistible and enervating impulse which heretofore had always seemed to her a mere frenzy of ungoverned senses, of disordered dreams. For once her life seemed incomplete if lived on without his.
Her irony and raillery could not aid her against herself; she was absorbed in, and invaded by a tide of new and warm emotion; the words which he had written to her seemed burned into her mind—seemed to fill the rose-scented air, and become audible, as though his voice were pleading to her.
‘If this be love?’ she thought again, with astonished impatience, with a sense of servitude and weakness.
Twice she rose to write the one word he asked; and twice she put the pen aside with it unwritten.
Such vacillation was new to her, and hateful as a sign of feebleness. Her caprices had been as changeful as the winds of April, but beneath them her will had been always firm as a rod of steel, centred ever on her own whim and pleasure. Now she was irresolute, and scarce knew what she wished, or what she chose.
She who had the blood in her of lascivious empresses, and of fierce murderers of men, was swayed by two unfamiliar and divided things—by conscience, and compassion. The tide of freshly-roused emotions, which would have swept her onward to the gratification of them without thought or pause, was checked by a sentiment as rare—the sentiment of mercy. Once, one of her people, in the dark days of Natalia Narischkine’s rule, being of those who slew in the name of the idiot, Ivan, had slaughtered the Narischkine right and left, not pausing for age or youth, or sex, but, coming to the place where a young child of the hated race lay sleeping, had dropped his blood-red sword in shame, as before some holy image, faltered, and turned away; the child had slept on unharmed. Such hesitation as that was with her now, born out of the very faults of her nature, out of her disdain, of her hauteur, of her superb self-love.
She was conscious of a desire to be in the presence of Othmar, to hear his voice, to see his face again; a desire enervating, vague, full of a dangerous languor, and a dangerous warmth; beyond that, stimulating and sustaining it, were the instincts of empire, of dominion, of a capricious and ever-victorious volition. Never in all her life had she resisted an impulse of self-indulgence, had she hesitated before any sacrifice of others. Absence had increased the shadowy attraction which had always drawn her towards this one amongst her many lovers; in the long silent months of her solitude his memory had grown dearer and more welcome with each day. And he was hers, if she chose.