A chill passed over the girl as he spoke. She said wearily:
‘Madame de Beaumont was as nature and religion made her; she could not have rivalled your Lescombat if she had wished.’
Then she rose and went away from him.
When she returned home to her own rooms, where she was now too often left as solitary as though she had been in her nun’s cell at Faïel, she fell upon her knees before her crucifix and sobbed bitterly: she had seen that night how wistfully, and with what unconsciously revealed longing and regret, the eyes of Othmar had followed every movement of her rival.
To her ignorance, Nadine Napraxine was a woman as cruel, as evil, as terrible as the murderess Lescombat of whom the Duc de Vannes had spoken. All the innumerable intricacies of line, and the delicate half-tints of which such a character as hers was composed, made a study far beyond the girl’s power of analysis, even had any such power been left to her in the confusion and the fever of her thoughts. She only saw in her a sorceress, whose merciless will and irresistible seduction drew her husband from her as the Greek ships of old that passed to the world of the east were drawn out of their safe straight road by the loadstone rocks of the Gulf of Arabia. A sense of entire helplessness and of unending despair came upon her in those glad sunlit flower-filled Parisian days when all the pomp and pleasure which the great world could give were continually around her. If ever timidly and ashamed she ventured to reveal anything which she endured in the sanctity of the confessional, her confessor, an austere and fanatical recluse, always met her with the reply that, having turned as she had done from the paths of religion, she only met with her just retribution if the golden apples of terrestrial life, for which she had abandoned spiritual things, changed to ashes between her lips. She received no compassion from him and little consolation; she followed meekly the course of self-mortification he traced out for her; and, day by day, her cheek grew paler, her eye heavier, her step more slow and joyless.
She suffered as only a nature can suffer which is too sensitive to seek comfort in revealing itself, and too unused to the ways of the world to be able to find either distraction or compensation. No tortures would have wrung from her the confession of what she felt; she was ashamed of the passionate and piteous jealousy of which she was conscious; she thought it an offence against her husband and her God. But she could not resist its inroads into her peace; it grew and grew, and its insidious fires spread farther and farther in her simple soul, as a cancer spreads in healthy flesh.
She felt no sense of wrong; even in her own thoughts she uttered no reproach against him. In her own sight she was so utterly his debtor that she had no title to complain, even though he should wring her very heart with desertion. But a sickening despondency stole upon her little by little; each week brought with it some clearer sense of counting for nothing in his life, some sharper consciousness that she had no real place in his affections. Her perceptions, suddenly and cruelly aroused by the knowledge that he loved another woman than herself, became preternaturally keen in instinct and second-sight. She could tell in an instant, by the expression of his features, when he had seen her rival or when he had failed to meet her. Her mind, lately so ignorant of all the meanings of the world’s babble, grew fatally alive to all its insinuations, its hints, its allusions, whenever these in aught concerned Nadine Napraxine. Her ear brought to her the faintest and most distant whispers in which the dreaded name was spoken. She became aware of the meaning of Othmar’s glance, animated or absent, according as Nadine Napraxine was within his sight or not. She grew sensitive to all the different inflections of his voice, in which expectation, disappointment, pleasure, mortification, or impatience spoke. She was as susceptible to every change in him as the mercury to the frost and to the sun. Her whole existence was consumed in her study of him.
The self-restraint and the silence to which her early years had been trained, made her perfectly capable of repressing every outward sign of what she felt. Othmar saw no alteration in her; he saw that she went eagerly into the world, and imagined that she, like all women, had learned to enjoy its frivolities. She was always calm, docile, cheerful; she had at all times a graceful answer to those with whom she spoke, an admirable manner in whatever scene she was placed in. He never divined how, beneath the serious smile on her mouth which served to hide the aching, wistful doubts and fears of her still childlike heart, how, beneath the pretty stateliness and gravity which he had first admired at Millo, and which never altered in her, there throbbed the poignant pain of a timid and impassioned affection—wasted.
If he had loved her, he might have seen something of it, little as men are able at any time to read the soul of a woman; but he was only kind to her, gentle to her, faithful—as yet—to her. He never loved her, and so all that wistful, lonely suffering went on and grew greater and greater unguessed by him. When he sat by her side in the opera-house, all he saw was Nadine Napraxine on the opposite side of the theatre; when he entered a ball-room, or a music-room, or a drawing-room before a dinner, all he looked for were the dark, languid, luminous eyes of the woman he adored, and when he met their glance, and saw across a crowded salon the irony of her slight and subtle smile, he only lived for her.