CHAPTER XLII.
This duel, if duel it could be called, since all the science and almost all the advantages were on one side, passed constantly in the presence and beneath the eyes of Othmar. But he was blind to it with the shortsightedness of a man; he was, even, more than once irritated by what he thought was an excess of kindness, an unusual interest, shown by the woman whom he loved to his wife. He hated to see them near each other. He scarcely disguised his restlessness when he noted any approach to intimacy between them. The remembrance of those two mornings at La Jacquemerille were for ever with him. He could not pardon Nadine Napraxine that she appeared so entirely to ignore their memory. True, he thought bitterly, it was she who had betrayed him, and it is always the betrayed who remembers, the betrayer who forgets. Had he said so much to her she would have answered: ‘My friend, I did not betray you; I only told you I would reflect. I did reflect; if the result of my reflections was adverse to you, it was your misfortune perhaps, but it was also your fault.’
Once or twice Melville endeavoured to induce Nadine Napraxine to speak of the young girl of whose destinies he considered her the arbitress, but he never succeeded.
‘She is very beautiful;’ she always answered with that talent in selecting what she could say truthfully, which was not the least of her wisdom. She added a few more words of eulogy, neither critical nor exaggerated; she did not permit him to have any glimpse of the consummate scorn joined to the sincere compassion with which she regarded the wife of Othmar, every one of whose emotions she read as though she read them in a book every time that the voice of Yseulte changed in greeting her or the girl’s tell-tale colour rose, or faded, whenever she herself entered a room or looked at her across a theatre.
No one of all her lovers had ever been so completely mesmerised by her power as was this girl who held the name, the home, the honour of Othmar, whilst she herself held all his memory, all his desires, all his mind and heart and life.
It was the fascination of the ophidian for the dove. It gratified her sense of dominion, and aroused all her more cruel instincts. The reluctant fascination which she exercised over Yseulte; the visible effort with which the girl strove to escape from it and failed; the magnetism with which her gaze was riveted and her ear strained to follow every movement, to catch every utterance of her foe; that helplessness, that unwilling, yet powerless, subjugation, excited all which was coldest, most contemptuous, most inexorable, in the soul of the woman in whose veins ran the blood of the assassins of Paul. That clairvoyance which is the gift of all rare intelligences, made her as conscious of all the bewildered thoughts which thronged the mind of Yseulte as though she saw them in the magic crystal of a sorcerer. She knew how, when she looked at the girl carelessly, smilingly, over the feathers of her fan or the flowers of her bouquet, across the sea of light of the opera-house, the whole soul of her innocent rival shrank and trembled within her, even whilst the natural courage, and resolution, and pride, of the de Valogne blood forced her to endeavour to resist, and enabled her to succeed in concealing, the fear and trouble which she felt.
‘She is brave,’ said Nadine Napraxine to herself with respect; but all the scorn which was in her made her add, without pity, ‘but what a child!—how foolish!—how transparent!’
In that continual flux and reflux of society which incessantly brings together those of the same world and allows them to see each other perpetually, even though they remain strangers, the occasions were frequent, almost daily, in which she could study this poor aching heart, which was laid as bare to her as though Yseulte had had a mirror in her breast, and, for no victory and no caprice of her life, had she ever been so interested de se faire belle as now, when she was conscious that her imperial charm, her nameless irresistible powers of seduction, had thrown their magic net over the life which had most cause of all on earth to fear her own.
If he had known that she had suffered thus, his compassion and his sense of honour would have been aroused and have taken alarm; but he was blind to it, as men dominated by an exclusive passion are blind to all outside it. His principles and his good taste would have made him his own most inexorable censor had he been in any act of his life faithless, in the gross meanings of the word, to the young life which he had united to his own. But he did not consider that a love which he pressed like a knife into the depths of his heart, and of which he believed he gave no outward sign whatever, did any wrong to Yseulte. She was still so young; she had all she desired; she would have children about her in other years; she was of that docile, feminine, unimpassioned nature which is easily content with the placid affections of the natural ties. He did not think that he betrayed her because, all unknown to her, he cherished in the depths of his own soul a bitter, cruel, hopeless, and yet most exquisite and most enduring passion. He had given her all which the world can give to any human creature; he did not realise that his lips were chill when he kissed her, his eyes indifferent when they glanced at her, his speech to her too often absent and conventional, his caresses too often forced, mechanical, and without any throb of warmth.