He knew well that if he were wise, even if he were faithful in intent to his wife, he would leave Paris whilst Nadine Napraxine was in it. His many possessions could have given him a hundred facile excuses for absence, and Yseulte would have gone willingly wherever he had chosen to take her. But he did not obey his conscience; he was swayed by his pride, which would not allow him to let the world say that he retreated before his sorceress, and he was held by that power which a great love exercises over the judgment and the volition. The mere glance of her eyes had fascination enough to destroy all his resolutions, and draw him into absolute oblivion of everything save herself. His passion for her was one of those which absence and denial intensify. He would make the arrangements of his whole day subordinate to one slight chance of meeting her for a moment in a crowd, of seeing her pass at a distance beneath the boughs of an avenue. He had received a mortal affront, a merciless insult, and yet he forgave them both; he was with her once more, he had no sense except of that one ecstasy. He was weak as a reed in her hands; he could have flung himself at her feet and kissed them. He knew that manliness, dignity, honour, duty, self-respect, all ought to have forbidden him to cross her threshold, but he was indifferent to them; they were mere names, without power, almost without meaning, for him. They had no more control over him than threads of silk upon the neck of a horse which has broken loose. She was before him, the one woman who was beautiful, beloved, and desired by him; and he realised that it had been of no use to try and cure a delirious fever with a simple draught of sweet herbs, as Melville had once said.
His own wife was nothing to him; the wife of Napraxine was all. He despised and hated himself for his inconstancy where his fealty bound him, for his fidelity where he had only received light mockery and cruel provocation. But he could not change his nature, and the education which life had given him had contained no lesson in the art of self-denial. The world had always been at his feet; his desires had always been gratified and his wishes forestalled; he had never been used to subjugate his own inclinations; and this, the first evil which had ever tempted him, began to assail him with increasing force with every day which brought him within sight of the one woman whom he adored. She knew his weakness as she knew that of every human being who ever approached her, and she had no compassion for it. A man who had done her the insult of presuming to seek elsewhere consolation for her own indifference, had no mercy from her in his failure; he had offended her in the only vulnerable portion of her character, her supreme love of exclusive dominion. She was not vain with any common vanity, but the instincts towards absolute mastery were strong in her; whoever thwarted those instincts, always repented his temerity in dust and ashes. Each step which Othmar made towards resumption of her yoke upon his passions, seemed to her only his due chastisement; every pang which she detected in him, every look of remorse, every imprudence of utterance or regard, pleased her as witness of his just degradation. In the many occasions which society gave her, she planted daggers in his breast with every cruelly chosen word she spoke, which was invariably veiled in easy irony or simulated friendliness, until his whole existence was consumed between the longing for, and the dread of, her approach. She had towards him a mingling of compassion, raillery, and kindness, which was of all means the one most certain to wound, excite, and enchain him. Whenever he was within hearing, she was in her wittiest moods, her most brilliant aspects; all the various charms of her acute intelligence and of her high culture seemed increased tenfold after the simple childlike speech and the convent-bred mind of his young wife. He felt like a man who, long chained to a narrow, colourless, peaceful shore, is suddenly set free amidst the flowering labyrinths and the voluptuous odours of a tropical savannah.
Never had Nadine Napraxine been so willing to please, so facile to be pleased, as in the course of this Paris winter, when he was constantly within sight of her coquetteries, within earshot of her speeches. He watched her across a salon as a captive sunk in the depths of a prison may gaze at a summer sky beneath which he may never again stand a free man. The sense of his vicinity and of his suffering, supplied that stimulant to life which her languid emotions needed; she viewed the drama of his regret and revolt with an interest in it half bitter, half sweet. A man who could have wedded another whilst he loved herself, deserved, she told herself, to suffer; yet there were moments when, beneath her triumphs and her mockeries, there was in her own heart a thrill of answering pain; what might have been, glided also before her memory with pale reproach.
One night, entirely by chance, he and she were alone for a few minutes, that solitude in a crowd for which great entertainments give so much opportunity.
It was at a ball given by Prince Orloff; those hazards of society which it always amused her to subdue and turn to the service of her own intentions, had brought him to her side; some great palms made a little grove around them; the sound of the valse from Faust came dreamily from the distant ball-room.
‘Do you know, Othmar, that I am disappointed in you?’ she murmured, in her softest, cruellest, most malicious tones. ‘I imagined that you would be so very good to your wife; you were always sighing to be an homme d’intérieur, you were always coveting solitude, sentiment, and sympathy. I expected to see you give us the example of a perfectly ideal union; but I am afraid that, after all, you are not much better than other men.’
‘Madame——’
‘Oh, you are angry, of course! Everyone is angry who is in the wrong. It is perfectly true, you are only a husband like ten thousand others. You were always a little like Chateaubriand: "Touriste, ambassadeur, ministre, ou amant, à peine arrivé, il s’ennuie."’
‘It might be true of M. de Chateaubriand,’ said Othmar, with displeasure, ‘it is not so of me. I am most constant,—where I have never been welcome.’