‘No one shall make me so long,’ he muttered. ‘If you will not answer me, I will go to him.’
She raised her head haughtily and looked him full in the face with that gaze wherewith she was accustomed to cow and to coerce men as the shepherd’s voice intimidates and rules the sheep.
‘That would be certainly original,’ she said, with a slight suggestion of laughter. ‘A husband going to an imaginary lover to beg him to reveal how high he stood in the favour of his wife!—it would be original if it would not be dignified. I wonder what Othmar would answer you! You will admit that it would be a great temptation to his vanity—and his invention!’
Napraxine paced a few steps to and fro the room in an agitation which every one of her languid and contemptuous words increased; a kind of hopelessness always came over him in the presence of his wife; it was so impossible to move, to touch, to hold, to comprehend her. The calm raillery, the chill imperious anger, which were all he ever could excite in her, left his heart so shrunken and wounded, his pride so humiliated and baffled.
He paused before her suddenly.
‘Nadège,’ he said, with a tremor in his voice: ‘You know that I have always liked Othmar. You asked me once why. It is not much of a narrative. This is it. One day, years and years ago, when he was quite a youth, we chanced to travel together in Russia. There was a movement of agrarian revolt at that time. As we passed a village in the province of Moscow we came upon a horrible conflagration; there were incendiary fires; great sheepfolds and cattle-pens were burning. I—Heaven forgive my selfishness!—would have driven on; I only wanted to get to Moscow itself in time for a masked ball at the Kremlin; but Othmar would not; he sprang out of the carriage and rallied a few men around him, and plunged right into the flames to save the sheep and the cattle, or such of them as he could; of course when he did that, I had no choice but to do the same. We worked all night; we saved thousands of the beasts, but we lost the ball at the Kremlin. I do not say it was anything very great to do. I dare say numbers of other young men would have done as much; but the remembrance of it has always made me like Othmar. If you had seen him scorched, and singed, and black with smoke, his hair burnt and his hands blistered, dragging the rams and the ewes, driving the bullocks and heifers, the flames curling up over the grass which was as dry as chips, for it was in the month of August;—I have always liked him ever since; he is not the mere ennuyé that they think him.’
He paused abruptly; his wife’s eyes had a conflicting expression in them; there was emotion and there was mockery.
‘Oh fool!—oh poor big innocent fool!’ she thought, ‘you to praise Otho Othmar to me!’
Yet something in what he had said softened her cynical intolerance of his questions and made her more merciful to him. The only qualities which were ever admirable to her in her husband were his courage and his sympathy with courage. They were not uncommon attributes, but they were those which always had affinity to hers. And the half-grotesque, half-pathetic ignorance which was visible as he spoke of Othmar moved her to a certain indulgence in all her scorn.
‘He is so stupid, but he is so honest,’ she thought, as she had thought so often before, with a feeling of compassion which might in any other woman have been a pang of conscience. However, the passing sentiment could not altogether exclude her more dominant instincts of raillery, her not easily appeased offence at interrogation and interference.