She, as soon as his step had ceased to echo along the distant corridors, and the sound of wheels and horses’ feet in the courtyard below told her that he was about to leave the house, dismissed her women, saying that she wished to sleep, and sat alone, with a sense of strong disgust and of vague anxiety upon her.
‘I could not allow him to provoke Othmar,’ she thought. ‘Anything but that! anything but that!’
She would have been capable of any self-sacrifice, of any concession to her husband, which could have prevented the hostile meeting of those men.
A sudden tide of strong emotion swept over her self-centred and languid life. In that one moment, in which she had become conscious of a possible danger to Othmar, she had become as conscious of the full force of her regard for him. Love, which had been her victim, her plaything, her instrument, her servitor, for so long, became at length the guest of her own heart, and was stronger than herself. She had driven that danger away from his path by the skill of her consummate finesse; but she was not wholly reassured, and if to save him from her husband’s suspicions she would be compelled to make herself the recipient of her husband’s re-awakened tenderness, she felt that the price would be more hateful than death.
Even the momentary constraint and feigning which she had put upon herself with her husband stung all her pride, offended all her dignity; she could take no delight in it as she did usually in the admirable issues of her most admirable skill in seduction and dissimulation. A certain impression, which was not profound enough to be shame but had its character, remained with her. She had been successful as usual, but success did not content her. She was exceedingly proud; her delicacy, which was as susceptible as any sensitive plant to any rude approach, shrank from the path into which she had entered. She could take an intellectual pleasure in adroit dissimulation, but she had no pleasure in deceiving an honest confidence. She had always despised with all the scorn of her nature the covered ways of intrigue, the hidden resorts of illicit desires; her taste as well as her pride had always preserved her from the pitfalls to which other women danced with light hearts and light steps. Some sense of approaching these perils touched her now and offended her, as with the presence of some vulgar thing. She saw clearly enough what Othmar perhaps did not or would not see, that their mutual love would soon or late take them on that same road which all lovers have taken since the days when the Book was read beneath the garden trees of Rimini. She was not alarmed or troubled in any moral sense, but her delicacy and her hauteur were disturbed. For the first time, she felt that it was possible for events and sentiments to have more control over her than she had over them; for the first time she had the sensation of being drawn on by fate in lieu of herself controlling it.
CHAPTER XLIV.
In the excitation of his new hopes and of his happy self-delusions her husband’s suspicions had all died away; he did not even notice how completely she had avoided all direct answer to the questions which had at the first so offended her. He had not the faintest conception of how completely he had been put off his guard, intoxicated by suggested concessions, and enwrapped in the blinding fumes of awakening affections.
He went, with his usual heavy and slow tread, but with a heart as light as a youth’s who has heard the first word of encouragement from lips he loved, out into the noon-day glare of the Paris streets. During these six years through which his wife had been no more to him than the tea-rose which she liked to wear at her throat, he had grown reconciled to the inevitable. He had consoled himself with the thousand and one consolations with which women are always ready to strew the path of a rich man; he had not, after the first shock of her dislike, greatly rebelled or greatly mourned; and he had been what his world called a viveur enragé. Yet at the depths of his soul there had been always—living, tenacious, indestructible, exceedingly humble, and infinitely forgiving—a great love for his wife. If she had cared, she could have done what she chose with him; he would have led the life of an anchorite to win her favour, and there would have been no heroism and no folly to which she could not have impelled him. She had never seen in him anything except a heavy, stupid, good-humoured man, who could have a very good manner when it was wanted, but had hardly more intelligence than one of his own moujiks. She never saw the possibilities of self-negation and of blind devotion which slumbered in his nature because she never felt interest enough in him to look for them. To see as little of him as was possible, whilst still remaining in accordance with the etiquette of the world, was all her study where Platon Napraxine was concerned.