He went home sculling himself across the lake, now perfectly calm beneath the rose and gold of a midsummer sunset. His heart was heavy, and a dull fear seemed to beat at his conscience like a child suddenly awaking who knocks at a long-closed door. Still, as a crime allures men who contemplate it by the fascination of its weird power, so the sin he desired to commit held him with its unholy beguilement, and almost it looked holy to him because it wore the guise of Wanda von Szalras.
He was not insensible to the charm of this interchange of thought. He had had many passions in which his senses alone had been enlisted. There was a more delicate attraction in the gradual and numberless steps by which, only slowly and with patience, could he win any way into her regard. She had for him the puissance that the almost unattainable has for all humanity. When he could feel that he had awakened any sympathy in her, his pride was more flattered than it could have been by the most complete subjection of any other woman. He had looked on all women with the chill, amorous cynicism of the Parisian psychology, as l'éternel féminin, at best as 'la forme perverse, vaporeuse, langoureuse, souple comme les roseaux, blanche comme les lis, incapable de se mouvoir pendant les deux tiers du jour—sans équilibre, sans but, sans équateur, donnant son corps en pâture à sa tête. He had had no other ideal; no other conception. This psychology, like some other sciences, brutalises as it equalises. In the woman who had risen up before him in the night of storm upon the Szalrassee he had recognised with his intelligence a woman who made his philosophy at fault, who aroused something beyond his mere instincts, who was not to be classified with the Lias, or the Cesarines, or the Jane de Simeroses, who had been in his love, as in his literature, the various types of the éternel féminin. The simplicity and the dignity of her life astonished and convinced him; he began to understand that where he had imagined he had studied the universe in his knowledge of women, he had in reality only seen two phases of it—the hothouse and the ditch. It is a common error to take the forced flower and the slime weed, and think that there is nothing between or beyond the two.
He had the convictions of his school that all women were at heart coquettes or hypocrites, consciously or unconsciously. Wanda von Szalras routed all his theories. Before her candour, her directness and gravity of thought, her serene indifference to all forms of compliment, all his doctrines and all his experiences were useless. She inspired him with reverential and hopeless admiration, which was mingled with an angry astonishment, and something of the bitterness of envy. Sometimes, as he sat and watched the green water of the lake tumble and roll beneath a north wind's wrath under a cloudy sky which hid the snows of the Glöckner range, he remembered a horrible story that had once fascinated him of Malatesta of Rimini slaying the princess that would have none of his love, striking his sword across her white throat in the dusky evening time, and casting her body upon the silken curtains of her wicked litter. Almost he could have found it in him to do such a crime—almost. Only he thought that at one look of her eyes his sword would have dropped upon the dust.
Her personal beauty had inspired him with a sudden passion, but her character checked it with the sense of fear which it imposed on him; fear of those high and blameless instincts which were an integral part of her nature, fear of that frank, unswerving truth which was the paramount law of her life. As he rode with her, walked with her, conversed with her in the long, light summer hours, he saw more and more of the purity and nobility of her temper, but he saw or thought he saw also an inexorable pride and a sternness in judgment which made him believe that she would be utterly unforgiving to weakness or to sin.
She remained the Nibelungen Queen to him, clothed in flawless armour and aloof from men.
He lingered on at the Holy Isle, finding a fresh charm each day in this simple and peaceful existence, filled with the dreams of a woman unlike every other he had known. He knew that it could not last, but he was unwilling to end it himself. To rise to the sound of the monks' matins, to pass his forenoons in art or open-air exercise, to be sure that some hour or another before sunset he would meet her, either in her home or abroad in the woods; to go early to bed, seeing, as he lay, the pile of the great burg looming high above the water, like the citadel of the Sleeping Beauty—all this, together making up an existence so monotonous, harmless, and calm that a few months before he would have deemed it impossible to endure it, was soothing, alluring, and beguiling to him. He had told no one where he was; his letters might lie and accumulate by the hundred in his rooms in Paris for aught that he cared; he had no creditors, for he had been always scrupulously careful to avoid all debt, and he had no friend for whose existence he cared a straw. There were those who cared for him, indeed, but these seldom trouble any man very greatly.
In the last week of August, however, a letter found its way to him; it was written in a very bad hand, on paper gorgeous with gold and silver. It was signed 'Cochonette.'
It contained a torrent of reproaches made in the broadest language that the slang of the hour furnished, and every third word was misspelt. How the writer had tracked him she did not say. He tore the letter up and threw the pieces into the water flowing beneath his window. Had he ever passionately desired and triumphed in the possession of that woman? It seemed wonderful to him now. She was an idol of Paris; a creature with the voice of a lark and the laugh of a child, with a lovely, mutinous face, and eyes that could speak without words. As a pierrot, as a mousquetaire, as a little prince, as a fairy king of operetta, she had no rival in the eyes of Paris. She blazed with jewels when she played a peasant, and she wore the costliest costume of Felix's devising when she sung her triplets as a soubrette. She had been constant to no one for three months, and she had been constant to him for three years, or, at the least, had made him believe so; and she wrote to him now furiously, reproachfully, entreatingly—fierce reproaches and entreaties, all misspelt.
The letter which he threw into the lake brought all the memories of his old life before him; it was like the flavour of absinthe after drinking spring water. It was a life which had had its successes, a life, as the world called it, of pleasure; and it seemed utterly senseless to him now as he tore up the note of Cochonette, and looked down the water to where the towers and spires and battlements of Hohenszalras soared upward in the mists. He shook himself as though to shake off the memory of an unpleasant dream as he went out, descended the landing steps, drew his boat from under the willows and sculled himself across towards the water-stairs of the Schloss. In a quarter of an hour he was playing the themes of the 'Gotterdammerung,' whilst his châtelaine sat at her spinning-wheel a few yards from him.
'Good heavens! can she and Cochonette belong to the same human race?' he thought, as whilst he played his glance wandered to that patrician figure seated in the light from the oriel window, with the white hound leaning against her velvet skirts, and her jewelled fingers plying the distaff and disentangling the flax.