She looked at him surprised, and vaguely troubled at the self-reproach and the self-scorn of his passionate utterance. Seeing that surprise and trouble in her glance, he controlled the emotion that for the moment mastered him.
'Ah, love!' he said quickly and truly, 'if you could but guess how gross and base a man's life seems to him contrasted with the life of a pure and noble woman! Being born of you, those children, I think, should be as faultless and as soilless as those pearls that lie on your breast. But then they are mine also; so already on that boy's face one sees the sins of revolt, of self-will, of cruelty—being mine also, your living pearls are dulled and stained!'
A greater remorse than she dreamed of made his heart ache as he said these words; but she heard in them only the utterance of that extreme and unwavering devotion to her which he had shown in all his acts and thoughts from the first hours of their union.
[CHAPTER XVII.]
The Princess Ottilie was scarcely less happy than they in the realisation of her dreams and prophecies. Those who had been most bitterly opposed to her alliance with him could find no fault in his actions and his affections.
'I always said that Wanda ought to marry, since she had plainly no vocation for the cloister,' she said a hundred times a year. 'And I was certain that M. de Sabran was the person above all others to attract and to content her. She has much more imagination than she would be willing to allow and he is capable at once of fascinating her fancy and of satisfying her intellect. No one can be dull where he is; he is one of those who make la pluie et le beau temps by his absence or presence; and, besides that, no commonplace affection would have ever been enough for her. And he loves her like a poet, which he is at once whenever he leaves the world for Beethoven and Bach. I cannot imagine why you should have opposed the marriage, merely because he had not two millions in the Bank of France.'
'Not for that,' answered the Grand Duke; 'rather because he broke the bank of Monte Carlo, and other similar reasons. A great player of baccara is scarcely the person to endow with the wealth of the Szalras.'
'The wealth is tied up tightly enough at the least, and you will admit that he was yet more eager than you that it should be so.'
'Oh, yes! he behaved very well. I never denied it. But she has placed it in his power to make away with the whole of Idrac, if he should ever choose. That was very unwise, but we had no power to oppose.'