'She is related to us,' he said a little feebly. 'One sees her of necessity a hundred times a week.'
'For our misfortune,' said the Princess, sententiously. 'But she is not altogether friendless in Paris. Can she find no one but you to ride with her?'
'Has Wanda been complaining to you?'
'My dear Marquis,' replied Madame Ottilie, with dignity. 'Your wife is not a person to complain; you must understand her singularly little after all, if you suppose that. But I think, if you would calculate the hours you have of late passed in Madame Brancka's society, you would be surprised to see how large a sum they make up of your time. It is not for me to presume to dictate to you; you are your own master, of course: only I do not think that Olga Brancka, whom I have known from her childhood, is worth a single half-hour's annoyance to Wanda.'
Sabran rose, and his lips parted to speak, but he hesitated what to say, and the Princess, who was not without tact, left him to receive herself some sisters of S. Vincent de Paul. His conscience was not wholly clear. He was conscious of a pungent, irresistible, even whilst undesired, attraction that this Russian woman possessed for him; it was something of the same potent yet detestable influence which Cochonette had exercised over him. Olga Brancka had the secret of amusing men and of exciting their baser natures; she had a trick of talk which sparkled like wine, and, without being actually wit, illumined and diverted her companions. She was a mistress of all the arts of provocation, and had a cruel power of making all scruples of conscience and all honesties and gravities of purpose seem absurd. She made no disguise of her admiration of Sabran, and conveyed the sense of it in a thousand delicate and subtle modes of flattery. He read her very accurately, and had neither esteem nor regard for her, and yet she had an attraction for him. Her boudoir, all wadded softly with golden satin like a jewel-box, with its perpetual odour of roses and its faint light coloured like the roses, was a little temple of all the graces, in which men were neither wise nor calm. She had a power of turning their very souls inside out like a glove, and after she had done so they were never worth quite as much again. The fascination which Sabran possessed for her was that he never gave up his soul to her as the others did; he was always beyond her reach; she was always conscious that she was shut out from his inmost thoughts.
The sort of passion she had conceived for him grew, because it was fanned by many things—by his constancy to his wife, by his personal beauty, by her vague enmity to Wanda, by the sense of guilt and of indecency which would attach in the world's sight to such a passion. Her palate in pleasure was at once hardened and fastidious; it required strong food, and her audacity in search of it was not easily daunted. She knew, too, that he had some secret which his wife did not share; she was resolved to penetrate it. She had tried all other means; there only now remained one——to surprise or to beguile it from himself. To this end, cautious and patient as a cat, she had resumed her intimacy with them as relations, and with all the delicate arts of which she was a proficient, strove to make her companionship agreeable and necessary to him. Before long he became sensible of a certain unwholesome charm in her society. He went with her to the opera, he took her to pass hours amidst the Noira collection, he rode with her often; now and then he dined with her alone, or almost alone, in a small oval room of pure Japanese, where great silvery birds and white lilies seemed to float on a golden field, and the dishes were silver lotus leaves, and the lamps burned in pale green translucent gourds hanging on silver stalks.
An artificial woman is nothing without her mise en scène; transplanted amidst natural landscape and out-of-door life she is apt to become either ridiculous or tiresome. Madame Brancka in Paris was in her own playhouse; she looked well, and was in her own manner irresistible. At Hohenszalras she had been as out of keeping with all her atmosphere as her enamel buttons, her jewelled alpenstock, her cravat of pointe d'Alençon, and her softly-tinted cheeks had been out of place in the drenching rain-storms and mountain-winds of the Archduchy of Austria.
He knew very well that the attraction she possessed for him was of no higher sort than that which the theatre had; he seemed to be always present at a perfect comedy played with exquisite grace amidst unusually perfect decorations. But there was a certain artificial bias in his own temperament which made him at home there. His whole life after all had been an actor's. His wife had said rightly: 'Men cannot be always serious.' It was just his idler, falser moods which Olga Brancka suited, and his very fear of her gave a thrill of greater power to his amusement. When the Princess, his devoted friend, reproved him, he was unpleasantly aroused from his unwise indulgence in a perilous pursuit. To pain his wife would be to commit a monstrous crime, a crime of blackest ingratitude. He knew that; he was ever alive to the enormity of his debt to her, he was for ever dissatisfied with himself for being unable to become more worthy of her.
'She jealous!' he thought. It seemed to him impossible, yet his vanity could not repress a throb of exultation; it almost seemed to him that in making her more human it would make her more near his level. Jealous! It was not a word which was in any keeping with her; jealousy was a wild, coarse, undisciplined, suspicious passion, far removed from the calmness and the strength of her nature.
At that moment she entered the room, coming from a drive in the forenoon. It was still cold. She had a cloak of black sables reaching to her feet; it still rested on her shoulders. Her head was uncovered; she had never looked taller, fairer, more stately; the black furs seemed like some northern robes of coronation. Beneath them gleamed the great gold clasps of a belt, and gold lions' heads fastening her olive velvet gown.