'You will come when you wish,' were her last words to him. 'You know well dear, that Hohenszalras without you will seem like a sadly empty eagle's nest.'
All his offences against her were heavy on him as he returned to the great house no longer graced by her presence. He would have given twenty years of his life to have been able to undo what he had done when he had taken a name not his own. He was sensible of great talents in him which might have brought him to renown had he been willing to face hardship and laborious effort. Even as he had been at his birth—even as Vassia Kazán—he might have achieved such eminence as would have made him her equal in honest honour. But he had won the world and her by a lie, and the act was irrevocable. Chance and circumstance may be controlled or altered, but the fate which men make for themselves always abides with them for good or ill: a spirit either of good or ill which once incarnated by their incantations never departs from them till death.
[CHAPTER XXXI.]
'Are you actually left alone?' said Madame Olga gaily to him that evening, when they met at an embassy. 'I thought Wanda was an Una, who never let her lion loose?'
'The remembrance of her would recall him if she did,' he answered quickly and coldly. 'She does not believe in chains because she does not need them.'
'Most knightly of men!' she said, with a little laugh. 'It must be very fatiguing to have to play the part you so affect, even in absence. Our metaphors are involved, but your loyalty seems one and indivisible. I suppose you are left on parole?'
The departure of his wife had disconcerted and disappointed her; as he, to realise his position, had required to have the world about him as spectator of it, so she felt all her triumph over him powerless and pointless if Wanda von Szalras were not there to suffer by the sight of it. He had remained; that was much; but she felt that the absence of his wife had made him colder to herself, that the blank left made a void between them, that remembrance might be more potent with him than vicinity; and his consciousness that he was trusted might have more power than any interference or opposition would have had. She became sensible that she had less charm for him; that he was less easily moved by her mockery and attracted by her wit. His earlier animosity to her still flashed fire now and then, and with this sense of revived resistance in him her own feeling, which had been born of caprice, took giant growth as a passion. She grew cruel in it. If she could only know his secret she thought she would crush him with it, grind him under her foot, torture him. There was a touch of the tigress under her feverish and artificial life.
'Il faut brusquer la chose,' she said savagely to herself, when he had been alone in Paris about a fortnight, and each day had convinced her that he grew more wary of her, more unwilling to surrender himself to the fascination which she exercised upon his baser nature. When she attempted jests at his wife he stopped her sternly, and she felt that she lost ground with him. Yet she had still a power upon him; an unhealthy and fatal power. When he looked at her he thought often of two lines:—
'O Venus! shöne Frau meine,
Ihr seyd eine Teufelinne.'