This afternoon, if ever, within the last few hours, if at all, he had acted in a way to justify that horror and that opinion. He had treated her—brutally; he had insulted and threatened her, had almost struck her. And yet—and yet Madame felt that she had moved so far from the point which she had once occupied that the old attitude was hard to understand. Hardly could she believe that it was on this man, much as she still dreaded him, that she had looked with those feelings of repulsion.
She was still gazing at him with eyes which strove to see two men in one, when he turned from the window. Absorbed in thought, she had forgotten her occupation, and stood, the towel suspended in her half-dried hands. Before she knew what he was doing he was at her side; he bade the woman hold the bowl, and he rinsed his hands. Then he turned, and without looking at the Countess, he dried his hands on the farther end of the towel which she was still using.
She blushed faintly. A something in the act, more intimate and more familiar than had ever marked their intercourse, set her blood running strangely. When he turned away and bade Bigot unbuckle his spur-leathers, she stepped forward.
“I will do it!” she murmured, acting on a sudden and unaccountable impulse. And as she knelt, she shook her hair about her face to hide its colour.
“Nay, Madame, but you will soil your fingers!” he said coldly.
“Permit me,” she muttered half coherently. And though her fingers shook, she pursued and performed her task.
When she rose he thanked her; and then the devil in the man, or the Nemesis he had provoked when he took her by force from another—the Nemesis of jealousy, drove him to spoil all.
“And for whose sake, Madame?” he added, with a jeer; “mine or M. de Tignonville’s?” And with a glance between jest and earnest, he tried to read her thoughts.
She winced as if he had indeed struck her, and the hot colour fled her cheeks.
“For his sake!” she said, with a shiver of pain. “That his life may be spared!” And she stood back humbly, like a beaten dog. Though, indeed, it was for the sake of Angers, in thankfulness for the past rather than in any desperate hope of propitiating her husband, that she had done it!