Othmar did not tell her that night of Damaris.

With daylight he remembered uneasily that it was a story which should be told. A certain nervousness came over him whenever he thought of her possible, her probable, laughter, the incredulity as to his motives which she would be sure, out of mirth, to affect if she were too unlike other women to in seriousness entertain it. He recalled the tone with which she had spoken of his escort of the girl to her island, and he shrank from hearing the same tone again. He felt that, if heard, it would anger him unreasonably, perhaps move him to the utterance of that kind of words which are most fatal to friendship, harmony, or love.

The lovely Diane endormie, who had received him with so sweet a smile, could, when aroused, select and speed arrows from her quiver which could pierce deep and rankle long.

It seemed to him impossible to tell her that for weeks his house had been the home of Damaris BÉrarde without awaking all those ironies and all that disdain which were always so very near the surface in her nature that they were displayed upon the slightest provocation. He would certainly seem to her to have behaved with needless exaggeration, with uncalled-for chivalry. Paris was wide enough to furnish other asylums than his own house; his means were large enough and powerful enough to have obtained friends for a desolate girl without becoming her chief friend himself. Away from the pathos and charm of Damaris's fate, of her perfect trust in himself, and of her childish courage and candour of character, what he had done seemed even to him, himself, unnecessarily personal in its care of her. He did not regret it; he would not have done less if he had had to do it again; yet he was conscious that to induce his wife to see his actions in the light in which he honestly saw them would be difficult, probably impossible.

This day drifted by, and another, and another; and the name of Damaris did not pass his lips.

She had for him the sanctity of innocence, of youth, and of supreme misfortune; he felt that he could not trust himself to have her made the target for the silver arrows of his wife's wit. True, there might be moments in which she would be so compassionate and generous, that the calamities of the child whom she had tempted from her safe solitudes would find in her a frank and generous friend. But Othmar knew women too well not to know that she would only have been so had he himself had nothing to do with the fate of this waif and stray; if she, and not himself, had found her adrift in the streets of Paris.

'She would doubt my motives and ridicule my endeavours,' he thought, and the fear of her slight, chill laughter was strong upon him. He knew that she would be unsparing in her sarcasms upon himself, even if she should chance to feel any remnant of her momentary interest in the future DesclÉe of her prophecies.

He could not forget the coldness and scorn with which she had treated his regret and remorse at AmyÔt; he could not forget the aching sense of loneliness and loss with which she had allowed him to leave her presence on the night when he had told her of the little verses which he had found in the closed chambers of Yseulte. He almost resented with a sense of weakness and unworthiness in himself, the empire which she possessed over his senses, the self-oblivion into which she had the power to draw him when she chose.

He was sensible that he lost all dignity in her eyes, because he was so willing to forgive, so easy to be recalled, so spaniel-like in his too meek acceptance of her slights, and too eager gratitude for her capricious tenderness.

The first hours passed of that dominion which she could always exercise over him at will, the sense of his own weakness returned to him with humiliation. He was conscious that he must appear unmanly and feeble to her, since he allowed her to play with him thus at her whim and pleasure. At AmyÔt she had been unkind, disdainful, contemptuous; if he condoned her cruelty, and accepted her commands, did he not seem to her no higher than the Siberian greyhound which it was her fancy one moment to adorn and caress, and which the next was abandoned and forgotten?

He knew that a lover may obey the varying shades of his mistress's temper without unmanliness, but that in marriage such humility and obedience on the man's side are fatal to his peace and self-respect. If he had had the strength of character from the first to resist her influence, and enforce his own, he might have had empire over her; now he felt that he would never gain it, that on her side alone was all that immense power of command, and of superiority, which in human love always remains with the one who loves least. He had too long allowed her to treat him as she treated her hawk in the falconry-parties at AmyÔt, whistling the bird to her wrist and casting it off down the wind with wanton unstable fancies, for him now to take that place in her esteem, and that dignity in her sight, which he had lost through his too fond and too submissive idolatry of her. He had only of late grown conscious of this, and the sudden perception of his own error was full of bitterness and useless regret.

'He resents the power I have over him,' she thought, 'and he is thinking of something which he does not say.'

She had never expected him to vary with her varying moods. When she was cold, she had always seen him unhappy; when she had chided his warmth, he had always remained her adorer. That any shadow from her own indifference which had fallen like night across the paths of others should ever touch herself, seemed to her impossible, intolerable, almost grotesque; that she could ever cease to be his sun and moon, his planet, and his fixed star, seemed to her as improbable as that the earth would cease to revolve.

Her philosophic wit had indeed predicted the time when the fate which overtakes all passion would overtake his, and end it, but in her inmost soul that time had seemed to her remote as death itself. From the time when his eyes had first met hers, she had had complete and undisputed mastery over his life; she had dominated his fancy, filled his imagination, ruled over his destiny, and held empire over his senses. More than once she had told herself, as she had told him, that in the common course of human life and human nature this would change and cease some day, but in her own heart she had never realised what her lips had said.

Men had seldom changed to her. They had met tragic ends for her sake or through her name, or they had given up their lives to celibate indifference to all other women, as Gui de BÉthune had done; but they had seldom or never, having once loved her, loved others; seldom or never learned to meet her tranquilly in the world as one who had become naught to them. The philtre poured out by her cool white hand had been of that rare flavour which makes all other beverages tasteless. Even Platon Napraxine, although her husband, had yet retained for her such utter devotion in his slow, rude, mute nature, that he had hungered for a rose from her bosom the night before he had gone out to be shot like a dog for her sake.

Of the mortification of waning ardour, of the slow sad change from fervour to apathy, of the great dÉbÂcle of all passion which so many women watch with hopeless and sinking hearts, as poor peasants of Alpine valleys watch the melting snow and stealing floods sweep away their homesteads—of these she had known nothing; known no more than the reigning and honoured sovereign knows of exile and dethronement. Now she was conscious of it, of the first slight imperceptible chillness of feeling, even as she had been conscious of what no other eyes than hers saw; the first faint change in her own beauty like the film of breath on a mirror. It was very slight, rather negative than positive, rather told by what was lacking than by what was present; a shadow of fatigue, an absence of eagerness, a forced attention, an accent of constraint, slender, vague, intangible things all; yet apparent and eloquent to her quick intelligence, to her supreme knowledge of human nature.

They affected her with a strange sense of offence, of astonishment, of irritation. She had a sudden impression of loss, as of one who, having carelessly swung in his hand, without remembering it, a jewel of value, discovers with a shock of surprise that his hand is empty, and his treasure dropped in some crowded street, its fall unheard, its loss only told by its absence.

Always, hitherto, after any separation he had returned to her with the impassioned enthusiasm of a lover; the hours had been long to him without her near presence, and all the warmth of early passion had accompanied his return to or his welcome of her. She had often chilled him, checked him, laughed at him, left him vexed, dissatisfied, and chafing, but the ardour on his side had never been less. Men had called him uxorious, and he had been careless of their ridicule; he had only lived for her. Now, for the first time, a chill had come, as sometimes in a summer night, in those still grass plains of Russia, there would steal through the hot, fragrant air a breath of ice-cold wind, and then those skilled to read the forecast of the weather would say to one another: 'Lo! the frost is near.'

She was as skilled in the weather of the human heart as the peasants were in that of the earth and skies; and she failed not to read its presage aright. With all her arrogance she had always had that kind of humility which comes from great intelligence and self-comprehension; part of her contempt for her many lovers had arisen from her candid estimate of herself, as not worth so much covetousness, despair, and dispute. All the flatteries she had been saturated with all her life had left her brain cool, and had never warped her estimate of herself. She would see coldness take the place of idolatry with the same philosophic consciousness of its inevitability with which she contemplated the certainty of age overtaking her upon the road of life if she continued to live. Long before their approach she had reasoned out the surety of the arrival of both, sure as the surety of winter to the Russian plains. But still, nature shrinks and withers before winter. Who can welcome it as they welcome summer?

With the inherent instinct of contradiction common to all human nature she, who had nine times out of ten evaded his caresses and repulsed his affections, was angered and felt defrauded of her own because for once her power over him in a measure failed in the exercise of its magnetism. To find thoughts which occupied his mind to her exclusion was something so strange, so new, that it disturbed all her philosophic serenity, and with that quick divination of the motives of men with which her experience and her penetration supplied her, she wondered if it were in truth only the memory of that poor dead woman which had changed his manner and chilled his caresses, or if it were some fresh and living influence?

A certain cold contempt succeeded her anger as this possibility suggested itself.

If he were like other men, after all? Well—why not? Would she care greatly? She did not know. All she was conscious of at the moment was that sense of astonishment, of affront, of loss, with which a woman feels for the first time that her power over any man has had its fullest sway, and has begun to decline and waste.

It was a sensation she had never experienced before, and it displeased her that she should be capable of feeling it.

'As if I were Jeannette and he were JeanÔt!' she thought with disdain for so bourgeois an emotion.

But it recalled to her sharply, painfully, what the world never had recalled to her hitherto; that the time must come to her, no less than to others, when her empire over all men would cease, when its sceptre would pass to other hands. It is a knowledge which hurts with the humiliation of dethronement every woman who has ever reigned.

There was nothing said by either which had the least actual coldness or offence in it: yet the sense of offence and coldness was between them, and many times he smarted under some such touch of ridicule or of reproof from her as had used to make Platon Napraxine stand like a chidden schoolboy before her. He was neither so blunt of nerve nor so dull of comprehension as Napraxine had been; and he had an impatient revolt of compromised dignity when he became the target for his wife's delicate and cruel ironies. True, he knew they were a part of her temper; as natural to her as its talon to the falcon, as its pungent odour to the calycanthus. He did not attribute too serious a meaning to them, knowing that her lips were often merciless when her heart was kind. Yet they irritated and estranged him. No man likes to feel that his character is lessened or his opinions regarded with indifference by the woman before whom he most desires to stand in a fair if not an heroic light.

'My dear Otho,' she said a little irritably one day when he had answered her with wandering attention, 'you are very pensive and distrait since you came to Russia. What have you been doing in the solitudes of a Parisian summer? You look as if you had been writing an epic and had failed in it.'

'Death is never gay or agreeable,' said Othmar; 'and I have been in its company.'

'My dear, when death does not come until our friends are over eighty, surely we can see his approach without surprise or any very great regret. Besides, I never knew that Baron Friederich was remarkably sympathetic to you. You used to quarrel with him about most things. But you have such a curious waywardness in always regretting, when they are dead, the absence of the very persons you most wished away from you when they were living.'

Othmar shrank a little from the words, as though they hurt him physically. They were true enough to be painful.

'Perhaps one knows their value too late,' he said, controlling with effort a strong impatience of her want of sympathy and her unkind and careless amusement at his expense.

'Or perhaps we imagine a value in them they never possessed,' she replied. 'That is far more probable. Distance lends enchantment to the view of them—at least it does with such temperaments as yours, which are always self-tormenting and given to idealising both things and people. When the persons are living, to ruffle and weary and contradict you, you only think what bores they are; but when they are dead you begin to idealise them, and sacrifice yourself to their manes in all kinds of self-censure. It is a very morbid way of taking life. I hope your son will not resemble you in that particular.'

'It is to be hoped, for his comfort, that he will rather resemble his mother in the art of immediate and complete oblivion of both the dead and the living,' said Othmar, with an irritation which was almost ill-temper, and a retort which passed the limits of courtesy.

He had never felt so strong an annoyance as he felt now at her ironical and slighting treatment of his thoughts and feelings; so great an impatience of that tranquil and contemptuous method of regarding life which never varied in her, and which would never vary, it seemed to him, even before his own dead body. Before it he felt that fatigue which human eyes feel when long in the radiance of electric light. He longed for simple sympathy, simple consolation, simple affection, as the tired eyes long for rest in cool shadows of dusky dewy eves in summer woods, and he was ill at ease with himself for what he concealed from her.

Yet, he thought, of what use would it be to tell her of that poor child at Les Hameaux? She would have no pity certainly, probably no patience, with what would seem to her the most absurdly romantic course of adventures. She would ridicule him as she ridiculed him now—if she believed him; and very likely she would not even do that.

She looked at him under the languid lids of her dreamy eyes: eyes so calm, so indifferent, so mysterious, so satirical in their survey of him as of all mankind.

'My dear friend,' she said, with a little contempt and a little rebuke in her tone, 'it seems to me that we are very nearly—quarrelling! Nothing is so vulgar as to quarrel. I have never done it in my life. It is a great waste of time; and nothing can be more bourgeois. I have never understood why people should quarrel; it is so very easy to walk away!'

Therewith she rose and walked towards the open doors, with that undulating movement of the hips and beautiful ease and grace of step for which she was renowned through Europe; no woman's walk was comparable to hers.

Othmar remained standing where he was, and looked after her with a sombre and regretful glance, in which some of the old worship and passion lingered, united to a new-born anger and offence. The mortification which lies for any man of intelligence and feeling in the sense that he has never really touched and held the soul of the woman of whose physical possession he has been master, was upon him in a strong and cruel sense of moral failure and of intellectual impotence. Was it his fault or hers? Was it true, as he had said once to her, that you cannot obtain more from any nature than it possesses, and that all the forces of created life cannot draw fire from the smooth marble or make the pale pearl blush like the opal? Was it that she had it not in her to give any man more than that mingling of momentary aphrodisiacal indulgence and of eternal immutable derision; and that whilst her power to create a heaven of physical passion was so great, her power of satisfying the exactions of the heart and soul was slight?

Or was it, as the self-depreciation of his temperament led him to think, that he himself had not moral and mental force or intellectual greatness strong enough to obtain empire over her mind—a mind so cultured, so refined, so exacting, so satiated, that hardly any human companionship could succeed in awaking in it any lasting interest?

He had humility enough to believe the last.

The Princess Lobow Gregorievna, sitting mute and chill as a statue of Nemesis, heard and watched, and in the depths of her narrow darksome soul, filled with harsh creeds and as harsh hatreds, said to herself that perchance, after all, her dead son might yet be avenged by the mere results of time—that foe of love, that friend of all disunion.

Their marriage had been abhorrent to her. It had seemed to her eyes like a blow on the cheek given to her son's corpse. Any laugh or smile of either of them seemed an affront to him. Every glance of sympathy exchanged between them seemed a mockery of his death, suffered for their sakes. She who had never doubted that Othmar had betrayed her son in his lifetime, only cherished one hope in her chill breast—to see him suffer the same fate. She had always felt that she would kiss on both cheeks any lover of Nadine's who should make Othmar feel the shame of a dishonoured name, the pangs of a betrayed trust. But for that lover she had looked in vain. She had always said to the hungry hate in her heart: 'Patience; time will bring all things; and the serpent may cast its skin but keeps its nature.'

But of late years she had feared that nothing would ever divide them.

Their lives seemed to her to pass on like a smooth full river, without shoal or rapid, or any spate from storm. There was many an hour when she lay stretched in semblance of devoutest prayer before the holy eikon of the chamber altar, when all that her soul uttered and her lips murmured were curses low and long upon them both.

Year after year went on and brought her no gratification of her desires and her hate. All things went well with them. They had health and pleasure; happiness too, so far as happiness comes to mortals. Their offspring throve in loveliness and grace, and the world honoured and caressed them both. Sometimes, in the stern yet frantic hatred which she cherished, she would pray that disease or pestilence might at least take the woman's beauty from her; but her prayer passed ungranted. Nadine had ever that serene immunity from all serious maladies of the flesh which so often accompanies the fragile appearance and sensitive nerves of women who, like her, declare themselves made unwell by a discordant noise, an unpleasant odour, a wearisome day, or any other trifle which displeases them. Even the pains and perils of maternity her good fortune had made unusually light to her, and except from that cause she had hardly had a day's real suffering in her whole existence. To the sullen eyes of Napraxine's mother she always seemed to bear a charmed life.

Therefore with fierce dumb joy Lobow Gregorievna, with her vigilant ear and eye, saw the one little rift within the lute, heard the one jarring chord on the music. It was so slight that no anxiety less keen than her own would have detected it; but it was there.

He remained in Russia a fortnight, but during that time he did not find any occasion which seemed to him propitious enough for him to speak of Damaris, with any chance of obtaining sympathy for her position or understanding of his own actions. With that ignorance of what most concerns us, which is one of the saddest things of life, he never dreamed that any change in himself had made his wife as he found her to be, in one of her most captious, most capricious, most unsympathetic moods. He was not unused to these; he attributed them now to the weariness she felt at existence in the plains of Ural and impatience at the companionship of the Princess Napraxine which he knew was at all times irksome to her. He was not aware that he was himself more absent of mind, less tender in manner, less frankly and fully confidential in speech; he was not aware that this one thing untold, this one thought unrevealed, had caused an alteration in him, slight and vague indeed, yet plainly perceptible to her, skilled reader of manner and of mind as she was.

A delicate nature shrinks from the imputation of unworthy motives, and a fastidious temper shrinks from any possibility of ridicule; it was the dread of both which kept him silent as to the friendship he had shown to the child from Bonaventure. The apprehension of his wife's scepticism and ironies hung like a grey mist over the generous impulses of his manhood, as in his earliest youth the certainty of his father's brutal cynicism had lain like a stone on the poetic aspirations of his boyhood.

Even in those rare instants when she was moved to sympathy with any unselfishness or any unworldliness, there was always in her eyes some faint gleam of derision, there was always in her voice some lingering accent of doubt and of raillery. She would have been capable of many great things in great emergencies herself, but she would have been wholly incapable of refraining from making a jest of them afterwards. It is the temper of all wit; it is the temper of much philosophy; but it is not the temper which invites the confidence or soothes the doubts of another.

Confidence, like a swallow coming over seas in the storm and sunshine of spring weather, will only nest where it is sure of a safe shelter.

The higher, better, subtler emotions of the human heart will not venture to come forth into the wintry air of mockery or scorn; they are shy blossoms which want the warm wind of a sure sympathy to enable them to expand.

'If I told her, she would only think me either an imbecile or a libertine,' he thought, and the tale went untold.