When she returned home, she shut herself in her own rooms, and was not seen, even by her women, for three hours. She lay almost immovable upon a couch, whilst the sunshine came tempered and rose-hued through the lowered awnings of her windows, and the air around her was filled with the scent of hundreds of cut roses placed in all the jars and bowls and vases in her sight. For the first time in her life a doubt which came from pity, and a hesitation which came from conscience, were at war with all her habits, instincts, and vanities. Underneath her egoism, and her cruelty, and her many ironies, there had always been latent a disdainful honour. Once having given it, she would have kept her word to the meanest creature; she would have taken no advantage of the weakest enemy, if to do so had been an injustice. She was capricious in every act of her life, but her caprices had no meanness in them; she was supremely merciless, because she was supremely indifferent, but she was capable of perfect loyalty in her own fashion. Far down in the depths of her complex nature there was, beneath all the coldness, malice and selfishness of disposition and of custom, a vague instinct of chivalrous generosity. If ever that chord in her were touched it always responded. When she had been a child, reading the old chronicles in her father’s library, her favourite of history had always been John of France, for sake of that voluntary return to his captivity in England.

She comprehended the delirious impulse on which Othmar, hearing that she was near him after twelve months of absence, had been unable to control the emotion which mastered him, and had, in an hour of irresponsible passion, laid his soul bare before her, in all its weakness, and offered to load it with any weight she chose, so that only he could be once more admitted to her presence. And she knew, even more surely than he did, because she was calmer than he was, all which hung upon her own decision. She knew that, once entering there, he would be then and for ever hers; never more his wife’s. She was too clear of sight to cheat herself with self-delusions. Othmar would be faithful to her, and false to all else all his life through, if once she wrote to him the simple word he asked for: ‘Come.’ She knew that he had played with fire unharmed, only because she herself had been cold as ice; but now her coldness seemed suddenly to melt within her, and her heart to go out to him in sweet and sudden yearning.

If he came there he would come as her lover.

To all her newly awakening tenderness, and to all her habitual instincts of supremacy, the temptation was strong. For once in her life she realised something of the force of that irresistible and enervating impulse which heretofore had always seemed to her a mere frenzy of ungoverned senses, of disordered dreams. For once her life seemed incomplete if lived on without his.

Her irony and raillery could not aid her against herself; she was absorbed in, and invaded by a tide of new and warm emotion; the words which he had written to her seemed burned into her mind—seemed to fill the rose-scented air, and become audible, as though his voice were pleading to her.

‘If this be love?’ she thought again, with astonished impatience, with a sense of servitude and weakness.

Twice she rose to write the one word he asked; and twice she put the pen aside with it unwritten.

Such vacillation was new to her, and hateful as a sign of feebleness. Her caprices had been as changeful as the winds of April, but beneath them her will had been always firm as a rod of steel, centred ever on her own whim and pleasure. Now she was irresolute, and scarce knew what she wished, or what she chose.

She who had the blood in her of lascivious empresses, and of fierce murderers of men, was swayed by two unfamiliar and divided things—by conscience, and compassion. The tide of freshly-roused emotions, which would have swept her onward to the gratification of them without thought or pause, was checked by a sentiment as rare—the sentiment of mercy. Once, one of her people, in the dark days of Natalia Narischkine’s rule, being of those who slew in the name of the idiot, Ivan, had slaughtered the Narischkine right and left, not pausing for age or youth, or sex, but, coming to the place where a young child of the hated race lay sleeping, had dropped his blood-red sword in shame, as before some holy image, faltered, and turned away; the child had slept on unharmed. Such hesitation as that was with her now, born out of the very faults of her nature, out of her disdain, of her hauteur, of her superb self-love.

She was conscious of a desire to be in the presence of Othmar, to hear his voice, to see his face again; a desire enervating, vague, full of a dangerous languor, and a dangerous warmth; beyond that, stimulating and sustaining it, were the instincts of empire, of dominion, of a capricious and ever-victorious volition. Never in all her life had she resisted an impulse of self-indulgence, had she hesitated before any sacrifice of others. Absence had increased the shadowy attraction which had always drawn her towards this one amongst her many lovers; in the long silent months of her solitude his memory had grown dearer and more welcome with each day. And he was hers, if she chose.

At her command all honour, duty and allegiance would be mere empty words on his ear, without power to hold him, or meaning to move him. Dignity, self-respect, and loyalty to his self-chosen vows would become no more to him than threads of silk upon the neck of a courser broke loose. She had only to let him enter there, and the world would hold nothing for him but herself.

And for once she might perchance be able to share that oblivion, to comprehend that ecstasy; and yet she hesitated, because a new faint sense of pity and of compassion had come upon her.

‘After all,’ she thought, ‘I should probably care such a little while, and she, poor child,—it is all her life!’

A disdainful compassion forbade her to strike down so weak a foe. Opposition or conflict would have intensified all her imperious resolve, and heightened the zest of her power of destruction; but the helplessness, the feebleness of her rival disarmed her. It would be like striking a nesting-bird, a wounded kid.

Nadine Napraxine thought of her with a sensation of pity and the stronger sensation of disdain which was inevitable to her character. A creature who could not conquer, could not resist, could not keep hold upon her own, seemed a thing so foolish and so feeble to her! Even in her solitude, her imperial supremacy made her lips smile contemptuously, her eyes gleam with scorn, as she rose and paced her chamber for a few moments, her head erect and her bosom risen high with her proud thoughts.

All the superb courage and scorn which were much stronger in her than any other emotion, rejected so easy a victory, so sure a triumph.

‘She is so impotent, poor little fool!’ she murmured. ‘She will break her heart for ever in vain; she will never touch his.’

Her rooms were filled with the sweet faint smell of the roses, and heated to the heat of a midsummer noon. She sat still in the dreamy warmth, and all her vague regrets oppressed her with a faint, heavy sense of inclinations suppressed, and impulses awaking after long torpor.

‘I should not hesitate at a crime,’ she thought, ‘but this would be almost a baseness.’

And her memory went once more back to the hour in which the dead body of Napraxine had been before her sight, the tea-rose held close in his stiffened hand, and darkly red with the blood of his lungs.

‘If he were living’—she thought.

If he had been living, he could have avenged Yseulte and himself.

But he was dead, a thing of bones and ashes—powerless, senseless, defenceless. Something in that dishonour which would be done to a dead man and to a helpless child seemed to her courage cowardice, to her generosity meanness, to her dignity unworthiness.

‘Neither could ever hurt us,’ she thought, ‘neither could ever avenge it on us.’

Her sense of the utter impotency of those two, when she remembered it, disarmed her where opposition or the struggle of forces equal to her own would have made her obstinate and pitiless. They were so helpless! the girl, in her pathetic, ignorant, unloved humiliation and ineptitude; the man, dead in his strength, who had left only a memory behind him. It would be as easy to sweep the one out of her path as to forget and deride the other; so easy that it seemed not worth the while; so easy that it seemed almost base.

She would have used her blade of steel without mercy to cleave through bone and flesh of any who should have ventured to oppose her; but to cut down a garden lily already dying of drought, to strike a pale shadow from the tomb—it seemed poor, unworthy.

Othmar was hers if she would.

Had there been any doubt of it, her nature would have urged her on in unsparing resolution until he should have yielded. But he was hers when she chose, body and soul, peace and honour, present and future. Her perfect sense of empire and security of dominion left her serene and gentle; she could listen to the voice of pity, the impulse of what men, in their stupidity, called conscience. It was with the disdainful generosity with which the Great Katherine might have loosed one of her lovers from the chains which bound him to her throne, that she renounced her power to take him from his wife.

‘If it were only a crime,’ she thought, in the mystical complex subtleties and intricacies of her brain, ‘if it were only a crime, the darkness would heighten the dawn, the danger would sweeten the pleasure, the courage of it would strengthen the self-indulgence; but when it is mean, when one is sure that there is no one living who can avenge it, only a poor meek fool who will weep——!’

The laws of so-called duty said nothing to her.

The morality of the world was in her sight a mere mass of affectation, hypocrisies, and timorous shifts.

To her sated and ever-curious intelligence a crime might have had some potent charm, because it would have possessed some novelty and proffered some strange experience.

But a meanness revolted her with the same sense of disgust as would have moved her before squalor or disease. The same impulse which moves the white-plumaged bird to keep aloof from dust or mud, moved her to recoil from what was base or was ungenerous.

She rose and approached one of the windows, and pushed the rose-coloured blind aside, and looked out over the wide white marble terrace and the blue silent sea beyond.

It was three in the afternoon.

He had waited ten hours for her answer.

She left the casement and sat down and wrote. She wrote rapidly, as her wont was; and when she had written, folded and sealed her letter rapidly, giving it no second glance or afterthought. Then she rang, and bade her women send her the African boy Mahmoud. When he obeyed her summons, she gave him a letter.

‘Take that to the chÂteau of S. Pharamond,’ she said to him. ‘You know Count Othmar. Wait until you can see him alone, and give it, when he is alone, into his own hands. You understand me.’

Mahmoud prostrated himself, put the letter in his vest, stretched himself again on the ground in obeisance, then silently left her presence.

She had always found the child obedient and intelligent, the only person in all her household who would obey implicitly and in silence, without feeling any curiosity as to the purport of his errands or ever babbling of them in the servants’ hall.

When he had left her she remained long motionless, lost in thought, sitting alone amidst the dying roses, and the sunbeams broken and dimmed by the deep shadows from the veiled windows. She had a strange desolate sense of having given up the only thing which could have made life worth the living.

‘But I think in what I wrote there was no suggestion of regret,’ she mused, recalling all her written words. ‘I think not; I hope not. If he believed that there were any regret on my side, it would be of no avail to have written it. He would be here in an hour, and he would follow me all the world over.’

Then she summoned her women again:

‘I go back to Russia to-night to Zaraizoff,’ she said to them. ‘Tell Paul to have everything done that is necessary.’