A few days later Nadine Napraxine was surprised and annoyed at receiving in the forenoon a request from her husband that she would be so good as to receive him for a few moments.

‘Beg the Prince to excuse me,’ she said to her women. ‘I am tired and must go out in an hour.’

Never once in the years of their marriage had Napraxine ever ventured to insist after such a message, or to revolt against her decisions. She was astonished and exceedingly irritated when they brought her a pencilled note in which were written some blurred words: ‘Pray pardon me, but I have urgent reasons to desire to see you without delay; I must entreat of you to admit me, if only for a moment.’

‘Quelle corvÉe!’ she murmured as she reluctantly gave the order to let him enter. The companionship of her husband, at all times wearisome to her, had become in the last few weeks more than usually intolerable.

‘I must beg of you not to send me these autocratic demands,’ she said, with much impatience, as he entered. ‘You want my women sent away? Why should they be sent away? What can you possibly have to say that may not be heard from the housetops?’

Looking at him with irritation and undisguised dislike, she saw an expression upon his face which was new there; he motioned the maids away with authority; he was disturbed and excited; he had nevertheless a certain dignity and anger in his attitude.

‘Do you know, madame,’ he said abruptly when they were alone, being scarcely conscious of what he did say, ‘that here in Paris there are persons who venture to hint that—that—that Othmar has been for many years at your feet? That his marriage was only one of pique? That even now he neglects his wife because of you? Had you any idea of this? Can you tell me what possible foundation there is for it? Oh, do not think for a moment that I pay any heed to it, only I would like to know why—when——’

Entangled in his words and in his ideas, he stammered, breathed heavily, came to a full pause; he dared not accuse her, did not even accuse her in his own thoughts; but the sudden knowledge that her name was spoken in union with Othmar’s had so galled and stunned him that he had lost his usual patience, his habitual timidity, before her.

His wife heard him with a contraction of her eyebrows, which was the only sign she ever gave of anger; her eyes were cold and haughty; her whole countenance was as unrevealing as the marble features of her bust by DuprÉ which stood on a table near. For the sole time in her life she was not prepared with a reply; the various memories which had united herself and Othmar had been always so carefully veiled from the knowledge of others that she had never imagined any outer light would be ever shed upon them. The world had certainly seen at one time that Othmar loved her, and had been ready to sacrifice his life at her word, but that had been long ago; she had not supposed that the emotions which her clairvoyance had discovered, the mesmerism which she still exercised, had had any spectators. But if for the moment surprised, she was never for a moment at fault. She looked steadily at her husband, with the delicate lines of her eyebrows drawn together in a frown, which lent a strange severity to her features.

‘My dear Prince,’ she said slowly and coldly; ‘you have known my character for nearly eight years. I cannot tell whether the opportunities you have had of understanding it have been employed to the utmost, or whether your powers of comprehension have been not altogether equal to the task. But one thing at least I should have supposed you would have learned in all that time—I should have thought you would have understood that I do not permit impertinent interrogation, or even interrogation at all. I never ask you questions; I expect never to be asked them.’

Napraxine stood before her like a chidden child; his long habit of deference to her will and fear of her superiority were still in the ascendant with him, but struggling against them were his own manliness, and a vague, new-born suspicion, strengthened by a certain evasiveness, which even his sluggish intelligence perceived, in her reply.

‘After all,’ he said, somewhat piteously and irrelevantly; ‘after all, NadÈge, I am your husband.’

‘Unhappily!’

The single word so chill and so contemptuous was cast at him like a blow with crystals of ice. He shrank a little.

‘No doubt you think so, though I have done what I could,’ he said, humbly repressing the pang he felt. ‘But unhappily or not, the fact is a fact. You permit me very few conjugal rights, but there is one which you will not surely deny me—the right to know what truth or untruth there is in these stories of Othmar?’

‘You speak like a juge d’instruction!’ she said, with all her customary disdain. ‘You ought to let no one tell you those or any other stories. It is yourself whom they make ridiculous, not me.’

‘No one shall make me so long,’ he muttered. ‘If you will not answer me, I will go to him.’

She raised her head haughtily and looked him full in the face with that gaze wherewith she was accustomed to cow and to coerce men as the shepherd’s voice intimidates and rules the sheep.

‘That would be certainly original,’ she said, with a slight suggestion of laughter. ‘A husband going to an imaginary lover to beg him to reveal how high he stood in the favour of his wife!—it would be original if it would not be dignified. I wonder what Othmar would answer you! You will admit that it would be a great temptation to his vanity—and his invention!’

Napraxine paced a few steps to and fro the room in an agitation which every one of her languid and contemptuous words increased; a kind of hopelessness always came over him in the presence of his wife; it was so impossible to move, to touch, to hold, to comprehend her. The calm raillery, the chill imperious anger, which were all he ever could excite in her, left his heart so shrunken and wounded, his pride so humiliated and baffled.

He paused before her suddenly.

‘NadÈge,’ he said, with a tremor in his voice: ‘You know that I have always liked Othmar. You asked me once why. It is not much of a narrative. This is it. One day, years and years ago, when he was quite a youth, we chanced to travel together in Russia. There was a movement of agrarian revolt at that time. As we passed a village in the province of Moscow we came upon a horrible conflagration; there were incendiary fires; great sheepfolds and cattle-pens were burning. I—Heaven forgive my selfishness!—would have driven on; I only wanted to get to Moscow itself in time for a masked ball at the Kremlin; but Othmar would not; he sprang out of the carriage and rallied a few men around him, and plunged right into the flames to save the sheep and the cattle, or such of them as he could; of course when he did that, I had no choice but to do the same. We worked all night; we saved thousands of the beasts, but we lost the ball at the Kremlin. I do not say it was anything very great to do. I dare say numbers of other young men would have done as much; but the remembrance of it has always made me like Othmar. If you had seen him scorched, and singed, and black with smoke, his hair burnt and his hands blistered, dragging the rams and the ewes, driving the bullocks and heifers, the flames curling up over the grass which was as dry as chips, for it was in the month of August;—I have always liked him ever since; he is not the mere ennuyÉ that they think him.’

He paused abruptly; his wife’s eyes had a conflicting expression in them; there was emotion and there was mockery.

‘Oh fool!—oh poor big innocent fool!’ she thought, ‘you to praise Otho Othmar to me!’

Yet something in what he had said softened her cynical intolerance of his questions and made her more merciful to him. The only qualities which were ever admirable to her in her husband were his courage and his sympathy with courage. They were not uncommon attributes, but they were those which always had affinity to hers. And the half-grotesque, half-pathetic ignorance which was visible as he spoke of Othmar moved her to a certain indulgence in all her scorn.

‘He is so stupid, but he is so honest,’ she thought, as she had thought so often before, with a feeling of compassion which might in any other woman have been a pang of conscience. However, the passing sentiment could not altogether exclude her more dominant instincts of raillery, her not easily appeased offence at interrogation and interference.

‘I do not really see, my dear Napraxine,’ she said languidly, ‘what possible connection singed sheep and burning heifers have to do with the rumours which—you say—society has been so good as to set on foot concerning me. It is unfortunate that your ideas are always so entangled that it is very difficult to follow them. But I imagine, so far as I can evolve anything from such a chaos, that what you intend me to understand by all this is, that because one summer night in Russia long ago you were witness of a courageous action on the part of—your friend—you would be sorry to suppose that he would commit one which would make him your enemy: is that so?’

Napraxine made a gesture of assent.

‘I cannot express myself well,’ he murmured. ‘But you are so clever you can always understand——’

‘To sort the black and the white beans set to Psyche for a task were easier,’ quoted his wife, with her enigmatical smile. ‘Still, if I interpret your meaning aright, it is that. Pray, then, let your mind be at rest; the Countess Othmar is not neglected that I know of, and if she be, je n’y suis pour rien.’

Then she poured out her chocolate. Napraxine was reassured by her indifferent manner, and did not observe that the major part of his interrogations was still left unanswered.

‘I was sure of it,’ he said with warmth. ‘He is very much in love with her, is he not?’

She gave a slight, most eloquent gesture, indicative of absolute ignorance and of as absolute indifference.

‘Ah! that is another matter which I could not presume to decide,’ she answered with a little yawn. ‘He has been married fourteen months; men are not usually in love so long as that.’

‘I——’ began Napraxine: then he stammered, paused, and coloured, afraid of her ridicule.

‘Yes; you were,’ said his wife, serenely. ‘But it is very unusual; it is very undesirable. I do not think it contributed to your comfort; it certainly did not to mine.’

Napraxine sighed.

‘I should have never changed,’ he said with ardour, though with timidity, as though he were a lover of eighteen.

‘You have never changed,’ she said with that smile which she could render enchanting in sweetness and in graciousness. ‘You have always been much better to me than I have deserved, and you have always been the most generous and the most amiable of men. Now go; I have many things to do, and I want my women.’

Napraxine grew red with pleasure at her praise, and his pale eyes shone with eagerness, delight, and the admiration which she had hated so intensely in the early years of their marriage. He stooped towards her, breathless with his gratitude, and his hopes suddenly aroused after so many years of despair and of resignation.

‘Nadine,’ he murmured. ‘Even now—now—if you would? None of them have loved you as I do.’

She stretched out her hand so that his lips, which would fain have gone elsewhere, were forced to remain there.

‘Perhaps,’ she said vaguely, still with that enchanting smile which was to him like a glimpse into Paradise itself. ‘Do not ask for too much at first; au revoir.’

Then she rang for her maids, and he was forced to withdraw; but he went with all the forces of a re-awakened passion throbbing in his veins and beating at his heart, like a swarm of bees roused by a ray of warmth from winter torpor.

She, as soon as his step had ceased to echo along the distant corridors, and the sound of wheels and horses’ feet in the courtyard below told her that he was about to leave the house, dismissed her women, saying that she wished to sleep, and sat alone, with a sense of strong disgust and of vague anxiety upon her.

‘I could not allow him to provoke Othmar,’ she thought. ‘Anything but that! anything but that!’

She would have been capable of any self-sacrifice, of any concession to her husband, which could have prevented the hostile meeting of those men.

A sudden tide of strong emotion swept over her self-centred and languid life. In that one moment, in which she had become conscious of a possible danger to Othmar, she had become as conscious of the full force of her regard for him. Love, which had been her victim, her plaything, her instrument, her servitor, for so long, became at length the guest of her own heart, and was stronger than herself. She had driven that danger away from his path by the skill of her consummate finesse; but she was not wholly reassured, and if to save him from her husband’s suspicions she would be compelled to make herself the recipient of her husband’s re-awakened tenderness, she felt that the price would be more hateful than death.

Even the momentary constraint and feigning which she had put upon herself with her husband stung all her pride, offended all her dignity; she could take no delight in it as she did usually in the admirable issues of her most admirable skill in seduction and dissimulation. A certain impression, which was not profound enough to be shame but had its character, remained with her. She had been successful as usual, but success did not content her. She was exceedingly proud; her delicacy, which was as susceptible as any sensitive plant to any rude approach, shrank from the path into which she had entered. She could take an intellectual pleasure in adroit dissimulation, but she had no pleasure in deceiving an honest confidence. She had always despised with all the scorn of her nature the covered ways of intrigue, the hidden resorts of illicit desires; her taste as well as her pride had always preserved her from the pitfalls to which other women danced with light hearts and light steps. Some sense of approaching these perils touched her now and offended her, as with the presence of some vulgar thing. She saw clearly enough what Othmar perhaps did not or would not see, that their mutual love would soon or late take them on that same road which all lovers have taken since the days when the Book was read beneath the garden trees of Rimini. She was not alarmed or troubled in any moral sense, but her delicacy and her hauteur were disturbed. For the first time, she felt that it was possible for events and sentiments to have more control over her than she had over them; for the first time she had the sensation of being drawn on by fate in lieu of herself controlling it.