'After all,' he said, somewhat piteously and irrelevantly; 'after all, Nadège, I am your husband.'
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.
'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.'