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 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.