She paused a moment; across even her profound indifference there passed the memories of some dead men.
'Catastrophes,' added Othmar; 'catastrophes have not been lacking in the pageant of your life, madame; but I believe they have only been the shipwrecks seen through the windows of rose-glass.'
She was silent. Then she said slowly and in a low voice:
'You mistake if you think that I did not feel pain for the death of Seliedoff.'
Othmar bent his head. She saw that he did not believe her. The sense of being misjudged banished her momentarily chastened mood.
'But I was at the same time very much annoyed,' she continued. 'Tragedy always annoys me. It sets the asses of the world braying. No one ever pleases me by irrational or exaggerated actions. I am sorry, of course, but I cannot forgive the uproar which all conduct of--of that sort causes me. It always irritates me like the conflagration in the cantata of the 'Dernière Nuit de Sardanapale,' where the _grosse caisse_ always roars and rolls so loud that all the music is lost, and one does not feel to care in the very least who may die or who may live.'
Then she rose and gave him a little smile.
'I assure you the _grosse caisse_ is a mistake in a cantata!' she said as she passed him and left him, the subtle, voluptuous odour of the gardenias of her bouquet floating by him like the dewy odours of a midsummer eve.
He thought bitterly that he could comprehend how such a man as Joubert loved the scent of tube-roses till his death, because a woman once had taken a cluster of them from his hand twenty years before in a garden alley of the Tuileries.
It irritated him extremely that she should so exactly have suspected and penetrated the motive which had led him to desire that the life of the world should distract and occupy the young companion of his life. It was a motive of which he was acutely ashamed, which he could not endure to confess to himself, much less could bear to feel was subject to the observation of her unsparing raillery. Of all wounds which she could have reopened, none would have ached more keenly in him than his humiliating sense of how she, at the least, must know that the young girl who bore his name had no place in his heart; that she, at the least, must remember, as he remembered, those interviews with her at La Jacquemerille which had been so closely followed by his marriage. He might deceive all the world into the belief that he loved his wife--he could not so deceive her. His veins thrilled, his blood burned, as he recalled those two days in which his passion had been spoken to her in words whose utterance he himself could never forget. What had they sounded to her ear? Only, no doubt, like the _grosse caisse_ which, symbolising death, agony, destruction, woe untellable, yet only seemed to her grotesquely forcible, jarring unpleasantly on the harmonious serenity of the symphony!