Inaccessible to any emotion but vanity, the baroness had never
shed a tear over her husband's sufferings. She was sure of her
absolute power over him. What did the rest matter? She even
gloried in her knowledge that she could make this man--who loved
her in spite of everything--at one moment furious with rage or
wild with grief, and then an instant afterward plunge him into the
rapture of a senseless ecstasy by a word, a smile, or a caress.
For such was her power, and she often exercised it mercilessly.
Even after the frightful scene that Pascal had witnessed, she had
made another appeal to the baron, and he had been weak enough to
give her the thirty thousand francs which M. de Coralth needed to
purchase his wife's silence.
However, this time the baroness trembled. Her usual shrewdness
had not deserted her, and she perfectly understood all that
Marguerite's presence in that house portended. Since her husband
brought this young girl--her daughter--to her he must know
everything, and have taken some fatal resolution. Had she,
indeed, exhausted the patience which she had fancied
inexhaustible? She was not ignorant of the fact that her husband
had disposed of his immense fortune in a way that would enable him
to say and prove that he was insolvent whenever occasion required;
and if he found courage to apply for a legal separation, what
could she hope to obtain from the courts? A bare living, almost
nothing.
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