A few minutes after Othmar had left the house her groom of the chambers
ushered into the library the Duc de Vannes and his elder daughter.
Blanchette, muffled up to her dancing turquoise-coloured eyes in
sealskin, and with her small, impatient feet cased in little velvet
boots lined with fur, in which costume Carlos Durand was about to paint
her portrait for the salon, with a background of snow and frosted
boughs taken from the Bois, sprang across the long room with the speed
of a little greyhound, and embraced her cousin as if she had never
loved anyone so much in all the days of her life. They had not met for
six months, for Blanchette had been in penitence with her governesses
and the dowager Duchesse de Vannes, in the depths of the Jura; a
chastisement which had only sent her back to Paris two centimètres
taller, full of resolution to avenge herself, and more open-eyed and
quick-eared than ever.
'Ah, my dearest! How happy I am to see you again!' she cried in
ecstasy, lifting her pretty little pale face to be kissed, in a
transport of affection.
'Il faut la ménager: elle est si riche!' she had said to Toinon that
morning, who was in bed with a cold, and who had grumbled in answer,
'Autrefois elle était si bête!' to which Blanchette had judiciously
replied, 'On n'est jamais bête quand on est riche.'
De Vannes, when his little daughter's ecstasies were somewhat spent,
approached with a smile and kissed the hand of Yseulte with a
reverential but cousinly familiarity.
'Out so early!' she said in surprise. 'Surely you never used to see the
outer air till two o'clock?'
'I brought this _feu-follet_ to enjoy your kindness,' said the Duc,
'that I might have the pleasure of seeing you before all the world
does. I wished, too, to be the first to congratulate you, my cousin,
on your brilliant success last night. You were perfect, marvellous,
incredible!----'
'I think I was much like any one else,' said Yseulte, to check the
torrent of his adjectives; 'and the success of the ball was due more to
Julien than to us; he was so enchanted to have a ball to organise in
this great house after so many years without any receptions.'
'Julien is an admirable maître d'hôtel, no doubt,' answered de Vannes,
with a smile; 'and he is happy in possessing a young mistress who
appreciates his zeal and fidelity, but it is not of Julien that all
Paris is talking and sighing this morning.'
'They must be talking and sighing in their beds then,' said Yseulte, a
little impatiently. 'I thought no one was up so early as this except
myself. Is the Duchesse well? She was so kind last night; she gave so
much _entrain_----'
'You know I never see her till dinner, if then, unless I chance to
cross her in the Bois,' answered the Duc, a little irritably.
He had risen three hours too early, and had bored himself to bring
his little daughter here in his _coupé_; and he felt that so much
self-sacrifice was not likely to avail him anything except that as he
looked at Yseulte he could see for once in his life a woman who was
still prettier in the morning than at night. He himself did not bear
that trying light well; the lines about his eyes were deep and not to
be hidden by any art, his eyes were dull and heavy, his cheeks hollow,
and his moustache dyed. By night he was still one of the most elegant
of _la haute gomme_, and his natural distinction could never altogether
leave him; but his manner of life had aged him prematurely, and he felt
old beside the freshness and the youth of Yseulte.
His vanity and his good sense alike counselled him to retire from a
position which would avail him nothing; but a certain malice, which was
a part of his character, and which his little daughter had inherited
in increased degree, prompted him first to take reprisal for the
indifference of his reception. Yseulte remained standing, holding the
hand of Blanchette, evidently not desiring that he should be long
there, and giving him no invitation to protract his visit until her
breakfast hour. Blanchette's mischievous eyes watched her father's
visible annoyance with keen appreciation of it; she had not forgotten
the medallion given at Millo, and she had guessed very well why she
had received the extraordinary honour of a seat in his brougham as
he drove to the Jockey. She had been just about to leave the house
with her maid when the Duc, passing her in the vestibule, had said
carelessly: 'Is it you, you little cat? Ah, you are going to your
cousin. Well, jump in with me, and I will set you down as I pass; I am
going to the Jockey.' Now Blanchette knew as well as he did that the
way from their house to the Jockey Club did not by any means lie past
the Hôtel d'Othmar; but she had been too shrewd to say that, and too
proud of driving beside her father, who smoked a big cheroot, and told
her about the little theatres.
'Can I see Othmar?' he asked now, as he made his adieux to Yseulte.
'I am sorry, but he is just gone out,' she answered; 'I think he is
gone for some hours; I do not know where.'
'You will soon learn not to say so,' thought the Duc, diverted even in
his discomfiture by her simplicity. He said aloud:
'Do you think he may have gone to see the Napraxines? He was always
a great friend of theirs, and they arrived last night; it is in all
the papers, but then you do not read the papers. I only ask, because
I should be so glad if I could meet him anywhere. The Prefect of Nice
writes to me about the basin of Millo; now S. Pharamond has much more
sea-front and much larger share of the harbour than we have, and if
Othmar would use his influence, one word from him----'
'I will tell him; he will be sure to come to you or write to you,' she
said quickly. She had flinched a little at the name of the Napraxine,
which no one had spoken to her since that silver statue of the Love
with the empty gourd had been sent to her before her marriage.
'Bien joué, petit papa,' thought Blanchette, with understanding and
appreciation, as her father bowed himself out of Othmar's library.
'Oh, how happy you are!--how I wish I were you!' she cried, five
minutes later, as she skipped about her cousin's boudoir, while the
glow of the fire of olive-wood shone on the panels which Bougereau had
painted there with groups of those charming nude children which he can
set frolicking with almost the soft poetic grace of Correggio.
Yseulte smiled on the little impudent face of the child, who leaned her
elbows on her knees as she spoke.
'I am very happy,' she said, with perfect truth. 'But I hope you will
be as much so one day, Blanchette.'
Blanchette nodded.
'I shall marry into the finance too; the noblesse is finished;
papa says so. He said yesterday, "Nous sommes de vieux
bonzes--emballons-nous!"'
Blanchette tied her arms and legs in a knot as she had seen a clown
do, and made a pantomimic show of being rolled away on a wheelbarrow;
then she gathered herself up and came and stood before her cousin and
hostess.
'Te voilà, grande dame!' she cried, looking at her with her own little
pert flaxen head, with its innumerable little curls held on one side
critically, as she surveyed Yseulte from head to foot with a frank
astonishment and admiration. It was only such a little while ago that
Yseulte had been her butt and victim at Millo; that she had ridiculed
her for her grey convent dress, her thick shoes, her primitive, pious
habits, brought from the Breton woods, and lo!--here she stood,
'très grande dame!' as Blanchette, a severe judge in such matters,
acknowledged to herself. So tall, so elegant, so stately, with her
beautiful slender hands covered with great rings, and her morning-gown
a cascade of marvellous old lace. 'She looks quite twenty years old!'
thought Blanchette. 'How nice it must be to be married, if one get
grown up all at once like that!'
She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she was unusually quiet for
a little time, during which her terrible eyes scanned every detail of
Yseulte's appearance, from the pearl solitaire at her throat to the
gold buckles in her shoes. Then, with a shriek of laughter, she cried
aloud:
'Do you remember when you came first to us you had leather
shoes--leather!--and no heels, and mamma sent you at once to have some
proper shoes; and how you could not walk a step in them, and cried?'
'I remember,' said Yseulte good-humouredly, 'but I wonder you do--you
were so little.'
'Oh, I never forget anything,' replied Blanchette, sagely. 'What
beautiful feet you have now, and you are so grown, so grown! And I want
to see all your jewels. Mamma says they are wonderful. I love jewels.'
'You shall see them, if you like, by-and-bye. But you did see many
before my marriage.'
'But mamma says he has given you ever so many more since--that you were
covered with them at your ball.'
'He is always generous.'
Yseulte smiled as she spoke--the dreamy introspective smile of one who
recalls happy hours.
'_Tope-là_, while it lasts,' said the small cynic before her.
'Hush,' said Yseulte, with some disgust.
'Papa never gives mamma anything,' pursued Blanchette. 'Papa gives
heaps of things to Mdlle. Fraise; the one they call Rose Fraise. She
plays; she has eyes like saucers; she is at the Variétés; she rides a
roan horse in the Bois of a morning. Don't you go to the theatre every
night? When I marry I shall have a box at every house. I have gone to
Hengler's. Now show me the jewels, will you?'
To humour the child, Yseulte took her to her dressing-room, where
the tortoiseshell and silver box, which was the outer shell of the
iron fire-proof jewel case, was kept, and told her women to open it.
Blanchette remained in an almost religious ecstasy before the treasures
exposed to her adoring eyes. Nothing could awe this true child of
her century except such a display as she now saw of ropes of pearls,
streams of sapphires, emeralds green as the deep sea, diamonds in
all possible settings, rare Italian jewels of the Renaissance, and
Byzantine and Persian work of the rarest quality. She was, after an
hour's worship, with difficulty persuaded to leave the spot where such
divine objects were shut within their silver shrine defended by Chubb's
locks.
'You _are_ happy!' she said, with a sigh.
Yseulte glanced at a miniature of Othmar which stood near.
'That is worth them all!' she said, and then coloured, vexed that she
had betrayed herself to the artificial, satirical mockery of the child.
But Blanchette did not hear; she was thinking of the great diamonds
lying like planets and comets fallen out of the sky into their velvet
beds.
'_Dis donc_,' she said abruptly, 'what is your budget for your
toilettes? You would not tell me when you married; tell me now.'
'I do not think it concerns you, my dear, and your mamma knows,'
replied Yseulte.
'Oh, it made mamma very angry; she said he gave you three times as
much as she has; that is why I want to know what it is, because then
I should know what hers is. And I know she is in debt so deep!' and
Blanchette held her little hand high above her head. 'What is the
first thing you ordered, Yseulte? Me, I should order a petticoat with
valenciennes quite up to the top; like that they are three thousand
francs each. Yours are like that? You have got them in all colours, and
ever so many white satin ones too? If I were you, I should be all day
long with the _lingères_ and _costumiers_. Are you not with them all
day long?'
'No, I have ordered nothing; I want nothing; I have such quantities of
clothes;--if I live to be a hundred I shall never wear them out!----'
'Wear them out!' cried Blanchette, with a scream which was as
inimitable as a shriek of Judic's or Jeanne Granier's. 'What an
expression! One would think you were a doctor's wife in the provinces.
You know you can never wear anything more than three times, and a
_toilette du soir_ never but once. Your maids surely tell you that?----'
'I wear what they put out,' said Yseulte, a little amused. 'But I doubt
very much whether I shall ever care about _chiffons_; not in your sense
of caring, Blanchette. Of course I like pretty things, but there are so
many other ways of spending money.'
'What ways?' said the child sharply. 'Play? Horses? The Bourse? Or do
you buy big jewels? It is very safe to buy big jewels; you can run away
with them in revolution, sown in your stays----'
'There is so much to do for the poor,' said Yseulte, with a little
hesitation; she feared to seem to boast of her own charity, yet she
thought it wrong to let the child think that she spent all she had
selfishly and frivolously.
Blanchette's little rosy mouth grinned.
'For the poor? One can _quêter_; that is always amusing. I stood at
the door of S. Philippe after Mass last month, and I got such a bagful
of napoleons, and I wore a frock, _couleur de feu_, and a Henri-Trois
hat, and Monseigneur himself kissed me--it was great fun--there was a
crowd in the street, and one of them said, "'Est crâne, la pétiote!" It
was a baker's boy said it; I threw him a napoleon out of the bag.'
'Oh, Blanchette!--out of the alms money!'
'Why not? I put a dragée in instead, and I dare say the boy was poor,
or he wouldn't have had a basket on his head. Monseigneur said to mamma
that I was one of the children of heaven!'
And Blanchette made her _pied de nez_, and waltzed round on one foot.
'You could buy the whole of Siraudin's and not feel it,' she resumed
enviously. 'You could buy half Paris they say; why don't you?'
'I have all I want,' said Yseulte; 'very much more than I want.'
'That is nonsense; one need never stop wishing----'
'One must be very ungrateful then,' said Yseulte. 'But you can wish
as much as you like this morning; you shall have your wishes. Only I
should like to hear you wish that Toinon were with you. Poor Toinon, at
home with her sore throat!'
'I don't wish that at all,' said Blanchette sturdily. 'She pinches, she
gobbles, and _she_ is vulgar, if you like; she swears like the grooms.
You know our rooms overlook the stables; we can hear all the men say
when they are cleaning the horses. Toinon makes signals to the English
tiger Bob, and he to her. Toinon will only marry someone who keeps a
fine _meute_ and good colours for a hunting-dress. She only lives for
the Cours Hippique. She got her sore throat because she would go on M.
de Rochmont's break when it was raining.'
'Poor Toinon! You ought to be so fond of each other. If I had had a
sister----'
'Ab-bah!' said Blanchette; 'you would have hated her! I can never have
a scrap of pleasure in a new frock because Toinon always has one too; I
know I do not make half the effect I should do if I were all alone!'
'Hush! If Toinon died, only think how sorry you would be!'
Blanchette laughed in silence; she did not dare to say so, but she
thought that if Toinon did die it would be a bore in one way, because
death always dressed one in black, and shut one up in the house; but
otherwise--there were quantities of Toinon's things which she would
like to possess herself, and in especial a set of pink coral, which
Toinon's godmother, the Queen of Naples, had given her, which was
delicious. Blanchette's own godmother was but little use to her, being
a most religious and most rigid Marquise, who dwelt on her estates in a
lonely part of La Vendée, and only made her presents of holy books and
crucifixes and relics in little antique boxes.
'Do you know, Yseulte,' she continued, with her persistent prattle, as
she hopped round the room, examining and appraising as accurately as a
dealer at the Drouot the treasures which it contained, 'they make bets
about you at the clubs? How nice that is! Nobody is anything in Paris
till the clubs do that. Papa and the Marquis have a hundred thousand
francs on it, and mamma laughs;--they think I don't hear these things,
but I do.'
'Bets on me?' repeated Yseulte in wonder. 'Why should they bet about
me?'
'Oh, they bet as to whether you will be the first to _flanquer_ Count
Othmar, or he you. They often make that sort of bet when people marry.
Papa is all for you; he says you will be _flanquée_, and bear it like
an angel,--"like a two-sous print of S. Marie!" said mamma.'
Yseulte coloured with natural indignation.
'You have no right to repeat such things if you hear them, Blanchette,'
she said, with only a vague idea of the child's meaning. 'You might
make great mischief. If Count Othmar were to know----'
'Bah!' said Blanchette. 'You will not tell him. You are in love with
him; they all say so; it is what they laugh at: it is what they bet
about--how long it will last, who will get him away first, what you
will do, whether you will take some one else. Papa says you will not;
mamma says you will: they quarrel ever so often about it. You see,'
continued Blanchette, with her mixture of _blasé_ cynicism and childish
naïveté, which made her say the most horrible things with only a half
perception of their meaning, 'they all only marry for that, to be able
to take some one else; that is why it does not matter if one's husband
is as old as the Pont Neuf and as ugly as Punch. You happen to be in
love with your's, and he is handsome; but it only makes them laugh, and
he was never in love with you--mamma says so; he married you because he
was angry with Madame Napraxine, and he wanted to do something to vex
her.'
Blanchette, who was given to such ruthless analysis of other people,
did not dissect her own emotions, so that she was ignorant of the
malice which actuated her speech, of the unconscious longing which
moved her to put a thorn in the rose. She wanted all those jewels for
herself! She knew very well she could not have them, that she would
be laughed at by Toinon and everybody if it were known she wished for
them; still, the longing for them made it pleasant to her to plant
her little poisoned dagger in the happy breast of her cousin. But she
paused, for once frightened at the sudden paleness of her cousin's face.
Yseulte gave a little low cry, like a wounded animal; she felt the air
grow grey, the room go round her, for a moment, with the intensity
of her surprise, the shock of her pain. But in another moment she
recovered herself; she repulsed, almost without pausing to examine it,
a suspicion which was an offence to himself and her. She laid her hand
on the little gay figure of the cruel child, and stopped her in her
airy circuit of the room, with a gesture so grave, a rebuke so calm,
that even Blanchette was awed.
'My little cousin,' she said, with an authority and a serenity which
seemed all at once to add a score of years to her age, 'you can jest
with me, and at me, as much as ever you like, I shall forgive it and I
shall never forget all I owed once to your mother; but if you venture
to speak again of my husband without respect, I shall not forgive it.
I shall close his house to you, and I shall tell your parents why I do
so.'
Blanchette looked furtively up in her face, and understood that she was
not to be trifled with. She began to whimper, and then to laugh, and
then to murmur in the coaxing way she had when she had been most in
fault.
'How grand you have grown, and how old in twelve months! You know I
only talked nonsense; I never heard them say a word; I only wanted to
teaze you; it is so silly, you see, Yseulte, to be so in love with M.
Othmar, it is so bourgeoise and so stupid, and they all say that it
is not the way to keep him. Me, when I marry, I will always make my
husband call me Madame, and I will never let him touch but the tip of
my little finger, and I will eat oysters every day, and drive the horse
that wins the Grand Prix in my basket in the Bois. _Dis, donc!_ you
will not tell mamma I said anything naughty?'
'I shall not tell her,' said Yseulte, who could not so quickly smile.
She felt as if some one had run a needle straight through her heart.
Blanchette laid her curly head against her cousin's breast:
'I do love you, Yseulte,' she murmured. 'You are always true, and you
are always kind, and you are so handsome, so handsome! Mercié, and all
the sculptors say so; and all the painters too. The Salon will be full
of your busts and your portraits; Madame Napraxine is only a pale woman
with great black eyes like coals in a figure of snow----'
'I desire you not to speak of Madame Napraxine!' said Yseulte, with a
violence which startled herself and momentarily shook her self-control.
The child, who had ignorantly meant to atone and to console for her
previous offence, was genuinely alarmed at her failure.
'I only meant that you are much prettier, much handsomer, than she is,'
she stammered.
'Madame Napraxine's beauty is celebrated,' said Yseulte, with enforced
calmness. 'Leave off your habit of indulging in personalities,
Blanchette; it is a very vulgar fault, and it makes you malicious for
the pleasure of fancying yourself witty. Come and feed my peacocks;
they are birds who will recommend themselves to your esteem, for they
are intensely vain, artificial, and egotistic; they believe flowers
only grow that they may pull them to pieces.'
'I don't care for the peacocks,' said Blanchette. 'Drive me in the
Bois in the _Daumont_ with the four white horses, and you can buy me
something at Siraudin's as we go.'
'As you like,' said Yseulte.
Yseulte humoured the child's caprices, and drove her out into the
cold sparkling air with the four white horses, with their postilions
in black velvet caps and jackets, which Blanchette condescended to
praise as the most _chic_ thing in all Paris. It was on the tip of her
tongue to say that they were even more _chic_ than the Napraxine black
horses and Russian coachman, but she restrained herself, unwilling to
offend her cousin before they stopped on their return from the Bois
at Giroux's, at Siraudin's, and at Fontane's, for Blanchette was too
sensible to be satisfied with toys and bonbons, and set her affections
on three monkeys in silver-gilt, playing at see-saw on a tree trunk of
jade, with little caps made of turquoises on their heads.
When she had chattered herself tired, and the day was declining, she
consented to allow herself to be driven home, and Yseulte returned
alone to the Boulevard S. Germain. For the first time since her
marriage her heart was heavy. The selfishness and greed of her little
companion were nothing new to her, but they had been made painfully
evident in that drive through Paris; and the wound which the child had
given her still smarted, as the bee-sting throbs after the insect has
flown away. It was not that she believed what was said; she was too
loyal and too innocently sure of her husband's affection to dishonour
him by such suspicion. Yet the mere knowledge that such things were
said of him and herself hurt her delicacy and her pride cruelly, and
she knew well that, if the Duchesse de Vannes said so, then the world
said so too. And her heart contracted as she thought involuntarily,
'Why should they speak of Madame Napraxine at all in connection with
me, unless--unless he had loved her?'
Yseulte was too young to think with composure of the women who had
preceded herself in the affections of her husband; she could not
console herself, as older or colder women would have done, with the
reflection that every man has many passions, and that the past should
be a matter of indifference to one who was indissolubly united with his
present and his future. To her it seemed that if he had ever loved any
one else he could not care for her; all the ignorance and exaggeration
of youth made this seem a certainty to her.
She was no longer the calm and innocent child that she had been at
Millo; the passions of humanity had become to stir in her; love, the
great creator and the great destroyer, had taken possession of her, and
had roused in her impulses, jealousies, desires, of whose existence
she had never dreamed; her temperament, naturally sweet and spiritual,
had beneath it unknown springs of ardour and of passions: _le vin
mousseux_, which her cousin Alain had said was latent in her blood from
the impetuous and voluptuous race of her fathers. She could not wholly
recover from the shock which she had received, as from a bolt that fell
from sunny skies. It had been only a child's frothy foolish chatter,
no doubt; yet the mere suggestion made in it clung to her memory with
a cruel and terrible persistency. She did not doubt that the child had
only repeated what she had heard; she knew that Blanchette's memory was
as retentive as a telephone; and if the Duchesse de Vannes had said
it, then the world had thought it. She had not allowed Blanchette to
perceive the pain that she had caused; but as her horses had flashed
through the chill bright frosty air of Paris, and the child's gay
shrill voice had chattered incessantly beside her, she had suffered
the first moments of anguish that she had known since her marriage.
As she drove now through the streets of Paris, in which the lamps were
beginning to sparkle through the red of the winter sunset, she felt a
strange sense of solitude amidst those gay and hurrying crowds through
which her postboys forced their fretting horses.
At Amyôt, on the days when Othmar had left her, she had never felt
alone; she had amused herself with the dogs, the birds, the horses, the
woods; she had dreamed over her classic music, or read some book which
he had recommended, and spent hours looking from the balustrade of the
great terrace, or from the embrasure of a window to watch for the first
appearance in the avenue of the horses which should bring him from the
station of Beaugency. She had never felt alone at Amyôt, but here in
the city which she loved from the associations of childhood, and as the
scene of her marriage, in this city which regarded her as one of the
most fortunate of its favourites of fortune, she felt a sense of utter
loneliness as the carriage rolled through the gates.
The _suisse_ told her that Othmar had not come home.
She went upstairs to her boudoir and threw off her close-fitting-coat
of sables and her sable hat, and sat down beside the olive-wood fire,
drawing off her long gloves. The room was softly lighted with a
rose-tinted light which shone on the gay children painted by Bougereau,
the flowered satin of the curtains and couches, the Dresden frames of
the mirrors, the marqueterie of the tables and consoles, the bouquets
of roses of all growths and colours. She looked round it with a little
sigh; with the same sense of chillness and sadness. Everything in it
seemed to echo the cruel words: 'He only married you to anger her!'
In the morning the whole chamber had seemed to smile at her from all
the thousand trifles, which spoke in it of his tender thoughtfulness
for herself; now, the roses in their bowls, the children on their
panels, the amorini holding up the mirrors, the green parrots swinging
in their rings, all seemed to say with one voice, 'What if he never
loved you?'
Her arms rested on her knees and her face on her hands, as she sat in
a low chair before the fire which burned under white marble friezes of
the Daphnephoria, carved by the hand of Clésinger. She could never
ask him, she could never ask any one, of this cruel doubt, which had
come into her perfect peace as a worm comes into a rose. All her pride
shrank from the thought of laying bare such a wound. Not even in the
confessional could she have brought herself to breathe a whisper of
it. She was not yet seventeen years old, and she had already a doubt
which, like the pains of maternity, she must shut in her heart and bear
as best she might alone. She had both courage and resignation in her
nature, and she needed both.
'It is impossible!' she murmured unconsciously, half aloud, as the
memory of a thousand caresses and gestures, which seemed to her to be
proof of the most absolute love, came to her thoughts with irresistible
persuasion, and made her face grow warm with blushes even in her
solitude. It was impossible that he did not love her--he who had been
free to choose from the whole world.
'It is impossible!' she murmured, with her head lifted as though in
some instinct of combat against some unseen foe.
'What is impossible?' said Othmar, as he entered the room and
approached behind her, unseen until he had drawn her head backward and
kissed her on the eyes. 'What is impossible, my child?' he repeated.
'No wish of yours if you tell it to me.'
She coloured very much, and rose, and remained silent. Her heart was
beating fast; she did not know what to reply. By the light of the fire
he did not see how red she grew and then how pale. He seated himself in
a low chair and took her by the hand.
'What is so impossible,' he said carelessly, 'that you dream of it in
my absence in the dark?'
'Nothing,--at least,--I would rather not say,' she murmured.
'As you like,' said Othmar. 'You know I am not Blue Beard, my dear.'
A great longing rushed through her to tell him what the Duchesse de
Vannes had said, and ask him if it were true or false--he who alone
could know the secrets of his own heart,--but sensitiveness, timidity,
delicacy, pride, all made her mute. What use would it be to ask him? He
would never wound her with the truth if the truth were what her cousin
had said.
Othmar smiled kindly as he looked at her; she did not know that if
he had loved her more he would have been more curious before this,
her first secret, less willingly resigned to be shut out from her
confidence.
'Who has been with you to-day?' he asked. 'Oh, I remember, you have had
little Blanchette. What a terrible child; she is an Elzevir compendium
of the century. Has she said anything to vex you? She is as malicious
as Mascarille----'
Yseulte touched his hand timidly. There was a grain of fear in her
adoration of him, that fear which enters into all great love, though
Nadine Napraxine and Madame de Vannes would have ridiculed it as
'jeu de lac et de nacelle,' the 'vieux jeu' of the romanticists and
sentimentalists.
'You do love me?' she said, very low, with much hesitation, while her
colour deepened.
Othmar looked up quickly with a certain irritation.
'Has that pert baby told you to doubt it? Can that be a question
between you and me? My dear child, would you be by me now if I did not
do so?'
And he soothed her agitation by those caresses with which a man can so
easily and with pleasure to himself counterfeit warmth and tenderness
to a woman who has youth and grace and cheeks as soft as the wing of a
bird.
'Yseulte,' he said gravely a few moments later, 'do not listen to
what other women say to you; if you do, you will lose your beautiful
serenity and fret yourself vainly by doubts and fancies. There is
nothing on earth so cruel to a woman as women. They envy you--not for
me--but for what you possess through me and for the face and form with
which nature has dowered you. Do not let them poison your peace. I am
not afraid that they will corrupt your heart, but I am afraid that
they may distress and disturb you. We cannot live all our lives in
seclusion at Amyôt, and the world must come about you soon or late.
To be in the world means to be surrounded with jealousies, cruelties,
enmities, ingratitude, and malice; if we once lend our ear to what
these will tell us, we shall have no more happiness. You have been like
your favourite, S. Ignace; by reason of your own purity you have been
allowed to hear the angels sing. Do not let the world's clamour drown
that divine song, for once lost no one ever hears it again! Do you
understand what I mean, my dear?'
She said nothing, but she hid her face on his breast and burst into
tears, the first that he had ever seen from her eyes.
'Can they not let her alone,' he thought with anger, and a sense of
weariness and apprehension; if the world taught her what men's love
could be, would she not discover what was missing in his?