As Yseulte went to her own room her way led her past the great
cedar-wood doors of her husband's library, that retreat where he passed
so many of those hours of meditation and of pain,--such hours as in old
days led men of his nature to the isolation of the cloister. He had
always told her that she was free to enter there; but the delicacy of
her temper had always made her use the privilege but rarely; so rarely,
that he had ceased ever to be afraid of her entrance in moments when
the lassitude or the dejection of his life overcame him and made him
little willing to meet her gaze. Now, as she passed by the door, a
wistful impulse moved her to see him, to speak to him, to be spoken to
by him. She had an instinctive feeling that this news of Napraxine's
death had caused him a greater shock than she could comprehend or
measure; all the affection, the adoration, which she bore him went out
to him in this incomprehensible sorrow.
'If he would only tell me'--she thought.
Inspired by that longing for his confidence, she opened the door.
Othmar sat at his writing-table, and his head was bowed down on his
arms; his back was to her, but his whole attitude expressed extreme
weariness, exceeding sorrow. When he sprang to his feet at the sound
of the opening door, she saw that his eyes were wet with tears. He
suppressed both his emotion and his irritation as best he could, and
said to her gently:
'Do you want me, my dear? Wait a moment; I will be with you.'
He turned from her as if to sort some papers on his table. She did
not advance; she stood looking at him with a scared, colourless face:
a truth had come into her mind swift and venomous as an adder. She
thought suddenly:
'If I were not here--she could be his wife--now.'
The secret of his uncontrollable emotion at the tidings of Napraxine's
death was laid bare to her in one of those flashes of thought which
light up the brain as lightning illumines the landscape. She murmured
some vague words and left the room: her long training in silence and
self-suppression gave her strength to repress the cry which rose to her
lips.
Othmar scarcely heeded her departure or heard her answer: his own pain
and restless rebellion against the fate which he had made for himself
absorbed him.
'Poor innocent child!' he thought once with self-reproach. 'She must
never know; it was I who sought her--I must keep her in her illusions
as best I may.'
He did not know that her illusions had been killed in that moment of
cruel certainty, as once in the church of S. Pharamond his orchids and
azaleas had perished in a single night of frost.
She told her people to have the horses taken back to the stables:
she felt unwell; she would not go out that morning; then she locked
herself in her own apartments. She could not face that world of Paris,
which would be speaking all the day of one theme,--the death of Prince
Napraxine.
It was the last day of April; the sunshine was streaming through the
gardens of the great hotel, and through her open windows there came
the scent of opening lilac buds and blossoming hawthorn boughs. Like
the year and the earth, she was in the early sweetness of her youth;
yet old age hardly knows a more chill and cruel sense of loneliness
and desolation than was with her now as she lay, face downward, on
her bed, and sobbed her youth away. With instantaneous and merciless
force the truth had broken in upon her at last; she suddenly realised
that she had no place in the heart of Othmar, and was but a burden
on his life. She realised that she had been taken in pity, wedded in
generosity and compassion, but without one passing gleam or throb of
love. She marvelled that she could have been so blind before. All
the memories which thronged upon her brought with them a thousand
inexorable witnesses of the truth. The knowledge of the world which she
had learned of late was like a lamp shedding its cruel rays on every
damning fact.
For long she had known, she had felt, that her husband cared only for
one woman upon earth, and that woman not herself. But never until
now had the conviction come to her of how cruelly and eternally she
barred the way between him and his happiness and his desires. The
weakness and the defects of the early training which she had received
now told upon her character, making her shut close in her own soul all
she suffered, and enabling her to keep perfect silence on all she had
discovered. Without that acquired habit of reserve, her natural candour
and trustfulness would have impelled her to give some confidence, to
receive some counsel, in her dire distress, would have even brought her
to her husband's side. But the pride which was in her blood was united
with the power of self-repression engendered by the teachings she had
received. In any sorrow which had not also been humiliation, in any
fault which had been her own, not his, she would have thrown herself at
Othmar's feet and confessed all that she felt. But this was impossible
to her now; the words would have choked her; she could not say to him:
'I know I am only a pensioner on your pity and your generosity;' she
could not say to him, 'I know that I stand between you and one whom you
loved before ever you saw me.' More undisciplined and less delicate
tempers might have found some refuge in such passionate lamentation and
revelation, but to Yseulte de Valogne such outbursts of reproach were
impossible; they would have been contrary to every habit of her young
life, to every tradition of the order and of the race from which she
sprang. 'The vulgar cry out when they are hurt,' her grandmother had
said once to her during the siege of Paris; 'but for us--there are only
two things possible--either vengeance or silence.'
Those words came back upon her mind as she lay upon her bed, whilst the
sweet fresh winds of the spring-time blew the scent of the lilac and
hawthorn across her chamber. Vengeance there could be none for her; he
had been her saviour, her protector, her kindest friend, her lover,
whom she adored with all the ignorant, innocent, mute worship of first
love; there only remained the alternative--silence.
There was something of the dumb obstinacy of the Breton in her, and
much also of the Breton force of heroism; the heroism which does not
speak, but bears and acts, immovable and uncomplaining. That great
strength of endurance enabled her now to recover her self-control by
the time that she was forced to meet Othmar again, and to go into her
drawing-rooms at eight o'clock before the hour of dinner, with no trace
of what she had suffered upon her except in the pallor of her face and
the dark shade beneath her eyes.
'Are you feeling ill, my dear child?' said her husband, as he met her.
'I hear you have not been out to-day, and you had many engagements?'
She murmured some vague answer;--she had been lying down; her head
ached.
He answered her with some tender expressions of regret, and inquired
no more. Her health was delicate and fluctuating at that moment; he
supposed that it was natural that she had such occasional hours of
depression.
They chanced to be alone at dinner that evening, which was unusual.
Neither of them spoke many words. When he addressed her it was with the
utmost kindliness and gentleness of tone, but he said little, and his
own preoccupation prevented him from noticing how constrained were her
replies, how forced her smiles.
She observed, with a cruel tightening of her heart, that he never
alluded to the death of his friend Napraxine.
When dinner was over, she said to him very calmly:
'There are several engagements for tonight too, but if you will allow
me, I will stay at home. I am a little--tired.'
'Certainly, my dear,' he said at once. 'Never go into the world but
when it amuses you; and your health is of far more value than any other
consideration. Shall I call your physicians?'
'Oh no; it is nothing. I am only a little fatigued,' she said
hurriedly; and as he stooped to touch her cheek with his lips she
turned her head quickly, and for the first time avoided his caress.
He was too absorbed in his own thoughts even to observe the
significance of the involuntary gesture. He led her to the doors of her
own apartments, kissed her hand, and left her.
'Sleep well,' he said kindly, as he might have spoken to a sick child.
But to Yseulte it seemed that she would never sleep again.