Whilst she was thus withdrawn from the world in the observance if not
in the regrets of mourning, Othmar left Paris for the seclusion of the
château of Amyôt.
The summer and the autumn months seemed to both him and Yseulte long
and cruel; all the beauty of Amyôt in the blossoming hours could not
make their life there happy to either of them. Since the death of
Napraxine a great constraint had come between them. Each of them was
sensible of thoughts and of emotions which neither would, or could,
confide in the other.
Friederich Othmar came and went between Paris and the great Renaissance
château, but he was powerless to alter what he deplored. There was not
even any definite thing of which he could speak. There was no fault
ever to be found in the gentleness and courtesy of Othmar to his wife;
and there was no alteration in the deference and the docility which
she always showed to him. Only there was something wanting: there was
no spontaneity; there was no sympathy; there was none of that unspoken
gladness which exhales from all real happiness as its fragrance from
the rose. The wise old man said to himself, impatient and regretful,
'Why did Napraxine die? But for that, time would have been her friend.
He would have grown used to her sweet presence, and habit would have
brought content. But now!----'
Now, he knew that with every day which dawned, with every night which
fell, Othmar brooded, night and day, over his lost future, destroyed by
his own rash haste.
All his mind was with Nadine Napraxine, and it fretted him at times
almost beyond endurance that he could see her and hear of her no more,
know no more of her than all her world knew, or than the chronicles of
the hour stated for public information. It seemed to him as it did to
her, as if the strangest silence had fallen on the earth. He loved her
infinitely more than he had ever done, intense and unscrupulous as had
been the passion which she had aroused in him. She was entirely free;
and he--he who had adored her--dared not even enter her antechamber or
go where he could see her shadow fall upon the ground she trod!
The silence and the self-effacement of Yseulte were the most dangerous
anodynes which he could have had. He dreamed his life away in visions
of joys which never could be his, and the resignation of his young
companion allowed him to dream on unroused.
Friederich Othmar saw his increasing preoccupation, his growing love of
solitude, his impatience when he was recalled by force to the things of
actual life, and he could have gnashed his teeth with rage and sorrow.
'He will never live out his years away from his sorceress,' he thought;
'and when they meet again, she will do what she chooses with him. If
she like to make him the ridicule of Europe, he will accept his fate
and deem it heaven. Whilst Yseulte--Yseulte,--before she is twenty,
will be widowed in fact and left to the consolation of some little
child, plucking the daisies on the sward here at her feet.'
To Friederich Othmar love had ever seemed the most puerile of
delusions, the most illogical of all human fallacies, but now it
took a deadlier shape before him, and he began to comprehend why
poets--interpreters of human madness as they were--had likened it to
the witch's mandrake, to the devouring sea, to the flame which no power
can quench, to all things terrible, irresistible, and deadly as death.
Occasionally an impulse came to Yseulte to tell everything to Melville,
who was not her confessor, but who had known all her people so well in
their days of trial and adversity; but her pride repressed the instinct
of confidence. Besides, she thought drearily, she knew well all that
Melville would answer--the only reply, indeed, which would be possible
to him in such a case--he would exhort her to patience, to hope, to
trust in heaven and in her husband. The originality of his character
would not be able to escape from the platitudes of custom; he would
only say to her what she could say to herself, 'Be courageous and be
calm; time often heals all woes.'
Sometimes, too, she thought wistfully that if she bore a living child
perhaps she would reach some higher place in her husband's heart.
She had heard it often said that children formed a tie between those
who were even indifferent to each other. At least--at least, she
reflected, and strove to solace herself with this hope,--as the
mother of a living child of his, she would be something in his house
more than a mere form to wear his jewels and receive his indifferent
caresses. Perhaps, she thought, if her eyes looked up at him from his
child's face, he might grow to care for her a little. At least she
would be something to him that Nadine Napraxine was not. It was a
desolate kind of consolation to be the only one within reach of a girl
scarce eighteen years old; a sadly forlorn and wistful hope; but it
was something to sustain her in the midst of her perfect isolation of
thought and suffering, and it prevented her abandonment to despair.
She had one of those natures to which tenderness is more natural than
passion; her character was of that gentle and serious kind which
enables a woman to endure the desertion of her lover if the arms of a
child are about her. And so she awaited the future patiently, without
much trust in its mercies, yet not without courage and not wholly
without hope.
'She looks very ill,' said the most observant of all her friends,
Friederich Othmar, more than once to her husband. But Othmar replied
that it was only the state of her health, and the elder man protested
in vain.
'You think a girl of those years can be satisfied with bearing your
children and being left alone in beautiful houses as a cardinal bird is
shut up in a gilded cage?' he said irritably.
'She is certainly not left alone,' replied Othmar with annoyance;
'and I believe that she is precisely of that docile and religious
temperament which will find the greatest enjoyment of existence in
maternity. There are women formed for that kind of self-sacrifice
beyond all others. She is one of them.'
'It is not the only sacrifice to which she is condemned!' muttered
Friederich Othmar, but he feared to do more harm than good if he
explained himself more clearly.
'Has she been complaining to you?' asked her husband with increasing
anger.
'She would never complain,' returned his uncle positively. 'Besides,
my dear Otho, whatever we may all think of you, to her you are a
demi-god, the incarnation of all mortal and immortal excellences. She
would as soon strike the silver Christ that hangs over her bed as
consent to see a flaw in your perfections!'
Othmar only replied by an impatient gesture.
Both irritation and self-reproach were aroused in him, but they did no
more than disquiet and annoy him. He saw no means by which he could be
kinder, or gentler, or more generous, to Yseulte than he was already.
Love was not his to command. He could not help it if day by day an
unsatisfied passion gnawed in him for an absent woman, and if day by
day the fair face of his young wife receded farther and farther from
him into the shadowy distance of a complete indifference. All which he
could compel himself to render,--consideration, deference, kindness,
attention,--all these he poured out upon Yseulte with the utmost
liberality. What was missing was not in his power to give. He felt with
a shudder that the longer time went on, the more their lives passed
together, the greater would grow the coldness he felt for her. He
recognised all her sweetness and grace; he was not ungrateful for the
affection she bore him; he admired the many delicate beauties of her
mind and character. But she was nothing to him; she never would have
the power to quicken his pulses by one second. She was all that purity,
honour, and spirituality of thought could make her; but she had no
place in his heart. He had even to struggle hard with himself at times
not to let the sense of her perpetual presence there become almost an
offence to him. He was a generous man, and he had always striven to
be just, but he knew that he failed to be just to her because of the
fret and fever of his own thoughts, which left him no peace, but kept
repeating for ever the same burden: 'The woman you love is free now. O
fool! O fool!'
He believed that he altogether concealed all that he felt from Yseulte.
He did not dream that she had divined his secret. Her manner, which had
never been demonstrative, but had been always marked by that mixture
of shyness and of stateliness which were most natural to her, was not
one which displayed the changes of every emotion; she had been reared
in too perpetual a sense that it was both low and coarse to show the
inner feelings of the heart by abrupt and transparent signs of emotion,
and the calm high breeding of her habitual tone was as a mask, though
a most innocent one, and hid alike her sorrow, her fear, her jealous
terrors, and her wistful tenderness.
'I must never trouble him,' she said to herself again and again. She
knew that she could not take away from him the burden of her life;
that she could not release him from the vows he had vowed to her; but
she did her uttermost to efface herself otherwise. In these tranquil
summer months no one saw more amiss with her than a certain melancholy
and lassitude, which were attributed to the state of her health. She
was often alone, by choice, in the great gardens and the forest nooks
of the park, and those poor little timid verses in which her soul
found some kind of utterance were the only confidants of her grief and
pain. They were poor things, she knew, but her heart spoke in them
with involuntary, though feeble and halting, speech. They did her some
little good. She had no mother or friend to whom she could say what
she suffered, and from a priest she shrank; her woes--the mental woes
of neglected love, the physical woes of approaching parturition--could
not be told to any man.
'No one has wanted me all my life!' she thought one day, as she sat
in the gardens of Amyôt, whilst her eyes filled with blinding tears.
Her father had never heeded her; her grandmother had cared for her,
indeed, but had willed her budding life to the cloister, as a thing
for which there was no place amidst the love and the laughter of the
earth. She had been dependent, undesired, on her cousin's charity, and
to her husband she was as little as the does that couched at noon under
his forest trees. No one had ever wanted her! The knowledge lay on her
young life as a stone lies on the bird which it has killed. Through
the hot mist of her tears she gazed wistfully at the long lines of the
majestic house which only a year before had been to her the centre of
such perfect happiness. And even that happiness he had never shared!
The hush of the golden noon-day was about her, and the perfume of
innumerable roses filled the air.
'My little child will want me,' she thought, with a throb of hope at
her heart.
After a little while she rose and walked towards the house. Othmar,
who had come out from his library on to the terrace, saw her in the
distance, and descended the steps to meet her.
'Do not tire yourself, my dear,' he said as he offered her his arm.
His very gentleness almost hurt her more than unkindness or discourtesy
would have done. She seemed to see in it how he strove, by all the
tenderness of outward ceremonial, to atone for the absence of all
tenderness of the heart,--to pay so liberally in silver because he had
no gold to give.
She had brushed her tears away before she had risen to return to the
house; her features were calm, as usual, and if their expression
was grave, that was not new with her. She had looked almost as much
so on that first night when he had seen her sitting alone in the
drawing-rooms of Millo.
As she walked beside him through the aisles of flowers in the sunshine
of the brilliant noonday, she said, with her eyes lowered and her voice
very low:
'If--if--I should die this time, would you remember always how much I
have felt all your goodness to me? I cannot say all I feel--well--but I
hope you would always believe how grateful I had been--when you should
think of me at all.'
Othmar was touched and startled by the words.
'My dear child, do not speak so. Pray do not speak so,' he said, with
real emotion. 'Send away such cruel thoughts. You must live long,
and see your children's children running amidst these roses. You
are hardly more than a child yourself in years even yet. And as for
gratitude--that is not a word between us; what is mine is yours.'
'I want you to be sure of it--to never doubt it--if I die,' she said,
in the same low, measured voice. 'I am always grateful.'
Then she withdrew her hand from his arm, and sat down for a moment on
one of the marble seats beneath the great terrace. She looked over the
wide sunlit landscape, the radiant gardens, the dark masses of the
forests, the green plains and shining river far beyond. Her heart was
full; words sprang to her lips, fraught with all the varying emotions
of the past months. She longed to cry out to him, 'Ah, yes! You do not
love me, I know!--I know! But is there nothing I could do? I would give
my life, my soul----.'
But timidity and pride both held her mute. The moment passed; he never
saw, as he might have seen, into her innocent heart if she had spoken.
The late autumn came, and her child was born as the first red leaves
were blown upon the wind. But, enfeebled by the distress of her mind
during so many months before its birth, it only breathed a little while
the air of earth, then sank into death as a snowdrop sinks faded in the
snow. The solace which she had looked to as a staff of comfort and of
hope broke in two like a plucked reed.
An intense melancholy closed in upon her, from which no effort could
rouse her. She said little; but when she rose from her bed and resumed
her daily life, all alone in her heart was the one great grief which
had now no hope to lighten it.
They strove to make her remember how young she was, what unspent
years yet lay to her account, what undreamed-of treasuries of new
happiness were yet untouched by her; but nothing availed to give her
any consolation.
The pale sunshine of the early winter found her white and chilled as
itself. For she had a deeper pang than ever in her heart since she said
ever to herself in her solitary grief: 'He does not care; he is good,
he is gentle, he is compassionate; but he does not care.'
All her young life writhed in secret beneath that kindness which was
only pitiful, that tenderness which was only conventional.
'I am nothing in his life,' she thought with tenfold bitterness.
'Nothing;--nothing;--nothing! Even for my child's death he does not
really care!'
A woman far away, unseen, almost unheard of, was sole mistress of his
existence. With all the terrible insight which a love forsaken and
solitary possesses into the secrets of the life to which it clings,
she read the thoughts and the emotions of Othmar as though they were
written on some open page lit by a strong lamp. Although never a word
of self-betrayal escaped him, never more than an involuntary gesture
of lassitude or an unconscious sigh, she yet knew how utterly one
recollection and one desire alone reigned over him and dominated him.
She was no more a child, but was a woman humiliated, wounded, isolated,
who suffered far the more because her wounds were not those which she
could show, her humiliation was not such as she could reveal, and her
isolation was one of the spirit, and not of the body.
'You must not mourn as those who have no hope,' said Melville to her,
believing that her continued melancholy was due to the loss of her
offspring. 'You are so young; you will have many other children; all
kinds of joy will return to you, as their foliage will return to these
leafless trees. Be grateful, my dear, to heaven for all the mercies
which abide with you.'
She said nothing; but she turned her eyes on him one moment with an
expression so heart-broken and weary that he was startled and alarmed.
'What grief can she have that we know not?' he marvelled. 'Othmar does
not leave her; and he is the last man on earth to be cruel or even
ungentle to a woman.'
For a moment he was tempted to refer his doubts to her husband;
but, on reflection, he dared not. He had a sensitive fear of being
deemed meddlesome, as priests so often are called; and it was
difficult to make to Othmar--a very sensitive man, and at all times
uncommunicative--so strange an accusation as would seem to lie in
saying to him, 'The companion of your life is unhappy: what have you
done?'
The winter in the country of the Orléannais grew very cold and damp;
the rivers flooded many parts of the plains, and the end of the year
menaced violent storms and widespread floods. Her physicians begged
Yseulte to go elsewhere, and recommended a southern air; they spoke
of S. Pharamond, and Othmar, though vaguely reluctant to go thither,
consented, for he had no valid reason of refusal to give. To Yseulte
herself any movement appeared indifferent; to whatever was proposed
she always assented passively; the acquiescence of one whom no trifles
or accidents of fate have power to hurt, and which belongs alike to
perfect happiness and absolute despair.
Othmar would have given ten years of his life to have been able to go
away by himself, to wander north, south, east, or west in solitary
desolation, to be alone with his undying desires, and away from the
innocent presence of a creature whom he knew that he wronged by every
thought with which he rose at daybreak and lay down at night.
Yseulte had never been more to him than a sweet and tender-hearted
child, whose personal beauties had for a little while beguiled him
into the semblance of a faint passion, into a momentary semi-oblivion,
always imperfect and evanescent. But now, quiet as she was, and careful
as she was never to betray herself, nevertheless a constant reproach
seemed to look at him from her eyes, and her continual vicinity seemed
as continual a rebuke. He was not a man, as many are, who could lightly
neglect or deceive a woman; he was incapable of the half-unconscious
cruelty with which many men, when their fancy has passed, leave the
object of it in pitiable solitude, to console herself as best she
can; he had too much sensitiveness and too much sense of chivalrous
obligation to deny, even to his own reflections, the claims which his
wife had on him for sympathy and affection. That he could not give
them to her, because all his heart and soul and mind were with another
woman, burdened him with a perpetual sense of injustice and offence
done to her. He had sought her; he had taken her life voluntarily into
his; he knew that it would be a treachery and a baseness to fail in his
duty towards her. For that very reason her daily presence galled him
almost beyond endurance, and, though he forced himself to remain beside
her and to preserve to her every outward semblance of regard, his whole
life chafed and rebelled, as the horse frets which is tied in stall to
its manger, whilst all its longing is for the liberty of the pasture
and the air.
If Melville had followed his impulse and said to him, 'What fault can
there be in her?' he would have answered truthfully, 'None: all the
fault is my own;' and he would have thought in secret: 'She has that
involuntary fault which is the cruellest of all others: she is not the
woman I love!'
He had to put strong constraint upon himself not to shrink from the
sound of her gentle voice, not to avoid the glance of her wistful
eyes; he was afraid that she should read the truth of his own utter
indifference in his regard; he felt with horror of himself that
it was even growing something greater, something worse, than mere
indifference; that soon, do what he would, he would be only able to see
in her the barrier betwixt himself and the fate he coveted.
'Good God! what miserable creatures we are!' he thought. 'I meant, as
honestly as a man could ever mean anything, to make that poor child's
days as perfect in happiness as mortal life can be, and all I have
actually done is to sacrifice uselessly both her and myself! Heaven
send that she may never find it out herself!'
He was far from suspecting that she had already discovered the truth.
All the fine prescience, the quickness at reading trivial signs and
forming from them far-reaching conclusions, which love lends to the
dullest were absent from him, because love itself was absent. Her pride
gave her a sure mask, and he had not the lover's impulse which looks
for the face beneath.
Their lives outwardly passed in apparent unison and sympathy. He seldom
left her save when any urgent matter took him for a brief space to
Paris or some other European capital, and the days passed as evenly
and unmarked by any event at the château of S. Pharamond as at that of
Amyôt. People of a conspicuous position can seldom enjoy solitude, and
the demands of society provide them with a refuge from themselves if
embarrassment has forced them to need one. Othmar, who had at no time
been willing to open the doors of his house to the world, now became
almost solicitous to have the world about him. It spared him that
_solitude à deux_ which, so exquisite to the lover and to the beloved,
is so intolerable to the man who knows that he is loved but has no
feeling to bestow in answer. Throughout the early winter months they
were seldom or never alone. Yseulte said nothing when he urged her to
surround herself with people, but obeyed with a sinking heart. She was
very proud; she remained tranquil and gentle in manner to him and to
everyone, and, if she were at times more pensive than suited her years
or her world, it was attributed by all who knew her to the loss of her
child. She grew thin and white, and was always very grave; but she had
so admirable a courtesy, so patient a smile for all, that not a soul
ever dreamed her heart was breaking in her breast.
Sometimes when she was quite alone she wandered up the hill-side
beneath the olive trees to the bastide of Nicole Sandroz, and sat
amidst the blossoming violets, the tufts of hepaticas, with a strange
dull wonder in her at herself. Could it be only two years ago since she
had seen Othmar coming in the dusk beneath the silvery boughs and had
learned on the morrow that he had asked her hand in marriage?
Nicole watched her wistfully, but she, too, who had lost her _petiot_
in the days of her youth, believed that the melancholy which she saw
in her darling was due to the death of her offspring. She strove, in
ruder words, but in the same sense, to console her as Melville had
done. Yseulte smiled gently, thanked her, and said nothing. What was
the use, she mused, of their speaking to her of the future? The future,
whatever else it brought, would only take the heart and the thoughts of
her husband farther and farther from her. She knew still but little of
the world, but she knew enough to be conscious that the woman who fails
in the early hours of her marriage to make her husband her lover will
never in the years to come find him aught except a stranger. All the
sensitive hauteur of her nature shrank from the caresses which she knew
were only inspired by a sense of pity or of duty. She drew herself more
and more coldly away from him, whilst yet the mere sound of his voice
in the distance made all her being thrill and tremble. And he was too
grateful for the relief to seek to resist her alienation.
He did not guess, because he did not care to guess, that she loved
him so intensely that she would stand hidden for hours merely to see
him pass through the gardens or ascend the sea stairs of the little
quay. Her timidity had always veiled from him the intensity of her
affections, and now her pride had drawn a double screen between them.
'He only pitied me then!' she thought, as she sat amongst the violets
at Nicole's flower farm. 'He only pities me now!'
Pity seemed to this daughter of a great race the last of insult, the
_obole_ thrown to the beggar which brands him as beggar for evermore.
'I was hungered, and he gave me bread; I was homeless, and he sheltered
me!' she said, in the agony of her heart. 'And I--I thought that love!'