Between his uncle and himself few intimate words ever passed. After the death of Yseulte a tacit understanding had been come to between them that neither should ever name those causes, whether great or small, which she had had for pain and jealous sorrow in her brief life's space. It was a subject on which they could never have touched without a breach irrevocable and eternal in their friendship.
Friedrich Othmar visited at their houses, caressed their children, preserved all outward amity with both of them, and devoted all the energies of his last years and of his immense experience to the interests of the house which he had honoured, served, and loved so long, but with neither his nephew nor his nephew's wife did he ever pass the limits of a conventional and courteous intercourse, which had neither affection in it nor any exchange of confidence.
Once or twice the worldly-wise and harsh old man did a thing which a few years before, in anyone else, he would have regarded as the most flimsy and foolish of sentimentalities. He took the little Xenia with him into the gardens of St. Pharamond, and made her gather with her own small hands a quantity of violets; then he led her to the tomb of Yseulte, and bade her lay them on it. She had been buried there, though a sepulchre sculptured by Mercier had been raised to her memory at Amyôt.
'Why are you not her child?' he said to her. 'Why are you not? She would have loved you better than your own mother can.'
The child scattered her violets, then came and leaned her arms upon his knee and looked up at him with serious eyes.
'You are crying!' she said, touching softly two great tears which had fallen on his cheeks. Then she added gravely: 'I thought you were too old!'
'I too should have thought so,' said Friedrich Othmar bitterly. 'It is a sign that my end is near.'
And he envied those credulous, unintellectual, happy imbeciles who could believe that that 'end' was only the opening of the portals of a wider, fairer, greater life; he whose reason told him that for his own strong keen brain and multiform knowledge and accumulated wisdom and fierce love of life, as for the youthful limbs and the fair soul and the pure body of the dead girl there, that end was only the 'end' of all things: cruel corruption, hideous putridity, blank nothingness, eternal silence.
'What is the use of it all? What is the use?' he said to the startled child, as he took her hand and led her from the tomb. What was the use of any life or any death? What had been the use of Yseulte's?