The mockery of her slight laughter remained now in jarring echo on his ears. What a fool he must seem to her! What a poor, romantic, sensitive, unwise stringer of unwritten madrigals!
To endeavour to arouse her jealousy never passed across his thoughts. It seemed to him that she must know so well that she had taken his own heart out of his breast never to return it to him. Othmar was not more chaste than other men of the world; but his passion for Nadine Napraxine had been of such length of endurance, of such intensity of feeling, had been so environed with the ennobling solemnities of death, and had been so fed on long denial and severance, that it always seemed to him his very life itself. His temperament was too grave for the light loves of the world, and his character too constant and too sincere for those intrigues which form a mere pleasant pastime without engaging either the affection or the memory. He was like the Greek who hung his spear, his shield, his sandals, and his flute before the shrine of Aphrodite's self; and could worship no lesser divinities than she.
He went out of the house and into the gardens of Amyôt, where they were most shadowy and solitary. The late summer roses were filling the air with their fragrance, and the stately peacocks were drawing their trains of purple and gold over the shaded grass. A flock of wild doves sailed overhead; near at hand a fountain sent its silvery column towering in the light, to fall in clouds of spray into the marble basin, where laughing loves rode their white dolphins through green fleets of water-lily leaves. In the distance, beyond the clipped walls of bay, his children with some dogs were playing on a lawn under one of the terraces. Their laughter came faintly on the wind; he could see their shining hair glisten in the sunshine. He did not go to them.
The kiss of a child could not soothe the irritated bitterness which was at his heart, the wound which the hand he loved best had given him.
It was a warm golden day; the heat lay heavy on all the country of the Orléannais; and the Loire water, low and still, was broken by wide stretches of sandy soil where the river bed was laid bare. He, with a vague depression for which he could not have accounted, felt restless and disposed to solitude. With that kind of impulse towards the relief of melancholy things which that sort of motiveless sadness usually brings with it, he, for the first time for years, turned his steps towards the chambers once occupied by his first wife. Nothing had ever been touched in them since the last day that she had been at Amyôt: save to keep away the cobwebs and the dust, no servant ever entered there; the doors were locked, and he himself kept the master key.
An instinct of remembrance, for which he could not have accounted, moved him to enter there this hot and silent noon. He trod the floors with a noiseless step, as men move in the chamber where some dead thing lies, and with a noiseless hand undid the fastenings of one of the great windows and let in the light. All things were as they had been left that day when she had last gone away from Amyôt to her death. The golden sunbeams strayed in on to the white satin coverlet of the bed, the ivory crucifix which hung above it, the prie-dieu with the Book of Hours open, the roses a mere brown heap of ugliness, withered where she had set them in their bowl.
He sat down in the midst of the lonely things and felt a sense of regret, of remorse, of wistful compunction and self-reproach. Ever and again at intervals such an emotion had passed over him whenever he had thought of her, but never sharply enough to cause him such pain as it caused him now, remembering her youth plucked by death like a snowdrop in its bud. The big dog which had belonged to her had entered unperceived after him, and was looking upward in his face, as if it likewise were moved by sudden and sorrowful remembrances.
Poor child! so little missed, so utterly unmourned!
'Et rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses:
L'espace d'un matin.'