Usually whenever he came thither he was surrounded by that society which was a necessity to his wife, even whilst it failed to satisfy her, by that movement, gaiety, and entrain, which even if they fail to amuse, yet can always in a manner distract thought and fill up time. There seemed to him a strange silence, a melancholy which was oppressive, in these stately places, usually so full of colour and pleasure, now so quiet and so lonely, with only some noiseless servant passing with swift step across its floors or down its staircases.
There was not even the song of a bird to break the stillness; it was early in autumn, and their sweet throats were mute.
He saw in remembrance the grace of his wife's movements as she had passed down these great stairs, he saw the smile in her eyes indulgent as to a child's weakness, ironical as of a man's folly; he heard her voice saying, with that little sound in it of some exquisite disdain falling from on high on mortal thoughts as silvery fountain-water falls from marble heights on creeping mosses:
'It is scarcely worth while to faire des madrigaux.'
Had that speaker ever loved him even for five minutes of her life?
Had she ever known what love was? He thought of the Court of Love which she had held under those oak trees yonder, above whose rounded masses a white moon now sailed. With what ingenuity, what subtlety, what philosophy, what absolute knowledge of all love's minutest weaknesses and utmost madness, she had been able to discourse of it. But was it not such knowledge as the physiologist's knowledge of pain in the creature on which he experiments? Of knowledge there is abundance, of the chill and analytical knowledge of science, of the name and structure of every torn tissue, of every bleeding fibre, of every tortured nerve; but knowledge such as is born of fellow feeling, of sensitive sympathy, of comprehending pity, there is none. Was it not so with her?
Had not love been always to her as the living organisation which he tortures is to the physiologist? Had she not, like him, watched, studied, tabulated the agonies of the wretched creature before her, whilst also, like him, she had never felt in her own nerves one single thrill of pain?
As her lover it had allured him with the intense attraction of an impenetrable mystery, this attitude of her mind, this indifference, both sensual and spiritual, before the demands of love. But as the companion of her life it left him with a sense of dissatisfaction, and of unsatisfied desire. For years it had served to excite and to sustain his passion, but as time wore on it almost communicated its coldness to himself; he began to feel with a sense of terror, as before some disloyalty which he could not escape, that the apathy, the fatigue, the absence of emotion, which are the certain attendants on all satisfied passion, were not far distant from himself.
The very air of Amyôt seemed melancholy to him in these late summer heats, without the usual gaiety and movement which were there at most other seasons when he came to it. Solitude had always, in his youth, been welcome to him, and had fatigued him less than the routine of society; but solitude requires the charm of accompanying dreams, it needs the visions of youth, the vague but glorious hopes of opening life; and Othmar had a vague sense that he would never dream any more, that he grew old, that his fate was fixed, that never would any very welcome or sweet response come to his wishes from the voices of the future. He had had the poet's temperament without the poet's power of expression; he could not take the poet's consolation, 'Sing to the Muses, and let the world go by.' His destiny imprisoned him, and there was little sympathy between himself and it.
As he walked in the moonlight, under the roofs of late roses which shed their petals, white, crimson, and blush-coloured, on him, dewy cool and sweet as the touch of his wife's cheek, a servant brought him a pencilled note.