Bertrand de Laon was not rich; at least not rich enough for the enormous expenditure at which they lived; and then he was so stupid, so amiable, so devoted, that there was no kind of pleasure in doing him every sort of wrong that a woman can do a man! He never knew anything about it, or, if he did know, never resented anything. She grew tired of kicking this poor spaniel, who, beat him as she would, always came humbly and caressingly to her feet.
As she wandered about the house she came on the doors which led to the apartments of Yseulte. They were locked. She sent one of her companions to fetch the major-domo.
'Open these doors,' she said imperiously to the official, who timidly answered that he dared not; except by his master's orders they could never be unlocked. 'I have his orders, open them,' said Blanchette, with such authority in her tone that the man never dreamed she was not speaking the truth; besides it seemed to him to be natural enough; she had been, he knew, the cousin german of the dead Countess Othmar. He fetched the duplicate keys he possessed, and opened the doors: great doors of cedar-wood like all those at Amyôt, with intricate locks of old Florentine work of steel and silver. Then he went in and opened also some of the shutters of the apartments, letting in the warm summer light from without on some portions of the rooms, whilst other parts of them were left in darkness.
Blanchette shut out her companions with her usual unceremonious manner.
'It is not for you,' she said curtly, and banged the doors in their faces with that insolence which was considered by others as by herself d'un chic suprême.
She had never been able to come there before, for she had never before been at Amyôt in the absence of its mistress. She was not sure why she came now; partly because she thought it would annoy Othmar, partly from a movement of that remembered affection for the companion of her childhood, which was the only thing of any tenderness which had ever sprung up in the breast of Blanchette: one tiny flower of sentiment blossoming on a granite soil. The sentiment had been rooted in selfishness; 'she used to give me so many things!' she thought always, whenever she remembered her.
The little volume of manuscript poems was in its place; Othmar had hesitated to remove it; everything was in the rooms as when Yseulte had lived, and no eyes but his own had ever beheld them. He had returned more than once to read again those poor fragments, so simple in language, so immeasurable in devotion: read them with a mist before his sight and the sense of some base ingratitude in himself which had come to him on his first discovery of them. He had always replaced them with a lingering and reverent touch in the drawer, whence he had first taken them, where they lay now with a crumpled glove, two or three faded roses, and some notepaper with her initials in silver on it. The restless penetrating agile glance and fingers of Blanchette, touching, seeing, alighting on all things, and skimming over each with the lightness of swallows, brought her to that drawer amongst other places, and showed her the little volume lying with the dead roses. She took it up, and turned over the pages rapidly; looking on it here, there, everywhere; scanning a hundred lines in the space of time that would have served to others to see only half a score. The familiar handwriting, the pathetic words, the mixture of ignorance and of intensity, the force of strong emotions striving to express themselves in an unwonted manner, and half observed, half revealed by the unaccustomed livery of language, had a certain effect upon her as she stood in the empty rooms before one of the great casements, and turned over the leaves of the little book, half contemptuous, half reverential.
If she had read such lines in a printed volume, she would have tossed it away with her most terrible sneer. 'Pleurnicheuse!' she would have said, with a grin of her white small teeth; but read in the handwriting of her dead cousin, they affected her differently; they did not seem ridiculous; they brought home to her the fact that this world, which was but a masked ball, a mad fête, a continual comedy to herself, might be to others, who yet were not wholly fools, a place of martyrdom, endured in silence. Her shrewd and quick intelligence supplying the place of sympathy, could read between the lines; could make her understand as Othmar had understood, all that was unuttered, or only half uttered, in those halting, timid, tender, wistful verses.
'Dame! Comme c'est drôle!' she murmured to herself: it was droll that anyone with youth, with fortune, with beauty, with all the pleasures, and pastime, and pomps of existence at her call, should have wasted her time and her tears in useless lament, because the heart of one man was cold to her. It was droll; it was absurd; it was contemptible; and yet she closed the little velvet book, and laid it down by the worn glove, and the dead roses with a vague admiration, with a certain respect.
But her heart grew harder than before against the man who had been thus loved, and had given no throb of love in answer.