'Pooh!' said Blanchette, resting her elbows on the stone and her chin on her hands. 'I have more title in her rooms than you; I have not forgotten her.'
His face flushed; he hesitated a moment.
'What means did you take to induce my servants to disobey me?' he asked, avoiding her later words.
'I told them I had your authority,' said Blanchette carelessly. 'What can it matter to you? You never come here. You never go to her grave. Your uncle did. Even I do. But you—never.'
Othmar was silent. He hated this woman with her impudent pale face, her high satirical tones, her overbearing effrontery, and he hated to see her there in the rooms which had been the bridal chambers of Yseulte in the one brief summer of happiness which she had known.
Blanchette looked down at him with hard cold eyes; she, on her side, hated him no less at that moment. There was no one within hearing; the western garden on which these rooms looked was the loneliest though the loveliest place in Amyôt; and since the death of Yseulte it had been so unfrequented, that hares would come and nibble at the moss-roses under the windows, and once a stag from the herds of red deer cast loose in the park had dared to enter and drink his fill at the fountain.
'Tiens!' said Blanchette, leaning from the window, her artificial pale blonde beauty looking akin there. 'She broke her heart for you: one laughs at those things in the world; they are good for the "Traviata," not out of it; it was absurd—grotesquely absurd; and yet in her one knows it was true. When I was a child, and she married you, I wanted her to think of the fine clothes, the fine jewels, the fine houses, all the rest of it—all the things we give ourselves for—but she never cared. She said once, "If he were a beggar I should be happier, because then he would be sure that it is for himself that I care." Oh yes, she would have gone barefoot in the dust after you if you had held out your hand. And you—you did not see it or know it, or thank her for it; all you cared for was Nadine Napraxine. It is always so. It is always the other—the other that we cannot have. And now "the other" is your wife; and so you go to the meadows in Chevreuse. How like a man! And to think that such a woman as Yseulte should have died for you! Pouah! If she had known you as I know men she would not have wasted a hair of her head on you. Pouah——!'
Then she banged the casement close, and left him standing there. He might rage in his heart as he chose, what did she care for his wrath or for his amours or for his whole existence? What she had cared for was the dead girl who had died for him. That she had insulted him in return for his hospitality and his courtesy was delightful to her. In that moment she would have liked to insult him before the whole world.
Othmar paused a moment, looking blankly up at this window of his own house thus shut in his face; then, with slow step, and with his head down, he pursued his way through the western garden. His guest had insulted him, but the worst sting of the insult lay in its truth. It was true, most true; he owned to himself that he had been wholly unworthy the sacrifice of such a life as Yseulte's.
Yet, he thought, in the words which had been quoted under the oaks of Amyôt in the Court of Love, 'How is it under our control to love or not to love?'