He had never wavered in his great love for her; the great passion with which she had inspired him still remained with him ardent and profound in much; the charm she had for his intelligence sustained the seduction for his senses; he loved her, only her, as much and as exclusively as in the early days of his acquaintance with her; she still remained the one woman upon earth for him. He could not hear her calmly speak of any future in which she would be less than then to him without a sense of irritation and offence. It seemed to him that such deliberate and unsparing analysis as hers could not exist side by side with any very intense feeling. Certainly he was used to it in her; he was accustomed to her delicate and critical dissection of every human motive and impulse, his, her own, or those of others; but it touched him now with a sense of pain, as though the scalpel had penetrated to some open nerve. His consciousness of his own devotion to her made him indignantly repulse the suggestion that he could ever change; yet his own knowledge of the nature of humanity and of the work of time told him that she had had truth on her side when she had said that such a change might come, would come; and he thrust the consciousness of that truth away as an insult and affront. Was there nothing which would endure and resist the cruel slow sapping of the waves of time? Was there no union, passion, or fidelity, strong enough to stand the dull fallings of the years like drops of grey rain which beat down the drooping rose and change it from a flower of paradise to a poor, pale, scentless wreck of itself?
CHAPTER VI.
On this the unwelcome anniversary of her birth, she was at St. Pharamond, which had been connected with the grounds of La Jacquemerille by the purchase, at great cost, of all the intervening flower-fields and olive-woods. It had been her whim to do so, and Othmar had not opposed it, though he would have preferred never again to see those shores; but, although she never spoke to him on that subject, she herself chose to go there with most winters, for the very reason that the world would sooner have expected her to shun the scenes of Yseulte's early and tragic death. She invariably did whatever her society expected her not to do, and the vague sense of self-blame with which her conscience was moved, whenever she remembered the dead girl, was sting enough to make her display an absolute oblivion and indifference which, for once, she did not feel.
She never remained long upon the Riviera; she seldom stayed long anywhere, except it were at Amyôt; but she went thither always when the violets were thick in the valleys, and the yellow blossoms of the butterwort were flung like so many golden guineas over the brown furrows of the fields. The children spent the whole winter there. This day, when they had wished her bonne fête, and brought her their great baskets of white lilac and gardenias, she was indulgent to them, and took them with her in her carriage for a drive after her noonday breakfast. She was not a woman to whom the babble and play of children could ever be very long interesting; her mind was too speculative, too highly cultured, too exacting to give much response to the simplicity, the ignorance, and the imperfect thoughts of childhood. But in her own way she loved them. In her own way she took great care of their education, physical and mental. She wished her son to become a man whom the world would honour; and she wished her daughter to be wholly unlike herself.
As yet they were hardly more than babies; lovely, happy, gay, and gentle. 'Let them be young as long as they can,' she said to those entrusted with their training. 'I was never young. It is a great loss. One never wholly recovers it in any after years.'
It was a fine day, mild, sunny, with light winds shaking the odour from the orange buds; such a day as that on which Platon Napraxine had died. She did not think of him.
Several years had gone away since then; the whole world seemed changed; the dead past had buried its dead; there were the two golden-haired laughing children in symbol and witness of the present.
'Decidedly, however philosophic we may be, we are all governed at heart by sentiment,' she thought, as the carriage rolled through the delicate green of the blossoming woods. 'And by beauty,' she added, as her eyes dwelt on the faces of Otho and Xenia, who were the very flower and perfection of childish loveliness; ideal children also, who were always happy, always caressing, always devoted to each other, and whose little lives were as pretty as those of two harebells in a sunny wood. Why were they dear to her, and sweet and charming? Why had the physical pain of their birth been forgotten in the mental joys of their possession? Why did her eyes delight to follow their movements, and her ear delight to listen to their laughter?
The other children had been as much hers, and she had always disliked them; she disliked them still, such time as she went to their Russian home to receive their annual homage, and that of all her dependents.