The kindliness of his tone, its mingling of familiarity and reverence, melted her reserve and disarmed her shyness. There had been that in the compliment of Alain de Vannes which had startled and alarmed her; but in the almost paternal gentleness and friendliness of Othmar’s words there was nothing to do so. He had little to her of the chillness and languid irony which often frightened even women in him, whilst he had all the graceful courtesy of a man polished by all the habits of the great world, and accustomed to that pre-eminence which gives supreme ease of manner. To her Othmar seemed a hero, a king, an ideal among men; when her cousin had said to her that this person, so powerful, so great, and so rich, was also unhappy, he had said the only thing needed to complete his fascination for her and to make him the master of her dreams.
He bowed low before her with a sense of something holier than was often met with in this world, and looked after her as she sped over the lawns to the house.
‘A beautiful creature, with a tender heart in her breast,’ he thought. ‘Why could I not meet her and find my heaven in possessing her, instead of caring only for a woman who has no more passion or pity than those Mexican aloes?’
As he walked home the remembrance of Nadine Napraxine seemed like a little adder growing in his heart, and the large eyes of Yseulte de Valogne seemed to look into his soul with their golden sun-rays. He was passionately in love with the one, bitterly, angrily, resentfully, in love; for the other he felt an extreme pity, a sympathy, which with propitious circumstances might become affection, an admiration of the senses which might with time be heightened to desire, an inclination to take her in his arms and save her from her fate as he might have taken up a wounded bird to save it from the trap.
CHAPTER XII.
Yseulte the next day was sitting writing a German theme in the children’s room, of which the windows opened on the gardens, when Alain de Vannes, with a cigarette in his mouth, pushed open the glass door and sauntered in from the open air.
‘Well, my cousin,’ he said gaily. ‘Here you are, shut up like a little mouse. What nonsense it is! German? What good will that do you? When the revanche comes, we shall speak with bullets and they will understand as we understood. Pardieu! When they burnt my woods in Charente!—I had a ball in my ribs at Saarbrück; did you know it? Where were you? In Paris?—during the siege? A baby like you! Is it possible!’
‘There were many other little children there,’ said the girl with a shudder; she had been such a little child then, that the horror of the time had left an ineffaceable mark upon her.