CHAPTER XXXII.
Othmar, faithful to his word, remained at the château of Amyôt throughout the spring and summer months, indifferent to the laughter of the world, if it did laugh. He divined very accurately that one person at least laughed and made many a satiric sketch to her friends of himself filant le parfait amour, and gathering wood violets, wood anemones, wood strawberries, beneath the shadows of his Valois trees in glades which had been old when the original of Jean Goujon’s Diane Chasseresse had been young.
Amyôt seemed to him to suit the youth, the grace, and the gravity of Yseulte better than any babble of the great world;—Amyôt, which was like a stately illuminated chronicle of kingly and knightly history, which was as silent as the grave of a king in a crypt, and which was shut out from the fret of mankind by the screen of its Merovingian forests.
He was scarcely conscious that he lingered in this seclusion from an unacknowledged unwillingness to go where he would see and hear of another woman; he persuaded himself that he chose to stay on in the provinces partially because the tumult of the world was always vulgar, noisy, and offensive to him, chiefly because nowhere else in the world so surely as in one of his own country houses could he be certain not to meet the woman who had wounded him mortally, yet whom he loved far more than he hated her.
‘It is absolutely necessary that you should be seen in Paris, and that you should receive there; it is absolutely necessary that you should sustain your position in the world,’ said Friederich Othmar, with much emphasis as he sat at noon one day on the great terrace of Amyôt. Othmar laughed a little, and shrugged his shoulders.
‘Amyôt is magnificently kept up—that I admit,’ continued the elder man. ‘It is a place that it is well to have, to spend six weeks of the autumn in, to entertain princes at; it is quite royal, and was one of the best purchases that my father ever made. But to bury yourself here!—when the Kaiser comes to Paris, to whom you owe by tradition every courtesy——’
‘The Othmars were never received at the Court of Vienna.’
The Baron made an impatient gesture.