A few months before, the Baron himself would have emphatically declared that no living woman could or should ever need more. But his nephew’s wife had touched a softer nerve in him; something which was almost tenderness and almost regret smote him when he saw the tall, graceful form of Yseulte like a garden lily, standing alone in the warmth of the sunset on the terraces at Amyôt, or saw Othmar, when he approached after a day’s absence, kiss her hand with the calm and serious courtesy which he would have displayed to any stranger, and turn away from her with an indifference which all his deference of manner and careful prévoyance of thought for her could not conceal from the keen eyes of the elder man.
‘He gives her his caresses, not his companionship,’ thought the old man, angrily, but he was too prudent and too wise to draw her attention to a fault against herself of which she was unconscious.
A few months earlier he would have said with Napoléon, ‘Qu’elle nous donne des marmots; c’est le nécessaire.’ But before this young mistress of this stately place as she moved, in her white gown, with her great bouquet of roses in her hand and her clear eyes smiling gravely on these men who so brief a while before had been unknown to her, and now held all her destiny in their hands, Friederich Othmar for the first time in his life saw a little way into a soul unsoiled, and began to dimly comprehend some desires not wholly physical, some necessities sheerly of the mind and heart. The impression came to him—a purely sentimental one for which he chid himself—that this child was entirely alone; more alone in her wedded life perhaps than she would have been in the monastic. She was surrounded with every species of material indulgence; day after day her husband gave her new pleasures, as people give children new toys; if she had wished for the impossible he would have endeavoured to obtain it for her; but Friederich Othmar twice or thrice in his hurried visits to Amyôt had found her in solitude, and walking alone in the stately gardens or sitting alone in some little rustic temple in the woods, and the fact, though insignificant enough, seemed to him indicative of a loneliness which would certainly become her fate unless she learned as so many other women have learned, to console herself for neglect by folly.
‘And that she will not do,’ the old man said to himself. ‘She is a pearl; but a pearl thrown, not before swine, but wasted on a pessimist, an ennuyé, a délicat whom nothing pleases except that which he cannot possess.’
He pitied her for what he foresaw would befall her in the future, rather than for any thing which troubled her at that present time, for although vaguely conscious of a certain discordance and dissatisfaction in her husband’s life, Yseulte was, in her own, as happy as a very young girl can be to whom kindliness seems love and the external beauty surrounding her appears like a lovely dream.
Othmar left her often to shut himself in his library, to lose himself in his forests, or to go for the affairs of his House to Paris; but he was always gentle, generous, and kind; he was even prodigal of caresses to her, because they spared him words in whose utterance he felt himself untrue; and if the reflex of his own sadness fell at times across herself, it became a light soft shadow without name, such as seemed to suit better than mere vulgar joys the silence of the gardens and the grandeur of the courts, where a life of the past, once so gracious, so vivid, so impassioned in love and so light in laughter, had been extinguished like a torch burned out in the night. A riotous or exuberant happiness would not have so well pleased her nature, made serious beyond her years whilst yet so mere a child, by the pains of poverty, the companionship of old age, and the sights and sounds of the siege of Paris. The long, light, warm days of spring and summer at Amyôt, with all the floral pomp around her, and the château itself rising, golden and silvery in the brilliant air, historic, poetic, magnificent, airy as a madrigal, martial as an epic, were days of an ecstatic but of an almost religious joy to her.
‘What have I done that all this should come to me?’ she said often in her wonder and humility, and Othmar seemed ever to her as a magician, at whose touch the briars and brambles in her path had blossomed like the almond and the may.