Baron Fritz, who made her blush with the fervour of his compliments, and was so delighted with her that he could not cease from gazing at her as though she were a water-colour of Copley Fielding’s, was alone sufficiently sympathetic, despite all his seventy years of cynicism, to perceive that the things of this world had little place in her thoughts, and he thought to himself as he looked at her:
‘Will Otho be wise enough to appreciate all that? He will have the carnation in its bud, the peach in its flower; he will make just what he pleases of them; the worse will be if he should leave them altogether alone: then the carnation will unfold, the peach will ripen and come out into fruit unnoticed, and if he be an ingrate, they will both come to their perfection for someone else—which will be a pity. The child is in love with him—parbleu!—he does not deserve it; he only cares for his Russian woman, his hothouse narcissus; he only wants to cure himself of Nadine Napraxine; as if one blush of this child’s cheek were not worth a century of Madame Napraxine’s languor!’
And he felt a passing regret that he was not forty years younger and in the place of his nephew.
After dinner he seated himself beside Yseulte, and talked to her of Othmar, of his boyhood, of his talents, of his opportunities, and of his destinies, with so much tact and so much skill that she was moved to an affectionate gratitude towards the speaker and to a sense of infinite awe before all the ambitions and responsibilities with which he filled her future.
‘She is a baby, but she is not a fool,’ thought the wise old man. ‘When the love fever has passed, we shall make of her just what we want, provided only that she has influence over Otho. But will she have any? In marriage there is always one who rules the other: “un qui se baisse, et l’autre qui tend la joue”: and it is always the one who cares who goes under.’
Even as he had eaten his truffles and drunk the fine wines grown on the de Vannes’ estates in Gironde, he had been more troubled by an impersonal anxiety than he had ever allowed himself to be in the whole course of his existence. The child had sat opposite to him, looking so youthful beside the faces, more or less maquillées, of the women around her, with her soft surprised eyes, happy as those of a child that wakes from sleep, and her colour coming and going, delicate and warm: ‘And he will not stay here to see, just because the desire for another woman is in him like a fly in the ear of a horse!’ had thought the Baron impatiently. He guessed very accurately that the departure of Othmar was due to a restless unwillingness to face the fate which he had voluntarily made for himself.
He himself had had no heed of Othmar’s marriage except as a means of legally continuing his race; his only notion of a woman was Napoleon’s, that she should bear many children; but as he looked at Yseulte de Valogne, something kinder and more pitiful stirred in his selfish old heart; she seemed to him too good to be sacrificed so; he understood that there would be other things than money and children which this sensitive plant would want; and worldly, unemotional, and unprincipled as he was, Baron Fritz was the only person present who divined something of the dreams which she was dreaming and felt a compassionate regret for them, as for flowers which opened at dawn to die perforce at noonday.
About eleven o’clock in the evening, when Yseulte was beginning to feel her eyelids grow heavy, and was thinking wistfully of her little white bed amidst the murmur of conversation unintelligible to her and the stare of inquisitive eyes, she heard with a little thrill of an emotion quite new to her the voice of the groom of the chambers, which announced Madame la Princesse Napraxine.
Jealousy she was too young, too simple, and too innocent to know; but a strange eagerness and an unanalysed pain moved her as she saw the woman whom they said that Othmar loved.
‘Is that really Madame Napraxine?’ she said in a low voice to the Baron, who was beside her.