‘Otho,’ he said once to her, ‘is like an Eastern sorcerer who holds the magic ring with which he can wish for anything under heaven; but, as he cannot command immortality, all his life slips through his fingers before he has decided on what is most worth wishing for. Do you understand?’
Yseulte did not understand; to her this sorcerer, if not benignant to himself, had at least given all her soul desired. He treated her with the most constant tenderness, with the most generous delicacy, with the most solicitous care; if in his love there might be some of the heat of passion, some of the ardours of possession, lacking, it was not the spiritual affection and the childish innocence of so young a girl which could be capable of missing those, or be conscious of their absence. To Yseulte, love was at once a revelation and a profanation: she shrank from it even whilst she yielded to it; it was not to such a temperament as hers that any lover could ever have seemed cold.
She did not understand her husband; physical familiarity had not brought much mental companionship. She adored him; the distant sound of his step thrilled her with excitement, his lightest touch filled her with delight; the intense love she bore him often held her silent and pale with an excess of emotion which she would have been afraid to render into speech even if she had been able to do so; and she was utterly unable, for the strength of her own feelings alarmed her, and the mode of her education had made her reticent.
He was to her as a god who had suddenly descended upon her life, and changed all its poor, dull pathways into fields of light. That she gave, or that she might give him, much more than he gave her, never occurred to her thoughts. That any ardour of admiration, or force of emotion, might be absent in him towards her, never suggested itself to her. Such love as he bestowed on her, indifferent though it was in reality, seemed to her the very height of passion. She could not tell that mere sensual indulgences mingled with affectionate compassion, may produce so fair a simulacrum of love for awhile that it will deceive alike deceiver and deceived.
Othmar knew that nothing tenderer, purer, or nearer to his ideal, could have come into his life than this graceful and most innocent girl. She satisfied his taste if not his mind; she was as fresh as a sea-shell, as a lily, as a summer-dawn; and he felt an entire and illimitable possession in her such as he had never felt in any living woman; she was so young, it seemed like drinking the very dew of morning; and yet he could not have told whether he was most restless or most in peace at Amyôt.
‘Love me a little, dear; I have no one,’ he had said to her on the day of their betrothal, and it had always seemed to him that he had no one; all his mistresses had never cared for him, but only for the golden god which was behind him; or, he had thought so. And now, she loved him with an innocence and a fervour of which he could not doubt the truth; and he was grateful, as the masters of the world are usually grateful, for a handful of the simple daily bread of real affection; and she gave him all her young untouched loveliness in pledge of that, as she might have given him a rosebud to pluck to pieces. And he felt the sweetness of the rosebud, he resigned himself to the charm of the dawn, and endeavoured to believe that he was happy; but happiness escaped him as the vermilion hues of the evening sky may escape the dreamer watching for them, who looks too closely or looks too far.
Yet he remained willingly at Amyôt through these winter weeks; as willingly as though he had been the most impassioned of lovers. Amyôt was as far from the world, if he chose, as though its pastures and avenues had been an isle in the great South Ocean; he wished to forget the world with the ivory arms of Yseulte drawn about his throat: he would gladly have forgotten that any other woman lived beside this child, on whose innocent mouth, sweet as the wild rose in spring, he strove to stay the fleeting fragrance of his own youth.
‘No man had ever sweeter physician to his woes,’ he thought as he looked at her in her sleep, the red glow from the angry winter sunrise touching with its light the whiteness of her sculptural limbs. But what drug cures for long?
Friederich Othmar often went to the château for a few hours on matters of business, and was persuaded that the shining metal roofs of the great Valois house of pleasure sheltered a perfect contentment.