An intense melancholy closed in upon her, from which no effort could rouse her. She said little; but when she rose from her bed and resumed her daily life, all alone in her heart was the one great grief which had now no hope to lighten it.
They strove to make her remember how young she was, what unspent years yet lay to her account, what undreamed-of treasuries of new happiness were yet untouched by her; but nothing availed to give her any consolation.
The pale sunshine of the early winter found her white and chilled as itself. For she had a deeper pang than ever in her heart since she said ever to herself in her solitary grief: ‘He does not care; he is good, he is gentle, he is compassionate; but he does not care.’
All her young life writhed in secret beneath that kindness which was only pitiful, that tenderness which was only conventional.
‘I am nothing in his life,’ she thought with tenfold bitterness. ‘Nothing;—nothing;—nothing! Even for my child’s death he does not really care!’
A woman far away, unseen, almost unheard of, was sole mistress of his existence. With all the terrible insight which a love forsaken and solitary possesses into the secrets of the life to which it clings, she read the thoughts and the emotions of Othmar as though they were written on some open page lit by a strong lamp. Although never a word of self-betrayal escaped him, never more than an involuntary gesture of lassitude or an unconscious sigh, she yet knew how utterly one recollection and one desire alone reigned over him and dominated him. She was no more a child, but was a woman humiliated, wounded, isolated, who suffered far the more because her wounds were not those which she could show, her humiliation was not such as she could reveal, and her isolation was one of the spirit, and not of the body.
‘You must not mourn as those who have no hope,’ said Melville to her, believing that her continued melancholy was due to the loss of her offspring. ‘You are so young; you will have many other children; all kinds of joy will return to you, as their foliage will return to these leafless trees. Be grateful, my dear, to heaven for all the mercies which abide with you.’
She said nothing; but she turned her eyes on him one moment with an expression so heart-broken and weary that he was startled and alarmed.
‘What grief can she have that we know not?’ he marvelled. ‘Othmar does not leave her; and he is the last man on earth to be cruel or even ungentle to a woman.’