For a moment he was tempted to refer his doubts to her husband; but, on reflection, he dared not. He had a sensitive fear of being deemed meddlesome, as priests so often are called; and it was difficult to make to Othmar—a very sensitive man, and at all times uncommunicative—so strange an accusation as would seem to lie in saying to him, ‘The companion of your life is unhappy: what have you done?’
The winter in the country of the Orléannais grew very cold and damp; the rivers flooded many parts of the plains, and the end of the year menaced violent storms and widespread floods. Her physicians begged Yseulte to go elsewhere, and recommended a southern air; they spoke of S. Pharamond, and Othmar, though vaguely reluctant to go thither, consented, for he had no valid reason of refusal to give. To Yseulte herself any movement appeared indifferent; to whatever was proposed she always assented passively; the acquiescence of one whom no trifles or accidents of fate have power to hurt, and which belongs alike to perfect happiness and absolute despair.
Othmar would have given ten years of his life to have been able to go away by himself, to wander north, south, east, or west in solitary desolation, to be alone with his undying desires, and away from the innocent presence of a creature whom he knew that he wronged by every thought with which he rose at daybreak and lay down at night.
Yseulte had never been more to him than a sweet and tender-hearted child, whose personal beauties had for a little while beguiled him into the semblance of a faint passion, into a momentary semi-oblivion, always imperfect and evanescent. But now, quiet as she was, and careful as she was never to betray herself, nevertheless a constant reproach seemed to look at him from her eyes, and her continual vicinity seemed as continual a rebuke. He was not a man, as many are, who could lightly neglect or deceive a woman; he was incapable of the half-unconscious cruelty with which many men, when their fancy has passed, leave the object of it in pitiable solitude, to console herself as best she can; he had too much sensitiveness and too much sense of chivalrous obligation to deny, even to his own reflections, the claims which his wife had on him for sympathy and affection. That he could not give them to her, because all his heart and soul and mind were with another woman, burdened him with a perpetual sense of injustice and offence done to her. He had sought her; he had taken her life voluntarily into his; he knew that it would be a treachery and a baseness to fail in his duty towards her. For that very reason her daily presence galled him almost beyond endurance, and, though he forced himself to remain beside her and to preserve to her every outward semblance of regard, his whole life chafed and rebelled, as the horse frets which is tied in stall to its manger, whilst all its longing is for the liberty of the pasture and the air.
If Melville had followed his impulse and said to him, ‘What fault can there be in her?’ he would have answered truthfully, ‘None: all the fault is my own;’ and he would have thought in secret: ‘She has that involuntary fault which is the cruellest of all others: she is not the woman I love!’
He had to put strong constraint upon himself not to shrink from the sound of her gentle voice, not to avoid the glance of her wistful eyes; he was afraid that she should read the truth of his own utter indifference in his regard; he felt with horror of himself that it was even growing something greater, something worse, than mere indifference; that soon, do what he would, he would be only able to see in her the barrier betwixt himself and the fate he coveted.
‘Good God! what miserable creatures we are!’ he thought. ‘I meant, as honestly as a man could ever mean anything, to make that poor child’s days as perfect in happiness as mortal life can be, and all I have actually done is to sacrifice uselessly both her and myself! Heaven send that she may never find it out herself!’
He was far from suspecting that she had already discovered the truth. All the fine prescience, the quickness at reading trivial signs and forming from them far-reaching conclusions, which love lends to the dullest were absent from him, because love itself was absent. Her pride gave her a sure mask, and he had not the lover’s impulse which looks for the face beneath.