Their lives outwardly passed in apparent unison and sympathy. He seldom left her save when any urgent matter took him for a brief space to Paris or some other European capital, and the days passed as evenly and unmarked by any event at the château of S. Pharamond as at that of Amyôt. People of a conspicuous position can seldom enjoy solitude, and the demands of society provide them with a refuge from themselves if embarrassment has forced them to need one. Othmar, who had at no time been willing to open the doors of his house to the world, now became almost solicitous to have the world about him. It spared him that solitude à deux which, so exquisite to the lover and to the beloved, is so intolerable to the man who knows that he is loved but has no feeling to bestow in answer. Throughout the early winter months they were seldom or never alone. Yseulte said nothing when he urged her to surround herself with people, but obeyed with a sinking heart. She was very proud; she remained tranquil and gentle in manner to him and to everyone, and, if she were at times more pensive than suited her years or her world, it was attributed by all who knew her to the loss of her child. She grew thin and white, and was always very grave; but she had so admirable a courtesy, so patient a smile for all, that not a soul ever dreamed her heart was breaking in her breast.
Sometimes when she was quite alone she wandered up the hill-side beneath the olive trees to the bastide of Nicole Sandroz, and sat amidst the blossoming violets, the tufts of hepaticas, with a strange dull wonder in her at herself. Could it be only two years ago since she had seen Othmar coming in the dusk beneath the silvery boughs and had learned on the morrow that he had asked her hand in marriage?
Nicole watched her wistfully, but she, too, who had lost her petiot in the days of her youth, believed that the melancholy which she saw in her darling was due to the death of her offspring. She strove, in ruder words, but in the same sense, to console her as Melville had done. Yseulte smiled gently, thanked her, and said nothing. What was the use, she mused, of their speaking to her of the future? The future, whatever else it brought, would only take the heart and the thoughts of her husband farther and farther from her. She knew still but little of the world, but she knew enough to be conscious that the woman who fails in the early hours of her marriage to make her husband her lover will never in the years to come find him aught except a stranger. All the sensitive hauteur of her nature shrank from the caresses which she knew were only inspired by a sense of pity or of duty. She drew herself more and more coldly away from him, whilst yet the mere sound of his voice in the distance made all her being thrill and tremble. And he was too grateful for the relief to seek to resist her alienation.
He did not guess, because he did not care to guess, that she loved him so intensely that she would stand hidden for hours merely to see him pass through the gardens or ascend the sea stairs of the little quay. Her timidity had always veiled from him the intensity of her affections, and now her pride had drawn a double screen between them.
‘He only pitied me then!’ she thought, as she sat amongst the violets at Nicole’s flower farm. ‘He only pities me now!’
Pity seemed to this daughter of a great race the last of insult, the obole thrown to the beggar which brands him as beggar for evermore.
‘I was hungered, and he gave me bread; I was homeless, and he sheltered me!’ she said, in the agony of her heart. ‘And I—I thought that love!’