She had meant, quite sincerely, to give sympathy and consolation, but she could not help fashioning both in her own likeness.
Yseulte, with a feverish instinct to reach solitude and the open air, left her tormentor within the house, and hastily covering herself, passed out into the gardens of S. Pharamond, and walked farther and faster than her physical strength, which had not been great since the birth of her child, was well fitted to bear. She longed thirstily for the grey skies and the moist air of Faïel, for the cold dusky seas of the north-west and the dim far-stretching lands. The light, the buoyancy, the glitter, the dry clear atmosphere of those southern shores, oppressed her and fevered her. If she had not altogether lost the habit of confidence in her husband, she would have said to him, ‘I sicken of all this drought and cloying sweetness. Let me go where the west wind blows; where the northern billows roll; where it is cold, and dusk, and green, and full of shadows; where it does not mock one’s pain with light and laughter!’
But she had lost that habit utterly: she never spoke of anything she felt or wished; she accepted all the days of her life as they came to her.
‘I have nothing of my own,’ she thought; ‘I have no right to wish for anything.’
He had made this place hers; he always spoke of it as hers; it was, indeed, her own inalienably; but she did not feel it to be so. It was only a part of his wide charity to her—the charity which she had thought was love.
She walked far, she scarcely knew herself where, taking her way mechanically through the grounds and into the fields and orange woods adjoining them, following the windings of the paths which wound upward between the great gnarled trunks of olives and beneath their hoary branches. As she ascended under the forest of olives, which was part of the lands of S. Pharamond, she could see below her a broad hunting road, cut in old times by the Maison de Savoie, neglected by the Commune, but kept in preservation by Othmar himself. She heard a sound of horses’ hoofs, and instinctively looked down; between the network of olive boughs she saw a low carriage, drawn by three black ponies abreast, and harnessed in the Russian manner, their abundant manes streaming on the wind as they dashed headlong down the steep incline. They were followed by two outriders in liveries of deep mourning.
The woman who drove them looked upward, and made a slight salutation with a smile.
It was Nadine Napraxine.
In another instant the turn of the road hid them from sight, and the beat of the galloping hoofs was lost in the sound of a little torrent which fell down through the red bare rocks above, and fed with its moisture the beds of violets beneath the olives.