The day was still young. The bare mountain sides wore the hues of the jacinth and amethyst; the odours of sweet herbs and spring flowers were strong and sweet; far down below, unseen, the sea was sparkling, lending the sense of its presence and its freedom to all the gorges and hillsides above. Her swift-footed ponies bore her fleetly as the Hours bore Aurora through the roseate and golden radiance of the April morning.
With intention she guided them up the steep roads which led to the humble church of S. Pharamond, hidden beneath its great gnarled olive trees, and covered with its network of rose-boughs. She knew that Yseulte went there often in the forenoon, and the caprice moved her to see if she could meet, as if by chance, this poor child, whose fate lay in the hollow of her hand, like a bird taken from a trap to be strangled with a touch at pleasure of its keeper. The sense of such power was always sweet to her; although so familiar, its familiarity did not detract from its pleasure. It was the sole thing which did not by repetition grow monotonous. Her life had been short by years, but it had been full of such dominion. She had dealt with men and women as she chose, and to make or mar their destinies had always been the sole pastime of which she did not weary. Humanity was her box of puppets, as it is that of the Solitary of Varzin. To hold the strings of fate, to bind and loose the threads of circumstance, and weave the warp and woof of destiny, was the only science which had ever had charm over her changeful temperament and her sceptical intelligence. Beside it all other things were trivial and tame. She had never met anyone who had resisted her will; Othmar himself had done so for awhile, but he had lived to repent and to succumb.
The church of S. Pharamond was empty and silent; there was no office said that day; it was grey and still and mournful, and no living thing was in it save a swallow perched upon the altar rail. She pursued the steep hillside road, overhung with olive and fig trees, the wayside carpeted with gladiolus and the blue fleur-de-luce. Below, through the light green foam of spring foliage and the sombre masses of pine and ilex woods, there rose the towers and pinnacles of the château, rising slim and fantastic, against the azure of the sky. Around her the silence was unbroken, except by a tethered goat cropping euphorbia and ivy from a ruined wall.
Looking through the boughs of the olives, she saw afar off the figure of Yseulte. Where she was standing was on the land of Nicole Sandroz, the furrows, thick with flowers, climbing the hill slope, the orchard of lemon and olive hiding the low white walls of the house. She alighted, and left her little horses standing by a stone well made in the old wall where the goat was tethered. She wished to see the wife of Othmar, and she moved straight towards her where she sat beneath one of the gigantic olives, whose foliage spread in a misty cloud silvery and sea-green above her. She had uncovered her head in the deep shadow around her; her attitude was listless, spiritless, dejected; in the shade thrown from the olive boughs her face looked very colourless, worn, and thin. All her look of childhood had passed away, and almost all her youth as well. As she recognised her rival she trembled violently and rose to her feet, losing for the moment all self-control and presence of mind. Her large brown eyes dilated with fear, like a deer’s when it is hard pressed in the chase. She had scarcely self-command to make the common gesture of salutation.
Nadine Napraxine, smiling, approached her and looked at her with that critical and penetrating glance which, through its languor, could read all the secrets of the soul. She spoke the bland commonplaces of compliment and courtesy with her sweetest manner, her most gracious grace; and the girl, paralysed once again, as a hundred times before, murmured a stupid sentence or so, coloured, grew pale, hesitated, felt herself awkward, foolish, and constrained, and could not keep down the tremor which shook her from head to foot, thus suddenly confronted with the woman whom her husband loved. All the terror which she had felt in Paris returned to her with tenfold more suffering, tenfold more intensity. In the morning light, standing amongst the simple wild herbs and flowers, her foe had the same magical power of magnetism over her as she had had in the lighted drawing-rooms and theatres of Paris. She understood why she herself was nothing in her husband’s life, and this other was all.
With simple gracious words, as she might have spoken to a timid child, her enemy continued to address her, passing over her constraint and silence as though she perceived them not, and all the while that the smooth, careless phrases rose so easily on her lips she studied the changing colour and the frightened eyes of Yseulte with that amused and merciless analysis which was so common to her. She understood how all the whole being of her victim shrank from her as a bird shrinks from the gaze of a snake, yet how her courage and her pride strove with her emotion and vainly tried to hide her fear.
‘Oh, foolish, foolish child!’ she thought, from the height of her own assured strength, her own irresistible power. ‘If you mistrust yourself, you lie at the mercy of all your foes. Do you not know that the first necessity for all success is to believe in our own power to attain it? Nature has given you personal loveliness, but the gift is of no more use to you than a score of music in the hands of an ignorant who cannot read it, than a sculptor’s chisel in the fingers of a child. You love Othmar, and you weep for him; and you know how to do nothing more. Do you suppose that women govern men with tears? Do you suppose that their desires wake because a woman prays?’
There was derision, but there was a not unkind pity in her, as her eyes studied the face in which, despite its youth and delicacy and charm, Othmar could see no beauty.
‘Your child died?’ she said suddenly, as she sat there beside her unwilling and trembling captive. Yseulte bent her head; she could not trust her voice to answer.
‘Did you care so much?’ said Nadine Napraxine in wonder.