‘I do not wish to learn them.’
She spoke almost sullenly, almost rudely, as the natural courage of her temper asserted itself and strove to struggle against the paralysis of mesmerised fear in which the presence of her rival held her.
‘They have been useful,’ said Nadine Napraxine with a chillier intonation. ‘And for want of them, what have women—who can only love—made of their lives, and of their lovers? But since you will not allow that I am your friend, I will leave you to your sylvan solitudes. Adieu, my dear. It is not in the woods and hills that you will learn to recover that secret de bonheur which you have lost so early.’
She lingered a moment, looking at Yseulte with her meditative, languid, unrevealing gaze. The girl’s lips trembled, her throat swelled, her eyes filled with scorching tears; she turned abruptly away lest her self-control should altogether fail her. She knew that she had betrayed herself as utterly to her enemy’s eyes as though she had poured out in words all the piteous secrets of her aching heart. Nadine Napraxine passed slowly beneath the olive branches, brushing the humble flowers with her careless sovereign’s step.
‘She is foolish, she is simple, she is awkward, and she is most unwise,’ she thought. ‘But she is brave——’
It was the quality which she always honoured.
CHAPTER LIII.
When she returned home, she shut herself in her own rooms, and was not seen, even by her women, for three hours. She lay almost immovable upon a couch, whilst the sunshine came tempered and rose-hued through the lowered awnings of her windows, and the air around her was filled with the scent of hundreds of cut roses placed in all the jars and bowls and vases in her sight. For the first time in her life a doubt which came from pity, and a hesitation which came from conscience, were at war with all her habits, instincts, and vanities. Underneath her egoism, and her cruelty, and her many ironies, there had always been latent a disdainful honour. Once having given it, she would have kept her word to the meanest creature; she would have taken no advantage of the weakest enemy, if to do so had been an injustice. She was capricious in every act of her life, but her caprices had no meanness in them; she was supremely merciless, because she was supremely indifferent, but she was capable of perfect loyalty in her own fashion. Far down in the depths of her complex nature there was, beneath all the coldness, malice and selfishness of disposition and of custom, a vague instinct of chivalrous generosity. If ever that chord in her were touched it always responded. When she had been a child, reading the old chronicles in her father’s library, her favourite of history had always been John of France, for sake of that voluntary return to his captivity in England.