‘I assure you the grosse caisse is a mistake in a cantata!’ she said as she passed him and left him, the subtle, voluptuous odour of the gardenias of her bouquet floating by him like the dewy odours of a midsummer eve.
He thought bitterly that he could comprehend how such a man as Joubert loved the scent of tube-roses till his death, because a woman once had taken a cluster of them from his hand twenty years before in a garden alley of the Tuileries.
It irritated him extremely that she should so exactly have suspected and penetrated the motive which had led him to desire that the life of the world should distract and occupy the young companion of his life. It was a motive of which he was acutely ashamed, which he could not endure to confess to himself, much less could bear to feel was subject to the observation of her unsparing raillery. Of all wounds which she could have reopened, none would have ached more keenly in him than his humiliating sense of how she, at the least, must know that the young girl who bore his name had no place in his heart; that she, at the least, must remember, as he remembered, those interviews with her at La Jacquemerille which had been so closely followed by his marriage. He might deceive all the world into the belief that he loved his wife—he could not so deceive her. His veins thrilled, his blood burned, as he recalled those two days in which his passion had been spoken to her in words whose utterance he himself could never forget. What had they sounded to her ear? Only, no doubt, like the grosse caisse which, symbolising death, agony, destruction, woe untellable, yet only seemed to her grotesquely forcible, jarring unpleasantly on the harmonious serenity of the symphony!
He forced himself not to follow her with his eyes as she moved away with that exquisite harmony of step and carriage which were due to the perfect proportions of her form, and he turned and sought out Yseulte herself.
She was in the music-room, listening absently to an andante of Beethoven’s, surrounded by a little court of men no longer young, who cared nothing for Beethoven, but much for her youth and her unconscious charm of manner.
‘Are you willing to come away?’ he murmured to her when the andante was ended.
She rose with eagerness; to be in the Hôtel Napraxine was oppressive and painful to her.
He took her away unobserved, and drove homeward beside her in silence. He looked at her profile, fair and clear against the light thrown from without on the glass of the carriage window, and at the whiteness of her slender throat, with its collar of pearls, and hated himself because he could only think, with a shudder, ‘All my life must I sit beside her, a living lie to her!’
‘Yseulte,’ he murmured suddenly; then paused: he felt a momentary impulse to tell her the truth, to say to her, ‘I do not love you—God forgive me!—I love another woman; help me, my dear, and pity me; do not reproach me; I will do the best that I can by your life; love me always yourself if you can; I need it sorely. We may never be happy; but at least there will be no falsehood or secrecy between us. That will be much.’
The impulse was momentarily strong upon him; he took her hand in his and said once more with hesitation: ‘Yseulte——’