His whole remembrance, desires, and adoration were with Nadine Napraxine. He imagined that he entirely concealed his weakness from the world and from Yseulte; but as the weeks passed on and the opportunities of society brought him continually into the presence of the one woman whom he loved, the magical influence of her dominion began completely to absorb and to subdue him afresh. He still abstained from any intimacy at her house; he still most rarely visited her or directly sought her, but all the indirect occasions to be in her presence which the routine of their world afforded he accepted and looked forward to with an eagerness which he imagined was wholly unsuspected by others. When she was entertained at his own hotel he was studiously distant in his courtesies, and though he did not betray it, he was embarrassed by the honest and cordial regard which her husband showed to him.
Friederich Othmar would very much have liked to speak his mind on the subject to his nephew, but he felt that he had no possible pretext to do so, for Othmar was perfect in his manner to his young wife and constant in his kindness and solicitude for her. The elder man felt that he could not with decency split straws about imaginary wrongs when he himself had been always so incredulous of the sorrows of the affections. So long as Othmar refused her nothing, inflicted no slight on her publicly, and never said a syllable to her that was unkind or uncourteous, it was impossible for anyone to call him to account for mere fanciful offences which, however real might be the suffering they caused, had no substantial ground or root.
‘He would laugh at me,’ thought the Baron, and the whole philosophy of his life made any possible ridicule on grounds of sentiment intolerable to him even in idea. He was, moreover, conscious that Othmar would do more than laugh, and united to his impatience of his nephew’s errors and caprices was a reverence for him as the chief of the House, which was still stronger than any other feeling. So might a loyal prince of blood royal see in his nephew a man most blameable, full of faults and of inconsistency, yet see in him also his sovereign, whose very errors or failures he was bound, for sake of their common race and of his sworn supremacy, to defend.
‘Othmar can do no wrong in your sight,’ said Nadine Napraxine once, with the smile that the Baron hated.
‘Nor could the Roi Soleil in the sight of his family,’ he responded, with a tone that was the reverse of amiable, ‘yet there were lovely ladies on the terraces of Marley and Versailles who must have tried their patience and their faith sometimes.’
‘Can faith and patience be said to exist unless they are tried?’ said his tormentor. ‘And I should think that the Treaty of Utrecht tried both much more than his preferences, which could not matter in the very least to them.’
Friederich Othmar was silent, twisting his white moustaches irritably. He would have liked to say many things to her, but he dared not; he did not know enough; and Othmar, implacably incensed, would have quarrelled with him then and for ever had he ventured to interfere.
He who had intelligence enough to appreciate the spirituality and unworldliness of Yseulte’s nature, who had been first touched by her unlikeness to all the young girls of his world, by her serious and elevated character and her simple unostentatious piety, felt a sting of shame at his own motives when he realised how much he sought to make her like all other women, how much he trusted to frivolous temptations to console and to absorb her.
‘In doubt do nothing,’ he knew well was one of the golden legends of the world’s wisdom. If she had sought advice or sympathy, her doubts and her fears might have been soothed in a measure. Her confessors would have given her the same counsel as that worldliest of men, Friederich Othmar. They would have entreated her not to fret her life out over mere sorrows of the emotions and the imagination; they would have hinted that she was exceptionally happy if she had no more to bear than an inconstancy of the mind and of the fancy; they would have bade her trust to her youth, to her own strength of affection, and to her place in his house and in his life, to give her ultimate supremacy in the thoughts and the heart of her husband. But even in the sanctity of the confessional she chose rather to commit the sin, for sin it was in her sight, of hiding all her inmost feelings and keeping silence on all her most rebellious impulses rather than speak of Othmar with any words which might imply suspicion, blame, or reproach to him. Her convent life had given her such little knowledge of human nature, her sensitive reserve of character left her so entirely without counsellors or friends, that she was altogether alone in the bewilderment of this world which had at first seemed to her at once a pageant and a paradise, but which, now that her soul was haunted by one poignant dread, only appeared to her filled with cruel problems, incomprehensible temptations, strange confusions and humiliating motives. To her, only one friend was possible, her husband; to him alone would her timidity and her honour have permitted her to confide all her pathetic fears, all her innocent secrets; but Othmar never sought her confidence. Treating her with the gentleness of a man to a child, with the respect of a gentleman for what he wholly reverences, and is always willing to protect and please, he yet remained as distant from her in true confidence and sympathy as any stranger ushered into her drawing-rooms, whose face she had never seen before.