The keen eyes of Aurore de Vannes saw what Othmar did not see; that since the arrival of the Princess Napraxine her young cousin had no longer the single-hearted and buoyant happiness of the early months of her marriage, that her face was often melancholy, her gaze wistful, her manner constrained.
But her reflections were precisely contrary to those of Melville.
‘She is fortunate beyond everything,’ said the Duchesse to her intimate friends. ‘He gives her all she can wish for, as if he were Haroun Alraschid, and he leaves her entirely to herself, because he is not in the least in love with her. Can anyone imagine a more enviable position?—to be seventeen years old and have all the Othmar millions at your back, and to enjoy such an absolute liberty that your husband never asks you even where you spend your days? Only she is such a baby still, so very full of all her convent fancies, so scrupulous, and proud, and old-fashioned, that I suppose she will never enjoy herself as she might do. She was ruined by those women at Faïel, and by the austerities and prejudices of the old Marquise. If she only knew it, her position might be the happiest in the world.’
‘Will it not be as I said?’ asked the Duc, her husband, triumphantly many a time. She always answered him irritably:
‘If a woman prefer to be miserable she always can be; men will always furnish her with the materials. But in this case you may be quite sure it is merely a girl’s romance and disappointment with marriage, which she expected, as they all do, to be a primrose path whilst it is only a common highway.’
‘The highway can be varied by étapes,’ murmured the Duc de Vannes.
He himself watched with unkind satisfaction the little cloud which had come in the serene heaven of Yseulte’s fate. It might betoken but an April shower, or it might bring in its wake a tempest. When he had seen Nadine Napraxine arrive in Paris he had said to himself, ‘Adieu les marguerites!’ The daisies were simple treasures of the spring; they would have no charm beside the hothouse flower. As his little daughter had said, he had bet heavily on the chances of Yseulte’s marriage, and he watched the unfolding of the leaves of fate with the impatience of the gambler added to the unacknowledged malice of a personal pique. In the frequent opportunities which both society and relationship afforded him he dropped the gall of many a vague insinuation, worded with tact and finesse, into the troubled peace of her thoughts. He had too much skill and too much good taste to permit himself to speak either Othmar’s or Nadine Napraxine’s name directly, but he had not been so long schooled in the cruelties of the world without having learned the art of suggestion in its most merciless and its most subtle shapes. He never said so in any clear form of words, yet he contrived to convey to her his own conviction and the conviction of society that she counted for nothing in her husband’s existence. All his delicately-hinted compassion, all his vaguely-worded indignation, the mere light jests with which he strove to amuse her, all contained that drop of acid which burned its way into the pure gold of her affections, and remained with her long after he had left her presence.
She always summoned fortitude enough to repress any sign of the harm he did to her; but the effect of it was for that reason the more baneful. Sorrows and doubts, which pass away when a woman can weep for them at her mother’s knees, or in her sister’s arms, grow strong and cruel in solitary meditation and the nurture of thoughts unconfessed.
One night at a great fête the Duc de Vannes approached her and said to her with a smile:
‘How preoccupied you are, my cousin! I never should have thought that anyone so young would look so grave at a ball. Really, you make one fear that after all you were wrongly turned from your vocation, and would have been happiest in the cloister, much as the world would have lost.’