CHAPTER XLVII.
As Yseulte went to her own room her way led her past the great cedar-wood doors of her husband’s library, that retreat where he passed so many of those hours of meditation and of pain,—such hours as in old days led men of his nature to the isolation of the cloister. He had always told her that she was free to enter there; but the delicacy of her temper had always made her use the privilege but rarely; so rarely, that he had ceased ever to be afraid of her entrance in moments when the lassitude or the dejection of his life overcame him and made him little willing to meet her gaze. Now, as she passed by the door, a wistful impulse moved her to see him, to speak to him, to be spoken to by him. She had an instinctive feeling that this news of Napraxine’s death had caused him a greater shock than she could comprehend or measure; all the affection, the adoration, which she bore him went out to him in this incomprehensible sorrow.
‘If he would only tell me’—she thought.
Inspired by that longing for his confidence, she opened the door. Othmar sat at his writing-table, and his head was bowed down on his arms; his back was to her, but his whole attitude expressed extreme weariness, exceeding sorrow. When he sprang to his feet at the sound of the opening door, she saw that his eyes were wet with tears. He suppressed both his emotion and his irritation as best he could, and said to her gently:
‘Do you want me, my dear? Wait a moment; I will be with you.’
He turned from her as if to sort some papers on his table. She did not advance; she stood looking at him with a scared, colourless face: a truth had come into her mind swift and venomous as an adder. She thought suddenly:
‘If I were not here—she could be his wife—now.’
The secret of his uncontrollable emotion at the tidings of Napraxine’s death was laid bare to her in one of those flashes of thought which light up the brain as lightning illumines the landscape. She murmured some vague words and left the room: her long training in silence and self-suppression gave her strength to repress the cry which rose to her lips.
Othmar scarcely heeded her departure or heard her answer: his own pain and restless rebellion against the fate which he had made for himself absorbed him.