‘Poor innocent child!’ he thought once with self-reproach. ‘She must never know; it was I who sought her—I must keep her in her illusions as best I may.’
He did not know that her illusions had been killed in that moment of cruel certainty, as once in the church of S. Pharamond his orchids and azaleas had perished in a single night of frost.
She told her people to have the horses taken back to the stables: she felt unwell; she would not go out that morning; then she locked herself in her own apartments. She could not face that world of Paris, which would be speaking all the day of one theme,—the death of Prince Napraxine.
It was the last day of April; the sunshine was streaming through the gardens of the great hotel, and through her open windows there came the scent of opening lilac buds and blossoming hawthorn boughs. Like the year and the earth, she was in the early sweetness of her youth; yet old age hardly knows a more chill and cruel sense of loneliness and desolation than was with her now as she lay, face downward, on her bed, and sobbed her youth away. With instantaneous and merciless force the truth had broken in upon her at last; she suddenly realised that she had no place in the heart of Othmar, and was but a burden on his life. She realised that she had been taken in pity, wedded in generosity and compassion, but without one passing gleam or throb of love. She marvelled that she could have been so blind before. All the memories which thronged upon her brought with them a thousand inexorable witnesses of the truth. The knowledge of the world which she had learned of late was like a lamp shedding its cruel rays on every damning fact.
For long she had known, she had felt, that her husband cared only for one woman upon earth, and that woman not herself. But never until now had the conviction come to her of how cruelly and eternally she barred the way between him and his happiness and his desires. The weakness and the defects of the early training which she had received now told upon her character, making her shut close in her own soul all she suffered, and enabling her to keep perfect silence on all she had discovered. Without that acquired habit of reserve, her natural candour and trustfulness would have impelled her to give some confidence, to receive some counsel, in her dire distress, would have even brought her to her husband’s side. But the pride which was in her blood was united with the power of self-repression engendered by the teachings she had received. In any sorrow which had not also been humiliation, in any fault which had been her own, not his, she would have thrown herself at Othmar’s feet and confessed all that she felt. But this was impossible to her now; the words would have choked her; she could not say to him: ‘I know I am only a pensioner on your pity and your generosity;’ she could not say to him, ‘I know that I stand between you and one whom you loved before ever you saw me.’ More undisciplined and less delicate tempers might have found some refuge in such passionate lamentation and revelation, but to Yseulte de Valogne such outbursts of reproach were impossible; they would have been contrary to every habit of her young life, to every tradition of the order and of the race from which she sprang. ‘The vulgar cry out when they are hurt,’ her grandmother had said once to her during the siege of Paris; ‘but for us—there are only two things possible—either vengeance or silence.’
Those words came back upon her mind as she lay upon her bed, whilst the sweet fresh winds of the spring-time blew the scent of the lilac and hawthorn across her chamber. Vengeance there could be none for her; he had been her saviour, her protector, her kindest friend, her lover, whom she adored with all the ignorant, innocent, mute worship of first love; there only remained the alternative—silence.
There was something of the dumb obstinacy of the Breton in her, and much also of the Breton force of heroism; the heroism which does not speak, but bears and acts, immovable and uncomplaining. That great strength of endurance enabled her now to recover her self-control by the time that she was forced to meet Othmar again, and to go into her drawing-rooms at eight o’clock before the hour of dinner, with no trace of what she had suffered upon her except in the pallor of her face and the dark shade beneath her eyes.
‘Are you feeling ill, my dear child?’ said her husband, as he met her. ‘I hear you have not been out to-day, and you had many engagements?’
She murmured some vague answer;—she had been lying down; her head ached.
He answered her with some tender expressions of regret, and inquired no more. Her health was delicate and fluctuating at that moment; he supposed that it was natural that she had such occasional hours of depression.