CHAPTER XLIX.
Whilst she was thus withdrawn from the world in the observance if not in the regrets of mourning, Othmar left Paris for the seclusion of the château of Amyôt.
The summer and the autumn months seemed to both him and Yseulte long and cruel; all the beauty of Amyôt in the blossoming hours could not make their life there happy to either of them. Since the death of Napraxine a great constraint had come between them. Each of them was sensible of thoughts and of emotions which neither would, or could, confide in the other.
Friederich Othmar came and went between Paris and the great Renaissance château, but he was powerless to alter what he deplored. There was not even any definite thing of which he could speak. There was no fault ever to be found in the gentleness and courtesy of Othmar to his wife; and there was no alteration in the deference and the docility which she always showed to him. Only there was something wanting: there was no spontaneity; there was no sympathy; there was none of that unspoken gladness which exhales from all real happiness as its fragrance from the rose. The wise old man said to himself, impatient and regretful, ‘Why did Napraxine die? But for that, time would have been her friend. He would have grown used to her sweet presence, and habit would have brought content. But now!——’
Now, he knew that with every day which dawned, with every night which fell, Othmar brooded, night and day, over his lost future, destroyed by his own rash haste.
All his mind was with Nadine Napraxine, and it fretted him at times almost beyond endurance that he could see her and hear of her no more, know no more of her than all her world knew, or than the chronicles of the hour stated for public information. It seemed to him as it did to her, as if the strangest silence had fallen on the earth. He loved her infinitely more than he had ever done, intense and unscrupulous as had been the passion which she had aroused in him. She was entirely free; and he—he who had adored her—dared not even enter her antechamber or go where he could see her shadow fall upon the ground she trod!
The silence and the self-effacement of Yseulte were the most dangerous anodynes which he could have had. He dreamed his life away in visions of joys which never could be his, and the resignation of his young companion allowed him to dream on unroused.
Friederich Othmar saw his increasing preoccupation, his growing love of solitude, his impatience when he was recalled by force to the things of actual life, and he could have gnashed his teeth with rage and sorrow.
‘He will never live out his years away from his sorceress,’ he thought; ‘and when they meet again, she will do what she chooses with him. If she like to make him the ridicule of Europe, he will accept his fate and deem it heaven. Whilst Yseulte—Yseulte,—before she is twenty, will be widowed in fact and left to the consolation of some little child, plucking the daisies on the sward here at her feet.’
To Friederich Othmar love had ever seemed the most puerile of delusions, the most illogical of all human fallacies, but now it took a deadlier shape before him, and he began to comprehend why poets—interpreters of human madness as they were—had likened it to the witch’s mandrake, to the devouring sea, to the flame which no power can quench, to all things terrible, irresistible, and deadly as death.