Both irritation and self-reproach were aroused in him, but they did no more than disquiet and annoy him. He saw no means by which he could be kinder, or gentler, or more generous, to Yseulte than he was already. Love was not his to command. He could not help it if day by day an unsatisfied passion gnawed in him for an absent woman, and if day by day the fair face of his young wife receded farther and farther from him into the shadowy distance of a complete indifference. All which he could compel himself to render,—consideration, deference, kindness, attention,—all these he poured out upon Yseulte with the utmost liberality. What was missing was not in his power to give. He felt with a shudder that the longer time went on, the more their lives passed together, the greater would grow the coldness he felt for her. He recognised all her sweetness and grace; he was not ungrateful for the affection she bore him; he admired the many delicate beauties of her mind and character. But she was nothing to him; she never would have the power to quicken his pulses by one second. She was all that purity, honour, and spirituality of thought could make her; but she had no place in his heart. He had even to struggle hard with himself at times not to let the sense of her perpetual presence there become almost an offence to him. He was a generous man, and he had always striven to be just, but he knew that he failed to be just to her because of the fret and fever of his own thoughts, which left him no peace, but kept repeating for ever the same burden: ‘The woman you love is free now. O fool! O fool!’
He believed that he altogether concealed all that he felt from Yseulte. He did not dream that she had divined his secret. Her manner, which had never been demonstrative, but had been always marked by that mixture of shyness and of stateliness which were most natural to her, was not one which displayed the changes of every emotion; she had been reared in too perpetual a sense that it was both low and coarse to show the inner feelings of the heart by abrupt and transparent signs of emotion, and the calm high breeding of her habitual tone was as a mask, though a most innocent one, and hid alike her sorrow, her fear, her jealous terrors, and her wistful tenderness.
‘I must never trouble him,’ she said to herself again and again. She knew that she could not take away from him the burden of her life; that she could not release him from the vows he had vowed to her; but she did her uttermost to efface herself otherwise. In these tranquil summer months no one saw more amiss with her than a certain melancholy and lassitude, which were attributed to the state of her health. She was often alone, by choice, in the great gardens and the forest nooks of the park, and those poor little timid verses in which her soul found some kind of utterance were the only confidants of her grief and pain. They were poor things, she knew, but her heart spoke in them with involuntary, though feeble and halting, speech. They did her some little good. She had no mother or friend to whom she could say what she suffered, and from a priest she shrank; her woes—the mental woes of neglected love, the physical woes of approaching parturition—could not be told to any man.
‘No one has wanted me all my life!’ she thought one day, as she sat in the gardens of Amyôt, whilst her eyes filled with blinding tears. Her father had never heeded her; her grandmother had cared for her, indeed, but had willed her budding life to the cloister, as a thing for which there was no place amidst the love and the laughter of the earth. She had been dependent, undesired, on her cousin’s charity, and to her husband she was as little as the does that couched at noon under his forest trees. No one had ever wanted her! The knowledge lay on her young life as a stone lies on the bird which it has killed. Through the hot mist of her tears she gazed wistfully at the long lines of the majestic house which only a year before had been to her the centre of such perfect happiness. And even that happiness he had never shared!
The hush of the golden noon-day was about her, and the perfume of innumerable roses filled the air.
‘My little child will want me,’ she thought, with a throb of hope at her heart.
After a little while she rose and walked towards the house. Othmar, who had come out from his library on to the terrace, saw her in the distance, and descended the steps to meet her.
‘Do not tire yourself, my dear,’ he said as he offered her his arm.
His very gentleness almost hurt her more than unkindness or discourtesy would have done. She seemed to see in it how he strove, by all the tenderness of outward ceremonial, to atone for the absence of all tenderness of the heart,—to pay so liberally in silver because he had no gold to give.