He felt an irresistible impulse to seek out the woman he loved, to unburden his heart to her of this new thought which seemed to him like a crime. He had left her in anger and mortification, but it was to her that he turned instinctively under the pain of a discovery which had filled him with a sense of intolerable remorse.

Alas! they were not alone; the great house was full of guests. With the slanting of the afternoon shadows across the hoary face of the old sun-dial, on which were the monogram of FranÇois de Valois and his sister, these indolent people had all left their chambers and were now scattered in quest of diversion all over the house, the gardens, or the woods, riding, driving, making music, or making love, carrying on their banter, their friendships, their rivalries, their intrigues. To see her as he wished, alone, was impossible for many hours. After sunset there was the long and ceremonious dinner; after dinner there was the usual evening pastime, some chamber music by great artists, some dancing for those who wished it, whist and baccarat in the card-room, flirtation in the drawing-rooms, constant demands, which he could not resist, made upon his own courtesy and social powers.

'What a stupid life!' he thought impatiently, being out of tune with its lightness and gaiety. 'What a stupid bondage! The vine-dressers sound asleep in their cave-cabins above the Loire water are a thousand times wiser than we are!'

He looked at his wife often. She had professed to think her world tiresome and its monotony of pleasure tedious; she had professed to find its conventional routine mere treadmill work which no one had the courage to refuse to pursue, but which every one of its toilers hated; and yet she never spent a day otherwise than in this conventional world!—she never ceased for an hour to surround herself with its artificialities and its pageantries. If she had really wished to escape from it how easy to have done so!—how easy to have chosen instead some solitary and tranquil spot with him and with her children!

But they were all as the very breath of her existence, this air of the great world, this perpetual movement and excitation, these elegant crowds, these honey-tongued courtiers, this Babel of news, and novelties, and fashion, and ennui, and endless effort to be amused! Were she alone with him at AmyÔt, would she not yawn with ennui every hour of the twenty-four? She had said that she would.

He left the brilliant rooms as soon as his duties as a host permitted him to escape, and wandered through the dusky aisles and avenues of his gardens.

The night was still and sultry; the sounds of music and the reflection of the lights within came from the many open casements of the great castle on to the terraces and lawns beneath. There was no moon: the steep roof, the pointed towers, the frowning keep of AmyÔt stood up black and massive against the starry sky. Restless, and tormented by his thoughts, its master paced the dark grass alleys of its gardens; all the simple verses of the little manuscript poems seemed whispered from their leaves and murmured by the fountains.

'She loved me!' he thought again and again. And to that warm and tender heart his own had been so cold!

It had been no fault of his; no man can love because he will; and still——

He stayed out in the gardens until the lights had ceased to shine in the great windows, and in the distant country lying beyond the forest belt of AmyÔt the call to vespers was ringing through the darkling daybreak from village tower and spire, waking the slumbering peasants to their toil amidst the vines or on the river.

Then he entered the house and went to his wife's apartments.

When her woman asked if she would receive him she smiled a little. He was like a repentant child, she thought, sorry that he had been ill-treated and tired of pouting!

'I am half asleep!' she said as he entered. 'Why do you come and disturb me? Where have you been all the evening? You look as if you had seen the ghosts of all the tellers of the tales of the Heptameron!'

She laughed a little as she spoke; she had put on a loose gown of soft white tissues, her hair was unbound; her feet were bare and slipped in Persian shoes sewn thick with pearls. She was lying back amongst the pale rose-coloured cushions of her couch in the hot night; her arms were uncovered to the shoulders; the light was mellow and tempered; the window stood open; a slight breeze stirred the air and the gauze of her gown; her eyes surveyed him with a smile of languid amusement.

'Pauvre enfant! a-t-il assez boudÉ!' she thought with an indulgent derision.

Othmar, for the first time in his life, was insensible of the seduction of her presence. She observed his preoccupation with some offence. It was a slight to herself.

'What is the matter?' she said impatiently. 'When I am dying to be alone and asleep, do you come to tell me that the Rothschilds will not join you in some loan, or that war is going to begin before the financiers wish for it? Surely, your bad news would have kept till to-morrow morning? Qu'avez-vous donc?'

Othmar winced under the irritability and lightness of the words.

'NadÈge,' he said very low, 'did ever you think that it was possible that—that—she sought her own death?'

His voice faltered, and had a sound of repressed tears in it.

She looked at him in astonishment and silence. She did not ask him whom he meant.

'Sometimes,' she answered at length in a hushed voice, with a certain sense of awe. 'Sometimes—yes—I have thought so. Yes, since you ask me.'

His head drooped upon his chest; he sighed heavily. She looked at him with compassion and surprise.

'Is it possible,' she thought, 'that he never had any suspicion of it? Men are moles!'

Aloud, she said gently:

'What makes you think of it now? What can have happened?'

He did not reply for some moments. Then he answered unsteadily:

'I went into those locked rooms; there were some verses in a drawer—some little poems. I do not know why; all at once the impression came to me; I had never dreamed of it before.'

'Men are always so blind!' she thought, as she replied aloud:

'My dear Otho, we cannot know; why let us imagine the worst? It might very well be a mere accident. The woman Nicolle has said how often she had warned her of the dangers of that ruined roof. Do not take that burden of great useless remorse upon your life. It will make you wretched.'

'Not more wretched than she was. Not more than I deserve. I was a brute to her.'

'That is nonsense; you could not be brutal to anybody if you tried. You were indifferent, but that was not your fault. She did not know how to make you otherwise. There are women who never know——'

'But she deserved so happy a fate!'

'Are there any happy fates? It is a mere expression. The happy people are the conventional terre À terre unemotional creatures who pass their lives between two bolsters, one Custom and the other Prejudice. These two bolsters save them from all shocks, and they slumber and grow fat. That poor child might have been happiest in the cloisters, because she would not have known all she missed. But in the world she would certainly have been unhappy, whether with you or any other, because she demanded impossibilities, and because she had no knowledge of human nature.'

Othmar did not hear what she said.

'I shall always feel that I have been her murderer,' he said in a hushed voice. Those poor little verses haunted him like the memory of dead children long unmourned and suddenly remembered.

She looked at him with some impatience rising in her.

'How like a man!' she thought. 'How exactly like a man—to have killed a woman with his indifference and never to have perceived that he killed her, and then suddenly, six or seven years afterwards, to become alive to it as a fact, and then to suffer indescribable tortures! A woman would have known at once, but probably would never have blamed herself for it. We have so much more intuition and so much less conscience.'

She was sorry for the pain she saw in him, but she was impatient at once of his slowness of perception and of the strength of his tardy emotions.

'Will she be like Banquo's Ghost between us?' she thought, with a vague jealousy of those memories suddenly arisen.

'My dear Otho,' she said aloud, with a little disdain in her sympathy, 'I understand all that you feel, because this cruel fancy has presented itself quite suddenly to you. But I do not think that you ought to dwell on it, since you can know nothing for certain. You have been always too much in love with imaginary sorrows; you have always been too apt to make for yourself calamities which destiny was willing to spare you. Do not make such a mistake now. Be man enough to face the truth as it stands, which is, that had that poor child lived, she would have grown more and more intolerable to you with every breath she drew. Men enjoy sophisms, and they hate looking at their own motives in all their nakedness. If she had lived you would have made her utterly miserable, through no fault either of yours or hers, but simply from the fault of marriage, which yokes two uncongenial lives together, and refuses to release them for mental and moral disparities which inflict a million times more misery than do the mere gross offences for which the law does grant release.'

'I have no doubt you are quite right, but I cannot follow your reasoning,' said Othmar with some bitterness. 'I can only feel that I have slain a better life than my own.'

'You were always so exaggerated in your expressions,' she said with the tone which he himself had so seldom heard from her. 'You have always, as I say, been like the German poets of the last century, perpetually in love with sorrow; I suppose because you can fashion her at your pleasure. Those to whom she comes uninvited dislike the look of her, and would shut her out if they could.'

Othmar rose impatient and wounded.

'I should have hoped you would have had more sympathy,' he said as he left the room.

She gave a little gesture of wrath as the door closed behind him.

'Do men ever know what they wish?' she said to herself. 'If he could bring that poor child to life again he would do it, for the moment, and spend the remainder of his life in repenting that he had ever done so. If the powers of men were equal in force to the momentary flashes of their consciences, what strange things the world would see!'

She herself was conscious that she had answered him with less feeling, with less sympathy than he might well have looked for from her, but the momentary sense of offence with which she had heard him speak had been too strong to allow her gentler instincts to prevail with her. She was irritated, amazed, profoundly offended, and amazed with such grand vanity of amazement as Cleopatra might have felt had some memory of poor pale Octavia risen up betwixt her lover and herself.

He meanwhile went through the hushed dim corridors of the house with a pang the more at his heart. He had spoken in a moment of strong feeling, of freshly-awakened pain, and the coldness with which his confidence had been received, left its own frost upon his soul. He did not remember that which every man finds; that no sorrow for one woman will ever awaken sympathy in the breast of another. Shame, suffering, wounds of the world's scorn or fortune's cruelties will make all women compassionate and tender; but when a man sighs for a woman lost, he will meet with no pity from those women whom he loves. He did not think of that; he only felt a bruised and baffled sense of utter loneliness; a momentary weakness like that of a child who, being hurt, creeps up to arms it loves only to be repulsed from them. That weary sense of hopelessness which her lovers had so often felt before her came to him; such hopelessness as may come over the soul of one who, standing shipwrecked on some barren shore, is fronted by some steep, straight, inaccessible wall of marble cliff, upon whose smooth white breast there is no place for any aching foot to rest or any hand to close: a white wall shining in the sun which sees men drown and die.

Some lines of Swinburne's earliest and greatest years came back in vaguely remembered fragments to his mind.

The verses came back to his memory as he went away from her chamber to his lonely couch; and he found in them that curious solace which poetry gives to pain when it echoes pain closely; that consolation of sympathy, which makes of poets the ministers and the angels of life. The dull, resigned abandonment which was in these lines was in his own soul. It was no more fierce grief or wild despair, or the delirious rebellion of the lover against his mistress's indifference; it was the apathetic acquiescence of a nature powerless to awake and sway another, the weary and resigned acceptance of a thing unchangeable.

Nay, and though all men living had pity on me,
She would not see!