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.
Occasionally an impulse came to Yseulte to tell everything to Melville, who was not her confessor, but who had known all her people so well in their days of trial and adversity; but her pride repressed the instinct of confidence. Besides, she thought drearily, she knew well all that Melville would answer--the only reply, indeed, which would be possible to him in such a case--he would exhort her to patience, to hope, to trust in heaven and in her husband. The originality of his character would not be able to escape from the platitudes of custom; he would only say to her what she could say to herself, 'Be courageous and be calm; time often heals all woes.'