She went out into the balmy air, clear as a crystal, and filled with the scent of blossoming orange-boughs. She stood awhile on the marble terrace and looked seaward. The memories of the dead men who so late had been living there beside her passed over her in the warmth and light of the morning with a chill, as the north wind will sweep through the sunshine and scatter the clusters of orange-buds. Of them all, it was of her husband that she thought with the nearest likeness to self-reproach which her nature made possible.
'He was brave, he was as trustful as a dog, he was _bon enfant_,' she mused, 'and I do not think I ever said to him a single kind word before that last day--and then it was only said to deceive him!'
She remembered him as he had spoken to her on that day. He had had a certain dignity, the dignity of manliness, of simplicity, of truthfulness; and all that was left of him was lying, mere dry dust and bones, in his emblazoned coffin in the gilded gloom of the church at Zaraizoff.
'Well--the dead are dead, and we shall soon be with them,' she thought with a sigh, as she turned from the sea wall of the terrace and looked at the picturesque and irregular front of the house, covered with its gay garlands of creeping plants.
The place was hers, bought for her by Napraxine, as one may buy a bonbon-box for a child. It seemed that day to laugh with light and colour. Coming hither as she did from the endless night of a Russian winter, it seemed bathed in heat, and luminance, and flowers. She descended the steps to where her ponies waited, and went with them along the climbing roads into the hills above La Jacquemerille.
The day was still young. The bare mountain sides wore the hues of the jacinth and amethyst; the odours of sweet herbs and spring flowers were strong and sweet; far down below, unseen, the sea was sparkling, lending the sense of its presence and its freedom to all the gorges and hillsides above. Her swift-footed ponies bore her fleetly as the Hours bore Aurora through the roseate and golden radiance of the April morning.
With intention she guided them up the steep roads which led to the humble church of S. Pharamond, hidden beneath its great gnarled olive trees, and covered with its network of rose-boughs. She knew that Yseulte went there often in the forenoon, and the caprice moved her to see if she could meet, as if by chance, this poor child, whose fate lay in the hollow of her hand, like a bird taken from a trap to be strangled with a touch at pleasure of its keeper. The sense of such power was always sweet to her; although so familiar, its familiarity did not detract from its pleasure. It was the sole thing which did not by repetition grow monotonous. Her life had been short by years, but it had been full of such dominion. She had dealt with men and women as she chose, and to make or mar their destinies had always been the sole pastime of which she did not weary. Humanity was her box of puppets, as it is that of the Solitary of Varzin. To hold the strings of fate, to bind and loose the threads of circumstance, and weave the warp and woof of destiny, was the only science which had ever had charm over her changeful temperament and her sceptical intelligence. Beside it all other things were trivial and tame. She had never met anyone who had resisted her will; Othmar himself had done so for awhile, but he had lived to repent and to succumb.
