by Ouida
Othmar understood that very well with his reason, but he was not reconciled to it in his heart; he would have desired something different. The immense hotel which his father had built, with its ceilings painted by Ingres and Delaroche, its gardens sloping to the Seine, its genuine treasures of art, its double staircase, its cour d’honneur, its stables built on the model of Chantilly, was no better than a barn to him; he detested it with a sort of petulance; he never willingly resided in it. Its network of communication with the banks and the bureaux, laid with all the facilities which modern science could invent, had no interest for him. He did not feel the slightest emotion about any public event that could possibly happen, whether wars and rumours of wars, or the betting of a racecourse. He had none of those tastes which may make a rich man popular for a season and ruined in a twelvemonth. To his mistresses he was invariably generous, but these extravagances scarcely made more impression on his vast fortune than a few pailsfull taken from the sea make diminution in its volume. His greatest pleasure, on which he spent his money most largely, was music. Wherever he was he gathered great singers and musicians around him. She had likened him to Ludwig of Bavaria. His caprices were not quite so eccentric, but his preference was almost as ungrudgingly indulged. He had studied music theoretically and profoundly, though he had never touched any instrument and had never written a bar. It was one of those tastes which to his father had appeared an absolute insanity. He also spent much upon his libraries and his horses, as the Princess Napraxine had said to him. But since he was not a bibliophile, and did not care for rare editions, and never raced or made wagers, his expenditure even here was moderate as compared with his powers. From the time of his early and bitter passion for Sara Vernon he had avoided those famous sorceresses who can beggar Crœsus and discrown Cæsar; they recalled too vividly to him the intense suffering of his boyhood, when he had found himself betrayed by what he adored. To the few women whom he had ever noticed he had been invariably generous even to excess, with a generosity that strove to make amends for the scorn he had for them; but he had had none of those long-enduring liaisons which cling like the octopus and drain like the vampire. The knowledge that so many women would have drunk the dregs of infamy at his word for the sake of his gold, held him aloof from them; he was conscious that they pursued him as the sword-fish pursues the fish entangled in a seine. There was no Venusburg which would not have let him enter into its enchantment with his golden key; and this untempted Tannhäuser turned away indifferent. All the rest which attracted other men — gambling, feasting, drinking, racing, living together in feverish crowds, — appeared to him ridiculous and tiresome. All the popular vices of men of his rank seemed to him dull and vulgar, trivial and stupid; the life of the muscadin, of the masher, seemed to him, on the whole, more stupid than the Tartar’s. There was a certain similarity between him and Nadine Napraxine. The world appeared to them both very narrow and its resources few.
For her the result of this impression took the shape of disdain; in him of regret.
In her it was a thirst of the mind, in him it was a hunger of the heart, which led them to think that the land around them was barren.
His friends called him jestingly as Chateaubriand was called, ‘le grand ennuyé,’ but it was precisely his vague discontent with the puerilities and the vulgarities of existence which made his affinity to Nadine Napraxine. She had much the same contempt for all those who surrounded her and who made so much of all their little ambitions, who crowned themselves with straw and thought they reigned, who set their souls on a winning horse, a political measure, a policy, a project, or a coup d’état, whilst the horse was to her taste as much worth wasting thought on as the statesmanship.
If he had heard of his own total ruin he would have put a Horace in his pocket and walked out of the great bronze Renaissance gates of his palace with a serenity which would have had in it nothing either strained or affected. He was no ascetic or philosopher, but his great fortunes bored him, and their origin annoyed him. His temperament would probably have led to higher ambitions if he had not been born to so much possession that ambition had no scope. He was wont to cite as the wisest man the world had known the gay physician of the Fronde epoch, Gui Patin, who sat throughout that troublous time, peaceful and amused, beneath his own cherry-trees. But fate had seated him, himself, beneath the gold pagoda-tree, and the tree seemed to him a sterile one; it had neither fragrance nor shade, yet a million eager hands were always trying to pluck from it, and for him who sat under it there was no quiet. Some one was always wanting him to shake down the fruit into their hands.
He had had one great misfortune; he had known satiety almost before he had known enjoyment; and men were so bent upon making use of him that they did not take time to attach him to them before they disgusted him. The world in general did not like him much; it followed him endlessly, but it thought his reserve arrogance, his simplicity of taste affectation, and his dislike to display avarice. It did not comprehend in the least the simple truth that Othmar would have shaken his gold off him if he could have done so like so much mud. In the Croat character there are both romance and religion; he had more of the Croat than the English temper in him; but, like most men of his time, he had no belief at all, though it was a sorrow to him, not a boast; and the romance of his impulses had been early chilled and silenced by the venal passions offered to his boyhood for sake of his wealth. He learned too early that there is scarcely anything which may not be bought. It is a knowledge which hardens the selfish, but saddens the generous, nature. The irresistible conviction that money is after all the one great power of the world is not an exhilarating or a consoling fact for thoughtful or visionary minds.
He knew very well that he might have been the most vicious brute, the most brutal tyrant, the most merciless of men, and mankind would have served, followed, and flattered him none the less; he could have purchased immunity for most crimes, condonation for most iniquities. So long as he had remained master of his fortune and of his possessions, he knew that men would have sought him none the less eagerly though he had had the vices of a Heliogabalus; and that women would have given themselves to him none the less willingly though he had been as hideous as the Veiled Prophet. It did not make him cynical; but it made him indifferent, and it moved him at times to a vague sadness. It seemed scarcely worth while for his forefathers to have raised that mountain of gold, only that from its summit he might see the nakedness of the world of men.
CHAPTER VII.
At eight o’clock on the following night Othmar walked across his gardens, under a starlit sky, towards the adjacent grounds of Millo. A few roods of plantation parted his from theirs; in the boundary fence there was a small gate, of which his major-domo had reminded him that a key existed. The night was young, but the stars already were many, and a slender moon had risen in the deep serene blue of the heavens. Though it was midwinter the air was sweet with the smell of orange orchards in flower and of the aromatic pine-woods of his own enclosures.
‘Will she be there?’ he thought a hundred times.
He had kept away from her all the day, had busied himself with his sailors, with his steward, with the condition of the place; but he longed to see that smile which even in its malice was sweeter to him than all the kindness of others, to hear again that voice which was music to his ear, even in its chill, indifferent mockeries.
He had an intuitive belief, which had been shaken but not destroyed by his own failure, that in her nature there were depths to be reached, passions to be awakened, though a bland and cruel indifference at present veiled them. He had been ruthlessly betrayed by her coquetry, profoundly wounded by her coldness, but he believed in her still — even still believed in himself as the man whom ultimately she would love. He had returned to Europe with the resolution never to be in her presence except when the hazards of society should bring them perforce in the same atmosphere, but at the first charm of her regard he had forgotten all his resolves, lost all his wisdom. Life only
seemed worth living if he could hear that one voice, so sweet in its modulations, so chilly in its perfect harmony. It was, perhaps, because he was one of the few men who could gratify all wishes, caprices, and ambitions as fast as such arose, that this one thing wholly denied to him, wholly inaccessible, had such force of attraction for him. Yet he was bitterly angered against himself for his own submission. She was but a supreme coquette, a woman pétrie du monde, despite all her charm; but she could make her careless little nod, or a half-ironical smile, more prized from her than the utmost tenderness of other women ever was. There was about her that air as of one so wholly indifferent to all the vulgarities which others esteem triumphs that, when she ever deigned to notice that a man existed, he was more flattered than by the fondest concessions of his most ardent adorers. She had been assailed by all the powers and vanities of passion, but she had always given it at most that cool little smile — sometimes the smile had been compassionate, more often it had been cruel. Women had succumbed to him as full-blown roses fall before the touch of a careless hand; for this reason the chillness of Nadine Napraxine, which seemed chastity, had had so strong an attraction for him that for awhile it had seemed to him sweeter to wait upon its caprices than to obtain fuller response from them. But no man tarries long at this stage of his affections, and the time had come when he had grown impatient of a pursuit without end, of an allegiance without recompense. It was like an empty cup of exquisite form and transparent beauty, for ever without wine in it; to the connoisseur the gem is perfect thus, but to those athirst it brings little delight.
The unshuttered windows of Millo were glistening with light, which shone through the thickets of rose-laurel and bay as he approached the house, and a flood of light was poured out shining on the stone perron, carpeted and screened closely by rose-coloured awnings from the air of night. After a year and a half spent on tropic seas and in desert lands, the return to society has always a half-sweet, half-bitter, flavour. Was it worth while, he thought, to leave all the routine and tedium and emptiness of the world only to drift back again into its formalities and follies?
He had, however, no choice left in the matter, for the servants in the antechamber were bowing low to him and taking his furred coat from him, and in another moment the Duchesse de Vannes was welcoming him with all the genuine pleasure which a hostess feels in having the first visit from a person long absent, and high enough in the world’s favour to make his return to the world an event of social interest and of public importance.
Aurore de Vannes, called Cri-Cri by her friends, was a very pretty woman, as much and as delicately painted as the fan she carried; she wore a marvellous costume of cream-coloured velvet blent with japonica-coloured satin, and had japonicas in her hair and at her bosom; she wore also some very fine rubies.
When he entered the drawing-rooms of Millo there were a dozen persons assembled there, most of whom he knew, but amongst them was not the Princess Napraxine. There was lamentation for her absence, but no surprise at it, because her caprices were so well known.
As he entered a little note had entered behind him; when Mme. de Vannes had said all her pretty greetings to him she glanced at it.
‘“Désolée — migraine — temps détestable,”’ she murmured, as she ran her eyes over it. ‘Of course!’ she said, aloud, ‘that is always Nadine’s way — she does it on purpose. She loves to disappoint people. She was out riding this afternoon; I saw her in the distance with Boris Seliedoff. She treated the Empress in that fashion last winter at Petersburg, and when the Dames du Palais told her that the Tsarina was so displeased that she would exclude her from Court, Nadine said to them quite simply: “Trop de bonté! Je m’habitue si mal à ces corvées-là.”’
‘And has she been excluded?’ asked one of the guests.
‘Ouf!’ cried the Duchesse de Vannes, ‘I see you do not know her. No empress in the world would dare to exclude her. Imagine how she would avenge herself! Courts cannot afford to be brave nowadays.’
Othmar heard every syllable she said as he conversed with De Vannes, a tall man of some eight-and-thirty years old, with a look of extreme distinction and of as supreme fatigue. ‘Who is Boris Seliedoff?’ he thought, with the restless jealousy of an unsatisfied passion. He regretted his tent in Tartary: the elegant rooms, the perfumed air, the pretty women, the low buzz of conversation, the little breaks of laughter, the artificiality, the monotony of the whole thing, wearied him already.
The dinner was gay and even brilliant; to him alone it seemed tedious. Why had she not come? he thought, and that disappointment alone occupied him. He was angered that she should have so much power to make la pluie et le beau temps of his time and of his moods.
‘Is Othmar cured by Central Asia?’ said one of the guests to the Duchesse de Vannes who looked across the table at him, and answered, ‘I should say not. He would hardly be within five leagues of La Jacquemerille if he were so. Besides, Nadine has a power of making herself remembered which I have seen in no one else. It is because she remembers nothing herself. The law of contrasts is the law of affinity.’
‘Madame Napraxine is the only woman in whom virtue does not look ridiculous,’ said an old gentleman to his neighbour, overhearing her name. ‘But then, true, this is because it is not virtue at all, but something much more disdainful and unapproachable. Have you seen a peacock ravage a flower-garden? He does not care for any one of the flowers, but all the same the carnations and roses and geraniums fall in showers as he goes, strewing them right and left, and drawing his plumes carelessly over the waste he has made behind him. Her lovers are no more to Madame Napraxine than the flowers to the peacock; but the result is the same.’
‘Is that a quality you would rank very highly?’ asked the person next him.
‘That depends on your standard,’ he answered. ‘It is a power which is to her just what plumage is to the peacock — something quite beyond imitation, and royal in its disdainful beauty. I did not think men were ever hopelessly in love in this century, but with her I perceive that they are so.’
‘Othmar’ —— began the other.
‘Othmar?’ repeated the old diplomat, ‘Othmar reminds me of a man I once knew, who was a collector of miniatures; the collection has been dispersed now by unworthy heirs, but some twenty years ago it was a marvel of completeness. Every admirable miniaturist whom the world has possessed was represented in it by his finest examples. It had taken him thirty-five years and more millions to make it what it was. Any one else would have thought it perfect. He did not, because he had not an example amongst it of Karl Huth. You may never have heard of Karl Huth; I never had. He was a German miniaturist of the sixteenth century; he dwelt at Daunenberg, a small place on the Elbe. There is nothing of him in any museum, and there was supposed to be nothing of him anywhere but his tradition. For thirty-five years my friend hunted North and South Germany for a Karl Huth. At length, such was his perseverance that he did find an undeniable Karl Huth, in the family of a tradesman at Grieffenhagen, in a little portrait of a woman, on ivory, the size of a walnut, and signed and dated. His joy was immense; but, alas! it was of short duration. The burgomaster who owned it would not part with it. My friend offered sums untold for this three inches of ivory, would have sold his estates to purchase it, stopped at nothing in his frantic offers; but the burgomaster was rich, too, and inflexible; he would not sell the Karl Huth. There was some fable in his family about it. Two obstinacies met with a shock like the foreheads of two elephants in combat; of course the Teuton obstinacy beat the Gaul’s. The Karl Huth remained in the burgomaster’s possession, and my friend had such an excess of rage and despair that it brought on gout and killed him in an inn in that obscure Pomeranian town — all because with three thousand five hundred famous miniatures he failed to acquire one obscure example. Now Madame Napraxine is certainly not obscure, nevertheless she is the Karl Huth of Othmar. He is one of those men who can command and enjoy everything; therefore, of course, he has set his heart on the only wom
an, probably, in Europe who will not smile on him. All his grand collection became worthless to my poor friend when once he failed to include in it that single Karl Huth.’