Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  ‘He is in love still with Madame Napraxine,’ thought his uncle, finding his attention hard to fix. He was not sorry for that. At Othmar’s age he was sure to be in love with someone, and the more he was in love the less likely was he to meddle with the transactions of the House.

  The Baron could be excessively amusing, and was so this day of his arrival at S. Pharamond; but Othmar would gladly have been free of his presence. He knew that the old man would see at a glance, if he and Nadine Napraxine met before him, that time had not cured him of passion; and the malice and the contempt of his uncle were both disagreeable to him. Moreover, Othmar had been too perpetually agreed with all his life to be pleased by the constant enunciation of opinions and sentiments the reverse of his own. There was that in the tranquil cynicism of Baron Friederich which left him with a sense of moral nausea. Men, it is true, were not worth much; but he could never get accustomed to the calm manner in which his uncle was habitually ready to sacrifice all their interests — their bodies, too, had there been any question of them — to what he considered advantageous to himself and to his house in public life and finance.

  He did not care for the new Russian loan, for the new Turkish loan, for the great naval dockyards to be made by Germany on the Baltic, for the railway that was to be driven along the ancient bed of the Oxus, nor for the necessities of the empire of Brazil, nor for the development of Canadian forests. It did not interest him that such and such a sovereign would be a cripple without his help, or such and such a country as virtually in pawn to him as though it had been a pledged estate; that the assistance of his gold could enable a Ministry to keep its tenure of office, or the refusal of it could precipitate a State into revolution; to Baron Fritz it was like holding the reins of the universe, but to Othmar himself it was excessively dull work. The heir of four generations of money-lenders, he was absolutely indifferent to the immense power which lay in the stroke of his pen; the genius of finance was inherited by him, though dormant in him; even his uncle did justice to the accuracy of his vision, to the certainty of his instinct; but it was genius unused; he had no taste to employ its capacities. Europe was as indifferent to him as a mound of clay.

  ‘We only do mischief, unmitigated mischief,’ he asserted very often. ‘Look at the Canal of Suez; it has only bred wars and pretexts for wars, and will probably embroil England and France for the next century, — until indeed India shall have become Russian, or the African negro have avenged Abd-el-Kadir. Then again take the Panama project: it will set Great Britain and the United States at each other’s throats like two bull-dogs.’

  ‘You are enough to make your father rise from his grave,’ said Baron Fritz.

  ‘It is only aristocrats who do that,’ returned Othmar. ‘The financier sleeps sound on the remembrance of his own virtues — and loans.’

  The memory of his father was bitter to him; he could not forget the injury done to him in his earliest youth by subjecting him to the charms and the corruptions of Sara Vernon.

  ‘You must marry, and then you will see things differently,’ his uncle insisted, reverting to the simplicity of reiteration.

  What a cruel thing was destiny! Thousands of men who had not a crust of bread begat legitimate offsprings in the most reckless and profuse manner; and the one man for whom lawful heirs were an absolute necessity and duty obstinately neglected his obligations to family and to the world.

  It was possible, even probable, that the last of the Othmars would remain the last of his race.

  ‘Marry for me,’ said Othmar. ‘I will give all we possess to any cousins you may give me, and keep only enough myself to live peaceably in Arabia Felix. I have always wished to live there; the climate is divine; and, after all, there is nothing that is of so much consequence as climate.’

  ‘You will always jest!’

  ‘Most people say I am too serious. I am not jesting at all. We have all a sort of superstition that we must live in Europe, but it is only a superstition. There is a great deal finer weather elsewhere, and without fine weather life is intolerable.’

  ‘Have you never seen a woman you would marry?’ asked Baron Fritz.

  ‘Perhaps I have,’ said Othmar, who never lied. ‘But never one I could marry.’

  ‘Ah! — someone else’s wife! That is just like you. If she were not unattainable she would have no more attraction than anyone else. You are so whimsical.’

  ‘I hope not. I dislike whimsical people. They are always asking for the windows to be shut, or imagining that there is a drainpipe open. Oh, some day I may marry. I do not pledge my future. But I have no inclination to marriage, and you will confess that you preach what you do not practise.’

  ‘I am seventy-one and you are thirty-two,’ said Baron Fritz; ‘I should have married fifty years ago if I had been as you are, the head of the House.’

  ‘Curse the House!’ said Othmar, though he was a man who never used any oaths, great or small. But it seemed to him that the House of Othmar was for ever on his shoulders like Sindbad’s burden; that he could do nothing freely as other men did; that go where he would he could never wholly escape from the mephitic acid which adulation and importunity exhale, and could never gain that simplicity of existence which, precisely because it was denied to him, seemed to him the chief good on earth.

  ‘You speak as if the Othmars had been Plantagenets or Comneni!’ he continued. ‘It is not quite two centuries ago that the world did not even know that a Croat horse-dealer bore that name! The last time I was at Agram, I looked into the archives of the city; nobody ever did so; they were crabbed and hard to decipher; but I passed a day over them when it was raining and blowing so hard that there was not a soul abroad in the streets except the sentries. In the municipal documents for the year 1730 I found an account of a famine which had been the result of floods such as we have seen in our own day, for science, after all, makes little way against natural catastrophes. It was during this famine, when every grain of wheat was worth treble its weight in gold, that your hero Marc Othmar made his first great coup. He had amassed money before, but this was the grand conception which first largely enriched him. He had bought enormously in corn, foreseeing a wet season and bad harvests. He had more than he had hoped for — he had the whole country under water. He had almost a monopoly of grain. In those days government aid could not come by steam, and besides, Croatia had just then no government. In these records it is stated that upwards of forty-five thousand persons, chiefly women and children, died of starvation; and all the while they were dying Marc Othmar shut up his grain and only sold it sack by sack, at an average rate of a death a bushel. You find that admirable; I do not. I confess, ever since I put these facts together out of the fragments of public history, it has seemed to me as if there were an earthy smell about all our money; you know the lungs of people who die starved always do smell like decaying mould. It is pure fancy — I am quite aware of that. But even, putting fancy out of the question, I do not see anything heroic about the figure of our founder. He is not Hugh Lupus or Godfrey de Bouillon.’

  Baron Fritz’s patience had scarcely endured the strain upon it.

  ‘I never heard the story. I believe you have invented it,’ he said irritably. ‘If it be true, we have no explanation, so we cannot form a correct judgment. At the most, accepting it as you relate it, no more was done then by Marc Othmar than every farmer or peasant proprietor in Europe and America does whenever he gets a chance. Not so much as was done by Ferdinand de Lesseps when he sacrificed the fellahs to make his Egyptian Canal. You cannot conduct any trade on abstract principles or æsthetic moralities. You must buy cheap and sell dear, or commerce falls to the ground, and the whole superstructure of society falls with it. As the lawyer cannot refuse to conduct a case because he disapproves of the morality of it, so a financier cannot let pass a favourable operation because he may not approve entirely of its scope; all he has to examine are its wisdom and utility. When once you enter the region of motives and of principles, all is conf
usion. No two men have the same views as to what is right; you must proceed on broader lines than those of fanciful ethics. For instance, nothing is more clearly immoral than the marriage of two diseased persons, but the priest or the mayor who should refuse to perform the ceremonies demanded of him because he conceived that the bodily health of the people came before him was unsatisfactory would be clearly overpassing the boundaries of his functions, which are limited to the consideration of simply legal obstacles. So, a man of business who once concerns himself with the vague moralities of his speculations is lost; all he has to occupy himself with is their solvency, their legality, and their probabilities of success or failure. Marc Othmar, no doubt, regarded his investments in corn in that purely practical light.’

  ‘For a very clever man as you are,’ returned Othmar, ‘you are curiously unconscious of what a satire your theories are on all that you most admire. I am as entirely convinced as you can be that Marc Othmar never gave a thought to the twenty-five thousand people who starved to death while his corn was shut up in granaries and barges; all the difference between us is, that you think this singleness of eye for his own interest was heroic, and I think it was not so, — that it was even as near true hellish wickedness as humanity can go.’

  ‘There is neither wickedness nor virtue in questions of finance,’ said Baron Friederich, with distress at his nephew’s obtuseness.

  ‘There is certainly no virtue,’ said Othmar.

  ‘Neither wickedness nor virtue,’ repeated the Baron. ‘They are pure abstractions, like political economy. To talk of the immorality of a speculation is like talking of the vices of a rock-crystal. There is only one sin in a financial operation; it sins if it be unsound.’

  ‘Financial morality,’ then said Othmar, ‘has at least this advantage over social morality, that it is very much simplified!’

  ‘It is simple as your stable’s doctrines,’ replied the Baron. ‘If a horse be sound, he is a good horse; if he be not sound, he is a screw; nothing can be simpler. And the moment that a man begins to confuse himself with asking any more complex questions than this one, “Is it sound?” — whether he engage in a great operation of finance, or whether he be only buying a roadster, he will be inevitably bewildered with his own multiform requirements and will fall into the hands of mere persuasive sharpers.’

  ‘I can buy a horse,’ said Othmar, ‘but I will leave finance to you.’

  ‘Not always,’ said Baron Fritz, grimly, with vivid recollections of more than one occasion on which his nephew had interfered with a peremptory veto to prevent some contemplated operation of which the morality was more doubtful than the expediency. The occasions had been rare indeed; but they had left an ineffaceable soreness on the mind of the elder man; nay, he would scarcely have forgiven them had it not been that his devotion to Otho as to the head of the House had something of the irrational and patient loyalty which the Russian nation renders blindly to its unseen Tzar.

  As for Othmar himself, he was too impatient of his uncle’s laxity of principle and conscience to do full justice to the fine qualities which accompanied these.

  Those huge stone palaces whose portals bore the magic name of Othmar were sacred to Baron Fritz as his temples to a Greek. His nephew never passed through the great doors of any one of them without a sense of impatience, of distaste, without a remembrance of the twenty-five thousand people who had died of hunger in Croatia whilst Marc Othmar was building up his piles of ducats and florins. The very homage with which he was himself met within their walls irritated him. He thought of all the debasing worship the earth has seen the worship of riches was the most corrupt. ‘If I were a leper they would kiss my ulcers so long as my hand could sign a cheque,’ he thought. After all, when Marc Othmar had used up human lives in the furnace of his speculations he had used up material which was but of little worth.

  Yet despite the disdain which human nature cannot do otherwise than awaken in those who are the objects of its adulation if they keep their senses clear amidst the incense fumes, his heart was empty.

  ‘You have people here to-night?’ asked the Baron, a little later, his vigilant eyes perceiving the preparations which were being made in the little theatre attached to the château.

  ‘To-morrow night,’ answered Othmar. ‘A small dinner; I hope you will remain for it. And as Talazac, Sembrich, and other good singers are at Nice disponibles, we shall have some music afterwards and a few people; for that you will not care.’

  ‘The Napraxines are here?’ enquired his uncle, with a little smile.

  Othmar was annoyed to feel that he changed colour despite himself, as he answered in the affirmative.

  ‘Have you seen her?’ said Friederich Othmar, carelessly. ‘How do you find her? Maladive as usual?’

  ‘There is no woman living less maladive,’ said Othmar, with some irritation. ‘She is glad to make the care of her health a pretext when she is disinclined for the world; that is all.’

  ‘Ah, indeed?’ said the elder man. ‘All great rulers are allowed to be ill at their own convenience. Will she be ill or well to-morrow night?’

  ‘Time will show,’ replied Othmar, in a tone which closed the subject.

  CHAPTER X.

  It was a tiny church which bore the name of S. Cecilia at S. Pharamond, and was perched on an olive-covered knoll, with the rolling woods of the château d’Othmar at its base and the gardens of Millo on its right. Nicole Sandroz and a few other families of the petite culture gathered there on Sundays and holy days; but the great people of Millo, with their household, had their own private chapel, and the friends to whom Othmar had lent his house had never troubled themselves to find their way to the little whitewashed, wind-blown sanctuary and the lowly presbytery that leaned up against its south wall.

  Othmar himself, who had a score of ecclesiastics in a score of places looking to him for support, had hardly known that this little church and its old purblind peasant-born curé were upon the confines of his estate. He had paid every year a large sum for the maintenance of S. Pharamond, as for that of each of his houses and estates, but he had never examined the details of the expenditure. The advantage of an immense fortune is that you can leave all such matters to your secretaries. He paid them more heed than many would have done because of the views he entertained on the duties of saving other people from temptation; but S. Pharamond, with all its luxuries, elegancies, gardens, carriages, and conservatories, was only to him as a mere cottage, a mere toy. He had, indeed, almost forgotten that he had owned it, until, beating up the Bay of Genoa in a storm-tossed and almost disabled vessel, he had suddenly remembered that somewhere on this coast which slid away in the dusk to the westward he had a harbour and a quay all his own if he chose to go thither.

  The little church was ugly, poor, and had been built since the Revolution; all that redeemed it was a great climbing rose which covered the whole of its front, and was even flinging audacious branches upwards to the cross upon the roof. In summer the rose made the little plain square place a glory of pink bloom. Inside, there were a few deal benches, a few bad prints, a humble little altar, and some pewter candlesticks; the presbytery was equally as bare.

  The old vicar lived with one servant as old as himself; he toddled out amongst the farms, and was scouted and scowled at by some of the peasants, petted and welcomed by others. He did no harm, and was quite happy if one of his parishioners gave him a basket of figs or a dish of seakale; he could almost have counted his flock on his fingers. The men about there were very radical and hard-headed; they were all small proprietors, who cursed Millo and S. Pharamond all the year round, though neither the villa nor the château did them the slightest harm. On the contrary, the stewards of both the Duc de Vannes and Othmar had orders to give away any rare seeds, aid in any irrigation-works, or contribute to any need that there might be in the neighbourhood. But the Duc was a duke and peer of France, and Othmar was an archimillionaire; the petite culture hated the sight of their gilded bronze gates and the
ir glittering high-pitched roofs.

  ‘It is for you that we pay taxes!’ snarled one of them once to the Duc de Vannes, who laughed and answered:

  ‘Oh, my friend, if we compared notes I think you would find that it is I who pay them for you and yours. I have not the slightest objection to do so, only do not let us misrepresent matters.’

  But they did not want logic, and they hated the steep shining roofs and the gates with the gilded scroll work. What they did not hate was Yseulte de Valogne; all countess though she was, they pardoned her that defect because she had always remained for them la pétiote de Nicole. They understood that she was to be sacrificed to the pride of her relatives; that because she was poor, so poor, she was to be refused all the joys of her youth and her sex and surrendered to the Church that she might not offend the grandeur of her family by making a portionless marriage. This, which they had learned, with many exaggerations of its enormity from Nicole and from the servants of Millo, gave her the halo of a martyr in their eyes; she was sacrificed to the noblesse, and that fact was enough to make her sacred to them even though she belonged to the detested order herself, and had not a little of its hauteur. Besides, her tenderness to their old people, the little gifts she made at the convent and brought to their little ones and their women, her intrepidity in cases of sickness in those winters when she was alone at Millo — a mere child, but with the courage of giants, as Nicole loved to tell — all these, joined to her personal elegance, which made her as unlike themselves as the orchids in Othmar hothouses were unlike the sweet peas and the lavender growing under their peach trees, had combined to make of the last Comtesse de Valogne the idol of petite culture which, with few exceptions, loathed and execrated the brilliant idlers who rode and drove out of the gates of Millo, and carried their light laughter, their painted fans, their blazing jewels, their grace and their luxuries, out on to the illuminated terraces, under the palms and the araucarias, amidst the lamps and the music, regardless of the people in the distant huts and houses on the surrounding hills who, rising to their work, as they went to their beds, swore savagely against them with all the unchanged rancorous class-hatred of the Terror still alive in them and unsatisfied.