by Ouida
‘It is disputed in Croatia, which has never been too loyal!’
‘Croatia be —— ,’ said Friederich Othmar, with difficulty restraining the oath because Yseulte was seated within hearing; and he returned to his old arguments, which were all brought to bear upon the fact that at the approach of winter Othmar owed it as a duty to society and to himself to throw open the doors of that vast hotel on the Boulevard S. Germain, which had always seemed to him the most hateful embodiment of the wealth, the unscrupulousness, and the past history of his race.
The hotel had been purchased from the Duc de Coigny during the White Terror by Marc Othmar for a nominal price; and under the reign of Louis Philippe, Stefan Othmar, deeming it neither grand nor luxurious enough, had had it changed and redecorated in the worst taste of the epoch, and, in the early days of the Second Empire, had farther enlarged and overloaded it, until to his son it was as a very nightmare of gilding, marble, and allegorical painting, a Cretan labyrinth of enormous and uninhabitable chambers, fit for such motley crowds as cram the Elysée in the days of Grevy.
It was one of the show-houses of Paris, and had, indeed, many real treasures of art amidst its overloaded luxury, but Othmar hated it in its entirety, from its porte-cochère, where the arms which the heralds had found for Marc Othmar had replaced the shield and crown of the Ducs de Coigny, to the immense library, which did not contain a single volume that he cared to open; an ‘upholsterer’s library,’ with all its books, from Tacitus to Henri Martin, clad in the same livery of vellum and tooled gold.
‘Absolutely necessary to sustain your position in the world!’ repeated Othmar when his uncle had left him. ‘That is always the incantation with which the fetish of the world obtains its sacrifices. Translated into common language, he means that as I have a great deal of money, other people expect me to spend much of it upon them. I do not see the obligation, at least not socially.’
‘Do you desire the life of Paris?’ he added abruptly to Yseulte, who hesitated, coloured slightly, and said with timidity:
‘I should prefer S. Pharamond.’
‘S. Pharamond is yours,’ said Othmar with some embarrassment, knowing why every rood of that sunny and flowering shore seemed to him nauseous with sickening memories. ‘S. Pharamond is yours, my dear; but I scarcely think that we can pass this winter there. There are tedious duties from which we cannot escape; to entertain in Paris is one of them.’
An older woman would have perceived that he contradicted himself, but Yseulte was blinded to such anomalies by her adoration of him; an adoration as intense as it was meek, dumb, and most humble.
‘I am so perfectly happy here,’ she answered, with hesitation; ‘but — —’
She was not actuated by the sentiment which he attributed to her hesitation; she infinitely preferred the country to the city, as all meditative and poetic tempers do, and the little she had seen of the great world at Millo made her dread her entry into it in Paris. What she wished, but lacked the courage to say, was, that she perceived that the country did not satisfy him himself. She was not so dull of comprehension that she did not see the melancholy of her husband, the listless indifference, the unspoken ennui, which spoiled his years to him, and left him without energy or interest in life. She could discern the wound she knew not how to cure, and Friederich Othmar in his conversations with her had repeatedly assured her that the vie de province stifled the intelligence of a man as moss grows over the trunk of a tree.
‘I am so happy here,’ she answered now with hesitation, ‘but still — —’
‘But still you are a daughter of Eve,’ he added with indulgence. ‘My poor child, it is quite natural, you are so young; all young girls long for the life of the world. It robs them of their lilies and roses, it draws bistre shadows under their eyes, it makes them old before they are twenty, but still they kiss the feet of their Moloch! I do not think, though, that you will ever be hurt by the world yourself. You are too serious, and have at once too much humility and too much pride: they are safe warders at the door of the soul; you will not easily become a mondaine.’
‘What is the difference?’
‘In the world, when she belongs to it, a woman crushes her soul as she crushes her waist; she is a butterfly, with the sting of an asp; she wastes her brain in the council-chambers of her tailors, and her time in a kaleidoscope of amusements that do not even amuse her; she would easily make the most hideous thing beautiful if she put it on once, and the most flagrant vice the fashion if she adopted it for a week; she has given the highest culture possible to her body and to her brain, only to spend her years in an ennui and an irritation beside which the life of the South Sea islanders would seem utility and wisdom; she has the clearest vision, the finest intelligence, the shrewdest wit, only to set her ambition on having a whole audience of a theatre forget the stage because she has entered her box, or the entire journals of a city chronicle the suicide of some madman who has taken his life because she crossed out his name on her tablets before a cotillon — —’
He paused abruptly, becoming suddenly conscious that he was speaking in no general terms, and had only before his thoughts the vision of one woman.
‘No, my dear,’ he said kindly, passing his hand over the shining tresses of Yseulte; ‘I am not afraid that you will become a coquette or a lover of folly; you will not learn the slang of the hour, or yellow your white skin with maquillage; you will always be the young patrician of the time of the Lady of Beaujeu. You shall go to Paris if you wish, and do just as you like there; you must not blame me if it do not suit you better than it suits those roses which your foster-mother sends up in moss from her garden.’
‘Poor child!’ he thought, with a pang of conscience. ‘She has a right to enjoy any amusement she can. She is young; the world will be a play-place to her; if she can make for herself friends, interests, pastimes, I should be the last to prevent her. Sooner or later she will find out that she is so little to me. She is content now because she takes kindness for love, and because, in her innocence, she cannot conceive how one’s senses may be roused while one’s heart may lie dumb and cold as a stone. But when she is older she will perceive all that, and then the more friends she has found, and the less she leans on me, the less unhappy she will be. I will give her everything that she can wish for; all women grow contented and absorbed in the world.’
So he argued with himself, but he knew all the while that he was to blame in desiring that sort of compensation and consolation for her; and that delicacy of taste, which has over some temperaments a stronger control than conscience, made him feel that there was a kind of vulgarity in thus persuading himself that material gifts and material triumphs would atone to her for the indifference of his feelings and the absence of his sympathy.
It was something better than mere material possessions and indulgences which he had meant to give the child whose lonely fate had touched him to so much pity under the palm trees of S. Pharamond and the gilded roofs of Millo. But he dismissed the rebuke of this memory with impatience. The world had so repeatedly told him that his gold was capable of purchasing heaven and earth, that, though he found it of no avail for himself, he fell instinctively into the error of imagining that with it at least he could heal all wounds not his own. She should have all her fancy could desire. His experience of women told him that she would be very unlike them if, in all the pleasure of acquisition, emulation, and possession, she did not find at least a fair simulacrum of happiness. She would be one out of a million — but if she were that one? Then her soul might starve in the midst of all her luxuries and pageants, like a bird in a golden cage that dies for want of the drop of water which the common brown sparrow, flying over the ploughed brown field, can find at will. But he did not think of that.
He knew that it was unworthy to speculate upon the power of the lower life to absorb into itself a soul fitted by its affinities to discover and enjoy the higher. He shrank from his own speculations as to the possibility of the world replacing h
imself in her affections. He had honestly intended, when he had taken her existence into his charge, to study, reverence, and guide this most innocent and docile nature; and endeavour, beside her, to seek out some trace of the purer ideals which had haunted his youth. And he felt, with remorse, that the failure to do so lay with himself, not with her. She remained outside his life; she had no sorcery for him. She was a lovely and almost faultless creature, but she was not what he loved. He realised, with bitter self-reproach, that in a moment of impulse, not ignoble in itself, but unwise, he had burdened his own fate and perhaps unconsciously done a great wrong to her, since, in the years to come, she would ask at his hands the bread of life and he would only be able to give her a stone.
She herself had as yet no idea that she was not beloved by Othmar with a lover’s love. She knew nothing of men and their passions. She had not the grosser intuitions which could have supplied the place of experience. She did not perceive that his tenderness had little ardour, his embraces nothing of the fervour and the eagerness of delighted possession. She had no standard of comparison by which to measure the coldness or the warmth of the desires to which she surrendered herself, and it was not to so spiritual a temperament as hers that the familiarities of love could ever have seemed love. But her nerves were sensitive, her perceptions quick; and they made her conscious that mentally and in feeling Othmar was altogether apart from her; that in sorrow she would not have consoled him, and that in his meditations she never had any place.
‘When I am older he will trust me more,’ she reflected, in her innocence, and she had been so long used to repression and obedience that it cost her much less than it would have cost most women of her years to accept, uncomplainingly, that humble place before the shut doors of his life.
She was too modest to be offended at a distraction which would have been certain to excite the offence and the suspicion of a more selfish or self-conscious nature; and she was too young to be likely to penetrate by intuition the secret of that evident joylessness which might well have excited her jealousy. It was rather the same sense of pity which had come to her for him in the weeks before her marriage which grew strongest in her as the months passed on at Amyôt. He enjoyed and possessed so much, yet could not enjoy or possess his own soul in peace.
‘I do not think he is happy, and it is not I who can make him happy,’ she said once, very timidly, to Friederich Othmar, who answered with considerable impatience:
‘My love, the fault does not lie with you. Otho, who believes himself, like Hamlet, out of joint with his time, is in reality a man of his times in everything; that is, he is a pessimist; he has a mental nevrose, to borrow the jargon of scientists; he has so cultivated his conscience at the expense of his reason, that I sometimes believe he will be satisfied with nothing but the abandonment of all he possesses; and no doubt he would have tried this remedy long since, only he has no belief in any Deity who would reward him for it. The misfortune of all the thoughtful men of Otho’s generation is, that they combine with their fretful consciences an entire disbelief in their souls, so that they are a mass of irritable anomalies. The mirthful sceptics of Augustan Rome, of Voltairian France, and of Bolingbroke’s England, were all consistent philosophers and voluptuaries; they disbelieved in their souls, but they believed in their bodies, and were amply content with them. They never talked nonsense about duty, and they passed gaily, gracefully, and consistently through their lives, of which they made the best they could materially, which is only reasonable in those who are convinced that the present is the sole sentient existence they will ever enjoy. But the tender-nerved pessimists of Otho’s kind and age are wholly inconsistent. They believe in nothing, and yet they are troubled by a multitude of misgivings; they think the soul is merely a romantic word for the reflex action of the brain, and yet they distress themselves with imagining that the human animal has innumerable duties, and should have innumerable scruples, which is ridiculous on the face of it, for, religion apart and Deity denied, there is no possible reason why man should have any more duties than a snail has, or a hare. The agnostics of the present generation do not perceive this contradiction in themselves, and that is why they look so inconsistent and so entirely valetudinarian beside the robust Atheism of the past century, and are, indeed, the mere malades imaginaires of the moral hospital.’
‘If I could only make him as happy as I am myself,’ she said again; but she had not the talisman which the woman who is beloved in return holds in the hollow of her hand.
‘She is too young,’ thought Friederich Othmar, angrily. ‘She is too innocent; she is a daisy, a dove, a child. She knows nothing of persuasion or provocation; she is not even aware of her own charms. She waits his pleasure to be caressed or let alone; she knows neither how to deny herself or make herself desired. She wearies him only because she does not know how to torment him. He will drift away to someone else who does, while he will expect her — at seventeen! — to be satisfied with bearing him children and owning his name!’
A few months before, the Baron himself would have emphatically declared that no living woman could or should ever need more. But his nephew’s wife had touched a softer nerve in him; something which was almost tenderness and almost regret smote him when he saw the tall, graceful form of Yseulte like a garden lily, standing alone in the warmth of the sunset on the terraces at Amyôt, or saw Othmar, when he approached after a day’s absence, kiss her hand with the calm and serious courtesy which he would have displayed to any stranger, and turn away from her with an indifference which all his deference of manner and careful prévoyance of thought for her could not conceal from the keen eyes of the elder man.
‘He gives her his caresses, not his companionship,’ thought the old man, angrily, but he was too prudent and too wise to draw her attention to a fault against herself of which she was unconscious.
A few months earlier he would have said with Napoléon, ‘Qu’elle nous donne des marmots; c’est le nécessaire.’ But before this young mistress of this stately place as she moved, in her white gown, with her great bouquet of roses in her hand and her clear eyes smiling gravely on these men who so brief a while before had been unknown to her, and now held all her destiny in their hands, Friederich Othmar for the first time in his life saw a little way into a soul unsoiled, and began to dimly comprehend some desires not wholly physical, some necessities sheerly of the mind and heart. The impression came to him — a purely sentimental one for which he chid himself — that this child was entirely alone; more alone in her wedded life perhaps than she would have been in the monastic. She was surrounded with every species of material indulgence; day after day her husband gave her new pleasures, as people give children new toys; if she had wished for the impossible he would have endeavoured to obtain it for her; but Friederich Othmar twice or thrice in his hurried visits to Amyôt had found her in solitude, and walking alone in the stately gardens or sitting alone in some little rustic temple in the woods, and the fact, though insignificant enough, seemed to him indicative of a loneliness which would certainly become her fate unless she learned as so many other women have learned, to console herself for neglect by folly.
‘And that she will not do,’ the old man said to himself. ‘She is a pearl; but a pearl thrown, not before swine, but wasted on a pessimist, an ennuyé, a délicat whom nothing pleases except that which he cannot possess.’
He pitied her for what he foresaw would befall her in the future, rather than for any thing which troubled her at that present time, for although vaguely conscious of a certain discordance and dissatisfaction in her husband’s life, Yseulte was, in her own, as happy as a very young girl can be to whom kindliness seems love and the external beauty surrounding her appears like a lovely dream.
Othmar left her often to shut himself in his library, to lose himself in his forests, or to go for the affairs of his House to Paris; but he was always gentle, generous, and kind; he was even prodigal of caresses to her, because they spared him words in whose utterance he
felt himself untrue; and if the reflex of his own sadness fell at times across herself, it became a light soft shadow without name, such as seemed to suit better than mere vulgar joys the silence of the gardens and the grandeur of the courts, where a life of the past, once so gracious, so vivid, so impassioned in love and so light in laughter, had been extinguished like a torch burned out in the night. A riotous or exuberant happiness would not have so well pleased her nature, made serious beyond her years whilst yet so mere a child, by the pains of poverty, the companionship of old age, and the sights and sounds of the siege of Paris. The long, light, warm days of spring and summer at Amyôt, with all the floral pomp around her, and the château itself rising, golden and silvery in the brilliant air, historic, poetic, magnificent, airy as a madrigal, martial as an epic, were days of an ecstatic but of an almost religious joy to her.
‘What have I done that all this should come to me?’ she said often in her wonder and humility, and Othmar seemed ever to her as a magician, at whose touch the briars and brambles in her path had blossomed like the almond and the may.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
With October days an accident as her boat crossed the Loire water, when the autumn currents were rolling strong and wide, brought on the premature delivery of a child, who barely breathed for a few moments, and then took with him into darkness the hopes of the Maison d’Othmar. The fury and the grief of Friederich Othmar were so great that they far surpassed the moderate regret shown by his nephew, who appeared to him intolerably cold and little moved save by his sympathy with the sorrow of the child’s young mother.
‘You would care, I believe, nothing if there were no one to succeed you when you die!’ said the elder man with indignation.
Othmar gave a gesture of indifference.
‘I hope I should care for my sons as much as most men care for theirs,’ he replied. ‘But the “succession” does not seem to me to be of vital importance. If you would only believe it, we are not Hohenzollerns nor Guelfs, and even they would be easily replaced, though perhaps Moltke or Wolseley would not be so.’