by Ouida
‘Why do I, indeed, care so little?’ said Othmar to himself when he was alone. ‘I am neither inhuman nor heartless. I used to be quickly touched to any kind of feeling; but the whole of life seems cold to me, and profitless. I was dry-eyed whilst that poor child wept over that little, frail, waxen body which was so much to her; would have been so much to her if it had lived to lie on her breast. It is the most pathetic of all possible things — a girl still sixteen sorrowing for her offspring which has perished before it had any separate existence; has died before it lived; and yet, I feel hardly more than if I had seen a bird flying round an empty nest, or a brood of leverets wailing in an empty form. I think she took my heart out of my chest that day she fooled me, and put a stone there — —’
He meant Nadine Napraxine, who remained the one woman on the earth for him.
A woman of unstable impulses, of incalculable caprices, of an infinite intelligence, of as infinite an egotism; absorbed in herself, save so far as her merciless eyes scanned the whole world as players, whilst her fastidious taste found them the poorest players, and judged them inexorably as dunces and as fools; a woman who had treated the tragedy of his own passion as a mere comedy, and had listened to it seriously for a moment only the better to turn it into jest.
Yet the one woman upon earth whom he adored, whom he desired.
For love is fate, and will neither be commanded nor gainsaid.
VOLUME III.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
When Yseulte had recovered enough to travel, he took her to the Italian lakes for awhile, to restore her to her usual health and strength, and distract her thoughts from what had befallen her at Amyôt. With the beginning of winter they returned, and made their home for awhile in the great hotel of the Boulevard St. Germain, which he hated, and where he intended to remain for the briefest time that could suffice for the fulfilment of those social duties of which Friederich Othmar never ceased to remind him. There his mother’s apartments had been prepared for his wife, and every grace and attraction that the art and the taste of the day could add to them had been added, as though the most solicitous affection had presided over the preparation of them. All the preferences she had shown in the country had been remembered and gratified; whatever she had liked best in colour, in treatment, in art, in flowers, in marble, had been consulted or reproduced in Paris; and even a large dog to which she had taken a fancy at Amyôt had been brought thence from the kennels, and was lying before the fire when she entered.
A much older and far wiser woman would have been persuaded to believe, as she believed, that in all this delicate prévenance for her pleasures and her preferences the tenderest love had spoken. She could not divine the self-reproach of her husband’s conscience, which made him sensible that he perforce denied her so much that was her due, and made him proportionately eager to atone for that denial by every material enjoyment and outward mark of affection and of homage. All those who surrounded him, all his acquaintances, his household, and his dependents, imagined that he loved his young wife. The person who was in nowise deceived was Friederich Othmar.
‘He is like a Sultan,’ thought the old man angrily, ‘a Sultan who loads the women of his zenana with ropes of pearls and emeralds as big as pigeon’s eggs, that they may not perceive that he only visits them twice a year!’
By the law of the attraction of contrasts, there had arisen a mutual attachment between her and Baron Fritz: the unscrupulous old man, for whom as for Turcaret the whole world was composed of shareholders, felt more reverence and tenderness for Yseulte than he ever felt in his life for anyone; and she, who only saw his devotion to Othmar, his admirable manners, his shrewd wit, and his paternal kindness to herself, grew fond of, and grateful to, him, and was wholly ignorant of that mercilessness and selfishness which would have immolated all mankind to the service of his personal ambitions, and to which all morality or humanity appeared as absurd as they did to Fouquet or to Talleyrand.
Friederich Othmar incessantly strove to inspire her with his own passion for the House he adored, and though he failed because she was too thoroughly patrician in all her instincts to easily welcome such impressions, and was more apt to share her husband’s disdain for all such ambitions, he did succeed in persuading her that the future content of Othmar himself would depend on the measure of the interest which he would take in those great fortunes of which he held the key.
‘Understand this, my child,’ he would say, ‘a man in old age never forgives himself for the occasions which he has let slip in youth; and every man who in youth is désœuvré, pays for it heavily when age has come. Otho is a clever man, but he has the sickness of his century; he is indifferent to everything’ (‘even to you!’ he thought impatiently). ‘We call it the malady of the time; I do not know that we are right. It existed in Petronius Arbiter’s, but it had no existence in our immediate forefathers’. However, you do not care for abstract discussions; you care for Otho. Well, let us confine ourselves to Otho. Nowadays, he is still a young man; he thinks he can afford to despise all things because he has strength, and health, and every form of enjoyment accessible to him — and he is certainly rich enough to play at cynicism all day if it amuse him most.’
‘He is no cynic,’ said Yseulte, quickly.
Baron Fritz smiled.
‘A little of Alceste, surely? You read “Le Misanthrope,” even at your convent, I imagine? My dear child, people always desire the fate they have not. Alfred de Vigny, with his sixteen quarterings, was always in rebellion against the fate of the poor gentleman; Otho, one of the richest men in Europe, is always rebelling against his riches as a chain and a species of dishonour. Now, it is for you to reconcile him to them; it is for you to persuade him that in the interests of his House lie those occupations and obligations which will not pall upon him as he grows older. I have known men weary of love and pleasure, but I have never known them weary of ambition. Otho scorns vulgar ambitions, but there are those which are not vulgar. In finance, as in life, there is no standing still. In his present mood he would be delighted if ruin were possible to us; it is not possible. Short of a European war that should last thirty years, nothing can harm us much. Still, no great house can long stand without a chief who cares for its welfare and honour. Like Catherine II., “je lis l’avenir dans le passé.” A wise statesman has always the past of the world spread out before him like an ordnance map for his guidance. So may we also, in the past history of such houses as our own, see what has led to their ruin, and so guide ourselves to avoid those evils in our own case. Now, nothing has been so commonly the cause of krach in financial establishments as their being afflicted with imprudent or indifferent members. Otho is not very often imprudent, but he is entirely indifferent. Certainly,’ continued the Baron, with pardonable pride, ‘the Maison d’Othmar is too solidly established, too greatly important to the public life of Europe, to be easily imperilled by a young man’s foibles. Still, I cannot disguise from myself the fact that when I am no more there will be no check on his eccentricities, no stimulus to his apathy. He will be ill served because he will at once expect too much virtue from men, and observe them with too little suspicion. The ship is sound and safe, and sure to have fair winds, but if the man at her helm be reading his Horace or his La Bruyère instead of steering by his chart, the ship may founder in clear weather and calm seas. You understand me?’
Metaphor was very unusual to him; he only condescended to use it for sake of making his meaning clearer to the feebleness of a feminine mind.
‘Yes, I understand quite well,’ she replied, with a little sigh. ‘But I have no influence; he would think me impertinent; and I am sure no one will care for the honour of the House more truly than he.’
‘Commercially speaking, there are two kinds of honour,’ said Friederich Othmar. ‘The fantastic and visionary one he will always maintain, but the practical one, which lies in doing your utmost for all the interests centred in yours, he will neglect. If I were to tell him that we must collapse to-mo
rrow, he would give up everything, down to his pet edition of Marcus Aurelius, to satisfy our debts; but if I were to tell him also how many financial schemes and companies would fall with us, he would only reply that the world would be exceedingly well rid of so many scoundrels. The honour is safe with him, doubtless, but the welfare is not. I shall not live for ever; I shall probably only live a very few years more. You must persuade your husband that his true duties and pleasures will lie in those ambitions which his fathers have bequeathed to him. I know that he and you would like to extinguish the House of Othmar financially, and dwell at Amyôt with no remembrance of the world. That is a lover’s dream. My dear, simplicity and solitude are impossible in our society; a shepherd’s peace is not attainable by a man whom the world claims. If I were to die to-morrow, and Otho to remain as indifferent to his own interests as he is now, all that I have done, all that his predecessors have done, would crumble away in ten or twenty years like so much soft sandstone in a succession of wet winters. He would not resent it now, but when he should be fifty years old he would resent it bitterly; he would never pardon himself. It is from this possibility that your influence must protect him.’
She hesitated, with a blush upon her face.
‘I have no influence,’ she said timidly. ‘He knows so much better, so much more than I — —’
‘Obtain influence over him,’ said the old man curtly; ‘for if you do not, someone else will. Nay, my dear, pardon me; do not be hurt by my plain speaking. Such men as Otho are always influenced by women; he should be so now by you; he will be so if you will leave off worshipping him timidly, making him your law and your religion, and realise that you are an exquisitely lovely woman, with mind enough not to be the mere toy of any man. You are very young, it is true, but you have grown ten years in a few months. You must remember that to be in love is very agreeable, no doubt, but you are not his mistress; you are his wife. You must not think only of the immediate moment, but of the far future when he will not be in love with you, ma belle, nor you with him, but when you may still influence him nobly and wisely, and he may find in you his safest friend.’
Yseulte listened, with a little sigh.
It seemed to her as if all her happy illusions were taking wing, like the group of amorini which flew away from a weeping nymph on the ceiling of her room, which had been painted by Bourgereau. They were seated in one of her own apartments, a very bower of primroses and white lilac, panelled in the Louis Seize style, with Bourgereau’s charming children in groups within each panel above the satin couches. Between the curtains, there were glimpses through the windows of the cedars and wellingtonias of the gardens. Without, it was a chilly winter’s day, but within, it was warm as summer, mellow with soft colour, fragrant with innumerable flowers; even to this great hotel of the Boulevard S. Germain, which had always seemed to Othmar the most oppressive and detestable of all his many mansions, the advent of Yseulte had brought a grace and light and sweetness as of young and innocent life, a charm of home to these splendid and desolate suites of rooms. Her dogs lay on the hearth, her voice called the peacocks in the lonely gardens, her scores of Beethoven and Schubert and Berlioz lay open on the grand pianos. Even the look of the great bouquets in the Japanese bowls and the jars of Saxe and Sèvres was different: her hand had added a rose there, a fern here; they were flowers which were there because she loved them, not only because they served for decorations grouped by skilful servants as mere masses of colour. The great house, sombre in its Bourbon stateliness, magnificent in its architecture, but oppressive in its too continual display of wealth, was no longer ‘une maison sans musique, une ruche sans abeilles;’ it had gained a charm which was none the less perceptible because undefinable and impalpable, as the scent of the tea-roses in the tall Sèvres jars. But Friederich Othmar was more sensible of this than was the possessor of the house and of her. Friederich Othmar, who had lived for fifty years and more without perceiving that he had never had, or wished to have, a home, perceived that his nephew had one and scarcely appreciated it. Friederich Othmar himself became suddenly alive to the pleasure of finding something home-like in that corner of her boudoir where she drew a Japanese screen between him and the draught from the windows, brought him his cup of green tea, and listened with an interest fresh and unfeigned to his anecdotes, his reminiscences, and his counsels: but he found Othmar there less often than he would have wished.
‘He will be glad of that coin du feu some day,’ he thought angrily; annoyed by a neglect which Yseulte herself did not perceive. She had been used to solitude; she was neither vain nor exacting; she understood that everything could not be in Paris altogether as it had been at Amyôt; and if she gave a sigh to that necessity, she bravely and tranquilly accepted it. The great world was about her with its demands, its solicitations, its tyrannies over time and thought; she had little leisure for meditation; the Countess Othmar could not escape the social obligations of her position or avoid its ceremonies and its courtesies.
She remained much graver and simpler than her contemporaries were; she cared for none of the noisy amusements of modern fashion; the world of pleasure seemed to her, on the whole, a little vulgar, a little tiresome, astonishingly monotonous, even in its feverish search for the untried and the startling. But at the same time she could not escape from its demands, and their effects upon her, and the counsels of Friederich Othmar incessantly reminded her that she could best serve the honour of the name she bore by making Europe admire and praise her. It was a counsel which contained the seeds of danger; but he read her character aright.
‘Voilà une qui ne cascadera jamais,’ said the Baron to himself in his tongue of the Boulevards. He was infinitely proud of, and delighted with her; he gave her the most magnificent presents, bought her the rarest of jewels. He accompanied her constantly in her drives and to the opera, and even in the visits which she paid.
‘It is Baron Fritz whom Othmar’s marriage has reformed!’ said a pretty woman, who had long considered the silver-haired financier as her own especial prey. He took a paternal pleasure in the admiration which the rare patrician graces of the girl awoke in that tout Paris which he had long considered the lawgiver of the universe.
‘If you had been Marie Antoinette, there might have been no revolution,’ he said jestingly to her. ‘You would never have flirted with Ferson, nor would you have played at shepherdessing, or worn a mask in the Palais Royal.’
‘I think I should only have thought of France,’ she answered.
‘Which would not have prevented you from going to the guillotine, I dare say,’ said the Baron. ‘Nations are the concentrated distillation of the ingratitude of men. There is only one thing which one can always count on with absolute certainty, and that is, the general and individual thanklessness.’
Nothing was further from his thoughts than to cloud over the trust, confidence, and faith of her innocent optimism. He spoke as he thought and felt, and as a long experience of mankind had taught him to do, without reflecting that he dropped the bitterness of gall into a fair and limpid spring, which had seen nothing above its waters save the white lily-cups and the blue heavens.
‘She will be robbed right and left endlessly if she be not taught a little mistrust,’ he said to Othmar himself, who replied:
‘Let her be robbed of everything rather than of her illusions. This is the only loss from which we never recover.’
‘What an absurd idea!’ thought the Baron, who had never cherished any illusions at all, and had found life exceedingly entertaining and enjoyable without them.
The practical mind can no more understand the regrets of the meditative one than a manufacturer, spending his days by choice amidst the roar of steam wheels and the ledgers of a counting-house, can understand the artist’s anguish when he is shut up in a city garret whence he cannot see a sunset or a sunrise.
‘The woes of the body, I grant, may be too much for one’s philosophy,’ the Baron was wont to say. ‘With the gout, or neuralgia, or sciatica
, Seneca’s self might fail to retain serenity. But the sorrows of the emotions or of the imagination are so entirely fictitious that anyone, by the exercise of a little self-control, may put them aside completely.’
‘What! Even the losses of death?’ objected some one once.
The Baron smiled:
‘Death cannot affect you very greatly unless you have already committed an act of unwisdom — that is, have already attached yourself to some other life than your own.’
‘Then where is love?’ said his interlocutor.
‘Where it has always been,’ said Friederich Othmar, ‘chiefly in the senses partially in the imagination. When we have both the senses and the imagination under the control of our temperate judgment, it cannot disturb us seriously. In my youth, and even in my maturity,’ he continued, with complacence, ‘I have dallied with love as well as other men, but the moment that I felt that any one passion was likely to exercise undue influence upon me, I withdrew myself from it. To break a chain is difficult, but never to let it be forged is easy.’
He thought it his duty to put his young favourite on her guard against all the deceptions and delusions which the world prepares for its novices; he told her much more than her husband would have done of all the intricacies and meanings of the varied life which was about her, gave her the key to many of its secrets, and the hidden biographies of many of its personages.
‘You are in the world, you must understand the world,’ he said to her; ‘if not, it will be a mere labyrinth to you, and you will be lost in it. You need not become a mondaine with your heart, but you must become one with your head, or the mondaines will devour you. It is not necessary that you should gamble or swear or get into debts for your petticoats, as they do; but it is necessary that you should understand the society of your time. At Amyôt you may be a young saint, as heaven meant you to be, but in Paris you must be able to hold your own against those who are the reverse of saints. Otho ought to teach you all this himself, but he will not, so you must listen to me. I have not been so engrossed in the gold market all my days that I do not know la haute gomme down to the ground. In my leisure I have always gone into the world: the boudoir of a pretty woman is always much more amusing than a card-table or a pistol-gallery. L’Ecole des Femmes is the one to which every wise man goes.’