by Ouida
‘No one does that has any real feeling in him or in her,’ said Othmar impatiently. ‘All those elaborate examinations under the glass are cold as ice. They are very scientific, no doubt, but there is not a heart throb in them.’
‘I think the greatest pleasure of strong emotion is the analysis of it,’ she replied with perfect truth. ‘You are not philosophic, you are poetic. So you do not understand what I mean.’
‘You mean,’ said Othmar angrily, ‘that when Hero saw Leander’s dead body washed up to her arms from the waves, she was amply compensated for his death by the advantage of putting her own tears under the spectrum!’
‘That is an exaggerated illustration. But I admit that the mental intricacies of every passion is what is alone interesting in it to me.’
‘It is why you have never felt passion!’
‘Perhaps!’
She smiled and stretched her arms indolently above her head as she lay back amongst her cushions.
‘I have always perfectly understood,’ she continued, ‘that unjustly abused lady of the legend who flung her glove into the lions’ den; she wanted emotions and she had the whole gamut of them no doubt in those few moments — fear, hope, pride, triumph, discomfiture; she must have known all that it is possible to know of emotion in those three minutes.’
‘You have often thrown your glove.’
‘Do you mean that for a rebuke? Your tone is gloomy. Yes, I have thrown it, but they have always brought it back to me like lap-dogs. There is too much of the lap-dog in men.’
‘In me?’ said Othmar with anger.
‘Yes, in you too. You would go for my glove still.’
‘Yes, I would, God help me.’
She laughed. ‘I am sure you would, at present. I suppose the time will come when you will go for some other woman’s. It is in your nature to do that sort of thing.’
Othmar was irritated and wounded: he was tired of this eternal jesting. His fidelity to her was the most real and the most sensitive thing in all his life, and yet he had the conviction that in her heart she ridiculed him for it.
‘Still, I think you of all women would be most intolerant of inconstancy,’ he said, speaking almost unconsciously his own thoughts aloud.
‘I hope I should forgive it with my reason, which would understand and so excuse it, though my feminine weaknesses might perhaps resent it; one never knows one’s own foibles.’
‘It is only indifference which forgives inconstancy.’
‘Oh — h — h! I am not sure of that. There may be indulgence without indifference.’
‘But not without contempt.’
‘I do not know that. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. I have so very slight an opinion of human nature that I do not think I could ever be seriously angry with any of its errors.’
‘Then that would be because none of them had power to reach your heart. I do not believe you would care for anyone sufficiently ever to be jealous of them.’
She smiled and rose. ‘My dear Otho, jealousy is a very ugly, useless, and unwise passion. The world decided, as soon as ever I was presented to it, that I had no such thing as a heart. You have always persisted in supposing that I have, but very likely the world is more right than you.’
‘May I not hope at least that I have a place in it?’ murmured Othmar, and he bent towards her with much of a lover’s ardour.
But she drew herself away with a touch of that dullness by which she had used to freeze the blood in Napraxine’s veins.
‘My dear Otho,’ she said, with her unkind little smile, ‘really that is a twice-told tale! Do you think after so many years it is worth while to chanter des madrigaux? You know I was at no time ever very fond of them. “Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day!” Let us be friends, the most charming friends in the world; that is far more agreeable.’
Othmar rose from where he had been half kneeling at her feet; his face was very flushed, and his eyes grew angry; he was irritably sensible of having made himself absurd in her eyes.
‘You will not awe me as you used to do that poor humble dead fool,’ he said bitterly. ‘But if you be tired of me I will summon my fortitude to bear dismissal as best I may.’
‘Oh! — tired — no!’ she said, with a deprecating accent which was marred on his ear by a certain latent thrill beneath it of suppressed laughter. ‘Only I think we have done with all that. If Mary Stuart had married Chastelard, I am sure he would not have gone on writing sonnets and songs; at least not writing them to her. We have a quantity of all kinds of interests and objects common to us. Let us be content with those. Believe me, if you will leave off the madrigals it will be very much better. You have been the most admirable lover in the world, but as you cannot be a lover now, suppose you leave off the language and — and — the nonsense? Regard me as your best friend: I shall ever be that.’
Othmar coloured with a confused mingling of emotions.
‘Friendship!’ he echoed. ‘I did not marry you to be relegated to friendship!’
‘Then you were not clairvoyant,’ she said, with her unkindest laugh. ‘There are only two results possible to any marriage: they are friendship or separation, the door to the left or the door to the right.’
Then with her prettiest, chilliest laugh she left him, amused by the vexation, offence, and embarrassment which his features expressed.
‘“Il faut en finir avec les madrigaux,”’ she said, as she looked at him over her shoulder and passed down the staircase.
Othmar was deeply pained and hotly angered. He had at all times, even in the earliest hours of their union, been conscious that his caresses were rather permitted than enjoyed, his tenderness was rather accepted indulgently than ardently returned. There was a total absence of physical passion in her, which had served to heighten his intellectual admiration of her, if at times it had held his emotions in check, and made him feel that his ardour was boyish, absurd, sensual, romantic. But he had never been prepared to accept the position into which Napraxine had been driven by the indifference of her temperament. He had never anticipated that the time might come when he also might be allowed no more than a touch of her cool white fingers, and a careless smile of morning greeting.
Sooner an open quarrel than such mockery of friendship! — so he thought.
He remained where she had left him, sunk in meditation, which retraced one by one the passages of his love for her. It had been love so great, so entire, so intense, that it could never change — unless she or her own will killed it. It had been one of those mighty incantations of which no hand but the sorcerer’s own can ever lift off the spell.
As her lover he had always imagined that she, marble to all others, would be wax to him; he had always believed that he would light the flame of fervour behind the alabaster-like ice of her temperament. But he had learned his error. He had found that possession is not necessarily empire. He had discovered that he pleased her intelligence and her vanity rather than awakened her senses or her emotions. She had made him mortifyingly conscious that she found him of no higher stature than other men, and had unsparingly reminded him that there was no more fatal foe of love than familiarity.
She had wounded him more than she had meant more than once, and this time the wound penetrated both his pride and his affections, and left with him an acrid sense of undeserved humiliation.
‘No man can have been truer to her than I have been,’ he thought, with that pathetic wonder that fidelity does not beget gratitude which is common to all lovers, be they man or woman.
Was it true that she would not care if his fancy wandered elsewhere? Would she not feel any anger were he, like all his friends, to spend his passions and his substance in the arms of cocottes, and in providing the splendours of their palaces? Would she indeed feel no pang if any other woman, whether duchess or drôlesse, were to obtain empire over him?
If not, then truly she had never loved him. He felt no impulse to put her to the test: he only felt a weary an
d dreary sense of loneliness, of discomfiture, of chagrin, of humiliation.
He had always doubted whether she had ever realised the depth and the extent of the passion he had spent on her. He had always fancied that she classed it only with the hot desires and romantic sentiments of men, of which she had seen so much; there might be even many of those men who appeared to her to have been truer lovers than he. He had married her: would Helen have ever believed that Menelaus could love like Paris? Surely not. There had been many men whose blood had been spilled like water on the ground for her sake, or from her caprice. It was inevitable that there should seem truer lovers than he who dwelt under the same roof as herself, and led the even tenour of his daily life beside her.
She had been too early saturated and satiated with the spectacle of strong and forbidden passions for the repetition of a well-known and often-laughed-at love to have any power to excite her interest in the tame sameness of a permitted and undisturbed intimacy. He felt that she had spoken the entire truth when she had said that she would have cared for him much more had she never married him. She required endless novelty, incessant renewal of excitation, continual stimulant to her love of mystery, of peril, and of power. There was no food for these in the calm certainty of possession which is the accompaniment and enemy of all conjugal life, in the tranquil succession of years which resembled one another monotonous as peace.
Perhaps she had loved him most of all on that day when she had written to him that their paths in life must wend for ever apart. It had been a bon moment, a moment of exaltation, of intensity, of strong interest, stimulated by a sense of self-sacrifice; a moment in which she had put him voluntarily away from her; and, so doing, had seen him in a light which had never before or after shone upon him in her eyes.
The mockery of her slight laughter remained now in jarring echo on his ears. What a fool he must seem to her! What a poor, romantic, sensitive, unwise stringer of unwritten madrigals!
To endeavour to arouse her jealousy never passed across his thoughts. It seemed to him that she must know so well that she had taken his own heart out of his breast never to return it to him. Othmar was not more chaste than other men of the world; but his passion for Nadine Napraxine had been of such length of endurance, of such intensity of feeling, had been so environed with the ennobling solemnities of death, and had been so fed on long denial and severance, that it always seemed to him his very life itself. His temperament was too grave for the light loves of the world, and his character too constant and too sincere for those intrigues which form a mere pleasant pastime without engaging either the affection or the memory. He was like the Greek who hung his spear, his shield, his sandals, and his flute before the shrine of Aphrodite’s self; and could worship no lesser divinities than she.
He went out of the house and into the gardens of Amyôt, where they were most shadowy and solitary. The late summer roses were filling the air with their fragrance, and the stately peacocks were drawing their trains of purple and gold over the shaded grass. A flock of wild doves sailed overhead; near at hand a fountain sent its silvery column towering in the light, to fall in clouds of spray into the marble basin, where laughing loves rode their white dolphins through green fleets of water-lily leaves. In the distance, beyond the clipped walls of bay, his children with some dogs were playing on a lawn under one of the terraces. Their laughter came faintly on the wind; he could see their shining hair glisten in the sunshine. He did not go to them.
The kiss of a child could not soothe the irritated bitterness which was at his heart, the wound which the hand he loved best had given him.
It was a warm golden day; the heat lay heavy on all the country of the Orléannais; and the Loire water, low and still, was broken by wide stretches of sandy soil where the river bed was laid bare. He, with a vague depression for which he could not have accounted, felt restless and disposed to solitude. With that kind of impulse towards the relief of melancholy things which that sort of motiveless sadness usually brings with it, he, for the first time for years, turned his steps towards the chambers once occupied by his first wife. Nothing had ever been touched in them since the last day that she had been at Amyôt: save to keep away the cobwebs and the dust, no servant ever entered there; the doors were locked, and he himself kept the master key.
An instinct of remembrance, for which he could not have accounted, moved him to enter there this hot and silent noon. He trod the floors with a noiseless step, as men move in the chamber where some dead thing lies, and with a noiseless hand undid the fastenings of one of the great windows and let in the light. All things were as they had been left that day when she had last gone away from Amyôt to her death. The golden sunbeams strayed in on to the white satin coverlet of the bed, the ivory crucifix which hung above it, the prie-dieu with the Book of Hours open, the roses a mere brown heap of ugliness, withered where she had set them in their bowl.
He sat down in the midst of the lonely things and felt a sense of regret, of remorse, of wistful compunction and self-reproach. Ever and again at intervals such an emotion had passed over him whenever he had thought of her, but never sharply enough to cause him such pain as it caused him now, remembering her youth plucked by death like a snowdrop in its bud. The big dog which had belonged to her had entered unperceived after him, and was looking upward in his face, as if it likewise were moved by sudden and sorrowful remembrances.
Poor child! so little missed, so utterly unmourned!
‘Et rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses:
L’espace d’un matin.’
Friedrich Othmar had had these two lines carved upon her tomb; they told of all the brevity of her life, but not of all its sadness. Had any living creature ever guessed all that?
A chill passed over Othmar as the doubts came to him. Had she suffered much more than he had ever thought? He had been caught then on the strong cyclone of a great passion, and been blinded by its rush and force.
The silence of the large chamber seemed filled with one long sigh.
The dog looked at him always, as though saying: ‘I have not forgotten: once she lived; where is she now?’
Ah, where!
He rose oppressed by new and painful thoughts, and moved from one object to another in the room, as though each of them would tell him something he had yet to learn. He touched with a reverent hand this thing and that which had belonged to her, and which survived unharmed, unworn, and would so last for centuries if his descendants spared them; frail toys and trifles, yet dowered with a power of endurance denied to the human life, which there had passed away like a cloud of the morning.
He took up her ivory tablets with the engagements of the day still written in pencil on them; he touched her long thin gloves, her tall tortoiseshell-tipped garden cane, her writing-case with its monogram in silver. The things moved his heart strongly for the first time in seven years: it had been no fault of hers that she had been powerless to gain love from him.
One by one he drew open the drawers of the buhl-table on which these, her writing things, had all been left unmoved: in one he saw a little book covered with vellum, and closed with a silver pencil as a gate is closed with a staple. He hesitated a moment; then he drew the pencil out and opened the book. It was half filled with those poor timid little verses of which Nadine Napraxine had once by a chance jest suggested the existence, and for which the child had blushed as for a sin. They were faint, blurred, often half effaced, purposelessly, as by a shy uncertain hand afraid of its own creations, but some were legible. He read them, and all the soul left in them spoke to his.
All the thoughts and fears and sorrows, all the longing and the doubt and the hesitation which she had been too timid and too proud to ever show in life, were spoken to him in those tender and imperfect poems. They were simple as a daisy, spontaneous as a wood-lark’s song; they were ignorant of all laws of science or rules of spondee and of dactyl; but, all halting and shy though they were, they had all the truth of a human heart in them. They were
deep and wide enough to hold the secret which she had shut in them.
As he read them a mist came before his eyes, and a sigh escaped him. He understood all that she had suffered here beneath this roof where he had promised her a life of joy. He saw all that she had hidden from him so carefully, through pride and shyness and the cruel humiliation of a love which knew itself powerless to awake response, of a soul which suffered in its innocence all the tortures of the damned. He had lived beside her seeing naught of that piteous conflict; parted from her by the wall built up out of his own indifference and coldness.
Had he even then been able to discern it, it would not have touched him, because of all chill things on earth the dullest is the heart of a man towards a love which he does not desire, which he cannot return. But it reached and touched him now.
The voice from the grave could not fret him as the voice of the living might have done, had he heard it in that pitiful cry of utter loneliness.
Poor timid little verses like nestling birds shivering in the chill winds and pallid sunshine of an unkind spring — across the years they brought her heart to his.
And though he had never loved her, yet in that moment of remorse he would have given all that he possessed, all the lives around him, and all the peace of his own soul, to be able, once to call her back to earth, and once to say to her, ‘Child, forgive me.’
But she was dead.
He sat there long in solitude, the dog lying mute at his feet.
He had read the broken, unfinished, humble little verses till their words were in his ear and before his eyes, and in all the sunbeams straying through the golden dust of the air around.
When he rose he laid them gently back where they had been left, with such a touch as a man gives to flowers which he lays on the dead limbs of some dear lost creature. Then he closed the window and went out of the chamber, the dog following him, with slow unwilling footsteps.
There went with him a remorse which would never leave him. For the first time the sense had come upon him that her death had been self-sought, in that sunset hour of the month of hyacinths, when her body had dropped as a stone drops down through the bird-haunted air.