Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  Othmar was filled with an invincible melancholy as he stood beside the bedside of this man, whose vast intellect had been suddenly beaten down into nothingness as a bull is brained by the slaughterer. There had been no great affection between them; their views had been too opposed, their characters too utterly different for sympathy, or even for much mutual comprehension, but he had always done full justice to the unerring intelligence, the stubborn courage, and the devoted loyalty to the interests of his house, which were so conspicuous in Friedrich Othmar, and he knew that his loss would leave a place in his own life, public and private, which would never be filled up again. No one not bound to him by ties of blood and of family honour would ever care for his interests, work for his welfare, guard his repute, and consolidate his fortunes as Friedrich Othmar had done from the days of his boyhood. They had often been sharply opposed in opinion and in action, and more than once the elder man had learned that the younger man deemed him well-nigh a knave, whilst the elder held the younger in complete derision as a dreaming fool. But despite all this there had been that bond between them of community of interest and kinship of descent which no hireling service and no friendship of aliens could ever replace.

  Othmar knew that, this man dead, he himself would stand utterly alone in many ways and in many difficulties with which no other would ever have power or title to advise or to assist him. There were engagements, obligations, secret treaties, and concealed alliances in his house of which he would bear the burden alone, Friedrich Othmar being once gathered to his fathers. And, selfishness apart, there was a keen pang to him in the sight of his old friend lying prone like any fallen tree, in the knowledge that the quick wit would never more play about those silent lips, and the clear flame of reason and of scorn would never more flash from those closed eyes.

  He was dying: soon he would be dead: and Friedrich Othmar was one of those who make the dream of immortality seem as grotesque as the child’s hope to meet her doll in heaven. Who could think of him without his slow, satiric smile, his fine intricate speculations, his genius at whist, his perfect burgundies, his firm white hand which, touching a button in the wall, could speed an assent or a refusal which served to convulse Europe?

  ‘Immortal? — what ennui!’ he would have said, with his most good-humoured contempt for the dull and grotesque shapes in which human illusions, ideas, hopes, and creeds have so oddly shaped themselves.

  ‘You will find everything in order,’ he had said more than once to Othmar. ‘I shall die suddenly one day, in all probability. I leave everything in perfect order every day. You will only have to wind up the watch after I am gone. But will you take the trouble to wind it?’

  That was his doubt, the doubt which had tormented him in many an hour.

  Othmar now, leaving the warm golden light of the streets and the summer air, sweet-scented even in Paris from passing over the hay-fields and the flower gardens of the country round, and the blossoms of the limes upon the boulevards, entered the hushed, close, darkened room with a sense of coming loss and of impending calamity. There was no sound but of the heavy, laboured breathing of the dying man.

  ‘There is no change?’ he asked of the attendants, but he knew their answer beforehand; there could be no change but one — the last.

  Life mechanical, painful, sustained and prolonged by artificial means, was there still, but all else was over — over the manifold combinations, the daring projects, the cool unerring ambitions, the pitiless study and usage of men, the traffic in war and want, the wisdom which knew when to stoop and when to command, the skill which could gather and hold so safely all the cross threads of a million intrigues, the intellect which found its fullest pleasure in the problems of finance and the great needs of nations. All these were over, and the quick, cautious, wise and well-stored brain was shattered and ruined like a mere piece of clock-work that a child stamps in pieces with an angry foot.

  Of course he had long known that what had come now might come any day; that at the age of his uncle the marvel was rather his perfect health, his clear brain, his strong volition, than any mortal stroke which might befall him.

  The afternoon was growing to a close; without, there were the sounds of traffic and of pleasure; through the closed venetian blinds the air came into the room, which was hot, dark, filled with the soporific odours of stimulants and medicines. Great physicians waited by the death-bed, though they could do nothing to avert the sure coming of death. Othmar sat there and watched with them. Now and then someone spoke in a whisper, that was all. The end was near at hand. The sun sank and the evening came. There was always the same slow, stertorous breathing so painful on the ear of the listener, so expressive of effort and of suffering still existent in that inert unconscious mass which lay motionless upon the bed.

  As the hours passed on, Othmar went downstairs and broke a little bread, took a little wine, then returned to the chamber of death and waited there. They told him that as the night wore away the last struggle must come. Death loves the hour before dawn.

  Many thoughts came to the watcher as he sat there; they were melancholy and tired thoughts. Life seemed to him, as to Heine, like a child lost in the dark. What was the use of all the energy and effort, all the desire and regret, all the grief and hope, all the knowledge and ambition? The issue of them all at their best was a few years of success and of renown, then a brain which refused to do its work any more, a body which was but as the carcass of a slaughtered beast.

  The hours stole on, the strokes of the clocks echoed through the silent house, the wheels of the passing carriages made low and muffled sounds upon the tan laid down on the street beneath in needless precaution for ears deaf for ever, for a brain for ever numb and senseless. The evening became night and night brightened towards morning; a little bird sang at the closed shutter. Othmar rose and opened one of the windows and looked out; it was daybreak. There was a soft mist over the masses of verdure of the Bois, and in the sky a pale, dim light.

  ‘Shall I die like this?’ he thought; ‘and will my son sorrow no more for me than I sorrow now? — who can tell?’

  He stood gazing out at the shadowy houses and the dim outlines of the avenues. When he turned back from the window he saw that the hand of the dying man feebly beckoned him. In the supreme moment of severance from earth, the stunned mind recovered one momentary gleam of consciousness, the mute lips one momentary spasm of thickened, struggling speech; once more and once more only the tongue obeyed the order of its master — the brain.

  Friedrich Othmar looked at him with eyes that for an instant saw.

  ‘Do not make that loan — do not make that loan,’ he said with his paralysed lips. ‘Wait — wait; there will be war.’

  His master passion ruled him in his death.

  Then he made a movement of his right hand as though he wrote his signature to some deed.

  ‘The house — the house — tell them the house will not — —’ he muttered thickly, then a spasm choked his voice, the agony began; in less than an hour he was dead.

  ‘God save me from such a death as this!’ thought Othmar as the full day broke. ‘Rather let me die a beggar in the high road, but with some love about me, some hope within my heart!’

  And the mouth of the dead man seemed to smile, as though the dead brain knew his thoughts, as though the dead lips said to him:

  ‘Oh, dreamer! — Oh, fool!’

  CHAPTER XXII.

  The death of Friedrich Othmar brought increased occupation and cares upon him, and the first few days after the obsequies were too full for him to give more than a passing thought once or twice in twenty-four hours to the sick girl lying under his roof. He asked each day after her health, and they each day answered him that the progress made in it was now all that could be wished; youth and strength had reasserted their rights. He was importuned by a thousand claimants on his uncle’s properties, fatigued by a thousand attempts at imposition and extortion; all the wearisome details which harass the living and add a mi
llionfold to the horrors of every death, encompassed him all day long.

  All that the old man had possessed he had bequeathed unconditionally to his nephew, and there were many companions of his late pleasures who clamoured incessantly to his heir for recognition of their unlawful demands. All these matters detained him in Paris until midsummer had waned, and a weary sense of irreparable loss and of harassed irritation was with him, through all these long summer days, which found him for the first time in his life in the stone walls of a city when fruits were ripe and roses were blooming in shady, fragrant, country places.

  The whole temperament of Othmar was one to which business was antagonistic and oppressive in the greatest degree; nature had made him a student and a dreamer, and all the dull, fretting cares which accompany the administration of all great fortunes and houses of finance were to him the most irksome and distasteful of all bondage. But they were fastened in their golden fetters on his life as the burden of the ivory and silver howdah lies heavy as lead upon the back of an elephant in a state procession. And now there was no longer beside him the astute wisdom, the ready invention, the untiring capacity of Friedrich Othmar, to take off his shoulders this mass of affairs, of projects, of public demands, of state necessities supplied or denied, of all the throngs of supplicants, of sycophants, of enemies or of allies, who day after day besieged the Maison d’Othmar.

  In these hot summer days in Paris, in the empty chambers of his uncle’s house, all the old weariness and disgust at fate came back upon him. He would willingly have cast aside all the power which men envied him, to be free to spend his time as he would, and shut the door of his room on these buyers and sellers of gold, these traffickers in war and want, these speculators in the folly or greed of mankind who call themselves the princes of finance.

  ‘Les délicats ne sont pas vêtus pour le voyage de la vie; ils n’ont pas la botte grossière qui résiste aux cailloux et ne craint pas la fange.’

  Othmar was a délicat, and most of the ambitions and all the prizes of life seemed to him supremely vulgar. It was a temperament which shut him out from the sympathies of men and made him appear eccentric, when he was only made of finer and more sensitive moral and mental fibre than were those around him.

  Meanwhile the child he had rescued was passing through the weary stages of pleuro-pneumonia, succoured by all that science and care could do for her, and slowly recovered to find herself with amaze lying on a soft bed, a canopy of pale-blue silk above her, and around her white panelled walls painted with groups of field-flowers, whilst from a wide bay window there came, tempered by pale-blue blinds, the ardent sunbeams and the hot air of July. It was only one of the many bed-chambers of the Hôtel d’Othmar, but to her in her first moments of convalescence, as the fragrance from the garden below came through the room, and the distant music of some passing regiment was wafted on the warm south wind, it seemed a very part of paradise itself.

  She did not remember very much; her mind was hazy and indolent through great weakness, but she remembered that she had seen Othmar. She knew that he had said to her, ‘I am your friend.’ Her attendants, the nuns, were astonished and annoyed that she asked them no questions; her taciturnity was irritating to their own loquacity and inquisitiveness. But she was silent from neither shame nor obstinacy; she was silent because she was utterly bewildered, and shrank willingly into the shelter of this knowledge of her safety under his roof, as a hunted hare shrinks under fern and bough. She never saw him after that first night in his library; but she heard his name often spoken, and she understood that every good thing came to her from him.

  The fresh flowers in the china bowls, the books when she was well enough to read, the volumes of drawings and engravings which amused her feeble tired mind, the grapes, and the nectarines, and the pines, piled in pyramids of beautiful colour on their porcelain dishes — all these things came, no doubt, from him; indeed, whenever she asked any questions, she was always answered by his name.

  A great unconquerable lassitude and melancholy lay upon her; yet, under it, she was soothed and lulled by the sense of this invisible but absolute protection. It was as a shield between her and the misery which she had undergone; it filled her with a vague, grateful sense of safety and of sympathy. As far as she could be sensible of much in the feebleness of illness, she was dully conscious that Othmar had stood between her and some crowning wretchedness, some unutterable horror.

  He never asked to see her.

  It seemed to him that to thrust himself upon her would be brutally to recall and emphasise the fact of all she owed to him: it would seem to cry out to her her own helplessness and his services. Extreme and even exaggerated delicacy had always marked the charities he had shown to those he befriended; and in this instance it seemed to him that only entire effacement of himself could make endurable to her her sojourn under his roof. To reconcile her to it at all appeared to him almost impossible. As far as he could learn she was quite friendless and alone: what would he be able to do for her in the present and in the future?

  He was more anxious than he knew to hear her story from her own lips, but he would not have any request to her made to receive him. A guest in his own house, above all when she was poor and homeless, must send for him as a queen would send before he could enter her chamber. It was one of those exaggerations of delicate sentiment which had always made him at once so absurd and so incomprehensible to Friedrich Othmar, and to mankind in general. For the majority of the world does not err on the side of delicacy, and is colour-blind before the more subtle shades of feeling.

  During these later weeks, which were filled for him with dull and distasteful cares, Damaris was recovering more fully and more rapidly health and strength than she had done at first in the atmosphere of luxury and service by which she was surrounded; it was the first illness that she had ever known, and she could not understand her own weakness, the languor which lay so heavily on her, the sense of dreaming instead of living which the lassitude and beatitude of convalescence brought to her.

  She had grown; she had lost all the warm sea bloom upon her face and arms; she was very thin, and her eyes looked too large for her other features: but she was nearly well again, and only a little pain in her breathing, a sense of feebleness in her limbs, remained from the dangerous malady which had threatened to cut her life short in its earliest blossom. When she could think coherently, and understand clearly, her shame at the beggar’s position to which she had sunk was shared and outweighed by her passionate gratitude to her deliverer. The figure of Othmar was always before her eyes, god-like, angel-like, stooping to deliver her from the mire and horror of the streets of Paris.

  ‘Could I see him?’ she said at last to her attendants; the question had been upon her lips many days, but she had not had courage to put it into words. They promised her to tell him that she wished it, and they did so.

  ‘I will see her, certainly, in the forenoon to-morrow,’ said Othmar, moved by the request to a sudden sense of the strangeness and responsibility of his own position towards her. What would Nadège see in it? Something supremely ridiculous, no doubt. Something of the ‘lac et nacelle’ school worthy of the romanticists of the year ‘30?

  As yet he had not even informed her of the bare fact that this child of the island was in his house in Paris.

  He looked often at the portrait by Loswa of the child with the red fishing-cap on her auburn curls, and he always heard the mocking of his wife’s voice saying with her careless amused raillery: ‘Si vous en devenez amoureux?’

  And each time that he was about to tell her as he wrote to her that the girl for whom she had predicted the destiny of Aimée Desclée was lying mortally sick and apparently wholly friendless beneath his roof, the recollection of that raillery made him unwilling to provoke it anew. She might share his compassion and appreciate his motives: it was possible that she might do so if — if! —— the narrative reached her in one of what she called her bons moments. He knew that there were emotions both of ge
nerosity and of pity in her nature, but he knew also that they were fitful and uncertain in their action. He had never known her stirred twice to interest in the same object; her caprices were, as she had said, like a convolvulus flower, and only blossomed for a day; when a thing or a person had ceased to interest her, sooner could a mummy have been awaked to consciousness under its swathings of linen than her attention be recalled and attracted to it any more.

  ‘Quand l’amour est mort, il est bien mort,’ says a cruel truism; and as it is with love so was it with her fancies and enthusiasms. Once dead and forgotten there was no resurrection for them.

  He knew that with her everything depended on her mood. A great tragedy or a great heroism would seem to her admirable or absurd, precisely according to the humour of the hour; a pathetic history or a terrible calamity would find her disposed either to turn it into ridicule, or receive it with sympathy, merely as her day had been agreeable or tiresome, as her companions had interested or wearied her, as her toilette had pleased or displeased her.

  ‘My dear Otho,’ she had said once to him, when he had ventured on some courteously-worded reproof of this extreme uncertainty of her temperament, ‘if I did not get a little variety out of my own sensations, I should never find any at all anywhere. I cannot be like the editor of a newspaper, who, whatever may happen, always has his joy or his woe already in stereotype and large capitals. If one gets up in the morning to find a grey sky when one wants a blue one, to find a dull post-bag instead of an amusing one, to be disappointed in the effect of a costume, to be prevented from riding by getting a chill, what can one care if all Europe were in flames? Whereas, if everything is pleasant when one wakes, one remains quite amiable enough all the morning to be sorry even for Gavroche and Cossette in the street! Caprice? No, it is not precisely caprice. It is rather something in one’s temperament which is acted on by one’s surroundings, as the barometer is by the weather. If I have ever done any very generous or great things, as you are flattering enough to tell me that I have, it must have been at some exceptional moment when Worth had especially pleased me. All the finer inspirations of women come from satisfaction with themselves or their gowns!’