by Ouida
‘My dear Otho,’ she said a little irritably one day when he had answered her with wandering attention, ‘you are very pensive and distrait since you came to Russia. What have you been doing in the solitudes of a Parisian summer? You look as if you had been writing an epic and had failed in it.’
‘Death is never gay or agreeable,’ said Othmar; ‘and I have been in its company.’
‘My dear, when death does not come until our friends are over eighty, surely we can see his approach without surprise or any very great regret. Besides, I never knew that Baron Friederich was remarkably sympathetic to you. You used to quarrel with him about most things. But you have such a curious waywardness in always regretting, when they are dead, the absence of the very persons you most wished away from you when they were living.’
Othmar shrank a little from the words, as though they hurt him physically. They were true enough to be painful.
‘Perhaps one knows their value too late,’ he said, controlling with effort a strong impatience of her want of sympathy and her unkind and careless amusement at his expense.
‘Or perhaps we imagine a value in them they never possessed,’ she replied. ‘That is far more probable. Distance lends enchantment to the view of them — at least it does with such temperaments as yours, which are always self-tormenting and given to idealising both things and people. When the persons are living, to ruffle and weary and contradict you, you only think what bores they are; but when they are dead you begin to idealise them, and sacrifice yourself to their manes in all kinds of self-censure. It is a very morbid way of taking life. I hope your son will not resemble you in that particular.’
‘It is to be hoped, for his comfort, that he will rather resemble his mother in the art of immediate and complete oblivion of both the dead and the living,’ said Othmar, with an irritation which was almost ill-temper, and a retort which passed the limits of courtesy.
He had never felt so strong an annoyance as he felt now at her ironical and slighting treatment of his thoughts and feelings; so great an impatience of that tranquil and contemptuous method of regarding life which never varied in her, and which would never vary, it seemed to him, even before his own dead body. Before it he felt that fatigue which human eyes feel when long in the radiance of electric light. He longed for simple sympathy, simple consolation, simple affection, as the tired eyes long for rest in cool shadows of dusky dewy eves in summer woods, and he was ill at ease with himself for what he concealed from her.
Yet, he thought, of what use would it be to tell her of that poor child at Les Hameaux? She would have no pity certainly, probably no patience, with what would seem to her the most absurdly romantic course of adventures. She would ridicule him as she ridiculed him now — if she believed him; and very likely she would not even do that.
She looked at him under the languid lids of her dreamy eyes: eyes so calm, so indifferent, so mysterious, so satirical in their survey of him as of all mankind.
‘My dear friend,’ she said, with a little contempt and a little rebuke in her tone, ‘it seems to me that we are very nearly — quarrelling! Nothing is so vulgar as to quarrel. I have never done it in my life. It is a great waste of time; and nothing can be more bourgeois. I have never understood why people should quarrel; it is so very easy to walk away!’
Therewith she rose and walked towards the open doors, with that undulating movement of the hips and beautiful ease and grace of step for which she was renowned through Europe; no woman’s walk was comparable to hers.
Othmar remained standing where he was, and looked after her with a sombre and regretful glance, in which some of the old worship and passion lingered, united to a new-born anger and offence. The mortification which lies for any man of intelligence and feeling in the sense that he has never really touched and held the soul of the woman of whose physical possession he has been master, was upon him in a strong and cruel sense of moral failure and of intellectual impotence. Was it his fault or hers? Was it true, as he had said once to her, that you cannot obtain more from any nature than it possesses, and that all the forces of created life cannot draw fire from the smooth marble or make the pale pearl blush like the opal? Was it that she had it not in her to give any man more than that mingling of momentary aphrodisiacal indulgence and of eternal immutable derision; and that whilst her power to create a heaven of physical passion was so great, her power of satisfying the exactions of the heart and soul was slight?
Or was it, as the self-depreciation of his temperament led him to think, that he himself had not moral and mental force or intellectual greatness strong enough to obtain empire over her mind — a mind so cultured, so refined, so exacting, so satiated, that hardly any human companionship could succeed in awaking in it any lasting interest?
He had humility enough to believe the last.
The Princess Lobow Gregorievna, sitting mute and chill as a statue of Nemesis, heard and watched, and in the depths of her narrow darksome soul, filled with harsh creeds and as harsh hatreds, said to herself that perchance, after all, her dead son might yet be avenged by the mere results of time — that foe of love, that friend of all disunion.
Their marriage had been abhorrent to her. It had seemed to her eyes like a blow on the cheek given to her son’s corpse. Any laugh or smile of either of them seemed an affront to him. Every glance of sympathy exchanged between them seemed a mockery of his death, suffered for their sakes. She who had never doubted that Othmar had betrayed her son in his lifetime, only cherished one hope in her chill breast — to see him suffer the same fate. She had always felt that she would kiss on both cheeks any lover of Nadine’s who should make Othmar feel the shame of a dishonoured name, the pangs of a betrayed trust. But for that lover she had looked in vain. She had always said to the hungry hate in her heart: ‘Patience; time will bring all things; and the serpent may cast its skin but keeps its nature.’
But of late years she had feared that nothing would ever divide them.
Their lives seemed to her to pass on like a smooth full river, without shoal or rapid, or any spate from storm. There was many an hour when she lay stretched in semblance of devoutest prayer before the holy eikon of the chamber altar, when all that her soul uttered and her lips murmured were curses low and long upon them both.
Year after year went on and brought her no gratification of her desires and her hate. All things went well with them. They had health and pleasure; happiness too, so far as happiness comes to mortals. Their offspring throve in loveliness and grace, and the world honoured and caressed them both. Sometimes, in the stern yet frantic hatred which she cherished, she would pray that disease or pestilence might at least take the woman’s beauty from her; but her prayer passed ungranted. Nadine had ever that serene immunity from all serious maladies of the flesh which so often accompanies the fragile appearance and sensitive nerves of women who, like her, declare themselves made unwell by a discordant noise, an unpleasant odour, a wearisome day, or any other trifle which displeases them. Even the pains and perils of maternity her good fortune had made unusually light to her, and except from that cause she had hardly had a day’s real suffering in her whole existence. To the sullen eyes of Napraxine’s mother she always seemed to bear a charmed life.
Therefore with fierce dumb joy Lobow Gregorievna, with her vigilant ear and eye, saw the one little rift within the lute, heard the one jarring chord on the music. It was so slight that no anxiety less keen than her own would have detected it; but it was there.
He remained in Russia a fortnight, but during that time he did not find any occasion which seemed to him propitious enough for him to speak of Damaris, with any chance of obtaining sympathy for her position or understanding of his own actions. With that ignorance of what most concerns us, which is one of the saddest things of life, he never dreamed that any change in himself had made his wife as he found her to be, in one of her most captious, most capricious, most unsympathetic moods. He was not unused to these; he attributed them now to the wearine
ss she felt at existence in the plains of Ural and impatience at the companionship of the Princess Napraxine which he knew was at all times irksome to her. He was not aware that he was himself more absent of mind, less tender in manner, less frankly and fully confidential in speech; he was not aware that this one thing untold, this one thought unrevealed, had caused an alteration in him, slight and vague indeed, yet plainly perceptible to her, skilled reader of manner and of mind as she was.
A delicate nature shrinks from the imputation of unworthy motives, and a fastidious temper shrinks from any possibility of ridicule; it was the dread of both which kept him silent as to the friendship he had shown to the child from Bonaventure. The apprehension of his wife’s scepticism and ironies hung like a grey mist over the generous impulses of his manhood, as in his earliest youth the certainty of his father’s brutal cynicism had lain like a stone on the poetic aspirations of his boyhood.
Even in those rare instants when she was moved to sympathy with any unselfishness or any unworldliness, there was always in her eyes some faint gleam of derision, there was always in her voice some lingering accent of doubt and of raillery. She would have been capable of many great things in great emergencies herself, but she would have been wholly incapable of refraining from making a jest of them afterwards. It is the temper of all wit; it is the temper of much philosophy; but it is not the temper which invites the confidence or soothes the doubts of another.
Confidence, like a swallow coming over seas in the storm and sunshine of spring weather, will only nest where it is sure of a safe shelter.
The higher, better, subtler emotions of the human heart will not venture to come forth into the wintry air of mockery or scorn; they are shy blossoms which want the warm wind of a sure sympathy to enable them to expand.
‘If I told her, she would only think me either an imbecile or a libertine,’ he thought, and the tale went untold.
CHAPTER XXXII.
Amyôt was still quite solitary when he returned from Russia. The children were on the north coast by the sea; its châtelaine was still taking her desired presence with rare condescension and alternative moods of ennui and irony to those royal hunting castles and imperial pleasure places she deigned to honour; the wide avenues, the great terraces, the blossoming gardens, the sunlit colonnades of the modern summer dining-hall were only tenanted by the last lingering butterflies which skimmed the air with white wings, blue wings, scarlet wings, and the balmy aromatic scent of the millions of roses which seemed to wander through the empty places like a visible presence.
Usually whenever he came thither he was surrounded by that society which was a necessity to his wife, even whilst it failed to satisfy her, by that movement, gaiety, and entrain, which even if they fail to amuse, yet can always in a manner distract thought and fill up time. There seemed to him a strange silence, a melancholy which was oppressive, in these stately places, usually so full of colour and pleasure, now so quiet and so lonely, with only some noiseless servant passing with swift step across its floors or down its staircases.
There was not even the song of a bird to break the stillness; it was early in autumn, and their sweet throats were mute.
He saw in remembrance the grace of his wife’s movements as she had passed down these great stairs, he saw the smile in her eyes indulgent as to a child’s weakness, ironical as of a man’s folly; he heard her voice saying, with that little sound in it of some exquisite disdain falling from on high on mortal thoughts as silvery fountain-water falls from marble heights on creeping mosses:
‘It is scarcely worth while to faire des madrigaux.’
Had that speaker ever loved him even for five minutes of her life?
Had she ever known what love was? He thought of the Court of Love which she had held under those oak trees yonder, above whose rounded masses a white moon now sailed. With what ingenuity, what subtlety, what philosophy, what absolute knowledge of all love’s minutest weaknesses and utmost madness, she had been able to discourse of it. But was it not such knowledge as the physiologist’s knowledge of pain in the creature on which he experiments? Of knowledge there is abundance, of the chill and analytical knowledge of science, of the name and structure of every torn tissue, of every bleeding fibre, of every tortured nerve; but knowledge such as is born of fellow feeling, of sensitive sympathy, of comprehending pity, there is none. Was it not so with her?
Had not love been always to her as the living organisation which he tortures is to the physiologist? Had she not, like him, watched, studied, tabulated the agonies of the wretched creature before her, whilst also, like him, she had never felt in her own nerves one single thrill of pain?
As her lover it had allured him with the intense attraction of an impenetrable mystery, this attitude of her mind, this indifference, both sensual and spiritual, before the demands of love. But as the companion of her life it left him with a sense of dissatisfaction, and of unsatisfied desire. For years it had served to excite and to sustain his passion, but as time wore on it almost communicated its coldness to himself; he began to feel with a sense of terror, as before some disloyalty which he could not escape, that the apathy, the fatigue, the absence of emotion, which are the certain attendants on all satisfied passion, were not far distant from himself.
The very air of Amyôt seemed melancholy to him in these late summer heats, without the usual gaiety and movement which were there at most other seasons when he came to it. Solitude had always, in his youth, been welcome to him, and had fatigued him less than the routine of society; but solitude requires the charm of accompanying dreams, it needs the visions of youth, the vague but glorious hopes of opening life; and Othmar had a vague sense that he would never dream any more, that he grew old, that his fate was fixed, that never would any very welcome or sweet response come to his wishes from the voices of the future. He had had the poet’s temperament without the poet’s power of expression; he could not take the poet’s consolation, ‘Sing to the Muses, and let the world go by.’ His destiny imprisoned him, and there was little sympathy between himself and it.
As he walked in the moonlight, under the roofs of late roses which shed their petals, white, crimson, and blush-coloured, on him, dewy cool and sweet as the touch of his wife’s cheek, a servant brought him a pencilled note.
It said briefly:
‘There has been an accident. We are not hurt, but the train cannot take us on. Send your carriages for us. I saw in the journals this morning that you were at Amyôt.’
The paper had been sent from the town of Beaugency, whilst it was signed ‘Blanche de Laon:’ the last person on earth whose presence he would have wished for in his solitude. Irritating, distasteful, and even painful to him as her society was, yet he could do no less than attend to such a request. He must have complied with it had it come from a stranger. He at once sent his brake and two other carriages, with fast horses, to do her bidding, and returned indoors to give such orders as were needful for this unexpected invasion of an unknown number of guests.
It was late, and he himself had dined two hours before; but he ordered a supper to be got ready for the new comers, who might not have dined at Orleans. He concluded that she was passing from Paris to one of her châteaux near Saumur, where in late summer and early autumn she often assembled the very distinguished, but somewhat noisy, society which regarded her as its queen. His musings and his solitude had been roughly dispelled; and, though both had been somewhat joyless, he regretted them as an hour later he heard the roll of the returning wheels and the stamping of impatient horses’ hoofs in the great central court of honour, and went perforce to meet and greet his uninvited guests.
The Princess Blanche, having herself driven the four horses of the brake through the moonlit cross-roads which led from Beaugency to Amyôt, was in the highest spirits as she descended from the box seat, and gaily greeted him in her shrill, swift voice and her fashionable langue verte. There had been a severe accident; a goods train had been met by the express; the usual story, a
s she said contemptuously. The line was strewn with wrecked waggons and overturned engines; there had been no possibility of proceeding to Blois. Had there been people killed? Oh, yes; she believed so. ‘On braillait là-bas, n’est-ce pas, Gontran?’ she said indifferently to one of her companions, and added, with fervour, ‘Tiens! J’ai une faim de loup!’
‘But you said that no one was hurt?’ said Othmar, regretting that he had not gone in person to the scene of trouble.
‘None of us were,’ she replied. ‘We were in the centre of the train. We felt the shock; that was all. We were playing the American “poker.” The collision threw down the cards. I should have come to Amyôt if you had not been here. No one could pass the night at a country station. Besides, Amyôt is always ready for a hundred people.’
‘Amyôt is always at the service of all my friends,’ replied Othmar with sincerity, but with a certain stiffness. He disliked her familiarity with him at all times, and was conscious that, despite it, she bore no good will to himself or to his wife.
She wasted no more words on him, but led the way into the house, scarcely deigning to present to him those of her companions with whom he was not already acquainted. There was some dozen of them, all, both men and women, notabilities of that haute gomme which was the only world she recognised. They had been travelling with her from Paris, being bidden for a shooting party to her castle in Touraine.
Othmar conducted her to the great hall; then he said to her:
‘Everything is at your disposition, and all the household at your command. You will excuse me if myself I leave you for awhile to go and see if I can be of any use to those less happily fated persons — qui braillaient là-bas.’
She laughed.
‘Ah! you were always a Don Quixote. Even Madame Nadège has not cured you.’
‘Your servants may have been hurt, or worse still, your fourgons damaged. I will bring you news of them,’ said Othmar, with an irony which affronted whilst it amused her.