Ouida

“ I can imagine what it is—a chez soi that one cares about and desires to return to—but I do not possess it.’
‘Make it,’ said Melville; ‘that is always in the power of every man who is not a priest.’
‘I suppose it is,’ said Othmar. ‘But it has never seemed very easy to me. The fire of the hearth is like the coal from the altar: it comes from heaven, and can scarcely be commanded.’
He glanced as he spoke at Nadine Napraxine, who was lying back against the golden gleams of the plush of her couch; she had a tea-rose in her hand which she had plucked from the gardens. ”

“ How many of them ally themselves with the mud of the earth for the sake of large dowries? how many mortgage their old lands till they have not a sod left which they can call their own? how many waste all their energies and all their health in a routine of miserable and stupid follies which are hardly even to be dignified as vice?’
She spoke with animation; her cheeks had a faint flush, delicate as that of the waxen bells of the begonia flowers, her eyes were full of light. Othmar looked at her with a passion of regret. ”

“ The world has not changed; the mode of expression may have altered, but men feel as they felt in the days of David or of Æschylus. Love is what it was then, a mere passing pleasure or pain to many, but to some the herald of heaven or of hell, the begetter of heroism or of crime.’
‘My dear Othmar, pray excuse me,’ said Nadine Napraxine, ‘you talk beautifully, you always did, but I cannot stay to hear you when the sun is just going down, and we have only a yacht that crawls to take us home to dinner. ”

“ He was seventy years old; he would be unable to live for ever; his arsenal of wires contained no ivory button by which he could summon eternal life; he had gout in his system, and he did not disguise from himself that any day his cook, with the silver saucepans, his pretty aquarelles, his gigantic operations, his intense love of life, might one and all be powerless to keep him in his place, and then!—all the magnitude and might of the House of Othmar would depend solely and entirely on one capricious and unstable young man, who only cared for a Greek poet or a German opera! ”

“ Women are like alabaster lamps, unlit until they learn envy and desire. When that flame is lighted, then the alabaster glows.’
He stooped his head and kissed her hand, but he did it with a different touch to Othmar’s, and she coloured with a sense of pain and anger.
‘Ma mie!’ he murmured. ‘I will undertake to combat successfully the scruples of your cousin; you shall see the ball next week. Cri-Cri shall find you a frock, and jewels you want none; you have the supreme jewel—youth; crowns are dull without it; and, let our dear women use what arts they may, they cannot counterfeit it. ”

“ Truthfully we can only date from 1767, when Marc Othmar, who dealt in horses, began to lend money in Agram. It is not a lofty beginning; it is not even a creditable one. But I do not think that to pretend that Marc Othmar, the horse dealer or horse stealer, was a hero and saint would mend matters. I accept him as what he was, but I cannot be proud of him; even sometimes I am on the eve of cursing him; at all events, of wishing he had never existed.’
‘My dear Othmar, you are very strange sometimes——’
‘Am I? One is never content with what one has. ”

“ To talk of the immorality of a speculation is like talking of the vices of a rock-crystal. There is only one sin in a financial operation; it sins if it be unsound.’
‘Financial morality,’ then said Othmar, ‘has at least this advantage over social morality, that it is very much simplified!’
‘It is simple as your stable’s doctrines,’ replied the Baron. ‘If a horse be sound, he is a good horse; if he be not sound, he is a screw; nothing can be simpler. ”

“ The Princess took no notice of her lord’s blunder; indeed, she seldom answered his remarks at any time; she drew her primrose satin and soft muslin over the sill of the French window, and seated herself at an oval table, gay with fine china, with flowers and fruit, and with a Venice point lace border to its table cloth, which was strewn with Parma violets and the petals of orange-blossoms. She had Geraldine on her right hand and her back to the light. She had an ermine bag holding a silver globe of warm water for her feet, and a chair that was the perfection of ease. ”

“ It is our old man of the sea pickaback with us for ever? Who can lead a meditative life that dines twice a day, as we all practically do, and eats of twenty services? When we prattle about nature, and quote Matthew Arnold, we are as artificial as the ribboned shepherdesses of Trianon; and what we call our high art is only just another sort of jargon. Suppose I followed your recipe and tried living quietly here, which means asking nobody to dinner, what would happen? Wilkes would go away, Platon would sulk or do worse, and you and I should yawn in each other’s faces. ”

“ Why, he wondered, why on earth should a man care about a pre-existence, or a spiritual existence, at all, who had everything that his heart could desire in his terrestrial life? He could imagine that starving poets or hungry theologians comforted themselves with those fancies, but Othmar!——
‘You should have been a Montalembert or a Lamennais,’ he answered, which was a polite way of saying that he was an imbecile.
‘Without being either the one or the other, one may carry into public life the same sort of honour which even you think incumbent on one in public life,’ said Othmar. ”

“ Fruit, perhaps, does keep something of the golden age about it; but our dinners!—were I a man I would never see the woman I admired taking her share of diseased livers, tortured fish, slaughtered songsters. They are fond of writing nowadays about a higher humanity which will succeed to ours; but my idea of it would be that it should be fed like Fénelon’s islanders by only breathing sweet odours. That would be even better than the bird’s dip in the rose.’
‘Then you will not go to Millo?’ persisted Othmar. ”

“ If he revered anything in life, it was the tradition of old Marc Othmar amassing his florins in the half-barbaric city of Agram.
‘For aught we know he was a Tchigan, a Romany,’ his nephew had said to him once; and he had replied angrily, ‘And if he were a gipsy? Is there blood more ancient? Is there a people freer? Is there an intelligence more complex? What are the European races beside the Oriental? But you know very well that he was a pure Croat,’ he had concluded, with intolerable impatience of such depreciation of the founder of their greatness. ”

“ The statesmen are thought to be the chief rulers and prime motors of the fate of the world, but they can but act as we who are behind them permit: they drag the coach; we drive it.’
‘That I know,’ answered Othmar. ‘We have the most gigantic responsibility united with the most utterly corrupt moral code. I grant that we are, in a way, the Cæsars of the modern world, but we are bestially selfish; we are hog-like in our repletion, as all Cæsars become. No financier ever risked ruin for a noble impulse or for a lost cause. ”

“ He had been ruthlessly betrayed by her coquetry, profoundly wounded by her coldness, but he believed in her still—even still believed in himself as the man whom ultimately she would love. He had returned to Europe with the resolution never to be in her presence except when the hazards of society should bring them perforce in the same atmosphere, but at the first charm of her regard he had forgotten all his resolves, lost all his wisdom. Life only seemed worth living if he could hear that one voice, so sweet in its modulations, so chilly in its perfect harmony. ”

“ Othmar had brought that dramatic element into her life without which, despite her really very high intelligence, ennui was apt to descend upon her. When his eyes encountered that look they became very cold, and had a challenge in them: the challenge of a man who defies a woman to make him again the slave of her caprices. Her husband saw nothing of those glances. Geraldine saw more even than there was to see, and became moody and dejected. ”

“ Canals, deserts, mines, cities, colonies, ocean ways, had felt the vivifying powers of the great Othmar loans; but the evil appeared to him far to out-balance the good, and all the wealth seemed to him tainted. He had considerable pride, in a shape with which men would not have sympathised. He fancied that the inherited nobility of his French and English blood was always at war with the blood of the Croat bankers by whom he had been begotten. ”

“ There is no one else to sing. But my cousin does not approve of it. She thinks there may be people over from Nice; but there never are. There is no one but the peasants.’
‘The Duchesse will not mind me,’ said Othmar. ‘Let us say au revoir!’
He kissed her hand with a careless gallantry which made her colour over her brow and throat, and let her leave him. She sped like a frightened fawn over the turf and was soon lost to sight in the bosquets of Millo. ”

“ CHAPTER IV.
‘The “Zostera” looks tempting in the sunshine,’ said Nadine Napraxine, as she rose and leaned on the marble balustrade to gaze over the sea, where the stately sailing yacht of Geraldine was at anchor outside the little bay of La Jacquemerille, which was too shallow to be entered. ‘I will go out in her in ten minutes’ time. I prefer to watch the sunset from the sea, and the sunset will be very fine to-day, for there are a few clouds above; the sky is usually so terribly monotonous here, it is like an eulogy of your predecessor at the Academy: il y a trop de bleu. ”

“ That is why I like the party obedience of your country, Wilkes; it is entirely unintelligent and profoundly immoral; to a generally intellectual nation it would be impossible, but it is loyal. I think when one has to choose between a crime and a disloyalty one must take the crime as the lesser evil of the two.’
‘Voting for party is a crime very often,’ said Geraldine. ‘It is one of the many things as to which I have never made up my mind. Ought one to sacrifice the country to what one believes a bad measure for the sheer sake of keeping one’s party in office? ”

“ I had my uncle with me all the day, and at night a dinner, a concert, and the sauterie, to which I hoped you would have been brought.’
‘But I cannot dance,’ said the child, blushing very much as she made the humiliating confession.
‘So much the better,’ said Othmar, inconsistently, ‘I am sure, however, that you would dance with admirable grace if you danced at all. Anyone who moves well can dance well.’
This time the colour in her cheeks was that of pleasure at his praise. She was silent, looking at him a little wistfully, recalling what De Vannes had said of the Princess Napraxine. ”

“ There is nothing makes the world so angry as indifference to what it thinks delightful.’
‘You have offended it in that way yourself, Princess.’
‘Often; but not quite with your insolence. A man who prefers his library to the clubs is beyond all pardon; and, besides, I am seen everywhere where it is worth while to be seen; [109] you are—or were—generally conspicuous by your absence.’
‘I imagine the world has grown as indifferent to me as I am to it, and having forgotten has so forgiven me. I have been away eighteen months.’
‘The world never forgets its rich men, my dear Othmar. ”

“ Paris—you know him, de Thiviers—he is very famous; he will shake his head over me as if I were doomed to die in ten minutes, and he frightens Platon out of his wits—he gets a great many rouleaux at the end of the season—and he and I look as grave as the two augurs, though, like the augurs, we are both longing to laugh. It is so useful to be thought very delicate, you have an excuse for everything. If at the last moment you don’t wish to go anywhere, nobody can say anything if it be your health that gives way. ”

“ You have no sympathy or compassion; you have only a sort of cynical amusement in what you do; you make yourself the centre of a man’s life with no more effort than you use that fan; the man is nothing to you, nothing on earth; but you destroy all his peace, all his future——’
‘Dear Wilkes, do not be so tragic!’ murmured Princess Napraxine, with a little yawn. ‘I dislike tragedy; I never by any chance go to Perrin’s when they play one. If men are fond of me—as you say——’
‘As I say!’ ejaculated Lady Brancepeth. ”

“ Occasionally, as Nadine Napraxine had said, il voyait en jaune; the bitterness of spirit which comes over all who see themselves sought for what they possess passed over him also, but its pessimism never lasted long. That human nature was trivial but not evil was, on the whole, the result of his experiences.
By one of the odd caprices in which destiny delights, a lettered ease would have been the utmost he would have cared to command. The incessant demands which a great fortune always brings upon its possessor were to him irksome ”

“ I do not count my smiles. That poor little slave is interesting, he is an exile, and he will die in a year or two; my children [362] are insufferably uninteresting; they have unchangeable health, intense stupidity, and will grow up to have every desire fulfilled, every caprice gratified, and to become that irresponsible, useless, tyrannical, anachronism—a Russian noble. Perhaps they will be good soldiers and kill a score of Asiatics. Perhaps they will only drink brandy, and gamble.’
Othmar did not reply; he was looking at the exquisite grace of her form, the tea-rose tint of her cheeks. ”