Othmar

“ The name of Othmar was, even to the ears of Damaris, a spell of might upon those shores. She was flattered, amazed, touched to intense emotion, but she stammered out that, although she was most grateful, yet she dared not; her grandfather would kill her if she left the island; he was most severe; he never forgave.
'I promise to disarm your grandfather if that is all your fear,' said Nadine, as she thought to herself, 'These good Communists, je les connais! ”

“ 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? ”

“ You might set her body down under her orange-boughs, under her blue sky, but you could not give her the heart of her childhood. You are a god in your way; the only god the nineteenth century knows—a rich man—but to do that is beyond your power.'
'If I had that power I should be a god indeed!' said Othmar bitterly, 'and the whole sick world would come to me to be cured.'
He needed not the words of Rosselin to remind him that never would he be able to undo the work his wife had done in one idle moment of imperious caprice. ”

“ What has Othmar to do with it either way? If it be a sacrifice made for him he will not care for it. He has been kind to you; he is kind to half a million people; but your future is nothing to him, except as he wishes you well, assuredly he wishes you well, and the more success and happiness you gain the less remorse will he feel that he and his broke up your life in the south. Oh, my child, my dear, be wise while it is time. The world is all before you, do not take a false step on its very threshold. The gods are seldom benevolent ”

“ 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. ”

“ I tell you that your idea is absurd, that Othmar will never attribute to you the motives you fancy; he is too wise and too generous, and no one could look at you, child, and think of you an ignoble thing. You may be a great artist if you choose. If you are not that, you will be of all creatures the most wretched, for you will live against all the instincts of your nature, against all the bend of your mind. What made you, when you read your poets on your island, dream of a life wholly unknown to you, if not the forces of genius which made you dissatisfied where you were, and cried to you "Go." ”

“ You know at one time he actually dreamed of breaking up the whole network of the Othmar power, and stripping himself of everything, and living like St. Vincent de Paul. That was before those children were born; their mother would certainly never take the vow of poverty! Well, shall you and I ride down to Magny some morning and see this prodigy of genius and simplicity? You can recall yourself to her, and you can present me. We will represent ourselves as inspired by what we have heard from Rosselin.'
Loswa hesitated. Othmar was not a man whom he cared to cross. ”

“ When in the course of the day he learned from some deep-sea fishers trawling near the island who his visitor had been—for the fishermen had recognised Othmar as he had passed in his boat—Louis Roze felt yet less sure that he had done wisely. To have pleased such a rich man might have been worth more than an acre of land, than a handful of gold. He hated aristocrats with all the savage hatred of a socialist of the south, but he respected rich men with all the admiring esteem which those who love money feel for those who possess it in unusual abundance. ”

“ You are a man, my dear Count Othmar, who is much more likely to be fascinated by a disinterested action than by a vulgar amour. I understand you, but I warn you that nobody else will.'
'I suppose not,' said Othmar. 'That must be as it may. How did you divine so well what I was thinking of?'
'Divination of that kind is easy after experiences as long as mine are,' answered Rosselin, gathering one of his carnations and fastening it in his linen coat. 'If we do not acquire that much from life we live to be old to little purpose. ”

“ Pharamond was blotted and blurred into oblivion under the heaps of forgotten things of a past year which could have no place in a mind engrossed in its own vanities and excitations, and living wholly in the present. But she had recognised Othmar himself as her carriage had passed yards off, and she had put up her field-glass at the towers of the château of Dampierre; and it had amused her to find that he was just like other men, though he affected such absurd, undivided devotion to one. ”

“ Rather than fail to execute the wishes of Nadège Federowna, or fail to keep the secret of them when fulfilled, he would have died a hundred times over with that serenity under torture which the Russian of the Baltic shares with the Asiatic of the Indus.
Of the very existence of this man Othmar knew scarcely anything. It had always seemed to her well to have some few instruments of which the position and the species were known only to herself. One is never sure of the future. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is inevitable that your name has been, or will be, associated with hers. Modern life is one huge glass-house. If she be first seen at your house, in your salons, calumny can scarcely attach to your friendship for her. Pardon me if I speak with too intimate a candour. If I said less, I should feel myself almost dragged into the base collusion of a Sir Pandarus.'
Othmar grew pale with anger; he was unaccustomed to familiarity, and the words seemed to him wanting in delicacy and in respect. ”

“ She smiled. 'I should not pity people who could shut themselves up in damp forests on the Loire water in midwinter. A Russian winter is quite a different thing; the air is like champagne, the frost is like diamonds, the plains are like marble; it is charming to have one's roses and palms in a temperature of 30° Réaumur, and by merely going out of doors plunge en pleine Sibérie. That is why I am a very patriotic Russian. I love the intensity of its contrasts.'
'As Marie Stuart loved Chastelard and Bothwell!' said Othmar with a certain significance. ”

“ He knew the weakness of love, and he knew the strength of genius.
'Listen to me,' he said, as the wood-fire gleamed and murmured. 'You dream too much of Othmar. I understand he was your saviour; he is your hero, your saint, your god: all that is inevitable; and he is a man whom women will always love, because he has a great grace and gentleness about him, and his discontent and sadness are in picturesque contrast with his magnificent and enviable fortunes. But he will never love you, my child: just because he has so loved that woman, that his heart has grown cloyed, yet cold ”

“ History always repeats itself, and how one wishes that it did not!’
‘I am flattered, Madame, that you deign to draw my portrait, since it shows that you have not wholly forgotten my features,’ said Othmar, with some bitterness. ‘At present I have not discovered the hen, the cabbages, or the keys that will make life worth living to me. ”

“ Othmar went into his great library, and shut the door upon himself. For more than an hour he paced to and fro the length of the room, overcome with an agitation which he could not master. He had a sense that his life was over. He felt as though his very heart-strings had snapped and parted for ever. A great love cannot perish without some such throb as a strong animal life suffers when it is forcibly torn asunder. ”

“ Well, we are as far off it as though we were not together.'
'Do you mean then,' said Othmar impatiently, 'that you think our life together a mistake?'
'No, not quite that; because we are more intelligent than most people, only we have been unable to rise above the commonplace; unable to keep our iron at a white heat. Our existence looks very brilliant, no doubt, to those outside it, but in real truth there is a poverty of invention about it which makes me feel ashamed of my own want of originality.'
She laughed a little; her old laugh, which always chilled the hearts of men. ”

“ Now, though you are a very clever man, my dear Othmar, you cannot be put in either of these categories. You know too much of the world for the first, and you have too much softness of heart for the second. Now, were you like Baron Fritz——’
‘My uncle is the one perfectly happy man that I have ever known,’ replied Othmar. ‘It is because he is the most perfect of egotists. ”

“ Oh, the beast, the beast! All that belonged to my son—every atom of it, from her little ear to her slender foot, and should have been burnt with him, like the Indian women, if I could have had my way—should have been buried with him, like his stars and his crosses. Oh, the beast, the beast! if I could only wring her neck!'
Then she rose, and murmuring some words inaudible and indifferent to her companions, she left the apartment. Othmar, alone beside his wife in the aromatic warmth of the summer evening, bent over her couch and kissed her little bouquet of heliotrope. ”

“ Rosselin is going to bring you out at the Français or the Odéon; you will have no trouble; everything is arranged; Othmar's name is enough, and your story will please Paris when it is in a romantic mood. It is romantic sometimes, despite the naturalists. You are very handsome, my dear, very; you have an antique type, and what blood and what health there are in you!—enough to make a million of our anémiques! Why do you go on living in this hole among pigeons and dogs? ”

“ 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. ”

“ If I had not seen genius in you it would not have been merely to please Othmar that I would have told you to give yourself to art; I should have said to you, on the contrary: "Go and marry a farmer of La Beauce, spin and sew, and wear a silk gown on Sundays; have any number of children; be an ordinary woman in a word."'
'Marry a farmer of La Beauce!'
She coloured with indignation. ”

“ Besides, you made me so many in Paris, and then you went to the Mongols. I never knew why you went to the Mongols; why did you go?’
‘Wounded brutes always get away somewhere to be unseen as long as their wound bleeds,’ said Othmar, with some bitterness.
‘How Sachs cried for that cartouche-box!’ she said, as she lit a cigarette. ‘His women scolded him, but I said to them, “Why do you scold him? He is a male creature; therefore he must weep for what he cannot get.” Some children cry for the moon; a moon, or a cartouche-box, or a woman, the principle is the same.’
Othmar rose and approached her. ”

“ The old grandmother, by name Reine Chabot, owned and farmed a few acres of good land near Les Hameaux, in the rich vale of Chevreuse. To Othmar, who had saved her boy in body and soul, she would have given body and soul herself. She was a hale and strong woman, of simple habits and of noble mind. She was a recluse, but not a morbid one, and her ways and manner of life were similar to those which Damaris had been used to on the island of Bonaventure. ”

“ No doubt ever entered her mind as to the legacy bequeathed by her grandfather; it was more than enough for all her wants, and she understood that she could live at Les Hameaux easily, all her lifetime, if she chose. But without [250] any apprehension for her future, she was not without that unrest which is the inseparable companion of all ambition. The remembrance of the wife of Othmar was like a thorn in her side: she had an eager, passionate, thirsty desire to justify herself in the sight of that great lady, to become something which could not be derided or denied or set aside with contempt. ”

“ It takes so much; it offers nothing. True, some of the greatest passions the world has [22] seen have been born after youth had long passed, and have burned on till death with deeper fires of sunset than ever dawn has seen. But a woman is not consoled by that possibility as morning slides past her and the shadows grow long.
Othmar, without other reply, opened the door of her dressing-room, and there entered two small children, a boy and a girl with faces like flowers, and sweet rosy mouths, carrying a large gilded basket between them, filled with white lilac and gardenia. ”