He dined alone; a few telegrams would have filled his rooms, but he
did not care for society, which he thought only came to him because he
was one of the few owners of milliards in Europe. He sat alone after
dinner in the salon which she had admired, with the light of half a
hundred wax candles bringing out the golden gleams in the plush, the
colours of the embroidered irises, the dead gold of the cornice and
panels, while a fire of olive wood glowed under the carvings of the
mantelpiece of porphyry. The plush curtains, with the lace beneath
them, veiled the shuttered windows; outside the night was calm, there
was no sound anywhere. The words of Melville came back to him as he
sat there in the midst of the luxury and of the loneliness: 'To make a
home is in the power of any man who is not a priest.'
It did not seem to him to lie in his. He could have bought a
principality, but he could not buy a home. Love alone could create
that, and the only woman he had loved for years was Nadine Napraxine.
If she had been what he wished to him, would she have made him this
ideal home--she, capricious, indifferent, disdainful, _mondaine_, as
she had said, in every habit, thought, and attitude of her life?
Perhaps not; probably not, he knew; yet she alone would have had power
to make a melody out of the discords of his desires and his
discontent; she alone seemed to him to fill the vacant places, to
smile across the solitary room, to have left the lingering perfume of
her presence there, as the orange flowers left their fragrance in the
cabinet in which they were laid for a moment.
Otho Othmar was one of the richest men in Europe; he was often
disposed to regret it, as many persons regret that to which they have
been born. He did not think it a thing to be vain of; he was even
occasionally ashamed of it. It seemed to him that when you were so
much richer than most of your fellows you were required to be very
much better than they; and it is not always agreeable, nor often easy,
to be so. When he signed 'Othmar' it was as when an emperor signs his
name, and with a stroke of the pen he could give away millions with as
much ease as lesser mortals can scatter pence. This facility was no
pleasure to him. Though he was well aware that riches are the one
ruling power of the modern world, and comprise in themselves the
wishing cap and the magician's wand, Excalibur and Holy Grail, he did
not greatly prize his possession of them; perhaps because they had
been always before him and about him in profusion from his birth.
The Othmar fortune had been steadily growing for a century and a half.
At the commencement Marc Othmar, a Croat, native of Agram, had been a
poor man enough--a horse dealer, some said a horse stealer--what
precisely never was known. Agram is not a very greatly frequented
place, and records get easily mildewed and dim in it. Whether he began
life as pedlar, or peasant, or, as some affirmed, as a robber of wild
colts, Marc Othmar at forty years old was a money-lender, commission
agent, and banker, and at sixty had become a millionaire, known of far
beyond Croatia, and had laid the foundations of one of the great
financial houses of Eastern Europe.
His son quadrupled his possessions and extended his operations
westward and northward. His grandson fell upon the hard times of the
Napoleonic wars as on a bed of roses; and from the misfortunes of
Austria and Prussia, and the necessities of Pitt's England, made gold
as rapidly as though he had had the philosopher's stone in a crucible.
He grew into a very colossus of riches, and his houses did their
business in Vienna, Paris, London, and Frankfort. He married the
daughter of a French duke, and made his central house of business in
Paris.
His eldest son Stefan, who inherited all his astuteness, succeeded him
in due course in the direction of affairs, ably seconded by his
brother Friederich, and in his turn married the daughter of an English
nobleman, by whom he had one son, Otho, who was chiefly educated in
England, and who had little or nothing of the Othmar type in feature
or in character.
He was a boy of infinite promise, and of no ordinary mind, but,
despite his personal and intellectual gifts, he was a bitter
disappointment to his father; and the indifference, which at times
deepened into contempt, with which the lad reviewed the origin and
the employment of the fortunes of his house seemed to him nothing
short of blasphemy. Stefan Othmar himself was a man of excessive
arrogance, but it was a bourgeois arrogance, proud of its own sources
and dominion, and capable of infinite self-abasement in the pursuit of
self-interest. That his boy should revolt against his descent and
despise the future before him was a fact so hideous and so amazing in
his sight that, had he not known his dead wife to have been the purest
and coldest of women, he would almost have doubted that his own blood
ran in the veins of his degenerate heir.
As Otho grew towards manhood the distance between them widened more
and more. That a fastidious fine gentleman, a fantastic and futile
dreamer, a mere visionary and dilettante, should be the outcome of a
hundred and fifty years of financial success and ambition seemed to
Count Stefan so frightful a mockery of fortune, that he cursed his own
folly in having wedded a patrician, instead of some woman of a common
but ambitious stock who would have given him successors content, and
solely content, with the superb position of princes of finance, and
capable of doubling and quadrupling those many millions which were his
own ecstasy. The very virtues of his son alarmed him as hardly any
vices would have done. The youth was so delicate of mind and taste, so
devout and chaste of habit, so meditative and so solitary by choice,
that his father grew alarmed lest he should actually do what he at
times threatened, and consecrate himself to the Catholic priesthood.
He took a violent remedy.
He went to one of the most seductive and most venal women of the day,
and said to her, 'Win this boy from his dreams or he will become a
monk.'
She undertook the mission, and succeeded in it. She destroyed all that
was spiritual and innocent in him with the merciless witchery of the
courtesan, which is like the tide of burning lava: no grass will
spring where the scoria has spread. He awoke in her arms without a
faith. He never again dreamed of the religious life. She earned well
the estate in Franche-Comté and the large sum in rouleaux which his
father settled on her; but nothing in after-life could ever give him
back those heavenward aspirations, that purity of soul, which she had
swept away as with a wave of fire. Like the young Reichstadt before
him, he had wasted all the splendour and innocence of a first passion
on a wanton who had betrayed him for gold. The first passion of a boy
colours all his future; the bitter-sweet flavour of this remained with
him through all his later years. Love without it was tasteless; love
with it was worthless. He said once to his father: 'You had better
have killed me than have given me to Sara Vernon.'
'Who passes by the gates of disillusion has died twice.' His father
had pushed him with a hard hand through those gates, believing that
they led to the path of self-knowledge and of empire over men. Stefan
Othmar had not wanted a poet, a scholar, a philanthropist, or a priest
for his successor; he had wanted a cold-hearted, clear-headed,
unscrupulous, unyielding financier to hold, and even to increase, the
mighty powers and possessions of which the name of Othmar was a symbol
to the world.
But the crime he had committed did not obtain for him what he desired.
The merciless cynicism with which he had destroyed the faith and the
purity of his son did not ensure its object. The youth remained as
aloof in mind from the traditions of his house, and as disdainful in
spirit of them, as he had been before. He consented, indeed, with
apathy, to put his signature to the deeds which made him one of the
chiefs of the house, but that was all which Stefan Othmar gained by
his son's immeasurable loss. Some four years later, when Otho was
two-and-twenty years of age, Stefan Othmar died suddenly on the steps
of his great hotel in the Boulevard St. Germain, as he was ascending
them after an audience at the Tuileries, in which he had been the
master of the situation, and Napoléon Trois the suppliant. He died of
fulminant apoplexy without an instant's warning; but his affairs were
left in the most perfect order. His brother Fritz remained, who had
been his _alter ego_ all his life, and nothing was altered in the
House of Othmar, of which his son became supreme master.
The young man received the news far away in the forest recesses of
Lahore, at the court of an Indian prince, where he was being feasted
with royal honours in the course of his travels over the world. There
had been no sympathy between his father and himself; their
temperaments had been as opposite as the poles; little sentiment of
personal affection mingled with his sudden consciousness that he was
absolute lord of his own destinies. His first impulse was to use the
power into which he had entered to destroy, at a blow, all that his
forefathers had been a century and a half in building up for him. 'It
is a mass of corruption; it shall perish,' he said to himself, with
the ruthless integrity, the unsparing fanaticism, of a generous and
high-souled youth. But when he returned to England and came face to
face with all his responsibilities and powers, he found that which he
had thought so easy was quite impossible to accomplish as he desired
to accomplish it. His first impulse was to throw the whole into
liquidation and efface the House of Othmar from financial existence
for ever. But to do so was but a dream; the financial world would not
have released him from his obligations; his only living relative, his
father's brother and partner, Baron Friederich Othmar, stoutly refused
to suffer that to be done which would, in his sight, have been a
greater crime than many murders.
Against his desires and against his conscience, he had, on reaching
his majority, been half persuaded, half coerced, by his father to
associate himself in legal form with the house. The act had been one
of filial sacrifice, and it hung like a wallet of stones about his
neck. He found that his power had its limits; that he could no more
disengage himself from all the operations and engagements of his firm
than a young king can emancipate himself from the trammels of court
and constitution. He had a right to ruin himself, but he had no right
to ruin all those whose fortunes were interwoven with the enterprises
of his predecessors. Irritated and disappointed he resigned himself to
the inevitable, and remained the 'master of milliards,' with as much
regret as the young Francis Joseph accepted the diadem of Austria. The
cloth of gold in which they, his forefathers, had wrapped him remained
upon him, and sometimes he thought it a very shirt of Nessus.
Sometimes he was almost tempted to take the vow of poverty for the
sake of getting rid of it, but he was restrained by two
recollections--one that he had no spiritual faith, the other that
mankind in general would have voted him insane. A profound melancholy,
without any definite or special cause, grew upon him; he felt the
sense of an immense responsibility, which he saw no manner of using
with proportionate usefulness. The sophism that duties unsought may be
disregarded did not satisfy his conscience, whilst his knowledge of
the world told him that to do harm is as easy as to kiss your hand,
whilst to effect any great good is as hard as to move the mountains
from their bases. Public charity only fills the pockets of greedy
speculators; private charity too often raises up a festering mass of
imposture. The rich man goes through the world as a sheep through
briars in spring time. If he be a perfect egotist, he is happy enough;
if he have thought and feeling, he is depressed by the universal greed
around him, and by the absolute impotence of all religions to bridle
it.
Otho Othmar remained always sensible of a bitter irritation and
degradation whenever he recalled the sources of the wealth he enjoyed:
the ruin of prosperous countries, the wholesale slaughter of wars, the
distress or disgrace of ancient nobilities, the impoverishment of
nations. True, there was another side to the throne of Plutus, on
which his fathers had seated themselves; by their means, no doubt,
enterprises had been carried out for which humanity, on the whole, was
materially, if not spiritually, the better. 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. Though his position was one which almost
all the world envied, it was one which galled himself. Titles had been
offered him, but he had contemptuously rejected them. He was Othmar;
the name spoke to all the ears of Europe; he did not consider that the
story it told could be either changed or buried by smothering it
underneath the blaze of some princeship or dukedom. He did not even
call himself, as others called him, Count Othmar, and he put neither
coronet or escutcheon on his carriages, his plate, or his
writing-paper. He was far too proud to be proud in that way.
Illustrious alliances had been proposed to him, but he had rejected
all; the world expected him to marry greatly, but he remained the hope
and the despair of all the European nobilities, who would have
willingly accorded him any one of their fair virgins. Their eagerness
had early given him a cynical disdain for the aristocracies to which
his tastes attracted him; he had no less a disdain for the financial
order to which tradition allied him. On the whole, although he had
never had any especial sorrow, he was scarcely a happy man, though the
whole world was ready to gratify and amuse him. He had been always
able to indulge his fancies to the uttermost, but all the venal beauty
which affected adoration for him left his heart cold.
Though gentle in manner and chary of speech, he could on provocation
say caustic truths which cut like surgeons' knives. In general,
however, he was indulgent to follies which he did not share. He lived
always a little apart from the world in which he was so conspicuous a
figure, and he judged it with good nature rather than with sympathy.
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; wherever he went mankind pursued him
hat in hand and hand outstretched. He could arrive nowhere without
petitions and invitations raining in on him; obscurity was not to be
enjoyed even in Mongolia, where the Foreign Ministers at the Chinese
Court and the Celestial Emperor himself sent mounted messengers after
him to see that he came to no harm. The interest everywhere excited by
his arrival or by his actions irritated him perpetually; the
impossibility of securing privacy, to him formed the gravest of
annoyances. His intolerance of publicity made him almost detest the
whole human race which combined to refuse it to him. To be compelled
to live in a glass-house appeared to him to destroy the very first
requisite for life's enjoyment. He concealed this sensitiveness under
a chilliness of manner which did injustice to the real warmth of his
sympathies. There was much that was at once attractive and irritating
to women in this young man whose fortunes were so immense and power so
extended, who yet passed through the world with so unaffected an
indifference to his own advantages in it, and who had the melancholy
and romantic features of a Ruy Blas or of a Rolla. With men, his
perfect simplicity of expression, his unpretentious courage, and his
unfailing generosity, commanded respect, whilst his position excited
their envy; but while he compelled their esteem, he did not, as a
rule, possess their attachment. 'If we are in a position to serve men
greatly, we shall never be greatly loved by them,' said Melville to
him once; 'we shall make too many ingrates, even though we do our best
not to make one. Men, as a rule, love most what they can afford a
little to despise and have no cause whatever to envy. Do you remember
when the anarchists of '48 came to old Rothschild at Ferrières and
demanded his fortune for the people of France, and he very quietly
took up his pen and made aloud his calculation that his fortune
divided thus would give everyone just four francs and a half each?
Well, the fault of the very rich man to the world is always
Rothschild's to the anarchists; everyone expects he can bestow on each
of them ten millions, whilst he can only really give four francs and a
half. The calculation may be as clear as day, but the fact is one
never forgiven.'
Othmar understood that very well with his reason, but he was not
reconciled to it in his heart; he would have desired something
different. The immense hotel which his father had built, with its
ceilings painted by Ingres and Delaroche, its gardens sloping to the
Seine, its genuine treasures of art, its double staircase, its _cour
d'honneur_, its stables built on the model of Chantilly, was no better
than a barn to him; he detested it with a sort of petulance; he never
willingly resided in it. Its network of communication with the banks
and the bureaux, laid with all the facilities which modern science
could invent, had no interest for him. He did not feel the slightest
emotion about any public event that could possibly happen, whether
wars and rumours of wars, or the betting of a racecourse. He had none
of those tastes which may make a rich man popular for a season and
ruined in a twelvemonth. To his mistresses he was invariably generous,
but these extravagances scarcely made more impression on his vast
fortune than a few pailsfull taken from the sea make diminution in its
volume. His greatest pleasure, on which he spent his money most
largely, was music. Wherever he was he gathered great singers and
musicians around him. She had likened him to Ludwig of Bavaria. His
caprices were not quite so eccentric, but his preference was almost as
ungrudgingly indulged. He had studied music theoretically and
profoundly, though he had never touched any instrument and had never
written a bar. It was one of those tastes which to his father had
appeared an absolute insanity. He also spent much upon his libraries
and his horses, as the Princess Napraxine had said to him. But since
he was not a bibliophile, and did not care for rare editions, and
never raced or made wagers, his expenditure even here was moderate as
compared with his powers. From the time of his early and bitter
passion for Sara Vernon he had avoided those famous sorceresses who
can beggar Croesus and discrown Cæsar; they recalled too vividly to
him the intense suffering of his boyhood, when he had found himself
betrayed by what he adored. To the few women whom he had ever noticed
he had been invariably generous even to excess, with a generosity that
strove to make amends for the scorn he had for them; but he had had
none of those long-enduring _liaisons_ which cling like the octopus
and drain like the vampire. The knowledge that so many women would
have drunk the dregs of infamy at his word for the sake of his gold,
held him aloof from them; he was conscious that they pursued him as
the sword-fish pursues the fish entangled in a seine. There was no
Venusburg which would not have let him enter into its enchantment with
his golden key; and this untempted Tannhäuser turned away indifferent.
All the rest which attracted other men--gambling, feasting, drinking,
racing, living together in feverish crowds,--appeared to him
ridiculous and tiresome. All the popular vices of men of his rank
seemed to him dull and vulgar, trivial and stupid; the life of the
_muscadin_, of the masher, seemed to him, on the whole, more stupid
than the Tartar's. There was a certain similarity between him and
Nadine Napraxine. The world appeared to them both very narrow and its
resources few.
For her the result of this impression took the shape of disdain; in
him of regret.
In her it was a thirst of the mind, in him it was a hunger of the
heart, which led them to think that the land around them was barren.
His friends called him jestingly as Chateaubriand was called, '_le
grand ennuyé_,' but it was precisely his vague discontent with the
puerilities and the vulgarities of existence which made his affinity
to Nadine Napraxine. She had much the same contempt for all those who
surrounded her and who made so much of all their little ambitions, who
crowned themselves with straw and thought they reigned, who set their
souls on a winning horse, a political measure, a policy, a project, or
a _coup d'état_, whilst the horse was to her taste as much worth
wasting thought on as the statesmanship.
If he had heard of his own total ruin he would have put a Horace in
his pocket and walked out of the great bronze Renaissance gates of his
palace with a serenity which would have had in it nothing either
strained or affected. He was no ascetic or philosopher, but his great
fortunes bored him, and their origin annoyed him. His temperament
would probably have led to higher ambitions if he had not been born to
so much possession that ambition had no scope. He was wont to cite as
the wisest man the world had known the gay physician of the Fronde
epoch, Gui Patin, who sat throughout that troublous time, peaceful and
amused, beneath his own cherry-trees. But fate had seated him,
himself, beneath the gold pagoda-tree, and the tree seemed to him a
sterile one; it had neither fragrance nor shade, yet a million eager
hands were always trying to pluck from it, and for him who sat under
it there was no quiet. Some one was always wanting him to shake down
the fruit into their hands.
He had had one great misfortune; he had known satiety almost before
he had known enjoyment; and men were so bent upon making use of him
that they did not take time to attach him to them before they
disgusted him. The world in general did not like him much; it followed
him endlessly, but it thought his reserve arrogance, his simplicity of
taste affectation, and his dislike to display avarice. It did not
comprehend in the least the simple truth that Othmar would have shaken
his gold off him if he could have done so like so much mud. In the
Croat character there are both romance and religion; he had more of
the Croat than the English temper in him; but, like most men of his
time, he had no belief at all, though it was a sorrow to him, not a
boast; and the romance of his impulses had been early chilled and
silenced by the venal passions offered to his boyhood for sake of his
wealth. He learned too early that there is scarcely anything which may
not be bought. It is a knowledge which hardens the selfish, but
saddens the generous, nature. The irresistible conviction that money
is after all the one great power of the world is not an exhilarating
or a consoling fact for thoughtful or visionary minds.
He knew very well that he might have been the most vicious brute, the
most brutal tyrant, the most merciless of men, and mankind would have
served, followed, and flattered him none the less; he could have
purchased immunity for most crimes, condonation for most iniquities.
So long as he had remained master of his fortune and of his
possessions, he knew that men would have sought him none the less
eagerly though he had had the vices of a Heliogabalus; and that women
would have given themselves to him none the less willingly though he
had been as hideous as the Veiled Prophet. It did not make him
cynical; but it made him indifferent, and it moved him at times to a
vague sadness. It seemed scarcely worth while for his forefathers to
have raised that mountain of gold, only that from its summit he might
see the nakedness of the world of men.