Othmar, faithful to his word, remained at the château of Amyôt
throughout the spring and summer months, indifferent to the laughter
of the world, if it did laugh. He divined very accurately that one
person at least laughed and made many a satiric sketch to her friends
of himself _filant le parfait amour_, and gathering wood violets, wood
anemones, wood strawberries, beneath the shadows of his Valois trees
in glades which had been old when the original of Jean Goujon's Diane
Chasseresse had been young.
Amyôt seemed to him to suit the youth, the grace, and the gravity of
Yseulte better than any babble of the great world;--Amyôt, which was
like a stately illuminated chronicle of kingly and knightly history,
which was as silent as the grave of a king in a crypt, and which was
shut out from the fret of mankind by the screen of its Merovingian
forests.
He was scarcely conscious that he lingered in this seclusion from an
unacknowledged unwillingness to go where he would see and hear of
another woman; he persuaded himself that he chose to stay on in the
provinces partially because the tumult of the world was always vulgar,
noisy, and offensive to him, chiefly because nowhere else in the world
so surely as in one of his own country houses could he be certain not
to meet the woman who had wounded him mortally, yet whom he loved far
more than he hated her.
'It is absolutely necessary that you should be seen in Paris, and that
you should receive there; it is absolutely necessary that you should
sustain your position in the world,' said Friederich Othmar, with much
emphasis as he sat at noon one day on the great terrace of Amyôt.
Othmar laughed a little, and shrugged his shoulders.
'Amyôt is magnificently kept up--that I admit,' continued the elder
man. 'It is a place that it is well to have, to spend six weeks of the
autumn in, to entertain princes at; it is quite royal, and was one of
the best purchases that my father ever made. But to bury yourself
here!--when the Kaiser comes to Paris, to whom you owe by tradition
every courtesy----'
'The Othmars were never received at the Court of Vienna.'
The Baron made an impatient gesture.
'We are Parisians, but we are Croats before all. Sometimes you are
pleased to insist very strongly that we are Croats, and nothing else.
If we are so, the Emperor is our sovereign.'
'It is disputed in Croatia, which has never been too loyal!'
'Croatia be----,' said Friederich Othmar, with difficulty restraining
the oath because Yseulte was seated within hearing; and he returned to
his old arguments, which were all brought to bear upon the fact that
at the approach of winter Othmar owed it as a duty to society and to
himself to throw open the doors of that vast hotel on the Boulevard S.
Germain, which had always seemed to him the most hateful embodiment of
the wealth, the unscrupulousness, and the past history of his race.
The hotel had been purchased from the Duc de Coigny during the White
Terror by Marc Othmar for a nominal price; and under the reign of
Louis Philippe, Stefan Othmar, deeming it neither grand nor luxurious
enough, had had it changed and redecorated in the worst taste of
the epoch, and, in the early days of the Second Empire, had farther
enlarged and overloaded it, until to his son it was as a very nightmare
of gilding, marble, and allegorical painting, a Cretan labyrinth of
enormous and uninhabitable chambers, fit for such motley crowds as cram
the Elysée in the days of Grevy.
It was one of the show-houses of Paris, and had, indeed, many real
treasures of art amidst its overloaded luxury, but Othmar hated it
in its entirety, from its _porte-cochère_, where the arms which the
heralds had found for Marc Othmar had replaced the shield and crown of
the Ducs de Coigny, to the immense library, which did not contain a
single volume that he cared to open; an 'upholsterer's library,' with
all its books, from Tacitus to Henri Martin, clad in the same livery of
vellum and tooled gold.
'Absolutely necessary to sustain your position in the world!' repeated
Othmar when his uncle had left him. 'That is always the incantation
with which the fetish of the world obtains its sacrifices. Translated
into common language, he means that as I have a great deal of money,
other people expect me to spend much of it upon them. I do not see the
obligation, at least not socially.'
'Do you desire the life of Paris?' he added abruptly to Yseulte, who
hesitated, coloured slightly, and said with timidity:
'I should prefer S. Pharamond.'
'S. Pharamond is yours,' said Othmar with some embarrassment, knowing
why every rood of that sunny and flowering shore seemed to him nauseous
with sickening memories. 'S. Pharamond is yours, my dear; but I
scarcely think that we can pass this winter there. There are tedious
duties from which we cannot escape; to entertain in Paris is one of
them.'
An older woman would have perceived that he contradicted himself, but
Yseulte was blinded to such anomalies by her adoration of him; an
adoration as intense as it was meek, dumb, and most humble.
'I am so perfectly happy here,' she answered, with hesitation;
'but----'
She was not actuated by the sentiment which he attributed to her
hesitation; she infinitely preferred the country to the city, as all
meditative and poetic tempers do, and the little she had seen of the
great world at Millo made her dread her entry into it in Paris. What
she wished, but lacked the courage to say, was, that she perceived
that the country did not satisfy him himself. She was not so dull of
comprehension that she did not see the melancholy of her husband, the
listless indifference, the unspoken ennui, which spoiled his years
to him, and left him without energy or interest in life. She could
discern the wound she knew not how to cure, and Friederich Othmar in
his conversations with her had repeatedly assured her that the _vie
de province_ stifled the intelligence of a man as moss grows over the
trunk of a tree.
'I am so happy here,' she answered now with hesitation, 'but still----'
'But still you are a daughter of Eve,' he added with indulgence. 'My
poor child, it is quite natural, you are so young; all young girls long
for the life of the world. It robs them of their lilies and roses, it
draws bistre shadows under their eyes, it makes them old before they
are twenty, but still they kiss the feet of their Moloch! I do not
think, though, that you will ever be hurt by the world yourself. You
are too serious, and have at once too much humility and too much pride:
they are safe warders at the door of the soul; you will not easily
become a _mondaine_.'
'What is the difference?'
'In the world, when she belongs to it, a woman crushes her soul as she
crushes her waist; she is a butterfly, with the sting of an asp; she
wastes her brain in the council-chambers of her tailors, and her time
in a kaleidoscope of amusements that do not even amuse her; she would
easily make the most hideous thing beautiful if she put it on once, and
the most flagrant vice the fashion if she adopted it for a week; she
has given the highest culture possible to her body and to her brain,
only to spend her years in an ennui and an irritation beside which the
life of the South Sea islanders would seem utility and wisdom; she has
the clearest vision, the finest intelligence, the shrewdest wit, only
to set her ambition on having a whole audience of a theatre forget the
stage because she has entered her box, or the entire journals of a city
chronicle the suicide of some madman who has taken his life because she
crossed out his name on her tablets before a cotillon----'
He paused abruptly, becoming suddenly conscious that he was speaking in
no general terms, and had only before his thoughts the vision of one
woman.
'No, my dear,' he said kindly, passing his hand over the shining
tresses of Yseulte; 'I am not afraid that you will become a coquette
or a lover of folly; you will not learn the slang of the hour, or
yellow your white skin with _maquillage_; you will always be the young
patrician of the time of the Lady of Beaujeu. You shall go to Paris if
you wish, and do just as you like there; you must not blame me if it do
not suit you better than it suits those roses which your foster-mother
sends up in moss from her garden.'
'Poor child!' he thought, with a pang of conscience. 'She has a right
to enjoy any amusement she can. She is young; the world will be a
play-place to her; if she can make for herself friends, interests,
pastimes, I should be the last to prevent her. Sooner or later she
will find out that she is so little to me. She is content now because
she takes kindness for love, and because, in her innocence, she cannot
conceive how one's senses may be roused while one's heart may lie dumb
and cold as a stone. But when she is older she will perceive all that,
and then the more friends she has found, and the less she leans on me,
the less unhappy she will be. I will give her everything that she can
wish for; all women grow contented and absorbed in the world.'
So he argued with himself, but he knew all the while that he was to
blame in desiring that sort of compensation and consolation for her;
and that delicacy of taste, which has over some temperaments a stronger
control than conscience, made him feel that there was a kind of
vulgarity in thus persuading himself that material gifts and material
triumphs would atone to her for the indifference of his feelings and
the absence of his sympathy.
It was something better than mere material possessions and indulgences
which he had meant to give the child whose lonely fate had touched
him to so much pity under the palm trees of S. Pharamond and the
gilded roofs of Millo. But he dismissed the rebuke of this memory with
impatience. The world had so repeatedly told him that his gold was
capable of purchasing heaven and earth, that, though he found it of no
avail for himself, he fell instinctively into the error of imagining
that with it at least he could heal all wounds not his own. She should
have all her fancy could desire. His experience of women told him that
she would be very unlike them if, in all the pleasure of acquisition,
emulation, and possession, she did not find at least a fair simulacrum
of happiness. She would be one out of a million--but if she were that
one? Then her soul might starve in the midst of all her luxuries and
pageants, like a bird in a golden cage that dies for want of the drop
of water which the common brown sparrow, flying over the ploughed brown
field, can find at will. But he did not think of that.
He knew that it was unworthy to speculate upon the power of the lower
life to absorb into itself a soul fitted by its affinities to discover
and enjoy the higher. He shrank from his own speculations as to the
possibility of the world replacing himself in her affections. He had
honestly intended, when he had taken her existence into his charge, to
study, reverence, and guide this most innocent and docile nature; and
endeavour, beside her, to seek out some trace of the purer ideals which
had haunted his youth. And he felt, with remorse, that the failure to
do so lay with himself, not with her. She remained outside his life;
she had no sorcery for him. She was a lovely and almost faultless
creature, but she was not what he loved. He realised, with bitter
self-reproach, that in a moment of impulse, not ignoble in itself, but
unwise, he had burdened his own fate and perhaps unconsciously done a
great wrong to her, since, in the years to come, she would ask at his
hands the bread of life and he would only be able to give her a stone.
She herself had as yet no idea that she was not beloved by Othmar
with a lover's love. She knew nothing of men and their passions. She
had not the grosser intuitions which could have supplied the place of
experience. She did not perceive that his tenderness had little ardour,
his embraces nothing of the fervour and the eagerness of delighted
possession. She had no standard of comparison by which to measure
the coldness or the warmth of the desires to which she surrendered
herself, and it was not to so spiritual a temperament as hers that the
familiarities of love could ever have seemed love. But her nerves were
sensitive, her perceptions quick; and they made her conscious that
mentally and in feeling Othmar was altogether apart from her; that in
sorrow she would not have consoled him, and that in his meditations she
never had any place.
'When I am older he will trust me more,' she reflected, in her
innocence, and she had been so long used to repression and obedience
that it cost her much less than it would have cost most women of her
years to accept, uncomplainingly, that humble place before the shut
doors of his life.
She was too modest to be offended at a distraction which would have
been certain to excite the offence and the suspicion of a more selfish
or self-conscious nature; and she was too young to be likely to
penetrate by intuition the secret of that evident joylessness which
might well have excited her jealousy. It was rather the same sense of
pity which had come to her for him in the weeks before her marriage
which grew strongest in her as the months passed on at Amyôt. He
enjoyed and possessed so much, yet could not enjoy or possess his own
soul in peace.
'I do not think he is happy, and it is not I who can make him happy,'
she said once, very timidly, to Friederich Othmar, who answered with
considerable impatience:
'My love, the fault does not lie with you. Otho, who believes himself,
like Hamlet, out of joint with his time, is in reality a man of his
times in everything; that is, he is a pessimist; he has a mental
nevrose, to borrow the jargon of scientists; he has so cultivated his
conscience at the expense of his reason, that I sometimes believe he
will be satisfied with nothing but the abandonment of all he possesses;
and no doubt he would have tried this remedy long since, only he has
no belief in any Deity who would reward him for it. The misfortune
of all the thoughtful men of Otho's generation is, that they combine
with their fretful consciences an entire disbelief in their souls, so
that they are a mass of irritable anomalies. The mirthful sceptics of
Augustan Rome, of Voltairian France, and of Bolingbroke's England, were
all consistent philosophers and voluptuaries; they disbelieved in their
souls, but they believed in their bodies, and were amply content with
them. They never talked nonsense about duty, and they passed gaily,
gracefully, and consistently through their lives, of which they made
the best they could materially, which is only reasonable in those who
are convinced that the present is the sole sentient existence they
will ever enjoy. But the tender-nerved pessimists of Otho's kind and
age are wholly inconsistent. They believe in nothing, and yet they are
troubled by a multitude of misgivings; they think the soul is merely a
romantic word for the reflex action of the brain, and yet they distress
themselves with imagining that the human animal has innumerable duties,
and should have innumerable scruples, which is ridiculous on the face
of it, for, religion apart and Deity denied, there is no possible
reason why man should have any more duties than a snail has, or a
hare. The agnostics of the present generation do not perceive this
contradiction in themselves, and that is why they look so inconsistent
and so entirely valetudinarian beside the robust Atheism of the past
century, and are, indeed, the mere _malades imaginaires_ of the moral
hospital.'
'If I could only make him as happy as I am myself,' she said again; but
she had not the talisman which the woman who is beloved in return holds
in the hollow of her hand.
'She is too young,' thought Friederich Othmar, angrily. 'She is too
innocent; she is a daisy, a dove, a child. She knows nothing of
persuasion or provocation; she is not even aware of her own charms. She
waits his pleasure to be caressed or let alone; she knows neither how
to deny herself or make herself desired. She wearies him only because
she does not know how to torment him. He will drift away to someone
else who does, while he will expect her--at seventeen!--to be satisfied
with bearing him children and owning his name!'
A few months before, the Baron himself would have emphatically declared
that no living woman could or should ever need more. But his nephew's
wife had touched a softer nerve in him; something which was almost
tenderness and almost regret smote him when he saw the tall, graceful
form of Yseulte like a garden lily, standing alone in the warmth of
the sunset on the terraces at Amyôt, or saw Othmar, when he approached
after a day's absence, kiss her hand with the calm and serious courtesy
which he would have displayed to any stranger, and turn away from her
with an indifference which all his deference of manner and careful
_prévoyance_ of thought for her could not conceal from the keen eyes of
the elder man.
'He gives her his caresses, not his companionship,' thought the old
man, angrily, but he was too prudent and too wise to draw her attention
to a fault against herself of which she was unconscious.
A few months earlier he would have said with Napoléon, _'Qu'elle
nous donne des marmots; c'est le nécessaire._' But before this young
mistress of this stately place as she moved, in her white gown, with
her great bouquet of roses in her hand and her clear eyes smiling
gravely on these men who so brief a while before had been unknown to
her, and now held all her destiny in their hands, Friederich Othmar
for the first time in his life saw a little way into a soul unsoiled,
and began to dimly comprehend some desires not wholly physical, some
necessities sheerly of the mind and heart. The impression came to
him--a purely sentimental one for which he chid himself--that this
child was entirely alone; more alone in her wedded life perhaps than
she would have been in the monastic. She was surrounded with every
species of material indulgence; day after day her husband gave her new
pleasures, as people give children new toys; if she had wished for
the impossible he would have endeavoured to obtain it for her; but
Friederich Othmar twice or thrice in his hurried visits to Amyôt had
found her in solitude, and walking alone in the stately gardens or
sitting alone in some little rustic temple in the woods, and the fact,
though insignificant enough, seemed to him indicative of a loneliness
which would certainly become her fate unless she learned as so many
other women have learned, to console herself for neglect by folly.
'And that she will not do,' the old man said to himself. 'She is
a pearl; but a pearl thrown, not before swine, but wasted on a
pessimist, an _ennuyé_, a _délicat_ whom nothing pleases except that
which he cannot possess.'
He pitied her for what he foresaw would befall her in the future,
rather than for any thing which troubled her at that present time, for
although vaguely conscious of a certain discordance and dissatisfaction
in her husband's life, Yseulte was, in her own, as happy as a very
young girl can be to whom kindliness seems love and the external beauty
surrounding her appears like a lovely dream.
Othmar left her often to shut himself in his library, to lose himself
in his forests, or to go for the affairs of his House to Paris; but
he was always gentle, generous, and kind; he was even prodigal of
caresses to her, because they spared him words in whose utterance he
felt himself untrue; and if the reflex of his own sadness fell at times
across herself, it became a light soft shadow without name, such as
seemed to suit better than mere vulgar joys the silence of the gardens
and the grandeur of the courts, where a life of the past, once so
gracious, so vivid, so impassioned in love and so light in laughter,
had been extinguished like a torch burned out in the night. A riotous
or exuberant happiness would not have so well pleased her nature, made
serious beyond her years whilst yet so mere a child, by the pains of
poverty, the companionship of old age, and the sights and sounds of
the siege of Paris. The long, light, warm days of spring and summer
at Amyôt, with all the floral pomp around her, and the château itself
rising, golden and silvery in the brilliant air, historic, poetic,
magnificent, airy as a madrigal, martial as an epic, were days of an
ecstatic but of an almost religious joy to her.
'What have I done that all this should come to me?' she said often in
her wonder and humility, and Othmar seemed ever to her as a magician,
at whose touch the briars and brambles in her path had blossomed like
the almond and the may.