When he saw the beauty of her children, Friedrich Othmar relented in
that unsparing bitterness which he felt against her. As a woman he
still hated her intensely, unspeakably, unchangeably, but as their
mother he had respect for her, and almost pardon.
'He will be childless all his days,' he had said with certainty and
scorn. 'That bloodless _mondaine_, that ethereal coquette will leave
the name barren; she is all brain and nerve; she will never give birth
to anything save an epigram.'
When his words had been disproved, he had rendered her a sullen honour.
He would take no joy in the children as he would have taken joy in
Yseulte's; but they were there to bear the name he thought so precious,
and he was forced to confess that no lovelier or stronger or healthier
creatures than the young Otho and his sister Xenia ever could have
played beneath the oak-boughs of Amyôt.
But the old man was faithful to the one innocent affection which had
ever lived in his selfish breast; with an aching heart he would often
turn from watching these children tumble amongst the daisies in the
sunshine, and find his way to a solitary tomb made in white marble in
the mausoleum of Amyôt, in memory of her whose slender crushed body lay
buried amongst the violets by the sea of the southern shore.
'All that weight of marble!' he thought, 'and not one little sigh of
regret!'
Not one; unless he gave it.
'I hate this Russian woman, but I am bound to say that the children are
beautiful,' he said once to Melville. 'I am bound to say, too, that
she has made a change for the better in Otho. Since he has discovered
(doubtless) that every _grande passion_ has its perihelion and its
decline, he has become more like other men. He has interested himself
in the welfare of the House. He has condescended to be conscious that
Europe exists. He has lived the natural life of the world, and has, I
think, ceased to wish himself a wandering Wilhelm Meister, a François
Villon without a rag to his back. My poor dead child only loved him,
and could do nothing to attach him to life or to detach him from his
fantastic preoccupations and morbid demands for the impossible. This
woman has made him so in love with the actual, with the real, that he
has ceased to dream of the ideal. He has even grown aware that his
own fate is an enviable one, which for thirty years of his life he
obstinately denied.'
'It is a questionable benefit to make a man abandon the ideal,' said
Melville. 'I think, however, that Othmar's feeling was always rather
impatience of existing facts than thirst of any impalpable perfection.
You believe that a discontented man is necessarily an imaginative man.
It does not follow. Imagination may perhaps create discontent; but
then, on the other hand, it may console it. If he had had imagination
enough, he would have found out a thousand idealised ways of using his
great wealth.'
'Thank heaven, then, that he has so little,' said Friedrich Othmar.
'Myself, I always considered that he had a great deal too much. I
do not underrate imagination in its proper place. None of the great
events of the world would have taken place without it: every great
revolutionist, every great conqueror, every great statesman, even,
must possess it; but it is a perilous quality, singularly similar to
nitro-glycerine; you can never be certain of the hour and the sphere of
its action; it may pierce a new road for humanity to use after it, or
it may wreck nations and send humanity backward by a thousand years.'
'I should not mind going back a thousand years,' murmured Melville.
'Basil was living, and Augustine.'
Since the death of Yseulte these two men, so dissimilar, even so
inharmonious, had become in a manner friends. Their mutual pain had
drawn them together. The thought which was the same in the minds of
each, and which each understood in the other without speech, made a
link of union between them. Both divined the secret of her death.
Neither ever spoke of it.
'He is a priest, but he is a man,' said Friedrich Othmar of Melville,
who in turn said of him:
'He is encrusted all over with gold, egotism, and disbelief; but
beneath that crust there is the heart of humanity.'
And they shook hands across the profound gulf of sentiment and opinion
which divided them.
'I think that, for once, the wise Baron is mistaken,' reflected
Melville, without saying his thoughts aloud. 'Othmar may have grown
less imaginative, because most men do as they grow older, unless they
be truly poets. But I do not think he is a whit more contented. I
believe, if he could see into his heart, that he has found his apple of
paradise not very much richer in flavour than a common rennet!'
But he forbore to say so. What business was it of his? Only, being the
profound student of the comedy and tragedy of humanity that he was, he
could not help feeling a keen interest in watching the issues of this
marriage of love.
Melville, like all persons of fine penetration and quick sympathies,
was deeply interested in all characters which were out of the common
lines of human nature, and whenever his busy years had any leisure he
spent it where he could observe all those who interested him most.
Of all these the Lady of Amyôt had the most powerful interest for him.
But for his years and his priest's frock, it might have been a more
tender and profound sentiment still with which she inspired him. For
Melville, as for all men of intellect, the very despondency she cast
over them, the very intricacy and unsatisfying changeability of her
character, possessed the most powerful charm. But whether these were
qualities which would make _bon ménage_ in the familiarity and the
triviality of daily life--of this he was not so sure.