She, who had been so exacting as a friend, was not in any way exacting
as a wife. There were a generosity and a breadth of thought in her,
which made her accord freedom in proportion to what lesser minds would
have considered her right to deny it. She held the whole ordinary
mass of womanhood in too absolute a disdain for her ever to stoop to
the same ways and weaknesses as theirs. She might have been the most
despotic of mistresses: she was the most lenient of wives. Tyranny,
which would have seemed, did still seem, to her natural and amusing
when used over lives which in no way belonged to her, would have
appeared to her _bourgeois_ and ridiculous exercised over her husband:
that sort of thing was only fit for two shopkeepers of Belleville. She
had too supreme a scorn for the Penelopes of the world, whose jealousy
was as impotent as their charms, not to let the reins which she drew so
tightly over others lie loose and unfelt on the shoulders of Othmar.
'Penelope thinks that no object in all created nature is more lovely
and important than her distaff; naturally Ulysses gets sick of the
sight of it,' she said once. 'Why are all women, in love with their
husbands, much more miserable than those who detest them? Only because
they insist upon giving so much of themselves, that the men grow to
view them with absolute terror, as the Strasbourg goose views the
balls of maize paste. Love is an art, and ought to be dealt with
artistically; in marriage, it has to contend with such insuperable
difficulties that it needs to be most delicate, most sagacious, most
forbearing, most intelligent, to surmount them. Instead of which,
women, usually, who have any love for their husbands at all, look on
them as so much property inalienably assigned to them, and treat them
as Cosmo dei Medici treated Florence: "_Mi piace più distruggerla che
perderla!_"'
Othmar himself had changed little; men at his years do not alter
physically, though great changes, moral and mental, may in brief time
transform their feelings and their ambitions.
Women looked at him inquisitively many a day, to try and see whether
that great wonder-flower of romantic passion, which had astonished his
world in a generation in which such passions are rare, had brought
forth contentment or disenchantment. But they could not be sure. No
one had ever succeeded in making him unfaithful to this great love,
which had been merged in marriage, but no one had ever penetrated his
confidence sufficiently to satisfy themselves whether any disillusion
had followed on the fulfilment of those dreams and desires, to which
he had been willing to sacrifice his life, his honour, and his soul.
All that society in general, or his most familiar friends could see,
was the outward pageantry of a life in the great world; that life which
leaves so little space for thought, so little time for regret, so
little leisure for conscience to speak or memory to waken. If he were
not entirely content he allowed no one to suspect so; and he did not
even like to admit it to his own reflections: yet there were times when
life did not seem to him much more complete than it had done before he
had attained the supreme desire of his heart; there were times when the
old vague indefinite dissatisfaction came back to him--the sense of
emptiness which moved the Cæsars of Rome with the world at their feet.
'I suppose it is inevitable,' he said to himself. 'I suppose she is
right; nothing on earth is content except a sucking child and an
oyster.'
It irritated him that he should be pursued by this foolish and
shapeless sense of still missing something, still desiring something,
still seeking something unknown and unknowable; but it was there at the
bottom of most of his thoughts, at the core of most of his feelings.
'You have had a great misfortune all your life,' Friedrich Othmar said
once to him. 'You have always had all your wishes granted you. When
a child is indulged in that way he kicks his nurse, when a man is
indulged in that way he sulks at destiny. It is human nature.'
'Human nature,' said Othmar, 'according to you and Nadège, is such a
consummate fool that it is scarcely worth the bread it eats, much less
the elaborate analysis which philosophers have expended on it from
Solomon to Renan.'
Friedrich Othmar shrugged his shoulders.
'It is not always a fool,' he made answer; 'but it is, I think, always
an ingrate.'
Was he himself an ingrate? Or did he only suffer from that inevitable
law of recoil and rebound which governs human life; that cessation
of tension which makes a great passion, once satisfied and become
familiar, like a bow unstrung?
There is always a pathetic reaction, a curious sense of loss in the
midst of possession, which follows on the attainment of every great
desire. If anyone had told him that he was not perfectly happy, he
would have indignantly denied the accuracy of their assertion. Whenever
any misgiving that he was not so arose in his own mind, he repulsed it
with contempt as the mere ungrateful rebelliousness of human nature.
Yet now and then a vague sense that his life was not much more perfect
than it had been before the desires of his heart had been given to him,
occasionally came over him, though he always thrust it away.
She herself felt sometimes an almost irresistible inclination to say
to him; 'And you, you who set your soul on marriage with me, have you
found the lasting joys that you expected, or have you learned that the
fulfilment of a dream is never quite the dream itself--has always some
glory wanting?'
But she refrained. Women are always so unwise when they ask those
questions, she reflected; so like children who pull up the plants in
their garden to see what growth or what roots they have.
'We are just like anybody else, after all!' she did say once, with a
mingling of despondency and of humour. 'I suppose we cannot escape
from the age we live in, which is neither original nor imaginative,
nor anything that I know of, except feverish and unhappy. Mr. Lawrence
Oliphant, certainly, is gone to live in Syria, and we might do the
same, but would it be any better? Do you think life is any larger
there? I should be afraid there are only more mosquitoes.'
'I imagine we should only find in Syria what we took there, as Madame
de Swetchine said of Rome,' replied Othmar, with some discontent. 'Life
is an incomplete thing; unsatisfactory because its passions are finite,
its years few, and its time of slow development and of slow decline
wholly disproportionate, as you said just now, to its short moment of
attainment and maturity; and also because habit, routine, prejudice,
human stupidity, have all contrived to weight it with unnecessary
burdens, to bind it with needless and intolerable laws, to take all
the glow and spontaneity and rebound out of it. Conventionality is its
curse.'
'And marriage!' said his wife. 'Oh, my dear, I do not mean to be
unpleasant, but you know it is indisputably true that I should have
been much fonder of you, and you of me, if we had never married each
other. There is something stifling in marriage; it confounds love with
property. I often wonder how the human race ever contrived to make such
a mistake popular or universal.'
'It is not I who say that,' said Othmar with a touch of embarrassment.
'Oh no; but you think it. Every man thinks it,' she replied tranquilly.
'I often wonder,' she continued more dreamily, 'how it will be when you
love some other woman. You will some day--of course you will. I wonder
what will happen----'
'How can you do such injustice to me and to yourself? I shall never
care for any other living thing.'
She looked at him through the shadow of her drooped lids.
'Oh yes, you will,' she repeated. 'It is inevitable. The only thing I
am not sure about is how I shall take it. It will all depend, I think,
on whether you confide in me, or hide it from me.'
'It would be a strange thing to confide in you!'
'Not at all. That is a conventional idea, and the idea of a stupid
man. You are not stupid. I should certainly be the person most
interested in knowing such a fact, and if you did tell me frankly, I
think--I think I should be unconventional and clever enough not to
quarrel with you. I think I should understand. But if you hid it from
me, then----'
The look passed over her face which the dead Napraxine had used to fear
as a hound fears the whip, and which Othmar had never seen.
'Then, I give you leave to deal me any death you like with your own
hand,' he said with a laugh, which was a little forced because a
certain chill had passed over him.
She laughed also.
'Well, be wise,' she said as she rose; 'you are warned in time. Oh, my
dear Otho, you grant yourself that every passion is finite. I think it
is; but I think also that the wise people, when it fades, make it leave
friendship and sympathy behind it, as the beautiful blowing yellow corn
when it is cut leaves the wheat. The foolish people let it leave all
kinds of rancour, envy, and uncharitableness, as the brambles and weeds
when they are burnt only leave behind them a foul smoke. But it is so
easy to be philosophic in theory!'
'Your philosophy far exceeds mine,' said Othmar with a little
impatience. 'I have not yet reached the period at which I can calmly
contemplate my green April fields laid sear to give corn to the
millstones; they are all in flower with the poppy and the campion.'
'Very prettily said,' replied his wife. 'You really are a poet at
heart.'
Othmar went out from her presence that day with a vague sense of
depression and of apprehension.
He had never wavered in his great love for her; the great passion
with which she had inspired him still remained with him ardent and
profound in much; the charm she had for his intelligence sustained
the seduction for his senses; he loved her, only her, as much and as
exclusively as in the early days of his acquaintance with her; she
still remained the one woman upon earth for him. He could not hear her
calmly speak of any future in which she would be less than then to him
without a sense of irritation and offence. It seemed to him that such
deliberate and unsparing analysis as hers could not exist side by side
with any very intense feeling. Certainly he was used to it in her; he
was accustomed to her delicate and critical dissection of every human
motive and impulse, his, her own, or those of others; but it touched
him now with a sense of pain, as though the scalpel had penetrated to
some open nerve. His consciousness of his own devotion to her made
him indignantly repulse the suggestion that he could ever change; yet
his own knowledge of the nature of humanity and of the work of time
told him that she had had truth on her side when she had said that
such a change might come, would come; and he thrust the consciousness
of that truth away as an insult and affront. Was there nothing which
would endure and resist the cruel slow sapping of the waves of time?
Was there no union, passion, or fidelity, strong enough to stand the
dull fallings of the years like drops of grey rain which beat down the
drooping rose and change it from a flower of paradise to a poor, pale,
scentless wreck of itself?