He felt an irresistible impulse to seek out the woman he loved, to
unburden his heart to her of this new thought which seemed to him like
a crime. He had left her in anger and mortification, but it was to her
that he turned instinctively under the pain of a discovery which had
filled him with a sense of intolerable remorse.
Alas! they were not alone; the great house was full of guests. With
the slanting of the afternoon shadows across the hoary face of the old
sun-dial, on which were the monogram of François de Valois and his
sister, these indolent people had all left their chambers and were now
scattered in quest of diversion all over the house, the gardens, or the
woods, riding, driving, making music, or making love, carrying on their
banter, their friendships, their rivalries, their intrigues. To see her
as he wished, alone, was impossible for many hours. After sunset there
was the long and ceremonious dinner; after dinner there was the usual
evening pastime, some chamber music by great artists, some dancing for
those who wished it, whist and baccarat in the card-room, flirtation in
the drawing-rooms, constant demands, which he could not resist, made
upon his own courtesy and social powers.
'What a stupid life!' he thought impatiently, being out of tune with
its lightness and gaiety. 'What a stupid bondage! The vine-dressers
sound asleep in their cave-cabins above the Loire water are a thousand
times wiser than we are!'
He looked at his wife often. She had professed to think her world
tiresome and its monotony of pleasure tedious; she had professed to
find its conventional routine mere treadmill work which no one had the
courage to refuse to pursue, but which every one of its toilers hated;
and yet she never spent a day otherwise than in this conventional
world!--she never ceased for an hour to surround herself with its
artificialities and its pageantries. If she had really wished to escape
from it how easy to have done so!--how easy to have chosen instead some
solitary and tranquil spot with him and with her children!
But they were all as the very breath of her existence, this air
of the great world, this perpetual movement and excitation, these
elegant crowds, these honey-tongued courtiers, this Babel of news, and
novelties, and fashion, and _ennui_, and endless effort to be amused!
Were she alone with him at Amyôt, would she not yawn with _ennui_ every
hour of the twenty-four? She had said that she would.
He left the brilliant rooms as soon as his duties as a host permitted
him to escape, and wandered through the dusky aisles and avenues of his
gardens.
The night was still and sultry; the sounds of music and the reflection
of the lights within came from the many open casements of the great
castle on to the terraces and lawns beneath. There was no moon: the
steep roof, the pointed towers, the frowning keep of Amyôt stood up
black and massive against the starry sky. Restless, and tormented by
his thoughts, its master paced the dark grass alleys of its gardens;
all the simple verses of the little manuscript poems seemed whispered
from their leaves and murmured by the fountains.
'She loved me!' he thought again and again. And to that warm and tender
heart his own had been so cold!
It had been no fault of his; no man can love because he will; and
still----
He stayed out in the gardens until the lights had ceased to shine in
the great windows, and in the distant country lying beyond the forest
belt of Amyôt the call to vespers was ringing through the darkling
daybreak from village tower and spire, waking the slumbering peasants
to their toil amidst the vines or on the river.
Then he entered the house and went to his wife's apartments.
When her woman asked if she would receive him she smiled a little.
He was like a repentant child, she thought, sorry that he had been
ill-treated and tired of pouting!
'I am half asleep!' she said as he entered. 'Why do you come and
disturb me? Where have you been all the evening? You look as if you had
seen the ghosts of all the tellers of the tales of the Heptameron!'
She laughed a little as she spoke; she had put on a loose gown of soft
white tissues, her hair was unbound; her feet were bare and slipped in
Persian shoes sewn thick with pearls. She was lying back amongst the
pale rose-coloured cushions of her couch in the hot night; her arms
were uncovered to the shoulders; the light was mellow and tempered; the
window stood open; a slight breeze stirred the air and the gauze of her
gown; her eyes surveyed him with a smile of languid amusement.
'_Pauvre enfant! a-t-il assez boudé!_' she thought with an indulgent
derision.
Othmar, for the first time in his life, was insensible of the seduction
of her presence. She observed his preoccupation with some offence. It
was a slight to herself.
'What is the matter?' she said impatiently. 'When I am dying to be
alone and asleep, do you come to tell me that the Rothschilds will
not join you in some loan, or that war is going to begin before the
financiers wish for it? Surely, your bad news would have kept till
to-morrow morning? _Qu'avez-vous donc?_'
Othmar winced under the irritability and lightness of the words.
'Nadège,' he said very low, 'did ever you think that it was possible
that--that--she sought her own death?'
His voice faltered, and had a sound of repressed tears in it.
She looked at him in astonishment and silence. She did not ask him whom
he meant.
'Sometimes,' she answered at length in a hushed voice, with a certain
sense of awe. 'Sometimes--yes--I have thought so. Yes, since you ask
me.'
His head drooped upon his chest; he sighed heavily. She looked at him
with compassion and surprise.
'Is it possible,' she thought, 'that he never had any suspicion of it?
Men are moles!'
Aloud, she said gently:
'What makes you think of it now? What can have happened?'
He did not reply for some moments. Then he answered unsteadily:
'I went into those locked rooms; there were some verses in a
drawer--some little poems. I do not know why; all at once the
impression came to me; I had never dreamed of it before.'
'Men are always so blind!' she thought, as she replied aloud:
'My dear Otho, we cannot know; why let us imagine the worst? It might
very well be a mere accident. The woman Nicolle has said how often
she had warned her of the dangers of that ruined roof. Do not take
that burden of great useless remorse upon your life. It will make you
wretched.'
'Not more wretched than she was. Not more than I deserve. I was a brute
to her.'
'That is nonsense; you could not be brutal to anybody if you tried. You
were indifferent, but that was not your fault. She did not know how to
make you otherwise. There are women who never know----'
'But she deserved so happy a fate!'
'Are there any happy fates? It is a mere expression. The happy people
are the conventional _terre à terre_ unemotional creatures who pass
their lives between two bolsters, one Custom and the other Prejudice.
These two bolsters save them from all shocks, and they slumber and grow
fat. That poor child might have been happiest in the cloisters, because
she would not have known all she missed. But in the world she would
certainly have been unhappy, whether with you or any other, because she
demanded impossibilities, and because she had no knowledge of human
nature.'
Othmar did not hear what she said.
'I shall always feel that I have been her murderer,' he said in a
hushed voice. Those poor little verses haunted him like the memory of
dead children long unmourned and suddenly remembered.
She looked at him with some impatience rising in her.
'How like a man!' she thought. 'How exactly like a man--to have
killed a woman with his indifference and never to have perceived that
he killed her, and then suddenly, six or seven years afterwards,
to become alive to it as a fact, and then to suffer indescribable
tortures! A woman would have known at once, but probably would never
have blamed herself for it. We have so much more intuition and so much
less conscience.'
She was sorry for the pain she saw in him, but she was impatient at
once of his slowness of perception and of the strength of his tardy
emotions.
'Will she be like Banquo's Ghost between us?' she thought, with a vague
jealousy of those memories suddenly arisen.
'My dear Otho,' she said aloud, with a little disdain in her sympathy,
'I understand all that you feel, because this cruel fancy has presented
itself quite suddenly to you. But I do not think that you ought to
dwell on it, since you can know nothing for certain. You have been
always too much in love with imaginary sorrows; you have always been
too apt to make for yourself calamities which destiny was willing to
spare you. Do not make such a mistake now. Be man enough to face the
truth as it stands, which is, that had that poor child lived, she would
have grown more and more intolerable to you with every breath she drew.
Men enjoy sophisms, and they hate looking at their own motives in all
their nakedness. If she had lived you would have made her utterly
miserable, through no fault either of yours or hers, but simply from
the fault of marriage, which yokes two uncongenial lives together, and
refuses to release them for mental and moral disparities which inflict
a million times more misery than do the mere gross offences for which
the law does grant release.'
'I have no doubt you are quite right, but I cannot follow your
reasoning,' said Othmar with some bitterness. 'I can only feel that I
have slain a better life than my own.'
'You were always so exaggerated in your expressions,' she said with the
tone which he himself had so seldom heard from her. 'You have always,
as I say, been like the German poets of the last century, perpetually
in love with sorrow; I suppose because you can fashion her at your
pleasure. Those to whom she comes uninvited dislike the look of her,
and would shut her out if they could.'
Othmar rose impatient and wounded.
'I should have hoped you would have had more sympathy,' he said as he
left the room.
She gave a little gesture of wrath as the door closed behind him.
'Do men ever know what they wish?' she said to herself. 'If he could
bring that poor child to life again he would do it, for the moment, and
spend the remainder of his life in repenting that he had ever done so.
If the powers of men were equal in force to the momentary flashes of
their consciences, what strange things the world would see!'
She herself was conscious that she had answered him with less feeling,
with less sympathy than he might well have looked for from her, but
the momentary sense of offence with which she had heard him speak had
been too strong to allow her gentler instincts to prevail with her. She
was irritated, amazed, profoundly offended, and amazed with such grand
vanity of amazement as Cleopatra might have felt had some memory of
poor pale Octavia risen up betwixt her lover and herself.
He meanwhile went through the hushed dim corridors of the house with
a pang the more at his heart. He had spoken in a moment of strong
feeling, of freshly-awakened pain, and the coldness with which his
confidence had been received, left its own frost upon his soul. He did
not remember that which every man finds; that no sorrow for one woman
will ever awaken sympathy in the breast of another. Shame, suffering,
wounds of the world's scorn or fortune's cruelties will make all women
compassionate and tender; but when a man sighs for a woman lost, he
will meet with no pity from those women whom he loves. He did not think
of that; he only felt a bruised and baffled sense of utter loneliness;
a momentary weakness like that of a child who, being hurt, creeps up
to arms it loves only to be repulsed from them. That weary sense of
hopelessness which her lovers had so often felt before her came to
him; such hopelessness as may come over the soul of one who, standing
shipwrecked on some barren shore, is fronted by some steep, straight,
inaccessible wall of marble cliff, upon whose smooth white breast there
is no place for any aching foot to rest or any hand to close: a white
wall shining in the sun which sees men drown and die.
Some lines of Swinburne's earliest and greatest years came back in
vaguely remembered fragments to his mind.
* * * * *
Yea, though we sung as angels in her ear,
She would not hear.
Let us rise up and part; she will not know,
Let us go seaward as the great winds go,
Full of blown sand and foam: what help is here?
There is no help, for all these things are so,
And all the world as bitter as a tear,
And how these things are, though I strove to show,
She would not know.
* * * * *
And though she saw all heaven in flower above,
She would not love.
* * * * *
Let us give up, go down; she will not care,
Though all the stars made gold of all the air,
Though all these waves went over us and drove
Deep down the stifling lips and glowing hair,
She would not care.
Let us go home and hence; she will not weep,
We gave love many dreams and days to keep,
* * * * *
All is reaped now, no grass is left to mow,
And we that sowed, though all we fell on sleep,
She would not weep.
The verses came back to his memory as he went away from her chamber
to his lonely couch; and he found in them that curious solace which
poetry gives to pain when it echoes pain closely; that consolation of
sympathy, which makes of poets the ministers and the angels of life.
The dull, resigned abandonment which was in these lines was in his own
soul. It was no more fierce grief or wild despair, or the delirious
rebellion of the lover against his mistress's indifference; it was the
apathetic acquiescence of a nature powerless to awake and sway another,
the weary and resigned acceptance of a thing unchangeable.
Nay, and though all men living had pity on me,
She would not see!