When Othmar returned to Paris he paid Rosselin a visit.
'You have been to Chevreuse?' asked Rosselin. 'No?'
'No,' said Othmar with sincerity and some annoyance, 'I am still
at Amyôt. I only come to Paris occasionally. Is she well? Are you
satisfied?'
'She is quite well,' replied Rosselin. 'The answer to the other
question is less simple. I am satisfied with her talent, not with her
character.'
'What do you mean?'
'Oh, nothing that is her fault. I merely meant that she is, as Madame
la Comtesse once said, "_une sensitive_." Such people have no business
in public careers. You do not make street-posts out of the stems of
a sensitive plant. The Latins gave the statues that were destined to
stand in thoroughfares brass discs to protect them. If you have not the
brass disc you must not stand even in the peristyle of a theatre.'
'I do not think she is weak. Had she been weak she would not have left
the island as she did.'
'Who is talking of weakness?--I mean that she is not of a temper for
the coarse career of the stage, which is always passed in the press
and glare of a stormy crowd. She would play Dona Sol divinely to an
audience of poets on your terraces at Amyôt under a midsummer moon.
But it is unfortunately not a question of playing it so, but on the
stages of public theatres, where very often the coarse applause of
the friendly ignorant is still more offensive than the envenomed
vituperation of the hostile critic. I dare say we can make her fit for
this. We can give her the brass disc, but it will spoil the fine white
marble when we fasten it to it. My dear Count Othmar, you know what the
life of a great actress in Paris is; you know what it will be for her.
We need not spend words on details. Is it a good action that we do when
we encourage her to qualify herself for it, or is it a bad one?'
Othmar heard him with distress. He was always haunted by the memory
that his wife, by a few careless words, had broken up for ever that
simple, peaceful, healthful, flower-like life which Damaris Bérarde had
led in Bonaventure. The power of all the kings of the earth could not
have replaced her in it.
'It is her choice,' he said, after a silence of some moments.
'Is fate ever wholly choice?' said Rosselin. 'And when a child says
he will be a soldier, what does he know of war, of wounds, of the
sickening stench of the rotting dead, of the maladies which kill men
in hundreds like murrained cattle? Nothing: he thinks it all _tambour
et trompette_ and _Væ Victis_! Your friend at Chevreuse knows no more
of what the life of the theatre is than the child knows of war, and I
for one have not the courage to enlighten her. Have you? She dreams of
all kinds of glories; she does not see the rouge-pot, the white powder,
the claque, the press, the lovers, the diamonds, the ugliness, the
vulgarity, the money bags, the whole _ronde du diable_. She thinks she
will be Dona Sol, be Esther, be Rosalind, off the stage as well as on
it. Who is to tell her the mistake she makes?'
'Surely you can, if anyone?'
'No, I cannot. You cannot make a mind conceive a thing wholly
inconceivable to it. I can say a certain number of words certainly
to her; produce a certain effect; suggest some images to her which
will be painful and revolting. But when I have done that I shall not
have done much; I shall not have produced any real impression on her,
because the advice which I mean will not in itself be intelligible
to her. I may talk as I will of war to the child; but I shall never
be able to make him see what I have seen in the days of the siege of
Paris, which sometimes still turns me sick when I awake at night and
think of it. Perhaps it is because I grow old, and, so, sentimental
that I am troubled with those scruples which I do not suppose would
have suggested themselves to me twenty, or even ten years ago; but I
certainly do feel that I have not done what contents me in preparing
Damaris Bérarde for the art of the stage. She will be a great artist, I
believe, but she will be a miserable woman.'
Othmar heard him with anxiety and pain. The vision of her was always
before him as he had left her in the red brown grass with the evening
skies behind her. Country peace, woodland silences, fresh air of early
autumn, simple pleasures of youth--these would find no place in life
into which she had been led to enter. Some, losing them early, long
for them all their lives.
'I suppose,' continued Rosselin, 'that the imagination in me is dying
out; as one grows old one drops illusions, as old trees drop branch
after branch on the ground, till there is nothing left but the trunk,
and perhaps a woodpecker in it, perhaps nothing except dust. Certainly
twenty years ago I should have said, and should have thoroughly
believed, that art--any art--was worth any sacrifice. But now I do not
think so. One pays too heavily for any kind of fame. To be famous at
all is to have all the doors and windows of your house standing wide
open, and a mob, all eyes and ears, for ever staring in and watching
you as you eat, as you drink, as you sleep, as you play, aye, even as
you weep by your child's coffin or draw the shroud over the breast of
your dead mistress. Once famous, you never can laugh or can cry in
solitude ever again. Either to throw laurel crowns at you or to pelt
you with stones, the mob is always pushing in over your threshold. When
boys and girls dream of fame they do not know what it is--the eternal
adieu to privacy, the eternal self-surrender to the crowd. Alkibiades
loved the crowd; there are many like him in all centuries; but _les
sensitives_ hate it, shrink from it, try to bar it out with their bare
arm, which gets broken in the struggle, like the Scottish maiden's in
history. The price paid is too heavy. All the shade and the freshness
and the quiet leafy by-paths of life are denied us for ever. There is
only the great high-road, the crude hard light, the gaping multitude
that stare and grin till we give up the ghost! The price is too heavy.
It is the same curse as the curse which lies on kings, never to be
alone.'
He sighed as he turned and walked up the little path of his cottage
garden. Looking back upon his life he seemed to have thrown his years
to the mob as offal is thrown to a pack of hounds.
It was only a mood, a passing mood, but there was a great truth in it.
'One needs not to be famous to suffer that curse,' said Othmar.
'Whoever is in the world has it. Private life is a thing of the past;
we are all expected to dine and to sup, and to spread our bridal-beds
and our death-beds, in public, like the monarchs of old. An age which
has invented the electric light has abolished solitude and respects no
privacy; it will end in forcing all _âmes d'élite_ to find and form a
new Thebaïd.'
'If they can anywhere find a square mile without a tramway and a
telephone!' said Rosselin, tenderly touching a tea-rose which blossomed
in the cold wet weather against the low white wall of his house.
Then he said abruptly:
'What does your wife say now of her second Desclée?'
Othmar was angered to feel that the natural interrogation embarrassed
him.
'My wife has forgotten both her prophecies and the subject of them,' he
said with a certain impatience and bitterness in the accent with which
the words were spoken.
'And you have not refreshed her memory?'
'I think it would be useless.'
Rosselin was silent: he was not pleased. He angrily thought of Béthune,
and wondered if he would speak of his encounter with Damaris.
'Some one will tell her if you do not,' he said with some significance.
'Pardon me if I say too much, but I dislike concealments; they are
usually unwise and seldom profitable. Chevreuse is not a vale in Venus
or Polaris, that we can be sure no one will ever see your _protégée_!'
'Anyone may see her,' said Othmar, with annoyance and hauteur. 'But
to recall to my wife a subject she has forgotten demands a courage of
which I frankly confess myself not the possessor.'
'Humph!' said Rosselin with dubious accent: he was not satisfied. It
seemed to him that embarrassing complications would of necessity grow
up out of so much needless reticence. Othmar, he thought, was most
probably not aware himself of all the various and confused motives
which disposed him to silence on the name of Damaris.
'She is not of a facile character,' he thought, recalling all he had
ever heard of the caprices and cruelties of Nadine Napraxine in her
youth. 'But when there is a nettle in question it is always best to
grasp it boldly. Besides, if she be so indifferent as they say, the
whole thing would be of infinitesimal insignificance to her, unless
concealment were to lend it an importance not its own, as some shadows
can be thrown on a white wall so as to make a beetle loom large as an
ox.'
'Chevreuse, moreover,' continued Othmar, 'is a place that no one
ever sees in winter. Unless it be in the few weeks when Dampierre is
occupied, not a soul of our world ever goes there. If she mean or
hope to become famous with the fame you decry, she is best there in
solitude; if, on the contrary, she fail it will be still well that none
should know her efforts who would not pity them. My wife is like the
Latins, she has no altar to pity; she despises it. If the world ever
applaud Damaris Bérarde, then and then only shall I venture to recall
to her the prophecy she made at St. Pharamond.'
'If with her nothing succeeds like success she only follows the world,'
said Rosselin. 'I thought she led it?'
'She does lead it: but she has great contempt for those who fail in it.
When a lamb falls from fatigue on the Australian plains the shepherd
walks on and leaves it to its fate. Those who fail seem to my wife as
the fallen lambs do to the shepherd: that is all.'
'Damaris Bérarde will not fail,' said Rosselin, with a sense of anger
and of triumph in her.
'Aimée Desclée did not fail--but she died.'
'Damaris will not die; she is too strong; but she may break her heart
over broken illusions, as a thorough-bred horse breaks his over bad
roads. Good God, what a beautiful world it would be if it were like the
world these youths and maidens see in their dreams!'
'She may break her heart over broken illusions.'
The words haunted Othmar's memory as he left the cottage at Asnières.
Yes, that was often the death of the strongest, death mental and moral
if not death physical.
What he had done for her had secured her future from want, had given
her a safe home for so long as she would be content with it; but how
much more was there for which no prescience could provide, from which
no friendship could secure her! With her ardent temperament, her
ignorance of life, her poetic and unwise impulses, how much would her
heart ask and her imagination demand! She would not, could not, lead
the passionless life of passionless natures. Whom would she love? Would
love only be for her the Charon who took her through a river of hell to
the shores of death, as he had been to Aimée Desclée?
Or would she leave behind her all those beautiful faiths and fancies,
all those innocent ardours and tender thoughts, as the year leaves
behind it the blossoms of spring, the young green of April: and would
she become famous and flattered, leading the world in a leash, and
putting her foot on the necks of her lovers?
He liked one vision as little as the other.
Either way the sea-bird of Bonaventure would be no more; either way
the child who had gone away from him in the moonlight under the silver
shadows of the olive-trees and of the mists of dawn would be as dead as
though she were in her grave. Would the time ever come when she would
say to him, 'Why did you not let me die on the stones of Paris instead
of keeping life in me for this?' Or would time give her that brazen
disk of which Rosselin had spoken, and with it the heart of bronze
which all must have instead of a heart of flesh and blood if they would
go triumphant through the heat and pressure of the world? Rosselin had
said aright, that the disk of brass would spoil the fair white statue,
and the heart of bronze, the heart of the mockers of men, the heart of
Venus Lubetina, would it ever be hers?
He went home to his own house, where he was expecting his wife's
return that evening. He went into his own rooms and looked at the
sketch made by Loris Loswa. The sight of it troubled and disturbed him.
He had a sense of wrong doing upon him of which, when he searched his
own conscience, he could with honesty declare himself blameless. He
had put her as much out of his own hands as it had been possible to
do, and the simple _ruse_ by which he had been able to provide for her
maintenance seemed as innocent as any pretence by which the motherless
lamb can be persuaded to eat or the unfledged bird to let itself be
befriended by gentle hands. Still it had been a subterfuge; it had
been an untruth; and he hated the merest shadow of falsehood. His
detestation of it had been the constant subject of Friederich Othmar's
ridicule and sarcasm, and the elder man had in vain argued with him a
thousand times, to endeavour to prove to him that it is, in the hands
of a skilled casuist, at once the most forcible and the most delicate
of weapons. He had always refused to admit its virtues; it seemed to
him a craven and contemptible thing, however dressed up with wit and
wisdom.
That Blanchette de Laon had seen him at Chevreuse had kept him from
returning thither, and it also made him feel the absolute necessity of
acquainting his wife with all he had done for Damaris before Rumour,
with her hundred tongues, and women, with their devilish ingenuity in
exaggeration and suggestion, should have bruited the tale abroad in
some guise wholly unlike the truth of it. If he could by good fortune
place the story before her in such a light that it would move her finer
and more generous impulses, then all would be well. But this was so
doubtful; the quixotism of his own conduct would be the first thing
which would strike her, and she would probably be unsparing in her
ridicule of it. Besides, the reception of his narrative would wholly
depend on her mood, on the trifles of the moment, on the facts of
whether or no she were in a sympathetic and kindly humour. Any trifle
would do to determine that: if the rooms were not heated enough, if the
flowers in them were not those she liked, if the costumes of the coming
season seemed ugly to her, or if she had caught a slight chill on her
journey--any one of these things, or anything similar to them, would
make any appeal to her generosity and sympathy worse than useless.
He had been so long accustomed to study the barometer of her caprices
that he dreaded its mutability. He knew that there were in her
instincts and elements of nobility, even of greatness, which, could
she have been cast on troublous times and dire disasters, would
have made her rise to sacrifice, even to heroism. As it was, in her
perpetual self-gratification, her unlimited power of command, her bed
of unruffled roses, and her atmosphere of incessant adulation, all the
capriciousness and egotism of her nature were encouraged and nursed to
overweening growth.
In the depths of her nature were those finer qualities which will
always respond to the appeal of higher emotions in moments of extremity
or the hours of great calamity or of great peril. She would have had
the dignity of Marie Antoinette before the Convention, the courage
of Anne de Montfort before Philippe de Valois, the strength of Maria
Theresa before Europe. But nothing less than the inspiration of such
supreme hours of life could have penetrated the indifference of her
temperament, and the trivialities and the frivolities of modern
existence could never do so for an instant.
Had he sought her pardon for some great crime, sought her fidelity
through some great ruin, he might, he probably would have aroused the
latent forces and sympathies dormant in her character; she would not
have given him a stone when he had asked for bread. But in the things
of daily life he had found her too often without mercy to have in her
mercies much trust.
The conviction that she would never give him the comprehension which he
wished made him withhold all other utterances of his deeper emotions
and more tender thoughts. He had gone to her in one supreme moment of
pain, and he had received a rebuff such as repels for long, if not for
ever, a sensitive nature.
She did not realise that her infinite comprehension of the moods
and minds of others was marred to them by the chill raillery which
accompanied her acute perceptions. She did not remember that though to
herself the dilemmas and the weaknesses, even the passions which she
studied were objects of amused ridicule, they were to those on whom she
studied them subjects of great moment, and often of as great suffering.
Even the men who most blindly loved her were afraid to confide in her,
because of the inevitable irony with which their confidence was certain
to be met. Many a time Othmar himself had longed to lean his head on
her knees, and lay bare to her all the contradictions, and longings,
and regrets of his soul; but he had never dared to do so, because
he had always shrunk from the certain mockery which would, he knew,
point through all her sympathy, if sympathy she would ever give. Her
comprehension of human nature made her in one sense the most lenient of
auditors; but in another sense she was the most unsparing: she could
pardon easily, but she could never promise not to ridicule. That one
fact held sensitive natures aloof from her with all the force of a
scourge.
'She will deem me such a fool,' he thought often: and then he kept
silence.
He went this evening down to the Gare du Nord to receive her, and
almost before the train had paused he had entered the saloon carriage
in which she had travelled undisturbed since she had left Berlin. There
was always in him something of the eagerness after absence of a lover;
her mere presence always exercised over him a magnetism and a charm.
She raised herself on her elbow from the mass of sable furs and of
wadded satin on which she had been lying; she had been rudely awakened
by the cessation of the train's movement; the blaze of a lamp was in
her eyes; she was impatient, and she yawned.
'Otho! my dear Otho!' she said with petulance, 'why will you always
come to meet one at a railway station? Of all the many absurd customs
of our generation that is the most absurd. Nobody's emotions are so
poignant that they cannot wait till one comes into the house. I was
asleep. What a cold night! Why cannot they devise something which would
carry the train straight to one's bedside? All their inventions are
very clumsy after all.'
She was slowly raising herself from her heap of furs and red satin;
her eyes were languid with arrested sleep; her tone was irritable and
irritating: she scarcely seemed to perceive his presence; the sweet
delicate odour as of tea-roses with which all her clothes were always
impregnated came to him well known as the accents of her voice. A
curious passion of conflicting feeling passed over him; he could have
seized her in his arms and cried aloud to her, 'I have given you all my
life, do you give me no more than this?' Yet he felt chilled, angered,
alienated, silenced for the moment; a feeling which was almost dislike
came over him; it seemed to him as if he had poured out all the love
of his life upon her and received in return a mere handful of ice
and snow. But the inexorable haste and vulgar trivialities of modern
exigencies left him no moment for thought or for the expression of it.
He could only offer her his hand in silence to assist her to alight,
and give her his arm and lead her through the throngs of the Northern
Terminus to her own carriage.
He drove with her through the streets to their own house and escorted
her to the apartments which were especially hers.
'I dare not disturb you longer to-night,' he said with a certain
bitterness of tone which he could not control. 'The children wished to
remain up to welcome you, but I did not allow them to do so; I know how
you despise undisciplined feeling.'
She laughed a little languidly, letting her women remove her fur
wrappings, whilst she stood in the delicious warmth and light of the
rooms where thousands of hothouse roses were gathered together in
welcome of her return, filling the hot air with their fragrance.
'Do you mean that for satire?' she said with a little yawn. 'Do not
try to be sardonic, it does not suit you. The children are certainly
much better in bed. I will go and look at them after I have had a bath.
I am very tired. Goodnight.'
She gave him a sleepy sign of dismissal, then chid her women for being
slow. Had they her pine-bath ready?--there was no bath so good after
fatigue and cold.
He left her presence with pain and anger, despite the coldness which
came over him towards her: coldness born from her own as the frosts
of the earth come from the cold of the atmosphere. His adoration of
her had been too integral a part of his life for her touch, her voice,
her glance, not to have a certain empire over him which no other woman
would ever obtain.
In the forenoon, quite late, he was again admitted to her presence.
She had recovered her fatigue, she was serene and almost kind, but
the children were there: they were not alone five minutes. Later, she
gave audience to all the great _faiseurs_, whose intelligence had been
busied inventing marvels of costume for her for the winter season.
Later yet, there came some of her intimate friends and some of her most
devoted courtiers.
It was raining heavily in the streets, but in her apartments there were
hothouse heat and hothouse fragrance, in the sultry air and amidst the
innumerable roses it was hard to believe that it was the thirtieth
of November. People came and went, laughed and chattered; she wrote
notes, sent messages, telegraphed many contradictory orders to her
tradespeople; the day was crowded and entertaining; there was a certain
stimulant, even for her, in the sense that she was in Paris.
Othmar did not see her again until they met at dinner. Béthune dined
there, and four or five other persons, who had called and been invited
that afternoon. The day was a type of all other days of her life.
Othmar thought with impatience and bitterness of the dreams he had
dreamed. She despised the world and ridiculed it; yet who was more
absorbed by it? Who was less able to live without it? She always spoke
with her lips of the fatigue of society, but, as he thought angrily,
she was not so weary that she was ever willing to forsake it. All the
year round it was about her. Every season saw her where its fashion,
its pastimes, its flatteries, were most largely to be found. Without
that atmosphere of adulation, of luxury, and of excitement she would
have been lost. The world was a poor affair, no doubt, not anything
like what if might be were people more inventive and more courageous.
She had said so a hundred times; but still there was nothing better
than its movement. To read Plato all day under an oak-tree, or to sit
alone by a library fire with a volume of Sully Prudhomme, would not be
any improvement on it, though it might be more philosophic.
To his fancy, life together was poor and meaningless, unless it implied
mutual sympathy and communion of feeling. He was a romanticist, as
she had always told him. To his views it was not in any way an ideal
of either love or happiness to be for ever surrounded by the fever
of the great world, to be for ever separated by its demands and its
excitements, to meet only on the common ground of mutual interests,
to dwell under the same roof with little more intimacy than two
strangers met there at a house-party. It appeared that this was what
she now expected, what she now preferred. His pride prevented him from
struggling against her decrees; but he felt, and loathed to feel, that
he was insensibly approaching a position towards her scarcely higher
than that which Napraxine had occupied. True, she still had moments of
exquisite charm, of irresistible sorcery, in which she occasionally
deigned to remember that he had been the lover of her choice; and in
these she bent his will and turned his brain almost as much as in the
earlier years of his idolatry. But these moments were rare, and when
they came appealed to the senses in him, and not to the heart; they
left him unnerved, they did not satisfy his affections.
The world had so many claims upon her: his were forgotten or ignored.
Where were the visions he had had of a life out of the world, poetic,
unworldly, tuned to another key than the brazen clangour of society?
They were gone for ever like last year's roses.
The so-called pleasures of life had never had attraction for him; they
were a mere routine; he was tired of crowds, of flattery, of splendour,
of movement; he was tired of the women who tried to beguile, and the
men who endeavoured to use, him; the whole thing seemed to him witless,
tedious, tame. She, who had always declared that it was so, yet could
find her diversion in dazzling it and stimulating its envy; though most
things failed to please her, yet, like all women, her own power pleased
her always; but he had no such resource, for the power which he had
(that of wealth) he despised.
A sense of failure came wearily upon him during this evening which
followed on her return. If this were all the issue of great passion and
great love, what use were either?
The world was a pageant to her, and he might stand by and see her
pass in it. The _rôle_ did not please him. He fancied--no doubt he
told himself it was but fancy--that the world ridiculed him in that
subordinate place, that half-effaced position, that too indulgent
acceptance of her continual caprices, tyrannies, and slights.
He did not remember, did not know, that he himself in Russia had
seemed cold to her. He was only sensible of the barrier which had
grown up between them, of the indifference with which his presence
or his absence was regarded by her. Gradually, as the fine mist of
approaching rain steals over a sunny country, dimming the colours and
effacing the lines of it little by little, until nothing is seen but
the colourless blur of the wide white rain itself, so the sensation
of dissatisfaction, of disappointment, of disunion had come over the
tenor of their lives together. The consciousness of it brought to him
a profound and passionate sense of irreparable loss. A word from her
would have dispelled it, an hour of full belief that she had ever loved
him as he had once loved her would have sufficed to sweep it away; but
the word was never spoken, the hour never came. Time only strengthened
his conviction that, were he dead before her, she would not greatly
care.
The sense of the incompleteness of his own life came upon him with
a strong consciousness as he stood in his brilliant rooms with the
laughter of his wife and her guests borne to his ear, and the sounds
of some gay music coming to him from another salon. He might have ten,
twenty, thirty, forty years more of this existence, and its years, its
days, its hours would always be precisely like this year, this day,
this hour. The future seemed to rise up like a phantom and say to him,
'The past gave you the fulfilment of your greatest desire. I shall give
you nothing but the fruit of that fulfilment. If that fruit do not
content you, whose fault is that?'
Men whose wishes are thwarted can throw the blame on fate if their
lives prove barren; but he had passionately wished for one thing, and
all the forces of life and of death had joined together to give it him.
He had no one to reproach, no unkind destiny to upbraid, if the gift
left his heart cold, his soul cheerless; if he felt at times a mortal
loneliness, and at times a weariness of vague regret.
The cruelty of all great passions is that, after their fruition, there
must come this inevitable regret. They are altogether beyond the pale
of daily life; they can never fraternise with the demands of social
existence. She had once said truly that death is the kindest friend to
love, because it saves it from being made ridiculous by daily habit and
worn away by daily friction.
The world is wrong when it pities Romeo, when it weeps for Stradella.
The great love he had borne her had survived all those trials of
familiarity and of habit which are crueller enemies to love than
absence or than death. It had been the romantic passion of Romeo united
to that depth and unity of devotion which Friederich Othmar had been
wont slightingly to call the knight's love for his lady. It had been so
essentially interwoven with his life that it had always seemed to him
it could only go away from him with life itself.
The idea that a love so great should yet have the same fate as have all
the little passions of a frivolous hour was still intolerable to him.
With him it had been of those passions which ennoble and enlarge human
nature, because, though interwoven with the senses, they yet embrace
the soul, and are drawn by their very idolatry to that longing for
immortality which is the only possible approach to faith in it.
But he knew that he had never moved her thus; he knew that, if he had
ever given utterance to all he felt, she would have listened with a
derisive compassion as to the exaggeration of a mind distraught. The
crystal clearness, the acute penetration, the ingrained scepticism
of her intellect made impossible to her those illusions and those
hopes which are so dear to minds more imaginative than critical, to
temperaments more impassioned than logical, as was his.
He had given his whole life away to her, and she did not even care
for the gift; scarcely deigned to accept it, except in conventional
shape. He was unreasonable, no doubt, as she would have told him had
he said so to her. He had asked of life and passion what neither can
give--immortality. All which serve to console the great majority of
mankind did not avail to console him for that loss.
Most men grow content with the crowd which is constantly about them,
with the host of petty interests which claim them, with the repetition
of pleasures and pursuits which is enforced on them; their days are
dull, but they are full; they are consumed by monotony, but they are
unconscious of its tedium, because they have no imagination and often
no passion.
Othmar could not be thus reconciled to the disappointments and the
sameness of existence. He required life to be a poem, and he was not
consoled because it proved a mere diary.
The new year brought him without break that increase of occupation
which makes it a season of such weariness to all who are of any
importance in the world, and have a crowd of supplicants and
petitioners always looking to them for support. Himself he would have
liked to pass the winter season at Amyôt, but to her it was useless
even to suggest it.
'You cannot ask the world to bury itself in a frozen wood by a river in
flood,' she had said when once he had wished to do so.
'But is the world absolutely necessary?'
'If it were not there what should we do? You would read Plato perhaps
for the thousandth time; I could not promise to read Goethe for the
hundredth. The country in winter is like a man of eighty repeating a
poem on spring.'
'It is just possible that the man of eighty might feel the meaning of
the poem more thoroughly than the boy of eighteen.'
'His feelings would not prevent him from looking absurd.'
'I suppose, you at least would never pity him?'
'Most surely not.'
'What would you pity?' he said bitterly.
She smiled. 'I should not pity people who could shut themselves up
in damp forests on the Loire water in midwinter. A Russian winter is
quite a different thing; the air is like champagne, the frost is like
diamonds, the plains are like marble; it is charming to have one's
roses and palms in a temperature of 30° Réaumur, and by merely going
out of doors plunge _en pleine Sibérie_. That is why I am a very
patriotic Russian. I love the intensity of its contrasts.'
'As Marie Stuart loved Chastelard and Bothwell!' said Othmar with a
certain significance.
'Should you think she loved either of them? I should doubt it. They
loved her, and being stupid as men only are, they compromised her.'
'I dare say she thought of all men as you do!--as a little higher than
the horse, a little lower than the dog! No more!' said Othmar with some
impatience.
She smiled: 'Perhaps! I am not sure that it is a bad compliment. Where
should we put you in the seat of creation--Mary Stuart and I--who
cannot adore you as Penelope and Hermione can?'
'I never hoped to be adored!' said Othmar with some bitterness.
'Oh, yes; you did, one day. All men hope for it, only they do not get
it,--except from Griseldis whom they beat, and from Gretchen whom they
forsake.'
They were alone in their drawing-room in the vacant five minutes before
a great dinner party. He looked at her wistfully. What woman was ever
comparable to her, he thought; where else were that exquisite grace,
that entrancing languor, that supreme distinction in every movement
and in every attitude? The very tones of her voice, sweet as the sound
of any silver bell, and cold as the breath of frost, had a charm in
it that no other's had. With a sudden impulse of reviving ardour he
stooped and pushed the loose glove from her arm, and kissed the white
soft skin beneath it. But she, remembering and resentful of the weeks
in Russia, drew it from his caress with her chilliest rebuke:
'My dear Otho! we are neither children nor lovers!'
He was repulsed and silent.
At that moment their groom of the chambers announced that some of their
coming guests, who were of imperial name and place, were entering the
gates.
He and she together descended the grand staircase between the lines of
their servants in state liveries.
'Together like this!' thought Othmar. 'Together in these pageantries,
these conventionalities, these mummeries; but never in any other hours,
in any other way!'