Othmar went into his great library, and shut the door upon himself. For
more than an hour he paced to and fro the length of the room, overcome
with an agitation which he could not master. He had a sense that his
life was over. He felt as though his very heart-strings had snapped and
parted for ever. A great love cannot perish without some such throb as
a strong animal life suffers when it is forcibly torn asunder. A kind
of horror seized him at the idea of the years which were to come; the
long, long years through which he would dwell in apparent amity beside
her in the sight of the world.
His first impulse was to go out of the house, out of the city, out of
the world, to leave her everything he possessed, but never to see her
face again.
But a brief reflection made him feel how impossible such a course as
that would be to him. Obscure people can do these things, they are
happy; they are not set in the fierce light of publicity and society,
and no one heeds it if they creep away to lay their aching heads under
some lowly roof in solitude. But to a man well known and conspicuous in
the life of the world, any such retreat into obscurity is impossible.
He is bound hand and foot by a million threads, each strong as cables
to hold him to his place. He cannot forsake his place without forsaking
a mass of interests confided to his honour. Solitude is for ever
forbidden to him, and liberty he can never more recover. Life never
gives two opposite sets of gifts to the same recipient; it never
bestows both the king's dominion and the peasant's peace. The sigh of
Henry IV. upon his sleepless couch is the sigh of all eminence whatever
be its throne.
Othmar's momentary longing to go far away from everything and everyone
he had ever known, and never again behold the woman whom he had adored,
and who had insulted him as though she had struck him with a knout,
was the natural thirst for loneliness of all wounded creatures. But
he knew that this desire, like so many others, was hopeless; he could
never leave her or the world he lived in; there were his children, who
must not be sacrificed, and the fortunes of others which must not be
imperilled. He knew that he could no more undo the bands fastened--many
by his own hand--around him, than he could sweep ten years off the sum
of his past life. Such as his existence was now, so he had to continue
it.
He walked to and fro the vast length of the chamber in the quiet of the
noonday. He felt as if her hand had struck him.
It had not been even an insult of unpremeditated passion, of hot
anger, of inconsiderate haste--as such as he might have pardoned
it--but, serene and deliberate and measured, spoken in cold blood, and
matured on long consideration, it had been such an outrage as severs
the closest ties, and destroys the most profound affections, cuts at
the deepest roots of self-respect, and burns up all delicate fibres of
sympathy. He would much sooner have forgiven a dagger's thrust.
He had been insulted by the one person for whom he had given up all his
life, all his loyalty, all his devotion, all his faith, and all his
years to come. The outrage of her insolence, of her disbelief, burned
in his heart as the shame of a blow burns on a brave man's forehead.
Never could he make her believe, though he were to swear the truth to
her as he lay dying!
That perfect silence with which she had listened and led him on
to speak, that perfect consciousness of all his actions which had
existed beneath her apparent ignorance, that feline attitude of cold
expectation and of watchful, motionless observation with which she
had waited for the telling of a tale of which she already knew every
smallest detail: all these seemed to him horrible, hateful, unnatural
in a woman so near to him, so dear to him, to whom he had given up his
life, and whom he had never wronged, or slighted, or betrayed. And then
the espionage!--all his soul revolted at it.
'One might have known that the weapon of a Russian woman is always a
spy!' he thought, with passionate indignation at what seemed to him
this last and lowest of affronts.
If he had found in her any of the warm and fond, though unwise, angers
of that jealousy which loves whilst it hates, he would have forgiven
and comprehended it. But he could not hope that there was any single
pulse of it in her breast. She had viewed and measured his actions with
the accuracy and coldness of a judge of court overwhelming any prisoner
with his logic, and had treated his own asseverations with utter and
contemptuous disbelief, not deigning even to weigh as remotely possible
the chance that he might tell the truth. He himself would have taken
her word against that of the whole world, against all evidence of his
own senses, all adverse witness of circumstance.
'I was mad to suppose she ever cared for me,' he thought bitterly,
whilst the tears rose hotly in his eyes. 'For my children she cares,
perhaps, but for me nothing: I have never been wise enough, great
enough, strong enough to compel even her respect. She looks on me as a
mere dreamer, a mere fool. All she is anxious for now is that the world
may not have a story to laugh at, because it would lessen her dignity
and offend her pride!'
And yet he loved her still as he remembered her there sitting so
still, so fair, with the cold challenge in her eyes, and the pale roses
at her breast; and she was all his, and yet as far off him as though
she were queen in another world beyond the sun; and he loved her still,
and was filled with guilty shame at his own weakness, as men are when
they still adore the women who have defiled their name.