'Quite well,' said Othmar, as he pushed it through the surf.
When he was some roods from the shore he looked back; he saw the figure of Damaris still standing where he had left her, the silvery green mass of the olive-clothed cliffs rising behind her till they were lost in the hovering clouds of mist. The barking of the dogs came faintly over the sea, and a bell tolled from above the daybreak call to work.
'I have done what I can,' thought Othmar, 'but the poison is there. No antidote, even if it succeed, can ever make the blood quite what it was before the virus entered. And what are ambition and discontent but as the bite of a snake when they seize on a woman—a child?'
Then he went back over the calm blue water, while with every moment the white light in the east spread further, and the mists lifted and the winds dropped, and soon in all its glory rose the sun.
To this man, whose youth had been full of high ideals, which his manhood had found it utterly impossible for him to fulfil, there was something which touched him profoundly in all youth which, as once his own had done, looked forward to the world as to some field of combat, where the fair flowers of faith and of justice would possess a magical strength like the lilies and roses wherewith the nymphs smote Rinaldo.
To the eyes of men, Othmar appeared the most enviable of all persons; to the society around him, as to the multitudes to whom he was but one of the great names which govern the destinies of nations, it seemed that few living beings had ever enjoyed so complete a happiness and prosperity as did he. But in the bottom of his own heart there was a latent bitterness, which was disappointment. He could not have said where or how precisely this sense of failure came to him, in the midst of what was absolute success and entire fruition of all his wishes. Yet it was there. It is the accompaniment of all power and of all possession. Contentment looks from a narrow lattice on a tiny garden bounded by a high box hedge. Culture has the vast horizon of the universe and finds it small, it can measure the stars, and sighs to wander beyond their spheres. Dissatisfaction is the shadow which goes with all light of the intelligence. The uncultured mind can be content; the cultured, never.
CHAPTER XIV.
Damaris went slowly from the cliffs through the moonlight; her heart was heavy. She had had a great temptation, a great joy, a great disillusion, and a great grief, each following close on the heels of the other in the short space of a few hours.
She came back to her poor little isle with something of that remorse, that dejection, that sense of all the golden fruits being but ashes at the core, with which the great ones of earth, after reaching the highest heights of power or of fame, will come back to their lowly village birthplace and think with a sigh, 'Could I but be as once I was!'