Othmar

by Ouida

A vainer man would have laid the blame on her, and have arrived, through vanity, at the perception that it was her temperament and not his character which was at fault. But all the flattery which every rich and powerful man daily receives had failed to make Othmar vain. His self-esteem was very modest in its proportions, and he attributed the fact of his wife's apparent indifference to him humbly enough to his own demerits.

'I have not the talent of amusing her,' he thought. 'I have been always too grave—have taken life too sadly to be the companion of a woman of her wit. I have never done anything of which she can be very proud with that sort of pride which would be the sweetest flattery to her; the years slip away with me and bring me no occasion, at least no capability, of the kind of distinction which she would appreciate. I cannot be a Skobeleff or a Gortschakoff; I cannot make that renown which might arrest her fancy and please her amour propre; she has loved me possibly as much as she can love, but as she finds that I am made of the common clay of ordinary humanity, I become not much more to her than all those dead men whom she has tired of and forgotten.'

But whilst his reason told him this, his heart yearned to disbelieve it, and his pride refused a meek submission to it. There was something in her fugitive, delicately disdainful, capriciously insecure, which was certain to sustain the passion of man, because it constantly stimulated it; her concessions were made to his desires not her own; she never shared his weakness even whilst she was indulgent to it.

'I have absolutely never known yet whether you have ever loved me!' he said to her once, and she replied, with her little indulgent, mysterious smile:

'How should you know what I do not know myself?'

It was a part, and no small part, of the ascendency she had over him; it stimulated his affections, because it perpetually stinted them; it made satiety impossible with her.

Yet all which excited his passions and secured the continuance of her influence over him, left him more and more conscious of a void at his heart which she would never fill, because a nature cannot bestow more than it possesses. All the intellectual charm she had for him had a certain coldness in it; her incorrigible irony, her inveterate analysis, her natural attitude of observation and of mockery before the foibles and follies and affections of mankind, enchanting as they were, were without warmth as they were without pity. It was the brilliant play of electric light on polished steel. Sometimes, with the wayward inconsistency of human wishes, he would have preferred the glow from some simple fire of the hearth.

There were times when the feeling which met his own left his heart cold. He had never wholly ceased to feel that he was always in a measure outside her life. He would have been ashamed to confess to her many youthful weaknesses, many romantic impulses which often moved him; there were many lover-like follies which would have been natural and sweet to him, which he had early learned to control and dismiss, unyielded to because he was afraid of that slight ironical smile, and that contemptuous little word with which she had the power to arrest the quick tide of any impetuous emotion.

The excesses of passion and the force of emotion always seemed to her slightly absurd; she had yielded to both for his sake more than she had ever thought to do; but her intelligence always held reign over her with much greater dominance than her feelings ever obtained. There were moments when he felt as if he asked her for bread, and she gave him a stone; a most polished stone of magical charm, of exquisite transparency, of occult power, but still a stone, when he merely wished for the plain sweet bread of simple sympathy.