Othmar

by Ouida

'My dear Otho,' she said, with her unkind little smile, 'really that is a twice-told tale! Do you think after so many years it is worth while to chanter des madrigaux? You know I was at no time ever very fond of them. "Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day!" Let us be friends, the most charming friends in the world; that is far more agreeable.'

Othmar rose from where he had been half kneeling at her feet; his face was very flushed, and his eyes grew angry; he was irritably sensible of having made himself absurd in her eyes.

'You will not awe me as you used to do that poor humble dead fool,' he said bitterly. 'But if you be tired of me I will summon my fortitude to bear dismissal as best I may.'

'Oh!—tired—no!' she said, with a deprecating accent which was marred on his ear by a certain latent thrill beneath it of suppressed laughter. 'Only I think we have done with all that. If Mary Stuart had married Chastelard, I am sure he would not have gone on writing sonnets and songs; at least not writing them to her. We have a quantity of all kinds of interests and objects common to us. Let us be content with those. Believe me, if you will leave off the madrigals it will be very much better. You have been the most admirable lover in the world, but as you cannot be a lover now, suppose you leave off the language and—and—the nonsense? Regard me as your best friend: I shall ever be that.'

Othmar coloured with a confused mingling of emotions.

'Friendship!' he echoed. 'I did not marry you to be relegated to friendship!'

'Then you were not clairvoyant,' she said, with her unkindest laugh. 'There are only two results possible to any marriage: they are friendship or separation, the door to the left or the door to the right.'

Then with her prettiest, chilliest laugh she left him, amused by the vexation, offence, and embarrassment which his features expressed.

'"Il faut en finir avec les madrigaux,"' she said, as she looked at him over her shoulder and passed down the staircase.

Othmar was deeply pained and hotly angered. He had at all times, even in the earliest hours of their union, been conscious that his caresses were rather permitted than enjoyed, his tenderness was rather accepted indulgently than ardently returned. There was a total absence of physical passion in her, which had served to heighten his intellectual admiration of her, if at times it had held his emotions in check, and made him feel that his ardour was boyish, absurd, sensual, romantic. But he had never been prepared to accept the position into which Napraxine had been driven by the indifference of her temperament. He had never anticipated that the time might come when he also might be allowed no more than a touch of her cool white fingers, and a careless smile of morning greeting.