Othmar

by Ouida

Othmar was filled with an invincible melancholy as he stood beside the bedside of this man, whose vast intellect had been suddenly beaten down into nothingness as a bull is brained by the slaughterer. There had been no great affection between them; their views had been too opposed, their characters too utterly different for sympathy, or even for much mutual comprehension, but he had always done full justice to the unerring intelligence, the stubborn courage, and the devoted loyalty to the interests of his house, which were so conspicuous in Friedrich Othmar, and he knew that his loss would leave a place in his own life, public and private, which would never be filled up again. No one not bound to him by ties of blood and of family honour would ever care for his interests, work for his welfare, guard his repute, and consolidate his fortunes as Friedrich Othmar had done from the days of his boyhood. They had often been sharply opposed in opinion and in action, and more than once the elder man had learned that the younger man deemed him well-nigh a knave, whilst the elder held the younger in complete derision as a dreaming fool. But despite all this there had been that bond between them of community of interest and kinship of descent which no hireling service and no friendship of aliens could ever replace.

Othmar knew that, this man dead, he himself would stand utterly alone in many ways and in many difficulties with which no other would ever have power or title to advise or to assist him. There were engagements, obligations, secret treaties, and concealed alliances in his house of which he would bear the burden alone, Friedrich Othmar being once gathered to his fathers. And, selfishness apart, there was a keen pang to him in the sight of his old friend lying prone like any fallen tree, in the knowledge that the quick wit would never more play about those silent lips, and the clear flame of reason and of scorn would never more flash from those closed eyes.

He was dying: soon he would be dead: and Friedrich Othmar was one of those who make the dream of immortality seem as grotesque as the child's hope to meet her doll in heaven. Who could think of him without his slow, satiric smile, his fine intricate speculations, his genius at whist, his perfect burgundies, his firm white hand which, touching a button in the wall, could speed an assent or a refusal which served to convulse Europe?

'Immortal?—what ennui!' he would have said, with his most good-humoured contempt for the dull and grotesque shapes in which human illusions, ideas, hopes, and creeds have so oddly shaped themselves.

'You will find everything in order,' he had said more than once to Othmar. 'I shall die suddenly one day, in all probability. I leave everything in perfect order every day. You will only have to wind up the watch after I am gone. But will you take the trouble to wind it?'

That was his doubt, the doubt which had tormented him in many an hour.

Othmar now, leaving the warm golden light of the streets and the summer air, sweet-scented even in Paris from passing over the hay-fields and the flower gardens of the country round, and the blossoms of the limes upon the boulevards, entered the hushed, close, darkened room with a sense of coming loss and of impending calamity. There was no sound but of the heavy, laboured breathing of the dying man.

'There is no change?' he asked of the attendants, but he knew their answer beforehand; there could be no change but one—the last.

Life mechanical, painful, sustained and prolonged by artificial means, was there still, but all else was over—over the manifold combinations, the daring projects, the cool unerring ambitions, the pitiless study and usage of men, the traffic in war and want, the wisdom which knew when to stoop and when to command, the skill which could gather and hold so safely all the cross threads of a million intrigues, the intellect which found its fullest pleasure in the problems of finance and the great needs of nations. All these were over, and the quick, cautious, wise and well-stored brain was shattered and ruined like a mere piece of clock-work that a child stamps in pieces with an angry foot.

Of course he had long known that what had come now might come any day; that at the age of his uncle the marvel was rather his perfect health, his clear brain, his strong volition, than any mortal stroke which might befall him.