In these hot summer days in Paris, in the empty chambers of his uncle's house, all the old weariness and disgust at fate came back upon him. He would willingly have cast aside all the power which men envied him, to be free to spend his time as he would, and shut the door of his room on these buyers and sellers of gold, these traffickers in war and want, these speculators in the folly or greed of mankind who call themselves the princes of finance.
'Les délicats ne sont pas vêtus pour le voyage de la vie; ils n'ont pas la botte grossière qui résiste aux cailloux et ne craint pas la fange.'
Othmar was a délicat, and most of the ambitions and all the prizes of life seemed to him supremely vulgar. It was a temperament which shut him out from the sympathies of men and made him appear eccentric, when he was only made of finer and more sensitive moral and mental fibre than were those around him.
Meanwhile the child he had rescued was passing through the weary stages of pleuro-pneumonia, succoured by all that science and care could do for her, and slowly recovered to find herself with amaze lying on a soft bed, a canopy of pale-blue silk above her, and around her white panelled walls painted with groups of field-flowers, whilst from a wide bay window there came, tempered by pale-blue blinds, the ardent sunbeams and the hot air of July. It was only one of the many bed-chambers of the Hôtel d'Othmar, but to her in her first moments of convalescence, as the fragrance from the garden below came through the room, and the distant music of some passing regiment was wafted on the warm south wind, it seemed a very part of paradise itself.
She did not remember very much; her mind was hazy and indolent through great weakness, but she remembered that she had seen Othmar. She knew that he had said to her, 'I am your friend.' Her attendants, the nuns, were astonished and annoyed that she asked them no questions; her taciturnity was irritating to their own loquacity and inquisitiveness. But she was silent from neither shame nor obstinacy; she was silent because she was utterly bewildered, and shrank willingly into the shelter of this knowledge of her safety under his roof, as a hunted hare shrinks under fern and bough. She never saw him after that first night in his library; but she heard his name often spoken, and she understood that every good thing came to her from him.
The fresh flowers in the china bowls, the books when she was well enough to read, the volumes of drawings and engravings which amused her feeble tired mind, the grapes, and the nectarines, and the pines, piled in pyramids of beautiful colour on their porcelain dishes—all these things came, no doubt, from him; indeed, whenever she asked any questions, she was always answered by his name.
A great unconquerable lassitude and melancholy lay upon her; yet, under it, she was soothed and lulled by the sense of this invisible but absolute protection. It was as a shield between her and the misery which she had undergone; it filled her with a vague, grateful sense of safety and of sympathy. As far as she could be sensible of much in the feebleness of illness, she was dully conscious that Othmar had stood between her and some crowning wretchedness, some unutterable horror.
He never asked to see her.
It seemed to him that to thrust himself upon her would be brutally to recall and emphasise the fact of all she owed to him: it would seem to cry out to her her own helplessness and his services. Extreme and even exaggerated delicacy had always marked the charities he had shown to those he befriended; and in this instance it seemed to him that only entire effacement of himself could make endurable to her her sojourn under his roof. To reconcile her to it at all appeared to him almost impossible. As far as he could learn she was quite friendless and alone: what would he be able to do for her in the present and in the future?
He was more anxious than he knew to hear her story from her own lips, but he would not have any request to her made to receive him. A guest in his own house, above all when she was poor and homeless, must send for him as a queen would send before he could enter her chamber. It was one of those exaggerations of delicate sentiment which had always made him at once so absurd and so incomprehensible to Friedrich Othmar, and to mankind in general. For the majority of the world does not err on the side of delicacy, and is colour-blind before the more subtle shades of feeling.