Othmar

by Ouida

At the present moment she was carrying her graceful person and her unchangeable ennui to the various great houses which she deigned to honour; imperial hunting châlets, royal riverain castles, noble summer palaces set on mountain side, in forest shadows, or on broad historic streams. She did not deem it necessary to go into retreat because her old enemy was dead. She telegraphed her condolence to Othmar, and thought that enough; she had some exquisite costumes made en demi-deuil, wore no jewels except pearls, and had no bouquets save white ones. So much was concession enough to the usages of the world at such moments; Friedrich Othmar himself would not have expected more.

Yet a vague regret, which was sincere, had touched her on receiving the telegram which announced his death. She had respected his intellect and his wit; she had even rather liked him for his stubborn and uncompromising hatred of herself.

When the world was so flat and so tame, and human nature so monotonous, anyone with character enough to hate unchangeably was to her interesting.

And her own intelligence had enabled her to measure and appreciate all the worth of his counsels and of his presence in the Maison d'Othmar. She had an idea that her husband, now that he would be uncontrolled, would drive the chariot of his fortunes in some such disastrous manner as Phaeton, only not from Phaeton's ambition, but from contempt and discontent. 'Only there is the child, happily there is the child,' she thought; a little fair-haired, happy boy then playing on the sands of the northern seas, scarcely more than a baby; but, possibly, link enough with the future of the world to make a sentimentalist like his father refrain from ruining his heritage. 'A quelque chose faiblesse est bonne,' she reflected with a compassionate smile.

She was at that time at Tsarkoë Selo.

She did not love the Imperial Court, nor did the Imperial Court love her; but they made bonne mine to one another for many potent reasons, and as matter of wise diplomacy on both sides. She was a woman whom even sovereigns cared not to offend, for her delicate and merciless raillery could pierce through robes of ermine and cuirass of gold, whilst she could sway her husband as she chose in any question of politics or public life. On her side she, for the sake of Napraxine's sons, desired always to retain her influence with and to remain a persona grata to the rulers of her country. She was not given to moods of remorse or of penitence, but sometimes her conscience smote her for her treatment throughout their life together of Platon Napraxine, and as a kind of atonement to him she studied the social advantages and future welfare of his children with a care which was perhaps of more real use to them than the effusions of maternal sentiment would ever have been. She disliked their personal presence at all times, but she never neglected their material interests.

There was something also in Russia which pleased her temperament, something which no other land could quite afford her. The vassalage and submission of the people gave her a sense of absolute dominion, more entire than any she could feel elsewhere. The intense and sharp contrasts of life which were there, the supreme culture beside the dense ignorance, the hothouse beside the isba, the orchid beside the icicle, stimulated her surfeited taste and moved her languid imagination. Though belief was not her weakness usually, yet she believed in the future of Russia. She would have liked to be herself upon the throne of Catherine, and to stretch her sceptre till it touched the Indian Ocean and the Yellow Sea.

She did not offer to return to him when Othmar notified the death of his uncle, and his own detention by various affairs in Paris. She wrote to him to join her wherever she might be whenever he should have leisure, and did not display any impatience that this should be soon. She liked his companionship—when he did not weary her by any 'madrigals,' or irritate her by any sentimental enthusiasms with which she could feel no agreement. She was never disposed to wish him away when he was beside her, or failed to admit that the resources of his intellect, and the sympathetic quality of his character, made him always agreeable. But as she had said to him, with her usual candour, she knew all about him; his character was a volume she had read through, he had ceased to possess that charm of novelty which goes for so much in the power which one life possesses to interest another; he would never again make her pulse beat a throb the quicker, if indeed he had ever done so. She bore his absence with an equanimity so philosophic that to him it appeared indistinguishable from indifference.

More than once when he was on the point of taking up his pen and writing to her of the circumstances which had brought her future Desclée beneath his roof, he was stopped by the sheer nervous apprehension of ridicule which paralyses delicate minds, and that sense that his communication would be supremely uninteresting to her, which is sufficient to make a proud and sensitive temperament refrain from any confidence. She would inevitably laugh at him as a Bayard of the boulevards, as a Sir Galahad of the asphalte, even if she took the trouble to read the narrative to its end—which was most doubtful. He decided to wait to tell it to her till he saw her: till he found her some day in a gentle and sympathetic mood. Besides, with whatever indifference and raillery she might view it, his knowledge of women told him that, nevertheless, his protection of Damaris Bérarde might not seem to her the mere inevitable and innocent thing that it really was.

At all times he wrote but rarely to her. He had too often seen her throw aside hastily, or only half read, perhaps not read at all, the letters of the cleverest and most preferred of her friends, for him to believe that his own letters would be likely to be rewarded with much closer attention. The delighted welcome which a woman gives to the writing of one she cares for, the eagerness and frequency with which it is studied and searched for all its expressions of tenderness, and all its more hidden meaning, was altogether impossible to the Lady of Amyôt. Spoken love interested her so slightly that written love could not possibly hope to charm her. People were tiresome enough in speech; what could be expected of them when they wrote? He would have read anything she might have written with keenest interest, with warmest reception, but he did not dare to suppose that she would have much patience if he wearied her on paper. When they were apart, therefore, they telegraphed often to one another, but they wrote to each other seldom. Telegrams were to her agreeable, because they were as little of an ennui as any communication can possibly be.