Othmar

by Ouida

Since his son had been born there, an affection for Amyôt had come to him. It was his residence of preference; if it had been possible he would have liked never to leave its vast woods, its sunny shining courts, its majestic and historic solitudes. The feeling that he was a new comer there had been soothed away as years had passed; he had ceased to be haunted by the memories of his fathers' evil deeds; he had begun to look forward to a race springing from himself which should ennoble and justify the riches of the Othmars. It had become to him less an ill-acquired and eternal monument of his ancestors' iniquities than the cherished birthplace of children who would transmit to the far future his own conscience and his own honour. But as he came to it now in its stillness and loneliness, the earlier feeling stole back on him, as a bitter taste will survive and return when a sweet one has passed away.

It towered before him in the warm ethereal rose of the sunrise on the morning of his arrival, one of the greatest of the historical palaces of a chivalrous and immemorial land; and as the first beams of the eastern sun caught the glittering vanes of the towers, the gilded salamanders of the first Francis, he once more recalled with sudden sharpness and disgust the memory that the Othmars had entered these mighty stone portals only through the usurer's right-of-way; had climbed these lofty sculptured towers only by the money-lender's ladder of gold.

The world of men had forgotten it, or, if they ever remembered it, did so only with respect and envy as they always jealously and admiringly chronicle what they call self-made success. But to him it was humiliating and hateful. Sometimes it seemed to him that, had he done what his conscience and his manhood required, he would have refused utterly and always to use this wealth of theirs in any luxury, would have stripped it off him like a plague-stricken garment, he would have gone to any personal toil, with hands empty but clean—dreams, fanatical and foolish dreams, all men would have said, yet dreams which, followed out, would have had in them a certain nobility, a certain reality, a certain fulfilment of the ideals of his youth.

As he paced its terraces in the balmy stillness, the gardens outstretched beneath him in all their beauty, which bloomed and faded unseen by any eyes save those of the hirelings who tended them, the remembrance of the dead girl who once had dwelt there beside him in a summer such as this came back upon him as it did often now since he had found and read those pathetic records of her short life. A repentant consciousness whispered that to her those dreams would not have seemed absurd: with her they would not have been impossible. Yseulte would have obeyed him had he chosen to change Amyôt to a La Garaye.

He would have seemed to her no more unwise or mad had he stripped her of all wealth and luxury than Claude of La Garaye seemed to the woman whose bones lie beside his beneath the weeds and grasses of the graveyard of Taden. Had he said but one word to her of such a dedication of their lives, all her unworldly simplicity and courage, all her childlike optimism and faith, all her heroism, fervour and superstition, would have made her whole soul kindle at his invitation as spirit leaps to flame at the first touch of fire. With her it would have been possible; a life wholly unlike the life of the world, led in open contradiction of all its opinions, demands and estimates; spent in entire imaginative atonement for the greeds and the crimes of dead men.

'No, it would not have been possible,' he thought, as these memories floated through his brain. 'No; for the life of La Garaye two things are essential, Love and Faith. I had none of the first for her; I have none of the second either for man or God.'

La Garaye was the outcome of blind unquestioning belief in humanity and heaven, such belief as can only come over narrow horizons and to uncultured minds. 'Have Augustine's faith,' says a modern teacher to a faithless world. But the teacher forgets that the world can no more return to its abandoned faiths than a man can return to the toys and the joys of his infancy.

There is a profound melancholy in the solitary musings of every man or woman whose youth has harboured all the high ideals of a lofty and pensive enthusiasm, and whose maturity is held down by all the innumerable habits and demands, usages and necessities of life in the great world. Society is imperious and irresistible. Out of its beaten track none of its subjects can wander far or long. Its atmosphere is pregnant at once with sloth and excitement, and its bonds are liliputian but indestructible. Society has neither imagination nor ideality, and when either of these comes into it, it destroys it unmercifully. There is a potent attraction in it even for those who believe themselves the least susceptible of such seduction, and the network of its usages and habits becomes a prison which even the most unwilling captives learn to prefer to liberty.

It might have been possible once, possible to have given back all those ill-gotten millions to the hungry multitudes of humanity; possible to have stripped himself of all pomp and possession and been nothing on earth save such as his own brain might have had power to make him. It might have been possible once, but it was now and for ever impossible.