Yet, however his philosophy may explain it, to have any other imagine that he does not render a woman who belongs to him perfectly contented with him always irritates and offends every man. It is a suspicion cast on his powers, his loyalty, and his good sense: it indirectly accuses him of deficiency in attraction or of feebleness of character. Othmar had but little vanity; no more than human nature naturally possesses in its unconscious forms of self-love; but the little he had was mortified by this child's observation. She, ignorant of all the fine intricacies of emotion which are the traits of such highly-cultured and over-refined temperaments as were theirs, could only say, in her simple and inadequate language, that they seemed to her 'not happy.' It was not the phrase which expressed what they lacked; it was too homely, too crude, too direct, to describe the complicated world-weariness of which they both suffered the penalties, the innumerable and conflicting sentiments and desires which made of their lives a continual vague expectation and as vague and continual a regret. But her young eyes, unused as they were to read anything less clear than the open language of sea and sky, and ignorant of the whole meaning of psychological analysis, had yet been able to perceive the shadow of this which she had had no power of understanding.
He was surprised at her penetration, whilst he wondered uneasily if the world in general, so much keener of sight and more bitter of tongue than she, saw as much as she saw. The idea that it might be so was unwelcome to him. The supposition was horrible to him that the great passion of his life had gone the way of most great passions which are exposed to that most cruel of all slow destroyers—familiarity; familiarity which is as the mildew to the wheat, as the sirdax to the fir-tree, as the calandra to the sugar-cane. He loathed to realise the fact, or think of it in any way; and when it was placed before him by another's observation, he saw his own soul, as it were in a mirror, and detested what he saw.
He answered with some constraint: 'I have told you, my dear, that happiness is the fruit of illusions; it cannot exist without them any more than we could have that beautiful haze yonder without water in the atmosphere. Besides, in the world, people are only content so long as they are of completely frivolous characters. My wife has cultivated her intelligence and her wit too exquisitely to be capable of that sort of coarse and common satisfaction with things as they are which is so easy to mediocre minds.'
'Yet you advise me to be content?'
'My dear child, you are young, you are accustomed to an out-of-door life, you have the felicity of belonging to country things and country thoughts which give you a storehouse full of sunny memories. My wife is a mondaine (if you have ever heard that word) who is also a pessimist and a metaphysician. Life presents many intricate problems to her mind which will, I hope, never trouble your joyous acceptance of it as it is. Fénelon, I assure you, was a happier man than Lamennais.'
'Because he was a stupider one.'
'Stupid? No, but simpler, cast in a different mould, naturally inclined to faith, averse to speculation, taking things as he found them without question. That is the cast of mind of all men and women who are made to be happy.'
She was silent; wishfully thinking of those immense fields of knowledge shut out from her own eyes like the aerial spheres of unseen suns and planets which the unassisted sight can never behold. She felt childish, ignorant, made of dull and common clay.
The bells of a little distant spire sounded for Vespers. The sun was sinking beyond the edge of the wide green plain. A deeper stillness was stealing over the meadow and the low coppices which made its boundaries. Birds, looking grey in the shadows, flew low, to and fro, restlessly, in that uncertain flight with which, near nightfall, they always seek a resting-place for the dark hours.
Othmar looked at his watch. 'I must leave you or I shall miss the train to Paris, and I go to-night to Russia.'