Othmar

by Ouida

When they had first met after her marriage with Othmar, there had been said between them such words as are ineffaceable on the memory like vitriol flung on the face.

'For the first time in my life I have allowed myself to be in a rage; je me suis encanaillée!' she had said to herself, penitent not for the anger into which she had been driven, but for the force with which she had uttered it, which was an offence against her canons of good taste.

The earlier years of the Princess Lobow had been dedicated to all those refined ingenuities of depravity in which the nineteenth century can rival the Rome of Vitellius and the Constantinople of the Byzantine emperors. There were terrible facts in her past, ready, like so many knives, to the use of her opponent, allusions which could pierce like steel, and could scar like flame. Nadège had spared none of them. With all the pitiless disdain of a woman in whom the senses have but very faint power, she had poured out her scorn on the other, whose senses had been her tyrants until, virtuous perforce through the chills of age, she had taken her worthless withered soul to God.

Since that time the bitterest enmity had been open and avowed between them. Concession to the world, and regard to the dead man's memory, caused them to still keep up a show and aspect of conventional politeness before others. But the polished surface covered the most bitter feud. They were studiously ceremonious and courteous one to the other; but beneath the few phrases they exchanged, often trivial and apparently amiable as these might be, there were a hint, a tone, a meaning which told to each of the other's undying animosity. To the younger woman it was a matter of pure indifference, of careless amusement; her nature was too capricious and too disdainful to cherish deep enmities; she despised rather than she disliked; but to the elder this hatred she cherished was the last flickering flame of the many hot passions which had governed her in earlier years. For her only son she had had a concentrated intensity of affection, into which all the ambition, cupidity, and love of dominion in her character had been united. His marriage had been hateful to her, and when Nadine, in her sixteenth year, as fragile as an orchid and as impertinent as Cherubino, petulantly detesting the husband they had given her, and in the bitterness of her disillusions at war with all the world, was brought in the first months of her marriage to the great house of Zaraïla, the Princess Lobow had seen in her not only the despoiler of her own power, but the ruin of her son.

Many and violent had been the scenes between Platon Napraxine and herself, of which his wife was the object and the cause.

'She is a crystal of ice, you say,' she told him a hundred times. 'Well, she will so chill your heart one day that it will be numb for ever. Remember that; I warn you.'

He did remember when he went out to his death in the dawn of the April morning at Versailles.

Whilst he lived his mother's hatred for his wife was impotent and perforce mute; but all the many slights, the constant indifference, the frequent ridicule of which he was the object, though unperceived or forgiven by him, were written on his mother's memory indelibly as on tablets of stone. All the coquetries and scandals which were associated with his wife's name, all the tragedies for which the breath of her world made her responsible, all the cruel words and strange caprices which were attributed to her, were gathered up and treasured by the Princess Lobow. Seldom leaving her solitudes in the provinces, and seldom seen even in Petersburg, she yet was as accurately informed of all the gossip of Europe concerning her daughter-in-law as though she had lived perpetually beside her. None of the minutiæ of the vaguest rumours about her escaped the vigilance of her enemy. Saint though she was, she prayed passionately that some imprudence greater than usual, some coquetry which would pass beyond the patience of her husband and her world, would deliver Nadège Federowna into her hands, but she waited in vain. The indulgence of both the world and the husband was inexhaustible for one to whom they were both of the most absolute insignificance.

Then one day, as falls a bolt from a clear sky, a single line by the electric wires told her that her son was dead.

In her eyes he was murdered by his wife, as surely as though she had touched his lips with poison.