Othmar

by Ouida

She had never expected him to vary with her varying moods. When she was cold, she had always seen him unhappy; when she had chided his warmth, he had always remained her adorer. That any shadow from her own indifference which had fallen like night across the paths of others should ever touch herself, seemed to her impossible, intolerable, almost grotesque; that she could ever cease to be his sun and moon, his planet, and his fixed star, seemed to her as improbable as that the earth would cease to revolve.

Her philosophic wit had indeed predicted the time when the fate which overtakes all passion would overtake his, and end it, but in her inmost soul that time had seemed to her remote as death itself. From the time when his eyes had first met hers, she had had complete and undisputed mastery over his life; she had dominated his fancy, filled his imagination, ruled over his destiny, and held empire over his senses. More than once she had told herself, as she had told him, that in the common course of human life and human nature this would change and cease some day, but in her own heart she had never realised what her lips had said.

Men had seldom changed to her. They had met tragic ends for her sake or through her name, or they had given up their lives to celibate indifference to all other women, as Gui de Béthune had done; but they had seldom or never, having once loved her, loved others; seldom or never learned to meet her tranquilly in the world as one who had become naught to them. The philtre poured out by her cool white hand had been of that rare flavour which makes all other beverages tasteless. Even Platon Napraxine, although her husband, had yet retained for her such utter devotion in his slow, rude, mute nature, that he had hungered for a rose from her bosom the night before he had gone out to be shot like a dog for her sake.

Of the mortification of waning ardour, of the slow sad change from fervour to apathy, of the great débâcle of all passion which so many women watch with hopeless and sinking hearts, as poor peasants of Alpine valleys watch the melting snow and stealing floods sweep away their homesteads—of these she had known nothing; known no more than the reigning and honoured sovereign knows of exile and dethronement. Now she was conscious of it, of the first slight imperceptible chillness of feeling, even as she had been conscious of what no other eyes than hers saw; the first faint change in her own beauty like the film of breath on a mirror. It was very slight, rather negative than positive, rather told by what was lacking than by what was present; a shadow of fatigue, an absence of eagerness, a forced attention, an accent of constraint, slender, vague, intangible things all; yet apparent and eloquent to her quick intelligence, to her supreme knowledge of human nature.

They affected her with a strange sense of offence, of astonishment, of irritation. She had a sudden impression of loss, as of one who, having carelessly swung in his hand, without remembering it, a jewel of value, discovers with a shock of surprise that his hand is empty, and his treasure dropped in some crowded street, its fall unheard, its loss only told by its absence.

Always, hitherto, after any separation he had returned to her with the impassioned enthusiasm of a lover; the hours had been long to him without her near presence, and all the warmth of early passion had accompanied his return to or his welcome of her. She had often chilled him, checked him, laughed at him, left him vexed, dissatisfied, and chafing, but the ardour on his side had never been less. Men had called him uxorious, and he had been careless of their ridicule; he had only lived for her. Now, for the first time, a chill had come, as sometimes in a summer night, in those still grass plains of Russia, there would steal through the hot, fragrant air a breath of ice-cold wind, and then those skilled to read the forecast of the weather would say to one another: 'Lo! the frost is near.'

She was as skilled in the weather of the human heart as the peasants were in that of the earth and skies; and she failed not to read its presage aright. With all her arrogance she had always had that kind of humility which comes from great intelligence and self-comprehension; part of her contempt for her many lovers had arisen from her candid estimate of herself, as not worth so much covetousness, despair, and dispute. All the flatteries she had been saturated with all her life had left her brain cool, and had never warped her estimate of herself. She would see coldness take the place of idolatry with the same philosophic consciousness of its inevitability with which she contemplated the certainty of age overtaking her upon the road of life if she continued to live. Long before their approach she had reasoned out the surety of the arrival of both, sure as the surety of winter to the Russian plains. But still, nature shrinks and withers before winter. Who can welcome it as they welcome summer?

With the inherent instinct of contradiction common to all human nature she, who had nine times out of ten evaded his caresses and repulsed his affections, was angered and felt defrauded of her own because for once her power over him in a measure failed in the exercise of its magnetism. To find thoughts which occupied his mind to her exclusion was something so strange, so new, that it disturbed all her philosophic serenity, and with that quick divination of the motives of men with which her experience and her penetration supplied her, she wondered if it were in truth only the memory of that poor dead woman which had changed his manner and chilled his caresses, or if it were some fresh and living influence?