Othmar

by Ouida

Othmar remained standing where he was, and looked after her with a sombre and regretful glance, in which some of the old worship and passion lingered, united to a new-born anger and offence. The mortification which lies for any man of intelligence and feeling in the sense that he has never really touched and held the soul of the woman of whose physical possession he has been master, was upon him in a strong and cruel sense of moral failure and of intellectual impotence. Was it his fault or hers? Was it true, as he had said once to her, that you cannot obtain more from any nature than it possesses, and that all the forces of created life cannot draw fire from the smooth marble or make the pale pearl blush like the opal? Was it that she had it not in her to give any man more than that mingling of momentary aphrodisiacal indulgence and of eternal immutable derision; and that whilst her power to create a heaven of physical passion was so great, her power of satisfying the exactions of the heart and soul was slight?

Or was it, as the self-depreciation of his temperament led him to think, that he himself had not moral and mental force or intellectual greatness strong enough to obtain empire over her mind—a mind so cultured, so refined, so exacting, so satiated, that hardly any human companionship could succeed in awaking in it any lasting interest?

He had humility enough to believe the last.

The Princess Lobow Gregorievna, sitting mute and chill as a statue of Nemesis, heard and watched, and in the depths of her narrow darksome soul, filled with harsh creeds and as harsh hatreds, said to herself that perchance, after all, her dead son might yet be avenged by the mere results of time—that foe of love, that friend of all disunion.

Their marriage had been abhorrent to her. It had seemed to her eyes like a blow on the cheek given to her son's corpse. Any laugh or smile of either of them seemed an affront to him. Every glance of sympathy exchanged between them seemed a mockery of his death, suffered for their sakes. She who had never doubted that Othmar had betrayed her son in his lifetime, only cherished one hope in her chill breast—to see him suffer the same fate. She had always felt that she would kiss on both cheeks any lover of Nadine's who should make Othmar feel the shame of a dishonoured name, the pangs of a betrayed trust. But for that lover she had looked in vain. She had always said to the hungry hate in her heart: 'Patience; time will bring all things; and the serpent may cast its skin but keeps its nature.'

But of late years she had feared that nothing would ever divide them.

Their lives seemed to her to pass on like a smooth full river, without shoal or rapid, or any spate from storm. There was many an hour when she lay stretched in semblance of devoutest prayer before the holy eikon of the chamber altar, when all that her soul uttered and her lips murmured were curses low and long upon them both.

Year after year went on and brought her no gratification of her desires and her hate. All things went well with them. They had health and pleasure; happiness too, so far as happiness comes to mortals. Their offspring throve in loveliness and grace, and the world honoured and caressed them both. Sometimes, in the stern yet frantic hatred which she cherished, she would pray that disease or pestilence might at least take the woman's beauty from her; but her prayer passed ungranted. Nadine had ever that serene immunity from all serious maladies of the flesh which so often accompanies the fragile appearance and sensitive nerves of women who, like her, declare themselves made unwell by a discordant noise, an unpleasant odour, a wearisome day, or any other trifle which displeases them. Even the pains and perils of maternity her good fortune had made unusually light to her, and except from that cause she had hardly had a day's real suffering in her whole existence. To the sullen eyes of Napraxine's mother she always seemed to bear a charmed life.

Therefore with fierce dumb joy Lobow Gregorievna, with her vigilant ear and eye, saw the one little rift within the lute, heard the one jarring chord on the music. It was so slight that no anxiety less keen than her own would have detected it; but it was there.