CHAPTER XXXVIII.
It was now towards the close of carnival. Othmar's time, always largely occupied, and doubly burdened since the death of his uncle, left him but little leisure for the studies and the thoughts most natural to his mind. His temperament led him to the love of leisure, of privacy, of meditation. To read Plato under an oak-tree all day, as she suggested, however insufficient it might have seemed to her, would have been to him the most congenial of occupations. He would have chosen Vaucluse, like Petrarca, could he have done so.
Amidst all the variety of affairs which came before him he was often tired with that fatigue of the mind which is more painful than the fatigue of the body. Study, even over-study, does not produce that fatigue; what produces it is the constant pressure of uncongenial and constantly-recurrent demands upon mental attention. Since the death of Friederich Othmar such demands upon him had been multiplied a hundredfold; and whilst all Paris looked on him as one of the most enviable of its great personages, he himself would willingly have given all his millions to be free to pass his years in the intellectual leisure and repose which were to him the chief excellence of life.
'He has remained Wilhelm Meister and Werter, though an unkind fate has made him a rival of the Rothschilds,' his wife had said once. And a student at heart he did remain, and a dreamer also whenever the thunder of the brazen chariots of the world around him left him any peaceful moment in which to enjoy silence and remember the dreams of his youth.
The moments grew rarer and wider apart every year. He was like the king on Burne-Jones's wheel of fortune: he was crowned, but bound on the wheel.
Therefore, in the press of great interests and of public matters, which despite himself absorbed so much of his thoughts and of his time, the remembrance of Damaris was no dominant thing, but a tender and fugitive memory which came to him ever and again, as the song of a bird on a bough outside his windows may bring the gentle thoughts of other days to the hearer of it who sits shut up in a close room under a zinc roof in a city. Whenever he remembered her it was with infinite pity, with great anxiety, with little of those more selfish impulses which tinge a man's thoughts of a woman, always with an almost passionate desire to undo the wrong which had been done her by his wife.
'What can I do for her? Command me in all ways,' he had said more than once to Rosselin, who had always answered: 'Perhaps the best thing you can do is to let her alone.'
He had many thoughts of her which troubled him, and vague projects which he was forced to abandon as impracticable. He wished to give her back the island, set her there in simple sovereignty over the orange trees and the sea-waves, restore to her her beautiful free open-air existence amongst the sea-swallows and the olive-haunting thrushes. He would have striven to do it at all cost; but the isle was not to be bought. The owner believed it to be a mountain of treasure, since it was sought for, and would not part with it at any price. There was no possibility for him to give her back her little realm, to make her life anything he would have liked to make it. He could only leave her alone, as Rosselin had bluntly told him to do; and that cold kindness did not satisfy the generosity of his temper, or seem suited to the softness and helplessness of her years.
This day when he had watched his wife's carriage roll through the gates of the courtyard, his conscience smote him especially for what seemed to him neglect and unkindness to one who had no other friend than himself.