CHAPTER XLIII.
The weeks passed on, and Othmar returned no more to the fields of Chevreuse. The great interests and the vast operations of his house occupied his time, and the days of this man whom Nature had created a dreamer and a student, went away in the consideration of financial enterprises, in the audience of innumerable supplicants, in the emission of national loans, and in the study of political situations. He thought oftentimes of her, but he went to her no more. To let her alone he knew was, as Rosselin said, all that he could do for her.
His wife he scarcely saw at this season.
Now and then when it was unavoidable he went with her to some great dinner or reception; oftener they received at home themselves, and on such evenings he saw her in all the grace and elegance which the highest culture and the utmost fashion can lend to a woman already patrician in every fibre of her being. Sometimes she addressed a few words to him concerning the children, or the horses, or some matter of mutual interest; and he saw her carriage passing in and out, her friends and acquaintances coming and going on the stairs, her attendants carrying her chocolate, or her bouquets, or the offerings made her by her courtiers: that was all. In no year had she been more absorbingly mondaine; in no year had she been so conspicuous as the greatest lady in Paris; in no year had her balls, her fêtes, her banquets, her concerts, been more wonderful in their novelty and more exclusive in their invitations.
'Dame! elle a un chic incroyable!' thought Blanchette, angrily, watching her and conscious that her day was not done as she had hoped.
Meantime, in the brilliant movement of which his house was the centre, Othmar felt that he was becoming rapidly a mere cypher amidst it all, as Platon Napraxine had been, and he perceived no way by which he could recover his influence without her ridicule and the world's comment. That had come to him which he had said should never come: he was nothing in her life, not so much as one of her mere acquaintances.
Such a position had always seemed to him the deepest humiliation that any man could accept; he had always thought that any man might save his dignity if he could not secure his own happiness; but now, he saw how easy it is to theorise, how difficult it is to resist the slow insidious influence of circumstances. We drift into positions which we hate without being conscious of our descent, and the effect of others upon our nature and our actions is as subtle and as unperceived as those of climate or of time.
He could not have said when the first coldness had come between himself and her, when the first irritation had crept into their intercourse, when the first frost of indifference had passed from her manner over the warmth of his own emotions. It had been unperceived, uncounted, but its results had grown and strengthened, until now they were like ten thousand other men and women in the world, living under the same roof, but wholly strangers to each other, only united by one slender thread, their mutual interests. It was a position which wounded him, humiliated him, oppressed him with a constant sense of weakness and of failure: he had not the slightest power over her, though she retained much over him; strong men, he thought, either left their wives or forced them to keep their marriage vows; and he did neither.
Of late she had become almost insolent in her tone to him; she seemed to take pleasure in passing the most marked slights upon him; she purposely withheld from him the slightest acquaintance with her movements or intentions, and at times her eyes looked at him with a cynical disdain.