There was the vibration of intensest passion in her voice; she half rose from her seat; her bosom heaved; the rose fell in a shower of leaves to the floor; for the moment he thought that she would strike him.
'You shall believe me,' he said in answer, 'or I will not live under the same roof with you!'
Then he looked at her with one last look, and left her presence.
CHAPTER XLIV.
Othmar went into his great library, and shut the door upon himself. For more than an hour he paced to and fro the length of the room, overcome with an agitation which he could not master. He had a sense that his life was over. He felt as though his very heart-strings had snapped and parted for ever. A great love cannot perish without some such throb as a strong animal life suffers when it is forcibly torn asunder. A kind of horror seized him at the idea of the years which were to come; the long, long years through which he would dwell in apparent amity beside her in the sight of the world.
His first impulse was to go out of the house, out of the city, out of the world, to leave her everything he possessed, but never to see her face again.
But a brief reflection made him feel how impossible such a course as that would be to him. Obscure people can do these things, they are happy; they are not set in the fierce light of publicity and society, and no one heeds it if they creep away to lay their aching heads under some lowly roof in solitude. But to a man well known and conspicuous in the life of the world, any such retreat into obscurity is impossible. He is bound hand and foot by a million threads, each strong as cables to hold him to his place. He cannot forsake his place without forsaking a mass of interests confided to his honour. Solitude is for ever forbidden to him, and liberty he can never more recover. Life never gives two opposite sets of gifts to the same recipient; it never bestows both the king's dominion and the peasant's peace. The sigh of Henry IV. upon his sleepless couch is the sigh of all eminence whatever be its throne.
Othmar's momentary longing to go far away from everything and everyone he had ever known, and never again behold the woman whom he had adored, and who had insulted him as though she had struck him with a knout, was the natural thirst for loneliness of all wounded creatures. But he knew that this desire, like so many others, was hopeless; he could never leave her or the world he lived in; there were his children, who must not be sacrificed, and the fortunes of others which must not be imperilled. He knew that he could no more undo the bands fastened—many by his own hand—around him, than he could sweep ten years off the sum of his past life. Such as his existence was now, so he had to continue it.