Othmar

by Ouida

'Because, I think it may amuse me; all original creatures and unconventional types are amusing for a little time at any rate.'

'Oh,' said Othmar, half in jest and half in earnest, 'when you have once taken the idea that anything is amusing, I know cities may burn and men may die, you will not relinquish your idea till you have exhausted it.'

'No. I do not think I easily relinquish my ideas; it is only weak people who do that. It is true few ideas live long; they are all belles du jour, the bloom of a day.'

Melville had for once erred in his estimate of his hostess. As tenacious when she was opposed as she was indifferent when unopposed, she that evening announced her intention of taking Loswa as her pilot, and of going in person to Bonaventure.

The opposition of Melville, and of her husband, the attraction of something new, and that charm which always existed for her in the discovery and examination of anything unusual in human nature, all contributed to make her dwell on an idea which, had it not been opposed, might probably have never taken serious shape.

The master passion of her temperament remained the pleasure she took in the excitation and the analysis of character. She had always liked to bring about singular scenes, unusual situations, strange emotions, merely for the sake of observing them with the same subtle and intellectual pleasure, as a writer of romance feels in the complications and characters which he creates at will, and at will destroys. She had always brought about a perilous position when she could do so, because to enter upon one was as agreeable to her as it is to a good mountaineer to ascend to perilous heights. She had been often tempted to regret her own physical coldness, which rendered such heat of emotion and of danger as d'Aubiac's royal mistress had known impossible to her. It was less the tragedy of passion than the psychological intricacies of character which interested her. 'Tous les amoureux sont bêtes,' she had so often said, and so continually thought. Of all things which had bored her throughout her life the love of the male human animal had bored her the most.

But a complicated situation, a set of emotions on an ascending scale—a spectacle of troubled consciences and of disturbing elements—these it had always diverted her to watch, calm and untouched by them as any marble statue which looks from a glass window upon a storm at sea. In the language which she used the most, she said to herself that she would have given nearly all she possessed to be for once 'empoignée' by an intense emotion.

Sometimes she would look at Othmar and think: 'It is not his fault; it has certainly not been his fault, and yet there has never been a second when my heart beat really any quicker for his coming.' In the highest heights of his own exaltation and ecstasy he had always left her irresponsive. 'You want Mignon or Juliet for all that,' she had said to him once.

It amused her now; this fancy of that unknown little island lying hidden in these gay and crowded seas. She had a fancy to see it and to divert herself with the human creature on it who she had said was 'un type.' In the afternoon of the following day she sailed thither. Who could have hoped for an undiscovered isle on these crowded seas? She was accompanied by Béthune, Loswa, and three other of her courtiers. Othmar refused to condone what he did not approve; and Melville had been suddenly called away to Rome.