Othmar

by Ouida

There were moments when the caprices of her wayward and dominant will irritated him; when her profound indifference to the consequences of any action which amused herself, and compromised others, repelled him by its coldness. What could this poor little peasant be to her? A toy for five minutes, a plaything sought out of mere contradiction, and destined to be cast aside ere the day was done!

He watched the graceful shape of the schooner as it bore down upon the coast with a sense of regret as from some definite misfortune which might have been averted by exercise of his own will. But he had never used his will in any opposition to his wife.

Wisely or unwisely, he had never made the slightest opposition to her desires or even her fancies. Begun in the blind adoration of a lover, the habit of deference to her had continued with him, not out of feebleness or uxoriousness, but out of that gradual growth of custom which is one of the most potent influences of life. She had power over him to make him relinquish many a project, abandon many a desire, but this power was not reciprocal; it seldom or never is so between two human beings. The old proverb, that of any twain one is booted and spurred and the other saddled and bridled, has a rough truth in it.

Othmar knew nothing of, and cared as little for, this girl whose face looked with so frank an audacity, so wistful an innocence, out of the brilliant drawing of Loswa. But he was sorry that she was not let alone. He had suffered many a bitter moment, even since his marriage, from the uncertainty of his wife's moods, from the mutability of her fancies. Constant in his own tastes, and very unwilling to wound others, her rapid changes from interest to weariness, and her profound indifference for the bruises she gave to the amour propre of her fellow-creatures, frequently troubled and distressed him. He was often kind to persons he disliked, to compensate them for her unkindness, or to prevent them from perceiving it.

Nadine, he knew, would think this poor child of no more account than the briar-rose to which he had likened her; but to him it seemed wanton and cruel to have disturbed the peacefulness of her life, merely as a child casts a stone at a bird, and then runs on, not even looking to see whether the bird be bruised or has fallen.

'Life is but a spectacle,' she had once said to him. 'When you go to the Gymnase do you distress yourself as to whether the actors catch cold at the wings or take a contagious disease in a cab as they go home? Of course you do not? Then why not view life in the same manner? People bore us or please us; that is all we are concerned with. We do not follow them home in fact; we need not, even in imagination.'

But Othmar did not agree with her. Life seemed to him much more often tragedy rather than comedy; he could not divest himself of a compassion for the players, with which much fellow-feeling mingled.

'Since I married him he has become very amiable,' she once said jestingly. 'It is due to the spirit of contradiction which always exists in human nature, and which is never so strongly developed as in marriage.'

It was a jest; but there was a truth in the jest. Often he felt so much irritated at his wife's indifference, that it stimulated him to more interest or sympathy than he would otherwise have felt on many subjects and in many persons.