He dined alone; a few telegrams would have filled his rooms, but he did not care for society, which he thought only came to him because he was one of the few owners of milliards in Europe. He sat alone after dinner in the salon which she had admired, with the light of half a hundred wax candles bringing out the golden gleams in the plush, the colours of the embroidered irises, the dead gold of the cornice and panels, while a fire of olive wood glowed under the carvings of the mantelpiece of porphyry. The plush curtains, with the lace beneath them, veiled the shuttered windows; outside the night was calm, there was no sound anywhere. The words of Melville came back to him as he sat there in the midst of the luxury and of the loneliness: ‘To make a home is in the power of any man who is not a priest.’
It did not seem to him to lie in his. He could have bought a principality, but he could not buy a home. Love alone could create that, and the only woman he had loved for years was Nadine Napraxine.
If she had been what he wished to him, would she have made him this ideal home—she, capricious, indifferent, disdainful, mondaine, as she had said, in every habit, thought, and attitude of her life? Perhaps not; probably not, he knew; yet she alone would have had power to make a melody out of the discords of his desires and his discontent; she alone seemed to him to fill the vacant places, to smile across the solitary room, to have left the lingering perfume of her presence there, as the orange flowers left their fragrance in the cabinet in which they were laid for a moment.
Otho Othmar was one of the richest men in Europe; he was often disposed to regret it, as many persons regret that to which they have been born. He did not think it a thing to be vain of; he was even occasionally ashamed of it. It seemed to him that when you were so much richer than most of your fellows you were required to be very much better than they; and it is not always agreeable, nor often easy, to be so. When he signed ‘Othmar’ it was as when an emperor signs his name, and with a stroke of the pen he could give away millions with as much ease as lesser mortals can scatter pence. This facility was no pleasure to him. Though he was well aware that riches are the one ruling power of the modern world, and comprise in themselves the wishing cap and the magician’s wand, Excalibur and Holy Grail, he did not greatly prize his possession of them; perhaps because they had been always before him and about him in profusion from his birth.
The Othmar fortune had been steadily growing for a century and a half. At the commencement Marc Othmar, a Croat, native of Agram, had been a poor man enough—a horse dealer, some said a horse stealer—what precisely never was known. Agram is not a very greatly frequented place, and records get easily mildewed and dim in it. Whether he began life as pedlar, or peasant, or, as some affirmed, as a robber of wild colts, Marc Othmar at forty years old was a money-lender, commission agent, and banker, and at sixty had become a millionaire, known of far beyond Croatia, and had laid the foundations of one of the great financial houses of Eastern Europe.
His son quadrupled his possessions and extended his operations westward and northward. His grandson fell upon the hard times of the Napoleonic wars as on a bed of roses; and from the misfortunes of Austria and Prussia, and the necessities of Pitt’s England, made gold as rapidly as though he had had the philosopher’s stone in a crucible. He grew into a very colossus of riches, and his houses did their business in Vienna, Paris, London, and Frankfort. He married the daughter of a French duke, and made his central house of business in Paris.
His eldest son Stefan, who inherited all his astuteness, succeeded him in due course in the direction of affairs, ably seconded by his brother Friederich, and in his turn married the daughter of an English nobleman, by whom he had one son, Otho, who was chiefly educated in England, and who had little or nothing of the Othmar type in feature or in character.
He was a boy of infinite promise, and of no ordinary mind, but, despite his personal and intellectual gifts, he was a bitter disappointment to his father; and the indifference, which at times deepened into contempt, with which the lad reviewed the origin and the employment of the fortunes of his house seemed to him nothing short of blasphemy. Stefan Othmar himself was a man of excessive arrogance, but it was a bourgeois arrogance, proud of its own sources and dominion, and capable of infinite self-abasement in the pursuit of self-interest. That his boy should revolt against his descent and despise the future before him was a fact so hideous and so amazing in his sight that, had he not known his dead wife to have been the purest and coldest of women, he would almost have doubted that his own blood ran in the veins of his degenerate heir.
As Otho grew towards manhood the distance between them widened more and more. That a fastidious fine gentleman, a fantastic and futile dreamer, a mere visionary and dilettante, should be the outcome of a hundred and fifty years of financial success and ambition seemed to Count Stefan so frightful a mockery of fortune, that he cursed his own folly in having wedded a patrician, instead of some woman of a common but ambitious stock who would have given him successors content, and solely content, with the superb position of princes of finance, and capable of doubling and quadrupling those many millions which were his own ecstasy. The very virtues of his son alarmed him as hardly any vices would have done. The youth was so delicate of mind and taste, so devout and chaste of habit, so meditative and so solitary by choice, that his father grew alarmed lest he should actually do what he at times threatened, and consecrate himself to the Catholic priesthood. He took a violent remedy.