He went to one of the most seductive and most venal women of the day, and said to her, ‘Win this boy from his dreams or he will become a monk.’
She undertook the mission, and succeeded in it. She destroyed all that was spiritual and innocent in him with the merciless witchery of the courtesan, which is like the tide of burning lava: no grass will spring where the scoria has spread. He awoke in her arms without a faith. He never again dreamed of the religious life. She earned well the estate in Franche-Comté and the large sum in rouleaux which his father settled on her; but nothing in after-life could ever give him back those heavenward aspirations, that purity of soul, which she had swept away as with a wave of fire. Like the young Reichstadt before him, he had wasted all the splendour and innocence of a first passion on a wanton who had betrayed him for gold. The first passion of a boy colours all his future; the bitter-sweet flavour of this remained with him through all his later years. Love without it was tasteless; love with it was worthless. He said once to his father: ‘You had better have killed me than have given me to Sara Vernon.’
‘Who passes by the gates of disillusion has died twice.’ His father had pushed him with a hard hand through those gates, believing that they led to the path of self-knowledge and of empire over men. Stefan Othmar had not wanted a poet, a scholar, a philanthropist, or a priest for his successor; he had wanted a cold-hearted, clear-headed, unscrupulous, unyielding financier to hold, and even to increase, the mighty powers and possessions of which the name of Othmar was a symbol to the world.
But the crime he had committed did not obtain for him what he desired. The merciless cynicism with which he had destroyed the faith and the purity of his son did not ensure its object. The youth remained as aloof in mind from the traditions of his house, and as disdainful in spirit of them, as he had been before. He consented, indeed, with apathy, to put his signature to the deeds which made him one of the chiefs of the house, but that was all which Stefan Othmar gained by his son’s immeasurable loss. Some four years later, when Otho was two-and-twenty years of age, Stefan Othmar died suddenly on the steps of his great hotel in the Boulevard St. Germain, as he was ascending them after an audience at the Tuileries, in which he had been the master of the situation, and Napoléon Trois the suppliant. He died of fulminant apoplexy without an instant’s warning; but his affairs were left in the most perfect order. His brother Fritz remained, who had been his alter ego all his life, and nothing was altered in the House of Othmar, of which his son became supreme master.
The young man received the news far away in the forest recesses of Lahore, at the court of an Indian prince, where he was being feasted with royal honours in the course of his travels over the world. There had been no sympathy between his father and himself; their temperaments had been as opposite as the poles; little sentiment of personal affection mingled with his sudden consciousness that he was absolute lord of his own destinies. His first impulse was to use the power into which he had entered to destroy, at a blow, all that his forefathers had been a century and a half in building up for him. ‘It is a mass of corruption; it shall perish,’ he said to himself, with the ruthless integrity, the unsparing fanaticism, of a generous and high-souled youth. But when he returned to England and came face to face with all his responsibilities and powers, he found that which he had thought so easy was quite impossible to accomplish as he desired to accomplish it. His first impulse was to throw the whole into liquidation and efface the House of Othmar from financial existence for ever. But to do so was but a dream; the financial world would not have released him from his obligations; his only living relative, his father’s brother and partner, Baron Friederich Othmar, stoutly refused to suffer that to be done which would, in his sight, have been a greater crime than many murders.
Against his desires and against his conscience, he had, on reaching his majority, been half persuaded, half coerced, by his father to associate himself in legal form with the house. The act had been one of filial sacrifice, and it hung like a wallet of stones about his neck. He found that his power had its limits; that he could no more disengage himself from all the operations and engagements of his firm than a young king can emancipate himself from the trammels of court and constitution. He had a right to ruin himself, but he had no right to ruin all those whose fortunes were interwoven with the enterprises of his predecessors. Irritated and disappointed he resigned himself to the inevitable, and remained the ‘master of milliards,’ with as much regret as the young Francis Joseph accepted the diadem of Austria. The cloth of gold in which they, his forefathers, had wrapped him remained upon him, and sometimes he thought it a very shirt of Nessus.
Sometimes he was almost tempted to take the vow of poverty for the sake of getting rid of it, but he was restrained by two recollections—one that he had no spiritual faith, the other that mankind in general would have voted him insane. A profound melancholy, without any definite or special cause, grew upon him; he felt the sense of an immense responsibility, which he saw no manner of using with proportionate usefulness. The sophism that duties unsought may be disregarded did not satisfy his conscience, whilst his knowledge of the world told him that to do harm is as easy as to kiss your hand, whilst to effect any great good is as hard as to move the mountains from their bases. Public charity only fills the pockets of greedy speculators; private charity too often raises up a festering mass of imposture. The rich man goes through the world as a sheep through briars in spring time. If he be a perfect egotist, he is happy enough; if he have thought and feeling, he is depressed by the universal greed around him, and by the absolute impotence of all religions to bridle it.
Otho Othmar remained always sensible of a bitter irritation and degradation whenever he recalled the sources of the wealth he enjoyed: the ruin of prosperous countries, the wholesale slaughter of wars, the distress or disgrace of ancient nobilities, the impoverishment of nations. True, there was another side to the throne of Plutus, on which his fathers had seated themselves; by their means, no doubt, enterprises had been carried out for which humanity, on the whole, was materially, if not spiritually, the better. Canals, deserts, mines, cities, colonies, ocean ways, had felt the vivifying powers of the great Othmar loans; but the evil appeared to him far to out-balance the good, and all the wealth seemed to him tainted. He had considerable pride, in a shape with which men would not have sympathised. He fancied that the inherited nobility of his French and English blood was always at war with the blood of the Croat bankers by whom he had been begotten. Though his position was one which almost all the world envied, it was one which galled himself. Titles had been offered him, but he had contemptuously rejected them. He was Othmar; the name spoke to all the ears of Europe; he did not consider that the story it told could be either changed or buried by smothering it underneath the blaze of some princeship or dukedom. He did not even call himself, as others called him, Count Othmar, and he put neither coronet or escutcheon on his carriages, his plate, or his writing-paper. He was far too proud to be proud in that way.
Illustrious alliances had been proposed to him, but he had rejected all; the world expected him to marry greatly, but he remained the hope and the despair of all the European nobilities, who would have willingly accorded him any one of their fair virgins. Their eagerness had early given him a cynical disdain for the aristocracies to which his tastes attracted him; he had no less a disdain for the financial order to which tradition allied him. On the whole, although he had never had any especial sorrow, he was scarcely a happy man, though the whole world was ready to gratify and amuse him. He had been always able to indulge his fancies to the uttermost, but all the venal beauty which affected adoration for him left his heart cold.