He knew very well that he might have been the most vicious brute, the most brutal tyrant, the most merciless of men, and mankind would have served, followed, and flattered him none the less; he could have purchased immunity for most crimes, condonation for most iniquities. So long as he had remained master of his fortune and of his possessions, he knew that men would have sought him none the less eagerly though he had had the vices of a Heliogabalus; and that women would have given themselves to him none the less willingly though he had been as hideous as the Veiled Prophet. It did not make him cynical; but it made him indifferent, and it moved him at times to a vague sadness. It seemed scarcely worth while for his forefathers to have raised that mountain of gold, only that from its summit he might see the nakedness of the world of men.
CHAPTER VII.
At eight o’clock on the following night Othmar walked across his gardens, under a starlit sky, towards the adjacent grounds of Millo. A few roods of plantation parted his from theirs; in the boundary fence there was a small gate, of which his major-domo had reminded him that a key existed. The night was young, but the stars already were many, and a slender moon had risen in the deep serene blue of the heavens. Though it was midwinter the air was sweet with the smell of orange orchards in flower and of the aromatic pine-woods of his own enclosures.
‘Will she be there?’ he thought a hundred times.
He had kept away from her all the day, had busied himself with his sailors, with his steward, with the condition of the place; but he longed to see that smile which even in its malice was sweeter to him than all the kindness of others, to hear again that voice which was music to his ear, even in its chill, indifferent mockeries.
He had an intuitive belief, which had been shaken but not destroyed by his own failure, that in her nature there were depths to be reached, passions to be awakened, though a bland and cruel indifference at present veiled them. He had been ruthlessly betrayed by her coquetry, profoundly wounded by her coldness, but he believed in her still—even still believed in himself as the man whom ultimately she would love. He had returned to Europe with the resolution never to be in her presence except when the hazards of society should bring them perforce in the same atmosphere, but at the first charm of her regard he had forgotten all his resolves, lost all his wisdom. Life only seemed worth living if he could hear that one voice, so sweet in its modulations, so chilly in its perfect harmony. It was, perhaps, because he was one of the few men who could gratify all wishes, caprices, and ambitions as fast as such arose, that this one thing wholly denied to him, wholly inaccessible, had such force of attraction for him. Yet he was bitterly angered against himself for his own submission. She was but a supreme coquette, a woman pétrie du monde, despite all her charm; but she could make her careless little nod, or a half-ironical smile, more prized from her than the utmost tenderness of other women ever was. There was about her that air as of one so wholly indifferent to all the vulgarities which others esteem triumphs that, when she ever deigned to notice that a man existed, he was more flattered than by the fondest concessions of his most ardent adorers. She had been assailed by all the powers and vanities of passion, but she had always given it at most that cool little smile—sometimes the smile had been compassionate, more often it had been cruel. Women had succumbed to him as full-blown roses fall before the touch of a careless hand; for this reason the chillness of Nadine Napraxine, which seemed chastity, had had so strong an attraction for him that for awhile it had seemed to him sweeter to wait upon its caprices than to obtain fuller response from them. But no man tarries long at this stage of his affections, and the time had come when he had grown impatient of a pursuit without end, of an allegiance without recompense. It was like an empty cup of exquisite form and transparent beauty, for ever without wine in it; to the connoisseur the gem is perfect thus, but to those athirst it brings little delight.
The unshuttered windows of Millo were glistening with light, which shone through the thickets of rose-laurel and bay as he approached the house, and a flood of light was poured out shining on the stone perron, carpeted and screened closely by rose-coloured awnings from the air of night. After a year and a half spent on tropic seas and in desert lands, the return to society has always a half-sweet, half-bitter, flavour. Was it worth while, he thought, to leave all the routine and tedium and emptiness of the world only to drift back again into its formalities and follies?
He had, however, no choice left in the matter, for the servants in the antechamber were bowing low to him and taking his furred coat from him, and in another moment the Duchesse de Vannes was welcoming him with all the genuine pleasure which a hostess feels in having the first visit from a person long absent, and high enough in the world’s favour to make his return to the world an event of social interest and of public importance.