‘Most people say I am too serious. I am not jesting at all. We have all a sort of superstition that we must live in Europe, but it is only a superstition. There is a great deal finer weather elsewhere, and without fine weather life is intolerable.’
‘Have you never seen a woman you would marry?’ asked Baron Fritz.
‘Perhaps I have,’ said Othmar, who never lied. ‘But never one I could marry.’
‘Ah!—someone else’s wife! That is just like you. If she were not unattainable she would have no more attraction than anyone else. You are so whimsical.’
‘I hope not. I dislike whimsical people. They are always asking for the windows to be shut, or imagining that there is a drainpipe open. Oh, some day I may marry. I do not pledge my future. But I have no inclination to marriage, and you will confess that you preach what you do not practise.’
‘I am seventy-one and you are thirty-two,’ said Baron Fritz; ‘I should have married fifty years ago if I had been as you are, the head of the House.’
‘Curse the House!’ said Othmar, though he was a man who never used any oaths, great or small. But it seemed to him that the House of Othmar was for ever on his shoulders like Sindbad’s burden; that he could do nothing freely as other men did; that go where he would he could never wholly escape from the mephitic acid which adulation and importunity exhale, and could never gain that simplicity of existence which, precisely because it was denied to him, seemed to him the chief good on earth.
‘You speak as if the Othmars had been Plantagenets or Comneni!’ he continued. ‘It is not quite two centuries ago that the world did not even know that a Croat horse-dealer bore that name! The last time I was at Agram, I looked into the archives of the city; nobody ever did so; they were crabbed and hard to decipher; but I passed a day over them when it was raining and blowing so hard that there was not a soul abroad in the streets except the sentries. In the municipal documents for the year 1730 I found an account of a famine which had been the result of floods such as we have seen in our own day, for science, after all, makes little way against natural catastrophes. It was during this famine, when every grain of wheat was worth treble its weight in gold, that your hero Marc Othmar made his first great coup. He had amassed money before, but this was the grand conception which first largely enriched him. He had bought enormously in corn, foreseeing a wet season and bad harvests. He had more than he had hoped for—he had the whole country under water. He had almost a monopoly of grain. In those days government aid could not come by steam, and besides, Croatia had just then no government. In these records it is stated that upwards of forty-five thousand persons, chiefly women and children, died of starvation; and all the while they were dying Marc Othmar shut up his grain and only sold it sack by sack, at an average rate of a death a bushel. You find that admirable; I do not. I confess, ever since I put these facts together out of the fragments of public history, it has seemed to me as if there were an earthy smell about all our money; you know the lungs of people who die starved always do smell like decaying mould. It is pure fancy—I am quite aware of that. But even, putting fancy out of the question, I do not see anything heroic about the figure of our founder. He is not Hugh Lupus or Godfrey de Bouillon.’
Baron Fritz’s patience had scarcely endured the strain upon it.