So he argued with himself, but he knew all the while that he was to blame in desiring that sort of compensation and consolation for her; and that delicacy of taste, which has over some temperaments a stronger control than conscience, made him feel that there was a kind of vulgarity in thus persuading himself that material gifts and material triumphs would atone to her for the indifference of his feelings and the absence of his sympathy.
It was something better than mere material possessions and indulgences which he had meant to give the child whose lonely fate had touched him to so much pity under the palm trees of S. Pharamond and the gilded roofs of Millo. But he dismissed the rebuke of this memory with impatience. The world had so repeatedly told him that his gold was capable of purchasing heaven and earth, that, though he found it of no avail for himself, he fell instinctively into the error of imagining that with it at least he could heal all wounds not his own. She should have all her fancy could desire. His experience of women told him that she would be very unlike them if, in all the pleasure of acquisition, emulation, and possession, she did not find at least a fair simulacrum of happiness. She would be one out of a million—but if she were that one? Then her soul might starve in the midst of all her luxuries and pageants, like a bird in a golden cage that dies for want of the drop of water which the common brown sparrow, flying over the ploughed brown field, can find at will. But he did not think of that.
He knew that it was unworthy to speculate upon the power of the lower life to absorb into itself a soul fitted by its affinities to discover and enjoy the higher. He shrank from his own speculations as to the possibility of the world replacing himself in her affections. He had honestly intended, when he had taken her existence into his charge, to study, reverence, and guide this most innocent and docile nature; and endeavour, beside her, to seek out some trace of the purer ideals which had haunted his youth. And he felt, with remorse, that the failure to do so lay with himself, not with her. She remained outside his life; she had no sorcery for him. She was a lovely and almost faultless creature, but she was not what he loved. He realised, with bitter self-reproach, that in a moment of impulse, not ignoble in itself, but unwise, he had burdened his own fate and perhaps unconsciously done a great wrong to her, since, in the years to come, she would ask at his hands the bread of life and he would only be able to give her a stone.
She herself had as yet no idea that she was not beloved by Othmar with a lover’s love. She knew nothing of men and their passions. She had not the grosser intuitions which could have supplied the place of experience. She did not perceive that his tenderness had little ardour, his embraces nothing of the fervour and the eagerness of delighted possession. She had no standard of comparison by which to measure the coldness or the warmth of the desires to which she surrendered herself, and it was not to so spiritual a temperament as hers that the familiarities of love could ever have seemed love. But her nerves were sensitive, her perceptions quick; and they made her conscious that mentally and in feeling Othmar was altogether apart from her; that in sorrow she would not have consoled him, and that in his meditations she never had any place.
‘When I am older he will trust me more,’ she reflected, in her innocence, and she had been so long used to repression and obedience that it cost her much less than it would have cost most women of her years to accept, uncomplainingly, that humble place before the shut doors of his life.
She was too modest to be offended at a distraction which would have been certain to excite the offence and the suspicion of a more selfish or self-conscious nature; and she was too young to be likely to penetrate by intuition the secret of that evident joylessness which might well have excited her jealousy. It was rather the same sense of pity which had come to her for him in the weeks before her marriage which grew strongest in her as the months passed on at Amyôt. He enjoyed and possessed so much, yet could not enjoy or possess his own soul in peace.
‘I do not think he is happy, and it is not I who can make him happy,’ she said once, very timidly, to Friederich Othmar, who answered with considerable impatience:
‘My love, the fault does not lie with you. Otho, who believes himself, like Hamlet, out of joint with his time, is in reality a man of his times in everything; that is, he is a pessimist; he has a mental nevrose, to borrow the jargon of scientists; he has so cultivated his conscience at the expense of his reason, that I sometimes believe he will be satisfied with nothing but the abandonment of all he possesses; and no doubt he would have tried this remedy long since, only he has no belief in any Deity who would reward him for it. The misfortune of all the thoughtful men of Otho’s generation is, that they combine with their fretful consciences an entire disbelief in their souls, so that they are a mass of irritable anomalies. The mirthful sceptics of Augustan Rome, of Voltairian France, and of Bolingbroke’s England, were all consistent philosophers and voluptuaries; they disbelieved in their souls, but they believed in their bodies, and were amply content with them. They never talked nonsense about duty, and they passed gaily, gracefully, and consistently through their lives, of which they made the best they could materially, which is only reasonable in those who are convinced that the present is the sole sentient existence they will ever enjoy. But the tender-nerved pessimists of Otho’s kind and age are wholly inconsistent. They believe in nothing, and yet they are troubled by a multitude of misgivings; they think the soul is merely a romantic word for the reflex action of the brain, and yet they distress themselves with imagining that the human animal has innumerable duties, and should have innumerable scruples, which is ridiculous on the face of it, for, religion apart and Deity denied, there is no possible reason why man should have any more duties than a snail has, or a hare. The agnostics of the present generation do not perceive this contradiction in themselves, and that is why they look so inconsistent and so entirely valetudinarian beside the robust Atheism of the past century, and are, indeed, the mere malades imaginaires of the moral hospital.’
‘If I could only make him as happy as I am myself,’ she said again; but she had not the talisman which the woman who is beloved in return holds in the hollow of her hand.
‘She is too young,’ thought Friederich Othmar, angrily. ‘She is too innocent; she is a daisy, a dove, a child. She knows nothing of persuasion or provocation; she is not even aware of her own charms. She waits his pleasure to be caressed or let alone; she knows neither how to deny herself or make herself desired. She wearies him only because she does not know how to torment him. He will drift away to someone else who does, while he will expect her—at seventeen!—to be satisfied with bearing him children and owning his name!’