'All that weight of marble!' he thought, 'and not one little sigh of regret!'
Not one; unless he gave it.
'I hate this Russian woman, but I am bound to say that the children are beautiful,' he said once to Melville. 'I am bound to say, too, that she has made a change for the better in Otho. Since he has discovered (doubtless) that every grande passion has its perihelion and its decline, he has become more like other men. He has interested himself in the welfare of the House. He has condescended to be conscious that Europe exists. He has lived the natural life of the world, and has, I think, ceased to wish himself a wandering Wilhelm Meister, a François Villon without a rag to his back. My poor dead child only loved him, and could do nothing to attach him to life or to detach him from his fantastic preoccupations and morbid demands for the impossible. This woman has made him so in love with the actual, with the real, that he has ceased to dream of the ideal. He has even grown aware that his own fate is an enviable one, which for thirty years of his life he obstinately denied.'
'It is a questionable benefit to make a man abandon the ideal,' said Melville. 'I think, however, that Othmar's feeling was always rather impatience of existing facts than thirst of any impalpable perfection. You believe that a discontented man is necessarily an imaginative man. It does not follow. Imagination may perhaps create discontent; but then, on the other hand, it may console it. If he had had imagination enough, he would have found out a thousand idealised ways of using his great wealth.'
'Thank heaven, then, that he has so little,' said Friedrich Othmar. 'Myself, I always considered that he had a great deal too much. I do not underrate imagination in its proper place. None of the great events of the world would have taken place without it: every great revolutionist, every great conqueror, every great statesman, even, must possess it; but it is a perilous quality, singularly similar to nitro-glycerine; you can never be certain of the hour and the sphere of its action; it may pierce a new road for humanity to use after it, or it may wreck nations and send humanity backward by a thousand years.'
'I should not mind going back a thousand years,' murmured Melville. 'Basil was living, and Augustine.'
Since the death of Yseulte these two men, so dissimilar, even so inharmonious, had become in a manner friends. Their mutual pain had drawn them together. The thought which was the same in the minds of each, and which each understood in the other without speech, made a link of union between them. Both divined the secret of her death. Neither ever spoke of it.
'He is a priest, but he is a man,' said Friedrich Othmar of Melville, who in turn said of him:
'He is encrusted all over with gold, egotism, and disbelief; but beneath that crust there is the heart of humanity.'
And they shook hands across the profound gulf of sentiment and opinion which divided them.
'I think that, for once, the wise Baron is mistaken,' reflected Melville, without saying his thoughts aloud. 'Othmar may have grown less imaginative, because most men do as they grow older, unless they be truly poets. But I do not think he is a whit more contented. I believe, if he could see into his heart, that he has found his apple of paradise not very much richer in flavour than a common rennet!'
But he forbore to say so. What business was it of his? Only, being the profound student of the comedy and tragedy of humanity that he was, he could not help feeling a keen interest in watching the issues of this marriage of love.
Melville, like all persons of fine penetration and quick sympathies, was deeply interested in all characters which were out of the common lines of human nature, and whenever his busy years had any leisure he spent it where he could observe all those who interested him most.
Of all these the Lady of Amyôt had the most powerful interest for him. But for his years and his priest's frock, it might have been a more tender and profound sentiment still with which she inspired him. For Melville, as for all men of intellect, the very despondency she cast over them, the very intricacy and unsatisfying changeability of her character, possessed the most powerful charm. But whether these were qualities which would make bon ménage in the familiarity and the triviality of daily life—of this he was not so sure.
CHAPTER V.
She, who had been so exacting as a friend, was not in any way exacting as a wife. There were a generosity and a breadth of thought in her, which made her accord freedom in proportion to what lesser minds would have considered her right to deny it. She held the whole ordinary mass of womanhood in too absolute a disdain for her ever to stoop to the same ways and weaknesses as theirs. She might have been the most despotic of mistresses: she was the most lenient of wives. Tyranny, which would have seemed, did still seem, to her natural and amusing when used over lives which in no way belonged to her, would have appeared to her bourgeois and ridiculous exercised over her husband: that sort of thing was only fit for two shopkeepers of Belleville. She had too supreme a scorn for the Penelopes of the world, whose jealousy was as impotent as their charms, not to let the reins which she drew so tightly over others lie loose and unfelt on the shoulders of Othmar.
'Penelope thinks that no object in all created nature is more lovely and important than her distaff; naturally Ulysses gets sick of the sight of it,' she said once. 'Why are all women, in love with their husbands, much more miserable than those who detest them? Only because they insist upon giving so much of themselves, that the men grow to view them with absolute terror, as the Strasbourg goose views the balls of maize paste. Love is an art, and ought to be dealt with artistically; in marriage, it has to contend with such insuperable difficulties that it needs to be most delicate, most sagacious, most forbearing, most intelligent, to surmount them. Instead of which, women, usually, who have any love for their husbands at all, look on them as so much property inalienably assigned to them, and treat them as Cosmo dei Medici treated Florence: "Mi piace più distruggerla che perderla!"'
Othmar himself had changed little; men at his years do not alter physically, though great changes, moral and mental, may in brief time transform their feelings and their ambitions.
Women looked at him inquisitively many a day, to try and see whether that great wonder-flower of romantic passion, which had astonished his world in a generation in which such passions are rare, had brought forth contentment or disenchantment. But they could not be sure. No one had ever succeeded in making him unfaithful to this great love, which had been merged in marriage, but no one had ever penetrated his confidence sufficiently to satisfy themselves whether any disillusion had followed on the fulfilment of those dreams and desires, to which he had been willing to sacrifice his life, his honour, and his soul. All that society in general, or his most familiar friends could see, was the outward pageantry of a life in the great world; that life which leaves so little space for thought, so little time for regret, so little leisure for conscience to speak or memory to waken. If he were not entirely content he allowed no one to suspect so; and he did not even like to admit it to his own reflections: yet there were times when life did not seem to him much more complete than it had done before he had attained the supreme desire of his heart; there were times when the old vague indefinite dissatisfaction came back to him—the sense of emptiness which moved the Cæsars of Rome with the world at their feet.
'I suppose it is inevitable,' he said to himself. 'I suppose she is right; nothing on earth is content except a sucking child and an oyster.'
It irritated him that he should be pursued by this foolish and shapeless sense of still missing something, still desiring something, still seeking something unknown and unknowable; but it was there at the bottom of most of his thoughts, at the core of most of his feelings.
'You have had a great misfortune all your life,' Friedrich Othmar said once to him. 'You have always had all your wishes granted you. When a child is indulged in that way he kicks his nurse, when a