'Human nature,' said Othmar, 'according to you and Nadège, is such a consummate fool that it is scarcely worth the bread it eats, much less the elaborate analysis which philosophers have expended on it from Solomon to Renan.'
Friedrich Othmar shrugged his shoulders.
'It is not always a fool,' he made answer; 'but it is, I think, always an ingrate.'
Was he himself an ingrate? Or did he only suffer from that inevitable law of recoil and rebound which governs human life; that cessation of tension which makes a great passion, once satisfied and become familiar, like a bow unstrung?
There is always a pathetic reaction, a curious sense of loss in the midst of possession, which follows on the attainment of every great desire. If anyone had told him that he was not perfectly happy, he would have indignantly denied the accuracy of their assertion. Whenever any misgiving that he was not so arose in his own mind, he repulsed it with contempt as the mere ungrateful rebelliousness of human nature. Yet now and then a vague sense that his life was not much more perfect than it had been before the desires of his heart had been given to him, occasionally came over him, though he always thrust it away.
She herself felt sometimes an almost irresistible inclination to say to him; 'And you, you who set your soul on marriage with me, have you found the lasting joys that you expected, or have you learned that the fulfilment of a dream is never quite the dream itself—has always some glory wanting?'
But she refrained. Women are always so unwise when they ask those questions, she reflected; so like children who pull up the plants in their garden to see what growth or what roots they have.
'We are just like anybody else, after all!' she did say once, with a mingling of despondency and of humour. 'I suppose we cannot escape from the age we live in, which is neither original nor imaginative, nor anything that I know of, except feverish and unhappy. Mr. Lawrence Oliphant, certainly, is gone to live in Syria, and we might do the same, but would it be any better? Do you think life is any larger there? I should be afraid there are only more mosquitoes.'
'I imagine we should only find in Syria what we took there, as Madame de Swetchine said of Rome,' replied Othmar, with some discontent. 'Life is an incomplete thing; unsatisfactory because its passions are finite, its years few, and its time of slow development and of slow decline wholly disproportionate, as you said just now, to its short moment of attainment and maturity; and also because habit, routine, prejudice, human stupidity, have all contrived to weight it with unnecessary burdens, to bind it with needless and intolerable laws, to take all the glow and spontaneity and rebound out of it. Conventionality is its curse.'
'And marriage!' said his wife. 'Oh, my dear, I do not mean to be unpleasant, but you know it is indisputably true that I should have been much fonder of you, and you of me, if we had never married each other. There is something stifling in marriage; it confounds love with property. I often wonder how the human race ever contrived to make such a mistake popular or universal.'
'It is not I who say that,' said Othmar with a touch of embarrassment.
'Oh no; but you think it. Every man thinks it,' she replied tranquilly. 'I often wonder,' she continued more dreamily, 'how it will be when you love some other woman. You will some day—of course you will. I wonder what will happen——'
'How can you do such injustice to me and to yourself? I shall never care for any other living thing.'
She looked at him through the shadow of her drooped lids.
'Oh yes, you will,' she repeated. 'It is inevitable. The only thing I am not sure about is how I shall take it. It will all depend, I think, on whether you confide in me, or hide it from me.'
'It would be a strange thing to confide in you!'
'Not at all. That is a conventional idea, and the idea of a stupid man. You are not stupid. I should certainly be the person most interested in knowing such a fact, and if you did tell me frankly, I think—I think I should be unconventional and clever enough not to quarrel with you. I think I should understand. But if you hid it from me, then——'
The look passed over her face which the dead Napraxine had used to fear as a hound fears the whip, and which Othmar had never seen.
'Then, I give you leave to deal me any death you like with your own hand,' he said with a laugh, which was a little forced because a certain chill had passed over him.
She laughed also.
'Well, be wise,' she said as she rose; 'you are warned in time. Oh, my dear Otho, you grant yourself that every passion is finite. I think it is; but I think also that the wise people, when it fades, make it leave friendship and sympathy behind it, as the beautiful blowing yellow corn when it is cut leaves the wheat. The foolish people let it leave all kinds of rancour, envy, and uncharitableness, as the brambles and weeds when they are burnt only leave behind them a foul smoke. But it is so easy to be philosophic in theory!'
'Your philosophy far exceeds mine,' said Othmar with a little impatience. 'I have not yet reached the period at which I can calmly contemplate my green April fields laid sear to give corn to the millstones; they are all in flower with the poppy and the campion.'
'Very prettily said,' replied his wife. 'You really are a poet at heart.'
Othmar went out from her presence that day with a vague sense of depression and of apprehension.
He had never wavered in his great love for her; the great passion with which she had inspired him still remained with him ardent and profound in much; the charm she had for his intelligence sustained the seduction for his senses; he loved her, only her, as much and as exclusively as in the early days of his acquaintance with her; she still remained the one woman upon earth for him. He could not hear her calmly speak of any future in which she would be less than then to him without a sense of irritation and offence. It seemed to him that such deliberate and unsparing analysis as hers could not exist side by side with any very intense feeling. Certainly he was used to it in her; he was accustomed to her delicate and critical dissection of every human motive and impulse, his, her own, or those of others; but it touched him now with a sense of pain, as though the scalpel had penetrated to some open nerve. His consciousness of his own devotion to her made him indignantly repulse the suggestion that he could ever change; yet his own knowledge of the nature of humanity and of the work of time told him that she had had truth on her side when she had said that such a change might come, would come; and he thrust the consciousness of that truth away as an insult and affront. Was there nothing which would endure and resist the cruel slow sapping of the waves of time? Was there no union, passion, or fidelity, strong enough to stand the dull fallings of the years like drops of grey rain which beat down the drooping rose and change it from a flower of paradise to a poor, pale, scentless wreck of itself?
CHAPTER VI.
On this the unwelcome anniversary of her birth, she was at St. Pharamond, which had been connected with the grounds of La Jacquemerille by the purchase, at great cost, of all the intervening flower-fields and olive-woods. It had been her whim to do so, and Othmar had not opposed it, though he would have preferred never again to see those shores; but, although she never spoke to him on that subject, she herself chose to go there with most winters, for the very reason that the world would sooner have expected her to shun the scenes of Yseulte's early and tragic death. She invariably did whatever her society expected her not to do, and the vague sense of self-blame with which her conscience was moved, whenever she remembered the dead girl, was sting enough to make her display an absolute oblivion and indifference which, for once, she did not feel.
She never remained long upon the Riviera; she seldom stayed long anywhere, except it were at Amyôt; but she went thither always when the violets were thick in the valleys, and the yellow blossoms of the butterwort were flung like so many golden guineas over the brown furrows of the fields. The children spent the whole winter there. This day, when they had wished her bonne fête,