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OTHMAR
BY
OU I DA
* I fear Life's many changes; not Death's changelessntss*
Lyttom
A NEW EDITION
Ifarttiron:
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1890
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
T ONDON
OTHMAR,
CHAPTER I.
Under the forest-trees of a stately place there was held a Court
of Love, in imitation and revival of those pretty pageantries and
tournaments of tongues which were the chief social and royal
diversion of the Italy of Lucrezia Borgia and the France of
Marguerite de Yalois.
It was a golden August afternoon, towards the close of a day
which had been hot, fragrant, full of lovely lights and shadows.
Throned on a hill a mighty castle rose, aerial, fantastic, stately,
with its colonnades of stone rose-garlanded, and its stone stair-
cases descending into bowers of foliage and foam of flowers. Its
steep roofs were as sheets of silver in the sun, its many windows
caught the red glow from the west, and its bastions shelved
downward to meet smooth-shaven lawns and thickets of
oleanders luxuriant with blossom, crimson, white, or blush-
colour. In the woods around, the oaks and beeches were heavy
with their densest leafage; the deer couched under high
canopies of bracken and osmunda; and the wild boars, sunk
deep in tangles of wild clematis and beds of meadow-sweet,
were too drowsy in the mellow warmth to hear the sounds of
human laughter which were wafted to them on the windless
air. In the silent sunshiny vine-clad country which stretched
around those forests, in ' le pays de rire et de ne rienfaire,' from
many a steep church-steeple and many a little white chapel on
the edge of the great rivers or in the midst of the vast wheat-
fields, the vesper-bell was sounding to small townships and tiny
hamlets.
It was seven o'clock, and the Court of Love was still open ;
the chamber of council, or throne-room, being a grassy oval,
with grassy seats raised around it, like the seats of an amphi-
theatre ; an open space where the forest joined the gardens,
with walls, first of clipped bay, and then of dense oak foliage,
around it; the turf had been always kept shorn and rolled, and
the evergreens always clipped, and a marble fountain in the
B
OTHMAR.
centre of the grass, of fauns playing with naiads, bore an in-
scription testifying that, in the summer of the year of grace
2530, the Marguerite des Marguerites had held a Court of Love
just there, using those same seats of turf, shadowed by those
same oak-boughs.
' Why should we'not hold one also ? If we have advanced
in anything, since the Valois time, it is in the art of intellectual
hair-splitting. We ought to be able to argue as many days,
together as they did. Only, I presume, their advantage was
that they meant what they said, and we never or seldom do.
They, laughed or they sighed, and were sincere in both ; but we
do neither, we are gouailleurs always, which is not a happy
temperament, nor an intellectually productive one.'
So had spoken tire mistress of that stately place ; and so, her
word being law, had it beei). in the sunset hours before the nine
o'clock dinner ; and it was a pastime well suited to the kiminaus
evenings of late summer in
The hush of old warm woods that lie
Low in the lap of evening, bright
And bathed in vast tranquillity.
She, herself, was seated on an ivory chair, carved with Hindoo
steel, and shaped like a curule chair of old Rome. Two little
pages, in costumes of the Yalois time, stood behind her, holding
large fans of peacock's plumes.
' They are anachronisms,' she had said with a passing frown
at the fans, ' but they may remain, though quite certainly the
Yalois did not know anything of them anymore than they knew
of blue china and yellow tea.'
But the gorgeous green and gold and purple-eyed plumes
looked pretty, so she had let them stay.
'We shail have so many jarring notes of "modernity" in
our discussions,' she had said, ' that one note the more in
decoration does not matter ;' and, backed by them, she sat now
upon her ivory throne, an exquisite figure, poetic and delicate,
with her cream-white skirts of the same hue as her throne, and
her strings of great pearls at her throat. Next her was seated
an ecclesiastic of high eminence, who had in vain protested that
he was wholly out of place in such a diversion. ' Was Cardinal
Bembo out of place at Ferrara and Urbino ?' she had objected ;
and had so successfully, in the end, vanquished his scruples,
that the late sunbeams, slanting through the oak-leaves and on
to that gay assemblage, had found out in it his handsome head
and his crimson sash, and his blue eyes fult of their and keen
witty observation, and his white hands folded together on his
knee.
In a semicircle whose wings stretched right and left were
ranged the gentlemen and ladies who formed momentarily the
OTHMAR.
house party of the chateau ; great people all; all the women
young and all the men brilliant, no dull person amongst them,
dulness being the one vice condemned there without any chance
of pardon. They were charming people, distinguished people,
handsome people also, and they made a gay and gracious pic-
ture, reclining or sitting in any attitudes they chose on these
grassy slopes, which had seen the court of Francis and of both
Marguerites.
Above their heads floated a silken banner, on which, in
letters of gold, were embroidered the wise words,4 Qu'on m'aime,
mais avec de Vesprit!'
4 To return to our original demand—what is the definition of
Love?' asked their queen and president, turiling her lovely
eyes on to the great ecclesiastic, who' replied with becoming
gravity: .
4 Madame, what can a humble priest possibly., know of the
theme 1'
She smiled a little. 4 You know as much as Bembo knew,
she made answer. ' -
' Ah no, Madame ! The times are changed.'
'The times, perhaps ; not human nature. However, this is
the question which must be first decided by the Court at large :
How is the nature of Love to be defined %'
A gentleman on her left murmured :
4 No one can tell us so as well you, Madame, who have torn
the poor butterfly in pieces so often sans merci.'
4 You have broken the first rule of all,' said the sovereign,
with severity. ' The discussion is to be kept wholly free from
all personalities.' ,
' A wise rule, or the Court would probably end, like an
Italian village festa, in a free use of the knife all round.'
'If you be not quiet you will be exiled for contempt of
court, and shut up in the library to write out Ovid's '' Ars
Amatoria." Once more, I inquire, how are we to define
Love 1'
4 It was never intended to be defined, but to be enjoyed.'
4 That is merely begging the question,' Said their Queen.
4 One enjoys music, flowers, a delicate wine, a fine sunset, a
noble sonnet; but all these things are nevertheless capable of
analysis and of reduction to-known laws. So is Love. I ask,
once more : How is it to be defined 1 Does no one seem to
know ? What curious ignorance !'
4 In woman, Love may be defined to be the desire of annexa-
tion ; and to consist chiefly in a passionate clinging to a sense of
personal property in the creature loved.'
4 That is cynical, and may be true. But it is not general
enough. You must not separate the love of man and the lovo
of woman. We speak of Love general, human, concrete.'
e 2
4
OTHMAR.
'With all deference I would observe that, if we did not
separate the two, we should never arrive at any real definition
at all, for Love differs according to sex as much as the physio-
gnomy or the costume.'
' Real Love is devotion !' said a beautiful blonde with blue
eyes that gazed from under black lashes with pathetic tenderness.
' Euh ! euh !' murmured one impertinent.
' Oh, oh !' murmured another.
• Ouiche !' said a third under his breath.
The sovereign smiled ironically :
' Ah, my dear Duchesse ! all that died out with the poets of
1830. It belongs to the time when women wore muslin gowns,
looked at the moon, and played the harp.'
'If I might venture on a definition in the langue verte,'
suggested a handsome man, seated at the feet of the queen,
' though I fear I should be turned out of Court as Rabelais and
Scarron are turned out of the drawing-room '
' We can imagine what it would be, and will not give you
the trouble to say any more. If the definition of Love be, on
the contrary, left to me, I shall include it all in one word—
Illusion.'
' That is a cruel statement!'
' It is a fact. We have our own ideal, which we temporarily
place in the person, and clothe with the likeness, of whoever is
fortunate enough to resemble it superficially enough to delude
us, unconsciously, into doing so. You remembei4 the hackneyed
saying of 'the philosopher about the real John^-the John as he
thinks himself to be, and the John as others imagine him: it is
never the real John that is loved; always an imaginary one
built up out of the fancies of those in love with him.'
' That is fancy, your Majesty ; it is not love.'
' And what is love but fancy ?—the fancy of attraction, the
fancy of selection ; the same sort of fancy as allures the bird to
the brightest plumaged mate 1'
' I do not think any love is likely to last which is not based
on intellectual sympathy. When the mind is interested and
contented, it does not tire half so fast as the eyes or the pas-
sions. In any very great love there is at the commencement a
delighted sense of meeting something long sought, some supple-
ment of ourselves long desired in vain. When this pleasure is
based on the charm of some mind wholly akin to our own, and
filled for us with ever-renewing well-springs of the intellect,
there is really hardly any reason why this mutual delight should
ever change, especially if circumstances conspire to free it from
those more oppressive and irritating forms of contact which the
prose of life entails.'
' You mean marriage, only you put it with a great deal of
unnecessary euphuism. Tastes differ. Giovanni Dupre's ideal
OTHMAR.
S
of bliss was to see Ms wife ironing linen, wMle Ms mother-in-law
looked on.'
' Dupre was a simple soul, and a true artist, but intellect
was not Ms strong point. If he had chanced to be educated,
the good creature with her irons would have become very tire-
some to him.'
' What an argument in favour of ignorance !'
4 Is it ? The savage is content with roots and an earth-baked
bird ; but it does not follow, therefore, that delicate food does
not merit the preference we give to it. I grant, however, that
a high culture of taste and intelligence does not result in the
adoration of the primitive virtues any more than of the earth-
baked bird.'
' Is this a discussion on Love ?'
'It is a discussion which grows out of it, like the mistletoe
out of the oak. The ideal of Dupre was that of a simple, un-
educated, emotional and unimpassioned creature; it was what
we call essentially a bourgeois ideal. It would have been suffo-
cation and starvation, torture and death, to Raffaelle, to Phidias,
to Shelley, to Goethe. There are men, born peasants, who soar
into angels; who hate, loathe, and spurn the bourgeois ideal from
their earliest times of wretchedness ; but there are others who
always remain peasants. Millet did, Dupre did, Wordsworth
did.'
The queen tinkled her golden handbell and raised her ivory
sceptre.
' These digressions are admirable in their way, but I must
recall the Court to the subject before them. Someone is bring-
ing in allusions to cookery, flat-irons, and the bourgeois ideal
which I have always understood was M. Thiers. They are
certainly, however interesting, wholly irrelevant to the theme
' which we are met here to discuss. Let us pass on to the ques-
tion next upon the list. If no one can define Love except as
devotion, that definition suits so few cases that we must accept
its existence without definition, and proceed to inquire what
are its characteristics and its results.'
'The first is exigence and the second is ennui.'
' No, the first is sympathy and the second is happiness.'
' That is very commonplace. Its chief characteristic appears
to me to be an extremely rapid transition from a state of im-
becile adoration to a state of irritable fatigue. I speak from the
masculine point of view.'
' And I, from the feminine, classify it rather as a transition
(regretted but inevitable) from amiable illusions and generous
concessions to a wounded sense of offence at ingratitude.'
' We are coming to the Italian coltellate ! You both only
mean that in love, as in everything else which is human, people
who expect too much are disappointed : disappointment is
6
OTHMAR.
always irritation ; it may even become malignity if it take a
very severe form.'
4 You seem all of you to have glided into an apology for
inconstancy. Is that inevitable to love 1'
4 It looks as if it were; or, at all events, its forerunner,
fatigue, is so.'
' You treat love as you would treat a man who asked you to
paint his portrait, whilst you persisted in painting that of his
shadow instead. The shadow which dogs his footsteps is not
himself/
4 It is cast by himself, so it is a part of him.'
4 No, it is an accompanying ghost sent by Nature which he
cannot escape or dismiss.'
4 My good people,' said their sovereign impatiently, 4 you
wander too far afield. You are like the group of physicians
who let the patient die while they disputed over the Greek root
from which the name of his malady was derived. Love, like
all other great monarchs, is ill sometimes ; but let us consider
him in health, not sickness.'
4 For Love in a state of health there is no better definition
than one given just now—sympathy.'
4 The highest kind of love springs from the highest kind of
sympathy. Of that there is no doubt. But then that is only
to be found in the highest natures. They are not numerous.'
4 No ; and even they require to possess a great reserve-fund
of interest, and a bottomless deposit of inexhaustible compre-
hension. Such reserve-funds are rare in human nature, which
is usually a mere fretful and foolish chatterbox, tout en dehors,
and self-absorbed.'
4 We are wandering far from the single-minded passion of
Ronsard and Petrarca.'
4 And we have arrived at no definition. Were I to give one,
I should be tempted to say that Love is, in health and perfec-
tion, the sense that another life is absolutely necessary to our
own, is lovely despite its faults, and even in its follies is delight-
ful and precious to us, we cannot probably say why, and is to
us as the earth to the moon, as the moon to the tides, as the
lodestone to the steel, as the dew of night to the flower.'
4 Yery well said, and applicable to both men and women, as
descriptive of their emotions at certain periods of their lives.
But '
4 For all their lives, until the ice of age glides into their
veins.'
4 You are poetical enough for Ronsard. Well, let us pass to
another question. Does Love die sooner of starvation or of
repletion 1'
4 Of repletion, unquestionably. Of a fit of indigestion he
perishes never to rise again. Starved, he will linger on sometimes
OTHMAR.
7
for a very long while indeed, and at the first glance of pity
revives in full vigour.'
' Why, then, do women usually commit the error of surfeit-
ing him ? For I agree with you that a surfeit is fatal.'
' Because most women cannot be brought to understand that
too much of themselves may bring about a wayward wish to have
none of them. They call this natural and inevitable reaction
ingratitude and inconstancy; but it is nothing of the kind ; it is
only human nature.'
' Male human nature. The wish for pastures new, charac-
teristic of cattle, sheep and man.'
4 '' La fernme est si souvent trompee parce qu'elle prend le desir
pour Vamour." Someone wrote that; I forget who did, but it
is entirely true. Une bouffee de desir, an hour's caprice, a swift
flaming of mere animal passion which flares up and dies down
like any shooting star, seems to a woman to be the ideal love of
romance and of tragedy. She dreams of Othello, of Anthony,
of Stradella, and all the while it is Sir Harry Wildair, or Joseph
Surface, or at the best of things Almaviva. She is ready for
the tomb in Yerona, but he is only ready for the chambre
meublee, or at most for the saison aux eauxd
'Is she always ready for the tomb in Yerona1?' asked a
sceptical voice. ' Does she not sometimes, even very often,
marry Paris, and "carry on" with Romeo? If I may be
allowed to say so, there are a few impassioned and profound
temperaments in the world to many light ones ; the bread and
the sack are, as usual, unevenly apportioned, but these graver
and deeper natures are not all necessarily feminine. It is when
you have two great and ardent natures involved (and then alone)
that you get passion, high devotion, tragedy ; but this conjunc-
tion is as rare as the passing of Yenus across the sun. Usually
Romeo throws himself away on some Lady Frivolous, and
Juliet breaks her heart for some fop or some fool.'
' That is only because all human life is a game of cross pur-
poses ; one only wonders who first set the game going, to amuse
the gods or make them weep.'
' That question will scarcely come under the head of amatory
analysis. Besides, the world has been wondering about-Wat ever
since the beginning of time, and has never received any answer
to its queries.'
'If a quotation be allowed,' suggested the ecclesiastic, 'in
lieu of an original opinion, I would beg leave to recall the
Prince de Ligne's " Dans Vamour il n'y a que les commencements
qui sont charmants." In the middle of the romance I see you
all yawn, at the end you usually quarrel. Some wise man—I
forget who—has said that it requires much more talent and
much more feeling to break off an attachment amiably than to
begin it.'
8
OTHMAR.
* Because we all feel so amiable at the beginning that it is
easy to be so.' <
' Admit also that there are very few characters which will
stand the test of intimacy ; very few minds of sufficient charm
and originality to be able to bear the strain of long and familiar
intercourse.'
' What has the mind to do with it ?'
* That question is flippant and even coarse. The mind has
something to do with it, even in animals ; or why should the
lion prefer one lioness to another ? When d'Aubiac went to the
gallows kissing a tiny velvet muff of Margaret de Yalois, or
when young Calixte de Montmorin knelt on the scaffold pressing
to his lips a little bow of blue ribbon which had belonged to
Madame de Vintimille, the muff and the ribbon represented a
love with which certainly the soul had far more to do than the
senses.'
' It was a sentiment.'
' A sentiment if you will, but strong enough to overcome all
fear of death or personal regret. The muff, the ribbon, were
symbols of an imperishable and spiritual devotion; these trifles,
like Psyche's butterfly, were representative of an immortal
element in mortal life and mortal feeling.'
' M. de Bethune would go to the scaffold like that himself,'
said the sovereign lady with a smile of approval and of indul-
g ent derision.
'And our lady,'hinted the Due de Be'thune, 'forgets her
own rule, that all personalities are forbidden.'
' It is of no use to have the power to make laws if one have
not also tne power to transgress them. Well, if immortality is
to enter into love, let wit also enter there. One is not beheaded
every day, but every day one is liable to be bored. J'aime qu'on
m'aime, mais avec de Vesprit. Every intellectual person must
exact that. To worship my ribbon is nothing if you also fatigue
my patience and my ear. The majority of people divorce love
and wit. They are very wrong. It is only wit which can tell
love when he has gone too far, or is losing ground, has repeated
himself ad nauseam, or requires absence to restore his charm.'
' Ah, Majeste ! by the time he has become such a philosopher
has he not ceased to be love at all ?'
' Oh no. That motto was chosen as the legend of this Court
expressly for the truth it contains. Why does most love end so
drearily in a sudden death by quarrelling or in a lingering death
by tedium ? Because it has had no wit, no judgment, no re-
serve, no skill. By way of showing itself to be eternal, it has
hammered itself into pieces on the rock of repetition. Qu'on
m'aime, mais avec de Vesprit! What a world of endured ennui
sighs forth in that appeal 1'
'No woman upon earth has had so much love given her as
OTHMAR.
9
the chatelaine of Amyot, and no woman on earth ever viewed
love with such unkind and airy contempt.'
She smiled. She neither denied nor affirmed the accusa-
tion.
' She has a crystal throne of her own from which she looks
down on the weaknesses of mortals and cannot be touched by
them,' said the Due de Bethune.
She replied again, ' Qu'on m'aime, mais avec de V'esprit'
' It is the motto of one who sets much greater store upon
amusement than upon affection. Who can say, moreover, what
may have the good fortune to be considered "esprit" by her?
I fear she finds us all very dull to-day.'
'Dull, no. Sentimental perhaps.'
* Your heaviest word of censure !'
' To return to our theme : do you not punish inconstancy ?'
' Certainly not. In the first place, inconstancy is a wholly
involuntary, and therefore innocent, inclination. In the second,
if any one be so stupid that he or she cannot keep the affections
they have once won, they deserve to lose them, and can claim
no pity.'
' Surely they may be the victims of a sad and unmerited
fate ?'
' Unmerited—no. They have not known how to keep what
they had got. Probably they have worried it till it escaped in
desperation, as a child teases a bird in a cage till the bird pushes
itself through the bars, preferring the chance of losing itself
on the road to the certainty of being strangled in prison.'
' Who would not prefer it ?'
' The difficulty in most cases is that, in all loves, the scales
of proportion are weighted unevenly : there is generally one
lighter than the other. Say it is a poor nature and a great
nature ; say it is a strong passion and a passing caprice ; say it
is a profound temperament and a shallow one ; in some way or
other the scales are almost always imperfectly adjusted. When
they are quite even—which happens once out of a million times
—then there is a great and felicitous love ; an exquisite and
imperishable sympathy.'
' But who holds these magical scales ? It is the holder who
is responsible.'
' The holder is Fate.'
' Chance.'
' Opportunity.'
'Destiny.'
' Predestination.'
4 Circumstance.'
' Affinity.'
' Affinity can only hold them on that millionth occasion
when a perfect love is the result.'
io
OTHMAR.
* Usually Chance and Circumstance fill the scales, and they
are two roguish boys who like to make mischief. Affinity is the
angel; perhaps the only angel by which poor humanity is ever
led into an earthly paradise.'
' That is worthy of Philip Sydney.'
' Or of the Earl of Lytton.'
* And is so charming that we will not risk having anything
coarse or commonplace said after it. Let us adjourn the debate
till to-morrow.'
' Nay, Majeste ; let us pass to another question : "What is the
greatest dilemma of Love'?'
' To have to galvanise itself into an imitation of life when it
is dead.'
' Is it worse to be the last to love, or the first to grow tired ?'
' In the former case one's self-esteem is hurt; in the latter -
one's conscience.'
' The wounds of conscience are sooner cured than those of
vanity.'
' Whoever loves most loves longest.'
'No, whoever is least loved loves longest.'
' How is that to be explained 1'
' The contradictions of human nature will usually suffice to
explain everything.'
' But there may be another explanation also ; the one who is
least loved is the least cloyed, and the most apprehensive of
alteration.'
4 Love is best worked with egotism, as gold is worked with
alloy.'
4 Surely the essential loveliness of love is self-sacrifice 1'
4 That is a theory. In fact, the only satisfactory love is one
which gives and receives mutual pleasure. When there is self-
sacrifice on one side the pleasure also is one-sided.'
4 Then the revellers of the Decamerone knew more of love
than Dante ?'
* That is approaching a theme too full of dangers to be dis-
cussed—the difference between physical and spiritual love. I
do not consider that you have satisfactorily answered the pre-
vious question : What is the greatest dilemma of Love ? '
* When, in the open doorway of its house of life, one passion,
grown old and grey, passes out limping, and meets another
passion newly come thither, and laughing, with the blossoms of
April in its sunny hair.'
' What a sonnet in a sentence ! What is Love to do in such
a case ? Shall he detain the grey-haired crippled guest 1'
4 He cannot. For the more he shall endeavour to retain
him the thinner and paler and more impalpable will the withered
and lame passion grow.'
* And the newly-come one ?5
OTHMAR.
II
* Oh, he will enter, smiling and strong, and will fill the
house with the music of his pipe and the odour of his hyacinths
for awhile, until he too shall in turn pass outwards, when his
music is silent arid his flowers are dead.'
' Is Love then always to be mourned like Lycidas ?'
' He is in no sense like Lycidas; Lycidas died, a perfect
youth. Love, with time, grows pale and wan and feeble, and a
very shadow of itself, before it dies.'
' There are some who say, if he have not immortality he is
not Love at all; but only Caprice, Vanity, Wantonness, or
faithless Fancy, masquerading in his dress.'
' How can that be immortal which has no existence without
mortal forms 1'
' Here is one of the notes of modernity ! 'The sad note of
self-consciousness; the consciousness of mortality and of insigni-
ficance ; the memento mori which is always with us. And yet
we do not respect death, we only hate it and fear it ; because it
will make of us a dreary, ugly, putrid thing. That is all we
know. And the knowledge dulls even our diversions. We can
be gouailleur, but we cannot be gay if we would.'
' There is too great a tendency here to use gros mots—devo-
tion, death, immortality, &c. They are a mistake in a disquisi-
tion which wishes to be witty. They are like the use of cannon
in an opera. But I think, even in France, the secret of light-
ness of wit is lost. We have all read too much German philo-
sophy.'
' We will endeavour to be gayer to-morrow. We will wake
all the shades of Brantome.'
' Well,' their sovereign declared, as she rose, ' we have held
our Court to little avail; some pretty things have been said,
and some stupid ones, but we have arrived at no definite con-
elusion, unless it be this : that love is only respectable when it
is unhappy, and ceases to exist the moment it is contented.'
' A cruel sentence, Madame !'
* Human nature is cruel; so is Time.'
When the sun had wholly set, and only a warm yellow glow
through all the west told that its glory had passed, the Court
broke up for that day, and strolled in picturesque groups
towards the house as the chimes of the clock tower told the
hour of dinner.
* How very characteristic of our time and of our world,' said
the queen, as she drew her ivory-hued, violet-laden skirts over
the smooth turf. ' We have talked for three whole hours of
Love, and nobody has ever thought of mentioning Marriage as
his kinsman !'
' He who has had the honour to marry you might well have
done so, had he been here to-day,' murmured a courtier on her
right.
12
OTHMAR,
She laughed, looking up into the deep-blue evening sky
through the network of green leaves :
' But he was not here, so he was saved the difficulty of
choice between an insincerity and a rudeness, always a very
serious dilemma to him. Marriage is the grave of love, my
dear friend, even if he be buried with roses for his pillow and
lilies for his shroud.'
'But Love may be stronger than Death. Solomon has
said so.'
' What is stronger than Death ? Death is stronger than all
of us. Tout cela pourrira. It is the despair of the lover and
the poet, and the consolation of the beggar when the rich and
the beautiful go past him.'
' She spoke with a certain melancholy, and absently struck
the tall heads of seeding grasses with her ivory sceptre.
' We have only wearied you, I fear,' said her companion,
with contrition and mortification.
' That is the fault of Love,' she answered, with a smile.
As they left the shadow of the trees, crossing the grassland
was a herd of cows and calves already passing away in the dis-
tance, going to their byres ; far behind them, lingering willingly,
were the herdsman and his love ; he a comely lad in a blue
blouse and a peaked cap, she a smiling buxom maiden with
dusky tresses under a linen coif, and cheeks glowing like a
' Catherine pear, the side that's next the sun.'
' Lubin and Lisette,' said Bethune with a smile, * practically
illustrating what we have been spoiling with the too fine wire-
drawing of analysis. I am sure that they come much nearer
than we to the story-tellers of the Heptameron.'
The chatelaine of Amyot looked at the two rustic lovers with
a little wistfulness and a good-natured contempt.
They had passed out of the shade of the woods, and the
rose-glow of evening illumined their interlaced figures as they
followed their cows.
' "To know is much, yet to enjoy is more,"' she quoted.
' I suppose that is what you mean. Yet I rather incline to
think that love as a sentiment is the product of education.
The cows know almost as much of it as your Lubin and
Lisette.'
'Brandos says,' observed one of her party, f that love as a
sentiment was always unknown in a state of nature, and was
only created with the first petticoat. Petticoats have in-
variably been responsible for a great deal. They ruined
France, according to the Great Frederic ; but if they have
raised us from the level of the cattle they have redeemed their
repute.'
' Poor cattle ! They have as much poetry in their eyes aa
there is in the Penseroso. Lubin and Lisette are Naturkinder;
OTHMAR.
13
but when both a cow and Lisette become the property of Lubin,
he will assign the higher place to the first, both in life and in
death.'
' Well, he shall have both of them, for having met us at so
apropos an instant,' she answered with a little smile. ' Perhaps
the only word of truth that has been said in the whole discussion
was the quotation: " II n'y a que les commencements qui sont
charmants ! "'
The great woodland which they traversed as she spoke
opened into an avenue of beeches, long and straight, the
branches meeting and interlacing overhead until the opening at
the farther end looked like an arched doorway closing a cathe-
dral aisle. The archway was filled with dim golden suffused
light, and within that archway of twilight and golden haze there
rose the snowy column of a high-reaching fountain ; it was the
first of the grandes eaux of the garden of Amyot. And the
sovereign of the Court of Love was she who had once been the
Princess Napraxine.
CHAPTER H.
As they entered on the smoother sward of the stately gardens a
figure came out of the deep shadow of clipped walls of bay and
approached them.
' Is the Court over ? At what decision has it arrived ?' said
the master of Amyot as he saluted the party and kissed the
hand of his wife with a graceful formality of greeting.
i It will have to sit for half a century if it be compelled to
come to any,' returned the chatelaine. ' We have said many
pretty things about love, Bdthune in especial ; but we met
Lubin with Lisette loitering behind their cows, and I fear
the living commentary was truer to nature than all our doc-
trines.'
' The only issue of its resolutions is that you are to give away
a cow and a maiden to the admirable lover,' said M de Bethune.
' He crossed our path just in time to point a moral for us : we
were all sadly in want of one.' ,
' Could you not agree then ? Surely you chose a very simple
subject?'
' It might be simple in the days of Philemon and Baucis. It
is sufficiently complicated now. Is the sentiment which sent
d'Aubiac to the scaffold, pressing a little blue velvet muff to his
lips, the same thing as the unpoetic impulse which makes the
femelle de Vhomme sought by Tom, Dick, and Harry 1 You will
admit that a vast field of the most various emotions separates the
two kinds of passion ?'
OTHMAR
* Certainly: there- is a great difference between Montrose's
Farewell and Sir John Suckling's verses.'
' Precisely : so we came to no decision. We have all too
much of the terrible modern tendency to hesitation and melan-
choly. I do not know why ; unless it come from the conviction
of all of us that love is always melancholy when it is not
absurd.'
' What a cruel sentiment!'
* A perfectly true assertion. The only loves respectable in
tradition are those which have ended wretchedly. Suppose
Romeo had been happy ; or Stradella ; what do you think the
poets could have made of them 1 Love must end somehow : if
it end in tragedy its dignity is saved like Caesar's.'
' But why need it end 1 You, at least, have seen that
through all disappointments it can endure,' murmured he who
had cited the love of d'Aubiac for Marguerite.
She looked at him and shrugged her shoulders ever so
slightly.
' Love is, so unhappily, like a comet. It mounts to its
perihelion, increasing in splendour as it goes, and then slowly,
little by little, the glory departs, the sovereign of the skies
grows less and less, until at last there is no more sign of it any-
where, and all is darkness. But the comet is not really gone ;
it has only gone—elsewhere.'
Her slight delicate laugh robbed the speech of the melan-
choly which it would otherwise have possessed.
' My wife believes in no constancy,' said Othmar.
She looked at him with her mysterious smile :
' I believe in Romeo's, I believe in Stradella's, because the
kindness of death saved them from the ridicule of forswearing
themselves. What a pity you did not come home a little sooner.
You would have been an invaluable ally to the sentimentalists
headed by Bethune. He was eloquent, but his cause was
weak.'
' My cause was strong,' said the Due de Be'thune ; * it was
my tongue which lacked persuasiveness.'
' Ho, you Avere very poetical; you were only not convincing.
My dear friend, Ave are too scientific in these days for senti-
ment to have any abiding place in us ; we are pessimists, it is
true, but we mourn for ourselves, not for others. We are
neither gay enough nor sad enough to do justice to such dis-
cussions as this which we have tried to revive ; we are only
bored. We do not take our fooling joyously or our sorrows
deeply. We are uneasily conscious that we are childish and
unreal in both. Then there is the incurable modern tendency
to end everything Avith a laugh en gouailleur, yet with tears in
our eyes. We are always ridiculing ourselves, yet Ave are
always vexed that, ridiculous as we are, we must still die.'
OTHMAR.
IS
'At the present moment we must still eat,' said Othmar, as
the boom of a silver-toned gong came over the gardens in deep
waves of sound.
It was nine o'clock, and that repast which had been used to
be called in the Valois Amyot arriere-grand-souper, and was now
called ' dinner,' awaited them.
There were some twenty-five guests then staying there ; she
did not approve of immense house parties, and she restricted
her house list to the very choicest of her favourites and
associates ; she always asked double the number of men to that
of women, but she was proportionately careful that the latter
should be those whom men most liked and admired ; she was
wholly above the petty envies and jealousies of her sex. Her
vanity rather consisted in having it said that she feared no
rivals.
As the deep boom of the gong sounded from the house, she
and her guests passed onward, and in their Valois dresses were
soon seated in the summer banqueting-room : a modern addition
to the chateau, an open loggia in the Italian style, with marble
floor and marble columns, one side open to the air, the other
sides rich in white marble bas-reliefs by French sculptors ; the
ceiling had been painted by Puvis de Chavannes with the story
of Europa. In each corner there were tall palms in large
square cases of white porcelain ; the white columns were
garlanded by passion-flowers, which grew without ; at either
end there was a fountain, their basins filled with gold fish and
water-lilies ; through the columns the whole enchanting view
of the west gardens was seen stretching far away to where the
Loire waters spread wide as a lake and mirroring the newly-
risen moon.
' I had it built,' she said, in answer to some one who com-
plimented her upon it. ' There is a great dining-hall and a
small dining-room indoors, but neither are fitted for summer
evenings. It is a barbarism to be shut up within four walls
just as the moon rises and the nightingales sing. The matter
of food is always a distressingly coarse question ; nothing can
really spiritualise or redeem it, but at least it may be divested
of some of its brute aspects. A delicate cuisine does that for
us in some measure, and the scene we have around us may do
more. The London and Paris habit of sitting in mere boxes,
more or less well decorated, is horrible. Perfect ease, vast
space, and soft shadowy distances are absolutely necessary to
preserve illusions as we dine.'
And to that end she had caused to be built the loggia of
Amyot, with as much celerity and breathless obedience to her
commands as the architects of the East showed a sultan of
Bagdad or Benares when he bade a palace of marble uprise
from the sand. Her fine taste would not have allowed her to
x6
OTHMAR.
hurt the architecture of Amyot with any incongruity, however
much her caprices might have desired it; but the marble loggia
accorded in exterior with the Renaissance outline of the
chateau, and the tone of Primaticcio and the epoch of Jean
Goujon had been faithfully followed in its internal decoration.
' What a perfect place it is !' said one of her guests to her
after dinner.
She smiled.
* In August, yes. When the terraces are hung with ice, and
the forests black with winter storm, it is not so perfect. All
places have their season, like all lives.'
'There are some places, like some lives, which can never
lose their beauty.'
' Do you think so ? I have never found them. When one
knows every leaf, every stone, every fence, the beauty of the
place fades for us as it does when one knows every impulse,
every prejudice, every fault, and every virtue of the life.'
' A melancholy truth—if it be a truth. Perhaps it is only
half a one. There are people who love their homes.'
' There are prisoners who have loved their cells! Amy6t is
delightful in many ways, but I have no more sense of home in
it than a swallow has in the eaves it builds under for one
summer. You must go to the vinedresser's wife in the cliff
cabin on the river for that.'
'Then the vinedresser's wife has a jewel which the great
chatelaine's crown is without ?'
'A jewel? Are you sure it is a jewel? I think there is
much to be said in favour of the restlessness of our world, it
saves us from rust and reflection ; it makes us unprejudiced and
cosmopolitan ; it annihilates nationalities and antipathies. I
imagine, if Horace had lived now, he would never have been
still; he would have seen the farm in its pleasantest season,
and that only. He would have carried with him the undying
lamp of his enchanting temperament, and he would have been
happy anywhere.'
' But is it really incomprehensible to you, the love of home ?'
'I think so. I have lived in too many places. We are a
few months here, a few months in Paris, a few weeks in the
Riviera, a few weeks in Russia, or Vienna, or London. It is
impossible to carry about the sense of home peripatetically with
you as the snail carries his shell. The sparrow feels it, the
swallow does not. I have always had a number of houses in
which I spend a number of months, of weeks, of days. I like
each of them to be perfect in its own way, and I like each to
have copies of my favourite books in it: the sight of Goethe, of
Molikre, of Horace makes one feel chez soi. That is as near
"home " as I approach. I imagine all happiness is much more
a matter of temperament than of place or of circumstance,'
OTHMAR.
17
41 do not believe you are happy even now !'
It was a personal speech, and too bold a one to be justi-
fied even by intimate and privileged friendship. But she was
moved to it by that ever ready and pitiless self-analysis which
made her as severe a critic of .herself as of others. .
'Happy? Oh, I must be,' she said with a smile. 'Who
on earth should be happy if I am not ? 1 have all the vulgar
attributes of happiness in profusion and all the more delicate
ones too. If I am not so, it cari only be because my tempera-
ment is the very opposite of a porte-bonheur like Horace's. I
have always expected too much of everything and of everybody,
and yet I am not at all what you would call an imaginative
person. I ought to be prosaically contented with the world as
it is. But I am not.'
It was a sultry and lovely August night. The sky was
radiant and the white lustre of the full moon shone over all the
scene, making the gardens, the terraces, the fountains, the
parterres of flowers light as day, and leaving the masses of the
great forest which surrounded them in deepest shadow. It was
haunted ground, this stately and royal place where both
Marguerites had passed in turn summers dead three centuries
ago ; where the one, witty, wise and faithful, had read the tales
of her Heptameron beneath its spreading oaks ; and the other,
lovely, perilous and faithless, had gathered its roses and ruffled
them, murmuring the 1 unpen—beaucoup—passionn^ment,' as
one passion hotly chased another from her fickle breast, each
scarce living the life of the gathered rose.
The present chatelaine of Amyot, leaning against one of the
marble columns of her summer dining-hall, and listening to the
words of a friend who dared tell her truths, looked out into the
wide white moonlight, on to the trellised rose walks, the turf
smooth as velvet, bordered with ground ivy ; the marble statues
standing against the high walls of close-clipped evergreens;
the deep and sombre forests which held the heart of so many
secrets, the story of so many lives and of so many deaths, safe
shut away for ever, dumb and dead in the eternal mystery of
its vernal solitudes. If she were not happy who should be ?
But happiness—what an immense word !—or what a little
one ! A poet's dream of paradise, or the peasant's contentment
in the chimney-corner and the pot of soup ! Which you will—
but never both at once.
She was as happy as a very analytical and fastidious nature
can possibly be, but at times her old enemy dissatisfaction
looked in over the flowers and through the golden air. She
was pursued by her old consciousness that the human race was
after all exceedingly limited in its capabilities, and the lives of
men on the whole very wearisome. There was with her that
vague disappointment and dissatisfaction which come to most of
a
i8
OTHMAR.
us when we have done what we wished to do. There is a mono-
tony even in what is most agreeable, which makes all happiness
dull after awhile. Priests tells us that this unpleasant weari-
ness is intended to detach us from the joys of earth, and philo-
sophers are content to find its solution in the physiology of the
senses. But whether explained sentimentally or scientifically,
the result is the same : that expectation makes up so large a
component part of pleasure that, when there is nothing new to
expect, pleasure becomes so attenuated as to be scarcely visible.
All loves which have been constant and become famous have
been those to which immense difficulties arose, where perils
supplied the element of an unending interest. It is when they
can only behold each other in the stolen hours of the moonlight,
that Romeo and Giulietta are to each other divinely fair. Were
they condemned to face each other at dinner every night for ten
years, what divinity would be left for either in the eyes of the
other 1
Habit and love cannot dwell together. As well ask the rose
to flower beneath a slab of stone.
' Happiness is not of this world,' she said, with a little
dreamy lingering smile. ' Is not that what your brethren are
always telling us 1'
Melville answered with a sigh :
' May this not prove that we may at least hope for it in some
other ?'
' Yes, I think,' she replied, rather to herself than to him,
' I think with you ; the strongest argument (if any are strong)
in favour of the future development of the soul, is the absolute
impossibility for anybody with any average mind to be conteirc
with what he or she finds in human existence. Life is a pretty
enough picture for people like ourselves ; it is sometimes a
pageant, it is sometimes even a poem, but it is all wonderfully
unproductive and circumscribed. Except in a few hours of
passion or exultation, we are sensible of the flatness and insuffi-
ciency of it all. We have ideals which may be only remem-
brance, but if not must surely be prevision ; ideals which, a,t
any rate, are larger and of another atmosphere than anything
which belongs to earth.'
Her voice grew soft and dreamy, and had a tone in it of
wistful regret. It was not the mere dissatisfaction of the
ennuyee which moved her. She had had her own way in life,
and the success of it had become monotonous.
'Yes,' she repeated with a little laugh, which was not very
gay ; ' I suppose it must be the soul in us ; that odcl, unquiet,
dissatisfied, nameless thing inside us, which is always crying,
*' Give, give, give ! " and never gets what it wants. Our dis-
content must be the proof of something in us meant for better
things, just as the eternal revolutions of Paris are the proof of
OTHMAR.
*9
its people's genius. What a night it is ! It wants Lorenzo and,
Jessica, but they are not here. There are flirtations and in-
trigues enough indoors, but Lorenzo and Jessica are not of our
World. It is a pity. The moon seems to look for them.'
Then she left the marble loggia and went amongst her
guests, who were gathering together in the silver drawing-room,
as the sounds of music, in the ever-youthful ' Invitation k la
Valse,' called them, with midnight, to the ball-room. Gervase
Melville strayed away by himself through the moonlit aisles of
roses.
' Always the pebble of ennui in the golden slipper of plea-
sure,' he thought. 'Perhaps life is, after all, more evenly
balanced than the wooden shoe and the ragged stocking will
ever believe. Perhaps in life, as they said to-day that it is in
love, hunger is a happier state than satiety. Perhaps, if Lorenzo
had never married Jessica, he would have written sonnets to her
all his life, as Petrarca wrote them to Laura ! The Lady of
Amyot is the most interesting woman I have ever known, but
she is the one person on earth capable of making me doubt the
faith that I have lived and hope to die for ; when I am amongst
the green savages of Formosa or the drunken Indians of Ottawa,
I can still believe in the human soul ; but when I am with her
I doubt—I doubt—I doubt ! She is as exquisitely organised as
this gloxinia which is full of dew and of moonbeams ; but she
believes that she will have only her one brief passage on earth
like the gloxinia—the glory of a day—and alas ! who shall prove
that she is wrong ? When she holds my creed in the hollow of
her white hand and smiles, it grows small and shrunken as a
daisy that is dead 1'
CHAPTER III.
1 Bulwer has said that none preserve imagination after forty;
does anyone preserve illusions after thirty 'i' said a very pretty
woman on her thirty-second birthday.
Her husband chivalrously replied, * Any one who lives beside
you will preserve them until he is a hundred.'
She looked at him dubiously, curiously, with a slight smile
which was a little cynical and a little pensive.
' I was never famous for the culture of them,' she said, a
little regretfully. ' I do not know why you should have found
me so favourable to yours—if you have found me favourable,'
she added, after a pause.
As the most eloquent and comprehensive answer he could
give, he kissed her hands.
She glanced at her face in the mirror; she was certainly
c 2
20
OTHMAR.
thirty two years old 011 this last day of February. She did not
like it ; no woman likes it. The way is not actually longer
because the traveller reads on a milestone the cipher which tells
him how many thousands of yards he has traversed and has still
to traverse, but the milestone suddenly and distastefully testi-
ties to distance, and increases the sense of fatigue which the
road has given.
' If women had all a happy Euthanasia,' she said dreamily,
' when they reach the age I am now, what a good thing it would
be for the world. On her thirtieth birthday every woman ought
to be put to death ; mercifully, poeiically, as the girl dies in the
" Faute de l'Abbe Mouret," stifled in flowers, but securely put
to death.'
' The world,'said Otlimar, smiling, * would certainly be rid
of its most perilous enchantresses if your proposal became laAV.'
'And how much prettier our drawing-rooms would look,
and how much effort and heartburning would be spared, if
every woman died before she began to " make up ! " Do you
know last night, in the mirror figure of the cotillion, as the men
looked over my shoulder one by one, I forgot all about them.
I only looked at my own face ; it seemed to me that there was
a sort of dimness in it, as there is on a photograph which has
been some years done ; not age exactly, but the shadow of age
which was coming up behind me as the men were coming, and
was looking over my shoulder as they looked. Why do you
laugh ? It was not agreeable to me. I was startled when the
voice of Hugo de Rochefort came behind my ear, " Ah, Madame,
is it possible? Do you reject us all?" I had quite forgotten
where I was, and why they were all waiting. Perhaps Age
only meant to say to me, '' Do not stay for the cotillions any
more 1"'
' If Age did, it certainly found no man living to agree with
it,' said her companion. ' If you will allow me to say so, I do
not recognise you in this unusual phase of self-depreciation..
What bee has stung you to-day ?'
' Self-knowledge, I suppose. Whatever philosophers may
declare to the contrary, it is a very uncomfortable companion.'
' Surely that depends on one's mood ?'
' Everything in life depends on one's mood. When I am
in another mood I shall say to myself that I have ten years left
in which I shall be agreeable to myself and other people ; that
the young girls do not understand men and do not influence
them ; that a woman is always young so long as she retains her
power to please and to be pleased. There are five hundred
sophisms with which I can console myself, but just now I am
not in a humour to be consoled by them. I am only sensible
of what is very frightful to think of—that a woman is allotted
threescore and ten years as well as a man, but that he may
OTHMAR.
21
enjoy himself to the end of them, if only he keep his health ;
she comes to the close of her pleasures before her life is half
lived. With her, the preface is exquisite, the poem is delight-
ful, but the colophon is of such preposterous and odious length
and dulness, that it is out of all proportion to the brevity of the
romance.'
He smiled. ' I know that it is always hopeless to convince
you when you are in a pessimistic humour.'
' Oh yes; into one's character, as into the characters of
others, one gets little flashes of real light here and there, now
and then ; the moments are not agreeable ; they are the flashes
of a policeman's lanthorn ; while they are shining disguise is
not possible.'
' What do you see when they flash upon me V
1 Not very much that 1 would have changed except your
sentimentalities.'
' I am grateful.'
She looked at him curiously. ' Did you doubt it 1'
He answered, ' Well, no ; not precisely. But with such a
character as yours one never knows.'
' Is not that the charm of my character 1'
' I think it is the secret of your ascendancy. No one can be
wholly, absolutely sure of what you are thinking far down in
the recesses of your immense thoughts.'
' That was what people use to say of Louis Napoleon, and
there never was a shallower creature. I think I have more
profundity than he ; but I have not so much as I had. Happi-
ness is not intellectual; it tends to make one content, and
content is stupidity ; that is why Age looked into the cotillion
mirror to-night to remind me that I was getting stupid. No,
you are not to pay me any compliments, my dear ; after ten
years of them they have a certain fadeur, though I am sure you
are sincere when you make them.'
She smiled and rose.
This was her thirty-second birthday. That unpleasant and
unpoetic fact shadowed life to her for the moment. She was
still young enough, and had potent charm enough, of which
she was fully conscious, to own it frankly. The world was still
at her feet. She could afford to confess that she foresaw the
time when it would not be so. True, in a way she would
have a certain empire always. She would never altogether lose
her power over the minds of men when she should lose it over
their passions. But it would be a pale-grey kingdom, a sad
shore, with sea-lavender blowing above silvery sand instead of
her own Ogygia, with its world of roses and its smiling suns.
Face it with what courage and charm she may, the thought
of age must always appal a woman. It takes so much ; it offers
nothing. True, some of the greatest passions the world has
22
OTHMAR.
seen have been born after youth had long passed, and have
burned on till death with deeper fires of sunset than ever dawn
has seen. But a woman is not consoled by that possibility as
morning slides past her and the shadows grow long.
Othmar, without other reply, opened the door of her dress-
ing-room, and there entered two small children, a boy and a girl
with faces like flowers, and sweet rosy mouths, carrying a large
gilded basket between them, filled with white lilac and gardenia.
They came up to her hand in hand, not very certain upon
their feet or in their speech, and bowed their little golden heads
with pretty reverence, and stammered together with birdlike
voices, * Bonne fete, maman.'
' Here are your eternal courtiers,' said their father. 'Time
will make no difference in their worship of you.'
She smiled again, and took them together on her lap, and
kissed them with tenderness, her hand playing with their soft,
light curls.
But she said perversely, and a little sadly : * My dear, how
can one tell ? That is only a phrase also. One never knows
what children may become. In fifteen or twenty years' time
Otho may send me a sommation respectueuse, because he wants
to marry a circus-rider, and Xenia may hate me because I make
her accept a grand-duke whilst she is in love with an attache.
One never can tell. They are fond of me now, certainly.'
' They will as certainly love you always.'
' What an optimist you have grown ! It is flattering to me,'
she answered, as she caressed the children and gave them some
crystals of sugar. ' I cannot help seeing things as they are;
you know I never could help it; and the relations of parents
with their children, which are pretty and idyllic to begin with,
are often apt to alter to very grim prose as time goes on, and
separate interests arise to part them. Why does no sovereign
who ever lived like his or her immediate heir ? Why is the
crown prince always arrayed against the crown ?'
'I am very fond of my crown prince,' said Othmar, as he
drew his young son to him.
' He is not a crown prince yet ; he is a baby. Wait until he
does want to marry that circus-rider, or until you see him take
an opposite side in European politics to yourself. It is when
the distinct Ego asserts itself in your child, in opposition to
your own entity, that the separation begins and the antagonism
rises.'
' You will always analyse so mercilessly!'
' I can never be content with the world's commonplaces and
sophisms, if you mean that. And on this day, when I am
thirty-two years old, no persuasion on earth would convince me
that, when the time should come which will make me twice
that age, I shall be anything but an unhappy woman. It will
OTHMAR.
23
not console me in the least that my grandchildren may wish me
bonne fete.'
' I wonder if you are serious 1'
'I was never more so, I assure you. Life is a series of
losses ; but a woman's losses outweigh a man's by a million.
From the first little line she sees between her eyebrows 01*
about her mouth, existence is nothing but a degringolade for
her. To say that she is compensated for the loss of her empire
by becoming a grandmother is wholly absurd.'
'You always allot such a small space to the affections !'
. * Madame de Sevigne allotted the largest that any clever
woman ever did or could. Do you think the chill philosophies
of Madame de Grignan rewarded her ? Myself, je n'ai pas cette
bosse la. You know it very well. I am fond of these children,
because they are yours ; but I do not think them in the least
a compensation for growing old !'
' As if years mattered to a woman of your wit!'
She smiled.
' That is so like a man's clumsy idea of consolation. True,
wit, in theory, is very much admired, but, practically, nobody
cares much about it, unless it comes out of a handsome mouth.
Men prefer white shoulders. And '
' And your shoulders ?' said Othmar, with a smile. ' Are
they not of snow, and fit for Venus' self l'
' Oh, they are white as yet,' she cried indifferently.
' For myself,' he added, ' I shall be delighted when the
faces of no aspirants are reflected in your cotillion mirror. I
detest all those men '
' Oh no, you do not,' she said tranquilly. ' If there were
none of them you would say to yourself, "Really, she is very
much aged." A man's love is always so made up of pride and
prejudice that if no one envy him what he has he soon ceases to
value it. On the whole, men go much more by the opinion of
the world than women do. A woman, if she take a fancy to a
cripple, or a hunchback, or a cretin, makes herself ridiculous
over him, without any regard to how she may be laughed at;
but a man is always thinking of what they say at the clubs. In
his most headlong follies he is always nervous about the opinion
of the galerie.'
'You always think us such fools,' said Othmar, with some
ill humour.
' Oh, no,' she said again with a smile, ' only I think you are,
in a way, more conscientious than we are, and in another way
more nervous. A woman, when she has a,fancy for a thing,
would burn down half the world to get at it; a man would
hesitate to sacrifice so many cities and people, and would also
be preoccupied with the idea that he would be badly placed in
history for his exploit.'
24
OTHMAR.
1 Then he is no true lover.'
4 Are there any true lovers ?'
'1 think you should be the last woman who could doubt it.'
4 You want a compliment, but I shall not give it you. Or if
you mean the others—well, perhaps they have been, or they
are, true enough ; but then that is only because a nassion for
me has always been thought d'un chic incroyable. I should
believe in the love of a man if I were a milkmaid, but when to
be in love with one is a mere fashion like the height of your
wheels or the shape of your mail, one may question its single-
mindedness. I have never, either, observed that the most de-
voted of them eat their dinner less regularly, or smoke less
often when they were unhappy. Even you, yourself, when you
were wasting with despair, did not refuse to dine or smoke.'
'Do not speak of that time,' said Othmar, with a look of
distress. 4 As for your complaint against us, we are mere
machines in a great deal; the machine goes on mechanically in
its daily exercise for its daily necessities ; that movement of
mechanism has nothing to do with the suffering of the soul.
Nothing can be more unjust, than to confuse the one with the
other. You say a man cannot be a poet or a lover because he
eats a truffled beefsteak. I say it is the mechanical part of him
which eats the beefsteak, and eating it impairs neither his sen-
sitive nerves nor his passions. As for smoking, it is a consola-
tion because it is a sedative.'
4 Admirably reasoned,' said Nadine, 4 but you do not con-
vince me. I am certain that the conventionalities and habits of
modern life do diminish the forces of passion. When Tityaeus
was forsaken by Musidora, and had only the primaeval woods,
the fons sylvce, the mountain solitudes, and the silent sheep, his
grief could reign over him undivided ; but nowadays, when he
dines out every evening, is made to laugh whether he will or no,
finds a hundred engagements waiting for every hour, and has
the babble of the world eternally in his ear, his remembrance is
of a very attenuated sort. I do not say that he suffers nothing,
but I do say that he often forgets that he suffers.'
' I am not at all sure of that,' said Othmar, ' and what is
more, I am almost disposed to think that the effort to affect
indifference which Society compels, is much more suffering than
the delightful permission which Nature gave your shepherd to
be as miserable as he pleased, unchecked and unremarked.
The world may cause the most excruciating torture to a man
who is compelled to be in it and of it, while some great pre-
occupation makes every thought except one alien and hateful.'
' If the man have a great nature, perhaps. But how many
have ?'
4 As many, or as few, as in the days of the shepherds. The
ordinary Tityaeus, I imagine, did not WGep long for the ordinary
OTHMAR.
Musidora, but soon tuned his pipe afresh and put new ribbons
on his crook.'
' I do not quite think that; I think all feelings were stronger,
warmer, deeper, more concentrated in the earlier ages of the
world. Nowadays we contrive to make everything absurd—
our heroes, our poets, our sorrows, our loves, all are dwarfed
by our treatment of them. Even death itself we have managed
to make ridiculous, and strip of all its majesty. Ulysses' self
would have looked grotesque if buried with the civil rites which
attended Gambetta to his tomb, or the religious rites which
mocked the prince of mockers, Disraeli. Whenever I die, I
hope you will let me be carried by young children clad in white
to some green grave in your own woods, where only a stag will
come or a pretty hare. Will you be unconventional enough for
that ? Or will you be afraid of the French municipalities and
the Russian popes 1 I should have courage to execute your last
wishes so, but whether you will have the courage to execute
mine Men are so much more timid than women!'
* Do not talk of death !' said Othmar, with a passing
shudder.
' Did I not say that men are cowards ?'
'Not for ourselves ; for those we love we are.'
She smiled a little contemptuously, a little sadly.
4 Ah, my dear ! who knows ? Death would not be so dreadful
to me as if I lived to incur Horace'3 reproach to Lyce. What
is it? "Fis anus, et tamen," &c., &c., though that reproach
perhaps belongs to a more unsophisticated age than our own.
Nowadays the perruquiers let nobody get grey, and there are a
great many grandmothers, even great-grandmothers, who are
entirely charming—more charming than the girls who are just
out.'
' I do not think you will ever go to the perruquiers, but you
will always be charming, and you will never be old.'
4 One would think you were my lover !'
4 Why will you never believe that I am still so ?'
'Because I do not believe in any miracles ; I go to no
Loretto. Love is a volatile precipitate, and marriage a solvent
in which it disappears. If we are exceptions to that rule of
chemistry and life, we are so extraordinarily exceptional that
fate must have some dreadful punishment in store for us.'
4 Or some exceptional reward.'
4 Is not virtue always punished I' she said, with her enigma-
tical smile. ' You are a very handsome man, and have been the
most poetic of lovers. But in the nature of things I grow used
to your good looks, and in the nature of things you do not
make love to me any longer. Love may be the most delightful
thing in the world, but it cannot resist the pressure of daily
intercourse. It is doomed when it has to look over a common
26
OTHMAR.
visiting list, and scold the same house-steward about the weekly
expenditure. 44 Ah—ouiche, Madame !" said one of the peasants
at Amyot to me once, " where is love when you dip two spoons
in one soup-pot 1—you only quarrel about the onions." That
is always the fault of marriage. It is always putting two spoons
in one pot. Whether it is an earthen pitcher or a Cellini vase
does not make the least difference. Poor love runs away from
the clash of the spoons.'
Othmar laughed, but he was irritated. 41 should be miser-
able if I believed you were in earnest,' he said impatiently.
'But I know you would sacrifice your own life to an epigram.'
' I am entirely in earnest,' she replied. ' But if you do not
believe me that shows that you are a less changeable man than
most, or I a wiser woman. Ah, my dear,' she added, with a
smile and a sigh, ' when men do not admire me any longer then
you will not admire me either, I imagine; I wonder you do as
it is—you see so much of me !'
' I shall adore you all my life,' said Othmar, with almost as
much fervour as when he had been the most impassioned and
the most hopeless of her lovers,
4 You fancy so; and that is very pretty in you, after so many
years; but it does not follow that you will think so still in twelve
months' time,' said his wife, with the smile of her incurable
scepticism upon her lips. 4 And do not insist on it too much.
Things which are insisted on too much have a knack of making
themselves tiresome, and you know of old that repetition has
no great charm for me, and say what you will you cannot pre-
vent me from feeling that very soon I shall grow old !'
She rose and looked over her shoulder at the silver-framed
mirror with its three glasses, showing her profile to her as she
turned.
' I could not brave the sunrise after a ball nowshe thought,
with a little pang.
'Has not a poet said,' she added aloud:
I fear
Life's many changes ; not Death's changelessness ? '
There was a touch of graver sadness in the tone with which
she quoted the line of verse, which forbade reply either by per-
sifiage or compliment.
Othmar kissed her hand with almost the same emotion as
when he had declared to her a passion hopeless, and therefore
for the time changeless; and he remained mute.
4 The same poet says:
Love's words are weak, but not Love's silences,'
she added, with a smile. 4 Well, I will believe you as yet.*
OTHMAR,
2 7
She had in nowise resigned the power of, and the diversion
afforded her by, what in a lesser person would have been called
endless flirtation. She amused herself constantly with the
follies of men and their subjugation.
' If you do not make yourself attractive to others, the man
to whom you care to be attractive will soon not find you so,'
she was wont to say. ' Those women who make themselves a
statue of fidelity, like the Queen in the "Winter's Tale," will
soon be left alone on their pedestals. Be as faithful as you
please, but show him that you have every temptation and
opportunity to be unfaithful if you did please.'
It was on those lines that she had traced her conduct, and
whilst her world knew that she was unaltered in coquetry, if
coquetry her languid charm and domination could be called,
it also saw that she was equally unaltered in profound and
universal indifference to all those whom she subjugated.
Qthmar, as he said, would have preferred that she should
subjugate none. But she frankly told him that it was of no
use to wish for subversion of the laws of nature. ' I am as
nature made me,' she said once to him. 'If you did not like
-the way 1 was made, why did you not leave me alone ? You
had plenty of time to study me. I am like Disraeli, I like
power. Now the only power possible to a woman is that which
she possesses over men. If men were more interesting, the
power would be more interesting to. But then it is not our
fault. It is perhaps the fault of the millions of stupid women
who swallow up the occasional originality of men as sand
swallows up the bits of agate and cornelian on the shore. It
is the fashion to say that it is the wicked, clever women who
hurt men. That is not the case ; it is the good silly ones who
make of life the sahara of commonplaces and of blunders which
it is. Talent will at least always understand; blameless stu-
pidity understands nothing.'
She was somewhat more, rather than less, of a charmeuse
than she had been. It was so natural to her to charm the lives
of men that she could have as soon ceased to breathe as to cease
to use her power over them. There were times when Othmar
grew irritated and jealous, but she was unmoved by his anger.
' It is a much greater compliment to you that men should
admire me,' she said to him, 'and it would look supremely
absurd if I lapsed into a bonne bourgeoise, and always went
everywhere arm-in-arm with you. I should not know myself.
You would not know me. Be content. You are aware that I
think very little about any one of them; they are none of them so
interesting as you used to be. But I must have them about
me. They are like my fans ; I never scarcely use a fan or look
at one, but still a fan is indispensable; it is a part of one's
toilette.'
28
OTHMAR.
Othmar, who retained for her much of the imperious and
perfervid passion which he had had as a lover, resigned himself
with a bad grace to her arguments. Something of the old
tyrannical feeling with which he would once have liked to bear
her out of sight and hearing of the world for ever still moved in
him at times, though he had grown diffident of displaying it,
having grown afraid of her delicate ironies.
' It is so good for him,' she said to herself ; 'that sort of
irritation and jealousy keeps his affections and his admirations
alive : they are not allowed to go to sleep, as both have a knack
of going to sleep in marriage. Anything is less dangerous
than stagnant water. If a man be not made jealous he must
drift imperceptibly into indifference. Monotony is like a calm
at sea; everyone yawns, and in time even a shark would be
welcomed as a delightful interruption. To avoid sameness is
the first requisite for the endurance of love. If he love me as
much as he did nine years ago—and I think he does—it is only
because at the bottom of his heart he never feels absolutely
sure of me. He has always a faint unacknowledged sense that
I may any day do something entirely unexpected by him ; may
even fly away, as a bird does, off a bough which it has tired of.
I am like a book of alchemy to him, of which he has mastered
all the secrets save just one or two lines, but in which those
lines always remain in unintelligible abracadabra to perplex and
interest him. He will never tire of the book till he thinks he
can decipher those lines. It is a mistake to suppose that men
are only allured by their senses ; there is an intellectual
mystery which fascinates them, and which is not so easily
exhausted. All men are amused by me, all men are more or
less attracted by me. I should not wish my husband, alone of
all men, to become tired of me. Of course it is very difficult to
prevent it when he is so used to me, but I think it is possible.'
A feeble woman, a dull woman, a woman of that kind of self-
complacency which goes with stupidity, would not have allowed
so much even in her own thoughts ; but she, who was deemed
the vainest of her kind, had no such vanity wherewith to deceive
herself. Her high intelligence and her unerring penetration
were glasses forever turned upon herself no less than upon
others. Othmar was at times surprised and almost irritated
that she left him so often to go on her own visits or travels,
or sent him alone upon his. But she knew very well what she
did.
' Frequent absences are like those pauses in the music
which in French we call silences, and in German Pausen,' she
said to herself. ' They make us care for the music more than
we should do if it were always on our ear. Monotony is the
most terrible enemy that affection or enjoyment ever has. Un-
fortunately, most women are so eternally monotonous that they
OTHMAR.
29
can never understand why men are not as pleased with the
defect as they are themselves. Lord Beaconsfield was not an
apostle of love, "but he was a shrewd observer of mankind, and
I always think that he suggested the most admirable phase of
modern love possible, when he depicted two people who were
fond of one another as going their different ways every evening
to different houses, and meeting again to talk it all over with
champagne and chicken at dawn. If people are always together
in the same places, what have they left to tell one another in
their own house ? Myself, I don't like either champagne or
chicken, but that is a mere matter of detail. You can say,
Rhine wine and green oysters, or yellow tea and Russian ciga-
rettes. It is, no doubt, only another form of vanity ; but I
wish our lives not to break down and drift away in little bits of
wreck wood, as most peoples' lives do. It is not goodness in
me ; it is only amour propre.'
She had more sympathy for him than she would in other
years have supposed herself capable of feeling, but with her
regard for him there was mingled that habit of analysis which
was so inveterate in her, and that indulgence to his weaknesses
which arose from her condescending comprehension of them.
She, as yet, made the preservation of his admiration her study,
but in her study there was blended the sense of amusement and
disdain, which always came to her before the inconsistencies and
the unwisdom of men. She loved him perhaps ; but she never
failed to weigh him accurately. To Yseulte, he had been as a
lord and a god ; to her he was dearer than other men, but not
more imposing. Even when the first winelike fumes of
awakened passion had touched her, she had been clear of judg-
ment and unerring in vision. She had said to herself : ' He
looked larger than others once, through the mists of my pre-
ference, but he is not so really.'
CHAPTER IY.
When he saw the beauty of her children, Priedrich Othmar
relented in that unsparing bitterness which he felt against her.
As a woman he still hated her intensely, unspeakably, un-
changeably, but as their mother he had respect for her, and
almost pardon.
' He will be childless all his days,' he had said with certainty
and scorn. ' That bloodless mondaine, that ethereal coquette
will leave the name barren ; she is all brain and nerve ; she
will never give birth to anything save an epigram.'
When his words had been disproved, he had rendered her a
sullen honour. He would take no joy in the children as he
30
OTHMAR.
would have taken joy in Yseulte's ; but they were there to bear
the name he thought so precious, and he was forced to confess
that no lovelier or stronger or healthier creatures than the
young Otho and his sister Xenia ever could have played beneath
the oak-boughs of Amyot.
But the old man was faithful to the one innocent affection
which had ever lived in his selfish breast; with an aching heart
he would often turn from watching these children tumble
amongst the daisies in the sunshine, and find his way to a
solitary tomb made in white marble in the mausoleum of
Amyot, in memory of her whose slender crushed body lay
buried amongst the violets by the sea of the southern shore.
'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 Framjois 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. Imagina-
tion 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
Ooiimar. ' 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
OTHMAR.
31
& 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,' mur-
mured 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 sym-
pathies, 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 Amyot 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, pos-
sessed the most powerful charm. But whether these were
qualities which would make bon menage in the familiarity and
the triviality of daily life—of this he was not so sure.
32
OTHMAR.
CHAPTER Y.
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
Avhat lesser minds would have considered her right to deny it.
She held the whole ordinary mass of womanhood in too absolute
a ^isdain 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 hus-
band : 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 unfeit 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 1 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 forbear-
ing, 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 : "Afi piace
pin distruggerla che perderla J " '
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 confi-
dence 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
CTHMAR.
33
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 Caesars 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 man is indulged in that way he sulk'i at
destiny. It is human nature.'
' Human nature,' said Othmar, ' according to you and Nadkge,
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 Mfe;
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
D
34
OTHMAR.
with me, have you found the lasting joys that you expected, of
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 1 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. Conven-
tionality 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. Everyman 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
OTHMAR.
35
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 Hapraxine had
used to fear as a hound fears the whip, and which Othmar had
never seen.
4 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 ; 4 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. 41 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.'
4 Very prettily said,' replied his wife. 1 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
36
OTHMAR.
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 1 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 inter-
vening 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 Amyot; 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 fete, and brought her their great baskets
of white lilac and gardenias, she was indulgent to them, and
took them with her in her carriage for a drive after her noonday
breakfast. She was not a woman to whom the babble and play
of children could ever be very long interesting ; her mind was
too speculative, too highly cultured, too exacting to give much
response to the simplicity, the ignorance, and the imperfect
thoughts of childhood. But in her own way she loved them.
In her own way she took great care of their education, physical
and mental. She wished her son to become a man whom the
world would honour ; and she wished her daughter to be wholly
unlike herself.
As yet they were hardly more than babies ; lovely, happy,
gay, and gentle. ' Let them be young as long as they can,' she
OTHMAR.
37
said to those entrusted with their training. I was never young.
It is a great loss. One never wholly recovers it in any after
years.'
It was a fine day, mild, sunny, with light winds shaking the
odour from the orange buds ; such a day as that on which
Platon Napraxine had died. She did not think of him.
Several years had gone away since then ; the whole world
seemed changed ; the dead past had buried its dead ; there were
the two golden-haired laughing children in symbol and witness
of the present.
'Decidedly, however philosophic we may be, we are all
governed at heart by sentiment,' she thought, as the carriage
rolled through the delicate green of the blossoming woods.
' And by beauty,' she added, as her eyes dwelt on the faces of
Otho and Xenia, who were the very flower and perfection of
childish loveliness ; ideal children also, who were always happy,
always caressing, always devoted to each other, and whose little
lives were as pretty as those of two harebells in a sunny wood.
Why were they dear to her, and sweet and charming ? Why had
the physical pain of their birth been forgotten in the mental joys
of their possession % Why did her eyes delight to follow their
movements, and her ear delight to listen to their laughter 1
The other children had been as much hers, and she had
always disliked them ; she disliked them still, such time as she
went to their Russian home to receive their annual homage, and
that of all her dependents.
Othmar was devoted to the interests of Xapraxine's two little
sons ; an uneasy consciousness, often recurrent to him, that he
had not merited the frank and steady friendship of the dead
man, perpetually impelled him to the greatest care of their
fortunes and education. They were kindly, stupid, vigorous
little lads, likely to grow into the image of their dead father ;
but all that could be done for them in mind and body, for their
present and their future, he took heed should be done ; and
placing them under wise and gentle teachers, endeavoured to
counteract the fatal instincts to vanity and overbearing self-
esteem which the adulation and submission they received every-
where on their estates had implanted in them long before they
could spell. He never saw them come into his presence without
painful memories and involuntary repugnance ; but he repressed
all signs of either, and the children, if they feared him, liked
him. Of their mother they saw but very little: a lovely delicate
vision, in an atmosphere scented like a tea rose, with a little
sound in her voice which made them feel they must tread softly
and speak low, looked at them with an expression which they
did not understand, and touched them with cool fragrant lips
lightly and distantly, and they knew she was their mother be-
cause they had always heard so : but Othmar seemed nearer to
38
OTHMAR.
them than she did, and when they wished for anything, it was
to him that they addressed their little rude scrawled notes. For
the rest, they were always in Russia : it was the only stipulation
with which their father had hampered their mother's guardian-
ship of them.
' Let them be Russians always,' he had said in his last letter
to her. ' Let them love no soil but Russia. The curse of
Russians is the foreign life, the foreign tongue, the foreign
ways, which draw them away from their people, make their
lands unknown and indifferent to them, and lead them to
squander on foreign cities and on foreign wantons the roubles
wrung by their stewards in their absence from their dependents.
Paris is the succursale of Petersburg, and it is also its hell.
"When the Russian nobles shall live in their own homes, the
Nihilist will have little justification, and the Jew will be unable
to drain the peasantry as a cancer drains the blood. I preach
what I have not practised. But if I could live my life again, I
would spend my strength, and my gold, and my years amongst
my own people.'
' Poor Platon !' she had thought, more than once remember-
ing those words. ' He thinks he would have done so, but he
would not. The first drolesse who should have crossed the
frontier would have taken him back with her in triumph. It is
quite true what he says ; an absent nobility leaves an open door
behind them, through which Sedition creeps in to jump upon
their vacant chairs. But so long as ever they have the power,
men will go where they are amused, and the Russian tchin will
not stay in the provinces, in the snow, with the wolves, and the
Jews, and the drunken villagers all around his house, when he
can live in the Avenue Josephine, and never hear or see any-
thing but what pleases him. Absenteeism ruined Ireland, and
will ruin Russia ; but, tant que le monde est monde, the man
who has only one little short life of his own will like to enjoy
it.'
Nevertheless, she and Othmar both respected his wishes,
and his boys were brought up in the midst of the vast lands of
their heritage, with everything done that could be done by
tuition to amend their naturally slow intelligence and outweigh
the stubbornness and arrogance begotten by centuries of abso-
lute dominion in the race they sprang from. She herself only
saw them very rarely, when, in midsummer weather, the flower-
ing seas of grass and the scent of the violets in the larch woods
brought life and warmth even to North-eastern Russia. They
were unpleasant to her : always unpleasant. They were the
living and intrusive records of years she would willingly have
effaced. They were involuntary but irresistible reproaches
spoken, as it were, by lips long dumb in death.
Living, their father had never had power to do otherwise
OTHMAR.
39
than offend, irritate, and disgust her : the least active senti-
ment against himself that he had ever roused in her had been a
contemptuous pity. But dead, there were moments when
Platon Nap'raxine acquired- both dignity and strength in her
eyes : the silence of his death and its cause had commanded her
respect: he had been wearisome, stupid, absurd, troublesome,
in all his life; but in his death he had gained a certain grandeur,
as features quite coarse and commonplace will look solemn and
white on their bier.
He had died to defend her name, and she could not re-
member ever once having given him one kind word! There
had been a greatness in his loyalty and in his sacrifice to its
demands which outweighed the clumsiness of his passion and
the grotesqueness of his ignorance. ' If he were living again, I
should be as intolerant of him as I ever was,' she thought at
times ; * he would annoy me as much as ever, he would be as
ridiculous, he would be as odious ; and yet I should like for
once to be able to say to him " Pauvre ours ! vous etes mal leche,
mais vous avez bon cceur! " '
It was a vague remorse, but a sincere one ; yet in her nature
it irritated and did not alter her. It was an intrusive thought,
and unwelcome as had been his presence. She thrust it away
as she had used to bid her women lock the doors of her cham-
ber ; and the poor ghost went away obediently, timid, wistful,
not daring to insist, as the living man had used to do from the
street door.
Remorse is a vast persistent shadow in the poet's metrical
romance and the dramatist's tragic story ; but in the great world,
in the pleasant world, in the world of movement, of distraction,
of society, it is but a very faint mist, which at very distant
intervals clouds some tiny space in a luminous sky, and hurries
away before a breath of fashion, a whisper of news, a puff of
novelty, as though conscious of its own incongruity and want of
tact.
When their drive was over this day she dismissed the young
Otho and his sister to their nurses and teachers, and remained
on the sea-terrace of St. Pharamond with some friends about
her. It was the last day in February, a day of warm winds and
full sunshine and fragrant warmth. The air was penetrated
with the sweet breath of primroses and the scented narcissus
which were blossoming by millions under the woods of St.
Pharamond. The place had been beautiful before, and under
her directions had become as perfect a sea palace as the south
coast of Europe could show anywhere. She had had a terrace
made ; a long line of rose-coloured marble overhanging the sea,
backed by palms and araucarias, with sheltered seats that no
angry breeze could find out, and wide staircases descending to
the smooth sands below. Here, lying on the cushions and white
40
OTHMAR.
bearskins, and leaning one elbow on the balustrade, she could
watch all the width of the waters as they stretched eastward and
westward, and see the manoeuvres in the cupraces of her friends'
vessels without moving from her own garden. To the sea-
terrace, when it was known that she would receive them, came,
on such sunny afternoons as this, all those whom she deigned
to encourage of the pleasure-seekers on the coast.
To see the sun set from that rose-marble terrace, and to take
a Russian cigarette or a cup of caravan tea beneath those arau-
caria branches, was the most coveted distinction and one of the
surest brevets of fashion in the world. She refused so many;
she received so few ; she was so inexorable in her social laws ;
mere rank alone had no weight with her ; ambassadors could
pass people to courts, but not up those rose-coloured stairs ;
princes and princesses, if they were dull, had no chance to be
made welcome ; and, in fine, to become an habitue there required
so many perfections that the majority of the great world never
passed the gates at all.
' The first qualification for admittance is that they must find
something new to say every day,' she said to the Due de Bethune,
who was in an informal way her first chamberlain. ' The second
is, that they must always amuse me.'
'The first clause a few might perhaps fulfil; but who shall
attain to fulfilment of the second ?'
' That will remain to be seen,' she said with a little yawn,
while she reclined on the white furs and the Eastern tissues, her
feet on a silver globe of hot water and her hands clasped idly
on a tortoiseshell field-glass. It was five o'clock ; the western
sky was a burning vault of rose and gold ; the zenith had the
deep divine blue that is like nothing else in all creation ; the
sea was radiant, purple here, azure there, opal elsewhere, as
the light fell on it; delicate winds blew across it violet-scented
from the land ; the afternoon sun was warm, and as its light
deepened made the pale rose of the marbles glow like the flowers
of a pomegranate tree. She forgot her companions ; she leaned
her head against her cushions and dreamily thought of many
things ; of the day she had first come thither most of all. It
had been nine years before.
Nine years !—what an eternity! She remembered the
bouquet which Othmar had given her on the head of the sea-
stairs. What a lover he had been !—a lover out of a romance—
Lelio, Ruy Bias, Romeo—anything you would. What a pity to
have married him ! It had been commonplace, banal, stupid—■
anybody would have done it. There had been a complete absence
of originality in such a conclusion to their story.
If Laura had married Petrarca, who would have cared for
the sonnets 1
She laughed a little as she thought so. Her companions
OTHMAR.
41
hoped they had succeeded in amusing her. She had not heard
a word they were saying. She gazed dreamily at the sea through
her eyelids, which looked shut, and pursued her own reflec-
tions.
Her companions of the moment were all men; the most
notable of them were Melville, the Due de Bethune, and a
Russian, Loris Loswa.
Melville, on the wing between Rome and Paris, loitered a
week 'or two in Nice, doing his best to shake alms for good
works out of the sinners there, and lifting up the silver clarion
of his voice against the curse of the tripot with unsparing
denunciation.
The Due de Bethune was there because for twelve years of
his still young life he had been uneasy whenever many miles
were between him and the face of his lady, whom he adored
with the hopeless and chivalrous passion of which he had sus-
tained the defence at the Court of Love at Amyot. He would
have carried her muff or her ribbon to the scaffold, like d'Aubiac
and Montmorin, whom he had cited there. He had been
almost the only one of her lovers whom she had deigned to take
the trouble to preserve as a friend. He had been inspired at
first sight with an intense passion for her, which had coloured
and embittered some of the best years of his life. On the death
of Napraxine he had been amongst the first to lay the offer of
his life at her feet. She had rejected him, but without her
customary mockery, even with a certain regret; and she had
employed all the infinite power of her charms and tact of her
intelligence to retain him as a companion whilst rejecting him
as a suitor. Such a position had seemed at first impossible to
him, and had been long painful; but at last he chose rather to
see her on those distant terms than never, and gradually, as time
passed on, he grew familiarised to the sight of her as the wife
of Othmar, and the love he bore to her softened into regard,
and lost its sting and its torment.
In person he was handsome and distinguished-looking to a
great degree; he resembled the portrait of Henri Quatre, and bore
himself like the fine soldier he was; he had a grave tempera-
ment and a romantic fancy ; the cradle of his race was a vast
dark fortress overhanging the iron-bound rocks of Finisterre,
and his early manhood had been ushered in by the terrible
tragedies of the annee terrible. As volunteer with the Army of
the North, Gui de Bethune had seen the darkest side of war and
life ; he had been but a mere youth then, but the misfortunes
of his country had added to the natural seriousness of his
northern temper. The most elegant of gentlemen in the great
world of Paris, he yet had never abandoned himself as utterly
as most men of his age and rank to the empire of pleasure ;
there was a certain reserve and dignity in him which became
42
OTHMAR
tfhe cast of his features and the gravity and sweetness of his
voice.
But he never loved any other woman. And unconsciously
to herself she was so used to consider that implicit and ex-
elusive devotion to her as one of her rights, that she would have
been astonished, even perhaps annoyed, had she seen that he
took his worship elsewhere. Her remembrance had spoiled
twelve years of the promise of his manhood, but if anyone had
reproached her with that, she would have said sincerely enough,
'I cannot help his adoring me.' She would have even taken
credit to herself for the unusual kindliness with which she had
endeavoured to turn the sirocco of love into the mild and harm-
less breeze of friendly sympathy.
The Due de Bethune was one of those conquests which
flattered even her sated and fastidious vanity; and she had been
touched to unwonted feeling by the delicate, chivalrous, and
lofty character of the loyalty he gave her so long.
She jested at him often, but she respected him always;
occasionally she irritated Othmai by saying to him, half in joke
and half in earnest :
' Sometimes I almost wish that I had married Bethune !'
That he remained unmarried for her sake was always
agreeable to her.
Boris Loswa was, on the contrary, one of the gayest of her
many servitors. By birth noble and poor, he had been early
compromised in a students' revolt at Kieff, and through family
influence had been allowed self-exile instead of deportation to
Tobolsk. He had turned his steps to Paris, and, possessing
great facility for art, had pursued the study seriously and so
successfully, that before he was thirty he had become one of the
most noted artists in France.
He had a wonderful talent- for the portraiture of women.
Ho one rendered with so much grace, so much charm, so much
delicate flattery, running deftly in the lines of truth, the pecu-
liar beauties of the mondaine, in which, however much nude
nature may have done, art always does still more. All that
subtle, indescribable loveliness of the woman of society, which
is made up of so many details of tint and costume, and manner
and style, and a thousand other subtle indescribable things,
was caught and fixed by the brush or by the crayon of Boris
Boswa with a power all his own, and a fidelity which became
the most charming of compliments. Ruder artists, truer per-
haps to art than he, grumbled at his method and despised his
renown. ' Faiseur de eMffons ' some students wrote once upon
his door ; and there were many of his brethren who pretended
that his creations were nothing more than audacious, and un-
really brilliant, trickeries.
But detraction did not lock the wheels of his triumphal
OTHMAR.
43
chariot; it glided along with inconceivable rapidity through the
pleasant avenues of popular admiration. And his art pleased
too many connoisseurs of elegant taste and cultured sight not to
have in it some higher and finer qualities than his enemies
allowed to it. He had magical colouring, and as magical a
touch; a woman's portrait, under his treatment, became gor-
geous as a sunbird, delicate as an orchid, ethereal as a butterfly
floating down a sunbeam. Then he was at times arrogant in
his pretensions, fastidious in his selections of sitters; he was
given tc call himself an amateur, which at once disarmed his
critics and increased his vogue ; he was an aristocrat, and very
good-looking, which did not diminish his popularity with any
class of women ; and what increased it still more was, that he
refused many more sitters than he accepted. Not to have been
painted in water colours, or drawn in pastel by Count Loris
Loswa, was to any elegante to be a step behindhand in fashion;
to have a pearl missing from her crown of distinction.
4 If anyone could paint dew on a cobweb it would be Loswa,'
a great critic had said one day. 4 Have you never seen dew on
a cobweb 1 It is the most beautiful thing in the world, espe-
cially when a sunbeam trembles through it.'
His present hostess had a high opinion of his powers,
mingled with a certain depreciation of them. 4 Perhaps it is
only a trick,' she admitted ; 4 but it is a divine trick—a trick of
Hermes.'
He leaned now over the balustrade of the terrace of £t.
Pharamond, the warmth of the western sun shining on his fair
curls and straight profile.
4 A coxcomb can never be a genius,' murmured the Due de
Bethune, glancing towards him with sovereign contempt and
dislike.
4 You are always very porte against poor Loris,' returned his
hostess with a smile. 4 Yes, he has genius in a way, the same
sort of genius that Watteau had, and Coustou and Boucher ; he
should have been born under Louis Quinze; that is his only
mistake.'
4 He is a coxcomb,' repeated Bethune.
4 He seems so to you, because all your life has been filled
with grave thoughts and strong actions. All artists are apt to
seem mere triflers to all soldiers. "Who is that girl he is looking
at 1—what a handsome face !'
She raised herself a little on her elbow, and looked down
over the balustrade ; a small boat with a single red sail and two
women under it were passing under the terrace ; one of them
was old, brown and ugly, the other was young, fair, and with
golden-brown hair curling under a red woollen fisher's cap.
The water was shallow under the marble walls of St. Phara-
mond; the boat was drifting very slowly; there was a pile of
44
OTHMAR.
oranges and lemons in it as its cargo ; the elder woman, with,
one oar in the water, was with her other hand counting copper
coins into a leathern bag in her lap ; the younger, who steered
with a string tied to her foot, was managing the sail with a
practised skill which showed that all maritime exercises were
familiar to her. When she sat down again she looked up at
the terrace above her.
She had a beautiful and uncommon countenance, full of
light; the light of youth, of health, of enjoyment ; she wore a
gown of rough dark-blue sea-stuff much stained with salt water,
and the sleeves of it were rolled up high, showing the whole of
her bare and admirably moulded arms. The memories of
Melville and of his hostess both went back to the day when
they had seen another boat upon those waters with the happy
loveliness of youth within it.
Loris Loswa, full of outspoken admiration, exhausted all his
epithets of praise as he watched the little vessel drift by them,
slowly, very slowly, for there was no wind to aid it, and the oar
was motionless in the water.
' Stay, oh stay !' he cried to the boat, and began to murmur
the 4 Enfant, si j'e'tais roi '
4 If you were a king you could hardly do better than what,
I am quite sure, you will do as it is,' said Nadine. 4 Find out
where she lives, and make her portrait for next year's Salon.
She is very handsome, and that old scarlet cap is charming. Let
us recompense her for passing, and astonish her.'
As she spoke she drew a massive gold bracelet off her own
arm, and leaning farther down over the marble parapet, threw
it towards the girl. Her aim was good ; the boat was almost
motionless, the bracelet was very weighty; it fell with admir-
able precision where it was intended to fall—on the knees of
the girl as she sat in the prow behind the pile of golden fruit.
4 How astonished and pleased she will be !' said Loswa. 4 It
is only you, Madame, who have such apropos inspirations.'
Even as he spoke the maiden in the boat had taken up the
bracelet, looked at it a moment with a frown upon her face, then
without a second's pause had sprung to her feet to obtain a
better attitude for her effort, and with a magnificent sweep of
her bare arm upward and backward cast the thing back again
on high on to the balustrade, where it rolled to the feet of its
mistress.
Without waiting an instant, she plucked the oars up, one
from the hand of the old woman the other from the bottom of
the boat, and with vigorous strokes drove her sluggish old
vessel past the terrace wall, never once looking up, and not
' heeding the cries of her companion. In a few moments, under
her fierce swift movements, the boat was several yards away,
leaving the shallow water for the deeper, and hidden altogether
OTHMAR
45
from the gaze of her admirers by the red sail flaked with amber
and bistre stains, where wind, and sun, and storm had marked
it for their own.
' What has happened ?' said Melville, who had not under-
stood the episode of the bracelet, rising and coming towards
them.
'We are in Arcadia, Monsignor 1' cried Nadine. ' A pea-
sapt girl rejects a jewel !'
' Is she a peasant ? I should doubt it,' said B^thune.
Melville looked through one of the spy-glasses.
' No, no ! It is Damaris Berarde,' he said as he laid it aside.
' She is by no means a peasant. She is a great heiress in her
own little way, and as proud as if she were dauphine of
France.'
' Damaris ! What a pretty name !' said Loswa. ' It makes
one think of damask roses, and she is rather like one. Where
does she live, Monsignor 1'
' She lives with her grandfather on a little island which
belongs to him. He is a very well-to-do man, but a great brute
in many ways ; he is not cruel to the girl, but were she to cross
his will I imagine he would be. Krapotkine is his hero and
Karl Marx his prophet; he is the most ferocious anarchist.
You know the sort of man. It is a sort very common in France,
and especially so in the South. Did you give her a jewel,
Madame Nadege 1 Ah, that was a very great offence! She
must have been mortally offended. When that child is en fete
sPe has a row of pearls as big as any in your jewel-cases.'
' She looked a poor girl, and I thought I should please her,'
said Nadine, with impatience. 'Who was to tell that the
owner of pearls as big as sparrows' eggs was rowing in a fruit-
boat, bare-armed and bare-headed ?'
' Where did you say that she lived 1' asked Loswa, curious
and interested.
' Oh, on an island a long way off from here,' said Melville,
regretting that he had spoken of this source of dissension.
•Take me to that island, Monsignor,' murmured Loris
Loswa in his ear.
' Oh, indeed no,' said the priest hastily. ' You are a
" cursed aristocrat ;" the old man would receive you with a
thrust of a pike.'
'I would take my chance of the pike,' said Loswa, 'and!
would assure him that the future lies with the Anarchists, for I
believe it, and I would not add that I also think that their millen-
nium will be most highly uncomfortable.'
' Will you take me to that island, Monsignor! ' said Nadine.
' It will not be favourable to fashionable impressionists like
Loris.'
Loswa coloured a little with irritation ; he had not thought
46
OTHMAR.
she would overhear his request. He was, besides, despite his
vanity, always vaguely sensible that her admiration of "his
powers was tinged with contempt.
' You, Madame !' cried Melville, cordially wishing that the
island of Damaris B^rarde was far away in the Pacific in lieu of
a score of leagues off the shores of Savoy. * Would I take the
world incarnate, the most seductive and irresistible of all its
votaries, into a convent of Oblates to torture all the good
Sisters condemned to eternal seclusion ? That poor little girl is
a little recluse, a little barbarian, but she is happy in her soli-
tude, in her saumgerie. Were she once to see the Countess
Othmar she would know peace no more.'
' She must see many very like me if she live a mile or so off
these shores,' said Nadine, dismissing the subject with indiffe-
rence. ' I am sure it is she who is to be envied if she can find
any entertainment in rowing about in a boat full of oranges.
I would do it this moment if it would amuse me, but it would
not. That is the penalty of having sophisticated and corrupted
tastes. How old is your paragon 1'
' Did I say she' was a paragon 1 She is a good little girl.
Her age 1 I should think fifteen, sixteen ; certainly not more.
Her birth is rather curious. Her mother was an actress, and
her father the master of a fruit-carrying brig ; dissimilar enough
progenitors. Her father was drowned, and her mother died of
nostalgia for the stage ; and Damaris was left to the care of
her grandfather, the fierce old Communist I have described to
you. However, he is not so terrible a bigot after all, for he
allowed her to be taught by the Sisters at the Yillefranche
Convent, as a concession to me when I knew him first, in return
for a little service I had done him. He thinks it does not much
matter what women do ; to him they are only beasts of burden;
he likes to see his hung with pearls only as he puts tassels and
ribbons on his cows when they are taken to market.'
* And what service did you render him ?'
' Oh, nothing worth mentioning; a trifle,' said Melville,
who never spoke of his own deeds of heroism, which were
many. The old man's younger and only remaining son had
lain dying of Asiatic cholera, brought to the coast in some in-
fected load of Eastern rags, with which they had manured the
olives one hot August day. Not a soul had dared to approach
the plague-stricken bed, except the courtly churchman whose
smile was so sought by great ladies and whose wit was so prized
at dinner-parties. He had not abandoned it until all was over,
and with his own hands had aided Jean Be'rarde to lay the body
of his boy in mother-earth. When the grave was filled up, the
old socialist, to whom priests had been as loathliest vermin,
gave his knotted work-worn hand to the slender white hand of
Melville:
OTHMAR.
47
• The only one that had the courage !' he muttered. 4 Do
not try to do anything with me, it would be no use ; but do
what you like about the child. I will say nothing. You alone
stayed by me to see her uncle die.'
So the girl Damaris had been allowed to go in her boat to
learn of the Sisters on the mainland, and had been allowed to
go also to Mass on high days and holy days. But Melville saw
no necessity to say all this to his worldly friends upon the sea-
terrace of St. Pharamond. Nay, he even reproached himself
that, in a momentary unconsidered impulse, he had given the
name of the girl to Loswa. Loswa was not perhaps a man to
go in cold blood on a seducer's errand, but he was conceited,
sensual, egotistic, and accustomed to take his own way without
much consideration for its consequences, whether to himself or
to others. And the worldly wisdom of Melville told him he
had committed an imprudence.
'•Jean Berarde,' he continued, 1 of course, abhor3 priests,
and would have a general massacre of the Church. But I
chanced to do him a service, as I said, some time ago, and so he
allows me now and then to go and sit under his big olives and
talk to the child, and even, grudgingly, lets her go to Mass now
and then. His past is written clearly enough in the history of
Savoy, but he either does not know or does not care anything
about his descent. All he does care about are his profits from
olives and oranges, and also, I suspect, from smuggling. What
is infinitely droll is, that the principles which slew his fore-
fathers and destroyed the cradle of his race have become his
own. Perhaps the fury of the (Ja ira got into him, being be-
gotten, as he was, in that time of blood and flame through
which his progenitors passed. Anyhow he is the fiercest of
socialists now.
4 The Counts de la Berarde were very mighty people ; almost
as great as their suzerains and neighbours, the Counts of Dau-
phine. The cradle of their race, of which you may see one
tower standing now, was set amongst the glaciers and gorges of
the Yal St. Christophe ; it stood above the Romanclie on a
great slope of gneiss, with the snow mountains at its back. Up
to the time of Richelieu the Bdrardes were omnipotent, and they
had sway as far down as the sea coast, and it is said that sea
piracy, as well as stoppage of land travellers going on their
horses and sumpter mules through the passes, swelled their
wealth and their power not a little. All these mountain lords
were robbers in those days. If you have never been up as far
as the St. Christophe valley, you should go as soon as the
weather opens and the roads are passable ; all the cols and the
combes are fine, well worth a little Alpine climbing; and the
Pointe des Ecrins may hold its own with the peaks of the
Engadine.
4S
OTHMAK.
' Well, to revert to the Counts de Berarde : Richelieu broke
the back of their power—it is odd that a Churchman, doing all
he could to strengthen the hands of a king, did in truth lay the
first stone of what became centuries after the Revolution!—
their chiefs were beheaded on the ramparts of Briangon, their
castle in the Alps was razed, and only two or three of their
younger scions survived the general destruction of the race.
From one of these distant branches, Jean de la Berarde, who
had a small stronghold on the sea, and who became, by all these
executions, the head of the family, this old man who owns
Bonaventure, and is the rudest and roughest of cruisers and
farmers, is lineally descended. I have been at pains to make
out his genealogy. These matters always have interest for me,
and it is curious to trace how the old patrician strain comes out
in the girl, his grand-daughter, though he himself is nothing
more than a boor. The Berardes never recovered the mas-
sacres and confiscations of the reign of Louis XIII., though they
were small suzerains on the sea-coast up to the days of Louis XV.
They then fell into poverty, and lost their hold over their
neighbours ; the Terror extinguished them entirely; they were
swallowed up in the night of anarchy. But Jean Berarde of
Bonaventure is legally heir of the Count Alain de la Berarde,
who was taken to Toulon, and shot there by the Maratists of
Freron and Barras. His only son, being a lad at the time, was
saved by disguising himself as a fisherman, and, being utterly
beggared by the Jacobins, took to the coasting trade, and in
time saved money, married a peasant, and bought the island :
my socialist friend was his son.
' That is the story of these people, who in two generations
have dropped the very memory of the fierce nobles they sprang
from so entirely that the old man on Bonaventure is as rabid a
Communist as any man can be who has property and clings to
it. There—I have been terribly prosy, and Madame will say
that all this genealogy is of no earthly interest to her ; and,
indeed, it cannot be to any of you, only that to a student of
human nature it is always, in a measure, interesting to see how
old races look under new hoods.'
'In this instance,' said Xadine smiling, 'the old race looks
very pretty under the Phrygian cap. The girl is unusually
handsome. You would be wild to paint her, Loswa, if only she
were a duchess !'
' I would ask no better fate as it is,' he replied. ' But per-
haps it might not be so easy. The grandfather Berarde is sure
to be a Cerberus.'
' You must air your destructive doctrines before him ; he
will be fascinated ; he will not know that you live with the
duchesses, and would not trouble yourself actually to walk the
length of a boulevard to save All The Russias.'
OTHMAR.
49
'I am not a political hypocrite, Madame, though you are
pleased to ridicule me as an artistic impostor,' said Loswa, with
an angry flush on his face.
She cast the end of her cigarette into the sea.
' Oh no ; you are not a hypocrite ; you would very much
like to see the destruction of the whole world, provided only
that your own armchair should withstand the shock. There
are so many anarchists of that type ; and, indeed, why should
you die for politics or creed when you can live and paint such
charming pictures ? For your pictures are very charming,
though they "are all pearl-powder and point-lace, all satins and
brocades, and we are all going to Court in every one of them.'
'Vandyke did not paint beggars,' said Loswa, who would
have lost his temper had he dared.
She looked at him with amusement.
'But you are not Vandyke, my dear Loris ; you are, at
most, Lely or Boucher, and the pearl-powder has got into your
brushes a little more than it should have done. You have only
one defect as an artist, but it is a capital offence, and you will
not outgrow it—you are never natural!'
He was silent from vexation.
He had an exaggerated opinion of his own genius, and saw
in himself a mingling of Clouet and Boucher, Leonardo and
Largilliere, and was often restless and nervous under his sense
of her depreciative criticism ; but he was very proud of the
intimacy he was allowed to enjoy with her, and usually bore
her chastisement with a spaniel's humility; a quality rare in
him, spoilt and courted darling of high dames as he was.
' If you do take a portrait of that child,' she pursued, point-
ing to the distant boat, ' you will be utterly unable to portray
her as she is ; you will never give the sea-stains on her gown,
the sea-tan on her face, the rough dull red of that old worn
sea-cap. You will idealise her, which with you means that you
will make her utterly artificial. She will become a goddess of
liberty, and she will look fike a maid of honour frisking under
a republican disguise to amuse a frisky Court. The simple
sea-born creature yonder, rowing through blue water, and
thinking of the sale of her oranges or the capture of her fish,
will be altogether and forever beyond you. It is always beyond
the Lelys and the Bouchers, though it would not have been
beyond Vandyke. Do you think you could paint a forest-tree
or a field-flower 1 Not you ; your daisy would become a gar-
denia, and your larch would be a lime on the boulevards.'
' Am I to understand, Madame, that you have suddenly
become a patroness of nature 1 Then surely even I, poor
creature of the boulevards though I be, need not despair of
becoming natilrlich 1'
' You mistake,' said Nadine with a little sadness. ' I have
OTHMAR.
lived in a hothouse, but I havd always envied those who lived
in the open air. Besides, I am not an artist; I am a mere
mondaine. I was born in the world as an oyster is in its shal-
lovrs. But an artist, if he be worthy the name, should abhor
the world. He should live and work and think and dream in
the open air, and in full contact with nature. Do you suppose
Millet could have breathed an hour in your studio with its
velvets and tapestries and lacquer work, with its draperies and
screens and rugs, and carefully shaded windows? He would
have been stifled. Why is nearly all modern work so valueless ?
Because it is nearly all of it studio-work ; work done at high
pressure and in an artificial light. Do you think that Michel
Angelo could have endured to dwell in Cromwell Road ? Or do
you think that Murillo or Domenichino would have built them-
selves an hotel in the Avenue Villiers? Why is Basil Yerescha-
guin, with all his faults and deformities, original and in a way
sublime ? Because he works in the open air ; in no light tern-
pered otherwise than by the clouds as they pass, or by the
leaves as they move.'
' For heaven's sake !' cried Loswa with a gesture of appeal.
She laughed a little.
* Ah, my poor Court poodle, with your pretty tricks and
graces !—of course, the very name of our wolf of the forests is
terrible to you. But I suppose the Court has made the poodle what
he is ; I suppose it is as much your duchesses' fault as your own.'
Then she turned away and left this favourite of fortune and
great ladies to his own reflections. They were irritated and
mortified ; bitter with that bitterest of all earthly things,
wounded vanity.
Good heavens ! he thought, with a sharp stinging sense of a
woman's base ingratitude, was it for this that he had painted
her portrait in such wise that season after season each succeed-
ing one had been the centre of all eyes in the Paris Salon ?
Was it for this that he had immortalised her face looking out
from a cloud of shadow like a narcissus in the mists of March 1
—that he had drawn her in every attitude and every costume,
from the loose white draperies of her hours of langour to the
golden tissues and crowding jewels of her court-dress at imperial
palaces? Was it for this that he had composed that divinest
portrait of them all, in which, with a knot of stephanotis at her
breast and a collar of pearls at her throat, she seemed to smile
at all who looked on her that slight, amused, disdainful smile
which had killed men as surely as any silver-hilted dagger lying
in an ivory case, which once was steeped in aqua Tofana for
Lucrezia or Bianca ? Was it for this !—to be called oppro-
brious, derisive names, and have Basil Yereschaguin, the
ainter of death, of carnage, of horror, of brown Hindoos and
ideous Tartars, vaunted before him as his master 1
OTHMAR.
51
He hated Vereschaguin as a Sevres vase, had it a mind and
soul to hate, might hate the bronze statue of a gladiator ; and
his tormentor, in a moment of mercilessness and candour, had
wounded him with a weapon whose use he never forgave.
' He is a coxcomb ! Bethune is quite right,' she said of him
when Melville hinted that she had been too cruel. ' He has
marvellous talent and technique, but he dares to think that these
two are genius. If he had not likened himself to Vandyke I
might perhaps never have told him what I think of his place
in art. He is a pretty painter, a very pretty painter, and his
portraits of me are charming ; but if they be looked at at all in
the twentieth century they will hardly rank higher than we
rank now the pastels of Rosalba; certainly not higher than we
rank the portraits of Greuze.'
1 If I were a painter I would be content to be Greuze,' said
Melville with a smile.
' No you would not,' said Nadine ; ' you would not be con-
tent to be a d'Estrees in your own profession, nor any other
mere Court cardinal.'
CHAPTER VII.
The following morning Loris Loswa rose much earlier than his
wont, and went out of the gilded gate of the pretty little villa
which he had taken for the season at St. Raphael; a coquettish
place with large gardens and trellised paths overhung with
creepers ; and down below, a small cutter ready for use in a
nook of the bay where the aloes and the mimosa grew thickest.
It all belonged to a friend of his, who was away in distant lands
to escape his creditors, and by whose misfortunes Loswa had
profited with that easy egotism which had been so advantageous
to him throughout his life, and which looked so good-natured
that no one resented it. He descended this morning to the
shore by the winding cactus-lined path which led down to it,
and asked the sailors if they knew of an island called Bona-
venture. They knew nothing about it; they, however, con-
suited the admiralty maps and found it: a tiny dot some leagues
to the south-westward.
A fisherman who was on the beach at the time told him
more. He knew the island, everybody knew it; but nobody
ever was allowed to land there ; its owner was an odd man,
morose and suspicious ; the demoiselle was good and kind ; the
islet belonged to Jean Berarde, who owned every inch of it. He
would leave it to the girl of course. It was small, but of very
considerable profit. Loswa listened with impatience, and told
,|iis skipper to make for the isle as fast as he could. He himself
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knew nothing of the sea, and hated it; but he was pique au jeu.
Melville had almost forbidden him to go thither, and the great
lady who had ridiculed him had doubted his power to paint the
picture of a peasant-girl. The irritation of antagonism had
aroused all the obstinacy and all the capricious self-will of an
undisciplined and vain nature.
' To Bonaventure !' he said with triumph, as in the glad and
cloudless morning air his little vessel danced over the waves,
the great seagulls wheeling and screaming in her wake. There
were a buoyant sea and a favouring breeze.
Loswa detested both sea and country, and was never at heart
content off the asphalte of the boulevards. But since it would
have looked very vulgar to spend his whole winter in Paris, he
selected the south coast usually for the colder months, because
the world went with him there, because he saw so many faces
that were familiar, and because on this shore so thickly set with
cMlets and villas, so artificially adorned, so trimmed, and
trained, and levelled, and planted by architect and landscape
gardener, it was possible for him to forget that he was not in
Paris ; the very sea itself, so blue, so tranquil, so idly basking
in broad light and luminous horizons, seemed like the painted
sea of an operetta by Lecocq.
Besides, though he had no pleasure in rural or maritime
things, found no joy in solitude and no consolation in nature
for the loss of the movement of the world, he could not have
been the fine colourist he was without possessing a fine sense of
colour, and the power to appreciate beautiful lines, and all the
changeful effects of light and shade. He did not see Nature as
Millet or Corot saw it, but as Lancret or Coypel saw it. It was
only a background for a nymph or a goddess to him as to them ;
but he was not insensible to the forms which made up that
background : the sunlit vapour, the blue mountain, the golden
woodland, or the shadowy lake.
The sea was full of life : market-boats, fishing-boats, skiffs of
all kinds, with striped curved lateen sails, were crossing each
other on it. There were a few yachts, French, English, American,
at anchor in the bays, in waiting for the cup-races ; there were
some merchant ships afar off, brown-canvased brigs bearing in
from Genoa or Ajaccio, and the ugly black smoke of a big
steamer here and there defaced the marvellous blue and rose of
the air at the birth of day. The sea was buoyant but not rough,
his light cutter flew airily as a curlew over the azure plain.
There were mists to the southward, lovely white mists, airy and
suggestive as the veil of a bride, but they floated away before
the sun, so rapidly as the day grew on, that the bold indented
lines of Corsica became visible, bathed in a rosy and golden
warmth. He had enough soul in him to feel the beauty of the
morning though he had been playing baccarat at the club till an
OTHMAR.
53
hour or two previously ; to be conscious of the charm of this
full clear sunrise which bathed the world of waters in its radi-
ance, of the silver-shining wings of the white gulls dipping in
the hollow of the wave, of the grandeur of the land as he looked
back at it with its semicircles of snow-capped hills towering to
the skies. But he would not have cared for them had there
been no human interest beside them.
After sailing steadily some two hours or so they sighted, and
in another two hours neared, a little island which was certainly
the one marked on the French chart as Bonaventure, lying all
alone far out to the south-west. Loswa did not need the
positive assertion of his crew to tell him that he had arrived at
his desired goal. It was small, conical-shaped, high, and steep,
with a broad reef of sand to the northward. It rose aloft in
the air, grey with olives, green with orange-trees. No habita-
tion was visible upon it; but on the sand there was drawn up
high and dry an old boat with a sail of Yenetian red stained
brown by wear and tear.
The island had evidently been made fruitful at the cost of
many centuries of labour; the natural rock of it was terraced
with many ridges rising one above another, each planted with
productive trees ; the soil had no doubt been carried up load by
load with infinite trouble ; but the effect of the whole was
luxuriant and picturesque, as the conelike mass of verdure,
here silver-grey and there emerald green, towered upward in
the thin sun-pierced vapours of the early day.
The soundings showed deep water almost up to the rock
itself.
' I am going to sketch,' said Loswa to his skipper as he
pointed to the level strip of sand. ' Let me land there.'
Their assertions that no one ever did land there he dis-
regarded. A small boat was rowed up to the strip of beach, and
he got out, bidding his sailors wait round the edge of a jutting
rock, which would give them shade as the day should advance.
He glanced at the old red coble drawn up on the shore. It
was the same he had seen three days before ; he felt sure of it
by its colour and its build.
He looked about him and around him for a means of ascent,
and saw a zigzag path that wound up through the hanging
orchards of olive, of lemon, and of orange, and higher still the
rope-ladder called passerelle, so often used in the Riviera to
climb steep rocks. The air was full of the intense perfume of
the trees, which were starred all over with their white blossoms.
He thought of Sicily, where you have to shut your door against
the fragrance of the fields in spring, lest you should faint and
sleep for ever from their fragrance.
The path and the passerelle would certainly, he reasoned, lead
up to any house there might be at the summit. He slung his
54
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sketching things over his shoulder and began to mount the
crooked rocky road of moss-grown stone with cyclamen growing
in its crevices, and the rose-hued flowers of the leafless cereus
springing up here and there.
But he was not allowed to ascend unchallenged ; high above
him there was a rustling sound, then a deep angry growl, and
in a moment or two a great white Pyrenean dog showed himself,
stared down at him with frank hostility, and bounded headlong
from ridge to ridge underneath the boughs, with full intent to
reach him and devour him. But a voice called aloud : ' To, to,
Clovis !' and Loswa smiled. He knew he had succeeded.
Through the labyrinth of branches, springing after the dog,
came the girl who had thrown back the gold bracelet to the lady
of St. Pharamond.
4 The dog will not hurt you whilst I am here,' she called out
to him. ' But he might kill you if I were not. Do you want
my grandfather ? Why have you landed here 1 It is private
ground. He has gone to Grasse for two days to see an oil mer-
chant.'
Loswa felt that he could not have timed his visit more
felicitously.
' Good heavens ! what a handsome child,' he thought, as he
bowed to her with his easy grace and that eloquent glance
which had power to stir the most languid pulses of his patrician
sitters.
' I landed in hopes that I might be allowed to paint the
view from thi3 exquisite little spot,' he said with well-acted
hesitation in his manner. ' A friend of mine, who is, I think,
a friend of yours too, a priest of the name of Melville, has
spoken to me so often of the beauty of your island.'
Standing above him, holding the big dog by the collar, she
smiled at the name of Melville, and came a few steps nearer
with more confidence. She never for a moment doubted the
entire truth of what he said.
Her blue-and-brown-striped linen gown was but a wisp ; it
had been drenched through in its time with sea-water, and had
the stains of grasses, and dews, and sands, and fruits upon it;
it was bound round her waist by a leathern belt, and its short
sleeves were pulled up to the shoulder, as they had been the day
before. But no artist would have wished for a better dress, and
even a sculptor would not have desired to remove it from the
limbs that it clung to so closely that it hid nothing of their
perfect shape and the curves of the throat and breast that had
the indecision and softness of childhood with the fulness of
feminine growth. Her hair was tucked away under a red fisher
cap, a veritable bonnet rouge ; and her large brilliant eyes, of an
indescribable colour, were shining, as if the sun was imprisoned
in them, under level, dark delicate eyebrows. Her skin was
OTHMAR.
55
fair, her hair auburn. He thought he had seen nothing so
perfectly lovely in all his life : it was a living Titian, a virgin
Giorgione.
'Anyone who knows Monsignor Melville is welcome to
Bonaventure,' she said frankly. ' It is a pity my grandfather is
away. He does not like strangers, but a friend of Monsignor's
would not seem so to him. No one has ever been here to
paint anything before. What is it you want to paint—the
house %'
Loswa knew that he" had done a dishonourable thing, and a
mean one, in using Melville's name as a passport to a place
where Melville would never have allowed him to go had he
known it; but, like everyone else, having begun on a wrong
course he went on in it. He had succeeded so well at the com-
mencement that he would not listen to that delicacy of good
breeding which represented conscience to him.
' Do not be afraid of Clovis. He will not hurt you now he
sees that I speak to you ; he is so sensible. Will you come now
or another day 1' she asked him with the frankness of aboy.
' We have a Latin poet who tells us that to-day alone is our
own,' said Loswa with a smile. ' I will come now at once, and
most gladly. Clovis is a grand dog and a good guard for his
young mistress,' he added ; thinking to himself, ' how lovely she
is, and she knows it no more than if she were a sea anemone on
the shore ; and she looks at me and speaks to me with no more
embarrassment than if I were but the wooden figure of a
ship !'
'I will come up most gladly,' he said again, with more
ardour than he showed in a duchess's drawing-rooms. ' It is so
very kind of you. I am sure the view from the summit must
be magnificent. I fear though,' he added, with hypocritical
modesty, ' that it will be beyond my powers.'
' I hope not. I shall like to see anyone paint,' she said with
cordiality ; and added, a little ashamed, 'I have never seen
anyone paint; I have heard of such a thing of course, and there
are the pictures in the churches and chapels which one knows
were painted by men ; but I have no idea of how it is done.'
'You should have been shown by Raphael himself,' said
Loswa.
' Raphael 1' she echoed. ' Oh no, he is our fruit-packer ;
he would not know how to do it any better than I do,' she said
as she turned and began to ascend to show him the way.
' Can you climb 1' she added, looking at him doubtfully. ' I
mean climb where it is like a stone wall 1'
She had taken him under her protection and into her favour,
but he felt that he would have preferred to this frank innocent
friendliness a certain hesitation and embarrassment such as
would have indicated a different kind of sentiment as possible.
56
OTHMAR.
She was as kind to him, as simple and frank and candid with
him, as if he were any old fisherman that she had known from
her birth. It was not what he desired, yet it had a certain
charm ; it was so childlike, so honest, so free from all affecta-
£ion or self-consciousness, or lurking suspicion or intention or
any sort.
' Clovis is so good,' she pursued, all unconscious of his re-
flections. * His wife (she is called Brunehildt) had four puppies
yesterday. Two were drowned ; it was such a pity ! I am
going to give one of the two left to Monsignor; he is always
fond of dogs. Take care how you come up, it is very steep;
for me I am used to it. I run up and down a dozen times a
day ; but a person hot used to it may slip.'
It was, indeed, steep, and often there were ledges of rock
in the way which had to be jumped over or scrambled over in
any handiest fashion, whilst on others the perpendicular face of
the cliff could only be ascended by the rope-ladder so often in
use in the Riviera ; but Loswa, in an indolent way, was athletic ;
he had in his youth been skilled in gymnastic exercises, and
though now enervated by his life in cities, he kept apace with
her, and soon had gained the level summit of the island, a broad
green tableland planted with olives and oranges, with here and"
there a great stone pine, relic of the wild pine woods which,
before the petite culture had stepped thither with axe and spade,
had clothed doubtless the whole of Bonaventure down to the
water's edge.
There was some ground planted with cabbages and arti-
chokes, some place where maize would be planted later in the
season, but the chief of the land was orchard; and in the midst
of it stood a long, low whitewashed house, with pink shutters
and a tiled roof.
' Row look !' she said, with a little pride in her voice as she
stretched her hand out to the northward view.
Everywhere far below them, stretching out to infinite in-
definite horizons, was the blue sea studded with various sails ;
and the beautiful coast stretched likewise away into endless
realms of sparkling light; the range of the mountains rose blue
and snow-crowned behind that fairy shore ; and this enchanted
paradise was always there to call men's thoughts to nature, and
they in it only though tof the hell of the punters, the caress of
the cocotte, the shining gold rolling in under the croupier's rake !
Familiar as he was with this sea and land, he could not re-
strain an exclamation of wondering admiration.
' Ro wonder you have become the beautiful thing you are,
looking on all that beauty from your birth !' he said in an im-
pulse of frank admiration, mingled with his habitual language
of flattery.
OTHMAR.
57
The girl laughed.
'Do you think I am beautiful? Everybody always says
that. But grandfather grumbles ; he says it is the devil's gift.
Myself, I do not know ; the flowers are beautiful, but I do not
think that human beings are so.'
4 And you have grown up like a flower '
4 How did you know about me ?' she interrupted him. 4 Did
Monsignor Melville speak so much of me ? He was with my
uncle in his last illness, you know, and whenever he is on this
coast he comes to us. You like the view ?' she continued with
satisfaction and a sense of possession of it. ' Yes ; it is good
to see, is it not ? But I am happier when I am down on the
shore.'
4 Indeed ! Why ?'
4 Because there one only wants to swim, and here one wants
to fly. Now, one does swim ; one cannot fly.'
4 To covet the impossible is the only divine thing in man,'
said he with a smile. 4 It is just because we have that longing
to fly that we may hope we are made to do something more than
walk.'
'Do you mean that discontent is good?' she said with
surprise.
'In a certain measure, perhaps.'
4 Content is better,' she said sturdily.
41 hope you will always be blessed with it. It is like a
swallow, it brings peace where it rests,' said her guest with a
little sigh ; and he thought: 4 My lady yonder is never content;
it is the penalty of culture. Will this child be so always in her
ignorance,? Will she marry the skipper of a merchant-ship or
the owner of an olive-yard, and live happily ever afterwards,
with a tribe of little brown-eyed children that will run out into
the road with flowers for the carriages ? I suppose so ; why
not ? Melville said in her little way she was an heiress. Of
course, all the louts that own a fishing-coble or an acre of
orange-trees will be eager to annex her and her island.'
She was walking, by his side under the gnarled olives which
had been stripped a month before of their black berries. She
was looking at him frankly, curiously, with doubtful glances.
41 am afraid you are of the noblesse,' she said, abruptly
stopping short within a yard of the house.
4 What makes you think that ?' he said, aware that he re-
ceived the prettiest of indirect compliments which a much
flattered life had ever given him.
4 You look like it,' she answered. 4 You have an air about
you, and your linen is so fine, and your voice is soft and slow.
It is only the noble people who have that kind of music in
their voices.'
58
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* I wish I were a peasant if it would please you better, he
said gallantly.
She answered very literally :
' That is nonsense. You cannot wish such a thing ; no one
ever wishes to go down. And, for myself, I do not mind ; it is
my grandfather who hates the aristocrats.'
' So I have heard,' said Loswa. ' But he is out to-day, you
say. "Will you not let me sketch this superb view 1'
'Yes, if you like. I never saw anyone paint, as I told you ;
I shall be glad to see it. But will you not come in and eat and
drink something first? I have heard that the nobles,- when
they are not dressing and dancing, are always eating and
drinking.'
'Nothing more cruel was ever said of them by all their
satirists,' answered Loswa. 'It will be very kind indeed if
you will give me a glass of water ; I need nothing else.'
' You shall have some of Catherine's cakes,' said the girl,
' and some coffee and a fresh egg-. Catherine—she is our ser-
vant—makes beautiful cakes when she is not cross. Why are
people who are old so often cross ? Is it the trouble of living so
long that makes them so 1 If it be that, I would rather die
young. I think one ought to be like the olive-trees ; the older
they are the better fruit they bear.'
Then she called aloud, ' Catherine ! Catherine ! here is a
stranger who wants some breakfast,' and ran across the bit of
rough grass before the house, where cocks and hens, pigeons
and rabbits, a tethered ass and a pet kid, were enjoying the
fine morning together in harmony.
An old woman in a white cap showed herself for a moment
in the doorway, grumbled inarticulately, and disappeared.
' She is gone to get it,' said Damaris. ' She is very cross, as
I tell you, but she is very good for all that. I have known her
all my life. Her honey is the best in the country. She always
prays for the bees. My grandfather does not know it, but
when it is swarming time she says a paternoster over each hive,
and the honey comes so yellow, so smooth, so fine ; its taste is
like the smell of thyme. Come through the house to my ter-
race ; you shall have your breakfast there.'
He followed her through the house, an ugly whitewashed
place, with nothing of grace or colour about it, though cleaner
than most such dwellings are upon the mainland; it smelt
sweetly, too, from the flood of fragrant, orange-scented air
which poured through past its open doors, and the odour from
the bales of packed oranges which were stored in its passages and
lumber-rooms, awaiting transport to the beach below. In the
guest-chamber there was some old oaken furniture of which he
recognised the age and value, and some chairs of repousse
leather, which would have fetched a high price ; but it was all
OTHMAR.
59
dreary, dull, stiff, and the figure of the girl, with her brilliant,
luminous beauty, and her vividly-coloured clothes, looked like
a pomegranate flaming in a dusky cellar.
' Come out here,' she said to him, and led him out on to a
little terrace.
It was whitewashed, like all the stone of the house, but it
was gay and bright. Its gallery was covered with a Canadian
vine still red ; it seemed to hang above the sea, so steeply did
that side of the island slope downward beneath it ; it had some
cane chairs in it and a little marble table, a red-striped awning
was stretched above it.
' This is all mine,' she said, with pride. ' You shall eat here.
Take that long chair : it came off one of the great ships that go
the voyages to India ; the mate of the ship gave it me. I
made that awning myself out of a sail. I bring my books here
and read. Sometimes I sit here half the night instead of going
to bed—that is, when the nightingales are singing in the orange-
trees. My grandfather will always have the house-door shut
and bolted by eight o'clock, even in summer. So I come here ;
it seems such folly to go to bed in the short nights, they are as
bright as day. The time to sleep then is noon. You rest, and
I will go and bring Catherine, and your breakfast.'
He caught her hand as she was about to go away.
'Pray, stay,' he murmured. 'It is to hear you talk that I
care; I want nothing else, not even that glass of water ; I only
made it an excuse to come into your house.'
She drew her hand from him and frowned a little.
' Why should you make an excuse ? If you had said ycu
wished to come I would have let you ; if you do not want to
eat there is nothing to come for; I am never indoors except to
eat, or if it rain very heavily.'
Then she went, and he dared not detain her lest he should
alarm her. She seemed to him like a bird which alights near a
stranger so long as there is no movement, but at a single sound
takes flight. Left alone he sat still in the chair she had assigned
to him, and gazed over the sea; there was nothing except sea
visible from this little terrace.
CHAPTER VIII.
In a little while she returned, bearing in her strong grasp an
old silver tray, with coffee, cream, and sugar in old silver pots.
The servant followed her, cross, wrinkled and suspicious,
carrying bread and honey and oranges, and a pile of sweet flat
cakes. Damaris set down her tray on the marble table.
' We have a few things like this,' she said, touching the old
silver. 'We were noble, too, once, very, very long ago, they
6o
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say; but my grandfather does not believe it. I like to believe
it. It may be nonsense, but one likes to fancy that ever, ever
so long ago one's forefathers were fighting men, not labourers ;
it seems to make one ready to fight too. It must make a dif-
ference, I think, in oneself whether they were soldiers or slaves.
Not, you know,' she added, after a moment's pause, ' that I do
not think la petite culture the happiest life in the world ; but the
labourer is narrow, mean, horribly fond of money, and very
rough to his women, and I suppose the poor were still worse in
that distant time.'
She poured him out his coffee as she spoke, and filled up the
cup with foaming milk, and pressed on him the rolls, the cakes,
the honey. The ehina was the heavy earthenware which rustic
people use, and did not suit the old silver of the tray and of the
vessels ; but Loswa, for once, was not critical; he thought he
had never tasted anything more delicious than was this island
fare.
Damaris, having served him, ate and drank herself, sitting
■on a wooden stool beside the balustrade covered with the red-
dened creeper. She did not want anything, but not to break
bread with a guest seemed to her bad manners. She had pulled
her sleeves down and put on shoes and stockings. She had
thrown aside her woollen cap ; her silky, golden curls shone in
the sun ; her eyes looked at him with honest inquisitiveness
and astonishment. Suddenly she said aloud :
' Ah ! I remember now ! It was you who were with that
lady yesterday when she threw me the gold bracelet over the
wall.'
Loswa assented, but he would have preferred to forget his
friend at that moment, being uneasily conscious of the contempt
with which his present position on this terrace would be re-
garded by her did she ever know of it.
' Did she take me for a beggar ?' said Damaris, with anger
glistening under her long lashes.
' Oh no, she only wished to please you—to surprise you.
You see, she could not tell who you were.'
The girl's cheeks grew a deeper rose.
' That is true,' she said, with her first touch of embarrass-
ment; ' I was rowing, and one cannot row in fine clothes.
Perhaps, if she saw me at Mass '
' If she saw you now !' said he, with a glance of meaning
thrown away upon her. ' Remember, she hardly saw you at
all; only an old boat, a pile of oranges, a ragged sail '
'My sail is very shabby,' said Damaris with shame. 'I
took the new one to make this awning, and my grandfather was
angry and would not let me have another. Who is that lady ?
She looked very pretty. Is she your wife ?'
' She is the Countess Othmar.
OTHMAR.
61
The Countess Othmar !' she repeated in a little awe.
Even she in her solitude had heard- that name of power. The
narrative was very vague to her; she had never known more
than the bare outline of it, but she remembered, when she was
a child sitting amongst the daffodils and plucking them on the
grass before the house on Bonaventure one evening in the
springtime, hearing Catherine, who had been with a load of
fruit to the mainland, cry aloud to Raphael:
' Holy Virgin, what think you 1 The petiote of Nicole, the
wife of Othmar, is dead !'
And the child, pausing with the daffodils lying in tumbled
gold upon her lap, had listened and heard all that was known
of that early death, which only the swallows had witnessed and
the blind house-dog had mourned. She had always remembered
it, and often, when she had seen the daffodils yellow in the
grass of March, had thought of it again, and her imagination
had been busy with it, creating bodily forms for the people of
whom she knew naught but the names. Therefore, when the
word ' Othmar' fell now upon her ear, it moved her with a
certain thrill, almost as of personal pain.
' You have heard of her 1' said Loswa.
' Not of her,' said Damaris gravely ; ' of the one who died—
who killed herself, they say, because he loved another woman.'
' Bah !' said Loswa, with the light contempt for all such
tragic follies which the boulevardier always affects, even when
he does not feel it.
' They said so,' repeated Damaris, with her eyes very large
and serious.
' Do you like this lady very much 1' she asked, after a
pause.
' She is a charming person ; yes.'
' Is she a very great lady i Does she reign over anything ?'
' Over everyone she approaches, if she can,' said he with some
impatience ; ' and nearly always she can, for she is a person of
very strong will, and influences others more than she knows or
they know.'
' And what does she do when she has influenced them ?
Monsignor says that to possess influence is to have the ten
talents, and that we shall have to account for the use of every
one of them.'
' That is just the chief mischief,' said Loswa, gloomily think-
ing of himself, not of his auditor. ' It is the getting the in-
fluence that amuses her ; that she cares about. When once
she has got it you are nothing at all to her ; no more than a
glove she has worn.'
' She must be a very cruel woman,' said Damaris.
' Oh no,' he protested, with a sudden sense of his disloyalty,
' she is not cruel at all, she is only indifferent,'
62
OTHMAR.
* Indifferent? That is to neither like nor dislike? I do
not understand how one can be like that. One must either
have good weather or bad ; one must either love or hate.'
' She does neither,' said he with a sigh ; then, with a sense
that it was altogether wrong to blame a great lady and a
countrywoman of his own to a little country girl whom he had
never seen before, he changed the subject abruptly.
' Are you not very dull on your island ? It is a long way off
the mainland.'
' Dull 1 Oh, people must be very stupid who are ever dull.
There is always so much to do out among the fruit-trees or
down by the beach. The days are always too short for me.'
' That is the charm of being fifteen. Are you always on this
island ? Do you never go to Nice ?'
' I have never seen Nice. I did want to see the Carnival
last year, but my grandfather would not hear of it. It was
Raphael told me about it. It must have been very fine ; but,
of course, we have nothing to do with the mainland, that is
only for the rich idle people. I hear they sleep all the day and
buzz about all the night, like moths or like bats. What a
strange life it must be !'
Loswa thought of the great gaslit glittering Salle des Jeux
which was not more than a dozen leagues off this primitive
orange-island.
' You are happier here, in the middle of your blue water,
putting out your oil lamps as the moon rises,' he replied.
' Chateaubriand might have lived on Bonaventure. Who would
have believed there was anything so solitary and so innocent as
this within a few hours' sail of the Blanc paradise ?'
' What is that ? ' said Damaris, who, although she could see
afar off the palms and domes of Monte Carlo gleaming in the
sun on the northward horizon every time she sailed that way,
was as profoundly ignorant of the tripot and its works as if
Bonaventure had been in the Pacific.
' I have heard,' she continued, ' that there are very strange
things and people over there, that it is a feast-day every day
with them, and all their life like a fair. My grandfather
always says he would shoot them all down as they shot the
hostages in the Commune, but I do not think that would be
right. If they are silly, one should pity them.'
' They are silly indeed, and I fear your sweet pity would
not avail to save them. The feast-day is a sorry affair at its
close.'
' Oh, I know. I have seen Raphael come home drunk and
beat Jacqueline (that is his wife) because she cried ; and he is
as good as gold when he is sober, and as gentle as a slaeep when
there is no drink.'
' In some way we all drink, we unfortunates,' said Loswa;
OTHMAR+
63
then, seeing her look of surprise, he added, 'I did not speak
literally, my dear ; your Raphael's drink is a petit vin bleu, and
ours is a costly thing we call Pleasure, but it comes to the same
result; only, I suppose, Raphael has some five or six days in
the week that he is good for work, and we cannot say as much
as that. We are all the week round at the fair.'
She ruffled her pretty loose short locks that hung over hey
forehead, and her brilliant eyes looked at him perplexedly.
' I am glad I live on the island,' she said as the issue of her
perplexity.
' And I too am glad you do,' said he, with more sincerity
than he usually put into his pretty speeches.
He felt that before he approached the great object of his
voyage he must justify his pretences and win her confidence by
painting something which would please her fancy. To his
facility of touch it was easy and rapid work to sketch on his
block of paper the sea view, the terrace wall, the interior of the.
sitting-room, the old chairs, and the silver tankards. Sheet
after sheet was filled and cut off and sent fluttering into her
eager hands. To her it seemed the work of magic. Just a
little water and a few pans of colour could make all the sea and
sky, all the plants and stones, all the pots and pans and house-
hold things, seem real again on fragments of paper! She did
not heed or even know that he was a man, young and handsome,
whose eyes spoke a bold and amorous language ; she was ab-
sorbed in his creations ; he seemed to her the most marvellous
of sorcerers. With delighted cries of recognition she welcomed
the likeness of all the places and the objects so familiar to her ;
she was filled with a rapture of childish ecstasy. She hung
over his work and watched him with a wonder which was only
not awe, because it was such frank and childish delight.
Whilst he sketched, he let her talk at her will, in her own
fashion, putting a few careless questions now and then. She
was by nature gay and communicative; the seclusion and
severity of her rearing had not extinguished the natural buoy-
ancy and originality of her temper, and it was a pleasure to her
to have anyone to speak to of other things than the land labours
and the household work.
In a few brief phrases she had described to him all her short
simple life ; how her mother had died at her birth, they said,
and her father when she had been eight years old ; how she had
never been baptised ' or anything,' until, to please Melville,
her grandsire had allowed her to enter the Church's fold like a
little stray sheep ; how she had been brought up by ojd Cathe-
rine, and taught to read by her, and how she had managed to
read all the books her mother had left: Corneille, Racine,
Lamartine, Lamotte, Fouquet, La Fontaine, and knew them
almost all by heart, for she had no new ones ; she told him ail
64
OTHMAR.
about the culture of the olive and the various kinds of oranges,
and all the different methods of pruning, tending, packing them;
the big fragrant golden balls were much nearer to her heart
than the black oily olives, but she was learned about both ; she
told him also all about the poor people she knew on the coast,
of the young men whom the conscription had taken just as they
were of use to their people, of the old women who took the
flowers into the towns, of the children who could swim and dive
like little fish, and were her playmates when she had time to
play ; the boat-builders, the fisherfolk, the flower-sellers, the
toilers of the working world of whom all the fashionable world
that flocks to the Riviera knows nothing, unless it throws them
a few pence in the dust of the road, or thinks they form a pretty
point of colour against the white walls and the flower-filled grass,
or bids them make a bouillabaisse for a picnic in some little
wooden cabin high up upon the red rocks, amongst the cactus
spikes and the sea-pinks.
All this simple talk interested Loswa as it would never have
done had not the mouth which uttered it been as lovely to look
at as a half-opened damask rose.
'How came Monsignor Melville to speak of me to you?'
she asked once with a persistency which was a strong trait of
Her character.
' He recognised you,' he answered her. ' He told us that
you were prouder than any princess of them all, and that where
we had meant but a joke you had, very naturally, seen an affront.
He is much attached to you, I am sure, and felt quite as angry
as you were.
' I was very angry,'she said ■ passionately, with the colour
hot in her cheeks. ' I thought the lady took me for a beggar.
When one goes in a boat one cannot be endimanchee. I was
taking the oranges to the Petite Afrique ; there is a little old
woman who keeps a little old shop there, and has nothing but
what she makes by the sale of the fruit people give her. There
are three trees here that are my own ; my father planted them
when he was home from a voyage, and to all their fruit I have a
right. Grandfather lets me sell it or give it away.'
' And I am sure you do always the latter ?'
' Oh, not quite always. Sometimes I want money for some-
thing, and then I sell the oranges ; but it is only if there be a'
wreck, or a boat lost at sea, or a death or a birth. Of course I
want nothing for myself ; grandfather does not let me want, but
he is not fond of giving to others, he likes to keep money locked
up, and see it grow slowly bit upon bit like the coral. Do you
like that ? Myself, I think there is no pleasure at all in money
except to give it away.'
' But whom do you give it to ? You are all alone on your
island.'
OTHMAR.
65
4 There are the people who work for us ; and then I know su
many on the coast. I have come and gone between this and
the mainland so many many times, ever since I was a baby. It
is such a good life being on the sea; so long as I have the
water I never want anything else. Some of them call me la,
mouette.'
'It is the best of all lives. I am much on the sea myself,
said her companion, who hated the sea.
' You have a boat then ?'
'I have a yacht; yes.'
' All to yourself \'
' Yes ; to go about in as I fancy. I shall be delighted if yon
will sail in it some day.'
' Ah ! it is a pleasure-ship then 1 I see those little ships
racing often ; they are beautiful. You must be very rich to
have one all ^o yourself, not trading anywhere, or even dredg-
ing. How much money have you 1 And how do you keep it 1
In boxes, in coffers 1 Some of my grandfather's is down the
well; he took bricks out of the side of the well, put the money
in the hole, and then put back the bricks again. He did it at
night; no one knows it but me. Do you keep your money like
that I'
' Ho; in our world we give it to other men to take care of
for us.'
' That seems very stupid. Why not take care of your own 1'
She was sitting on the parapet of the terrace, her feet hung
down; she leaned one hand on the stone she sat on; behind
her was the broad blue of the sky, and about her all the shining
of the effulgent light. She looked like a rhododendron flower
growing up into the sunshine out of a corner of a dusky old
garden.
' You have not told me how much money you have,' she
pursued. ' If you let other folks take care of it for you, it is no
wonder that you gentle people come to poverty so often.'
'We have too many caretakers, no doubt,' said Loswa, ' and
they feather their own nests. But I am not a very rich man ;
pray do not think I am. I am only an artist. Nobody is rich
now except the Jews here, and the rogues across the Atlantic.
Would you let me make a sketch of yourself just as you sit
now % It would be charming.'
' Will you give it to that lady ?'
' No, on my honour. I will give it to you, and make a copy
for myself.'
' Well, if you like; but would it not be better if I put on
my Sunday frock 1'
' Not for worlds. Sunday frocks have no affinity with art,
my dear; yours is, no doubt, a very pretty one, but I shouid
prefer to make your portrait as I have seen you first.'
F
56
OTHMAR
' Oh, I do not mind ; only this gown is very shabby and old.
I am grown too big for it. I am always growing. Monsignor
says that if I grew in grace as I do in centimetres I should soon
be a saint like our St. Veronica.'
' It is not for me to disparage the saints,' said Loswa, ' but I
think you will have another mission in this life than to be of
their community. Keep still a little while ; I will not detain
you long. So !—that is just right. I wish I were Raffaelle and
Leonardo in one, to be worthier of the occasion.'
' Who are they %' said Damaris, as he set his folding easel
straight before him and began to sketch in the flowerlike figure
on the wall, fresh and wholesome as the sea-lavender that grew
in the sand below. He who was all his life in a hothouse recog-
nised the value and fragrance of that sea-born plant, though it
was too homely and simple for him ; recognised it with his mind,
though not with his soul.
The girl knew nothing of all that made up the world to him ;
the names most common to him in modern literature and art
were to her dead letters that said nothing ; the allusions familiar
to him would have been to her phrases without meaning; all
that constitutes .modern culture was to her as an unknown
country, and the only whisper she had ever heard of all that
poets and artists tell the world was what she had felt rather
than understood of the read and re-read pages of ' Athalie,' and
of 'Attila,' of ' Cinna,' and of ' Sintram.' Yet there was a
certain richness, as of virgin soil, in that absolute freedom from
conventional education, and from received ideas ; she expressed
herself with simplicity and vigour, and this unworn, untrained
mind, only nurtured on the high thoughts of great poets, had
escaped all the bondage of tradition and of secondhand know-
ledge, and remained what it had been made by nature.
It required a higher intelligence than Loswa's was wholly to
appreciate this charm ; he was too conventional to be greatly
attracted by unconventional things ; he was too used to all the
artificial attractions of artificial women, and too artificial himself
to enjoy and admire all this freshness of fancy. It would have
needed a poet to have done so, and he had nothing of the poet
in him. But he was enough of a student of human nature to
understand that with which he scarcely sympathised, and she
was so handsome that her physical beauty created in him a
compassion for the solitude in which it dwelt, such compassion
as her intellectual solitude, and her half-unconscious longing for
wider worlds than her own, would have failed to awaken.
' Is it possible that all that is to go to a gros bourgeois who
builds boats 1' he thought, as he looked at the beautiful lines of
her features and her form, and that fairness of her skin just
warmed by sun and air into the bloom as of a peach, which he
strove in vain to reproduce to lus own satisfaction in his drawing.
OTHMAR.
67
A face that would turn all Paris after it like sunflowers after the
sun, to be left to pass from the glow of youth to the greyness of
age on a little island in mid-sea ! It seemed impossible—it
would become impossible if she once learned her own charms.
4 Your isle is worthy of Paul and Virginia,5 he said to her,
speaking to her in the phrase that she could understand, for she
knew every line of Bernardin de St. Pierre. 4 But where is
Paul 1 Is there no Paul 1'
4 No, there is nobody at all like Paul,' she answered, with a
little laugh at the idea. 4 The youngest man is Raphael, and he
has a fat wife and five children. They live down on the other
side of the cliffs.'
4 But Paul will come,' said Loswa. 4 He always comes.
Would you let me substitute myself for him 15 he added with
that somewhat impertinent audacity which had made his success
so great amongst women of the world.
It did not please Damaris. Her brows drew together in that
instantaneous and tempestuous anger which her face had ex-
pressed as the bracelet had fallen on her lap.
4 You are not at all like Paul,' she said a little contemptu-
ously. 4 You are not young enough, and you have wrinkles
about your eyes.'
Loswa reddened with irritation. He was still young, but
life in the world ages fast, and he was conscious that to this
child, in the first flush and sunrise of her earliest girlhood, he
might well seem old.
4 You are cruel,' he said humbly, 4 and I am unhappy ; lean
only envy the Paul of the future.'
4 Oh,5 said Damaris very tranquilly, 41 know all about my
future. I am to marry my cousin, Louis Roze ; he has a chantiei
at St. Tropez; he is quite rich ; he is very ugly and stout;
he builds boats and barques ; myself, I would sooner sail in
them.'
She said all the sentences in the same even voice ; marriage
seemed to her to be hardly of as much interest as the boats.
4 Good heavens !' said Loswa involuntarily. 4 Athene to a
Satyr!'
He could imagine the shipwright of St. Tropez without much
effort of imagination; a black-browed son of the soil, smoking a
short pipe, supping up prawn-soup noisily on feast days; a
Socialist, no doubt, and an argumentative politician when he
had drunk his glass of brandy, or he would not be to the taste
of the Sieur Berarde, her grandfather. This her future ! As
well might a young nightingale, singing under acacia flowers in
spring, talk of its future when it should be roasting on the spit
to give a mouthful to a boor 1
4 Do you not intend to refuse %' he said abruptly, without
thinking whither such suggestion might lead her.
F 2
68
OTHMAR.
She turned quickly and looked at him with astonished eyes;
her breath came and went more quickly.
' Refuse !' she repeated. ' Refuse ! oh no ; what would be
the use ? No one refuses to do what my grandfather has decided
for them.,
' But you cannot be willing to make such a marriage ?'
She was astonished and troubled by the rebellious sugges-
tion.
' I do not think about it,' she replied at last, shaking the
hair out of her eyes. ' It is a thing which is to be, you know.
What is the use of thinking 'i I am not to leave Bona venture.
I should not like to marry anyone who would not live on Bona-
venture ; but if I stay here and live as I always have done, it
will not make any difference at all.'
He was silent. This absolute ignorance of what she talked
about seemed to him pathetic and sacred. He did not wish to
be the one to break away the wall which stood between her and
the realities of life.
'He thinks of making a chantier here,' she explained ; 'the
only doubt is whether anyone will ever come such a distance to
order a boat or a brig ; and whether it would really pay to bring
the timber out so far as this '
' Good heavens !' said Loswa again.
' Why are you so surprised ?' she said, looking at him in
perplexity.
'How can you think about timber and shipwrights?' he
said, irrationally enough he knew. 'What a life for you! I
thought you loved Racine and Corneille.'
' But there is no one else here who loves them,' she answered
with a little sigh. ' It is only making money that they care about
—money—always money—and when it is made nobody enjoys it.'
' But who can oblige you to marry this man of St. Tropez ?'
She ruffled her hair, not very well knowing what to reply.
' It is decided so,' she answered at last.
' But many tilings are decided for us which we do not accept.
No one has any right to dispose of our own future against our
own will.'
She looked vaguely troubled : the sense of herself as of an
independent entity had never before presented itself to her.
' All those things are settled for one,' she said with some
impatience. ' It is not worth talking about. Whether it is
Gros Louis or another, it is the same to me. They are all stupid,
they all smoke, they all drink when they can, they all say there
is no God, and that there must never be any kings. They are
all just alike.'
She was not conscious of the sombre revolt and vague con'
tempt which were at work in her as the heat of the distant
thunder cloud dulls slightly the sunny blue of a June sky.
OTHMAR.
69
' But there is another world than theirs,' said Loswa.
* Out of the books ?'
'Yes, beside the dreamland of the books. All the earth
is not peopled with shipwrights and skippers. There is a
world '
He hesitated, for he was afraid of alarming her ; it seemed
to him that, were she displeased, she would send him spinning
down the cliff with short ceremony.
' There is a world where life is always en fete, where women
are treated not as goods and chattels and beasts of burden, but
as sovereigns and sorceresses ; where you yourself '
*1 shall never go there,'she said, abruptly interrupting him.
' Do not talk about it. It makes me restless. I feel as I do
when I look over there.'
She pointed northward, where the unseen shore was.
' I see the sun shine on the mountains, and I see a dazzle of
gold, a gleam of white, a long low line under the blue of the
hills, and I know that is what they call the world, the big
world ; but I never land there ; it is not for me.'
' Let me take you,' he said softly.
'No,' she said with petulance and resolution. 'Grandfather
does not allow me ever to see the mainland without him ; he
says it is accursed, that the people are all mad. And now, as
you have eaten and drunk all you will, it will be best that you
should go : he may return any time, and he does not love
strangers.'
' But I may come back and bring you your portrait 1'
Her eyes smiled, but she said carelessly, ' That can be as
you like. You are very welcome to what you have had. I will
show you the way to the shore, though I dare say you would
find it again by yourself.'
He endeavoured to linger, but she gave him no leisure to do
so. She escorted him to the edge of the steep descent, and
there bade him a decided adieu.
Loswa, with all his grace and ease and habits of the world,
felt at a loss before this child. He would have kissed her hand
in farewell, but her arms were folded on her chest as she stood
on the rock above him, and nodded to him a good-humoured
good-bye ; cheerfully, indifferently, as any boy of her years
might have done.
' It is easy to see that you come from Paris !' she called
after him, watching his descent along the passerelle with a
kindly little laugh at the hesitation of his steps.
' Let her marry Gros Louis !' he thought angrily as that
clear childish laughter echoed through the sunlit air from above
his head. ' I have her portrait—that is all that matters.'
What a feature of the next year's Salon would be that bril-
liant, bold head when it should be hung in the full light of a
7o
OTHMAR.
May day, for all Paris to gaze upon, marked * Jfaprls Nature,*
and signed Loswa!
He soon, despite his indolent limbs, which were more used
to the boulevards than the sand and the shingle, regained his
boat, and pushed it in deep water.
Damaris Berarde stood above on the brow of the cliff,
amongst the olive-boughs and the great leaves of the fig-trees,
looking towards that pale golden far-off shore where 'the world'
was a world with other men than Raphael and Gros Louis, with
other fruits than the round orange and the black olive, with
other music than the tinkle of the throat-bells of the goats.
CHAPTER IX.
Two days later Loswa entered the drawing-rooms of St. Phara-
mond, bearing with him a covered panel, which, after his
ceremonious salutation of his hostess, he uncovered and placed
on an unocupied easel before her.
' Ah! my charming sea-born savage !' said Nadine as she
approached it.
It still looked only a sketch, but it is a very sincere man
who will display a sketch without touching it up and embellish-
ing it, and Loswa was not sincere in that way, or in many
others. He had copied his original drawing done upon the
island, enlarging and improving it, and, though the portrait
had the look of an impromptu creation, an impression vivid and
masterly, it was in reality the product of many hours of pains-
taking labour and elaborate thought. Produced however it
might be, it was one of the most brilliant studies which had
ever come from his hand. It was not idealised or made arti-
ficial; it was the head of the girl as he had seen it in the full
light of the morning on Bonaventure. The eyes had the frank,
fearless, childish regard which hers had, and the whole face
seemed speaking with courage, ardour, health, and imagination.
There was a chorus of admiration from all the great people
who were there ; it was her jour, and the rooms were full.
Anything drawn by Loswa instantly elicited the homage of that
world of fashion in which his powers were deemed godlike, and
this sketch had qualities so rare and true that even his enemies
and hostile critics would have been forced to concede to it a
great triumph of art.
'You have succeeded,' said Nadine, as she put out her hand
to him with a smile. ' You were right and I was wrong. You
have painted the portrait without spoiling it by any affectations.
No living painter could have done it better, and few dead ones.'
Loswa inclined his graceful person to the ground before her.
OTHMAR.
71
and murmured his undying gratitude for the condescension of
her praise.
' Tout de meme, elle me le paiera,' he thought, remembering
the words she had spoken to him on the sea-terrace.
' And how did Perseus find Andromeda ?' she asked. 1 It
must be a story to be told in verse in the old fashion. Re-
late it!'
' "there has been very little romance about it,' said Loswa,
'and Andromeda, alas! is contentedly going to marry a boat-
builder, stout, ugly, and old !'
' My dear Loris, that will be for you to prevent,' said Nadine,
still gazing at the sketch. ' I have never seen a face with more
character or more suggestion. C'est un type, as the novelists say.
If she do marry the boat-builder, he will have a stormy existence.
There are daring and genius in her face. Come—sit there and
narrate your adventures with her.'
Never unwilling to be the hero of his own stories, Loswa
seated himself where she bade him, and, becoming the centre of
a circle of lovely ladies, he embellished and heightened the
narrative of his expedition to Bonaventure as he had done the
sketch, making his own part in it more romantic, and the recep-
tion of Damaris warmer than either had been. He had a very
picturesque fashion of speech, and the little incident, under his
skilful treatment, obtained the grace and the colour of a story
of Ludovic Haldvy's. The portrait could not open its lips and
contradict him. Only his hostess thought to herself, with
amusement: 41 wonder how much of all that is true !'
Whilst he was talking and drawing towards a close in his
admirably-coloured narrative, Melville and Othmar together
entered the room behind him, and the former caught the name
of his favourite of the isle.
He listened in silence till Loswa paused to take breath at the
end of a sentence ; then, with a very angry gleam in his clear
eyes, he interposed :
' So, M. Loswa, you have found the latitude and longitude
of Bonaventure without a pilot ! Your portrait on that easel is
very like, but I confess I do not recognise the same verisimili-
tude in your narrative.'
i Loswa, who had paused to meditate on the end of his
adventure, which he felt could not be told with the tame finale
which it had had in real life, was disconcerted, and for a moment
silent.
' I have seen your heroine this morning,' pursued Melville ;
' I am distressed to disturb your romance, but she is not the
mingling of Gretchen and Graziella you have just described. I
left her busied in feeding the pigs.'
' I dare say Gretchen and Graziella both fed pigs,' said
Loswa with some ill-humour. ' At least, Monsignor, you will
72
OTHMAR.
admit that I have proved to the Countess Othmar that I was
capable of making a study of the betrothed of Gros Louis.'
' That is feeding the pigs with pearls indeed,' said Nadine.
'The pigs are a better destiny than many another,' said
Melville.
' You cannot seriously think so 1'
' I do, indeed. If you had seen the dark side of life,
Madame, as I have done, you would think so too.'
'No, never. That young girl has genius, or something very
like it, in her face. I will send for her, and show her that
there are other fates possible for a young Hebe with the brows
of Athene.'
' That would be a cruel kindness if you like,' said Othmar,
who had been attentively studying the portrait.
'And that is for once a commonplace remark, my dear
Otho. Nothing which takes the band off the eyes is really
unkind.'
' I do not know,' said Othmar. * Great ladies like you have
pets which are not the happier fated for the petting ; the dog is
shaved and frizzed, the bird is caged and killed, the marmoset
is adored and neglected; if they were all left to their natural
fates they would be less honoured but longer lived. Yonder
palms are honoured too, no doubt, by being allowed to stand in
a corner of your room behind a lacquered screen and in a gilded
basket, but they have neither light nor air, and will be dead,
and when they are so, will be replaced in a month.'
She smiled. 'How little you know about it! and what
perilous things metaphors always are ! The palms go back to
their glass-houses and thrive as well as they did before, while
other palms take their place in my rooms. You talk a little like
a Socialist lecturer; your arguments are all invectives and—
what is the logician's word ?—pathetic fallacies !'
'Which is the glass-house to which you could send any
human being whom you had taken from obscurity and content-
ment ?'
'The glass-house is the world, which is always ready for
novelties as the hothouses are ready for new seedlings. How
can you tell that this handsome child may not be destined to
make the world her slave 1 Besides, even in the interests of
Gros Louis himself, it is as well that the consciousness should
come before instead of after.'
' And certainly,' said Loswa, ' no one can say that Gros
Louis is a fate meet for this exquisite child?'
Melville hesitated : ' Gros Louis is not a very admirable
person ; he is an unbeliever, of course very avaricious, and of a
rough coarse exterior ; but he is a good-tempered man and a
very laborious worker. On the whole, worse things might
happen to Damaris Berarde than to live always on her island
OTHMAR*
7.3
and rear her children there, as she now rears her poussins and
her puppies.'
4 That is looked at from a very low plane, Monsignor;
unusually low for you.'
41 can imagine so many things worse for her, that is all,'
said Melville, with an apology in his tone. 4 Certainly she
ought to have a mate like a shepherd in Theocritus' pastorals,
but as those shepherds exist not, at least this side of the
Alps '
4 Why a shepherd at all ?'
4 Because they are better than hunters,' said Melville curtly.
Loswa smiled.
'Monsignor is prejudiced to-day,' said his hostess. 4De-
cidedly this Galatea must be worth seeing, and the island itself
sounds idyllic. I did not know there was anything so near us
still so like Bernardin de St. Pierre. Dear Melville, go and
bring your treasure to us just as she is; just as Loswa has
sketched her, red cap, bare feet, and striped sea-gown. The
moment these people are endimanchees they are horrible.'
'She does not belong to "those people,"' said Melville, a
little impatiently. 4 Her mother was an actress of Paris. I
think you might dress her how you would, she would look well.
She has a patrician look like those girls of Magna Grecia, who
are as ignorant as the stones they tread, but have the port of
goddesses.'
41 will see this especial young goddess,' said Nadine, who
never relinquished a whim when it encountered opposition.
Melville was seriously annoyed.
4 Will you make Gros Louis more acceptable to her ?' he said
angrily.
4 No ; we shall make him impossible.'
4 You will create one more declassee, then, when there are
already so many !'
4 What 1 By seeing her once 1'
4 Yes,' replied Melville with a certain sternness. 4 Once is
enough. Discontent is born at a touch. Content is a thing
which no one can create ; but discontent almost anyone can
bring about with a word. Merely to see you, Madame, would
be to render this poor child wretched and ashamed all the
rest of her days. I mean no compliment; only a fact. You
float in the very empyrean of culture ; you can only make
this young barbarian conscious of her barbarianism. What is
the curse of our age 1 That every class is wretched because
it is straining forever on tiptoe, striving to reach into the class
above it.'
4 Dear Monsignor, I think they always did. Colbert stretched
the draper's yard measure till it reached the throne, and Wolsey
Btood on the chopping-block. till he was tall enough to touch
74
OTHMAR.
hands with king and pope. It is nothing new, though modern
democracy thinks it is.'
' The just ambition of the man of genius is not the restless
monomania of the declassee.'
' Who can tell what ambition may lie under this Phrygian
cap 1' said his tormentor, as she looked once more at the sketch
of Damaris. 'Dear Monsignor, I am so delighted when you
become a little cross ! It makes us feel that, after all, you are
really human !'
' I am exceedingly cross,' said Melville ; ' or, to speak more
truly, infinitely distressed.'
'After all, Monsignor, it is not absolutely just to this in-
voluntary recluse never to give her an occasion to estimate Gros
Louis at his actual worth. According to what you and Loswa
say, there are the gases of revolt already smouldering in her ;
surely it will be better for them to take flame before than after.'
' There are a great many lives,' said Melville, with a tinge of
personal bitterness, ' in which those gases are never extinct, yet
in which they are, nevertheless, not allowed to come to the
surface and take fire. It may very well be so with hers.'
' Oh, the cruelty of a priest! Decidedly you will not let
her come to us if you can help it. Well, we will go to her. I
owe her an apology.'
Melville trusted to his usual experience of his hostess; he
knew that with her, very often, a caprice ardently desired at
sunset was forgotten by sunrise; that, in default of opposition,
such a mere whim as this would most likely expire as soon as
conceived. He said nothing more to her, and Loswa took his
sketch down from the easel.
'I fear you are angry with me, Monsignor,' he murmured to
Melville, to whom he was always courteous and deferential.
' Indeed, but for the challenge that Madame Nadege cast at me,
I should not have ventured to find out your inviolate isle.'
' There is no harm done,' said Melville curtly. ' You will
not find there either Gretchen or Graziella.'
Othmar had no sympathy with this new fancy.
' With all the world at your feet, what can you want with
a fisher-girl ? ' he said, when they were alone, to his wife, who
replied :
' She may be original and amuse me. There is hardly any-
thing original in these days. One never sees anything ; and I
do not think she is a fisher-girl. She may even be a genius—an
Aimee Desclde—a Rachel.'
' And do you think it is better to be a Desclee than to live
and die, a happy wife and mother, en bonne bourgeoise ?'
' Oh, my dear, it is you who are bourgeois if you see any-
thing enviable in the prose of Fate ! You may be sure that, if
she be a genius, and I help to open her prison doors, I am only
OTHMAR.
75
the instrument of Destiny. Someone else would open them if
not I.'
* I thought you always ridiculed the idea of Destiny ?'
' For ordinary mortals—yes. But genius is accompanied by
the Parcae. It cannot escape them. Men may kill the body of
Chatterton, but they cannot prevent the dead boy being greater
than they.-'
* I think your project cruel,' said Othmar. 'If you goto
this child, or bring her here, you will interfere unwarrantably
with her peace and quietude, you will take her out of her
sphere ; and you can never make a declassee happy. Melville is
quite right.'
' A declassee ! My dear Otho, what a very conventional
reply. A declassee is a person uprooted from her own sphere, to
be placed in, or to long to be placed in, one for which she is not
the least adapted. Genius is much more than adapted, it is
armed in advance for any world it choose to take as its own.
Rachel was an unlettered and unwashed Jewess, and Desclee
was a tattered little Bohemian : but the one ruled the world,
and the other made it weep like a child !'
' But I do not know why you should suppose this little girl
on her island is necessarily destined to possess genius ?'
' It is in her face, and it would be amusing to discover it.
It would give one a Marco Polo sort of feeling.'
'It is a dangerous kind of exploration. You cannot tell
what mischief may not come out of it.'
' And you do not understand that the supreme charm of a
caprice lies precisely in never knowing in the least what one
may come out of it.'
' But where your toys are human souls '
' There are no such things as human souls. It is an exploded
expression. There are only conglomerates of gases and tissues,
moved by automatic action, and adhering together for a few
years, more or less. That is the new creed. It is not an ex-
hilarating one, but il en vaut bien un autre.'
' All this does not explain why you have taken a fancy to
disturb the destiny of a little girl whom you have seen once in a
boat.'
' Because, I think it may amuse me ; all original creatures
and unconventional types are amusing for a little time at any
rate.'
' Oh,' said Othmar, half in jest and half in earnest, 'when
you have once taken the idea that anything is amusing, I know
cities may burn and men may die, you will not relinquish your
idea till you have exhausted it.'
'No. I do not think I easily relinquish my ideas ; it is only
weak people who do that. It is true few ideas live long ; they
are all belles du jour, the bloom of a day.
OTHMAR.
Melville had for once erred in his estimate of his hostess.
As tenacious when she was opposed as she was indifferent when
■unopposed, she that evening announced her intention of taking
Loswa as her pilot, and of going in person to Bunaventure.
The opposition of Melville, and of her husband, the attrac-
tion of something new, and that charm which always existed
for her in the discovery and examination of anything unusual
in human nature, all contributed to make her dwell on an idea
which, had it not been opposed, might probably have never
taken serious shape.
The master passion of her temperament remained the plea-
sure she took in the excitation and the analysis of character.
She had always liked to bring about singular scenes, unusual
situations, strange emotions, merely for the sake of observing
them with the same subtle and intellectual pleasure, as a
writer of romance feels in the complications and characters
which he creates at will, and at will destroys. She had always
brought about a perilous position when she could do so, because
to enter upon one was as agreeable to her as it is to a good
mountaineer to ascend to perilous heights. She had been often
tempted to regret her own physical coldness, which rendered
such heat of emotion and of danger as d'Aubiac's royal mistress
had known impossible to her. It was less the tragedy of passion
than the psychological intricacies of character which interested
her. ' Tons les amoureux sont betes,' she had so often said, and so
continually thought. Of all things which had bored her through-
out her life the love of the male human animal had bored
her the most.
But a complicated situation, a set of emotions on an ascend-
ing scale—a spectacle of troubled consciences and of disturbing
elements—these it had always diverted her to watch, calm and
untouched by them as any marble statue which looks from a
glass window upon a storm at sea. In the language which she
used the most, she said to herself that she would have given
nearly all she possessed to be for once ' empoignee' by an intense
emotion.
Sometimes she would look at Othmar and think : (It is not
his fault; it has certainly not been his fault, and yet there has
never been a second when my heart beat really any quicker for
his coming.' In the highest heights of his own exaltation and
ecstasy he had always left her irresponsive. ' You want Mignon
or Juliet for all that,' she had said to him once.
It amused her now ; this fancy of that unknown little island
lying hidden in these gay and crowded seas. She had a fancy
to see it and to divert herself with the human creature on it
who she had said was i un type.' In the afternoon of the follow-
ing day she sailed thither. Who could have hoped for an un-
discovered isle on these crowded seas ? She was accompanied
OTHMAR.
77
by Bethune, Loswa, and three other of her courtiers. Othmar
refused to condone what he did not approve; and Melville had
been suddenly called away to Rome.
' To the new Desclee !' she said, as her yacht glided out
of its harbour and bore southward through smooth sparkling
sapphire waters.
' A name of melancholy omen,' said Gui de Bethune. ' Some-
times I think Aimee Descle'e is the most pathetic figure of our
century.'
' She was a sensitive, and she was a poitrinaire,' answered
Nadine with her sceptical little smile. ' What does physiology
tell us 1 That genius is only a question of brain tissue and
blood-globules, and that the Mois de Mai and the Frometheus
Unbound are only the consequence of a kind of disease. It is
so consoling for us ; who have no disease, perhaps, but have
also, alas, no genius ! That is why the world is so fond of the
physiologists. They are the great consolers of all mediocrity.'
CHAPTER X.
Damaris was gathering oranges and carrying them to the pack-
ing-sheds. She was bearing an empty skip upon her head, and
kicking one of the golden balls before her through the grass,
when a woman, unlike any woman that she had seen before,
appeared to her astonished eyes amidst the emerald foliage of
the orange-boughs and the lilac of the hepaticas which filled the
grass.
' I am sure you know me again ?' said the sweetest and
coldest of voices. '1 am come to apologise to you for my rude-
ness. Here is Loswa, who is afraid to approach you ; he will
vouch for me.'
Damaris stood still and mute ; she put the basket off" her
head, and looked in blank stupor at her visitfEht; her colour
came and went painfully ; all in a moment she seemed to her-
self to grow ugly, awkward, coarse, foolish, everything which
was hideous and painful. She had no words at her command,
she might have been born dumb. No man had any power to
confuse her, but this beautiful woman paralysed her every
nerve.
'Iam come to apologise to you for my involuntary rudeness,'
said her visitant in her sweetest manner. ' Your rebuke was
apt and very deserved, but you may be sure that, had I really
seen you I should not have incurred it.'
' It was I who was rude,' said Damaris, with her cheeka
scarlet.
Loswa had been unable to embarrass her, but a cruel con-
78
OTHMAR.
fusion possessed her before this woman, who was so unlike her-
self, who was so languid, so delicate, so marvellous.
'Not that she is so very beautiful either,' thought the child
even in her bewilderment. ' But she is—she is—wonderful!
She is like those gauze-winged dragon-flies, all silver and
gossamer; she is like the delicate white lilies of the tree
datura ; she is like, like 1 did not think a woman could be
like that!'
' Do you forgive me 1' said her visitor with her sweetest
smile. ' I did not really see you, or I should not have made
such a blunder—I who detest such mistakes.'
'I was rude,' stammered the girl again, with difficulty find-
ing her tongue, whilst her colour came and went with violence.
'Oh no, you were justly on the defensive. You were
offended, and took a j ust reprisal; the only one in your power.
My dear child, M. Loswa has shown me the sketch he made of
you, and told me of your hospitality to him. Will you not be
as hospitable to me ? I want much to make friends with you.'
The words were spoken with all the exquisite charm and
graciousness in which she could put such magic, when she
chose, that no one living would have resisted them, and all such
little courage or such vague prejudice as might have moved
Damaris against her melted before them like little snowflakes in
spring before the sun amidst the lilac-buds.
' If Madame will honour me,' she stammered, not even see-
ing the men who were present, only thinking of her own rough
gown, of her tumbled hair, of the state of the house filled with
wood smoke, as the oven was getting ready for the baking ; of
the lines of washed linen that were stretching from one wall to
another.
' How did Clovis let you pass ?' she said, struck with &
sudden thought.
' Clovis knew me again,' said Loswa. ' Besides, a man was
at the foot of the passerelle, and brought us up to you.'
' He did not do his duty,' said the girl with a little frown,
which drew together her pencilled eyebrows.
' The man or the dog ?' asked Nadine, amused.
' Neither,' said Damaris. , She was angered, though she did
not divine how many napoleons had passed into Raphael's hand,
who had been pruning olives, and had had much trouble to
hold back the faithful Clovis, for whom gold had no charm.
' If Bruneliildt .had not been shut up with her puppies,' she
added regretfully ; ' she is much more savage than Clovis.'
' You seem very sorrowful that we did not all have the fate
of Penelope's suitors,' said Nadine, much amused. 'We are
the friends of Monsignor Melville; may not that fact protect
us ? Is your grandfather at home ?'
No; he was away in the sloop ; gone to St. Jean with a
OTHMAR.
79
cargo. Damaris did not add that he would have been much
worse to pass than even Brunehildt.
' But I pray you come into the house, Madame,' she added,
her natural courtesy gaining the ascendancy over her embarrass-
ment. ' It is a poor place, but there is a fine view, and if I had
only known '
'You would have been endimanchee and hideous,' thought
Nadine, as she answered with her sweetest grace that she would
go willingly to that balcony of the beauties of which she had
heard so much from Loswa.
' All her eyes are for me,' she whispered to Bethune. ' She
does not see that any of you exist.'
'I suppose,' rejoined Bethune, 'that we, after all, do not
differ so very much from Raphael and Gros Louis ; but between a
woman and a woman of the world there is as much difference as
between a raw egg and a souffle, between a hen and a peahen.'
' You might find a more poetic comparison ; say a poppy and
a gardenia,' said Nadine smiling. ' She is not at the age to
think of you. Have patience ; ga viendra. She is really very
handsome, lovelier than Loswa's sketch.'
Damaris, meanwhile, was thinking with agony that there
. were ready no cakes, no cream, no white bread, nothing which
this delicate and ethereal visitant would be able to touch—
thinking of the linen swinging in the wind, and of the bacon
grey with smoke, and of Catherine, whc, on washing-days, was
in her crossest mood !
Nadine, with that swift intuition into the thoughts of others
which made her the most sympathetic of companions where she
deigned to be sympathetic at all, guessed what was passing
through the girl's mind, and hastened to relieve her embarrass-
ment by asking to be permitted to remain out of doors, alleging
that the air was so soft and the scent of the orange-blossoms so
sweet, that she was reluctant to leave either.
' Will Madame really prefer it %' said Damaris, unable to
conceal her relief.
' There is the same view to be seen from here,' she added as
she opened a door in the wall and showed them the southern
sea stretching far away, shining blue and violet through arches
of olive-boughs lying all hushed and bright and warm in the
glow of the afternoon sun.
Then she caught a little boy by the shoulder, the son of
Raphael, who was looking on stupidly.
' Run and bring some wine and some fruit,' she whispered
to him, ' and ask Catherine to send the old silver.'
Her sense of the obligations of hospitality was stronger than
the dread of her great lady.
' It is not because she is great,' she told herself, angry with
her own timidity. ' But she is so wonderful, so wonderful!'
8o
OTHMAR.
That supreme distinction in the wife of Othmar, which,
when she walked down a throne-room, made half the other
Women there look vulgar, had its charm even for this child, who
could not have given a name to the superiority which awed and
fascinated her, even whilst it made her ready to hide her head
beneath the stones like the lizards.
Nadine, pleased with everything, or so professing herself,
sat on a stone bench within sight of the sea and quartered a
mandarin orange with her white fingers, whilst the sun played
on the jewels of her great rings.
'Of all your many conquests, perhaps you have had none
more flattering than the adoration and amazement of this child,'
whispered Be'thune to her.
She smiled.
'And I should not think,' she answered, 'that she was by
nature easily daunted or easily impressed. She has reigned
here, the innocent Alcina of a bucolic paradise. She has cha-
racter, whether she have genius or no. Look how coolly she
puts poor Loswa aside ! As he discovered Alcina, it will be hard
on him if he be not her Rinaldo !'
' You are kinder to him than to her,' said Btithune.
' You always think ill of him.'
' I think of his character much as I do of his art.'
' Surely his art is admirable ?'
' It is clever ; it is not sincere.'
'My dear Duke, is not that a little hypercritical? You
mean that it is a mannerism.'
' And what is a mannerism but an affectation ? And what is
an affectation but a want of truth 1'
' That is a wide subject. I cannot discuss it with you just
now, because I want to speak to this child.—My dear, I am a
neighbour of yours ; I live on the coast which you see every
day ; will you come and stay a few hours with me ? We would
show you things which would amuse you.'
' Stay with you 1'
The eyes of Damaris opened to their fullest, her face flushed
scarlet; she was so amazed that she forgot her awe of the
speaker.
' Why should you want me ?' she said bluntly.
' When you are older you will know that people want many
things without knowing why they want them. But I can give
you very good reasons : Monsignor Melville has interested me
in you, and I think it a pity anyone so gifted as you are by
nature should never see anything better than your yard-dogs
and—what is your fiance's name ?—Gros Louis ? My poor child,
how can you know what it is you do with yourself ? You cannot
tell what the world is like.'
*1 am very happy,' said Damaris.
OTHMAR.
Si
The world was a name of magic to her. How often had she
not looked over the strip of sea which severed her from that
dazzling shore where amethystine hills and ivory snows and
silvery olive woods spoke of a world from which she was forever
severed!
' I would come to you if I were ever alone,' she said after a
pause.
'Well, come with us,' said her temptress smiling. 'It
is three o'clock only now. We will take you with us for a
while and send you back by twilight. Loris has told you who
I am.'
The name of Othmar was, even to the ears of Damaris, a
spell of might upon those shores. She was flattered, amazedj
touched to intense emotion, but she stammered out -that,
although she was most grateful, yet she dared not; her grand-
father would kill her if she left the island; he was most severe;
he never forgave.
'I promise to disar/n your grandfather if that is all your
fear,' said Nadine, as she thought to herself, ' These good Com-
munists, je les connais ! They would string us all up to the
lamp-posts, if they could, and yet, when we speak to them,
they are in heaven !'
The more terrified and resolute in resistance Damaris grew,
the more decided was her visitant to carry her point and succeed
in her caprice.
' It is really cruel,' murmured Bethune. ' The child is happy:
oh Madame! why pluck this wild rose only to droop in your
glass-house, and be good for nothing ever afterwards 1 You can-
not put it back upon its stem if once you break it off '
' Do you think to flower for Gros Louis's buttonhole is a
better fate1?' said Nadine with amusement. 'I think you all
are very hard to please. Usually I never notice anybody, and
you say I am cruel; when I do notice anybody you say that is
cruel also! I am just in the mood to play at being a bene-
factress, and you all oppose my charitable inclinations. To-
morrow I may not be in the humour.'
' Precisely,' said Bethune. ' To-morrow you will wonder
what you ever saw in a hedge rose, but that will not put the
rose back in bloom on the hedge again.'
' The rose will cease to bloom certainly anywhere, and that
is nature's fault, and not mine.'
' I hear you love the old poets,' she said, turning,to Damaris.
' Will you recite something to me ? I love them too.'
' And you yawn before every stage in Paris!' murmured
Bethune. But Damaris did not hear him.
' I shall say it very ill, Madame,' she murmured. She was
diffident, terrified indeed ; yet her vague consciousness that she
had some sort sf power in her, as the lark had, as the night»
G
82
OTHMAR.
ingale had, made the old remembered poetry come thronging in
her brain and trembling on her lips as she spoke of it.
' If, after all, I have talent 1' she thought, her heart seeming
to beat up to her throat.
' Give us something from Esther,' said her visitor ; ' that is
the one play permissible to young girls.'
Damaris smiled, as if at the name of a dear friend. Those
verses, which generation after generation of children have
spoken since the young disciples of the early years of St. Cyr
first wept over the perils of the Jewish heroine, were amongst
those which most touched her heart and pleased her imagina-
tion. Unknown to herself, she had something of the sense of
loneliness of an exile, of an alien, on this little island, which
yet she loved so well.
' Voyons, voyons!' said ISTadine impatiently, not accustomed
to, or tolerant of, being made to wait. ' Do not be afraid. I
will tell you frankly whether you have any artistic aptitude, or
whether you had better stay and gather oranges and never open
a poem all your life. These gentlemen will flatter you, but I
shall not. Voyons !'
She spoke imperatively, and with the imperial air of her
most resolute will. Damaris grew very pale, even to her lips,
but she did not dare refuse to obey. She opened her mouth
once, twice, with a deep-drawn, fluttering, frightened breath;
then she began to recite, with tremulous voice, the
Notre ennemi cruel devant vous se declare:
C'est lui, c'est le ministre infidble et barbare
Qui, d'un zble trompeur a vos yeux revetu,
Contre notre innocence arma votre vertu.
Et quel autre, grand Dieu! qu'un Scythe improvable
Aurait de tant d'horreurs dicte l'ordre effroyable ?
and passed on to the passage,
0 Dieu, confonds l'audace et l'imposture!
At first her timidity was so great that she was almost in-
audible, but at the fifth and sixth lines the charm which the words
possessed for her began to absorb her thoughts, to take her out
of herself into the region of poetic feeling, to spur and stimulate
and strengthen her. Nature had given her tones full of tender-
ness and power, and capable ot many varying emotions, and the
dramatic instinct, which was either inherited or innate in her,
made her give wholly unconsciously the just expression, the
true emphasis, the accent which best aided the meaning of the
verse, and best shaped its harmonies and grace.
Her first embarrassment once passed, the animation and
spirit natural to her returned ; her intuitive perception made
her lend the required force and feeling to each verse ; she could
OTHMAR.
83
have recited the whole of the play with ease, so familiar to her
were the lines of all the few volumes she possessed. Night after
night, in her little balcony, when everyone slept except herself
and the nightingales, she had declaimed the speeches sotto voce
for her own delight, living for the hour in the scenes they sug-
gested, andforgetting all the more sordid details of the existence
which surrounded her, seeing only the moon and the sea and
the orange flowers. At any other time her meridional accent,
her childish exaggeration of emphasis, and southerner's excess
of gesture, would have incurred the ridicule of her hypercritical
auditor. But now the critic was in the mood to be kind and to
be easily pleased. She closed her ears to the defects, and only
noted with approbation the much there was to praise and to
approve in the untaught recitation of a girl of fifteen, who had
never seen a stage or heard a recital in the whole of her short
life.
Damaris paused abruptly, and with a startled look, like one
awakened out of dreamland into rough reality.
'I beg your pardon, I forgot myself,' she said stupidly, not
well knowing what she meant and hardly where she was.
She did not hear the eager praises of the gentlemen about
her ; she only heard the sweet cool voice of the woman who was
her judge, and who had listened in impassive silence :
* My dear, you have talent,' said that voice. 'Perhaps you
have even genius. With all that music in your shut soul you
must not marry Gros Louis.'
Damaris looked at her wistfully, with all the colour hot in
her face, and her heart beating visibly. Then, she could not
have told her why, she burst into tears.
' Une sensitive !' murmured her visitant a little impatiently.
' You see, my dear Duke !—it is Aimee Descl'e'e, not Rachel;
Adrienne Lecouvreur, not Mile. Mars.'
' The greater pity then to take her from her orange-groves,'
answered Bethune. ' What will Paris or the world give that
will compensate for all her loss !'
Damaris did not hear. With shame at her own emotion,
and unwillingness that it should be pitied or observed, she had
turned away, and had been sobbing silently over the uplifted
head and questioning face of Clovis, who had come upward tc
inspect the strangers.
' If Esther can move her so greatly,' said Nadine with her
little ironical smile, 'what will Dona Sol do and Marion de
l'Orme 1'
'I do not think,' said Bethune, 'that it is Esther which
moves her now ; it is your abrupt revelation to her of her own
powers. Surely to discover you have genius must be like dis-
covering that you have a snake in your breast and eternal life
in vour hand.'
a 2
84
OTHMAR*
She laughed, and went to where Damaris stood with the
dog, striving to conquer her weakness.
'My dear child, surely you cannot weep for Gros Louis?
Nay, I understand ; I startled you because I told you that if
you study and strive you can do great things. I believe so.
If you wish I will help you to do them.'
The girl was silent. So immense was the vision which
opened before her, and so enormous to her fancy were the
perils and difficulties which stretched between her and this
promised land, that she was mute from awe and from amaze-
ment.
Always to dwell on Bonaventure, always to steer and sail
on the sea, always to gather the olives and oranges, always to
see the sun rise over the wild shores of Italy and set over the
coast of Spain far away in immeasurable golden distances,
always to run up and down the rocks like the goats, and swim
like the dolphins, and go to bed with the birds and get up with
them—this had been the only life she had known. For the
moment she could attain no conception of any other. She had
seen the churches at Villefranche and Eza, and she had seen
the building yards of Yillefranche and St. Tropez, and that
was all; her only idea of the great world was of a perpetual
fete-day, with the priests always in their broidered canonicals,
and the church bells always ringing, and the people always
thronging in holiday attire, and going up and down sunny streets
noisily and laughing.
That was all she could think of ; and yet Imagination, that
kindliest of all the ministers of humanity, had told her there
must be more than this somewhere ; had filled her mind with
many dim, gorgeous, marvellous pageantries which grew up for
her from the black printed lines of 'Sintram' and 'The Cid.'
There must be something better than the Sundays of the main-
land And yet to leave her island seemed to her like leaving
life itself!
All these conflicting thoughts striving together in a mind
which was vivid in its fancies and childish in its ignorance
moved her to an emotion which she could neither have con-
trolled nor have described ; she could find no words with which
to answer this great lady, who seemed to her to have thrown
open great golden gates before her, and let in a flood of light
which dazzled her, streaming on her from unknown skies. And
at last she yielded.
' Catherine, I am going on the sea,' she cried, as she ran
indoors, blushing to the roots of her hair at the subterfuge, for
she was very truthful.
The old woman, invisible for the smoke as she stooped over
the great oven, with the handle of its door in her hand,
grumbled some cross words which were neither assent nor
OTHMAR.
85
dissent. Damaris took them as the former, and waited for no
more ; she passed half her life on the sea, the old servant would
find nothing strange in her absenoe if she were out till sunset.
'You are sure I shall be back by Ave Maria 1' she said
timidly to her temptress.
'Certainly,' said Nadine, who knew well that it was not
possible.
' I am sure I ought not to come,' said the girl wistfully.
Her temptress smiled a little.
'Oh, my dear, if you be as feminine as you look, that
consideration will only add la pointe a la sauce.'
Damaris gazed at her with pathetic, impassioned eyes. She
did not understand ; she said nothing ; she only sighed.
' Come,' said the enchantress.
' I think Othmar was right. It is cruel, murmured
B^thune.
' Men are always so timid,' said Nadine with her customary
indulgent contempt for them. ' Ignorance is not bliss, my
dear friend, although the copybooks say so.—Come, my pretty
demoiselle, come and see our enchanted coasts ; we will not
harm you, and we will only give you a little spray of moly such
as Ulysses gathered ; and perhaps a magic ring and a wishing-
cap, nothing worse.'
The child hesitated still; she knew that she was doing very
wrong ; she knew that if what she was doing were discovered,
her grandfather's chastisement would be pitiless ; but curiosity,
imagination, interest, were all enlisted on the side of dis-
obedience, and she had a certain turbulence and ardour of
self-will in her nature which had brought her many hard words
from Catherine, and even blows from Jean Berarde. All these
together conquered her conscience, her judgment, and her
prudence; the gates of the enchanted world stood open; she
might never pass through them, or see what was beyond them
unless she went now.
"With that reasoning she sprang down the first ledges of the
stone staircase, and as lightly as a kid would have done leaped
from one step to the other till she reached the edge of the
sea.
She allowed her feet to be guided into the barge, and felt it
dance beneath them with a strange thrill; it seemed all to be
as unreal as a chapter of ' Sintram ;' the lovely lady who wooed
and tempted her appeared like a being from another world ; the
gilded prow, the embroidered flag, the rich awnings fringed
with silver wavered before her in the sunlight.
Before she had known what she had actually done, the oars
of the men cleft the sunshiny water, letting it flow in streams
of diamonds off their blades, and the vessel had already glided
away from her home.
36
OTHMAR.
Clovis, who was accustomed never to leave the island, but
never failed to give voice to his grief when he saw her leave
him for the sea, either by swimming or sailing, stood on the
strip of sand beneath the rocky steep of Bonaventure and
howled in dismal solitude. She put her hands to her ears not
to hear him ;, it seemed as if he reproached and rebuked her.
Soon he became but a little white speck beneath the red
sandstone of the cliff, and the boat had reached the side of the
stately schooner which awaited them in the midst of gay sun-
shine and azure water, whilst a flute-player discoursed sweet
music from some unseen retreat.
When the island also began to recede from sight she then,
and only then, began to realise what she had done.
,' C'est Bemardin de St.-Pierre tout pur,' said Nadine, sur-
veying with diversion the amazement and the awe of her captive.
Nothing could be more enchantingly kind than her manner,
or more gentle and encouraging in its patience with the girl's
stupor and timidity. She had gratified her caprice, she had
won her wager, and she was sweet and gracious to the object
of it. Obedience had always found her benignant if at times it
had found her as quickly oblivious. This had been a little
thing indeed ; a very little thing ; but she would have been
irritated if it had escaped or beaten her ; would almost have
been mortified.
All her world had told her that to bring the girl thither
would be a folly if not a cruelty; and for that reason beyond
all others she had persevered.
Damaris, seated in the prow of the barge, had the charm for
her of representing the triumph of her own will. So might
some young slave, hardly acquired, on whom her fancy had
been strongly and waywardly set, have represented hers to
Cleopatra.
CHAPTER XI.
Othmar was leaning over the balustrade of the sea-terrace aa
the vessel returned. He looked and saw the captive from
Bonaventure. A sort of vague pity mingled with irritation as
he did so. Why had Nadine brought this hapless child from
her safe sea silences and solitudes 1 It was a jest, but the jest
was cruel; as cruel as that which ties the little living bird on
to the bouquet that is tossed from hand to hand in jests of
Carnival.
The poor sea-born curlew would do well enough left to its
own nest upon the rocks, but once taken prisoner its day was
done.
OTHMAR.
8 7
There were moments when the caprices of her wayward and
dominant will irritated him ; when her profound indifference to
the consequences of any action which amused herself, and com-
promised others, repelled him by its coldness. What could
this poor little peasant be to her 1 A toy for five minutes, a
plaything sought out of mere contradiction, and destined to be
cast aside ere the day was done !
He watched the graceful shape of the schooner as it bore
down upon the coast with a sense of regret as from some definite
misfortune which might have been averted by exercise of his
own will. But he had never used his will in any opposition to
his wife.
Wisely or unwisely, he had never made the slightest oppo-
sition to her desires or even her fancies. Begun in the blind
adoration of a lover, the habit of deference to her had continued
with him, not out of feebleness or uxoriousness, but out of that
gradual growth of custom which is one of the most potent
influences of life. She had power over him to make him
relinquish many a project, abandon many a desire, but this
power was not reciprocal; it seldom or never is so between two
human beings. The old proverb, that of any twain one is
booted and spurred and the other saddled and bridled, has a
rough truth in it.
Othmar knew nothing of, and cared as little for, this girl
whose face looked with so frank an audacity, so wistful an
innocence, out of the brilliant drawing of Loswa. But he was
sorry that she was not let alone. He had suffered many a bitter
moment, even since his marriage, from the uncertainty of his
wife's moods, from the mutability of her fancies. Constant in
his own tastes, and very unwilling to wound others, her rapid
changes from interest to weariness, and her profound in-
difference for the bruises she gave to the amour propre of her
fellow-creatures, frequently troubled and distressed him. He
was often kind to persons he disliked, to compensate them for
her unkindness, or to prevent them from perceiving it.
Nadine, he knew, would think this poor child of no more
account than the briar-rose to which he had likened her ; but
to him it seemed wanton and cruel to have disturbed the
peacefulness of her life, merely as a child casts a stone at a bird,
and then runs on, not even looking to see whether the bird be
bruised or has fallen.
' Life is but a spectacle,' she had once said to him. ' When
you go to the Gymnase do you distress yourself as to whether
the actors catch cold at the wings or take a contagious disease
in a cab as they go home 1 Of course you do not 1 Then why
not view life in the same manner 1 People bore us or please
us ; that is all we are concerned with. We do not follow them
home in fact; we need not, even in imagination.'
88
OTHMAR.
But Othmar did not agree with her. Life seemed to him
much more often tragedy rather than comedy ; he could not
divest himself of a compassion for the players, with which
much fellow-feeling mingled.
' Since I married him he has become very amiable,' she once
said jestingly. 'It is due to the spirit of contradiction which
always exists in human nature, and which is never so strongly
developed as in marriage.'
It was a jest; but there was a truth in the jest. Often he
felt so much irritated at his wife's indifference, that it stimu-
lated him to more interest or sympathy than he would otherwise
have felt on many subjects and in many persons.
As he saw the yacht approach the sea-wall now, he turned
away impatiently and went into the house to his books. Ho
did not choose to assist at the festive procession which was con-
ducting this poor little wild goat of the cliffs to be offered upon
the altars of caprice and flattery.
As if, he thought, a life out of the world were not such an
enviable thing that we should be as afraid to destroy it as we
are afraid to break a Tanagra statuette !
Meanwhile, unretarded by his displeasure, the schooner
approached as nearly as the draught of water would permit,
and the boat from it landed Damaris Berarde at the foot of the
rose-marble stairs. Bethune would have assisted her, but she
sprang from the boat to the landing-stair with the assured and
graceful agility of one who passed all her life in the open air,
and was practised in the free exercise of all her muscles. Her
eyes gazed in delighted wonder at the beauty of the place.
' It is like Alcina's palace,' she said with a quick breath of
admiration.
' What do you know of Alcina ? ' asked her hostess, amused.
' I have read Ariosto,' she answered, and then, with her
extreme care for perfect truthfulness, added, ' I mean I have
read his poems, translated.'
' It is rather your island which is like Alcina's,' said her
hostess.
Then they led her through the gardens, which seemed all a
maze of rose, of yellow, and of white from the innumerable
thickets of azalea which were in bloom. Here and there, out
of their gorgeous glow of colour, there rose the white form of a
statue or the white column of a fountain. The sun was still
high in the west; the gardens seemed to laugh like children in
its warmth.
It was all so beautiful, so magical, so strange ; the child
whose imagination had been fed on poets' fancies, and had
grown unchecked in an almost complete solitude, expected some
marvellous message, some wondrous destiny to meet her there
on this threshold of a new life.
OTHMAR.
89
She found herself the centre of attention and of homage;
everyone looked at her, spoke to her, strove to gain her notice.
A vague fancy came into her mind—perhaps she was a king's
daughter after all, like the Goose Girl in Grimm's stories, of
whom Melville had told her once. Anything would have
seemed possible to her, and nothing too incredible to happen
at the close of this astonishing day.
They led her into the house, which was entered from the
garden through conservatories filled with Asiatic and South
American plants and gaily peopled by green paroquets and
rose-crested cockatoos, and scarlet cardinals, which flew at their
will amongst the feathery foliage.
They were all kind to her ; full of compliment and of thought-
fulness for her ; even her hostess took trouble to interest her,
to explain things to her, to make her feel that she was wel-
come and admired. In her serge frock and her thick shoes,
with her rope of pearls twisted round her throat, and her face
in a rose glow of surprise and of innocent vanity and pleasure,
she sat the centre of their interest, their approval, and their
praise. She was a very picturesque figure with her short blue
rough gown and her scarlet worsted cap. She had twisted her
big pearls round her throat, and she had slipped on her Sunday
shoes. She was tall, and lithe, and erect; she looked as-
tonished, but not intimidated. If a smile were exchanged
between them at her expense she did not see it, and if they
looked at her much as they would have done at a ouistiti or a
topaza pyra from wild woods, she was unconscious of it.
The whole scene was enchantment to her eyes. Her natural
sense of the beauties of form and of colour was at once soothed
and excited by the beauty of these chambers, which had all
the subdued glow of old jewels. It was still daylight, but rose-
shaded lamps were burning there, and shed a mellow hue over
all the brilliant colours. They brought her tea, and ices, and
bonbons, things all as strange to her as they would have been
to a savage from South Sea isles.
Her ignorance, her simplicity, her frank surprise amused
them, and the natural shrewdness and pertinence of her replies
stimulated them with the sense of a new intellectual distraction.
But when they pressed her to recite, she grew shy and silent.
She was not a machine to be set in action by pressure of a
spring ; and a certain suspicion that she had only been brought
here as a plaything dawned upon her ; the idea suddenly came
to her that these great people were amusing themselves with
her ignorance and astonishment, and when once that sting of
mortified doubt had come into her mind, peace fled, and pride
kept her mute and still.
Other persons came in, pretty women, and handsome men ;
there was a murxnuy of laughter and a confusion of voices in all
90
OTHMAR.
the rooms. She began to feel less at her ease, less satisfied,
less sure of her own self. Some of the new-comers stared at
her and sauntered away laughing; her one little hour of triumph
was already over; she had been seen, she had ceased to be a
novelty.
But it was too late to repent. She could not ask such
strangers to retrace their steps for her ; and she felt by intui-
tion that this lovely sovereign, with her delicate face and her
gracious smile, could have become as chill as the north wind
and as terrible as the white storms, were she offended by
caprice or ingratitude.
Damaris had strong natural courage, and all the hardiness
of a resolute and defiant youth; but she felt a vague fear of
Nadine Napraxine, which only served to intensify the fascina-
tion by which she was subdued in her presence.
Her hostess still spoke kindly to her from time to time, but
soon ceased to think much about her : having once been
captured and brought thither, she had ceased to be an object
of great interest.
It was five o'clock; more people had driven over from other
villas; great ladies, with their attendant gentlemen. There
were the usual laughter and murmurs of conversation, and
general buzz of voices ; the rose-shaded lamps were shining
through the daylight; the sounds of a grand piano magnificently
played came from the music-room ; the air was full of the scent
of roses and gardenias, of incense and perfume. Damaris, after
a few glances cast at her, a few smiles caused by her, was for-
gotten and left to herself. Her head turned; her breath
seemed oppressed in this atmosphere so different to her own ;
she felt lonely, ashamed, miserable ; she shrank into a corner
behind some palms and gloxinias, it was the saddest fall to
pride and expectation.
Othmar and Bethune, watching her, both thought, * She
has found out she is only a plaything, and she is resentful.'
Othmar thought, in addition, ' If only she knew how very little
time she will even be as much as that!'
They saw without surprise, but with contempt, that Loswa,
through whose imprudence she was there, avoided her, was
evidently ashamed to seem acquainted with her, and devoted him-
self assiduously to two or three of the great ladies. Loswa wished
to show her that if he had sought her for sake of his art, he had
better interests and occupation than a little peasant in knitted
stockings could afford him. In himself he was angered against
her for the slightness of the impression he had made on her,
and the indifference with which she had treated him after he
had honoured her by taking her for a model.
' She is a little sea-mouse that came up in Miladi's deep-
OTHMAR.
9*
water net to-day,' he said with a slighting laugh to the great
ladies who asked him about her.
Damaris overheard, and her child's heart burnt with rage
and scorn against them.
' He broke bread with me yesterday, and he ridicules me to-
day !' she thought, with her primitive islander's notions as.to
the sanctity of the rites of hospitality. She hated this soft-
eyed, soft-voiced man, who had made an effigy of her with his
colours, and had brought to her these cruel strangers, who had
in a single hour made such havoc of her peace. And they had
told her that she should be back at Ave Maria, and it was now
night; deep night, she thought it; for she did not know that
though these rooms were all lit artificially, and the windows had
now been long closed, behind these thick draperies of golden
plush the last glow of daylight had scarcely then faded from
the western skies.
What would they think on the island?—and what would
Catherine and Raphael do ?
No one now noticed her since they had ceased to stare at
her as a young barbarian ; no one now remembered her, sought
her, or cared for her; she seemed likely to pass the whole
afternoon in a corner, undisturbed and unremembered, like a
little sea-mouse, as he called her, too insignificant even to be
expelled!
On her island nothing could have daunted her, silenced her,
troubled her ; she was mistress there of the soil and of herself ;
she was proud and intrepid as any sovereign in her own tiny
kingdom; but here all her courage deserted her; she only
realised how utterly she was unlike all these people around her ;
she was only conscious of the rude texture of her gown, of the
rough wool of her hose, of the sea-brown on her hands and
arms, of the red on her cheeks blown there by the wind and
the weather.
All these women were delicate and pale as the waxen bells
of the begonia, as the creamy column of the tuberose.
She had been innocently vain, unconsciously proud of her-
self; everybody had told her she was handsome, and her own
sense had told her that she was born with finer mind and
higher organisation than were possessed by those who were her
daily companions. And now she felt that she was nothing—
nothing—only an ignorant and common peasant. She was well
enough at Bonaventure, but she was a poor little savage here.
Suddenly there was a general murmur of excitation and a
general movement of personages, and from where she had
been placed she saw the mistress of the house going forward
to greet a young man who had entered as various voices had
exclaimed:
92
OTHMAR.
' Prince Paul is come !'
They all surrounded this new-comer with murmurs of ardent
congratulation. He was the Rubenstein of the great world, a
rare and most sympathetic genius, and, ce qui ne gate rien, he
was the son of a grand duke, though he held it as a much higher
title that he had been also the pupil of Liszt and the beloved of
Wagner. He was one of the innumerable cousins which Nadine
could claim here, there, and everywhere in the pages of the
Almanach de Gotha, and he was a person whose visits were
always agreeable to her.
This visit was unexpected, and was, therefore, all the more
welcome. In the reception of Paul of Lemberg she altogether
forgot her poor little bit of seaweed off Bonaventure, and every-
one did the same.
Othmar, coming through his rooms to welcome his new and
unlooked-for visitor, who was a great favourite with himself,'
caught sight of the figure so unlike all others there, which was
seated forlorn and alone on a low couch, with a group of palms
and some draperies of Ottoman silks behind her.
' So soon abandoned !' he thought with compassion. ' Poor
child ; she looks sadly astray. She is very handsome—as hand-
some as Loswa's sketch,' he thought also, with a few swift
glances at her.
When he too had greeted Prince Paul he turned to his wife
and said in an undertone :
'Have you forgotten another guest whom you have left
there all alone 1'
She looked fatigued and annoyed at the suggestion.
'My dear Otho, go and console her; you were always a
squire of distressed damsels.'
Othmar turned away and passed back through the apart-
ments to the place where he had seen Damaris.
'Poor little declassee !' he thought pitifully. 'You have no
power to amuse them for more than five minutes. It was cruel
to bring you away from your own orange and olive shadows
into a world with which you have no single pulse in common !'
With his gentlest manner he addressed her :J
' May I present myself to you, mademoiselle ? My wife, I
understand, persuaded you to favour us by leaving your soli-
tudes. I am afraid we have not much to offer you in return.'
Damaris was silent. She was grateful for the kindness, but
she was too offended and pained by the position in which she
had been placed to be easily reconciled to herself.
' You are Count Othmar ?' she asked abruptly.
She was thinking of the story told her, when she was a child,
by Catherine.
'That is what men call me,' said he. 'Believe me, I am
your friend no less than my wife is so, and I am most happy
OTHMAR.
92
fco see you beneath my roof. I first made your acquaintance
through Loswa's sketch.'
4 He was not honest about that,' she said angrily.
Othmar smiled.
4 No artists are honest when they are tempted by beautiful
subjects. He will make you the admiration of all the Paris art
world next year.'
She did not reply at once. Then she repeated :
4 It was not honest. I did not think he was going to show
it, and bring people to me.'
4 No; in that I think he took unfair advantage of your
hospitality.'
4 That is what I mean. I shall not let him ever go back.'
4 Poor Loswa! The punishment will perhaps be greater
than the offence.'
She was again silent. She knew nothing of the light give
and take of social intercourse. To her the things of life were
all very serious.
He felt an extreme compassion for her, and with, great
patience, kindness, and tact, strove to overcome her half-fierce
shyness. He talked to her in a way which she could under-
stand and of things she knew; of the life of the sea, of the
fruits and their seasons, of dogs and their ways, of old poets
and simple writers such as she loved and reverenced. Little
by little her sullenness gave way, her face lightened with its
natural smile; she felt confidence in him and spoke to him with
that candour and directness which were as common to her as its
blue tint to the sea-water; but all the while she thought with
sinking heart:
41 wonder if I might ask him how late the hour is 1 I wonder
if I might tell him how much I do want to go home 1'
But she did not dare to do so ; she thought it would be
rude.
Othmar placed before her some volumes of Dora's illus-
trations to beguile her time, and rejoined his wife, who was
still occupied with the Prince of Lemberg. He was at all
times one of her favourites, and he had just come from Yienna,
and had many chroniques scandaleuses of that patrician court to
tell.
4 What is to be done with this unhappy child ?' Othmar said
to her somewhat sternly. 4 She is miserable and depaysee.'
41 sent you to amuse her,' replied Nadine. 'If you did
not '
4 You must allow me to say,' returned Othmar, 'that it was
not worthy of you to bring that poor little peasant here, only
to neglect her and make her miserable. I should have thought
you were too great a lady to commit such a—will you pardon
me the word '4—such a vulgarity.'
94
OTHMAR.
. She was not as angry as he had expected ; she even smiled;
but she remained as indifferent.
' Vulgarity is indeed a terrible charge ! I do not think any-
body ever brought it against me before. I thought she was very
well entertained. I supposed Loswa took care of her. He is
responsible for her.'
'Ho,' said Othmar, 'we are responsible. She is in our
house, and she came here by your invitation ; on your in-
sistence. There is surely the law of hospitality '
'Among savages,' said his wife, amused. 'I believe it
exists somewhere still on the Red River, or amongst the Red
Indians; I am not sure which. We know nothing about it.
We only invite people because we think they will amuse us,
and we usually find that they do not. I fancied this girl would
be amusing, but she is not at all so here. She is dull, and she
is frightened.'
' What else could you expect ?'
' I expected—I do not know what I expected. Genius
should not be abashed by mere tables and chairs.'
' Perhaps she has no genius. Even if she have any, to be
stared at and laughed at by a number of strange people may be
sufficiently embarrassing. I confess that I think you have done
a very cruel thing.'
She laughed. When men are angry they amuse immeasur-
ably a clever woman whose temper is serene. And it seemed
such a trifle to her.
'Pending your arrangements for her future,' said Othmar
after a pause of excessive irritation, ' where is she to be this
evening? The second gong has sounded.'
She gave a little gesture of impatience.
' How very tiresome you are ! Can she not go to the
servants ?'
' In my house ? Certainly not. I will have no guests sent
to the servants' hall. This young girl is as well born as any
other of your visitors.'
' How odd you are ! You will make me insist on separate
establishments if you develop such quaint notions ! I am sure
she would be infinitely happier with the maids, and she would
run no risk of becoming declassee.'
' It is the only time in my life that I have found your ex-
pressions in bad taste,' said Othmar as he turned to leave the
room.
She laughed: 'You had better take her into dinner your-
self.'
' I shall do so if she will come.'
The door closed on him, and she looked after him with a
frown of impatience and a smile of astonishment.
What a fuss about a little fisher-girl! she thought. As if
OTHMAR.
95
the girl could not go to the maids—go to the nurseries—go to
the still-room—anywhere, anywhere. What could it matter ?
She was accustomed to see her playthings no more when
once they had passed an idle hour for her. Why could not
somebody take away this one ? She would not have been here
had it not been for Loswa. It was all Loswa's fault, no one
else's. And who could tell that the girl would be such a dumb,
stupid, frightened creature ? On the island she had had force
and courage and talkativeness enough.
Why would Otho always take everything au grand serieux ?
He should have lived on that island.
He was quite capable of taking her in to dinner, though
there were high ladies of every degree staying in the house !
And she hated the idea of his making himself ridiculous. She
would override all customs and conventionalities herself when
she chose, but she was too thoroughly a woman of the world
not to regard a social solecism, a drawing-room blunder, with
much more horror than she would have felt for greater crimes.
Anything which made an absurd story for society was to her
detestable.
' Murder all your enemies to three generations, like a
Montenegrin,' she would say a propos of such matters, 4 but
never make a fault in precedence at your table.'
Othmar meanwhile dressed very hurriedly, and hastened to
the drawing-rooms before they could fill again. The latent
chivalry of his temper was active ; he would have been capable
for the moment of any eccentricity to show his honour for this
forlorn child.
' What wretched artificial creatures we all are !' he thought.
4 No wonder, when any natural life comes amongst us, it feels
dazed and astray.'
The existence he led looked to him for the instant supremely
absurd. The instincts towards wider freedom and plainer
habits, and higher thoughts than those possible in his society,
had always been in him from his youth, though they had found
no issue and no sympathy ; and in his marriage he had tightened
around him the bondage of the world.
The brilliant rooms were deserted when he re-entered them:
here and there a servant moved, attending to a lamp or carrying
away a stray teacup ; there was no one else.
In his gentlest tones he again addressed Damaris : .
4We are about to go to dinner,' he said to her kindly;
4 will you do me the honour to accompany me ?'
No hunted antelope could have looked more terrified than
Bhe.
4 Dinner,' she echoed. 41 dined at noon.'
'But you can dine again? The sea air always gives one an
appetite. You must not starve like this in my house.'
$6
OTHMAR.
(I could not! I could not!' she said with tremulous lipS*
She glanced in an agony of dread through the rooms where all
those gay people were. The idea of dining with them appalled
her more than it would have done to find herself on a wrecked
vessel, in the midst of the winds and waves. What would they
think of her 1 What errors would she not make ? What could
she know of their manners and fashions ?
' I could not! I could not!' she repeated, her colour
changing a dozen times a minute.
He endeavoured to persuade her, but found that it only
caused her more pain. After all, he reflected, it was natural
enough that she, who had never been at any table save her own,
should be appalled at the prospect of dining before a score of
fine ladies and gentlemen.
He was sorry for her. He knew the rapidity with which
his wife's caprices altered and her preferences evaporated. He
had seen so many please her, for an hour, to weary her im-
measurably whenever they afterwards presumed to recall to her
the fact of their existence.
' Well, you shall do as you please in this house,' he said to
her. ' Remain here, and 1 will tell them to bring your dinner
to you.'
' Indeed—indeed I want nothing,' she protested ; * I could
not eat.'
She was about to say to him much more than that; to say
that the sun had set, the night flad come, the hours were passing
fast—but she could not find courage. After all, what was she ?
—a stupid, ignorant little sea-born savage in the eyes of all
these people.
She remained where she was, silent, and miserable, yet
watching with curious eyes the pageant so new to her of the
lighted salons, the lovely ladies, the pretty procession that
passed out of the drawing-rooms as they went to dinner. Could
these be human beings who lived always like this? She
wondered—she envied—and yet she longed for her own free
life on the waves, under the olives, climbing with the goats,
diving with the gannets, rocking in the orange-boughs with the
thrush and the greenfinch. It was beautiful here, magical,
marvellous, incredible ; yet she wanted fresh air, she wanted
free movement; like a mountain-born rose shut up in a hot-
house, she felt suffocated in this sultry and perfumed air.
CHARTER XII.
As Othmar had promised, a servant brought to her, served on
silver and Japanese porcelain with damask, which she took to
QTHMA&
97
fee satin, a repast of Which the dishes succeeded each other in
bewildering rapidity, and looked so ethereal and pretty that it
seemed^ to her quite grievous to break them up and eat them.
The fairies themselves might have feasted off these tempting
viands, and her appetite, which was the robust one of youth,
proved to her that it is possible to dine at noon and yet be
ready to dine again at eight. She had satisfied her hunger,
however, long before the full complement of the services had
been brought to her, and the fruit and bonbons best pleased
her childish tastes. She gained courage to leave her corner and
come from beyond the palms and move timidly about the rooms,
looking now at this picture, now at that statue, and ever con-
fronted by her own likeness in the mirrors, and beholding it
with impatience. She touched the flowers embroidered on the
plush of the chairs, astonished that the blossoms were not real.
She looked with wonder at the grand piano, marvelling that out
of its painted panels and ivory keyboard such melodies as she had
heard could have been drawn. She gazed at the figures on the
Gobelin tapestries in entranced delight, and, with the unerring
selection of a nature instinctively artistic, paused enraptured
before the marble copy by Chsinger of the Vatican Hermes.
She who had never seen anything but Bonaventure and
the fisher-people's cabins on the mainland, and the little dusky
shops where the fruit was sold, was dazzled by the beauty of
St. Pharamond within and without. Everything around her
was strange and wonderful; the very flowers were unfamiliar;.
gorgeous blossoms to which she could give no names.
But when she caught sight of her own figure in the mirrors,
standing amidst all the glow and delicacy of colour of these
marvellous chambers, she seemed to herself barbarous, incon-
gruous, grotesque, a blot upon the scene, a savage set amidst
civilisation. All the flatteries which had been poured out to her
ear had passed by her, making little impression. There were
the mirrors, which were truer counsellors than he ; they showed
her that she was not as these people were. She did not think she
had any beauty at all, she only saw that she had none of thi3
grace which was around her, that she was like a bit of ribbon
Weed from the sea amongst lilies and lilac.
She was so interested and so absorbed that she was startled
as by a blow when she saw the double doors at the end of the
drawing-rooms thrown open by a man with a silver chain and a.
white wand, and the figure of her hostess appeared led by the
Prince of Lemberg and followed by all the ladies and gentlemen
who had dined with her that evening.
With the swift movement of a hunted thing Damaris drew
back behind a screen of plush embroidered like the walls andl
chairs and couches with silken garlands of spring flowers.
No one was thinking of her.
H
OTHMAR.
Even Othmar passed by the spot where he had left her with-
cut looking for her. He was talking to a very tall slight blonde
woman, who was the Princesse de Laon, and had been Blanchette
de Yannes. They all went by the screen and passed on into the
farthest room of all, where the Erard stood. Damaris, like a
forsaken child, crouched down on the stool she had found there,
and the big hot tears forced themselves from under her eyelids.
It was foolish, she knew ; unreasonable, no doubt; but the
most piteoun sense of mortification and of insignificance was
upon her, like a heavy hand crushing her down into the earth.
At Bonaventure, despite the harshness at any disobedience
with which she was treated by her grandfather, she had been in
much a spoilt child ; the few people on the island were all her
ministers and servants. On the rare occasions when she visited
the mainland, everyone treated with reverence and flattery the
heiress to Jean Berarde's wealth and acres ; even when these
great people had come to her they had praised her talent, they had
suggested wild hopes to her, they had given her honeyed words ;
unconsciously she had expected something very great to happen
to her when she should be seen at this house where her presence
was said to be so desired—to realise that she was nothing here,
less than the servants, who at least had their, place and their
duties in it, was the most cruel of disillusions.
Overcome by the unusual warmth and closeness of the
atmosphere, which sent her blood to her temples and filled her
with a strange drowsiness, she let her head fall back upon the
cushion of her couch and fell asleep. She dreamed strange
things. There was nothing to distract her. • The servants
glanced at her contemptuously and let her alone; they had no
orders about her, and in the house of Nadine no one ever dared
to act without orders.
The perfumed air, the dry warmth from the caloriferes, the
profound stillness, invited slumber ; and she slept on as soundly
as any tired child that throws itself upon a primrose bank on an
April day.
She was roused by a sound of sweet notes like the voices of
her nightingales when they sung under the orange-leaves.
In the farthest room of all, where the pianoforte stood, Paul
of Lemberg had begun £o play ; melodies of Tristan and Isolde
thrilled through the silence to her ear and awakened her in her
hiding-place. She who had never heard any such music in her
life listened with a surprised sense of delight so intense that it
was also pain. The delicate rain of harmonious notes falling one
on another, the strange mystery with which the chords of the
instrument repeat and concentrate all the sighs of passion and
the woes of feeling, all the inexplicable and marvellous humanity
and sympathy with which all perfect music is filled, were heard
by her for the first time in their most exquisite forms. She
OTHMAR.
99
listened entranced, awed, and penetrated with an ecstasy which
was as sharp as suffering. She forgot where she was. When
silence followed she was weeping bitterly ; all the wounds of her
heart at once deepened a thousandfold, yet healed by a touch
divine.
All the longing, all the dreams, all the vague desires and un-
satisfied fancies which had been in her mind and heart untold
to anyone, and misunderstood even by herself, burned to obtain
utterance in this the first music she had ever heard. She
crouched in her corner unseen; a servant, who had placed a
lamp behind the screen, had been too discreet in his office, and
too contemptuous of herself, to disturb her. She sat still on her
low stool, and listened as the harmonies succeeded each other
from the distance.
Paul of Lemberg was in the mood to recall a thousand
memories and invent a thousand fancies in music, and his com-
panions were capable of giving him that comprehension and
appreciation which the finest scientific knowledge of the tonic art
alone can render.
In the pauses which at times ensued, the conversation was
animated and absorbing ; they spoke of music, always of music,
and Othmar, whose greatest interest had always been found in
music, forgot as web. as others the guest whom his house
sheltered.
When at length Lemberg rose and drank a cup of cofFee, and
lit a cigarette, and proceeded to faire la cour to the Princesse de
Laon, and four violins in a quatuor of well-known artists were
tuning to fill up the blank of silence he had left, Othmar, with a
pang of compunction, recalled the hours during which the child
had been neither seen nor sought by any one of them. It had
been half-past eight when they had gone into dinner; it was
now past eleven o'clock.
He went through his drawing-rooms hastily, looking for her
in every place, and failing to find her. At length, when he was
about to inquire for her of his household, he saw a shadow
behind the embroidered screen, and moving the screen aside,
discovered her in her solitude.
' My dear child !' he exclaimed, ashamed at his own neglect
of her, ' where have you been ? I have not seen you for hours.
What a dull evening you have passed !'
The tears were dry on her cheeks, but they had left her eyes
humid and heavy ; her face had grown very pale.
(I have heard all that,' she said with a little gesture towards
the distant music-room. ' I did not think there was anything as
beautiful in the world.'
' Une sensitive !' thought Othmar, recalling his wife's half-
unkind and half-compassionate expression as he answered. His
knowledge of such sensitive natures induced him now to observe
H 2
IOO
OTHMAR.
with an instinct of pity the trouble visible On the young girl's
face. She had an isolated, pathetic, bewildered look which
touched him, and with it there was an expression of anger and
hurt pride. No child lost at dark in a wood where it had
strayed through disobedience, was ever more bewildered, lonely,
or punished for its sin, than she was in those radiant drawing-
rooms, surrounded with the light laughter and the, to her, un-
intelligible chatter in which she had no share ; oppressed by this
overheated, over-perfumed air in which she felt stifled and sick,
abashed, and yet angered by the neglect and obscurity to which
they had abandoned her.
' I fear you want to go home, my dear,' he said compassion •
ately. ' Is it not so 1'
She hesitated, then answered curtly : ' Yes.'
' How long have you been asked, or have you promised, to
stay with us 1'
' She said I should go back by sunset.'
' My wife said so 1'
'Yes.' She paused, then added with a tremor of terror ill
her voice, ' If I be out when he comes home my grandfather will
kill me.'
' But he will know you have been safe here with us V
She shook her head. ' That will make no difference,
Monsieur. You do not know him. Of course it is all my fault;
I did wickedly '
' You did, as I understand it, a natural childlike piece of
disobedience ; you ought not certainly to have been tempted by
others to do it, but as your grandsire will learn whom you have
been with, I cannot see that he can be so very greatly angered,
even if you should stay here all night.'
'You do not know him,' said Damaris.
She was nervous and pale ; her hands played restlessly with
the pearls at her throat; her beautiful eyebrows were drawn
together in anger and distress. She did not say so, but more
than once her shoulders had felt the stroke of Jean Berarde's
heavy cudgel.
'He must know our name very well,' added Othmar. 'It
will surely be voucher enough to him that you have passed your
time in safe keeping ?'
' You are " aristos." He hates you.'
He smiled ; he had seen many of these red Republicans who
hated him furiously in theory, yet were never averse to wor-
shipping the golden calf of the Mai son d'Othmar.
' Seriously,' he said, ' do you think that you will be punished
cruelly if you should be here all night 1 Are you sure that your
grandfather will not be open to reason ?'
'You do not know him, or you would not ask.'
' No ; I do not know him, and so I have no right to form
OTHMAR,
loi
any opinion. But I see that what you do know of him makes
you miserable at the idea of his anger. Well, then, home you
must go in some manner. Our promise to you must in some
way or other be kept. Wait a moment here, and I will return
to you.'
Damaris looked after him with interest and gratitude.
Young though she had been when the death of Yseulte had
moved the hearts of the whole people on those shores, some-
thing of its sadness and of its tragedy had reached her, and still
remained in memory with her like the echo of some melancholy
song heard at evening in the shade of the olive-woods. They
had been mere names to her, but they had been names of pathos
and of meaning, like the names of Athalie, of Ondine, of
Calypso, and of Helen—names attached to a story, leaving a
recollection, suggesting something outside common life and
ordinary fate.
'I suppose he has forgotten her long ago,' she thought as she
looked at him as he passed through the salons.
Othmar approached his wife, and waited impatiently until
there was a pause in the conversation buzzing around her.
Then he bent towards her :
' Nadege, did you really promise this child from Bonaventure
that she should go home at sunset %'
'Yes, I think I did. What of it ?'
' Only that I thought you always kept your word, and I find
you have not done so.'
There was that in his tone which irritated her extremely ;
she thought he spoke to her as if she were a person at fault
whom he reproved. Those nearest her could hear every word
he uttered. She turned away from him with her coldest
manner:
' Tell the girl that she may sleep here ; the women will see
to it. She can say that she has my commands.'
Othmar did not reply ; he moved aside and let her pass on
to the room where they were playing baccarat. Had they been
alone he would have said what lie thought ; as it was, he went
out of his drawing-rooms and across the gardens to the boat-
house on the quay.
The yacht could find no anchorage there, and was gone to
Villefranche. Ho sailors remained there in the night-time ;
even the keeper of the boats did not sleep there. All the pretty
painted toys were locked up in the boathouse, and the keeper
had the keys, he could not even get at one of them.
' This is the use of being master of the place !' he said to
himself with natural irritation. It had never chanced before at
St. Pharamond that anyone had ever wanted to go oil the sea
after twilight.
He retraced his steps to the house and called two of his
102
OTHMAR.
servants, and gave them orders to break open the door of the
boathouse and take out the Una boat as the lightest and
swiftest.
Then he returned to where Damaris awaited him.
' You are not afraid to go on the sea in an open boat %' he
asked her. * The water is like glass, and there is a full moon.'
'Afraid—on the sea !'
She could have laughed at the idea; the sea was her com-
rade and playfellow, and had never harmed her. She was no
more afraid of its storms than of Clovis's teeth.
'Then you shall go home,' he said briefly. 'Come with
me.'
'I can go home V she exclaimed in ecstasy.
'Yes, if you are not afraid of an open boat; there are no
other means.'
' Oh, I can sail it myself ! I steer with my foot, and sail
very well.'
'You shall not go wholly alone,' said Othmar with a smile.
' I regret that to speed the parting guest is the only form of
old-fashioned hospitality which it is possible for me to show
you.'
Damaris hesitated a moment.
' Must I not say farewell to Madame 19
' Madame is occupied,' he said as curtly. ' Come, my dear.
Unless you are sure you would not sooner stop here and return
in the morning 1' he added. ' My wife bade me say she would
be happy if you would so decide.'
' Oh no ! ' said Damaris, with terror in her eyes. * I could
not, I*dare not ! My grandfather may be home at sunrise.'
'Come, then,' said Othmar.
She needed no second bidding, but willingly followed him
through the gardens to the landing-place of the little harbour.
The moon was brilliant ; the cedars and other evergreen trees
spread their boughs over the marble balustrades ; the aloes and
cacti raised their broad spears and showed their fantastic shapes
in the clear white light; there was a marble copy of the Faun
which laughed at the stars ; the waves were gently rippling over
the last stair, the sea spread smooth as a lake as far as the eye
could reach; the lights of Villefranche glittered in the darkness
in the curve of the shore ; the air was fragrant with the scent of
millions of violets and of the tall bay thickets under which they
bloomed.
Othmar paused involuntarily.
' How seldom we look at the night!' he said with an uncon-
ficious sigh.
' It is so beautiful here !' she said with a sigh which echoed
his, but had a very different emotion for its source as she looked
with timidity at the marble Faun. She had never seen a statue
OTHMAR.
before ; she was not sure what its meaning was, but the sweet
laughing face whose lips seemed to move in the moonlight be-
witched her.
' It is as beautiful on your island, no doubt,' he answered,
'and far more natural. This place is almost wholly conven-
tional.'
The word said nothing to her ; she had never heard it before.
She was gazing at the marble statue.
' What does that mean ?' she said with hesitation.
'It means youth — the treasure you have,5 said Othmar.
'Do not want any other. They have tried to teach you discon-
tent. They have been very wrong. You have not been happy
here.'
'No—not quite,' she said, afraid to seem ungrateful, yet
obliged to tell the truth.
' No ; you have felt remorse ; you have been wounded by
neglect; and you have been allured by the artificial and the
insincere. Take warning : the world would give you just what
this house has given you.'
The Una boat was at the foot of the stairs ; its little sail was
spread, there were cushions and shawls inside it; the men of
the household whom Othmar had summoned had made every-
thing ready, and waited there.
' Tell your lady,' he continued to his men, 'that I am gone
on the sea ; shall be back probably before dawn.'
Then he waved them aside and launched his boat into deep
water.
Othmar gave his hand to Damaris ; she touched it, but
vaulted into the boat without his aid. When she saw that he
followed her she grew scarlet, and her large eyes opened with
that look of amaze which so well became her.
' You—you ' she stammered, and could utter no other
word.
' Certainly,' said Othmar. ' Since you have been deceived
into coming to my house, I will at least see you safely back to
your own.'
She was still so astonished that she could form no protest
and shape no thanks.
' You must steer,' he said to Damaris as he handled the sail.
She still said nothing, but she took the tiller-ropes. The
little vessel glided easily through the peaceful waves ; the wind,
by a favouring chance, blew lightly from the north-west ; it
plunged with the grace and swiftness of a gannet into the silvery
moonlight and the phosphorescent water.
Othmar gave his companion a little gold compass set at the
back of a watch.
' You must guide our course,' he said to her. ' Bonaventur©
is as unknown to me as Japan to Marco Polo
io4
OTHMAR.
* I shall make no mistake,' she said, finding her voice for the
first time since she had seen him enter the hoat. ' I have
steered on Sundays from Yillefranche home. But—but—I
cannot bear to trouble you ; it is not right.'
' You give me a charming moonlight sail,' said Othmar ■
* and you will show me a terra incognita. I am immeasurably
your debtor. But for you I should still be indoors in warm
rooms with artificial light and an artificial laughter round me.
One can have enough of that any evening.'
' If I did not like it I would not have any of it,' said Damaris,
with her natural manner returning to her.
' I am not sure that I do not like it,' said Othmar ; 'and, at
all events, the person I most wish to please likes it. That must
be sufficient for me.'
Damaris looked at him ; she did not say anything. She was
thinking of that day when she had gathered the daffodils, and
the swallows had flown about her head, and the old woman
Catherine had said : ' Holy Virgin, to think she was so un-
happy !' Were they all unhappy, these great people, al-
though they had everything on earth that they could want or
wish ?
Life outside the island seemed to be a terrible per-
plexity.
' Mind how you steer,' said Othmar, as in the multiplicity
and gravity of her thoughts they drifted perilously near the
troubled water churning in the wake of a steam yacht. With
prompt dexterity and coolness sho corrected her oversight in
time.
' There are few things more delightful than being at sea at
night when the moon is bright, and the vessel is small enough
to make one very near the water,' he said, as they pursued
their course and he aided the passage of the boat with the oars.
' Just like this, between the sea and sky, with all those stars
above, and all the silent night around one—one ought to be a
poet to be worthy to enjoy it, or able to put the charm of it
into fitting words.'
'Yes.'
She had felt herself what he said so often, and she too had
never been able to find speech for that deep delight, that name-
less melancholy, which came to her with the solitude of the sea
at night.
He looked at her as she sat at the tiller with the moonlight
falling full upon her face, and making it older and more spiritual
than it had been by day. So she would look when years had
saddened her, chastened her, etherealised her, taken from her
the boylike buoyancy of her spirit, the frank audacity of her
childhood. Or rather, no ;—she would not look like that, she
would have wedded Gros Louis, have had sturdy, healthy.
OTHMAR.
ios
riotous children plucking at her skirts; have grown heavier,
stouter, coarser, duller; have ceased to care about the moon'-
light on the sea ; have heeded only the sea's harvest of tunny,
crawfish, cod, and haddock. Poor Galatea, whom the Poly-
phemus of a common marriage would bind upon her rock with
all the greedy waves of common cares leaping at her and licking
her with unkind tongues ! Yet there was no fate better for
Galatea than her rock ; ho was persuaded of it; he wished her
to be so persuaded.
CHAPTER XIII.
As the boat went smoothly and fleetly over the calm water,
through the silvery night, beneath the immense vault of the
starry heavens, he talked to her with kindly gentleness, and
heard from her all there was to hear of her short life and of her
great love for Bonaventure.
The course they took was almost wholly free of vessels ;
some heavy brig, fish or fruit laden, alone crossed their path,
and the great green or red lights of the steamships were always
afar off. The navigation of their little vessel did not so engross
either of them that they had not leisure to converse, and
Damaris, in the dusk of the night, in the familiar sea breeze
and sea scent, in the motion of the boat which was as welcome
and soothing to her as the rocking of its nurse's arms to a child,
felt an exhilaration which restored her spirits and loosened her
power of speech. She ceased to be afraid of the chastisement
she would receive at Bonaventure, and she felt a confidence in
the kindness and the protection of her companion which was
very different to the flattered vanity and fascinated awe which
his wife had aroused in her.
That he was a grand seigneur did not affect her with any
sense of diffidence, both because the granddaughter of Jean
Berarde had been reared in an utter indifference to such divi-
sions of rank, and also because in her own heart she fondly
nourished the legend of her own pure descent. The sea lords
of the mountain above San Remo were as true and near to her
in her belief as Hugh Lupus to the Grosvenors, as Hugues
Capet to Don Carlos.
It had been eleven o'clock when they had left the quay of
St. Pharamond. It was dawn when they came in sight of the
island ; its grey olive-crowned side fused softly with the silvery
dusk which preceded the sunrise. There was no sail in sight,
except in the offing to the eastward some score of barques look-
ing no larger than a flock of sea-swallows: they were those of a
poral fleet.
io6
OTHMAR.
1 Is that your little kingdom 1' asked Othmar, looking towards
the cloudlike isle which seemed to float between the sea and
sky. 'Well, it must be a charming life all alone there amidst
the waters, far away from the world and all its fret and fume.
You must be happy there ?'
' Oh yes,' she answered rather doubtfully, without the
spontaneous whole-heartedness which had characterised her
replies to Loswa. ' But, you see—there is a good deal of the
fret and the fume—because Ave trade with the mainland, and
when prices are bad my grandfather is out of temper. It is
not like Fenelon's island at all.'
' Even if not, be sure it is happier to be on it than amidst
the world,' said Othmar, anxious to undo what his wife and her
friends had done. ' The pastoral life is the best there is, and
when it is joined to the liberty of a seafaring life, it seems to
me to be perfect.
' I believe, at least I know,' he continued with some hesita-
tion, ' that my wife spoke to you of your talents, and of all they
might do for you in that bigger world which is to you only
" the mainland." Perhaps they might do much, perhaps they
might do nothing ; that world is very capricious, and its rewards
are not always just. Poets are charming companions, but they
are not infallible guides. Fate has given you a safe home, a
tranquil lot, a sure provision. Do not tempt fortune to desert
you by showing it any ingratitude. I fear my words seem very
cold and dull ones after the gorgeous flatteries you have heard,
but they at least are wise as 1 see wisdom for you ; and, believe
me, they are well meant.'
He spoke with earnestness as the boat approached the island,
and, with the sail lotvered, drifted lightly before the wind to-
wards the beach.
' Will you tell your grandfather ?' asked Othmar, as they
neared the isle.
' Do you think that I ought ? ' she said in a very low voice,
in which was an unspoken supplication.
' I think you ought,' he ansAvered. ' Do not begin your life
with a secret.'
She was silent.
' Surely,' he continued, 'he will not be very angry when he
knows that you were so much pressed by the Countess Othmar,
and that I have myself brought you home. He will be sure you
have been as safe as with himself. I will come and see you
again some day.'
The face of Damaris clouded. She was silent, occupying
herself with guiding the vessel through the surf which broke on
the broad shell beach of Bonaventure.
The mists were white and soft, the head of the clifls waa
invisible in the tender silvery fog; she could hear the voices
OTHMAR.
107
above her of Clovis and Brunehildt. The boat was run ashore,
and she leaped out before Othmar could aid her.
'You are vexed with me,' he said with a smile. 'But,
indeed, my dear, it would be a life-long regret to me if, through
any suggestion or persuasion of my wife's, you were brought
into a life which failed to answer your ideal of it, and rendered
you unfitted to return to the simplicity and quiet of this happy
little place. There are neither knights nor lions nowadays for
Una. She must defend herself in a bitter warfare in which her
sex is only a weapon against her, while her enemies are without
scruple. Adieu, you will prefer to go up alone.'
She turned quickly, and looked up at him with a contrite,
timid little smile.
' I have no doubt you are right, only—one dreams things
—sometimes. I ought to thank you so much : you have been
very good to me.'
'Not at all. I have had a charming night upon the sea,
and am youi debtor.'
Then he begged her to keep the little gold compass in memory
of that evening, raised his hat, and left her.
' Can you manage the boat alone 1' she cried to him in
anxiety.
' Quite well,' said Othmar, as he pushed it through the surf.
When he was some roods from the shore he looked back;
he saw the figure of Damaris still standing where he had left
her, the silvery green mass of the olive-clothed cliffs rising
behind her till they were lost in the hovering clouds of mist.
The barking of the dogs came faintly over the sea, and a bell
tolled from above the daybreak call to work.
' I have done what I can,' thought Othmar, ' but the poison
is there. No antidote, even if it succeed, can ever make the
blood quite what it was before the virus entered. And what
are ambition and discontent but as the bite of a snake when they
seize on a woman- a child 1'
Then he went back over the calm blue water, while with
every moment the white light in the east spread further, and
the mists lifted and the winds dropped, and soon in all its glory
rose the sun.
To this man, whose youth had been full of high ideals,
which his manhood had found it utterly impossible for him to
fulfil, there was something which touched him profoundly in all
youth which, as once his own had done, looked forward to the
world as to some field of combat, where the fair flowers of faith
and of justice would possess a magical strength like the lilies
and roses wherewith the nymphs smote Rinaldo.
To the eyes of men, Othmar appeared the most enviable of
all persons ; to the society around him, as to the multitudes to
whom he was but one of the great names which govern the
io8
OTHMAR.
destinies of nations, it seemed that few living beings had ever
enjoyed so complete a happiness and prosperity as did he. But
in the bottom of his own heart there was a latent bitterness,
which was disappointment. He could not have said where or
how precisely this sense of failure came to him, in the midst of
what was absolute success and entire fruition of all his wishes.
Yet it was there. It is the accompaniment of all power and of
all possession. Contentment looks from a narrow lattice on a
tiny garden bounded by a high box hedge. Culture has the
vast horizon of the universe and finds it small, it can measure
the stars, and sighs to wander beyond their spheres. Dissatis-
faction is the shadow which goes with all light of the intel-
ligence. The uncultured mind can be content; the cultured,
never.
CHAPTER XIV,
Damakis went slowly from the cliffs through the moonlight;
her heart was heavy. She had had a great temptation, a great
joy, a great disillusion, and a great grief, each following close
on the heels of the other in the short space of a few hours.
She came back to her poor little isle with something of'that
remorse, that dejection, that sense of all the golden fruits being
but ashes at the core, with which the great ones of earth, after
reaching the highest heights of power or of fame, will come
back to their lowly village birthplace and think with a sigh,
' Could I but be as once I was !'
The night seemed far severed from the day which had
heralded it as if by long years: never more could she rise in the
daybreak quite the same child who had leaped to the lattice,
and laughed at the sunrise on the sea, that morning.
She did not reason on the change in her, nor understand it,
but she felt it.
When the little velvet-hided calf has been branded in the
stock-yard with the cruel iron, never more (though turned loose
again) will it frolic the same in the prairie grass unwitting of
pain or ill.
She took her way slowly over the head of the cliff across the
breadth of pasture where a few days before she had led Loswa.
There was a dusky crouching figure waiting in the shadow of
the orange-boughs ; it was that of old Catherine the servant,
who sprang towards her and gripped her arm with both hands.
c He is come home !5 she said in a loud, terrified whisper.
{My grandfather !'
Bold though she was by nature, her Lips and cheeks grew
qpld and her heart stood still.
OTHMAR.
109
1 Who else ! * cried the old woman roughly. * For who else
would I keep out of my bed at such an hour to watch for you I
Where have you been all the while 1'
'I have been with the lady,'
Her voice sounded very dull and hopeless; it melted the
heart of the peasant who loved her.
' Well, well, you have had your will and your vanity, and
have paid for them both !' she said, less harshly. ' Poor little
fool ! It is your mother's light blood working in you, I sup*
pose ; you're not to blame. They are to blame who bred you.
I have watched for you ever since I gave him his supper. He
asked where you were. I said you were asleep. He has had a
good deal of brand}'. If you get in by the scullery door, and
take your shoes off, and go softly up the stairs, he will not hear,
and nobody knows you have been away save Raphael and my-
self. That is why I waited outside, to stop and tell you that
you might creep in unseen.'
Damaris stooped her tall head and kissed the woman's
withered cheek :
'That was like you, dear Catherine !'
'More fool I, perhaps. I will punish you come morning,
never fear. But I should be loath for you to see Berarde
to-night. Get in.'
Seeing that Damaris did not move, she pushed her by the
shoulder.
But the words which Othmar had spoken were echoing
in the ear, and sounding at the conscience, of the girl, bear-
ing a harvest which he had never dreamed of when he had
uttered them. There was that in them which had aroused
all the courage and exaggerated sentiment of her mind and
character.
The instincts of heroism, always strong in her, and that
instinct to martyrdom ever dear to anything of womanhood,
rose in her with irresistible force.
' If Count Othmar ever heard that I did not tell, he would
think it so mean and so false,' she pondered, while the eager
grip of the woman's fingers closed on her and tried to pull her
to the open side-entrance of the house.
She resisted.
' No, no ; not so, not so ; not in secret,' she muttered. ' I
wish to see my grandfather. Let me pass.'
' Are you mad 1' screamed Catherine, dragging her backward
by her skirts. ' He is hot with brandy, I tell you ; you know
what brandy makes him; if he knows you have been off the
island he will beat you. Has he not beaten you before, that
you should doubt it 1'
' I do not doubt,' said Damaris. ' But it is only just that he
should be told
no
OTHMAR.
'I owe him everything, you know,' she added, (and I did
wrong to go away from home in his absence.'
'Wrong! of course you did wrong. But you would listen
to nobody, you were so taken up with those fine folks. Of
course you did wrong, but since the harm is done, and it is of
no use to cry over spilt milk and broken eggs, get you into your
bed ; your grandfather will never know anything. Raphael and
I, be sure, shall not tell. Get in and hold your own counsel.
In the morning it will all be as one.'
4 No, it would not be fair,' said Damaris.
Her face was very pale, but the exaltation of a romantic
devotion to honour had come upon her, and gave her a strength
not her own. She passed the figure of Catherine in the entrance
of the scullery, and walked with firm steps through the stone
passages, between the crowded bales of oranges and lemons,
straightway into the great kitchen, where Jean Berarde sat.
The light from an oil lamp which swung from the rafters shone
on his strong, harsh, brown features, his grizzled eyebrows, his
white beard ; the broad-leaved hat he had drawn over his face
threw a dark gloom over the upper part of his features, and
added to the natural hardness and fierceness of their expres-
sion. He had been running smuggled brandies successfully in
his brig, a sport very dear to him, though prudence made him
but seldom indulge in it; he had been drinking a good deal,
and though not wholly drunk his temper was in readiness for
any outbreak, like flax soaked in petroleum. He looked up
from under his heavy brows at Damaris as she entered; the
light and shadows were wavering before his sight, but he re-
cognised her.
' The woman said you were a-bed,' he muttered with a great
oath. 4 What do you mean—up at this time of night 1'
The exaggerated scruples and the overwrought exaltation of
the child made her brave to answer him. She came up quite
close to him and looked at him with shining, steady eyes:
'I am only now come home,' she said in a low voice. *1
have done wrong; I have been out all day.'
Jean Berarde rose to his feet unsteadily, and towered above
her, a rude, savage, terrible figure; his breath, hot as the fumes
of burning spirit, scorched her cheek.
' Out!' he echoed. ' Out ?—without my leave ? Out where ?'
She looked at him without flinching. Only she was very
pale.
' They came and asked me—the ladies and gentlemen—and
I wished so much to go. I have never seen at all how those
people live, and when I got there the hours went on, and I
could not get back until he, Count Othmar, was kind enough
to bring me home in his own boat, and he rowed himself all the
way; and he said that it would not be right for me to hide
OTHMAR.
hi
such a thing from you, because, though I have done no harm,
yet I have disobeyed you '
She paused, having made her confession ; she breathed very
quickly and faintly ; her eyes looked up at him with an un-
spoken prayer for pardon.
In answer, he lifted his arm and struck her to the ground.
CHAPTER XV.
Othmar did not see his wife on the following day until the
one o'clock breakfast, and then saw her surrounded with her
friends.
When everyone had gone to their rooms after midnight he
ventured to visit her in her own apartments. Her women were
there; she did not as usual dismiss them; she looked at him
with something of that expression which used to chill the soul
of Platon Napraxine.
' My dear friend,' she said coldly as he greeted her, ' do not
speak to me again as you spoke yesterday evening. It is not
what I like.'
41 regret it if I spoke improperly,' replied Othmar. ' I was
not conscious that I did. You had made a promise, and I re-
minded you of it. I was not aware there was any grave offence
in that.'
' CP est le ton qui fait la musique. Your tone was offensive.
You may remember that I do not care to be reminded of any-
thing when I forget it.'
' There is nothing praiseworthy in your sentiment,' said her
husband unwisely ; ' and it seemed to me that a promise made
to a poor child, who could not enforce its fulfilment '
She laughed unkindly.
' You kept my promise for me. I believe you accompanied
her yourself. I dare say she preferred it. Really, my dear
Otho, what can this trivial matter concern either you or me?
The girl has gone back to her island. Let her stay there and
marry her cousin.'
' I wish she may. But I doubt whether she will do so now.'
' Because you sailed with her across the sea ? It was very
wrong of you, though probably very natural, if you took the
occasion to conter Jieurettes !'
' I do not care for those jests from you to me. It is what
you yourself have said to her which will have probably poisoned
her contentment for the rest of her days.'
She yawned a little behind her hand and gave him a sign of
dismissal.
'Pray let me hear no more about her,' she said coldly,
112
OTHMAR.
«And if you will forgive me for saying so—I am tired—good-
night.'
' Will you not send away your women ?' said Othmar in a
low tone, with a flush of irritation on his face.
'No, thanks—good-night.'
He hesitated a moment, mastering a great anger which rose
up in him ; then he touched her hand coldly with his lips and
left the room.
' If she thinks she will he able to treat me as she did that
poor humble dead fool ' he thought with mortified im-
patience.
With the waywardness of human nature he wished for that
mere human fondness which probably, he knew, had he had it,
would have soon tired and palled on him.
As he went out from her presence now, he thought, ■ he
knew not why, of the girl Damaris. What warmth on those
untouched lips ! what deep wells of emotion in those darksome
eyes! what treasures of affection in that faithful and frank
heart! Poor little soul!—and the best he could wish her was
to live in dull content beside Gros Louis.
Nadine heard the doors close one after another, as he left
her apartments, with a little smile about her mouth.
' How easy it is to punish them,' she thought; ' and to think
there are women who do not know how !'
The power of punishment was always sweet to her; it
seemed to her that when a woman had lost it she had lost every-
thing that made life worth living. She had not heard that he
had accompanied Damaris home himself because she had not
inquired about it, but she had guessed that he had done so. It
was a silly thing to have done, exaggerated, quixotic ; but then
he had those coups de tete at intervals ; he had always had them
in great things and small; they made him poetic and picturesque,
but occasionally they made him absurd. He seemed to her to
have been absurd now; he could have sent the girl home with a
gardener or a servant, with anybody who could handle a boat, if
she must have gone home at all: she herself did not see the
necessity. But a vague irritation against Damaris came into
her as she sank to sleep between her sheets of lawn.
Une sensitive, une entetee ! If there were any two qualities
wearisome to others were they not those 1 No one was allowed
to be either nervous or headstrong in her world. When she
came in contact with either fault she was annoyed, as when gas
escaped or a horse was restive.
' She has talent, and I would have aided her,' she thought,
' but since she is obstinate and thankless, let her marry Gros
Louis and have a dozen children and forget all about Esther
and Hermione. The world, on the whole, wants olives and
oranges more than actresses, good or bad. Myself, I never
OTHMAR.
"3
understand why one should wish to see a play represented at all
when one can read it; it argues great feebleness of imagination
to require optical and oral assistance.'
The next day, however, when 'she saw Othmar she said to
him with her most gracious grace and that charm with which
she could invest her slightest word :
' I think you were right, my friend, and I was wrong, about
that poor little girl on her island. I did not behave very well
to her. I sought her, and ought to have made her of more
account. Shall I go and see her again, or what shall I do to
make her amends %'
Othmar kissed her hand.
* That is like yourself ! You are too great a lady to be cruel
to a little peasant. As for amends to her, I think the kindest
thing you can do now is to let her forget you, and, with you,
the ambitions which you suggested to her.' .
She looked at him with penetration, amusement, and a
little scepticism.
' She is very handsome; do you wish her to forget you 1 '
she said with a smile. ' I am sure you must have told her you
will go and see her again.'
Othmar was annoyed to feel himself a little embarrassed.
* I told her I would see her again some time, but I did not
say whether this year or next.'
His wife laughed.
' I was sure you did ! Well, then, you can go and see her
at once, and take her some present from me.'
' If you will allow me to say so, I think a present will only
painfully emphasise the difference of cast between you and her.'
' You have des apergus tres fins sometimes ! That is a very
delicate one, and perhaps correct, though a little pedantic.
Well, go and see her, and say anything in my name that you
think will smooth her ruffled feathers and restore her peace. I
think we should have another Desclee in her ; but perhaps you
are right, that it will be better to let her marry her ship-builder.
Wait; you may take her this book from me. That cannot
offend her.'
She took off her table a volume of the * IAgendes des Sibcles,'
an idition de luxe, illustrated by great artists, bound by Marius
Michel, illustrated by Hedouin, and published by Dentu, and
in the flyleaf of it she wrote, ' From Nadege Fedorevna Platoff,
Countess Othmar.' Then she gave it to her husband.
' I am certainly not going there to-day, nor for many days,'
he said as he took it.
She smiled as she glanced at him.
' Are you sure you are not % Well, take it when you do go.'
* I shall go, if at all, only as your ambassador.'
'That is rather prudishly and puritanically put. Why
2
H4
OTHMAR.
should you not say honestly that the girl is very pretty, and
that you like to look at her 1 I assure you it will not distress
me.'
' I could not hope that it would,' said Othmar rather bitterly,
as Paul of Lemberg entered the room.
There were times when the serene indifference to his actions
which his wife displayed found him ungrateful; times when he
almost wished for the warmth of interest which the impatience
of jealousy would have shown. Jealousy is an odious thing, a
ridiculous, an intolerable, a foolish and fretful and fierce
passion, which is as wearing to the sufferer from it as to those
who create it; and yet, unless a woman be jealous of him, a
man is always angrily certain that she is indifferent to him.
Jealousy is a flattery and a homage to him, even whilst it is an
irritation and an annoyance : it assures him that he is loved
even whilst it wears and whittles his own love away. But
jealousy was a thing at once foolish and fond, humiliating and
humble, which was altogether impossible to the serenity and
the security of the proud self-appreciation in which his wife
passed her existence.
In a week's time she had forgotten that she had ever seen
Damaris Berarde ; but in a year's time Othmar did not forget
that he had done so.
A few days later Boris Loswa was ushered into their pre-
sence; he had the sullen perturbed expression of a child
baulked in its wish, or deprived of some toy.
' Loswa looks as if he had had an adventure,' she said as he
entered. ' He is one of the few people to whom these things
still happen.'
' I have been both shot at and nearly drowned, Madame,'
replied Loswa. ' But that would not matter much if it were
not that I have had also the greatest of disappointments.'
'Disappointment and assassination together are certainly too
much in the same day for one person. Tell me your story.'
' I have been to Bonaventure,' said Loswa, and paused.
He looked distressed and annoyed, and had lost that airy non-
chalance and that provoking air of conscious seductiveness
which so greatly irritated his comrades of the ateliers who had
not his success either in art or in society.
' To Bonaventure, of course,' said his hostess, as she glanced
at Othmar with a smile. ' Everyone is going to Bonaven-
ture ; it will very soon see as many picnics as the He Ste.
Marguerite.'
' Not if the tourists be received as I have been,' said Loswa,
in whose tone there was an irritated regret which was not hidden
by the lightness of his manner. ' Jean Berarde is a madman.
I took a little sailing-boat from Villefranche this morning, and
bade them take me to the island. When we reached there, I
OTHMAR.
"5
left the boatmen on the beach and climbed the passerelle as
usual, but I had not got halfway up the cliff before a bullet
whistled past me, and I was warned that if I stirred a step
farther I should be shot like a dog. I could not see who spoke,
but the voice came from above. I replied that I was Loris
Loswa, a painter from Paris, and that I merely wished to be
permitted to finish a sketch which I had taken there a few days
earlier. I presume that this was the worst thing that I could
have said, for I received a second bullet, which this time passed
through the crown of my hat. The person who fired was still
invisible amongst the olives above. At the same moment some
hands clutched my ankles so suddenly and forcibly that I lost
my footing and fell headlong down the ladder through the
brushwood to the beach. I was stunned for a few minutes,
and when I realised where I was, the man Raphael, mindful, I
suppose, of the napoleons he had had, begged my pardon for
having made me descend in such a summary mode, but said
that, had he not done so, Jean Berarde would have killed me.
Raphael was in a great tremor himself, and urged me to go
away on the instant, adding that " le vieux," as he called him,
was resolute to shoot all trespassers without regard to rank or
right, and had put a notice up to that effect on the rocks. " But
it is against the law," I said to him. "Eh, monsieur!" said
Raphael; "he is the law to himself here, and he is mad, quite
mad—un fou furieux—since the little one came back from your
friends. He has sent her away, heaven only knows where, and
not a soul will be let to set foot on the island." " Sent her
away ?" I cried to him. " But I have not finished her portrait."
The wretch did not care. " What does that matter ?" he said.
" What matters is that the one bit of gaiety and goodness in
the place is gone. My children are crying for Damaris all the
day long." I used bad words about his children ; what did
they matter to me ? And I asked him how the old brute had
learned that his granddaughter had been out that night: had he
come home earlier than she? "Yes," said Raphael, "he did
come home an hour before her, but he need not ever have
known anything, for we would, all of us, have kept her little
secret; even old Catherine would never have told of her. But
Damaris was always headstrong, and in some things foolish,
poor child ; and she would have it that it was cowardly and
wrong not to tell Berarde herself ; and so, do what we would,
she would go straight in and tell him ; and he—he had not had
a good day's trade, and he had heard of a debtor who had
drowned himself, and left no goods worth a centime, and so he
was in the vilest of humours that evening ; and when she
related to him what she had done, he up with his big elm staff
and struck her down, and my wife and I thought she was dead ;
and old Catherine was cursing, and the children were screaming,
i 2
Ii6
OTHMAR.
and the dogs howling. Such a scene ! such a scene! How-
ever, she was not injured, and in the evening he took her away
by himself in the open boat, and what he did with her nobody
knows. He made Catherine pack all her clothes in a great
bundle, and so I do not think that he killed her. I suppose he
took her to the mainland, to some convent perhaps, though he
does not love them. I dare say he would have made away with
Catherine too, only he wants her to cook his dinner, and he
knows there is nobody else who can manage the bees." That
was all that I could make Raphael say ; he was in a great state of
terror, and urged me to go away at once. He said the old man
might come down on to the beach for aught he knew. As
Damaris was gone, there was little to be gained by remaining,
so I left the island. In returning we encountered a white
squall; the boat capsized, we clung to her for half an hour,
when we were picked up by a yawl which was going to Yille-
franche. That is all my story; I have been bruised and
soaked, but all that would not matter if I could only finish my
picture. But where is Damaris ?'
' It is really an adventure,' said Nadine, ' and you have
told it dramatically. As for your picture, you deserve not to
complete it, for you neglected her disgracefully when she was
here.'
' I hope this old tyrant has not hurt her ; but a ruffian who
fires at one from his olive-trees as if one were a fox or a
stoat '
' Of course he will not hurt her ; he will either keep her in
a convent to punish her, or, as he does not love convents, marry
her at once to her boat-builder.'
Othmar did not say anything; he had heard Loswa's narrative
with regret.
' Poor, brave little soul!' he thought; ' and it was I who told
her that it was her duty not tu conceal what she had done.'
' A caprice may cost something sometimes you see, Madame,
said Bethune with a smile to his hostess.
' She may become a second Desclee yet,' said Hadine. ' Her
grandfather will not be wise if he drive her to desperation. I
am sorry he struck her: it was brutal.'
'Perhaps we hurt her quite as much,'said Othmar, which
were the first words he had spoken on the subject.
His wife smiled.
' I know that is your idee-fixe. I do not agree with you. If
she marry the shipwright she will now do it with her eyes open.
It is always well to know what one is about.'
'You have made it impossible for her to marry the ship-
wright.'
' I really do not see why. Perhaps you mean your com-
pliments or Paul's music.'
OTHMAR.
11J
* Paul's music, and other things. You showed her the world
&s Mephistopheles showed Faust youth in a mirror.'
* Faust was, after all, Mephistopheles' debtor.'
4 About that there may be two opinions.'
4 After all, she would not have been punished if she had not
spoken.'
' You must admire that at least. Courage is the only quality
which you respect.'
' I admire it, but it was not wise.'
4 What heroic thing ever is 1'
He went away, leaving her presence with some irritation and
some discontent. He knew that he had only said what was best
for Damaris when he had counselled her to have no concealment
from her grandfather; but the idea of the child's having suffered
through his advice, the thought of her taken from her sunny
happy life amongst her orange-groves and honey-scented air,
and all the gay fresh freedom of her seas, into some strange and
unknown place—perhaps into some forced and joyless union—
hurt him with almost a personal pain.
The wild rose had paid dearly for its one day in the
hothouse.
' Why could not Naddge let her alone 1' he thought angrily
as he looked across the shining sea to the gold of the far distance,
where westward the island which had sheltered the happy child-
hood of Damaris lay unseen.
CHAPTER XVI.
A few days later they left the coast for Amyot and Paris»
There was no record left of their visit to Bona venture save the
rough sketch which Loris Loswa had made, and from which he
still meant some time, when he should have leisure, to create a
great picture. One day Othmar bought the sketch of him at
one of those exaggerated prices which Loswa could command for
any trifle which he had touched.
When his wife saw it hanging in his room in Paris she
laughed.
' You are determined,' she said, 4 that I shall not forget my
Desclee manquee.'
4I do not think you were kind to her,' said Othmar.
41 did not intend to be unkind, certainly. She gave me an
impression of force, of talent, of a future: the sketch suggests
that. But no doubt she has married the shipwright by this
time. Little girls begin by dreaming of Rend and Nemorin,
but they end in making the pot an .feu for Jacques Bonhomme.'
OTHMAR.
* I do not think she will ever marry the boat-builder. I told
you that we made it impossible for her.'
'I know you did ; but then you have always des billevesees
romanesques. The steward at St. Pharamond could tell you what
has become of her.'
' I have inquired. She has not returned to the island ; her
grandfather never speaks of her, and no one knows anything at
all about her.'
Nadine smiled.
' Ah ! you have inquired already 1 I thought she impressed
you very much.'
' Not at all,' said Othmar irritably, as he glanced at the sketch
on which the sunshine was falling. ' But I was sorry that any
caprice of yours should have cost anyone so dear.'
' Is that all 1 And you are sure she has not married her
cousin %'
' They say not. He is still living at St. Tropez.'
' Then she must be shut up in some convent.'
'Or dead.'
' Oh no, my dear, she had too much life in her to die. Be-
sides, her grandfather would have made her death known. I am
sure she will live and have a history, probably such a history as
Madame Tallien's or as Madame Favart's. She carries it in her
countenance.'
' Five fathoms of blue water were perhaps the better fate,'
said Othmar.
'You are very poetic,' said his wife with her unkindest
smile. ' I always thought you had a touch of genius yourself,
only it never took speech or shape. You are a Dante born
dumb.'
' Then you should pity me indeed,' said Othmar, with
irritation.
He kept the sketch hanging in the room which he most often
used at his house in' Paris. It served to retain in his memory
that night upon the sea when he had seen the figure of Damaris
disappear in the moonlight, amidst the silver of the olive-trees,
while the fragrance of the orange-scented air and the breath of
the sweet-smelling narcissus were wafted to him from the island
pastures out over the starlit waters.
' You will end in falling in love with that picture,' said his
wife to him with much amusement. He was angered at the
suggestion. His regret for Damaris was wholly impersonal.
' We did her a cruel kindness,' he thought sometimes when
he glanced at it. ' Wherever she be, and whatever she live to
become, she will always carry a thorn in her heart, because she
will always have the sentiment that she might have been some-
thing which she is not. It is the saddest idea that can pursue
anyone through life. Perhaps she will marry the boat-builder
OTHMAR.
"9
and have a dozen children, but that will not prevent her some-
times, when she sees a fine sunset, or sits in the moonlight on
the shore waiting for the sloop to come in, from being haunted
by the thought that if things had gone otherwise she might have
been in the great world. And then, just for that passing
moment, while the ghost of that " might have been " is with
her, she will hate the man who comes home in the sloop, and
will not even care for the children who are shouting on the
beach.'
CHAPTER XVII.
They were again at Aymot in the golden August weather, when
no place pleased its mistress better than the cool and stately
palace set upon its shining waters and stone piles, with the deep
forests of France drawn in an impenetrable screen of verdure
around its majestic gardens. She had a constant succession of
guests, and a kaleidoscopic infinitude of pastimes. Great singers
came down and warbled by moonlight to replace the nightingales
grown mute; great actors came down also and played on the
stage which had been built and ornamented by Primaticcio ;
every kind of ingenuity in novelty and diversion was exercised
for her by cunning intelligences and brilliant wits. The weeks
of Amyot were likely to become as celebrated in social history
as the grandes nuits de Sceaux; everyone invited to them re-
ceived the highest brevet of fashion that the world could give.
Other people were immensely pleased and amused at Amyot and
at her other houses : she alone was not. Her intelligence asked
too much ; the whole world was dull and finite for her.
She had known the greatest triumphs, the highest heights
of passion, the most voluptuous ecstasies, the most brilliant of
successes, and they had all seemed to her rather tame, quickly
exhausted. Faustina appeared to her as absurd, and com-
manded her sympathies as little, as Penelope.
Life's little round is all too short for satisfaction in it ; it
is so soon over ; it is so crowded and so transient; to have
children who may do less ill or do less well than we, to pursue
aims or ambitions which have no novelty in them and little
wisdom, to love, to cease to love ; to dream and die ; this is the
whole of it, and the sweetest of all things in it are its child-
hood which is ignorant that it is happy, and its passion which
is no sooner made happy than it pales and falls.
' If only life were like a play !' she thought. ' Any drama-
tist knows that in his last act his movement must be accelerated,
and his incidents accumulated, till they culminate in a climax.
But in life, on the contrary, everything waxes slower anc
720
OTHMAR.
slower, everything grows duller and duller, incidents become
very scarce, and there is no denouement at all—unless we call
the priests with their holy oil, and the journey to the church-
yard behind the mourning-coaches, a denouement. But it cannot
be called a climax: the going out of a spent lamp is not a
climax.'
Her lamp was far from spent ; and yet a sense of the dull-
ness of life, generally, often came to her. She had everything
she had ever wished for, and yet it left her with a vague senti-
ment of dissatisfaction.
'I wonder if he is really contented,' she thought sometimes
doubtfully of Othmar. It seemed to her quite impossible he
should be. Why should he be when she was not f And yet
there was no one she would have liked better or so well.
The sameness of human nature irritated her. Surveying
history, it seemed to her that character, like events, must have
been much more varied in other times than hers ; say in the
Fronde, in the Crusades, in the time of the Italian Republics,
even in the days of the Consulate, when all Europe was drunk
with war like wine.
Nowadays people are always saying the same thing ; enter-
tainments resemble each other like peas ; wherever the world
gathers it takes its own monotony and tedium with it, and
repeats itself with the dull perseverance of a cuckoo-clock.
She endeavoured to infuse some originality into her own
society and her own pleasures ; but she did not consider that
she succeeded. People were too dull. Why was it 1 Nobody
was dull in Charles the Second's time, or in the days of Louis
Quinze, or of Henri Quatre. At Amyot, if anywhere, she sue-
ceeded, but, though her invitations to the house parties there
were passionately coveted, and everyone else was so exceedingly
delighted with them, the utmost she could ever say was that
she had not been too greatly bored. Modern existence was not
dramatic enough to please her.
* And yet if it be ever dramatic you say it is melodramatic,
and ridicule it as vienxjeu,' said Othmar to her once.
'No doubt I do ; one is not happily obliged to be consis-
tent,' she replied. ' We are too intellectual or too indifferent
nowadays to have a Guise slaughtered in our antechamber, or
an Orloff assassinated by our bedside, but the consequence is
that life is dull. It is a journey in a wagon lit, one is half
asleep all the time ; it has no longer the picturesque incidents
of a journey on horseback across moor and mountain, with the
chance of meeting Malatesta or the Balafr6 en route.'
' Yet men have died for you !'
' Oh, my dear ! they never did it with any picturesqueness
at all! What picturesqueness can there be ? A man falls in a
duel; he is put in a cab with a doctor ! A man kills himself
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121
With a revolver ; there is again a doctor, and also, probably, a
policeman !'
4 Which does not prevent the emotions which lead to those
incidents from being as genuine as they used to be.'
41 know that is your theory. It is not mine. The passions
are nowadays all crusted with conventionality, like life. Look
at ourselves, as I have said to you before.'
'Well? What of ourselves?'
J You and I think ourselves very original, but in reality we
are the servants of conventionality. I told you so last winter.
When we were free and had the world before us, we could
think of nothing more original than to marry each other like
Annette and Lubin, like John and Mary. We had no imagina-
tion. We thought we should do all sorts of fine things, but
we have not done them. We have merely just dropped back
into the routine of the world like all other people.'
4 I do not see what else we could have done,' replied Othmar,
somewhat feebly as he was aware.
' What a conventional reply !' she said impatiently. 4 That
is just what I am saying. Neither of us had imagination, or
perhaps courage, enough to strike out any new path, though we
thought we were so much above other people. Both you and I
have enough of originality to be dissatisfied with the world as it
is, but we have not originality enough to create another one.
People who have the perception which belongs to the poetic
temperament, as you and I have, without its creative power, are
greatly to be pitied. Both you and I have something of poetry
—something of heroism—in us, but it never comes to anything.
We remain in the world, and conform to it.'
41 would lead any life you suggested—out of the world if
you pleased.'
4 Ah, but I do not please,' she said, with a little sigh. 4 That
is just the mischief. You remember when we went to your
Dalmatian castle the first year; the solitude was enchant-
ing, the loneliness of the sea and the shore was exquisite, the
mountains seemed drawn behind us like a curtain, shutting out
all noise and commonness and only enclosing our own dreams ;
but after a little time you looked at me, I looked at you, and
we both tried to hide from each other that we yawned. One
morning when there was a rough wind on the sea and the first
snow on the hills, I said to you, 44What if we go to Paris?"
and you were relieved beyond expression, only you would not
say so. Now, if we had been poets—really poets, you and I—
we should never have quitted Zama for Paris. We should have
let the whole world go.'
Othmar did not well know what to reply, because he was
conscious of a certain truth in her words.
41 am not a poet, you have often told me so,' he said with
122
OTHMAR.
some bitterness. * The atmosphere I was born in was too thick
and yellow with gold for the Parnassian bees to fly to my cradle.
The supreme privilege of the poet is an imperishable youth, and
I do not think that I was ever young ; they did not let me
be so.'
'You were so for a little while when you first loved me,'
she said with a smile ; ' that is why I wonder we had not more
imagination at that time. Anybody could live the life we five
now. It shows what a stifling, cramping thing the world is;
we who used to meditate on every possible idealic and idyllic
kind of existence have found that there is nothing for us to
do but to open our houses, surround ourselves with a crowd,
spend quantities of money in all commonplace fashions, and
be hated by envy and envied by stupidity. Do you remember
our sunlit kingdom in Persia that we were to have gone
to together? Well, we are as far off it as though we were not
together.'
'Do you mean then,' said Othmar impatiently, 'that you
think our life together a mistake ?'
' No, not quite that; because we are more intelligent than
most people, only we have been unable to rise above the com-
monplace ; unable to keep our iron at a white heat. Our
existence looks very brilliant, no doubt, to those outside it, but
in real truth there is a poverty of invention about it which
makes me feel ashamed of my own want of originality.'
She laughed a little ; her old laugh, which always chilled the
hearts of men.
She had always foreseen the termination of their pilgrimage
of joy in that mortuary chapel of lifeless bones and motionless
dust to which the lovers' path through the roses and raptures
was so sure to lead. But he, man like, had been so certain that
the roses would never fade, that the raptures would never
diminish!
Othmar was sensible that he had in some manner failed to
fulfil her expectations, and the sense of such a fact stings the
Belf-love of the least vain and least selfish of men. Her life
possessed all that any woman could in her uttermost exactness
require. All the perfect self-indulgence and continual pageantry
of life which an immense fortune can command were always
hers ; her children by him were beautiful and of great promise,
physical and mental ; her world still obeyed her slightest sign,
and her slightest whim was gratified ; men still found the most
fatal sorcery in her careless glance, and society offered to her
all that it possessed. If this sense of disappointment, of dis-
illusion, of dissatisfaction were really with her, it could only be
so because he himself, as the companion of her life, failed to
realise what she had expected in him—was unhappy enough to
weary her, as all others before him had done.
OTHMAR.
123
A vainer man would have laid the blame on her, and have
arrived, through vanity, at the perception that it was her tem-
perament and not his character which was at fault. But all the
flattery which every rich and powerful man daily receives had
failed to make Othmar vain. His self-esteem was very modest
in its proportions, and he attributed the fact of his wife's appa-
rent indifference to him humbly enough to his own demerits.
'I have not the talent of amusing her,' he thought. 'I
have been always too grave—have taken life too sadly to be the
companion of a woman of her wit. I have never done any-
thing of which she can be very proud with that sort of pride
which would be the sweetest flattery to her ; the years slip
away with me and bring me no occasion, at least no capability,
of the kind of distinction which she would appreciate. I cannot
be a Skobeleff or a Gortschakoff; I cannot make that renown
which might arrest her fancy and please her amour propre ; she
has loved me possibly as much as she can love, but as she finds
that I am made of the common clay of ordinary humanity, I
become not much more to her than all those dead men whom
she has tired of and forgotten.'
But whilst his reason told him this, his heart yearned to
disbelieve it, and his pride refused a meek submission to it.
There was something in her fugitive, delicately disdainful,
capriciously insecure, which was certain to sustain the passion
of man, because it constantly stimulated it; her concessions
were made to his desires not her own ; she never shared his
weakness even whilst she was indulgent to it.
' I have absolutely never known yet whether you have ever
loved me !' he said to her once, and she replied, with her little
indulgent, mysterious smile :
' How should you know what I do not know myself 1'
It was a part, and no small part, of the ascendency she had
over him; it stimulated his affections, because it perpetually
stinted them ; it made satiety impossible with her.
Yet all which excited his passions and secured the continu-
ance of her influence over him, left him more and more con-
scious of a void at his heart which she would never fill, because
a nature cannot bestow more than it possesses. All the intel-
lectual charm she had for him had a certain coldness in it ; her
incorrigible irony, her inveterate analysis, her natural attitude
of observation and of mockery before the foibles and follies
and affections of mankind, enchanting as they were, were with-
out warmth as they were without pity. It was the brilliant
play of electric light on polished steel. Sometimes, with the
wayward inconsistency of human wishes, he would have pre-
ferred the glow from some simple fire of the hearth.
There were times when the feeling which met his own left
his heart cold. He had never wholly ceased to feel that he was
124
OTHMAR,
always in a measure outside her life. He would have been
ashamed to confess to her many youthful weaknesses, many
romantic impulses which often moved him ; there were many
lover-like follies which would have been natural and sweet to
him, which he had early learned to control and dismiss, un-
yielded to because he was afraid of that slight ironical smile,
and that contemptuous little word with which she had the
power to arrest the quick tide of any impetuous emotion.
The excesses of passion and the force of emotion always
seemed to her slightly absurd ; she had yielded to both for his
sake more than she had ever thought to do ; but her intelli-
gence alway held reign over her with much greater dominance
than her feelings ever obtained. There were moments when
he felt as if he asked her for bread, and she gave him a stone;
a most polished stone of magical charm, of exquisite transpa-
rency, of occult power, but still a stone, when he merely wished
for the plain sweet bread of simple sympathy.
Once, in riding alone through the forests of Amyot, his
horse put its foot in a rabbit's hole and threw him. He was
unhurt, and rose and remounted. But he thought as he rode
onward : 4 If I had been disfigured, crippled, made an invalid
for life, how would she have regarded me ?'
With pity, no doubt, but probably with aversion ; certainly
with indifference. She would have brought her exquisite grace,
her cool nonchalant smile, her delicate fragrant presence to his
bedside, and would have come there every day, no doubt, and
have been careful that he should want for nothing; but would
there have been the blinding tears of a passionate sorrow in her
eyes, would her cheek have grown hollow and her hair white
with long vigil, would her whole world have been found within
the four walls of his sick room ]
He thought not.
He sighed as he rode through the green glades of the great
woods where she had held her Court of Love.
Of love no one could speak with such science and surety as
she. She had known it in ail its phases, studied it in all its
madness, accepted it in all its sacrifices ; on no theme would her
silver speech be more eloquent; and love had been given to her
as the widest of all her kingdoms. But had she really known
it ever 1 Had not that which her own breast had harboured
always been the mere impulse of curiosity, the mere exercise of
power, the mere dullness of analysis such as that with which
the physiologist gazes on the bared nerves of the living or-
ganism 1 After all, why had men cared so much for her 1 Only
because she had been as unmoved as the moon. Men are
children; they long for what they cannot clasp. He himself
had only loved her so long, despite the chilling and dulling
effect of marriage, because he had always felt that he possessed
OTHMAR.
bo little real hold upon her that any day she might take it into
her fancy to leave him, not out of unkindness but out of ennui.
Sometimes he thought with a curious compassion of Ha-
praxine. He thought of him now, and for a moment his own
heart grew hard against her as he rode through the beautiful
summer world of his woods ; hard as had grown the hearts of
men who, dying for her sake, had felt that they had given their
life for a smile, for a jest, for a chimera, for a caprice—given it
away unthanked.
But then, when he entered his house again and saw her, he
forgave her and loved her; he cared more still for one touch of
her cool white hand, the favour of one careless smile cast to
him, than he cared for the whole world of women—women
who would willingly have seen him forget his allegiance to her,
and have consoled him for all her defects.
' Otho is uxorious, like Belisarius, like Bismarck,' said
Friedrich Othmar, with an unpleasant smile. ' And alas! he
is neither a great soldier nor a great statesman, to make the
weakness respected either by the world or by his wife.'
Othmar had overheard the speech, and it had made him
irritated, and afraid lest he ever looked absurd.
* Yet,' he thought bitterly, ' if she were still the wife of
Napraxine, no one would ever see anything singular in any
weakness or madness that I might commit for her !'
Between his uncle and himself few intimate words ever
passed. After the death of Yseulte a tacit understanding had
been come to between them that neither should ever name
those causes, whether great or small, which she had had for
pain and jealous sorrow in her brief life's space. It was a sub-
ject on which they could never have touched without a breach
irrevocable and eternal in their friendship.
Friedrich Othmar visited at their houses, caressed their
children, preserved all outward amity with both of them, and
devoted all the energies of his last years and of his inmense
experience to the interests of the house which he had honoured,
served, and loved so long, but with neither his nephew nor his
nephew's wife did he ever pass the limits of a conventional and
courteous intercourse, which had neither affection in it nor any
exchange of confidence.
Once or twice the worldly-wise and harsh old man did a
thing which a few years before, in anyone else, he would have
regarded as the most flimsy and foolish of sentimentalities. He
took the little Xenia with him into the gardens of St. Phara-
mond, and made her gather with her own small hands a quantity
of violets ; then he led her to the tomb of Yseulte, and bade
her lay them on it. She had been buried there, though a
sepulchre sculptured by Mercier had been raised to her memory
at Amyot.
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OTHMAR.
* Why are you not her child 1' he said to her. * Why are you
not ? She would have loved you better than your own mother
can/
The child scattered her violets, then came and leaned her
arms upon his knee and looked up at him with serious eyes.
' You are crying!' she said, touching softly two great tears
which had fallen on his cheeks. Then she added gravely : ' I
thought you were too old !'
'I too should have thought so,' said Friedrich Othmar
bitterly. ' It is a sign that my end is near.'
And he envied those credulous, unintellectual, happy imbe-
ciles who could believe that that ' end' was only the opening
of the portals of a wider, fairer, greater life ; he whose reason
told him that for his own strong keen brain and multiform
knowledge and accumulated wisdom and fierce love of life, as
for the youthful limbs and the fair soul and the pure body of
the dead girl there, that end was only the * end ' of all things :
■cruel corruption, hideous putridity, blank nothingness, eternal
silence.
' What is the use of it all ? What is the use ?' he said to
the startled child, as he took her hand and led her from the
tomb. What was the use of any life or any death ? What had
been the use of Yseulte's 1
One day he found before her mausoleum at Amyot the most
mondaine of women : Blanche Princesse de Laon, who, in her
childish days, had been Blanchette de Yannes.
' You, too, remember her 1' he said in surprise.
Blanche de Laon replied roughly :
' I loved her ;—tout le monde est bete unefois I'
She stood before the marble sepulchre where Mercier had
made the angels of Pity and of Youth weeping. She was not
twenty years of age, but she knew the world like her glove.
She was cruel, cold, avaricious, sensual, steeped in frivolity and
intrigue as in a bath of wine, but underneath all that there was
one little spot of memory, of regret, of tenderness in her
nature ; as far as she had been capable of affection she had
loved Yseulte.
1 Tiens !' she said, as she stood beside the sepulchre. * Do
you think it has succeeded—your nephew's last marriage 1'
'I believe so,' replied Friedrich Othmar with surprise.
'Yes, certainly, I should say so ; they seem quite in accord;
he is devoted to her still.'
' Tiens !' she said again, and she struck the marble of the
tomb sharply with the long iyory stick of her sun umbrella.
' I watch them like a cat a mouse. I will be even with her still;
the first time there is a little crack in what you call their happi-
ness, I shall be there—and I will widen it. Have you seen the
drivers of Monte Carlo make an open wound in their horses'
OTHMAR.
127
flank on purpose ? Well, this is how they do it. A fly settles
and leaves a little piece of braised skin, the men rub that little
place with sand, it widens and widens, they rub in more sand,
the sun and the flies do the rest.'
Then she struck her ivory stick once more on the marble
parapet of the great tomb.
' She died for them ! She was so foolish always. But there
was something great in it. We are not great like that. If he
only remembered, I would forgive him for her sake. But he
never remembers. He does not care. A dog might be buried
instead of her.'
' You cannot be sure of that.'
* Bah ! I am perfectly sure. He has never even understood
that she did die for him. He thought it was an accident!'
' Hush!' said Friedrich Othmar harshly, but with great
emotion. ' She wished that he should think it so ; what right
have you or have I or has anyone in the wide world to betray
her last secret if we guess it 1 It has gone to the grave with
her, like her dead children.'
' I betray it no more than you !' she replied with asperity.
'I have given no hint of it to any living soul; when Toinon
said it .was a suicide I struck her, I made her hold her peace.
I was a child then, and all these years since I have never said a
word ; but you, you know ; you know as well as I.'
' It was not a suicide, it was a heroism. If there were a
God, a great God, He would have honoured it.'
' But there are only priests !' said Blanchette, with her
bitterest smile.
They turned away together from the mausoleum, where the
marble figure of Yseulte seemed to lie in the peace of a dream-
less sleep beneath the shadowing wings of the two angels.
Gates of metal scroll-work let in the sunlight to this house of
death ; there was no darkness in it, no terror, no melancholy ;
white doves flew around its roof, and white roses blossomed at
its portals.
'Madame la Princesse de Laon,' said Friedrich Othmar
gravely, as they passed across the turf, ' whenever the fly begins
that little wound in the skin that you talked of, forbear to
widen it for the sake of your cousin who sleeps there ; do not
make her sacrifice wholly useless. What is done is done. We
cannot bring her back to life, and if we could she would not be
happy in it. There are souls too delicate and too spiritual for
earth. Hers was so.'
Blanche de Laon gave him no promise. She walked on over
the smooth sward through the labyrinths of blossom, and
crossed the gardens where her courtiers met her, with outcries
of welcome and of homage.
She was at the supreme height of coquetry and triumph and
128
OTHMAR.
fashion. She was not beautiful in feature, but she was dazzling
fair, had a marvellously perfect figure, une cranerie inouie, and
the advantage and fascination conferred by an absolute indiffer-
ence to all laws, hesitations and principles. She was hard as
her own diamonds, plundered her lovers with a greed and ruth-
lessness which rivalled any cocotte's, kept her splendid position
by sheer force of audacity as high above the world as though
she were the most pure of women, and before she had com-
pleted her twenty-first year knew all that was to be known of
the refinements of vice, the exaggerations of self-indulgence,
and the eccentricities of unbridled levity. She had supreme
scorn for her sister Toinon, who had espoused the Due de Ypres,
a hunting-noble of the Ardennes, and who spent most of her time
in the provinces chasing wolves, bears, and wild deer, and could
give the death-blow with her knife to an old tusked monarch of
the woods or a king-stag of eleven points, as surely as any hunts-
man in French Flanders or the Luxembourg.
The Princesse de Laon came as a guest to Amyot with most
summers or autumns. She knew that her host disliked her,
and would willingly, had it been possible, never have seen her
face ; she knew that his wife disliked her scarcely less, but that
knowledge increased her whim to be often at their houses, afid
she never gave them any possible pretext to break with or to
slight her. Her name was included, as a matter of course, in
their first series of guests every season, and usually she was
accompanied by Laon himself ; a man of small brains and
admirable manners, who adored her, and would no more have
dared resent the liberties she took with his honour than he
would have dared to enter her presence uninvited.
' J'ai etudie vos moyens de punir voire meute,' she said once
to the chatelaine of Amyot, with a malice equal to her own.
4 Etje les ai imites; tant lien que mal /'
She was the only person in whom Nadine had ever found
her equal in high-bred insolence, in merciless raillery, in un-
sparing allusions, couched in the subtilties of drawing-room
banter or of drawing-room compliment. Blanche de Laon was
the only one who could fence with those slender foils of her
own, which could strike so surely and wound so profoundly.
Blanche de Laon, outwardly her devoted admirer and friend,
was the sole living being who could irritate her, could annoy
her, and could make her feel that Time, to use the words of
Madame de Grignan, robbed her every day of something which
she would never recover and could ill afford to lose.
Before this insolent youth of Blanchette she, who had been
Nadkge Napraxine, felt almost old.
She was not old; she was still at the height of her own
powers to charm. She proved it every day that she drove
through the streets, every night that she passed down a ball-
OTHMAR.
129
room. Still Blanchette, twelve years younger than she, reign-
ing in her own world, repeating her own triumphs, awarding
the cotillion to her own lovers, made a certain sense of coming
age approach her. Age was not at her elbow yet, but she saw
his shadow in the doorway. She forgot that approaching
shadow at every other time, but Blanchette had the power to
point it out to her in a thousand ways imperceptible to all
spectators. Hundreds of other young beauties grew up and
entered her society, and met her daily and nightly, and she
never thought once about them, except when she wanted them
for a costume quadrille at her ball in Paris or tableaux vivants
at Amyot. But Blanchette forced her to think of her ; forced
her to see in her a rival, perhaps an equal, in those kingdoms
where she was wont to reign alone. Blanchette, when she let
her myosotis-coloured eyes gaze at her, said to her with cruel
pertinacity and candour:
' You are a beautiful woman still, but you owe something to
art now; you will have to owe more and more every year ; you
would not dare be seen at sunrise after the cotillion now ; soon
you will dance the cotillions no longer, but your daughter will
dance them instead of you. How will you like it 1 You have
too much esprit to be Cleopatra. You will not give and take
love philtres at forty. You will have too much wit. But when
your empire passes you will be wretched.'
All this the blue keen eyes of Blanche de Laon alone of all
women said to her, anticipating the years that were to come,
asking in irony—
' How wilt thou bear from pity to implore
What once thy power from rapture could command ? '
This is the question which every woman has to ask her-
self in the latter half of her life. A woman is like a carriage
horse; all her beaux jours are crowded into the first years of
her life ; afterwards every year is a descent more or less rapid
or gradual; after being made into an idol, after living on velvet,
after knowing only the gilded oats and the rosewood stall and
the days of delight, she and the horse both drift to neglect,
and hunger, and rainy weather, and the dull plodding world
between the shafts. The horse comes to the cab and the
cart; the woman comes to middle age and old age ; he is un-
groomed, she is unsought; he stands in the streets dumbly won-
dering why his fate is so changed; she sits in the ball-room
chaperons' seat silently chafing against the lot which has become
hers.
Men are so fortunate there. The very best of their life
often comes in its later years. If a man be a poet, a soldier, a
Statesman, all the gilded laurels of fame are reserved for his
later years; honours crowd on him in his autumn as fast as
130
OTHMAR.
the leaves can fall in the •woods. Even as a lover it is often in
his later years that his greatest successes and his happiest
passions come to him. This is always what creates the immense
disparity between men and women. For men age may become
an apotheosis. For women it is only a debacle.
This will always cause disparity and discord between them.
When love has said its last word to her, it is still weaving all
kinds of first chapters to new stories for him. Nobody can
help it. It is nature. The fault lies in the ordinances of
modern civilisation, which have made their laws without any
recognition of this fact, and indeed affects altogether to ignore
its existence.
She said such things as these in jest very often ; but beneath
the jest there was a sorrowful and impatient foreboding. The
days of darkness had not come to her, but they would certainly
come. Having been in her way omnipotent as any Csesar, she
would see her laurels drop, her sceptre fall, her empire diminish.
A woman holds her power to charm, as Balzac's hero held the
•peau de chagrin; little by little, at first imperceptibly, then
faster with each hour, it shrinks and shrinks until one day
there is nothing left—and life is over.
Life is over : though the automatic joyless mechanism of
living may go on for half a century more.
It is useless to say that the affections will compensate for
this decadence. , They will do no such thing. As intelligence
is more and more highly cultured, and taste made more fasti-
dious, the power to console of the ties of family grows less and
less ; the mind becomes too subtle, the sympathies become too
exacting and refined, to accept blindly such companionship or
compensation as these ties may afford.
Every woman who has had the power to make herself be-
loved has known a height of ecstasy beside which all the rest
of life must for ever look pale and dull. You say to a woman,
' When your lovers fall away from you, console yourself with
your children.' It is as though you said to her, ' As you can no
longer have the passion-music of the great orchestras, listen to
the little airs of the chamber harmonium.'
While your lover loves you he is all yours ; you are his sun
and moon, his dawn and darkness, his idol, his lawgiver, his
ecstasy—what can compensate to you for the loss of that power?
Whether time or marriage or other women kill that for you,
whenever it goes utterly, you are more beggared than any
queen driven from her kingdom naked in winter snows, like
Elizabeth of Hungary. And it always goes; always, always !
We reach the height, but we cannot stay at it. We live for a <
few instants with the stars, then down we drop like stones.
So she would think at times; and the presence of Blanche
de Laon had power to recall and emphasise such thoughts more
OTHMAR.
131
irritatingly than had that of any other woman. In a thousand
hinted insolences, couched in bland phrase, Blanchette again
and again reminded her that ' lejour est aux jeunes.'
The day was indeed still her own, but twilight was near.
It was the Princesse de Laon's fashion of vengeance—pend-
ing any other.
Blanchette had known very little emotion in her twenty
years of existence, hardly any pain except that of some ruffled
egotism or some denied caprice. She had been a woman of the
world to her finger tips, from the time of her infancy, when she
had been curled and frizzed and dressed in the latest mode to
show her small person in the children's balls at Deauville or at
Aix ; but when she had heard of the death of her cousin, and
realised that she would never hear the voice of Yseulte again on
earth, she had known a grief more violent, a regret more sud-
den and sincere, than her vain and self-absorbed little life could
have been supposed capable of in its inflated frivolity and
egotism. With her intuitive knowledge of' human nature, she
had divined the true cause of that death, and into her small
cold soul there had entered two sentiments which were not of
self : the one an imperishable regret for her cousin, the other
an imperishable hatred of Xadine Xapraxine.
Others forgot: she did not.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Amyot was to the great world of the hour what Compi&gne
used to be to it in the finest days of the Second Empire. More
indeed, for whilst nearly all patrician France would never pass
an imperial threshold, there was no one of such eminence in
all the nobilities of Europe that he or she did not covet, and
feel flattered to obtain, their invitation to those summer and
autumnal festivities of the Chateau Othmar. But enraptured
as her guests all were, the chatelaine of Amyot remained
moderately pleased by what pleased her guests so excessively,
and less and less pleased with every year.
' After all, there is nothing really new in anything we do
here,' she said slightingly to Loris Loswa, who occupied there
a half-privileged and half-subordinate position as chief director
of the various entertainments; it was he who brought the greatest
actors on the stage, who initiated the greatest singers to direct
the concerts, who invented new figures for the cotillions, and
who organised the moonlight fetes in the gardens with the do-
cility of a courtier and the ready imagination of a clever artist
steeped to Ms fingers' ends in the traditions of the eighteenth
century.
132
0TJ7MAR.
'Vereschaguin would certainly not be one half so useful in
the summer in a French chateau/ said Nadine, with her con-
temptuous appreciation of his merits and accomplishments.
' Take care that your poodle does not bite one day,' Othmar
answered. 'You hurt his vanity very often.'
' He may bite me for aught I know,' she replied. ' Bu.
be very sure he will never quarrel with Amy6t. He is very
prudent in his own self-interest.'
' But no man likes to be merely used as you show that you
use him.'
' I pay him. I have made him the fashion. I can unmake
him.'
Othmar ventured to demur to that.
' You can do a great deal in faisant la pluie et le beau temps,
we all know ; but surely the fashion which Loswa has attained
(for it is fashion and not fame) is, though a great deal of it may
be owing to full artificial support, yet real enough to stand
alone. For his own generation, at any rate.'
' My dear Otho, nothing is ever easier than to denigrer:
Pope has said it before us. It costs an immense quantity of
time and trouble to make a reputation, but to unmake it is as
easy as to unravel wool. A word will do. If I were to hint
that Loswa is a little loud in his colour, a little crude or voulu
in his treatment, everyone would begin to find his talent vulgar.
I shall not say it, because I shall not think it; he is an incom-
parable artist in his own way ; but he always knows that I can
say it, and that knowledge keeps him my slave.'
Othmar was silent: he did not like Loswa, and was im-
patient of his familiarity at Amyot, a familiarity made more
offensive to him by its mixture with flattering docility. That
Loswa had a talent so masterly that it was nearly genius he
quite admitted, but the quality of the talent was artificial, and
seemed to him to represent the moral fibre of the artist's
character.
'All Russians of a certain class are artificial,' said his wife
to him when he said this. ' We are all stove plants—children
of a forced culture and an unreal atmosphere. In our natural
instincts we are cruel, fierce, fickle, Slav toto corde. In our
social relations we are the most polished of all people. As
children we bite like little wolves; grown-up we know more
perfectly than anyone else how to caress our enemies. Losvra
is only like us all.'
' The future of the world is with Russia ?'
' I think so. All the science of history makes one sure of
it: but at the present instant we are the oddest union of the
most absolute barbarism and the most polished civilisation that
the world holds. Society has nothing so perfectly cultured as
the Russian patrician; Europe has nothing so barbarously
OTHMAR.
133
ignorant and besotted as the Russian peasant. " Les extremes
se touchent" more startlingly in Russia than in any other
country, and out of those conflicting elements will come the
dominant race of the future, as you say.'
Othmar looked at her, then said after a pause : * I have
always wondered that you have not cared to become a great
political leader ; all political questions interest you, and nothing
else does.'
' My dear Otho, I should only be a conspirator if I did ; you
would not wish that; it would upset the House of Othmar.'
' I should like whatever pleased you,' he said, weakly per-
haps but sincerely.
' Even your own ruin ?' she asked, amused.
' Even that, perhaps !' he answered—and thought: 'if it
served to draw us more closely together.'
She guessed what remained unspoken.
' I do not think ruin would have an agreeable effect on my
character,' she said, still with amusement at his romantic
fancies. ' I have never at all understood why it should develop
all one's virtues to have a bad cook, or why it should render
one angelic to be obliged to draw on one's stockings oneself, or
brush one's own hair before a cracked glass. I think it would
only make me exceedingly unpleasant to everybody, yourself
included.'
' Marie Antoinette '
' Oh, poor Marie Antoinette! She adorns the moral of
every lesson of earthly vicissitudes ! I think the very enormity
of her agony served as a stimulant. Besides, she knew she had
all posterity for an audience. In great crises it ought to be
easy to behave greatly. Antigone and Iphigenia are intelligible
to me.'
' Because you have instincts which are great in you;
only '
' Only what ? Do not pause. The one privilege of mar-
riage which is really valuable, is the permission to say disagree-
able things.'
' It is a privilege of which the wise do not avail themselves.
I was only going to say that I think you would become heroic,
were you in heroic circumstances. But the world is always
with you and its influences are narcotic or alcoholic, heroic
never.'
' I hope I should go to the scaffold decently, if you mean
that, were I sent there. That always seems to me a very easy
thing to do. But to be amiable or philosophic if one had no
waiting-woman, or no bath, or no change of clothes, seems to
me much more difficult.'
' Yet, even then, if you were tried '
' Pray do not, in your anxiety to test my character, go and
134
OTHMAR.
ruin my fortune ! Poverty is tolerable in a novel; but in real
life it can only be sordid, tiresome, and vulgar.'
'Not necessarily vulgar. I assure you if I could have
brought the House of Othmar down as Samson did the temple
of Dagon, without slaying the Philistines under it, as he did, I
should have done it many years ago. If poverty be vulgar,
what are riches % Intolerably vulgar in my estimation.'
She looked at him with a certain admiration crossed by a
certain disdain.
' I always thought your contempt for wealth very pic-
turesque,' she replied, ' and it is, I know, quite sincere. At
the same time it is a quixotism, and gets you laughed at by
those who cannot possibly understand all the refinements of
your motives as I do ; to Bleichroeder or Soubeyran you would
seem insane. And I do not think you do at all understand one
sign of your times ; which is the immense preponderance given
by it to mere wealth. Every year adds to the power of the
financiers. Already it is they who, in reality, make peace or
war; ministers cannot move without them, and without them
armies starve. At present their dominion is greatly hidden,
and not understood by the people; but in a little while it is
they who will be the open dictators of the world. It will not
be precisely a millennium, but, were I you, I should see the
picturesque and the ambitious side of it.'
' I can only see the absolute corruption and decadence which
will be inevitable.'
' Because nature meant you to be a poet, writing sonnets to
a grasshopper like Meleager, or dying early in the arms of the
sea like Shelley; you have been always out of tune with your
own times. It is a kind of anaemia, for which there is no
cure.'
' It is a malady you share '
' Oh no ! We are as far asunder as Jean-qui-rit and Jean-
qui-pleure. What amuses me as a comedy distresses you as a
tragedy : when I see a satire like Pope's you see a dirge like the
Daphnis. The two attitudes are as different as a horse chestnut
and a chestnut horse.'
' At one time we were not so very inharmonious !' said
Othmar unwisely ; since it is always unwise to recall a bond of
sympathy at any moment when that bond seems strained or
out-worn. It is natural to do so, but it is unwise.
' Wl.-^u people are amouraches they always imagine them-
selves sympathetic to each other on every point,' she said with
cruel truth ; then she paused a moment, and, smiling, added a
truth still more cruel.
* I should always have sympathised with you, probably, if I
had not married you,' she repeated dreamily and amiably.
1 That I quite understand,' said Othmar, with bitterness.
OTHMAR.
135
•One can be a hero to one's wife as little as to one's valet. It
is not to be hoped for in either case.'
'I know all about you,' she said with a sigh. ' That is so
very fatal! Perhaps if you would do something I do not know,
you would become interesting again.'
' That is a suggestion which may have its perils.'
' Peril ]' she repeated. ' My dear Otho, there is much more
peril in the monotony of undisturbed relations. I often wonder
if you are really sincere when you profess such constant admira-
tion of me ; myself, I admit I constantly think how unwise we
were not to remain delightful illusions to each other. It is
impossible to retain any illusions about a person you live with ;
if you looked at Chimborazo every day it would seem small!'
They were alone for a few rare moments in her own apart-
ments at Amyot; it was but seldom now that he ever was in-
dulged with a conversation sotto quattr* occhi. She held firmly
, to her theory that too much intimacy is the grave of love, a
grave so deep that love has no resurrection.
Those stupid women who allowed their lovers or their lords
to enter their apartments as easily as they could enter their
stables!—what could they expect ? All the charm of admit-
tance there was gone.
His face flushed deeply as he heard her now.
* I wonder if you have any conception of what bitterly cruel
things you say V he exclaimed. ' Or are the subjects of your
vivisection too infinitesimally small in your eyes for you to
remember their possible pain ?'
' My dear Otho ! I do not think a truth should ever be
painful to any candid mind !' she replied, with a little merciless
laugh. ' If a man and woman, who know each other as well as
. we do, cannot say the truth to one another, who is ever to make
any psychological studies at all ?'
4 Ho one does that has any real feeling in him or in her,'
said Othmar impatiently. 4 All those elaborate examinations
under the glass are cold as ice. They are very scientific, no
doubt, but there is not a heart throb in them.'
' I think the greatest pleasure of strong emotion is the
analysis of it,' she replied with perfect truth. ' You are not
philosophic, you are poetic. So you do not understand what I
mean.'
'You mean,' said Othmar angrily, 'that when Hero saw
Leander's dead body washed up to her arms from the waves, she
was amply compensated for his death by the advantage of
putting her own tears under the spectrum !'
'That is an exaggerated illustration. But I admit that the
mental intricacies of every passion is what is alone interesting
in it to me.'
' It is why you have never felt passion !'
136
OTHMAR.
' Perhaps!4
She smiled and stretched her arms indolently above hdr
head as she lay back amongst her cushions.
'I have always perfectly understood,'she continued, 'that
unjustly abused lady of the legend who flung her glove into the
lions' den ; she wanted emotions and she had the whole gamut
of them no doubt in those few moments—fear, hope, pride,
triumph, discomfiture ; she must have known all that it is pos-
sible to know of emotion in those three minutes.'
'You have often thrown your glove.'
'Do you mean that for a rebuke? Your tone is gloomy.
Yes, I have thrown it, but they have always brought it back
to me like lap-dogs. There is too much of the lap-dog in men.'
' In me ?' said Othmar with anger.
' Yes, in you too. You would go for my glove still.'
' Yes, I would, God help me.'
She laughed. ' I am sure you would, at present. I suppose
the time will come when you will go for some other woman's.
It is in your nature to do that sort of thing.'
Othmar was irritated and wounded ; he was tired of this
eternal jesting. His fidelity to her was the most real and the
most sensitive thing in all his life, and yet he had the conviction
that in her heart she ridiculed him for it.
' Still, I think you of all women would be most intolerant of
inconstancy,' he said, speaking almost unconsciously his own
thoughts aloud.
' I hope I should forgive it with my reason, which would
understand and so excuse it, though my feminine weaknesses
might perhaps resent it; one never knows one's own foibles.'
•It is only indifference which forgives inconstancy.'
' Oh—h—h ! I am not sure of that. There may be indul-
gence without indifference.'
'But not without contempt.'
' I do not know that. Tout comprendre, cfest tout pardonner.
I have so very slight an opinion of human nature that I do
not think I could ever be seriously angry with any of its
errors.'
' Then that would be because none of them had power to
reach your heart. I do not believe you would care for anyone
sufficiently ever to be jealous of them.'
She smiled and rose. ' My dear Otho, jealousy is a very
ugly, useless, and unwise passion. The world decided, as soon
us ever I was presented to it, that I had no such thing as a
heart. You have always persisted in supposing that I have, but
very likely the world is more right than you.'
' May I not hope at least that I have a place in it ?' mur-
mured Othmar, and he bent towards her with much of a lover's
ardour..
OTHMAR.
137
But she drew herself away with a touch of that dullness hy
which she had used to freeze the blood in Napraxine's veins.
' My dear Otho,' she said, with her unkind little smile,
* really that is a twice-told tale ! Do you think after so many
years it is worth while to chanter des madrigaux ? You know
I was at no time ever very fond of them. " Laurel is green for
a season, and love is sweet for a day ! " Let us be friends, the
most charming friends in the world; that is far more agree-
able.'
Othmar rose from where he had been half kneeling at her
feet; his face was very flushed, and his eyes grew angry ; he
was irritably sensible of having made himself absurd in her
eyes.
' You will not awe me as you used to do that poor humble
dead fool,' he said bitterly. ' But if you be tired of me I will
summon my fortitude to bear dismissal as best I may.'
' Oh !—tired—no !' she said, with a deprecating accent which
was marred on his ear by a certain latent thrill beneath it of
suppressed laughter. ' Only I think we have done with all that.
If Mary Stuart had married Chastelard, I am sure he would not
have gone on writing sonnets and songs ; at least not writing
them to her. We have a quantity of all kinds of interests and
objects common to us. Let us be content with those. Believe
me, if you will leave off the madrigals it will be very much
better. You have been the most admirable lover in the world,
but as you cannot be a lover now, suppose you leave off the
language and—and—the nonsense? Regard me as your best
friend : I shall ever be that.'
Othmar coloured with a confused mingling of emotions.
* Friendship 1' he echoed. ' I did not marry you to be
relegated to friendship !'
' Then you were not clairvoyant,' she said, with her un-
kindest laugh. 'There are only two results possible to any
marriage : they are friendship or separation, the door to the left
or the door to the right.'
Then with her prettiest, chilliest laugh she left him, amused
by the vexation, offence, and embarrassment which his features
expressed.
' " Hfaut enjinir avec les madrigaux,"' she said, as she looked
at him over her shoulder and passed down the staircase.
Othmar was deeply pained and hotly angered. He had at
all times, even in the earliest hours of their union, been con-
scious that his caresses were rather permitted than enjoyed, his
tenderness was rather accepted indulgently than ardently re-
turned. There was a total absence of physical passion in her,
which had served to heighten his intellectual admiration of her,
if at times it had held his emotions in check, and made him feel
that his ardour was boyish, absurd, sensual, romantic. But he
138
OTHMAR.
had never been prepared to accept the position into which
Napraxine had been driven by the indifference of her tempera-
ment. He had never anticipated that the time might come
when he also might be allowed no more than a touch of her
cool white fingers, and a careless smile of morning greeting.
Sooner an open quarrel than such mockery of friendship !—
so he thought.
He remained where she had left him, sunk in meditation,
which retraced one by one the passages of his love for her. It
had been love so great, so entire, so intense, that it could never
change—unless she or her own will killed it. It had been one
of those mighty incantations of which no hand but the sorcerer's
own can ever lift off the spell.
As her lover he had always imagined that she, marble to all
others, would be wax to him ; he had always believed that he
would light the flame of fervour behind the alabaster-like ice of
her temperament. But he had learned his error. He had found
that possession is not necessarily empire. He had discovered
that he pleased her intelligence and her 'vanity rather than
awakened her senses or her emotions. She had made him
mortifyingly conscious that she found him of no higher stature
than other men, and had unsparingly reminded him that there
was no more fatal foe of love than familiarity.
She had wounded him more than she had meant more than
once, and this time the wound penetrared both his pride and
his affections, and left with him an acrid sense of undeserved
humiliation.
' No man can have been truer to her than I have been,' he
thought, with that pathetic wonder that fidelity does not
beget gratitude which is common to all lovers, be they man or
woman.
Was it true that she would not care if his fancy wandered
elsewhere? Would she not feel any anger were he, like all his
friends, to spend his passions and his substance in the arms of
cocottes, and in providing the splendours of their palaces?
Would she indeed feel no pang if any other woman, whether
duchess or drolesse, were to obtain empire over him ?
If not, then truly she had never loved him. He felt no
impulse to put her to the test : he only felt a weary and dreary
sense of loneliness, of discomfiture, of chagrin, of humiliation.
He had always doubted whether she had ever realised the
depth and the extent of the passion he had spent on her. He
had always fancied that she classed it only with the hot desires
and romantic sentiments of men, of which she had seen so much;
there might be even many of those men who appeared to her to
have been truer lovers than he. He had married her : would
Helen have ever believed that Menelaus could love like Paris ?
Surely not. There had been many men whose blood had been
OTHMAR.
139
spilled like water on the ground for her sake, or from her
caprice. It was inevitable that there should seem truer lovers
than he who dwelt under the same roof as herself, and led the
even tenour of his daily life beside her.
She had been too early saturated and satiated with the
spectacle of strong and forbidden passions for the repetition of
a well-known and. often-laughed-at love to have any power to
excite her interest in the tame sameness of a permitted and
undisturbed intimacy. He felt that she had spoken the entire
truth when she had said that she would have cared for him
much more had she never married him. She required endless
novelty, incessant renewal of excitation, continual stimulant to
her love of mystery, of peril, and of power. There was no food
for these in the calm certainty of possession which is the accom-
paniment and enemy of all conjugal life, in the tranquil succes-
sion of years which resembled one another monotonous as
peace.
Perhaps she had loved him most of all on that day when she
had written to him that their paths in life must wend for ever
apart. It had been a bon moment, a moment of exaltation,
of intensity, of strong interest, stimulated by a sense of self-
sacrifice ; a moment in which she had put him voluntarily away
from her ; and, so doing, had seen him in a light which had
never before or after shone upon him in her eyes.
The mockery of her slight laughter remained now in jar-
ring echo on his ears. What a fool he must seem to her!
What a poor, romantic, sensitive, unwise stringer of unwritten
madrigals !
To endeavour to arouse her jealousy never passed across his
thoughts. It seemed to him that she must know so well that
she had taken his own heart out of his breast never to return it
to him. Othmar was not more chaste than other men of the
world; but his passion for Nadine Kapraxine had been of such
length of endurance, of such intensity of feeling, had been so
environed with the ennobling solemnities of death, and had
been so fed on long denial and severance, that it always seemed
to him his very life itself. His temperament was too grave for
the light loves of the world, and his character too constant and
too sincere for those intrigues which form a mere pleasant pas-
time without engaging either the affection or the memory. He
was like the Greek who hung his spear, his shield, his sandals,
and his flute before the shrine of Aphrodite's self; and could
worship no lesser divinities than she.
He went out of the house and into the gardens of Amyot,
where they were most shadowy and solitary. The late summer
roses were filling the air with their fragrance, and the stately
peacocks were drawing their trains of purple and gold over the
shaded grass. A flock of wild doves sailed overhead ; near at
140
OTHMAR.
hand a fountain gent its silvery column towering in the light, to
fall in clouds of spray into the marble basin, where laughing
loves rode their white dolphins through green fleets of water-
lily leaves. In the distance, beyond the clipped walls of bay,
his children with some dogs were playing on a lawn under one
of the terraces. Their laughter came faintly on the wind ; he
could see their shining hair glisten in the sunshine. He did not
go to them.
The kiss of a child could not soothe the irritated bitterness
which was at his heart, the wound which the hand he loved best
had given him.
It was a warm golden day; the heat lay heavy on all the
country of the Orleannais ; and the Loire water, low and still,
was broken by wide stretches of sandy soil where the river bed
was laid bare. He, with a vague depression for which he could
not have accounted, felt restless and disposed to solitude. With
that kind of impulse towards the relief of melancholy things
which that sort of motiveless sadness usually brings with it, he,
for the first time for years, turned his steps towards the cham-
bers once occupied by his first wife. Nothing had ever been
touched in them since the last day that she had been at Amy6t:
save to keep away the cobwebs and the dust, no servant ever
entered there ; the doors were locked, and he himself kept the
master key.
An instinct of remembrance, for which he could not have
accounted, moved him to enter there this hot and silent noon.
He trod the floors with a noiseless step, as men move in the
chamber where some dead thing lies, and with a noiseless hand
undid the fastenings of one of the great windows and let in the
light. All things were as they had been left that day when she
had last gone away from Amyot to her death. The golden sun-
beams strayed in on to the white satin coverlet of the bed, the
ivory crucifix which hung above it, the prie-dieu with the Book
of Hours open, the roses a mere brown heap of ugliness, withered
where she had set them in their bowl.
He sat down in the midst of the lonely things and felt a
sense of regret, of remorse, of wistful compunction and self-
reproach. Ever and again at intervals such an emotion had
passed over him whenever he had thought of her, but never
sharply enough to cause him such pain as it caused him now,
remembering her youth plucked by death like a snowdrop in its
bud. The big dog which had belonged to her had entered un-
perceived after him, and was looking upward in his face, as if
it likewise were moved by sudden and sorrowful remembrances.
Poor child ! so little missed, so utterly unmourned !
' Et rose, elle a v£cu ce que vivent les rosea :
L'espace d'un matin.'
OTHMAR.
141
Friedrich Othmar had had these two lines carved upon her
tomb ; they told of all the brevity of her life, but not of all its
sadness. Had any living creature ever guessed all that ?
A chill passed over Othmar as the doubts came to him. Had
she suffered much more than he had ever thought % He had
been caught then on the strong cyclone of a great passion, and
been blinded by its rush and force.
The silence of the large chamber seemed filled with one
long sigh.
The dog looked at him always, as though saying : ' I have
not forgotten : once she lived; where is she now V
Ah, where !
He rose oppressed by new and painful thoughts, and moved
from one object to another in the room, as though each of them
would tell him something he had yet to learn. He touched
with a reverent hand this thing and that which had belonged
to her, and which survived unharmed, unworn, and would so
last for centuries if his descendants spared them ; frail toys and
trifles, yet dowered with a power of endurance denied to the
human life, which there had passed away like a cloud of the
morning.
He took up her ivory tablets with the engagements of the
day still written in pencil on them ; he touched her long thin
gloves, her tall tortoiseshell-tipped garden cane, her writing-
case with its monogram in silver. The things moved his heart
strongly for the first time in seven years : it had been no fault
of hers that she had been powerless to gain love from him.
One by one he drew open the drawers of the buhl-table on
which these, her writing things, had all been left unmoved : in
one he saw a little book covered with vellum, and closed with a
silver pencil as a gate is closed with a staple. He hesitated a
moment; then he drew the pencil out and opened the book.
It was half filled with those poor timid little verses of which
ISTadine Kapraxine had once by a chance jest suggested the
existence, and for which the child had blushed as for a sin.
They were faint, blurred, often half effaced, purposelessly, as by
a shy uncertain hand afraid of its own creations, but some were
legible. He read them, and all the soul left in them spoke to
his.
All the thoughts and fears and sorrows, all the longing and
the doubt and the hesitation which she had been too timid and
too proud to ever show in life, were spoken to him in those
tender and imperfect poems. They were simple as a daisy,
spontaneous as a wood-lark's song; they were ignorant of all
laws of science or rules of spondee and of dactyl; but, all halt-
ing and shy though they were, they had all the truth of a human
heart in them. They were deep and wide enough to hold the
secret which she had shut in them.
142
OTHMAR
As he read them a mist came before his eyes, and a sigh
escaped him. He understood all that she had suffered here
beneath this foof where he had promised her a life of joy. He
saw all that she had hidden from him so carefully, through pride
and shyness and the cruel humiliation of a love which knew
itself powerless to awake response, of a soul which suffered in
its innocence all the tortures of the damned. He had lived
beside her seeing naught of that piteous conflict; parted from
her by the wall built up out of his own indifference and coldness.
Had he even then been able to discern it, it would not have
touched him, because of all chill things on earth the chillest is
the heart of a man towards a love which he does not desire,
which he cannot return. But it reached and touched him now.
The voice from the grave could not fret him as the voice of
the living might have done, had he heard it in that pitiful cry
of utter loneliness.
Poor timid little verses like nestling birds shivering in the
chill winds and pallid sunshine of an unkind spring—across the
years they brought her heart to his.
And though he had never loved her, yet in that moment of
remorse he would have given all that he possessed, all the lives
around him, and all the peace of his own soul, to be able, once
to call her back to earth, and once to say to her, ' Child, for-
give me.'
But she was dead.
He sat there long in solitude, the dog lying mute at his feet.
He had read the broken, unfinished, humble little verses till
their words were in his ear and before his eyes, and in all the
sunbeams straying through the golden dust of the air around.
When he rose he laid them gently back where they had been
left, with such a touch as a man gives to flowers which he lays
on the dead limbs of some dear lost creature. Then he closed
the window and went out of the chamber, the dog following
him, with slow unwilling footsteps.
There went with him a remorse which would never leave
him. For the first time the sense had come upon him that her
death had been self-sought, in that sunset hour of the month
of hyacinths, when her body had dropped as a stone drops
down through the bird-haunted air.
CHAPTER XIX.
He felt an irresistible impulse to seek out the woman he loved,
to unburden his heart to her of this new thought which seemed
to him like a crime. He had left her in anger and mortification,
but it was to her that he turned instinctively under the pain of
OTHMAR.
*43
a discovery «vhich had filled him with a sense of intolerable
remorse.
Alas ! they were not alone; the great house was full of
guests. With the slanting of the afternoon shadows across the
hoary face of the old sun-dial, on which were the monogram of
Francois de Yalois and his sister, these indolent people had all
left their chambers and were now scattered in quest of diversion
all over the house, the gardens, or the woods, riding, driving,
making music, or making love, carrying on their banter, their
friendships, their rivalries, their intrigues. To see her as he
wished, alone, was impossible for many hours. After sunset
there was the long and ceremonious dinner; after dinner there
was the usual evening pastime, some chamber music by great
artists, some dancing for those who wished it, whist and bacca-
rat in the card-room, flirtation in the drawing-rooms, constant
demands, which he could not resist, made upon his own courtesy
and social powers.
* t What a stupid life !' he thought impatiently, being out of
tune with its lightness and gaiety. ' What a stupid bondage !
The vine-dressers sound asleep in their cave-cabins above the
Loire water are a thousand times wiser than we are !'
He looked at his wife often. She had professed to think her
world tiresome and its monotony of pleasure tedious ; she had
professed to find its conventional routine mere treadmill work
which no one had the courage to refuse to pursue, but which
every one of its toilers hated ; and yet she never spent a day
otherwise than in this conventional world !—she never ceased
for an hour to surround herself with its artificialities and its
pageantries. If she had really wished to escape from it how
easy to have done so !—how easy to have chosen instead some
solitary and tranquil spot with him and with her children !
But they were all as the very breath of her existence, this
air of the great world, this perpetual movement and excitation,
these elegant crowds, these honey-tongued courtiers, this Babel
of news, and novelties, and fashion, and ennui, and endless
effort to be amused! Were she alone with him at Amyot,
would she not yawn with ennui every hour of the twenty-four %
She had said that she would.
He left the brilliant rooms as soon as his duties as a host
permitted him to escape, and wandered through the dusky aisles
and avenues of his gardens.
The night was still and sultry ; the sounds of music and the
reflection of the lights within came from the many open case-
ments of the great castle on to the terraces and lawns beneath.
There was no moon : the steep roof, the pointed towers, the
frowning keep of Amyot stood up black and massive against
the starry sky. Restless, and tormented by his thoughts, its
master paced the dark grass alleys of its gardens ; all the simple
144
OTHMAR.
verses of the little manuscript poems seemed whispered from
their leaves and murmured by the fountains.
4 She loved me !' he thought again and again. And to that
warm and tender heart his own had been so cold !
It had been no fault of his; no man can love because he
will ; and still
He stayed out in the gardens until the lights had ceased to
shine in the great windows, and in the distant country lying
beyond the forest belt of Amyot the call to vespers was ringing
through the darkling daybreak from village tower and spire,
waking the slumbering peasants to their toil amidst the vines
or on the river.
Then he entered the house and went to his wife's apart-
ments.
When her woman asked if she would receive him she smiled
a little. He was like a repentant child, she thought, sorry that
he had been ill-treated and tired of pouting !
' I am half asleep !' she said as he entered. 4 Why do you
come and disturb me % Where have you been all the evening ?
You look as if you had seen the ghosts of all the tellers of the
tales of the Heptameron !'
She laughed a little as she spoke ; she had put on a loose
gown of soft white tissues, her hair was unbound ; her feet
were bare and slipped in Persian shoes sewn thick with pearls.
She was lying back amongst the pale rose-coloured cushions of
her couch in the hot night; her arms were uncovered to the
shoulders ; the light was mellow and tempered ; the window
stood open ; a slight breeze stirred the air and the gauze
of her gown; her eyes surveyed him with a smile of languid
amusement.
'Pauvre enfant! a-t-il assez boude/' she thought with an
indulgent derision.
Othmar, for the first time in his life, was insensible of the
seduction of her presence. She observed his preocupation with
some offence. It was a slight to herself.
4 What is the matter 1' she said impatiently. 4 When I am
dying to be [alone and asleep, do you come to tell me that the
Rothschilds will not join you in some loan, or that war is going
to begin before the financiers wish for it ? Surely, your bad
news would have kept till to-morrow morning? Qu'avez-vous
done ?'
Othmar winced under the irritability and lightness of the
words.
' Nadkge,' he said very low, 4 did ever you think that it was
possible that—that—she sought her own death ?'
His voice faltered, and had a sound of repressed tears in it.
She looked at him in astonishment apd silence. She did
not ask him whom he meant.
OTHMAR*
145
'Sometimes,' she answered at length in a hushed voice,
With a certain sense of awe. ' Sometimes—yes—I have thought
so. Yes, since you ask me.'
His head drooped upon his chest; he sighed heavily. She
looked at him with compassion and surprise.
4 Is it possible,' she thought, 4 that he never had any sus •
picion of it ? Men are moles 1'
Aloud, she said gently :
'What makes you think of it now? What can have
happened ?'
He did not reply for some moments. Then he answered
unsteadily :
' I went into those locked rooms; there were some verses in
a drawer—some little poems. I do not know why ; all at once
the impression came to me ; I had never dreamed of it before.'
' Men are always so blind!' she thought, as she replied
aloud:
' My dear Otho, we cannot know; why let us imagine the
Worst ? It might very well be a mere accident. The woman
Nicolle has said how often she had warned her of the dangers
of that ruined roof. Do not take that burden of great useless
remorse upon your life. It will make you wretched.'
'Not more wretched than she was. Not more than I
deserve. I was a brute to her.'
' That is nonsense ; you could not be brutal to anybody if
you tried. You were indifferent, but that was not your fault.
She did not know how to make you otherwise. There aro
women who never know '
' But she deserved so happy a fate !'
' Are there any happy fates ? It is a mere expression. The
happy people are the conventional terre a terre unemotional
creatures who pass their lives between two bolsters, one Custom
and the other Prejudice. These two bolsters save them from
all shocks, and they slumber and grow fat. That poor child
might have been happiest in the cloisters, because she would
not have known all she missed. But in the world she would
certainly have been unhappy, whether with you or any other,
because she demanded impossibilities, and because she had no
knowledge of human nature.'
Othmar did not hear what she said.
' I shall always feel that I have been her murderer,' he said
in a hushed voice. Those poor little verses haunted him like
the memory of dead children long unmourned and suddenly
remembered.
She looked at him with some impatience rising in her.
' How like a man!' she thought. ' How exactly like a
man- -to have killed a woman with his indifference and never
to have perceived that he killed her, and then suddenly, six or
I.
146
OTHMAR.
Beven years afterwards, to become alive to it as a fact, and then
to suffer indescribable tortures! A woman would have known
at once, but probably would never have blamed herself for it.
We have so much more intuition and so much less conscience.'
She was sorry for the pain she saw in him, but she was
impatient at once of his slowness of perception and of the
strength of his tardy emotions.
1 Will she be like Banquo's Ghost between us?' she thought,
with a vague jealousy of those memories suddenly arisen.
' My dear Otho,' she said aloud, with a little disdain in her
sympathy, 'I understand all that you feel, because this cruel
fancy has presented itself quite suddenly to you. But I do not
think that you ought to dwell on it, since you can know nothing
for certain. You have been always too much in love with ima-
ginary sorrows; you have always been too apt to make for your-
self calamities which destiny was willing to spare you. Do not
make such a mistake now. Be man enough to face the truth
as it stands, which is, that had that poor child lived, she would
have grown more and more intolerable to you with every breath
she drew. Men enjoy sophisms, and they hate looking at their'
own motives in all their nakedness. If she "had lived you would
have made her utterly miserable, through no fault either of
yours or hers, but simply from the fault of marriage, which
yokes two uncongenial lives together, and refuses to release
them for mental and moral disparities which inflict a million
times more misery than do the mere gross offences for which
the law does grant release.'
' I have no doubt you are quite right, but I cannot follow
your reasoning,' said Othmar with some bitterness. 'I can
only feel that I have slain a better life than my own.'
' You were always so exaggerated in your expressions,' she
said with the tone which he himself had so seldom heard from
her. ' You have always, as I say, been like the German poets
of the last century, perpetually in love with sorrow ; I suppose
because you can fashion her at your pleasure. Those to whom
she comes uninvited dislike the look of her, and would shut her
out if they could.'
Othmar rose impatient and wounded.
41 should have hoped you would have had more sympathy,'
he said as he left the room.
She gave a little gesture of wrath as the door closed behind
him.
1 Do men ever know what they wish ?' she said to herself.
4 If he could bring that poor child to life again he would do it,
for the moment, and spend the remainder of his life in repent-
ing that he had ever done so. If the powers of men were equal
in force to the momentary flashes of their consciences, what
strange things the world would see !'
OTHMAR.
147
She herself was conscious that she had answered him with
less feeling, with less sympathy than he might well have looked
for from her, but the momentary sense of offence with which
she had heard him speak had been too strong to allow her
gentler instincts to prevail with her. She was irritated, amazed,
profoundly offended, and amazed with such grand vanity of
amazement as Cleopatra might have felt had some memory of
poor pale Octavia risen up betwixt her lover and herself.
He meanwhile went through the hushed dim corridors of
the house with a pang the more at his heart. He had spoken
in a moment of strong feeling, of freshly-awakened pain, and
the coldness with which his confidence had been received, left
its own frost upon his soul. He did not remember that which
every man finds ; that no sorrow for one woman will ever
awaken sympathy in the breast of another. Shame, suffering,
wounds of the world's scorn or fortune's cruelties will make all
women compassionate and tender ; but when a man sighs for a
woman lost, he will meet with no pity from those women whom
he loves. He did not think of that; he only felt a bruised and
baffled sense of utter loneliness; a momentary weakness like
that of a child who, being hurt, creeps up to arms it loves only
to be repulsed from them. That weary sense of hopelessness
which her lovers had so often felt before her came to him; such
hopelessness as may come over the soul of one who, standing
shipwrecked on some barren shore, is fronted by some steep,
straight, inaccessible wall of marble cliff, upon whose smooth
white breast there is no place for any aching foot to rest or any
hand to close : a white wall shining in the sun which sees men
drown and die.
Some lines of Swinburne's earliest and greatest years came
back in vaguely remembered fragments to his mind.
Yea, though we sung as angels in her ear,
She would not hear.
Let us rise up and part; she will not know,
Let us go seaward as the great winds go,
full of blown sand and foam : what help is here t
There is no help, for all these things are so,
And all the world as hitter as a tear,
And how these things are, though I strove to show,
She would not know.
And though she saw all heaven in flower above,
She would not love.
Let us give up, go down; she will not care,
Though all the stars made gold of all the air,
Though all these waves went over us and drove
Deep down the stifling lips and glowing hair,
She would not care.
s, 2
143
OTHMAR.
let us go homo and hence; she will not weep,
We gave love many dreams and days to keep,
All is reaped now, no grass is left to mow,
And we that sowed, though all we fell on sleep,
She would not weep.
The verses came back to his memory as he went away from
her chamber to his lonely couch; and he found in them that
curious solace which poetry gives to pain when it echoes pain
closely ; that consolation of sympathy, which makes of poets
the ministers and the angels of life. The dull, resigned aban-
donment which was in these lines was in his own soul. It was
no more fierce grief or wild despair, or the delirious rebellion of
the lover against his mistress's indifference; it was the apathetic
acquiescence of a nature powerless to awake and sway another,
the weary and resigned acceptance of a thing unchangeable.
Nay, and though all men living had pity oil me,
She would not see I
CHAPTER XX.
If was a warm and beautiful night a year later, in full mid-
summer in Paris.
Othmar was alone there, being detained there by the illness
of his uncle, who had bfeen stricken three weeks before with
hemiplegia, as he had sat at dinner in his own house in the Rue
du Traktir, and had ever since lain insensible and paralysed, in
a semblance of that death which in all its verity and tyranny of
annihilation might come to him at any hour.
It was a dreary and melancholy waiting for an end which
was inevitable, which no science or effort could avert. He had
come out in the coolness of the night, glad, after the closeness
of a sick-room, of a little air, a little exercise. His wife was
making a series of visits at various great houses throughout the
north-east of Europe ; the children were on the shores of the
Norman coast with their separate household; Paris was a desert,
though both men and women were found there who seized the
occasion to press on him their presence and their friendship with
that assiduity which the world always shows to its very rich
men. But he had felt no taste at such a moment for the society
of either, and had repulsed both with impatience and scant
courtesy.
The world of pleasure never found Othmar pliant to it; he
disliked and despised it; he was intolerant alike of its frivolity
and of its coarseness ; its enormous expenditure seemed to him
grotesquely disproportioned to its poor results in amusement;
and the mere jargon of its habitual speech was unpleasant to
OTHMAR.
149
him. He was rarely seen at a club, never at a racecourse, and
the laughter of a supper-table left him unmoved to mirth, as
the limbs of a dancer left him untouched by admiration.
Crossing the bridge of Solferino now, he paused to look at
the river in the moonlight. There was neither wind nor cloud,
and the sky was brilliant with stars ; the Seine seemed a sheet
of silver. It was past midnight; the city on the rive gauche was
dusky and silent, the other city was studded with a million
points of artificial light; the ceaseless hum of movement had
not ceased there. The air was warm; the water looked cool
and full of repose ; the rays of the full moon, which shone
down from the zenith, played in the ripples of it, and its mute
highway seemed for the moment a silver path into some magic
land.
He leaned against the parapet, and looked down its westward
course : he knew every inch of its way ; he knew all the quiet,
poplar-shadowed hamlets, all the flowering-grass meadows, all
the sleepy quiet ancient little towns which were on either side
of the historic stream ; he knew how the apple and the cherry
orchards sloped to the water, how the lilies and flags grew about
the washing-places and the landing-stairs, how the white-capped
children, knee-deep in cowslips, stood still to see the boats go
by, how the water flowed through the plaisant pays de France
until it grew black and sullied in the smoke of Rouen, and
washed itself white again plunging joyously into the snow-
flecked sea by Honfleur.
It was all hidden now, nothing of any of it seen except a
broad band of silver spreading away into the darkness ; but the
eyes of his mind followed it and illumined its way, and in fancy
his nostrils smelt the fragrance of the sweet dew-wet fields, and
the breath of the sleeping cows, and the scent of the wild flowers
growing where Corneille and Flaubert had died. By day it was
but a busy water highway, crowded with sail and dulled with
steam, serving to bind city and seaport together ; but by night
it was transfigured, and all the sighing sounds which came up
from it seemed only like the peaceful breathing of the slum-
bering children in the many little wooded hamlets down its
shores.
'And Flaubert lived above that water,' thought Othmar
dreamily, 'and from his great window saw through his green
poplar boughs on to it at sunrise and at sunset, and in the light
of the moon like this, and yet he could get nothing of its
serenity, and could hear none of its songs, but must vex his
soul over the sordid troubles of " Bouvard et Pecuchet." The
Seine ought to have been to him a Muse with hands full of
meadow-sweet and lips vocal with tender folk-songs. If he had
had more genius it would have been so. The village has its
Mrae. Bovary, no doubt, under its low red roof covered up with
OTHMAR.
apple-boughs ; but the village has also its Dorothea—if one be
Goethe and not Flaubert.'
The idle thoughts passed dreamily through his brain as he
leaned over the coping of the bridge. He had stood there so
long and so aimlessly that one of the street-guards came up to
him with suspicion, but recognising him, went onward, leaving
him undisturbed.
'If I were that archimillionnairef thought the man, 'it
would be the inside of Bignon's that would have me at this
hour, and not the outside of a bridge.'
That the man who can command all indulgence of the appe-
tites may not care to so indulge them, always seems to the man
who cannot command such indulgence the most inexplicable of
mysteries. The poor man drinks all day long when he has a
chance; he wonders why does the rich man only take a few
glasses of claret when he could be drunk the whole year if he
chose 1
Othmar, unwitting of the guard's commentary, continued to
gaze down the river, repeating in his thoughts the Greek of
Bion's sonnet to Hesperus. He was wishing vaguely that he
had had the gift of poetical expression; he knew that he thought
as poets think, but nature had denied him the power of giving
metrical utterance to them. He would sooner, he believed, on
such moonlit nights as these, have been able to express what he
felt, to portray what he fancied, than have had all the millions
which fate had allotted to him. Even a second-rate poet can
have such happiness in the fancies he plays with and the figures
in which he shapes them on the empty paper. Othmar, from
his earliest boyhood, had been haunted with all those imaginings
which make the heaven of those who can lose themselves in
them, and find complete clothing of eloquence for them. But
they remained mute within him ; they were rather painful than
consoling to him ; when he recalled passages of Shelley, of
Musset, of Heine, of Leopardi, it seemed to him that the tongue
in which they spoke was so familiar to him that it should have
been his own, and yet he had forgotten it or could not learn it,
in some way could never make it his.
' You are a poete manque. What a misfortune !' his wife had
said to him very often with good-humoured derision. But he
himself knew that if he had had the poet's faculty of rhythmical
expression there would have been no force of circumstances
which could have killed it in him. Why he loved music with
so strong a passion was, that in it all he would fain have said
was said for him.
' If I were going home now, he thought, ' to some dark old
garret in some crowded cite des pauvres, and yet could write a
ballad of the Seine on a summer night, so that all the world
should listen '
OTHMAR.
It seemed to him that it would be infinitely more like hap-
piness than to lend to kings, and baffle ministers, and strengthen
cabinets, and give the sinews of war to nations, as he was able
to do in that great white pile over in the town on the right,
which was known to all Paris as the Maison d'Othmar. And
yet what beautiful poems the world already possessed, and how
seldom it cared to think of one of them !
Some bright-eyed scholar, some dreaming maiden, some
sighing lover : was not this the sole public of the great singers,
whose songs, bound in pomp and pride, lay unopened on the
shelves of so many libraries 1
4 And a second-rate singer,' thought Othmar. 4 No, I would
never have been that. The world, as it is, is cursed and suffo-
cated with teeming mediocrity. If one cannot do greatly, let
one do nothing.'
He turned with a sigh from the spectacle of the cloudless
shining skies and of the windless shining waters, and went on
his way over the bridge to return to his house in the Faubourg
St. Germain. The clocks of Paris were striking the half-hour
after twelve.
As he took out his cigar-case and lighted a fusee, a woman,
held by the same guard who had lately passed him, was dragged
by. She was silent and white with terror, but as she went she
put out her hand to him in supplication. It seemed to him that
he heard some faint bewildered words of appeal too low to be
distinct. He threw his cigar aside, and followed and overtook
them in three steps.
4 What are you doing 1' he asked the guardian of the
streets. 4 What is she guilty of ? Touch her more gently at the
least.'
To a man of his habits and temperaments, roughness to any
woman seemed a horrible unmanliness and offence. At the
sound of his voice the face of the captive was turned to him
quickly, and the light of one of the bridge lamps fell full upon
it. Her lips parted to speak, but her breathing was fast and
oppressed, and her voice failed her. Yet he recognised her in
unspeakable amaze.
4 Damaris Berarde !' he exclaimed involuntarily. 4 Good
heavens ! What has happened to you 1 My poor child '
41 do not know why the guard has taken me,' she said
feebly. She put her hand to her forehead and staggered a little,
as if from faintness.
She did not understand why they had arrested her, and of
what she was suspected. It was the old story which meets all
hapless, lone young creatures who are in the streets after dark.
The man had thought that he did his duty ; she belonged to a
sad sisterhood, and had no legal warrant, so he had believed.
To her the charge had been unintelligible ; she had only known
152
OTHMAR.
that they were taking her to the nearest commissary of police,
accused of some unknown crime.
' Let her go at once,' said Othmar to the guard. ' I know
her : I will be responsible for her. Good God, do you not see
that she is ill ?'
'If Count Othmar know her ' said the man with a
dubious smile, unwillingly taking his hand from his victim.
Losing that support she wavered a moment like a young tree
that is cut to the root, and then fell in a heap upon the stones
of the bridge.
'You have killed her !' said Othmar as he stooped to her.
' A country child in the brutality of Paris !'
' She is not ill: she wants food ; that is all,' replied the
police officer, assisting him with the respect which he felt for
his riches.
' They always fall like stones in that way when they are
hungry,' he added. ' I am sorry, sir, but how was I to know %
She was a stranger, and she liad no permit.'
'Call a fiacre,'' said Othmar.
Although past midnight, a little crowd had gathered, and
was fast assembling with that passion for novelty which is as
strong in Paris as it was in Alkibiades' Athens. Most of them
knew Othmar by sight.
' To the hospital 1' asked the driver of the cab which ap-
proached.
'No, to my house,' answered Othmar, ' the Boulevard St.
Germain.'
He lifted her in himself, threw his card to the guard, and
drove over the bridge with the girl's inanimate form beside
him.
The crowd laughed a little, cut some coarse jokes, and dis-
persed. It was a tame ending to its expectations. It would
have preferred an assassination, or at least a suicide. The
guard, sullen and aggrieved, carried Othmar's card and his own
deposition to the nearest commissary. He knew that he would
be censured, but whether for taking her up, or for letting her
go, he was not certain.
Meantime, the vehicle rocked and jolted on over the asphalte
till it reached the patrician quarter. Damaris remained insen-
sible, but her heart beat, though slowly and faintly.
He looked at her with curiosity and compassion. It was
certainly she; the granddaughter of Jean Berarde, the be-
trothed of Gros Louis ; the same child that he himself had
taken over the moonlit sea to her fragrant island. White as
she was, and thin, and altered by evident suffering, she was still
too young to be much changed. Her features were the same,
though they were pallid and drawn, and in place of the brilliant
colours born from the sea winds and the southerly suns, thev
OTHMAR.
153
had the dull pallor which comes from want of food and want of
air. Her clothes were the same dark serge that she had worn'
at Bonaventure, but they were discoloured and ragged. Her
hair had lost its lustre, and was rough and tangled ; her hands
were scarce more than bone ; her bosom was scarce more than
skin ; all the lovely rounded contours and curves of a rich and
well-nourished youth were gone. He saw that the guard had
been right: she had no doubt fainted from hunger.
But how had she come adrift in Paris ? she, the heiress of
Bonaventure, so safe and so sheltered under the orange-boughs
of her island 1
Had that single drop of the wine of ' the world' which his
wife had poured into her innocent breast been so developed in
remembrance and solitude that its consuming fever had left her
no peace until she had plunged into the furnace and sunk
beneath its flames ? Heavens ! how easy it was to influence to
evil, how hard to sway to any better thing !
He looked at her with a compassion so tender and solemn that
it left no place in him for any other feeling. She had no sex
for him ; she was only one of the world's innumerable victims,
swallowed up in the vast self-made shell which men call a city.
To him, always surrounded by every luxury and comfort, there
was something frightful in the thought that a young female
thing could actually want bread in the very heart of crowded
thoroughfares and human multitudes.
' The very wolves are better than men and women,' he
thought. ' The wolves at least always suffer together, and make
their hunger a bond of closer union.'
He did not touch her ; he shrank as far away from her as
the space of the hired vehicle allowed him to do. It seemed to
him a sort of violation to gaze at her thus in her helplessness,
her poverty, her unconsciousness. She was as sacred to him as
though she had been dead.
When the cab passed before the great gilded gates of his
own residence, and the night porter opened them with wonder,
Othmar descended, and paused, hesitating for a moment. He
was in doubt what it would be best for her that he should do.
Then he lifted her out of the fiacre himself, and crossed the
court, bearing her in his arms.
' Send for a doctor and awake some of the women,' he said
to the concierge as he paused at the foot of the staircase.
The lights were burning low. All such of the household as
remained in Paris were in bed or out; the only person up, be-
side the porter, was his own body-servant, who, hearing his
master's step, came down the stairs to meet him. With a few
words of explanation to this man Othmar, assisted by him,
carried the girl into his own library, and laid her down on one
pf the broad leather couches. Thep he took some cognac from
154
OTHMAR.
a liqueur-case which was in one of the cabinets, and forced a
few drops of it through her teeth.
In a few minutes the head women of the house, hastily
roused, had hurried to his summons. He gave them a few
directions, and left her to their care.
'When she is sensible, you will tell me,' he said to them,
and went into an inner room. He was still pursued by that
sense as of doing her some wrong, some dishonour, if he looked
long at her in her unconsciousness.
The servants obeyed him without venturing on any question
or comment, even among themselves. They were accustomed
to strange things which their master did, and knew that human
misery was title enough to his pity. When the physician joined
them, he said at once what the guard of the streets had said:
she was senseless from want of food.
' By my examination of her,7 he added to Othmar, ' I am
inclined to believe that no food has entered her body for
twenty-four hours or more.'
' Good God ! How hideous !' said Othmar.
It seemed to him as if it were some crime of his own.
Not a crust of bread in all Paris to nourish this child? In
Paris, where epicures spent a thousand francs on a single dish
of Chinese soup, or Russian fish, or honey-fed Sicilian ortolans !
The sharp contrast of wealth and of want jarred on him
with a dissonant harsh clangour. A child could die from want
of a mouthful of food in a city teeming with human life—and
Christianity had been the professed creed of Europe well-nigh
two thousand years !
' It is hideous !7 he repeated; while a profound emotion
consumed him and oppressed his utterance.
The physician looked at him in surprise at his agitation.
' You know her ?' he asked.
Othmar hesitated ; then he told the little that he did know.
'A year and a half ago,7 he added, 'she was the boldest,
brigntest, happiest of young girls; the only heiress of a rich
old man.7
' Many things may happen in a year and a half,7 said the
physician. ' Were I you, I would send her now to the Ladies
of Calvary; their refuge is open day and night to any such case
as h«rs.'
' So is my house,7 said Othmar coldly. Turn her out at
such an hour as this ! He would not have turned out a dog
that had trusted and followed him.
' He is always eccentric,' thought the man of medicine,
' and I dare say he goes for something in her misfortunes ; he is
confused and agitated.7
Aloud he said that he placed himself wholly at the disposi-
tion of Count Othmar. There was no immediate danger fnr
0'rHMAR.
the young girl; she had recovered consciousness in a measure,
but she was dull and not clear of mind. He feared that, later
on, fever or lung disease might be developed. He spoke long
and learnedly with many scientific terms; his auditor heard him
impatiently.
' Shall I see her ?' he asked.
The other answered that this could be as he pleased.
Othmar hesitated a little while, then re-entered his library.
The electric light which illumined it bathed in its effulgence
the poor dusky ill-clad form of Damaris, where it was stretched
on the couch almost under the great statue of Andromache,
sculptured by Mercier. Her clothes were rough, even ragged ;
her feet were clad in coarsest stockings of hemp ; her whole
figure was expressive of extreme poverty, that ugly and cruel
thing which would blanch the cheeks of Aphrodite or Helen ;
and yet on her face, as the light fell on her where her head
rested on the purple leather of the cushions, there was a great
loveliness, though wan and dulled and fevered. The features
had a sculpture-like repose, and the tumbled hair, though
lustreless, was rich and of fine colour ; her eyelids were closed ;
her mouth was half open, as if with pain or thirst.
Hung by a little piece of shabby ribbon from her throat he
saw a small gold object. He was touched to the heart when he
recognised in it the little maritime compass which he had
begged her to keep in memory of their moonlit sail together.
She had nearly lost her life from hunger, yet she had not
sold this little jewel! Why? Because she had always regarded
it as his, or because the memory of that moonlit voyage in
the open boat was pleasant to her. A flush of feeling passed
over his face as he thought so; and remembered his wife.
What two romantic simpletons both he and this poor child
would seem to her, could she know the fidelity with which the
little gift had been kept, and the emotion with which he re-
garded it!
' Une sensitive, indeed !' he thought with emotion, recalling
that epithet which his wife had contemptuously bestowed on
her. A soul how little fitted for the rude realities and cruel
egotisms of the world !
As he drew near, her eyes slowly opened and looked at him
with a dreamy, heavy, half-conscious look.
' Do you know me 1' he said gently.
She made a sign of assent.
Othmar took one of her hands in his. A great emotion
stirred in him; he had always the vision of the child beside
whom he had sailed across the moonlit sea, with the sweet
fragrance of the orange-groves coming to them through the
shadows and the stillness of the night.
' Lie still and rest, my dear,' he said to her. 'You are safe,
OTHMAR.
and I am your friend. Can you understand me ? Good-night.
To-morrow we will talk together.'
She looked at him with comprehension and with gratitude;
two large tears gathered in her eyes and fell slowly down her
cheeks. She had no power to speak.
When the morrow came she was lying insensible on a bed in
one of the largest chambers of the house, a room of which the
windows looked out upon the green sward and tall fountains
and stately trees of the gardens, and where scarcely any sound
from the streets around could penetrate. Exposure and hunger
had brought on pleurisy; Sisters of Charity had been sent for
to attend her, and all the resources of modern science were
called to her assistance. Had she been a young sovereign of a
great country she could not have been better ministered to or
more carefully assisted through the darkness and peril of
sickness.
' Spare nothing,' said Othmar to his physicians, careless of
what evil construction might be placed upon his generosity.
He was obeyed with that complete and eager obedience
which is one of the treasures rich men can command, and which
may somewhat atone to them for the subserviency and fulsome-
ness of mankind.
CHAPTER XXI.
Othmar went from her chamber to that of his uncle, lying
dumb, unconscious, almost inanimate in his little hotel in the
Rue de Traktir, all the innumerable wires which connected that
little house with the Bourses of many nations only serving now
to bear north, south, east, west, the words so momentous to the
ear of financial Europe :
' Be Baron Friedrich se meurt.'
Many there were who trembled at these few words; more
who rejoiced to know that the keen eyes were closed, the subtle
brain paralysed, the powerful mind swamped in a flood of dark-
ness. He had millions of enemies, thousands of sycophants,
few friends ; crowds came about his door to know how near he
was to death, but it was of the share list and the money market
that they thought: how would his loss affect this scheme, those
actions, these banks, that syndicate?
'Heaven and earth !'thought his nephew, 'all this excite-
ment, this outcry, this anxiety, and amongst it all not one single
honest thought of regret for the man who lies dying !'
If in love Ave only give Avhat Ave possess and can do no more,
bo in life we receive that which Ave desire. Friedrich Othmar
had wished for success, for power, for the means to paralyse
OTHMAR.
157
nations, inspire wars, control governments, purchase and in-
fluence humanity. He had had his wish; but now that he lay
dying these thing left him poor.
Men who had eaten his admirable dinners through a score of
seasons, said in their clubs : ' Le vieux farceur ! est-ce vrai qxCil
creve ?' and women who had fitted up their costly villas and
adorned their worthless persons at his cost hurried to his rooms
and took away these jewels, those enamels, that aquarelle, this
medallion, whatever they could lay their hands on, screaming
* C'est a moi ! c'est a moi ! c'est a moi !'
Othmar when he had arrived there, on the first intelligence
of his uncle's attack of hemiplegia, had found the house already
sacked as though an invading army had passed through the
apartments ; ' ces dames out pince par ci et par la,' said the ser-
vants, not confessing their own collusion, with apology. Hardly
anything of value that was portable had been left in it; they
had all robbed this poor, senseless, fallen monarch as they
would.
Othmar was filled with an invincible melancholy as he stood
beside the bedside of this man, whose vast intellect had been
suddenly beaten down into nothingness as a bull is brained by
the slaughterer. There had been no great affection between
them ; their views had been too opposed, their characters too
utterly different for sympathy, or even for much mutual com-
prehension, but he had always done full justice to the unerring
intelligence, the stubborn courage, and the devoted loyalty to
the interests of his house, which were so conspicuous in Fried-
rich Othmar, and he knew that his loss would leave a place in
his own life, public and private, which would never be filled up
again. ISTo one not bound to him by ties of blood and of family
honour would ever care for his interests, work for his welfare,
guard his repute, and consolidate his fortunes as Friedrich
Othmar had done from the days of his boyhood. They had
often been sharply opposed in opinion and in action, and more
than once the elder man had learned that the younger man
deemed him well-nigh a knave, whilst the elder held the
younger in complete derision as a dreaming fool. But despite
all this there had been that bond between them of community of
interest and kinship of descent which no hireling service and
no friendship of aliens could ever replace.
Othmar knew that, this man dead, he himself would stand
utterly alone in many ways and in many difficulties with which
no other would ever have power or title to advise or to assist
him. There were engagements, obligations, secret treaties,
and concealed alliances in his house of which he would bear
the burden alone, Friedrich Othmar being once gathered to his
fathers. And, selfishness apart, there was a keen pang to him
in the sight of his old friend lying prone like any fallen tree, in
OTHMAR.
the knowledge that the quick wit would never more play about
those silent lips, and the clear flame of reason and of scorn would
never more flash from those closed eyes.
He was dying : soon he would be dead : and Friedrich
Othmar was one of those who make the dream of immortality
seem as grotesque as the child's hope to meet her doll in. heaven.
Who could think of him without his slow, satiric smile, his fine
intricate speculations, his genius at whist, his perfect burgundies,
his firm white hand which, touching a button in the wall, could
speed an assent or a refusal which served to convulse Europe %
' Immortal ?—what ennui !' he would have said, with his
most good-humoured contempt for the dull and grotesque shapes
in which human illusions, ideas, hopes, and creeds have so oddly
shaped themselves.
' You will find everything in order,' he had said more than
once to Othmar. * I shall die suddenly one day, in all proba-
bility. I leave everything in perfect order every day. You
will only have to wind up the watch after I am gone. But will
you take the trouble to wind it ?'
That was his doubt, the doubt which had tormented him
in many an hour.
Othmar now, leaving the warm golden light of the streets
and the summer air, sweet-scented even in Paris from passing
over the hay-fields and the flower gardens of the country round,
and the blossoms of the limes upon the boulevards, entered the
•hushed, close, darkened room with a sense of coming loss and
of impending calamity. There was no sound but of the heavy,
laboured breathing of the dying man.
' There is no change ? ' he asked of the attendants, but he
knew their answer beforehand ; there could be no change but
one—the last.
Life mechanical, painful, sustained and prolonged by arti-
ficial means, was there still, but all else was over—over the
manifold combinations, the daring projects, the cool unerring
ambitions, the pitiless study and usage of men, the traffic in war
and want, the wisdom which knew when to stoop and when to
command, the skill which could gather and hold so safely all the
cross threads of a million intrigues, the intellect which found
its fullest pleasure in the problems of finance and the great
needs of nations. All these were over, and the quick, cautious,
wise and well-stored brain was shattered and ruined like a mere
piece of clock-work that a child stamps in pieces with an angry
foot.
Of course he had long known that what had come now might
come any day ; that at the age of his uncle the marvel was rather
his perfect health, his clear brain, his strong volition, than any
mortal stroke which might befall him.
The afternoon was growing to a close ; without, there were
OTHMAR.
159
the sounds of traffic and of pleasure ; through the closed vene-
tian blinds the air came into the room, which was hot, dark,
filled with the soporific odours of stimulants and medicines.
Great physicians waited by the death-bed, though they could do
nothing to avert the sure coming of death. Othmar sat there
and watched with them. Now and then someone spoke in a
whisper, that was all. The end was near at hand. The sun sank
and the evening came. There was always the same slow, ster-
torous breathing so painful on the ear of the listener, so expres-
sive of effort and of suffering still existent in that inert unconscious
mass which lay motionless upon the bed.
As the hours passed on, Othmar went downstairs and broke
a little bread, took a little wine, then returned to the chamber
of death and waited there. They told him that as the night
wore away the last struggle must come. Death loves the hour
before dawn.
Many thoughts came to the watcher as he sat there; they
were melancholy and tired thoughts. Life seemed to him, as to
Heine, like a child lost in the dark. What was the use of all
the energy and effort, all the desire and regret, all the grief and
hope, all the knowledge and ambition 1 The issue of them all
at their best was a few years of success and of renown, then
a brain which refused to do its work any more, a body which was
but as the carcass of a slaughtered beast.
The hours stole on, the strokes of the clocks echoed through
the silent house, the wheels of the passing carriages made low
and muffled sounds upon the tan laid down on the street be-
neath in needless precaution for ears deaf for ever, for a brain
for ever numb and senseless. The evening became night and
night brightened towards morning; a little bird sang at the
closed shutter. Othmar rose and opened one of the windows
and looked out; it was daybreak. There was a soft mist over the
masses of verdure of the Bois, and in the sky a pale, dim light.
' Shall I die like this 1' he thought; ' and will my son sorrow
no more for me than I sorrow now 1—who can tell ?'
He stood gazing out at the shadowy houses and the dim out-
lines of the avenues. When he turned back from the window
he saw that the hand of the dying man feebly beckoned him.
In the supreme moment of severance from earth, the stunned
mind recovered one momentary gleam of consciousness, the mute
lips one momentary spasm of thickened, struggling speech ; once
more and once more only the tongue obeyed the order of its
master—the brain.
Friedrich Othmar looked at him with eyes that for an instant
saw.
* Do not make that loan—do not make that loan,' he said
■with his paralysed lips. ' Wait—wait; there will be war.'
His master passion ruled him in his death.
i6o
OTHMAR.
Then he made a movement of his right hand as though he
wrote his signature to some deed.
' The house—the house—tell them the house will not *
he muttered thickly, then a spasm choked his voice, the agony
began ; in less than an hour he was dead.
' God save me from such a death as this !' thought Othmar
as the full day broke. ' Rather let me die a beggar in the high
road, but with some love about me, some hope within my heart!'
And the mouth of the dead man seemed to smile, as though
the dead brain knew his thoughts, as though the dead lips said-
to him :
* Oh, dreamer !—Oh, fool!'
CHARTER XXII
The death of Eriedrich Othmar brought increased occupation
and cares upon him, and the first few days after the obsequies
were too full for him to give more than a passing thought once
or twice in twenty-four hours to the sick girl lying under his
roof. He asked each day after her health, and they each day
answered him that the progress made in it was now all that could
be wished ; youth and strength had reasserted their rights. He
was importuned by a thousand claimants on his uncle's properties,
fatigued by a thousand attempts at imposition and extortion ; all
the wearisome details which harass the living and add a million-
fold to the horrors of every death, encompassed him all day long.
All that the old man had possessed he had bequeathed un-
conditionally to his nephew, and there were many companions of
his late pleasures who clamoured incessantly to his heir for re-
cognition of their unlawful demands. All these matters detained
him in Paris until midsummer had waned, and a weary sense of
irreparable loss and of harassed irritation was with him, through
all these long summer days, which found him for the first time
in his life in the stone walls of a city when fruits were ripe and
roses were blooming in shady, fragrant, country places.
The whole temperament of Othmar was one to which busi-
ness was antagonistic and oppressive in the greatest degree ;
nature had made him a student and a dreamer, and all the dull,
fretting cares which accompany the administration of all great
fortunes and houses of finance were to him the most irksome
and distasteful of all bondage. But they were fastened in their
golden fetters on his life as the burden of the ivory and silver
liowdah lies heavy as lead upon the back of an elephant in a state
procession. And now there was no longer beside him the
astute wisdom, the ready invention, the untiring capacity of
Fried rich Othmar, to take off his shoulders this mass of affairs,
OTHMAR.
161
61 projects, of public demands, of state necessities supplied or
denied, of all the throngs of supplicants, of sycophants, of
fenemies or of allies, who day after day besieged the Maison
d'Othmar.
In these hot summer days in Paris, in the empty chambers
of his uncle's house, all the old weariness and disgust at fate
came back upon him. He would willingly have cast aside all
the power which men envied him, to be free to spend his time
as he would, and shut the door of his room on these buyers and
sellers of gold, these traffickers in war and want, these specu-
lators in the folly or greed of mankind who call themselves the
princes of finance.
' Les delicats ne sont pas vetus pour le voyage de la vie ; ils
n'ont pas la botte grosstere qui resiste aux cailloux et ne craint
pas la fange.'
Othmar was a delicat, and most of the ambitions and all the
prizes of life seemed to him supremely vulgar. It was a tern-
perament which shut him out from the sympathies of men
and made him appear eccentric, when he was only made of finer
and more sensitive moral and mental fibre than were those
around him.
Meanwhile the child he had rescued was passing through
the weary stages of pleuro-pneumonia, succoured by all that
science and care could do for her, and slowly recovered to find
herself with amaze lying on a soft bed, a canopy of pale-blue
silk above her, and around her white panelled walls painted
with groups of field-flowers, whilst from a wide bay window
there came, tempered by pale-blue blinds, the ardent sunbeams
and the hot air of July. It was only one of the many bed-
chambers of the Hotel d'Othmar, but to her in her first
moments of convalescence, as the fragrance from the garden
below came through the room, and the distant music of some
passing regiment was wafted on the warm south wind, it seemed
a very part of paradise itself.
She did not remember very much; her mind was hazy
and indolent through great weakness, but she remembered
that she had seen Othmar. She knew that he had said to
her, 'I am your friend.' Her attendants, the nuns, were
astonished and annoyed that she asked them no questions;
her taciturnity was irritating to their own loquacity and in-
quisitiveness. But she was silent from neither shame nor ob-
stinacy ; she was silent because she was utterly bewildered, and
shrank willingly into the shelter of this knowledge of her safety
under his roof, as a hunted hare shrinks under fern and bough.
She never saw him after that first night in his library ; but she
heard his name often spoken, and she understood that every
good thing came to her from him.
The fresh flowers in the china bowls, the books when she was
M
OTHMAR.
well enough to read, thd volumes of drawings and engravings
which amused her feeble tired mind, the grapes, and the neo
tarines, and the pines, piled in pyramids of beautiful colour on
their porcelain dishes—all these things came, no doubt, from
him ; indeed,whenever she asked any questions, she was always
answered by his name.
A great unconquerable lassitude and melancholy lay upon
her ; yet, under it, she was soothed and lulled by the sense of
this invisible but absolute protection. It was as a shield
between her and the misery which she had undergone ; it filled
her with a vague, grateful sense of safety and of sympathy. As
far as she could be sensible of much in the feebleness of illness,
she was dully conscious that Othmar had stood between her and
some crowning wretchedness, some unutterable horror.
He never asked to see her.
It seemed to him that to thrust himself upon her would be
brutally to recall and emphasise the fact of all she owed to
him : it would seem to cry out to her her own helplessness and
his services. Extreme and even exaggerated, delicacy had
always marked the charities he had shown to those he be-
friended ; and in this instance it seemed to him that only
entire effacement of himself could make endurable to her her,
sojourn under his roof. To reconcile her to it at all appeared
to him almost impossible. As far as he could learn she was
quite friendless and alone: what would he be able to do for her
in the present and in the future %
He was more anxious than he knew to hear her story from
her own lips, but he would not have any request to her made
to receive him. A guest in his own house, above all when she
was poor and homeless, must send for him as a queen would
send before he could enter her chamber. It was one of those
exaggerations of delicate sentiment which had always made him
at once so absurd and so incomprehensible to Friedrich
Othmar, and to mankind in general. For the majority of the
world does not err on the side of delicacy, and is colour-blind
before the more subtle shades of feeling.
During these later weeks, which were filled for him with
dull and distasteful cares, Damaris was recovering more fully
and more rapidly health and strength than she had done at first
in the atmosphere of luxury and service by which she was
surrounded; it was the first illness that she had ever known,
and she could not understand her own weakness, the languor
which lay so heavily on her, the sense of dreaming instead of
living which the lassitude and beatitude of convalescence
brought to her.
She had grown; she had lost all thefwarm sea bloom upon
her face and arms ; she was very thin, and her eyes looked too
large for her other features : but she was nearly well again,
OTHMAR.
163
and only a little pain in her breathing, a sense of feebleness in
her limbs, remained from the dangerous malady which had
threatened to cut her life short in its earliest blossom. When
she could think coherently, and understand clearly, her shame
at the beggar's position to which she had sunk was shared and
outweighed by her passionate gratitude to her deliverer. The
figure of Othmar was always before her eyes, god-like, angel-
like, stooping to deliver her from the mire and horror of the
streets of Paris.
4 Could I see him ?' she said at last to her attendants ; the
question had been upon her lips many days, but she had not
had courage to put it into words. They promised her to tell
him that she wished it, and they did so.
41 will see her, certainly, in the forenoon to-morrow,' said
Othmar, moved by the request to a sudden sense of the strange-
ness and responsibility of his own position towards her. What
would Nadege see in it ? Something supremely ridiculous, no
doubt. Something of the 4 lac et nacelle ' school worthy of the
romanticists of the year '301
As yet he had not even informed her of the bare fact that
this child of the island was in his house in Paris.
He looked often at the portrait by Loswa of the child with
the red fishing-cap on her auburn curls, and he always heard the
mocking of his wife's voice saying with her careless amused
raillery : 14 Si vous en devenez amoureux ?'
And each time that he was about to tell her as he wrote to
her that the girl for whom she had predicted the destiny of
Aimee Desclee was lying mortally sick and apparently wholly
friendless beneath his roof, the recollection of that raillery made
him unwilling to provoke it anew. She might share his com-
passion and appreciate his motives : it was possible that she might
do so if—if! the narrative reached her in one of what she
called her bons moments. He knew that there were emotions
both of generosity and of pity in her nature, but he knew also
that they were fitful and uncertain in their action. He had
ilever known her stirred twice to interest in the same object;
her caprices were, as she had said, like a convolvulus flower,
and only blossomed for a day; when a thing or a person had
ceased to interest her, sooner could a mummy have been
awaked to consciousness under its swathings of linen than
her attention be recalled and attracted to it any more.
4 Quand Vamour est mort, il est bien mortf says a cruel
truism; and as it is with love so was it with her fancies and
enthusiasms. Once dead and forgotten there was no resurrec-
tion for them.
He knew that with her everything depended on her mood.
A great tragedy or a great heroism would seem to her admirable
or absurd, precisely according to the humour of the hour; a
m 2
OTHMAR.
pathetic history or a terrible calamity would find her disposed
either to turn it into ridicule, or receive it with sympathy,
merely as her day had been agreeable or tiresome, as her com-
panions had interested or wearied her, as her toilette had pleased
or displeased her.
'My dear Otho,' she had said once to him, when he had
ventured on some courteously-worded reproof of this extreme
uncertainty of her temperament, ' if I did not get a little variety
out of my own sensations, I should never find any at all any-
where. I cannot be like the editor of a newspaper, who, what-
ever may happen, always has his joy or his woe already in
stereotype and large capitals. If one gets up in the morning to
find a grey sky when one wants a blue one, to find a dull post-
bag instead of an amusing one, to be disappointed in the effect
of a costume, to be prevented from riding by getting a chill,
what can one care if all Europe were in flames % Whereas, if
everything is pleasant when one wakes, one remains quite
amiable enough all the morning to be sorry even for Gavroche
and Cossette in the street! Caprice ? No, it is not precisely
caprice. It is rather something in one's temperament which
is acted on by one's surroundings, as the barometer is by the
weather. If I have ever done any very generous or great things,
as you are flattering enough to tell me that I have, it must have
been at some exceptional moment when Worth had especially
pleased me. All the finer inspirations of women come from
satisfaction with themselves or their gowns !'
At the present moment she was carrying her graceful person
and her unchangeable ennui to the various great houses which
she deigned to honour ; imperial hunting chalets, royal riverain
castles, noble summer palaces set on mountain side, in forest
shadows, or on broad historic streams. She did not deem it
necessary to go into retreat because her old enemy was dead.
She telegraphed her condolence to Othmar, and thought that
enough ; she had some exquisite costumes made en dem^-deuil,
wore no jewels except pearls, and had no bouquets save white
ones. So much was concession enough to the usages of the
world at such moments ; Friedrich Othmar himself would not
have expected more.
Yet a vague regret, which was sincere, had touched her on
receiving the telegram which announced his death. She had
respected his intellect and his wit ; she had even rather liked
him for his stubborn and uncompromising hatred of herself.
When the world was so flat and so tame, and human nature
Bo monotonous, anyone with character enough to hate unchange-
ably was to her interesting.
And her own intelligence had enabled her to measure and
appreciate all the worth of his counsels and of his presence in
the Maison d'Othmar. She had an idea that her husband, now
OTHMAR.
that he would be uncontrolled, would drive the chariot of hia
fortunes in some such disastrous manner as Phaeton, only not
from Phaeton's ambition, but from contempt and discontent.
4 Only there is the child, happily there is the child,' she thought;
a little fair-haired, happy boy then playing on the sands of the
northern seas, scarcely more than a baby ; but, possibly, link
enough with the future of the world to make a sentimentalist
like his father refrain from ruining his heritage. ' A quelque
chose faiblesse est bonne,' she reflected with a compassionate
smile.
She was at that time at Tsarkoe Selo.
She did not love the Imperial Court, nor did the Imperial
Court love her; but they made bonne mine to one another for
many potent reasons, and as matter of wise diplomacy on both
sides. She was a woman whom even sovereigns cared not to
offend, for her delicate and merciless raillery could pierce
through robes of ermine and cuirass of gold, whilst she could
sway her husband as she chose in any question of politics or
public life. On her side she, for the sake of ISTapraxine's sons,
desired always to retain her influence with and to remain a
persona grata to the rulers of her country. She was not given
to moods of remorse or of penitence, but sometimes her con-
science smote her for her treatment throughout their life
together of Platon Napraxine, and as a kind of atonement to
him she studied the social advantages and future welfare of his
children with a care which was perhaps of more real use to them
than the effusions of maternal sentiment would ever have been.
She disliked their personal presence at all times, but she never
neglected their material interests.
There was something also in Russia which pleased her tern-
perament, something which no other land could quite afford
her. The vassalage and submission of the people gave her a
sense of absolute dominion, more entire than any she could feel
elsewhere. The intense and sharp contrasts of life which were
there, the supreme culture beside the dense ignorance, the
hothouse beside the isba, the orchid beside the icicle, stimu-
lated her surfeited taste and moved her languid imagination.
Though belief was not her weakness usually, yet she believed
in the future of Russia. She would have liked to be herself
upon the throne of Catherine, and to stretch her sceptre till it
touched the Indian Ocean and the Yellow Sea.
She did not offer to return to him when Othmar notified the
death of his uncle, and his own detention by various affairs in
Paris. She wrote to him to join her wherever she might be
whenever he should have leisure, and did not display any im-
patience that this should be soon. She liked his companion-
ship—when he did not weary her by any ' madrigals,' or irritate
her by any sentimental enthusiasms with which she could feel
i66
OTHMAR.
no agreement. She was never disposed to wish him away when
he was beside her, or failed to admit that the resources of his
intellect, and the sympathetic quality of his character, made
him always agreeable. But as she had said to him, with her
usual candour, she knew all about him; his character was a
volume she had read through, he had ceased to possess that
charm of novelty which goes for so much in the power which
one life possesses to interest another; he would never again
make her pulse beat a throb the quicker, if indeed he had ever
done so. She bore his absence with an equanimity so philo-
sophic that to him it appeared indistinguishable from in-
difference.
More than once when he was on the point of taking up his
pen and waiting to her of the circumstances which had brought
her future Desclee beneath his roof, he was stopped by the
sheer nervous apprehension of ridicule which paralyses delicate
minds, and that sense that his communication would be
supremely uninteresting to her, which is sufficient to make a
proud and sensitive temperament refrain from any confidence.
She would inevitably laugh at him as a Bayard of the boule-
vards, as a Sir Galahad of the asphalte, even if she took the
trouble to read the narrative to its end—which was most
doubtful. He decided to wait to tell it to her till he saw her:
till he found her some day in a gentle and sympathetic mood.
Besides, with whatever indifference and raillery she might view
it, his knowledge of women told him that, nevertheless, his
protection of Damaris Berarde might not seem to her the mere
inevitable and innocent thing that it really was.
At all times he wrote but rarely to her. He had too often
seen her throw aside hastily, or only half read, perhaps not
read at all, the letters of the cleverest and most preferred of
her friends, for him to believe that his own letters would be
likely to be rewarded with much closer attention. The de-
lighted welcome which a woman gives to the writing of one she
cares for, the eagerness and frequency with which it is studied
and searched for all its expressions of tenderness, and all its
more hidden meaning, was altogether impossible to the Lady of
Amyot. Spoken love interested her so slightly that written
love could not possibly hope to charm her. People were tire-
some enough in speech ; what could be expected of them when
they wrote? He would have read anything she might have
written with keenest interest, with warmest reception, but he
did not dare to suppose that she would have much patience if
he wearied her on paper. When they were apart, therefore,
they telegraphed often to one another, but they wrote to each
other seldom. Telegrams were to her agreeable, because they
were as little of an ennui as any communication can pos-
sibly be.
OTHMAR.
I6y
In an early time Othmar, absent from her, had been given
to pour out his feelings in ardent expression, and even offer her
those delicate flowers of sentiment which always dwell shyly
hidden in every deep and affectionate temperament. But one
day she had written back to him a cruel little word. She had
said : 'You are Obermann and Amiel; do you really think life
is either long enough or interesting enough to be worth so very
much sentimental speculation ?'
It was only her irresistible and incurable poco-curantism
which dictated the lines, but they mortified and chilled him.
He dreaded, with something that was actually apprehension,
her ridicule or her irony. He knew well that to weary her was
to lose her favour. From that day he had never written to
her a syllable of the feelings and reflections of his inmost
thoughts.
'She has never really loved me,' he had said to himself
bitterly, of the woman on whom he had spent the great passion
of his life.
Therefore it became easy to him to say nothing of the pre-
sence of Damaris in his house in Paris.
' I shall tell her when I meet her, and she will not even listen
to it, most probably,' he said to himself. It would entirely
depend upon the mood in which he might find her, whether the
part which he had himself played would seem to her utterly
absurd or partly worthy of sympathy.
' If only Melville were in Europe !' he thought very often.
But Melville was in China, using his persuasive eloquence and
Churchman's tact to obtain Celestial concessions and protection
to the Jesuit missions in the Flowery Land. Melville had
written to him : ' I walk amongst the ruined palaces and deso-
lated gardens which the Allies defiled in 1860, and endeavour to
believe that it is we who are the civilised and the Chinese who
are the barbaric people, but I fail. Shall we ever be apostles of
light whilst our coming is proclaimed with musketry, and our
path strewn before us with charred ruins? It was a strange
way of teaching enlightenment to destroy in a day treasures of
beauty and of art which all the world together could not repro-
duce again.'
Melville was taking his scholarly thought and his courtly
smile through the flowering ways and over the marble bridges
of the Summer Palace, believing, if he thought of her at all,
that the child he had baptized and taught was safe in her island
home amongst the flowering orange-trees, steering through the
blue water at her will, and going in peace and quietude to the
churches on the shore.
i68
OTHMAR,
CHAPTER XXIII.
In the morning he was detained by many matters of importance,
and it was towards evening when he at length found leisure to
visit his guest. He felt a certain hesitation and delicacy in
entering her presence. He was conscious that he had done so
much for her that, on her side, she could not meet him without
some embarrassment, some pain.
He had seen her but twice ; he was no more to her than a
name. Yet he had known her in her island life : he thought
that tie of memory would make him seem to her less of a stran-"
ger than any of these white-coifed pious women who changed
places in vigil at her bedside. And a wonder which was warmer
and wider than mere curiosity made him anxious to learn how
she could have become alone and adrift in Paris, she whose life
had been so safe and so sweet and so simple in the midst of
the blue water and the flashing sunbeams, and free from spot or
stain as the white narcissus growing in the orchard grass, as the
white wings of the pigeons cleaving the azure air.
When he entered her chamber she was lying on a couch be-
side the open window ; one of the Sisters was sitting near her
doing some needlework. She flushed over all her face as she
saw him, and she put out her hand timidly. Othmar bent over
it and touched it with his lips in silence. Emotion held them
both mute. The nun looked inquisitively at them.
Damaris was still weak, and pale, and changed, but there
was the look of fast returning health about her. She was thin
still, but no longer emaciated ; her lips had regained a little of
their damask-rose colour, her hair which had been cut short was
bright and shining ; she wore a loose plain linen gown which
the women had made for her, and her arms were bare to the
elbow ; the afternoon was close and sultry, and she seemed to
breathe with effort.
' I am so glad to see you so nearly well, my dear, and my wife
will be no less glad to hear of your recovery,' said Othmar, as
he recovered his self-possession. It was a subterfuge, in a way
an untruth; but he used his wife's name almost involuntarily,
as the only possible way of reconciling this child to her presence
in his house.
'You have been very good,' said Damaris simply. Her
words seemed poor and thankless, but she could think of no
better ones. She was still bewildered at her own position, and
wounded in her tenderest pride by the charity she had received.
She was not ungrateful, but now that she saw him face to face,
she would have given her soul that he had let her die on thq
Stones of Paris.
OTHMAR,
169
4 Where did you find me 1' she added, 41 cannot remember
—at least not everything.'
4 You were taken unwell on the Solferino bridge,' said Oth-
mar evasively. 4Do not think about that. You are safe here,
and all my house is at your service; it is yours whilst you are
in it, as the Spaniards say.'
He spoke a little hurriedly ; he felt the embarrassment which
every generous nature feels before one whom it has benefited.
The red blood came quickly and painfully over her face and
throat.
41 do remember now,' she said. 4 They were going to take
me to prison. Can they do that when one has done no harm 1'
' The guard thought you looked ill, and were too young to
be alone at night,' Othmar answered, evasively still. He wished
to learn something of her position, but he would not even hint
any question to her. She should say what she chose in her own
time and way.
' I do not mind being alone,' she replied, with something of
the old pride and independence which Loswa had admired in
her. 41 was weak because I had not eaten.'
She stopped abruptly, and grew scarlet.
It seemed very shameful to her to have been without food.
She had always despised the poor crawling beggars whom she
had seen on the mainland, even whilst she had given them all
the loose coin in her pocket. 4 Only the lazy and the idle ever
starve,' her grandfather had often said to her, in the hardness
of heart of a man full of energies and riches ; and she had be-
lieved him. And now she had starved, she herself, and it
seemed to her pitiful, miserable, hateful, a very brand for ever
of disgrace.
4 Do not think of it,' said Othmar kindly, as he took her hand
in his.
41 shall think of it all my life !' she said bitterly, whilst the
intensity of the tone told him that it was no mere empty phrase.
She turned her face from him and looked steadfastly out into
the green spaces and pleasant shadows of the gardens below,
whilst her young features grew cold and stern, and full of re-
pressed pain. Then all at once her head drooped on her breast,
and she burst into a passion of tears.
4 Oh, why did you not let me die !' she cried in reproach to
him. 4 Why did you not let me die when I was dying ? I
should have known nothing now !'
4 That is thankless and sinful,' muttered the nun. 4 Thankless
and sinful to heaven and to earth.'
4 Hush !' said Othmar to the Sister with a frown; he was
troubled and distressed by the child's passionate rebuke. He
hated at all times to see the sorrow of a woman, and he was too
ignorant of her circumstances to know how to console her, He
170
OTHMAR.
could not have told why, but a memory of Yseulte passed over
his mind ; a memory which rarely ever rose at any time before
his thoughts. Nothing could be more unlike her than this sea-
born, impetuous, daring child; yet he remembered her as he
saw Damaris weep. How many tears had the dead girl wept
for him! how often had her young eyes looked wistful and
sorrowful out on these green gardens, on these towering trees,
on these distant and gilded domes of Paris !
The nun cast angry glances at him, and began to tell her'
beads.
Othmar remained silent till the first force of grief had a little
spent itself. Then he said the first consoling words which
occurred to him, without remembering all to which they might
commit him in the future.
' My dear child, do not talk of death. Death and youth are
horrible in the same phrase. Your life is scarcely begun, why
should you wish it away 1 If you have no other friends than
ourselves, do not deem yourself friendless. We will supply the
place of others to you. You will remember the interest which
my wife took in you at St. Pharamond. Believe me, it will be
only strengthened by any sorrow or misfortune you may have
had since we saw you then.'
She looked at him, strongly grateful, yet hurt and ashamed.
' It is charity,' she said, in a low tone. All the pride of her
indomitable childhood was in the word.
' I do not like the expression,' he replied. 1 You will pain
me if you use it. I should be a cur if I had not done the little
that I have done, for you would certainly,' he added more
gaily, 'have done as much for me if I had been wrecked off
Bonaventure.'
She sighed wearily. No kindness of speech could reconcile
her to the burden of debt which she felt laid on her. She
knew she was all alone in the world and homeless, except so
far as this stranger's home was momentarily hers, and she
shrank with horror from the memory of all she must have
owed to him during these weeks of sickness and semi-con-
sciousness.
He saw the pain and humiliation there were in her, and
rose to leave her in peace.
' I will return whenever you wish me, my dear,' he said, as
he laid his hand on hers. ' For the rest, look on my house as
yours.'
She hesitated.
' Wait,' she said faintly, ' I have so much I ought to tell
you.'
'You can tell me in your own time. I shall not leave
Paris, at least only for a day or so at a time. My uncle died a
few weeks ago, and many affairs in consequence keep me here.
OTHMAR.
171
Adieu, my dear : rest and recover. That is all you have to do
now.'
'But I have no right to be in your house, and you know that
the lady despised me !' she murmured with a painful agitation,
which said, without more words, how cruel a dilemma it seemed
to her in which her weakness and her helplessness had placed
her.
' You have every right,' said Othmar. ' And she would be
the first to say so. Do not hurt me by taking this kindly
chance which made us meet as a burden or an injury. I have
often thought of you since we parted that night upon your island
beach, and always with a deep regret that my wife had so fatally
influenced your life. Will you not believe how glad I am to
be able to do you any little service to help efface that wrong 1'
He kissed in grave farewell her wasted hand, once so plump
and brown with youth and health, and the bronze from the sun
and the sea, and now so pale and fleshless.
She looked at him and stopped him with something of her
old pride and spirit in her face, as she said a little abruptly :
' You remember you told me it would be mean not to tell
him where I had been that day ?'
*'Yes, my poor child. I remember.'
* I did tell him.'
' That was very brave of you and very noble. I fear my
advice cost you dear.'
A smile that was almost happy at his praise parted her lips
and showed her small white teeth.
' You told me what was right,' she said. ' It would have
been cowardly to say nothing.'
' It was very brave to say the truth. You shall tell me all
that happened from it on another day. I can never forgive my-
self for all the misery which my wife's thoughtless invitation has
entailed on you. Let me do my best to atone for it.'
Then he bowed low with unfeigned reverence, and left her.
What was so worthy of reverence as so much innocence, as so
much courage ?
She drew a long sigh, and her eyes closed. She was tired
with the exhausted sense of failing powers which the feebleness
of illness causes after every slight exertion. But his visit had
left on her a deep, sweet sense of serenity and safety.
' How good and great he is !' she said dreamily to the nun,
as the door closed on him.
The pious woman did not reply. Othmar was not her idea
of human excellence. He went to no church, and he supported
no religious institutions. Besides, as she thought to herself,
who could tell what motives he had in taking this handsome
child off the streets ? It was not her business to speak ; her
Huoeriors had sent her there, and had said to her : ' N urse the
172
OTHMAR.
girl, and say nothing.' But the Sister had not gone on her
many errands of mercy for a score of years in all the quarters
of Paris, good and bad, rich and poor, without knowing the
meaning of human vices. She began to convey vague warnings,
and cite praiseworthy examples of temptation resisted and over-
come to her patient. Her voice went on and on unanswered,
like the flowing of a slothful brook, and when at last she looked
up from her embroidery, Damaris was asleep upon her couch,
the last red reflection from the sun, which had set beyond the
trees of the gardens, tinging her face with its warmth, and her
hair with its light. For the first time since she had been
brought there her expression, as she slept, was one of peace.
But soon she woke again, startled and distressed. The
tears sprang to her eyes; she pressed her hands together in
passionate agitation.
' I spoke so badly !' she said, in great contrition. ' I said
such poor weak words ! He will never know all I feel. He
will only think me ungrateful !'
' Tut, tut!' said the nun roughly, ' Take your gratitude
to God, not man!'
CHAPTER XXIV.
The following day he sent to ask if she would receive him
again; it seemed to him that not to do so would be to appear to
neglect her. He did not misconstrue her few embarrassed
words or deem her thankless; he had that intuition into the
minds of others which minds sensitive themselves possess ; he
understood all the conflicting emotions which had agitated her,
all the vast weight of gratitude which held her dumb and. made
her almost mute, almost awkward in his presence. He paid
her a brief visit four or five times in that week, then was absent
himself at Amyot for a few days. On his return he saw her
again, and she seemed to have gained greatly in strength. She
could sit erect; her face had the hues of returned health, and
her eyes met his with the candour and brightness which were
natural to her regard. She was a child still, and she had so
much trust in him that it supplied to her the place of friends
and home.
If the memory of the great lady who had tempted her and
ridiculed her, and who was his wife, had not been too constantly
before her, she would have been almost happy again. But for
her she had a sombre antagonism, a curious sentiment, half
defiance, half fear. Othmar never pressed her to tell him more
or sooner than she wished of all the circumstances which had
led to his discovery of her on the bridge ; but one day when li§
OTHMAR.
173
found her nearly well, standing by the open windows with the
breeze lifting the short thick waves of her hair, and her eyes
looking wistfully across the trees at the domes and roofs of
Paris, she turned and caught his hand in hers and laid her lips
on it.
'What can I do? How can I thank you? A very dog
could do something to show you his gratitude, and X—I can do
nothing.'
' You have rewarded me by getting well,' said Othmar
kindly and lightly, to avoid the expression of any stronger
emotions, ' and you can reward me more greatly if you will tell
me everything that has befallen you since I took you home
that night. Will you ?'
' It will not tire you ?'
' It will interest me greatly.'
She sat down, the full afternoon sun falling on her face as
it was upraised to him, her hands locked in he^ lap, her face
pensive and grave with many memories.
' When I told him the truth that night,' she began, 'he hurt
me a good deal, but more in my heart than in my body. I
suppose he did not believe that I had done nothing wrong;
anyhow, in going to your house I had disobeyed him. In the
morning he took me to the mainland and my clothes with me,
and without speaking ever a word, drove me in different
vehicles up, up, up into the interior where the hills were, and
placed me in a convent of Benedictine nuns up in the mountains
above Yal de ISTieve. There he left me without saying a word
to me; though I suppose he explained things to the Sisters.
Perhaps he told them I was wicked, for they were very harsh to
me, and their discipline was very severe. It was exceedingly
cold there after the island, which you know is so warm, and for
months there was snow all around, nothing but snow. I felt
like a chained dog, and I fretted and raged, and they punished
me. It was very miserable. Twice I tried to run away, but
they prevented me. Then the better weather came and the
very mountains grew green and bore flowers. This gave me a
kind of hopefulness; and there were a number of little children
in the convent, and I played with them and became less wret-
ched, and I learned many things, for the Sisters were instructed
women and taught well, and I had always been fond of books
and eager to read them. But how I longed for the sea, and to
feel a boat bound under me, and go as I chose it to go ! You
see I had always been in the open air and on the open sea at my
fancy, and that is no doubt why I felt like a chained dog in
these stone chambers, with their iron bars and their windows so
high that one could only see a hand's-breadth of sky. Why do
people live so when there is the air and the earth and the
water ? I was there half a year, or rather more. Then in the
174
OTHMAR.
month of October my grandfather came, just before the passes
in the mountains were closed with snow, and took me back to
Bonaventure.'
Her eyes closed a moment as if to keep in unshed tears.
Then she resumed her story.
' He never addressed me except just about things which he
could not help, and we crossed the sea and landed at the dear
island, and I thought the dogs would have gone mad with joy.
Catherine had died whilst I was at the convent, and he had
never allowed me to be told. That she should have died in my
absence was a great pain to me, because I had known her all my
life, and she had been often kind and good though her temper
was cross, above all on washing and baking days. But now she
was gone, poor soul! Everything else, however, was as I had
always known it, and I was so happy to be home I could have
kissed all the inanimate things ! The goats knew me, too, and
one of the hens flew to my shoulder directly. My grandfather
let me do whatever I liked all that day, but he never spoke once
except to bid me eat and drink. When it was night and I was
about to go to bed, for I felt tired, he took me out under the
orange-trees ; it was a fine night and the air very light and
clear, and there was a moon then coming up above the edge of
the sea. There he said to me that if I would marry my cousin
he would give me the whole island all for my own, and to my
cousin the brig and all the money that was saved, and he him-
self would only keep a room or two and enough for his wants,
and my cousin was to take the name of Berarde. I thanked
him, but I said I would not marry my cousin. I might have
done if your Lady had never come to me that day, perhaps ; I
do not know. I said a score of times that I would not; each
time I was more resolved than before. Then my grandfather
grew like a madman and cursed me horribly, and told me that
I had no claim on him ; that my father had never married my
mother, that the law would allot me nothing. I do not very
well understand how, but it seems that I had no legal right
there, and that all he had done for me he had done to please my
uncle Jules, the one who died of cholera, who had loved my
father and so loved me. Now, perhaps, as all my life had been
a burden to him and a debt, I ought to have obeyed him and
married Louis Roze. Do you think so ?'
'No,' said Othmar, with some vehemence. 'J5o ; such a
marriage would have been a blasphemy !'
' I did not stay to think, I did not want to think. I said
no—no—no—a thousand times no ! And then I thought he
wohld have beaten me as he beat me the night you took me
home.'
' Beat you ? Good God !'
' He had beaten me before when he was in drink, never at
OTHMAR.
m
any other time. This night he had not drunk. He was quite
sober, but he became mad with rage ; it was always so with him
at any opposition, and he had thought that I should be dull and
tame, having been so long in the convent. But I was not. I
told him that I would obey him and work for him as long as
he lived, because I owed him everything I had ever owned or
enjoyed ; that I would be his servant, and till the ground, and
sail the boat, and fish in the sea,, and cut wood, and do all that
Raphael did ; but that I would never marry my cousin or any-
one else. Never—never. So I told him as we stood under
the moon together.'
' But, before we saw you, you were willing to make this
marriage 1'
Damaris coloured more.
' I had never thought about it before then. My grandfather
said it was to be. It was to me as when he said so many
thousand oranges were to be packed, or so many barrels of oil
sent to the mainland. I never thought about it. But after—
after I had seen your wife, and your house, and your friends,
then, I do not know why, but everything seemed different.'
If his wife had not gone to the island in that hour of caprice,
this child would no doubt have accepted the fate prepared for
her, and passed her life as so many other women did, mated to
a boor but reconciled by habit to uncongenial companionship,
putting aside her dreams with the grange-flowers of her bridal
clothes, and learning to think only of the gold pieces in the
bank, the yield of the oil-presses, the price of fish and of fruit,
the growth of the children that with each year came to birth.
Would it not have been better ? Common sense and vulgar
prudence would say yes, he knew, but in his inmost soul he
could not say it. Besides, revolt might have come, disgust, the
desire for wider worlds and higher thoughts and warmer
passions.
With her luminous eyes and her poet's thoughts she would
have never been contented long with the narrow, coarse, dull
ways of such a life as would have been hers had she yielded.
' Poor child !' thought Othmar, with a pang of almost per-
sonal repentance.
Nadege had done many things which were as so much mere
thistle-down on the wind in her own eyes, but which had sown
dragon's teeth in the paths of others. But it seemed to him
that she had never done a more unkind or a more wanton act
than when, on the spur of an idle moment's caprice, she had
tempted this innocent Alcina from her happy island of con-
tent.
Damaris did not say so, but he himself had haunted her
dreams ever since that night's sail over the moonlit sea.
This man, with his gentle courtesies, his low soft voice, hia
t?6
OTHMAR.
tender care and compassion for her, his high romantic sensd
of honour which had made him counsel her - to tell the truth,
cost what it would, seemed to her a being of another world
than that to which her grandfather and her affianced lord
belonged.
She had thought of little else but Othmar ever since he had
left her on that shore in the soft-tinted shadow, where the light
of daybreak crossed the last rays of the moon. It was not love
which she felt; he was too far away from her, too impersonal,
too great for her to think of him with any personal thoughts ;
but it was an idealised admiration, a keenly grateful remem-
brance, a vague, unconscious sympathy, which had filled her
mind with his image in the many lonely hours she had passed
since that night, and the remembrance of him had made her
shrink from the possible contact, from the mere thought of her
cousin, with a disgust and a revolt which had made her as un-
moved as the rocks of her island itself, before the rage of her
tyrant and the threats of his blind passion.
A thousand times better death, she had said to herself—
death under the blue waters on the deep sea bottom of her native
gulf; death and peace and silence amongst the broad green
weed and the jewelled fishes and the white coral branches which
she had seen so often, fathoms down below her, as she had
leaned over the boat's side and gazed through the pellucid water
clear as a mirror to her eyes.
Startled, she was recalled to the present by the voice of
Othmar, as he asked her to continue her narrative.
* I thought I was on the island !' she said with a sigh.
(Would you like to go back there?' he asked. A vague,
wild fancy came to him of buying back her lost paradise for her
at any cost. She hesitated.
* It would not be the same,' she said at last. * I should not
be the same, you know. But sometimes I want the sea so much !
I want the sight of it, the scent of it, the feel of the wind from
it blowing on my face ! He was very cruel, but, I guppose, he
could not help it. He was disappointed in me, and that made
him very hard. When he found that he could not force me to
marry my cousin he became quite mad. He took me down to
the water, and put me in one of the small boats, and he told me
to go, just as I was, with nothing but the clothes I had on and
the gold cross Monsignor gave me at my first communion, which
I always wore at my throat, and a few trinkets which had be-
longed to my mother. He ordered me to row away or he would
fire upon me.'
' Good God, what a brute !' cried Othmar.
* I am sure he did not intend to really hurt me,' she said
earnestly. * I am sure he only meant to frighten me, and thought-
I should go back to him and do what he wished me to do. He
OTHMAR.
m
never supposed, I dare say, that I should take him at his word
and go.'
'Few of your age and sex would have had the courage to
do so.'
A look of contempt passed over her face.
' I would have given myself to the sharks sooner than return
and give in. One must be a very,weak creature to be driven
like that.'
' Why did you not come to us ?'
' I could not have done that.'
'Why ? We were absent, but if you had gone to the house
there and written to me—or to my wife.'
'No. I could not have done that. When I was there I was
a burden to her. Besides, you had no right to do anything for
me. You were a stranger.'
' I had the right I have now—that of a friend. You were
ill treated in my house, that I know, but it was no fault of
mine.'
' It was no one's fault. Only my own, for being foolish
enough to go there. But let me tell you the rest as quickly as
I can, or you will be tired '
The colour rose over her face, and her voice grew lower, and
her words more rapid as she hastened on the course of her
narrative.
' I knew he would do as he said, for he stood above with his
musket levelled downward at me. I took up the oars and I
rowed away from the island, steering with my foot. I felt
quite stunned ; I did not think of resisting : when once he said
I was nothing to him, and ought not really to bear his name, I
did not feel as if I had any business there ever any more. Only
I could hot understand it, because after all he said that I was
his son's child ; and I have been all the days of my life on the
island, and I thought my heart would break. Well—I got into
the boat. It was quite light because the moon was now at the
full. The sea was still. I did not feel in any way afraid. Yet
I had never felt the sea so solitary as it seemed that night. Far
away there were the lights of steamers moving steadily. I could
smell the smell from the orange trees for a long, long while, and
the last sound I heard from home was the cry of Clovis. He
was howling because I was gone '
Tears choked her voice ; but she only paused a moment.
' Of course,' she continued, ' I had never been alone at sea
in the night time before. One feels so small, so weak, so very
lonely, all by oneself between the water and the sky. I was
afraid, but I was not frightened. Do you know what I mean 1
1 mean that I was not a coward, but I felt very near death.
The boat was so small, and the sea was so large. It had never
seemed so large to me before. Well, I could steer by this com-
N
178
OTHMAR.
pass you gave me, which. I had never let anyone see lest they
should take it; and the wind was southerly and drove me north-
ward.
' After many hours, and when my arms were very tired, and
the day was breaking, I came to the coast.
' I landed at St. Jean ; no one saw me land, and I avoided
the fisher-people whom I knew there, because I could not bear
to tell them how my grandfather had dealt with me. There
were a few of them on the beach, getting their cobles ready to
go out, but it was only dawn, and I did not let the few there
were astir see me. I left the boat tied to some piles and went
inland. I have never seen the sea since ! '
There was a great regret and longing in her voice.
'I did not like to stop anywhere on the coast, for there
were many people there who knew me ; and I was sure they
would ask me so many questions. I drank some water at a
well; I was not hungry. I dare say you will wonder that
I did not feel afraid, but I did not. I went out of the town
on the northern road; I wished to get to Grasse and so to
Paris.
' I had not gone very far before I met a Brigasque woman
mounted on a mule. I knew her as a friend of Catherine's.
She was well-to-do, and owned a flower-farm not far from St.
Dalmas de Tende ; she grew common plants for the perfume
distillers of Grasse. She thought I had run away from the
island, and I let her think so ; and as she hated my grandfather,
because he had outbidden her years before at the sale by auction
of some acres of land in the Roya valley, she offered me to go
home with her and work for her amongst the flowers. As I did
not know what to do or where to sleep I accepted her offer, and
she hired a mule for me at the next inn we came to, and so I
rode with her into the Brigasque country, which I did not know
at all, but which I found was very pretty and had more trees in
it than usual. I stayed with her all the winter, helping her in
what ways that I could.
* I passed the winter there, for I knew I must not go tc
Paris without some little money at least. One day in the new
year there came by a pedlar whom I knew; we had bought little
objects of him once or twice, when Catherine and I had been at
St. Jean at the same time as he. He recognised me at once and
roughly called me a fool, for he said that my grandfather had
died of apoplexy straining at the oil-press one day, in place of a
bullock which had dropped at the work. He called me a fool,
because he said if T had not run away I should have now in-
herited the islaqd and all he had, whereas it was now left uncon-
ditionally to Louis Roze. 1 did not tell him that I had not run
away.'
* In what little things,' thought Othmar as he listened, 4 a
OTHMAR
179
high and generous nature shows itself, quite unwitting how it
innocently displays its own fine instincts !'
'Did you not tell him of your wrongs then?' he asked
aloud.
' Oh no : not when my grandfather was dead and could not
defend himself! To me it was the end of all hope. I had
hoped that one day I should go home. I had always thought
he would relent and seek me out; it made me miserable to think
that he should have said such cruel words to me for the last
words, and he had certainly been good to me, very good in his
way. He could not be very gentle, it was not in him ; but he
had been generous to me, and sometimes kind and quite proud
of me too. I was very sorry, because when a person is dead,
you know, one only remembers what was good in them, and one
wants so much to say so many, many things to them ; but now
I knew that this could never be, and I was very wretched. The
pedlar had said that everything was given to my cousin, but the
people I was with would not believe it. They got a letter
written to my cousin, and asked for my share (unknown to me ;
I would not have let them do it had I known). Louis Roze
wrote back to them that I inherited nothing under the will, and
had no legal claim to insist on any division of the property ; he
said he was about to marry a young woman of St. Tropez, and
he sent me a bank note for a thousand francs. I sealed it up
and sent it back to him. You know he knew that all the island
would have been mine. I care nothing for the money, but I
love the island; I love every stick and stone upon it, every shell
on its sand, every wave that breaks on its rocks !'
' You shall have your island again, if money can buy it!'
thought Othmar, with one of those heedless impulses of. gene-
rosity which had more than once cost him dear.
' I was so unhappy to think my grandfather was dead, and
dead with rage in his heart against me, that for weeks I could
do nothing,' she pursued, while the tears rolled off her lashes.
' But then I felt that there was no one on earth to do anything
for me jf I did not do it for myself, and I worked hard to get
together money enough to take me to Paris, and keep me there
a little while. They all said that life there was very dear, and
money ran like water. You see I was always thinking of what
your Lady had said, about my having some talent in me. I
thought of it all day long as I worked in the rose-fields and
among the great thickets of jessamine. Your Lady had said
that I might be great some day, and it is always to Paris that
people go who wish to be great, at least all the books say so.
Watteau went, and Moliere, and Rousseau, and Napoleon, and
ever so many others '
' Ah, poison of the world !' thought Othmar. 'What cruelty
we did ! She would have stayed on her island and been 1 he
n 2
180 OTHMAR.
mother of little brown children, and known nothing of the
world but its fresh honest sea and its frank, bold winds! What
a pity,! What a pity ! The rattlesnake is kinder than such
dreams of fame !'
He was sorry and troubled, and angered against his wife,
who had cast the stone of worldly desire into the limpid, calm
waters of this young child's thoughts.
He was unspeakably saddened by the vision of her, coming
northward over the sandy roads of Provence, with so much hope
and fancy in her heart, only to drop sick with hunger upon the
stones of Paris—Paris, so fair a mistress to the rich, so hard a
stepmother to the poor. Gilbert, and Hegesippe Moreau, and
Meryon, and how many others, had traversed that path before
her, only to perish in the hospital or the garret, mad or famished,
clutching at the bough of laurel, obtaining only the hemlock of
death !
4 So I determined to leave St. Dalmas,' she continued, * and
walk all the way to Grasse when the March weather came. On
the roads I assure you I did quite well. People were very kind
whilst I was in my own country, as it were. At the bastidea
and the cottages they let me sleep well and gave me food, and
let me do work in return. I know how to do many things that
are of use on the farms, but of no use at all in Paris. So little by
little I did get to Grasse, and there one of the women who knew
my Brigasque friends gave me welcome, because some of them
had given me a letter to her asking her to be kind. But I shall
weary you ; I will try to tell the rest shortly. I could have
stayed on at Grasse as long as I would, but I wanted to get to
Paris ; above all, now that my grandfather was dead, there was
nothing to keep me in my own country ; no one wanted me or
sought for me. They had paid me a little for what I did in the
Brigasque country, and I saved up all of it, and when I had
enough to pay for the railway to take me there (it is very dear
indeed), I bade them farewell and took the train to Paris. I
had never travelled by land before, only on the dear sea. It is
horrible to have all that fire in that great iron pot swinging one
to and fro, while it yells and bellows through the heat and the
air that is not like air at all but only so much smoke. How
Fenelon would have hated it; it would have seemed to him like
hell ! Why do men travel in such a way when there are the
tree-shadowed roads and the rivers ? I had taken my passage
(do they call it so ?) straightway to Paris, and there were many
changes and many pauses and great confusion, and the noise and
the heat and the strangeness made me feel unwell. I had never
felt ill before, that I remember. It Avas a very great many hours,
even days I think, before we reached Paris ; it was night, and it
was raining; nothing was at all like what I had pictured it.
There were crowds and crowds of people, but no one noticed
0 Tit MAR,
181
me. I felt lonely, and I missed the sea and the Street fresh
smell that is anywhere where the country is. Here the air felt
so thick and so greasy, and the rain had no pleasantness in it; it
was not clean and fragrant, as it is when it scours over the fields
or patters through the orange-leaves at home. As I came out of
the station a young man looked into my face and was insolent.
I struck him a blow on his cheek with all my might; I hurt
him ; the people wanted to seize me, but I was quicker than
they, and I ran, and ran, and ran until I outstripped them, and
then I was in a narrow, dark street, and sat down on a doorstep
and wondered where I ought to go. I had only three gold
pieces with me in a belt round my waist, and I knew they would
not last long. I had spent almost as much as that for the train
and in food at the places the train waited at; the food was very
dear and very bad, even the bread.
' Some women went by and spoke to me, but I did not like
their words, and I answered nothing, but got up and looked
about me for a place to sleep in. I was wet through, for it
rained a great deal. I saw a little place which seemed like a
restaurant, and I went in and asked if I could have a room
there. They gave me one, a very little one, and not clean, and I
went to bed without eating, being afraid to spend the little I had.
'"When I got up in the morning and went to pay for my
chamber and supper, I found that I had no money at all. My
belt was gone. I suppose I had been so sound asleep that I
never heard them come into my room and take it. I always
think it was the woman of the house who stole it, because I had
shown her the napoleons. She raved and abused me when I told
her my money had been stolen, and said her house had always
been honest. She denied that she had ever seen the belt, and
swore that I should pay for all I had or go to prison. I told her
that it was she was the thief, not I. I threw her my little gold
cross to pay her, and went out of her house into the streets. I
think she was a wicked woman.'
' Wicked, indeed,' said Othmar, whilst he thought, ' it is
heaven's mercy that she did not do worse to you.'
He, by whom all the hideous vice of the great city was known,
all its grasping greed, its hunger for gold, its remorseless seizure
of all ignorance, and innocence, and pleasant rural things, and
virgin beauty of the body and the mind, knew that by a miracle
scare* less than that which in legend bears the royal saint of
Alsace unharmed through the flames had this child escaped
pollution in the heart of Paris. Corruption had been all around
her, and the morass of iniquity upon every side ; her own sex
were for ever on the watch for such as she, to sell their youth
into the slavery of the brothel, and she had known no more the
peril which she ran than the wild dove does when its flying
shadow passes over the trap hung below it in the oak-boughs.
182
OTHMAR.
(I asked in a great many places for such worlc as I knew
how to do, but nobody wanted any of it done. There seemed
such numbers of people everywhere clutching at every little bit
of work. Many laughed at me : I saw my clothes were different
to what they wore in Paris, and my accent was different too to
theirs. But they were cruel to laugh. I went to the theatres
and tried to see the directors, but no one of them would even
see me. All these days I lived on the little money I had gained
by selling my great cloak : it was such warm weather I did not
want it. I had made acquaintance with a good woman who was
very poor herself, but she told me what to do and where to go,
and let me sleep in her one little attic ; she had three children,
quite little ones, and she worked in a match factory. She lives
in a little passage up at Montmartre. Of course I had to make
her think I ate all I wanted out of doors or she would have
robbed herself for me, poor though she was. I had a friend in
her, but when I had been with her three weeks, there was a
noisy mob which assembled near, and screamed for bread, and.
broke open the bakers' shops and stole the loaves. She was
coming home from the factory, and was arrested as one of the
rioters, though I am sure she had been merely passing down the
street, and the little children had no one but me for a little
while. I did what I could for them until their grandmother
came up from some village outside the barrier and took them
away, and I missed them very much.
' I would rather not talk about the days that came after that
dreadful morning,' she pursued, the wavering colour fading
wholly from her face, for the recollection of them was unbear-
able to her. ' It is only three months ago since I came to Paris,
but it seems as if it were years. I saw and heard things that I
could never tell anyone, they were so horrible. I sold all I
had of clothes, it was very little. I lived as I could, I was very
hungry all the time, but I did not mind that so much as I minded
the squalor, the noise, the crowds, the filthy smells, the horrible
language. I tried to get work, but I could not. I went to the
theatre doors, but the porters would not let me in. I did not
know what to do ; even my linen was sold. I sold even my
shoes, and people give you so little when they know that you
want much. I could not get any work of any kind. I was of use
on my island, but not here ; and the men jeered at me and were
rude—and—and—there is nothing more to tell that I know. I
could make no money at all, and so of late I could get no food,
and the night I fell down on the bridge I was faint and very
unhappy, for they had turned me out of the woman's room
because she did not come back, and I had no money to pay for
keeping it. But that is enough about me. I met you on the
bridge. You know the rest. I had not eaten anything all the
day, I suppose that wa3 why I fainted. I never fainted in my
OTHMAR.
183
life before. It is only three months since I left Grasse, but it
seems so many years—so many years! Is this the world indeed
that the Comtesse Othmar spoke of \ Surely it cannot be—it is
cruel, it is hideous, it is hateful—if I could only see the sea or
the country once more! You have been very good to me. I
pray you to help me to gain my own living somehow, only not
in this city—pray not here 1 I am stifled in it. I want the air.
Pray help me !'
Othmar was silent from emotion. It seemed unutterably
cruel to him that this child should have been led into such perils,
such pain, such want, by one careless word of his wife's, and he,
who all his life long had had about him everything that luxury
can invent and comfort demand shuddered at the thought of her
suffering and her exposure, as though he had seen his own little
daughter naked and shivering in the snows and the winds of a
winter's night.
When he left her presence that day he could think ot
nothing but her piteous story. The heroic courage of the
young girl, the noble qualities she had all unconsciously
revealed in the course of its narration, the utter friendlessness
of her position, and the fearless frankness of her confidence in
himself, all touched his heart closely. It seemed horrible to
him that any woman-child should suffer so much and be sur-
rounded with such cruel perils. Those days in Paris had done
the work of years upon this innocent creature, who had before
only known the freshness of sea and shore, the safety of a
sheltered youth, the dauntless gaiety of a buoyant and un-
checked spirit; but he saw that all through it, through all it3
miseries and all its temptations, she had kept her soul unhurt.
He dared not ask her how she had done so, but he knew that
she had defended herself safely from all foul contact, and again
it seemed to him a miracle great as that which guides the
swallow over desert and ocean back to its last year's nest.
CHAPTER XXV.
Othmar was naturally of a tender and even enthusiastic nature.
His sympathies were warm and spontaneous, his imagination
was strong and governed his reason very often. There was
much in the circumstances of this poor child which appealed
both to tenderness and imagination, and he was haunted by her
swift mellow voice, with its meridional intonations, her great
dark luminous eyes filling with sudden tears as she remembered
her island home.
He felt that they owed her a debt. They had robbed her of
her birthright of simple joys and honest, obscure, healthful
184
OTHMAR.
ways of life. They could never again make her what they had
found her. Who can put back the gathered rosebud on the
rose-bough ?
They had a right to give her what they could give in lieu of
all which she had lost, indirectly but indisputably, through
their means. His conscience, as well as his common sense,
told him that as his wife had been the chief offender against the
child's peace, so she had the first right to know the results of
her interference, and amend them. But he had the moral
timidity of proud, reticent, and sensitive natures : he dreaded
her irony and her indifference. He could not tell what she
would say or do ; possibly in the end something which he would
approve ; but he knew that first of all she would ridicule' him :
with her lips certainly, very likely even in her thoughts. Even
when he had been her lover she had always laughed at him for
taking life so seriously, for being Ituy Bias and ltolla rather
than Sir Harry Wildair. And even if she were moved to any
kindness, how likely would her languid, haughty footsteps tread
hurtfully, without knowing or heeding it, on the storm-tossed
wild flower? She could be exquisitely kind, magnificently
generous ; none more so : but was it not, alas ! only while her
mood to be so lasted ?
' I will tell her—later,' he said, with that temporising before
difficulty which many a man, bold and even rash in his dealings
with his fellow-men, is apt to adopt when he deals with
women.
Meanwhile, something had to be done at once, he knew, to
reconcile Damaris to her dependence upon himself. He knew
she was of the temper which would break loose from the safest
shelter and rush to the direst danger if she deemed herself
humiliated by assistance. In all her grace of youth and help-
lessness of circumstance, there was still something warm, strong,
untameable in her, which he felt as the hand which holds a
bird will feel its wings stir and tremble ready to fly. It would,
he knew, be hard to aid her. It would have to be done in her
own despite.
A thought occurred to him ; one of those spontaneous ideas
which come to us like very angels, and which, in after years,
seem rather born of hell than heaven. On it he spoke to her
the next day.
' Tell me, my dear—your grandfather died after you had
left the island some months ? Well, did you never hear any
details of his death or of his will ? You know only what the
pedlar said ?'
' Only that.'
' Then I think you should know more. He may have
repented him of his cruelty, or he may have made some sort of
bequest to you, even if the bulk of what he had has gone to
OTHMAR.
18S
your cousin. My people there could soon inquire. Will you
allow me to do that 1'
' If you wish. But I am certain he left me nothing—never
thought of me. You did not know him : once he had put any
person out of his heart, it was to him as if they never had lived
at all. He was very hard, and he never by any chance forgave.
Beside—he told me—I had no claim on him, was nothing to
him.'
' Legally. But sixteen years of life spent beside him could
scarcely pass utterly out of his memory. If he had left you
anything, it is possible your cousin was not honest enough to
say so. I will inquire at any rate. It will be more satisfaction
to you to know more definite tidings than the hawker could
possibly give you.'
'I am sure he left me nothing. But I should be glad to
hear of Raphael and the dogs.'
' You shall hear. Raphael, I have no doubt, will be as
glad to hear of you. Meanwhile be sure that both my wife and
I should be unhappy if you fled away from our roof out into tlie
world again. The world is not a kind place or a safe place, my
dear, for those who are young and motherless.'
'But I must do something,' she repeated feverishly. ' I
must do something. I cannot live on your charity. I would
die sooner!'
' I tell you I do not like the word of " charity,"' said Othmar.
'When people have all a common misfortune, they have as it
were a common tie. We have all the misfortune, the supreme
misfortune, of human life.'
Even absorbed as she. was in her own great straits and needs,
Damaris was astonished at such words from one who, it seemed
to her, was at the very summit of all earthly happiness.
' If he be not content, who can be 1' she thought.
'It is a tie,' continued he, unconscious of her surprise,
'which binds us all together. No one is so fortunate that he
may not live to want aid and pity. It is not so very many years
ago, as the lives of nations count, that here in Paris a king and
queen became so friendless that none dare say a kind adieu to
them as they went to their deaths upon the scaffold. Compared
to Marie Antoinette, how rich you are ! You have youth,
talents, friends, and all your future.'
' I have no friends,' said Damaris, with a gloomy rejection
of all solace.
' You have one at least,' said Othmar. ' You are a little in
love with sorrow, my dear ; all imaginative youth is so. When
we have really had its actuality with us for awhile, we get to
hate it bitterly, and do all we can to forget its presence.'
She looked at him with wonder.
'Have you ever been unhappy?' she said incredulously;
136
OTHMAR.
4 with all these beautiful places ? with that beautiful lady ? with
all the world ?'
4 One is never happy for more than a day,' said Othmar with
some impatience. 'One wants, one wishes, one desires, one
obtains, one regrets—there is the whole gamut of all human
notes. The scale no sooner ascends than it descends. There
is nothing happy except youth, which does not know that it is
so, and so goes through all the glories of its time ignorant, pur-
blind, longing to cease to be youth.'
41 was quite happy on the island,' said Damaris wistfully.
'Then you were wiser than I ever was,' said Othmar, as he
thought with a sort of remorse of how this innocent animal
happiness, born of the waves, and the winds, and the sun, and
the blossoms, and the radiant joy of mere living, had been de-
stroyed by one breath and glimpse of the world, as a flower
withers up in a flame, as a bird drops dead in carbonised air.
Had they only let her alone, she would have been happy still.
4 Yes,' Damaris sighed, and her eyes had a weary, troubled,
introspective look. They saw the blue sea washing the face of
the cliffs, the white dogs barking on the strip of yellow sand,
the steep path going up and up and up under the olive trees,
the old woman in her blue kirtle and a grey hood coming from
out the groves of orange and of lQinon, a saucepan freshly
scoured or linen freshly washed in her horny hands—had all
those familiar pictures faded for ever from her sight ?
Bethune had said truly that to gather the rosebud is the act
of an instant, but what power in heaven or on earth shall put
the rosebud, once broken off, back again upon the mother
plant ? If by any force of will or of wealth they were to buy
back her island again for her, it would never be possible to give
her back with the solid soil, and the old house-roof, and the
fruitful trees of it, the old, sweet, happy ignorance and peace
of her childhood there.
4 She is not here ?' she asked suddenly, as she roused herself
from her dream of her old home.
'My wife?' he asked in some surprise. 'No; she is in
Russia.'
4 She will despise me,' said Damaris, a dull red glow of shame
mounting over her forehead. 'Will you tell her that I was
found in the streets ?'
4 Not if it pain you. But you mistake if you think '
41 should hate her to know it,' said the girl under her breath.
* I wanted to become something very great; something that she
would hear of and come to see ; and then I should have said to
her : 44 Yes, it is I, madame, and you will not laugh at me any
more now.'"
4 She never laughed at you. She admired you, and predicted
a great future for you,' said Othmar with a little embarrassment,
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187
not knowing very well how to speak of one so near to him to this
child, whose memory was so tenacious alike of benefits and
affronts.
4 Is this house hers ?' asked Damaris.
4 Surely, my dear : what is mine is hers.
Her face darkened.
41 am well now,' she said abruptly. 4 May I not go away?
I could get work, I think, in the gardens or on the river ; there
would be things I could do. I learnt something, too, at the
convent in the mountains ; not much, but something. Pray try
and get me work.'
4 Do not be in such haste,' said Othmar. 4 It sounds like a
reproach to me. You are most fully welcome, my child. I shall
always feel that we can never atone to you for being the cause,
however unconsciously, of the breaking up of your happy life.
Wait, at least, until I have made some inquiries into your grand-
father's death and testament. It may very well be that your
cousin took the occasion of your absence to help himself to more
than was his due.'
41 do not think so. Louis was an honest man.'
4 If he be honest, inquiry will not hurt him.'
He had resolved to go himself upon an errand which he had
re'solved not to entrust to any of his agents, trustworthy though
many of them were.
In the warm August night he took the express train for the
south, and went across the country, golden with ripe corn and
green with vine-leaves, straightway to the sultry shores of the
south, deserted by their hosts of guests, and sweltering, baked
and white with dust, in the intense suns of the late summer
weather.
He went first to the seaport of St. Tropez, and made
inquiries in its dockyard and shipyard as to Louis Poze. He
found that the man had really inherited the possessions of his
uncle Be'rarde, had married a young woman of the town, and
was now living on the island of Bonaventure. So far the tale
told by the pedlar to Damaris had been true. An old man, an
owner of a coasting brig, who had done business with the Berardes
all his life, told him also of the manner of Jean Berarde's death,
and added, with regret, that the curmudgeon had left not a
penny to his granddaughter because she had refused to marry
her cousin; and added, further, that the poor child had gone no
one knew whither. It was a pity, the old man said regretfully,
for she had had a face and a voice that it did good to the souls
of men to see and to hear, and had been as active on the sea as
any curlew, and so handy with a boat, even in wild weather,
that it had been a pleasure to sail with her anywhere.
Asked as to whether she had truly no legal claim upon her
grandsire, the old skipper affirmed that everybody had always
i88
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known she was a bastard, except herself ; but nobody had ever
supposed it would make any difference in her succession to
Bonaventure. Louis Roze had always known it, but had been
willing to marry her to prevent any division of the property. So
much he learned, sitting on the sea-wall of St. Tropez, and
letting the old master of the brig Paul Mousse ramble on at will
with the sunbaked land behind them, and before them a sea,
tame as a plain, and oil-like in the drowsy drought.
He knew who Othmar was, as did most people on those
shores, and readily told him all he knew, though silently
wondering why he was asked these questions.
Othmar slept that night at his own house, and on the
morrow, almost before the sun was up, took one of his own
sailing-boats, and, attended only by one man, crossed the well-
nigh motionless sea in the direction of Bonaventure. When the
isle rose in sight, lifting its green cone out of the waves in the
hot blue air, it was still early in the morning. As he went over
the smooth surface of the summer sea, skimmed by thousands
of gulls and fanned by languid fruit-scented breezes from the
land, his heart ached for the sea-born child shut away under the
zinc roofs and gilded vanes of Paris. Even if he could buy
back her island, who could make her quite what she had been ?
He was angered against his wife, who, for sake of an absurd
caprice, which had had no more duration in it than the light of
a wax match, had brought about so sad an exile, so utter an
uprooting and alteration of a simple and a happy life.
He, like many men of high position, deemed a lowly fate by
far the happiest; he would have agreed with Cowley and George
Herbert, and would have chidden Herrick for not being content
amidst his Devon moors and streams, his cherry trees and roses.
Health, peace, and fresh air seemed to him three treasures
which were ill exchanged for the feverish struggle and the
artificial joys of life in the cities of the world.
When they neared the island they saw no one. The boat
was easily run up on to the smooth strip of beach, and he
ascended the pcisserelle and the steps cut in the rock, as Loris
Loswa had done before him once and Damaris a thousand
times.
Things were all changed upon the little isle. Catherine,
dead, had left no successor so thrifty and sturdy as herself; the
man Raphael had gone with all his family to live at Yallauris ;
Louis Roze and his wife had new faces, new ways, new things
about them. The dogs were chained up; the old coble was
newly painted ; the little balcony had a dab of gilding, tricolour
paint, and some smoking chairs ; the great white rose had been
cut down, the new owners had thought it harboured caterpillars
and slugs. Nature had made the place lovely, and even man,
the universal deformer and destroyer, could not make it wholly
OTHMAR,
189
otherwise. But it had lost its look of freshness and luxuriance,
and all its deep charm of solitude ; it was choked up with vulgar
furniture and gewgaws that the bride thought fine and rare.
Modern china stood upon the shelves, and in the old solid silver
pots artificial flowers were stuck. Some maidens, with many
colours in their gowns and great ear-rings in their ears, cackled
and giggled behind the orange trees. It had been an idyl of
George Sand's; it was now a rustic scene for an operetta of
Offenbach's.
All that could not be vulgarised was the pure air, rich with
the odour of millions of orange-blossoms, and the serene far-
stretching sea, blue as the mouse-ear growing by a woodland
brook.
Louis Roze in his shirt-sleeves, smoking beside the door, was
a big, burly, red-faced man, with ear-rings also in his ears, and
the broad roll of the southern accent in his thick voice ; his
wife was a buxom, brown, stout, and vulgar woman of four- or
five-and-twenty. They did not know Othmar by sight, and he
did not make himself known to them. He gave them an order
for a boat in the name of one of his own yacht-builders ; an
order large enough to open the heart of the boat-builder of St.
Tropez. Then by casual questions, and by letting the owner of
Bonaventure talk on and boast of his possessions, he learned
what he wanted to know : the facts of the elder Berarde's death,
and of the amount which had been bequeathed to his nephew.
' He left everything he had on earth to me ; he knew in
whose hands it would prosper and increase,' said in conclusion
the big, oily-tongued, boastful Provencal.
' Had he no other heirs at all ?' asked Othmar, ' or was it
your uncle's very natural preference for yourself ?'
' None on earth,' said the man hastily, with a little added
red on his red cheeks, and a quick glance of his eye.
' Who was the girl, then,' asked his guest, ' who used to live
with him, and go out in his brig 1'
' She was nothing at all to Berarde,' said Louis Boze sullenly,
beginning to perceive that he had been interrogated with a
purpose.
' A bastard!' he added. ' The law does not recognise
bastards.'
'The law, like proverbs, is the distilled wisdom of man-
kind,' said Othmar. ' Like proverbs also, it occasionally may
be caught tripping in its wisdom.'
The man eyed him uneasily.
' She was a bastard,' he said again. ' I did generously by
her, because after all blood is blood. I sent her a handsome
dowry ; big enough to get her a good spouse amongst better
men than she had any right to look for :—'
He felt angry and baffled, and would have been quarrelsome
190
OTHMAR.
and have told his visitant to mind his own business, only that
he saw the unbidden guest was a gentleman, and the order for
the craft had made him patient and obsequious.
Othmar looked at him with some disgust, changed his tone,
and addressed him with more severity.
* M. Louis Roze, it is no concern of mine you will say, but
I am here to tell you one thing, and you must listen to me.
Legally, maybe, your cousin Damaris had no claim on this
estate, but you know that she was brought up from infancy as
her grandfather's heiress, that she was always encouraged to
believe the island would be her own, and that only because of
her refusal to marry you was she omitted from her grand-
father's will, to your benefit—perhaps from an old man's
perverse tyranny and rage, perhaps a little also from your
suggestion and your intrigues. Be that as it will, you are
morally bound, unless you are a cur indeed, to share your in-
heritance with one who has every moral right, and right of
usage, to the whole of it. The dower you boast of having sent
was returned to you. Your cousin is poor, but not so poor as
to take as your alms what is her right. She is with those who
can protect her, and is out of the danger to which you allowed
her to drift without stretching out a hand to save her. If you
consent to divide in equity your inheritance with her, I will
tell yoti who I am, and give you all proofs and explanations
that you may reasonably require. If you refuse I shall bid you
good-morning, and rest content with the satisfaction, not a rare
one in this world, of having seen an unjust and dishonest man.'
Louis Roze stared at him, perplexed by his tone, purple
with rage and astonishment, made a coward not by conscience
but by fear of losing a lucrative order, and so bewildered at the
sudden attack that, southerner though he was, he had no good
lie ready. All he felt for the moment sensible of was that not
a bronze bit of the money, not a rood of the soil, not a rotten
bough off one of the trees, should go away from himself to that
girl, who had so grossly outraged him in refusing his hand.
In a boorish, dumb-animal fashion he had been in love with
the handsome child, who had always laughed at him and
flouted him, and had never even let him kiss her cheeks in
cousinly manner. As she had made her bed so she might lie in
it. Not a sou should she get out of him, that he swore; the
will was a good will, attested and duly proved ; no one could
gainsay it, and the young woman falsely called Berarde was
without any possible claim whatever ; there had been no legal
adoption of her. So he declared, with many an oath to keep
his courage up before this stranger, whose manner daunted him;
and his wife overhearing that it was a question of the inheri-
tance which was under discussion, thrust herself into the
balcony and vociferated with shrill iteration and the fury of a
OTHMAR.
191
woman menaced in her 'dearest possessions, that whilst she
lived not a centime should ever go away from her lawful lord.
Othmar turned away before their clamour was half done.
' That is enough,' he said to them, 'keep all you have and
may it prosper with you. Your cousin has no need of it, but I
thought it right to give you a chance to do your duty.'
Louis Roze eyed him with perplexity, and grew silent.
Othmar asked him nothing more and took his leave ; the
bride and her sisters watching his departure through the in-
tricacy of the orange-boughs, giggling and criticising him in
audible phrase, their black eyes and their gold hair-pins flash-
ing in the sunshine amongst the glossy leaves.
' That brute will do nothing for her,' he thought, as he
descended to his boat. ' And even if he were inclined ever to
do so, his wife would never let him follow his inclination.
There is nothing on earth so avaricious as peasants who have
grown rich.'
He took his way back to the mainland, and left behind him
much uneasiness, wonder, and speculation amongst the inhabit
ants of Bonaventure.
The will was a good will, and his position was as sound as
sound law could make it, yet Louis Roze was not quiet in his
mind. He was not a bad man, though greedy, and he felt that
this stranger was right; that something of all he had gained by
this inheritance ought to go to the child who for so many years
had been allowed to look upon herself as the future owner of
Bonaventure. He was pursued by his recollections of her
leaping like a young kid up the rocks, steering through the sea
foam and the sunshine, gathering the oranges or the olives,
carrying the linen down to the beach to dry, running gaily with
the white dogs before her, swimming like a fish with her beautiful
arms flung out on the water, and her eyes smiling up at the
sky ; la mouette as the people had called her, because she was so
at home in the waves and the winds.
Truly she ought to have had something ; she was of the old
man's blood, whether or no the law recognised her or not; and
where was she and what would become of her ? His thoughts
were painful and perplexed as he smoked his pipe under the
orange trees.
But he was not ready to part with any portion of what had
been bequeathed to him. He was well off certainly, still no
one has ever enough ; and his wife was with child, and might
in time give him a score of children. It was better to keep
what he had got, and, after all, Damaris had insulted him after
being affianced to him from the time she was twelve, and his
heart hardened utterly against her at that memory. If she had
not been an obstinate, insolent, wayward fool she would have
been here now, instead of the young woman from St. Tropez,
ig-2
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who had a shrew's tongue, which Louis Roze heard oftener than
he cared to hear it.
So he thrust the matter from his mind and counted the
oranges on the tree nearest him with complacent sense of
ownership. This stranger had said that Damaris was with
friends, let them look after her ; his conscience was clear.
When in the course of the day he learned from some deep-
sea fishers trawling near the island who his visitor had been—
for the fishermen had recognised Othmar as he had passed in
his boat—Louis Roze felt yet less sure that he had done wisely.
To have pleased such a rich man might have been worth more
than an acre of land, than a handful of gold. He hated aristo-
crats with all the savage hatred of a socialist of the south, but
he respected rich men with all the admiring esteem which those,
who love money feel for those who possess it in unusual abun-
dance. The good-will of this archimillionnaire might have been
more valuable to him than a little piece of the land, had he
offered it frankly as his cousin's share.
When, in a week's time, some persons came to him to seek
to buy the island, he was certain that they came from his late
visitor, although they came only in the name and by the com-
mission of a well-known lawyer of Aix.
He was himself dazzled by the great sums they were willing
to propose, was half-disposed to treat with them ; but his bride
was shrewder, or thought herself so, than he.
' Would you barter your coming child's property ?' she
hissed in his ear. ' If rich men seek after the place, be sure it
is because it has some value we are not aware of ; it has some
buried treasure that they know of, or some silver in the rocks,
or some other ore or another. If you sell it you will never
forgive yourself. Keep it, and send them about their business,
and begin to bore in the ground and see what you can find.'
The suggestion heated the fancy and the cupidity of her
husband. Of course, he reflected, no one offered three or four
times the apparent value of a place unless they knew that it
would become worth what they were anxious to pay for it; and
he sternly refused to hearken to any terms of sale for the rock
of Bonaventure.
' What is mine is mine, and all the kings of the earth cannot
buy it of me,' he said, with a petty mind's delight in power and
in the occasion of baffling and thwarting his superiors.
CI believe he is in love with the girl,' he added to his wife,
4 and wants to get the island for her. We i might make a rare
bargain if it were so ; but those men of Aix are too cautious to
let out who is behind them.'
' Roze,' the wife said, 1 you are a simpleton. There is no
love in the business. They know of some value in the island that
we do not; that is why they want to buy. Because you are for
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193
ever hankering yourself after that great-eyed, long-limbed child,
you think every other man is just a fool the same.'
And Louis Roze, whose temper was cowed by the fiercer
sharper temper of his bride, gave in to her argument, and
remained so stubborn that the agents from Aix could come to
no terms with him.
Inspired by the idea of buried treasures or possible ore in
the rocks, he began to neglect his own affairs at St. Tropez and
elsewhere, and dig and delve himself in the soil, and hack at
the stone face of the cliffs with a pickaxe. The chimera of a
fantastic hope entered into him and gave him no peace ; he was
ready to ruin all the fair fruits of the surface, and all the arti-
ficial soil brought there at such labour in the previous century,
for the sake of this imaginary wealth, hidden in the bowels of
the isle.
Meantime the men of Aix informed Othmar that it was not
possible to induce the proprietor to part with Bonaventure, and
ventured to hint that the property was not worth one-half or
one-quarter of what he had been willing to spend on its
purchase.
' That may be,' he said ; ' but it is a caprice of mine. If
the island ever comes into the market, obtain it for me on any
terms. The owner may need money some day, or may change
his mind.'
His experience of men was that they always sold things in
the long run, if they could do so with advantage, and that they
seldom remained in the same mind when it turned to their
profit to change it.
CHAPTER XXYI.
When he returned from the south he paused at Amyot before
going on to Paris. He wanted a day or two to reflect on the
future of Damaris before he saw her again. It was a problem
which did not very easily admit of solution, without oppress-
ing her with a sense of debt and servitude.
The certainty that her cousin would do nothing to help her
brought home to himself the gravity of his position towards
her. He had taken her from the streets as a kind man will
take a stray dog ; he had as much actual right to turn her out
to them again as the man would have to turn out the dog, but
his compassion and his chivalry forbade him to think of such
desertion of her. There was chat in the loneliness of her
circumstances which touched all the warmest and most pitiful
fibres of his nature, whilst the fact that more or less directly
the caprice of his wife had been the beginning of all her mis-
194
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fortunes, made him feel that he owed a duty and a debt to hoi
which could only be discharged by the most honest and sedulous
endeavour to do well by her and secure her future from ship-
wreck.
But what was that future to be 1 To seek any counsel from
his wife seemed to him useless. He had seen her more than
once moved to strong interest and expectation by some nascent
talent which she had fostered and sheltered in the sunshine of
her favour, in the hothouse of her world ; and he had also seen
her intolerant impatience and her profound oblivion when her
anticipations had been unrealised, and that which she had
honoured had proved incapable of rising to the heights of great
achievement. He knew the changes of her temperament too
well to be willing to subject to their fluctuations a proud and
sensitive child. Even if she deigned to notice her again,
Damaris could never be more to her than a mere plaything, and
she had a terrible habit of tiring of her toys in ten minutes.
She had had a fanciful idea that the girl had talents of a high
order, and he knew that if her fancy proved at fault she would
become intolerant of the person who had disappointed her
expectations. Mediocrity had always seemed to her the worst
of all offences. The flowers which might unclose at sunrise
might never reach, or never bear if they did reach, the glare of
noon. The world is pitiless, that he knew, and to its wedding
feast of fame many crowd, but few are chosen. And Nadkge,
he knew too, would be as intolerant as the world if where she
had deigned to believe that genius existed, she should only find
a mere facile and fragile talent, without power to ascend where
she bade it soar, or force to justify her protection of it.
He had not, either, forgotten her suggestion before Loswa'a
sketch, that some day he would fall in love with the subject of
it. The jest had annoyed him and offended him.
Some time, no doubt, she would know everything : circum-
stances would bring it before her if the world and Damaris
ever became acquainted ; and if not, if obscurity became the
child's lot, and failure the issue of her dreams, then it would be
better that JSTadine, who had no pity for the one or sympathy
with the other, should hear nought of her. He did not care to
dwell himself on the possibilities of the future of one who seemed
to him so ill fitted for the prosaic brutalities of a struggle for
fame : he had temporised with her destiny, and vaguely trusted
to some sequence of fair chances to drift the barque of her life
into some safe haven. Of the pure and chivalrous tenderness
for her which he felt, he would have been ashamed to speak to
any living soul: for who would have believed him ?
' How difficult it is to do a little good !' he thought, as he
drove through the deep glades of his own woods, through the
cool, dewy, windless air of a summer evening towards the great
OTHMAR.
195
castle which had once known the Yalois kings. 'Now, if I
wished to do the most brutal, selfish, hellish thing on earth,
how easy it would be ! I should find the whole world conspiring
to help me, and should buy souls as easily as if they were
oysters !'
Since his son had been born there, an affection for Amy6t
had come to him. It was his residence of preference ; if it had
been possible he would have liked never to leave its vast woods,
its sunny shining courts, its majestic and historic solitudes.
The feeling that he was a new comer there had been soothed
away as years had passed; he had ceased to be haunted by the
memories of his fathers' evil deeds ; he had begun to look for-
ward to a race springing from himself which should ennoble and
justify the riches of the Othmars. It had become to him less
an ill-acquired and eternal monument of his ancestors' iniquities
than the cherished birthplace of children who would transmit
to the far future his own conscience and his own honour. But
as he came to it now in its stillness and loneliness, the earlier
feeling stole back on him, as a bitter taste will survive and
return when a sweet one has passed away.
It towered before him in the warm ethereal rose of the sun-
rise on the morning of his arrival, one of the greatest of the
historical palaces of a chivalrous and immemorial land ; and as
the first beams of the eastern sun caught the glittering vanes of
the towers, the gilded salamanders of the first Francis, he once
more recalled with sudden sharpness and disgust the memory
that the Othmars had entered these mighty stone portals only
through the usurer's right-of-way ; had climbed these lofty
sculptured towers only by the money-lender's ladder of gold.
The world of men had forgotten it, or, if they ever remem-
bered it, did so only with respect and envy as they always
jealously and admiringly chronicle what they call self-made
success. But to him it was humiliating and hateful. Some-
times it seemed to him that, had he done what his conscience
and his manhood required, he would have refused utterly and
always to use this wealth of theirs in any luxury, would have
stripped it off him like a plague-stricken garment, he would have
gone to any personal toil, with hands empty but clean—dreams,
fanatical and foolish dreams, all men would have said, yet
dreams which, followed out, would have had in them a certain
nobility, a certain reality, a certain fulfilment of the ideals of
his youth.
As he paced its terraces in the balmy stillness, the gardens
outstretched beneath him in all their beauty, which bloomed and
faded unseen by any eyes save those of the hirelings who tended
them, the remembrance of the dead girl who once had dwelt
there beside him in a summer such as this came back upon him
as it did often now since he had found and read those pathetic
o -z
196
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records of her short life. A repentant consciousness whispered
that to her those dreams would not have seemed absurd : with
her they would not have been impossible. Yseulte would have
obeyed him had he chosen to change Amyot to a La Garaye.
He would have seemed to her no more unwise or mad had
he stripped her of all wealth and luxury than Claude of La
Garaye seemed to the woman whose bones lie beside his beneath
the weeds and grasses of the graveyard of Taden. Had he said
but one word to her of such a dedication of their lives, all her
unworldly simplicity and courage, all her childlike optimism
and faith, all her heroism, fervour and superstition, would have
made her whole soul kindle at his invitation as spirit leaps to
flame at the first touch of fire. With her it would have been
possible ; a life wholly unlike the life of the world, led in open
contradiction of all its opinions, demands and estimates ; spent
in entire imaginative atonement for the greeds and the crimes
of dead men.
'Ho, it would not have been possible,' he thought, as these
memories floated through his brain. 'Ho ; for the life of La
Garaye two things are essential, Love and Faith. I had none
of the first for her ; I have none of the second either for man
or God.'
La Garaye was the outcome of blind unquestioning belief in
humanity and heaven, such belief as can only come over narrow
horizons and to uncultured minds. ' Have Augustine's faith,'
says a modern teacher to a faithless world. But the teacher for-
gets that the world can no more return to its abandoned faiths
than a man can return to the toys and the joys of his infancy.
There is a profound melancholy in the solitary musings of
every man or woman whose youth has harboured all the high
ideals of a lofty and pensive enthusiasm, and whose maturity is
held down by all the innumerable habits and demands, usages and
necessities of life in the great world. Society is imperious and
irresistible. Out of its beaten track none of its subjects can
wander far or long. Its atmosphere is pregnant at once with
sloth and excitement, and its bonds are liliputian but indestruc-
tible Society has neither imagination nor ideality, and when
either of these comes into it, it destroys it unmercifully.
There is a potent attraction in it even for those who believe
themselves the least susceptible of such seduction, and the net-
work of its usages and habits becomes a prison which even the
most unwilling captives learn to prefer to liberty.
It might have been possible once, possible to have given
back all those ill-gotten millions to the hungry multitudes of
humanity ; possible to have stripped himself of all pomp and
possession and been nothing on earth save such as his own brain
might have had power to make him. It might have been possible
once, but it was now and for ever impossible.
OTHMAR.
197
Such thoughts drifted through his mind as he paced the
beautiful rose-colonnades and magnolia-groves of these gardens
which had in them the sadness inseparable from all places
which have a history and have once been peopled by a historic
race.
Neither power nor place had any fascination for him, and the
meannesses of mankind wearied him and left his heart barren.
"When the world grudges the rich man his ' unearned increment,'
it forgets how much base coin it gives him in revenge for his
possessions; it is for ever seeking to cheat or, at best, to use
him ; the parasite and the sycophant are always licking the dust
from his path, that, unseen, they may steal the gold from his
pocket; the meanest side of all humanity is exposed to him ;
even friendship becomes scarcely distinguishable from flattery,
and the greed, the envy, and the low foibles of his fellows,
though the base toys with which the cynic plays, leave his soul
sick when it is not covered with the cynic's buckler.
Othmar was no cynic, and his knowledge of his fellows had
saddened and oppressed him. This knowledge had not made
liim serve them less faithfully, but it had taught him that all
such service was utterly vain, either to secure gratitude or to
ennoble society. The world rolls on, soaked in dulness, in
bestiality, in cruelty, in a hideous monotony of vulgar inven-
tions and crafty crimes and imbecile conventionalities; it has
America instead of Athens, a machine instead of an art, a
Krapotkine instead of a Socrates—and it prates of progress !
Governed by money as men are, things were possible to
Othmar which would have been impossible, or most difficult at
least, to many. His position made a vast number and variety
of persons of all classes known to him ; his large liberalities had
endeared him to many people of all kinds, who would have done
anything he desired in return for his benefits ; he had always
dealt with his fellows with great kindliness and indulgence, but
with perspicuity and intelligence ; he was well served by those
who laboured for him, and was seldom betrayed. Ingratitude
and treachery he met with sometimes, but less often than his
own slight estimate of human nature led him to expect, and
when he needed assistance or service he could always find on
the instant instruments adapted to his end. If he had had the
instincts of a bad nature he could have contributed endlessly to
the demoralisation of his fellow-men ; with the temperament he
possessed he never asked any return for his benefits or expected
any thankfulness for them. Nevertheless the world was set
thick with his debtors, if he believed that he numbered few
friends, and whenever he wanted anything done it was as easy
for him to discover doers of it as it was for the Borgia to find
the hand that would fill the cup, the fingers that would use the
dagger.
198
OTHMAR.
One half-hour's thought, as he wandered through the lonely
gardens of his chateau, sufficed him to dispose of the problem
of Damaris's fate. She must be made to believe, he decided,
that her grandfather had left her enough to keep her from
want, and she must be placed somewhere in safety. As for her
genius, if genius she had, it would find its way to culture as
surely as a plant to the light. But meantime she must live :
and live without imagining that she lived on charity. The only
way to make it possible for her to do so would be to induce
her to think that she had not been wholly forgotten by Jean
B&rarde. So he reasoned, and acted on his conclusions without
weighing their possible consequences to himself or her.
He was a man much more truthful than life in the world
makes men usually. A falsehood was contemptible and cowardly
in his sight. One of his most continual contentions with Fried-
rich Othmar had always been his refusal to admit that lying
was needful in politics and finance ; and in private life his wife
laughed at him frequently for his distaste to those mere social
untruths which have become the small change of society's cur-
rency. He disliked all subterfuge, all sophism, all distortion of
fact, and even the harmless falsehood of compliment.
But this single untruth to be told to Damaris seemed so neces-
sary, so harmless, that it carried with it no odour of dishonesty to
him. In no other way could she be kept from want and danger.
Without some such simple ruse she could never be saved from
herself, and from all that impetuosity and ignorance which
would destroy her as surely as a like enthusiasm destroyed th©
virgin of Domremy.
Bich people, who have many connections and dependents,
can arrange circumstances to their liking in many small ways,
with a facility which is sometimes in pathetic contrast with,
their powerlessness to command personal happiness and health,
human gratitude or human contentment. To Othmar it was
easy to arrange circumstances for those in whom he was in-
terested, though it was out of his power to make his own life
the thing he would have liked it to be. His wide command of
money, and his great knowledge of men and women, enabled
him sometimes to play the part of deus ex machina success-
fully. He tried to play it for Damaris : tried, with an honest
wish to serve her, and a boyish disregard of consequences,
which would have made his wife, had she known of them, call
him a berger de Florian in pitiless ridicule.
Amongst the many persons who owed him more than a
common debt, there was an old woman whose only remaining
grandson, a young student at the time, had been compromised
in the days of the Commune, and would have been numbered
amongst those who were to be shot without - mercy, had not
Othmar, who was at Versailles at the time, interceded for and
OTHMAR.
J99
saved him, being touched by the youth's fine countenance and
his entreaty to be allowed to see his grandmother ere he died.
On inquiry and further knowledge of the lad he had been more
and more interested in him, perceiving that mistaken creeds
and distorted ideals had brought him amongst this sorry com-
pany of pillagers and petroleuses. He had influence enough
with M. Thiers to get a free pardon for the youth, on condi-
tion of his leaving France at once. He sent him at his own
expense out of the country, gave him a clerkship in his house at
Vienna, and had the satisfaction of seeing him become in a
few years a peaceable and happy citizen, a diligent and devoted
servant.
The old grandmother, by name Reine Chabot, owned and
farmed a few acres of good land near Les Hameaux, in the rich
vale of Chevreuse. To Othmar, who had saved her boy in body
and soul, she would have given body and soul herself. She
was a hale and strong woman, of simple habits and of noble
mind. She was a recluse, but not a morbid one, and her ways
and manner of life were similar to those which Damaris had
been used to on the island of Bonaventure. To her he resolved
to confide the girl's charge during her convalescence, or for so
long as she might need a home. He went himself down to the
farm, and, almost before he had spoken, his request was granted
and received as an honour.
The dark, stern eyes of the aged woman were soft with
moisture as she joined her brown hands on his, and said with
fervour :
* All that I have is yours to command. Did you not do for
me and mine that which was beyond all praise or price ?'
* I have found two people who accept my motives as honest
ones,' thought Othmar. ' I shall surely find no more. To expect
belief in any action that has no personal object at the bottom
of it is a folly that nobody but a boy should commit. The
child believes in me because she is at the age of faith and of
innocence ; and the woman believes me because she adores me
and does not look any further ; but nobody else will be so quick
in faith.'
The farmhouse, called the Croix Blanche, was a stout
seventeenth-century building, which had escaped injury during
the great war by some miracle, and was as lonely in its situa-
tion as though it had been five hundred instead of fifteen miles
from Paris. In such a retreat he thought this checked and
bruised sea-bird might find as safeva nest for a season of rest as
the lark found there in the long grass of its meadows. Rural
quietude, pure air, good care, and the balm which lies for
poetic temperaments in the mere sense that the country silences
are around them, would do all that was needed, he fancied, to
restore the natural buoyancy and strength of her constitution,
200
OTHMAR.
and thither he directed the nuns to take her one afternoon when
the shadows grew long over the grass pastures and quiet woods
of that smiling and pastoral country which stretches around the
ruins of what was once Port-Royal des Champs.
She was in that state of weakness blended with the delicious
sense of returning health which makes life seem like a dream,
and all its scenes pass like dream-pictures. She was filled with
a vague sense of perfect faith and peace, and all that he did for
her she accepted unquestioningly as undoubted good.
When she saw the low grey-stone farmhouse covered with
its climbing roses, its wooden outhouses buried under elder and
poplar trees, its grass lands lying warm in the glow of the after-
noon sun, she stretched out her thin hands to it all as to a friend,
and tears of pleasure swam in her eyes.
4 It is the country,' she said under her breath with delight.
All the sweet pungent smell of the turned earth where a
labourer dug in it, all the fresh glad scent of growing leaves
and ripening fruits and grasses browning in the sun, all the
familiar sounds, a watch-dog's bark, a blackbird's song, the hum
of bees in the rose bloom, the distant call of a corncrake in the
meadows—they were all dear and welcome like the voices of
friends long unheard. It was the country: all the strength and
the warmth and the force of her youth seemed to rush back
into her veins with the sight and the sounds of it.
For the first time since she had left the island she laughed.
4 That is well,' thought the old woman, her hostess, regarding
her. 4 Those who love the country have clean souls.'
She had not asked or wished to ask any questions concerning
her guest.
In her eyes Othmar could do no wrong, and to her gratitude
his will was law. But she had kept her own soul clean all her
days, dwelling here always in these same green peaceful places ;
and as she looked on the face of Damaris she was glad, for she
saw there three things which are as beautiful as flowers—inno-
cence, and youth, and ignorance of all fear and guile.
Damaris slept very soundly that night in a little white room
that smelt of lavender and pressed rose-leaves, and when she
awoke in the morning heard the pleasant sound of mowing
scythes, of rippling water, of a thrush's singing in a blossoming
elder bough ; and all the young life in her seemed to arise and
grow anew, and become once more as glad to greet the sun as
any bird which wakes at dawn as the first white light gleams
through its house of leaves.
Many quiet and almost happy summer days followed for her,
in which she recovered all her normal strength. The ways and
the work of the farm were familiar and welcome to her, and
she scarcely waited to be well before taking to herself a share
of its labours.
OTHMAR.
201
The widow Chabot asked her no questions, but she, having
no secrets, soon related the few incidents of her short existence,
and heard in return the narrative of Othmar's actions during
the Commune. Taciturn by temperament, and grave and re-
served by habit as the old woman was, she grew eloquent when-
ever she spoke of the saviour of the last of her race, and
Damans, when the day's work was done, and they sat together
in the rose-coloured porch while the spinning-wheels flew round,
never wearied of hearing that tale, and said in her own heart as
she listened, ' How good he is !—how good !'
These summer weeks in Chevreuse were full of rest and
solace to her. It was but a pause, a halt before the heat and
stress of life, she knew; an ' etape' such as she had seen the
dust-covered conscripts on the march enjoy, resting by the
wayside under the trees, where some little water-spring bubbled
up amongst the cistus bushes and the euphorbia of a Riviera
road. But she was at peace in it, and, childlike, hardly thought
of the morrow.
Sometimes she looked far away, when the sun rose, to the
east where Paris was, and wondered if ever there the world
would hear of her, know her, care for her. But it was all vague.
Her future was bathed in golden light, like the green landscape
when the sun came out from the mists of dawn ; but it had no
distinctness to her, no definite shape or end. It was mere
radiant nebulae, like the rosy and amber-tinted clouds which
the peasants looking eastward said was Paris, though no roof,
or dome, or spire was visible when the morning broke.
Othmar came to see her rarely, and his visits were brief ;
but as she had no vanity and had much gratitude, she was wholly
content with such slight remembrance. He sent her many books
and other things which amused her, and her mind was eager
for all kinds of knowledge. She had great natural intelligence
and quickness of perception, and she read the fine prose and the
stately alexandrines of the old French authors with avidity and
delight. Something of the intellectual life of Port Royal
seemed to her fancy still to linger in the air, and make classic
all the rustic paths of this quiet valley.
When she walked over the daisied grass that grew about the
ruined dovecot, Pascal seemed to pace beside her, and as she
leaned over the little brook which finds its way amongst the
cresses and the mouse-ear, she fancied she saw the face of her
great master Racine reflected in its shallow waters.
Her hostess, though a woman of no great culture, yet was
learned enough in the literature of earlier days, and in the asso-
ciations of her birthplace, to know every legend and name that
are attached to the stones and the meadows of Les Hameaux.
She was no uncongenial companion to an imaginative girl, for
though taciturn, she could have a certain rude eloquence when
202
OTHMAR.
strongly moved, and to her reverent and unworldly mind * lea
Messieurs de Port-Royal' were ever present memories, both
saintly and heroic.
CHAPTER XXVH.
He had apportioned the sum needed at a lower figure than his
own wishes would have dictated, that it might seem to her more
natural as the legacy of Jean Berarde ; it was enough to keep
her in such simple ways of life as she had been used to, no more.
He told her of it, as of a legacy, the first day that he saw her
at Les Hameaux : told it in few words, for all equivocation was
painful to him. She never for a moment doubted the truth of
the story, and he was touched to see that her first emotion was
not relief at the material safety insured to her, but joy that the
old man dying had forgiven her.
' If I had only known,' she said through her tears, ' I would
have gone back to him ! I would have gone back just to have
heard him say one kind word for the last!'
The thought that her grandsire had pardoned and remem-
bered her was a philtre of health and strength to her. It
brought back all the warmth to her cheeks, all the depth of
colour to her eyes ; she wept passionately, but from a sweet not
harsh sorrow, from gratitude to his memory, from thankfulness
that his last thought of her had been one of kindness.
Othmar watched and heard her with an embarrassment which
she was too absorbed in her own emotions to notice.
* All the money I shall give her would not suffice to buy one
of Nadine's rows of pearls,' he thought. 4 Yet what rapture it
affords her! A lie ! of course it is a lie ; and all my Jesuit
tutors could never make me credit that a lie could be a good
thing, however good its motive. But this lie is innocent if ever
there were one innocent, and even if it were a crime the crime
would be worth the doing, to set this poor lost sea-bird safe from
storm upon a ledge of rock. She would be beaten to death by
the waves without some shelter.
Yet his conscience was not wholly easy as he responded to
her warm words of gratitude to himself for having discovered
this bequest for her, and answered her many questions as to the
island that she loved, the children of Raphael, the dogs, the
trees, the boat; all things on Bonaventure were living things to
her. However long her life might last, always the clearest and
the dearest of her memories would be those sunny childish years
in the little isle of fruit and flowers, where for sixteen years the
sun had shone and the sea wind blown on her, and the fish and
the birds and the beasts been her schoolfellows.
OTHMAR.
203
She had something of meridional heedlessness, and much of
meridional imagination, which made the fiction of her grand-
sire's legacy more easily believed by her than it would have
been by more prosaic and cautious tempers. To her it seemed
so natural that he should have relented towards her and provided
for her. All her memories were of wants provided for by him ;
he had been her providence, if a harsh one, for so long that it
seemed a natural part of his character and of her destiny that
he should continue to be her providence even in his grave.
' If I could only be sure that he is happy in heaven,' she
said to Othmar, with a certain appeal and doubt in her accent.
Even to her, though she had respected him, it was difficult to
think of Jean Berarde of Bonaventure in any celestial life.
'Do you not think,' she added wistfully, 'that God would
remember that he was a very good man in many ways, and
always honest and upright in all his dealings with rich and
poor? He loved money, but he was not mean—not to me,
never to me—and if laborare est orare, as the Sisters used to
say, surely he must be in peace 1'
Othmar heard the tormenting fear which was expressed in
her tone, and refrained from adding one grain of doubt to it.
'Be sure he is at peace, my dear,' he answered ; while he
thought, ' more peace than such a brute deserves—the peace of
utter extinction; the peace of dissolution and absorption into
the earth which holds him, into the grass which covers him;
peace which he shares with kings and poets and heroes !'
'He believed nothing, you know,' said Damaris wistfully,
' nothing of any creed, I mean. But then, if he could not, was
it any more his fault than it is a deaf man's fault that he can-
not hear ? I think not. Do you remember that poem of Yictor
Hugo's ? I forget its name, but the one in which a great wicked
king of the east, all black with crime, is saved from hell because
he has a moment of pity for a pig that is sick and tormented
with flies and lies helpless in the sun ? The king drew the pig
aside out of the sun and drove the flies away. It is beautifully
told in the poem j I tell it ill. But what I mean is, that I
think if they are angered in heaven with my grandfather
because he led a hard, selfish, crooked, cramped life, they will
yet let him into paradise because he was so good to me.'
Othmar assented, with a sense of infinite compassion for her.
All her dream was as baseless as the golden city which an even-
ing sun builds out of clouds for a moment in the western sky.
But he let it be. Life would soon enough wake her from such
dreams with the rough hand of a stepmother, who grudges
motherless children sleep.
' Let us speak of present things,' he said, to distract her
thoughts. ' This is very little money, though you think so
much of it, which is left to stand between you and all kinds of
204
OTHMAR.
want. Will you let me place it out for you where it will bring
you most 1 You may have heard, my dear, that I am one of
those hapless persons who are doomed by circumstance to have
much to do with gold. I hate it, but that is no matter. It is
my fate. Will you trust me to try and multiply your little
fortune ? I will be very careful of it, but something more it
shall make for you in my hands than if it were lying in a kitchen
chimney or under an orchard wall, which you are too true to
your nation not to think the safest kind of investment. I may ?
Then be it so. No, do not thank me, there is no need for that.
But you are very young and you are not very prudent, I should
say, and in these matters you will need advice. Remember
always to command mine.'
She looked at him with grateful but questioning eyes.
' Why should you do so much for me 1' she said with
wonder.
' I do very little,' returned Othmar. ' And were it far more,
you have a direct claim on me—on us. If my wife had not
tempted you away that memorable day, you would have been
dwelling contented on your island still, and probably for ever.'
' No : not there,' she said slowly, as if she reasoned with
herself. ' I do not think I should ever have stayed there very long.
I loved it, but I wanted something else. When I used to sit, as
so often I sat, all alone on the balcony that hangs over the sea,
when it was late at night, and everyone else was asleep, and the
nightingales were shouting in the orange-boughs underneath, I,
used to think that some other world there must be where some
one cared for Ondine and Athalie, where some one had cried as
I cried for Triboulet and Hernani ; where they did not all talk
all day long of the price of oil, and the cost of cargoes, and the
disease in the lemons, and the worm in the olive wood. I knew
that all these great and beautiful things could not have been
written unless men and women were, somewhere, great and
beautiful also ; and very often—oh, often ! long before your
Lady spoke to me—I had thought that whenever my grand-
father should die I would go and find that world for myself.
And now '
He waited some moments, but her sentence remained in-
complete.
'And now ? 'he repeated at last. 'Now do you think still
that there is such a world, or do you not see that no one does
care for Ondine or Athalie ? that the price of oil and the worm
in the olive (or their equivalents) are the sole carking cares of
the great world, just as much as of your peasant-proprietors ?
Did you not dream of Hernani, and did you not only meet the
sergent de ville ?'
' I met you ! ' she said gently, with a tinge of reproach ill
her voice.
OTHMAR.
205
'My dear child !' said Othmar, touched arid a little em-
barrassed. ' I am far from heroic. , Ask the person who knows
me best, and she will tell you so. I only rake the world's gold
to and fro as if I were a croupier, and I assure you the olives
and the lemons are much worthier subjects of thought.'
She made a little involuntary gesture of her hand, as if she
pushed away some unworthy suggestion which it was not needful
to refute in words. Her face had grown serious and resolute ;
she had the look of a young Pallas Athene. Innumerable
thoughts were crowding on her which she could ill express.
Ever since a possible fate had been suggested to her in which
fame might attend on her, ever since a vague immeasurable
ideal had been suggested to her in the music of Paul of Lem-
berg, it had become impossible for her ever to remain content
with the homely aims and the prosaic thoughts of the people
amongst whom she had been born. Heredity and accident had
alike combined to divorce her from her natural fate. Of those
thus severed from their original source, thus rebellious against
their native air, two or three in a generation become great,
famous, victorious ; the larger number fall back from the sum-
mits which they aspire to reach, and fill the restless, dissatisfied,
tarnished ranks which are comprised in the all-expressive word
declasses. But the word seemed unfitted to her; there were
that simplicity, that originality, that force in the child which
mark the higher natures of humanity, whether they be found in
peasants or in princes ; there were in her also that natural high
breeding and absolute self-unconsciousness which render all
vulgarity and assumption impossible; those marks of race
which are wholly independent of all circumstance. Jeanne
d'Arc greeted her king as her brother, and Christine Nilsson
meets sovereigns as her sisters.
He had seen this child also bear herself with inborn grace
and natural dignity in the first dazzling scene and unkind em-
barrassment of circumstance which she had ever known. It
seemed to him that she would go thus through life.
'I think I could make the world care,' she said, with a
curious mingling of dreaminess and decision, of ardour and of
doubt in her tone. ' Even your wife said I might do so—it is
something outside myself, beyond myself. I do not mean any
vanity or folly. It is something one has, as the nightingale has
its song, and the lemon flower its odour. If they would hear
me—as your Lady heard 1 How could I make them hear me 1'
Othmar was silent.
Then he added almost cruelly, but cruelty seemed to him
kindness :
' My wife forgot that she had heard you five minutes after-
wards : so perhaps would the world. And if so, what then ?'
4 At least I should have tried.'
205
OTHMAR.
The divine obstinacy of genius spoke in the words. Better
failure and oblivion than oblivion without effort.
' If only I could try ?' she repeated with imploring prayer :
to her he seemed the master of the world, as utterly as Agrippa
or Augustus seemed so to the Roman girls who saw them pass
from palace to temple, ' I know it would be only interpreta-
tion ; but I feel their words say so much to me that I surely
could interpret them, aloud, so that I could move some to feel
them as I do.'
He knew she meant the words cf those poets which had
taken so strong and firm a hold upon her imagination, read as
she had read them in the glory of the southern light, between
the sea and sky.
'Perhaps you could,' he answered reluctantly. 'But if
you did, what would be your fate? You would die like Aim.ee
Desclee. My wife likened you to her.'
' Who was she ?'
He told her, with the pathetic force of a profound sym-
pathy ; for poor Frou-frou had been well known to him in her
brief career, and all the feverish yearning, the tumult of un-
satisfied desires, the conflict of genius and malady in that tender
and hapless soul had been sacred to him. He passed in silence
over the passions of that life, but he dwelt long and earnestly
on its storm-tossed youth, and its premature and. tragic close.
Damaris listened; her whole countenance reflecting the
narrative she heard.
' I think she was happy,' she said at length. ' You do not,
but I do. She broke her heart singing, like the nightingales in
the poem. I read once of a sword which wore out its scabbard.
Who would not sooner be that than the sword which rusts
unused ?'
Othmar did not reply. To him the life and the death of
Aimee Descle'e were the saddest of his generation ; but he could
not tell this child why he thought them so, and even if he could
have done it would have been of no avail. He knew that he
argued with that thing which no example appals, no warning
affects, no prescience intimidates ; the thing at once so strong
and so feeble, at once blind as the bat and far-sighted as the
eagle—the instinct of genius.
When he quitted her that day he left her with disquietude
and uncertainty. It seemed to him as if he held her fate, like a
bird, in his hand, and could either close the cage-door on it in
safety, or toss it upward free to roam through fields of air or to
sink under showers of stones as chance might choose.
He believed that she did not deceive herself when she
thought that she could move others by the electric forces within
herself. He recognised a certain volition in her which re-
Eembled that of genius. Her imagination, which could console
OTHMAR.
207
her for so much, her quick assimilation of high thoughts and
poetic fancies, her power of feeling impersonal interest, her
very ignorance of real life, and imprudence in its circumstances,
were all those of genius. Reared in prosaic habits, she had
forced her own way to a subjective and idealistic mental life, even
amidst the most opposing influences. She had heard the night-
ingale in the orange-boughs, though all those around her had been
only busied counting the oranges to pack the crates. She had
watched the shoal of fishes spread its silver over the waves
beneath the moon, though all those around her at such a sight
had only thought of the deep sea seine, the casks for market,
and the curing brine. Surely this power of withdrawing from
all ffamiliar association, and escaping from all compelling forces
of habit, could only exist where genius begat it 1
But then he knew that even with the wedding-garment of
genius on, yet to the wedding-feast of fame many are called
but few are chosen. And it might be only a breath, a flash, a
touch of inspiration, un brin de genie, as his wife had said,
enough to have impelled her to push open the doors of her
narrow destiny, and look thence with longing eyes, but not
enough to force her with untired feet and unconquerable
courage across that desert of effort which parts effort from
triumph, poetic faculty from mere dreamy indolence. He who
had always from his boyhood honoured and assisted talent,
wherever he had found it, with a patience and a liberality very
rare in this world, had suffered much disappointment from
many ordinary and pretentious lives which he had been led to
believe had had the hall-mark of intellectual superiority. He
had too often found what deemed itself genius was mere facility;
originality, mere eccentricity; ambition mere instinct of imita-
tion ; the ' coal from the altar' only the momentary blaze of a
match. Many and many a time he might have said of the
immature Muses who sought him, in the words of Yictor Hugo,
4 Que de jeunes filles j'ai vues mourir !'
Damaris Berarde appeared to him, as to his wife, a beautiful
child with an uncommon nature, and with possibly uncommon
gifts ; but between the mere promise of the dawn of youth and
the full heat of the meridian of genius what a difference there
was!
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Ik lieu of driving homeward to Paris that day, he turned his
horses' heads in the direction of Asnieres, where a once famous
artist, David Rosselin, lived.
'I will ask Rosselin,' he thought. 4 Rosselin can judge as
I have no power to do ; and if he decide that she has genius she
2o8
OTHMAR.
had better make a career so for herself. I have no business to
stand between her and any future she may be able to create.'
He disliked the idea of his wife's careless predictions being
fulfilled. It seemed to him barbarous to let this white-souled
sea-bird soar to the electric-flame life in Paris, fancying its
light the sun. But who could tell 1 1
It was a doubt which troubled and oppressed him as he
drove back to Paris through the pastoral country, consecrated
by the memory of Port-Royal. He felt that he had no right
to make himself the arbiter of her destinies ; he would be no
more to her in her future than the dead thinkers whose brains
had once been quick with philosophic and poetic creation
amidst these quiet green meadows.
So he opened the little green trellis-work gate which was
set in the acacia hedge of the cottage at Asnieres, and found
the once great impersonator of Alceste, of Tartuffe, of Sgana-
relle sitting beside his beehives and behind his rose-beds, with
a white sun umbrella shading his comely and silvered head, and
in his hand a miniature Aldine Plautus. His old servant was
close by carefully dusting the cobwebs off the branches of an
espaliered nectarine.
It was a small suburban villa which sheltered the last years
of the great actor ; a square white house set in a garden, over t
whose trim hedges of clipped acacia Rosselin could see the
groups of students and work-girls going down to the landing-
stairs of the Seine, and farther yet could see the grey-green
shine of the river itself with its pleasure craft going to and fro
in the midsummer sunshine.
David Rosselin in his prime had made many millions of
francs, but they had gone as fast as they were gained', and in
his old age he was poor : he had only this little square white
box, so gay in summer with its roses and wistaria, and within
it some few remnants of those magnificent gifts which nations
and sovereigns and women and artists had all alike showered
upon him in those far-off years of his greatness ; and some
souvenir from Othmar of an Aldine classic, or a volume bound
by Clovis, which had lain on his table some Hew Year morning.
Othmar, who was quickly wearied by men in general, appre-
ciated the intelligence and the character of this true philosophe
sans le savoir, and would have made Rosselin free of all his
libraries and welcome at all his houses if the old man would
have left for them his white-walled and rose-covered cottage at
Asnieres.
'Ho one who is old,' said Rosselin, 'should ever go out,
though he may receive, because he knows that those whom he
receives care to see him, or they would not come to him ; but
how can he be ever sure that those who invite him do not do sy
out of charity, out of pity, out of complacency?'
OTHMAR,
209
And save those of the theatres, of the Conservatoire, and of
the public librairie, he crossed no threshold save his own.
' If I had only been a grocer,' he used to say with his mellow
laugh, 'a good plump grocer, as my poor father wished, who
knows ? I might have even been mayor of my native town by
this, and had a son a vice-prefet!'
He was a man now nigh on eighty years, erect, vivacious,
combating age with all the eternal youthfulness of genius.
His black eyes had still a flash of those fires which had once
scorched up the souls of women, and his handsome mouth had
still the smile of fine irony which had adorned and accentuated
his Alceste and his Mascarille. He dwelt alone with a servant
nearly as old as himself ; he had a great natural contempt for
all domestic ties.
' Had I become a grocer I would have married,' he was wont
to say. 'If you are in trade, respectability is as necessary to
you as dishonesty ; but to the artist the nightcap of marriage is
like the biretta which they draw over a man's head in Spain
before they garotte him. When once you put it on, adieu les
reyes ! '
And in his celibate old age, if he had no longer dreams, he
had recollections and interests which kept him mentally young.
His Paris was his one mistress, of whom he never tired.
He had left the stage five-and-twenty years and more, in
his own person, but he still took the keenest interest, possessed
the highest influence, in all higher dramatic art and life. The
silence of David Rosselin on a first night condemned a play as
an irrevocable failure, whilst his smile of approval was assurance
to an author that he had successfully empoigne his public. He
was the most accurate of judges, the most penetrating of critics;
he would occasionally make little epigrammatic speeches which
remained like little barbed steel darts, but he was indulgent to
youth and encouraging to modesty. When Rosselin said that a
pupil of the Conservatoire had a future, the future, when it
became the present, never belied his judgment. For the rest,
he was in a small way a bibliophile, delighted in rare copies
and delicate bindings, and was an unerring authority on all
centuries of costume and custom.
' Incessantly acting all your life, when did you find all the
time to acquire so much knowledge %' Paul Jacob had said once
to him.
David Rosselin had replied with his genial laugh :
' Ah, mon cher, I have had all the time that I should have
spent in quarrelling with my wife if I had had one !'
This love of books had been a bond of sympathy between
him and Othmar ever since one night in the green-room of the
Francais, when they had spoken of fifteenth-century Virgils ;
and to him the thoughts of Othmar had turned more than once
p
210
OTHMAR.
since the problem of Damaris and her destiny had come before
him. There was no one in all Europe who could discern the
gold from the pinchbeck in human talent with such precision;
no one who could more unerringly discriminate between the
aspirations of genius and its capabilities, between the mere
audacities of youth and the staying powers of true strength.
An absurd reluctance to speak of her, of which he was
ashamed, and for which he would have assigned no definite
reason even to himself, had made him indisposed to seek his
old friend on such a subject; but it seemed to him, now that
her soul was apparently set on the career which his wife's care-
less praise had suggested to her, no other way of life was so
possible for her, or so likely to afford her interest, occupation,
and independence.
He had seen the life of the stage near enough to loathe it.
The woman whom he had adored with all a boy's belief and
passion, and who had been hired by his father's gold to do him
the cruel service of destroying all belief in him, had been an
actress, famous for the brief day of splendour which beauty
without genius can gain in the cities of the world. He hated
to imagine that the time might come when this child, full now
of ideals of heroisms, of innocence and of faithfulness, might
grow to be such a woman as Sara Yernon had been! Sara
Yernon, who had now turned saint and dwelt in the odour of
good works on her estates in Franche-Comte : the estates which
had been his father's purchase-money of her.
But it seemed to him that he had no right to let his personal
prejudices, his personal sentiments or sentimentality, stand
between Damaris and any possibility of future independence,
of future happiness which might open out before her through
her natural gifts. He felt nothing for her except a great com-
passion and a passionless admiration, and he had a sense of
indefinite self-blame and of infinite embarrassment for the
position towards her into which circumstances had drifted him.
It was not possible to retreat from it: he had become her
only friend, her sole support; but the sense that to the world,
and perhaps even to his wife, his too impulsive actions would
bear a very different aspect, haunted him with a feeling which
was foreboding rather than regret.
'Ah! my'friend!' said Bosselin in some surprise, as he
passed through the gate. 'Is it possible you are in Paris
while Sirius reigns over the asphalte? It is charming and
gracious of you to remember a decrepit old gardener. Come
and sit by me in the shade here, and Pierre shall bring you the
biggest of the nectarines. If Yirgil could have tasted a necta-
rine ! There may be doubts about every other form of pro-
gress, but there can be no manner of doubt that we have
improved fruits since the Georgics, and wines.'
OTHMAR.
211
Othmar answered a little at random, and accepted the
nectarine. The quick regard of Rosselin read easily that there
was something in the air graver than their usual talk of rare
editions and coming hook-sales which his visitor desired to say
to him, and with a sign dismissed the old servant to the strip
of kitchen garden on the other side of the house.
Othmar made his narrative as brief, his own share in it as
small, and the facts as prosaic as he could ; but he could not
divest them of a tinge of romance which he was ill-pleased to
discover to the shrewd comprehension of the great artist who
listened to him.
' Do what I will, tell it all how I may,' he thought angrily,
* how ridiculous I shall look to him, playing knight-errant like
this !'
And as he related the story of Damaris to Rosselin he
seemed in fancy to hear the voice of his wife behind him com-
menting in her delicate suggestive tones on his own exaggerated
share in it. What she would say, and what the world would
say, seemed to him to be said for both in the momentary smile
which passed over Rosselin's face.
'Of course he does not believe me,' he thought. 'Nobody
will ever believe me. They will always suppose that I have
base reasons which have never even approached me ; they will
always accredit me with the coarsest of motives.'
Rosselin, with his power of divining the thoughts of others,
guessed what was thus passing through his mind.
' Yes, they will certainly never accredit you with a good
motive,' he said, answering the unspoken thoughts of his visitor.
' For that you must be prepared. But if you think that I shall
do so, you mistake. You are a man, my dear Count Othmar,
who is much more likely to be fascinated by a disinterested
action than by a vulgar amour. I understand you, but I warn
you that nobody else will.'
' I suppose not,' said Othmar. ' That must be as it may.
How did you divine so well what I was thinking of 1'
' Divination of that kind is easy after experiences as long as
mine are,' answered Rosselin, gathering one of his carnations
and fastening it in his linen coat. ' If we do not acquire that
much from life we live to be old to little purpose. You have
done a generous thing, and probably the world will punish you
for it; it always does. The position your chivalry has led you
into is of course certain to be explained in one way, and one
only, by people in general. The world is not delicate, and it
never appreciates delicacy.'
' Of that I am well aware,' returned Othmar. ' It is on
account of the coarseness of all hasty and ordinary judgments
that I wish to keep my own name and personality hidden as
much as possible in relation to this child. If her own talents
p 2
213
OTHMAR.
could secure independence for her, it would be very much to be
desired that they should do so. Will you do me the favour to
judge of them ?'
Rosselin hesitated.
'You can command me in all ways,' he added. 'But I
think it only fair to warn you that, even if she have very great
talent, as you seem to believe, neither technique nor culture
come by nature. Training, long, arduous, severe, and to the
young most odious, is the treadmill on which everyone must
work for years before being admitted into the kingdom of art.
Has she enough to live on during these years of probation ?'
'Yes,' answered Othmar; he did not feel called upon to
confess his device for supplying this necessity. ' All I would
ask of you is your judgment of her talents. Of course she is
only a child ; she has seen and heard nothing ; even the poorest
stage she. has never seen. She has not had any of those indirect
lessons which the very poverty and misery of their surroundings
gave Rachel and Desclee. They were always in the road of
their art, even though they went to it through mire. She knows
nothing, absolutely nothing; I tell you she has not been even
inside the booth of strolling players at a fair. Yet she gave to
my wife and to me the impression of latent genius. Will you
see her and hear her, and then give me your opinion ?'
'I would do much more for you, my dear friend,' replied
Rosselin with a vague sense of reluctance. • ' But I have seen so
many of these maidens who dream of the stage—little, quiet,
good girls, with mended stockings and holes in their umbrellas,
thronging to the Conservatoire to pipe out "0 sire! je vais
oiourir" or " Infame ! croyez-vous," going away with their
mothers like chickens under the hen's wing when a big dog is
in the poultry-yard ; falling in love with the student who gives
them the replique, keeping chocolate in their pockets to nibble
at like little mice between the scenes ; little good girls, some
pretty, some ugly, some saucy, some shy, all of them as poor as
church rats, all of them with hair-pins tumbling out of their
braids—fen ai vu tant! And hardly a spark of genius amongst
them ! When they have fine shoulders and big eyes, then their
career is certain—in a way; when they have no figure at all and
no complexion, then they go into the provinces and one hears
no more of them ; or, perhaps, they leave their illusions alto-
gether at the Conservatoire, and take a place behind a counter.
It is the prudent ones who do that: "elles commencent ou les
autres finissent." Some clever woman has said so before me.
Is it not better to begin so? Why not get a little snug shop for
Mademoiselle Berarde from the first ?'
Othmar moved impatiently.
'And the two or three who are better than the rest,' he asked;
' those whose lips the bees of Hymettus have really kissed ?'
OTHMAR.
213
' My dear friend, yoa know how it is with these also,' sighed
Rosselin: ' immense success, immense insouciance, immense
enjoyment for the first few years ; lovers like the leaves on the
trees in midsummer ; debts as numerous as the leaves ; enor«
mous sums thrown away like waste paper ; beauty, health,
power, all spent like a rouleau of gold in a fool's hand at Monte
Carlo ; and then the degringolade, the apathy of the public, the
indifference of the lovers, the persecution of the creditors whose
ardour grows as hotly as that of the others cools, the infinite
mortifications, humiliations, chagrins, disappointments; then
the death from ansemia or from consumption, or the still worse
end, which is a fifty-year-long obscurity: Sophie Arnould sweep-
ing out her garret with a two-sous broom ! Ah bah ! Marry
Mile. Be'rarde to one of your cashiers, and buy her a cottage at
Neuilly.'
' Do you suppose DescMe or Rachel would have married a
clerk, and lived in a little house in the suburbs 1' said Othmar
with some impatience.
'Ah, who can say? Neither would have stayed with the
clerk certainly,' replied Rosselin, lifting up the drooped stalk of
one of his picotees and fastening it to its deserted stick. ' It is
all a matter of chance and circumstance. Temperament goes
for much, but accident counts for more, and opportunity for
most. You say yourself, for instance, that Mile. Berarde might
have lived and died on her island but for some careless words
of Madame Nadine and an invitation to St. Pharamond. While
we are young life is always inviting us somewhere, and we accept
the invitations, without thinking whether they will lead us to
Bicetre or to a quiet cottage garden in our old age. Allons
done ! Let us do our best to secure the garden and the sunshine
for your little friend from the South. I need not assure you
that you shall have my perfect honesty of opinion and my abso-
lute discretion concerning her. Will you come into the house
a moment ? I picked up yesterday, at a bookstall, a precious
little bouguin ; nothing less than a copy of the " Terentii
Comoedise" of 1552 by Roger Payne.'
Othmar went in and admired the bouguin, and stayed a few
moments longer, while the evening grew duskier and the scent
of the carnations and stocks and great cabbage-roses came richer
and sweeter through the open windows into the small rooms,
clean and cosy, and raised from the commonplace by the rare
volumes which were gathered in them, and the fine pieces of
porcelain standing here and there on their wooden shelves.
Then, promising to return on the morrow, he took his
leave. Rosselin walked beside him down the little path to the
gate. The sun had set and the skies were growing quite dark.
The ripple of the Seine water under the sculls of a passing boat
was audible in the stillness. From the distance there came the
214
OTHMAR.
sounds of a violin, and some voices singing the postillions and
travellers' chorus from the ' Manon Lescaut' of Massenet.
Rosselin, left alone, leaned over his wooden gate between his
acacia hedges, and listened to the voices dying away in the dis-
tance, and looked through the soft dusk to where his Paris lay.
' I wonder if he has told his wife ?' he thought. ' If not—
well, if not, perhaps Madame may not care. She has never
cared, why should she care now ?'
The interrogation had been on his lips more than once whilst
Othmar had been with him, but his worldly wisdom had kept it
back unspoken.
' Entre Varbre et Vecorce ne mettez pas le doigt,' was an
axiom of which he, so often the exponent of Sganarelle, knew
the profound truth.
Aloud he added:
' Of course I will see her, and with the greatest pleasure.
When and where 1'
' I will take you to-morrow. I shall remain in Paris two days.'
'Then to-morrow I will await you. Do not think me a
cynical and indifferent old hermit. If I dread to see youth
throw itself into the river of fire which leads to fame, it is only
because I have seen so many burned up in its course. I always
advocate obscurity for women. Penelope is a much happier
woman than Circe, though the latter is a goddess and a sor-
ceress. Your protegee may become great only to die like Des-
clee, like Rachel. You would do her a greater service if you
married her to one of your clerks, gave them a modest little
house in the banlieue, and became sponsor to their first child.
Though I have been a graceless artist all my life, I confess I
hesitate at being the person to assist such a friendless creature
as you describe to enter on a dramatic career. I have seen so
many failures ! By-the-bye, is she handsome ?'
' She has beauty,' said Othmar a little coldly, because the
question slightly confused and irritated him.
' It was a needless interrogation,' said Rosselin to himself.
Even the chivalry of Othmar would have deemed it necessary
to do so much for a plain woman.
When he went to Les Hameaux on the following day he saw
her, heard her, studied her, stayed some two hours near her, now
and then reciting to her himself, half a scene from ' Le Joueur,'
a single speech from the ' Misanthrope,' a few lines of Feuillet,
a few stanzas from the ' Odes et Ballades.'
'Oh, who are you?' she asked in transport, the tears of
delight and admiration rising to her eyes.
' My dear,' answered Rosselin with a smile, which for once
was sad, ' I am that most melancholy of all things—an artist
who was once great and now is old ?' -
She took his hand with reverence and kissed it.
OTHMAR.
215
*Va/'said the man whom the world had adored, with a
little laugh which had emotion it. ' Va ! Life is always worth
living. The flowers always smell sweet and the sunshine is
always warm. And so you, too, would be an artist, would you ?
Well, well! every spring there are young birds to fill the old
nests.'
When he left her he was long silent. When he at last spoke,
he said briefly to Othmar : ' Elle a de VavenirJ
CHAPTER XXIX.
The day after Othmar went alone to the green shadows of the
vale of Port-Royal. It was five o'clock in the afternoon when
he reached there : he saw Damaris before she saw him ; all her
rural habits and associations had come to her in this leafy and
rustic place ; she rose with the sun and went to bed with it;
she had recovered her colour and her strength ; she assisted in
the out-of-door work and rejoiced in it. As he drew near he
saw her mowing a swath of the autumnal aftermath of the little
field, the two watch dogs of Bonaventure, which he had bought
and restored to her, lying near and watching her with loving
eyes. Her arms, vigorous as a youth's and white as a swan's
neck, were seen bare to the shoulder in the swaying sweep of
the scythe ; her hair was bound closely round her head, and its
dark gold glistened in the sun. The veins in her throat stood
out in the effort of the movement; the linen of her bodice
heaved and fell. It was an attitude which Rude or Clesinger
would have given ten years of their lives to reproduce in marble ;
it was the perfection of full and youthful female strength and
health, teeming with all the promise of a perfect organisation,
all the vitality which makes strong mothers of strong men.
It was womanhood ; not the womanhood of the mondaines,
delicate and fragile as a hothouse flower, pale from late hours or
faintly tinted with the resources of art, serene and harmonious
in tone, in charm, in manner, the most perfect of all the pro-
ducts of artificial culture ; but womanhood as it was when the
earth was young, and when life was simple and straight as a rod
of hazel; womanhood buoyant, healthful, forceful, fearless ;
with limbs uncramped by fashion and beauty ignorant of art,
living in the wind, in the water, in the grass, in the sun, like
the dappled cattle and the strong-winged bird.
He watched her awhile, himself unseen. With what grace,
yet with what vigour, she moved the scythe, sweeping round
her in its wide semicircle, the long grass falling about her in
green billows, with trails of bindweed and tall red heads of
clover in it; beyond her, the blue sky and the pastoral horizon
of the vast wheat-fields of La Beauce.
216
OTHMAR.
What would the hot, close, fevered pressure of life in the
world give her that was half so good as that % How much better
to dwell so, between the green grass and the wide sky, than to
court the fickle homage and the fleeting loves of men ! How
much better if all her years could pass so on the peaceful breast
of the kindly earth, living to lead her children out amongst the
swaths of hay and teach them to love the lark's song and the
face of the fields as she loved them ! How much better to be
Baucis than Aspasia!
Perhaps ! but where was Philemon 1
As the thoughts drifted through his mind she paused to whet
her scythe, looked up, and saw him. With a smile that was as
glad as sunshine in May weather she came towards him, leaping
lightly over the hillocks of mown grass. She was happy to see
him there. She felt no embarrassment for her bare arms and
her kilted skirt; she had not been taught the immodesty of
prudes.
'No, we will not go in the house,' he said to her when he
had greeted her. ' Let us stay in your sweet-smelling meadow.
Why are you mowing ? Are there no mowers to do it ?'
' I like doing it,' she answered ; ' and it spares Madame
Chabot the day's pay of a man. I can mow very well,' she
added, with that pride in her pastoral skill which she had been
imbued with on Bonaventure.
She walked on by his side through the little narrow spaces
of mown ground which ran between the waves of the fallen
grasses. She had pulled down her sleeves and taken the pins
out of her skirt, and passed with her firm light tread and her
uncovered head over the rough soil, with the afternoon sun in
her eyes and on the rich tints of her face. It intensified the
radiance of her colouring, as it did that of the scarlet poppies
which were blowing here and there where the grass still stood
uncut.
' What did he say of me ?' she asked anxiously and wistfully,
as Othmar walked on in silence beside her.
' He says you have not deceived yourself.'
' Ah !'—she drew a deep breath of relief—' I pleased him,
then 1 And yet, when I heard him recite, it seemed to me that
I could do nothing more than stutter and gabble foolishly; his
voice was music '
' He has been a very great artist, and speech is to him as the
flute to the flute-player : an instrument with which he does what
he will. Yes, you pleased him, my dear. He thinks that you
have in you the soul of an artist, the future of one if you
choose.'
' Ah !' she laughed aloud for sheer happiness and triumph, in
the joy and the pride of a child. It seemed to her the most
exquisite glad tidings, the most superb success.
OTHMAR.
217
4 He will even help you ; he will train you himself; and
whoever is trained by David Rosselin is in a certain sense secure
of the public ear,' said Othmar with a reluctance which he felt
was unjust to her, for if she possessed this power why should
she be denied the knowledge of it? 'But,'he added slowly,
41 must warn you that even he, great artist as he has been,
thinks as I think—that it is better to mow grass in the fresh air
than to seek the suffrage of crowds in the gaslight. He thinks
as I think, that, for a woman, the more secluded and sheltered
be the path of life the happier and the better is it for her. This
sounds very cold and cautious to you, no doubt; but it would
be what every man of the world would tell you, who was honest
with you, and had your welfare at heart.'
Her face changed and clouded as she heard him.
4 Why ?' she said abruptly.
He was silent. It was impossible to tell this child, who was
as innocent as any one of the poppies blowing in the grass, all
the reasons which made the future she coveted look to him like
the open mouth of a furnace into which a white sea-bird was
flying in its ignorance.
' Private life is the best life,' he said as she repeated, a little
imperiously, her ' why V ' It is the calmest, the simplest, the
most screened from envy and hatred. I suppose tranquillity
does not seem to you the one inestimable blessing which it really
is. You are full of ardours and enthusiasms and longings, as
the vines are full of sap in the springtime. You want the wine
of life, because you do not know that the intoxication of it
is always coupled with nausea, and fever, and unspeakable dis-
gust. It is of no use saying this to you, because you are so
young ; but it is true. If I could compel your future, I would
have it pass yonder, where, far away, we see that golden haze.
There are the great wheat-lands of La Beauce, and the thrift
and the peace and the abundance of a rich pastoral life. If you
spent your little fortune on a farm there, with your love of
country sights and sounds and ways, you would be happy ; and
you could take your choice from the many gallant youths who
reap the harvests of those plains. You would be a rich demoi-
selle in La Beauce, but in the world of art you may be poor, my
dear, for all your gifts from nature. We are poor, very poor,
forever, when once we have failed.'
His own words sounded in his ears unkind, unsympathetic,
harsh, and almost coarse; but he spoke as, it seemed to him,
both experience and conscience made it duty to do. Damaris
looked down on the shorn grass at her feet, and he saw her fa
and throat grow red.
' If I had wished to marry I would have_married my cousin,'
she said with a sound of anger and offence in her voice. ' Pea-
Bant life is good, very good. Perhaps, if I had never seen any-
218
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thing different, it might have seemed always the best. But not
now—not now '
* But you do not know He left his reply unfinished.
Standing in the green warm meadow, with the light of after-
noon shed on it, and the golden haze of a late summer day on
its horizon, his thoughts were full of all the many things in life
of which she could imagine nothing. All the passions and
pleasures and disgusts, all the desires and satisfactions and
satieties, all the tumult and vanity and nausea and giddy haste
of life in the world—what could she tell of these ? She would
be handsome and young and alone ; what would that world not
teach her in a year, a month, an hour? Self-consciousness
first; then, with that knowledge, all else.
As, to her, having never known anything but the close limits
of peasant life, the world which she did not know assumed the
colours and the rejoicing of a vast borealis pageantry, so to him,
by whom the world was known like an oft-read Virgil, it seemed
that the safety, the quietude, the daily round of simple duties,
undisturbed by ambition within or by contention from without,
which the life of the peasant afforded, was a kind of happiness,
a positive security from which any safe within it were ill-advised
to wander.
Of all wretched creatures the declassee seemed to him to be
the most wretched. He had reproached his wife with the effort
to make this child one of those pitiful anomalies, and he now
reproached himself with doing the same unkindness.
Damaris was a declassee ; she could never more return to the
order of life whence she had come. Ever since some indistinct
glory for herself had been suggested to her by the thoughtless
words of the great lady who had represented Fate to her, she
had been haunted by the desire for an existence wholly unlike
that to which she had been born and by which she had been sur-
rounded. It had been only a very few hours which she had
passed under the roof of St. Pharamond, but that short space
had been long enough to make her conceive a world wholly
inconceivable to her before, a world in which art and luxury
were things of daily habit, in which leisure and loveliness and
gaiety and ease were matters of course, like the coming and
going of time, in which personal graces and personal charm
were all cultured as the flowers were cultured under glass ; in
which even for her there might become possible the fruition of
all manner of gorgeous indefinite visions, born out of the sug-
gestions of poets and the phantasmagoria of romantic books—a
Avorld in which all she had humbly longed for, as she had listened
to the nightingales in the orange thickets, would become visible
to her and possessed.
She was a declassee : not in the vulgar sense, but in the sadder
meaning of a young life uprooted from its natural soil and filled
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with desires, aspirations, dreams, which made all that was
actually within her grasp valueless to her. That one night, in
which she had seen around her the destinies which appeared to
her like a tale of fairy-land, had impressed her imagination with
indelible memories and her heart with ineffaceable wishes. He,
who only saw in the life of his own world tedium, inanity,
stupidity, extravagance, monotonous repetition, could not guess
what enchantment its externals had worn to her. He, who was
tired of the unvaried paths of that garden of pleasure whose
habitues only see that in it ' grove nods to grove, each alley has
its fellow,' could not divine what a paradise it had looked to this
young waif and stray, who had been only able to catch one
glimpse of its beauties through the golden bars of its shut gates.
To him her wish for the world appeared the most pathetic of
errors, the most pitiable of blunders, a very madness of unwise
choice. Had not the world been with him always, and what
had it given him ? Possibly it had in reality given him much
more than he remembered : it had given him culture with all
its charms, and courtesy with all its graces ; it had given him
the great powers which lie in wealth, and the great light which
shines from knowledge. But then he was so used to these he
counted them not, and the world only wore to him the aspect of
a monster devouring all leisure, all simplicity, all repose, driving
all mankind before it in a breathless chase of swiftly escaping
hours ; and to her this monster would be ravenous as a wolf,
cruel as it could never be to any man ! It would take every-
thing from her, and only give her in return worthless gifts of
ruinous passions, of consuming fevers, of poisoned fruits, of fierce
desires.
It seemed to him as if he saw some young child coming gaily
through the grasses, clasping all unconscious to its breast a mass
of smoking dynamite, and deeming it a kindly playfellow.
And it was impossible to warn her in words brutal enough
to scare her from her purpose. He could not say to her, ' Men
are beasts, and women are worse : there are hideous pleasures,
hateful appetites, cruel temptations, of which you know nothing,
but which will all crowd on your knowledge and grow to your
taste, once you are in the midst of them. The world will
embrace you, but as the bull embraced the Christian maiden
forced to appear as Pasiphae in the circus of Nero. Be wise
while there is time. Stay in the clean, clear daylight of a
country life. Its paths are narrow and few, they only lead
from the hearth to the door, from the door to the brook or the
rnill ; but you may walk in them safe and content, and teach
your children to follow your steps. Peace of mind is the
sweetest thing upon earth; but it is like the wood-sorrel, it
only grows in shady, quiet, homely places. No one has it in
the world.'
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But he thought these thoughts, and did not say them. Ha
looked at her standing with dew-wet feet amongst the seeding
grasses, the warm fresh air about her, the blue sky above, and
he thought of her in the atmosphere of a supper-room in Paris,
with the smoke, and the perfumes, and the odours of the wines,
and beside her men with swimming lascivious eyes, and drdlesses
with flushed faces and indecent gestures. He would not take
her there, but others would.
She raised her head suddenly and looked at him.
4 What are you afraid of for me ?' she said suddenly. 4 There
is nothing to be afraid of. If I fail I fail; I have enough
always to live on, you say; and if I succeed '
' Failure will not hurt you,' he said coldly ; 4 success may.'
4 How can success hurt one unless one be very vain or very
weak 1 I do not think I am vain, and I know I am strong.'
4 My dear—you can go from the meadows to the world if
you will, but remember you cannot come back from the world
to the meadows.'
' Why 1 Did not many come from the world to Port-Royal
when it stood yonder ?'
4 Yes ; they came with sick hearts, with defeated hopes,
with aching wounds, with disappointed passions; but they
never stood in the green pastures, in the morning of life, again.'
There was a sigh in the words which -brought them home to
her heart with a sudden sense of all their meaning.
She was mute while the little crickets in the stalks of the
hay grass sung their last little song of one note, which would
soon end with the end of their tiny lives.
4 You are not happy yourself 1' she said after awhile.
Astonishment and regret were in the question.
Othmar hesitated. His sincerity combated the negative,
which a vague sense of loyalty to one absent made him desirous
to utter.
4 Ho one after a certain age is happy, my dear,' he answered
evasively. 4 Illusions are happiness ; and in the world which you
think must be a fairy tale, we lose them very quickly.'
41 should have thought you were happy,' she said regret-
fully ; that splendid pageantry of life of which she had seen a
glimpse seemed to her magical, marvellous, inexhaustible.
41 did not think she was,' she added, with that directness
and candour which made her great unlikeness to all of her sex
whom he had ever known.
4 Why 1' he asked abruptly; the supposition annoyed him.
4 She looked tired, and as if she were looking for something
she did not find.'
The accuracy and divination in the words surprised him.
How had this child, who had never before seen any woman of
the world, guessed so accurately the perpetual vague desire and
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221
as vague dissatisfaction which had always gone with the soul of
his wife as a shadow goes through brilliant light ?
All her life long Nadkge had found the old saw true, familiarity
had bred contempt in her ; custom had made wisdom seem
foolishness, wit seem prose, amusement become tedium, and
interest change to apathy. Intimate knowledge of anything, of
anyone, had always altered each for her, as the fairy gold
changed in mortal hands to withered leaves.
It was no fault of hers ; it was not even mere inconstancy of
temper ; it was rather due to the infinitude of her inexhaustible
expectations and the microscopic penetration of her intelligence.
The world was small to her as to Alexander.
He knew that neither to her nor to himself had their life
together been that poem, that passion, that harmony which they
—or he at least—had imagined that it would be. But was not
this due only to that doom of human nature which they shared
in common with all the rest of mankind 1 Was it not merely
the effect of that lassitude and vague disappointment which
must follow on the indulgence of every great passion, simply
because in its supreme hours it reaches heights of rapture at
which nothing human can remain ?
Yet, however his philosophy may explain it, to have any
other imagine that he does not render a woman who belongs to
him perfectly contented with him always irritates and offends
every man. It is a suspicion cast on his powers, his loyalty,
and his good sense : it indirectly accuses him of deficiency in
attraction or of feebleness of character. Othmar had but little
vanity; no more than human nature naturally possesses in its
unconscious forms of self-love ; but the little he had was morti-
fied by this child's observation. She, ignorant of all the fine
intricacies of emotion which are the traits of such highly-cul-
tured and over-refined temperaments as were theirs, could only
say, in her simple and inadequate language, that they seemed
to her ' not happy.' It was not the phrase which expressed what
they lacked; it was too homely, too crude, too direct, to describe
the complicated world-weariness of which they both suffered the
penalties, the innumerable and conflicting sentiments and de-
sires which made of their lives a continual vague expectation
and as vague and continual a regret. But her young eyes, un-
used as they were to read anything less clear than the open
language of sea and sky, and ignorant of the whole meaning of
psychological analysis, had yet been able to perceive the shadow
of this which she had had no power of understanding.
He was surprised at her penetration, whilst he wondered
uneasily if the world in general, so much keener of sight and
more bitter of tongue than she, saw as much as she saw. The idea
that it might be so was unwelcome to him. The supposition
was horrible to him that the great passion of his life had gone
222
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the way of most great passions which are exposed to that most
cruel of all slow destroyers—familiarity; familiarity which is as
the mildew to the wheat, as the sirdax to the fir-tree, as the
calandra to the sugar-cane. He loathed to realise the fact, or
think of it in any way ; and when it was placed before him by
another's observation, he saw his own soul, as it were in a
mirror, and detested what he saw.
He answered with some constraint: ' I have told you, my
dear, that happiness is the fruit of illusions ; it cannot exist
without them any more than we could have that beautiful hase
yonder without water in the atmosphere. Besides, in the world,
people are only content so long as they are of completely frivo-
lous characters. My wife has cultivated her intelligence and
her wit too exquisitely to be capable of that sort of coarse and
common satisfaction with things as they are which is so easy to
mediocre minds.'
' Yet you advise me to be content 1'
' My dear child, you are young, you are accustomed to an
out-of-door life, you have the felicity of belonging to country
things and country thoughts which give you a storehouse full of
sunny memories. My wife is a mondaine (if you have ever
heard that word) who is also a pessimist and a metaphysician.
Life presents many intricate problems to her mind which will, I
hope, never trouble your joyous acceptance of it as it is. Pdnelon,
I assure you, was a happier man than Lamennais.'
' Because he was a stupider one.'
* Stupid 1 No, but simpler, cast in a different mould, natu-
rally inclined to faith, averse to speculation, taking things as
he found them without question. That is the cast of mind of
all men and women who are made to be happy.'
She was silent; wishfully thinking of those immense fields of
knowledge shut out from her own eyes like the aerial spheres of
unseen suns and planets which the unassisted sight can never be-
hold. She felt childish, ignorant, made of dull and common clay.
The bells of a little distant spire sounded for Vespers. The
sun was sinking beyond the edge of the wide green plain. A
deeper stillness was stealing over the meadow and the low
coppices which made its boundaries. Birds, looking grey in the
shadows, flew low, to and fro, restlessly, in that uncertain flight
with which, near nightfall, they always seek a resting-place for
the dark hours.
Othmar looked at his watch. . ' I must leave you or I shall
miss the train to Paris, and I go to-night to Russia.'
She changed colour.
' To Russia ! That is very far away !'
' It does not seem so in these days. One sleeps and wakes
and sleeps again, and one is there. If you want me in any
way, write to me at the Paris house and they will forward your
OTHMAR.
223
letter. Rosselin will come to see you to-morrow. He will tell
you, s!k no one else can, all you will have to prepare for and
encounter if you choose the life of an artist. Do not decide
too hastily. There is no hurry. I like best to think of you in
these safe pastures.'
* But the winter will come to them and—some time—to me %'
* It is far enough off you, at least, to be forgotten. Well,
listen to Rosselin and be guided by your own impulses ; they
are the only safe guides in such a choice as this. I dare say the
world will win you ; the world always does. It is only in fable
that Herakles goes with Pallas. Adieu.'
She grew very pale, and the light had gone out of her face
as it had now gone off the landscape.
* You will come back soon %' she asked.
Othmar resisted a wave of tenderness and pity which passed
over him.
'Not very soon,' he answered. 'You know I have many
occupations, and the world I warn you against is always with
me, alas ! I shall never be able to see you often, my dear, for—■
for—very many reasons ; but whenever you really need me,
write to me without hesitation, and always depend upon the
sincerity of my regard.'
She did not reply. She stood motionless. With the coming
of the evening shadows there had came a great chillness, a sense
of loss upon her, as if she had been suddenly brought from the
warm green meadows of the vale of Chevreuse into the awful
silence and whiteness and frozen solitude of a winter's night in
Siberia.
. ' Write to me,' said Othmar again. With a gentle movement
he stooped and kissed her on the soft thick waves of hair which
fell over her forehead.
Then he left her.
She remained standing in the same place and the same
attitude, her feet in the mown grass growing wet with dew, her
head bent like a statue of meditation. The caress had been
gentle, slight, passionless, like a kiss to a child; but her face
and bosom had grown hot with blushes which the evening shadows
veiled, and a strange vague joy and pain strove together in her.
CHAPTER XXX.
It was eight o'clock in the evening on the plains of Russia, and
warm with that Asiatic heat which comes with the reign of the dog-
star even to the provinces that lie between the Baltic waters and
the Ural snows. In the vast gardens and white wide courts of the
house at Zaraila the evening was sultry, and Nadege, spending a
few dull days in her annual visit to her elder children and their
224
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estates, was lying half asleep upon a couch, listening to the
monotonous drip of the lion-fountain in the central court, and
thinking of nothing in especial. This visit had always repre-
sented to her supreme and unmitigated tedium. It was a duty
to come there no doubt ; her duties were docile courtiers as a
rule and seldom troubled her; but it was tiresome, infinitely
tiresome, it was so much time lost out of the sum of her life.
Why is duty never agreeable ?
The Napraxine children were in their own apartments ; the
clear sunny evening, whose light would stretch almost to dawn,
illumined the gardens and terraces. She reclined motionless
upon her broad low couch, with a little cigarette between her
lips, now and then sending into the air around her delicate rings
of rose-scented'smoke. The mother of Platon Napraxine, a
woman old and austere, with the terrible austerity of women
who have loved pleasure and passion, and only turned to devo-
tion when both have deserted them, sat near and watched her
with dark, brooding, sunken eyes, full of a hate which the
object of it was too indifferent and too careless to care for or to
measure.
The Princess Lobow Gregorievna, born a Princess Miliutine,
was a woman who had been handsome, but had now lost nearly
all trace of past beauty. She was spare, colourless, and at-
tenuated, and her severe, straight profile, and her expression of
ascetic rigidity, gave her a curious likeness to those Byzantine
portraits of St. Anne and of St. Elizabeth which were sur-
rounded with jewels and relics on the altars of her private
chapel. Her piety in old age was as complete and absorbing as
her licentious amours had been in her earlier womanhood.
Superstition had taken the same empire over her in age which
her passions had possessed previously ; and she was as extrava-
gant in her donations to church and convent as she had once
been to the impecunious officers of the guard and princely
gamblers, who had been in turn favoured with her fantastic
and short-lived preference. Her religious and most orthodox
fervour was neither a mask nor an hypocrisy. It was the most
genuine of all religions—that which is founded on personal fear.
But it intensified the hardness of her temper, and never whis-
pered to her that mercy might be holier than long prayers.
In all Europe Othmar and his wife had no enemy colder,
harder, more implacable than this holy woman, whose name
meant Love, and whose good works were seen in endowed con-
vents, jewelled reliques, mighty treasures bestowed all over her
province, and ceremonials, fasts, and penances of the orthodox
most rigidly observed in her person. Hadkge never tried to
conciliate or propitiate her grim foe ; she was at once too care-
less and too courageous. With her delicate and unsparing
raillery she had stung this enmity with many a barbed word,
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225
subtle and negligent and penetrating, accentuated with the cruel
sweet music of her laughter, until the hatred with which the
Princess Lobow hated her was deep as the Yolga, though hidden
like the Volga's bottomless holes so long as Platon Napraxine
had lived. His death had given it justification, and intensified
it a thousandfold.
' If she were a good woman she would be compelled to hate
me,' thought the object of her hate. ' And being what she is,
if she could poison me secretly she would do it, even in the
blessed bread itself.'
When they had first met after her marriage with Othmar,
there had been said between them such words as are ineffaceable
on the memory like vitriol flung on the face.
' For the first time in my life I have allowed myself to be
in a rage ; je me suis encanaillee !' she had said to herself,
penitent not for the anger into which she had been driven, but
for the force with which she had uttered it, which was an offence
against her canons of good taste.
The earlier years of the Princess Lobow had been dedicated
to all those refined ingenuities of depravity in which the nine-
teenth century can rival the Rome of Vitellius and the Con-
stantinople of the Byzantine emperors. There were terrible
facts in her past, ready, like so many knives, to the use of her
opponent, allusions which could pierce like steel, and could scar
like flame. Nadfege had spared none of them. With all the
pitiless disdain of a woman in whom the senses have but very
faint power, she had poured out her scorn on the other, whose
senses had been her tyrants until, virtuous perforce through the
chills of age, she had taken her worthless withered soul to God.
Since that time the bitterest enmity had been open and
avowed between them. Concession to the world, and regard to
the dead man's memory, caused them to still keep up a show
and aspect of conventional politeness before others. But the
polished surface covered the most bitter feud. They were
studiously ceremonious and courteous one to the other ; but
beneath the few phrases they exchanged, often trivial and ap-
parently amiable as these might be, there were a hint, a tone, a
meaning which told to each of the other's undying animosity.
To the younger woman it was a matter of pure indifference, of
careless amusement; her nature was too capricious and too dis-
dainful to cherish deep enmities ; she despised rather than she
disliked ; but to the elder this hatred she cherished was the last
flickering flame of the many hot passions which had governed
her in earlier years. For her only son she had had a concen-
trated intensity of affection, into which all the ambition,
cupidity, and love of dominion in her character had been
united. His marriage had been hateful to her, and when
Nadine, in her sixteenth year, as fragile as an orchid and as
Q
226
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impertinent as Cherubino, petulantly detesting the husband
they had given her, and in the bitterness of her disillusions at
war with all the world, was brought in the first months of her
marriage to the great house of Zara'ila, the Princess Lobow had
seen in her not only the despoiler of her own power, but the
ruin of her son.
Many and violent had been the scenes between Platon
Hapraxine and herself, of which his wife was the object and the
cause.
'She is a crystal of ice, you say,'she told him a hundred
times. ' Well, she will so chill your heart one day that it will
be numb for ever. Remember that; I warn you.'
He did remember when he went out to his death in the
dawn of the April morning at Versailles.
Whilst he lived his mother's hatred for his wife was impo-
tent and perforce mute ; but all the many slights, the constant
indifference, the frequent ridicule of which he was the object,
though unperceived or forgiven by him, were written on his
mother's memory indelibly as on tablets of stone. All the
coquetries and scandals which were associated with his wife's
name, all the tragedies for which the breath of her world made
her responsible, all the cruel words and strange caprices which
were attributed to her, were gathered up and treasured by the
Princess Lobow. Seldom leaving her solitudes in the provinces,
and seldom seen even in Petersburg, she yet was as accurately
informed of all the gossip of Europe concerning her daughter-
in-law as though she had lived perpetually beside her. Hone
of the minutiae of the vaguest rumours about her escaped the
vigilance of her enemy. Saint though she was, she prayed
passionately that some imprudence greater than usual, some
coquetry which would pass beyond the patience of her husband
and her world, would deliver Hadfege Federowna into her
hands, but she waited in vain. The indulgence of both the
world and the husband was inexhaustible for one to whom they
were both of the most absolute insignificance.
Then one day, as falls a bolt from a clear sky, a single line
by the electric wires told her that her son was dead.
In her eyes he was murdered by his wife, as surely as
though she had touched his lips with poison.
Her grief and her rage were terrible : the more terrible
because the hatred which might have assuaged it had no outlet
in action, could scarce have any in speech.
For Platon Napraxine had left his young sons wholly in
the hands of their mother, and she could take them whither
she would, and do with them whatever she chose ; and the
elder woman, who had transferred to them all that jealous and
violent attachment which she had given their father, concealed
all she felt that she might retain them near her, whilst the
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227
secretiveness and ruses of the Slav temperament made it pos-
sible for her to continue in apparent friendship before the world
with one whom she looked on as his destroyer.
She sat now erect on an antique chair of gilded and
painted leather, and through her dropped eyelids watched the
indolent attitude, the profound idleness, the outstretched limbs,
like those of a reposing Diana, of the woman she loathed. In
all the attitude, from the sans gene and complete ease of it to
the little rose-scented puffs of smoke which ever and again
came from her parted lips, there was that ' note of modernity'
which beyond all other things the Princess Lobow detested.
The women of her time had been as licentious as the great
Catharine herself, but they had been different to the cocodettes
in manner, in mind, in opinion, in everything. They had been
like fierce Oriental empresses, often barbarous, uncleanly, gross,
but they had had a stateliness which all their excesses could
not impair. The modern woman of the world, with her care-
less attitudes, her mockery of all ceremonial, her disrespect for
tradition and etiquette, her airy scepticism, and her vague dis-
satisfaction, was, wherever she was met with, an enigma and an
affront to the elder woman, whose own life had been divided
between strong vices and strong faiths, and whose bigotry
and whose sensuality had been of equal force. They had
neither senses nor souls, these poor modern anemiques, thought
this woman of seventy years, who had been a Messalina and
who had become a St. Katherine.
' Ah, you despise us, madame; how right you are !'
Nadkge had said to her once. ' We never know what we wish,
and when we get what we ask for, we are as irritated as when
it is denied to us. It is the fault of all culture—it creates dis-
content and fastidiousness as surely as civilisation brings all
kinds of new diseases. I only wish that we could be like our
granddames and godmothers, who had no earthly ideals beyond
a constant succession of big officers of cuirassiers, and no mental
doubt whatever as to the existence of a " bon Dieu." It must
have simplified life so much to have been able to balance the
little weakness for the succession of cuirassiers with such a
perfect confidence in Heaven !'
At this moment in the summer evening at Zara'ila neither of
them were speaking. They had exchanged many cruel, cour-
teous innuendoes in the course of the day, but with the evening
there had come a tacit truce. The little boys were wholly
under the power of their mother as their guardian, and their
grandmother feared that if she were too much irritated she
might remove them from Zaraila or request her to leave it.
Nadine, on her side, had thought, with a sense of compas-
sion and that disdainful but candid justice which was seldom
wanting in her ; ' After all, as she loved that poor, big, clumsy
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fellow so well, and he was her only son—the only thing she
had—it is pardonable, it is natural, that she should hate me for
ever.'
It grew late, but it was still light with the long and radiant
evening of the north in summer. She, in the drowsy heat of
the eventide, looked with still dreamy eyes out on to the sultry
gardens beneath, where golden evening light was poured on
endless aisles and fields of roses, and groves of feathery bananas
and plumed palms ; the vegetation of the vales of Kashmere
made by art to blossom there for the brief season of a Russian
summer.
' How very foolish women are to fear absence,' she thought.
' Absence is the only possible avenue which can lead us to find
the fontaine de jouvence of renewed interest. Familiarity is so
fatal—so fatal! Helen's self would be unable to hold her own
against it. Those silly women who let the man they love enter
their chamber as easily as he can go into his racing stables, set
a great grey ghost of indifference at the threshold. Most
women are afraid of not being near what they love. If they
only knew how distance helps them ; how constant proximity
hurts them ! If Love cannot keep a few surprises in his poeket,
he is as tiresome as a newspaper a week old.'
She laughed a little, watching the leaves of a full-blown
rose fall under the touch of an alighting bird.
'When it has once been full-blown,' she thought, 'any
touch—even a bird's, even a butterfly's—will serve to finish it
for ever.'
Love was so like that great crimson rose, which a moment
before had been a cup of ruby-coloured fragrance, and now was
a mere litter of dropped leaves upon the grass. Love lives by
its emotions, its desires, its illusions: so long as these can be
excited and sustained it is Love ; when they cannot be so, it is
as the Spanish poet said centuries ago, habit, friendship, what
you will, but not Love any more.
She had studied the natures of men too profoundly not to
know this.
There was the sound of wheels in the central court, and
various doors opened and shut in the apartments leading to the
grand salon where they were. Then the groom of the cham-
bers, in his black uniform, only relieved by his silver chain of
office and the key embroidered on his collar, preceded and
announced Othmar.
Nadine half rose, leaning on one arm on the cushion.
' My dear Otho, this is charming of you ! I did not expect
you until to-morrow,' she said, with a smile of welcome, as she
put out her left hand to him. Othmar kissed her fingers with
warmth and deference, then saluted with ceremony the Princess
Lobow.
OTHMAR.
229
41 came from Moscow more quickly than I could have hoped
to do,' he said, as he seated himself beside his wife. 'An
Imperial train was leaving for the north, and the Grand Duke
Alexis offered me a place in it. Are you well % It is three
months and more since we met.'
' I am as well as it is ever permitted one to be in a century
in which the nerves play the most prominent role. And the
children 1'
' Perfectly well, and perfectly happy. They are not yet at
the age of nerves. But I have telegraphed all news to you;
there is nothing left to say, except that absence '
' Oh, do not make me compliments like a berger d'eventail!
We will take all that for granted.'
The reproof to him was the same sort of mockery with
which she had been always wont to repress the attempts at
tenderness of Napraxine ; but his mother, listening, heard the
difference in the accent, and watching, saw the difference in
the smile with which they were spoken.
' The wanton !' she thought bitterly ; ' she expected him to-
night, though she said not till to-morrow. It was for him, that
attitude like a Diane endormie, that coquette's disarray, that
studied disorder of laces and gauzes, that little bouquet of helio-
trope fastened just above the left breast! Oh, the beast, the
beast! All that belonged to my son—every atom of it, from her
little ear to her slender foot, and should have been burnt with
him, like the Indian women, if I could have had my way—should
have been buried with him, like his stars and his crosses. Oh,
the beast, the beast! if I could only wring her neck!'
Then she rose, and murmuring some words inaudible and
indifferent to her companions, she left the apartment. Othmar,
alone beside his wife in the aromatic warmth of the summer
evening, bent over her couch and kissed her little bouquet of
heliotrope.
' Allons, berger /' she cried, with a little resistance which was
not displeasure.
It pleased her that she had the power to make her husband
her lover ; that she could still see him moved to the folies des
bergers. It was a point of vanity with her, as well as an impulse
of the heart, to retain something of that empire over him which
had once been so absolute. When she should wholly cease to be
able to do so, it seemed to her that she would be grown old
indeed. She had never put more coquetry, more sorcery, more
art concealed by art into her efforts to blind and enslave her
lovers, than she had done that evening when she was awaiting
Othmar after three months' absence. It might not be the
highest form of love, but it was the ablest. It was of a piece
with that magic by which Cleopatra defied time, and changed
the ravages of habit into philtres of fresh charm.
23©
OTHMAR,
CHAPTER XXXI.
Othmar did not tell her that night of Damaris.
With daylight he remembered uneasily that it was a story
which should be told. A certain nervousness came over him
whenever he thought of her possible, her probable, laughter,
the incredulity as to his motives which she would be sure, out
of mirth, to affect if she were too unlike other women to in
seriousness entertain it. He recalled the tone with which she
had spoken of his escort of the girl to her island, and he shrank
from hearing the same tone again. He felt that, if heard, it
would anger him unreasonably, perhaps move him to the utter-
ance of that kind of words which are most fatal to friendship,
harmony, or love.
The lovely Diane endormie, who had received him with so
sweet a smile, could, when aroused, select and speed arrows
from hei quiver which could pierce deep and rankle long.
It seemed to him impossible to tell her that for weeks his
house had been the home of Damaris Berarde without awaking
all those ironies and all that disdain which were always so very
near the surface in her nature that they were displayed upon
the slightest provocation. He would certainly seem to her to
have behaved with needless exaggeration, with uncalled-foi
chivalry. Paris was wide enough to furnish other asylums than
his own house; his means were large enough and powerful
enough to have obtained friends for a desolate girl .without be-
coming her chief friend himself. Away from the pathos and
charm of Damaris's fate, of her perfect trust in himself, and of
her childish courage and candour of character, what he had
done seemed even to him, himself, unnecessarily personal in its
care of her. He did not regret it; he would not have done less
if he had had to do it again; yet he was conscious that to
induce his wife to see his actions in the light in which he
honestly saw them would be difficult, probably impossible.
This day drifted by, and another, and another; and the
name of Damaris did not pass his lips.
She had for him the sanctity of innocence, of youth, and of
supreme misfortune ; he felt that he could not trust himself to
have her made the target for the silver arrows of his wife's wit.
True, there might be moments in which she would be so com-
passionate and generous, that the calamities of the child whom
she had tempted from her safe solitudes would find in her a
frank and generous friend. But Othmar knew women too well
not to know that she would only have been so had he himself
had nothing to do with the fate of this waif and stray; if she,
and not himself, had found her adrift in the streets of Paris.
OTHMAR.
231
'She would doubt my motives and ridicule my endeavours,'
he thought, and the fear of her slight, chill laughter was strong
upon him. He knew that she would he unsparing in her sar-
casms upon himself, even if she should chance to feel any
remnant of her momentary interest in the future Desclde of her
prophecies.
He could not forget the coldness and scorn with which she
had treated his regret and remorse at Amyot; he could not
forget the aching sense of loneliness and loss with which she had
allowed him to leave her presence on the night when he had
told her of the little verses which he had found in the closed
chambers of Yseulte. He almost resented with a sense of weak-
ness and unworthiness in himself, the empire which she possessed
over his senses, the self-oblivion into which she had the power
to draw him when she chose.
He was sensible that he lost all dignity in her eyes, because
he was so willing to forgive, so easy to be recalled, so spaniel-
like in his too meek acceptance of her slights, and too eager
gratitude for her capricious tenderness.
The first hours passed of that dominion which she could
always exercise over him at will, the sense of his own weakness
returned to him with humiliation. He was conscious that he
must appear unmanly and feeble to her, since he allowed her to
play with him thus at her whim and pleasure. At Amyot she
had been unkind, disdainful, contemptuous ; if he condoned her
cruelty, and accepted her commands, did he not seem to her no
higher than the Siberian greyhound which it was her fancy one
moment to adorn and caress, and which the next was abandoned
and forgotten ?
He knew that a lover may obey the varying shades of his
mistress's temper without unmanliness, but that in marriage
such humility and obedience on the man's side are fatal to his
peace and self-respect. If he had had the strength of character
from the first to resist her influence, and enforce his own, he
might have had empire over her ; now he felt that he would
never gain it, that on her side alone was all that immense power
of command, and of superiority, which in human love always
remains with the one who loves least. He had too long allowed
her to treat him as she treated her hawk in the falconry-parties
at Amy6t, whistling the bird to her wrist and casting it off down
the wind with wanton unstable fancies, for him now to take that
place in her esteem, and that dignity in her sight, which he had
lost through his too fond and too submissive idolatry of her.
He had only of late grown conscious of this, and the sudden
perception of his own error was full of bitterness and useless
regret.
' He resents the power I have over him,' she thought, ' and
he is thinking of something which he does not say.'
232
OTHMAR.
She had never expected him to vary with her varying moods.
When she was cold, she had always seen him unhappy ; when
she had chided his warmth, he had always remained her adorer.
That any shadow from her own indifference which had fallen
like night across the paths of others should ever touch herself,
seemed to her impossible, intolerable, almost grotesque ; that
she could ever cease to be his sun and moon, his planet, and
his fixed star, seemed to her as improbable as that the earth
would cease to revolve.
Her philosophic wit had indeed predicted the time when the
fate which overtakes all passion would overtake his, and end it,
but in her inmost soul that time had seemed to her remote as
death itself. From the time when his eyes had first met hers,
she had had complete and undisputed mastery over his life ; she
had dominated his fancy, filled his imagination, ruled over his
destiny, and held empire over his senses. More than once she
had told herself, as she had told him, that in the common course
of human life and human nature this would change and cease
some day, but in her own heart she had never realised what her
Jips had said.
Men had seldom changed to her. They had met tragic ends
for her sake or through her name, or they had given up their
lives to celibate indifference to all other women, as Gui de
Be'thune had done ; but they had seldom or never, having once
loved her, loved others ; seldom or never learned to meet her
tranquilly in the world as one who had become naught to them.
The philtre poured out by her cool white hand had been of that
rare flavour which makes all other beverages tasteless. Even
Platon Napraxine, although her husband, had yet retained for
her such utter devotion in his slow, rude, mute nature, that he
had hungered for a rose from her bosom the night before he had
gone out to be shot like a dog for her sake.
Of the mortification of waning ardour, of the slow sad change
from fervour to apathy, of the great debacle of all passion which
so many women watch with hopeless and sinking hearts, as poor
peasants of Alpine valleys watch the melting snow and stealing
floods sweep away their homesteads—of these she had known
nothing; known no more than the reigning and honoured
sovereign knows of exile and dethronement. How she was
conscious of it, of the first slight imperceptible dullness of feel-
ing, even as she had been conscious of what no other eyes than
hers saw * the first faint change in her own beauty like the film
of breath on a mirror. It was very slight, rather negative than
positive, rather told by what was lacking than by what was
present; a shadow of fatigue, an absence of eagerness, a forced
attention, an accent of constraint; slender, vague, intangible
things all; yet apparent and eloquent to her quick intelligence,
to her supreme knowledge of human nature.
OTHMAR.
*33
They affected her with a strange sense of offence, of astonish-
ment, of irritation. She had a sudden impression of loss, as of
one who, having carelessly swung in his hand, without remem-
bering it, a jewel of value, discovers with a shock of surprise that
his hand is empty, and his treasure dropped in some crowded
street, its fall unheard, its loss only told by its absence.
Always, hitherto, after any separation he had returned to her
with the impassioned enthusiasm of a lover; the hours had been
long to him without her near presence, and all the warmth of
early passion had accompanied his return to or his welcome of
her. She had often chilled him, checked him, laughed at him,
left him vexed, dissatisfied, and chafing, but the ardour on his
side had never been less. Men had called him uxorious, and he
had been careless of their ridicule ; he had only lived for her.
Now, for the first time, a chill had come, as sometimes in a
summer night, in those still grass plains of Russia, there would
steal through the hot, fragrant air a breath of ice-cold wind,
and then those skilled to read the forecast of the weather would
say to one another : ' Lo ! the frost is near.'
She was as skilled in the weather of the human heart as the
peasants were in that of the earth and skies ; and she failed not
to read its presage aright. With all her arrogance she had
always had that kind of humility which comes from great in-
telligence and self-comprehension ; part of her contempt for her
many lovers had arisen from her candid estimate of herself, as
not worth so much covetousness, despair, and dispute. All the
flatteries she had been saturated with all her life had left her
brain cool, and had never warped her estimate of herself. She
would see coldness take the place of idolatry with the same
philosophic consciousness of its inevitability with which she
contemplated the certainty of age overtaking her upon the road
of life if she continued to live. Long before their approach she
had reasoned out the surety of the arrival of both, sure as the
surety of winter to the Russian plains. But still, nature shrinks
and withers before winter. Who can welcome it as they wel-
come summer %
With the inherent instinct of contradiction common to all
human nature she, who had nine times out of ten evaded his
caresses and repulsed his affections, was angered and felt
defrauded of her own because for once her power over him in
a measure failed in the exercise of its magnetism. To find
thoughts which occupied his mind to her exclusion was some-
thing so strange, so new, that it disturbed all her philosophic
serenity, and with that quick divination of the motives of men
with which her experience and her penetration supplied her,
she wondered if it were in truth only the memory of that poor
dead woman which had changed his manner and chilled his
caresses, or if it were some fresh and living influence 1
234
OTHMAR.
A certain cold contempt succeeded her anger as this possi-
bility suggested itself.
If he were like other men, after all? Well—why not?
Would she care greatly? She did not know. All she was
conscious of at the moment was that sense of astonishment, of
affront, of loss, with which a woman feels for the first time that
her power over any man has had its fullest sway, and has begun
to decline and waste.
It was a sensation she had never experienced before, and it
displeased her that she should be capable of feeling it.
' As if I were Jeannette and he were Jeanot !' she thought
with disdain for so bourgeois an emotion.
But it recalled to her sharply, painfully, whai the world
never had recalled to her hitherto ; that the tiriie must come to
her, no less than to others, when her empire over all men would
cease, when its sceptre would pass to other hands. It is a
knowledge which hurts with the humiliation of dethronement
every woman who has ever reigned.
There was nothing said by either which had the least actual
coldness or offence in it: yet the sense of offence and cold-
ness was between them, and many times he smarted under
some such touch of ridicule or of reproof from her as had used
to make Platon Napraxine stand like a chidden schoolboy before
her. He was neither so blunt of nerve nor so dull of com-
prehension as Napraxine had been ; and he had an impatient
revolt of compromised dignity when he became the target for
his wife's delicate and cruel ironies. True, he knew they were
a pari of her temper; as natural to her as its talon to the
falcon, as its pungent odour to the calycanthus. He did not
attribute too serious a meaning to them, knowing that her lips
were often merciless when her heart was kind. Yet they irri-
tated and estranged him. No man likes to feel that his charac-
ter is lessened or his opinions regarded with indifference by the
woman before whom he most desires to stand in a fair if not an
heroic light.
' My dear Otho,' she said a little irritably one day when he
had answered her with wandering attention, 'you are very
pensive and distrait since you came to Russia. What have you
been doing in the solitudes of a Parisian summer ? You look
as if you had been writing an epic and had failed in it.'
4 Death is never gay or agreeable,' said Othmar; ' and I
have been in its company.'
' My dear, when death does not come until our friends are
over eighty, surely we can see his approach without surprise
or any very great regret. Besides, I never knew that Baron
Friederich was remarkably sympathetic to you. You used to
quarrel with him about most things. But you have such a
curious waywardness in always regretting, when they are dead,
OTHMAR.
235
the absence of the very persons you most wished away from you
when they were living.'
Othmar shrank a little from the words, as though they hurt
him physically. They were true enough to be painful.
' Perhaps one knows their value too late,' he said, control-
ling with effort a strong impatience of her want of sympathy
and her unkind and careless amusement at his expense.
'Or perhaps we imagine a value in them they never pos-
sessed,' she replied. 'That is far more probable. Distance
lends enchantment to the view of them—at least it does with
such temperaments as yours, which are always self-tormenting
and given to idealising both things and people. When the
persons are living, to ruffle and weary and contradict you, you
only think what bores they are ; but when they are dead you
begin to idealise them, and sacrifice yourself to their manes in
all kinds of self-censure. It is a very morbid way of taking life.
I hope your son will not resemble you in that particular.'
' It is to be hoped, for his comfort, that he will rather re-
semble his mother in the art of immediate and complete oblivion
of both the dead and the living,' said Othmar, with an irritation
which was almost ill-temper, and a retort which passed the
limits of courtesy.
He had never felt so strong an annoyance as he felt now at
her ironical and slighting treatment of his thoughts and feel-
ings; so great an impatience of that tranquil and contemptuous
method of regarding life which never varied in her, and which
would never vary, it seemed to him, even before his own dead
body. Before it he felt that fatigue which human eyes feel
when long in the radiance of electric light. He longed for
simple sympathy, simple consolation, simple affection, as the
tired eyes long for rest in cool shadows of dusky dewy eves in
summer woods, and he was ill at ease with himself for what he
concealed from her.
Yet, he thought, of what use would it be to tell her of that
poor child at Les Hameaux ? She would have no pity certainly,
probably no patience, with what would seem to her the most
absurdly romantic course of adventures. She would ridicule
him as she ridiculed him now—if she believed him; and very
likely she would not even do that.
She looked at him under the languid lids of her dreamy
eyes : eyes so calm, so indifferent, so mysterious, so satirical in
their survey of him as of all mankind.
' My dear friend,' she said, with a little contempt and a
little rebuke in her tone, ' it seems to me that we are very
nearly—quarrelling! Nothing is so vulgar as to quarrel. I
have never done it in my life. It is a great waste of time ; and
nothing can be more bourgeois. I have never understood why
people should quarrel; it is so very easy to walk away !'
236
OTHMAR.
Therewith she rose and walked towards the open doors, with
that undulating movement of the hips and beautiful ease and
grace of step for which she was renowned through Europe ; no
woman's walk was comparable to hers.
Othmar remained standing where he was, and looked after
her with a sombre and regretful glance, in which some of the
old worship and passion lingered, united to a new-born anger
and offence. The mortification which lies for any man of intel-
ligence and feeling in the sense that he has never really touched
and held the soul of the woman of whose physical possession he
has been master, was upon him in a strong and cruel sense of
moral failure and of intellectual impotence. Was it his fault or
hers % Was it true, as he had said once to her, that you cannot
obtain more from any nature than it possesses, and that all the
forces of created life cannot draw fire from the smooth marble
or make the pale pearl blush like the opal % Was it that she
had it not in her to give any man more than that mingling of
momentary aphrodisiacal indulgence and of eternal immutable
derision ; and that whilst her power to create a heaven of physi-
cal passion was so great, her power of satisfying the exactions of
the heart and soul was slight %
Or was it, as the self-depreciation of his temperament led
him to think, that he himself had not moral and mental force
or intellectual greatness strong enough to obtain empire over
her mind—a mind so cultured, so refined, so exacting, so sati-
ated, that hardly any human companionship could succeed in
awaking in it any lasting interest ?
He had humility enough to believe the last.
The Princess Lobow Gregorievna, sitting mute and chill as
a statue of Nemesis, heard and watched, and in the depths of
her narrow darksome soul, filled with harsh creeds and as harsh
hatreds, said to herself that perchance, after all, her dead son
might yet be avenged by the mere results of time—that foe of
love, that friend of all disunion.
Their marriage had been abhorrent to her. It had seemed to
her eyes like a blow on the cheek given to her son's corpse.
Any laugh or smile of either of them seemed an affront to him.
Every glance of sympathy exchanged between them seemed a
mockery of his death, suffered for their sakes. She who had
never doubted that Othmar had betrayed her son in his life-
time, only cherished one hope in her chill breast—to see him
suffer the same fate. She had always felt that she would kiss
on both cheeks any lover of Nadine's who should make Othmar
feel the shame of a dishonoured name, the pangs of a betrayed
trust. But for that lover she had looked in vain. She had
always said to the hungry hate in her heart: 4 Patience ; time
will bring all things ; and the serpent may cast its skin but
keeps its nature,'
OTHMAR.
237
But of late years she had feared that nothing would ever
divide them.
Their lives seemed to her to pass on like a smooth full river,
without shoal or rapid, or any spate from storm. There was
many an hour when she lay stretched in semblance of devoutest
prayer before the holy eikon of the chamber altar, when all that
her soul uttered and her lips murmured were curses low and
long upon them both.
Year after year went on and brought her no gratification of
her desires and her hate. All things went well with them.
They had health and pleasure; happiness too, so far as happi-
ness comes to mortals. Their offspring throve in loveliness and
grace, and the world honoured and caressed them both. Some-
times, in the stern yet frantic hatred which she cherished, she
would pray that disease or pestilence might at least take the
woman's beauty from her; but her prayer passed ungranted.
Nadine had ever that serene immunity from all serious maladies
of the flesh which so often accompanies the fragile appearance
and sensitive nerves of women who, like her, declare themselves
made unwell by a discordant noise, an unpleasant odour, a
wearisome day, or any other trifle which displeases them. Even
the pains and perils of maternity her good fortune had made
unusually light to her, and except from that cause she had hardly
had a day's real suffering in her whole existence. To the sullen
eyes of Napraxine's mother she always seemed to bear a charmed
life.
Therefore with fierce dumb joy Lobow Gregorievna, with
her vigilant ear and eye, saw the one little rift within the lute,
heard the one jarring chord on the music. It was so slight that
no anxiety less keen than her own would have detected it; but
it was there.
He remained in Russia a fortnight, but during that time he
did not find any occasion which seemed to him propitious enough
for him to speak of Damaris, with any chance of obtaining sym-
pathy for her position or understanding of his own actions.
With that ignorance of what most concerns us, which is one of
the saddest things of life, he never dreamed that any change in
himself had made his wife as he found her to be, in one of her
most captious, most capricious, most unsympathetic moods. He
was not unused to these ; he attributed them now to the weari-
ness she felt at existence in the plains of Ural and impatience at
the companionship of the Princess Napraxine which he knew
was at all times irksome to her. He was not aware that he was
himself more absent of mind, less tender in manner, less frankly
and fully confidential in speech ; he was not aware that this one
thing untold, this one thought unrevealed, had caused an alter-
ation in him, slight and vague indeed, yet plainly perceptible to
her, skilled reader of manner and of mind as she was.
238
OTHMAR.
A delicate nature shrinks from the imputation of unworthy
motives, and a fastidious temper shrinks from any possibility of'
ridicule ; it was the dread of both which kept him silent as to
the friendship he had shown to the child from Bonaventure.
The apprehension of his wife's scepticism and ironies hung like
a grey mist over the generous impulses of his manhood, as in-
his earliest youth the certainty of his father's brutal cynicism
had lain like a stone on the poetic aspirations of his boyhood.
Even in those rare instants when she was moved to sympathy
with any unselfishness or any unworldliness, there was always in
her eyes some faint gleam of derision, there was always in her
voice some lingering accent of doubt and of raillery. She would
nave been capable of many great things in great emergencies
herself, but she would have been wholly incapable of refraining
from making a jest of them afterwards. It is the temper of all
wit ; it is the temper of much philosophy ; but it is not the
temper which invites the confidence or soothes the doubts of
another.
Confidence, like a swallow coming over seas in the storm and
sunshine of spring weather, will only nest where it is sure of a
safe shelter.
The higher, better, subtler emotions of the human heart will
not venture to come forth into the wintry air of mockery or
scorn ; they are shy blossoms which want the warm wind of a
sure sympathy to enable them to expand.
' If I told her, she would only think me either an imbecile
or a libertine,' he thought, and the tale went untold.
CHAPTER XXXII.
Amyot was still quite solitary when he returned from Russia.
The children were on the north coast by the sea ; its chatelaine
was still taking her desired presence with rare condescension
and alternative moods of ennui and irony to those royal hunting
castles and imperial pleasure places she deigned to honour; the
wide avenues, the great terraces, the blossoming gardens, the
sunlit colonnades of the modern summer dining-hall were only
tenanted by the last lingering butterflies which skimmed the air
with white wings, blue wings, scarlet wings, and the balmy
aromatic scent of the millions of roses which seemed to wander
through the empty places like a visible presence.
Usually whenever he came thither he was surrounded by that
society which was a necessity to his wife, even whilst it failed to
satisfy her, by that movement, gaiety, and entrain, which even
if they fail to amuse, yet can always in a manner distract thought
and fill up time. There seemed to him a strange silence, a
OTHMAR.
239
melancholy which was oppressive, in these stately places, usually
bo full of colour and pleasure, now so quiet and so lonely, with
only some noiseless servant passing with swift step across its
floors or down its staircases.
There was not even the song of a bird to break the stillness ;
it was early in autumn, and their sweet throats were mute.
He saw in remembrance the grace of his wife's movements
as she had passed down these great stairs, he saw the smile in
her eyes indulgent as to a child's weakness, ironical as of a man's
folly; he heard her voice saying, with that little sound in it of
some exquisite disdain falling from on high on mortal thoughts
as silvery fountain-water falls from marble heights on creeping
mosses:
i It is scarcely worth while to f aire des madrigaux.1
Had that speaker ever loved him even for five minutes of her
life ?
Had she ever known what love was? He thought of the
Court of Love which she had held under those oak trees yonder,
above whose rounded masses a white moon now sailed. With
what ingenuity, what subtlety, what philosophy, what absolute
knowledge of all love's minutest weaknesses and utmost mad-
ness, she had been able to discourse of it. But was it not such
knowledge as the physiologist's knowledge of pain in the creature
on which he experiments ? Of knowledge there is abundance,
of the chill and analytical knowledge of science, of the name and
structure of every torn tissue, of every bleeding fibre, of every
tortured nerve; but knowledge such as is born of fellow feeling,
of sensitive sympathy, of comprehending pity, there is none.
Was it not so with her ?
Had not love been always to her as the living organisation
which he tortures is to the physiologist ? Had she not, like him,
watched, studied, tabulated the agonies of the wretched creature
before her, whilst also, like him, she had never felt in her own
nerves one single thrill of pain ?
As her lover it had allured him with the intense attraction
of an impenetrable mystery, this attitude of her mind, this in-
difference, both sensual and spiritual, before the demands of
love. But as the companion of her life it left him with a sense
of dissatisfaction, and of unsatisfied desire. For years it had
served to excite and to sustain his passion, but as time wore on
it almost communicated its coldness to* himself; he began to
feel with a sense of terror, as before some disloyalty which he
could not escape, that the apathy, the fatigue, the absence of
emotion, which are the certain attendants on all satisfied
passion, were not far distant from himself.
The very air of Amyot seemed melancholy to him in these
late summer heats, without the usual gaiety and movement
which were there at most other seasons when he came to ic.
240
OTHMAR.
Solitude had always, in his youth, been welcome to him, and had
fatigued him less than the routine of society; but solitude
requires the charm of accompanying dreams, it needs the visions
of youth, the vague but glorious hopes of opening life ; and
Othmar had a vague sense that he would never dream any more,
that he grew old, that his fate was fixed, that never would any
very welcome or sweet response come to his wishes from the
voices of the future. He had had the poet's temperament with-
out the poet's power of expression ; he could not take the poet's
consolation, ' Sing to the Muses, and let the world go by.' His
destiny imprisoned him, and there was little sympathy between
himself and it.
As he walked in the moonlight, under the roofs of late roses
which shed their petals, white, crimson, and blush-coloured, on
him, dewy cool and sweet as the touch of his wife's cheek, a
servant brought him a pencilled note.
It said briefly :
4 There has been an accident. We are not hurt, but the train"
cannot take us on. Send your carriages for us. I saw in the
journals this morning that you were at Amyot.'
The paper had been sent from the town of Beaugency, whilst
it was signed 4 Blanche de Laon :' the last person on earth whose
presence he would have wished for in his solitude. Irritating,
distasteful, and even painful to him as her society was, yet he
could do no less than attend to such a request. He must have
complied with it had it come from a stranger. He at once sent
his brake and two other carriages, with fast horses, to do her
bidding, and returned indoors to give such orders as were need-
ful for this unexpected invasion of an unknown number of
guests.
It was late, and he himself had dined two hours before ; but he
ordered a supper to be got ready for the new comers, who might
not have dined at Orleans. He concluded that she was passing
from Paris to one of her chateaux near Saumur, where in late
summer and early autumn she often assembled the very dis-
tinguished, but somewhat noisy, society which regarded her as
its queen. His musings and his solitude had been roughly dis-
pelled ; and, though both had been somewhat j oyless, he regretted
them as an hour later he heard the roll of the returning wheels
and the stamping of impatient horses' hoofs in the great central
court of honour, and went perforce to meet and greet his unin-
vited guests.
The Princess Blanche, having herself driven the four horses
of the brake through the moonlit cross-roads which led from
Beaugency to Amyot, was in the highest spirits as she descended
from the box seat, and gaily greeted him in her shrill, swift
voice and her fashionable langue verte. There had been a severe
accident; a goods train had been met by the express ; the usual
OTHMAR.
241
story, as she said contemptuously. The line was strewn with
wrecked waggons and overturned engines; there had been no
possibility of proceeding to Blois. Had there been people killed 1
Oh, yes ; she believed so. ' On braillait Id-bas, n'est-ce pas,
Gontran ?' she said indifferently to one of her companions, and
added, with fervour, ' Tiens ! <Pai une faim de loup !'
* But you said that no one was hurt?' said Othmar, regretting
that he had not gone in person to the scene of trouble.
'None of us were,' she replied. ' We were in the centre of
the train. We felt the shock ; that was all. We were playing
the American " poker." The collision threw down the cards. I
should hare come to Amyot if you had not been here. No one
could pass the night at a country station. Besides, Amyot is
always ready for a hundred people.'
' Amyot is always at the service of all my friends,' replied
Othmar with sincerity, but with a certain stiffness. He disliked
her familiarity with him at all times, and was conscious that,
despite it, she bore no good will to himself or to his wife.
. She wasted no more words on him, but led the way into the
house, scarcely deigning to present to him those of her compan-
ions with whom he was not already acquainted. There was
some dozen of them, all, both men and women, notabilities of
that haute gomme which was the only world she recognised.
They had been travelling with her from Paris, being bidden for
a shooting party to her castle in Touraine.
Othmar conducted her to the great hall; then he said to
her :
' Everything is at your disposition, and all the household at
your command. You will excuse me if myself I leave you for
awhile to go and see if I can be of any use to those less happily
fated persons—qui braillaient Id-bas.'
She laughed.
' Ah ! you were always a Don Quixote. Even Madame
Nadkge has not cured you.'
' Your servants may have been hurt, or worse still, your
fourgons damaged. I will bring you news of them,' said Othmar,
with an irony which affronted whilst it amused her.
She went to her own apartments pour se debarbouiller ; and
a little later, surrounded by her fellow-travellers, sat down to
supper in the summer dining-hall, which shed its dazzling light
far out on to the dusky lawns and the pale aisle of the white
roses ; there was a banquet fit for the gods, though prepared at
such short notice ; the delicate wines circulated quickly; the
adventure was amusing ; the whole thing unexpected. Blanche
de Laon and all her companions were in the highest spirits, in a
more vulgar world they might even have been thought a little
intoxicated ; their laughter rang frequent and shrill and long
over the quiet gardens and the royal woods.
H
242
OTHMAR.
Meanwhile their host went to the scene of the late disaster,
and found a sight of frightful destruction and of many deaths,
while scores of poor horned cattle, mutilated and moaning,
lay in pitiful heaps of bruised and bleeding misery upon the
iron way.
It was noon in the following day when he returned to
Amyot, where all his unbidden guests were slumbering soundly
and late after their alarm and their fatigues.
He, tired out himself, went to his own rooms and rested as
well as he could rest for the sights and sounds of suffering which
haunted him in his sleep. He had done what he could to alle-
viate it; but that all seemed so little and so inefficacious. At
sunset he met all his undesired visitors at dinner. "
'Your wife is still in Russia 1' asked Blanchette that
evening.
Othmar assented.
4 Does it amuse her, Russia ? If it did not, however, she
would not stay there.'
4 It is her country, and her court.'
4 Of course. But that would not make her stay there if she
were bored. Why did not you stay too %'
4 I had business in France; the death of my uncle has
doubled my obligations and occupations.'
4 And some of your business lies at Chevreuse ?'
4 At Chevreuse ?'
He was astonished and was annoyed to feel himself also em-
barrassed. The blue cold eyes of Blanche de Laon were looking
at him with their penetrating supercilious malice over the
feathers of her great fan.
She smiled, amused and unmerciful.
4 Did Baron Fritz leave you that legacy at Chevreuse % It is
a very handsome one !'
41 do not understand to what you allude,' said Othmar, with
coldness and irritation.
She laughed ; a little short incredulous laugh.
4 My cousin ! If you do not want people to talk about it,
why do you stand in the middle of a hay-field with your uncle's
legacy 1—if it be your uncle's.'
Othmar was irritated and more embarrassed than he showed.
Blanchette was the last person on earth whom he would have
chosen to know anything of the more intimate details of his life.
He knew her unsparing tongue, the exaggerated colour she
could give to the slightest story, the smallest incident; the
malicious pleasure in mischief-making and in scandal which she
took at all times from mere natural malice and love of caustic
words. Whatever she saw, or knew, or guessed, she dressed up
In colours of her own invention, and made into comedies, to
divert herself and her world. Was it possible that she ha<i(
OTHMAR.
243
recognised Damaris ? He thought not. Many months had gone
by since the evening at St. Pharamond, and it was scarcely
probable that so great a lady, with her multiform interests,
excitement, and intrigues, had ever remembered the peasant
girl of Bonaventure.
He was silent because he was for the moment too amazed
to trust himself to speak, and Blanchette gazed at him over
her fan, with cruel satisfaction and entertainment at his visible
irritation.
' The open air is always so dangerous,' she said, maliciously.
( Even if you be sure there is nobody near, how can you be sure
there is not a balloon somewhere above you 1 or a field-glass
half a mile off? I had a field-glass; I was driving from Yer-
sailles. If the Baron left you many legacies like that one,
your affairs must be more agreeable than legal successions often
are.'
Then she laughed again, and rose and took her elegant per-
son, her shrill, cruel, little laugh, her pale, keen, penetrating
eyes into an adjoining room, where she gathered her adorers
about her to play at chemin de fer, and win or lose, in breathless
alternations, gold enough to dower fifty dowerless maidens, or
stock a score of farms, whilst without the still, cool, dewy night
lay soft as a blessing on the gardens and the woods and the great
distant river, with the shadowy vessels gliding to and fro, and
the little villages, dusky and noiseless, hidden away under the
vineyards and the pear trees.
She cared in nothing what he did ; he was profoundly indif-
ferent to her when she did not remember her dead cousin, and
then she hated him. She had not seen the features of his com-
panion in the fields of Les Hameaux, nor would she have
recognised them had she done so. The evening at St. Pharamond
was blotted and blurred into oblivion under the heaps of for-
gotten things of a past year which could have no place in a mind
engrossed in its own vanities and excitations, and living wholly
in the present. But she had recognised Othmar himself as her
carriage had passed yards off, and she had put up her field-glass
at the towers of the chateau of Dampierre ; and it had amused
her to find that he was just like other men, though he affected
such absurd, undivided devotion to one.
No doubt it was only an amourette; but it pleased her to
have something with which she could tease him when she felt so
disposed ; and it pleased her more strongly still to reflect that
his wife was losing her power over him, which she probably
was, she reasoned, if another woman were gaining any. Pure
malice was an integral part of her nature ; to irritate, torment,
and dominate people through their various little secrets seemed
to her the best part of the comedy of life. She had nothing of
the supreme indolent disdain of the woman she hated, or of her
244
OTHMAR.
absolute indifference. She loved to fourrer son nez in all holes
and corners. Her theory was that all knowledge was useful,
especially when it was knowledge to your friends' detriment;
and a lively and insatiable curiosity was her strongest guarantee
against ennui.
She thought complacently of the trouble she had cast into
his mind as she sat and played her game of hazard, the light
flashing on her rings and the gold she handled. No doubt the
thing was only an amour en milage, an absurdity, a caprice, some
rosy-limbed, coarsely-built nymph of La Beauce, who pleased
him for the hour because of her utter unlikeness to the great
ladies he lived amongst.
' Je les connais 1' thought Blanchette, with something of
Nadine's contempt for the sex. ' When they can drink out of a
hundred silver goblets they are always crazy for a brown cottage
pipkin. They are always like that.'
She attached no importance to the discovery that he walked
not unaccompanied in the fields of the vale of Chevreuse ; but
the knowledge that he did so had embarrassed him ; that was
enough to make it delightful to her.
It amused her to be at Amyot when its mistress was absent.
' Nous sommes tres Men installes,' she said carelessly to Othmar,
not even going through the form of inquiring as to his wishes,
and she and her party stayed on for the rest of the week. He
was displeased, but he could not tell them to go. His wife
could do that sort of thing; he could not. It seemed to him
impossible to make even self-invited guests realise that they
were not welcome. Blanche de Laon thought his compliance
argued fear of her, and was more diverted than before.
' Perhaps he is dying to get back to Chevreuse !' she thought
with much amusement. 4 But he is too courteous to turn us
out; he belongs to the last century.'
She was not grateful for his courtesy ; she, rather, despised
him for it.
One morning she took a fancy to wander over the house by
herself ; it was an immense building, and to visit it thoroughly
would have taken more hours than she gave it minutes; but
even in her rapid and cursory fashion, she covered a good deal
of ground.
' It is really a royal place,' she thought. 4 We have nothing
like it. La Finance gets everything.'
She disliked Othmar ; he was everything that she detested
in man : he was reserved, punctilious, prejudiced; he had a
distant manner of cold courtesy, which was not at all of her own
generation ; he was <grave, often preoccupied, and always blind
to her own attractions : yet as she went over she wished tha$
she had married him.
0T1IMAR.
245
4 Quel diable de vie je lui aurais donne !' she thought with
oomplacency, and how amusing it would have been !
Bertrand de Laon was not rich ; at least not rich enough for
the enormous expenditure at which they lived ; and then he
was so stupid, so amiable, so devoted, that there was no kind of
pleasure in doing him every sort of wrong that a woman can do
a man ! He never knew anything about it, or, if he did know,
never resented anything. She grew tired of kicking this poor
spaniel, who, beat him as she would, always came humbly and
caressingly to her feet.
As she wandered about the house she came on the doors
which led to the apartments of Yseulte. They were locked.
She sent one of her companions to fetch the major-domo.
4 Open these doors,' she said imperiously to the official, who
timidly answered that he dared not; except by his master's
orders they could never be unlocked. 41 have his orders, open
them,' said Blanchette, with such authority in her tone that the
man never dreamed she was not speaking the truth ; besides it
seemed to him to be natural enough ; she had been, he knew,
the cousin german of the dead Countess Othmar. He fetched
the duplicate keys he possessed, and opened the doors : great
doors of cedar-wood like all those at Amyot, with intricate locks
of old Florentine work of steel and silver. Then he went in
and opened also some of the shutters of the apartments, letting
in the warm summer light from without on some portions of the
rooms, whilst other parts of them were left in darkness.
Blanchette shut out her companions with her usual uncere-
monious manner.
4 It is not for you,' she said curtly, and banged the doors in
their faces with that insolence which was considered by others
as by herself d'un chic supreme.
She had never been able to come there before, for she had
never before been at Amyot in the absence of its mistress. She
was not sure why she came now ; partly because she thought it
would annoy Othmar, partly from a movement of that remem-
bered affection for the companion of her childhood, which was
the only thing of any tenderness which had ever sprung up in
the breast of Blanchette : one tiny flower of sentiment blossom-
ing on a granite soil. The sentiment had been rooted in selfish-
ness ; 4 she used to give me so many things !' she thought always,
whenever she remembered her.
The little volume of manuscript poems was in its place ;
Othmar had hesitated to remove it; everything was in the rooms
as when Yseulte had lived, and no eyes but his own had ever
beheld them. He had returned more than once to read again
those poor fragments, so simple in language, so immeasurable
in devotion: read them with a mist before his sight and the
sense of some base ingratitude in himself which had come to him
246
OTHMAR.
on his first discovery of them. He had always replaced them
with a lingering and reverent touch in the drawer, whence he
had first taken them, where they lay now with a crumpled glove,
two or three faded roses, and some notepaper with her initials
in silver on it. The restless penetrating agile glance and fingers
of Blanchette, touching, seeing, alighting on all things, and
skimming over each with the lightness of swallows, brought her
to that drawer amongst other places, and showed her the little
volume lying with the dead roses. She took it up, and turned
over the pages rapidly ; looking on it here, there, everywhere ;
scanning a hundred lines in the space of time that would have
served to others to see only half a score. The familiar hand-
writing, the pathetic words, the mixture of ignorance and of
intensity, the force of strong emotions striving to express them-
selves in an unwonted manner, and half observed, half revealed
by the unaccustomed livery of language, had a certain effect
upon her as she stood in the empty rooms before one of the
great casements, and turned over the leaves of the little book,
half contemptuous, half reverential.
If she had read such lines in a printed volume, she would
have tossed it away with her most terrible sneer. ' Pleurni-
cheuse !' she would have said, with a grin of her white small teeth;
but read in the handwriting of her dead cousin, they affected
her differently ; they did not seem ridiculous ; they brought
home to her the fact that this world, which was but a masked
ball, a mad fete, a continual comedy to herself, might be to
others, who yet were not wholly fools, a place of martyrdom,
endured in silence. Her shrewd and quick intelligence supply-
ing the place of sympathy, could read between the lines ; could.
make her understand as Othmar had understood, all that was
unuttered, or only half uttered, in those halting, timid, tender,
wistful verses.
' Dame ! Gomme Jest drdle!' she murmured to herself : it
was droll that anyone with youth, with fortune, with beauty,
with all the pleasures, and pastime, and pomps of existence at
her call, should have wasted her time and her tears in useless
lament, because the heart of one man was cold to her. It was
droll; it was absurd ; it was contemptible ; and yet she closed
the little velvet book, and laid it down by the worn glove,
and the dead roses with a vague admiration, with a certain
respect.
But her heart" grew harder than before against the man who
had been thus loved, and had given no throb of love in answer.
She remembered the words of Freiderich Othmar at the
mausoleum in the grounds yonder: ' She would wish you to
spare him.' Yes, no doubt, poor, generous, heroic, saintly,
foolish soul!—if she could know, if she could speak, if she could
interpose, she would always come from her grave to save or to
OTHMAR.
247
Berve the husband who had never had one impulse of love for
her. But the dead know nothing ; the dead never stir ; ' quand
on est mort c'est pour longtemps,' thought Blanchette, with grim
realism, as she closed the drawer which held the little poem :
and meanwhile, if ever she herself had the chance, she would do
as she had said : she would rub the sand into the gall, she would
widen any wound that she saw.
She thought to herself, ' If she had lived, perhaps ' per-
haps she would have kept alive some little green place in her
own soul; perhaps she would have kept her own steps aloof
from some vices which were not all sweetness ; perhaps she
would have had something in her own life besides insolent
audacity, merciless intrigue, and insatiable curiosity of unattain-
able excitations : it was a consciousness of her own loss, in the
loss of the one purer influence which her life had ever known,
which made the arid and frivolous nature of Blanche de Laon
cherish her hatred for those who seemed to her as the murderers
of Yseulte with a ferocity and tenacity of remembrance which
was the only impersonal emotion she had ever known.
Avarice, expenditure, vanity, corruption, every ingenuity of
self-indulgence and of physical licence, filled up her own days,
and left no space for any memory which was not selfish, any
desire which was not base ; she had copied and exaggerated the
egotism of ZSTadine Napraxine until it had become a monstrosity,
and she had replaced the physical indifference of her model by
appetites and curiosities which were both morbid and insatiable.
Yet her life at times failed to satisfy her, and at such time the
recollection of Yseulte came to her as a cool breeze will touch
the hot forehead of a drunkard. Things which had been odious
and ridiculous to her in all others, had looked worth something
when mirrored to her in the clear soul of her childhood's com-
panion ; when Yseulte had passed out of her life she, little
greedy, callous cynic of a child though she had been,.had vaguely
felt that something had gone away from her which would never
be replaced.
' Poor little saint! Poor little fool!' she thought now, with
as near an approach to tenderness and reverence as her tempera-
ment could approach, as she cast a lingering glance over the
lonely rooms, with the dead flowers in the vases, the dust of
years on the walls, the stray sunbeams slanting on to the empty
bed, the scent of late roses and autumn fruits coming in through
the dusky shadows and close odours within.
' Poor little saint! Poor little fool!'
As she stood thus, Othmar, passing through the gardens, saw
the windows open which were by his command always closed.
He was immediately beneath them, and he called aloud in tones
of exceeding anger : ' Who has ventured to enter there ? '
Blanche de Laon heard, and her insolent, fair, small face
248
OTHMAR.
looked out from one of the open places in the old painted case-
ments, guarded with their scrolls of iron.
' It is I,' she said, with the usual impertinence of her accent
hushed into quietude, almost into sadness. Then she leaned
her elbows on the stonework of the sill, and put her face close
to his. He was almost on a level with her, for those rooms
were raised but a metre or two from the ground.
He grew pale with indignation.
' Madame de Laon,' he said in a low tone, through which all
his anger thrilled, ' when I put all my house at your disposition
there were some things in it which I did not suppose it neces-
sary to enjoin you to respect.'
' ' Pooh !' said Blanchette, resting her elbows on the stone
and her chin on her hands. ' I have more title in her rooms
than you ; I have not forgotten her.'
His face flushed ; he hesitated a moment.
i What means did you take to induce my servants to disobey
me ?' he asked, avoiding her later words.
' I told them I had your authority,' said Blanchette care-
lessly. ' What can it matter to you ? You never come here.
You never go to her grave. Your uncle did. Even I do. But
you—never.'
Othmar was silent. He hated this woman with her impu-
dent pale face, her high satirical tones, her overbearing effron-
tery, and he hated to see her there in the rooms which had
been the bridal chambers of Yseulte in the one brief summer of
happiness which she had known.
Blanchette looked down at him with hard cold eyes ; she,
on her side, hated him no less at that moment. There was no
one within hearing ; the western garden on which these rooms
looked was the loneliest though the loveliest place in Amyot;
and since the death of Yseulte it had been so unfrequented,
that hares would come and nibble at the moss-roses under the
windows, and once a stag from the herds of red deer cast loose
in the park had dared to enter and drink his fill at the fountain.
' Tims !' said Blanchette, leaning from the window, her arti-
ficial pale blonde beauty looking akin there. i She broke her
heart for you: one laughs at those things in the world; they
are good for the "Traviata," not out of it; it was absurd—
grotesquely absurd; and yet in her one knows it was true.
When I was a child, and she married you, I wanted her to
think of the fine clothes, the fine jewels, the fine houses, all the
rest of it—all the things we give ourselves for—but she never
cared. She said once, "If he were a beggar I should be
happier, because then he would be sure that it is for himself
that I care." Oh yes, she would have gone barefoot in the dust
after you if you had held out your hand. And you—you did
not see it or know it, or thank her for it; all you cared for was
OTHMAR.
249
Nadine Napraxine. It is always so. It is always the other—
the other that we cannot have. And now " the other" is your
wife ; and so you go to the meadows in Chevreuse. How like a
man I _ And to think that such a woman as Yseulte should
have died for you ! Pouah I If she had known you as I know
men she would not have wasted a hair of her head on you.
Pouah /'
Then she banged the casement close, and left him standing
there. He might rage in his heart as he chose, what did she
care for his wrath or for his amours or for his whole existence ?
What she had cared for was the dead girl who had died for him.
That she had insulted him in return for his hospitality and his
courtesy was delightful to her. In that moment she would
have liked to insult him before the whole world.
Othmar paused a moment, looking blankly up at this window
of his own house thus shut in his face; then, with slow step,
and with his head down, he pursued his way through the
western garden. His guest had insulted him, but the worst
sting of the insult lay in its truth. It was true, most true ; he
owned to himself that he had been wholly unworthy the sacrifice
of such a life as Yseulte's.
Yet, he thought, in the words which had been quoted under
the oaks of Amyot in the Court of Lpve, ' How is it under our
control to love or not to love ?'
Love is not to be commanded, and naught less than a great
and undivided love could ever have given happiness and faith
in itself to so delicate, to so sensitive, to so perfectly and
sincerely humble a nature as that of the dead girl whose bridal
hours had been passed in those closed chambers, around whose
casements theqvy climbed and the swallows nested undisturbed
as the seasons passed. The rough, sharp, upbraiding words of
Blanche de Laon smarted in his memory, as the cut of a knife
smarts in the flesh. They only repeated in coarse emphasis
what his own conscience had said to him ever since he had found
the little manuscript poems in the drawer with the faded roses.
Before then, with the blindness of a man whose whole soul is
centred on another passion than the one which claims his
sympathy, he had never once dreamed that the death of Yseulte
had been self sought.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Damahis, meanwhile, was altogether at ease as to her OAvn cir-
cumstances. No doubt ever entered her mind as to the legacy
bequeathed by her grandfather; it was more than enough for
all her wants, and she understood that she could live at Les
Hameaux easily, all her lifetime, if she chose. But without
250
OTHMAR.
any apprehension for her future, she was not without that un-
rest which is the inseparable companion of all ambition. The
remembrance of the wife of Othmar was like a thorn in her side :
she had an eager, passionate, thirsty desire to justify herself
in the sight of that great lady, to become something which could
not be derided or denied or set aside with contempt. The
memory of that day under the roof of St. Pharamond was con-
tinually with her, in all its humiliation and its disappointment,
and its sharp cruel sense of being a barbarian amongst the
highest grace and culture that were possible to human life
and manners. It had been a glimpse into an unknown land
never to be forgotten ; the gates to it had been shut in her face,
almost as soon as opened ; but the dreams which had come to
her through them remained with her, and pursued her sleeping
and waking.
She threw herself into the resources of study with a kind of
passion. In books, she thought, lay all the secrets of the spells
of power.
When he had bidden her wed a farmer of La Beauce he had
wounded her in a way that she could not forget; not because
she despised that homelier life of the husbandman, but because
she thought that he deemed her incapable of the higher life of
the intellect or the soul. She had been violently uprooted from
all her childish associations, and severed from all the habits,
thoughts, and attachments which had been hers from birth.
The shock of that separation had intensified and deepened the
sensitive side of her nature, and subdued the sanguine insouci-
znce of it. She was not happy at Les Hameaux as she had been
happy on Bonaventure ; but she was still companioned by many
dreams, and still full of high courage, though the dreams had
lost something of their splendid phantasy, and the courage had
lost something of its rash undoubting faith.
At times she longed for her old playmate, the sea, with a
curious painful yearning—the yearning of the home-sickness
of the exile.
4 How well I can understand,' she said once to Rosselin,
4 that Napoleon longed all his life for the smell of the earth cf
Corsica. All my life I am sure I shall smell the smell of the
fresh sea water leaping up in the wind under the orange boughs
and the bay leaves ; there is nothing like it here, though the
pastures smell sweet in the dew.'
In a short time she had changed much. She had become
still taller, and the peachlike bloom of her face had paled. She
had the look in her eyes of one who studies assiduously the
great thoughts of great writers ; she had a less childlike and
boylike beauty, and one more intellectual and spiritual. Months
count as years at her age, and the southernJblood of the Bdrardes
matured early.
OTHMAR.
251
Bosselin watched her growth with pride. Her softened
accent, her subdued gesture, her intelligent comprehension of
intellectual things, her simple but picturesque clothing, were all
due to his training or his suggestion. He had taken her to great
libraries, famous galleries, historic palaces, and had taught her
to understand the true and the false in art; he had taken her
to recitals of the Conservatoire, and even to rehearsals at the
great theatres, where, secured from observation, she could her-
self observe, and realised, as she listened, all the many traits
and the many efforts which go together to make up admirable
dramatic representation. He never allowed anyone to speak to
her, scarcely to see ,her, but he gave her thus that training of
the eye and of the ear without which no great artist can be
created.
' Nature does much,' he said to her. ' Yes. But art is a
different thing to nature. Art is three parts divine, but it is
one part human, and that human part requires the most un-
wearied and elaborate training. The sculptor may bring a god
out of the clay in the fire and the fever of his inspiration, but
if he have not studied the laws of anatomy, the limbs of his
god will be out of proportion, and one leg will be shorter than
the other.'
In the artistic circles there went a whisper about that Rosse-
lin had some paragon whom he was educating, and would pro-
duce some day; but every one feared the sarcastic power of the
great artist's tongue too much to meddle, unasked, with his
concerns, and Damaris, under his guidance, passed unmolested,
almost unobserved, through the intricate mazes of that art-
world, which she touched without entering it.
One day, when she had been taken to a recital at the Con-
servatoire, he had left her alone for a few moments ; the recital
was over, the pupils had left the stage; the professors were
conversing together; from the floor there rose a cloud of dust,
and from the hot, pent air a strong noisome odour. Her eyes
ached, her temples throbbed ; she, whose whole life had been
passed in the fragrance of the open air, in the freshness of
buoyant sea winds, felt stifled, stunned, nauseated. Fame
itself seemed hateful, approached through this vitiated atmo-
sphere. To pass your years in boxes of brick and stone, in cages
of wood and iron, rather than in the glad freedom of glancing
waters and unchecked movement over golden sands and flower-
ing meadows, was it not madness indeed ?
She remembered the words of Othmar, bidding her live
the life that was led on the wide cornlands of La Beauce. All
that was strong in her, and born to freedom, and filled with the
love of the sea, and the joys of untrammelled movement through
sunlit air, and against fruit-scented breezes, rose in nausea and
revolt against the pent-up life of the artist in cities.
252
OTHMAR.
Where, oh where, was the open-air theatre of the Greeks,
with no dome but the blue sky, and the voices of the chorus
echoed by the sounds of the sea-waves breaking to surf upon
the marble stairs 1
'What are you thinking of1? Your eyes look wild,' said
Rosselin, rejoining her.
' I was thinking that I could never speak upon a covered
stage : the air would choke me !'
Rosselin looked at her in silence. He himself was think-
ing of Aimde Desclee, of the bohemienne who had always
wanted the fresh air, the free sunlight, the unpaid laughter, the
unbought love.
Aimee Desclee seemed to rise before him, and cry to him :
' Why tempt another on my path ?'
He said to her solemnly and tenderly, while his voice
sounded very grave in the silence of the emptied theatre :
' My dear, we cannot call back the Athens of Pindar for
you, nor yet give you the ideal world of your fancy. If you
want to be great in our world as it is, you must breathe its air,
which is dust and chokes sensitive lungs. When the air is gold
dust it is not much lighter to breathe, though people fancy it
light as the air of the planet Yenus. If you decide that it will
be too weighty for yours, I do not say that you will not decide
wisely. Your friend Othmar has told you that obscurity and
liberty are the happier choice. He is a man who knows by
experience how painful a thraldom are eminence and wealth.
You yourself may attain eminence, and wealth too, possibly,
probably, but you cannot do so and remain free to be all day
long under the blue sky. You must dwell in the air that is
full of dust, and poisoned by being shared by a million mouths.
That air killed Aimee Desclee.'
Damaris was silent.
She went out beside him through the sordid ways and
shabby passages of this temple of the acolytes of fame, and
thence into the crowded streets, which were grey with a leaden-
coloured slow rain.
Oh, how sweet the rain was in the country, scudding over
the green fields, brimming in the grass holes, hanging from the
orchard boughs, shining in the window lattices, lying in the
great dock leaves ! How the snails came out in the glistening
roads, and the birds drank it from off the ground, and the
ducks went about in the little shallows it left, and how merry
and glad the whole land was !
' You love the country,' said Rosselin, when they had
walked the length of some streets in silence. ' You love the
country, my dear. Stay in it; you have enough to live on ;
let fame go by, unsought, unmourned '
Damaris sighed :
OTHMAR.
253
* But if I do not do something great she will always say that
I could not. She will always despise me.
'Who?'
■ ' His wife.'
' Othmar's 1'
'Yes.'
' Ah !' said Rosselin ; he understood the motives which
moved her more completely than she understood them herself.
' Do not think of that capricious woman,' he said with irrita-
tion. ' Be sure that the day after she saw you she had forgot-
ten that you existed.'
The colour rose to the face of Damaris.
'I wish to make her remember,' she said under her breath.
' Ah !' said Rosselin once more.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
One evening in October Rosselin walked beside his pupil
amongst the fields of Les Hameaux. She had had her lesson
in elocution in the afternoon; a lesson in which he was in-
exorably hard to please, a very tyrant over all the minutiae
of accent and of expression; and now in the walks at sunset
he had relaxed into all that benignity and bonhomie which were
most natural to him in the company of women and of children.
' I am afraid I do not please you,' she had said with some
dejection.
' If you did not, my dear, do you think I would come thrice
a week to Chevreuse to train you 1' he answered. ' It is
because you have exceeding natural talent, because you have
uncommon gifts, a flexible and beautiful voice, quick percep-
tions, and that intuitive comprehension which is the innermost
soul of art, that I deal with you harshly to compel you to
acquire all that artificial treatment of your own powers which
is absolutely indispensable to success. If I had not seen genius
in you it would not have been merely to please Othmar that I
would have told you to give yourself to art; I should have said
to you, on the contrary : "Go and marry a farmer of La
Beauce, spin and sew, and wear a silk gown on Sundays ; have
any number of children ; be an ordinary woman in a word."'
' Marry a farmer of La Beauce !'
She coloured with indignation. Was it not what Othmar
himself had said to her ?
' It is not a life to be despised,' continued Rosselin. ' They
live in corn as the crickets do. You, who are so fond of
country things, would be happy enough if—if—you had never
read Racine and Hugo, if you had not that fermentation of the
fancy in you which seethes and stirs and smokes until out of it
254
OTHMAR.
comes the wine of genius. The swallows cannot stay in the
fields as the linnets do. There is something in them that
makes them go when the hour is come. They do not know
what it is; they obey an imperious instinct. They cannot stay
if they would. They go blindly, and very often they drop
down dead in mid-ocean, and never see the rose fields of
Persia or the magnolia woods of Hindostan, as they meant to
do; yet they go.'
Unknown to herself, a strong impulse moved her to prove
to the wife of Othmar that the brin be genie was hers; a true
bough of laurel, not a spurious weed. The indifference and the
oblivion of this, the first great lady she had ever seen, still
remained in her memory with the sting of an affront which
nothing could efface. The world was represented to her eyes
by that one delicate, smiling, negligent, cruel critic, whom she
passionately admired, whom she unconsciously challenged. The
child had no vanity, but she had great pride ; the pride of the
aristocrat and the pride of the republican had been inherited
by her, each stubborn as the other. Her pride had been
wounded, and her ambition and her dreams excited. She
knew that she might drop, like the tired swallow that crosses
the sea, into the deep abyss of failure and oblivion; but, like
the swallow, the instinct which moved her was irresistible.
Posselin saw that it was so, and he was too utterly an artist
in every fibre of his being to be able to preyail on himself to
discourage her wholly. He believed that she would become the
glory of the French stage; that very union of the strength of
the peasant and the delicacy of the patrician, which was so
marked in her physically and mentally, seemed to him to pos-
sess that rare originality which all those destined to be great
in any art are stamped with from their birth. He did not
admit to her how much he admired her, but when she recited
to him at one lesson those passages which had been set to her
at a previous one, he was secretly amazed at the justness of her
reading of them, the accuracy of her rendering, and he mar-
veiled where in her simple life, set between sea and sky as it
had been, she had reached such understanding of the greatest
utterances of great minds.
' Yet what a fool I am to wonder,' he thought a moment
later. ' As if it were not always so with genius, or as if any-
thing less than that ever could be genius.'
But he took care not to utter that word often to her. All
he ever granted to her was that she might arrive at something,
perhaps, if she studied hard ; if she were resolute and yet
humble ; if she accepted all his corrections and instructions,
and did her best .to lose that southern accent which would
send all Paris into Homeric laughter if it were ever heard upon
any stage.
OTHMAR. 255
'It could only be permitted,'he added, 'if you were reciting
Mireille.'
She did not know what he meant, but she listened to his
pure and exquisite pronunciation, and did her uttermost
docilely to acquire it, as to obey and execute all Ms teachings.
Then, when their lesson was over, not seldom he would
unbend utterly, and strolling with her through the meadows,
or sitting beneath the trelliswork of the porch with the rose
leaves falling on his white hair, he would tell her the most
wonderful and enchanting of stories, merely drawing all of
them from the innumerable treasures of that wonder-horn, his
own manifold experiences. He said not a word that would
hurt her. All that would be learnt soon enough.
' JTen ai vu tant!' he would think often as he left the Croix
Blanche in the warm evenings. He had seen the world devour
so many, like the dragons that were fed on white flesh. But
he fancied she would be one of those who bind the dragon, like
St. Marguerite, and make it follow them slavishly.
She had strength in her, the strength of the old mountain
race of Bdrarde. He knew nothing of those dead people who
had ruled land and sea in the dark ages, and perished finally
under the axe on the scaffold ; but there were a vitality and a
force in her which seemed to him destined to conquer where
weaker natures gave way and failed.
Provided only, he thought, provided only that she would
have as many passions as there were grains of sand on her own
Bea-shores, but amongst them all no real love.
Passion is the most useful of teachers to any artist; that he
knew; but love is the destruction of all art. Mademoiselle
Mars lived through a blaze of glory; Adrienne Lecouvreur died,
in her youth. Bosselin did not trouble himself about conven-
tional morality. He took the world as he had found it. He
respected this child's supreme innocence, and would not have
sullied it by a breath ; but, casting her horoscope, he would have
given her the heart of Rachel, not that of Desclee, if he had had
the power. It is better to be the tigress which preys than the
hind which bleeds.
He was no cynic ; he only knew the world well, and well
knew what the world makes of women.
On est broye, on on broie les autres. There is no middle path
for those who once have left the cool secluded ways of privacy
and joined the crowd which pushes at the brazen gates of fame.
But still, to Rosselin, to have passed these gates seemed the
perfection of human triumph.
' What all who are not artists underrate,' he said to Damaris,
as they passed beside the round tower of the dovecote, ' is the
artist's joy in the mere power of expression. It is a mistake to
suppose that it is the ignis fatuus of celebrity which allures the
OTHMAR
young poet, the young musician, the young painter ; that is
very secondary with him. What overmasters him is the longing
for the opportunity of expression; the besom de se faire sentir,
which is as powerful and imperious as the besom Maimer. I
first played in a barn to villagers ; I had a grand part, Robert
Macaire ; I was as perfectly happy as when I later on played at
the Frangais to emperors and their courtiers. It is the same
delight as the lark feels in singing, as the swan feels in swim-
ming, as the heron feels in slowly sailing through the air : the
ecstasy in the expansion of natural powers. But the majority
of men know nothing of that. The custom-house officer would
not believe that Berlioz was composing music as he sat on a
rock above the sea. They laughed in his face and said : " Where
is your piano 1" This is as far as the world goes ; it under-
stands the piano, but not the music which is mute in the soul.'
He rested as he spoke on a stone of what had once been the
great' abbey of the fields :' the fields were there unchanged, it
was only the great thinkers whose brains were dust.
' I had no such romantic cradle as you possessed in your
island of orange groves,' he continued. '1 was born in a little
dusky, close, noisome shop in a back street of Yierzon, that
dreary town of our dreary district of the Sologne. My grand-
father had been born in that shop before me. Everything in it
was poverty-stricken, ugly, vulgar, sordid; and vulgarity is so
much worse than any ugliness, and sordid small aims and hopes
are so much worse than any poverty ! Of course no one need
be ignoble in a shop, even in a shop where they sell tallow. I
suppose Garibaldi was not, but my people were. Well, in that
little stuffy plebeian den, only frequented by the lowest of the
ironworkers and the canal bargemen, beautiful fancies thronged
on me and noble visions haunted me, as they did you in your
sea-girt orange thickets, and I used to sit in my hideous attic
and recite verse to the one star which was all I could see
through a chink in the wall, as you did, you tell me, to the
whole of the southern skies glowing above your balcony. It
was not fame that I wanted ; I never thought of it ; I longed
to hear my own voice in the glory of the words ; I longed to
leap up and shout to all the sleeping town ; I longed to cry out
to the Immortals, wherever they were, "I have understood
you, I am not unworthy !" Ah, those beautiful impersonal
enthusiasms of youth! Fame ! It is of nothing so narrow or
so selfish that we think!'
The tears rose to his eyes : half a century and more had
rolled away from him ; he was a boy again, dreaming his dreams
as he wandered over the sandy wastes of the Sologne.
'Ah, my dear,' he said with a sigh, 'how miserable I
thought I was in that little ugly house, with the sluggish canal
water slipping past its walls, and the black-faced iron puddlers
OTHMAR.
257
quarrelling over my father's short weight! It stifled me; it
cramped me ; it killed me ! so I thought. But I got away from
it, nevertheless. Pegasus came for me in the shape of a towing-
horse, which carried me away to Issoudun first, and to a new
life afterwards. I had the seven lean years as a strolling
player; a jack at a pinch, a Jean-qui-rit or a Jean-qui-pleure, as
it was wanted ; and then I had more than thrice over the seven
fat years, and all that men call success. I have had all the
best things that there are in life, and I do not think I should
have had as many of them if I had remained in the dingy little
shop all my days, as my father wished me to do. Poor old
father ! he came to see me once in Paris—once, when I was
thirty years old, and in the height of my best triumphs ; and
he was dazzled and dazed, and did not very well understand,
but he found out that my servants charged me four times too
much a pound for candles. " Un grand liomme toi ! " he said,
with a sneer at me, " et tu n' sais pas la prix d'une bougie ! " The
world admired me : he never did. I was always to him a fool
who burned wax instead of tallow. There is always something
to be said for the bourgeois point of view ; but it is narrow—
narrow. After all, the storms and sunshine on Parnassus are
better than the worry over a lost centime in the back parlour.
I have been a successful artist in my day, but I should have
been a very indifferent shopkeeper, because I never could bring
myself to care for that lost centime—though I have lost
many!'
He rose with a laugh, remembering the grand gaspillage of
his generous and careless manhood. It had not been wise, per-,
haps, but it had been delightful ; and, after all, he had as much
as he wanted now in his little river-side house, his good wall
fruits, and his first editions of Moliere and of Marivaux. He
would not have been a whit happier had he been a million-
aire.
As the frank mellow sound of his laughter echoed on the
air, and the shadow of the doves' tower lengthened behind
them on the grass, the notes of a horn in the fanfare which
is called La Brisee, blew loud and full over the fields to their
ears.
' What is that ?' cried Damaris, startled at the sound which
she had never heard before.
' I forgot; it is the first day for hunting,' said Bosselin,
listening. ' It is the ouverture de la chassed
As he spoke some equestrians rode out from a thicket across
the field in which they were. They were members of the hunt
of Dampierre, clad in a picturesque costume and looking like a
picture of the time of Louis Quinze as the warm sunset light
fell across them. They rode on quickly towards the west
whence came the notes of the hunting fanfare.
s
258
OTHMAR.
They did not look towards herself or Rosselin; but a few
seconds later another huntsman, whose hunter was lame, came
by in their wake more slowly, leading his horse. He turned
his head, paused a moment or two, then rode straight towards
them.
It was the Due de Bethune. He doffed his tricornered
gold-laced hat and bade Rosselin, whom he knew well, good-
evening ; then glanced at Damaris.
' Mademoiselle Berarde !' he said, hesitatingly. * Surely I
do not mistake ?'
She looked at him with recognition.
'You came to the island with her,' she said, rather to her-
self than to him. The colour grew hot in her face ; all the
unforgettable shame of that day was with her in bitter recol-
lection.
' I am honoured by so much remembrance, and grateful to
the hole in the turf which lamed my horse.'
'That is language for the chateau of Dampierre,' said
Rosselin. ' M. le Due has lost his way, I think ?'
' No ; I know my road,' said Bethune, who understood the
old man's meaning. ' And I never speak any language,
Rosselin, but that which best conveys my real thoughts. You,
who are so perfect an artist in speech, must be aware that I am
a very clumsy one. Is there any smith here who could look to
my poor beast 1'
' You can put him up at the house where I live,' said
'Damaris. ' It is a very little way off ; we can show you.'
' That will be sweetest charity,' said Bethune.
Rosselin did not see his way to prevent what annoyed him.
The Duke, with the bridle over his arm, walked beside her over
the pasture ; the notes of the Brisee had ceased ; the hunt had
passed onward westward, where Dampierre was.
Bethune spoke to her with deference and interest, but she
answered him briefly and absently. Rosselin kept up the con-
versation. Suddenly she said in a low tone :
' You have seen her—lately ?'
Bethune was surprised.
'You mean the Countess Othmar, your hostess of St.
Pharamond 1 Yes ; I saw her a week ago. We stayed together
at the same country house in Austria, and I shall soon see her
again at Amyot. That is her castle, as I dare say you know,
on the Loire.'
Damaris said nothing. She paced onward, a little in ad-
vance of him and of Rosselin ; her head was drooped, her face
was thoughtful.
' She was not as kind to you in appearance that day as, I
assure you, that she was in feeling,' said Bethune, not knowing
well what to say. ' She is capricious and negligent, but she
OTHMAR.
259
has a mind that is very generous and true in its instincts, and
those instincts were all your friends and admirers.'
Daman? ,emained silent.
' The chief instinct of the lady you speak of is to provide
herself with amusement,' said Rosselin curtly. ' She usually
fails, because the world is so small.'
' You are unjust to her,' said JBethune, her loyal servant
and courtier. ' I am sure that she felt the truest interest in
Mademoiselle Be'rarde. We were all of us distressed when we
learned that that magic isle was tenantless.'
'The new Yirginie has left her isle,' said Rosselin, 'and I
am endeavouring that she shall not make shipwreck on these
stormy seas of art ,ind life. My dear duke, great ladies like
your chatelaine of Amyot let fall idle words, never thinking
what they may bring forth. It is so easy to destroy content
and to suggest ambition. But to efface a suggestion is very
hard when once it has taken root in a young mind.'
Bethune guessed at his meaning. ' The world will be the
gainer,' he said, as they entered the courtyard of the Croix
Blanche.
Damaris called a man to his horse, then, without even look-
ing at him, she crossed the court and went indoors, and he saw
her no more.
' She is very much changed,' said Bethune in surprise a3
he looked at the dusky archway of the door through whose
shadows she had passed from his sight. 'What is her story
since I saw her on that happy island ; I shall never forget it;
its blue sea, its radiant air, its scent of orange-flowers, its hand-
some child reciting to us from Esther—it was a poem. Are
you going to make a great artist of her ? Tell me her story
since that day I saw her on her isle.'
' I do not know it,' said Rosselin. ' All I have to do with is
the Muse in her. My dear Duke, I repeat, your gracious Lady
of Amyot, for her own diversion, poured into a childish breast
a little drop of that divine curiosity which men call ambition :
it was only a drop but it burned its way into the soul, and will
eat up the life before it has done, I dare say. Madame Nad&ge
did not care what mischief she did : oh no : she only wanted to
while away an empty hour for herself.'
Bethune reddened indignant for his absent sovereign.
' As you are so great an artist yourself you should think that
she did well in waking any soul to art.'
' No,' said Rosselin angrily. ' No one does well who meddles
with fate or displaces peaceful ignorance and honest content by
unrest and desire. This child was happy on her island. The
world may perchance make her famous some day, but liappy it
will never make her again, for happiness is not amongst it,a
gifts !'
26o
OTHMAR.
' That is quite true,' said Bethune with a sigh. He asked
many more questions, but obtained little information. He
waited in vain for Damaris to re-appear. The sun sank, the
shadows deepened into dusk over all the vale, the swallows
circled in their last flight round the high house roofs. With
reluctance he was forced to bid adieu to Rosselin and take his
way to the distant chateau of Dampierre, where he was a
guest.
' Salute her for me,' he said at parting. ' Say that I shall
return to thank her to-morrow.'
' If you wish to do her any service in return for the help to
your horse, do not speak of her at Dampierre or in Paris,' said
Rosselin.
' I will not speak of her to anyone,' returned Bethune,
' unless it be to the Countess Othmar. But you will allow me
to return.'
' I have no power to forbid you. Yet it is to her that perhaps
it would be desirable you should say nothing,' answered Rosselin
after a moment of hesitation. ' I merely mean that the Lady
of Amyot did, I believe, prophesy a great career for my pupil,
and first of all suggest to her the possible possession of talents
the world might recognise. For that reason I think Damaris
Berarde would prefer that she should hear nothing more of her,
unless some day the world itself may have justified her predictions.'
' You think it probable, or you would not waste your hours
on her 1' x
' I think she has infinite feeling and a poetic temperament.
Whether these are enough remains to be seen. There are so
many other qualities required, all those humbler qualities which
are the prose of genius, the plain bread of character.'
' She has one requisite, beauty. She is exceedingly hand-
some. What brought her here 1'
' I cannot say : I am only her teacher.'
' And who is her lover 1' mused Bethune, as he walked slowly
out of the grey courtyard in the gloaming. His suspicions drifted
to Loswa.
Rosselin went within and mounted a low wooden staircase
which led to the door of Damaris's chamber.
' Come out and bid me good-night, my dear. If I loiter I
shall lose the last train to Paris.'
She obeyed him and came outside her door.
' Why did you avoid Bethune 1' he asked her. £ He is a
gentleman and a soldier ; he is a man you may respect and who
will respect you ; though he is a great noble he is an honest
fellow. He is one of the few lovers who have worshipped
Othmar's wife without losing dignity or honour.'
Damaris did not answer. She could not well have defined
why she had come within doors. There was a certain pain to
OTHMAR.
261
her in the presence of B^thune because he was associated with
that one day so big, for her, with fate.
Rosselin looked at her as she stood in the twilight at the
head of the stairs. There was an open window behind her, a
hand's breadth of blue sky, a bough of pear heavy with fruit.
* Why did you not mention Othmar to him 1' he said abruptly;
'you mentioned her.'
' I do not know,' said Damaris. She spoke the truth.
She did not know why she was always reluctant to speak of
him.
' Good-night, my child,' said Rosselin, with a tenderness in
his voice that was new to her ear. He sighed as he too went on
his way through the dusky dewy fields, sweet with the breath
of browsing cattle and murmurous with the whispers of the
leaves.
CHAPTER XXXV.
When Othmar returned to Paris he paid Rosselin a visit.
' You have been to Chevreuse 1' asked Rosselin. ' Ho ?'
' Ho,' said Othmar with sincerity and some annoyance, ' I am
still at Amyot. I only come to Paris occasionally. Is she well 1
Are you satisfied 1'
' She is quite well,' replied Rosselin. ' The answer to the
other question is less simple. I am satisfied with her talent, not
with her character.'
'What do you mean 1'
' Oh, nothing that is her fault. I merely meant that she is,
as Madame la Comtesse once said, " ame sensitive." Such people
have no business in public careers. You do not make street-
posts out of the stems of a sensitive plant. The Latins gave the
statues that were destined to stand in thoroughfares brass discs
to protect them. If you have not the brass disc you must not
stand even in the peristyle of a theatre.'
' I do not think she is weak. Had she been weak she would
not have left the island as she did.'
' Who is talking of weakness 1—I mean that she is not of
a temper for the coarse career of the stage, which is always
passed in the press and glare of a stormy crowd. She would
play Dona Sol divinely to an audience of poets on your terraces
at Amyot under a midsummer moon. But it is unfortunately
not a question of playing it so, but on the stages of public
theatres, where very often the coarse applause of the friendly
ignorant is still more offensive than the envenomed vituperation
of the hostile critic. I dare say we can make her fit for this. We
can give her the brass disc, but it will apoil the fine white marble
when we fasten it to it. My dear Count Othmar, you know
what the life of a great actress in Paris is ; you know what it
262
OTHMAR.
will1 be for her. We need not spend words on details. Is it a
good action that we do when we encourage her to qualify herself
for it, or is it a bad one 1'
Othmar heard him with distress. He was always haunted
by the memory that his wife, by a few careless words, had
broken up for ever that simple, peaceful, healthful, flower-like
life which Damaris Berarde had led in Bonaventure. The
power of all the kings of the earth could not have replaced her
in it.
'It is her choice,' he said, after a silence of some mo-
ments.
' Is fate ever wholly choice 1' said Rosselin. ' And when
a child says he will be a soldier, what does he know of war, of
wounds, of the sickening stench of the rotting dead, of the
maladies which kill men in hundreds like murrained cattle?
Nothing : he thinks it all tambour et tronvpette and Foe Victis!
Your friend at Chevreuse knows no more of what the life of
the theatre is than the child knows of war, and I for one have
not the courage to enlighten her. Have you ? She dreams of
all kinds of glories ; she does not see the rouge-pot, the white
powder, the claque, the press, the lovers, the diamonds, the
ugliness, the vulgarity, the money bags, the whole ronde du
diable. She thinks she will be Dona Sol, be Esther, be Rosa-
lind, off the stage as well as on it. Who is to tell her the mis-
take she makes ?'
' Surely you can, if anyone ?'
' No, I cannot. You cannot make a mind conceive a thing
wholly inconceivable to it. I can say a certain number of
words certainly to her ; produce a certain effect; suggest some
images to her which will be painful and revolting. But when
I have done that I shall not have done much ; 1 shall not have
produced any real impression on her, because the advice which
I mean will not in itself be intelligible to her. I may talk as I
will of war to the child ; but I shall never be able to make him
see what I have seen in the days of the siege of Paris, which
sometimes still turns me sick when I awake at night and think
of it. Perhaps it is because I grow old, and, so, sentimental
that I am troubled with those scruples which I do not suppose
would have suggested themselves to me twenty, or even ten
years ago ; but I certainly do feel that I have not done what
contents me in preparing Damaris Berarde for the art of the
stage. She will be a great artist, I believe, but she will be a
miserable woman.'
Othmar heard him with anxiety and pain. The vision of
her was always before him as he had left her in the red brown
grass with the evening skies behind her. Country peace,
woodland silences, fresh air of early autumn, simple pleasures of
youth—these would find no place in life into which she had
OTHMAR.
263
been led to enter. Some, losing them early, long for them all
their lives.
4 I suppose, continued Rosselin, 4 that the imagination in
mo is dying out ; as one grows old one drops illusions, as old
trees drop branch after branch on the ground, till there is
nothing left but the trunk, and perhaps a woodpecker in it,
perhaps nothing except dust. Certainly twenty years ago I
should have said, and should have thoroughly believed, that
art—any art—was worth any sacrifice. But now I do not
think so. One pays too heavily for any kind of fame. To be
famous at all is to have all the doors and windows of your house
standing wide open, and a mob, all eyes and ears, for ever star-
ing in and watching you as you eat, as you drink, as you sleep,
as you play, aye, even as you weep by your child's coffin or
draw the shroud over the breast of your dead mistress. Once
famous, you never can laugh or can cry in solitude ever again.
Either to throw laurel crowns at you or to pelt you with stones,
the mob is always pushing in over your threshold. When boys
and girls dream of fame they do not know what it is—the
eternal adieu to privacy, the eternal self-surrender to the crowd.
Alkibiades loved the crowd ; there are many like him in all
centuries ; but les sensitives hate it, shrink from it, try to bar
it out with their bare arm, which gets broken in the struggle,
like the Scottish maiden's in history. ,The price paid is too
heavy. All the shade and the freshness and the quiet leafy
by-paths of life are denied us for ever. There is only the great
high-road, the crude hard light, the gaping multitude that stare
and grin till we give up the ghost! The price is too heavy. It
is the same curse as the curse which lies on kings, never to be
alone.'
He sighed as he turned and walked up the little path of his
cottage garden. Looking back upon his life he seemed to have
thrown his years to the mob as offal is thrown to a pack of
hounds.
It was only a mood, a passing mood, but there was a great
truth in it.
4 One needs not to be famous to suffer that curse,' said
Othmar. 4 Whoever is in the world has it. Private life is a
thing of the past; we are all expected to dine and to sup, and
to spread our bridal-beds and our death-beds, in public, like the
monarchs of old. An age which has invented the electric light
has abolished solitude and respects no privacy ; it will end in
forcing all ames d'elite to find and form a new Thebald.'
4 If they can anywhere find a square mile without a tramway
and a telephone !' said Rosselin, tenderly touching a tea-rose
which blossomed in the cold wet weather against the low white
wall of his house.
Then he said abruptly:
OTHMAR
' What does your wife say now of her second Descl^e ?'
Othmar was angered to feel that the natural interrogation
embarrassed him.
' My wife has forgotten both her prophecies and the subject
of them,' he said with a certain impatience and L'iterness in
the accent with which the words were spoken.
' And you have not refreshed her memory ?'
* 1 think it would be useless.'
Rosselin was silent: he was not pleased. He angrily
thought of B£thune, and wondered if he would speak of his
encounter with Damaris.
' Some one will tell her if you do not,' he said with some
significance. ' Pardon me if I say too much, but I dislike con-
cealments; they are usually unwise and seldom profitable.
Chevreuse is not a vale in "Venus or Polaris, that we can be
sure no one will ever see your protegee !'
' Anyone may see her,' said Othmar, with annoyance and
hauteur. ' But to recall to my wife a subject she has forgotten
demands a courage of which I frankly confess myself not the
possessor.'
' Humph !' said Rosselin with dubious accent: he was not
satisfied. It seemed to him that embarrassing complications
would of necessity grow up out of so much needless reticence.
Othmar, he thought, was most probably not aware himself of
all the various and confused motives which disposed him to
silence on the name of Damaris.
' She is not of a facile character, he thought, recalling all he
had ever heard of the caprices and cruelties of Nadine Napraxine
in her youth. 4 But when there is a nettle in question it is
always best to grasp it boldly. Besides, if she be so indifferent
as they say, the whole thing would be of infinitesimal insigni-
ficance to her, unless concealment were to lend it an importance
not its own, as some shadows can be thrown on a white wall so
as to make a beetle loom large as an ox.'
'Chevreuse, moreover,'continued Othmar, 'is a place that
no one ever sees in winter. Unless it be in the few weeks
when Dampierre is occupied, not a soul of our world ever goes
there. If she mean or hope to become famous with the fame
you decry, she is best there in solitude; if, on the contrary,
she fail it will be still well that none should know her efforts
who would not pity them. My wife is like the Latins, she has
no altar to pity ; she despises it. If the world ever applaud
Damaris Berarde, then and then only shall I venture to recall
to her the prophecy she made at St. Pharamond.'
4 If with her nothing succeeds like success she only follows^
the world,' said Rosselin. ' I thought she led it ?'
4 She does lead it: but she has great contempt for those who
fail in it. When a lamb falls from fatigue on the Australian
OTHMAR.
265
plains the shepherd walks on and leaves it to its fate. Those
who fail seem to my wife as the fallen lambs do to the shepherd:
that is all.'
' Damaris Berarde will not fail,' said Rosselin, with a sense
of anger and of triumph in her.
' Aimee Desclee did not fail—but she died.'
' Damaris will not die ; she is too strong ; but she may break
her heart over broken illusions, as a thorough-bred horse breaks
his over bad roads. Good God, what a beautiful world it would
be if it were like the world these youths and maidens see in
their dreams !'
' She may break her heart over broken illusions.'
The words haunted Othmar's memory as he left the cottage
at Asnikres. Yes, that was often the death of the strongest,
death mental and moral if not death physical.
What he had done for her had secured her future from want,
had given her a safe home for so long as she would be content
with it; but how much more was there for which no prescience
could provide, from which no friendship could secure her!
With her ardent temperament, her ignorance of life, her poetic
and unwise impulses, how much would her heart ask and her
imagination demand ! She would not, could not, lead the pas-
sionless life of passionless natures. Whom would she love?
Would love only be for her the Charon who took her through a
river of hell to the shores of death, as he had been to Aimee
Desclee?
Or would she leave behind her all those beautiful faiths and
fancies, all those innocent ardours and tender thoughts, as the
year leaves behind it the blossoms of spring, the young green of
April: and would she become famous and flattered, leading the
world in a leash, and putting her foot on the necks of her
lovers ?
He liked one vision as little as the other.
Either way the sea-bird of Bonaventure would be no more ;
either way the child who had gone away from him in the moon-
light under the silver shadows of the olive-trees and of the
mists of dawn would be as dead as though she were in her grave.
Would the time ever come when she would say to him, ' Why
did you not let me die on the stones of Paris instead of keeping
life in me for this ?' Or would time give her that brazen disk
of which Rosselin had spoken, and with it the heart of bronze
which all must have instead of a heart of flesh and blood if they
would go triumphant through the heat and pressure of the world?
Rosselin had said aright, that the disk of brass would spoil the
fair white statue, and the heart of bronze, the heart of the
mockers of men, the heart of Venus Lubetina, would it ever be
hers ?
He went home to his own house, where he was expecting his
266
OTHMAR.
wife's return that evening. He went into his own rooms and
looked at the sketch made by Loris Loswa. The sight of it
troubled and disturbed him. He had a sense of wrong doing
upon him of which, when he searched his own conscience, he
could with honesty declare himself blameless. He had put her
as much out of his own hands as it had been possible to do, and
the simple ruse by which he had been able to provide for her
maintenance seemed as innocent as any pretence by which the
motherless lamb can be persuaded to eat or the unfledged bird
to let itself be befriended by gentle hands. Still it had been
a subterfuge ; it had been an untruth ; and he hated the merest
shadow of falsehood. His detestation of it had been the con-
stant subject of Friederich Othmar's ridicule and sarcasm, and
the elder man had in vain argued with him a thousand times,
to endeavour to prove to him that it is, in the hands of a skilled
casuist, at once the most forcible and the most delicate of
weapons. He had always refused to admit its virtues ; it seemed
to him a craven and contemptible thing, however dressed up
with wit and wisdom.
That Blanchette de Laon had seen him at Chevreuse had
kept him from returning thither, and it also made him feel the
absolute necessity of acquainting his wife with all he had done
for Damaris before Rumour, with her hundred tongues, and
women, with their devilish ingenuity in exaggeration and sugges-
tion, should have bruited the tale abroad in some guise wholly
unlike the truth of it. If he could by good fortune place the
story before her in such a light that it would move her finer and
more generous impulses, then all would be well. But this was
so doubtful; the quixotism of his own conduct would be the
first thing which would strike her, and she would probably be
unsparing in her ridicule of it. Besides, the reception of his
narrative would wholly depend on her mood, on the trifles of
the moment, on the facts of whether or no she were in a sym-
pathetic and kindly humour. Any trifle would do to determine
that: if the rooms were not heated enough, if the flowers in
them were not those she liked, if the costumes of the coming
season seemed ugly to her, or if she had caught a slight chill on
her journey—any one of these things, or anything similar to
them, would make any appeal to her generosity and sympathy
worse than useless.
He had been so long accustomed to study the barometer of
her caprices that he dreaded its mutability. He knew that there
were in her instincts and elements of nobility, even of greatness,
which, could she have been cast on troublous times and dire
disasters, would have made her rise to sacrifice, even to heroism.
As it was, in her perpetual self-gratification, her unlimited
power of command, her bed of unruffled roses, and her atmo-
sphere of incessant adulation, all the capriciousness and egotism
OTHM'AR.
267
of her nature were encouraged and nursed to overweening
growth.
In the depths of her nature were those finer qualities which
will always respond to the appeal of higher emotions in moments
of extremity or the hours of great calamity or of great peril.
She would have had the dignity of Marie Antoinette before the
Convention, the courage of Anne de Montfort before Philippe
de Valois, the strength of Maria Theresa before Europe. But
nothing less than the inspiration of such supreme hours of life
could have penetrated the indifference of her temperament, and
the trivialities and the frivolities of modern existence could
never do so for an instant.
Had he sought her pardon for some great crime, sought her
fidelity through some great ruin, he might, he probably would
have aroused the latent forces and sympathies dormant in her
character; she would not have given him a stone when he
had asked for bread. But in the things of daily life he had
found her too often without mercy to have in her mercies much
trust.
The conviction that she would never give him the compre-
hension which he wished made him withhold all other utterances
of his deeper emotions and more tender thoughts. He had
gone to her in one supreme moment of pain, and he had received
a rebuff such as repels for long, if not for ever, a sensitive
nature.
She did not realise that her infinite comprehension of the
moods and minds of others was marred to them by the chill
raillery which accompanied her acute perceptions. She did not
remember that though to herself the dilemmas and the weak-
nesses, even the passions which she studied were objects of
amused ridicule, they were to those on whom she studied them
subjects of great moment, and often of as great suffering.
Even the men who most blindly loved her were afraid to
confide in her, because of the inevitable irony with which their
confidence was certain to be met. Many a time Othmar himself
had longed to lean his head on her knees, and lay bare to her
all the contradictions, and longings, and regrets of his soul;
but he had never dared to do so, because he had always shrunk
from the certain mockery which would, he knew, point through
all her sympathy, if sympathy she would ever give. Her com-
prehension of human nature made her in one sense the most
lenient of auditors ; but in another sense she was the most un-
sparing : she could pardon easily, but she could never promise
not to ridicule. That one fact held sensitive naiures aloof from
her with all the force of a scourge.
' She will deem me such a fool,' he thought often : and then
he kept silence.
He went this evening down to the Gare du Nord to receive
268
OTHMAR.
her, and almost before the train had paused he had entered tlie
saloon carriage in which she had travelled undisturbed since she
had left Berlin. There was always in him something of the
eagerness after absence of a lover ; her mere presence always
exercised over him a magnetism and a charm.
She raised herself on her elbow from the mass of sable furs
and of wadded satin on which she had been lying ; she had been
rudely awakened by the cessation of the train's movement; the
blaze of a lamp was in her eyes ; she was impatient, and she
yawned.
' Ctho ! my dear Otho !' she said with petulance, ' why will
you always come to meet one at a railway station ? Of all the
many absurd customs of our generation that is the most absurd.
Nobody's emotions are so poignant that they cannot wait till
one comes into the house. I was asleep. What a cold night!
Why cannot they devise something which would carry the train
straight to one's bedside ? All their inventions are very clumsy
after all.'
She was slowly raising herself from her heap of furs and
red satin ; her eyes were languid with arrested sleep ; her tone
was irritable and irritating : she scarcely seemed to perceive his
presence ; the sweet delicate odour as of tea-roses with which all
her clothes were always impregnated came to him well known
as the accents of her voice. A curious passion of conflicting
feeling passed over him ; he could have seized her in his arms
and cried aloud to her, 'I have given you all my life, do you
give me no more than this?' Yet he felt chilled, angered,
alienated, silenced for the moment; a feeling which was almost
dislike came over him ; it seemed to him as if he had poured
out all the love of his life upon her and received in return a
mere handful of ice and snow. But the inexorable haste and
vulgar trivialities of modern exigencies left him no moment for
thought or for the expression of it. He could only offer her his
hand in silence to assist her to alight, and give her his arm and
lead her through the throngs of the Northern Terminus to her
own carriage.
He drove with her through the streets to their own house
and escorted her to the apartments which were especially hers.
' I dare not disturb you longer to-night,' he said with a cer-
tain bitterness of tone which he could not control. ' The chil-
dren wished to remain up to welcome you, but I did not allow
them to do so ; I know how you despise undisciplined feeling.'
She laughed a little languidly, letting her women remove
her fur wrappings, whilst she stood in the delicious warmth and
light of the rooms where thousands of hothouse roses were
gathered together in welcome of her return, filling the hot air
with their fragrance.
' Do you mean that for satire ?' she said with a little yawn-
OTHMAR.
269
' Do not try to be sardonic, it does not suit you. The children
are certainly much better in bed. I will go and look at them
after I have had a bath. I am very tired. Goodnight.'
She gave him a sleepy sign of dismissal, then chid her
women for being slow. Had they her pine-bath ready ?—there
was no bath so good after fatigue and cold.
He left her presence with pain and anger, despite the cold-
ness which came over him towards her : coldness born from her
own as the frosts of the' earth come from the cold of the atmo-
sphere. His adoration of her had been too integral a part of his
life for her touch, her voice, her glance, not to have a certain
empire over him which no other woman would ever obtain.
In the forenoon, quite late, he was again admitted to her
presence. She had recovered her fatigue, she was serene
and almost kind, but the children were there : they were not
alone five minutes. Later, she gave audience to all the great
faiseurs, whose intelligence had been busied inventing marvels
of costume for her for the winter season. Later yet, there came
some of her intimaite friends and some of her most devoted
courtiers.
It was raining heavily in the streets, but in her apartments
there were hothouse heat and hothouse fragrance, in the sultry
air and amidst the innumerable roses it was hard to believe that
it was the thirtieth of November. People came and went,
laughed and chattered; she wrote notes, sent messages, tele-
graphed many contradictory orders to her tradespeople ; the day
was crowded and entertaining ; there was a certain stimulant,
1 even for her, in the sense that she was in Paris.
Othmar did not see her again until they met at dinner.
B^thune dined there, and four or five other persons, who had
called and been invited that afternoon. The day was a type of
all other days of her life.
Othmar thought with impatience and bitterness of the dreams
he had dreamed. She despised the world and ridiculed it; yet
who was more absorbed by it 1 Who was less able to live with-
out it 1 She always spoke with her lips of the fatigue of society,
but, as he thought angrily, she was not so weary that she was
ever willing to forsake it. All the year round it was about her.
Every season saw her where its fashion, its pastimes, its flatteries,
were most largely to be found. Without that atmosphere of
adulation, of luxury, and of excitement she would have been
lost. The world was a poor affair, no doubt, not anything like
what it might be were people more inventive and more courageous.
She had said so a hundred times ; but still there was nothing
better than its movement. To read Plato all day under an oak-
tree, or to sit alone by a library fire with a volume of Sully
Prudhomme, would not be any improvement on it, though it
might be more philosophic.
2 70
OTHMAR.
To his fancy, life together was poor and meaningless, unless,
it implied mutual sympathy and communion of feeling. He was
a romanticist, as she had always told him. To his views it was
not in any way an ideal of either love or happiness to be for
ever surrounded by the fever of the great world, to be for ever
separated by its demands and its excitements, to meet only on-
the common ground of mutual interests, to dwell under the
same roof with little more intimacy than two strangers met there
at a house-party. It appeared that this was what she now ex-
pected, what she now preferred. His pride prevented him from
struggling against her decrees ; but he felt, and loathed to feel,
that he was insensibly approaching a position towards her scarcely
higher than that which Napraxine had occupied. True, she
still had moments of exquisite charm, of irresistible sorcery, in
which she occasionally deigned to remember that he had been
the lover of her choice ; and in these she bent his will and
turned his brain almost as much as in the earlier years of his
idolatry. But these moments were rare, and when they came
appealed to the senses in him, and not to the heart; they left
him unnerved, they did not satisfy his affections.
The world had so many claims upon her : his were forgotten
or ignored. Where were the visions he had had of a life out of
the world, poetic, unworldly, tuned to another key than the
brazen clangour of society 1 They were gone for ever like last
year's roses.
The so-called pleasures of life had never had attraction for
him; they were a mere routine; he was tired of crowds, of
flattery, of splendour, of movement; he was tired of the women
who tried to beguile, and the men who endeavoured to use, him;
the whole thing seemed to him witless, tedious, tame. She, who
had always declared that it was so, yet could find her diversion
in dazzling it and stimulating its envy; though most things
failed to please her, yet, like all women, her own power pleased'
her always ; but he had no such resource, for the power which
he had (that of wealth) he despised.
A sense of failure came wearily upon him during this evening
which followed on her return. If this were all the issue of
great passion and great love, what use were either ?
The world was a pageant to her, and he might stand by and
see her pass in it. The role did not please him. He fancied—
no doubt he told himself it was but fancy—that the world
ridiculed him in that subordinate place, that half-effaced position,
that too indulgent acceptance of her continual caprices, tyrannies,
and slights.
He did not remember, did not know, that he himself in
Russia had seemed cold to her. He was only sensible of the
barrier which had grown up between them, of the indifference
with which his presence or his absence was regarded by her.
OTHMAR.
271
Gradually, as the fine mist of approaching rain steals over a
sunny country, dimming the colours and effacing the lines of it
little by little, until nothing is seen but the colourless blur of the
wide white rain itself, so the sensation cf dissatisfaction, of dis-
appointment, of disunion had come over the tenor of their lives
together. The consciousness of it brought to him a profound
and passionate sense of irreparable loss. A word from her would
have dispelled it, an hour of full belief that she had ever
loved him as he had once loved her would have sufficed to sweep
it away ; but the word was never spoken, the hour never came.
Time only strengthened his conviction that, were he dead before
her, she would not greatly care.
The sense of the incompleteness of his own life came upon
him with a strong consciousness as he stood in his brilliant rooms
with the laughter of his wife and her guests borne to his ear,
and the sounds of some gay music coming to him from another
salon. He might have ten, twenty, thirty, forty years more of
this existence, and its years, its days, its hours would always be
precisely like this year, this day, this hour. The future seemed
to rise up like a phantom and say to him, 4 The past gave you
the fulfilment of your greatest desire. I shall give you nothing
but the fruit of that fulfilment. If that fruit do not content you,
whose fault is that?'
Men whose wishes are thwarted can throw the blame on fate
if their lives prove barren ; but he had passionately wished for
one thing, and all the forces of life and of death had joined
together to give it him. He had no one to reproach, no unkind
destiny to upbraid, if the gift left his heart cold, his soul cheer-
less ; if he felt at times a mortal loneliness, and at times a
weariness of vague regret.
The cruelty of all great passions is that, after their fruition,
there must come this inevitable regret. They are altogether
beyond the pale of daily life ; they can never fraternise with the
demands of social existence. She had once said truly that death
is the kindest friend to love, because it saves it from being made
ridiculous by daily habit and worn away by daily friction.
The world is wrong when it pities Romeo, when it weeps for
Stradella.
The great love he had borne her had survived all those trials
of familiarity and of habit which are crueller enemies to love
than absence or than death. It had been the romantic passion
of Romeo united to that depth and unity of devotion which
Friederich Othmar had been wont slightingly to call the knight's
love for his lady. It had been so essentially interwoven with
his life that it had always seemed to him it could only go away
from him with life itself.
The idea that a love so great should yet have the same fate
as have all the little passions of a frivolous hour was still in-
272
OTHMAR.
tolerable to him. With him it had been of those passions which
ennoble and enlarge human nature, because, though interwoven
with the senses, they yet embrace the soul, and are drawn by
their very idolatry to that longing for immortality which is the
only possible approach to faith in it.
But he knew that he had never moved her thus ; he knew
that, if he had ever given utterance to all he felt, she would have
listened with a derisive compassion as to the exaggeration of a
mind distraught. The crystal clearness, the acute penetration,
the ingrained scepticism of her intellect made impossible to her
those illusions and those hopes which are so dear to minds more
imaginative than critical, to temperaments more impassioned
than logical, as was his.
He had given his whole life away to her, and she did not
even care for the gift; scarcely deigned to accept it, except in
conventional shape. He was unreasonable, no doubt, as she
would have told him had he said so to her. He had asked of
life and passion what neither can give—immortality. All which
serve to console the great majority of mankind did not avail
to console him for that loss.
Most men grow content with the crowd which is constantly
about them, with the host of petty interests which claim them,
with the repetition of pleasures and pursuits which is enforced
on them ; their days are dull, but they are full; they are con-
sumed by monotony, but they are unconscious of its tedium,
because they have no imagination and often no passion.
Othmar could not be thus reconciled to the disappointments
and the sameness of existence. He required life to be a poem,
and he was not consoled because it proved a mere diary.
The new year brought him without break that increase of
occupation which makes it a season of such weariness to all who
are of any importance in the world, and have a crowd of suppli-
cants and petitioners always looking to them for support. Him-
self he would have liked to pass the winter season at Amyot, but
to her it was useless even to suggest it.
' You cannot ask the world to bury itself in a frozen wood
by a river in flood,' she had said when once he had wished to
do so.
' But is the world absolutely necessary ? '
' If it were not there what should we do 1 You would read
Plato perhaps for the thousandth time ; I could not promise to
read Goethe for the hundredth. The country in winter is like
a man of eighty repeating a poem on spring.'
' It is just possible that the man of eighty might feel the
meaning of the poem more thoroughly than the boy of eighteen.'
' His feelings would not prevent him from looking absurd.'
11 suppose, you at least would never pity him 1'
' Most surely not.'
What would you pity ?' he said bitterly.
OTHMAR.
273
She smiled. 'I should not pity people who could shut
themselves up in damp forests on the Loire water in mid-
winter. A Russian winter is quite a different thing ; the air
is like champagne, the frost is like diamonds, the plains are
like marble ; it is charming to have one's roses and palms in
a temperature of 30° Reaumur, and by merely going out of
doors plunge en pleine Siberie. That is why I am a very
patriotic Russian. I love the intensity of its contrasts.'
1 As Marie Stuart loved Chastelard and Bothwell!' said
Othmar with a certain significance.
(Should you think she loved either of them ? I should
doubt it. They loved her, and being stupid as men only are,
they compromised her.'
' 1 dare say she thought of all men as you do !—as a little
higher than the horse, a little lower than the dog! No more !'
said Othmar with some impatience.
She smiled : ' Perhaps ! I am not sure that it is a bad
compliment. Where should we put you in the seat of creation
—Mary Stuart and I—who cannot adore you as Penelope and
Hermione can ?'
' I never hoped to be adored !' said Othmar with some
bitterness.
' Oh, yes; you did, one day. All men hope for it, only
they do not get it,—except from Griseldis whom they beat,
and from Gretchen whom they forsake.'
They were alone in their drawing-room in the vacant five
minutes before a great dinner party. He looked at her wistfully.
What woman was ever comparable to her, he thought; where
else were that exquisite grace, that entrancing languor, that
supreme distinction in every movement and in every attitude ?
The very tones of her voice, sweet as the sound of any silver
bell, and cold as the breath of frost, had a charm in it that
no other's had. With a sudden impulse of reviving ardour he
stooped and pushed the loose glove from her arm, and kissed the
white soft skin beneath it. But she, remembering and resentful
of the weeks in Russia, drew it from his caress with her chilliest
rebuke :
' My dear Otho ! we are neither children nor lovers !'
He was repulsed and silent.
At that moment their groom of the chambers announced
that some of their coming guests, who were of imperial name
and place, were entering the gates.
He and she together descended the grand staircase between
the lines of their servants in state liveries.
' Together like this !' thought Othmar. ' Together in
these pageantries, these conventionalities, these mummeries;
but never in any other hours, in any other way J
T
274
OTHMAR.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
The days slipped one after another away, and he had still said
nothing to her of Damaris. He seldom saw her alone ; when
he did so, no opening had presented itself which seemed to him
propitious. The length of time which he had unwisely allowed
to elapse now created an additional difficulty. She might, if
he told her now, naturally ask why he had been silent so long.
He had made no intentional concealment; anyone of the house-
hold knew that the girl had been there in the summer and
throughout her illness. But no one, not even her most confi-
dential attendants, would ever have ventured to tell their mis-
tress anything unasked. She held them at a distance, which
the boldest of them never dared to pass. The only servant she
had treated with more familiarity had been the little African
boy Mahmoud ; and Mahmoud had died, in his fifteenth year,
from the cruel north winds of Northern Europe, babbling in his
delirium to the last, in Arabic, words of his lady and his love
for her, poor little tropical beast! killed as men kill the ante-
lope kid of the desert when they drag it from its groves of palm
and its warm golden sands, to shiver and perish behind the bars
of a cage in a northern menagerie.
Not one of the household spoke, or would ever speak, of
anything which ever took place unknown to their mistress ; but
they knew, doubtless—as servants in great cities know all the
affairs of their employers—that the young girl who had been ill
there, brought in from the streets in the bygone summer, was
dwelling at Les Hameaux, and was occasionally visited by their
master. Partly from their gossiping when outside his walls, and
partly from other causes, the name of Damaris Berarde began
to be bruited about in Paris. A secret is very like a subtle
odour; it escapes by unseen crevices and passes to the outer air,
though every egress may be barred. A certain vague rumour
arose that not only had Rosselin discovered some new and great
talent which he was training for the public stage, but that with
this hidden life which was so carefully concealed the name of
Othmar was connected.
Had Blanche de Laon been accused of first setting afloat that
breath of calumny, she would have declared, and truthfully,
' Moi 1 Je Wai jamais souffle mot !1
Yet she had conveyed a hint into the air, and it was sufficient.
One thistle-seed is enough to choke a field with thistles.
Irv vain do we think we walk in private paths unseen ; some
eyes are forever there to peer through the thickest hedge ; some
lips are forever ready to say what they do not know, and magnify
OTHMAR,
275
the harmless mouse-ear to a wonder-flower with a poisoned root.
Those of whom rumour thus discourses with bated breath and
comprehensive gesture are seldom or never aware that they are
the subject of such whispers; they are always the last to
imagine that their acts are put under the magnifying-lenses of
public speculation.
Even Rosselin, with his intimate knowledge of the inquisi-
tiveness and the loquacity of human nature, did not dream that
the mere fact of his going twice or thrice a week to Les Harneaux
and taking a neophyte to the temples of his own art, to quiet
morning recitations, could be a fact of any import to the world
at large. He had had so many pupils, and he never remem-
bered that the world had had any concern with them unless
they had become ultimately great enough to challenge and compel
its languid attention ; and even then its notice had been very
hard to obtain. Why should it break its rule of universal
apathy and indifference towards those who are obscure because
a young girl lived on a farm in the pastoral solitudes which had
once sheltered Racine 1
Both he and Othmar, in very different ways, had a reserve
and hauteur of manner which always kept at arm's length rash
intruders and trivial questioners. Therefore they were the last
persons on earth to hear anything of what rumour murmured of
either of them. Damaris, in her simple home under the ashes
and elms of the Croix Blanche, was not more isolated from the
gossip of the world than they both were by choice and tempera-
ment. But the world gossiped not the less but the more for
the immunity which their ignorance permitted to it, and because
it knew little invented much.
The world to whom Othmar's was so familiar and conspicuous
a name built for him a tall edifice of lies down in those innocent
pastures of Les Harneaux. But he was unconscious of that
house of fable in which they made him dwell. He believed
that his own abstention from any visits there made Damaris as
safe from notice as though she were still beneath the orange
leaves and olive shadows of her isle. If she wanted anything
or any counsel, Rosselin would tell him he felt sure. At times
the memory of her, as he had left her standing in the evening
dusk amongst the red-brown seeding grasses, made him desire
to see her with a wish he restrained. Sometimes the rccollec-
tion of her flushed, bowed face, as he had touched her fore-
head with his lips, came over him with an emotion which
was too gentle for desire, too kind for passion; but he re-
sisted it.
' To see me can do her no good,' he said to himself ; i and
it may make others do her harm. If she be left alone she may
learn to live for art : it is a safe and kindly friend.'
One day, when he was at work in his little cabinet du travail,
I 2
276
OTHMAR.
his wife came to him there for a moment on her way to he*
carriage. It was his favourite room; it opened on one side
into the library, on the other into the gardens ; the peacocks
would walk in from without when the doors stood open, and
the green gloom of an avenue of coniferse stretched away
immediately in front of its steps. It was here that the sketch
made by Loswa hung betwixt a woodland glade painted by
Corot, and' a sloop becalmed in the Sound painted by Aiva-
noffsky.
It was rarely that Nadine deigned to enter there ; she paused
there now for a moment with an open note in her hand, which
she had received that instant from Prince Hohenlohe, request-
ing her intercession with Othmar concerning some matter of
German interest which did not brook delay.
It was soon disposed of. He wrote a line and gave it to
her to do as she pleased with it, and looked at her with wistful-
ness. It was the first time he had seen her that day ; it was
four o'clock, she was about to attend a musical gathering at the
Prince of Lemberg's hotel in the Boulevard Josephine, con-
vened to hear the first execution by illustrious amateurs of a
pastoral cantata of his own composition on the theme of Ruth.
' You are going to the Ruth 1' asked Othmar.
' Yes ; I wonder you are not. Music used always to draw
yon out of your hole like a lizard.'
' I have a great deal to do,' he replied ; ' and, besides, how
many times have you not enforced on me the bourgeois absurdity
of accompanying you anywhere ?'
' You need not accompany me. You can come by yourself.
Certainly I think it does look absurd to see two people always
together like two dogs in a coupling-chain.'
Othmar sighed a little impatiently.
' Lemberg has chosen a very bourgeois theme ; surely very
archaic and ill adapted for his audience. The emotions of Ruth
will seem to your world something as ridiculous as a gown of
the time of Marie Amelie!'
' They are only in a pastoral,' she said with a smile. ' They
are very well there. We are not required to share them. You
would share them, perhaps ; nobody else would.'
* You mean I should share those of Boaz !'
' Boaz or any other vrai berger. You should inhabit one of
the happy valleys of Florian and Mademoiselle Scudery. There
is always something in your ideas which is quite of the last
century, and seems to suggest a flock of sheep with ribbons and
a crook, like those in the Saxes statuettes. If I were to die,
you would like to lie on a bank of violets and mourn me in
alexandrines.'
He smiled, but the raillery was not welcome to him. It
seemed to him that, if she had any love for him, she would
OTHMAR.
2 77
never laugh at him, never see in him that weaker, absurder side,
which may be found in every human character if eyes without
sympathy look for it. And the imputation of sentimentality
irritated him as it irritates all those whose feelings are strong
and whose temperament is incapable of any affectation or of any
shallowness.
Let a man have as little vanity as he may, yet in his secret
heart he likes the woman he loves to find him a little more than
man. He had been long conscious that he would for ever look
in vain for this kind of admiration from her. There was a
certain depreciation even in her indulgence ; there was an
invariable criticism in her mental attitude, however favourable ;
she could be no more deceived as to the weaknesses of character
than a great surgeon can be as to the weaknesses of body. True,
her wit and her intellect served to retain her power over him,
but then he was nervously sensible that these made him less
in her eyes than he would willingly have been. He was aware
that the very fineness of her penetration, the very brilliancy of
her mind, made her infinitely more hard to please for any length
of time than women of smaller brain and of less highly-trained
powers. To a woman of rare intellect and of critical wit it is
difficult for any man to remain long a hero.
' Our minds are all finite, alas ! and you want the infinite,'
he said once to her with some petulance, conscious that his own
mind did not content hers any more than any other man's.
She assented.
' I have no doubt it was always the same everywhere,' she
conceded. ' Probably Marcus Aurelius was very dull and fussy
if one knew the truth ; and I dare say even Horace is livelier
on paper than he was in person !'
As she spoke now, her eyes had wandered at the paintings
which were hung on the wall behind him. He saw that they
rested on Loswa's sketch. He took the occasion which seemed
to present itself.
'Have you ever thought of her?' he asked, turning to look
himself at the portrait.
' Thought of whom ? I was thinking that Loswa has lost
something of his originality, of his singularity : what he has
produced this year is all banal.'
' Or seems so. That is always the Nemesis which overtakes
a mere trick of manner ; when once it ceases to startle it
becomes common-place. That sketch is so admirable because it
is no trick : it was a genuine inspiration of the moment. Loswa
was never so natural before or since.'
He spoke indifferently, but he was looking at her with con-
cealed anxiety. Perchance it was a propitious hour in which
to tell her of the fate of Damaris.
4 Do you ever think of that child 1' he said abruptly.
278
OTHMAR.
4 Of what child ?' she asked.
4 Of the one for whom you predicted the future of Descl£e ?1
he answered with a movement of his hand towards the picture.
She looked at the portrait with an effort at recollection.
She had really forgotten the whole matter ; it had been such a
trivial incident to her, though so momentous to the other actor
in it. He saw that her forgetfulness was quite unfeigned. She
went up to the sketch and looked closely at it, drawing on one
of her long gloves as she did so.
4 Ah, yes; I remember now. A little fisher-girl who in-
terested you, and whom you took home one night over the sea
in a most romantic fashion. What of her ? Has she married
her shipwright ? Was it a shipwright ? Do you want me to
give her some nuptial present, or a baptismal cup ? All the
idyls end in one's having to buy something ugly at a silver-
smith's !'
4 I told you once before she did not marry the boat-builder
—the shipwright, as you call him. You made it impossible for
her to do so.'
4 I did ?' she repeated with amusement. * You mean Loswa
did ; or you, perhaps '
He grew red with anger.
' 1 do not like such jests.'
4 Oh, my dear, you like no jests ! You are a knight of
doleful countenance and take everything au pied de la lettre.. If
you had had a little amourette with a fisher-girl it would argue
bad taste .perhaps, but it would not surprise me, except as a
fault in taste.'
4 Nor would it matter to you,' he said bitterly; 4 you have
given me my liberty so very often that, with the usual obstinate
ingratitude of human nature, I could have wished you less kind
—and less indifferent.'
4 All the same, are you sure you have never taken advantage
of my kindness ?' she said with amusement. If not, you must
be the ideal husband of that bourgeois par excellence, Dumas
fils. But it is a quarter-past four. Au revoir.'
He opened the door for her in silence, and in silence escorted
her through the house to her carriage, and bowed low as it
rolled away.
His heart was bitter against her. He had been at once
disappointed and relieved at the failure of his effort. Damaris
was not even a recollection to her ; she had caused the uproot-
ing of the child's whole life, but she thought no more about it
than a person strolling through green fields thinks of some field
flower which he has plucked up, carried a moment in listless
fingers, then flung away. Her own life was humbly touched by
bo many supplicants whom she passed, not seeing them, so
many whose eyes were fastened on her in envy and in wonder,
OTHMAR.
m
that a poor little barbarian who had been under her roof one
brief evening could occupy no cell of her memory. If he told
her the whole story she would only laugh; call him probably
Scipio or Galahad. She would be sure to say something which
would wound him ; she would be sure to receive his narrative
with a cruel smile of doubt if not of derision.
' Time will tell her a3 much as she will ever care to know,'
he thought with the procrastination natural to a hesitating
temper. Time would tell her, if ever her forgotten Desclee
should become one of those on whom the fierce light of the
world's fame beat; whilst if the life of Damaris should pass
away in failure, in obscurity, in the paths of privacy, what
would it ever be to her ? No more than the rain which fell, or
the dust which blew, in some dreary by-street which her own
graceful steps never approached. She had no pity for failure,
no sympathy with impotence ; the unsuccessful were to her eyes
the born cretins of the world.
He paused on the terrace of the house as her carriage rolled
on its noiseless tires through the courtyard and out of the great
gilded gates.
His heart was heavy, and a personal offence was in him
against her as he remembered her words.
What plainer hint could she have given him to pass his time
and take his caresses elsewhere ?
All alone though he was, his cheek grew red with anger and
mortification.
'What does it matter to her what I do?' he thought bitterly,
with a sense of mortification. ' I must be the vainest fool if I
can flatter myself that, had I a hundred mistresses she would be
ever jealous of any one of them. Men are feeble creatures, and
coarse, and what they do matters nothing to her. So long as I
do not cross her threshold unbidden, or ruffle a rose-leaf beneath
her, what does she care what I do ?'
As she herself passed behind her black Ukraine horses
through the streets, a certain vague annoyance came over her,
remembering his manner and his words.
He had never before been irritable as he was now. The
evenness of his temper had been perfect, and had allowed her
so great a latitude in the indulgence of her satire upon him, that
she had been led to think him weaker than he was. It was only
of late that he had answered her with a touch of bitterness, had
hinted his impatience of her criticisms, and had shown that
fatigue before their manner of life which he did not now affect
to conceal.
' If we go on like this,' she thought, ' we shall become like
everybody else ; we shall not subside into friendship, but only
into dissension, and the world will end in observing our dis-
sensions, which will annoy me. His whole temper is so utterly
28o
OTHMAR.
unphilosophic. lie cannot understand and accept the inevitable.
He would have liked me to go and live in the centre of Asia
Minor and adore him : I refused to do it when it would have
been interesting to do. Good heavens ! Why should I do it
now, when I know every line of his face and every turn of his
character as one knows the very stones on a road one takes
daily?'
She had been wearied by his romantic ideas and by his un-
practical aspirations, which suggested to her only more ennui
than the world, stupid as it was, afforded her already. Yet she
was irritated by her own latent consciousness that she should
not care to know that his dreams went elsewhere.
1 Comme cettejille lui irotte dans la tete!' she said, half aloud,
with surprise and irritation. Her knowledge of men told her
that remembrance with them usually means attraction, that
irritation usually means some secret consciousness, some un-
spoken interest.
Languidly she recalled from the depths of her own memory
the trivial, long-forgotten incident of Damaris Berarde, whose
features the sketch by Loswa had preserved from oblivion. She
remembered how absurdly chivalrous Othmar had been that
evening, how coldly and sharply he had rebuked herself for her
negligence towards the child.
Pshaw ! how like a man it would be, she thought; if he
had been attracted by a little peasant with brown hands and
bare feet!
If, after all, he were just like other men, she thought J if he
had a villa on the Seine, a cottage at Meudon, where he passed
his time when he was supposed to be closeted with the Roths-
child, or gone to a conference with Bleichrceder ? Would she
care much ? She thought not. She would feel that half good-
natured disdain which a woman, passionless herself, always feels
for the riotous passions of men ; but she did not think that it
would affect her peace of mind in any way.
If it were a woman in her own world, yes ; she would have
resented that. She would have felt it an offence and an
outrage. She would have disliked the comments of her own
world on it; she would have been impatient of the ridicule or
the compassion which it might have entailed on herself from
others; and she would have been angered at the possible
ascendency over his intellect, and the possession of his confi-
dence, which such a rival would perchance have acquired to
her own despite.
But of what she would have called a mere vulgar liaison she
would have felt no jealousy, not even much surprise, for she
considered that men were slaves of their appetites, even when
they were masters of their intelligence.
For the whole ways of life of a man she had that contempt
OTHMAR.
281
which a woman who reads their hearts and knows their follies
is apt to entertain when to herself the senses say little, and
their gratification is indifferent. But if it were a question of
the possession of his mind and thoughts by a new passion, if
anyone had passed before her and taken that pre-eminence in
his imagination which she had held so long, she became
irritably conscious that this would be unwelcome to her. A
love which reigned over his fancy, occupied his memory in
absence, and had empire over his will, would be an assumption
of her own place, would be a seizure of all that more spiritual
and subtle dominion which had been peculiarly her own.
She had had unbounded influence over him for ten years ;
she had been so certain of her influence that she had been for
once absurdly credulous of its duration. Though she knew
that passions wane like moons, yet she had never doubted in
her soul (whatever scepticism her lips might have declared in
jest) that his for her would never become less. She had never
truly realised that the time would come when her surpassing
seductions might leave him cold as one who hears a twice-told
tale, when his immortal passion for her might lie dead like last
year's leaves.
She had always piqued herself upon the wisdom with which
she had looked at all accidents and sentiments of life. She had
always believed that no weakness or instability of human nature
could ever take her by surprise. And yet to find thatat last she
had lost her sorcery for his senses and her exclusive reign over
his thoughts astonished her with a shock of humiliated surprise.
During the pause between the two parts into which 4 Ruth '
was divided, the guests of the Prince of Lemberg left the music-
room and strayed at their will through the other apartments of
his beautiful little house, which was modestly called a pavilion,
and stood withdrawn behind gardens and high walls of clipped
evergreens. It was four o'clock in the winter's day, and the
whole of the rooms were lighted as at night; the hundred or so
of people who were there represented all that was greatest in
fashion, with a few of those who were greatest in art. Belong-
ing, as he deemed, to both categories, Loris Loswa was amongst
those present.
4 Bring me some tea,' she said to him when she had seated
herself in a little alcove filled with bananas and palms, whose
green branches drooped against a background of Florentine
tapestries, and threw up in high relief the dead gold and dusky
furs of her costume. When he brought it she signed to him to
seat himself on a stool at her feet. He obeyed, flattered and
charmed.
4 Loris,' she said in a low tone to him, 4 what became of the
subject of that sketch you made two years ago on that island in
the seas beyond Monaco ?'
283
OTHMAR.
Loswa reflected a moment, then he answered with perfect
candour:
' I have never thought of her from that day to this. I meant
to have made a great picture from that little study, but I lost
sight of it; I sold it.'
' You sold it to us: yes. It is there in Otho's room. I
have often wondered what became of the original. Do you
mean that you have never had the curiosity to inquire 1'
' I really never have. She was certainly a provincial beauty,
but they are not the beauties which dwell longest in my mind.
I intended to make something tres empoignant of that sketch,
but I forgot it, once it was sold.-1
' How like a modern painter!' she said with amusement]
and changed the subject.
Lemberg approached and Loswa rose.
' What is your verdict on my work ?' asked the composer of
* Ruth.' ' I am very nervous till you have spoken. When
they are all praising me and you are mute, I think of those lines
of Robert Browning's, which tell us how the musician heard all
the theatre applaud, but himself looked only to the place where
"Rossini sat silent in his stall."'
'If I were silent in my stall,' she replied, 'it must have
been because silence seemed the fittest tribute to your exquisite
pastoral. One seemed to hear the corn bend, the wind sigh,
the poppies blow. For one half hour you made me in love with
the country ! And then the farewell to Naomi 1 only wish
that Gluck were alive to hear.'
She passed on to a discriminating criticism of the musical
structure of the composition, with all that profound and scientific
knowledge of the tonic art which were united in her to the most
subtle appreciation of its phases. The ' Ruth' had charmed her
ear, and her mind could distinguish why it did so.
Bethune, who was near, had heard the conversation, and
wondered if Loswa were speaking falsely. He thought not; he
felt an impulse to speak of what he had seen at Les Hameaux
on the day his horse was lamed, but he refrained. Rosselin had
invited his silence, and Rosselin was not a man of idle words,
nor likely to give a caution without some good motive.
Yet he felt a sense of guilt and of complicity. He had gone
back twice or thrice out of a sense of courtesy, as well as of in-
terest, and he had learned easily, from the people of the hamlet,
how and through whom she had been brought thither. The
knowledge that it was Othmar who had placed her there had
struck him first with amazement, then with anger.
He knew none of the circumstances which had brought
Damaris Berarde to Paris. She preserved an obstinate silence
in regard to herself, and his good breeding would not allow him
to put direct questions to her which were evidently unwelcome
OTHMAR.
283
ones. It was only in the village that he heard the name of
Othmar, and the chivalrous laws which governed his actions at
all times did not allow him to try and learn what was withheld
from him. The hostility to Othmar which had for so many
years been so powerful a factor in his life was the strongest of
all reasons with him to compel him to abstain from all investiga-
tion, to avoid the least semblance of inquisitiveness as to his
conduct. But in the absence of knowledge he placed the natural
construction of a man of the world on the little he knew, and
the facts of her altered abode and manner of life, and he was
angered against the man who could, as he thought, change for
new amours the passion which he had given to his wife.
Of the faults of that temperament which left Othmar's un-
satisfied and repelled, Bethune was too loyal a lover to see any-
thing. Her very defects had always seemed beauties in his
eyes. To desert such a woman as she was for even so lovely a
child as Damaris seemed to him intolerably unworthy ; and the
secret conduct of such a connection seemed to him at once com-
monplace and coarse. He had always done justice to the rarity
and delicacy of many qualities in his successful rival, and the
discovery of what he supposed to be a mere intrigue in his daily
life surprised and disgusted him. When he heard Nadege now
speak of Damaris Berarde he felt indignantly grieved for her
deception, as men are always inclined to grieve for a woman
who interests them before an infidelity which is not their own.
'Who would have believed that even she would fail to
secure constancy 1' he thought as he watched the light play
upon the rings upon her hand as she gave back her cup to
Loswa.
' You look interested in my inquiries,' said Nadine, observ-
ing his countenance with amusement. ' Is it possible that you
followed up that idyl on an island of which I let you read the
first chapter ?'
' JSTo, indeed,' said Bethune in haste, with a certain em-
barrassment which did not escape her observation.
'My dear friend, it would not be a crime if you did,' she
said with a smile. ' Considering how many men saw that hand-
some child in my rooms, I know very little of human nature if
some one at least of them did not return to the isle to write an
epilogue to 'Esther.' Loris denies that he has done so. To be
sure, men always deny that sort of accusation. But for once
he looks innocent.'
'You never heard anything of her1?' asked Bethune, con-
scious that he did not speak wholly at his ease.
' What should one hear 1 I dare say she has shut up her
play-books and eaten her bridal bonbons by this. I remember
she was quite stupid when one saw her close ; she kept blink-
ing in the light of my dancing-rooms like a little owl out at
284
OTHMAR.
noonday. If she had had any real talent mere upholstery would
not have had any power to strike her dumb/
'Probably it was not the upholstery. You have struck
dumb greater persons than she.'
4 "When I have desired to do so. But with her I do not
remember that I desired it. I desired only to be kind to her,
I have always wished to discover genius n some obscure
creature.'
'They say Rosselin has discovered one,' said Paul of
Lemberg. ' Then you will say, it is his trade.'
' Who is it %'
* Ah, that I know not. ' Some woman or child who is to
revive all the last glories of the French stage. Some one kept
in perfect obscurity hitherto, as bird-trainers keep their piping
bullfinches in the dark all day long.'
He spoke with no second thought, knowing nothing more
than that which he said. But Bethune, silently listening, felt
again an uneasy sense as of some guilty complicity in what he
withheld from the person whom it most nearly concerned.
Yet it was not for him to give up to her what Othmar had
concealed from her. Unwillingly and. perforce, his honour and
his delicacy made him the reluctant keeper of a secret which he
disapproved. ' I have always been his enemy, so I must be
now his friend,' he thought with that loyalty which was the
strength of his character, though a quality so little known to
his generation that it seemed to it to be a weakness.
' Am I an imbecile,' she thought as she drove away from
the house, ' am I an imbecile, that this girl I had utterly for-
gotten haunts me all day long like a phrase of the ' Ruth 1'
Is it just because I looked at her picture 1 Or is it because that
song of Paul's, " 0, reine des champs," made me remember her
as I saw her going through the hepaticas under the orange
leaves on her strange little island % All these men know some-
thing of her, I think, and Otho perhaps knows most.'
As she drove through the streets, lying almost at full length
in her carriage, wrapped in furs and with a great bouquet of
gardenia idly clasped in her hands, her eyes were closed, but
her thoughts were awake. A little contemptuous smile was on
her lips, but a great slowly-arousing and amazed suspicion was
in her heart.
She had bidden him take his liberty, true. So great sove-
reigns bid their courtiers take theirs ; but evil betides th«
courtier who is rash enough to construe the bidding literally.
OTHMAR.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
There lived in Paris an old man who had once been a freed
serf, and then a confidential private secretary of her father's.
He had received a pension from her family for his faithful and
intelligent services, and the devotion which he had given to her
father he had continued to give to her. He was a man of great
humility, though of great sagacity. He had the patience and
submissive temper of the Muscovite peasant joined to the
subtlety and the adroitness of the educated Slav. Whenever
she needed any errand executed in which prudence and ability
were needed, she always sent for this person, whom she had
known from infancy, and who loved and revered her with an
almost abject devotion. Rather than fail to execute the wishes
of Nadkge Federowna, or fail to keep the secret of them when
fulfilled, he would have died a hundred times over with that
serenity under torture which the Russian of the Baltic shares
with the Asiatic of the Indus.
Of the very existence of this man Othmar knew scarcely
anything. It had always seemed to her well to have some few
instruments of which the position and the species were known
only to herself. One is never sure of the future. It was her
manner of keeping 'une poire pour la soi/,' after the wise in-
junction of the provincial proverb.
She had never hitherto used the services of Michel Obreno-
vitch for any wrongful cause ; but she knew that, to whatever
purpose she chose to dedicate him, to that purpose he would be
bound.
When she rose in the following forenoon she sent for him,
and gave him the name of Damaris Berarde and the name of
the island of Bonaventure.
' Whatever there can be learnt of this person and this place
learn for me,' she said to him.
He asked no more instructions. He kissed the hem of her
gown in sign of humblest loyalty and good fath, and withdrew.
' He has the grip of a ferret,' she thought, ' and the heart of
a dog.'
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
It was now towards the close of carnival. Othmar's time, always
largely occupied, and doubly burdened since the death of his
uncle, left him but little leisure for the studies and the thoughts
286
OTHMAR.
most natural to Ms mind. His temperament led Mm to the love
of leisure, of privacy, of meditation. To read Plato under an
oak-tree all day, as she suggested, however insufficient it might
have seemed to her, would have been to him the most congenial
of occupations. He would have chosen Yaucluse, like Petrarca,
could he have done so.
Amidst all the variety of affairs which came before him he
was often tired with that fatigue of the mind which is more
painful than the fatigue of the body. Study, even over-study,
does not produce that fatigue ; what produces it is the constant
pressure of uncongenial and constantly-recurrent demands upon
mental attention. Since the death of Friederich Othmar such
demands upon him had been multiplied a hundredfold; and
whilst all Paris looked on him as one of the most enviable of
its great personages, he himself would willingly have given all
his millions to be free to pass his years in the intellectual leisure
and repose which were to him the chief excellence of life.
'He has remained Wilhelm Meister and Werter, though an
unkind fate has made him a rival of the Rothschilds,' his wife
had said once. And a student at heart he did remain, and a
dreamer also whenever the thunder of the brazen chariots of
the world around him left him any peaceful moment in which
to enjoy silence and Remember the dreams of his youth.
The moments grew rarer and wider apart every year. He
was like the king on Burne-Jones's wheel of fortune : he was
crowned, but bound on the wheel.
Therefore, in the press of great interests and of public mat-
ters, which despite himself absorbed so much of his thoughts
and of his time, the remembrance of Damaris was no dominant
thing, but a tender and fugitive memory which came to him
ever and again, as the song of a bird on a bough outside his
windows may bring the gentle thoughts of other days to the
hearer of it who sits shut up in a close room under a zinc roof
in a city. Whenever he remembered her it was with infinite
pity, with great anxiety, with little of those more selfish im-
pulses which tinge a man's thoughts of a woman, always with
an almost passionate desire to undo the wrong which had been
done her by his wife.
' What can I do for her ? Command me in all ways,' he had
said more than once to Rosselin, who had always answered:
'Perhaps the best thing you can do is to let her alone.'
He had many thoughts of her which troubled him, and
yague projects which he was forced to abandon as impracticable.
He wished to give her back the island, set her there in simple
sovereignty over the orange trees and the sea-waves, restore to
tier her beautiful free open-air existence amongst the sea-
swallows and the olive-haunting thrushes. He would have
striven to do it at all ce«t; but the isle was not to be bought.
OTHMAR.
287
The owner believed it to be a mountain of treasure, since it was
sought for, and would not part with it at any price. There was
no possibility for him to give her back her little realm, to make
her life anything he would have liked to make it. He could
only leave her alone, as Rosselin had bluntly told him to do;
and that cold kindness did not satisfy the generosity of his
temper, or seem suited to the softness and helplessness of her
years.
This day when he had watched his wife's carriage roll
thropgh the gates of the courtyard, his conscience smote him
especially for what seemed to him neglect and unkindness to
one who had no other friend than himself.
On an impulse of compassion and repentance he went out of
the house and took the train which goes west on its way to the
sea-shores of Brdtagne.
'Poor child,-' he thought. 'Fear of them makes me a.
coward to her. She must have deemed me unkind and neglect-
ful; all these weeks and months I have never been near her.
Time goes so fast '
He alighted at the little station of Trappes, and took his
way on foot across the fields towards the Croix Blanche.
The weather, though dull and grey, had been rainless as the
train passed through the market-gardens and shabby suburbs of
the north-west, but when he reached Magny the valley in its
silvery fog looked poetic, and wore a charm all its own after the
dreary bricks and mortar of the outer-boulevards. The leafless
woods wore lovely hues of bronze and ashen-grey ; the bare
fields were of the red-brown of a stag's hind ; far away the
plains of La Beauce were veiled in a mist which promised snow ;
a man went by him carrying cut wood with the bowed back, the
bent head, the heavy step, the downcast face which Millet has
made immortal in art.
' How have we managed to make a toil and a burden of that
outdoor life which was so blessed to the Greeks 1' he mused.
' We must have blundered horribly. Or is it the weather which
is more at fault than we 1 In the south, pastoral life is still
enjoyable and still graceful.'
He spoke to the woodman and got only sullen monosyllables
in return. He gave him some money, and saw the slow dull
eye lit up with surprise and greed.
' I should be as sullen and as covetous myself, I daresay,' he
thought, ' if I had to cut faggots for a living.'
Then he went on over the fields along the cross-road which
led to the home of Damaris.
He had not yet reached it, when he perceived her at a little
distance, walking quickly, with the white dogs running before
her. She had on a long dark cloak, and the hood of it, lined
with crimson, was drawn over her head; her head was a little
288
OTHMAR.
thrown backward; her eyes were looking upward at the steel-
grey sky, across whose sad-coloured vault a flock of the farm
pigeons flew. Her hands held an open book; her lips were
moving, but he was too far off from her to hear the sound of
her voice. Her feet came quickly over the brown bare pasture
so that she almost touched him ere she saw him. When she
did so she dropped the book; the colour in her face changed
instantly from white to red, from red to white. She gave an
inarticulate cry of pleasure and amaze.
' You ! you !—at last!' she said, holding out to him both
her hands, warm with the warmth of youth, though gloveless,
in the winter weather.
Othmar took them in his own with a tender gesture and
touched them with his lips.
He could not doubt the great joy which his presence brought
to her. Her eyes were shining through suddenly starting tears
of gladness ; her mouth was tremulous with smiles ; her cheeks
had flushed scarlet; her whole face and form were eloquent of
a happiness which needed no words for its expression.
He thought of a languid, amused, disdainful voice which
had said to him awhile before, 4 Surely anyone's emotions can
restrain themselves until one gets into the house !'
The welcome of Damaris affected him profoundly, touched
him to a vivid gratitude. He was so used to the repression of
his warmer feelings, so accustomed to irony and languor, and
the ridicule of all ardour and enthusiam, that this delight which
his presence caused was to him at once infinitely pathetic and
deliciously responsive. He was thankful to be paid in such
unwonted coin, and the beautiful sincerity of it was clear and
radiant as the sunrise of a summer morning.
41 should have come before if I had known ,' he said,
and paused with a pang of conscience. Was it not a reason
rather to compel his absence 1
Damaris was not sensible of any double meaning in either
his words or his silence. She was abandoned to the pure and
frank rapture with which she saw the living man of whom the
memory abode with her sleeping and waking. There was so
much youth in her, and so perfect a candour, that no thought of
concealment entered her mind for an instant. He had been
everything to her ; he had stood between her and sickness and ■
misery and death ; he had made life bloom again for her when
it had seemed engulfed in the blackness of poverty and solitude.
To her he had been truly a ministering angel. She could have
wept and laughed for joy at the touch of his hand, at the sound
of his voice.
Othmar was embarrassed : she was not. He was conscious
of the meaning of her happiness ; she was not. He let go her
hands, and moved beside her under the leafless trees.
OTHMAR.
289
4 May we go into the house ?' he asked. He remembered
Blanche de Laon.
' Yes,' she answered ; her voice was tremulous with emotion,
and had the thrill of an exquisite happiness in it.
'You see, it is quite near,' she added. 'It is so long since
you came ! Why have you been so long 1'
Othmar did not look at her as he replied :
' My dear, I have so many occupations, so few moments that
I may call my own. And I had told you to write to me if you
needed me.'
'I do not write very well,' she said, with a blush of shame
at the confession. ' And I thought you would come when you
wished.'
' When I could, would be more nearly the truth. I am not
my own master in many ways.'
'No?'
To her it sounded very strange ; to her he seemed the
master of the world.
' No, indeed,' said Othmar bitterly.
He walked silently beside her a few moments. His dejection
of tone, his weariness of manner communicated something of
their sadness to her, and threw their shade over the shadowless
and innocent joys of her soul. He roused himself with an
effort.
' And you—I have heard of you often from Rosselin. Believe
me, I did not forget you, if I seemed neglectful. You love the
open air still, I see, though it is the chill grey air of the Seine-
et-Oise instead of your own warm winter sunshine. What were
you reading or reciting ?—Dona Sol ?'
' Yes.'
She had ceased to look up at him with candid luminous eyes;
her face was downcast and her cheeks burned. A vague sense
stole on her of the utter difference between himself and her ; of
the fact that, though he was all the earth held for her, she to
him could only be a mere passing thought, a mere occasional
interest, a mere waif to be pitied and aided and forgotten. His
life was so crowded, so absorbed, so full of the world's gifts and
the world's honours, she could expect nothing in it but here and
there an instant of remembrance. She led the way into the
dwelling-house in silence. The recollection of his wife had come
to her : of that great lady who had tempted her, ridiculed her,
forgotten her, and been her fate.
Where was she ?
What did she know of herself ?
She did not ask him ; her joyous face grew dark under the
shadow of the crimson hood drawn above her shining curls. If
the mother of Napraxine could have seen into her heart at that
v
290
OTHMAR.
moment her aged lips would have given the kiss of peace to these
young ones for sake of the hatred her young soul felt.
' They are all away at work,' she said aloud ; * will you come
into my room ? I think the fire is not out.'
'I do not care about the fire,' replied Othmar. * I wish I
could bring you the sunshine of your own seas and shores—or
take you to them.'
She did not answer ; he asked again :
* Why would you not write to me 1'
'I do not write very well, I told you,' she said, with the
colour still hot in her cheeks ; ' and I have no right to trouble
you—in that way. It is cold here. Will you come to my
room ?'
She went up a few wooden stairs and opened the door of the
little chamber, of which she had made her study. It had an
open fireplace, and wood was burning on the hearth ; its lattice
window showed the wintry landscape. It was simple, but
looked like the room of an artist: the books, the engravings,
the water-colour sketches, the little statuettes he had sent there
to make it habitable and picturesque, gave it that air of culture
without which a palace is no better than a barn; a copper bowl
was filled with ivy and bay and holly, there were some snow-
drops in a glass which stood before a small bronze he had sent
there, in the summer, of a Greek shepherd playing on a reed.
What there was of art and decoration there was of his providing;
but still a certain grace of arrangement and harmony of tones
were due to her and to the same instincts in her which had made
of her sea balcony on Bonaventure a little hermitage dedicated
to the few nightingales and the many sea-swallows, and, amidst
the sordid cares and the harsh accents which were around her,
had enabled her to hear the voice of Buy Bias or of Fortunio,
as, hid in the orange-grove, she had read through drowsy noons
in
A dim house of happy leaves, with shadows populous.
As he looked around this chamber with its union of elegance
and rusticity, there passed over his mind the consciousness of
how utterly his wife would mistake the motive which had
brought him there, the feeling which had prompted him to have
this child surrounded, as far as it was possible, with such simple
pleasures as art and nature can bestow on poetic temperaments.
The world was always with her; its influences had saturated
her mind and coloured her judgments too deeply for her ever
to judge otherwise than as the world would do. To her as to
the world, if ever either became aware of this home which he
had made for another woman under the ash-trees of Les
Hameaux, he could only seem the protector of Damaris in a
very different sense to that in which he actually was so. The
OTHMAR.
291
certainty of sucli inevitable judgment oppressed Him, and
obscured to him the beauty of the girl's face, the lovely fresh-
ness and fervour of her welcome.
The one great love of his life had been so long his only pre-
occupation, his only idolatry, that it hurt him with a sense of
loss and of insult to think that to others it would seem as
though he had been faithless to it. Even the sense which was
present k> his own heart and mind, that such infidelity might
perchance become possible to him, humiliated him in his own
eyes and made him feel a weak, irresolute, mutable fool.
' Perhaps she is right enough to disdain me !' he thought
with impatience of himself.
His thoughts were far more with her than with Damaris ;
and yet the poor child's welcome of him sunk into his heart
with a sense of warmth and of sympathy, to which he had long
been a stranger. Her very personal beauty, too, seemed to
retain in it the glow of her own suns, and to give to those who
looked on it a vivifying warmth and radiance. He felt as
though, in leaving the presence of his wife for hers, he had
come out of the cool pale luminance of moonlight, shining on
the classic limbs of a marble goddess, into a sunlit and fragrant
garden, with birds at play amongst wild boughs of roses.
Absorbed in his own meditations, his words were dreamy
and spoken with effort, his abstraction affected the sensitive
nerves of his companion and cast a chill upon her buoyant and
ardent nature. She grew silent, and watched him with eyes
passionate with gratitude and dim with tears. She saw in him
the saviour of her life, the lord of all her thoughts, her only
friend; she longed to throw herself at his feet and strive to
tell him all she felt. But she could not, she dared not ; there
was something in his voice, in his gaze, in the mere fact of his
presence, which daunted and held her dumb. In his absence
she had repeated to herself a thousand times the eloquent words
with which she would tell him all she felt ; but now that he
was there before her, she was mute. The colour came and
went in her expressive face, the veins in her throat swelled
with emotion ; she could find nothing to say which was worth
saying ; when she spoke in the words of the poets she was
eloquent, but when she could only look in her own heart and
long to speak, how poor she seemed to herself, how dull and
dumb !
The intensity of the happiness his presence brought with it,
in itself bewildered and alarmed her with a vague fear to which
she could have given no name had she tried. She had been
happy in her childhood upon Bonaventure, with the happiness
of youth and health and vigour ; the happiness of the fawn in
the fernbrake, of the swallow on the wing ; unconscious, de-
lightful. instinctive hat>niness in the mere sense of sentient
292
OTHMAR.
life. But this happiness which she felt now was new to het,
and closely allied to pain, and nervous as its twin-sister,
sorrow ; she was afraid of it and mute.
At last she broke the silence timidly :
4 There was something I thought I would write to tell you
because he is one of your friends, but then I thought it did not
matter. It was only that M. de Bethune has been here twice or
three times.'
4 Bethune !' echoed Othmar with astonishment and some dis-
pleasure. 4 How came he here 1 '
She told him, and added ' He has come back on different
days. He brought me a jewel once ; it was very handsome. It
was because I attended to his horse's sprain ; I asked him to take
it back again and he did so. Since that he has brought me
flowers. Those flowers are some of his.'
He looked where she looked and saw a group of hothouse
blossoms of value and rarity. He felt an annoyance which he
did not dissimulate. 'Do he and his flowers please you ?' he
asked, not wisely as he knew.
But the perfect candour of her eyes remained unclouded.
- 41 do not think about him,' she replied in that tone which
was an echo of her free and fearless life upon the island. 4 He
is kind, and M. Rosselin says he is good. He is a great friend
of hers, is he not 1'
4 Of my wife's 1' said Othmar, with irritation. 4 Yes. She
likes him, he is often with her ; he is one of those persons whom
great ladies care to chain to their thrones.'
He had himself always had a vague jealousy of Gui de
Be'thune; the intimacy which his wife allowed him, although
only, he knew, in accordance with the habits and usages of a
woman of the world, yet was always more intimate than he
cared to see. He knew the solidity and nobility of Bethune's
character and the hopeless devotion which had so long absorbed
his heart, but sometimes he thought that his wife might have
found better ways of rewarding the one and of curing the other
than the constant attendance on her which she permitted to a
man who had adored her before the death of Napraxine, and
had offered her his hand after it. He had said little against
it, because he had known how absurd and vulgar a passion
jealousy had always seemed in her sight, but there had never
been any cordiality of intercourse between himself and
Be'thune, and it irritated him to hear that Bethune of all men
should, lay an accident of sport, have found his way to Les
Hameaux.
The idea had caused him uneasiness, and associated with the
remembrance of Blanche de Laon, made him conscious that the
secret of the vale of Chevreuse had been very rashly and
consciously kept by him from his wife. The Due was a man of
OTHMAR.
293
chivalrous honour and fastidious delicacy; he would in all
likelihood feel bound to respect a secret which he had acci-
dentally suppressed, but the influence of Nadkge was unbounded
with him, and if by any chance through the malice of Blanchette,
or any other means, her suspicions should be in any way aroused,
she would turn the mind of B6thune inside out as easily as a
child can empty a bird's nest. He knew her great power over
men, and the tenacity with which she would at times follow out
an idea if it were one which appeared to elude her, or which
others sought to conceal from her.
4 Does he know your story ?' he asked, with some embarrass-
ment. ' Have you mentioned me to him ?'
' Oh no !'—the colour flushed into her face, there was indig-
nation in her denial. 4 Do you think that I would talk of—of—
of that time and of you ?'
Her voice trembled a little over the last word; she added
after a moment,
4He speaks of her sometimes—of you never.'
4 Ah!'
Othmar understood the meaning of that, though his com-
panion did not.
The admiration and loyalty with which her visitor had
spoken of a lady who was nothing to him, had seemed even to
her unworldly ignorance something which Othmar would not
like. She, who had only seen the homely lives of the toilers of
the sea and soil, with their primitive passions and their single-
minded ideas, did not dream of the easy relations and the elastic
opinions which exist in the great world, of the friendships which
have all the grace of love without its fatigue and its bondage, of
the influence which brilliant women can exercise over the minds
and lives of men, without giving in return one iota of their own
freedom or feeling one pulse of. tenderness. All those intricate
motives, and half-dissolute, half-delicate, liberties which prevail
in society, were to her unknown, unimaginable. She could
understand that a woman or a man should die for love, or should
in an hour of hatred slay what they were jealous of, or what had
robbed them of their love. All the simple deep undivided
emotions of life were intelligible to her and aroused response in
her nature, but the refinements of caprice and of fancy, the
subtleties of cultured minds playing with passions which they
were too languid and too hypocritical to share, these were
altogether unintelligible to her.
In her short life she had not lived with the rude labouring
folk who had been her sole companions, without knowing that
men could be faithless and women also. But in the only people
she had ever known, fidelity had had a rude and literal inter-
pretation, and infidelity had often been roughly chastised by a
blow of the knife, or Hie scourge of a rope's end. All the refined
294
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gradations of inconstancy in the great world were wholly unim-
aginable by her.
You will have to live ten years more before you can play in
Sardou's pieces,' Rosselin had said one day to her ; ' as yet you
must remain with the poets, with the eternal children, with the
eternal NaturMnder.'
' Perhaps,' Rosselin had added to himself, ' she will never be
able to play Dora, or Froufrou, only Adrienne Lecouvreur, or
Marie Stuart. She has a character cast on broad bold antique
lines; simple and profound feelings alone are natural to her.
The intricacies of complex emotion, and the contempt born of
analysis, are not intelligible to her. She would understand why
the Duchesse de Septmonts throws the cup down so violently in
" L'Etrangkre," but she would not understand why Froufrou
vacillates so helplessly between her family and her lover.'
She looked wistfully now at Othmar, afraid that she haa
displeased him, yet urged on by the unconquerable attraction
which the character of his wife exercised over her :
1 Why has she so much power over people 1' she asked in a
low voice.
' My wife 1' asked Othmar, who was absorbed in his own
thoughts. ' How can I tell you, my dear 1 Perhaps she has
it because she does not care about it; perhaps because all men
seem to her to be fools ; perhaps because nature has made her
cleverer than we are : how can I tell you ? There are persons
born into this world with a magnetic power over the minds of
others : she is one of them. You have seen it yourself; she
was an utter stranger to you, yet she said but two words to you,
and you followed her, and all your peaceful, and innocent, and
happy life went to pieces like a child's sand-city before the tide,
of the sea". She can always do that. She has done it a million
times. She has done it with this man you speak of; she looked
at him once years and years ago, and he has never been free any
more. Other women hardly exist for him. He would prefer
to be wretched following her shadow, than to be happy where
she was not. There are others like him '
The face of Damaris grew troubled and embarrassed, there
was a sound of indignation in her voice as she said : ' But since
she is your wife 1'
Othmar laughed a little bitterly.
£ Ah, my dear child !—you belong to another world than
ours. You have seen amongst your fisher-folk and your fruit-,
sellers a kind of union of labour, which is called marriage, and
which makes the woman toil all day for her children and her
house, and grow grey on one hearthstone, and live out her life
with the sun shining on one narrow field. You do not under-,
stand that when a great lady does a man the honour to accept
his hand in marriage, she retains her own complete immunity
OTHMAR.
295
from all obligations whatever; she only remains beside him on
the tacit condition that he shall submit to all her terms ; she
makes his houses brilliant, she amuses herself, and he can do
the same if nature have not made him too dull; she has a
number of friendships and interests with which he has nothing
to do ; and if his heart remain unsatisfied, that is nothing to her
—he can take it elsewhere.'
There was the bitterness of personal feeling in the words
spoken, as if in impersonal generalisation. His hearer did not
penetrate all their meanings, but she felt the personal offence
and dissatisfaction which were in them, and they filled her with
a wistful and sympathetic sorrow. She did not understand.
How could people be so rich, so great, so beautiful, have so
much power in their hands, and so much love at their command,
and yet be for ever so restless, so weary, so dissatisfied ? Her
heart hardened itself more utterly than ever against this woman
who had such empire, and used it with such cruelty; who was
so beloved, and so contemptuous of love ; who bore his name,
dwelt in his houses, could see him when she would, and yet
seemed to give him no more rest or kindness than she gave a
stranger passing in the street. The reasons of it were all too
intricate and too subtle for her mind to be able to guess one
half of them. In her own simplicity of phrase she would have
said only that he was unhappy, which would not have covered
one half, or one tithe of the truth ; but that scanty knowledge
was enough to make all her own intensity of gratitude and
devotion to him yearn with longing to console him, and sink
heartsick before its own impotency to do so.
All through the months in which he had been absent, she
had thought of him with wistful memories, vague troubled
thoughts, of which he was the centre and ideal. The remem-
brance of his light grave kiss upon her brow had thrilled through
her with a magical force, banishing childhood. All her warm
and passionate heart, rich as the fruits of her native land, was
given to him unasked, unconscious of all it gave. Never in any
hour of her empire over him had the woman to whom he had
given up all he possessed, his past, his present, and his future,
known one single pulse of such love for him as filled the whole
nerve and soul and nature of Damaris Berarde.
She would have gone blindfold wherever he had led. She
would have died happy if gathered one moment to his breast.
But as yet she knew it not. As yet her own heart was a
sealed book to her. To him it was open ; he could read on it
what he would ; but he was unwilling to read.
'Have we not done her harm enough,' he asked himself,
' that I should do her this last, this greatest ? Shall I bind her
to me in her youth and her ignorance when I can but give her,
what?—an hour of my time, a fragment of my thoughts, the
296
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cold hospitality of a heart which has been swept empty by
another woman ?'
He looked at her where she stood, with the grey light of the
pale day powerless to dull or take away the warmth and depth
of colour, the strength and grace of outline from the form and
face. The shining curls, the luminous eyes, the mouth like the
bud of the pomegranate, the warm soft cheeks with the bright
blood pulsing in them, they were just what they had been in
the sea-wind, and the sun of the south ; the pallor and cold of
the north had had no dominion over them.
She had the triple beauty of youth, of health, of genius.
There was the lavish glory of the springtime in her, as in the
April fields when nature flings down flowers at every step. She
should have been Heliodora to be crowned with white violets
and blue hyacinths by the singer of Gadara, and he—if he had
loved her, he might have opened his arms to her; but he looked
in his own soul and no love of any kind was there.
Should he dare to offer her pale pity, mere tenderness, the.
fatigue of passions tired and chilled by another ? What more
unfair than for one weary and world worn to lay his head upon
the warm white breast of youth when he no more could dream
there any of the dreams youth loves and love begets ?
Damaris was perplexed and pained because he stayed so brief
a time with her, for the low winter sun, already when he came
so near to its last hour above the grey and purple of the plains,
was still sinking red and dim in a western sky of smolce-like
vapour, when he rose to leave her and return to Paris. She
vaguely felt that there was some reserve between them, that
all he thought was not expressed, that all he desired was not
said.
In her ignorance of the waywardness and contradictions of
the hearts of men, she could only think that he was angered
with her for her persistency in a career which he had told her
was not a happy or a wise one. To her it seemed that he had
every right over her life, since without him she must have
perished miserably amongst the unnoticed misery of the great
city in which he had found her.
'You are not vexed that I was reciting the speeches of
Dona Sol ?5 she asked him timidly, trying to find out what he
wished.
'Vexed? Surely not,5 he answered her. 'I understand
that you still cling to this one thought, and since the ambition
of it is so strong in you, it is no doubt best that you should
give it an undivided devotion. We do nothing well that we dc
half-heartedly.'
'Does he tell you what he thinks of me?5 she asked, still
timidly.
' Rosselin ?5 said Othmar. ' Yes : he thinks greatly of your
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297
natural gifts ; you content him, which is a rare thing, for he is
hard to please ; he believes you may move that dull, stupid,
imitative mass which calls itself the world. I have never heard
him say otherwise or say less. But neither Rosselin or I are
gods, my child ; we can push open the gates for you, but we
cannot control what you may find beyond the gates.'
(You mean ?'
' I mean that his experience and influence will enable you to
face the world with every advantage, will enable you to begin
where others only arrive after long years of toil and of proba-
tion : but when he has done that he will have done all that he
can do. The rest will lie with all the blind forces which govern
human fates.'
There was something in the words, gently as they were
spoken, which chilled her eager faiths and sanguine hopes, and
brought back to her that fear of the future, that dread of the
imprisonment of the art world, which had moved her after the
recital of the Conservatoire.
' I begin to understand !' she said, with an impetuous sigh.
' It will be a slavery where I thought it a conquest. But—but
—could not I have one triumph and then come back to the
country and the quiet of it if I wished? Could I not make
Paris crown me once, even if I gave the crown back to them ?
Why not ? '
' Because, drinking once, every one drinks as long as a drop
is left of that amari aliquid called Fame. If you once taste
triumph you will never return to obscurity. Did I not tell you
so in the summer ? Besides, why should you wish to triumph
at all unless it be to give over your life to Art ? I do not under-
stand '
The face of Damaris grew red and overcast.
* I want her to know that I need not be despised,' she said
in a very low voice, through which there ran the thrill of a deep
and sombre meaning. Othmar started and himself coloured at
the menace which there was in the sound of her voice.
' You mean Nadige ?' he said abruptly.
Damaris gave a gesture of assent.
She was ashamed of what she had said, but it had escaped
her almost involuntarily. He was silent. He was uncertain
what to say. There was a sense of reluctance in him to speak
at all of his wife to her. Commonplace words could have been
said in plenty; but these he did not choose to employ. He
understood that the whole strong and ardent soul of this child
was on her lips; it was not a time for trivial platitudes, for
empty phrases, which in moments of great emotions seem more
unkind than blows.
' If I be your friend, my dear, you must not think of her as
your enemy,' he said at length. ' She admires genius—it is the
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one thing -which commands her respect: if you show her you
possess it she will be a better friend to you than I can ever be.'
' I do not want her friendship.'
Damaris had grown pale ; she spoke with impetuous and
almost fierce meaning; the darker instincts which were in the
hot blood of the B^rardes were aroused ; she did not pause to
consider her own words.
It grew dark without : the sun had now sunk below the
horizon ; the red light of the fire on the hearth reached her and
shone in her auburn curls, on her shining sombre eyes, on her
lips shut close with scorn. She looked at him from under her
level brows.
' You care for her very much ? ' she said suddenly.
Othmar was silent some moments. How much or how little
should he show of his real thoughts to this child, who loved him
and whom he could not love in any way as she deserved 1 He
thought she had merited candour at the least from him.
'Yes, dear; I care for her very much, to use your words.
She has been all the world to me ; in a sense she will be so
always. Every great passion has a eertain immortal element in
it; at least I think so. She has been the one woman for whom
I would have sinned any sin, have done any folly, have given
up place and name, and honour, and all I had, if she had
wished. Ho one loves twice like that. Many never love so
once. I do not pretend that life with her has been all I hoped
for; those exquisite dreams are never realised; human nature
does not hold the possibility of their realisation. I disappoint
her perhaps as much as she chills me ; it is inevitable, and is no
one's fault that I know of ; the fault lies with human nature.'
He paused. Damaris stood where she had been before, but
the light had died down from the wood-fire, and the shadows of
the twilight were upon her face. Her open-air, bird-like,
flower-like life upon the island had made all life seem very
simple to her, a thing regulated like the coming and going of
the boats between the shores, broad and plain as the smooth
sea sand of the mainland. All suddenly she saw that it was a
thing of intricate mysteries, of cruel perplexities, of fathomless
emotions, with whose disquietude and disillusion the learned
played as with knotted threads which it amused them to dis-
entangle, but before whose impenetrable secret the simple broke
their heart.
Othmar continued with an effort, leaning against the side of
the shut casement grown dark with the descending gloom of
coming night.
' I cannot make you comprehend, my dear, with how great
a passion I have loved her. You may have heard of one who
bore my name before her, one who died on your own shores.
She was lovely in body and soul, and had no fault that ever I
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299
saw, and would have died for me—did die for me, perchance—
and to her I was without any love, always because my whole
soul was set upon another woman. And that other is now my
wife. And her, I tell you, I have loved in such wise that I
believe no other love worthy the name will ever arise in me
again. I do not say that it is impossible, for no man knows ;—
but so I think. She has disdained the place she took, and has
left it empty, but no other can fill it after her. She has made
that impossible-—'
The tears rose to his eyes as he spoke. He could not think
of the woman he had worshipped, and whose heart he thought
had never had one pulse of actual love for him, without a pain
which overmastered him. He had never spoken of all he felt
for her to any living being throughout the years in which her
influence had reigned over his life.
Damaris looked at him in the deepening shadows which hid
her own face. A passionate pain communicated itself to her as
she listened.
4 Is it she who does not care, then 1' she asked. Her voice
was hurried and had a tremor in it.
4 God knows !' said Othmar. 4 No ; I think she does not.'
He sighed wearily ; his reserve once broken through, it was
a kind of solace to him to speak out aloud the disappointment
mute for so long, for so long unconfessed even to himself.
4 It is not her fault,' he continued ; 4 nature made her so.
We all seem to her weak and sensual fools. Her own mind is
so cultured and so hypercritical that men far greater than I am
would seem to her poor creatures. She needed a Csesar to share
his empire with her, and she would have laughed even at him
because his laurels could not have covered his scanty locks !
She would have always seen his baldness, never his greatness.
She is made like that. She does not care ; why should she ?
We care for her. But that is no reason. Perhaps she would
regret it if the children she has had by me died, but if I died
to-morrow I doubt if the world would look dark to her. It
certainly would not look empty !'
He spoke bitterly, with truth and irony so intermingled in
his unconsidered words, that it was far beyond the powers of
his inexperienced hearer to distinguish between them ; all she
felt was that he was unhappy, yet that his soul was set irrevocably
upon this woman who had wedded him only to torment, to
elude, to disappoint, to humiliate him.
She did not know enough of men and women and their
passions to understand all that he meant in all its fulness of
mortification, but she could understand that he suffered with a
kind of suffering for which it was impossible for anyone to
console him, and which severed him from herself by a vast and
cruel distance of which she became suddenly sensible as she had
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never been before. His presence was sweet to licr with a
sweetness which was akin to anguish; the sound of his voice
thrilled through all her being, the touch of his hand was a
magnetism over her, charming her to a sense of ecstasy in which
she lost all power of will : but she was powerless to banish for
an hour the remembrance of this other woman, she had no
sorcery which could undo and replace the magic of the past;
she did not think this or feel this because her thoughts and her
feelings were all confused and inarticulate, but it was so, and
an immense consciousness of loneliness and impotency weighed
like lead upon the warmth and the buoyancy of her soul.
She was nothing to him.
They were alike silent, standing in the dusky windows with
the cold dark country in its wintry silences stretched without.
' It is best she should know !' he thought with a sense of
cruelty and ingratitude. It seemed to him terrible that she
should waste all the treasures of her lovely youth, of her fresh
emotions, of her original thoughts, of her awaking passions,
upon one who could not give her even one single heart's beat of
love in answer. He stooped and kissed her on her shining
curls.
'Good-night, my child/ he said with pitying tenderness.
' Good-night. Think of me as your friend, always your friend,
and if you see me seldom believe that it is not due to want of
sympathy, but only because—because '
He paused, seeking for words which could render his meaning
clear to her without wounding her by too plain and blunt a
warning against her own heart.
' Because I meet you too late to be able to care for you/ he
thought; ' because I have nothing to give you worth your
dreams and your youth ; because I would give you more if I
could, but I cannot; because my heart is like a shut grave, it is
too full of its own dead to be able to let in the living !'
But he could not say this, it would have been too harsh; so
he said nothing. He kissed her once more on her soft thick
hair gently and coldly, and left her, while the darkness of the
night gathered around her, and over the silent fields the last
snow of the winter began to fall, drifting noiselessly before a
northern wind.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
That night he received a letter from Melville, written in answer
to the one in which he had told him the story of Damaris.
Melville was far away in Asia at a Jesuit mission station in the
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301
snowy mountains, and his reply. had taken many months to
cross the Chinese plains and seas.
1 What you tell me,' he wrote, ' of a child whom I knew so
happy on her little island has startled and does distress me
greatly. Was it any other than yourself who were her friend,
I should be not only distressed but very apprehensive. She is
of that ardent, impetuous, imaginative temperament which can
be led to any madness if misled by its dreams or by its affections.
I shall for ever blame myself that I did not see her before my
departure for Asia. But I left the South of France for Borne
very hurriedly, and thence came at once to these strange lands
to examine and report on the state of all the Catholic missions
of the far East to the Vatican. I had not a moment for any
personal memories or personal farewells.
' I would that I were in Europe, but it will be impossible for
me to execute my errand under another year. You will do, I
know, all that is chivalrous and generous by her, but what I
fear is that thus doing it you will inevitably become the angel
and ideal of her poetic fancy. Let me urge on you to see her
yourself as little as is consistent with necessity and common
kindness, and to have her as much as possible occupied by in-
tellectual pursuits and interests. You will not be offended with
me that I say thus much. The vulgar successes of such easy
seduction will have no attraction for you, and I am sure that the
share which your wife originally had in thus bringing about her
misfortunes will make this child altogether sacred to you.
' The dramatic art may be the only career, as you say, which
is open to her. I remember that she was for ever reading plays
and poems, and could recite her favourite passages with pathos
and with fire. It is not what one would choose for her, but if
she enter upon it, it may occupy her and save her from herself.
I have no churchman's prejudice against that or any art. My
time, when in Paris, has been largely spent amongst great
artists, and I have found in them many great qualities of the
mind and heart which might go far to balance before any judge
the freedom and the passions of their unconventional lives. I
believe the character of Damaris to be in every way that of an
artist. That resistance to all inherited destiny, and to all
habitual surroundings, always marks out the one who is born to
separate himself or herself from the common herd, and she had
this very strongly. Hardy, and loving all country things and
seafaring ways, as she did, there was yet always in her some-
thing which was unlike her destiny, something restless, daring,
and dreamful, something which, wherever it is found, presages
woe or fame. She has at all times attracted me greatly, for
from her earliest years she has had that about her which suggests
the possession of genius, and there is in her that union of the
peasant and the patrician which has before now made the most
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original, and most psychologically interesting, characters on the
earth. Tell me more and at once of what you expect from her
future, if she be not, indeed, as yet too young for its horoscope
to be securely cast. I will write to her direct. Meantime re-
ceive my thanks for all that you have already done to save this
poor sea-gull astray in a city, and believe in my respect and
esteem. Of course you have told Madame Nadkge : what does
she say 1'
Othmar read the letter sitting in the solitude of his library
in the small hours of the waning night; and a pang, which was
almost that of conscience, smote him as he did thus read. He
had done nothing indeed to forfeit the esteem of the writer ;
nothing which made him unworthy of the writer's confidence ;
yet a vague sense that he had been unwise in all which he had
meant for kindness, and wrong in the reticence which had sprung
from his own selfish sensitiveness, oppressed him with a useless
self-reproach. How could he tell Melville that his wife knew
nothing of the presence of Damaris Berarde at Chevreuse,
without appearing to him to have become that mere vulgar
seducer which Melville would have thought it the grossest of
insults to suppose him ?
CHAPTER XL
The next day Othmar called upon Rosselin, and without preface
said to him abruptly :
* You had better tell the Due de Bethune all I have told you
about your pupil. I do not know whether he will believe it or
not, but it is wholly intolerable for us to allow him to suppose,
as he may suppose from appearances, that there are relations
between myself and her which have no existence in fact.'
Rosselin listened and made no reply.
Othmar continued with impatience.
'I do not know what he thinks, but he probably thinks
something entirely and grossly unjust to her. He is a man of
honour : he will respect confidence if it be placed in him.'
' Why not tell him yourself ? He is, I believe, very intimate
in your houses.'
'He is no especial friend of mine. He is often at my
house, it is true, but personally I have no intimacy with him
whatever.'
Rosselin hesitated; then he summoned his courage and said
frankly: f
' Pardon me, but it is not the Due de Bethune or any other
man who has any concern with the position which you have
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303
created for yourself and for my pupil; the only person for whom
it can have any vital interest, or who can exercise any influence
over it, is the Countess Othmar, to whom you will not speak
of it/
Othmar coloured ; he was greatly annoyed. He was conscious
also that Rosselin was right in what he said.
' If my wife heard of her from others, I would tell her how
Bhe came there,' he said, with some embarrassment. 4 But I
can assure you that though M. de B^thune might believe in the
facts as you know them, she would not do so. She never, be-
lieves in any single motives. She would suppose that I tried to
gloss over with sentiment a mere vulgar amour.'
4 Men's natures,'he added, bitterly, 'are often as simple, and
straight, and frank as a dog's, because, like dogs, we are stupid
and trustful; but the mind of a woman of culture is far too
critical in its survey and too intricate in its own motives
ever to accredit us with the intellectual honesty we possess. It
is a quality so stupid that it seems to women as incredible as it is
uninteresting.'
Rosselin grew in his turn impatient.
4 You, too, appear to me,' he said bluntly, 4 to be too fond of
Pascal's esprit de finesse, jugement de sentiment. Intellectual
analysis is very interesting no doubt, but I never knew it serve
in the least to solve the prosaic difficulties of active life. You
cannot govern circumstances with theories.'
In himself he thought:
4 You create a position in the frankness of your generosity
which you perceive becomes equivocal in its aspect to others ;
you earnestly desire to prevent its appearing so ; yet you do not
take the one measure which would secure to it immunity from
suspicion.'
41 have an idea,' he continued aloud, 'that the best way to
test her talents and prepare the world for the appreciation of
them, would be for her to recite at some great house, to be seen
and heard by some choice audience. Why not in yours ? Why
not to your friends 1'
4 In mine ? To my acquaintances 1'
'Why not? It is, in my opinion, the easiest and most
propitious way in which a beginner can try her powers. It is
less alarming than a public stage, and the verdict given is more
discriminating, and of greater value afterwards. The majority
of neophytes have no such chance possible. They may go where
they can ; begin in the provinces; take anything they can get.
But when it can be done, there is no question but that to make
an entry into the world in the best society is an immeasurable
benefit to any aspirant. It is*to be famous at once if successful;
whilst, if unsuccessful, the failure is passed over as the caprice
of the host in whose house the neophyte is tried. As you are
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disposed to do anything for her, it seems to me that it Would
cost you little to ask Madame Nadege to permit the representa-
tion of some saynete, or some short piece like the "Luthier de
Cr£mone," at one of her great winter entertainments. She
likes novelty ; and I believe she often has dramatic representa-
tions both in Paris and at Amyot.'
' She has them, certainly,' said Othmar with some constraint.
Rosselin looked from under his eyelids at him.
' Then what objection is there ? You have said that Madame
your wife, first of all of us, saw something like genius in Damaris
Berarde. She would not refuse to allow her prophecy to be
proved true under her own auspices.'
'No ; I do not suppose that she would refuse.'
'If you would dislike that she should be asked, that is
another matter,' said Rosselin with some impatience, whilst to
himself he thought, 'You have made a secret of this thing,
and you find what a burdensome and stupid thing a secret is,
especially when it is one that circumstances are certain to take
out of our hands, whether we will or no.'
'I have no dislike to your project,' replied Othmar with
hesitation ; ' but,' he added more frankly, ' I must tell you that
my wife is not in the least likely to take interest twice in the
same person ; and I must also tell you, as I did some months
ago, that she knows nothing of the present .existence of your
pupil. If you like to tell her, do so; I give you free per-
mission.'
' 11' echoed Rosselin. ' My dear friend, if such a great
lady saw a superannuated old actor enter her presence she
would surely order her lackeys to turn him out unheard. I
never spoke to Madame Nadege in my life, though rumour has
made me feel well acquainted with her.'
' She always treats genius with respect. It is, perhaps, the
only thing she does respect '
' Are you sure she does not think it escaped from Bicetre ?
Most grandes dames do.'
' No ; she has too much intellect herself. She is a grande
dame, but she is much more besides. She admires talent
wherever she finds it; only she thinks that she finds very
little.'
' There she is right enough; there is any quantity of mere
facility, of mere imitativeness, in our time, but there is very
little which deserves a higher name.'
' And you believe that Damaris Berarde has more than mere
talent 1'
' Yes, I believe it. I may be wrong, but I have never been
wrong in such judgments, though it seems pretentious to say so.
It is because I believe that she has this, that I am anxious for
the world to first hear of her in such 3 way that she may be
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spared tlio vulgar and tedious novitiate which is generally un-
avoidable before a dramatic career; and also I should like to
command for her such an audience as may become a title of
honour to her, and a protection against false tongues. It is
inevitable that your name has been, or will be, associated with
hers. Modern life is one huge glass-house. If she be first seen
at your house, in your salons, calumny can scarcely attach to
your friendship for her. Pardon me if I speak with too intimate
a candour. If I said less, I should feel myself almost dragged
into the base collusion of a Sir Pandarus.'
Othmar grew pale with anger; he was unaccustomed to
familiarity, and the words seemed to him wanting in delicacy
and in respect.
' You are very hopeful!' he said bitterly, ' and wonderfully
trustful, my good friend, if you imagine that in the world we
live in she would be secured from slander by being seen in my
drawing-rooms. The only thing they would say, if they were
in the mood to say anything, would be that I deceived my wife
into facilitating my amours. Society is not so easily persuaded
of innocence as you appear to think, whilst it is thoroughly per-
suaded of the Countess Othmar's indifference to myself !'
In the impulse of his anger he said what he would not have
said in a cooler moment. He was greatly irritated at all which
was implied in Rosselin's latest words, and the allusion to
his wife's indifference to his actions escaped him almost in-
voluntarily.
'I regret if I offend you,' said Rosselin, whose keen eyes
read his feelings in his face. ' I say what it seems right to me
to say. I know the world has always mauvaise langue, I know
it as well as you can do, but there are limits to its impudence.
I do not believe that the lowest knave of it all would ever dare
to say that you passed any insult on your wife. It has been too
well aware of your devotion to her. However, let us abandon
my idea. We can find some other way, perhaps ; the prepara-
tion I have given my pupil has been short, and perhaps im-
mature. She can wait awhile without injury. You have said,
I think, that she has means enough of her own to live on as she
lives now ?'
' She has means enough. Yes.'
' Without wasting her little substance 1 I suppose her
grandfather did not leave her much 1'
' She has quite sufficient income for her wants; I believe
they are very simple.'
He spoke impatiently and rose. Rosselin, whose tact was
always of the acutest kind, understood the hint and changed
the subject.
Left to himself, the anger of Othmar soon grew Less, and the
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courtesy of his nature made him regret his impatience with a
man double his years and not his equal in station ; one, more-
over, who had only spoken honestly thoughts which were
blameless.
The suggestion had annoyed him both by what it asked,
which seemed to him difficult, and by what it implied, which
seemed to him offensive. And he repented of his manner of
receiving it, and of wounding a person who had warmly
answered to his own appeal, and had aided him in regard to
Damaris with a sympathy the more noteworthy because it had
at first been reluctantly given. Before night he wrote a brief
note to Rosselin :
' I regret my impatience, and apologise for it. No doubt
you are right in your views. If I can see my way to comply
with them I will do so. Meanwhile, believe in my friendship
and my high esteem.'
He signed the few lines, and sent thern by a messenger to
Asnieres.
When Rosselin received them he was sitting by his solitary
lamp examining the condition of a much injured copy on vellum
of ' The Birds,' which he had picked up at a bookstall on one of
the quays the day before. He put the manuscript down, and
read the note with its clear signature of Othmar at the end.
'A graceful amende,' he thought. 1 He has a heart of gold,
but his judgment is not so much to be trusted as his feelings
are. He spoke of his wife's indifference. What could he ex-
pect ? You cannot get out of a nature what it has not got in it.
For five-and-twenty years she had lived for herself: did he
suppose that all in a moment she would forget herself and live
for him? I daresay he did. He was ready to live for her.
That sort of mistake is so often made; and it is always the
highest nature which makes it.'
Rosselin lost interest in his Aristophanes for that night. He
had a foreboding of some evil. Imaginative minds are like the
birds : they know when storms approach.
CHAPTER XL1.
A week or two later he saw Othmar again enter his little par-
lour. Othmar made ministers wait on him, and would keep
princes in his ante-chamber with an indifference which gained
him the repute of arrogance ; but he waited himself on Rosselin,
a man old, poor, and solitary. These were his eccentricities,
which the world hated as it would never have hated any vices
in which he might have chosen to indulge.
OTHMAR.
41 have come to speak to you of your wishes, which I perhaps
dismissed too hastily,' he said, as he seated himself. 'You
really believe that to be first seen and heard, as you proposed,
would benefit your pupil ?'
'I do riot doubt it,' replied Rosselin, 'for the reasons I
named to you, and also because to succeed before a choice and
cultured audience is the greatest of stimulants, the most certain
of practical tests. I do not think that a long novitiate would
suit Damaris B^rarde. She is of the south ; her beauty is
nearly at its height now; she is fully matured in every way;
she is of an impetuous and sensitive temperament; she is not
easily governed ; she would never brook the tedium and slavery
of the theatres of the provinces; she must take the world by
storm, mount its throne at a bound, or not at all. She would
easily be irrevocably disgusted and eternally lost to art.'
' Would that be so much a matter for regret!'
' What fate can she have otherwise ? You cannot make her
a duchesse, she would not consent to become a bourgeoise. She
is a declasse : you have said it yourself. There are two asylums
possible for a declasse : they are Pleasure and Art. I prefer the
latter.'
' Art is quite cruel enough. She will never be able to go
back into privacy. What a loss !—what an irreparable loss !
And you speak of it as a gain !'
' I speak as I spoke long ago, when first you named her to
me. The publicity you lament is the price which is paid for
fame. Some do not think the price too high, some do. It is
you yourself who wished me to prepare her for an artist's
career. She cannot become a great artist if she remain in
obscurity.'
' Of course not. But it is horrible. Publicity is a kind of
violation '
' Recompensed like Danae's !'
Othmar was silent. He was conscious that a strong personal
dislike to her leaving the safe shadow of private life moved him
to an exaggerated objection to her being seen and known by
others. When once the world had beheld her, she would
belong to the world. It might make her triumphant or it
might make her wretched, but she would belong to it evermore.
Rosselin guessed what he was feeling, and answered his un-
spoken thoughts.
' Yes ; she will never go back either to Les Hameaux or to
Bonaventure. That is certain. She will belong to all men, in
a sense, when once she has sought their suffrages. But what
else can be done with her 1 What else1? You would not hear
of a conventional marriage for her and a house in the suburbs,
and I suppose she would not hear of it either. She is half a
poet, half a thing of the open air like a doe or a swallow. You
3o8
OTHMAR.
cannot send her back whence she came. If you could do it in
fact, you could not do it in spirit. The soul would never be
the same—poor white seabird of a soul, which comes across the
flames of ambition and burns in them ! You might set her
body down under her orange-boughs, under her blue sky, but
you could not give her the heart of her childhood. You are a
god in your way ; the only god the nineteenth century knows—
a rich man—but to do that is beyond your power.'
' If I had that power I should be a god indeed !' said Othmar
bitterly, 'and the whole sick world would come to me to be
cured.'
He needed not the words of Rosselin to remind him that
never would he be able to undo the work his wife had done in
one idle moment of imperious caprice.
Though the words were harsh and, in a great measure, unjust
to him, he did not resent them; he poignantly regretted the
fate brought on Damaris, and when he saw her he felt a reproach
greater than any which others could address to him. The break-
ing up of the happy simplicity of her life had always seemed to
him as wanton an act as to shoot a seabird which falls in the
sea.
Had he said so to his wife she would have laughed, and have
denied all responsibility. She would have declared that fate, in
some guise or another, always finds out female children with
handsome faces ; that Strephon always comes to them, or Faust.
But he would not look at it thus. To him it always seemed the
cruellest unkindness needlessly to have brought Damaris Berarde
and the world together.
'Why does he dislike a public career for her so much?'
thought Rosselin. ' I do not think that he cares for her, except
in kindness. I do not think he would give her any part of his
own life. Passion has died in him, died under the coldness of
his wife's nature, as flowers die in frost. This child would give
him, I daresay, all the richness and all the heat of her own heart,
but he would only give her in return les cendres tiedes d'un feu
eteint, and, as he is a man more generous and more sensitive
than most, he would never forgive himself for having sacrificed
her to himself. Better for her all the dangers of life in the
world than the consuming love for one who would never love
her as she loved. Had I been the confessor of Louise de la
Vallifere, I should have said to her, " Remain in the crowds of
Versailles if you wish to forget: do not go into solitude." No
woman forgets who has no one to teach her forgetfulness. Soli-
tude is the nurse of all great passions, because in solitude there
is no standard of comparison !'
Othmar, unaware of his companion's reflections, was lost in
thought himself. He felt that he had resigned the direction of
her life into Rosselin's hands, and had no right to dispute witfy
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309
her guide the course which he deemed most desirable for her.
He had sought the counsels and the assistance of a man of
genius in a moment of extremity, and he felt that he had no
title to dissent from whatever the vast experience of such a man
might consider wisest on her behalf. He knew that she could
not continue to dwell at Les Hameaux, unseen save by the dogs
and the birds and the mild eyes of the cattle, if ever those
desires for art and for fame which tormented her were ever to
have any fruition. If he had had the power to close the gates
of solitude on her he would not have used it; he would have felt
that he had no right so to use it.
He was conscious that he had no title to stand between her
and any career which might become possible for her. Since his
last visit to her he had felt that he himself occupied too large a
place in her life ; that his memory coloured all her thoughts too
deeply and too warmly; that her whole existence might be his
utterly in any way he chose if he would take that gift as easily as
a man may gather a half-open rose in the freshness of morning.
He had no vanity of any sort. The many women who had
offered themselves to him in his life for sake, of the riches which
were behind him had taught him humility rather than vanity,
for they had been so plainly idolatrous, not of him but of his
possessions. He had always doubted his power to make himself
beloved for himself alone, and he would willingly have put it to
the proof, like the Lord of Burleigh, had it been possible. But
even he, little self-appreciation as he had, yet could not doubt
that with the life of this child whom he had saved from the
streets he could do whatsoever he chose. Every expression of
her ingenuous nature, every glance of her innocent eyes, every
impulse of her ardent and untrained nature, told him that he
could, with the first moment he chose, render himself wholly
master of her whole existence. He was the god of her dreams
and the providence of her waking thoughts. Had he had less
charm for women than he possessed, he would still scarcely have
failed to become, through circumstance, the one person domi-
nant over all her mind and senses. Without any self-deception,
he could not but be aware that he could become her lover when
he chose. Gratitude, imagination, all the fervour of waking
passions stirring in a southern nature as the juices of the vine
stir in its tender flowerets ; all the favour of opportunity and of
circumstance, which idealised her relations with him ; and all
the impressionability of the first years of a youth early matured
under the heat of Mediterranean suns ; all these were combined
together to make of him the adoration and the arbiter of her
life. And he—what had he to give in return for all that glory
of the daybreak of the soul 1 Not even, as Rosselin had thought,
les eendres tiedes d'un feu eteint.
He had wider thought and bolder judgment than the timid
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and narrow laws which a vast majority of mediocrities had been
able to impose on a sheepish world. Could he have rendered
her such feeling as she was ready to give to him, could he have
given her the warmth of a genuine passion, the sincerity and
the undivided force of a great emotion, he would not have con-
sidered that he sacrificed her to himself if he had kept her in
eternal isolation.
Great natures and great affections do not need the com-
panionship or the suffrages of the world. Its narrow and hollow
laws mean nothing to them, and its opinions mean as little.
Love is not love if it have any remembrance of either.
But he could not give her this, or anything like this. The
great devotion of his life for the woman who had become his
wife had left his heart empty, yet shut to any other visitant.
That immeasurable and intense passion had been to him so
supreme in its dominance, so voluptuous in its ecstasies, that all
other love after it seemed pale as dead flowers beside living
ones.
Men sometimes say to women that they have never loved
but once, and those women if they know what men's lives are
laugh, as well they may. Yet the meaning of the words is true
enough, and not a mere form of phrase.
In the life of every man of higher soul than the vast majority
there is some one passion which stands out unrivalled in his
memory amidst a host of fleeting fancies, hot desires, dull
affections, passing pastimes, which also have in their time been
called love by him wrongly. In that one great passion he has
attained, enjoyed, realised what he can never reach again ; what
no woman who lives will ever be able to make him feel again ;
and in this sense he is not untruthful when he says that he has
only loved but once.
Such a love Othmar had known for the one woman who,
despite the enemy Time, and the decaying worm of custom, had
still, through her very mutability, cruelty, and negligence,
retained a power to wound him and a power to delight him
which no living creature could ever rival with him. Even when
the chill of her own indifference now spread itself to his own
emotions, and he felt life, as it were, grow cold and wintry
around him, memory was there to tell him of the sorceries of
the past, and even love was still there, which watched her wist-
fully, and would still have obeyed her sign had she made one.
What then had he to give Dajnaris ?
Nothing which was worthy her.
Such baser ardours as a creature who is young and beautiful
can always awaken in the breast of any man, and a pitying and
gentle tenderness which would be, offered to love, the cruellest
of tortures.
And then she owed everything on earth to him : she was his
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3"
debtor for the very bread she ate. That one fact seemed to him
to stand between her and himself like a white wall made of
ivory by hands divine. That she herself did not know the
extent of her debt to him made it the more sacred to him.
Circumstance being then as it was between them, and power-
less as he was to feel for her anything more than the tenderness
and the pity which she had from the first aroused in him, what
title had he to stand between her and any possible triumphs
and consolations which the world might offer to her 1 None,
he thought. None that any generosity could allow him to
claim.
He said aloud to Rosselin :
' Whatever you think best to do for her, do. Her career
will be your creation. If she ever attains greatness she will
owe it to you. I do not think that I have any right to inter-
fere either one way or the other. To interest my wife in what
she has forgotten is impossible. You might as well try to
gather last year's raindrops. But it is possible that she might
be pleased if her predictions were proved to her to have been
accurate. Contrive for her to see your pupil before she hears
of her. She may perhaps recognise her with interest. I dare
not say that she will. But you can make the experiment.'
' It will be difficult,' said Rosselin.
' Not very. You have before now done me the honour to
arrange dramatic representations at my house. Whenever the
Countess Othmar next wishes for entertainment of that kind,
which she is sure to do before long, I will place the arrange-
ments for it in your hands. You can then bring forward
Damaris Berarde in any piece you choose. What you wish will
so be done. She will be seen and heard under my roof ; and,
if successful, she may—possibly—reconquer a place in my wife's
memory. If she fail she will certainly never do so.'
' She will not fail,' said Rosselin ; whilst he thought to him-
self, ' She will not fail, because she will have the stimulant of
your wife's presence and the memory of your wife's disdain.
She will not fail if I have left in me any of the magnetism
which I used to be able to communicate to others.'
Rosselin was a man of warm feelings and keen sympathies,
but the artist in him dominated the friend. He was so satu-
rated with the love of art that, as he had surrendered all his
own existence to its claims, so he unhesitatingly surrendered
that of others. The kindest of natures wherever there was no
question of art, he almost became cruel where the interests of
art were involved. To Othmar, the life of a girl seemed too
tender and poetic a thing to be given over to the imperious
exactions of any art; but to Rosselin, though he had at first
been unwilling to draw her into its sphere, he became, the
moment that he believed he saw genius in her, willing even to
312
OTHMAR.
hurt her, if by such a hurt such genius could be stung or scourged
into any ampler evidence of its own powers. He thought little
of what she might or might not suffer if he brought her into the
presence of the women who represented destiny to her. All he
considered was, that no other spectator would be so likely to
move her, to goad her into the fullest revelations of the re-
sources of her talent. With the future consequences of such a
meeting he had nothing to do, all he thought of was its influence
on his pupil. He knew that the wife of Othmar had a fascina-
tion for her as strong as hatred, and irresistible as magnetism.
It was an electric force which he could not afford to allow to lie
latent in the desire he felt, a desire which had grown stronger
on him with every week that he had paid his visits to Les
Hameaux, to compel Damaris into the seizure of that fame
which had at first seemed to him a burden too great, a passion
too fierce, for this young daughter of the sun and of the sea.
' She will ultimately be the mistress of Othmar, or of the
world,' he thought. ' I prefer the world. I will do what I can
that she shall give herself to it instead of to him. To throw
away genius on one human life is to take a planet out of the
skies and bury it like a diamond between two human breasts.'
It was in pursuance of the same belief in what was best for
her which had made him wish her the heart of Rachel, not the
heart of Desclee. Rosselin had surveyed human nature in all
its aspects, and his survey of it had convinced him of one fact,
that all the higher and more delicate qualities of the soul are
but so much penalty-weight to carry in the race of life. The
weight is of gold without alloy ; but, nevertheless, whoso carries
it loses the race.
He with his fine penetration perceived that in her was that
greater nature which will lose itself in a great love, and throw
away all ambition and all possessions, as though they were but
a dead leaf or a broken crust. In a little while such a love,
now strong in her, but scarcely conscious of itself, would
become wholly conscious, and would take its empire over her
whole existence. He wished to oppose to it the only rival with
any chance of success—the world.
CHAPTER XLII.
A FEW days later Rosselin, going to Les Hameaux for his usual
recitation with her, found Damaris feverish, restless and
despondent. She had lost, for the time at least, that buoyancy
and enthusiasm which were the most prominent qualities of her
nature; she seemed to him listless and taciturn, her eyes had a
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313
brooding pain in them, and she took little interest in the studies
of the day.
Rosselin heard from the woman of the house that Othmar
had been there that week.
4 It will end as such things always end,' he thought impa-
tiently. 4 All the fine sentiments on his side will not enable him
to cast nature out of him ; and to her, of course, he must seem
an angel from another world. He has stood between her and
all the misery of life. A dog which he had saved in such a way
would adore him. He is a man, too, made to charm a poetic
nature, because there is so much of the poet in him, and a
melancholy which' is in pathetic contrast with his wealth and
power. One can always understand that women love Othmar ;
what one cannot understand is that his wife cares for him so
little. And yet, why should I say so 1 All the world over one
sees familiarity bring indifference, security create neglect.'
Aloud he said, with anger to her :
4 What has come to you ? If you do not mean to become an
artist, and a great artist, adieu ! My hours are not likely to be
so many on earth that I can afford to waste them. What ails
you'? Your voice is dull; your face is no mirror for your words.
You are not listening. If you have tame moments like this, do
not dream of ever moving the world. It is a block of stone ;
you cannot stir it without putting out all your strength. And
even then it will roll back and roll on to you if you relax your
efforts. If you give yourself to art you may be great in it, I
think ; but if you love anything—any person—better than art,
do not touch it. Go, and be an ordinary woman like the rest.'
The words were harsh. The tears started to her eyes as she
heard them, and a hot colour rose over her face and throat. She
was silent.
4 She never speaks of him. How fine that is !' thought
Rosselin. ' Most female creatures at her years babble of what
fills their thoughts, as birds chatter of the spring in April.'
Aloud he said :
4 You will not do any good to-day. You look ill, and you are
restless. Come with me to Paris ; I will show you something
which will interest you—and the weather is fine though cold.
Let us walk to Magny.'
She went with him in silence.
The day was drawing to a close as the train sped through the
dark fields of winter and entered Paris. A city was always
terrible and hateful to her. She loved air and light and the
solitude of sea and land. Crowds hurt her, and the labyrinth
of streets had never ceased to oppress and to bewilder her. She
felt amidst the walls and roofs as a young eagle feels barred up
in a cage. He talked to her of many things with that picturesque
detail with which his great knowledge of the city and of the
3*4
OTHMAR.
world filled his conversation. He endeavoured to interest and
distract her; he strove to amuse and arouse her. But he felt
that he succeeded but indifferently. Her thoughts were not
with him ; she was silent and she was nervous.
"When night fell he took her with him to the Theatre
Frangais ; not for the first time. It was the night of a premiere
of a great dramatist. The house was filled with the choicest
critics of Paris; the most famous actors occupied the classic
stage. Behind the grating of the hidden box to which he led
her she could see without being seen. Before this she had been
only taken to rehearsals in the daytime ; she had never seen a
great theatre in the full blaze of one of its gala nights. It
blinded and oppressed her. She longed for the coolness, for the
shadows, for the dewy stillness of the country. The pungent
scents, the blazing lights, the multitude of faces, the hum of
voices, made her afraid ; afraid as she had not been all alone in
the hours of night adrift in her boat on the sea.
$ Watch and listen and learn,' said Rosselin. ' You may be
on this stage one day, or on none.'
She did not reply : the new play had begun ; the most
famous players in Paris acted with that exquisite grace and ease
which characterise them; the play was witty and brilliant;
each scene had its separate success, each phrase its separate
charm. Rosselin himself, vividly interested and keenly critical,
gave all his attention to the stage, and for the time forgot his
companion. When the curtain fell upon the first act he turned
to speak to her ; he was startled to see that her face was pale as
death, and her eyes, wide open and fascinated, were fastened on
the opposite side of the house. He looked where she was look-
ing, and saw a great lady with a bouquet of orchids lying on the
cushion before her, and several gentlemen in her box behind her.
' Ah, Madame Nadine !' murmured Rosselin. ' She does not
often deign to honour a first night, even when it is Sardou's.
She is going to some great ball afterwards, I suppose, for look
at her diamonds, and she has her Russian orders on. Voila
une veritable grande dame !'
Damaris gazed at her without a word; her eyes were strained,
her very hps were pale, she breathed quickly and painfully, the
theatre seemed to circle round and round her, and across its in-
tense light of all the many faces there she saw but this one.
When the second act began she had no ears for it and no con-
sciousness of what was said or done in it. She never once
looked at the stage. Her eyes remained rivetted on the wife of
Othmar ; the voices of the actors were a mere dull babble to
her; when the audience laughed she knew not why they laughed,
when they applauded, she had no knowledge why they did so ;
all she saw was that delicate colourless beauty on the other aide
of the house with the great jewels shining on it like stars.
OTHMAR.
315
She looked, and looked, and looked till her eyes swam and
her heart grew sick.
This was the woman whom he loved, this great lady leaning
there with that look of utter indifference on her face, with that
slight smile as this man or the other entered her box, with the
diamonds shining in the whiteness of her breast, with her un-
covered shoulders gleaming white as snow ; a hothouse flower in
all the rarity, the languor, the perfection, which .the hothouse
gives. The same sense which had come to her in the drawing-
rooms of St. Pharamond came again to the child ; a sense of
rudeness, of rusticity, of inferiority, of coarseness in herself as
contrasted with that patrician elegance, that pale and languid
loveliness, that marvellous charm of the world and of its highest
form of culture.
' What can I look like to him !' she thought with humilia-
tion. 'Beside her I must seem to him like some rude
peasant '
All that she had felt vaguely before the mirrors of St.
Pharamond came back upon her embittered, intensified, made
conscious. She realised the immense distance that there was
between her and Othmar as she saw his wife. She realised the
grace and splendour of this life in the world which they led.
She realised the passion which she had given to her.
She realised that she herself could only stand outside his life,
like a beggar outside his gates.
When the curtain fell again, Rosselin looked at her with
impatience.
' You looked at that woman always, never at the stage,' he
said angrily. ' She is a great lady ; leagues above you, leagues
beyond you ; you have nothing in common with her. But one
day you may force her to hear you in this very house if you
choose. Will you choose ?'
' She will not care,' said Damaris.
Tears were standing in her eyes; the sense of an infinite
loneliness, and of a great inferiority, were on her. What would
it matter if she ever became famous yonder on those classic
boards ? That great lady would come and see her for an hour—
smile or censure—then forget. The dreams which she had
nurtured of compelling the admiration of the world, seemed to
dissolve like a mirage before the mere presence of Othmar's
wife. ' She would not care,' she said wearily.
To this patrician she would always be a half-barbarian and
uncultured creature. The heart of the child asked with long-
ing to go back to her old life in the sunny air by the blue
water, with the homely people, with the simple wants, with
the sound of the birds in the leaves, and the feel of the wind
on the sea. But she knew that never could she go back so any
more.
OTHMAR.
If her feet were to travel thither, her soul would not go.
The passion of the world, the aims of ambition, the heart-
sickness of jealousy and desire were all in her; where they have
passed the soul is for ever a stranger to peace, even as where
lire has burnt the soil of a green field, grass will grow no more.
' "Why did she not let me alone ?' she thought.
Between the second and the third acts, Rosselin left her to go
to the foyer, where he had been for so many years so conspicuous
a figure, and so dreaded a critic.
' Fasten the door after me, and if a thousand people should
knock, let no one in until you hear my voice,' he said to her,
drawing the door behind him.
Left to herself she drew back into the deepest shadow of the
little den she occupied, and gazed as she would at the woman
who had been destiny to her. She saw numerous gentlemen
come and go in her box, make their reverence to her, linger if
they were permitted, or withdraw and give place to others,
hfadine had changed her position so that her profile only was now
turned towards the house. She leaned her elbow on the cushion,
and her cheek on her hand, a butterfly of emeralds sparkled
under her shoulder; sometimes her face was hidden by the fan
of white ostrich feathers, sometimes she furled the fan and let it
lie unused beside the orchids.
Damaris watched her with the strange fascination of fear and
of wonder, of hatred and admiration, which had moved her
in the salons of St. Pharamond. All the words which Othmar
had spoken a few days before, were sounding in her ears. Her
simple and candid thoughts were beginning to gain something
of the complexity, of the weariness, of the pain of his. She
understood why he had loved this woman so much that, empty
though his heart might be, it would remain untenanted. Inno-
cent as Mignon, she yet watched her rival with something of the
passion of Adrienne Lecouvreur.
' She is his, he is hers—and she does not care !' thought the
child, in whom the ignorance of childhood still lingered, blent
with the awakening strength and heat of a tropical nature.
As the curtain rose for the third act, Othmar himself entered
his wife's box. Damaris shrank farther and farther back against
the wall, though she knew well that the keenest eyes could not
find her out in her obscurity. Her breath came hard and fast
like a panting hare's ; the great tears rose to her eyes; she
suddenly realised what this world was Which held him so closely.
She saw his wife give him the same slight smile that she gave to
others : no more. She saw him bend before her with the same
low bow the others gave ; she saw him converse with the gentle-
men near him ; from time to time he glanced round the house.
Once or twice his wife turned her head and spoke to him as she
spoke to the others. To this child who had the heart of Juliet.
OTHMAR.
317
the soul of Heloise, the conventionalities of the world seemed
like the frost of death.
' She is his ; he is hers : and she does not care !'
That was all she could think of as she watched them across
that sea of light. The wit of the play amused him, and Othmar
looked less weary and more animated than usual. To her he
appeared happy.
Rosselin called thrice to her through the door before she
heard him and let him enter.
' You should not dream like that when you are at the
Fran§ais. You should study. What more admirable lessons
can you have ?' he said angrily. ' Poets may dream if they like
They speak best in their trances. Those who would only
interpret them must never dare to do so. Have I not told you
so a score of times? There is nothing poetic about the stage;
it is all hard, prosaic, literal. If you will dream go and bury
yourself under green leaves, under yellow corn ; do not come to
the theatres of the world.'
Damaris for once did not even hear him. He looked across
the house and saw Othmar.
'Come,'he said to her, 'you will miss the last train that
pauses at Trappes if you do not come away now. Never will
they forgive me for leaving before the close ! But that will not
matter much. They know I am old ; they can think I am ill.
Come, or you will be too late.'
'Wait a little,'said Damaris, in a shamed, hushed voice ; her
face grew red as she spoke.
Rosselin glanced impatiently at the box on the other side of the
house. He said nothing; he waited, artist as he was in all the fibres
of his nature ; his eyes and his ears and his art were all with Got,
with the Coquelins, with the moving and speaking persons of the
stage : yet a little corner of his heart ached still for the child.
' What wretchedness she prepares for herself !' he thought
with pity and sorrow combined. ' She will never be a great
artist, because with her feeling will always take the mastery.
You are only a, great artist if when you suffer, though you suffer
horribly, you can study what you feel, you can make your own
heart strings into a lyre. If you cannot do that, you are only a
creature that loves another. Ah, my dear ! No one ever con-
quered the world so !'
He let her alone until the piece was over ; the box of the
Countess Othmar had been vacated some moments before the
termination of the last act. He did not speak to her whilst he
hurried her through private passages and into the frosty air of
the streets.
' Cover yourself well, it is cold,' was all he said as he took
her with gentle steps over the pavement which his feet had
trodden so many thousands of times, in the hurry of youth, in
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OTHMAR.
the ecstasy of triumph, in all the alternations of a manhood
tossed up and down upon the stormy seas of public favour and
of public caprice. All that network of streets about the Fran§ais
was as dear to him as the banks of Doon to Burns, as the green
wood and ways of Milly to Lamartine, as the sweet meads and
streams of Penshurst to Philip Sydney.
Damaris walked on beside him, her head bent, her face
covered. The tears were rolling slowly down her cheeks.
' Let me do whatl would,' she thought, ' she would not care.'
Rosselin took her home to his own little house that night, for
it was too late to return to Les Hameaux. He made her seat
herself by his fire ; he dried the damp of the night on her hair
and her clothes ; he would have made her eat of his preserved
nectarines and drink of his choice wines which were sent by his
friends. But she would not touch anything. She sat lost in
thought.
All she saw was that beautiful woman ; all she heard was
the voice of Othmar saying, ' I have so loved her that I shall
never love any other woman ever again.'
No doubt it was so : she could understand. Only he seemed
to go away from her, herself, utterly and for ever ; to glide out
of her life as the ships she had used to watch from her balcony,
as the nightingales sang under the moon, used to pass away
further and further, till the great distance and the shadows of
night swallowed them up and they were no more seen, and all
the wide sea was empty.
Rosselin watched her sadly.
' Poor Mignon,' he thought. * Who shall transform her to a
Mademoiselle Mars 1 How does the gymnast teach his child to
stand and catch the metal ball, to tread and hold the rope in
air. He works and kneads the tender flesh till it grows hard,
he strains the soft limbs till they become like steel, he bends
and twists and forces, and forges the immature sinews and
tendons till they are like cords to resist, and in every separate
muscle there almost seems a separate brain. When their nature
has been driven out and the body has become an iron machine
the teacher has succeeded. Who shall do for her mind and her
heart what the gymnast does to his son's limbs and spine ? And
will ever anybody do ,it ? Will she ever be Mars—be Rachel ?
Will she ever fling her soul away and keep only her body and her
brain1? And if she do not do that what success wilflshe ever have?'
In that kind of cruelty with which the true artist would
always emulate any living thing to art, he almost wished that
Othmar were a man with less honour and less compassion, more
license and more selfishness.
' If he would break her heart and rouse her hatred how much
art would gain,' he thought. ' She would pass through the fire
like Goethe's dancing girl, and come out of it immortal.'
OTHMAR.
319
He knew the weakness of love, and he knew the strength of
genius.
' Listen to me,' he said, as the wood-fire gleamed and mur-
mured. ' You dream too much of Othmar. ' I understand he
was your saviour ; he is your hero, your saint, your god: all
that is inevitable ; and he is a man whom women will always
love, because he has a great grace and gentleness about him,
and his discontent and sadness are in picturesque contrast with
his magnificent and enviable fortunes. But he will never love
you, my child : just because he has so loved that woman, that
his heart has grown cloyed, yet cold ; great passions always
leave that kind of satiety behind them. And then the world
holds him, a hundred thousand invisible threads bind him; if
he had the heart left for it, which he has not, he would not
have the time to turn back ; his life is fixed, such as it is, and
he and the world are wedded together, though it may not be
the spouse he would have chosen. Do not either live for him
or die for him. What will she say if you do either 1 That you
are a love-sick fool. 1 do not talk to you as moralists would
talk, because I do not believe in conventional morality; it is an
absurdity, like all conventional things. USTo doubt your old
friend Melville would speak much better than I do, but 1 speak
honestly, and according to my lights. You have wished, and
the wish has seemed to me natural, to compel recognition of
your own powers from the person who first caused you to leave
the happy obscurity of your life. You have said that you
wish her to see you can have a greatness she has not. It is a
personal motive, and art is best served by impersonal motives.
Still it seems to me natural. I can understand it. But to do
this you must be strong, you must be bold, you must be true to
yourself. You must not be overcome because you see her
looking like the great lady she is. There is only one thing
which the wife of Othmar respects, it is genius ; she respects
that because her intellect appreciates, and her gold cannot buy,
it. Prove to her that it is in you, and she will respect you. If
you died for her lord to-morrow, she would only say that you
had forgotten you were not upon the stage. I seem to speak
harshly and roughly. Ah, my dear, my heart is neither; but
I wish to save you from your own heart if I can. You are all
alone, and you are scarcely more than a child, and the world,
the world, is a beast.'
She did not answer ; her head was bent down on Jier arms,
and her face was hidden ; all he could see was the hot flush on
the ivory of her throat, and the curling hair which was made
golden by the ruddy light from the leaping flames.
All her dreams and aspirations and ambitions seemed all
huddled together, bruised and colourless, like a heap of child's
toys broken and faded.
320
OTHMAR.
' She would not care! that was all she thought. If the
world were to give her fame, what would the best that, she
could ever reach seem to the unreachable disdain of that other
woman ? No more than the gleam of a glow-worm may seem to
the planet on high.
A rude sun-browned wench of the sea and the land, good to
row through blue water, and mow down green billows of grass :
that was all she would ever seem to Othmar's wife.
' Tell me what you wish,' she said in a low tone. ' If I can
I will do it.'
The voice of Rosselin shook a little as he answered, 'My
child 1 want you to do what she cannot. These people have
all things ; they have ease and mirth, and soft beds, and minds
without care, and great riches, and great palaces, and great
powers, but there are two things which often escape them, and
ofttimes the poor have the one and now and then they are born
to the other. I mean that great consoler of the humble, con-
tent, and that great redresser of injustice, genius. You have
the latter. In your sea-gull's nest the Muses found you. Oh,
child, be grateful! You are richer than the kings who ruled
here in Paris—if only you knew your riches !'
She looked up at him suddenly, pushing her troubled curls
out of her eyes.
' If I spoke before her my throat would dry up—my voice
would be strangled in it. If I were to do well, she would never
care. If I were to fail, she would smile. I should see her
smile in my grave. He loves her you know, he loves her so
much, but she has made his heart numb in him with her indif-
ference and her scorn.'
He was awed and amazed at such intensity of dread in a
nature which had always seemed to him bold as the winds, and
resolute and headstrong.
'Yes,' he said, almost brutally. 'If you fail she will smile,
she will laugh ; she knows nothing of failure. But you will not
fail. Only the weak fail. You are strong. You will not let
that woman think that you threw away your genius for love
of her lord !'
They were words which were hard and rough and brutal;
but they seemed to him the wisest words that he could speak.
She was a child with a passionate heart half broken; unless
that heart were torn out and trodden under her foot, he
thought that she would never walk straight to where the laurels,
the bitter laurels, grew.
He meant to do well; he spoke according to his light; but
he was only a man and childless, and forgot a little what easily
bruised things the hearts of some women are when they are very
young, and have hot blood in their veins, and are all alone in a
world which feels to them as the stony road of the moorland
OTHMAR.
321
feels to the shot doe when there is many a long mile to be
covered between her and the herd.
She turned her head from him quickly, and he saw the dark
red flush which stained her throat.
She did not answer. The words brought no solace to her.
Her heart was empty. He saw the great tears roll slowly down
her cheeks. He realised that the hilt of this two-edged sword
which he held out to her was too cold a pillow for so young a
breast.
CHAPTER XLIII.
The weeks passed on, and Othmar returned no more to the
fields of Chevreuse. The great interests and the vast opera-
tions of his house occupied his time, and the days of this man
whom Nature had created a dreamer and a student, went away
in the consideration of financial enterprises, in the audience of
innumerable supplicants, in the emission of national loans, and
in the study of political situations. He thought oftentimes of
her, but he went to her no more. To let her alone he knew
was, as Rosselin said, all that he could do for her.
His wife he scarcely saw at this season.
Now and then when it was unavoidable he went with her to
some great dinner or reception ; oftener they received at home
themselves, and on such evenings he saw her in all the grace
and elegance which the highest culture and the utmost fashion
can lend to a woman already patrician in every fibre of her
being. Sometimes she addressed a few words to him con-
cerning the children, or the horses, or some matter of mutual
interest; and he saw her carriage passing in and out, her friends
and acquaintances coming and going on the stairs, her attendants
carrying her chocolate, or her bouquets, or the offerings made
her by her courtiers : that was all. In no year had she been
more absorbingly mondaine; in no year had she been so con-
spicuous as the greatest lady in Paris; in no year had her balls,
her fetes, her banquets, her concerts, been more wonderful in
their novelty and more exclusive in their invitations.
' Dame! elle a un chic incroyable! thought Blanchette,
angrily, watching her and conscious that her day was not done
as she had hoped.
Meantime, in the brilliant movement of which his house was
the centre, Othmar felt that he was becoming rapidly a mere
cypher amidst it all, as Platon Napraxine had been, and he
perceived no way by which he could recover his influence
without her ridicule and the world's comment. That had come
to him which he had said should never come : he was nothing
in her life, not so much as one of her mere acquaintances.
322
OTHMAR.
Such a position had always seemed to him the deepest
humiliation that any man could accept; he had always thought
that any man might save his dignity if he could not secure his
own happiness ; but now, he saw how easy it is to theorise, how
difficult it is to resist the slow insidious influence of circum-
stances. We drift into positions which we hate without being
conscious of our descent, and the effect of others upon our
nature and our actions is as subtle and as unperceived as those
of climate or of time.
He could not have said when the first coldness had come
between himself and her, when the first irritation had crept
into their intero* urse, when the first frost of indifference had
passed from her manner over the warmth of his own emotions.
It had been unperceived, uncounted, but its results had grown
and strengthened, until now they were like ten thousand other
men and women in the world, living under the same roof, but
wholly strangers to each other, only united by one slender
thread, their mutual interests. It was a position which wounded
him, humiliated him, oppressed him with a constant sense of
weakness and of failure : he had not the slightest power over
her, though she retained much over him; strong men, he
thought, either left their wives or forced them to keep their
marriage vows ; and he did neither.
Of late she had become almost insolent in her tone to him;
she seemed to take pleasure in passing the most marked slights
upon him; she purposely withheld from him the slightest
acquaintance with her movements or intentions, and at times
her eyes looked at him with a cynical disdain.
It was absurd, he felt, and exaggerated, and probably wholly
ungrounded in every way, but there were moments when he
imagined that she wished to remind him of his social inferiority
to herself, moments when the recollection of the origin of the
Othmar fortunes spoilt for a passing hour her pleasure in the
existence of her children. Though he did not harbour the sus-
picion, but threw it away from him as unworthy of both himself
and her, it yet existed and made him over-sensitive to any
slight upon her part, quick to perceive the faintest tinge of con-
tempt in her tone to him. He knew that she could count her
great ancestries far beyond the dim days of Rurick; whilst
there were courts of Europe where feudal etiquette still pre-
vailed strongly enough to make his presence in their throne-
rooms impossible. These were mere nominal differences, no
doubt, and he might perchance have saved from bankruptcy the
very state in which he would have been forbidden to pass the
palace gates if he had sought to accompany her through them ;
but still there were moments when the voice and the glance of
his wife recalled these conventional things to him out of the
limbo of absolute nullity in which, but for those, he let them
OTHMAR.
323
lie. Never by any spoken word or hint had she ever reminded
him of them, yet now and then in her colder moments he
thought: ' Perhaps she remembers that two hundred years ago
if her forefathers rode over the plains of Croatia they could
ride down mine before them, and drive them with their whips
like so many acorn-eating swine !'
He began to believe that she was in truth as cruel as the
world had always called her ; and a feeling which was almost
hatred at times awoke in him and blent with the suffering she
caused him.
It seemed to him that no man on earth ever gave a woman
such passion and such worship as he had given her; these might
at least, he thought, have secured respect from her, even if they
had failed to hold her sympathy.
He said nothing to her. Remonstrance would have been
useless, supplication unmanly. He let time drift them where it
would : and in the ever-exercising burden of his pain Damaris
became almost forgotten.
Some weeks after the performance of Lemberg's cantata,
Blanche de Laon, calling on the woman whom she hated on her
'jour,' came late, stayed until the rooms were nearly emptied
of their crowd, and then sank down beside her hostess on a low
couch in a corner palm-shadowed, where banks of lilies of the
valley gave out their fragrance under rose-shaded lamps, and
great Japanese vases were filled with the rosy flowers of the
gesneria and the philesia. She always paid great outward
deference to Nadege, was coaxing and caline, and for her alone
subdued the rudeness and the shrillness of her voice and manner.
She leaned now beside her on the broad low seat of the cushioned
corner, whilst the few people who remained in the rooms con-
versed in little groups, and the flowers, the porcelains, the
stuffs, the pictures, the embroidered satins of the walls, the
long vista of salons opening one out of another, made up one of
those pictures of harmonised colour and of artistically arranged
luxuries of which the modern world is so full. Blanchette had
all manner of confidential things to disclose, secrets of this
toilette and that, of this scandal and the other, of the true
reason of a dear friend's sudden indisposition, and the actual
cause of a coming duel; all these secrets de Polichinelle, which
society loves to carry about and distribute, things which are
mysteries of life and death yet whispered at every ' petit qua/rt
(Phwvre' in every house Known to fashion.
Nadine listened, leaning back amongst her cushions indiffer-
ent, scarcely affecting attention, thinking of her own costume at
a coming ball she was about to give, in which the regne animal
of Cuvier was to furnish the dresses. She had chosen a panther.
All the yellow and black would make her delicate colourless
skin look so well, and she would wear all her diamonds, and
324
OTHMAR.
. She was aroused from her meditation by the question
which Blanche de Laon put suddenly to her.
4 Do tell me,' she said, leaning down amongst her cushions
4 You know I like to be the first to hear things—when will the
new genius make her debut with you ?'
4 What do you mean ?'
4 Oh, you know what I mean ; this young artist whom
Bosselin is training, in whom your husband is interested, and
who is to make her first appearance here ? Who is she ? Do
tell me about her. I should like to have her appear at my
house if you have no proprietary rights to her exclusive pro-
duction.'
41 have no idea of what person yo«u speak of ; I am not fond
of untried artists,' she answered, with perfect indifference, but
Blanchette saw a shade of surprise and a coldness of displeasure
on her face.
4 Oh, surely you like a debutante 1' she said carelessly. 4 It
always amuses people so much, something quite new, and I
believe this girl is beautiful; does not Othmar say so ?'
But by this time her hostess was on her guard, and her
expression wholly under control.
41 think I know whom you mean now,' she replied in-
differently. 4 But as to a debut here—that is quite in the future.
I am not fond of untried artists as I say : one does not take out
unbroken horses to drive in a crowd. Genius is admirable, but
I think like wine it wants time and a seal set upon it before one
offers it at one's table.'
Blanche de Laon was perplexed.
4 Does she know all about her, or nothing about her 1' she
wondered. 41 want to know more myself before I go on
with it.'
Some other people approached them at that moment; the
conversation turned on the regne animal ball; Blanchette, dis-
appointed, rose and went and drank deux doigts de liqueur, and
ate a caviare biscuit, in another room, where Loris Loswa was
drawing some caricatures of mutual acquaintances, as the beasts
of Cuvier, on his visiting cards, and distributing them amongst
some ladies of fashion.
4 Meet me on Saturday at eleven at the Bond point,'she
murmured to him as she took from him a sketch of her brother-
in-law the Due d'Ypres as a wild boar in top boots, over which
she condescended to shriek her shrillest laughter and approval.
When her rooms were all quite emptied, and she was left
alone in them, Nadine remained leaning back amongst the
cushions motionless and with a cold contemptuous anger on
her face.
4 To think that I should accept such a part as that !' she
thought. 4 He must be mad and the whole world with him !'
OTHMAk.
325
Weak women, indulgent women, women wlio were afraid
and wanted pardon for their own secrets, these women did thdse
things, aided their husbands' amours, received their husbands'
favourites, helped their husbands to conventional disguises of
equivocal situations, but that role was not hers.
' And he came from this girl to me in Russia ;' she thought
with that physical disgust which is so strong in some women, and
which men never understand.
One forenoon on entering his study, Othmar missed from the
wall the sketch made by Loswa. There was only a blank space
between the places of the Corot and the Aivanoffsky. He rang
for the major-domo.
' Who has taken the portrait from that place ?' he asked ; he
feared the entrance of some thief from the gardens.
The major-domo, astonished and alarmed, replied that he
had taken it down that morning by command of his mistress,
and had sent it whither she had directed him to do ; to a certain
gallery recently built on the Trocadero.
'You were quite right to do so if Madame desired you,'
said Othmar ; and dismissed the official without more com-
ment.
As soon as he could be admitted to his wife's presence, he
went to her and opened the subject with scanty preface.
' Philippe says that you ordered him to send the sketch by
Loswa out of my study to the new gallery on the Trocadiro,'
he said, when he had made her his usual greeting. ' Is that
true 1'
' Very true. One would think I had ordered him to blow up
the Louvre or the Luxembourg !'
' May I venture to inquire your reasons 1'
' Certainly. There is an exhibition of Loswa's works about
to be opened there. You are aware that these exhibitions of a
single master are very popular now. That head is one of the
best things he has done. It will come back to you in three
months. Cannot you live without it till then 1'
Othmar felt that he coloured like a boy.
' I would, of course, have lent it,' he said with a little hesi-
tation.
' I have sent all his portraits of myself and of the children,'
she said with a cold glance at him. ' You do not appear to have
missed those.'
' I have probably not entered the rooms in which they hung.
If you will pardon my saying so, I do not care to know less of
what you wish to do than my servants know—and to know it
first through them.'
' If I had told you, you would have objected. When I know
that people will object, I never ask them what they wish.'
' The method has the merit of simplicity.'
326
OTHMAR.
He felt exceedingly angered ; in the first place he did not
care to have the portrait seen by all Paris at a moment when the
original was living so near Paris with no friend but himself, and
in the second place he indignantly resented being treated like a
cypher in his own houses ; he never permitted himself to intrude
on her personal arrangements—could she not respect his ?
Now and then, and above all of late, there had been some-
thing high-handed and even insolent in her occasional treatment
of things which concerned him, and on which she did not con-
suit him ; something which made him fancy that in the deepest
depth of the thoughts and feelings there was occasionally the
remembrance that the great race of princes from whom she
herself descended would have deemed her alliance with one of
the princes of finance a gross mesalliance.
This was a trifle, no doubt, and he was not a man who ever
disputed small matters. But the tone with which she had
spoken had given it something of personal offence, and he could
not shake from him the impression that she had purposely sent
away the portrait. The exhibition was about to take place, no
doubt, at the new gallery on the Trocadero; Loswa having
quarrelled violently with the committee of the Salon, had
chosen to prove that the collection of his works would be more
attractive to the public than anything which' the Salon could
offer without his assistance ; but the manner in which this
sketch had been removed from his study, conveyed to Othmar
the impression of some personal motive, some personal meaning
in the act.
Capricious as his wife always was, she yet was usually cour-
teous. This insolence of the removal of his picture was unlike
her.
She always held the very true creed that mutual politeness
is the first of obligations to render the intimacy of daily life
endurable.
He left her presence quickly, afraid of what his anger might
bring him into saying. He had never as yet wholly lost his
temper with her, though there were times when it was sorely
tried.
Her cold, nonchalant, slighting tone was that which always
tried it the most. Of all things which he most hated it was to
be spoken to as Platon Napraxine had been ; like the last of her
lacqueys! as he thought bitterly now. She looked after him
with some scorn.
' Is he gone to the Trocadero to seize back his lost treasure ?'
She had sent the sketch thither on purpose to see what he
would do or say.
With an impulse which was as swift as thought itself and
which he did not pause to consider, he turned back as he reached
the threshold of her boudoir, and stood before her.
OTHMAR.
32 7
Nadege,' he began with an impetuosity which yet had a
certain timidity in it. ' There is something which I wished >«o
tell you the other day. There is a reason which makes me es-
ecially regret that you should have sent that portrait for exhi-
ition without referring the matter to me. Are you inclined to
be patient enough to hear a little tale which might interest you
perhaps if it were a sketch by Ludovic Halevy, but I fear will
not do so told in my poor words ?'
He did not observe the expression of her eyes, which sur-
veyed him with a cynical coldness, as she asked :
' Do you mean that you have written a romance ?—or played
one?'
There was the mockery in the words which he had dreaded
so much that he had put off this moment day after day, week
after week, month after month.
' Neither,' he answered, curtly. ' I have not talent for the
one, nor time and inclination for the other. You may believe
me,' he added a little bitterly, 'if I had been foolish enough to
tempt fate with either, your indulgence is the last mercy for
which I should hope.'
Her eyes still looked at him coldly, steadfastly ; with no
revelation in her gaze of whether she were surprised, interested,
indifferent, or already wearied.
She was leaning back in her long low chair ; there was a
great deal of lace ruffled at her bosom and on her arms ; she
wore a long loose satin gown of palest rose effeuillee of which the
lights and shadows were very beautiful : her hands were tightly
clasped upon her lap ; her great pearls gleamed behind the lace ;
she looked like a woman of the time of the Stuarts or of the
Yalois. At her elbow stood an immense bowl of Louise de
Savoy roses ; as she looked at him she drew out one and put it
in her bosom. She did not speak or attempt to aid him in any
way to continue the conversation which he had begun. She
only waited, and as he saw her in that impassible attitude, his
task grew harder to him ; that sudden sense of her cruelty, of
her want of sympathy, of her immovable indifference, which
had come to him so sharply on the night of her return from
Russia, struck him once more and hardened in him almost to
dislike.
Why should he tell her anything ? She cared nothing for
what he did or what he felt. She dwelt in that serene rarefied
atmosphere of her own in which no passions or pains of his could
disturb her. If she had once seemed to him to lean from it for
a little while to share his emotions, that time was passed, long
passed, never to return again.
She was silent many minutes, but she asked no question,
threw out no conjecture, did not even by a glance assist him to
beain his offered narrative. If she would only have said some-
328 OTHMAR.
thing—anything—it would have broken the ice at least. But
the marble bust of herself which stood near her, carved by Hil-
debrand, was not more mute than she ; and she was quite
motionless, her hands clasped on another rose with which she
toyed.
He was angered with himself to feel that his cheeks grew
warm, and that his voice was nervous as he said at last:
' I regret that the portrait is gone to the Trocadero, because
the original of it is living near Paris, and it may lead to com-
ment and conjecture which may be injurious to her; she is
scarcely more than a child, and she will be an artist; she is
better without the attention of the public until she challenges it
directly.'
He did not notice a gleam like that of such which flashed
over him one instant from the unrevealing eyes of his wife ; the
next moment the eyes of the bust were not colder and more
impenetrable than hers.
' I have long meant to tell you,' he continued with rapidity,
his words now coming with eagerness and eloquence from his
lips. ' But I have been afraid of your ridicule. Long ago, in
the midsummer of last year, I found the child of Bonaventure
dying in the streets. It was at the time my uncle was on his
death-bed. 1 did all I could for her, of course. She was lopg
ill; when she recovered I placed her in the country with good
simple people whom I knew. She is there now. Rosselin, the
great actor whose name you will remember, though his career
was over before your time or mine, has trained her these many
months past; he believes she has great talents ; that she has a
future ; that when you predicted the career of Desclee for her
you showed your usual insight. She has had little but sorrow
since that day you tempted her from her island ; it has always
seemed to me that we owed her a great debt, that we had done
her a great brutality ; but for us her life would have gone on in
peace and prosperity, she would never have left her little king-
dom; if you realised what you did that day you would regret
your caprice. There are many more details I could tell you if
you cared to hear them, but I know your intolerance of any
demand upon your patience.'
She smiled slightly ; the smile was very chill; it checked the
expansion and the confidence of his words.
'You are pleased to ridicule my knight-errantry, no doubt,'
he said, with heightened colour in his face. ' But no man living
would have done less than I did, I think, being conscious as I
was that the invitation which you gave her without thought was
the origin of all her unmerited misfortune. I believe you were
right that she has genius or something very nearly approaching
genius, in her ; and it may be that the world will in time com-
pensate to her for all she has lost. But meantime '
OTHMAR
32U
' You do so !'
The words were very calm and cold, but they struck Othmar
like the cut of a whip. They cast on his words the dishonour
of disbelief.
He strove to command his temper as he replied : ' I do not;
no one can; she lost what no one ever can give back to her,
when you showed her what the world was like, and taught her
discontent. But for you, and that one evening in your house,
she would have lived, and married, and spent all the even
tenour of her days in her native air, on her native soil, as
ignorant of ambition as any of the sea-birds on her coast.'
She looked at him with an expression of fatigue, and of
exhausted patience ; he saw that she was perfectly incredulous,
that his words might as well have remained unspoken for any
impression of their truthfulness which they conveyed to her.
' Is this all your story 1' she asked.
' It is the outline of it all,' he answered. ' If you care to
know more of the causes which drove her from her home—
' They do not interest me in the least.'
Her voice was as chill as frost.
' Then allow me to apologise for having intruded even so
much as this on your atttention.'
He bowed before her, and was about to leave the room ; but
she, without rising a hair's breadth from the languid attitude in
which she reclined, said, ' Wait.'
He waited, in sanguine expectation of an impulse of sym-
pathy in which those more generous instincts, those kinder
emotions which sometimes swayed her, would be aroused on
behalf of a life she had thoughtlessly injured.
Still without rising she stretched out her arm, and took up
a blotting-book from her writing-cabinet, which stood near.
In the blotting-case was a tiny note-book of ivory and silver;
she opened it, and read from it in a serene voice certain dates.
' Before you give your idyl to Hale'vy—or to the journalists
in general—let me renew your memory with these memoranda,'
she said in the same soft cold voice. ' Your narrative, as you
tell it, is bald and wanting, as you admit, in detail. I will
supply some of those details. On June 10 you brought Damaris
Berarde to this house, where she remained ill for many days,
even weeks. On July 20 you went yourself to visit her cousin,
the present proprietor of the island of Bonaventure, and en-
deavoured to negotiate through bankers of Aix the purchase of
the island, which, however, the owner refused to sell. On
August 2 you had her taken, accompanied by her gardes-
rnalades, to the farm of the Croix Blanche, which lies between
the villages of Les Hameaux and Magny. On August 15 you
visited Les Hameaux. In the last week of July, many objects
of artistic interest and value had been already sent by you to
33°
OTHMAR.
the farmhouse. In the same week, rentes to the amount of a
hundred thousand francs, were purchased on the Bourse in the
name of Damaris Berarde. > There are many more dates than
these in my note-book, but those are enough to supply the
lacunae in your story. On pent broder dessus without any great
imagination. A knowledge of human nature will suffice. You
will dome the favour never to re-open the subject; and as a
matter of good taste, to endeavour that your idyl shall not be
too largely talked about for the amusement of the world in
general.'
Then she slid the little note-book within the leaves . of
blotting-paper, and fastened the rose in the lace at her breast.
It was impossible for him to misunderstand her meaning.
A violent anger eclipsed for the moment all sense of
astonishment at her knowledge, or of wonder as to how she had
acquired it. All he was conscious of was the indignity, the
insult, put upon him by her utter disbelief.
He felt it a task almost beyond his strength to forbear from
some such words as men must never say to women, and in the
bewilderment of his emotions he was silent.
' You have engaged an actor, once great, to give her lessons
in elocution,' she continued, in the same unmoved harmonious
tones. ' It is the fashion of the day to have a mistress on the
stage. I suppose I cannot blame you for that. As it was I
who first suggested the future possibility of a dramatic success
for your protSgee, it is, perhaps, natural that you should have
remembered my suggestions, when you sought the cover of some
artistic career for her. Someone has told me that you reserve
for me the part of Msecena to her Roscia (can one feminise the
names 1), that you intend to have her talents first essayed and
pronounced on under my roof; that the world is to be invited
to smile at my credulity, or at my good nature, with whichever
it may most prefer to accredit me. Women often do such
things as this, I know, because they are weak, or because they
need indulgence in return. But it is not a rdle which will suit
either my temper or my taste. I see the convenience to your-
self of your project, but you must pardon me if I do not accept
the part you would assign me in it. The world and Mile.
Berarde will have opportunities for mutual acquaintance and
admiration without their first meeting each other in my draw-
ing-rooms. I should not have mentioned the matter unless you
had done so first, but I should have prevented the execution of
your and of M. Rosselin's intentions !'
She looked at him from under her drooped eyelids, with
that critical observation which never deserted her in the most
trying hour, or before the deepest emotion. She did not hurry
him or dismiss him, only he knew by the look upon her face,
that the discussion was, in her view of it, closed irrevocably.
OTHMAR.
331
But for the sake of the other who was involved in her judg-
ment, he put aside his pride, his offence, and his dignity, and
stooped to an appeal.
' I do not know,' he said, and he was sensible that his voice
vibrated with fury, as well as with emotion, ' I do not know
what steps you may have taken to enable you to tabulate my
actions so exactly. I keep no diary, but I have no doubt your
facts are correct. But as you put the data which have been
given you by some creature you have stooped to employ, they
would certainly seem to point to some selfish intrigue on my
part, some vulgar use for my own ends of this young girl's
illness and misfortunes. It may be even quite natural that
you should take such a view of it as this, though it shows that
you do not, after all, much understand my character. But I
will admit that your suspicions may seem to you just. I will
admit that my own reticence has been blameable and unwise,
and I do not suppose you will believe how much your own habit
of ridicule, of irony, and of cruel scorn, has made me shrink
from provoking your malicious comments by any confidences
which would seem to you sentimental and melodramatic.'
He paused, hoping for some word from her. But she spoke
none. She continued to listen and to wait, in unbroken silence
and serenity, her fingers touching the rose at her breast. A
momentary sense of rage passed quivering over him. He
understood how men may in some moments kill the woman
they have loved best.
He restrained his passion with great effort, and tried to
keep his words within the compass of ordinary courtesy.
' You do not know, and if you knew you would not care for
it, how many a time this story, like many another thought and
memory of mine, has been upon my lips, and speech has been
stopped in me, merely because I was conscious you would laugh.
I am a fool in your eyes, worthy to die with Rolla, to fall with
Desgrieux, or any other absurd sentimentalist. I dare say you
will even despise me the more if you be compelled to believe
that, though I might be the lover of Damaris Berarde, I am not
so, whatever your spies may have told you.'
Her face flushed haughtily.
•' Spies ! I set no watcher on your actions until you deceived
me. When I know that I am deceived I have no mercy. Those
who deceive me are outside my pale. I hunt them down.
Foolish women can bear to be blinded. I am not foolish, and
I do not consent to be so.'
' I have never deceived you.'
She gave a gesture of deprecation, slight but full of unuttered
disdain.
' Long ago I told you that if you had strength enough in
you to tell me when you were weak, I should not be like other
332
OTHMAR.
women \ I should understand : to understand is always to for-
give ; a greater woman than I am has said it. If you had come
to me frankly, with no subterfuge, no pretext, no empty phrases
of untrue sentiments, but had said honestly that you were no
better than other men, I should have told you that follies of
that sort need never disturb our friendship nor our confidence,
but '
' But, my God, what had I to confess ?' cried Othmar, with
that passionate protest of the tortured man who calls in vain
that he is innocent.
Infinite contempt swept over her face. "What a fool he
seemed to her ! What a poor, weak coward and fool!
' If there were any lover whom I loved, how I should hurl
the truth of it in his face !' she thought. ' Men are such
cowards—so half-hearted and so tame, and never hardly even
knowing what they do love ! If he would only be truthful even
now, what should I care !—a wretched child off the streets, a
creature who owes her very bread to him—what rival could she
be to me !'
She felt for him all the superb disdain that Cleopatra might
have felt had she known that Anthony toyed with a slave from,
the market-place, and dared not plead guilty to his paltry sin.
He heard her with indignant and bewildered amaze. There
is a great simplicity in every honest man, and he, despite his
knowledge of the world, was single-minded as a boy. That she
should refuse to believe him when he told the truth seemed to
him incredible.
'Can you insinuate that I would speak such a lie—J?'he
cried to her in violent emotion.
She answered coldly:
' Oh, yes : those untruths are always counted as men's
honour.'
' They are not mine ; nor my dishonour either. I never
willingly spoke an untruth yet to man or woman. If this child
were my mistress I would tell you so. You may remember that
many a time you have bade me take my liberty. You would
care nothing if I did so. Why should I have concealed what
you would not have done me the honour to resent 1'
He paused, expecting her to say some word of assent or
dissent, but she remained silent.
'Certainly,' he said, bitterly, ' had I considered myself free
in all ways I should have been justified in doing so. Few men
of your world see less of you than I. Your very lacqueys know
more of your engagements and your intentions than I do. You
lend great brilliancy to my name, you give great distinction
to my houses, you allow my children to sit by you in your
carriage, and you permit me to receive kings for you in your
antechambers. But more than that you deny me. If I sought
OTHMAR.
333
elsewhere the tenderness I seek in vain from you, could you
complain of my infidelity ?'
' I do not complain of the infidelity ; it is immaterial; I
complain of the long series of elaborate deceptions with which
you have endeavoured, with which you still endeavour, to
surround it.-'
' I repeat, there has been no deception.'
She laughed, laughed slightly that cruel laugh of a woman,
which can tell a man with impunity what a man could never
dare to tell him—that he has lied.
' You dare to doubt me still !' he exclaimed, with that
blindness and good faith with which a man, candid and honest
himself, expects credence from others; he had never in his
heart really doubted that when he should tell the truth to her
she would believe it.
Conscious rectitude has a curious pathetic ignorance of its
own impotence to move others ; it imagines that it has but to
speak and mountains will fall before it.
Because this thing was clear as daylight to his own know-
ledge, to his own conscience, he stupidly thought that it must
stand out plain as the noonday to her likewise. Those who
tell the truth always fancy that the truth must be like those
trumpets before which the walls of Jericho fell.
' You dare to doubt my word !' he cried again passionately ;
she looked him full in the face coldly and calmly.
' Told earlier,' she said in her serenest voice, ' your comedy
might have deceived even me. Told now, I do not think it
would deceive the most credulous woman living—and I am not
credulous. I am like Montaigne ; I do not accept miracles out
of church.'
His face grew white and grey with wounded pride and
breathless passion as he heard her. The same sense of hope-
lessness which had come over so many of her lovers when driven
to appeal to a mercy which had no existence in her, came over
him now. He felt that one might throw one's self for ever
against the smooth white marble of her soul, and never gain
from it either pity or belief.
His patience was at an end, and his bitter sense of wrong,
done to himself and to one absent, broke down all his self-
control.
' But as God lives you shall believe !' he cried to her. 'You
shall believe it for her sake, not for mine nor yours. You can
cover the whole world with the fine scorn of your scepticism if
you will, but you shall believe this. I may have done unwisely
what I have done for her. I may have acted with that mule-
like stupidity which you consider the characteristic of men. I
may even, God forgive me, have not done what was best for the
child herself ; but in all that I have done, I have been honest
334
OTHMAR.
in it, and not a mere lecherous egotist. You have never deigned
to try and measure the feeling with which I have regarded you,
but you ought, I think, to understand enough of the common
honour which I share with all men who are not scoundrels, to
believe in my word when I give it you. The woman with whom
she lives at Les Hameaux is of good repute and blameless con-
duct. Rosselin, who has become her teacher, is a man too
upright to accord his assistance in any common intrigue. The
money I placed to her credit she imagines to be a legacy of her
grandfather, whose heiress she would have been if you in a
moment of unaccountable and unconsidered caprice had not
tempted her to incur the old man's anger. All these things are
capable of the simplest explanations. Still, I will concede that,
without explanation, they may have appeared singular and sus-
picious to you. But, however much they may do so, I expect
from you that acceptance of my bare word, that belief in my
common honour, which the merest stranger to me on earth would
not dare to refuse.'
She preserved her perfect composure, the rose in her breast
was not ruffled by one uneven breath ; she looked at him with
cold, calm, unkind eyes, which never wavered:in their rejection
of him.
1 You are melodramatic,' she said, with her serene contempt.
' Perhaps you will appear on the stage, -too ! I shall be glad if
you will spare me more words on such a subject. I shall not
resent it publicly. All I request of you is to avoid publicity in
it as far as possible. That is a mere matter of good taste.'
' Good God !' he cried, beside himself. ' Do you credit that
I should stand here and lie to you ? Do you believe that I
should stoop so low 1—do you think that I come here like a
comedian to repeat a monologue of my own invention 1 You
may think what else of me that you will, but this you shall not
think. I am not the lover of Damaris Berarde ; I have never
been so—I shall never be so.'
(If you swore it on the lives of your own children, I would
not believe you ?'
Some reflex and heat of the flame of his rage caught her
soul also for one sudden instant, and drew it out for that one
instant from its serenity and reticence.
There was the vibration of intensest passion in her voice ;
she half rose from her seat; her bosom heaved ; the rose fell in
a shower of leaves to the floor ; for the moment he thought that
she would strike him.
4 You shall believe me,' he said in answer, ' or I will not
live under the same roof with you !'
Then he looked at her with one last look, and left her
presence.
OTHMAR.
335
CHAPTER XLIV.
Othmah went into his great library, and shut the door upon
himself. For more than an hour he paced to and fro the length
of the room, overcome with an agitation which he could not
master. He had a sense that his life was over. He felt as
though his very heart-strings had snapped and parted for ever.
A great love cannot perish without some such throb as a strong
animal life suffers when it is forcibly torn asunder. A kind of
horror seized him at the idea of the years which were to come ;
the long, long years through which .he would dwell in apparent
amity beside her in the sight of the world.
His first impulse was to go out of the house, out of the city,
out of the world, to leave her everything he possessed, [but
never to see her face again.
But a brief reflection made him feel how impossible such a
course as that would be to him. Obscure people can do these
things, they are happy ; they are not set in the fierce light of
publicity and society, and no one heeds it if they creep away to
lay their aching heads under some lowly roof in solitude. But
to a man well known and conspicuous in the life of the world,
any such retreat into obscurity is impossible. He is bound hand
and foot by a million threads, each strong as cables to hold him
to his place. He cannot forsake his place without forsaking a
mass of interests confided to his honour. Solitude is for ever
forbidden to him, and liberty he can never more recover. Life
never gives two opposite sets of gifts to the same recipient ; it
never bestows both the king's dominion and the peasant's peace.
The sigh of Henry IY. upon his sleepless couch is the sigh of
all eminence whatever be its throne.
Othniar's momentary longing to go far away from everything
and everyone he had ever known, and never again behold the
woman whom he had adored, and who had insulted him as
though she had struck him with a knout, was the natural thirst
for loneliness of all wounded creatures. But he knew that this
desire, like so many others, was hopeless ; he could never leave
her or" the world he lived in ; there were his children, who must
not be sacrificed, and the fortunes of others which must not be
imperilled. He knew that he could no more undo the bands
fastened—many by his own hand—around him, than he could
sweep ten years off the sum of his past life. Such as his exist-
ence was now, so he had to continue it.
He walked to and fro the vast length of the chamber in the
quiet of the noonday. He felt as if her hand had struck him.
It had not been even an insult of unpremeditated passion,
336
OTHMAR.
of hot anger, of inconsiderate haste—as such as he might have
pardoned it—but, serene and deliberate and measured, spoken
in cold blood, and matured on long consideration, it had been
such an outrage as severs the closest ties, and destroys the most
profound affections, cuts at the deepest roots of self-respect, and
burns up all delicate fibres of sympathy. He would much
sooner have forgiven a dagger's thrust.
He had been insulted by the one person for whom he had
given up all his life, all his loyalty, all his devotion, all his
faith, and all his years to come. The outrage of her insolence,
of her disbelief, burned in his heart as the shame of a blow
burns on a brave man's forehead. Never could he make her
believe, though he were to swear the truth to her as he lay
dying!
That perfect silence with which she had listened and led him
on to speak, that perfect consciousness of all his actions which
had existed beneath her apparent ignorance, that feline attitude
of cold expectation and of watchful, motionless observation
with which she had waited for the telling of a tale of which she
already knew every smallest detail : all these seemed to him
horrible, hateful, unnatural in a woman so near to him, so dear
to him, to whom he had given up his life, and whom he had
never wronged, or slighted, or betrayed. And then the es- •
pionage !—all his soul revolted at it.
' One might have known that the weapon of a Russian
woman is always a spy !' he thought, with passionate indignation
at what seemed to him this last and lowest of affronts.
If he had found in her any of the warm and fond, though
unwise, angers of that jealousy which loves whilst it hates, he
would have forgiven and comprehended it. But he could not
hope that there was any single pulse of it in her breast. She
had viewed and measured his actions with the accuracy and
coldness of a judge of court overwhelming any prisoner with his
logic, and had treated his own asseverations with utter and con-
temptuous disbelief, not deigning even to weigh as remotely
possible the chance that he might tell the truth. He himself
would have taken her word against that of the whole world,
against all evidence of his own senses, all adverse witness of
circumstance.
'I was mad to suppose she ever cared for me,' he thought
bitterly, whilst the tears rose hotly in his eyes. 'For my
children she cares, perhaps, but for me nothing : I have never
been wise enough, great enough, strong enough to compel even
her respect. She looks on me as a mere dreamer, a mere fool.
All she is anxious for now is that the world may not have a
story to laugh at, because it would lessen her dignity and offend
her pride!'
And yet he loved her still as he remembered her there
OTHMAR,
337
sitting so still, so fair, with the cold challenge in her eyes, and
the pale roses at her breast ; and she was all his, and yet as far
off him as though she were queen in another world beyond the
sun ; and he loved her still, and was filled with guilty shame at
his own weakness, as men are when they still adore the women
who have defiled their name.
CHAPTER XLV.
For the first time in her whole existence his wife had known
the mastery of a strong and uncontrollable impulse of emotion ;
for the first time since her dreamy eyes had smiled at the pains
and follies of men a wave of fierce and simple passion had passed
through her as the seismic wave moves the still earth.
She was touched With the common infirmity of common lives.
The women in her laundry rooms, the groom's wife who
lived above her horses' stables, might feel as she felt now.
Jealousy ! It could not be jealousy. Would Cleopatra have
been jealous of that slave from the market-place, that Nubian
seller of green figs, or Persian dancing girl 1
For jealousy it seemed to her there must first of all, be
equality. No—no : she was not jealous ; she was only angered,
bitterly angered, because he had stooped to subterfuge and to
untruth : earths in which the fox of cowardice always hides. It
was all ignoble, mean, unworthy, there was no manliness in it
and no honesty. Any common knave could have woven such a
net of falsehood and stupidity as this.
He had thought to deceive her ! She could almost have
laughed aloud at the idea!—was there any brain subtle enough,
clear enough, wise enough in all Europe to invent a lie which
would have power to blind her ? Surely not; and he knew it;
and yet he had thought such vulgar ordinary devices as have
served in half the vaudevilles of half the theatres of France
would serve to hoodwink and to satisfy her !
There was a vulgarity in such miserable intrigue, which
offended her taste whilst it outraged her dignity. In all the
innumerable women of their own world could he not have found
some rival in some measure her equal 1
It might have hurt her more, but at least it would have
insulted her less.
She remained alone and motionless, except for such feverish
mechanical action as that with which her right hand plucked the
roses from the bowl one by one and tore their hearts asunder.
She did not know she did it. She shed the sweet, faint-
smelling petals on the floor, and her fingers had the movement
of a great nervousness as they played with the loosened leaves.
z
338
OTHMAR.
No one came there to disturb her ; no one would dare to do so
until she rang; the slow morning hours crept on, the very foot-
fall of time was muffled, and did not dare obtrude in these still
fragrant chambers where the air was heavy with hothouse heat,
and was sweet with a somnolent lily-like odour. v
She took the little written sheets from between the blotting-
paper and read what was written on them again. There was
more than she had read aloud to him. All the' details of his
intercourse with Damaris Berarde were described there with
searching minuteness. She studied them again and again.
Their bare records were full of suggestion to her ; they seemed
to tell so much which was not said in words, to be pregnant
with meaning and with cynical emphasis.
She sat still as any statue of a queen dethroned ; the pale
rose folds of the satin flowing about her feet, the ruin of pale
rose leaves on the floor before her.
All her life she had laughed at the love of men and derided
it, and starved it on graceful philosophies and ethereal conceits,
and dismissed it with airy banter and disbelieved its truest
words and its hardest pains : and now a love which she had
lost escaped her, and she found no comfort either in her wit or
in her scorn.
Certain of the words which he had said to her remained in
persistent echo on her ear. . Some sense that she had been cold
to him and too capricious, and too negligent of what he felt,
came to her. It might even be that he had sought the warmth
of other affections because she had left his heart empty herself.
He had always been a sentimentalist! Had she not called him
Werther, Obermann, Rene, Rolla 1 He had wanted the impos-
sible, the immutable, the eternal.
He had asked of love and of life what neither can give.
He had expected a moment of divinest rapture to be pro-
longed through a lifetime.
He had expected the song of the nightingale to thrill through
the year. Senseless dreams and hopeless !—but had she been
too cruel to them 1
For a moment her conscience spoke, and her heart relented
towards him. She remembered the many times when she had
treated the warmth of his passion as an absurd delirium or an
exaggerated sentiment, when she had again and again and
again bidden him take his erratic rhapsodies elsewhere than to
her.
If he had done so, was he so much to blame ?
Almost she could have pardoned him. If only he had not
lied to her she would have pardoned him.
' Good God, why could he not be honest %' she thought, with
indighant scorn. 'Why could he not kneel at her feet, and lay
hia head upon her knee and own his folly 1 Men were weak
OTHMAR.
339
always, and so easily misled whenever their senses ruled them,
and such mere animals after all, even those in whom the mind
was strongest!
CHAPTER XLYI.
Send the children to me,' she said when at last she rang for
her women, and the children came. They had come in from
their morning's ride on their small ponies in the Bois. They
were very pretty in their velvet riding dresses, with their golden
hair flowing over their shoulders ; they were very gentle and
had admirable manners; the little boy with his cap in his hand
kissed his mother's fingers with an old-world grace. She drew
them both towards her.
' Mes mignons,' she said, looking alternately at each of them,
' I want you to tell me something quite honestly; are you afraid
of me, either of you ?'
The young Otho, a very sensitive and chivalrous child,
coloured to his hair and was silent; his sister Xenia, less timid
and more communicative, answered for him and for herself:
' We are both of us—a little.'
The brows of Xadine contracted with a sudden sense of
pain.
' Why 1' she said imperiously.
The children did not reply ; their small faces grew serious ;
they were not prepared to analyse what they felt.
' Do you mean,' she continued, ' that if you wished for any-
thing you would sooner ask your father for it than you would
ask me 1'
The children nodded their heads silently.' They had lost
their colour. She saw that the interrogation alarmed them.
' Why 1' she repeated, in a softer tone.
They were still silent; they could not really tell; they only
knew that a certain sense of timidity and awe was always upon
them in their mother's presence, that they never dared to laugh
too loudly or ask a question twice before her. They loved her,
and had the passionate admiration of childhood for that which
is above it and incomprehensible to it, and she seemed to them
more wonderful and beautiful than any other living creature,
but there was a tinge of fear in their sense of her presence.
She read their unformed confused thoughts, and she felt a
sharp reproach in their tacit confession.
Had she been so engrossed in the ice of her egotism, that
she had never taken the trouble even to stoop and draw to her
these young hesitating half-opened souls 1
Had she been cold and careless even to theni 1
Enfants d'amour, nes d'une dtreinte I
Z 2
34°
OTHMAR.
she murmured as she kissed them with lips which trembled ; had
she been so little kind to them that even they feared her ?
4 Maman etait prete a pleurer,' murmured Xenia to her
brother in amazed awe, as with their arms wound about each
other they passed down the corridor to their own apartments.
Otho drew a long breath.
iMle nous a embrasses, vois-tuhe murmured, 4 comme on
embrasse les petits pauvres !'
4 Les petits pauvres,' whom he had seen in the Tuileries or
the Luxembourg gardens, kissed by their ragged mothers with
eager tenderness on cold winter mornings, when perhaps the
mothers had no food to give them except such fond caresses.
"Watching those happy hungry children, he had said more
than once to his sister enviously, 4 Si maman nous embrassait
comme ga J'
And then they had always kissed each other to make up for
the caresses which they did not obtain.
And now she too had kissed tliem 4 comme ga !' They were
not sure whether they had done something very wrong or
something very good to move her so ; one or the other they
were sure it must have been.
As the children went from her presence a note was brought
her which briefly announced that the Princess Lobow Gregori-
evna had arrived in Paris from Russia to consult some famous
physician.
4 As the vulture comes when there is death in the air,' she
murmured with passion, as she tore the note in two. Must this
mummied saint even change all the habits of her life and quit
her country to be present here, when for the first time a rupture
open and irrevocable had come between herself and Othmar,
when in a few days' time, if it were not doing so already, all
Paris would be speaking of the cause of their disunion !
All the vague dormant superstition which slumbered beneath
her sceptical intelligence, made her see a fatal omen in this
unlooked-for arrival of her bitterest enemy. More than once
she had said in her heart, 4 If ever I have misfortune, Lobow
Gregorievna will be there to triumph in it.' And now she was
there, within a few streets, residing in a religious house of
Muscovite nuns, a dark still austere spectre, which seemed to
her like the carrion bird which waits for those who die.
4 Do I grow nervous and hysterical 1' she asked herself in
scorn.
She who had meted out destiny to so many, who had thought
that it was only the timid and foolish who let life go ill with
them, who had regarded the sorrows of sentiment and emotion
with an indulgent contempt, felt with anger against herself that
such a trivial thing as the advent of a woman who hated her
could affect her nerves and appear to her a presage of ill. With
OTHMAR.
341
her delicate scorn and her consummate indifference she had
turned aside all the efforts of others to move her or influence
her; she had never known either apprehension or regret; it
had always seemed to her that life was a comedy to be played ill
or well according as you were wise or stupid. Suddenly, for the
first time, emotions which were beyond her own control affected
her, and a sense that circumstance escaped her guidance filled
her with the sharp pain of irritated impotence.
She knew the world too well not to know that all the women
who had vainly envied her, and many of the men who had vainly
wooed her, would take pleasure and find solace in every whisper
which should tell them of the offence to her pride ; and she knew
the world too well not to know also that there is no such thing
as privacy in it, that all which she had learned through Michel
Obrenowitch society would find out and gossip exaggerate ; and
that the whole of the society throughout Europe which she had
dominated and influenced and been feared by for so long, would
know that she—she—Nadkge Feodorowna—was deserted for a
peasant girl taken from the streets.
All the imperious blood which was in her changed to fire as
she thought of the certain comments of the courts and drawing-
rooms in which she had been so long so arrogant a leader, so
dreaded a wit; she knew that eagerly as hounds at the curee
would all her flatterers, friends, and lovers join her foes in
exultantly rejoicing over her insulted dignity.
How many and many a time she had heard society laugh
over just such a story as this ! How well she knew all the cruel
derision, all the gay contempt, all the equivocal jests, all the
affected pity ! How well she knew that precisely in measure to
the homage which they yield us is the pleasure of others in
our pain !
CHAPTER XLVII.
Blanche de Laon that morning rode her English horse slowly
down one of the unfrequented roads in the Bois de Boulogne,
and beside her paced the handsome Tunisian mare of Loris
Loswa. They were good friends, although, or rather because,
they went for their loves and their vices elsewhere than to each
other. He was conscious of the use it was to him to be caressed
and favoured by this pre-eminent leader of la jeunesse crane ;
and she found in him a suppleness, a malice, and an ingenuity,
in tormenting and in defaming, which made him an ever amusing
and an often useful companion to a lady who had no better sport
than the harassing of her friends and acquaintances.
Loswa was acutely sensible of the necessity which exists for
any artist who would continue fanions and fashionable tp make
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OTHMAR.
his court to the new sovereigns of the great world, as turn by
turn they succeed to their leadership. The obligations of old
loyalties and the memories of old favours did not weigh a feather
with his wise and self-loving nature ; a woman's influence was
the measure of her beauty in his eyes, and had Helen's self been
swr le retou/r she would have commanded no smile from him.
He saw in the Princesse de Laon an influence which would grow
with every fear for the next decade, so entirely were her qualities
those which her generation most admires and fears. Therefore
to no one was he in semblance more devoted, and no one had he
flattered more ingeniously, and immortalised more frequently
with all the most delicate homage of his art, though in his secret
thoughts he denounced as detestable the irregular colourless
impertinent features of her minois chiffonne, and her myosotis-
coloured insolent eyes which stared so arrogantly and so inquisi-
tively on all living things.
' It is a vile type,' said Loswa in his own mind. ' It is a vile
type, all this jeunesse du monde. It is without grace and without
seduction ; it is insolent and noisy ; it is over-dressed and over-
drawn ; it screams and it gambles ; it wears the gowns of
Goldoni's Venice with the head-dresses of the Directoire ; it
empties the bazaars of Japan into its salons of Louis Quinze; a
vile type, with nothing in it of the great lady, and nothing of
the honest woman, only a diable d'entrain which carries it away
as a broomstick carries a witch!'
But, all the same, he was not willing to be left behind in the
excursions of the broomstick, and was very conscious that
unless cette jeunesse made him one of them, he would cease to
be the painter whom fashion loved. It is so easy to become
old-fashioned ! so easy to become one of that joyless and dis-
regarded band—' les vieux !'
Therefore to all the young beauties, even if he owned them
hideous, he was careful to pay devoted court, and to none more,
since none were so powerful as she, than to Blanchette de Laon.
His last portrait of her was then upon his easel half finished ; a
study of pale tints, with her pale face seen above a necklace of
opals, with a great mass of lemon-coloured chrysanthemum
around and below, one of those dexterous and daring violations
of conventional art of which he possessed the secret; and in it
he had flattered her so delicately, yet so immoderately, that her
museau de chatte had become actually beautiful in his treatment
of it.
' That is what one wants when one goes to be painted,' she
had said herself with cynical honesty.
She and he, good friends always and better friends still of
late, rode now side by side through the solitude of a rarely-used
alley of the Bois, and spoke in confidential tones together, as
her perfec+ figure in its dark cloth habit seemed one with the
OTHMAR.
343
perfect English hunter which she rode. She was not fond of
any country sports, but she rode admirably, and knew that
riding displayed all the graces of her form.
4 You are sure it is the girl of the island ?' she asked.
4 Quite sure,' answered Loswa. ' Madame Nadege asked me
some questions, you gave me a hint, Lemberg spoke of some new
protegee of Rosselin's. I inquired about the theatres, at the
Conservatoire ; I imagined this hidden miracle was the future
Desclee of Bonaventure. I found out that she lived near Magny,
and was visited by Othmar ; Magny is not the North Pole that
they should deem it unvisitable ; I went there unseen myself,
and a farm labourer pointed out to me "la demoiselle she
was at a distance from me, walking by the river, but I recognised
her at a glance. One might have guessed it before. When she
disappeared from the island it was Othmar who knew where she
went.'
4 It is very droll!' said Blanchette, showing her white small
teeth in a grin of genuine appreciation. ' And do you suppose
his wife knows ?'
4 Bethune knows, by his look the other day, and he will tell her:
he will be only too glad de lui donner une dent against Othmar.'
41 have told her something,' said Blanche de Laon ; 4 though
I did not know who it was I knew that there was an interest at
Chevreuse; I saw him walking in the fields there : but is the
girl truly a genius I'
Loswa smiled.
' Who shall say ? But the chhre amie of a rich millionaire
will always find a public to swear that she is so. They already
speak amongst artists of her coming debut, and it is easy to see
the value which is attached to the millions behind her. There
is very little known about her, but that fact is known of Othmar's
interest in her, and no doubt it will make it easy for her to
appear on some great theatre.'
4 They say she is first to appear at Othmar's own house.'
4 That will be very clever, but very dangerous. Madame
Nadfege is not a person with whom on pent plaisanter. I should
doubt her condescending to condonation of that kind.'
Blanchette laughed.
'He is very indulgent to her about Bethune. He may
surely expect the usual equivalent in return.'
Loswa was irritated.
4 He knows well enough that Bethune is nothing to her;
Bethune has worshipped her for fifteen years. I admit that;
but he has had his pains for his payment; she lets him follow
her about, but it is only pour rue.'
Blanchette laughed and flicked her horse's throat with her
little white switch.
4 You speak as if you were jealous ! You always admired
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that cold woman. To return to the coming Desclde. Paris
already talks of her, you say 1'
' It is not my fault if it do not,' she thought.
' Vaguely, yes,' answered Loswa. ' It has an expectation of
some new talent which has what all talent in our generation
requires : a prop of gold behind it.'
' Have you discreetly whispered that it is one with the
original of a sketch of a fishing girl 1 *
Loswa smiled.
' I have caused it to be whispered, of course ; we never say
those things ourselves.'
' Where does Othmar hide her at present, do you say ?'
* At a farmhouse at Les Hameaux. He is not magnificent in
his maintenance of her ; it is a very simple place, and she lives
very simply there.'
' That is just like a very rich man. Besides, Othmar always
has a taste for black bread and bare hoards. You know at one
time he actually dreamed of breaking up the whole network of
the Othmar power, and stripping himself of everything, and
living like St. Vincent de Paul. That was before those children
were born ; their mother would certainly never take the vow of
poverty! Well, shall you and I ride down to Magny some
morning and see this prodigy of genius and simplicity ? You
can recall yourself to her, and you can present me. We will
represent ourselves as inspired by what we have heard from
Bosselin.'
Loswa hesitated. Othmar was not a man whom he cared to
cross. Yet he had a desire to see again the face which he had
sketched on Bonaventure, and he had a vague idea that by going
thither he might in some way learn something which would enable
him to pay off that old score whichhe had so long cherished against
Othmar's wife. He had had a restless and hopeless passion for
her years before ; he had served and flattered her docilely he-
cause he held at its just value the great power of her social
influence ; he had been of use to her in a thousand ways at her
chateau parties and in her Paris entertainments; he had al-
ways been docile and devoted, and ingenious to please, and
submissive under offence, but all the same, at the bottom of his
heart there was a bitter rancour against her for her blindness to
his charms ; for her criticism of his talents ; for her constant
careless treatment of him as a mere decor de fete, as a mere
amateur ; and if he could see her pride hurt or her indifference
penetrated, he felt that he would be happier and better satisfied.
A thousand slighting words which she had spoken out of ca-
price, and forgotten as soon as they were uttered, had remained
written on his memory and unforgiven. He would not have
quarrelled with her openly for his life ; he was too sensible of
the pleasure of her acquaintance, the charm of her presence, the
OTHMAR.
345
value of her goodwill; but if he could have helped unseen to put
any thorns under the rose leaves of her couch, he would have
done so willingly; he would have even chosen thorns which
were poisoned.
' Yes, we will go and see her,' said Blanchette, as their
horses paced under the boughs. ' It is always amusing to be
the first to inspect a person the world is going to be asked to
admire. On pent la denigrer si bien !'
' But,' suggested Loswa, with hesitation, ' if we denigrer here,
we shall please Madame Nadfege. Is that what you wish to do ?
I think if we go at all we must, on the contrary, go to befriend,
to admire, to assist the new talent.'
Blanche de Laon gave him a little approving caress with
her whip.
'You are a clever man, Loris,' she said with appreciation.
'We will go to-morrow—no, the day after to-morrow,' she
added. 'I will meet you at St. Cyr ; the horses shall be sent
there by train ; I often send mine by train to places where 1
wish to ride ; send yours also. We will go early because it is a
long way. The day after to-morrow I know that Othmar will
be at Ferrieres ; there is a great breakfast ; he cannot escape
from it; there will be no fear of meeting him in Chevreuse.'
' But are you sure what we shall accomplish when we reach
there ?'
'You will finish the sketch begun on the island, and I shall
forestall the dramatic criticism of Francisque Sarcey.'
' Othmar will not like it.'
' Othmar need not know it. My dear Loris, do you suppose
that by feeding her on buttermilk, and hiding her under a
thatched roof, he secures the primitive virtues in his idealised
peasant 1 You may be sure she already tells him nothing that
she does not choose to tell. On n'est pas femmepour rien !'
Loswa rode on in silence awhile, then he said with a smile :
' I have an idea, which, if we could realise it, might possibly
prove amusing. You will recollect that there are to be dramatic
representations at Amyot next week when the Princes are
there 1'
Blanchette nodded assent.
' And Madame Nadege,' continued Loswa, ' is always very
solicitous for the success of her theatre ; she spares nothing at
any time on that kind of entertainment; and the representations
of next week are to be really royal; all the greatest artists are
engaged for them. I have always a good deal to do with
arranging these things for Amyot; and I know that it is most
likely that the Reichenberg, who is to play there, will not have
recovered the chill which she caught yesterday at La Marche.
If she should not, shall we substitute Damaris Berarde 1 I need
not appear in the matter; I can send the director of Amyot to
346
OTHMAR.
Rosselin, and in any way we should have an entertaining scene
not included in the programme. If the new wonder succeed,
the Lady of Amyot will not be pleased, and will undoubtedly
quarrel with her husband; if, on the contrary, the girl should
turn nervous, or hysterical, or passionate, and forget her rdle,
it will be diverting enough, and in any case will embarrass
Othmar himself. I think in either event we should have a droll
ten minutes.'
Blanche de Laon showed her white teeth in an approving
smile.
'You are always ingenious,' she said. 'Butif Othmar be
already desirous of making the girl appear under his wife's
patronage, perhaps your scheme would only gratify him ? What
then ?'
' He is only desirous of that because he thinks that his wife
. does not know of Les Hameaux ; but we will take care that she
does know ; and I think she may be trusted to resent it. She
does not care a straw for him, but she cares immeasurably for
her own dignity, her own influence, her own empire.'
Blanchette nodded again.
'We will see what the new star is like, first,' she answered.
' It is not a mere handsome nobody with a turn for the stage
who will excite her jealousy: she is too proud to be easily
jealous.' '
'The girl is magnificent,' said Loswa, as he thought.
'Jealousy is always alive, even if love has been dead a century.'
CHAPTER XLVIII.
The day after the morrow they kept their word to each other.
She descended at the little station of St. Cyr, and found her
horse and groom and those of Loswa waiting for her. Loswa
and she bade their men stay at the station there, and rode them-
selves through the country ways which lie between St. Cyr and
Les Hameaux. That if anyone chanced to see them their meet-
ing would look like an assignation, did not trouble the thoughts
of the Princesse de Laon for an instant; there were far too
many much more weighty imputations which she incurred daily
to allow so trivial a possible charge as this would be to have any
terrors for her. She delighted in the creation of scandal, in the
risks of equivocal positions ; and challenged both the admiration
of her husband and the long-suffering of her world with the most
daring and shameless of provocations. She knew that to those
who dare much, much is forgiven ; she knew that the world
would never quarrel with her. It feared her tongue too greatly.
It was scarcely noonday when they reached the quiet fields
OTHMAR.
347
which stretched around the Croix Blanche. There were the
greenness and freshness of very earliest spring in all the land ;
little birds were flying and twittering, with thoughts of coming
nests, to be hidden away under orchard blossoms, and the sheep
were cheerfully cropping the short grass which covered the ruins
of Port Royal. All these things and the memories which went
with them said nothing to Blanchette ; all she knew of spring
was the dates of the various races, and all she knew of history
was that it gave you travesties for costume balls.
They left their horses in charge of a labouring servant, who
was sitting resting under one of the ash trees to eat his noonday
bread, and then, crossing the court-yard, pushed their way
without ceremony past the dairy-wench who tried to stop them
and learn their errand, and so, without either announcement or
apology, opened the door at the head of the wooden stair and
found themselves in the chamber of Damaris.
She was sitting reading at a table, the white dogs lay at her
feet; a great volume was open on the table before her, her head
leaned on her hand, which was hidden in the masses of her close-
curling hair. As she started at the unclosing of the door and rose
to her feet, and restrained the dogs with a gesture, the intruders
upon her privacy were both astonished to see the development
which her beauty had taken since the night two years before
when she had stood, bewildered and astray, like a young night-
hawk brought into a lighted house from the shadows of night,
in the drawing-rooms of St. Pharamond. She did not speak ;
she remained motionless, her hand on the head of the male dog;
she recognised Loswa instantly, with a sense of pain and of
regret that he had found her there ; his companion she was not
conscious of ever having seen before.
' Here is Loris Loswa, whom you will remember, and I am
Madame de Laon,' said Blanchette, advancing towards her,
with her abrupt familiarity, her eyes roving all over the place
and coming back to fasten themselves with envy on the beauti-
ful lines of the girl's throat and bosom.
' We are come to see you,' she continued, ' because you will
be a celebrity very soon ; Rosselin is going to bring you out at
the Fran§ais or the Odeon; you will have no trouble ; every-
thing is arranged ; Othmar's name is enough, and your story
will please Paris when it is in a romantic mood. It is romantic
sometimes, despite the naturalists. You are very handsome,
my dear, very ; you have an antique type, and what blood and
what health there are in you '.—enough to make a million of our
anemiques ! Why do you go on living in this hole among
pigeons and dogs ? I should have thought he would have given
you an hotel in the Avenue Josephine or the Boulevard Haus-
mann before now !'
Damaris looked at her from under bent brows ; she did not
348
OTHMAR.
understand, but she had a sense of offence in the "way she was
addressed; this great lady seemed to her rudely familiar,
brusquely intimate ; she did not like her tone, her face, her
manner ; and the use of Othmar's name bewildered her. She
was silent because she had no idea at all what she should reply.
Loswa tried to propitiate her.
4 I have not forgotten my day on the island,' he said to her,
' nor all your goodness to me. Is it true that you are going to
dazzle all Paris in 44 Dona Sol" as you charmed us on that island
with 44 Esther'' 1 Why does Rosselin delay to give the world
so much pleasure, and why does he keep you so hidden 1'
Damans heard with impatience and anger.
41 do not suppose 1 shall ever play Dona Sol,' she said
abruptly ; 4 and if I did, most likely Paris would laugh, and you
first of all.'
4 Paris does not laugh at handsome people,' said Blanche de
Laon, cutting short the flattering protestations of Loswa. 4 Hot,
at least, till it gets tired of their good looks. ' But it is quite
true, is it not, that you are being taught by Rosselin to rival
Bernhardt 1'
'I do not know as to rivalry,' said Damaris, with constraint
and displeasure. 4 If I ever follow art I shall endeavour to be
as true to it and as far from imitation of others as I can. M.
Rosselin is very kind and patient with me.'
Blanchette smiled.
4 You are very grateful. Be sure he finds as much interest
in training you as you can find in being trained ! I should think
you might dispense with study—with such a face as yours, and
such a friend as Otho Othmar !'
Damaris coloured angrily.
She resented the intrusion of this stranger, whose imperti-
nent and familiar manners offended her, and seemed to her a
personal insolence. At Loswa she did not look. His presence
was unwelcome to her, and brought back the memories of Bona-
venture so strongly that it was with difficulty that she kept the
tears from rising to her eyes. How far away it seemed, that
sunny noonday, when she had made him welcome to her little
balcony amongst the orange boughs and the lemon leaves ! And
then how basely he had repaid her and betrayed her, and
brought his friends to laugh at her, as he had brought this
woman of fashion now !
Blanchette continued to gaze at her with unsparing examina-
tion, and Loswa continued to make to her those pretty speeches
of graceful compliment of which he was a finished master. She
grew angered and stubborn under the eye of the one and deaf
and contemptuous to the flatteries of the other. Why had they
come 1 When would they depart ? These were the only two
questions in her thoughts.
OTHMAR.
349
She was troubled, too, by the abrupt ffietitihn of Othmar,
and uncertain what she ought to say, how she should reply. If
only Rosselin had been there ! He would have known how
to meet these insolent gay people, who stared at her as though
she were some curious strange beast; he would have stood
between her and their persistent inquisitive examination. But
the visit of Rosselin had been paid on the previous day, and he
would not return until the morrow. The woman of the house
was at the market of Versailles; she was wholly alone ; and
she had lost the dauntless, careless courage with which she had
treated Loswa on the island, the courage born of childish igno-
ranee and of childish audacity. Life seemed now very difficult
and intricate to her, and her steps in it were shy and unsure.
'If I ever do go before the world I shall probably fail,' she
said wearily, in answer to their continued allusions to her
coming career.
' Fail !' echoed Blanche de Laon, breaking in roughly on
the graceful protestations of Loswa. ' You will not fail, you
shall not fail; it would please her too much. Dame! how
unlike you are to us ! You look as if you were made of some
other stuff than we are made of; you look as if you had come
fresh out of the sea like the Greek goddess that is in the Salon
every year. Has she seen you again 1 You ought to let her
see you now.'
' Who ?' said Damaris.
' Who 1' said Blanchette, and muttered in her small white
teeth 'Ah ! gafait Vinnocente, ga sepose!
Aloud she said to her companion, ' My dear Loswa, go and
sketch the nymphs of the farm; there are always nymphs on
a farm, are there not 1 I want to be alone a moment with
Mademoiselle Berarde. AUez-vous-en ! '
As he obeyed her unwillingly and with a look of eloquent
regret, Blanchette scanned with all the penetration of her pale
keen eyes the poetic and classic face of Damaris ; she was a
skilled appraiser of female beauty, and there were a force, a
colour, an ideality here which she had never seen before, which
were as unlike the beauties of the women of her own world,
washed with lait d'lris and shadowed with kolh, as a warm
morning on southern fields, where the sun shines on wine-hued
wind flowers, is unlike a waxlit evening in a conservatory.
'Paris has had nothing like her for ages,' she thought.
* But she is stupid ; she does not know her own power ; she
lives on at a farm ; if she waits for Othmars leave she will never
t»e seen by the world ; she does not understand ; perhaps she
mixes sentiment up with it; she has the head of a Sappho;
that type is always romantic.'
'How he is gone,' she said aloud. ' Do not be afraid and
35°
OTHMAR.
do not pose. Tell me truly, has Othmar's wife seen you since
you left your island ?'
'No.' Damaris coloured at the name.
' No ? What a pity ! Look you, my dear,' she continued,
as she leaned familiarly towards her and poured the sharp pale
rays of her penetrating eyes into the face of Damaris. ' I will'
befriend you because you hate her. She had power once, but
now I have more than she had. Le jour est aux jeunes. I will
use my power for you. You shall become great if my world
can make you so, because she will suffer in seeing it. You
must be great, I tell you ; it is all very well to filer le pcvrfait
amowr with him under these trees if you like it—I wonder you
like it, it is such waste of time, and you should have had your
hotel and your major-domo, and your blood-horses by now,
and men never think much of a woman for whom they do little ;
it is the woman they are ruined by whom they esteem;—but
you must be great, you must shine, you must set all Paris talk-
ing or you will not hurt her in the least. I do not think she
cares what affairs he may have, all that is beneath her; she will
only care if you can oppose her de puissance a puissance, if the
world admires you, adores you, and flatters him and insults her
every time that it praises you. Do you understand ? I do not
think you understand. Are you stupid or do you only pose 1
Do not feign with me. Why should you feign with me 1 All
that serves nothing. You only hurt yourself and lose influence
if you let him think you are content to be shut up like this,
adoring his image. You are one of the sentimentalists I see;
you must change all that. It is not of our time, it is not in our
manners ; it is silly and provincial, and you may be sure does
you no good with him. Let Rosselin bring you out on any
theatre he can, any is better than none ; but with Othmar
behind him he will be able to buy all the theatres in Paris.
You are magnificent to look at; they say you have talent, and
you have a lover who is a Croesus ; it will be your own fault if
you are not the admiration of all Europe at a bound. Then she
will hate you, and she will be wounded to the soul, and she will
realise that her day is done ; le jour est aux jeunes. And then
I will kiss you on both cheeks before all Paris if you like.
Yes—I, even I—Blanche de Yannes, Princesse de Laon ! '
Her voice had risen into a swift enthusiasm, a faint flush had
come on her pale features, she smiled with pleasure at the
vision her words conjured up ; her cold narrow world-encrusted
soul expanded with the sweetness of a satisfied hatred and the
honesty of a genuine sentiment. Love she could not, but she
could hate, and in all the cruelty and the wickedness of her
there was thus much of candour and of feeling ; she was true to
the childish affections and the promised revenge of a day long
gone by. Even as she spoke she was thinking of the poor little
OTHMAR.
351
verses hidden with the dead roses in the drawer at Amyot;
even as she spoke she was saying in her heart, ' My pure angel,
I do not forget; better people than I forget, but I do not.
She shall suffer what you suffered ; she shall lose what you lost;
she shall feel that she is the laugh of the world ; she shall know
that she is as powerless to hold the heart of her husband as
you were, and she shall see him chained in public to the
triumphal car of this child. And I shall be by the child's
ear, and I shall tell her all the secrets of power and all the vices
that make men like sheep to be driven, and I shall make her
dupe him and deceive him, and keep other lovers on his gold,
and ruin him body and soul ; and no one will know I am there
behind her but myself. I shall know, and what a jest it will be !'
All these thoughts floated before her while her hands clasped
the ivory handled white whip and her eyes flashed their pale
fires over the face of Damaris.
To tempt, to corrupt, to revenge : they are a triad sweeter
to those who love them than are ever all the Graces and
Persuasion, or Charity and her gentle sisters.
Damaris still did not speak. The colour was hot in her face
and her eyebrows were drawn together ; a look of intense
suffering had replaced the momentary stupor of bewilderment
and surprise ; she breathed loudly and slowly with effort; the
blue veins of her throat were swollen. Little by little she had
gathered up the sense of all which had been said to her, and
ravelled it out bit by bit, and comprehended it.
The swift shrill voice of her temptress still went on in her
ear.
1 Perhaps you wonder what business it is of mine, why I
mix myself up in it, why I care what your lover does. Well, I
care nothing at all for him ; he may have a harem as large as
Versailles for aught I care, but I hate her; I have always hated
her. She is insolent, she is arrogant, she has that power over
men still which it irritates one to see, and she killed my cousin.
You may have heard of Othmar's first wife and of her death. I
was fond of my cousin ; she was of a type so rare—so rare !—
one that one never sees now; she was only a child, and she took
her own life because Othmar loved this woman who is his wife
now; she thought she would make him happy in that way—poor
little sweet generous fool ! So she died by the sea there, in that
country of yours. I was sorry then ; I am angry still; I have
always said that I would live to see this other woman humiliated
and abandoned as she was humiliated and abandoned. And
that is why I will be your friend; openly, freely, I cannot be so,
but I will do all I can in my world to make you great, and I can
do a great deal, because great you must be. She will not care
if he only make love to you a la derobee under these ash trees.
You are nothing now ; you are only a little neasant whom it has
OTHMARi
pleased him to set in a dovecot—it does not matter to her even
if she knows of it. But, if you triumph in the sight of all Paris,
then it will wound her. If you be a second- Desclee as she
prophesied for you, so Loris says, then it will make her bitterly
mortified if she sees herself deserted for you.'
She paused to take breath after the rapid, voluble, unstudied
sentences which had followed each other so fast and in so im-
pressive a whisper off her lips.
Damaris made no word in reply. She listened as though
she were made of wood or stone ; her full curved lips were
pressed close together, her eyes were sombre and had a dusky
ominous gleam in them, the only expression on her face was
that of a vague, half-stupid bewilderment which left her com-
panion in the same doubt as before, as to wliether she were
stupid or feigning.
'If she have no more intelligence than this,' Blanche de
Laon thought, impatiently, ' how can they think to make her
famous for all her beauty % To be sure, great artists are some-
times great imbeciles.'
She leaned still nearer till her eyes seemed to plunge them-
selves into those of Damaris ; she had drawn off" her gloves,
and her thin small hands with their glittering rings were clasped
on her riding whip where it lay on the table in front of her ; her
voice rose swifter and shriller as she resumed her argument.
'You do not understand your own forces,' she said, with the
impatience of a keen intelligence baffled by a slow one. ' You
do not see that now—now—now is the moment for you to do
everything you choose, to get everything you wish ; if you let
time go by, Othmar will refuse you a piece of pinchbeck where
now he would give you a river of diamonds. If you waste your
best years living in obscurity to please him, he will recompense
you by leaving you to obscurity all the rest of your days. Men
never appreciate sacrifice. If he cannot do better for you than
a room or two in a farmhouse, what use is it to you that he is
worth millions of millions as he is % You are only a handsome
child, only a handsome peasant; but if you come into the world
you will be a beautiful woman. You will lead men any way
you like, and he will love you all the more because he will be
afraid of his rivals.'
Suddenly she rose and stood erect.
' I know what you mean,' she answered, with the vibration
of a great passion in her voice. ' At first I did not know. I
think you cannot understand. He saved me from the streets,
as a man may a dog. He has been as an angel to me. He does
not care for me except in pity. He loves her. I would give
my body and my soul to him if he wished for them. But he
does not. He is not mine in any way, nor will he ever be.
You do not understand. If I could make him happy for one
OTHMAR.
353
hour I would burn in hell for all eternity with joy. But I have
not the power. I am nothing to him, nothing ; no more than
the world is to me. You do not understand—go, go.'
Her voice lost its intensity of expression, and sank exhausted
at the close ; the colour faded from her face ; she leaned against
the wall with a sense of sudden weakness on her.
Blanche de Laon stared on her with hard unsympathetic
Skeptical eyes ; she laughed a little, coarsely, rudely.
1 Dame! You have a mind to show me you can act! If
you were on the boards now you would bring down the house.
You are no simpleton I see. Ho doubt you know the role
which pays you best. I spoke to you in sincerity, and you
answer me with a tissue of untruths. CP est lien du midi ga I'
Damaris looked at her wearily : the pain in her was too great
for anger to have any place in it.
'You can believe what you like,' she said with effort.
'Go!'
Blanche de Laon, who had never in her life known any im-
pulse of submission or any sense of fear, was vaguely awed and
touched into involuntary acquiescence. Her swift, ready, in-
solent, and cruel tongue was silent.
She was baffled and angered. She had spoken so frankly
and so cynically, because she had been certain that her words
would fall on a willing ear, and be received by a mind open and
ready for them. The possibility that Damaris might refuse to
hearken to them had never presented itself to her. She had
made the usual mistake of an ignoble mind. The possibility of
a mind being noble had never suggested itself to her.
She was sure that Othmar was the lover of this child, and
that the girl denied it to save him from all comment of the
world, and all jealousy of his wife.
Such a denial was stupid and exaggerated, and unwise,
because the force of all women lies in their power to make
themselves feared, and in their unblushing employment and
proclamation of their triumphs : still it was fine, even Blanche
de Laon felt that. She did not for a moment believe the answer
given her, and she was bitterly incensed at the rejection of all
her overtures and the failure of all her counsels ; but she was
moved despite herself to a certain unwilling admiration of so
much courage and of so much loyalty. It was a lie she felt
sure ; but there were a grandeur and utter oblivion of self
in such a lie which impressed her by their utter unlikeness to
herself.
She looked at the averted face of Damaris; then gathered
up her gloves and whip, and without any other words went from
the chamber.
' May I not go back to make my adieux?' asked Loswa, who
waited for her in the courtyard of the house.
A A
354
OTHMAR.
'No,' she said sharply. ' What should you do there ? You
are no student of the antique, That child is a daughter of the
gods—a sister of Phsedra and of Medea—no contemporary of
yours or mine. Let her alone. She will not suit your canvas.'
* Will she play at Amyot?'
' I do not think so.'
She mounted her horse and rode in silence through the fields
and lanes. Her tireless incessant voice for once was mute, and
her face was troubled and surprised. All the malice and the
vileness which had been in her thoughts, her hopes, her suggest
tions, had been scared and confounded by the sense of a great
unintelligible passion, the nobility of which was incomprehen-
sible to her, yet affected her with a dim sense of its strength
and its strangeness.
Once she laughed aloud and turned to Loswa.
' Descl£e ! Desclee never equalled Damaris Berarde. What
an incomparable actress the future will enjoy whether we get
her to Amyot or not!'
' You mean ' asked Loswa perplexed.
* My dear Loris ! Almost she persuaded me that she loves
Otho Othmar for himself and not for his millions ! Almost she
persuaded me too that he is not as yet her lover, though he
may be when he will! You will grant that she surpasses
Desclee.'
CHAPTER XLIX.
When the echo of their horses' feet had ceased from the stones
of the courtyard, and the quiet air had no sound in it except the
twitter of the sparrows pecking among the food of the poultry in
the yard below, Damaris remained motionless, leaning against
the wall of the chamber. One by one all the words which had
been spoken to her returned on her memory, bringing with
them a clearer meaning, a fuller comprehension, a deeper
disgust.
Little by little she understood all which Blanche de Laon
had meant, all which she had promised, all which she had
supposed.
' They think that I live on his money, and that all I care for
is that,' she muttered with the sick sense of a loathsome impu-
tation stealing all the strength out of her nerves, and all the
peace out of her life.
Othmar to her was as a deity. But the very exaltation and
intensity and ideality of the passion which moved her for him,
rendered all the coarse suggestions and conclusions of this woman
of fashion most intolerable to her, most cruel, and most degrad-
OTHMAR.
355
ing. Because she would have followed him to any fate with joy
and with devotion, therefore was she most tortured, most out-
raged, by the supposition that she could regard him as the
means to riches and to fame. Nothing on earth suffers so in-
tensely as a loyal and l'ofty passion, which sees itself classed with
venal and avaricious lusts.
Perhaps even he himself might suspect her of some such vile
hopes as these !
She leaned against the wall, sick at heart in her utter soli-
tude, her lips white, her brow red with dusky colour, her
breathing slow and loud, her limbs cold. The white dogs
watched her with wistful eyes as they had once watched her
little boat go away over the moonlit sea. The morning crept
onward, the pale sunbeams strayed across the floor, amorous
pigeons cooed in their little homes under the eaves, distant
voices of labourers, calling one to another, came through the
stillness; there was the sound of the strokes of an axe in the
copse.
She was conscious of nothing.
An hour and more passed uncounted by her, when the step
of Rosselin, still so firm and so light, mounted rapidly the
wooden stairs and his voice called gaily to her before he had
reached the door of her chamber.
' My child, where are you 1 I have great news for you. You
had no expectation of a visit from me to-day. I have great
news for you, my dear ; it would not brook delays ; the Fates
have sent us the very chance we wanted, there is always a dea
Fortuna for genius, the very stars fight in their courses for
it '
His gay and excited voice dropped suddenly, for his eyes
caught sight of her leaning against the wall of the room, where
she had stood during the last words spoken by Blanche de'Tiaon.
She turned her head and looked at him, but without much re-
cognition in the look, her face was suffused with dark colour,
she had an expression in her eyes, stunned, disgusted, bewildered,
and yet one of intense anger.
' Who has been with you 1' said Rosselin, abruptly. ' What
have they done to you 1'
She did not repiy.
Rosselin repeated his question impatiently.
' Have you not trust enough in me to speak ? You look as
if you had seen ghosts. Good God! what has happened to you 1
Child, cannot you answer me 1'
'There is nothing to say,' she replied slowly. Not for the
universe could she have repeated what she had heard.
'Nothing to say ! and you have lost faith in me in a night!
I left you as usual yesterday. Youhavebeen graver, shyer,
stiller of late it is true, but you have never been like this. I
a A 2
356
OTHMAR.
came to tell you Of a great chance. There may he no more gocU
for the vulgar, for aught I know, but there is a divine providence
still for genius ! Mdlle. Reichenberg is ill from cold ; she was
to play in the great theatricals at Amyot. Louis Loswa, who
directs them as he always does, has just sent to me to suggest
that you should take her place in two scenes from the 44 Misan-
thrope." He says that Othmar suggested it; that he wishes
his wife to see you there. You are letter perfect, I say, in the
part of Celimene, you have recited it £o many times with me.
True you have never played on any stage, but I am not afraid
of you if you will be courageous, if you will speak as you speak
when we are alone. Child, you have genius. What is the use
of having it if you are dumb as the stocks and stones 1 Why do
you look so ? What has happened to you since I left you 1'
Damaris stared at him with dilated eyes.
4 Amyot!' she repeated.
4 Yes, Amyot,' said Rosselin angrily. 4 The great country
house of Othmar. It is what I always most desired. It will be
the finest debut you can have, and will, perhaps, stay evil
tongues. You have said that you would be dumb if you stood
before her, but that pusillanimity is wholly unworthy of you.
What is she to you ! A woman who once predicted fame for
you. Show her that she predicted aright. You can succeed if
you choose. Succeed then, to do honour to me and justice to
yourself '
She did not reply.
4 Cannot you trust me to know what is best for you ?' said
Rosselin, still with anger and upbraiding. 41 have arranged
everything. You will go down to Beaugency to-night with me;
rest one day, rehearse twice or thrice there, and on the next
play the part at Amyot. It will be perfectly easy. You are
neither weak nor nervous, though you are impressionable and
take strange loves and hatreds. All is arranged ; I have your
costumes ordered ; the people who will act with you are all my
friends, and will aid you in every way. God in heaven! What
can you hesitate for? What can you want? At your age had
I had such an opportunity to take my place at a bound on
the highest steps of French art I should have gone mad with
joy !'
Damaris was silent. Her face was in shadow and he could
not see its expression.
4 Does he wish it, you say ?' she asked in a low voice.
'Othmar? Yes, I believe so. He gave his permission for
such a presentation of you to his wife months ago ; he will be
present, and he will certainly be glad to see your triumph. He
knows well that there is no other life possible for you. You
cannot go back to the life you left; you will not be content
with the paths of obscurity; you have touched the enchanted
OTHMAR.
357
cup and you must go on to drink of it, whether you will or no.
There are a score of reasons, which it is not necessary to detail,
why it is much to be desired that you should be seen first at
Amyot, beyond all other places. I think you should trust me.
I am not likely to mislead you after having passed so many
months in striving to develop the talents Nature has given you.
Your natural gifts are great; if you do not throw them away in
_a passion of mistaken feelings or of childish despair you may
live to reign in France as a woman of genius can reign in no
other country in the world. You make me angry to see you
so—Othmar's wife ! What is Othmar's wife to you that you
should fret your soul for her ? What matter to you, child, are
your own gifts, your own future, your own victory ? Love Art
and follow it. It will be more faithful to you than any lover
that lives !'
She still did not reply.
He grew impatient and indignant with her. He had the
conviction which is so sincere in a great artist, that all passions,
affections, joys, woes and desires, loves and hatreds, were of no
weight whatever put in the scale with Art and with renown.
He had given up his whole existence to Art, and now that he
was old his devotion to it had remained in him whilst he had
forgotten the force and the despair of the affectiohs and of the
passions when they govern the early years of life.
It seemed to him intolerable, [incredible, that the mere
weight and sway of Othmar's memory should stand for a moment
in the same scale with her as her destiny in the world, her
place in fame. As a youth he himself had swept away all the
flowers of feeling whenever they had threatened to choke the
growing laurel of his genius : why could she not do the same 1
Was it because she was weak with the weakness of women 1
After love there is nothing so cruel as the tyrannies of art,
and Rosselin was art incarnated. Moreover he believed in the
magnetism and vivifying force of unexpected events and of
sudden emotions. They were a portion of those drastic and
searching medicines with which he thought an imperfectly de-
veloped genius needs treatment. Once he had wished and
wished sincerely that Damaris Berarde should remain in the
cool and shady paths of private life ; but he had long ceased to
wish it ; he was impatient for the world to crown the novitiate
on which he had bestowed so much care and labour.
The thought of the fetes at Amyot captivated and stimulated
his own imagination. They seemed to him the occasion she
most needed ; a very frame of Renaissance carvings, in which
the portrait of Celimene as portrayed by Damaris would show
in its finest colours and its finest lines. He dreaded for her the
coarse and ugly trivialities of a theatre with its throng of actors,
its imperious direction, its hired applause, its niggard criticisms ;
358
OTHMAR.
he feared that she would feel in it like a hind caught in the
toils, would rebel against it all and flee. But at Amyot it would
be pure art which would claim her, refined praise which would
salute her, an atmosphere of delicacy, of culture, of magnificence
which would be about her. If such a scene and such a stimulant
would not arouse all the soul slumbering in her, then he thought
that he would be ready to confess : ' I mistake; she has no
genius ; let her go and till the earth and reap its fruits ; of the
fruits of art she shall have none.'
If she failed in such an air with such an opportunity, he
thought that he could be as cruel to her as Garcia was to Mali-
bran when her Desdemona was too timid and too tame.
' ' I want you to be seen at Amyot,' he said once more, with
irritation at being forced to explain. ' Othmar's friendship for
you is only an injury unless you have his wife's countenance too.
You can feel for her what aversion you will, but you must be
seen by the world in her presence : then she can do you no
harm. You are too ignorant and too young to see the perils in
your path, but I see them. I will save you from them if you
will be guided by me. If you are afraid to act, if you are un-
willing to be with the others, they must find some other sub-
stitute for Reichenberg; there are many eager enough to replace
her; and you yourself shall only say some legend in verse,
some monologue, some simple poem, the "R6volte des Fleurs"
or the "Vase et l'Oiseau anything will do; you will be
heard, you will be seen, you will be known to have recited on.
the stage at Amyot; it will suffice.'
He did not add that he expected so much from the charm of
her voice and from the beauty of her face that the slightest
cause which should afford a reason for her being seen by the
great world would, in his anticipations, suffice to give her a
place in its admiration, and rank in its realms of Art.
'Come,' he said imperiously, 'there is little time to lose.
We must reach Beaugency to-morrow in the forenoon'. All the
rest are already there. You must rehearse with them thrice at
the least, for you have none of the habits of the stage, though I
think they will come to you easily ; I have taught you all there
really is to know. Come: why do you stand like that ? Have you
been moon-struck or sun-struck since I saw you the day before
yesterday ? You have an opportunity given you for which you
should go on your knees with thanksgiving, and you look as
though you were doomed to your death ! Oh, child, what did
I tell you the other day ? If the hate of this woman be in your
soul, let it spur you on to great efforts, let it move you to high
.endeavours, let it force her to own that you are dowered by
nature with what she has not. Hate is an ignoble thing, and I
do not think it the parent of noble actions, but if you cannot
cast it out of your breast, compel it to inspire vou noblv. You
OTHMAR.
359
have wished for the world's applause, for the solace of art, for
the joys of moving the minds of multitudes: all these may
become yours, if you choose. But not if you consume your soul
in vain passions.'
The face of Damaris grew duskily red. She knew his
meaning.
' I cannot play at Amy6t,' she said slowly. ' Do not ask me,
I cannot. I should disgrace you. My tongue would cleave to
my mouth. You would curse me.'
'Great God !' cried Rosselin, furious and amazed. 'Be-
cause that one woman has such terror for you ?'
' .Not that,' said Damaris.
She was mute some moments, the blue veins swelled in her
throat, a mist of tears gathered hastily in her eyes.
' I was starving and he fed me, I was friendless and he be-
friended me. He shall not think that I look on his kindness as
a mere stairway to climb by to fame and the ways of the world.
His wife and his friends shall not say that I am made by his
gold and sustained by his influence; a mere thing of selfish,
covetous, ambitious, mercenary greed—like so many, many
women—so they say. I did not understand ; now I have
thought—and I do understand. You are angry and I must
seem thankless. But I will never go upon the stage—never—
never—never—because his wife and his world, and perhaps his
own thoughts, would always tell him that all I cared for was the
help he could give me, the reflection his wealth could cast on
me. I never saw it like that before, but now that I have seen
it so, once, I cannot go back into blindness.'
The tears rolled slowly from her eyes down the burning
crimson of her cheeks; her voice was lost in one great sob.
Rosselin seized her arm with a violent gesture.
' Who has been with you ?' he said, fiercely. ' Who has
dared to spit on you the venom of the world's lying mouth ?'
' I have thought it out all myself. Before I did not know,'
she answered briefly, and more than that he could not force
from her.
She could not have told him the temptations and the sug-
gestions made by Blanche de Laon to save her life. All their
shamefulness had burnt into her very soul, as vitriol burns the
flesh.
He stayed with her till night had fallen, and urged, implored,
commanded, persuaded, entreated her, with all the might of
that golden speech of which he was master. But it was all in
vain. The rocks of her own island were not more deeply rooted
in their deep-sea bed, than was her immovable purpose— never
to try and force her way into the world's publicity.
' Do you mean to say,' he asked, with incredulity and despair,
' that you give up all idea of a dramatic career ?'
360
OTHMAR.
She made a sign of assent.
* You cannot know what you do,' he cried in amazement and
indignation. 'You have gifts which are not given to many.
Do you mean to say that you will let all these lie and rust
because of some sentimental fancy which has rooted itself
against all reason in your mind 'I Your objections are absurd.
They are the morbid, exaggerated feelings of a child who has
lived too much alone, and knows nothing of the world except
what books can tell. What has Othmar to do with it either
way ? If it be a sacrifice made for him he will not care* for it.
He has been kind to you ; he is kind to half a million people ;
but your future is nothing to him, except as he wishes you well,
assuredly he wishes you well, and the more success and happi-
ness you gain the less remorse will he feel that he and his broke
up your life in the south. Oh, my child, my dear, be wise
while it is time. The world is all before you, do not take
a false step on its very threshold. The gods are seldom bene-
volent; if we refuse the good that they would do us, they leave
us alone ever afterwards. They will never return to ingrates.'
She was silent ; but by the look upon her face he saw that
he had not altered her resolve.
' I seem to speak harshly no doubt,' he pursued, ' for you
cannot see in my heart, and for the first time since I have known
you, you refuse to believe in my judgment. I tell you that
your idea is absurd, that Othmar will never attribute to you
the motives you fancy; he is too wise and too generous, and no
one could look at you, child, and think of you an ignoble thing.
You may be a great artist if you choose. If you are not that,
you will be of all creatures the most wretched, for you will live
against all the instincts of your nature, against all the bend of
your mind. What made you, when you read your poets on
your island, dream of a life wholly unknown to you, if not the
forces of genius which made you dissatisfied where you were,
and cried to you " Go." Fate has been kind to you : it has set
open the door ; it has left you free. If you are thankless and
refuse what it offers, you will deserve to perish in misery.'
She was still quite silent.
' But what will become of you ?' he cried in his amazement
and his grief. ' Child, you are so young, you cannot pass all
your life living down all the vital powers that are in you.
Genius struggles like a child in the womb to force its way out
to light. You cannot go against your nature. What will you
do 1 What will you do 1 We have made you for ever unfit for
the existence to which you were born. If you do not go and
sit where Fame beckons you now, you will stay out in the cold,
friendless and homeless for life. Have I not told you so
before 1 There is nothing on earth so wretched as the genius
OTHMAR.
361
which is born to speak, yet fettered by circumstance, stands
dumb.'
She heard, but she remained unmoved. She was but a
child, and she had a great hopeless passion shut in her heart,
and the vileness of the world had touched her like the saliva of
an unclean beast, and what could the fame which such a world
could give seem ever worth to her? All the youth and the
warmth, and the awaking senses and the wasted tenderness in
her all yearned for gentler, simpler, tenderer things, than the
glittering corselet of fame and the noisy applause of a crowd.
Itosselin was so used to being all alone himself so many a year,
that he could not measure the loneliness of a girl who has no
mother to weep with her, no sister to laugh with her, no lover
to kiss the dewy roses of her lips. He forgot that when he
spoke to her of fame and of art, all her young life called out in
her, ' Ah—where is love ? *
He stayed until late in the evening, bringing to bear on her
all the arguments and all the persuasions of which his fertile
memory and eloquent tongue could arm him ; but he failed to
pierce the secret of the change in her, and he abandoned in
despair the effort to form her steps to Amyot. He left her in
anger and in reproach in the soft vapours of a sweet night of
early spring, fragrant with the scent of opening fruit blossoms
and of violets growing under the low dark clouds of rain. He
was alarmed, afraid, and full of impotent anger and of unsatis-
fied wonder.
' Who has been with her ? What has she heard ?' he asked
himself in vain, as he walked through the cold shadowy sweet-
scented fields. His own heart was heavy with anxiety and dis-
appointment. She was the last ambition of his life. For her
his own youth, his own genius had seemed to live afresh, and
ally themselves with the awaking forces of a coming time.
What some men feel in their children's promise he felt in
hers.
He recognised in her the existence of great gifts, of uncom-
mon powers, which would move the minds and the hearts of
nations. That such things should be wrecked because the mere
common useless sorrow of a human lov«e held her soul captive
and made her mouth dumb, seemed to the great artist the
the cruellest irony of fate, the crowning anomaly of all gods'
grim jests.
Was Love ever, he thought bitterly, any better thing than
the satire of success, the curse of genius, the ruin of imaging,-
tion and of art ?
362
OTHMAR.
CHAPTER L.
Damaris remained unmoved by the departure of her old friend
—almost unconscious of it. His "words had drifted by her ear,
bringing little meaning, and no conviction. He spoke as an
artist, as a man, as experience and the world suggested to him;
but his arguments could avail nothing against the instincts of
her own heart and the horror which the charges and the offer
of Blanche de Laon had left upon the ignorance and innocence
of her mind. What would have been as nothing to one who
had dwelt, in the world, to which evil is familiar and disgrace
immaterial if of profit, was of an overwhelming disgust and
terror to a child whose brain was nu tured on the high un-
worldly chivalries of the great poets, and who had dwelt in a
solitude of imaginative meditation amongst the solitudes of
nature, amongst the simple and noble lessons of 1 the world as
it is God's.'
She passed the whole day in a kind of trance. She ate
nothing ; she drank water thirstily. She scarcely replied to the
questions of the woman of the house. The night went by,
bringing her no sleep, no dreams ; she was in that kind of agony
which nothing except youth, in all its exaggeration, its magnifi-
cent follies, and its pathetic ignorance, can suffer. At daybreak
she went out with her companions, the dogs, and roamed half
unconsciously and quite aimlessly over the pastures which in the
days of Port Royal had been trodden by so many restless feet,
along the margin of the little stream which had heard the sigh
of so many a world-wearied heart.
The morning was clear and cold and very still. Far away
where Paris lay there was a dusky, heavy cloud. By noon her
mind was made up.
A great and heroic impulse came upon her, born out of the
innocence of her soul and the infinitude of her gratitude.
With its instinct of self-negation and noble efforts moving
impetuously in her as the warm sap moves in the young vines,1
she took no time to reflect, sought no word of counsel. She
covered herself in her great red-lined cloak, and took her well-
known way once more across the pastures, bidding the woman of
the house keep the dogs within.
The movement of walking, the coolness of the wind, the
scent of air full of all the promise of the spring, renewed the
health and youth in her, gave her courage and exaltation and
force. Her dual nature, with its homely rustic strength and its
patrician pride, its peasant's stubbornness and its poet's illu-
sions, moved her by dual motives, dual instincts, on the path
OTHMAR.
363
she took. To do something for him, however slight, to try and
move for him that only soul which had the power to please his
own, to prove that she was not vile or mean or basely counting
on personal gains or personal glories—this seemed the only thing
that life had left her to do.
All her innocent ambitions were dead ; the career of which
she had dreamed with delight now seemed to her only loath-
some. Rosselin had said aright : she was half a child and half
a poet, and with the rude primitive faiths of a peasant she had
the unworldly and unreal imaginations of a student of imagina-
tive things. All the stubbornness and the simplicity of rustic
life, and all the idealisation and unwisdom of a romantic mind
were blended in her ; and to both of these the accusations and
the invitations of Blanche de Laon seemed as hideous as crime.
The world could hold no laurels and no treasures she would ever
care for now. Were she to reach fame what would the world
think % Only that, as that woman had said, she had loved him
and had used him to make of him a ladder of gold to a throne of
power.
He himself, even, would think so.
He himself might come one day to believe her sorrows and
her hunger, her sickness and her loneliness, all parts of some
mere drama studied and played to touch his pity and to win his
aid.
The thought was sickening to her : sooner than let such sus-
picion lie on her, she felt that she would seek death as Yseulte
de Valogne had sought it. They would believe then, she
thought.
She walked on over the fields, past the grazing sheep, and
along the stream where Pascal had mused and Racine dreamed ;
and with the rapid resolute movements of a mind strung up to
some great action and committed to some course accepted past
recall, she reached the station of Trappes and took her way to
Paris.
She had gone on that road so many a time with Rosselin
that it seemed to her she could have gone blindfolded along it.
She sat motionless and unconscious of anything around her
as the train went on to Paris ; her clothes were dark, her face
was covered. She reached the Boulevard Montparnasse and
mingled unnoticed with the crowd, though twice or thrice men
looked after her, attracted by the supple elastic freedom of her
walk, which had in it all the ease and vigour of movement which
had come to her in those happy days of childhood when she had
raced over the sands with the goats, and leaped from rock to
rock, and sprung into the waves with headlong joyous greeting
of the sea as her best comrade.
She remained an open-air creature, a daughter of the winds
and the waters, of the sun and the dew ; and all the exigencies
364
OTHMAR.
of life in the streets and the constraint of movement in a city
could not take from her that liberty of movement, as of the
circling sea-gull, as of the cloud-born swallow.
She took her way straight to the house of Othmar, to the
house which had sheltered her in her sickness and need. Many
times as she had been in Paris she had never seen its portals
since she had been carried through them to go to Les Hameaux.
It stood before her now in the sunshine ; the vast pile behind its
gates and rails of gilded bronze, which Stefan Othmar had
purchased in the days of Louis Philippe from a great noblev
compromised and exiled for the Duchesse de Berri. The Suisse
in his gorgeous uniform was standing in the grand entrance;
liveried servants were going to and fro, through the archways of
the courtyard there was a glimpse of the green gardens and the
shining fountains. The sight of it all gave her a strange sense of
her own utter distance from him.
She remembered how she had said to him, 'Is this house
hers ?' and how he had answered, ' Surely, my dear, what is
mine is hers,' and of how then she had longed to rise and go out,
homeless and friendless as she was, and die in the streets rather
than stay under that roof. Standing there now, a lonely, dusty,
obscure figure before that lordly palace, she suddenly realised
how utterly apart she was from him, how eternally she would be
nothing in his life. She had been sheltered there for a few
weeks in charity, that was all. He was the whole world to her,
but she was no more than a passing compassion to him. All the
pomp and pageantry and power of his material existence op-
pressed her, symbolised as it was in this great palace, with its
hurrying servants, its liveried guards, its waiting equipages, its
stately gardens : whilst the knowledge she had of the thwarted
affections, and emptiness of heart, and vain desires, which
haunted him, master of so much though he was, filled her with
an agony of longing to be able to give him that simple herb of
sweet content which will so rarely blossom in the gardens of the
great, in the orchid houses of the rich man.
She stood in the sunlight which shone and glittered on the
gilded gates, a dark and lonely figure so motionless and still
that the concierge spoke to her roughly, bidding her not stand
so near. At that moment through the gateways there came the
Russian equipage of the mistress of the house ; the three black
horses were rearing and plunging, their silver chains glistening,
their bells chiming; amongst the cushions of the carriage
Nadine reclined. Her face was very pale, her expression very
cold ; she was about to pay her ceremonious visit of welcome to
the Princess Lobow Gregorievna.
Full of the purpose which had driven her thither, and not
wholly conscious of what she did, Hamaris stretched her hands
OTHMAR.
363
out atid caught at the sable skins of the carriage rUg as the
wheels passed her.
' Wait—wait!' she cried stupidly. The horses dashed onward;
Nadine threw her a silver piece, seeing only a supplicant figure
between her and the light.
One of the men in the gateways picked Up the coin and
tendered it to her. She repulsed it with a gesture.
4 When can one see her ?' she asked in a low tone.
The servant stared. ' See her ? Why never, unless you know
her and she sends for you;' then, being good-natured, he
added, 'what is it for?—all petitions go to the secretaries.'
' I want nothing of her,' said Damaris. ' I want to speak to
her.'
' Then you will wait for a century,' said the young man, and
looking at her he thought, ' I think it is the girl who was here
last summer. I heard that they had made an actress of her, and
that Othmar kept her somewhere out Versailles way. What can
she be doing on the streets ?'
Then, being of a mischievous humour, and deeming that it
would be good sport to bring about any scene which would be
disagreeable or embarrassing to the master whose bread he ate
and whose livery he wore, the fellow added, as if in simple good
nature, ' you could get speech with either of them more readily
at Amyot: they go down there in a day or two for Easter;
they have some royal people.'
Damaris did not answer him ; she turned away with one long
look at the house which had sheltered her in her homelessness
and misery. Was the master of it there, she wondered ? She
did not ask. She did not dare. After what Blanche de Laon
had said to her, she shrank from the thought of meeting his
eyes.
She went wearily from the gates as she had come to them ;
her purpose was baffled, but not beaten. The vague impulse
which had taken her there, had been only strengthened by
momentary defeat; the momentary vision of his wife's face had
made her the more passionately long to clear herself from dis-
grace in those cold eyes. She remembered a garden-door in the
garden wall opening out into a bye-street: when she had been
carried out under the trees in her convalescence, she had seen
gardeners go to and fro through it, and dogs run in and out
when it stood ajar ; she turned away into the quietude of this
little side street, and walked beneath the garden wall until she
came to the little entrance which had been a postern-gate in
older Paris days. It was standing open as she had so often
seen it, the gay branches of budding lilac and laburnum showing
through it. She passed in unseen, and waited under the shadow
of the boughs.
The gardens were as still as though they were the gardens
366
OTHMAR.
of Amy6t; the peacocks swept with stately measured tread
across the lawns, the fountains were rising and falling under
the deep green shade of groves of yew and alleys of cedar. It
was three in the afternoon, the shadows were long, the silence
was complete. She sat down on a rustic bench, and waited;
for what she scarcely knew. But the purpose in her was too
deeply rooted in her heart to let her go thence with its errand
undone.
She could see the marble terrace, and the rose-coloured
awnings of the western front of the great hotel, she could see
the banks of flowers which glowed against its steps, the white
statues which rose out of the evergreen foliage around them;
the massive pile of the building itself was, from the garden-side,
almost hidden in trees.
She saw two young children come out gaily, and laughing,
their shining hair floating behind them in the light, they
mounted two small ponies and rode away with their attendants
beside them, out of the great garden gates. She watched them
with a strange suffering at her heart.
They were the children of the woman whom he had loved
so much.
She remained hidden in the little ivy-grown hut, watching
the house. No one came near her ; only some birds flew near
and pecked at the ivy-berries. When several hours had gone
by, she heard the carriage roll into the courtyard ; she imagined
that the mistress of the house had returned. Long suspense,
long fasting, for she had taken scarcely any food since very
early in the previous day, the exaltation of a purpose romantic
to folly, but unselfish to sublimity, all these had made her
nerves strung to high tension, her mind little capable of separ-
ating the wise from the unwise, the possible from the impossible^
in the strange act which she meditated.
But oftentimes, in moments of irresponsible excitement, the
will can accomplish what in calm moments of reflection would
seem utterly beyond its powers.
She waited yet awhile longer, till the gardens grew dark,
then without hesitation she crossed the lawn, and ascended the
terrace steps. To the servants waiting there she said simply :
' I come to see the Countess Othmar. Say that I am here—
Damaris B^rarde.'
The men hesitated ; but some amongst them recognised her,
and were moved by the instinct to do mischief with impunity,
which is so characteristic of their class.
' It is the girl from Chevreuse, the girl who was here last
summer,' said one idle lounger to another, then they laughed
a little together in low tones ; and she heard one say, ' It is a
pity Othmar is still at Ferrieres !'
Then one of them indolently showed her a staircase
OTHMAR.
3&7
4 Go up there,' he said to her. 4 My lady's apartments are
to the right. You will find her women.'
The man added in a whisper to one of his fellows : 4 She
came in through the gardens, we can swear that we never saw
her enter if any mischief come of it;' and they watched her
with languid curiosity as her dark figure passed up the lighted
staircase, with its blue velvet carpets, its bronze caryatides, its
great Japanese vases filled with azaleas, its arched recesses filled
with palms and statues.
Presently she came to a wide landing place, where corridors
branched off from side to side ; it was lighted also, and here
also its masses of blossom, its green fronds of ferns and palms
were beautiful against the white marble and the blue hangings
of the walls.
A servant was walking up and down awaiting orders. To
him she said the same words : 4 I come to see the Countess
Othmar. Tell her I am here. I am Damaris Berarde.'
CHAPTER LI.
She whom she sought was alone in her apartments within.
She was resting, after her drive, in her bed-chamber, which
was lighted by silver lamps, and of which the furniture was all
of ivory and silver, with hangings of white plush embroidered
with spring flowers in silks of their natural colours. The bed
in its alcove was watched over by the angel of sleep ; a statue
in silver, modelled by modern artists from a design of Canova's.
"White lilac and white jessamine filled large silver bowls of
Indian artificers' work. The portrait of her children in the
rose gardens of Amyot, painted by Caband, stood on an easel
draped with some cloth of silver of the fifteenth century. The
floor was covered with white bearskins. It was a temple dedi-
cated to rest and dreams ; but it had given her neither of late.
She was restless, disquieted, ill at ease, and dissatisfied with
herself.
She had the same pale rose satin gown on her; in another
hour she would dress again for a dinner at the Duchesse
d'Uzes' ; her hair was a little loosened, her face was weary, she
had a knot of hothouse roses at her bosom ; her women were
asking instructions as to what jewels she would wear. Her old
sense of the dulness of life was strong upon her ; was it worth
while to go on with it, all these days so alike, all these dress-
ings and undressings, all these amusements which so seldom
were amusements—tant de frais pour si peu de chose 1
In ten years'—twelve years'—time she would bring out her
$68
OTHMAR.
daughter aiid marry her, probably to some prince or aiiother—
and afterwards 1—well, afterwards it would be the same thing,
always the same thing ; what else could it be ? She would not
be able, like Lubow Gregorievna, to solace herself for lost loves
with church images.
She was tired, the day had dragged, she had been unable
to put off from her the sense of loss and of bitterness which had
come to her for the first time in all her life. She had not seen
her husband since the hour, three days before, when he had
left her, insulted beyond words, outraged, and stung to the
quick by the dishonour of her contemptuous disbelief.
In a day or two more there would be the fetes for Easter at
Amy6t; royal guests were bidden to them ; he would of neces-
sity appear and play his part in his own house ; he and she
would meet with the world around them. Was not this the
supreme use of the world?—to cover discord, to compel dis-
simulation, to efface the traces of feud, to bring in its train
those obligations of surface-courtesies and outward amities
which restrain all violent expression of emotion ?
One of her women with hesitation approached her, and with
apology ventured to say that some one was waiting who en-
treated to see her ; a young girl, Damaris Berarde. Was she
to be permitted to come in ? or should she be dismissed ?
' Damaris Berarde !' she repeated with amazement.
The women were astonished to see that this plebeian name,
unknown to them, had an effect on their mistress for which they
were wholly unprepared.
' To see me !' she echoed, ' to see me!'
She half rose from her reclining attitude, and a look of ex-
treme surprise was on her face, which so seldom showed any
strong expression of any kind.
' To see me !' she echoed aloud.
So might Cleopatra have Said the words if the Nubian slave
from the market-place had approached the purple of her bed and
Anthony's.
Her first impulse was to give the instant refusal for which
her women looked ; but her next was to wait, to hesitate : per-
haps to consent; the strangeness of such a visit outweighed with
her its insolence and intrusion. She disliked all things which were
sensational, emotional, romantic, ridiculous ; and yet the more
uncommon circumstances, the more singular situations of life,
had always an attraction for her. Curiosity to penetrate the
motive of it, and to see with her own eyes this creature whom
she despised, was stronger with her than her haughty amaze at
such a request, whilst the morbid love of analysis and of pene-
trating to the depths of all emotions, and of playing on them,
which is common to the century, and in her reached its extreme*
indulgence and development, impelled her to allow the entrance
OTHMAR.
369
of Damaris into her presence, that she might see the issue of a
situation of which the peculiarity allured her.
' If she come to assassinate me, it will at least be a new
sensation,' she thought, with her habitual irony.
The women felt afraid : they never dared to name any
visitants to her whom they had not previously been directed to
•receive ; they awaited her commands in apprehension.
' Can he have sent her ?' she wondered ; then she rejected
the supposition. He was too well-bred for that. What, then,
could bring this girl to her 1
Her first impulse was to have her thrust out shamefully by
her household, the next was that intellectual inquisitiveness
which was the strongest characteristic of her mind. Despised,
contemned, abhorred as this girl was by her, she yet felt a
strange desire to see and to examine what she believed possessed
the power to reign, if only for a passing season, over the thoughts
and the feelings of Othmar. She herself had no more doubt
that Damaris was her husband's mistress than she had that the
roses she wore in her breast were her own. But the disgust,
the offence, the aversion which she felt, in common with all
other women, before such a rivalry were overborne in her by
the psychological interest of the moment which it offered.
Always mindful to preserve her dignity before her inferiors,
she said to her chief woman-in- waiting :
' It is a young girl whom I knew at St. Pharamond ; yes, say
that she may come to me for ten minutes.'
The woman obeyed, and in a moment more Damaris stood
between the satin curtains of the doorway : a dark, tall, slender
figure, with the light shining on the dusky gold of her hair, the
changing painful colour of her cheeks.
The women, at a sign from their mistress, withdrew and closed
the door behind her. Othmar's wife made no gesture, said no
syllable which could help her. She remained seated afar off,
the intense light of the room reflected from the many mirrors in
their silver frames showing her delicate cold features, the pale
rose satin of her sweeping gown, her reclining attitude, languid,
haughty, motionless.
The girl trembled from head to foot.
But she advanced.
4 It is I, Damaris Bdrarde,' she said, in a low voice.
She paused in the centre of the room, bewildered by the
beauty of decoration which was around her, the intensity of
light, the hot-house-like warmth and fragrance, the merciless
gaze of the great lady who gazed at her from a distance unmoved
and chill as death. The heart of the child beat thickly with
terror and emotion :
4 Madame—Madame,' she stammered.
In her ignorance she had fancied that because she was
B B
37o OTHMAR.
received she would be welcomed, that because those doors had
unclosed to admit her, that behind them she might hope to find
a friend.
This silence, this coldness, this unspoken but all-eloquent
disdain made her feel herself the intruder and alien which she
was, there in the house of Othmar, in the presence of his wife.
Her very soul sank within her.
The cold contemptuous eyes of the woman whom she
dreaded swept over her with withering scorn.
' You have mistaken the apartments,' said Nad&ge, with her
cruellest intonation. ' Those of Count Othmar are on the other
side of the house.'
The intensity of emotion which possessed Damaris, the in-
tensity of resolve which was in her, the high-strung and over-
wrought feeling which had nerved her to her present act made
her deaf and callous to all that was implied in the words and to
the look with which her great rival repulsed her. She crossed
the room, and caught the shining satin folds of the gown in her
hands and hung on them.
'Let me speak to you once, only this once,' she cried. 'I
only came to Paris for that '
' What can you seek from me 1 Surely my husband gives
you all you want!'
All the icy disdain, the cruel irony, the scorn of her as of a
creature beneath contempt, passed over Damaris almost unfelt.
She had the intense self-absorption which a strong purpose and
a passionate generosity inspire.
'I came to Paris to see you,' she said boldly. 'I tried to
stop your carriage ; you thought I was beggar, you threw me
a coin ; I have come here because I hoped that I might speak
to you. Listen to me once, this once; then I will go away for ever.
Her hearer looked at her with less bitterness of scorn, with
a slowly awakening wonder. What was strange, unusual,
startling, had always a fascination for her; a position which
was intricate and unintelligible, a character which was mysterious
and for the hour unfathomable, always possessed for her an
attraction which nothing else could have. Had an assassin been
at her throat she would have stayed his hand only to ask his
motives. The supreme interest of the enigma of human life
with her surpassed all other more personal considerations.
Psychological analysis far outweighed with her all personal
emotions. What the young mistress of her husband could seek
her for, or want of her, seemed to her so odd that for the
moment the strangeness of the supplication outweighed her
pitiless scorn of the suppliant.
Her dignity would never have allowed her to cross the width
of a street to see this girl who had caused such division between
herself and Othmar; but the wish to see her had been strong in
OTHMAR.
371
her for some time. Her philosophic inquisitiveness before all
mysteries of human character, and her artistic appreciation of
all human beauty combined to make Damaris interesting to her
as a study, though hateful as a living creature.
'I will hear you,' she said, and drew her skirts from the
touch of Damaris, and seated herself with the coldness of a
sovereign who listens but does not forgive, of a judge who
examines but does not pardon.
' Great heaven, how handsome she is !' she thought with
involuntary admiration; and beneath her haughty calm and
scorn there burned the fires of a jealousy which scorned itself.
Was this the child whom she had brought over the sea ? The
peasant in blue serge and leather shoes whom she had seen
hidden from others in her drawing-rooms like a startled stray
sheep under a hedge ?
Damaris stood before her pale, infinitely troubled, passion-
ately pained, but so nerved with the force of her purpose that
she had lost all sense of fear and of hesitation. Her voice came
from her lips quick and low, and her hands were clasped to-
gether in earnestness as she spoke at length to this woman who
had been the terror of her dreams so long.
'I do not know what they have told you of me,' she said,
' but I am come here to tell you the truth. I think there are
those who believe that I am coarse, and selfish, and base, that
there are those who believe that he who saved me out of the
streets, and from death, only seems to me the mere means to
an end, and that end my own renown, my own riches, my own
gain. But that is not true. So little is it true that now that I
know they say it, the world shall never see me whilst I live.
You know, it was you yourself who first told me that I could
make the world care for me. You put that thought in my head
and my heart, and it worked and worked there, and left me no
peace. He tried to dissuade me, because he said that an obscure
life was best, but I would not believe. I wished to be great, I
wished to come before you some day, and to make you say,
"After all she has done well; after all she has genius "'
She paused, overcome by the rush of her own memories, by
the flood of thoughts she was longing to utter.
ISTadkge looked at her with her cruellest irony.
' Why do you come to tell me this 1 Be great if you like—
if you can ! You say quite truly : my husband can easily build
you a golden bridge to the temple of fame. But you can
scarcely expect me, I think, to come and crown you upon it!'
The chill, sarcastic scorn cut the soul of Damaris to the quick.
' Oh, my God, can you believe it too !' she cried, in an
agony of despair. ' Only because he took me in when I was
half-dead with hunger, as he would have taken home a starved
dog ! He has been good to me with the goodness of angels.
B B 2
37 2
OTHMAR.
There is a tale of a beggar whom a king befriended, and the
beggar cut the gold fringe from the king's robes in return ; do
you think me as vile as that beggar ? I know that my debt is
great to him, so great that I cannot pay it with my life ; but if
you can believe that I dream of taking of his gold—that I would
use him, or rob him, or ask his help for my own ambition '
NadSge looked at her with cold, impenetrable, unmerciful
eyes of unrelenting contempt and pitiless examination.
' I am still at a loss to know why you come to me. I am
not interested in the terms that you may have made with him.
Whether he give you a cottage at Chevreuse or an hotel in the
Champs Elysees, what does it matter to me % Do you wish for
my advice upon the architecture of either ?'
She spoke with her usual languor and irony unaltered, she
sat erect with the roses at her breast, and the pale rose of the
satin gown flowing to her feet: her eyes were cold and hard as,
jewels, the only trace of any anger, or of any feeling repressed
was in her lips, from which all colour had gone.
Why did she let an interview so hateful be prolonged?.
Why did she not summon her people, and have this stranger
thrust in ignominy from her chamber ? Why did she not send
for her husband and confront him with the truth he had
denied ? She did not know why she did none of these things,
unless it were that all exposure and publicity were hateful to
her, and also because the psychological interest of the instant
was strong enough to hold in suspense both her offended dignity
and her aroused passions. What brought this girl to her?
Until she knew that, she would not send her from her presence.
The simplicity and strength of the nature of Damaris, in
which single motives and undivided instincts reigned, mean-
while made the complexity and the variety of sentiments in this
cultured and satirical intelligence wholly incomprehensible to
her. That any woman could see matter for jest, for derision,
for amusement, in passions which bitterly offended and mortally
alienated her, was a contradiction which was utterly beyond her
comprehension. That the wife of Othmar, believing what she
evidently believed, might have struck her some mortal blow, or
bidden her servants scourge her from the house, she could have
understood ; but this complex mind, which could play with its
own pain, and dally with its own injuries, she could not follow.
She only felt that such a mind scorned her herself as something
too low to be believed, too poor to be quarrelled with, too far
beneath contempt to be even accepted as a foe.
'You think—you think—I do not know what it is you
think,' she said in a voice broken by great emotion. 'I have
done whatever he told me, he has told me nothing but good ;
he does not care for me—in—in in that way which you believe?
I am nothing to him. He loves you '
OTHMAR.
373
' I thank you for your assurance of it !'
The poor child in her ignorance had spoken the Very words
which could most fatally offend and arouse the dignity and the
passion of her hearer. To he assured of her husband's love by
the subject of her husband's illicit amours ! Even the ironical
patience and the contemptuous tolerance of her habitual temper
could not remain in silence under such an outrage to her posi-
tion and her dignity as this.
With a gesture as though .sweeping away some unclean
things, she motioned Damaris away.
' Leave my presence ; leave my house,' she said with an in-
tense rage, only controlled by pride still greater than itself.
4 How dare you come where I and my children dwell ? Go—go
at once, or I will disgrace you before my people.'
But Damaris, whose dread of her had been so great, did not
shrink or quail before her.
4 You cannot disgrace me for I have done no wrong,' she
said in desperation. 41 am nothing to him—nothing, nothing,
except a thing he pities. Why should you think that I am ?
Are not you far above me ? have not men loved you always and
died for you ? do not you know that he himself is sick of heart
because you care so little? You will not believe. Oh, God,
what shall I say to you ! Madame, it is for this only that I
came. I wanted to tell you that my heart will break if,
through me, any pain comes to him; you think things which
are not true, and which would offend him bitterly if he knew
them; and he has spoken to me of you as the only woman
whom he could ever care for. Why are you angered that I say
so ? He thinks that you do not care, he thinks that you are
weary of him, he thinks that he has no power to please you any
more. And I said to myself that perhaps you did not know
this, that perhaps you would care if you did know, that perhaps
you would put some warmth in his heart, give him some kinder
words. I say it ill, but this is what 1 want to say. He thinks
you do not care.'
Her hearer listened with the scornful rage of her soul held
in check for an instant by her own knowledge of the likeness in
the words thus spoken to the reproach, which Othmar himself
had cast against her. In her innermost soul she acknowledged,
that if Othmar loved this creature, he was not the mere sen-
sualist she had thought; she recognised the spirituality and the
nobility in the beauty and the youth of her disdained visitant j
she acknowledged that a man might well lose his wisdom and
break his faith for such a face as this ; and would have for his
madness some excuse of higher kind than would lie in the mere
temptation of the senses. The highest quality in her own
temperament had always been her candour in her acceptance of
truths which were unwelcome to her. This truth was loathsome
374
OTHMAR.
to her; but it was a truth, and she confessed it as such to her
own mind. Yet, even whilst she did so, it pierced the very
centre of her soul, and filled her with a new and intolerable pain.
Her insight into the minds of others also told her that this1
child's mind was honest, innocent, and candid, and though she
would not believe what her own penetration said, she could not
wholly resist its influence, she could not wholly continue to
doubt the good faith of the speaker, even whilst her anger re-
mained unabated at the daring and familiarity of such a scene
as this.
Damaris took the brief instant of silence for consent, and
sustained and nerved by the pure unselfishness of her romantio
purpose, she persevered in her supplication.
' Listen to me for one moment more. You are an aristocrat
and I am nothing ; I had only some little talent and that is dead
in me ; you will live beside him all the days of your life, and.I
shall never, perhaps, see his face again. Believe what I say as
though I were dying. You are all that he thinks of on earth,
and he is 'tired, and chilled, and empty of heart because you
have never cared for him as lie cared. I shall go where I shall
never trouble you, and if ever he think of me it will be only
with pity just for one passing moment. Will you remember
only this, that I have come to beg of you to make him happier,
to make his dreams true—it is only you who can do it. You
have his heart in your hands ; do not throw it against a stone
wall, cold and hard, as they throw a bird to kill it. You are a
great lady, and the world is with you, and you have many
lovers and courtiers, they say, but what will it profit you, all of
it, if one day he looks at you and you know that he thinks of
you no more because you, yourself, have killed his soul in him?'
'I am flattered that Count Othmar has made me the subject
of his discourse with you !'
Damaris perceived the fault she had committed, the offence
she had excited. Resolute to follow out the purpose which had
brought her there, she drained the cup of bitterness which she
had voluntarily taken up to the last drop.
' He hardly ever spoke of you,' she said. ' But I think he
wished me to know that all his thoughts and memories were
yours, so that I should not ever—ever—be misled to dream
that they were mine. I have seen him seldom ; very seldom ;
only once this year; but that once he did speak of you, and I
knew that all his life was in your hands, and that he thinks you
do not care '
The words were simple, and not wisely chosen, and spoken
out of the fulness of her heart, but they carried a sense of their
sincerity to the sceptical ear of their auditor. Almost for the
moment she believed that they were truth. A sense of com-
passion touched her.
OTHMAR.
375
This girl, so young, so ignorant, so hopelessly devoted to a
man who could be nothing to her, seemed to her childish, melo-
dramatic, plebeian, absurd ; and yet had a certain nobility and
force, and pathos, and mystery in her which stirred to pity this
heart which had never known pity. She had been only a
peasant, born and reared amongst the rude toilers of the sea and
of the soil; what fault was it of hers if she had given away her
life to the first man who had been kind to her, and in whom she
saw the charm of gentleness, the grace of culture ? The infinite
comprehension which she herself possessed of all the frailties
md all the errors of human nature, almost supplied in her the
place of sympathy. She did not pity because she disdained so
much ; but she understood, and that power of understanding
made her in a manner indulgent, though indulgent with con-
tempt.
But the memory of things which seemed to her damning
witnesses of fact rose to her thoughts, and checked as it arose
the softer and more intelligent impulse which for awhile had
held her passive.
She repulsed Damaris coldly, drawing once more her skirts
from her touch.
4 You are a good actress. Do not neglect your calling. Rise
and go. You have been too long maintained by Count Othmar
to be able to play the role, of disinterested innocence with any
chance of duping me. Why you come to me I cannot tell.
Perhaps he sent you, teaching you your part.'
Damaris rose to her feet, and her face grew scarlet with
honest shame and with indignant Wonder.
' I have never had anything of his except his kindness,' she
said passionately. 'I have never taken a coin from him any
more than I took yours in the street to-day. What he did for
me in my illness I know was charity—a debt I could never pay
—I said so. But what I have lived on has been my own,
always my own, what my grandfather left to me when he died.'
For the moment even her listener believed her ; her candid
luminous eyes flashing fire through their tears, her flushed in-
dignant face, her truthful voice, all bore their witness to her
innocence and ignorance, all told even the prejudice and arro-
gance of her judge, that whatever the facts might be she herself
believed the truth to be that which she said.
Mercy and generosity for a moment held the lips of Radine
silent; she was a child, she was a peasant, if she were the dupe
of her lover, was hers the fault % But that jealous scorn which
has no pity and no justice in it, swept over her soul afresh, and
extinguished in her all the finer charities and nobler compre-
hension of her mind.
'It is useless to tell me this,' she said with cold contempt.
(Whether you know it or not, your grandfather left you
376
OTHMAR.
nothing ; you are living, and you have lived, only on what my
husband has given you. Leave me, and try my patience no
more. Count Othmar's amours are nothing to me, but I do not
care to have a comedy made out of them to be played for some
unknown purpose on my credulity.'
Then she rang for her women.
Damaris said no other word, all the light and warmth had
gone out of her face, there had come on it a pallid horror of in-
credulous and stupefied doubt.
Silently and quite feebly, as if all strength were gone out
from her, she passed across the chamber, and felt her way
through the curtains of the door. On the entrance she turned
her head and looked back : her great eyes had the look in them
of a forest doe's when it is wounded unto death. She looked
back once, then went.
Nadine smiled bitterly.
' When she found that I knew all, she could say nothing !'
she thought. ' She will be an acquisition to the French stage.
Her melodrama was so well acted that almost it deceived me.
Why was it played 1'
She could not see the motive. For the first time in her
life the reasons for the actions which she watched escaped her.
And think as she would that the scene had been a melo-
drama, an invention, yet there were certain tones, certain
words in it which haunted her with a persistent sense of their
truth.
These had not been common entreaties, common reproaches,
which Damaris had addressed to her ; there had been an im-
personal generosity, a noble simplicity, in them which lifted
them out of the charge of sensational and dramatic affectation.
There was an enigma in them which she could not solve. They
were unselfish and founded on accurate knowledge ; they were
out of keeping in the mouth of a paid companion of a man's
passing amourettes. It seemed wholly impossible to her that
they could have been spoken truthfully, and yet if they were
not true there was no sense in them.
Some pang of self-consciousness moved her own heart as she
pondered on these passionate supplications to her to make the
life which was spent beside hers happier—' happier !'—that one
simple word which was so ill-fitted to the complex feelings, the
capricious demands, and the hypercritical exigencies of such
characters as theirs.
She had no doubt that her husband was the lover of this
girl; the denial of the one had moved her no more than the
denial of the other ; all her knowledge of human nature told
her that it must be so ; but as she sat in solitude a certain
remorse came to her, a certain sense that from her own unassail-
able height and dignity and rank she had stooped to strike a
OTHMAR.
37?
creature not only unworthy of her wrath, but unprotected by
youth, by ignorance, and by the quixotic temerity which had
made her thus bold.
She honoured courage. She could not refuse her respect to
the courage of this child.
She could not class her with the common souls of earth.
' Why did I not let her alone at the first ? She was so con-
tent and so safe on her island,' she thought, with that pang of
conscience which others had tried in vain to arouse in her.
It had been a caprice light as the freak which makes a
butterfly pause on one flower instead of another. But the fruits
of it were bitter to her.
When her women came she began her toilette for the dinner
at the Duchesse d'Uzes'. It was long, and nothing contented her.
From that dinner she went to various other houses ; she
returned to her own house late ; she heard that Othmar had
come back from Ferrieres and gone to his own apartments. The
following day they would be obliged to go to Amy6t. The great
party there could by no possibility be postponed ; royal people
were bidden to it. If such a gathering were broken up at the
last moment, for any less cause than death or illness, the whole
world would know that there was subject for separation and
dissension between her husband and herself. She would have
given ten years of her life to prevent the world ever knowing
that.
For the first time in her life, as her woman unrobed her and
took off her jewels, she was conscious that she had been unwise
in the management of fate. She had been desirous that the
world should see that her influence could even withstand and
outlast all those adversaries of time and custom and disillusion
which saw stealthily at the roots of every human happiness and
sympathy ; yet she had been so careless and so indifferent, that
she had allowed tlie very changes which she wished the world
never to see, to creep in upon her unawares.
It had never occurred to her that she had been as inconsistent
as one who wishing to preserve untouched a fragile vase of
crystal, should set it and leave it in a crowded street for anyone
to use or break who chose. She had not cared to keep her
crystal vase herself, and yet she was enraged that it was
broken.
CHAPTER LIT.
Damaris went out blindly, down the staircase and across the
vestibule and halls into the open air.
She had no knowledge of what she did ; the serving-men
looked at her and then at each other, and laughed, and whispered
378
OTHMAR.
some coarse things, but no one attempted to arrest her steps;
on the contrary, they put her right when she mistook her way
in the corridor, and almost shoved her into the street, where the
light of day was fading.
She was strongly made in body and in mind, and in all the
tumult of her thoughts, the sickness of her shame, she did not
grow faint, or forget her road, or fall upon the stones, over which
her feet were dragged so wearily.
She found the streets which led to the station of the West,
and sat down in the waiting-chamber, and heard the roar of
Paris go on round her like the roaring of wild beasts calling for
food : that those beasts had not devoured her was due to him ;
she did not reproach him or forget her debt to him, only she
wished that he had let her die that night upon the bridge.
The doors flew open, the bells rang, the crowds hastened;
without any conscious action on her part she was pushed with
the others to the wicket, paid the coins they asked her for, and
found her way to a seat in the crowded waggons.
The train moved. Soon the cold country air of evening
blowing through an open window revived her, and brought her
a clearer sense of where she was, of what had happened. She
saw always that cold, still, regal figure looking down on her with
such ineffable disdain; she heard always that chill, languid,
contemptuous voice, sweet as music, cruel as the knife which
severs the cord of life.
' She does not believe,' she muttered again and again. 4 She
will never believe.'
Those who were in the carriage with her heard the broken
stupid words said over and over again, while her great eyes
looked out, wide opened and startled, into the shadows of the
descending night.
One or two of them spoke roughly to her, being afraid of
her ; then she was silent, vaguely understanding that they
thought her strange and odd.
She leaned in a corner and shrank from their comments and
their gaze.
It was now quite dark ; the flickering lamplight seemed to
wane and oscillate before her eyes; she had not touched food or
water for many hours ; her throat was dry, her hands were hot,
her head felt light ; she had done all she could and had failed.
The only thing she had gained was a knowledge which seemed
to eat her very soul away with its shame and misery.
She was so young that she did not know that if she had
patience to live through this agony it would cease in time, and
grow less terrible to her with every year which should pass over
her head. She did not know the solace that comes with the
mere passage of the seasons ; to her the shame, the torture she
endured were eternal.
OTHMAR.
379
She had taken his money innocently, ignorantly indeed,
honestly believing it to be her own ; but she understood now
why to his wife she seemed only a wretched paid creature of
hazard ; she understood now why the Princess de Laon had
spoken to her as to one of whose avarice and whose vileness
there was no doubt.
To the haughty, frank innocent soul of the child it was such
unspeakable degradation that it seemed to stop the very pulses
of life in her.
She could have torn the clothes off her body because they
had been bought with this money she had ignorantly accepted
as her own.
Not for one moment did she do him the wrong that his wife
had done him ; she never doubted his motives, or thought that
any intention save that of the kindest and most chivalrous
compassion had been at the root of his generosity to her. Her
mind was too intrinsically noble, her instincts were too pure
and untainted by suspicion, for any baser supposition to attach
itself to him in her thoughts, even in the moment of her greatest
Buffering.
Only she wished—ah, God ! how she wished—that he had
left her to die on the bridge in that summer night.
Intense pride had always been existent beneath her ardent
and careless temperament; the stubborn self-will of the peasant
united to the finer, more impersonal, pride derived from a great
race. She had been always taught to suffice for herself, to repel
assistance as indignity, to hold herself the equal of all living
creatures; and now what was she?—only what Jean Be'rarde,
had he been living, would have driven out of his presence as a
beggar, only what all the labourers in the fields of the vale of
Chevreuse would have the right to hoot after as she passed
them. Her imagination distorted and her sensitiveness exagge-
rated all the debt she owed to Othmar ; to herself she seemed
nothing better than any one of those wretched paupers who
stretched their hands out to him as he passed. The shame of
it made all the devotion she bore to him seem a horror, a
disgrace, a thing cankered and corrupt, which he must despise
utterly if he knew aught of it. And what should he know ?
What should he care ? What could she be in his sight except a
friendless, lonely thing, whom he had saved from want, as he
might save any ragged, homeless, child who asked for a sou
from him in the streets.
She loved him with the passion of Juliet, of Francesca, of
Mignon, and she found herself so disgraced in her own sight
that nothing she could ever do, it seemed to her, would make
any utterance from her, even of gratitude, worth the breath
spent in speaking it. To him and to his wife she would be for
38o
OTHMAR.
ever, all their lives long, only a peasant who had not had
strength or courage to earn her own daily bread.
The cold scorn which had gazed at her from the eyes of his
wife seemed to pierce through and through the very core and
centre of her life. She had dreamed of being great in this
woman's sight, of compelling her admiration, her applause, even
her envy !—and all the while she had been nothing more than,
any dog which lived on the food thrown from their table.
The train went on through the descending darkness of the
night, and the scent of the wind blowing over grass-lands and
wheat-fields came to her in her trance, and filled her with a
strange dumb longing to be put away for ever in silence under
the cool and kindly earth, the budding leaves, the sprouting
corn. The aged hate the thought of death, and fear and shun
it; but for the young it has no terrors, and in their pain it
always beckons, with a smile, to them to rest in the arms of the
great Madre Natura. Death seemed to her the only stream
which could wash her soul white again from the indignity it
had, all unconsciously, accepted. A passion which was hopelegs
and cruel, and ashamed of its own force, burned up her young
heart like fire. Dead, only, it seemed to him that she might
keep some place in his compassion and his remembrance without
indignity.
She descended at the familiar road-side of Trappes, and
passed through the wicket, and took her way through the
country paths she knew so well. It was not yet a year since
they had first brought her there, and she had laughed with joy
to see the country sights and hear the country sounds once
more. Now they only hurt her with an intolerable pain.
The night was dark, and a fine s'ight rain was falling, but
she was not conscious of it. She found her way by instinct, as
a blind dog finds his ; it was long, and went over fields and
pastures, but she kept straight on unerringly, going home, why
she knew not, for she felt that she would never dwell there
another day : now that she knew.
Now that she knew, she could not have touched a coin of
that silver and gold which lay in her drawer in her room at Les
Hameaux ; she would not have eaten a crust of the bread which
had been purchased with it. She had no idea what she would
do ; she was alone once more, as utterly alone as she had been
when her solitary boat had been launched on the world of
waters, to reach a haven or to founder as it might. Her only
instinct was to go anywhere on the earth, or under the earth,
where the eyes of Othmar's wife could never find her in their
merciless scorn.
Everything had gone from her, all her dreams of a future,
all her love for art and for the poets, all her bright and buoyant
courage, all her innocent and idealised ambitions : they were
OTHMAR.
381
all gone for evermore ; she was alone without that companion-
ship of a fearless hope which had sustained her strength upon
the lonely seas, and in the hell of Paris. She had no hope now
of any kind ; and youth can no more live without it, than
flowers can live without the air of heaven. She was weakened
from fasting, and her brain Was giddy ; as she walked on over
the rough ground through the chill rain, she thought she
was on the island; she thought her grandfather was calling
to her not to loiter, she thought dead Catherine was stretching
out her arms to her, and crying, ' Hasten ! hasten !' She
smelt the odour of the orange flowers, she heard the sound
of the sea washing up amongst the pebbles and the sand—' if I
could only die there, if I could only die there,' she thought dully,
as she stumbled through the wet grass and the fields of colza.
Death would be so easy and so sweet, amongst the blue bright
rolling water, in the scented southerly air, under the broad
white moon of her own skies.
She came with a shock to a knowledge that she was entering
tlte village of Les Hameaux as a peasant driving furiously
shrieked to her to move out of his road, and in the cabins around
the lights twinkled as the people of the house sat at their suppers
of soup and bread. Burning tears rushed to her eyes and fell
down her cheeks. She knew that she would never see the
shores of Bonaventure again in life.
She went through the village with weary steps, she was very
tired, her wet clothes clung to her, her face was white and
drawn, her hands and her throat were hot. Some people lean-
ing against the doorposts of their houses looked at her, and
wondered to see her out so late, so wet, so jaded, and all alone.
She went through the hamlet without pausing and without
hearing any of the words called out to her.
Outside the village and on the road to the farm of the Croix
Blanche, there stood a lonely cottage, half hidden in elder trees
and built two centuries before with the stones and rubble of the
ruins of Port Royal. A woman whom she knew dwelt there
with four young children : a widow, very poor, making what
living she could from poultry and from fruit; a laborious,
patient, honest, and good soul, always at work in all weathers,
and happy because the four fair-haired laughing children
tumbled after her in the grass or in the dust.
As she passed down the road in the grey film of rain, this
woman ran out of the house to her, weeping piteously, and
catching at her clothes to make her stop.
' My Pierrot is dying !' she cried to her. ' Ho has the ball
in his throat—he will be dead by dawn—for the love of God
send some one to me. I am all alone.'
Damaris pausing, looked at her stupidly. Indistinctly
roused from her own stupor, she was unconscious for the
382
OTHMAR.
moment where she was or who spoke to her. The light through
the open doorway streamed out into the road ; she saw the wild
eyes, the tearful cheeks, the dishevelled hair of the wretched
mother; she understood by instinct what woe had come upon
the house. Pierrot was the youngest and the prettiest of the
four little children who lived huddled together, and happy under
these elder trees like small unfledged birds in a nest.
' Do not come in, do not come near him,' cried the wo'man,
4 oh, my dear, it would be death ; but send some one who is
old and will not mind ; the old never take this sickness—and
I have been all alone till I am mad. My pretty baby—the
prettiest, the youngest!'
Damaris looked at her with dull, blind eyes. A strange
sense of fatality came on her ; here was death—not death in the
clear blue water which would never more smite her limbs with
its joyous blows, and rock her in the cradle of its waves ; but
death which would end all things, which would put her away to
rest under the green earth, which would purify her from greed
and from baseness in his sight. She turned and entered through
the doorway of the house.
' I am not afraid,' she said to the woman. 41 will stay wit*1
Pierrot.'
The woman strove to draw her back, but she would not be
dissuaded from her choice.
' If God will it, I shall die,' she thought; 4 and if I die, then
perhaps she will believe, and he remember me.'
CHAPTER LHI.
The great Easter fetes at Amyot were successful with all that
brilliancy of decoration and novelty of wit for which their
mistress was famous to all Europe. The weather was mild, the
guests were harmonious, the princes and their consorts were
well amused; nothing more agreeable or more original had
been known in the entertainments of the time; and the choicest
and rarest forms of art were brought there to lend the dignity
of scholarship to the graces and frivolities of pleasure.
No one noticed that the host and hostess of Amyot never
once spoke a word to each other throughout this week of cere-
mony and festivity, except such phrases as their reception of
and courtesy to others compelled them to exchange. No one
observed or suspected the bitter estrangement between them,
so well did each play their parts in this pageantry and comedy
of society. No one except Blanche de Laon, who thought with
contentment: 4 qa marche!'
Othmar had not seen his wife for one ijioment alone since
OTHMAR.
3«3
the day when he had left hej? with the bitterness of her in-
credulity and her insult like ashes in his soul.
The world with its demands, its subjugations, and its per-
petual audience, was always there.
Que de fois fermente et gronde,
Sous un air de froid nonchaloir,
Un souriant desespoir
Sous la mascarade du monde 1
He knew not whether he most loathed, or was most grateful
to, this constant crowd and pressure of society which spared
him thought, postponed decision, gave him no leisure to look
into his own soul, and sent him to his joyless couch more tired
out with the fatigue of so-called pleasure than the labourer in
the vineyards or the forests by his day of toil.
The six days passed without any cloud upon their splendour
or their gaiety, so far as the three hundred guests gathered
there could see, or even dreamed. The sunshine of the early
spring was poured on the glittering roofs, the stately terraces,
the towers and fanes, the gardens and the waters, of this
gracious place where the old French life of other days seemed
to revive with all its wit, its elegance, and its good manners,
as they had been before the shadow of the guillotine fell over a
darkened land. With the eighth day the royal guests and most
of the others took their leave. Some score of friends more
intimate alone remained there.
A certain dread came upon him of the first hour on which
he should find himself alone before his wife. He felt that it
was the supreme crisis of his life with her; the frail cup of
existence in which their happiness, such as it was, was placed,
was set in the furnace of doubt to be graven and proved, or to
be wrecked and burst into a thousand pieces.
'If only she would say to me that she believed me,' he
thought, 'I would, I think, forgive the rest.'
But this she never said.
Man-like, the very indignity he had suffered, the very sense
he had of her cruelty, her insolence, her injustice, seemed only
to re-awaken in him that passion for her which had so deeply
coloured and absorbed his nature. The very knowledge that
legally and in name he was her master, her possessor, whilst in
fact he could not touch a hair of her head or move a chord of
her heart, sufficed to re-arouse in him all those desires which
die of facility and familiarity, and acquire the strength of giants
on denial.
He had almost forgotten Damaris. The gentle and com-
passionate tenderness he felt for her could have no place beside
the bitter-sweet passion which filled his memory and his soul
for his wife.
In these days, when he was constantly in her presence, con-
384
OTHMAR.
stantly within the sound of her voice, and compelled by the
conventionalities of society to address conventional phrases to
her, whilst yet severed by the world from her as much as if a
river of fire were between them, something of that delirious
love which he had felt for her in the lifetime of Napraxine re-
turned to him, united to a passion of regret and a poignancy, of
wrath which was almost hatred. He was her husband—her
lord by all the fictions of men's laws—and he would not be per-
mitted to touch one of the pearls about her throat or obtain five
minutes' audience of her ! She was the mother of his children,
and yet she was as far aloof from him as though she were some
Phidian statue with jewelled eyes and breasts of ivory !
Whilst he went amongst his guests outwardly calm and
coldly courteous, fulfilling all the duties of a host, his heart
was in a tumult of indignation and despair. . The failure of his
whole life was before him. Without her the whole of the
world was valueless to him.
Yet of one thing he was resolved. He would not live under
the same roof with a woman who believed him guilty of a lie to
her, who insulted him as he would not have insulted the com-
monest of his servants. He would sever his existence from
hers, let it cost him what it would. The cost would be great:
to bring the world as a witness of their disunion ; to admit to
society that his marriage had been a failure, like so many
others ; to let his children, as they grew older, know that their
parents were strangers and enemies : all this would be more
bitter than death itself to him. All the reserve and the delicacy
of his temper made the idea of the world's comments on his
quarrel with his wife intolerable to him, and the rupture of his
ties to her unendurably painful in its inevitable publicity. He
was lover enough still to shrink from the thought of any future
in which he would cease to hear her voice, to see her face.
True, of late their union had been but nominal. She had passed
her life in separate interests and separate pleasures. She had
allowed him to see no more of her than her merest acquaintances
saw, and to meet her only in the crowds of that great world
which separates what it unites. Yet absolute severance from her
—such severance as would be inevitable if once their existences
were led apart—was a thing without hope, would make him
more powerless to touch her hand, to approach her presence,
than any stranger who had access to her house. Once separated,
her pride and his would keep them asunder till the grave. He
knew that, and all the remembered passion which had been at
once the strongest and the weakest thing in him shrank from
the vision of his lonely future.
Yet all the manhood in him told him that to continue to live
under the same roof with a woman whose every word was insult
to him, would degrade him utterly and for ever in his eyes and
OTHMAR. 38c
in her own. And he had loved her too passionately for it to be
possible for him to continue to dwell in that passive enmity,
that alienation covered with ostensible cordiality and external
courtesy, with which so many men and women deceive society
to the end of their lives, and sustain a hollow truce, of which
the hatefulness and the untruth are only visible to themselves
•and to their children. Such insincerity, such hypocrisy, as this,
were to him altogether impossible. Sooner than lead such a life,
he felt that he would end his days with his own hand, and leave
mankind to blame him as they would: they would not blame her.
On her part, unknown to him, she watched him with a new
interest, bitter, painful, and more absorbing than any which
had ever had power upon her; a feeling of disdain, of scorn, of
impatience, of regret, of forgiveness, of tenderness, all inextric-
■ably mingled in an emotion stronger than any she had known.
When she thought of him as in any way with however much
indifference as the lover of Da maris, she was conscious of an
intense disgust, of a wondering scorn, which were not wise or
■cold, or temperate with the judicial severity of her usual judg-
■aments, but were merely and strongly human, and born of
human emotions. They humiliated her with the consciousness
of their own humanity, and the uncontrollable bitterness of the
sentiments which they aroused on her. Jealousy it could have
scarce been called. For jealousy implies a recognition of
-equality, a fear of usurpation, and these to her haughty soul
were impossible in face of a peasant girl, a declassee, a waif and
-stray, with no place in the world save such as Othmar might
■choose to give her. Jealousy in this sense, jealousy intellectual
;and moral it was not; but jealousy physical it was. She thought
and hated to think of the personal beauty of Damaris; she thought
And hated to think of all those summer hours in her own house
•in which that beauty had been helpless and dependent before
him. Like all women who know much of the natures of men,
she knew that the senses were often beyond control, when the
heart in no way went with them. She had always thought that
it would never matter to her whither such undisci; ■lined vagaries
■might lead him. She had always felt with the disdain of a
nature over which physical desires have little power, that
wherever his caprice took him there he might go for aught
-that she would say to restrain hira.
She was startled to find that it did pain her, that it did rfevolt
her, to believe that this disloyalty had been done her, that this
■child had had from him even the slightest, most soulless kind of
love.
Her world had never seen her more full of wit, and grace, and
brilliancy, than in those days when in her inmost soul she
suffered more mental pain and doubt than she had ever known,
life had become touched with humiliation, indignation, emotion
c o
386
OTHMAR.
of a complex kind, contemptuous auger, and a vague remorse ,
but it had thereby become to her once more a thing of interest
and of vitality, her languor had been startled, her self-love
shocked, her whole nature stirred. She gave no sign of it that
any one, either foe or friend, could read, but she was conscious
that these emotions which she had ridiculed in others could
become the dominant forces and tyrannical preoccupation even
of her own thoughts and life.*
A sensation of failure, of loss, of humiliation, was always
with her ; not so much for this fact of what she believed to be
his infidelity, as for her own consciousness that she herself had
been untrue to all the theories and philosophies of her existence,,
that she had failed to guide their lives into that calm haven of
friendship and mutual comprehension which had always seemed
to her the only possibly decent grave for a dead passion ; and
had failed also in this crisis of their fates to preserve that
wisdom, patience, and composure, which can alone lend dignity
to the woman who sees her power passed away. '
All her life long she had woven the most ingenious and
elaborate theories as to the failure of men and women to secure
fidelity and peace ; she had reasoned with perfect philosophy on
the causes of that failure, and turned to ridicule that childish-
passion and that fretful inaptitude with which the great majority
meet those inevitable changes of the affections and the character
which time brings to all. But now, she herself, having been
met with such changes, had done no better, and been no wiser
than they all. She had suffered like them, she had made
reproaches like them, she had allowed indignation and offence to
hasten her into anger which could only gratify her enemies-
and all the gaping world.
' Any fool could have done what I have done !' she thought,
with bitter impatience against herself : any fool could have
reproached him, and denounced him, and placed him in such a
position that out of sheer manliness he had no choice left but to
reiterate the untruth once told, and go on in the path once taken.
Yet she knew that were it to be done again, again she would
do the same. When she thought of him as the lover of this
child, she'was only conscious of the mere foolish, irrational,
personal, bitterness of emotion which any other feebler woman,
would have felt.
Had she not said under the oaktrees yonder in her Court of
Love, that inconstancy, being only involuntary, should be
blamed by none : had she not again and again said and thought
that what a woman or a lover cannot keep, they well deserve ta
lose : had she not quoted from the poets and the philosophers of
a thousand years, to prove by a thousand lines of wisdom that
it is 4 not under our control to love or not to love :' and was
this not most supreme truth?
Why then in face of the first faithlessness which she had
OTHMAR.
387
ever known, had she had no better or wiser impulse in her than
that of anger?—such stupid, witless, unwise anger, as Jeanne in
the kitchens would feel against Jeannot in the stables. What
use were the most subtle intellect, the most delicate and pene-
trating perception, the most intimate and accurate knowledge of
human nature, if all these only resulted in producing, under
trial, such primitive instincts, and such simple emotions, as
would exist in the untutored brain and the rude breast of any
peasant woman passing under the trees of the park yonder with
her herd of milch cows, or her flock of sheep ? If the higher
intelligence could not reach a nirvana of perfect tolerance, of
perfect comprehension, of perfect indifference, of what avail
were its culture and its pride ?
All men were inconstant; she knew that. It was not their
fault; they were made so. She believed that, had he told her
frankly of his frailties, she would have been perfectly indifferent
and indulgent to them. It was the long deception and conceal-
ment which had seemed to her so contemptible. ' Such a coward
—such a coward !' she thought bitterly. Cowardice was to her
the one unpardonable sin.
As she and Bethune walked on the seventh evening before
dinner through the outer gardens, where these joined the woods,
they chanced to see in the distance the same Lubin and Lisette,
whom they had seen as lovers two years before, and who had
been wedded with many gifts and much gaiety in the August
weather a week or two after the sitting of the Court of Love.
The man was walking far ahead this time ; the woman lagged
behind ; the cows were the same happy creatures, serene and
mild, going through the sun and shadow, pausing to crop a
mouthful of sweet grass between the beechen banks ; but the
lovers were only now a lout who whistled and smoked, a scold
who fumed and wept.
4 Let us ask how the idyl ends,' said the Lady of Amyot. 4 It
is easy to see that it is ended.'
4 Ah, Madame,' said th9 woman being interrogated, 4 voila
qu'il regarde deja la petite Flore !'
Her chatelaine laughed with a certain bitter tone in her
laughter.
4 44 Voila qu'il regarde dejct la petite Flore,"' she repeated •,
4 and she is so stupid that she knows no better than to be angry !'
Bethune glanced at her wistfully. After a moment's silence
he said in a low tone :
4 There are those who never look—elsewhere.'
She smiled, knowing his meaning, and touched by the
remembrance of his long constancy.
' Ah, my dear friend,' she said, with some pang of conscience,
41 have had too much affection given me in my life, and perhaps
I have given too little '
cc 2
388
OTHMAR.
As she walked back through the gardens, under the long
arcades covered with tea roses and the banksian creepers, she
thought with that ridicule of herself, as of others, which was
always sure to succeed any emotion :
4 Nous voild en plein melodrame I—the contrast of the hus-
band's infidelity makes the lover's fidelity touch the,hard heart
of the deserted wife ! We are all grouped ready for the stage of
the Gymnase !'
She seemed absurd to herself in her anger and her humiliation.
She had always been so contemptuous of life when it grew melo-
dramatic, although so impatient of it while it remained dull.
Othmar watched her cross the gardens from where he stood
in one of the windows of his library. Under the excuse of many
letters to dictate to his secretaries, he had escaped* for awhile
from his guests.
It was near sunset, the light so clear and cool of earliest
spring was shining on the terraces and rose walks, and clipped
bay hedges of the garden to the south which had been left un-
altered from the Yalois time. The peacocks were moving up
and down on the grass, the first swallows were wheeling above
the glowing colour of the azalea thickets, a light breeze was
blowing the spray of the fountains this way and that; he
watched her as she came through the dewy green foliage and
under the white and yellow tea roses ; she wore a gown of white
velvet, she had a high ivory handled cane, there was a white grey*
hound before her, and the graceful figure of Bethune at her side.
He saw her gather one of the Marechal Niel roses above her
head, and fasten it in the bosom of her dress ; Bethune said
something to her ; she gathered another and let him take it.
Othmar watched them with a pang.
4 If I died to-morrow I suppose she would give him her hand
as she gives him that rose !' he thought, and the thought was
intolerable to him. 4 She thinks me faithless to her, and she
does not care ; she was angered for an instant; only that; then
her days pass on the same ; she has all her courtiers and friends
about her; she does not need me, or miss me amongst them.'
And he watched her with eyes which studied her incompar-
able grace, her divine languor, her indolent movements, as
though he saw them then for the first time ; so great a quickener
Df sleeping love is the sting of a jealous fear.
But his heart was very weary. She had wounded, insulted,
injured him, well nigh beyond forgiveness; she had dishonoured
him with the secret observation of his actions and the open
accusation of his falsehood, She had had him followed and
tracked like a criminal, and had refused to believe his word,
which all Europe honoured as the surety of unimpeached truth.
Greater insult surely no woman could do to any man.
And yet, if she would only say one word, he felt that he way,
ready to forget that she had done so ; he was ashanxed of his own
OTHMAR.
389
weakness, but he knew that he would forgive everything :—and
he reminded himself of his own offences to her without ex-
tenuation, willing to lind in blame of himself excuse for herself.
He watched her now as she came slowly and smiling under
the trellis of the roses : to look at her it seemed that she had
no care, no regret, no desire.
' And if I went out and shot myself to-night,' he thought, as
he watched the two figures pass on under the trellised roses, ' she
wouldhave called Bethune to console her before the yearwas out 1'
He believed it; but, man-like, the belief only gave her a
stronger dominion over him.
He thought of some verses which he had read not long
before, written by that poet who, more perfectly than any other,
mirrors the dissatisfaction, the wistfulness, the intricate emotions,
the unsatisfied passions of our time.
Que n'ai-je a te soumettre, ou bien & t'obeir ?
Je te vouerais ma force ou te la ferais craindre :
Esclave ou maitre, au moins je te pourrais contraindre
A me sentir ta chose, ou bien h me hair.
J'aurais un jour connu l'insolite plaisir,
D'allumer dans ton cceur des soifs ou d'en eteindre,
De t'etre necessaire ou terrible, et d'atteindre,
Bon gre, mal gre, le cceur jusque lit sans desir.
Esclave ou maitre, au moins j'entrerais dans ta vie,
Par mes soins captivde, h mon joug reservee,
Tu ne pourrais me fuir, ni me laisser partir.
Mais je meurs sous tes yeux, loin de ton etre intime,
Sans meme oser crier, car ce droit, du martyr,
Ta douceur impeccable en frustre ta victime.
For seven years lie had been always the nominal, sometimes
the actual, possessor of her life, and yet he had never once
known whether this woman whom he had possessed had ever
had one moment of what could be called love for him ! Many
women had loved him for whom he had felt nothing ; but by one
of those strange and melancholy ironies of which life is so full
the only women he had loved—the courtezan who had ruined
his boyhood, and his wife who had ruined his manhood—had
given themselves to him, without love.
He shut the window at which he stood, and turned away
with a bitter sigh :—without her life would be for ever valueless
to him.
Nadkge and her servitor, unconscious of his observation of
them, entered the house ; it was the moment when people
gathered in the conservatories for tea ; the most pleasant hour
of the twenty-four was spent thus amongst the flowers ; often
there was music in the music-room adjoining ; the children
usually came there with their pretty grace and gaiety, their long
loose hair, their bright costumes, looking like larger butterflies
under the fronds of the palms.
39°
OTHMAR.
As she went towards her own apartments to rest there a little
while before joining her gnests and friends in the orchid-houses,
one of her confidential servants brought her a note which
had been sent by hand from Beaugency, and was marked urgent.
She was about to send it unopened to her secretary, for letters
wearied her and she seldom read them herself unless their super-
scription told her that they were of some especial interest, when
she saw written in the corner of the envelope the name of
Rosselin. She knew that it was the name of the great artist who
had be§n the teacher of Damaris B^rarde.
She took the packet with her to her own rooms and once
alone there opened it. There were two letters inside it. One
was written in a feeble unformed hand, the words were ill-
shaped, and the lines were uneven. The fingers which had
traced them had never been very skilful in the management of
the pen, being more used to guide the tiller ropes of a boat, or
the handle of a scythe.
The characters were ill-writ and very pale, but she could
read them ; she knew even without reading them, that they came
from Damaris ; they were brief :
' When you get this, Madame, I shall not be living. Then I
think you will not be angered any more, and you will believe.
Do not let him know, because it would pain him. I mean, do
not let him learn that I sought this death myself. Perhaps it
was wrong, but I saw no other way ; I could not live any longer
on his charity now that I know. Before, I did not know. I
could not bear to live either without seeing him sometimes, and
I should never see him. Nothing wants me except the dogs,
and they will be happy on the farm here. My master would
only be disappointed in me if I lived. The world would not care
for me. I should not have any strength in me to make it care.
I used to think that I had genius, but it is all dead in*me, quite
dead now ;—perhaps it was only imagination, and the wish to be
something I was not, and the mere love I had of the poets.
Forgive me that I write to you ; I want to beg you to believe.
I would have given my life for him, but he never thought of me
in that way. I pray you to make him happier. I wish I could
have seen him once .'
The ill-written words ended abruptly, as though the pen
which had written them had suddenly fallen from a hand too
weak to hold it any more.
On an outside sheet was written in the fine clear writing of
Rosselin :
'She died last night as the moon rose. I write to you,
Madame, instead of to your husband by her desire. You will
tell him as much or as little as you choose. I had not seen her
for four days. God pardon me for it ! I shall never pardon
myself. I had left her in anger because I could not persuade her
to play before you at Amyot, and in anger I had staved away
OTHMAR.
391
from her. When they sent for me I found her already dying.
The woman of the house told me that she had been one day
alone to Paris, and what had been done to her there this woman
did not know, but on her return she was quite silent, and very
feverish and strange. She wandered about the village and the
fields, and would scarcely come into the house to bed. At one
of the cottages a young child she had often played with was
lying ill with diphtheria. Damaris remained day and night
with him, and when he was dying kissed him on the mouth :
she never confessed it to me, but I believe that she sought
death that way, for I think life for some reason or other which
I know not had become wholly intolerable to her. She suffered
very much. I brought her all the aid that science could give
her, but it was of no avail. She had no wish to live, I thank.
She talked often of her island, and of the sea, and of the boats.
Latterly she could not speak at all, then she wrote to you. It is a
hideous death : heaven spare you and yours the like. You feel
no sorrow for anything they say, but I think you would have
been sorry for her. Perhaps it is best so. The world would
have broken her heart; it has no place in it for such dreams as
hers were. To the last she bade me never to let your husband
know. Her last thought was of him. He was very good to her,
but a worse man would perhaps have injured her genius less. I
know not what passed between her and you. I only know that
she had seen you. "Whether you said anything which made her
despair of living I cannot tell; all she said when she became
delirious, which she did become towards the end, was only this
always : " She will believe now, she will believe now." So I
suppose you doubted her. I send you the few lines which she
wrote three hours before she died when she could scarcely see.
I have not read them myself. I think she would not wish me
to do so. I am over eighty years old ; it is hard to live so long
only to see the last thing that one loves perish miserably. But
she had genius, and the world hates it, so perhaps after all it is
best as it is.'
She put the letters down, one on another, and her face had
a great blankness of horror on it. Like Yseulte, this child had
died for him, through her.
She shuddered as with cold in the warm fragrant air of her
room, and large tears sprang into her eyes.
She could not doubt now.
She locked her doors, and no one entered there for an
hour.
CHAPTER LIV.
When that time had passed she descended the grand staircase
and joined her friends in the conservatories ; the tea rose3
392
OTHMAR.
renewed in the white velvet of her corsage, the great pearls
lying on her white soft breast. No one was aware of anything
changed in her manner or aspect. Twice or thrice she looked
nervously at the doors ; that was all; she was afraid of seeing
her husband enter.
When he came she looked away from him, and Blanche de
Laon, who was near her, saw a certain tremor on her lips, and
thought with victorious pleasure, though uncertain of the cause :
(7a vous blesse, hein ? (7a vous blesse ?
At the long dinner she was somewhat silent and absorbed,
but her world was used to her caprices, and knew that she was
seldom pleased long. Men endeavoured all the more to amuse
her. They thought that they succeeded. They did not know
that instead of the brilliant room, the faces of her friends, the
flowers and fruits of the table, and the frescoes of the walls, she
only saw a little low dark chamber with a girl dying miserably
in it, like a strangled dog, as the moon rose.
She had never believed in sacrifice or in remorse, or if
forced to believe in them she had said with disdain, 'What
melodrama !' But she believed now.
Shame and remorse approached the delicate hauteur of her
life and touched it for the first time. What she had thought so
low had humbled her.
The dinner seemed very long to her, the evening slow to
pass ; the burden of the world can be at times as heavy as the
travail of the poor; there were the usual pastimes, and wit,
and gaiety ; Paul of Lemberg was there, and the ineffable
sweetness of his music thrilled through the flower-scented air ;
people laughed low, and played high, and made love in shadowy
corners ; it was all pretty, and graceful, and amusing. But
she, amidst it all, only heard a voice which cried to her :
4 Why will you not believe 1'
She only saw a grave made in dark wet earth, and a girl's
body thrust into it in cruel haste, and sods thrown in one on an-
other on the lifeless limbs, the dull hair, the disfigured throat;
it was horrible—horrible ! Why had she not left her alone in
the gay sunshine, under the orange trees, by the blue water 1
With all the pressure and the distraction of society upon her
she was endlessly pursued by the self-accusation which had been
brought to her by those simple lines traced by a dying child.
A consciousness of the supreme good fortune with which
fate had always lightened her own life, came to her, for the
first time, with a sense of unworthiness and ingratitude in her-
self. A consciousness of the greatness of the gifts she had
received, and of the little she had given in return, smote her
heart with a vague repentance and a vague fear. What had
she done ydth all those lives which had been put into her hands,
with all the loyalty and the devotion which had been spent on
her oftentimes, without receiving from her even a passing pity
OTHMAR.
393
In recognition of it? Would not life tire one day of blessing
her, when she gave no benediction in return 1
She had always cared so little, she had been always so in-
different and so dissatisfied. Would fate not strike her with a
rough, wild justice, if it took from her her children, her hus-
band, her intellect, her fortune, her beauty ? Would not
destiny be only fair and honest if it forced her on her knees
beside some death-bed of some creature well-beloved, and said
to her :—
' You have never been content in happiness ; henceforward
you shall dwell with sorrow.'
Fear touched her for the sole time in her victorious and
indifferent life ; she was afraid lest one day she should stand
alone with only the graves of what had been once dear to her
as her companions and her friends :. one day when youth and
power and beauty and wit would all be gone from her : like
the great sovereigns of the world, she shuddered to remember
that she was mortal.
With all her philosophy and epigram, she had discoursed
full many a time of the only cruel certainty life holds : the cer-
tainty that tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe. She had played
with the dread problems which Time, the merciless master of
the highest, sets before all his scholars with no solution to them
possible to the clearest brains. And whilst she had toyed with
their subtleties, this child had had the courage to cut the knot
and pass away for ever to the eternal night of nothingness !
Some perception of the utter selfishness of her whole exist-
ence smote her as she sat alone in the stillness of the after-
midnight hours.
These children dwarfed her in her own sight. They had
been mere children, both of them, foolish, romantic, unwise,
exaggerated : but they had been in a way sublime. And he
had loved neither of them. He had only loved her who had
left his heart empty, his affections cold, his life dissatisfied and
solitary.
For the first time since she had thought at all, a passionate
repentance and regret came on her ; a sense of her own cruelty
weighed heavily upon her. Why had she not been more
tolerant, more merciful, more willing to acknowledge that inno-
oence and generosity of which she had been so unwillingly con-
scious all the while that Damaris Berarde had stood before her ?
Why had she not been guided by that serenity and tolerance of
judgment on which she had so long prided herself ; why had
she crushed to the earth with the weight of her scorn, and her
rank, and her place as his wife, this lonely creature who had
loved him so humbly, so silently, so perfectly ?
There was a greatness in her own nature, obscured as it
was by the languors of self-love and the vanities of the world,
which forced her to recognise the greatness of the simple words
394
OTHMAR.
sent to her. She herself, in her anger, in her incredulity, in
her cruelty, seemed to her own eyes very poor beside them.
She had judged as the common herd always judged : coarsely,
superficially, brutally. No better.
She was humbled in her own eyes. The sentimentalists
had conquered throughout, they had been greater than she !
Poor Mignon, with her heart breaking in a love which she
dared not avow, which no one wanted !
A few kind words might have saved her; might have healed
the bruised child's heart and made it strong for the burden of
life ; and she had not spoken those words.
If she had read this story in a book of poems, if she had seen
it unfolded on the scene of a pastoral as of an opera, it would
have touched her; but as it had been in real life she had not
cared ; because the living, throbbing, aching nerves had been
alive before her she had not cared ; she had turned away, and
had left them to bleed to death as they would—a3 they might.
A sense of guilt was upon her. She felt as though she had
killed some humble, wounded animal which had crept to her
feet for safety. She had always declared that genius was sacred
to her; and now she had dealt with it as a mere common
noxious thing, and driven it away from her to perish.
'And we are such wretched shallow egotists/she thought.
' I grieve for her now, and I know that she has been greater
than I shall ever be, and I know that we have killed her—he
and I and the world which had no place for her ; and yet how
often shall I remember her, how often shall I be gentler to
others for her sake ?—once or twice, whilst the memory of her
is warm perhaps—no more ; one has no time.'
Rosselin would remember every hour of all such few days
as might remain to him on earth ; but no one else.
' Oh, foolish child,' she thought, 'to die for that! Why not
have lived, and reigned over the souls of men, and put a curb
on the slavering mouth of the fawning world! It is never
worth an hour of sacrifice.'
Yet all overwrought, unwise, useless, as such sacrifice was,
it had a nobility in it which awed her, and a generosity which
made her own egotism seem poor and pale beside it.
' Make him happier.'
The unselfish prayer of the dead girl touched her conscience
and her heart as no rebuke would ever have done. She had
the power to do so still; that she did not doubt. He was hers
in every way if she chose to stretch her hand out to him.
A sense of the infinite patience, and fidelity, and devotion
of the great love which he had always borne her from the first
hour his eyes had met hers came to her with the force of a
reproach from the grave itself. His submission to her caprices,
his constancy under her neglect, his instant response to the
faintest kindness from her, his unchangeable, tenderness which
OTHMAR.
39 t
outlived the many mortal wounds she dealt to it; all these came
to her memory with a sense of her own debt to them, of their
own sweetness and patience, and longsuffering. In him she
could if she chose find a friend, whom no fault of hers would
alienate, and no passing of time make weary. She had had
too much love given to her in her life ; she saw that she had
been too careless of this, the greatest gift life holds : and death
had come too often where she passed.
The chill of its ghastly presence seemed with her as she
moved through the silent house in the still small hours. This
child had had force in her youth to seek death, but she feared
it: she who had feared nothing on earth or in heaven.
When all the guests were gone to their chambers, and the
great house was still, she did what she had never once done in
the years of their marriage : she went to seek Othmar instead
of sending her women to summon him. She had on her pale
rose satin chamber-gown, and even in that moment, with an
- impulse of care for her person and its charms, a coquetry which
would never cease in her whilst she had breath, she paused a
moment before one of the mirrors, and glanced lingeringly at
her own reflection, and put some fresh roses in her bosom,
Had she been on her way to the scaffold she would have done
the same: had the same remembrance of her own power to
charm.
As she passed one of the great windows of the hall, she
looked at the night without. The moon, which rose late,
being on its decline, poured its whole light over the gardens and
the forests beyond. A whi e owl flew through the clear air; the
shadow of the great palace fell black over the silvered grass,
distant bells for daybreak prayer were ringing very far away
over the hushed country.
And the night before, ' as the moon rose,' Damaris B^rarde
had died in her narrow chamber, in all her beauty and strength,
in all the height of her dreams and hopes, in all the vigorous
promise of life which had been as full and as fair in her as was
now the promise of spring in the woods : and these were all
gone for ever and for ever, the body laid in the earth to perish,
and the tender and valiant soul passed away like a dew that
dries up before the heats of the noonday.
' Heaven spare such death to you and yours I'
She remembered the words with the first sense of terror her
nature had ever known. They seemed less like a prayer for
good than like a menace of evil. She thought of the fair lives
of her children : not fairer than had been this other young life
which she had first seen under the starry orange flowers above
the edge of the sea.
% Why could she not have left her alone 1
She passed through the length of the quiet building to hei
husband's rooms. He was writing at a writing-table with his
39$
OTHMAR.
back turned to her, and did not raise his head at the sound of
the unclosing door.
But as the sweet rose-scent came towards him on the air, a
consciousness of her presence came with it: he started violently
and rose to his feet. He was very pale as he bowed low before
her, then stood waiting for her to speak. She was silent some
moments.
To her temper so imperious, so arrogant, so indifferent, to
praise or blame, it was not without great effort that she could
gay what she had come to say.
A strong emotion moved her. She had never believed it
possible for her conscience to pain her, for her heart to ache
with self-reproach, as they did now.
' Make him happier.'
The childish words haunted her. After all, what had she
ever given him in return for the supreme devotion of his life 1
A few hours of physical ecstasy; and years of indifference,
mockery, and neglect.
' Make him happier.'
To her critical intelligence and satiated mind, happiness in
such simple reading of the word could not exist; it needed faith, it
needed ignorance, it needed youth ; it is never possible to those
whose passions demand what nothing mortal can satisfy. Yet
some reparation she knew she might still give to him ; some
gentleness, some sympathy, some response. These children
who had loved him so well should not have died wholly in
vain.
She leaned towards him, and the fragrance of the roses in
her breast swept with dreaniy sweetness over him.
'I came to ask your pardon,' she said in a low voice. ' I
wronged you, I insulted you '
He bowed low, and his lips, as they touched her hand, were
very cold.
' Pardon is no word between you and me,' he said wearily.
' How could you doubt me 1 Had I ever lied to you, or to
anyone 1'
' Ho : I was wrong.
Her proud mouth trembled.
* How much or how little shall I tell him 1' she thought;
* men are such children !'
He looked at her with hesitation ; and a great and sudden
joy touched his life.
' Do you love me at all, then 1' he said with wonder and
with doubt.
She smiled a little : her old slight mysterious smile !
' I suppose so—since I doubted you. Love is always blind !'
Spotliswoode & Co., Printers, New-street Square, London,
nobility of life.
" WHO BEST GAN S UFFEB, BEST CAN DO"-milton.
The Victorian Reign is unparalleled, in the History of Great Empires for its Purity,
Goodness, and Greatness!!
ABOVE ALL HI
A FEARLESS DEVOTION to DUTY and UNFLINCHING TRUTHFULNESS.
THE QUEEN'S PRIZE!
The Conditions laid down by the Queen for the
Prize given by Her Majesty to the Marine Boys
are these
Cheerful Submission to Superiors ; Self-
respect and Independence of Character;
Kindness and Protection to the Weal*;
Readiness to Forgive Offence; a Desire
to Conciliate the Differences of others;
and, above all, Fearless Devotion to Duty
and Unflinching Truthfulness.
"Such principles, if evoked and carried into
action, wouldproduce an almost perfect moral
character IN EVERY CONDITION OP LIFE."
—Smiles.
SHAKSPEARE AND DUTY.
" Come the corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Naught shall make
us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true."
THE PIVOT OF DUTY.
Sterling Honesty of Purpose; without it Life
is a Sham!
THE GREAT DANGER OF SUGAR, PINK
-1- or CHEMICALLY COLOURED SHERBET
or ACIDULATED SHERBET MASKED with
SUGAR.—Experience shows that sugar, pink or
chemically coloured sherbet, acidulated sherbet
masked with sugar, mild ales, port wine, dark
sherries, sweet champagne, liqueurs, and brandies,
are all very apt to disagree; while light white
wines, and gin or old whisky largely diluted with seltzer water, will be found the least objection-
able. ENO'S "FRUIT SALT' is peculiarly adapted for any constitutional weakness of the
liver. It possesses the power of reparation when digestion has been disturbed or lost, and places
the invalid on the right track to health.
EUROPE, ASIA, AFRICA, AMERICA, AUSTRALIA.
IMPORTANT TO ALL TRAVELLERS.
" Please send me half-a-dozen bottles of ENO'S ' FRUIT SALT.' I have tried ENO'S
' FRUIT SALT' in America, India, Egypt, and on the Continent, for almost every complaint,
fever included, with the most satisfactory results. I can strongly recommend it to all Travellers;
in fact, I am never without it.—Yours faithfully,
June 26, 1878. "AN ANGLO-INDIAN OFFICIAL."
ENO'S FRUIT SALT is particularly valuable.—No TRAVELLER should leave home
without a supply, for by its use the most dangerous forms of FEVERS, BLOOD POISONS,
&c., are prevr - A and cured. It is, in truth, a FAMILY MEDICINE CHEST in the simplest
yet most pot . >rm. Instead of being lowering to the system, this preparation is, in the highest
degree, invl ' lg. Its effect in relieving thirst, giving tone to the system, and aiding digestion,
is most strii.
HEADACHE AND DISORDERED STOMACH.—" After suffering for nearly two-
and-a-half years from severe headache and disordered stomach, and after trying almost
everything, and spending much money without finding any benefit, I was recommended by a
friend to try ENO S ' FRUIT SALT,' and before I had finished one bottle I found it doing me a
great deal of good, and now I am restored to my usual health; and others I know that have tried
it have not enjoyed such good health for years.—Yours most truly, Robert Humphreys, Post
Office, Barrasford."
QTIMULANTS AND INSUFFICIENT AMOUNT OF EXERCISE frequently
derange the Liver. ENO'S "FRUIT SALT" is peculiarly adapted for any constitutional
weakness of the Liver. A world of woes is avoided by those who keep and use ENO'S " FRUIT
SALT."—"All our customers for ENO'S 'FRUIT SALT' would not be without it upon any
consideration, they having received so much benefit from it.—Wood Bros., Chemists, Jersey."
CAUTION.—Examine each Bottle, and see the CAPSULE is marked ENO'S "FRUIT SALT."
Without it you have been imposed on by a worthless imitation. Of all Chemists.
Prepared only at ENO'S "FRUIT SALT" WORKS, Pomeroy Street, New Cross
Road, London, S.E., by J. C. ENO'S Patent.
June, 189O*
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