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.'
'I regret it if I spoke improperly,' replied Othmar. 'I was not
conscious that I did. You had made a promise, and I reminded you of it.
I was not aware there was any grave offence in that.'
'_C'est le ton qui fait la musique._ Your tone was offensive. You may
remember that I do not care to be reminded of anything 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
fleurettes_!'
'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. '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 be able to treat me as she did that poor humble
dead fool----' he thought with mortified impatience.
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 everything 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 tête_ 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 entêtée!_ If there were any two qualities wearisome
to others were they not those? 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 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_?' 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 aperçus très 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 Desclée
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 'Légendes des Siècles,' an
_édition de luxe_, illustrated by great artists, bound by Marius
Michel, illustrated by Hédouin, and published by Dentu, and in the
flyleaf of it she wrote, 'From Nadège 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 should you not
say honestly that the girl is very pretty, and that you like to look at
her! 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
Bérarde; but in a year's time Othmar did not forget that he had done so.
A few days later Loris Loswa was ushered into their presence; 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 nonchalance 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 Bonaventure; it will very soon see
as many picnics as the Ile 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 Bérarde 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 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 Bérarde
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 Bérarde 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, and the dogs howling. Such a scene!
such a scene! However, 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 Villefranche. 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 to conceal what she had done.'
'A caprice may cost something sometimes you see, Madame,' said Béthune
with a smile to his hostess.
'She may become a second Desclée yet,' said Nadine. '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 _idée 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 shipwright.'
'I really do not see why. Perhaps you mean your compliments or Paul's
music.'
'Paul's music, and other things. You showed her the world as
Mephistopheles showed Faust youth in a mirror.'
'Faust was, after all, Mephistopheles' debtor.'
'About that there may be two opinions.'
'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.'
'What heroic thing ever is?'
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 Nadège let her alone?' 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 childhood of Damaris lay
unseen.