It was a warm and beautiful night a year later, in full midsummer in
Paris.
Othmar was alone there, being detained there by the illness of his
uncle, who had been 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 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 slumbering
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
Pécuchet." 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 Mme. Bovary, no
doubt, under its low red roof covered up with 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 _archimillionnaire_,' 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 appetites 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?
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 _poète manqué_. 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 _cité des pauvres_, and yet could write a ballad of the Seine
on a summer night, so that all the world should listen----'
It seemed to him that it would be infinitely more like happiness 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?
'And a second-rate singer,' thought Othmar. 'No, I would never have
been that. The world, as it is, is cursed and suffocated 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.
'What are you doing?' he asked the guardian of the streets. '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.
'Damaris Bérarde!' he exclaimed involuntarily. 'Good heavens! What has
happened to you? My poor child----'
'I 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 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 had 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?' asked the driver of the cab which approached.
'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 dispersed. 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 insensible, but her
heart beat, though slowly and faintly.
He looked at her with curiosity and compassion. It was certainly
she; the granddaughter of Jean Bérarde, the betrothed 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, they
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?
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, beside 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 of the broad leather couches. Then he took some cognac
from 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' 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!' 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,' he added, 'she was the boldest, brightest,
happiest of young girls; the only heiress of a rich old man.'
'Many things may happen in a year and a half,' 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 hers.'
'So is my house,' 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.'
Aloud he said that he placed himself wholly at the disposition of Count
Othmar. There was no immediate danger for 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 regarded 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?' 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, 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 window's 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 fulsomeness of mankind.