The death of Friedrich 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
millionfold to the horrors of every death, encompassed him all day long.
All that the old man had possessed he had bequeathed unconditionally to
his nephew, and there were many companions of his late pleasures who
clamoured incessantly to his heir for recognition 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 business 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 howdah 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 Friedrich Othmar, to take off his shoulders this mass of
affairs, of projects, of public demands, of state necessities supplied
or denied, of all the throngs of supplicants, of sycophants, of enemies
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 speculators in the folly or greed of mankind who call themselves
the princes of finance.
'Les délicats ne sont pas vêtus pour le voyage de la vie; ils n'ont pas
la botte grossière qui résiste aux cailloux et ne craint pas la fange.'
Othmar was a _délicat_, and most of the ambitions and all the prizes of
life seemed to him supremely vulgar. It was a temperament 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 Hôtel 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 inquisitiveness.
But she was silent from neither shame nor obstinacy; 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 well
enough to read, the volumes of drawings and engravings which amused
her feeble tired mind, the grapes, and the nectarines, 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 befriended; 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 the warm 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, 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.
'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.
'I will see her, certainly, in the forenoon to-morrow,' said Othmar,
moved by the request to a sudden sense of the strangeness and
responsibility of his own position towards her. What would Nadège see
in it? Something supremely ridiculous, no doubt. Something of the 'lac
et nacelle' school worthy of the romanticists of the year '30?
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: '_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 Aimée Desclée 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 compassion 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 never 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.
'_Quand l'amour est mort, il est bien mort_,' 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 resurrection 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 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 companions 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 anywhere. I cannot be like
the editor of a newspaper, who, whatever 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 châlets, 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 demi-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 so monotonous,
anyone with character enough to hate unchangeably 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 that he would be uncontrolled,
would drive the chariot of his fortunes in some such disastrous manner
as Phaeton, only not from Phaeton's ambition, but from contempt and
discontent. '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 Tsarkoë 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 Napraxine'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 conscience
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 temperament,
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, stimulated 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 impatience that this should be
soon. She liked his companionship--when he did not weary her by any
'madrigals,' or irritate her by any sentimental enthusiasms with which
she could feel 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
philosophic that to him it appeared indistinguishable from indifference.
More than once when he was on the point of taking up his pen and
writing to her of the circumstances which had brought her future
Desclée 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
boulevards, 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 Bérarde 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 delighted 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
Amyôt. Spoken love interested her so slightly that written love could
not possibly hope to charm her. People were tiresome 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 possibly be.
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 presence 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 desolated 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 reproduce 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.