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 Bérarde; 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 remembered 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. '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.
She had something of meridional heedlessness, and much of meridional
imagination, which made the fiction of her grandsire'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 Bérarde
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?'
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 cannot hear? I think not. Do you
remember that poem of Victor 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; 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 evening 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 want. Will you let
me place it out for you where it will bring you most? 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?' 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 grandfather should die I would go and find that world
for myself. And now----'
He waited some moments, but her sentence remained incomplete.
'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 in her voice.
'My dear child!' said Othmar, touched and a little embarrassed. '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 Lemberg, 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 summits which they aspire to reach, and fill the restless,
dissatisfied, tarnished ranks which are comprised in the all-expressive
word _déclassés_. 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 embarrassment 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? How could
I make them hear me?'
Othmar was silent.
Then he added almost cruelly, but cruelty seemed to him kindness:
'My wife forgot that she had heard you five minutes afterwards: so
perhaps would the world. And if so, what then?'
'At least I should have tried.'
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 interpretation; 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 of 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 Aimée Desclée. My wife likened
you to her.'
'Who was she?'
He told her, with the pathetic force of a profound sympathy; for poor
Frou-frou had been well known to him in her brief career, and all the
feverish yearning, the tumult of unsatisfied 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 Aimée Desclée
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 resembled that of genius.
Her imagination, which could console 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 nightingale
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 familiar association, and escaping from all
compelling forces of habit, could only exist where genius begat it?
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 génie_, 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 imitation;
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 Victor Hugo, '_Que de jeunes filles j'ai vues mourir!_'
Damaris Bérarde 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!