In lieu of driving homeward to Paris that day, he turned his horses'
heads in the direction of Asnières, where a once famous artist, David
Rosselin, lived.
'I will ask Rosselin,' he thought. 'Rosselin can judge as I have no
power to do; and if he decide that she has genius she 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?
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 Asnières, and found the once great
impersonator of Alceste, of Tartuffe, of Sganarelle 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 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 New Year
morning.
Othmar, who was quickly wearied by men in general, appreciated 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 Asnières.
'No 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 so out of charity, out of pity, out of
complacency?'
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-préfet!'
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 rêves!_'
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 _empoigné_ 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 Français, when they had
spoken of fifteenth-century Virgils; and to him the thoughts of Othmar
had turned more than once 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 careless 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 Vernon had been!
Sara Vernon, who had now turned saint and dwelt in the odour of good
works on her estates in Franche-Comté: 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 compassion 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 Rosselin 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 Virgil could have tasted a
nectarine! There may be doubts about every other form of progress, but
there can be no manner of doubt that we have improved fruits since the
Georgics, and wines.'
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 book-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 commenting 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?'
'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 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 Desclée. 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 "O sire! je vais mourir" 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 _réplique_, 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--_j'en 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 altogether at the Conservatoire, and take a place behind a
counter. It is the prudent ones who do that: "_elles commencent où 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
Bérarde 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?'
'My dear friend, you 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; enormous 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 _dégringolade_, 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 anæmia or from consumption, or the still worse end,
which is a fifty-year-long obscurity: Sophie Arnould sweeping out her
garret with a two-sous broom! Ah bah! Marry Mlle. Bérarde to one of
your cashiers, and buy her a cottage at Neuilly.'
'Do you suppose Desclée or Rachel would have married a clerk, and lived
in a little house in the suburbs?' 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
Mlle. Bérarde 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 Bicêtre
or to a quiet cottage garden in our old age. _Allons donc!_ 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 absolute discretion concerning her. Will you
come into the house a moment? I picked up yesterday, at a bookstall, a
precious little _bouquin_; nothing less than a copy of the "Terentii
Com[oe]diæ" of 1552 by Roger Payne.'
Othmar went in and admired the _bouquin_, 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 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 distance, 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 l'arbre et l'écorce 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?'
'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 sorceress. Your protégée may become great only to die
like Desclée, 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.
'_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 l'avenir_.'