One evening in October Rosselin walked beside his pupil amongst the
fields of Les Hameaux. She had had her lesson in elocution in the
afternoon; a lesson in which he was inexorably hard to please, a very
tyrant over all the minutiæ of accent and of expression; and now in the
walks at sunset he had relaxed into all that benignity and bonhomie
which were most natural to him in the company of women and of children.
'I am afraid I do not please you,' she had said with some dejection.
'If you did not, my dear, do you think I would come thrice a week to
Chevreuse to train you?' he answered. 'It is because you have exceeding
natural talent, because you have uncommon gifts, a flexible and
beautiful voice, quick perceptions, and that intuitive comprehension
which is the innermost soul of art, that I deal with you harshly to
compel you to acquire all that artificial treatment of your own powers
which is absolutely indispensable to success. If I had not seen genius
in you it would not have been merely to please Othmar that I would have
told you to give yourself to art; I should have said to you, on the
contrary: "Go and marry a farmer of La Beauce, spin and sew, and wear a
silk gown on Sundays; have any number of children; be an ordinary woman
in a word."'
'Marry a farmer of La Beauce!'
She coloured with indignation. Was it not what Othmar himself had said
to her?
'It is not a life to be despised,' continued Rosselin. 'They live in
corn as the crickets do. You, who are so fond of country things, would
be happy enough if--if--you had never read Racine and Hugo, if you had
not that fermentation of the fancy in you which seethes and stirs and
smokes until out of it comes the wine of genius. The swallows cannot
stay in the fields as the linnets do. There is something in them that
makes them go when the hour is come. They do not know what it is; they
obey an imperious instinct. They cannot stay if they would. They go
blindly, and very often they drop down dead in mid-ocean, and never see
the rose fields of Persia or the magnolia woods of Hindostan, as they
meant to do; yet they go.'
Unknown to herself, a strong impulse moved her to prove to the wife
of Othmar that the _brin de génie_ was hers; a true bough of laurel,
not a spurious weed. The indifference and the oblivion of this, the
first great lady she had ever seen, still remained in her memory with
the sting of an affront which nothing could efface. The world was
represented to her eyes by that one delicate, smiling, negligent,
cruel critic, whom she passionately admired, whom she unconsciously
challenged. The child had no vanity, but she had great pride; the pride
of the aristocrat and the pride of the republican had been inherited by
her, each stubborn as the other. Her pride had been wounded, and her
ambition and her dreams excited. She knew that she might drop, like
the tired swallow that crosses the sea, into the deep abyss of failure
and oblivion; but, like the swallow, the instinct which moved her was
irresistible.
Rosselin saw that it was so, and he was too utterly an artist in every
fibre of his being to be able to prevail on himself to discourage her
wholly. He believed that she would become the glory of the French
stage; that very union of the strength of the peasant and the delicacy
of the patrician, which was so marked in her physically and mentally,
seemed to him to possess that rare originality which all those destined
to be great in any art are stamped with from their birth. He did not
admit to her how much he admired her, but when she recited to him at
one lesson those passages which had been set to her at a previous
one, he was secretly amazed at the justness of her reading of them,
the accuracy of her rendering, and he marvelled where in her simple
life, set between sea and sky as it had been, she had reached such
understanding of the greatest utterances of great minds.
'Yet what a fool I am to wonder,' he thought a moment later. 'As if it
were not always so with genius, or as if anything less than that ever
could be genius.'
But he took care not to utter that word often to her. All he ever
granted to her was that she might arrive at something, perhaps, if she
studied hard; if she were resolute and yet humble; if she accepted
all his corrections and instructions, and did her best to lose that
southern accent which would send all Paris into Homeric laughter if it
were ever heard upon any stage.
'It could only be permitted,' he added, 'if you were reciting Mireille.'
She did not know what he meant, but she listened to his pure and
exquisite pronunciation, and did her uttermost docilely to acquire it,
as to obey and execute all his teachings.
Then, when their lesson was over, not seldom he would unbend utterly,
and strolling with her through the meadows, or sitting beneath the
trelliswork of the porch with the rose leaves falling on his white
hair, he would tell her the most wonderful and enchanting of stories,
merely drawing all of them from the innumerable treasures of that
wonder-horn, his own manifold experiences. He said not a word that
would hurt her. All that would be learnt soon enough.
'_J'en ai vu tant!_' he would think often as he left the Croix Blanche
in the warm evenings. He had seen the world devour so many, like the
dragons that were fed on white flesh. But he fancied she would be one
of those who bind the dragon, like St. Marguerite, and make it follow
them slavishly.
She had strength in her, the strength of the old mountain race of
Bérarde. He knew nothing of those dead people who had ruled land
and sea in the dark ages, and perished finally under the axe on the
scaffold; but there were a vitality and a force in her which seemed to
him destined to conquer where weaker natures gave way and failed.
Provided only, he thought, provided only that she would have as many
passions as there were grains of sand on her own sea-shores, but
amongst them all no real love.
Passion is the most useful of teachers to any artist; that he knew; but
love is the destruction of all art. Mademoiselle Mars lived through a
blaze of glory; Adrienne Lecouvreur died in her youth. Rosselin did not
trouble himself about conventional morality. He took the world as he
had found it. He respected this child's supreme innocence, and would
not have sullied it by a breath; but, casting her horoscope, he would
have given her the heart of Rachel, not that of Desclée, if he had had
the power. It is better to be the tigress which preys than the hind
which bleeds.
He was no cynic; he only knew the world well, and well knew what the
world makes of women.
_On est broyé, ou on broie les autres._ There is no middle path for
those who once have left the cool secluded ways of privacy and joined
the crowd which pushes at the brazen gates of fame.
But still, to Rosselin, to have passed these gates seemed the
perfection of human triumph.
'What all who are not artists underrate,' he said to Damaris, as they
passed beside the round tower of the dovecote, 'is the artist's joy
in the mere power of expression. It is a mistake to suppose that it
is the _ignis fatuus_ of celebrity which allures the young poet, the
young musician, the young painter; that is very secondary with him.
What overmasters him is the longing for the opportunity of expression;
the _besoin de se faire sentir_, which is as powerful and imperious as
the _besoin d'aimer_. I first played in a barn to villagers; I had a
grand part, Robert Macaire; I was as perfectly happy as when I later on
played at the Français to emperors and their courtiers. It is the same
delight as the lark feels in singing, as the swan feels in swimming,
as the heron feels in slowly sailing through the air: the ecstasy in
the expansion of natural powers. But the majority of men know nothing
of that. The custom-house officer would not believe that Berlioz was
composing music as he sat on a rock above the sea. They laughed in his
face and said: "Where is your piano?" This is as far as the world goes;
it understands the piano, but not the music which is mute in the soul.'
He rested as he spoke on a stone of what had once been the great 'abbey
of the fields:' the fields were there unchanged, it was only the great
thinkers whose brains were dust.
'I had no such romantic cradle as you possessed in your island of
orange groves,' he continued. 'I was born in a little dusky, close,
noisome shop in a back street of Vierzon, that dreary town of our
dreary district of the Sologne. My grandfather had been born in that
shop before me. Everything in it was poverty-stricken, ugly, vulgar,
sordid; and vulgarity is so much worse than any ugliness, and sordid
small aims and hopes are so much worse than any poverty! Of course no
one need be ignoble in a shop, even in a shop where they sell tallow.
I suppose Garibaldi was not, but my people were. Well, in that little
stuffy plebeian den, only frequented by the lowest of the ironworkers
and the canal bargemen, beautiful fancies thronged on me and noble
visions haunted me, as they did you in your sea-girt orange thickets,
and I used to sit in my hideous attic and recite verse to the one star
which was all I could see through a chink in the wall, as you did, you
tell me, to the whole of the southern skies glowing above your balcony.
It was not fame that I wanted; I never thought of it; I longed to
hear my own voice in the glory of the words; I longed to leap up and
shout to all the sleeping town; I longed to cry out to the Immortals,
wherever they were, "I have understood you, I am not unworthy!" Ah,
those beautiful impersonal enthusiasms of youth! Fame! It is of nothing
so narrow or so selfish that we think!'
The tears rose to his eyes: half a century and more had rolled away
from him; he was a boy again, dreaming his dreams as he wandered over
the sandy wastes of the Sologne.
'Ah, my dear,' he said with a sigh, 'how miserable I thought I was in
that little ugly house, with the sluggish canal water slipping past its
walls, and the black-faced iron puddlers quarrelling over my father's
short weight! It stifled me; it cramped me; it killed me! so I thought.
But I got away from it, nevertheless. Pegasus came for me in the shape
of a towing-horse, which carried me away to Issoudun first, and to a
new life afterwards. I had the seven lean years as a strolling player;
a jack at a pinch, a _Jean-qui-rit_ or a _Jean-qui-pleure_, as it was
wanted; and then I had more than thrice over the seven fat years, and
all that men call success. I have had all the best things that there
are in life, and I do not think I should have had as many of them if I
had remained in the dingy little shop all my days, as my father wished
me to do. Poor old father! he came to see me once in Paris--once,
when I was thirty years old, and in the height of my best triumphs;
and he was dazzled and dazed, and did not very well understand, but
he found out that my servants charged me four times too much a pound
for candles. "_Un grand homme toi!_" he said, with a sneer at me, "_et
tu n' sais pas le prix d'une bougie!_" The world admired me: he never
did. I was always to him a fool who burned wax instead of tallow. There
is always something to be said for the _bourgeois_ point of view; but
it is narrow--narrow. After all, the storms and sunshine on Parnassus
are better than the worry over a lost centime in the back parlour. I
have been a successful artist in my day, but I should have been a very
indifferent shopkeeper, because I never could bring myself to care for
that lost centime--though I have lost many!'
He rose with a laugh, remembering the grand _gaspillage_ of his
generous and careless manhood. It had not been wise, perhaps, but it
had been delightful; and, after all, he had as much as he wanted now
in his little river-side house, his good wall fruits, and his first
editions of Molière and of Marivaux. He would not have been a whit
happier had he been a millionaire.
As the frank mellow sound of his laughter echoed on the air, and the
shadow of the doves' tower lengthened behind them on the grass, the
notes of a horn in the fanfare which is called La Brisée, blew loud and
full over the fields to their ears.
'What is that?' cried Damaris, startled at the sound which she had
never heard before.
'I forgot; it is the first day for hunting,' said Rosselin, listening.
'It is the _ouverture de la chasse_.'
As he spoke some equestrians rode out from a thicket across the field
in which they were. They were members of the hunt of Dampierre, clad in
a picturesque costume and looking like a picture of the time of Louis
Quinze as the warm sunset light fell across them. They rode on quickly
towards the west whence came the notes of the hunting fanfare.
They did not look towards herself or Rosselin; but a few seconds later
another huntsman, whose hunter was lame, came by in their wake more
slowly, leading his horse. He turned his head, paused a moment or two,
then rode straight towards them.
It was the Duc de Béthune. He doffed his tricornered gold-laced hat and
bade Rosselin, whom he knew well, good-evening; then glanced at Damaris.
'Mademoiselle Bérarde!' he said, hesitatingly. 'Surely I do not
mistake?'
She looked at him with recognition.
'You came to the island with her,' she said, rather to herself than to
him. The colour grew hot in her face; all the unforgettable shame of
that day was with her in bitter recollection.
'I am honoured by so much remembrance, and grateful to the hole in the
turf which lamed my horse.'
'That is language for the château of Dampierre,' said Rosselin. 'M. le
Duc has lost his way, I think?'
'No; I know my road,' said Béthune, who understood the old man's
meaning. 'And I never speak any language, Rosselin, but that which best
conveys my real thoughts. You, who are so perfect an artist in speech,
must be aware that I am a very clumsy one. Is there any smith here who
could look to my poor beast?'
'You can put him up at the house where I live,' said Damaris. 'It is a
very little way off; we can show you.'
'That will be sweetest charity,' said Béthune.
Rosselin did not see his way to prevent what annoyed him. The Duke,
with the bridle over his arm, walked beside her over the pasture; the
notes of the Brisée had ceased; the hunt had passed onward westward,
where Dampierre was.
Béthune spoke to her with deference and interest, but she answered him
briefly and absently. Rosselin kept up the conversation. Suddenly she
said in a low tone:
'You have seen her--lately?'
Béthune was surprised.
'You mean the Countess Othmar, your hostess of St. Pharamond? Yes; I
saw her a week ago. We stayed together at the same country house in
Austria, and I shall soon see her again at Amyôt. That is her castle,
as I dare say you know, on the Loire.'
Damaris said nothing. She paced onward, a little in advance of him and
of Rosselin; her head was drooped, her face was thoughtful.
'She was not as kind to you in appearance that day as, I assure you,
that she was in feeling,' said Béthune, not knowing well what to say.
'She is capricious and negligent, but she has a mind that is very
generous and true in its instincts, and those instincts were all your
friends and admirers.'
Damaris remained silent.
'The chief instinct of the lady you speak of is to provide herself with
amusement,' said Rosselin curtly. 'She usually fails, because the world
is so small.'
'You are unjust to her,' said Béthune, her loyal servant and courtier.
'I am sure that she felt the truest interest in Mademoiselle Bérarde.
We were all of us distressed when we learned that that magic isle was
tenantless.'
'The new Virginie has left her isle,' said Rosselin, 'and I am
endeavouring that she shall not make shipwreck on these stonily seas of
art and life. My dear duke, great ladies like your châtelaine of Amyôt
let fall idle words, never thinking what they may bring forth. It is
so easy to destroy content and to suggest ambition. But to efface a
suggestion is very hard when once it has taken root in a young mind.'
Béthune guessed at his meaning. 'The world will be the gainer,' he
said, as they entered the courtyard of the Croix Blanche.
Damaris called a man to his horse, then, without even looking at him,
she crossed the court and went indoors, and he saw her no more.
'She is very much changed,' said Béthune in surprise as he looked at
the dusky archway of the door through whose shadows she had passed from
his sight. 'What is her story since I saw her on that happy island;
I shall never forget it; its blue sea, its radiant air, its scent of
orange-flowers, its handsome child reciting to us from Esther--it was
a poem. Are you going to make a great artist of her? Tell me her story
since that day I saw her on her isle.'
'I do not know it,' said Rosselin. 'All I have to do with is the Muse
in her. My dear Duke, I repeat, your gracious Lady of Amyôt, for her
own diversion, poured into a childish breast a little drop of that
divine curiosity which men call ambition: it was only a drop but it
burned its way into the soul, and will eat up the life before it has
done, I dare say. Madame Nadège did not care what mischief she did: oh
no: she only wanted to while away an empty hour for herself.'
Béthune reddened indignant for his absent sovereign.
'As you are so great an artist yourself you should think that she did
well in waking any soul to art.'
'No,' said Rosselin angrily. 'No one does well who meddles with fate or
displaces peaceful ignorance and honest content by unrest and desire.
This child was happy on her island. The world may perchance make her
famous some day, but happy it will never make her again, for happiness
is not amongst its gifts!'
'That is quite true,' said Béthune with a sigh. He asked many more
questions, but obtained little information. He waited in vain for
Damaris to re-appear. The sun sank, the shadows deepened into dusk over
all the vale, the swallows circled in their last flight round the high
house roofs. With reluctance he was forced to bid adieu to Rosselin and
take his way to the distant château of Dampierre, where he was a guest.
'Salute her for me,' he said at parting. 'Say that I shall return to
thank her to-morrow.'
'If you wish to do her any service in return for the help to your
horse, do not speak of her at Dampierre or in Paris,' said Rosselin.
'I will not speak of her to anyone,' returned Béthune, 'unless it be to
the Countess Othmar. But you will allow me to return.'
'I have no power to forbid you. Yet it is to her that perhaps it would
be desirable you should say nothing,' answered Rosselin after a moment
of hesitation. 'I merely mean that the Lady of Amyôt did, I believe,
prophesy a great career for my pupil, and first of all suggest to
her the possible possession of talents the world might recognise.
For that reason I think Damaris Bérarde would prefer that she should
hear nothing more of her, unless some day the world itself may have
justified her predictions.'
'You think it probable, or you would not waste your hours on her?'
'I think she has infinite feeling and a poetic temperament. Whether
these are enough remains to be seen. There are so many other qualities
required, all those humbler qualities which are the prose of genius,
the plain bread of character.'
'She has one requisite, beauty. She is exceedingly handsome. What
brought her here?'
'I cannot say: I am only her teacher.'
'And who is her lover?' mused Béthune, as he walked slowly out of the
grey courtyard in the gloaming. His suspicions drifted to Loswa.
Rosselin went within and mounted a low wooden staircase which led to
the door of Damaris's chamber.
'Come out and bid me good-night, my dear. If I loiter I shall lose the
last train to Paris.'
She obeyed him and came outside her door.
'Why did you avoid Béthune?' he asked her. 'He is a gentleman and a
soldier; he is a man you may respect and who will respect you; though
he is a great noble he is an honest fellow. He is one of the few lovers
who have worshipped Othmar's wife without losing dignity or honour.'
Damaris did not answer. She could not well have defined why she had
come within doors. There was a certain pain to her in the presence of
Béthune because he was associated with that one day so big, for her,
with fate.
Rosselin looked at her as she stood in the twilight at the head of the
stairs. There was an open window behind her, a hand's breadth of blue
sky, a bough of pear heavy with fruit.
'Why did you not mention Othmar to him?' he said abruptly; 'you
mentioned her.'
'I do not know.' said Damaris. She spoke the truth. She did not know
why she was always reluctant to speak of him.
'Good-night, my child,' said Rosselin, with a tenderness in his voice
that was new to her ear. He sighed as he too went on his way through
the dusky dewy fields, sweet with the breath of browsing cattle and
murmurous with the whispers of the leaves.