It was now towards the close of carnival. Othmar's time, always largely
occupied, and doubly burdened since the death of his uncle, left him
but little leisure for the studies and the thoughts most natural to
his mind. His temperament led him to the love of leisure, of privacy,
of meditation. To read Plato under an oak-tree all day, as she
suggested, however insufficient it might have seemed to her, would have
been to him the most congenial of occupations. He would have chosen
Vaucluse, like Petrarca, could he have done so.
Amidst all the variety of affairs which came before him he was often
tired with that fatigue of the mind which is more painful than the
fatigue of the body. Study, even over-study, does not produce that
fatigue; what produces it is the constant pressure of uncongenial
and constantly-recurrent demands upon mental attention. Since the
death of Friederich Othmar such demands upon him had been multiplied
a hundredfold; and whilst all Paris looked on him as one of the most
enviable of its great personages, he himself would willingly have given
all his millions to be free to pass his years in the intellectual
leisure and repose which were to him the chief excellence of life.
'He has remained Wilhelm Meister and Werter, though an unkind fate has
made him a rival of the Rothschilds,' his wife had said once. And a
student at heart he did remain, and a dreamer also whenever the thunder
of the brazen chariots of the world around him left him any peaceful
moment in which to enjoy silence and remember the dreams of his youth.
The moments grew rarer and wider apart every year. He was like the king
on Burne-Jones's wheel of fortune: he was crowned, but bound on the
wheel.
Therefore, in the press of great interests and of public matters, which
despite himself absorbed so much of his thoughts and of his time, the
remembrance of Damaris was no dominant thing, but a tender and fugitive
memory which came to him ever and again, as the song of a bird on a
bough outside his windows may bring the gentle thoughts of other days
to the hearer of it who sits shut up in a close room under a zinc roof
in a city. Whenever he remembered her it was with infinite pity, with
great anxiety, with little of those more selfish impulses which tinge a
man's thoughts of a woman, always with an almost passionate desire to
undo the wrong which had been done her by his wife.
'What can I do for her? Command me in all ways,' he had said more than
once to Rosselin, who had always answered: 'Perhaps the best thing you
can do is to let her alone.'
He had many thoughts of her which troubled him, and vague projects
which he was forced to abandon as impracticable. He wished to give her
back the island, set her there in simple sovereignty over the orange
trees and the sea-waves, restore to her her beautiful free open-air
existence amongst the sea-swallows and the olive-haunting thrushes. He
would have striven to do it at all cost; but the isle was not to be
bought. The owner believed it to be a mountain of treasure, since it
was sought for, and would not part with it at any price. There was no
possibility for him to give her back her little realm, to make her life
anything he would have liked to make it. He could only leave her alone,
as Rosselin had bluntly told him to do; and that cold kindness did not
satisfy the generosity of his temper, or seem suited to the softness
and helplessness of her years.
This day when he had watched his wife's carriage roll through the gates
of the courtyard, his conscience smote him especially for what seemed
to him neglect and unkindness to one who had no other friend than
himself.
On an impulse of compassion and repentance he went out of the house and
took the train which goes west on its way to the sea-shores of Brétagne.
'Poor child,' he thought. 'Fear of them makes me a coward to her. She
must have deemed me unkind and neglectful; all these weeks and months I
have never been near her. Time goes so fast----'
He alighted at the little station of Trappes, and took his way on foot
across the fields towards the Croix Blanche.
The weather, though dull and grey, had been rainless as the train
passed through the market-gardens and shabby suburbs of the north-west,
but when he reached Magny the valley in its silvery fog looked poetic,
and wore a charm all its own after the dreary bricks and mortar of the
outer-boulevards. The leafless woods wore lovely hues of bronze and
ashen-grey; the bare fields were of the red-brown of a stag's hind; far
away the plains of La Beauce were veiled in a mist which promised snow;
a man went by him carrying cut wood with the bowed back, the bent head,
the heavy step, the downcast face which Millet has made immortal in art.
'How have we managed to make a toil and a burden of that outdoor life
which was so blessed to the Greeks'?' he mused. 'We must have blundered
horribly. Or is it the weather which is more at fault than we? In the
south, pastoral life is still enjoyable and still graceful.'
He spoke to the woodman and got only sullen monosyllables in return. He
gave him some money, and saw the slow dull eye lit up with surprise and
greed.
'I should be as sullen and as covetous myself, I daresay,' he thought,
'if I had to cut faggots for a living.'
Then he went on over the fields along the cross-road which led to the
home of Damaris.
He had not yet reached it, when he perceived her at a little distance,
walking quickly, with the white dogs running before her. She had on a
long dark cloak, and the hood of it, lined with crimson, was drawn over
her head; her head was a little thrown backward; her eyes were looking
upward at the steel-grey sky, across whose sad-coloured vault a flock
of the farm pigeons flew. Her hands held an open book; her lips were
moving, but he was too far off from her to hear the sound of her voice.
Her feet came quickly over the brown bare pasture so that she almost
touched him ere she saw him. When she did so she dropped the book; the
colour in her face changed instantly from white to red, from red to
white. She gave an inarticulate cry of pleasure and amaze.
'You! you!--at last!' she said, holding out to him both her hands, warm
with the warmth of youth, though gloveless, in the winter weather.
Othmar took them in his own with a tender gesture and touched them with
his lips.
He could not doubt the great joy which his presence brought to her.
Her eyes were shining through suddenly starting tears of gladness; her
mouth was tremulous with smiles; her cheeks had flushed scarlet; her
whole face and form were eloquent of a happiness which needed no words
for its expression.
He thought of a languid, amused, disdainful voice which had said to him
awhile before, 'Surely anyone's emotions can restrain themselves until
one gets into the house!'
The welcome of Damaris affected him profoundly, touched him to a vivid
gratitude. He was so used to the repression of his warmer feelings, so
accustomed to irony and languor, and the ridicule of all ardour and
enthusiasm, that this delight which his presence caused was to him at
once infinitely pathetic and deliciously responsive. He was thankful to
be paid in such unwonted coin, and the beautiful sincerity of it was
clear and radiant as the sunrise of a summer morning.
'I should have come before if I had known----,' he said, and paused
with a pang of conscience. Was it not a reason rather to compel his
absence?
Damaris was not sensible of any double meaning in either his words or
his silence. She was abandoned to the pure and frank rapture with which
she saw the living man of whom the memory abode with her sleeping and
waking. There was so much youth in her, and so perfect a candour, that
no thought of concealment entered her mind for an instant. He had been
everything to her; he had stood between her and sickness and misery and
death; he had made life bloom again for her when it had seemed engulfed
in the blackness of poverty and solitude. To her he had been truly a
ministering angel. She could have wept and laughed for joy at the touch
of his hand, at the sound of his voice.
Othmar was embarrassed: she was not. He was conscious of the meaning of
her happiness; she was not. He let go her hands, and moved beside her
under the leafless trees.
'May we go into the house?' he asked. He remembered Blanche de Laon.
'Yes,' she answered; her voice was tremulous with emotion, and had the
thrill of an exquisite happiness in it.
'You see, it is quite near,' she added. 'It is so long since you came!
Why have you been so long?'
Othmar did not look at her as he replied:
'My dear, I have so many occupations, so few moments that I may call my
own. And I had told you to write to me if you needed me.'
'I do not write very well,' she said, with a blush of shame at the
confession. 'And I thought you would come when you wished.'
'When I could, would be more nearly the truth. I am not my own master
in many ways.'
'No?'
To her it sounded very strange; to her he seemed the master of the
world.
'No, indeed,' said Othmar bitterly.
He walked silently beside her a few moments. His dejection of tone, his
weariness of manner communicated something of their sadness to her, and
threw their shade over the shadowless and innocent joys of her soul. He
roused himself with an effort.
'And you--I have heard of you often from Rosselin. Believe me, I did
not forget you, if I seemed neglectful. You love the open air still, I
see, though it is the chill grey air of the Seine-et-Oise instead of
your own warm winter sunshine. What were you reading or reciting?--Dona
Sol?'
'Yes.'
She had ceased to look up at him with candid luminous eyes; her face
was downcast and her cheeks burned. A vague sense stole on her of the
utter difference between himself and her; of the fact that, though he
was all the earth held for her, she to him could only be a mere passing
thought, a mere occasional interest, a mere waif to be pitied and aided
and forgotten. His life was so crowded, so absorbed, so full of the
world's gifts and the world's honours, she could expect nothing in it
but here and there an instant of remembrance. She led the way into the
dwelling-house in silence. The recollection of his wife had come to
her: of that great lady who had tempted her, ridiculed her, forgotten
her, and been her fate.
Where was she?
What did she know of herself?
She did not ask him; her joyous face grew dark under the shadow of the
crimson hood drawn above her shining curls. If the mother of Napraxine
could have seen into her heart at that moment her aged lips would have
given the kiss of peace to these young ones for sake of the hatred her
young soul felt.
'They are all away at work,' she said aloud; 'will you come into my
room? I think the fire is not out.'
'I do not care about the fire,' replied Othmar. 'I wish I could bring
you the sunshine of your own seas and shores--or take you to them.'
She did not answer; he asked again:
'Why would you not write to me?'
'I do not write very well, I told you,' she said, with the colour still
hot in her cheeks; 'and I have no right to trouble you--in that way. It
is cold here. Will you come to my room?'
She went up a few wooden stairs and opened the door of the little
chamber, of which she had made her study. It had an open fireplace, and
wood was burning on the hearth; its lattice window showed the wintry
landscape. It was simple, but looked like the room of an artist: the
books, the engravings, the water-colour sketches, the little statuettes
he had sent there to make it habitable and picturesque, gave it that
air of culture without which a palace is no better than a barn; a
copper bowl was filled with ivy and bay and holly, there were some
snowdrops in a glass which stood before a small bronze he had sent
there, in the summer, of a Greek shepherd playing on a reed. What
there was of art and decoration there was of his providing; but still
a certain grace of arrangement and harmony of tones were due to her
and to the same instincts in her which had made of her sea balcony
on Bonaventure a little hermitage dedicated to the few nightingales
and the many sea-swallows, and, amidst the sordid cares and the harsh
accents which were around her, had enabled her to hear the voice of Ruy
Blas or of Fortunio, as, hid in the orange-grove, she had read through
drowsy noons in
A dim house of happy leaves, with shadows populous.
As he looked around this chamber with its union of elegance and
rusticity, there passed over his mind the consciousness of how utterly
his wife would mistake the motive which had brought him there, the
feeling which had prompted him to have this child surrounded, as far
as it was possible, with such simple pleasures as art and nature can
bestow on poetic temperaments. The world was always with her; its
influences had saturated her mind and coloured her judgments too deeply
for her ever to judge otherwise than as the world would do. To her as
to the world, if ever either became aware of this home which he had
made for another woman under the ash-trees of Les Hameaux, he could
only seem the protector of Damaris in a very different sense to that in
which he actually was so. The certainty of such inevitable judgment
oppressed him, and obscured to him the beauty of the girl's face, the
lovely freshness and fervour of her welcome.
The one great love of his life had been so long his only preoccupation,
his only idolatry, that it hurt him with a sense of loss and of insult
to think that to others it would seem as though he had been faithless
to it. Even the sense which was present to his own heart and mind, that
such infidelity might perchance become possible to him, humiliated him
in his own eyes and made him feel a weak, irresolute, mutable fool.
'Perhaps she is right enough to disdain me!' he thought with impatience
of himself.
His thoughts were far more with her than with Damaris; and yet the poor
child's welcome of him sunk into his heart with a sense of warmth and
of sympathy, to which he had long been a stranger. Her very personal
beauty, too, seemed to retain in it the glow of her own suns, and to
give to those who looked on it a vivifying warmth and radiance. He felt
as though, in leaving the presence of his wife for hers, he had come
out of the cool pale luminance of moonlight, shining on the classic
limbs of a marble goddess, into a sunlit and fragrant garden, with
birds at play amongst wild boughs of roses.
Absorbed in his own meditations, his words were dreamy and spoken with
effort, his abstraction affected the sensitive nerves of his companion
and cast a chill upon her buoyant and ardent nature. She grew silent,
and watched him with eyes passionate with gratitude and dim with tears.
She saw in him the saviour of her life, the lord of all her thoughts,
her only friend; she longed to throw herself at his feet and strive
to tell him all she felt. But she could not, she dared not; there was
something in his voice, in his gaze, in the mere fact of his presence,
which daunted and held her dumb. In his absence she had repeated to
herself a thousand times the eloquent words with which she would
tell him all she felt; but now that he was there before her, she was
mute. The colour came and went in her expressive face, the veins in
her throat swelled with emotion; she could find nothing to say which
was worth saying; when she spoke in the words of the poets she was
eloquent, but when she could only look in her own heart and long to
speak, how poor she seemed to herself, how dull and dumb!
The intensity of the happiness his presence brought with it, in itself
bewildered and alarmed her with a vague fear to which she could have
given no name had she tried. She had been happy in her childhood upon
Bonaventure, with the happiness of youth and health and vigour; the
happiness of the fawn in the fernbrake, of the swallow on the wing;
unconscious, delightful, instinctive happiness in the mere sense of
sentient life. But this happiness which she felt now was new to her,
and closely allied to pain, and nervous as its twin-sister, sorrow; she
was afraid of it and mute.
At last she broke the silence timidly:
'There was something I thought I would write to tell you because he is
one of your friends, but then I thought it did not matter. It was only
that M. de Béthune has been here twice or three times.'
'Béthune!' echoed Othmar with astonishment and some displeasure. 'How
came he here?'
She told him, and added 'He has come back on different days. He brought
me a jewel once; it was very handsome. It was because I attended to his
horse's sprain; I asked him to take it back again and he did so. Since
that he has brought me flowers. Those flowers are some of his.'
He looked where she looked and saw a group of hothouse blossoms of
value and rarity. He felt an annoyance which he did not dissimulate.
'Do he and his flowers please you?' he asked, not wisely as he knew.
But the perfect candour of her eyes remained unclouded.
'I do not think about him,' she replied in that tone which was an echo
of her free and fearless life upon the island. 'He is kind, and M.
Rosselin says he is good. He is a great friend of hers, is he not?'
'Of my wife's?' said Othmar, with irritation. 'Yes. She likes him, he
is often with her; he is one of those persons whom great ladies care to
chain to their thrones.'
He had himself always had a vague jealousy of Gui de Béthune; the
intimacy which his wife allowed him, although only, he knew, in
accordance with the habits and usages of a woman of the world, yet was
always more intimate than he cared to see. He knew the solidity and
nobility of Béthune's character and the hopeless devotion which had so
long absorbed his heart, but sometimes he thought that his wife might
have found better ways of rewarding the one and of curing the other
than the constant attendance on her which she permitted to a man who
had adored her before the death of Napraxine, and had offered her his
hand after it. He had said little against it, because he had known how
absurd and vulgar a passion jealousy had always seemed in her sight,
but there had never been any cordiality of intercourse between himself
and Béthune, and it irritated him to hear that Béthune of all men
should, by an accident of sport, have found his way to Les Hameaux.
The idea had caused him uneasiness, and associated with the remembrance
of Blanche de Laon, made him conscious that the secret of the vale of
Chevreuse had been very rashly and consciously kept by him from his
wife. The Duc was a man of chivalrous honour and fastidious delicacy;
he would in all likelihood feel bound to respect a secret which he had
accidentally suppressed, but the influence of Nadège was unbounded with
him, and if by any chance through the malice of Blanchette, or any
other means, her suspicions should be in any way aroused, she would
turn the mind of Béthune inside out as easily as a child can empty
a bird's nest. He knew her great power over men, and the tenacity
with which she would at times follow out an idea if it were one which
appeared to elude her, or which others sought to conceal from her.
'Does he know your story?' he asked, with some embarrassment. 'Have you
mentioned me to him?'
'Oh no!'--the colour flushed into her face, there was indignation in
her denial. 'Do you think that I would talk of--of--of that time and of
you?'
Her voice trembled a little over the last word; she added after a
moment,
'He speaks of her sometimes--of you never.'
'Ah!'
Othmar understood the meaning of that, though his companion did not.
The admiration and loyalty with which her visitor had spoken of a lady
who was nothing to him, had seemed even to her unworldly ignorance
something which Othmar would not like. She, who had only seen the
homely lives of the toilers of the sea and soil, with their primitive
passions and their single-minded ideas, did not dream of the easy
relations and the elastic opinions which exist in the great world, of
the friendships which have all the grace of love without its fatigue
and its bondage, of the influence which brilliant women can exercise
over the minds and lives of men, without giving in return one iota
of their own freedom or feeling one pulse of tenderness. All those
intricate motives, and half-dissolute, half-delicate, liberties which
prevail in society, were to her unknown, unimaginable. She could
understand that a woman or a man should die for love, or should in
an hour of hatred slay what they were jealous of, or what had robbed
them of their love. All the simple deep undivided emotions of life
were intelligible to her and aroused response in her nature, but the
refinements of caprice and of fancy, the subtleties of cultured minds
playing with passions which they were too languid and too hypocritical
to share, these were altogether unintelligible to her.
In her short life she had not lived with the rude labouring folk
who had been her sole companions, without knowing that men could be
faithless and women also. But in the only people she had ever known,
fidelity had had a rude and literal interpretation, and infidelity had
often been roughly chastised by a blow of the knife, or the scourge of
a rope's end. All the refined gradations of inconstancy in the great
world were wholly unimaginable by her.
'You will have to live ten years more before you can play in Sardou's
pieces,' Rosselin had said one day to her; 'as yet you must remain with
the poets, with the eternal children, with the eternal _Naturkinder_.'
'Perhaps,' Rosselin had added to himself, 'she will never be able to
play Dora, or Froufrou, only Adrienne Lecouvreur, or Marie Stuart. She
has a character cast on broad bold antique lines; simple and profound
feelings alone are natural to her. The intricacies of complex emotion,
and the contempt born of analysis, are not intelligible to her. She
would understand why the Duchesse de Septmonts throws the cup down so
violently in "L'Etrangère," but she would not understand why Froufrou
vacillates so helplessly between her family and her lover.'
She looked wistfully now at Othmar, afraid that she had displeased him,
yet urged on by the unconquerable attraction which the character of his
wife exercised over her:
'Why has she so much power over people?' she asked in a low voice.
'My wife?' asked Othmar, who was absorbed in his own thoughts. 'How can
I tell you, my dear? Perhaps she has it because she does not care about
it; perhaps because all men seem to her to be fools; perhaps because
nature has made her cleverer than we are: how can I tell you? There are
persons born into this world with a magnetic power over the minds of
others: she is one of them. You have seen it yourself; she was an utter
stranger to you, yet she said but two words to you, and you followed
her, and all your peaceful, and innocent, and happy life went to pieces
like a child's sand-city before the tide of the sea. She can always do
that. She has done it a million times. She has done it with this man
you speak of; she looked at him once years and years ago, and he has
never been free any more. Other women hardly exist for him. He would
prefer to be wretched following her shadow, than to be happy where she
was not. There are others like him----'
The face of Damaris grew troubled and embarrassed, there was a sound of
indignation in her voice as she said: 'But since she is your wife?'
Othmar laughed a little bitterly.
'Ah, my dear child!--you belong to another world than ours. You have
seen amongst your fisher-folk and your fruit-sellers a kind of union of
labour, which is called marriage, and which makes the woman toil all
day for her children and her house, and grow grey on one hearthstone,
and live out her life with the sun shining on one narrow field. You do
not understand that when a great lady does a man the honour to accept
his hand in marriage, she retains her own complete immunity from
all obligations whatever; she only remains beside him on the tacit
condition that he shall submit to all her terms; she makes his houses
brilliant, she amuses herself, and he can do the same if nature have
not made him too dull; she has a number of friendships and interests
with which he has nothing to do; and if his heart remain unsatisfied,
that is nothing to her--he can take it elsewhere.'
There was the bitterness of personal feeling in the words spoken, as
if in impersonal generalisation. His hearer did not penetrate all
their meanings, but she felt the personal offence and dissatisfaction
which were in them, and they filled her with a wistful and sympathetic
sorrow. She did not understand. How could people be so rich, so
great, so beautiful, have so much power in their hands, and so much
love at their command, and yet be for ever so restless, so weary, so
dissatisfied? Her heart hardened itself more utterly than ever against
this woman who had such empire, and used it with such cruelty; who was
so beloved, and so contemptuous of love; who bore his name, dwelt in
his houses, could see him when she would, and yet seemed to give him no
more rest or kindness than she gave a stranger passing in the street.
The reasons of it were all too intricate and too subtle for her mind to
be able to guess one half of them. In her own simplicity of phrase she
would have said only that he was unhappy, which would not have covered
one half, or one tithe of the truth; but that scanty knowledge was
enough to make all her own intensity of gratitude and devotion to him
yearn with longing to console him, and sink heartsick before its own
impotency to do so.
All through the months in which he had been absent, she had thought of
him with wistful memories, vague troubled thoughts, of which he was the
centre and ideal. The remembrance of his light grave kiss upon her brow
had thrilled through her with a magical force, banishing childhood. All
her warm and passionate heart, rich as the fruits of her native land,
was given to him unasked, unconscious of all it gave. Never in any
hour of her empire over him had the woman to whom he had given up all
he possessed, his past, his present, and his future, known one single
pulse of such love for him as filled the whole nerve and soul and
nature of Damaris Bérarde.
She would have gone blindfold wherever he had led. She would have died
happy if gathered one moment to his breast.
But as yet she knew it not. As yet her own heart was a sealed book to
her. To him it was open; he could read on it what he would; but he was
unwilling to read.
'Have we not done her harm enough,' he asked himself, 'that I should
do her this last, this greatest? Shall I bind her to me in her youth
and her ignorance when I can but give her, what?--an hour of my time,
a fragment of my thoughts, the cold hospitality of a heart which has
been swept empty by another woman?'
He looked at her where she stood, with the grey light of the pale day
powerless to dull or take away the warmth and depth of colour, the
strength and grace of outline from the form and face. The shining
curls, the luminous eyes, the mouth like the bud of the pomegranate,
the warm soft cheeks with the bright blood pulsing in them, they were
just what they had been in the sea-wind, and the sun of the south; the
pallor and cold of the north had had no dominion over them.
She had the triple beauty of youth, of health, of genius. There was
the lavish glory of the springtime in her, as in the April fields
when nature flings down flowers at every step. She should have been
Heliodora to be crowned with white violets and blue hyacinths by the
singer of Gadara, and he--if he had loved her, he might have opened his
arms to her; but he looked in his own soul and no love of any kind was
there.
Should he dare to offer her pale pity, mere tenderness, the fatigue
of passions tired and chilled by another? What more unfair than for
one weary and world-worn to lay his head upon the warm white breast of
youth when he no more could dream there any of the dreams youth loves
and love begets?
Damaris was perplexed and pained because he stayed so brief a time with
her, for the low winter sun, already when he came so near to its last
hour above the grey and purple of the plains, was still sinking red
and dim in a western sky of smoke-like vapour, when he rose to leave
her and return to Paris. She vaguely felt that there was some reserve
between them, that all he thought was not expressed, that all he
desired was not said.
In her ignorance of the waywardness and contradictions of the hearts
of men, she could only think that he was angered with her for her
persistency in a career which he had told her was not a happy or a wise
one. To her it seemed that he had every right over her life, since
without him she must have perished miserably amongst the unnoticed
misery of the great city in which he had found her.
'You are not vexed that I was reciting the speeches of Dona Sol?' she
asked him timidly, trying to find out what he wished.
'Vexed? Surely not,' he answered her. 'I understand that you still
cling to this one thought, and since the ambition of it is so strong in
you, it is no doubt best that you should give it an undivided devotion.
We do nothing well that we do half-heartedly.'
'Does he tell you what he thinks of me?' she asked, still timidly.
'Rosselin?' said Othmar. 'Yes; he thinks greatly of your natural
gifts; you content him, which is a rare thing, for he is hard to
please; he believes you may move that dull, stupid, imitative mass
which calls itself the world. I have never heard him say otherwise or
say less. But neither Rosselin or I are gods, my child; we can push
open the gates for you, but we cannot control what you may find beyond
the gates.'
'You mean----?'
'I mean that his experience and influence will enable you to face the
world with every advantage, will enable you to begin where others only
arrive after long years of toil and of probation: but when he has done
that he will have done all that he can do. The rest will lie with all
the blind forces which govern human fates.'
There was something in the words, gently as they were spoken, which
chilled her eager faiths and sanguine hopes, and brought back to her
that fear of the future, that dread of the imprisonment of the art
world, which had moved her after the recital of the Conservatoire.
'I begin to understand!' she said, with an impetuous sigh. 'It will be
a slavery where I thought it a conquest. But--but--could not I have
_one_ triumph and then come back to the country and the quiet of it
if I wished? Could I not make Paris crown me once, even if I gave the
crown back to them? Why not?----'
'Because, drinking once, every one drinks as long as a drop is left
of that _amari aliquid_ called Fame. If you once taste triumph you
will never return to obscurity. Did I not tell you so in the summer?
Besides, why should you wish to triumph at all unless it be to give
over your life to Art? I do not understand----'
The face of Damaris grew red and overcast.
'I want her to know that I need not be despised,' she said in a very
low voice, through which there ran the thrill of a deep and sombre
meaning. Othmar started and himself coloured at the menace which there
was in the sound of her voice.
'You mean Nadège?' he said abruptly.
Damaris gave a gesture of assent.
She was ashamed of what she had said, but it had escaped her almost
involuntarily. He was silent. He was uncertain what to say. There
was a sense of reluctance in him to speak at all of his wife to her.
Commonplace words could have been said in plenty; but these he did
not choose to employ. He understood that the whole strong and ardent
soul of this child was on her lips; it was not a time for trivial
platitudes, for empty phrases, which in moments of great emotions seem
more unkind than blows.
'If I be your friend, my dear, you must not think of her as your
enemy,' he said at length. 'She admires genius--it is the one thing
which commands her respect: if you show her you possess it she will be
a better friend to you than I can ever be.'
'I do not want her friendship.'
Damaris had grown pale; she spoke with impetuous and almost fierce
meaning; the darker instincts which were in the hot blood of the
Bérardes were aroused; she did not pause to consider her own words.
It grew dark without: the sun had now sunk below the horizon; the red
light of the fire on the hearth reached her and shone in her auburn
curls, on her shining sombre eyes, on her lips shut close with scorn.
She looked at him from under her level brows.
'You care for her very much?' she said suddenly.
Othmar was silent some moments. How much or how little should he show
of his real thoughts to this child, who loved him and whom he could not
love in any way as she deserved? He thought she had merited candour at
the least from him.
'Yes, dear; I care for her very much, to use your words. She has been
all the world to me; in a sense she will be so always. Every great
passion has a certain immortal element in it; at least I think so. She
has been the one woman for whom I would have sinned any sin, have done
any folly, have given up place and name, and honour, and all I had, if
she had wished. No one loves twice like that. Many never love so once.
I do not pretend that life with her has been all I hoped for: those
exquisite dreams are never realised; human nature does not hold the
possibility of their realisation. I disappoint her perhaps as much as
she chills me; it is inevitable, and is no one's fault that I know of;
the fault lies with human nature.'
He paused. Damaris stood where she had been before, but the light had
died down from the wood-fire, and the shadows of the twilight were upon
her face. Her open-air, bird-like, flower-like life upon the island
had made all life seem very simple to her, a thing regulated like the
coming and going of the boats between the shores, broad and plain as
the smooth sea sand of the mainland. All suddenly she saw that it was
a thing of intricate mysteries, of cruel perplexities, of fathomless
emotions, with whose disquietude and disillusion the learned played as
with knotted threads which it amused them to disentangle, but before
whose impenetrable secret the simple broke their heart.
Othmar continued with an effort, leaning against the side of the shut
casement grown dark with the descending gloom of coming night.
'I cannot make you comprehend, my dear, with how great a passion I have
loved her. You may have heard of one who bore my name before her, one
who died on your own shores. She was lovely in body and soul, and had
no fault that ever I saw, and would have died for me--did die for me,
perchance--and to her I was without any love, always because my whole
soul was set upon another woman. And that other is now my wife. And
her, I tell you, I have loved in such wise that I believe no other love
worthy the name will ever arise in me again. I do not say that it is
impossible, for no man knows;--but so I think. She has disdained the
place she took, and has left it empty, but no other can fill it after
her. She has made that impossible----'
The tears rose to his eyes as he spoke. He could not think of the woman
he had worshipped, and whose heart he thought had never had one pulse
of actual love for him, without a pain which overmastered him. He had
never spoken of all he felt for her to any living being throughout the
years in which her influence had reigned over his life.
Damaris looked at him in the deepening shadows which hid her own face.
A passionate pain communicated itself to her as she listened.
'Is it she who does not care, then?' she asked. Her voice was hurried
and had a tremor in it.
'God knows!' said Othmar. 'No; I think she does not.'
He sighed wearily; his reserve once broken through, it was a kind of
solace to him to speak out aloud the disappointment mute for so long,
for so long unconfessed even to himself.
'It is not her fault,' he continued; 'nature made her so. We all seem
to her weak and sensual fools. Her own mind is so cultured and so
hypercritical that men far greater than I am would seem to her poor
creatures. She needed a Cæsar to share his empire with her, and she
would have laughed even at him because his laurels could not have
covered his scanty locks! She would have always seen his baldness,
never his greatness. She is made like that. She does not care; why
should she? We care for her. But that is no reason. Perhaps she would
regret it if the children she has had by me died, but if I died
to-morrow I doubt if the world would look dark to her. It certainly
would not look empty!'
He spoke bitterly, with truth and irony so intermingled in his
unconsidered words, that it was far beyond the powers of his
inexperienced hearer to distinguish between them; all she felt was
that he was unhappy, yet that his soul was set irrevocably upon this
woman who had wedded him only to torment, to elude, to disappoint, to
humiliate him.
She did not know enough of men and women and their passions to
understand all that he meant in all its fulness of mortification, but
she could understand that he suffered with a kind of suffering for
which it was impossible for anyone to console him, and which severed
him from herself by a vast and cruel distance of which she became
suddenly sensible as she had never been before. His presence was
sweet to her with a sweetness which was akin to anguish; the sound of
his voice thrilled through all her being, the touch of his hand was a
magnetism over her, charming her to a sense of ecstasy in which she
lost all power of will: but she was powerless to banish for an hour
the remembrance of this other woman, she had no sorcery which could
undo and replace the magic of the past; she did not think this or
feel this because her thoughts and her feelings were all confused and
inarticulate, but it was so, and an immense consciousness of loneliness
and impotency weighed like lead upon the warmth and the buoyancy of her
soul.
She was nothing to him.
They were alike silent, standing in the dusky windows with the cold
dark country in its wintry silences stretched without.
'It is best she should know!' he thought with a sense of cruelty and
ingratitude. It seemed to him terrible that she should waste all the
treasures of her lovely youth, of her fresh emotions, of her original
thoughts, of her awaking passions, upon one who could not give her even
one single heart's beat of love in answer. He stooped and kissed her on
her shining curls.
'Good-night, my child,' he said with pitying tenderness. 'Good-night.
Think of me as your friend, always your friend, and if you see me
seldom believe that it is not due to want of sympathy, but only
because--because----'
He paused, seeking for words which could render his meaning clear to
her without wounding her by too plain and blunt a warning against her
own heart.
'Because I meet you too late to be able to care for you,' he thought;
'because I have nothing to give you worth your dreams and your youth;
because I would give you more if I could, but I cannot; because my
heart is like a shut grave, it is too full of its own dead to be able
to let in the living!'
But he could not say this, it would have been too harsh; so he said
nothing. He kissed her once more on her soft thick hair gently and
coldly, and left her, while the darkness of the night gathered around
her, and over the silent fields the last snow of the winter began to
fall, drifting noiselessly before a northern wind.