Damaris remained unmoved by the departure of her old friend--almost
unconscious of it. His words had drifted by her ear, bringing little
meaning, and no conviction. He spoke as an artist, as a man, as
experience and the world suggested to him; but his arguments could
avail nothing against the instincts of her own heart and the horror
which the charges and the offer of Blanche de Laon had left upon the
ignorance and innocence of her mind. What would have been as nothing to
one who had dwelt in the world, to which evil is familiar and disgrace
immaterial if of profit, was of an overwhelming disgust and terror to a
child whose brain was nurtured on the high unworldly chivalries of the
great poets, and who had dwelt in a solitude of imaginative meditation
amongst the solitudes of nature, amongst the simple and noble lessons
of 'the world as it is God's.'
She passed the whole day in a kind of trance. She ate nothing; she
drank water thirstily. She scarcely replied to the questions of the
woman of the house. The night went by, bringing her no sleep, no
dreams; she was in that kind of agony which nothing except youth,
in all its exaggeration, its magnificent follies, and its pathetic
ignorance, can suffer. At daybreak she went out with her companions,
the dogs, and roamed half unconsciously and quite aimlessly over the
pastures which in the days of Port Royal had been trodden by so many
restless feet, along the margin of the little stream which had heard
the sigh of so many a world-wearied heart.
The morning was clear and cold and very still. Far away where Paris lay
there was a dusky, heavy cloud. By noon her mind was made up.
A great and heroic impulse came upon her, born out of the innocence of
her soul and the infinitude of her gratitude.
With its instinct of self-negation and noble efforts moving impetuously
in her as the warm sap moves in the young vines, she took no time to
reflect, sought no word of counsel. She covered herself in her great
red-lined cloak, and took her well-known way once more across the
pastures, bidding the woman of the house keep the dogs within.
The movement of walking, the coolness of the wind, the scent of air
full of all the promise of the spring, renewed the health and youth
in her, gave her courage and exaltation and force. Her dual nature,
with its homely rustic strength and its patrician pride, its peasant's
stubbornness and its poet's illusions, moved her by dual motives, dual
instincts, on the path she took. To do something for him, however
slight, to try and move for him that only soul which had the power
to please his own, to prove that she was not vile or mean or basely
counting on personal gains or personal glories--this seemed the only
thing that life had left her to do.
All her innocent ambitions were dead; the career of which she had
dreamed with delight now seemed to her only loathsome. Rosselin had
said aright: she was half a child and half a poet, and with the
rude primitive faiths of a peasant she had the unworldly and unreal
imaginations of a student of imaginative things. All the stubbornness
and the simplicity of rustic life, and all the idealisation and
unwisdom of a romantic mind were blended in her; and to both of these
the accusations and the invitations of Blanche de Laon seemed as
hideous as crime. The world could hold no laurels and no treasures she
would ever care for now. Were she to reach fame what would the world
think? Only that, as that woman had said, she had loved him and had
used him to make of him a ladder of gold to a throne of power.
He himself, even, would think so.
He himself might come one day to believe her sorrows and her hunger,
her sickness and her loneliness, all parts of some mere drama studied
and played to touch his pity and to win his aid.
The thought was sickening to her: sooner than let such suspicion lie
on her, she felt that she would seek death as Yseulte de Valogne had
sought it. They would believe then, she thought.
She walked on over the fields, past the grazing sheep, and along
the stream where Pascal had mused and Racine dreamed; and with the
rapid resolute movements of a mind strung up to some great action and
committed to some course accepted past recall, she reached the station
of Trappes and took her way to Paris.
She had gone on that road so many a time with Rosselin that it seemed
to her she could have gone blindfolded along it.
She sat motionless and unconscious of anything around her as the
train went on to Paris; her clothes were dark, her face was covered.
She reached the Boulevard Montparnasse and mingled unnoticed with
the crowd, though twice or thrice men looked after her, attracted by
the supple elastic freedom of her walk, which had in it all the ease
and vigour of movement which had come to her in those happy days of
childhood when she had raced over the sands with the goats, and leaped
from rock to rock, and sprung into the waves with headlong joyous
greeting of the sea as her best comrade.
She remained an open-air creature, a daughter of the winds and the
waters, of the sun and the dew; and all the exigencies of life in the
streets and the constraint of movement in a city could not take from
her that liberty of movement, as of the circling sea-gull, as of the
cloud-born swallow.
She took her way straight to the house of Othmar, to the house which
had sheltered her in her sickness and need. Many times as she had been
in Paris she had never seen its portals since she had been carried
through them to go to Les Hameaux. It stood before her now in the
sunshine; the vast pile behind its gates and rails of gilded bronze,
which Stefan Othmar had purchased in the days of Louis Philippe from
a great noble, compromised and exiled for the Duchesse de Berri. The
Suisse in his gorgeous uniform was standing in the grand entrance;
liveried servants were going to and fro, through the archways of the
courtyard there was a glimpse of the green gardens and the shining
fountains. The sight of it all gave her a strange sense of her own
utter distance from him.
She remembered how she had said to him, 'Is this house hers?' and how
he had answered, 'Surely, my dear, what is mine is hers,' and of how
then she had longed to rise and go out, homeless and friendless as she
was, and die in the streets rather than stay under that roof. Standing
there now, a lonely, dusty, obscure figure before that lordly palace,
she suddenly realised how utterly apart she was from him, how eternally
she would be nothing in his life. She had been sheltered there for a
few weeks in charity, that was all. He was the whole world to her, but
she was no more than a passing compassion to him. All the pomp and
pageantry and power of his material existence oppressed her, symbolised
as it was in this great palace, with its hurrying servants, its
liveried guards, its waiting equipages, its stately gardens: whilst the
knowledge she had of the thwarted affections, and emptiness of heart,
and vain desires, which haunted him, master of so much though he was,
filled her with an agony of longing to be able to give him that simple
herb of sweet content which will so rarely blossom in the gardens of
the great, in the orchid houses of the rich man.
She stood in the sunlight which shone and glittered on the gilded
gates, a dark and lonely figure so motionless and still that the
_concierge_ spoke to her roughly, bidding her not stand so near. At
that moment through the gateways there came the Russian equipage of
the mistress of the house; the three black horses were rearing and
plunging, their silver chains glistening, their bells chiming; amongst
the cushions of the carriage Nadine reclined. Her face was very pale,
her expression very cold; she was about to pay her ceremonious visit of
welcome to the Princess Lobow Gregorievna.
Full of the purpose which had driven her thither, and not wholly
conscious of what she did, Damaris stretched her hands out and caught
at the sable skins of the carriage rug as the wheels passed her.
'Wait--wait!' she cried stupidly. The horses dashed onward. Nadine
threw her a silver piece, seeing only a supplicant figure between her
and the light.
One of the men in the gateways picked up the coin and tendered it to
her. She repulsed it with a gesture.
'When can one see her?' she asked in a low tone.
The servant stared. 'See her? Why never, unless you know her and
she sends for you;' then, being good-natured, he added, 'what is it
for?--all petitions go to the secretaries.'
'I want nothing of her,' said Damaris. 'I want to speak to her.'
'Then you will wait for a century,' said the young man, and looking at
her he thought, 'I think it is the girl who was here last summer. I
heard that they had made an actress of her, and that Othmar kept her
somewhere out Versailles way. What can she be doing on the streets?'
Then, being of a mischievous humour, and deeming that it would be
good sport to bring about any scene which would be disagreeable or
embarrassing to the master whose bread he ate and whose livery he wore,
the fellow added, as if in simple good nature, 'you could get speech
with either of them more readily at Amyôt: they go down there in a day
or two for Easter; they have some royal people.'
Damaris did not answer him; she turned away with one long look at the
house which had sheltered her in her homelessness and misery. Was the
master of it there, she wondered? She did not ask. She did not dare.
After what Blanche de Laon had said to her, she shrank from the thought
of meeting his eyes.
She went wearily from the gates as she had come to them; her purpose
was baffled, but not beaten. The vague impulse which had taken her
there, had been only strengthened by momentary defeat; the momentary
vision of his wife's face had made her the more passionately long
to clear herself from disgrace in those cold eyes. She remembered a
garden-door in the garden wall opening out into a bye-street: when she
had been carried out under the trees in her convalescence, she had
seen gardeners go to and fro through it, and dogs run in and out when
it stood ajar; she turned away into the quietude of this little side
street, and walked beneath the garden wall until she came to the little
entrance which had been a postern-gate in older Paris days. It was
standing open as she had so often seen it, the gay branches of budding
lilac and laburnum showing through it. She passed in unseen, and waited
under the shadow of the boughs.
The gardens were as still as though they were the gardens of Amyôt;
the peacocks swept with stately measured tread across the lawns, the
fountains were rising and falling under the deep green shade of groves
of yew and alleys of cedar. It was three in the afternoon, the shadows
were long, the silence was complete. She sat down on a rustic bench,
and waited; for what she scarcely knew. But the purpose in her was too
deeply rooted in her heart to let her go thence with its errand undone.
She could see the marble terrace, and the rose-coloured awnings of the
western front of the great hotel, she could see the banks of flowers
which glowed against its steps, the white statues which rose out of the
evergreen foliage around them; the massive pile of the building itself
was, from the garden-side, almost hidden in trees.
She saw two young children come out gaily, and laughing, their shining
hair floating behind them in the light, they mounted two small ponies
and rode away with their attendants beside them, out of the great
garden gates. She watched them with a strange suffering at her heart.
They were the children of the woman whom he had loved so much.
She remained hidden in the little ivy-grown hut, watching the house.
No one came near her; only some birds flew near and pecked at the
ivy-berries. When several hours had gone by, she heard the carriage
roll into the courtyard; she imagined that the mistress of the house
had returned. Long suspense, long fasting, for she had taken scarcely
any food since very early in the previous day, the exaltation of a
purpose romantic to folly, but unselfish to sublimity, all these had
made her nerves strung to high tension, her mind little capable of
separating the wise from the unwise, the possible from the impossible,
in the strange act which she meditated.
But oftentimes, in moments of irresponsible excitement, the will can
accomplish what in calm moments of reflection would seem utterly beyond
its powers.
She waited yet awhile longer, till the gardens grew dark, then without
hesitation she crossed the lawn, and ascended the terrace steps. To the
servants waiting there she said simply:
'I come to see the Countess Othmar. Say that I am here--Damaris
Bérarde.'
The men hesitated; but some amongst them recognised her, and were
moved by the instinct to do mischief with impunity, which is so
characteristic of their class.
'It is the girl from Chevreuse, the girl who was here last summer,'
said one idle lounger to another, then they laughed a little together
in low tones; and she heard one say, 'It is a pity Othmar is still at
Ferrières!'
Then one of them indolently showed her a staircase.
'Go up there,' he said to her. 'My lady's apartments are to the right.
You will find her women.'
The man added in a whisper to one of his fellows: 'She came in through
the gardens, we can swear that we never saw her enter if any mischief
come of it;' and they watched her with languid curiosity as her dark
figure passed up the lighted staircase, with its blue velvet carpets,
its bronze caryatides, its great Japanese vases filled with azaleas,
its arched recesses filled with palms and statues.
Presently she came to a wide landing place, where corridors branched
off from side to side; it was lighted also, and here also its masses of
blossom, its green fronds of ferns and palms were beautiful against the
white marble and the blue hangings of the walls.
A servant was walking up and down awaiting orders. To him she said the
same words: 'I come to see the Countess Othmar. Tell her I am here. I
am Damaris Bérarde.'