She whom she sought was alone in her apartments within.
She was resting, after her drive, in her bed-chamber, which was lighted
by silver lamps, and of which the furniture was all of ivory and
silver, with hangings of white plush embroidered with spring flowers in
silks of their natural colours. The bed in its alcove was watched over
by the angel of sleep; a statue in silver, modelled by modern artists
from a design of Canova's. White lilac and white jessamine filled large
silver bowls of Indian artificers' work. The portrait of her children
in the rose gardens of Amyôt, painted by Caband, stood on an easel
draped with some cloth of silver of the fifteenth century. The floor
was covered with white bearskins. It was a temple dedicated to rest
and dreams; but it had given her neither of late. She was restless,
disquieted, ill at ease, and dissatisfied with herself.
She had the same pale rose satin gown on her; in another hour she would
dress again for a dinner at the Duchesse d'Uzès'; her hair was a little
loosened, her face was weary, she had a knot of hothouse roses at her
bosom; her women were asking instructions as to what jewels she would
wear. Her old sense of the dulness of life was strong upon her; was
it worth while to go on with it, all these days so alike, all these
dressings and undressings, all these amusements which so seldom were
amusements--_tant de frais pour si peu de chose_?
In ten years'--twelve years'--time she would bring out her
daughter and marry her, probably to some prince or another--and
afterwards?--well, afterwards it would be the same thing, always the
same thing; what else could it be? She would not be able, like Lubow
Gregorievna, to solace herself for lost loves with church images.
She was tired, the day had dragged, she had been unable to put off
from her the sense of loss and of bitterness which had come to her for
the first time in all her life. She had not seen her husband since the
hour, three days before, when he had left her, insulted beyond words,
outraged, and stung to the quick by the dishonour of her contemptuous
disbelief.
In a day or two more there would be the fêtes for Easter at Amyôt;
royal guests were bidden to them; he would of necessity appear and play
his part in his own house; he and she would meet with the world around
them. Was not this the supreme use of the world?--to cover discord, to
compel dissimulation, to efface the traces of feud, to bring in its
train those obligations of surface-courtesies and outward amities which
restrain all violent expression of emotion?
One of her women with hesitation approached her, and with apology
ventured to say that some one was waiting who entreated to see her; a
young girl, Damaris Bérarde. Was she to be permitted to come in? or
should she be dismissed?
'Damaris Bérarde!' she repeated with amazement.
The women were astonished to see that this plebeian name, unknown
to them, had an effect on their mistress for which they were wholly
unprepared.
'To see me!' she echoed, 'to see _me_!'
She half rose from her reclining attitude, and a look of extreme
surprise was on her face, which so seldom showed any strong expression
of any kind.
'To see me!' she echoed aloud.
So might Cleopatra have said the words if the Nubian slave from the
market-place had approached the purple of her bed and Anthony's.
Her first impulse was to give the instant refusal for which her women
looked; but her next was to wait, to hesitate: perhaps to consent;
the strangeness of such a visit outweighed with her its insolence and
intrusion. She disliked all things which were sensational, emotional,
romantic, ridiculous; and yet the more uncommon circumstances, the
more singular situations of life, had always an attraction for her.
Curiosity to penetrate the motive of it, and to see with her own
eyes this creature whom she despised, was stronger with her than her
haughty amaze at such a request, whilst the morbid love of analysis
and of penetrating to the depths of all emotions, and of playing on
them, which is common to the century, and in her reached its extreme
indulgence and development, impelled her to allow the entrance of
Damaris into her presence, that she might see the issue of a situation
of which the peculiarity allured her.
'If she come to assassinate me, it will at least be a new sensation,'
she thought, with her habitual irony.
The women felt afraid: they never dared to name any visitants to her
whom they had not previously been directed to receive; they awaited her
commands in apprehension.
'Can he have sent her?' she wondered; then she rejected the
supposition. He was too well-bred for that. What, then, could bring
this girl to her?
Her first impulse was to have her thrust out shamefully by her
household, the next was that intellectual inquisitiveness which was the
strongest characteristic of her mind. Despised, contemned, abhorred
as this girl was by her, she yet felt a strange desire to see and to
examine what she believed possessed the power to reign, if only for
a passing season, over the thoughts and the feelings of Othmar. She
herself had no more doubt that Damaris was her husband's mistress
than she had that the roses she wore in her breast were her own. But
the disgust, the offence, the aversion which she felt, in common with
all other women, before such a rivalry were overborne in her by the
psychological interest of the moment which it offered.
Always mindful to preserve her dignity before her inferiors, she said
to her chief woman-in-waiting:
'It is a young girl whom I knew at St. Pharamond; yes, say that she may
come to me for ten minutes.'
The woman obeyed, and in a moment more Damaris stood between the satin
curtains of the doorway: a dark, tall, slender figure, with the light
shining on the dusky gold of her hair, the changing painful colour of
her cheeks.
The women, at a sign from their mistress, withdrew and closed the door
behind her. Othmar's wife made no gesture, said no syllable which could
help her. She remained seated afar off, the intense light of the room
reflected from the many mirrors in their silver frames showing her
delicate cold features, the pale rose satin of her sweeping gown, her
reclining attitude, languid, haughty, motionless.
The girl trembled from head to foot.
But she advanced.
'It is I, Damaris Bérarde,' she said, in a low voice.
She paused in the centre of the room, bewildered by the beauty
of decoration which was around her, the intensity of light, the
hot-house-like warmth and fragrance, the merciless gaze of the great
lady who gazed at her from a distance unmoved and chill as death. The
heart of the child beat thickly with terror and emotion:
'Madame--Madame,' she stammered.
In her ignorance she had fancied that because she was received she
would be welcomed, that because those doors had unclosed to admit her,
that behind them she might hope to find a friend.
This silence, this coldness, this unspoken but all-eloquent disdain
made her feel herself the intruder and alien which she was, there in
the house of Othmar, in the presence of his wife. Her very soul sank
within her.
The cold contemptuous eyes of the woman whom she dreaded swept over her
with withering scorn.
'You have mistaken the apartments,' said Nadège, with her cruellest
intonation. 'Those of Count Othmar are on the other side of the house.'
The intensity of emotion which possessed Damaris, the intensity of
resolve which was in her, the high-strung and overwrought feeling which
had nerved her to her present act made her deaf and callous to all that
was implied in the words and to the look with which her great rival
repulsed her. She crossed the room, and caught the shining satin folds
of the gown in her hands and hung on them.
'Let me speak to you once, only this once,' she cried. 'I only came to
Paris for that----'
'What can you seek from me? Surely my husband gives you all you want!'
All the icy disdain, the cruel irony, the scorn of her as of a
creature beneath contempt, passed over Damaris almost unfelt. She had
the intense self-absorption which a strong purpose and a passionate
generosity inspire.
'I came to Paris to see you,' she said boldly. 'I tried to stop your
carriage; you thought I was a beggar, you threw me a coin; I have come
here because I hoped that I might speak to you. Listen to me once, this
once; then I will go away for ever.'
Her hearer looked at her with less bitterness of scorn, with a slowly
awakening wonder. What was strange, unusual, startling, had always a
fascination for her; a position which was intricate and unintelligible,
a character which was mysterious and for the hour unfathomable, always
possessed for her an attraction which nothing else could have. Had an
assassin been at her throat she would have stayed his hand only to ask
his motives. The supreme interest of the enigma of human life with
her surpassed all other more personal considerations. Psychological
analysis far outweighed with her all personal emotions. What the young
mistress of her husband could seek her for, or want of her, seemed to
her so odd that for the moment the strangeness of the supplication
outweighed her pitiless scorn of the suppliant.
Her dignity would never have allowed her to cross the width of a
street to see this girl who had caused such division between herself
and Othmar; but the wish to see her had been strong in her for some
time. Her philosophic inquisitiveness before all mysteries of human
character, and her artistic appreciation of all human beauty combined
to make Damaris interesting to her as a study, though hateful as a
living creature.
'I will hear you,' she said, and drew her skirts from the touch of
Damaris, and seated herself with the coldness of a sovereign who
listens but does not forgive, of a judge who examines but does not
pardon.
'Great heaven, how handsome she is!' she thought with involuntary
admiration; and beneath her haughty calm and scorn there burned the
fires of a jealousy which scorned itself. Was this the child whom
she had brought over the sea? The peasant in blue serge and leather
shoes whom she had seen hidden from others in her drawing-rooms like a
startled stray sheep under a hedge?
Damaris stood before her pale, infinitely troubled, passionately
pained, but so nerved with the force of her purpose that she had lost
all sense of fear and of hesitation. Her voice came from her lips quick
and low, and her hands were clasped together in earnestness as she
spoke at length to this woman who had been the terror of her dreams so
long.
'I do not know what they have told you of me,' she said, 'but I am come
here to tell you the truth. I think there are those who believe that I
am coarse, and selfish, and base, that there are those who believe that
he who saved me out of the streets, and from death, only seems to me
the mere means to an end, and that end my own renown, my own riches, my
own gain. But that is not true. So little is it true that now that I
know they say it, the world shall never see me whilst I live. You know,
it was you yourself who first told me that I could make the world care
for me. You put that thought in my head and my heart, and it worked and
worked there, and left me no peace. He tried to dissuade me, because he
said that an obscure life was best, but I would not believe. I wished
to be great, I wished to come before you some day, and to make you say,
"After all she has done well; after all she has genius----"'
She paused, overcome by the rush of her own memories, by the flood of
thoughts she was longing to utter.
Nadège looked at her with her cruellest irony.
'Why do you come to tell me this? Be great if you like--if you can! You
say quite truly: my husband can easily build you a golden bridge to the
temple of fame. But you can scarcely expect me, I think, to come and
crown you upon it!'
The chill, sarcastic scorn cut the soul of Damaris to the quick.
'Oh, my God, can you believe it too!' she cried, in an agony of
despair. 'Only because he took me in when I was half-dead with hunger,
as he would have taken home a starved dog! He has been good to me
with the goodness of angels. There is a tale of a beggar whom a king
befriended, and the beggar cut the gold fringe from the king's robes in
return; do you think me as vile as that beggar? I know that my debt is
great to him, so great that I cannot pay it with my life; but if you
can believe that I dream of taking of his gold--that I would use him,
or rob him, or ask his help for my own ambition----'
Nadège looked at her with cold, impenetrable, unmerciful eyes of
unrelenting contempt and pitiless examination.
'I am still at a loss to know why you come to me. I am not interested
in the terms that you may have made with him. Whether he give you a
cottage at Chevreuse or an hotel in the Champs Elysées, what does
it matter to me? Do you wish for my advice upon the architecture of
either?'
She spoke with her usual languor and irony unaltered, she sat erect
with the roses at her breast, and the pale rose of the satin gown
flowing to her feet: her eyes were cold and hard as jewels, the only
trace of any anger, or of any feeling repressed was in her lips, from
which all colour had gone.
Why did she let an interview so hateful be prolonged? Why did she not
summon her people, and have this stranger thrust in ignominy from her
chamber? Why did she not send for her husband and confront him with the
truth he had denied? She did not know why she did none of these things,
unless it were that all exposure and publicity were hateful to her,
and also because the psychological interest of the instant was strong
enough to hold in suspense both her offended dignity and her aroused
passions. What brought this girl to her? Until she knew that, she would
not send her from her presence.
The simplicity and strength of the nature of Damaris, in which
single motives and undivided instincts reigned, meanwhile made the
complexity and the variety of sentiments in this cultured and satirical
intelligence wholly incomprehensible to her. That any woman could
see matter for jest, for derision, for amusement, in passions which
bitterly offended and mortally alienated her, was a contradiction
which was utterly beyond her comprehension. That the wife of Othmar,
believing what she evidently believed, might have struck her some
mortal blow, or bidden her servants scourge her from the house, she
could have understood; but this complex mind, which could play with its
own pain, and dally with its own injuries, she could not follow. She
only felt that such a mind scorned her herself as something too low to
be believed, too poor to be quarrelled with, too far beneath contempt
to be even accepted as a foe.
'You think--you think--I do not know what it is you think,' she said in
a voice broken by great emotion. 'I have done whatever he told me, he
has told me nothing but good; he does not care for me--in--in in that
way which you believe. I am nothing to him. He loves you----'
'I thank you for your assurance of it!'
The poor child in her ignorance had spoken the very words which
could most fatally offend and arouse the dignity and the passion of
her hearer. To be assured of her husband's love by the subject of
her husband's illicit amours! Even the ironical patience and the
contemptuous tolerance of her habitual temper could not remain in
silence under such an outrage to her position and her dignity as this.
With a gesture as though sweeping away some unclean things, she
motioned Damaris away.
'Leave my presence; leave my house,' she said with an intense rage,
only controlled by pride still greater than itself. 'How dare you come
where I and my children dwell? Go--go at once, or I will disgrace you
before my people.'
But Damaris, whose dread of her had been so great, did not shrink or
quail before her.
'You cannot disgrace me for I have done no wrong,' she said in
desperation. 'I am nothing to him--nothing, nothing, except a thing
he pities. Why should you think that I am? Are not you far above me?
have not men loved you always and died for you? do not you know that
he himself is sick of heart because you care so little? You will not
believe. Oh, God, what shall I say to you! Madame, it is for this only
that I came. I wanted to tell you that my heart will break if, through
me, any pain comes to him; you think things which are not true, and
which would offend him bitterly if he knew them; and he has spoken to
me of you as the only woman whom he could ever care for. Why are you
angered that I say so? He thinks that you do not care, he thinks that
you are weary of him, he thinks that he has no power to please you any
more. And I said to myself that perhaps you did not know this, that
perhaps you would care if you did know, that perhaps you would put some
warmth in his heart, give him some kinder words. I say it ill, but this
is what I want to say. He thinks you do not care.'
Her hearer listened with the scornful rage of her soul held in check
for an instant by her own knowledge of the likeness in the words
thus spoken to the reproach, which Othmar himself had cast against
her. In her innermost soul she acknowledged, that if Othmar loved
this creature, he was not the mere sensualist she had thought; she
recognised the spirituality and the nobility in the beauty and the
youth of her disdained visitant; she acknowledged that a man might
well lose his wisdom and break his faith for such a face as this; and
would have for his madness some excuse of higher kind than would lie
in the mere temptation of the senses. The highest quality in her own
temperament had always been her candour in her acceptance of truths
which were unwelcome to her. This truth was loathsome to her; but it
was a truth, and she confessed it as such to her own mind. Yet, even
whilst she did so, it pierced the very centre of her soul, and filled
her with a new and intolerable pain.
Her insight into the minds of others also told her that this child's
mind was honest, innocent, and candid, and though she would not
believe what her own penetration said, she could not wholly resist its
influence, she could not wholly continue to doubt the good faith of
the speaker, even whilst her anger remained unabated at the daring and
familiarity of such a scene as this.
Damaris took the brief instant of silence for consent, and sustained
and nerved by the pure unselfishness of her romantic purpose, she
persevered in her supplication.
'Listen to me for one moment more. You are an aristocrat and I am
nothing; I had only some little talent and that is dead in me; you will
live beside him all the days of your life, and I shall never, perhaps,
see his face again. Believe what I say as though I were dying. You are
all that he thinks of on earth, and he is tired, and chilled, and empty
of heart because you have never cared for him as he cared. I shall go
where I shall never trouble you, and if ever he think of me it will
be only with pity just for one passing moment. Will you remember only
this, that I have come to beg of you to make him happier, to make his
dreams true--it is only you who can do it. You have his heart in your
hands; do not throw it against a stone wall, cold and hard, as they
throw a bird to kill it. You are a great lady, and the world is with
you, and you have many lovers and courtiers, they say, but what will it
profit you, all of it, if one day he looks at you and you know that he
thinks of you no more because you, yourself, have killed his soul in
him?'
'I am flattered that Count Othmar has made me the subject of his
discourse with you!'
* * * * *
Damaris perceived the fault she had committed, the offence she had
excited. Resolute to follow out the purpose which had brought her
there, she drained the cup of bitterness which she had voluntarily
taken up to the last drop.
'He hardly ever spoke of you,' she said. 'But I think he wished me to
know that all his thoughts and memories were yours, so that I should
not ever--ever--be misled to dream that they were mine. I have seen him
seldom; very seldom; only once this year; but that once he did speak of
you, and I knew that all his life was in your hands, and that he thinks
you do not care----'
The words were simple, and not wisely chosen, and spoken out of the
fulness of her heart, but they carried a sense of their sincerity to
the sceptical ear of their auditor. Almost for the moment she believed
that they were truth. A sense of compassion touched her.
This girl, so young, so ignorant, so hopelessly devoted to a man
who could be nothing to her, seemed to her childish, melodramatic,
plebeian, absurd; and yet had a certain nobility and force, and pathos,
and mystery in her which stirred to pity this heart which had never
known pity. She had been only a peasant, born and reared amongst the
rude toilers of the sea and of the soil; what fault was it of hers if
she had given away her life to the first man who had been kind to her,
and in whom she saw the charm of gentleness, the grace of culture? The
infinite comprehension which she herself possessed of all the frailties
and all the errors of human nature, almost supplied in her the place
of sympathy. She did not pity because she disdained so much; but she
understood, and that power of understanding made her in a manner
indulgent, though indulgent with contempt.
But the memory of things which seemed to her damning witnesses of fact
rose to her thoughts, and checked as it arose the softer and more
intelligent impulse which for awhile had held her passive.
She repulsed Damaris coldly, drawing once more her skirts from her
touch.
'You are a good actress. Do not neglect your calling. Rise and go. You
have been too long maintained by Count Othmar to be able to play the
_rôle_ of disinterested innocence with any chance of duping me. Why you
come to me I cannot tell. Perhaps he sent you, teaching you your part.'
Damaris rose to her feet, and her face grew scarlet with honest shame
and with indignant wonder.
'I have never had anything of his except his kindness,' she said
passionately. 'I have never taken a coin from him any more than I took
yours in the street to-day. What he did for me in my illness I know was
charity--a debt I could never pay--I said so. But what I have lived on
has been my own, always my own, what my grandfather left to me when he
died.'
For the moment even her listener believed her; her candid luminous eyes
flashing fire through their tears, her flushed indignant face, her
truthful voice, all bore their witness to her innocence and ignorance,
all told even the prejudice and arrogance of her judge, that whatever
the facts might be she herself believed the truth to be that which she
said.
Mercy and generosity for a moment held the lips of Nadine silent; she
was a child, she was a peasant, if she were the dupe of her lover, was
hers the fault? But that jealous scorn which has no pity and no justice
in it, swept over her soul afresh, and extinguished in her all the
finer charities and nobler comprehension of her mind.
'It is useless to tell me this,' she said with cold contempt. 'Whether
you know it or not, your grandfather left you nothing; you are living,
and you have lived, only on what my husband has given you. Leave me,
and try my patience no more. Count Othmar's amours are nothing to me,
but I do not care to have a comedy made out of them to be played for
some unknown purpose on my credulity.'
Then she rang for her women.
Damaris said no other word, all the light and warmth had gone out of
her face, there had come on it a pallid horror of incredulous and
stupefied doubt.
Silently and quite feebly, as if all strength were gone out from her,
she passed across the chamber, and felt her way through the curtains
of the door. On the entrance she turned her head and looked back: her
great eyes had the look in them of a forest doe's when it is wounded
unto death. She looked back once, then went.
Nadine smiled bitterly.
'When she found that I knew all, she could say nothing!' she thought.
'She will be an acquisition to the French stage. Her melodrama was so
well acted that almost it deceived me. Why was it played?'
She could not see the motive. For the first time in her life the
reasons for the actions which she watched escaped her.
And think as she would that the scene had been a melodrama, an
invention, yet there were certain tones, certain words in it which
haunted her with a persistent sense of their truth.
These had not been common entreaties, common reproaches, which Damaris
had addressed to her; there had been an impersonal generosity, a noble
simplicity, in them which lifted them out of the charge of sensational
and dramatic affectation. There was an enigma in them which she could
not solve. They were unselfish and founded on accurate knowledge; they
were out of keeping in the mouth of a paid companion of a man's passing
amourettes. It seemed wholly impossible to her that they could have
been spoken truthfully, and yet if they were not true there was no
sense in them.
Some pang of self-consciousness moved her own heart as she pondered
on these passionate supplications to her to make the life which was
spent beside hers happier--'happier!'--that one simple word which was
so ill-fitted to the complex feelings, the capricious demands, and the
hypercritical exigencies of such characters as theirs.
She had no doubt that her husband was the lover of this girl; the
denial of the one had moved her no more than the denial of the other;
all her knowledge of human nature told her that it must be so; but as
she sat in solitude a certain remorse came to her, a certain sense that
from her own unassailable height and dignity and rank she had stooped
to strike a creature not only unworthy of her wrath, but unprotected
by youth, by ignorance, and by the quixotic temerity which had made her
thus bold.
She honoured courage. She could not refuse her respect to the courage
of this child.
She could not class her with the common souls of earth.
'Why did I not let her alone at the first? She was so content and so
safe on her island,' she thought, with that pang of conscience which
others had tried in vain to arouse in her.
It had been a caprice light as the freak which makes a butterfly pause
on one flower instead of another. But the fruits of it were bitter to
her.
When her women came she began her toilette for the dinner at the
Duchesse d'Uzès'. It was long, and nothing contented her.
From that dinner she went to various other houses; she returned to her
own house late; she heard that Othmar had come back from Ferrières and
gone to his own apartments. The following day they would be obliged
to go to Amyôt. The great party there could by no possibility be
postponed; royal people were bidden to it. If such a gathering were
broken up at the last moment, for any less cause than death or illness,
the whole world would know that there was subject for separation and
dissension between her husband and herself. She would have given ten
years of her life to prevent the world ever knowing that.
For the first time in her life, as her woman unrobed her and took
off her jewels, she was conscious that she had been unwise in the
management of fate. She had been desirous that the world should
see that her influence could even withstand and outlast all those
adversaries of time and custom and disillusion which saw stealthily
at the roots of every human happiness and sympathy; yet she had been
so careless and so indifferent, that she had allowed the very changes
which she wished the world never to see, to creep in upon her unawares.
It had never occurred to her that she had been as inconsistent as one
who wishing to preserve untouched a fragile vase of crystal, should
set it and leave it in a crowded street for anyone to use or break who
chose. She had not cared to keep her crystal vase herself, and yet she
was enraged that it was broken.