The great Easter fêtes at Amyôt were successful with all that
brilliancy of decoration and novelty of wit for which their mistress
was famous to all Europe. The weather was mild, the guests were
harmonious, the princes and their consorts were well amused; nothing
more agreeable or more original had been known in the entertainments of
the time; and the choicest and rarest forms of art were brought there
to lend the dignity of scholarship to the graces and frivolities of
pleasure.
No one noticed that the host and hostess of Amyôt never once spoke a
word to each other throughout this week of ceremony and festivity,
except such phrases as their reception of and courtesy to others
compelled them to exchange. No one observed or suspected the bitter
estrangement between them, so well did each play their parts in this
pageantry and comedy of society. No one except Blanche de Laon, who
thought with contentment: '_ça marche_!'
Othmar had not seen his wife for one moment alone since the day when
he had left her with the bitterness of her incredulity and her insult
like ashes in his soul.
The world with its demands, its subjugations, and its perpetual
audience, was always there.
Que de fois fermente et gronde,
Sous un air de froid nonchaloir,
Un souriant désespoir
Sous la mascarade du monde!
He knew not whether he most loathed, or was most grateful to, this
constant crowd and pressure of society which spared him thought,
postponed decision, gave him no leisure to look into his own soul,
and sent him to his joyless couch more tired out with the fatigue of
so-called pleasure than the labourer in the vineyards or the forests by
his day of toil.
The six days passed without any cloud upon their splendour or their
gaiety, so far as the three hundred guests gathered there could see,
or even dreamed. The sunshine of the early spring was poured on the
glittering roofs, the stately terraces, the towers and fanes, the
gardens and the waters, of this gracious place where the old French
life of other days seemed to revive with all its wit, its elegance, and
its good manners, as they had been before the shadow of the guillotine
fell over a darkened land. With the eighth day the royal guests and
most of the others took their leave. Some score of friends more
intimate alone remained there.
A certain dread came upon him of the first hour on which he should
find himself alone before his wife. He felt that it was the supreme
crisis of his life with her; the frail cup of existence in which their
happiness, such as it was, was placed, was set in the furnace of doubt
to be graven and proved, or to be wrecked and burst into a thousand
pieces.
'If only she would say to me that she believed me,' he thought, 'I
would, I think, forgive the rest.'
But this she never said.
Man-like, the very indignity he had suffered, the very sense he had of
her cruelty, her insolence, her injustice, seemed only to re-awaken in
him that passion for her which had so deeply coloured and absorbed his
nature. The very knowledge that legally and in name he was her master,
her possessor, whilst in fact he could not touch a hair of her head
or move a chord of her heart, sufficed to re-arouse in him all those
desires which die of facility and familiarity, and acquire the strength
of giants on denial.
He had almost forgotten Damaris. The gentle and compassionate
tenderness he felt for her could have no place beside the bitter-sweet
passion which filled his memory and his soul for his wife.
In these days, when he was constantly in her presence, constantly
within the sound of her voice, and compelled by the conventionalities
of society to address conventional phrases to her, whilst yet severed
by the world from her as much as if a river of fire were between
them, something of that delirious love which he had felt for her in
the lifetime of Napraxine returned to him, united to a passion of
regret and a poignancy of wrath which was almost hatred. He was her
husband--her lord by all the fictions of men's laws--and he would not
be permitted to touch one of the pearls about her throat or obtain five
minutes' audience of her! She was the mother of his children, and yet
she was as far aloof from him as though she were some Phidian statue
with jewelled eyes and breasts of ivory!
Whilst he went amongst his guests outwardly calm and coldly courteous,
fulfilling all the duties of a host, his heart was in a tumult of
indignation and despair. The failure of his whole life was before him.
Without her the whole of the world was valueless to him.
Yet of one thing he was resolved. He would not live under the same roof
with a woman who believed him guilty of a lie to her, who insulted him
as he would not have insulted the commonest of his servants. He would
sever his existence from hers, let it cost him what it would. The cost
would be great: to bring the world as a witness of their disunion;
to admit to society that his marriage had been a failure, like so
many others; to let his children, as they grew older, know that their
parents were strangers and enemies: all this would be more bitter than
death itself to him. All the reserve and the delicacy of his temper
made the idea of the world's comments on his quarrel with his wife
intolerable to him, and the rupture of his ties to her unendurably
painful in its inevitable publicity. He was lover enough still to
shrink from the thought of any future in which he would cease to hear
her voice, to see her face. True, of late their union had been but
nominal. She had passed her life in separate interests and separate
pleasures. She had allowed him to see no more of her than her merest
acquaintances saw, and to meet her only in the crowds of that great
world which separates what it unites. Yet absolute severance from
her--such severance as would be inevitable if once their existences
were led apart--was a thing without hope, would make him more powerless
to touch her hand, to approach her presence, than any stranger who had
access to her house. Once separated, her pride and his would keep them
asunder till the grave. He knew that, and all the remembered passion
which had been at once the strongest and the weakest thing in him
shrank from the vision of his lonely future.
Yet all the manhood in him told him that to continue to live under
the same roof with a woman whose every word was insult to him, would
degrade him utterly and for ever in his eyes and in her own. And
he had loved her too passionately for it to be possible for him to
continue to dwell in that passive enmity, that alienation covered with
ostensible cordiality and external courtesy, with which so many men and
women deceive society to the end of their lives, and sustain a hollow
truce, of which the hatefulness and the untruth are only visible to
themselves and to their children. Such insincerity, such hypocrisy, as
this, were to him altogether impossible. Sooner than lead such a life,
he felt that he would end his days with his own hand, and leave mankind
to blame him as they would: they would not blame her.
On her part, unknown to him, she watched him with a new interest,
bitter, painful, and more absorbing than any which had ever had power
upon her; a feeling of disdain, of scorn, of impatience, of regret,
of forgiveness, of tenderness, all inextricably mingled in an emotion
stronger than any she had known. When she thought of him as in any
way with however much indifference as the lover of Damaris, she was
conscious of an intense disgust, of a wondering scorn, which were not
wise or cold, or temperate with the judicial severity of her usual
judgments, but were merely and strongly human, and born of human
emotions. They humiliated her with the consciousness of their own
humanity, and the uncontrollable bitterness of the sentiments which
they aroused in her. Jealousy it could have scarce been called. For
jealousy implies a recognition of equality, a fear of usurpation, and
these to her haughty soul were impossible in face of a peasant girl,
a _déclassée_, a waif and stray, with no place in the world save such
as Othmar might choose to give her. Jealousy in this sense, jealousy
intellectual and moral it was not; but jealousy physical it was. She
thought and hated to think of the personal beauty of Damaris; she
thought and hated to think of all those summer hours in her own house
in which that beauty had been helpless and dependent before him. Like
all women who know much of the natures of men, she knew that the senses
were often beyond control, when the heart in no way went with them.
She had always thought that it would never matter to her whither such
undisciplined vagaries might lead him. She had always felt with the
disdain of a nature over which physical desires have little power, that
wherever his caprice took him there he might go for aught that she
would say to restrain him.
She was startled to find that it did pain her, that it did revolt her,
to believe that this disloyalty had been done her, that this child had
had from him even the slightest, most soulless kind of love.
Her world had never seen her more full of wit, and grace, and
brilliancy, than in those days when in her inmost soul she suffered
more mental pain and doubt than she had ever known. Life had become
touched with humiliation, indignation, emotion of a complex kind,
contemptuous anger, and a vague remorse; but it had thereby become to
her once more a thing of interest and of vitality, her languor had been
startled, her self-love shocked, her whole nature stirred. She gave no
sign of it that any one, either foe or friend, could read, but she was
conscious that these emotions which she had ridiculed in others could
become the dominant forces and tyrannical preoccupation even of her own
thoughts and life.
A sensation of failure, of loss, of humiliation, was always with her;
not so much for this fact of what she believed to be his infidelity,
as for her own consciousness that she herself had been untrue to all
the theories and philosophies of her existence, that she had failed
to guide their lives into that calm haven of friendship and mutual
comprehension which had always seemed to her the only possibly decent
grave for a dead passion; and had failed also in this crisis of their
fates to preserve that wisdom, patience, and composure, which can alone
lend dignity to the woman who sees her power passed away.
All her life long she had woven the most ingenious and elaborate
theories as to the failure of men and women to secure fidelity and
peace; she had reasoned with perfect philosophy on the causes of that
failure, and turned to ridicule that childish passion and that fretful
inaptitude with which the great majority meet those inevitable changes
of the affections and the character which time brings to all. But now,
she herself, having been met with such changes, had done no better, and
been no wiser than they all. She had suffered like them, she had made
reproaches like them, she had allowed indignation and offence to hasten
her into anger which could only gratify her enemies and all the gaping
world.
'Any fool could have done what I have done!' she thought, with bitter
impatience against herself: any fool could have reproached him, and
denounced him, and placed him in such a position that out of sheer
manliness he had no choice left but to reiterate the untruth once told,
and go on in the path once taken.
Yet she knew that were it to be done again, again she would do the
same. When she thought of him as the lover of this child, she was only
conscious of the mere foolish, irrational, personal, bitterness of
emotion which any other feebler woman would have felt.
Had she not said under the oaktrees yonder in her Court of Love, that
inconstancy, being only involuntary, should be blamed by none: had
she not again and again said and thought that what a woman or a lover
cannot keep, they well deserve to lose: had she not quoted from the
poets and the philosophers of a thousand years, to prove by a thousand
lines of wisdom that it is 'not under our control to love or not to
love:' and was this not most supreme truth?
Why then in face of the first faithlessness which she had ever
known, had she had no better or wiser impulse in her than that of
anger?--such stupid, witless, unwise anger, as Jeanne in the kitchens
would feel against Jeannot in the stables. What use were the most
subtle intellect, the most delicate and penetrating perception, the
most intimate and accurate knowledge of human nature, if all these only
resulted in producing, under trial, such primitive instincts, and such
simple emotions, as would exist in the untutored brain and the rude
breast of any peasant woman passing under the trees of the park yonder
with her herd of milch cows, or her flock of sheep? If the higher
intelligence could not reach a nirvaña of perfect tolerance, of perfect
comprehension, of perfect indifference, of what avail were its culture
and its pride?
All men were inconstant; she knew that. It was not their fault; they
were made so. She believed that, had he told her frankly of his
frailties, she would have been perfectly indifferent and indulgent to
them. It was the long deception and concealment which had seemed to her
so contemptible. 'Such a coward--such a coward!' she thought bitterly.
Cowardice was to her the one unpardonable sin.
As she and Béthune walked on the seventh evening before dinner through
the outer gardens, where these joined the woods, they chanced to see
in the distance the same Lubin and Lisette, whom they had seen as
lovers two years before, and who had been wedded with many gifts and
much gaiety in the August weather a week or two after the sitting of
the Court of Love. The man was walking far ahead this time; the woman
lagged behind; the cows were the same happy creatures, serene and mild,
going through the sun and shadow, pausing to crop a mouthful of sweet
grass between the beechen banks; but the lovers were only now a lout
who whistled and smoked, a scold who fumed and wept.
'Let us ask how the idyl ends,' said the Lady of Amyôt. 'It is easy to
see that it is ended.'
'Ah, Madame,' said the woman being interrogated, '_voilà qu'il regarde
déjà la petite Flore_!'
Her châtelaine laughed with a certain bitter tone in her laughter.
'"_Voilà qu'il regarde déjà la petite Flore_,"' she repeated; 'and she
is so stupid that she knows no better than to be angry!'
Béthune glanced at her wistfully. After a moment's silence he said in a
low tone:
'There are those who never look--elsewhere.'
She smiled, knowing his meaning, and touched by the remembrance of his
long constancy.
'Ah, my dear friend,' she said, with some pang of conscience, 'I have
had too much affection given me in my life, and perhaps I have given
too little.'
As she walked back through the gardens, under the long arcades covered
with tea roses and the banksian creepers, she thought with that
ridicule of herself, as of others, which was always sure to succeed any
emotion:
'_Nous voilà en plein mélodrame!_--the contrast of the husband's
infidelity makes the lover's fidelity touch the hard heart of the
deserted wife! We are all grouped ready for the stage of the Gymnase!'
She seemed absurd to herself in her anger and her humiliation. She had
always been so contemptuous of life when it grew melodramatic, although
so impatient of it while it remained dull.
Othmar watched her cross the gardens from where he stood in one of the
windows of his library. Under the excuse of many letters to dictate to
his secretaries, he had escaped for awhile from his guests.
It was near sunset, the light so clear and cool of earliest spring was
shining on the terraces and rose walks, and clipped bay hedges of the
garden to the south which had been left unaltered from the Valois time.
The peacocks were moving up and down on the grass, the first swallows
were wheeling above the glowing colour of the azalea thickets, a light
breeze was blowing the spray of the fountains this way and that; he
watched her as she came through the dewy green foliage and under the
white and yellow tea roses; she wore a gown of white velvet, she had a
high ivory handled cane, there was a white greyhound before her, and
the graceful figure of Béthune at her side. He saw her gather one of
the Maréchal Niel roses above her head, and fasten it in the bosom of
her dress; Béthune said something to her; she gathered another and let
him take it.
Othmar watched them with a pang.
'If I died to-morrow I suppose she would give him her hand as she gives
him that rose!' he thought, and the thought was intolerable to him.
'She thinks me faithless to her, and she does not care; she was angered
for an instant; only that; then her days pass on the same; she has all
her courtiers and friends about her; she does not need me, or miss me
amongst them.'
And he watched her with eyes which studied her incomparable grace, her
divine languor, her indolent movements, as though he saw them then for
the first time; so great a quickener of sleeping love is the sting of a
jealous fear.
But his heart was very weary. She had wounded, insulted, injured him,
well nigh beyond forgiveness; she had dishonoured him with the secret
observation of his actions and the open accusation of his falsehood.
She had had him followed and tracked like a criminal, and had refused
to believe his word, which all Europe honoured as the surety of
unimpeached truth.
Greater insult surely no woman could do to any man.
And yet, if she would only say one word, he felt that he was ready to
forget that she had done so; he was ashamed of his own weakness, but
he knew that he would forgive everything:--and he reminded himself of
his own offences to her without extenuation, willing to find in blame
of himself excuse for herself.
He watched her now as she came slowly and smiling under the trellis of
the roses: to look at her it seemed that she had no care, no regret, no
desire.
'And if I went out and shot myself to-night,' he thought, as he watched
the two figures pass on under the trellised roses, 'she would have
called Béthune to console her before the year was out?'
He believed it; but, man-like, the belief only gave her a stronger
dominion over him.
He thought of some verses which he had read not long before,
written by that poet who, more perfectly than any other, mirrors
the dissatisfaction, the wistfulness, the intricate emotions, the
unsatisfied passions of our time.
Que n'ai-je à te soumettre, ou bien à t'obéir?
Je te vouerais ma force ou te la ferais craindre:
Esclave ou maître, au moins je te pourrais contraindre
A me sentir ta chose, ou bien à me haïr.
J'aurais un jour connu l'insolite plaisir,
D'allumer dans ton c[oe]ur des soifs ou d'en éteindre,
De t'être nécessaire ou terrible, et d'atteindre,
Bon gré, mal gré, le c[oe]ur jusque là sans désir.
Esclave ou maître, au moins j'entrerais dans ta vie,
Par mes soins captivée, à mon joug réservée,
Tu ne pourrais me fuir, ni me laisser partir.
Mais je meurs sous tes yeux, loin de ton être intime,
Sans même oser crier, car ce droit, du martyr,
Ta douceur impeccable en frustre ta victime.
For seven years he had been always the nominal, sometimes the actual,
possessor of her life, and yet he had never once known whether this
woman whom he had possessed had ever had one moment of what could be
called love for him! Many women had loved him for whom he had felt
nothing; but by one of those strange and melancholy ironies of which
life is so full the only women he had loved--the courtezan who had
ruined his boyhood, and his wife who had ruined his manhood--had given
themselves to him, without love.
He shut the window at which he stood, and turned away with a bitter
sigh:--without her life would be for ever valueless to him.
Nadège and her servitor, unconscious of his observation of them,
entered the house; it was the moment when people gathered in the
conservatories for tea; the most pleasant hour of the twenty-four was
spent thus amongst the flowers; often there was music in the music-room
adjoining; the children usually came there with their pretty grace and
gaiety, their long loose hair, their bright costumes, looking like
larger butterflies under the fronds of the palms.
As she went towards her own apartments to rest there a little while
before joining her guests and friends in the orchid-houses, one of
her confidential servants brought her a note which had been sent by
hand from Beaugency, and was marked urgent. She was about to send it
unopened to her secretary, for letters wearied her and she seldom
read them herself unless their superscription told her that they were
of some especial interest, when she saw written in the corner of the
envelope the name of Rosselin. She knew that it was the name of the
great artist who had been the teacher of Damaris Bérarde.
She took the packet with her to her own rooms and once alone there
opened it. There were two letters inside it. One was written in a
feeble unformed hand, the words were ill-shaped, and the lines were
uneven. The fingers which had traced them had never been very skilful
in the management of the pen, being more used to guide the tiller ropes
of a boat, or the handle of a scythe.
The characters were ill-writ and very pale, but she could read them;
she knew even without reading them, that they came from Damaris; they
were brief:
'When you get this, Madame, I shall not be living. Then I think you
will not be angered any more, and you will believe. Do not let him
know, because it would pain him. I mean, do not let him learn that I
sought this death myself. Perhaps it was wrong, but I saw no other way;
I could not live any longer on his charity now that I know. Before,
I did not know. I could not bear to live either without seeing him
sometimes, and I should never see him. Nothing wants me except the
dogs, and they will be happy on the farm here. My master would only
be disappointed in me if I lived. The world would not care for me. I
should not have any strength in me to make it care. I used to think
that I had genius, but it is all dead in me, quite dead now;--perhaps
it was only imagination, and the wish to be something I was not, and
the mere love I had of the poets. Forgive me that I write to you; I
want to beg you to believe. I would have given my life for him, but he
never thought of me in that way. I pray you to make him happier. I wish
I could have seen him once----.'
The ill-written words ended abruptly, as though the pen which had
written them had suddenly fallen from a hand too weak to hold it any
more.
On an outside sheet was written in the fine clear writing of Rosselin:
'She died last night as the moon rose. I write to you, Madame, instead
of to your husband by her desire. You will tell him as much or as
little as you choose. I had not seen her for four days. God pardon me
for it! I shall never pardon myself. I had left her in anger because
I could not persuade her to play before you at Amyôt, and in anger I
had stayed away from her. When they sent for me I found her already
dying. The woman of the house told me that she had been one day alone
to Paris, and what had been done to her there this woman did not know,
but on her return she was quite silent, and very feverish and strange.
She wandered about the village and the fields, and would scarcely come
into the house to bed. At one of the cottages a young child she had
often played with was lying ill with diphtheria. Damaris remained day
and night with him, and when he was dying kissed him on the mouth: she
never confessed it to me, but I believe that she sought death that way,
for I think life for some reason or other which I know not had become
wholly intolerable to her. She suffered very much. I brought her all
the aid that science could give her, but it was of no avail. She had no
wish to live, I think. She talked often of her island, and of the sea,
and of the boats. Latterly she could not speak at all, then she wrote
to you. It is a hideous death: heaven spare you and yours the like.
You feel no sorrow for anything they say, but I think you would have
been sorry for her. Perhaps it is best so. The world would have broken
her heart; it has no place in it for such dreams as hers were. To the
last she bade me never to let your husband know. Her last thought was
of him. He was very good to her, but a worse man would perhaps have
injured her genius less. I know not what passed between her and you.
I only know that she had seen you. Whether you said anything which
made her despair of living I cannot tell; all she said when she became
delirious, which she did become towards the end, was only this always:
"She will believe now, she will believe now." So I suppose you doubted
her. I send you the few lines which she wrote three hours before she
died when she could scarcely see. I have not read them myself. I think
she would not wish me to do so. I am over eighty years old; it is
hard to live so long only to see the last thing that one loves perish
miserably. But she had genius, and the world hates it, so perhaps after
all it is best as it is.'
She put the letters down, one on another, and her face had a great
blankness of horror on it. Like Yseulte, this child had died for him,
through her.
She shuddered as with cold in the warm fragrant air of her room, and
large tears sprang into her eyes.
She could not doubt now.
She locked her doors, and no one entered there for an hour.