Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  There was a chorus of admiration from all the great people who were there; it was her jour, and the rooms were full. Anything drawn by Loswa instantly elicited the homage of that world of fashion in which his powers were deemed godlike, and this sketch had qualities so rare and true that even his enemies and hostile critics would have been forced to concede to it a great triumph of art.

  ‘You have succeeded,’ said Nadine, as she put out her hand to him with a smile. ‘You were right and I was wrong. You have painted the portrait without spoiling it by any affectations. No living painter could have done it better, and few dead ones.’

  Loswa inclined his graceful person to the ground before her, and murmured his undying gratitude for the condescension of her praise.

  ‘Tout de même, elle me le paiera,’ he thought, remembering the words she had spoken to him on the sea-terrace.

  ‘And how did Perseus find Andromeda?’ she asked. ‘It must be a story to be told in verse in the old fashion. Relate it!’

  ‘There has been very little romance about it,’ said Loswa, ‘and Andromeda, alas! is contentedly going to marry a boat-builder, stout, ugly, and old!’

  ‘My dear Loris, that will be for you to prevent,’ said Nadine, still gazing at the sketch. ‘I have never seen a face with more character or more suggestion. C’est un type, as the novelists say. If she do marry the boat-builder, he will have a stormy existence. There are daring and genius in her face. Come — sit there and narrate your adventures with her.’

  Never unwilling to be the hero of his own stories, Loswa seated himself where she bade him, and, becoming the centre of a circle of lovely ladies, he embellished and heightened the narrative of his expedition to Bonaventure as he had done the sketch, making his own part in it more romantic, and the reception of Damaris warmer than either had been. He had a very picturesque fashion of speech, and the little incident, under his skilful treatment, obtained the grace and the colour of a story of Ludovic Halévy’s. The portrait could not open its lips and contradict him. Only his hostess thought to herself, with amusement: ‘I wonder how much of all that is true!’

  Whilst he was talking and drawing towards a close in his admirably-coloured narrative, Melville and Othmar together entered the room behind him, and the former caught the name of his favourite of the isle.

  He listened in silence till Loswa paused to take breath at the end of a sentence; then, with a very angry gleam in his clear eyes, he interposed:

  ‘So, M. Loswa, you have found the latitude and longitude of Bonaventure without a pilot! Your portrait on that easel is very like, but I confess I do not recognise the same verisimilitude in your narrative.’

  Loswa, who had paused to meditate on the end of his adventure, which he felt could not be told with the tame finale which it had had in real life, was disconcerted, and for a moment silent.

  ‘I have seen your heroine this morning,’ pursued Melville; ‘I am distressed to disturb your romance, but she is not the mingling of Gretchen and Graziella you have just described. I left her busied in feeding the pigs.’

  ‘I dare say Gretchen and Graziella both fed pigs,’ said Loswa with some ill-humour. ‘At least, Monsignor, you will admit that I have proved to the Countess Othmar that I was capable of making a study of the betrothed of Gros Louis.’

  ‘That is feeding the pigs with pearls indeed,’ said Nadine.

  ‘The pigs are a better destiny than many another,’ said Melville.

  ‘You cannot seriously think so?’

  ‘I do, indeed. If you had seen the dark side of life, Madame, as I have done, you would think so too.’

  ‘No, never. That young girl has genius, or something very like it, in her face. I will send for her, and show her that there are other fates possible for a young Hebe with the brows of Athene.’

  ‘That would be a cruel kindness if you like,’ said Othmar, who had been attentively studying the portrait.

  ‘And that is for once a commonplace remark, my dear Otho. Nothing which takes the band off the eyes is really unkind.’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Othmar. ‘Great ladies like you have pets which are not the happier fated for the petting; the dog is shaved and frizzed, the bird is caged and killed, the marmoset is adored and neglected; if they were all left to their natural fates they would be less honoured but longer lived. Yonder palms are honoured too, no doubt, by being allowed to stand in a corner of your room behind a lacquered screen and in a gilded basket, but they have neither light nor air, and will be dead, and when they are so, will be replaced in a month.’

  She smiled. ‘How little you know about it! and what perilous things metaphors always are! The palms go back to their glass-houses and thrive as well as they did before, while other palms take their place in my rooms. You talk a little like a Socialist lecturer; your arguments are all invectives and — what is the logician’s word? — pathetic fallacies!’

  ‘Which is the glass-house to which you could send any human being whom you had taken from obscurity and contentment?’

  ‘The glass-house is the world, which is always ready for novelties as the hothouses are ready for new seedlings. How can you tell that this handsome child may not be destined to make the world her slave? Besides, even in the interests of Gros Louis himself, it is as well that the consciousness should come before instead of after.’

  ‘And certainly,’ said Loswa, ‘no one can say that Gros Louis is a fate meet for this exquisite child?’

  Melville hesitated: ‘Gros Louis is not a very admirable person; he is an unbeliever, of course very avaricious, and of a rough coarse exterior; but he is a good-tempered man and a very laborious worker. On the whole, worse things might happen to Damaris Bérarde than to live always on her island and rear her children there, as she now rears her poussins and her puppies.’

  ‘That is looked at from a very low plane, Monsignor; unusually low for you.’

  ‘I can imagine so many things worse for her, that is all,’ said Melville, with an apology in his tone. ‘Certainly she ought to have a mate like a shepherd in Theocritus’ pastorals, but as those shepherds exist not, at least this side of the Alps — —’

  ‘Why a shepherd at all?’

  ‘Because they are better than hunters,’ said Melville curtly.

  Loswa smiled.

  ‘Monsignor is prejudiced to-day,’ said his hostess. ‘Decidedly this Galatea must be worth seeing, and the island itself sounds idyllic. I did not know there was anything so near us still so like Bernardin de St. Pierre. Dear Melville, go and bring your treasure to us just as she is; just as Loswa has sketched her, red cap, bare feet, and striped sea-gown. The moment these people are endimanchées they are horrible.’

  ‘She does not belong to “those people,”’ said Melville, a little impatiently. ‘Her mother was an actress of Paris. I think you might dress her how you would, she would look well. She has a patrician look like those girls of Magna Grecia, who are as ignorant as the stones they tread, but have the port of goddesses.’

  ‘I will see this especial young goddess,’ said Nadine, who never relinquished a whim when it encountered opposition.

  Melville was seriously annoyed.

  ‘Will you make Gros Louis more acceptable to her?’ he said angrily.

  ‘No; we shall make him impossible.’

  ‘You will create one more déclassée, then, when there are already so many!’

  ‘What? By seeing her once?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Melville with a certain sternness. ‘Once is enough. Discontent is born at a touch. Content is a thing which no one can create; but discontent almost anyone can bring about with a word. Merely to see you, Madame, would be to render this poor child wretched and ashamed all the rest of her days. I mean no compliment; only a fact. You float in the very empyrean of culture; you can only make this young barbarian conscious of her barbarianism. What is the curse of our age? That every class is wretched because it is straining forever on tiptoe, striving to reach into the class a
bove it.’

  ‘Dear Monsignor, I think they always did. Colbert stretched the draper’s yard measure till it reached the throne, and Wolsey stood on the chopping-block till he was tall enough to touch hands with king and pope. It is nothing new, though modern democracy thinks it is.’

  ‘The just ambition of the man of genius is not the restless monomania of the déclassée.’

  ‘Who can tell what ambition may lie under this Phrygian cap?’ said his tormentor, as she looked once more at the sketch of Damaris. ‘Dear Monsignor, I am so delighted when you become a little cross! It makes us feel that, after all, you are really human!’

  ‘I am exceedingly cross,’ said Melville; ‘or, to speak more truly, infinitely distressed.’

  ‘After all, Monsignor, it is not absolutely just to this involuntary recluse never to give her an occasion to estimate Gros Louis at his actual worth. According to what you and Loswa say, there are the gases of revolt already smouldering in her; surely it will be better for them to take flame before than after.’

  ‘There are a great many lives,’ said Melville, with a tinge of personal bitterness, ‘in which those gases are never extinct, yet in which they are, nevertheless, not allowed to come to the surface and take fire. It may very well be so with hers.’

  ‘Oh, the cruelty of a priest! Decidedly you will not let her come to us if you can help it. Well, we will go to her. I owe her an apology.’

  Melville trusted to his usual experience of his hostess; he knew that with her, very often, a caprice ardently desired at sunset was forgotten by sunrise; that, in default of opposition, such a mere whim as this would most likely expire as soon as conceived. He said nothing more to her, and Loswa took his sketch down from the easel.

  ‘I fear you are angry with me, Monsignor,’ he murmured to Melville, to whom he was always courteous and deferential. ‘Indeed, but for the challenge that Madame Nadège cast at me, I should not have ventured to find out your inviolate isle.’

  ‘There is no harm done,’ said Melville curtly. ‘You will not find there either Gretchen or Graziella.’

  Othmar had no sympathy with this new fancy.

  ‘With all the world at your feet, what can you want with a fisher-girl?’ he said, when they were alone, to his wife, who replied:

  ‘She may be original and amuse me. There is hardly anything original in these days. One never sees anything; and I do not think she is a fisher-girl. She may even be a genius — an Aimée Desclée — a Rachel.’

  ‘And do you think it is better to be a Desclée than to live and die, a happy wife and mother, en bonne bourgeoise?’

  ‘Oh, my dear, it is you who are bourgeois if you see anything enviable in the prose of Fate! You may be sure that, if she be a genius, and I help to open her prison doors, I am only the instrument of Destiny. Someone else would open them if not I.’

  ‘I thought you always ridiculed the idea of Destiny?’

  ‘For ordinary mortals-yes. But genius is accompanied by the Parcæ. It cannot escape them. Men may kill the body of Chatterton, but they cannot prevent the dead boy being greater than they.’

  ‘I think your project cruel,’ said Othmar. ‘If you go to this child, or bring her here, you will interfere unwarrantably with her peace and quietude, you will take her out of her sphere; and you can never make a déclassée happy. Melville is quite right.’

  ‘A déclassée! My dear Otho, what a very conventional reply. A déclassée is a person uprooted from her own sphere, to be placed in, or to long to be placed in, one for which she is not the least adapted. Genius is much more than adapted, it is armed in advance for any world it choose to take as its own. Rachel was an unlettered and unwashed Jewess, and Desclée was a tattered little Bohemian: but the one ruled the world, and the other made it weep like a child!’

  ‘But I do not know why you should suppose this little girl on her island is necessarily destined to possess genius?’

  ‘It is in her face, and it would be amusing to discover it. It would give one a Marco Polo sort of feeling.’

  ‘It is a dangerous kind of exploration. You cannot tell what mischief may not come out of it.’

  ‘And you do not understand that the supreme charm of a caprice lies precisely in never knowing in the least what one may come out of it.’

  ‘But where your toys are human souls — —’

  ‘There are no such things as human souls. It is an exploded expression. There are only conglomerates of gases and tissues, moved by automatic action, and adhering together for a few years, more or less. That is the new creed. It is not an exhilarating one, but il en vaut bien un autre.’

  ‘All this does not explain why you have taken a fancy to disturb the destiny of a little girl whom you have seen once in a boat.’

  ‘Because, I think it may amuse me; all original creatures and unconventional types are amusing for a little time at any rate.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Othmar, half in jest and half in earnest, ‘when you have once taken the idea that anything is amusing, I know cities may burn and men may die, you will not relinquish your idea till you have exhausted it.’

  ‘No. I do not think I easily relinquish my ideas; it is only weak people who do that. It is true few ideas live long; they are all belles du jour, the bloom of a day.’

  Melville had for once erred in his estimate of his hostess. As tenacious when she was opposed as she was indifferent when unopposed, she that evening announced her intention of taking Loswa as her pilot, and of going in person to Bonaventure.

  The opposition of Melville, and of her husband, the attraction of something new, and that charm which always existed for her in the discovery and examination of anything unusual in human nature, all contributed to make her dwell on an idea which, had it not been opposed, might probably have never taken serious shape.

  The master passion of her temperament remained the pleasure she took in the excitation and the analysis of character. She had always liked to bring about singular scenes, unusual situations, strange emotions, merely for the sake of observing them with the same subtle and intellectual pleasure, as a writer of romance feels in the complications and characters which he creates at will, and at will destroys. She had always brought about a perilous position when she could do so, because to enter upon one was as agreeable to her as it is to a good mountaineer to ascend to perilous heights. She had been often tempted to regret her own physical coldness, which rendered such heat of emotion and of danger as d’Aubiac’s royal mistress had known impossible to her. It was less the tragedy of passion than the psychological intricacies of character which interested her. ‘Tous les amoureux sont bêtes,’ she had so often said, and so continually thought. Of all things which had bored her throughout her life the love of the male human animal had bored her the most.

  But a complicated situation, a set of emotions on an ascending scale — a spectacle of troubled consciences and of disturbing elements — these it had always diverted her to watch, calm and untouched by them as any marble statue which looks from a glass window upon a storm at sea. In the language which she used the most, she said to herself that she would have given nearly all she possessed to be for once ‘empoignée’ by an intense emotion.

  Sometimes she would look at Othmar and think: ‘It is not his fault; it has certainly not been his fault, and yet there has never been a second when my heart beat really any quicker for his coming.’ In the highest heights of his own exaltation and ecstasy he had always left her irresponsive. ‘You want Mignon or Juliet for all that,’ she had said to him once.

  It amused her now; this fancy of that unknown little island lying hidden in these gay and crowded seas. She had a fancy to see it and to divert herself with the human creature on it who she had said was ‘un type.’ In the afternoon of the following day she sailed thither. Who could have hoped for an undiscovered isle on these crowded seas? She was accompanied by Béthune, Loswa, and three other of her courtiers. Othmar refused to condone what he did not approve; and Melville h
ad been suddenly called away to Rome.

  ‘To the new Desclée!’ she said, as her yacht glided out of its harbour and bore southward through smooth sparkling sapphire waters.

  ‘A name of melancholy omen,’ said Gui de Béthune. ‘Sometimes I think Aimée Desclée is the most pathetic figure of our century.’

  ‘She was a sensitive, and she was a poitrinaire,’ answered Nadine with her sceptical little smile. ‘What does physiology tell us? That genius is only a question of brain tissue and blood-globules, and that the Mois de Mai and the Prometheus Unbound are only the consequence of a kind of disease. It is so consoling for us; who have no disease, perhaps, but have also, alas, no genius! That is why the world is so fond of the physiologists. They are the great consolers of all mediocrity.’

  CHAPTER X.

  Damaris was gathering oranges and carrying them to the packing-sheds. She was bearing an empty skip upon her head, and kicking one of the golden balls before her through the grass, when a woman, unlike any woman that she had seen before, appeared to her astonished eyes amidst the emerald foliage of the orange-boughs and the lilac of the hepaticas which filled the grass.

  ‘I am sure you know me again?’ said the sweetest and coldest of voices. ‘I am come to apologise to you for my rudeness. Here is Loswa, who is afraid to approach you; he will vouch for me.’

  Damaris stood still and mute; she put the basket off her head, and looked in blank stupor at her visitant; her colour came and went painfully; all in a moment she seemed to herself to grow ugly, awkward, coarse, foolish, everything which was hideous and painful. She had no words at her command, she might have been born dumb. No man had any power to confuse her, but this beautiful woman paralysed her every nerve.