by Ouida
In a week’s time she had forgotten that she had ever seen Damaris Bérarde; but in a year’s time Othmar did not forget that he had done so.
A few days later Loris Loswa was ushered into their presence; he had the sullen perturbed expression of a child baulked in its wish, or deprived of some toy.
‘Loswa looks as if he had had an adventure,’ she said as he entered. ‘He is one of the few people to whom these things still happen.’
‘I have been both shot at and nearly drowned, Madame,’ replied Loswa. ‘But that would not matter much if it were not that I have had also the greatest of disappointments.’
‘Disappointment and assassination together are certainly too much in the same day for one person. Tell me your story.’
‘I have been to Bonaventure,’ said Loswa, and paused. He looked distressed and annoyed, and had lost that airy nonchalance and that provoking air of conscious seductiveness which so greatly irritated his comrades of the ateliers who had not his success either in art or in society.
‘To Bonaventure, of course,’ said his hostess, as she glanced at Othmar with a smile. ‘Everyone is going to Bonaventure; it will very soon see as many picnics as the Ile Ste. Marguerite.’
‘Not if the tourists be received as I have been,’ said Loswa, in whose tone there was an irritated regret which was not hidden by the lightness of his manner. ‘Jean Bérarde is a madman. I took a little sailing-boat from Villefranche this morning, and bade them take me to the island. When we reached there, I left the boatmen on the beach and climbed the passerelle as usual, but I had not got halfway up the cliff before a bullet whistled past me, and I was warned that if I stirred a step farther I should be shot like a dog. I could not see who spoke, but the voice came from above. I replied that I was Loris Loswa, a painter from Paris, and that I merely wished to be permitted to finish a sketch which I had taken there a few days earlier. I presume that this was the worst thing that I could have said, for I received a second bullet, which this time passed through the crown of my hat. The person who fired was still invisible amongst the olives above. At the same moment some hands clutched my ankles so suddenly and forcibly that I lost my footing and fell headlong down the ladder through the brushwood to the beach. I was stunned for a few minutes, and when I realised where I was, the man Raphael, mindful, I suppose, of the napoleons he had had, begged my pardon for having made me descend in such a summary mode, but said that, had he not done so, Jean Bérarde would have killed me. Raphael was in a great tremor himself, and urged me to go away on the instant, adding that “le vieux,” as he called him, was resolute to shoot all trespassers without regard to rank or right, and had put a notice up to that effect on the rocks. “But it is against the law,” I said to him. “Eh, monsieur!” said Raphael; “he is the law to himself here, and he is mad, quite mad — un fou furieux — since the little one came back from your friends. He has sent her away, heaven only knows where, and not a soul will be let to set foot on the island.” “Sent her away?” I cried to him. “But I have not finished her portrait.” The wretch did not care. “What does that matter?” he said. “What matters is that the one bit of gaiety and goodness in the place is gone. My children are crying for Damaris all the day long.” I used bad words about his children; what did they matter to me? And I asked him how the old brute had learned that his granddaughter had been out that night: had he come home earlier than she? “Yes,” said Raphael, “he did come home an hour before her, but he need not ever have known anything, for we would, all of us, have kept her little secret; even old Catherine would never have told of her. But Damaris was always headstrong, and in some things foolish, poor child; and she would have it that it was cowardly and wrong not to tell Bérarde herself; and so, do what we would, she would go straight in and tell him; and he — he had not had a good day’s trade, and he had heard of a debtor who had drowned himself, and left no goods worth a centime, and so he was in the vilest of humours that evening; and when she related to him what she had done, he up with his big elm staff and struck her down, and my wife and I thought she was dead; and old Catherine was cursing, and the children were screaming, and the dogs howling. Such a scene! such a scene! However, she was not injured, and in the evening he took her away by himself in the open boat, and what he did with her nobody knows. He made Catherine pack all her clothes in a great bundle, and so I do not think that he killed her. I suppose he took her to the mainland, to some convent perhaps, though he does not love them. I dare say he would have made away with Catherine too, only he wants her to cook his dinner, and he knows there is nobody else who can manage the bees.” That was all that I could make Raphael say; he was in a great state of terror, and urged me to go away at once. He said the old man might come down on to the beach for aught he knew. As Damaris was gone, there was little to be gained by remaining, so I left the island. In returning we encountered a white squall; the boat capsized, we clung to her for half an hour, when we were picked up by a yawl which was going to Villefranche. That is all my story; I have been bruised and soaked, but all that would not matter if I could only finish my picture. But where is Damaris?’
‘It is really an adventure,’ said Nadine, ‘and you have told it dramatically. As for your picture, you deserve not to complete it, for you neglected her disgracefully when she was here.’
‘I hope this old tyrant has not hurt her; but a ruffian who fires at one from his olive-trees as if one were a fox or a stoat — —’
‘Of course he will not hurt her; he will either keep her in a convent to punish her, or, as he does not love convents, marry her at once to her boat-builder.’
Othmar did not say anything; he had heard Loswa’s narrative with regret.
‘Poor, brave little soul!’ he thought; ‘and it was I who told her that it was her duty not to conceal what she had done.’
‘A caprice may cost something sometimes you see, Madame,’ said Béthune with a smile to his hostess.
‘She may become a second Desclée yet,’ said Nadine. ‘Her grandfather will not be wise if he drive her to desperation. I am sorry he struck her: it was brutal.’
‘Perhaps we hurt her quite as much,’ said Othmar, which were the first words he had spoken on the subject.
His wife smiled.
‘I know that is your idée fixe. I do not agree with you. If she marry the shipwright she will now do it with her eyes open. It is always well to know what one is about.’
‘You have made it impossible for her to marry the shipwright.’
‘I really do not see why. Perhaps you mean your compliments or Paul’s music.’
‘Paul’s music, and other things. You showed her the world as Mephistopheles showed Faust youth in a mirror.’
‘Faust was, after all, Mephistopheles’ debtor.’
‘About that there may be two opinions.’
‘After all, she would not have been punished if she had not spoken.’
‘You must admire that at least. Courage is the only quality which you respect.’
‘I admire it, but it was not wise.’
‘What heroic thing ever is?’
He went away, leaving her presence with some irritation and some discontent. He knew that he had only said what was best for Damaris when he had counselled her to have no concealment from her grandfather; but the idea of the child’s having suffered through his advice, the thought of her taken from her sunny happy life amongst her orange-groves and honey-scented air, and all the gay fresh freedom of her seas, into some strange and unknown place — perhaps into some forced and joyless union — hurt him with almost a personal pain.
The wild rose had paid dearly for its one day in the hothouse.
‘Why could not Nadège let her alone?’ he thought angrily as he looked across the shining sea to the gold of the far distance, where westward the island which had sheltered the happy childhood of Damaris lay unseen.
CHAPTER XVI.
A few days later they left the coast for Amyôt and Paris. There was no
record left of their visit to Bonaventure save the rough sketch which Loris Loswa had made, and from which he still meant some time, when he should have leisure, to create a great picture. One day Othmar bought the sketch of him at one of those exaggerated prices which Loswa could command for any trifle which he had touched.
When his wife saw it hanging in his room in Paris she laughed.
‘You are determined,’ she said, ‘that I shall not forget my Desclée manquée.’
‘I do not think you were kind to her,’ said Othmar.
‘I did not intend to be unkind, certainly. She gave me an impression of force, of talent, of a future: the sketch suggests that. But no doubt she has married the shipwright by this time. Little girls begin by dreaming of Réné and Némorin, but they end in making the pot au feu for Jacques Bonhomme.’
‘I do not think she will ever marry the boat-builder. I told you that we made it impossible for her.’
‘I know you did; but then you have always des billevesées romanesques. The steward at St. Pharamond could tell you what has become of her.’
‘I have inquired. She has not returned to the island; her grandfather never speaks of her, and no one knows anything at all about her.’
Nadine smiled.
‘Ah! you have inquired already? I thought she impressed you very much.’
‘Not at all,’ said Othmar irritably, as he glanced at the sketch on which the sunshine was falling. ‘But I was sorry that any caprice of yours should have cost anyone so dear.’
‘Is that all? And you are sure she has not married her cousin?’
‘They say not. He is still living at St. Tropez.’
‘Then she must be shut up in some convent.’
‘Or dead.’
‘Oh no, my dear, she had too much life in her to die. Besides, her grandfather would have made her death known. I am sure she will live and have a history, probably such a history as Madame Tallien’s or as Madame Favart’s. She carries it in her countenance.’
‘Five fathoms of blue water were perhaps the better fate,’ said Othmar.
‘You are very poetic,’ said his wife with her unkindest smile. ‘I always thought you had a touch of genius yourself, only it never took speech or shape. You are a Dante born dumb.’
‘Then you should pity me indeed,’ said Othmar, with irritation.
He kept the sketch hanging in the room which he most often used at his house in Paris. It served to retain in his memory that night upon the sea when he had seen the figure of Damaris disappear in the moonlight, amidst the silver of the olive-trees, while the fragrance of the orange-scented air and the breath of the sweet-smelling narcissus were wafted to him from the island pastures out over the starlit waters.
‘You will end in falling in love with that picture,’ said his wife to him with much amusement. He was angered at the suggestion. His regret for Damaris was wholly impersonal.
‘We did her a cruel kindness,’ he thought sometimes when he glanced at it. ‘Wherever she be, and whatever she live to become, she will always carry a thorn in her heart, because she will always have the sentiment that she might have been something which she is not. It is the saddest idea that can pursue anyone through life. Perhaps she will marry the boat-builder and have a dozen children, but that will not prevent her sometimes, when she sees a fine sunset, or sits in the moonlight on the shore waiting for the sloop to come in, from being haunted by the thought that if things had gone otherwise she might have been in the great world. And then, just for that passing moment, while the ghost of that “might have been” is with her, she will hate the man who comes home in the sloop, and will not even care for the children who are shouting on the beach.’
CHAPTER XVII.
They were again at Amyôt in the golden August weather, when no place pleased its mistress better than the cool and stately palace set upon its shining waters and stone piles, with the deep forests of France drawn in an impenetrable screen of verdure around its majestic gardens. She had a constant succession of guests, and a kaleidoscopic infinitude of pastimes. Great singers came down and warbled by moonlight to replace the nightingales grown mute; great actors came down also and played on the stage which had been built and ornamented by Primaticcio; every kind of ingenuity in novelty and diversion was exercised for her by cunning intelligences and brilliant wits. The weeks of Amyôt were likely to become as celebrated in social history as the grandes nuits de Sceaux; everyone invited to them received the highest brevet of fashion that the world could give. Other people were immensely pleased and amused at Amyôt and at her other houses: she alone was not. Her intelligence asked too much; the whole world was dull and finite for her.
She had known the greatest triumphs, the highest heights of passion, the most voluptuous ecstasies, the most brilliant of successes, and they had all seemed to her rather tame, quickly exhausted. Faustina appeared to her as absurd, and commanded her sympathies as little, as Penelope.
Life’s little round is all too short for satisfaction in it; it is so soon over; it is so crowded and so transient; to have children who may do less ill or do less well than we, to pursue aims or ambitions which have no novelty in them and little wisdom, to love, to cease to love; to dream and die; this is the whole of it, and the sweetest of all things in it are its childhood which is ignorant that it is happy, and its passion which is no sooner made happy than it pales and falls.
‘If only life were like a play!’ she thought. ‘Any dramatist knows that in his last act his movement must be accelerated, and his incidents accumulated, till they culminate in a climax. But in life, on the contrary, everything waxes slower and slower, everything grows duller and duller, incidents become very scarce, and there is no dénouement at all — unless we call the priests with their holy oil, and the journey to the churchyard behind the mourning-coaches, a dénouement. But it cannot be called a climax: the going out of a spent lamp is not a climax.’
Her lamp was far from spent; and yet a sense of the dullness of life, generally, often came to her. She had everything she had ever wished for, and yet it left her with a vague sentiment of dissatisfaction.
‘I wonder if he is really contented,’ she thought sometimes doubtfully of Othmar. It seemed to her quite impossible he should be. Why should he be when she was not! And yet there was no one she would have liked better or so well.
The sameness of human nature irritated her. Surveying history, it seemed to her that character, like events, must have been much more varied in other times than hers; say in the Fronde, in the Crusades, in the time of the Italian Republics, even in the days of the Consulate, when all Europe was drunk with war like wine.
Nowadays people are always saying the same thing; entertainments resemble each other like peas; wherever the world gathers it takes its own monotony and tedium with it, and repeats itself with the dull perseverance of a cuckoo-clock.
She endeavoured to infuse some originality into her own society and her own pleasures; but she did not consider that she succeeded. People were too dull. Why was it? Nobody was dull in Charles the Second’s time, or in the days of Louis Quinze, or of Henri Quatre. At Amyôt, if anywhere, she succeeded, but, though her invitations to the house parties there were passionately coveted, and everyone else was so exceedingly delighted with them, the utmost she could ever say was that she had not been too greatly bored. Modern existence was not dramatic enough to please her.
‘And yet if it be ever dramatic you say it is melodramatic, and ridicule it as vieux jeu,’ said Othmar to her once.
‘No doubt I do; one is not happily obliged to be consistent,’ she replied. ‘We are too intellectual or too indifferent nowadays to have a Guise slaughtered in our antechamber, or an Orloff assassinated by our bedside, but the consequence is that life is dull. It is a journey in a wagon lit, one is half asleep all the time; it has no longer the picturesque incidents of a journey on horseback across moor and mountain, with the chance of meeting Malatesta or the Balafré en route.’
&nbs
p; ‘Yet men have died for you!’
‘Oh, my dear! they never did it with any picturesqueness at all! What picturesqueness can there be? A man falls in a duel; he is put in a cab with a doctor! A man kills himself with a revolver; there is again a doctor, and also, probably, a policeman!’
‘Which does not prevent the emotions which lead to those incidents from being as genuine as they used to be.’
‘I know that is your theory. It is not mine. The passions are nowadays all crusted with conventionality, like life. Look at ourselves, as I have said to you before.’
‘Well? What of ourselves?’
‘You and I think ourselves very original, but in reality we are the servants of conventionality. I told you so last winter. When we were free and had the world before us, we could think of nothing more original than to marry each other like Annette and Lubin, like John and Mary. We had no imagination. We thought we should do all sorts of fine things, but we have not done them. We have merely just dropped back into the routine of the world like all other people.’
‘I do not see what else we could have done,’ replied Othmar, somewhat feebly as he was aware.
‘What a conventional reply!’ she said impatiently. ‘That is just what I am saying. Neither of us had imagination, or perhaps courage, enough to strike out any new path, though we thought we were so much above other people. Both you and I have enough of originality to be dissatisfied with the world as it is, but we have not originality enough to create another one. People who have the perception which belongs to the poetic temperament, as you and I have, without its creative power, are greatly to be pitied. Both you and I have something of poetry — something of heroism — in us, but it never comes to anything. We remain in the world, and conform to it.’