by Ouida
The idle thoughts passed dreamily through his brain as he leaned over the coping of the bridge. He had stood there so long and so aimlessly that one of the street-guards came up to him with suspicion, but recognising him, went onward, leaving him undisturbed.
‘If I were that archimillionnaire,’ thought the man, ‘it would be the inside of Bignon’s that would have me at this hour, and not the outside of a bridge.’
That the man who can command all indulgence of the appetites may not care to so indulge them, always seems to the man who cannot command such indulgence the most inexplicable of mysteries. The poor man drinks all day long when he has a chance; he wonders why does the rich man only take a few glasses of claret when he could be drunk the whole year if he chose?
Othmar, unwitting of the guard’s commentary, continued to gaze down the river, repeating in his thoughts the Greek of Bion’s sonnet to Hesperus. He was wishing vaguely that he had had the gift of poetical expression; he knew that he thought as poets think, but nature had denied him the power of giving metrical utterance to them. He would sooner, he believed, on such moonlit nights as these, have been able to express what he felt, to portray what he fancied, than have had all the millions which fate had allotted to him. Even a second-rate poet can have such happiness in the fancies he plays with and the figures in which he shapes them on the empty paper. Othmar, from his earliest boyhood, had been haunted with all those imaginings which make the heaven of those who can lose themselves in them, and find complete clothing of eloquence for them. But they remained mute within him; they were rather painful than consoling to him; when he recalled passages of Shelley, of Musset, of Heine, of Leopardi, it seemed to him that the tongue in which they spoke was so familiar to him that it should have been his own, and yet he had forgotten it or could not learn it, in some way could never make it his.
‘You are a poète manqué. What a misfortune!’ his wife had said to him very often with good-humoured derision. But he himself knew that if he had had the poet’s faculty of rhythmical expression there would have been no force of circumstances which could have killed it in him. Why he loved music with so strong a passion was, that in it all he would fain have said was said for him.
‘If I were going home now,’ he thought, ‘to some dark old garret in some crowded cité des pauvres, and yet could write a ballad of the Seine on a summer night, so that all the world should listen — —’
It seemed to him that it would be infinitely more like happiness than to lend to kings, and baffle ministers, and strengthen cabinets, and give the sinews of war to nations, as he was able to do in that great white pile over in the town on the right, which was known to all Paris as the Maison d’Othmar. And yet what beautiful poems the world already possessed, and how seldom it cared to think of one of them!
Some bright-eyed scholar, some dreaming maiden, some sighing lover: was not this the sole public of the great singers, whose songs, bound in pomp and pride, lay unopened on the shelves of so many libraries?
‘And a second-rate singer,’ thought Othmar. ‘No, I would never have been that. The world, as it is, is cursed and suffocated with teeming mediocrity. If one cannot do greatly, let one do nothing.’
He turned with a sigh from the spectacle of the cloudless shining skies and of the windless shining waters, and went on his way over the bridge to return to his house in the Faubourg St. Germain. The clocks of Paris were striking the half-hour after twelve.
As he took out his cigar-case and lighted a fusee, a woman, held by the same guard who had lately passed him, was dragged by. She was silent and white with terror, but as she went she put out her hand to him in supplication. It seemed to him that he heard some faint bewildered words of appeal too low to be distinct. He threw his cigar aside, and followed and overtook them in three steps.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked the guardian of the streets. ‘What is she guilty of? Touch her more gently at the least.’
To a man of his habits and temperaments, roughness to any woman seemed a horrible unmanliness and offence. At the sound of his voice the face of the captive was turned to him quickly, and the light of one of the bridge lamps fell full upon it. Her lips parted to speak, but her breathing was fast and oppressed, and her voice failed her. Yet he recognised her in unspeakable amaze.
‘Damaris Bérarde!’ he exclaimed involuntarily. ‘Good heavens! What has happened to you? My poor child — —’
‘I do not know why the guard has taken me,’ she said feebly. She put her hand to her forehead and staggered a little, as if from faintness.
She did not understand why they had arrested her, and of what she was suspected. It was the old story which meets all hapless, lone young creatures who are in the streets after dark. The man had thought that he did his duty; she belonged to a sad sisterhood, and had no legal warrant, so he had believed. To her the charge had been unintelligible; she had only known that they were taking her to the nearest commissary of police, accused of some unknown crime.
‘Let her go at once,’ said Othmar to the guard. ‘I know her: I will be responsible for her. Good God, do you not see that she is ill?’
‘If Count Othmar know her — —’ said the man with a dubious smile, unwillingly taking his hand from his victim. Losing that support she wavered a moment like a young tree that is cut to the root, and then fell in a heap upon the stones of the bridge.
‘You have killed her!’ said Othmar as he stooped to her. ‘A country child in the brutality of Paris!’
‘She is not ill: she wants food; that is all,’ replied the police officer, assisting him with the respect which he felt for his riches.
‘They always fall like stones in that way when they are hungry,’ he added. ‘I am sorry, sir, but how was I to know? She was a stranger, and she had no permit.’
‘Call a fiacre,’ said Othmar.
Although past midnight, a little crowd had gathered, and was fast assembling with that passion for novelty which is as strong in Paris as it was in Alkibiades’ Athens. Most of them knew Othmar by sight.
‘To the hospital?’ asked the driver of the cab which approached.
‘No, to my house,’ answered Othmar, ‘the Boulevard St. Germain.’
He lifted her in himself, threw his card to the guard, and drove over the bridge with the girl’s inanimate form beside him.
The crowd laughed a little, cut some coarse jokes, and dispersed. It was a tame ending to its expectations. It would have preferred an assassination, or at least a suicide. The guard, sullen and aggrieved, carried Othmar’s card and his own deposition to the nearest commissary. He knew that he would be censured, but whether for taking her up, or for letting her go, he was not certain.
Meantime, the vehicle rocked and jolted on over the asphalte till it reached the patrician quarter. Damaris remained insensible, but her heart beat, though slowly and faintly.
He looked at her with curiosity and compassion. It was certainly she; the granddaughter of Jean Bérarde, the betrothed of Gros Louis; the same child that he himself had taken over the moonlit sea to her fragrant island. White as she was, and thin, and altered by evident suffering, she was still too young to be much changed. Her features were the same, though they were pallid and drawn, and in place of the brilliant colours born from the sea winds and the southerly suns, they had the dull pallor which comes from want of food and want of air. Her clothes were the same dark serge that she had worn at Bonaventure, but they were discoloured and ragged. Her hair had lost its lustre, and was rough and tangled; her hands were scarce more than bone; her bosom was scarce more than skin; all the lovely rounded contours and curves of a rich and well-nourished youth were gone. He saw that the guard had been right: she had no doubt fainted from hunger.
But how had she come adrift in Paris? she, the heiress of Bonaventure, so safe and so sheltered under the orange-boughs of her island?
Had that single drop of the wine of ‘the world’ which his wife had poured into her innocent breast been so develo
ped in remembrance and solitude that its consuming fever had left her no peace until she had plunged into the furnace and sunk beneath its flames? Heavens! how easy it was to influence to evil, how hard to sway to any better thing!
He looked at her with a compassion so tender and solemn that it left no place in him for any other feeling. She had no sex for him; she was only one of the world’s innumerable victims, swallowed up in the vast self-made shell which men call a city. To him, always surrounded by every luxury and comfort, there was something frightful in the thought that a young female thing could actually want bread in the very heart of crowded thoroughfares and human multitudes.
‘The very wolves are better than men and women,’ he thought. ‘The wolves at least always suffer together, and make their hunger a bond of closer union.’
He did not touch her; he shrank as far away from her as the space of the hired vehicle allowed him to do. It seemed to him a sort of violation to gaze at her thus in her helplessness, her poverty, her unconsciousness. She was as sacred to him as though she had been dead.
When the cab passed before the great gilded gates of his own residence, and the night porter opened them with wonder, Othmar descended, and paused, hesitating for a moment. He was in doubt what it would be best for her that he should do. Then he lifted her out of the fiacre himself, and crossed the court, bearing her in his arms.
‘Send for a doctor and awake some of the women,’ he said to the concierge as he paused at the foot of the staircase.
The lights were burning low. All such of the household as remained in Paris were in bed or out; the only person up, beside the porter, was his own body-servant, who, hearing his master’s step, came down the stairs to meet him. With a few words of explanation to this man Othmar, assisted by him, carried the girl into his own library, and laid her down on one of the broad leather couches. Then he took some cognac from a liqueur-case which was in one of the cabinets, and forced a few drops of it through her teeth.
In a few minutes the head women of the house, hastily roused, had hurried to his summons. He gave them a few directions, and left her to their care.
‘When she is sensible, you will tell me,’ he said to them, and went into an inner room. He was still pursued by that sense as of doing her some wrong, some dishonour, if he looked long at her in her unconsciousness.
The servants obeyed him without venturing on any question or comment, even among themselves. They were accustomed to strange things which their master did, and knew that human misery was title enough to his pity. When the physician joined them, he said at once what the guard of the streets had said: she was senseless from want of food.
‘By my examination of her’ he added to Othmar, ‘I am inclined to believe that no food has entered her body for twenty-four hours or more.’
‘Good God! How hideous!’ said Othmar.
It seemed to him as if it were some crime of his own. Not a crust of bread in all Paris to nourish this child? In Paris, where epicures spent a thousand francs on a single dish of Chinese soup, or Russian fish, or honey-fed Sicilian ortolans!
The sharp contrast of wealth and of want jarred on him with a dissonant harsh clangour. A child could die from want of a mouthful of food in a city teeming with human life — and Christianity had been the professed creed of Europe well-nigh two thousand years!
‘It is hideous!’ he repeated; while a profound emotion consumed him and oppressed his utterance.
The physician looked at him in surprise at his agitation.
‘You know her?’ he asked.
Othmar hesitated; then he told the little that he did know.
‘A year and a half ago,’ he added, ‘she was the boldest, brightest, happiest of young girls; the only heiress of a rich old man.’
‘Many things may happen in a year and a half,’ said the physician. ‘Were I you, I would send her now to the Ladies of Calvary; their refuge is open day and night to any such case as hers.’
‘So is my house,’ said Othmar coldly. Turn her out at such an hour as this! He would not have turned out a dog that had trusted and followed him.
‘He is always eccentric,’ thought the man of medicine, ‘and I dare say he goes for something in her misfortunes; he is confused and agitated.’
Aloud he said that he placed himself wholly at the disposition of Count Othmar. There was no immediate danger for the young girl; she had recovered consciousness in a measure, but she was dull and not clear of mind. He feared that, later on, fever or lung disease might be developed. He spoke long and learnedly with many scientific terms; his auditor heard him impatiently.
‘Shall I see her?’ he asked.
The other answered that this could be as he pleased.
Othmar hesitated a little while, then re-entered his library.
The electric light which illumined it bathed in its effulgence the poor dusky ill-clad form of Damaris, where it was stretched on the couch almost under the great statue of Andromache, sculptured by Mercier. Her clothes were rough, even ragged; her feet were clad in coarsest stockings of hemp; her whole figure was expressive of extreme poverty, that ugly and cruel thing which would blanch the cheeks of Aphrodite or Helen; and yet on her face, as the light fell on her where her head rested on the purple leather of the cushions, there was a great loveliness, though wan and dulled and fevered. The features had a sculpture-like repose, and the tumbled hair, though lustreless, was rich and of fine colour; her eyelids were closed; her mouth was half open, as if with pain or thirst.
Hung by a little piece of shabby ribbon from her throat he saw a small gold object. He was touched to the heart when he recognised in it the little maritime compass which he had begged her to keep in memory of their moonlit sail together.
She had nearly lost her life from hunger, yet she had not sold this little jewel! Why? Because she had always regarded it as his, or because the memory of that moonlit voyage in the open boat was pleasant to her. A flush of feeling passed over his face as he thought so; and remembered his wife. What two romantic simpletons both he and this poor child would seem to her, could she know the fidelity with which the little gift had been kept, and the emotion with which he regarded it!
‘Une sensitive, indeed!’ he thought with emotion, recalling that epithet which his wife had contemptuously bestowed on her. A soul how little fitted for the rude realities and cruel egotisms of the world!
As he drew near, her eyes slowly opened and looked at him with a dreamy, heavy, half-conscious look.
‘Do you know me?’ he said gently.
She made a sign of assent.
Othmar took one of her hands in his. A great emotion stirred in him; he had always the vision of the child beside whom he had sailed across the moonlit sea, with the sweet fragrance of the orange-groves coming to them through the shadows and the stillness of the night.
‘Lie still and rest, my dear,’ he said to her. ‘You are safe, and I am your friend. Can you understand me? Good-night. To-morrow we will talk together.’
She looked at him with comprehension and with gratitude; two large tears gathered in her eyes and fell slowly down her cheeks. She had no power to speak.
When the morrow came she was lying insensible on a bed in one of the largest chambers of the house, a room of which the window’s looked out upon the green sward and tall fountains and stately trees of the gardens, and where scarcely any sound from the streets around could penetrate. Exposure and hunger had brought on pleurisy; Sisters of Charity had been sent for to attend her, and all the resources of modern science were called to her assistance. Had she been a young sovereign of a great country she could not have been better ministered to or more carefully assisted through the darkness and peril of sickness.
‘Spare nothing,’ said Othmar to his physicians, careless of what evil construction might be placed upon his generosity.
He was obeyed with that complete and eager obedience which is one of the treasures rich men can command, and which may somewhat atone to them for the
subserviency and fulsomeness of mankind.
CHAPTER XXI.
Othmar went from her chamber to that of his uncle, lying dumb, unconscious, almost inanimate in his little hotel in the Rue de Traktir, all the innumerable wires which connected that little house with the Bourses of many nations only serving now to bear north, south, east, west, the words so momentous to the ear of financial Europe:
‘Le Baron Friedrich se meurt.’
Many there were who trembled at these few words; more who rejoiced to know that the keen eyes were closed, the subtle brain paralysed, the powerful mind swamped in a flood of darkness. He had millions of enemies, thousands of sycophants, few friends; crowds came about his door to know how near he was to death, but it was of the share list and the money market that they thought: how would his loss affect this scheme, those actions, these banks, that syndicate?
‘Heaven and earth!’ thought his nephew, ‘all this excitement, this outcry, this anxiety, and amongst it all not one single honest thought of regret for the man who lies dying!’
If in love we only give what we possess and can do no more, so in life we receive that which we desire. Friedrich Othmar had wished for success, for power, for the means to paralyse nations, inspire wars, control governments, purchase and influence humanity. He had had his wish; but now that he lay dying these thing left him poor.
Men who had eaten his admirable dinners through a score of seasons, said in their clubs: ‘Le vieux farceur! est-ce vrai qu’il crève?’ and women who had fitted up their costly villas and adorned their worthless persons at his cost hurried to his rooms and took away these jewels, those enamels, that aquarelle, this medallion, whatever they could lay their hands on, screaming ‘C’est à moi! c’est à moi! c’est à moi!’
Othmar when he had arrived there, on the first intelligence of his uncle’s attack of hemiplegia, had found the house already sacked as though an invading army had passed through the apartments; ‘ces dames ont pincé par ci et par là,’ said the servants, not confessing their own collusion, with apology. Hardly anything of value that was portable had been left in it; they had all robbed this poor, senseless, fallen monarch as they would.