by Ouida
At the present moment she was carrying her graceful person and her unchangeable ennui to the various great houses which she deigned to honour; imperial hunting châlets, royal riverain castles, noble summer palaces set on mountain side, in forest shadows, or on broad historic streams. She did not deem it necessary to go into retreat because her old enemy was dead. She telegraphed her condolence to Othmar, and thought that enough; she had some exquisite costumes made en demi-deuil, wore no jewels except pearls, and had no bouquets save white ones. So much was concession enough to the usages of the world at such moments; Friedrich Othmar himself would not have expected more.
Yet a vague regret, which was sincere, had touched her on receiving the telegram which announced his death. She had respected his intellect and his wit; she had even rather liked him for his stubborn and uncompromising hatred of herself.
When the world was so flat and so tame, and human nature so monotonous, anyone with character enough to hate unchangeably was to her interesting.
And her own intelligence had enabled her to measure and appreciate all the worth of his counsels and of his presence in the Maison d’Othmar. She had an idea that her husband, now that he would be uncontrolled, would drive the chariot of his fortunes in some such disastrous manner as Phaeton, only not from Phaeton’s ambition, but from contempt and discontent. ‘Only there is the child, happily there is the child,’ she thought; a little fair-haired, happy boy then playing on the sands of the northern seas, scarcely more than a baby; but, possibly, link enough with the future of the world to make a sentimentalist like his father refrain from ruining his heritage. ‘A quelque chose faiblesse est bonne,’ she reflected with a compassionate smile.
She was at that time at Tsarkoë Selo.
She did not love the Imperial Court, nor did the Imperial Court love her; but they made bonne mine to one another for many potent reasons, and as matter of wise diplomacy on both sides. She was a woman whom even sovereigns cared not to offend, for her delicate and merciless raillery could pierce through robes of ermine and cuirass of gold, whilst she could sway her husband as she chose in any question of politics or public life. On her side she, for the sake of Napraxine’s sons, desired always to retain her influence with and to remain a persona grata to the rulers of her country. She was not given to moods of remorse or of penitence, but sometimes her conscience smote her for her treatment throughout their life together of Platon Napraxine, and as a kind of atonement to him she studied the social advantages and future welfare of his children with a care which was perhaps of more real use to them than the effusions of maternal sentiment would ever have been. She disliked their personal presence at all times, but she never neglected their material interests.
There was something also in Russia which pleased her temperament, something which no other land could quite afford her. The vassalage and submission of the people gave her a sense of absolute dominion, more entire than any she could feel elsewhere. The intense and sharp contrasts of life which were there, the supreme culture beside the dense ignorance, the hothouse beside the isba, the orchid beside the icicle, stimulated her surfeited taste and moved her languid imagination. Though belief was not her weakness usually, yet she believed in the future of Russia. She would have liked to be herself upon the throne of Catherine, and to stretch her sceptre till it touched the Indian Ocean and the Yellow Sea.
She did not offer to return to him when Othmar notified the death of his uncle, and his own detention by various affairs in Paris. She wrote to him to join her wherever she might be whenever he should have leisure, and did not display any impatience that this should be soon. She liked his companionship — when he did not weary her by any ‘madrigals,’ or irritate her by any sentimental enthusiasms with which she could feel no agreement. She was never disposed to wish him away when he was beside her, or failed to admit that the resources of his intellect, and the sympathetic quality of his character, made him always agreeable. But as she had said to him, with her usual candour, she knew all about him; his character was a volume she had read through, he had ceased to possess that charm of novelty which goes for so much in the power which one life possesses to interest another; he would never again make her pulse beat a throb the quicker, if indeed he had ever done so. She bore his absence with an equanimity so philosophic that to him it appeared indistinguishable from indifference.
More than once when he was on the point of taking up his pen and writing to her of the circumstances which had brought her future Desclée beneath his roof, he was stopped by the sheer nervous apprehension of ridicule which paralyses delicate minds, and that sense that his communication would be supremely uninteresting to her, which is sufficient to make a proud and sensitive temperament refrain from any confidence. She would inevitably laugh at him as a Bayard of the boulevards, as a Sir Galahad of the asphalte, even if she took the trouble to read the narrative to its end — which was most doubtful. He decided to wait to tell it to her till he saw her: till he found her some day in a gentle and sympathetic mood. Besides, with whatever indifference and raillery she might view it, his knowledge of women told him that, nevertheless, his protection of Damaris Bérarde might not seem to her the mere inevitable and innocent thing that it really was.
At all times he wrote but rarely to her. He had too often seen her throw aside hastily, or only half read, perhaps not read at all, the letters of the cleverest and most preferred of her friends, for him to believe that his own letters would be likely to be rewarded with much closer attention. The delighted welcome which a woman gives to the writing of one she cares for, the eagerness and frequency with which it is studied and searched for all its expressions of tenderness, and all its more hidden meaning, was altogether impossible to the Lady of Amyôt. Spoken love interested her so slightly that written love could not possibly hope to charm her. People were tiresome enough in speech; what could be expected of them when they wrote? He would have read anything she might have written with keenest interest, with warmest reception, but he did not dare to suppose that she would have much patience if he wearied her on paper. When they were apart, therefore, they telegraphed often to one another, but they wrote to each other seldom. Telegrams were to her agreeable, because they were as little of an ennui as any communication can possibly be.
In an early time Othmar, absent from her, had been given to pour out his feelings in ardent expression, and even offer her those delicate flowers of sentiment which always dwell shyly hidden in every deep and affectionate temperament. But one day she had written back to him a cruel little word. She had said: ‘You are Obermann and Amiel; do you really think life is either long enough or interesting enough to be worth so very much sentimental speculation?’
It was only her irresistible and incurable poco-curantism which dictated the lines, but they mortified and chilled him. He dreaded, with something that was actually apprehension, her ridicule or her irony. He knew well that to weary her was to lose her favour. From that day he had never written to her a syllable of the feelings and reflections of his inmost thoughts.
‘She has never really loved me,’ he had said to himself bitterly, of the woman on whom he had spent the great passion of his life.
Therefore it became easy to him to say nothing of the presence of Damaris in his house in Paris.
‘I shall tell her when I meet her, and she will not even listen to it, most probably,’ he said to himself. It would entirely depend upon the mood in which he might find her, whether the part which he had himself played would seem to her utterly absurd or partly worthy of sympathy.
‘If only Melville were in Europe!’ he thought very often. But Melville was in China, using his persuasive eloquence and Churchman’s tact to obtain Celestial concessions and protection to the Jesuit missions in the Flowery Land. Melville had written to him: ‘I walk amongst the ruined palaces and desolated gardens which the Allies defiled in 1860, and endeavour to believe that it is we who are the civilised and the Chinese who are the barbaric people, but I fail.
Shall we ever be apostles of light whilst our coming is proclaimed with musketry, and our path strewn before us with charred ruins? It was a strange way of teaching enlightenment to destroy in a day treasures of beauty and of art which all the world together could not reproduce again.’
Melville was taking his scholarly thought and his courtly smile through the flowering ways and over the marble bridges of the Summer Palace, believing, if he thought of her at all, that the child he had baptized and taught was safe in her island home amongst the flowering orange-trees, steering through the blue water at her will, and going in peace and quietude to the churches on the shore.
CHAPTER XXIII.
In the morning he was detained by many matters of importance, and it was towards evening when he at length found leisure to visit his guest. He felt a certain hesitation and delicacy in entering her presence. He was conscious that he had done so much for her that, on her side, she could not meet him without some embarrassment, some pain.
He had seen her but twice; he was no more to her than a name. Yet he had known her in her island life: he thought that tie of memory would make him seem to her less of a stranger than any of these white-coifed pious women who changed places in vigil at her bedside. And a wonder which was warmer and wider than mere curiosity made him anxious to learn how she could have become alone and adrift in Paris, she whose life had been so safe and so sweet and so simple in the midst of the blue water and the flashing sunbeams, and free from spot or stain as the white narcissus growing in the orchard grass, as the white wings of the pigeons cleaving the azure air.
When he entered her chamber she was lying on a couch beside the open window; one of the Sisters was sitting near her doing some needlework. She flushed over all her face as she saw him, and she put out her hand timidly. Othmar bent over it and touched it with his lips in silence. Emotion held them both mute. The nun looked inquisitively at them.
Damaris was still weak, and pale, and changed, but there was the look of fast returning health about her. She was thin still, but no longer emaciated; her lips had regained a little of their damask-rose colour, her hair which had been cut short was bright and shining; she wore a loose plain linen gown which the women had made for her, and her arms were bare to the elbow; the afternoon was close and sultry, and she seemed to breathe with effort.
‘I am so glad to see you so nearly well, my dear, and my wife will be no less glad to hear of your recovery,’ said Othmar, as he recovered his self-possession. It was a subterfuge, in a way an untruth; but he used his wife’s name almost involuntarily, as the only possible way of reconciling this child to her presence in his house.
‘You have been very good,’ said Damaris simply. Her words seemed poor and thankless, but she could think of no better ones. She was still bewildered at her own position, and wounded in her tenderest pride by the charity she had received. She was not ungrateful, but now that she saw him face to face, she would have given her soul that he had let her die on the stones of Paris.
‘Where did you find me?’ she added, ‘I cannot remember — at least not everything.’
‘You were taken unwell on the Solferino bridge,’ said Othmar evasively. ‘Do not think about that. You are safe here, and all my house is at your service; it is yours whilst you are in it, as the Spaniards say.’
He spoke a little hurriedly; he felt the embarrassment which every generous nature feels before one whom it has benefited.
The red blood came quickly and painfully over her face and throat.
‘I do remember now,’ she said. ‘They were going to take me to prison. Can they do that when one has done no harm?’
‘The guard thought you looked ill, and were too young to be alone at night,’ Othmar answered, evasively still. He wished to learn something of her position, but he would not even hint any question to her. She should say what she chose in her own time and way.
‘I do not mind being alone,’ she replied, with something of the old pride and independence which Loswa had admired in her. ‘I was weak because I had not eaten.’
She stopped abruptly, and grew scarlet.
It seemed very shameful to her to have been without food. She had always despised the poor crawling beggars whom she had seen on the mainland, even whilst she had given them all the loose coin in her pocket. ‘Only the lazy and the idle ever starve,’ her grandfather had often said to her, in the hardness of heart of a man full of energies and riches; and she had believed him. And now she had starved, she herself, and it seemed to her pitiful, miserable, hateful, a very brand for ever of disgrace.
‘Do not think of it,’ said Othmar kindly, as he took her hand in his.
‘I shall think of it all my life!’ she said bitterly, whilst the intensity of the tone told him that it was no mere empty phrase. She turned her face from him and looked steadfastly out into the green spaces and pleasant shadows of the gardens below, whilst her young features grew cold and stern, and full of repressed pain. Then all at once her head drooped on her breast, and she burst into a passion of tears.
‘Oh, why did you not let me die!’ she cried in reproach to him. ‘Why did you not let me die when I was dying? I should have known nothing now!’
‘That is thankless and sinful,’ muttered the nun. ‘Thankless and sinful to heaven and to earth.’
‘Hush!’ said Othmar to the Sister with a frown; he was troubled and distressed by the child’s passionate rebuke. He hated at all times to see the sorrow of a woman, and he was too ignorant of her circumstances to know how to console her. He could not have told why, but a memory of Yseulte passed over his mind; a memory which rarely ever rose at any time before his thoughts. Nothing could be more unlike her than this sea-born, impetuous, daring child; yet he remembered her as he saw Damaris weep. How many tears had the dead girl wept for him! how often had her young eyes looked wistful and sorrowful out on these green gardens, on these towering trees, on these distant and gilded domes of Paris!
The nun cast angry glances at him, and began to tell her beads.
Othmar remained silent till the first force of grief had a little spent itself. Then he said the first consoling words which occurred to him, without remembering all to which they might commit him in the future.
‘My dear child, do not talk of death. Death and youth are horrible in the same phrase. Your life is scarcely begun, why should you wish it away? If you have no other friends than ourselves, do not deem yourself friendless. We will supply the place of others to you. You will remember the interest which my wife took in you at St. Pharamond. Believe me, it will be only strengthened by any sorrow or misfortune you may have had since we saw you then.’
She looked at him, strongly grateful, yet hurt and ashamed.
‘It is charity,’ she said, in a low tone. All the pride of her indomitable childhood was in the word.
‘I do not like the expression,’ he replied. ‘You will pain me if you use it. I should be a cur if I had not done the little that I have done, for you would certainly,’ he added more gaily, ‘have done as much for me if I had been wrecked off Bonaventure.’
She sighed wearily. No kindness of speech could reconcile her to the burden of debt which she felt laid on her. She knew she was all alone in the world and homeless, except so far as this stranger’s home was momentarily hers, and she shrank with horror from the memory of all she must have owed to him during these weeks of sickness and semi-consciousness.
He saw the pain and humiliation there were in her, and rose to leave her in peace.
‘I will return whenever you wish me, my dear,’ he said, as he laid his hand on hers. ‘For the rest, look on my house as yours.’
She hesitated.
‘Wait,’ she said faintly, ‘I have so much I ought to tell you.’
‘You can tell me in your own time. I shall not leave Paris, at least only for a day or so at a time. My uncle died a few weeks ago, and many affairs in consequence keep me here. Adieu, my dear: rest and recover. That is all you have to do now.�
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‘But I have no right to be in your house, and you know that the lady despised me!’ she murmured with a painful agitation, which said, without more words, how cruel a dilemma it seemed to her in which her weakness and her helplessness had placed her.
‘You have every right,’ said Othmar. ‘And she would be the first to say so. Do not hurt me by taking this kindly chance which made us meet as a burden or an injury. I have often thought of you since we parted that night upon your island beach, and always with a deep regret that my wife had so fatally influenced your life. Will you not believe how glad I am to be able to do you any little service to help efface that wrong?’
He kissed in grave farewell her wasted hand, once so plump and brown with youth and health, and the bronze from the sun and the sea, and now so pale and fleshless.
She looked at him and stopped him with something of her old pride and spirit in her face, as she said a little abruptly:
‘You remember you told me it would be mean not to tell him where I had been that day?’
‘Yes, my poor child. I remember.’
‘I did tell him.’
‘That was very brave of you and very noble. I fear my advice cost you dear.’
A smile that was almost happy at his praise parted her lips and showed her small white teeth.
‘You told me what was right,’ she said. ‘It would have been cowardly to say nothing.’