by Ouida
‘In what little things,’ thought Othmar as he listened, ‘a high and generous nature shows itself, quite unwitting how it innocently displays its own fine instincts!’
‘Did you not tell him of your wrongs then?’ he asked aloud.
‘Oh no: not when my grandfather was dead and could not defend himself! To me it was the end of all hope. I had hoped that one day I should go home. I had always thought he would relent and seek me out; it made me miserable to think that he should have said such cruel words to me for the last words, and he had certainly been good to me, very good in his way. He could not be very gentle, it was not in him; but he had been generous to me, and sometimes kind and quite proud of me too. I was very sorry, because when a person is dead, you know, one only remembers what was good in them, and one wants so much to say so many, many things to them; but now I knew that this could never be, and I was very wretched. The pedlar had said that everything was given to my cousin, but the people I was with would not believe it. They got a letter written to my cousin, and asked for my share (unknown to me; I would not have let them do it had I known). Louis Roze wrote back to them that I inherited nothing under the will, and had no legal claim to insist on any division of the property; he said he was about to marry a young woman of St. Tropez, and he sent me a bank note for a thousand francs. I sealed it up and sent it back to him. You know he knew that all the island would have been mine. I care nothing for the money, but I love the island; I love every stick and stone upon it, every shell on its sand, every wave that breaks on its rocks!’
‘You shall have your island again, if money can buy it!’ thought Othmar, with one of those heedless impulses of generosity which had more than once cost him dear.
‘I was so unhappy to think my grandfather was dead, and dead with rage in his heart against me, that for weeks I could do nothing,’ she pursued, while the tears rolled off her lashes. ‘But then I felt that there was no one on earth to do anything for me if I did not do it for myself, and I worked hard to get together money enough to take me to Paris, and keep me there a little while. They all said that life there was very dear, and money ran like water. You see I was always thinking of what your Lady had said, about my having some talent in me. I thought of it all day long as I worked in the rose-fields and among the great thickets of jessamine. Your Lady had said that I might be great some day, and it is always to Paris that people go who wish to be great, at least all the books say so. Watteau went, and Molière, and Rousseau, and Napoleon, and ever so many others — —’
‘Ah, poison of the world!’ thought Othmar. ‘What cruelty we did! She would have stayed on her island and been the mother of little brown children, and known nothing of the world but its fresh honest sea and its frank, bold winds! What a pity! What a pity! The rattlesnake is kinder than such dreams of fame!’
He was sorry and troubled, and angered against his wife, who had cast the stone of worldly desire into the limpid, calm waters of this young child’s thoughts.
He was unspeakably saddened by the vision of her, coming northward over the sandy roads of Provence, with so much hope and fancy in her heart, only to drop sick with hunger upon the stones of Paris — Paris, so fair a mistress to the rich, so hard a stepmother to the poor. Gilbert, and Hégésippe Moreau, and Meryon, and how many others, had traversed that path before her, only to perish in the hospital or the garret, mad or famished, clutching at the bough of laurel, obtaining only the hemlock of death!
‘So I determined to leave St. Dalmas,’ she continued, ‘and walk all the way to Grasse when the March weather came. On the roads I assure you I did quite well. People were very kind whilst I was in my own country, as it were. At the bastides and the cottages they let me sleep well and gave me food, and let me do work in return. I know how to do many things that are of use on the farms, but of no use at all in Paris. So little by little I did get to Grasse, and there one of the women who knew my Brigasque friends gave me welcome, because some of them had given me a letter to her asking her to be kind. But I shall weary you; I will try to tell the rest shortly. I could have stayed on at Grasse as long as I would, but I wanted to get to Paris; above all, now that my grandfather was dead, there was nothing to keep me in my own country; no one wanted me or sought for me. They had paid me a little for what I did in the Brigasque country, and I saved up all of it, and when I had enough to pay for the railway to take me there (it is very dear indeed), I bade them farewell and took the train to Paris. I had never travelled by land before, only on the dear sea. It is horrible to have all that fire in that great iron pot swinging one to and fro, while it yells and bellows through the heat and the air that is not like air at all but only so much smoke. How Fénelon would have hated it; it would have seemed to him like hell! Why do men travel in such a way when there are the tree-shadowed roads and the rivers? I had taken my passage (do they call it so?) straightway to Paris, and there were many changes and many pauses and great confusion, and the noise and the heat and the strangeness made me feel unwell. I had never felt ill before, that I remember. It was a very great many hours, even days I think, before we reached Paris; it was night, and it was raining; nothing was at all like what I had pictured it. There were crowds and crowds of people, but no one noticed me. I felt lonely, and I missed the sea and the sweet fresh smell that is anywhere where the country is. Here the air felt so thick and so greasy, and the rain had no pleasantness in it; it was not clean and fragrant, as it is when it scours over the fields or patters through the orange-leaves at home. As I came out of the station a young man looked into my face and was insolent. I struck him a blow on his cheek with all my might; I hurt him; the people wanted to seize me, but I was quicker than they, and I ran, and ran, and ran until I outstripped them, and then I was in a narrow, dark street, and sat down on a doorstep and wondered where I ought to go. I had only three gold pieces with me in a belt round my waist, and I knew they would not last long. I had spent almost as much as that for the train and in food at the places the train waited at; the food was very dear and very bad, even the bread.
‘Some women went by and spoke to me, but I did not like their words, and I answered nothing, but got up and looked about me for a place to sleep in. I was wet through, for it rained a great deal. I saw a little place which seemed like a restaurant, and I went in and asked if I could have a room there. They gave me one, a very little one, and not clean, and I went to bed without eating, being afraid to spend the little I had.
‘When I got up in the morning and went to pay for my chamber and supper, I found that I had no money at all. My belt was gone. I suppose I had been so sound asleep that I never heard them come into my room and take it. I always think it was the woman of the house who stole it, because I had shown her the napoleons. She raved and abused me when I told her my money had been stolen, and said her house had always been honest. She denied that she had ever seen the belt, and swore that I should pay for all I had or go to prison. I told her that it was she was the thief, not I. I threw her my little gold cross to pay her, and went out of her house into the streets. I think she was a wicked woman.’
‘Wicked, indeed,’ said Othmar, whilst he thought, ‘it is heaven’s mercy that she did not do worse to you.’
He, by whom all the hideous vice of the great city was known, all its grasping greed, its hunger for gold, its remorseless seizure of all ignorance, and innocence, and pleasant rural things, and virgin beauty of the body and the mind, knew that by a miracle scarce less than that which in legend bears the royal saint of Alsace unharmed through the flames had this child escaped pollution in the heart of Paris. Corruption had been all around her, and the morass of iniquity upon every side; her own sex were for ever on the watch for such as she, to sell their youth into the slavery of the brothel, and she had known no more the peril which she ran than the wild dove does when its flying shadow passes over the trap hung below it in the oak-boughs.
‘I asked in a great many places for such work as I knew how to do, but nobody wanted a
ny of it done. There seemed such numbers of people everywhere clutching at every little bit of work. Many laughed at me: I saw my clothes were different to what they wore in Paris, and my accent was different too to theirs. But they were cruel to laugh. I went to the theatres and tried to see the directors, but no one of them would even see me. All these days I lived on the little money I had gained by selling my great cloak: it was such warm weather I did not want it. I had made acquaintance with a good woman who was very poor herself, but she told me what to do and where to go, and let me sleep in her one little attic; she had three children, quite little ones, and she worked in a match factory. She lives in a little passage up at Montmartre. Of course I had to make her think I ate all I wanted out of doors or she would have robbed herself for me, poor though she was. I had a friend in her, but when I had been with her three weeks, there was a noisy mob which assembled near, and screamed for bread, and broke open the bakers’ shops and stole the loaves. She was coming home from the factory, and was arrested as one of the rioters, though I am sure she had been merely passing down the street, and the little children had no one but me for a little while. I did what I could for them until their grandmother came up from some village outside the barrier and took them away, and I missed them very much.
‘I would rather not talk about the days that came after that dreadful morning,’ she pursued, the wavering colour fading wholly from her face, for the recollection of them was unbearable to her. ‘It is only three months ago since I came to Paris, but it seems as if it were years. I saw and heard things that I could never tell anyone, they were so horrible. I sold all I had of clothes, it was very little. I lived as I could, I was very hungry all the time, but I did not mind that so much as I minded the squalor, the noise, the crowds, the filthy smells, the horrible language. I tried to get work, but I could not. I went to the theatre doors, but the porters would not let me in. I did not know what to do; even my linen was sold. I sold even my shoes, and people give you so little when they know that you want much. I could not get any work of any kind. I was of use on my island, but not here; and the men jeered at me and were rude — and — and — there is nothing more to tell that I know. I could make no money at all, and so of late I could get no food, and the night I fell down on the bridge I was faint and very unhappy, for they had turned me out of the woman’s room because she did not come back, and I had no money to pay for keeping it. But that is enough about me. I met you on the bridge. You know the rest. I had not eaten anything all the day, I suppose that was why I fainted. I never fainted in my life before. It is only three months since I left Grasse, but it seems so many years — so many years! Is this the world indeed that the Comtesse Othmar spoke of? Surely it cannot be — it is cruel, it is hideous, it is hateful — if I could only see the sea or the country once more! You have been very good to me. I pray you to help me to gain my own living somehow, only not in this city — pray not here! I am stifled in it. I want the air. Pray help me!’
Othmar was silent from emotion. It seemed unutterably cruel to him that this child should have been led into such perils, such pain, such want, by one careless word of his wife’s, and he, who all his life long had had about him everything that luxury can invent and comfort demand shuddered at the thought of her suffering and her exposure, as though he had seen his own little daughter naked and shivering in the snows and the winds of a winter’s night.
When he left her presence that day he could think of nothing but her piteous story. The heroic courage of the young girl, the noble qualities she had all unconsciously revealed in the course of its narration, the utter friendlessness of her position, and the fearless frankness of her confidence in himself, all touched his heart closely. It seemed horrible to him that any woman-child should suffer so much and be surrounded with such cruel perils. Those days in Paris had done the work of years upon this innocent creature, who had before only known the freshness of sea and shore, the safety of a sheltered youth, the dauntless gaiety of a buoyant and unchecked spirit; but he saw that all through it, through all its miseries and all its temptations, she had kept her soul unhurt. He dared not ask her how she had done so, but he knew that she had defended herself safely from all foul contact, and again it seemed to him a miracle great as that which guides the swallow over desert and ocean back to its last year’s nest.
CHAPTER XXV.
Othmar was naturally of a tender and even enthusiastic nature. His sympathies were warm and spontaneous, his imagination was strong and governed his reason very often. There was much in the circumstances of this poor child which appealed both to tenderness and imagination, and he was haunted by her swift mellow voice, with its meridional intonations, her great dark luminous eyes filling with sudden tears as she remembered her island home.
He felt that they owed her a debt. They had robbed her of her birthright of simple joys and honest, obscure, healthful ways of life. They could never again make her what they had found her. Who can put back the gathered rosebud on the rose-bough?
They had a right to give her what they could give in lieu of all which she had lost, indirectly but indisputably, through their means. His conscience, as well as his common sense, told him that as his wife had been the chief offender against the child’s peace, so she had the first right to know the results of her interference, and amend them. But he had the moral timidity of proud, reticent, and sensitive natures: he dreaded her irony and her indifference. He could not tell what she would say or do; possibly in the end something which he would approve; but he knew that first of all she would ridicule him: with her lips certainly, very likely even in her thoughts. Even when he had been her lover she had always laughed at him for taking life so seriously, for being Ruy Blas and Rolla rather than Sir Harry Wildair. And even if she were moved to any kindness, how likely would her languid, haughty footsteps tread hurtfully, without knowing or heeding it, on the storm-tossed wild flower? She could be exquisitely kind, magnificently generous; none more so: but was it not, alas! only while her mood to be so lasted?
‘I will tell her — later,’ he said, with that temporising before difficulty which many a man, bold and even rash in his dealings with his fellow-men, is apt to adopt when he deals with women.
Meanwhile, something had to be done at once, he knew, to reconcile Damaris to her dependence upon himself. He knew she was of the temper which would break loose from the safest shelter and rush to the direst danger if she deemed herself humiliated by assistance. In all her grace of youth and helplessness of circumstance, there was still something warm, strong, untameable in her, which he felt as the hand which holds a bird will feel its wings stir and tremble ready to fly. It would, he knew, be hard to aid her. It would have to be done in her own despite.
A thought occurred to him; one of those spontaneous ideas which come to us like very angels, and which, in after years, seem rather born of hell than heaven. On it he spoke to her the next day.
‘Tell me, my dear — your grandfather died after you had left the island some months? Well, did you never hear any details of his death or of his will? You know only what the pedlar said?’
‘Only that.’
‘Then I think you should know more. He may have repented him of his cruelty, or he may have made some sort of bequest to you, even if the bulk of what he had has gone to your cousin. My people there could soon inquire. Will you allow me to do that?’
‘If you wish. But I am certain he left me nothing — never thought of me. You did not know him: once he had put any person out of his heart, it was to him as if they never had lived at all. He was very hard, and he never by any chance forgave. Beside — he told me — I had no claim on him, was nothing to him.’
‘Legally. But sixteen years of life spent beside him could scarcely pass utterly out of his memory. If he had left you anything, it is possible your cousin was not honest enough to say so. I will inquire at any rate. It will be more satisfaction to you to know more definite tidings than the hawker could possibly give you.’
‘You shall hear. Raphael, I have no doubt, will be as glad to hear of you. Meanwhile be sure that both my wife and I should be unhappy if you fled away from our roof out into the world again. The world is not a kind place or a safe place, my dear, for those who are young and motherless.’
‘But I must do something,’ she repeated feverishly. ‘I must do something. I cannot live on your charity. I would die sooner!’
‘I tell you I do not like the word of “charity,”’ said Othmar. ‘When people have all a common misfortune, they have as it were a common tie. We have all the misfortune, the supreme misfortune, of human life.’
Even absorbed as she was in her own great straits and needs, Damaris was astonished at such words from one who, it seemed to her, was at the very summit of all earthly happiness.
‘If he be not content, who can be?’ she thought.
‘It is a tie,’ continued he, unconscious of her surprise, ‘which binds us all together. No one is so fortunate that he may not live to want aid and pity. It is not so very many years ago, as the lives of nations count, that here in Paris a king and queen became so friendless that none dare say a kind adieu to them as they went to their deaths upon the scaffold. Compared to Marie Antoinette, how rich you are! You have youth, talents, friends, and all your future.’
‘I have no friends,’ said Damaris, with a gloomy rejection of all solace.
‘You have one at least,’ said Othmar. ‘You are a little in love with sorrow, my dear; all imaginative youth is so. When we have really had its actuality with us for awhile, we get to hate it bitterly, and do all we can to forget its presence.’