by Ouida
‘I believe he is in love with the girl,’ he added to his wife, ‘and wants to get the island for her. We might make a rare bargain if it were so; but those men of Aix are too cautious to let out who is behind them.’
‘Roze,’ the wife said, ‘you are a simpleton. There is no love in the business. They know of some value in the island that we do not; that is why they want to buy. Because you are for ever hankering yourself after that great-eyed, long-limbed child, you think every other man is just a fool the same.’
And Louis Roze, whose temper was cowed by the fiercer sharper temper of his bride, gave in to her argument, and remained so stubborn that the agents from Aix could come to no terms with him.
Inspired by the idea of buried treasures or possible ore in the rocks, he began to neglect his own affairs at St. Tropez and elsewhere, and dig and delve himself in the soil, and hack at the stone face of the cliffs with a pickaxe. The chimera of a fantastic hope entered into him and gave him no peace; he was ready to ruin all the fair fruits of the surface, and all the artificial soil brought there at such labour in the previous century, for the sake of this imaginary wealth, hidden in the bowels of the isle.
Meantime the men of Aix informed Othmar that it was not possible to induce the proprietor to part with Bonaventure, and ventured to hint that the property was not worth one-half or one-quarter of what he had been willing to spend on its purchase.
‘That may be,’ he said; ‘but it is a caprice of mine. If the island ever comes into the market, obtain it for me on any terms. The owner may need money some day, or may change his mind.’
His experience of men was that they always sold things in the long run, if they could do so with advantage, and that they seldom remained in the same mind when it turned to their profit to change it.
CHAPTER XXVI.
When he returned from the south he paused at Amyôt before going on to Paris. He wanted a day or two to reflect on the future of Damaris before he saw her again. It was a problem which did not very easily admit of solution, without oppressing her with a sense of debt and servitude.
The certainty that her cousin would do nothing to help her brought home to himself the gravity of his position towards her. He had taken her from the streets as a kind man will take a stray dog; he had as much actual right to turn her out to them again as the man would have to turn out the dog, but his compassion and his chivalry forbade him to think of such desertion of her. There was that in the loneliness of her circumstances which touched all the warmest and most pitiful fibres of his nature, whilst the fact that more or less directly the caprice of his wife had been the beginning of all her misfortunes, made him feel that he owed a duty and a debt to her which could only be discharged by the most honest and sedulous endeavour to do well by her and secure her future from shipwreck.
But what was that future to be? To seek any counsel from his wife seemed to him useless. He had seen her more than once moved to strong interest and expectation by some nascent talent which she had fostered and sheltered in the sunshine of her favour, in the hothouse of her world; and he had also seen her intolerant impatience and her profound oblivion when her anticipations had been unrealised, and that which she had honoured had proved incapable of rising to the heights of great achievement. He knew the changes of her temperament too well to be willing to subject to their fluctuations a proud and sensitive child. Even if she deigned to notice her again, Damaris could never be more to her than a mere plaything, and she had a terrible habit of tiring of her toys in ten minutes. She had had a fanciful idea that the girl had talents of a high order, and he knew that if her fancy proved at fault she would become intolerant of the person who had disappointed her expectations. Mediocrity had always seemed to her the worst of all offences. The flowers which might unclose at sunrise might never reach, or never bear if they did reach, the glare of noon. The world is pitiless, that he knew, and to its wedding feast of fame many crowd, but few are chosen. And Nadège, he knew too, would be as intolerant as the world if where she had deigned to believe that genius existed, she should only find a mere facile and fragile talent, without power to ascend where she bade it soar, or force to justify her protection of it.
He had not, either, forgotten her suggestion before Loswa’s sketch, that some day he would fall in love with the subject of it. The jest had annoyed him and offended him.
Some time, no doubt, she would know everything: circumstances would bring it before her if the world and Damaris ever became acquainted; and if not, if obscurity became the child’s lot, and failure the issue of her dreams, then it would be better that Nadine, who had no pity for the one or sympathy with the other, should hear nought of her. He did not care to dwell himself on the possibilities of the future of one who seemed to him so ill fitted for the prosaic brutalities of a struggle for fame: he had temporised with her destiny, and vaguely trusted to some sequence of fair chances to drift the barque of her life into some safe haven. Of the pure and chivalrous tenderness for her which he felt, he would have been ashamed to speak to any living soul: for who would have believed him?
‘How difficult it is to do a little good!’ he thought, as he drove through the deep glades of his own woods, through the cool, dewy, windless air of a summer evening towards the great castle which had once known the Valois kings. ‘Now, if I wished to do the most brutal, selfish, hellish thing on earth, how easy it would be! I should find the whole world conspiring to help me, and should buy souls as easily as if they were oysters!’
Since his son had been born there, an affection for Amyôt had come to him. It was his residence of preference; if it had been possible he would have liked never to leave its vast woods, its sunny shining courts, its majestic and historic solitudes. The feeling that he was a new comer there had been soothed away as years had passed; he had ceased to be haunted by the memories of his fathers’ evil deeds; he had begun to look forward to a race springing from himself which should ennoble and justify the riches of the Othmars. It had become to him less an ill-acquired and eternal monument of his ancestors’ iniquities than the cherished birthplace of children who would transmit to the far future his own conscience and his own honour. But as he came to it now in its stillness and loneliness, the earlier feeling stole back on him, as a bitter taste will survive and return when a sweet one has passed away.
It towered before him in the warm ethereal rose of the sunrise on the morning of his arrival, one of the greatest of the historical palaces of a chivalrous and immemorial land; and as the first beams of the eastern sun caught the glittering vanes of the towers, the gilded salamanders of the first Francis, he once more recalled with sudden sharpness and disgust the memory that the Othmars had entered these mighty stone portals only through the usurer’s right-of-way; had climbed these lofty sculptured towers only by the money-lender’s ladder of gold.
The world of men had forgotten it, or, if they ever remembered it, did so only with respect and envy as they always jealously and admiringly chronicle what they call self-made success. But to him it was humiliating and hateful. Sometimes it seemed to him that, had he done what his conscience and his manhood required, he would have refused utterly and always to use this wealth of theirs in any luxury, would have stripped it off him like a plague-stricken garment, he would have gone to any personal toil, with hands empty but clean — dreams, fanatical and foolish dreams, all men would have said, yet dreams which, followed out, would have had in them a certain nobility, a certain reality, a certain fulfilment of the ideals of his youth.
As he paced its terraces in the balmy stillness, the gardens outstretched beneath him in all their beauty, which bloomed and faded unseen by any eyes save those of the hirelings who tended them, the remembrance of the dead girl who once had dwelt there beside him in a summer such as this came back upon him as it did often now since he had found and read those pathetic records of her short life. A repentant consciousness whispered that to her those dreams would not have seemed absurd: with her they would not have
been impossible. Yseulte would have obeyed him had he chosen to change Amyôt to a La Garaye.
He would have seemed to her no more unwise or mad had he stripped her of all wealth and luxury than Claude of La Garaye seemed to the woman whose bones lie beside his beneath the weeds and grasses of the graveyard of Taden. Had he said but one word to her of such a dedication of their lives, all her unworldly simplicity and courage, all her childlike optimism and faith, all her heroism, fervour and superstition, would have made her whole soul kindle at his invitation as spirit leaps to flame at the first touch of fire. With her it would have been possible; a life wholly unlike the life of the world, led in open contradiction of all its opinions, demands and estimates; spent in entire imaginative atonement for the greeds and the crimes of dead men.
‘No, it would not have been possible,’ he thought, as these memories floated through his brain. ‘No; for the life of La Garaye two things are essential, Love and Faith. I had none of the first for her; I have none of the second either for man or God.’
La Garaye was the outcome of blind unquestioning belief in humanity and heaven, such belief as can only come over narrow horizons and to uncultured minds. ‘Have Augustine’s faith,’ says a modern teacher to a faithless world. But the teacher forgets that the world can no more return to its abandoned faiths than a man can return to the toys and the joys of his infancy.
There is a profound melancholy in the solitary musings of every man or woman whose youth has harboured all the high ideals of a lofty and pensive enthusiasm, and whose maturity is held down by all the innumerable habits and demands, usages and necessities of life in the great world. Society is imperious and irresistible. Out of its beaten track none of its subjects can wander far or long. Its atmosphere is pregnant at once with sloth and excitement, and its bonds are liliputian but indestructible. Society has neither imagination nor ideality, and when either of these comes into it, it destroys it unmercifully. There is a potent attraction in it even for those who believe themselves the least susceptible of such seduction, and the network of its usages and habits becomes a prison which even the most unwilling captives learn to prefer to liberty.
It might have been possible once, possible to have given back all those ill-gotten millions to the hungry multitudes of humanity; possible to have stripped himself of all pomp and possession and been nothing on earth save such as his own brain might have had power to make him. It might have been possible once, but it was now and for ever impossible.
Such thoughts drifted through his mind as he paced the beautiful rose-colonnades and magnolia-groves of these gardens which had in them the sadness inseparable from all places which have a history and have once been peopled by a historic race.
Neither power nor place had any fascination for him, and the meannesses of mankind wearied him and left his heart barren. When the world grudges the rich man his ‘unearned increment,’ it forgets how much base coin it gives him in revenge for his possessions; it is for ever seeking to cheat or, at best, to use him; the parasite and the sycophant are always licking the dust from his path, that, unseen, they may steal the gold from his pocket; the meanest side of all humanity is exposed to him; even friendship becomes scarcely distinguishable from flattery, and the greed, the envy, and the low foibles of his fellows, though the base toys with which the cynic plays, leave his soul sick when it is not covered with the cynic’s buckler.
Othmar was no cynic, and his knowledge of his fellows had saddened and oppressed him. This knowledge had not made him serve them less faithfully, but it had taught him that all such service was utterly vain, either to secure gratitude or to ennoble society. The world rolls on, soaked in dulness, in bestiality, in cruelty, in a hideous monotony of vulgar inventions and crafty crimes and imbecile conventionalities; it has America instead of Athens, a machine instead of an art, a Krapotkine instead of a Socrates — and it prates of progress!
Governed by money as men are, things were possible to Othmar which would have been impossible, or most difficult at least, to many. His position made a vast number and variety of persons of all classes known to him; his large liberalities had endeared him to many people of all kinds, who would have done anything he desired in return for his benefits; he had always dealt with his fellows with great kindliness and indulgence, but with perspicuity and intelligence; he was well served by those who laboured for him, and was seldom betrayed. Ingratitude and treachery he met with sometimes, but less often than his own slight estimate of human nature led him to expect, and when he needed assistance or service he could always find on the instant instruments adapted to his end. If he had had the instincts of a bad nature he could have contributed endlessly to the demoralisation of his fellow-men; with the temperament he possessed he never asked any return for his benefits or expected any thankfulness for them. Nevertheless the world was set thick with his debtors, if he believed that he numbered few friends, and whenever he wanted anything done it was as easy for him to discover doers of it as it was for the Borgia to find the hand that would fill the cup, the fingers that would use the dagger.
One half-hour’s thought, as he wandered through the lonely gardens of his château, sufficed him to dispose of the problem of Damaris’s fate. She must be made to believe, he decided, that her grandfather had left her enough to keep her from want, and she must be placed somewhere in safety. As for her genius, if genius she had, it would find its way to culture as surely as a plant to the light. But meantime she must live: and live without imagining that she lived on charity. The only way to make it possible for her to do so would be to induce her to think that she had not been wholly forgotten by Jean Bérarde. So he reasoned, and acted on his conclusions without weighing their possible consequences to himself or her.
He was a man much more truthful than life in the world makes men usually. A falsehood was contemptible and cowardly in his sight. One of his most continual contentions with Friedrich Othmar had always been his refusal to admit that lying was needful in politics and finance; and in private life his wife laughed at him frequently for his distaste to those mere social untruths which have become the small change of society’s currency. He disliked all subterfuge, all sophism, all distortion of fact, and even the harmless falsehood of compliment.
But this single untruth to be told to Damaris seemed so necessary, so harmless, that it carried with it no odour of dishonesty to him. In no other way could she be kept from want and danger. Without some such simple ruse she could never be saved from herself, and from all that impetuosity and ignorance which would destroy her as surely as a like enthusiasm destroyed the virgin of Domrémy.
Rich people, who have many connections and dependents, can arrange circumstances to their liking in many small ways, with a facility which is sometimes in pathetic contrast with their powerlessness to command personal happiness and health, human gratitude or human contentment. To Othmar it was easy to arrange circumstances for those in whom he was interested, though it was out of his power to make his own life the thing he would have liked it to be. His wide command of money, and his great knowledge of men and women, enabled him sometimes to play the part of deus ex machinâ successfully. He tried to play it for Damaris: tried, with an honest wish to serve her, and a boyish disregard of consequences, which would have made his wife, had she known of them, call him a berger de Florian in pitiless ridicule.
Amongst the many persons who owed him more than a common debt, there was an old woman whose only remaining grandson, a young student at the time, had been compromised in the days of the Commune, and would have been numbered amongst those who were to be shot without mercy, had not Othmar, who was at Versailles at the time, interceded for and saved him, being touched by the youth’s fine countenance and his entreaty to be allowed to see his grandmother ere he died. On inquiry and further knowledge of the lad he had been more and more interested in him, perceiving that mistaken creeds and distorted ideals had brought him amongst this sorry company of pillagers and pétroleuses. He had influence enou
gh with M. Thiers to get a free pardon for the youth, on condition of his leaving France at once. He sent him at his own expense out of the country, gave him a clerkship in his house at Vienna, and had the satisfaction of seeing him become in a few years a peaceable and happy citizen, a diligent and devoted servant.
The old grandmother, by name Reine Chabot, owned and farmed a few acres of good land near Les Hameaux, in the rich vale of Chevreuse. To Othmar, who had saved her boy in body and soul, she would have given body and soul herself. She was a hale and strong woman, of simple habits and of noble mind. She was a recluse, but not a morbid one, and her ways and manner of life were similar to those which Damaris had been used to on the island of Bonaventure. To her he resolved to confide the girl’s charge during her convalescence, or for so long as she might need a home. He went himself down to the farm, and, almost before he had spoken, his request was granted and received as an honour.
The dark, stern eyes of the aged woman were soft with moisture as she joined her brown hands on his, and said with fervour:
‘All that I have is yours to command. Did you not do for me and mine that which was beyond all praise or price?’
‘I have found two people who accept my motives as honest ones,’ thought Othmar. ‘I shall surely find no more. To expect belief in any action that has no personal object at the bottom of it is a folly that nobody but a boy should commit. The child believes in me because she is at the age of faith and of innocence; and the woman believes me because she adores me and does not look any further; but nobody else will be so quick in faith.’
The farmhouse, called the Croix Blanche, was a stout seventeenth-century building, which had escaped injury during the great war by some miracle, and was as lonely in its situation as though it had been five hundred instead of fifteen miles from Paris. In such a retreat he thought this checked and bruised sea-bird might find as safe a nest for a season of rest as the lark found there in the long grass of its meadows. Rural quietude, pure air, good care, and the balm which lies for poetic temperaments in the mere sense that the country silences are around them, would do all that was needed, he fancied, to restore the natural buoyancy and strength of her constitution, and thither he directed the nuns to take her one afternoon when the shadows grew long over the grass pastures and quiet woods of that smiling and pastoral country which stretches around the ruins of what was once Port-Royal des Champs.