by Ouida
She was in that state of weakness blended with the delicious sense of returning health which makes life seem like a dream, and all its scenes pass like dream-pictures. She was filled with a vague sense of perfect faith and peace, and all that he did for her she accepted unquestioningly as undoubted good.
When she saw the low grey-stone farmhouse covered with its climbing roses, its wooden outhouses buried under elder and poplar trees, its grass lands lying warm in the glow of the afternoon sun, she stretched out her thin hands to it all as to a friend, and tears of pleasure swam in her eyes.
‘It is the country,’ she said under her breath with delight.
All the sweet pungent smell of the turned earth where a labourer dug in it, all the fresh glad scent of growing leaves and ripening fruits and grasses browning in the sun, all the familiar sounds, a watch-dog’s bark, a blackbird’s song, the hum of bees in the rose bloom, the distant call of a corncrake in the meadows — they were all dear and welcome like the voices of friends long unheard. It was the country: all the strength and the warmth and the force of her youth seemed to rush back into her veins with the sight and the sounds of it.
For the first time since she had left the island she laughed.
‘That is well,’ thought the old woman, her hostess, regarding her. ‘Those who love the country have clean souls.’
She had not asked or wished to ask any questions concerning her guest.
In her eyes Othmar could do no wrong, and to her gratitude his will was law. But she had kept her own soul clean all her days, dwelling here always in these same green peaceful places; and as she looked on the face of Damaris she was glad, for she saw there three things which are as beautiful as flowers — innocence, and youth, and ignorance of all fear and guile.
Damaris slept very soundly that night in a little white room that smelt of lavender and pressed rose-leaves, and when she awoke in the morning heard the pleasant sound of mowing scythes, of rippling water, of a thrush’s singing in a blossoming elder bough; and all the young life in her seemed to arise and grow anew, and become once more as glad to greet the sun as any bird which wakes at dawn as the first white light gleams through its house of leaves.
Many quiet and almost happy summer days followed for her, in which she recovered all her normal strength. The ways and the work of the farm were familiar and welcome to her, and she scarcely waited to be well before taking to herself a share of its labours.
The widow Chabot asked her no questions, but she, having no secrets, soon related the few incidents of her short existence, and heard in return the narrative of Othmar’s actions during the Commune. Taciturn by temperament, and grave and reserved by habit as the old woman was, she grew eloquent whenever she spoke of the saviour of the last of her race, and Damaris, when the day’s work was done, and they sat together in the rose-coloured porch while the spinning-wheels flew round, never wearied of hearing that tale, and said in her own heart as she listened, ‘How good he is! — how good!’
These summer weeks in Chevreuse were full of rest and solace to her. It was but a pause, a halt before the heat and stress of life, she knew; an ‘étape’ such as she had seen the dust-covered conscripts on the march enjoy, resting by the wayside under the trees, where some little water-spring bubbled up amongst the cistus bushes and the euphorbia of a Riviera road. But she was at peace in it, and, childlike, hardly thought of the morrow.
Sometimes she looked far away, when the sun rose, to the east where Paris was, and wondered if ever there the world would hear of her, know her, care for her. But it was all vague. Her future was bathed in golden light, like the green landscape when the sun came out from the mists of dawn; but it had no distinctness to her, no definite shape or end. It was mere radiant nebulæ, like the rosy and amber-tinted clouds which the peasants looking eastward said was Paris, though no roof, or dome, or spire was visible when the morning broke.
Othmar came to see her rarely, and his visits were brief; but as she had no vanity and had much gratitude, she was wholly content with such slight remembrance. He sent her many books and other things which amused her, and her mind was eager for all kinds of knowledge. She had great natural intelligence and quickness of perception, and she read the fine prose and the stately alexandrines of the old French authors with avidity and delight. Something of the intellectual life of Port Royal seemed to her fancy still to linger in the air, and make classic all the rustic paths of this quiet valley.
When she walked over the daisied grass that grew about the ruined dovecot, Pascal seemed to pace beside her, and as she leaned over the little brook which finds its way amongst the cresses and the mouse-ear, she fancied she saw the face of her great master Racine reflected in its shallow waters.
Her hostess, though a woman of no great culture, yet was learned enough in the literature of earlier days, and in the associations of her birthplace, to know every legend and name that are attached to the stones and the meadows of Les Hameaux. She was no uncongenial companion to an imaginative girl, for though taciturn, she could have a certain rude eloquence when strongly moved, and to her reverent and unworldly mind ‘les Messieurs de Port-Royal’ were ever present memories, both saintly and heroic.
CHAPTER XXVII.
He had apportioned the sum needed at a lower figure than his own wishes would have dictated, that it might seem to her more natural as the legacy of Jean Bérarde; it was enough to keep her in such simple ways of life as she had been used to, no more. He told her of it, as of a legacy, the first day that he saw her at Les Hameaux: told it in few words, for all equivocation was painful to him. She never for a moment doubted the truth of the story, and he was touched to see that her first emotion was not relief at the material safety insured to her, but joy that the old man dying had forgiven her.
‘If I had only known,’ she said through her tears, ‘I would have gone back to him! I would have gone back just to have heard him say one kind word for the last!’
The thought that her grandsire had pardoned and remembered her was a philtre of health and strength to her. It brought back all the warmth to her cheeks, all the depth of colour to her eyes; she wept passionately, but from a sweet not harsh sorrow, from gratitude to his memory, from thankfulness that his last thought of her had been one of kindness.
Othmar watched and heard her with an embarrassment which she was too absorbed in her own emotions to notice.
‘All the money I shall give her would not suffice to buy one of Nadine’s rows of pearls,’ he thought. ‘Yet what rapture it affords her! A lie! of course it is a lie; and all my Jesuit tutors could never make me credit that a lie could be a good thing, however good its motive. But this lie is innocent if ever there were one innocent, and even if it were a crime the crime would be worth the doing, to set this poor lost sea-bird safe from storm upon a ledge of rock. She would be beaten to death by the waves without some shelter.’
Yet his conscience was not wholly easy as he responded to her warm words of gratitude to himself for having discovered this bequest for her, and answered her many questions as to the island that she loved, the children of Raphael, the dogs, the trees, the boat; all things on Bonaventure were living things to her. However long her life might last, always the clearest and the dearest of her memories would be those sunny childish years in the little isle of fruit and flowers, where for sixteen years the sun had shone and the sea wind blown on her, and the fish and the birds and the beasts been her schoolfellows.
She had something of meridional heedlessness, and much of meridional imagination, which made the fiction of her grandsire’s legacy more easily believed by her than it would have been by more prosaic and cautious tempers. To her it seemed so natural that he should have relented towards her and provided for her. All her memories were of wants provided for by him; he had been her providence, if a harsh one, for so long that it seemed a natural part of his character and of her destiny that he should continue to be her providence even in his grave.
‘If I could
only be sure that he is happy in heaven,’ she said to Othmar, with a certain appeal and doubt in her accent. Even to her, though she had respected him, it was difficult to think of Jean Bérarde of Bonaventure in any celestial life. ‘Do you not think,’ she added wistfully, ‘that God would remember that he was a very good man in many ways, and always honest and upright in all his dealings with rich and poor? He loved money, but he was not mean — not to me, never to me — and if laborare est orare, as the Sisters used to say, surely he must be in peace?’
Othmar heard the tormenting fear which was expressed in her tone, and refrained from adding one grain of doubt to it.
‘Be sure he is at peace, my dear,’ he answered; while he thought, ‘more peace than such a brute deserves — the peace of utter extinction; the peace of dissolution and absorption into the earth which holds him, into the grass which covers him; peace which he shares with kings and poets and heroes!’
‘He believed nothing, you know,’ said Damaris wistfully, ‘nothing of any creed, I mean. But then, if he could not, was it any more his fault than it is a deaf man’s fault that he cannot hear? I think not. Do you remember that poem of Victor Hugo’s? I forget its name, but the one in which a great wicked king of the east, all black with crime, is saved from hell because he has a moment of pity for a pig that is sick and tormented with flies and lies helpless in the sun? The king drew the pig aside out of the sun and drove the flies away. It is beautifully told in the poem; I tell it ill. But what I mean is, that I think if they are angered in heaven with my grandfather because he led a hard, selfish, crooked, cramped life, they will yet let him into paradise because he was so good to me.’
Othmar assented, with a sense of infinite compassion for her. All her dream was as baseless as the golden city which an evening sun builds out of clouds for a moment in the western sky. But he let it be. Life would soon enough wake her from such dreams with the rough hand of a stepmother, who grudges motherless children sleep.
‘Let us speak of present things,’ he said, to distract her thoughts. ‘This is very little money, though you think so much of it, which is left to stand between you and all kinds of want. Will you let me place it out for you where it will bring you most? You may have heard, my dear, that I am one of those hapless persons who are doomed by circumstance to have much to do with gold. I hate it, but that is no matter. It is my fate. Will you trust me to try and multiply your little fortune? I will be very careful of it, but something more it shall make for you in my hands than if it were lying in a kitchen chimney or under an orchard wall, which you are too true to your nation not to think the safest kind of investment. I may? Then be it so. No, do not thank me, there is no need for that. But you are very young and you are not very prudent, I should say, and in these matters you will need advice. Remember always to command mine.’
She looked at him with grateful but questioning eyes.
‘Why should you do so much for me?’ she said with wonder.
‘I do very little,’ returned Othmar. ‘And were it far more, you have a direct claim on me — on us. If my wife had not tempted you away that memorable day, you would have been dwelling contented on your island still, and probably for ever.’
‘No: not there,’ she said slowly, as if she reasoned with herself. ‘I do not think I should ever have stayed there very long. I loved it, but I wanted something else. When I used to sit, as so often I sat, all alone on the balcony that hangs over the sea, when it was late at night, and everyone else was asleep, and the nightingales were shouting in the orange-boughs underneath, I used to think that some other world there must be where some one cared for Ondine and Athalie, where some one had cried as I cried for Triboulet and Hernani; where they did not all talk all day long of the price of oil, and the cost of cargoes, and the disease in the lemons, and the worm in the olive wood. I knew that all these great and beautiful things could not have been written unless men and women were, somewhere, great and beautiful also; and very often — oh, often! long before your Lady spoke to me — I had thought that whenever my grandfather should die I would go and find that world for myself. And now — —’
He waited some moments, but her sentence remained incomplete.
‘And now?’ he repeated at last. ‘Now do you think still that there is such a world, or do you not see that no one does care for Ondine or Athalie? that the price of oil and the worm in the olive (or their equivalents) are the sole carking cares of the great world, just as much as of your peasant-proprietors? Did you not dream of Hernani, and did you not only meet the sergent de ville?’
‘I met you!’ she said gently, with a tinge of reproach in her voice.
‘My dear child!’ said Othmar, touched and a little embarrassed. ‘I am far from heroic. Ask the person who knows me best, and she will tell you so. I only rake the world’s gold to and fro as if I were a croupier, and I assure you the olives and the lemons are much worthier subjects of thought.’
She made a little involuntary gesture of her hand, as if she pushed away some unworthy suggestion which it was not needful to refute in words. Her face had grown serious and resolute; she had the look of a young Pallas Athene. Innumerable thoughts were crowding on her which she could ill express.
Ever since a possible fate had been suggested to her in which fame might attend on her, ever since a vague immeasurable ideal had been suggested to her in the music of Paul of Lemberg, it had become impossible for her ever to remain content with the homely aims and the prosaic thoughts of the people amongst whom she had been born. Heredity and accident had alike combined to divorce her from her natural fate. Of those thus severed from their original source, thus rebellious against their native air, two or three in a generation become great, famous, victorious; the larger number fall back from the summits which they aspire to reach, and fill the restless, dissatisfied, tarnished ranks which are comprised in the all-expressive word déclassés. But the word seemed unfitted to her; there were that simplicity, that originality, that force in the child which mark the higher natures of humanity, whether they be found in peasants or in princes; there were in her also that natural high breeding and absolute self-unconsciousness which render all vulgarity and assumption impossible; those marks of race which are wholly independent of all circumstance. Jeanne d’Arc greeted her king as her brother, and Christine Nilsson meets sovereigns as her sisters.
He had seen this child also bear herself with inborn grace and natural dignity in the first dazzling scene and unkind embarrassment of circumstance which she had ever known. It seemed to him that she would go thus through life.
‘I think I could make the world care,’ she said, with a curious mingling of dreaminess and decision, of ardour and of doubt in her tone. ‘Even your wife said I might do so — it is something outside myself, beyond myself. I do not mean any vanity or folly. It is something one has, as the nightingale has its song, and the lemon flower its odour. If they would hear me — as your Lady heard? How could I make them hear me?’
Othmar was silent.
Then he added almost cruelly, but cruelty seemed to him kindness:
‘My wife forgot that she had heard you five minutes afterwards: so perhaps would the world. And if so, what then?’
‘At least I should have tried.’
The divine obstinacy of genius spoke in the words. Better failure and oblivion than oblivion without effort.
‘If only I could try?’ she repeated with imploring prayer: to her he seemed the master of the world, as utterly as Agrippa or Augustus seemed so to the Roman girls who saw them pass from palace to temple, ‘I know it would be only interpretation; but I feel their words say so much to me that I surely could interpret them, aloud, so that I could move some to feel them as I do.’
He knew she meant the words of those poets which had taken so strong and firm a hold upon her imagination, read as she had read them in the glory of the southern light, between the sea and sky.
‘Perhaps you could,’ he answered reluctantly. ‘But if yo
u did, what would be your fate? You would die like Aimée Desclée. My wife likened you to her.’
‘Who was she?’
He told her, with the pathetic force of a profound sympathy; for poor Frou-frou had been well known to him in her brief career, and all the feverish yearning, the tumult of unsatisfied desires, the conflict of genius and malady in that tender and hapless soul had been sacred to him. He passed in silence over the passions of that life, but he dwelt long and earnestly on its storm-tossed youth, and its premature and tragic close.
Damaris listened; her whole countenance reflecting the narrative she heard.
‘I think she was happy,’ she said at length. ‘You do not, but I do. She broke her heart singing, like the nightingales in the poem. I read once of a sword which wore out its scabbard. Who would not sooner be that than the sword which rusts unused?’
Othmar did not reply. To him the life and the death of Aimée Desclée were the saddest of his generation; but he could not tell this child why he thought them so, and even if he could have done it would have been of no avail. He knew that he argued with that thing which no example appals, no warning affects, no prescience intimidates; the thing at once so strong and so feeble, at once blind as the bat and far-sighted as the eagle — the instinct of genius.
When he quitted her that day he left her with disquietude and uncertainty. It seemed to him as if he held her fate, like a bird, in his hand, and could either close the cage-door on it in safety, or toss it upward free to roam through fields of air or to sink under showers of stones as chance might choose.