Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  Then she banged the casement close, and left him standing there. He might rage in his heart as he chose, what did she care for his wrath or for his amours or for his whole existence? What she had cared for was the dead girl who had died for him. That she had insulted him in return for his hospitality and his courtesy was delightful to her. In that moment she would have liked to insult him before the whole world.

  Othmar paused a moment, looking blankly up at this window of his own house thus shut in his face; then, with slow step, and with his head down, he pursued his way through the western garden. His guest had insulted him, but the worst sting of the insult lay in its truth. It was true, most true; he owned to himself that he had been wholly unworthy the sacrifice of such a life as Yseulte’s.

  Yet, he thought, in the words which had been quoted under the oaks of Amyôt in the Court of Love, ‘How is it under our control to love or not to love?’

  Love is not to be commanded, and naught less than a great and undivided love could ever have given happiness and faith in itself to so delicate, to so sensitive, to so perfectly and sincerely humble a nature as that of the dead girl whose bridal hours had been passed in those closed chambers, around whose casements the ivy climbed and the swallows nested undisturbed as the seasons passed. The rough, sharp, upbraiding words of Blanche de Laon smarted in his memory, as the cut of a knife smarts in the flesh. They only repeated in coarse emphasis what his own conscience had said to him ever since he had found the little manuscript poems in the drawer with the faded roses. Before then, with the blindness of a man whose whole soul is centred on another passion than the one which claims his sympathy, he had never once dreamed that the death of Yseulte had been self sought.

  CHAPTER XXXIII.

  Damaris, meanwhile, was altogether at ease as to her own circumstances. No doubt ever entered her mind as to the legacy bequeathed by her grandfather; it was more than enough for all her wants, and she understood that she could live at Les Hameaux easily, all her lifetime, if she chose. But without any apprehension for her future, she was not without that unrest which is the inseparable companion of all ambition. The remembrance of the wife of Othmar was like a thorn in her side: she had an eager, passionate, thirsty desire to justify herself in the sight of that great lady, to become something which could not be derided or denied or set aside with contempt. The memory of that day under the roof of St. Pharamond was continually with her, in all its humiliation and its disappointment, and its sharp cruel sense of being a barbarian amongst the highest grace and culture that were possible to human life and manners. It had been a glimpse into an unknown land never to be forgotten; the gates to it had been shut in her face, almost as soon as opened; but the dreams which had come to her through them remained with her, and pursued her sleeping and waking.

  She threw herself into the resources of study with a kind of passion. In books, she thought, lay all the secrets of the spells of power.

  When he had bidden her wed a farmer of La Beauce he had wounded her in a way that she could not forget; not because she despised that homelier life of the husbandman, but because she thought that he deemed her incapable of the higher life of the intellect or the soul. She had been violently uprooted from all her childish associations, and severed from all the habits, thoughts, and attachments which had been hers from birth. The shock of that separation had intensified and deepened the sensitive side of her nature, and subdued the sanguine insouciance of it. She was not happy at Les Hameaux as she had been happy on Bonaventure; but she was still companioned by many dreams, and still full of high courage, though the dreams had lost something of their splendid phantasy, and the courage had lost something of its rash undoubting faith.

  At times she longed for her old playmate, the sea, with a curious painful yearning — the yearning of the home-sickness of the exile.

  ‘How well I can understand,’ she said once to Rosselin, ‘that Napoleon longed all his life for the smell of the earth of Corsica. All my life I am sure I shall smell the smell of the fresh sea water leaping up in the wind under the orange boughs and the bay leaves; there is nothing like it here, though the pastures smell sweet in the dew.’

  In a short time she had changed much. She had become still taller, and the peachlike bloom of her face had paled. She had the look in her eyes of one who studies assiduously the great thoughts of great writers; she had a less childlike and boylike beauty, and one more intellectual and spiritual. Months count as years at her age, and the southern blood of the Bérardes matured early.

  Rosselin watched her growth with pride. Her softened accent, her subdued gesture, her intelligent comprehension of intellectual things, her simple but picturesque clothing, were all due to his training or his suggestion. He had taken her to great libraries, famous galleries, historic palaces, and had taught her to understand the true and the false in art; he had taken her to recitals of the Conservatoire, and even to rehearsals at the great theatres, where, secured from observation, she could herself observe, and realised, as she listened, all the many traits and the many efforts which go together to make up admirable dramatic representation. He never allowed anyone to speak to her, scarcely to see her, but he gave her thus that training of the eye and of the ear without which no great artist can be created.

  ‘Nature does much,’ he said to her. ‘Yes. But art is a different thing to nature. Art is three parts divine, but it is one part human, and that human part requires the most unwearied and elaborate training. The sculptor may bring a god out of the clay in the fire and the fever of his inspiration, but if he have not studied the laws of anatomy, the limbs of his god will be out of proportion, and one leg will be shorter than the other.’

  In the artistic circles there went a whisper about that Rosselin had some paragon whom he was educating, and would produce some day; but every one feared the sarcastic power of the great artist’s tongue too much to meddle, unasked, with his concerns, and Damaris, under his guidance, passed unmolested, almost unobserved, through the intricate mazes of that art-world, which she touched without entering it.

  One day, when she had been taken to a recital at the Conservatoire, he had left her alone for a few moments; the recital was over, the pupils had left the stage; the professors were conversing together; from the floor there rose a cloud of dust, and from the hot, pent air a strong noisome odour. Her eyes ached, her temples throbbed; she, whose whole life had been passed in the fragrance of the open air, in the freshness of buoyant sea winds, felt stifled, stunned, nauseated. Fame itself seemed hateful, approached through this vitiated atmosphere. To pass your years in boxes of brick and stone, in cages of wood and iron, rather than in the glad freedom of glancing waters and unchecked movement over golden sands and flowering meadows, was it not madness indeed?

  She remembered the words of Othmar, bidding her live the life that was led on the wide cornlands of La Beauce. All that was strong in her, and born to freedom, and filled with the love of the sea, and the joys of untrammelled movement through sunlit air, and against fruit-scented breezes, rose in nausea and revolt against the pent-up life of the artist in cities.

  Where, oh where, was the open-air theatre of the Greeks, with no dome but the blue sky, and the voices of the chorus echoed by the sounds of the sea-waves breaking to surf upon the marble stairs?

  ‘What are you thinking of? Your eyes look wild,’ said Rosselin, rejoining her.

  ‘I was thinking that I could never speak upon a covered stage: the air would choke me!’

  Rosselin looked at her in silence. He himself was thinking of Aimée Desclée, of the bohémienne who had always wanted the fresh air, the free sunlight, the unpaid laughter, the unbought love.

  Aimée Desclée seemed to rise before him, and cry to him:

  ‘Why tempt another on my path?’

  He said to her solemnly and tenderly, while his voice sounded very grave in the silence of the emptied theatre:

  ‘My dear, we cannot call back the Athens of Pindar for you, nor yet give you
the ideal world of your fancy. If you want to be great in our world as it is, you must breathe its air, which is dust and chokes sensitive lungs. When the air is gold dust it is not much lighter to breathe, though people fancy it light as the air of the planet Venus. If you decide that it will be too weighty for yours, I do not say that you will not decide wisely. Your friend Othmar has told you that obscurity and liberty are the happier choice. He is a man who knows by experience how painful a thraldom are eminence and wealth. You yourself may attain eminence, and wealth too, possibly, probably, but you cannot do so and remain free to be all day long under the blue sky. You must dwell in the air that is full of dust, and poisoned by being shared by a million mouths. That air killed Aimée Desclée.’

  Damaris was silent.

  She went out beside him through the sordid ways and shabby passages of this temple of the acolytes of fame, and thence into the crowded streets, which were grey with a leaden-coloured slow rain.

  Oh, how sweet the rain was in the country, scudding over the green fields, brimming in the grass holes, hanging from the orchard boughs, shining in the window lattices, lying in the great dock leaves! How the snails came out in the glistening roads, and the birds drank it from off the ground, and the ducks went about in the little shallows it left, and how merry and glad the whole land was!

  ‘You love the country,’ said Rosselin, when they had walked the length of some streets in silence. ‘You love the country, my dear. Stay in it; you have enough to live on; let fame go by, unsought, unmourned.’

  Damaris sighed:

  ‘But if I do not do something great she will always say that I could not. She will always despise me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘His wife.’

  ‘Othmar’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Rosselin; he understood the motives which moved her more completely than she understood them herself. ‘Do not think of that capricious woman,’ he said with irritation. ‘Be sure that the day after she saw you she had forgotten that you existed.’

  The colour rose to the face of Damaris.

  ‘I wish to make her remember,’ she said under her breath.

  ‘Ah!’ said Rosselin once more.

  CHAPTER XXXIV.

  One evening in October Rosselin walked beside his pupil amongst the fields of Les Hameaux. She had had her lesson in elocution in the afternoon; a lesson in which he was inexorably hard to please, a very tyrant over all the minutiæ of accent and of expression; and now in the walks at sunset he had relaxed into all that benignity and bonhomie which were most natural to him in the company of women and of children.

  ‘I am afraid I do not please you,’ she had said with some dejection.

  ‘If you did not, my dear, do you think I would come thrice a week to Chevreuse to train you?’ he answered. ‘It is because you have exceeding natural talent, because you have uncommon gifts, a flexible and beautiful voice, quick perceptions, and that intuitive comprehension which is the innermost soul of art, that I deal with you harshly to compel you to acquire all that artificial treatment of your own powers which is absolutely indispensable to success. If I had not seen genius in you it would not have been merely to please Othmar that I would have told you to give yourself to art; I should have said to you, on the contrary: “Go and marry a farmer of La Beauce, spin and sew, and wear a silk gown on Sundays; have any number of children; be an ordinary woman in a word.”’

  ‘Marry a farmer of La Beauce!’

  She coloured with indignation. Was it not what Othmar himself had said to her?

  ‘It is not a life to be despised,’ continued Rosselin. ‘They live in corn as the crickets do. You, who are so fond of country things, would be happy enough if — if — you had never read Racine and Hugo, if you had not that fermentation of the fancy in you which seethes and stirs and smokes until out of it comes the wine of genius. The swallows cannot stay in the fields as the linnets do. There is something in them that makes them go when the hour is come. They do not know what it is; they obey an imperious instinct. They cannot stay if they would. They go blindly, and very often they drop down dead in mid-ocean, and never see the rose fields of Persia or the magnolia woods of Hindostan, as they meant to do; yet they go.’

  Unknown to herself, a strong impulse moved her to prove to the wife of Othmar that the brin de génie was hers; a true bough of laurel, not a spurious weed. The indifference and the oblivion of this, the first great lady she had ever seen, still remained in her memory with the sting of an affront which nothing could efface. The world was represented to her eyes by that one delicate, smiling, negligent, cruel critic, whom she passionately admired, whom she unconsciously challenged. The child had no vanity, but she had great pride; the pride of the aristocrat and the pride of the republican had been inherited by her, each stubborn as the other. Her pride had been wounded, and her ambition and her dreams excited. She knew that she might drop, like the tired swallow that crosses the sea, into the deep abyss of failure and oblivion; but, like the swallow, the instinct which moved her was irresistible.

  Rosselin saw that it was so, and he was too utterly an artist in every fibre of his being to be able to prevail on himself to discourage her wholly. He believed that she would become the glory of the French stage; that very union of the strength of the peasant and the delicacy of the patrician, which was so marked in her physically and mentally, seemed to him to possess that rare originality which all those destined to be great in any art are stamped with from their birth. He did not admit to her how much he admired her, but when she recited to him at one lesson those passages which had been set to her at a previous one, he was secretly amazed at the justness of her reading of them, the accuracy of her rendering, and he marvelled where in her simple life, set between sea and sky as it had been, she had reached such understanding of the greatest utterances of great minds.

  ‘Yet what a fool I am to wonder,’ he thought a moment later. ‘As if it were not always so with genius, or as if anything less than that ever could be genius.’

  But he took care not to utter that word often to her. All he ever granted to her was that she might arrive at something, perhaps, if she studied hard; if she were resolute and yet humble; if she accepted all his corrections and instructions, and did her best to lose that southern accent which would send all Paris into Homeric laughter if it were ever heard upon any stage.

  ‘It could only be permitted,’ he added, ‘if you were reciting Mireille.’

  She did not know what he meant, but she listened to his pure and exquisite pronunciation, and did her uttermost docilely to acquire it, as to obey and execute all his teachings.

  Then, when their lesson was over, not seldom he would unbend utterly, and strolling with her through the meadows, or sitting beneath the trelliswork of the porch with the rose leaves falling on his white hair, he would tell her the most wonderful and enchanting of stories, merely drawing all of them from the innumerable treasures of that wonder-horn, his own manifold experiences. He said not a word that would hurt her. All that would be learnt soon enough.

  ‘J’en ai vu tant!’ he would think often as he left the Croix Blanche in the warm evenings. He had seen the world devour so many, like the dragons that were fed on white flesh. But he fancied she would be one of those who bind the dragon, like St. Marguerite, and make it follow them slavishly.

  She had strength in her, the strength of the old mountain race of Bérarde. He knew nothing of those dead people who had ruled land and sea in the dark ages, and perished finally under the axe on the scaffold; but there were a vitality and a force in her which seemed to him destined to conquer where weaker natures gave way and failed.

  Provided only, he thought, provided only that she would have as many passions as there were grains of sand on her own sea-shores, but amongst them all no real love.

  Passion is the most useful of teachers to any artist; that he knew; but love is the destruction of all art. Mademoiselle Mars lived through a blaze of glor
y; Adrienne Lecouvreur died in her youth. Rosselin did not trouble himself about conventional morality. He took the world as he had found it. He respected this child’s supreme innocence, and would not have sullied it by a breath; but, casting her horoscope, he would have given her the heart of Rachel, not that of Desclée, if he had had the power. It is better to be the tigress which preys than the hind which bleeds.

  He was no cynic; he only knew the world well, and well knew what the world makes of women.

  On est broyé, ou on broie les autres. There is no middle path for those who once have left the cool secluded ways of privacy and joined the crowd which pushes at the brazen gates of fame.

  But still, to Rosselin, to have passed these gates seemed the perfection of human triumph.

  ‘What all who are not artists underrate,’ he said to Damaris, as they passed beside the round tower of the dovecote, ’is the artist’s joy in the mere power of expression. It is a mistake to suppose that it is the ignis fatuus of celebrity which allures the young poet, the young musician, the young painter; that is very secondary with him. What overmasters him is the longing for the opportunity of expression; the besoin de se faire sentir, which is as powerful and imperious as the besoin d’aimer. I first played in a barn to villagers; I had a grand part, Robert Macaire; I was as perfectly happy as when I later on played at the Français to emperors and their courtiers. It is the same delight as the lark feels in singing, as the swan feels in swimming, as the heron feels in slowly sailing through the air: the ecstasy in the expansion of natural powers. But the majority of men know nothing of that. The custom-house officer would not believe that Berlioz was composing music as he sat on a rock above the sea. They laughed in his face and said: “Where is your piano?” This is as far as the world goes; it understands the piano, but not the music which is mute in the soul.’