by Ouida
He rested as he spoke on a stone of what had once been the great ‘abbey of the fields:’ the fields were there unchanged, it was only the great thinkers whose brains were dust.
‘I had no such romantic cradle as you possessed in your island of orange groves,’ he continued. ‘I was born in a little dusky, close, noisome shop in a back street of Vierzon, that dreary town of our dreary district of the Sologne. My grandfather had been born in that shop before me. Everything in it was poverty-stricken, ugly, vulgar, sordid; and vulgarity is so much worse than any ugliness, and sordid small aims and hopes are so much worse than any poverty! Of course no one need be ignoble in a shop, even in a shop where they sell tallow. I suppose Garibaldi was not, but my people were. Well, in that little stuffy plebeian den, only frequented by the lowest of the ironworkers and the canal bargemen, beautiful fancies thronged on me and noble visions haunted me, as they did you in your sea-girt orange thickets, and I used to sit in my hideous attic and recite verse to the one star which was all I could see through a chink in the wall, as you did, you tell me, to the whole of the southern skies glowing above your balcony. It was not fame that I wanted; I never thought of it; I longed to hear my own voice in the glory of the words; I longed to leap up and shout to all the sleeping town; I longed to cry out to the Immortals, wherever they were, “I have understood you, I am not unworthy!” Ah, those beautiful impersonal enthusiasms of youth! Fame! It is of nothing so narrow or so selfish that we think!’
The tears rose to his eyes: half a century and more had rolled away from him; he was a boy again, dreaming his dreams as he wandered over the sandy wastes of the Sologne.
‘Ah, my dear,’ he said with a sigh, ‘how miserable I thought I was in that little ugly house, with the sluggish canal water slipping past its walls, and the black-faced iron puddlers quarrelling over my father’s short weight! It stifled me; it cramped me; it killed me! so I thought. But I got away from it, nevertheless. Pegasus came for me in the shape of a towing-horse, which carried me away to Issoudun first, and to a new life afterwards. I had the seven lean years as a strolling player; a jack at a pinch, a Jean-qui-rit or a Jean-qui-pleure, as it was wanted; and then I had more than thrice over the seven fat years, and all that men call success. I have had all the best things that there are in life, and I do not think I should have had as many of them if I had remained in the dingy little shop all my days, as my father wished me to do. Poor old father! he came to see me once in Paris — once, when I was thirty years old, and in the height of my best triumphs; and he was dazzled and dazed, and did not very well understand, but he found out that my servants charged me four times too much a pound for candles. “Un grand homme toi!” he said, with a sneer at me, “et tu n’ sais pas le prix d’une bougie!” The world admired me: he never did. I was always to him a fool who burned wax instead of tallow. There is always something to be said for the bourgeois point of view; but it is narrow — narrow. After all, the storms and sunshine on Parnassus are better than the worry over a lost centime in the back parlour. I have been a successful artist in my day, but I should have been a very indifferent shopkeeper, because I never could bring myself to care for that lost centime — though I have lost many!’
He rose with a laugh, remembering the grand gaspillage of his generous and careless manhood. It had not been wise, perhaps, but it had been delightful; and, after all, he had as much as he wanted now in his little river-side house, his good wall fruits, and his first editions of Molière and of Marivaux. He would not have been a whit happier had he been a millionaire.
As the frank mellow sound of his laughter echoed on the air, and the shadow of the doves’ tower lengthened behind them on the grass, the notes of a horn in the fanfare which is called La Brisée, blew loud and full over the fields to their ears.
‘What is that?’ cried Damaris, startled at the sound which she had never heard before.
‘I forgot; it is the first day for hunting,’ said Rosselin, listening. ‘It is the ouverture de la chasse.’
As he spoke some equestrians rode out from a thicket across the field in which they were. They were members of the hunt of Dampierre, clad in a picturesque costume and looking like a picture of the time of Louis Quinze as the warm sunset light fell across them. They rode on quickly towards the west whence came the notes of the hunting fanfare.
They did not look towards herself or Rosselin; but a few seconds later another huntsman, whose hunter was lame, came by in their wake more slowly, leading his horse. He turned his head, paused a moment or two, then rode straight towards them.
It was the Duc de Béthune. He doffed his tricornered gold-laced hat and bade Rosselin, whom he knew well, good-evening; then glanced at Damaris.
‘Mademoiselle Bérarde!’ he said, hesitatingly. ‘Surely I do not mistake?’
She looked at him with recognition.
‘You came to the island with her,’ she said, rather to herself than to him. The colour grew hot in her face; all the unforgettable shame of that day was with her in bitter recollection.
‘I am honoured by so much remembrance, and grateful to the hole in the turf which lamed my horse.’
‘That is language for the château of Dampierre,’ said Rosselin. ‘M. le Duc has lost his way, I think?’
‘No; I know my road,’ said Béthune, who understood the old man’s meaning. ‘And I never speak any language, Rosselin, but that which best conveys my real thoughts. You, who are so perfect an artist in speech, must be aware that I am a very clumsy one. Is there any smith here who could look to my poor beast?’
‘You can put him up at the house where I live,’ said Damaris. ‘It is a very little way off; we can show you.’
‘That will be sweetest charity,’ said Béthune.
Rosselin did not see his way to prevent what annoyed him. The Duke, with the bridle over his arm, walked beside her over the pasture; the notes of the Brisée had ceased; the hunt had passed onward westward, where Dampierre was.
Béthune spoke to her with deference and interest, but she answered him briefly and absently. Rosselin kept up the conversation. Suddenly she said in a low tone:
‘You have seen her — lately?’
Béthune was surprised.
‘You mean the Countess Othmar, your hostess of St. Pharamond? Yes; I saw her a week ago. We stayed together at the same country house in Austria, and I shall soon see her again at Amyôt. That is her castle, as I dare say you know, on the Loire.’
Damaris said nothing. She paced onward, a little in advance of him and of Rosselin; her head was drooped, her face was thoughtful.
‘She was not as kind to you in appearance that day as, I assure you, that she was in feeling,’ said Béthune, not knowing well what to say. ‘She is capricious and negligent, but she has a mind that is very generous and true in its instincts, and those instincts were all your friends and admirers.’
Damaris remained silent.
‘The chief instinct of the lady you speak of is to provide herself with amusement,’ said Rosselin curtly. ‘She usually fails, because the world is so small.’
‘You are unjust to her,’ said Béthune, her loyal servant and courtier. ‘I am sure that she felt the truest interest in Mademoiselle Bérarde. We were all of us distressed when we learned that that magic isle was tenantless.’
‘The new Virginie has left her isle,’ said Rosselin, ‘and I am endeavouring that she shall not make shipwreck on these stonily seas of art and life. My dear duke, great ladies like your châtelaine of Amyôt let fall idle words, never thinking what they may bring forth. It is so easy to destroy content and to suggest ambition. But to efface a suggestion is very hard when once it has taken root in a young mind.’
Béthune guessed at his meaning. ‘The world will be the gainer,’ he said, as they entered the courtyard of the Croix Blanche.
Damaris called a man to his horse, then, without even looking at him, she crossed the court and went indoors, and he saw her no more.
‘She is ver
y much changed,’ said Béthune in surprise as he looked at the dusky archway of the door through whose shadows she had passed from his sight. ‘What is her story since I saw her on that happy island; I shall never forget it; its blue sea, its radiant air, its scent of orange-flowers, its handsome child reciting to us from Esther — it was a poem. Are you going to make a great artist of her? Tell me her story since that day I saw her on her isle.’
‘I do not know it,’ said Rosselin. ‘All I have to do with is the Muse in her. My dear Duke, I repeat, your gracious Lady of Amyôt, for her own diversion, poured into a childish breast a little drop of that divine curiosity which men call ambition: it was only a drop but it burned its way into the soul, and will eat up the life before it has done, I dare say. Madame Nadège did not care what mischief she did: oh no: she only wanted to while away an empty hour for herself.’
Béthune reddened indignant for his absent sovereign.
‘As you are so great an artist yourself you should think that she did well in waking any soul to art.’
‘No,’ said Rosselin angrily. ‘No one does well who meddles with fate or displaces peaceful ignorance and honest content by unrest and desire. This child was happy on her island. The world may perchance make her famous some day, but happy it will never make her again, for happiness is not amongst its gifts!’
‘That is quite true,’ said Béthune with a sigh. He asked many more questions, but obtained little information. He waited in vain for Damaris to re-appear. The sun sank, the shadows deepened into dusk over all the vale, the swallows circled in their last flight round the high house roofs. With reluctance he was forced to bid adieu to Rosselin and take his way to the distant château of Dampierre, where he was a guest.
‘Salute her for me,’ he said at parting. ‘Say that I shall return to thank her to-morrow.’
‘If you wish to do her any service in return for the help to your horse, do not speak of her at Dampierre or in Paris,’ said Rosselin.
‘I will not speak of her to anyone,’ returned Béthune, ‘unless it be to the Countess Othmar. But you will allow me to return.’
‘I have no power to forbid you. Yet it is to her that perhaps it would be desirable you should say nothing,’ answered Rosselin after a moment of hesitation. ‘I merely mean that the Lady of Amyôt did, I believe, prophesy a great career for my pupil, and first of all suggest to her the possible possession of talents the world might recognise. For that reason I think Damaris Bérarde would prefer that she should hear nothing more of her, unless some day the world itself may have justified her predictions.’
‘You think it probable, or you would not waste your hours on her?’
‘I think she has infinite feeling and a poetic temperament. Whether these are enough remains to be seen. There are so many other qualities required, all those humbler qualities which are the prose of genius, the plain bread of character.’
‘She has one requisite, beauty. She is exceedingly handsome. What brought her here?’
‘I cannot say: I am only her teacher.’
‘And who is her lover?’ mused Béthune, as he walked slowly out of the grey courtyard in the gloaming. His suspicions drifted to Loswa.
Rosselin went within and mounted a low wooden staircase which led to the door of Damaris’s chamber.
‘Come out and bid me good-night, my dear. If I loiter I shall lose the last train to Paris.’
She obeyed him and came outside her door.
‘Why did you avoid Béthune?’ he asked her. ‘He is a gentleman and a soldier; he is a man you may respect and who will respect you; though he is a great noble he is an honest fellow. He is one of the few lovers who have worshipped Othmar’s wife without losing dignity or honour.’
Damaris did not answer. She could not well have defined why she had come within doors. There was a certain pain to her in the presence of Béthune because he was associated with that one day so big, for her, with fate.
Rosselin looked at her as she stood in the twilight at the head of the stairs. There was an open window behind her, a hand’s breadth of blue sky, a bough of pear heavy with fruit.
‘Why did you not mention Othmar to him?’ he said abruptly; ‘you mentioned her.’
‘I do not know.’ said Damaris. She spoke the truth. She did not know why she was always reluctant to speak of him.
‘Good-night, my child,’ said Rosselin, with a tenderness in his voice that was new to her ear. He sighed as he too went on his way through the dusky dewy fields, sweet with the breath of browsing cattle and murmurous with the whispers of the leaves.
CHAPTER XXXV.
When Othmar returned to Paris he paid Rosselin a visit.
‘You have been to Chevreuse?’ asked Rosselin. ‘No?’
‘No,’ said Othmar with sincerity and some annoyance, ‘I am still at Amyôt. I only come to Paris occasionally. Is she well? Are you satisfied?’
‘She is quite well,’ replied Rosselin. ‘The answer to the other question is less simple. I am satisfied with her talent, not with her character.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, nothing that is her fault. I merely meant that she is, as Madame la Comtesse once said, “une sensitive.” Such people have no business in public careers. You do not make street-posts out of the stems of a sensitive plant. The Latins gave the statues that were destined to stand in thoroughfares brass discs to protect them. If you have not the brass disc you must not stand even in the peristyle of a theatre.’
‘I do not think she is weak. Had she been weak she would not have left the island as she did.’
‘Who is talking of weakness? — I mean that she is not of a temper for the coarse career of the stage, which is always passed in the press and glare of a stormy crowd. She would play Dona Sol divinely to an audience of poets on your terraces at Amyôt under a midsummer moon. But it is unfortunately not a question of playing it so, but on the stages of public theatres, where very often the coarse applause of the friendly ignorant is still more offensive than the envenomed vituperation of the hostile critic. I dare say we can make her fit for this. We can give her the brass disc, but it will spoil the fine white marble when we fasten it to it. My dear Count Othmar, you know what the life of a great actress in Paris is; you know what it will be for her. We need not spend words on details. Is it a good action that we do when we encourage her to qualify herself for it, or is it a bad one?’
Othmar heard him with distress. He was always haunted by the memory that his wife, by a few careless words, had broken up for ever that simple, peaceful, healthful, flower-like life which Damaris Bérarde had led in Bonaventure. The power of all the kings of the earth could not have replaced her in it.
‘It is her choice,’ he said, after a silence of some moments.
‘Is fate ever wholly choice?’ said Rosselin. ‘And when a child says he will be a soldier, what does he know of war, of wounds, of the sickening stench of the rotting dead, of the maladies which kill men in hundreds like murrained cattle? Nothing: he thinks it all tambour et trompette and Væ Victis! Your friend at Chevreuse knows no more of what the life of the theatre is than the child knows of war, and I for one have not the courage to enlighten her. Have you? She dreams of all kinds of glories; she does not see the rouge-pot, the white powder, the claque, the press, the lovers, the diamonds, the ugliness, the vulgarity, the money bags, the whole ronde du diable. She thinks she will be Dona Sol, be Esther, be Rosalind, off the stage as well as on it. Who is to tell her the mistake she makes?’
‘Surely you can, if anyone?’
‘No, I cannot. You cannot make a mind conceive a thing wholly inconceivable to it. I can say a certain number of words certainly to her; produce a certain effect; suggest some images to her which will be painful and revolting. But when I have done that I shall not have done much; I shall not have produced any real impression on her, because the advice which I mean will not in itself be intelligible to her. I may talk as I will of war to the child; but I shall never be ab
le to make him see what I have seen in the days of the siege of Paris, which sometimes still turns me sick when I awake at night and think of it. Perhaps it is because I grow old, and, so, sentimental that I am troubled with those scruples which I do not suppose would have suggested themselves to me twenty, or even ten years ago; but I certainly do feel that I have not done what contents me in preparing Damaris Bérarde for the art of the stage. She will be a great artist, I believe, but she will be a miserable woman.’
Othmar heard him with anxiety and pain. The vision of her was always before him as he had left her in the red brown grass with the evening skies behind her. Country peace, woodland silences, fresh air of early autumn, simple pleasures of youth — these would find no place in life into which she had been led to enter. Some, losing them early, long for them all their lives.
‘I suppose,’ continued Rosselin, ‘that the imagination in me is dying out; as one grows old one drops illusions, as old trees drop branch after branch on the ground, till there is nothing left but the trunk, and perhaps a woodpecker in it, perhaps nothing except dust. Certainly twenty years ago I should have said, and should have thoroughly believed, that art — any art — was worth any sacrifice. But now I do not think so. One pays too heavily for any kind of fame. To be famous at all is to have all the doors and windows of your house standing wide open, and a mob, all eyes and ears, for ever staring in and watching you as you eat, as you drink, as you sleep, as you play, aye, even as you weep by your child’s coffin or draw the shroud over the breast of your dead mistress. Once famous, you never can laugh or can cry in solitude ever again. Either to throw laurel crowns at you or to pelt you with stones, the mob is always pushing in over your threshold. When boys and girls dream of fame they do not know what it is — the eternal adieu to privacy, the eternal self-surrender to the crowd. Alkibiades loved the crowd; there are many like him in all centuries; but les sensitives hate it, shrink from it, try to bar it out with their bare arm, which gets broken in the struggle, like the Scottish maiden’s in history. The price paid is too heavy. All the shade and the freshness and the quiet leafy by-paths of life are denied us for ever. There is only the great high-road, the crude hard light, the gaping multitude that stare and grin till we give up the ghost! The price is too heavy. It is the same curse as the curse which lies on kings, never to be alone.’