by Ouida
He sighed as he turned and walked up the little path of his cottage garden. Looking back upon his life he seemed to have thrown his years to the mob as offal is thrown to a pack of hounds.
It was only a mood, a passing mood, but there was a great truth in it.
‘One needs not to be famous to suffer that curse,’ said Othmar. ‘Whoever is in the world has it. Private life is a thing of the past; we are all expected to dine and to sup, and to spread our bridal-beds and our death-beds, in public, like the monarchs of old. An age which has invented the electric light has abolished solitude and respects no privacy; it will end in forcing all âmes d’élite to find and form a new Thebaïd.’
‘If they can anywhere find a square mile without a tramway and a telephone!’ said Rosselin, tenderly touching a tea-rose which blossomed in the cold wet weather against the low white wall of his house.
Then he said abruptly:
‘What does your wife say now of her second Desclée?’
Othmar was angered to feel that the natural interrogation embarrassed him.
‘My wife has forgotten both her prophecies and the subject of them,’ he said with a certain impatience and bitterness in the accent with which the words were spoken.
‘And you have not refreshed her memory?’
‘I think it would be useless.’
Rosselin was silent: he was not pleased. He angrily thought of Béthune, and wondered if he would speak of his encounter with Damaris.
‘Some one will tell her if you do not,’ he said with some significance. ‘Pardon me if I say too much, but I dislike concealments; they are usually unwise and seldom profitable. Chevreuse is not a vale in Venus or Polaris, that we can be sure no one will ever see your protégée!’
‘Anyone may see her,’ said Othmar, with annoyance and hauteur. ‘But to recall to my wife a subject she has forgotten demands a courage of which I frankly confess myself not the possessor.’
‘Humph!’ said Rosselin with dubious accent: he was not satisfied. It seemed to him that embarrassing complications would of necessity grow up out of so much needless reticence. Othmar, he thought, was most probably not aware himself of all the various and confused motives which disposed him to silence on the name of Damaris.
‘She is not of a facile character,’ he thought, recalling all he had ever heard of the caprices and cruelties of Nadine Napraxine in her youth. ‘But when there is a nettle in question it is always best to grasp it boldly. Besides, if she be so indifferent as they say, the whole thing would be of infinitesimal insignificance to her, unless concealment were to lend it an importance not its own, as some shadows can be thrown on a white wall so as to make a beetle loom large as an ox.’
‘Chevreuse, moreover,’ continued Othmar, ’is a place that no one ever sees in winter. Unless it be in the few weeks when Dampierre is occupied, not a soul of our world ever goes there. If she mean or hope to become famous with the fame you decry, she is best there in solitude; if, on the contrary, she fail it will be still well that none should know her efforts who would not pity them. My wife is like the Latins, she has no altar to pity; she despises it. If the world ever applaud Damaris Bérarde, then and then only shall I venture to recall to her the prophecy she made at St. Pharamond.’
‘If with her nothing succeeds like success she only follows the world,’ said Rosselin. ‘I thought she led it?’
‘She does lead it: but she has great contempt for those who fail in it. When a lamb falls from fatigue on the Australian plains the shepherd walks on and leaves it to its fate. Those who fail seem to my wife as the fallen lambs do to the shepherd: that is all.’
‘Damaris Bérarde will not fail,’ said Rosselin, with a sense of anger and of triumph in her.
‘Aimée Desclée did not fail — but she died.’
‘Damaris will not die; she is too strong; but she may break her heart over broken illusions, as a thorough-bred horse breaks his over bad roads. Good God, what a beautiful world it would be if it were like the world these youths and maidens see in their dreams!’
‘She may break her heart over broken illusions.’
The words haunted Othmar’s memory as he left the cottage at Asnières. Yes, that was often the death of the strongest, death mental and moral if not death physical.
What he had done for her had secured her future from want, had given her a safe home for so long as she would be content with it; but how much more was there for which no prescience could provide, from which no friendship could secure her! With her ardent temperament, her ignorance of life, her poetic and unwise impulses, how much would her heart ask and her imagination demand! She would not, could not, lead the passionless life of passionless natures. Whom would she love? Would love only be for her the Charon who took her through a river of hell to the shores of death, as he had been to Aimée Desclée?
Or would she leave behind her all those beautiful faiths and fancies, all those innocent ardours and tender thoughts, as the year leaves behind it the blossoms of spring, the young green of April: and would she become famous and flattered, leading the world in a leash, and putting her foot on the necks of her lovers?
He liked one vision as little as the other.
Either way the sea-bird of Bonaventure would be no more; either way the child who had gone away from him in the moonlight under the silver shadows of the olive-trees and of the mists of dawn would be as dead as though she were in her grave. Would the time ever come when she would say to him, ‘Why did you not let me die on the stones of Paris instead of keeping life in me for this?’ Or would time give her that brazen disk of which Rosselin had spoken, and with it the heart of bronze which all must have instead of a heart of flesh and blood if they would go triumphant through the heat and pressure of the world? Rosselin had said aright, that the disk of brass would spoil the fair white statue, and the heart of bronze, the heart of the mockers of men, the heart of Venus Lubetina, would it ever be hers?
He went home to his own house, where he was expecting his wife’s return that evening. He went into his own rooms and looked at the sketch made by Loris Loswa. The sight of it troubled and disturbed him. He had a sense of wrong doing upon him of which, when he searched his own conscience, he could with honesty declare himself blameless. He had put her as much out of his own hands as it had been possible to do, and the simple ruse by which he had been able to provide for her maintenance seemed as innocent as any pretence by which the motherless lamb can be persuaded to eat or the unfledged bird to let itself be befriended by gentle hands. Still it had been a subterfuge; it had been an untruth; and he hated the merest shadow of falsehood. His detestation of it had been the constant subject of Friederich Othmar’s ridicule and sarcasm, and the elder man had in vain argued with him a thousand times, to endeavour to prove to him that it is, in the hands of a skilled casuist, at once the most forcible and the most delicate of weapons. He had always refused to admit its virtues; it seemed to him a craven and contemptible thing, however dressed up with wit and wisdom.
That Blanchette de Laon had seen him at Chevreuse had kept him from returning thither, and it also made him feel the absolute necessity of acquainting his wife with all he had done for Damaris before Rumour, with her hundred tongues, and women, with their devilish ingenuity in exaggeration and suggestion, should have bruited the tale abroad in some guise wholly unlike the truth of it. If he could by good fortune place the story before her in such a light that it would move her finer and more generous impulses, then all would be well. But this was so doubtful; the quixotism of his own conduct would be the first thing which would strike her, and she would probably be unsparing in her ridicule of it. Besides, the reception of his narrative would wholly depend on her mood, on the trifles of the moment, on the facts of whether or no she were in a sympathetic and kindly humour. Any trifle would do to determine that: if the rooms were not heated enough, if the flowers in them were not those she liked, if the costumes of the coming season seemed ugly to her, or if she had caught a
slight chill on her journey — any one of these things, or anything similar to them, would make any appeal to her generosity and sympathy worse than useless.
He had been so long accustomed to study the barometer of her caprices that he dreaded its mutability. He knew that there were in her instincts and elements of nobility, even of greatness, which, could she have been cast on troublous times and dire disasters, would have made her rise to sacrifice, even to heroism. As it was, in her perpetual self-gratification, her unlimited power of command, her bed of unruffled roses, and her atmosphere of incessant adulation, all the capriciousness and egotism of her nature were encouraged and nursed to overweening growth.
In the depths of her nature were those finer qualities which will always respond to the appeal of higher emotions in moments of extremity or the hours of great calamity or of great peril. She would have had the dignity of Marie Antoinette before the Convention, the courage of Anne de Montfort before Philippe de Valois, the strength of Maria Theresa before Europe. But nothing less than the inspiration of such supreme hours of life could have penetrated the indifference of her temperament, and the trivialities and the frivolities of modern existence could never do so for an instant.
Had he sought her pardon for some great crime, sought her fidelity through some great ruin, he might, he probably would have aroused the latent forces and sympathies dormant in her character; she would not have given him a stone when he had asked for bread. But in the things of daily life he had found her too often without mercy to have in her mercies much trust.
The conviction that she would never give him the comprehension which he wished made him withhold all other utterances of his deeper emotions and more tender thoughts. He had gone to her in one supreme moment of pain, and he had received a rebuff such as repels for long, if not for ever, a sensitive nature.
She did not realise that her infinite comprehension of the moods and minds of others was marred to them by the chill raillery which accompanied her acute perceptions. She did not remember that though to herself the dilemmas and the weaknesses, even the passions which she studied were objects of amused ridicule, they were to those on whom she studied them subjects of great moment, and often of as great suffering.
Even the men who most blindly loved her were afraid to confide in her, because of the inevitable irony with which their confidence was certain to be met. Many a time Othmar himself had longed to lean his head on her knees, and lay bare to her all the contradictions, and longings, and regrets of his soul; but he had never dared to do so, because he had always shrunk from the certain mockery which would, he knew, point through all her sympathy, if sympathy she would ever give. Her comprehension of human nature made her in one sense the most lenient of auditors; but in another sense she was the most unsparing: she could pardon easily, but she could never promise not to ridicule. That one fact held sensitive natures aloof from her with all the force of a scourge.
‘She will deem me such a fool,’ he thought often: and then he kept silence.
He went this evening down to the Gare du Nord to receive her, and almost before the train had paused he had entered the saloon carriage in which she had travelled undisturbed since she had left Berlin. There was always in him something of the eagerness after absence of a lover; her mere presence always exercised over him a magnetism and a charm.
She raised herself on her elbow from the mass of sable furs and of wadded satin on which she had been lying; she had been rudely awakened by the cessation of the train’s movement; the blaze of a lamp was in her eyes; she was impatient, and she yawned.
‘Otho! my dear Otho!’ she said with petulance, ‘why will you always come to meet one at a railway station? Of all the many absurd customs of our generation that is the most absurd. Nobody’s emotions are so poignant that they cannot wait till one comes into the house. I was asleep. What a cold night! Why cannot they devise something which would carry the train straight to one’s bedside? All their inventions are very clumsy after all.’
She was slowly raising herself from her heap of furs and red satin; her eyes were languid with arrested sleep; her tone was irritable and irritating: she scarcely seemed to perceive his presence; the sweet delicate odour as of tea-roses with which all her clothes were always impregnated came to him well known as the accents of her voice. A curious passion of conflicting feeling passed over him; he could have seized her in his arms and cried aloud to her, ‘I have given you all my life, do you give me no more than this?’ Yet he felt chilled, angered, alienated, silenced for the moment; a feeling which was almost dislike came over him; it seemed to him as if he had poured out all the love of his life upon her and received in return a mere handful of ice and snow. But the inexorable haste and vulgar trivialities of modern exigencies left him no moment for thought or for the expression of it. He could only offer her his hand in silence to assist her to alight, and give her his arm and lead her through the throngs of the Northern Terminus to her own carriage.
He drove with her through the streets to their own house and escorted her to the apartments which were especially hers.
‘I dare not disturb you longer to-night,’ he said with a certain bitterness of tone which he could not control. ‘The children wished to remain up to welcome you, but I did not allow them to do so; I know how you despise undisciplined feeling.’
She laughed a little languidly, letting her women remove her fur wrappings, whilst she stood in the delicious warmth and light of the rooms where thousands of hothouse roses were gathered together in welcome of her return, filling the hot air with their fragrance.
‘Do you mean that for satire?’ she said with a little yawn. ‘Do not try to be sardonic, it does not suit you. The children are certainly much better in bed. I will go and look at them after I have had a bath. I am very tired. Goodnight.’
She gave him a sleepy sign of dismissal, then chid her women for being slow. Had they her pine-bath ready? — there was no bath so good after fatigue and cold.
He left her presence with pain and anger, despite the coldness which came over him towards her: coldness born from her own as the frosts of the earth come from the cold of the atmosphere. His adoration of her had been too integral a part of his life for her touch, her voice, her glance, not to have a certain empire over him which no other woman would ever obtain.
In the forenoon, quite late, he was again admitted to her presence. She had recovered her fatigue, she was serene and almost kind, but the children were there: they were not alone five minutes. Later, she gave audience to all the great faiseurs, whose intelligence had been busied inventing marvels of costume for her for the winter season. Later yet, there came some of her intimate friends and some of her most devoted courtiers.
It was raining heavily in the streets, but in her apartments there were hothouse heat and hothouse fragrance, in the sultry air and amidst the innumerable roses it was hard to believe that it was the thirtieth of November. People came and went, laughed and chattered; she wrote notes, sent messages, telegraphed many contradictory orders to her tradespeople; the day was crowded and entertaining; there was a certain stimulant, even for her, in the sense that she was in Paris.
Othmar did not see her again until they met at dinner. Béthune dined there, and four or five other persons, who had called and been invited that afternoon. The day was a type of all other days of her life.
Othmar thought with impatience and bitterness of the dreams he had dreamed. She despised the world and ridiculed it; yet who was more absorbed by it? Who was less able to live without it? She always spoke with her lips of the fatigue of society, but, as he thought angrily, she was not so weary that she was ever willing to forsake it. All the year round it was about her. Every season saw her where its fashion, its pastimes, its flatteries, were most largely to be found. Without that atmosphere of adulation, of luxury, and of excitement she would have been lost. The world was a poor affair, no doubt, not anything like what if might be were people more inventive and more courageous. She had
said so a hundred times; but still there was nothing better than its movement. To read Plato all day under an oak-tree, or to sit alone by a library fire with a volume of Sully Prudhomme, would not be any improvement on it, though it might be more philosophic.
To his fancy, life together was poor and meaningless, unless it implied mutual sympathy and communion of feeling. He was a romanticist, as she had always told him. To his views it was not in any way an ideal of either love or happiness to be for ever surrounded by the fever of the great world, to be for ever separated by its demands and its excitements, to meet only on the common ground of mutual interests, to dwell under the same roof with little more intimacy than two strangers met there at a house-party. It appeared that this was what she now expected, what she now preferred. His pride prevented him from struggling against her decrees; but he felt, and loathed to feel, that he was insensibly approaching a position towards her scarcely higher than that which Napraxine had occupied. True, she still had moments of exquisite charm, of irresistible sorcery, in which she occasionally deigned to remember that he had been the lover of her choice; and in these she bent his will and turned his brain almost as much as in the earlier years of his idolatry. But these moments were rare, and when they came appealed to the senses in him, and not to the heart; they left him unnerved, they did not satisfy his affections.