by Ouida
The world had so many claims upon her: his were forgotten or ignored. Where were the visions he had had of a life out of the world, poetic, unworldly, tuned to another key than the brazen clangour of society? They were gone for ever like last year’s roses.
The so-called pleasures of life had never had attraction for him; they were a mere routine; he was tired of crowds, of flattery, of splendour, of movement; he was tired of the women who tried to beguile, and the men who endeavoured to use, him; the whole thing seemed to him witless, tedious, tame. She, who had always declared that it was so, yet could find her diversion in dazzling it and stimulating its envy; though most things failed to please her, yet, like all women, her own power pleased her always; but he had no such resource, for the power which he had (that of wealth) he despised.
A sense of failure came wearily upon him during this evening which followed on her return. If this were all the issue of great passion and great love, what use were either?
The world was a pageant to her, and he might stand by and see her pass in it. The rôle did not please him. He fancied — no doubt he told himself it was but fancy — that the world ridiculed him in that subordinate place, that half-effaced position, that too indulgent acceptance of her continual caprices, tyrannies, and slights.
He did not remember, did not know, that he himself in Russia had seemed cold to her. He was only sensible of the barrier which had grown up between them, of the indifference with which his presence or his absence was regarded by her. Gradually, as the fine mist of approaching rain steals over a sunny country, dimming the colours and effacing the lines of it little by little, until nothing is seen but the colourless blur of the wide white rain itself, so the sensation of dissatisfaction, of disappointment, of disunion had come over the tenor of their lives together. The consciousness of it brought to him a profound and passionate sense of irreparable loss. A word from her would have dispelled it, an hour of full belief that she had ever loved him as he had once loved her would have sufficed to sweep it away; but the word was never spoken, the hour never came. Time only strengthened his conviction that, were he dead before her, she would not greatly care.
The sense of the incompleteness of his own life came upon him with a strong consciousness as he stood in his brilliant rooms with the laughter of his wife and her guests borne to his ear, and the sounds of some gay music coming to him from another salon. He might have ten, twenty, thirty, forty years more of this existence, and its years, its days, its hours would always be precisely like this year, this day, this hour. The future seemed to rise up like a phantom and say to him, ‘The past gave you the fulfilment of your greatest desire. I shall give you nothing but the fruit of that fulfilment. If that fruit do not content you, whose fault is that?’
Men whose wishes are thwarted can throw the blame on fate if their lives prove barren; but he had passionately wished for one thing, and all the forces of life and of death had joined together to give it him. He had no one to reproach, no unkind destiny to upbraid, if the gift left his heart cold, his soul cheerless; if he felt at times a mortal loneliness, and at times a weariness of vague regret.
The cruelty of all great passions is that, after their fruition, there must come this inevitable regret. They are altogether beyond the pale of daily life; they can never fraternise with the demands of social existence. She had once said truly that death is the kindest friend to love, because it saves it from being made ridiculous by daily habit and worn away by daily friction.
The world is wrong when it pities Romeo, when it weeps for Stradella.
The great love he had borne her had survived all those trials of familiarity and of habit which are crueller enemies to love than absence or than death. It had been the romantic passion of Romeo united to that depth and unity of devotion which Friederich Othmar had been wont slightingly to call the knight’s love for his lady. It had been so essentially interwoven with his life that it had always seemed to him it could only go away from him with life itself.
The idea that a love so great should yet have the same fate as have all the little passions of a frivolous hour was still intolerable to him. With him it had been of those passions which ennoble and enlarge human nature, because, though interwoven with the senses, they yet embrace the soul, and are drawn by their very idolatry to that longing for immortality which is the only possible approach to faith in it.
But he knew that he had never moved her thus; he knew that, if he had ever given utterance to all he felt, she would have listened with a derisive compassion as to the exaggeration of a mind distraught. The crystal clearness, the acute penetration, the ingrained scepticism of her intellect made impossible to her those illusions and those hopes which are so dear to minds more imaginative than critical, to temperaments more impassioned than logical, as was his.
He had given his whole life away to her, and she did not even care for the gift; scarcely deigned to accept it, except in conventional shape. He was unreasonable, no doubt, as she would have told him had he said so to her. He had asked of life and passion what neither can give — immortality. All which serve to console the great majority of mankind did not avail to console him for that loss.
Most men grow content with the crowd which is constantly about them, with the host of petty interests which claim them, with the repetition of pleasures and pursuits which is enforced on them; their days are dull, but they are full; they are consumed by monotony, but they are unconscious of its tedium, because they have no imagination and often no passion.
Othmar could not be thus reconciled to the disappointments and the sameness of existence. He required life to be a poem, and he was not consoled because it proved a mere diary.
The new year brought him without break that increase of occupation which makes it a season of such weariness to all who are of any importance in the world, and have a crowd of supplicants and petitioners always looking to them for support. Himself he would have liked to pass the winter season at Amyôt, but to her it was useless even to suggest it.
‘You cannot ask the world to bury itself in a frozen wood by a river in flood,’ she had said when once he had wished to do so.
‘But is the world absolutely necessary?’
‘If it were not there what should we do? You would read Plato perhaps for the thousandth time; I could not promise to read Goethe for the hundredth. The country in winter is like a man of eighty repeating a poem on spring.’
‘It is just possible that the man of eighty might feel the meaning of the poem more thoroughly than the boy of eighteen.’
‘His feelings would not prevent him from looking absurd.’
‘I suppose, you at least would never pity him?’
‘Most surely not.’
‘What would you pity?’ he said bitterly.
She smiled. ‘I should not pity people who could shut themselves up in damp forests on the Loire water in midwinter. A Russian winter is quite a different thing; the air is like champagne, the frost is like diamonds, the plains are like marble; it is charming to have one’s roses and palms in a temperature of 30° Réaumur, and by merely going out of doors plunge en pleine Sibérie. That is why I am a very patriotic Russian. I love the intensity of its contrasts.’
‘As Marie Stuart loved Chastelard and Bothwell!’ said Othmar with a certain significance.
‘Should you think she loved either of them? I should doubt it. They loved her, and being stupid as men only are, they compromised her.’
‘I dare say she thought of all men as you do! — as a little higher than the horse, a little lower than the dog! No more!’ said Othmar with some impatience.
She smiled: ‘Perhaps! I am not sure that it is a bad compliment. Where should we put you in the seat of creation — Mary Stuart and I — who cannot adore you as Penelope and Hermione can?’
‘I never hoped to be adored!’ said Othmar with some bitterness.
‘Oh, yes; you did, one day. All men hope for it, only they do not get it, — except from Grise
ldis whom they beat, and from Gretchen whom they forsake.’
They were alone in their drawing-room in the vacant five minutes before a great dinner party. He looked at her wistfully. What woman was ever comparable to her, he thought; where else were that exquisite grace, that entrancing languor, that supreme distinction in every movement and in every attitude? The very tones of her voice, sweet as the sound of any silver bell, and cold as the breath of frost, had a charm in it that no other’s had. With a sudden impulse of reviving ardour he stooped and pushed the loose glove from her arm, and kissed the white soft skin beneath it. But she, remembering and resentful of the weeks in Russia, drew it from his caress with her chilliest rebuke:
‘My dear Otho! we are neither children nor lovers!’
He was repulsed and silent.
At that moment their groom of the chambers announced that some of their coming guests, who were of imperial name and place, were entering the gates.
He and she together descended the grand staircase between the lines of their servants in state liveries.
‘Together like this!’ thought Othmar. ‘Together in these pageantries, these conventionalities, these mummeries; but never in any other hours, in any other way!’
CHAPTER XXXVI.
The days slipped one after another away, and he had still said nothing to her of Damaris. He seldom saw her alone; when he did so, no opening had presented itself which seemed to him propitious. The length of time which he had unwisely allowed to elapse now created an additional difficulty. She might, if he told her now, naturally ask why he had been silent so long. He had made no intentional concealment; anyone of the household knew that the girl had been there in the summer and throughout her illness. But no one, not even her most confidential attendants, would ever have ventured to tell their mistress anything unasked. She held them at a distance, which the boldest of them never dared to pass. The only servant she had treated with more familiarity had been the little African boy Mahmoud; and Mahmoud had died, in his fifteenth year, from the cruel north winds of Northern Europe, babbling in his delirium to the last, in Arabic, words of his lady and his love for her, poor little tropical beast! killed as men kill the antelope kid of the desert when they drag it from its groves of palm and its warm golden sands, to shiver and perish behind the bars of a cage in a northern menagerie.
Not one of the household spoke, or would ever speak, of anything which ever took place unknown to their mistress; but they knew, doubtless — as servants in great cities know all the affairs of their employers — that the young girl who had been ill there, brought in from the streets in the bygone summer, was dwelling at Les Hameaux, and was occasionally visited by their master. Partly from their gossiping when outside his walls, and partly from other causes, the name of Damaris Bérarde began to be bruited about in Paris. A secret is very like a subtle odour; it escapes by unseen crevices and passes to the outer air, though every egress may be barred. A certain vague rumour arose that not only had Rosselin discovered some new and great talent which he was training for the public stage, but that with this hidden life which was so carefully concealed the name of Othmar was connected.
Had Blanche de Laon been accused of first setting afloat that breath of calumny, she would have declared, and truthfully, ‘Moi? Je n’ai jamais soufflé mot!’
Yet she had conveyed a hint into the air, and it was sufficient. One thistle-seed is enough to choke a field with thistles.
In vain do we think we walk in private paths unseen; some eyes are forever there to peer through the thickest hedge; some lips are forever ready to say what they do not know, and magnify the harmless mouse-ear to a wonder-flower with a poisoned root. Those of whom rumour thus discourses with bated breath and comprehensive gesture are seldom or never aware that they are the subject of such whispers; they are always the last to imagine that their acts are put under the magnifying-lenses of public speculation.
Even Rosselin, with his intimate knowledge of the inquisitiveness and the loquacity of human nature, did not dream that the mere fact of his going twice or thrice a week to Les Hameaux and taking a neophyte to the temples of his own art, to quiet morning recitations, could be a fact of any import to the world at large. He had had so many pupils, and he never remembered that the world had had any concern with them unless they had become ultimately great enough to challenge and compel its languid attention; and even then its notice had been very hard to obtain, Why should it break its rule of universal apathy and indifference towards those who are obscure because a young girl lived on a farm in the pastoral solitudes which had once sheltered Racine?
Both he and Othmar, in very different ways, had a reserve and hauteur of manner which always kept at arm’s length rash intruders and trivial questioners. Therefore they were the last persons on earth to hear anything of what rumour murmured of either of them. Damaris, in her simple home under the ashes and elms of the Croix Blanche, was not more isolated from the gossip of the world than they both were by choice and temperament. But the world gossiped not the less but the more for the immunity which their ignorance permitted to it, and because it knew little invented much.
The world to whom Othmar’s was so familiar and conspicuous a name built for him a tall edifice of lies down in those innocent pastures of Les Hameaux. But he was unconscious of that house of fable in which they made him dwell. He believed that his own abstention from any visits there made Damaris as safe from notice as though she were still beneath the orange leaves and olive shadows of her isle. If she wanted anything or any counsel, Rosselin would tell him he felt sure. At times the memory of her, as he had left her standing in the evening dusk amongst the red-brown seeding grasses, made him desire to see her with a wish he restrained. Sometimes the recollection of her flushed, bowed face, as he had touched her forehead with his lips, came over him with an emotion which was too gentle for desire, too kind for passion; but he resisted it.
‘To see me can do her no good’ he said to himself; ‘and it may make others do her harm. If she be left alone she may learn to live for art: it is a safe and kindly friend.’
One day, when he was at work in his little cabinet du travail, his wife came to him there for a moment on her way to her carriage. It was his favourite room; it opened on one side into the library, on the other into the gardens; the peacocks would walk in from without when the doors stood open, and the green gloom of an avenue of coniferæ stretched away immediately in front of its steps. It was here that the sketch made by Loswa hung betwixt a woodland glade painted by Corot, and a sloop becalmed in the Sound painted by Aivanoffsky.
It was rarely that Nadine deigned to enter there; she paused there now for a moment with an open note in her hand, which she had received that instant from Prince Hohenlohe, requesting her intercession with Othmar concerning some matter of German interest which did not brook delay.
It was soon disposed of. He wrote a line and gave it to her to do as she pleased with it, and looked at her with wistfulness. It was the first time he had seen her that day; it was four o’clock, she was about to attend a musical gathering at the Prince of Lemberg’s hotel in the Boulevard Joséphine, convened to hear the first execution by illustrious amateurs of a pastoral cantata of his own composition on the theme of Ruth.
‘You are going to the Ruth?’ asked Othmar.
‘Yes; I wonder you are not. Music used always to draw you out of your hole like a lizard.’
‘I have a great deal to do,’ he replied; ‘and, besides, how many times have you not enforced on me the bourgeois absurdity of accompanying you anywhere?’
‘You need not accompany me. You can come by yourself. Certainly I think it does look absurd to see two people always together like two dogs in a coupling-chain.’
Othmar sighed a little impatiently.
‘Lemberg has chosen a very bourgeois theme; surely very archaic and ill adapted for his audience. The emotions of Ruth will seem to your world something as ridiculous as a gown of the time of Marie Amélie!’
‘They are only in a pastoral,’ she said with a smile. ‘They are very well there. We are not required to share them. You would share them, perhaps; nobody else would.’
‘You mean I should share those of Boaz!’
‘Boaz or any other vrai berger. You should inhabit one of the happy valleys of Florian and Mademoiselle Scudéry. There is always something in your ideas which is quite of the last century, and seems to suggest a flock of sheep with ribbons and a crook, like those in the Saxes statuettes. If I were to die, you would like to lie on a bank of violets and mourn me in alexandrines.’
He smiled, but the raillery was not welcome to him. It seemed to him that, if she had any love for him, she would never laugh at him, never see in him that weaker, absurder side, which may be found in every human character if eyes without sympathy look for it. And the imputation of sentimentality irritated him as it irritates all those whose feelings are strong and whose temperament is incapable of any affectation or of any shallowness.
Let a man have as little vanity as he may, yet in his secret heart he likes the woman he loves to find him a little more than man. He had been long conscious that he would for ever look in vain for this kind of admiration from her. There was a certain depreciation even in her indulgence; there was an invariable criticism in her mental attitude, however favourable; she could be no more deceived as to the weaknesses of character than a great surgeon can be as to the weaknesses of body. True, her wit and her intellect served to retain her power over him, but then he was nervously sensible that these made him less in her eyes than he would willingly have been. He was aware that the very fineness of her penetration, the very brilliancy of her mind, made her infinitely more hard to please for any length of time than women of smaller brain and of less highly-trained powers. To a woman of rare intellect and of critical wit it is difficult for any man to remain long a hero.