by Ouida
He spoke with no second thought, knowing nothing more than that which he said. But Béthune, silently listening, felt again an uneasy sense as of some guilty complicity in what he withheld from the person whom it most nearly concerned.
Yet it was not for him to give up to her what Othmar had concealed from her. Unwillingly and perforce, his honour and his delicacy made him the reluctant keeper of a secret which he disapproved. ‘I have always been his enemy, so I must be now his friend,’ he thought with that loyalty which was the strength of his character, though a quality so little known to his generation that it seemed to it to be a weakness.
‘Am I an imbecile,’ she thought as she drove away from the house, ‘am I an imbecile, that this girl I had utterly forgotten haunts me all day long like a phrase of the ‘Ruth?’ Is it just because I looked at her picture? Or is it because that song of Paul’s, “O, reine des champs,” made me remember her as I saw her going through the hepaticas under the orange leaves on her strange little island? All these men know something of her, I think, and Otho perhaps knows most.’
As she drove through the streets, lying almost at full length in her carriage, wrapped in furs and with a great bouquet of gardenia idly clasped in her hands, her eyes were closed, but her thoughts were awake. A little contemptuous smile was on her lips, but a great slowly-arousing and amazed suspicion was in her heart.
She had bidden him take his liberty, true. So great sovereigns bid their courtiers take theirs; but evil betides the courtier who is rash enough to construe the bidding literally.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
There lived in Paris an old man who had once been a freed serf, and then a confidential private secretary of her father’s. He had received a pension from her family for his faithful and intelligent services, and the devotion which he had given to her father he had continued to give to her. He was a man of great humility, though of great sagacity. He had the patience and submissive temper of the Muscovite peasant joined to the subtlety and the adroitness of the educated Slav. Whenever she needed any errand executed in which prudence and ability were needed, she always sent for this person, whom she had known from infancy, and who loved and revered her with an almost abject devotion. Rather than fail to execute the wishes of Nadège Federowna, or fail to keep the secret of them when fulfilled, he would have died a hundred times over with that serenity under torture which the Russian of the Baltic shares with the Asiatic of the Indus.
Of the very existence of this man Othmar knew scarcely anything. It had always seemed to her well to have some few instruments of which the position and the species were known only to herself. One is never sure of the future. It was her manner of keeping ‘une poire pour la soif,’ after the wise injunction of the provincial proverb.
She had never hitherto used the services of Michel Obrenovitch for any wrongful cause; but she knew that, to whatever purpose she chose to dedicate him, to that purpose he would be bound.
When she rose in the following forenoon she sent for him, and gave him the name of Damaris Bérarde and the name of the island of Bonaventure.
‘Whatever there can be learnt of this person and this place learn for me,’ she said to him.
He asked no more instructions. He kissed the hem of her gown in sign of humblest loyalty and good faith, and withdrew.
‘He has the grip of a ferret,’ she thought, ‘and the heart of a dog.’
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
It was now towards the close of carnival. Othmar’s time, always largely occupied, and doubly burdened since the death of his uncle, left him but little leisure for the studies and the thoughts most natural to his mind. His temperament led him to the love of leisure, of privacy, of meditation. To read Plato under an oak-tree all day, as she suggested, however insufficient it might have seemed to her, would have been to him the most congenial of occupations. He would have chosen Vaucluse, like Petrarca, could he have done so.
Amidst all the variety of affairs which came before him he was often tired with that fatigue of the mind which is more painful than the fatigue of the body. Study, even over-study, does not produce that fatigue; what produces it is the constant pressure of uncongenial and constantly-recurrent demands upon mental attention. Since the death of Friederich Othmar such demands upon him had been multiplied a hundredfold; and whilst all Paris looked on him as one of the most enviable of its great personages, he himself would willingly have given all his millions to be free to pass his years in the intellectual leisure and repose which were to him the chief excellence of life.
‘He has remained Wilhelm Meister and Werter, though an unkind fate has made him a rival of the Rothschilds,’ his wife had said once. And a student at heart he did remain, and a dreamer also whenever the thunder of the brazen chariots of the world around him left him any peaceful moment in which to enjoy silence and remember the dreams of his youth.
The moments grew rarer and wider apart every year. He was like the king on Burne-Jones’s wheel of fortune: he was crowned, but bound on the wheel.
Therefore, in the press of great interests and of public matters, which despite himself absorbed so much of his thoughts and of his time, the remembrance of Damaris was no dominant thing, but a tender and fugitive memory which came to him ever and again, as the song of a bird on a bough outside his windows may bring the gentle thoughts of other days to the hearer of it who sits shut up in a close room under a zinc roof in a city. Whenever he remembered her it was with infinite pity, with great anxiety, with little of those more selfish impulses which tinge a man’s thoughts of a woman, always with an almost passionate desire to undo the wrong which had been done her by his wife.
‘What can I do for her? Command me in all ways,’ he had said more than once to Rosselin, who had always answered: ‘Perhaps the best thing you can do is to let her alone.’
He had many thoughts of her which troubled him, and vague projects which he was forced to abandon as impracticable. He wished to give her back the island, set her there in simple sovereignty over the orange trees and the sea-waves, restore to her her beautiful free open-air existence amongst the sea-swallows and the olive-haunting thrushes. He would have striven to do it at all cost; but the isle was not to be bought. The owner believed it to be a mountain of treasure, since it was sought for, and would not part with it at any price. There was no possibility for him to give her back her little realm, to make her life anything he would have liked to make it. He could only leave her alone, as Rosselin had bluntly told him to do; and that cold kindness did not satisfy the generosity of his temper, or seem suited to the softness and helplessness of her years.
This day when he had watched his wife’s carriage roll through the gates of the courtyard, his conscience smote him especially for what seemed to him neglect and unkindness to one who had no other friend than himself.
On an impulse of compassion and repentance he went out of the house and took the train which goes west on its way to the sea-shores of Brétagne.
‘Poor child,’ he thought. ‘Fear of them makes me a coward to her. She must have deemed me unkind and neglectful; all these weeks and months I have never been near her. Time goes so fast — —’
He alighted at the little station of Trappes, and took his way on foot across the fields towards the Croix Blanche.
The weather, though dull and grey, had been rainless as the train passed through the market-gardens and shabby suburbs of the north-west, but when he reached Magny the valley in its silvery fog looked poetic, and wore a charm all its own after the dreary bricks and mortar of the outer-boulevards. The leafless woods wore lovely hues of bronze and ashen-grey; the bare fields were of the red-brown of a stag’s hind; far away the plains of La Beauce were veiled in a mist which promised snow; a man went by him carrying cut wood with the bowed back, the bent head, the heavy step, the downcast face which Millet has made immortal in art.
‘How have we managed to make a toil and a burden of that outdoor life which was so blessed to the Greeks’?’ he muse
d. ‘We must have blundered horribly. Or is it the weather which is more at fault than we? In the south, pastoral life is still enjoyable and still graceful.’
He spoke to the woodman and got only sullen monosyllables in return. He gave him some money, and saw the slow dull eye lit up with surprise and greed.
‘I should be as sullen and as covetous myself, I daresay,’ he thought, ‘if I had to cut faggots for a living.’
Then he went on over the fields along the cross-road which led to the home of Damaris.
He had not yet reached it, when he perceived her at a little distance, walking quickly, with the white dogs running before her. She had on a long dark cloak, and the hood of it, lined with crimson, was drawn over her head; her head was a little thrown backward; her eyes were looking upward at the steel-grey sky, across whose sad-coloured vault a flock of the farm pigeons flew. Her hands held an open book; her lips were moving, but he was too far off from her to hear the sound of her voice. Her feet came quickly over the brown bare pasture so that she almost touched him ere she saw him. When she did so she dropped the book; the colour in her face changed instantly from white to red, from red to white. She gave an inarticulate cry of pleasure and amaze.
‘You! you! — at last!’ she said, holding out to him both her hands, warm with the warmth of youth, though gloveless, in the winter weather.
Othmar took them in his own with a tender gesture and touched them with his lips.
He could not doubt the great joy which his presence brought to her. Her eyes were shining through suddenly starting tears of gladness; her mouth was tremulous with smiles; her cheeks had flushed scarlet; her whole face and form were eloquent of a happiness which needed no words for its expression.
He thought of a languid, amused, disdainful voice which had said to him awhile before, ‘Surely anyone’s emotions can restrain themselves until one gets into the house!’
The welcome of Damaris affected him profoundly, touched him to a vivid gratitude. He was so used to the repression of his warmer feelings, so accustomed to irony and languor, and the ridicule of all ardour and enthusiasm, that this delight which his presence caused was to him at once infinitely pathetic and deliciously responsive. He was thankful to be paid in such unwonted coin, and the beautiful sincerity of it was clear and radiant as the sunrise of a summer morning.
‘I should have come before if I had known —— ,’ he said, and paused with a pang of conscience. Was it not a reason rather to compel his absence?
Damaris was not sensible of any double meaning in either his words or his silence. She was abandoned to the pure and frank rapture with which she saw the living man of whom the memory abode with her sleeping and waking. There was so much youth in her, and so perfect a candour, that no thought of concealment entered her mind for an instant. He had been everything to her; he had stood between her and sickness and misery and death; he had made life bloom again for her when it had seemed engulfed in the blackness of poverty and solitude. To her he had been truly a ministering angel. She could have wept and laughed for joy at the touch of his hand, at the sound of his voice.
Othmar was embarrassed: she was not. He was conscious of the meaning of her happiness; she was not. He let go her hands, and moved beside her under the leafless trees.
‘May we go into the house?’ he asked. He remembered Blanche de Laon.
‘Yes,’ she answered; her voice was tremulous with emotion, and had the thrill of an exquisite happiness in it.
‘You see, it is quite near,’ she added. ‘It is so long since you came! Why have you been so long?’
Othmar did not look at her as he replied:
‘My dear, I have so many occupations, so few moments that I may call my own. And I had told you to write to me if you needed me.’
‘I do not write very well,’ she said, with a blush of shame at the confession. ‘And I thought you would come when you wished.’
‘When I could, would be more nearly the truth. I am not my own master in many ways.’
‘No?’
To her it sounded very strange; to her he seemed the master of the world.
‘No, indeed,’ said Othmar bitterly.
He walked silently beside her a few moments. His dejection of tone, his weariness of manner communicated something of their sadness to her, and threw their shade over the shadowless and innocent joys of her soul. He roused himself with an effort.
‘And you — I have heard of you often from Rosselin. Believe me, I did not forget you, if I seemed neglectful. You love the open air still, I see, though it is the chill grey air of the Seine-et-Oise instead of your own warm winter sunshine. What were you reading or reciting? — Dona Sol?’
‘Yes.’
She had ceased to look up at him with candid luminous eyes; her face was downcast and her cheeks burned. A vague sense stole on her of the utter difference between himself and her; of the fact that, though he was all the earth held for her, she to him could only be a mere passing thought, a mere occasional interest, a mere waif to be pitied and aided and forgotten. His life was so crowded, so absorbed, so full of the world’s gifts and the world’s honours, she could expect nothing in it but here and there an instant of remembrance. She led the way into the dwelling-house in silence. The recollection of his wife had come to her: of that great lady who had tempted her, ridiculed her, forgotten her, and been her fate.
Where was she?
What did she know of herself?
She did not ask him; her joyous face grew dark under the shadow of the crimson hood drawn above her shining curls. If the mother of Napraxine could have seen into her heart at that moment her aged lips would have given the kiss of peace to these young ones for sake of the hatred her young soul felt.
‘They are all away at work,’ she said aloud; ‘will you come into my room? I think the fire is not out.’
‘I do not care about the fire,’ replied Othmar. ‘I wish I could bring you the sunshine of your own seas and shores — or take you to them.’
She did not answer; he asked again:
‘Why would you not write to me?’
‘I do not write very well, I told you,’ she said, with the colour still hot in her cheeks; ‘and I have no right to trouble you — in that way. It is cold here. Will you come to my room?’
She went up a few wooden stairs and opened the door of the little chamber, of which she had made her study. It had an open fireplace, and wood was burning on the hearth; its lattice window showed the wintry landscape. It was simple, but looked like the room of an artist: the books, the engravings, the water-colour sketches, the little statuettes he had sent there to make it habitable and picturesque, gave it that air of culture without which a palace is no better than a barn; a copper bowl was filled with ivy and bay and holly, there were some snowdrops in a glass which stood before a small bronze he had sent there, in the summer, of a Greek shepherd playing on a reed. What there was of art and decoration there was of his providing; but still a certain grace of arrangement and harmony of tones were due to her and to the same instincts in her which had made of her sea balcony on Bonaventure a little hermitage dedicated to the few nightingales and the many sea-swallows, and, amidst the sordid cares and the harsh accents which were around her, had enabled her to hear the voice of Ruy Blas or of Fortunio, as, hid in the orange-grove, she had read through drowsy noons in
A dim house of happy leaves, with shadows populous.
As he looked around this chamber with its union of elegance and rusticity, there passed over his mind the consciousness of how utterly his wife would mistake the motive which had brought him there, the feeling which had prompted him to have this child surrounded, as far as it was possible, with such simple pleasures as art and nature can bestow on poetic temperaments. The world was always with her; its influences had saturated her mind and coloured her judgments too deeply for her ever to judge otherwise than as the world would do. To her as to the world, if ever either became aware of this home which he had made for
another woman under the ash-trees of Les Hameaux, he could only seem the protector of Damaris in a very different sense to that in which he actually was so. The certainty of such inevitable judgment oppressed him, and obscured to him the beauty of the girl’s face, the lovely freshness and fervour of her welcome.
The one great love of his life had been so long his only preoccupation, his only idolatry, that it hurt him with a sense of loss and of insult to think that to others it would seem as though he had been faithless to it. Even the sense which was present to his own heart and mind, that such infidelity might perchance become possible to him, humiliated him in his own eyes and made him feel a weak, irresolute, mutable fool.
‘Perhaps she is right enough to disdain me!’ he thought with impatience of himself.
His thoughts were far more with her than with Damaris; and yet the poor child’s welcome of him sunk into his heart with a sense of warmth and of sympathy, to which he had long been a stranger. Her very personal beauty, too, seemed to retain in it the glow of her own suns, and to give to those who looked on it a vivifying warmth and radiance. He felt as though, in leaving the presence of his wife for hers, he had come out of the cool pale luminance of moonlight, shining on the classic limbs of a marble goddess, into a sunlit and fragrant garden, with birds at play amongst wild boughs of roses.
Absorbed in his own meditations, his words were dreamy and spoken with effort, his abstraction affected the sensitive nerves of his companion and cast a chill upon her buoyant and ardent nature. She grew silent, and watched him with eyes passionate with gratitude and dim with tears. She saw in him the saviour of her life, the lord of all her thoughts, her only friend; she longed to throw herself at his feet and strive to tell him all she felt. But she could not, she dared not; there was something in his voice, in his gaze, in the mere fact of his presence, which daunted and held her dumb. In his absence she had repeated to herself a thousand times the eloquent words with which she would tell him all she felt; but now that he was there before her, she was mute. The colour came and went in her expressive face, the veins in her throat swelled with emotion; she could find nothing to say which was worth saying; when she spoke in the words of the poets she was eloquent, but when she could only look in her own heart and long to speak, how poor she seemed to herself, how dull and dumb!