by Ouida
The intensity of the happiness his presence brought with it, in itself bewildered and alarmed her with a vague fear to which she could have given no name had she tried. She had been happy in her childhood upon Bonaventure, with the happiness of youth and health and vigour; the happiness of the fawn in the fernbrake, of the swallow on the wing; unconscious, delightful, instinctive happiness in the mere sense of sentient life. But this happiness which she felt now was new to her, and closely allied to pain, and nervous as its twin-sister, sorrow; she was afraid of it and mute.
At last she broke the silence timidly:
‘There was something I thought I would write to tell you because he is one of your friends, but then I thought it did not matter. It was only that M. de Béthune has been here twice or three times.’
‘Béthune!’ echoed Othmar with astonishment and some displeasure. ‘How came he here?’
She told him, and added ‘He has come back on different days. He brought me a jewel once; it was very handsome. It was because I attended to his horse’s sprain; I asked him to take it back again and he did so. Since that he has brought me flowers. Those flowers are some of his.’
He looked where she looked and saw a group of hothouse blossoms of value and rarity. He felt an annoyance which he did not dissimulate. ‘Do he and his flowers please you?’ he asked, not wisely as he knew.
But the perfect candour of her eyes remained unclouded.
‘I do not think about him,’ she replied in that tone which was an echo of her free and fearless life upon the island. ‘He is kind, and M. Rosselin says he is good. He is a great friend of hers, is he not?’
‘Of my wife’s?’ said Othmar, with irritation. ‘Yes. She likes him, he is often with her; he is one of those persons whom great ladies care to chain to their thrones.’
He had himself always had a vague jealousy of Gui de Béthune; the intimacy which his wife allowed him, although only, he knew, in accordance with the habits and usages of a woman of the world, yet was always more intimate than he cared to see. He knew the solidity and nobility of Béthune’s character and the hopeless devotion which had so long absorbed his heart, but sometimes he thought that his wife might have found better ways of rewarding the one and of curing the other than the constant attendance on her which she permitted to a man who had adored her before the death of Napraxine, and had offered her his hand after it. He had said little against it, because he had known how absurd and vulgar a passion jealousy had always seemed in her sight, but there had never been any cordiality of intercourse between himself and Béthune, and it irritated him to hear that Béthune of all men should, by an accident of sport, have found his way to Les Hameaux.
The idea had caused him uneasiness, and associated with the remembrance of Blanche de Laon, made him conscious that the secret of the vale of Chevreuse had been very rashly and consciously kept by him from his wife. The Duc was a man of chivalrous honour and fastidious delicacy; he would in all likelihood feel bound to respect a secret which he had accidentally suppressed, but the influence of Nadège was unbounded with him, and if by any chance through the malice of Blanchette, or any other means, her suspicions should be in any way aroused, she would turn the mind of Béthune inside out as easily as a child can empty a bird’s nest. He knew her great power over men, and the tenacity with which she would at times follow out an idea if it were one which appeared to elude her, or which others sought to conceal from her.
‘Does he know your story?’ he asked, with some embarrassment. ‘Have you mentioned me to him?’
‘Oh no!’ — the colour flushed into her face, there was indignation in her denial. ‘Do you think that I would talk of — of — of that time and of you?’
Her voice trembled a little over the last word; she added after a moment,
‘He speaks of her sometimes — of you never.’
‘Ah!’
Othmar understood the meaning of that, though his companion did not.
The admiration and loyalty with which her visitor had spoken of a lady who was nothing to him, had seemed even to her unworldly ignorance something which Othmar would not like. She, who had only seen the homely lives of the toilers of the sea and soil, with their primitive passions and their single-minded ideas, did not dream of the easy relations and the elastic opinions which exist in the great world, of the friendships which have all the grace of love without its fatigue and its bondage, of the influence which brilliant women can exercise over the minds and lives of men, without giving in return one iota of their own freedom or feeling one pulse of tenderness. All those intricate motives, and half-dissolute, half-delicate, liberties which prevail in society, were to her unknown, unimaginable. She could understand that a woman or a man should die for love, or should in an hour of hatred slay what they were jealous of, or what had robbed them of their love. All the simple deep undivided emotions of life were intelligible to her and aroused response in her nature, but the refinements of caprice and of fancy, the subtleties of cultured minds playing with passions which they were too languid and too hypocritical to share, these were altogether unintelligible to her.
In her short life she had not lived with the rude labouring folk who had been her sole companions, without knowing that men could be faithless and women also. But in the only people she had ever known, fidelity had had a rude and literal interpretation, and infidelity had often been roughly chastised by a blow of the knife, or the scourge of a rope’s end. All the refined gradations of inconstancy in the great world were wholly unimaginable by her.
‘You will have to live ten years more before you can play in Sardou’s pieces,’ Rosselin had said one day to her; ‘as yet you must remain with the poets, with the eternal children, with the eternal Naturkinder.’
‘Perhaps,’ Rosselin had added to himself, ‘she will never be able to play Dora, or Froufrou, only Adrienne Lecouvreur, or Marie Stuart. She has a character cast on broad bold antique lines; simple and profound feelings alone are natural to her. The intricacies of complex emotion, and the contempt born of analysis, are not intelligible to her. She would understand why the Duchesse de Septmonts throws the cup down so violently in “L’Etrangère,” but she would not understand why Froufrou vacillates so helplessly between her family and her lover.’
She looked wistfully now at Othmar, afraid that she had displeased him, yet urged on by the unconquerable attraction which the character of his wife exercised over her:
‘Why has she so much power over people?’ she asked in a low voice.
‘My wife?’ asked Othmar, who was absorbed in his own thoughts. ‘How can I tell you, my dear? Perhaps she has it because she does not care about it; perhaps because all men seem to her to be fools; perhaps because nature has made her cleverer than we are: how can I tell you? There are persons born into this world with a magnetic power over the minds of others: she is one of them. You have seen it yourself; she was an utter stranger to you, yet she said but two words to you, and you followed her, and all your peaceful, and innocent, and happy life went to pieces like a child’s sand-city before the tide of the sea. She can always do that. She has done it a million times. She has done it with this man you speak of; she looked at him once years and years ago, and he has never been free any more. Other women hardly exist for him. He would prefer to be wretched following her shadow, than to be happy where she was not. There are others like him — —’
The face of Damaris grew troubled and embarrassed, there was a sound of indignation in her voice as she said: ‘But since she is your wife?’
Othmar laughed a little bitterly.
‘Ah, my dear child! — you belong to another world than ours. You have seen amongst your fisher-folk and your fruit-sellers a kind of union of labour, which is called marriage, and which makes the woman toil all day for her children and her house, and grow grey on one hearthstone, and live out her life with the sun shining on one narrow field. You do not understand that when a great lady does a man the honour to accept his hand in marriag
e, she retains her own complete immunity from all obligations whatever; she only remains beside him on the tacit condition that he shall submit to all her terms; she makes his houses brilliant, she amuses herself, and he can do the same if nature have not made him too dull; she has a number of friendships and interests with which he has nothing to do; and if his heart remain unsatisfied, that is nothing to her — he can take it elsewhere.’
There was the bitterness of personal feeling in the words spoken, as if in impersonal generalisation. His hearer did not penetrate all their meanings, but she felt the personal offence and dissatisfaction which were in them, and they filled her with a wistful and sympathetic sorrow. She did not understand. How could people be so rich, so great, so beautiful, have so much power in their hands, and so much love at their command, and yet be for ever so restless, so weary, so dissatisfied? Her heart hardened itself more utterly than ever against this woman who had such empire, and used it with such cruelty; who was so beloved, and so contemptuous of love; who bore his name, dwelt in his houses, could see him when she would, and yet seemed to give him no more rest or kindness than she gave a stranger passing in the street. The reasons of it were all too intricate and too subtle for her mind to be able to guess one half of them. In her own simplicity of phrase she would have said only that he was unhappy, which would not have covered one half, or one tithe of the truth; but that scanty knowledge was enough to make all her own intensity of gratitude and devotion to him yearn with longing to console him, and sink heartsick before its own impotency to do so.
All through the months in which he had been absent, she had thought of him with wistful memories, vague troubled thoughts, of which he was the centre and ideal. The remembrance of his light grave kiss upon her brow had thrilled through her with a magical force, banishing childhood. All her warm and passionate heart, rich as the fruits of her native land, was given to him unasked, unconscious of all it gave. Never in any hour of her empire over him had the woman to whom he had given up all he possessed, his past, his present, and his future, known one single pulse of such love for him as filled the whole nerve and soul and nature of Damaris Bérarde.
She would have gone blindfold wherever he had led. She would have died happy if gathered one moment to his breast.
But as yet she knew it not. As yet her own heart was a sealed book to her. To him it was open; he could read on it what he would; but he was unwilling to read.
‘Have we not done her harm enough,’ he asked himself, ‘that I should do her this last, this greatest? Shall I bind her to me in her youth and her ignorance when I can but give her, what? — an hour of my time, a fragment of my thoughts, the cold hospitality of a heart which has been swept empty by another woman?’
He looked at her where she stood, with the grey light of the pale day powerless to dull or take away the warmth and depth of colour, the strength and grace of outline from the form and face. The shining curls, the luminous eyes, the mouth like the bud of the pomegranate, the warm soft cheeks with the bright blood pulsing in them, they were just what they had been in the sea-wind, and the sun of the south; the pallor and cold of the north had had no dominion over them.
She had the triple beauty of youth, of health, of genius. There was the lavish glory of the springtime in her, as in the April fields when nature flings down flowers at every step. She should have been Heliodora to be crowned with white violets and blue hyacinths by the singer of Gadara, and he — if he had loved her, he might have opened his arms to her; but he looked in his own soul and no love of any kind was there.
Should he dare to offer her pale pity, mere tenderness, the fatigue of passions tired and chilled by another? What more unfair than for one weary and world-worn to lay his head upon the warm white breast of youth when he no more could dream there any of the dreams youth loves and love begets?
Damaris was perplexed and pained because he stayed so brief a time with her, for the low winter sun, already when he came so near to its last hour above the grey and purple of the plains, was still sinking red and dim in a western sky of smoke-like vapour, when he rose to leave her and return to Paris. She vaguely felt that there was some reserve between them, that all he thought was not expressed, that all he desired was not said.
In her ignorance of the waywardness and contradictions of the hearts of men, she could only think that he was angered with her for her persistency in a career which he had told her was not a happy or a wise one. To her it seemed that he had every right over her life, since without him she must have perished miserably amongst the unnoticed misery of the great city in which he had found her.
‘You are not vexed that I was reciting the speeches of Dona Sol?’ she asked him timidly, trying to find out what he wished.
‘Vexed? Surely not,’ he answered her. ‘I understand that you still cling to this one thought, and since the ambition of it is so strong in you, it is no doubt best that you should give it an undivided devotion. We do nothing well that we do half-heartedly.’
‘Does he tell you what he thinks of me?’ she asked, still timidly.
‘Rosselin?’ said Othmar. ‘Yes; he thinks greatly of your natural gifts; you content him, which is a rare thing, for he is hard to please; he believes you may move that dull, stupid, imitative mass which calls itself the world. I have never heard him say otherwise or say less. But neither Rosselin or I are gods, my child; we can push open the gates for you, but we cannot control what you may find beyond the gates.’
‘You mean —— ?’
‘I mean that his experience and influence will enable you to face the world with every advantage, will enable you to begin where others only arrive after long years of toil and of probation: but when he has done that he will have done all that he can do. The rest will lie with all the blind forces which govern human fates.’
There was something in the words, gently as they were spoken, which chilled her eager faiths and sanguine hopes, and brought back to her that fear of the future, that dread of the imprisonment of the art world, which had moved her after the recital of the Conservatoire.
‘I begin to understand!’ she said, with an impetuous sigh. ‘It will be a slavery where I thought it a conquest. But — but — could not I have one triumph and then come back to the country and the quiet of it if I wished? Could I not make Paris crown me once, even if I gave the crown back to them? Why not? — —’
‘Because, drinking once, every one drinks as long as a drop is left of that amari aliquid called Fame. If you once taste triumph you will never return to obscurity. Did I not tell you so in the summer? Besides, why should you wish to triumph at all unless it be to give over your life to Art? I do not understand — —’
The face of Damaris grew red and overcast.
‘I want her to know that I need not be despised,’ she said in a very low voice, through which there ran the thrill of a deep and sombre meaning. Othmar started and himself coloured at the menace which there was in the sound of her voice.
‘You mean Nadège?’ he said abruptly.
Damaris gave a gesture of assent.
She was ashamed of what she had said, but it had escaped her almost involuntarily. He was silent. He was uncertain what to say. There was a sense of reluctance in him to speak at all of his wife to her. Commonplace words could have been said in plenty; but these he did not choose to employ. He understood that the whole strong and ardent soul of this child was on her lips; it was not a time for trivial platitudes, for empty phrases, which in moments of great emotions seem more unkind than blows.
‘If I be your friend, my dear, you must not think of her as your enemy,’ he said at length. ‘She admires genius — it is the one thing which commands her respect: if you show her you possess it she will be a better friend to you than I can ever be.’
‘I do not want her friendship.’
Damaris had grown pale; she spoke with impetuous and almost fierce meaning; the darker instincts which were in the hot blood of the Bérardes were aroused; she did not
pause to consider her own words.
It grew dark without: the sun had now sunk below the horizon; the red light of the fire on the hearth reached her and shone in her auburn curls, on her shining sombre eyes, on her lips shut close with scorn. She looked at him from under her level brows.
‘You care for her very much?’ she said suddenly.
Othmar was silent some moments. How much or how little should he show of his real thoughts to this child, who loved him and whom he could not love in any way as she deserved? He thought she had merited candour at the least from him.
‘Yes, dear; I care for her very much, to use your words. She has been all the world to me; in a sense she will be so always. Every great passion has a certain immortal element in it; at least I think so. She has been the one woman for whom I would have sinned any sin, have done any folly, have given up place and name, and honour, and all I had, if she had wished. No one loves twice like that. Many never love so once. I do not pretend that life with her has been all I hoped for: those exquisite dreams are never realised; human nature does not hold the possibility of their realisation. I disappoint her perhaps as much as she chills me; it is inevitable, and is no one’s fault that I know of; the fault lies with human nature.’
He paused. Damaris stood where she had been before, but the light had died down from the wood-fire, and the shadows of the twilight were upon her face. Her open-air, bird-like, flower-like life upon the island had made all life seem very simple to her, a thing regulated like the coming and going of the boats between the shores, broad and plain as the smooth sea sand of the mainland. All suddenly she saw that it was a thing of intricate mysteries, of cruel perplexities, of fathomless emotions, with whose disquietude and disillusion the learned played as with knotted threads which it amused them to disentangle, but before whose impenetrable secret the simple broke their heart.