by Ouida
The suggestion had annoyed him both by what it asked, which seemed to him difficult, and by what it implied, which seemed to him offensive. And he repented of his manner of receiving it, and of wounding a person who had warmly answered to his own appeal, and had aided him in regard to Damaris with a sympathy the more noteworthy because it had at first been reluctantly given. Before night he wrote a brief note to Rosselin:
‘I regret my impatience, and apologise for it. No doubt you are right in your views. If I can see my way to comply with them I will do so. Meanwhile, believe in my friendship and my high esteem.’
He signed the few lines, and sent them by a messenger to Asnières.
When Rosselin received them he was sitting by his solitary lamp examining the condition of a much injured copy on vellum of ‘The Birds,’ which he had picked up at a bookstall on one of the quays the day before. He put the manuscript down, and read the note with its clear signature of Othmar at the end.
‘A graceful amende,’ he thought. ‘He has a heart of gold, but his judgment is not so much to be trusted as his feelings are. He spoke of his wife’s indifference. What could he expect? You cannot get out of a nature what it has not got in it. For five-and-twenty years she had lived for herself: did he suppose that all in a moment she would forget herself and live for him? I daresay he did. He was ready to live for her. That sort of mistake is so often made; and it is always the highest nature which makes it.’
Rosselin lost interest in his Aristophanes for that night. He had a foreboding of some evil. Imaginative minds are like the birds: they know when storms approach.
CHAPTER XLI.
A week or two later he saw Othmar again enter his little parlour. Othmar made ministers wait on him, and would keep princes in his ante-chamber with an indifference which gained him the repute of arrogance; but he waited himself on Rosselin, a man old, poor, and solitary. These were his eccentricities, which the world hated as it would never have hated any vices in which he might have chosen to indulge.
‘I have come to speak to you of your wishes, which I perhaps dismissed too hastily,’ he said, as he seated himself. ‘You really believe that to be first seen and heard, as you proposed, would benefit your pupil?’
‘I do not doubt it,’ replied Rosselin, ‘for the reasons I named to you, and also because to succeed before a choice and cultured audience is the greatest of stimulants, the most certain of practical tests. I do not think that a long novitiate would suit Damaris Bérarde. She is of the south; her beauty is nearly at its height now; she is fully matured in every way; she is of an impetuous and sensitive temperament; she is not easily governed; she would never brook the tedium and slavery of the theatres of the provinces; she must take the world by storm, mount its throne at a bound, or not at all. She would easily be irrevocably disgusted and eternally lost to art.’
‘Would that be so much a matter for regret!’
‘What fate can she have otherwise? You cannot make her a duchesse, she would not consent to become a bourgeoise. She is a déclassé: you have said it yourself. There are two asylums possible for a déclassé: they are Pleasure and Art. I prefer the latter.’
‘Art is quite cruel enough. She will never be able to go back into privacy. What a loss! — what an irreparable loss! And you speak of it as a gain!’
‘I speak as I spoke long ago, when first you named her to me. The publicity you lament is the price which is paid for fame. Some do not think the price too high, some do. It is you yourself who wished me to prepare her for an artist’s career. She cannot become a great artist if she remain in obscurity.’
‘Of course not. But it is horrible. Publicity is a kind of violation — —’
‘Recompensed like Danaë’s!’
Othmar was silent. He was conscious that a strong personal dislike to her leaving the safe shadow of private life moved him to an exaggerated objection to her being seen and known by others. When once the world had beheld her, she would belong to the world. It might make her triumphant or it might make her wretched, but she would belong to it evermore.
Rosselin guessed what he was feeling, and answered his unspoken thoughts.
‘Yes; she will never go back either to Les Hameaux or to Bonaventure. That is certain. She will belong to all men, in a sense, when once she has sought their suffrages. But what else can be done with her? What else? You would not hear of a conventional marriage for her and a house in the suburbs, and I suppose she would not hear of it either. She is half a poet, half a thing of the open air like a doe or a swallow. You cannot send her back whence she came. If you could do it in fact, you could not do it in spirit. The soul would never be the same — poor white seabird of a soul, which comes across the flames of ambition and burns in them! You might set her body down under her orange-boughs, under her blue sky, but you could not give her the heart of her childhood. You are a god in your way; the only god the nineteenth century knows — a rich man — but to do that is beyond your power.’
‘If I had that power I should be a god indeed!’ said Othmar bitterly, ‘and the whole sick world would come to me to be cured.’
He needed not the words of Rosselin to remind him that never would he be able to undo the work his wife had done in one idle moment of imperious caprice.
Though the words were harsh and, in a great measure, unjust to him, he did not resent them; he poignantly regretted the fate brought on Damaris, and when he saw her he felt a reproach greater than any which others could address to him. The breaking up of the happy simplicity of her life had always seemed to him as wanton an act as to shoot a seabird which falls in the sea.
Had he said so to his wife she would have laughed, and have denied all responsibility. She would have declared that fate, in some guise or another, always finds out female children with handsome faces; that Strephon always comes to them, or Faust. But he would not look at it thus. To him it always seemed the cruellest unkindness needlessly to have brought Damaris Bérarde and the world together.
‘Why does he dislike a public career for her so much?’ thought Rosselin. ‘I do not think that he cares for her, except in kindness. I do not think he would give her any part of his own life. Passion has died in him, died under the coldness of his wife’s nature, as flowers die in frost. This child would give him, I daresay, all the richness and all the heat of her own heart, but he would only give her in return les cendres tièdes d’un feu éteint, and, as he is a man more generous and more sensitive than most, he would never forgive himself for having sacrificed her to himself. Better for her all the dangers of life in the world than the consuming love for one who would never love her as she loved. Had I been the confessor of Louise de la Vallière, I should have said to her, “Remain in the crowds of Versailles if you wish to forget: do not go into solitude.” No woman forgets who has no one to teach her forgetfulness. Solitude is the nurse of all great passions, because in solitude there is no standard of comparison!’
Othmar, unaware of his companion’s reflections, was lost in thought himself. He felt that he had resigned the direction of her life into Rosselin’s hands, and had no right to dispute with her guide the course which he deemed most desirable for her. He had sought the counsels and the assistance of a man of genius in a moment of extremity, and he felt that he had no title to dissent from whatever the vast experience of such a man might consider wisest on her behalf. He knew that she could not continue to dwell at Les Hameaux, unseen save by the dogs and the birds and the mild eyes of the cattle, if ever those desires for art and for fame which tormented her were ever to have any fruition. If he had had the power to close the gates of solitude on her he would not have used it; he would have felt that he had no right so to use it.
He was conscious that he had no title to stand between her and any career which might become possible for her. Since his last visit to her he had felt that he himself occupied too large a place in her life; that his memory coloured all her thoughts too deeply and too warmly; that her whole existence might
be his utterly in any way he chose if he would take that gift as easily as a man may gather a half-open rose in the freshness of morning.
He had no vanity of any sort. The many women who had offered themselves to him in his life for sake of the riches which were behind him had taught him humility rather than vanity, for they had been so plainly idolatrous, not of him but of his possessions. He had always doubted his power to make himself beloved for himself alone, and he would willingly have put it to the proof, like the Lord of Burleigh, had it been possible. But even he, little self-appreciation as he had, yet could not doubt that with the life of this child whom he had saved from the streets he could do whatsoever he chose. Every expression of her ingenuous nature, every glance of her innocent eyes, every impulse of her ardent and untrained nature, told him that he could, with the first moment he chose, render himself wholly master of her whole existence. He was the god of her dreams and the providence of her waking thoughts. Had he had less charm for women than he possessed, he would still scarcely have failed to become, through circumstance, the one person dominant over all her mind and senses. Without any self-deception, he could not but be aware that he could become her lover when he chose. Gratitude, imagination, all the fervour of waking passions stirring in a southern nature as the juices of the vine stir in its tender flowerets; all the favour of opportunity and of circumstance, which idealised her relations with him; and all the impressionability of the first years of a youth early matured under the heat of Mediterranean suns; all these were combined together to make of him the adoration and the arbiter of her life. And he — what had he to give in return for all that glory of the daybreak of the soul? Not even, as Rosselin had thought, les cendres tièdes d’un feu éteint.
He had wider thought and bolder judgment than the timid and narrow laws which a vast majority of mediocrities had been able to impose on a sheepish world. Could he have rendered her such feeling as she was ready to give to him, could he have given her the warmth of a genuine passion, the sincerity and the undivided force of a great emotion, he would not have considered that he sacrificed her to himself if he had kept her in eternal isolation.
Great natures and great affections do not need the companionship or the suffrages of the world. Its narrow and hollow laws mean nothing to them, and its opinions mean as little. Love is not love if it have any remembrance of either.
But he could not give her this, or anything like this. The great devotion of his life for the woman who had become his wife had left his heart empty, yet shut to any other visitant. That immeasurable and intense passion had been to him so supreme in its dominance, so voluptuous in its ecstasies, that all other love after it seemed pale as dead flowers beside living ones.
Men sometimes say to women that they have never loved but once, and those women if they know what men’s lives are laugh, as well they may. Yet the meaning of the words is true enough, and not a mere form of phrase.
In the life of every man of higher soul than the vast majority there is some one passion which stands out unrivalled in his memory amidst a host of fleeting fancies, hot desires, dull affections, passing pastimes, which also have in their time been called love by him wrongly. In that one great passion he has attained, enjoyed, realised what he can never reach again; what no woman who lives will ever be able to make him feel again; and in this sense he is not untruthful when he says that he has only loved but once.
Such a love Othmar had known for the one woman who, despite the enemy Time, and the decaying worm of custom, had still, through her very mutability, cruelty, and negligence, retained a power to wound him and a power to delight him which no living creature could ever rival with him. Even when the chill of her own indifference now spread itself to his own emotions, and he felt life, as it were, grow cold and wintry around him, memory was there to tell him of the sorceries of the past, and even love was still there, which watched her wistfully, and would still have obeyed her sign had she made one.
What then had he to give Damaris?
Nothing which was worthy her.
Such baser ardours as a creature who is young and beautiful can always awaken in the breast of any man, and a pitying and gentle tenderness which would be, offered to love, the cruellest of tortures.
And then she owed everything on earth to him: she was his debtor for the very bread she ate. That one fact seemed to him to stand between her and himself like a white wall made of ivory by hands divine. That she herself did not know the extent of her debt to him made it the more sacred to him.
Circumstance being then as it was between them, and powerless as he was to feel for her anything more than the tenderness and the pity which she had from the first aroused in him, what title had he to stand between her and any possible triumphs and consolations which the world might offer to her? None, he thought. None that any generosity could allow him to claim.
He said aloud to Rosselin:
‘Whatever you think best to do for her, do. Her career will be your creation. If she ever attains greatness she will owe it to you. I do not think that I have any right to interfere either one way or the other. To interest my wife in what she has forgotten is impossible. You might as well try to gather last year’s raindrops. But it is possible that she might be pleased if her predictions were proved to her to have been accurate. Contrive for her to see your pupil before she hears of her. She may perhaps recognise her with interest. I dare not say that she will. But you can make the experiment.’
‘It will be difficult,’ said Rosselin.
‘Not very. You have before now done me the honour to arrange dramatic representations at my house. Whenever the Countess Othmar next wishes for entertainment of that kind, which she is sure to do before long, I will place the arrangements for it in your hands. You can then bring forward Damaris Bérarde in any piece you choose. What you wish will so be done. She will be seen and heard under my roof; and, if successful, she may — possibly — reconquer a place in my wife’s memory. If she fail she will certainly never do so.’
‘She will not fail,’ said Rosselin; whilst he thought to himself, ‘She will not fail, because she will have the stimulant of your wife’s presence and the memory of your wife’s disdain. She will not fail if I have left in me any of the magnetism which I used to be able to communicate to others.’
Rosselin was a man of warm feelings and keen sympathies, but the artist in him dominated the friend. He was so saturated with the love of art that, as he had surrendered all his own existence to its claims, so he unhesitatingly surrendered that of others. The kindest of natures wherever there was no question of art, he almost became cruel where the interests of art were involved. To Othmar, the life of a girl seemed too tender and poetic a thing to be given over to the imperious exactions of any art; but to Rosselin, though he had at first been unwilling to draw her into its sphere, he became, the moment that he believed he saw genius in her, willing even to hurt her, if by such a hurt such genius could be stung or scourged into any ampler evidence of its own powers. He thought little of what she might or might not suffer if he brought her into the presence of the women who represented destiny to her. All he considered was, that no other spectator would be so likely to move her, to goad her into the fullest revelations of the resources of her talent. With the future consequences of such a meeting he had nothing to do, all he thought of was its influence on his pupil. He knew that the wife of Othmar had a fascination for her as strong as hatred, and irresistible as magnetism. It was an electric force which he could not afford to allow to lie latent in the desire he felt, a desire which had grown stronger on him with every week that he had paid his visits to Les Hameaux, to compel Damaris into the seizure of that fame which had at first seemed to him a burden too great, a passion too fierce, for this young daughter of the sun and of the sea.
‘She will ultimately be the mistress of Othmar, or of the world,’ he thought. ‘I prefer the world. I will do what I can that she shall give herself to it instead of to him. To throwaway genius on one
human life is to take a planet out of the skies and bury it like a diamond between two human breasts.’
It was in pursuance of the same belief in what was best for her which had made him wish her the heart of Rachel, not the heart of Desclée. Rosselin had surveyed human nature in all its aspects, and his survey of it had convinced him of one fact, that all the higher and more delicate qualities of the soul are but so much penalty-weight to carry in the race of life. The weight is of gold without alloy; but, nevertheless, whoso carries it loses the race.
He with his fine penetration perceived that in her was that greater nature which will lose itself in a great love, and throw away all ambition and all possessions, as though they were but a dead leaf or a broken crust. In a little while such a love, now strong in her, but scarcely conscious of itself, would become wholly conscious, and would take its empire over her whole existence. He wished to oppose to it the only rival with any chance of success — the world.
CHAPTER XLII.
A few days later Rosselin, going to Les Hameaux for his usual recitation with her, found Damaris feverish, restless and despondent. She had lost, for the time at least, that buoyancy and enthusiasm which were the most prominent qualities of her nature; she seemed to him listless and taciturn, her eyes had a brooding pain in them, and she took little interest in the studies of the day.
Rosselin heard from the woman of the house that Othmar had been there that week.
‘It will end as such things always end,’ he thought impatiently. ‘All the fine sentiments on his side will not enable him to cast nature out of him; and to her, of course, he must seem an angel from another world. He has stood between her and all the misery of life. A dog which he had saved in such a way would adore him. He is a man, too, made to charm a poetic nature, because there is so much of the poet in him, and a melancholy which is in pathetic contrast with his wealth and power. One can always understand that women love Othmar; what one cannot understand is that his wife cares for him so little. And yet, why should I say so? All the world over one sees familiarity bring indifference, security create neglect.’