by Ouida
All her innocent ambitions were dead; the career of which she had dreamed with delight now seemed to her only loathsome. Rosselin had said aright: she was half a child and half a poet, and with the rude primitive faiths of a peasant she had the unworldly and unreal imaginations of a student of imaginative things. All the stubbornness and the simplicity of rustic life, and all the idealisation and unwisdom of a romantic mind were blended in her; and to both of these the accusations and the invitations of Blanche de Laon seemed as hideous as crime. The world could hold no laurels and no treasures she would ever care for now. Were she to reach fame what would the world think? Only that, as that woman had said, she had loved him and had used him to make of him a ladder of gold to a throne of power.
He himself, even, would think so.
He himself might come one day to believe her sorrows and her hunger, her sickness and her loneliness, all parts of some mere drama studied and played to touch his pity and to win his aid.
The thought was sickening to her: sooner than let such suspicion lie on her, she felt that she would seek death as Yseulte de Valogne had sought it. They would believe then, she thought.
She walked on over the fields, past the grazing sheep, and along the stream where Pascal had mused and Racine dreamed; and with the rapid resolute movements of a mind strung up to some great action and committed to some course accepted past recall, she reached the station of Trappes and took her way to Paris.
She had gone on that road so many a time with Rosselin that it seemed to her she could have gone blindfolded along it.
She sat motionless and unconscious of anything around her as the train went on to Paris; her clothes were dark, her face was covered. She reached the Boulevard Montparnasse and mingled unnoticed with the crowd, though twice or thrice men looked after her, attracted by the supple elastic freedom of her walk, which had in it all the ease and vigour of movement which had come to her in those happy days of childhood when she had raced over the sands with the goats, and leaped from rock to rock, and sprung into the waves with headlong joyous greeting of the sea as her best comrade.
She remained an open-air creature, a daughter of the winds and the waters, of the sun and the dew; and all the exigencies of life in the streets and the constraint of movement in a city could not take from her that liberty of movement, as of the circling sea-gull, as of the cloud-born swallow.
She took her way straight to the house of Othmar, to the house which had sheltered her in her sickness and need. Many times as she had been in Paris she had never seen its portals since she had been carried through them to go to Les Hameaux. It stood before her now in the sunshine; the vast pile behind its gates and rails of gilded bronze, which Stefan Othmar had purchased in the days of Louis Philippe from a great noble, compromised and exiled for the Duchesse de Berri. The Suisse in his gorgeous uniform was standing in the grand entrance; liveried servants were going to and fro, through the archways of the courtyard there was a glimpse of the green gardens and the shining fountains. The sight of it all gave her a strange sense of her own utter distance from him.
She remembered how she had said to him, ‘Is this house hers?’ and how he had answered, ‘Surely, my dear, what is mine is hers,’ and of how then she had longed to rise and go out, homeless and friendless as she was, and die in the streets rather than stay under that roof. Standing there now, a lonely, dusty, obscure figure before that lordly palace, she suddenly realised how utterly apart she was from him, how eternally she would be nothing in his life. She had been sheltered there for a few weeks in charity, that was all. He was the whole world to her, but she was no more than a passing compassion to him. All the pomp and pageantry and power of his material existence oppressed her, symbolised as it was in this great palace, with its hurrying servants, its liveried guards, its waiting equipages, its stately gardens: whilst the knowledge she had of the thwarted affections, and emptiness of heart, and vain desires, which haunted him, master of so much though he was, filled her with an agony of longing to be able to give him that simple herb of sweet content which will so rarely blossom in the gardens of the great, in the orchid houses of the rich man.
She stood in the sunlight which shone and glittered on the gilded gates, a dark and lonely figure so motionless and still that the concierge spoke to her roughly, bidding her not stand so near. At that moment through the gateways there came the Russian equipage of the mistress of the house; the three black horses were rearing and plunging, their silver chains glistening, their bells chiming; amongst the cushions of the carriage Nadine reclined. Her face was very pale, her expression very cold; she was about to pay her ceremonious visit of welcome to the Princess Lobow Gregorievna.
Full of the purpose which had driven her thither, and not wholly conscious of what she did, Damaris stretched her hands out and caught at the sable skins of the carriage rug as the wheels passed her.
‘Wait — wait!’ she cried stupidly. The horses dashed onward. Nadine threw her a silver piece, seeing only a supplicant figure between her and the light.
One of the men in the gateways picked up the coin and tendered it to her. She repulsed it with a gesture.
‘When can one see her?’ she asked in a low tone.
The servant stared. ‘See her? Why never, unless you know her and she sends for you;’ then, being good-natured, he added, ‘what is it for? — all petitions go to the secretaries.’
‘I want nothing of her,’ said Damaris. ‘I want to speak to her.’
‘Then you will wait for a century,’ said the young man, and looking at her he thought, ‘I think it is the girl who was here last summer. I heard that they had made an actress of her, and that Othmar kept her somewhere out Versailles way. What can she be doing on the streets?’
Then, being of a mischievous humour, and deeming that it would be good sport to bring about any scene which would be disagreeable or embarrassing to the master whose bread he ate and whose livery he wore, the fellow added, as if in simple good nature, ‘you could get speech with either of them more readily at Amyôt: they go down there in a day or two for Easter; they have some royal people.’
Damaris did not answer him; she turned away with one long look at the house which had sheltered her in her homelessness and misery. Was the master of it there, she wondered? She did not ask. She did not dare. After what Blanche de Laon had said to her, she shrank from the thought of meeting his eyes.
She went wearily from the gates as she had come to them; her purpose was baffled, but not beaten. The vague impulse which had taken her there, had been only strengthened by momentary defeat; the momentary vision of his wife’s face had made her the more passionately long to clear herself from disgrace in those cold eyes. She remembered a garden-door in the garden wall opening out into a bye-street: when she had been carried out under the trees in her convalescence, she had seen gardeners go to and fro through it, and dogs run in and out when it stood ajar; she turned away into the quietude of this little side street, and walked beneath the garden wall until she came to the little entrance which had been a postern-gate in older Paris days. It was standing open as she had so often seen it, the gay branches of budding lilac and laburnum showing through it. She passed in unseen, and waited under the shadow of the boughs.
The gardens were as still as though they were the gardens of Amyôt; the peacocks swept with stately measured tread across the lawns, the fountains were rising and falling under the deep green shade of groves of yew and alleys of cedar. It was three in the afternoon, the shadows were long, the silence was complete. She sat down on a rustic bench, and waited; for what she scarcely knew. But the purpose in her was too deeply rooted in her heart to let her go thence with its errand undone.
She could see the marble terrace, and the rose-coloured awnings of the western front of the great hotel, she could see the banks of flowers which glowed against its steps, the white statues which rose out of the evergreen foliage around them; the massive pile of the building itself was, from the garden-side, a
lmost hidden in trees.
She saw two young children come out gaily, and laughing, their shining hair floating behind them in the light, they mounted two small ponies and rode away with their attendants beside them, out of the great garden gates. She watched them with a strange suffering at her heart.
They were the children of the woman whom he had loved so much.
She remained hidden in the little ivy-grown hut, watching the house. No one came near her; only some birds flew near and pecked at the ivy-berries. When several hours had gone by, she heard the carriage roll into the courtyard; she imagined that the mistress of the house had returned. Long suspense, long fasting, for she had taken scarcely any food since very early in the previous day, the exaltation of a purpose romantic to folly, but unselfish to sublimity, all these had made her nerves strung to high tension, her mind little capable of separating the wise from the unwise, the possible from the impossible, in the strange act which she meditated.
But oftentimes, in moments of irresponsible excitement, the will can accomplish what in calm moments of reflection would seem utterly beyond its powers.
She waited yet awhile longer, till the gardens grew dark, then without hesitation she crossed the lawn, and ascended the terrace steps. To the servants waiting there she said simply:
‘I come to see the Countess Othmar. Say that I am here — Damaris Bérarde.’
The men hesitated; but some amongst them recognised her, and were moved by the instinct to do mischief with impunity, which is so characteristic of their class.
‘It is the girl from Chevreuse, the girl who was here last summer,’ said one idle lounger to another, then they laughed a little together in low tones; and she heard one say, ‘It is a pity Othmar is still at Ferrières!’
Then one of them indolently showed her a staircase.
‘Go up there,’ he said to her. ‘My lady’s apartments are to the right. You will find her women.’
The man added in a whisper to one of his fellows: ‘She came in through the gardens, we can swear that we never saw her enter if any mischief come of it;’ and they watched her with languid curiosity as her dark figure passed up the lighted staircase, with its blue velvet carpets, its bronze caryatides, its great Japanese vases filled with azaleas, its arched recesses filled with palms and statues.
Presently she came to a wide landing place, where corridors branched off from side to side; it was lighted also, and here also its masses of blossom, its green fronds of ferns and palms were beautiful against the white marble and the blue hangings of the walls.
A servant was walking up and down awaiting orders. To him she said the same words: ‘I come to see the Countess Othmar. Tell her I am here. I am Damaris Bérarde.’
CHAPTER LI.
She whom she sought was alone in her apartments within.
She was resting, after her drive, in her bed-chamber, which was lighted by silver lamps, and of which the furniture was all of ivory and silver, with hangings of white plush embroidered with spring flowers in silks of their natural colours. The bed in its alcove was watched over by the angel of sleep; a statue in silver, modelled by modern artists from a design of Canova’s. White lilac and white jessamine filled large silver bowls of Indian artificers’ work. The portrait of her children in the rose gardens of Amyôt, painted by Caband, stood on an easel draped with some cloth of silver of the fifteenth century. The floor was covered with white bearskins. It was a temple dedicated to rest and dreams; but it had given her neither of late. She was restless, disquieted, ill at ease, and dissatisfied with herself.
She had the same pale rose satin gown on her; in another hour she would dress again for a dinner at the Duchesse d’Uzès’; her hair was a little loosened, her face was weary, she had a knot of hothouse roses at her bosom; her women were asking instructions as to what jewels she would wear. Her old sense of the dulness of life was strong upon her; was it worth while to go on with it, all these days so alike, all these dressings and undressings, all these amusements which so seldom were amusements — tant de frais pour si peu de chose?
In ten years’ — twelve years’ — time she would bring out her daughter and marry her, probably to some prince or another — and afterwards? — well, afterwards it would be the same thing, always the same thing; what else could it be? She would not be able, like Lubow Gregorievna, to solace herself for lost loves with church images.
She was tired, the day had dragged, she had been unable to put off from her the sense of loss and of bitterness which had come to her for the first time in all her life. She had not seen her husband since the hour, three days before, when he had left her, insulted beyond words, outraged, and stung to the quick by the dishonour of her contemptuous disbelief.
In a day or two more there would be the fêtes for Easter at Amyôt; royal guests were bidden to them; he would of necessity appear and play his part in his own house; he and she would meet with the world around them. Was not this the supreme use of the world? — to cover discord, to compel dissimulation, to efface the traces of feud, to bring in its train those obligations of surface-courtesies and outward amities which restrain all violent expression of emotion?
One of her women with hesitation approached her, and with apology ventured to say that some one was waiting who entreated to see her; a young girl, Damaris Bérarde. Was she to be permitted to come in? or should she be dismissed?
‘Damaris Bérarde!’ she repeated with amazement.
The women were astonished to see that this plebeian name, unknown to them, had an effect on their mistress for which they were wholly unprepared.
‘To see me!’ she echoed, ‘to see me!’
She half rose from her reclining attitude, and a look of extreme surprise was on her face, which so seldom showed any strong expression of any kind.
‘To see me!’ she echoed aloud.
So might Cleopatra have said the words if the Nubian slave from the market-place had approached the purple of her bed and Anthony’s.
Her first impulse was to give the instant refusal for which her women looked; but her next was to wait, to hesitate: perhaps to consent; the strangeness of such a visit outweighed with her its insolence and intrusion. She disliked all things which were sensational, emotional, romantic, ridiculous; and yet the more uncommon circumstances, the more singular situations of life, had always an attraction for her. Curiosity to penetrate the motive of it, and to see with her own eyes this creature whom she despised, was stronger with her than her haughty amaze at such a request, whilst the morbid love of analysis and of penetrating to the depths of all emotions, and of playing on them, which is common to the century, and in her reached its extreme indulgence and development, impelled her to allow the entrance of Damaris into her presence, that she might see the issue of a situation of which the peculiarity allured her.
‘If she come to assassinate me, it will at least be a new sensation,’ she thought, with her habitual irony.
The women felt afraid: they never dared to name any visitants to her whom they had not previously been directed to receive; they awaited her commands in apprehension.
‘Can he have sent her?’ she wondered; then she rejected the supposition. He was too well-bred for that. What, then, could bring this girl to her?
Her first impulse was to have her thrust out shamefully by her household, the next was that intellectual inquisitiveness which was the strongest characteristic of her mind. Despised, contemned, abhorred as this girl was by her, she yet felt a strange desire to see and to examine what she believed possessed the power to reign, if only for a passing season, over the thoughts and the feelings of Othmar. She herself had no more doubt that Damaris was her husband’s mistress than she had that the roses she wore in her breast were her own. But the disgust, the offence, the aversion which she felt, in common with all other women, before such a rivalry were overborne in her by the psychological interest of the moment which it offered.
Always mindful to preserve her dignity before her inferi
ors, she said to her chief woman-in-waiting:
‘It is a young girl whom I knew at St. Pharamond; yes, say that she may come to me for ten minutes.’
The woman obeyed, and in a moment more Damaris stood between the satin curtains of the doorway: a dark, tall, slender figure, with the light shining on the dusky gold of her hair, the changing painful colour of her cheeks.
The women, at a sign from their mistress, withdrew and closed the door behind her. Othmar’s wife made no gesture, said no syllable which could help her. She remained seated afar off, the intense light of the room reflected from the many mirrors in their silver frames showing her delicate cold features, the pale rose satin of her sweeping gown, her reclining attitude, languid, haughty, motionless.
The girl trembled from head to foot.
But she advanced.
‘It is I, Damaris Bérarde,’ she said, in a low voice.
She paused in the centre of the room, bewildered by the beauty of decoration which was around her, the intensity of light, the hot-house-like warmth and fragrance, the merciless gaze of the great lady who gazed at her from a distance unmoved and chill as death. The heart of the child beat thickly with terror and emotion:
‘Madame — Madame,’ she stammered.
In her ignorance she had fancied that because she was received she would be welcomed, that because those doors had unclosed to admit her, that behind them she might hope to find a friend.
This silence, this coldness, this unspoken but all-eloquent disdain made her feel herself the intruder and alien which she was, there in the house of Othmar, in the presence of his wife. Her very soul sank within her.
The cold contemptuous eyes of the woman whom she dreaded swept over her with withering scorn.
‘You have mistaken the apartments,’ said Nadège, with her cruellest intonation. ‘Those of Count Othmar are on the other side of the house.’
The intensity of emotion which possessed Damaris, the intensity of resolve which was in her, the high-strung and overwrought feeling which had nerved her to her present act made her deaf and callous to all that was implied in the words and to the look with which her great rival repulsed her. She crossed the room, and caught the shining satin folds of the gown in her hands and hung on them.