by Ouida
‘Let me speak to you once, only this once,’ she cried. ‘I only came to Paris for that — —’
‘What can you seek from me? Surely my husband gives you all you want!’
All the icy disdain, the cruel irony, the scorn of her as of a creature beneath contempt, passed over Damaris almost unfelt. She had the intense self-absorption which a strong purpose and a passionate generosity inspire.
‘I came to Paris to see you,’ she said boldly. ‘I tried to stop your carriage; you thought I was a beggar, you threw me a coin; I have come here because I hoped that I might speak to you. Listen to me once, this once; then I will go away for ever.’
Her hearer looked at her with less bitterness of scorn, with a slowly awakening wonder. What was strange, unusual, startling, had always a fascination for her; a position which was intricate and unintelligible, a character which was mysterious and for the hour unfathomable, always possessed for her an attraction which nothing else could have. Had an assassin been at her throat she would have stayed his hand only to ask his motives. The supreme interest of the enigma of human life with her surpassed all other more personal considerations. Psychological analysis far outweighed with her all personal emotions. What the young mistress of her husband could seek her for, or want of her, seemed to her so odd that for the moment the strangeness of the supplication outweighed her pitiless scorn of the suppliant.
Her dignity would never have allowed her to cross the width of a street to see this girl who had caused such division between herself and Othmar; but the wish to see her had been strong in her for some time. Her philosophic inquisitiveness before all mysteries of human character, and her artistic appreciation of all human beauty combined to make Damaris interesting to her as a study, though hateful as a living creature.
‘I will hear you,’ she said, and drew her skirts from the touch of Damaris, and seated herself with the coldness of a sovereign who listens but does not forgive, of a judge who examines but does not pardon.
‘Great heaven, how handsome she is!’ she thought with involuntary admiration; and beneath her haughty calm and scorn there burned the fires of a jealousy which scorned itself. Was this the child whom she had brought over the sea? The peasant in blue serge and leather shoes whom she had seen hidden from others in her drawing-rooms like a startled stray sheep under a hedge?
Damaris stood before her pale, infinitely troubled, passionately pained, but so nerved with the force of her purpose that she had lost all sense of fear and of hesitation. Her voice came from her lips quick and low, and her hands were clasped together in earnestness as she spoke at length to this woman who had been the terror of her dreams so long.
‘I do not know what they have told you of me,’ she said, ‘but I am come here to tell you the truth. I think there are those who believe that I am coarse, and selfish, and base, that there are those who believe that he who saved me out of the streets, and from death, only seems to me the mere means to an end, and that end my own renown, my own riches, my own gain. But that is not true. So little is it true that now that I know they say it, the world shall never see me whilst I live. You know, it was you yourself who first told me that I could make the world care for me. You put that thought in my head and my heart, and it worked and worked there, and left me no peace. He tried to dissuade me, because he said that an obscure life was best, but I would not believe. I wished to be great, I wished to come before you some day, and to make you say, “After all she has done well; after all she has genius — —”’
She paused, overcome by the rush of her own memories, by the flood of thoughts she was longing to utter.
Nadège looked at her with her cruellest irony.
‘Why do you come to tell me this? Be great if you like — if you can! You say quite truly: my husband can easily build you a golden bridge to the temple of fame. But you can scarcely expect me, I think, to come and crown you upon it!’
The chill, sarcastic scorn cut the soul of Damaris to the quick.
‘Oh, my God, can you believe it too!’ she cried, in an agony of despair. ‘Only because he took me in when I was half-dead with hunger, as he would have taken home a starved dog! He has been good to me with the goodness of angels. There is a tale of a beggar whom a king befriended, and the beggar cut the gold fringe from the king’s robes in return; do you think me as vile as that beggar? I know that my debt is great to him, so great that I cannot pay it with my life; but if you can believe that I dream of taking of his gold — that I would use him, or rob him, or ask his help for my own ambition — —’
Nadège looked at her with cold, impenetrable, unmerciful eyes of unrelenting contempt and pitiless examination.
‘I am still at a loss to know why you come to me. I am not interested in the terms that you may have made with him. Whether he give you a cottage at Chevreuse or an hotel in the Champs Elysées, what does it matter to me? Do you wish for my advice upon the architecture of either?’
She spoke with her usual languor and irony unaltered, she sat erect with the roses at her breast, and the pale rose of the satin gown flowing to her feet: her eyes were cold and hard as jewels, the only trace of any anger, or of any feeling repressed was in her lips, from which all colour had gone.
Why did she let an interview so hateful be prolonged? Why did she not summon her people, and have this stranger thrust in ignominy from her chamber? Why did she not send for her husband and confront him with the truth he had denied? She did not know why she did none of these things, unless it were that all exposure and publicity were hateful to her, and also because the psychological interest of the instant was strong enough to hold in suspense both her offended dignity and her aroused passions. What brought this girl to her? Until she knew that, she would not send her from her presence.
The simplicity and strength of the nature of Damaris, in which single motives and undivided instincts reigned, meanwhile made the complexity and the variety of sentiments in this cultured and satirical intelligence wholly incomprehensible to her. That any woman could see matter for jest, for derision, for amusement, in passions which bitterly offended and mortally alienated her, was a contradiction which was utterly beyond her comprehension. That the wife of Othmar, believing what she evidently believed, might have struck her some mortal blow, or bidden her servants scourge her from the house, she could have understood; but this complex mind, which could play with its own pain, and dally with its own injuries, she could not follow. She only felt that such a mind scorned her herself as something too low to be believed, too poor to be quarrelled with, too far beneath contempt to be even accepted as a foe.
‘You think — you think — I do not know what it is you think,’ she said in a voice broken by great emotion. ‘I have done whatever he told me, he has told me nothing but good; he does not care for me — in — in in that way which you believe. I am nothing to him. He loves you — —’
‘I thank you for your assurance of it!’
The poor child in her ignorance had spoken the very words which could most fatally offend and arouse the dignity and the passion of her hearer. To be assured of her husband’s love by the subject of her husband’s illicit amours! Even the ironical patience and the contemptuous tolerance of her habitual temper could not remain in silence under such an outrage to her position and her dignity as this.
With a gesture as though sweeping away some unclean things, she motioned Damaris away.
‘Leave my presence; leave my house,’ she said with an intense rage, only controlled by pride still greater than itself. ‘How dare you come where I and my children dwell? Go — go at once, or I will disgrace you before my people.’
But Damaris, whose dread of her had been so great, did not shrink or quail before her.
‘You cannot disgrace me for I have done no wrong,’ she said in desperation. ‘I am nothing to him — nothing, nothing, except a thing he pities. Why should you think that I am? Are not you far above me? have not men loved you always and died for you? do not you kn
ow that he himself is sick of heart because you care so little? You will not believe. Oh, God, what shall I say to you! Madame, it is for this only that I came. I wanted to tell you that my heart will break if, through me, any pain comes to him; you think things which are not true, and which would offend him bitterly if he knew them; and he has spoken to me of you as the only woman whom he could ever care for. Why are you angered that I say so? He thinks that you do not care, he thinks that you are weary of him, he thinks that he has no power to please you any more. And I said to myself that perhaps you did not know this, that perhaps you would care if you did know, that perhaps you would put some warmth in his heart, give him some kinder words. I say it ill, but this is what I want to say. He thinks you do not care.’
Her hearer listened with the scornful rage of her soul held in check for an instant by her own knowledge of the likeness in the words thus spoken to the reproach, which Othmar himself had cast against her. In her innermost soul she acknowledged, that if Othmar loved this creature, he was not the mere sensualist she had thought; she recognised the spirituality and the nobility in the beauty and the youth of her disdained visitant; she acknowledged that a man might well lose his wisdom and break his faith for such a face as this; and would have for his madness some excuse of higher kind than would lie in the mere temptation of the senses. The highest quality in her own temperament had always been her candour in her acceptance of truths which were unwelcome to her. This truth was loathsome to her; but it was a truth, and she confessed it as such to her own mind. Yet, even whilst she did so, it pierced the very centre of her soul, and filled her with a new and intolerable pain.
Her insight into the minds of others also told her that this child’s mind was honest, innocent, and candid, and though she would not believe what her own penetration said, she could not wholly resist its influence, she could not wholly continue to doubt the good faith of the speaker, even whilst her anger remained unabated at the daring and familiarity of such a scene as this.
Damaris took the brief instant of silence for consent, and sustained and nerved by the pure unselfishness of her romantic purpose, she persevered in her supplication.
‘Listen to me for one moment more. You are an aristocrat and I am nothing; I had only some little talent and that is dead in me; you will live beside him all the days of your life, and I shall never, perhaps, see his face again. Believe what I say as though I were dying. You are all that he thinks of on earth, and he is tired, and chilled, and empty of heart because you have never cared for him as he cared. I shall go where I shall never trouble you, and if ever he think of me it will be only with pity just for one passing moment. Will you remember only this, that I have come to beg of you to make him happier, to make his dreams true — it is only you who can do it. You have his heart in your hands; do not throw it against a stone wall, cold and hard, as they throw a bird to kill it. You are a great lady, and the world is with you, and you have many lovers and courtiers, they say, but what will it profit you, all of it, if one day he looks at you and you know that he thinks of you no more because you, yourself, have killed his soul in him?’
‘I am flattered that Count Othmar has made me the subject of his discourse with you!’
Damaris perceived the fault she had committed, the offence she had excited. Resolute to follow out the purpose which had brought her there, she drained the cup of bitterness which she had voluntarily taken up to the last drop.
‘He hardly ever spoke of you,’ she said. ‘But I think he wished me to know that all his thoughts and memories were yours, so that I should not ever — ever — be misled to dream that they were mine. I have seen him seldom; very seldom; only once this year; but that once he did speak of you, and I knew that all his life was in your hands, and that he thinks you do not care — —’
The words were simple, and not wisely chosen, and spoken out of the fulness of her heart, but they carried a sense of their sincerity to the sceptical ear of their auditor. Almost for the moment she believed that they were truth. A sense of compassion touched her.
This girl, so young, so ignorant, so hopelessly devoted to a man who could be nothing to her, seemed to her childish, melodramatic, plebeian, absurd; and yet had a certain nobility and force, and pathos, and mystery in her which stirred to pity this heart which had never known pity. She had been only a peasant, born and reared amongst the rude toilers of the sea and of the soil; what fault was it of hers if she had given away her life to the first man who had been kind to her, and in whom she saw the charm of gentleness, the grace of culture? The infinite comprehension which she herself possessed of all the frailties and all the errors of human nature, almost supplied in her the place of sympathy. She did not pity because she disdained so much; but she understood, and that power of understanding made her in a manner indulgent, though indulgent with contempt.
But the memory of things which seemed to her damning witnesses of fact rose to her thoughts, and checked as it arose the softer and more intelligent impulse which for awhile had held her passive.
She repulsed Damaris coldly, drawing once more her skirts from her touch.
‘You are a good actress. Do not neglect your calling. Rise and go. You have been too long maintained by Count Othmar to be able to play the rôle of disinterested innocence with any chance of duping me. Why you come to me I cannot tell. Perhaps he sent you, teaching you your part.’
Damaris rose to her feet, and her face grew scarlet with honest shame and with indignant wonder.
‘I have never had anything of his except his kindness,’ she said passionately. ‘I have never taken a coin from him any more than I took yours in the street to-day. What he did for me in my illness I know was charity — a debt I could never pay — I said so. But what I have lived on has been my own, always my own, what my grandfather left to me when he died.’
For the moment even her listener believed her; her candid luminous eyes flashing fire through their tears, her flushed indignant face, her truthful voice, all bore their witness to her innocence and ignorance, all told even the prejudice and arrogance of her judge, that whatever the facts might be she herself believed the truth to be that which she said.
Mercy and generosity for a moment held the lips of Nadine silent; she was a child, she was a peasant, if she were the dupe of her lover, was hers the fault? But that jealous scorn which has no pity and no justice in it, swept over her soul afresh, and extinguished in her all the finer charities and nobler comprehension of her mind.
‘It is useless to tell me this,’ she said with cold contempt. ‘Whether you know it or not, your grandfather left you nothing; you are living, and you have lived, only on what my husband has given you. Leave me, and try my patience no more. Count Othmar’s amours are nothing to me, but I do not care to have a comedy made out of them to be played for some unknown purpose on my credulity.’
Then she rang for her women.
Damaris said no other word, all the light and warmth had gone out of her face, there had come on it a pallid horror of incredulous and stupefied doubt.
Silently and quite feebly, as if all strength were gone out from her, she passed across the chamber, and felt her way through the curtains of the door. On the entrance she turned her head and looked back: her great eyes had the look in them of a forest doe’s when it is wounded unto death. She looked back once, then went.
Nadine smiled bitterly.
‘When she found that I knew all, she could say nothing!’ she thought. ‘She will be an acquisition to the French stage. Her melodrama was so well acted that almost it deceived me. Why was it played?’
She could not see the motive. For the first time in her life the reasons for the actions which she watched escaped her.
And think as she would that the scene had been a melodrama, an invention, yet there were certain tones, certain words in it which haunted her with a persistent sense of their truth.
These had not been common entreaties, common reproaches, which Damaris had addressed to her;
there had been an impersonal generosity, a noble simplicity, in them which lifted them out of the charge of sensational and dramatic affectation. There was an enigma in them which she could not solve. They were unselfish and founded on accurate knowledge; they were out of keeping in the mouth of a paid companion of a man’s passing amourettes. It seemed wholly impossible to her that they could have been spoken truthfully, and yet if they were not true there was no sense in them.
Some pang of self-consciousness moved her own heart as she pondered on these passionate supplications to her to make the life which was spent beside hers happier— ‘happier!’ — that one simple word which was so ill-fitted to the complex feelings, the capricious demands, and the hypercritical exigencies of such characters as theirs.
She had no doubt that her husband was the lover of this girl; the denial of the one had moved her no more than the denial of the other; all her knowledge of human nature told her that it must be so; but as she sat in solitude a certain remorse came to her, a certain sense that from her own unassailable height and dignity and rank she had stooped to strike a creature not only unworthy of her wrath, but unprotected by youth, by ignorance, and by the quixotic temerity which had made her thus bold.
She honoured courage. She could not refuse her respect to the courage of this child.
She could not class her with the common souls of earth.
‘Why did I not let her alone at the first? She was so content and so safe on her island,’ she thought, with that pang of conscience which others had tried in vain to arouse in her.
It had been a caprice light as the freak which makes a butterfly pause on one flower instead of another. But the fruits of it were bitter to her.